Ian & Aaron discuss Laravel Pulse, DHH's upcoming Slack competitor, Rails copying Laravel, & more.
Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com.
Sent questions or feedback to mostlytechnicalpodcast@gmail.com.
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Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com.
Sent questions or feedback to mostlytechnicalpodcast@gmail.com.
- (00:00) - Helloooooooo
- (06:10) - Follow Up
- (10:00) - Laravel Pulse
- (20:09) - Video is Hot
- (35:55) - Ian's Sage Advice
- (53:06) - They're Gonna Sell Plenty!
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Creators & Guests
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What is Mostly Technical?
Hosted by Ian Landsman and Aaron Francis, Mostly Technical is a lively discussion on Laravel, business, and an eclectic mix of related topics.
You're listening to Mostly Technical, which is brought to you by Lara Jobs, the official Laravel job board, and Screencasting .com, where you can learn how to create high quality screencasts Faster than ever. Now, Ian and Aaron.
Ian Landsman:Hello. Hello. La la la.
Aaron Francis:I think I think we're both in a Seinfeld mood. It we it just came out.
Ian Landsman:This is the timing's unbelievable on this.
Aaron Francis:Man. So, Justin Jackson, what a guy.
Ian Landsman:What a guy.
Aaron Francis:Had to had to have spent hours clipping that together. Right?
Ian Landsman:Hours and hours and hours. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. If you haven't seen, we'll post it up and everything, but Justin Jackson, friend of the show, Friend of mine for many years, did a supercut of the podcast with Seinfeld, and it's It is
Aaron Francis:It's uncanny.
Ian Landsman:It's uncanny. I was in tears laughing. Bayless. It's so funny. Dying laughing.
Ian Landsman:So good. It's so well done. It's just spot on. So, yeah. Thank you, Justin, for that.
Ian Landsman:But, yeah, just Wow. Blew me away.
Aaron Francis:I just I I just walked into the living room where, my wife and my mom and the au pair were And I was like, hey. Can I put this thing on the TV and show you this this video? And they're like, what's going on? Like, what is this? So Freaking funny.
Ian Landsman:It is. And, I mean, we've talked about that that it is kinda like that, but then when you see it
Aaron Francis:When you see it side by side. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:And I even posted this to Justin. I was like, now it, now I'm questioning if I even have any original thoughts. Like, maybe maybe we're just channeling, you know, Millions of hours of Seinfeld into Yeah. Into the show here. I don't know.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. My I after I showed my mom, she was explaining Seinfeld to our au pair, and My mom was saying that, like, we grew up on that, like our whole family, you know, me and my brother grew up watching so much Seinfeld, and I think it is like, It's just been internalized.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. That's that's great. And it's funny because, like, you're probably a little young to have seen it live. Right? Or were you guys watching it the end of it I don't
Aaron Francis:know if I was watching it live. What was the last season?
Ian Landsman:Oh, jeez. I think it was, like, 99?
Aaron Francis:I think that's right. I think it was 98 or 9. Friends and Side Club ended pretty close, but I think it was 98 or 9. Yeah. And I would have been, I think 10 in in 99.
Aaron Francis:So Yeah. I don't think we are watching it live, but I think we I think my brother and I watched, the reruns Over and over and over.
Ian Landsman:He runs, man. That's where, like, it just got into my brain from the room. Cause like 11. So before it was streaming and all that, like 11 PM on WPIX in New York here anyway. Like, it would just be on every night and just obviously a random rerun, and it's like, I just watched that every night, Just Yep.
Ian Landsman:Every single night. So good.
Aaron Francis:Yep. Somebody once asked on Twitter, like, how do I get better they weren't asking me. They're just asking the void. And the question was, like, how do I get better at, like, low stakes casual small talk? And my, like, unironic answer was watch Seinfeld straight through.
Aaron Francis:Like, watch it fully straight through, and you will start to internalize, like, the you can basically make a conversation out of anything.
Ian Landsman:Out of just a few words.
Aaron Francis:Yes. Exactly.
Ian Landsman:So You're a big straight through guy. This is a thief. This is one of your thieves.
Aaron Francis:For sure.
Ian Landsman:Straight through.
Aaron Francis:Very much very much a completionist.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. Us.
Aaron Francis:Big time. Yep. Love love to have love to have the full set. Love to love to know the full canon. No.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. It's Seinfeld especially, I think is really good and that it pays off a lot. Like, a lot of sitcoms, you know, they're just, like, They're really isolated, like, every episode or maybe there's an arc of a couple episodes, but that's it. But, like, especially from midpoint on, like, Seinfeld, like, each season would have an arc, And then, like, there would be arcs that cut across even multiple seasons to some, you know, not full arcs, but, like, people would return and whatever. There would be things they go back to and re reference.
Ian Landsman:So, yeah, like, If you watch the whole thing through, you really do get a lot of payoff.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. It it does compound because then you start to get a catalog of, like, The close talker, the low talker, the loud talker. You get all like, oh, they're doing a they're doing a running bit here. And and, honestly, the The learning how to do a good callback joke, I feel like I learned a lot from Seinfeld. Yep.
Aaron Francis:Like, how do you make the joke, and then, you know, 21 minutes later at the end of the episode, how do you make the joke again as a callback and
Ian Landsman:yeah. And their character like, they stayed in character so well. I feel like that's, like, That's the only thing people can pick up on. Yeah. Whether it's on Twitter or a podcast or whatever.
Ian Landsman:There is, like, this element of entertainment that you're doing, and it's like, Seinfeld's just the master of that. Like, they're just so those characters are just so fully realized. I feel like that they really
Aaron Francis:And one of their tenants one of their Jerry's core tenants on the show was no growth, no learning. And so that helps.
Ian Landsman:Like It does help. Right? There's just a lot of the same people.
Aaron Francis:Right? Not becoming a better person. Right. The last, You know, the last argument or the last observation of the series is the 1st observation of the series about the button getting too high. Yep.
Aaron Francis:It's like, No. No growth. We're just who we are the for 9 seasons straight. It's like, well, yeah, that that worked pretty well.
Ian Landsman:That that that did. You when you got something that works, stick with it. Right?
Aaron Francis:Yep. Don't mess it up. Oh, man. Thank you, Justin. Incredible, incredible work.
Aaron Francis:I laughed so hard.
Ian Landsman:Wow. I was that. It's just, like, almost scary now. It's like, oh, man. I don't it's like a pressure.
Ian Landsman:I'm like, I feel pressure. It's like, wow. Seinfeld. You're very disseinfeld.
Aaron Francis:Out of our minds.
Ian Landsman:But Yeah. We gotta clear it for a sec.
Aaron Francis:You're a little you're a little bit on the male body being grotesque. I it just made me laugh so hard again when watching it.
Ian Landsman:It's true, though. I definitely must have got that from Seinfeld. Like, that just
Aaron Francis:he just had that word for word. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:Was word for word. Like, he was just like, oh, here's the Seinfeld version of it. It's like, oh, the exact thing. Just Me having watched that episode a 1000 times. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:I mean, I I think I believe it too, but who knows? Maybe I don't
Aaron Francis:know. At this point. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:Who doesn't know? I just might be regurgitating Elaine. Yep. Alright. We got a couple more updates.
Ian Landsman:We could stay on that the whole time, but we'll do some updates, and then we got topics. Topics and all kinds of stuff, but, 2 things from last week. I want to follow-up on our Jason talk that I actually know the guy who added, JSON to PHP. Omar Khilani is also a friend of mine who does all remember the milk. Yep.
Ian Landsman:The the there was not JSON support until he added it. So he added JSON encode and JSON decode. Wow. I don't know if they've been they've probably been rewritten since then or whatever, but, he did the original implementation. I don't remember.
Ian Landsman:I think it was 2014. Or
Aaron Francis:Man, I remember remember the mail. That was that was big for a while.
Ian Landsman:They're still going. They're still out there.
Aaron Francis:That's amazing.
Ian Landsman:Doing the to do list, and then a very small update on slippers. So I said only my middle kid was into the slippers and me and my wife were in slippers. All of a sudden, just like it must be in the air, they come home from they had to go to the mall for something, and my daughter has nice LOB and slippers. No. So 4 of the 5 of us are on the slipper bandwagon now.
Aaron Francis:Wow. Okay. It's going around.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. So we gotta get you on.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. It seems it seems like that is my least popular opinion.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. People didn't didn't care for your opinion there. I was kinda surprised. I thought there would be a lot more pushback, on people who are like, no way. Shoes in the house were all about it.
Ian Landsman:I was I was pretty surprised. It was quite universal on the no shoes in the house for the most part.
Aaron Francis:Couple of people part, except for boss Holly, my boss at PlanetScale.
Ian Landsman:Yes. Your boss. Yes. Oh, you think, you think she's being honest there? Maybe she just she wants maybe she just wants to stand with you.
