Our B2B SaaS Journey

In this episode, Mitchell and Gavin get ready for the Marinas event, unpack a very busy week of sales meetings, rethink their LinkedIn strategy, and work through the product, marketing, and sales roadmap leading into the World Police and Fire Games launch window in August.

Links

Chapters
  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (01:05) - Fitness, accountability, and morning routines
  • (03:29) - Marinas is almost live
  • (08:10) - Event support and customer service expectations
  • (13:01) - Nine meetings in one week
  • (13:59) - Using DealBuddi and Gamma for proposals
  • (20:13) - Rethinking the LinkedIn strategy
  • (29:21) - Building a sales dashboard
  • (34:05) - Cold outreach and new sales channels
  • (37:40) - Mitch stole Gavin’s big idea
  • (40:41) - Everything changes in August
  • (44:34) - Rebuilding the marketing website
  • (46:57) - Turning changelogs into feature and use case pages
  • (53:00) - Scheduled notifications, voting, and dev updates

In this episode, we cover:
  • Mitchell’s attempt to get back into fitness, and Gavin’s suspiciously productive morning routine
  • The upcoming Marinas event, and what it has taught us about onboarding larger events
  • Why hands-on customer support still matters when you are bootstrapping a SaaS
  • Gavin’s nine sales meetings in one week, and what that says about the new lead generation motion
  • Using DealBuddi and Gamma to quickly produce a professional proposal
  • The difference between strategic white papers and lighter proposal decks
  • What we are learning from LinkedIn content, and why the strategy is changing
  • Moving SixSides-focused posts to the company page
  • Building personal founder audiences through build in public posts
  • Creating a sales dashboard to track effort, pipeline, and revenue
  • The cost and strategy behind thoughtful cold outreach
  • Mitch accidentally rediscovering Gavin’s Canva integration idea
  • The August roadmap for the World Police and Fire Games
  • Preparing the SixSides marketing website for a potential spike in attention
  • Turning changelog entries into feature pages, use case pages, and industry pages
  • Using AI tools to improve product marketing and website design
  • Shipping scheduled notifications and live voting for events
  • Why August could become a major turning point for SixSides
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.

Speaker 1:

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

Speaker 2:

I'm Gavin Tye, CEO and sales and marketing and slash operations. No.

Speaker 1:

Really? What? You're off I suppose. Yeah. Between the two of us.

Speaker 1:

You're you're a bit of the every you're the everything that I'm on.

Speaker 2:

No. No. I mean operations is in, as in reporting and doing all that stuff. Not operations on building six sides. Sorry.

Speaker 2:

Client facing No.

Speaker 1:

No. No. Yeah. No. Oh, you keep the you keep it running behind the scenes.

Speaker 1:

I'll just I'll sit in my corner and build the stuff, and you go make it run. That's what I'm after. We are into year two of running a remote starter, 6sides.co, which is a community led events platform focused on events, I guess. I gotta update my intro script. We're documenting both the business and tech of our journey as we build our SaaS.

Speaker 1:

How are you, mate?

Speaker 2:

I'm very well, mate. I'm very well. This is where I would typically throw to you and say, how are you? But we're not gonna do that today.

Speaker 1:

No. Instructions.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. We're gonna talk about no. Everything's going really well, mate. I've had a good week on, doing fitness stuff. I'm sore as held today, as buggery, as an Australian saying.

Speaker 2:

Yep. But yeah, everything's going, going pretty good. What about yourself, Mitchell Davis?

Speaker 1:

Mate, I'm pretty good too. Thank you for asking. It's very nice of you. I did wanna I put in fitness here because I gotta own up. I've been a real lazy bone since coming back from Tassie and I I'm yet to go out for even a single walk.

Speaker 1:

So I'm putting it out here into the universe and I'm asking everyone to hold me accountable that I'm back on. So I have started to drink a little on a more social basis and I'm going to widen that back in. And then I'm also going to start up with the exercise. So I will report back next week after having done, let's say four walks. That's my Yeah.

Speaker 1:

I don't have to do it every single day. I mean, that would be good, but I don't it's a pain in the ass. And honestly, lately the weather's been pretty shitty at night and that like, yeah, if it's rainy and stuff, that's a no bueno for me. So we will see. But anyway, four walks.

Speaker 1:

I'm gonna do them by the time we record next week.

Speaker 2:

Did it make you feel bad today when I called you and almost let through your alarm and already done an hour at the gym and gone for a

Speaker 1:

It didn't make me feel bad. I was just like

Speaker 2:

It would do.

Speaker 1:

No. I we I was racing to quickly get ready because we had a 08:30 meeting where the person didn't even get there till, like, 08:45 anyway, so it didn't matter. But you were like, mate, you texted me. Can we hop on a quick call just to catch up before this thing? And then I'm like, you're yapping on the phone about lots of stuff.

Speaker 1:

And I was like, I need to get in the shower so I'm not late for this meeting. I ended up being FaceTime.

Speaker 2:

It was fine.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe next time. After I lose a bit more weight. And, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Anyway to the next level.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Well, that's right. That's yeah. Exactly. Alright.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about marinas. So it's happening next week.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Monday, Tuesday next week. Yeah. We've got a big day. It's it's a, we've, we've added a heap more functionality since our last conference and, Sylvia shout out to Sylvia, from Marina, she's built out six sides amazingly and it it's awesome.

Speaker 2:

So I think there's over 60 exhibitors and sponsors. There's, there's a loan, 180 employees for those businesses that are already in the platform. Right. So, we've learned a lot, on what to do for the next, next, clients, but, next, next events, but yeah, it's, yeah, it's come up really well. It's come up really well.

