DevCraft: What Is a Sprint? | Episode 31

In this episode, Gary and David talk about sprints: what are they and how do you explain them to a client? They also discuss landing page sales and David's newest nerd obsession: pens.

Enjoy!

___________________________________

Submit Your Questions to:

hello@thebigpixel.net

OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube

Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

Contact Us

hello@thebigpixel.net

919-275-0646

www.thebigpixel.net

FB | IG | LI | TW | TT : @bigpixelNC

Big Pixel

1772 Heritage Center Dr

Suite 201

Wake Forest, NC 27587

Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

David: 0:08

Hi, everyone, welcome to biz dev, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter. And I'm joined today per usual by Gary Boyd, what's up, man? How you doing? I'm good. I'm good work coordinates on a Monday, because we were putting out fires and stuff on Friday, and we could not get to the buckets. So it's a little different. Yeah, we

Gary: 0:28

don't have that Friday morning energy. But we have Monday morning, that is that day, afternoon energy,

David: 0:34

Monday afternoon energy, you know, it's energizing to me, and I don't really want to talk about this. But as we speak, Twitter might be bought by Elon Musk. And I find that very interesting. I'm not diving into it, because I don't know anything about it. But it's like, the time you hear this. In my

Gary: 0:51

I mean, Twitter might be owned by Elon. They gave him the poison pill, and then he came back, and who knows what's going to happen? And now

David: 0:57

they're now they're seriously considering it, which I never, I thought this was all just gonna fade away. But it's very interesting.

Gary: 1:03

I'm hoping it's still just a weird publicity stunt somehow.

David: 1:07

Oh, why not? At this point. Now he's got real money involved. But anyway, we'll see what happens. I think it's very interesting. I want to start today off with a question I found on the intertubes. And I thought it was really, it was very apropos. Using one of my wife's words there.

Gary: 1:23

It's interesting. I think there's a couple of ways you can look at it. But overall, the meat and potatoes the answer.

David: 1:31

So the we've been talking a lot about, you know, validating your idea and doing different techniques and stuff to before you drop a lot of money on building an app to, to validate it in various ways, right. That's what we've been talking about for weeks now. And so this question popped up. And I was like, Man, that is right on point. So the question is, if I set up a landing page for my product, and set up ads, and SEO and all of that, and I actually sell a product that doesn't exist, I take the money. And then I immediately refunded, is that a good way to validate my idea? So on the face of pickle, the, the question is, well, I'll I won't bear the lead. That's totally illegal, by the way. So you, you can't you can't do that. But I think the ethics of it is the same lines is you're promising something that doesn't exist. Now. The immediate follow up question that is, what about Kickstarter? Right? Because that's basically the same thing. You are buying my widget before it exists. But the difference is, you're telling them that upfront. That's why that's legal.

Gary: 2:39

They know what they're not exactly buying. They're blindly investing into something that is promised, but they're also expecting to get their money back if it's not delivered. Or at least a percentage of it.

David: 2:52

Yeah, well, it depends. I mean, like, I guess what is it? It's not GoFundMe is it GoFundMe, one of those, it's not Kickstarter, they get the money, whether they hit their goal or not. So you're basically giving them the money, and you're not getting it back. But the promise is that I give you money in the future, I get a product. Right, that's, that's the good. But if you don't have a product, even if you are, you're not stealing, because you're refunding the money, but there's something about it, and I'm not a lawyer, but there's something about that, that you're crossing some sort of line that you can get real big trouble,

Gary: 3:23

immediately, I would think of you're giving financial information to an institution that is not giving you any kind of product or service in return, that's fair throws, for, you know, regulators and such. Yeah, security, what

David: 3:37

some people have done, which is getting close, they will go all the way to the point where you would purchase and then when you say the buy button, they say, Hey, thanks for checking this out, we're gonna put you on a list for whatever's right, or they're taking you down, because they want to see serious

