Our B2B SaaS Journey

In this episode, Mitchell and Gavin submit the first Police Games app release ahead of a 6,000-person rollout, unpack SixSides’ pivot from event managers to community-led organisations, and share how AI-assisted development, a tough client decision, and a new AEO strategy are shaping the next phase of the business.

Chapters
  • (00:00) - Moving out of the office and working from home
  • (08:14) - The Police Games app is submitted
  • (13:39) - Automated testing and the launch timeline
  • (20:45) - New SixSides events and client updates
  • (22:18) - The City of Gold Coast and solving the cold start problem
  • (27:45) - Our ICP pivot and finding a blue ocean
  • (32:53) - Sales-market fit and the 5.8 method
  • (36:24) - Rebuilding DealBuddi with Laravel AI
  • (45:30) - The difficult client decision
  • (49:23) - AEO, HubSpot and getting ready to launch

In this episode, we cover:
  • Mitchell leaving his coworking office after five years and adjusting to working from home full-time
  • Submitting the Police Games mobile app to Apple and Google ahead of a rollout to around 6,000 people
  • The final QA push across iOS, Android, API endpoints and app screens
  • How Claude Code and AI-assisted development dramatically accelerated the final stages of the release
  • Using Maestro for automated mobile app testing across real devices
  • Planning the Police Games launch timeline, onboarding and communications
  • Running another SixSides event for Toll Women in Aviation and preparing for the Queensland Volunteering Conference
  • Gavin’s plan to build local network effects by concentrating communities around the Gold Coast
  • Applying ideas from The Cold Start Problem and Blue Ocean Strategy to SixSides
  • Pivoting the SixSides ideal client profile from event managers towards community managers and associations
  • Revisiting sales-market fit and Gavin’s 5-ate sales method
  • Rebuilding DealBuddi onboarding with Laravel AI to make one-to-many workshops commercially viable
  • Making the difficult decision to end a client relationship after a successful pilot stopped feeling collaborative
  • Answer engine optimisation, HubSpot and creating content designed to appear in AI-generated answers
  • Getting the business infrastructure, product and marketing ready for the next phase of SixSides growth
Got questions or topics you want us to cover? Email us at journey@sixsides.co

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Creators and Guests

Host
Gavin Tye
Sales and Marketing and Co-Founder of SixSides
Host
Mitchell Davis
Developer and Co-Founder of SixSides

What is Our B2B SaaS Journey?

Join the SixSides.co team as we navigate the highs and lows of building a B2B SaaS company. From finding product-market fit to scaling sales and community-driven growth, we share real insights, tough lessons, and candid conversations about what it really takes to grow a successful SaaS business. Whether you're a founder, marketer, developer, or just SaaS-curious, this is your backstage pass to the journey.

Mitchell Davis:

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, CTO and Laravel developer.

Gavin Tye:

Hey, Mitchell Davis. Gavin Tye, CEO and cofounder of sixsides.

Mitchell Davis:

You got it. We're into year two of running our remote starter, sixsides.co. It's a community led events platform. And on this show, we're documenting the business and tech of our journey as we build our SaaS. How are you, mate?

Gavin Tye:

Mate, amazing. Amazing. Amazing. I see you've got two new employees in your office today. Know, your jobs.

Mitchell Davis:

I do. We've got Franklin and Remington.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Franklin and Remington. Names that roll off the tongue.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. Well, they're they're Frankie and Remy.

Gavin Tye:

Frankie and Remy. There we go. Yeah. But you introduce them formally. Is that how it is?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

That's right. Franklin Davis. Remington Davis.

Gavin Tye:

They shake hands

Mitchell Davis:

and stuff.

Gavin Tye:

We've had this when we first met, right, or when not long ago, some episode, we're like, it's gotta be Mitchell on email, not Mitch. So

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. They demand the same respect. Yes.

Gavin Tye:

Absolutely. Fair enough. Yeah. Yep. So if we hear any barking in the background during this podcast, it is that is it.

Gavin Tye:

So why the train why are they with you today, mate? You've had some big news?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. We I mean, we put it right at the end of last episode, but, yeah, I've moved out of the office that I was in for the last five years or in that coworking space at least. But, yeah, I moved back home. So I'm on Tuesday this week. Nicole helped me my wife Nicole helped me move everything out, and it's very convenient that this coworking space was is on top of, like, it's Level 2 And 3 above a shopping centre.

Mitchell Davis:

And so there was a Woolies with, like, trolleys and stuff. So we we commandeered two trolleys and had to make three trips down to the car, two or three trips. So I had so much stuff in that office. And it was yeah. It was a bit like it was an eye opener.

Mitchell Davis:

Like, god, I had a lot of crap just sitting in that office. But anyway yeah. Cleared out of there and then, yeah, started working from here Wednesday and really been enjoying it. So I set up all my stuff. I've got my three monitors and my microphone and everything just like ready to go.

Mitchell Davis:

I still need to buy a proper like a chair for the computer. So I'm sitting on a on like a dining table chair at the moment. And this is what I've used whenever I've done any work from home for the last few years, and it's okay. But, yeah, if this I'm gonna be here permanently now, I probably wanna get a better chair. So So what the chair It's great.

Gavin Tye:

The chair was part of the coworking space at the place you're at?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So they had furniture as part of the thing. And yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

So I had a desk, had some chairs, had some like, they give you like some storage things, little stuff. And because I've been there so long, I'd kind of over the years whenever other people had moved out, I would like go raid. Oh, yeah. Okay. I could have that.