Speaker 2:

I think she's really happy. Looks great. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. It looks great. She's added logos for all of them. So there's like some nice visuals in there. The background of the event looks good too.

Speaker 1:

It's a nice theme and yeah, it's really fleshed out already and hasn't even the thing's still three days away as at the time that we're recording. So it's going really well. So I'm excited to see what that number gets to, because I don't actually know. How many people do they have going?

Speaker 2:

Well, I think there's about 400, but that's not including exhibitors. So, well, I wouldn't think that that's including that. Right. That's 400 paying tickets.

Speaker 1:

So,

Speaker 2:

I would expect we're going to get upwards of 600, like probably I'm just looking at while we're, while we're chatting, I'm going have a look see how many are in there at the I

Speaker 1:

think that might be our biggest event then if we do get

Speaker 2:

that Yeah. All right. Two zero nine people are in there at the moment.

Speaker 1:

Yep. Yeah. Okay. Great. So let's see.

Speaker 2:

Summary that is two zero nine people over three days, 37 sessions and 59 sponsors.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Big event. Done well. Yep.

Speaker 1:

And it was great. We, we caught up with, their team, this week earlier on in the week, and we've got to catch up with them later this afternoon as well. We got some new functionality rolled out for them, which we'll talk about later in the episode, which is really exciting and has pushed us forward. And then we're actually rolling out some more today. And, again, I'll talk through that.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, a couple things getting rolled out for marinas, and it's it's been really good. They've been lovely the whole time. Yep. So, yeah, so shout out Marinas.

Speaker 2:

Been interesting. When did they say yes to us? It was before Christmas. Right? I think it was late last year.

Speaker 1:

Yes. It was. Yeah. Can we win two more customers before Christmas? Episode 41.

Speaker 1:

And the very first item on the list was marinas 26. So

Speaker 2:

How did

Speaker 1:

you

Speaker 2:

how did you find that so fast? It was like three finger taps.

Speaker 1:

I just control f on Trello, marinas, and then it came up.

Speaker 2:

There you go. How about that? So smart people out there like people out there, it's not how smart you are. It's how quick you can have fun use a shortcut.

Speaker 1:

That's right. Well, last last week, I was, it was inferred I was a bit of a dumbass. So I'm I'm just proving myself to you this episode.

Speaker 2:

You just proved that you can do shortcuts if we're gonna be honest. Oh, okay. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Work work work harder, not work smarter, not harder, mate.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. But then you've released functionality where you redeem yourself later. So that's pretty cool. So yeah, like it's been, it's interesting when they, people give you the, go ahead and then it's quite, quite, quite a little bit, and then it's full on in the last month, which is what it's been. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Everyone's like that. So yeah. You're you're going to this event, right, on on Monday and Tuesday or just a Monday?

Speaker 2:

I'll go Monday and I'll go for the first morning part of Tuesday, I think until they don't need me anymore. But I think I'm going, up there in the welcome address and then giving a housekeeping, presentation on how to use the app. So, yeah, they've asked me if I'd do it. I don't know if that's changed. I could have, but if it's it's a great opportunity to be able to get in front of people if I can.

Speaker 1:

Let's find that out, of the call today. If, if that's still happening, you should probably know about that and have it prepped, if it is.

Speaker 2:

Oh, I was just gonna make it up. Oh, no. I've already given them, I've already given them slides. I've already yeah. So I've already done everything, on what

Speaker 1:

to do. Okay.

Speaker 2:

So, but yeah, it's, it's exciting. It's, and it's, it's on the Gold Coast. I'll be able to go down there. So, It's fantastic. So,

Speaker 1:

yeah. So fingers crossed that'll all go well. I'll be here to support you in case there's any dramas, of course, but not expecting there to be.

Speaker 2:

It does bring up something that, I think that cause we don't have it's, it's running largely, on, by itself at the moment with people. Yep. Right. Yep. We did have someone on what's today, Friday, Wednesday night chat.

Speaker 2:

They come into the chat on, on, cause we've got HubSpot on our website and they said, Hey, this is really important, blah, blah, blah. Right. And they had a problem with their, their profile. Right. Yep.

Speaker 2:

Also, I think they emailed us as well. I think we need to probably just have something like with both of us be although we expect things not to happen and issues not to happen, but have our phone or our computer with us that if something does happen, we can log in and fix it if we need to. I think the guy was largely unreasonable. He was saying it's urgent. It's a matter of life and death.

Speaker 2:

I'm like, calm down, mate. Like, but,

Speaker 1:

still is in one of the, I think he's a bit of a feature at this event. Is he? Relates to yeah. Relates to one of the features that we're gonna talk about later in the app. So I think that's probably why.

Speaker 2:

Oh, he's oh, okay. Right. So, but I think we do need to either if it's okay until we can get our team up and running. Cause they can run later in the night because of what they're doing. But we might just have to man the areas that they're going to come to us either by email or by HubSpot and, be able to jump in and rectify stuff if we need to.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. If that's, if that's possible because the conferences on Monday, I would expect a lot of these people are largely going to sign up Saturday, Sunday night. Right. We might have some issues there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, potentially. I mean, to date, I think we've had a grand total of three support emails ever. Yes. We have a couple thousand people in the platform. It's not like we get much support.

Speaker 1:

But, yes, I I agree, and I hear what you're really asking me is, okay, Mitch, can we be I know it's I know you mean both of us. I get you. But, yes, like, you're asking, okay, can we be available like on weekends and stuff if we are around? Can we just get on and do it? Because it's it's not my way.

Speaker 1:

I typically would wait until I'm back in the office, you know, but I get that you have expectations of like this level of customer service and that's a differentiator for us. So yes, I can do that.

