We even had an episode about checklists like a year ago. Do you remember if we had a checklist for the episode about the checklist? I think we had and then we started doing checklists for all subsequent episodes until we stopped the checklists for the episodes. Hello and welcome to the episode 60 of the Metacast Behind the scenes podcast. I'm your host Ileabesdilif. I'm Arnaud Dekka We are co-founders of Metacast, a podcast app with transcripts that helps you get them
and most out of podcasts. Metacast has transcripts, you can bookmark things, you can extract quotes. Share them, search for it, lots of other things. Yes, and we have a lot more stuff coming up. Right now we are in Google Play Store on Android and we are in beta on iOS in TestFlight.
We are about to ship it to the Apple App Store. Right now you can find links to both on metacast.app. That's our website.
I think because I'm not an Android user, I've been calling Google Play Store for a year. It took me a very long time to learn that it's called differently.
That actually kind of is interesting. Why did they name it Play Store? Maybe because Apple trademarked App Store. Yeah.
On this podcast we talk about the scenes of how we build the app. We have been trying to do a 30 minute challenge for the last, I don't know, how many months.
So that we don't go musing about why Google decided to call it Play Store and such kind of threads. So what are we talking about today Arnaud?
We launched on the Android Play Store about a month ago now, right? Or no?
Three weeks. Actually, when this episode comes out that you'll be about three and a half weeks.
Right. Last episode on 59, we talked a little bit about that. And today we're going to talk a little bit about the process of launching on the Play Store.
And some interesting as well as fun feedback that we've received so far, we're going to discuss some of that. And hopefully close it with a few announcements and what we're reading.
And that'll be it. We'll try to hit it at 33 minutes, like you said.
Yeah, let's target 32. So let's start with the quick topics. Rapid fire. We launched one of the important things in that launch was that we added an ability for people to pay us for the app.
So we have annual and monthly subscriptions. And on the last episode, we talked about how we picked up the pricing, how we thought about discounts.
We also wrote a very lengthy blog post, which you'll link in the show notes about the whole pricing process. It actually has more information than the podcast.
The podcast is just fun to listen to, but the blog actually has a lot of detail.
When we launched, I remember that moment, you were like, well, when will somebody pay for this? Right?
Yeah. I think the first day we got a couple of signups for the Metacast premium subscription, which includes access to transcripts and basically everything has to be transcripts.
To be clear, it was to the free trial. Yeah, for sure. 14 day free trial. Yeah. It is impossible to start paying us without first going through free trial.
So yeah, it was sign up for the Metacast premium free trial. And after two weeks, lapsed, I was also like, so those few users who signed up for the free trial, I think I'm gonna convert, right?
I was really excited when I saw those messages coming up in Slack that, you know, this user converted from free trial to the subscription that user converted. So that was really, really cool.
Yeah. So our lifetime revenue, which is also our two week revenue, by the way, is in the order of hundreds of dollars at this point.
Yes, which is what we got to begin somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the positive thing I saw was that we knew what two of those, I think, two or three of those people who subscribe, we knew the others ones are pretty unknown to us.
I mean, we were able to later on slew around and see how they found out about us, but we don't really know them directly. So that was a great sign.
We have also gotten a lot of feedback over the last couple of weeks. So we're going to talk about that today. And I think things are going on a hopeful upward trajectory.
This is still extremely early days. I won't even call it day one. This is like day early morning, 5 a.m. Right. You know, one thing I'm realizing now is, you would hope that when you launch products, people will fluctuate. They'll start using it and paying for it and everything is hanky, right?
But what is happening is when you start getting feedback from people that a lot more feedback when you actually launch and then you see, okay, so this is missing that is missing that needs to be better. So I almost feel like I doubt that any products V1 has 100% product market fit.
Yeah, if we were to all the stories and podcasts and in books that the first version of Instagram was like a whiskey bar finder thing. It's this kind of stories. I guess, well, I hope ours will not be that far.
