Our B2B SaaS Journey

In this episode, Mitchell and Gavin race towards the first World Police Games app handover, onboard two new clients, upgrade HubSpot for future growth, and debate gated content, paid advertising, encrypted chat, translations, and the next phase of SixSides.

Chapters
  • (00:00) - Intro and a very busy week
  • (04:20) - Onboarding two new clients
  • (07:13) - Community growth and the HubSpot upgrade
  • (16:25) - Is gated content dead?
  • (23:04) - When should SixSides start advertising?
  • (26:39) - The SixSides redesign and launch deadline
  • (32:55) - News feeds, official posts and the first milestone
  • (38:43) - Encrypted chat and group messaging
  • (41:43) - Translation, on-device AI and speech-to-text
  • (45:57) - Fitness, stress and going sober

In this episode, we cover:
  • Onboarding two new SixSides clients while preparing for a major product launch
  • How referrals between event organisers are creating new sales opportunities
  • Turning event attendees into future community builders and qualified leads
  • Whether SixSides should host its own community instead of relying on platforms like Skool
  • Using white glove onboarding to improve the experience for new community organisers
  • Upgrading HubSpot to manage a growing sales pipeline and thousands of new users
  • Using Claude and MCP integrations to configure CRM workflows
  • The opportunity to support organisations with communities of up to 70,000 volunteers
  • Why gated white papers and downloadable resources may be losing their value
  • Making content publicly available for AEO, AI discovery and organic search
  • Waiting for a proven customer acquisition pipeline before spending money on advertising
  • Measuring return on ad spend in a bootstrapped SaaS business
  • Redesigning the SixSides website ahead of the World Police Games app release
  • Creating onboarding emails, product guides and launch communications for 5,000 users
  • Separating official announcements from general community posts in the SixSides news feed
  • Designing private messaging, group chats and announcement channels
  • The challenges of end-to-end encryption in community messaging products
  • Translating user-generated content without compromising user privacy
  • Exploring on-device AI for private translations and live speech-to-text
  • Managing founder stress, fitness routines and the decision to take a break from alcohol
Got questions or topics you want us to cover? Email us at journey@sixsides.co

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Creators and Guests

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

What is Our B2B SaaS Journey?

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

Mitchell Davis:

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

Gavin Tye:

Hello. I'm Gavin Tye, CEO and cofounder.

Mitchell Davis:

We are into year two of running our remote startup, sixsides.co, which is a community led events platform. We're documenting both the business and tech of our journey as we build our SaaS. How you going, mate?

Gavin Tye:

Good. Mate, just to carry on from our intro last week, you officially served me a written warning by saying six sides in the beginning. So I cut that off. Okay. So I've learnt.

Mitchell Davis:

Sure. Yeah. Right. People won't know what to believe. But Mate,

Gavin Tye:

it's all about misinformation in this world today.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. With you. With you on the mic it is. Yeah. Absolutely.

Mitchell Davis:

Anyway, how are you, mate? What's going on?

Gavin Tye:

Oh, you know, mate, good about 10 different things going on around the house with the insurance and all that kind of stuff from the the flooding. We're in contract negotiations for someone. We wanna get a pool put in for the kids before the end of the year, so that's top of mind. We've got all this other stuff. Mate, it is I'm getting pulled about five ways from Friday at the moment.

Mitchell Davis:

Not in not in the way that you want. We'll leave it at that.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair enough.

Mitchell Davis:

Have to expand on that metaphor,

Gavin Tye:

do we? Yeah. That's what she said. Yeah. How are you?

Gavin Tye:

How are you going?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I'm okay. I'm a bit stressed. This, like, delivering the this police games app, I can't even get my words out, is a lot. There's a lot going on for me at the moment just in this, let alone, like, personal stuff and other work stuff.

Mitchell Davis:

Like, it's just woof. We are down to the the wire with it. So it's Friday as we record. And on Monday, we're handing over to them like, we're we're demoing the first version of it. And, course, I'm sure they'll wanna maybe change a couple little things.

Mitchell Davis:

But my hope is that by end of day Monday, like, we're submitting it to the App Store, basically. And yeah. So I have been working all week on it. I'll I'll share more towards the end of the episode, but it's taken all my time at the moment. This and the gym, I'm just making sure those are the two things that I don't let slip.

Mitchell Davis:

And then everything else is just I don't have time to think about anything else right now. So, yeah, you and I both are like under the pump. Busy time. Busy time for us. So Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

We put out those in this position to try to like, we've tried worked hard to be in this position and we're there. Right? You sometimes you can't get what you wish for. But without stress, there's no growth, I think. Or without friction, there's no growth.

Gavin Tye:

So

Mitchell Davis:

Is that Tolstoy?

Gavin Tye:

Gavin Tye. Yeah, right. Okay. Could be. Could be

Mitchell Davis:

Tolstoy. Maybe.

