User Hate = ❤️ - Open Office Hours - With Ray Deck (LIVE) - Episode 6

Hello, Ray Deck.

Hello, Yasin. We get to do this again.

I'm always so happy meeting with you every week. This is exciting. We didn't do last week, but we're going to do it twice as good this week now.

Yeah.

So, you know, I've learned a very valuable lesson from you is when people give you feedback about your product, don't start conversations on online forums. And I've been getting better at this. Very good, I would have to say. Where whenever someone says, I don't like this about your product, it's not because they don't like your product, it's because they actually spent the time looking at it. They found something that based on their knowledge is a critical issue most of the times, and they want you to fix it to make a better product. And I always looked at it from a defensive position where I'm like, how can this person say that Despia is not the best? But I'm now looking at it, I was like, Oh shit, okay, there's an issue. We gotta fix this. If, if people find stuff to criticize about your product, it's just because it's not 100% yet, and you want to take that feedback and you want to implement it so it becomes 100% one day, which it's, it's a, it's almost a perfectionist goal, but it's my goal.

Sure. Well, I don't even think it's about perfectionism. I think there's a real thing in customer service that when you have a turnaround situation like that There's this great line from Apollo 13 where like the whole thing's sort of gone and the astronauts are in a lot of danger and people in ground control, someone says, this is going to be the worst disaster ever hit NASA. And the mission director says, I think this will be our finest hour. And I call these finest hour situations because if, you know, sure, the issue happened, the technical issue happened, whatever. But if you can provide that good service, you get or you have the opportunity to get a real referenceable, you know, fan. And like you say, it has the nice side effect of being the right thing to do.

Yeah. And your product is getting better just because of that. So that's amazing. And, you know, I remember there was someone in the WeWeb forum, Zachary, and he was like, desktop documentation sucks, which he was right. And you only get offended by it because you know it's true. And you're like, how? Oh shit, someone figured that out. And then first, the first phase is denial. It's like, it's not that bad. The second phase is you make a post. The third phase is you regret what you posted. The fourth phase is you actually do it. And you can skip all the stress and struggle in the middle by just going to the last phase and actually realizing they can only criticize issues that are there and you got to fix them and you got to do your work to make sure that there's no critique. Actually, now I look at it from a different perspective. Now I look at things and I'm like, oh, thank God someone is criticizing this. Now we have people who are not customers yet making sure that we keep and get more customers because otherwise people are saying, oh, this feature is broken, I want a refund. Now that doesn't happen because we already have people doing the QA for us.

I read this book recently, um, which talked about how there are some problems that you need to fix and you build the skills to fix them, and there's some problems that fix you. I thought that was a really good point. It's like doing homework in school, right? The appropriate— what you weren't creating value by doing all those math problems, you were training your brain. Right? And so these conversations you're having with your customers, these aren't a bunch of things to be smashed down, which is what happens when we try to just sort of have the conversation, right? These are things that can evolve us into being, you know, better marketers and, uh, and, and servants of our customers.

Yeah. And, and I think this is actually what most people overlook. And most of the times when you go to a no-code tool as a power user, because if you have power users First of all, congratulations. Second of all, if you do have them, I feel sorry for you because they're keeping you busy and I'm certainly keeping Andreas busy with Norecraft and I appreciate everyone who's keeping me busy with Despia trying to always get us to do exciting stuff and always keep up the innovation. But power users are great, but I think most of the times, even if you're not building a no-code tool, if you're building a SaaS, having power users is great because they help you so much. But most of the time it's like, we know that this is not working. You don't have to always tell us this every week. But actually you got to embrace that because you got reminders that help you make better business, make better software, make a better product. And you should take their voices seriously, even though they may not have the nicest way of packaging their words into a nice little gift wrap.

Yeah. In fact, I think there's a lot to be said for it. A number of other products, including some that you and I both use, have what they call insiders programs. The idea is that you take your fans/power users and you invite them in. This creates a couple of things I think are really useful if you're looking to create—

Next channel. With the Insiders.

Yes, Xano has its own program called Insiders. Um, but the— what, what, what does is it gives you the opportunity to hear more from those power users, right? Get more, more feedback from them. Uh, it gives them a way to blow off steam because they can be putting things out there and they can feel heard without having the dirty laundry that's being aired out in front of everybody. Because yeah, power users don't necessarily have the same concerns that other users do., right? And on one hand they provide feedback that can be especially valuable, but it's not linearly valuable. It's not like it's more valuable than coming from the new people. It's just different. And so by creating the segmentation, a place where they can be talking and even be helping each other, there's, you know, can you, you can create a much greater amount of success, right, among your customers by just allowing that kind of segmentation. Now some people are gonna abuse this. Some people are going to, you know, use this as their private venting zone or whatever. There's a little bit of maybe better in private than public, but I think overall, I think those kinds of programs are fantastic because when you have people who are excited enough about your product, they're going to be chatting about it. If you give them the opportunity to share more, you will learn more that's valuable. You give them the opportunity to make them feel like they're heard, they're more likely to turn into fans. And then the trick I think in all this is, and I was talking with a VP of marketing about this recently, is that it is possible to be too community-led. And what happens when you're community-led is that the loudest voices in the room start bullying around the direction of the product. And by creating this kind of special channel for them, you're able to get their feedback without it sort of turning the whole crowd. And then you can segment what's sort of behind that feedback that matters, that should be driving your decisions. So instead of you being led by the loudest voice in the room, you're being led by the actual aggregate needs of the market.

