Charge More! - Open Office Hours - With Ray Deck (LIVE) - Episode 5

Hello, hello, welcome, Ray. Thank you for being here.

Always fun to get to do this with you.

I have no idea if we're actually streaming, so let me double-check if we're on YouTube here. Let's see.

It says that we're live and we should be live on StateChange YouTube as well as on Restream.

Normally I can see people watching. It could also be that nobody's interested in our live streams. Let's see. I think we're live. We should be. I just got an email from a client saying their app I built in Tuddle doesn't work anymore. But that's a different thing. Are we shooting a little bit at them?

Not Tuddle anymore is what he's trying to say.

Maybe that's why. There you go. But speaking of clients, Considering what you built in total actually works, you should charge more. And this is why we have Ray today inside of here, who's the expert at charging money. Every time I look at your pricing, it just always increases. So it's like you got some self-confidence, and, uh, I would love to learn from you. So every time people look at my pricing, they're like, ooh, Right. And for our audience as well.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you, you went on a bit of a journey with your own professional services over the course of, you know, early '24 through late '24 and going from, you know, what you were building to, you know, some of the higher level stuff. And I think a lot of people would like to hear more about your story and your journey with that. And then we can sort of mix that into, you know, sort of some of the lessons along the way and how it's a case study.

I started building applications for people, right? And that's kind of like how I pitched my services through that YouTube channel when I did it with, with Wiz back then, right? And I think I was one of the fewer people out there who kind of like figured out how to hack stuff into Wiz to make the things that it's supposed to not really supposed to do. So, you know, there was a market for that and it was a niche market. And then the more, you know, you kind of like hack into there, the more unstable everything gets. And, you know, taking a look at that state change and all of that. But what I learned from that was actually people don't know how to get those things into their project to just get that feature, get that SDK in there. So then I started doing consultation and that was like, I would say, great charges. So was it back then, it was $700 or so, like Ray charges $700. I'm not as good as Ray, but also people don't know, don't know how to do stuff in Wiz. So I think I can do $500. So I started actually with $250. I went up to $500 because there was lots of demand. So you told me the more demand there is, the higher your price has got to go. So I was doing $500 an hour. People joined on a Zoom meeting and then I helped them fix their issue in Wist. Yes, it was quite some demand for that because, you know, there are lots of issues in Wist, like how do I get this JavaScript library in here? Or how do I do this custom code? You have lots of Webflow people and they have no idea about code and they need some help with that. And then I was thinking, but people always join and they always ask the same question. I kind of feel bad always charging $500 and knowing kind of like how to solve that. It's always the same. So I was thinking, you know, Ray is doing the office hours, so he has his low ticket offer and his highest ticket offer. How about I copy that? And then I sent you a message on stage and I was like, Ray, I want to do what you're doing, but I need your blessing. I don't want to compete against you. So I sent you a message. I was like, Ray, I need your blessing on this. And I got his blessing. Look at that. Yeah, now we're here.

I, I, I think it's a great model, you know, like the, um, I, I, I think that people can get really trapped when they are doing this kind of work because they are— I, I call it becoming a lackey. Right? Where like, hey, you're the person, you're my tech person and you're gonna do more tech stuff for me. And the user has this initially high amount of value and then it starts to fall, right? As you sort of hit more of a lackey line, you're acting more like an employee, right? And that is something that might still be adding a lot of value, but the employer sort of starts to take you for granted, I think. And it becomes much harder for you to change your rate, much like when you have a job, it's very hard to be rapidly changing your income. So what I have found to be able to, you know, keep on creating more value and be able to keep on increasing your rate is you need to have shorter engagements, right? Because basically your previous engagements become the basis for proving out your value that justifies your new rate for future engagements, right? That's how you create a supply-demand imbalance. But in order to do that, you need to end the previous engagement, have the new one, have the higher price. And that's kind of like what I saw you do. Like when I, when we first met, I think you were at like $250 and then you were, you're going up and then went up and up and up. I mean, fair enough. Really rapid succession because you were just doing these, you know, rapid-fire projects, a lot of which were going and being these rescue deals, right? And the—

with Wiz, every project was a rescue deal.

And you were adding so much value. That becomes a really key thing, like how much value can you add to your customers? If you're doing just table stakes stuff, you can get table stakes rates. If you're doing high-value stuff, either because you have an unfair understanding of their business, an unfair understanding of technology like you were doing with the SDKs, wherever you have that edge, if you can really focus on delivering and levering on that edge, well then you can create a lot more value for the client, but also receive it. And that justifies the higher rate.

Also what I do like, the ideas of the short engagements, because I was like, people went to me like, they're like, our project in Wist is done, it's working, but this is broken and it's the last thing and we can't get it. Sorry, not.

Yes.

Okay, let me look at this. And then I was like, oh, it'll take me 3 hours to do, and I can, you know, it will be $5,000.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, it's like they already invested $50,000 in the project and it's the last thing missing, and then you can make like $1,000 an hour. Sounds like, oh great, I can make $1,000 an hour. You get like one of those a month, but like, you're not that— or two or something. But like, there is not like— you won't like, you know, you won't like continuously make $1,000 an hour or so. Those are like, you know, there are only so and so many people that use this specific framework that have this specific issue that need you to rescue it. So like, it's not like, you know, being employed and making $1,000 an hour constantly. It's like you make $1,000 an hour and then there are a few hours where you don't make anything, right? When you have a problem come to you and you actually get stuck with it because it's not that simple of a thing to solve.

Yeah.

