DonTheDeveloper Podcast
DonTheDeveloper Podcast
Building a Startup as a Developer: Lessons from Little Planets Founders
Thinking about starting a side hustle or launching your own app? In this episode, I chat with the founders of Little Planets about their journey from idea to execution. We dive into their challenges, tech stack choices, marketing struggles, and valuable lessons learned along the way. Perfect for developers looking to turn their passion projects into reality!
James Ebentier (guest):
Twitter - https://x.com/jebentier
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jebentier
Website - https://jamesebentier.com
Danny Peck (guest):
Twitter - https://x.com/upwithdanny
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannypeck
Website - https://www.dannypeck.com
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If you're a developer trying to start a side hustle, like I know a lot of you out there are trying to do, this is the podcast episode to watch. So I brought on two founders of Little Planets and they're still kind of fleshing out the idea and trying to build it up and they're going to talk about their journey and you know the good, the bad of it and the mistakes they made and hopefully you know some of their wisdom can rub off on you and encourage you to start your own side hustle and you know maybe some things to avoid. But I really appreciate both of you coming on. James, danny, it's really nice to have you on. Let's go and do a quick intro so people kind of get a feel for who you are. We'll start with you, james.
Danny Peck:Sure.
James Ebentier:My name is James Ebentier, working with Danny for like three, four years now. A little about my background I got started in security when I was fresh out of college. I did security consulting and that has been my passion thread throughout my entire career. I moved into web dev shortly after that with Ruby on Rails, python, django and now venturing into entrepreneurship and starting my own thing.
Danny Peck:Fun. I love entrepreneurship. It's nice to 2001, when I got out of school for computer science and I've just been sort of a contributor ever since. Number of different roles in the industry as a professional developer, but then a number of just sort of side projects as well, yeah, and I kind of mix programming with my other passion, which is making music. So just kind of two ends of the creative spectrum, I think. So, yeah, I'm excited to be here.
Don Hansen:Awesome, all right. Thanks for sharing. Well, let's dive into it. So you know, this can come from either of you, both of you up to you. But what is Little Planets?
Danny Peck:Yeah, so you know it all clicked sort of like during a late night stream with a friend of mine and he's a Twitch streamer and they were just talking about their community and just sort of these like amazing people who like come together through gaming, share incredible moments and then just sort of drift apart. And you know that kind of hit me because I've experienced that as well. So you know, I think we can all relate where you've had, like you know, as from a gaming perspective, like you've had this sort of experience with people and there's just this incredible energy among the group and everyone's excited, wanting to stay connected. No-transcript, so no accounts, no apps to download, no commitment. You just a space that appears exactly when you need it and then, you know, disappears when you don't.
Danny Peck:So it's just this, basically an idea of these small, like self-contained worlds. Like each planet is that sort of spot for you to create. Your planet. You share like a link, and then everyone can just suddenly be right there, sharing, chatting, posting photos and being like in the moment. And then there's this sort of seven day. They're ephemeral by nature, so after seven days, kind of like a festival-like energy where everyone knows this is sort of seven day. They're ephemeral by nature, so after seven days, um kind of like a festival, like energy, where everyone knows this is sort of like a special fleeting thing um, after seven days, by default the planet self-destructs and everyone kind of goes on their way. Uh, there's options to make planets permanent if you'd like uh through like a, you know, either a one-time unlock to make uh like rename a planet, or like a one dollar a month to sort of create like a permanent planet if there's a space you want to keep around indefinitely. But yeah, that's, that's the general idea, cool I, you know what comes to mind.
Don Hansen:So so immediately I think about, like, what could go wrong whenever I think of an idea that seems like a moderation nightmare, right, because a lot of people lock people into signups and stuff like that, and what happens when they post just porn or you know, whatever content you don't want on there. You know, I know it's still probably early, early stages, but have you guys thought about how to deal with that?
