Advice From 2 Developers Who Launched a Side Hustle | Golden Record

In this episode, I talk with two senior developers, Danny Peck and John Ostler, as they share the real story behind their side project journey—the good and the bad. They delve into their experiences building Golden Record, an app designed to preserve personal memories through audio recordings. Despite their extensive backgrounds in development, Danny and John discuss the unexpected challenges they faced, from technical hurdles to marketing struggles, and the reality of making little revenue in the early stages.

If you're a developer contemplating starting your own side project or looking to turn a hobby into a business, this conversation is packed with invaluable insights. Learn from their successes and failures as they offer candid advice on what it truly takes to bring a project to life, maintain momentum, and navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship in the tech world.

Watch this episode to gain knowledge, inspiration, and a realistic perspective on transforming a developer side hustle into a viable startup.

Website: https://www.goldenrecord.app

Danny Peck (guest):
Twitter - https://x.com/dep

John Ostler (guest):
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwostler

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Chapters

• 0:00 Building Golden Record
• 8:38 Developing Web and Native Platforms Strategy
• 21:31 Optimizing Backend With Cloud Database
• 27:04 Monetization and Market Validation Strategy
• 40:39 Marketing Authenticity and Brand Voice
• 52:43 AI and Audio Capturing Future
• 1:04:11 Balancing Side Projects and Entrepreneurship
• 1:17:21 Networking for Side Projects

Transcript

John Ostler: 0:00

Welcome back to another web dev podcast where we help aspiring developers get jobs and junior developers grow. We're going to pivot a bit and we actually brought on two founders that have kind of built up a side project and are kind of trying to turn it into their own business. Both of them have many years of experience in the dev world and so I kind of just want to bring them on, pick their brains, ask questions about like, how this app went and some of the you know turbulence that they faced and what they're facing now and what they're trying to turn it into. So, if you're trying to turn your side project into anything, uh, turn your side hustle into kind of a business. Your developer you're trying to push out a product Um, this is the episode to watch. So I appreciate you guys coming on, I appreciate your time, but, um, yeah, let's, let's go ahead and just roll into the intros.

Danny Peck: 0:50

Danny, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, name's Danny Peck. Kind of a career programmer. I've been at it since the really late 90s as a hobbyist, but then I'm kind of one of those you know odd ducks that went into school knowing exactly what I wanted to do. So computer science major, you know, right out of school straight into a developer job in 2001. And I've literally been just a developer since then. So fast forward 23 years. I'm still at it. So yeah, programmer, I live in Michigan, West Michigan, just moved up here with my wife last last year, and in addition to programming I'm also a musician producer, uh. So I like to just sort of jump between uh programming and and music and stuff. It's kind of where I kind of balance out, get my, get my uh creative outlet in cool, cool thanks.

Don Hansen: 1:40

Thanks for john osler, um, co-founder here, golden Golden Record and, similar to Danny, got my sort of cut my teeth in the internets back in the late 90s trying to get designs online into websites and that kind of sparked into all the digital tools like got into the Adobe Suite early and things like that early and things like that. So um and we actually Danny and I met originally in Chicago at a at a agency called design kitchen. That um was one of these creative agencies that had moved from kind of more marketing and traditional print advertising into the web. So we were part of a group of people who were probably too young to be working on these like major brands that are headquartered in Chicago and like building a lot of cool new tech using Ruby on Rails and things like that. So yeah, like Danny said, I've had a similar path.

Don Hansen: 2:31

I'm not a computer science major. I was a visual quick start guide type of dude. I'd go into Barnes Noble and try to figure it out that way, but you know as you do. But since then started a couple of agencies when they got pretty big for a while there and still run one agency that does kind of full service tech and design. And then, yeah, golden Records started in January to you know. Try to go for it officially so that's my background.

John Ostler: 3:00

That's awesome. So a lot of experience, different backgrounds, and it's cool to meet someone else that wasn't a computer science major. It can be a little bit tougher as well Got to be resourceful but I'm kind of excited to dive into this project. You know I've heard bits and pieces from Danny, but you know the product is Golden Record and I kind of just want you guys to share like what you think Golden Record is.

Don Hansen: 3:32

And we'll kind of dive into what it's going to be. But, like right now, what is it? Well, I, I think if I, if I could take a quick stab, danny is more eloquent than myself, so I'll let him like, really like, sell the the full picture for you. But this, this started in the uh, the paper prototype phase as a cassette audio recorder.

Don Hansen: 3:47

So if anyone has one of these sitting in a drawer somewhere. It's got the old cassette tape. You'd maybe make your mixtape with it. But there's a few people that might have had an old recording done from a parent or someone like this. But anyway, long story short was I effectively gifted these cassette recorders to a few of the family members I don't see very often, so my grandma or her brother, a few other people that are.

Don Hansen: 4:13

You know that I wanted to get their stories out of and they took me up on it, and so we had these keepsakes and I've always, like, really appreciated what those were, because they, you know, know, they're now long past. But we kind of have these recordings not of not only of their stories they're kind of childhood stories and things like that but just the sound of their voice. And so when it came time to talking about you know, what is a side hustle or what is what is going to be, this sort of uh, you know, sink your teeth in type app play, I knew that for me I've got the kind of shiny thing syndrome problem, which is like if you're a developer, you feel like you can just build anything at any time and you could spend most of that time, building tools for yourself or people like you, and so to cut it short here, basically I was trying to think like what is something that I knew that I would live with for a very long time and not give up on, and and kind of. I think there's there's a sense of willing things into existence, rather than them having an opportunity and doing well or not. It's like, oh no, this is going to be real and so this, this kind of golden record thing, came from that.

Don Hansen: 5:20

It's like I know, I know this is something I'll stick with and it's actually something I care about, like capturing people's memories, so that's that was kind of the build up to it. It's like, again, paper prototype phase, like there's an analog to this and could we digitize it, make it easier for people and and it almost tell people like hey, this isn't such a bad idea to do this, to capture, capture sound, capture audio, audio and and chronicle people's life that way okay, I am back off of that.

Danny Peck: 5:49

Um, you know the original like golden record was. It was humanity's like, it was our attempt to capture our essence for the cosmos. So like it was a copper disc that launched aboard like nasa's voyager spacecraft in like 1977 and it created. It contained earth's greatest hits, like you know, music from around the world, natural sounds, like greetings in 55 languages and, like you know, 115 images representing like human life. So it's essentially like humanity's time capsule for the universe. So like, the golden record app that we're trying to build like, takes the same profound concept of like, but but points it inwards. So, instead of preserve preserving humanity's voice for distinct distant civilizations, like, it helps preserve like individual voices, just for like future generations. So like, just as like nasa's record, like aim to tell Earth's story through sound. Like, the app like golden record enables families to create their like own golden records.

Don Hansen: 6:51

So I carefully curated audio time capsules that capture the voices, the stories and like the wisdoms of loved ones, basically basically, and that was kind of a Carl Sagan idea, who's you know very famous like publicly famous astronomer right, who was really good at educating the public on various you know parts of the humanities and science and space and things like that, and he, he and his wife and team put together this idea of this golden record. So, yeah, it definitely I think the naming comes from that. It's. It's a riff off being a total science nerd and space nerd, um, but it's.

Danny Peck: 7:27

It's very akin also to what you're doing, what we're doing, obviously, as Danny said, yeah, and if you really want to just like treat yourself like to something really nice, like, go on YouTube and just search for like Carl Sagan monologues, and people have put these like videos online with music and it's just like Carl Sagan giving like, uh, like a lecture or something like that, and just talking about the universe for like five minutes and it's just like the most beautiful thing you've ever heard.

John Ostler: 7:54

It's great I fall asleep to stuff like that, I like that yeah, exactly, exactly.

