Sean and Andrew stop by to chat about what happens when you build a client website live on a sales call 20 minutes into the presentation. We get into Andrew's cold outreach restart for MetaMonster, the report card angle they are testing with SEO agencies, and somehow end up debating whether Astro or Next.js is the right call for a SaaS marketing site.

Links:

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:01.20
Sean
What's up?

00:01.85
Andrew
Three, two, Oh, shit. Sorry. ah Awkward.

00:05.68
Sean
All good.

00:06.14
Andrew
Embarrassing.

00:07.26
Sean
All good. Jesus. ah

00:12.34
Andrew
Dude, every day that goes by without Metamonster closing a new customer, i just get more and more insecure about my abilities to be a SaaS founder.

00:25.30
Sean
Is that like...

00:27.14
Sean
Like every day, like you have a sales call and they don't buy right away or like, I see.

00:31.78
Andrew
I'm not even like having sales calls is the problem. Yeah, I we we do actually like you know, we've been working on the product when I when I started like breaking it down.

00:43.58
Sean
Yeah.

00:44.04
Andrew
I'm like, okay, it makes sense. um It's not like that shocking, but I'm still just like, ah like, is there demand for this thing? Are we wasting our time? What's going on?

00:55.96
Andrew
ah um but

01:00.21
Andrew
Like, so what we're doing right now, I do think the product has gotten a lot better.

01:06.46
Sean
Yeah.

01:06.55
Andrew
It still, like, has rough edges, but it is, like, it is way better than it used to be.

01:06.56
Sean
OK.

01:15.31
Andrew
um And um I think it's, like, in a sellable place now. What we're doing right now um is we're trying to spin up cold outreach again and start doing cold outreach.

01:33.04
Andrew
um And i think we've gotten clearer on our ICP. I think we've gotten clearer on like the problem we're trying to solve. um And so hopefully clearer on like the kind of signals we can look for to find good fit customers.

01:52.44
Andrew
um and so and'm like cautiously optimistic about this round of outreach that like and then jade's also almost officially on board so like i will have her to work with and to like help hold me accountable and i think we make a good team bouncing ideas off of each other and just like pushing building momentum together yeah um they

02:04.33
Sean
Nice.

02:13.65
Sean
Yeah, wait, didn't last time when we spoke, didn't Jade have like 25 demos lined up though or something like that?

02:23.19
Andrew
They haven't really been converting. um She's only done, i think she's done eight or so, and one may turn into a customer.

02:34.04
Andrew
um But she also hasn't really been pitching and because they're it's largely just like friends of hers, and so she didn't want to come in pitching too hard.

02:38.21
Sean
Yeah.

02:42.84
Andrew
It was more like more approaching them from a feedback standpoint.

02:43.16
Sean
Right, right. but Yeah, I meant like how is how's the feedback going?

02:49.49
Andrew
Feedback has been good, I think. i think But it's it's again, it's that like kind of mom test. it's the kind of It's a lot of feedback that kind of fails the mom test where it's like it's like people like the tool, but they're not adopting the tool.

03:01.93
Sean
Hmm.

03:07.44
Andrew
um And I think there's like a million reasons that can be. so like one of the one of the simple things that Jade's starting to do is um when people tell her like hey i'm interested in using this she's going to start scheduling a follow-up meeting to be like great why don't you use it for two weeks and then we'll talk again in two weeks and like create some accountability create a little bit of social pressure um and then in that second call i think we can more think she'll feel more comfortable asking for a sale

03:36.05
Sean
Right. Right.

03:44.02
Sean
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

03:45.17
Andrew
Yeah, because like at that point, they've shown interest.

03:45.69
Sean
Yeah.

03:47.29
Andrew
And it's like, OK, now it's time to ask for a sale.

03:47.81
Sean
Right.

03:50.23
Andrew
um

03:50.31
Sean
Right. Right. I mean, at that point, they've like actually, if they've actually used it and found it useful, and if they haven't, it's also useful to just know.

03:57.68
Andrew
Figure out why. Try to figure out why.

03:58.76
Sean
Yeah.

03:59.50
Andrew
Yeah.

04:00.44
Sean
Yeah,

04:00.47
Andrew
um And then we're trying to, like, it's like, OK, we also need to prove we can get demos outside of her network. And so let's...

04:12.30
Andrew
but scale up cold outreach, get that going again. We're doing it manually. When I say scale it up, I just mean, i basically just mean turn it on. I mean, start doing it.

04:22.26
Sean
yeah yeah

04:22.96
Andrew
um We're not like worried about scale. We're trying to do it very manually, very personably do it. My friend also challenged me to do not just like email or LinkedIn, but cold call people.

04:39.08
Sean
Oh, cool.

04:40.31
Andrew
Which, which is terrifying, which probably means I should try it.

04:45.20
Sean
ah Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I have a cold call video video to send you. like

04:49.72
Andrew
Okay. Send it to me.

04:50.52
Sean
you know there's a lot of scammy like this is how you cold call people and whatever i forget his name he's now with like a cold calling sas product but like he like live records his cold cold calls about like sas apps or like trucking whatever and like you you hear the guys go like no you or like whatever um like he's using it a demo the platform but like

04:50.76
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

04:54.92
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

05:01.25
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

05:15.12
Sean
It's probably one of the better, like repeatable sales motion type things that he follows. And it's, yeah, I want to say the app is called Glen Coco, but I don't remember if I'm just making Uh,

05:29.70
Andrew
Isn't Glen Coco like some pop culture reference?

05:33.96
Sean
sure. Uh, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Oh yeah. Glenn Coco for, for you, Glenn Coco, you go Glenn Coco. All right. Uh, uh, Mean Girls.

05:43.98
Andrew
What's that from? Mean Girls. Okay, that's right.

05:47.04
Sean
Um, yeah, it is, it is, it is, it is from, it's yeah, it's Glenn Coco.

05:47.58
Andrew
That's right. That's right.

05:53.72
Sean
Um,

05:54.35
Andrew
Well, he named his app after a Mean Girls reference.

05:56.98
Sean
I guess so. I don't know if if it's his app or if he's just, it probably is his app now that I'm thinking about it, but like, it's actually a pretty cool app.

05:57.85
Andrew
That's kind of great.

06:04.30
Sean
It's like, it's like you want to be a freelance BDR. You basically like cold call people for different companies and like Glen Coco gives you the names, the the context, the script to follow.

06:16.19
Sean
And like, it's just how good you are at the thing. And like, there's a bunch of like tests you have to go through in the beginning to like be verified and stuff. It's like, Anyway, not sponsored, but it's pretty cool.

06:26.32
Andrew
Interesting. Yeah, send it to me because I have never done cold calling. It's absolutely terrifying.

06:29.92
Sean
Yeah.

06:31.04
Andrew
um I've been going back to founding sales.

06:31.14
Sean
Yeah.

06:34.04
Andrew
um Peter Zeransky or something, I think.

06:36.99
Sean
Cool.

06:37.78
Andrew
um

06:37.89
Sean
Cool.

06:38.72
Andrew
He's in the microconf circle.

