some people may feel like they're in a rat race some people may be okay with being in a rat race
being totally honest some people may actually be happy where they are they are ratatouille
i'm making it worse okay ratatouille is a turkish travel company
hello hello hello welcome to episode 31 of the metacast podcast with ilia and arnab and ilia
are we kind of like back to our regular programming recording remote yeah we're recording remote and
for those of you who have missed the last two episodes we were recording side by side
and it was a lot of fun i really enjoyed the dynamic actually one of the episodes episode
29 it was just you and me which was pretty cool because there was no online delays and lags and
all that and episode 30 was with the startups.com founders will and ryan they were both remote but
we were standing next to each other and i think it helped us to interrupt each other less so it was
good yeah i think the video though was a bit weird like when i looked at the shorts that we created
because i'm looking like sideways at you like this and not at you like this so yeah so this time i
would like to control the conversation a little bit and go to the checklist right and for those of you
who listened to the last episode you know exactly why i'm making this comment so what are we talking
about today oh thank you for putting me on the spot because i thought you wanted to go to the checklist
and like yeah let's do it no no i thought because you wrote what are we going to talk about today i didn't
realize it was a question for me yeah but i can do it i can do that's fine
taking the reins so today we're going to talk about a few changes that we're making to the podcast
they aren't going to be big changes but pretty significant in terms of how we approach it
and it's still going to be weekly don't worry you'll still get your regular dues
exactly so then we want to talk about our off-site that we had all hands all hands yes
when i was in vancouver so if you don't know what you're talking about listen to episode 29 because we
touched on that a little bit but yeah we spent some time working in person we want to talk about
that and last but not least not at least in terms of money so we want to talk about the book that we've
just published and yeah we'll talk a bit about what the book is about and where you can buy it if you
want to start a podcast if you want to support us all right so let's get started so can you believe
that we're 30 episodes in this is episode 31 it's actually 33 right because one of the episodes
was two part episode 24 where we talked about living our jobs was episode 24 1 and 24 2 and also we had
a bonus episode 7.5 yes prime episode we are not very consistent with our naming no no we are actually
very consistent those are the only ones and that 24 part 1 and part 2 made total sense i think
to me at least yeah exactly so in this episode if we didn't cut the topics in half it would have been
a two-part episode or a very long episode which we were asked not to do anymore so yeah i guess
episode 31 kind of turning over a leaf after 30 plus 3 episodes 33 episodes into episode 31
so officially or unofficially we are into season 2 of the podcast and with that we are doing a few
subtle changes to what is the focus of the podcast and what are we going to talk about it to be honest i
think it's not that we are doing a change to the podcast we are just formalizing what we had already
been doing since like episode 24 or so yes so let's first actually tell the listeners what we are changing
and then i want to bring up the other point so the podcast today is called metacast the podcast about
podcasting actually no that's what it was called last episode so starting from this episode it's called
metacast behind the scenes which is kind of meta but it's also it also reflects what we have been doing
all this time we have been talking about us starting a company how we got there why we are doing this
talking about processes talking about all sorts of things that are related to our company the reason
why we started as a podcast about podcasting tagline is our initial hypothesis was that we will talk about
all things podcasting podcasters will love it they will listen to it and they will have a lot of
connections with podcasters who can then advertise our app so we are building a podcast app in case if
you missed that we're building a podcast app which will be awesome and will come out later this year
so that was the hypothesis right and i was still having a full-time job at google so we were kind of
thinking about that but we weren't building anything yet but we started a podcast we weren't ready to
talk about the app and the platform and all that too i mean if you think about it we started recording
those first few episodes in october in 2022 and i actually you and i talked about the app and the
platform and all that like maybe in march or so like seriously we kind of had an idea that we want to
work on something like this but we definitely weren't ready exactly yes so that whole thing of podcasters
listening to us didn't happen and maybe one of the reasons is that we aren't really going too much into
the technical stuff like let's say the podcast junkies podcast goes and uh yeah if actually any
of you listening know harry duran introduce us to him we would like to get him on the podcast we will
get him i think at some point that didn't happen but what did happen was we met a lot of cool podcasters
and we interviewed them but we always always ended up talking about careers entrepreneurship and a bunch of
other stuff but the common thread there is podcasting anyway because we are building a podcast app
and people we invite to the show all of them have some kind of connection with either podcasting or
audio so what we are going to change about the podcast is that i think we will continue inviting
the same kind of guests but we will talk more about building a business and how in case they are
podcasters how podcasts help that how they build their social persona their podcasting persona how they
promote it all of that but podcasting is no longer the primary topic of it and i think the jason
freed episode episode 28 was the turning point because we wanted to talk about their podcast but
we ran out of time and we never did yeah but it was such a great episode regardless yeah it was
probably our best episode so far in terms of like how much we personally learned from that and also in
terms of popularity popularity wise it's not the most popular episode but it is up there it's like
in the top five we did get a lot of exposure from that episode too yeah and what we heard back from
people is also similar our episodes where we talked about building the new startup taking the like
basically the leap of faith to jump out of like career jobs and do something like that where we talk to
