John Nunemaker (00:00) Hello, this is John and you are listening to Standing in the Fire, Real Talk for Founders in the Heat of SaaS Growth. It is December 19th when we're recording and we have a couple different topics today. I'm going to pass it off to Kris first. We're going to talk some Black Friday stuff. Kris (00:16) Well, I thought it would be interesting to talk about Black Friday from the sense of I know we tried a little bit of stuff for fireside. I did a little bit for Speaker Deck, not as much as maybe I've done in the past, but I've noticed a drop, I think, in conversions. And, you know, maybe for a couple of different reasons of everybody sending out way too many emails now and just not having offers that are enticing enough. first, I guess I also question Outside of your typical Amazon purchases, did you guys buy any, sign up for a software or sign up for a book or do any of that for Black Friday? Was anything enticing enough for you? John Nunemaker (00:55) I did not. actually, this was probably like the least I have ever spent on Black Friday. I feel like typically, you know, even looking at watch deals or random things like that, I'll find something. But I think this year, I just didn't. I don't know why. I looked at a few things. I've looked at a few deals. I looked at a few different, you know, Amazon popping in there and stuff, but nothing really tempted me this year. Garrett Dimon (01:17) I'd say a little bit what I discovered, not to over promote, like somehow Shopify keeps scaling on Ruby. I've been digging their shop app. And because I've long felt like Amazon is just such a dumpster fire of uncuration, the shop app, because it all has to be stores and you can kind of filter like I'm not interested in this store, never show me this stupid store again. Or. John Nunemaker (01:27) Mm. Garrett Dimon (01:41) you know, and you can like things. it gives a somewhat unified interface, even though it organizes each shop and, but it's curated. it's just not, you're not swimming through crap or like 30 listings of the exact same thing with a different brand name. you know, and that kind of stuff. And so, and it's pretty good about unifying all the discounts, even though every shop has different discounts or whatever. And so it's been a better experience than Amazon. for finding specific types of gifts for people and that sort of thing. like shops that I like, this was an interesting thing that I discovered this year, things that I liked and had purchased because those shops are kind of in my history is like, I liked that. I'm sure my brother would like that or my dad liked that, you know, or whatever. And so it's been an interesting way to curate Christmas shopping. But yeah, discount wise, would say nothing drastically. It was more kind of, a convenient discount for products like that where I was like, I liked this, they'll like it. So I'm going to get that for them or whatever. And so, and it's a discount so boom. But no, I do feel like a lot of it's either superficial or just way too much pestering. Like, you know, final sale, final, final sale, final last chance sale, hurry quick. And just a lot of that, especially when it's like a week before Black Friday, it's like, eh, let's come on guys. Kris (02:58) Yeah. Garrett Dimon (02:59) Or like the worst, I bought, I had to buy like my first like blazer jacket for coaching games and stuff so I don't look like a total bum. And, and so. John Nunemaker (03:06) I go the bum route in a t-shirt. I'm totally a bum. So I'm impressed you have a blazer. Garrett Dimon (03:11) Well, you know, so we do sometimes, you know, with like branded stuff for the school, but like, we hadn't gotten that stuff yet. So it was like, okay, well, I mean, I'm still wearing tennis shoes and jeans, like, you know, balancing it. But like I bought something that was on sale. And then literally the next day or no, the day to like a couple days later, when it got delivered, they sent another email. And mind you, it was on sale and I bought it. And then they sent another email. Now it was like $30 cheaper. And like, so thankfully I emailed it back. like, like, I just got this and then it just shows up. And then I like literally pick it up off the porch. I sit down the first email I see in my inbox is this thing is $30 cheaper. And I'm like, don't have like a final sale, a final final sale and then a quick flash sale. And luckily they're like, no problem. And they, you know, just refunded the difference. But nonetheless, like that moment, I was like, wow, this is all such a mess. Kris (04:02) Well, and the other thing that I thought about for like, like art, like some of the software stuff is, is it better to meet people like when they need it? So like, we don't all need the software, you know, Black Friday, like that's maybe not when we're making the purchase. And so for, for, for example, like Fireside might be, do we have the, I know it's still soon from it, but like everyone's had new year resolutions, you know, they want to start their podcast, like maybe that should be the sale time because that's what everyone's wanting to do the thing. And similar for SpeakerDeck, just to give another example. So we have a lot of storyboard artists in the film and entertainment industry. And I've typically, you know, try to do some segmented emails for them. But what I really should be doing, and I realized it actually too late was there are certain conferences they go to that. And I think there's certain months that those happen. John Nunemaker (04:28) Yeah. Yeah. Mm. Kris (04:53) And they're trying to get more gigs and I should have the sale, you know, a month before that happens or like when that happens so they can get the pro features versus a month afterwards because they're like, okay, well that doesn't help me anymore. cause I think I know that October is one of those months where there's a lot of those industry conferences. I think understanding the customer more and then doing those sorts of when they might actually be more enticed to purchase is maybe the way to do it going forward. But it takes more time and effort for companies to do that. John Nunemaker (05:25) I like that a lot about starting the new year. Like that makes a lot of sense for me. Like I think we should, you know, lean into that because that's when you would start a podcast. I feel like you'd be like new year, new me. I'm gonna, you know, be in people's ears. Whereas like Black Friday, you're, you're looking for deals. like, you're like the last you want to splurge and get a good deal. You don't want to spend. Yeah, exactly. Kris (05:36) Mm-hmm. Garrett Dimon (05:43) It's more gifts and deals. Not, I'm going to buy myself a year long commitment of recording and editing podcast episodes. Well, we said, you know, maybe there's something there too, right? Like when somebody that, you know, that initial exuberance of starting a podcast versus the brick wall of reality of recording, editing, producing, you know, part of me wonders if maybe there's something there because it's like, John Nunemaker (05:51) Yes, exactly. Yeah, way too much work. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (06:11) hate to, you know, don't want to just offer somebody a discount and entice them to start something that like they're not ready, but maybe they're just kind of nudged into doing it because there was a discount. And like, I don't know, I'm one of those that's very anti discount. Like I appreciate some discounts, but I've gotten to the point where I'm almost anti discount. Like Apple does a pretty good job with their, you know, they don't generally let people discount things like things as they get older, right before a new release, they start loosening their reigns. You see those deeper discounts, but I hate teaching people to watch for discounts. I'd rather, you know, and this is very idealistic and I recognize that. That's why I'm not the marketer in this trifecta. But like there are certain brands that like I like the brand and I buy from them, but I know that when they're going to freak, they're going to have a sale once a quarter or something. And so instead I just, I don't buy anything unless it's on sale there. because I know it's going to happen frequently enough or whatever. so I don't know. mean, I guess probably six one way, half a dozen the other. just a tactic. But the idealist in me wants to like, let's just make a better product. So they want to pay full price because they get the value out of it. then, but you know, everybody sometimes needs that much. John Nunemaker (07:25) Yeah, a fun fact as well. Like while we're recording this, I'm actually using one of the new, and that's not new, but new to me features of fireside where we have, you can make a new episode, create it without putting in any information. And once you've done that, you can go to recording notes and hit start when you start the podcast. And then you can just type and hit enter whenever you, there's like a moment that's worth tracking. so I'll try and include like an image or something. linked in the show notes, but it's kind cool to be able to do that while we're going. Garrett Dimon (07:52) which is. which is only useful if you have a quiet keyboard or a really good mic setup. Otherwise, the whole episode is clickety-clackety. John Nunemaker (07:58) That's true, yes. If you're, yeah. Yeah, yep, that's very true. Yeah, so anything else on Black Friday? Garrett Dimon (08:07) one less thing now that this is something you just said, John, that got me thinking was in a way like what if to like that discount, it's less of like, here's a discount to get you to buy this thing. And it's like, more, hey, we know lots of people for, you know, that New Year, everybody's kind of on the edge. Like, what do I do this year? What am I going to change? And it's more of like, just lower the risk for them to try podcasting. And so like, what do we do? did like What was our discount that we sent? Or did we end up getting it out successfully? Kris (08:38) Yeah, we did send it out. I think it was maybe 40 % off for like three months. I think that I think was something like that. Garrett Dimon (08:44) Okay. Well, like I wonder if like instead of a discount, it could be more of like your first two months or like once you initiate it and sign up and add a credit card, the first two months are zero cost. So you can get up and running and like help just reduce that upfront friction or something so that it is a little, makes the podcasting less intimidating for people to try. They may not stick with it and that's fine. then the only cost is on us. Like two months should be plenty of time to record and start and publish your first episode. Know where you stand and whether you want to do that a bunch. And so it kind of just lowers the risk for them in terms of, or heck, maybe, you know, partnership with like Riverside or something where it's like if they sign up and then Riverside gives them a discount too or something. So that way they could literally take two months and explore podcasting with little risk, little cost. And yeah, they might not stick with it, but at least it's a way to help them kind of. Get that final nudge like I can start a podcast and then maybe they're going to hate it, but at least they don't have to be scared of it. Kris (09:43) Well, I actually might. So I'm going to jump to one of the things you were going to maybe have a different prompt on. So I won't spoil that one. But of thinking, you as you were saying those things, I'm like, well, what if it's also, though, like either one of two directions, one, a community. So like you start almost like a cohort of saying, OK, January one to help get people motivated to keep going. Like, especially if they're single, like, say, person podcasts. Garrett Dimon (09:52) Haha Kris (10:10) So, because we want them to do more episodes. And so how do we get them to do the first 20 episodes? So there's either that like that community building or as we talk about some of software stuff, like is there an onboarding sequence? And I think there's both like automated things, but also, you maybe not automated things that we can do to help people get from episode one to 10. Like, Garrett Dimon (10:13) each other. Kris (10:37) getting that 10th episode is maybe way more intensive. And I don't know what the data would say of like, if you get this many, you're way more likely, you know, to do 50 or a hundred. And what is that number we need to help people get to? that'd be interesting to me to figure out and how do we create that resource that's not just how to use our software, but other tips and tricks. Cause if I was running into issues like John mentioned before we started of the editing, you know, If next week he got an email that was like, here's how to edit quicker or do something, how to make your editing better. Like that would be very timely for him. And I think that sounds super cool to me. We have to maybe make notes as we go so that we understand what we could have used and then have some professionals or some experts help us write that content. John Nunemaker (11:24) Yeah, and the thing I keep thinking too is you're talking about Garrett of, you know, charge basically doing like two months free. I'd almost do