Gary: 3:55

Yeah, I mean, a lot of them will go to a lot of products now that I've seen, especially when it comes to like things for the design industry. Like if there's paid plugins or anything like that, or ads that are helpful, you know, they don't have it completely figured out yet. But they want to make sure there's enough interest where they can actually make their money back if they invest into it. So it'd be like sign up for the newsletter, and then be the first and you get 10% off if you you know, go for the pre sale. So you don't actually have to give them the credit card information. But you get up to the point where you would and then yeah, you're you know, you'll get the emails every week saying where they are, what the numbers are, and then when it's available, then you have to pay for it. But at least that way they're getting information past just your interest of you know, emailing you their newsletter, at least they're getting to the point where they they're trusting your promise that you're going to buy it but I keep thinking

David: 4:50

to myself is what I recommend a client to do this like not the illegal part, obviously. But but the getting you all the way up so it looks like you You're doing something so that you're really gauging whether or not they actually would have bought this? And I, I don't know, I can't say with the empirical evidence that one shows better returns than another, you know, if I sign up for newsletter, does that mean you're gonna buy a product? No. But that extra lift you would have to do to simulate all of that is not the point. The point is to get through this as quickly and easily as possible. And to really gauge interest, right? You don't get there's a lot of fake a click is not enough. It's just it's just not because I can click on your ad because I'm a jerk, and I want you to spend money that happens all the time. So that doesn't

Gary: 5:41

kind of click on the X to the top. Right. But it's so small that you just click on the ad anyway. Sure. You know what I think and that is traffic

David: 5:48

may talk about as a

Gary: 5:50

tangent is a term for that, like dark buttons or dark. There's a term

David: 5:54

Oh, the invisible buttons. Yeah, I did it. Well, there is a term I can't remember. There's a website I like it's a gaming website and their whole, like, they have the site in the middle, you know, it's like an 800 pixels wide, that's where all their content is. And then everything else is an ad. And so no matter where you click, if you click off, you're going to that ad like it's really like sometimes when I got it up and open another window, and I'm just going back and clicking on my browser to wake it up. I went to the Add New, that's a little much. But I think that the key here is, is you want them to do one more action, I think a newsletter, or something simple like that does what you need it to because that means that they've clicked on the ad good. They've read something in your copy that makes them interested, and they want to learn more. I think at this stage of development, that's all you need. I think that's

Gary: 6:47

I think it's not wanting to add another layer, just have something where after they sign up for the newsletter, one of the first or second emails that they get has an additional link to download, say like a PDF, like a brochure of what the product will be or something like that. So then you have another click from their email. I mean, for that you could record that there's interest beyond just maybe a bot filling out some

David: 7:13

when you can also, I'm thinking out loud here, but I think you could also in the newsletter to see okay, let's say I had 100 people click on the ad, I had 50 People click sign up for the newsletter. Now over the next week, I'm going to have links inside of that newsletter or a poll or a white paper or something that makes them actually

Gary: 7:31

in the newsletter interaction. Yeah. And see, okay, out of those 50.

David: 7:35

I've got 10 Who are clicking on every link that I'm putting in

Gary: 7:38

there, you can that way you could judge your engagement level beyond just the initial interest.

David: 7:44

Now you're Yes. And do you tank your idea? Because you can't write a newsletter? Maybe? Maybe not. But I mean, these are all there's lots of variables here that you would have to be careful of, right? Because if you're not good at writing the newsletter that's engaging. That doesn't mean your idea stinks. That's

Gary: 8:01

right. No, but I mean, we're just offering this as an alternative to going through a fake signup. And so the product is somewhat correct. And the runny Eagle scam,

David: 8:10

don't do that. Yeah. Okay. So I think I just wanted to throw that out there. I've seen that out there. And it seems like oh, yeah, I'll just sell it and give them back their money. Just don't do that.

Gary: 8:21

That's the easiest way for that person to go email all of their friends who are in that same thing and say, stay away from

David: 8:27

that you're a scammer.

Gary: 8:35

So as we've been discussing the different stages and processes of going from having an idea of validating it leading all the way up to the point where you're making some sales, but you want to automate your process more, and you're looking for a dev company, someone to build some custom, either app or store or something to help you do your business, things that you should look for in a Deaf company. We talked about transparency before, which brought up a question in my mind of let's say, you don't really know too much about the tech industry, you've never worked with developers before. Some of the terminology and phrases that they can throw around pretty easily, you can just pretend to agree with so you don't look like you don't know what they're talking about. But at the same time, you might use more clarification. And for years now, the term sprint has been used a lot like a design sprint dev sprint, you know, how long is the sprint? What is a sprint? What does it include? And I'm sure the answer could be different for different agencies and companies. But just in general, how would you define what the term sprint means when it comes to developing?

