Episode 12
· 01:23:24
Welcome to the panel where two Bootstrap founders talk about building a better life and a better business. I'm Justin Jackson, the cofounder of transistor.fm.
Brian Casel:I'm Brian Casel. I am building something brand new, and maybe I'll even reveal the name and the domain today. We'll see.
Justin Jackson:We're both chatting while it looks like the world is on fire. I was just sharing this with Brian before we got on here.
Brian Casel:I must have been in a hole because I haven't heard about this until just now.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. We heard about in chat right away. So this is what I'm seeing. Spotify down, Google down, Google Cloud down, Google Meet, AWS, Discord. And then if you look at you got Cloudflare.
Justin Jackson:But for Spotify to be down, like, the Spotify web app to be down, that is wild. It is interesting to me when, like, stuff like this, you'd think it would hit the news outlets right away. But if I just put broad outage, what does that Massive Internet outage reported. What could cause this? Like, for the whole Internet to go out all at the same time?
Justin Jackson:Is the entire Internet down?
Brian Casel:Some some kid. One one kid just brought it all down.
Justin Jackson:Some kid just pasting in commands from ChatGPT.
Brian Casel:Yeah. One ChatGPT prompt went totally wrong.
Justin Jackson:But somehow Riverside is working. Somehow YouTube is working. It's like, yeah, this is this is wild. So, yeah, hopefully, we'll have lots of people join us live. We got Corey here.
Justin Jackson:We got Emmett just joined.
Brian Casel:Got got the the fellow Mets fan here, Emmett. We're we're rooting for the best team in baseball right now.
Justin Jackson:Dude. Tonight, my Edmonton Oilers are playing again. And sports are heartache. Like, sports is just heartache.
Brian Casel:I okay. Let let's talk about this. This is just a random topic.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Right?
Brian Casel:I've really picked it back up. I've been a lifelong sports fan, especially in New York sports. But I put it down for, like, ten year ten, fifteen years there in in the early part of my career. Picked it back up probably in the last five or six years and especially lately. I think there are what I noticed is that there are a lot of, like, hardcore sports fans who follow everything, like, follow the the entire league, every player, all the ins and outs of it all.
Brian Casel:I am a home team sports fan. Like like, I am I'm deep into the storylines of the New York Mets and the New York Knicks. Like, those are the and and, know, I'll I'll follow, like, the playoffs, and and I like to tune into, like, you know, tennis and golf on on, like, the major tournaments and stuff like that. But and, like, I'll follow, like, March Madness. I'll follow follow the NFL playoffs.
Brian Casel:But I am, like, personally invested in the storylines of the players on the Mets and the players in the Knicks. And that's that's what's most interesting to me.
Justin Jackson:It is kind of fun. I mean, as much as the what I don't like is I think the NHL playoffs are the hardest sport tournament in ever. It's it's four rounds. You have to win four games. It's like the series playoffs.
Justin Jackson:They just drag on forever. Just goes forever. And it it can feel like you get through one series and you're like, that felt like the Stanley Cup playoffs, like the finals. But that wasn't the finals. That was just the round.
Justin Jackson:And then you got to do a round and a round and a round. It's just so hard on the players, but also on the fans. I think I eat about 10,000 calories every game.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep.
Justin Jackson:I'm just nervously eating the whole time.
Brian Casel:I mean, the the playoffs are this, and they happen right now at the same time, you know. It it just drags on for so long. And like, as much as I wanted to see the Knicks make it into the finals, they they made it to the Eastern Conference Finals. I was a little bit relieved when they when they got knocked out because I'm like, alright. I mean, I still actually watched, you know, some of the finals last night, but, like, it's just so many games, and it's like it's summer already.
Brian Casel:Like, summer is not basketball. I'm done. Now I'm ready for baseball. You know?
Justin Jackson:I mean, I I would like I would like some relief from from these playoffs just from the agony of it all. It was really nice when I was in London at this podcast show because the Oilers games were on at, like, one in the morning. So then you just wake up the next day and you look at the highlights. You're like, okay. Win or lose.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. It you're not, like, as invested.
Brian Casel:I'm not a huge NHL fan, but I but I as a kid, I went to a lot of New York Islanders games.
Justin Jackson:Oh, sweet.
Brian Casel:And I I loved seeing it live. Like that I I really think hockey is one of the best live sports.
Justin Jackson:I just I actually don't know. To me, every other sport feels slow. Like, hockey is so fast.
Brian Casel:If you're used to hockey. Yeah. Definitely.
Justin Jackson:And Yeah. Like football is like, god, this takes forever. You know?
Brian Casel:Football really is I mean, I know it gets, like, loud and exciting live. I've been to a few Giants games, but, like, football is really a TV sport. It's so much better on TV
Justin Jackson:Than live.
Brian Casel:I think, especially with, yeah, especially with, like, the graphics. You see the line of scrimmage and all that. Like and, like, you because, like, based on where you're sitting at at an NFL game, you could be so far away from the action.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Alright. That's our sports talk for this week. Let us know in the comments if you like the sports talk. We might do some more.
Justin Jackson:Maybe from my side, I can do a quick update on what I've been thinking about and working on.
Brian Casel:Let's hear it.
Justin Jackson:We're doing lots of exploratory work around video and HLS right now. The big challenges that we're facing right now is hosting and specifically bandwidth costs for video. Mhmm. There are a lot of people in the podcast ecosystem that think this is an impossible task. There's a lot of commentary that even YouTube can't make video streaming profitable at scale.
Justin Jackson:Like, nobody really knows YouTube's numbers.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I went deep into this with Clarity Flow. I we could get into it.
Justin Jackson:I mean, our friend of the show, Aaron Francis, has a great article on how they ended up doing it. And we're that's where most of us are leaning is basically using Cloudflare r two. Is that the way you went with Clarity Flow?
Brian Casel:We are using all AWS infrastructure right now. But early on, like in the year of Zip Message, I spent a lot of time looking at mux.com. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And they
Brian Casel:have a they they have really good looking like APIs for both streaming and recording and and stuff. But I did we did like a deep dive, like cost comparison analysis and like sort of like modeling out, like, what if our usage gets to this level or that level? What do the cost look like? And it still worked out that, like, just streaming and storing with with all AWS stuff works best for us. And the other thing is like so it would be much more complicated for you with, like Yeah.
Brian Casel:Long form content. And also, like, I don't know if you're doing, like, live stuff, but, like, you know, like, all of our models and and calculations were based on, like, well, what's the average number of recorded minutes per account
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Per month? And what's the cost to store it, to transcode it, to transcribe it, to stream it, to download it? And so, like, all those are are like a little bit of cost that add up. And, like, we get the question all the time about, like, like, customers will come in and say, like, what happens if I if I have, like, thousands of recorded minutes a month? Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And like our analysis of our actual users, even our most active users, like nobody even comes close to that.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like in terms of like async video messaging. Because like they'll do a bunch of async video messaging, but then a lot of it is, like, text. A lot of it is just audio.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our problem like, I could I won't show you live, but our if you look at how much bandwidth we're doing just with audio, it is beyond it is just so huge. And those are, you know, 50 megabyte to a 100 megabyte files. But as soon as we get into video and, you know, the nice thing about HLS is you can do it at different screen resolutions and you can you only pay for what you're sending in chunks.
Justin Jackson:Right? Mhmm. But still, four k video is like that can be a two gigabyte file. Mhmm. And that's just a whole different ball.
Justin Jackson:And podcasts unfortunately have the thing where they're long. Like, our last episode was an hour and a half. So Right. And we're actually what we're doing right now is our whole point is we want to build a prototype with the panel podcast where there's an alternate enclosure that points to an HLS streaming URL that then a podcast player like Pocket Cast could pick up and use that as the source for the video episode.
Brian Casel:That's pretty cool. So so you mean, like, if I if I'm, like, subscribed to any podcast and I want like, currently, I download the audio onto my device and then I listen to it when I'm ready. Yeah. But you're saying, like, I would not download the actual video? I would be sort of, like, streaming it off of your servers?
Justin Jackson:That's right. Yeah. In in small little chunks. So it gets chunked out. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:So the the the default behavior right now is every time you click play in Apple Podcasts or Pocket Casts or Spotify, it is requesting that m p three from Transistor, one of our competitors, and it's essentially just downloading that whole file locally. Even if it says it's streaming, it's really just it downloads it from the host and then it, quote unquote, streams. This would be quite different. This would be actually in real time. It gets chunked out in little pieces.