I found out that I like your model because not everybody can afford that $5,000 or, you know, that $500 an hour. Um, so that's when I kind of started like, started, let's get office hours so people can pay monthly subscription as kind of like their rescue insurance. Whenever something breaks, we can take a look at it. And they know if I'm paying $129 for this a month, whenever shit hits the fan, I can join office hours. I can DM him. We're going to get it solved. If there's something urgent, he may even go on a meeting with me even though it's outside of office hours, right? And I did like that model, and I was like, nobody should be paying thousands of dollars to have a little thing fixed because it's really a little thing for me. Because if you get skilled and you know how the product works, it's simple. And I was saying, not everybody can afford that. And what's with all the people who maybe can afford $100 a month but they can't afford $5,000 to get this across the finish line, right? And because they've already spent so much on their project, or they're not going to work to get that sorted out. So this is kind of like why I completely moved away from that consultancy model and only moved to the office hours model, because I think it provides way more value than just fixing this critical thing for a company for $5,000 and doing the work myself. It is way more fun teaching people how to do it themselves.

Yeah, I think a good consultancy also looks like teaching people to do it themselves, and certainly right now that most of, not all, but most of the clients I have for my consulting are also members of, you know, StateChange. And like what happens is most of the time they just need a little bit. Great. They drop in StateChange, they get there a little bit because it's about, I've got a problem instead of making it last for days, let's make it last for a short period of time. And then when something very big is going to come along, I actually find primarily the engagements that come my way are the, are for what I call the accelerator program. Where there's some big project they're trying to take on. It's usually some combination of scale and security that really matters, right? We can't do it out in the open office hours. And those two things combine to make more sense for let's do a consulting engagement. But when we're using these, you know, accelerated development tools, you know, the AI, the low-code, no-code, whatever it is, a key principle is that the buyer, the client, should be able to run it themselves. And so I think it's really important that, you know, a significant part of the job isn't just go fix it and make it work. It's make it so that I am able to own this thing afterwards. And when you can do the two of those things, you know, with a great deal of speed, that's really fulfilling the promise. It's very high value. It's a small number of hours. And that's the reason why that high value justifies a higher rate. But the size of the engagement, it's not like you're doing a $500 an hour engagement for 500 hours. Right. It's a, the idea is to be a smaller engagement, just do those important parts.

The state change, talk about maybe even like, uh, 30 minutes and then you charge by the minute and it'll be $250 actually.

Uh, you, you want, one could do that as well, but also if it's gonna be that small, that's really good for office hours.

Yeah, I tell them join office, it will be way cheaper if you join office hours. I actually don't do direct consulting. What I did is I actually put a consulting subscription for office hours, so you can get 4 meetings a month plus code reviews or no-code reviews. I'll look into your project. You get on a private Slack with me. Yeah, I will be connected with your team. All your team members can join office hours. Right now it's limited to 5 in case you have like a 100-person team. We need to improve rates a little bit for you to do a custom rate. So I got that and I found that works actually well. It's $9.99 a month. And it helps people accelerate their development time rapidly. And they're, you know, we had one, Tara and Jack from NASM, they have been taking on that offer. They started using Nordkraft, they actually ended ditching Nordkraft because it wasn't reliable enough for them. And we found that they learned it during it, but they also had a trusted partner who was able to look in their eyes and say, I don't think this is right for you. For you and I support your decision in using something else. Sometimes you need to fall to learn to find the right thing for you because it had lots of issues where it wasn't reliable, they were updating things and it didn't work. Not saying that Nortcraft is bad, I'm saying there are people who can work with Nortcraft and there are people who can work better with FlutterFlow and there are people who can work better with WeWeb. Those tools have different mental models, And everybody is different in what they're working with. And sometimes you got to spend 2 months to save yourself 2 years of time in Nordkraft without making great progress, right? I think people always say this is the best tool, and it can be the best tool in terms of specifications, but what actually matters is, is it the right tool for you, right? For some people, Wiz makes more sense than Nordkraft, and for others, Nordkraft makes more sense than Wiz. And for other people, they both don't make sense. And Vue is the way to go. And for others, it's React. Yep, right. You can't say this is the one tool you should be using in 2025 because everybody has to answer that question themselves, because everybody's different, everybody has a different understanding, everybody has different expertise going into this. So just saying this is the best, this is what I would use in your position, without knowing that person, without knowing kind of like how they work with it, I think that that's not the right way to do it.

In state change, we talk repeatedly. We have a few different mental models in state change that we use repeatedly. One of them is called the shopper's mindset. And the idea behind shopper's mindset is that you are— you should think about 3 things. What's the state of the art of the tooling? So that's like, hey, what's currently going on with Nordkraft or WeWeb or like you say, or React or AI?

Client that broke that I didn't touch, and my client is a little bit pissed.

Um, so the second though, and this is important, is where are you— this is your point— where are you in your journey? Like, where are you in terms of technical skill? What do you find easy versus hard? Some people really know their way around design, some people really know their way around code, some people know— are more comfortable back-end, front-end, whatever. But, but understand— but self-understanding is really important. And the third, and this is like, I think something that's under-indexed, is what's the job to be done? Because, you know, you might have a band of technologies that are appropriate to you based on where you are in your journey. But the— but which one's going to be most appropriate for the thing you're looking to do? And what happens is, as you are building this kind of gets to your story, as you are building the job to be done and your understanding of that job changes, and then the tool that was appropriate based on your initial understanding becomes less appropriate based on your new understanding. And that leads to another one of our mental models. You will build this again. Yes.

Also, one thing is Tara and Jack, they're actually not using Nordcraft anymore for their application. They moved it to FlutterFlow. And then I told them you should join StateChange with Ray because he's an expert at everything. And also, if anybody's listening to this right now, join StateChange. It will be the best investment you can ever make. If let's say I were to be in the in a building that's on fire and I could take a Statechain subscription or a No-Code Pro Code subscription to save from that building, I would save that Statechain subscription over the No-Code Pro Code subscription because without Ray there wouldn't be any No-Code Pro Code because I wouldn't know nothing about what I'm talking about.