But I think our story is more like Amazon's or more like AWS services where they launch something it finds some market, but it also gets a lot of feedback. And once Amazon starts address that feedback, more and more people start to use the service and eventually you get the EC2 lambda or other services that become the darlings of the industry, right?
And I hope that within a few months we will be there where something will start to click in a way that people will start to sign up in draft, you know?
I think part of this is actually building the app and producing it and distributing it to the app store, but a huge part of that is actually the marketing, right?
Because the benefit that these big companies have is they launch something and instantly it's like visible or it's marketed whether it's directly or indirectly through some other channels to thousands, maybe even millions of people depending on the consumer product and all.
And so they get a lot of feedback, they get a lot of usage immediately. That's not going to be the case for any independent app being produced anywhere.
And it's going to be a slow grind and I forget who said it, but maybe it was the 37 signals folks, but they said the overnight success that you see has been like eight years in making or something like that, right?
I think we talked about this last week between the three of us, you me and Jenny that at this point, I'm starting to feel like if we keep doing this, if we're committed, it's going to be like impossible.
I never want to say impossible, but almost impossible to like say take over Apple podcasts or Spotify, that kind of numbers. But if you look at the rest, those are good quality podcasts, but the main thing is people have been dedicated towards them.
And the products that are popular are the ones that have basically been there for at least five to seven years and they have been dedicatedly working on it. That's what people like to see, I think people who pay for these kind of things, they like to see that there's dedication in there and the quality is in there.
We've started with a good V one, we ourselves know there's a lot of things to add, but I think the foundations are there and this is what gives me hope that if we keep working on it for a few number of years, we can actually become one of those recognized rest of the best line ups.
And from there on, we'll see where it goes. Yeah, eventually, who knows, maybe that impossible becomes possible someday.
You mentioned marketing, right? I think there is a relationship between marketing and retention, basically like top of the funnel acquisition of users, that's the result of marketing, hopefully.
And the retention of users who do download your app and do sign up and do start to use it, if the V one is not as good.
So you can put millions in the marketing or you can be the Amazon that says, look, we've got this great thing and then people come in the like 99% of the graphic.
I think that's what happened to Amazon wallet or something that they eventually did pretty good because it just wasn't ready for the prime time, right?
I'm not saying our app is crappy, our app is awesome and we've been using it for a while, right?
But it also depends on who you ask and we'll get to the overcast users in a moment.
But the point is right now, I was talking to my mother and low, and she's like, yeah, you got to do ads. I'm like, I'm not sure because we are going to spend a lot of money if you do ads.
But then what is going to be the conversion rate? How is it going to work? Because in the differences, she works in the business that is very predictable.
It's kind of Airbnb kind of apartment rentals. So you know people need a part that you know if your apartment is decent, you just need to grab a piece of the market, right?
And the product is a commodity in a way. So ours is not a commodity. So there's like marketing top of the funnel and retention, like you said, is the quality of the product quality drives retention.
Yeah. And I think what I would love to see us is obviously we'll keep putting time, but not money into organic marketing. So we will launch the product hunt, you'll keep doing ready it.
And we also got some success with the Reddit, which was called like SEO, yeah, blog posts. And hopefully through that top of the funnel that comes to our app, we will sift through some of those hardcore users who really want something different, right?
And then they will give us the feedback and then we will work to satisfy those users and make extension will satisfy a larger niche.
Because some of the emails we got in last two days were wow. Yeah, like they have spent so much time giving us so much information about how they use it and all.
And these are like we didn't reach out to these people, right? We didn't say like he tell us about all this because early on, remember when we were building it, we did seek out people and we had user interviews and all that. And we used to ask this kind of questions.
But this was like a hour of our time also spend versus this is like awesome information somebody is just giving us saying, hey, somebody needs to add these these things and I would totally pay for it.
Right. And when people spend so much time writing to you and we respond to them and we engage in the back and forth, I think that's where we build a relationship with that particular user one user at the time, right?