David: 9:42

Yeah, I think there's a couple of phrases that are all wrapped up in that. So whenever you're talking to dev company, you will hear the term sprint a lot but you will also hear the term agile, or you'll hear the term waterfall you know, Scrum. You'll hear that waterfall you don't hear it as much because that's kind of an old school way of doing it. Most people nowadays most smaller dev shops follow what's called an agile method of some form, some are very, very strict. And they, they've got a scrum master, that's a real job title, who is cracking the whip to make sure that the sprint is going well. And others take a very loose view of what they do for Agile. So what is agile is basically a way of developing software. It's it's doing short bursts of deliverables and having those deliverables roll based on how the project is going. So you're saying, Okay, our goal is to get this much done in this sprint, which could be anywhere from a week to a month, I doubt they don't go any longer than that, generally, their week month is on the high end.

Gary: 10:48

So it's kind of like a technique of a workflow that's proven to do well, with developers and clients as far as Yeah,

David: 10:57

I mean, it's been around for a long time. And it's a super deep hole. Like, like I said, there are people to like, have you ever heard of project managers and get like PMP, and all these titles and certifications and stuff, there's that same thing for development and agile scrum, it's a way of managing projects. And it's not just software, it's mainly software. But it gets really people get really serious about this, especially larger shops. But what they're basically saying is, okay, we will do this much as a sprint, and some places will say, a sprint is a week. So it's one guy, it's 40 hours, this is what we're going to promise you for this amount of money for this, because most shops are hourly, we are not, but most shops are. So they will tell you, okay, my bill rate is 150 An hour or 200 miles an hour. If you're offshore, it's gonna be way cheaper than that. And they're gonna say, Okay, well, for 40 hours a sprint, we're gonna get this much done. And the thing that's always struck me and the reason why we're fixed fee, and we do things a little different, is the traditional way is I do the best I can we're giving best effort. And I believe that. But if I don't get what I promised to get done, see, I can at least say there were five features I said I'd get done in those 40 hours. And I want to get for the idea behind agile as well, we adjust Oh, here are the four that I did. There. They're good. We're going to roll over this just took longer. We're sorry, we move forward.

Gary: 12:23

So then adding on the bill for the 80 hours? Or do they? That's just kindness.

David: 12:29

It's no no, like Bill for all of it. That's what time material is all about. And that's not wrong. It's just a way of doing things that are is just kind of different. I mean, it's

Gary: 12:39

just my mind. And I was being explained that from a dev shop, where it's like, we're promising you, you know, 100 things, but we're only gonna get 80 done. Clients gonna say well, do I pay for all of it then? Or do I only pay for what you get done? Like, where's the

David: 12:54

a good dev shops, again, transparency, time materials is going to tell you, Hey, I'm estimating 40 hours for these features. But in my contract, I promise, there's a fair amount in there. Yeah, plus minus 30% 25%, something like that. That is to build that in.

Gary: 13:11

So again, with the transparency, it's on the dev shop to explain, you know, like, there's going to be some wiggle room in here. And that's just the nature of us trying to solve these problems on the fly and build what you need.

David: 13:23

And that's true for every dev shop on the planet. Like, I don't care how amazing you are. someone on your team misunderstand something, you misunderstand something, your project manager does something wrong, something happens, and you don't hit what you want to hit. If you are a fixed fee shop like we are, then you have ways that you manage that. So that you don't We don't charge the customer more. But we have to protect ourselves right there. Generally we have, we know how long things should take. And there are some pads around that some are worse than others. We tried to keep it as low as possible. But there are some to protect ourselves. If you're hourly, there technically aren't any pads even though oftentimes there are hidden. And when that rolls, well, I got 25 30%. So how do I use that that's where the scuzzy ones, we'll be right? I promised you I'd get this done in 100 hours, but I've got that thing built into my contract for 25 extra hours.

