Mario: Alright.
How's it going?
Alan: Hey, how's it going?
I'm good.
Mario: Good.
Good.
Alan: How's things over there.
Okay.
Mario: yeah.
Yeah.
It's just wrapping up my work day and trying
Alan: getting started on mine.
It's still, I never understand what's going on with the time zones.
It's like, I've been doing it for, I dunno, like 12, 13 years.
I've been dealing with multiple timezones and I swear I'll never get used to
Mario: Yeah,
Alan: people are online and they either answer me or they don't and
they'll get back to me when they do
Mario: yeah.
Right.
Alan: it's.
I mean, I kind of like ever embraced the asynchronous, working
to a, an extreme extent, I guess.
Mario: Yeah.
Alan: like my the previous company, I did a lot of rework remote work for
they're based in the most people were in the U S but there was some in Europe.
And I would occasionally.
Come over to Japan for like, you know, a month or two.
And I swear one of the, you know, I always try and give them a
heads up that like, oh, I'm going to be on a different time zone.
But I started one of the times people are messaging me and I'm like, oh, I like,
I'll get back to you in the morning.
They're like, hold on.
What, where the hell are you?
I'm like, I'm in Japan.
And they're like, okay.
I was not aware.
It's like, okay.
Yeah, we can just, you know, that's, that's the beauty of remote and
asynchronous flexible working.
Right.
Mario: Yup.
It can be a pain, but
Alan: Oh, I know.
I noticed a new feature or I don't know if that's intentional or not,
but it says recording audio only.
Mario: Yes.
new thing that I added a new label that lets you know, whether you're
recording just audio or audio and video because video recording is optional.
So,
Alan: Yeah.
And it's also both storage and storage heavy and I guess bandwidth heavy as well.
If you're recording everything,
Mario: exactly, that's one of the reasons why, I introduced that switch
so that video recording can be optional.
That way, if you don't really need to capture video, then why, you
know, why use up resources and
Alan: right.
Like, again.
This kind of comes back to our discussion last last time about storage costs, right?
Video isn't cheap.
Mario: yeah, And not to mention, you know, just putting more burden on the
whole process, you know, capturing
Alan: got to upload it and you've got to like capture it, upload it and process it.
Right.
Mario: yeah.
Do all that stuff.
And if, if you don't need it, then why, why bother some, a lot of podcasters
don't are not interested in video.
They, they just want to record audio.
So.
Alan: I think from what I've this is, I guess, somewhat anecdotal,
both from what I've seen.
And I had a discussion last week with somebody about
doing some like podcast stuff.
And I think there's this idea, especially around like corporate podcasts or
like ones that are more, I don't want to say professional, but dumb
by businesses instead of by people.
I think this idea of being able to repurpose you know, stuff as like
YouTube clips or you know, like it's a tweet with some video, things like that.
I think that seems stronger in that for those kinds of creators.
Whereas I guess just straight forward podcasters are like, yeah.
I don't care.
Mario: Yeah.
Yeah,
Alan: And plus it's, I mean, it's nice.
It makes the recording process easier when you can see each other.
Just cause, you know, it's easier to communicate when you
can see somebody, but yeah.
For the actual end result.
Yeah.
Mario: Yeah, yeah.
So I guess I'll share my update.
Since we're talking about this stuff So this week I've I'm supposed to
be doing some marketing related stuff, but I haven't, because I've
been trying to squash some bugs that have come up, some people using the
product have reported some issues.
a couple of them were kind of major because it kept
them from using the product.
Alan: Kind of major
Mario: yeah.
so I kind of got concerned about that because I hadn't seen that before.
And Luckily, one of them, at least it turned out to be an easy fix.
And it had to do with cameras capturing really high resolution,
like, you know, 4k or,
Alan: Oh, Right.
Yeah.
Mario: which generates a lot of data, just an incredible amount of data.
And I've found that Fusioncast wasn't handling that much data properly.
So it was breaking, you know, basically after a few minutes.
Well the first person who reported it, it was breaking up for a few seconds into
recording and it was not working at all.
Alan: I guess that's something.
Yeah.
You got to consider is like for, casual podcasters like us.
Yeah.
You're just using the, in computer, like web camera, which is probably low
bandwidth kind of, it was obviously crappy quality, but yeah, if there's
semi pro or, or they know what they're doing, they're likely to have a big
4k SLR sat behind the computer, right.
Mario: Yeah.
Some people have a pretty advanced setup.
And and, and that's why, I guess it hadn't come up before because most people
are using just regular cameras and not super advanced stuff like that, but Yeah.
I was able to fix that.
Luckily it wasn't too bad.
I mean it took a couple of days of debugging and,
Alan: Can you basically ask for a smaller version Of the video.
How do you deal with it?
Mario: Yeah.
So, so basically I would like to allow or provide for capturing 4k video.
But at this point it's not, you know, it's beyond the scope of what Fusioncast
Alan: seriously.
Yeah.
I mean, he renamed his scope at first, at least anyway.
Mario: yeah.
Yeah.
So it technically could handle it, but the problem is you really need
first of all, you can, I guess you can add a, let's say you add an
external 4k camera to your computer.