That makes sense. I mean, I got kicked out of the Nordkraft Insider Program, so that's how it happens too.

Do they have an Insider Program?

Not an Insider Program. I was an insider and now I'm back to normal. Okay, kicked me out of there, but Uh, it was because I was— they released a feature that was public, and but I was an insider, but I made a video about their new feature which was public before they had a chance on making a video about it, and they didn't like it because an insider was making a video about a public feature before they had the chance to, and that feature was out there since a month or so.

Yeah, I think it's reasonable for them to set rules of the road for that kind of thing, but my goodness, isn't that what you should want? You want the people who are insiders to be making these celebratory videos, and then, you know, you can embargo it. You can say, hey, don't put that out there until we release, and then you can be a little bit coordinated about it.

But I didn't ask for permission. I never asked for permission of making a video.

Yeah, well, that's, that's sort of a, a different thing. I mean, they, they, they could create things to make it more incentivized for you to be, you know, asking permission.

I'm not on payroll, I'm not asking for permission.

Well, that's a fair point, but like, I think there's a difference between asking permission, saying I won't do it unless you say it's okay, to I'm going to do this, how can I do this in a way that's best for you? Yeah. And that second one is inviting cooperation. Now, if their answer is no, don't do it because we have need to blah blah blah, then, you know, maybe they're not gonna get quite what they want. But, you know, when they know that it's coming, one, they can cross-promote it, they can like really make hay with that kind of thing. And that's, uh, that's a missed opportunity, I think.

I think so too. It was a little bit fun. I made the video because I, again, I didn't really think much about it. I just was like, this is a great feature, I love the new style pen, let me make a video about it. Many people in our community are using it because it's public, let me make a video. I made the video and then, uh, the, the CEO, the other CEO of Notecraft, Casper, was like, you got to remove this video immediately. And then Andreas didn't like it, and then I told Andreas that, you know, if I'm getting that scrutiny because I'm an insider, I'm a total hero, was it called back then, for making a video about a public feature, then, you know, maybe then I'm not a hero then. Because, you know, I want to keep my freedom of making videos about what I like. And I think it's very important that when you run a community-centered product, you want to have those people that are faster than you, because that puts a little bit work off your shoulders in saying how great your product is. It's always better if you have other people telling people how great your stuff is. And I think community-centered marketing, where like Webflow, most of the videos about Webflow are not made by Webflow. And most of the things, look at this new feature, like Timothy Riggs and Fin Suite and Joe and all those fabulous people. They are driving all the growth and all the information in the Webflow community. And Webflow is very smart. They got Emily Loretta— what is her name? And her job is full-time managing the relation, the communication, the friendship, the connections with those people making those videos for Webflow. So they're incentivizing people making videos And you can make a video about a feature that was just released. Maybe if you're lucky and if you're good with timing, you can make it a day before Webflow, but Webflow ensures that they're probably the first one to announce it. And you know, they got NDAs and all that. Like with Xano, they made me sign an NDA, possibly because they figured out what happened with Nautcraft. Um, but I did sign an NDA to go into Xano's insider program, and that is completely fine. It's just with Nautcraft, they never asked me to sign an NDA. Then I was like, I can talk about this.

Interesting. I didn't have Simon, but of course I'm already a fiduciary. I am happy with the other.

But that was fun. But I think when you build a product, regardless if it's a no-code tool or if it's a SaaS, you want your power users to talk great about you. I found that if you limit them in what they can say, they turn into They don't, they're not your best friends or best users anymore. I would actually love for a time when a no-code tool that I use and make videos about, like, don't contact, doesn't, does not contact me. For example, with Xano, they never contacted me about making videos. Like, I made just Xano videos because I enjoy Xano. I never got contacted by anybody from Xano saying, hey, you make great Xano videos, but this kind of time, can you say it like this? Or, you know, like Never had that. Xero, just, they're just glad I make the videos. They don't, they don't, they're like, don't fix what's not broken. And I do like that about it. And I think more companies should have such a mentality. Usually when you start making videos about a no-code tool, about any SaaS, about an API, what they always do is they start emailing you and they're like, hey, we love that you made this video, our CEO wants to talk to you, or we want to And this is usually what I found when that relationship gets a little bit interesting where the only reason they want to get in touch with you is to kind of like influence what you're saying on camera. And that is not just with certain companies, it's with every tool out there. And I think this is a marketing no-go. You want people to give the freedom to feel like they can say everything about your product without losing or, you know, without being in a position where they have to take a different look at your product. So, because if you get people unfiltered on the internet, just making a video saying, I don't like this feature, I don't like this, that's how you get the most valuable feedback from users and the users that actually spend most of their time in your product. And trying to suppress certain things being shown, said, shared with people because you think it's a bad thing just shows that you need to mature a little bit more in how you run your business. Because you want all the bad stuff. You want to hear everything because if you're living in your bubble where you only work with your fans together, your business, your product is never growing completely. So with Despia, I remember where Johnny from our community wanted to make a few videos about Despia. He said, anything specific I can say? I was like, oh, just, you can bash Despia in one, in one hour YouTube video. Like, I don't care. You can say anything about it, good, bad, ugly, the truth, whatever, because I want to know. I want to know what you think about it. And if you think that something isn't right, don't tell me, tell people so they can make their own opinion about it. They can test it themselves and then they can see, okay, you know, in this use case is actually pretty shit, or in this use case it does make sense to use it, right? I want to get all the information out there because I know that SBM, my product, will be great for lots of people. And it will be probably not great for lots of people as well. And I want to give people the information out there because the worst thing you can have in your business is the wrong customer at the wrong time. Maybe someday they'll be the right customer at the right time, but you don't want wrong customers for your product. So by suppressing certain opinions, by trying to moderate some of the content that's out there on your product, you're actually holding back your growth because you are misaiming your ideal target audience. What do you think about that, Ray?

