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Kilian: Hey Prince.

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Nesters: Yeah, I'm here.

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Daniel: Hey Prince, can you hear me?

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Nesters: Yeah, I can hear...

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Nesters: hopefully you can hear me guys as well.

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Daniel: Yeah, yeah, we can hear you loud and clear.

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Nesters: I have way too many way too many mic devices.

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Daniel: No, no, this is a good one.

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Nesters: Yeah.

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Nesters: Okay, so I need to promote Christian as well.

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Nesters: Okay, so initially we were even planning that we're only going to introduce, I guess, the resident experts, but I see that there's requests even from community members to already to speak.

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Nesters: So that's interesting.

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Nesters: Are we adding them already?

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Daniel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let them speak.

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Nesters: We can definitely add some.

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Nesters: Yeah, yeah, we can add Vlad for now.

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Nesters: And Lilian is here as well.

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Nesters: Vlad is a trusted guy.

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Daniel: We can let him speak.

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Daniel: Hey everyone, how's it going?

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Daniel: Hi Christian.

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Daniel: I'm good.

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Daniel: Hey guys.

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Daniel: Hey Kylian.

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Nesters: Hey.

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Nesters: Yeah, it's the first time speaking to some of the resident experts and members as well.

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Nesters: Yeah, good to link the voice.

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Nesters: Actually, Daniel, is it possible to integrate voice in the base case in like 37 seconds?

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Nesters: Oops, sorry guys.

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Nesters: That was not my intention, by the way, to mute everyone, because someone requested to speak, but then they removed the request and I pressed the mute button because it shifted on the screen.

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Nesters: This is one of the problems.

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Nesters: Yeah, no worries.

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Daniel: I think you, Kylian, asked the question.

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Daniel: I mean, everything is possible.

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Daniel: It's a code base that we can write code and make it do that.

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Daniel: I don't think there's a trivial way to do it.

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Daniel: I don't think it's very straightforward.

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Daniel: But maybe something we'll explore in the future.

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Daniel: I don't know.

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Daniel: Yeah, I think I'm more inclined to use X spaces like we're doing here for these kinds of things.

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Daniel: It allows us to sort of have a broader audience.

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Daniel: But yeah, we'll see.

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Nesters: Yeah, and other people can join.

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Nesters: Yeah, I made one suggestion that we could have that Hangout room like you have on Discord sometimes.

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Nesters: But that was the only reason I mentioned having maybe a voice channel there.

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Nesters: But I think this is more about also a little bit of promotion of the community, of course, and letting everyone join, because not many even maybe visit the campfire as often.

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Nesters: And they might actually see it here and finally check in again.

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Daniel: I agree.

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Daniel: I think something we can do, I think you, Nestor, suggested it is like having a calendar in campfire with scheduled spaces like this.

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Daniel: Yeah.

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Daniel: First of all, bear in mind that feature doesn't work in Twitter.

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Daniel: We're just joking.

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Daniel: We can do that.

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Daniel: And there will be like a sense of place for people to know like what's coming up.

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Daniel: So something we can look into.

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Nesters: Yeah, which was also that the members could also potentially add their some kind of launch events on the calendar as well.

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Nesters: I agree.

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Nesters: I agree.

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Nesters: Maybe that's a good idea.

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Daniel: I think that's something we can do.

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Nesters: Yeah, I see more people joining in.

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Nesters: That's nice.

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Nesters: Yeah, anyone who wants to also ask questions or speak and also request that.

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Nesters: Hopefully I won't mute the space next time.

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Nesters: Oh yeah, I forgot to remind Orly, actually.

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Nesters: I promised him to remind about the space.

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Nesters: But he joined.

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Nesters: Yeah, you can request to speak, by the way, if you're interested.

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Nesters: So yeah, for those who don't even know about... Oh yeah, Francesco is here as well.

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Nesters: You can request to speak.

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Nesters: Yep.

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Nesters: Let's add you to the... Oh okay, let's get you Orly.

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Nesters: And where's Francesco?

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Nesters: I came from you, Nestor.

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orlie: Yeah, sorry, I was actually stuck buying groceries.

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orlie: You're excused.

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orlie: But luckily the X notification somehow worked today.

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orlie: So here we go.

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orlie: Nice.

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Nesters: Where do you live, Nestor?

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Nesters: Do you live in the States or in Europe?

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Nesters: No, Europe.

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Nesters: I'm actually in Latvia right now.

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Nesters: Okay, yeah.

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Nesters: It's your home country?

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Nesters: Yeah.

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Nesters: Awesome.

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Nesters: I mean, I lived in Sweden before for a while as well and otherwise I've only traveled around a little bit.

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Nesters: But yeah, I mostly live here.

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Nesters: I guess I enjoy it here, even though it's a little bit spicy right now in some regards.

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Nesters: But yeah, I like being close to also family and friends.

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Kilian: I remember Latvia from the 2004 Soccer European Cup.

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Kilian: That was the only tournament I think you qualified and you drew against Germany 0-0.

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Nesters: Yeah, I remember.

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Nesters: We had like one good player at that time.

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Nesters: I remember him.

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Kilian: There was another one, Rubin or so.

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Nesters: Rubin, yeah, that was decent.

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Nesters: Look, I remember those players.

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Nesters: I was maybe like, yeah, I was eight.

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Nesters: I keep that in my memory.

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Nesters: Man, that hurts.

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Nesters: Yeah, I watched that as well back then.

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Nesters: I don't actually watch football much, but I did watch that tournament.

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Hassan: Hey Nestors, thanks so much for setting this up.

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Hassan: And this is great to kind of have everyone here as a speaker from small bets.

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Hassan: Maybe we'll kick it off by congratulating the man, the myth, the legend Daniel DeSalo on the amazing sale of small bets to Gumroad.

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Hassan: How does it feel, Daniel?

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Hassan: Like how's that sort of milestone here for you and what's next for everyone who's considering joining small bets and the experts?

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Daniel: Yeah, thank you.

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Daniel: Very unexpected.

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Daniel: Absolutely wasn't on my radar at all until about a month or so when Sahil reached out.

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Daniel: So yeah, I mean, you know, how does it feel?

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Daniel: I don't know if I'm going to disappoint everyone, but I don't know.

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Daniel: Not a lot different.

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Daniel: But it's exciting.

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Daniel: I think it's interesting because my journey has been like, it's funny, like I started self-employment and I took the plunge from full-time to self-employment in 2019.

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Daniel: And like almost every single year, almost every calendar year, there was something different.

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Daniel: Maybe the only two years that were somewhat similar were maybe 2022 and 2023.

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Daniel: But otherwise, there was always some new thing happening, major income stream, new product and whatever.

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Daniel: And this, you know, I started this year thinking it's going to be more of the same as last year.

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Daniel: But now this thing happened.

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Daniel: So excited.

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Daniel: I think it's especially, look, with small bets, I honestly, I really believe, I know this is very often said, and sometimes the promise is not held, but I honestly think, you know, nothing is going to change at least in the near term.

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Daniel: There's no reason to.

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Daniel: You know, small bets is a profitable business.

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Daniel: Basically, it's been cashflow positive for 41 consecutive late months.

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Daniel: Gumroad acquired it again for partly, you know, not the only reason, but partly for the economic interest to add the profits to its bottom line rather than just to mine.

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Daniel: So that's certainly no, I see no reason to disrupt that.

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Daniel: And I think there's still, you know, the business is still healthy there.

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Daniel: But I think my involvement with Gumroad as a company is exciting to me because it's a higher level now of a bigger business.

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Daniel: And part of the deal is that I'm going to be getting a decent size of equity.

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Daniel: It will vest over time.

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Daniel: So not immediately, but once everything vests and everything sort of gets exercised, I would eventually own about 4.4% of Gumroad.

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Daniel: So I'm very excited to try to, I wouldn't necessarily say turn the business around because the business is doing well already.

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Daniel: But there's like, you know, there's a potential for something better there.

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Daniel: And I certainly wouldn't have been able to pursue that kind of outcome just with small bets as is on my own.

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Daniel: So excited about that.

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Daniel: So honestly, I'm not hiding anything.

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Daniel: There's no concrete plans yet.

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Daniel: Almost about anything.

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Daniel: Just some vague ideas floating around.

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Daniel: But if anything, if there's any direction, is I think small bets has proven that there's a need for helping a new and aspiring entrepreneurs basically finding their first small wins.

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Daniel: And this is not something that software can do.

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Daniel: Not even AI can help much at all yet.

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Daniel: So this is not a matter of let's add more features to Gumroad or let's, you know, or like, or reduce prices or so on and so forth.

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Daniel: It's purely an educational slash support network kind of thing.

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Daniel: And I think small bets as the community has shown that it can be helpful.

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Daniel: Not to everyone.

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Daniel: I'm not going to exaggerate it.

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Daniel: Every member has gotten some life changing transformation.

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Daniel: But certainly there's a good percentage.

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Daniel: Recently, as you know, since August of last year, I started doing also these one on one consultations with people.

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Daniel: I know there's a few people in the group here with whom I have these with as well.

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Daniel: And those also have been very interesting in terms of assistance.

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Daniel: In fact, I would say probably with everything I've tried in the educational space with regards to doing recorded courses, books, communities, live events, the one on one consults probably I would say have maybe been the most effective in terms of actually seeing the results on a percentage level.

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Daniel: That's also has been interesting.

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Daniel: And now basically one vague idea that we're sort of having is like potentially expanding this to not just, of course, me, because certainly I don't know everything and I can't help with everything.

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Daniel: There's lots of things that I can't be helpful with.

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Daniel: But to assemble a team of 10, 20 people, right, that can almost be like, you know, your plans on speed diet with experience in different things.

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Daniel: And I would like to try this with small bets first.

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Daniel: But there's potentially, you know, an idea that this could eventually expand to being something under the Gumroad brand, where, you know, that brand could evolve into more of a community with payment processing being just a tool that supports creators.

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Daniel: But this is something that Sahil agrees with a lot that, you know, we could be helping people who could just not use Gumroad at all.

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Right.

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Daniel: And this would be, that would be amazing.

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Daniel: So actually, it could be people using competing products as well, like, like yourself, Hasan, you know, using Udemy.

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Daniel: And I know you use Gumroad and you're a fan as well.

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Daniel: But, you know, big on Udemy and Amazon KDP, which technically are the competing products to Gumroad.

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Daniel: But why not help people as well who are, for whom those platforms are even a better fit.

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Daniel: And I've already been doing that myself.

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Daniel: When I, when I, when I meet someone who, or whom, you know, KDP would work better, that's what I would recommend.

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Daniel: So I think, like I explained in my announcement tweet, that sort of payment processing seems to be almost like a lace at the bottom.

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Daniel: I still believe that Gumroad as a product is probably the most feature rich and the simpler to use.

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Daniel: And, you know, it has everything people need, especially for selling digital products.

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Daniel: But it's very hard to compete when there's like, in the game now, you know, charging very low prices, there are competitors who are very likely losing money that we don't really know for sure.

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Daniel: It's very hard to compete just on features there.

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Daniel: Like, it likely needs something more like a support network.

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Daniel: And, you know, vaguely, there's the direction, right?

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Daniel: So I think smallbags fits part of it, just because it has been doing this.

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Daniel: And maybe, you know, we can make it into something bigger as well.

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Daniel: But yeah, I'm very excited.

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Daniel: And yeah, thank you all for the best good wishes and for being of support.

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Daniel: And I think many of you here in the room are members of smallbags as well.

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Daniel: So thank you.

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Hassan: Super excited about what's next for sure.

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Hassan: I mean, to your point earlier about the unlimited consulting package, I think, especially with the whole AI shift, people are gravitating more towards, you know, one-on-one conversations.

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Hassan: I think the resident experts program worked a lot.

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Hassan: I know Francesco and I have had conversations about that as well, that it's, you know, it's working.

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Hassan: And plus the community aspect of smallbags is something that can't be replaced by AI as well, right?

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Hassan: Like, you want to connect with other people with their own unique stories and experiences.

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Hassan: One quick question, Daniel, and then maybe we'll open it up to everyone who wants to ask a question.

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Hassan: I know Nestors is kindly hosting this today.

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Hassan: Do you foresee that smallbags could become like an upsell with Gumroad?

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Hassan: Like meaning someone signs up to Gumroad and then part of that onboarding process, this could be a, you know, a plugin or an add-on for that?

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Daniel: Yeah, no, no.

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Daniel: So almost certainly that's what will happen.

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Daniel: And I think, you know, part of the economics of the business, smallbags did about 420k in profit last year.

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Daniel: There's a good part of that was Gumroad fees.

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Daniel: So, you know, Gumroad now gets to keep those as well.

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Daniel: So probably about 500k in profit if you exclude Gumroad fees.

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Daniel: We really think that with the upsell opportunity, we could probably even double this.

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Daniel: Maybe not immediately, right?

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Daniel: But Gumroad has a bigger audience than I have and that smallbags has.

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Daniel: But imagine if everyone in the Gumroad dashboard were to have a button to join smallbags.

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Daniel: And, you know, I think basically it could just improve the business, right, as well.

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Daniel: And I think, yeah, offer something to all creators that is a bit unique.

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Daniel: So it's almost like the default play there.

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Daniel: So this seems almost like a no-brainer.

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Daniel: But I don't think the desire is to stop there.

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Daniel: I think that would be a nice step, but not sufficient to do the big repositioning that we're thinking about.

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Daniel: But this would like to be the first step.

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Daniel: Absolutely.

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Daniel: Awesome.

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Hassan: That makes a lot of sense.

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Nesters: Great.

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Nesters: So Nestor, over to you.

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Nesters: Yeah.

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Nesters: I guess one more question regarding that Twitter comment where Sahil asked if you're joining as CEO of Gumroad.

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Nesters: Are you taking a role where you're going to be more active in that product?

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Nesters: Yeah, yeah, not as a CEO.

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Daniel: That was a bit of a...

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Nesters: I know it was a bit of a joke, but... Yeah, yeah.

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Daniel: So, yeah, part of the deal was that I keep running smallbags as is, right?

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Daniel: So I'm basically, smallbags is going to continue to be its own subsidiary, its own LLC, and, you know, just Gumroad, its own owner.

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Daniel: So effectively, it's like I'm still like the CEO of smallbags, the business.

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Daniel: But in addition to that, part of the deal was that I also helped in... so, you know, when we had the conversation initially, like we were talking about, you know, me helping sort of part-time with some product management side with Gumroad, which is something that some of you might know I had done before for a couple of years.

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Daniel: But when we started discussing about how actually we'll do it, right?

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Daniel: In terms of my own other constraints, and so on and so forth, the arrangement was that it's interesting, right?

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Daniel: Because it's like I'm extending my one-on-one consulting services to the Gumroad team.

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Daniel: So literally, like I offered my Calendly to everyone at Gumroad, right?

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Daniel: So whenever the engineers or Sahil or others, like, need my assistance on anything, they can just book a call with me, right?

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Daniel: And we can sort of discuss the roadmap, discuss the products, discuss, you know, support issues and things like that.

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Daniel: So basically, I'm not taking any salary.

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Daniel: There's a small asterisk here.

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Daniel: I mentioned this in the... but basically, my proposal for the deal was I would take no salary once the lawyers started writing this up.

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Daniel: They realized there's a law in my home state that since I'm still offering some services to the company, it would potentially be a bit sketchy to not take a salary because it can look like what they call disguised compensation since I'm getting paid for the acquisition.

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Daniel: And in terms of taxation, acquisition is taxed as a capital gains tax, which is much lower than income tax on a salary.

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Daniel: I think, you know, some people in the past might have disguised their compensation as a capital gain instead of an income gain.

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Daniel: Not to bore you with the details, I'm going to have to get paid a minimum wage just, you know, to be by the books.

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Daniel: But I'm going to actually be using that income just to have my options exercised anyway.

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Daniel: So in terms of cash flow, I'm not really gaining anything from Gumroad.

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Daniel: But basically, I have my own vested interest with my equity part.

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Daniel: So look, I mean, completely honest, I mean, Gumroad, you know, stays where it is, or, or the business links, basically, my equity becomes pretty much worthless, where it's zero, right.

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Daniel: So, you know, my drive will be to help the company turn that around, right, and make my equity worth much more than the 1.8 million that it is currently worth right now.

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Daniel: Again, like, it's not actually, I don't really have it completely yet, it will vest over time.

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Daniel: But that's the that's the desire.

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Daniel: So to answer your question, yes, I'm offering some services to Gumroad, not really in an employee fashion, as people would expect, because sometimes these acquisitions, partly they're an acqui-hire, and like, you get the founder to become a director or something.

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Daniel: There's certainly a little bit of that, right, I mean, it was clear inside his intention that he wants me to part of this deal wants me to be involved in Gumroad.

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Daniel: But I think we both know each other that I'm probably not fit to be like a nine to five employee, right, where, you know, I have, like, things to do.

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Daniel: And that's also what I mean, I insisted not to take a salary, because I think, actually, Sahil, when we discussed, he was actually mentioning that probably I should take something reasonable, like, just for my own involvement.

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Daniel: But I really also didn't want to be like, you know, I'm collecting, say, $10,000 a month or something, and I need to be justifying those every time.

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Daniel: I really want my input to be very strategic and as high leverage as possible, right, where, you know, there's nothing to do, you know, like, no, I shouldn't be doing anything, right, but if I can help adjust course or, you know, or, you know, give some input,

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Nesters: yeah, that would be good.

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Nesters: Obviously, I guess we would love to sometimes be heard about some of the features with Gumroad, because I know it's a little bit more US-centric product.

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Nesters: It's has been way less accommodating, I guess, for European users so far, because of the tax not being included in the price.

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Nesters: And then on the checkout, you see the VAT, it actually works even... it's more of a buyer's perspective that, like, suddenly, there's an extra tax on top.

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Nesters: I agree.