Justin Jackson:And if you only watch two minutes, we will only send you two minutes of that file. The interesting thing is that we can also use this for audio. And so there's always this chicken and egg thing with, you know, open protocols and open web. Like, you wanna introduce something new, and this happens on the web. Like, they wanna introduce a new HTML tag, they all have to talk and coordinate and say, okay, what are we going to add, you know, to the browsers that and so we all render the same thing.
Justin Jackson:Right? It's the same thing in podcasting is I think eventually, HLS streaming, whether it's audio or video, will be the thing that we the modern way to do it. And not everybody will, you know, support it. We can stick with the old way of doing it, which is you point to this audio file, and then we have these alternate enclosures for video HLS streaming, but also audio HLS streaming.
Brian Casel:My mind goes to or my question goes to what is the market demand for this, and what is, like, the job to be done? Because it I mean, obviously, it sounds like a big technical lift to do this. Mhmm. What's the what's the fundamental problem that this is solving? And I I wonder because, like, the thing that I think about is I think that a typical, like, public facing podcast that's, like, discoverable, that that's, like, shareable, the object the the objection is just gonna be like, well, just put it on YouTube.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:It's it's gonna end up on YouTube anyway. But I think that The U the use case that's sort of interesting I don't know if this fits into, like, podcasting per se, but, like well, like, private podcasting. Right? Like, stuff that you just don't want to be public, but you do wanna share with some group of people or maybe like a group of a 100 people, like in your organization or in your community, but not public to the Internet and still have video. Like, that's interesting.
Brian Casel:Or or like the other case I think of is, like, course content or, like, stuff that needs to be, like, behind some sort of membership.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. So, I mean, I think there is an application in private podcasting to back up who's asking for this. Our customers are asking for it in the sense that they want to publish their podcast everywhere. And when they ask us about video, they'll say, hey, do you have video hosting video podcast hosting? We'll always say, well, what does that mean to you?
Justin Jackson:And the response often is, well, I wanna distribute my video everywhere. Like,
Brian Casel:YouTube I see. So, like, put it up on Transistor the video, and then have have Transistor zap it out to YouTube, Vimeo, wherever else.
Justin Jackson:That's right. I mean, we probably wouldn't syndicate it to Vimeo right now because they're not really a they've I think they've switched to kinda b to b. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I'm just old school. I'm just trying to think of, like, all the different places where you would wanna put a video.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I mean, eventually, like I said, in Pocket Casts, if you're listening to the audio version and then you hear, like, maybe there was just a moment where you heard me say, oh, let's look and see which apps are down. You might want to switch to the video version just to see that and then switch back. You might get home, and you might want to flip it to video and watch it on your TV. There is this is a a bit of a moonshot also in a sense, because I am, in a way, taking on the one of the strongest consumer behaviors and habits ever, which is YouTube.
Justin Jackson:So there is there is a part of this that is me saying along and me trying to coordinate along with the rest of the open podcast ecosystem, like, we have to at least try to have an alternative to YouTube. And the benefit is customers seem to be asking for it. I think so because customers are asking for it. And I also think sometimes the zeitgeist or the the serendipitous thing happens when you prepare for it. So like talking to my teenagers, I do see with them and their friends, them grappling with Internet addiction, especially with apps like YouTube, pulling them in with Shorts and other things.
Justin Jackson:And I do think there could be a countercultural movement. So already kids are looking for alternatives, ways to escape the bad Internet and get to the good Internet. And you see this reflected everywhere, even with old folks like us, like on the How About Tomorrow podcast, Adam and Dax were debating this too. Like, man, growing up in the nineties, we really got to experience the good Internet. And now there's all this bad Internet, which is addictive, which sucks you in, which has you scrolling forever.
Justin Jackson:And so, yeah, part of me is also saying let's prepare for that. And if there is a cultural movement, let's say with Gen Z, where they're saying, you know what? Screw YouTube. I'm done with that. I want to go to something more mindful.
Justin Jackson:We can say, well, there's an app on your phone called Apple Podcasts, and it supports video. And maybe I can convince Apple, I'm talking to them right now, about supporting HLS. It could happen.
Brian Casel:It's interesting. I I I have a hard time wrapping my head around the use case and the market justification for this. But, like, I also think that you probably know a lot more about this than I do. And and we talked about this last time where, like, I'm I'm an old school podcast listener.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Right? I don't know what the younger generations are doing necessarily, but I don't really hear anything from just from my use case, like, it it doesn't sound like it's solving the problems that I would want to solve. But and the other thing that I question just from the standpoint of, like, transistor the business, right, is like, yep. You you might be totally right that there is a market or there's a growing movement of of a younger generation who wants to receive content in that way.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But are there businesses and content creators and podcast creators who are your customers who want to deliver that like
Justin Jackson:Yeah. They want it for sure. Like, the we get asked multiple times, sometimes multiple times per day if we do video podcast hosting. And for a long time, we were clarifying that. Like, what do you mean by that?
Justin Jackson:Are you just talking about just doing it on YouTube? And, you know, some of this because Spotify now supports video, that's helped. And because some of the podcast players like Pocket Casts are also rolling out support for video, it's become more ubiquitous. But right now, the headline on Transistor is called publish your podcast everywhere. And we arrived at that headline by observing the customer's behavior, which is what's the job to be done?
Justin Jackson:I just want my show to be everywhere. Everywhere. Even though many of them have never heard of Overcast or Podcast Addict or any of these things. But when they see that option of like, oh, it's going everywhere. There's something about it that just makes it feel like I'm getting distribution everywhere.
Justin Jackson:And as video becomes more of a thing, and because there's already two big channels that offer video, and I'm hoping there will be a with Apple Podcasts, people just creators want to have it everywhere. And so that's what we're gonna try to do.
Brian Casel:I know this isn't like quite what you're talking about, but like one job to be done or or use case to me is, like, the clips thing. Like, taking Mhmm. And you've been doing this for the panel podcast. Like, taking, like, a clip. Yep.
Brian Casel:Because that is how I actually consume podcasts on video. If I if I ever consume podcasts on video, I almost never watch an entire episode on on video. I'm watching their ten minute clip. Yeah. You know?
Brian Casel:Like, I that's how I consume Conan's podcast is ten minute clips. You know? Like, I was watching, like, ten minutes of Bill Simmons last night on YouTube, and then I switched to the audio version of that when I was in the car today to to hear like the rest of the long form.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's interesting. And this is something that, like, I just find a total pain because I and I and this is why I rarely ever do it is like take a long form piece of video content that I've created and chop it up in for whatever. Mhmm. TikTok, which I've never posted to, or, like, YouTube shorts or, you know, reels or, like, all all these short form things.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And, like and each platform has its own limits. Like, some of them are only one minute. And I think LinkedIn is like you you have up to fifteen minutes. Like, taking your long form podcast from Transistor and automatically saying, like, here are three clips based on the most interesting parts of your transcript. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Already clipped them. They're ready to go. Just click this button, and you can disseminate them out to
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Your you know?
Justin Jackson:That stuff is all possible. I mean, that would be quite a bit further downstream. Mhmm. I and I I wanna be clear. Like, Transistor is a profitable company.
Justin Jackson:I have bandwidth to engage with some of this. So I've taken a much more active role with the podcast standards project. I'm doing a lot of behind the scenes advocacy with executives at Apple and executives at Spotify and talking a lot with other hosting providers and apps because I find it interesting. I love the open web, and we have some bandwidth to do it. And I think, you know, if it doesn't work out, this bet, it's not the worst thing.
Justin Jackson:We can try it. But customers are asking for it, and this will be a higher priced offering. So it'll be in one of the higher priced tiers.
Brian Casel:The other interesting angle maybe you can think about there is like you are sort of charting some new grounds, new territory in the podcasting space that this, you know, h t c HTC?
Justin Jackson:HLS. HLS. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I don't know what I'm maybe there's some technology there that you can figure out and deploy for Transistor and sell to other
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Podcasting companies, you know, like and like be be like the start start to become more of like an infrastructure provider for like, not only podcasting companies, but like even like any SaaS that's offering any sort of, like, media recording, streaming, messaging, delivery, like, this could be the way to tap into that network of content. It's like using your using your, like, API for this or whatever it is. You know?
