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Interviewing indie founders about their journey and their products. itslaunchday.com
Dagobert (00:01)
Hey Daniel, welcome to launch day.
Daniel Legut (00:04)
Hi, Daga. It's good to be here.
Dagobert (00:07)
Yeah, so I've known you for so long, but I don't really know you, which is interesting. I've known you since, I think I started on Twitter, we are like, I don't know, first hundred followers or something. So that's like the beginning. I think if I look at people I follow on Twitter, and I scroll at the bottom, it's you. Like, it's like, I think, let me check.
Daniel Legut (00:13)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah,
I remember you as the guy posting ⁓ really deep cut memes about just about ⁓ like self-deprecating basically.
Dagobert (00:45)
Yeah.
It was
very much that. Okay, let me just check because I'm just curious to see if that's true what I just said. But yeah, yeah, I used to post... I tweeted about this recently because I always tweet, but I was like... ⁓
I used to be passive aggressive, now I'm just aggressive. And that's how I feel right now. You know, with my memes, it was always just like trying to say something in a fun way, you know? It was, there was a lot of bite, it was like very kind of spicy. ⁓ And now I'm just like, you know, fuck this, you know? And I stopped doing memes. I don't need to do memes anymore, because memes was like my therapy, now I don't need it. So yeah.
Daniel Legut (01:23)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I'm a big fan of using social media to post funny things, you know? So that's like half of what I'll post, or at least I hope it comes across as funny.
Dagobert (01:51)
Yeah, no, hear it. Look, you're there. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Eleven, guy.
Daniel Legut (01:59)
Holy crap.
Yeah, I didn't realize. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we, started following each other. Yeah. Years ago at this point.
Dagobert (02:06)
Yeah, we go way back like they say, but I still don't really know you and I think you kind of disappeared from Twitter for a while or no, or was it just like less active?
Daniel Legut (02:15)
I mean, was like, so I noticed that you were super active and at one point I did mute, I muted you just because my feed became you. And I was like, okay, I have to mute Dago because he's funny, he's great stuff, but it's only him. I'm like, okay, I have to mute him for right now. And then I...
Dagobert (02:19)
Yeah, for sure, yeah.
Yeah, that can happen.
Daniel Legut (02:36)
I bumped into you on a Twitter space, or X space, which was awesome, because I was like, ⁓ this is first time I'm hearing this guy's voice. This is great. And that was only like within the past few weeks.
Dagobert (02:48)
Yeah, that's awesome. And you're part of Small Bets, right? And we also, you know, that was like this whole thing. Yeah.
Daniel Legut (02:54)
Yeah, I joined them earlier this year just to see what it was about, just to meet a bunch of other people, work on their projects and get to know more people, you know? ⁓
Dagobert (03:03)
Yeah, yeah.
And so, yes, so you didn't really know me until a few weeks ago when you heard my voice. And I don't really know you. So how would you introduce yourself? Because I'm curious.
Daniel Legut (03:15)
Man yeah, I mean it's like the such a tough question right ⁓ Yeah, I mean I think of myself as a you know software guy right ⁓
Dagobert (03:25)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (03:26)
I have my own little company where I do some consulting and then I also split my time, half doing work for other people, half work doing for myself. ⁓ So I've been, I guess, indie hacking for years now, working on project after project, seeing what works, what doesn't. Most of it doesn't work. ⁓ And yeah, and a lot of...
Dagobert (03:47)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (03:52)
kind of the unique things I'll do is a lot of hardware stuff compared to most people who do indie hacking. Yeah, so like, you know, like this week I'm actually helping out a...
Dagobert (03:57)
⁓ interesting. Like what?
Daniel Legut (04:06)
I'm helping out an engineering firm with doing some drones, right? So they need help like assembling and creating more drones of a certain type that they're building. So this week I'm just helping out with that, right? A lot of wiring, soldering, and just, you know, helping put them together. that's kind of, that's kind of.
Dagobert (04:26)
That's awesome. Did you do any indie projects
with hardware yet?
Daniel Legut (04:31)
You know, it's tough because I, you know, I've thought about doing ones that I launched and do hardware myself, but it is incredibly risky, right? So I've, I've open sourced some projects just to put out a sense of like a feeler to be like, is this, is this something people would want or interested in? ⁓ you know, like recently I put one out that was just a concept for a trail camera. like, you can just get pictures of, you know, if you put a camera on a tree and you're going to.
Dagobert (04:44)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (05:01)
take pictures of wildlife, you know, is this something people would want, right? Right. So, yeah, yeah. So like, what's cool is the,
Dagobert (05:05)
interesting. Like GoPro but for like wildlife or something. Yeah.
