From now on, everything that we say should say in a way that can be clearly cut in the one minute bit of insights.
So you can post and link them in every thought one minute max.
I do it 15 seconds because I think we'll have younger listeners as well.
They can keep attention for more than 15 seconds.
Actually more like 5 seconds.
I guess our faces have to be like feeling for younger audience.
Otherwise, who's going to listen to...
Middle age man.
Yeah. Hello, hello, hello.
Look where we are.
Welcome to episode 29 in person in Vancouver.
Welcome, Ilja. Yeah, we don't know if it's sunny yet.
It is, we can see it.
And the forecast is also mid summer.
Yeah, I think most people will be listening, not watching.
So for those of you who are your headphones, yeah, we are standing next to each other.
Yeah, recording.
Two microphones.
Yeah, sometimes I'm speaking here.
That doesn't matter, I guess.
All right.
You just made it a bit more complicated for post production, but anyway.
Right.
So why are we here, Ilja?
So we have our first annual all hands.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah. Most of who are listening, I guess, are probably pretty familiar with all hands and all that.
So yeah, this is our first ever annual company, all hands.
Yes, and what is all hands?
All hands is like all of us are together, usually, I mean, like only all employees of the company.
All employees of the company, yes.
And they're together.
They probably do some presentations, try to motivate each other, give some updates on what's happening.
It's a map review.
A map review.
Yep, yep, yep.
How about the team building exercises?
Yes, we are doing some this weekend and next weekend.
Yeah. So what's our team building plan for these 13 days?
Yeah. So we have first one coming up this weekend.
So we are recording on July 27 on a Thursday on Friday.
We are going over to Vancouver Island.
So we're going to do a bit of like driving, start in Victoria on the down south, Bucard Gardens and stuff, and then drive up to Nanaymo.
Stay there a couple of days, do some paddle boarding and hiking and stuff like that.
And then come back, work, work, work, quite a lot strategy planning, road map review, goal.
Yeah, yeah, financial planning.
Financial planning.
We'll have our off site.
Yeah, we need to define company values in principles, right?
Because like, where and if not now?
But the time we have one more person to be too late.
Yeah. Well, that's actually kind of true.
But okay, yeah.
And then next weekend we'll be doing a hike here.
We'll let you know next week more about that.
Yeah, that's cool.
So welcome to our first off site.
Yeah, all of you are with us.
Cool. So in one of the previous episodes, we said we should improve at least one thing for every episode.
So I'll start while you can gather your thoughts.
Or as to what we are doing for this episode, I think we should voice it.
So that we committed.
I started doing short video clips starting, I think two episodes ago.
And yeah, we're getting about 1000 views on Instagram, probably about 100 views on YouTube shorts.
But couple of hundred on TikTok.
Yeah, I had to install TikTok.
Man, their algorithm is awesome.
Yeah, anyway, so I'm feeling younger now.
So yeah, we also linked in, of course.
So we are doing those videos.
So now from now on, everything that we say, we should say in a way that can be...
That can be clearly cut into one minute bit of insights.
So we can post the link in and write something very insightful and finish with thoughts.
What's your speech?
Every thought, one minute max.
I do it 15 seconds because I think we will have younger listeners as well.
They can't keep attention for more than 15 seconds.
Actually, more like five seconds.
I guess our faces have to be like appealing for younger audiences.
Otherwise, who's going to listen to two...
Middle age men talking.
Yeah, I wish the pleasant filters.
No, I think that's actually makes sense.
But on a more serious note, you know how I was talking about like some people...
The social persona they put on, it over time changes them.
Not us.
Not us, okay.
But I think if you take this too far, try to do everything in a real, worthy way.
It is going to change you.
I definitely noticed that when I was doing a blog on Instagram and might sound strange to our American listeners or even European.
But in Russia, Instagram somehow took off as a blogging platform.
A lot of people did text blogs, which was what like 2000 characters I think it was, the character's limit.
And the picture was just there because Instagram required it.
People would pay professional photographers take 50 shots all over the place.
And then they just use those randomly. So it would be like somebody with a cup of coffee talking about whatever, some professional stuff.
