needs to get to a point where it's just
like, we're having a Superbowl party and everyone, when they come in, just
like grab your glasses at the door. Right. And it's just like, all right,
everyone now is AR everywhere in this house is a Superbowl party. Welcome back to This Week in No Code. I'm your host, JJ Englert. Here with my co host, David Pal. We have another fantastic show
for you for This Week in No Code. David, are you back in L. A. yet? I am back in drenched LA. It has been raining for days. It's finally sunny. Thank goodness. Fantastic. Well, we're glad to have
you back in the States. I will actually be in L. A. next week and and within the next couple
of weeks, we will, I think, have the first chance to meet each other in real life. In real life. Yeah, yeah. I looking forward to seeing if you
have legs and all that kind of stuff. I don't. It's actually just, I'm
basically a talking statue. This is a bust of me. I had a feeling this, but I guess
we'll have to see in a couple of weeks when I come to LA. Otherwise, listeners, thanks for
tuning back in to This Week in NoCode. We have a small news segment for you this
week, and then David and I are going to get into what it's like running Studio
NoCode, a NoCodeFirst agency, what we have found by building this agency,
keeping it small, building, what, six MVPs, five MVPs in the last six months
now, having a lot of success with that, taking some of these MVPs live. Working with clients in a live
environment, what that requires. We had our pricing plan,
whether it's fixed or hourly. We have so much to get into when it
comes to running a no code agency. So we just wanted to take a beat,
talk about all that stuff with you. But first, let's start with the
news of this week with David. Well, hello. Good morning from rainy slash
not rainy anymore Los Angeles from the flood zone of LA. Not so much news today to talk about
but let's start with some exciting news. Always celebrate our friends wins. Zero Code buys Minimum Studio plugins. Seems like the whole set of
plugins from Minimum Studio, now under Zero Code ownership. So take a look in your bubble editors. I use a ton of Minimum Studio plugins. I think they're a great dev agency
that builds really high quality, really useful, like, right on target plugins. I use a bunch of them all the time. Hero Icons I think is probably
the most well known that everyone uses and everyone saw the bugs. They just put that because
of bubbles changes. One of the things I love about Minimum
Studios plugins is they've always been really attentive, like they've
always been great at pushing updates. Hopefully Zero Code holds the
torch and pushes this through, so, And there was a lot of them too. There 33 plugins that they got acquired? plugins, yeah. Zero Code's scooping them all up. They seem to be buying every plugin
they can, which is nice, it's great. It also is a little
nervous that everything is consolidating under one roof. Just from an ecosystem perspective, right? We have vendor lock at bubble. We now have plugin lock in with zero code. And so I hope, just hope
that you maintain the Yeah, you know, there must be an
interesting business behind that, you know, they must be seeing success in
the plug in ecosystem And they want more of it quite frankly And so this
is kind of like a SAAS play for this ecosystem where you can they could
charge recur you know and they have a large audience that they can market to
And they have the support team in house that they can use to you know, manage
these so They've done a good job with it. The support has been well for the
plugins that I've used with them. So, nothing bad to say. I just hope they keep it up
keep creating cool stuff. I think on the Minimum Studio side, it
was interesting that they let go of all these plugins, right, on the 33 plugins. They'll probably continue to build more
because that's just kind of what they do. They love doing this stuff, right? But I think it says something about
if an agency is also looking to have a side business of plugins you know,
if it's profitable or not, if it's time consuming or not from this, you
would assume that, Hey, it's just, wasn't making as much money as they
could have been making in the agency route with their hourly and billables. So maybe just focus entirely on the
agency and, you know, get a little bit for these plugins and just go all in there. So that's what I think of it. Yeah. I'm not sure why they sold. It's definitely going to be a distraction
from building apps for folks, but they need, you need to build plugins
for certain things to work, right? You can't just build it right into
the app, especially if you're reusing it, you want to use it in a plugin. So I think it's really smart of
them to take what they've built to earn some extra money on the side. But once it starts becoming
a distraction and once things become stable, it might as well. You know, go get the cash as we're
going to talk about, you know, agencies or cashflow challenged businesses. And so getting a bunch of cash to help
shore up some accounts may be great. Yeah, maybe, maybe they'll tell
us in the comments what they did. Yeah. Well, let's move on to the next news with
Apple Vision Pro, man, that looks cool. If it wasn't 3, 500 out, like
that's a lot of money to buy. And like, from what I am reading, is
everyone's kind of like, this is the best consumer tech I have seen in,
Years or maybe ever, but don't buy it yet unless you're a developer or like
you can warrant just 3, 500 purchase. Like, yes, this is incredible, but like
it's a V1 and it's not as realistic. Although some of these
videos are so, so funny. Like I love seeing that guy courtside
at the game, the NBA game, wearing his Apple vision or walking across the street
or ordering food or working on cars. Like AR is going to change everything. I feel like it's, this is
just the beginning for AR. It's the beginning. I don't know. I think there's a long way to go
before it's really embedded in people's workflow, and the price
has to just be so much lower. I guess certain businesses that have like
