Our B2B SaaS Journey

In this episode, Mitchell and Gavin deal with their first proper hater, reset their routines after a messy few weeks, unpack a six month marketing project for SixSides, and get into a surprisingly tense debate about whether AI is helping us work smarter or quietly making us lazier.

Links

Chapters
  • (00:00) - Intro x2
  • (01:33) - Meeting the first hater
  • (03:56) - New habits die easy
  • (08:01) - Fitness goals, walking, and pickleball
  • (13:48) - Juggling multiple balls across SixSides and DealBuddi
  • (17:46) - Planning a six month marketing project
  • (20:39) - Research projects for the engineering team
  • (23:37) - Redesigning the SixSides mobile app
  • (35:13) - World Police and Fire Games delivery timeline
  • (37:52) - AI is making us dumber

In this episode, we cover:
  • Handling negative feedback from someone who does not believe in the SixSides vision
  • Why the opportunity might be in the cracks that other people miss
  • How moving house disrupted Gavin’s routines, habits, gym schedule, and focus
  • Why new habits die easy, especially when your environment changes
  • Mitch’s post-wedding fitness motivation struggles and the search for a new goal
  • Pickleball, long walks, and finding achievable physical challenges
  • Gavin juggling SixSides, DealBuddi, family revenue, house setup, sales, and lead generation
  • The pressure of managing a team, delivering for the World Police and Fire Games, chasing customers, and exploring funding
  • Planning a six month marketing project around community fundraising ideas
  • Using research, interviews, webinars, podcasts, blog posts, LinkedIn content, and white papers as one connected marketing engine
  • The SixSides community being set up on Skool
  • Research projects for the engineering team across ticketing, event websites, and event registration
  • Why the team paused coding for a week to research the market before building
  • The new SixSides mobile app design, including native iOS patterns and liquid glass
  • Reducing event organiser customisation so the app feels more cohesive
  • Designing communities, events, explore flows, and future app navigation
  • Preparing for the World Police and Fire Games timeline and internal testing window
  • Offline mode research and why it may require a major rethink of the mobile app data layer
  • Whether AI-generated research, code comments, LinkedIn posts, and internal communication can be trusted
  • The difference between AI-generated work and AI-assisted thinking
  • Why founders still need to slow down, think clearly, and care about quality
Got questions or topics you want us to cover? Email us at journey@sixsides.co

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5-star rating and a review on your favourite podcast app. It really helps us reach more people!

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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 Lara Wood developer.

Gavin Tye:

Good day, Mitchell Davis. I'm Gavin Tye, CEO and sales and marketing.

Mitchell Davis:

We are into year two of running a remote starter, 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 are going, mate?

Gavin Tye:

Mate, you need to put a little bit more pizzazz into that intro. You can tell you're reading off a script. We're doing a second year of, try it again. Read it again. Just and and think like you're you're on a game show.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. We are into year two of running a remote starter, and it's called sixsides.co. You should check it out. It's a community led events platform. And on this show, we're documenting the business and tech of our journey.

Mitchell Davis:

How are you going, mate?

Gavin Tye:

I don't know how you got that twang in your voice, but mate, more than reading off a script, mate, I'm doing really well. I'm doing really well. Thank you. Excellent. Yep.

Gavin Tye:

How's how's life going in your neck of the woods in developer land? It's crap. With your little community.

Mitchell Davis:

You've thrown me off here. Yeah. My little community. I'm good. Things are good.

Mitchell Davis:

Things have been going pretty well with development on the mobile app, and I'll I'll talk about that more later. But we've got an interesting one to kick the show off. We had a meeting this morning with someone, and it was okay, but they were a bit more negative on our idea, on our business than we might

Gavin Tye:

have hater. Right? First hater. Yeah. And, he's like, oh, I've never seen it work.

Gavin Tye:

I've never seen people stick around in an app before, and, I don't see what you do different to some others. I was like, okay. Thank you. I had to push back a little bit on him and I was like, man, if we saw the world like you, we wouldn't have started the business. He's like, yeah, it's a fair call.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. It was good. It was like, it was a bit eye opening, but it was also like, okay, Let's just get off this call. Like, clearly, there's nothing here. Let's go.

Mitchell Davis:

And then it was good. I could see you you weren't you weren't rude or anything, but you were, like, asserting your point back against him, and that was kind of fun. It was satisfying to watch. So it was, but we

Gavin Tye:

only look at those. We've always known this, that some events platforms or some platforms do service parts of the site, like sides of an event community and the bigger ones like events, air and Cvent, they are made for event organizers. Right. And what we're trying to do is yes, help them, but also help the other side. So, and he just wasn't thinking about the audience.

Gavin Tye:

They have a different, they have a model that's clearly working in their business. And, yeah, it's alright. I'm, every now and then you get them and it tests your resolve and you're yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

I'm glad I didn't meet him, like, within the first week of us beginning deciding to set it up.

Mitchell Davis:

It would've been. Yeah. It might have been a bit more, detrimental to our optimism. Yeah. Anyway.

Gavin Tye:

But it's alright. It doesn't matter, mate. I've seen a lot of I've come across a lot of haters in certain things, especially in sales market fit. I get them all the time. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. So,

Gavin Tye:

you've just gotta, the gold is in the cracks of what people miss. So, right. If everyone saw it, mate, put that on a t shirt.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Jesus. That's our new slogan or something. Wow.

Gavin Tye:

The gold is in the cracks that people miss. Yep. Sounds a bit rude. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. It's got some other connotations to it. Anyway, we'll we'll we'll workshop it. Anyway, we got something here about new habits.

Mitchell Davis:

So this is fitness related. Walk us through it.

Gavin Tye:

All sorts of things. You know, the saying old habits die hard. I think the inverse of that is new habits die hard, die easy.