Yeah, I think that a lot of people as they get more senior in their careers have grown up with a lot of control and they've had control inside their house, right? If you're an engineer, you've had control over your machines. If you become manager of engineering, you have control over the people who are working for you. Even if you're a vice president of marketing, I found, or a chief marketing officer, I've been meeting, talking with a bunch of these types of folks in the course of the last few weeks. And many of them are about like, well, what, What's gonna be our messaging strategy, right? And how are we gonna go get stuff? And like, what, what, what do we need to put out there? I'm like, dudes, get out from behind your desk and you need to post, you need to post and you need to get other, and more importantly, you need to get other people to post about you. And that means you need to step back to the product people and get the product to be more remarkable. You're looking for the features that can be talked about and then go, go, go point them out to like your power user people so that they will say, oh yeah, that's so cool. I gotta go make some content about it. And then you should be helping them by asking them, hey, did you make that video so that we can go repost it? Post it. They'll say, you're gonna repost it with your number of followers. That's great. That's how you get that wheel turning, right? The thing is it doesn't come from control. It's not like I am going to buy media on ABC or one of the American big three television stations, and then gonna go blast that message out to everybody, right? That's not how media distribution happens anymore. It happens bottom up and nobody trusts what's coming from the brand. Like, they will— they trust you for a lot of stuff, you've seen. But I suspect they trust you less for what you have to say about Despia than we have to say about other things. Exactly. Other people post. Yes. Yeah, that's terrible.

And that's what matters.

So, so yeah, I'm totally like, go, go release that control.

And I think that's the best thing that you can do. I mean, this is why so many people signed up for Nordcraft, so many people signed up for Wisp, because not about what Norcraft or Wist have to say about it, but what I had to say about it.

Yeah, right. And, and what they want, all the difference in the world.

And I think my internet connection is a little bit slow. Is that— am I slow? Am I slowing down here?

Uh, I would never describe you as slow, Yasin, but your, your, your video was a little bit janky a minute ago.

Okay, let me try connecting to something else. I may be breaking up temporarily.

See how we do here. But Charles, at least we're getting a good picture of Yasin while, you know, while he's reconnecting. I'm back, and we have the other Yacine. Hello, sir.

There you go.

I'm back now.

You're on that other side. I like that. Uh, very cool. So I'm back. Um, So where did we stop again?

Well, yeah, sure. I think this whole thing about like control is important. You have to let it go a bit. I think it's also about needing to be more interdisciplinary about the way that we approach marketing. I think when you're like 1 or 2 people, super easy to be interdisciplinary, right? You're wearing a lot of hats. That's all fine. But as you get to larger organizations, like, you know, Tuddle is growing, right, in terms of number of people. You know, Xano is like, you know, whatever it is, a couple score people. The, there are, you know, like WeWeb, I think is approaching 20. The, as you have more of that, you have more specialization of labor, right? And you have your part of the briar patch and I've got my part of the briar patch. And the, and as a result, the marketing person no longer has the influence over product that they might otherwise. The engineering person no longer has as much exposure to what the customers are saying as they might. Have in the previous round. And so keeping that information flow going becomes more work as you become a bigger organization, but I think still remains very important because otherwise you get undercut by the next small company coming along that can be that kind of supple and responsive.

Yeah. And also what I learned is it doesn't really matter how people, what people talk about your product. What ultimately matters is the people that actually use it, how they feel using it. Do they feel that you're providing support? Do they feel that you're seriously caring about the product? What is your vision for the next 5 years of the product? Um, and, and what is behind that product? With Despi, it's my passion. I'll do it most of the day, and I do have a little team that helps with some of the things so we can do better. I'm totally invested in it. I hope that I'll be doing it in the next 10 years again, unless there isn't too big of an offer to buy it out, which I think I would probably not do because I'm a little bit too emotionally bound to it. It's my baby. I've been working on it. It's the only thing I've been working on for 2 years constantly without abandoning it, like everyone's programmer side projects.

There's a side project and real project. I think that also gets to another key thing here, which is when you are We talk about software as a service, right? But when you hire a service, you're hiring someone who's providing the service. You're providing, you're hiring a company or a team. And I think we forget about that because we suddenly struck the word software in here. That what they are hiring is very much you. This is why your personal brand matters so much in the putting out of your software and becomes a very tricky thing as a company gets larger because that which might have been previously built on a single personal brand now needs to cross a bit of a cross a bit of a chasm, right? But you get to play uneasy relative to say, no, no, WeWeb, because it can be you, right? And your trust and credibility, and then you sort of need to stand or fall on that. But the— and then if you were looking at, say, WeWeb, they're talking about trying to say, well, WeWeb, the company, is what you want to stand on, not necessarily the 4 or 5 personalities that we might associate with it, right? Like, you know, Raph and Joyce and Matthew. Maybe Fabian or someone, but who are they that are front and center? How do you turn that into the institution? But either way, it's an institution. It's not just the product. And I think we can lose sight of that. We think, oh, they're just buying the products and they're not going to want any of us. And that way they're going to pay us and we're going to make lots of money as they just sort of keep on paying us over and over and over. No, they're paying for a service. And they want to be taken care of in the course of that service. Now, if you can take care of it without needing human intervention, that's great. That's probably better service for them and better profitability for you. Interests are aligned. But the North Star is, are they more profitable? Is there impact as a result of having, you know, engaged, uh, with this, uh, either service, software, or whatever you want to call it?