other people about their journeys building things those seem to resonate a lot with our listeners i mean
of the four or five really like touching uh experiences emails people that we have met uh that we have had
everybody said the same thing right those are the episodes that they love the most and so we're like
okay so that's the second topic the second part the third part is that we are also now more and more
open about what we're building right it's becoming real we're launching our alpha this week and so
alpha is in like close bit we don't have to we'll talk about it in the next episode or so anyway so we
won't go this week meaning last week because this episode comes out next week so for the record
we're recording this on august 9th this episode will come out uh actually next wednesday right
august 16th is when it's gonna come out so essentially our app is now there it's invite only for now
but it is there we're experimenting with it so this means that we are ready to talk more and more about
it and about our journey so all of these things combined like you said like are naturally converging
towards like entrepreneurship and starting that people telling us that that's what they want to hear
and us being ready i think that all kind of jives well into this moment where we turn the page and say
season two unofficially and we go with this metacast behind the scenes
yes we were talking a lot more but because now we almost sort of gave ourselves a license
to be more uh less about podcasts and more about the other things and what i've heard from people is
that the stuff that resonated with them is not like oh now i know how to do this podcast stuff or
something like that it was all about like we were talking to one person and she said that
she's still coming to terms with leaving her high-paid job and all and she's like i need to listen to
you a second episode 24 a second time and actually the other person who wrote an email to us he also
listened to that episode twice because those are the things that really struck the chord with people
and uh not any of the stuff you know where you talk about descript and all that which you know i would
say is good and useful enough i would say in those episodes because we would always go on tangents
right i would say some of those bits are probably useful but like if you take this whole is a thing
this whole thing right listen for one hour of that there is probably 10 minutes of really good useful
info for podcasters but the rest only matters for people who have built or are in the market for an
emotional connection with us and i'm saying being in the market for emotional connection with us
meaning that people are looking for podcasters for podcasts and they somehow discover us and they
connect with us of the people who reached out to us none of them were podcasters but they were all
mostly actually software engineers or people in other places some related kind of area yeah i have to call this
out is it okay if i name that person who approached us at the dinner i think so we asked her and she said it's
fine so yes so first of all hi pinky thank you for listening so we were you visiting your friends in
vancouver for dinner it was a few families there and i just talked along because i was with you
and uh so one person comes in and she's like oh my god you're illia i'm like i'm like you guys discussed
this in whatsapp that i'm coming and all you didn't know that yeah nobody else was so excited about
seeing me i mean they were they were glad to see me but they were not excited to see me and she was
just like so excited and yeah then you know i found out that she actually has been a fan of ours
she's been listening to you know the all of the episodes and i think she's a designer is it right
yeah yeah so nothing to do with podcasting but she just connects i mean she's your friend uh so
obviously she connects with you but she also i guess built that connection with me as well
through the podcast that was very exciting and i think this is the kind of connection that i would
like to build with people more so if our podcast resonates with you you know where to find us i
think we've been talking about this ad nauseum hello at metacastpodcast.com so one other thing that we
have been talking a lot about and i guess both of us want that is to be more deliberate about how we do
our podcast we don't want to be like step by step kind of how to kind of show we want to be very lively
and engaging but at the same time previously we would prepare really well with our guests because
we don't want to make the wrong impression we want to make sure that we are just this kind of people
but when it came to our own podcast we would just go on the whim and just talk about whatever which i
think the more episodes we record the more jarring it might become because the more relaxed we have
become but if somebody listens to just this episode and not the previous 30 they might not get some of
the things that we're talking about so yeah i want to be more deliberate about the length first of all
uh say 45 minutes probably a sweet spot i would say between 30 and 45 minutes because that's what
people have been telling us to we'll see we're halfway there by the way are we because i have i have my
camera in obstructing the timer so me too me too yeah i can go on like forever on this yeah so being
shorter i think is one of the things and second in one of the episodes we were talking about how we
want to make one improvement every episode and i think you've been working on this improvement and
you've been pushing both of us for the last few weeks is announce what we are going to be talking
about in this episode so today we almost derailed this but we are trying we are trying yeah yeah and
then for me personally i'm trying to speak slower and just be more deliberate so i have less to edit
later on but also i think it's just a good habit to build because it will serve me well everywhere
right so when i listen to our podcast i don't feel like you're going too fast you're almost always way
slower and more deliberate than i am i think it's not about just the speech the actual like
pronunciation of syllables even though that as well it's also about stutter stutter and false starts
which you don't hear for most part when you listen to our podcast because they're all cut out you're
trying to reduce that work for yourself yes but also i'm realizing this is how people hear
me and even if they don't pay so much conscious attention in regular conversations still when
somebody sounds much more deliberate and precise especially in professional setting i think it
helps a lot it just builds your credibility you sound more confident and you sound more confident
even if you like no shit about what you're talking about okay let's go to the next topic so so
very quickly the punchline of that whole thread what is the value that we're hoping to bring with