Speaker 2:

I just feel like, like, yeah. So I don't do it on the weekends. If I go out, I don't take my laptop, but I and I don't expect to use it, but it the issue that happened the other day was fixed within two seconds. But only you and I could have done it or Sylvia could have done it and he's just come to up. So, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Anyway, I just think until we can figure that out and, that it'll be the otherwise they're gonna, you know, that squeaky wheel thing fixes like blah, blah, blah, blah stuff. Yep. Squeaky wheel.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's fantastic. That is the biggest bed shit I've ever seen.

Speaker 2:

The what? The biggest what?

Speaker 1:

The bed shit. Shitting the bed. Just the it just, like, gave up on the experience.

Speaker 2:

Trailed off. I started thinking about other things. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's fantastic. Anyway, yes. I let's do that. I think that'll be fine. So is there anything else for marinas that's on your mind?

Speaker 1:

Oh, I had to send you up the banner. We've got one of those, like, pull up banners you see in conference lobbies. Had to send you that. And, I was remarking that it's pretty cool that within less than twenty four hours, it was at your door, right, from my post office. Like, super cool how that can happen.

Speaker 1:

You know? It's different in the like and sure. That's normal now and whatever. It's been around for thirty years. But, like, I send an email, it goes instantly.

Speaker 1:

Right? But I can send you a metre long pull up banner and within less than twenty four hours, it's there at your door. It costs

Speaker 2:

me. Wow.

Speaker 1:

It costs the business like $22 to do that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. That is amazing. That is amazing. You think they would have something like express post for that? That's

Speaker 1:

yeah. All right. All right, mate. All right. Come on.

Speaker 1:

What is this? The payout Mitch hour? Come on.

Speaker 2:

Well, anyway.

Speaker 1:

All right. Let's talk about you had a lot of meetings this week.

Speaker 2:

Well, I mentioned in a, I think two weeks ago that the team is starting to produce results, right, for lead generation way quicker than what I, that I would have anticipated. Right. But anyway, we, we have got there. So this week my calendar has been full. Like I've got nine meetings this week, like an average of two a day, for, for clients.

Speaker 2:

And some of these are updating him on functionality that you rolled out this week to get them interested to use as well, to try to sell on that functionality. We're making a very specific play for a very specific, competitor, which I think, which we've just nullified basically. But yeah, no, it's been really good. Like one is a, like a, a world summit and, I use deal buddy, which we're going to jump again, to another topic here, but I use, took the meeting transcript we had with this guy and then put it into deal buddy and create a, created a strategic brief with pricing really quickly. And then put it into gamma within about 30.

Speaker 2:

I was able to create a professional, proposal. Like that was very strategic. I was like, fucking this is amazing. Like that's a new process to, to make proposals, to be honest. It was great.

Speaker 2:

So yeah. Was awesome.

Speaker 1:

It did look really good. It's not to the same level of detail as the white papers that you've prepared before.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Because I really I think those are amazing.

Speaker 2:

Right?

Speaker 1:

Yep. And it's it's basically all text. Like you yes. You add a couple screenshots and you do some themes and stuff, but like it's 99% text in those. And I was curious about your approach.

Speaker 1:

Does this proposals in Gamma replace the white papers or is

Speaker 2:

No, it doesn't. Think about that conversation that we had with this individual. We didn't have the rapport with him. I don't think that he would sit down and read an eight page white paper. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Right. So he wasn't asking for that. Like he was just doing assessments on businesses around like, like us to see what they would use. I made a call that you have to educate them on something and get them go, oh, that's amazing. Go, well, let me put that in a white paper so you can share it with others.

Speaker 2:

He wasn't at that spot.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yep. So this is another tool in the belt that's for lower touch or even after preparing a white paper, if the situation calls for it. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And they go, oh, wow, this is great. Let's get a proposal. And this is how you could present those.

Speaker 2:

Well, go back to the word police games. Yeah. You would take that and then put that into that strategic into that brief, like pricing brief around the stages and stuff. So, yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Like, it does look it looks aesthetically amazing. And it did have some really specific things that we spoke about. Why choose six sides and this, the approach that we would take. But yeah, the, the, it's not an education piece. It's kind of a justification piece really.

Speaker 2:

Right? So I don't, I would still like to do, depending on what that team is, you would probably do one later on for the world, like the whole foundation that's a that's global. Right. Or for the civil contractors federation national body for, for how they would do that. Like that strategic brief, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

That's not educating anybody.

Speaker 1:

No, no. It's, it's presenting a nice dollar figure basically.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Correct. And and there's somewhat justification based on our summary, like our value proposition and what we would like to do. Yep. As far

Speaker 1:

as that cool to me that you're on all this stuff, by the way. Like, it's your job. Yes. It's your area of expertise. Yes.

Speaker 1:

It's obvious. Right?

Speaker 2:

You're on my block today, mate. Have you had any, any any any substances that we should know of? You're in love with the the post office. Now you're in like,

Speaker 1:

it's just really cool. Like to get to see you do all this stuff. And, you know, like I it took us a while to get to this point. It took a whole year, you know, basically just a lot of, yeah, I've got a lot of irons in the fire, but there wasn't, it wasn't, we weren't there yet. Right.

Speaker 1:

Cause the app wasn't there yet either. Like we weren't, we weren't ready. Now it feels like we're more ready and I'm getting to see you just like, just smashing through some of these things like it's nothing and it's really sick. Like it's cool to have you doing all this, you know? And I don't know half of what you're doing like, but it's great.

Speaker 1:

It's getting results.

Speaker 2:

It's fantastic. Half of what you're doing.

Speaker 1:

So it's just That's right. You caught me the other day. I was playing a mobile a game on my phone. I was playing Rocket League because I I was waiting for Cursor to finish doing something. Alright?