John Ostler: 8:00

um, I I like that both of you are very much interested in this right. Um, I've been exploring the indie hacker community a bit and I'm finding that there are very different people that are building products and I I find that I'm more interested in connecting with developers that, like, care about the product that they're building, because some people don't, and it's really hard to. Honestly, I think it's really hard to connect to your users and flesh out something that's truly going to provide value when you don't care about the product. So I love that both of you actually do care about it and it shows and you know, john, as you said, danny's very eloquent in the way he describes it too, so I got to keep up with him.

John Ostler: 8:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don Hansen: 8:38

Well, and I think, don, just to add to that, I mean, especially on the consulting side, you meet so many people building products and there's a real difference, exactly what you said. There's a real difference. To someone who hasn't found a business case to solve or taken this, I think there's a business strategist version of creating startups, which is absolutely fine and fair, but that approach it's a cold open, which is absolutely fine and fair. But that approach, you know it's it's a cold open. It's like, usually the, the companies that are successful like that are, you know, maybe younger students who have a lot of time, who are fresh out of business school, who are playing, trying to play the play the game properly, right.

Don Hansen: 9:21

Or you've got people that are very experienced, who have maybe sold businesses and they're not that invested but they know mechanically what needs to happen. So you've kind of you kind of have this juxtaposition of those type people versus the people who are potentially solving their own problem, who are truly passionate about it and will go the eighth mile to get this thing done, which is kind of what you need. So I think both are survival skill but, like you said, the developers or entrepreneurs who are invested in the actual problem that they're solving. I think they have a much better chance of actually pulling it off Because, like you said, they're going to be closer to the metal in terms of understanding what is the problem. What am I actually trying to do here, versus it being it being like well, this should work because this framework is like relevant to this market. It's like okay, like good job.

John Ostler: 10:10

So yeah, I agree with you and um, because a lot of people will give up on whatever they're building and they might pivot too early. But, like, if you really care about this, you can. You can pivot in the right direction, but you can also take go the extra mile, like when you get burned out. When you're like this isn't working, you figure out what to do rather than giving up on it and going to the next product. So what was the original product supposed to be like? What was the mvp and is like what you have now? Is that different than what you had originally planned?

Don Hansen: 10:44

yeah, it's. It started taking a bunch of forms when, when I started and then and then and then tricked danny into doing it with me, it was almost, um, the approach originally was well, uh, could this be an ios only play like, is this a self-contained organism where we don't have a lot of platforms and we don't have anything involved in the web and it's just a simplified private? Everything lives on device in the like Apple walled garden the whole time, and so again, that's like I think that's a more traditional approach. If you're a one man band where it's like okay, where you know, play to your strengths, Is there a market for it? What can you do? And so that was kind of. The original vision is like there's a great audio recorder on our smart devices, so iPhone's going to do well with that aspect, and so can we platform this in one way going forward. And that was kind of like I would say MVP, MVP.

Don Hansen: 11:42

But the more we kind of bringing Danny in and talking to various people and investors and things, it got shaped a lot more in terms of thinking like well, actually, if our goals are truly to have this be something that has the opportunity to be massively adopted, then not only do we need to platform differently, but we need to be able to support the people who are doing it right. We need to be able to potentially help them recover files or, if something happens in a family or something you know, managed at a support level which, you know, having a single platform app doesn't really afford you to do, especially if everything's totally walled off to just that account. So that's when we kind of went the other direction, which is like we need to start with the web and make it accessible to as many people as possible and use that as our kind of learning tool to be able to iterate quickly over that, and then the native app which we're about to release here is complementary to that, to both play to the ecosystem but also take advantage of the device and some of the native functions of the device. So that was kind of the two methods. But yeah, I think it's like you say with anything, I mean ideally, when we're talking about MVPs, we're trying to get something out as fast as possible with the fewest number of features that get in the way of that, and so I think we've probably over engineered it a bit because we can, which is this is the classic developers problem. We just don't know when to stop right.

Don Hansen: 13:16

But yeah, here we are and I think we're quite lucky to have done it the way we have because, as we're doing our market validation tests and things, not having a mobile app is super helpful because we can actually see and isolate the behavior. We can't say well, I think some people might be downloading the app and getting stuck here, or there's this bifurcation of user behavior that you start to lose the trail of like is the messaging wrong? Is it the app download? You start to blame potentially other things for why your conversion numbers may be the certain way or how your funnels are set up. So, yeah, we're taking advantage of the fact that we're just web right now. It's really great to be able to look at the insights a lot more clearly.

Danny Peck: 13:59

Yeah, and I think the native app then becomes an enhancement rather than a requirement, which is nice, and so then it's all about augmenting the experience with like device specific features, while maintaining the core accessibility and the preservation capabilities of like the web platform. So, like I think the hybrid approach just ensures that, like the most important thing, like the actual preservation of memories isn't like dependent on any like single technology or platform or ecosystem.

Don Hansen: 14:29

Yeah, and I would say that the beautiful thing that's happened and kind of I think we realized it a bit later in the process, like late this summer is that by having us both independently attack the platforms, we both can show and tell how we solve certain ux or funnel things like how we solve those problems and take almost the best approaches of both.

Don Hansen: 14:53

So if, if in and I I didn't fully appreciate this in that I've I've been in the, the native app game for a really long time, like, like since the SDKs came out so that you could build apps, and I think the interesting thing about progressive web apps, in terms of them being, like Kotlin or any of these languages allow you to deploy one to many is that your responsive web is actually, it is truly a limited view of how you could run the user experience, while also there isn't anything to really push the web experience because there aren't native things being tried to be like, hey, could we like use 3JS for this, or like, could we hide this view until this happens? And so, anyway, what I'm trying to say is, by the two of us having the different platforms, that collaboration aspect uh, it just made it better. We could actually retool each other's solutions almost live and uh, and I think it's making for a much better um set of platforms altogether.

John Ostler: 15:59

because that, because we're actually independently developing them- and so you're doing that in parallel and kind of just essentially propping both of each other up with things that you discover as you continue fleshing this out.

Don Hansen: 16:14

Exactly.

Danny Peck: 16:15

I like that. I think there's something magical that happens when you develop a web and native platform in parallel. You end up with this sort of beautiful cross-pollination of ideas. So, like, instead of like the typical approach when one platform tries to mimic the other, you get these sort of like two independent explorations of how to solve the same, like fundamental problems. Yeah, so I think the web platform sort of forces you to think deeply about accessibility and like universal design, like how to create experiences that work across like any device or browser, where, like, meanwhile, the native platform can kind of push the boundaries of what's possible with like device specific features, like an optimized user experiences from that perspective.

John Ostler: 16:57

Yeah, that makes sense. What I'm kind of more curious about the web version. So, john, you basically picked the iphone ecosystem because you're comfortable with that. Is that what you said before?

Don Hansen: 17:10

well, I think it's. It's comfort's one thing. I think the other thing that, um, I've I've quite a bit of experience launching standalone apps in the iphone store. So I've got a couple apps that have maintained their top 50 status in the paid apps and the iPhone marketplace ecosystem is definitely self-sustaining If you are able to tool it correctly and also do a bit of the search engine optimization. Piece, even between web, you can do quite well there. Piece, even between web, you can do quite well there.

Don Hansen: 17:43

So it more represented, like you said, a familiar but also kind of strategic angle in that if it's going to be a one-man show for a while, then keep it that way. Simplify as much as possible. Have, offload payment, offload servers, offload push notifications, everything you possibly can. Just offload it, offload push notifications, everything you possibly can. Just offload it to apple services. Let them do all the heavy lifting, pay them their 15 commission and then when you look cool and you're in your, you know you can buy new jeans. Then you can like bring in a developer to like do the android version or do the web app and things like that, right, um, so that that was more it, but again, that I, that's been my experience. I know that apps in general are it's like the wild west, like I think most apps die pretty young and probably have an audience of five, so um. So that that was just more my experience of like maybe cracking a few codes on how to get some of those apps and visibility.