the new format of metacast behind the scenes just a question for me again okay so first i always ask
the hard questions ilia yeah i should have been used to that after eight years working with you
so we want to encourage people who are either working on their business or and are as early as us or even
earlier if that's even possible but primarily i guess people who are in that journey where maybe
they are employed or they're doing something that they don't like or they're lost or all of the above
and we've been there we've been there i mean we've been there not like in the last two months we've been
there for the last years and we talk about that some insights come out of how we got out of that rat race
into what you're doing right now we don't know if it's going to work out so uh there's a lot of
vulnerability i guess that goes on into making this podcast especially if it doesn't work out
because then we would look back at this and we're like okay but at the same time it's a great diary
even for us to go back and listen to this but i think for people who are going through this a little
bit behind us i think that will be very helpful
one quick note i'll add there ilia is you said rat race i just have a kind of like negative reaction to
that because it may not necessarily be a rat race certainly some people are in there just for like
the race and the ego and the status that comes with all of that but a lot of people actually like
doing that and you and i were like that then they're not in the rat race they are doing what
they want but i think even with that you and i were happy but we knew that we want to if we had the
chance we want to do something on ours of our own that actually gets very interesting because i think i
had moments when i was happy but overall i spent 16 years total working in big companies and i would
say percentage wise for most part doing the work i was doing i was not happy so that's why i use the term
the rat race maybe i should have said the people who feel like they are in the rat race because yeah
some people may not agree with me with that and actually thank you for correcting me on this one
because it's one of the things that i'm working on is to actually see when i say stupid things or not
stupid things but things that might be perceived as offensive because i just say them so directly
without adding i think right yeah like some people may feel like they're in a rat race some people
may be okay with being in a rat race being totally honest some people may actually be happy where they
are but they may start to be inspired so they are ratatouille they're okay
i'm making it worse okay rat at uh yeah anyway um they actually too is a uh i think it's a turkish
travel company so anyway you're right at that point yes where you're losing
okay rat at anyway but i think it's also to inspire people who are thinking like hey maybe i want to do
this someday and also being totally honest like you said we are i do feel very vulnerable about
documenting these things on the internet in case it doesn't work out the good thing about audio is it
cannot be easily copied and distributed yeah of course sure sure no i mean like text can just go
viral audio just doesn't go viral well unless it's like our video unless our the thing that we're making
makes it possible ironically yeah yeah we are very far away from where we need to be so let's head back
towards the railway track the rat track yes so next thing we want to talk about is working in person
and what kind of value we got out of it because for the last three years i've been working remotely for
the last three years you've been working remotely for even longer and i think we kind of got used to
being remote but i didn't realize actually how lonely i would feel this summer i worked with google
for three years visit the office twice in those three years and also only the tail end of my time
there but it was fine every day i was talking to a lot of people because i had a lot of meetings
so that was part of the rat race right it's like getting out of that thing where you can't control
your schedule but while doing that so it was like i would be in meetings back to back all day talking
to people great people lovely people love them all just i guess didn't want so much of it but it kept
me busy and then i would have my family in the evening and then obviously for the weekend but now my family
is out of town they've been out of town since late june and they're only coming back in uh august so i've
been by myself for actually exactly a month when i came to visit you and that month was very very lonely
because like sometimes i wouldn't speak much to a person to a person right because you've also you
moved to florida last year so you haven't made a lot of like social connections yet in that area
exactly yes and also it is crazy hot here yeah in june it was just hot right at least in the evening
i would go for a run uh or just take a walk now like i came back from vancouver in early august and i'm
keep getting these messages uh from i think it was on the ring ring up it's like heat wave like 150
degrees fahrenheit i don't even know how much it is i never had to convert more than 90 to celsius
but it's like i think getting closer to 40 degrees celsius so today i walked from a car to a shopping
mall for maybe 200 meters so it's like 200 yards in american in imperial system so i went back and forth
within an hour i had a terrible headache when i got to my car it was just incredible how
this excessive heat can make you feel so yeah that didn't that didn't help my loneliness that's
very very long with that way to say that i got really really lonely here so actually i won't go too
far on this thread but i will point out that one of our listeners i actually i won't name them
i don't know if they want to be named or not but i started following them we had a meeting with them
like last week and then i started following them on instagram and they published uh like a really good
book that i started listening to why i'm saying that it's called ministry of future and it's about
the climate crisis it's the ai ministry no yeah not yet but it might turn into who knows like i'm about
maybe 20 percent into the book but it starts with exactly that there's a huge disaster with the climate
crisis and about 40 degrees temperature but also high humidity at the same time and how like millions of
people died yeah and as we speak actually i don't know if you've heard or not there was a fire
caused by some sort of a like heat thing in hawaii in maui i might be wrong but i believe some lives were
lost there and they're like crazy videos out there right now of the fire it's in maui anyway yeah coming
back to topic i think yeah a month of being on your own without talking to a person i can imagine
