Andrew just launched MetaMonster! Andrew and Sean dig into how the launch is going so far (spoiler alert: not great), whether the product is overpriced, and what to try next. Then the guys talk about the demo for Sean's new product and what to name it. 

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00:00.75
Sean
Welcome back. How is robotics?

00:00:02.92
Andrew
Robotics was good and bad. Bad good? Good bad?

00:00:07.35
Sean
Okay.

00:00:08.00
Andrew
So we got our butts kicked. Like, plain out, got our butts kicked.

00:00:10.85
Sean
Oh.

00:00:12.28
Andrew
We got there. The robots were insanely good, all of them. We played well. Like, there's this crazy advanced stats thing in robotics.

00:00:22.25
Andrew
Some probably, like, 20-year-old or something.

00:00:22.12
Sean
Yeah.

00:00:26.42
Andrew
built a website called StatBotics that pulls the live data from... All the live data is published through the site called the Blue Alliance from every match.

00:00:36.61
Andrew
And he runs that through some sort of equation, statistical...

00:00:40.43
Sean
Cool.

00:00:41.28
Andrew
thingy and creates he calls it EPA estimated points added which is supposed to because like robots always compete in teams of three and so EPA is like how much of your total score did you actually contribute to the the team estimated points added so anyway this is a long rambly way to say that like throughout the competition so we were

00:00:47.18
Sean
OK.

00:00:56.35
Sean
Oh, what what does what does EPA stand for?

00:01:00.84
Sean
OK, OK, gotcha. OK.

00:01:09.00
Andrew
There were 40 robots in on our field. 160 robots at the competition total, by the way. Four fields going simultaneously all right next to each other. So it's like pure chaos. It's wild. It's really fun and interesting and crazy.

00:01:22.28
Sean
Yeah. Sweet. sweet

00:01:23.97
Andrew
We go into the the weekend ranked top 20 in EPA, like maybe 17 or something like that. And our goal was to end up like around that range at the end of qualifiers like if we had ended up around that range gotten picked for playoffs we would have been a lock for worlds uh our epa stayed around that range like we were at one point as high as like 11 we finished 22 in epa and then like fluctuated kind of between that range so we were playing well our driver was driving well

00:02:00.39
Andrew
But we just got our butts kicked in the actual matches. And EPA is definitely not perfect. It's not everything. like you know It has a bunch of obvious flaws. And so like you know just because our EPA was good didn't mean we were doing well. but But like we had some hiccups here and there.

00:02:12.63
Sean
Yeah.

00:02:15.77
Andrew
But like objectively, I think the team, like the kids drove well. I think they played well. But we ended up ranked out 40th. so we just got whooped we hit we won one match the entire weekend

00:02:25.28
Sean
Damn.

00:02:30.61
Sean
But out of the top 40. Yeah.

00:02:34.09
Andrew
uh well top 160 like top 40 we there were 40 in our field 160 robots there total and most of the robots never play each other so you don't really know who the top 40 are

00:02:37.13
Sean
okay

00:02:46.33
Sean
I just meant like of the state.

00:02:48.19
Sean
cause

00:02:48.29
Andrew
Yeah.

00:02:48.68
Sean
because

00:02:49.17
Andrew
We were top 160. sixty Again, what I'm saying is like, 160 the state.

00:02:51.79
Sean
Yeah.

00:02:54.51
Sean
god i Got it, got it, got it.

00:02:55.25
Andrew
yeah

00:02:55.52
Sean
Makes sense.

00:02:57.41
Andrew
And so like that part sucked. like It sucked to lose a bunch of matches. it really You could tell it was like wearing on the kids. After a while, we had a little bit of drama that we had to work through with the team. like some you know you know it It was sort of getting to people, and it was causing some conflict and tension and stuff.

00:03:15.63
Andrew
But the good side of it is we worked through all of that. We got our first win. We celebrated the heck out of that.

00:03:25.17
Andrew
Celebrated the heck out of the seniors, you know, just, you know, making it to states and their senior season and all of that. And then really cool on Saturday.

00:03:35.58
Andrew
So that we didn't get picked for playoffs. so we just had Saturday to chill, which was honestly really nice and fun. And like, just got to spend a lot of time. Like the team got spend a lot of time bonding and hanging out and watching robots do cool robot shit.

00:03:49.53
Andrew
and then we were one of four teams who won an award called the rising all-stars award which is given to a team that is like has grown drastically and is on an upward trajectory which is exactly what we are and so that was really cool it was it was really cool to get that and so like

00:03:55.32
Sean
Sick. I love it.

00:04:03.57
Sean
love it

00:04:10.31
Andrew
Final rankings in the state, which again are imperfect in the same way that stats are imperfect and all this stuff, but final ranking in the state, we finished 91st in the state out of like 600 teams. So still objectively an incredible season, drastically overperformed where we thought we were going to be,

00:04:29.92
Andrew
The bar like just keeps getting raised every season. you know i think clearly our goal you know our goal for this season was to get to States. And now our goal for next season is pretty clearly get to Worlds.

00:04:43.00
Andrew
Which is just a crazy thing to say. Because like four years ago, 2020 season, this team was down to one kid.

00:04:44.94
Sean
Yeah, absolutely.

00:04:51.22
Andrew
And like barely getting a robot a functioning robot to competitions. Yeah.

00:04:55.84
Sean
Yeah.

00:04:56.24
Andrew
And now we're like, no, we think we can realistically compete for Worlds within the next few years.

00:05:03.07
Sean
I mean, that's awesome. Like, I hope everyone is super proud of all all of that. So that's pretty sweet.

00:05:08.54
Andrew
Yeah, I think they are. like Once they got over the initial losing streak, and then like we got the win, and then we got the award, and I think that the team was able to like feel really proud and really excited.

00:05:44.08
Sean
Nice.

00:05:20.89
Andrew
And yeah, a bunch of the kids are like excited for the offseason. They want to take on offseason projects, and they're like really excited for next season. Some kids who we might have lost because they were going to other schools want to come back and be part of the team, even if they go to another school. So like vibes were really good, even if we objectively got our butts kicked.

00:05:44.94
Sean
Well, nice. Good job. Good job. Good stuff.

00:05:47.71
Andrew
Thanks.

00:05:48.07
Sean
Congrats.

00:05:48.60
Andrew
Yeah. I am exhausted. i like, I am kind of relieved we did not make worlds because then I would have had a week to raise like $20,000 and I would just be super tired.

00:05:51.91
Sean
Yeah.

00:05:59.59
Sean
Yeah.

00:06:02.09
Andrew
By the way, we're not technically up like 100% out of the running yet. There's still like some teams that could decline. And then like the 88th ranked team in the state got an offer yesterday to so move up to worlds and we're 91.

00:06:15.07
Sean
Whoa.

00:06:18.16
Sean
Whoa.

00:06:19.05
Andrew
And at this point, like, we're hoping and praying it doesn't happen because we're just, like, too tired. Like, I'd rather go next year at this point.

00:06:28.77
Sean
yeah okay well good luck to either outcome whichever one is good I guess right

00:06:29.92
Andrew
But obviously, if they offer, we'll say yes. So,

00:06:35.97
Andrew
yeah, I think bad luck is what I want. Like, I don't really know. But, yeah, so it was overall, I would say it was really, really good, even though... Like, yeah, we definitely got our butts kicked a little bit and competition was tough.

00:06:49.37
Sean
nice

00:06:55.39
Sean
well cool nice while you've been gone we i don't know we've been busy and it's it's a crazy time it's a crazy time we are prepping for rsa which is end of the month which is pretty wild we're not

00:07:10.82
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:07:13.23
Andrew
How many ongoing projects do you have with like RSA is the deadline?

00:07:17.17
Sean
I can't, I can't, I can't count. I don't know how to tell you. too many.

00:07:20.36
Andrew
Too many.

00:07:21.51
Sean
We get inbound. the and like, we can't, we can't, like...

00:07:25.85
Andrew
Please tell me you're not still getting inbound for RSA.

00:07:32.82
Andrew
Clients, man.

00:07:36.84
Sean
yeah. Uh, yeah, while you've been gone, a lot of, lot of miscreant stuff. We just did a, we just did a retro, which is like the first retro we've ever done as a team for the quarter.

00:07:47.40
Andrew
Cool. cool

00:07:49.95
Sean
And that was really cool. Like everyone sort of filled out, filled things out. I wasn't even really a part of it. Like they filled like what's going well in design, what's going well in dev, all that stuff. And like, like shout outs for people and like everyone's shouting each other out. And the thing I'm not sure. I'm like, there's no love for me in any of that, which is beautiful, which is amazing. Like this is the first time where like,

00:08:10.20
Sean
It's a company detached from me where everyone else is working together and I'm just kind of am available sometimes to help but and and I'm generally unreliable which is good. Yeah.

00:08:23.83
Sean
yeah

00:08:23.93
Andrew
Any specifics that you can share from that? like Anything that kind of surprised you that you that people said you were doing well or that people said needed to be done better that like kind of caught you off guard or that you think was like really spot on that you feel like you can share publicly?

00:08:43.69
Sean
I think nothing was surprising. i think what was... i think what was a really good indicator was that... Like, jj let JJ let the retro...

00:08:56.83
Andrew
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:08:57.13
Sean
And a bunch of people spoke up and were we're saying things. And that, I think, is well it is a very different vibe than just, like, the cult of Sean. and Like, the solar system and and everyone rotates around me.

00:09:08.97
Sean
i think that... like to know to To zero credit of my own, I think one of the problems I've always had running the company in the early days was that everything also felt siloed, right?

00:09:20.58
Sean
I was the router, but route work, and I thought that was like delegation enough like of doing task delegation. But then I always had this frustration of like why does this person and this person not, like though why don't they ever talk to each other?

00:09:32.98
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:09:33.08
Sean
i think what was cool was that it seems like there's plenty of people talking to each other and designers and devs are talking to each other. And it's helpful that our dev is, you know, also a design professor. So it's also to do design and like support in that way.

