Do Things That Don't Scale - A BrandGhost Story

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all right leaving the office on a Monday it's a little after 5:00 and that means it's probably going to be the worst traffic imaginable that's okay though um was definitely a good day today it was quite productive um going my windows up here before we get moving too fast someone told me in the comments people leave comments on these videos which is cool someone told me that they were they started watching this and apparently like I ramble too much so they were about to they're about to switch away from the video because I was rambling and then I started talking about some software engineering stuff and I guess the thing that I got to clarify cre if you're watching this is like I'm literally going to be sitting in traffic you were going to hear me ramble uh no I don't mean to uh to

crap on anyone for the comments uh it's cool like I I'm happy people are watching it and checking it out but truthfully if you want clean cut like stuff go to my Dev leader Channel um you know I got to get through that light woo um that wasn't on video right um yeah my Dev leader channel has like edited like videos edited not by me so that they're actually in better shape um you know I put a lot more time and effort into the content it's uh you know mistakes and stuff for cut out I do live streams on that channel too so you can see me messing stuff up and doing it live um but this this channel is me in a car getting frustrated at traffic and talking about software engineering as much as I possibly can um so I apologize if you

don't like the rambling but uh just think like you get to hang out with me right that's that's got to count for something um wanted to say big shout out to to Dave Dave I don't know if how to say your last name is it Callen I think it's Dave Callen I like Dave a lot Dave's a net content creator um that's not all he does but that's how I know Dave from the social media World um Dave's awesome he was putting out a ton of information about uh Benchmark results that were really cool but I think he's always got some really interesting topics to share with people so um on LinkedIn he he was I the reason I'm bringing this up is that uh he had mentioned my this channel on on LinkedIn and he said that I should get a guest in the

car and then he had a I can't remember what the show was called but uh is it car karaoke or whatever um yeah I think it's that's what it's called but uh you know have the two people that are in the car and I was like yeah I should get a guest and I should get them to sing um no but I just wanted to say shout out to Dave cuz he's awesome this guy better keep driving through this light cuz it's turning red and uh then he was jokingly saying that uh because he knows that Jade Wilson who I mentioned uh in one of the previous videos he mentioned that uh Jade is uh sorry I'm trying to get through this light I'm sitting in the middle of the intersection um he was like oh next time Jade's in town you should have her

on and like she can be the one to sing and I I was thinking it's funny because uh I had Jade in my car and she was vlogging so it's kind of funny um but she has the footage for that I don't I was hoping this person in front of me would have moved up and now I'm totally blocking the intersection like a an idiot but oops um but yeah uh it's kind of cool that Dave was recognizing it there we go made it through um and there's that's me rambling right so I wanted to talk a little bit about this is going to be less like specific for I don't know like less specific for like General software engineering distributed systems and stuff like that more like kind of like entrepreneurship and uh kind of building something on your own still related to software

engineering but that's what I want to talk about we'll see how it goes um but I've been talking about how I'm building brand ghost which is sort of the the platform that I use for creating content and and Publishing content it is man this look at this bus blocking me in here um it's the thing that I've been like spending a lot more time programming on to the point where like I can't write blogs because I don't have time kind of thing and that is very much like this other this other scenario that I had before brand ghost which is meal coach and meal coach was sort of like a SAS uh for nutrition that I was building that ultimately failed in the end and a lot of it comes down to like it's not a a technology thing which is kind of funny right

um it's I I always say this but like software engineering the biggest problems are not technology related it's like it's everything else so with meal coach we had this nutrition platform that worked like it could basically do a meal plan for you I know everyone's like oh llms can do that for you but like if you're into nutrition you might realize that like you know that's not the that might be a good starting point but like it's not really accurate um and then we we we also quickly learned that the US Food database also wasn't that accurate so anyway we had this solution that worked technically but we had a lot of difficulty like just approaching people to try and get them to use it acquiring users in general um just like we struggled with that and I don't think it's because we had something