That's, that's super sweet of you. Although I, I think there are a lot of people who should consider maybe doing both of those. I mean, this is kind of like when we started the conversation here is like, what, what is the right model for getting help? Yes. And the— and you and I both have significant experience as people who do, you know, software development on a consultative or on a contract basis and then being a bit more advisory and sort of as we sort of try to get sharper about it. But, you know, particularly these tools that are in fact usable and the people who are coming in who have more background working with technology. I know I'm going to sound like an old man for a second, but like, you know, when I was earlier in my career, the idea that someone who's just sort of coming in from the business side is gonna be able to be as adept with technology as someone in 2025 just, just wasn't the case. And that's a real demographic shift. But, but, and that's true for a lot of people who are watching this and a lot of people who come into StateChange and I'm sure coming into NoCodeProCode. And that's why this model of like an office hours type model can just help people so much, you know? And so like the, I, I think is that, that's why I was so excited that you would start NoCodeProCode. Let's put up the QR code for NoCodeProCode. Okay. Yeah. You would start NoCodeProCode because You taking your expertise that previously you were charging, whatever it was, like $500 an hour, right, for people to get access to. And now you have these office hours, you have these recordings, you have these tools, right, which allow people to get access to more, more of you, not just like at a lower price point, which I think is also great, but also far more accessible. So they get like, hey, I've got a problem. Wait, I don't need to decide to do a big consulting engagement. I can just, you know, go talk to Yacine about it at office hours tomorrow. Or I've got a question on, you know, this backend stuff, this data structure stuff, this AI stuff, whatever. And I can be talking to Ray about it at his office hours and then we can be doing it in a way that isn't like totally disruptive to us because we're not sort of filling up our day with tons and tons of meetings. We can have a nice focused office hours, help a bunch of people. And then at the end, I don't know exactly how it works over at NoCodeProCo, but like a state change, we record them. About an hour after the meeting ends is up on StateChange. About a day after the meeting ends, it's been sliced up and is available through our vault for semantic searches. And later this month, we're actually going to have an MCP server for it so that people will be able to pull up, be able to ask questions, integrate into their development efforts, the knowledge from over 1,000 hours of StateChange office hours that they can come back at, like, what are the ideas? What would Ray say about this? What do the mental models say about this? They're combining the office hours, you know, the content from the forums, the various essays and posts and whatever. So they can just sort of get the best in a concentrated fashion. And every time we do an office hours, that gets bigger.

Very nice. With No-Code Pro Code, it can take up to a few days to have the recordings available though. I'm not as fast as Ray. I'm doing too many things at the same time.

Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. And video is challenging, to be sure.

Yes. But yeah, I mean, if you want fast Office Hours uploads, go stay changed. But the only thing important is living in the moment. So we've got a great excuse for being a little bit behind because you can experience it live if you join today. But, but you know, this, this brings me also to my community. I increased the pricing 3 times. It started at $79, and I found out that the people who joined for $79 were actually hard to deal with. There were lots of questions, lots of DMs, lots of work. When I increased it to $99, less work, less maintenance, better questions. When I increased it to $299 to $129, I was like, why didn't I start with $129? Not saying that the people who joined for $79 are not great people. 99% are always great, but you have the ones that are hard to deal with in the $79 bracket are different than the ones that are hard to deal with, with a $99 bracket, and are different than the ones that are hard to deal with, with the $129 bracket. If that makes sense.

Yeah, it, it, it, it does. One of the things we found at StateChange is that people who join at one bracket versus the other tend to be looking more for content versus looking for, you know, the direct office hours help. Like they want the benefit of the office hours, but not necessarily going. And like that, that's just something we are learning. And this again brings us to the question about pricing, right? It's not, it's not really about like, keep on increasing your pricing, although that is, you know, good and positive from an economic point of view. I think the big standard that we should be thinking about here, and that if you're gonna, if the audience can take one thing away, this is the way keep on increasing your value. Yeah. You know, I also run something called StateChange Mastermind, which is an application-only, you know, a club for people who are running, you know, professional service businesses, consultancies. And they're also, you know, increasing, you know, their rates, you know, as they go. But we have a framework that we use for our weekly check-ins, which Study, Sell, and Ship.

Wait a second, how can I join that? I didn't know you had that.

Yeah, well, it's been kind of in beta for about 6 months now. We— and, you know, our first member has, you know, like tripled his income in the course of that, which has been pretty exciting to see. It's like there's lots of opportunity, you know, that's sitting in there.

Can we put a website or a QR code up for this?

Uh, no, we don't. If people want to know about it, they, they can reach out to me initially. But like the reason I was bringing it up was this idea of value, like how you increase value. So I'm going to give everyone like something for free that we do through StateChange Mastermind, which is otherwise a, you know, not, not inexpensive system, but you know, it's all game sharing based. And the idea is that, uh, you spend about a third of your time studying, a third of your time selling, about a third of your time shipping. We call shipping, that's, that's delivery of professional services. So like you were talking about like, hey, how many hours do you spend doing professional services? And like, does everything come along and how much do you charge? Well, our standard is 20 hours a week for, is maximum for delivering professional services with the expectation you're spending another 20 working on your own sales and another 20 working on studying so that your June doesn't look like your May in terms of the value you deliver for your customers because you just keep on climbing, climbing, climbing both in terms of business knowledge and technical knowledge. And, but, and that, that's how you're able to, you know, increase your And that's the secret to increasing your rates. So increasing your rates is downstream of increasing your value and increasing the demand for you, right? And your value comes from the studying and the demand comes from the sales and sort of making sure the market knows and creating that supply demand imbalance. And then that flows into the ability to charge, you know, good money, but you're charging good money because you're delivering such extraordinary value on a continuous basis.