Ian Landsman:Is there any chance of that? She's just
Aaron Francis:being loyal? No. Because she has all the hour. She doesn't you know?
Ian Landsman:She doesn't need to do that. But
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Unless she's reaching down to the little man. I don't I think she really does she really does wear shoes in the house, I think.
Ian Landsman:I think they're out there.
Aaron Francis:Out in the country. She lives, you know, who knows where, like, out in the country, and she probably has, like, scorpions in her house or something. And so she doesn't wanna I wanna be taking her shoes off all day long. You know?
Ian Landsman:Yeah. And then the things get into the shoes. If she's on all the time, you don't have to worry about stuff living in there.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. And then I saw I saw, I saw people wearing their slippers outside on Twitter, and I'm like, you just that's just shoes. That's just true. That's true. That's
Ian Landsman:worse shoes. So I will wear the slippers, like, onto the driveway, but I try not to leave the driveway with the slippers. Definitely not leaving the house zone with the slippers ever for sure.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. And walking outside with slippers on, you're just doing the same thing but in reverse.
Ian Landsman:But I do think you do want the slippers to have, like, some grip and the and the actual bottom. So they are very shoe sneaker like. Yeah. You don't want those, like, It's just a cloth bottom. Those things are then you're
Aaron Francis:You know what I could
Ian Landsman:you know what
Aaron Francis:I could be sold on? And this may this may be, like, This may be a terminology you may think I'm insane. I could be sold on house shoes.
Ian Landsman:Oh, yeah. Be
Aaron Francis:sold on that. Yeah. Like, a pair of maybe maybe they're Not slippers, and maybe they are just shoes, but a pair of shoes that you wear in the house only.
Ian Landsman:Dedicated to the house.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. I could I could be sold on that.
Ian Landsman:See, I feel like if you're gonna go that route, then I wouldn't go sneakers. I would go, like, UGGs or, like, something like Yeah. Something like that that's got a little slipperiness, but isn't all the way down to a slipper perhaps.
Aaron Francis:You know, we don't need to retread the whole thing, but it just feels a little bit like giving up to Put on some hugs and, like, toot around the house. You know? I just I can't I don't think I can get there.
Ian Landsman:There yet? You got old though? I don't
Aaron Francis:think I can get there. No.
Ian Landsman:Gotta clear 40. Maybe when you hit 40?
Aaron Francis:Yeah. When I when I hit 40 and I have, you know
Ian Landsman:All your best days are behind. Just
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Exactly. It's all that helps. Understand. Yep.
Aaron Francis:Maybe I'll maybe I'll give up, but until then, I'm gonna I'm gonna fight the good fight.
Ian Landsman:Alright. I'm with you. Alright. Alright.
Aaron Francis:Alright. Topic.
Ian Landsman:So I guess we'll do the big one first is the the Laravel people crew released pulse, And you have been pulse. Deep into it, so once you take us through.
Aaron Francis:Pulse is very good. Yeah. Pulse is very, very good.
Ian Landsman:So Love the idea.
Aaron Francis:They released Pulse first party package, it is it is interesting how it's being pitched and how it could be used, so it's being pitched as, you know, lightweight APM, basically, vital signs in real time is is the h 1 on olst.laravel.com, and there's, you know, an image of, users making requests, queue backlog, cache hits, slow queries, etcetera. Right? So that's how it's being billed as is, like, keep an eye keep an eye on your server at a high level, whatever, whatever. It's all written in LiveWire, Very dashboard. Yeah, I know the year of LiveWire continues.
Aaron Francis:The year
Ian Landsman:of LiveWire.
Aaron Francis:Very, very dashboard centric. Yeah. And their customization story is Pretty good, in that you can create your own cards. And so I've dug in I've dug in quite a bit in, you know, 30 minute hour increments that I have. I've dug in quite a bit to look at how it works, and it's basically a dashboard framework.
Aaron Francis:Like, yeah, you can use it to monitor vital signs in real time or whatever. You can also use it to do just about anything else, that's kinda where I that's kinda what I've been working on is, making cards for a bunch of other providers. I'm gonna try to drop them all at once, But, like
Ian Landsman:Like that.
Aaron Francis:More of like a more of like a social or business dashboard than a server dashboard. And it's kind of cool the way they've done it. They've separated it into, like, recorders and displays, so, like, you have one thing that's responsible for recording data and the other thing that's and the infrastructure for recording the data is really robust, in that you can record time series data as aggregates only without storing all of the entries.
Ian Landsman:Right. The underline.
Aaron Francis:Got, you know, 5,000,000 requests An hour or whatever, you can just store that as, like, you know, 4 or 6 different rows instead of 5,000,000, And Pulse handles all of that, like, it abstracts all of that away from you. So if you dig in deep enough and look at it, and I need to do some videos and write about it because I don't think anybody's gonna dig in that far. But if you dig in deep enough, the way that they're doing automatic roll ups and aggregations is very, very good. So lot of potential here, and I think it's gonna be a little bit of, like, a a land grab to to build out some of these cards.
Ian Landsman:Well, I I mean, I've always wanted a dashboard like thing, and it's like I've tried some of those services, but Mhmm. I don't know. It's just never really stuck, and I just feel like, oh, you have. It's just, like, in your Laravel app already, and you're already using pulse for, you know, what it's meant for, but then you can also If it's all abstracted nicely, which it sounds like, you know, I'm sure there'll be more stuff to do there, but that it already is at a pretty good level for, being able to customize. And and the thing that I think I saw from you is that you can multiple dashboards, so that really opens it up.
Ian Landsman:So it's not just like, well, here's my Stripe stuff mixed in with my flow queries and whatever. Yep. Like, Kind of annoying. It's like, no, I could just have, like, my finance one, and I could have my, you know, APM one, and I could have Yep. Maybe internal app stuff and whatever, and they can all just be in their own little zone, but in the same same place.
Ian Landsman:So that Yep.
Aaron Francis:So I so out of the box, You cannot have that with Pulse Okay. But I have created a way
Ian Landsman:Hacked it.
Aaron Francis:I've hacked it. And I'm gonna put that out as a package itself because I think I think, like And I don't know if it was a strategic decision for them to not say, like, universal dashboard builder, you know, because it's like,
Ian Landsman:who cares?
Aaron Francis:Well, I don't even know what that means. But I think that's what it's going to turn into. I think this is going to sit a little bit in the middle of or on one side or the other of A filament or a nova, honestly.
Ian Landsman:It does have those vibes.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. To the extent that it's monitoring and not necessarily fully wired crud, Pulse makes way more sense than setting up one of those 2 things, I think.
Ian Landsman:Right. Yeah. If you don't need the forms and everything and you just want the display, like, yeah, this is gonna be a much nicer, cleaner way to do it, it seems like.
Aaron Francis:Yep. And I'll I'll scoop myself because this probably won't come out until tomorrow, and I can probably get some of these done before tomorrow, but Having cards for Fathom Analytics, for Transistor, for Lemon Squeezy, for Stripe, for YouTube, having cards to, like, monitor all of that, that's what I'm going for, because I want, like, my own personal dashboard of Alright. What's going on in the business of, you know, the Aaron empire? And having those things would be great, and so I'm, like, working furiously to get those things finished enough because I think I have a really good handle on the data storage layer underneath, because I worked with Jess a little bit before they transformed it into what it is now. She went away and just, like, drank a bunch of coffee.
Aaron Francis:I don't know if she drinks coffee, but she drank a bunch of coffee and stayed up for, like, 5 days straight and rewrote the whole thing, like a mad scientist. But, I wanna knock some of these cards out to to, like, kinda show, hey, this is this could be your business dashboard as well.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. That to me, that definitely the in the thing I thought of instantly. I think you're totally on the right track there, and people are gonna really love that, Yeah. And and use that a lot. Hopefully, things like the multi dashboard can just get absorbed in.
Ian Landsman:You'd love to see that in the core, and then, obviously, then you can just have everybody the whole, You know, ecosystem of cards then come about around it. Exactly. Yep. All the big players and then down into the niches and everything. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:It's really exciting. I'm really excited to use that. I thought it's great too that they give you the options, like, use a separate database, so if you don't wanna have it hitting your main database and all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I mean, it seems pretty straightforward.
Aaron Francis:They also have an interesting intermediate layer Between so on the recording side, you can decide to record everything in a separate database. You can also Send all of your, like, to be written events through an ingest engine, so, like, you can just dump them into Redis, and then run a command to more slowly or more methodically put them into whatever database you choose. And so if you're like, I don't really want any of my pulse stuff to be, you know, blocking or in in a critical path, you can just dump it all into Redis and then work it out Later, which is big, is pretty smart.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. That is. So, yeah, you can just have a log, and it'll then aggregate from the log.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. I think it drains out the events from Redis in a in a command. It's like if you get a huge burst of requests, you're not trying to insert all of those into the Pulse database. You just put them in the Redis storage locker, and then it'll put them into the database in a little bit.