06:40.77
Sean
Mm-hmm.

06:40.88
Andrew
So I've been going back to to founding sales and trying to refresh. And like one of the things... um I met Ali from Sinja in Mexico City a couple weeks ago, um and he was pushing back on me.

06:49.95
Sean
know.

06:53.95
Andrew
He was like, you're being really vague when you talk about your ICP. You need to get like way more clear on your ICP and the problem, and then like everything needs to funnel from ICP and the problem.

07:05.57
Sean
Yeah.

07:05.68
Andrew
um and yeah The good news is we have Jade, who is our ICP.

07:05.67
Sean
Yeah.

07:10.04
Andrew
She is our like our biggest power user. um and so we've basically just tried to get specific about what is it about Jade that makes her a good customer?

07:24.21
Andrew
um And what's the problem we're solving for her? And the takeaways right now are like, so one, it's we want to serve, um,

07:36.40
Andrew
SEO agencies or agencies that do SEO work. We're still there's still a little bit of a hypothesis that our best audience might actually be people more like miscreants who ah SEO is not their core offering, but they need to be able to do SEO for their clients either to improve the quality of their offering or to like create a new offering and like generate more revenue.

07:45.64
Sean
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

07:58.87
Andrew
Not sure yet. We're not going to actively test that like our ICP I think we will sort of coincidentally test that in some of the outreach work that we're doing. um But like basically we're looking for marketing agencies that offer SEO services that have less than 10 people, but more than but at least two people. So you've at least hired your first employee.

08:22.81
Sean
Right.

08:23.16
Andrew
um Ideally you are actively hiring or just hired. um And ah you're doing like less than a million in revenue or less than 2 million in revenue. not sure exactly what the sweet spot is there yet.

08:36.82
Andrew
um And one of the big things that we're currently testing as a hypothesis is that like we were thinking of this as like the pain point is the actual work that you're doing in Metamonster.

08:51.67
Andrew
But we're now thinking of it more as like the problem is actually The person we're selling to isn't going to be the biggest user of Metamonster at their agency.

09:02.68
Andrew
um The person we're selling to is the agency owner, and their problem is not just getting the work done, it's being able to hand the work off to someone more junior and trust that the quality is going to be good.

09:16.72
Andrew
um And so we're trying to like emphasize how Metamonster helps you like make ah SEO improvements that are high quality in a way that's like easy to follow um and easy to like go back and forth with a client and like work with a client.

09:23.49
Sean
Right.

09:30.63
Sean
Right.

09:35.39
Sean
Right.

09:35.99
Andrew
um And so it's all about like helping you deliver high quality SEO work. helping you hand off SEO work to other members of your agency and deliver high quality SEO work to your clients without you having to like hold their hand through the process.

09:48.94
Sean
Right.

09:58.96
Sean
Sick. OK, interesting.

10:02.64
Andrew
and the Sorry, go ahead.

10:05.60
Sean
Oh, the one thought was like, I feel like web design agencies are all getting asked, like always get asked like about the SEO, but also now, especially like the ADO side and like, like just going back to like possibly like an ICP being like us, right? Like we, like,

10:21.68
Sean
We don't have a single client we don't build a website for that doesn't have ao and SEO as like a thought in their head and like we do it but you know Like we're design agency or it's limited. It's my hours plus like one other person's hours So I did fire I did log into men a monster the other day because I had to had to use it oh

10:41.67
Andrew
Nice. What'd you use it for?

10:44.24
Sean
What did I use it for it was for It was more for it was for auditing. Actually, I'm pretty sure it was for scanning and auditing. And the thing is like the thing that's still super useful for us for us is just the cloud side is just like I can run a scan and my like that's like the screaming frog side of like I can run a scan and the team can see the scan and they can, you know, do things on it.

11:10.13
Andrew
go in and fix things.

11:10.76
Sean
Like that's yeah.

11:11.64
Andrew
Yeah.

11:12.63
Sean
um

11:13.71
Andrew
OK.

11:14.14
Sean
Yeah.

11:14.58
Andrew
Cool.

11:14.96
Sean
But I don't.

11:15.06
Andrew
That's a good thing to keep in mind.

11:16.50
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. yeah

11:20.38
Andrew
I'd be really curious to have you try some of the keyword generation and content like optimization stuff that that we've been working on lately.

11:29.40
Sean
I remember the other reason i never got to doing this, but um we have a client with all their H2s in their blogs, all our introduction and conclusion.

11:40.16
Andrew
Yeah.

11:40.47
Sean
um And but so like you go to Ahrefs or SEMrush, like you get a scan, you get like 5,000 errors back because like 5,000 warnings, like your H2s are duplicates, like, you know, shit, because all their content has just its introduction. And basically the thought was like,

11:56.79
Sean
Like what is the fastest, easiest way to rewrite all these things? bernar Burn our, burn our metamonster credits. But anyway, never got, I never actually got far enough to doing it. So I'll let you know when I.

12:09.97
Andrew
Yeah, my biggest concern with web design agencies as an ICP is that like, is there's this looming question in my head, will it require behavior change for them to implement Metamonster?

12:21.37
Andrew
Like for SEO agencies, they're already doing the work that Metamonster does. It's just like, okay, can we help you do it faster, keep the quality higher?

12:33.34
Andrew
um

12:34.39
Sean
Yeah, i think it's I think it's a completely different like sales motion for you to do it. like I think i think like the best way for you to do that is you start running workshops, teaching web design agencies how to launch an SEO service to boost their revenue and all this sort of stuff.

12:46.29
Andrew
Yeah.

12:48.63
Sean
right but like I think that starts to move away from that what you're building the first place.

12:55.12
Andrew
Yeah, potentially, yeah.

12:56.56
Sean
Yeah.

12:56.76
Andrew
So for right now, we're staying focused on SEO agencies, but what I'm finding in my prospecting is we're reaching out to a lot of like more general purpose marketing agencies or web design agencies who say they offer SEO work.

13:09.51
Andrew
And so my thought is, okay, if you at least say you offer SEO work, if you're already doing SEO is like kind of part of your job, but like maybe

13:09.76
Sean
Yeah.

13:18.39
Andrew
the founder still has to be the one to do the SEO because they don't have anyone on their team who can do it. And now they can hand that off to someone else or, or like they have to hire her a really expensive consultant anytime someone wants ah SEO work. And now they don't have to do that. Like if we can find those people who are already offering it to start with and just like give them a better way to offer it um or a better way to execute on it.

13:42.62
Andrew
um Hopefully that can help. The other thing that we're trying to do is now that the content optimization and like the recommendations are getting pretty good, it's not perfect, but it's getting good.

13:55.03
Andrew
um We're generating a report and sending them a report of like, hey, here's here's like, I ran your homepage through MetaMonster and here's like the keyword it picked and like the recommendations that it came up with.

14:11.61
Andrew
um

14:12.100
Sean
Wait, can I give you a separate idea that's based on that that crossed my mind?

