Friendly Show
Yaro and Adrian are online and conference buddies that enjoy speaking about development, tech, SaaS, and product development.
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Friendly Show
🥑 Avo joins TinySeed 🤑! What will Adrian do with the money?
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We talk about:
- Adrians' worldwide conference tour in the first half of 2024 (Tropical RB, Singapore, Sin City)
- Yaro & Adrian spending time together at the French Riviera
- Upcoming conferences (EURUKO, Rails World, FriendlyRB)
- FriendlyRB plans & speakers
- Avo future plans (marketplace, no-code/low-code)
- Hiring for Avo
Building a No Code Tool
Speaker 1Hello friends , and welcome to the Friendly Show .
Speaker 2Everyone , how's it going ?
Speaker 1Yeah , it's been quite a while . Actually , I really needed a small break after our marathon of recording maybe five or six episodes during two days of Belkin Ruby .
Speaker 2Yep , I agree . I agree , we did some cool episodes . You know , impromptu , you had this great idea of , just hey , let's get into that office right there and let's move the furniture around and let's make a studio for recording . Okay , let's try it . But that was amazing . That was a great idea . I think everybody had fun . I love the studio yeah , the studio was great . Everybody was checking out like what are these guys doing up there ?
Speaker 1like it was a cool time , good opportunity yeah , I actually enjoyed it on the Balkan RB .
Speaker 2Yep , yep , it was great . It was a great conference .
Speaker 1Talking of conferences you've visited , like so many of them this year already , Yep , yeah , yeah , it's been .
Speaker 2I started the year strong . I've been on a little vacation in Thailand , a workation actually . I spoke a little bit at Bangkok RB . I met some cool , cool friends there . Then I went to Sin City , ruby in Las Vegas , the conference organized by Jason Sweat , which was amazing . I met a lot of cool Ruby folks , very well-known folks as well , like Jason Charns and others , and that was like super , super , a very cool experience to go and gamble a little bit with them . Tom I'm talking about you , tom and then I went a little bit on a tiny trip in South America . My wife and I went to Machu Picchu and then we went to Brazil to Tropical RB , which was amazing . Those people , the Brazilian people , are so welcoming and so friendly and everybody was so happy that Tropical RB was happening again . It seemed like it was like you know , this mini Rails world . I spoke with Serdes after like two weeks of you know , selling out , like putting the tickets on sale Serdes is an organizer right .
Speaker 2Serdes yes , is one of the organizers , and Deborah and I think there are more , and Rafael Franca , of course , and he told me , like , if you're writing for tickets , I don't have any anymore , like we are fully sold out . And you could see at the conference that , yes , they were sold out . The whole space , which was like a beautiful , beautiful space , it was packed with Ruby developers , a lot of cool , cool ruby folks . So , yeah , I enjoyed that . And then , uh , we came back to europe and after a few days , uh , we went to , uh , balkan ruby , uh , the whole avo team and you were there . We spent a few time , a few days , in sofia before the conference and we did this co-working stuff where we worked on Navo and your projects and other things and we brainstormed , and it was such a cool experience , right , yeah , I actually loved it .
Speaker 1So we arrived a few days before the Balkan Ruby conference and had the whole week to just hack on stuff together and I had my first experience with touching AVO code . Yeah , so me and Alex worked on building a calendar feature into AVO . By default you have the table view . You can also select the grid view and additionally , as a new view , we were thinking of a monthly calendar view . So we hacked a minimal working conversion during the stay in the sofia yes , that was great .
Speaker 2That was great because you just published a video like two weeks before , three weeks before I was checking it out , and I see I was looking like this is so . This is so cool . Like you have everything you build the whole month view , like that was for me the hardest thing to build , but you just did it and we could just hook into that and have records being shown inside Avvoid . That was just a perfect synchronicity when you did that and we needed it , kind of . And now I saw I noticed that you were working a little bit more on the calendar view , so maybe we can get it published as one of the first items in our alpha marketplace . How about that ?
Speaker 1our marketplace sounds like a great expansion idea , like there will be lots of different stuff there I can imagine , like calendar plugin . I mean , I've developed , like I've worked on , some Shopify marketplace apps before and it was really interesting to see how apps from the marketplace can extend functionality of the core product . And if you open up the possibility for developers to create apps on the marketplace , there could be some potential yep .