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Daniel: These are things that I think I can help with, because I think one of the benefits of having... look, I've been a power user of Gumroad for five... more than five years now.

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Daniel: I think I got access to the database.

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Daniel: I'm the 40th creator by lifetime sales, and, you know, sold 30,000 customers.

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Daniel: So, I've heard these complaints firsthand, and I've, you know, suffered through them as well, because, like you're saying, people tell me, you know, the VAT should be included in the price, and I can see... so, especially for high-ticket items, like my consultations,

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Daniel: I charge $2,500, like my people from certain European countries get slapped, you know, an extra 25% or 22%.

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Daniel: I mean, it's not... it doesn't help conversion.

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Daniel: Let's put it this way.

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Daniel: Although, anyway, long story short, I think I can bring these insights to Gumroad, as which, yeah, I think, you know, because the engineering team is usually focused on... of course, you know, good stuff, you know, incremental improvements, but sometimes it helps to have someone who's been in the arena,

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Daniel: so to speak, to actually bring, you know, these somewhat consequential... actually, I don't think they're very consequential to... like, if you're selling a $10 digital product, whether the VAT is included in the price or not probably doesn't matter that much,

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Daniel: at least.

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Daniel: So, and that's probably the bulk of Gumroad's volume.

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Daniel: But I think, yeah, like, once you're selling higher ticket items, and there's all these little things.

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Daniel: And I have my own little pet peeves as well, like the checkout process, like small things as well, like the back button on the checkout takes you to the profile page, and like, little things like that, that I think I can bring forward to the team that's with data and first-hand experience about why they're more important.

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Nesters: Yeah, I mean, mostly coming from, sorry, mostly coming from Shopify and like eCommerce, there's a lot of small things like this, including the variations of the products, they're so hard to set up properly, because you're like bumping the price of each option.

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Daniel: There's a balance, I think, I still believe that, you know, Gumroad should continue to be elling on being simple rather than a power user, because I've seen competitors like, you know, Teachable was a good example of a very good product, but I want to start to set up something there,

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Daniel: just again, a bit of market research.

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Daniel: And it's incredibly complicated, I felt like, I know, barely even setting the price of something.

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Daniel: So, you know, once you start getting, because it's a balance, like once you're getting, you know, variations, you're already creating a bit of, you know, facet of complexity, it can never be completely very, very simple.

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Daniel: The reality, however, is that I think it's expected that there's going to be some categories or some businesses that just are not a good fit, or, oops, did I, sorry, no, I thought...

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Daniel: Ah, you're fine, you're fine.

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Daniel: That are not a good fit, or they outgrow Gumroad, right, and that's always going to be the case, right, that, you know, you start with something simple, and then your product becomes so sophisticated that you just need more control.

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Daniel: And you might, yeah, build your own thing on top of Stripe, or use Shopify, or so on and so forth.

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Daniel: I think that's always going to be the reality.

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Daniel: And I still think, you know, and I think this is in line with the community part as well, like Gumroad's focus, what is a product, and even the community part will be more in terms of helping people go from zero to one, getting their first small wins,

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Daniel: getting something going.

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Daniel: Because then, you know, once you're successful, lots of options starts to open up for you.

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Daniel: And, you know, it's hard to have something for everything.

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Daniel: One other thing we're thinking of doing, it is, again, very, you know, we just started discussing it, but Gumroad as a company also has, actually, I'm quite, to be honest, blown away by some of the quality of some of the other products they have.

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Daniel: They have, for example, a customer support tool called helper.ai, which Gumroad is using internally.

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Daniel: He's been using it I think for over a year now.

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Daniel: It's very, very impressive in terms of its features.

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Daniel: Currently, it doesn't really have a lot of other external customers.

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Daniel: There's some discussions.

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Daniel: But something interesting that we discussed together is that, because, you know, if you're selling the tool, again, there's lots of competition.

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Daniel: There's Intercom, there's HelpScout, there's others out there that are, again, somewhat similar features, and it's very hard to just compete on features alone.

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Daniel: But I really think for creators who are somewhat already successful, you know, for me personally, for example, one of my biggest pain points of running small business has been just customer support.

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Daniel: Customer support of the kind, I forgot my email, I want a refund, I can't log in, my browser is not working, this kind of thing.

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Daniel: I don't get, you know, at my scale, I don't get super high volumes, maybe two to three tickets a day.

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Daniel: But it's really, you know, it's really a quality of life, you know, negative thing.

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Daniel: You have to, you know, deal with this.

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Daniel: And they're important.

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Daniel: Of course, I don't want to let my customers down if they can't log in.

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Daniel: It's a big deal for them.

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Daniel: But wouldn't it be amazing if, say, Gumroad were to take over your customer support?

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Daniel: Not just give you a tool to help you, right?

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Daniel: But, you know, we can talk about Gumroad support.

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Daniel: I know there's currently a bit of a reputation that, you know, they're not doing great.

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Daniel: But actually, right, there's actually quite a very good system, very good employees behind the scenes, around the clock, like, answering tickets, and they're very, very efficient and effective.

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Daniel: Like, my three tickets a day, basically, I think they could handle them, like, in, like, minutes.

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Daniel: And honestly, I would probably pay $500 a month, $1,000 a month, almost blindly.

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Daniel: For example, for my business.

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Daniel: If, say, Gumroad were to take that off of my hands, right, and just do customer support for me.

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Daniel: Completed as a service.

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Daniel: It's a bit like hiring a virtual assistant.

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Daniel: But instead of having to find someone and teach them, like, you're actually starting with someone who's been doing this, you know, for 14 years.

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Daniel: I think Gumroad receives something, if I'm not mistaken, thousands of tickets a day.

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Daniel: I don't remember the exact numbers.

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Daniel: But very much experienced in handling this stuff.

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Nesters: Yeah, I think I agree, actually, that can be a good service.

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Nesters: There is a little bit of that personal touch missing when you hand over the customer support to someone else, which sometimes is great for the creator to actually basically... that works as good marketing sometimes with the creator.

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Daniel: Yeah, I think so.

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Daniel: Although, personally, this is the reason why I've done it myself for a long time.

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Daniel: But I think once you started getting to these very low technical things, like, again, I just forgot my email or, you know, things like that.

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Daniel: It's... sure.

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Daniel: I mean, if the creator responds...

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Nesters: If it's an if-else, if it's like an if-else statement very early, if the question is about a specific thing, you forward it to the creator, right?

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Nesters: Yeah, that makes complete sense.

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Yeah.

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Daniel: And, you know, even the setup, right?

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Daniel: Of course, there could still be things forwarded to the creator and this escalation.

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Daniel: So more, of course, like the first level of support to take things away.

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Daniel: I know, for example, you know, Peter Levis automates a lot of these things.

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Daniel: It's interesting.

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Daniel: I think, I don't know to the extent, but I saw him tweet, for example, he automated refunds that if someone replies with the word refund in an email, it literally looks up their Skype account and defines them automatically, which is quite interesting.

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Daniel: Yeah, I saw that.

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Daniel: It's, I mean, very efficient.

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Daniel: It's basically doing things like that.

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Daniel: To be honest with you, I don't know if I would be confident automating it to that level, because maybe, you know, I would be curious about the false positives or things like that.

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Daniel: Someone might say, I don't want a refund and you give them a refund.

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Daniel: Something like that, for example.

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Nesters: Yeah, or you have some kind of AI agent available, which like checks every single refund window for your products and automatically starts requesting refunds.

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Nesters: Exactly.

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Daniel: There you go.

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Yeah.

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Nesters: Obviously, there's that abuse as well, if you automate it all the way.

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Daniel: But actually, you know, customer support with Gumroad, I know some of you might have maybe had, because, you know, Gumroad has huge volumes of support.

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Daniel: This is one of the hard truths of running a business like this, like lots of, again, from customers, from sellers, and so on, so forth.

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Daniel: So there's been time to automate as much as possible and to streamline and so on, so forth.

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Daniel: And certainly, there's been a period where I think it was, the experiments weren't working.

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Daniel: I think you, Nestor, encountered some of this yourself, with regards to... Yeah, I think that was one of the worst cases I've seen.

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Daniel: I think so.

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Daniel: And I think yours should be fixed.

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Daniel: In fact, just yesterday, I had a discussion, because actually, the improvement has been to flag accounts as VIPs, right?

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Daniel: And VIPs get treated normally as a human.

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Daniel: I mean, there's a layer of AI happening, right?

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Daniel: It just sort of summarizes things and drafts the response, and it pulls some data from the system.

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Daniel: But there's always, not only does a human responding, but there's also like, notifications in Slack, like if there's a VIP request that's been delayed for like more than 12 hours, people get literally pinged and mentioned to take a look.

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Daniel: And there's like, they keep recurring, so they can't get ignored, which I think actually, it's a good system.

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Daniel: And I think one of the problems that was happening is that there were still some people like you who are falling between the cracks of like, not being marked as a VIP, and you're just getting treated with almost like, with all the other spam.

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Daniel: But yeah, we've been tweaking this with, for example, something I just noticed yesterday, someone pinged me actually on DMs, there was a guy who did $50,000 in sales like eight years ago.

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Daniel: And they were trying to do something new on Gumroad.

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Daniel: And they ran into some issue today with setting up their bank account and whatever.

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Daniel: But since they hadn't done sales for a long time, you know, again, they had fallen to the cracks of not being treated as a VIP, and they didn't get the support they needed.

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Daniel: And then they get very annoyed, which was very rightfully so.

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Daniel: But yeah, we're just tweaking this, for example.

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Daniel: So now we're like looking at like your lifetime sales, like if you've done more than $1,000 in lifetime sales, for example, you're automatically, this is not the only threshold, by the way, and I'm sure it will continue to get tweaked, you're automatically treated as a VIP and things like that.

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Daniel: So but like, it's a very interesting challenge, right, in terms of how to shift to all the noise and to create a stopping.

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Nesters: Yeah, I think we're gonna switch up a little bit.

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Nesters: And I know a few people asked to speak before, but I didn't approve during the conversation.

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Nesters: So and I guess they disappeared or withdrew their request.

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Nesters: If you want to like ask a question right now, still to Daniel or something, or whatever, any resident experts, you can do that.

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Nesters: And we can also, I guess, instead of Gumroad, we can also speak a little bit more about the actual community and the resident experts, which is a nice feature that I believe a lot of people still don't really know that it exists, although it is within the community.

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Daniel: I can start a little bit with the motivation of why I did this, and you're happy to take questions, but there are actually, I think, two reasons.

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Daniel: So first of all, the resident experts program, we gathered 12 people with first-hand experience who are always available in the campfire small beds group chat to answer questions on the things that they have experienced.

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Daniel: So there's some compensation as well for the experts based on the questions they answered.

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Daniel: That's also sort of a paid thing.

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Daniel: And the motivation to do this work twofold.

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Daniel: One is to increase the quality of the responses.

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Daniel: But to be honest, many of these people who are in the resident experts group have already been voluntarily helping people in the community for many, many times.

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Daniel: Nestor, certainly one of them, Hassan, many others here as well.

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Daniel: So I'm very grateful to that.

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Daniel: But so this is just to systematise it a little bit and, you know, fairly compensate these people for their time.

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Daniel: Some of the responses, you know, usually take minutes and more to thoughtfully answer.

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Daniel: But also to motivate again, like to have high-quality answers to members who have problems.

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Daniel: So this was one of the motivations.

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Daniel: The other motivation was a bit more subtle.

384
00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:55,660
Daniel: I think something I noticed is that members of the small bed community, sometimes they feel a bit timid asking a question.

385
00:33:56,080 --> 00:33:57,840
Daniel: You know, they jump into the community.

386
00:33:58,100 --> 00:34:00,060
Daniel: They maybe have never really spoken before.

387
00:34:00,840 --> 00:34:08,200
Daniel: They feel a bit they shouldn't be asking before they contributed first.

388
00:34:08,360 --> 00:34:12,320
Daniel: You know, there's this somewhat feeling of reciprocity.

389
00:34:12,520 --> 00:34:16,920
Daniel: If I haven't been active yet, I have no place asking for help.

390
00:34:17,760 --> 00:34:21,280
Daniel: And I wanted to try to address that.

391
00:34:21,680 --> 00:34:27,020
Daniel: Where, look, now, you know, there are these people who are paid to help you.

392
00:34:27,360 --> 00:34:27,980
Daniel: So feel free.

393
00:34:28,240 --> 00:34:30,180
Daniel: Tag them and they will help you.

394
00:34:30,360 --> 00:34:38,060
Daniel: You don't need to feel that you need to introduce yourself or contribute back and so on and so forth.

395
00:34:39,060 --> 00:34:43,280
Daniel: So on the first goal, I think that's working really well.

396
00:34:44,060 --> 00:34:49,760
Daniel: I'm actually very impressed with the quality of the answers the experts are giving.

397
00:34:50,140 --> 00:34:55,580
Daniel: I got a lot of very, very good feedback from members who were really blown away and impressed by what they got.

398
00:34:55,900 --> 00:34:56,780
Daniel: So that helped.

399
00:34:56,860 --> 00:35:02,880
Daniel: I think it's improved engagement a lot from existing members.

400
00:35:03,380 --> 00:35:04,100
Daniel: So very good.

401
00:35:04,320 --> 00:35:07,200
Daniel: With the second one, I'm still not convinced it helped.

402
00:35:07,620 --> 00:35:13,260
Daniel: Or maybe my messaging didn't really help with people to not feel that comfortable.

403
00:35:13,420 --> 00:35:29,820
Daniel: I think there's probably still a gap that I need to address maybe either with the onboarding or something in the group chat to try to reduce this fear or this sort of timidness of just asking questions.

404
00:35:30,520 --> 00:35:32,940
Nesters: Yeah, a few more people are DMing now, though.

405
00:35:33,220 --> 00:35:37,900
Nesters: Like, there are actually an increase in people who are just asking questions in DMs.

406
00:35:37,980 --> 00:35:41,160
Nesters: Because they're maybe not comfortable bringing up the problem publicly.

407
00:35:41,440 --> 00:35:42,760
Nesters: That's more of a...

408
00:35:42,760 --> 00:35:45,320
Daniel: Yeah, and that's totally fine.

409
00:35:45,500 --> 00:36:01,600
Daniel: And that's very clear as well with the Express program, that you can DM the experts directly for any reason, whether you want to keep it private, or whether, again, you don't feel like it should be discussed in public form, completely fine, completely encouraged.

410
00:36:02,420 --> 00:36:04,940
Daniel: And that's good that that's happening as well.

411
00:36:06,280 --> 00:36:12,100
Daniel: But yeah, I think there's always a challenge with community.

412
00:36:14,900 --> 00:36:18,480
Daniel: In terms of... I think we definitely think digitally, actually.

413
00:36:18,640 --> 00:36:19,840
Daniel: I think even with social media.

414
00:36:20,080 --> 00:36:28,320
Daniel: I think there's a famous ratio, heuristic, that is like 10% lurk, I forgot, like 1% produce.

415
00:36:28,620 --> 00:36:30,720
Daniel: I forgot what the ratios and the numbers are.

416
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:32,920
Daniel: And I basically noticed the same thing with small banks.

417
00:36:33,360 --> 00:36:38,160
Daniel: I think the numbers are about 6,600 members now.

418
00:36:38,960 --> 00:36:47,480
Daniel: Daily active users who log in and check out the chat are about 400 unique a day.

419
00:36:48,080 --> 00:36:53,720
Daniel: But those who actually post are more about 50 people who post at least a message or something like that.

420
00:36:54,080 --> 00:36:56,220
Daniel: And those who post a lot are even fewer.

421
00:36:57,180 --> 00:37:03,640
Daniel: So I don't think it's possible to eliminate that kind of ratio.

422
00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:09,400
Daniel: But I think there's probably opportunities to maybe widen it a little bit.

423
00:37:09,980 --> 00:37:17,000
Daniel: I certainly would like to see even more people who log in every day and who ask more.

424
00:37:17,340 --> 00:37:19,860
Daniel: But yeah, so there's some room for improvement there still.

425
00:37:20,100 --> 00:37:30,160
Daniel: And I have some ideas, I think, with probably with just the UI and the maybe welcome screens and onboarding and reminders and things like that.

426
00:37:30,420 --> 00:37:34,460
Daniel: Probably my next bet would be on how to dis-suspect.

427
00:37:35,700 --> 00:37:45,620
Nesters: But yeah, I believe many agree at the point that onboarding is like the one thing we kind of lack.

428
00:37:45,700 --> 00:37:52,200
Nesters: Because when you come in and see all those channels, it's definitely overwhelming to actually see the list of the channels as well.

429
00:37:53,220 --> 00:37:57,220
Nesters: And nowadays there's like 30 to 40 active channels, I believe, daily.

430
00:37:57,620 --> 00:38:02,660
Nesters: Which obviously, if anyone's listening here hasn't joined, there's a lot of different topics being discussed.

431
00:38:03,300 --> 00:38:10,560
Nesters: There's like 30, I believe like 30 channels daily now are active, at least one to two messages, at least in those channels.

432
00:38:10,720 --> 00:38:12,160
Nesters: A lot of them get like 10 plus.

433
00:38:12,940 --> 00:38:15,960
Nesters: So it's great in that way.

434
00:38:16,040 --> 00:38:22,940
Nesters: But it's also overwhelming without a little bit more onboarding experience where people actually maybe can select the topics they like more.

435
00:38:24,240 --> 00:38:29,560
Nesters: When they're being onboarded, maybe like some kind of like just chill, just you can message.

436
00:38:29,700 --> 00:38:31,800
Nesters: Because some people also leave those messages when they join.

437
00:38:31,940 --> 00:38:35,700
Nesters: I'm like, I'm not sure if I'm comfortable, you know, like leaving a message right now.

438
00:38:37,700 --> 00:38:42,900
Nesters: Yeah, that kind of thing obviously has been one of the, I guess, issues I've noticed.