Yeah. And, and your your best way to learn is by people who have some critique about your product or by the not so nice support requests. That is very important. If you don't have any bad support tickets like this doesn't work, why is this not working, is this broken, I need help troubleshooting it, then you're doing something wrong.

Yeah. State change DMs. Definitely are bifurcated that way. People saying, hey, this thing isn't working. And then other people saying, this is the best thing in the world. And sometimes it's the same person in sequence as we go from it being broken to being—

all the time. Like with Webflow, it's a very nice thing. Like there are like every major agency who uses Webflow and loves Webflow and trusts Webflow. At the same time, they hate it out of their guts. This is a love-hate relationship. You love the good things, you hate the things that don't work. Ask every no-code developer.

I was only gonna say you can only hate what you love.

Exactly, exactly. And then most people, you know, what I, you know, sometimes you tempt yourself doing that is when you see someone who likes your product and then all of a sudden has an issue or likes a post and says, oh, this doesn't work and it's shit. It's like, oh, it feels like betrayal almost. But then you gotta look behind the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is your product has made a promise. You probably haven't kept that promise. That's why the person is now angry. And they are only raising their voice because of their frustration. And what you wanna do when that happens to you, you wanna go to the person and say, I'm so sorry for that experience. We will make it right. Here's my personal phone number, or whatever you want to share, or my personal email. Please send me what's going on. I will take a look at that, and I will make sure that your issue is resolved within the next few days, maximum a week. We're working day and night on it to, um, to solve that, and we're sorry for the trouble and for the inconvenience that you have. Experience with it. And if you ever need to build a mobile application again, our next license— the next license will be on task. Something like that. And you want to make sure that whenever there are people can't keep— because the only reason they go vocal outside is because they are not making progress inside of the support chat.

Yeah, right. You know, I, I tend to think that like there is less value. I, I think a lot of people when they hear about how to make right with customers, they kind of go very quickly to rebates, refunds, discounts, what have you. And I actually think those are really over-indexed. People, people do that too often.

Um, and there's two of them. Yeah, because if you do a refund, it doesn't help the customer. The customer is using your product because they have to ship a mobile app or whatever your product is doing. Refunding them is not helping them with their deadline that the client gave them to ship the mobile app. So most of the— we had it a few times where people came to Despia and they said there is an issue with Despia, but it actually turned out to be user error. Now, first rule, you never tell customers user error.

Never.

You say there is an issue in our system, it has been unclear, we have been wrong in our communication, we understand that you have a deadline by next week, invite me to your Apple developer account as a guest, I'll do it for you, the app will be out there tomorrow. That's what I've been doing. Whenever there was someone who had an issue with Despia, who didn't understand the progress, I told them, invite my developer account to your Apple developer account. I'll do it for you free of charge. And then that is way better than a refund because the refund just is like, okay, what alternative are we using? We already planned Despia in. Should we go to Medium, which is $40,000 for the same thing almost? What do we do? And then the refund doesn't solve the problem. You got to get involved to solve the problem for the customer.

That's right.

Yeah, that's very important. And, and this is why things like StateChange are so amazing, because you have Ray solving all your problems.

Yeah, you know, the, um, I'm— this StateChange has— I, I think StateChange and, and no-code, uh, pro-code both serve really important jobs for these products. And hey, look, hey, there's a QR code and that's always great.

Scan Ray's QR code and join right now. And the next time you can talk with Ray would be tomorrow.

Actually, it'll be, if you want to talk to me, our next office hours are 90 minutes from now.

So if you scan the QR code right now and make your payment with your credit card, very convenient, super fast, you can talk to Ray in less than an, in almost an hour. Isn't that a great deal?

The, um, the, uh, can I ask, like, can we bring up No-Code Pro-Code, uh, QR code for a second? Because, uh, we should be, um, you know, also, also talking about your thing. But, you know, one thing I was curious about, as we're going to talk about more about, like, you know, your, your following on the, the social networks, was also like the integration, right, of No-Code Pro-Code, which is you helping people with their builds and Despia, which is a tool that helps people with their builds. So these are two ways that you're helping people, obviously two products and two price points and all that. But how, how you have found the two of these are intersecting as we sort of talk to other people who are listening today who are, you know, thinking about building their own, you know, businesses and the multiple pieces that might go into that.