Go squirrel, I'm just trying to, I'm just brainstorming, but
yeah.
Daniel Legut (05:16)
Yeah, so the electronics board company sponsored that project and so it made use of satellite communication and 4G data, like cell data. And ⁓ it's just really cool because you can just kind of set this up anywhere in the world and it could send you back a picture, right? And that's just like incredibly cool to be able to do that, right? Thinking back to being a teenager.
Dagobert (05:34)
Yeah, yeah.
So wait, you build this?
Daniel Legut (05:46)
Yeah, it's actually on my GitHub. You want me to...
Dagobert (05:50)
yeah, but like
the production side is like the difficult, like the very risky part. So for now it's like an open source thing. Yeah.
Daniel Legut (05:56)
I mean, I built one, I built one
and I put it out there and shared it with people. And so if somebody wants to take it and commercialize it fully, like they have at it, it's licensed in a way where people can try it and ⁓ take in and go with it. But yeah, you know.
Dagobert (06:12)
Did you consider doing
a Kickstarter or something like that?
Raise funds for building
Daniel Legut (06:17)
⁓
you know it
Possibly, but you know it does take quite a bit of marketing effort to get to get that to
Dagobert (06:29)
yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah.
Daniel Legut (06:34)
get that out there. I I am part of a few, like a Discord community that's all just hardware people. And you you'll see them, you know, do Kickstarters. There is also like a specific ⁓ fundraising platform for hardware called Crowd Supply, which I don't know if you've ever heard of that one, but that's one that I've seen people do.
Dagobert (06:39)
Yeah.
Okay.
Let me check.
Interesting, yeah, engineer based. Yeah, but it's like, okay. But it's not really consumer products at this stage. Seems it's still mostly circuit boards and shit. Yeah.
Daniel Legut (07:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That one is interesting, yeah, because you'd be basically ⁓ what one of my friends calls be the geek, right? So you'd be selling to other hardware ⁓ enthusiasts, right?
Dagobert (07:27)
Yeah, B2G, okay.
Yeah, which is
similar to doing eye to eye, which is Indie maker to Indie maker, which is also trending right now. Yeah. No, I'm kidding. I just realized that I don't know. It was in a tweet comment and I started doing it, saying it because that's like that's what we all of us are doing. We're just Indie selling to Indies. You know, it's kind of like stay small in a way. So maybe not the best move, but we're.
Daniel Legut (07:41)
Is that really trending?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I the
trend nowadays is to say you're a five-year-old who started a company or anything.
Dagobert (08:07)
You see this guy, know this 10 year old kid
got viral with this. And I just, I was just thinking, just his dad, probably 10 years failing on product hunt, really cool ideas, but never good marketing. Eventually his son grows up, he's a bit of a nerd and he thought, you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. Because the product that his son built is not a product a kid thinks about, I think. Because the product his son built...
Daniel Legut (08:24)
He
Is that?
Dagobert (08:42)
It's like a way to block scammers when they call you. What the fuck, like it...
Daniel Legut (08:47)
Is this the one where he's holding up the $100 bill or whatever and he's trying to give it away or something?
Dagobert (08:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's trying to give away $100 to
his followers. He's 10 years old. Okay. You know, maybe that's true. Probably not. I don't know. Maybe there's an explanation. There's sometimes crazy explanations for things. So I always give the benefit of the doubt. But like, it's just funny. Like, I just imagined this guy.
Daniel Legut (08:57)
You
Dagobert (09:10)
like the father or something, or the uncle, like just like on product hunt or like trying to launch and it's failing. And then, you know what? I'm just gonna go all in. don't have nothing to lose anymore. Fuck this. And then his son is like, yeah, I this. Yeah.
Daniel Legut (09:22)
You know what's
funny? I think this same thing that you saw, that's potentially like an indie maker or indie hacker and their son. I think the same stuff happens out ⁓ in California, but for founders, right? For people who are like in tech, like the, big tech scene. I think the same thing happens with, ⁓ you know, you've got like parents who, you know, basically raise their kids to basically.
go in and start a tech startup, right? So like, think it's like, ⁓ I think there's like, I'm ⁓ in near Chicago, so I'm based out of St. Charles, Illinois. So right now I'm actually close to downtown Chicago right now. So I'm taking the call before helping out with building those drones.
Dagobert (09:54)
⁓ I don't know. Where are you based? You're in the US or in Europe?
yeah, okay.
Yes, yes, yes.