If you look at their feed, there is nothing in the pictures that tells you what this post is about.
It's just them, right?
So when I did this, I realized that I started writing in a way to fit in that I think it was 20-100 characters.
But I often write longer.
So then I had to take like screenshots of those, like extra words, put them into the carousel.
And then I had to take a picture of Instagram. It was just so bizarre to plan your writing for the medium.
Image sharing medium.
Yeah, for the image sharing medium.
So even now, like you were doing an audio medium, an also a video on YouTube, but it's like a long-form conversation medium.
So yeah, if you have to adjust to one minute reels for those of you who didn't get it, it was a joke.
Of course.
I mean, it was a joke that people have to have to do everything in a real worth away, right?
But I think once you start doing those, it's actually very hard to keep your mind off.
It's like if you're a photographer, you walk anywhere, right?
And you are...
See, photograph.
You are applying the frame, yeah, the photographs.
And I think people who do like TikTok and stuff like that, they always think, oh, is it like worth it for a video.
And actually, I wasn't that camp a little bit more with pictures and also with Instagram stories.
I don't do that anymore because of that reason, actually.
Because you start seeing the world from the view of like, are people going to like it?
It's a very miserable way to live life. Actually, I think that thing was a real worth it.
Okay. So what are you improvising?
You're shaved, so you can't use this twice.
I got a haircut, shaved.
So yeah, I'm continuing that.
The thing that I am trying to do this episode is because we are both together physically here.
We're recording with two microphones, people on YouTube can see it.
And I, apparently, thanks to some feedback from Ilia, turns out I'm a very active listener.
So what that means is like, when he's saying things like we have to make real worthy things, I would be like nodding my head, but beyond nodding my head, I'd be saying, oh, yeah, right.
Things like that.
And today, because we are recording together, my audio will bleed over into his mic while he's speaking.
That's going to give him a while pro-processing and editing it.
So I'm going to try and change my behavior just for this one episode and not say things.
We'll see.
You see the offset of his writing is to start him to play off because like, it was hard feedback, right?
Yeah. So we didn't do one improvement that we said we will do now on, which is about eight minutes into our episode now.
Let's tell our listeners what this episode is about.
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, we wanted to just chat, which we've already done.
So that part is checked.
We will give a bit of an update on just a couple of things happening, which I think we already partially done to.
We did want to introduce our CDO, right?
CDO, right?
We also wanted to talk about subscriptions.
I think subscriptions is a very nasty topic, but that's also very interesting topic because the whole world, a software now seems to be converging with subscriptions.
And we are in subscription pandemic right now.
So we will talk about that.
I don't think we'll have time to talk about anything else.
We should not forget to mention that person who cancels subscriptions right after they sign up to them, which is probably like pretty much everybody.
Okay. So, our setup.
Yeah. So, you already said that we are in the same space in your, is it the office?
Yeah. You can see how I'm trying to drink even water very silently.
Yeah, thank you.
No, no slurps, did you go over?
Yeah, so we have two mics next to each other.
We're very close to each other.
Basically, shoulder to shoulder.
We record this with two cameras, but we'll probably use just one.
So both of us are in frame, which is pretty cool, I think.
I dropped the mic this morning, but I was able to actually catch it mid flight.
But in a earlier episode, I think one of the very first you said this is one of those in this track.
No, it's not this one.
Okay. This is the other one.
That's the MB7.
S-58.
That's the one that like rockstars use on stage and smash it around.
Yeah, if you've ever seen like some green day taking that microphone with the cable and like waving it around like a lasso.
Not as if it's smashing, but accidentally smashing it.
And then they just pick it up and continue stinging it.
It sounds like that didn't happen.
Those are the S-58 microphones, $100 to piece, completely indestructible.
That's what people, $100.
$100.
Yes, $100.
But you need an audio interface for that.
So total maybe like seven, eight hundred dollars.
No, the audio interface, you can get like a cheapest one, probably about $100.
And the cable, so you're looking at maybe $250 bucks.
A run-ac from our episode about software misadventure.
Yeah, I forgot the number of it.
He was using a S-58.
All 12-ish I think, or yeah, episode 12.
And also on our very first recording, I think I'll also use the S-58.