Which hopefully will result in them continue to use or coming back if they missed something and then we added that and we have this channel to engage back with them.
I think that's also what makes us different from the apples and Spotify is over the world or you know, got with YouTube who will never talk to users.
We actually can't talk to users. We can make it personal at least until we can't know more. Right. But for now, I think this is the unique opportunity for people to actually engage directly with the founders, which I personally actually really like when I get something new and I write their email and then the founder responds and they could be actually the only person working that.
And then engage in back and forth is just awesome. Like psychologically, I just like that feeling, right?
Talking about feedback, let's talk about the first one star review we got on Play Store.
I think I've read it like 50 times at this point and I think I'm starting to get it. What this person wrote is I think this comment came from Germany.
It says just one more podcast app for free. Why do I need it without transcripts? And it's a one star review. Well, at least they wrote something that we can try to decipher.
And if you're listening to this whoever wrote this, yeah, you can send us an email at feedback at metacast.app.
You would like to learn more because the first time I read it, I'm like, okay, so they say it's a free app and it doesn't have transcripts. Let's have interpreted the comment.
The first time I'm like, it doesn't make sense because there are transcripts. You just have to pay subscription fee in order to get access to them.
But now I feel like I understand it differently. I think what they say is that it's a free app because you can download it for free.
But if they have to pay for transcripts, then they sort of don't need it. Oh, is it a very generous interpretation of the comment?
Again, this is very hard to understand what this actually means because it's like two sentences. This is less than a tweet worth of information that you're getting.
But I read that why do I need it without transcripts to be maybe they tried it and the transcript failed or something like that and they couldn't load it.
And they're like, okay, if the thing that you're talking about didn't work, then why do I need this?
We ship the app to the bug where transcripts were not loading.
Yes, we did.
It is possible. Yeah, after that we received like a few five star reviews. So that's good. Some with text. And I think some of our beta users left it on the beta thing, which doesn't appear in Google Play Store.
So we're trying to figure out how to move them to the production side. Yeah.
And if you are a beta user of Metacast on Android, so please uninstall the app and reinstall it from Google Play Store, which will move you from beta to the production app.
So the exact steps are you uninstall the app, go to the Play Store for Metacast listing.
So let's take a step back. You first need to make sure that you have logged in with Google if you want to keep your favorites data and your bookmarks on your playlist.
Because if you signed up as an anonymous user, you cannot migrate your data from a beta to production.
Because we don't know who you are because you're anonymous. Yes, because it's impossible to log in with an anonymous account twice, which means anonymous accounts work.
I guess there is a limitation for beta to production transition. So yeah, if you want to extend anonymous, you can disregard that and then you can just create a new anonymous account, but you have to basically start from zero again.
Yeah, if you sign in with Google, you can sign in again on a different device even and you will get all your data back.
So you have to uninstall after you've signed in you have to uninstall. Then there is apparently a place in the Play Store to say, leave the beta or something like that.
You have to tap that. Otherwise, you will not leave the beta after that. Otherwise, if you install, you'll keep getting that beta version.
Anyway, we should probably do an email or something like that. We'll figure it out in the next few days and send it to all the open beta customers. Other people don't care about it.
Yeah, I really like how Apple has this very clear dealing nation between test flight, which is pain in ass for users, but at least you just stop distributing test flight.
And after 90 days, it just stops working. Right. There is no problem of people staying on beta indefinitely. Whereas in our case, we do have a problem.
Yeah, the Google Play thing has been pretty bizarre because we can't even see who's using it through the open beta.
You don't think we can see those on Apple either, but at least on the test flight, we know how to transition, how to stop it. Google plays not as good.
Okay, so the other channel we got feedback from, which was pretty cool and unexpected.
It was first of all, part news, which is a daily publication about podcasting. So there author James Criedland reached out to us and said, like, yeah, I saw you guys launched and he asked a few questions, which responded to.
And then there was a short blurb in the email newsletter that day. I don't think it drove much traffic. And then their podcast, the daily podcast also dimensioned us in there.