Gavin Tye:

Could be. I don't know who he is. Does he live in on the Gold Coast?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. He

Gavin Tye:

used to.

Mitchell Davis:

He does. Yeah. In Ormo. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

But yeah. No. Look. It's I'm looking forward to seeing their reaction on on Monday. And Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Because it's the first time we delivered to them. And, yeah, we haven't showed them anything really apart from what we thought about in our original concept drawings, which is not too far off. I was looking at the white paper the other day, and it's it's not unsimilar to it, really.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Well, that was the idea. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Like, I was trying to design it around some of those those screens. So, yeah, it's not exactly the same, but it's not far off. So, yeah. Anyway, yeah, I too am excited. I just know that, okay, there's still more that needs to be done, and I'm working on it every spare minute that I can't.

Mitchell Davis:

Will get it there. Anyway, we'll get into dev stuff later. Why don't you tell us we got some new action happening with some new clients. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. We do. We've got two new clients coming up. We've our first kickoff meeting today with Queensland Volunteering. They got a volunteering conference coming up.

Gavin Tye:

They're really excited about because they knew apparently, they've been talking to volunteering WA about what we did to help them last year. They were really lovely people last when I met them. I'm really looking forward to working with them. They're also really interested in the community aspect of Six Sides. The Christina, which is the lady responsible for the conference, she's been traveling around Queensland.

Gavin Tye:

And she said there are so many opportunities to bring communities together. She goes, her mind's racing with what they could do with the platform. Awesome. Being said, I've had I think I've had three or four meetings this week where people are really keen on this community stuff. I'm helping with their community because, yeah, they run one or two events, but they always trying to engage with community.

Gavin Tye:

And it even got me thinking that we've been running this we've been starting to build six sides like a community base or community leaders on school. And I think you mentioned it the other week is why wouldn't we do that in six sides? And I think that we probably should.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. I think your argument though was like, well, they've got the distribution. Right? They'll surface us in their school and Substack would surface us.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Could could do. I think it's probably more the demographic on the school platform is probably the younger ish guys who follow Alex or Mozy and all that kind of stuff, like, who wanna build digital communities. The older people or the different type of demographic that we'll be shooting for wouldn't naturally go there. So but anyway, it's but if we we can get these people into the six sides with their communities, they would make sense to be part of our community.

Gavin Tye:

Right? We can build a build a community there and probably host more in person events through four, six sides around the country or wherever over time. So yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

How are the those networks going? I'm just on school now. It doesn't look like there's been much activity on

Gavin Tye:

really been doing any action in there. Like, one thing that I've realized is anything that we do needs to be sustainable over a longer period of time. And like, we're doing cold email. We're doing LinkedIn. It's I think we should narrow our focus down into one or two, like LinkedIn obviously, which is the primary one.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. And then some cold email. I just haven't had a chance to look at it yet. But I also think people coming into six sides and coming into our world is another in like a it's another lead generation opportunity here where if we can turn attendees into community builders or event managers or event organizers, that is a pathway as well, which is probably in large part help me decide whether we should upgrade our HubSpot. Put it like, start bringing it in as a central management tool for the business, like, to prepare for the next next six, twelve, eighteen months as well.

Gavin Tye:

So Okay. Yeah. But before that, we're also bringing on another business called V Agency as of next Monday, next Tuesday. Hopefully, we'll catch up with them. I told them we couldn't do anything.

Gavin Tye:

Well, cc'd you in in May yesterday. We can't do anything with them until at least Monday afternoon. Okay. Gotcha. I emailed you put you an email there yesterday.

Mitchell Davis:

Don't think

Gavin Tye:

I saw it. Was late last night. Right. Okay. Yep.

Gavin Tye:

So Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, it's I'm starting to think about with the World Police Games there, I met with them this week and they've got like already 5,000 people registered for the games. And so when they when we release the app, we're gonna have at least half of them come into the app straight away. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Well, hopefully we Yeah. Stagger Yeah. But they should be excited. Right? And then they come into our world.

Gavin Tye:

It may not They may not necessarily turn into event organisers. I wouldn't expect most of them to, but they could- They may have be parts of other communities. Right? Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. And if even just a few percent of them do, then okay, wow, this is opening us up to a lot of people that run events. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. I think we should put them on a wait list. I don't think we should let them do that. I think we should white glove them into the platform until we can actually iron out the onboarding and make sure it's smooth that we can get them in under five or ten minutes. And then we can slowly release.

Gavin Tye:

That's what Clubhouse did. That's or and they also made an exclusive Clubhouse. You have to know someone to get an invite. But Superhuman did it as well, which is an email platform. They they made people sign up to the wait list.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So

Mitchell Davis:

I just don't I you've talked about this before. I don't know that we have the clout, like, in the marketing budget and the right connections for us to be like, hey, we're exclusive. You know? No. No.