Danny Peck:yeah, it's, you know that's a thought. Uh, we, we have the ability to report content, the fact that it is an ephemeral planet where you don't need accounts, and because planets self-destruct after seven days, then if there is inappropriate content, it doesn't like stick around. So the goal is just to make it sort of super lightweight, drama-free and a simple way for friends to connect without, like all the usual like social media baggage. And so, and interestingly, just by looking at some of the metrics from the planets being created, like, we're not seeing any of that, at least yet. I don't know if you take it to scale. If this thing was hitting like millions of planets created, I'm sure like some of that content would start to emerge. But I think we've taken the approach of like let's see the usage by the people and we will adjust accordingly, like you know, if and when that problem comes along cool, um, okay, uh, I'm kind of interested in the engagement.
Don Hansen:You dove into that a little bit. What, what kind of engagement are you seeing? Who, how many people are signing up and using your application?
Danny Peck:yeah, we've had some, uh, initial bursts, like incredible early bursts of activity, especially when we had a couple of posts on a planet, um, and sort of like, posted like a test message trying to figure out, like kick the tires, how does this thing work, um, and there was, like we noticed it tapered off a lot.
Danny Peck:Uh, a lot of people create a planet, post a message and then, like you know, they would bounce, um, you know, and then a subsection of those would actually like share with friends and you'd see like some communities forming in there and stuff like that perspective to like guide people more about like coming in and, like you know, here's how you use the site, sort of like a real quick, interactive tour type of thing. You know, maybe a little bit more about how to like share with other people and get them involved, because I think a lot of people don't understand exactly what it is, despite like messaging and stuff on the homepage and click to create a planet and the planet appears. And you know we kind of leaned into this sort of sci-fi thing. So it's like some people were like, is this a game? Like what did I just do, like you know? So that was kind of.
James Ebentier:One of my favorite Reddit comments was like I clicked on this expecting to play a game and it wasn't what is this Exactly.
Danny Peck:So we're still learning those lessons as we go, but the initial I think there's something there that people are interested in this idea of like ephemeral social network, like micro community with like one click. So we're still exploring like themes of how to keep people engaged.
Don Hansen:Okay, I'm just taking a look at your website again. Um, that's. Yeah, that's always fun to figure out how people are going to stay engaged, but that's pretty incredible to get 1500 planets with one reddit post and within 24 hours.
Danny Peck:Yeah, and we ran into quite a number of problems because of that. We, you know, we were still getting things set up as far as transactional email and things of that nature. So immediately people were signing up and they were getting all of these notifications from our system about thanks for signing up and creating a planet and this, that and the other, and we did not have our domain set up properly with the SPF and the DKIM and the DMARC stuff. So we were very quickly like blacklisted from all of Gmail and it sent us down this like horrible, like three week rabbit hole trying to figure out how to like redeem ourselves with Google and like how to, you know, improve our reputation with. That is like they just thought. They thought it was like a spam thing and it wasn't.
Danny Peck:Um, so, like you know that that sent us down a whole rabbit hole of things. We ended up having to like literally register another domain as our mailer and do some like redirects between the two. It was just amateur hour, honestly. You know what I mean. So that was my bad.
Don Hansen:Yeah, I feel like everyone that creates an app goes through the email spam thing. It's a pain in the butt.
Danny Peck:Oh, yeah, oh yeah, exactly Right of passage, I guess.
Don Hansen:Yeah, exactly, so let's dive into some of the technical issues that you guys face. I'm also curious about your stack and why you chose it and kind of like, would you stick with it if you had to redo it? But kind of just talk about some of your choices with your tech.
James Ebentier:Yeah, I think I was the one that dictated the stack more than anything. Danny was just like yeah, I'll play ball with whatever you're doing. So we did Ruby on Rails because that's something that I'm super familiar with, and I also wanted to play around with some of the new features in Ruby on Rails around Hotwire and how it's moving away from single-page app land and trying to move back to traditional HTML CSS served over the wire and doing more efficient server-side loading and rendering. So this was a really fun application to try and use those tools at a kind of a, a wider scale of that um, social, uh social media type application where you want like really instantaneous, uh feedback of like made a post, somebody posted and I'm getting notified in the application immediately, uh kind of environment. So we're doing that.
James Ebentier:And then we started out being deployed onto render and saw the, the monthly costs going up as those thousand plus planets started getting created and so quickly switched over to just a $ dollar a month box. That's a static box and we just deploy everything on that and it has enough hardware to um run our database, our web server and everything and we have a little bit more control there. Um, which was a. That was a fun migration to make and it like dropped our our costs while still being able to serve just as fast to everybody that was trying out the app, which was a lot of fun.