John Ostler: 18:43

Okay, it's always interesting to hear kind of the different ecosystems, even between Android and Apple. There's definitely pros and cons of each and I've heard complaints of both, but I do think I want to learn a little bit more about that. But I like your philosophy of trying to offload as much as you possibly can into kind of that ecosystem. I think that's helpful. Like I don't know, maybe just speaking for myself as a developer, like I feel the need to like, even on the web, I feel the need to implement every kind of custom integration that I possibly can to keep the experience entirely on whatever I'm hosting and in my application, and I think that's a horrible idea and I, at least initially, you know I'm trying to get better with that. But, um, I'm also interested though, um, danny, in the web stack. Um, why did you decide to go with it? Are aren't you using like Ruby on the backend? Why did you decide to go with it?

Danny Peck: 19:47

Aren't you using like Ruby on the backend? Yeah, so we are using Ruby on the backend and it's kind of like we sort of built our own sort of I call it MVC light framework, like model view controller light. We needed something that was robust enough to give us a model framework so that we could offload some of the more complex controller stuff to the backend, to the server side. We're using Firebase and React on the front end, but Ruby gave us the nice controllers that we could tap into to do server-side processing for things like stripe and like email notifications and like sending off like jobs to sidekick for like scheduled future, like email notifications and things like that.

Danny Peck: 20:34

So, um, it kind of partly was like a mvc framework that I was familiar with and I knew I could get in there quickly and start building. But then it kind of morphed into this like sort of nice, like very like sort of ruby light, like it's there and it has all the likes, the the bells and whistles that I can tap into if I want, but it's very optional and it stays very light. I can stay on the front end and do a lot of stuff with like the firebase, uh software development kits and do a lot of stuff with the Firebase software development kits and a whole lot of things just in the React app. But then I can hand things off and hit API endpoints on the back end and lean on the nice Rails gems that you get for things like payment processing and email notifications and also working with Firebase, but on the backend as well.

John Ostler: 21:28

Yeah, that's interesting. You don't often hear kind of like you often have like a self-hosted database when you do set up a custom backend for that, and I think it's interesting that you offloaded that to kind of a cloud database. It's just not a common thing but it completely makes sense why you're doing that. You're just offloading a lot of your backend logic and just integrations that you're set up like with Stripe and you just use Ruby to do that.

Danny Peck: 21:58

You felt comfortable with the organization um, yeah, and one huge uh unlock with that is that you know, john in ios can be sort of tapped into that same like cloud firebase, database storage and all that kind of stuff.

Danny Peck: 22:15

Uh, and firebase makes it really easy to just like kind of run in production mode where you can have multiple devices, just kind of all like locked into the same like data store, and it's just like super powerful. This is like one of my first like really like deep dives into firebase, so it's just been amazing for just like database stuff, like one click login with google and like signing in with like different like third-party oauth providers. Um, but yeah, I just uh, I I found that like I've done a lot of active record stuff with, like you know, local database and in rails, but um, yeah, you immediately become a walled garden unto yourself and just being able to iterate with john with the same database through different on different ecosystems was like such a great yeah, it meant that we we could both work in parallel and be adding properties and screwing each other up a little bit here and there, in a good way, I think.

Don Hansen: 23:09

I think particularly with with Firebase and frameworks like Firebase, one of the recurring issues and struggles on the native app side is just data persistence and how to manage offline and online, because obviously with mobile apps, there's an assumed you're not connected to the internet at times, or what do we do with these files on and off and when do they sync and all that. And, um, yeah, firebase, and you know there's others that do a great job of managing that, so that you're not in the weeds. Or you know there are other mobile frameworks you can integrate, but just in the weeds doing that. So it was kind of double. That it allowed us to both work in parallel and I'm not, you know, asking for asking for end points or being like, oh, this is giving me a weird return. It's like, no, I can see the rule, I can make an adjustment and then WhatsApp Danny and be like, hey, I'm going to mess up your world. Just get ready for this.

Danny Peck: 24:02

It's also pretty great Just trying to figure out really like complex sort of data handshaking stuff.

Danny Peck: 24:07

Like there was one part during the implementation where we're like okay, so you know, someone creates an album, they want to share it to someone else and, like you know, they need to put in their email address. But we need to handle a scenario where, like, does the person have an account already? We need to look that up and if they do, we need to put their ID in this table. If they don't, we need to like put their email address in a different like table so we can send them an email, send them an email and then so, like you know, negotiating all of that sort of like in the same with the same like back in the same database just made that so much easier because I could just point to the table and be like yep, see, see what I'm doing there, yeah, yeah, or even I can just I could just run the web app, watch the record, go in live, look at the, look at the properties and how the chain be like, oh, oh, okay, like it almost saves the discussion.

Don Hansen: 24:53

I mean, obviously you know we're confirming everything, but yeah, it made a big difference. So, yeah, I mean Don to your point, I mean most of the apps or most of the websites I've worked on, yeah, would have a localized. You know why send it out, you know why even involve you know a third party, why offload some of that? But I think in cases where I think it's becoming more rare really, but in cases where you've got a multi platform play, this is one of those cases where, if there's, you know, push notifications and offline management and some other things, you're like you're really saving time and they're not really spending much more, or you might be saving in some cases, but yeah, yeah I.

John Ostler: 25:36

Think that's a great idea. Especially, that's a good point about multi platform and, honestly, like a lot of Front-end developers that want to build their application, like you can build a lot of what you want to do With just firestore, real-time firebase, like, yeah, unless you need some complicated custom logic on the back end and you're running processes on the back end, that's a little bit heavier. I think a lot more people should consider something like that, to be honest. But you know what I'm curious about, though what was your biggest technical challenge? Because it sounds like you guys are pretty comfortable and confident with the technologies you pick, but were there any big hiccups on things? You didn't expect to happen Anything like that.

Danny Peck: 26:21

From a development standpoint.

Don Hansen: 26:22

I mean, I mean I, to give you an idea, I'm on the eighth version of the iOS app and it hasn't launched now. That obviously started with an all localized version using CloudKit and Swift data and all the just Apple Cloud crap, which is super complicated and convoluted and, for some reason, really hard. But I would say when we finally decided to start using Firebase, that all loosened up and then came the re-architecture. That was the reckoning. So I know on the native app side that was I don't know if that was a challenge. Well, I would say, anyone who's tried to do a CloudKit with CloudKit, share and some of that management where you're doing a collaboration on files, it's kind of a pain, to be honest, as well as just kind of doing some of that memory management with that. But I don't know, danny, I don't feel like we've really hit anything.

Don Hansen: 27:25

I mean Stripe. I'd say this Stripe's been a pain just from a. Stripe itself wasn't a pain. No one ever in the world has ever said Stripe is a pain. But the it flagging cards for fraud, meaning like someone's, like hey, this is a new startup. Like is this legit? Call your bank. We've come across that a number of times now we're like oh, this is like rough, it's just not a problem. You're thinking about Like, oh, we need to like manage what happens to an account when it's in limbo because of a fraud alert. Right, it like kind of goes through, but it doesn't go through. So that's been a little bit of a challenge just in terms of like navigating that and figuring out how to handle the errors and make for a good user experience, when you're basically adding the most friction you possibly could to onboarding, which is like literally stopping people from paying I feel like things have gone pretty smoothly.

Danny Peck: 28:23

I feel like the yeah, the biggest trip ups for me are dealing with like third-party integrations. So like stripe is a pain in the butt, like if you've ever dealt with transactional emails, that is also can be a huge pain in the butt, like if you don't properly set up your dns to handle like spf and like, uh, dmarc, dkim and like all that stuff you can get like literally blacklisted by gmail and they'll say like you can't send a gmail ever again, like you're out there and setting which is no big deal emails like iron that stuff out, don't sleep on.