really high stress on people and their kind of functionality, it might be helpful
to have a headset like AR inspections and things may actually improve
throughput to justify the 3, 500 price. But for the average person, I think
it's going to be a little tough. And I think that's how computers
evolved as well, right? Like, the first computers
were at universities. Because they were bulky and slow
and didn't do enough for the average person to make it worth it. Eventually the price came down
and then everyone took them. Yeah, I mean, look at the iPod, you know,
it started with that big iPod, then it got to the mini, and then it got to a point
where it's eventually just in your phone, you know, there wasn't even need a knife. So I think it's going to get there. You know, I think AR itself has
already kind of proven success, at least in like, Pokemon Go. Remember like that fad that was happening
where they were using their phones for AR? Like that There are people that are still playing. It's still not like, it's not over. Yeah, people are still using it. And it just adds this whole new,
unique element to the world. I was thinking the other day of like. You use Apple Vision Pro or any
kind of AR where you essentially just reskin your house to make it
look however you want it to look. And so it's just like, boom, I'm
now living in, you know, whatever, it's all glass or whatever. Like there's a lot that you
could do and like really cool things just everywhere with AR. So I feel like it's just one of those
things that it's just going to blow up in the next 10 years for sure. Hmm. a lot about tech adoption with AI. I think it's following the same trend. There's a lot of really
cool stuff you can do. There's very little
useful stuff you can do. And I think that's where, you know,
things need to evolve and people need to figure out how it actually
inserts itself more effectively. Like, I think it's cool, I saw a demo
of people touring houses on Zillow through the Apple Vision Pro, right? You can just like, look in a room. And I'm sure it's pretty good,
but again, I feel like a lot of people are not going to trust it,
and they still have to go see it. Maybe it helps filter out a
bunch of things you won't see. Like, oh, I know this one I don't want
because I can now see it this way. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe for model home builders that
want to like help build your showroom, like your example, or wedding venues. you can, there's so many different
industries that can build all this stuff in AR or VR or whatever, and then just
say, throw this headset on, here you go. How does this look? Kind of thing, what you'd like? Yeah. So, it's going to take a bit to get there. I was thinking the other day, it's
like, it really also needs to be affordable enough where, Everyone
can, in your house can have it. And even you guys, like I was thinking
the other day, like it needs to get to a point where it's just like,
we're having a Superbowl party and everyone, when they come in, just
like grab your glasses at the door. Right. And it's just like, all right,
everyone now is AR everywhere in this house is a Superbowl party. We've got all of our screens and
everything, but it's just like. You, you can afford to just
say, I have extra glasses here. Use this kind of thing, right? Or you don't leave home
without your glasses kind of but why even go over like i'm you still want to stay at home. Yeah, I think you'd still
want to be in person. I don't know. Maybe you don't even go in person anymore. I don't know. Well, it's interesting because this
these glasses have come up a long time ago and I always then thought like So
what does a family room look like like most family rooms and homes are like tv
centered Right, everyone, the couches, the chairs, they all point towards the TV. Well, now it's just like a big circle. Right, like just chairs kind
of pointing at each other. Because it doesn't matter anymore. Indiscriminate chairs around the Yeah, it would make the design
of the home look better. And it could just save you from
having to buy so many damn TVs. So, Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I really liked the tracking
part of it where you could like set up screens in different parts of the
house or the room and like go there. I know it's not perfect yet, but
like, I really love the idea of. Going to your stove and placing timers
over the pots and then walking into the other room and seeing your TV and
other monitors Kind of still in that position, you know Like I didn't know
that that was gonna be a thing and it is and it's still like a v1 the
tracking still needs to Be improved. I think it's just like like 30 frames
a second right now and it needs to get way more than that but I still really
liked that kind of spatial awareness and tracking of it and It feels very
much like this is the first iPod kind of thing or like maybe a little bit
More than that, because it's quite expensive, but like the first generation
of something revolutionary and It's nice to see Apple innovating again because
it's been quite a while in my opinion. my first thought when you talked about
the timers was Oh great, well that's cool because now I can set the timer and I
don't have to keep pulling my phone out. But then I was like, but then
I have to put my headset on. Like it doesn't, like it
doesn't really solve the problem of needing the technology. Yeah, to be able to have it nearby,
have it on hand, have it charged. I think we're just gonna get to that
point where we're gonna wear glasses And it's gonna be like prescription
or regular glasses, but everyone is gonna have glasses on and that's gonna
be like our phone That's gonna be like you wake up you put your glasses on
there's your AR world Like that's where I feel like we're going kind of thing. And we, live there, yeah. yeah, and some people will,
we'll live there for sure. And some people won't put
the glasses on, but yeah. All right. So we started this studio, was it August? I think it was right around August. Yeah. And we got our first project. Homemade quickly. pretty quickly near the end of
August, we, we got our first project. I think we got paid for the