Justin Jackson:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Just looking at the the comments here from the the live viewers.
Justin Jackson:One thing someone mentioned is Cloudflare Stream. And Cloudflare Stream is a great example of a product that is not priced appropriately for our use case. It would be so expensive to use, in this case, Cloudflare Stream, which is built for this use case, but nobody I know uses it. Like, Aaron didn't use it for their screencasting.com stuff. It's just not priced well.
Justin Jackson:I don't know who's using it. Maybe big enterprise customers are using it, but we have to find a different solution.
Brian Casel:I don't know how that that's a different service from Cloudflare, but I don't know how all their main services, like their domain stuff, the DNS, the the the page host, all that stuff is so is free and Mhmm. And great, and I just love it. I I I love Cloudflare so much, and I just can't believe I use so much of their services for free. It's insane.
Justin Jackson:And, unfortunately, they have a few things that are like so this is the article I was telling you by Aaron, delivering 15 terabytes of four k video with Cloudflare r two for $2.18. So this is where we're kind of headache. And again, video is hard. He compares it to like, the cost. Their monthly cost is $2.18 on Cloudflare.
Justin Jackson:It would be 1,500 on Vimeo, 5,000 on Wistia, or about 1,300 on MUX. And so and then it goes into HLS as well and what they're doing. So in if you're not using Cloudflare stream, you have to encode yourself with FFmpeg. By the way, FFmpeg, I think we all owe owe them a check. You know?
Justin Jackson:Right. They got for like, these guys are the open source guys are just, like, you know, plugging away. They've produced this utility that is used by everybody, including trillion dollar corporations.
Brian Casel:I do wanna do maybe like a separate panel episode. We've already had some people on this show before who are big in in open source, but like, I it still sort of boggles my mind. I get, like, when there's, like, large companies who are sort of behind these tools, but I don't understand the indie I'm so appreciative of these, like, smaller indie developers who put amazing things out to the world open source. Mhmm. But I just don't know how they sustain it unless they have some business model that makes sense with it.
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna try to make some donations. We were talking about in our team meeting today.
Justin Jackson:Like, we gotta we gotta actually, you know, put our money where our mouth is on some of these and actually donate to these projects.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep.
Justin Jackson:Anyway, there's Zach is wondering what my after our last panel when Adam was talking, if I've changed my mind about AI. But let's switch to you. What's going on in in your world? What are you thinking about working on? What's what's the secret project?
Justin Jackson:Like
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it's okay. So of all, I had my I think, like, hit video on my YouTube channel Nice. This week. It's up to, like, something like 35,000 views.
Brian Casel:And it was like I dropped the same day as our podcast episode last week, and I just released a follow-up video to it today. It's about building with AI. Like And and so like that's Oh, there it is.
Justin Jackson:34,000 views.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think my subscribers went up by like 2,000 just in the past week off of this. You know, like, the game with YouTube is so interesting how it's like I I like, I knew I wasn't really maximizing the opportunity on YouTube this year even though I've been publishing so much there. I've so focused on the instrumental components product Yeah. Showing showing that and building it and shipping it.
Brian Casel:But now I feel like starting last week and now, again, this week, I can finally focus on, like, actually building the brand and the topic focus and the new business that I'm trying to build, which is, like, helping people I'm I'm trying to play with different headlines and elevator pitches for this. But the the one that I'm I don't love this, but it's like helping professionals gain leverage in the age of building with AI. Something along those lines. Don't it it sounds a little bit too corporate.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. The the helping any helping blank gain leverage might be a bit too corporate. But I know. You're directionally there. You're directionally there.
Justin Jackson:Sorry. Give it give it to us again so we can listen.
Brian Casel:Helping us gain leverage in this age of building with AI.
Justin Jackson:Us as in devs?
Brian Casel:Build builders. Okay. So software designers, developers, people building software at the professional level. So you're not a hobbyist. In terms of my okay.
Brian Casel:My target market Yeah. For this new business that I'm working on now.
Justin Jackson:That you're about to reveal.
Brian Casel:Sure. Okay. I don't have a website for it. So I'll I'll give you the domain in a but there's nothing nothing there. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's it's aimed at what I'm calling builders. Okay. Professional builders. So you are a I I think there there are probably two sides of this market or two flavors of this market. Right?
Brian Casel:I think the main the main dish is professional full stack designer developers or maybe more developers who've been coding by hand for many years. They've they've made a career out of this. But here we are in 2025. The reality is setting in. Tools like Claude Code and Cursor are here.
Brian Casel:They're not going away. This is not a fad. Yeah. Like, it's time to start embracing the new way of building software. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And and it's I'm hearing this from multiple people, multiple teams that we we all feel like we're behind the curve. We all feel like we are not we are not staying ahead of it. We're not keeping up Yeah. With with the new way of building. Because frankly, we just don't have time to tinker and play around with all the latest tools all day because we have to be shipping our current projects, our work.
Justin Jackson:Yes. Yeah. I felt this a lot. Like, after our conversation last week, I was inspired enough that I was like, okay. I'm gonna set aside two hours to jump into one of these.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm. Didn't happen. I'm I'm busy. I I've got too it's too much to I don't have time to tinker.
Brian Casel:On that same point, so I I just booked a coaching engagement that I I talked last week about the guy who reached out. Yeah. So we so we just booked that. I'm actually gonna be doing it next week. So he and his team are paying me to work with his developers and just look over their shoulder, watch them work, offer them tips.
Brian Casel:Hey, maybe we can consider, you know, building things this way or using this tool or or whatever that might be. Right?
Justin Jackson:So I could see that being very useful, by the way. Just that someone looking over your shoulder and going, okay. Hey. Like Have
Brian Casel:you tried it this way? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The interesting pain point that I think that this is solving is like if you think about a developer who's like employed at a SaaS company, they are not being paid to go tinker and explore and play around with the newest tools.
Brian Casel:They're being paid to ship this week's feature that they have to ship. Mhmm. Right? So they are, like, correctly not. Like, they're they're doing a good job at their at what they're being paid to do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so that's why it sort of makes sense to like, I'm not necessarily trying to be a consultant or a coach in this, but I'm I'm speaking to what the pain point is. I the the main vision for this business is more of a training company, content and and training company. Yeah. But I think the out of the gate, the revenue is gonna come from some form of coaching.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. So just for me to kind of wrap up what I just heard, you put this idea out into the world. You had some people approach you and say, we our team wants that right now.
Brian Casel:The interesting thing is I didn't even put it out to the world. Oh, are just approaching you. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:So which a good sign. Because like I said, I thought I think this is perfect for you because in my mind, you've been that guy for a long time, like early versions of ChatGPT, and you were like, people need to be using this. So someone approached you, said, hey, can you help my team do this? You're doing that engagement partly to get some money right now, but mostly for learning to set up kind of this next business, which will be around these pain points?
Brian Casel:The name that I settled on for this new business is gonna be Builder Methods. I I got buildermethods.com. You can go there. There's nothing there yet.
Justin Jackson:I'm gonna go run there right now.
Brian Casel:My my goal my goal for this week or next week is to get some sort of early landing page up on that domain. Here let me just give you what I think is gonna be the rollout over the next month. Okay. But next couple months. I want you to poke holes in this.
Justin Jackson:Okay.
Brian Casel:Okay. So I think that my top priority right now with Builder Methods is to launch something on buildermethods.com. Mhmm. There has to be like an e like, this whole business is gonna be about growing the email list.
Justin Jackson:Yes.
Brian Casel:Well, two two things. Like, growing the YouTube channel and the email list. The YouTube channel is the top of the funnel distribution for this. Like, I'm really trying to be, like, all in on that is the gonna be the the channel. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Every single week, I'm gonna be doing at least one new video. I I did a last week was a was a hit. The one that dropped today is off to a pretty good start today. It's all these videos going forward are gonna be building with AI. And then I I need to get people from YouTube onto the email list.
Brian Casel:Yep. My thought for the email list is I really like this idea of doing workshops, like live workshops. Mhmm. But I don't have a lot of bandwidth to do live workshops all the time. But I but I do like I think I'm gonna be doing like quarterly workshops.