I see, I see, Yeah, because I haven't been in San Francisco in a long time. So, but I see it does seem weird. ⁓ Lots of young people getting lots of attention for building new startups with VCs and like very young people from the Bay Area. That's an interesting scene, but I'm not connected. So I don't know exactly how that works.
Daniel Legut (10:36)
I get the impression that it's like somebody who already is established. I feel like there's a pattern where if somebody's parents are already established in engineering or in tech out there, that their children go into it, right? And it's kind of the same thing, right? With ⁓ having your son pose with a hundred dollar bill online, right? But it's to a different scale.
Dagobert (10:50)
Yeah.
And there's definitely like a bonus
to being a young tech genius or being perceived like that. There's always a bonus to that. Like I started when I was 15 and I had a real job paid, like part-time job at 17 building websites for a French company when I was just like still in high school. But I had a real job contract and everything.
And there is something when they think you're this young tech genius. You know, I was like 16, 17. They just think, you know, it's just like makes people like think you can do anything. I don't know. Like it's a it's it's for a few years you have this bonus. Like I had this bonus until like, I don't know, 22 or something. I remember it. So there's something with that. If you if you're young enough and you're mature enough, you can capitalize on it, actually. Probably.
Yeah, but 10 is definitely very young. seems more like, it seems fishy, man. Yeah. So, yeah. ⁓
Daniel Legut (12:01)
definitely,
yeah definitely. mean it's a yeah it's there's a certain point where yeah it's it's being ridiculous.
Dagobert (12:12)
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so hardware products, but I don't think that's the product you are on launch day for. It's not a hardware product. So...
Daniel Legut (12:25)
No, no, I, ⁓
you know, I've been working on QR codes for a while, right? So one of the things is I worked on, yeah, and that was like one of the first ones I had made, because I was working on like a game startup or like a game studio, I guess, years ago, and it fell apart, but it was a really cool concept.
Dagobert (12:34)
your profile pic. That's how I remember you from your profile pic, which is half of a QR code.
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (12:53)
It was a mobile app where you could scan trading cards, like physically printed trading cards, and you could play the game. So you'd buy the cards, scan them, and you'd be playing remotely with somebody else who has their own deck of cards. ⁓
Dagobert (13:00)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (13:11)
we were gonna be using QR codes on the cards themselves to scan them. And I thought, well, these look really terrible. I'd love to make them look nicer, because these cards will not sell if they look ugly, right? And I thought QR codes look ugly. ⁓ And so I started looking into what techniques exist to make them look nicer. And there's like...
Dagobert (13:20)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (13:32)
There's some really great techniques that exist in the minds of researchers that they've published a little bit, something here or there about, but there wasn't really a service for that, and I thought that was really interesting. after that, I had started looking into it more and more, and every time I find a new technique, or I come up with one, I just kind of add it to the service.
Dagobert (13:58)
Cure
codes are very interesting because it seemed amazing when it came out. Then it became very boring for many years and we kind of like forgot to use them. And then they become somehow trendy again. And now, mean, since it's in the default camera apps, also it helps. You just point it, you don't have to open a separate app. Because for years you had to have a Cure code app, which seems insane now when you think about it.
Daniel Legut (14:04)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dagobert (14:27)
to just read them.
Daniel Legut (14:27)
Yeah,
that's when I got into it, because I was thinking about basically during COVID, how you saw it become standardized in the camera app. at the time, working on mobile apps, I was just thinking about how.
how wow, I don't have to tell somebody to download something, right? Like that would be so nice, right? ⁓ You know, this, you know, same advantage of.
Dagobert (14:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
or you don't have to type the whole
link and sometimes the link is so complicated.
Daniel Legut (14:59)
Yeah,
but just like all the QR scanners are built in the phones and I was like, this is amazing. Why is no one talking about this? ⁓ You could do so much with this, right? ⁓
And yeah, and then if you start really going down at the rabbit hole of like what people use QR codes for, it's kind of crazy. Like I've seen some indie hacker products where like people replace their doorbells with them. So you just scan a QR code and it it starts ringing your doorbell for you. It just, you know, it tells you who's at the door, right? On your phone, right? Things like that. Right. So, I mean, if you just start thinking like, oh, Hey, I can encode a URL in this. What can I do with an API endpoint or a
Dagobert (15:37)
my god.
Daniel Legut (15:46)
You could do an action, right? And so whatever that action is, you know?
Dagobert (15:47)
Yeah, makes sense, I just realized.
Well, actually, the gym I go to in
France, it's a QR code to come in. Is the access, yeah, so that's the same. And it regenerates every 10 seconds, so you cannot share it with someone. It has to be your app, you have to have your subscription active, and then they use it to control, and you can only go once per hour or something. You cannot, so they avoid cheating and everything.