first time in September. And so we went on to build homemade,
which was a marketplace, two sided MVP. Then we went on to build Yistrict,
which was a two sided social marketplace kind of thing. Like an information social feed yep. local, local government and elections. Yep. And then we went on to build Hire
Latino, that's the third one, which was a two sided marketplace
to hiring more affordable talent in South America, VAs and whatnot. then we went on to build, I
thought we had another one too. We We almost, well, there were a
couple that we were close to, to starting, but I think that's, I'm
just looking at the channels in our Yeah. Slack group. I think that's, and then, And then we have MediaSpace,
which is our current one. Yeah, and MediaSpace is
a two sided marketplace. So they all marketplaces? Just about all marketplaces. I mean, I wouldn't really
call Yistrict a marketplace. Yeah, But I think, I think marketplaces
are the vast majority, not the vast. I'd say more than half of all bubble
apps that get built through agencies are marketplaces of some kind, some kind of
like two sided half, because usually the people that are building marketplaces
want to build an app structure. They aren't the ones doing
the thing to be sold. And I think it's a little
different with homemade. Because she was, like, McKenzie,
the CEO, she was already, like, or, orchestrating all of this herself. So she, but she's not the chef. Like, she's not the caterer, and
she's not an event organizer. But she was connecting the two. And so I think that's pretty common,
uh, how many businesses work, especially in the software first world. Yeah, so yeah, and then our
final marketplace that we're building now is media space. That's our biggest one so far And
that's the two sided marketplace where influences can go and list, you
know, their podcast availability There any kind of sponsorships and then a
sponsor can go in and book those with integrated Scheduling and whatnot. And so that's our current one. And then we have, of course, tons of
that we're bidding out and having our pipeline, but funny, the thing has
been in a marketplace also, I thought we did more than four but I guess I know, we didn't start
off with six, but I Yeah. Yeah. But I guess it's been four and about
five months going on in six months now. And we have learned a lot, you know, when
we, when we first started off, it was our. We said, what, 10, 000 for
an MVP in four weeks, right? That's like, that's the
first thing we said. the first MVP was 20. And then, and then, get 20, but we didn't
get 20 the first time. yeah, well, we were just like,
our first message to Twitter was 10, 000 in four weeks. And then everyone quickly
said, that's too cheap. And so then we was like, all
right, 20, 000 in four weeks. Which everyone on Twitter should
have also said, that's too cheap too. Yes, yes. And so we put that on our website. But. We've actually never
built an app for 20, 000. It was either, 20, 000 yeah, it's either below that or over
that the irony of the fixed price, but the thing that we did kind of
keep was that fixed priced was okay. People came to us with all sorts of
ideas, all sorts of complexity, and we're not just going to say it's 10, 000
because it's 10, 000, we're going to say. This is how long it's actually
going to take after we scope it for you and everything, right? And so, we quickly learned, alright, so
some of these are going to take longer, some of these are going to take shorter. We scoped it. We figured out how much
it would actually take. And then we added in some small
contingency on our side just to make sure it didn't go wrong. And then we gave them
a fixed price for that. and well, not always. The, the real truth is sometimes we just
said whatever budget you had we'll do. It's fine. We just wanted the projects and get, get At least the first one. The first two, we were like that. I think the first Maybe maybe the first three. Yeah. Basically, almost all of them were
just like, oh, you don't have 20? Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. it. So the first three, we were definitely
not that we were beggars, not choosers. And if that's the word, you could use it. But by the fourth, we're just
like, okay, we, we need to charge what we need to charge, which Yeah, we're losing yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, with the fixed price. It's good because there are some benefits. The benefits of the fixed
price is, all right, you know, you're going to make this much. And if you do come in under budget, that's
extra money that you are making, right? Which is good. And that's great. And if you calculate by hour. Yeah, Right? Right. And it's just, and it's just simple. It's just, we're going to charge
you this much and we don't need to worry about tracking our hours and
hourly basis, all that kind of stuff. So it keeps it simple and less complex. But the bad thing about
billing by a fixed amount is. Estimations are really hard
and development is really hard. Design is really hard and building
a business for the first time with these entrepreneurs is really hard. And so you, Setting an alignment is impossible. exactly. And so, you know, You build something and
it's maybe 95 percent there and it's a really, really good V1, but then sometimes
it's like, well, this pixel isn't right. And, or now that we see this, we actually
want it this way or no, we, we saw this, this is good, but now that our
users are using it, we want it this way. And all of that stuff is fine. Like also this stuff is development
and like, that is what it is. Right. But the hard part is. companies keep software
developers on staff, Right. Exactly. software is a living, breathing thing. It always changes. There's always updates. There's always new complexity. Right. And, but then with the fixed pricing
method, it's just like, well, when do we draw the line of like, this was the
functionality included in your V1, but eventually we got to start charging you
more hourly for this additional stuff. And I think that has been particularly