Mitchell Davis:

Right? Easy.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So we've moved, we've moved house. Like we're in our second week here and Mel last night come home and she's like, you're not doing anything. And I'm like, and I was thinking about it for a while, like it's unpacking and stuff. And I was like, oh, the house is a bit of a mess, but it's the new norm here.

Gavin Tye:

And I haven't really paid attention to it. I was like, oh, that's the way it's always been. And especially with going to the gym and all that kind of stuff as well, I've had a complete change in habit or circumstance and all my habits are kind of starting from scratch again. And I've really gotta start trying to build them out one at a time. Like, I'm not even getting up early anymore.

Gavin Tye:

Like all my good habits have just gone.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Right. Wow. That's rare for you. When are you getting up then?

Gavin Tye:

Oh, it's two. I'm like 05:00. It's it's two. It's two

Mitchell Davis:

four. Right?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. In some days I have a sleeping on a Thursday when Mel goes to work, but generally I'll try to get up early. I'll get up today at 04:30. It's, I've got to start building the habits, the foundational habits from the, from the beginning, from the start around this new house and the new environment. So it's a really interesting insight I had today.

Gavin Tye:

I was talking to Mel about it and, I'm gonna plan out everything. The next, the next thing we're talking about is juggling multiple balls. Right? Like I've got so much on like you do. And I've got them in my head, need to start listing them out.

Gavin Tye:

Like each thing I need to do in order of each of these big rocks that I've got to do. And I even thought it thinking that logically, if I've got five big rocks and I've got seven steps in each thing, which is 30 tasks I've got to do. Right. I could just do three of them a day across all six. And then after ten days it'd be all done.

Gavin Tye:

But instead I don't do anything and just get overwhelmed. So can be a

Mitchell Davis:

bit yeah, exactly. Overwhelming is the right word. Yeah. And it is hard with with habits. Like, for us, we would speaking of, house getting dirty and whatever, we would, just let the Convert you see it?

Mitchell Davis:

No. We would let the kitchen become a bit of a mess and like, okay. All it takes is like two nights of not having done any washing up or whatever, and the kitchen is just a complete mess. Right? Yep.

Mitchell Davis:

And then I would typically on Sundays, I would get in and do like a complete kitchen clean, right, and get it back to spotless. And I've started a new habit of like, no, every day I will go in and just clean whatever needs to be done. Just like a you know? And it's always it's only okay. It's a couple pots and pans, whatever.

Mitchell Davis:

Take care of the dishwasher, all of that. And then now it's working. So, like, our kitchen is staying clean, and it's just such a better mindset, you know, to walk into a clean house. It feels heaps better. So, yeah, I'm trying to do that and form that as a habit and, you know, just do a little cleanup after dinner.

Mitchell Davis:

It only takes a couple minutes versus like two hours sometimes of get in and completely redo the kitchen. It's a nightmare.

Gavin Tye:

So Oh, a 100%. Our house is clean. Like, we clean do the we don't have the problem with the dishes and stuff. Mel would not live with that. It's just the boxes that are around and we just, anyway, we've gotta, but it's like, gotta get back on track and like, oh, it's interesting now.

Gavin Tye:

I'm trying to pay attention to habits a bit more and all this kind of stuff and just can't be wasting time. Right? I don't have the luxury of it. So, it's,

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Well, for me on, fitness habits wise, I have been going to the gym a couple times a week. You

Gavin Tye:

look massive, Matt.

Mitchell Davis:

Thank you. I look massive, not in a good way.

Gavin Tye:

In a good

Mitchell Davis:

no. No. Not yet. Not yet in a good way. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

I'm I'm working on that. I've struggled really hard to find the same motivation as what I had pre wedding. And you and I spoke about that this week of, like, it's just really hard. If you don't have

Gavin Tye:

a

Mitchell Davis:

goal, at least for me, I find that really hard to get in and just apply that have that motivation just in general every day. And you mentioned something as well, for yourself. It's it can be similar. But, yeah, I I just wanted to update on that I am doing what I said I was gonna do. I I wanna do more and push myself further, but, you know, there's a lot of things going on that's just I'm I'm feeling okay with where I'm at with the fitness.

Mitchell Davis:

It's just it's not to the level of what I was pre wedding. Yep.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Okay. So I've I've thought about that yesterday, like, when we had a conversation about I do work good to goals, but I'm more like, and I'm also trying to build habits.

Gavin Tye:

I was after we got off the phone yesterday, what the background of the conversation was is when I've done things like train for an Ironman or half Ironman, that's, I don't wanna give it away and sound like I'm more fit than I am or a half marathon, then I do do my training and I do hit the training goals and then be able to compete. But I'm also trying to form foundations of going to the gym three or four times a week. And so after I got off the phone last night, I was like, I'm going to go have a look at the there's a, there's a ride from Brisbane to the Gold Coast. It's a 100 K bike ride and it's very achievable for me to do it, but I just have to do some training. Like I can't, I couldn't get on a bike and do it tomorrow, but it's not that hard to do.

Gavin Tye:

And I talked to Mel this morning and I was like, I should, I should do that. And she's like, yeah, do it. Cause it goes right past our house almost. And so I was thinking about that just before, like, and I just had a look, maybe looking at something for yourself, like, like trying to find something that's like a walk, like a 50 ks walk, like, and just go or a 30 ks walk, whatever it is, just do something that you can't do today. You couldn't do it today.

Gavin Tye:

You'd have to do some training for a couple months to be able to achieve it. 50 ks walk is not that hard. It's only about eight hours. But you can't, everything gets difficult after 50 Ks. But 50 Ks is achievable if you do some walking for a few months.

Gavin Tye:

Right.