Mitchell Davis:

So I had like I had a fair bit of stuff. And yeah. Anyway. So, yeah, it's it's been a good change. Like, I'm enjoying it, to be honest.

Mitchell Davis:

Like, maybe more than I thought. It's nice to just kind of wake up, still have some routine about it. Like, this morning I went to the shops and made sure, like, I put a load of washing on and all this sort of stuff before we get on and and start the podcast. Just I was saying to Nicole yesterday, like, I feel like I've got a lot more time. And she said, yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

It feels like that too. Because last night we went out with some friends and then I came back and I was able to quickly check-in on something here on the computer at like 11:00 at night. And that might not sound healthy, but, like, I wouldn't have been able to do that before because this computer would have been at the office. And I was only on here for five minutes, but, like, I didn't have to wait until the next day, you know, to go check, oh, how did that thing go or whatever. So, yeah, so far so good.

Mitchell Davis:

And I've got I've sorted my lunches out as well. So for ages, I've been having salad at Soul Origin, like a chicken schnitzel salad, and I I really like it. And I was worried about how I would make that work here at home. And then Nicole, who's pretty good with food, kinda got me set up with that. So, yeah, being able to, like, simulate having the sole origin chicken salad, and I had it yesterday.

Mitchell Davis:

It was fucking delicious. I think it may be even better than the original one. So it the cost. Well, yeah, exactly. And it just it, like, you know, set it up in the air fryer and then in between meetings, just turn that on and away we go.

Mitchell Davis:

It was fantastic. So so far so good. See let's see how I feel in in a month or so whether I'm still liking it.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So this week has been pretty stressful. It's I'd be up there with one of the most stressful times that you've had in the business because of the gravity of the situation and the importance of it. And it's not 200 people waiting for you like at Laravelt Denmark, Laravelt Denmark. This is now 6,000 people.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. I got an update yesterday. But you have been noticeably displaying less stress levels in the last couple of days. And you are not you are stressed, but you don't seem overwhelmed as much as what you have been. So maybe that's got something to do with it.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I don't know. It was it it felt like hard mode to do the move in the middle of this time, but it was like, you know, the first of the month is coming up, and then I would have had to pay another month of rent when I'm gonna be away for half of that. And I'm just I was looking at it. I'm like, stuff this.

Mitchell Davis:

I wanna get out of here. So

Gavin Tye:

Three trolley loads is not a move, mate. Let's be honest. Come on.

Mitchell Davis:

It's also But also

Gavin Tye:

I get it. I get it. But let's be honest.

Mitchell Davis:

And it's sentimental as well. Like, the the emotional stress of it. Like, I am I I I've come to realise this about myself this week. I'm a very sentimental person. And so it was I'm like I put a clip in last episode when I said I'm moving out.

Mitchell Davis:

I had a clip of Billy Joel's song, Moving Out. And I listened to that song for, like, an hour straight just on my headphones as I was like and it was like I wasn't crying or anything, but it was an emotional it was like, oh, okay. This is like end of an era stuff. It was you know, it's full on for for me, at least, in my personality. So

Gavin Tye:

You don't like change either?

Mitchell Davis:

No. I really don't.

Gavin Tye:

You like your everything to be where it is and like Yeah. Case in point, when we went to Melbourne at AIM, you packed your whole fucking office in three suitcases down, and you're like, I'm ready to go.

Mitchell Davis:

That's right. Yeah. And I and I nailed it, and we recorded the podcast.

Gavin Tye:

So And then after you did it, like, I'm sure after you've done the move and got home, you're like, actually, it's not that bad. It's actually quite good.

Mitchell Davis:

It wasn't that bad because I brought three suitcases with all my stuff.

Gavin Tye:

No. I'm talking about when you made the move and now you're home. That's what I mean.

Mitchell Davis:

Move. Yeah. I knew I would like this because I'd been slowly weaning into it of like I'd spent less time in the office over the last couple weeks.

Gavin Tye:

Mhmm.

Mitchell Davis:

I was working from home, like, three days a week instead of one day a week, which is what I've done the last year or so just to kind of break it up a bit and to get stuff done around the house as well. And so I figured I would like it. The only downside is the dogs do you know, I love them, but they are noisy at times. But even that, I've kind of got into the right cadence there where I'll take them out around 11:00, 11:30, something like that and go out for half an hour, and then they'll sleep for the next few hours. So I can get that.

Mitchell Davis:

It's good for me as well, you know, obviously, get me out of the house. So, yeah, it's I'll I'll figure it all out, but so far so good. So

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Good one. Yeah. So, mate, you we talked just briefly before about being a big, big overwhelming week or stressful week with police games. What have you break that down.

Gavin Tye:

How about we update everyone on what what's going on on your side of the fence?

Mitchell Davis:

Sure. So I am very happy to report that the police games app is up. Like, the final build for this first release is up. And, actually, I haven't told this to you yet, but Google has already approved it. It's ready to publish.

Mitchell Davis:

So Google is done, and they did it in, an hour and ten minutes, which is fantastic. So shout out to Google. I know they're listening. Apple, on the other hand, nothing yet. So and last time they pushed back because we we did a trial run of the police games app, like submitting the first version of it to try and get through this, like, two week hurdle.

Mitchell Davis:

And they then took a week, Apple did, to come back and raise some issues with us about, hey, you need to have a way for people to delete their account. If you're asking them to sign up, they need to be able to delete it. Then, like, some privacy things that they had. And when you create an app, you have to give them a login. And so we've got like a dedicated user account for Apple and for Google to use.