hard for us because we want to make sure our clients are happy. Right. First and foremost, and we
want to help them succeed. And I, I'd say the third thing is, is. Working with no code, we could just
make these changes so quick that it's just not like sometimes worth going
and asking for more money when we could just do it in 20 minutes, right? So, I'd say those are the three things,
but it creates this fine line then of like, okay, well, you're then You're
then setting a precedence for like how work goes in the future and what we
can ask for, what we can add on, what is charged and what's not charged, and
there's that really tricky line, right? So I think we could talk a little
bit about like how do we find that line, which we're still trying to do. And then also there's another part
of it too, which is We have an internal PM, product manager, right? And also, the amount of work that he takes
on to organize us, to communicate back and forth and how do we pay for him, how do we
track his hours, and also you know, like, scheduling and all that kind of stuff. It's just a lot of overhead that goes
back and forth with working with a client like this, especially, If they're
in like a live situation where they expect quicker turnarounds, you know,
so it's, it's new for us of just, all right, we've built a lot of apps. We built a lot of live apps, but, and,
but mostly when we're worked with our live apps, they were like our employers, right? And so it's just like, okay, they
expect a quick turnaround because that's what there's our only focus, but now
working with live apps that are not our employers and we have multiple. multiple clients, right? I think setting expectations for
turnarounds and what we can do for each of those clients is as utmost importance. And I think that's also been hard for us. Yeah, a few different things. First every client's most urgent issue. Is a fire for them. Right? But we can't manage multiple
fires at the same time. Right? And, and the level of fire is,
is always subjective, right? If they've never built an app before
and they haven't worked with things in production, and they haven't
spent this much time with any other piece of software, they don't
know what bugs are, normal or not. Right? Like we've all worked
with apps that have bugs. You just happen to know
where the bugs are. You know what's tolerable,
like what you can push off, how you prioritize your list. But for some folks that are new to
software operations, right, not just not building that are not building themselves,
but running a software platform, they're not used to having backlogs of tickets
that need to get done eventually, right? So everything always needs to be perfect. Bugs need to be solved immediately. All of that. The second thing. They say this about
entrepreneurship and hiring. When you hire someone, you have to
understand no one will care about your business as much as you do, right? That's the same in reverse
with agencies, right? We can't care about everyone's
business as much as they do. And we care about the agency, right? Like that's our business. Our business is building an agency. Not necessarily being their product
head or, you know, and so there's always this, this trade off,
especially in the fixed price world. And I think this is where
things get a little murky. They want us to care about every little
pixel, which we should, and we should be delivering, you know, as close to
pixel perfect designs as possible. But when we're not getting paid anymore
for the next little thing that they want to add, it's kind of like, well, it's not
really good for our business to do that. Right, we should be going and earning,
earning more the next dollar in the fixed price, you know, where, what falls
into free work at the end is an open question and never well defined, right? No matter how hard we try to push,
okay, we're, approve the figma, right? Like the first thing we did was, you
know, we built the figma, we handed it off, we're like, hey, this is what
we're building, they add some comments. And then, like, as we're going
through, they're changing things, and we weren't very clear that we're
only gonna hit what's in the Figma. The last project, we were very clear,
look at it, you have a week left on the Figma comments before we start building. Nothing else gets added,
this is exactly what. But even then, we still had, you know,
kind of this, well, they had a different Figma they were also working from. And we were pushing what was there. And Figma is a flat design, right? Like there isn't every little interaction. So is it included? Is it in there? What if things don't
look great in real life? Like all of those things, right? It's not all designed for
every, every screen size. So things look different as they
stretch, like all of these things. Is it part of what's in Figma? I guess kind of, but. You know, if you wanted all of these fine
little details, one, we should have spent more time designing, which you should have
been paying for, and two, that should have been a bit more clear as we're building. Yeah, you know, it's I think it's
hard because most of the clients that we're working with our first
time entrepreneurs and or first time tech entrepreneurs, right? And building technology
for the first time. And I think what things that we do
really well is we work with them and we help them find success. We help them plan properly. We help set expectations, right? But that's also hard to do. And sometimes there are things that
come up that we didn't actually foresee. And, you know, we learn from that and
we get better for the next client, but it's just generally hard to do. Cause it's a hard process. You're like, we're turning
out a hundred tickets a week. Right. You know, and for one of our clients, week we did 140 tickets. we did 140 tickets in a week and, you
know, with two people and the amount of contact switching that requires that. And that is also a factor
of your development team. If I need to do every single thing
100 percent pixel perfect, which I always strive for, but I have to
do that 140 times, that's gonna be really, really difficult, right? And we need to pick what are