So just because the camera is 4k doesn't necessarily mean
your computer can handle it.
Right?
Cause if you don't have a powerful enough computer with a really good
network connection, then it'll lag and it'll, become a bottleneck And it
becomes a problem for Fusioncast to
Alan: things get out of sync and stuff as well.
Mario: things get out of, sync So technically it could handle it given
that it's a good enough computer with a good enough network connection, but, you
know, I don't have control over that.
So it's really hard to handle, at least for me, you know, solo developer
Alan: again, a way out of scope for this
Mario: Yeah.
exactly.
It's it's way out of scope because everyone has different kinds of setups
and even for myself, I have a 4k camera, but it's an external camera.
My laptop is kind of old now.
So it, kind of handles it.
But for.
Uploading and, you know, continuously uploading the stream with my wifi
connection, which is, not the greatest in this part of the house.
You know, it, has some, some issues.
So what I, what I'm doing is I'm dropping the resolution.
Even if it's a 4k camera, it'll drop it to full HD, which is,
you know, it's still really Good.
quality, but it's, you know,
Alan: It's manageable.
Mario: it.
Yeah.
It's more
Alan: I mean, it's a fraction of the data bandwidth, right?
Mario: Yeah.
It's, it's crazy.
The, the amount of data that 4k generates it's a huge jump from full HD to
Alan: I mean, I guess maybe to do with my age as well, but I really find
it difficult to see the difference.
Mario: Right.
It's, it's very unnoticeable,
Alan: It really is.
I mean, again, unless I'm, you know, pixel peeping on I'm right up to it, I really
find it difficult to see the difference.
I mean, I mean, there's certain content which you, you might
kind of go, oh, that looks sharp.
But for general stuff, I mean really like, no,
Mario: Yeah.
And yeah, exactly.
And and the other thing is a lot of places that you upload,
these videos that you may capture
Alan: Compress the hell out of the room anyway, right?
Mario: Yeah.
They're going to compress it anyways.
So especially When we're talking about the web, you know
it's going to get compressed.
Yeah,
Alan: YouTube is like, yeah, that's, it's got better, but it's still not great.
Mario: yeah, yeah.
Alan: the YouTube, you know, postage stamp kind of like tiny first flash clips.
Mario: A little videos.
yeah,
Alan: it's come on a little bit since then.
Mario: Yeah.
So that's the way I'm handling it.
dropping The resolution to full HD.
Basically the way it, the way it handles any video now is it
attempts to set it at full HD.
And if the camera can handle it and it'll, do that.
And if it doesn't, then it'll drop it to the next best available resolution
that the current camera can handle.
But then another, issue that was reported had to do with interruption of recording
like sudden interruption of recording like for example, someone changing
their wifi connection in the middle of recording or, the connection just
dropping, you know, for whatever reason.
Someone reported having an issue with that where they couldn't get back to recording
after something like that happened where the, the network of the guest dropped.
So that one has become a little more challenging to fix.
Just because dealing with sudden interruption of recording is, a big
deal in the Fusioncast environment
Alan: system, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it relies on data being there to upload and getting
acknowledgements and everything can then suddenly everything stops.
It's like, whoa.
Mario: Yeah.
exactly.
And, and.
If you keep in mind that it's continuously uploading, and buffering data and
dealing with a lot of moving parts.
So all of a sudden stopping like that, where the network has
gone, it's like a freight train.
That's full speed ahead.
And, and, you know, all of a sudden it just has to come to a stop.
and what do you do with all that energy that's, being pushed and all of a
sudden it doesn't have anywhere to go.
Right.
you know, all this data is flowing, it's going, and it's a lot of moving
parts are happening and all of a sudden, bam, you know, network.
Alan: Yeah.
That's it's I mean, it basically just kills everything, right?
Yeah.
You're, there's no way for you to go with that.
Mario: yeah, exactly.
But now if you think about.
Let's say there's a session going on where there's two or three people.
participating in one of them has a problem and their network breaks.
They're out of the, session they're out of the picture at that point, but
everybody else can continue recording everybody else is still in the session.
So if you think it has to handle that scenario where, things have to
continue for the ones that can, but the one that that was dropped it has
to deal with that as well and bring
Alan: good point.
Mario: you know, bring them back into the session in a graceful way.
And what I found is that Fusioncast wasn't handling that gracefully before.
Right, now I'm in the middle of, improving that.
But Basically, there was not much guidance.
It was just, it dropped.
So the user had to figure out what to do, how to come back and rejoin the session.
and even if they were able to do that I guess there were some issues where getting
them back into the session where everybody else is already they're still recording.
right.
So they have to come back in and pick that up and, and automatically start recording.
So,
Alan: tricky.
Mario: yeah, it's kinda tricky.
So so I'm doing some work to improve that and how that whole
thing is handled more gracefully.
Alan: You think you can manage the coming back into it?
It's the, it's the coming rejoining.
That sounds like the the nightmare, but in there, I mean, dropping one of the streams
and truncating that fail seems doable.
But trying to pick up an extra stream where it, that sounds not easy.
Mario: yeah, exactly.