439
00:38:43,120 --> 00:38:49,540
Nesters: And as you mentioned the numbers, yeah, I think we're like our users probably like one to two percent, probably like 1% of all the members.

440
00:38:50,060 --> 00:38:53,980
Nesters: And then like 9%, I guess, are those who like occasionally message.

441
00:38:54,180 --> 00:38:58,000
Nesters: And then the 90% probably are lurking for most part.

442
00:38:58,460 --> 00:39:00,040
Nesters: That's probably around yeah.

443
00:39:00,460 --> 00:39:02,800
Daniel: And just go ahead already.

444
00:39:02,980 --> 00:39:03,680
Daniel: Yes, yes, go ahead.

445
00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:04,500
orlie: Yes, yes.

446
00:39:04,580 --> 00:39:07,120
orlie: I had a couple questions about this specifically.

447
00:39:07,340 --> 00:39:11,440
orlie: Like I have three questions maybe or suggestions, I don't know.

448
00:39:11,620 --> 00:39:19,920
orlie: But yeah, the channels, you know, like the fact that anyone can create any channel, I find that's kind of too much.

449
00:39:20,540 --> 00:39:20,900
orlie: Yeah.

450
00:39:21,160 --> 00:39:29,980
orlie: And I know you guys probably like moderate and clean up the channels, but it's really hard to like, you know, always keep track of all the channels.

451
00:39:30,260 --> 00:39:33,580
orlie: You know, they're ordered by recency, which I find very cool.

452
00:39:33,700 --> 00:39:41,920
orlie: But like sometimes there's recent channels that I have no interest in communicating in and just in like relationship and advice.

453
00:39:42,040 --> 00:39:47,600
orlie: Like yesterday night I was like, okay, well, I don't know anything about giving advice on relationships or whatever.

454
00:39:47,740 --> 00:39:49,200
orlie: So why does it pop up for me?

455
00:39:49,260 --> 00:39:55,100
orlie: So I guess the fact that it's there by default and it's kind of overwhelming as a user.

456
00:39:55,780 --> 00:40:05,420
orlie: The second thing about onboarding and something that I'm curious why, or maybe it's coming, but some sort of like mind groups or whatever you want to call them.

457
00:40:05,760 --> 00:40:15,140
orlie: I've done this before where you get like four or five people in a group together in a session where everyone has their webcam on or just voice or whatever.

458
00:40:15,140 --> 00:40:19,260
orlie: And you kind of discuss like blockers around a certain theme.

459
00:40:19,680 --> 00:40:25,620
orlie: And so you can join like a theme, like a channel basically, but like with real people, right?

460
00:40:25,680 --> 00:40:33,560
orlie: So you actually speak by a voice and it's a little bit more close counters, if that makes sense, with like one moderator.

461
00:40:34,300 --> 00:40:36,700
orlie: And I can expand on that later, perhaps.

462
00:40:37,100 --> 00:40:43,640
orlie: Those were the two main things that I was kind of curious about why this decision.

463
00:40:43,640 --> 00:40:48,360
orlie: And the last thing is the emoji picker and the coding system.

464
00:40:48,800 --> 00:40:50,840
orlie: The emoji picker thing is kind of unique.

465
00:40:50,960 --> 00:40:52,480
orlie: I think it's interesting.

466
00:40:53,020 --> 00:40:54,480
orlie: I don't think that's a bad thing.

467
00:40:54,820 --> 00:41:10,160
orlie: But when I quote someone, like try to respond to them, I find that a little clunky, especially when there's maybe a wall of text and I basically end up having to quote and then delete parts of the quote, if that makes sense when I reply to someone.

468
00:41:10,820 --> 00:41:11,120
orlie: Yeah, yeah.

469
00:41:11,220 --> 00:41:11,500
Daniel: No, no.

470
00:41:11,580 --> 00:41:12,500
Daniel: Very good points.

471
00:41:12,960 --> 00:41:16,600
Daniel: And the room creation thing is interesting.

472
00:41:16,720 --> 00:41:19,160
Daniel: That was actually, this was one of the surprises for me.

473
00:41:19,400 --> 00:41:21,460
Daniel: So SmallBets actually had been running on Discord.

474
00:41:21,680 --> 00:41:23,620
Daniel: Some of you might know for a long time, I think.

475
00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:28,060
Daniel: We only officially switched less than a year ago to Campfire.

476
00:41:28,200 --> 00:41:30,200
Daniel: I think it was May or June of last year.

477
00:41:31,540 --> 00:41:33,660
Daniel: So since 2021, he'd been running on Discord.

478
00:41:33,760 --> 00:41:36,460
Daniel: And on Discord, I was in charge of setting up the channels.

479
00:41:36,860 --> 00:41:37,800
Daniel: And it was very strict.

480
00:41:38,240 --> 00:41:46,700
Daniel: Actually, I used to get lots of requests for people who want to create rooms, and it was almost like default to no, because I really wanted to have very own topic.

481
00:41:47,600 --> 00:41:52,540
Daniel: And I didn't, sometimes I joined Discord servers, we had like 100 channels, very inactive ones.

482
00:41:52,640 --> 00:41:54,700
Daniel: And I felt like I didn't want that to happen.

483
00:41:55,240 --> 00:42:08,660
Daniel: But then it's interesting that with Campfire, when we're running the beta, and we invited a few people just to see how it goes, people started creating all sorts of random things, you know, what did you have for breakfast as a channel, right?

484
00:42:08,740 --> 00:42:14,460
Daniel: Or live revelations, or cat photos, or all these sort of, you know, fun, little, silly rooms.

485
00:42:15,040 --> 00:42:21,540
Daniel: And, you know, my first reaction was going to be, wait, I need to put up a policy, or I need to console it, or I need to get console.

486
00:42:21,840 --> 00:42:26,740
Daniel: Because by default, Campfire let everyone create rooms.

487
00:42:26,740 --> 00:42:31,620
Daniel: But I had access to the code, I could very, very easily disable it and make it only an admin-only feature.

488
00:42:31,620 --> 00:42:41,500
Daniel: But what I started to realize, very quickly, is that these very fun, silly side rooms were actually bringing people back, right?

489
00:42:41,600 --> 00:42:45,480
Daniel: So, my first realization was when someone created a food room, right?

490
00:42:45,600 --> 00:42:54,900
Daniel: And I was noticing that people were like, you know, making dinner, taking a photo of their meal, and they come and share it in this small Bats Campfire.

491
00:42:55,180 --> 00:43:04,340
Daniel: And you might think, but what does this have to do with why we're there in the first place with business and entrepreneurship, finding small wins, and whatever?

492
00:43:04,980 --> 00:43:07,660
Daniel: And it's an indirect thing, right?

493
00:43:07,680 --> 00:43:18,280
Daniel: It's like one of the, like I said, what I said in the beginning, like one of the challenges with communities is to remind people that this group exists, and they want to come back again every day, and so on and so forth.

494
00:43:18,280 --> 00:43:30,520
Daniel: So, what these rooms were doing were, like, basically reminding people that, you know, maybe I should come and share this in the small Bats chat, right?

495
00:43:30,560 --> 00:43:32,180
Daniel: I saw something interesting, right?

496
00:43:32,380 --> 00:43:34,780
Daniel: I took a photo of my cat, or whatever.

497
00:43:34,900 --> 00:43:44,060
Daniel: And they come, then they might see some activity happening in the marketing room, or in the small wins room, and they jump into the conversation, right?

498
00:43:44,220 --> 00:44:01,460
Daniel: So, if anything, now if I have a lesson about community building, right, and it's a recent lesson, is that for something like this, I really believe now that it's important to let a lot of casual conversation of topic happening, right?

499
00:44:01,500 --> 00:44:03,640
Daniel: And that's actually what happens a lot in small Bats, right?

500
00:44:03,640 --> 00:44:18,640
Daniel: And there's a lot of, you know, very, very, you know, casual stuff happening, but still, right, there's that other 10%, 20% that's more likely to happen, because there's this casual stuff happening on the side.

501
00:44:18,820 --> 00:44:25,680
Daniel: So, I know there's, like, with everything, there's trade-offs, and this is probably one of the overwhelming sides, but actually, we have more than 100 rooms.

502
00:44:26,020 --> 00:44:33,680
Daniel: There's also a long tail of rooms that are a bit less active.

503
00:44:34,580 --> 00:44:39,040
Daniel: But I really think they're still relevant, still much more inclined to more of this.

504
00:44:39,440 --> 00:44:44,780
Daniel: Sure, probably some more UI things to help mitigate the downsides.

505
00:44:45,080 --> 00:44:49,400
Daniel: In fact, I don't know if you know already, right, but we have a way to star rooms to make them favorite.

506
00:44:50,260 --> 00:44:56,940
Daniel: And this was our attempt, right, to have you select, oh, these are the five rooms I'm interested in.

507
00:44:57,200 --> 00:44:58,220
Daniel: You see them at the top.

508
00:44:58,220 --> 00:45:11,520
Daniel: In fact, something we did, which actually hurt engagement quite a lot, but I still think it was the right thing to do, was we're not showing unreads, any unread signal, unless you start the room.

509
00:45:11,740 --> 00:45:18,700
Daniel: Because before, it used to be, I used to log in with Grandfire, and I would see, like, you know, 50 rooms with an unread mark.

510
00:45:18,900 --> 00:45:26,840
Daniel: Actually, it used to be, like, overwhelming even to me, right, who I was keeping up with everything all the time, let alone someone who logs in casually.

511
00:45:27,880 --> 00:45:37,400
Daniel: So, now, actually, it's very sane, like, if you log in and you don't start anything, there's nothing flashing, nothing catching, trying to get your attention.

512
00:45:37,920 --> 00:45:46,300
Daniel: But if you start a room, then, you know, you will see it on your favorite list, and then if there's an unread message there, you will see it there.

513
00:45:46,520 --> 00:45:57,880
orlie: If I can add, I think, you know, what's really missing is kind of like you said, the onboarding to how Gamefire works, because I just realized that before I would...

514
00:45:58,920 --> 00:46:07,680
orlie: I had this thing where I hid certain rooms or left them, whatever the technical term was, but I didn't realize that I could star rooms now.

515
00:46:07,920 --> 00:46:12,840
orlie: Like, I think in between V4 and V5, I must have...

516
00:46:12,840 --> 00:46:13,420
orlie: We changed it.

517
00:46:13,420 --> 00:46:14,160
orlie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

518
00:46:15,420 --> 00:46:31,600
orlie: So, I don't know, is this like something where, you know, you or, you know, your associates, like, make a loom, say, hey, welcome to SmallBets community, here's how to get the most out of Gamefire, and then it's like, oh, here's how you code, here's how you reply,

519
00:46:31,780 --> 00:46:37,840
orlie: here's how you start the rooms that you find on the right, if you like them, if you want them to stick at the top.

520
00:46:38,000 --> 00:46:40,760
orlie: Like, I think that would be pretty useful, potentially, to...

521
00:46:40,760 --> 00:46:43,380
Daniel: I think so, I think so.

522
00:46:43,460 --> 00:46:59,660
Daniel: And in fact, you know, to your third question, or to one of your other questions, as we were mentioning, like the sort of regular looms, I mean, to talk with people, this might be an interesting thing, like to have maybe a session for new members or members who haven't been active and want to sort of get,

523
00:47:00,000 --> 00:47:02,240
Daniel: like, an update on, like, what's up and coming.

524
00:47:02,360 --> 00:47:15,320
Daniel: I remember Clubhouse used to do this very well, back, I think now five years ago, whenever they were still acting, there used to be, like, a weekly call with the founders.

525
00:47:15,980 --> 00:47:23,980
Daniel: And yeah, they used to pretty much repeat every time, okay, so to get the best out of Clubhouse, you have to comment, you have to do things, you have to organize a channel.

526
00:47:24,320 --> 00:47:29,900
Daniel: And maybe this is what's missing a little bit here, like to have a bit of a regular thing, right?

527
00:47:30,500 --> 00:47:33,520
Daniel: Because, yeah, it's not just new members, but also people who are casual.

528
00:47:34,080 --> 00:47:42,880
Daniel: Maybe, I mean, you're quite active, but, like, even you, like, despite you being active, you probably missed one of the changes with it over time.

529
00:47:43,240 --> 00:47:46,480
Daniel: And yeah, no, very good point, a good idea.

530
00:47:46,760 --> 00:47:55,580
Daniel: And yeah, some of these things, it's good to hear about them, because, yeah, it's probably the motivation I need to actually take them more seriously and do them.

531
00:47:57,740 --> 00:48:12,280
Nesters: By the way, that unread thing about for all rooms and not having the unread pop-up is, I believe it's, even if it hurts engagement, because, yeah, nowadays I miss way more channels having some maybe even interesting discussions, is that it's actually a good thing,

532
00:48:12,320 --> 00:48:19,680
Nesters: because it doesn't feel like a chore when you actually open the app, which started to become a thing at some point when there were a lot of messages.

533
00:48:19,680 --> 00:48:23,840
Nesters: I was like, oh my god, now I need to click through 30 channels just to clean them up.

534
00:48:24,200 --> 00:48:24,580
Daniel: Exactly.

535
00:48:25,200 --> 00:48:28,560
Daniel: And look, the effect on the engagement was very clear.

536
00:48:28,660 --> 00:48:32,840
Daniel: That was, like you said, many people started missing things because they don't see them.

537
00:48:33,060 --> 00:48:37,340
Daniel: But I think it's recovered, and I'm still very happy, because I think it was the right decision.

538
00:48:38,520 --> 00:48:46,780
Nesters: I think it recovered in a way that there's just more different rooms that are active, and there's basically a specific group of people are discussing in a specific room now.

539
00:48:46,960 --> 00:48:49,020
Nesters: So that's actually a change I've also noticed.

540
00:48:49,400 --> 00:48:50,720
Daniel: Which I encourage as well.

541
00:48:50,820 --> 00:49:00,300
Daniel: I like that, for example, there's a group of people who are in the Vibe coding room, there's a group of people who are in the lighting room, and in the SEO room, and so on and so forth.

542
00:49:00,360 --> 00:49:08,080
Daniel: It's a bit of like mini subreddits, but which are much more, again, like... I don't like the Reddit culture, actually, almost at all.

543
00:49:09,000 --> 00:49:10,840
Daniel: So I'm not trying to replicate that.

544
00:49:10,900 --> 00:49:17,320
Daniel: But I think there's something in the Reddit system that you subscribe to some subreddits, and you're part of that community.

545
00:49:17,900 --> 00:49:24,020
Daniel: And yeah, it's like there's many communities within the community, basically, which I'm liking that's happening.

546
00:49:25,500 --> 00:49:33,280
Krystian: It might be completely different, like the opposite to all of that, because I literally stared all the channels.

547
00:49:33,700 --> 00:49:42,620
Krystian: So I can make sure that when I, you know, every day, I can just check, you know, skim through what's been what's been chatted or happening about.

548
00:49:43,020 --> 00:49:52,160
Krystian: Because even though, like, I agree with that, I think very often there are conversations about different topics across different rooms.

549
00:49:52,760 --> 00:49:55,340
Krystian: And it's just, I personally didn't want to miss that.

550
00:49:55,520 --> 00:50:02,000
Krystian: So I'm like, all pretty much all the rooms are stirred, so I can get the bold, that's a new message at the top.

551
00:50:02,680 --> 00:50:04,840
Daniel: Yeah, look, I'm almost like that as well.

552
00:50:04,940 --> 00:50:08,880
Daniel: But you know, I'm a bit of a different soul, because it's part of my job to keep up with things.

553
00:50:09,080 --> 00:50:13,220
Daniel: But yeah, I think it's a bit of a rare case question.

554
00:50:13,540 --> 00:50:15,420
Daniel: But yeah, it's a user preference.

555
00:50:15,540 --> 00:50:16,820
Daniel: So you can certainly do that.

556
00:50:17,840 --> 00:50:20,500
Nesters: Yeah, I think Christian is a completionist.

557
00:50:20,980 --> 00:50:22,660
Nesters: Maybe in video games as well.

558
00:50:25,720 --> 00:50:28,820
Krystian: I do, I get anxious that I don't know.

559
00:50:29,040 --> 00:50:30,760
Nesters: Yeah, you used to have that.

560
00:50:31,140 --> 00:50:33,000
Nesters: You used to have the inbox feature.

561
00:50:33,100 --> 00:50:36,720
Nesters: And then you could actually just have that stream of all messages posted.

562
00:50:36,880 --> 00:50:38,200
Nesters: That was actually a decent way.

563
00:50:38,300 --> 00:50:39,780
Nesters: I know, I think it's gone now, right?

564
00:50:40,260 --> 00:50:42,880
Daniel: I usually think, I don't know if I moved it completely.

565
00:50:43,040 --> 00:50:43,960
Daniel: I think the code is still there.

566
00:50:44,040 --> 00:50:45,260
Daniel: Maybe I hid it from the UI.

567
00:50:45,680 --> 00:50:47,360
Nesters: Maybe it's a slash inbox or something.

568
00:50:47,660 --> 00:50:48,980
Daniel: Yeah, I'm sure you can find it.

569
00:50:50,680 --> 00:50:53,060
Daniel: Yeah, basically, I found I wasn't using it myself.

570
00:50:53,160 --> 00:50:56,320
Daniel: And I should probably have been a perfect candidate to use it.

571
00:50:56,380 --> 00:50:58,360
Daniel: And this was why I felt like maybe it's not very useful.

572
00:50:58,440 --> 00:51:01,760
Daniel: But I like the idea, actually, of having one feed, a bit like Twitter.

573
00:51:01,960 --> 00:51:07,240
Daniel: Twitter, when you think about it, you might follow 1000 accounts, and you see them all in one feed.

574
00:51:08,180 --> 00:51:11,400
Daniel: But yeah, maybe I'll bring it back or emphasize it a bit more.