Mitchell Davis:

I don't know that

Gavin Tye:

we're exclusive. No. No. We're not trying to do that. We just wanna onboard people so they have the right experience.

Gavin Tye:

So we curate the experience. We don't have the marketing budget for a superhuman or clubhouse. It's not the right Exactly. But superhuman was a white glove service. Clubhouse was exclusivity.

Gavin Tye:

So but we want people to have the right experience so they're on there and then they bring their community in and we can help them bring their community in. Right? So Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. We'll have to figure out how we manage that technically. Okay. Some more stuff there for us to to talk through. But yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Cool. Okay. You mentioned briefly HubSpot. So you've done some work and and some meetings with some with a sales rep at HubSpot. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Why don't

Gavin Tye:

you tell us more about that? HubSpot have got a great sales process. Right? They have got triggers on their app, like in their platform. As soon as you look at a site or a page, it fires off a bloody thing to their sales team.

Gavin Tye:

So their sales guy, he called me and he he wanted to check-in. And I actually couldn't talk to him a couple of weeks ago. And I said, look, let's catch up. I'll give you fifteen minutes. And as soon as he got on a call, was like, mate, I'm not trying to sell don't try to sell me.

Gavin Tye:

I can't afford your price point. It's too expensive. And he was like, well, what if price wasn't an option? And I'm like, oh, here we go. And anyway, so we worked through the process and he said there was a startup program, which it's actually quite generous.

Gavin Tye:

It's 90% off. Yeah. And then we work through the workflow about where they would help, like what we would do, how we would use it potentially. And the reality is if we have to move into being more formal in that side of the process, it's a bit it's a bit at the moment ad hoc. Okay.

Gavin Tye:

And when we have we're gonna start getting volume through soon. Well, I'm anticipating we'll start getting volume through soon, and we need to have a way to order that properly to be able to float opportunities to the top. HubSpot does it. It's a bit of a pain to configure. Like, it is hard to get it looks not that hard, but it can be hard.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. And he said they've got a is it m an MCP link or an integration with Claude?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. And he said, don't even need to actually know HubSpot anymore. You can just get Claude to configure it for you and go from there. I'm like, yeah, okay. I need to figure out how to do that.

Gavin Tye:

And I've been resisting for years and I've gotta do it. Otherwise, we're gonna pay for it. We're not gonna we can't pay for it. So Yeah. I'm preparing for the next ten, twenty, 50,000 people coming into six sides.

Gavin Tye:

Right? We need a way to be able to manage them and communicate with them in an efficient, effective way. So that's what I've upgraded on that for with HubSpot. So Yeah. Bring that on.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Let's get there.

Gavin Tye:

Well, mate, I was just having a call with the police games this week, like a guy over there, Chris. And we were talking about, like, where where next? Like, what what else? What does he see out in the market, like, about community? And he he pointed me in the direction of a of a institution that has 70,000 volunteers in it and have no real way to connect them and beyond what app and all that kind of stuff, the standard stuff to help build their community.

Gavin Tye:

And they're like 70,000. He goes, I think they'd be really keen on it, but we need to show them. And I'm like, yeah. Right. Okay.

Gavin Tye:

So we've That's on my mind now. That number 70 is on my mind to Yeah. Go after that. What's that?

Mitchell Davis:

Let's go after that.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah. You'd be happy to know I've connected with all the senior leadership last night on the Invictus Games.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay.

Gavin Tye:

All of yeah. Yep. They all connected with me last night.

Mitchell Davis:

Good one.

Gavin Tye:

Even this I've even connected with the CEO of Apollo. They're having a community event next month in San Francisco, and I've reached out to him. Who? Apollo who? Apollo.

Gavin Tye:

.Io. The

Mitchell Davis:

Oh, the the generic code. Wow. Here you go. There's a throwback.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Yep. Cool. I don't know what it is. Like, all our connections are connection requests.

Gavin Tye:

Well, most of them are going through at the moment. Like, The success rate of the team, whatever they've done, it's A lot of people are connecting.

Mitchell Davis:

So We got some juice. That's good. We need some juice. That's great.

Gavin Tye:

Must be that 10,000 number.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And now you're set on bigger fish, like on the 70,000, then now some of these other ones are coming into play. Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Great. So Yes. I am very happy to hear Okay. See see where that goes.