Speaker 2Yep , yeah , definitely , we want to make this more and more open , because we do envision people that want to build like extra fields , extra views , like resource tools and other integrations , maybe with Sidekick and other things , and we also build like a solid queue UI for everything . So we definitely see people that want to build other things because they are . So some . Somebody built like this whole three view of um , of the family tree , and that was just amazing when I saw that . So , yeah , uh , we want to open that up and probably this would be the first item . So the calendar view uh , where people can , you know , download it and , uh , someone and like people like can monetize it . So you can also like sell it if you need to , or , you know , publish it for free or whatever makes sense for you to do . Yeah , yeah , that sounds cool Avvo Marketplace .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , we're actually working on this new feature called Kanban . The Kanban board so many people asked us about like hey , could we have like a board where we can see our records and that's just . You know , made our day and the light bulb went up and said , yeah , this could happen . And we started thinking about how to do it and actually the technical implementation is not that straightforward , so I had some . I looked at your video , I checked out Andrea Roca's Hotwire cookbook .
Speaker 1Do you know ?
Speaker 2that one , yeah . So he has a chapter on that and I had some look at his code and it's kind of like it's easy when you want to do it for one kind of model , one resource , but when you want to do it to support more many , then you got to remember the position on the board and maybe the position maybe it's on multiple boards , on multiple columns , one record . So it's quite deep that rabbit hole . But we want to do it again , like we do everything else .
Speaker 2This is the initial iteration . This is what we're going to have initially , and then we're going to build on it . But again , we're very excited about this and when we want to have it by the end of this month , maybe half mid-August , probably to have it out there at least the initial iteration , so people can play around . So this could be like the second thing in our marketplace . Let's call it .
Speaker 1Oh , you know , it's such a nice feeling , Like you mentioned , like a Kanban board and Ava and I started like thinking how in other ? And I start like thinking how would I build it ?
Speaker 2Right , right , yeah , that's so cool to do it Like . I think we should do some . One of the things that I do with with Paul is get together Like how would we build this ? And we start jamming . So I think that it'd be cool . Like on a Friday evening we just have like this public call where okay , let right and I think that would be like a nice bonding uh experience , for yeah , actually , have you ever had something like other work in hours uh calls with just people who would like to talk about other ?
Speaker 2I did have one , and only my friend uh jacob showed up but I wanna I think maybe maybe people weren't , you know , didn't know about it , so maybe now I should restart it . What do you think , guys , if you're hearing this , just write to me and whatever and say , yeah , adrian , start having those open office hours . We want to talk to you , we can do those , I can tell you about the news and then you can tell me about problems or issues or stuff and we can try to jam over them .
Speaker 1Yeah , talking of Avvo , I remember some time ago you talked about the vision of it potentially being like no code or low code tool . How's ? It going with that .
Speaker 2So that's great , that's a good question . We have this customer that actually made Avvo a no code tool . So basically they installed it and they have this special resource where they you know , you can create go and create a new resource like product and then you can say like , okay , it has these fields and everything is stored in their database . But also they are kind of hooked into Avvo to basically make them dynamic so he can change all the options dynamically . They can change like the number of tables . He made this cool little thing where you set up like a filtering scheme and then you hit save and you tell it which columns they want , want to see . So that's a special view just for that thing .
Speaker 2So again , that's a good inspiration for us . But I think we will start some . Maybe some sometime end of year , maybe next year , beginning of next year we could start and build our own UI layer on Avvo so you can do , you know that drag and drop GUI graphical user interface kind of stuff . So people can do that drag and drop GUI graphical user interface kind of stuff . So people can give it to non-technical people . You need a developer in the beginning but then you can just pass it off to a non-developer .
Speaker 1So that's exciting . Maybe this customer of yours that has built this feature can potentially put it on their Avvo marketplace .
Speaker 2Yes , yes , that could be something , that could be something .