Right. But I think it was Friday, Friday, Thursday, last week, August 15th or so. Somebody posted a ready thread on overcast subreddit.
So overcast is one of those other popular like iOS only apps for podcasts. It's been there for a long number of years. It was very popular right now.
And then, frankly, they're starting to be more and more problems. But anyway, it has a very dedicated user base. And somebody mentioned that, hey, there's this new alternative podcast step on the overcast subreddit.
Yeah. And then it is I learned about that because on our subreddit, somebody posted a what could be called the question that's not the question.
The question that starts, why can't you do this instead of what you're doing? They had certain assumptions about how our stack works or should work. And then when they responded and then they responded back, I realized that it's not really a discussion.
It's I felt it was very negative. The whole exchange. It's okay. Yeah. I mean, in social media, you can't avoid negative stuff. Right. I had flashbacked back to Amazon because Amazon launches products that are not ready for prime time.
And sometimes it keeps these products for a long time in this kind of under-baked stage. I'm sort of used to hearing a lot of negative feedback about things I work on like the way I was console. It's still pretty bad.
So God bless you, people who work on this. It's improving. It is improving. Yeah, that's what they'll tell you, right? But it's still not great.
And then what you start learning there is to listen to haters, but ignore them at the same time. Sort of try to pick up constructive pieces from what they say, ignoring the voice and tone of their emotional reaction to what you do.
And turns out actually that person they have a point. I started thinking more about this problem and what the pitfalls could be for us. I still feel like we're doing the right thing, but it just made me realize how much more challenging it is than maybe we anticipated, right?
But then what we saw is I think you found that this person was also on that thread in the overcast subregate. That's where they discovered about meta-cast.
Exactly. And there were a bunch of comments like, oh, before it has like custom playlists, I'm not doing it. And we also discovered that we forgot to turn off the paywall. Well, I guess we didn't forget, but we didn't realize just how annoying it would be. You turned it off after those posts.
I think there were a couple of people saying that they want this smart audio controls that overcast has.
So basically the things that overcast is great at, which is what you would expect, right? In the overcast subreddit is these things are not there yet. So I need these before I move.
These are the exact things that overcast is famous for. It stands for these exact things like custom playlists and the smart audio controls.
Yeah, and I was actually pleasantly surprised by the amount of conversation and feedback that happened on there. Also, I think the number of people, so based on our analytics, who found the app and all this private feedback that we received after that.
I'm assuming that these people all found us through that overcast subreddit post, but they didn't post on that main thread publicly. They sent us very helpful detailed feedback in email.
So thanks to all those people and a lot of people seem to have tried it out on iOS at that point. So that's good. Yeah.
So we didn't turn off the paywall for iOS because we wanted to launch it in Google Play Store and then turn on the subscriptions because we didn't know whether subscriptions would work for many people or not.
So we wanted that ability to like feature toggle in and this is actually something we want to talk about. So why don't we go through the feature toggle part maybe today.
The last two topics, the FSE and forcing them in version like how we planned the Google Play release. Yeah, should we go to speedrun through the whole process. We did have a checklist.
I think we already begin checklist. We even had an episode about checklists like a year ago, where we talked about how checklists are important.
Do you remember if we had a checklist for that episode about the checklist? I think we had and then we started doing checklists for all subsequent episodes until we stopped doing the checklist for episodes.
Okay. So our checklist right now says there's like four minutes remaining. So well, we know how checklist for that specific.
Actually, no, we do. We do the very top of our checklist right now says 30 minute challenge. So yeah.
Yeah. And I think we almost met the deadlines besides for ourselves in the checklist.
I think there were a couple of things that took a bit longer. One of them was the verification process we had to do with Google, which was a bit of a shit show.
We should write a blog post about that. You might want to say dance show. Dance show. So dance is dance and and Bradfield or something.
I keep forgetting the name of that company, but they hold the quote unquote monopoly on the app store in Google Play store business account notifications.