Danny Peck:Yeah, you switched us to something like is it called Cabal? Is that the tool?
James Ebentier:Yeah, it's the new DHH Rails addendum Kamal. Oh, that's right, kamal, kamal for deploying K-A-M-A-L, and so it's leveraging Docker for containerizing the environment and then, essentially, instead of using like kubernetes to distribute across a network of like your own private network of instances, uh, it just hot deploys directly onto the, the docker daemon, on on whatever nodes you have ssh access to, which is really nice what database are you using?
James Ebentier:Postgres, postgres. Okay, we're going very, very like run-of-the-mill basic, out-of-the-box Rails stack, which has been a bit of a blessing. I think it's been nice kind of to get back to just like basic core framework, moving away from adding a bunch of like bolts and addendums to make kind of this like perfect environment and just getting back to bare bones and like out of the box environments.
Danny Peck:I like it yeah, there's absolutely sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to throw to that end, on the front end, where we're absolutely doing nothing fancy whatsoever as far as technology goes, where it's straight up rails, views with tailwind and that really helped us to iterate extremely quickly. On on the front end side of things. It's actually pretty light front end, so there's really not a ton to it, like honestly, and yeah, so Tailwind helped us to iterate quickly. There's absolutely zero React, which is kind of weird for me to say, because that's usually what I immediately reach for on the front end, but we just didn't see that as a need, at least not yet.
James Ebentier:I think the one main change that you made was upgrading from Webpack to Vite. That's correct. That's the main thing that we changed for out-of-the-box framework.
Don Hansen:Yeah, okay. What was the reason for that?
Danny Peck:Yeah, yeah, I, um I was looking at vite. I wanted to use it um in uh, a a project, a side project, because I hadn't really had a ton of familiarity with it. Um, there wasn't a huge uh passion like sort of behind that, aside from just wanting to like, get familiar with it, and this seemed like a good project to to start getting familiar with it. So, um, yeah, we switched from webpack to vite at the very beginning and that's the either the really the best time or the worst time to do an untested technology because, as you know, um, some of those decisions can can haunt you for for many weeks and months to come.
Don Hansen:But fortunately, that was a good one that didn't hasn't given us any, any issues, so bite's been great yeah and well, and I think side projects are a really good opportunity to try stuff that you've always wanted to try. Um and I like for my project I brought in nest. It's a pretty heavy back-end nodejs framework and it's probably delayed my app by months from launching, to be honest, and I think it's one of the best decisions I've made. I wanted to learn something new and I'm tired of kind of the crazy Nodejs Express ecosystem and I want to try something new. I think that's a great opportunity inside projects and not enough developers will branch out like that. They always go with what they're comfortable with, so awesome, yeah and if it slows down the launch.
Danny Peck:But, like the, the learning experience is super invaluable. Um, yeah, absolutely, sometimes take. Sometimes taking the longer path pays off, especially when you're building something you really care about yes, very much so, um, would.
Don Hansen:So what was your second biggest issue? You mentioned, like the email thing, which is a pain in the butt. Um, did you deal with any other technical issues or smooth sailing?
Danny Peck:uh. So we I found it really difficult to, and james seemed to navigate this like a champ, but we we sort of evolved this, uh, this platform, from completely anonymous to having like planet level usernames, to having like global usernames that spanned all planets, and I found this really difficult to wrap my head around, the the architecture of um from a database perspective, as well as just managing those different scenarios on the front end. Um. James might have a different take on it, but I found that to be challenging to, to to wrestle with um personally myself. Yeah.
Don Hansen:Okay.
James Ebentier:Yeah, I think I think that was a. That was an interesting problem to get through, yeah, originally. So I mentioned that security is like a big passion thread of mine across my career, and so I came into this because we're entering this like new age of like data privacy and data protection and like people wanting to protect their identities online more and more while also being able to be authentic, and so one of the things that snapped with me when Danny was explaining this little planets was initially the idea of it being completely anonymous, so people can come in and not have to share their identity with their guildmates from video games in order to because when you, when you have like a discord account, that is for everything, you are instantly kind of like connecting your identity to your guildmates and might not necessarily want to be sharing that Right. So we started with that anonymity at first, but then very quickly found out like there's a lot of limitations to that, because how do you identify that somebody wrote the post that you're reading?