Ian Landsman:Yep. So Seems like a dynamo DB ish type of use case too.
Aaron Francis:I'm sure they'll be Don't bring that
Ian Landsman:around here.
Aaron Francis:All those things. Wonder I do wonder the, the engine is pluggable, so you could write a Dynamo engine. Right. Still have, like, your redis ingest, You know, buffer, but then go into Dynamo. And I wonder so I I bet somebody I bet somebody will will write that.
Ian Landsman:I would think there's all kinds of also, like, dedicated tools that people may already be dumping stuff into that then they wanna, dump more stuff into, but then use that so you don't have a whole separate setup for that. So yeah. I think people I mean, it'll be interesting to see, because I think people are gonna really push this, like, How it how it performs when someone drops it in on, you know, one of these huge sites that's Yeah. Getting a lot of traffic and and all that, and Mhmm. That was my pitch to Jess.
Ian Landsman:I was like, now we need to extract this into aggregate data functions into the Laravel database driver.
Aaron Francis:It's crazy.
Ian Landsman:Well, there's lots of use cases for that. Like, I mean, in my own products, obviously, being fully selfish here. We have all kinds of reporting and stuff where we do of what I wanna do in new, version of things is to do more along these lines where you're not always especially for, like, really heavy things, like, Trying to query the database in real time through millions and millions of rows, and that's always slow and so on. It's like yeah. You could just aggregate Whatever helped us tickets.
Ian Landsman:Right? Like, okay. You did millions of them over this year. Certain types of reports are just like Yep. The Counts of how many, and, yeah, it'd be cool if it was just, like, a nice way to aggregate that without, always hitting the database live every single time to Count those millions of rows.
Ian Landsman:So Yep. Yeah. A lot of stuff like that. Yeah. I'll be it does seem like I mean, I I wonder what they I don't know.
Ian Landsman:Taylor was just kinda like when I talked to him a little bit offline about it, it was just like, yeah. We'll release this thing. You know? It's cool. And so I don't know.
Ian Landsman:I'm I don't know how if you heard, like, it would if they were expecting it to be so big, but I feel like it's it's like people don't really take a lot
Aaron Francis:of All I've heard is public information, but he has sounded It's so laissez faire about it on Right. On their podcast. She's like, yeah. You know, I wrote a few paragraphs to the initial pitch, and then Tim and Jess went off and build it. And, And it just yeah.
Aaron Francis:When I talked to Tim and Jess, they were everyone has been so focused on the server monitoring story, Which I think is a compelling story and a good, like, tip of the spear, but I don't know that I don't know that they or maybe they secretly did, but I don't know that they had the idea that everybody was gonna take it and be like, I'm gonna shove everything in here. This is now my business dashboard. I don't I don't know if that was, on their mind at all.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. I think that's, what's going to happen though. I think that's that use case, but I do agree. Like I think that having a, the set use case is sort of interesting. It's like, Oh no, this is like the APM.
Ian Landsman:And then not just, like, what you can talk about, but then let everybody else then create the rest of that ecosystem without trying to do it all yourself or whatever. Whether they thought of it or not, it's like nice if that's fleshed out by the the community, I think.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. I think so.
Ian Landsman:Alright. Along those lines, Christophe works at Laravel now.
Aaron Francis:He does. Yeah. He's the new video guy at Laravel now.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. So that'll be cool. I've watched a few of his things. Seems like he's gonna be doing more there. So I believe it's hot.
Aaron Francis:It's hot this year, man. Video. Gotta be on video.
Ian Landsman:The video is so huge. Even, like, with the podcast, like, having this video, I feel like the video when you share audio snippets, it doesn't do anything. No. Video players. Don't watch the whole pod some people do watch the podcast as, like, hey.
Ian Landsman:I'm watching an hour and a half of podcast. But Yep. Even just having the video as a resource to then chunk up into interesting snippets is just, I think, gigantic for the podcast.
Aaron Francis:Yes. I think so. I think it it unlocks A lot more shareability than just audio. I mean, even the thing that Justin just did, he wouldn't have done that if it was just audio.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. I don't so. Right? Like, it would just wouldn't hit the same way to, like No. Have the cuts, not to the actual Seinfeld videos and things.
Ian Landsman:I think it just works so much better seeing that cut back and forth. So, Yeah. It opens up the virality, I guess. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's really smart of killer.
Aaron Francis:I'm not full time, Kristoff?
Ian Landsman:No. I think he's part time Gotcha. My understanding. Yeah.
Aaron Francis:I've seen they've started to do a little bit more of, like, what's new in Laravel, you know, 10 dot whatever.
Ian Landsman:Right. Formalizing some of that.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. That seems That seems good. It's just man, YouTube is just a distribution engine unto itself. You really like, if you can figure it out In your business, you gotta you gotta be on YouTube. And I feel like for for Laravel, you know, LLC, that just makes the most sense in the world to have a dedicated person working on that stuff.
Ian Landsman:I've been trying to figure this out for the help spot end of things, and I can't really, like it's so hard. Like, it doesn't have the, like, plan scale had this nice, yeah, I can people about the database, like, and that's a thing people are confused by or whatever. And, like, we could do soft things like that, like, whatever, be a better help agent or whatever, but it just feels, like, generic. Yeah. You know?
Ian Landsman:Yeah. It's, like, super boring, super generic. So I don't know. I haven't cracked that code of What we could do there, but I don't know how
Aaron Francis:to sell. Because you gotta be, like it's gotta be entertaining. I mean Right. Even to the extent that you're teaching, it has to be, like, Entertaining. And so and I don't know how many, you know, developers hang out on YouTube, but do a lot of either people who buy help desk software or help desk People themselves hang out on YouTube.
Ian Landsman:Right. Well and the thing is that I'm sure they do. Right? But it's that they aren't looking for things in the same way that The good developers on there being, like, what the hell is a foreign key? Right?
Ian Landsman:And, like, then they might look on YouTube for that, and then they're gonna find your thing about foreign keys or whatever. Right? And But they're not going home from their job. Like, so devs are doing that. Like, they go home from their job, and then they're, like, hey.
Ian Landsman:I'm doing this side project or I have this thought or whatever. The help desk agents and help desk managers are not necessarily like, I go home from my job, and I'm, like, querying about how to, like, be a better agent. Right. Yeah. Like, I I mean, you're
Aaron Francis:looking at, like, hydroponic farming or mister beast buddy.
Ian Landsman:So they're on YouTube. Yeah. They're on there as humans, but they're not necessarily looking for stuff for their job. Mhmm. So I think that's a little bit trickier, but
Aaron Francis:Must be nice. Sounds healthy to, like, just go home and watch videos about other stuff.
Ian Landsman:Not too your Yeah. Do 4 more hours of your job. Yeah. So
Aaron Francis:you're telling me I can just log off? That's an option?
Ian Landsman:Just go That's interesting. A hobby?
Aaron Francis:Do do
Ian Landsman:something else? Never heard of my hobby. My job also.
Aaron Francis:Makes makes no sense to me.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. So
Aaron Francis:Yeah. I don't know what your strategy would be.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. I don't know. If you think of anything, let me know. If anybody out there has any ideas, I'm open to suggestions. But,
Aaron Francis:yeah,
Ian Landsman:This is where, like, the SEO has always been pretty good for us because it's like, people are just directly searching, like, best help desk software or whatever. You know, like, they're like, I'm buying right now. This is the thing I'm I need this tool. It's not like a sexy tool. I'm not, like, super excited about it necessarily, but I'm searching for it right now, And that's not the way people really use YouTube as much.
Ian Landsman:For certain areas, it is, but not in general. You know? It's more like product Reviews somewhat and things like that, but, again, b to b is not so much like that. I don't feel like there's that, yeah, kind of minds up there. So, I don't know, but alright.
Ian Landsman:So why don't you talk to us more about YouTube? Because you've had some big success with announced and
Aaron Francis:Making it work. Yeah. Let's see what the numbers are right now. So PlanetScale has officially hit switching accounts to PlanetScale 27 1,372 subscribers.
Ian Landsman:And when you start doing these videos, they had, like, 1,000 subscribers
Aaron Francis:or whatever. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. Something like that. Well, now.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Wow. So it's been, you know, it's been let's see. I think Sam, the CEO, posted something, but, You know, it's been less fewer than 6 months that we've been doing these videos, and we're up, you know, 25,000 subscribers.
Ian Landsman:His post was I think was August or something. Right? It was, like Yeah. It's Yeah. So it's, like, 3 months or that's crazy.