Gavin Tye:

I've got to one of the things even this sales guy said, he goes, it's not gonna work for you if you don't configure it. So you're gonna have to make time to do it, or we can put you in contact with people to do it. I'm like, no, no, I'll do it.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

I've gotta devote I don't know what my schedule is, but all next week I'm gonna tell the team to maybe not book me meetings unless it's like oh, hang on. I'm a bit long one. Yeah. Next week is relatively free.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

We will I will spend a lot of time next week just getting that down pat.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yeah. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Start doing that. So once we get the website tracker up, then we can get rid of snitcher and we can go from there. Yep. Then we can start doing some other shit from there. So

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Sounds good. Sounds pretty promising.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Alright. Awesome. Sweet. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Mate, that's me there and yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

That covers, yep, those as well. Okay. So there's a a question that we have here around gating of content. Right? So for context, you know, especially probably it's now maybe five years or so ago is probably where I stopped seeing this type of tactic of, hey, we've got some white paper, some PDF, some bit of content and putting an email gate behind that.

Mitchell Davis:

Right? Okay. Enter in your email and we'll send you a link to go view it. Right? And then now you're on a marketing list.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. And we're wondering about that. Right? Is that still relevant? As I said, I don't really see it anymore, but I'm also not in the market for that sort of a thing.

Mitchell Davis:

I'm not typically out I'm not the type of person to go try and find that content and be willing to put an email in. Yeah. I've got a bit of an aversion to marketing. So, yeah, what are what are you thinking about there?

Gavin Tye:

I think it's dead as well, to be honest. Like, giving up an email address, I think that's over. Like, I I do think it's dying. Like, I did a podcast which we haven't released yet on change makers called, is for the founder of Park Run. Founder sorry.

Gavin Tye:

Let me be more clear on that. The founder of Park Run Australia. He bought the first event to Park Run. Yeah. And he said they've been really conscious in parkrun to remove friction because any amount of friction just stops people from participating.

Gavin Tye:

So why like, but some of the things about gated content, like, what kind of content would we gate? And, basically, we've been writing these pretty bespoke white papers for very specific instances of a sales process with a specific client. But a lot of that content can then be repurposed and made more general to apply to a certain industry or a certain situation. There is potential to gate that stuff. But then again, most people are getting all their information from chat GBT these days anyway.

Gavin Tye:

So you're not downloading stuff. You can get it from GBT. Right? And then if we gate it, then GBT can't crawl it and they can't reference us. I don't think that works.

Gavin Tye:

I'm not sure. It needs a bit of research on that. That's one of the biggest things with HubSpot is what's it called? AI SEO or something like that?

Mitchell Davis:

I think it's AEO.

Gavin Tye:

AEO. Like, we wanna make sure we're optimized for that. And I think putting out valuable content in there is and I still think the law of reciprocity is underrated when it comes to this stuff. Right? So as

Mitchell Davis:

in where you put something out into the world and good things will come back?

Gavin Tye:

When you give, good things happen. Yeah. Right? Yep. It's it's it's alive and well in sales process.

Gavin Tye:

Right? Like when you give when you give give give and you you are generous in your time and you and you seek to offer value first before you ask, that's the right way it should go. And it people respond to that. We're subconsciously wired for that. So I don't know what we would gate.

Gavin Tye:

Right? Maybe we would gate I think the gating in in the future might be chatting with an agent around why they're here for about their community. And then they start chatting and then go, you wanna continue the conversation? And we gate that and we bring them to our world. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Can see that. Yeah. So and I think that is where your base 40 fours and your lovables and all that are gating. At the beginning, they didn't gate it because they wanted people to use it.

Gavin Tye:

And after six or seven messages, they would get you to sign up. Now it's within two messages sign up cause they've got the traction now. They've got the reputation. They can afford to do that. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

But I think we make the resource the resources accessible, then if people were joining the communities anyway and they'd go look at that content, then we will get tagged they would get tagged and scored in HubSpot that they're reading that content anyway. So it kind of works. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. But only if how does that tell me how that works. How can HubSpot know who you are other than just your IP address if you don't log in? Right? It's got no way to know, oh, that's Gavin as opposed to that someone from Six Sides or someone from Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Some university. Right? It doesn't know who you are unless you sign in.

Gavin Tye:

Couldn't take. Maybe it maybe it's yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Okay.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Anyway. Yeah. I think I think it's a good premise. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

So, yeah, I agree. Let's not do gating of content. Let's leverage after we've made this switch to HubSpot fully. Let's leverage their tools that they have to help with AEO. And when we are ready for it and we do have some type of public agent that you can chat with, let's implement a similar strategy with the gating there after a few messages, you know.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. And that might even be, you think about it, that might be like, okay, when it gets when the conversation gets to the point of we are ready to create an event in our system. Right? Yep. It's that kind of plan mode first and then, alright, it's time to build it.

Mitchell Davis:

Then that's where we go. Alright. We're ready to go. Let's log you in.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Yeah. That's right. Or well, they maybe it's, yeah, event or community. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Hey. I'm I'm the administration person of this or marketing person of this is this association. Okay. Great. I wanna set up a community and six sites.

Gavin Tye:

Great. Give us all your like, what do you wanna do? Yeah. Give us a context around what you have, and then we set that up and then we go, okay, you're in. Right?