Mitchell Davis:

But I they told me in the reply to this that it didn't have any, like, it didn't have any events or like most of the screens were all empty, you know, and they don't wanna have to click around and go explore. They're just trying to quickly rush through and see what your app is. So, yeah, so I've spent a few days working on a bunch of things. Like, the the amount of stuff that I've covered in the last forty eight, seventy two hours is insane. But, yeah, basically going through every screen in the app, testing like every endpoint of the API, pressing every button, you know, looking for styling issues, trying it out on current iOS, old iOS, current Android as well.

Mitchell Davis:

Like, mate, it has been just so full on. And I basically had to like shut out the world. I cancelled all my meetings with the team and then and even for Atlas, I moved some meetings to be later so that I could just get in and focus on this. And, yeah, it's been hard. It's been really hard, but got through it.

Mitchell Davis:

So yeah. So yesterday, right before I went out with with some friends, yeah, got down to the wire around 04:30 yesterday. And then, yeah, by got it up and submitted. And then by, yeah, 05:36 Google it already said, yep. You're good to go.

Mitchell Davis:

So amazing.

Gavin Tye:

It was phenomenal yesterday. We went through the app, like, because we had the team from the police games going through it. Right? And they were submitting bugs from all sorts. They did everything but used the spreadsheet, which we sent them, which was okay.

Gavin Tye:

Right? They don't do that. They're not testers. They're just doing it probably on the fly. And you collated all that and we went through each line item plus what we saw.

Gavin Tye:

And it was just amazing when you went, oh, hang on, let me fix that. And you were using Claude Code. Was it? Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Claude Code.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Claude Code. And it was just go, yeah, that's done. Let's just check it and go, fucking hell. Like Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

For you, I would imagine I've seen it before when you've gone in and gone, hang on. Let me find that bit of code and update that. It would take good ten, fifteen minutes at best, and this is just doing it in seconds. It's like you've got a team behind you. And it was would have been impossible to do this three years ago, like even do the amount of work and get it up to this stage.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

I completely agree. Yeah. It's like Yep. It's revolutionary. So if you're if you are a developer and and you're listening to this and you're not leveraging AI, like, I I hear you if you are someone who's like, I don't wanna use AI.

Mitchell Davis:

I really like writing code. That's great. You can still do that if you want, but, like, maybe give it a try to just see what's possible and how quickly you can fly. You'll lose some quality, definitely, but you gain so much speed. So then it's up to you to kind of manage the quality and make sure that it's still okay.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

It's that quality cost speed triangle. Right? Yeah. You give it up. But but still in we've been debating this, so maybe the listeners, might help sway it.

Gavin Tye:

You've done some pretty interesting things in reducing costs across your database, and I think it's a really interesting video for you to make. You're like, Oh, I'm not sure people will watch it. But if you are listening and you would like to hear it, send us an email at journey at sixsides.co and Mitch might be able to do a quick YouTube video or what he's done on it and how he's configured it. Because I still think there's still quality developers who use AI in a quality way opposed to just, you know, run of the mill developer. And from what I can tell and what you're doing is you're you're using it in an advanced way.

Gavin Tye:

And I'm yes. There's people ahead of you, but I think what you've done here is phenomenal in such a short period of time. So

Mitchell Davis:

Thank you, mate. Yeah. I appreciate that. So yeah. So we've got the the app is up for review, but we haven't yet completed that automated Maestro testing, which is where it'll like download the app and run it on like an actual device somewhere hosted by this company, Maestro.

Mitchell Davis:

And we've got a seven day free trial with them. They actually emailed emailed me overnight and said we would qualify for some startup plan or something like that. And that if they if we wanted any help, like, getting on board or basically just them reaching out. So that might be something for us to consider similar to, like, the HubSpot startup discount thing because this is like the last line of defence of does the app actually work on all the devices that we think it does. They would be pretty powerful.

Mitchell Davis:

But, yeah, I'll have to understand what the costs are there. But anyway, we've got a seven day trial of it. And, yeah, hopefully soon, even though the app itself is up for review, we could still do our own testing. Then if we find there's some big fatal flaw in it, we can pull it and resubmit it. But, yeah, hopefully we'll get that done.

Mitchell Davis:

Apart from that, I think it's all oh, I'm still working on the final piece that wasn't held up by the app review is like managing that database of all of the athletes that are registered and their rego numbers, what sports and what country they're from and all this sort of stuff. So that is what I'm working on today. I expect to have that rolled out today. But, yeah, it doesn't hold up the app review. And then it will finally be ready to hand over to the police games team and have them like, we'll work with them on the timeline for releasing it.

Mitchell Davis:

But, yeah, my the big slog that I'll have gone through will finally be done. Then we can move on to stuff for phase two, which is really exciting. How are you feeling about the timeline?

Gavin Tye:

Look, I think we're we're I was talking to them yesterday about about the timeline because next week their marketing person's away on leave. The following week, Chris and Tess or someone, Rach, which are some people we deal with there, they're going to Birmingham. So they're away. Then you're away the week after on the fourteenth. So I was just nailing out the timeline.

Gavin Tye:

We need to get right down. We've got a week of them to test it next week or not test it. We're beyond that now. They've got a populate it with a welcome to the world police games, do a few posts, pin it, put in some posts on the different sports and all that kind of stuff like what they're doing. I do think that once we release it and put it on the dashboard, can I put posts up from the dash or it's only from the

Mitchell Davis:

I think so, but I would have to check? I'd pay zero attention to that. But that's

Gavin Tye:

but that's okay. Well, we need to be able to give them training to be able to do that. They were asking about the artwork yesterday. What should they put out? And I said, just make it simple.