James Ebentier:How do you actually serve authenticity on the platform? How do you allow people to edit their posts or react and unreact to posts, posts or react and unreact to posts? You have to kind of like try and juggle IPs, and IPs are very finicky when you start thinking about VPN usage and people traveling between different homes and different internet connections, and so that's not reliable for authenticity. So then we had to figure out a way to add that layer of authenticity on top, which came to, like danny was saying, like planetary level users to even global users on the on the platform um, okay, so it wasn't just about making themselves anonymous to the people that they were talking to, but to the platform itself.
Don Hansen:That was your original goal. Yeah, okay, um, interesting, um, yeah, it, I mean, I even find decentralized technology fascinating and what it tries to solve too, but it it has its cons versus kind of like a centralized um of, or centralized identification or whatever you want to call it. But little planets has that feel where it's very spontaneous and and this is immediately why I thought, like people are going to be posting like illegal stuff or porn, because, like this can be, like, if I were corrupt, I would use a platform like this to post random stuff that's going to get destroyed in seven days. That's fantastic, right, and that's something you you got to be aware of. Like people might use it for that use case.
Don Hansen:Um, but you know the the focus on privacy and anonymity. Um, I think it's, it's very, um, I think it's awesome and I think a lot of platforms should consider, like, what information do we truly need about you? What is a bare minimum possible? So I I like that you guys are trying to solve that in this app. Um, what about marketing it? How has that gone? And like what strategies have you tried? What do you plan on trying? What hasn't worked? Let's talk about that.
Danny Peck:Yeah, marketing has been a little challenging. I think the core demographic, you know, has been tough to narrow in on. Obviously, like tech savvy, like younger audiences, like people who are, um, you know, keen to the, to the web and used to, you know, early adopting new platforms and things like that. So, but at the same time, like it's, it's a little bit difficult to reach those people, um, through traditional marketing and things like that. Like, we tried some like target advertising. Um didn't really like yield any results for us and you know it's it's a niche platform and you cast a wide net and like, if you're scrolling Twitter and you see a link you know with like, uh, some planets, and it says little planets create your own micro community. I mean, like, what is that? How do you like get people, the people who actually have this need to like get eyes on your platform? So, like, we're still just trying to figure out the best way to reach that audience. So, you know, it's a lot of trying to get involved in conversations, like on Reddit and like other social platforms like that. But, um, you know, I think we all know that Reddit is pretty, they have a pretty hard line when it comes to any sort of self-promotion. Um, like, if you, if you cough and say the name of your platform like, you might get like permabanned from the subreddit you're on. So Reddit's been extremely challenging, so you have to sort of engage with people on a very like non-marketing level, almost, as if, like you know, getting involved with communities and finding people who are talking about this problem and like trying to like get involved with that conversation. But that still feels very like. You know, manual acquisition, like, but maybe that is the strategy for a lot of these small startups is manually acquiring your first thousand users, like literally one at a time. I've heard, you know, the Y Combinator guy can't remember his name, don you probably remember his name talking about Nope, I always forget it the manual acquisition. So, yeah, very unhelpful anecdote for everyone listening. But you know, I do think that paid marketing was not very helpful for this.
Danny Peck:Word of mouth has been good, but it's like I only know so many people. Word of mouth has been good, but it's like I only know so many people. So, um, you know, I've had a lot of people sign up and try it out and they're like, oh, this is cool. You know, I don't really need it for me, but I will pass it along and so, uh, I think it's one of those things where it's just like it needs to sort of permeate itself into like the internet subconscious as like a thing that exists, and then, uh, it can be a thing that people reach for, naturally. You know, if it were to reach a level of like ubiquity where people are like, oh, you know, let's cluster up, we'll use little planets, um, we'll create a, uh, a little space to have this conversation, um, and then on. But, yeah, still haven't really like narrowed in on what that is specifically yet strategy Makes sense.