So you have to have a dance number if you're a company. What happens with Google is if you update your dance. So you put your new address in a dance.
When you phone number, Google does not update that information in their systems. And why is this important because Google recently changed it.
So if your app has premium substance like basically you can pay for the app, then they will publish your business address or whatever you have said is your address and phone number on publicly on there.
So that's why it's important not to have Ilya's personal home address on there. And we actually have a business address on there.
Right. Yeah. And we had some support tickets for the Google support Google Play store and also Google payments because it's done by the payments profile team and they sent us to the Google Play team who said that they cannot do this because it's a Google profile team.
In the end, the recommendation was to just create a new payments profile, which I don't even understand what it is really because we haven't used it enough.
So, but we had to recreate the whole thing in order to fetch the new data from dance. I was really disappointed in Google's lack of automation here, especially given how much people time they spent but responding to us.
I wasn't there something in here where you had to upload your driver's license to prove your identity and because there was a little bit of glare on it, they said, OK, this won't work.
That was part of it. Yeah. It was like there's all this AI in the world, but sure, there's a little glare on this so we can't read this. Yeah.
And there are some weirdness for the Florida driver's licenses because they are too shiny. So even when you go through the TSA, they scan that license and it doesn't always scan the first time.
Maybe there's too much sun in Florida. That's why I think Florida gets something to be heard.
And once those verifications done, we work with our friends over in tram line tram line is a service that helps you like automate your release process for apps.
And we basically did a percentage base roll out into the production like 5 10 15 and that's enabled so far to production.
How do you do percentage roll out with the app store? It's either in the app store or it's not.
No, app store also when we enable it for production, both app store and play store, it will be percentage based roll out.
So for Google, we can decide the percentages for Apple. It's just built in. It will only show it to like 5% only certain percentage of users can see the app.
Probably they collect some vitals from your app based on the performance and all they will roll it out to more and more users.
And for Google, we actually do that because it was small anyway. We did 5 50 or 100 or something like that.
Right. Then filled in all of the contents of the Google Play listing, which was very straightforward.
We just did a few images in Canva or some copy. It went in without any delays.
But I think about a week later, we got a violation notice from Google because the description of our app and also one of the pictures that we submitted.
It said it has either an attribute of testimonials or more than 5 attributed testimonials.
And we had 6 testimonials with names and we removed those.
We have no idea what to this day. We don't know what an unattributed testimonial means because we did have the names and all that in there.
Yeah. So eventually we just decided to just remove all the testimonials so that we don't get kicked out from the play store.
I did find this one a bit weird because they approved it. It went to production. It was visible.
Then after a week, they noticed it and not only did they say your in violation fixed this, they said your app will be taken down within the next seven days.
And I found like, isn't this something you should have checked before and not published that?
Yes. And the second issue we had with the Google Play Store was that the safety form was not matching what the app was doing because apparently Firebase collects, I think it's called Firebase installation idea or something, we just considered a device ID.
And we didn't check that box because we didn't know about that.
We don't collect a device ID ourselves. Yes.
Yes, we don't. But yeah, Firebase hasn't identified that Google considers as this thing.
And I'm pretty sure they cost this programmatically. I'm not sure why they didn't catch it when we submitted the app.
It's like a premium model, right? So they let you into the app store and then they start imposing rules that you later on.
But we resolved all of those within the week or so. You know, I think I got some great hair from that experience, but it was not that bad overall.
Yeah, they were all approved right now. We're all like in the green.
All right. So now you want to talk about the feature access control?
Yeah. So something we have in our app, everybody should have.
It's called feature toggling, right? Launched darkness is another famous service for this, but there are lots of other services available.
So what this allows us to do is we launch software in the app to do certain things, but they're not enabled until a later point when we decide that this is ready and let's flip it.
Because unlike a website, an app is distributed. It's actually software running on your phone. So we don't know when you will install or update that version again later on.
So we distribute code beforehand and then turn the features on.
