Exploring Free Tier SaaS Features In BrandGhost

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what is up it is Monday I don't know what the date is it's November it's early I'm leaving CrossFit um backing out of this crappy spot and uh yeah I got a couple topics planned for the day I the morning drive back to back home for me is relatively short so um I'll just keep this one is kind of like the the brief of what's happened what's coming up and uh we'll use the longer drives for for the good stuff I'm just trying to move my mic without turning it off okay come on Mike there we go it felt like it was sliding off and then the grab onto it I was pressing like it's very small and it's just like covered in buttons so I was like oh no what am I pressing but we're okay um and it's hot in here one sec

sorry I'm falling apart can't breathe um so I just finished CrossFit as you can tell um because I'm literally dying um which is good it's a workout that was like only things I bad at which is the best kind of workout uh if you can't sense the sarcasm it's there um a very bad shoulder Mobility uh it's not a good excuse but in particular from bodybuilding just because like you should work on that stuff especially for posing but it gets neglected cuz it's easy to neglect and then you know your your lats get tight your chest gets tight and it really restricts a lot of Mobility so we had to do like uh snatches which are an Olympic overhead movement and overhead squats and like I I simply cannot uh hold a bar in that position so um just a very challenging workout for me

because of that but it was good um cuz I got to work on those things so over the weekend uh we're focused on brand ghost development of course uh so a bunch of progress there we're we're trying to launch a free tier of our tool um and I think I've explained a little bit about this before but I want to kind of dive into a couple of the aspects like um like functionality under the hood if we're talking like strictly like what the code does is like it allows you to make posts and we can send them to different social media platforms right like it's not really rocket surgery there and um so what's interesting though is like there's a bunch of tools that do this especially like with blue sky becoming a lot more popular there's like a lot of tools coming out that

are like purely just like cross posters between Twitter blue sky masted on like some feter stuff and it's like uh buffer has been around since uh before I started getting into like uh social media originally so back in like 2013 they've been around for over a decade they do crossplatform posting like that stuff is not new and there's a lot of people that do it um sorry I'm fogging up in here let's get this let's get this under control um so it's not new um and we kind of see it as like a commodity like that's not the we don't think that's where we make money as a business which sounds kind of funny because like that seems like the core of what we do um so we're uh launching a free tool that just well a free version of our our platform that just

allows crossposting for free so um you should never have to pay for any tool to post crossplatform so that's kind of like the shakeup that we're doing um because really that doesn't fit in with like our business model um we think that where we add value is everything on top of that oh my God the highways I see brake lights because I'm about to get on it crashes ahead the whole highway on Google Maps is a solid dark red line oh I just want to get home and sleep man I got to sleep before I go to work ah man good thing it's Monday um positive positive vibes only um so yeah we we want to do that um we're just in the middle of like updating our our pricing and stuff online to reflect that like we have this free tier and uh you

know we want people to to start or uh shift their content creation Journey uh over to us basically oh someone's trying to cut me off from behind not very smart um I I realize it sounds really funny to say but they were trying to like we were on the onramp and they're trying to zoom past me and they were going to basically cause me to stay in a lane that was going to end I got to get in front of this truck cool now we sit in the traffic um so yeah like we're working on that we think that's a big uh important part of our our our business Journey um because is like I said it's like there's a lot of tools that do that and we don't think that's where the value is um brand ghost like we started with what we think

our value is and that's recurring content posting content that's valuable yesterday today tomorrow and then allowing you to repurpose that um and then leveraging AI on top of all of that to allow you to create more effective content so we will continue down that path um we had uh our first Tik Tok post through the platform over the weekend which is good there's one like that was in testing so it's not public yet uh there's just one more thing to take care of there it's a very small it has a big impact but it's like a very small thing conceptually and sounds kind of funny but like Tik Tok their user experience requirements before they will approve your app um anyone who's about to post to the platform they must be able to toggle like 10 of these different settings that they have um and