because i was going to coffee shops just to talk to the baristas and they're maybe like why is this
person like talking to like just get your coffee and go sit and work i learned all their names
right right and but i think it's a very valid point because even though i left my job it's been
actually just shy of a year now that i left my job i did spend the first three months like no connections
at all except for my family but i did have my family but since then i have been going to a lot of like
tech meetups and social connection like you saw how much of social connection there was when you came to
vancouver like we went to people's houses and all that so i haven't felt too much of that and i have
been coding way more than i was and i think that's maybe why that's making me happy or keeping me happy
yeah cool so this brings us to the value of in-person communication and it's just fundamental
human level we need that we are social creatures we just need people to stay sane i think i mean some
deep introverts might disagree with me right now i don't know but i think for majority of people
even for introverts like i am actually still meaningful connections are important it reminds me that
podcast that i've previously talked about so paul rosalie a conservationist working at amazon was on
lex friedman's podcast and he was talking about those solo trips he does in the jungle where he basically
only sees nature and animals and he said like he brings photographs and national geographic magazines
with him because uh you just start to get a little cuckoo it like on the fifth day you just need that
connection yeah we're like hardwired to be social at this point exactly yes so but also the other thing is
there are some conversations that we had while driving for example or while taking the walk that we did not have
during video conferences we do long and lengthy video calls but i think it was way easier maybe because of
the in-person like body language dynamic but it's almost like i don't even have to say it you know what
i'm going to say already yeah but also sometimes one of the hard conversations we had i think it was
about our approaches to schedules and to shipping too early or shipping something that may not be reliable
where we had a slightly differing opinions or levels of comfort i guess these kind of topics are harder to
bring up when you don't see the person just because you don't know how they're going to react and you
you don't know if what you're seeing in terms of their reaction is their true reaction if you do
it over video but if you are looking at them it's just much easier to navigate a discussion that might
turn i don't know the right word for that but it's like it might be a bit hard to talk about these
things because it's a bit like challenging each other and i feel like challenging each other is easier in
person so i would say this my personal experience with this is if i haven't met a person at all like
in real life i've only seen them on video then it's hard to have these kind of conversations but for
example you and me i have no trouble having hard conversations with you on video because i have
worked with you quite a lot and i think that personal respect and trust it's there where
i know i can be like totally up front and like honest with you and you will be honest with me but
let's say i start working at a place where i haven't met most of the people it's of course going to be
very hard and it's it's going to be way easier to meet them work with them maybe a few times in
person and then the relationship gets way smoother when you're back remote yeah maybe we differ in
this a little bit but i fully agree with you that the level of previous respect and background really
matters a lot i guess i'm focusing more on that can last five percent of like looking at the eyes and
getting those cues and all that yeah because i'm very sensitive i sometimes say stupid stuff or
stuff that people might be offended by but then i immediately recognize it when you're in person
because i see those micro reactions but on video i don't you see what i mean because you are more
politically correct than me just in general so you generally don't blurt out things like i do and then
and then regret it right so maybe this is very different i mean i do say my fair share of stupid
things i just don't even realize it until i tell you about it but i have to be like with you in the
car to talk about it i'm just kidding i'm just kidding no no yeah but that's true i do say my fair
share more maybe more than that of stupid stuff but it's okay i i at least people like you or like
people that i work or live with i know that they get me so yeah one thing i also noticed actually about
myself let's just get vulnerable right so we stayed i mean i stayed in your house for i think it's about
12 days and we worked a lot then we also had this trip to vancouver island for three days and we also
did this whistler trip we went to that gathering of multiple families so all of that was very tiring
for me also also like i was out of my comfort routines i wasn't doing any exercising except for
walking i was drinking too much i'll say one thing that you mentioned i think on the second or third
day that you felt like you were like almost like a toddler that others were making decisions about
where to go when to go what to do and all that and you were just tagging along and you completely bought
into that role oh my god that was so comfortable but i think eventually it is significantly different
from like especially after a month of being completely alone i think it was a big change
i think i was very energetic inside but physically i think i was very drained and then i think the last
few days it started to get to me i think i became just irritated for no reason on some occasions and
then i would need to drink a coffee and eat a muffin and that would make me feel good again which
is not the right way to approach this you should just sleep but um in any case my point there could
also be too much of in-person work if you are outside of your common environment and uh i mean i was
tagging along everywhere which was great but at the same time i think next time we should probably limit
this to a week and maybe with one weekend i might also take away was that this was our first all hands
right and i think in this all hands if you look back at it we did two things social things like we
went on trips or something like that and all has been four hands and two paws and well six with our cdo
boomer yeah two hands and two paws okay yeah yeah yeah we did two things one is we had
some social like trips and we went to people meet people and all that and every other moment that we
weren't doing that we were working and it was intense and i think we got a lot of stuff done it was
at the right time for our nascent company to have this kind of a thing but i feel like at least me i