Mitchell Davis:

Eight hours. Are you sure? 50? Yeah. Divide by eight.

Gavin Tye:

You'd be about six k's

Mitchell Davis:

an Yeah. Six k's an hour for eight hours. Wow. That's a lot. I was thinking this morning about how pre wedding and I was doing those long walks and I got to I think my longest one was like twelve, thirteen, 14 k, something like that.

Mitchell Davis:

Think about that. That's a fair walk. Like, that's pretty good. You know?

Gavin Tye:

Mate, you can't live you can't live on yesterday, mate. You gotta Can't live in the past. Yeah. Come on, man.

Mitchell Davis:

No, I know, mate. You

Gavin Tye:

didn't have to walk today, Mitch. That you did the twelve or thirteen k's a few months ago, six months ago. You're harming yourself. You've already done it, mate. Just go have a burger.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Is that what you wanted? Is that what you

Mitchell Davis:

wanted? I don't want that. No. But just like thinking about, wow, that's actually, that's pretty far, you know? Yep.

Gavin Tye:

It is.

Mitchell Davis:

I don't know. Yeah. With the whole 50 k's, I don't know. I'm not sure. That sounds like a lot, but yes.

Mitchell Davis:

Find yourself

Gavin Tye:

a challenge. That's a few months away, book it in and then work towards it.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Mitchell Davis:

Well on fitness actually, over the weekend I went and played pickleball for the first time ever. That was a bit of fun.

Gavin Tye:

Was it?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. It was fun. We played for two hours, and we're gonna start doing, we played with some friends of Nicole and I. And, yeah, we're gonna start doing that, once a fortnight. So we'll go not this weekend, but the next one.

Mitchell Davis:

And, yeah, go go play for a couple hours. It's really fun. So if you've never given it a try, give it a try. It's pretty cool. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

It's just like small tennis is is the vibe.

Gavin Tye:

Pretty fun. I have been talking to Roman, about going to do it. So we we said, yes, let's do it. We just gotta find it find a time to do it. So yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Have fun. Well, this was we there were five of us and it's a four up to four people on the court. So we did a bit of a rotating system for, who was gonna like keep score. That was good.

Mitchell Davis:

Would it just be you and Roman going? Probably bring you yeah. Okay.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Yeah. I won't be taking kids, mate. Not a chance.

Mitchell Davis:

No. No. No. But, yeah, your partners at least like to fill out a four.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. But then what do you do with the kids? Yeah. Like, if it's only a little mini court, what do you if you need a partner, then it's true. Yep.

Gavin Tye:

True. I don't what

Mitchell Davis:

what am I being what am I being offended with?

Gavin Tye:

Like, because you're not fit enough to get across a small pickleball court, so you need a partner to cover the other side.

Mitchell Davis:

Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Okay. Alright, mate.

Mitchell Davis:

I'll have you know, I used to walk 12 to 14 Ks on a daily.

Gavin Tye:

Six months ago. Like, that fitness is still lingering. Like I can walk up the stairs. Yep. Fair enough.

Mitchell Davis:

I can. I can walk up the stairs. Thank you.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Yep. Brilliant. Yeah. Okay.

Gavin Tye:

You should have said that in that meeting before. Maybe you wouldn't have hated as much. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Oh fuck. Anyway. Okay. Mate, what

Gavin Tye:

are the balls nuts and guts of it, Hank.

Mitchell Davis:

Well, into the balls of it specifically. What are what are these multiple balls that you're juggling?

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. So look, I've got lots of different things going on at the moment. I need, I'm paying attention to Deal Buddy. Like I've got a, we originally hired our team, our marketing team to split across six sides and Deal Buddy. And we haven't been doing that too much.

Gavin Tye:

So now we're starting to push into helping people with their sales strategy. Right? Like I've got to still fund, I still think we're going to be funding us for another twelve months at least. And, and I just can't be just meeting, meeting the line with family revenue. And we just moved into this new house as well.

Gavin Tye:

So I've got to actually pay attention to it. Yep. We want to set up a new community, which we've done in, school as well. So side note, if anyone wants to join our school community, we're going to start adding to it in the coming weeks. So Mitch will put a link in the show notes for that.

Gavin Tye:

Anyone who's thinking about growing a community or, supporting a community, that's what we'd be adding content in there. But I'm probably gonna need to do the same for deal buddy or, or sales for founders and all that kind of stuff is support them, do the same thing. Right. And, or salespeople, which wouldn't be a bad thing to do anyway, because any good salespeople we could hire. Right.

Gavin Tye:

Sure. In time. So yeah, we've got that. We've got to turn on different lead generation engines. Like I think we'll start recording videos for six sides and deal buddy.

Gavin Tye:

I've got about already there is six things plus closing out sales of what we've got on now. Which is overwhelming to be honest. And then we've the house stuff here. I've got lots of stuff going on. So it's, I mean, yeah, finding myself in a bit of analysis paralysis this week, like sitting around, like even to the point I was like yesterday, I'm like, I don't think I'm good mentally at the moment.

Gavin Tye:

Then, and that did took took me a little bit time to realize that. I'm like, okay, I need to figure out a plan.

Mitchell Davis:

Yep. Yep. Yeah. I think we're both kind of we're both in this mode at the moment, it seems, of dealing with, like, our own struggles a bit. And it's probably a big part of it is like this is it's a lot of responsibility of managing a team and doing all of these things all at once.

Mitchell Davis:

We've got commitments, big important commitments with the police games. We're also trying to get other customers and big customers ideally dealing with funding, dealing with like, yeah, it was just, there's just a lot. It's an it's a whole lot of new stuff that we've taken on all at once. Plus then personal things like, yeah, you moving house and yeah.