00:09:48.13
Sean
So like, I think generally vibes were good. I think,

00:09:57.15
Sean
I don't think anything was surprising. I think we came out, came out of it with some like good, what to do better things. things like like ideas you know one of the things that always gets brought up is the fact that clients don't get content in time for a website to launch until the last minute yeah yeah yeah well our our thinking now is to do like a content extraction workshop which is probably the one piece of like value i added to that entire meeting

00:10:14.17
Andrew
the yeah If you can solve that problem, let me know.

00:10:22.50
Andrew
the

00:10:27.53
Andrew
o It's an interesting way to way to tackle it is like get there and is is that sort of like you all do like interviews and then produce content from that or you just sit there and hold the client's hand and force them to write?

00:10:32.70
Sean
yeah

00:10:44.08
Sean
That, that, it's like pulling, we're gonna pull teeth is is, that seemed to be the, but i think that's I think that's good.

00:10:47.15
Andrew
Yeah.

00:10:50.90
Sean
I think that's, yeah.

00:10:52.08
Andrew
The other way to handle it, I guess, is just to like require clients to let you produce the content.

00:10:58.96
Sean
Right, right. But that's so that's a lot of work. Well, it's been a lot of work because I've always been the bottleneck there. I think that I got called out on one of the one of the things that aren't going well is like when we don't have content internally.

00:11:07.67
Andrew
I mean, copywriter is like a pretty straightforward position to hire for, even freelance, I think.

00:11:16.72
Sean
I've tried. It's been tough.

00:11:18.46
Andrew
Really?

00:11:19.12
Sean
Yeah, because I need,

00:11:19.75
Andrew
Security copywriting is harder than a lot of copywriting because you need someone who understands the technical stuff at a deep enough level to avoid just filling the thing with cliches or inaccuracies.

00:11:23.67
Sean
Yeah.

00:11:30.26
Sean
Mm-hmm.

00:11:34.35
Sean
Yeah, that's pretty much the hard, yeah, that's basically the hardest part of it.

00:11:35.06
Andrew
Yeah, that's fair. That makes sense.

00:11:38.62
Sean
But we have a really great, I mean, the new product marketer we brought on is awesome.

00:11:38.91
Andrew
Hmm.

00:11:42.65
Sean
I don't know. It's been good. It's been good vibes all around. We are, yeah, yeah, we're, we're, i think I think it's going to happen, but they were talking about doing like badges across the team of a particularly tough client.

00:11:56.95
Sean
You know, you would all get a sticker or a badge. It's like, I survived. XYZ and all I got was a sticker or things like that. I think it just spun out of some internal jokes people were having. So, it's cool.

00:12:05.47
Andrew
That's funny.

00:12:06.37
Sean
That's good.

00:12:06.39
Andrew
We were also talking about doing a badge system for the robotics team, mainly because like as the team was losing and taking it really hard, we were like, oh, we need to do a better job of highlighting like success that isn't directly tied to winning matches.

00:12:06.95
Sean
Good time.

00:12:09.54
Sean
Nice.

00:12:20.15
Sean
Yeah.

00:12:23.10
Andrew
And so we were talking about having some sort of badge or certificate system so that part of your feeling of success can come from, I learned a new skill

00:12:32.07
Sean
yeah yeah

00:12:32.91
Andrew
or I'm now qualified to teach other students the skill even, and not just we won a match or we lost a match, because then that gets tough.

00:12:43.90
Sean
interesting that is that is kind of the same takeaway I had out of my out of my thing like yeah

00:12:48.100
Andrew
I mean, like, so one of the interesting things about this this weekend was, like, as we were having some of the drama on the team and having the kids struggle with the losses, a friend of our lead mentor came over and helped us out.

00:12:53.55
Sean
Yeah. Totally. Totally.

00:13:01.61
Andrew
And, like, her whole thing now is just floating around to teams and helping mentors like communicate with kids better and everything and as she was talking us through all of this stuff i was like there are a lot of fucking adults who could use this exact same advice like this this is does not just apply to children and like this this 100 applies to the workplace and if you ever wanted to make a stupid amount of money you could just go be a like a culture consultant and like help people put processes into place to you know better communicate as a team

00:13:08.24
Sean
yeah

00:13:14.42
Sean
totally

00:13:30.83
Sean
I mean, separately. i mean, there I feel like absolutely. i think there's a couple of folks that do that.

00:13:36.21
Andrew
Oh, for sure.

00:13:36.56
Sean
One of them is called Totally.

00:13:37.41
Andrew
Organizational consultant is is like a huge thing.

00:13:41.31
Andrew
There's even organizational psychologists and stuff.

00:13:44.17
Sean
Interesting.

00:13:45.23
Andrew
Yeah.

00:13:46.27
Sean
Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah. what else happens What else is going on? What else what else happened last week?

00:13:55.70
Andrew
so you may have heard we launched MetaMonster on Monday. yay

00:14:01.59
Sean
Yay. How'd it go?

00:14:03.13
Andrew
Whose brilliant idea was it to launch a product like the day after States while I was still like partially, I I'm going to use the term hungover.

00:14:03.48
Sean
I've been burning.

00:14:12.27
Andrew
i wasn't, I obviously wasn't like drunk at States or anything like that, but I was like, just so tired and so wiped out and just like had a headache and it felt like I was hungover, even if I wasn't.

00:14:16.32
Sean
Right, right, right.

00:14:25.04
Sean
I feel that, yeah.

00:14:27.73
Andrew
uh i'll also say good bad bad good i know and i like i have i've been trying to like figure out how like should i signal to you that like it's not as hype as i want it to be or should i just wait and and unload to you on the pod so here we are

00:14:31.06
Sean
Okay, okay. I've been waiting all week, by the way. I have an...

00:14:49.17
Sean
Is this why you're feeling salty, by the way?

00:14:50.42
Andrew
Yeah, yeah, 100%.

00:14:51.27
Sean
Okay, okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

00:14:52.07
Andrew
100%.

00:14:53.30
Sean
Gotcha.

00:14:54.29
Andrew
I'm mad at myself.

00:14:55.40
Sean
Okay, okay.

00:14:56.06
Sean
Okay, all right, so what happened? what what What's the deal?

00:15:00.77
Andrew
It's just been quiet. It's just been a a kind of lackluster launch, which is not unexpected, right? Like, I think people way, way overemphasize launches.

00:15:09.98
Andrew
And, like, you never make or break a business off the launch.

00:15:10.37
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. yeah

00:15:14.16
Andrew
A launch is just kind of a point in time. And, like, you're going to have a million tiny launches throughout the course of your your product. But I still like want to use that as an opportunity to try to generate some buzz. And I just feel like there wasn't any buzz generated.

00:15:30.69
Andrew
so You know, looking at metrics, like the metrics aren't great. Like we we had 300 people on the mailing list. We got like a 23% open rate on the launch rate email and then a like 3% click rate or something. So we had nine people click.

00:15:49.59
Andrew
through to like sign up for metamonster and of those nine people who clicked through only one made it all the way through creating an account and putting down a credit card and then they immediately canceled uh so they like signed up and then immediately canceled so they wouldn't be charged which like fair but and it's someone that i know and i have talked to and like they were genuinely curious about the tool but they're like

00:15:52.35
Sean
Oh. OK. Gotcha.

00:16:03.88
Sean
oh

00:16:09.04
Sean
okay

00:16:15.91
Andrew
Not really a great fit for the tool. They were more just curious to see what I was working on.

00:16:18.30
Sean
gotcha

00:16:21.44
Sean
Gotcha. Gotcha. Cool. <unk> got

00:16:23.64
Andrew
And then, you know, I was like, okay, shake it off. I also sent out an email to my personal mailing list, which got more clicks. Although not all to this to the the app, but like got some more opens and clicks and stuff. It's a much bigger mailing list.

00:16:41.43
Andrew
Haven't seen any conversions come through that, that I can tell. I got Google ads cranking again. and that's been, you know, it always takes a little while to ramp up to like full speed.

00:16:52.63
Andrew
Like they, you know, they do their kind of algorithm testing

00:16:55.27
Sean
Yeah, they have learning mode and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah.

00:16:57.10
Andrew
Yeah, so it's not at full speed yet. I think it's only driven, i don't know, 10 or 20 people to the site. We got another person who came through and like made it all the way through the signup flow and also canceled pretty quickly. So you know I think the biggest, it's it's hard to tell and it's hard not to overreact.

00:17:22.47
Andrew
like It's hard to tell what's going on And hard to tell like how seriously to take these different signals.

00:17:29.88
Sean
Mm-hmm.

00:17:30.52
Andrew
So you know there's there could be a bunch of different reasons for why we're seeing what we're seeing. One, you know I didn't do as good a job as I could have of keeping the waiting list warm and like building excitement and building hype. And we haven't shipped features that fast. And so like there hasn't been a ton to talk about. and you know That could be a reason.

00:17:52.85
Andrew
It could be that yeah the tool really is a web crawler that can do page title and meta description generation right now. We still don't have our or CMS integration, which is like,

00:18:06.76
Andrew
think is going to be a limiting factor for a lot of people because it just sounds like a lot of work to export something to a CSV and then get it into a CMS. We're really close on that, by the way. Austin has it functional. He's just wrapping up the last like API key generation stuff.

00:18:24.17
Andrew
He's submitted to the WordPress plugin store, so hopefully we'll be releasing that within the next week. So like you know lack of CMS integration could be hurting us. Lack of general functionality could be hurting us.

00:18:39.28
Andrew
I think I'm worried that we might be overpriced. i tested, got some feedback from a few alpha users on pricing and the feedback was generally like super positive. Like, yeah, this feels right.

00:18:57.73
Andrew
This looks good. And so I kind of, maybe I should have, listened to that but instead i doubled the pricing because i was like if no one's complaining about it we're undercharging uh is like the conventional wisdom that i've often heard and so i just like i doubled the pricing and now that puts us in i was just doing some market research before this call and like

00:19:12.42
Sean
That's fair. That's fair.