the most important things here? Where do I spend my time? What is really going to move the needle
kind of thing, especially in the V1, V2 world because it's just not realistic
to take every single thing to the utmost perfect pixel because it's just,
it's, you're going to be there forever. And then what happens when a user Doesn't
end up using it and then you trash it all and then that that is all, you know, time
wasted So I think ethically That's maybe some stuff that I battle with of just
like when you know I put something out 98 percent pixel perfect and then I move on
to my other 75 tickets and then they come back and say Oh, no, this is 2 percent
pixel perfect off, go back and do it. And it's just like, it's frustrating
because there's so much other stuff that we're trying to do
that's going to move the needle. But understandably at the same
time, they're paying for a product and they want their product. So it is one of those things where
you just, you kind of need to give on each, each side needs to give a little
bit understanding the situation and the gravity of what we're building for Yeah. Yeah, I think, and to be clear, I think
a lot, we're venting a little bit, but everyone we've worked with has been
very understanding when we explain the and wonderful clients in that way. Yeah. that's, that's important to set
and check in and communicate. That, hey, this is what's happening. Like, we can't just keep going forever. And there were projects that we didn't
take on because we didn't think we could. Work with that client in a way that we
want to you know Like picking a client is really important like because you're
you're building really advanced technical stuff And hopefully this is a long term
relationship with each other, right? And so you need to pick someone
that you can be in the trenches with on a weekly basis, right? And I think with our four clients, we've
been really lucky with that so far. And then that's part of like the
scoping process we pay to scope. And it's mostly because we want to make
sure one that they're serious before we dedicate a lot of time to them. And to scoping is
really, really important. We need to figure out what
what's involved in everything. And then three, it gives us the time to
work with them to see if we want to work with them for a longer term relationship. yeah. And I think we're finally getting
some projects that are much longer, not just the build phase and hand it
off, which I think is what we intended when we started the agency side. We're like, okay, great. We're gonna take four weeks. We'll start day one, day 28. We'll never talk to you again, right? Like, here's your app, your MVP is done,
and like, goodbye, good luck, right? And that was kind of the thought,
I think, in what we were starting. It wasn't meant to be, hey,
we're just like, building this like, book of business. And, you know, we're getting to the
point where a lot of people are asking about, okay, great, what comes next? And, And how can you support me
in a more rapid environment? Yeah, we want ongoing work. We want ongoing support and we want
more features coming like we just we cut what we needed to hit the budget
and now we want to add new things. Hey, we've launched now
we're gonna need X, Y and Z. Can you help us at these features? And those now have a weird trade
off associated with them, right? Because now contact switching
within an app is hard contact switching between apps. Is even harder, right? Getting into fresh build mode versus edit
mode on a different app is really tough. And so. And also QAing in build
mode for a live app to make Yeah. QA, yeah. Managing tickets, monitoring
Trello boards, like multiple Trello boards and prioritizing forth with the conversations
to make sure you're clear. There's just a lot of overhead that
comes with working with a client, even if you're not actually building
for the, in the moment for them. A lot of mental bandwidth, I would say, Yeah. And so now we need to
think about how we work. And so now we have this trade off. Okay, great. Context switching is going to be
really hard, but now we have a decision to make of bringing on more people. Right. Great. Now we have more work, right? threaded. We're going to build an app. We look at our two schedules and go,
can we do this in the next six weeks? Do we have the time to do this? Let's just hit the ground
running and build it. Now we're juggling a lot
more work than we need. And so now we're like, great. How do we scale this? Like, how do we add the first next person? Right. And what does that mean? And what project do they
go on the new project? Do they go on the management project? Do they go on the next features? Like, what is that? And then how does it
change our margins, right? In the fixed price world, we
talked about things going over. Well, they go over because
now we're earning less than our hourly rate, what we want, Right. but when you start bringing
other people in, you actually still have to pay them, right? And you have actually goes over. and it actually goes over, right? Like. In this fixed price model, you take
a lot more risk when you add another person because you could actually,
you know, the two of us personally can put money into the project to pay
the guy because we're not getting paid enough and that is never a position
that we, we should be in, right? Like I, there's no chance I ever want
to put money in to finish a project. After months of working on that project. And then still have to do the
work, if the work isn't up to par. And then what? Right? Like, the agency world, you,
there's no exit multiple based on this asset you've built, right? Like, oh, we built these six apps that,
they're not ours, we can't go sell them, we just lost a bunch of money. And, and I'd rather just sit
around and do nothing than work really hard and lose money, right? Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a hard business and,
you know, we have chosen particularly or specifically to keep it small,
just the two of us, because we both like building and we, I personally