they won't approve your app unless you have that so when you're adding content onto our platform we we have to put the the options that they require we have to include them and it feels very silly and out of place but like if we want Tik Tok we need Tik Tok um so when I went to go test it it was through our new like post it now feature so you don't have to use a topic stream and uh oh my a lane that's going to end what the hell is going on here I think so um and by default that feature doesn't include like any of the extra fancy settings and the default setting for Tik Tok is that and this is just part of their requirements is like the default is uh is that it doesn't publish it like puts it into your

drafts so we have to explicitly turn on like make it public and uh it just it's kind of funny because we went to post it and I was like oh no it's broken it's not working but there's no errors even Tik Tok said there's no errors and then I like was on my account and realized that it just went into my drafts so anyway Tik Tok will go live very soon we just have to make sure that uh those features are present on on that particular screen got to move over Lanes here um so that's cool uh what else oh we're going to be doing an affiliate program so we're just sorting that out and that way people can earn through sharing uh and getting other people to register on our platform so uh we think that that's an important part of our strategy as

well uh obviously the end goal with any in my opinion end goal with like any business in terms of like a marketing and branding perspective is like you want people talking highly about your product on their own self motivated just because they love to use it um I realize that like you that's like very very difficult and requires like outstanding product outstanding team like just a lot of things and a lot of effort have to be like in place for that so ultimately that's the goal but like I think that there are I don't want to say shortcuts to that cuz it's not my intention but I mean I think that there's ways that you can emulate some of that and that's what in incentivizing people to be promoting uh and if you're finding people that are credible that like will only promote things that

they like to use and I think it's a good fit and everyone wins so we're we're finishing that up um then we have a bunch of other like we're at an interesting point because the more people we're talking to especially like our our core target audience they want features that like they're not directly related to the scheduling and we put a lot of emphasis on the scheduling aspects first on purpose just so we wouldn't get very distracted and now that more people were talking to like they're starting to to say oh like if you had you know feature X then I would consider it and these are some of the things that like we've talked about we know we want to build but like it has felt like it might distract so um I guess it's interesting to me because if we have people asking

for those things like maybe it's time right like maybe it's time to actually start building them and it's not a distraction because people said they they'll use it if we have it so um other than that uh there's a couple more platforms I want to make sure we have cuz we're like a lot of them are coded already they just haven't been like polished or properly approved so for example uh my social Med media posts to YouTube through brand ghost every day so if you're on YouTube on my primary Channel um every short form video you see is through brand ghost and that's only possible right now because YouTube has approved our application but um they have a quota that's like outrageously low like I think our platform could support six short videos in a day so it's just like we can't turn that on

for everyone because it would be so unfair so I use it it's constantly being tested that way and then uh when we get the approval from Google we'll turn it on but the approval is kind of similar to like what Tik Tok needed like they they have some ux requirements like I think we need to there's maybe isn't so complicated but I think they have like branding requirements like the YouTube button has to be like we can't pick a YouTube button that fits the theme of our app it like literally has to be like uh their color scheme and everything so anyway it's going to be interesting but um we have that that's it's functional just not uh enabled in the user interface we have mastedon which is functional but we have to change some of the login stuff um because of the fediverse and

being able to log into different uh servers so we got to sort that out um but like if you were to authenticate you could use Mastadon on our platform so there's that um and then I think the last two beyond that are Pinterest and Reddit and I am not too concerned about either of those I think Pinterest uh I think Pinterest does need an app approval though so like that one might be just a pain in the butt because we're waiting for approval but we'll see uh but those are the last four like major platforms and then we want to do like Google Business uh Pages that's been requested um so we have to keep chipping away at those because that um when you have people that are using the core part of brand ghost like that just unlocks functionality for everyone right so for