burned myself out in like seven or eight days yeah i would second that i actually enjoyed working like
that for a little bit when i came back home yesterday i just realized actually yesterday was easy because
i just went to bed and i didn't do much but today i had to make my own breakfast yeah and i'm like okay
so there are actually benefits to live in your house not in my place right um yeah i agree with you and
in terms of getting things done we didn't do much coding in those two weeks but we hashed out what exactly
we're launching what is the priority of those features yeah pricing strategy pricing strategy
yeah because we had i think two or three iterations on that because it's not straightforward for how
you price a podcast app even though our app will be the best podcast app ever created by mankind if
you price it wrong nobody will use it right and if you price it too low we may not break even because
we have costs there's a bunch of that uh stuff yeah and you and i we come from like a big tech product
development background so we just have this inherent tendency of looking very forward right the vision
and trying to like break down things into smaller chunks prioritize it which i feel like we're doing
a good job we're not thinking like five years down the line what are we we're not writing a plan
for five years down the line because everything is a guess at this point if you're on either of those
extremes you can be in really bad shape if you are too big company focused where you actually write
all those strategy and all that well all you do is you're just planning and you're doing nothing you're
guessing not even planning yes you're guessing instead of doing the work right yes so it's kind
of one apprenticeship at its worst right but also the other spectrum like other end of the spectrum
like you said yeah the other end of the spectrum you can be just be so myopic that uh you work on
something and you think of a feature that you should have thought a month ago or a customer says hey
wouldn't it be nice to have this and you immediately go and build that wars actually and you want to go
and build it but your ui cannot scale to that you have to redo your flows or like there is no way
to stick that button in all that kind of stuff right so for us we have a very long list of things that
we want to add to the app we do not break them down into how we're going to build them what we're going
going to do but when we work on a screen let's say we were looking at the podcast info screen
and we were thinking what are the other elements that you'll need to go in here so that we design it
now such that those elements could be easily added and we don't break any patterns because most of the
software becomes bloatware when people add features that they didn't think about up front and it's just
left and right worst case scenario it's also done by different teams in some kind of like a shared
framework where nobody has a centralized control and then you end up with the franken frankenware
frankenstein yeah frankensoft yeah so and we try to avoid that so we're trying to balance that
middle which means sometimes we may spend a bit more time than let's say a hungry startup would
on kind of deliberation but at the same time we know exactly where we're going well exactly as in
we know what will be the other things in here and we just not building it right now yeah we just don't
architect ourselves in the corner because that could be an easy thing just for example right there are
four million podcasts it is very hard to build infrastructure for four million podcasts even an app
it's very hard and it requires very different approaches from building something for a thousand
podcasts or even ten thousand podcasts and four million podcasts and like 70 80 million episodes total
i think and multiplied by we operate at not the audio what sets us apart is not the audio right for
most podcast apps a podcast and an episode is a url to an audio file we operate at like a thousand
or maybe ten thousand level deeper because we're operating at almost every sentence or word level
so we are not doing the bird's eye view right like other apps we are doing an octopus level view giant
squid view right so the amount of data that we're talking about is like humongous already for a
two-person startup yes and you can easily design yourself into a corner if you do it for a thousand
podcasts because then very soon you will start hitting scaling issues and then what do you do it's not
like you can just work your way around it you will have to re-architect the whole thing and then while
it is being re-architected you will either not onboard new users or you like have to limit the data that
you work with or the thing is just plain broken for a while and we won't name apps but one of your
favorite apps ilia that you used to listen to podcasts with is unfortunately in a state like that right now
where the notifications are generic because well i won't go into why it's generic but yeah anyway
yeah yeah our hypothesis is that they actually don't know how to handle all the data or they
don't have the right infrastructure and that's why at a certain point the experience really hit the
bottom yeah i'll just let my subscription lapse which is a good thing i guess because now i can
subscribe to our app you're not paying for it anymore yeah yeah okay but one more i think super fun
thing out of this was that you came back to software development like guns and i don't want to talk
about guns swinging and swords and all that going on a tangent again sorry we'll try to keep it into
one minute recently maybe a few months ago i realized not realize i read somewhere and then introspected and
felt how much of the words that we use in software the industry are about wars and fights i'll give you
more and more examples but there's a lot of like deadline and so many things if you just take a moment
and when you say things think about it it's all like coming from the military and i'm trying to actively
trying to like not say things that are like inherently tied to wars and violence yes you're applying some
gun control yeah so so you didn't come out swinging your guns but you did come out building out our
app for android which was awesome yeah yeah so i guess for those people i don't know if we discussed
before or not so my training unlike yours was actually computer science yes which one of us
the cto or the ceo who had the education in computer science exactly yes so i used to really love and
enjoy programming when i started recording when i was a teenager but it unfortunately for me i guess
happened at the time when tooling was so bad and also i was in a fairly remote place i didn't really have
good role models of coders because i was doing my own thing working as a freelancer so i was just