crappy it certainly wasn't because like oh the code is bad no one could see the code um so it's like not this guy has really got to figure it out man like uh sorry this person was driving like I needed to merge lanes and they just literally were not moving to let me in which is infuriating but meal coach wasn't like a technical challenge for us and brand ghost is similar like it's not a technical challenge there's some dumb stuff that we have to work through uh that has been challenging but ultimately it's like the solvable problems for sure so it kind of puts us back into the same spot which is like okay we have a SAS we have a platform how do we make sure that we're not like I don't want to fail at this one right you know and if it

fails it fails I'm not going to it's not going to be the end of the world but like I want to prevent that I want I obviously want it to succeed so what do we got to do different because something's got to be done differently and one of the lessons that we learned from before is like when we finally toss in the towel we saw that there were two other competitors that we had we had never seen before and we we had seen what they were building and we were like man like they literally have built out all of the things we've been talking about trying to debate like is it going to be a good Market fit they built all this stuff they had tons of users and we were like sucks like we been kind of spending time trying to ask questions about

whether or not we have something that will solve problems but the reality is like we knew we knew it was solving problems because we are also people that would be using it so it solves someone's problem and I think we were being too careful about like making sure it's a perfect fit kind of thing let's get this going one sec um sorry crappy crappy spot on the highway so this time around it's like okay how do we trust ourselves a little bit more you still don't just want to blindly like go building stuff and saying oh someone will use this like you're going to waste a lot of time and maybe get very disappointed but um the reality is there at least one person who absolutely needs it who has seen success with it and that's me so with meal coach the one of the

big differences is like I wasn't using it but I was also the target audience so we didn't even have me using it sorry this car was driving so slow but we didn't even have me using it even though I was the target audience and like it's because I was literally paying a coach for bodybuilding purposes and like wanted that accountability so a different reason but in this case like there's there's no doubt that it works and that's not to brag it's not like there's some Secret Sauce like it's it's not there's no doubt that doing this works you have to be creating content but the tool itself does exactly what we want it to and there's proof so that's really cool so instead of going like do we do we need to prove that the technology works is it's feasible we know the answer we

know the answer because it's been working for over a year it hasn't been in the same form factor but the concept has been working for over a year so that part's out of the way that's good now we need to see if it's resonating with other people and one of the things that I want to be very cautious of here compared to meal coach like a lesson is like I don't think it's is it going to resonate with other people I think that's a a mistake to frame it that way it's not if it's going to resonate with other people it's how do we find the people that it resonates with because I can assure you I am very confident after having done this it has it's not like it's been my career creating content but what what's the month is it's uh September now

it's almost October like it's been I can't do math it's like it's almost 22 months straight of creating content posting stuff every single day and I can tell you that this will help people I just need to find the people that create content or want to create content the same way as me the other proof that we all already have is that and I mean it's only one user who's kind of like um what's the pH like phrase I want to use like a early adopter like he basically he gets it right away and I've talked about him before he has a real estate business in a roofing company and he's like this is this is what I need to be able to have content going out right so he understands that he's not he's not doing it for Content creation he's doing it to

like support his business and advertise it's a whole different audience right but the point is that spending time trying to schedule and post content out across different platforms is a pain in the butt so this is the problem that we're solving immediately and all of this to say that I I don't want to waste time trying to go oh is it a fit for people it's not is it a fit it's who is it a fit for and let's go find those people let's make sure we can get this in front of those people that's a big difference because I think we spent far too much time with meal coach trying to go is it a fit and like second guessing oursel that is it a fit and we re like we knew the whole time it was a fit because I already said this

but like we were an audience that would use it so I'm already rambling more than I wanted to but that's one thing I wanted to bring up about about this process that we're going through right now and and so far it's cool like I had um I trying to avoid people's names and stuff because it's like not uh not my place to kind of share on their behalf unless they want me to but I had another content creator this morning that was getting set up on brand ghost and he know he was reaching out and asking some questions um and yesterday or two days ago another content creator who has been he's been very busy he's been sorry that he can't get onboarded but um you know he was getting set up but it's resonating like they're going oh I I definitely can see the