14:16.45
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

14:18.46
Sean
If you want to sell to SEO agencies, um they have a process so like every seo you see does what you just says right to get more clients they go and run a seo report and they send the audit and they do that for free the audit kind of fucking sucks because but like that's i feel like that's how semrush and ahrefs grew iss like hit the easy button to run the report but i wonder if like meta monster is like the in like the wedge in for Metamonster is like we help you run better audits on prospective clients because we can give you like we can do the like the the problem with the report is that like it tells you like you have 5,000 duplicates of this thing and the client the person who sees it is like i don't like um' know what going to do with this or more importantly like they the client just like ships it off to their web developer go fix this and it's this constant debate but like

15:10.77
Andrew
Yeah.

15:13.47
Sean
If I'm in a like maybe metamonsterauditreports help me close deals better because I can provide a much better report. And then when the client wants to do the like once the onboard with us, we just we have the end like we have the answer sheet there. So we doing it takes, you know, nothing. And now I can sell a productized service of. Yeah, so.

15:41.21
Andrew
Yeah, 100%.

15:41.63
Sean
<unk> fine

15:42.49
Andrew
Jade has already been asking us, she's like, ooh, this report is cool. My report card function on my website has been broken for six months. Can you give me like a form and like let me use this as a report card?

15:51.84
Sean
Oh, yeah.

15:56.60
Andrew
um the the The interesting thing there is like right now our auditing and up and everything are good auditing.

15:57.33
Sean
That's me too. Yeah.

16:05.33
Sean
Mm.

16:05.53
Andrew
um and like reporting is page based, not site based.

16:10.43
Sean
Mm.

16:10.59
Andrew
Like, we do crawl your entire site and we find like missing, but we don't, we don't have a good way to like bubble that up yet.

16:17.23
Sean
Mm.

16:17.43
Andrew
um And, and like the really interesting recommendations that are like different from anything else I've seen on the market are the like page based recommendations.

16:27.62
Sean
For sure.

16:27.72
Andrew
And so the question is like, is that enough and jade thinks it might be that like just being able to like send a client back a report on like hey here's what we've here's our recommendations for your home page like just your home page we can do this for every page on your site if you work with us she thinks that would actually be enough um and um

16:47.67
Sean
Yeah.

16:52.95
Sean
I mean, I think so. I think it's like a good framing to in the email, right? It's like we're a page based SEO agency. Everyone else does it. Site based. Site based is useless and AEO land.

17:04.63
Sean
I don't know. making stuff up now, but like or I'm fluffing it, but like page site base is not useful.

17:06.20
Andrew
Businesses.

17:10.63
Sean
That's old SEO tactics. These are new ones. New ones care about AEO because citations are a real thing and citations care about pages. um honestly would just i kind of want to run like an experiment of like like if it was like all like automated just like a fake seo agency that just like throws out a bunch of these to a bunch of like prospective clients and yeah yeah just to see like who bites or like it's don't know it seems like a cheap experiment to well the automation of all of that is is more time consuming than the actual running of it but

17:33.56
Andrew
this is

17:41.29
Andrew
Yeah,

17:46.84
Andrew
yeah because that's that's the thing, to like really build that feature.

17:51.10
Sean
Right.

17:51.35
Andrew
as a feature we need to build like a form builder we need to build like you know yeah we need to like stitch everything together so that we can like automate the process and like send you an email report and yada yada yada but we have jade's agency um and so what we could do is i could just spend an afternoon with jade being like let's set up

18:08.73
Sean
Right.

18:16.06
Andrew
like a fucking tally form on your website.

18:18.97
Sean
Yeah.

18:20.02
Andrew
um And then when you get form requests, you're going to use metamonster to send them a report.

18:24.85
Sean
Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

18:30.04
Andrew
And let's see if it works. And then if it works for you, let's build a case study about that and start talking about that and then start doing outreach around that and then figure out the rest later.

18:33.69
Sean
Right.

18:36.81
Sean
Right.

18:42.79
Sean
I like it. It's good idea. That's the best idea I've heard about Chromina Monster so far.

18:44.64
Andrew
Damn.

18:48.91
Sean
that's better That's... Yeah. Plus...

18:51.26
Andrew
The other thing that that this like opens up, like the content optimization stuff opens up, is like there's like three levels of reporting we eventually want to be able to do for people.

19:01.55
Andrew
Actually, maybe four.

19:01.88
Sean
Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

19:03.48
Andrew
There's, let me audit a page or your whole site and send you some initial recommendations to get you in the door. Then there's, okay, I've now decided what I'm going to actually change on your site, and I've i've made a draft of the changes. Let me show you that draft so that you can approve or deny them.

19:25.91
Andrew
Then there's, here's what we did for you this month. Here's what we actually like just here's what we checked off, like all the changes we made for your site this month, all the improvements we made.

19:34.96
Sean
Right.

19:37.53
Sean
Right.

19:38.30
Andrew
And then there's here's like the changes we've made for you in the last six months and how those have impacted your data. There's like four levels of SEO reporting that we eventually need to be able to do if we're going to like really focus on agencies.

19:50.85
Sean
Yeah.

19:54.81
Sean
Yeah.

19:58.61
Sean
Um... I like it. I like it. Oh, so by the way, i the the I don't know if you said this or I just like imagined it or Jade said this, but like the idea of being able to embed, not doing the tally form, but eventually like being able to embed an auto scan thing. like most i feel like 50% of SEO agencies actually have that on their site, but like 100% of SEO agencies the other 50 could just use yeah they could all just use meta monsters thing because it's not like you can do i don't think you can do with like Ahrefs or SEMrush or anything like that

20:27.16
Andrew
want that

20:34.65
Sean
um

20:34.79
Andrew
you're talking about like are you talking about like i i have a page on my site where you can come in and you can give me like a link and i give you a report back or something like that free seo audit yeah

20:46.43
Sean
yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If I'm an SEO agency, I have a free SEO scan. And like, hey, maybe I give, thanks, thanks, free SEO audit, fair enough.

20:56.60
Sean
And I, you know, like maybe I give MetaMonsteros my Ahros API key to like pull some extra like site level data back, right? Like, I don't know, whatever it is. And like, now.

21:06.84
Andrew
I will say the really nice thing about our reports is like they, because they're generated by LLMs, they have rationale.

21:12.75
Sean
Yeah, yeah.

21:12.79
Andrew
So they like explain, it's like, this is what we recommend you change and this is why.

21:17.42
Sean
Yeah.

21:18.100
Andrew
And that's the thing that like most audits are just like an overwhelming amount of numbers. Ours are like, you have to read them, but yeah.

21:23.03
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Which is way better, though. Yeah. yeah um Cool. Sick.

21:33.16
Andrew
Damn, maybe we need to build this. i but I don't think we need to build it yet. I think we could, I think we can like kind of hack it to start.

21:39.02
Sean
Totally. Yeah. I think you could also just keep, like, I think you arguably never have to build it if there's a tally form integration, you know, or any, any like, form webhook type thing. um Yeah.

21:56.22
Sean
Like,

21:56.54
Andrew
have to be willing to set it up for people or something like that. Um,

22:01.37
Sean
as long as you can, like, take in a form webhook.