figuring stuff on my own and it was like early 2000s late 90s there was no stock overflow there were
no developer tools in browsers there was no aws or firebase the browser was like netscape and internet
explorer yeah there was no cloud none of that existed so it was very hard well it was easier in some
way to like just get started like build an app by me in like a program for windows or like a website
right but it was very difficult to debug it was very difficult to work with other people so if i had
a mentor like you i actually might have stayed in coding i think but i didn't so i decided to do
something where i don't get stuck as often and use my soft skills as opposed to hard skills but during
this trip i guess for the last few months i've really been feeling like i do want to go back to coding
at least a little bit and i've been doing a bunch of scripts and proof of concepts and analytics scripts
in the last few years but i really wanted to get back to application code to actually when you write
something that you can see direct effect of i think one of the things that i did fix the bug yeah you
fixed the date so if an episode was less than one minute long we wouldn't show the length yeah we just
show an empty place with the border which like didn't sense so i look i looked into the code
what code is dart right in the app so because it's flutter dart flutter yeah yeah and uh you helped me
find where it was and then i did those four lines of code i mean with your help and then bingo it was
fixed and uh that's the kind of things that i want to dip myself a little bit of course i will be able to
i guess maybe not right now maybe eventually uh to write the right the same quality as you do but i
really love that thing where i do something and it changes the experience and uh it makes me feel very
satisfied and also hopefully take some stuff off your plate yeah we definitely need that right as
we are seeing what we're building i mean so first of all without like you said without the tooling and
the technology we have right now building something like this even like say 10 years ago by one person
or two people would have been impossible yeah because we are doing a lot of like server side stuff that a
lot of like podcast apps don't do it's almost always client side so they help like with costs and
infrastructure and all that but also like you're limited in how much you can do but yeah i think
coming back to this um on i think the third day or fourth day feel free to cut this out if you don't
like it but i'll say it honestly on the third day or fourth day you mentioned like you want to get back
like do some more like hands-on stuff and i suggested maybe analytics
right and you were like you didn't say it immediately but i i got the vibe that okay you're
not going to be happy with analytics and i was actually personally happy to see you like jump into
it coincidentally we had a chat with one of our super fans jenny last week and we also came to know
that stitcher one of the popular like android podcast apps is shutting down and she's starting
to look for a new app and we're like okay we gotta like ship our alpha even if it's half broken
and a lot of features are not there yet into her hands and so you with my help of course but you
cranked out the ability for the app to be built on android and like basically on the emulator and all
that so that was amazing yeah yeah we had a bunch of stuff that we had to troubleshoot for the app to
work on android but none of that stuff was in code it was all in configuration configurations and security
policies all that stuff but it took us maybe i would say cumulatively maybe half day and that's beauty
of flutter we have the app now for both android and ios actually we should maybe we should talk about
that we want to get a device for android so we are able to test on android yeah because you and i are
completely on like apple ecosystem yes entirely you found somebody on one of the marketplaces who was
selling a phone not related to metacast yeah okay yes facebook marketplace right yes so and the guy
really wanted to meet you in your house for some reason and then what did you do i mean i kept saying
let's meet at a mall and he was offering like his device for 60 dollars right which is most other
places shops and all are saying okay this is very attractive very attractive but he was very
particular i can only deliver it at a personal address so i gave him an address which was a walmart
and he said oh this is a walmart i can't meet you there and so eventually we said all right fine we're
not doing this yeah but i think then we looked at the i guess here's the tip for everybody if you are
selling something on facebook marketplace it will just show you then i think the name of the person
probably even the first name and also just their small very very small avatar but if you make five
clicks and go to their profile you may discover some very interesting things about the person like we did
yeah i think we will not share what exactly we discovered but uh it would not be a good idea to
meet this person in person even at walmart i guess yeah yeah yeah it was definitely not a very good fit
but sometimes like if i was selling something previously when we were moving i would go to the
profile see that this person has an account since 2008 and they have pictures with their kids like
five years ago that's legit you can trust them but if somebody is like oh everything is locked and there
are some sketchy things well 40 bucks that you save it's not worth it right i am now connected with one
more person who looks way more legit on facebook and has like pictures and stuff who knows it's fake
who knows right but and he is not offering like the phone for like 60 dollars also it looks like a decent
thing i'll meet on friday and come back and talk about it hopefully yeah and and we will see if this
whole flutter thing actually works as expected because right now it runs in the emulator on the computer
so let's see if we can just deploy it to that device that you is the samsung or is it pixel it's a
samsung galaxy a 52 yeah so let's see if if it works in that mambo jumbo of numbers it's better right
so a bit too uh too much apple fan right now yeah yeah the other thing that i kind of thought about
is there should be a marketplace for broken phones i would be perfectly happy with a let's say last year's
android some phone but the camera is broken like completely not working it doesn't matter to us
but the device the screen works like i can use the browser and apps and all but the camera is completely
broken so it's completely useless to anybody almost anybody for like day-to-day use but works
perfectly for testing as long as you don't need the camera yeah i would pay like 100 to get that phone
versus like paying 250 to get that same device which most places will sell for right not even new like