It's a good microphone.
Yeah, so I guess we talked about the bleed over that's happening.
I'm trying to control it.
Trying to control it.
So you're checking the check box.
Yeah, because at the north side you have to make sure that you use the time effectively.
Productivity, right?
So our next meeting is I think in 15 minutes, but we are running late.
Yeah, so let me send a quick text.
Let me run you over.
All right.
Next one was we were going to introduce our CDL.
This is our CDL Chief Dog Officer.
We love staying in our podcast.
You sometimes he kind of gives us a sound bite or two.
Sometimes he gives us a literal bite.
So the funny thing about Boomer is when I came in yesterday, he was always leaking my left knee, which kind of felt weird.
I told him about it to my wife and she's like, he's healing you.
Maybe there's something in there.
I don't feel any pain there, but...
Wait, do you have that big toe kind of pain or something?
It wasn't right.
Maybe he doesn't know.
Boomer may not know about it.
All right.
So that part of the checklist is done.
CDL introduced...
It's interesting.
Let's move on.
Yes. Interesting.
What do people say usually?
We are repeating ourselves.
Maybe you do that in Google.
I didn't hear that much.
Google, because I never worked in the office.
So we always use Google Meet and it had this emoji things.
I think they're public now, but they used to be only like internal.
And they had a crab emoji there.
A crab means that you keep repeating yourself over time.
The passive-aggressive, Google-y way to say that this topic has to end and it's time to move on.
It was a crab running across the screen from left to right, right to left.
Like somebody triggers it.
Somebody clicks that crab thing on their interface.
And then everybody in the call sees that this person thinks that the person who is speaking should move on and stop repeating the same thing over and over.
Oh my God. I would have somebody say that rather than do that, like that sounds so bizarre.
It's very Google-y, I guess.
It's a position that's kind of a funny, dorky thing, right?
Of course, yeah, yeah.
But it's more aggressive than passive-aggressive.
To be fair, I said it in a way that makes fun of them.
I would say for the first six months or so, actually didn't know what it meant.
I thought it was just a funny crab.
Why is that crab?
Nobody knows.
It's some folklore.
So I just kept talking while I was thinking I have people in English because they're sending me crabs.
All right.
Quick few updates on what's going on before we head in, jump into the subscription.
We had our episode with Jason Fried, episode number 28.
Amazing episode.
Amazing.
I actually already have heard it twice.
From other people?
No, no, like myself.
Other people have said that they are listening to it or they're like queuing it up for the weekend and stuff like that.
But just during the interview itself, we knew that it's going to be a pretty good episode.
Yeah, I'm like, oh, this is a great real.
I think he talks on camera so much.
It was great.
He knows how to say things that are shareable.
I guess semi-kidding, of course.
But generally, he expresses his thoughts very concisely, very clearly.
And he says them in a way that grabs your attention.
And I think one thing that we did, I haven't listened to that many of his interviews, but somebody I know, actually somebody who mentioned in the episode, in the beginning, he sent me a note that you guys did a great job with questions because you did not ask him to quote and quote read his book.
He said, like, usually people just ask him questions that are already answered in the book.
And I could just read the book.
And he has a, I think, wonderful way.
Even if you ask him hard questions, or you don't agree with his viewpoint, and you ask him something pointed like that, he has a really awesome way of bringing it back, basically accommodating your viewpoint into his thought process.
Yes. And yeah, and it all happens in real time.
It was awesome.
Yeah. I think there's a lot to learn from him in terms of just how to speak, how to answer questions.
Remember when we asked him about Jeff Bezos' investment?
I thought that might get a bit contentious, because they talk about bootstrapping, but they took some money from Bezos 15 years ago.
17 years ago.
So I was curious how it's going to be answered, right?
And he actually explained the rationale for how that money didn't go into the business, how it was more for them to reduce their own personal exposure and dependence on the business.
It was such a fascinating answer, one of my more way favorite parts of the interview, because it just puts things into perspective so well.
Yeah. And like you said, everything that he was saying, like the way he was answering questions was very genuine, very pointed.
I also remember one part, you asked him a two-part question.