Gavin Tye:

We're also six months through the year. We're almost, which we're, it's easy to forget that we're halfway through the year. Right. Been going, pretty, pretty hard. So I do think we're going through a big, both of us are going through a big period of growth at the moment.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. It's a little bit beyond us wise in with our current skill set. So we need to get better at it and otherwise we'll burn out. So, Yeah. It's just an evolution.

Gavin Tye:

I've got a plan, I think, on how to, fix it. So I'm gonna work on the juggling the multiple balls this week, and then I'll report back on my solution and how I've implemented a plan to fix it. So, Yeah. Sounds good. I'll let you move

Mitchell Davis:

that up. Fingers crossed you can. Yeah. Cool. Final point here on your side of the fence, a six month marketing project.

Mitchell Davis:

That sounds It

Gavin Tye:

does. Doesn't it? Sounds really interesting.

Mitchell Davis:

It does.

Gavin Tye:

So basically we've been, we've been just doing random marketing stuff on LinkedIn without really a plan. Just try to build awareness. Right? And so what I'm thinking we should do is write like a, for instance, like a, it culminates in a white paper and something like the top 20 innovative ideas to raise funds for your community or raise funds for your charity or something like that. Right.

Gavin Tye:

And, it will involve researching the top 20 companies, trying to reach out to their head, like fundraiser or their events person, us, get them to talk about what they've done, how they got to that approach, some lessons, but also be broadcasting that in the six sides community channel so we can get people to come into the channel and add value. Yep. But if we can ask people those questions, one, we can develop a webinar. Two, we can make a podcast out of it. Three, we can write a blog post, or a long form piece of content on our website.

Gavin Tye:

We can write mini LinkedIn posts from it. And then at the end it can culminate in evaluating piece of content. Plus I think we could probably do some more backlinking and all that kind of stuff with the post to each other and all that stuff. So, I do

Mitchell Davis:

think- This is the change makers pod, right? That's the idea behind it.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Well, it's been parked, but yes, it will probably fall under change makers or the six sides, whatever it is. Yeah. But I think we can hang our head on that and then develop a plan for the next six months and then the team can help us execute it. And then I'll probably just do the same for deal buddy too.

Gavin Tye:

Right? Something that some but it gives us a north star to aim at instead of just trying to produce content.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. And it's a good idea to get on the radar of like big organisations that do fit our ICP.

Gavin Tye:

There you go. That's in, that's the secondary reason as well. We want to add value first, but hopefully the law of reciprocity will open up and then we will get, they will become aware of us and then they'll want to have conversations and hopefully we might get some business out of it. But if not, we will use it for marketing content and get exposure. Yeah.

Gavin Tye:

So I'm going to develop, that's one of the big rocks that I want to, one of the big things I want to do now, the, the we'll talk about how I'm gonna do that later because it's one of the topics you wanna talk about is AI, but I'll talk about how I wanna do that in a way that's authentic. Sure.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Well, before we get into that, little update. So last week, we put my, the engineering team onto some research projects. So we asked them to go away and look at ticketing solutions, event websites, and registration for events and go kind of do a bit of a survey of the land. Like, what's out there?

Mitchell Davis:

How are people pricing these things? What's the functionality, etcetera, and give you and I some stuff to think about so that when it comes time for us to start building those features, we've already got it. We got the layered plan.

Gavin Tye:

Right?

Mitchell Davis:

And so, they've completed that work and and done a pretty, pretty good job. So that was awesome. It was fun to get them away from just writing code. Like, didn't write any code for a week basically. And I think they appreciated that it was a bit more it was novel, you know, it was something different.

Mitchell Davis:

And it's not like we'll ask them to do this often, but I could see us asking them to do this a couple more times if we've got some other big swings that we wanna take.

Gavin Tye:

I think it's be interesting to get them to go, find it, hunt it, kill it, skin it. Right? Like from the beginning to end, like, like they do it the whole thing. Too too many hunting analogies there.

Mitchell Davis:

To Yeah. That level.

Gavin Tye:

Your little developer community that may be green or or liberal. They don't

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I it it was interesting to go from start to finish on that and then, yeah, prepare a piece of content for you and I to go and review and update the way we're thinking about certain things. Like, it's pretty cool. It's a cool cool project to have them do. So, yeah, we're not ready to execute on any of that at the moment, but I could see us starting work on ticketing in the next couple of months once we kick through some more goals for the police games, I think it makes makes total sense.

Mitchell Davis:

So, yeah, now we've got that foundation there of what's everyone else doing right now, which is awesome.

Gavin Tye:

So Yep.

Mitchell Davis:

Well, credit to the team.

Gavin Tye:

And speaking of your little little developer community, shout out to Michael Dorinda from LaraCon who has offered up two seats at the very end on the left for your talk for the audience.

Mitchell Davis:

No, I think they were in the second row.

Gavin Tye:

Oh, okay. Promised a little buy ticket. So you have to be going anyway, but he will flag it off as a little VIP section.

Mitchell Davis:

I think he might've meant that for you mate, to be clear. Okay.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. V I l v I l, very important listeners. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. That's right. Yep. Yeah. So that was nice.

Mitchell Davis:

It's good to know that, people people are listening, which is which is nice. Anyway, then on my side of the fence, I've been working on the new design of the mobile app. So, we are undergoing a massive change to the mobile app to support all of the community led features that we are implementing now. Some we've already implemented, but the on the back end, there's no design for it in the mobile app. Yep.