Gary: 14:20

So that's gonna take 125 It's gonna

David: 14:23

take between 100 125 and I, that's why I just don't like hourly work. Most development shops are absolutely fine materials. And there's nothing wrong with that. I just have a tough time wrapping my head around that because at the end of the day, a client wants to know how much some of that is going to cost. And they shouldn't assume that we're going to eat all of those extra hours, but that's what a sprint is. So back to the original compensation.

Gary: 14:44

A spread is just a defined period of time with a promise of deliver best efforts. What's going to be delivered.

David: 14:52

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And Design Sprint is similar. I think we probably so we used to call them Sprint's when we do our free XP things we recently changed them to stages, because sprint carries so much other meaning baggage, if you will. Because and it confused me because some people do know what a sprint means. Even our non technical clients, they know kind of what a sprint is. And so they're like, confused,

Gary: 15:15

they might have what is this patients based on? Yeah, like a previous dev shop or something? Yeah. Changes just to kind of define it more of just implemented periods of time within the overall process. And this

David: 15:27

is how big Pixel does their projects is with stages. It's our own unique term. And we do. So that is, that is what a sprint is. And I think it's the transparency angle is, again, there's I have nothing wrong with a hourly develop Velma shop, I don't think they're doing anything wrong there. I just think that you need to be as a client, if they are hourly, you need to question what is that variant? Because let's say you promised 100 hours, but you didn't finish. What happens next? Does the dev team eat that time? Or am I supposed to at that time? What is the limit? At what point do I stop paying for the fact that you didn't hit the promise? You said you would. Those are the kinds of questions you should ask to a dev shop when they're time materials. Because some things legitimately go sideways. If you're doing OAuth, which is a way of authenticating websites that can sometimes go horribly wrong.

Gary: 16:24

What does that mean often authenticating websites.

David: 16:27

So if I am a, you've all seen it on a website that's got a big Google button. And I could sign in with Google, right click the button and Google

Gary: 16:36

authenticate the users ID based on a different software.

David: 16:40

Yeah, so it used to be, and I'm dating myself here. But it used to be if I wanted to connect to Google. And I'm saying this is 15 plus years ago, I would literally ask as part of your onboarding for your Google email and password. And I would store those in my system. And I would log in as on your behalf to their API, and I would do work. Now, as you can imagine, that has all sorts of problems. Not too good. So they all all the companies, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, I mean, all of them. They all kind of worked with this standard called OAuth, which is actually OAuth two, I don't remember how I never worked in OAuth one, I think that does skip that completely. But whatever. Oh, off two is the way that you basically, instead of giving your name and password, you give you pop up a window for Google, let's say, you type in your name and password to Google, you're not on my system anymore. Google then gives me a big snarling looking blob of text,

Gary: 17:39

they're giving you a specific ID for that one time that the users logging in and giving what gets weird,

David: 17:46

right, because it's not just one time that thing will work over and over and over again, for a specific period of time. But it's even stranger than that. Because behind the scenes, I have two tokens and access and a refresh token. I'm totally nerding out here. But it shows you some of the complexity. When that access token runs out of time, it goes to its own refresh token and refreshes itself using Google's code. So you get a fresh one. It's just wild. And that refresh token usually lasts for years. So that you can just keep refreshing it as long as you have a legitimate thing. And OAuth is complicated. Everyone uses it, and everyone hates it. But it works. And some things just take off. I'm using that as an example. There's all sorts of things that I when I look at it when I'm specking it out, I'm like, Yeah, I'll do it in 50 hours. And we get in there like, oh my gosh, that's gonna take at least 75. And the way we do it as a fixed fee company, is we say, man, you know, we estimated this 50 hours and we are way, way off, it's gonna be 85 hours. Here's why. Here's the explanation of what we were wrong. And we say, hey, we promised you we wouldn't raise it. But I'm going to ask hat in hand, can we split it? And if the answer is no, then we eat it. That's our job. Because we promised it wouldn't go up. But we do ask and we try to split it so that we're not losing our shirt.