Speaker 1:

I was. And then I was like, alright. I'm just gonna go on my phone for a couple minutes. And then you called me and I was like, just hang on a sec. I'm in a game.

Speaker 1:

I'll let me yeah. So Yeah. Anyway. But

Speaker 2:

the I guess the main, like, you never know. I kind of in the beginning where, think about for people who aren't in Australia, there's some famous explorers called Burke and Wills that were Australian, like the Australian explorers. Right. What we're doing is yes, we kind of know the direction we want to head in, but we're really don't know what we need until we get to an obstacle. And then we build that tool and then we go, okay.

Speaker 2:

Now when we see a similar obstacle, we can get over that tool a lot quicker, If that makes sense. So I know where we're going, but then I just build the tool as we get there and go, oh, that worked well. Let's put that in there. Put that in our, our, toolbox. So same as a lady she canceled, she goes, can you send me a one pager?

Speaker 2:

I'm like, oh fuck, we don't have a one pager. So I built the one, wrote the content for the one pager and thank God the image engine on GPT is so much better. It built us a 80% good quality one pager based on the content. And I just put it in Canva and edited the final 20%. And it looks, that looks awesome as well.

Speaker 1:

It does. Yeah, it does.

Speaker 2:

But that's all largely based off the work that you're doing. Oh, please,

Speaker 1:

please.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So it's all tying in together. And I'm so lucky, Mitch, that we're doing this together.

Speaker 1:

Come on. Come on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. We're right. I've had a pill as well. No.

Speaker 1:

Alright. LinkedIn. So we've got here, we've had some, we've had some thoughts, right, about LinkedIn, looking at the posts that the team are coming up with for us, and we're wanting to slightly change the strategy so that those posts are instead coming from the Six Sides company account because it feels a little well, why don't you explain why we're doing that?

Speaker 2:

So the most important thing when the team so I'm always thinking in the strategy first and the principles first before anything else, before we do anything on the ground. Right. The number one thing that we needed to do when we started, when we got the team working was in there's there's only three levers that you can pull to get better at something, right, of of sales, of lead generation, really, mostly anything, which is you can either increase your you gotta increase your effort, increase your skill, or target better people. Right? So the most important thing to do there, the easiest thing to do in that first of the three is increase our effort.

Speaker 2:

Cause we weren't doing any LinkedIn posting. I post religiously for my clients and the other part of the business, but for myself, don't do it. Right? So as soon as we got the level of posting up for both of us, then we had a chance to look back and assess and go, is this what we want LinkedIn to be saying about us? And for you, it was predominantly six sides focus, which after a while I was like, that doesn't belong on your LinkedIn.

Speaker 2:

Not all the time that belongs on our company page. Right? And then on myself in particular, cause cause I have deal buddy and six sides and I'm very active on LinkedIn. Well, not as active because we got other people to post, but I'm on there all the time. It was disingenuous and feels like it's there was friction there when I was talking about events and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yet the next post was talking about creating demand. If you didn't close a sale, like it's two different audiences and I wouldn't want people who I'm talking to about six sides to go, oh, he's just trying to game me about something, or he's put me in a sales process. It, it, I fear it would break rapport. So they belong, they're amazing posts. They just don't belong in our profile.

Speaker 2:

So we're going to redistribute those to our linked, our six sides page, which we haven't looked at for ages. Ray is going to update the banner and all that kind of stuff, about, and then she's going, we're gonna get the team to invite 50 people to the page a week. We're gonna actively build up the followers on both pages. And then, then we're gonna post to those pages and then you're going to post stuff in your voice that you want So

Speaker 1:

what are you going to start posting? Then what about

Speaker 2:

community, about building community and the importance of community, maybe highlighting some community leaders or some great work other community organizations are doing to help bring light to, I think there's an actual, is altruistic motive behind that? I don't know if that's the right word, but I feel like there's so much stuff online these days about left and right, about opposition to things like there's always a left and right thing. There's not that many people trying to bring community together. And so I want to try to highlight the community and just talk about the good things that people do. Right.

Speaker 2:

Yep. And then yes, maybe some of those people could be clients of six sites, but that's not the intention. It's just to show people that they can make an impact, I think in a community. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Check you out. Hey, wow. That's great.

Speaker 2:

Who's all loved up now? Mate, it's flowing like it's going backwards and forwards. I think that's the name of the episode. We're naturally loved up.

Speaker 1:

Just I might be doing that. So for me, my plan will be more of the build in public type stuff. So it's naturally gonna bring down the number of posts because we're at the moment we're doing three posts a week and they're all coming from Raya. So I will be actually creating these posts myself at least getting them to like 90%. No, I think I'll, I'll just be doing them in their entirety.

Speaker 1:

And I have to start coming up with some actual stuff that I want to talk about because notoriously I am not a social media user. And I just, like I've tried in the past, I just, I don't know. I feel like I struggle with finding stuff to talk about. I'm not that interested in sharing my opinion all that much, but this feels like the right move for us. So, we wanna give

Speaker 2:

your opinion on Israel on or Gaza on LinkedIn?

Speaker 1:

No, I don't. No. No, definitely not. We've playing offline before.

Speaker 2:

Piss off.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely not. I'm surprised you even know the names of those two places, mister. I don't watch the news or anything.

Speaker 2:

Mate, I am more worldly than you realize.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Right.

Speaker 2:

Couldn't point him out on that, but I know no.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, let's steer clear of that. No, I won't be posting about any of that. It'll be more the building public. I'm going to, you actually, we, we have come up with a system where, if ever we're noticing in the other person like, Hey, oh, that's something that's interesting that maybe, you know, you might just think, oh yeah, that's just like normal. This is day to day stuff.