22:03.35
Andrew
I should try some outreach messages that are that are targeted that do this as the value prop though and be like, hey, this is the type of of report we can generate. Do you want me to show you how you could set this up?

22:17.46
Sean
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like it'll take 30 minutes. Uh, improve all your, like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a bunch of ways you can like test this idea without actually like hard committing.

22:31.19
Andrew
Yeah, yeah, building the full feature.

22:32.24
Sean
So yeah.

22:33.40
Andrew
Right away.

22:34.36
Sean
Yeah.

22:34.46
Andrew
Yeah, cool. um

22:36.06
Sean
Nice.

22:36.67
Andrew
Right now, Austin's working on the that second form of reporting, which is like, um okay, we want to we want to apply all of these changes.

22:42.09
Sean
Yeah.

22:48.81
Sean
Yeah.

22:49.31
Andrew
Now let's make sure we get client approval first.

22:52.06
Sean
Right. Right. Nice.

22:55.83
Andrew
Yeah. um

22:57.62
Sean
Cool. Cool.

22:59.87
Andrew
Yeah.

23:00.76
Sean
Okay.

23:00.86
Andrew
And then we're also trying to figure out pricing because now that we're using more expensive models consistently, it's like kind of pricing is kind of scary.

23:09.46
Sean
Right, right, right. Are you? yeah, yeah. Because you're also...

23:12.09
Andrew
I would love to just do bring your own API key, honestly, because that gets us into like more into pure SAS margins. But I just don't know if our target audience is really going to be like I don't think most of our target audience have API keys generated that they can easily pull up.

23:32.67
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

23:33.75
Andrew
I think it's like a step farther than most of them have gone yet with AI.

23:33.84
Sean
i think it's

23:37.53
Sean
Yeah. ah

23:39.74
Sean
Is there like login with Claude yet? Or like connect to Claude?

23:44.15
Andrew
That would be awesome.

23:45.50
Sean
Yeah, like not like a log on cloud, but just like one click, you know?

23:49.42
Andrew
There's not, but that would be amazing.

23:51.07
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

23:52.76
Andrew
Someone should build that.

23:55.89
Sean
That'll get shut down by Claude and OpenAI real fast.

23:58.65
Andrew
But maybe not. Because if you if you if it was if it was basically just like, because Claude might already have like a login with Claude kind of thing. And if it's just like automating the API key generation and it's like,

24:12.15
Sean
Yeah, I mean, it does, because cloudude code that's how cloud code works, right? It's an auth token.

24:16.87
Andrew
mm-hmm.

24:17.40
Sean
So, maybe. Maybe.

24:19.86
Andrew
worth looking into that's interesting there's something interesting there because yeah if we could like let people pay direct pay claude directly for usage and then we just we're just the the system the the tooling i would prefer that because then i just i it has to be easy

24:20.92
Sean
Yeah.

24:30.15
Sean
Right.

24:35.04
Sean
Yeah.

24:37.44
Sean
Yeah.

24:42.80
Sean
Right. Right.

24:44.51
Andrew
And yeah, right now it's not easy enough, I don't think.

24:48.42
Sean
Yeah.

24:48.58
Andrew
um Cool.

24:51.46
Sean
Nice.

24:51.49
Andrew
I should try, i think I want to try this experiment with Jade. And then I think I should try doing a round of outreach ah where that's the angle.

24:56.50
Sean
Yeah.

25:00.76
Andrew
Like that's the thing I'm selling is like report card.

25:02.56
Sean
Yeah.

25:05.86
Andrew
Like set up a report card for you.

25:08.62
Sean
Metamonster report cards. Monsters University.

25:13.13
Andrew
Monsters Inc, let's go.

25:15.87
Sean
yeah cool so how's your how you feeling about a monster now good i'm glad

25:17.09
Andrew
love it.

25:22.47
Andrew
Better. This is the thing that's like confusing to me about Metamonster, is like we have no traction, really. we haven't We haven't gotten any new traction in a long time.

25:34.62
Andrew
And so it's like, on the one hand, it's like, maybe that means the demand's not there, maybe that means we should give up. On the other hand, i have so many fucking ideas still. Like there's so many things we haven't tried that I think could potentially work.

25:48.64
Sean
Yeah. Yep.

25:48.80
Andrew
There's this report card angle. There's, um there's ah we still haven't tried really going up market and selling more to up market. We haven't tried selling direct to businesses, like skipping the SEO agencies and going direct to businesses and selling this as like ah SEO automation.

26:07.78
Andrew
you know, we walk you through optimizing your website kind of stuff.

26:12.23
Sean
Wait, yeah. Hold on a second. You know there's no like your AI SEO engineer tool. Like there's plenty of like go-to-market engineer AI go-to-market engineer tools, but like.

26:25.79
Andrew
I mean, there are a million SEO automation tools. There's like, there's a fucking million of these, like we generate blog posts for you and we magically get backlinks for you.

26:29.22
Sean
don't know, it's different.

26:35.46
Andrew
And we just, it's just like one click SEO and a button in a box.

26:40.22
Sean
Yeah, but they're not like, okay, so like all the go to market tools of all ah their positioning is like we're an AI go to market engineer, right? You plug us in, we do all this work for you. It happens automatically, whatever, blah, blah, blah.

26:52.26
Andrew
Yeah.

26:52.42
Sean
All the SEO tools are we automate SEO workflows. I don't want to, ah if I'm a marketer and i don't know shit about SEO, I don't want to automate ah SEO workflows. I want to plug the thing in and and it runs, but i don't want, sir i don't I don't want auto is the thing because like, yeah, exactly.

27:05.38
Andrew
Yeah. Auto's garbage. I mean, that's kind of what we were trying for a long time. i just don't know the like what people are looking for that and who's looking for it exactly.

27:18.88
Sean
Yeah. Right.

27:19.14
Andrew
but But yeah, like we we haven't tried going directly to content marketing, to marketing teams or to like small business owners.

27:19.42
Sean
Right.

27:28.80
Andrew
um So there's like, there's all that that we could still try. um There's, yeah, still a lot of like product things we can try. And so it's like, you know, we don't have traction, but we still have a million ideas.

27:43.38
Andrew
Yeah.

27:44.06
Sean
I mean, Rob does say that you only give up when you're out of ideas. So yeah.

27:52.90
Andrew
I just worry sometimes that like, that like

27:58.79
Sean
Uh-huh.

28:00.45
Andrew
we could be having more leverage working on something else. One of my friends, i won't say what he's working on, but he just got his first customer for a product that he's been tinkering with since like November.

28:13.79
Sean
Nice.

28:14.14
Andrew
um And he quoted this customer a thousand dollars a month. They told him that was too low. They landed on $15,000 setup fee and a thousand dollars a month.

28:25.74
Sean
Nice. What the fuck?

28:30.62
Sean
That's too low. um That's a dream customer right there. and's a that's the That's the best thing to hear. We have we go only...

28:39.40
Sean
We only ever had that happen like one time. um Yeah, that's sweet. That's good. And that's like one of our favorite customers clients. Nice.

28:49.10
Andrew
They always are.