Danny Peck: 29:01

Like setting up the spf and the dcam and the dmark stuff that is so important and so it's a huge pain in the butt the question is did you guys get blacklisted? Not on this particular project. No.

John Ostler: 29:17

I've screwed that up before, even just setting up a mailing list and setting up some custom domain email for that. It's a pain to set up.

Danny Peck: 29:28

It should be, it really is.

John Ostler: 29:30

Yeah, so what is your monetization strategy like? How are you going to make money? How are you going?

Don Hansen: 29:40

to grow this. Well, everyone knows that we're not going to make money, including us, so let's get that out of the way. No, we've got, we've got. I think we've got a really good uh setup right now. We've, we, we basically have a three tier model and so on, the low tier, that what we're calling the bronze tier, it's a, it's a digital only subscription. It's an annual payment, it's it's 49, 99 us, which basically unlocks the crack and you can basically do everything you'd want to do. As many albums you can share the albums, you can basically do everything you'd want to do, as many albums, you can share the albums you can like, do all the things that you might want to do as well, as it takes limits off, like tracks and lengths of tracks and things like that. And then and then and then we pivot into.

Don Hansen: 30:24

The other two tiers are much more keepsake oriented. So the silver, silver record we're calling silver record is basically a usb gift set. So you get two usbs that are engraved and effectively, you pick the tracks that are going to go into them and then you can gift that. The idea is you can gift that sort of audio book, that audio keepsake, uh, to someone in something physical and then, and then at the high end, and if you're really cool, um, you can get the golden record, which is an actual vinyl cut, uh, lp, 45 minutes of audio, uh, with a custom, custom labels, custom jacket, um, yeah, lathe cut for you, um, and that's a. That's at, uh, the 124.99 price point, right, kind of up there, and that gets you.

Don Hansen: 31:08

So we've, we've got kind of three, three modes of kind of engaging. There's this gets you. So we've, we've got kind of three, three modes of kind of engaging. There's this kind of light mode which is digital only. That just keeps you going, allows you to, like, do that gift email and get that going, um, or you can, you can, get right into the actual keepsakes themselves.

Don Hansen: 31:24

So we're, we're kind of, um, we're market validation, testing that right now. Like, what are people willing to? Is that appropriate for a gift or for a user who is going to use this app or these products more passively? And we'll see where it goes. We know that that's positioned really nicely in the other type of personalized keepsake market. You know you've got a lot of custom books and newsletters and things that are coming out where they're custom done for families, so, um, so we've done, we, we've got a good price comparison there. It's just really a matter of, I think, uh, you know, basically doing two things Number one, solving the problem of what to get your parents or grandparents, which is hard, but the second one, solving the problem of, is this, uh, a way that you know know, someone finds compelling to capture and preserve memories, like we need to kind of do both jobs a little bit okay, um, do you guys have any customers yet?

Don Hansen: 32:26

we have, we're in. We're sort of still in friends and family mode right now, so we've got. We do have customers, but they're, they don't count basically gotcha.

John Ostler: 32:36

Do they pay for the product?

Don Hansen: 32:38

they do a couple. A couple of them are paying, but I don't know if those those are. You know they feel obligated to pay or not. We'll see. I definitely personally write that off. Or it's like yeah, the first, like hundred people, like don't count, like those are, like those are the invisibles, the supporters, the emotional support group might get in there if they know you well enough, and then after that, then the people really don't care, come in and you're in trouble.

Danny Peck: 33:02

Basically, we're kind of at that pre-public stage. We're just like we're holding it, like we haven't really told anyone outside of our friend group about it yet, so we're just like kind of waiting to like burst the bubble and send it out there. We're just trying to figure out to the most effective way to like just get, send the messaging out, like you know, to to like a wider audience and stuff and like two-pronged as well. Like you know, we want to keep that user count low so that we can continue to like iron out any issues or quirks or things we didn't consider with, like you know, audio storage and like stuff like that before. Like we get like people flooding in and, like you know, realizing that we have some terrible bug in our code. That's like you know. Obviously we probably don't, but you know, you never know.

Don Hansen: 33:47

So I mean, what we do know about our product and this is just from, like, comparative companies doing this sort of thing is that it is very periodic, it's occasion based, right. So there, I mean, there are a few ways of getting in front of people for other sort of life events, but ultimately this is like maybe a birthday gift, but very hard to get in front of birthday gift people. A Christmas gift, for sure. Mother's Day, father's Day, grandparents related days Like those.

Don Hansen: 34:19

These are like the major holidays, that where our product makes sense because of those two pieces again, but of even if you took all the meaning behind what we're trying to do and all the like responsibility of holding family memories and oral history, if you took all that out, people still have the problem of not knowing what to get parents or grandparents, and ideally it gets something that's like meaningful and cool, right.

Don Hansen: 34:46

So when it comes to pure problem, solving that problem ends up being the most important for a little while, and then after the holidays, then it goes back to being the well, you should kind of do this.

Don Hansen: 34:56

And here's why there's like a lot of compelling arguments, like if you're about to have a baby, you should probably do this, or like if your grandparents are in hospice you should do this, or there are all these other use cases that start to come up just in regular life. But yeah, so we're basically in gear up mode to hit that holiday buying season. Right now We've got the iOS app, which is about to be submitted here, and we've probably retooled all the language in the website and everything 100 times after talking to friends and family, and we've got a few like very tiny ad campaigns out just to try out different messaging and imagery and see how that ladders back to the website. So we've got all that kind of going in the like science experiment mode. But then, like Danny said, we're going to we're going to really open it up in November to, you know, try to make a significant dent in the market.

John Ostler: 35:51

Okay. So you, I like the, I like the audience that you're targeting and you're thinking about moments in which they would like what your product has to offer. You're thinking about it that it might be seasonal, so you're thinking about timing, um, and you, you have good reasons why someone would use your product. I'm really curious how you are going to get that in front of people and basically deliver that vision, deliver that solution to people. Um, you know, whether it's through, like paid advertisement, whether it's through content creation, like anything like that, how like it feels like you have your messaging down. How are you getting or planning to get that messaging out?

Don Hansen: 36:42

I think you said November, yeah, I mean, I think I think there's a. There's a, you know, a combination of things that Danny and I have done in previous entrepreneurial things or projects where we've gotten visibility. So like, for instance, one is we have a number of media contacts, some of them that are relevant to this. Like Fatherly is one of them. I've had previous apps, things written up in there. It has a huge, huge family-based audience. You could make a compelling argument for, you know, for multiple reasons, why this might be a good family gift to get, and obviously that's orientation. So there's, there are groups like this that have wider audiences that we would you know, I think you know try to court for this this quarter to get on some of those lists. So that's that's one tactical thing. I think. The other one is there is a lot of orientation toward people who have effectively been diagnosed with Alzheimer's but are early in the stage. This is something that our families dealt with and it puts an additional time crunch on everyone being like, okay, let's get our acts together, what do we need to do? And obviously storytelling and some of that memory keeping ends up being a pretty major part. So there are. It's just to say that there are a lot of like subgroups of people that we could target that maybe have a more urgent need to do something like this, rather than going full wide market look and saying like, hey, anyone could gift this to anyone for the holiday, just because you don't want to compete with that group, we don't have the millions to put into a proper B2C startup. So those are like a couple examples of areas.

Don Hansen: 38:33

I think what's unique about golden record is we have we have a few inner nerd plays in there for one, the whole Carl Sagan golden record thing. If you told anyone who's into astronomy about golden record, they'll know. They'll immediately know what you're talking about. And there is kind of a little kind of inside connector there in terms of again sub-targeting that audience, right. And then the same goes for, like audiophiles, the fact that we've got a vinyl offering and that's something pretty cool and unique.