Alan: mean, is that enough to not deal with that?
Is that something that you, you, you think you could just like
Mario: thankfully, because I had this auto recording feature already kind of
in place like the auto recording when you joined I kind of tapped into that
functionality to, you know, help get that participant back into the session
and start recording automatically.
But before that can happen.
it seemed like I needed to add a little more guidance.
a screen that comes up when they lose connection to the network
lets them know, rather than saying that the network connection is
gone just by, showing a, an alert.
I basically take them to a completely different screen that just deals
with that instead of keeping them in the studio because at that point,
it's pointless to stay in the studio because they're not, they're really.
Alan: you're not, you're not part of that session at all.
Mario: Exactly so I take them to a different screen, completely that guides
them and tells them what's going on.
And it waits for the network connection to be reestablished.
And once it's reestablished, then they can see, Okay.
it's back.
And now I have this button to request to join again.
right.
So there's a little more visual cues of what's going on and more guidance.
And when they click on that button, then they're taken back
into the, the waiting room and you know, back to the first step as,
Alan: So, so does that
Mario: to join the session.
Alan: their recording effectively, you end up with just an extra recording,
which happens to start not at the beginning, but like wherever they rejoin.
So it's up to the editor to deal with that.
Not your problem.
Right.
But at least it lets you recover in some graceful, as graceful as possible way.
Right.
Mario: Yes.
Exactly.
yeah.
So,
Alan: pull it off.
Mario: yeah.
Yeah.
So
Alan: I have confidence in you.
Don't worry.
Cause especially like, I'm just thinking of the scenarios that would be useful.
And, and, you know, especially if there's three of you doing some kind of
recording, you know, you can deal with one person falling off and then them
rejoining and just it, you might be able to, you know, as if you're interviewing
someone else, you might be able to pull that off better than everybody
just getting kicked out or something.
Right.
Yeah, if you can pull it off in that way, then that'd be, that'd be Nice.
Mario: Yeah.
And that's the way it's shaping up to be.
I'm still working on, that stuff, but it's looking good.
But there are still some, loose ends that I still need to tie down and
In the process of working on that, I discovered a few little tangentially
related bugs little things that werent' working the way they were supposed to.
And, so I'm cleaning that up as well as I go.
Alan: So, how has your, you said these reports were reported by users as well.
So have you added any, any more to it or is this still your current news
Mario: I added I think a couple of people since we last spoke
Unfortunately I haven't been able to do marketing stuff that
I was supposed to do this week, but yeah, that's the way it goes.
This.
Alan: it is.
Yeah.
Mario: Yeah, this is higher priority at this point because I don't want
issues where user is not able to use the product, you know, that's really bad.
Alan: Yeah.
That's I mean, I, I I'm not going to give you a hard time about, I feel
like I should, I feel like it's my responsibility to say no, that's, that's
a post launch fix, but I also know the frustration when you can see that.
I mean, so I had, you know, a few of these with, with DotPlan that like, you
know, I'm like, I can't release with this unless, you know, does it, I know
there's a bug under these circumstances.
I know this doesn't deal with this condition.
And then literally nobody has come up against this at all.
And yeah, but I fixed it, but I know I probably shouldn't
have it's I could have left it.
And so I know the, the The feeling of being compelled to like, prioritize this.
So I can't really give you a hard time, even though I feel like,
because I, here the same thing, but I mean, I I'm, so yeah.
So what's been helpful with that plan.
So the the big thing here is so that the, the customer, which I affectively signed
up like the, this Japanese customer.
So they've got a kind of it's not as, not even as a soft deadline, so I've
agreed to add a feature for them.
And it's one of those things that I knew I should have done when I built it.
But I did just, I actually did convince myself that I'm going to need that.
That's not important.
Well, it turns out it is.
And that's the, so, because we've added this time card thing in,
you know, like check-ins checkouts and that, that all my current.
Plan, especially with regards to selling to Japanese.
So I can't remember if we talked about this, but I spoken to a few, again, a
few kind of mentors and people locally in Japan about selling it in Japan.
So the big push back or the big feedback, which all of these, you know, both VCs
and mentors has given me is that like eats as it's not impossible, but don't try
selling to bigger customers now is just really not worth your time going that in.
If, if things work out, then they'll know about you anyway, but
really just don't don't bother.
They're going to give you so much hassle and requests and
there's there's this definite.
Mario: Compliance and all
Alan: Yeah.
So one of the more.
The things.
I see a lot with regards to bigger customers.
And I saw this quite a lot at the startup that I was out here previously, is that
Japanese bigger customers don't see that there's a lot of partnerships happen here.
Like, you know, small, a bigger customer with, you know, like
enterprise type customer with a lot of smaller customers that they sell to.
They sell all those existing products and they want to add
you as one of their products.
So they offer this, oh, we do a partnership.
You know, there's some kind of you know, revenue share and, you know, we
will basically sell your application as you know, a long with ours and.
It sounds great.
But there seems to be this, and again, speaking to other companies this
seems happen a lot, is that, that means they think they own your roadmap
Mario: Yeah,
Alan: it doesn't become your product becomes what they decided
they, your product is going to be.