Aaron Francis:It's crazy. Yeah. So, like
Ian Landsman:And how long have you worked there, though? You haven't you worked there a little longer than that. Right? Because didn't you
Aaron Francis:go to start with
Ian Landsman:that big prod okay. So you were doing other stuff first, or you were just working on that big Yeah. First or
Aaron Francis:I worked on the big course first. I did some other little stuff. Like, I was, you know, writing articles and Right. I built, like, a demo. I actually built it in LiveWire.
Aaron Francis:I built a demo for, like, our boost plant scale boost product for our salespeople to use. And so then I launched the course in February, and kind of that was, like, the big the 1st big public thing I did, and the course was, you know, Big success. Great. Totally worked. And then kinda just, like, did content and did the, you know, did the stuff for a while.
Aaron Francis:And then I think it was in, maybe June I posted like I was like, hey, what if I post a planet scale YouTube video? And I posted 1 and was like, hey, this is kind of fun. I could do this. I could make more of these. And so then I just kind of started, you know, playing around with it, and then It started to, like, it started to hit.
Aaron Francis:And then I basically went to Holly and was like, what if I just make this my full time thing?
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:Like, what if I am solely responsible for growing, you know, the the top of the funnel through YouTube? She's like, great. Let's do it. And after that, it's off to the races.
Ian Landsman:Because the big course, the big MySQL course wasn't, on YouTube. Right? Like, that's just on the website or whatever. Right.
Aaron Francis:So so we get we get our, you know, whatever they're called, MQLs or marketing qualified leads. People come to the course. They, like, watch the videos, and we get their email, and then we follow-up with them. That Right.
Ian Landsman:Right. Right. So that's amazing. So 3 or 4 months to go to, you know, have 20, whatever, a 1000 I know. 25,000, New subscribers.
Ian Landsman:They must be
Aaron Francis:that silver
Ian Landsman:plate, bud. Very happy. I They're very happy.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. They're very happy. We're all very happy.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. So what's your personal channel at, though? Is is Personal channel out almost stripping you?
Aaron Francis:Yeah. It is. Yeah. Because I'm able to put out more videos there.
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:Because, you know, The main thing is that PlanetScale pays me money. So That's a
Ian Landsman:that is motivating.
Aaron Francis:It is motivating. I think let's check the let's check the personal channel. I think So I'm at 14732. So from Okay. The beginning of this year, fewer than a100 to Wow.
Aaron Francis:15,000. That's pretty good.
Ian Landsman:Man. And I have in
Aaron Francis:the last 28 days, I've earned $186 off of YouTube. So You can see where why why PlanetScale gets more of the inner cheese.
Ian Landsman:You could make a okay salary or whatever. Yeah.
Aaron Francis:Making many tens of dollars
Ian Landsman:for all of my efforts.
Aaron Francis:But, yeah, this is growing this is growing very well, and I'm very happy about it.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. They must be super happy. I mean, I don't know.
Ian Landsman:I obviously can't Share super details, but I guess just like ultra high level, like it. Is it effective marketing? Like, do they feel like it's The the powers that be in the
Aaron Francis:Ultra high level, everyone is very happy. Okay.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. That's
Aaron Francis:great. We have a long term strategy of, like, How it's going to work.
Ian Landsman:Mhmm.
Aaron Francis:And we're in phase 1 of the strategy, and everyone is very happy with the results of phase 1.
Ian Landsman:Awesome. Yep. Cool.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. It's a good thing. It's a lot of fun. It's it's it's a whole lot of fun. And being on Steve the editor was a huge
Ian Landsman:Oh, yeah. That's great.
Aaron Francis:Huge unlock for me. Yep. Because 1, he's really, like, he's really talented. First of all, he just can make better stuff than I can, but, 2, like, It releases a lot of the pressure of me having to edit everything personally. And so is he he
Ian Landsman:can do, like, motion
Aaron Francis:graphics and everything? I think he's still contract, but I think he works for us pretty much exclusively. But, so Do
Ian Landsman:you have to give him a lot of notes, or how does that whole relationship work?
Aaron Francis:That's the thing that is shocking is he is a developer. So he's one of those that's like building a sass on the side, and, you know, is a view. I don't think he's Laravel, but he's a Vue developer
Ian Landsman:Mhmm.
Aaron Francis:And primarily has used Postgres historically, But he's also a video editor, and so when, you know, we were interviewing him, and he was, like, yeah. I edited videos for bodybuilding.com and, you know, helped grow their channel to 4,000,000. Also, I saw that you all use TablePlus in a lot of your videos. I use TablePlus. I'm, you know, developing my own SaaS, and I use TablePlus.
Aaron Francis:And I'm like, You're a video editor for bodybuilding.com, and you know what Table Plus is?
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:How does it look like Table?
Ian Landsman:Yeah. Tired on the spot.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Exactly.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. So Wow. That's great. Yeah.
Aaron Francis:So no. I don't give him a lot of notes. He, like, knows.
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:He knows the content.
Ian Landsman:He gets what you'd wanna see there and whatever. Yeah.
Aaron Francis:It's It's doubly helpful because he's like a he's like an odd he's the avatar of the audience because he's not a database expert.
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:And so I can go to him and be like, hey. Is this, like, general topic interesting to you? And he's like, yeah. I would I would wanna know how that works, or, like, no. That's too in the weeds.
Aaron Francis:I don't care about that. It's like, okay. Cool. So he's a, you know, a smart person, but kind of a database normie. And it's like, that's who I need to target.
Ian Landsman:Right. Those are the people we're after.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, it's working, man. Just got to keep
Ian Landsman:it going. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. I mean, how has it been Since you've been out, and I don't think I've have the has there been a video since you've been away yet? Okay.
Aaron Francis:They haven't been. They've posted 2 since I've been out.
Ian Landsman:Okay. Because I know you had some in in there. So I guess I guess we haven't seen what it's like if you're not posting, really, but it's like Yeah. Once you reach a certain level, you will still gain followers even Mhmm. Without, obviously, new videos help, of course, but, once you're kinda in the algo and and the plants go ones are so you know, they're Long term valuable there.
Ian Landsman:They're not just, like, views for today. They're like, hey, this is how this thing works. Right? And so that's Gonna be good forever. So or Yep.
Ian Landsman:A long time anyway. So, yeah.
Aaron Francis:They've posted it looks like they've posted 3 since I've been out. Oh, wow. And one of them has 97,000 views just looking you know, they're only revealing public information. You could go to PlanetScale page and see this, but it's Yeah. 97,000 views, 23,000, 37,000.
Aaron Francis:So it's crazy. Those are big numbers.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. And those are all your those are all you?
Aaron Francis:Those are all 3 me.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. Yeah. And and then they have some more. Are you are you out of canned ones yet? Or they're still
Aaron Francis:No. No. No. They're still, There's still probably You
Ian Landsman:got it. You got it.
Aaron Francis:There's still probably 4 or 5 more
Ian Landsman:that Beautiful. They have in
Aaron Francis:the can. And I think Steve the edit Steve the editor is working on one that's, like, a Fully animated explainer video, which I think will be a really interesting, experiment, But I I don't, honestly, I don't even know what it is, so I'm excited to see it along
Ian Landsman:the road. I saw you I saw the boss Holly is also, Up in her video game, so just seems like get get into the YouTube streets a little bit
Aaron Francis:here at some point. I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to introduce more of the characters on YouTube. So I talk about Steve, the editor. I talk about boss Holly, and so that we can start bringing more people on the channel and it not be yeah. Kinda, like, maintain the consistency.
Aaron Francis:And see,
Ian Landsman:this is really interesting though because, like, I feel like I don't know if you do know who Doug Demeros? It's like one of the biggest car YouTube channels. So it was just, you know, it was him doing YouTube videos about cars, new cars, old cars, whatever reviews. And, then he got, you know, really big. He has, like, millions of followers, blah blah blah.
Ian Landsman:He started this website called Cars and Bids, Which is like
Aaron Francis:Oh, yeah. I know that.
Ian Landsman:Our auction website. Yep. So okay. So that's his thing. Okay.
Ian Landsman:And then he's gotten, you know, investment for that, and I think that that is profitable already anyway. And so it's all great, like the platform and blah blah, the the audience and everything, but then what he did recently is he likes so he got this investment of, like, a lot of money, like $100,000,000 or and so he added more people
Aaron Francis:to the To the content side?
Ian Landsman:To the content side.
Aaron Francis:Interesting.
Ian Landsman:And, Oh, man. It's really I feel like it's very much hurt the channel. Like, I don't know if it's I don't know if it's actually hurt the channel. Like, maybe it's fine. Right?
Ian Landsman:The numbers might all be great. But for me as a viewer, like, I watch way less Doug Demerra because there's, like, all these mixed in ones now where, like, it's somebody else. And, like, I love Doug. I don't want this other person, and
Aaron Francis:they might be great.