Speaker 1:

Everybody knows about this when that's not the case. Like, we'll try and point that out to each other. And you did point out something to me, which I'll talk about later. But that already was pretty helpful. So I think I might make that one of my first posts.

Speaker 1:

So I'm setting myself a goal to try and do that, sit down on either Monday or Tuesday and just make that a regular, like weekly thing. Maybe even on the weekend because then I don't have people like no one's reaching out to me on the weekend, you know? But yeah, just spend half an hour and come up with something.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So you like, I think at your most principled level, like you like helping people. I think you're, you're very generous. Right. And I think that is probably the foundation.

Speaker 2:

Like you you'd have, we have some really interesting conversations. We've had about four of them really. One was you went through a heap of frustration onboarding The Philippines teams just because the tech or the settings were wrong from one country to different and wasn't necessarily documented easily for people to uncover. So that would be so helpful for people to know how would I get over that if I bought on a, person from, I just wouldn't be able to, I don't know how I would be able to navigate that.

Speaker 1:

You just work through the problem. Like it it's not, it's not like, oh, I came out with a miracle solution. It's just like, okay. It document your stuff is the is the real key here. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Have a plan of how to actually get someone new into the code base before you hire.

Speaker 2:

That's fine. Well, so I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. But, I think what the lessons you've gone through might be really useful for people.

Speaker 2:

And there's also, we've, what you're going to, I'm sure we're going to talk about linear. You've had to meet, you tried to educate me on some design principle stuff, which I think is, I never really thought about. You know, there's some other cool stuff that we do speak about that I think are worthy of actually posting. And then I also learned at this pitch night I went to the other night is we've got to get better at leading with our best stories online because we're, I'm humble. I don't share that stuff and we need to.

Speaker 2:

Right. So,

Speaker 1:

yeah. Yeah. I I agree. It doesn't come easily to me, to brag. That's just not who I am either, but makes sense.

Speaker 1:

We're trying to win business. We've convince people that we're worth their business. You know? Let's talk about our success stories. So

Speaker 2:

But even that I think is yes. That's a like in posting on LinkedIn under your profile, is secondary to win business for six sides. I think part of it is building your following for over the next three to five years or ten years. Well, if you can get your following to a certain amount, it will be easier for you to do whatever you wanna do later. And yes, people would naturally follow us through to six sides, but they'll also follow you for Atlas and all this other stuff.

Speaker 2:

Right? And who knows where we go in the future? Maybe we have fantastic success and then we want to start, we want to invest in companies. Right? Like, and then we have that platform to be able to do it.

Speaker 2:

Like, you know? But anyway, it's,

Speaker 1:

Better to have the followers than to not. Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

That's right. It's, you know, why biggest thing is you go down the path five years time, which I'd at Redeye and I was like, damn, I wish I actively grew my followers back then. Knew it all, but what I was saying back then is different to what I'm saying now. So yeah, sure.

Speaker 1:

Yep. Okay. So your final piece in sales land is building out your sales dashboard for reporting. So you touched on this a little bit last week, but I've seen you've shown me now. It's looking pretty good.

Speaker 1:

You've got some, you put some work in. So why don't you tell us about it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So thanks, Mitch. That's a good lead lead.

Speaker 1:

That's into, a

Speaker 2:

oh shit, the bed again. What I'm trying to do is trying to bring everything together so we can see what the lead indicators are to, like with effort and skill and all that kind of stuff and how that translate in translates one into a pipeline growth down into actual revenue generated. Now.

Speaker 1:

This is like KPIs, right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So like, if we're doing all this effort in, lead gen or we're turning on all these channels and our revenue's not growing, then we're wasting effort. We should be, we're doing it's either our efforts, not enough, our skills, good enough, or our targets aren't good enough, but we need to visually be able to see it and draw comparisons over time.

Speaker 2:

So I've been spending a lot of time, first and foremost, I visual, I had to get a visual of what our, a full strategy would look like. Yes. Some of those channels aren't turned on, but we are turning some of them on now. And so what I thought about is how our revenue's getting into the business and it's largely getting in initially through, I've coined these term, this term PER per event revenue. And then we would, hopefully we show them enough value and then they want to transfer into recurring monthly revenue for many events.

Speaker 2:

So we're starting to break that out so we can see, and that kind of leads to different strategies. How do we get from per event revenue to multiple, to monthly revenue? And then that has fed over into some other stuff that you're doing. So it's all kind of coming together, which I think is, just thinking about it now, our left and right hands are talking together and where it's a it's a very symbolic loving relationship. Isn't that nice?

Speaker 1:

We're holding hands as we walk along the beach. Yes. And I think that's good for the business. It's great. So yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yes. It is it is cool. It's really cool to see. Again, this is stuff that I would just never think about doing, and you're going off and doing it and actually, like, running a business, which is awesome. I look forward to seeing it like a couple months of work into that into those into the reporting.

Speaker 1:

Right? And seeing, okay, can we start to notice trends and things like that? It's it's too early days for that. Right? Because at this point, the team's been on for at least your side, Chris and Raya have been on for four or five weeks now, I think.

Speaker 2:

I think we've paid them twice. Okay. Well we A month.

Speaker 1:

We've hired our so we hired our first two days, '59, 12347. So seven weeks ago. So I think we hired them eight weeks ago.

Speaker 2:

'58 was when we hired them. So where?

Speaker 1:

So that's seven weeks ago now.

Speaker 2:

Seven? Yeah. But it's a while. Has it been

Speaker 1:

that long? Wow. I thought it was only four.

Speaker 2:

No, no, definitely not four. But yeah, they're, they've been, they've been great. Right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So they've been fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

We could go back on LinkedIn, and spend a couple of hours. We should do it actually, because we have been doing LinkedIn, not fantastically. We could put in the, the post and impressions we've got between the two of us for the last four months and then show the difference when they come in. Cause it will be, Much bigger. Anomical.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. Yeah. We might not have, cause we've got marinas from LinkedIn. We've got NFPA through LinkedIn, all from your side.