And I don't know how common this partnership thing is outside of Japan.
It just seems incredibly common here for smaller startups startups in general,
that they seem to have this, this path to market of becoming, or getting a partner.
That's a bigger company that can effectively resell for you.
But that means you effectively become beholden to every single urgent request.
And there, you know
Mario: Yeah.
and multiply that times.
However, many of those types of customers you have, and each one is pulling you
in a different direction because they would think the product should do this.
And the other one thinks the product should do
Alan: Right.
It would completely irrespective of what your product is.
They just have come up with a, an idea of what it should be, and they'll sell
that and then tell you that, well, it's got to do this by next week because
we've sold this and it's not even, you know, within your company or you
don't even know who's being sold to.
So it's, it's less than optimal.
So the big feedback is here is sell to startups.
I mean, there's this huge push.
I can't remember if I mentioned this last time, there's a huge push here in Japan
for the government, trying to encourage graduates our younger people to, to start
their own companies because you know, Japan is way behind in this regard, as far
as younger people being entrepreneurial and starting software companies.
So the big feedback here is like sell to them that, that you understand them.
You know, I kind of are on the same wavelength anyway.
They have got no problem.
Putting in a credit card and paying, you know, $50 for something.
Whereas again, trying to get a big company to pay anything is
like, well, there's a process and there's a department that will,
Mario: Yeah.
Yeah.
Alan: so the big thing is just sell to small startups.
And again, that you understand what they're trying to do.
You understand their problems, you can communicate with them.
They're more likely to understand English as well, because again,
university students or graduates who are starting a company there'll be
more exposed and be better at English.
Anyway, whereas a bigger company is like less likely to have some
English knowledge, which just helps me communicate outside of the
Japanese route, which I'm also taking.
So so along those lines is like, okay, the big thing here is
that for compliance reasons, you have to keep time cards, right?
Mario: right?
Alan: For everybody, unless you're a director level.
I think there's a limit of 10 million yen a year, which is like a hundred K dollars.
If you're below that you have to keep timecards of when you
start work, when you stop work.
Supposedly too, the reason being is to stop overwork that it's debatable whether
that has whether it works, but that's the theory behind it anyway, because
Mario: that's the reasoning behind it.
Alan: yes, I mean, overwork is a massive problem here and you know,
there's been a number of deaths through, you know, people doing like
a hundred hour weeks and things for
like months at a time.
And so like trying to keep companies in check is, is a big.
So even if a company doesn't, they should be doing and they probably know
that they should be doing so if we can make that easy and part of their
normal communication and it's a win.
So that's one of the the core messages that I'm going to try to communicate
with the sales process for selling to Japanese companies is like simply,
you know, a very simple way of keeping track of your, your working hours,
you know, for compliance reasons.
As well as the, the more the core idea of, you know, being a, you
know, communication and empathy, and being able to share your day as well.
So try to mix those two together, you know, give them as a, there's a good
reason why you should be doing it for, you know, logistical and compliance reasons.
And then there's the added benefit of this as well.
So we had time codes and the.
It's the easiest thing to do when viewing timecards is show them by month, right?
Because all I have to do is put, show them current month, then you go forwards
and back you can select a month.
Well, that's not, of course not how companies work is it?
Japanese companies tend to pay around the 20th to the 25th.
25th, 26th is the start of the next month.
All your bills tend to go out on the 25th or 26th.
It is generally around there.
So people get paid between the 20th and 25th, depending on the company.
And that's when they expect time cards to be recorded from.
So your payslip is calculated from around the 20th to the 19th ish.
So of course they're like, yeah, well we need it from the
20th to the 19th every month.
And it's like, of course you do.
So I kinda like, it's fine.
We were just doing this with Excel, you know, we just opened
the previous month and we cut and we paste and yeah, it's fine.
We can do it.
And I'm like, I, I can't let you just do that every time you do it.
It's like a grain of sand in your shoe.
Right.
It it's every single time they do this, they're going to
be like, oh, bloody DotPlan.
Right.
And so it's like this.
Mario: yeah.
Alan: Reasonably easy thing for me to change to improve upon.
And it just, you know, it gives that, well, you know, I'm listening to the,
the needs of the customers and, you know, it's just, it's bugging me that they have
to work around this every single month.
Right.
So I'm like, okay, I've got to, I've got to do this.
I've just got to have a time date range for viewing time codes.
And and it's one of those, just add a date range, right.
It's amazing.
How many small.
Niggly things that come up with this.
Right.
So the obvious one is okay.
So I I just started to date picker things.
Again, date pickers are stupidly a pain in the bum that they're not like,
how is this not completely and utterly solved in, on a web browser now?
I it's.
So there's, there's a pretty decent one.
It's like vanilla date picker or something like this.
And it, it does the job and there's a version that does tailwind.
That's in tailwind, but it's, it's, it's not quite right.
And it kind of forces other preset formatting on it was so it's like way too
long trying to fiddle around with that.
And it's like, I just want a date and a date range picker, and it's fine.
So it's kind of got that looking more or less as I want it to which
is way more work than it should be.