value in this so um we're we're going through like an exciting time of like getting feedback and kind of getting those first users on board and which is cool so that's why I wanted to talk about that part but the other part that I wanted to focus on and I don't have like all the I'm not like a y combinator not um who like tries to focus on everything that comes out a y combinator like kind of like how there's a lot of people that are like Elon Musk Fanboys and stuff like that I think Y combinator is super cool but I don't know like all the I couldn't list like every company that's come out of Y combinator and and all these stories and stuff but in our group the people that are working on brand ghost um one of the people in particular

follows a lot of YC stuff pretty closely and uh well I guess two people have kind of shared this before with us um like this idea of like do things that don't scale and it's it's a pretty interesting concept so I wanted to talk about this on this strive do things that don't scale not because I'm an expert at it and I I want to kind of clarify that I'm not I don't want to sit here and like have a lecture oh I'm doing things that don't scale listen to me uh I wanted to talk about it because it's very relevant for the stage that we're at right now and what was really cool there's a YouTube video where they're talk like from YC they're talking about a bunch of examples of doing things that don't scale to kind of illustrate what they mean by

that and oh man this Lane is garbage I don't understand why traffic is so horrible on this highway all the time um so they were talking about like door dash for example and they were like okay so door Dash like their example of do things that don't scale is like they basically had a website and as soon as like they the way they phrased it was like if by some miracle someone placed an order the the founders are basically rushing out as fast as they could to go pick up the food and deliver it right like that obviously doesn't scale but they're doing it because that's like what needs to get done and they're going to be extremely motivated to do it and to do a good job because their business depends on it if they did a crappy job and that like that word

of mouth started to spread there's people aren't going to want to pick up on that but you can uh you can Delight the customer right and then like you're setting yourself up for Success they were I'm going to butcher the Reddit example I thought it was pretty cool though cuz I didn't know this about Reddit but when they had launched it apparently they were like okay well it's going to look kind of dumb because like we don't have users right like here's the site where you can go submit links and stuff but there's nothing there like why is anyone going to want to show up here so apparently they made like a tool that would every day with fake usernames just go submit links so it looked like the site was busy um and that's like a thing that doesn't scale right like you can't

you can't just keep doing that um but they were talking about this example and you know how they had a couple of friends check it out and stuff and they reached a point where the in the story this is why I said I'm going to butcher it but in the story they said they had gone out like partying or or something or they were out late and they forgot or failed to run like this tool that would go post for the day and they had looked at the you know they were kind of upset about it and then they went to go check their Telemetry or their metrics and they were like wait a second like we actually had enough people on the platform that made up for it and I think they were saying it was like 30 users or something so cool like

they the kind of had this growth phase where they finally got to 30 users and that was enough to to not have to like use their little cheat anymore um they have more examples like this that they were sharing that I thought was pretty cool but um we've been talking about that a lot for us and the first example that we kind of took to heart with brand ghost was um I only have a backend or I I only had a backend kind of service built to start things off and that was me creating a code base that was migrating from some other sort of hack together stuff and I was like I'm going to build this for real and I was migrating my own stuff over to use this backend service but I started talking with the guy who has the real estate company

and his roofing business and I was talking to him about posting content this way and it's really resonating so I said look man like I can get you set up I will basically I will go configure it all by hand for you all that you need to do is write your content tell me what you want in the post we'll put it into literally like put it into a Google sheet and I'll get it posted for you you're going to have to log into these platforms so we could do like a screen sharing thing and like you can log in and uh or I can give you I think I had to give him a password to log in and then he could go do it on his side but anyway like we didn't have a user interface or anything so like I had to