Don Hansen: 39:02

We've got an ability again to target audiophiles and people who are into music production and are kind of into that nostalgic thing to kind, of, like I said, production and are kind of into that nostalgic thing to kind of, like I said, use the product itself as a lever to get them interested in what we're trying to do. So I think it's been my experience with, like the other startups I've created and little niche apps I've done. It is really helpful. If you can just think about getting the seed to sprout, you know what I mean. You're not trying to like create a whole plant or like plant a field. You're just literally putting the right amount of money and investment in this like micro market so that they can help tumbleweed. You know the referrals you might get from it or the use cases, or to build on to the next, slightly larger market.

John Ostler: 39:51

Just to ask a question about what you're saying. So you really have your audience down and I understand that you're trying to niche down. You're saying you're going to target these specific people. I'm kind of curious how are you going to target them? Because you talked about the Alzheimer's group and you talked about other people that can relate to what golden record means. How are you going to find them and talk to them?

Don Hansen: 40:16

Yeah, I mean, I think. I think I mean the easy, the easy way to do it or the. I guess maybe the lazy way to do it is is to do targeted advertising, because people who follow these things are very easy to profile they're. They live in this like post cookies world where the pages they like help identify who they are Right Um, including like are right, including the different associations and things around some of these subjects. So that's the kind of easy way.

Don Hansen: 40:39

But also, I think for us we're looking really closely at who are the influencers in these spaces. Are there opportunities to target these micro-influencers and see if there's an opportunity to either have a chat or sponsor a show and be kind of part of the larger micro-ecosystem, so to speak? So I think tactically those are a couple ways It'll be interesting to see. I mean, there is a chance that, because of the nature of this being very family-oriented, that it does have a large network effect. But we don't have any social proof of that yet.

Don Hansen: 41:17

We're not exactly sure what it's going to look like once somebody's done this right and they see like, oh, maybe I should do this, for you know, your partner wants to now do this, and things like that. So there might be this like 10-year plan of referral network kind of the way story worth and some of these other companies have done where they've just like literally just grown organically year over year. And sure enough, here here we are talking about them. So so we'll see, I think. I think we're pretty open to both approaches, while also knowing that we really do need to niche down. I mean, there's no question about that.

Danny Peck: 41:49

Yeah, and I think we need to build authentic connections rather than just running like generic advertising campaigns because, like, I think the key for us is just understanding that, you know, this isn't just a tech product, like it's a tool for preserving, like emotional legacy. So, like the marketing needs to reflect that like sort of depth and sensitivity, while making the urgency, like you know, clear, making the urgency clear, that like sort of depth and sensitivity, while making the urgency, like you know clear, making the urgency clear that, like these are, these are voices and stories that, like, we can't afford to lose. So, like by focusing on specific communities and moments, uh, like where, when memory preservation like becomes like particularly meaningful, like, yeah, I think we can build authentic connections rather than just running like generic advertising campaigns.

John Ostler: 42:37

For sure, okay, yeah, I like without kind of a large audience built up in any of these specific communities, like you know that paid ads, targeted ads, are really effective and even just kind of getting your name out there a little bit, um, but you, you know what you mentioned, danny. Um, you know, really having an authentic message is something that you guys care about, and that's the tricky thing. It's like. I think urgency is like a real concern for your audience, right and um, it's also something that you probably want to sell in your marketing material, and then you kind of have a fine balance of like what is a little bit too pushy, what is kind of predatory, but like it also is important. Urgency is important in this business.

Don Hansen: 43:21

so that's, yeah, I find that interesting well, and I think I think too, our, our general. You know we don't have a formal brand voice established yet, necessarily anything like that, but I think, um, you know we don't have a formal brand voice established yet necessarily, or anything like that. But I think you know there's something we said of we don't want this to be a, we don't want this to be predatory in any way or like or to be shining a light on the fact that our time together is limited. We don't want to take the dark route. We want it to be the kind of positive thing that you'd add and you'd do and you'd feel good about, and then, yeah, you'll maybe be relieved or rewarded later in life when you're like I'm so glad we did that, but that's not the focus.

Don Hansen: 44:04

So, for instance, one of the messaging slash campaigns we're working on right now is, you know, kind of showcasing the birth of a child and a grandma rocking that child, and in the messaging is basically like she'll, she'll, she'll always know grandma's favorite lullaby and basically capture her voice. So so it's. It's kind of playing off the event in timeliness. It's like if you have a newborn, the sounds of that newborn, the sounds of life at that time. It's a tiny window. Everyone knows that it's a life event. You've also got this moment when a grandparent is connecting with a grandchild for the first time and how special that brings everyone together and you're kind of shedding a light on all, on how special family is all at once. It's like grandma newborn, grandma's favorite lullaby family.

Don Hansen: 45:00

This is all very cool, like this should be captured and I think I think that's the kind of thing we want to promote it's. It's almost like we want to raise the stakes of that and how important these moments are, rather than being like oh, time is almost up, you better get going. You know what I mean. It's like oh no. Like, if anything, you don't want this gift. Your parents get this gift, or grandparents are like, oh no, they think I'm gonna, I think I'm going tomorrow. My stories are almost gone. So I think I think you know, like, like danny said, we do have a sensitivity to that, but I think our brand voice is always going to be the light. It's not going to be the dark, it's going to be like the joy of life, the joy of stories. You know it's a celebration of life. It's not a, you know, a cataloging of life.

Danny Peck: 45:42

Yeah, the message isn't about scarcity or fear. It's about, like, abundance and appreciation. Basically, we're not selling insurance against loss, we're offering a way to amplify the joy and connection across generations. So, like, it's the difference between saying like you know, don't let these memories slip away, and like let's make sure this beautiful moment lives forever, you know.

John Ostler: 46:02

Yeah, yeah, I think both of you are really good with that messaging and it sounds like you guys are pretty much on the same page with that. So, um and I've even checked out your landing page, um, as well, and I I like it. I I think your messaging is really good and it'd be interesting to see, like, how that translates into your marketing campaign and your ads and stuff like that, and even just watching people shorten it, summarizing it, because you always want to expand, like, but they don't know enough and you got to just figure out, you know, the few words that are really going to make it count. Um, so, um, what I think. I'm just going to ask this Do you guys have any doubts about this project succeeding?

Don Hansen: 46:40

Definitely 100%. I think, yeah, I think I, I don't know. I'm sure, dan, you have a different perspective because we've built a lot of things, but I think you have to doubt it because it's sort of a new thing. I know it's, I know it's an, there's an analog and that's, that's at least a, an olive branch, you know, to being like, oh, maybe this is okay, but the idea of people talking into their phones is maybe it'll get normalized more as we go forward with AI and things like that is maybe it'll get normalized more as we go forward with AI and things like that.

Don Hansen: 47:16

But I think the idea of people sharing into a mic, I think you know, I think Gen Z is pretty happy to do that and share the odd random voicemail against each other on WhatsApp or something. But I think for you know, a boomer to use their mic to record stories, I think it's still TBD whether they're comfortable doing that. I think it's more comfortable than other means, but that doesn't mean that they will be. So I think that is interesting, which may cause us to pivot this to a younger demographic, which I think again plays into different life events. But I think that's one of the biggest risks, I think the second one is just the fact that it is so broad.

Don Hansen: 47:58

Anytime you're entering a market that could be like anyone, you know, red alert. You know there's a reason why the B2B developer market is so red hot because you actually know your little audience. You know how to solve it and you're gonna. Then they're willing to spend x amount for it and so you've got you know. For I think for most investors in particular, like okay, like you've nailed down a number of things, including an exit strategy, whereas what we're doing is the classic thing you shouldn't do, which is go b to c, uh, go up against companies that have enormous budgets and still try to win over a lot of hearts in the process. So I think the odds are totally against us. But I think on the plus side is everyone we tell about this thing. They're pretty on board and or they're saying like, oh, I'm going to do this.