So then you go, okay, well you've picked a date.
So what happens if they press the previous month?
Well, under normal circumstances, that makes sense, right?
Because if you've gone the 20th to the 19th, press previous, you still
want to see the 20th to the 19th, but of the previous date range.
Right.
But when someone is looking at the current month, say they show from
the 1st of February to the 28th of February, what happens when they
press previous month, then what you want to see from the 1st of January
to the 31st 31 days in January, know
Mario: Yeah,
Alan: you want to see the month, right?
Not until the 28th of January.
So how, how do I know that they wanted to look at a month instead of a date range,
then it's like, oh, that's different.
Mario: Yeah.
Alan: And then what happens if they select, you know, that the 1st of
January, 2020, and they're looking at the 31st of February, 2022 that's.
Show them two years with a beta.
So then I've got about pagination.
I didn't have pagination on that.
Or do I just restrict the time, the date range to maximum three?
And there's all these like stupid little cases when I'm
like viewing a month was easy.
This, it I'll just start a date range.
Right?
Mario: Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh man.
Dealing with dates is always a pain.
Alan: the other thing is the other fun thing as well is time zone,
very dependent on time zones, right?
Because you're doing check-ins, you're doing clock in clock out, you know,
work, start work, stop it, stop it.
Stop.
And of course they're doing it here in Japan.
Of course I store everything in UTC because that's.
Necessary which means you select a date range?
Well, if you're in Japan has selected the date range, which means this time, date
range in UTC right, which means everything has to be converted through time zones
for literally every single query and keeping track of that is it's an effort.
Mario: Yeah.
Alan: So that's been my week.
It, again, it's such a trivial little thing.
So the, one of the the fixes I'm going to try and do to make this less flaky are
less susceptible to use input problems is to add an option for an organization
to say, when does your mother.
So rather than the date range will be there.
And it will kind of work, but there's going to be places where it's not going
to be optimal because I'm not taking care of necessarily every single edge case
all these but I still want to provide them the option of being able to say,
show me, you know, from the last week.
But given that this company is always starts on the 20th of the month, let
them set a start date for their month.
And default to that, that means the back in the fold will work because
they know that there's, it, it will set to the 20th to the 19th going back.
We'll show them the previous 20th and 19th.
And it's unlikely that they're really going to use the
range selector that often.
It, that's going to be a, a niche case rather than the standard case.
If every time, they went to the page.
They have to select last month.
And then this month, this date, the chance of error is high.
Right.
Because they'll get the wrong month.
I mean, I do it used to like start date and you, oh, I've got to go back
a month and then you click it again and you just get the wrong month.
You've always got to be kind of on top of making sure that
you'd enter in the right thing.
Mario: Yeah.
Yeah.
Alan: So if I can default to what they expect, then I'll get it right.
95% of the time.
Right.
And then if they do need a specific date range, let's say, yes, they do need from
September 1st until August the 19th.
Other way round, then they can still do that, but that's only
going to be a niche request.
And so, yeah, just, just to just start date ranges, it can't be difficult, right?
Yeah.
I opened like, oh, this is a nice can of worms what's in here.
Mario: Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Alan: all over my desk.
Mario: Dealing with dates is such a pain and, time zones man I
Alan: combo there.
Mario: I don't envy you at all.
Alan: So that's yeah, it as I am, I'm 80% of the way through this.
So I'm kind of like, I've, I've, I've got it all working.
I just need to make it not as brittle now.
And just add some validation stuff to some guards to make sure they can't
go crazy and do stupid stuff with it.
You know so that's, I've broken it back.
It's just got to get this done and yeah, that's my, my week a good one.
Mario: Yeah.
The fun never ends.
Right.
Alan: Yeah.
And so doing this as well, I I'll just get Phoenix up to date as well.
Which to be honest, Phoenix is I think this is an offshoot of
Elixir being unfinished for this matter, being very unmatched sick.
I mean, does what it provides.
You feels like magic as an end-user just like I wrote this code and it
makes me do all this live and it's to my page and it it's fantastic, but it's
very explicit about what you're doing.
You know, but rails has this, I think somewhat justified like myth
of it being magical and oh, lucky, you know, it's all, there's all this
stuff happening under the surface.
And you've got like this abstract way of doing it once, you know, rails quite well.
It doesn't, you don't feel like that.
It's just, it's, it's quite a common meme, right?
That rails is magic.
Phoenix never feels like this.
It's everything you do is very ex it feels a lot like rails and you know,
when you first create a project and you start like working on it, it's
like, oh, I know this there's models here, there's views there there's, it
all kind of feels very familiar, but.
Everything is much more explicit.
You never hit a point where you're like, I don't know where that's getting set.
It's like, no, there's this pipeline.
There's all these plugs.
And it goes through here that does that.
And then it does that.
It's like a very easily followable path to where you are right now.
And that makes it when you do an up date, the updates tend to be, well, this
has changed in this part of the path.
So therefore I just need to change this.
It never feels like I, now nothing works.
It never feels like that.
It feels like a very straightforward upgrade path.
And there've been, you know, the documentation is, is fantastic.