James Ebentier:Yeah, I would say marketing is the learning edge for both of us on this, on this project, and has been the most difficult part, for sure. The tech, like technical problems, we know how to solve and it's pretty, pretty easy to navigate them. We're we're seasoned, we're veterans at this point in that regard. But the, the marketing, the. How do you tell a story to your users? How do you get it in front of the right people at the right time?
Danny Peck:It's a grind Like that's the part, that's the grind. Yeah, agreed, and you know I deal with the same thing as like a music producer as well. Like, love the creative process, but then, when it comes time and it's the same with this, there's so many parallels when it comes time to like actually let people know that it's out there, it's just um, the fun stops and it becomes work. At that point, like you know, I think we're all happy to like wake up early and start working first thing on a project that we're passionate by, but like and I tip my hat to people who like love the marketing angle of it, and that's just not me so it's hard to get excited about and stick with something that you find not personally like fun, or you know, it's just, it's just not fun for us because we're developers, right.
Don Hansen:So, yeah, that's the struggle it's kind of like css you hate it until you you get comfortable with it. Then it becomes fun maybe that's it yeah I do.
Don Hansen:I I do feel like marketing is that thing and I at you know what maybe I'm kind of just speaking for myself, but I do feel like I've talked to other people that have gained this excitement for. But when you start getting good with it, you start seeing results, you start learning, you start iterating, you try stuff, it fails, you try stuff, it fails, you try stuff again. It starts working a little bit. You get those aha moments, just like you would learn to code and just like anything else, so you can have fun with it eventually, and I do have trust that you guys will. But that's the hard thing. A lot of developers you know we know how to code, but you know getting it out there and getting it in front of people and telling the story and marketing and branding. It's all new, it's really new to us and so, um, to me, you know that's that's really exciting. But it could be frustrating when you you want to see this project flourish and the only thing stopping it is like the thing that you really have, no, I clue no idea what to do with Right, um, I got a question for you guys, though, so like not saying you you need to write a blog. But I've talked to Danny about this, but I think like writing a blog is a fantastic way for organic search. It's really good for a lot of different applications that a lot of you know developers that are just launching applications they don't think about like content creation as a marketing strategy. It doesn't have to be a blog, right, that are just launching applications. They don't think about like content creation as a marketing strategy. It doesn't have to be a blog, right, it could be posting to other, uh, social platforms with different mediums, different types of content.
Don Hansen:But if you were to write a blog, what? What kind of content would you create for little planets? Is it? Is it educational? Um, and don't just lean on like how to use little planets, like that's a tutorial. That's not a blog, that's not going to gain you much traffic. But like, if you had to think about, like, what does little planets represent? Like who is this for and what kind of content can I create for these types of people? When I identify my audience, like, what would that content be? Would it be educational content, about something? Maybe it is about privacy. But like, what would that content be? Would it be entertainment? Would it be like maybe you target the gaming, a gaming audience, and there's some kind of like entertainment value in covering like gaming news or something like that. I don't know, but like what would that content be for you guys?
Danny Peck:Yeah, I think you know the whole idea of Little Planets came from sort of gaming communities and just how fleeting those connections can be. So I feel like writing about that experience and the problems we're trying to solve feels natural. Friendships inspired the platform. Discussing the challenges of keeping communities together across different social networks, we could highlight how some early users are using the planets in creative ways. I've always found that you're really onto something when people use your platform in ways that you didn't expect. I feel like the early days of Twitter was like such a great example for that, when they really started having people. It was a flexible platform. They could just just kind of bend it and use it like in completely like avant-garde ways. I would I'd love to see usage like that. So, yeah, I think, if it's authentic to our mission, you're right. I think that would really help with organic discovery for sure.
James Ebentier:Yeah, and as you were describing that, my mind was going through this kind of like aha moment of why didn't we think about that, of like a permanent little planet that is. Our blog is kind of the like a quintessential usage of our platform too. Like we write a blog post, we put it on the feed. That's the little planet and other people can subscribe to it and follow it and get notified through being attached and like active on our planet. Right? So like the little planets planet, yeah, I love that.
