Charles and Valentino join this week's episode. They dive into the world of coaching and mastermind groups. They share insights on monthly coaching sessions, quick support over text messages, and the power of collaboration in mastermind groups. They also explore the importance of staying current in your field, building a personal brand, and the upcoming launch of a podcasting masterclass. Additionally, they discuss live streaming, sponsors, and future plans for a top-notch Rails conference. 

Charles Max Wood (00:00.76)

All right. Hey folks, welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week on our panel we have Valentino Stoll.

 

Valentino (00:10.1)

And out.

 

Charles Max Wood (00:11.32)

I'm Charles Max Wood from Top End Devs. And yeah, we didn't have a guest today and I've been kind of neck deep in all the stuff that we're adding to or changing on the podcast. And so I thought, hey, I'll surprise Valentino and tell him all the stuff that we're gonna do to him. I mean, for him. And yeah, we'll see how it goes. If you're watching the videos, one of the things you're probably gonna notice is that I've got this nifty looking background. And that's because I set up a green screen and I'm gonna start doing video stuff.

 

for other content. So if you're looking for career content, things like that, keep an eye out. I'll announce when the show's actually live. But yeah, I'm going to be putting together... I've been talking to a lot of people who feel like they're stuck. It's like, hey, I don't know what my options are, especially people who have been in it for a year or two. They just kind of get to the point where it's like, you know, I'm not really growing here. They don't really go in the direction I want to go. And...

 

then they look at the job market, the job market slowed down some and they're not sure what their options are. And so I have a ton of advice for people as far as just how to build your personal brand, how to make sure that you have the right skills and how you're building a network that may give you that opportunity even if the job market's a little bit shaky. Does that make sense?

 

Valentino (01:31.03)

Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have any examples of who you've helped so far?

 

Charles Max Wood (01:36.28)

I've had a few people that I've coached. I haven't asked them if I can tell their particular story. And so I can, in general terms, kind of give you some of the advice that I've given out. Most of it's around understanding what's going on out there in whatever field you're in. So for example, if you're a Rails developer, it's keeping track of what's going on in the Rails community, right? And we've talked about some of that just before the show, right? With OpenAI, or it was Merck and now it's Kamal,

 

You know, some of the things out there in that world, I'm going to be going to Rails World in a couple weeks. And so, you know, we'll see what people are talking about there and what's coming out in Rails. I've been watching DHH argue with people over TypeScript versus JavaScript, you know, which may or may not be something we want to discuss here, or at least, you know, what that means for Turbo. And I don't know. Anyway, so it's just how to stay current on stuff. And then...

 

build skills, right? So once I know what the current thing is or what things I need to be learning, then it's, okay, how do I pick this stuff up, right? Where do I go to learn it? Sometimes it's been out long enough for somebody to have built a course or, you know, written an e-book or something like that. But a lot of times it's just, okay, I'm going to go look at the code, I'm going to go look at blog posts, I'm going to go watch some videos, right? And then how do I apply it? How do I learn it? How do I know whether or not it applies to what I'm working on?

 

Is this something that I can use at work? It's not something I can use at work, but it's something other companies are gonna wanna use. So anyway, it's all that stuff, right? And then just pulling it together. And then, yeah, just how do I meet people out there in the community that might have that next opportunity for me or at least who I can help and may be able to introduce me around? A lot of times that's how a lot of the work that I've gotten lately has come in, right? I know somebody who knows somebody.

 

Charles Max Wood (03:36.616)

And then just building a personal brand. And so talking about, hey, here's how you start a podcast or a YouTube channel and building that up. And I've helped a number of people start podcasts. That's one of the things that I've done probably more than a lot of the other stuff. The other stuff I can kind of put into a course, starting a podcast I can, but it seems like people get to a certain point and then they need help. And so just doing the coaching and stuff. But yeah.

 

So, and this kind of ties into what I've got coming down the pipe with some of this stuff, but yeah.

 

Valentino (04:11.786)

So where do you start with somebody? Like, I know you kind of went through the whole drill, but I mean, is it a lot of like self exposing, self exploration, or is it more of like, you know, setting up the framework and plugging them into it kind of thing?

 

Charles Max Wood (04:31.384)

Yes and no. And just to put this out there, because I'm going to be offering this and I think this episode will go live before Railsworld. But I am offering free coaching at Railsworld. So if you're interested, email me, check at topendevs.com and I'll send you a scheduling link. But yeah, usually where I start is not in any of those places. I need to know where people are at, like what the real problems and pain are. Right.

 

It doesn't make sense to go into, hey, here's how you start a podcast if that's not really the kind of direction they want to head into, if that makes sense. So I start talking to people more about, okay, where are you at? Where do you want to go? What are you trying to do? What have you tried that has or hasn't worked? Because if I can get that much done, then it's okay. Well, it sounds like you need a mentor, right? And so then I aim for more of the networking. Or

 

You know, hey, look, it looks like you're, you've kind of got a lot of the fundamentals in place, but a lot of this stuff isn't really aligned with where things are headed. So you need to be able to keep up and build better skills, build new skills, right? Or maybe it is, you know, with some of the people who have been in the industry for a handful of years, or maybe, you know, they're in a good place where they're going to meetups and they know how to have the conversations with people.