I also think that the secret of charging more is actually having a service that nobody can offer. I think it would be hard for someone just to be the next Ray doing state change, right? Even though that's kind of like what I'm doing, but it's different. It's a different thing. I think like it would be hard for someone to be the next NoCodeProCode. And I think it would be hard for someone to be the next StateChange in terms of our unique way of teaching and our unique way of solving problems. I think if people were to look at that, someone comes in there and they would look at state change and that thing, they were like, I'll trust Ray. Well, that makes sense because there's also some— you're making videos on YouTube, you're providing value on there. People see you in the Xano forum. First, I thought you were working for Xano because you were responding more to stuff than— until you were trying to sell me your subscription after every post. Which, that's how I joined. I was like, how do I do this? And you were like, this is how you do it. We do more of this at statechange.ai. I tried doing that in the Nordcraft channel, but I got some warnings.

Yeah. It's like you figure out a balance, but I do believe, totally believe in content marketing and personal branding. And the way you do it is just by creating value for folks. If you tell them what you have and Gary Vaynerchuk, has a, I think, a pretty good model for this. He calls it Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, which is give, give, give, and the 4th time you're giving, you also mention what you do. That 1 in 4 rule sort of, I think, is a reasonable rule of thumb for getting—

I was doing it all the time. I was like, I was a walking billboard. I took your advice too literally. So don't, you know, like, don't take it too literally. But, uh, you know, otherwise you, you get some, you get some DMs from, from people that are administrators saying stop advertising here your, your stuff in there. Um, but you know, the advertisement is still up there and people still know about it, so I, I consider it a success. And then just, just stop when they, you know, kind of like tell otherwise you're out. So, you know, Have some balance in that.

Don't, don't get booted. You know, I'm also a big fan of forums that are cacheable on the web, like, you know, the ones that are on Discord or on Discord. Yeah, but like, uh, one of the advantages, for example, of say the Xano forum or the WeWeb forum, right?

Also, 99% of our traffic from to Despia comes from there.

Well, and you know, I don't know if you've noticed, but like when people look up mobile and WeWeb They're taken to the, the Despia posts that are on the WeWeb forum, right? So like, this is why for when people are sort of trying to figure out like how to do content marketing, um, I really like content marketing that like links into either search engine marketing, uh, search engine optimization, or social media marketing. So this is where I will recommend to people that they post on, say, LinkedIn. LinkedIn more than, you know, others because it has such wide reach and reach outside of just the technical community. And then into these forums, particularly for these various products that are also cached on the web. The problem with the Discord ones is they are not cacheable outside of that, and people were like, hey, can I do this with that?

NerdCraft is actually taking the, the Discord posts and putting them on the website so they're cacheable. So I didn't like that. I put my advertisement in there, otherwise the NerdCraft website was a billboard for my stuff, right? Which I think if you are giving enough value, kind of like the whole idea of me posting and helping people. Like, like you're doing. Like, if I look up Xero Forum, Ray, I think 80% of the density of your posts are advertisements for StateChange. Like, this is how you do it, and we do more of that at StateChange.

And just like, if you keep on going out, giving value, that creates an ad, but then they need to know how to buy from it. And that, that's why you do— that's all right. The jab, jab, jab, right hook, I think, is a reasonable way of, you know, going about that, you know.

I also think the WeWeb forum and the, and the Xano forum are more open towards consultants, um, than some of the other tools out there, if that makes sense, right? Uh, because like Xano has their whole consultant program, and I was talking with Daniel from Xano about it, and they're very appreciative of people who are actually helping people get unstuck in Xano for a little rate. Or for monthly subscription or for, you know, X amount of dollars an hour. They really like that because most of the engagements with Xano are middle-class and enterprise engagements. And most of the people that pay for Xano are not actually using it. That's kind of like the way I look at that, or not fully using it. They have a team, they're leading it, they know enough what Xano is to be able to pay the monthly invoice, but they need people to kind of like get them onto the next level. So I think this is why Xano appreciates people like you saying, hey, I also do consultations because you're going to get them on the next plan because they're going to grow faster with you and they're going to grow faster on Xano and they're going to spend more for Xano. Right. I think there is a— with some communities, I found that in the WISC community, because you're always competing with, with FinSuite whenever you advertise something. Also in the Nordkraft community, I found generally speaking in the Nordkraft community, It sounds odd, but the people who use Supabase do not buy stuff. It's like a little observation. So the Supabase users compared to the Xano users, Supabase users are not paying for services. They're more like open source. Is it free? Is it this? So this is why I have nothing against Supabase. I think it's a great tooling, great technology. I wouldn't use it because I prefer convenience over having a Swiss Army knife for databases. Yeah. But I found that if I focus on Xano and Nordkraft, the people that join with Nordkraft are actually willing to pay for the subscription. Where the people that use, uh, Supabase, they're using Supabase for a reason. If they're using Supabase because of a technical reason, most of them will join and most of them will move to Xano once they join. We had that actually a few times. But people that use Supabase because they have a very generous free tier are not going to pay for your stuff anyway.

I think that is, uh, that's right. I remember, uh, well, like 4 years ago I got myself into a system called CodeMentor, which is actually a micro consulting service. So the idea is you can ask for questions.

I was looking for code magic experts on there.