Daniel Legut (15:58)
Really?
Yeah, and that's like what having a QR code is way cheaper than a key fob, right? So you can't beat the price of a slip of paper. ⁓ like like a, you know, a key RFID or like a little plastic chip, right? Yeah.
Dagobert (16:25)
I know what, because I'm not technical enough. What is the thing you said? Keyfab?
an actual object that people have to have a chip. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
And it's cool now. And like the only thing that annoys me with QR codes, and you probably have a solution for this, I hope that you can tell me, how do I use them when they're on my Mac? You know, and I want to open the link on my Mac. Like, you know, like, for example, somebody like you can share your Spotify playlist and it's like a QR code thing and you can send a screenshot.
Daniel Legut (16:46)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dagobert (17:03)
or you see it on your Mac. How the fuck do you open it? It's like the only thing that annoys me. It's it's made for phones.
Daniel Legut (17:11)
Yeah, I mean, you're definitely right about that. I I typically, you know, end up search, you know, think ⁓ Google Lens, I think is something I've heard of. I don't know if it's on the Mac, if that works, but, you know, normally I'll just look up like QR scanner, like website. start, I use like, ⁓ for me, it's like, I, you know, I'll use it.
Open CV library, which is like open computer vision and there's we chat Contributed subcode to like do a really crazy QR scanner, right? So I'll just search search for that and I'll find somebody who who's hosted some code for that ⁓ that scanner and I'll just upload the image
Dagobert (17:56)
I'm just realizing there's no app. I could just build this app like QR code reader on Mac. And you, I don't know, it just seems so basic. I don't know. But anyway.
Daniel Legut (18:07)
Yeah, you know, you'd be shocked at ⁓ how well a QR scanning app can do ⁓ on an iOS. Somebody just sent me, yep, somebody just sold me, or somebody just sent me a link to an app broker website and the app broker is selling an iOS app ⁓ and they want...
Dagobert (18:16)
Yeah, even though it's in the phone still.
Daniel Legut (18:32)
to sell the iOS app for $30 million and all it does is it scans QR codes and it's got a few features beyond that, but that's what I saw it as.
Dagobert (18:43)
It makes me think
of this clipboard app that saved the history of your copy and paste.
Daniel Legut (18:50)
Mm-hmm.
Dagobert (18:51)
which is also basic as fuck, but I guess, you And then they try to make all these features, you know, but come on.
Daniel Legut (18:54)
Yes. Don't ever under...
You know, don't underestimate ⁓ or don't make the mistake of overestimating others, right? So, know, like if you do understand technology, right, you're mapping what you know onto other people, right? And you know a lot about your phone, you know a lot about, you know, your desktop or your computer, right?
Dagobert (19:13)
Yes.
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (19:30)
Some people, they have a certain way of doing it. So it could be legitimately that they're just searching through the app store, finding this application, and then that's how they found it and they download it. And then they pay a subscription for it.
Dagobert (19:41)
How much money can we make with people not knowing
you can use the camera app? No, that's a legit question.
Daniel Legut (19:47)
I mean,
who teaches you to do that, right? Who teaches you that that's a thing unless you look into it? Yeah, that's the stuff that blows my mind, right? Because it's like thinking about stuff like...
Dagobert (19:51)
Yeah, exactly. There's so many users that a lot will not know. Yeah, yeah.
Imagine the fear
of the founder of this company every time someone opens the photo app and accidentally is in front of a QR code and realize that the link shows up. know, like, ⁓ no, you know, $5 a month I don't make. Yeah, so funny. But there's many businesses like this. It's so funny.
Daniel Legut (20:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah
Dagobert (20:31)
And you you were talking about me projecting my knowledge of technology on other people. And it's really true, like, you know, 15 years ago when there was iPads and iPhones and all this shit was new, and you know, newborns, babies and kids, they started playing with it. And I remember, you know, I had friends with new kids, and I'm like, my God.
they're going to be so much better than us at computers. They are native and everything. And now they're like teenagers or grownups. They don't know shit. They don't know how to use a computer. They suck completely, most of them, because it's actually, and I think we're maybe the only generation like between people between like 25 and 50 or something like that, or that we were at the right time.
to actually become good at computers because he was cool enough and doable enough. But now I think the new kids maybe. And that's why I think every time I see posts of people be like, yeah, look at my kid, what he built with V0. I'm absolutely not convinced it means this kid will be a builder or anything. It seems like making it so easy is also making people kind of ⁓ clueless about it. I don't know, but I noticed it with kids.