 

they're still building those skills up and they want to know what else they can do, then we start talking about, okay, well, maybe you need a media channel like a podcast or YouTube channel. One of the things that I'm finding actually is more of a thing. So I went to podcast movement like two or three weeks ago, and one of the things that they're talking about is expanding your...

 

Valentino (06:13.034)

Wait, wait, what's that podcast movement? I'm not familiar. Okay.

 

Charles Max Wood (06:16.972)

It's a podcasting conference. It's been around for like 10 years. I funded it back in 2014, so I guess I know how old it is. I paid into Kickstarter when it started, went to the first one. So I've been to all but like three of them. Anyway, it's interesting to just see what the trends are in podcasting. And it looks a lot like the way to go with podcasting anymore is actually to live stream your episodes.

 

out to all the platforms and then you bring people in that way. And so we're going to start doing that. By the way, that's one of the things that I was going to spring on Valentino. So I am discussing right now a deal with, right now we record on Riverside and I'm discussing with StreamYard. They're kind of going to match the pricing on Riverside, but the difference is that...

 

Valentino (06:59.022)

What was that?

 

Charles Max Wood (07:14.92)

StreamYard, one of the issues we've had with Riverside is that you can only record one stream at a time per seat that you have, and you have to be signed in as the different accounts on the seat. If we're on here and there's another podcast that wants to run at the same time, they have to sign in to the other account or the other sign in with this account, and then they can record. But if somebody else wanted to record at the same time, they can't. Some of the shows...

 

run off of basically the same login. And so what we've run into is we've had two shows that are back to back. One show will go over, and the other one can't start until they're off. Or until somebody signs out and they get the other log in so they can get in on the other account. And StreamYard doesn't have any restrictions like that. They also allow me to set up like 10 users on the account. So I can set up a user per show or user per two shows, depending on what we're doing.

 

You can sign in, you can get into the studio, and you're off to the races. We don't have any of those issues. The quality is more or less the same. I think we can actually have up to 10 people on StreamYard, and I think it's eight people for Riverside. The point I was making when I got into this was that the conventional knowledge for growing a podcast, besides going on other podcasts or maybe advertising in the podcast apps,

 

is to stream, to live stream your episodes. And the nice thing with StreamYard that they do as well, and cause you can live stream with Riverside as well, but you can only set up like four or five streams. StreamYard does up to like 10. And they also aggregate everything, but like Twitter into basically a chat on the side. So you can chat back to people. So if people are watching and they comment on it and LinkedIn, you can respond to the comments.

 

while you're recording and streaming out live. And so if somebody comes in and says, hey, what about this? We can cover it on the show live. It'll go into the show, hey, we had John Doe say that, this is now coming in Rails and we know that he's a Rails core contributor, somebody who, he gave us the link to the article even if he's not, right? So we can go and verify, hey, look, it really does look like this is a thing, right?

 

Charles Max Wood (09:39.328)

we can talk about it on the show and we can cover a lot more of that stuff live. We can also just give people a StreamYard link and they can just get in and chat at us.

 

Valentino (09:48.074)

You know, I'm imagining like a CNN or something like ticker on the bottom or like updates. Is it not quite that extreme or? OK.

 

Charles Max Wood (09:56.972)

Yeah, my, no, it's not that extreme. StreamYard does allow you to set your name and stuff. So I just recorded an episode of, what does she call it? Just ship it? It's a new show that Tracy Lee is putting out. And so it's more the JavaScript arena is how I know her than the Ruby arena, but she used StreamYard and it allowed you to put

 

So I put my name and my Twitter handle and you know, and so you can put all that information in and it'll show up as it records the video and as it streams it. So, you know, there are a lot of things to like. So just kind of getting that all nailed down, we'll do the live streams, we'll tell people where to get the show on every live stream, right? So that afterward it's like, hey, you can go watch this on YouTube or you can go, you know, get on the RSS feed and take it with you on the road, right? Because...

 

What people have been finding is that, so the live streams and the video feeds to like YouTube and stuff, a lot of younger folks really do like having the video. That wasn't always the case with podcasting, but it is now. And so a lot of people will go watch it on YouTube or whatever. They'll watch it on LinkedIn if we're pushing it to a LinkedIn profile or channel.

 

But they still like being able to download it onto their phone in audio format because they still do drive and mow the lawn and the things that the rest of us all listen to podcasts while we're out doing things. And so you still get the subscribers, right? You may get some of them on YouTube and some of them on the RS feed and some of them on both, but it still does grow your show. And then the other thing is, is that if you're talking sponsors,

 

That's more exposures that you get for your sponsors. I can go back to the sponsors now and say, hey, look, when we live stream and after we live stream, we have 1,000 people watch it on LinkedIn and 2,000 people watch it on YouTube and 500 people watch it on Facebook and we have the 4,000 subscribers that we always had on the podcast feed. We may get a larger number that we can sell sponsorships on.

 

Charles Max Wood (12:13.984)

The flip side of that is that if we're live streaming and we want the sponsorships in this live stream, then I think StreamGuard will allow you to play a video so we could put up a video that goes into the live stream. Otherwise, the hosts are gonna have to read it. So if I'm not here, one of you guys would have to read it. You know, so they're, yeah. But, you know, I feel like we get a wider exposure that way. So.

 

Valentino (12:33.014)

Surprise! No.