the opposite, like put in your credit card. And if you publish like four podcasts in the first two months, it's free. Otherwise we charge you like it's it reminds me of like the weight loss challenges where you actually have accountability, you know, but I like the community idea better. That's a little more carrot than stick. So I think the carrot of the community or like a cohort is a really cool idea. Garrett Dimon (11:41) Right, yeah. free for too much. mean, I guess it is stick technically, but it does feel kind of carrot. Like we are trying to help give them a little extra motivation built in. Or, you know, how about like, if you don't publish the episodes, you have to email us and we'll refund it. If you do publish the episodes, it's just straight up free. You know, like that way they still get the same offer and they're not feeling against the wall, but. Kris (12:10) Hahaha Garrett Dimon (12:17) Like just that, like, I mean, I would much rather, and I hate like all the production stuff. I would much rather publish a few episodes of a podcast than email somebody and ask for a refund. Right? Like, I don't know. Kris (12:29) I actually think, I can't think John Nunemaker (12:29) Hahaha Kris (12:31) of, I feel like that tactic is actually used in some other industries where like, yeah, like if you don't do the thing, then you have to like manually ask for the refund and you're kind of admitting that you failed on the thing that like it was your fault that the thing wasn't, didn't make you successful. It wasn't the product's fault. That's interesting. John Nunemaker (12:45) Yeah. Garrett Dimon (12:48) I mean, I don't want them to feel bad, like, I feel like that, and you know, everybody's motivated differently, but like, I feel like that would motivate me in a unique way that I know there's no risk either way. And now I'm just choosing between, do I want to do this thing that I really thought I wanted to do? Or do I want to just ask for refund? And so like, I don't know. Maybe there's something there. I think it's worth noodling on, thinking about some. John Nunemaker (13:05) Ha It's psychology. Cool. Garrett Dimon (13:16) Yeah, but like to help them not like for us to somehow trick somebody and make more money like because they're going to get making other money back your way. It's just whether they want to do it in pursuit of their goal or whether they want to do it by giving up on that goal, which in a way to like there's some value in recognizing like, okay, I thought I wanted to do this. really don't clearly like and so to me that helps as well. John Nunemaker (13:19) Yeah. Kris (13:40) Well, and now I'm just thinking and we can we can jump off this after this. But so it's a couple of years ago, I bought one of those pamphlets from not pamphlets, but a startup guy who had, you know, how to grow your Twitter followers by like, you know, 10 X or 100 X and like do these things, you know, how many of those things I did. It was like zero, you know, and and I think like that's the sort of thing of John Nunemaker (13:59) Zero. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (14:01) How many of them did you feel were dirty and you didn't do them because they felt dirty? Kris (14:07) Well, it was more of like, you know, I think it's interesting. I'm like, I wouldn't ask for refund that didn't work because I didn't do any of it. And so it's I think it's more of that thing of like he I'm not saying he didn't provide the value. It was more of I literally probably did zero of them now. And so, yeah, I get suckered in those things, too, sometimes. John Nunemaker (14:14) Yeah. You Garrett Dimon (14:26) I'm sure we all do, I think. And that's why I like the idea of even if you like, it's not just us trying to bait somebody in to failing to start a podcast. It's trying to give them a little extra motivation where they get the same outcome either way. They're not paying for those two months. It's just a matter of whether they choose friction or no friction for that payment. no, John Nunemaker (14:50) I love this cohort idea. You could have it be a cohort that like, let's say it costs 50 bucks to be in it or something. It's like it's like a course or a co, you know, and so it's like the first time you meet as a group, whatever on a zoom or something, you know, you get access to the community where you can talk to each other about like, like what Mike are you using or random things like that. But you also get all the materials of like from A to Z. Here's how to start a podcast and do all the work. And then you're going to do it with other people. And then there's someone in there facilitating volunteering Kris. And that person can just be like, hey, like, what have you done today? You know, or this week for your podcast? Like, and then people can talk about it. We could even use like, like liminal that Jeremy made from the IndieRails people. Like he made this forum. It could be like a forum where it's all email based. It doesn't have to be like fancy or anything like that or Slack chat room. We'll see. I don't think any of us needs another Slack chat room, but Kris (15:22) Mm. John Nunemaker (15:41) Yeah, I love that idea of like a cohort. You come in, there's like 10 spots and it's just those 10 people. Either it's free or it, you know, costs a little bit more if that means that people will actually take advantage of it. Yeah, and show up. So. Kris (15:52) show up. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (15:55) It could be like a quarterly, like every quarter we have 10 spots and people sign up and then you're, you know, it's free during the cohort. John Nunemaker (16:05) blog like we could blog it too. So immediately we could have like, OK, like here's the latest episodes from this quarter's cohort of people. So and so got a new whatever again, I'm going back to the mic or so and so started paying an editor because they're really getting into this. And so this person, here's the different formats that these people are using. Interviews, solo, you know, all that season versus just showing up every week and talking. I think that that could be really interesting. That's a great idea that came out of this. Garrett Dimon (16:33) I agree because it's much less, we'll offer you software, you give us money and more like, how do we help you start a podcast that you want to start and follow through with it? yeah, yeah. Which of course we obviously went out, assuming they like fireside and stick with it forever. We went out by virtue of having people who now are familiar with the software, they have very direct, easy support with any questions, feedback they have for the software. This was hard. John Nunemaker (16:42) Yeah, and that's the goal. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (16:59) And then we're like, we can make that easier. So obviously too, it's beneficial for the growth. But I like the idea that it's not entirely about like, how do we get customers? It's more, how do we help people do what they think they want to do? And I say think, because like I thought I was like, would love podcasting too. And God, it's so tedious. I I mean that in the best way possible. Like it creates a good result. It's just not the type of work I enjoy at all. John Nunemaker (17:15) Yeah Kris (17:23) So, you know, in order to do some of that email and community building, obviously we would want to sync our users to a software email system. So kind of switching gears on, you know, how do we think it's been going on upgrading, of the backend things, you know, to get to certain levels, what are the challenges maybe you've seen? And then what do we think for you know, once we get that base or some top ideas that we want to maybe tackle first. John Nunemaker (17:52) Yeah, I think I've been thinking about this a lot and mostly because there's always this, we talked about last week, the balance between like updating, you know, old things or maintaining things versus like new product things or enhancing the product in some way. And how do you balance that and what do you choose? And honestly, right now, you know, we're in a place where we don't really get to choose a lot. we're on the software is just, you know, Rails versions are old enough, Ruby versions are old enough that like a lot of the stuff isn't supported like Let's say we have Mailjet and we want to use Mailjet to sync our users over there so we can automatically do onboarding sequences and things like that. Their gem requires whatever, Ruby 3 or 3.2 or something like that. so it's just like little things like that always end up kind of blocking it. I found it really nice when I was able to just drop. And those are the things that I've done. When I can just drop in. you know, a gem and go to town and it supports this older version. That's been that's been really slick. Use that with like, you know, honey badger app signal error tracking performance monitoring stuff like that. And that's worked really well. But it is always a balance. And I think for us, what we're trying to do is get to the point where we're in Rails, you know, let's say 6.1, 6.2, whatever, so that we're and you know, Ruby 3.1, 3.2, something like that, where we're modern enough that we're no longer blocked. to use certain already prepackaged ready to go code just because we're on too old of a version. hopefully here in the next, like we were shooting for the end of the year, I think realistically it's probably going to be more like middle of January, end of January before we get up to those. But we'll see how it goes. yeah, so that's kind of where it's been. And Garrett and I have been on that for, I mean, basically the two months or so that we've owned it. any kind of bug that crops up that's pervasive fixing that. And then upgrading to more modern versions. Those have been two of the biggest that's modern versions has been Garrett. So he can probably talk more about that. then performance and bugs has been more myself. Garrett Dimon (19:50) yeah, so the, I mean, obviously the upgrades, they just kind of are what they are. It's like, the way I describe it to my non-technical friends. It's like we bought a fixer upper and now we've got to do all the plumbing and electricity before we can do anything else. Right. But, you know, we're focusing on that internal stuff, like fixing the plumbing leaks or whatever it is. in some ways, like as much as it feels like it's. behind the scenes. Like we've already had a handful of customers mention that they've noticed that it's snappier, faster. And even some customers who, when you know their initial contact, at least once we were in the driver's seat, you know, they weren't happy because they were frustrated with some things that hadn't been fixed. like having worked on fireside in the past, like some of those stuff I had looked at and tried to fix, but it was a little beyond me. But then you add John into the mix. And for John, it's a walk in the park. John Nunemaker (20:18) Yeah. Garrett Dimon (20:38) And so you were able to fix it and then they're happy and they're like, my gosh, thanks. Like, this has been driving me nuts for years and like now it's fixed. And like, it's just one of those bugs that was tedious enough, but infrequent enough that the value to fix it was never a slam dunk until it was easy for you to like, we had the observability. You could tell what's going wrong and then know exactly how to fix it and just fix it. John Nunemaker (20:59) Yeah, the observability is a key. feel like with anything technical, like I, that's one of the things I've pushed for a long time is the only way to get better on, you know, performance or, or bugs or any of those kinds of things is you have to measure. So if you don't measure you, you don't know what to improve. So that was like the first thing that I added in. mean, we're spending, you know, $500 $600 a month, almost as much as our hosting, like our actual servers running the code just on monitoring the stuff. And doing that, like I could see right away, the dashboard was intensely slow for a lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people. And I was like, that's weird. Why is it so slow? And I looked and you know, can once you know something slow, you can look at it and say, OK, I bet it's this. And it's typically it's analytics data. Counting things generally is slow unless you're using like particular type of database or particular type of storage and stuff. So I went in, looked at it. Sure enough, it was the you know, counting all the downloads forever for that podcast and showing it there that was slow. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to write a tiny bit of JavaScript to load the dashboard first and then delay loading in that count. And so the count will still be just as slow, but the dashboard is there and people can click on the episodes tab or appearance or whatever they need to change and they can move on and they can just wait for the download count if they actually need the download count. So very simple change, but dramatically improve the performance. think that's the one that customers have written in about the most is seeing the dashboard speed up like that. Garrett Dimon (22:30) because you've got to go through it to get to anything and thus it's slowing you down. So out of curiosity and not to get too technical, if we were on a more modern version of Rails that supported the async queries, would that have made that any easier or was it pretty straightforward anyways? John Nunemaker (22:32) Exactly. Yep, it's a blocker. So I don't think that would have made it easier because the async queries would still wait to render until all of them were done. you could run the async queries at the same time, and then it's just how fast is the slowest of those. So that's the best way to think about async stuff like that. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (23:02) So the query would still be implicitly blocking because it's waiting for the whole server side portion to finish before rendering. John Nunemaker (23:06) slow. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, where it could possibly speed it up is on the actual metrics page. So when we show all the metrics, we're querying a whole bunch of stuff there. And so on that page, you know, then the page would instead of rendering, you know, sequentially, like this took five seconds, five seconds, five seconds. And so it's 15 seconds total. You know, you could async all those as long as they're not, you know, required knowledge between them. They're all just Garrett Dimon (23:19) Yeah. John Nunemaker (23:33) three separate queries and then it would be five seconds instead of 15 kind of idea. So that's definitely a possible thing. But in this case, it was literally just like offload the work, you know, to come in just like every app does. When every app loads, you got those loading boxes or spinners or all those kinds of things. It's the same kind of stuff. So we're going to do the same thing. Me and the mouse in my pocket. When I say we are going to do the same thing on the metrics page to make all that stuff load. Garrett Dimon (23:38) Okay. John Nunemaker (24:00) delay loading in the shell will come up really fast and then the rest of the stuff will load slow and then over time I'm going to make all those things load faster because that's the totally doable. just takes a lot more shuffling data around in order to do that. Garrett Dimon (24:12) Right, or even redesigning a whole page to change what data is on what page or how it's presented or organized or whatever. then that, you I wouldn't necessarily call it yak shaving, but yeah, it quickly becomes a much larger project than just getting the performance wins right away. John Nunemaker (24:18) Exactly. Yeah, and was going to try and get the performance wins. And then I was like, starting to dig in there. And I was like, you know what, this is going to take a little bit of work. And I was like, this is literally blocking everybody. This is an easy one to say, not everybody, everyone who had a podcast. Yeah, of a certain number of downloads and a certain number of episodes and things like that. So I was like, you know what, let's just delay it and see what the improvement is. And it was pretty dramatic. So it was the same thing for the Discover page. We have a page that shows like recently published episodes. Garrett Dimon (24:42) Large Podcasts. John Nunemaker (24:58) And it was loading, you know, doing some complex queries and stuff like that. And I kind of. Futz around with it for a little while and got it from, you know, it would be two to five seconds, server side. So, I mean, it was a lot of data. And so I tweaked it a little bit. The algorithm, we basically get the same end result and it renders in 50 milliseconds instead. So again, it's just like product trade offs of saying like, look, maybe this other algorithm was like. 5 % better. But it took an order of magnitude, you know, 10 times longer to complete. So let's just do the simple thing. That's you know, 5 % worse, but it's totally acceptable. Just knowing what the level of acceptable is on a thing, I think is important. So, so those were like, some of the biggest, know, speeding up deploys, speeding up discover, all that kind of stuff, I think have been the biggest ones. Garrett Dimon (25:41) All that's it. Kris (25:50) that's interesting. I'm looking at the discovery page. So is that randomly putting up like most recent podcasts? John Nunemaker (25:57) algorithm was get the last 24 updated podcasts and pick the latest episode that's published from each of those and then show them like shuffled kind of what I changed it to instead is just get the last 24 last 100 published episodes. And then, you know, so theoretically, if someone published 24 episodes in a row, I wouldn't want them to show up 24 times. what it does is it basically says, get one, you know, it assumes that like someone's not going to upload 100. So if you're out there and you're uploading 100 at once, you're going to end up with all of the discover spots. So now you know the algorithm, but it's very basic. We'll improve it over time and make it make it work better. But for now, it's just get 100 episodes and then pick the last 24 unique podcasts, one episode from each. So Kris (26:26) Right. Right. John Nunemaker (26:51) It just has to query a hundred episodes and then do the rest in Ruby. Whereas before it was doing a whole bunch of database stuff and pulling over like a lot of episodes and stuff. So now it's blazing fast and it gets you know cached and things like that as well. But yeah it's much much better. Does that answer the question though. Eventually I want to make that page way better. This is one of the things I've been working really hard to not do because I want to do it a lot. I want to add like I want that to be like a directory. Kris (27:03) Hmm. Yep. John Nunemaker (27:16) and have like popularity factored in, recency, like categories. So could see like, yeah, latest in business, latest in business entrepreneurship, like latest in religion, whatever. Like I want to be able to like filter and slice and dice it and then also show popularity, you know, last seven days, whatever, last hundred days, like that kind of stuff. I think that would be really cool. Anything that kind of helps people discover things. I'd also like to show like related podcasts there, like find ways to like, you're all, if you actually Kris (27:19) Yeah. Yep. Garrett Dimon (27:21) categories. Discovery. John Nunemaker (27:45) Yeah, see one that you like and you click on it, you should be able to see like five like it that are on the fireside, you know, platform. So that is definitely something I want to work on. Like next early next year, I would love to spend some time on that. That's that kind of stuff. Analytics and things like that are my jam anyways. So Garrett Dimon (27:50) Yeah. Yeah. Well, and obviously we've got a huge backlog of other ideas that are more customer facing, less like just invisible performance improvements. Even though some of these performance improvements haven't been invisible, but then, you know, it's this debate in my head as I'm, mean, I would like to come up from Rails upgrades and do some other stuff because that's all I've been doing across all three code bases I'm working on. in addition to those upgrades, like we're merging a couple of separate apps that Dan originally architected it made sense just because of the way infrastructure and everything was then. Whereas now it makes more sense for us to get all these apps merge into one code base. So it's a monolith and we have one deployment script and none of the logic is replicated across different apps and that kind of stuff. like that's, it's been its whole other layer of challenges. And because you know we want to upgrade rails in the main app, then we also upgrade rails in this other app or because it's simple enough, it's probably going to be fine. There's not going to be anything that is going to drastically affect it. It's like, well, let's just do. You know this minimal rails version upgrade and then. We can do it on both once and then hopefully will be at the point where will be easier to merge them and then from then on we won't be doing that everywhere. But then obviously too like. as we inch up on it and then Rails 8 got released and then here next week Ruby 3.4 is going to be released. And so like even though we're caught up, we're already behind again. John Nunemaker (29:23) Yeah, Kris, do you know that? Do you know that every year Ruby, a new version comes out on Christmas? That's Matt's. Yeah, Matt's the creator. It's his Christmas present to all Rubyists. They always do it December 25th. I think that's the most ball. Garrett Dimon (29:29) Like a Christmas present. Yeah. Kris (29:29) No. Garrett Dimon (29:34) It's so cool. It's so ruby too. That's the type of thing that makes Ruby Ruby, I feel like. but so yeah, we'll be hopefully caught up and out of the extremely deprecated versions of things and just onto the less, you know, just closer to soft deprecated, but too, think it'll be base. Like it feels easier to go from six to seven. If I'm remembering right on other upgrades. and rails has been getting much better about that. feel like too is making even the big version upgrades. John Nunemaker (29:43) Yeah, very cool. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (30:10) You know, they're still challenging, but in a good way. And they do a good job deprecating versions ahead. And so I feel like we'll be in a good spot to then make that jump. But it's like, okay, well now once we get to 6.1 and Ruby 3.0, does that unlock enough stuff that it's worth it for us to shift over and focus on some more customer things? But then we don't want to be too far behind because of security updates and patches and... so like that trade-offs constantly there. And then like, we've got all these discovery things that we've been talking about working on where we want to make the fireside site help all of our customers with discovery or improving their podcast or whatever it is. and then got, you know, a million other features like dynamic ad insertion, you know, that's so close to being finished, but given all the upgrades, it's like, we should probably do these upgrades and performance improvements before we add in. a whole new layer of intensive performance issues through workers who are generating the dynamic episodes and that kind of thing and managing that when the campaigns start and end. And so I definitely think it was the right move to make those performance improvements before getting into dynamic ad insertion. But nonetheless, it's like, well, that's sitting there and it's so close. Like I want to get over the finish line. And I mean, I think we will early next year, hopefully, but Deciding all of this stuff like day to day. It's almost like I have to just tune it out and this is what I'm gonna work on and I know there's a million other things and Definitely not get nerd sniped by other issues to work on Yeah, it's just tough John Nunemaker (31:37) It's very easy to get nerd sniped. It's very easy. Even just in marketing and things like that. Like I've been trying, you know, again, I'm not like necessarily doing a bunch of marketing straight to the general audience, but even just like tech people, you know, it's like all everything that we do performance wise. I try to like take screenshots, write it up, tweet it, blue sky, LinkedIn, all those kinds of things, just so that those technical people who also have podcasts, they're thinking about fireside, you know, so they They hear about the cool changes and they're like, well, maybe I'd rather use that platform to start my podcast because they hear about it. Garrett Dimon (32:11) Yeah. Well, and you know, it's funny, I've been trying to, and I mean, obviously it's not like we know every single app that anybody's ever bought, but I feel like there's not as many stories of people buying an app and then like really, really just pouring themselves into it and improving it. I feel like so many apps just get bought and kind of not like fully put into maintenance mode, but definitely not like flipped over and revived. I haven't heard many stories of apps being bought and then like, you know, putting the pedal to the metal and just going and fixing it up and that kind of thing. It's more just, I'm just going to start cashing these checks to pay off the loan and then once the loans paid off, then maybe we can invest in it or whatever. And so I keep wondering if maybe there's more stories out there like that that we just haven't heard or, know, because nobody hears an app is getting acquired by somebody and then goes, yay, this is going to be awesome. And like we even got John Nunemaker (33:04) No, but that's what the public release always says, Garrett. It always says, we're going to do more with less and more resources because now we've got this big parent company. And so that's what every public thing says. So I'm sure everyone gets excited when they see that. Garrett Dimon (33:07) Well, right. Yeah. But we even had people email us once the announcement came out and they're like, great, some private equity firm is going to run this into the ground. it's like, no, we're different. But no point in telling people you're different. We've got to just show them and that's what we're hopefully doing. But yeah, it was interesting and not surprising to hear people were mad and like, great, now you're going to