Gavin Tye:

And then we flag fire off a a lead score, whatever it is to the team. Right? Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yep. Cool. Okay. Some exciting stuff there.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. Awesome. Advertising. When do we start advertising? Good question.

Mitchell Davis:

Walk us through this.

Gavin Tye:

Well, when we have something, I don't think we should advertise now because we don't have it's a bit too difficult. We don't have a way to get people into the system at the moment. We we're because we're we're going through a lot of change. Right? But I do think once we go, okay, we we have I've been thinking about, like, when people start coming to us and we know that it's working or they're they're signing up to the wait list to be to become onboarded in the community.

Gavin Tye:

Right? We can train up Chris and Raya to help onboard these people into the community. We go, oh, look. That's working. Like, we're bringing in I would love it.

Gavin Tye:

This week, we signed up five people in five communities, and then next week it'll be seven. And then in October, it's a 120. Right? Like, it looks like we're on track there. Then we can start advertising to boost to boost what's working.

Gavin Tye:

Right? Yeah. I agree. And whether we do it on Facebook, probably not. I reckon that will get flagged because Facebook will go in and say, keep competing against us.

Gavin Tye:

No. It's not gonna work.

Mitchell Davis:

I don't think Facebook will give a shit. Yeah. We are we are a tadpole compared to them who are the elephant. Right? So

Gavin Tye:

And then yeah. Like, and then we where do we advertise? Like, do we start advertising and putting some stuff out? You've gotta be able to have what's it called? ROAS, return on ad spend.

Gavin Tye:

So Right.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. There you go.

Gavin Tye:

There you go. I've always known I've always known what the number is and the name is, but I've never had a need for it in my businesses. Right? So if we spend a $100, do we get back a 110 or whatever? Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Right? We gotta turn the ROAS into a positive Okay. Positive integer.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

But it's but it'd be interesting once we have it down pat, like, when do we start doing it? And obviously, we're funding it, so we don't wanna burn money for that reason. Right? Yeah. So

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. No. What's your thought about We're probably a couple months away. I would wanna have other systems already in place and working, which you've just called out. Of, okay.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. Are we getting organic growth through our other non spendy avenues, right, and channels? And then if we are, then that proves, okay, we've got a working system and now it's time to just juice it a bit. Yeah. Pour some

Gavin Tye:

We to have to get the pipeline working. Like, it doesn't have to be efficient. It just has to work. And it's we're getting really close. I reckon this week I reckon this week if we had the communities up, I would have had three or four proper opportunities of a sale to go ahead relatively quick.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Because no one else is offering. Well, there are other competitors out there. Not in our neck of the woods, though. Alright? Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Look, I look forward to that being the case. Me too. But, yeah, we'll we'll circle back on advertising when this is working. Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

It's exciting, though. Exciting times. Alright. Cool. My turn.

Mitchell Davis:

So design. So we we mentioned last week that we kicked off the project with Robin whole Robin Holcinski. We've heard back from Robin now with a bunch of questions on a Notion doc. So we're going through and and working on those to kick off on Monday next week. So we should already be underway by the time you're listening to this, which is awesome.

Mitchell Davis:

We've got a a timeline that he's given us. So it looks like we should have the landing page at least delivered to us by the end of August, which is great. August 27, I think. And so as soon as that's ready to go, I'll start implementing that because it's gonna hold us up for the police games when The plan is, for those who aren't in the know, we're trying to align the release of the mobile app for the police games, this phase one, whenever they choose to release it with the marketing site being updated. And looking at this, I don't think we could reasonably ask the police games to wait any longer than say, like the first ish of September.

Gavin Tye:

Because you're going away too. Right? We're butting up against

Mitchell Davis:

That's right. Yeah. We've got all these three

Gavin Tye:

months. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Exactly. Yeah. So around the I think it's the fourteenth that I'm going away of September. So we want to make sure that we've at least got through the first, like, the first cohort of users into the system well before then. So, that way I'm not dealing with anything while I'm on a plane to Europe.

Mitchell Davis:

So, yeah. So, it's a tricky timeline. Back to the design, I think what that will mean is, okay, I'll need to just make some assumptions of how the rest of the site should look based on what Robin comes up with for the landing page so that at least okay, the landing page, I go build that. It doesn't look crazy different from the rest of the website as people get in there and start looking around at other things. Like, it needs to feel cohesive even though Robin won't have yet designed those pages.

Mitchell Davis:

So, yeah, I'll just take a stab at some of that stuff. Obviously, I'll use AI to help me and we'll just see how we go. Right. So, it might not be the perfect marketing site at launch, but at least it'll be better than what we've got. And then, yeah, hopefully the two weeks after that we can get it finished.

Mitchell Davis:

By the time I head off, we can be ready to go with the new design. So Yeah. I think you and I have to sit down soon over the next two weeks and really figure out copy. Like, what are we actually wanting to say? Right?