Gavin Tye:

We'll send them the artwork we put up in the app store so they know what they're looking for and then just show them the app. And he's like, yep. Fair enough. So I've aligned with I've sent Tess an email this morning, which is the communications person, and we'll just really knock that out. Ideally, we will get them to send out the the email to people, their broadcast on all channels or whatever they're doing on the seventh, which is a Monday.

Gavin Tye:

And so we have a full week to iron out any issues if there is any of getting them on board. So you are not playing with you're not on your computer as you're sitting in the terminal ready to go like a bulldogan and duster. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

But yeah. So but it's pretty good. Like, now once we get the final release, which we're I don't have a Google phone, so I can't do it. But once we get the Apple release, I can start taking screenshots and do the welcome emails as well. We can work on the integration between six sides and HubSpot because we're starting we're gonna pull people into there.

Gavin Tye:

There's just Yeah. Everything's coming together. It's pretty good. And I think, mate, we're working to a timeline with like a hard stop timeline and we are You're a couple of days out, but that's to be expected. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

We had fat in there to account for that. So, yeah, I think pretty good. I mean, and the police games love it. Like, I think you even got a message from them the other day. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Like

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I did.

Gavin Tye:

One of the guys.

Mitchell Davis:

I won't read the whole thing, but, yeah, from one of the the guys that are, like, leading this, leading the police games. Yeah. Just basically, it was a really nice message. So I won't read the whole thing, but I just wanted to reach out and thank you for the work you've done on the app so far. You guys are so easy to work with, and it's such a relief knowing that this is just coming together in the background.

Mitchell Davis:

He said, I know not that simple, but you make it appear that way. Yeah. Yeah. So so that was really nice. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

And he he certainly didn't have to do that, and it was very unexpected. So, yeah, that was great. Because you have primarily dealt with them. You're you're the one with the 95% of the relationships with them. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

So, yeah, that was really nice. It was great

Gavin Tye:

to see. Yeah. So they're even going to Birmingham in England next week or two weeks for the for some big police conference, and they're setting up a stand trying to get people to join, right, to come along. Nice. He said and I was like, you can test the how quick it is over there.

Gavin Tye:

I guess, I never thought about that. Absolutely. But he's gonna try to catch up with the Invictus Games for us.

Mitchell Davis:

Yes. Okay. Amazing. He

Gavin Tye:

doesn't know if he'll get there. It seems like the timelines are a bit might not work. But yeah, I love working with great people at the end of the day. There's a blur it gets a blur. If it's a blur between client and a friend, a mate, which is clearly becoming between the World Police Games.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. It was it's a really good relationship, I think. As long as we hold up our the deal. Right? And we are above and beyond, I think.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Mate, it's awesome. I'm really happy. It's great to like, I could feel the stress levels coming down. I'm sure they're gonna ramp back up again when it goes out to the 6,000 people.

Mitchell Davis:

But, yeah, it's good. Can take a little more of a breather this weekend.

Gavin Tye:

6,000 people. How mate, what a mate what an amazing achievement then to bring all the existing users over as well.

Mitchell Davis:

It's going be big.

Gavin Tye:

We also ran another event this week for Toll, Toll Women in Aviation. So I got a message back yesterday from Athena who said it went very well. Thank you. Yeah. They really loved it.

Gavin Tye:

They took a lot of photos. They used That was great. It was really great. So yeah, they really liked it. And then now we're next week, we're starting to move into the Queensland Volunteering Conference.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. They're a latest That's happening in November. Right? Yes. That's right.

Gavin Tye:

But they start wanting to see the app. We need to once we're now we're past

Mitchell Davis:

toll. Yeah. We can roll out an update that'll bring in all the all the latest changes we've done for the police games. We can get that out for six sites too.

Gavin Tye:

Correct. We can start configuring it now. I can go to the latest version of it because I've been running the old one because I gotta run I wanna run the oldest one that's out live.

Mitchell Davis:

So yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yep.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. That's been like a big that's been in my mind of like, oh, okay. I'm making all these changes to the back end, like the API to support this and get it out the door for the police games. But also, we have an event running like right now. And I could see the whole way through, like, there weren't any errors and they were using it.

Mitchell Davis:

I could tell that as well. Yeah. They they had a really good go in the gallery. So, yeah, it was that was comforting to see. Like, okay, everything turned out fine, which, you know, you would expect.

Mitchell Davis:

But, it was good.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. We're also I also met with Mr Worldwide yesterday, which we haven't talked about them for a while. Yep. And we're starting to plan for the big event in November too. So we're gonna put a waiting list.

Gavin Tye:

Help is gonna put a waiting list or a registration of interest, people who wanna participate in their event in November, and then we will start bringing them on board. We'll sign an agreement with them. We'll work towards getting an agreement, but we want that exposure to these innovation hubs and stuff like that. People doing innovation work around the country. So that probably leads me into know we're jumping around on our list a bit, but my plan with the city of Gold Coast, we've got I found the lady who the specific lady who looks after communities in the region.