 

Charles Max Wood (12:40.86)

That's one thing that I'm looking to bring in. And then the other thing is that I've been looking at as another place to watch it, putting up an app that's just top end devs. And then you would watch it and it would not have the ads in it. Right. So we would just clip them out, which would be weird because usually we're sticking them in, we're inserting them. But in this case, we would not insert them, right? We would take them out. But anyway.

 

So that's another thing that I'm working on and I should have that up here within the next week or so because as I go to Rails world, I want to be able to tell people, hey, you know, if you want, and I'm gonna do more than that, but it'll be a subscription where you can get the ad-free episodes and then if you want a higher level of subscription, what I'm looking at doing is adding other content. So it may be, hey, here's a 10 minute explanation of some fundamental feature in Ruby or Rails.

 

Maybe do something like drifting Ruby or go rails or rails casts. That's part of that higher level subscription, right? So it's like, hey, plus you get this extra walkthrough on some concept. I'm looking to do the same thing for JavaScript incidentally, since that's my largest audience on top end devs. But yeah, so then you could sign up maybe for a package. And so it's, hey, I'm going to get a React content and a JavaScript content and a

 

Ruby content that's extra that goes above and beyond, right? I'm also looking at possibly turning the book club into more of a content piece and less of a subscription join the call piece or maybe a mix. But yeah, so that's gonna be another thing. And that app, I should have it up here within the next two, three weeks, which puts it right around Railsworld. And so then you can get the premium RSS feed if you just want the audio.

 

And then you can go watch them, right, any of the video pieces that correlate with the audio that you're getting on the premium feeds. And I'm hoping to be able to do that at least initially for JavaScript, Ruby and React. And so.

 

Valentino (14:49.59)

Now, since these are live streamed, is there any planned channel for like, getting like, making commentary or, you know, doing like a commentary spot spotlight on a segment or something like that? Where they're like, you know, people are for each episode, right? Like if people are streaming them live, like, can they be like, oh, hey, I love this, like, check this out. And we can be like, oh, this person just, you know, commented like.

 

Charles Max Wood (15:05.656)

for...

 

Charles Max Wood (15:15.689)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

 

Valentino (15:17.77)

You know, that's an interesting idea, you know.

 

Charles Max Wood (15:20.468)

Yeah, so if we stick with Riverside, there's a link that people can use to join as a guest and then they can join our chat basically. The way the StreamYard works is on like Facebook and a lot of the other streaming platforms, YouTube, it actually uses the API to pull those comments back into the StreamYard platform. And then if you respond, then they'll show up back on the original platform, you know, in text, but...

 

Valentino (15:47.202)

Oh, that's cool.

 

Charles Max Wood (15:48.396)

But we could also, right, it's like, hey, yeah, John Doe said that this is gonna be a feature in Rails 8, right? And so, you know, maybe somebody goes, well, I don't know about that, let me go check it. So they go verify it, come back and say, yeah, it's a thing, here's the link. Or maybe they provide the link, hey, John Doe, do you have a link for that, right? They provide the link, hey, this looks like it's, you know, it's a real thing, we're super excited for that. And yeah, we could see that happen.

 

Valentino (15:56.715)

Right.

 

Charles Max Wood (16:18.32)

I don't know how many people you really get on the live streams. I think the value that I've heard most people get out of that comes from having it because you live stream it and it stays in your Twitter feed or stays in your Facebook page. My understanding is that that's the value you get is that people can come back and watch it right. Now, they'll still release to the podcast feed and they'll get edited and cleaned up and maybe re-uploaded to the...

 

YouTube channel after the fact, right? Because I do want high quality, you know, somebody has an oops during the episode. I still want to be able to clean that up. But for the few weeks that exist between us live streaming it and it going, you know, full whatever, you know, and it may be also that we may we put that behind some kind of paywall, right? So it when it's live, you can join for free. But then, you know,

 

You can get them early without them being edited, heading in, I don't know. But those are all things that I'm looking at as far as how a lot of that works.

 

Valentino (17:26.882)

Cool. Yeah, I know I've joined a couple of like, as an example, Aaron Patterson hacking on his, you know, personal JIT, and they're just fun to leave commentary as they're going. So it'll be interesting to see how that pans out, right?

 

Charles Max Wood (17:42.356)

Yep, absolutely. And I mean, you can stream stuff out to Twitch too. I think that's where a lot of people kind of see the live streams that way. That's definitely something that I'd like to do. And yeah, I've got a couple of apps that I kind of want to build in public. I think that would be fun. I may not release the source code, but you can watch me add features to stuff or whatever. So that's another thing that I definitely like to go to. And I'm looking at kind of either doing

 

Some of it in Rails and some of it in Redwood JS is kind of the thing I've been playing with lately.

 

Charles Max Wood (18:20.044)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (18:23.837)

So yeah, so we're definitely going to see some changes. I'm adding SEO features to top end devs. And I'm also working on adding a search feature, because I get requests for that quite a bit. So you can go in and you can say, hey, when did you talk about this thing? And it finds it. So.

 

Valentino (18:39.942)

I'm always looking for that when we're doing these episodes. And I'm like, you know, I always, you know, fumble and try and remember what it was. And sometimes I find it right. It'd be great to have that.

 

Charles Max Wood (18:42.966)

I know, I know, right?