One of the things we did for this launch was we built in all the code for subscriptions and all we tested it internally within ourselves, but we turned off that feature and shipped it.
We need to see that the app is actually working in Google Play production before we turn this feature on.
And we also need to be able to turn it off in case of problems.
Yeah, just a little bit of an extra explanation. So we keep the value of that feature in the sort of remote config.
Basically, the idea is that when the app launches, it checks remote config in CIS is this feature enabled for this user.
If it is, then the feature shows up. If it's not the feature doesn't, or if you want to disable it for everybody, we just flip the switch and then nobody sees the feature.
Maybe there was a bug in the feature rate and that's why we want to do that.
Yeah, so we launched subscriptions that way. So we didn't have subscriptions when it went through Playstore the first time and they approved it.
And then we later on turned it on. And I think this was a misunderstanding from at least my side, maybe our side, I want to say is this means that Google didn't get a chance to look at the subscriptions flow before they approved it.
When we updated it, we turned the feature flag on and then the subscriptions got turned on after that we received another policy violation saying that your subscription information, like you need to provide more information blah, blah, blah, your app will be taken down.
The only result is our net tell us.
We looked at the feedback and we thought actually all the information that they're saying is there maybe they're talking about wording or whatever, but just on a hunch, I decided to publish another revision without any code changes.
And for a lot of proof that this time, so it's like, have you turned it off and on again.
Yeah, somebody else from Google looked at it and they were like, it's fine. And that violation was resolved without us doing anything.
Yeah. And I think finally one of the other levers we have with our app. And again, everybody should have is when the app starts up, it checks what's my version.
And we have a canonical definition of what's the minimum required version that we keep again in remote config. That's one of the back ends that we have, right. So it checks that. And if it is below the minimum required version, then the app doesn't let the user use it basically right.
It shows a screen saying that hey, you need to update this and go here and updated.
Because we launched the 1.1 version at this point, basically our first 1.0 version, we updated that and that was it. People got migrated over to the new 1.0 version.
Yeah. And I think right now we have version 1.3 in open beta. Yeah, in open beta 1.2 in production.
Yeah. And then we are going to send that email to the user, telling them that they need to unenroll from the beta, install the app from the place store, et cetera.
And it will give them a little bit of time. And then we will have to turn on the version requirement to 1.4 1.5, whatever it will be at the time.
And basically the app will stop working for the open beta users because they will not be able to install 1.4 through the open beta channel anymore.
Cool. We have just a few minutes to maybe just quickly actually talk about the transitioning of existing users because we wanted to make sure that people who have trusted us during the beta period that we treat them well and give them the heads up and also give them discount.
Right. So we pulled the emails of all of the users who were not anonymous users because obviously for anonymous users, we don't have emails.
And we also pulled some stats for their usage. Yeah, but some people like who signed up and didn't use at all, they are less likely to react.
Well, I guess you could argue that you could reignite them, but also like you cannot personalize the email or anything, right.
So I think what we got is we took the first ex users who listened to more than why episodes and consider them active.
For those users, actually, we went through data we have them, we pulled their first names. So we actually filled in the Google sheet and then use mail marriage to send them an email that actually had their name in there.
So we kind of made it more personalized this way and their personalized usage. No, we actually we did not do that. So first we asked people for testimonials. We added personal usage.
A couple of users had a lot of usage, but the rest there was nothing like super impressive there for them, right. There is one user who could say like you listen to like 800 episodes in the last three months, which I still find it fascinating because how is it possible even.
But yeah, for the others, it didn't make that much sense. It was like semi personalized with their name on it. And then the rest to be just said something like hello and then they always see the same text and use the Gmail's mail marriage feature that lets you get emails from Google sheet.
And then Gmail sends individual emails to all of those users. I think eventually we will need to use something like mail chimp with all of those DKM, whatever all of those email things that prevent you from being sent to spam.
So now with low numbers, we will just keep using a mail merge I think. And some people reacted immediately by subscribing from our mail merge, which is fair. And then some other sent us feedbacks and sent us testimonials. So yeah, it was great.