Danny Peck: 48:52

So there's this kind of push and tug of like confidence building and worry as we sort of enter the market yeah, but I do think we have like certain valuable truths that we we're realizing is that, like you know, everyone has lost a loved one. Like wishes they had more recordings of their voice. Like I'm guilty of, like you know, listening to like voicemails of like loved ones I've lost. It's like why is this the only audio I have of them? Like this is a problem.

Danny Peck: 49:20

You know, the technology barriers are getting lower every day, like voice interfaces are becoming like increasingly normalized and like younger generations to john's point, like are already comfortable with voice as a medium. So like I think the question isn't like whether preserving voice and stories is valuable, like we know, we know it's. I think the question is whether we can make the process like natural and accessible enough that people actually do it, and so like that's a design and user experience challenge, like not a value proposition challenge, at least. So like sometimes I think the most worthwhile projects are the ones that make you nervous because they're asking people to care about something they might not have thought about before, but we'll be grateful for later. So it's a new thing.

John Ostler: 50:07

Okay, so it's not about the value proposition, it's more about making this as easy as possible and, you know, also considering that you're competing with other companies with a larger budget. I really like you guys kind of just keep mentioning it in just different formats, but like you're, I mean you kind of just spelled it out, John, like trying to win the hearts.

John Ostler: 50:30

And that's what a lot of large companies don't do, as well as a lot of smaller companies that, like, truly still are passionate about their product and they're on the ground floor talking to customers, and you know, they're not replacing their customer service with AI, like, they are actually talking to their customers. They they're not trying to create a bunch of automated systems to profit. They truly care about this product and I think that's the strength of smaller founders, that's the strength of passionate founders over a lot of larger companies, and you almost have to triple down on that, um, because that's what's going to be shared with family as well, um, I, so I again, like I'm going to keep tabs on this project. I want to see how it does over the years, for sure, but you know, if everything goes well, what are your long term plans, if you have any, for this app?

Don Hansen: 51:22

Well, you know, it's interesting because there there was recently, well, ok, so there's there's been a lot of recent articles in like Fast Company and places maybe it's like HBR or something regarding this kind of this new market or a new sector or startup space in immortalization. Right, it's all about mortalizing how do we immortalize people, and that can go a lot of different ways. Obviously there's, you know, the biosciences that are doing their shtick and Facebook has its own way of doing it, and obviously there's companies like Legacycom and Ancestry that are doing what they can. So I think, you know, we sort of naturally fit into that, I think long term, that immortalization piece, because I think once someone does that, does this with our platform I mean, it isn't the case that we keep them from their files and things, but our hope is to always have the sort of best tooling for revisiting those memories or searching through them and that kind of thing, right. So I think we're seeing kind of this natural movement into okay, does does this take on any other form factors? You know that could start with, like, on the keepsake side, things would evolve.

Don Hansen: 52:43

Um, in terms of that continuing to evolve, like we've talked about, how you know, currently, when you you go to a cemetery or gravesite, the headstones don't really mean anything. There isn't any takeaways from that, but perhaps this is an opportunity for a family who wanted to be able to utilize some of the audio clips and have it in some way available to someone who's on their mobile device. There's obviously a lot of work being done in synthesizing and restoring a person just from that sort of fine-tuned model of that person that we could visit, if the market kind of goes that way. So I think there's a lot of value in still maintaining audio as the foundation for this. I'm still a big believer that audio is the ultimate form of soul capturing and that's never going to go away. But I think there's a lot of ways that then you can do things with that audio to create experiences or create other mediums for kind of revisiting those memories.

John Ostler: 53:54

Well, you know, there are even AI tools and maybe this is what you're alluding to that will capture enough audio and enough context and about that person, where you're basically talking to an AI that reflects that person that you know, yeah, and I think what's interesting because for a lot of the early investor meetings we had, this came up it's like the current LLM technology would allow you to do something more with this miniature trained thing.

Don Hansen: 54:22

Right, you've got a certain amount of transcript, you've got the mannerisms, you've definitely got something you could use today, and I think where we kind of ended up is that we have to be, as a brand, pretty careful about what role AI plays in who we are as humans, Because I think at least this is totally my personal opinion right now is that there is going to be this anti-tech AI movement, big one, and so any company that uses AI beyond the tooling for generative purposes might lose their connection and authenticity, and so I think we just have to tread very carefully into this space of like, yeah, you could immortalize someone and have a chat and ask your dad for advice again 50 years after he passed, but I don't know if that's a good idea actually like, maybe not, maybe don't do that, uh I mean so I don't know so, but I think I think the market you know that's where I see, you know there is.

Don Hansen: 55:22

that's where this uh, where the opportunities are really fruitful, and that what ai does do outside of the generative side is allow us to interpret and do more with the content or produce other things with the content that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. I mean, I feel like there's a lot of new audio capabilities now where you can get audio into data forms much easier, so that's going to be, in the near term, really exciting to see what we can do with that.

Danny Peck: 55:54

Yeah, and audio to text as well. Like once someone has built this archive of like stories, you know we can take the transcripts and we can do all sorts of things. Like you know, sentiment analysis or like grouping sort of similar stories together and, like you know, show me all the stories where my dad mentioned, like you know, working on a certain car and like it just kind of brings all those pieces together. Like you know, that's where we can use AI and kind of a thoughtful way to just like make sense of large amounts of like tech or data and like organize and like make it easier for people to find the clips they're looking for.

John Ostler: 56:29

I think that's yeah, I think that's really insightful because your questions themselves might expand. Right, you don't really know the questions that everyone wants to answer and you're probably going to look for patterns of like. Maybe they choose 10 out of like 300 questions that you provide. Maybe you just randomize them and then you can provide kind of a system for feedback or like what you know older folks choose to record of themselves that they think the younger generation wants to know, or what questions does the younger generation like choose for their grandparents to record a lot of that and be able to just provide like kind of a more. Just get them, get the questions in front of them a lot faster and make it more appealing for them to actually use your application and follow through with it.

Don Hansen: 57:20

Like you're right, ai can do a lot of that well, and we've got a bit of that already, because in in our, our early version of of the app um, of the web app app um, you know you just you created your questions, or we had like a set of 20 questions that are common for creating, uh, you know, some kind of memoir. Uh, and those are pretty good. I mean, they're pretty in there, but you know there would be, you know, the certain questions that you probably wouldn't want to ask because they might be triggering. Or maybe you know someone in the family you know had a different relational situation that evolved over time or who knows right. So they don't always work. They might work a lot of the time, and so one of the first things we tooled from an AI perspective is the question generation itself. So when you're, when you're creating a golden record, you provide just a few details about the person. You know their name, some of their interests, their hobbies, maybe some things that you wanted to know about them specifically, because you had something in mind for this. You just give it a few inputs and then it generates questions that are completely relevant to that person. In addition to giving it a bit of that, you know we're creating biography style question making. So it kind of peppers in the like, specific, like, for instance, for my dad's, like I was like you know, he loves to play French horn, he paints clowns, he's into yoga, he's healthy, like you can add these kind of arbitrary things in there and then it'll ask you know, one of the questions it'll create to you know, get you started, you can modify them or add is like what what you know? Get you started, you can modify them or add it's like what, what you know, why did you get you know? What made you get into French horn playing? And it allows him to kind of expand on that and sometimes it's not totally on the nose like that. It's using that to kind of infer you know how they got into music or what their favorite classical artists were and things like that. But that's again a great example where AI tooling is enhancing the human side of what Golden Record does.

Don Hansen: 59:17

And to kind of take it further, one of the things that so my wife and I we've been together 10 years and next month will be, are like 10 years of knowing each other right. So we've got like three kids and we've lived our lives right. We've done all these kind of adventures in life. But one of the unique things about us is that at the one-month anniversary of being together, we recorded an audio journal and we kind of did it as a joke, meaning we were like, you know, let's see how long this lasts, kind of thing. And once we did it, we kept up with that and we've kept up with it for our entire relationship. So we've got our early beginnings, our getting engaged, married first, kids, you know, like we have.