Daniel Legut (21:24)
you
you
Dagobert (21:50)
where I thought 15 years ago, they're going to be so good and zero. I had to teach this kid how to print paper the other day. And so,
Daniel Legut (21:59)
You know, I think that there's just like a certain percentage of the population that like, ⁓ you know, becomes really good with technology, right? Or really dives into things, right? ⁓ I do think that, like something I was thinking about with like the, you know, these vibe-surfing tools, right? Is like what I'll call like, you know, you know how there's like a black box, right? You don't know what's going, you know what's going in, what's coming out, but you don't know what's happening in between. And so I started thinking about like black box.
Dagobert (22:27)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (22:29)
learning or like, or black onion learning, learning where it's just layers, right? So, so, you know, the, the first layer might be that you use V zero, right? But then you peel, you know, the person who really starts getting into technology, they peel that layer back and they learn more, right? And so there's, there's just like a certain percentage of people who are curious enough to figure that stuff out, right? And I think back to like, you know,
Dagobert (22:33)
Mmm.
Maybe.
Daniel Legut (22:55)
me learning how to do stuff with computers and it starts with modifying games and playing games online. I think I was really into Counter-Strike and putting together a computer so that way I could play some games online. ⁓
Dagobert (23:09)
Yeah, my god, yeah.
What was your favorite map? Your favorite map?
Don't say Dust 2, like a real one.
Daniel Legut (23:20)
It was a mod, Scout's Knives, right? That's the one I played a bunch of, right? Where they modded... Yes, it was only snipers and you... ⁓ They changed the gravity so you could strafe and so you could be jumping around and like move fluidly, right? So it was the... Yeah, it was only your knife and only a sniper and it was just so much fun.
Dagobert (23:27)
with only snipers?
and the scout, not
AWP, so the shitty sniper, so that takes two bullets or headshot, Yeah, okay, my god.
Daniel Legut (23:49)
Yes, no, just the scout. Yeah, just the, yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you're just like,
you're just flying through the air and you're just trying to shoot each other out of the air at the same time. Right.
Dagobert (24:00)
Oh my god. It's
a bit too much for me, these mod maps. Yeah. I really like the militia. The CS militia. You know where you have like this underground, this sewers, you go through the sewers, you also have this big house with the windows and you you can snipe. Really like this one. Yeah. Oh my god. Where's the fun now? Where is our youth, man?
Daniel Legut (24:08)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dagobert (24:29)
It's over. We are cooked. ⁓ my god. anyway, your passion for QR codes, you have your profile picked like this. How did you come to build your product?
Daniel Legut (24:32)
You
man, I, you know, I spent a bunch of time working on it, right. you know, I think what definitely helped was, ⁓ you know, putting my profile picture as the QR code, right. Cause people would just send me things or tell me about things, right. As, as things happen. It, that one scans. Yes, that one. Yeah. And that one goes to, ⁓ yeah, to devmandan.com.
Dagobert (24:59)
Yeah?
I just realized, can we scan it? Can we scan this picture? Is it to your website, I guess?
Let me check.
Daniel Legut (25:14)
And I've tested it out to see how small it could be to scan, right? ⁓ And you could, you could.
Dagobert (25:19)
Yeah, yeah, because it's quite small. yeah, let me try it. Very small.
⁓
Daniel Legut (25:25)
You could print this thing out to being one centimeter by one centimeter and it would potentially scan, right? Which is kind of nuts to think about, right?
Dagobert (25:36)
Okay, small profile pic doesn't work, but regular profile pic on your profile probably works. Yeah, it works. Okay, such a cool pic, man. Oh my god.
Daniel Legut (25:43)
Yeah.
One of the ideas behind it was thinking like, man, if I made a post and it went viral, I'd get credit for it, you know? And people would be fine. I've yet to have a post go viral, so. Well, I don't know, if you actually had a post become popular, right? So you make posts that go and get a lot of views all the time.
Dagobert (25:59)
What do you mean a post go viral? Like what's the... I don't get it.
and people would see your profile pic.
Daniel Legut (26:12)
Yeah, and so you'd have attribution to something you've posted online, right? Even if your name's not next to it, right? People could find who you are and what you're about just from the, if somebody were to screenshot a post on Twitter, right? So a lot of content online gets reshared in other places, right? So if it goes and gets shared enough, it's just a screenshot that floats around online, right? ⁓
Dagobert (26:28)
Yeah, yeah.
You know I had this.