go do it all by hand for him and set up like a oneoff kind of thing to start posting his content for him now here's the funny part the first version of this cuz I kind of the story is not quite accurate the first version of this was technically before I had the service fully operational I I was still trans positioning so the first version of this was that I was posting the content for him so I was the automation talk about things that don't scale right so not only am I managing all my own social accounts by the way after hours and using automation to do it but now I took on this other person's accounts I had three accounts that he wanted to post to and the problem was that the automation that I had set up was not working so I had

a lot of incentive to make sure that I can get the brand ghost back end up and running as fast as possible because if you can imagine I've now just taken on manually posting someone else's social media and I don't even manually post my own so the whole point was that the thing that I used for myself in the very beginning wouldn't even work for him after I had told him to on board so um manually post this stuff by hand we worked our butts off to get all the backend stuff working at the same time we put the front end and stuff in place but you know that's an example of like that obviously doesn't scale and I think it was the right thing to do uh he's you know very interested it got to prove to him the value of posting content this

way and I don't think that he doubted it which is important to know I don't think we we convince someone who who thought this was a terrible idea I think he thought it was a great idea believed in it and he just happened to be like Yep this is continuing to work um so I think that was the right thing now what else though right like what else are we doing like that doesn't scale and uh something that we talked about is like we wanted to build an onboarding process and we have something in place right now it's not I want to be careful how I say this cuz I don't want to make it sound like I'm talking badly about our product or the person that built it I think we want more out of it is how I'll say it I think it's

I think it's great I think it absolutely works it's cool but I think when we set out to build it we were like we want more and we're just not there yet which is fine it's going to take time it'll take iteration and what we've said is like there's a a handful of people that we've uh sort of invited to use the product and it's open to everyone by the way but initially we invited people by hand and the agreement that we had internally was like I will manually on board their content for them so if they're like hey that sounds interesting but I don't have time that sucks sucks for me because then my offer to them is like Point me at whatever content you want me at your LinkedIn your Twitter whatever you want and I will start taking your posts and you

can you know you can tell me if you want it filter down to certain things or not but I'm going to start taking your posts and putting them on like into brand ghost and you can turn them on edit them however you want but I will do it by hand for you that guy's going real fast um so that's like one example or sorry another example of things that don't scale because ultimately we want to make sure people are kind of getting to that aha moment and we know that to make sure they get there we have to lower the barrier to get on boarded we're well aware of that but it's like the time investment to go build that and get that done really well it's just going to take more time and effort which is totally fine right not saying we're not going

to get there but it's going to take time and effort and in the meantime there's a lot of other things to be building too so if we can do the things that don't scale right if I can onboard people by hand now that's what we'll do right so now we do have onboarding hopefully it works for people and they can use it that way and if not if they're like hey sorry I don't have time to do this then I can at least jump in and be like hey look like I'll extend your trial I will on board your content by hand because I'm confident if you liked the idea and we can get you on boarded you're going to want to stick around because once you don't have to worry about scheduling your content and posting it you're never going to want to go

back from it um if you're a content creator or a small business owner if you have to think about going back to manually like scheduling content and stuff across platforms no chance um I've I don't know if I've said this on camera before but I've told my wife I might have said it on camera but like if I didn't have brand ghost if it just stopped working like I don't I might give up on content creation because I or like at least posting to social media platforms maybe I'd still make YouTube videos or something but it would be like I would feel so I don't know like uh I don't want to say the word crippled I don't think that's a good word to use but I would feel so um un unable to like be effective um I I just feel like I wouldn't

be able to do anything and it would be so much overhead that I would just be overwhelmed and give up so that's why you got to make sure it doesn't fail but overall I think yeah those are two major Concepts I wanted to talk about like this idea of what we're doing differently I wanted to talk about doing some things that don't scale I'm hoping that that period of like that period of do things that don't scale teaches us like where the gaps are because if we're doing things that don't scale forever uh that's probably an opportunity for things to improve on right like I don't want to be onboarding people's content for years to come so how do we make sure they have that experience where they don't need me to do that that's the idea okay so that's that um I'm close to