Some subscribe to the free trial and then converted after two weeks, which is even greater. All right, I think after that you have a pretty good detail plan of what we're going to do in the next one month content wise because like we discussed at the very beginning, we have our foot through the door at this point.
There's a lot of things to build, but at this point it's also marketing growing the top of the funnel and retention. Those are the two big things for us. So maybe in the next episode we can talk about our plan for that and how it's panning out because it will be about a month by that time.
I think we should time the next episode released a couple of days before launch and product hunt. Actually, I'll say this. So if you listen to this episode, we are going to have a product hunt launch soon.
So please subscribe to our newsletter because we will give everybody heads up. Please go and support us by this link when we have the launch active. So if you want to support us, please.
I guess I have subscribed to our Reddit or to our newsletter, because that's where we will communicate about the upcoming product hunt lunch. We will really, really appreciate any feedback, any sort of reviews and ratings because that will help us get more visibility.
Yeah. Okay. So let's close this with what you're listening to. And then I'll go.
I had this thing where I want to learn because I haven't read any nonfiction books for ages for probably a year because I've been mostly listening to podcasts and reading fiction books.
And I'm like, hmm, I need something inspirational. I picked up David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.
For some reason, I've always resisted his books, even though I respect him as an author and I also watched his masterclass and masterclass.com. He's amazing. But his books are kind of the same story repeated over and over until we get them.
And they get all about the same thing. But I just found it inspirational, sort of uplifting. It's a book about small groups of people or individual people beating up larger opponents or the system.
It got me thinking about our advantage versus Spotify or Apple, where I think engaging with users doing niche things. It could be our David play against their huge galastiness.
Yeah. Also, I enjoyed listening to the episode from Bootstrap web. It's also two guys just like us. But they're not co-founders. Each of them have their own companies. I guess they're friends from a long time. I actually don't know the history.
And they just talk about what happens in their world. And the episode, I listened about was about the repal.fm. So one of them launched a social media site for podcasters. I have found that episode to be pretty cool.
And also, I've been spending a lot of time gaming. I haven't been gaming for 20 years. I guess a bit of history here. I was gaming competitively. We were like quick to championships, clans, all the jazz when I was in high school.
And then I just realized, like, I'm wasting my life. And they stopped doing that. It was like 25 years ago. But I always liked the East waspeed franchise. I played all versions from version one through, I think, the second underground.
And so, yeah, download NFS No Limits on my iPhone. And man, it is addictive. It is so addictive. Wait on the iPhone. So you're playing it on the phone now?
Yes. So NFS No Limits was a console game. Looking at the graphics, it was probably like 15 years ago, give or take. I think in 2015, the reasons for the iPhone graphics is really top notch on the phone. And it's really good. And what I realized is just how much I get addicted to these things like you earn gold, you earn cash, and you get like bonus race skips.
So you can grind more materials for your car, all that kind of stuff, right? And some days I would log into the app and I wouldn't even play the game itself. I wouldn't race, right? That was like an interesting realization that there is the gameplay, like the racing in this case. And there is the gaming aspect of it, which means getting the materials, getting the resources, the currency and all stuff.
I am not a gamer, but I think this is called grinding in the gaming world. My son taught me this term, yeah, and I was grinding car blueprints to upgrade the car you have to grind blueprints. I have to confess I spend about 50 bucks.
I have a real cash to get like the upgrade packs so that I don't have to grind and I can just get the next upgraded version of the car. Because otherwise I wouldn't be able to like proceed in the quest right in the campaign. And it made me think about how maybe you could do some of that mechanics in the app to to make it a little bit more engaging for the users.
And I also picked up a couple of books from library about gamification, which I'm really looking forward to read and listen to.
How about your nap? Yeah, so for my part, last few days and weeks has been all about Dave Grohl and the full fighters. So back in 2022, they had a tour and they were going to come to Vancouver. And I was super excited.