don't want to get into a supervisor role where I'm not building anymore. I'm just. Working with clients and communicating
and, you know, or, or planning sales, all that kind of stuff. Right? Like, that's not why I'm
doing this right now. For me, personally, I'm doing this
to build and keep my skills top notch and to work alongside of you and,
and to, to create some cool things. Right? So that was always my intent. At least when we started, it was,
and then as, as we've grown, it's now it's kind of pushing us of
like, well, we have all this work. What do we do with it? Do we say, okay, we're going to add
more people, which then takes us. Us, our responsibilities
of it changes them, right? Puts us into a different kind of role. Do we want that? Is that going to be, are we going to be
pushed into a direction that we want? Or do we say, no, we can't
actually take on this work. We start booking out or we
just start denying it because that's kind of where we are at. Right. And I think all three of those things
are worth a conversation and it depends on what you want personally. But we, we have definitely
not tried to grow this thing. Yeah. We have been very specific about this is
the work we are going to do to fill our schedules to earn what we can and the, And even that we only, yeah, even that we
work a piece 20 hours a week because we still have other things that we are still
passionate about that we still want to do. And not just to have the agency
do everything for us, right? Because I think we've seen a lot of
other colleagues where the agency saw success, they went all in on it. And, you know, with each new
quarter and growth, the role changed, the role changed. And eventually they were
never building anymore. They're not even hiring anymore than
maybe they're just all sales now. And they're doing a whole different
thing than when they got started. And yes, the, the revenue
month over month is good. What does that profit margin look like? What does the multiple on it look like? What, and then, and then at the end
of the day, you're not actually doing something, a role that you actually
enjoy and you don't want that either. So it's this weird thing of
like, how do we grow this thing? Make more money, but still do what we want
to do and have the life we want to have. I think that's kind of
the dilemma with agencies. yeah. And make enough money to keep doing
stuff that we want to do on the side. Right. Like if we, if we said, okay, great,
we're going to bring on someone full time and pay them full time. They have, we have to give
them enough work to do right. To stay busy, to pay
their full time salary. Well, that means we're going to earn less. And at what point do we earn so
little, not so little, but not enough to pay the bill to make it worth
doing because we should have just been doing the work, less of it. Um, there's like a, a trade off. Like if it's not our full thing and
we'd rather be doing, not rather be, we, we're also doing other
things and this is supplementing that income to help, you know, pay
everything, pay all of the bills. Then. And we're not meeting that criteria. Well, why do any of it do something
else that could pay the bills? But, the trade off is, while those
other things that could pay the bills are a bit of an unknown, right? They're a bit of, maybe it'll work
out, but you have to wait another six months before it's earning
enough money to pay the bills. And so it's almost like, at some
point, you might rather just do less work, like, do less net, total
work at the agency level, so that it's maintainable for just us. To do so we can earn enough
money without the hiring Yeah. And, you know, I think Eric from
Flywheel Studios recently posted about this and also Jesus as well from Low
Code Agency of, you know, Q4 last year was really slow for the agency or kind
of vice versa, whatever it may be, but the importance of having three, four,
five, six months of runway, should you have an agency with a lot of employees? And have a slow quarter or a slow
month to be able to pay for all those folks to still work, even though you
don't have the clients for it, right? And then it's like, okay, agencies
are great for cashflow, that's great. But if you're storing six months of
it away for those rainy days, then it's like maybe the cashflow isn't
good after all because it's just going into reserves and not your pocket. After all, with those kind of
bigger agencies, and I think that could be a downside, should you
not have consistent enough sales. Yeah It once you start trying to grow
and move out of and i've said this about what we've built It's kind of an agency. It's also kind of just like
The three of us building stuff together right as a team. It's not an agent in the sense
of You know, we're trying to scale and add people and We don't have a we're just managers. And, you know, we're just building, like,
we just happened to build apps for folks. We know how we're good at it. And so we just built like, that's
the thing we do and we charge for it. Yeah, I don't know that we have a good. Like, really model of how the agency
thing works, and I think it becomes a whole other, and a whole new beast if
we tried to approach it like an agency instead of just the two of us doing work. Yeah. You know, the most popular model right
now is productized services, right? So throw some kind of retainer
monthly fee on the services, right? We see this a lot with design joy
and the design industry and whatnot. Haven't seen it as much in
the development industry. But I do think that it could work. It's a little bit more
complicated, but it could work. Some other agencies, no code
agencies are charging like. five grand every two weeks kind of thing. Or, you know, they kind of split
it up into like a weekly or bi weekly thing of just like, Hey,
we're going to do two week sprints. You pay for every single
sprint you do kind of thing. You can pause at any time, you
know, there's negatives and positives that go with that. But one thing I would say is. Now that we're doing as much overhead,
admin, product management work as we are doing with one client in a live