Gavin Tye:

Yep. We do need

Mitchell Davis:

to get this, it's all gonna be for nothing.

Gavin Tye:

We do need to sit down and redo the deal like, Deal Buddy, the sales market fit process for the communities. Right? Because I think in a large part is where the copy will come from. Right? So it'll at least help us give us some food for thought there.

Mitchell Davis:

Sure.

Gavin Tye:

I just a thought there about, well, one, we want all the current users to be given access to the platform by the time well before you go, right? The 5,000, they're gonna wanna give them stages. Like, I would imagine they're gonna wanna release 500, 1,500, 2,000, whatever else over the subsequent days. Right? Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Are we going to handle I know that you may have thought about it, but you probably haven't got a plan yet. Where they want to just upload new registrants over time. Would they do it once a week? Like, or would they

Mitchell Davis:

They can do it as often as they want. Yeah. So, they'll just give like, I will make a link for them where they can go upload a new spreadsheet and that'll just be the source of truth, whatever's in that spreadsheet.

Gavin Tye:

Okay.

Mitchell Davis:

So, yeah, they can do that themselves, and we won't be involved. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So that that will also be well, so next week, although we yeah. Well, I wanna spend all the time setting up HubSpot. HubSpot. I gotta do the welcome email series for the people coming into the police games.

Gavin Tye:

Right? Like Yeah. Saying, hey. Look. Thanks for coming along.

Gavin Tye:

We really blah blah blah blah. Whatever we wanna say. And then give them some even screen recordings of what had what they could do in it over the next over seven emails or something. Seven emails in seven days or something. Right.

Mitchell Davis:

It feels to me like there is a lot more work to be done on the operational side, like, and this is largely gonna be your domain. Mhmm. Oh, yeah. Yeah. With the with the police games and this launch to make sure we get it right.

Mitchell Davis:

And it it makes me wonder, like, should you you already mentioned, hey, maybe team, don't book me any meetings for next week. I think potentially the sales side of things has to take a backseat maybe all through August. If you were having maybe one or two meetings a week and then the rest of your time that you are allocating to six sides is on this stuff. It's the email sequencing. It's it's any user guides that we might have to put together.

Mitchell Davis:

It's copy for the website. It's like, we got shit to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Right?

Gavin Tye:

Oh, I don't disagree with you. We kinda we needed to wait till we get to this point. Right? Like, as of

Mitchell Davis:

I think so. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

It might make sense. But they can't can't do recordings on how to use it until we know what it is. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

But we're close. We're close. Yep. I think the main thing is setting the stage. Hey, this is the first release, but we will like, get them excited.

Gavin Tye:

Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Cool. Alright. Well, yeah, the first milestone. So there's been a lot of development that's happened over this last week to try and get this thing feeling really polished.

Mitchell Davis:

We used to just have one tab which was for it was called connect, and that tab featured like a list of your communities plus a news feed. And it was just too much to have it all in one. And so this is something that you identified. I think we need to specifically call this out as like news or as a feed because we know that the police games are going to use this as their official communication tool, and you you really stress that point. So that made me kind of rethink, okay, how do we surface official news, let's say, from the police games team versus just community posts of, hey, you know, I'm having a beer at the whatever.

Mitchell Davis:

Let's let's meet up. Right? So I've reworked that now over the last couple days. So we now have a feed tab, and it's the very first tab that you see when you open up the app. And then the first thing you see as well is a list of filtered official posts.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. So that way it's always front and centre for anything that needs to go out to everyone. It's flagged with official. It's got a little badge on it, a little green badge and this sort of stuff. And then you can flick over into all posts from the community.

Mitchell Davis:

And then from that, any communities that you're involved in, so that will be, you know, for a firefighter in Australia who's competing in the swimming. You might be in the global police games community, team Australia, team swimming. Right? So you might be in those three communities. You would then see on this all posts tab, you would or filter, you would see all posts from any of those three communities.

Mitchell Davis:

And then you'll have the ability to go look at all other communities as well still under the police games umbrella. So if you wanna see, okay, what's Team USA doing or whatever or team archery, you could still go explore those, but we won't automatically add you to anything that you're not directly involved in.

Gavin Tye:

Sure. Sure.

Mitchell Davis:

That's the plan.

Gavin Tye:

Okay. Have you thought about we're changing some of the wording on the app to, I think, agency instead of company and all that kind of stuff. Have you thought about when they have their exhibition? Like, because they're gonna need sponsors in that particular event and all that kind of stuff. It's gonna kinda go back to original Six Sides.

Gavin Tye:

Have you factored that in yet?

Mitchell Davis:

Can we go back to six sides? No. What do mean?

Gavin Tye:

You know how six sides has got spawn like, when we set up an event, it's got sponsors, exhibitors. They're gonna have that in that particular instance.