Gavin Tye:

So I've reached out to her. I could tell she's looked at my email and went to book a meeting, but didn't quite book it. I know where she is, I know who she is, and it looks like it's a repeatable role around council. So I'm gonna Once I get HubSpot fixed up, I'm going to, yeah, start making a plan to chase these particular people.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Good one.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So the city of Gold Coast, my plan is there is I read a book ages ago and I think I've talked about it ages ago called The Cold Start Problem. And it's about talked about Airbnb and Uber is if they apply if you go too wide too soon, you don't get traction. It's not concentrated. And so although we wanna help give visibility to communities, if we go too wide and not a lot of people are into the app because there's a chicken and egg issue we gotta deal with, if we go too wide, then people won't get the visibility.

Gavin Tye:

It won't work. We need to try to concentrate some stuff around. It's either I think it's regional, concentrated to a region or an industry or a group of people. There's three variables there, I think. And I've got a plan for each one of them.

Gavin Tye:

We'll go And look, the police games could be one. Right? But they are global. So it's a bit difficult too. It gets diluted.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. For sure.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. So Okay. So you're thinking like, alright. Set up, find a couple of communities that run events on the Gold Coast, let's say, or somewhere near you so that it kind of this is like the home base for building up a bunch of events and kind of spreading out. Have I got that right?

Gavin Tye:

Or My perfect plan, if I can pull it off and and you need the city of Gold Coast, the council to be able to do it as well. I couldn't do it alone is going back to we went to this conference, this street parade a few months ago. It was called the Burley cane cutters parade or some shit like that. Right? And Mel was like, I did not know there were so many communities around.

Gavin Tye:

They just had no idea. So I was like, okay. Well, what if a circle around where I live, 50 k radius, a 100 Ks around here. And we tried to get all the communities on six sides. And then with the help of the Gold Coast, have some type of like a a fate or parade, not a parade, but a an event.

Gavin Tye:

Right? And then have it sponsored by six sides or or done by six sides. And everyone would who would come would sign up to six sides, and then they could see all the communities there. They could interact with them. They could take photos.

Gavin Tye:

They could see potentially food trucks at an event, see the menu, like they and have the ability to interact with someone beyond the day of the event if they wanted. Right? And then

Mitchell Davis:

we could

Gavin Tye:

we could prove that out. We we don't have solutions for this yet, but reporting or analytics, we just don't have that yet, but we could do that around that in time. Like because I think there are hundreds of communities here. I just you just don't know who they are. Right?

Gavin Tye:

They have a visibility problem. Right? Yeah. Okay. That's my plan.

Gavin Tye:

Maybe bringing that back on a smaller scale be we may need to do that. But if the Gold Coast in my mind or people are responsible for communities and tackling loneliness and bringing people together, why wouldn't they support this? It makes sense, right? There's been three times in my life, two other times in my life where I thought, well, it would make complete sense to do something and it worked. I just framed the pitch the right way.

Gavin Tye:

One was I got my mom on knock of cash on channel nine. I framed it in a way. And the other one is I won a holiday to the tour down under cycling event when I threw tag, a watch that I have. And both times I just framed it the right way and it was course I would say yes. And I think this is one of those situations.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Okay.

Mitchell Davis:

I like it. I'm keen to keen to see where that goes. Because, yeah, you you are good at you are good at framing narratives. It's clearly working for us already with six sides. That's good.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. And then once we get six side once we get everything configured in the police games up, which is we're very I'm very close on my end, then we'll pivot to six sides to get the app all sorted, the onboarding there. Then we just need to sell the shit out of it, which we haven't been able to do yet.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Because it's kinda held up on this release. Well Yeah. Now it feels no?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Well, yes. I think I think we're incomplete event app, like because we didn't have ticketing and all that stuff. You start having conversations. That's the first one of the first places they go.

Gavin Tye:

Right? And now we've been working hard to get into a blue oceans scenario, which for those people who don't know, there's there's a philosophy called red ocean and blue ocean, blue ocean strategy. I actually wrote my final paper in my MBA on it for red eye, by the way. Did you? But basically what it is is the red ocean is you're competing in a congested market with many competitors.

Gavin Tye:

It's very hard to differentiate yourself over everyone else. So it becomes a race to the bottom with price. Right? And so we were competing in a red ocean in event management, and I've always stood firm on that since we first met. Right?

Gavin Tye:

I was like, yeah. Look. It's a great, but it's a it's a hard place to compete in. Right? Bigger budgets.

Gavin Tye:

We're under a big umbrella of events air, which is not too far away. Right? They dominate the market here. So we've been working towards the blue ocean of a community led event platform or a community led platform. And I think we're there.

Gavin Tye:

I think we're close. It's so close to it. Right? So close to it. Yep.

Gavin Tye:

So, you know, what about you? What do you think?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yes. I'm very excited to be like, let's get let's get the six sides out the door, which includes all of the functionality of the police games. It's probably 98% ready. I just wanna review everything as well and make sure it makes sense in the context of six sides and not just a police game.

Mitchell Davis:

But once that's out, yeah, I'm very excited to now, like, go back to any of those leads that we've had in the past, you know, and maybe that it's all gone cold now. But I know you've got plenty of prospects that are keen or have been keen to see what we've got for to offer them for managing their communities and being able to show them all of that stuff now and then hopefully turn that into some revenue. Like, very excited for that. So, yeah. Don't know.

Mitchell Davis:

We got our work cut out for us over the next week with getting the all of this onboarding stuff and the sequencing and whatever, getting that all up to speed. The marketing side as well, like the redesign for that is coming along. I'm hopeful that by Monday we'll have like, hey, here's your here's what the landing page should look like, and I'm gonna very quickly go and implement that to try and have it ready for when the first emails go out the week after. So

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully, we're about to have

Mitchell Davis:

a big, like, a big couple months of inbound and yeah. Just everything. Hopefully, we're hitting the go button.