flush this thing down the toilet. And it's like, no, that's exactly not what we want to do. John Nunemaker (33:24) Yeah. Garrett Dimon (33:44) So. John Nunemaker (33:44) I don't think we've proven it over the first two months. We've made a ton of performance improvements. We've simplified a bunch of the infrastructure stuff. We just need to like talk about those things and start, you know, I've thought about having like, well, yes, that's obviously one of the easiest ways. The other thought was like, you know, on the blog, we got that linked up now today. if you go to fireside, you can click on blog, it'll take you there. There's some articles we've been putting up and stuff you could subscribe, et cetera. Like and subscribe in the words of Kris. Garrett Dimon (33:52) Yeah. Like on a podcast. John Nunemaker (34:10) So the other thing that you can do there, I think, I think a good place would be to put like, you know, here's, we're two months in, like recaps, you know, like, what have we done? Like, here's a bunch of like big hits, big wins. I think on a regular basis, it's just too easy to get in this log of like improving things and not talk about it. And so even though the customers might feel it, it's good to recap it so that they can see it and know that that was intentional and not accidental. So Garrett Dimon (34:18) Yeah. I wonder if some of the customers who've noticed it and written in and told us if they would be cool with us sharing that. I mean, obviously we'd ask them, but that could be a cool thing. John Nunemaker (34:41) Yeah, I'm sure they would. Yeah. Kris (34:42) Hey testimonials man, that's one thing we need on our site is some more customer testimonials. John Nunemaker (34:45) There you go. Garrett Dimon (34:46) Right. Well, you know, mean, it's one thing for a company to be like, look, but like when a customer it's much more rewarding as a product person to hear a customer say like, oh my gosh, I noticed how much faster this page is. Thank you. Like that's great. And, you know, at the same time, the back of our mind, we're like, well we just kind of like spent a little bit of time on that because we knew we'd go down a rabbit hole and it could turn into like a week's long project if we didn't, but Even just knowing that like a 30 minute fix then creates that multiplier effect and makes it so much easier on customers. Like it feels small when we're building it, but when you know a customer feels the difference, then it's like, okay, it was small, but like it was the right thing and we'll get better over time. And you know, you just can't always swing for the fences on every improvement. John Nunemaker (35:36) Yeah, I mean, I've got hours, hours and hours and hours in on fireside over the last two months. And I would say the biggest changes that I made probably came down to about five hours of work. And that's it. It's kind of crazy to think about, but like, it really is true, I think, in life where just a few of the things actually make the biggest difference, like the 80-20 rule In this case, it's like the biggest ones that have made a difference is I spent a couple hours on like the routing for the custom websites and stuff like that and speeded that up and the templates that get rendered and what not. spent a couple hours, like less than an hour on the discover page. And that was a huge performance boost to the whole app. And then spent a little bit of time on deploys and stuff like that, which is not directly seen by customers. But now, like Garrett and I, when we're pushing out changes, it's five minutes or less, fewer. And before, I mean, it would sometimes take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, yeah, less or fewer. I'm aware I still use less once in a while. But yeah, the biggest changes have taken maybe five, six hours. I wish I could have picked those from the beginning, but you can't always. Garrett Dimon (36:28) There you go. So. ballparking that from hours to lines of code, how much code do you think you've changed to achieve all that? John Nunemaker (36:52) very, very minimal. Yeah, it I mean, I think fewer than 100 lines of code changed, you know, and again, it's like, part of it is like, it takes time to get in and to learn, and to figure out where those things can be made. And but it's interesting to me that like, that's possible. And I've always wished this I feel like in business and all that stuff, there's always like a few things that really move the needle. And once you figure those out, Garrett Dimon (36:58) Right. John Nunemaker (37:16) you don't have to go crazy and work a ton and stuff like that. You can you can achieve great success by turning those levers. But sometimes it just takes a lot of work to figure out what those levers are. And that's kind of the hard part. Kris, Kris and I were even talking about it last night a little bit just about like, you know, that kind of you're not always sure what can make a difference. And so you read a book and you do another thing and you're trying to figure out what's the thing that's going to move the needle? And in reality, the thing that moves the needle is do a bunch of things and see which one moves the needle. That's often what it is. Yeah. Yep. And one of those 20 things is going to actually move the needle. You just don't know which one. And eventually over time, hopefully you get smarter and you realize those things more quickly. And so you can pick them out and then not spend the, you know, whatever, eight hours straight trying to figure it out. You can just spend one hour. Garrett Dimon (37:43) every day, just a little bit, keep going, don't burn out. I feel like that's the thing with SaaS in general is it's like, I'm sure some people have, know, teams have gone viral, new product just hit the sweet spot, nailed it, they knew exactly what they're doing, had a bunch of experience. But on the other hand, every other SaaS app I've been involved in, it is nothing but just slow and steady constant improvements that are customer centric. And eventually at some point you've removed enough of the friction in onboarding registration, daily usage, whatever it is, you know, either it's it combats churn a little bit or it increases registrations. And then, you know, you look back three years later and you're like, look, it got there. But without that immediate reward all the time, it's definitely challenging to keep the faith sometimes. John Nunemaker (38:51) Yeah. Any closing thoughts over there, Kris? Kris (38:54) I mean, I'm just thinking about swag, but that's a discussion for another day. Garrett Dimon (38:57) Hahaha John Nunemaker (38:58) Dude, I was