So it was I was kind of dreading it and then, oh, I spent a few evenings
doing it and I'm on the latest Phoenix.
So I'm glad I, I did that.
I was less successful with the JavaScript dependencies updating,
but we'll not talk about.
Mario: Oh man.
So are you, yeah, so you've been busy with,
Alan: Yes.
So yeah, my, my
Mario: low level.
Alan: of of doing some you know, this landing page, complete redesigns and
everything have also been like put on the shelf for another week or two,
just because it's like, I get this.
So this customer, again, that they're kind of getting preferential treatment, just
because of how much they've helped me with the, you know, they were the most vocally
helpful with, through the beach process.
Just like, you know, we're, they're really relying on it.
And they've just been really helpful with all of that feedback.
gone into that office a number of times and they just sat with us and it's like,
this is, this is what we need it to do.
And this is what, where we're feeling that it is not right.
So they're just been so helpful.
Yeah, of course they're getting, you know preferential treatment, but.
Mario: Yeah.
Alan: they're kind of going live with the whole company using this in very soon.
So it's like, okay, let's get these, these things sorted for them.
So they they go into it with a good feeling.
Right.
Mario: Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah Nice.
Alan: it's a, it's a, you know, it's super important to keep these
early customers, you know, close.
Right.
Just cause they've been, they've been so good.
And I, you know, I'm treating them as that.
I'd like to be treated.
Mario: Yeah, exactly.
they're giving you a.
vote of trust and confidence, you know, even though they know the
product is in its early stages
Alan: Right.
Exactly.
Mario: They're patient with any issues that come up and, that's invaluable.
That's amazing to have that kind of support and product and customers that,
that are willing to give you a chance, you know at this early stage that's
always, I'm so grateful for that too.
I have a couple of users who have been very supportive and very vocal about it
and, recommending it and, to other people.
And even though it has its issues and it's not quite there yet,
but really grateful for, for
Alan: I mean, I think this comes back to, you know, we've we talked about
this before, but you know, trying to be an authentic creator, you're not a
faceless corporation, it's you, and you know, you're doing your best and you
want to make the right thing for people.
Right.
So it's and it it's you know, my.
Feeling for, especially when you, you come across quite a, an obviously
well-financed startup, that's trying to do something versus, and you know,
an indie maker or something that you you're aware of the person or the
handful of people are built at your, your tolerance and your the amount you,
just, how you feel about it in general.
It's so different, right?
You're, you're much more willing to to give feedback.
You're much more willing to just give things a chance and not overlook, but
be supportive of it rather than just be like, well, this sucks, which is
very easy to do for something that you think is just like a well-funded team.
Mario: Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
There's because you feel like there's no excuse, right.
At that point he felt like, well, I mean, how many engineers
do they have working there?
And this is what they do.
Alan: Seriously?
Mario: Like that
Alan: Well, yeah, exactly.
That's a very common thought process is like, you mean use,
it costs you and you can't.
Okay.
Speaking of interesting little product, so this is, this is
something that I, I found this week.
It's an app called Tango.
So one of the requests, which I have had again from Japanese customers,
more so than non-Japanese is a manual.
I know the same script, but basically some kind of a help system.
So I started off a knowledge based thing, which I'm using what's it called?
Eager?.
Is it yeah, I can't remember, but and that's quite nice for putting
together a knowledge based thing, but for that also that It's a
pain to write these things, right.
Because it's really difficult to say, and then click on
this, go and take a screenshot.
And then, you know, and then do this and fill in this here.
And it's just a very boring process to make any form of help documentation.
Right.
Mario: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Totally.
It's not fun at all, but
Alan: at all.
So, oh, go ahead.
Mario: No, I was, I was going to say maybe video is like we talk, I know we've talked
about that before where, you know, maybe video is a better way to go about it,
Alan: Right.
So that, that was my feeling too.
But of course, then I've got all okay.
Japanese customers.
I have to then recall Japanese videos, which is you know, they might
realize, okay, this guy really needs to start this Japanese up, or I get
pay somebody to record it for me.
But so this is an interesting one, Tango, what it lets you do is it
it's a Chrome extension thing.
You, activate it.
You say record a new flow of something.
I think he calls it flow account workflow or something.
You then do the.
And in your browser and then you click finish.
It takes screenshots of that part of the screen with the thing highlighted that
you clicked and it's, and it will auto fill it in using like alt tags and tie
and button names and things like that.
So for instance, creating a new user, I think adding a new user to your system,
you know, you go to settings, you know, workspace, settings members, click
add user typing, their email address.
And that's that's it, but that would take me.
It's just, I really don't want to do that.
It's such a painfully process to go through.
So this, you, you hit record, you effectively go and do those things.
It gives you a series of screenshots and texts click on this click
on that click on the other.
The buttons are highlighted on your screenshots and you can just export it
or you can link to it on their platform.
And it's like, okay, I could rattle through this in half an hour, produce
like 20, how to guides for things like, you know, change, making someone an admin
or you know, like editing your timecard, things like that, which are like, it's
obvious you just click on this button, but still it's obvious to me, it's not
necessarily obvious to an end user.
So I'm going to give this a go and just try and get using this
just because it's, again, it is.