Yeah. So what I've found is the first 50 people that built, started building their app in Despia all came from no-code. That's got, they got it rolling because the people already trust you. And it's actually quite hard to convince people to host their whole application with a company that exists since a few months. It's quite a tough sell. So the thing that has been helping me to get that understanding out there that this is actually something people can trust is my YouTube presence and my community. So the first users already trusted me. They know I've solved their hardest problems. When it broke at midnight, they were able to send me a DM. I responded and I helped them troubleshoot it over our messaging system at no-code-pro-code.com. So they already trust me. They trust me that this is what I'm invested in and that, that this is not going away. And there were a team of, I think, with remote, about 4 people now, including me. So 3 plus me. And this is something that I'm completely invested in because no-code, pro-code really can scale. I need a business now that actually scales. So this is why I'm doing this. And I've been fascinated with mobile apps for the last 8 years. I always loved mobile apps, but I could never build them. So this is the right thing. I'm my biggest user. I got like 40 projects with it, and I use all for client projects. So I know I'm invested, so they trust it. And then the second wave of people was first wave community members that already trust you, that, you know, you know, you're a legitimate person, um, you know, you actually exist, you're not just, you know, sitting somewhere and not delivering a product, you're right, you're actually, you know, providing that product and it works and it doesn't have build errors or something, right? So that's your first group. The second group is YouTube. People know you, but they haven't purchased something from you. And this is, they're like, you know, I have the problem, I need that solution. And you know, because they already know him from YouTube, I'm going to purchase it. That's the second, right? And they're not purchasing the competitor for me because the competitor is like 20 times more expensive. And they already know me, so, and they already know it fits their needs because I've been helping them before virtually on YouTube. That's the second group. Now the third group, which is actually happening, is people who I never know, who don't know me from YouTube, start signing up for Despia and getting their app out there. And that is the thing that is the most fascinating to me.

Yep, that's takeoff.

And I'm like, oh wow, we have one. And I, and I was like, it's almost a compliment. He was building a web application in React and he chose Despia instead of Expo, which is a compliment. Yeah. Also, we have UI changes without you having to do code push and all that stuff. You can change, which is a benefit. You can just change the UI remotely, very simple.

Is that because the way Despia works under covers is like it's a wrapped web UI?

It's a little bit more than RAP, it's 2,000 files in Swift, but yeah.

Only 2,000 files?

Compile it down. Yeah.

That makes a lot of sense. It's like the Electron app for mobile. But the fact that it's being hosted remotely means it's much more straightforward to, like you say, feed through those.

We've got great features. We've got smart widgets, we got app clips, We got shared targets, you can share things natively in it. We have biometric authentication, in-app purchases, basically everything that React Native offers, we have. Even eSIM installments, so you can install your eSIMs.

Now we get to the real question here. Who's making videos about Despia who's not named Yacine?

That's a good question and there's no one right now, but I hope they change this one day.

Yeah, uh, well, and, and do you do anything, uh, sort of, sort of deliberate to try to encourage, uh, that kind of spreading of the word?

I mean, we did talk about like how the relationships I ever had with no-code companies broke the moment they tried to encourage me to do certain things.

That's an interesting point.

That's good. So like with Wiz, the— like with Wiz, I was great with the Wiz team, and then Joe contacted me, and then our whole relationship fell apart. Same thing with Andreas. I learned that you just, like, the best thing you can do is make a good product, have people talk about it. The moment you start contacting the people and trying to encourage them to do specific things like don't use double UEL in your videos, please mention WIST attributes or whatever, that's kind of like when you just start messing things up.

So So I've been thinking about this video thing for a while, and I actually just had a conversation with the head of sales over at Xano, and they noticed something in my background. I'm going to turn my, my desk a little bit so you can see it in the background. There's this little X, right, that I've got up here on my, on my shelf, and a little thing, right? Um, and it is, uh, is something they had like 18 months ago. They decided to take like the top members of the, the Xano community— and not, not top members, I'm obviously— they're nicer people than me, but people people who have like posted—

you're number one—

that have been other people, uh, and I like a few other people, um, got, you know, they, they made a little care pack, uh, of stuff. But I think the most remarkable thing was this: they 3D printed this little X, and which I thought was brilliant marketing because now you have something that's kind of nice, it's distinctive, you can put it on the shelf. And like in the age of Zoom calls, it goes in your background, looks good in the background. And the, um, and now it it makes the people who are on the call look better because they've got special Xing. It makes the people who— it makes Xano look better because, hey, look, it's associated with these people, assuming you gave it to all the people. Now, the reason I'm bringing this up, you see, is as I think about like you and the, the video thing, like, you could like not have people put out, you know, videos or whatever, but like, I think if people do, you might consider rewarding them. And I emphasize rewarding them not by sending them money. We sort of talked about the refund thing before. And Xano, sadly, like this year for their top people in the community, of which I was still one, they sent like a gift card. Like, what are you doing? Where's the marketing benefit? That thing is marketing benefit. So what I'm thinking is like people who you are, you know, who would make a video for you, you could send them as a thank you. Now I'm not a, you know, super encourager, but you can just say thank you. Hey, if you send me a video, let me know you made a video. And I'm going to send you, you know, a, uh, a Despia thing for the background. These things aren't expensive.

Yeah, I want to do those, uh, and that's a great idea, but I think you can't force it. Oh, you absolutely— my job right now is making sure that we got the best education out there for Despia and that it's clear for people to do that. If anybody else wants to join the party, they're more than welcome to do that, but I will not— I don't want to control the content they're putting out there because I think the moment you want to control the content about your product out there, that's when you mess your product up. You can't control a free market.

I think what you want to do is pour in the gasoline and take off the brakes. Yeah, the, um, the, the, the, the control comes from trying to stop, right? Control comes from being able to say no. But if instead—

which is like, it's something that I'm, I'm always surprised. I was like, I've been making videos about Wiz, I've been making videos about Nordcraft, hundreds of videos of Xano. They never offered me like a month of Nordcraft for free, a month of Wiz for free. I always had to pay for it myself. I'm like, What are you thinking? I mean, I'm spending hundreds of dollars a month in subscriptions just to have accounts for my videos. So with DeskApp, I've been giving out free licenses to people who want to make videos about it at some point. I mean, of course we have a vetting process.