Speaker 2Customer if you're listening . Yes , of course , of course we want to have this feature . Um , well , I think that , uh , at some point they will switch on on our implementation as well . I mean , we've been talking to them and they've been like super open , like , yeah , we just want to start with this and then we'll just do your thing , whatever you're doing . So , definitely , it definitely helps out , because when we talk to them and they tell us their use cases , we can think about those and prepare for those use cases , for those edge cases . So it's not building in the dark , but actually building it for a product and extracting from there .
Speaker 1Yeah , and talking of AVO , I've heard you have a big , big , big orchard . A tiny news . A tiny news , yes , Tiny seed .
Speaker 2Tiny seed . Yeah , so I don't know if I mentioned this to you , but when I was in Sin City in Las Vegas , at Sin City Ruby , I was there like two days before and I got super sick . I had the stomach flu and I was in bed cramping up , couldn't sick . I had the stomach flu and I was like in bed , like cramping up , you know , couldn't do anything . Yeah , yeah , it wasn't it wasn't a pleasant experience .
Speaker 2But then I got this email and I was just knowing my bed . I was looking at this email and said like , congratulations , we would like to invite you to be in our next spring 24 batch . And I was like , oh my god , this is so good . But it was like in such pain . So , uh , yeah , but that , but that was good news , and we started . I said yes , we applied .
Speaker 2I think this is the second time we applied , maybe the third time or the second time , but I think we are more ready now than we were before and we did the program kickoff in London and we
Startup Investment and Growth Strategy
Speaker 2met there . The whole batch were like 10 startups from Europe , asia and Australia and there are so many cool people . So the batch is cool , but also the people from TinySeed , from the incubator . They're so knowledgeable and they're so kind and they want us to raise this good , not VC kind of backed company . We don't want to raise like round after round after round , just pump the numbers just for numbers sake . We want to build this cool , stable , calm , profitable business where us and our customers get the most value of . So it's actually the best thing that could have happened to Alvo . So there's an investment component as well , so we got some investment from for them . But there's also this full 12 months worth of program where we get access to special workshops , to mentors and , most importantly , to the network . So there are , I think , about 170 startups and the network .
Speaker 2Uh , you know , whenever you have an issue , you go under slack and you ask like , okay , I have , I need advice on this thing and people are so helpful and they've been through it and it's great to get that experience . You're not just building it from scratch . So , yeah , good things are coming to Avvo . We're going to have some money to play around , we want to hire a new developer , we want to do some marketing expansion kind of thing , because we're definitely not reaching everybody so we can improve on that . So , yeah , good times are coming for us .
Speaker 1Okay , so you received some investment and I wonder how are you going to split the money ? How many percent are you going to spend on marketing ? How many percent on development ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so the money . I think I'm going to buy myself a Tesla and just percent on development . Yeah , so the money . I think I'm going to buy myself a Tesla and just go and live in Thailand on a beach or something I'm kidding , I'm kidding .
Speaker 2So , basically , when I had a look at other startups the big ones they raise like millions of dollars and they have this plan for the next 18 months or something before they raise another round or whatever . We of you know they have this plan for the next 18 months or something between , before they raise another round or whatever . We want to spend on this and this . And like we don't have that and I and I guess not that not all startups have that we don't have this big plan where we know how we're going to spend it and this is how we're going to make the most out of it . But , uh , we do again , like I I want to hire a new developer because I want to do less development . I don't want to , but I'll have to because I have to do less development . I don't want to , but I'll have to , because I have to do the marketing stuff and other things .
Speaker 2But I want to help Paul get things done faster , maybe get the designer . We want to scale up our marketing efforts . So we don't have this . You know that much percent for this area , but we are going to take some risks and some bets and we are going to spend some money , because that's what everybody told us , like , hey , now , if you have this money , it's not like your hard-earned money , so you're going to be trying to spend it a little bit . Be more okay with spending some money to increase the value of your startup . So that's what we are going to do and try to improve AVO for ourselves and for our customers as well .
Speaker 1Actually , I like this idea . Yeah , that , uh .
Speaker 2This investment allows you to take some risks yes , definitely like , for example , I want to get somebody to help us with the documentation , like go through all of it and like , let's do and keep it up to date and write some rules and stuff , and this is something that you know when you like . If you know when you like , if you're like a small startup , like we are , we're right now like two full-time people and some contractors If you say something like , hey , I want to spend like $2,000 a month or $5,000 or whatever , $1,000 per month for the documentation , that's a lot of money . It's not like you know people are going to get features or you know more value . They are going to get value because it's documentation .