Ian Landsman:I don't want that. I don't want that random person. That is a risk. You go through and balance.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. It's
Ian Landsman:a balance. I mean, I just heard Characters is one thing, but then when they, like, take over, I feel like that's a different thing. And it's like, well, obviously, it's a corporate channel, so it's even totally different there for, Like, a playing scale, but still, it is very interesting, the, like, personal relationship you get with the YouTuber and how that impacts what you can do and how it affects things.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Somebody was talking recently about some of these creators that have, like, leveled up and gone pro and how the content has suffered because of it. And I'm curious. Like, I think Ali Abdaal was one that was mentioned. Like, it just became so, like, polished and Highbrow that people were just like, this isn't interesting anymore.
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:And it isn't it it seems like there's, like, some sort of life cycle or arc to this kind of stuff. And if you can retain if you can retain what originally was compelling but scale it up, That's the ticket, but I see it seems like that might be hard to do.
Ian Landsman:I do think it is tricky. I don't know. It's it's hard to say. I mean, there are obviously other channels where it works too where it is, like, a team or whatever Mhmm. Group of people, but it is an interesting challenge.
Ian Landsman:Even for I think the business aspect It's very interesting too of, like, investing in somebody, and from a business perspective, it's like if I make this person the face of my business, like, what that implies, and, Like, the economics of that are very interesting, and so, like, there's a lot there, which are obviously well, I'm not gonna put you on the spot for
Aaron Francis:it, but Please don't put me on the spot.
Ian Landsman:Well, as a business owner, when I think about doing it, it's like, wow, if I hire somebody to do this, it's like yeah. Then and it's a huge success, like that's like a good problem, but it's It's a potentially tricky problem in many other ways and, you know, not whatever keeping them happy on one hand, and when they go on, at some point, just do it Something else, like, now you've lost, like, the face of your YouTube channel, which is a big thing, so, but I mean, it's all good. Much rather have that problem than not have that problem. Of course, it's like, oh, I've built this huge YouTube channel and whatever. If, like, I have to find a new face, then I could do that, like, that's a good problem, But, but still, it is it is very interesting in this world of social media to be have a corporate face be a person, in that way.
Ian Landsman:It's kind of a different thing than you really had in the past.
Aaron Francis:Many interesting questions, Ian.
Ian Landsman:Alright. What else would you like
Aaron Francis:to talk about?
Ian Landsman:So it's should we go? Should we go on to my sage advice with you, some sage advice?
Aaron Francis:Yeah. You've been mixing it up, man.
Ian Landsman:THH corner. Can we do THH corner?
Aaron Francis:You've been stoking you've been stoking the fires with some, With some reductive takes, I think. Reductive. Reductive. You're reducing it. So tell us tell us your hot take.
Ian Landsman:Alright. So DHH was on the interview, which I actually think was really good on this interview, and, I didn't watch the entire thing yet, but, I agree with actually quite a bit of what he says. But, yeah. But, you know, he's talking about the new ones.com thing, which we've covered on here before. In some ways, I don't even have that much to add.
Ian Landsman:I feel like what we covered before is still my complete valid take. But, and
Aaron Francis:And this was DHH on Jason Calacanis' This Week in the Startups, and we'll put a a link in the show notes.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. We'll get that linked up, but, well, he basically just revealed that the first product is a Slack competitor. Okay. And then there was not like a lot of other details around it, But, you know, he implied that it's gonna be, like, I guess, just an actual one time fee. I mean, definitely, some of this thing asterisk
Aaron Francis:Based based on the domain, it seems like it's a it they're kinda leaning in on the one topping thing. So
Ian Landsman:And his example was, like, shop you know, he knows Toby of Shopify, and Shopify spends 1,000,000,000 of dollars a year on Slack, and that he they'll be able to replace that with The Slack competitor for $1,000 one time. And so I just think the whole thing is ridiculous. It's like that's just what it comes down to. Like, it's just ridiculous.
Aaron Francis:That's not an that's not an argument.
Ian Landsman:A lot. Okay. Here's the thing. So I have sold on premise software. 20 years.
Ian Landsman:Yep. Know a lot about on premise software. Mhmm. Alright. We saw a cloud version, and I I think I tweeted this out, but, like, have had hundreds and hundreds of customers move from the on premise version to the cloud.
Ian Landsman:In HelpSlots case, you can go both directions. You can also go cloud to on premise. Mhmm. I literally I can't even I think I we've I can only actually remember 1 customer actually doing it. I think there's probably been a few others, so I said, like, less than 5.
Ian Landsman:But this is just not a direction businesses wanna go for many reasons, and those reasons are all tied into the why Shopify can't replace their Slack installation for $1,000 because you need support. You need updates on I mean, I guess they're gonna give forever, I'm assuming, so I can't imagine they're doing support. No. So this is gonna be a unsupported Slack product that my whole Shopify is gonna use this thing. Right?
Ian Landsman:And the business critical application that's way beyond just like the Geeks. Like it's gonna be in marketing and all these different departments are gonna be in their Slack. And like, you're just gonna have a huge Group of people and servers and costs involved in running this $1,000 Slack installation. You're gonna have at least 1, probably multiple dedicated expensive engineers to it. Then you're gonna have 3 or 4 other ones that are like round the clock, You know, uptime because Shopify is not closed, you know, at 5 PM.
Ian Landsman:I'm sure there's people working 24 hours a day there and Slack needs to be up 24 hours a day, so you're gonna have them. You're gonna have lots of servers. Like, you're not gonna just run this on some digital ocean this is an Aaron Francis .com where you use a static site Or Ian lands with .com where you can throw it up on a digital ocean. Like, you're gonna have to
Aaron Francis:Or vapor or Larevel vapor.
Ian Landsman:I mean, they can use vapor, but it's gonna be a big vapor install and they're gonna pay AWS a lot of money. Oh, yeah. I think great use for vapor if, you know, if I don't know, vapor probably can't run the rails app or whatever. The idea being you're gonna have tons of costs and tons of responsibility, and you gotta secure it, and you gotta keep it from getting hacked, and all this stuff That nobody wants to do anymore. They don't wanna do it, and the people who want to do it are very particular use case people.
Ian Landsman:Like, I'm a bank and I have I already have all this infrastructure. I already have all these people, and I have a certain set of regulations and different things that I Have to deal with. I have no choice. Yes. I want it on premise.
Ian Landsman:Fine. But that's, like, not that's, like, 5% of the market. That's not
Aaron Francis:That's enough of the market. Okay. So here's
Ian Landsman:here's why. People Here's why. Those people don't want an unsupported version of Slack Either. They do 1 on 1 unsupported Slack. They do not.
Aaron Francis:I I don't know. Okay. So here's here's here's why it's reductive, I think. Alright. Because your tweet is something like I don't I don't even need to look it up.
Aaron Francis:I'll make it up, and and it'll still be I'll make it up, and it'll still be right.
Ian Landsman:Make it up.
Aaron Francis:No. Nobody should run their own Slack to save $100 a year. That's Right. Basically your tweet. I could write it myself.
Aaron Francis:Yeah.
Ian Landsman:That's your tweet. That's, like, amalgamation of 2 different tweets. Yes. That's the the core idea. That's the reduction of your reductive pace.
Ian Landsman:So
Aaron Francis:I agree. I agree with that. Nobody should run their own Slack to save $100 a year. The people I think the people that this would target would be would be people that are paying 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year to Slack. And so I think the reason I think the reason why Slack is a good starter for them is because Slack does become prohibitively expensive for very, very large companies.
Aaron Francis:Even at PlanetScale, we only have a 100 people, and I think our Slack bill is very expensive. If you want, like, message retention over, you know, whatever it is, 10,000 Messages or I I forget what it is.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. But if it comes to the user or something, I mean
Aaron Francis:I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know the pricing, but so Take somebody take somebody like, Shopify, thousands of of users.
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:Potentially thousands of engineers. I don't know. I would imagine they've got at least several 100 engineers. And what is Shopify really good at? Running a freaking Rails app.
Aaron Francis:And if this, like, if this Slack thing is a Rails app, which
Ian Landsman:it is I'm sure it is. Right? Yeah.
Aaron Francis:They have the operational expertise to, like Mhmm. You know, spin up a new Kubernetes cluster or whatever, and, like, that's pretty much They're bread and butter at this point, and so they could throw some other service on it. Maybe they do hire 1, you know, individual to babysit, You know, the once Slack or whatever, they could still come out several $1,000 ahead, and, presumably, this isn't just like a one to 1 clone. Maybe DHH and at al. Have some sort of, like, you know, special thing where you can customize it for your org, and then it's, like, that makes it really cool and that makes lot better, and you can have single sign on for not, you know, amputating an arm and a leg, and it's like, oh, maybe maybe this is better.