Yeah. He was talking for maybe like three, four, five minutes about the first part.
And then he said, like sorry, I forgot what was the second part of the question.
So he did remember that it was a two-part question, which was fine that he forgot about it, but he respected it.
And then he kind of gave him a point, and he immediately picked it up.
Yeah. Actually, our episode wasn't even the best example of I think how he does this.
I won't name the podcast because I didn't really enjoy it, but there was another episode in preparing for the Jason Fried episode.
We were listening to a lot of different podcasts that he has been on, right?
And one of those, the host pretty much going off a checklist, asking questions.
And there was not really a good flow, or he would ask a question, and then Jason Fried would reply, and then he would immediately move on to a completely different question, something like that, right?
And you could sense that it's kind of like jumbled together, and there's more stuff to talk about, and he wants to talk about it, but there is no time because he's jumping off into the next topic.
I thought he did a great job not getting like pissed.
He's like, it's going to be over in an hour or so. I just keep doing this.
This brings us to actually the good next topic.
We have started doing user research studies with some of our potential alpha testers.
We had three so far, and we had another four, five lined up.
Yeah, we actually doing one in person with a friend of mine later today, a hero in Vancouver, so which is awesome.
Basically, we wanted to see how people use their podcast apps, and learn from there, but also introduce our app, because these people will be our first alpha testers.
So before we prime them on our app, we wanted to see how they actually do things today.
And we prepared the list of questions to go off, which I think the very first meeting we did.
We went off the list pretty much sequentially, and we got some answers, and we documented them, you know, all the standards, kind of a few extra stuff.
And then the next study, we asked the person to share their screen, and that whole questions thing just went out of the window.
We started doing, I think what's called anthropology study, I guess, very close to being an anthropology study, so for those of you who don't know what that is, use your research.
You can just ask people questions that they give you answers.
For example, like, what app do you listen to? Why do you use that app? What is your most favorite feature in that app?
Yeah, and it just basically goes methodically. And I think often is the case, at least in my experience, is that user researchers are not domain experts.
So they wouldn't be able, in many cases, to have the deep conversation because they just don't know the product deep enough, or the area deep enough, because they're generalist, many of them are generalist.
That's why such a checklist of questions help.
Yes, it helps. And they rely on somebody with domain expertise to help them actually come up with the questions.
I think that both at Google and Amazon, which is fair, right? You can't have a researcher working just one product all the time. There is not nothing neat, but because we are both domain experts.
We can, because we don't have any other people or money to get a UX researcher and all that.
Yeah, and right now it would be really wasteful to hire a researcher. So we do this as founders and we met, so yeah, the second person we had, we asked him to share his screen, and we just like, what podcast do you listen to?
Let's take a look at those. Like what do you click? And we just observe that in real life. And I think the most important thing there is you still want to keep in mind what you want to get out of this and go back to your question list and actually see if anything.
There's anything you missed while following them, like in this cap hazard random way. But I think the anthropologist really gives a good understanding.
The questions are really a guardrail for you to not forget to ask about these things, but I really love the anthropology way because it meanders around a variety of topics.
But you get a lot more honest feedback. Well, not even feedback facts.
Because what people say they do and what people do might be different. It was really interesting observing our third participant. She was scrolling so fast.
Yeah, sometimes I wouldn't like I would have to reconstruct where she actually pressed because it was just happening too fast.
But it was good to observe how she's doing this because like she's not reading the episode titles or descriptions. It's her machine learning algorithm in her brain is like finally tuned to pick what she wants to listen to podcast since 2009.
And so she had this some extreme pattern matching ability that she developed in those 14 years, right.
And that's why we couldn't keep up because it just wasn't obvious. But I think what it also shows is that's how she operates, which means we ask her that question in person in writing.
And she will go, first step, I do this, that's like a step to do that. It should be forced to do what we ask her to do. Whereas in the observation, she just asks what she does. And maybe steps are completely different because she doesn't even think about them as steps.
And we definitely wouldn't have come to know how fast she's doing this if we had asked this question.
And also what we also saw with those three people and also the two of us, so we have a sample of five at this point. People have their own idiosyncratic ways of doing things. I mean, the only thing that is common is clicking the play button.