Gary: 19:09

And you're also making a legitimate case to the client. Here's why where's your why that's where the transparency part plays a big issue and also develops more trust with them into you knowing that you're not trying to just pat

David: 19:21

we're not just trying to Pat hours and and that's how we do it. That's how every dev company I believe should do it. Whether the time materials or not, Hey, dude, you know, we said this is 50 hours. I know we've got this 25% built in here. But I want to show you how we're going to use it. Right that's that's what you should expect from your, from your dev company, regardless of who they are when you're working with them this ongoing thing. But to me trust is a currency. And initially you don't have any in your bank and they have none in their bank. And the more you can be upfront about this, you're putting little pennies into those trust banks. Sounds cheesy, but it because at some point, something on one side or the other is going to go wrong. And you've got to I have enough in your piggy bank that you're not angry at each other. Right that oh, you know, I know you're not gonna hose me down. You're a good dude, you've been working with me for a few months, you've been upfront transparent. I understand things go sideways, that's fine. Hey, I got you. That's how it should work. Right? If you build that trust bank up enough, you're gonna cash in sometimes, and they're gonna cash in sometimes.

Gary: 20:23

Oh, for sure. Definitely strength, it strengthens the relationship. And that's just makes everybody happier to work with each other.

David: 20:31

Yeah. Because on the on our side, the clients like oh, my gosh, can you especially startups? Hey, can you wait to cash that check for two weeks? That's happened to me numerous times? And if you're someone that you've built up that trust? Sure, absolutely. I will not cash your check for two weeks. But if I think you're kind of hosing me, because you do this every time, or that check bounced in the past. Again, startups are a different beast. But you get my point that trust is either there or not there. And that's on our side, we were working hard for you, we expect to be paid for that. And if you're, if that's a problem regularly that causes problems just with the relationship.

Gary: 21:15

So just you didn't answer the question and then some, but just for that, sorry, gap, the spring we're stage or whatever, it's just a period of time in which services will be provided based on what you expect to be done. And that's transparently communicated between the client and the dev shop, their workflow techniques or whoever they describe their Sprint's doesn't really,

David: 21:36

sometimes they don't really mention that, they'll just say that in passing. And that's important to you, because it's just, it's good to be educated about some of the stuff because they're gonna say that they're not even really talking about Yeah, we got to spread do it for you next week. They're not really saying anything. And except for that's an internal conversation they've had. Yeah. Because all that you know, is that you're getting billed for 40 hours, right. And that's why but it's still good to be entertained.

Gary: 21:58

And you should see something next week.

David: 22:00

Yeah, you should see something

Gary: 22:02

next week as right. But I think the recurring theme for the last like ever since we started this little, I guess you can say, step by step process, the recurring theme seems to be transparency and trust.

David: 22:15

To be fair, I think that is such a me way of doing things. But yes, that is why I pound that drum every day. And almost everything we do, when it comes to development, it's or any service, if I'm building a house, right, whatever it is, it's not a transaction, I'm not going to buy an iPhone, and I'm done with that, then it's, I'm building something for you. And it takes time, it takes expertise. And the only way that that works is if it's built on trust. Otherwise, everyone hates each other and they don't like their job

Gary: 22:56

now in the past couple weeks, I've made fun of you for your, your new obsession with Dungeons and Dragons. Surrogate then today on Slack, you mentioned your, your new little purchase that you're so proud of, and it's a pen. My new obsession is pens, pens, taking notes with pens and paper. Now I've been a huge, like, pen and paper guy forever. Let's because you're an artist, yes. Not only that, just the actual writing down stuff. You said you're an auditory learner. Yep, I'm a visual learner. And for me, if I write something down and watch myself craft those words together, it sticks in my head better. Yeah, makes sense. So yeah, I've always been kind of like, even if I type, you know, the actual big descriptive parts of things onto like a task list. I'll still write down little bullet points, just so it's so yeah, I've been using Pentagon for a long time you said you're going to start using pen and paper for, you know, taking notes, but it can't just be any pen. No, that's right. So d&d Master. That's what has to go out and get a fancy pants high tech web three pen.

David: 23:56

It's a crypto. It's not really here. It's an NF T pen.