 

Charles Max Wood (18:50.6)

Yep. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm looking at my options as far as, yeah, full text search or something like that. So yeah, people can find that. So those are kind of the things that I've got coming down the pipe for the shows. One other thing that I'd like to do, and I don't know exactly how to pull this together, is you can set...

 

artwork for each episode in the podcast apps and on the podcast feeds. And so I've been playing with that. I've gotten different feedback on that. Some people really highly recommend that you use like the same template, right? So they all kind of look the same, but they all say, you know, we talked about this on this one.

 

And then I've had other people say that you should change it up, right? Whether it's just changing up the colors, but keeping the main design or. Yeah, I don't know. I think that's something that we just have to try out. There are a couple of shows I listened to that do that. One of them is no agenda. And what they do is they actually have a, an artwork contest every week. And so people submit the artwork and then they pick the artwork for the next, next week's episode after people have joined live, right?

 

Valentino (20:01.715)

Oh, that's cool.

 

Charles Max Wood (20:09.92)

But they have like 2000 people join their episodes live, right? And they get a ridiculous number of episodes downloaded every week. Um, yeah, the other thing that, that I'm seeing is that they, they have a donation segment in their show. And I keep going back and forth as to whether people would want to listen through that, right? If we have 20 people donate, it's like, Joe donated a thousand dollars and gave us this note. Here's Joe's note, right? I don't know. Um,

 

which is something that they do, but I don't know. I don't know what the trade-offs are on that as far as whether or not people would be interested. But people like hearing their names on the episodes, and so.

 

Charles Max Wood (20:49.724)

But I feel like kind of giving out the premium content is a good way to get support for the shows. Sponsorships have been a little bit tricky to come by lately. So just kind of working through that too. I mean, I'm working on a contract to pay for the podcasts and yeah, it kind of sucks to give up some of your income from something else to pay for some of this stuff.

 

Valentino (21:03.658)

Yeah, you know I thought.

 

Valentino (21:08.333)

I thought...

 

Valentino (21:13.662)

Yeah, I get that. I did think of an idea for something we could give to guests, is because I have this 3D printer and Etcher behind me is some kind of badge you could wear like, oh, Ruby Rhoades episode. You know?

 

Charles Max Wood (21:20.97)

Uh-huh.

 

Charles Max Wood (21:24.757)

Right.

 

Charles Max Wood (21:28.286)

Mm-hmm.

 

Yeah, I've looked at that. I've also thought of, because you could just do one-off t-shirts, or we could just do a, I was a guest on Ruby Rogues, and just send them all the same shirt. I don't know. I love the idea of sending like a swag bag out to guests. One other thing I'd like to add to Top End Devs is basically a guest slash host page, right? So if somebody came and looked up one of us, it would list all the episodes we've been on.

 

But if they look up one of our guests or click on one of their pictures on one of the episodes, we've had some people that have come back multiple times, right? So you click on DHH and it shows all the episodes he was on that, you know, across any of the shows he's been on, right? Because he was on Rails Coach and Top, or Teach Me to Code before he was on Ruby Rogues. I don't know that he's been on any of the other shows.

 

Charles Max Wood (22:27.656)

Anyway, but yeah, just stuff like that, right? So then you can come see the full set of things that people have done.

 

Valentino (22:36.118)

Yeah, that's cool. So do you have like a, now that you're kind of like piecing this together and solidifying things, like do you have like a podcast starter kit that you like give to people's like, that has like agendas and like, here's all the services you should use. Like, I'm curious how that, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (22:53.68)

No, I'm working on that. So last year, I think it was last year, yeah, last year I bought a domain called podcastplaybook.com. And yeah, that's what I've been planning to do is basically put together that podcasting master class. And I have a lot of friends that are like life coaches or financial coaches and stuff like that. And so I kind of want to put that master class together for them as well. And yeah, it would be your starter kit. And so...

 

It would be everything from, hey, here's all the equipment I use. Right. Here are some cheaper, you know, like if you don't have the budget to buy it all. Right. It's like, Hey, here's, here's like the minimum you have to have to start with. And then here, here are the first few episodes that I would put on any podcast. Here's how you get guests. Here's the script I use when I email guests and say, Hey, do you want to come on the show? Um, if you're going to do a co-hosted show, I mean like this, right.

 

It would be, hey, here are some of the things you need to look at in a co-host. Um, here's some of the agreements you probably have to put together. I mean, all of our shows are shows that I started, right. Or helped start one way or the other. Right. And all of the other hosts basically gave over ownership of the show. If, if I didn't just have it outright when I started it, right.

 

You know, so I either started it with the understanding that, hey, you're all going to join a show that's owned by the podcast network, or it just kind of evolved into that now. And so. You know, but you have to come up with some kind of ownership agreement because I've seen people get together with people they know to start a show. And after a year or three or five or however long, somebody wants to part ways, but they feel like there's value in the show that they help start.

 

And so they don't want to just walk away from that. They want to get bought out. And so if you have an agreement ahead of time that says, Hey, this is how we determine the buyout value. This is how we write. This is how I buy you out. Uh, these are the agreements for all that stuff, right? Um, you know, I have to agree to buy you out, right? Or you can trigger the clause that forces me to buy you out over the, this amount of time, and if you can't do it, then I can sell my share.