Speaker 2Documentation would be good , but it's not like the first place where the money goes right . So now that we have this money , okay , we can invest in these corner edges , like , okay , let's make the ui a little bit better on the actions drop down . Everybody like complained about it . It's like , yeah , it's not , but it's not great and we just left it like that . But now we can invest in , okay , let's fix that , let's make that better , right , all of these corner cases that are not , you know , burning issues , pressing issues .
Speaker 1So , yeah , small bets , yeah . And actually talking about AVO , recently I was playing with Jumpstart , starting like a new jumpstart app , and uh , I was really uh unimpressed , uh , by the default admin that the jumpstart uses and uh , like I , I saw that avo has this uh , uh template that you can run to replace the default jumpstart admin with avo and uh , run it and vote like a charm . Yeah , so , yes , fun oh , thank you .
Speaker 2Thank you , yeah , um , we use jumpstart for our hq website . Um , it's amazing , you know . It helps out with the subscriptions and everything is just a bliss . Everything just works out of a box . But , like you said , yeah , the admin kind of side , the back office , back office , it's a little bit bare bones , which is okay . You can do your stuff mostly . But we kind of , you know , we implemented Avvo in our website in our Jumpstart app and we said , okay , we can extract that . So basically what you're getting we extracted it into a template . So what you're getting is resources for all of the things that Jumpstart comes with , like the payments and the subscriptions and everything else . So you basically get that out of the box with just running that template . We have that template , so you'll see it in our footer somewhere on the website . So you just run a command and everything will be set up for you yeah , and when do we meet next time ?
Speaker 2I think next time we're gonna be in . Actually , let's talk about when we met the last time . So we met in Sofia , but we also met in Cannes , where you live , which was amazing .
Speaker 1Thank you for inviting us yeah , guys , actually here's a small secret . If you look at our new logo of the friendly show , you will see us two standing together . That's actually not Photoshop . We met in real life .
Speaker 2Again , again , again . But we were in a vacation kind of setting . It wasn't just a conference setting , we just went together , we just met to be together and we went to the beach and we went to the island and Nice and everywhere else and we had a lot of fun .
Speaker 1You know Adrian got this investment , so obviously he went to like the French Riviera , Of course of course , of course .
Speaker 2You know . Right now I'm , you know , flowing in money . It's just a joke . It's just a joke , tiny C , don't take the money back . No , it was great . It was great to be there and thanks for teaching me how to windsurf . By the way , jaro is a great windsurfer , so if you ever meet him at the beach , you know you can talk about that .
Speaker 1I really love it . I started windsurfing just last year and I've been doing it 2-3 times a week since nice , nice .
Speaker 2Yeah , it's a good . It's a pretty good exercise , man .
Speaker 1I was like super tired after the first day I mean , it's the hardest on the beginning because you cannot stand well on the surf and you keep falling down and you spend a lot of energy standing back up and picking up the sail .
Speaker 2But after you have like 20 or 30 hours of training , it's much easier because you stop falling down so often so you don't lose so much energy yep , and and one thing that I can say , like I noticed when you were there so get somebody to help , somebody that knows how to do this thing . So yarrow was there and telling me like hey , you're not pulling the , you know the , the rope , in a good manner . You have to keep it , you have to keep your hands close , or whatever . So that tip , that small little tip that just made me , improved me like 10 , made me 10 better . So if you have somebody , if you're trying to do , you know , snowboarding or something like that , or windsurfing or kites , have somebody that knows how to do that next to you , because they'll see what you're doing wrong and they'll correct it and your learning path will be like 10 times faster . So that's great . Thanks , man
Friendliness and Innovation in Conference Season
Speaker 2.
Speaker 1Yeah , and talking about the future , we have another conference season coming up soon . We have El Ruko , we have Railsworld and , of course , we have the most important fun , the highlight of the year , the Krem de le Krem , the friendly conference in Romania .