Brian Casel:And maybe the one is gonna happen in July.
Justin Jackson:Okay.
Brian Casel:But I'm thinking about roughly every three months, I'm going to do a new workshop. Like a live workshop. Yeah. I think the one will probably be free, but I'll start to charge for these. Like a low dollar amount to come to the come to the next live workshop.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Maybe in between, like during those three months, people can opt in to to see a recording of of the of the current workshop. Yep. But that's the main email lead magnet to get lots of people onto the email list, and this is like growing the leads. The the reason why I think it's good to do an like a new or a fresh workshop every two or three months is because this space keeps changing and updating. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, the the one that I do three months from now should be focused on, like, this is the the new current way to build with Cursor. And then three months after that, they're gonna release all sorts of new features and tools that like, alright, now now we gotta talk about this. You know? And so and also, like, just gotta keep learning, gotta keep hearing questions, hear hearing what what the pain points are.
Brian Casel:So there's that quarterly cadence with workshops. In between, you can see the recordings. That's like the email magnet.
Justin Jackson:Yep.
Brian Casel:On the weekly cadence, I'm I'm creating and publishing new YouTube videos, and that is based on it. Like, I need a good two or three days every week at least of just tinkering and playing around. Right? Yeah. So like this this video that I dropped today is all about the background agents feature in Cursor, which is new.
Brian Casel:It took me probably two days of playing with the feature and then two days of recording and then rerecording the video Yeah. To to get a good a solid take on this.
Justin Jackson:That is how how are you feeling about that part? Like, the everything you've said so far sounds good to me. The the big question mark in my head is like, man, that sounds like a lot of energy, lot of time.
Brian Casel:It's tough. And I I I think that I need to be improving over time is the efficiency.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Right? So, like, my efficiency at taking an idea for a YouTube video and getting it into a a recordable state Mhmm. And then an editable state, Like, that's taking me hours now. That that needs to cut down. And I think that's gonna that efficiency will will come through it's a muscle.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, just under like, knowing how to I I did two takes of today's video. Right? The one, I was too ambitious. I I made the demo content like way too complicated and it ended up breaking while I was recording it.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. And
Brian Casel:I had to you know? So then I did like a take where I just did like a simpler demo.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. You
Brian Casel:know? And so like things like that, I'm just gonna get better and better at to to increase the speed. Yeah. Same with the editing workflow. I'm using Descript right now.
Brian Casel:I I have some complaints about it, but there are some things that can get faster.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm. This is actually something I think people do not realize how much time it takes to produce video. Video is just unbelievable. Even like, I'm pretty good at a standard video for me is I just hit record. I have kind of in my head what I want to talk about.
Justin Jackson:Hopefully, I've been working it out, just demoing it for customers or whatever. And so I can just hit record and basically record it beginning to end. Not in one take. I I might have a few gotchas along the way, but that's done. And I've got a thirty minute thirty minutes of video that I need to get down to five or 10.
Justin Jackson:Yep. That part just even when like, for some people, just recording the video is hard. That part, you know, I have a I just turn this camera on, turn this light on, turn this light on, hit record, goes right into my computer. I don't even use an SD card. It's just like right into my computer.
Justin Jackson:Done. Editing. Editing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Editing, dude. I I I did I had a I was working with an editor for the part of this year, and he he ended up taking a full time job somewhere. And that was really great because I do have an easy setup here to just flip the camera on, get my raw recording into Dropbox, and I can give it to him. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So like most of the videos that I published earlier this year were edited by him. Yeah. And that was fantastic. It was like less than an hour of my time. I'm done.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But and he's he's pretty good at what he does. But I must say, like, now, I'm putting so much more care and love into the creation of my videos with me editing them and finding just the right b roll to show and the, you know, and and, like, editing every line and, like, really, like, writing every line of the script and all this stuff. Like, I think it's a really important part of this whole thing that I'm doing is, like, high quality and just ever improving quality on the YouTube channel. I do think that there's a gap on YouTube too.
Brian Casel:Like, there's there's obviously, like, a ton of people showing YouTube videos about how to vibe code the next million dollar app in twenty minutes.
Justin Jackson:Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:There's a lot of that kind of garbage right now. And I'm I'm like this video that that did well last week, I got, like, 200 comments on it. Mhmm. I think that there are a lot of, like, professionals who are, like, finally some like, someone who's who's given some, like, real talk about building with AI.
Justin Jackson:I'm curious. Did you have you looked at the analytics for it yet? Like, how did people find it?
Brian Casel:I haven't dug into it too much. I I know that most of the videos come through the algorithm. You know?
Justin Jackson:Because the I edited just a piece of our conversation with Adam and published it on my channel. And I was I mean, it's always just interesting to see where things come from where things come, like how people find it. And this one was YouTube recommendations. 66.6% of views came from YouTube home. So just getting recommended on the homepage.
Justin Jackson:Yep. And then up next was 20%. Everything else, like, send it to my email list. That's somewhere down here. I sent it to you know?
Justin Jackson:And
Brian Casel:and actually interesting thing about that, like, I think that I I've I've done, like, a lot of, like, research into how to grow on YouTube. Yeah. And I think it's actually, like, not like, I actually try not to promote my YouTube videos outside of you like, I don't tweet them very much. I don't put them on on Blue Sky. Occasionally, I'll send it to my newsletter.
Brian Casel:But I think the thing to be careful of there is that, like, it could be a negative signal to YouTube's algorithm
Justin Jackson:if
Brian Casel:the views are coming from elsewhere. Yeah. Because what because what YouTube's algorithm really wants is they want to know that people are discovering it organically and they are sticking with it and watching. Like, if you can get that watch time in other words, make it interesting enough so that they don't press stop and go away.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:If people are watching long enough because they discovered it through the algorithm, that's then YouTube wants to keep promoting that.
Justin Jackson:Know? Interesting. Because the the traditional wisdom was always like you wanna at some point, I heard the algorithm liked it when there was initial wave of interest and watch time.
Brian Casel:But you I
Justin Jackson:think I think they do right.
Brian Casel:Like Like, they do wanna see that early action. But, like, their algorithm sends people who they think are perfectly aligned with this topic.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:You know? So they wanna make sure that, like, okay, we found the product market fit for this video. Yep. That's why I'm so excited about YouTube in general as a as a platform
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:For marketing. You know?
Justin Jackson:I I do think there's lots of opportunity here still for this is gonna sound so funny because but I think in terms of if like if anyone out there's looking for a job, I'm not necessarily saying I would hire you for this. But I think there is an opportunity for for video editors that can edit quickly with with YouTube in mind.
Brian Casel:I feel like Descript is trying to be this, and I'm using them. They've gotten good. They're it's not there yet. Like, it's pretty slow and clunky. It's still a little bit over complicated than it should be.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. But it's pretty cool now how I can they have a tool where I can, like, automatically cut out bad takes. Yeah. You know? So I often say lines, like, three or four times.
Brian Casel:Like, it'll just keep the last one. And it obviously it does a really good job of getting rid of all the ums. Yeah. And they they have some secret sauce that that really make make it seamless. So it's kind of cool.
Brian Casel:But I I wanna I wanna also get maybe get your take on the product like revenue and product.
Justin Jackson:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just to leave this, I do think there's lots we could talk about in the future.
Justin Jackson:And there's probably an Aaron Francis connection point here, which is Oh, yeah. And you're so great at this process. Like, what's the process for efficiently creating video? And I feel like I have the part of it nailed. I've got a studio set up, camera on, and I give up some video quality by just having it go right into my Ecamm Live, right into ScreenFlow or, sorry, my not Ecamm Live, my, Cam Link.
Justin Jackson:It goes right into my Cam Link. And then
Brian Casel:That's what I do too.
Justin Jackson:Record it in ScreenFlow, and then the video's on my machine. I don't have to take an SD card out and put it in, and it's just videos on my machine.
Brian Casel:Same. Yep.
Justin Jackson:That part after that, which is, like, structuring it so there's some sort of hook. And, you know, it's almost like I wish I could just have a producer come and look at all the video and then say, okay, Justin, you need to record one more bit just to bring people in.