Speaker 1:

All from me. Yeah. I'm the only one that does anything. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Do you want to bring up your fidget spinner? You clan?

Speaker 1:

No.

Speaker 2:

And so, but we're also now starting to add in email and we're doing that far more professionally than we've done before. Because we're putting in different mailboxes, but I'm also now, just got another idea for LinkedIn, which is like, how did I not get that? How did I like, like targeting our competitor pages? Which is we should have, anyway, we're gonna do that as well.

Speaker 1:

Try and steal some followers. Yep.

Speaker 2:

Yep. Yep. Why not?

Speaker 1:

It's business, baby.

Speaker 2:

It is. We've won it to us.

Speaker 1:

Yep. That's right. So, yeah, so on the cold outreach front, we've registered a couple extra domains now so that we don't tank our own. We're not looking to, like we're gonna send some cold outreach emails, but I hope the plan isn't to become like the ridiculous spammer people, like really bad spammers. I hope we're not gonna become that, but it'd still be it'd be thoughtful cold outreach, but I'm sure everybody that does it feel feels the same way.

Speaker 1:

No, they don't. Feels that there's no.

Speaker 2:

There's a guy I was on his podcast a few years ago. His name is Charles. I won't say his last name, but he goes, I've got these 10 AI businesses or whatever. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, he's just half assing all these businesses.

Speaker 2:

Then he sends me these emails. Like you can tell they're written by AI. They're four sentences. They're just shit. Like, we're not doing that.

Speaker 2:

Okay. What we wanna do, I think is because we have a community like part, we will try to get people into a webinar or some type of value adding, Ex like, like webinar or something. And then we'll aim to either get them into the community or talk to them about it. They have an event coming up. But if we can get them into the community, we will be able to enrich them there and add value.

Speaker 2:

Maybe even bringing community leaders in to talk about their experience of running the variety big bash or something like that. Right? Okay.

Speaker 1:

You give people a lot. Like, hey, random person, you you run events. Can we get on a call? It's not like that. It's pushing them towards value adding stuff like like a webinar or something.

Speaker 2:

One thing that I've learned this market is actually quite dynamic. There are people who are always looking. Like we had a meeting yesterday with, Daniel and he said, oh, about three to six months out, they start looking for, event apps and platforms. So we've gotta do some of it. If it works, it works, but we will try to do other things as well.

Speaker 2:

Right. So, but maybe we just try to get them into the community and then we, we are, I don't know, but we gotta, we can't be afraid to push, but, and we have to be comfortable that we will crack a few eggs, but if we crack too many eggs, we'll scale it back. Yeah. Sure. No one answers cold email now anyway.

Speaker 2:

So, it's gonna be difficult with whatever we do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. And it's expensive. Like every email inbox that we wanna set up has to be another Gmail account. And those are like eleven, twelve a month or something. So now our, our Google bill is just like tripled.

Speaker 2:

The whole system we're setting up in this last week is a three thousand dollars three and a half thousand dollars system for a year.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. But that's where we gotta look at it. We want it to produce $10,000, dollars 50,000. Right? So if that produces a 20X ROI, it's worth it.

Speaker 2:

Then we can just scale that out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay.

Speaker 1:

So now let's get into this one's interesting. So I came to you two days ago, I think, with like mate, I've been thinking about Canva because you sent me this picture of that Chris had on our team had put up somewhere, had shared with you, and it had this, like, nice overlay around the outside of it. Right? It was this, like, wavy pattern or something.

Speaker 2:

Like a photo that we speak about.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Yeah. And it got me thinking. I was like, okay. I know you can do a lot of stuff in Canva.

Speaker 1:

I wonder if there's some way that that we could tie in Canva into our, like, into our theme designer and and like the recap feature that we have as well to allow people to configure whatever filter over the top of it. And I I tell you about this. And what did you say?

Speaker 2:

You fucking stole my idea, mate. I fucking pulled it up like in week five of us working together. It wasn't that far, but I think it might've been

Speaker 1:

as soon as we had the recap idea, it was which, yeah, that's been there since day one, actually.

Speaker 2:

Now I think about it. I knew you fobbed me off back then. I thought you

Speaker 1:

could fob me

Speaker 2:

off. Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

This is that's ridiculous. That's never gonna work. How can how can we possibly do that? And then I go and think of the idea seemingly on my own. I go look it up.

Speaker 1:

Turns out they do have some API or something like that. I know that now with all these AI tools, they're able to talk to Canva at least. So I know there's some level of connection available, and now my eyes have been open to it. I'm like, that sounds pretty cool. Not saying we're gonna build this straight away, mind you.

Speaker 1:

We got a million other things to do, but it's a cool idea, and I just forgot that you'd already had the idea. You hilarious?

Speaker 2:

That before I brought it to you, was like, yeah, there is. There's this guy. And then you shut me down, and I was like, he's just fucking he just said no to me because he's he didn't wanna look at it.

Speaker 1:

Well, we had so much other shit to do. Like, there's just it's like, yeah, yeah, whatever. We'll get to that later at some Do

Speaker 2:

know that same thing? I can't get too mad because Melanie says, at home, I'll say, I've just had this idea. She goes, I've been telling you that for months. And I was like, I genuinely have never heard it out of your mouth before. So anyway, it's a great idea.

Speaker 2:

Does open up, so many possibilities. If people were looking to design their, their app, the background and the dashboard is be able to go into their Canva account. They probably got their logos in there. However, whatever it is, right. There'll be some work to do of course, but, them to be able to do whatever they want and that will be an amazing, amazing functionality.