Mitchell Davis:

So I've been using this as an opportunity to update us to using Liquid Glass on the latest versions of iOS and then just kind of rethinking our design and having our app have more opinions on like, okay, this is how we want any given event inside of the app to look and taking away some of the customization options that we've got at the moment for events. So to give a little more context, like currently event organizers, they can go configure like, I think it's 11 or 12 different colors that appear in different spots through the app. And that's like, okay, change the way that buttons look or the way that cards look or screen backgrounds or whatever. And it's like, it served us pretty well, but it makes it impossible to design an app that feels cohesive and like connected from screen one to screen two. It's not for

Gavin Tye:

the masses. Right? Like if it was just for one app at a time, then they could muck around with it. Yeah. Get it.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Exactly. Doesn't work

Gavin Tye:

if we're trying to facilitate the community growth or something like that. So it's easy. Yeah. I understand.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. So, it's going really well, and I'm enjoying having that freedom to put in some of my design style, like, my thoughts into it instead of just going, well, okay, this is the this is how the car body should be structured, but the paint choices are entirely up to the event organiser. Sure. You know? Now I get to go, okay, the car's black and you can add a red stripe here if you want, you know, or something like that.

Mitchell Davis:

Right? And that it feels heaps better. And, at the same time as making these changes, I'm now getting a lot more familiar with using, the native, like, native elements. These are they're called like SwiftUI elements for iOS at least.

Gavin Tye:

Of course.

Mitchell Davis:

Well, you know this, but for the audience. And, and I'm getting a lot more familiar with, like, some of the native things that you can do on an iPhone app. And it's going really well. I'm having a ball with it. It it's a bit of a learning curve because things aren't always super intuitive, but it's really fun.

Mitchell Davis:

So, I've been able to redesign all of the app now basically to feel a lot more native and feel like it is has been created by Apple, which is kind of the goal that I've set for myself. And I've been showing you some things and you're like we we talked on Monday. Here's a bit of inside baseball. We talked on Monday and I didn't yet have, the screens prepared for, browsing a list of communities. And we were just kind of talking in the abstract about, okay, this is how it's roughly gonna be and and you I couldn't convey to you the design that I had in my mind.

Mitchell Davis:

And this became really this was like a bit of a sticking point because on Monday, we both we get on and I was really excited to show you some of the stuff that I'd done over the weekend with this new design. And you're like, yeah, okay. Well, these parts look good, but what's gonna be like the community area? And it turned we didn't it wasn't an argument, but like we were both we were a bit at odds with each other. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Of like, okay. I I think it should look like this and you think it should look like that. And that showed me like, okay. I don't ever really wanna go into a situation with you like that where I'm trying to show you an idea without it actually being there on the screen. We could talk about things more in the abstract, but if I'm trying to show you anything at all, I think it should probably be 80% finished instead of like 10 or 20% started.

Mitchell Davis:

Right.

Gavin Tye:

But in but what if okay. There's a couple of things there. Yep. One is maybe our conversation on Monday, maybe shifted your perspective on some things and changed how you were looking at that. Or maybe did you just ignore that and just keep going?

Mitchell Davis:

No, it, it didn't. I didn't, I didn't ignore you, but what we talked about on Monday, I've now implemented. Yeah. So what what Monday did for me was make it clear like, okay, the way to show you what I'm thinking is to just go ahead and build what I'm thinking, and then we can really quickly adapt it. Like, it's not to say, okay, hey, it's it's my way or the highway.

Mitchell Davis:

It's I don't think we can get into a conversation and look at something that doesn't yet exist and get a proper understanding of what each other's opinion is. Right. So it's so much easier if you've got something there on the screen and you go, actually, I don't like how this button looks there or whatever. Because specifically we were having trouble, talking about how we're going to display a difference between a list of events and a list of communities. And then I have built now exactly what I had in my mind on Monday in that conversation, and I've shown that to you now and you're like, yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. I see where you're going with this now that it's there instead of what we were doing on Monday where it was just like we weren't seeing each other's perspective because I wasn't able to communicate it to you. Right? And so, yeah, I think I'll take that moving forward. Now I won't just show you the second I've got something.

Mitchell Davis:

I'll sit down and make sure it's like, this is actually what I think this should be and open the door for feedback on what what already exists at that point. You know?

Gavin Tye:

I also think, yeah. Okay. But I, I don't think it's that simple. It might be seen that simple on your side of the fence, but I think part of it is as well, I've been thinking a lot about Monday and then trying to come along and I needed some time to, to actually talk that through and think it through a little bit and what it looked like. So I don't think it was a bad thing.

Gavin Tye:

I think maybe, I think maybe I was surprised at what I was going to see on Monday. I had no context of what I was walking into. And I was like, well, hang on a sec. That's a, it was different. I wasn't expecting that.

Gavin Tye:

And maybe I wasn't expecting you to do that on the weekend. I wasn't sure. Maybe I missed it. But once I could think about it and I was like, cause I've been thinking, and I've been trying to apply it to conversations that I had and some challenges that I foresee that we've got to figure out on how to present it. And then when you showed me today, I'd had a week to warm up to it, I guess.

Gavin Tye:

You probably still have, I think we'd still probably have the conversation like similar to Monday if you showed me today, but I just need time to digest it and think about it. So maybe that we take that into account is, Hey, just think about it. Just have a look at it. Just have a look at it and think about it. And then just trying to think about conceptually what I'm trying to build or what we're trying to achieve.

Gavin Tye:

And then we'll come back and come back with your thoughts. Right?

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah, sure.

Gavin Tye:

Because we can, if you can do that and then we could record it, then I could go back. Cause I wanted to have a look at it a few times during the week. And I'm like, I just I I didn't have access to it, which I'm sure it's in fireflies, but maybe that that's it. I don't know.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. We'll continue to evolve. Right. And and learn how each other work well and all that sort of stuff. But, it was just it was interesting.

Mitchell Davis:

Because we've come out of it with, I feel like a pretty strong looking app. Right? It looks good. I think it's gonna be fit for purpose and do everything that we need it to do. And and now that the structure is there, you can now add input.