575
00:51:12,120 --> 00:51:17,680
Nesters: Yeah, and if AI, maybe it's not even a feed, necessarily, but there'll be just be AI summary.

576
00:51:17,860 --> 00:51:18,340
Daniel: Yeah, I could.

577
00:51:18,500 --> 00:51:24,400
Daniel: And that's something, you know, I tried with AI maybe 12 months ago, and I didn't like the output.

578
00:51:24,520 --> 00:51:31,520
Daniel: But I think things have improved so much now, that maybe we actually can have... I was just using Slack again for the first time recently.

579
00:51:31,520 --> 00:51:35,620
Daniel: And they have this feature now, like, what you missed, and it gives you a recap.

580
00:51:35,780 --> 00:51:36,880
Daniel: And this, I think, is very good.

581
00:51:37,340 --> 00:51:44,540
Daniel: And maybe, yeah, they could, like, we have like a daily recap of, like, what happened, maybe, because it'd be based on your start zooms, and so on, so forth.

582
00:51:45,820 --> 00:51:50,440
Daniel: Yeah, I think, actually, that would very likely happen.

583
00:51:50,820 --> 00:51:51,040
Nesters: All right.

584
00:51:51,360 --> 00:51:53,600
Nesters: I believe there's another request.

585
00:51:54,280 --> 00:51:54,620
Nesters: Yeah.

586
00:51:55,880 --> 00:52:05,080
Daniel: Okay, that was from... Let's see if someone... Yeah, I'm going to have to run in eight minutes, but happy to answer anything in the meantime.

587
00:52:05,340 --> 00:52:07,400
Nesters: Yeah, any questions so you guys can talk?

588
00:52:08,920 --> 00:52:09,200
Nesters: Oh, yeah.

589
00:52:09,600 --> 00:52:21,600
Ira: I just wanted to jump in and say that I think the problem with the inbox was that it would have messages from all kinds of channels, and sometimes different threads of conversation would mix together.

590
00:52:21,840 --> 00:52:24,100
Ira: And for me, it was very difficult to follow.

591
00:52:24,260 --> 00:52:25,620
Ira: I almost never went there.

592
00:52:25,620 --> 00:52:27,900
Ira: I would always go to this.

593
00:52:28,040 --> 00:52:30,100
Nesters: Yeah, I would only sometimes go there.

594
00:52:30,300 --> 00:52:41,620
Nesters: But actually, for me, I guess, because I was checking a lot of the channels before, it wasn't a problem for me, because I would kind of understand the context of the conversation.

595
00:52:41,920 --> 00:52:43,160
Nesters: So I just go there.

596
00:52:43,300 --> 00:52:45,380
Daniel: I think that's the difference between Twitter.

597
00:52:45,540 --> 00:52:49,180
Daniel: Twitter has the initial post is a conversation starter.

598
00:52:49,400 --> 00:52:56,540
Daniel: It's a clear entity, whereas in a chat, yeah, there's like random things intermingled.

599
00:52:57,180 --> 00:52:59,860
Daniel: And I think that was the issue.

600
00:53:00,040 --> 00:53:01,100
Daniel: That's why it wasn't in a map.

601
00:53:03,260 --> 00:53:03,860
Nesters: Yeah, I agree.

602
00:53:04,100 --> 00:53:12,080
Nesters: I assume most people didn't use the inbox, because I know that people always needed to be told that there is a function, like there is the inbox functionality.

603
00:53:12,300 --> 00:53:14,600
Nesters: You can check the latest messages.

604
00:53:15,920 --> 00:53:18,480
Nesters: Yeah, so yeah, any more questions?

605
00:53:18,720 --> 00:53:19,820
Nesters: Oh, suddenly there's more people.

606
00:53:20,040 --> 00:53:22,520
Nesters: It's suddenly the amount of people jumped up.

607
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:23,880
Nesters: There's 80 people now.

608
00:53:24,700 --> 00:53:28,820
Nesters: Yeah, are all the bots joining now?

609
00:53:29,600 --> 00:53:33,720
Prince: Yeah, all the ones that don't exist anymore.

610
00:53:34,260 --> 00:53:35,620
Prince: I have a question, Daniel.

611
00:53:36,780 --> 00:53:38,240
Prince: I have a question, Daniel.

612
00:53:38,240 --> 00:53:47,940
Prince: I was wondering, like we have about 7,000 people in small bits, but it's usually the same faces, a lot of them who are here right now.

613
00:53:48,480 --> 00:53:56,480
Prince: Do you have any, I guess, some marketing plans to ping people and say, hey, you have been logged in for a year or two.

614
00:53:56,760 --> 00:54:00,000
Prince: We've made these changes and you're missing out.

615
00:54:00,120 --> 00:54:01,560
Prince: You should definitely come say hi.

616
00:54:02,360 --> 00:54:10,900
Prince: I'm trying to do it even on X, see people that I know that are part of the community of, hey, come over, say hi, we could learn something from you.

617
00:54:11,300 --> 00:54:17,780
Prince: Do you have any kind of, maybe not concrete, but do you have any particular ideas about this kind of thing?

618
00:54:18,520 --> 00:54:26,020
Daniel: I think this is one of the... This is one of them, like the resident experts was an attempt and it helped a bit.

619
00:54:26,600 --> 00:54:37,860
Daniel: Certainly, again, like looking at the engagement numbers and just anecdotes, feedback I got, people explicitly told me this made it worth it to come check and log in again.

620
00:54:38,800 --> 00:54:40,180
Daniel: Again, in terms of numbers, it's interesting.

621
00:54:40,340 --> 00:54:44,060
Daniel: I think as I mentioned in the beginning, there's about 400 unique people.

622
00:54:44,200 --> 00:54:51,940
Daniel: I know it's still a much smaller number than the 7,000 total members, but there's about 400 people who log in every day, unique people.

623
00:54:52,180 --> 00:54:54,000
Daniel: So there's a lot of lurkers as well.

624
00:54:54,120 --> 00:54:57,720
Daniel: By the way, I think there's value to get from just lurking.

625
00:54:59,980 --> 00:55:05,140
Daniel: Value from something like this can also be just inspiration, seeing other people do their thing and so on and so forth.

626
00:55:05,180 --> 00:55:08,120
Daniel: You don't necessarily need to be participating actively all the time.

627
00:55:08,220 --> 00:55:10,560
Daniel: So it's not a bad thing.

628
00:55:11,700 --> 00:55:20,740
Daniel: But also, I think you recognize the 7,000 people, a lot of... There's a bulk of them who joined a long time ago, two and a half years ago.

629
00:55:20,920 --> 00:55:24,000
Daniel: And SmallBets started in October 2021.

630
00:55:24,860 --> 00:55:29,600
Daniel: And this is the kind of thing, which is related as well to why I charge a one-time fee.

631
00:55:30,560 --> 00:55:38,260
Daniel: SmallBets is the kind of thing that you can also outgrow or you go to a phase of your life where you're just doing something different and you're not interested.

632
00:55:38,680 --> 00:55:43,860
Daniel: So I really think there's always going to be some decent group of people that we are just right now.

633
00:55:43,960 --> 00:55:45,480
Daniel: It's not the right time for them.

634
00:55:45,740 --> 00:55:52,640
Daniel: So it's like shooting towards close 100% participation is certainly not possible.

635
00:55:54,500 --> 00:55:57,060
Daniel: I don't even know what the target should be.

636
00:56:00,680 --> 00:56:06,260
Daniel: I wouldn't necessarily say I have concrete plans, but certainly there is the desire.

637
00:56:07,340 --> 00:56:11,700
Daniel: I'm basically always thinking of what can I do to bring people in?

638
00:56:11,900 --> 00:56:12,480
Daniel: Because it's interesting.

639
00:56:12,900 --> 00:56:28,040
Daniel: I really think SmallBets started where I was just promoting it to my own audience in the beginning, but you start to realize that you saturate your... Even though I do have a biggish audience, eventually everyone would have heard of it and people either have decided to either join or not.

640
00:56:28,400 --> 00:56:34,000
Daniel: So then the other marketing gangsters start to become word of mouth.

641
00:56:34,580 --> 00:56:41,920
Daniel: And I would probably, I think right now, most of the people who come is like the fellows, some other people.

642
00:56:42,740 --> 00:56:46,980
Daniel: People talk and say, you should check out SmallBets, you should join, so on and so forth.

643
00:56:47,500 --> 00:56:53,960
Daniel: And I notice this because I often see, very often actually, people join who don't follow me because they don't even know me.

644
00:56:53,980 --> 00:56:54,920
Daniel: And that's a good thing.

645
00:56:55,280 --> 00:57:03,160
Daniel: But basically, I bring this up because engagement from current members is actually what fuels the word of mouth machine.

646
00:57:03,420 --> 00:57:08,440
Daniel: Basically, if people are not thinking of SmallBets, they're unlikely to be recommending it.

647
00:57:08,780 --> 00:57:12,180
Daniel: It's a little bit like what you said, which by the way, thank you, I appreciate that.

648
00:57:12,200 --> 00:57:21,680
Daniel: But the fact that you're very active, you're there all the time, you're way, way more likely to encounter someone and tell them, hey, you should come check out this community we're part of.

649
00:57:22,240 --> 00:57:40,740
Daniel: So basically, indirectly, encouraging current members to be active again is also a marketing effort, because it feeds into more word of mouth and sort of all the networking, so all the network effects that that entails.

650
00:57:41,160 --> 00:57:54,140
Daniel: So yeah, it may be not a very satisfying answer, because actually, you know, this was the most recent attempt of like re-engaging people, work to some degree, and actually, more or less to my expectations.

651
00:57:55,440 --> 00:57:58,160
Daniel: But, you know, we'll keep thinking of more.

652
00:57:58,780 --> 00:58:01,960
Daniel: And, you know, certainly something to keep talking.

653
00:58:02,280 --> 00:58:09,920
Daniel: But certainly, currently, a metric that I'm almost always looking at is like messages per day, which is a bit of my key metric to marketing.

654
00:58:10,180 --> 00:58:14,960
Daniel: It's key messages per day and actually unique, unique, unique daily users.

655
00:58:15,560 --> 00:58:19,180
Daniel: And I'm seeing it always going up, up to the lights now.

656
00:58:19,320 --> 00:58:23,060
Daniel: I think it's actually in a very linear way, which is promising, right?

657
00:58:23,200 --> 00:58:26,660
Daniel: So, you know, I'm just making sure, first of all, to keep it up.

658
00:58:27,680 --> 00:58:33,660
Daniel: But also, you know, trying to maybe re-engage some people as well.

659
00:58:36,180 --> 00:58:38,600
Daniel: But yeah, good, good, good, good, good, good question.

660
00:58:39,160 --> 00:58:41,860
Daniel: And hopefully... Okay, yeah, thank you for that.

661
00:58:41,900 --> 00:58:45,400
Prince: Yeah, I understand the face thing completely makes sense.

662
00:58:45,600 --> 00:58:52,020
Prince: Like how, you know, like a year, a bit more than a year ago, we would have like, you know, 100 plus people on Zooms.

663
00:58:52,180 --> 00:58:54,080
Prince: And now no one likes to do that anymore.

664
00:58:54,480 --> 00:58:55,260
Daniel: So, yeah, exactly.

665
00:58:55,680 --> 00:58:56,260
Daniel: And things change.

666
00:58:56,320 --> 00:58:58,200
Daniel: That's something very interesting with communities as well.

667
00:58:58,320 --> 00:59:06,100
Daniel: Like, and there may be, I allowed to the wave of the pandemic, post pandemic, and now maybe back to normal world somewhat.

668
00:59:06,660 --> 00:59:09,660
Daniel: And yeah, like people's appetite for things has changed.

669
00:59:09,860 --> 00:59:16,020
Daniel: I really feel like back in 2021, there was more desire to be in a Zoom call together.

670
00:59:16,380 --> 00:59:17,960
Daniel: I think now there's more Zoom fatigue.

671
00:59:19,000 --> 00:59:21,620
Daniel: And people prefer more asynchronous communication.

672
00:59:21,780 --> 00:59:24,620
Daniel: Again, I'm generalizing, but not everyone is like this, right?

673
00:59:24,700 --> 00:59:27,500
Daniel: But it's like, trends that I'm noticing.

674
00:59:29,460 --> 00:59:39,800
Prince: Can I ask you to... Sorry, I was just gonna ask you to make a promise, you know, even if someone offered you like $50 million, please, let's never go to Circle.

675
00:59:40,500 --> 00:59:40,980
Daniel: Okay.

676
00:59:41,460 --> 00:59:43,160
Daniel: I don't even know, especially now.

677
00:59:43,520 --> 00:59:45,160
Daniel: Daniel was on Circle before.

678
00:59:45,260 --> 00:59:46,020
Daniel: I was on Circle, yeah.

679
00:59:46,220 --> 00:59:48,480
Daniel: I never... I think Circle is a great product.

680
00:59:49,380 --> 00:59:50,640
Daniel: I'm sorry, I'm a great business.

681
00:59:51,080 --> 00:59:55,360
Daniel: I personally never really... something never really worked for me.

682
00:59:55,860 --> 00:59:57,220
Daniel: Seems like just too formal.

683
00:59:57,380 --> 01:00:01,240
Daniel: Again, I haven't been keeping up with... because they've been doing some changes.

684
01:00:01,860 --> 01:00:07,340
Daniel: But I honestly, I'm not aware of a single community who is active on Circle.

685
01:00:07,340 --> 01:00:09,280
Daniel: And I think that's basically my problem, right?

686
01:00:09,340 --> 01:00:12,280
Daniel: It's like... and maybe I'm missing one or two.

687
01:00:12,300 --> 01:00:14,260
Daniel: Even Justin Walsh couldn't make it work, so...

688
01:00:14,260 --> 01:00:18,720
Daniel: Yeah, it's... there's something there, yeah, which is interesting.

689
01:00:19,140 --> 01:00:21,200
Daniel: Anyway, guys, I'm going to have to run because I have another call.

690
01:00:22,120 --> 01:00:23,560
Daniel: But yeah, great catching up with all of you.

691
01:00:24,360 --> 01:00:25,360
Daniel: Maybe we'll do this more.

692
01:00:25,460 --> 01:00:26,360
Daniel: Thanks for organizing this.

693
01:00:26,540 --> 01:00:26,820
Daniel: Thanks, Daniel.

694
01:00:27,180 --> 01:00:27,780
Daniel: Thanks, everyone.

695
01:00:28,000 --> 01:00:28,540
Daniel: Have a good one.

696
01:00:28,820 --> 01:00:29,360
Krystian: Thanks, Daniel.

697
01:00:29,540 --> 01:00:30,060
Krystian: See you later.

698
01:00:30,060 --> 01:00:39,240
Nesters: Yeah, I mean, we can still sit around a little bit if you guys... whoever wants to still be around and discuss a little bit.

699
01:00:40,780 --> 01:00:45,820
Nesters: Like, Prince, you actually are the one who didn't even know Daniel, right, before you joined?

700
01:00:47,380 --> 01:00:49,880
Nesters: Yeah, I think I'm probably the only one, yeah.

701
01:00:50,620 --> 01:01:05,260
Nesters: No, you're not the only one, but you're one of them who joined from... I believe Daniel said that around three to four people monthly joined from that list of... whatever list of communities you found, the Discord communities or whatever, there was a list.

702
01:01:05,640 --> 01:01:06,040
Nesters: Yeah, yeah.

703
01:01:06,500 --> 01:01:07,860
Nesters: And there are like three or four people.

704
01:01:08,060 --> 01:01:18,200
Nesters: I remember he told me that there are like three or four people from there joined his campfire, which technically is not the Discord community, but he was still advertising it there and paying the 99 bucks a month or something.

705
01:01:19,400 --> 01:01:22,340
Prince: Well, you know, that was a great return on investment he got me.

706
01:01:22,920 --> 01:01:24,360
Nesters: It's a great return, actually.

707
01:01:24,660 --> 01:01:28,340
Nesters: When I heard it's at least three or four members a month, that's actually a great return.

708
01:01:28,900 --> 01:01:33,160
Nesters: So that's like four times ROI, basically.

709
01:01:33,560 --> 01:01:35,620
Prince: 25 bucks for a person, not bad.

710
01:01:35,740 --> 01:01:35,880
Nesters: Yeah.

711
01:01:36,420 --> 01:01:39,720
Nesters: And we still have some of the resident experts here.

712
01:01:40,020 --> 01:01:42,320
Nesters: Yeah, we mostly got Daniel to talk today.

713
01:01:42,500 --> 01:01:49,200
Nesters: Actually, that's the thing about these spaces, you never know where it actually takes you, because initially I was like, okay, let's introduce the experts.

714
01:01:49,600 --> 01:01:52,520
Nesters: But Daniel was here, so he could spend the hour with us.

715
01:01:52,780 --> 01:01:57,660
Nesters: So we actually got to talk about the Gumroad direction and also the SmallBits direction.

716
01:01:59,880 --> 01:02:04,320
Francesco: I don't talk in spaces with more than five people, that's my issue.

717
01:02:04,640 --> 01:02:07,560
Francesco: So now I'm waiting for the numbers to go lower.

718
01:02:08,880 --> 01:02:11,120
Nesters: Oh yeah, remember our ads space.

719
01:02:11,440 --> 01:02:18,120
Nesters: Remember when people didn't actually care about ads and we were the only ones who would be in a space because the topic was ads?

720
01:02:18,940 --> 01:02:20,840
Nesters: The things have changed a little bit now.

721
01:02:21,780 --> 01:02:33,460
Francesco: Yes, I mean, the expert thing, actually, there's a lot of questions now about that, and a lot of DMs and also a lot of messages in general.

722
01:02:33,720 --> 01:02:47,560
Francesco: People are really interested and it's something that is a bit of an obscure topic, but everybody's like, maybe I should try, maybe I'm curious about it, and they ask all sorts of questions.