 

Charles Max Wood (25:16.652)

to somebody else, right? And so anyways, you need to work all that stuff out ahead of time so that you know who owns what at the end of the day, including the content, right? Because if you both co-own the show, then you do have some claim to your likeness and stuff like that being used as part of the show. I've talked to plenty of attorneys. If you show up with the understanding that your likeness and voice are gonna be used as part of the show, right? You don't really have a claim.

 

If you co-own part of the show, then it's a different story. And so just stuff like that you got to figure out. And then, yeah, the services I use to host stuff, and my playbook for getting sponsors, and yeah, all that stuff I plan on putting in there. And I'm looking at doing basically a $2,000 four week master class. And so it would just be, hey, just you come in and you.

 

You do all this stuff and at the end of the day, you're going to have a high quality, nice sounding podcast with a growth strategy and stuff like that. Right. And then maybe there's another masterclass that's, Hey, grow from a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers. Right. And so then it gets into, Hey, you're going to live stream and here's how you do this. Now I'm trying to figure some of that out now, but, um, I've reached out to podcasts and said, Hey, would you like to have me on your show or do a swap? And a lot of people are open to that. So.

 

So it's just working some of those out and how they work and some of the concerns that you may have to help alleviate and things like that. So yeah, I'm working on that kind of a playbook and that kind of equipment list and things like that so that yeah, you can put a show out if you're so inclined.

 

Valentino (27:01.43)

So I'm curious you have like, I mean, you have a ton of podcasting experience at this point. Like what would you underline as like maybe with some of the top like things to be like focused on? Right. Like somebody wants to make their own podcasts, you know, like what are you focusing on?

 

Charles Max Wood (27:06.396)

Yeah, a little bit.

 

Charles Max Wood (27:19.468)

So to start out, usually I'm talking to people about why. Why do they want a show, right? Because if you're just putting a show out there just to have a show, a lot of those people wind up fading off because they don't even know if they're being successful. And so then what happens is they'll get in and they'll see some numbers. They get two, three months in and it's, hey, I have a few hundred subscribers and it doesn't feel like that's what they wanted. And so they...

 

Charles Max Wood (27:49.504)

They start to back off and not be as excited about it, not realizing that if you have more than 300 subscribers, you're in the top, what, 10%, 5% of podcasts. So you're doing pretty good. And so then it's just a matter of figuring out, okay, what do I do from here? So if it's just the vanity numbers, I've never seen that be enough for somebody to want to keep doing the show. So there's usually another reason.

 

For some people, it's, hey, I want to meet people in my community, I want to be speaking at conferences and get recognition, and things like that. A lot of times, that's kind of the measure. So then what you start doing is you start measuring out, okay, when I submit to CFPs for conferences, am I getting accepted? If I reach out to somebody who's big time in the community and they say yes to me, how often does that happen? Versus them going, I don't even know who you are, so no.

 

So you can kind of keep track of that. So 70% of the people that I reach out to that are big time in the community come on the show. Okay, well I feel like I'm doing pretty good. One other measure is, and this is something that's come out of the podcasting over the last, how long have I been doing this? 18 years? 17 years? I started in 2008, so 15 years. So the last 15 years, what's changed in my situation? Well in my situation...

 

most of the time I go into a job interview, I tell them that I'm on Ruby Rogues and they wanna talk to me about the podcast and not what I can do, right? And then it's, hey, we hired him because he's a friendly guy and we liked him, right? Whereas early in my career, I had to prove that I knew what I was talking about, right? And even early on, when I was doing Teach Me to Code screencasts, I got one job, I got laid off that morning, went in for a job interview that afternoon, they watched two of my videos after I'd done the interview.

 

and called me on the way home and asked me when I could start. It was because they were confident that I knew or could figure out the stuff that they needed me to know because they went and saw the content. That kind of personal brand, that kind of opening that you get, that kind of thing that you can refer people to and stand out on, that makes a major difference. If you're feeling stuck in your career and you do a podcast for six months and then start

 

Charles Max Wood (30:13.952)

looking for a job and using that as your body of work to try and get that job. Right. It's, it's this, it's, you know, I talked about some of the projects that I had built that were on GitHub, um, you know, so, so you have a body of work to go to so people can go and they can easily consume it. It's like, Hey, go subscribe to my podcast and listen to two of them on the way home, you'll know where I'm at. Um, right. So, so that's kind of the thing for some other people, it, they have a freelance practice, right. They're.

 

They're finding clients and so it's, hey, you know, let's start a podcast, but it's not going to be a podcast on here are the deep dark secrets of Ruby on Rails. Cause your clients aren't going to care, right? That your clients care. Can you build me an e-commerce platform that's going to work for me? Right. And so what you do is you do a podcast and you talk about building an e-commerce business on solidus. Right. And so anyway, um, but, but then your measure is, um, how many clients am I getting off of this? Right.

 

And your strategy might be, well, I'm going to interview people who currently own or, and are looking to switch platforms on their e-commerce business or people who are looking to start an e-commerce business. Right. And so you get them on as your guests and then you just consult for an hour. Right. That's your podcast episode because at the end of the day, you're showing your expertise and when you get off the call, you've built this report cause they got to talk about their business and what they wanted and get all their questions answered for free.