00:19:19.95
Andrew
That definitely puts us in like a higher bracket of of SEO tools when we still have pretty limited functionality. So I think we might be overcharging. This is also the first product I've ever launched that required a credit card up front, which yeah was an intentional decision to add friction to the signup process to be like,

00:19:41.12
Andrew
so that we could reduce tire kickers and you know make sure that the people we we're getting in the product like really were interested in it but maybe that's too much friction maybe we should you maybe we need to show people how easy the product is to use and give them a little more of a taste of value before they have to put a credit card in whether that's just switching to like a no credit card required free trial or switching to like a usage based free trial so there's a bunch of different like possibilities swirling around in my head for what we may need to do differently

00:20:20.87
Andrew
definitely not loving the conversion rates I'm seeing. Like, you know, 60 people have visited the signup page in the last three days and two have made it all the way through.

00:20:31.68
Andrew
So I'm not loving that. But I also, again, and there's another part of me that's just like trying not to overreact because it's so early and we really have gotten very little traffic.

00:20:44.71
Andrew
So yeah, Yeah, I'm feeling a little disappointed, a little like, yeah, this is kind of what i expected to happen.

00:20:53.38
Andrew
And then a little bit like impatient.

00:20:57.93
Sean
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

00:20:58.43
Andrew
Like I want to do all these things. I want to change all these things. But I also want to try to wait and see what the real numbers are with a little bit more data. And I'm just like, so I'm just feeling kind of antsy and impatient and kind of

00:21:08.55
Sean
right

00:21:14.87
Sean
yeah

00:21:16.70
Andrew
frustrated. Austin was like, is this the start of the long, slow, fast ramp of death?

00:21:18.60
Sean
yeah

00:21:24.93
Andrew
I was like, I guess.

00:21:27.80
Sean
uh well

00:21:28.24
Andrew
I guess we're here.

00:21:32.08
Sean
you know in a way that's a win also going back to the whole uh i'm gonna i'm gonna stop therapizing in a second or playing uh but but like you know going back to the whole the kids with the badges and then learning new skills and the launch you know product

00:21:53.67
Andrew
yeah

00:21:54.39
Sean
You know, like, I know an adult that needs that. needs that I know two adults, you and me, who both need that talk.

00:22:01.04
Andrew
yeah fairy

00:22:01.23
Sean
but but But also, like, isn't this a beta launch, though? Okay.

00:22:05.11
Andrew
yeah yeah yeah it's it's a

00:22:06.32
Sean
Because it's not like you post it on Product Hunt or any Reddit or, like, any level.

00:22:10.66
Andrew
No, i've i've been I've spent the last like couple days posting to a bunch of smaller directories.

00:22:15.40
Sean
Okay. Okay.

00:22:16.67
Andrew
By the way, the directory business, such a fucking racket. I have dropped like $500 to post to like a bunch of directories, fully expecting to get zero traffic from them.

00:22:21.05
Sean
Totally.

00:22:25.35
Sean
Yeah, yeah.

00:22:28.39
Sean
Totally. How much traffic have you gotten from them?

00:22:30.95
Andrew
I mean, I've just did this yesterday and today, so probably none so far.

00:22:36.05
Andrew
But you I'll be able to tell you better next week.

00:22:39.58
Sean
Gotcha. I think the value isn't...

00:22:41.53
Andrew
The value, I'm doing it for backlinks.

00:22:43.26
Sean
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:22:43.27
Andrew
That's, I'm buying backlinks.

00:22:44.22
Sean
It's that's like the cheapest backlinks you can buy. Yeah.

00:22:46.46
Andrew
Yeah. Yeah.

00:22:48.65
Sean
Yeah, they're just... Because they're a volume play, they're just they're so much cheaper than a guest post, right?

00:22:53.76
Andrew
Yep.

00:22:56.11
Sean
Okay, well, i'm curious how that goes. I feel sus about it. I mean, how did this how did this compare with Chart Juice? not that Not that you launched it in this way with Chart Juice, with the credit card, thing but...

00:23:06.31
Andrew
Yeah, with Chart Juice, I didn't have... I might have had a little waiting list. remember I can't remember. don't know that I did. And then with Chart Juice, I did opt-out or opt-in free trial.

00:23:19.23
Andrew
So no credit card required.

00:23:19.80
Sean
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:23:21.37
Andrew
Yeah. pretty low conversion rates on that too. You know, ran some Google ads for like a month or something. And, you I wasn't even, the i think the biggest difference, the thing that I'm still kind of holding onto as the biggest positive is I'm still getting people to talk to me in a way that I never did with Chart Juice. With Chart Juice, it was like hard to get people to sign up and the people who did sign up, I couldn't get to talk to me. But like,

00:23:51.58
Andrew
here are alpha users even the ones who aren't using the product actively are still happy to talk to me and and everything the the guy who signed up and kicked the tires and then canceled like i reached out to him and he gave me some good feedback which was generally positive it was just like hey i like the tool it's easy to use like i yeah i was just kind of curious about it got the feeling that he doesn't really pay much for SEO tools. he's He's going to pay as little as possible, so not a great fit.

00:24:21.75
Andrew
So

00:24:21.92
Sean
Right, right. Right.

00:24:25.42
Andrew
so yeah, I think that's a positive that I'm i'm trying to stay focused on. And like to

00:24:32.67
Andrew
The thing that feels different about this versus Chart Juice is like we're not really inventing. Like Chart Juice, there were so few chart to image APIs. Like the space we were trying to live within was like not really an established market.

00:24:42.86
Sean
right right

00:24:46.64
Sean
right

00:24:46.83
Andrew
And here, there are so many web crawlers and like SEO tools that leverage ai already and stuff. And so it's it's a much more established market. And yeah.

00:24:58.46
Andrew
and We have lots of ideas for things we want to do to improve the tool that will bring us more directly in line with some of the competition, get us up to feature parity.

00:25:10.14
Andrew
you know I don't think we're going to try to be exactly like any of the tools we've seen out there, but... We will certainly have more overlap within a few months than we do right now.

00:25:21.54
Sean
Yeah, you

00:25:22.94
Andrew
And then there's still lots of things that I want to do to increase traffic. you know I'm seeing little trickles of SEO and YouTube working. And so I want to keep keep pushing on SEO and content marketing and stuff.

00:25:36.08
Andrew
I want to turn cold outreach back on and see if if I can get any, you know, at least some conversations from that that I was, you know, so that i can I can learn again now that we've got a product and I can say like, hey, can you give me feedback on this tangible thing instead of like,

00:25:36.86
Sean
yeah you know

00:25:56.58
Andrew
hey, I'm building a thing maybe in the future. So, like, lots of ideas. Not all negative signals, just, like, I think we're in that hard slog early period.

00:26:12.76
Sean
yeah i think you're not in the i don't know this is in the what is it the trough of sorrow is that what it's called the sass

00:26:20.54
Andrew
The long, slow sass ramp of death.

00:26:22.70
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah.

00:26:23.41
Andrew
So the the idea behind the long, slow sass ramp of death is just that, like...

00:26:23.70
Sean
Mm-hmm.

00:26:27.48
Andrew
when you launch a SaaS product, you're stacking like 20, 30, 40, $50 a month charges. And it just, until you find product market fit and you find a reliable distribution channel, it just, you're slowly growing revenue until you get to the point where you've solved a couple things and you start feeling the effects of compound growth.

00:26:43.60
Sean
yeah

00:26:49.64
Andrew
And so I think that's pretty squarely where we are.

00:26:55.11
Sean
yeah yeah okay I was thinking totally 100% I think you're very yeah I think you're very much in the early part of that yeah in my brain was thinking of what is the thing with the Airbnb guy like the like the trough of sorrow where he gets into a bunch of credit card debt you know what I'm talking about okay

00:26:56.01
Andrew
And on the very early end of that.

00:27:12.37
Andrew
Yeah, yeah. I think those two are related. Like, where you, like, you see some initial success and then it kind of plummets a little bit.

00:27:19.23
Sean
uh-huh yeah

00:27:21.20
Andrew
And then you're, like, struggling to find your way. And then you find something that's working.

00:27:23.83
Sean
Right, right.

00:27:24.100
Andrew
And

00:27:26.06
Sean
Right, right. Then your hockey stick growth.

00:27:26.91
Andrew
Yeah.

00:27:30.96
Sean
what

00:27:32.19
Sean
so what are you going to do about it? What's...

00:27:35.07
Andrew
So I'm going to try to be patient, for one, and try not to overreact.

00:27:37.03
Sean
Okay. Okay.

00:27:39.68
Andrew
I think that's that's step one.

00:27:42.25
Sean
Okay.

00:27:43.29
Andrew
I am going to keep doing some market research and I'm seriously can thinking about cutting our prices.

00:27:50.11
Sean
Mm-hmm.

00:27:51.50
Andrew
I am going to keep pushing on acquisition.

00:27:56.31
Andrew
Like we're still getting a very small amount of traffic to the website, which makes it hard to know what to make of any of this. so I'm going to keep pushing on that. Like I said, with, by turning cold outreach back on my hope is to at least have conversations with people have sales conversations and figure out if people don't want to buy why.

00:28:19.04
Sean
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

00:28:20.80
Andrew
and then, yeah, we're going keep adding the features that we think need to be in the product for it to be a much more compelling tool.

00:28:31.16
Andrew
the market research made me feel better in a way it's interesting like rank math has this ai offering that claims to be able to do anything they've got like a collection of like 125 prompts you can use it for a bunch of different shit and like the most expensive version costs 15 bucks a month so like that sucks it's like oof if we're having to compare against that that that blows so

00:28:29.66
Sean
yeah

00:28:35.05
Sean
okay

00:28:49.14
Sean
Gotcha.

00:28:56.53
Sean
and Sure. Yeah.

00:28:57.99
Andrew
I think that's for like a single site versus like multi-sites and stuff. but But then Ahrefs, as far as I can tell, you have to have an existing Ahrefs subscription and then add $200 month per add-on

00:29:09.84
Sean
Yeah.

00:29:12.34
Andrew
per site add on

00:29:13.46
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:14.64
Andrew
in order to get access to what is currently the only things their AI like patch feature can do right now are meta descriptions, page titles, and broken links, like for a links that point to a 404 page.

00:29:31.53
Sean
Nice.

00:29:32.64
Andrew
And so it's like, if that's the bar, and if they're, don't know if they're selling that, right? Like, I have no idea. it's such a new feature. I don't know if they're selling that. But if if they are, and we can compete with that, that feels

00:29:50.14
Sean
Yeah, that feels cool.