Don Hansen: 1:00:06

You know, I think you know we've built up this enormous inventory of audio. Each one is like 20 to 30 minutes and we've got, you know, 120 of these. And so for our kids, they'll be able to pinpoint how we mess them up, which is great, and they can just give that whole audio file to the therapist and it's like who's going to sit there and listen to us yabber on about you know that month's goings? And so instead, like Danny was saying, as a use case, if Charlie, our middle, he can like be like, you know, bring up all the audio times when you hear me in the background, you know. Or bring up all the times we were talking about going to Disney World, or you know what I mean, and just quickly get to that. It's like I just want to hear that. Or how many times did my parents, you know? Every time my parents swore I want to see what the fuck's going on, you know.

Don Hansen: 1:01:03

So I think I think there's something really kind of fun and unique which, again that you know, I it may not, it might not be AI exactly in terms of from a technical perspective, but it certainly does empower that type of curation, the same way that our photo albums and some of our video now is getting curated for us in these kind of prefab memory lockets. So for me, like you know talking, you know. Going back to your earlier question, don, about where I see this going, I know that there's a tooling that's going to have to happen at least for our family to solve our problem, which is like, hey, like we've got a lot of audio now. It's not just a few stories, it's not just 20 questions, it's actual, it's real life, it sounds real life, like I want to hear every time Anna was playing piano and the kids were playing Lego. I just want to be there, give me that, and then I can go, and then when I, you know, get senile, I can at least like, just sit back and enjoy.

John Ostler: 1:02:02

You know hundreds of hours of that on repeat, so I think you have new marketing messaging with that story that you just shared too. Like you painted a different picture than I had envisioned this app to be as well. Now, should it pivot to that? I have no idea. You guys might not know, but you know that that it's essentially why your app has value, and it shows the power of audio and capturing all of those moments with your family and the way, and like just painting that picture of how you can use that audio, I just kind of want to live there, I want to be there, you know, and I want to feel their presence again. Right, so, like I also think you know, do you really want to heavily plan all this? No, but having this long-term vision can kind of just help steer you through some of the rough times as you figure out this application. So that's pretty cool, okay. So last question what advice would you give to developers who are considering turning their side projects into a business?

Don Hansen: 1:03:07

Oh man, I if I'll just go first because I can be the most wrong, but I like the I don't think you need to make I think most developers I know, including myself, I don't think you need to make a total leap of faith to do a startup.

Don Hansen: 1:03:27

To do a startup Like I think we overestimate the effort we'll need to put in to do it and we're like, oh, I gotta, like I gotta take a sabbatical to do this.

Don Hansen: 1:03:36

Like, no, you don't, you know, I would say that's the developer superpower, which is, you know, this Parkinson's law in that we fill the time we give ourselves. Like, if we say, like I did this with one of the agencies I started about four years ago, I was like I decided that Monday through Thursday I was going to work on it from 9pm to 3am and that's how I was going to do it and it wasn't going to play up in my normal role or affect anything. And, sure enough, that was like those are the most productive hours I think I've ever had in my entire career. Like that was like hardcore. So I think my advice to anyone, you know, any developer, is like, hey, I'm going to do a product, I would I would not overreact and try to just slam this out in the weird hours that you enjoy working on it, the same way you do a hobby or something else. Just like treat it as such, like continue to enjoy it so that you keep doing it.

John Ostler: 1:04:32

Um, yeah, that that would oh, all right, uh, you still there, john. Okay, I think he wrapped up his uh uh thing. Yeah, I could jump in.

Danny Peck: 1:04:50

I would say like oh there, you back, okay, yeah did you have anything else to add?

Don Hansen: 1:04:54

all right. No, I was just going to add that I think I think you know thinking about it a long time is, if you're just creating a tool to solve a problem that isn't your own, I would say it might not be a good use of time. I think it's much easier to build something and realize it's hard to market it and stop, and marketing is kind of a problem. It's the real problem. So at least do something you really enjoy, or you, or or do something you know a lot about where you're like well, I'm going to just solve this problem because I don't have to go very far to find that I'm going to solve it.

Danny Peck: 1:05:27

That's great, yeah I would agree that like, first and foremost most important banner headline like build something you care deeply about. So, like when you're solving a problem that generally like genuinely matters to you, like you'll have that sort of emotional fuel to just like push through the inevitable challenges for sure. So, like I think the transition from side project to like a business requires that shifting from, like you know, what's technically interesting to like what actually creates lasting value for users. So it's about building something that only works not only works but um matters deeply to the people who use it.

Danny Peck: 1:06:06

And you as the creator, as a bonus, yeah, and I would say, like you know, I would very heavily uh encourage you to like not quit your day job until you've like pushed out an mvp, uh and like solved the sort of question. The basic question is starting with why and like focusing on user value and like thinking about sustainability and building for growth before you like quit your nine to five. That was actually like giving you a paycheck before diving in, I think. I think you can kind of do both until it's like I have something here. I'm gonna you know it's proven itself a little bit, I'm gonna like lean into it, but yeah, yeah, don't, don't, don't jump too quick.

John Ostler: 1:06:52

Yeah, I think that's really good cautious advice and I can even give it from my end. I think I dove into content creation too soon. I think it was a really rough journey for me and like I have a ton of failures and a ton of some months. I went to debt and I had to try to make it up and like it was a really hard journey. Did I grow a lot from it? Yes, but like I think that also carries over into a lot of side projects, a lot of entrepreneurship ventures. They fail right, and you can find time, like there are parents with children that find time to be able to just, you know, spend a little bit on their side project or hobby, whatever they're passionate with. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is possible, and I you have to make that time and that's probably the way to do it too. Um, yeah, yeah.

John Ostler: 1:07:40

Quit a job without like sustainable revenue and especially for many, many months, to show kind of a proof that, like you know, your app has a place in this, not just like a quick revenue boost when you push it out and advertise it, but like sustainable revenue that's going to be coming in, especially when you have other responsibilities. I think a lot of people jump in a little bit too quickly and I, you guys, are right to caution. You should do it on the side, do it.

Danny Peck: 1:08:07

Yeah, I would say, cultivate the practice of like waking early, like it's amazing, like what you can accomplish, like before work. I I still have a nine to five myself, but like I wake up at 5 am every day and I work from like 5 am to like 8 30 am, but because I'm doing something that I truly love doing, that like energizes me, that like it's the reason I woke up, because I'm excited to work on this thing, like it doesn't feel like work, it actually just feels like play. So, you know, find that side hustle that you're really passionate about where you're solving a problem and, if you can, if it feels like you're not working but playing, like you you found the right, the right, right idea and just just keep pushing it.

Don Hansen: 1:08:47

Well and Well, and here's where the advice I think when you go purely in entrepreneurial land, the advice is often especially at the investment side is you got to go all in? What's the deal? You know what I mean. And I think this is where it's a little conflicting. It's like the side hustle doesn't sound very official, especially to the investment community. It's like I'm not sure you guys kind of need to go at this like 60 miles per hour, 60 hours a week.

Don Hansen: 1:09:16

So I think that the real way to do it is, like we said if you can get this launched in those bonus hours, whatever ones you can steal away, because, like Danny said, you're enjoying it, or, donald, you're saying you're getting a lot from it, great, when it comes time to investor time, then you can talk about how you'd like to do this full time and I think from a pre-seed investment standpoint, they'd be happy to pay for your salary to continue the momentum and that can be the transition period.

Don Hansen: 1:10:04

So if you're kind of running down that line of like I got to get money for this which I think not all developers are juxtaposition that way, but some of them are then it's still okay to have that and agree that like, yeah, I would love to spend all day every day, because, yeah, this demands it, but you can, like Danny said, you can get to that point, or you should be able to get to that point without doing that, and that's kind of the trick. That point, or you should be able to get to that point without doing that, and that's kind of the trick. Or at the very least, like I said, proved that what you have is something that people pay for, that has value intrinsic value, long term value.