Everything else, like five people, five, sometimes like almost orthogonal approaches to let's say picking up the new episodes.
Sometimes similar, bad, different and for us building a podcast tab, you know, we obviously can't be great for everybody. We need to pick our battles. But some of those things, you could see, actually you can make it work for both pretty well.
But if you don't know that the other one exists, then you will just over optimize for maybe what you do for what you've heard.
And I think this also brings us to the topic of just the importance of early user research and early user feedback. And once we get our app to them, that's when the feedback will come over.
Because right now we can show them everything about that, but until we start using it until we start figuring out what really works for them, or maybe like find useless.
We don't know, right? And only given it to them, and that's when we discover that.
I think we have one more feature to add, like favorites, and then we have to rename that because everything is in my personal accounts right now.
And then we're off to the alpha.
Yeah. Oh, actually, what was the original name of the app and the company that you want to use? I think we can talk about that.
Sure. Yeah. Orca pod. Orca pod. Yeah. I think it was like a code name. And why is it orca?
People who know me, I think know that I love Orcas, but also orcas are social animals that rely heavily on information being passed through the pod.
A collection of Orcas, basically families there, maybe engineers, a collection of Orcas, a set of Orcas, order set of Orcas, an order set of Orcas are called the pod, right?
And of course, pod podcast, there's a play there already, but also they are heavily reliant on like making their own noises, communicating through sounds and passing their information from generation to generation casting their noises through their pod.
It's a funny how we humans assume we are more intelligent and we call their communication patterns noises. Maybe they're much smarter.
So yeah, it was Orca pod podcasting app and how you'd be want to name the company or collapse or the land. Yeah.
And then we went to register it and we found out that Norwegian company. I think the region company is something else because it's Norway, but there was a company in the US that does some kind of aquarium thing.
So it was already taken some actual physical thing that is related to like actual fish and see life. Yeah, the name was taken and we were like, okay, so we get a scramble and we won't disclose the name just yet.
You you may know it already, but we won't disclose it.
But yeah, we had our I think our first app, we should keep some of those error screens and all that for posterity because there's literally orcas jumping out of the water and stuff like that. Yeah. And saying things like whale, whale, whale.
Let's go to the subscriptions topic because yes, we don't have much time. We need to run to the next meeting. All right. So we wanted to talk about it like three episodes ago.
We haven't made that time for it. So finally it's time. I think we wanted to start with what are the subscriptions we use for this like creating and producing and managing this podcast.
Not also for the company, right? Yeah.
So let's start there and then we'll just to set some context why we want to talk about subscriptions more recently. I think we've been kind of annoyed with some of the subscriptions that we have to pay for.
And I think the final turning point from sort of accepting subscriptions to like completely disliking some of them. So using this tool called can for
creating the podcast covers the YouTube images. So we use it once a week to like basically type different text into templates and drop a photo and like be done with it. It's like I literally spent 10 minutes a week on this.
This thing costs, I think it's $299 for personal user or $499 for like team of two, which I find excessive for what it does.
And the only reason why actually we would pay for this is to make those images transparent for YouTube covers because it's really cool. So right now we actually we haven't paid yet because we are on the free trial. I also use it previously.
I needed to use some custom image that they had and actually they had a micropayment there. You could pay a dollar. You can get all of those for free with the subscription or you can pay $1.99 and just get that particular image.
You'd rather do that right. I actually did that. So I paid a couple of bucks for those images and I'm like, okay, that's great. Actually, it's it makes much more sense. It's I consume this I pay for this. So it's like you don't buy subscription for like drinking coffee every day right.
You pay for it whenever you want and you can get some discounts if you buy like a lot. And that's how I feel like some of the software should operate because Canada for us is not a required tool.
You could do this all with that kind of kind of just makes it a bit simpler but still like 15 bucks is too much for what we get out of it. But there are some other tools like squadcast we are recording right now we've been 40 bucks month and that's actually very useful like we could not do this without you could not do it without right.
And I think Riverside is like a cheaper but we just so used squadcast also support the kind of the small company. We also have the founders on our show in episode eight.