Aaron Francis:But I think People saying like, hey. You're a bootstrap company of 5 or 10 or 30 people, and you should host your own Slack instance. That seems silly to me, but it's also it feels similar, almost kinda like to Vitesse, which is the open source, you know, database that PlantScale runs. Like, HubSpot, for example, runs Vitess. It's open source.
Aaron Francis:They have 5 engineers that are, like, dedicated to running Vitesse. Right. And it's like, yeah, you don't really get any support at all with that because it's, you know, it's open source, but a whole community built around it or whatever. And you could make the same argument that, like, hey, HubSpot. You really shouldn't be in the database A hosting game, like, messaging is even more ancillary, of course, but
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:I don't know. It just feels like there is a company or a Size of company or some set of factors where it's like, this makes perfect sense to me.
Ian Landsman:I mean, I definitely think it makes sense for the, the free Slack communities where it's, like, free or semi free Slack cities, right, where it's like, yeah, you can't have over a thou whatever. There's all the limits Slack guys, I don't even know what they are, but, like, people have these big communities and they have to pay something and they can't obviously because it's like a free community or whatever. So, like, Instead of going to a forum or something like that, like, yes, here's this Slack thing that you pay him $1,000 one time or maybe it's less if it's that kind of use case and Totally makes sense. I think that's great. Works.
Ian Landsman:Totally works. See, I don't think big companies think about it at all. Like, What you're describing is the issue is that, like, it's not first of all, like, even $1,000,000, not a lot of money to a big company. And, like, so and the other and they're gonna want all the other stuff. When the big company says, yeah.
Ian Landsman:We wanna buy this tool that we're even when we're gonna host ourselves, Like, they want support. Like, they are not gonna dedicate all these people to this thing and not have support unless they have no choice. So, like, Yeah. Like an open source Viteness or whatever. Right?
Ian Landsman:Fine. Like, this is there's not a lot of ways to shard MySQL. You wanna use MySQL. You know, I'm sure there's some other options out there, but that's the biggest one, I think, or one of the biggest ones, and so you do what you have to do to run your whole business, but Messaging. Like, I could just buy Slack and never think about it again.
Ian Landsman:Right? And even if it costs me $1,000,000, it's like, I don't have to worry about it. And I think people, I I feel like they've even got kind of are thinking about it from the dev perspective, and I don't think that's the way businesses think about it. I think when I make this decision As a middle manager in a company. Right?
Ian Landsman:And it forgets Shopify in the sense of, like, Shopify knows DHH super well. So maybe Shopify really will do this. Right? Because whatever. They're best friends and whatever.
Ian Landsman:Fine. Great. But if you're just a generic company and you're just like, alright. We spend $500,000 a year on Slack. I'm the guy in charge of making this decision.
Ian Landsman:This is not my money, and we have 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars in revenue or 100 of 1,000,000
Aaron Francis:you're having 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars.
Ian Landsman:Right. So what what if so if I have a $500,000 Slack bill, that implies I have 100 of 1,000,000 Right. I can't really have a Slack bill that big without
Aaron Francis:a lot of revenue. Your headcount has to be pretty big. So Right.
Ian Landsman:It has to be huge, which means my which means my salary is right. Exactly. That just implies that. So so then the downside for me is I get fired when I move us to this unsupported $1,000 one time payment thing. Right?
Ian Landsman:But that's the downside. The upside is I saved us half $1,000,000. That's not a good trade off. There's not a lot of managers who look at that trade off, and they're like, man, that's an awesome trade off. Like, the upside is I get a little win for 1 year I saved us a few bucks, and then everybody forgets it forever.
Ian Landsman:And the downside is I get fired if this thing ever goes wrong...
Aaron Francis:And it goes down in the middle of the night...
Ian Landsman:Yeah. And somebody's like: "Why what the hell were we doing this when we could just be paying Slack and they manage the uptime and we don't have to think about it? We had to hire these 3 people to manage it, and now they're after 3 years, their salary has grown to where we're paying $750,000 for these three people to run this Slack thing that was supposed to save us money.
Ian Landsman:Like, it's just... just don't know.
Ian Landsman:Like, now, listen. Maybe the actual offering is different. Maybe they're gonna have a big support thing, and they're gonna really go after it, right, and and try to be enterprise y. But I that's no. He doesn't ever talk like that. So...
Aaron Francis:No. I don't think they're gonna do that. I don't think they're gonna do that.
Ian Landsman:I just don't know...
Aaron Francis:I don't know...
Ian Landsman:I feel like a lot of geeks...
Ian Landsman:A lot of people are gonna buy it because everybody wants to see DHH's code.
Ian Landsman:Nobody's seen DHH's code. I think they're gonna sell 10,000 copies on day one to people who wanna see a production DHH product. Boom.
Aaron Francis:Yep.
Ian Landsman:That's for sure. And they're gonna have fanboys. They're gonna have people who run their own stuff and are super into hosting it.
Aaron Francis:They're going to sell some; they're going to make money...
Aaron Francis:Yeah, they're gonna make $10 million dollars off of this.
Ian Landsman:I'm not saying they're not gonna make money. I'm not saying they're not gonna sell any. They will sell some. They will make some money, But that's also because these have a huge audience and they have a very devoted fan base and all those things. But I just don't think these big companies are gonna be like, yeah, let's use this Slack replacement.
Ian Landsman:Like, to me, if anything, it's gonna be more the small companies because they're like, whatever. I'm the owner, and I make the decision.
Aaron Francis:Yes, I think that is true.
Ian Landsman:I'm willing to take the risk. Right? Like, I don't if it goes down, it's on me. I said to use this thing, and we're gonna use it. I'm fine, but, you know, I don't know.
Ian Landsman:Slack is just so much bigger than just messaging too. Like, I mean, it has hundreds of integrations, thousands of integrations. I don't know. A lot a lot of integrations.
Aaron Francis:I don't think the once The Once version of the of it will, and I think that's part of can't.
Ian Landsman:Right? Not day 1. Like, maybe it has a few core ones. Right? But it can't have 300 in integrations day 1.
Ian Landsman:I think that's very unlikely. So...
Aaron Francis:No. I don't I don't think so. And I think part of, I feel like part of What you're saying is, like, it's gonna be so operationally complex to run, and I don't I don't know if that's gonna be the case. Like, is this the kind of thing that you could just, like, Push to Heroku and have a, you know, a Postgres database on Heroku, and it just, like, it works? If so
Ian Landsman:For Userscape, yes. But for Shopify? Not for Shopify.
Aaron Francis:Maybe not maybe not for Shopify. Right. But, again, Shopify has already got hundreds of engineers that know how to run and scale rails out. Right?
Ian Landsman:But they all have other things to be doing too. Like, they're not
Aaron Francis:Do they? Who does any? Like, what
Ian Landsman:they don't always nobody's doing they got 2 engineers. People are worse siloed in those big Now nobody's doing anything.
Aaron Francis:When you have that many people, everybody's got slack. They're, you know, down downtime. I mean, they're just hanging out.
Ian Landsman:Somebody's responsible when it goes down. You know? If it's down at 2 AM on Christmas, who who's in charge of that? I don't know. Like Yeah.
Ian Landsman:Somebody's gotta be in charge of it.
Aaron Francis:I feel like there's they're simplifying my guess. My guess is they're gonna simplify the piece of software to where you don't have hundreds of integrations. Maybe you receive webhooks and everything else you gotta figure out, right? You don't have screen sharing, you don't have huddles, you don't have themes, you don't have all this Stuff that Slack continues to bloat up with. Mhmm.
Aaron Francis:And it is, operationally ready for Heroku or Maersk, which I think is their deployment thing they've invented.
Ian Landsman:Oh, that's camel whatever thing
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Whatever. You can just presumably, You know, point it at a digital ocean box, and it'll self set up. That would be my guess. And I think
Ian Landsman:Not for Shopify.
Aaron Francis:Well, no. You're you're saying Shopify.
Ian Landsman:Availability. You have some you have some you have some you have some you have some you have some stuff to it.
Aaron Francis:Let's talk small SMBs then. So you're talking 50 people...
Ian Landsman:Alright, fine.
Aaron Francis:You're talking 50 people, and you throw it up on Heroku, and suddenly you own all of your data, which who cares about that? I don't care about that. You own all of your data and you're not paying Slack these exorbitant fees. Now I think the problem with doing Slack first is everybody's going to have Slack open anyway. So now my company my company Slack is in, like, this once .com thing, and all my other Slacks are over in this other thing.
Aaron Francis:Like, I feel like that's Kinda that's gonna kinda suck a little bit.
Ian Landsman:You mean if, what do you mean?
Aaron Francis:I mean, as a user, I'm logged into, like, My friends Slack and my open source Slack, and then I have switch over.