Gary: 24:00

It's not. So I just wanted to talk about pens for a moment as someone who's been using them since, you know, whatever, one long time for many different forms. And then I'm sure you've been using pens for a long time, too. But I just wanted to weigh in with the my opinion on what constitutes an expensive pen versus a regular pen. What's a good pen bad pen? Here's

David: 24:19

what I found. So interesting. I have, I am a nerd. And I revel in my nerdiness. And so when I think of something like I'd say, Hey, I'd like to take some notes, right, because I put things on notepad and this that and the other but

Gary: 24:33

it's what is the best way to take notes. So yeah, so

David: 24:37

I immediately started nerding out and I had no idea that there is a whole planet. A pen nerds

Gary: 24:44

out there. Yeah, there's a culture. Oh,

David: 24:46

my goodness. Yeah, like it's deep and the paper you write on and like this pen I have a barren fig squire is officially what I have. And this pen was rated by some random guy I don't know who he is. He rated 100 different pens on four different things. And this was number one. And so,

Gary: 25:08

vacuum of pens, or ballpoint is not nearly as expensive as you have to qualify as a ballpoint or rather point pen. This is a

David: 25:17

this is a rollerball pen. And I didn't know even what that meant

Gary: 25:22

is refillable cartridges. Correct. I had to put in

David: 25:25

a new gizmo into it to refill it. I didn't know fountain pens, were still a thing. They still are big time. And those are the most expensive things. I mean, it was shocking to me you could spend $400 on the pin. Not and I'm not talking about one that's gold inlaid or something like that. I'm talking about just a pen. Yeah, 40 bucks.

Gary: 25:44

When I went to the media company, one of the first ads I had to create a salesperson sold an ad for a guy who was trying to resell collectible pens. And he literally wanted me to make the headline, you know, prestigious pens starting under 600. He was trying to resell pens for more than $600. But he was buying little three inch by five inch print ads. That nice like magazines and papers and stuff and oh, yeah, the red flags of rip off them just like shot through the roof. But anyways, so it made me start looking at pens that are that expensive and like there's no way this can be real assessed to be a scam. He's selling like, tickets and then pretending it's you know, the pen comes with it like the old you know,

David: 26:36

yep. My dad had a Mont Blanc pen. With Jeff they're very famous pen company. I didn't know anything about it as a kid except for it had the cool little mountain top on the top, it was a little white little starburst thing. And that their signature. And it was a ridiculously expensive pen. I think his was 300 plus dollars, he sold houses. So we always like to sign contracts with these really grand. And

Gary: 26:58

yeah, a lot of times companies would give those away as like, you know, anniversary gifts. Chloe's after like 20 years and stuff like I know my dad had a fancy set of a gold pen and mechanical pencil that you had to like just to get the refill ink cartridge or the refill lead was like another 25 or $30 for each one of them so crazy. They were rated and how smooth when you twisted the pen how smooth the either the lead would come out or the ballpoint would come out of the pen. And they would rate it on the angle of writing. So if you could write to almost complete 180 upside down degrees, like and the ink wouldn't stop flowing. Like that Seinfeld episode with the astronaut pen

David: 27:39

would get that reminds me the astronaut pin like that was a thing in the 70s or 60s, America spent tons and tons of money to invent a pen that would work in space.

Gary: 27:47

And they had to engineer a pen that the ink would work in zero gravity

David: 27:51

in the in the Russians just used a pencil. I love that so much that is the most American thing ever. So anyway, I'm not expecting anybody to become a pen nerd. But I do think if I would ever give advice about anything, which apparently I do find something to nerd out about and just dive into that hole man. And what's fun about a pin is you can get a really nice pin for not a ton of money. And you can have to say I have a it's not a big or something silly, but you can and there's tons of little hobbies or whatever you want to get down it whatever you want to nerd out about. I just I think there's something uniquely fun about grabbing a new topic and nerding out about it just go into the weeds and just revel in it like a pig down

Gary: 28:36

that rabbit hole and just it's so much fun. Yeah, it is sometimes, but I've also noticed there's sometimes some I don't know if you want to call it products or topics or whatever, that I find myself if I start nerding out like here's an off one. pocket knives like flip out

David: 28:54

Oh mass do

Gary: 28:57

I subscribe to the James knife company and this other knife company just because I was so interested in how they're charging $400 for a three inch pocket knife based on the the materials they use to build it and how they lock in the springs. Yep, and of course I would never buy one but man that stuff looks awesome. And then I'm sure if I bought like one of the lower end ones just to get in then I'd be jealous of all the higher end ones and then there's no way I can you know, go down that rabbit hole to the point where I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars in our pocket.