Danny Peck:Yeah, it's a great way to dog food our own. Like software as well, and um and. And that gives me other ideas too about and we've talked about because right now planets aren't discoverable at all, like they're islands unto themselves, they're not searchable via google. So, like we've started to talk about a permissions system at the planet level where, you know, creators can decide who they want to be able to join their planets and stuff like that. So I think the idea, this idea of like having discoverability of planets if you think about the universe metaphor, like that kind of works where show me little planets that are frequently visited and are about technology or about, like you know, X, Y, Z, any any given topic I guess that cracks the door for who knows what sort of people are going to start using it and moderation becomes more of a deal. But uh, yeah, I love that idea of using little planets as as a blog. That just makes all sort of sense.
Don Hansen:Yeah, that's an interesting concept.
Don Hansen:It does feel like that moves away from your original idea of kind of something that's temporal, is that the word I'll just say temporarily.
Don Hansen:Um, if you create or if you use a planet as a space, that is, that can gain organic traffic as a blog, is that like you're probably going to think of potentially like meta tags and how it's going to rank in the search engine and you start thinking about like how this is a blog, now Right, and that does kind of change fundamentally what it is. And so do you have this special planet for yourselves where this is searchable, where you can kind of showcase what it can do, and does that communicate effectively or accurately what this is meant to be? But that's a hard decision because now you're starting to think about like you're starting to change what this is and that is going to change your target audience. But that I think that target audience and like really figuring that out and going into those communities like you said you were Danny, but figuring out that target audience is going to be that's the key to figuring out how to make this like really, really work.
Danny Peck:Yeah, and I feel like the target audience would inform our decisions on the direction of the platform, like because we can't be too like firm on what the platform is like. It has to be malleable, and if we need to pivot it in some minor way to like better suit the needs of the users, then that's definitely what. What we should do. That's like the best kind of feedback we can get is like you know, I really wish the little planets did you know this thing and immediately we can start implementing meaningful changes. And it kind of snowballs Like. You get those users that are kind of following you and then you know they're finding value and they're telling friends and then one thing leads to another and that's how you build that community in your product, I guess.
Don Hansen:Yeah yeah, it's a tricky thing to figure out.
James Ebentier:Yeah, the idea is definitely like, no idea is going to be void of evolution, and so that's one of the things that I've learned most is the idea you start with isn't always the one that even makes it to your V1, that gets in front of an actual audience, because you're going to take in feedback, you're going to evolve it, you're going to adapt it, you're going to try different things with it and see what catches and, um, the, the, the core of little planets, I believe, like right now, is communities right, and so there's a lot, there's a lot of different directions you can go in for the simple idea of communities and still keeping that ephemeral nature that we have currently right, and so it's all about just like, like you said, like finding that target audience, actually connecting with them and getting that feedback so that we can let the users decide what the direction of the idea is.
Don Hansen:Yeah, um, yeah, honestly, if you guys had a blog where you talked about how this experience went, I I could tell you I would personally follow that blog. Um, but sometimes, um, sometimes, you could even get ideas from an audience that wouldn't use your application. But that's fascinated, with you growing an app to begin with and you diving into entrepreneurship. That's at least what I found, too, and I've gotten some good ideas from twitsprout, with just developers who are just coming in to watch me code and they're like, hey, what about this idea? And I, I have a list of really good stats to like record that are going to be relevant for streamers and, um, yeah, but it's tough.
Don Hansen:I, I know this journey is really tough to solidify. Um, so what advice would you give to people that want to try to push out their side project and they want to try to grow it? Um, and they, they want to flush it out, they want to build it, they want to, or whatever you think they need to do to try to make this successful based off of, like, what you guys have tried with your personal ventures? What would you share? What advice would you give?
Danny Peck:Yeah, I would say you should always start with an idea that you're really interested in and passionate about, because that is going to help you push through the times when you don't, when you get, you know, when you just get discouraged or tired and you need to push through.
Danny Peck:Like, if you just have that core idea that you're really excited about, I think that will keep you, keep you going. But yeah, I'd say, start small, like be ready to move fast, find, try to build community, a core community, as early as possible and also don't like get stuck in the development cycle in a cave to your point. Don, you told me this once. Like you know, don't isolate in a cave trying to figure out what people want the product to be. Like, get it out there quickly and engage that core community and just try to iterate in public I guess's on Blue Sky or something like that. It can help just keep you motivated because you're getting instant feedback from other people who are also going through the same challenges and I think that can be good inspiration to keep pushing forward.