Mitchell Davis:

And like we did just before we we recorded this podcast, we're going through and we're thinking like, okay, how should you be able to see a list of other communities that you're not a part of that might interest you? And then is that something like explore, you know, or something like that? And you and I are sitting down and going through and thinking through that stuff now that we've got, you know, the the painting is roughly on the canvas, and we're just gonna go in and add polish. Right? So yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

So, anyway, so that's gone really well. I'm having a blast doing this. The marketing site, the work I was doing on that has paused because I realized like I really need to get us in and moving forward on this new redesign because the work doesn't stop here as soon as this is finished. I then have to still get everything working for older versions of iOS plus Android and I don't want our Android app to feel like it was made by Apple. I want that to feel like it was made by Google you know and have it blend in natively to Android.

Mitchell Davis:

So there's still probably another six weeks or so of work to go into this, but I wanna have the the liquid glass version of the app basically done probably two weeks from now. I think that gives us enough time. So yeah.

Gavin Tye:

So So was just thinking about the police games there, like at the structure you currently have. Right? Maybe inside the word police games, there's multiple multiple communities. Communities. There's There's the American community, there's a swimming community.

Gavin Tye:

And so what the structure that you have there is, yeah, like the within that communities or connect, you have the different tab, like The US, whatever else, and they can search through sports and all that kind of stuff.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

All of those that'll be behind explore or something. And then Yep. You could just start typing in swimming or whatever or Argentina, whatever. You know, it'll come up. And then you can just go join, something like that.

Mitchell Davis:

So Yes.

Gavin Tye:

Something like that.

Mitchell Davis:

Should be pretty cool. Yep.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Okay. So now as far as that, like you said, that the development team didn't have didn't do much coding last week. When do we we're week seven weeks out, I think from the Yep. Today's a seven week update.

Gavin Tye:

So when do we get to the point and go, okay, that's going to be the police games and then show them. And then, we still gotta have that infrastructure, I think. Was that all set up? The infrastructure basically set up?

Mitchell Davis:

No. There's still there's plenty of things to do. So, we're gonna be working the whole seven weeks, I think. But, yeah, we made early progress on a bunch of things, that have kind of moved us forward, and that's what opened up that that one week gap to work on the on those research projects. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

But, yeah, work we're we're back to working on actual code now. So we're looking at, things like our splash screen, and we're also working on a a change that, I won't go into any detail on now, but basically to support offline mode. And, yeah, being able to do offline and people can go in, download the app, obviously, when they're online and then, turn off the network and it'll still function except for making changes to things. So Yep. That's a goal that we've had for the police game.

Mitchell Davis:

So that's currently what we're working on.

Gavin Tye:

So does does that offline mode need to be done now or can it be closer to the games because we're not expecting them to be offline anytime? Or is that just

Mitchell Davis:

something It's it's something that's like all I've asked, Martin to do is a proof of concept for now to get an understanding of like, okay, when it is time to do this, what is it gonna look like? Because we might wanna make some of those changes now. Yep. If it is the beast that I think it will be, it requires a bit of a like a complete rewrite of the mobile app. All of the screens will stay the same, but the way we get data into those screens will be fundamentally different.

Mitchell Davis:

So we'll talk more about that separately. As far as actually delivering this for the police games, we're still very much on track for this phase one. And then I'd be ready to show them within a couple weeks to start showing them the, like these screens, the new design and everything, but we're not gonna be giving them a test flight version before the seven week mark. Yeah. Like, that's when they get internally, they get that version.

Mitchell Davis:

So we got a full seven weeks until then. Right? And then we've added a two week buffer so that it's middle of August and that's when the apple actually go out. That gives them time to do testing and us to make us to do our testing, make any last minute changes, all that sort of thing. So the timeline is right.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. It's Okay. Seven weeks. Sure. So we're good there.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Cool. Alright. Okay. So final piece.

Mitchell Davis:

I've got a hypothesis that AI is making us dumber. And Okay. Explain where this thanks, mate. I was just gonna leave it at that and end the episode, if that's okay.

Gavin Tye:

See you next week, everyone.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. But I I guess, if you're asking me to, I'll I'll explain further. So I've been thinking lately about how we internally in our team, how we communicate with each other, Right? And how AI plays a part in that. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

So so I asked the guys when I gave them these tasks, I said, hey. You know, go and conduct this research. Use AI. They haven't done anything wrong, to be clear. This this is not a shitting on them.

Mitchell Davis:

But the reports that were returned back were obviously AI generated. Right? And it got me thinking about, is this something I can trust? Like these reports, this research, is it something that I can trust? Because we all know like the, you know, Chad GPT and all these models, like they just they do make stuff up, and they'll just go down a path without thinking about other other approaches.

Mitchell Davis:

Right? And the task that I gave them was, yes, use AI to produce a report, but I want your brain to actually think about this like the given project. Okay. Ticketing. How would you go about building ticketing?

Mitchell Davis:

You know, something like that. Don't just rely on the LLM to do the job. Right. And then it extends into other areas as well. Like, I've asked my team to write me comments on any of the tickets that we do in linear whenever they, go through and finished up on something for the day or they complete a given ticket, ask them to just write up a comment of like, hey, okay, this is how I implemented it.

Mitchell Davis:

This is why I did this, etcetera. Instead of just, you know, hey, cursor or Claude or whatever, go build this ticket and then submit a pull request. Right? I wanna actually know that they put thought and care into this thing. So I've asked them to slow down.