Daniel Legut (26:41)
And so how does somebody
get credit for it, right? ⁓
Dagobert (26:45)
I'm not sure that's what you're talking about, but I had this theory with my memes, because my memes, when I was doing that every day, two or three years ago, sometimes it was getting so massive, like even beyond Twitter, and I didn't even know it. Just some people send me screenshots, dude, it's going huge on Reddit or something, but I didn't know I was just on Twitter. And I thought...
How can I get traffic from that? So I started putting a watermark. I created this website, MemeLogy, where I put all my memes. It's still available, memelogy.co, if you wanna see all the memes I made a couple years ago, like 500 or something. And man, I get so little traffic. A meme with like a million views. You know how much traffic I get? I get like 15. You know? Fucking 15.
Daniel Legut (27:27)
you
Hahahaha
Dagobert (27:32)
You know, and when I thought I'm like, at least I'm going to get 200, then I can make a meme course and I sell the meme course and I make some money. Impossible, man. That is rough. I got probably I I got tens of millions, literally tens of millions of views. But my meme website, my God, biggest spike was 100 views in one day when I promoted it. Yeah. So, yeah.
Daniel Legut (27:33)
That's...
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
that's rough. Yeah. Cause I, I, ⁓ sometimes I'll use, like if I make some work, right. And I, and I have like, ⁓ I don't know, like if I make some UI design or something and I, ⁓ you know, give it to somebody as, like, ⁓ as some design work, I'll, put like a watermark, but it'll be my QR code, right. Or if I give somebody a proposal, right. Right. Like, you know, you know, at the header of the page, I'll put
Dagobert (28:18)
That's awesome. That's a very cool watermark,
Daniel Legut (28:25)
that same thing, right? So if they need to find out more about me, they can just scan it and it's like attribution, right? So I'll use it not just as a profile picture, but like, you if I'm putting out a proposal to somebody, hey, here's, you know, here's this thing at the top of the page, you can find out more about me, right? So it's just, it's so much better than a URL, right? But yeah.
Dagobert (28:40)
Yeah.
And you can have
attribution because you make unique.
Daniel Legut (28:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually, went to, ⁓ somebody sent me ⁓ a post about a show in New York about just QR codes. So I ended up going like a couple, ⁓ earlier this year to New York, know, crashed on a friend's couch who lives out there.
Dagobert (29:06)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (29:07)
And the only reason I knew about the show is because somebody knows me as the QR code guy. So they sent me a link to this. It's like, hey, you might be interested in this. And there was a guy, hosted a show only about QR codes. Everybody showed up and they just showed projects related to QR codes. Right? So like,
Dagobert (29:14)
Awesome.
That's amazing. You can be the QR
code guy too. That could be your branding on Twitter. That's smart. I met a guy on Twitter, a new indie maker, and his app is Public Toilet Finder. So I named him the Toilet King. You and I'm like, you should use that as your brand, the Public Toilet King. It's more fun. It's more interesting.
Daniel Legut (29:29)
You
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I think that one I'd have trouble with if I was him, but yeah.
Dagobert (29:51)
No, it's brutal but you know, you need something
like me. When I started putting emopreneur, like people like it man, it's funny. know, it's like you... Public toilet king is funny too. I would own it. I would own public toilet king 100%. Like this guy is famous for having this garbage company, this other famous guy on Twitter. He could be like, you know, the garbage king or something, which sounds a bit shit but it's funny. So anyway, yeah.
Daniel Legut (29:58)
That, okay, that one is, that is funny. That is funny, actually. is...
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. There's
a guy I found on Twitter. does... Like, he's a guy, you know, he raised a bunch of money and he's doing like ⁓ some kind of ⁓ IoT or like...
bidet kind of camera thing for toilets, right? So it looks at like your bowel movements or whatever. And I just post, I just make, I just make poop jokes on his posts. like, you know, just, and and he's getting tired of me making these jokes. I'm like, no, this is all you should be making jokes about this whole time, right? Everything you post should be just, you know, appealing to middle-aged potty humor, right? Like as if you're.
Dagobert (30:40)
my god.
Make sense
You
Daniel Legut (31:00)
You know a grown man making dad jokes all day long, right?
Dagobert (31:06)
There's nothing funnier than poop jokes. Like I realize, I farted a hundred thousand times in my life and I still think it's funny. There's no better ROI than this. know, it's the most funny thing in the world.
Daniel Legut (31:18)
Well yeah,
mean people are, I've never, you can never exhaust that amount of jokes that people would make about it, Yeah, it's too, it's evergreen, you know?
Dagobert (31:28)
Yeah.
So wait,
went super far. And let's show your product for a couple of minutes because I still want to see your product.
Daniel Legut (31:41)
Sure, yeah, yeah. Let me share my ⁓ screen.