Yeah, okay. So the, um, and I, I was doing experiments with it, uh, and what I would do is I would go and help and I'd get some reviews and then I would increase my rate. And what I found was, as I initially went in and like the vast majority of stuff was asking me for like help with web apps because that's what most people do. So I was helping web apps and then I increased my rate. And then what happened was I saw I had a greater density of doing mobile development help, people helping people with like, you know, developing in Swift and that kind of thing. And the, and because I priced myself out basically of doing the mobile app, the regular web app stuff, right? Because my, you know, sort of my pricing was going up. Okay, fine. Then I kept on increasing my pricing, saw that fall away and started seeing more things like AI. Actually, at the time, machine learning work. This is like 2021, right? So before ChatGPT, before generative AI was as cool as it is now. I remember I got in that period, I got to help a data engineer at NASA, the US space program.

Put that logo on your website. We've been helping NASA.

That was super cool. He was taking a real course and everything, and I helped tutor him through it. That was a lot of fun. And then, but, but then I kept increasing my rates and that fell away. And then there were only two things that remained at the end. So one was actually crypto because a lot of finance people are looking for technical help on that front. And the other was low-code, no-code building because the, in both those cases, it was people who were not themselves professional developers who were looking to help to put their products through their visions into the market, either on the money side or on the development side. So the, the, the reason I bring all this up is that the, when, when you go into these communities, you start talking to people who look like those OG developers who are working in, you know, you know, open source or what have you, those are people who see their jobs as being, I do tech. I'm not going to pay someone else to do tech. That's supposed to be my money that I'm bringing home. Yeah. When you're working in like the low-code, no-code tech or in AI system development, et cetera, you're talking to people who are, have other jobs, right? I am a finance expert. I am a lawyer. I am, you know, a real estate person or what have you. And those people say, I am willing to pay. I want help to, to, I'll pay for tools, I will pay for help to bring my vision to fruition because they don't have it tied up in their identity. And when you have that, there's a great opportunity to create value because they get value from having the app and the understandings. They become sort of a cyborg of technical and domain knowledge and, and they're happy to pay for that help to be able to make that transformation happen.

Yeah, and that's exactly what I found. The people using Xano, entrepreneurs, they're building tremendous stuff. People using Supabase are developers because in the NerdCraft community there are two sides. There are the no-code people, most of them are freelancers or people building their own product, and on the other side there are developers who use this because they want to have a visual way and they kind of like an alternative to React. I found you can't make money on developers, you can make money on entrepreneurs, and freelancers, because the money they're going to invest in having this thing fixed and getting this help or using this tool that makes it faster for them is a paycheck increase.

Yeah.

So you help people make more money, more efficient, by getting these issues resolved. You're going to make more money on the other side because you make more money if you help people make more money because they see a value in your offering. Where the developers are like, why should I join this course? I can have the videos all for free on YouTube and I'm going to put it all together. And it was like, that makes sense for developers. And thank God I'm monetized. I'm making a little bit off that as well. But the audience I like are the no-code people because they're way more fun to work with. And because they're not opinionated on what they want to do, right? If you have a developer join office hours, for example, and he's like, I need to build it on the stack, Supabase, and it needs to have this in the middle. I need to use N8N. For that, and I need to do, you know, not crap for my front end. And I was saying something like, if you were to cut out NNN and use Xano instead and structure that correctly, you would be cheaper than paying NNN at a certain level. And I think you're going to have— with that much users, it's going to be cheaper probably after one month using Xano and using NNN, you know, kind of like with their unit costs. And then, you know, they say something, but I can self-host it, I can spend I spent a week figuring out how to self-host it, manage all the infrastructure myself. And I'm like, do you really want to spend a week managing all the infrastructure yourself, making sure updates and all that? So I found it's just way easier working with no-coders. They use Xano, it's always up to date. And there are just certain issues we don't have to talk about in office hours because our focus is on Xano and our focus is on the frontend, primarily on Nordcraft, but I can also talk about WeWeb because I think we actually have our first people asking me about WeWeb questions, which is, you know, it's coming along a little bit. But no, what I found is no-coders, they're unopinionated of the tooling and their concern is getting it out there. They're not following an ideology how someone like Theo said on YouTube how you should do that and why you should use React instead of this. Because I think if you get rid of the ideology, you're going to make more money and you're going to start producing more results way faster because the biggest asset that you have is your time. And if you're willing to change your time to save $19 a month, I think you're doing a wrong decision, right? Because your time is way more valuable. Like one hour saved, you got the $19 out.

I think that's such a key idea that the people need to—

Especially market. Every tool out there is an AI. If you can be with this next AI API that's trending right now and no app is on the App Store yet, out there a week faster, going to make how much money? $20,000 more? $50,000 more? Because everybody looking for it on the App Store is going to look at your app until in a week all your competitors who are using Swift or React Native will be on there. Because you're using Despia and you can move fast with web app development, you're up, you're already on there. So I think this idea of using no-code tools, um, like Nordcraft, WeWeb, Despia, Capacitor— I would even call that a no-code tool— um, those tooling, right, and those infrastructure attached to the tooling is helping you get things out there faster. And everything that helps you get things out there faster provides such a value. And if you can help people get their stuff out there faster, get more of the market, you can increase your rates because you're providing more value. And people will be willing to pay for it. That's the most important thing. And, and that's kind of like what I learned from you, so I'm just repeating what you've always been preaching.

Yep, people will— that's, that's key. Uh, you want to create something that people are willing to pay for. Um, and the— it's— and, and, and that just starts with— this starts with value. But you're— I think your point about a elapsed time was really a key one. And that is, that becomes the reason why one wants to use these tools. That's why, that's where they pay their money. And if using the tool doesn't make you go faster in that regard, it's often not worthwhile. I often talk about two concerns. One is speed, which you just talked about, and the second is ownability.

Yeah.