home here so I'll probably just talk about some other random stuff like how bright it is right here um but yeah this week There's I mentioned this morning in the video there's some more office travel so that was pretty good for today I'm going to be going into the office tomorrow and Wednesday we're going to do a little offsite tomorrow little team event which is pretty cool so excited to do that um yeah it's nice like I know I've talked about like remote work and hybrid work and in office and stuff before but it's nice to be able to to be back in the office and and do stuff on some days right like I love the flexibility of working from home uh I unless I lived beside the office or something I don't think you'd ever see me back in an office full-time um

that or unless this podcast or this Vlog it's on a podcast sorry if this Vlog somehow was making me millions of dollars or something like that then sure then yeah get me driving I'll drive however far you want me to go um but yeah I don't like the the time commuting it's no good but um I do I do miss things like this like going to have like a little like me seeing people in the office and doing offsites and stuff like that that is cool so that's what this week's going to be looking like um there's no space in this road a lot of motorized scooters and stuff like that and I don't mean like a like a moped I mean this person I've seen a whole bunch of them in the past couple years like the like got I I don't think that

was an electric scooter I think it had a little motor on it but a gas powered electric SC or sorry gas powered powdered can't speak a gas powered scooter here we go kind of neat looking but this road is really windy and narrow and there's not a lot of space for someone to be riding a scooter so and it's really bright too if you couldn't tell so I can't see anything but I have the live stream tonight what was my newsletter about oh man I can't remember oh failing interviews so I'm going to be live streaming about that tonight and then uh I'm going to do a coding stream in the morning which I have not been doing recently just because of schedule and stuff um just had too much stuff going on like I had on call last week that was my excuse not

be able to stream in the morning so I'm going to trying to stream tomorrow morning I'm going to talk about Azure blob storage and I'll try to make a little app or something little console app maybe just to show how it all works no one's driving through the intersection all I guess uh so that'll be cool I'll do that 7: a.m. tomorrow trying to think if there's anything else there's an accident here very nice it's out the other side you don't get to see it sorry just a little fender bender but of course they didn't pull off the road cuz why would you do that right they just blocking the whole Lane but whatever uh uh I'm going to try my best to do a better job advertising our behavioral interview course um I don't like I don't like being pushy when I like I

I have courses that I've made and like I'm just not like a good salesperson or hold on let me let me take that back I am trying to be a better salesperson there we go none of that negative self talk right we got to talk about getting better all the time so I am still someone that feels uneasy about trying to pitch things that cost money and I'm trying to be better at feeling comfortable with that and I think sometimes it's just like this um like I wouldn't try to sell something to someone where it's just like I don't care if this is of value to you just give me your money like I that's not who I am and I think it feels that way whenever I'm trying to like suggest that like if I'm like hey I got this thing then I'm like

oh they probably think that like I'm just trying to take advantage of them and it feels bad so I'm trying to be better at that like if I'm telling people like hey I have this course that helps you with X like I wouldn't have made the course if I didn't think it was going to help so like I should be telling people like hey I made this and I I think it's going to help you the other thing too is like someone oh was it on uh on daily Dev I don't know like if many people use that site but I post a It's Kind it's almost like a little kind of Reddit type of thing and I post links to my my content and someone on that platform I posted a link to my course and they said like it's pretty I think they

used the phrase like it's pretty cringe to like use a free platform to to like advertise like a paid for product and I was thinking like man like okay so name some other free platforms Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Instagram Tik Tok like there's a million platforms you're telling me that I I can't advertise anything on those platforms because they're free what um so anyway I got to get better at pitching stuff but yeah I don't like that feeling of like uh it just feels wrong sometimes but I need to remember if I'm making things that I think are going to help if I have a course great let me let me share that with you I put out tons of free content that's where I was going put out tons of free content and it's like no one pays me for that so like like if

you don't want to buy my course that's totally cool you don't have to um you just want to consume all my free stuff that's fine but like don't don't guilt me into like oh it's so cringe that you're trying to do that like give me a break anyway thanks for hanging out I'll see you next time