28:50.66
Sean
Two times, two times. Three times. but Regardless. Anytime it does happen, it's a great client.

28:54.82
Andrew
But no.

28:56.53
Sean
You know, it's like.

28:57.35
Andrew
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

29:00.33
Sean
ah I mean, do you, do you want, like, do you and Austin want to be working on something else?

29:06.85
Andrew
Oh, no.

29:07.78
Sean
Okay.

29:07.91
Andrew
No. This is like the amount of time it would take. i did that. I built ship letter, and it was like kind of a waste of time. ah

29:15.81
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah.

29:17.03
Andrew
Yeah, I want to focus on Metamonster. I just want to fucking start working. um ah One other idea i have that's like a little wacky and out of left field that ah we're not going to try anytime soon.

29:32.42
Andrew
But there's like, there's all these dev tools that are gaining popularity, like the solos and the conductors and that are like true like cloud code wrappers they're local tools and i kind of think the like the actual modern version of screaming frog is more like that it's like it's a local web crawler with like spreadsheets and and documents built in that like

29:46.01
Sean
Yeah.

29:51.86
Sean
Yeah.

29:56.42
Sean
Yeah.

30:00.71
Andrew
and like a set of skills that come pre-baked and so it's like it's like corey haynes thing but in a in an actual ui with the tooling to do the stuff that's hard to do with like data for seo baked in with like and it's just like you turn it on and then and it's for more like technical seos

30:23.45
Sean
For what it's worth, I think you're absolutely correct. It's literally what I have scrapped together like hyper-agent shittily oh for the record. But like, yeah, I do that.

30:36.47
Sean
Why not? That's sick.

30:39.32
Andrew
um because that that's like a big i would that would require yet another rewrite which we don't want to do right now

30:44.44
Sean
Yeah, yeah,

30:50.46
Sean
yeah. and i think I think you'll end up running into like new UX things to solve for that. ah Yeah, yeah. i I also think the difference is

31:02.36
Sean
I think it's a good idea, I think it's a good idea and i think it's a thing you can you can punt after. the other things but It is a good idea though, that is a good point.

31:12.98
Sean
That is like a, that's like a yeah. Damn, it's kinda cool, I'm not gonna lie.

31:20.34
Andrew
Yeah, like solo conductor for SEOs.

31:20.34
Sean
like

31:23.45
Sean
Yeah, yeah. that I mean, plus if it's like, i mean, even if it's not local, right, it's like in the browser and I can share it with my team, like that's pretty sweet. Like my one problem with HyperAgent is that I can't share with you.

31:36.28
Andrew
The problem with it being in the browser is I think then Claude gets mad at you. Like, what I'm talking about is like something that actually is just like, it's a bunch of tooling that you run Claude code inside of.

31:47.42
Andrew
and you just expose a bunch of like tools to Cloud Code to be able to do all of this SEO stuff better.

31:55.18
Sean
why Why can't I, so why why does hyperagent work? Okay.

32:01.68
Andrew
i don't I still don't really know what Hyperagent is. I mean, I know what it is because I saw it years ago.

32:04.85
Sean
Okay. okay

32:06.28
Andrew
but

32:07.09
Sean
Okay. Hyperagent is exactly what you said, but not like for SEO. It's just that I have been using it for SEO. It's just like you put, like it's in the browser.

32:16.27
Andrew
You sign in with Claude Code in the browser?

32:16.36
Sean
It's like, no, no, You use their credits.

32:20.72
Andrew
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

32:21.72
Sean
Yeah.

32:21.74
Andrew
the what i'm So, I mean, that would work, too. The difference is...

32:25.33
Sean
Right.

32:27.12
Andrew
um

32:28.11
Sean
Right. You don't want to sell credits. You want to be a more pure SaaS thing.

32:31.15
Andrew
Yeah, and and um credits are just more expensive than Claude Code. Like Claude Codes, you you get the discount.

32:37.73
Sean
Yeah.

32:40.01
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. fair Fair. Fair. Fair. Okay. That's what you meant. I see. I see.

32:43.25
Andrew
Yeah.

32:43.85
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Local models is hard. Yeah.

32:47.09
Andrew
And I'm talking about like selling something to people who using Claude Code for SEO right now.

32:51.86
Sean
Yeah.

32:52.11
Andrew
And they're like but they're having to stitch a bunch of shit together. Yeah.

32:56.20
Sean
Yeah, fair. um

32:59.74
Andrew
But I also think that's a persnickety audience who like kind of likes to build their own stuff and might not want to buy anything.

33:06.52
Sean
That is the dev tools. I mean, given how many fucking conductors there are in the world, because everyone just builds their own, like, yeah, 100%.

33:08.80
Andrew
Yep.

33:12.26
Andrew
Yep.

33:15.24
Sean
That is the and is the perpetual dev tools trauma. um Cool. Speaking of cloud code i guess i guess this isn't new news but we're like deep in like AI psychosis i'm like like we had a we had a presentation with the client today like really really cool like uh design and like well built in Figma so i was just like grabbed the Figma like dubbed it a cloud and like you know 20 minutes ah into the call i like like config like made some like light changes and then i was like yeah so want to see a dev they're like yeah also because like there's some things in figment that would like interaction based was um was yeah here you go but like here's the app it's i mean here's the here's the site it's like you know 80 done and they're like great amazing

33:35.100
Andrew
Uh-huh.

34:09.15
Andrew
That's insane, Sean.

34:09.25
Sean
okay And the whole team was like, what the fuck?

34:10.19
Andrew
Yeah.

34:13.05
Sean
I was like, don't know. It was going to be so easy. um Yeah, yeah. ah It's completely broken. like This whole thing is like like... It's completely broken, our entire like processes and everything. um like yeah like i can do animation and like like complex, like hardcore, like like webgl type stuff in...

34:38.78
Sean
in all of this, like as long as I am good at describing it, it can give it enough reference, like wireframes and like some starting code or whatever, like it is, like it's completely short like shortened our dev and design time.

34:44.22
Andrew
Yeah.

34:54.71
Andrew
That's something I haven't tinkered with at all. And I would love to, if I could do good like product illustrations and good like product demo videos, um that would be huge. That would be so freaking helpful.

35:09.58
Sean
I don't know about all that.

35:11.20
Andrew
ah

35:14.50
Sean
That part is still shit. Like the ReMotion with Claude.

35:16.23
Andrew
so okay

35:17.52
Sean
I love the, on Twitter, you see like one shot this with ReMotion and you click and it's like an amazing like animated video and it's just their growth strategy because it's like haha JK, like hire us instead.

35:29.89
Sean
Yeah.

35:30.25
Andrew
yeah yeah it's like yes we used remotion and then we spent 20 hours editing this and like yeah

35:31.81
Sean
yeah

35:36.61
Sean
Right, right, right. It's the shot with iPhone effect.

35:41.67
Andrew
yeah Yeah, if you have world-class editors and lighting and like...

35:46.85
Sean
You had a giant rig for your iPhone. like Yeah. Yeah.

35:53.32
Andrew
Yeah. um What's going on in your world? we We talked about Metamonster for half an hour.