But ownability is increasingly, I mean, not university, but increasingly table stakes. I think I'm all for a lot of these tools. And a lot of the ones that were sort of previously deemed as scary, right? Oh, that's code. I mean, AI-generated code is really good. And even to the point where like I've got a fairly deep experience as a developer, but I got to say, all the UI stuff I'm doing, I'm doing it through the chat, the sidebar, right? Where the chat is, right? In the code editor, not by creating the code itself. When I'm doing backend work or more sophisticated data science work, more likely I'm going to be editing code because it's like they can't quite figure out what I'm doing. But particularly that frontend stuff, oh my goodness, you can go so much faster.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think this brings us to an interesting question, you know, for, for people who are watching are like freelancers and they are, you know, they're, they're working for clients or they're consultants what would be your advice for them, how they can start charging more and making more money at the end of the year, at the end of the month?

Yeah, I— get fired. Um, I think you've used a term that's a state change term a little while ago. Um, and I say state change term just because I hadn't heard it before, before I said it, but but maybe it also comes from somewhere else. I talk about short and sharp engagements.

Yeah.

And the idea of being short video, the idea behind being short and sharp is that you are trying to have a whole lot of impact in a short period of time, right? It is not a win for the engagement to go longer. If you are saying, hey, we're gonna do this on a call together, and then they're like, okay, well, we're getting to the end of the hour. Can you finish this up after the call? That's not a win. That's a loss, right? Because even though they're gonna pay you for that maybe additional hour, like the, the shorter you make it, the higher value it is. If you can get that done in an hour, oh my goodness, they'll pay more for the hour. They'll pay more than what the otherwise would've been for the 2 hours because you've delivered a high level of value and that it has a high trust quality to it. If you can get something done in a day versus a week, get something done in a week versus a month, that is worth a whole lot to the client. And that's even if you like just do concentrated work. Work, right? More hours. But even better is like bring the right tools to the job so that you can do it in fewer hours with less time and higher degree of reliability. You put those together, it's really great. And that's what we call short and sharp.

And if you love short and sharp engagements and you want to learn directly from Ray, scan the QR code that you see on the screen right now and join StateChange. Office hours, mental models, and tools to solve the hardest 5% of building remarkable software. Lots of testimonials, everybody loves it. It's beyond 5 Coding and it's beyond no-code. It's about making you a better developer and also from a business perspective, a better developer. And you can learn directly from the man himself, Ray Deck.

Let's go. You say the— yeah, but this gets to your question, like what, what should freelancers be doing?, right? Yeah. If they can be doing more in a short period of time, then the thing that happens is like your, your career is your, the progress of your career is measured usually in the jobs you have, right? So someone who's got a bunch of jobs in their career and they're sort of each one sort of stepping up, stepping up, stepping up. That's a high flyer, right? Somebody who spends 20 years doing one job is, well, obviously not a high flyer cuz they're doing 20 years doing one job. So the, so what I look to do is get fired. Right, do the job, it's a win, they, they get to their next state, go move on to the next client. Oh wait, you can charge more because you actually have the credibility of having helped the previous client who's so, who's so happy with you they're providing some kind of testimonial. Now, not all clients provide testimonials, not all clients are happy, but if you, if you can get that wheel turning, right, then, uh, then you keep on going to the next one. Now, this is like you were talking about before, that's not a job.

Right?

You can't be consulting 40 hours a week in that kind of model. That's why we talk about study, sell, and ship as a required framework. In fact, it makes for a 60-hour week, not a 40-hour week. But the idea is you keep on studying to increase your skills, you keep on marketing out so that you have that stream of new business coming in. It's not a, well, how can I like put up a post on LinkedIn that's going to get a whole bunch more leads? You're not gonna. But you do a bunch of posts on LinkedIn, you give a lot of value back into the market that compounds over time if you keep it up. It actually can dry up pretty quickly if you don't keep it up. Uh, the videos again, I've been too busy making tutorial videos, making marketing videos, showing, showing just that you're a human being can actually help quite a lot. And then doing things that focus on the business customer, not just your fellow— I talk about chickens and foxes, not just for the other foxes who are the other vendors, but for the customers. Or the business people who you want to be working with. And then they see more of that, they're able to get that, they get value from it. Maybe they were able to solve a problem just by using your video, and then they get to the problem where they can't solve by using your video, and now they're coming back to you because you are the person.

Always going to leave out some things in your videos so people join your membership.

Fair enough. I will tell everyone here, don't leave anything out. Share all of your best ideas because you're— I— you, you are— you're not just your ideas, you're also your execution. Right? So people who— if you put out your best ideas, people will then try to put them to work. They'll get some value from them, and then they'll say, well, for the rest of this, right, I know there's a different— I can see that's a good idea. I appreciate that's a good idea, but I'm not as good as executing. I need somebody who can help me execute. Who do I trust to execute? The people who had the idea.

And that's what I'm doing with the videos. For example, when I'm making a video how to integrate Stripe, I'm like, this is how I do it. I go through all the steps, then at the end of the video I say like, now canceling your subscription, working with webhooks, securing those webhooks. Those are things that really depend on how your project structure is. I can't just provide a boilerplate in this video and you can't just fly with that because that would be unreliable because it may not work for your structure. This depends on how your backend is structured. We gave an example in this video, but if you want more something that's tailored to your solution. And that's, that's the leaving out I meant. You can join my community, we can take a look at your project together, and we can implement it in Offers House the way it works securely for your project. Works wonders.

Yeah, it does. Uh, and, and, but, but, but your question, like, how, how do they get started? Uh, they should be spending more. They should be saying they don't need to be spending all their time billing They should be allocating similar amounts of time. I find like start, you can start small, but like get big, um, of both selling and studying. Take your engagements, try to get fire from them. That doesn't mean you can't have rollover. You can't have like a next engagement with the same client, but you want to have one close, one door closed so the other can open so that you can be doing it from where you are today as opposed to being a mere extension of where you were previously. Because if you start with where you were previously, then it's based on what that rate was. I can't tell you how many clients I have, or the, you know, I, I talk with these consultants who say, well, I can't afford to, you know, go do more sales to increase my rates because I need to do this work because I have clients who really want me to do work. Well, what are you charging? I'm charging $50 an hour anymore. And there's nothing wrong, by the way, with charging $50 an hour or whatever rate you think is appropriate to you. But I, I, I do think that as As technical professionals, we are only as good as our connection to technology, and technology keeps on changing, and that— so we need to keep on changing too if we're going to keep on being relevant and be able to command a premium in the marketplace.