00:29:51.60
Andrew
very doable.

00:29:52.75
Sean
Yeah, yeah i've seen the I've seen the pop-ups every once in a while when i log into Azure, so I'm like, I'm not paying for this.

00:29:58.33
Andrew
Interesting. Yeah.

00:29:59.46
Sean
and And I think I'm closer to the ICP in this case, right? Even with clients, like there's just no value or not that there's no value. There's,

00:30:12.62
Sean
it's just expensive. It's just like way too expensive.

00:30:13.73
Andrew
Yeah. Yeah.

00:30:15.36
Sean
A per site is also crazy. Yeah.

00:30:17.44
Andrew
yeah

00:30:17.64
Sean
Mm-hmm. yeah

00:30:19.88
Andrew
LinkScout's pricing is, they have a like a free, they call it a free trial, not a free tier. But they have their like free trial, and then they're 50 bucks a month and 200 bucks a month.

00:30:32.33
Andrew
And the pricing that we launched with starts at 50, goes 50, 100, 200, 400. goes fifty ah hundred two hundred four hundred And so I'm kind of thinking that if i cut that in half and go twenty five fifty hundred two hundred that'll put a closer to you know standard SEO ranges.

00:30:55.18
Andrew
you know The bottom end, maybe a little high.

00:30:59.83
Andrew
It's hard because you're like you're comparing apples to oranges.

00:31:01.40
Sean
I think so.

00:31:02.14
Andrew
like So many of these things have different totally different features. like We're not going to compare to Ahrefs directly.

00:31:06.73
Sean
Yeah, yeah.

00:31:08.28
Andrew
but But I think just trying to look at it from like how will users be thinking about this? What does this pricing look like? And I feel like if I were a user right now, the pricing would feel really high for what you're getting.

00:31:21.02
Andrew
The flip side of that is maybe just be patient and like keep adding features to the tool until it feels worth

00:31:28.34
Sean
I think you should keep adding features to the tool for sure

00:31:28.33
Andrew
high price.

00:31:32.07
Sean
But I also think you said something really important earlier about this sort of like finding that one distribution channel that works like I think, I mean, I think 25 is great. I think you'll find a lot of folks who buy for 25, but I think when you talk about your ICP, I don't know if it's those people that are like 25 feels like I'm a single, like I have one or two sites, right?

00:31:54.55
Andrew
Yeah.

00:31:54.58
Sean
And I'm going to use the thing because 25 is affordable. Once you're at 50, you're going for like SEO agency, SEO freelancer, you know, 50 managing 50 sites.

00:32:06.27
Andrew
And right now our pricing, our first tier is aimed at solo individuals. it's And it's 50.

00:32:12.10
Sean
I see.

00:32:14.40
Andrew
And then our first agency tier is 100.

00:32:14.66
Sean
Gotcha.

00:32:17.73
Andrew
And so it feels to me like those, yeah.

00:32:17.81
Sean
Gotcha, gotcha.

00:32:20.40
Sean
That's right. I forgot I got a sweetheart deal on it.

00:32:22.44
Andrew
Yeah.

00:32:24.66
Sean
Okay. Well, the thing the thing that I'm trying to get to is... Alex Bottschillian- think i think the problem is that you haven't landed in like you haven't gotten of the eyeballs in front of more of just your ICP like.

00:32:38.81
Sean
Alex Bottschillian- Right and I mean I don't know who those people are or I don't know where you go with at like you're getting with ads and all that sort of sort of stuff but.

00:32:43.77
Andrew
sure.

00:32:47.10
Sean
Alex Bottschillian- yeah like. Yeah, i don't I don't think there's meta monster awareness with the Jackie Chow's of the world or or whatever, like SEO people at the moment, right?

00:33:00.50
Sean
You're not in the like local SEO space or the, you know, those guys are like the rank and rents or the, or just like more white hat se SEO stuff.

00:33:05.54
Andrew
for sure

00:33:10.18
Sean
like but Like, you know, you haven't posted in, doubt, you know, you've posted in like black hat SEO forum, right?

00:33:17.32
Andrew
Well, I don't think I want to post in Black Hat SEO forums. Like, I don't want to

00:33:21.49
Sean
No, no, no. That specific, like, that. there's There's one specific one, which is, like, Black Hat World. Have you heard of that?

00:33:30.23
Andrew
No, but still, that doesn't feel like our ICP to me.

00:33:31.16
Sean
Okay.

00:33:34.31
Andrew
Anyone who's hanging out in Black Hat world does not feel like our ICP.

00:33:38.30
Sean
I beg to differ. I begt and think there's a lot of SEOs in there. Yeah.

00:33:41.69
Andrew
I'm sure there are, but like, I feel like I'm looking for more of like the professional consultant, eight small agency SEOs, which don't feel like the kind of people who are drawn to black hat world.

00:33:42.63
Sean
Yeah.

00:33:55.48
Sean
That's fair. I mean, i i see your point. I see your point. Yeah, I see your point. I just like have a hard time delineating those two. for my like I think there's plenty of people who still go on that to like keep up.

00:34:13.41
Sean
And there's plenty of those folks that run SEO agencies, especially like local SEO agencies.

00:34:14.28
Andrew
Sure.

00:34:18.16
Sean
Okay, I think i think the... the uh the the what do you call it the venn diagram of folks that run seo agencies and are in maybe like black hat world or like local seo agency like like or agencies that do local seo so more google maps based sort of work right they'll help you set up a website try to get you google list my business try to pump into that but yeah i see your point it's not like

00:34:44.61
Andrew
I don't know that I want our brand affiliated with Black Hat World.

00:34:48.09
Sean
I gotcha. I gotcha.

00:34:49.66
Andrew
Yeah.

00:34:49.76
Sean
I gotcha.

00:34:50.24
Andrew
At least not yet.

00:34:50.33
Sean
Yeah.

00:34:51.44
Andrew
I'm not...

00:34:51.47
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. know It's too, it's too content. got it. Yeah. Yeah.

00:34:54.94
Andrew
Yeah.

00:34:55.36
Sean
Yeah.

00:34:56.18
Andrew
i am I am trying to... think through like and it's just way too early to tell but i am curious if our icp is going to end up being who i currently think it is which is like small boutique seo agencies that are like their bread and butter is seo or if it's going to end up being folks more like miscreants that are like general purpose marketing agencies that do that have to provide some level of seo for their clients but it's not like their bread and butter and

00:35:27.27
Andrew
I could see us actually being more useful to someone like that because they're like, I'm not going to invest the time in, in like diving deep, deep, deep into SEO land and like configuring these really complicated tools.

00:35:36.57
Sean
Yeah. I mean, I...

00:35:42.24
Andrew
I just want something that'll get me to 80% for my clients as quickly as possible. so I have been, have been thinking about that a little bit,

00:35:53.40
Sean
yeah

00:35:54.82
Sean
i mean i my My gut still feels like the former feels more correct.

00:36:00.94
Andrew
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:36:02.45
Sean
I mean, I certainly think that web dev agencies are a good secondary ICP. Yeah. i think the I think what it is is that the

00:36:15.33
Sean
we don't get asked to do SEO work. We just do it because we want to And because we get brought on to do like marketing retainers after a lot of, i don't think, I think a lot of web dev agencies don't continue to do or web design, web design for sure, but like web design into web dev don't get asked to do like the same type of main like SEO retainer work as much your phone.

00:36:44.74
Andrew
I would challenge that. I see a fuck ton of general purpose marketing agencies that offer SEO as an ongoing service.

00:36:46.13
Sean
Okay.

00:36:51.47
Andrew
A fuck ton.

00:36:51.86
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We're saying two different things. I'm saying web design agencies. You're saying general purpose marketing agencies.

00:37:00.100
Andrew
Whatever.

00:37:01.17
Sean
But okay.

00:37:02.12
Andrew
Web design agencies that like, I see a lot of people branded as a web design agency that offer ongoing services.

00:37:05.85
Sean
Hmm.

00:37:11.24
Sean
Okay, fine. Fair enough. Yeah.

00:37:13.38
Andrew
Yeah.

00:37:15.27
Sean
Anyway.

00:37:17.28
Sean
Maybe you're right then. Maybe maybe it is.

00:37:20.18
Sean
Maybe it is like general purpose marketing folks who need like the Pareto principle of SEO, you know, like gets you, but then how does that, does that change the way you start building and thinking about the product?

00:37:37.44
Sean
Because. Hmm.

00:37:38.12
Andrew
Well, it it changes things, I think. So like one of the things that i have been debating is like how opinionated to make the product and how much to like hold your hand. And in our marketing material, how much to talk about how SEO works versus assuming that our audience are experts.

00:38:00.12
Sean
Mm-hmm.

00:38:01.00
Andrew
So I think it changes a lot about how we talk about MetaMonster and how we build help documents and you know, just supporting marketing materials.

00:38:11.40
Andrew
If we're assuming that our people are like marketers who know a little bit about SEO, but aren't really experts, then I want to do a lot more explaining and a lot more talking about you know, doing this will benefit you from an SEO perspective here versus if I'm selling to experts, then I'm going to talk a lot more.

00:38:33.00
Andrew
I'm going to assume they know, like when it's worth updating a meta description and when it's not, and just talk to them more about like, you know, time savings and like client, you know, making their life easier, you know, sort of stuff.

00:38:50.36
Sean
is there any Is there any value prop that moves past just the time savings portion of it? Yeah,

00:38:58.50
Andrew
I don't know yet. So one thing I heard recently is that like, we're kind of, you were telling me this from microconf. There was that guy saying like, don't talk about time savings or making money.

00:39:06.40
Sean
yeah.

00:39:09.23
Andrew
Talk about like, you know, ease of use and.

00:39:11.24
Sean
He was explicitly, yeah yeah. Explicitly it was no one buys, no one buys a product to spend more time on the, on the task.

00:39:17.32
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:39:19.06
Sean
And then he had a good like Harvard Business Review thing that he brought up where like reasons why people buy and like, uh product experience and everything was far like greater than time savings time savings was one of the was quite literally the last bit of of like the why people buy chart yeah that's that's sort of what came into mind and it was like i wonder yeah i wonder what

00:39:34.04
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:39:47.90
Sean
I wonder what else you can you can add on to it. For example, right, one thing we are struggling with internally, so please build this into MetaMonster because you great you have already. We need to... we are We are redesigning someone's site right now.