I just want to give you this as an example like I've been posting to Pinterest for like two years straight now and you might say well Nick like why would you waste time posting to Pinterest and then my argument back to you is well because I don't waste time posting to Pinterest I never do anything manually for Pinterest I've been posting to two years to Pinterest posting for two years to Pinterest at at no cost to me I set it up once and now brand ghost has the ability to go post there indefinitely um and when I'm saying that by the way you might be confused cuz you might say like well didn't you just say it's not done um it's a little bit more complicated than that like I have all of my social media that you see is posting uh through uh through

some type of automation so like I have built what needs to be built it's just not integrated in the way that needs to be productized for for clarity so anyway that's brand ghost uh and then we're we're still chipping away at reaching out to people like kind of cold call style um it's just super uncomfortable but that's that way we got to do it um we just launched our uh Ryan Murphy and I just launched our second course together on dome train uh so that's available right now uh depending when you're watching this if you're watching it and it's like leading up to Black Friday good timing for you um because because there's a 40% discount on dome train uh for everything and that includes our new course and um you know I'm back to going to start recording maybe tonight even if not then

tomorrow for the our third course together we got months of courses coming up so there's no breaks really um so I'll be working on that and I think I think I've said this before but for me chorus creation is going to focus all on the career stuff I have like uh like my YouTube channel my primary one Dev leader is for a lot more tutorials like more polished software engineering conversations like not me rambling stream of Consciousness um so that's not changing it's just that like my effort into a programming course is uh in my opinion not as valuable as me trying to take my you know my my 12 years of managing software engineering teams and and trying to help teach people about being a better soft software engineer so that's where my efforts will be on the course creation side of stuff oh

um I don't know how I forgot to bring this up uh but I'm super stoked about it my my blog is finally migrated to Blazer um it's a little beat up um so there's a couple broken things like my my migration from WordPress over the um it's kind of funny the the blog post themselves like I have to I basically have to like convert them for lack of better word into the new format now for the most part I can like just drop in the HTML and it's good but there's some stuff that like that doesn't fit in and it's uh like it gets pretty beat up so for example there's like this concept of short codes so short codes are just something you drop into your your blog post and then when before it gets rendered replaces it with like other controls other HTML

and stuff like just reusable pieces so uh Steven uh gel did put in support for that into his Blazer blog engine which is awesome um but I have a couple more short cods I have to Port over and one of the things I've noticed is like I used regular expressions for a lot of the replacement of different uh formatting and there's a couple of blog posts where I guess I was using like it's a greedy match on the regular expression so uh instead of looking for the first occurrence of something and stopping it will try to match as much as possible and what's happening is that it's over it's over matching and then it trims out like entire bodies of blog post it's really funny so um the cool news is the way that I set up my migration my migration yeah that was it

sounded weird uh I'm able to basically just keep rerunning it it's like item potent essentially so if I notice if I come across a blog post and I'm like oh crap like this one's formatted wrong I can literally just run the entire conversion process again and not worry that anything's going to break which is super cool um so I was doing that a whole bunch over the weekend just trying to polish stuff up and I think one of the last things that I need to figure out is like my Google analytics the um I thought this was simple to do um I think it's just a tag right but like apparently apparently it's more complicated than that um I I use like a Blazer extension or like a Nate package to to try and set it all up and I guess I'm dumb uh because

like if you go to my my blog right now it's like oh there's an error on the page it's crashed and it's only because of this like this control um sorry it's not a control it's a a component so I don't I don't know what I'm doing wrong it's like a one line but I feel stupid so um I got to sort that out because then I lose all the analytics and uh I would like to make sure that I maintain my analytics because I like data but other than that uh it'll be cool like I'll write my newsletter this week and I will put it into my new blog engine so that's awesome um I think the I ran it through GT metrics for performance and like it gets like it's almost 100% on performance which is cool um and then I never I

just never have to worry about like stupid WordPress plug-in updates and my site crashing like this morning for example I woke up and I had like 15 alarms from AWS I'm not exaggerating when I say that by the way like I had 15 alarms and it's because the the WordPress site is just like crashing and then it doesn't recover like there's no automatic restart of the of the services so it just goes down and then my blog's done but fortunately last night I'd already switched it over to point at Blazer so um that's goodness so yeah it feels good because like I talked about the this before as well but I'm able to make changes in Blazer and like touch any part that I want and in WordPress it was like I'm so far abstracted from what's going on and there's like different plugins and