 

and you can turn around and say, oh, by the way, would you like to work with me? Right. And so your lead magnet is exposure for your business by coming on my podcast and having other e-commerce people hear it. Um, and so, so anyway, so, uh, the, the common denominator, the thing that I see. That makes podcasts the most successful is defining what that success looks like ahead of time. And, um, it feels a little bit funny to say it, cause that is not where I started.

 

I didn't start out to build a brand or anything like that. When I started, I was talking to Greg Pollock over email and I think we did a couple of phone calls. And I was brand new. I was baby programmer. When I started podcasting, I didn't even have a full-time job as a programmer. But I loved Rails. I loved learning this stuff. I was super passionate about it. And so he helped me get going.

 

Charles Max Wood (32:35.84)

and encouraged me to start a show where I was interviewing people. And then if I didn't have an interview, I just talked about what I was learning, which was usually pretty fundamental stuff when it came to Rails. And anyway, so I was doing those interviews and I kind of stumbled into this, right? Where all of a sudden I had validation because I was talking to Rails core team members or people who had a reputation in the community. And so people would get to know me because they already knew them. And so...

 

And that helped me advance my career. And then once we started Ruby Rogues, the other thing that came out of it was my talking to the other guys on the show, because that was what, 2011? And so at that point I was like three, four years into my professional programming career. Yeah. I was talking to people that were light years ahead of me in experience on a regular basis. And so I leveled up very quickly.

 

just by virtue of having those conversations. And so if you're measuring it by that, then it doesn't really matter how many people are listening, right? It's like, hey, look, I'm talking to people who are on a regular basis challenging the way I think, or helping me realize that I don't know enough about this topic, and I should, if that makes sense, right? And so if you know what the parameters are, what I'm trying to get out of it, and you have some way of measuring that, then you can start saying, okay, this is a successful show.

 

but the successful show may be a hundred people listening and I have steady freelance business.

 

Valentino (34:07.606)

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think next to content is probably like, you know,

 

getting people to come on. Right. And I always I always wonder, like, is it just asking enough? Right. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (34:20.865)

Well...

 

Charles Max Wood (34:26.836)

Most of the time, most of the time it is. For the people that really want to know that it's gonna pay off for them, and this is why our template is the way it is, is that it's, hey, we have this many people listen on a weekly basis, right? The show's been going, like, Ruby Rouges has been going for 12 years now, right? And so all of those things, right, we've done more than, I think we're dangerously close to 600 episodes at this point.

 

Right? And so all those things lean into, hey, you come on the show, you're gonna get in front of, I think our numbers right now are 4,000, 4,500 people listen to every episode. Right? You're gonna get in front of all those people. They're gonna hear about your project. You know, the thing you're working on and passionate about right now is cool. Right? And so, we kind of tick as many of those boxes as we can so that at the end of the day, it's kind of a.

 

Oh, okay, this would be really good for what I'm doing, or this would be really good for my personal brand, or this would be really good to get people to read my blog or whatever. And then that makes it kind of a no-brainer. But a lot of people, I've just emailed them and said, hey, do you wanna come on and talk about this thing? And they say yes, right? And I don't give them any of that.

 

Valentino (35:41.95)

Yep. Yeah, I know I've asked people to come on and they've accepted but you know, I don't know how much of that is just because I know them or right. Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (35:46.312)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (35:50.9)

Yeah, that helps too. If you meet people at a conference, I find that they're much, much more likely to say yes. Incidentally, it's the same for sponsorships. I probably am able to sell two or three to one in person that I am over the internet. And it's not that my close rates any different when I get them on a call face-to-face over the internet. The difference is getting them on that call. And if I'm already there and chatting with them,

 

They'll sit me down with the right person.

 

Valentino (36:24.158)

Yep. Yeah, I know I've sold people on tools at conferences, you know, just by, Hey, look at this thing. And they're like, Oh, I didn't even know that existed. You know, I wasn't even trying to sell them a tool. I was just like, Hey, look at this fun thing I'm doing. Power of presence, right?

 

Charles Max Wood (36:36.232)

Right? Yep. So, yeah. Yep. And that's part of the reason why I like going to them. I mean, I like just talking to people and seeing where people are at too, but that's kind of the big piece there. And so that's part of why I'm excited to go to Railsworld. And it was funny, cause I went to podcast movement and the company that's sponsoring the podcasters at Railsworld, where, you know, so I submitted an application and they picked us.

 

Um, they're a podcasting company. They, they do podcast hosting. Um, it's Buzzsprout in case you're wondering, we've had Tom Rossi on the show before and, uh, yeah, so, you know, I'm walking by and, uh, you know, I saw Tom out there talking to podcasters and I'm like, Hey, Tom, and so he brings me over, right? We're, we're paying for him to go to rails world is telling all his coworkers. But, um, you know, it's, it's that kind of face to face. You just, you don't get it any other way.

 

and it really pays off. But their stuff's all written in Rails, so.

 

Valentino (37:43.638)

It helps.

 

Charles Max Wood (37:44.776)

Yeah, it does, it really does.

 

Valentino (37:49.09)

So I'm curious at this point, because you have so many podcasts that do kind of so many different things, do you find yourself split on where to focus your time for what aspect of it?