00:40:04.78
Sean
have a They have a copywriter. This is not SEO anymore, right? this is like This is the entirety of Monster Endeavors and everything, but... I think I've always told you what the really cool thing you've also built is the fact that you scrape the entire site and you turn it to markdown and now it is digestible.

00:40:18.71
Andrew
Yep. yep

00:40:21.74
Sean
We need that so bad. need that yesterday at the moment because our clients are like, or clients like, i don't want to go to the site. Can I just have it in a word doc so I can edit it there?

00:40:33.68
Sean
cause, cause the, yeah. Uh, anyway I don't have I don't like JJ asked me today he's like do you have an easy way to do this I was like nope can't do it amazing amazing cool sick

00:40:43.29
Andrew
We are probably going to build that within the next week or two and export to Markdown. Export Markdown. Yeah, it's it's on our list. We have a small bundle of like small improvements to make in the next round of updates. And that's that' for sure one of them.

00:40:58.94
Sean
Yeah.

00:40:59.35
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:41:00.02
Sean
One thing I learned from my product marketer that might be helpful for you. And this is how we're, I'm having her like enumerate out a bunch of these things. So that basically this, this came from the fact that I hopped on a workshop and call with her and I was like, I really hate the way we sell retainers because it's infinite scope subscription rate. know And it's based on like just expected output of work.

00:41:20.02
Sean
And you just kind of have to trust us that we're going to do something. And then think good thing. think that's good thing. think that's good thing. I that's good thing. I think that's good thing. think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing.

00:41:33.88
Sean
I think that's good thing. a thing. think that's good thing.

00:41:40.21
Sean
so then at the end at the tail and they're like oh can we get social posts and can we get this this and we sell the retain it on top of that But if that's packaged as a campaign, we just sell the whole campaign and know that we're doing all these things anyway.

00:41:52.82
Sean
So then I was talking to her and she's like, yeah, like in the past, like we used to call them tier one, tier two, tier three campaigns.

00:41:59.10
Andrew
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:41:59.44
Sean
Tier one, you would spend a quarter on, which is your launch your giant product launches. But then tier three were new feature announcement, right? to the Like add to the change log.

00:42:09.54
Sean
you know, brings awareness, social buzz, all that sort of stuff. Tier two are things to kind of get you to feature parody or to like talk about like differentiators. Like you've built a new something and you're announcing it to compete and and whatnot. So it's like that middle ground of work.

00:42:26.60
Sean
And what what it sounds like to me is like you need a lot more tier three, like these tier three campaigns.

00:42:29.66
Andrew
Yeah.

00:42:31.14
Sean
So, yeah.

00:42:32.04
Andrew
I think that's that's for sure true.

00:42:32.70
Sean
Yeah.

00:42:33.67
Andrew
Like, we need to build more shit and talk about what we're building and, like, show people why it's cool.

00:42:34.10
Sean
yeah

00:42:36.62
Sean
yeah Yeah.

00:42:38.44
Sean
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:42:39.06
Andrew
It also occurred to me that, like, kind of going back to your point of, like, can you go beyond the, like, meta descriptions and time savings thing, like, The reason you bought was not because of the meta descriptions or page titles. Like, I almost feel like you would have bought without the generate button at all.

00:42:57.44
Andrew
Like, that was just kind of like a nice feature. And like, you kind of just bought because you were like, oh, this is a really easy, lightweight web crawler.

00:43:07.63
Sean
Yeah, yeah, that was...

00:43:08.13
Andrew
Like, you get more value out of that than anything else. And I don't know that we talk about that. nearly enough on the website of like, hey, like we're like, this is Screaming Frog with AI.

00:43:18.25
Andrew
And like maybe the actual value we should be pushing is like, this is Screaming Frog that won't make you want to claw your eyes out.

00:43:18.33
Sean
you

00:43:25.59
Sean
Yeah. I mean, i think i think it is Screaming Frog that won't make me. First of all, it's lightweight, but it's also the fact that it's in the cloud, right?

00:43:33.81
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:43:34.36
Sean
I don't and don't, like, I can use it, and then my dev can use it.

00:43:38.02
Andrew
Yeah.

00:43:39.22
Sean
And that's in itself, like, really useful.

00:43:41.60
Andrew
Yeah.

00:43:41.99
Sean
I think if I had to.

00:43:42.37
Andrew
And like there, like SiteBulb has a cloud crawler, but it starts at $250 a month for a million yeah URLs.

00:43:46.08
Sean
I see.

00:43:49.28
Andrew
And that's just so much more than most people need.

00:43:51.75
Sean
Right.

00:43:53.34
Andrew
although again, if we're, if our base plan is a hundred dollars a month for 2,500 URLs that you start to go, two things feel kind of comparable now versus if our base plan is like 50 bucks a month for 2,500 URLs, the base agency plan.

00:43:52.30
Sean
Right.

00:44:07.80
Sean
and do you think I do think while I bought because of the the lightweight scraping, that's not the value my team gets out of it, though.

00:44:15.11
Andrew
Yeah.

00:44:15.27
Sean
Like, the value my team gets out of it is the fact that there's an authority telling them what a better meta description is for this thing, which is, I mean, I use it too, like, like if I don't want to think about it, I i guess for me, it's, it's, there is the time-saving aspect, but I think it's time-savings plus the trust that it is going to be better.

00:44:32.73
Sean
All right, right.

00:44:33.01
Andrew
Yeah.

00:44:33.57
Sean
I'm buying, I'm trying to buy like aspirationally the performance increase of that, which right, right.

00:44:39.80
Andrew
Like the better click through rates on pages. Yeah.

00:44:42.41
Sean
Like why meta descriptions matter if like, I don't know, where's my, where's my white paper on that? Don't do a white paper, but where's the blog post?

00:44:49.81
Andrew
Well, this is the other awkward thing is like all the research I've seen lately says meta descriptions don't matter.

00:44:50.29
Sean
Like, but

00:44:56.06
Andrew
Page titles matter a lot. Meta descriptions, like there was this big research that some SEO agency did recently that said pages actually performed better if you removed the meta descriptions entirely.

00:44:57.91
Sean
Oh, sure.

00:45:09.24
Andrew
Which is wild.

00:45:10.66
Sean
That is wild. I can, I mean, I can, one okay, sorry. When I said my description, I also meant page title, but like it being a better page, like better page titles do help me.

00:45:15.60
Andrew
Yeah.

00:45:20.26
Andrew
Yeah, those everyone seems to still say that those matter a lot.

00:45:20.81
Sean
Like, mm-hmm.

00:45:24.19
Andrew
That having good page titles, yeah, makes a big difference.

00:45:27.78
Sean
Yeah. Right.

00:45:30.03
Andrew
Yeah, i think I think that's right too, that like our, you know, being the authority. But again, going back to like, is our ICP going to be marketing agencies or is it going to be SEO agencies?

00:45:42.27
Sean
right

00:45:42.48
Andrew
I think that SEO agencies don't want to outsource the authority necessarily. Like they want to be the authority. so like and seo agencies are different they come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes but like i keep going back to like one of my best friends runs a really successful seo agency that does like high ticket work with like big name b2b sass brands and i've i showed him metamonster and i showed him and he's currently actively onboarding with a quasi competitor called arops this like

00:45:55.10
Sean
right

00:46:02.09
Sean
Mm-hmm. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yep.

00:46:06.01
Sean
yeah

00:46:18.99
Andrew
air ops is much more complicated it's more about building seo and ai like workflows these like kind of complicated workflows and like the complication is part of the value to him because he's like we still are bringing some expertise here in setting up these workflows and knowing like what the flow should be and metamask

00:46:40.28
Sean
Right. I hate that so much, by the way. I hate i hate hate that with a burning passion, but I...

00:46:45.43
Andrew
that's fair but like metamonster feels too point and click to him it's like yeah like metamonster we've been building metamonster to be a little bit more of a point and shoot camera versus a dslr and the people who like a point and shoot are the people who are like i don't want to have to learn all the how to mess with all the knobs i just want it to work

00:46:46.36
Sean
Right.

00:46:57.46
Sean
Right.

00:47:06.70
Sean
Yeah, but I mean, like point and shoots work well, not only for the casual photographer, but also for the professional street photographer who, you know, needs, who has those specific needs.

00:47:15.27
Andrew
Yeah.

00:47:18.96
Sean
So.

00:47:21.43
Sean
Hmm.

00:47:21.44
Andrew
Yeah. Anyway, I think the the reality like... like We don't have product market fit and and we've got we're a long way off from there.

00:47:28.99
Sean
Right.

00:47:31.37
Andrew
And there's a lot, a lot of question marks, but at least now we're out, we're live. There's no more like, uh, we're still in alpha.

00:47:37.06
Sean
Yeah.

00:47:40.33
Andrew
No, we're our beta is live.

00:47:41.43
Sean
Yeah. you and think that's a big I think that's a huge victory, by the way, because it unlocks the ability to finally do the learning.

00:47:42.30
Andrew
People can sign up and pay for it and we can start learning. It is. Yeah.

00:47:50.100
Sean
Yeah.

00:47:51.31
Andrew
Even if it's just mental, even if like we could have been doing this learning all along and we're trying to do what we could, like now it feels more open or official or something.

00:48:01.95
Sean
Yeah.

00:48:02.08
Andrew
so So yeah, I'm excited.

00:48:02.99
Sean
Sweet.

00:48:04.70
Andrew
We'll see. I'm frustrated and excited all at the same time.

00:48:09.22
Sean
Yeah, I feel that. I get that. Yeah, I mean, i to you know, there was one I had to shut down, like the SAS, before.

00:48:15.78
Andrew
Yeah, it's part of being a founder.

00:48:16.44
Sean
That was... Yeah.

00:48:18.89
Andrew
Yeah. Dude, tell me about your SaaS, the one that is not shut down, that is actively being worked on, because I'm pretty stoked by the demo that I just saw.

00:48:23.72
Sean
Okay. It is actually being worked on.