David: 29:31

I am not one I'm always afraid because those things are ridiculous benchmark. I'm afraid I'm going to cut myself too much so I'm not a knife guy. But that my business group for the annual gift that they gave like a Christmas gift. They gave everyone a little bitty pocket knife a very nice one. And it started like this. This space war kind of you know I'm saying like this build up of which

Gary: 29:57

everybody's knives. Yeah For a couple of months, they'd get an upgrade. And they all knew about

David: 30:03

knives and I don't I feel like I turned in my man card somewhere because I don't know anything about knives because I'm afraid I'm gonna cut myself. And these guys are like, Oh, would you have this card because it's got this kind of flicky flick, and this has a hoochie coochie. And I'm like, What are you talking about? And these guys were like, just drooling over these three inch knives. And yeah, knives are really interesting. Like, I'm, that's not my world. But

Gary: 30:24

hints can get served to me just like that, too, though, just to say,

David: 30:28

what are you using, you're using a big get out.

Gary: 30:31

I mean, from where I cover, I've used so many different kinds of, I had to buy a set of pens for art stuff that I was doing in school or whatever $80 for a set of those micron ink pens that you have to actually fill with Indian ink. And they have the metal tip that goes from 0.4, like the thinnest the thinnest dot all the way up to like, you know, a two. So when you're drawing with ink, you have all that different range of like a nice line, or you can have the calligraphy pens, with the different spreads,

David: 31:00

my mom got into those when I was kid. And then you get the

Gary: 31:03

brush tip markers. And you can spend $4 on a brush tip marker, or you can get a brush tip marker that's you know, $40 and literally see no difference in it. So I've just found over the years, if there's a feel like a tip to paper feel that I like. And the way the ink comes out with or without bleeding through the paper that I'm using, like that little sacred combination is what I go for. And so lately, it's been just, I used to always use the Sharpie fine tip pens, but then they bleed through the paper a little bit. And I use the field notes. So I've been using the Sharpie, the extra black gel, Sharpie pens, and that tip to paper feel like the way it pulls and the fact that it doesn't bleed through. It looks just as dark as a Sharpie. That's just what you are.

David: 31:52

You are such a much bigger nerd about this. And it

Gary: 31:54

when I was nerding about the actual construction of the pen of the price. I'm nerding out to the actual stupid little the way the fibers hit the tip feeling.

David: 32:02

Here's why I know I love my team because I said hey, I'm nerding out about pins. And like half of them threw down like yeah, I'm using blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I don't ever do

Unknown: 32:15

whatever I got from the bank drive through. Yeah. They

David: 32:19

they're like all coming out. Yeah, man, I use this and a dad on this kind of paper. What do you got? Yes, I am home with my fellow nerds. Anyway, I'm sure my wife and everyone who listens is completely asleep right now. But I thought I thought I would encourage the nerds to

Gary: 32:35

Oh, come on. There's, there's YouTube channels dedicated to these like knives and stuff like that. I'm sure there's channels dedicated to me, you know, besides just desk setups, because that's a huge thing.

David: 32:46

But just leave your nerd you know, and painted our own gardens,

Gary: 32:50

desk mats. It's like mechanical keyboards, it's just the keyboard.

David: 32:54

We need to start a podcast called Find Your nerd and it just interviews just various eating site. I did but I think that'd be so cool to interview someone in a different nerd field like get the knife guy in the end guy in the paper guy. I don't know as long

Gary: 33:12

as they can spear pretty passionately about it because if you just get like some monotone droning Oh, yeah, something and then it's like this is the worst time of my life.

David: 33:20

Sure, yes, you gotta get the the one guy with a personality who collects

Gary: 33:25

is a YouTuber. I've been watching for years, a photographer, Peter McKinnon. And he does this where he gets into these little tangents and stuff nerding out on things collecting things. Pens was one for a while but the pocket knives ones coffeemakers was one like and he'll just go and he'll make videos about these products that he tries and tells you about him and stuff. But his passion for these things. And he makes it kind of funny when he talks about him. You end up at the end of the video. You're on Google like looking up how much does this pen cost? How much?

David: 33:57

That's right. That's right. That's when you've done it. Right. Okay. Thank you all for joining us and we will be back next week.