Yeah, well, there's a little bit of like email for, for that kind of review process.

That is a great idea. So the moment someone, uh, makes a video about it, they can expect to get few licenses for free for future videos. Or, you know, if you want to make a film how you built your app and then get it out there, we'll still give you a free license.

Yeah, I hear that. The, the hardware thing I really liked because it is remarkably cheap and at the same time totally different from what other people do. Nobody else does hardware. People do like swag, like I'll send you a hood, you know, a vest or something like Who cares?

Don't roast the toddler hoodie.

Go into a backdrop, something that— or like if you're in office, something goes on your desk. Those things create conversation pieces. They make the people who made them more remarkable and are just— it's good marketing all around.

And the thing that shocked me is I want to do very nice certificates people can hang on the wall, almost looking like a degree from a university. When people publish their first mobile app with Despia or like their first few ones. Like, I want to do it like a YouTube play button you can put in the background. If you publish more than 50 apps successfully, you get like bronze. If you do more than 100, you get silver. If you do more than 200 or so, you get gold. And that is kind of like your certificate for your excellence in working with it.

Despia gold.

And it makes— agencies can put that in their office when they're meeting clients and it gives them the validity. Like YouTube, right? The more views you have and subscribers, the more of a validity do you have. So I want to give like a— essentially will look like a YouTube play button but with the Despia logo that will show their milestones. And I think the first milestone is not that much of a stretch. Maybe we'll get it down, like maybe we'll make a plastic one for 5 apps or so. But the idea is I want to reward people for doing work in it. And for doing a great job and getting apps out there, because that is what clients want. Clients want people who actually get the apps out there. And if you're able to just smash those apps out there and get them quickly out there in a high quality, and they get an official thing that can— like, that looks great as a conversation starter, they can put in the background, but it also shows their milestones with the software— I think nobody has done that before. Besides YouTube.

Super cool.

So that's what I want to do. But also, I want to do another play button for people who criticize the product. I want to, I want to build a page on Despia called Hall of Shame where people could post everything they don't like about it, and it's public, people can look at it. And then the moment you start a post saying, I hate this about it, I don't like this about it, you will see how it creates a ticket in our internal system and how we start working on improving what you don't like about it. And you can track the progress in steps and you see in real time the progress that we're making on it. Not because the product is not good, it's fantastic as far as I'm concerned, but the moment you stop listening to people who are using your product or to people who are are, you know, not obsessed with it yet, and the moment you stop listening to constructive criticism or non-constructive criticism, that is the moment you stop growing as a company. And I don't want that to happen. I want to have the best product out there, and the way you do that is by doing transparency and letting the opinions get out there, letting— giving people a chance to express the opinion. You can respond that saying it's resolved, but you want people to feel like they can be honest with you about your product because that's what you want. If you don't know what's wrong with your product, you can never fix it. It's like going to the doctor. Maybe you're afraid to go to the doctor because you're afraid the doctor will tell you something that you don't like, but it's better hearing something you don't like early on than hearing something you don't like when it's too late. And that's the same thing with companies.

Yes, I think you're right.

You don't want to build a cult following, you want to build an honest following and where critique is welcomed no matter what wording it uses. Like, you can use shit, you can use whatever profound words you want to use. The message is the thing that's important. And if people are very passionate about how to talk about it, it means that it's a constant and it's something that frustrates them. It's the consistent error. So I thought actually customer support is an art you gotta master. And then more importantly, PR. And even more importantly is customer relations because you want that conversation to uplift the customer the user, help them get to a point where they got a solution quickly, and then you need to make sure that this never happens again.

Yes, that there is this continuum.

It always looks so simple, especially now with the live coding YouTubers out there like Mark Liu, or you can just build a startup in a day and get rich. Yeah, but you still gotta learn customer service. You gotta keep relations with your customers. You can build a SaaS in a weekend. That's true with AI and with no-code, you know, maybe not the best one, but you can do something in a weekend. But the— if it really has some long-term potential depends on how you are listening to the customers. And it's most of the times better getting a half-baked product out in the market but being really fast in turning around customer ideas and suggestions and working with your early customers almost like a partner together rather than spending years of perfectionating what you're building and then figuring out it doesn't have any market fit. Your customer should be part of your development pipeline. It shouldn't be something you look against or you look below or look down to. Because essentially they, they are your payroll. If they stop paying, you're broke.

So they're— boy, there, there's just a lot of wisdom in what you just said. And the thing you ended with, like the people, the customers helping you build is I think really, really on target. Certainly been doing that in the context of state change and whenever I do it, I really profit from it. And whenever, and I'll, I'll tell you what else, whenever I do it, I'm like, why didn't I do this 3 months ago? Because it's always much better once you start including the customers. Right now I'm feeling very under the gun because I've got this, you know, chat interface for SiteChange that I'm trying to release. I've already told people, hey, who wants to volunteer? And I've got like half a dozen people said yes, I want it. And like, I don't have it yet. And now I'm trying to get it out into them in a way that like allows us to start.