Mitchell Davis:

You and I sat down and I I ran all this past you prior to me asking them. I've asked them to slow down and go, okay. Anything that like you would have got done previously, take twice as long with it. Let's halve our speed and make sure that the quality is there, but also that like they're not just pumping out code, you know, and I give them something and they come back in an hour without having really thought about it. I'm not okay with that.

Mitchell Davis:

I'm not. It's not the sort of business that I wanna be involved in or lead at least on the tech side. And, yeah, it had kind of been getting me down a bit. I don't like how much we rely on these AIs now to communicate with each other. And so I'm really pleased with that we've turned off on both of our accounts at least on LinkedIn.

Mitchell Davis:

Like, we turned off the posting just pure like AI generated stuff because it wasn't working. People weren't responding well to it. And the plan was for me to start creating my own posts on LinkedIn and doing that like at least once a week. And so far I've failed to do that. I did the LaraCon announcement last week and then I haven't posted this week.

Mitchell Davis:

And, it's not out of laziness or anything. It's just it is harder to write authentically and to think about, okay, what do I actually wanna talk about and what's my perspective? And and then sitting down and actually doing it versus just like, hey, chat GPT, give me a LinkedIn post, you know, and it's done in two seconds. So I feel like we're all becoming a little dumber, definitely lazier with the rise of AI, and it's not going away. And I don't want it to.

Mitchell Davis:

Certainly can save us a lot of time on doing stuff that we don't wanna do. But it is a bummer to me. Anytime I see something that's like, this is just someone just phoning it in, you know, instead of their actual thoughts on something. So why don't I let you jump in now? What do you think?

Gavin Tye:

So a couple of things that you said there is you want people to care about their work. Right? Yep. I don't think we can make people care about their work. I just think some people would just work for places to put money on the table.

Gavin Tye:

Right. But some people will care. I think you can't force people to care about anything. Right. Some people get in relationships and they don't care about their partner.

Gavin Tye:

Right. I think care is a personal thing. We don't have any control over. I think, the other thing as well is I think about AI in a slightly different way. I don't think our brains turn off or my brain certainly doesn't turn off.

Gavin Tye:

I don't go, oh, AI, like I don't have to, I don't have to do anything anymore. I do get lazy from it. And I ask it to, I have asked it to think for me before, and then it hasn't really done a good job. Do. And I haven't learned that lesson.

Gavin Tye:

So I do think, I think using it the right way, we've got to make sure we use it the right way that is authentic to us. When we spoke about it this week, I did think, like, I always try to get back to models that I know. Right. And the speed quality cost triangle is one that come up when we had a conversation. Right.

Gavin Tye:

You can, you can have speed, but you can't have cost if you want quality. Right. Or if you want costs, cheaper costs, can't have, and speed, you can't have quality. Right. You always sacrifice one.

Gavin Tye:

Right. But I do think one thing that I think AI is not good at is coming up with new ideas. Right. But it's really good at researching. Like I know that you mentioned about the research projects for the team.

Gavin Tye:

They've researched, like I think AI is good for research, but asking them how to develop something or implement that research is a different task. Right. That's a different thing. Where they may be, where they have more influence or more capability to be able to show me how you would start building it out. I think, yes, we can be lazy from it and I've been lazy.

Gavin Tye:

But we just gotta be careful that that doesn't happen. That we don't fall into that lazy part. Like for instance, with the develop, like that six month marketing project, I will talk to it and I'll like, it's my original idea. Like, and I want to make sure, going back to that quality cost triangle, I think we are responsible for the quality output of the, of the AI agent. Right.

Gavin Tye:

And I don't think that there's, I'm saying, Hey, this is what I want to achieve. This is what I'm thinking. These are the current other bits of content. I think we can pull out weekly from each bit. Like, what am I missing that have you seen others do that maybe we could make more content and it could go, doing this.

Gavin Tye:

Well, you could do this very easily. I'd go, oh great. I never thought about it like that. Okay. And then doing the interviews and then having it help structure an output for something a lot easier.

Gavin Tye:

And I don't think that, yes, it's writing it, but it's coming from an original idea. Right? Like the sales market fit white paper that I wrote back a few years ago was an 8,000 word piece of content that I originally wrote. It was before ChatGPT was around, but I use that now as a baseline of knowledge that I extract with AI, but I'm comfortable that it's original, it's derived from original content. If that makes sense.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Absolutely. So I don't necessarily think it's doom and gloom. And like, what I meant before is my brain doesn't turn off. It just allows me to think about more things and a different level of thinking.

Gavin Tye:

Whereas I liken it back to when we were hunters and gatherers, all we were thinking about is just eating and, our next meal is when we started farming, then we could actually start putting our brain to other things. And I think that will always be the case, but lazy people will use AI lazily. Right. Right. To, to be lazy.

Gavin Tye:

And I, and I do understand what you're saying around that.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I'm just not okay with with that laziness. Like, I think I I have a problem with laziness. Sure. And it's tricky to get around because absolutely first one to put my hand up and go, yeah, sometimes I'll just use whatever chat GBT will give me on certain things.

Mitchell Davis:

Like, I'm I'm a culprit too. 100%. And I will continue to be. And that's okay. Like, I'm I'm human.

Mitchell Davis:

Right? But just in general, I don't like the idea of like with internal communication or like stuff like like these the research things like Yep. Yep. I just wanna be able to trust that the person who wrote this put thought and care into whatever we're producing and telling each other.

Gavin Tye:

Okay. So the other remember I told you I wrote a white pay a white paper and then I got some feedback from Chris? I met him. I spoke to him afterwards. I said, can I ask you a question?

Gavin Tye:

And I was like, did you put the GPT, the white paper into a GPT and then ask, and then ask for a response? He said, no, no. I gave it the response that I wanted to say, but I used GPT to make it easier for you to understand. So we, so I could give you the right message. And I was like, okay, that's, but then again, that's not being lazy.