Speaker 2:

Right? Yeah. It would be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. It's, something that we'll think about. Yeah. At a future point. But good idea, mate.

Speaker 1:

You get a point on that one. That's brilliant. Alright. Yeah. Police games.

Speaker 1:

So we've got we are forty minutes into the episode, and we we're finally getting to the the meat of it. Everything changes in August, hopefully. Fingers crossed. We have the police games this August 2020

Speaker 2:

Why?

Speaker 1:

Why August? Because of the police games. I was saying it as you interrupted me, mate. And the god. I'm now I'm shooting a bit.

Speaker 1:

Alright. The police games phase one release is going out. So we're we're doing the police games. We're delivering it in a few phases. Phase one is going out middle of August.

Speaker 1:

We're targeting August 17. So obviously we need to have the first version of their mobile app ready by then, but also our marketing website. Ideally, we want to have our pricing up. We want it to like we want to redesign the marketing website. We're gonna look at getting out like getting published in a few different things.

Speaker 1:

Hopefully things newspapers are at least on like LinkedIn and all this sort of stuff, like a real marketing push. Right? Don't know. Have couple of

Speaker 2:

just that you just jumped around a couple of things there. So Yeah. Yeah. So what we have a what we wanna do is release it to the police games in August. And then what they're gonna do is then go out to their all the people who have come to the games before or buying tickets.

Speaker 2:

And this is where 10,000 athletes they're anticipating. They're going to send it out. And so what we expect from that is a heap of traffic to come back and start looking at us. And we haven't announced that to the world on social media, that we were successful in the games. We want to hold out to that point in time.

Speaker 2:

So with that, we want to actually develop the website to be able to accommodate that by adding in different use cases. You've done some initial stuff on pricing because we've hopefully we're hopeful that people will be interested and want to sign up or talk to us and go, who are these guys? Why interesting. Yeah. Great.

Speaker 2:

And we want to be prepared for the influx of attention that we'll get. Part of that is we want to control, like when we do a, get permission to go out and say, we want them, we want to be able to go out to our network and, help them promote us doing that to bring further attention to us as well. So it's a massive deadline, but it's a great deadline because it has the potential to change our business by August. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Huge. We could be sitting there ready to go on August at midnight on seventeenth and go, yep. Brilliant. And no one could come through. Right?

Speaker 1:

I know. Exactly. Which makes me very nervous that we're gonna be a little heartbroken. But Yeah. That's business.

Speaker 1:

Right? So we just gotta put ourselves out there and and hope for the best and obviously put all the work in behind it. So we've got a list of features, the roadmap features for the police game. So already we've started implementing I think there's 13 different things on this list and we are like halfway through six of those. So things are going really well.

Speaker 1:

They are some of the smaller features, which I'll get into some of these in a sec. But then next week we'll be starting development on some of the bigger ones. So actually white labeling and building like a custom app for the police games. We're looking at doing some of the translations of our UI to support, you know, a 100 different languages, that sort of a thing. So those are some of the big ones.

Speaker 1:

A big kind of background task for me over the last month and probably for the next month has been work on the marketing website. It is going pretty well. Like I've been able to find a design style that's working well enough. You and I actually saw a video and I'll link it in the whatever that's called in the show notes that walked through like marketing, like landing page design and it broke it down into like different levels of sophistication. Type one and type four.

Speaker 2:

Right? So

Speaker 1:

Yeah. That's right. And and so we think when all is said and done, we'll probably be at a level three. Yep. So I'll link the

Speaker 2:

video now. We may jump into level three every now and then, but largely on average,

Speaker 1:

we're a level two, like It's pretty basic. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

A deeper level two, not above average level two, but already what you're showing now is already above into, I think, very nice level three. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So that's been good. I've been using I'll link this as well, UI. Sh. It's the Tailwind Labs team's new product that they've got which like gives AI, like your LLM tools, their sense of design.

Speaker 1:

And I've been using that on anything that's like any visual designs. And I think it's already paid for itself with like it's what has been able to get us to this point, I think. So, yeah. So I'll link to all of that stuff because, it's been pretty cool. It's been a fun exercise to do.

Speaker 1:

But I'll I've also been LinkedIn

Speaker 2:

post. This is very this is very interesting.

Speaker 1:

That's a good point. Yeah. The man makes a good point.

Speaker 2:

You could take a transcript from what, mate? Take a transcript from this. The really key points you just spoken about then throw in mobbin because you're using that as well. Bang.

Speaker 1:

That's true.

Speaker 2:

Mobbin. Bada boom. Bada bing. Link to the YouTube video. There's your post.

Speaker 1:

Alright. Done. Alright. That'll be my first post. That's excellent.

Speaker 1:

Good one. Yeah. Or maybe that should maybe I publish that when we publish the marketing website so that way I can link people to our shit.

Speaker 2:

No. You can just update it and do two.

Speaker 1:

Oh, okay. That's right. That's true. Anyway, so, yeah, new redesign is coming along pretty well. I did something that was, was pretty cool, I think.

Speaker 1:

I was able to take the the look at our git history it's called. So git is this for those that aren't in the know, it's the version control system it's called, and it keeps track of all the changes that we make to our app over time. So, anytime we add a new feature or whatever, git manages that under the hood. That's all you need to know. So therefore I was able to produce a bunch of change log items to see when did we make certain changes to the app?

Speaker 1:

When did we roll out different features? What were those features, etcetera? I was able to use cursor in this case to go through, look at our git history across our mobile app and our web back end for the dashboard and API and produce like, I think 20 different change log entries. It's really cool to see, because I never think about when did any of this stuff get added, you know, when did we add the gallery or or whatever? And it all shakes out in the change log.