Yeah, we've been working on some experimental features. I've just invited users that like, we have a few users who really push it. Like Damien, he's like, oh my God, what he's doing is amazing. He's essentially building TikTok in Despia. I'm like, yeah, you want to use HLS video streaming and you want to do this. With our power users, I'm like at this point I'm giving them advice how they should structure your product. Doesn't fall in like if you go with any other company that does this thing, they could care less about how you build it. They just care that you pay and, you know, however it goes out there. But I want to make sure that the things that are being produced in Despi are high quality and that they actually look good because I want to build a great case study. I'm not putting something on the case studies that's not 1,000% perfect and meets my quality expectations. But most importantly is your customers, your early customers, and every customer after that. You need to build a relationship with them. You want to treat your business almost like an agency. Where you make sure that people are making progress. And it's easy if you have less than 2,000, 3,000 customers. There are great tools, Asana, Slack, to automate some of those proceedings and be more efficient. But I think the worst thing that you can do is just to get a VA overseas early on in the start to deal customer support for you. Because if you don't know how your business works, what problems people have, if you don't have a relationship with your customers, your business can't succeed. You need to do a whole process from the start, and then you can teach people to be almost as good as you are.

That's a really, really good point. I think people do over-optimize. How can I protect my time? How can I make money while I sleep? There's a great book called Sense and Respond from like 20 years ago. It's by the people who made Lean UX, if you ever read that one. But the premise of Sense and Respond is that the customer support channels, right? And like, and the ones we have now, like the communities that we're using, give us insight into what customers are doing and what the market needs. And that we should be treating them as top-level priorities. Right? There are other things we might otherwise spend more money on. We spend less money on those things, more money on these things. That's a sensory organ for the company.

I got a good quote for you. I get paid while I sleep, but I got to go to work while I'm awake.

Sounds about right. Right?

The idea most of the times of building a SaaS is you don't have to work.

Well, right, people, people think that, and of course that's, that's just not the, not the case.

It's not sustainable. You can do it for 1 to 2 months and then, you know, Trustpilot, right?

Uh, you know, the people, uh, listening to this, you know, either live or on the recording, be very curious. You alluded a while ago to like you having a small team of people who help you with Despia. We just talked about the whole VA thing. Uh, could you talk a little bit about like, you know, what your what your team looks like that you are employing to make your successful company?

We have one who does the code magic part. His job responsibility is making sure that the pipeline works, that we're doing updates on the pipeline. Then actually because the technology that Despia is built on is actually something out there since 2011. It was called all the way back then Advanced WebView. I don't like the word WebView, so we had to rebrand that name and make it look nicer. But John, the one who— and that was 2011, he was 14 back then. He invented this in 8th grade. He's a super genius. With 14 years old, 8th grade, he invented this technology. I think it was one of the first mobile apps that used this technology. It was many years before Capacitor. Capacitor, let's say, got inspired by some of the stuff that he built, but he built this technology. When I found out that this is the best on the market and this is what agencies use to build hybrid applications and that most agencies don't use Capacitor but they use his technology and they work with him, that's when I was like, okay, because the first version of Despia was, let's say, heavily inspired by Capacitor and was using some of the Capacitor stuff. It was never made to production, so I'm fine on that. Once I knew that his thing was the gold standard, I was like, I can either compete against him or I can team up with him. With Despia, we have what he doesn't have. We have the CI/CD part and we have the no-code part. He has the framework and he perfected it. He's now 28. He did this 14 years ago when he was 14, 8th grade, super genius. And he built this, and I reached out to him. I said, we are your competitor, and we don't want to be your competitor. We know that you got the best technology out there to do this. We want to work together with you. So we joined forces. We're not competitors anymore, and now we work together. And he has his own team because they run their own agency. They build enterprise-grade applications for government, for all kinds of high-profile industries with this kind of technology. And we utilize some of their team, and then we have our own team doing our stuff, and we work together. It's a joint partnership, and that's Despia. So that's me and John, we're joined forces, and then I have my team and John has his team. And he's been inventing this since 14 years, and I was like, 14 years of experience sounds way better than me trying to hack this thing together. And that's how we do that. And so essentially with Despia, there have been 50 apps published. If you really count the thing, if you remove the Despia brand name and consider the technology, there have been hundreds and thousands of apps published with it successfully.

Super cool. All right.

It's just me with Despia, but I need to do a better job explaining that.

I think that this description team really helps folks. It tells them what way you're bringing in the external, super senior experience.

You can still download Advanced WebView for free on GitHub, I think. But Despia is way better. It's 14 years old. You don't want to use it.

Then being able to see the type of team, the way you bring a combination of expertise and ability to do some grunt labor and what can make sense. It's the thing also makes clear where do you spend money in building a tool like this. I think that's bringing us pretty close to the end of the hour here, Yacine. I think we've really talked a lot about how we can do support and managing community here today.

You've been a venture capitalist investing in people. You've been building your tech startups. I remember your story on the 8th floor with your servers that overheat. From a year ago or something. What is your opinion on that? How did you work with that? Did you ever do tech support in your own companies?

Oh, always. The— when you are working— well, particularly if you're working in enterprise, support isn't a low-level concern. It's a top-level concern because you don't call it support, you call it account management, you know, because you're going to have a limited number of customers who are going to be paying you a lot of money and you should take them very seriously. I think the trick as we expand the universe of customers that we want to work with is that if you're not just going to work with half a dozen or several dozen large institutions who are paying you good deals of money for the privilege, you need to figure out how you can do this a little bit more at scale. This is why the community stuff we talked about matters. This is why the, you know, what you're talking about, like in terms of getting educational content out there. Really matters. And the irony is those same things that help that broader base, the enterprise customers love because people are actually using your stuff. They come out and they're able to get their answers. Because the irony is that you can have your account manager who's there to be helping with the senior person over the enterprise company. But then when it's percolating down and like someone 3 levels down actually needs to be using your product, they don't want to be going all the way up through the manager back to their account rep. What they want, how can we get an answer here? And the fact that you do this on that more, what's sometimes called a product-led growth or PLG basis is super, super helpful, right? Doing the one really helps with the other too.