I think that's very good. I also think that most of the times when— whenever you, you are doing videos out there and you're creating content, you also want to have ways for people to kind of like get involved in your offering. I think lots of people, they're doing stuff for free for the sake of doing it for free, but there are no clear ways so people can reach out to them. And then they kind of believe maybe someone is doing a tip on my Buy Me a Coffee or something. They won't. You want to have clear call to actions for people that actually get value on the stuff that you're providing for free to the community, be it a package, be it a template, be it a video Very cool. Like, great. Like, this is how you do it. And we do more of this and we solve the hardest 5% at statechange.ai. That's how it got me in. I was trying to get 11Labs working. And I was— that was 2 years ago. So I was trying to get 11Labs working. And then Ray said, this is how you do it. And if you need more help, here's— you can, you can join my community here for, uh, for money. And he did— he said it nicer. And then there was the link. I looked at the picture, I was like, oh, that guy's trying to sell me his course. And then when I got stuck the next time, he planted that. I was like, wait a sec, wait a sec, what was his name again?

Yeah.

And then I joined. And since then I'm paying $150 a month, I think, for the past 1 or 2 years It's been the best investment of my life. I have— I can tell you I've never made the best investment in my life than StateChange. And I'm not joining the office hours mostly, but I'm still paying for it because it's such a great investment. Just looking at the community, taking a look what's going on there, being able to read what other people are sharing, being able to look at the vault and the script tag alone is worth the money. Right. And just great tools, great educational material in there. If you are serious about what you're doing, you've got to join this. And it starts actually as low as $39 a month.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I'm selling your stuff hard today, but you're providing so much value and I want people to benefit from this because I completely believe that what you're doing is the right way to do it and you're doing it professionally and you're really helping people in their position get better software out there, get it faster, and leverage that on the market towards their advantage.

Yeah, I, I, well said, man, and I, I appreciate the kind words.

And we also get good news because we're going to the end of the hour. We got some good news. V3 of Despia is ready. It wouldn't be—

we—

I, I wouldn't even got to be 3 out there without Ray, but So we got— that's the new landing page. It's the native runtime to compile web to native, no coding needed. We also now have widget support coming in a few days, and we got new documentation. And I want to thank Zachary from the WeWeb community so much for providing his insights on our old documentation, which sucked. And thanks to him, we were able to take that feedback, improve it, make it better for you, make it way clearer, outline every specific step, document every SDK. It's publicly available on docs.despia.com. I think also when you want to start charging more, you've got to listen to people who do, who you don't agree with, because they're right and you're wrong. That's why I don't agree with them.

Yeah, that was a— I remember you talking to me about that conversation, and that was that was a super useful, you know, moment. Like, listen, you know, not to say that people who have that kind of feedback are always right, but they often—

there's some truth to it. I think with him it was completely right.

But absolutely.

And this is how Despia works for the people wondering. If you have your web app, you put the Despia JavaScript library inside of there, you got the runtime that is JavaScript to Swift Kotlin, and then you got the native core that runs your application. That's how it nicely connects. That's how you can build your mobile application in WeWeb, Nordcraft, Wiz, whatever you want to do. Then now we have one-click publishing for iOS and Android. One click, we run that build tool for you. You don't have to deal with it. It's building the application as an IPA or AAB or APK and sending it one click to the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. You don't have to deal with any of the submission and all that stuff. We do it all for you. And if you set it up correctly, we have 100% success delivery rate of getting back to the App Store. Super cool, man. And then bring— let me bring that back to Ray's beautiful advertisement again for StateChange. You want to say anything to us?

Well, I was about to ask you, how many apps have been shipped to the App Store through Despia today?

Um, so I think it's about 10, which sounds bad, but most of those tools have— they can only count— you can count less on two hands how many ships— how many apps have been actually shipped. But if I take a look at how many have been sent to, you know, um, TestFlight and have been approved for beta testing, that's been around 60. So, and nobody has gotten a rejection, which is pretty nice.

Right. And you know, the, the, we, we should expect at some point there's going to be some rejections and like it'll come around. But those are—

I only had one projection that said you got to charge inside of the app. I mean, there's no hard rejection saying no, not with Despia. Like, people always think, can I use Despia and will I be approved by the App Store? It, you know, if you're building a good application, you'll be approved by the App Store. Apple doesn't care what technology you're using.

That's true in general. That's true. That's truer now than it used to be. And that's another good example of the whole shopper's mindset thing. Like, what is, what is true today that might not have been true before? And that, that's, uh, that, that's super cool, man. Congratulations. And you're absolutely right that if you go look under the covers at like, you know, FlutterFlow in 2023 or DraftBit even very recently, um, the number of apps they've actually shipped, um, I usually ask these questions like How many apps have been shipped to production? I understand that question, you don't know the answer. But it should be much easier for the mobile apps to answer because it's a question of how many have gotten shipped to the App Store, and the answer is shockingly small. For you, from such a small base, to have that much that is actually committed up is a remarkable sign and a real achievement. Congratulations.