Ian Landsman:Networky aspect to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:That's a big a big thing for sure. I mean, I don't know. The thing is a small, medium business, like, alright, 50 users at $12 a user a month on the top. Is that what it is?
Aaron Francis:Do we have do we have real numbers Yeah.
Ian Landsman:I just looked at this the other day. I mean, there is like then an enterprise one that adds like really enterprise y enterprise y stuff, but that presumably if you're 20, 30, 50 users, you don't need that upper tier. So that one's a call me price, but the the highest 1250 month. Tier is 1250 business. So how do you get that $600 a month?
Ian Landsman:I mean
Aaron Francis:When paying once a year, so that's how that gets you. So it's $15 a month, Month to month.
Ian Landsman:It's not expensive. I mean, I pay 8 a h refs $100 a month, so I can go in there once a month if that and poke on our s c like, I have I have literally 20 apps I pay $100 a month, and half of them I don't even use. So I don't know. And we're not that big, so I just think that's not a lot of money. I don't know.
Ian Landsman:But everybody was like, it's so much money. It's not it's not much money.
Aaron Francis:$15 a month times 12 months in a year. I knew that one. That one I had memories times Fifty employees, $9,000 Yeah.
Ian Landsman:A year. Even $10. I'm paying $10
Aaron Francis:to Percona much money.
Ian Landsman:3 days to fix our database server. Like, this is, like, for 50 users all year long to use Slack, and I never have to worry about it down. I never have to back it up.
Aaron Francis:A 100 users. 18,000. Wow. That cut. It doubled.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. That's not that much money.
Ian Landsman:It's just not that much money. Everybody's salary's $100,000 plus And but this thing that is that everybody uses all day long cost me $18,000 a year if I have a 100 people. That's not even 1 person's healthcare. What? So I'm just not making big biggest business decisions like this to save 1 person's health care.
Ian Landsman:I don't think that math makes any sense at all. You know, again, unless you there will be people with special use cases, fine. Like, you're running some high security thing where you have your own. Mhmm. You want security beyond Slack.
Ian Landsman:Click you want everything in house because you're some military contractor. Well, fine. Great.
Aaron Francis:They have gov slack at the very bottom if you're a government person.
Ian Landsman:There you go. Exactly. So but fine. Whatever. You're you have a culture in house of of security and wanting things done your way.
Ian Landsman:There are definitely those people out there, But, you know, this is a very edge case type thing. On premise is now an edge case situation.
Aaron Francis:And So what is the main what is your main What's your main argument? Other people shouldn't pursue this as a business strategy, or this isn't going to work?
Ian Landsman:I mean, I don't think it's you know, again, this is so, like, because everybody's gonna be like, oh, you're an idiot. Look, DHA just said they sold 10,000 copies. And I don't I don't was what I was
Aaron Francis:I had that in my show notes for the next show. I'm ready to say that to you.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. They're gonna sell 10,000 copies or a 100,000. Whatever. They're gonna sell plenty. I'm not even saying they won't sell it because they are them.
Ian Landsman:Right?
Aaron Francis:But Yes.
Ian Landsman:I just don't think you're going what he is portraying it as, what the ones.com website says And what he is portraying it as, I don't think is what's going to happen. And maybe they'll be able to roll out a few companies, then, hey. Look. Shopify uses it. Fine.
Ian Landsman:Whatever. I do not think You
Aaron Francis:don't think the industry is swinging or think this has no effect at
Ian Landsman:all. Swing. I think that Slack is not even gonna notice this thing. I mean, some sales rep inside is gonna be annoyed that, like, they lost the Shopify account, fine, whatever, but I don't think that it's gonna be, like, you're gonna see Slack, I don't know. Even I mean, Slack, even if they did, like, Slack could crush them in a second and just be like, we're gonna have Slack on premise, and people will pay half $1,000,000 a year for that For those very edge case uses where people want some, for whatever reason, need it to be actually internal, but Yeah.
Ian Landsman:I don't know. I mean, it'll be fine, whatever. It's like, they're never gonna I just feel like it's definitely not gonna be base camp. Right? Let's put it that way.
Ian Landsman:It's not gonna be base camp. Probably not even gonna be, hey. It's a cool thing to be doing
Aaron Francis:to do something. Money.
Ian Landsman:That's, hey, I don't know. That came up on the Twitter thread too. I wonder I think you're curious about how much, hey, actually,
Aaron Francis:they pay. Makes a lot of money.
Ian Landsman:I think it does. What we would consider a lot of money, but I don't think it's, like, a tiny percentage of base camp.
Aaron Francis:I think everything is 10% of of base camp.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. So by the way, take
Aaron Francis:a look at stuff
Ian Landsman:in the morning.
Aaron Francis:What does it make? A $100,000,000 a year?
Ian Landsman:Yeah. More. I think more. 100 of millions a year. So
Aaron Francis:it's project management.
Ian Landsman:I know. So I mean, they're just doing a cool thing they want to do. It's kind of like Laravel released pulse, right? Like, I mean, I think I would be cool for them to do is just, like, release it free. I mean, they're kind of doing that.
Ian Landsman:They've been copping a lot of the Laravel game. I that this isn't the thing that came up on Twitter, They've really been cop a lot. Like, the new rails is having a bunch of stuff that's very Laravel ish. Yeah. This whole once thing, it's like they can't bring themselves to actually do it Free like Taylor does, but like, this is essentially that like, it's like, Hey, we're not going to support it and we can't bring ourselves to make it free, but we know you all pay us anyway.
Ian Landsman:So Whatever. We'll make it $100 or whatever, and there you go.
Aaron Francis:Yeah. That's that's funny. They're basically doing Open source, but not calling it open source. Right? I mean, what does the $1,000 mean to them?
Ian Landsman:Right. Nothing. Yeah.
Aaron Francis:But it's no support. It's source available. It's yeah. Right. That's interesting.
Ian Landsman:I think that I think the, It's flipped a little bit here in the open source framework world. I feel like the Laravel is the big dog and Rails is having to catch up a little bit, and this is kind of that, part of that part of that, I guess. It's like, here's a here's a way we can ship our production app. Yeah. You know, all all that kind of stuff.
Ian Landsman:So Honestly help desk eventually. We'll see that once help
Aaron Francis:desk if you're listening, and if if you're not listening, Ian, you should tell Taylor this when you guys hang out next. You, Taylor, should do this. You should make production apps.
Ian Landsman:Right.
Aaron Francis:And then not not just not just sell the code. Just be like, yeah.
Ian Landsman:Just the code. Yeah. I mean, Taylor could definitely do the same thing. Right? We would love to see a Taylor Otwell Yes.
Ian Landsman:Production app. Like, they would love to Yes. Go through that code with a fine tooth comb and, see how he does things and everything. And so
Aaron Francis:supposed to be that? Wasn't that a thing at
Ian Landsman:some point? He he built it. It was, like, built up built it. It was, like, built up built it. It was, like, Fully built.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. But he didn't release it. But it was a I don't know. I don't think it was a was it gonna be self hosted?
Aaron Francis:I thought it was, like, a SaaS app that he was not gonna, like, was not gonna host and host it as assassin. He's basically just gonna, like, use it as a, yeah, as a reference material.
Ian Landsman:Right. I think you're right. Yeah. They could I mean, there is, like, a cost you
Aaron Francis:Can you imagine how much people would freak out if Taylor's sold code?
Ian Landsman:People will
Aaron Francis:be like, what are this? What are you doing? You're supposed to be open source ethos. Like, it's against the spirit.
Ian Landsman:While they took out their credit card and paid them for it? While the while
Aaron Francis:the rest of us are, like, oh, this is really cool. I'm gonna buy this today.
Ian Landsman:Right. I wanna see what he's doing. Yeah. I wanna see all the little helpers and little Yeah. Exactly.
Ian Landsman:Built in. Although, I don't think I think Taylor's thing the thing with Taylor is I I think a lot of his stuff, it it really is just, like, very pure Laravel. Like, I mean, I'm sure he has his little things or whatever, but a lot of those little things just make their way into So, like Yeah. Like, yeah, I I had to do this thing, so I put it in the Laravel.
Aaron Francis:But what if he made, like, a Slack plug and sold it?
Ian Landsman:Right. Man, that was an idea.
Aaron Francis:The one if you made a Slack clone that had a back end, it had a native PHP, you know, desktop front end, and he was like, hey, man. I just you know, I made this $1,000.
Ian Landsman:I like it.
Aaron Francis:That'd be awesome.
Ian Landsman:Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know, man. Are you gonna use this thing on any projects? How about that?
Aaron Francis:Am I gonna use what?
Ian Landsman:1 the ones.com/ I
Aaron Francis:don't know anything about Rails. I'm not gonna sign up to host that.
Ian Landsman:Okay.
Aaron Francis:Yeah.
Ian Landsman:Not that excited about it. Not gonna do that.