I also think that people have the wrong impression that the founder of the tech company doing the tech support, most people think, oh, it's 'cause they don't have money to afford for team members. But I see it different. It's like, oh, they got money to hire people to do the job of the CEO so the CEO can be on the front lines helping actually people using the product. I think that's right. Having people in support, I'd rather have people doing the UI, doing the development, doing some of the CI/CD integrations for me so I can spend more time in support rather than having people be in support because I know the product I'm building and it would be very hard to explain a support person what this whole thing is and how it works.

I think that what, what you really want to do is find the way to become the maximum version of you. Yeah. Be, I, I think a lot of people who start these things are service professionals and their highest version is gonna be by providing service. So if you can be taking things like, you know, like you say, the building, the marketing, even the management, of the company. So you can be that absolutely top-level, you know, service professional who's able to, you know, really boost that company's reputation. And that reputation means brand, and brand is equity, uh, is going to seriously increase the value of the whole of the firm. If what you're really good at is making content, good, go create content. And like, because I mean, I'm thinking like you, you've seen like what I would really wish for is that you're out there able to just bang out those videos all day long because I can see how that makes lots and lots of value for your company if you are able to do that, you know, more and more.

We're going to lots of videos about Despia. It's just we've been so focused on shipping all the updates, and there— if I'm going to film a video today, next week everything will be different. So I'm just this time waiting until the updates are out, and then I'm going to make all the videos. And we also re— I rewrote all the documentation So in the meantime, I'm doing videos about Nordcraft, Xano, all that. And then they're going— we're going to build something called Despia Academy, which will provide you with all the education step by step how to do it. And we used to have videos only for Nordcraft because I thought most of our market share would come with from Nordcraft, but it turns out 90% of our paying customers with Despia, uh, are WeWeb. So we will need to adjust my content strategy. So we will do how to integrate X using Despia and Nordcraft, and then how to integrate X and Despia and WeWeb, and then how to integrate X and Despia and JavaScript. Because most— so like 10% of our customers use React or AI assistant thing with Lovable, 10% Nordcraft/Wist. I'll just put them in one group. 80% is WeWeb. Fascinating, right? So I thought it was the opposite. So we were not ready to advertise for WeWeb, so I have to change my whole strategy. But this is why you want to get your software out there, talk to customers. If I wouldn't be doing customer support, I wouldn't know about this.

Cool, man.

Uh, well, let you know, we got a fun comment from Charles. Tunnel could take some notes.

Oh yeah, from back when we were talking at the beginning where you talk about the, the tall community. This has been, uh, just, uh, just, just fantastic getting to learn from you today.

It was also fantastic having this wonderful conversation with you. What should we talk about next week? I mean, it's a good topic that, that you got some recent learnings from that you want to share with us that kind of like nicely aligns with what we're talking about today.

Yeah, I think that folks might be interested in hearing more about, you know, sort of moving ahead into the AI zone, you know, and like some of— I just recently went to the Open Data Science Conference last week and the— in Boston and the lessons in there, like just what software is getting created and what matters, I think is really useful stuff and puts us in a very different frame. Than I think where a lot of the no-code, low-code tools are. Um, and yet something makes some of them even—

my own programming language with the help of Cursor, DespiaScript. Yeah, I built my own server-side runtime for building interactive vectors. So it will look like— it does look like— think of SVGs with React props in them and in the props you write JavaScript like in Wist.

Okay.

And there will be a no-code tool that will look very similar to Wist to write this inline JavaScript to define the formulas, to build interactive smart widgets for our new widget integration with Apple Smart Widgets. So you can build those widgets visually. So the AI will do the template, and then you can click on those things and edit it, and you can also drag and drop and rearrange the UI. It will be no-code plus visual development. I invented my own server-side runtime that works on a Cloudflare worker. It's very memory efficient and super cheap to run.

Super cool.

It's essentially a mini version of Tunnell, but I did not use any of Tunnell's intellectual property to do that because I would get in trouble for that because it's not open source, Despia itself.

Yeah. That's cool, man. These kinds of domain-specific languages, DSLs, are, I'm curious how they're going to work in the new world of AI development. I know that like Xano's got this thing called XanoScript they're trying to make work.

And that's where I got the name from.

DespiaScript. DespiaScript.

Yeah. One day we're going to add a web builder to Despia.

Okay. I don't know. I'm not sure you need one. I really like the idea of being mobile. And I think that the—

Okay, then if you say so, then I'm going to I'm going to discard that idea. I'm going to go right to my to-do list and I'm crossing that through.

There you go.

Whatever Ray says will be done.

But, but I do, I do think there's a really fun conversation for us to have next week, um, about, you know, uh, using AI and then, but, but the, but the, I, I might use that as jumping off point for what kind of software is gonna matter. Yeah. You know, cuz I, I think that is one of the reasons why I sort of talk about, you know, web, web tech versus mobile tech. Is that I think web tech becomes a little more commoditized. And I think there's some really interesting dynamic stuff in there. I think that the mobile tech work that you're doing is very much, you know, is where more of the future is, right? If for no other reason, we spend—

I like hearing that.

So we'll— yeah, well, let's talk about the state of the market and how we can take best advantage of that when we meet together. Hopefully this time next week.

Thank you so much for your time, Ray. I always appreciate that. Take care. And all you, thank you so much for