environment, those start to make a lot more sense of we need some
kind of retainer or monthly amount, minimum, that we can guarantee in
order to give this level of service so we can staff accordingly on a
consistent basis going forward. Because otherwise, if it's just still
on an hourly or it's still on, you know, a fixed price here and a fixed
price there, And what's all that in between and what's happening there? It's just too hard to, I think, provide
excellent service without having that type of retainer in place personally. Yeah, you can't really plan anything
to hire, you don't know how many people you need to hire in three
weeks because you don't know if there's work for them in three weeks. And it's a little risky even to
do it at, you know, you offer two week sprints because tech, in
theory, there's something else. You need. a pipeline of deal flow to really
justify that you'll always be growing because then you'll eventually be dying. And then you start losing people
and then things get really tight and it's cashflow, right? Like this is not unusual with
any service business, right? Like roofers or carpenters, right? You want to build a carbon
carpentry business, you hire a bunch of people to help do work. Well, if the work dries up,
well, who gets paid, right? Unless everyone's a partner at the
agency and you're just like, great. We're just splitting everything. We're gonna try do as much work
as possible to get it done. Like I don't know how you possibly and Yeah, just grow everything without constantly
worrying about needing to fire everyone or fire some people and
then hire back and Shrink and grow. It's it seems dreadful you know, like it's on those quiet months,
you might think, all right, well, then we'll just have the team spin up like a
new SAS product or something, or start some kind of other and endeavor, like a
venture studio or something like that. Like, we have the team,
we have the capabilities. It's dry right now. Why don't we do something else? But I think kind of what we saw with
minimum studio early on is like. Yeah, they probably had that and they
built 33 plugins and that is value that was added, but they probably
ended up finding out that that took a lot of time and that took them
away from the core business and that took them away from other things
that probably earned them more money. So they ended up just cashing out
and getting back to the things that, you know, earn them the most money. And I feel like that is also the
dangerous thing with agencies of like, Alright, well, it's a dry month. Let's just spin up our own SaaS product. And then that SaaS product bleeds into
the next couple of months or whatever. And instead of doing agency billables,
you're working on this for free. And if this doesn't actually work
or take off because you need to bring it to market, you need a
GTM, a sales team marketing, etc. And all the costs that invest in
that, then it's an additional drain rather than an additional, you
know, generator in your pocket. requires more bandwidth than you might be
able, than you might be able to give it. So it's not just a, Oh, it's a dry month. Let's go create something because that
comes with a lot of weight as well. yeah Like you just make up a job for
folks like I think the wall in in Ireland and Scotland you see lots of like in
the In the countryside, you see lots of fences, not fences, stone walls. Those stone walls are there because
it was the great depression and the government didn't want to
give money away for nothing. They gave people fake jobs of
building these stone walls. they just only exist because
they needed something to do. And like, that kind of happens
with this, like, Hey, let's just try and launch something. Well, it's probably not really that
helpful or probably not going to work out. And I think that's a
symptom of every agency. Not every agency, the majority of agencies
I've known are always one bad month away from converting into a venture studio. Yeah. Like everyone just would rather
be launching their own products, but no one pays until they pay and
they can't fund a hundred new bets, like a venture portfolio, right? They may have time for one, but
no one can bet the one because you don't know if it's going to work. so there's, there's this tension
of cash now versus venture and. This is always the trade off. Like it just seems like that's always the,
someone's, I hate, you know, I hate this. I wish I was a venture studio. Or they try to fund it, the
venture studio, separately. But running a venture studio is very
different than running an agency. And so they're, they're
competing priorities and time and you just don't really know. It's just like, well, why
is anyone doing anything? They're trying to get paid. They're trying to, you
know, make ends meet. They're trying to, you
know, Get rich quick. They're trying to get enough to
survive, whatever their, their threat, their goals are, they just,
they're doing it for the cash. Like no one's running an
agency for philanthropy. They're like, yeah, I
just like helping people. You don't have to pay me. It's fine. I'll fund it. No one, no one does that because
they all want to make money. So that's what they're
aiming for first, right? They're aiming first to go make money. And the quick money, the quick
next project is all is not always, but usually there. And so you, the default is just to
say, well, I'll just one more project. That is the last project, but let's let's work to put a couple bows
on these thoughts I don't think we're gonna be able to like wrap it up and
Officially say like this is what you need to do because I don't think we
have those answers for you We're still trying to figure those out ourselves
I'd say a couple things, you know, if you do have a quiet month, I like the
idea of creating like spec work Or some kind of like go out and recreate
this, there's whatever, something. So you can show the world the quality
of work that you're able to deliver. And if there's like no strings
attached, you don't need to bring it to market or anything like that. You can abandon it at any time. That's a good way to just say,