35:58.09
Sean
We are...

36:01.73
Sean
All good. All good. That was fun. it was ah I'm kind of excited for you on this. Excited to hear how how this experiment goes with Jade. ah i

36:11.20
Andrew
sick

36:13.19
Sean
We just sent out offer letter, I think, number 22.

36:17.52
Andrew
cool holy shit you have 22 people working for you

36:19.24
Sean
Yeah, yeah,

36:22.46
Sean
Full time. Yeah, that's a crazy burn rate, I'll tell you that one.

36:26.27
Andrew
that dude that's that is a wild

36:31.01
Sean
I don't. I think we're going to hire like three more people is the thing. um um i have an EA. i have like an official like an EA e now, um which was hiring over 21, I think.

36:46.10
Sean
I don't know. I lost track. 21, I think.

36:48.40
Andrew
I'm actually, I'm stoked to hear that. um i also i also met in Mexico City Amar from ZenMaid.

36:50.41
Sean
Thanks. Thanks. Oh,

36:55.97
Andrew
ah And apparently he, like one of his big things is trying to convince all of his friends to hire EAs because he's like, I want you to hire EAs so that you can, you have more time to hang out with me.

36:56.09
Sean
cool.

37:07.98
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. um Yeah. Super excited to have Sarah, my new EA on board. Sarah comes to us from.

37:18.12
Andrew
Did you hire the Grey Noise, Sarah? Okay.

37:23.28
Sean
I don't know. Sarah, this Sarah, like, was an EA in, like, Hollywood. So the the pitch to me was, like, if she can deal with fucking Hollywood execs, if she can deal with you.

37:29.51
Andrew
Oh, cool.

37:35.33
Sean
again Like, and she was telling Yeah.

37:38.15
Andrew
She's going to spend a month at Ms. Grant's and then be like, dear God, take me back to Hollywood. i thought i thought I knew Divas.

37:46.28
Sean
Yeah.

37:46.31
Andrew
i never met Sean's son.

37:46.91
Sean
Yeah.

37:49.64
Sean
And that's signal for me to go to Hollywood. That's the, hunt um yeah, we, ah yeah, she comes from, she comes from Hollywood. Like she's telling me some war stories of like, like execs, like throwing shit at the wall and like crazy, like, like you either went to go to the bathroom, like number three, man, you were going to the bathroom to cry.

38:11.88
Sean
um It was like, yeah, yeah.

38:14.47
Andrew
Jesus. God, I hate toxic workplaces.

38:16.13
Sean
yeah two yeah Me too. Yeah, so we're not that bad yet, ah here I hear. hope.

38:26.53
Sean
um um Yeah, and otherwise, we are we are building. so So all of our clients are super on board. A lot of our clients have been like really on board for Astro. We're building a lot in Astro.

38:42.72
Andrew
Oh, that's cool. That's really exciting.

38:44.13
Sean
yeah At the same time, though, there are a lot of things with Webflow that like like are niceties. right like like It's great that like a marketer can use Cloud Code and build something, but like is a marketer going to like spin up Cloud Code to like change something in the headlines?

38:50.68
Andrew
Yeah.

38:59.32
Sean
No, but are they going to really are they really going to go into like the HTML file and like know that they're changing it correctly?

38:59.38
Andrew
Yep.

39:03.40
Andrew
Yeah.

39:04.48
Sean
No. Yeah,

39:05.61
Andrew
I do feel like there needs to be an in-between. And you're building a headless CMS.

39:08.65
Sean
yeah like what we're building right now.

39:13.30
Sean
No, no, no, no, we're building a visual editor for Astro.

39:16.29
Andrew
Oh, okay.

39:17.03
Sean
Yeah.

39:18.47
Andrew
So you're building a like a Git-based CMS then? Like a local Git-based CMS? or

39:24.29
Sean
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it would just be, I mean, with Astro, it'll just pull the markdown files anyway, right, when it generates the thing. We don't need, like, a true, true Git-based CMS.

39:34.48
Sean
I think for some of our more complex clients, we're considering some other more, like, Git-based CMSs, but...

39:39.65
Andrew
Are your astro sites not in Git? like How are you deploying them?

39:42.22
Sean
Oh, they are. They are. That's what i'm saying. Oh yeah.

39:43.80
Andrew
Yeah.

39:44.59
Sean
What I'm sorry. What I'm saying is like, we don't need like a, like, we don't need like a Tina, for example, or, or, uh, I forget whatever the other, other popular one is like.

39:49.84
Andrew
Yeah.

39:54.66
Andrew
Tina, um...

39:58.52
Andrew
because Gatsby became Tina, right? Or no, Gatsby's the, Gatsby's the front end.

40:00.89
Sean
ah forestry.

40:04.40
Andrew
Gatsby's like the Astro, um, forestry became Tina.

40:04.43
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

40:07.100
Andrew
Um, uh, there was another one that I used, but it was like really, it was too rough around the edges. It didn't really work very well.

40:14.21
Sean
Yeah.

40:15.07
Andrew
Um, spinal was the one I tried and it just, yeah, it didn't really work.

40:17.57
Sean
Gotcha.

40:20.03
Andrew
Um,

40:20.18
Sean
Yeah. Yeah, we.

40:24.67
Andrew
Why not just use Tina? Like, why not just hook hook Astro up into it Tina?

40:27.36
Sean
Oh, the way the way Tina works is not like good. you know like ah when you use Tina, when you build the Astro site with Tina, that then is then that it I believe it just becomes like a React app at that point.

40:41.50
Sean
um Because for Tina to work as a visual editor on top with a CMS thing, it needs like to hydrate the Astro components, and now you're just building like React components, and now you're not now we're not talking about...

40:42.59
Andrew
Hmm.

40:55.49
Sean
like lightweight like server-side rendered sites anymore we're talking about like full

41:02.90
Andrew
OK. And that's the same reason you don't want to use like a full, proper, headless CMS, like Sanity or um Contentful or something?

41:09.15
Sean
uh

41:10.24
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

41:11.03
Sean
No, Sanity is on the plate at the moment because it's you know it's a free plan. It's good for like startups and whatnot. Sanity is our other option.

41:17.24
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

41:18.01
Sean
um It's just that most of the things that we build don't need it. And like like if it's just blog content, like it's just Markdown files.

41:22.60
Andrew
Yeah.

41:26.35
Sean
Yeah.

41:26.64
Andrew
Yeah. The problem I ran into with Sanity years ago was like, and AI may have solved this problem by now, but because it was so flexible, it was like so open-ended, you could build yourself into a corner. Like you really had to architect.

41:42.35
Sean
Yeah.

41:42.37
Andrew
You had to think really critically about the content architecture.

41:42.55
Sean
Yeah. Yeah.

41:45.28
Andrew
And like if you didn't have experience architecting the like the underlying data model for content sites you could build sites that were really hard to update um and like really build yourself into a corner and so i don't know if ai has gotten better at that to where it can like it can kind of do some of that content architecture because it should be basically the same for every site um it shouldn't be rocket science but we just like didn't do enough content websites like we weren't really a cms shop we were a

42:13.76
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

42:16.96
Andrew
an app dev shop. And so we just didn't have the experience and ended up like building a sanity site that was like too annoying to update.