Gavin Tye:

Well, when you think about I just had a realisation then, you know, we started in late twenty four. So this is two years in only a couple months time, which is fucking gone so fast. But when you think about the rate of change and the rate of things we've done in the last three months, yeah, we won the police games in March, but there was still there wasn't go time. It was a little bit of time before then. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

The rate of change that we've undergone in the last two months particularly has been off the off the charts. We're implementing a new website, like a new design. We're completely changing our ICP from an event manager to a community manager or an association, whatever that is. We are setting up the foundations of on my side of the fence, like a CRM and all that kind of stuff to take into so much more that's well outside of my comfort zone. You're implementing a whole new code base or whatever you're doing on your side of the fence.

Mitchell Davis:

Good. We'll go with that.

Gavin Tye:

We're doing so much change at the moment And we're going from just a little MVP to we're really fucking turning this into a proper business now. Right? And it's stressful for you. It's stressful for me. Like you're getting tired, I'm getting tired, but I feel like there's gotta be light at the end of the tunnel here.

Mitchell Davis:

Sure. Hope so.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. It kind of helped us this week where we sat down and we looked at we actually ran six sides through the sales market fit process. Right? And we sat down and which I feel really think is important to get on the same page about where so we're looking at the market the same way and stuff like that. How did you find that experience that we that we worked on?

Mitchell Davis:

It was good. But before that, why don't you just explain what the sales market fit process is for anyone who doesn't know?

Gavin Tye:

Mate, come on. It's well renowned. I don't think people need a explanation, no. Just just to give context is I've been selling software for a long time since 2015, and it's not like selling anything else that I've ever and I've been in sales for twenty years. And B2B software, let's be specific here, that most people say sell the value and sell the outcome and all this kind of stuff and solution sales.

Gavin Tye:

On the surface, everyone knows what that means. But when you actually implement it in a way that works beyond just buzzwords, it's really difficult. So what essentially the sales market fit process is aligning your sales process to how your target markets buy or to the problems that they have that you can align your value to because something's only valuable if it aligns or solves a problem that they have. And sometimes people don't know the problems that they have and that makes it really difficult. So yesterday we sat down, I've worked on this process called the five eight method, which is really easy to follow, which is called educate, articulate, demonstrate, quantitate, formulate, which is educate the market on the problem, articulate how you have an impact, demonstrate how you do it in real time, quantify your value like ROI and then formulate how they'll buy you, which is exactly the process we ran through with the World Police Games.

Gavin Tye:

It's a natural way that people make decisions. And so yesterday we sat down because our target market and our ICP has changed, ideal client profile is changing or the value we offer is changing. So we have to shape the problem differently or talk about a different problem. And that's what we worked on yesterday. And because we don't wanna restrict the barrier of entry, we want everyone to put all their communities on.

Gavin Tye:

We have to have a free tier. There's just no way around it. But there's value in having a free tier because if members come on, some of those members will be parts of other communities and some of those communities would be worthwhile might find it worthwhile paying for six sides, a different version or like an upgraded version. So, yeah, we just sat down and created some of that content that we could then inform Build Deal Buddy out to, which is a sales strategist that I built the other line for this. So yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Is that a good explanation?

Mitchell Davis:

It was good. So it is. Thank you. To answer your question, yeah, it was interesting to sit down and go through it together and relook at some of these assumptions of how what the company's being built on. And, yeah, it was good.

Mitchell Davis:

It was like I was largely following along with you. You were definitely, like, steering it. But like how

Gavin Tye:

you code. Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. So, anyway, it was fun and worthwhile doing. So, yeah, it leads us in naturally to Deal Buddy. So this week, well, for the last little while, we've had in the back of our minds of like, hey, I need to get involved with DealBuddy. And the plan was to start start that off because the code base for Deal Buddy is a bubble.io app with like all of this complicated stuff behind the scenes that makes it work, but it's like a completely different tech stack that I don't have any idea how to really work in.

Mitchell Davis:

And so Laravel has an AI SDK, and the plan eventually is to port the code base over to using Laravel. Right? And then it's something that I can actively contribute to. And so you are speaking at an event in November where you are speaking about Deal Buddy. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

It's my understanding.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah. I've got a booth there as well. So Yeah. For two days, two or three days, whatever it is.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. And there's some friction at the moment with setting up a new customer in Deal Buddy. The onboarding just isn't isn't there, isn't where it needs to be. So you have people go through a process to create a bunch of, like, source material, and it's done using AI, but still need to ask the customer some questions about their industry and, you know, about their business and who they sell to and whatever.

Mitchell Davis:

And so we looked at that process and could we streamline that to make it possible for you to potentially pick up five, ten customers over the course of, you know, a couple weeks. And right now, like, that just wouldn't be possible. That would take all your time. And therefore, you have to charge a higher rate, right, for it. And so the idea is to automate some of that so that you can reduce the rate, bring in more customers, and have it be a bit more self sustaining.

Gavin Tye:

Yes. So the current challenge is being able to deliver the workshop and get them to like the it's cost prohibitive and I can't it's not accessible to a new time founder. Right? But my charge rate almost to get people on board is close to 4 to $8,000 or something like that. Right?