Dagobert (31:44)
And you were
saying it was basically broken this morning and not ready. So we'll also put on the website an actual...
Daniel Legut (31:49)
Well, could show, could
show. So I'll tell you what broke. So what broke is I was my, so I have this right here, right? And this is a Gradio app and it's, and it's embedded in the site, right? And right now it's, it's broken cause it's not embedded, right? So I have to recreate the UI, which, which sucks because I migrated hosts, but this is basically the application right here, right? ⁓ And so like I have a few.
Dagobert (32:00)
Okay.
Okay, yeah.
So I see a picture.
Daniel Legut (32:17)
Yeah, this picture right here, I just uploaded it. This is just kind of a picture of myself. And this is like one style. So I've got one tab here for mosaic style. So if I click around here, I can pick what to take out of the image. So I'm just picking myself. If I click Create, it'll start creating a QR code. And it'll scan to whatever URL you put into it, right?
And then you can customize how it looks right here and do a bunch of...
Dagobert (32:49)
And how complicated
was it to find this algorithm to create the QR code?
Daniel Legut (32:54)
I mean, this one I created myself completely and it came out of ⁓ a desire to want to be able to put them on curved surfaces, right? So.
Dagobert (32:59)
wow.
so that's
a QR code, this thing. No, it's ⁓ only if you zoom in, there's like multiple time QR code or just one.
Daniel Legut (33:10)
Yeah, so this is a...
Yeah, this one, this one, this style has multiple.
Dagobert (33:20)
Yeah, that's what you were saying, mosaic.
Daniel Legut (33:23)
Yeah, it's a mosaic, right? And so, you you would print this up pretty big, maybe wrapped around a light pole, right? Or whatever, right? And the big idea behind this is that it's human readable, right? You look at this and it's, you know, it's a person, right? And you could, you know, you kind of get a sense of where this might scan to. Oh, it's like, hey, it might connect me to this person, right?
Dagobert (33:29)
Wow.
I see.
Yeah, yeah, it's a picture.
Daniel Legut (33:49)
And then I've got this other style here, which is more like AI. I just kind of clicked create, but it takes about 20 minutes for this one to be made. ⁓ you type in a prompt. And so the default prompt is White Cliffs of Dover.
Dagobert (34:02)
Wow. So
it's like a photo, like realistic photo, but the QR code is still embedded in the photo. It reminds me of these images of like in negative space that you can make with AI, or you can create fake.
Daniel Legut (34:16)
yeah, yeah, it's
definitely in that alley of stuff, right? So it's within that space, right? ⁓
Dagobert (34:21)
Wow. It's embedding the QR
code inside the image. That's an awesome idea. Wow. Or like, you know, some images, it's a hamburger, but if you squint your eyes, it's like Obama or something. And, you know.
Daniel Legut (34:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah. So you could make this kind of style and I, you know, and then I've got this other style here, which, you know, you just kind of crop the image you upload.
And then, yeah, you you just hit create. If it will actually click it. Come on.
There we go. I don't know why that didn't click right. But...
Dagobert (35:10)
Yeah, no worries,
Daniel Legut (35:17)
like it's going through, but it takes about a minute. ⁓ But yeah, these styles, mean, you know, the first style that I came up with was actually, ⁓ was the one you saw in my profile picture. And then it started getting
Dagobert (35:32)
Yeah,
Daniel Legut (35:33)
It started getting more ambitious from there. was like, hey, I can get more pixels in, right? I can ⁓ change the version number of the QR code to get more pixels in, to get higher fidelity QR code to be put out. wait, where could I use that? start getting really crazy with it.
Dagobert (35:51)
So you have four styles, have one
of your profile pic I guess, ⁓ then the realistic photo, and then the mosaic kind of thing.
Daniel Legut (36:01)
Yeah, so for overall styles, let's just get this one started as well. I don't know if this one's airing out or something, but it should be. There we go. Yeah, so here's another style, right? So it'll take a photo realistic image and go, this one's another style, right? So I can.
Dagobert (36:12)
⁓ so colored one.
It's my favorite style this one because it's low fidelity.
Daniel Legut (36:25)
Yeah, this one works well with like,
yeah, like the lo-fi stuff does look pretty awesome and you could use it in more situations. And so like...
Dagobert (36:32)
And that's awesome for
like a business card. mean, I'm just saying that realizing nobody has business cards anymore, but still.
Daniel Legut (36:39)
Yeah, and so you could start playing around with all the settings to get something that's like of higher quality, right? So, you you could start changing how much it, you know, how much of the dark it takes from the original image, how, you know, thresholding it, changing. Yeah. And so that's the whole point of this, Is to make it ⁓ look higher quality and you could keep changing around however much you want, right?