stuff like I don't want to go touching someone's plug-in code to go fix something like not not getting into that business so um it just feels like I have a lot more control which is a good feeling um and then I think otherwise for Dev leader um something that I'll be doing is and it's based on some like video feedback right so last week on Friday I puted a video that was like a Reddit read through um about someone like basically criticizing like a junior developer for being very heavy on AI usage maybe that'll be a good talk for um for this uh for the commute as well but um you know a lot of people were uh responding in comments and stuff it's probably my I don't want to say it's my most successful video that I've ever put out because I've had some

videos that have been around as tutorials for longer and they have more views but like this is one of my best performing videos like at launch I guess so I don't know if that's because I got lucky uh or if because people want to hear about AI more I feel like that's a pretty relevant thing unless you're living under a rock of course and uh I think what I want to try doing is a couple of videos where I'm just building applications like totally using AI I think that would be pretty fun to see uh and I shared this on my my like weekly check-in Vlog Channel cuz yes I have a a third YouTube Channel That's only once a week I put up a video uh kind of almost like this one documenting what I'm doing and I was saying there like I want

to play around with a couple of different variations of of those videos one is like so I've been programming for over 20 years like I I have some insights cuz I built a couple of things uh would it be more interesting to see me try and build something with AI assuming I don't know any like basically have to use AI for every step of the way and like kind of emulate what is it like to to be a very Junior developer aspiring developer and say I'm going to build stuff but like I need the AI to do every step of it for me like I think that would be interesting but another thing that I'd like to show is like because I have been a software engineer or a software developer for a long time I don't like saying a software engineer because well talked

about this before technically I'm not by my by my definition um I am not a professional software engineer but um would it be more interesting to see me talk about or demonstrate in a video like building AI building with AI using knowledge I have for my career um and then you can see the difference right like for example if I were building something and asking like I use chat GPT a lot for helping with SQL queries but like the conversations I have with chat GPT are like why are we doing this can you optimize it um debugging with it whereas someone who's more Junior and in experienced they might not even know what they should be asking it they might not know how to prompt it effectively and I'm it's interesting I'm not a good like air quotes Pro prompt engineer um certainly like I

don't know the ins and outs of like how to get the most out of uh chat GPT and other llms but I've been building software for a while so I know what context I want to provide it right so I think that is a core part when we talk about um say junior Engineers like trying to lean into AI a lot is like if they if they never learn what extra context to provide it then they're kind of going to hold themselves back long term so um yeah I think some some interesting things to explore there so we'll see but uh I am almost home I'm going to be driving to the office today um before I do that of course I'm going to nap for about an hour and a half I'm absolutely zoned right now um I feel like feel like last night

I was sleeping and like dreaming the entire time so it almost feels feels like I've been awake all night because uh I have very very vivid dreams usually it's kind of it's been like that for I don't know since I was like 18 I guess um that's I think when I like when I went to University I think that's when I started noticing uh like my dreams are just getting more and more Vivid so if I have a night like last night where I feel like and I I I don't have like data to prove that I was actually dreaming the whole night but that's how it felt and uh then I feel like pretty exhausted in the morning cuz it almost feels like my brain hasn't really had a time to rest the other thing I should mention about it like is I very

frequently my dreams are like lucid dreams so I have like control in my dreams which sounds pretty cool and pretty fun and like it is until uh you're like I just want to relax and then it's a pain in the butt so so I got a nap and then I'm going to take our kitties we got veto and Vinnie I'm going to nap with them they're super cuddly um they're getting to be better with uh the big dog Arya I mean they've been fine with her mostly but she's uh she's really good with one of them now and the other one she tries to Nom a lot so we can't have her Nom in on the cats and uh we're getting there so so okay drive in we'll be talking about some sent in topics um and then I'll do the same on the drive

home so I will catch you then thanks for tuning in and thanks for being here I appreciate you joining me on the drive take care