Actually, let me take you a little bit back to 30 seconds promise in about 2017 or so. I attended the first full fighters concert. My first.
At that time, maybe I knew five or six full fighter songs. Some friend got me a ticket. I was like, yeah, let's go. And I absolutely loved it. And I became a fan of like Dave Grohl and full fighters to be clear.
I was already a Nirvana fan and I was a fan of Dave Grohl, but not full fighters. But that time I got hooked into it right. And since then I've been following them pretty deeply.
So then 2022, there was the concert in Vancouver. I thought, okay, we'll take our daughter to her first rock concert. And this will get her into all of this.
But then their drummer Taylor Hawkins, I feel like he was my second favorite drummer all time right after Dave Grohl himself. He passed away and they had to scrap the tour midway, I think, or they have to cancel the tour or something. Anyway, so they did the 2024 tour now.
And their last stop was in Seattle this weekend. So we were like, okay, we have to do this now. So we went. And it was a blast.
They had like, first of all four opening acts, which was kind of like going on and on. But the third of those four opening acts was the legendary, the pretenders band. I couldn't believe that they're opening for full fighters.
And then the full fighter started at eight o'clock. Apparently they have been doing about two hours on this tour. But maybe because it was the last night and maybe because it's Seattle. That's where it all started. They kept on playing like for three hours.
Some of their first album songs that they haven't performed like live for a while. They performed it and it was amazing, right. It was awesome to see my daughter also like jumping and had banging and singing all the songs together. It was amazing.
I'm curious because Nirvana is from Seattle, but is they grow himself from Seattle? No, he's from Washington DC, but he came to Nirvana pretty early on. And in fact, it never mind some of that amazing drumming in the stay awake song or sorry, stay away. That's him, right.
I thought they grow with Nirvana on all albums. No. I think very early on he started. Yes. Not in the very beginning because there was only two people, right.
There from Aberdeen. Aberdeen is a very sleepy small town in Washington near the Pacific Ocean. And they came over to Seattle. They became huge and Dave girl almost at the beginning. He was there. Yeah.
Dave girl is a very authentic person, right. Unlike a lot of other rock stars. And he has this book called the storyteller. That's his autobiography. So I'm listening to that. And also a lot of podcasts about Dave girl and all that.
That book itself. I've got the hardcover also, but I got the audiobook also because he himself is speaking it. That's beautifully done. But very often in the book, he would talk about a song. And then I would go listen to that song. So I'm going very slowly through the book, enjoying it to the full extent.
Actually, it would be nice if the audiobook had the songs in there. So far, I mean, the first 10% or so they do a little bit clips of the song. I think they didn't want to probably put in the whole song in there.
I see. So I was listening to an episode with Rick Rubin on the Joe Rogan podcast. And there they were just turned on the whole song from system of down from other bands that were produced by Rick Rubin.
And it was actually so cool to listen to this in context. So you don't have to go somewhere else. He just keeps playing in your head. And then like they picked the right duration and the right seconds of it. I found it to be really, really cool. I wish books also did that more often.
So Dave girl did say turn up the volume and that there will be like music in this audiobook. So that's probably more to come.
So the one that he talked about today morning when I was listening was smells like team spirit from Nirvana. But I know that song inside out. I've heard it. I don't know, like at least a thousand times maybe.
But that reminded me there are all these other awesome tracks from the Nevermind album that I have not heard for a long time. And so I went down.
Like I listened to a little bit of the audiobook that I spent about 40 minutes like listening to all those other songs that I have not heard for a while.
And there's actually one song on that album that is really good for your dog walks. It's called territorial pissings.
Oh yeah.
And insane like shouting towards the end of that song. Yeah. Well, my favorite is stay away. There's a lot of personal history with that song too. I won't say it on the podcast, but I'll tell you afterwards.
My favorite song from that album is one of their least popular songs overall is called Drain you. There's something about that song. It's a weird song when I heard it for the first time when I was at 16 or 17. It just stuck with me.
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