Yes, yeah. So yeah, we're cool with that or this crypto paying 30 bucks a month for this script. It helps us. It saves us a tremendous amount of time to begin with. And second, it allows us to do those video reels with transcripts and also they look nice.
They are alternative. We would have to pay for final cut pro or whatever those other tools 500 dollars. Yeah, I think final cut pros like the like two three four hundred. It's expensive.
And also like we wouldn't be using those capabilities nearly as much. Well, I don't be audition. I think it's like 30 bucks a month or something or not audition what is that premiere and described you get the editing of audio you get to edit video you get all of the transcripts and reels.
Now we also just use the studio sound feature a bit to produce the sound rate. Actually, I don't anymore. I used to video we can keep it for another another time. It's good but not up to your standard not up to my standards here.
It works for audio. There are better ways to do this as long as you know what you're doing and you have you have spent 500 dollars on another.
So the software on as a top. I think generally speaking, I love the convenience of subscriptions, especially on my phone where I can just tap something. I don't need to enter all the credit card information and all that and say like done.
However, there is a subscription epidemic. I think it's a worldwide phenomenon. So it's a pandemic and it's not just us like you go to any social media you look up this topic and you'll see lots of like great points about it.
One of the worst subscription models that I absolutely hate right now is car manufacturers. I don't know if you've heard. So car manufacturers. I think BMW is your favorite car company. Not mine anymore apparently.
So they would ship with all the required hardware but to turn on some specific features like heated seats. So the car is already equipped with heated seats but to turn that on you have to pay a monthly subscription.
It is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Yeah. It's crazy but they have already tried it out. I don't know about the success rate or not. But that's just like going beyond.
I think it ventures into the realm of being almost. I mean it's like borderline I guess it's just if you know how they do this. It just feels wrong.
Yeah. It doesn't like when you turn on your heated seats. It's not like there's some backend service that is being sent requests that you have to service and it's costing you anything.
It was like zero operating cost. So it's only capital expenditure that they put into making those heated seats. That technology probably hasn't changed for 30 years.
But it doesn't just do the same thing with autopilot. Autopilot is a one time payment. It's not a six thousand dollars. It's quite expensive.
Yeah. And that's very common in cars though. You buy features and I'm okay with when you buy the car you decide or maybe even later on you decide, okay I want autopilot and I want to buy it. Sure. One time.
The car already shipping with hardware that doesn't cost anything extra to use. But you're charging a monthly subscription for it. That just is ridiculous.
And you might start thinking like do you need to warm my butt. Is it really worth 10 bucks a month? Yeah. Maybe I needed only in January and February. Yeah.
But it's an annual subscription probably. Right.
Only a three-year plan or something. Yeah. But there is a definitely a subscription epidemic. And this is really attractive to companies because it gives them a very predictable recurring revenue.
Yeah. So I just realized when we moved to Florida. So we brought the car from Seattle to Florida. And I have heated seats. Luckily I also have actually ventilated seats because it's that brand that you just mentioned.
But we paid a few thousand dollars for that whole kind of package up front which has only kind of the heating and ventilation and an actual massage and you see it's kind of useless. But it's nice. It's nice to turn it on every now and then. But it also has the heated wheel. Steering wheel.
Which was extremely useful in Seattle. And like Florida, I wish it was like it was able to cool the wheel. But if I could pay less a month to like cancel the steering wheel subscription. But still I think that whole thing that we paid for with all of the heating and I think it was like a panoramic roof and all that stuff was probably a few thousand dollars.
I think it was called like the executive package or something which includes everything. That's what I like actually because we looked at another brand when we were buying the car and they're like you have to pay for like the power windows.
It's a very expensive German brand by the way. But then you would pay like almost as much in options as you pay for the car itself. It goes like over a hundred thousand dollars. And you were like seriously.
Toyota doesn't do that. It costs like twenty five hundred dollars. And it has all of that already included. But I think it then they all comes down like capital expenditures versus rating expenditures.
Like is it cheaper for me to pay BMW but I'm 50 bucks a month and get all of those features. And then if I use the car for three years I end up paying what like three thousand dollars versus let's say spend seven thousand dollars on all those features upfront.