723
01:02:47,860 --> 01:02:49,740
Francesco: And it's very nice, it's very nice.

724
01:02:50,060 --> 01:02:52,260
Francesco: There's a lot of engagement around the topic right now.

725
01:02:52,740 --> 01:03:08,400
Nesters: Yeah, I think if you're a software engineer in the US making like two, three hundred thousand a year and you want to try your site project, I think it's reasonable for you to set aside a small ad budget and actually just test your idea with ads.

726
01:03:09,060 --> 01:03:25,040
Nesters: Maybe you disagree, but I think it's actually a decent way to get a good return on investment in terms of your time, because those golden handcuffs of a high salary obviously will stop you from making that investment.

727
01:03:25,200 --> 01:03:29,240
Nesters: Oh no, I'm going to need to spend like 40 hours, I'm going to do some SEO, etc.

728
01:03:29,960 --> 01:03:35,720
Nesters: Nah, just spend some hours on ads, just try it out, see if you get something.

729
01:03:35,840 --> 01:03:41,180
Nesters: And obviously, ideally, now in small bets, you get the resident expert like Francesco helping you with that.

730
01:03:42,160 --> 01:03:47,180
Nesters: I think that's actually a great return on investment in terms of optimizing your time.

731
01:03:47,960 --> 01:03:56,580
Francesco: You know what I'm seeing a lot, and I don't want to bore anyone with this, but the first question is actually, it's always like, what can I do for marketing?

732
01:03:56,940 --> 01:04:00,300
Francesco: So they're like more, what can I do to promote this?

733
01:04:00,580 --> 01:04:04,600
Francesco: And ads are maybe the third or fourth or even eleventh thing to do.

734
01:04:05,140 --> 01:04:18,720
Francesco: And first, you need to do other things that are very basic, but nobody, not nobody, but most people don't think about them, don't think about just shouting in the community, in the small bets, for example, about the project.

735
01:04:18,860 --> 01:04:20,940
Francesco: Sometimes they say, should I do ads for this?

736
01:04:21,080 --> 01:04:23,000
Francesco: And I'm like, what is your product?

737
01:04:23,320 --> 01:04:27,760
Francesco: Nobody knows here, and we are 7,000 people, and nobody knows what you're doing.

738
01:04:28,360 --> 01:04:33,500
Francesco: And you have 7,000 people that are waiting for you to tell them, what are you doing?

739
01:04:33,740 --> 01:04:35,000
Francesco: And it's crazy.

740
01:04:35,220 --> 01:04:54,860
Francesco: They would rather spend money on ads, and not, you know, telling 7,000 people like what Daniel was saying, a bit of this shyness, you know, it's, please, please tell us what you're doing, because we might be clients, we are not, you know, we might be clients and help you.

741
01:04:54,920 --> 01:04:55,860
Nesters: Oh, I definitely agree.

742
01:04:56,440 --> 01:05:01,280
Nesters: You need to do the, whatever, Reddit, for example, is a good opportunity for you to advertise.

743
01:05:01,780 --> 01:05:12,140
Nesters: Like, they don't like advertising, but it's a good opportunity to reach out to people and actually just post something regarding your idea and see how they react, or actually just go through discussions.

744
01:05:12,240 --> 01:05:19,860
Nesters: Even if you use Google and just go through discussions regarding your product, and check if anyone has that problem, you can even message them sometimes.

745
01:05:20,920 --> 01:05:31,680
Nesters: There's obviously ways you can interact, the same with the small bits community, the same with, obviously, you would mention, I know that one of the points you had mentioned, you need to talk to real customers, you know, so you have the idea.

746
01:05:32,400 --> 01:05:40,760
Nesters: After you have, I guess, laid out what your product really is, you actually need to talk to those couple customers you can identify.

747
01:05:41,120 --> 01:05:49,380
Nesters: And actually, that's obviously a prerequisite for you to running the ads in the end, obviously, you actually need to talk to real people, you need to know what's happening.

748
01:05:49,500 --> 01:06:04,060
Nesters: I was just mentioning ads in terms of one of the ways to, if you're not starting to waste time on some kind of like, not really telling people what you're doing, but you're just starting to like, spend a lot of time on like, I'm gonna build my audience now,

749
01:06:04,380 --> 01:06:24,760
Nesters: or I'm gonna do SEO work and like not actually... I think a lot of people drop off in that point that they feel like they spend too much time on the project while they're making so much on their main business or like job, that they kind of drop off in terms of actually committing to the project because they don't see any results.

750
01:06:25,600 --> 01:06:41,560
Nesters: That's my counter-argument to some parts of what you're saying is that it's very hard to like, cross that bridge where you're going from your guaranteed income and potentially much higher income to like, you know, actually committing to that project.

751
01:06:41,700 --> 01:06:44,020
Nesters: You kind of want to see those little bit of results.

752
01:06:46,520 --> 01:06:56,240
Francesco: Very true, I know we have this inspiration, honestly, inspiration for the community, what happened, the sale of the community, the acquisition.

753
01:06:56,840 --> 01:07:05,560
Francesco: I mean, it shows that something that is close to us, you know, that we interact every day or we are part of it.

754
01:07:05,680 --> 01:07:24,200
Francesco: It's possible to, you know, to get a lot of value, but we should not be tricked into thinking that it was easy because it comes from other dozens of small bets and time and, you know, a lot of effort to get to this point.

755
01:07:25,140 --> 01:07:33,720
Francesco: And sometimes we saw some tweet from some guy and say, oh, I sold this for 500k or for 1 million and whatever, I did it in two weeks.

756
01:07:34,500 --> 01:07:35,860
Francesco: It's never like this.

757
01:07:36,500 --> 01:07:37,720
Francesco: It's never like this.

758
01:07:37,800 --> 01:07:40,020
Francesco: It's always, always, always a lot of work.

759
01:07:41,220 --> 01:07:43,140
Francesco: They probably failed a lot of projects.

760
01:07:43,700 --> 01:07:48,680
Francesco: Yes, yes, exactly, failed a lot, failed a lot and a lot of sleepless nights.

761
01:07:48,940 --> 01:07:50,620
Francesco: And is this the right thing?

762
01:07:51,000 --> 01:07:58,960
Francesco: But there's one common factor that all these people, they became obsessed and especially they start talking about this thing.

763
01:07:59,600 --> 01:08:03,700
Francesco: They were building a lot of times and with a lot of people.

764
01:08:04,000 --> 01:08:08,560
Francesco: And this is the first thing to do, whatever you're doing, tell us.

765
01:08:08,740 --> 01:08:14,100
Francesco: I mean, nobody will steal anything here because we are all busy building some other things.

766
01:08:14,320 --> 01:08:18,800
Francesco: And now, you know, yeah, you can create stuff easily.

767
01:08:19,440 --> 01:08:28,880
Francesco: But at that point, there's a threshold where the project becomes yours and you have to push it a lot and you have to talk about it, become obsessed about it.

768
01:08:29,180 --> 01:08:32,360
Francesco: And this is the point where nobody can catch you anymore, right?

769
01:08:32,660 --> 01:08:36,920
Francesco: You're going to stay where the product is real.

770
01:08:37,080 --> 01:08:40,400
Francesco: People know about you, know that you are the guy that is doing that.

771
01:08:40,660 --> 01:08:44,780
Francesco: So this is a bit my preach and my suggestion, you know.

772
01:08:45,040 --> 01:08:49,260
Francesco: I mean, Peter Levels does it really well.

773
01:08:49,400 --> 01:08:52,720
Nesters: I mean, I hate on him for a lot of things.

774
01:08:54,460 --> 01:08:58,600
Nesters: I mean, obviously, he also has a very good relationship with me.

775
01:09:00,480 --> 01:09:04,380
Nesters: But yeah, that's obviously, he does it very well.

776
01:09:04,480 --> 01:09:17,180
Nesters: I know like John Rush, the one who, I don't know how many different products he has, but he does it really well as well, constantly promoting his products and talking about how he does all these things and how he has optimized it, you know.

777
01:09:17,680 --> 01:09:19,280
Nesters: He's just talking his products.

778
01:09:19,880 --> 01:09:20,500
Nesters: That's great.

779
01:09:20,900 --> 01:09:22,280
Nesters: Someone wants to actually speak.

780
01:09:23,020 --> 01:09:23,700
Nesters: Did they?

781
01:09:24,820 --> 01:09:26,520
Nesters: Oh, that's Christian again.

782
01:09:27,440 --> 01:09:28,660
Nesters: Are you dropping out sometimes?

783
01:09:29,280 --> 01:09:31,400
Nesters: Yeah, you should be promoted now.

784
01:09:32,460 --> 01:09:35,020
Nesters: Anyway, anyone who wants to talk right now actually can join in.

785
01:09:35,020 --> 01:09:38,440
Nesters: Unfortunately, Daniel left like 10 minutes ago.

786
01:09:40,820 --> 01:09:51,560
Krystian: I was just, I wanted to add to what Francesco was saying about the small bets acquisition yesterday.

787
01:09:51,780 --> 01:10:03,940
Krystian: I saw a bunch of tweets of like other people quoting and saying like how, you know, communities can be monetized by actually getting sold for like a large amount of money.

788
01:10:04,280 --> 01:10:10,040
Krystian: And it felt to me like significantly simplifying the whole operation, right?

789
01:10:10,060 --> 01:10:14,420
Krystian: Like you just start community, you bring a bunch of people in and then you can just sell it.

790
01:10:14,800 --> 01:10:16,660
Nesters: Yeah, and you're just monetizing, right?

791
01:10:16,940 --> 01:10:22,920
Nesters: Suddenly it becomes about monetizing it, not about the community itself, which is not even true for Daniel.

792
01:10:23,060 --> 01:10:28,360
Nesters: While Daniel took a good exit, he's still working on the community for the next five years.

793
01:10:28,580 --> 01:10:30,720
Nesters: So like it's not like an exit.

794
01:10:31,100 --> 01:10:40,400
Nesters: It's like he's still part, like it's an exit for him in a sense that he's actually merging together with Gumroad and he's no longer like the owner of it, but he's still working on it.

795
01:10:40,660 --> 01:10:44,340
Nesters: So it's not like, it's a very simplified way to look at it, obviously.

796
01:10:45,740 --> 01:10:57,900
Krystian: But to me, the more interesting aspect was that like where the small bets firstly started, which was like the course and the like all the small like tools and products that Daniel has done.

797
01:10:58,300 --> 01:11:07,640
Krystian: And to the point where now it's the... in a form that is right now, it just went like a really long way.

798
01:11:07,780 --> 01:11:17,600
Krystian: And I think not many people is aware of, and it's just like really simplifies the whole aspect that Francesco was talking about, like pivoting and trying loads of things, failing and then moving forward.

799
01:11:17,860 --> 01:11:25,260
Krystian: Like it's not, you know, zero to one, but it's just zero to 100 with like 99 steps between, right?

800
01:11:25,580 --> 01:11:26,800
Nesters: Yeah, it started as cohort.

801
01:11:27,300 --> 01:11:29,900
Nesters: Specifically, this community started as cohorts.

802
01:11:30,100 --> 01:11:37,680
Nesters: So it was running the cohorts and he realized he can just continue adding the new members from the cohorts when they were popular.

803
01:11:37,800 --> 01:11:40,300
Nesters: Like it was like 2022, I believe.

804
01:11:41,880 --> 01:11:47,160
Nesters: So he can just continue adding those members to the community and they continued like discussing things.

805
01:11:47,380 --> 01:11:52,700
Nesters: So obviously that was not... community was not even the initial point where it started.

806
01:11:53,940 --> 01:11:57,280
Nesters: Yeah, so I completely agree with the sentiment a little bit.

807
01:11:57,400 --> 01:12:01,920
Nesters: I mean, I understand what they're partially saying, that communities definitely are becoming a bigger thing.

808
01:12:02,000 --> 01:12:06,960
Nesters: I've noticed a lot of larger influencers in the space.

809
01:12:07,080 --> 01:12:08,960
Nesters: I mean, they call them influencers, creators, whatever.

810
01:12:09,240 --> 01:12:12,000
Nesters: They also have communities spun up.

811
01:12:12,060 --> 01:12:16,220
Nesters: I know Mark Lowe, I believe, started the community not long ago.

812
01:12:16,360 --> 01:12:17,680
Nesters: There's a couple more I've seen.

813
01:12:18,520 --> 01:12:22,640
Nesters: Yeah, so I see that there's like an increase in like the community part.

814
01:12:23,740 --> 01:12:30,080
Nesters: But smallbets is way different in terms of the evolution, how it came to become a community.

815
01:12:31,240 --> 01:12:35,200
Krystian: I think my problem with most of that kind of community is that they just become...

816
01:12:39,840 --> 01:12:44,580
Krystian: like a kind of echo chamber in terms of like a lot of people's talking, but they don't...

817
01:12:44,580 --> 01:12:46,060
Krystian: it doesn't have that much substance.

818
01:12:46,620 --> 01:12:59,600
Krystian: And I'm not sure where's it coming from, like whether it's type of audience or whether it's because they're mainly free, so people are just like automatically joining and they try to like advertise, like just purely advertise.

819
01:13:01,660 --> 01:13:04,180
Nesters: Yeah, I believe you hit that point.

820
01:13:04,560 --> 01:13:09,180
Nesters: A lot of communities I've seen, personally, it becomes like an advertisement board.

821
01:13:09,580 --> 01:13:10,620
Nesters: Exactly, yeah.

822
01:13:11,120 --> 01:13:20,480
Nesters: Even if you're discussing, like you basically sometimes even have this like income threshold for your MMR, like MMR thresholds for your project to join.

823
01:13:21,020 --> 01:13:25,600
Nesters: But you join and they're basically, even if they're discussing like ideas, it's kind of like a promotion.

824
01:13:25,780 --> 01:13:26,720
Nesters: They're always promoting.

825
01:13:26,900 --> 01:13:31,040
Nesters: It's like, yeah, this project I'm working on, you know, like, and this does... like it's...

826
01:13:31,440 --> 01:13:34,960
Nesters: that part is what's something that smallbets doesn't have as much.

827
01:13:35,040 --> 01:13:37,080
Nesters: You're actually free to promote on smallbets.

828
01:13:37,260 --> 01:13:41,680
Nesters: Like you're supposed to, as Francesco said, you're supposed to actually talk about your project.

829
01:13:41,980 --> 01:13:52,200
Nesters: But because of the community has evolved in a way that it's just naturally just talking a little bit, promoting, it doesn't feel like it has become some kind of advertisement board at all.

830
01:13:53,320 --> 01:13:56,360
Nesters: And I love that part about smallbets.

831
01:13:57,660 --> 01:14:12,020
Nesters: It's probably the most natural community, like, I don't know, it's more like a public square type of thing where just random people talking, you know, maybe between each other in separate rooms, maybe sometimes joining together, you know, having a party.

832
01:14:13,220 --> 01:14:24,880
Nesters: I remember that Daniel actually made that initial comment about like he just treats the smallbets community as a party, so you're not supposed to catch up, you're just joining the conversation that's happening right now.

833
01:14:25,600 --> 01:14:29,360
Nesters: And I believe that part still lives on right now.

834
01:14:31,240 --> 01:14:32,000
Krystian: Yeah, totally.

835
01:14:32,640 --> 01:14:50,620
Krystian: I think because I haven't been part of the community for a long time, I think one of the things that I've been mostly surprised about is like how good vibes it has and it doesn't have like this typical internet culture that you experience pretty much everywhere else.

836
01:14:50,960 --> 01:14:55,180
Krystian: It's very genuine and it's very value-packed.

837
01:14:55,260 --> 01:15:05,140
Krystian: I think anyone who is interacting, either asking questions which are really thought-provoking or even just answering on so many different topics, right?

838
01:15:05,200 --> 01:15:10,300
Krystian: So it's not even just about smallbets, but it's like immigration, visas, taxes.

839
01:15:11,140 --> 01:15:16,260
Krystian: Yeah, you essentially can find anyone on any topic there, which is pretty cool, I think.

840
01:15:16,680 --> 01:15:23,840
Nesters: Oh yeah, we were going to talk about experts today, but honestly like there's other members helping out all the time.

841
01:15:24,980 --> 01:15:27,720
Nesters: Taxes, as you said, setting up a U.S.

842
01:15:28,780 --> 01:15:30,260
Nesters: company, whatever state.

843
01:15:31,320 --> 01:15:35,820
Nesters: There's also about visas to like immigration process to U.S.

844
01:15:35,880 --> 01:15:36,580
Nesters: or U.K.

845
01:15:36,720 --> 01:15:36,860
Nesters: even.

846
01:15:36,980 --> 01:15:39,260
Nesters: I've noticed there were like some questions regarding that.

847
01:15:39,820 --> 01:15:44,660
Nesters: There's a lot of things happening at the same time, so and that's great.

848
01:15:45,580 --> 01:16:03,120
Nesters: The fact that actually people are discussing and sometimes people point out the issues with like how engagement is hard and stuff, but even with that, those drawbacks, like somehow the community has worked very well to help people and have like these natural discussions around the topics.

849
01:16:04,020 --> 01:16:12,500
Nesters: Which also means that the lurkers actually, I noticed that I believe there's an increase in like engagement from the lurkers as well recently, which surprises me.

850
01:16:12,680 --> 01:16:13,660
Nesters: I don't know what happened.

851
01:16:13,660 --> 01:16:16,340
Nesters: Maybe it's the partially the experts part.

852
01:16:16,800 --> 01:16:18,760
Nesters: I'm not entirely sure, but...

853
01:16:20,080 --> 01:16:21,400
Nesters: It's all you, man.

854
01:16:21,920 --> 01:16:22,400
Prince: All you.

855
01:16:22,960 --> 01:16:27,020
Nesters: No, I've actually been less, I've been actually less active.