used ones because it's last year's phone and all the marketplaces i looked at i asked chat gpt about
it too and chat gpt pointed me at like ebay swappa gazelle amazon everything it kind of makes sense
they're giving you a guarantee that the phone works which i don't want i want like broken phone but
cheaper so i think it would be nice to have a marketplace like that if somebody is listening
into it maybe do some market study let's go on our last tangent because you mentioned chat gpt
when i was posting doing promotion for one of our videos for one of our episodes oh the linkedin one i
copy pasted uh it was i think most of you talking about how the social persona makes you a different
person right how you like start to look for things to shoot so that you can post them so you basically
start to look at the world through the lens of uh will other people on social media like it will get
engagement everything that you do yeah so i copy pasted that transcript and paste it to chat gpt
and i asked it to summarize it in a share worthy linkedin post chat gpt came out with a five or six
paragraph blob i don't really want to use the word text for this it says blob of content that has a
bunch of emojis pretty much like multiple emojis per line to be fair it is like a lot of linkedin
posts that you see i'm probably not subscribed to any people who post like this and i kind of unsubscribe
immediately when i see this kind of stuff but i think linkedin lunatics probably has a bunch of
stuff like that no no i'll share some with you right after this like today you you commented on it too
you may not feel like that because you know the person but that style of like using the rocket emoji
and other emojis at the beginning of a paragraph that's a linkedin thing okay so the thing i commented on
didn't start with hey hashtag linkedin fam was like hey linkedin fam yes and it didn't end with
let's like live our real lives be yourself hashtag inspiration or something and everything in between
i would say it actually did a very good job summarizing what uh was in the transcript it also added a bunch
of stuff i didn't ask to add like encouraging people to do what we said what we were talking about
but it was just so cringy i forced myself to read what it output and um i actually eventually ended
up posting this but not under not under my name under my fake persona no i said that like i put this in
the chat gpt and uh that's what it gave me actually actually that post i think it actually performed
actually i don't think it performed well i mean linkedin fam didn't like it this whole linkedin fam thing
um yeah yeah no i think i agree it was too cringy i think here's the whole thing about social media
right i have known people who say like instagram family or facebook family and stuff like that and
i'm like this is not your family you don't even know who these people are i was listening to a podcast
today where a person who are going to interview tomorrow for our episode 32 he was saying how like
up until certain point he had 1500 subscribers on linkedin oh sorry on uh what do you call it twitter
x but next but most of those people knew him from offline from conferences and talking and all of that
and at some point he crossed the threshold where all people knew was his twitter persona and then he
realized that actually forgot what the inside was but basically for him you could say that people who knew
him from another thing you could have called him like a family the early beginning yeah but the people who
are just like complete random people from twitter you wouldn't call him a family x x family
demoted to x family yeah it's fine okay anyway so you wanted to go on tangent and i hope your train of
thought was not derailed again no we are like 56 minutes into our 30 minute recording so let's get into our
final topic yes i think we'll leave most of the topic for later what you'll say now is i think we
already said in the last episode but let's do it again is that we have published a book called the
pragmatic podcaster which is about starting a podcast it goes into how you choose your mic how you set up
your recording space how you do post production how you create a podcast cover how you choose music
what kind of licenses exist for for music because this is important legal stuff you don't want to get in
trouble how you choose your hosting provider and how you publish that's what i call a day one part of
starting your podcast is basically like getting the first episode out getting that mvp out and actually
use quite a bit of analogies with the lean startup methodology with mvp getting the thing out being
a bit embarrassed about it that's fine just get it out otherwise you will spend endless weeks and months
to abandon it and not even ship it right it's also a very concise and like to the point book if you're not
not even thinking about creating a podcast but just wondering like what does it take to create a
podcast i think if you read skim it you'll get a really good idea of how much work and money is
involved yeah so if you're looking to start a podcast you can buy it and actually you'll be equipped to
start a podcast i think it's a really good it's a really good book for this use case but if you are just
interested like you said right in understanding how this whole thing works maybe our podcast inspired you to
like understand it a little bit more yeah by all means buy it and uh i would say half of the content
of the book will be interesting in terms of how you actually go about all that because it also applies
to other types of content and finally even if you are not interested in this at all but you want to
support us then you can still buy the book and do not use the promo code so you can pay the full price
and support us even more so what is the promo code they should not use uh so the promo code that will
give you a 30 off is metacast so you just type metacast and gives you 30 off so instead of paying
15 you pay i think it's 10 50 that's what it comes down to usd usd yeah but if you want to support us
four and a half dollars more yeah you don't have to use the code but by all means i guess you use the
code you know we don't care if you use it or not but we do believe that this book is is useful i don't
want to use like qualifiers is good i think but i think it is useful it's a book that i wish i had
when uh i was first starting a couple of years ago and uh nobody wrote it so i did and i think we
haven't yet put it up on amazon and we'll talk about that in the next episode about why it has
taken us so long to put it up on amazon stay tuned for the next one of the reasons that we were drinking
so much in vancouver that's true and had fun but there are other other reasons also we'll get into it
but once we do i think we'll share like announce it and we haven't done any announcements and all that