I think this is where the calculus starts to make sense. But if you want to keep the car for ten years, you're probably better off buying that.
The question is though it's not an option anymore. Yeah, that's what really bothers me is if you want heated seats, you have to do the subscription.
I think Adobe has done something like that actually. I remember listening to this podcast, I forgot the guy he was a CPO of Adobe. He was a founder of Benant's or Behance or something.
Binance. Yeah. The idea is a crypto thing. Behance was like a community of creators or something. Then Adobe acquired them and then think he became the CPO.
So he was talking about the transition from one time license fees, which should be like you pay like hundreds of dollars for Adobe product to that creative cloud thing that they have, which is probably twenty is probably the cheapest twenty five.
And I remember that was the point in time when I stopped using Adobe because I don't use it enough to pay twenty five bucks a month, but I can shell out let's say sixty bucks for lightroom one of and use it for next three years.
Okay, so now we're really running late for our next meeting with our CDO. No, the CDO doesn't accept reschedules unfortunately physical limits says.
Yeah, and we really have to run for that meeting. We got to wrap up what that's what they say. Yes, we got to wrap up. So yeah, do you want to talk about the subscriptions we have right now? Yeah.
The squad cast, the scrap we already talked about it. We got a bunch of one off actually purchases like I said to open other things, which I'm super happy with. We pay we use calendar. We are on the free plan right now, but it only allows you to connect like one calendar or some restriction like that.
So what Elias is doing is if he has a like dentist appointment, let's say, right, then he would put a blocker in my calendar. And so yeah, I know when all of Elias dentist appointment because of our time zones and because my calendar is mostly empty that works for us.
I had kind of for the same time zone. We would have to actually pay for this. And also it's another thing. I think it's eight dollars a month per person. I don't think it's worth it. That's the problem. I would pay with our fifty cents per schedule.
I think that's probably way more than they get uses. I think you're talking more and more about like uses based pricing. Yes.
And openly, I, for example, with chat GPT, they do that. I love that feature because I think there is an option. They do have that option that every month you could do, I think, $20 and get the subscription.
Or you could do usage based pricing. And I use it quite a lot. It cost me maybe like seven point four, four, nine, six, two, three dollars or something. Less than 20.
What if you go over 20, really be kept at 20? I don't know. That would take a lot of chat GPT usage, I think. I've not gone there.
Yeah. So we also pay for Google Drive personally. I mean, both of us pay pay for it personally. And then you have been trying to get Google workspace set up for like a week and a house now, which is crazy.
Yeah. I mean, I was trying to get onto Google for startups program, what gives you Google workspace for free for a year with a bunch of other credits.
And I think it's like, you should not have a Google workspace set up in the last 31 days for them to give you the free one, which is why we haven't set it up yet for the company.
We don't need it frankly right now, but it would be nice to have. And Google being Google, we got to response a week later after submitting the form that something was incorrect.
And what was incorrect like some email address or some domain? Yeah, like email address domain. And it does not match what you said in here or something, but it actually does match actually does match.
Or there are some new ones that I'm not understanding. So I sent them a response. It's been two weeks. I sent them a follow up a couple days ago, still no response.
Yeah, I guess listen to the latest three work episode called the Google graveyard that puts a bit of perspective on how Google works.
Right. Actually one last thing, even though we're running out of time, I'll add this yesterday, you and I were talking about this. So why Google sculpture is like this versus why Amazon sculpture is different.
And the thing that we were talking about is it probably starts right from the very beginning of the company with seeds, it's DNA with values with values.
And so for example, in case of Amazon, it was a book shipping business in the very beginning. So if a customer complains or says like, Hey, where's my book?
You have to have all of that tooling build to detect like at what step of the process did we fail?
In fact, if you don't have a tooling, you can't even ship the book. You can't accept the payment.
It's like every transaction is important to you at a almost personal level. Right. You care about that customer deeply.
I have accounting of everything that's going on. And that goes into the DNA of Amazon's excellent customer service that we know of today versus Google how they started is this massive search engine.
And you don't really care about exactly who's searching what you care more about the aggregates and the friends and things like that. And that shows in the DNA of the company today in the customer service.