Speaker 1:

It's really cool. So I had it go through and do that and produce all these change log items. And then from that stroke of genius, mate, I went and I was like, let's turn all of these into feature pages and use case pages and industry pages on the marketing website. So that gave us it's by no means is that ready to publish because the content is all just junk basically, but it's given us the right categories, the right things to think about the right pages. And then I've been using those to go and create all of the, like the navigation items in the nav bar and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

And I sent you through a bunch of screenshots and you're like, wow, okay, there's a lot here. So I think you and I have some work to do to go through and actually polish out those pages. And of course we'll use AI to help us write them and stuff like that. But I just, the pages themselves need to actually be worth clicking on. I don't want them to just be complete slop, you know?

Speaker 1:

But now we've got the, yeah, the foundations of it. It's really cool to see because it's now the website has gone from feeling like, okay, we've only got six pages on there or something like that at the moment to now we're about to have like thirty, forty pages. It's gonna do it hopefully a lot better on like SEO and on, on getting picked up by LLMs and stuff. It's

Speaker 2:

great. I think we need to take into account obviously SEO, but whatever, there's a couple of other abbreviations of make sure they're optimized for that, but that probably ties into the conversation we had with Alex a couple of weeks ago about auto publishing and being able to, set that stuff up. Once you do a change log, it releases a page or ties it into the right page and stuff. So, yeah, it's

Speaker 1:

I'm looking at doing everything on autopilot with without like that doesn't just mean, oh, everything's AI. Like I still, I wanna be in the loop on writing the change logs and making sure it's got the right voice and stuff. But yeah. As soon as I release something out, then it does get published to the marketing website. It's really cool.

Speaker 2:

So I'm pretty happy with it. The game of building a business, when we think about our capacities at fifty hours, maybe sixty hours, it's probably fifty hours each. Right? We don't want to go much more than that. We don't want go much more than forty hours if we can help it and go up and go down if we need to.

Speaker 2:

Right. But call it fifty hours. And then without, with every task that we want to do, that's repeating or on some level it's repeating, then we've got to account for how many hours that's going to take per week. Right. And we're not productive fifty hours a week.

Speaker 2:

We're productive probably 75% of that time. So when things start going down, we start getting into the red and we don't have any time we go, okay, can we filter either one? Can we automate that or give that to an agent or two, do we hire someone to take that task? And already now we're offloading that's working, but if we want to build a sustainable business, like with a small headcount, we've got to be able to do this. There's so much stuff that we're doing.

Speaker 2:

It's gotta be able to do it on we're conducting, not doing or overseeing or auditing, not doing. Right.

Speaker 1:

Sure. I guess for me specifically with the change log, like we're only probably doing one release a week, you know? So it's not, and it's like, I'm talking it's half an hour of work. It's not, it's not anything crazy. And I actually I I I did some so I'm very happy to take that on in in its entirety.

Speaker 1:

Right? And I know I can I can sustain that into the future? Right? I I did something with Remotion, which is like the under the hood, it's the technology that we use to produce video recaps. Sure.

Speaker 1:

So you can create videos using React and JSX, and it's really cool. So I had an idea for it. I was like, I wonder if we could produce a video to go along with each changelog because then some people prefer a more visual approach, right, instead of just text. And so turns out I can. So now I can do that.

Speaker 1:

So I have to go through I don't have to. Maybe on select big change log items, I can go through and publish like a a video for them out of those 15 or so that I mentioned, I might do it for five. And then, yeah, that's now just another like another nice thing that makes us look, you know, premium Yeah. Yeah. And more professional.

Speaker 1:

Right? Yeah. It's pretty cool. So, yeah, there's there's just lots of good stuff happening at the moment. I am feeling that I'm like, I'm so busy and so slammed for time, but I have set up for next week that I'll do all of my pairing time with both the team here at Six Sides and then also Chris at Atlas.

Speaker 1:

I've blocked out like an hour and a half that covers both of those groups in the middle of the day. And so if I can try and do meetings with you and customers potentially in the morning plus any, you know, meetings I need to have under Atlas in the morning, then do my pairing and then just leave the afternoon free for myself to actually get in and do all the management stuff I have to do plus any coding that I have to do. I'm trying to make that work. So look, we did have some more stuff. I'll just super quickly run through it because I've teased it through here.

Speaker 1:

We have now right after this call, I'll be rolling out scheduled notifications. So this is the ability to say, okay, at, you know, 10AM on Tuesday, send out a notification to everyone. And that's something that marinas will use. And the other big feature that we got rolled out this week is on voting. So you can now add votes or polls basically to sessions within the app and then people can go and vote.

Speaker 1:

It's all in live in real time. The speaker can then go, okay, reveal the results, that sort of a thing. It's really cool. So that too is getting used at marinas and they were really impressed with that when we caught up with them this week. So, yeah, it's, it's exciting times, and I we've already got a change log item out for that.

Speaker 1:

The change log isn't public, so no one could see it yet anyway. So that will come out, you know, in the next month or so. Alright, mate. I guess we should probably wrap this up now. So Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Where can people find you online?

Speaker 2:

Mate, on LinkedIn, at 6sides.co. No. Hang on. Oh. I switched off.

Speaker 2:

Gavin Tye

Speaker 1:

Gavin Tye. But also you can find us and follow our LinkedIn page for the company because that's where a of places will dense,

Speaker 2:

I think we're called there.

Speaker 1:

Right? That's right. I think so. It's in the description, show notes area, you can go check that out. You can find me under Mitch Dev on LinkedIn as well and look forward to some more technical ish posts.

Speaker 1:

And, thank you for listening, and we'll catch you all

Speaker 2:

next week. See you, mate.