Gavin Tye:

That's care.

Mitchell Davis:

Right? You're right. Yes. In that case it is.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. But I also think that there is a nuance and I understand what you're saying. Maybe we have, maybe we have in our business, we implement for any internal communication, but then I don't think this works saying it out loud that we don't use AI to communicate with each other, but that's unfair for the team in The Philippines because they may not be confident to write in our language. Yeah.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. It's a difficult one. There's, there's no like said answer. Right. There's no, I'm not looking to change the world here.

Mitchell Davis:

It's just something that I've, I've felt internally over the last couple months of like, God, it just kind of, kinda sucks that, like, there are it's hard to trust what people say.

Gavin Tye:

Sure.

Mitchell Davis:

I find. That's how I feel.

Gavin Tye:

Being hard to trust what people say.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. But at least you knew it was what they said. Right? They wrote out on a keyboard. They wrote you an email, you know, or something like that.

Mitchell Davis:

Unless they copied it verbatim from somewhere else. Right? It was their brain. And and now you can't trust that. And it just kind of sucks in my opinion.

Gavin Tye:

Sure. Anyway, it But in, but in saying, like going back to your, like full circle back to what you wrote about, what you said before about your LinkedIn post, there's lots of different, like you do get analysis paralysis. Like you always, you get it, especially around this stuff. This is not the first time that you've, I reckon we've had this conversation probably 12 times. Right.

Gavin Tye:

At least, but you do have original thoughts. Like some of the original thoughts were that we had is, Hey, around onboarding, offshore people, like you could say to it saying, Hey, I want to write a post this about this. When we had an issue with onboarding the Philippines team, we had these issues in the different regions and this is specifically the issue. This is specifically what we did. These five things.

Gavin Tye:

And I really think it's valuable to let other people know who are onboarding an offshore team. Can you help me structure this in a way that feels like I'm saying it? I think that is perfectly fine to use AI because it's from your original thought.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. I don't know. I think we differ there. Yeah. Like

Gavin Tye:

Well, well, what's better? Not writing it or having it, not having that out there or or having something out there that's helped you write it?

Mitchell Davis:

I think you think one way very struggling on that. I don't know that I you like, it's obvious. You think, yeah, it's better to just have it out there. I'm saying, I don't know if that's the case. Like, I you know, it's something that I'm struggling with myself of yeah, I just don't know.

Mitchell Davis:

I really hate that now everything is so AI generated and it's just yeah, look, I should, I don't think we're going to uncover any, any more nuggets here.

Gavin Tye:

But I do think like there's a difference here between AI generated, which is generating something from nothing, some from somewhere else or AI assisted in helping you form your thoughts. Like you could say something like, Hey, I don't want you to pull any other information in from any other resource. I just want you to use solely what I'm going to tell you what I did. And I want you to structure it in a way that is written in my voice. Like I don't like, but I think when they talk about this with software development and it's better to have something out that's 70 then instead of waiting, it's a 100% because you just never release it.

Gavin Tye:

Yeah. Right. But if you're coming from a premise of don't worry about like, what's the reason for doing it? Maybe it's to help someone that's going through an issue now onboarding a team. And then maybe if they read that it could save them some time.

Gavin Tye:

Like, but if you wait till you write it and it takes three months, you could have not helped 10 people.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. I yeah. I can see your perspective. I just

Gavin Tye:

because it's like I

Mitchell Davis:

don't think I have, I just don't think I have any more to add to this. I don't. Yeah. But yeah. Anyway.

Mitchell Davis:

Okay. Well, talk

Gavin Tye:

to AI, get your thoughts, and come back.

Mitchell Davis:

That's right. Yeah. I'll ask my AI what to think for me, and then we'll talk about it. Alright, mate. Anything else before we wrap up?

Gavin Tye:

No. That's it. I just think you're too hard on yourself with that. Like and if you're not getting the quality of output that you want or it's not in the level that you want on your side of the fence, then then put steps into, take action to make sure you do. But there's also a fine line between no output and like no result and being something that you're comfortable with.

Gavin Tye:

Right. There is a margin there that you gotta figure out, I think.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Well, that's, I, I have already started working on some of that with the team to bring it back down to the ground floor. Yep. Started working with the team on, okay, these are areas that I think we could use AI in, and these are ones that we shouldn't. Yep.

Mitchell Davis:

And, yeah, changing the process. So I I am doing that.

Gavin Tye:

Yep. Could you maybe try that what I mentioned before, just as an exercise with no intention to publish it? Like just talk through that experience. If you can remember onboarding the team and just say, Hey, look, I'm just going to tell you what happened and just, can you write it from my perspective? Don't don't have expectation of publishing it and just see if that makes you feel more comfortable because it's all your original thought.

Gavin Tye:

Right. And it gets you over your writer's block, which is a real thing that you have.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. I, problem that I have with it is that it's the computer telling me what to set. I don't like that.

Gavin Tye:

But not if you record, like you record to it. Like, it's not your saying it's your words. They're just structuring it in a way. It's all your, it's like going paying a copywriter to reword what you've, what you've written. It's I don't think it's the same thing.

Gavin Tye:

I think that's a similar thing.

Mitchell Davis:

Yeah. Yeah. It is. Anyway, alright. I'm gonna wrap that up now.

Mitchell Davis:

So, hopefully, there was some nugget in here that the the listener got out of it. Mate, where can people find you online?

Gavin Tye:

On LinkedIn. Gavin Tye, t y e. You, mate? Excellent.

Mitchell Davis:

You can find me at Mitch Dev, couple other places. You can also find us on school. We are the Community Builders Network, and I'll have a link for all of that in the show notes for you. And hope you have a good week. Thanks, mate.