Hey, look at, we just built all these really cool things. Give us a chance on your next project. And I think Flywheel did a little
bit of that when FlutterFlow was doing their competition. They had some downtime. They had just developers put
together some really cool FlutterFlow templates and apps. And that was really cool to see their
capabilities come to life like that. Because sometimes when you're doing
client work, most times you can't actually show the work that you're doing, right? So a lot of our work doesn't
actually go on to be seen. And we need our work to be seen in
order for us to get more clients, right? So I do like the idea of just
spec work, small little stuff that you can spin up to show. what you can do in a short time with very
little strings attached and you can punt at any time should agency work come in. I think another bow that we could
put on this is agency stuff is tough. It's, it's important to find
clients that you enjoy working with that you can work with. And if you have clients that it's
just grinding more gears and it's not working, maybe it's just best that
you do separate ways because you want what's best for both parties and you
also want to enjoy what you're doing. Right? And if you're, if you dislike
working with them, you know, every time you have to work with them,
then maybe it's just not worth it. Maybe the opportunity cost of them
taking you taking them out as a client is not worth it and you should just
part ways and find a new client that you know, you could work better with. And then I think the last thing I'll
say on my side to put a bow in it, fire a client. That's, you know, that's the thing. I think the last thing I'll say before
I put it over to you for putting some bows on things is make sure that
you're not being pushed in a direction that you don't want to be pushed in. Right? As new clients come in, as new
opportunities come in, there are a lot of dollar signs at the beginning of that, but
those dollar signs do route you to a path. You need to be okay going on that path
if you're going to accept that deal. And so be very intentional about the
work you are taking on, the clients you are taking on, and making sure
that it's bringing you to a spot that you want to be in, right? And I think David and I have
done a really good job with that. And there's a reason why we're such
a small agency still is because we've intentionally kept it that way, right? And so I think we've had a success in
that way of, we know that we also like to do more things outside of this. But this is also a major thing that we do. And that also brings
us joy in these roles. So for now, that's how we're going to
keep it until maybe we are ready to grow. But otherwise, that's
kind of our status quo. So what do you think, David? How can we wrap up some of these
other thoughts that we've had? Yeah. I think for the agency owners
listening, I think lots of people are feeling the similar things a lot. I think finding other people to
talk to and vent to is, is helpful. It's nice that we both talk, we can
talk to each other about this, right? We're not just like the one man
show trying to figure it out. We can bounce ideas off of it. I think every client is an opportunity
to change a process, improve, or stop. Like, you can just say, hey, we did it,
we're done, that's it, we're wrapping. If you really don't like it, I think
life's too short to do things you hate. If you can sell clients on custom
software, high ticket custom software, You could probably sell other things as well. And sometimes it's just about, you
know, taking a bet on yourself. Doing the work instead of outsourcing
the work and earning the dollar and putting some feelers out there. and I think, look, make sure that
every, everything you take is something you can do for six months or a year. Like be prepared to do that. And if you don't see it, don't do it. And there's a lot more
that we can get into. I don't think we have the time for it
today, but different types of industries. We service mostly entrepreneurs,
but you know, if we shift our ICP to, you know, larger corps and what
are those services look like and what are those packages work like, I
think there's huge opportunity there. Different tool sets that you could
use, you know, particularly we are using bubble because that's what
we're really, really good at, but I don't think we're just bubble. If there was something that's better
for the job, we would look into it. I think generally we are no code, low
code studio agnostic in that sense, but our daily driver is bubble because
that's kind of where we've come from. And it does lend itself well to
these types of MVPs that we're creating with marketplaces. Right. So I think all that comes
into it, but I do think that. Being able to have different skill
sets and different platform skill sets does open you up to even more work
outside of just bubble work, you know, a lot of web stuff coming in, a lot of
flutter flow stuff coming in you know, all that kind of work could you know,
lead to more opportunities in different areas and different clients as well. That's fair. Definitely. So whatever you're doing with your
journey, just make sure it's what you want to do in your journey. It's your journey. So do it for a reason. Have fun with it. Make sure it's taking you to
the place that you want to go. But otherwise, like we're
in a good time right now. Like technology is flourishing. Platforms are getting better than ever. People recognize the need for automations,
for efficiencies, for technologies, I think more than ever before. I think every company is turning
into a tech company, so it can't be a better time than what it is
for what we're doing right now. Just make sure it's what you want to do. That's all. That's all we're going to say. Yeah. And you can always take a break, come
back, realize you made the wrong choice. And there's going to be more demand. There's always going to be
more people building software. No code will still be here. No, take a chance All right, that's all we
got for you this week. Otherwise, we will see you next week week in no no code. See you guys. See ya.