42:26.49
Sean
um we it's it's super likely that we end up like at least like offering it as an option for clients it's just like you know when i say that like the thing is like when i say that like here's an astro site that you host on your github so you own the code and you can do whatever you want with it and if you ever want a cms it's not super hard to like hook up technically and it's just hosting a cloud for pages so it's free 99

42:46.47
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

42:49.97
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

42:49.98
Sean
and that's not going down ever you know um like and and you know if you want to update something we'll give you the design.md file because it's like it's not secret sauce uh like you can just spin of a landing page and the the webflow devs on the team have really liked it because the thought process around how we build components in webflow is like

42:52.45
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

43:16.06
Sean
pretty much one-to-one with astro um so yeah like with props and variants and whatever it's like quite literally like one-to-one um and yeah anyway uh super easy super and then so

43:18.90
Andrew
Oh, cool.

43:22.100
Andrew
Nice.

43:29.37
Andrew
Nice. It's cool to see y'all making this transition, because I i was like, you know maybe six months ago, I think I said to you, like I was a little worried that if y'all got stuck in Webflow land, that people might just

43:40.83
Sean
yeah yeah

43:44.57
Andrew
yeah just

43:45.76
Sean
Yeah, we do get, for what it's worth, we still do get like pushback on it. Like people are scared about the code part.

43:51.55
Andrew
I bet. Yeah.

43:54.24
Sean
So.

43:54.94
Andrew
And I still think that for some teams, Webflow is probably a better solution bru now.

43:59.13
Sean
Definitely. Yeah.

44:00.86
Andrew
um Yeah. I really wish there was like a true Webflow-level editor that that just had good enough APIs that you could instrument everything from Claude and like make changes and updates in Claude, but also have the UI if you wanted it.

44:12.52
Sean
Yeah.

44:15.60
Sean
Yeah.

44:20.22
Andrew
But it just doesn't exist right now.

44:20.26
Sean
Yeah. I'll give you a demo of ours later.

44:24.54
Andrew
Yeah.

44:24.72
Sean
Working on it. It's actually incredibly hard to build. Like, it is not even the chat, like the cloud chat portion, like,

44:28.97
Andrew
I bet it is.

44:34.53
Sean
the getting like a good builder and the thing is like we can't uh it can't be a sass well it can but it's way more complicated as a sass than it is like a local electron app that the marketers download but um yeah

44:46.21
Andrew
Yeah.

44:50.86
Andrew
Yeah. I noticed the last time I got i was playing around with my ghost website, um my ghost website Ghost has now rolled out like snippets um where you can like create reusable components inside of the Ghost editor and then reuse them in different places.

45:00.99
Sean
okay cool yeah

45:07.85
Sean
I

45:07.90
Andrew
And so i think Ghost is getting close to the point that you could hack it to be like a proper marketing site instead of just a publication.

45:18.75
Andrew
um But i don't i don't I haven't dug in deep enough to know if that's true. My dream is still that someday I'll be able to use Ghost as a marketing site.

45:28.22
Sean
think you can use Ghost as a marketing. I think you can.

45:31.51
Andrew
It's last i tried looking into it, it just like wasn't really built for that still.

45:32.65
Sean
It's... It's just shitty.

45:38.65
Sean
Yeah, it's definitely not.

45:39.90
Andrew
mean, it's definitely not built for that, but it like it was just not really going to function.

45:46.94
Sean
Yeah. Well, I think, I think like at that point you are like, it's like building a Shopify so liquid template to be a marketing site, you know, and like, it's just, yeah.

45:56.24
Andrew
Yeah.

45:57.53
Sean
Yeah.

45:57.73
Andrew
I do still want to move the Metamonster site off of Astro and in fully into Nuxt, kind of, because one, Nuxt has...

46:04.22
Sean
Oh, really? Okay.

46:07.25
Andrew
There's a Nuxt CMS that I'm curious to play around with. um And I really want to build a bunch of um ah bunch of free tools as lead magnets for Metamonster.

46:19.52
Andrew
And I think that would be so much easier to do

46:19.57
Sean
Right.

46:22.08
Andrew
if um

46:23.64
Sean
For

46:24.57
Andrew
if everything was in the Nux code base, because one, Nux is just better for application type stuff than Astro is.

46:30.82
Sean
sure.

46:31.17
Andrew
Astro is clunky it at anything like too interactive.

46:32.84
Sean
For sure. Sure.

46:34.88
Andrew
um

46:34.99
Sean
Right. Right.

46:35.61
Andrew
And then two, if it was all in the same code base, then I could more easily hook into our APIs for things that I wanted, where I wanted to leverage Metamunster functionality for the free tools.

46:49.43
Sean
Yeah. That makes sense. Makes sense. um My understanding from another client that has used the Nux CMS is that it's the same like sanity issue of like very composable.

47:03.65
Sean
But if the engineer is not used to content sites, they will engineer it in a more difficult to edit sort of way.

47:13.03
Andrew
The NUC CMS, that makes sense.

47:13.64
Sean
Yeah, yeah.

47:15.06
Andrew
Makes a lot of sense, yeah.

47:15.29
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. um cool um yeah anyway we're working on like a visual therefore i'm excited about it we'll see how we'll see how far it goes um currently uh yeah i'll send it to you it's it's um

47:28.06
Andrew
I might use it if you if you get decently far with it, because if I could set up Jade to be able to make changes to the Metamonster site, that would be cool.

47:41.82
Sean
Yeah, please. We'd love to. Yarek's the one who's working on it heavily, so it would be good for him to get feedback that isn't...

47:45.79
Andrew
Love it.

47:48.67
Andrew
Is Yarek still listening to podcast ever?

47:49.15
Sean
I don't know. Hi, Yarek.

47:52.83
Andrew
Hey, Yarek.

47:53.92
Sean
well I guess we'll we'll find out.

47:54.11
Andrew
Miss you, Yarek.

47:56.46
Sean
Yeah. ah ah

47:59.41
Andrew
There's like probably not that many people on the Miscreants team at this point that like I really know or really know who the fuck I am. It's Yarek and like Ben.

48:10.96
Sean
Jime.

48:12.21
Andrew
Jene. Hell yeah.

48:14.75
Sean
Yeah. I mean, but those are the people that you mainly worked with.

48:17.38
Andrew
Yeah, yeah.

48:17.50
Sean
Brianna's still around.

48:17.98
Andrew
I didn't work with that many people.

48:20.18
Sean
That's fair. Yeah.

48:21.17
Andrew
Yeah.

48:21.79
Sean
Yeah. um

48:25.33
Andrew
It's cool. It's cool to see how much you'll grown.

48:27.36
Sean
Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. It's not. It's. There's so many people.

48:31.64
Andrew
How many countries are you in?

48:31.66
Sean
There's.

48:34.66
Sean
Currently, I'm in one, but oh, I don't know.