I appreciate it. Again, I couldn't have done it without you. You've been helping us so much across all the steps of the way. And I mean, it's, it's great technology. It compiles down to over 2,000 native files for iOS and more with Android. So it's kind of like the whole engine that builds it together. And yeah, I mean, I remember in office hours you actually kind of like gave me half of the idea. I said I want to make a mobile application, can I do this in WYSIWYG? And you say, yeah, you could use something like capacitor. And then I was like, what's capacitor? You essentially gave me the idea for Despia, and then I tried capacitor and was like, oh, I don't like that thing. Yeah.

You know, uh, just recently, uh, our friends at Xano hired the former heads of marketing from OutSystems. Uh, well, from— but you know where they came from before OutSystems was Ionic.

Yeah, because our system's by Ionic, right?

Right. So they're, they're, they're, they're, they're mobile people, so they've got some mobile DNA in the company now.

I think Xano should go into the front-end market and, uh, and, and, uh, you know, take over the market from Nordkraft and WeWeb. But that's probably a hot take though.

I think there's, there, there are questions about that. I also remember that Backendless did this a couple of years ago. They introduced Friend endless. I think it's literally called Friend endless. I don't think it worked out really well for them. The question like, what are you totally world-class at? What I think is more interesting, this actually might be a good topic for us for the next Office Hours session too, is like, you know, what's the future of apps? Because what I think is really interesting is this like, There are people fighting over what's a better way to build an app. And I ask, given the context that we're in, what's an app that's worth building? What does it look like? Where's the technology for it? And does it use the same things as before? Rachel Neighbors gave a great talk at All Things Open about— called it Death of the Browser. And the idea of—

You just mentioned Death of the Browser. I'm just going to put up the Despic QR code. Like a nice way to place this now.

Oh yeah, the mobile apps become really interesting, but also apps that are, you know, have a very different kind of use case. Like we've talked about MCP before, the idea of being able to deliver apps through, you know, uh, through the AI interface. Um, or let's go up another level. How about being able to have apps that are completely dynamically generated based on who you are?

I mean, in Despia, I'm using the Despia runtime to have an interface to build React code that will then— because Despia can render React. It's very similar in how it works to React. If you actually export the code, you'll see we have lots of React Native dependencies in there. Um, it doesn't use React Native, but like the, the packages, the SDKs we use, most of them are designed for React. So like ScreenShield and all that. So, um, you can run React in Despia and it works great. So I built an app that, because I have this issue, I want to have little tools on my phone that I just generate. I built a little chat interface like the VibeCode app, but I didn't want to pay for it and I wanted to make it myself to see if I can do it. I built this app where I just type in and it builds actually a full application for MCP clients. I have my tools in the application setup to do image, to do this, and it then generates React code that puts all of those things together, runs it client-side. So the API— so I'm actually sending this generated code to Xano, and then it adds the API key securely to it, and then serves me this back as an HTML document with my React application, and then renders that in Despia because Despia has a remote rendering. That's how I'm going to set that up. The files are being served from Xano, dynamically generated. API keys are not in local storage. So that's secure as well. And, um, and, and then kind of like, that's how I set it up. And I can now go into that application, type in, I need a, you know, SEO analyzer for websites, and then I can get the interface, put in a URL, and it analyzes its SEO with AI. And I built like an app that can generate apps, and I have a— it's almost like TestFlight a little bit.

Well, yeah, the, the app that generates apps that are going to be relevant for you is, I think, where, where, where all this is going. It's complicated idea, um, and I think we've seen it in Despia.

The question is if Apple will approve it.

Yeah, because Apple does not like mutable apps. Uh, that, that's definitely true. That, that's going to be an interesting challenge. Uh, but the fact that the app is being presented as a, um, as an artifact, right, which is, say, like as a text file, right, as opposed to being a change to the binary code is where things get kind of interesting. And there are complete programming systems that are deployed, like, you know, like particularly educational ones, like Hopscotch comes to mind, that are available for the iPhone as well. And the more recent, you know, Apple versus Epic stuff will— has potential to, you know, open up that issue of mutability even further.

Yeah, I was shocked that I saw some bad code mobile apps on the App Store. I think that will— having those links will give you a good argument if Apple rejects yours. Because with the App Store, it's almost like court. You gotta come up with an argument, you gotta present your evidence, and you gotta sound sleek. Like, you gotta be very well-spoken. You gotta be, you know, I've been looking at that situation, there are some Evidence is attached of competitors. Like, I wanted to get an application to the App Store where people can test their Despia mobile application, and Despia mobile application, and Apple told me we can't do that. And I told them, but Bravo Studio is doing that. And personally said, yeah, but we stopped approving that, never again. So it can also go in two directions. Yep. So sometimes Apple— I, I don't know, I don't want to sue them So, so I just gave up on that fight and they told us to use TestFlight.

Okie dokie.

So that would be the one Despia app that didn't make it to the App Store because I was rendering apps in one app. And they said, but what, what prevents users from putting malicious stuff in that application? And people— and I was like, yeah, but you can do that with React Native too, and look at Expo. And they were like, like, yeah, but it's different. I was like, how?

It's a bit different. Yeah, I hear you. Um, okay, man, uh, this has been— this has been awesome.

It's been wonderful. I think it's been very interesting conversation. Uh, definitely check out— where do we have it? StateChanger AI.

Yep. And also check out, uh, NoCodeProCode. Uh, let's put that up there too. There we go. Uh, and, um, and then be able to, you know, see what the, the coaching model that we open the conversation with can be all about. And we will— and people will be able to see more of what we're all about when we meet up next week.

Yeah. And, you know, I also think if you have any questions, let us know in the comments so we can answer some questions next time. I think Ray will and me, we will probably like to answer some questions and get some questions to kind of like create new conversations and new topics that we can build our office hours around. Super. Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time, Ray, and thank you so much everybody watching for your time as well. We really appreciate that, and we can't wait to see you next time.

See you all.

Take care. Bye.