856
01:16:27,440 --> 01:16:35,080
Nesters: Okay, my total message count doesn't say that, but have been actually less active in terms of amount of rooms I engage in.

857
01:16:36,100 --> 01:16:37,280
Nesters: So yeah, yeah.

858
01:16:38,160 --> 01:16:39,820
Nesters: So for the new joiners...

859
01:16:39,820 --> 01:16:40,360
Nesters: Which ones have you abandoned?

860
01:16:41,060 --> 01:16:44,580
Nesters: I have abandoned like most of the rooms, actually.

861
01:16:46,960 --> 01:16:49,340
Nesters: I don't really believe that.

862
01:16:49,720 --> 01:16:51,200
Nesters: He replies everywhere, but...

863
01:16:51,200 --> 01:16:54,300
Nesters: No, I reply in like five or six rooms, usually daily.

864
01:16:54,540 --> 01:16:57,920
Nesters: The rest of the rooms are just like whoever wants to grab them, like...

865
01:16:59,020 --> 01:17:00,800
Nesters: You're just spamming in politics.

866
01:17:01,620 --> 01:17:04,920
Nesters: Oh yeah, that's a nice channel, that's a nice channel.

867
01:17:04,920 --> 01:17:06,600
Nesters: Just trigger someone.

868
01:17:07,140 --> 01:17:08,780
Prince: I've muted that one of his.

869
01:17:08,980 --> 01:17:10,560
Prince: Yeah, me too.

870
01:17:11,000 --> 01:17:12,260
Krystian: I don't want to...

871
01:17:12,260 --> 01:17:14,140
Krystian: Yeah, that one's, that one's, that one's...

872
01:17:14,140 --> 01:17:18,620
Prince: I don't want to get into another conversation there, that will take me till 3am.

873
01:17:18,680 --> 01:17:22,580
Nesters: That one's dying as well a little bit now, so...

874
01:17:24,160 --> 01:17:25,160
Nesters: That's probably good.

875
01:17:25,260 --> 01:17:31,880
Nesters: I mean, there's certain topics that come up and like, that's the thing about that, even those topics, like they come up and they die off.

876
01:17:32,020 --> 01:17:33,300
Nesters: So there's no problem, actually.

877
01:17:33,660 --> 01:17:37,140
Nesters: Like, it's not like the politics was like this really bad room there.

878
01:17:37,300 --> 01:17:42,640
Nesters: It was just sometimes getting a little bit heated, but otherwise it was just jokes mostly.

879
01:17:43,520 --> 01:17:43,920
Ira: And memes.

880
01:17:44,100 --> 01:17:45,780
Ira: But it was a complete time suck.

881
01:17:45,960 --> 01:17:49,740
Ira: I actually stayed away from, away from that room during this month.

882
01:17:49,840 --> 01:17:50,940
Ira: I think I posted once.

883
01:17:51,500 --> 01:17:54,300
Ira: And it's done wonders to my income this month.

884
01:17:56,280 --> 01:17:58,280
Ira: I could actually focus on work.

885
01:18:00,040 --> 01:18:01,900
Prince: Yeah, you should post about that, you know?

886
01:18:02,340 --> 01:18:03,780
Prince: Yeah, I definitely should post about it.

887
01:18:03,940 --> 01:18:07,020
Prince: Like actual hard numbers, you know, don't talk about politics.

888
01:18:07,160 --> 01:18:08,400
Prince: This is how much money you can make.

889
01:18:09,100 --> 01:18:11,520
Nesters: Yeah, I think something happens with those other rooms.

890
01:18:11,640 --> 01:18:14,460
Nesters: Remember, the relationships room as well was a similar problem.

891
01:18:15,560 --> 01:18:17,180
Prince: Oh, yes, I remember that.

892
01:18:17,480 --> 01:18:19,400
Nesters: Yeah, like, just like a time sack.

893
01:18:19,620 --> 01:18:23,180
Nesters: But other rooms have been like, pretty good value overall.

894
01:18:23,500 --> 01:18:25,640
Nesters: A lot of the rooms have been really good value.

895
01:18:26,240 --> 01:18:38,140
Nesters: And I agree that that actually, you actually get the like AB test in a way, you go in this one room, you chat a little bit there, you see like how it affects your income or your mental state, you'd be like, okay, I definitely don't want that.

896
01:18:38,680 --> 01:18:40,680
Nesters: And you just move to the next, move on to the next room.

897
01:18:44,400 --> 01:18:44,800
Nesters: Yep.

898
01:18:44,800 --> 01:18:46,200
Prince: Video games is always open.

899
01:18:48,300 --> 01:18:51,880
Nesters: Oh, yeah, I'm pretty sure you're like the top chatter in that.

900
01:18:52,420 --> 01:18:54,080
Nesters: You're a top spammer in that room.

901
01:18:54,180 --> 01:18:54,920
Nesters: I'm pretty sure.

902
01:18:55,540 --> 01:18:56,360
Nesters: Yeah, you are.

903
01:18:57,100 --> 01:18:57,640
Nesters: 1k messages.

904
01:18:58,160 --> 01:18:58,660
Nesters: 1k messages.

905
01:18:58,720 --> 01:18:59,940
Nesters: No, no, you're at 1k.

906
01:19:04,220 --> 01:19:08,600
Nesters: Lots of time spent or slash wasted on video games then, yeah.

907
01:19:09,040 --> 01:19:11,580
Nesters: Yeah, I mean, anyone else who wants to talk right now can join.

908
01:19:11,760 --> 01:19:16,540
Nesters: By the way, like some people consider like video games, time waste, etc.

909
01:19:16,580 --> 01:19:21,100
Nesters: But we actually have people who are working on projects related to video games.

910
01:19:21,120 --> 01:19:29,160
Nesters: And some are even starting to make money and own Blue Sky out of all places, not on Twix, you know, they actually get sales from Blue Sky.

911
01:19:30,560 --> 01:19:31,600
Nesters: Yeah, sponsorships.

912
01:19:32,460 --> 01:19:35,100
Nesters: So, yeah, everything can be...

913
01:19:35,100 --> 01:19:42,100
Nesters: Everything like goes like if you're making like an app, like a mobile game or like a platform for like games, etc.

914
01:19:42,220 --> 01:19:46,880
Nesters: Like you're free to join the community and discuss with people, you know, the most of it.

915
01:19:47,320 --> 01:19:53,820
Nesters: There's almost no off-topic, no off-limit topics in terms of community.

916
01:19:54,020 --> 01:19:57,520
Nesters: I mean, probably some will get enforced in case something goes really bad.

917
01:19:58,220 --> 01:20:02,820
Nesters: But even the most heated discussions have mostly resolved.

918
01:20:08,440 --> 01:20:14,720
Krystian: I think that's the aspect that I really liked about Miguel's story with getting that sponsorship.

919
01:20:15,040 --> 01:20:24,280
Krystian: Because I think to me what he mentioned that was the key is not really the Blue Sky, but the aspect of just chatting to people.

920
01:20:24,800 --> 01:20:38,660
Krystian: It's like much easier to sell things to people if you actually create a relationship with them rather than just, you know, just doing things like very mechanically, right?

921
01:20:38,800 --> 01:20:49,160
Krystian: Like people are okay with spending money or they're looking for solutions or like sponsorship and so on, but they just might not know about it until you talk to them.

922
01:20:49,700 --> 01:20:53,540
Krystian: So I think that's the aspect that to me it's like very powerful.

923
01:20:53,680 --> 01:21:02,740
Krystian: Whether it's like Reddit or Twitter or Blue Sky is just about creating relationships and having chats with people.

924
01:21:02,860 --> 01:21:09,780
Krystian: And then maybe naturally you can mention, oh, like I'm doing this kind of thing, maybe it will be useful to you, you know, you can give it a go.

925
01:21:11,160 --> 01:21:19,360
Nesters: Yeah, and I think Blue Sky has that aspect in terms of like for video games and some art subjects, Blue Sky is actually a really good platform.

926
01:21:19,820 --> 01:21:30,200
Nesters: So it's basically like small bets in terms of like small time entrepreneurship, you know, like the side projects, the Blue Sky is actually pretty good platform with a good video games audience.

927
01:21:30,200 --> 01:21:39,420
Nesters: So you can actually have those similar discussions, like those really friendly discussions and people eventually be like, oh, yeah, I actually enjoy your product as well.

928
01:21:39,440 --> 01:21:43,100
Nesters: I could like, you know, sponsor, like join as a sponsor.

929
01:21:43,340 --> 01:21:47,860
Nesters: So you develop those relationships, which is something you can develop in small bets as well.

930
01:21:50,720 --> 01:22:01,360
Nesters: I think there's like, yeah, I believe that because we, even with Francesco, when we talked about like, in the end, we also became like the old expert spot, etc.

931
01:22:01,520 --> 01:22:09,560
Nesters: But I was always saying like, you should definitely like, promote that ads part in the small bets community, because that's something that's missing.

932
01:22:09,920 --> 01:22:26,900
Nesters: And eventually, like, Francesco started working with a couple of the members from the community, or also some people Daniel knew, I'm not sure if they were members of the community at the time, they weren't active members, at least, but Francesco started working with them.

933
01:22:27,000 --> 01:22:45,060
Nesters: And suddenly, suddenly, also, the ads became a more popular topic between like in the Hindi space, which I, which I think is great as a development, even outside of the community that like sort of happened, because we had spaces last year, which we kind of died down,

934
01:22:45,200 --> 01:22:54,560
Nesters: but for various reasons, but we did actually talk about the ads topic before, and it was not resonating well, like with people, I think.

935
01:22:55,740 --> 01:23:03,380
Nesters: But after like a couple people had a little bit more success stories, I noticed that there's an uptick, like in people actually being interested in running ads.

936
01:23:04,600 --> 01:23:20,700
Francesco: And I think this, this can apply to everybody, you know, in any, in any, if you're an expert on something, or you, you know how to do something, and you just promote a bit yourself relentlessly in the community, and being everybody, at some point, it will pick up,

937
01:23:20,740 --> 01:23:25,800
Francesco: because you give good answers, you give good feedback on anything.

938
01:23:26,480 --> 01:23:37,620
Francesco: And people are really need to for such things, because you're building something, maybe you're a builder, or you are designing something, but you're lacking some other skills.

939
01:23:37,940 --> 01:23:57,780
Francesco: And it's very good when you have someone else telling you, look, maybe this thing, try this or try that, and you cannot have this feedback from customers, or maybe you're not at that, you know, step or stage of your company in a small bet or whatever yet.

940
01:23:58,020 --> 01:24:01,160
Francesco: And so you have a lot of people here.

941
01:24:02,040 --> 01:24:10,380
Francesco: And I, for example, received feedback on my website from users, they tell me, look, this, do this and do that, and it's super nice.

942
01:24:11,260 --> 01:24:24,080
Francesco: So for any kind of venture, or kind of project you have, you can find someone in small bet that can give you can give you feedback, then you can, you know, listen to that feedback or not.

943
01:24:24,160 --> 01:24:26,280
Francesco: But there's always very good feedback.

944
01:24:26,560 --> 01:24:28,920
Francesco: And there's always people looking at what you're doing.

945
01:24:29,160 --> 01:24:34,600
Francesco: So the second you share something, you know, you have eyes on you and in a good way.

946
01:24:34,960 --> 01:24:40,180
Francesco: And that's what every project needs, right?

947
01:24:41,880 --> 01:24:43,080
Nesters: Yeah, exactly.

948
01:24:44,500 --> 01:24:51,140
Nesters: And for the next, yeah, so for the next space, I definitely want to get some guests or a guest.

949
01:24:51,340 --> 01:24:59,800
Nesters: I mean, I see one in the listeners, the mad cat music, I think it's a good, would be nice if he would actually join as a guest, for example, next time.

950
01:24:59,940 --> 01:25:15,060
Nesters: So we can also have extra inspiration for those who actually want to jump on the jump on this train and actually show like, get a little bit of that story, you know, and also like how, how it started and like, maybe was that like something you really enjoyed doing,

951
01:25:15,200 --> 01:25:15,460
Nesters: etc.

952
01:25:15,700 --> 01:25:18,120
Nesters: Like, and, and what was the progression?

953
01:25:18,540 --> 01:25:36,900
Nesters: Because I think those stories are also very important right now to tell, like tell people, so they actually know how someone's became successful, and maybe how it was hard, or maybe how they pivoted through all those steps that we talked through with us about with Christian about the smallpix community as well,

954
01:25:36,960 --> 01:25:52,600
Nesters: like, that's something I want to feature in the, like in the upcoming hopefully weekly spaces we do together with the experts, which would also be really nice if we have like a discussion with experts at the same time also with the with the guests, so we can like maybe like,

955
01:25:53,000 --> 01:26:04,720
Nesters: brainstorm a little bit and also get a little bit more value out of that story the person is telling by maybe with our experience, where we can like, you know, like, get those good questions in, that would be really nice.

956
01:26:09,110 --> 01:26:27,250
Krystian: I think this is like a really great idea, because there are so many of those, like a popular outlets, where like a founder stories are being like highlighted, but usually they, they are of, they're made of people who have a pretty big success, right?

957
01:26:27,810 --> 01:26:44,190
Krystian: And I think like you're looking at those and you're still like very overwhelmed, even if they are broken down, but I think a lot of people in the community have loads of like a small, like a nice small wins or something that is a bit more achievable or aspirational to wider group of people,

958
01:26:44,710 --> 01:26:50,590
Krystian: but perhaps they are not getting the same amount of... By the way... You know, sorry?

959
01:26:51,490 --> 01:26:53,410
Nesters: No, no, by the way, I wanted to say something.

960
01:26:54,050 --> 01:27:00,330
Nesters: I just looked at the smallbits community chat right now, and I just saw two messages at the same minute.

961
01:27:00,550 --> 01:27:03,790
Nesters: Two people joined just because of our space right now.

962
01:27:05,090 --> 01:27:06,130
Nesters: That's great.

963
01:27:06,330 --> 01:27:12,690
Nesters: Like they joined like 15 minutes ago, like two people messaged at the same minute that they're, yeah, we just joined because of the space.

964
01:27:12,810 --> 01:27:14,370
Nesters: It's actually like a nice small win.

965
01:27:14,470 --> 01:27:17,490
Nesters: Yeah, nice small win actually for the spaces.

966
01:27:19,050 --> 01:27:19,570
Krystian: Nice.

967
01:27:20,430 --> 01:27:24,450
Nesters: Yeah, that's actually a great win, by the way, for these spaces.

968
01:27:25,570 --> 01:27:32,270
Nesters: Yeah, so I'm glad actually people appreciate the format and the ideas.

969
01:27:32,590 --> 01:27:36,870
Nesters: Yeah, sorry, Christian, you can maybe add something.

970
01:27:36,870 --> 01:27:39,390
Krystian: No, I was just, I was just mopping up.

971
01:27:39,510 --> 01:27:53,750
Krystian: I was just meaning that, you know, those people are not getting as much as, I think, attention or, you know, I think those things would be still interesting to talk about as a case study and dissect and so on.

972
01:27:53,750 --> 01:28:01,470
Krystian: And perhaps would be more applicable in terms of, you know, what else other people can do to help with their project.

973
01:28:01,750 --> 01:28:09,810
Nesters: Yeah, and I think it's beneficial also for the guests as well, in a way, if we like have the experts discuss, there's just bouncing ideas around at the same time.

974
01:28:11,110 --> 01:28:27,990
Nesters: It could actually be help like, I don't know, marketing or like SEO direction or maybe some kind of ideas thrown around, like how to take it to the next level if they want to, or maybe they have some other frustration with terms of like set up with the co-founders,

975
01:28:28,210 --> 01:28:28,810
Nesters: sometimes, etc.

976
01:28:29,010 --> 01:28:33,190
Nesters: Whatever that is, like, that, like having that discussion would be nice.

977
01:28:33,810 --> 01:28:37,390
Nesters: And I love the way it's going for now.

978
01:28:37,570 --> 01:28:43,010
Nesters: So we should probably cut it off soon, because obviously people are dropping off and it's been an hour and a half.

979
01:28:43,850 --> 01:28:45,430
Nesters: Definitely appreciate everyone joining.

980
01:28:47,350 --> 01:28:50,990
Nesters: Especially like Daniel was obviously really nice to have as a guest.

981
01:28:51,410 --> 01:28:56,910
Nesters: And hopefully he also joins other times as he is one of the resident experts himself as well.

982
01:28:59,050 --> 01:29:02,650
Nesters: But yeah, I had a great time.

983
01:29:03,650 --> 01:29:05,230
Nesters: Thank you for organizing it.

984
01:29:05,690 --> 01:29:14,390
Nesters: Yeah, I mean, I myself right now, for example, I'm a little bit frustrated because I'm not getting the progress on my SEO course as much as I would like to.

985
01:29:14,510 --> 01:29:19,430
Nesters: And also the other project I mentioned to you, Christian, as well, about the European alternatives.

986
01:29:21,470 --> 01:29:26,330
Nesters: Yes, but those are the two things that I'm currently focused on myself.

987
01:29:28,030 --> 01:29:36,790
Nesters: I also know that, for example, you as well, like talked about the XR job boards, like the XR jobs board, right, where you actually don't feel like doing it right now.

988
01:29:38,050 --> 01:29:51,270
Nesters: And I guess, by the way, do you even consider working on that project in the future, like for the next coming months, or is it just shelved for now?

989
01:29:54,030 --> 01:30:01,410
Krystian: Yeah, I had a bit of, you know, a lot of kind of back and forth in terms of what I want to do about it.

990
01:30:01,910 --> 01:30:12,790
Krystian: Because I have a bunch of ideas and things that I could do for sure in terms of growing it or pushing it into different directions.

991
01:30:13,650 --> 01:30:27,570
Krystian: But it's just, like, I have other stuff on my mind and I kind of wanted to give it a go with productizing my design experience.