Mitchell Davis:

It's exactly the same. Yeah. Yeah. It's the same. So, events will work exactly the same as they do in the Six Sides app.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. As will these communities. Like, we will now have these feeds and this sort of stuff, this concept of communities and official posts and all of that in the Six Sides app as well. We just might shuffle around some of the tabs in that case. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

And go, well, we're an event app first and foremost, you know, so maybe we put events there first, you know, that sort of thing. Yep. So, yeah, it'll work work the same.

Gavin Tye:

Would be interesting, and it's probably step two or three down the track where you've got your official you've got your official World Police Games notice notices, and then you've got your other notifications. Right? And then say you're out for the two days, you're at the convention, then you can filter on just those convention posts so you don't get anything else. Right? I know that it's probably a bridge too far.

Gavin Tye:

It's a bridge too often. But Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Well, I'm not thinking posts at the event level. Posts would remain at the community level. But yeah, you could I'm sure there's ways that we could do things that like Yeah. It really It's early days for that stuff, which won't happen until March or February next year, you know. We've got time to figure out, okay, test this model.

Mitchell Davis:

Does this work? What changes could we make to make it better? We've got heaps of time for that. Yep. So, yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. So that's all going well. Continuing to make some small like UI tweaks as we go, trying to not get too deep in the weeds on anything. I've still got a list of, hey, these are some of the things that we really should have, and I'm just working through those. I will be working this weekend as well on on this.

Mitchell Davis:

We're right down to the wire with it. So I really wanna turn up. I need to make sure I turn up to that meeting on Monday and everything is done, and it's got my sign off at least. Right? And you and I should catch up maybe right before that meeting on Monday and go through and just make sure that, hey, you like, you're happy with everything as well.

Gavin Tye:

Well, we're we're gonna do that in our meeting at 09:00 to so

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I'm just thinking, like, if I need more time on Monday, like, you know, as of now, it's only seventy two hours away or something like that. Right? That I'm just giving myself as much time as possible.

Gavin Tye:

Okay. You know?

Mitchell Davis:

So yeah. Okay. Alright. Yeah. So then the only other thing that's happening on my side, the team has been working this week on just doing some research and proof of concepts onto features that we're gonna roll out as part of phase two, which is slated to be delivered in November.

Mitchell Davis:

And those two projects are chat. So being able to private message one on one with other users, like other members of the police games community. But this will also come over into the Six Sides app. And then group chat as well. So being able to have group chats inside of communities or just

Gavin Tye:

Generally. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Just disparate like, hey, you, me and Roman, you know, are all in a group chat together inside of the app, and that would be fine as well. So, yeah, there's a lot of complicate complicated stuff there to do with like encryption of those messages because ideally we would like this to be end to end encrypted so that we're not storing and have the ability to see people's messages. It's generally best practise, and it's expected for a lot of these messaging apps. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

But it's complicated to do for group chats. We have we have a proof of concept now that works. Raymond's been working on it, and it's gone really well, but it's it's shown me that there are some limitations. So things like group chats that have that are meant for announcements. So, for example, LaraCon AU, Michael will create an announcements channel in Telegram, and he's the only one that can write into that channel.

Mitchell Davis:

So, it's meant it's just like a read only feed of, hey, you know, we're meeting up at this pub or whatever, blah blah blah. Right? So, being able to support that, that is a group chat. The the way the encryption works, you wouldn't be able to see any messages that were sent before you joined that channel. So if Michael had sent a message yesterday but you only joined today, you wouldn't be able to see it because you didn't have this encryption key.

Mitchell Davis:

So, we've had to work through a bunch of and that's obviously not okay for things like public announcements. So, we need to be able to toggle on and off the encryption and go, okay, well, actually, this is an announcements channel. It's not sensitive information. It needs to remain unencrypted. So, there's so much nuance, which is why, like, I knew forever as you'd been asking me, could we do chat?

Mitchell Davis:

Let's do chat. What's going on? Like, there's all this stuff that comes with it and it's like you have to sit down and work through it. And so, a lot of that work has happened now, but I wouldn't be taking forward this proof of concept that Raymond's been working on and just immediately bringing it in. It will probably take another month of work to take this proof of concept and actually get it production ready.

Mitchell Davis:

There's so many things to think about, but really promising to see like what's been able to happen in the span of a week. It's pretty cool. But then also, the other project that Martin's been working on is translations. So, this is translation of any user provided content. So, that could be chat messages, being able to translate it if I send a message in English and someone in France is reading it, being able to translate that into French.

Mitchell Davis:

So, that's something that we're working on. Not just chat, though, things like event names and titles and community names and descriptions and bios and talk titles at an event and that sort of a like, all of that stuff. That's all user provided content, and we wanna be able to translate that.

Gavin Tye:

So, didn't we have it already translated into eight languages? Isn't that what that was?