Dagobert (36:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you have complete control to make it look cool.
Awesome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.
Daniel Legut (37:05)
And it takes some playing around with, it's something that I think one of the ways I described it initially to people is design software just specifically for QR codes. ⁓ And then there's a bunch of other things I want to do with it as well, So add analytics on top. How many people are scanning? That's very obvious stuff. then, you
Dagobert (37:21)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (37:28)
also have it so when somebody makes one, hey, can they order it and get printed copies ⁓ after they're done, right? But yeah, mean, this is the basic idea, and this is taken.
Dagobert (37:38)
I feel like there is a way to
connect this. feel like when you're online, everybody has a profile pic and you can click on it and see who they are. We could have that in real life. I could have a t-shirt with this on it, like big, and if people see me, they scan me and then they have my page. I don't know.
Daniel Legut (37:47)
Mm-hmm.
yeah, now I've, ⁓ here let me ⁓ let me go and show you one that I made. This one right here. So this is my friend's dog, right? And his dog's name's Pascal and there's a corky, right? And so I sent him a t-shirt in the mail, just, just cause I wanted to test out printing it. But yeah, this, this, this goes, it.
Dagobert (38:07)
Yeah.
And it works with printing even on fabric like this.
Daniel Legut (38:22)
This one, yeah, so this one works. This style works on fabric and as long as you make it large enough so each of the individual coats can scan, it works. And I think I even made it so this goes to his dog's Instagram page because his dog has an Instagram page. So I thought this was awesome just to be able to do that, right? Like it's ⁓ so ridiculous but so awesome at the same time. And a lot of the
Dagobert (38:31)
Yeah, yeah, because it's mosaic. And what does this dog links to?
⁓ okay, I see. I see.
It is awesome.
Daniel Legut (38:52)
you know, this overly saturated color look right here, where it's kind of like too orange or whatever, right, is because it's meant to try to make it high contrast so it scans better, right? And, you know, so you can, can, you know, it's like two and a half times the contrast just to make the colors pop out more, right?
Dagobert (38:56)
Yeah.
⁓ I see,
Yeah, I see.
Daniel Legut (39:15)
And just so it'll scan more. And that actually came from this experiment of getting, trying out making shirts, right? ⁓ Let's see if I can.
show you another one that I did because yeah like the the idea of being able to put these on non-flat objects is really awesome and ⁓
Dagobert (39:32)
Yeah.
Daniel Legut (39:42)
it loads. Come on.
Dagobert (39:42)
I see.
no, okay, that's not that, okay.
Daniel Legut (39:47)
No, I gotta, I'm on a hot spot, so that's why it's loading slowly.
Dagobert (39:56)
wow, yeah, you have an Instagram page with all these examples.
Daniel Legut (39:59)
Yeah. And so like a shirt, right? You know, another example of that, right? You know, you can have, this is like a singer, right? So this would go to some music that I shared, right? So if you scan it, it goes to that, you know, person's music, right? And so you could just keep, you know.
Dagobert (40:03)
Yeah, Marilyn Monroe, that's nice. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Legut (40:23)
keep doing those, right? So I just think that there's a lot of stuff that people could do with this. So I think about it more in the realm of creative.
Dagobert (40:27)
Yeah, I feel like I'm just thinking of the,
he's giving so many ideas, Yeah.
Daniel Legut (40:32)
Mm-hmm.
It's in the realm of creative QR codes, right? So that's kind of how I think about it. Yeah.
Dagobert (40:37)
Yeah, this AI thing is awesome. All
right, well, maybe it's gonna give me ideas. Well, thanks so much, Daniel, for being a part of this launch day and coming here and showing your product. And really happy to have finally met you after five or four years of following you on Twitter since the beginning. It's funny how you can interact with someone and not know them, basically. That's funny. Yeah.
Daniel Legut (40:55)
Yeah.
All right, well I loved being on here and it was great talking to you and I appreciate what you're doing here with the launch day. think it's awesome ⁓ and hopefully some people get their stuff in front of people, right, because of what you're doing. So that'd be awesome.
Dagobert (41:26)
That's what I want, know, it's so hard to solve,
but yeah, I think we can do it. So yeah, let's get people some sales. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to try. Thanks, man.
Daniel Legut (41:31)
It's tough, you know. Alright, well,
have a good one man, it was great talking with you, alright?
Dagobert (41:42)
Yeah, you too.
Daniel Legut (41:43)
Alright, I'll see you.