Brian Casel:My process keeps changing on this. I keep what what I'm finding now is that I'm removing layers from my process and just going bare bones to, like, most essential pieces. Right? Yeah. I the the technical setup, mine is exactly the same as you.
Brian Casel:I've got a big light right here.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Got my camera, Cam Link. Now I'm recording directly into Descript, but I I used to record directly into ScreenFlow. The only reason I I use Descript instead of ScreenFlow is because they have the script based editing.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:If as as soon as ScreenFlow adds that, like, I'm switching back to ScreenFlow. Yeah. Right. But I don't think they are. That's the technical setup.
Brian Casel:But I now focus on I I I spend a lot of time, like, planning the topic. Mhmm. And what the title and the thumbnail are gonna be before I even record. It I and I think that's the key strategy on YouTube is, like, think about how you're gonna package this thing before you even create it. And I'm using some AI, so I'll I'll I'll have like the raw idea.
Brian Casel:It's mostly from me, and then I'll I'll throw it into chat GPT. Like, can we can we punch up this this title idea? And I also really write word for word, at least the intro section, like the thirty seconds, I'm writing that word for word Yeah. Script. Again, it's like the most important thing.
Brian Casel:You you gotta hook them and try to get them to stay for the whole video. Yeah. Lately, I've been I I just get into the groove of writing, like copywriting, that I end up writing the script for most of the video. But I I only really read off of the script in the in the thirty seconds. And when I say read, I mean, like, sit here and I try to memorize a line, and then I say it.
Brian Casel:Then I then I memorize a line, and then I say it. You know? And when I I I'll say it, like, six times before I'm happy with how I said it. But I I just let I just let it roll for, an hour, and and that gets cut down to, a fifteen minute video. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's
Justin Jackson:and that's the part that's have have you been using before we leave this, I I'm just in this mode as well. Have you been using the YouTube thumbnail tester?
Brian Casel:No. I probably should.
Justin Jackson:Oh, dude. You gotta use
Brian Casel:I because I yeah. I just kind of only have time to create the one thumbnail. I do I like, I'll I'll snap a photo of myself in in the same shirt that I wore for the recording and same same lighting and everything. And then lately, I've been using Pixelmator Pro to just, you know, whip up a a thumbnail image. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But I but beforehand, I'm giving a lot of thought to like, alright, what's the what's the title gonna be and what's the text that I'm gonna have on the thumbnail? But, like, all of that informs how I actually write the script and then what what I'm focusing on in the video.
Justin Jackson:Like Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know, I have that concept beforehand.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. That, I think, is key. A good, some homework for you and me and everybody else is go watch some of Steven Robles' videos, r o b l e s. He's just a master at setting up that intro in a way and and, structuring his videos in a way that hooks the user, the viewer, and brings them in.
Brian Casel:The other thing I've been meaning to do, I haven't gotten around to it, is just go back to older videos and update the thumbnail.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. You
Brian Casel:know? That works really well. And I know that I have a few videos from my two, three months ago. Like, have one on Ruby on Rails on AI. Right?
Brian Casel:And that's still one of my best performing videos now. It's like three or four months old.
Justin Jackson:It's still getting views.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's got like a really crappy thumbnail. Like, what like, what if I actually improved the thumbnail? It'd probably do even better, you know.
Justin Jackson:The I've now gotten in the habit of doing those tests every time. It's just basically if you haven't seen it at home for the listener, it's just a AB tester. And so for this last video, I tested it's always three variations. Usually, my and I just make these in Canva. So my my thumbnail is probably not that good.
Justin Jackson:I've made the one was a big winner. It was like 54%.
Brian Casel:People want more Adam. More
Justin Jackson:Adam. But I also think it was the headline forced to use AI. So I took something he said, which was I forced myself to use AI. And this is a trick Aaron Francis taught me. It was just like, the less words in the title, the better.
Justin Jackson:And the more it kind of like opens up a curiosity loop, the better. And so it was just forced to use AI.
Brian Casel:Does that automatically select the winner and use that going forward?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I found this very helpful. Just and this is the biggest winner I've ever had.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it really I should I we we should just be creating like three thumbnails for every video. Yeah. Just, you know
Justin Jackson:And like I said, this is my approach in Canva as I just create three separate pages, and I just pull in images, and then I'm just like it's it's pretty simple. I'm not doing anything crazy here. I try to always stick with this font, and that's it.
Brian Casel:Love it. Okay. Alright. So here's
Justin Jackson:Let's talk about money. Gonna make money. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Okay. My thought I I don't know what the ultimate ultimately, what the product line is gonna be from this thing. I'm trying to focus all the energy upfront on, like, grow the distribution channel, grow YouTube. Yeah. And grow the and grow the email list.
Brian Casel:And also learn from the market and figure out but I think that it'll probably end up being courses.
Justin Jackson:K.
Brian Casel:And there can be a few different types of these. We could talk about that. And maybe sponsorships will will play an element in this. Mhmm. I would say short like, there's a short term, medium, long term.
Brian Casel:Right? So short term, like, right now is like coaching. Yep. And I think coaching can come in like one to one. It can be some team coaching.
Brian Casel:It might be like one time sessions, like a one time audit. Or it might be a a month thing with your team. Yeah. Or might or maybe like a private workshop with your team. That could be some like upfront revenue that I can that I have already started selling now.
Justin Jackson:I like that idea.
Brian Casel:Yep. But I don't intend to do that for very long. Yep. I I don't wanna do that for very long. The courses, I think one flavor, probably medium term in the next couple of months, could be what are the most obvious, very self obvious, like, tightly scoped self serve courses that I can create.
Brian Casel:Like, maybe like an intro to using cursor or or mastering cursor or something like that. But like, you know, or like prompting for development, prompting techniques or I don't know.
Justin Jackson:Like, I
Brian Casel:I don't know what they're gonna be, but like very very tightly focused things. Couple $100 each. So like not very expensive. Like, oh, oh, I'm really interested in that specific topic right now. Let me grab that off the shelf and and do it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That could be like a medium term thing. I think ultimately, most of these businesses end up making their way toward, a cohort based flagship course. Right? Where, like, roughly three times a year, I'm running a three month program.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And it's a 4 figure price tag to get in on that, and you're joining a cohort of other members and and myself. And, like, together, we're we're we're building something or or we're, like, we're upping our development game over the next two, three months. Yeah. Right? And we're in a private group, and it's it's live and and async, but you're joining the spring cohort.
Brian Casel:And then I'll do another one in the summer and then another one in the fall. Yeah. And, like, those will be like the big the the big moneymaker. Right?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. Can I just pause here and say one thing I like about both of these ideas is they both can leverage Clarity Flow? So Yep. In idea number one, you're the coach.
Justin Jackson:And Clarity Flow is async video messaging and just messaging and payments and other things for coaches. And then the idea, which is some sort of course and then moving to a cohort based course that might be async and live, that's a really great way for you to use your own software.
Brian Casel:I expect I will. I I I use Clarity Flow every single day anyway with people. So I'm not I'm not necessarily I I I don't see it as a requirement to, like, integrate these businesses. I I I don't feel, absolutely tied to we must use Clarity Flow for everything, but I do happen to use Clarity Flow for most of these types of things. I expect I will be using it, you know.
Justin Jackson:So sorry. Do you think long term long term a cohort based course is maybe the thought or a mix of that and sponsorship?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I it remains to be seen how how in how interested I am in that sort of rhythm. I'm historically very, very async. I don't like doing things live. I don't like having a lot of meetings.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:But maybe I can grow to like this sort of thing. I and I I, again, I think the subject matter of this is, like, like with when I was doing the productized course over ten years ago, I created that course, and then I sold it for, like, five years. Mhmm. You know? I did maybe a few improvements to it here and there over those years, but, like, it was like set it and forget it for a long time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's not gonna work here. No. This type of subject matter has to keep staying fresh. So so the more live elements and, like, whatever I create this quarter is gonna be updated or completely redone next quarter.
Brian Casel:And I think that goes for my lightweight workshops. Yeah. It goes for my YouTube content. It goes for the the flagship cohort. Like like the the the spring twenty twenty six cohort should probably have a lot very different content than like the spring twenty twenty seven cohort.