992
01:30:27,770 --> 01:30:41,370
Krystian: I think that I found it quite, you know, just feel like really nice to chat to people about design and helping or work on a large amount of projects.

993
01:30:42,090 --> 01:30:54,550
Krystian: So I might give it a go on firstly, like setting up a better foundation when it comes to that, and then spin up XR jobs board or anything like that.

994
01:30:54,830 --> 01:31:07,970
Nesters: Yeah, I know that also your job situation, you actually probably benefit more from going with the design experience monetization for now when the jobs board is more like a side project, right?

995
01:31:08,130 --> 01:31:10,650
Nesters: So in terms of priorities, it makes more sense.

996
01:31:10,910 --> 01:31:12,890
Krystian: Yeah, definitely.

997
01:31:13,890 --> 01:31:17,850
Krystian: I mean, you know, I'm sure that loads of folks is working full time.

998
01:31:17,970 --> 01:31:27,290
Krystian: It's a bit tricky to work on other projects while doing that so... For many reasons, right?

999
01:31:27,350 --> 01:31:31,490
Nesters: One is the energy, the other is time, then also the income part as well.

1000
01:31:31,670 --> 01:31:40,070
Nesters: Sometimes, like, it's harder to justify when you're full time to work on something that doesn't bring in money yet or not as much as you would like.

1001
01:31:40,410 --> 01:31:57,790
Nesters: So not as much as we would like, but more like the ROI feels like it's not, it doesn't justify your, like, maybe, like, having those, like, sometimes, like, I don't know, not sleepless nights, but, you know, the longer nights just working on a side project when you still have that full time job to focus on.

1002
01:31:59,010 --> 01:32:21,070
Krystian: Yeah, I get... In terms of the job board, I think that the most trickiest part was that you need to keep it alive, like, every day or every week, you know, create, you know, curating the jobs, sending out newsletters and so on, which is, I think, a bit more tricky than something that you might build and it's still alive,

1003
01:32:21,190 --> 01:32:26,150
Krystian: even if you don't add new features or new content to it, right?

1004
01:32:26,730 --> 01:32:45,570
Krystian: I think that was, to me, the biggest kind of realization and hurdle to keep working on it, because if it just stayed and I, you know, and I would try to keep it alive a bit on a sideline, I think it would be different, but it requires this maintenance time,

1005
01:32:45,890 --> 01:32:52,170
Krystian: like, every single week to make sure that it, you know, it makes sense for people when they go to it.

1006
01:32:54,590 --> 01:33:09,790
Nesters: Yeah, I mean, obviously, the job board has a lot of challenges, because you have the job sourcing, you need also people, obviously, the audience would actually go and sign up for those jobs, so that's the SEO effort as well.

1007
01:33:09,890 --> 01:33:15,810
Nesters: I mean, you did invest additional SEO effort before and it seems to be going okay.

1008
01:33:18,170 --> 01:33:24,670
Krystian: Yeah, that was a great performance, I would say.

1009
01:33:24,870 --> 01:33:45,670
Krystian: It's like, at the moment, it's like 1,000 clicks, like, keeps at this, which I find it like a, you know, big win, taking into consideration that, you know, last year, I had no idea about SEO at all, which, you know, I have to also, like, mention that,

1010
01:33:45,790 --> 01:33:56,390
Krystian: you know, it's all thanks to you and your kindness in terms of providing feedback and a lot of your time, which was a part of, you know, small bets as well, right?

1011
01:33:56,830 --> 01:34:04,270
Nesters: So... Yeah, I did run some live streams last year, yeah, actually, like, regarding SEO.

1012
01:34:05,970 --> 01:34:14,850
Nesters: They kind of died off, because I also didn't feel like I had enough time or energy to do them, but I might get back to them at least a little bit.

1013
01:34:15,270 --> 01:34:26,090
Nesters: Definitely would like to, in terms of, like, together with the SEO course, I have to do a little bit more on topic, I guess, things, also socially and on small bets community as well.

1014
01:34:27,130 --> 01:34:40,710
Nesters: So, yeah, regarding that, obviously, we'll probably return a little bit to those topics and we'll see what kind of format I first need to deal with the vibe group for the course, which were the people that promised something to.

1015
01:34:40,870 --> 01:34:48,150
Nesters: That's the first, and after that, I want to hopefully do some, a little bit of public live streams again as well.

1016
01:34:48,410 --> 01:34:52,410
Nesters: But maybe try not to push it too hard, maybe just do once a week or something.

1017
01:34:53,510 --> 01:35:05,150
Nesters: Well, maybe the live streams could be a part of the... Oh, I think they'll probably be as a leading up thing after I do a little bit of the more private, I guess, feedback.

1018
01:35:05,410 --> 01:35:07,290
Nesters: They'll probably be like that.

1019
01:35:07,390 --> 01:35:09,470
Nesters: Yeah, I'll add a couple of those soon.

1020
01:35:10,710 --> 01:35:13,470
Nesters: But yeah, we should probably wrap it up for today.

1021
01:35:13,850 --> 01:35:18,970
Nesters: For next week, just let's try to get a guest as well, together with experts.

1022
01:35:19,290 --> 01:35:21,430
Nesters: We'll see if we get to Daniel to join as well.

1023
01:35:21,570 --> 01:35:28,430
Nesters: I mean, it was actually nice to hear from Daniel about the Gumroad acquisition and the SmallBets community from his standpoint one more time.

1024
01:35:28,770 --> 01:35:31,030
Nesters: Some of us have heard it, others have not.

1025
01:35:31,730 --> 01:35:40,090
Nesters: But it certainly worked, and people have joined the community today as well as part of the, you know, being convinced that yeah, it's a good place to be.

1026
01:35:41,570 --> 01:35:47,770
Nesters: So whoever wants to join obviously right now and not in the community, yeah, you're welcome to join smallbets.com.

1027
01:35:50,090 --> 01:35:51,510
Nesters: It's a wonderful community.

1028
01:35:51,890 --> 01:35:59,010
Nesters: Not even trying to really sell it, I'm just saying it's a wonderful place where you can ask feedback from experts and other members as well.

1029
01:35:59,430 --> 01:36:07,630
Nesters: So, and yeah, the experts are always available, and they will provide feedback because technically they're paid for it.

1030
01:36:07,910 --> 01:36:07,910
So

1031
01:36:11,330 --> 01:36:18,770
Nesters: all right, yeah, if anyone wants to like say anything, that's also fine if you still have a question, but we're about to wrap it up.

1032
01:36:22,130 --> 01:36:24,790
Ira: Yeah, it's a very long day for me, but I just want to say thanks.

1033
01:36:24,890 --> 01:36:27,770
Ira: It was cool to hear everyone's voices and accents and everything.

1034
01:36:28,150 --> 01:36:31,270
Ira: Feels like getting to know people a bit more.

1035
01:36:31,270 --> 01:36:35,450
Nesters: Yeah, I'm surprised you never joined our previous spaces last year.

1036
01:36:37,750 --> 01:36:41,630
Ira: Well, there were periods where I wasn't really active in the community.

1037
01:36:41,630 --> 01:36:57,770
Nesters: Maybe that was actually, yeah, that might have been the time, yeah, because yeah, I believe it's also for the first time I've heard you speak as well, because I don't think I've been in a single call where you've been speaking as well.

1038
01:36:57,930 --> 01:37:06,230
Ira: I tend to dive into a project and disappear for a while, and Daniel has been really patient with that tendency of mine.

1039
01:37:08,750 --> 01:37:15,410
Ira: And when I say Daniel has been really patient, I mean, because I'm tweaking Campfire, and sometimes I would disappear for weeks at a time.

1040
01:37:16,610 --> 01:37:21,330
Nesters: Yeah, I think you disappeared for like a month or two months when you had to, like, last year.

1041
01:37:21,490 --> 01:37:24,770
Nesters: I think that might have been the time when we were actually doing the spaces.

1042
01:37:25,070 --> 01:37:28,210
Nesters: I remember Daniel actually mentioned the other day.

1043
01:37:28,210 --> 01:37:32,090
Ira: Sorry, I didn't mean to ignore, yeah.

1044
01:37:32,230 --> 01:37:33,390
Nesters: No, that was fine.

1045
01:37:33,470 --> 01:37:40,630
Nesters: It was actually Daniel was a little bit busy during that time as well, because he sold his consultations, you know, the lifetime consultations.

1046
01:37:41,010 --> 01:37:49,530
Nesters: And then he was booked, I believe, for like a month and a half, having like five hours a day or whatever it was during that time.

1047
01:37:49,630 --> 01:37:50,190
Nesters: That was crazy.

1048
01:37:52,790 --> 01:37:58,450
Ira: Yeah, and by the way, one second now, because I'm in a co-working space and I was in a shared space.

1049
01:37:59,630 --> 01:38:04,750
Ira: I hear you, I've seen you folks discussing this lifetime consultation thing.

1050
01:38:05,310 --> 01:38:10,030
Ira: And I just realized that I would probably never be comfortable with promising someone lifetime.

1051
01:38:10,650 --> 01:38:11,130
Ira: I don't know.

1052
01:38:11,330 --> 01:38:28,030
Ira: I've heard all the arguments, but I just feel like there's something unnatural about saying lifetime as many as you want, but kind of expecting that to settle on some number that is about just a few consultations.

1053
01:38:28,030 --> 01:38:29,490
Ira: I don't know, that would stress me out.

1054
01:38:29,830 --> 01:38:34,270
Nesters: Yeah, Daniel mentioned 3.8, I believe that's his average or something like that.

1055
01:38:35,630 --> 01:38:40,410
Nesters: Yeah, I had a lot of reservations initially about it as well.

1056
01:38:40,650 --> 01:38:43,350
Nesters: And I still launched it and I had some buy-ins.

1057
01:38:43,810 --> 01:38:46,570
Nesters: And honestly, there were people who just didn't book.

1058
01:38:47,550 --> 01:38:56,610
Nesters: Like there was a person who booked really once or something and then showed up three days before the refund deadline, which was generous, 180 days, which makes sense, it's lifetime.

1059
01:38:57,830 --> 01:39:00,770
Nesters: Three days before the deadline and asked for a refund.

1060
01:39:01,290 --> 01:39:09,510
Nesters: And it was like, oh, should we set some plan for a project I could launch, but I haven't had time, or is there still a chance for a refund?

1061
01:39:09,610 --> 01:39:14,990
Nesters: I understand he didn't feel comfortable about asking for a refund, but I was like, but he hasn't actually done it.

1062
01:39:15,030 --> 01:39:16,690
Nesters: So you just refund the people.

1063
01:39:17,270 --> 01:39:25,670
Nesters: But that's a problem, obviously, if it's like 180 days, you need to keep that money, you can't just be spending it all the time.

1064
01:39:25,710 --> 01:39:35,270
Nesters: You actually need to understand that some refunds might come in at some point, especially with this lifetime deal, where people don't end up booking the calls as frequently.

1065
01:39:37,030 --> 01:39:40,170
Nesters: So to me, that's actually a bigger stressor.

1066
01:39:40,270 --> 01:39:48,810
Nesters: What I had objections about initially with Daniel and for my own launch was like, I think there will be people who will start asking for refunds at some point.

1067
01:39:49,750 --> 01:40:05,250
Nesters: And that was what was stressing me more, because I was like, I just hate that, it's kind of like, it basically feels like I'm lent money, and I need to give the loan back, you know, like that kind of thing where you're actually uncertain about a relatively large sum of money,

1068
01:40:05,530 --> 01:40:07,170
Nesters: like 2000 per person.

1069
01:40:07,650 --> 01:40:12,430
Nesters: And you're just like, yeah, at some point, they'll be coming maybe to collect it, some of them.

1070
01:40:13,970 --> 01:40:18,070
Nesters: That part was actually more on my mind as an issue.

1071
01:40:18,290 --> 01:40:20,450
Nesters: And it did realize at least one person.

1072
01:40:21,910 --> 01:40:22,430
Nesters: Yeah.

1073
01:40:23,250 --> 01:40:27,690
Nesters: But I agree with that feeling of three calls, four calls.

1074
01:40:28,970 --> 01:40:31,990
Nesters: I explained that to Daniel, and I explained that in the community.

1075
01:40:32,670 --> 01:40:42,150
Nesters: Those who book, because I have also five and 10 consultations as a batch, those who join five or 10 book more calls than the lifetime clients.

1076
01:40:42,470 --> 01:40:46,590
Nesters: And the reason is because those who book five or 10, they have an immediate need.

1077
01:40:46,830 --> 01:40:48,550
Nesters: So that's actually resolving a problem.

1078
01:40:49,090 --> 01:40:59,230
Nesters: The lifetime ones are more like aspirational clients, they join because they feel like they need some like someone who might help them with some project coming up, etc.

1079
01:40:59,830 --> 01:41:05,290
Nesters: And if a person chooses to pay money for it, like I do, I understand where you're coming from.

1080
01:41:05,350 --> 01:41:11,850
Nesters: But at the same time, if they will actually get that value from it, eventually, maybe that's entirely fine.

1081
01:41:11,890 --> 01:41:20,170
Nesters: And maybe someone's completely fine paying 500 bucks a call that I think that's reasonable for some for some fields, that's a completely normal consulting rate.

1082
01:41:20,390 --> 01:41:26,050
Nesters: So I don't see, like, I don't really see that necessarily.

1083
01:41:26,470 --> 01:41:34,670
Nesters: I actually know, I had the same arguments, I think, many of them that you have, and I still feel like some of them exist in my head.

1084
01:41:37,090 --> 01:41:44,490
Ira: But I just like, yeah, I like, I guess I like precise things.

1085
01:41:44,850 --> 01:41:51,510
Ira: And when I look at the unlimited consultations, it's almost like unlimited vacation, where it's nice to have the unlimited one.

1086
01:41:51,590 --> 01:41:58,930
Ira: But if I were ever to join a company with unlimited vacations, my preference would be to have vacations like six months out of a year, probably.

1087
01:41:59,610 --> 01:42:01,690
Ira: And, and that doesn't seem reasonable.

1088
01:42:01,690 --> 01:42:05,710
Ira: And I don't like that idea that the line of reasonable is unclear.

1089
01:42:06,570 --> 01:42:19,790
Ira: Anyway, and I'm thinking if someone purchases a batch of like five or 10 consultations, I think perhaps they book more because there's this clear line of how many you're entitled to, and you've like clearly paid for that many.

1090
01:42:20,170 --> 01:42:23,330
Ira: And you know, people don't like to underuse whatever they paid for.

1091
01:42:23,650 --> 01:42:31,850
Ira: So I, in my mind, it's easier for them to book like 10 calls in close proximity in time.

1092
01:42:32,130 --> 01:42:38,670
Ira: Whereas if you buy something that's lifetime, I don't know, maybe you feel like you've, you'll have all the time in the world to book the reminder of sessions.

1093
01:42:38,830 --> 01:42:41,810
Ira: Maybe you feel like you don't know where that line is of decency.

1094
01:42:42,170 --> 01:42:42,170
Yeah.

1095
01:42:42,550 --> 01:42:42,950
Ira: Yeah.

1096
01:42:42,970 --> 01:42:46,990
Nesters: I think, I think we're going into that discussion we had about the high IQ.

1097
01:42:47,130 --> 01:42:53,150
Nesters: Remember about the introvert nightmare when you're like starting to analyze every single point.

1098
01:42:53,870 --> 01:42:54,670
Nesters: After having had the calls...

1099
01:42:54,670 --> 01:42:55,970
Nesters: Thank you for reminding me.

1100
01:42:56,510 --> 01:42:56,750
Nesters: Yeah.

1101
01:42:56,830 --> 01:43:04,170
Nesters: After having had the calls, I would actually, even though you're right, people will always feel like they have all the time in the world.

1102
01:43:04,670 --> 01:43:06,270
Nesters: And that's why they're not booking more.

1103
01:43:07,230 --> 01:43:16,730
Nesters: Well, after having the calls, I can clearly tell that they are different segments of the clients because the ones who book like five or 10, they have an actual immediate problem.

1104
01:43:17,010 --> 01:43:27,290
Nesters: The other ones really speaking often about more like general things about direction of their business, etc.

1105
01:43:27,490 --> 01:43:32,810
Nesters: Dealing with some like, or maybe thinking about launching this project.

1106
01:43:33,290 --> 01:43:36,410
Nesters: It's completely different.

1107
01:43:38,790 --> 01:43:39,810
Nesters: It's not the same.

1108
01:43:40,030 --> 01:43:43,490
Nesters: There's definitely not the same segment who book one or the other most of the time.

1109
01:43:43,710 --> 01:43:47,530
Nesters: I'm pretty sure Daniel could, if he was here, he could comment more on that.

1110
01:43:50,630 --> 01:43:58,990
Nesters: How it is for the unlimited ones, because I had not as many, I had less than 10 unlimited clients, so I wouldn't be able to speak as much about that.

1111
01:43:59,070 --> 01:44:05,630
Nesters: But I noticed that difference in the actual segment of what their needs are and how they'll also perceive that.

1112
01:44:06,150 --> 01:44:11,030
Nesters: So I would say, even though, like, yeah, obviously someone with five or 10 might want to get more value out of it.

1113
01:44:11,130 --> 01:44:15,990
Nesters: But at the same time, I had a person who did book five or 10.

1114
01:44:16,070 --> 01:44:17,110
Nesters: I didn't even check.

1115
01:44:17,410 --> 01:44:18,450
Nesters: They had one call.

1116
01:44:18,730 --> 01:44:25,130
Nesters: It was VC funded, like some kind of investment type of thing.

1117
01:44:26,350 --> 01:44:33,330
Nesters: And he was like, after the call, he was like, oh, I didn't know if I'm going to get enough value out of this when I booked it.

1118
01:44:33,910 --> 01:44:37,430
Nesters: But actually, I got a lot of things to think about.