 

Charles Max Wood (38:05.856)

Sometimes. So for the most part, most of the shows, the hosts are able to find good guests. Some of the shows occasionally they just don't. So there are a couple of our shows and I'm not gonna point out which ones because I don't wanna pick on anybody. But there are a handful of the shows that don't find guests and I'm not really an expert in their area. And so I'll guess.

 

Charles Max Wood (38:35.308)

So we just had the panel of React Roundup. They just went and started their own show. They're doing something completely different now. But that was their big complaint was that the guests I was finding them didn't always line up with what they wanted to talk about. And, you know, I realized a couple of things about how I could do that better. But yeah, the issue is, is I don't really do React, right? I'm kind of getting into Redwood JS now and it uses React on the front end. So I'm kind of picking it up.

 

I mean, that was just a thing, right? And so some of the other shows, I just, it's like, I don't know what's, you know, some of them it's like, this looks like a good topic, but I don't even know if it's exciting or relevant anymore. Right? So on the surface of it, it looks good, right? Cause it's new to me, but yeah. So finding guests has been kind of a tricky bit. I've dedicated more time to it and I'm decent at, you know, lining up for like JavaScript Jabber and Ruby Rogues. But some of the other ones,

 

It's hard and yeah, getting the other hosts to do it just. It's a tough thing. So that's one thing as far as like, um, you know, bringing together the premium podcast feeds and the, the app and everything else that that's where I've.

 

Charles Max Wood (39:54.708)

That's why I focus so much. Yeah. Friend of the show, right? But yeah. Yeah. So yeah, making a cameo appearance. So yeah, some of the other stuff where I'm putting together some of the premium stuff and things like that, I'm really just focusing on the ones where I think I can contribute that are larger shows. And the three biggest shows are React, Angular, or React, sorry, React, Ruby, and JavaScript. Angular's close.

 

Valentino (39:55.478)

Yeah, we have a friend. We have a special guest today, my dog, Jupiter.

 

Valentino (40:02.114)

Friend of the show, huge fan.

 

Charles Max Wood (40:27.028)

So that's where I'm working on that. And then what I may do is see if I can find other people who want to help make some of that content and then compensate them in a way that makes sense that's worth it to them. But yeah, so yeah, so that's a disproportionate focus on those shows versus the others. And then if I can't, I'm starting to think that if I can't get some of these shows to work out either

 

with sponsorship income or premium content or something like that, I may actually just end them. I don't know. But I feel like the next show that I could put content together for is a show that's been on hiatus for three years, and that's the freelancer show. I think people would pay for that content. I could put together a master class on that. Here's how you go freelance.

 

Charles Max Wood (41:22.172)

So yeah, so that's kind of where things are kind of sitting. I'm really looking at, you know, how do I get this to pay to the point where I don't have to do the contracting anymore and I can just, hey, I'm gonna spend more time finding you guests or hosts or, you know, finding somebody who can do guests or hosts and I just pay them something or, you know, maybe give them premium content in lieu of payment or whatever makes sense, right? I coach them in their career and then they help, you know.

 

help me not be a not expert in some of these areas. So anyway.

 

Valentino (42:00.694)

Yeah, I could see that being a pain point.

 

Charles Max Wood (42:03.848)

Yeah. Well, and it's funny too, because, um, you know, I went through some drama in 2019 and that's where I put a bunch of the shows on hiatus and then COVID hit and, you know, marketing budgets dried up and it got real hard to find sponsors. And then I just kind of acted like it was all supposed to fix itself. And I realized that, uh, what I need to do is I need to provide people with stuff that's actually going to help make a difference for them.

 

and then let them know that it's there and figure out how to get more people in so that they can find that. And that way, because what I really want to do is I just want to help as many people as I can be as productive and happy in their careers as possible. And so if some of those people are willing to pay for me to give them a little extra help, then I'd much rather do that. And then I can spend the time making sure that all of this stuff lines up for all the people that...

 

want that kind of help, whether it's free or not. So, that's kind of the deal. That's what we're aiming for here. But it's just been within the last month or two where I decided, hey look, if I really want this to go the way that I want it to go, then I have to take it seriously and put in the work. So, it's like, okay, well, let's get the app together. Let's get the courses running in it. Let's get the premium content getting out there on a regular basis. Let's get people to sign up, right, set some revenue goals.

 

and see if we can make this work out so that, yeah, it pays all the bills for me and my family and my team of people that work for me and I can hire a couple more people to make that all run. At the same time, I can help people at a higher level because, yeah, it's hard to help with some of these specific issues and know what the answers to give those folks are with just kind of the generic content.

 

And so some of this is going to have to be coaching or masterminds or things like that. And so if I can open the doors for some of that stuff, then, then I can start to make that kind of a difference for people.

 

Valentino (44:12.618)

Yeah, you know, I could see like sponsorship kind of being a hard thing to get a hold of starting a podcast. I'm curious like what, you know, what that was like early on. Like was that super hard to figure that aspect of it out? Or was it kind of just like a learning like a, you know, trial and error kind of thing?

 

Charles Max Wood (44:35.8)

So that's changed too, right? So when we started Ruby Rogues in 2011, I went to a conference, I met, what is his name, Lucerne from New Relic, and talked to him and he told his marketing people to sponsor us, right? And it was because we were kind of a novel thing. I mean, we were one of only a handful of shows out there that even talked about Ruby. And that's where they started. They started...