Mitchell Davis:

Nope. That is our user interface. So, that's text that we wrote and that's baked into the app. That all gets translated. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

So, you'll see the word, you know, events or communities would be in French. Right? Because that's the title of one of the tabs in the app. Okay. But all of the user provided content, those event names or people's names or probably wouldn't translate people's names, but like their bios, let's say, that's all gonna be in whatever language the person wrote it in.

Mitchell Davis:

And you wouldn't have any way to read that if it was in French and you didn't understand that. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Sure.

Mitchell Davis:

So, this is for user generated content. And, yeah, that's something that we're looking at doing. What are the best ways to do that? Are there ways to do that that still preserve privacy, especially dealing with private messages? Because if we just go, we do all this work to encrypt these messages and make it so that we as a platform can't read them, only the two users can read them, and then we wanna go translate it and we have to send that off to our servers to then pass it out to Google translate or something like that.

Mitchell Davis:

Well, now we've got a copy of whatever that message was and it defeats the purpose. So, there's all this nuance that comes with doing this. And I've told the team, like, ultimately, we're not trying to recreate WhatsApp or Signal or any of these others. If it's if it proves to be that they're doing end to end encryption is just making a rod for our own back, it's too hard, then we'll just scrap it. And that's fine.

Mitchell Davis:

I'm I'm okay to accept that. But I wanna try to do this because it feels like the right thing to do as long as we can it doesn't get in our way too much. So, other things that we're looking at are like, okay, could we have an LLM that runs on the person's phone directly? Therefore, it's private. It's not hitting the Internet.

Mitchell Davis:

And that would require like, okay, they download a couple 100 megabyte model that can run on their phone, super low power, this sort of stuff. We're looking at some of those things. We've already got working proof of concepts for some of that too, which is pretty exciting. So, yeah, that's all good. And then the the recording, like speech to text mode as well of being able to sit down next to someone at the police games who speaks an entirely different language to you and have the phone listen to that conversation and then be able to translate live between both languages and present on the screen.

Mitchell Davis:

It would just be speech to text. We wouldn't then say it out in the in the other person's language. But yeah, display like, okay, hey, this is what's being said. And then you could have a conversation with someone next to you. And that's a feature that the police games really seem to like.

Mitchell Davis:

I'm curious as to how much it would get used. It feels like it might be a bridge too far for the typical person to try and do that, but it's something that we're we're gonna deliver for them. So, yeah, it'd be interesting to see if it is used or not. So, yeah. So we're looking at all of that this week and and it will bleed into next week.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yeah. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Cool. Awesome, mate.

Gavin Tye:

Well, we're getting so close. Like and then it yeah. Then then we can start then they can start shopping it around and showing other people too. So that's we have all these ambassadors, Six Sides ambassadors out there talking about it. And they've been talking about the concept for ages.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yeah. Yeah. It's exciting. Yep. Just gotta get it done.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. And then my stress levels can can decrease. I can't wait. Alright. Final thing, little fitness update.

Mitchell Davis:

So you and I both actually were pretty good. Went to the gym this morning prerecording, which is great. They're feeling good. How are you going with everything?

Gavin Tye:

Oh, yeah. Still mate, we are still so far out of whack in the house. So we're getting close. I think all the fans go out today. But, yeah, I did a couple of gym sessions this week, and then I'm gonna go for a ride tomorrow.

Gavin Tye:

I was gonna go for a ride to Sabo, but I think that people the cleaners are coming, so I can't go. I can't leave the house. So

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Sure.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Okay. But, yeah, it's alright. It's good.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Cool. Well, for me, I've made the decision to go sober for the next while Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

At Just tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've so far so good.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. I there will be a I will be at a wake next Friday, and I will have a drink there. But then apart from that, I plan to resume going sober. So, yeah, just trying to, like, okay.

Mitchell Davis:

Let's get in a a better place right now. So, yeah, so that's good. What else? I have continued going to the gym. It's going well.

Mitchell Davis:

Oh, and I'm starting the walks again. My leg stuff has cleared up. So, yeah, I'll be going on a five k walk tonight. So you can catch all of that on Strava. Live stream.

Mitchell Davis:

Nope. Absolutely not. Just on Strava.

Gavin Tye:

Man, I keep putting these things out here and you keep knocking me down. You're supposed to say yes and. That's it. That's how things go.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. I know. But you gotta have good ideas, not

Gavin Tye:

Insta bad live then.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. Yeah. Right. Alright. Cool, mate.

Mitchell Davis:

Where can the people find you online?

Gavin Tye:

LinkedIn, pal. Yep. Gavin Tye. Okay. Pal.

Gavin Tye:

Pal.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Buddy. You can find me on LinkedIn as well at Mitch Dev. We've got links to everything in the show notes. We will catch you all next week.

Mitchell Davis:

Thanks, man.