Every single time with Japanese customer, like need a manual or at least a help
system of some kind that is I don't know.
It's just, it's really difficult to talk myself into that.
I know how to know what I need to do, and I know that I need to, it's
Mario: Yeah.
Alan: to actually convince myself to start.
So hopefully this will will, again, it'll get me 70% to 80% of the way there.
So it's like, okay, well it's kind of done now.
I just need to finish it off.
So
Mario: Yeah.
It sounds, like it's a pretty useful tool and it'll be helpful.
Alan: I will report in how it goes
Mario: All right.
Is it a paid service
Alan: do there is, but there's also quite a good prebuilt.
I'm trying to remember Tango.us.
I think it is tango dot us Yup create step by step documentation
with screenshots in seconds.
Here we go.
So yeah, unlimited workflows.
It's got logos on it.
It's got watermarks on the things.
If you pay $12 a month, you can blur sensitive information, things like that.
You can do with more people.
So freebies looks good enough for me to start off with, and then, you know,
I'm all for the freebie accounts.
Mario: Nice.
Yeah,
Alan: Although speaking of which, I just got a mixed panel telling me that my
free account is now going to be $300.
I was like, cancel.
They have like, it's one of these, what seems to be common in big
Silicon valley well-funded startup type things is like, oh, we're
giving you $50,000 worth of credits.
And you're like, of course it expires in a year.
Right.
And you've used $300 worth of it.
Mario: yeah,
Alan: So yeah.
I'm like,
Mario: are you going to go for it or are you going to cancel it?
Alan: Oh canceled.
I immediately.
Mario: $300 a month.
Alan: no, no.
Yeah.
I think that,
Mario: a, year.
Alan: yeah, I think it was a year for the lowest plan.
I'm like, yeah,
Mario: Yeah.
It's still it's quite a bit.
Alan: I mean, it's interesting.
I think there's a free.
I think it goes down to a free plan, which is, you know, well, within my
budget of clicks or if not, then I'll just remove some clicks and if going to
stop it, I mean, it's interesting from a an analytics, not it just an, I, it
gives me a general idea of, you know, how people are using it on what times, and you
know, like, so I know when to break it.
Mario: Yeah, hopefully you didn't have a lot of integration code
Alan: Now I, I mean, the nice thing about it is it's literally
like just dropping a bunch of, you know, like track, track track.
So, you know, in your, it looks goji, you can just put like a Mixpanel dot
track event and it'll just be, does it.
So yes, just like find comment,
Mario: Cool.
Yeah, I'm looking at their website here at tango.
Alan: No Tango is say, it's it.
I'm going to give it a go and see how it works out.
But I did just a test.
We'd like two things which you know, took 30 seconds each to do.
And it got me much further than I have got on any other help documentation so far.
So I'm like, okay, I can do that.
I've just got to make a list of, things that I need to do.
And then yeah.
Do that.
Mario: nice, nice find.
Alan: And then I'll get to the landing page.
No really need to do that.
Mario: cool, nice looking website too.
Alan: interesting.
Yeah, it's kind of, it
Mario: nice.
and clean.
Really good looking site.
Alan: Hmm.
Mario: Very cool.
It's gonna bookmark it in my tools here,
Alan: what's the other main tools you cause you're using as was,
was the landing page, Statamic.
Mario: yeah.
Yeah.
I'm using Statamic
Statamic for the marketing site.
Yeah.
I'm using that with a Tailwind and Yeah.
still, I love Statamic.
It's super flexible, but still it's, it's a tool for developers really, you know?
So it requires that you wire everything up together and some level of maintenance
is required, you know keeping it up to date and, and if you want to do
any custom stuff, you have to go in.
Back and, code some stuff here and there mostly it's markup
and templating, language
Alan: what's the meat for something like a landing page?
What's the, it's a static site generator, right?
So if you've got like a blog, it'd be great because it could just
generate all of your pages and stuff.
Mario: can
Alan: a landing page, what do you get from just like writing html?
So say I just made an HTML page with tailwind and hosted
it on Netlify or something.
Is that, what does it give me over that?
I assume it's for, if you're building like a series of pages,
Mario: Yeah.
With Statamic, you mean?
Alan: Yeah, yeah.
Mario: Yeah.
I mean, you can, you can build
that's the thing it's it's really well, so you can build anything from
like a single page, site to like a full-blown, super complex website.
and also you can use it as a static site generator, or you could use
it as a kind of like a dynamic website, but it uses static files.
That's why it's called static because it, it can do kind of like both, it's kind of
like both worlds static sites, but it can be dynamic in the way that it behaves, or
you can export all your pages as static files, which is what I'm doing, but Yeah.
you can build anything really with it, but there's still.
A little bit of complexity in terms of, you know, it's not just like
one of these services where you can just go online, log in and make
your changes and you're done, right.
You still have to because you make your changes and, push your, code
up to the re repo and then do the deployment and that kind of stuff.
there's still a little bit of a few steps involved in, maintaining your site and
Alan: Yeah.
Cause I'm using Umso, Umso.com
Mario: Oh yeah.
You mentioned that the other day.