John Ostler: 1:10:20

Yeah, I, and I think that's fair and that is a little bit different if you are going the investor investor route. I think that's definitely fair, that, and admittedly I am not incredibly familiar with that route either. So I appreciate you bringing that perspective.

Don Hansen: 1:10:38

Let me just add one thing From my other consultancy. There's a lot of consultancies who are trying to do products and incubate products. I've never actually seen a single one succeed because there's a juxtaposition between the ability to bill or get a project now and make that 10 months of runway or see if this product will little by little make it, and the one always beats out the other. It's like let's get the money now, like let's feed the beast, feed the monster, feed the beast, feed the monster. So I would say that is the only case where I've seen now a couple of consultancies who have completely broken off their product, that they've ideated that some developers built in their free time and made it an official, totally separate entity and that which is super high risk on everyone but is using the funds from the company. I've seen that be successful. So that's kind of an exception to the rule.

Don Hansen: 1:11:33

I think if you're doing this you know kind of half-sies program, but I've never seen it actually work where people take their little bits of free time and try to stack them together and do a product in a company like an intrapreneur. I've never actually seen that work ever. So that's one of those weird things where. Why doesn't it work?

Don Hansen: 1:11:52

And I don't know if it has to do more with like it's not a passion project or something else like that, but it very much is about finding, like Danny said, like those early morning hours are rock and productive For me that that nine to 3am, like I just I hit my stride at 1am and like was good to go, like just totally focused, the new cycles over no one'sm. And like was good to go, like just totally focused, the new cycle's over no one's slacking me, like let's go. So that's what I just do to color that, just because I think it really is insanely difficult to bring a side project to positive revenue, like insane. And so, and that's the challenge Like I think the development community has, and that we know we can solve a lot of problems well, you can almost solve too many problems, but then knowing where to put that time and how to market it ends up being, you know, the achilles heel, the whole process, right.

John Ostler: 1:12:44

So do you think that gets easier if you linked in your how long it's going to take you to build it and try to be successful with it? Like versus like, trying to push it out in six months versus two to three years?

Don Hansen: 1:12:57

I. I think it actually gets worse with time. I think I think if you can put it out in under in under eight weeks, you'll be fine. If it takes any longer, you'll totally get bored of it because it won't, it won't be, it won't be at least this is my experience now. But I just I don't feel.

Don Hansen: 1:13:14

I think speed is energy. You have to have speed and I think good developers know that when you're going fast and you're not feeling much friction, you're awesome and you love what you're doing and it doesn't even matter the problems you're solving if you can go fast and I think the same is true for your side product and it doesn't even matter the problems you're solving if you can go fast and I think the same is true for your side product. If you know you can move fast and you're not like building with frameworks and you just know what you're building, you feel good and you like want to get up in the morning the minute you start stretching out and you're like well, in eight months I want to be here and you know we're going to start developing the marketing strategy there. It's like oh man, like the momentum's gone, like you've lost it, you lost the love.

John Ostler: 1:13:53

It's interesting to hear that perspective. Um, cause I I think that is very true for me. Unless I keep momentum and there are some days where I have to force myself to keep that momentum but I know that that dip I have in motivation it comes back and I trust that it's going to come back as long as I keep momentum. When I lose that momentum, that's when it gets really hard.

Don Hansen: 1:14:14

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if you, and if you and this is where it kind of gets back to if you don't care as much about the problem you're solving, or start to not care as much for a little while, even that's where it becomes a real issue, cause all it takes is two or three weeks of not doing something or not seeing them and be like I don't know if I'm doing it. I think I want to try doing something else. I just saw some cool library I want to try out, or like, ooh, what if we made this thing? Danny and I are the worst for it. I mean, we have bad shiny thing syndrome. We've actually introduced on Fridays I don't know if we get into this, but on Fridays we've started to do a 40-minute hackathon where basically we have ChatGPT, decide the theme, and we both force ourselves to build something in 40 minutes and show and tell it. I think it just gets it out of your system because you're like, oh man, I've been trying to do this weird thing with circles and playing notes.

Danny Peck: 1:15:11

It has no business whatsoever worse for tangents like we, we, we spun off and did like a mini golf ios game. We spun off and did like a like a little airline pilot like ios game. It just is like an aside, it's like, okay, yeah, we should get back to like yeah, you almost need that.

Don Hansen: 1:15:28

You almost need that, but you do need it.

John Ostler: 1:15:30

Yeah, yeah, I think that's pretty common among developers. No, I appreciate. I'm sure it's very relatable to people listening. I'm sure it is um, but you know that that's what it's. It's also about kind of knowing yourself and your personality, like what long-term things have you accomplished, like, and what did you have to do to actually get to that finish line too? It really is about knowing yourself and hacking yourself a bit.

John Ostler: 1:15:54

So I appreciate the different perspectives. Well, I feel like I asked all the questions I wanted to. I really appreciate you guys sharing kind of your journey with this. I'm definitely going to be keeping up to date with it. I'm going to include the link to golden records in the description, but I'll kind of just wrap it up, uh, with having you guys just share your socials, that people want to reach out to you and anything else you want to shout out if it's part of the app or whatever. Uh, we'll start with you, danny.

Danny Peck: 1:16:20

Oh geez, Uh. Yeah, you can find me on uh, the X Twitter, um, at DEP, and uh, and I'm a music producer as well. I just put an album out, like last couple months ago.

Don Hansen: 1:16:36

No, it's very good.

Danny Peck: 1:16:38

Oh, if you go to Danny Peck dot com, that's my main site. It's literally just like my music portfolio. You can link off to it. But yeah, I got a couple other projects that I've been kind of working on the side AI Diary dot US is just a really simple little like microsite that allows you to like daily journal and it gives you ai insights on the things that you've been writing and that's kind of fun. And then another one, uh, little planetsus is uh just a platform to create like a little micro community with your friends and family. Click a button, then you get get like a little social network. So just two little like fun, like side projects. But yeah, that's what's going on with me.

Don Hansen: 1:17:20

Cool yeah for me. I'm like LinkedIn guy. I don't know I'm supposed to be on X, I think, because all the developers I know are on X, but I'm a LinkedIn person, so just so you can look up my name. I, but I'm a LinkedIn person, so just so you can look up my name. I'm not sure how you find people on LinkedIn. To be honest, I think you just put their names in, you know.

John Ostler: 1:17:36

I'll link your socials.

Don Hansen: 1:17:38

There we go, but I think, yeah, same as Danny, I've got, I've got. I mentioned I've got a few apps in the store that you can check out under my name under the app store. And then Unicorn Road and 8-Bit Studios are the two agencies that I founded and you can check out that if you want. I was looking to meet awesome developers. To be honest, I'm the type of person that likes to connect relationships and had the luxury of working with a lot of really cool companies, both startups and big ones, so I was looking to make new connections. So definitely, yeah, reach out like love to connect.

John Ostler: 1:18:20

Yeah, all right, love it, dan John. I really appreciate you guys coming on and anyone that's watching this episode is really for people that are just trying to launch side projects and turn them into something real. I know, like I did a poll a long time ago, I know a lot of you want to launch a side project, make a little money off of it, and there are different ways of doing it. But I think what helps is, at least for me, is hearing how other people, quite frankly, are failing and then overcoming that failure. Right, I like hearing about that and what they're doing to pivot and what they're doing to change their marketing strategy. And, you know, maybe they spent too much dev time which a lot of us do to build, you know, our products out sometimes. So, um, but I like hearing about these stories. Um, we'll probably do more episodes like this, but yeah, that's pretty much it. Uh, leave any comments you have in the comments below, but