Gavin Tye:

It's just too much. People can't afford it. And so but I've got the delivery of it all right now and I know how to do it. It's Like doing the course is one thing. It's creating the content, which that there's certain set of tools that you create, which trains Deal Buddy that is a pain in the butt, right, to do.

Gavin Tye:

I've got all these individual agents or old GPTs that I've built. It's just It does not lend myself to be able to do a classroom of people at the one time because it doesn't work. So that's what we're trying to get to is go from one to one to one to many right now.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So this week, now that like a lot of the work on the police games, at least phase one, has calmed down and like has has been resolved or is at a point where, okay, I could go finish off something. We were looking at this timeline that you've got of this November conference and the fact that I'm going away for five weeks in the lead up to that.

Mitchell Davis:

And it was just like, okay, I think we need to tackle this now. And so this week got Martin started on just some proof of concept stuff with the Laravel AI SDK to get him more familiar with it, specifically dealing with things like file uploads, how does that all get handled with the SDK, and it's gone pretty well. So then I briefed him on Tuesday, Wednesday, maybe. I don't quite remember. But earlier this week, I said, hey.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. So this is what we're building. You gave me all of the source material of those GPTs that you've got set up so you can just go copy. They're just like instructions basically. And then some example input and output, like PDF, spreadsheets, etcetera, from each of these couple of steps that you have to do in the onboarding.

Mitchell Davis:

And I gave all of that to Martin and I said, okay, this is what you're building. This is how it should work. Should have some ability for Gavin to go in and update these instructions from an admin area, add example files, and ask questions of the user, like, in a dynamic way so that we just set this up once basically, and then you can reconfigure it at any point in time. Right? And what did you think of what he's done?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Look, I think it's great. It's a good it's so much, but I tried to do it once. I tried I couldn't do it. So, I tried to do it all at once and it was too tricky.

Gavin Tye:

But, yeah, like a good start. Like, it'd be great. I'm just thinking about the outcome of it. How do we work it? Like, everyone would go and learn the content or and then they go through and fill out fill out what they need to fill out and then the producers, then they can amend it.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. It's really it's awesome. It's powerful. And there's nothing around like even now, like it's such a game changer when everyone has gone through and done that client maturity scale. It is really people do it and go, oh my God, this is amazing.

Gavin Tye:

And they even still tell me now just that one thing alone is so It helps them so much. And to be able to do this at scale. Yeah. Like what I'm thinking about when we do this, Ben, is taking expressions of interest when I do a workshop and I can take like, I can if I could get enough who was who are keen to do it or wanna do it at in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, I can book them over a weekend and get people down and and do five or six people over the course of a weekend and get it all lined up, ready to go. It's just- It gives me the ability to do that.

Gavin Tye:

So Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's huge. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

And I was really impressed with how quickly it got put together and the seemingly the quality. Like, the interface itself looked decent. The way it worked, Martin only had a couple of questions for me around like, you know, this document that it produces at the end of step one is gonna take roughly a minute. I'm hitting some timeouts. Like, do you have any thoughts on how we could improve this prompt?

Mitchell Davis:

And I said, no. No. No. Just let it run-in the background. Okay.

Mitchell Davis:

We'll kick it off to the queue. We it's okay to tell the user like, hey, this is gonna take a minute. That's fine. Like, this that's expected. And so, yeah, he then just like, okay, cool.

Mitchell Davis:

We got that all working and then we demoed it for you on Thursday. So, he literally had like less than two working days on it. And it's already at a point where that could be producing real value if we could get that live. And then now he's going and implementing the other few steps, then we're gonna look at getting each step to talk to like the previous ones so that it's not like you're having to reenter any information from scratch. And then there's only like a couple more things before we could deploy it.

Mitchell Davis:

You having the ability to like invite people. We're gonna get it on Laravel Cloud, which is their like their new cloud hosting platform, which I've never used before. So, I'm I'm interested to use that. So it's all going on. Feels like before maybe like end of September, maybe four weeks from now, that could probably be live.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. I was thinking about just that then. Once we have that sorted and those tools sorted, the main thing is then producing the playbook, which is what I've said, the playbook in your sales execution guide. Once we have all those tools, I don't think we need to probably pull the content out of Deal Bodie or how it's written because we can rewrite that really fast into somewhere that makes sense, that's easier. I don't think we're bound by

Mitchell Davis:

Stuff.

Gavin Tye:

By bubble stuff. Right? I do think there's a way better stuff that we could do on there. It was just a really to prove an MVP. I don't necessarily

Mitchell Davis:

Might not be as far away, yeah, from from this becoming actually deal buddy. Might not be as far away as it once seemed. But this is I'm really happy to have made this the decision of starting this in this particular way. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense, and it'll help us prove out like, okay.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. This is gonna work just fine in Laravel. Build a solid foundation. So yeah. Cool, mate.

Mitchell Davis:

Very exciting. Yeah. Alright. We've got just a couple more things here as we wrap up. So a week two weeks ago, two episodes ago, we spoke about a hard client decision that we were facing.

Mitchell Davis:

Do you wanna take this one?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Look, we we had a client that we ran a pilot for, like, a couple pilots for was it was a while ago now. And they said, oh, we run around a couple of pilots to see if it's okay. And we're like, yep. Okay.

Gavin Tye:

We did it. And proved out. Sure. It was a bit slow in adoption and all that kind of stuff. We understood that.

Gavin Tye:

We weren't trying to boil the ocean at once. And then we got to a point we started talking about pricing, and it just kind of got pushed out a little more. We let them run another couple of events. And then all of a sudden, they went quiet, and they were still reusing it, using the platform. And it switched from it just switched from being a collaboration to being very uncollaborative, I'll say, is probably the easiest word to and, you know, we tried our best to make it work, tried our best to contact.