Speaker 2Yeah . So this year I think we're kind of the same like last year . We're just between Euruko and Railsworld , which is great because some people can still do the triathlon , even though Railsworld is a little bit farther away . So Yuruko is going to be one week before . I think it's the 11th , 12th or something in September . I'm going to be there . I'm going to be there a few days before , not a few days after , so I think I'm leaving the next day . So if you're there a few days before , let before , not a few days after . So I think I'm leaving the next day . So if you're there a few days before , let's get in touch . Let's grab some dinner , some breakfast , some brunch and have some good time together . We can maybe work together or something , or try to get an Airbnb . So Yuruko and then FriendlyRB . So we're going to have two cool , cool days with cool , cool speakers . So we're going to have Rosa Gutierrez from 37signals . We're going to have Nabila Yusup from Factorial Stephen Markheim he's going to talk to us about SQLite .
Speaker 1SQL Jesus .
Speaker 2SQLite , jesus , exactly . Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout , greg Molnar , which is going to he's like a super you know security freak , if you know him . So definitely it's going to be amazing . He's going to be amazing . He's going to have like a cool uh , oas top 10 for rails , for developers . It's going to be a great talk . And then another two guests that I'm very , very , uh , you know , happy about . It's nate hopkins , uh , the author of stimulus reflex and turbo boost , um , and uh , julian chill as well . He's our friend from the uk . He's going to build a game using Dragon , ruby Rails and some real-time shenanigans . So , yeah , I'm very , very excited for this year's lineup .
Speaker 2We just closed the CFP . So , yeah , actually I think it might be still open . So , if you hear this and you want to write a CFP , submit a CFP , just do it now , because we're going to close it very , very soon . So , uh , we're just closing the cfp and we're going to do the review in the next one or two weeks . So we're going to have the final , um , the final schedule , and we are preparing a few surprises , uh , so , besides the you know , the walking tour , the friday trip to the mountains and everything else , we are preparing a few , two other surprises , but I don't want to talk too much about . It's going to be like a good , cool person , a very important person in the community . I cannot say anything . I want to , I want to , I want to make sure everything is going to happen , uh , but um , yeah , keep you know , subscribe to updates there and we'll keep you up to date on twitter and on on the newsletter about it .
Speaker 1Yeah , actually you mentioned that Julian is going to talk about building a game with Dragon Ruby . I've been hearing about Dragon Ruby for quite a while , but I never had the opportunity to work with it or try it , so it'll be cool to see the talk Also , greg , around a year ago I was working with a company that needed this kind of OSCP certificate that they adhere to some kind of security standards , and we had a penetration test being done on the code base and it was extremely interesting to see the results of the penetration test and what needs to be updated yeah , there were lots of like small stuff , like add a capture on sign in , add the like ip rate limiting , add the session timeouts , add the possibility to sign out from another device remotely .
Speaker 1So lots and lots of small things .
Speaker 2Yes , when you're not such a big security freak , we do things with security in mind . But , dude , this can go so , so deep and having somebody like that that is in check and is up to date with everything , that's amazing . To get a report like that , yeah , that's great .
Speaker 1Yeah , Nate , I think he'll be talking more like about Turbo Boost .
Speaker 2Actually .
Speaker 1I'm looking at the Friendly RB website right now and I see the list of speakers seven speakers so far and I don't see the names of the talks .
Speaker 2Yes , that's a little bit on purpose . So we try to keep this , you know , friendly kind of uh vibe to it . So the way we invite people , we invite because most of these uh speakers were invited by us . We invite them because we we know that they're doing an amazing uh . You know they're doing good to the community , they're contributing , they are a very good person , they're very friendly , they're doing good to the community , they're contributing , they are a very good person , they're very friendly and they're , you know , improving the community .
Speaker 2And we're not trying to put that pressure . We want to keep it friendly . Like , hey , we want you to come and speak and , you know , be with our attendees , with our guests , no pressure . Whenever you want to tell us whatever you want to talk about , that's just perfect , I'm sure it will be , it will be good , uh . So again , they'll tell us when they are ready . But I'm sure it's going to be like oh , but one thing I want to mention like I know you've seen steven at a few conferences he's going to have an original talk for friendly . So you know it's okay . That's going to be like the first question that people are going to ask . So , yeah , steven is going to have , but everybody's going to have like kind of an original talk for .