00:48:29.09
Sean
Yeah, so what do you would you tell me more? what do you think? Also, by the way, it's not... but Let me just answer your question. I realize I ghosted you earlier. i don't know how long it takes to submit to the Webflow App Marketplace because we have not submitted it yet because we don't have a name and we're stuck on this right now.

00:48:40.63
Andrew
OK. OK.

00:48:44.46
Sean
But tell me what you thought about the...

00:48:44.93
Andrew
We'll talk about the name thing in a second. To be brutally honest, my thought when I saw the demo was, fuck, Sean's going to get to product market fit before I do.

00:48:49.58
Sean
Yeah.

00:48:56.45
Andrew
Which is like shitty thing a shitty thing to think because like I shouldn't be jealous of you.

00:48:57.91
Sean
Hell yeah. See...

00:49:01.22
Andrew
I should be stoked for you. But I was genuinely like this thing is already like useful. And I'm sure there's some SaaS crap you need to put in place to be able to start selling it and everything.

00:49:08.71
Sean
What...

00:49:13.32
Andrew
But I was like this thing is already better than the Webflow CMS. And like if if if Sean can market this the right way, i don't see how this isn't successful.

00:49:22.58
Sean
okay so i i have two thoughts for you because when you said salty this came into my head one i think you were comparing my potential for success with your current reality by the way just say when you told me you're salty two actually i say don't remember what the second part was i kind of had i had the really smart thing to say and then i

00:49:34.07
Andrew
Sure. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair.

00:49:46.12
Sean
uh oh oh two two was like yeah kind of maybe up but you know i think the i think the the reason we went uh

00:49:55.54
Andrew
The more important thing here besides my fragile ego is you've built a really fucking cool demo and I am really excited and think it has a ton of potential.

00:50:03.59
Sean
thanks thanks thanks i also think it's lot of i think it has a lot of potential i think it has okay one i think it has a lot of potential i think it's it's because there was it was an educated guess based on all like multiple clients begging for it and we've built like many tools to solve that so now it's sort of all of that together

00:50:18.39
Andrew
Sure.

00:50:25.61
Sean
so yeah i'm excited about it uh okay so so i should talk about what it is right because we haven't okay i don't know we're kind of out time so maybe next episode like okay okay okay okay so so blogging with flow sucks that's my headline by the way blogging with flow sucks and as an agency because blogging with flow sucks so much

00:50:29.29
Andrew
Yeah, I think so.

00:50:34.01
Andrew
fuck it. No, no, no. Come on. We can we can run a little long.

00:50:41.46
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:50:47.36
Sean
plenty of like our of all of our clients are are always asking us like hey can you stage this blog for me

00:50:52.46
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:50:52.52
Sean
which which alsoso sucks that's because they're always writing google docs copying it and and like like someone always writes in google docs and it gets copied and pasted into webflow nobody blogs inside of that thing

00:51:03.69
Andrew
Yeah.

00:51:03.99
Sean
so why wouldn't

00:51:04.32
Andrew
I'm not sure that's going to totally change because Google Docs is still like has all of the like editing and collaboration and commenting features that will take you a while to build.

00:51:12.04
Sean
totally

00:51:13.05
Andrew
And like, there's also just value to having things separate from your CMS. Yeah.

00:51:17.50
Sean
Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody should be blogging necessarily inside of, yeah. Anyway, it is, it's it's basically just like a, like a wrapper on top of Webflow CMS that has a much better edit editing experience and it solves two things. One, it solves the,

00:51:36.14
Sean
One is that we have custom content types that pushes to what, like like you write in that and that editor, it feels like you're writing in like a notion or something and you press publish and it publishes the web flow, but you get to add in content types and we'll we'll constantly continue to release content types, like tables for example, or columns and all these things that our clients have asked for.

00:51:56.31
Sean
And we always just go and have to like hack it together with like HTML and put it in there. So we're solving that problem. And the other problem that we're trying to solve is the is the roles-based access problem, which is the fact that like, as our clients, basically Webflow CMS is not built for the same content velocity as like other, like a WordPress is, and we're trying to bridge that gap.

00:52:08.81
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:52:23.02
Sean
But if a website wants have high content velocity, website needs have multiple writers. And the last thing as a, let's say, an editor in chief of of, you know, like as I outsource to writers all across the world or or contractors or whatever, the last thing I want is one contractor to accidentally go and delete something else on a different CMS.

00:52:44.19
Sean
And Webflow has never had this had this sort of like these controls.

00:52:48.10
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:52:49.39
Sean
worse is that editors get to edit static things on the site so we need to kind of separate it and pull it out yeah that's that's what we're doing and now we are reached our biggest roblock our our first big robloc was finding a developer who could do this stuff but our second roadblock is I have no idea what to name this thing.

00:53:09.18
Sean
And I can't submit it to Webflow's marketplace until I have a name for it.

00:53:17.87
Andrew
So what are the top contenders right now? What are your favorite names from...

00:53:20.98
Sean
Okay.

00:53:21.67
Andrew
Because you started the thread in the Miscreants channel and asked your team to help you name it.

00:53:26.32
Sean
Yep.

00:53:28.37
Andrew
And there were a lot of good ideas floating around in there.

00:53:28.75
Sean
Yep.

00:53:30.69
Andrew
Although a lot of them don't come with.coms. So I don't know how much that matters to you.

00:53:34.65
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:53:37.45
Andrew
i think I think I agree with something Rob said on a recent episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, which is that like, Probably having the.com doesn't matter so much anymore.

00:53:49.09
Andrew
Like.ai,.io,... I o dot and don't love.co, but, like, there's a handful that work pretty well..so works pretty well, yeah.

00:53:54.13
Sean
Mm. Yeah,.so for this sort of stuff, right? Feathers. Mm-hmm.

00:54:01.05
Andrew
i I don't like.co just because I think people still get it confused with.com, and so it just is, like, yeah, it's just a little bit of a UX trap.

00:54:05.52
Sean
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

00:54:08.28
Andrew
Yeah.

00:54:08.69
Sean
Yeah.

00:54:10.34
Andrew
But i think he's right that like trying to keep the name of the product directly, like not having like try, feather or whatever like we used to be built by crit.com and like our name was crit but everyone thought our name was built by crit and until we got crit.com and then once we had crit.com people started calling us crit and so like yeah i do think that having the name of the product be directly the name of the domain does probably matter

00:54:20.56
Sean
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:54:24.44
Sean
Yeah.

00:54:28.13
Sean
Totally.

00:54:33.36
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

00:54:42.72
Sean
I think that's the, what the what do you call it? It's a priority. it it is but That's one of the goals. Dotcom would be nice.

00:54:52.87
Sean
I think I have to like sacrifice one or the other for something like this, unless I can think of something.

00:54:56.97
Andrew
Yeah, 100%.

00:54:59.09
Sean
Yeah,

00:55:00.34
Andrew
Also, especially since you like plain English word names.

00:55:05.25
Sean
yeah.

00:55:06.04
Andrew
you like

00:55:06.19
Sean
yeah

00:55:06.96
Andrew
like Your list that you gave people was like miscreants, ballpark, ironclad. like Those are all just dictionary words. And you can't get a dictionaryword.com for an amount that makes sense to drop on a pre-revenue product.

00:55:13.99
Sean
yeah

00:55:19.55
Sean
yeah i i'd still drop it yes agreed i do think sometimes like back when i was doing the seltzer thing like when i was called next tops like drink next hops.com wasn't bad as a domain so there's like very rare occasions where i think it's okay but yeah

00:55:39.80
Andrew
I agree. I think i think you can and i think he can almost always work. It's just going annoy the shit out of you. like i would

00:55:46.15
Andrew
yeah

00:55:50.72
Andrew
App.tryfeather or whatever.

00:55:58.60
Sean
so it was interesting.

00:55:55.19
Andrew
What do you think about the names that have CMS in them?

00:56:01.28
Sean
Like,

00:56:01.49
Andrew
because there's a lot of really good ones that have CMS in them. Like, like i I did my little AI name thing and I got PulleyCMS, SquishCMS, which I thought was hilarious.

00:56:05.21
Sean
yeah,

00:56:11.93
Sean
Dude, Squish was so good. i actually really like Squish.

00:56:20.39
Sean
Yeah.

00:56:24.12
Andrew
Like, so that's a boring one. It's too boring for you. You won't go for it. But, like, SimplerCMS is, like, kind of fucking brilliant.

00:56:27.44
Sean
No, that's actually good.

00:56:31.31
Sean
That's actually really good. That's genuinely very... i like Does that have a.com available?

00:56:36.04
Andrew
Yes.

00:56:36.69
Sean
Okay. Oh, shit. maybe Maybe it will be simpler CMS.

00:56:41.97
Andrew
SimplerCMS is kind of fucking perfect.

00:56:42.32
Sean
Oh.

00:56:47.95
Andrew
i figured I figured you would.

00:56:45.20
Sean
I kind of ah kind of hate it by the way. ba Yeah, yeah.

00:56:49.35
Andrew
Uh-huh.

00:56:49.65
Sean
It's kind of like like how Airbnbs speak, like Air Bed and Breakfast, or or these like other startups that have way shittier names and now finally...

00:56:59.08
Andrew
What's a, there's the, the guy who's really successful in the indie hackers community. Who's like a simple CRM or easy CRM or something like that.

00:57:08.56
Sean
I don't know.

00:57:09.32
Andrew
Do you know this guy?

00:57:10.12
Sean
I feel like I know what you're talking about, but no.

00:57:13.66
Andrew
Simple CRM. It's something like that.

00:57:15.54
Andrew
It's a CRM product and it's, uh, maybe it's easy CRM.

00:57:27.61
Sean
Yeah, I don't know. i I was also thinking about the CMS stuff. Uncertain. it's not a you So it's not a CMS, but it kind of is in a way.

00:57:37.84
Andrew
But it kind of is.

00:57:40.69
Andrew
Will it evolve into a CMS?

00:57:44.18
Andrew
Because it's it's an editor on top of an existing CMS, is what you're saying.

00:57:44.27
Sean
<unk>

00:57:47.82
Sean
Right, right, right. And by the way, these things exist. I'm not the first person to build thing like this. They exist for static site generators. For Jekyll, for Hugo, right?