James Ebentier:Yeah, I agree with all of that, and something that I would add on top is especially around trying to get feedback from the public or direct contacts that you're in contact with, that are users of your prototype or anything like that. As engineers myself included and especially I'm always inclined to ask very specific, narrow than just trying to validate my like, what I think is right. Ask them and let them tell the full story of what, what they need or what they see, and that has always been a lot more valuable in the feedback yeah, yeah, I like that, especially in the beginning, where you, where you know your identity of what your app is, isn't flushed out that much.
Don Hansen:And, yeah, I think that's really. I'm even thinking about it for my own app and, like you guys are just reminding me, I need to get this in front of people a little bit sooner, because I've been in the dev work for a while now months and I think it's about time I pushed that out. Um, okay, cool. Um, you know, just like the other app, danny golden record, I'm going to be paying attention to little planets as well and seeing how that journey goes. But, um, yeah, I, I really appreciate you guys coming on and sharing this Um, so we'll actually just wrap it up there. Um, yeah, I, I really appreciate you guys coming on and sharing this Um, so we'll actually just wrap it up there. Um and uh, I definitely want to.
Don Hansen:I again, I probably want to do more episodes like this, but, um, if anyone has kind of built a side project and gained users or gained revenue, um, I'd love to hear it in the comments below. Um, how did that like what worked for you and you know at what point did you finally figure out what to do, to change, to pivot. What did you like? Feel free to join me in the live streams and share those kinds of stories, but I'm like I'm. I'm definitely on this journey right now and I want to hear other people doing this. So, um, but yeah, we'll go ahead and wrap it up with that. Um, james, if people want to reach out to you and anything else, you know, if you wanted to say anything else, uh, that we didn't cover, uh, where could people reach you?
James Ebentier:Uh yeah, so across the internet I'm at uh, my first list, my first initial last name, like everywhere on socials, so just jayabenteer everywhere, and so that's super easy, which is really nice. So Twitter is at jayabenteer, linkedin jayabenteer. I have my own site. That's my online CV and some of the cool stuff that I'm working on, which is just jamesebenteercom that one's slightly different. I'm working on, which is just jamesebentiercom that one's slightly different. Um and um other than that. Just like, my top advice is just go out and do it, just just build, try stuff, fail, succeed. Just get out there and and try it.
Don Hansen:Yeah, how about you, danny?
Danny Peck:Yeah, Uh. I'd say the easiest way is just go to dannypeckcom and that's kind of an entry point. You can find me online and other projects like music and otherwise there, Yep.
Don Hansen:All right, cool. Well, the goal of this episode is to get people to just kind of build that side project, cause I know most developers have thought about it and they just don't execute. And you know, james, like you said, just get out there and build it and it's it's. It's also one thing I've noticed and I just want to share this, when I, you know, I worked for Danny at Analyte Health for my first dev job. You know, I worked for Danny at Analyte Health for my first dev job and one thing I noticed is if I had a 40 hour week at that job and I did nothing on the side no dev work, no content creation, anything like that I eventually got burned out. And it wasn't until I added hours in my personal time building what I wanted to build that that burnout went away. And it was a crazy thing. I never would have discovered, but I think a lot of if I didn't try it.
Don Hansen:But I think a lot of developers might even find, because I think a lot of us get into this building something that we are interested in building, that we enjoy with our own conventions and our own stack, and we get to explore and that kind of gets snuffed out in a professional dev job right, and you can get burned out and there's a lot of politics at work you got to deal with and a lot of different departments and stakeholders, and that can kind of just crush our original enjoyment at least just a little bit of why we got into coding in the first place. So I even think pushing out a side project is just a healthy thing for developers to do so, even if it's for that reason, even if your app fails, maybe it'll leave a lot of that burnout that you're feeling at work too. But that's just my personal opinion. So anyways, thank you so much, james and Danny, for coming on and sharing this.
James Ebentier:Thanks for having us, thanks for having us yeah, pleasure.