Speaker 1Oh , actually I mentioned recently , steven has been posting much more about CSS tricks rather than about . Sqlite Jesus stuff .
Speaker 2Yes , but I don't know if you knew that . But he has like an amazing collection of like CSS . What do you call it ? Snippets , not snippets , but you know experiments on CSS tricks or I can't remember the other website . So he does . He did a lot of those uh , you know experiments beforehand . Those are really cool . So again , he's not just sqlite jesus , he's also maybe a little bit of css , I don't know , um .
Speaker 1So yeah , definitely talk to him about that as well yeah , actually , when you visit a lot of conferences and you see the same speakers with the same talks all over again , it's not so much fun . So it's nice to hear that there will be original talks .
Speaker 2Yes , yeah , we try to do that , especially with speakers that you know maybe have been to Yuruko or something , because there are people that are going to come from Yuruko and you don't want to you know , see the same talk again . So we're trying to keep it as original as possible and as friendly as possible . We're making something different .
Speaker 1Yeah , and I remember last year you mentioned that it was not so easy to find sponsors for the conference . How is it going this year ?
Speaker 2Yeah , so it's definitely better . So last year everybody told me that it's difficult to get sponsors for your first edition because nobody knows you . You air quotes , uh , that they won't like trust you , whatever , it doesn't matter . But we had amazing sponsors last year . We had andy kroll , we had flagrant , an agency from the us , evil martians softia from romania and trailblazer from nick from uh Trailblazer . They were amazing to support us and that really gave us the financial support to actually build it , because if anybody threw in a conference , made a conference , they know you cannot do it just from selling tickets .
Speaker 2And this year we have amazing , amazing sponsors as well . So we have 2Performant . They are a marketing uh network , uh , that has been , you know , has been created in in romania . Uh , we have app signal uh , which everybody knows they're amazing and they support the community through these kinds of sponsorships to all kinds of uh conferences . And we have , probably , which will sponsor our after party . So , yeah , we are trying , we are trying to make , yes , the the uh , we will make a , I think , a better after party than we had last year . And , of course , we have some production sponsors and some community partners , which I invite you to go and and see on our website because and and give them a follow . Give use their services and products because , if you know the , they are helping the community and we can help them back . Whenever we need their services , we can use them . So , yeah , thank you to our sponsors for helping put together this cool experience that we call FriendlyRB this year yeah , cool man so well .
Speaker 1Lots of conferences this year , a lot happening with AVO . I'm so excited to see all this news about the features you're building , about the TinySeed collaboration . Yes , yes .
Speaker 2So it was a big year for us . It's still continuing , it's going to be a big year .
Speaker 1It's just the middle of the year now .
Speaker 2It's just the middle of the year , exactly so many things have happened , but just the middle of the year . But , yeah , the middle of the year , exactly so many things have happened , but just the middle of the year . Um , but yeah , cool things are incoming and yeah , reach out to us like if you tell us how much you love it , tell us how much you you hate it , because that's what I tell people when , when they talk about our , and I'm looking forward to seeing everybody at the conferences . Oh , we didn't mention grail's world . Uh , after Friendly next week , let's see each other in Toronto as well . Again , let's have brunch and lunch and dinner and maybe we can share an Airbnb . If anybody's interested , definitely give us a shout , because we do this . We did this in Athens in .
Speaker 1Sofia . Oh yeah , I loved it .
Speaker 2Yeah , we can find a bigger Airbnb and we can maybe work a little bit and spend some time together .
Speaker 1It's just a different kind of experience , I wonder how big of an airbnb can be found like in toronto , 40 guests , dude to make it affordable .
Speaker 2Yes , a 20 room , airbnb or something . No , no , it will be great . So , yeah , uh , this is how we found our , our , our last roommate in in Greece . You just tweeted about it . And John John , which is an amazing person . He just joined . And it was . It was a great , great experience . So if you want to , if you want to join us and live with us in in Airbnb , in at Yuruko or in Toronto at Railsworld , definitely give us a shout , because we would love to to you know , to meet you and spend some time .
Speaker 1Yeah , okay , guys , it was a nice episode . Thank you for listening .
Speaker 2Yes , thanks for listening Everybody . Ooh confetti , yay , see you in the next one . Thanks so much , arrow .