thinking about that too. like, I need fireside behind me. I mean, we'll go video at some point, but I need fireside behind me. I should have been wearing my fireside sweatshirt. We definitely need more swag. Garrett Dimon (39:02) Alright. John Nunemaker (39:08) What made you think about swag? Kris (39:09) that I have a coffee mug and Gareth's coffee mug and we kept drinking. I was like, we should have fireside coffee mugs. And then I was thinking, like, should we give away? Then I was thinking, I didn't get it. You guys were talking about all the nerd, you know, like tech stuff. I was, I was trying to, I was thinking about, like, I wonder if customers want some swag and you know, is it t-shirts then do that in the new year is like a, you know, thank you. And just things like that. John Nunemaker (39:14) Hmm. Yeah. Garrett Dimon (39:15) No, no, no. John Nunemaker (39:21) As you're so bored as he's so bored Garrett Dimon (39:24) He just zoned out. John Nunemaker (39:34) Yeah, this is Kris. Swag rules everything around him. Like, it's definitely that. Garrett Dimon (39:38) Well, but the thing is, John and I are both using Embers and then we're thinking eventually we're going to get some sponsorship. You're the one holding us back, Kris. Kris (39:46) yeah. John Nunemaker (39:47) Yeah, there you go. Kris (39:50) hahahaha John Nunemaker (39:50) Awesome. Garrett Dimon (39:55) So like one other type of, or like category of thing, there's like customer facing value based features, right? Like functionality that helps deliver a podcast faster, better, easier, less effort, whatever it is. but then too, there's things like, like fire. The fireside app is old enough that all the billing stuff was built before. some of Stripe's advancements with like building portal and checkout and all that kind of stuff. that's one of those things that sits squarely in between kind of this like backend performance improvements and front end customer facing improvements because like no customer is ever gonna be like, damn, I love their new billing system. Like, right, it's just a thing that's there and it has to get done. But at the same time, like, John Nunemaker (40:37) Yeah Garrett Dimon (40:42) No customer wants to deal with a clunky billing interface and not to say that the fireside interface is clunky. And if it is, it's totally my fault because that's something I've been responsible for. But, I have wanted so bad for so long since working on fireside and since Stripe came out with their billing portal, and checkout and all that to lean that way because it removes one of those tedious operational aspects, from Kris (41:04) Thank Garrett Dimon (41:07) the customers. you know, it's not something the customer is going to be excited about, but it definitely makes their life easier in terms of maintaining their billing and all. Kris (41:11) Thank you. John Nunemaker (41:16) Yeah, that's very true. It is nice on Flipper that we have that aspect. Like we're able to like tweak some of those things by using some of the more modern, you know, stripe stuff and things like that. Garrett Dimon (41:26) or like currency conversion, like Stripe just announced, if you're using the billing portal and checkout and all that, you can use currency conversion, which lets the people buy the software in their own currency, which it's minor, but nobody likes doing like the math to like figure out, okay, well, US dollars. And I guess if you're outside the US, maybe you're more... familiar with just kind of doing napkin math in your head on US dollars to whatever your currency is. But nonetheless, like that's just one little thing that why put that on customers if you don't have to like just let Stripe handle it makes their life easier. And then too Stripe said that, you know, converts better, which makes sense because you're speaking in their terms instead of yours. And so like just little things like that, where we could get a lot more wins if we were already on that. Kris (41:59) Thank you. Okay. Garrett Dimon (42:13) And so then it becomes more of a multiplier because we can make it more convenient for customers and all that. But at the same time, it's not something that's going to like make them jump out of bed in the morning and be like, I can't wait to record this morning because I don't have to mess with billing. so there's all this kind of stuff that I know would help customers and help us and just be a win. But it's like, well, is that the right thing to do? Cause that's not going to be the thing that's really going to help them. But how do you know? And so it's like almost like this, seasonal. Kris (42:32) Thank you. Okay. Garrett Dimon (42:41) or like inhale, exhale, like, you you inhale and work on performance and you exhale. deploys are faster. Performance is better. We can more quickly improve the things that deep down customers really want. And so it's just more to the debate of like, how do you judge all this and like decide and prioritize and. But that's one of those things that just haunts me because it's like, I want to be. I want to get rid of all of our billing code and push it off and let Stripe handle it. So just less maintenance, fewer tests, just great all around. Better for customers. John Nunemaker (43:13) Well, as soon as we get this, the last couple of batches of infrastructure and rails and things like that, we're definitely going to ship some features because I, I know both of us have the itch. we're, we're good at maintaining stuff, but it gets old. Eventually you want to like go out and make something new. And I've got some ideas because of, know, using the app quite a bit, the last couple of weeks, editing and then getting, getting the podcast tweaked and stuff like that, getting it shipped, all that. So I have like a lot. Kris (43:26) I've got an idea. John Nunemaker (43:40) ideas and I know you've used it in the past as well so. Garrett Dimon (43:43) Well, it's just more energizing to ship something every week rather than work on a Rails upgrade that takes a little while, requires a lot more exhaustive testing and careful examination of configurations and things that no customer is ever going to feel or see. But you got to do that stuff to do the fun stuff. Kris (44:01) That's it. John Nunemaker (44:04) Tru dat. The end. Kris, how do we end this? Be sure to... Kris (44:10) We when does this come out? John Nunemaker (44:12) This, this will come out in like a week, week and a half. Kris (44:15) hopefully by then we have some amazing new year's resolutions started. We have some new pushes out and we have some new swag. So that's what we got. Make sure to find us at fireside.fm.