1119
01:44:37,530 --> 01:44:38,370
Nesters: And thank you for this.

1120
01:44:38,550 --> 01:44:45,530
Nesters: And the rest of the consultations, maybe we can use as some kind of research that you do without consultations for me.

1121
01:44:45,790 --> 01:44:48,130
Nesters: But he never got back about that research.

1122
01:44:48,590 --> 01:44:50,090
Nesters: He was done after that one call.

1123
01:44:51,010 --> 01:44:52,250
Nesters: And that's it.

1124
01:44:52,370 --> 01:44:54,050
Nesters: I've never heard from that person again.

1125
01:44:55,230 --> 01:44:56,450
Nesters: But he was like, basically, yeah.

1126
01:44:57,630 --> 01:45:06,050
Ira: And I definitely admire yours and Daniel's boldness to just go for it, to do an experiment and see how it works and deal with whatever comes later.

1127
01:45:06,550 --> 01:45:19,690
Ira: And I feel like this acquisition by Gumroad is a testament to Daniel's, I don't know how to describe it, but basically this willingness to experiment and go with the flow and try new things.

1128
01:45:20,250 --> 01:45:21,370
Ira: So it is interesting.

1129
01:45:21,470 --> 01:45:25,750
Ira: I'm just saying that it's a gap that would be difficult for me to bridge.

1130
01:45:26,990 --> 01:45:31,630
Nesters: And also Sahil's, because Sahil takes pretty crazy bets, to be honest.

1131
01:45:31,850 --> 01:45:43,050
Nesters: Even this one, although it makes sense, it's a pretty crazy leap to actually take to be like a first one in terms of payment processing, becoming suddenly a community.

1132
01:45:43,250 --> 01:45:46,430
Nesters: And I get it, all the 10% payment fee that needs to be justified.

1133
01:45:46,650 --> 01:45:50,970
Nesters: So the community part and this business model would actually make a lot of sense.

1134
01:45:53,570 --> 01:46:07,690
Nesters: And by community, I mean that actually being for the 10% fee, you're actually being the one who facilitates your business growth and having the experts, et cetera, people helping you get there.

1135
01:46:09,650 --> 01:46:10,210
Nesters: Yeah.

1136
01:46:10,410 --> 01:46:20,010
Ira: When I used to work at Gumroad and having seen the behind the scenes, you know, Sahil can make decisions very, very quickly.

1137
01:46:20,510 --> 01:46:22,690
Ira: He's ready to reverse the decision.

1138
01:46:22,910 --> 01:46:23,570
Ira: It's not a problem.

1139
01:46:23,790 --> 01:46:31,730
Ira: But after a certain point, I just realized that I kind of understand why he's the CEO of Gumroad.

1140
01:46:32,590 --> 01:46:34,870
Ira: Yeah, I think that's that decisiveness.

1141
01:46:36,090 --> 01:46:37,570
Ira: And I like that he's taking those risks.

1142
01:46:37,830 --> 01:46:42,590
Ira: And I don't know if you've seen he's working for Doge with Elon right now.

1143
01:46:43,570 --> 01:46:44,150
Ira: Yeah.

1144
01:46:45,750 --> 01:46:52,410
Nesters: That's a funny thing, because I knew about Gumroad's acquisition for more than two months now.

1145
01:46:53,610 --> 01:46:58,610
Nesters: But I knew about SmallBets acquisition by Gumroad for like more than two months now, actually.

1146
01:46:59,250 --> 01:47:02,470
Nesters: I knew it was going to happen because Daniel is technically my client.

1147
01:47:02,610 --> 01:47:04,350
Nesters: He's my unlimited client, by the way.

1148
01:47:04,870 --> 01:47:07,730
Nesters: We had a discussion about things, and he mentioned all those things.

1149
01:47:07,870 --> 01:47:11,570
Nesters: He actually mentioned that thing about Doge as well to me.

1150
01:47:11,630 --> 01:47:13,370
Nesters: I was like, he's going to be joining the Doge.

1151
01:47:13,450 --> 01:47:15,470
Nesters: I'm like, okay, that's interesting.

1152
01:47:16,770 --> 01:47:18,170
Nesters: But yeah, yeah.

1153
01:47:18,470 --> 01:47:19,830
Nesters: So I knew about that thing.

1154
01:47:19,990 --> 01:47:24,090
Nesters: So I was like, actually, I'm surprised it didn't leak anything because of all the spam I do.

1155
01:47:25,790 --> 01:47:31,850
Nesters: But yeah, when I heard that, even like all the myths, I was like, oh, that's interesting.

1156
01:47:32,150 --> 01:47:37,850
Nesters: Like, that's actually like also like, and supposedly the decision was also made pretty fast, and it just made sense for them.

1157
01:47:38,010 --> 01:47:45,190
Nesters: And to me, it was like, wow, even about Daniel's decision to do it, I was like, wow, that's interesting.

1158
01:47:45,530 --> 01:47:55,070
Nesters: Because I would personally felt like I would have taken the step where I maybe would have branched out on trying ads to acquire new members.

1159
01:47:55,330 --> 01:48:03,110
Nesters: Although at the same time, I did mention also that running ads for that means that there will be way different potential audience that joins.

1160
01:48:03,630 --> 01:48:07,610
Nesters: And depending also on the rate of people joining, it can completely change the vibe.

1161
01:48:07,790 --> 01:48:15,490
Nesters: Because currently, this natural Daniel's audience plus word of mouth, it kind of brings in more of the same people, I believe.

1162
01:48:15,810 --> 01:48:20,270
Nesters: In terms of mindset, not like the same people, everyone's the same, there's a lot.

1163
01:48:20,790 --> 01:48:35,790
Nesters: I think that works better with ads, you're actually are reaching out into different segments, you might reactivate people who have been like, like you basically might activate people by retargeting the same people who have checked your website, your profile on x,

1164
01:48:35,850 --> 01:48:43,990
Nesters: for example, that kind of maybe your audience, but you but you also would probably be starting to reach into audiences that are not familiar with small bets.

1165
01:48:43,990 --> 01:48:51,630
Nesters: And if you start increasing that rate of new members being added from a completely different segment, it does change the vibe.

1166
01:48:52,050 --> 01:48:58,950
Nesters: That's what actually so yeah, I actually in the end, when he mentioned that acquisition, I was like, wow, that's actually makes sense.

1167
01:48:59,070 --> 01:49:16,830
Nesters: You're actually going in a gumroad in terms of expanding to gumroad, which also was one of the things, how will that mix together later, because that's another, you're again, adding a gumroad user base to your community potentially later, how will that impact it.

1168
01:49:17,330 --> 01:49:24,310
Nesters: But currently, as I see it, I think it will be more of like gradual, slower integration with gumroad.

1169
01:49:24,590 --> 01:49:30,350
Nesters: So the community might actually not change much in this in the sense of the spirit we have currently, you know.

1170
01:49:32,050 --> 01:49:36,530
Ira: Yeah, if I understood correctly, small bets could be upsold to gumroad audience.

1171
01:49:36,730 --> 01:49:47,570
Ira: I initially also thought that it might perhaps become free for gumroad creators, but I don't think so, because Daniel has mentioned that it will try to remain profitable.

1172
01:49:48,030 --> 01:49:48,710
Ira: I don't know, maybe.

1173
01:49:51,230 --> 01:49:57,970
Nesters: I want to clarify, because he mentioned actually today, he might open it up for free to gumroad.

1174
01:49:58,290 --> 01:50:03,390
Nesters: It was also a discussion I had had with him before, it might happen.

1175
01:50:03,510 --> 01:50:07,170
Nesters: He did mention it, just a small comment, he did mention it today as well.

1176
01:50:07,690 --> 01:50:09,670
Nesters: But it's not likely happening, right?

1177
01:50:10,290 --> 01:50:12,650
Nesters: Yeah, it's not happening right away, most likely.

1178
01:50:12,890 --> 01:50:15,430
Nesters: And I don't know how that will happen, if it happens.

1179
01:50:16,710 --> 01:50:25,410
Nesters: But as far as I understand that making it profitable is more related to what he mentioned about potentially having 10 to 20 experts.

1180
01:50:25,810 --> 01:50:33,630
Nesters: And those experts will be basically not only these resident experts, but they will be basically available on these unlimited booking calls.

1181
01:50:33,810 --> 01:50:37,590
Nesters: And it might be something like an annual fee instead of a lifetime fee.

1182
01:50:38,110 --> 01:50:43,750
Nesters: And you basically have access to SEO ads, audience building, etc.

1183
01:50:44,210 --> 01:50:47,810
Nesters: You have access to this pool and you just choose whatever experts you want.

1184
01:50:47,930 --> 01:50:55,410
Nesters: Let's say you choose five experts and you basically can have technically unlimited access for that year.

1185
01:50:56,490 --> 01:51:10,810
Nesters: I think that's part of what he wanted to make as profitable that he will launch that additional product under Gumroad, not under his personal company that he split separately now, the LLC, but under Gumroad.

1186
01:51:12,670 --> 01:51:21,430
Nesters: He'll basically get whatever his shares in Gumroad are, he'll be getting percentage of it, but he'll actually be making money for Gumroad that way.

1187
01:51:22,650 --> 01:51:27,930
Ira: Yeah, I think part of the deal was that Daniel wouldn't be making his personal money out of the community, which makes sense.

1188
01:51:30,470 --> 01:51:46,690
Ira: With regards to the Gumroad acquisition, I don't know what resides in Daniel's head, obviously, I don't want to speak for him, but I think that there is some value in just associating with people that you've worked with before, and Daniel has worked with Sahil before,

1189
01:51:46,950 --> 01:51:49,370
Ira: and if you feel like your values align.

1190
01:51:50,070 --> 01:52:08,450
Ira: And there is just value of staying in close orbit of those people that you like to, maybe not work for, but because I feel like Daniel's arrangement is very flexible, but you get to brainstorm with them, you get to influence the direction where Gumroad goes next.

1191
01:52:08,830 --> 01:52:22,790
Ira: And with having like 4.4% of Gumroad and having direct... because I think Daniel was considering opening up his call, his hours to product managers from Gumroad, and he used to be a part-time product manager at Gumroad.

1192
01:52:23,190 --> 01:52:45,250
Ira: So I feel like if Daniel it's a pretty cool challenge, because Gumroad does face some challenges right now, with lots of competitors popping up, with AI making it much easier to spin up a clone and everything, and it is a cool challenge to think whether Daniel can influence and add a significant amount of value with the community to influence the public perception of Gumroad,

1193
01:52:45,330 --> 01:52:51,690
Ira: and how people think about whether it's worth it for them to pay up to 10% of their profits to Gumroad.

1194
01:52:51,990 --> 01:53:07,290
Ira: I don't know, I just feel like all in all, it could have been an interesting challenge when compared to just growing the business independently through paid ads, because I think there might have been some saturation from Daniel's Twitter audience in terms of how many people have bought already.

1195
01:53:07,590 --> 01:53:24,030
Nesters: Oh yeah, with ads I meant that you're probably reaching out to the new audiences outside of Daniel, because Prince, who is one of the top spammers in the community, he joined from one of those services Daniel uses to bring in people that do not know Daniel,

1196
01:53:24,190 --> 01:53:26,310
Nesters: because Prince did not know Daniel when he joined.

1197
01:53:26,490 --> 01:53:31,870
Nesters: I understand there are some of those people who exist who also have no idea who Daniel is when they join.

1198
01:53:32,550 --> 01:53:41,610
Nesters: So with ads you'll be basically reaching out to more of that audience, and I would clearly say that Prince, I mean not in a negative way, but Prince is different.

1199
01:53:44,150 --> 01:53:50,070
Nesters: He's not like most of the tech guys who join, you know, the tech people who join the community.

1200
01:53:51,310 --> 01:53:56,790
Nesters: So yeah, when you have a lot of them join at once, you change a lot of the vibe.

1201
01:53:57,490 --> 01:53:59,590
Ira: You do remember this is recorded, right?

1202
01:54:00,070 --> 01:54:02,190
Nesters: Yeah, I know, I mean I can even publish it later.

1203
01:54:03,850 --> 01:54:15,890
Nesters: It's technically recorded, but getting the recording later after the 30 days I need to download my private GDPR data, and then I can get out of that data, I can get out the actual recording.

1204
01:54:16,150 --> 01:54:17,570
Nesters: It's a mess.

1205
01:54:17,710 --> 01:54:20,150
Nesters: You can't actually just export it.

1206
01:54:20,750 --> 01:54:21,250
Ira: Got it.

1207
01:54:21,810 --> 01:54:42,690
Ira: Yeah, but I was just saying that perhaps when Daniel considered growing this business, what kind of challenge in terms of being interesting would it be to grow this business, keep growing this business independently, versus I can see some positives on joining Gumroad and taking it on as a personal challenge to influence the direction of that company.

1208
01:54:42,970 --> 01:54:48,230
Nesters: Yeah, no, I entirely agree with the growing personally.

1209
01:54:48,550 --> 01:54:57,810
Nesters: I completely, personally not being maybe the feasible, because we know that he's like the new members, because he did not try really running ads.

1210
01:54:58,110 --> 01:54:59,790
Nesters: I think he just didn't want to run ads.

1211
01:54:59,910 --> 01:55:05,090
Nesters: And even for reasons I mentioned, I think running ads would become a problem, by the way.

1212
01:55:05,190 --> 01:55:06,510
Nesters: I think it would become a problem.

1213
01:55:07,690 --> 01:55:19,890
Nesters: But he was basically tapped out on what he liked to do, which was just his personal brand, getting people from his personal brand and the word of mouth of people who enjoyed being as part of the community.

1214
01:55:20,410 --> 01:55:26,430
Nesters: I think that was he was betting on, and that's what he enjoyed the most as the way to build the community, and it worked out.

1215
01:55:27,270 --> 01:55:37,930
Nesters: So right now, I think it makes sense that he'd be actually joining with Gumroad, how both can grow in a new way, I guess.

1216
01:55:39,230 --> 01:55:42,650
Nesters: And for the matter, what was that?

1217
01:55:43,970 --> 01:55:48,190
Nesters: When Daniel also, because he didn't want to really, I believe, run ads himself either.

1218
01:55:48,450 --> 01:55:58,890
Nesters: So when he just did this, gosh, I lost my train of thought, because I wanted to talk about the fact that the new members were slowly dropping off.

1219
01:55:58,990 --> 01:55:59,770
Nesters: We already knew that.

1220
01:56:00,310 --> 01:56:09,430
Nesters: The revenue was also harder, especially when he was running the classes, the revenue was also, because the new members were starting to drop off, the revenue was technically going down.

1221
01:56:09,530 --> 01:56:11,030
Nesters: You can see that in the public statement.

1222
01:56:11,270 --> 01:56:19,530
Nesters: Although the community itself was doing well, the revenue was actually starting to become harder to come by, partially because of that saturation with his audience.

1223
01:56:20,310 --> 01:56:26,990
Nesters: And that way, joining Gumroad actually makes sense that you kind of get a potentially new audience in.

1224
01:56:27,330 --> 01:56:34,770
Nesters: Even after the sale, I believe, I don't know how many, like 30, 40 members joined, I think, after the sale.

1225
01:56:34,970 --> 01:56:42,310
Ira: Yeah, I feel like this event becomes a marketing event in itself.

1226
01:56:43,730 --> 01:56:48,050
Nesters: And even this space as well, it got at least two members, I think, if not more.

1227
01:56:48,210 --> 01:56:51,290
Nesters: I haven't checked, I saw two messages, but maybe there's even more than two.

1228
01:56:51,910 --> 01:56:55,310
Nesters: That's just, it also becomes in a way a marketing event, you know.

1229
01:56:56,970 --> 01:57:02,010
Ira: You should get an affiliate kickback from the sales that happened during the Twitter space.

1230
01:57:02,650 --> 01:57:03,750
Ira: Oh, I see.

1231
01:57:04,110 --> 01:57:09,270
Nesters: I may discuss that in that Residence Expert channel as well.

1232
01:57:09,410 --> 01:57:15,930
Nesters: I think if Daniel wants to continue doing this, I think it actually becomes a paid thing for me as well, to run these things.

1233
01:57:16,530 --> 01:57:18,350
Nesters: But maybe that pays it for itself.

1234
01:57:19,410 --> 01:57:19,810
Ira: Awesome.

1235
01:57:20,270 --> 01:57:21,210
Nesters: Yeah, we'll see.

1236
01:57:21,270 --> 01:57:22,830
Nesters: I'm still behind the Residence Expert channel.

1237
01:57:23,170 --> 01:57:25,070
Ira: Well, I unfortunately have to drop off.

1238
01:57:25,170 --> 01:57:26,510
Nesters: No, no, I think we should have.

1239
01:57:26,570 --> 01:57:29,990
Nesters: We should have dropped off a long time ago, but it was nice chatting with you.

1240
01:57:30,390 --> 01:57:30,990
Nesters: Oh, guys.

1241
01:57:31,310 --> 01:57:31,730
Nesters: Same, same.

1242
01:57:32,210 --> 01:57:35,190
Nesters: Yeah, so we'll see you, I guess, see you all next week.

1243
01:57:35,450 --> 01:57:36,330
Nesters: It's been two hours.

1244
01:57:36,690 --> 01:57:38,930
Nesters: Thank you for joining, whoever's still listening.

1245
01:57:41,030 --> 01:57:43,870
Nesters: Next time, we'll try to get some other guests as well.

1246
01:57:44,230 --> 01:57:46,750
Nesters: So, some inspiration, perhaps, from...

1247
01:57:46,750 --> 01:57:48,250
Ira: Yeah, thanks, everyone.

1248
01:57:49,350 --> 01:57:50,430
Nesters: Yeah, see you, guys.

1249
01:57:51,050 --> 01:57:51,590
Ira: Bye.