it's more like a soft launch right now i feel like it's almost pointless to announce it before we have
it on amazon because even when we were having this discussion with your friends i forgot how the
topic of the book came up i wasn't promoting it to that group of people but somehow came up and uh
the first question that the person asked was is it on amazon because it's so so easy to buy it on amazon
than to like go to gumroad and well it is very easy to buy it on gumroad so by all means go and buy
it on gumroad but you don't even have to go to gumroad you can go to just where pragmaticpodcaster.com
and it is the very first thing in the show notes so we will have a separate episode that's dedicated
specifically to the process of how that book was written to what tools i used what was the process i
have quite a bit of learnings to share and hopefully by the time we will also have published it on amazon
so i can also share that part of the thing so just a few quick teaser questions for you in this episode
we'll go deeper into the next one how long did it take you to write this book ilia i almost feel
like if i say how long it took me it will diminish the perception of its quality i was in tiktok today
i don't know why but i subscribed to a few pretty cool accounts and on that account they were talking
about charging per hour versus charging for the whole project for a logo this is for a for a designer
right and uh i will go into the details of the whole thing it was very insightful but the punchline was
that so if i do things faster and charge you more because i am better and i'm also doing it faster it
feels less valuable to you as a customer than like paying somebody you know a lower rate but they like
take longer or something maybe to to some customers yeah yes it was i guess it's one of the objections
that he handled from the audience it was a clip from training but it made perfect sense so i can say
that yeah i wrote it in two weeks end to end without formatting it's just just the actual content i was
amazed by the way but i have to qualify this right because i'm very good at writing and that's why
it took me such short amount of time because at amazon like when i got my promo to principal and
all that like everybody commanded my writing and it just comes naturally to me i mean i'm by no means
like neil gaiman or stephen king or anything i'm actually pretty bad at fiction writing but i wouldn't
say i'm pretty good i'm too good at um like inspirational writing and all that but if you take some content
that just goes straight to the point with no fluff but still feels kind of light that's what i'm pretty
good at to the point i think crisp and clear writing that's your strength it took me much longer to write
to the first chapters that are about you can do it why like what kind of audience you choose those were
the hardest chapters for me to write but the more technical ones i would just write like pages and
pages and pages per day pragmatic podcaster.com promo code metacast right and the other other teaser
question that i'll have is what was my only contribution to the book a photograph oh no no
yes there is one photograph in there the cover the choice of the cover to be more correct and you did an
amazing like i love the cover that we finally came out with but i do think in the show notes for this
episode you should put that the hilarious one it looks very similar but we're kind of on the side oh
no that was for the podcast the startups.com okay no but for this one to be fair i use the canva
template to come up with the youtube episode covers which we just reformatted that and we're using that
for the podcast episode covers so if your app is one of the better apps that supports podcast episode
covers you will see our cover right there if not wait until our app is released and you will see
that in the better app and we use the same thing for the book cover and i think i was really struggling
with like where they put our company logo on there and then none of it looked good and i guess except
one and that's the one that you said okay this actually looks better and we went with that it actually
looks amazing if i'm saying so myself yeah and the episode covers and the podcast like i think we're
going to rebrand everything to use that style it looks so good yes and with that if you liked our
first behind well not first continued behind the scenes episode but this one was more shameless
guys because we gave ourselves the license to not talk about descript and all that other stuff
and actually go about the company stuff for as much as we wanted give us a rating send us an email
leave a comment yeah all of that no pressure but send us an email i would say if this resonates with
you send us an email at hello at metacastpodcast.com and if you did not listen to our previous episode
episode 30 with the startups.com founders they go into this story of how they received that email of a
person who was crying while listening to their podcast and how they spoke directly to him
or her actually i don't know and they said to their partner that this is all the things that i
couldn't tell you and they just said it for me we cry while listening to our podcast but send us a
message we try not to make you cry but but if you make a laugh which i hope we do because you know
when i listen to our episodes i laugh a lot i don't know if it's so self-indulging but and i mean to be
fair the four or five outreaches that we have had over email they have been beautiful stuff that just
makes your day yeah absolutely hello at metacastpodcast.com you know where to find us all right that was a
great episode thank you tomorrow we are recording another episode 32 and then next episode we're going to
talk more in detail about the book itself and some of the technical details of the book too like
how did you do it how did you get into that mindset and yeah all that it will be basically behind the
covers of the behind the scenes right behind the spline is called the spline the thing in the back
yeah yeah yeah behind the spline yeah and tomorrow we are gonna be recording well i am gonna be recording
in the car in parking lot so i'll have to keep my ac running because it will be crazy hot here
but i have a very important appointment i can't miss i won't say what it is until i feel comfortable
talking about it it is not a job interview no thank you not a job interview it's not an investor page but it
is very important uh for me and um we decided not to reschedule the recording but we'll have to go
through some logistical hurdles tomorrow and we'll see how that comes out and our guest doesn't know
about it too that you'll be in a car so it'll be fun he doesn't think it's disrespectful but we will
explain no i think it makes sense so once it's all done we'll let people know what that appointment
was okay cool all right hello and with that see you next week all right