Alan: Yeah.
And it's again, I don't have to do anything, so
Mario: Yeah,
Alan: Is it literally a, you know, like select your blocks kind of,
you know, filling a tax sense.
So I know if I went for a custom page, which again, it, it would be
nice to do, but I know I'd spend a million times more fiddling with the
layout than actually the content.
So using this as kind of forcing me to like, just focus on what you're
actually putting on the page, not how it you know, how it's laid out
in code, not necessarily the content.
Right.
So.
Mario: Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's sometimes that's something I miss, you know, just
being able to just, drag and drop.
And then, you know, just something simple at this stage is probably ideal to, have
a set up like what you have with Umso because, you don't have, like you said,
Alan: mean, to be honest, I think this is the thing which costs me
the most in all of the tools I use and that's like $30 a month.
So but at the same time, the thought of actually going to something that
is that I have to do myself is just like, I'll pay the $30 just it's.
It's, it's crazy.
That, that the thing that I pay the most for is hosting a static page.
Mario: Yeah,
Alan: It's like, like servers running all database and things.
It's like I'm on the freebee though is, but keeping a landing page
study landing the page up, it's like, well, I'll pay for that.
Mario: yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you're
Alan: may be weird.
Mario: well, you're paying for the convenience and you don't have
to, it saves you a lot of time.
I'm sure.
Cause you don't have to waste time fiddling with, all your custom build
template and all the custom stuff.
And it's just trying to figure out coming up with a design
and all that it takes forever.
Alan: Well, again, yeah, it's kind of, I know I'd spend more time thinking
about that then again, the content, if I went to custom routes, so
Mario: Yeah.
Alan: it's kind of forcing my me down a particular course of action is like,
no, you've got to think of the content because the design is out of your hands.
So maybe that's good,
Mario: yeah.
That's why I kind of settle for a really simple design for now.
And I'm still using Statamic, cause it gives me that flexibility, but cause
you know, in a way it's also nice to be able to add things your own way.
Like for example, I wanted to have that change log.
So I just, you know, did it, in Statamic is really easy to do that.
As long as you don't spend a lot of time fiddling with the design and
stuff, you can just create simple pages and that all, all of that is, you
know, it's, it's really simple to do.
but yeah, it takes a little more time
Alan: Oh, so that, that's what I'm using Eager, eager.app for a help desk like
knowledge base and they have changed log and a pop-up thing for what's new.
So again, it's a one person indie maker project and yes, I've
started putting these things into that just because it's it's nice.
it's, it's got like a help desk email thing, so you can get like, you
know, people send you help request.
It basically has keep keeps it all and then you can link to
your knowledge base from it.
So it's, it seems pretty nice.
Mario: Cool.
I started playing with what is it called?
Crisp.
Alan: All Right.
Mario: Crisp is another solution kind of like
Alan: kind of thing.
Right.
So yeah, this is I think, you know, this is, this is, it was nice cause
it's an indie maker and and it was a whole lot cheaper than Intercom
put she's terrified, expects it.
Mario: Yeah.
I was curious about crisp because I know some, people who are using it and, I
create an account just to check it out and it looks really good, but if I can
help support an indie maker, I would rather go with something like that.
As long as it's, you know priced,
Alan: Exactly.
Mario: And yeah, send me the link if you, if you don't mind.
Alan: I'll put it in the shoulder.
Mario: Oh, there you go.
Perfect.
Alan: Yeah.
Eager dot up.
But yes, I'll, I'll send you th
Mario: Cool.
Alan: and so w what are you using for analytics?
I'm curious now we, should, we still hold things talking about what
tools we we have in our back pocket.
Mario: Oh yeah, that would be a cool episode.
So actually for analytics, I haven't done anything yet.
I don't want to use Google analytics.
Are those are the types of analytics you were referring to
Alan: That's what I was curious about.
Yes.
Mario: Yeah, I, in the past I've used Google analytics, but
I'm trying to stay away from As much as I can from Google stuff.
So my plan is to use fathom analytics at some point, but I haven't done that yet.
Alan: So I'm using a plausible which again, similar idea to for them.
It's two guys I think in the UK I think I've mentioned it before,
because it's written in Elixir as well.
So it's actually that they open sourced the app.
And so it's an interesting.
open-source you can, if you want to host it yourself, you can, do you want to
host your own little analytics service?
No, so you pay them.
It's not expensive and it's just really good.
And so there seemed to be doing really well and yeah, it's super simple, but
it's, it does everything I need it to.
So I like it.
It's good.
Mario: Nice, nice.
Yeah.
That's a great idea.
We should do an episode with just that
Alan: What we use and why we like it and what we don't like about it.
Mario: yeah, once we have once we've established some of these tools, a
little better, cause some of these we're still playing around and trying
to figure out which one to use.
Right.
Cool.
All right.
Well anything else we want to talk about?
Alan: I think that's good.
Mario: we should wrap it up here
All right, Alan, I'll let you go then.
Have a great rest of your day.
You're just getting started, and mine is ending.
Alan: Enjoy your week
Mario: Yeah.
Thank you.
Cheers man.
Take care.