Aaron Francis:That excited not that excited about it. I am excited I am excited to see how it does. I'm excited I'm excited to see, you know, rejuvenation in the Rails ecosystem. I'm excited to see a return to simplicity. I feel like that is for all of his faults and foibles, DHH is very much like, y'all are making this too complicated.
Aaron Francis:And I I vibe with that for sure. Very much on board with that with that take from him. And I will say the the the rehabilitation of DHH has been Strong. I mean, I don't know if you listened to that whole podcast with him and his and palicanos.
Ian Landsman:That, but yeah.
Aaron Francis:But he did say, like, I used to be IDHH used to be a hardcore Cynic and fighter, and I would just argue with everyone about everything. And I've just realized that's not what I wanna do with my life. I'm like, hey. Cool.
Ian Landsman:Good good for you, man.
Aaron Francis:So
Ian Landsman:I I'm I'm here for the the He's on the comeback trail?
Aaron Francis:Yeah. I'm here for the Rehabilitation of DHH. I think that's great. But now I'm not gonna use it.
Ian Landsman:Character. Yeah. Yeah. I can't Can't. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:I can't. Just the rails part of it, obviously. Like, every time I ever try to do anything with rails, I'm like, yeah, this whole, like, getting it going stories
Aaron Francis:Getting it going. Maybe it's tough.
Ian Landsman:Now, but Yeah. I never like the getting it going story. It's like No.
Aaron Francis:They don't have a clean onboarding story.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. Yeah. When are they gonna get their herd? You know herd herd for rails is coming at some point here.
Aaron Francis:It's got to. Man, I have said so many times, if I knew the first thing about Rails or wanted to, you know, find a niche in the in the industry, I would just copy everything that Laravel has done for rails. I really would.
Ian Landsman:I feel like that's a that's a solid game plan.
Aaron Francis:Like, 4 or 5 friends together and start a little agency and be like, alright. What do we do? Pulse? They came out with something called Pulse. What is it?
Aaron Francis:We're doing it.
Ian Landsman:Like, you
Aaron Francis:don't even have you don't even have to have an original thought.
Ian Landsman:No. It's so fun. Like, that's the way businesses work Forever, really. Right? Like, people would go overseas and, like, oh, we discovered this thing in Europe, and we brought it back here.
Ian Landsman:Now we do it here, like, And nobody knows what
Aaron Francis:that is. But smaller, and we call it espresso. It's like, oh, that's a great idea.
Ian Landsman:Exactly. Like, we'll just bring it here and make it a thing and brand it with a cool brand name. Now, like, people are all about it and mix it with whatever, and it's, like yeah. Like, just take I mean, this is a whole other conversation, but, like, repurposing ideas and Remixing ideas, like, this is the way you do things. Like, if you're out there trying to start a business, that's how you start a business.
Ian Landsman:Like but Yes. Tech ecosystem is so Like, you must invent AI. Like, nothing short of that. It's like that's the dumbest thing ever. Like, just do something that already exists, put your, you know, your sensibilities into it, not like not, like, straight copy it, but put your sensibilities.
Aaron Francis:That restaurant down the street, it makes a lot of money. Maybe I'll make 1 I'll make a restaurant.
Ian Landsman:Over and over. It's like Right. That's kinda hard. Right. And it's like, we'll find recipes, but
Aaron Francis:What do we have? We've got Horizon, Pulse, Nova, Envoyeur even. Like, if you wanna do full on SaaS, you could do something like Envoyeur. There's just so many things, HEARD, native, PHP. There's so many things that we have that Rails just does simply.
Aaron Francis:Yeah.
Ian Landsman:Shit, I think. I mean, shift for rails. Like, that would be
Aaron Francis:something that
Ian Landsman:I think. I mean, maybe some of those stuff exists. But
Aaron Francis:Yeah. Like, Passport, Socialite, all of that stuff. You know, there's there's a question of, like, how do you get rich doing it? And I think, You know, reinventing Socialite feels like a lot of work for just like an open source product. Yeah.
Ian Landsman:But if
Aaron Francis:you were to reinvent Pulse in Rails, You can see a hybrid model there for sure.
Ian Landsman:Yeah. For sure.
Aaron Francis:You do the open source thing, and you also have a hosted version where people can add cards and stuff like that. Like
Ian Landsman:Yeah. Or there's, like, ultra premium cards or something. Like, one of the more complicated ones are are paid add ons or something like that. Like Yeah. I don't know.
Ian Landsman:I I you don't see that as much as I would think you should for sure. I don't know why that is. Even like a Laracast. Like, I mean, there's lots of Ruby on Rails video courses and things, but I don't think there's, like, a Laracast that's like
Aaron Francis:There's a a
Ian Landsman:facto standard.
Aaron Francis:There's Chris Oliver's thing. Yeah. Railscasts. Railscasts. Him?
Ian Landsman:Maybe it is.
Aaron Francis:Is that him or no?
Ian Landsman:I haven't looked at rails in so long. I I honestly don't know what's going there in the last, like
Aaron Francis:Go Rails.
Ian Landsman:Tell me.
Aaron Francis:Go Rails.
Ian Landsman:Okay. Yeah. So that's at least out there. But, yeah. I I don't know.
Ian Landsman:It does seem like you're You're you're always ahead when you start with an idea you know works and then build off that versus, like, trying to invent an idea that you don't know if it'll work. Then if you wanna do that, then that's when you definitely gotta have, like, VC money and all that. That's when you
Aaron Francis:For sure.
Ian Landsman:You need to risk other people's money, but those ideas you don't know are gonna work, and Yeah. You give up the equity. Yeah.
Aaron Francis:So if you're listening and you know Rails, everything we talk about, just steal it and Just steal it.
Ian Landsman:Steal it from Laravel. All this goes well. Don't go to this list. This is the
Aaron Francis:first time. Dot com, and just, like that. Just start copy and pasting. Speed it into chat g p t and say turn this from Ruby to or from PHP to Ruby.
Ian Landsman:The next thing I want to take over in PHP slash Laravel land is it's super annoying to me that like all this AI stuff, I don't know if you've how much you've dug into account the AI ecosystem, but and a lot of other areas too. Like, it's all Python. Yeah. Oh, man. I want Hate to see that.
Ian Landsman:I want PHP to be the default. Like, I gotta be Python. I don't wanna Nobody wants Python.
Aaron Francis:Nobody likes Python.
Ian Landsman:Python actually is yeah. They've I have a whole Python story. But, anyway, yes. I don't I'd, I want PHP to be or, like and tons of these sites also, like, they don't, Like, I have all these SDKs. They don't have PHP.
Ian Landsman:I'm the,
Aaron Francis:I don't
Ian Landsman:know, PHP.
Aaron Francis:I know
Ian Landsman:why you have all this esoteric language. We didn't talk to this before, but Anyway. Alright. What else is up there? I don't think there's everybody should just go back and watch the original take if you want more on that because I feel like it's all the same.
Ian Landsman:Like, the ones It's
Aaron Francis:all the same. Is I think I think it's gonna
Ian Landsman:work everything and
Aaron Francis:fabulously well for them. And Yeah.
Ian Landsman:I think they'll sell a lot because they're gonna
Aaron Francis:sell a lot and
Ian Landsman:That's what I saw on Twitter. He could do if you if there was a 37 signals toaster, People would buy that toaster. It's so out of the toaster. People would be very excited about the toaster because it's the h h, and he put his thumb on a toaster, and, you know, it would have some Cool button that did something or is a weird shape or whatever. And, you know, and it'd be awesome, and people would buy a buck.
Ian Landsman:But Yeah. Like, he could sell anything because he had a big audience. That's the that's one of the upsides when you get the audience.
Aaron Francis:Meta takeaway there. You gotta
Ian Landsman:get a big audience. You can
Aaron Francis:sell anything.
Ian Landsman:Audience. Yes. You could sell. You only need a few percent of a large audience to make it the dollars add up to a large number.
Aaron Francis:Yep.
Ian Landsman:So, Yeah. I don't know. We've had we're what is that? 105. I know.
Ian Landsman:We have 1 other card that we haven't got to. You wanna should we touch on this one quick?
Aaron Francis:Oh, no. That's a long one.
Ian Landsman:That's a long one. I feel I feel like that's a yeah.
Aaron Francis:That's a ranty one. We can't go
Ian Landsman:there yet. Alright. We'll keep this a nice short. We're giving the people a long ones. Next week's probably gonna be a long one.
Ian Landsman:So, we will wrap it. Thanks everybody for Joining us, definitely make sure you check out Justin's, video. He's super good. We'll have it linked below, but definitely check that out. Follow us on the Twitter, Mostly Tech Pod, most technical.com and, email us at mostly technical podcast at Gmail.
Ian Landsman:Talk to you next week.