48:36.23
Andrew
No. Miss Koreans.

48:40.58
Sean
um We have France, Poland, Ireland, Mexico City, um United States, UK.

48:50.12
Sean
That's it?

48:50.28
Andrew
ah Australia be cool You should do a team retreat in Mexico City Okay fine Fine do it do it in Portugal and then you just come actually visit me in Mexico City.

48:51.52
Sean
Oh, shit. Yeah, Shrelia. All right, right, right, right. um Possibly, if depending on if one of them moves, Hong Kong. um Yeah, yeah.

49:03.95
Sean
It'll be part of our 12-hour other half. I going to do it in Portugal with the team, but fine. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see what's been cheaper.

49:14.24
Sean
you know

49:18.43
Sean
Yeah, or you can come to our team retreat and then you'll know everyone.

49:23.18
Andrew
Yeah.

49:24.41
Sean
Oh, i'm pu i almost forgot about Puerto Rico.

49:26.42
Andrew
I'd have to put you on my LinkedIn again.

49:28.91
Sean
Oh, never mind. You're not invited.

49:32.70
Andrew
I hadn't done any work for you in like six months. I was like, it's weird to just like leave this dangling here.

49:37.66
Sean
I agree. agree.

49:41.44
Sean
um Do we have other countries? don't know. um I bet I'm forgetting someone. and but We also hired someone from Sweden.

49:48.88
Andrew
Jonery is in the Philippines.

49:51.50
Sean
That's true. That's true. We do have one at one guy in the Philippines. um We want to hire someone in Sweden. We will probably send an offer letter out to this person in Sweden. It just won't be for June. It'll be for like August or something for a start.

50:03.02
Andrew
Cool.

50:03.74
Sean
But yeah, lot of places. A lot of lot of crazy ass tax policies, by the way. Yeah. yeah

50:11.42
Andrew
Are you all using remote?

50:12.89
Sean
Yeah, and we're using remote for the the non-US, so we use rippling PO for um the US folks.

50:13.09
Andrew
Yeah.

50:19.70
Sean
But yeah.

50:21.92
Andrew
ah yeah yeah i I remember calling a friend of mine back in 2018, 2019, right around the time Remote was starting and being like, there should really be a JustWorks for like an international JustWorks.

50:35.93
Andrew
And then I found Remote and I was like, oh, sweet, someone's doing it.

50:38.64
Sean
Nice.

50:38.86
Andrew
um Because I was never going to do it because, God, that sounds like the worst. like

50:43.72
Sean
It's awful.

50:45.09
Andrew
the most painful business in the world to run, which is like an incredible mode.

50:47.94
Sean
It is.

50:49.12
Andrew
It's like the classic like the Stripe, um what's it called?

50:51.01
Sean
Yeah.

50:54.38
Andrew
schlo The schlep like ah factor or whatever, schlep policy or something. If you just if you find something that's like boring enough know and hard enough, like no one's going to want to do it.

51:02.18
Sean
Oh, yeah, yeah

51:05.41
Andrew
And so if you're willing to do it, then you've probably found something valuable.

51:07.36
Sean
yeah, yeah. Yeah. I wonder how much that'll change with like

51:13.36
Andrew
AI.

51:13.34
Sean
No, no, I feel like that's like super defensible against AI. It's like one of those things you can't hallucinate on. Yeah.

51:20.20
Andrew
yeah Yeah, you can't hallucinate on it.

51:22.22
Sean
Yeah.

51:23.11
Andrew
Honestly, like i

51:24.34
Sean
Yeah.

51:25.57
Andrew
you know people talk about you know ai eliminating so much shit, but if you tried to update a CMS with computer use, it's miserable.

51:39.66
Sean
yeah

51:40.36
Andrew
It doesn't doesn't work. It's like basically unusable. um I wish it worked because then I wouldn't have to build fucking CMS integrations with CMSs that refuse to release APIs.

51:51.68
Sean
That's why plat is worth so much money, man.

51:52.09
Andrew
Looking at you, Wix and Squarespace.

51:56.00
Sean
Like, talk about, like, banks don't have APIs, so it's all playwright scripts.

51:56.30
Andrew
Yep.

51:59.61
Andrew
Yep. Honestly, like part of me thinks Metamonster should build like a copy and paste as a service. where it's just like, Hey, if you've got a bunch of shit, you need to get into a CMS. We'll do that for you.

52:16.00
Sean
This is a whole other startup. This is, yeah, yeah, yeah.

52:17.84
Andrew
Yeah.

52:20.23
Sean
Because at that point.

52:20.33
Andrew
But like not do it with tech, just do it with humans because I I'm not convinced the AI is good enough to do it.

52:26.34
Sean
I mean, that's kind of, if Metamonster is just services software, like a tech enabled thing, that's kind of what, like, you would just end up hiring VAs for is that.

52:34.83
Andrew
Yeah. Yep.

52:37.74
Sean
Yeah.

52:38.44
Andrew
um I think I had a friend who was trying to do that a while ago.

52:38.66
Sean
Anyway.

52:41.60
Andrew
He called it like content heroes or something like that. um And it was, I think that's basically what it was. should reach out to him and see if they're still around. Maybe we could just partner with them.

52:52.78
Sean
hmm hmm interesting yeah this is not all like a fun business to run i gotta to be honest with you

52:56.70
Andrew
Cool.

53:01.23
Andrew
No, I mean, you're basically, you've got to find people who are willing to just copy and paste all day.

53:06.06
Sean
yeah yeah yeah i'll just buy out one of those capture farms yeah and like in some offshore country that's basically what it is um

53:17.08
Andrew
Gross.

53:17.84
Sean
Yeah.

53:19.04
Andrew
Super gross.

53:19.20
Sean
Anyway, of talent, I got to go speak to my head of talent.

53:20.17
Andrew
You got it right?

53:24.48
Sean
We have a full-time HR person.

53:25.90
Andrew
you have a You have a head of talent?

53:26.04
Sean
A head of people, head talent, head of people, head of HR person.

53:30.25
Andrew
Wild. That's crazy.

53:32.48
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

53:33.56
Andrew
That's crazy. Damn, one more job I can't get at miscreants if I i fail at startups.

53:37.19
Sean
I feel like I offered you this position long time ago.

53:41.38
Andrew
I guarantee you whoever you have is better than me.

53:42.02
Sean
Oh, 100%, 100%.

53:43.67
Andrew
i'd be like

53:43.66
Sean
oh hundred percent hundred percent

53:44.86
Andrew
yeah i'd be I'd be loving the culture stuff, but you would have forms that were like six months overdue that like racking up penalty after penalty.

53:55.70
Sean
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Do you want to call Rippling and Remote and talk to them about hiring policies?

54:00.71
Andrew
No, not even remotely.

54:01.77
Sean
and

54:04.48
Andrew
Yeah. I want to have like conversations about values and like plan team retreats.

54:10.71
Sean
That's what this podcast is for.

54:14.71
Andrew
Sick. right. Go talk to your head of people and I'll catch you later.

54:17.42
Sean
Yeah, thanks. See you later. Bye. Thanks.