00:57:55.62
Andrew
Yeah, that makes sense.

00:57:57.81
Sean
Forestry is a really, really popular one. there's There's a bunch of them.

00:58:00.57
Andrew
Isn't Forestry dead now? Didn't they like stop supporting it?

00:58:03.20
Sean
Oh, probably. i don't I don't know. I have no idea. But but the point being is that there's there's a large number of these.

00:58:07.09
Andrew
Yeah.

00:58:08.87
Sean
think Sightleaf is another one.

00:58:10.59
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

00:58:11.79
Sean
But yeah. the

00:58:12.44
Andrew
Editleaf is available, by the way. Editleaf.com.

00:58:16.52
Sean
I think that's just going to sound like Sightleaf.

00:58:18.63
Andrew
Yeah. I mean, I'd never heard of Sightleaf until today, so I don't know.

00:58:19.29
Sean
And but's that's fair. That's fair. Yeah. yeah

00:58:25.18
Andrew
Yeah. i was hoping i was hoping for like something good, like editor. Uniform editor isn't terrible. Uh...

00:58:33.63
Sean
Yeah.

00:58:35.31
Andrew
Minimal editor is again to a little too boring, I think, for you.

00:58:39.08
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. i I think I'm, I think I'm, it's kind of like buying a place in New York, right? You have, you have six things in your criteria and you're only ever going to get four of them and you just have to live with it.

00:58:50.01
Andrew
Yeah.

00:58:51.62
Sean
Right. You get the really nice place, but it's gonna, I don't know, <unk> it's not going to be south facing and you just have to prioritize. that sort of stuff and that's sort of where that's sort of where i'm at with with this writing thing i think i'm okay with it not being a plain english word even though i really really like compound words like ballpark which is a free which is andrew wilkinson's previous uh freelancer info and freelancer invoicing platform it's just such a good name there's so much branding potential to it

00:59:14.45
Andrew
Yeah.

00:59:22.72
Andrew
Wait, i thought I thought that one wasn't Andrew Wilkinson. I thought that was the other holdco guy from Tennessee who used to.

00:59:28.49
Sean
Oh, maybe. don't know. Whatever the whole flow, guys.

00:59:31.96
Andrew
Yeah, there's like some other.

00:59:36.44
Sean
Yeah, I thought ballpark was...

00:59:36.84
Andrew
By the way, they're getballpark.com.

00:59:40.51
Sean
Okay, well, whatever.

00:59:41.26
Andrew
Were they ever tiny? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're owned by Simple Focus. They were owned by Tiny, and Simple Focus bought them.

00:59:46.56
Sean
Okay. Okay, okay.

00:59:50.10
Andrew
But Simple Focus is an agency hold code.

00:59:50.25
Sean
That makes sense.

00:59:53.16
Andrew
Or it it started with an agency. It's now a hold code that owns a bunch of like little SaaS products. Yeah.

00:59:59.83
Sean
Yeah.

01:00:01.98
Andrew
yeah

01:00:03.77
Sean
I think about, okay, so so like I think about Lex announced Lex.page and that's pretty cool. There's another editor that the super path people.

01:00:12.03
Andrew
Oh, I do like.page. I don't hate.page at all.

01:00:16.64
Sean
Yeah. to There's no flow. You can't get flow.page, unfortunately. Yeah.

01:00:21.11
Andrew
But I don't think you'd want to be flow.page because then what is your name? Is your name flow page? Is your name flow? Like, you don't want your name to be flow.

01:00:27.00
Sean
Yeah.

01:00:29.28
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:30.15
Andrew
And like Lex, people people sometimes refer to Lex as Lex.page, but I think it's like, again, because it's like the...

01:00:30.43
Sean
That's a period tracker. That's a period.

01:00:37.61
Sean
Right.

01:00:38.21
Andrew
the one word in the actual like domain, I think it's Lex.

01:00:40.82
Sean
Right.

01:00:43.69
Andrew
And so you wouldn't want to be flow.

01:00:43.72
Sean
Right.

01:00:48.12
Sean
Yeah.

01:00:48.65
Andrew
i liked

01:00:50.18
Andrew
of the ones the other folks on the team suggested, I liked Bureau from Bin.

01:00:50.40
Sean
WF Blocks was crazy, by the way.

01:00:55.29
Sean
I can't do Bureau. i just i just suggested bureau Bureau. I just named one of my friends Apps Bureau.

01:01:01.22
Andrew
OK.

01:01:01.97
Sean
i

01:01:03.78
Andrew
Binder is kind of fun. uh binder is fun it makes me think of like like you could do like throwbacks 90s throwback school vibes like get getting ready for school yeah yeah yeah yeah so i kind of like binder uh i like drafted is obviously fantastic but like drafted.page

01:01:06.30
Sean
yeah

01:01:12.17
Sean
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Little Jansport jansport backpacks. Yeah. Yeah.

01:01:24.86
Sean
for sure

01:01:28.71
Sean
there's no way that's yeah i know i know i know wait wait okay right so let me tell you some well that's okay that's fine we can that's uh you can tell jj that then those are the ones okay

01:01:31.26
Andrew
can't be i don't like spinach

01:01:36.80
Andrew
To be honest, I don't like any of yours.

01:01:46.27
Sean
So before I did this exercise two days ago, I went and sat and like put down like themes of like themes to kind of go riff off of names for right. One theme is power ups for Webflow. That's where spinach comes from.

01:01:58.52
Andrew
Okay, okay.

01:01:58.66
Sean
Other ones are like Fire Flower, Merlin, NZT, etc.

01:02:02.00
Andrew
once you Once you say that, I hate it less. Spinach, I think, is my favorite of the names.

01:02:05.10
Sean
Good. Good. Good. Okay, we're not going to go with spinach because it's supposed Popeyes themed and like

01:02:10.86
Andrew
No, I don't want to... I wouldn't do Popeye themed.

01:02:13.98
Sean
Anyway, but other other themes are other themes are, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

01:02:15.81
Andrew
I'm just shitting on... I'm shitting on this so much.

01:02:19.26
Sean
I hate all these names, so it doesn't matter. Other themes are they c for like content marketing and other themes like smooth foods because like Butter Docs is a thing and they're a cool writer.

01:02:28.75
Andrew
Uh-huh.

01:02:31.11
Sean
They're never going to publish the Webflow, even though you know this project was never going to happen until like i i got butter dogs was like this is great and i pinged i emailed the guy and i was like can you can you make this publish the webflow he was like that's not on our roadmap sorry why would we do that i think i think he was nicer about it about it i think he was asking like he was asking for more

01:02:50.31
Andrew
Drafted.page is available.

01:02:53.32
Andrew
So is binder. I wonder if draft.page is available.

01:02:55.08
Sean
finding there's no way

01:02:59.06
Andrew
There's no way draft.page is.

01:03:00.51
Sean
Yeah. Or it's like $10,000. Yeah,

01:03:03.65
Andrew
Taken. Yeah.

01:03:05.03
Sean
yeah makes sense.

01:03:06.47
Andrew
Drafted.page is available. And binder.page are both available.

01:03:12.57
Sean
i think I think Binder is cool. There's something interesting with Binder.

01:03:14.79
Andrew
I think Binder's kind of fun.

01:03:16.45
Sean
Yeah.

01:03:16.83
Andrew
Yeah.

01:03:17.69
Sean
Yeah.

01:03:18.35
Andrew
Shout out to Albain?

01:03:20.97
Sean
Alban, Alban, Alban's a new product marketer.

01:03:21.79
Andrew
Albon?

01:03:23.27
Sean
He's killing it.

01:03:23.37
Andrew
Hey, cool.

01:03:24.38
Sean
Yeah, so much added value.

01:03:24.95
Andrew
Yeah.

01:03:28.85
Sean
Okay, where let me run you through some other themes.

01:03:30.71
Andrew
Okay.

01:03:31.16
Sean
Or let me run you through each one for the themes. Okay. There's, okay, the theme for content marketing.

01:03:35.05
Andrew
Naming is like my favorite thing in the entire world, by the way.

01:03:37.34
Sean
Naming is my favorite thing in the entire world. We should just make a naming podcast.

01:03:40.68
Andrew
Austin and i used to like have a running competition for like who could name the most crit client projects or crit projects.

01:03:42.15
Sean
Okay.

01:03:48.76
Andrew
For a while, almost all of my names got... got I had him like five to one or something.

01:03:53.28
Sean
Nice. Nice.

01:03:55.00
Andrew
But then he he started to to win out over me after a while.

01:03:58.70
Sean
Nice.

01:03:59.14
Andrew
One of my all-time favorites was Pigeon. Pigeon was such a good such a good name for like a healthcare messaging app.

01:04:02.57
Sean
That's good.

01:04:05.79
Sean
Yeah. Alright, so name mine. What the hell, man?

01:04:10.33
Andrew
I've been trying.

01:04:12.58
Sean
Pulley is good.

01:04:12.79
Andrew
i got you simplercms.com, bro.

01:04:14.94
Sean
SimplerCMS is good. and but I'll register SimplerCMS before we...

01:04:19.16
Andrew
if If you don't, I want to buy it from you if if I ever build an actual CMS.

01:04:26.30
Sean
Yeah. Do it. if i don't If I don't use it.

01:04:30.43
Andrew
Maybe I'll buy it right now while year before you can.

01:04:33.75
Sean
Go for it.

01:04:36.52
Andrew
All right, tell me your themes.

01:04:36.80
Sean
OK, OK, OK.

01:04:37.32
Andrew
Tell me your themes and then let's get out of here.

01:04:38.60
Sean
OK. okay Smooth foods. So like mousse, pudding, butterscotch, risotto, flan, crepe. Paper movings like rustle, collate, bindery, decal.

01:04:51.99
Sean
level Another one about like fluid dynamics. So like laminar.

01:04:55.04
Andrew
Kerning or something? Kern? I don't know. Something there? don't know.

01:04:58.91
Sean
Kernel, popcorn, maybe. There's like themes on like fluid dynamics because it's like easy. Outpour, laminar.

01:05:06.92
Andrew
Kernel is kind of cool. like There's like a kernel of truth in a piece of content. A kernel explodes into something bigger and better.