Right. Yeah, they're not just dealing with customers. They want to automate dealing with customers. There's Amazon, like you said, every single interaction with the customer, I was a business interaction. I don't know if it was right or if it was it.
But there is always money involved. I mean, there are probably other things like Alexa and all this stuff. But like the core business, the Amazon.com, the shopping thing, AWS, like you always pay.
So there is always money involved. And when there is money involved, you have to care about it. Right.
Like how many times a package would be like last because USPS lost it or they did it with somewhere else. Like it's not Amazon's fault at all.
You just send them a message and sometimes and it's not a thing right try to call in some other companies and you will never be able to get through automated response system Amazon, even if you get a chatbot.
If it's below certain amount, it just gives me money back. It's actually more effective than human. It's the only childbot, I guess that I actually really enjoy because I'm like, hopefully we will just stop it there.
The childbot will give me a refund and then I don't need to deal with the human. But then if a human comes on board, it takes a few more minutes. And then we will like, I'm sorry to hear this. Here is your refund.
Even though it's not even the default. And then that's why I'm spending thousands of dollars on Amazon and Whole Foods and all every year.
So with that amazing three minute real, let's close this episode. We have coming up next week. We are actually recording here to pretty awesome people. We want to name them or will we?
Unless it gets canceled. So there's a cool podcast called startup therapy is a guy's a wheel and Ryan they run startups.com website and the community of founders.
Serial entrepreneurs. Yeah, pretty successful, massively successful. Yeah.
And their podcast is really really good. I've been doing it. They talk a lot about bootstrapping and VC and all that. It's very, very good.
So yeah, that episode that you shared with me that's so insightful. And I kept like even though it's a podcast medium, I think I was actively listening and saying like, yes, yes, that makes sense.
Yeah, we even were listening.
So I know why it's difficult to change the behavior. So that's going to be on your annual review.
It might affect your ratings. It's a room for improvement. I think it's called why bootstrapped companies or are bootstrapped companies less valuable than venture by companies? I think it's a 45 minutes episode. I think I'm going to listen to it. It's an amazing episode.
So we'll have them next week. Yeah. So unless something gets canceled, there is casual. So we'll have them. So I'm really looking forward to getting their wisdom.
And after that, we have a really special person, but we'll talk about that later. We'll keep it for. Yeah, very special for a specific subset of tech people.
It's so relevant that if we name that subset of tech people, I think you will know who we are talking about. So we won't even name them right now.
Exactly. Yeah. All right. And with that, where can people find us?
Metacastpodcast.com. If you like this episode or you want to talk about your podcast, listening habits, anything in the podcasting domain, drop us an email at hello at Metacastpodcast.com.
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Ilya has started doing like episode specific t-shirts now. So if you want to buy a t-shirt and fund us, yeah, do that. I'm wearing one of Ilya's previous t-shirts, by the way. It's called copy pasta engineer. I love this shirt. It's me. I think you need to make a new one called chat GPT engineer.
Yeah, because it's not copy pasta from Stack Overflow anymore. From the engineer. From the engineer. I heard a joke about somebody I know he made this real. It's in Russian so we won't share it. It's like a child talking to his, I think, grandparent and saying that like these days, they just copy codes from chat GPT. And he's like, no, you can't do this. And then the dad of this child, he's like, but they are manually typing it from chat GPT into their ID. He's like, okay, yeah, that's just fine.
They just made me think how like we learned from books previously and actually we did type codes from the books, but I think it was a facilitated understanding of what you're doing.
And I think finally Ilya, like he said, he does a lot of reals and stuff on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok. Yeah, so find us on all those places. Give us a like.
Every time you see our content, just like it because it's a single list. If you don't watch. Well, but here's the thing, right. How real that we share on LinkedIn. Some get like zero impression.
I mean zero zero, but very small hundred to hundred impressions. And usually those have no likes at all. But then when you have some engagement, those could get like six, eight hundred views. And then just in three
to one, like it's less than 24 hours. It's been at eight thousand already. But there was quite a bit of engagement going on there. So yeah, engagement is good. Help us game algorithms.
All right, then with that, I'll start the list. Yes.