Brian Casel:Yes. Like, because things are gonna evolve so so much over that period
Justin Jackson:of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:So yeah. I mean, part of and unfortunately, the beginning of any idea, you're in the fog of war, and you don't really know, as you explore the map, like what's going to reveal itself. So, for example, you might publish a YouTube video every week on how to build with AI. And you might get right away a massive email list. It could happen.
Justin Jackson:And then right away, it might be like, you know what? The best model for this is sponsorship. There's tons of AI companies.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And that's the other you know, it's funny enough. Like, literally today, I got the email. Somebody just emailed me randomly because that that video went crazy last week. So they are they're from an AI tool.
Brian Casel:They're like a plug in for Versus Code. And they're like, hey, like, we'd love to do a collaboration with you. Can you do a video about, like, how this compares to Cursor? Yeah. Frank, honestly, what I told him, I was like, look, I plan to do sponsorships maybe later this year.
Brian Casel:I haven't started doing that, but I do plan to. I'm I'm just curious to know, like, how much do you usually pay for that? Like, have you done these things with other YouTubers before? I'm not quite ready right now to just do a video next week for for this random product. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And I don't think I would do it do a video a whole video for just any anyone who wants to sponsor. But but, you know, that does come with the territory of like, if if I do grow the channel to tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers over time, like, sponsored YouTube videos or at least sponsorship spots in my YouTube videos is definitely
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:A a thing that can happen.
Justin Jackson:Know? How often do you think you'll do the email newsletter?
Brian Casel:That's a that's another good question. My my idea, this is totally up in the up in the air, is like, my thought was to do a once a month newsletter. I just don't I won't have the bandwidth to do a weekly thing unless it was a little bit more automated. But I like the idea of somehow carving out the time once a month to say to to to really write like this, I think, is the most important idea that I'm thinking about this month.
Justin Jackson:I I'm still I could be wrong. I'm still kind of feeling like this needs to be a weekly email. And it's only because it's so in today's environment more than ever. Yeah. It's this is kind of like the whole discussion Ian and Aaron were having over at Mostly Technical, which is so many people didn't realize that Aaron was releasing a new course.
Justin Jackson:And us builders fall into this all the time. We're like, well, I have. I sent five emails, you know? Like, how come nobody nobody got it? And it's just like your hit rate.
Justin Jackson:Like, there's email newsletters that I would say I quote unquote love, and that I am a active reader of. But I actually only read one out of four. And I just worry about your the hit rate on a monthly podcast monthly email newsletter. It just might not even if it's amazing and people think, oh, yeah, Brian's newsletter is amazing. It just might not have you might get more out of it if you if it was every week.
Brian Casel:Well, I think that people will still receive more emails through my email systems, like the automated
Justin Jackson:Okay.
Brian Casel:Like drip campaign. So once you get into the once you attend a live workshop or once you get into the email list somehow, I'll have campaigns set up in Kit to to nurture you and to sell you on the product that you haven't bought yet. Like, that's that's the vision for like, that's that's why these types of businesses grow their email lists is like Mhmm. Okay. Like, get into the free or the low cost workshop and you'll be upsold on on the cohort program next time it comes around.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and then also, having, like, a like a a lineup, a product lineup of, like, oh, you're interested in cursor? We have a cursor course. Mhmm. Oh, you're interested in Claude code?
Brian Casel:Take our Claude code course. Yeah. Right? So, like, so we can and and I can have, like, surveys where I'm tagging people and, oh, you you expressed interest in Rails with AI. So maybe, you know, we have specialized products and and courses that you can trigger with automated email campaigns through that.
Brian Casel:Like, that's the vision that it'll take years to build all that stuff out.
Justin Jackson:In in terms of a subscriber magnet, I think another thing you could suggest I think workshops is a good thing to test. Another thing that I'm kind of thinking about is just, again, what's the problem that a lot of us are having? Which is just like, I've got to make the time to just jump in to one of these things and do a crash course on it. And I think a like five email or three email sequence, which is like, here's your three day crash course. I'll send you an email each day.
Justin Jackson:I'll give you one distinct task on what to do. And you are gonna do it, you know, and you're going to finally get this off your anxiety list.
Brian Casel:Really like that. Yeah. Totally. I had a productized crash course that was my go to lead magnet for years.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I like that. And, like, maybe an idea for that could be shift your mindset around, like, starting to have, like, an AI for building with AI mindset coming from a hand coding mindset. And that's something that can be a little bit more timeless, and it could last a year or two years or more. Like, I can create it, and it's just about mindset. It's not specific to any tool right now.
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin Jackson:Can I give you another idea I just had? This might be dumb. But what do what do you call those those documents you create at to set up the LLM? Like, it's like a project it it's an Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like a PRD, the project department. Yep.
Justin Jackson:PRD generator? Like, is that a thing that could be a thing? Because
Brian Casel:Yeah. There there I think there's some tools to do that. Also also people are now offering cursor rules as, like, offerings.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know, like like, swipe my cursor rules.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. That and, like see, I know you you and Adam were talking about PRDs and cursor rules and all this stuff. And I was like, okay. And then I, like, watched Ryan Carson's video, and then I went into the GitHub project. And then I was like, okay, I'm done.
Justin Jackson:Like, I've I I exhausted myself. If I could just go somewhere and just, like, generate my PRD and my rules based on like, it just asks me a bunch of questions. I I I guess I could use ChatGPT for this. But maybe that could be I guess that would be day one of the crash course. Like here's how to finally get your PRD done.
Brian Casel:I think the key is to have multiple lead magnets and just develop them over time. Alright. I I gotta get your your take on one last piece of this.
Justin Jackson:One more thing.
Brian Casel:And that is start starting another podcast.
Justin Jackson:Jeremy. My my my Laravel friend Jeremy, who I always see at LaraCon. I I'm not gonna see you this summer, Jeremy, I don't think, unfortunately, but he just commented, do you guys not have enough podcasts? No.
Brian Casel:We we clearly don't. Gotta do we gotta do another one. And alright. So this is one that I really wanna do. I have no idea when I'm gonna have the time to do it.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Time is the key.
Brian Casel:But, like, as like, I think I'll probably just call it, like, the Builder Methods podcast. It's it's gonna be a a thing for this business. Here's what I wanna do. I want to hop on call like, video calls with guests. Show me how you are currently working.
Brian Casel:Show me your current projects. But especially people who are building with AI. Not like, this is not me coaching people who want to build with AI. I'm I wanna talk to friends, builder friends who have already started embracing AI in their workflow. And this is for I'm trying to kill multiple birds with one stone here.
Brian Casel:The main thing is like, I need to be exposed to new ideas. Yeah. And and I need to be doing like, the value that this whole business is offering is, like, we're doing the research and development for you. Mhmm. So I need to have my finger on the pulse of, like, what is Derek what's Derek Rimer doing in in his in his workflow?
Justin Jackson:What's What is
Brian Casel:Derek Rimer doing over I gotta ask him. I gotta I gotta ask him. I gotta record it. I gotta put it on a podcast. Yeah.
Brian Casel:You know?
Justin Jackson:I don't think that one thing I'd say, as much as I'm a podcast person, that doesn't sound like a podcast to me. That just sounds like a supplement to your existing YouTube channel. Like, I'm gonna do video.
Brian Casel:That was gonna be one of my questions.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's a podcast.
Brian Casel:So I I wanna do that. Like, I wanna have, like, a a series where I'm just always at, like, show me show me your work, show me your show me your screen, show me what you're working on. Like like, oh, that was an interesting shortcut. Or, oh, you you'd have an interesting approach to prompting or using agents. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Or, you know and I I I think it'll be interesting content, but I'm looking for patterns Yeah. That I can turn into, like, insights that I can develop into a into a YouTube video or a course or something.
Justin Jackson:I mean, I love this idea because I think, like, that little segment I edited up of Adam talking about how he's using AI, I think it did well because I think a lot of people were curious about how he's using AI. And Mhmm. I think it would be fascinating. I mean, I would love to know how Derek Rimer is using AI. That what was interesting about that conversation that we had last week was I got to listen to two smart people who are both very opinionated, you and Adam, basically say this is how we're using it.
Justin Jackson:And we're not thinking about it in the same way that the the hype AI coder boys are thinking about it. This is real life application, how we're doing it. And I do think you're right. Like you said that earlier. I think that's refreshing.