Gavin Tye:

You know, they weren't getting the best use out of the platform by the end, but because we'd changed so much and they weren't engaging with us, they were doing lots of things manually instead of just talking to us so we could show them how things were had improved. And we tried to give them every opportunity to to rectify it. And then we just had to make a call just to say no and then close the platform down on them, which is really, really difficult. But I felt like we had moved from being a partnership to something else, even if it had have recovered and they would have paid what we asked, what we thought was fair. I don't think I think the relationship was tainted, which is a shame.

Gavin Tye:

Right? And Yeah. Like even the last messaging that we got from them right at the end was just completely Yeah. Not Yeah. That's right.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

I mean, the learnings from that, I guess, is like to just not be as like, I don't want to be insulting to you, but maybe not as like naive of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, everything will work out. Like, is that the learning that you take away? I don't mean that in a mean way to you, but hopefully you get

Gavin Tye:

what I mean. Sometimes you need to take a chance on certain things. I'm like because that was a big that was that was a decent sized business, and you need to take a chance. Like Yeah. I talk about this as well.

Gavin Tye:

I do get emotionally invested in things and go, yeah, this is gonna be great. You have to be, but you have to be able to get emotionally invested to see things through and go through it. And I don't regret I don't regret anything. Yeah. I would probably put a hard stand on after the two pilots and say, if that works out, then this.

Gavin Tye:

No more. Right? Opposed to, oh, it'll be fine. We'll work it out. There are some lessons there for sure.

Gavin Tye:

There were probably indicators earlier that I just chose to ignore. But again, still they allowed us to prove some stuff out and I was really thankful. That's true. But yeah, it is a shame. Is a shame.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

It is what it is. We move on.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Move on. Don't look back. I don't often have regrets, mate. I don't really go, oh, that was shitty.

Gavin Tye:

But I think it's Yeah. It's a shame. A real shame because I considered them a friend. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Anyway. Bit disappointing.

Mitchell Davis:

Is what it is. Alright. Well, onto greener pastures as we wrap up. AEO, which we've come to learn. I thought it was agentic engine optimisations, actually, answer engine optimization.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Absolutely. And you've been doing some work in that with HubSpot.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. That's right. So we you know, I think it's pretty evident that most people are using Google for search now. They're using Chatuchibi tea or they're going to Chatuchibi tea for answers mostly. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Even Google's returning back AEO answers themselves. So we have to have to start playing in that space because if we're not optimizing for that, we're gonna get left behind. So last week well, HubSpot's been recommending a heap of AEO topics for us to be part of. And I ran that test last week, this week. So when we reconfigured Deal I took the new content that it was producing and did a beginner's guide to nonprofit event communities and actually published that, put it in HubSpot.

Gavin Tye:

Now I think we just need to give it time to bake before it gets crawled because I don't think it's straight away. Right? They just periodically do it. So Yeah. That's right.

Gavin Tye:

But now I'm gonna switch the team because they do it. They write a heap of content. We just have nowhere necessarily to put it all the time. So I'm gonna get them to write content based on what HubSpot is saying so we can actually start ranking in some of those prompts.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. It's the the interface for it is pretty cool.

Mitchell Davis:

You were showing me in HubSpot the suggestions and how it works of like it goes and has a bunch of conversations with different agents to see does our name get mentioned and that sort of thing. It's pretty cool.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yep.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. So, yeah, interested to see where that goes. Hopefully, that'll that'll help.

Gavin Tye:

And our brand visibility is low. Right? And we'd expect that because we haven't written any content on in this space. So if you give it three to six months, now we can see on people are coming to our website based on our content now. Like it is getting picked up.

Gavin Tye:

So we are getting quite a few people land on our site, but we're working on that now. So we're pivoting. Yeah. So it's all coming together, all these different things that we've got scaffolding up in the business. All this stuff's coming together, and it'll be all sorted by next the September 7.

Gavin Tye:

Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Maybe we do the podcast recording on that Monday then because that'll be the the go live date. We do it in the arvo on Monday on that Monday after it's gone out. Yep. We could do a Don't know.

Gavin Tye:

We could do a live count party.

Mitchell Davis:

That might be depressing if it takes people a while to get in. Or into thirty minutes so that the count is still at, two people or something. It could be bad, but we'll see.

Gavin Tye:

See how we go. When they're gonna put it out. Like, we could do it. We that could be fun. We can do it.

Gavin Tye:

Because I could look at Riverside. We could do a live YouTube. You could do live YouTube. We can just do a live YouTube on our six sides channel and just do a live count podcast.

Mitchell Davis:

Maybe. Let us know if you want to see that and if you would turn up as well because I don't want to do it and then have one viewer or something like that. That's crushing. Mate, it doesn't

Gavin Tye:

matter who comes. We could just do it live anyway. And then anyway, think about it. It all depends on when the police games send out their their broadcast. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Their EDM. So Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Anyway, we'll figure it out. We'll let you know. Alright. Mate, where can people find you online?

Gavin Tye:

Mate, you can find me online next Monday on the seventh as a live broadcast, but other than that, it's on on LinkedIn on Gavin Tye.

Mitchell Davis:

Alright. Well, for me, it's similar, and the handle is Mitch Dav. So thank you very much for listening, and we will catch you all next week.

Gavin Tye:

Thanks, man.