01:05:13.44
Sean
Colonel dot page? Colonel dot, Colonel, Colonel page?

01:05:15.84
Andrew
No. That sounds awful. i don't I don't know that kernel also sounds too much like C-O-L-O-N-E-L, kernel.

01:05:23.80
Sean
Hmm, Colonel Sanders?

01:05:23.80
Andrew
Yeah. and yeah

01:05:28.60
Sean
Buy your thing. You'll get KFC. Another theme was like writing your best work. So like that's where Calibur came from. Opus, like Magnum Opus, Watershed, Crescendo, Pantheon, Epitome, Bedrock, Airtight.

01:05:36.65
Andrew
okay

01:05:43.06
Sean
And then another theme was like writing things that resonate. So like Reverb, Groundswell, Encompass, Vonick. and then i i also written down like cadence cadence.so which i like the most out of all of it for like a separate thing for what it's worth i think i've pitched you on like what cadence would be and the past

01:06:01.36
Andrew
Yeah. oh Oh, Cadence is your changelog thing?

01:06:08.94
Sean
no no no that's that's called wind chime

01:06:11.36
Andrew
OK.

01:06:11.88
Sean
yeah yeah but it's internal tools so it doesn't matter what it's called i just yeah and then i wrote down things like highline furnish immaculate glacier grease i don't like any of them so yeah fire flower i like

01:06:14.57
Andrew
OK.

01:06:25.69
Andrew
Opus is pretty good. it made me think of Opal, like the, the like, uh, yeah.

01:06:32.39
Sean
that's also what it makes me think of which is wild yeah

01:06:38.00
Andrew
Call it Magnum. Magnum.

01:06:40.45
Sean
Magnum docs. Magnum docs.com.

01:06:43.77
Andrew
Be super, like toxic, toxically masculine and with everything you do.

01:06:44.57
Sean
Yeah. Hmm.

01:06:48.09
Sean
Uh-huh.

01:06:49.68
Andrew
God. Yeah, I gotta say, so far my favorites are Binder and Simpler CMS. I think those are my two favorites. I also, for the record, you know i like I like weird names that are just like so strange that it sticks in your head.

01:07:05.79
Andrew
I like simple, straightforward names where it's just obvious what it is.

01:07:10.03
Sean
Same.

01:07:10.19
Andrew
And I like names that give me an animal mascot. An obvious, adorable mascot. like i'm still sad that that link ferret became metamonster because as much as i love metamonster as a name and i love the like little monster and like that we named our company monster endeavors i had such a cute i was gonna have so much fun with like the cute little ferret and i'm a little heartbroken i mean i'm having fun with cute little monsters but like the ferret was gonna be so cute

01:07:25.03
Sean
Right.

01:07:32.33
Sean
you're furry. Yeah.

01:07:37.02
Sean
yeah

01:07:39.51
Sean
Yeah, I mean, you could still do Linkferret. Linkferret. Link...

01:07:43.98
Andrew
Yeah, but I want Metamonster to do everything, so.

01:07:46.19
Sean
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Oh, well, the monster part. The monster stuff is better.

01:07:51.76
Andrew
The monster stuff is fun.

01:07:51.80
Sean
I think it it' opens up some a lot of more like possibilities. Yeah.

01:07:56.11
Andrew
It does. It does, for sure.

01:07:57.79
Sean
Yeah.

01:07:57.96
Andrew
Also, Monster Endeavors, I love as our holding company name.

01:07:59.66
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can have some flirty CMS. You can, you can, uh, you can register it.

01:08:06.45
Andrew
Nah, nah.

01:08:07.99
Sean
I mean, I'll find, I can squat it and then we can, we can see over who needs it.

01:08:08.18
Andrew
I mean.

01:08:13.53
Andrew
So you're officially not using simpler CMS?

01:08:15.74
Andrew
Why do you hate me, Sean?

01:08:17.69
Sean
I just, I want you, okay. You gave me three, dance you gave me three types of names, animal, straightforward, and like weird as hell that sticks in your brain. Where's my weird as hell that sticks in your brain name?

01:08:29.42
Andrew
Yeah. We don't have an animal one for you either.

01:08:33.38
Sean
What's an animal that writes?

01:08:37.17
Andrew
immediately think like owls or...

01:08:40.38
Sean
Yeah, same.

01:08:42.09
Andrew
Meerkats, maybe?

01:08:42.91
Sean
I think about the i think about the the owl that licks the lollipop and asks you how many licks it takes to get to the center.

01:08:47.57
Andrew
yeah Like owls or, yeah like a meerkat or there just an animal that does like cool communication, has some sort of cool communication style?

01:08:59.92
Sean
Bats. Dolphins.

01:09:02.63
Sean
Some bird. I'll pick up.

01:09:05.19
Sean
Maybe I'll pick a bird. You know, cardinal.

01:09:07.62
Andrew
True. i one of my favorite product names that we actually built and launched, we launched an MVP in a week.

01:09:16.39
Sean
Sick.

01:09:18.07
Andrew
for it was called albatross that was a good name that was a good name it was going to be like it was like tying your time tracking to your estimates so kind of like a very very simple version of parallax where like you you just make estimates for a project and then you track your time according to like the buckets that you created in your estimate and then it shows you like a progress bar as you're

01:09:20.54
Sean
Yeah, wish I was good. and which I wish I was solid. I wish I was. Yeah.

01:09:29.40
Sean
Hmm.

01:09:33.57
Sean
Mm.

01:09:43.85
Sean
Mm.

01:09:44.07
Andrew
working to see like how when you're approaching your estimates and like when you've gone over and like help you revise your estimates over time

01:09:48.37
Sean
Nice.

01:09:50.85
Sean
Nice. That's good. That's good. Ouch House is good.

01:09:53.72
Andrew
yeah no one no one wanted it well it wasn't that no one wanted it it was that everyone had a different way of doing time tracking and so like getting people to like follow a format for time tracking was going to be next to impossible

01:09:54.35
Sean
Yeah.

01:10:00.76
Sean
Yeah.

01:10:07.27
Sean
Yeah. Anyway, so drop and drop drop ideas in the comments, please. If you're watching this on YouTube, please help. I don't know what call this guy.

01:10:19.96
Sean
I'm so stuck. I've never had so much trouble with naming a thing before. That's not true. i I've only ever had trouble naming one other thing before, which is my if I were to ever like have a Holdco.

01:10:32.01
Andrew
Yeah.

01:10:32.32
Sean
but life You know what? One of my favorite names is still Disco Shrimp.

01:10:35.09
Andrew
I love Disco Shrimp Company.

01:10:35.54
Sean
Hands down. Yeah.

01:10:37.42
Andrew
Yeah. But I didn't come up with that.

01:10:38.72
Andrew
I just stole it from my uncle.

01:10:40.62
Sean
That's great. That's awesome.

01:10:41.79
Andrew
Yeah.

01:10:42.24
Sean
there's My two favorite Holdco names are Disco Shrimp and Golden Walk.

01:10:46.42
Andrew
Golden Walk is amazing. That's a wonderful...

01:10:48.13
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

01:10:49.63
Andrew
Yeah. my The hardest thing I've ever tried to name was like the Grey Noise Sensors.

01:10:55.64
Andrew
We ended up just calling them Sensors.

01:10:55.20
Sean
Mmm.

01:10:58.89
Sean
Wow.

01:11:00.09
Andrew
Yeah.

01:11:00.46
Sean
That's... with a Z. it that

01:11:05.59
Andrew
Yeah, man, I tried so many things and just, yeah, nothing, either nothing fit or it was like, there's, like, I tried to call it like Hive.

01:11:05.99
Sean
I mean, it's descriptive, I guess.

01:11:15.39
Andrew
Like, I think our internal name for it was Hive for a long time or something like that.

01:11:18.54
Sean
Mmm.

01:11:19.62
Andrew
But Morris was adamantly against B names because like they'd been done so many times.

01:11:24.33
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

01:11:26.21
Andrew
So.

01:11:26.45
Sean
What about cabinet? and

01:11:29.76
Andrew
Your old idea cabinet

01:11:32.34
Sean
Yeah, but they use the name. Because

01:11:34.83
Andrew
I don't know if it works as well here.

01:11:37.58
Sean
it's like a file folder.

01:11:39.58
Andrew
Yeah.

01:11:39.67
Sean
Yeah.

01:11:41.20
Sean
Hmm. not sold.

01:11:43.36
Andrew
I'm not sold. I like binder better if you're going to go in that direction.

01:11:47.16
Sean
No. Composition notebook.

01:11:50.34
Andrew
Yeah.

01:11:50.43
Sean
college ruled yeah number two could really lean into that one there's yeah yeah that's terrible that's awful like you've seen the product

01:11:53.88
Andrew
Number two.

01:11:59.36
Andrew
Yeah, except then you've just got poop emojis everywhere.

01:12:09.76
Sean
yeah i don't know man oh hopefully hopefully by the next time we meet we'll have settled on a name and

01:12:15.07
Andrew
You could name it after a pen or a pencil company or something. like Call it Ticonderoga.

01:12:19.60
Sean
Dixon Ticonderoga no one will be able to spell that yeah dude I love Dixon Tiger yeah yeah yeah man ever like I think back those pencils every time I have to use a pencil that's not either Dixon Ticonderoga or a Blackwing all other pencils just suck they're spoiled as a kid

01:12:23.93
Andrew
Do you remember those, though? Like, Ticonderoga pencils? They were a thing. They were nice as hell. the With the shiny green font.

01:12:45.24
Andrew
Is there a pen that people like? I mean, i guess now you're getting into copyright infringement, like, potential. So...

01:12:51.20
Sean
yeah depends depends yeah i don't know we'll see thank you thank you

01:12:56.18
Andrew
Cool. Well, I hope you come up with a name for your very cool product. And I hope I figure out how to get customers for MetaMonster.

01:13:07.33
Sean
me too me too me too we should jam on it off this podcast and that's i can also just not talk to you for a week that's fine too that's okay

01:13:12.46
Andrew
Or on the next podcast.

01:13:17.62
Andrew
No, no, I definitely want to jam. All right, man, this was fun.

01:13:21.36
Sean
All right. see you later. Bye. Thanks.

01:13:22.54
Andrew
Peace.