Justin Jackson:I think that's gonna be refreshing on YouTube. Because maybe it's an older audience, you know, like that's that's who who doesn't want all this hype? They just want okay. I've been coding for two decades. What do I do?
Justin Jackson:What do I do now?
Brian Casel:I do think that there is a I was saying earlier how there's like a couple different flavors of my target audience for this. Yeah. I do wanna keep it focused on like you're the you're a professional. And and a professional can mean a lot of things. It can mean you're a founder.
Brian Casel:It can mean that you work for a company. Or it could it could also mean like you're pretty junior. Mhmm. And I think that that that's the other flavor of and I'm seeing this in some of the some of the responses like
Justin Jackson:Yep.
Brian Casel:I think that there are people who are vibe coding. They're not trying to vibe code to, like, whip up an MVP that they can go sell and hack together. Mhmm. And, like, they're trying to, like, make a career in software development.
Justin Jackson:Yep.
Brian Casel:And if you're trying to get into this industry right now or grow in this Or maybe you started in this industry only five years ago. Yep. Just before AI came through. So you haven't gained years of experience yet. But you can't just keep going down the train of like, oh, I'm going to be a JavaScript writing expert.
Brian Casel:That's not going to help you anymore. You need to be an expert in building with Cursor.
Justin Jackson:See, this is what Dave Junta called out last episode was how how to be if you and Adam are saying the best way to use AI as developers is you have to develop expertise, How are we gonna get all of these junior developers who can't get a job to develop expertise? Like, there's a big gap there.
Brian Casel:But there's there is an interesting thing there because it's I'm I'm definitely not saying you don't need to know anything about software development. Like, you can just vibe code your way to professionalism. Like, no. Yeah. You know?
Brian Casel:Like, do need to know how software applications get built, what the infrastructure how how that works. Like, how how databases work, how what happens when a user makes a request on a web page, where is that going to, how's it going through a controller and hitting a database. You need to understand how these things work. You just don't need to know how to write a line of code yourself anymore. You know?
Brian Casel:You need to be able to read it. You don't have to write it.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. One kind of opinionated response to that is I do think you've just identified two streams, like the experienced developer who's been programming for two decades that now needs to figure this out. And then that junior developer that's like just getting started. Those do feel like two audiences for me. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:And in my head, I think I think you should be going to the more extreme. Even though I personally am very interested in this problem of how do we help junior developers, this one here feels like it might be a better fit for your goals. But
Brian Casel:I think it's interesting because it's the other the other channel so like this this client that I have next week who who hired me to coach his team. Yeah. It's like the person making the buying decision is the founder or the CEO or the manager. Yeah. But he wants me to coach the junior employees.
Justin Jackson:Okay. I'm surprised he has a team of juniors. It feels like nobody's hiring juniors.
Brian Casel:The way that he described it was like, they're not necessarily juniors, but they're not he's he's not competing with Google for, like, the best software talent out there. Like, he's a bootstrapped SaaS, and and he actually prioritized developers who really know his product space really well. They like, they know that customer base, but they're not, like, the the greatest you know, they're not the most competitive software developers.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. This is one of those things that at the beginning of a project, it's the curse, and it's the great thing is that you get to test out different approaches. Because maybe there's a big market, for example, of junior developers. Like one pain point I'm picking up with junior developers is they're saying, I wish ChatGPT didn't exist because I can't go through the school of hard knocks to actually get that fundament. I can just be lazy with everything.
Justin Jackson:I do think there's, in the future, the potential for a school that will take someone who's interested in programming and say, we're gonna do this hard mode. Like, that we we we are going to teach you all the things you would need to know if you were studying computer science in 02/2005, but in 2025. That does feel like a thing you could do. But I'm wondering for your market, maybe it's better to not
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I I I yeah. I I I've been thinking of like, how can I help I I really think that the the the wave and the opportunity is in the more experienced people getting up to speed?
Justin Jackson:Mhmm. That's how I feel too. But there
Brian Casel:is this idea of like, how can I help you read vibe code? Like, you know, like like, you don't really know anything about how stuff gets built, but but, like, maybe I can teach you how, like, the how to how the dots actually connect behind the scenes.
Justin Jackson:I don't know.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But but I I must say, you know, I've been sort of on the search for the last, like, two years for, like, what is my next business gonna be? This one feels like the time that I feel like I'm actually timing something really right.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Everything else, I actually felt like my timing is off. Instrumental components feels like the timing was off on that. And, like, other ideas that I had over the last year or two had some ideas for, like, SaaS products, like, maybe I'll do. And, alright. Like, it just seems like a grind, like an uphill grind to, like, go find a customer and market and and weasel my way in and Yeah.
Brian Casel:Make a business out of that. And this is the one where I feel like I I did one YouTube last week, and it's going crazy. And I I did another one today. And, like, And also just seeing everyone I know keep talking about this same topic. Again, I don't know what the end product is going to be, but I just feel like I'm actually playing in the right pool right now.
Justin Jackson:I think so too. Like I said, I think this topic, like building with AI is perfect for you because you've been talking about it for years. When most of the world was skeptical, You were the one person in my earbuds saying, no, I think this is actually gonna be a big deal. And every time I put out a, you know, a skeptical post, you were like, well, maybe think about it this way or whatever. So I think you already have this reputation, which is why unprompted that person approached you.
Justin Jackson:And I kind of feel like if I was you, I would just be like, if you're gonna give this a good go, like, whatever you need to do on the YouTube channel to completely rebrand it so people know,
Brian Casel:like, this is it's it's like half not like, I'm still I don't even have a website to promote yet, you know? Yeah. The what was I gonna say?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. You do builder methods dot Yeah.
Brian Casel:I I gotta I gotta update and and get that get that going. Like, I I was thinking today, like, okay. I I think I think the very low hanging fruit lead magnet that I could possibly do is a live workshop. I'm gonna announce it. It's gonna be some date in in in, like, July after my trip.
Brian Casel:I'll probably just make it free, the one. Yep. But even that, like, I'm so early in this whole game that, like, I don't even know we were just talking about, like, who should I who should I make this workshop for? Like, should what should the content of this workshop be? I I really think it's just gonna be an open, like, ask me anything and, bring your questions.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I'm gonna give you my current thinking on these questions. And I might have a couple bullet points that I can that I can touch on, but, like, I I don't have any curriculum yet. I'm I just have some patterns and some concepts and some and some experience building with AI that, like, I'm I really just need to listen and hear what are the most common questions being asked right now, and that's gonna sort of guide the direction of of everything right now. You know?
Justin Jackson:Personally, it feels I'm kinda leaning towards just because I know there's so many existing software companies and software teams and agencies with experienced developers with, like, businesses that are working, but they're stressed about this. They're thinking about it, and they have money. And so it feels like that approach, which is like Brian could come in and say, well, here's a bunch of things you you might not even know about cursor rules or whatever. Like, I'm just gonna help you set up all that stuff. I'm gonna look at, like, what do most of your developers code in?
Justin Jackson:Okay. Well, here's what I would recommend for if you're in Visual Studio Code, here's what I recommend.
Brian Casel:The guy who hired me for for next week, you know, he's like I I see it much like you're like a golf trainer. Like, you're just, like, observing the swing, giving some tips. Mhmm. It remains to be seen, like, how effective I can actually be on, like, a live call. Because I do think that with this kind of stuff, it's a lot of like, okay, here's a tip or a new workflow for you to consider.
Brian Casel:Now you gotta spend the next few weeks, like, changing around the way that you build stuff and rebuilding your muscle memory and like, it's not gonna happen overnight. You know?
Justin Jackson:I think that's gonna be the value. Cause we've already exposed, like, if selling a product is saying, you're here, there's an obstacle here, and you don't know how to get over that obstacle to the thing that you want. The obstacle in in front of experienced developers and teams is like, we're already we've we've been doing something one way for two decades. We've just been coding things by hand, looking up answers on Stack Overflow. And now you're saying we need to change completely.
Justin Jackson:And we've been getting paid for a lot of grunt work like we talked about last week. And so the value part of the value will be, I think, I'm going to I know you want to think about this, so I'll give you a forcing function to think about it. Yeah. I'm gonna show you how to do it. But then for there to be some sort of accountability on the other side in a week or two weeks, like, okay.
Justin Jackson:I'm checking in. Have have you been doing things the new way or the old way? And Right. It's kind of like when you go to a drumming lesson, and maybe you taught yourself how to drum, and then your drumming instructor goes, okay. Sorry, bud.
Justin Jackson:You've got some good things going there, but your your technique's all wrong. You're gonna have to relearn how to play the drums. And you're like, oh god. I don't wanna do that. And the drums drumming teacher says, I'm gonna force you to do it for the next three weeks.
Brian Casel:And you'll appreciate it.
Justin Jackson:And you'll appreciate it. I feel like people needs people kinda need someone to be doing that for them.
Brian Casel:Like, the other thing about like how I think about topics right now, and I think filling a niche is like Like the video I dropped today is called how to crush your backlog using background agents and cursor. I The thing that I find most interesting about topics like this is like, why should I care about this thing? What is like, it's I don't wanna be the guy who's just saying like, hey, you all need to be building with AI because that's the new way of doing it. Like, that's not good enough. There has to be a reason.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Brian Casel:There has to be an incentive for you and your team to actually change up the way that you build stuff. Yeah. Because you like, there has to be a payoff. You have to be doing getting some speed benefits Yeah. Or product benefits or whatever that might be.
Brian Casel:Right? So, like, Cursor just dropped this new background agents feature. Codecs like OpenAI's Codecs is essentially the same thing. Both of them are background agents.
Justin Jackson:Right? Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like Unlike Claude Code, unlike normal cursor where you're working directly, like, the foreground with the agent, these are like, give it a task, go get a coffee, and it's gonna keep working. Right? Yeah. But, like, why is that actually interesting? Right?
Brian Casel:It's like alright. Cool. But, like, it's to me, it's like about your backlog. Yeah. Like, you have this backlog of of things that you need to ship or bugs that you need to fix.
Brian Casel:Yep. And and your backlog is the reason why you can't ship your main big features fast enough because your backlog keeps distracting you. Right? And so it's like, okay. This this feature is interesting, but the reason it's interesting is because you can now offload your backlog Mhmm.
Brian Casel:So that you can focus on the on the main dish. Yeah. I I I feel like that's a theme that I wanna sort of, like, be known for in all of my content. It's like, okay. Like, what what's actually worth paying attention to, and and why should I even care?
Brian Casel:Like, well, this is why. And and and then I'll show you how to do it. You know?
Justin Jackson:And I think as you pay attention and observe what people are saying, as you observe them kind of struggling out loud, I think you're gonna get the clues to a lot of that stuff. Like, what's the Yeah. That's why coaching, I think, early on can be so helpful because then you're actually observing the dynamics. Yeah. And if you could do that with a few different teams, I think you would be able to see it's it's maybe there's different jobs to be done with different teams, you know?
Justin Jackson:Like Yeah. You know, for transistor, it's like we have two full time engineers on the product side. And the biggest struggle we have is like, we can really only focus on, like, one thing at a time. And our pace is good. Like, we ship we ship fast, but there's always the feeling of, like, I wish we could ship more faster.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, I have one developer on Clarity Flow, and, like, literally, like, half of her time is fixing bugs and the other half is building the next feature. Right? Like, imagine if she's only building the next feature. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. And I there's lots of opportunities in here too. One thing in the chat I wanted to call out, I think this was Dustin. I might be wrong.
Justin Jackson:Sorry. But they said a good course or Oh, yeah. Sorry. Ryan said DevOps for Vibe coders. I think it would be really good.
Justin Jackson:Because that's gonna be a huge thing. Like, I I don't know if you saw that article I wrote. But what's really hard about software is maintenance. And I just keep thinking like a lot of the this stuff that we're exploring right now with, you know, vibe coding, it's actually not that new. Like, there was this whole open source clone wave where if you wanted your own to do app, you could clone a project really easily on GitHub, maybe modify it a bit, and then deploy it to Heroku with of that could take, like, twenty minutes.
Brian Casel:And then there was a big, like, no code movement.
Justin Jackson:And then there was a big no code movement. And the problem with both of those, incidentally, is that you just like, I'm still getting Dependabot security vulnerability warnings for projects I built ages ago. Mhmm. And anybody that's been around software for a long time knows, like, that's what kills you. Like, you've still got this thing running on some Heroku machine, or I got a bill for like $500 because somebody had discovered this opening on AWS and was just like hammering it trying to like, those are the real problems is Yeah.
Justin Jackson:Vulnerabilities, dependencies, keeping versions up to date. Then you finally go back into it and you're, you know, three versions of Laravel behind and there's no upgrade path. And that is I that could be a huge topic, which is like, yeah, you're building more. How can you actually do the other side of that?
Brian Casel:One thing that sort of makes me nervous about that this is that, like, I I don't consider myself, like, like, a a a really great, like, all around I am I am full stack. I can build full stack design development front end, back end applications. Yep. But I definitely don't know everything there is to know. Certainly not across the board on different tech stacks and programming languages.
Brian Casel:And DevOps is like the the where I'm the least experienced. You know? And so like but I I think I think if I focus more on, like, the workflow and the tooling of building with AI, like, I don't have to be the expert in JavaScript or, you know, databases or whatever that might be. Like Yep. I just had kinda need to know, like, what the big pieces mean and what their role is and how to work with them.
Brian Casel:Yep. And I know my personal tech stack of choice and stuff, but I think if I could just relate to most of it and really that's the same mindset that I've always had. It's like, I just need to know just enough to be able to ship my own products. Mhmm. You know?
Brian Casel:In this case, I feel like I am in a space finally where I could actually carve out a niche where I can be a a deep expert on using cursor and using background agents and using MCP and and, like you know? Because I I I wouldn't feel qualified, like, teaching even, like, Rails. Like, I I know a lot about Rails now, but, like, I I wouldn't really feel qualified teaching a course on like writing,
Justin Jackson:you know Yeah.
Brian Casel:Ruby or or like a database course or like JavaScript. Know?
Justin Jackson:I mean, that's why I think this is your sweet spot.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's it is kind of cool, especially now that I have a little bit of revenue through this and doing some coaching stuff where it's like, actually, I feel like I'm my new job now is to stay on top of
Justin Jackson:this.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And to build like demo apps and tinker around and spend a day or two just playing with this stuff so so that I can make the next YouTube video so that I can coach someone on this or develop course material. Like, it's actually kinda cool to feel like, alright. Now now I feel justified in being able to go out and play around with these tools. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Whereas like whereas for the last two years, it's been like, I I don't wanna pull the trigger on that until I I know that there's a market to validate or or, I'm not gonna build this app until I know that's really the way I wanna go. Like, now I can just like, yesterday, I just built a habit tracking app. Not a it's not a real product. It's just something to use for a YouTube video. Like, it and so that it's kind of fun to do that.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Like I said, I love this idea. Let's wind down. But everyone should go to buildermethods.com. By the time this episode is published, it
Brian Casel:Just just keep hitting refresh.
Justin Jackson:Keep hitting refresh, everybody.
Brian Casel:And and eventually, there will be something there.
Justin Jackson:Also, next week, I think we're gonna try to record live again. Is that right? June 19, 12:15PM Pacific. Show up for that. I want to thank all the people I think we should do some shout outs at the end of the episodes for people who show up live.
Justin Jackson:So we've got Dustin LeBlanc. We got Zach Gilbert. Yeah. Zach Gilbert. Jeremy Wout.
Justin Jackson:Aaron Francis showed up.
Brian Casel:Oh, Aaron Francis was in there. Emmett.
Justin Jackson:We had Emmett. Ryan Hefner.
Brian Casel:Emmett was in there. Ryan Hefner.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Anyone else we missed there? Michael Cooper. There's a
Brian Casel:solid crew in here. Andrew Askins.
Justin Jackson:Cool. Ariel. Ariel? Yeah. Thanks for showing up.
Justin Jackson:And, Tony as well.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We're we're talking paradiddles. I've I've been doing drum drum lessons. I I I got a drummy
Justin Jackson:Oh, is that what a drum is a paradiddle, drum thing?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like a like a drum Rooty.
Justin Jackson:Okay. Okay. I missed that. I didn't know what he was talking about. Thanks, everyone, for showing up.
Justin Jackson:We'll see you next week live.
Brian Casel:Later, folks.
Justin Jackson:Bye.
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