 

providing analytics for Ruby apps. I mean, now they do all kinds of stuff. But anyway, it was a lot easier because we basically got sponsorships on Charm, right? Nowadays, it's much more established media. It's still new and it's still small-ish, but yeah, so that in nowadays, the sponsors wanna see an ROI. But what's still different from some of the others,

 

And I think this is the same for some of like TV or radio or things like that, is that it's hard to know how many of the people coming to your website are coming from the podcast and things like that. And so I've talked to some of the sponsors about, hey, let's use some of the tools that are out there, right, to create a sales funnel or a landing page or something like that so that you can track what's coming from the podcast. Most of them still don't. Most of them, they're just like, no, just send them to, you know, ourmagicwebsite.com.

 

They land on the landing page for the main page for the app. Sometimes they give us UTM parameters for Google Analytics, but that's about it. They can track some of that from there, but a lot of people, they hear about it on the show and they just go to the page. It's like go to raygun.com and they won't know if it was raygun.com because they...

 

heard about it from us or heard about it from somewhere else or their boss heard about it, told them to go check it out or...

 

Charles Max Wood (46:42.336)

But yeah, a lot more of them are looking for that ROI, right? So what they want to see is they want to see their ad show up on your podcast and then they want to see their visitor numbers go up or their signups go up. And the thing is, is sometimes people have to hear it six, seven, eight, 10 times before they're willing to go look at it. Some people they have to hear it six, seven, eight, 10 times and then two months after that...

 

They start having a problem and they realize, oh, this tool would be really nice to help me figure out how to fix this problem. That's when they sign up. If you had kept advertising on the podcast for those two months and they had kept hearing your name, they would have remembered you instead of somebody else. It's kind of a tricky business knowing exactly how that's all going to pan out for a sponsor. Lately what I've been doing is I've been talking to... Raygun did this, for example.

 

They sponsor two episodes a month on like six or seven of the shows. And so that way their, their cost per month stays lower, right? Because they're not sponsoring every episode. You'd like a lot of people do, they'll sponsor every episode for 12 weeks or something, and then they can just continue to do that on a regular basis. They stay, you know, they keep the presence of mind for the people who listen to the show on a regular basis.

 

and they can do that on a lot more shows. And so they get a wider coverage while still, you know, and they, you know, there is an element of, hey, we like you, so we want to send you money. But yeah, it's also kind of a branding play where they're maintaining that presence of mind over a longer period of time. So.

 

Valentino (48:26.251)

Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Charles Max Wood (48:27.88)

Yeah, so I've been selling people on that. And then I've also been trying to get folks to let me build demo apps with their tools and things like that.

 

Charles Max Wood (48:41.961)

Anyway.

 

Valentino (48:46.468)

So what's next? What other changes are coming here?

 

Charles Max Wood (48:48.684)

So.

 

So the big ones are really just the premium content and the way that we deliver it. And so I'm using hero.fm for the premium podcast feeds. I'm using passion.io for the app because I've kind of got it all built up. And all I have to do is add the content to it. I kept looking at building these things on my own and it would take me months, right? I can sign up and I can start adding the content now. And then if it gets to the point where it's just like, hey,

 

you know, this is a killer feature that would double our income if we had it. Then maybe I build it myself or hire somebody out to go build it. But right now, no. And so, um, and then I'm, I'm signing up for a new card processor, working out the web hook stuff so that it'll hook into Zapier and put people on the right plans in both systems.

 

Valentino (49:41.386)

I will say I just tried bullet train for the first time, uh, which is like the, the real SAS framework. We got to have them on cause it is incredible. I had a whole like SAS product, you know, app ready to go. And it was, it was super easy to set up like a huge, huge props to those guys. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

 

Charles Max Wood (49:45.28)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (49:53.228)

Huh. Yeah, let's do it.

 

Charles Max Wood (50:01.396)

No way. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. And we'll have to have them on. Yeah, definitely.

 

Charles Max Wood (50:10.732)

But yeah, so that's the next thing, is just getting those together. And then I am reaching out and trying to line people up as far as coaching and mastermind groups go. The coaching is effectively, okay, we'll sit down, we'll figure out where you're at. Right, and then, yeah, basically every month is, I'm looking at monthly coaching, right? Because I did weekly group coaching for a while and I'd have one or two people in at a time, and yeah.

 

like half of the more than half the reports were I'm still working on stuff, right? The stuff you gave me two weeks ago, I'm still working on it. And so if I do monthly coaching, um, when you figure out where you're at, we can set up the game plan for the next month. And then, you know, I can check in over text message or something. In the meantime, if you get stuck on anything, you can ask me over text message and I'll respond to you pretty quick. And then, yeah, we get on, get in the next month and okay, you got this done. You didn't get that done. You know, um,

 

you've gotten this kind of response to what you did, so here's the next thing. The mastermind groups are more along the lines of you have a large group of people, and so let's say that you're like, you know what, something, Doximity, I'm trying to decide if I should stay here, right? And you're on the fence because you really love them and they've done a lot of good things for you, but you're wondering if there's a better opportunity somewhere else.

 

So everybody chimes in, right? And they're like, hey, well, have you considered this? Have you considered that? Have you considered this other thing, right? And I'm just part of the group, right? I just facilitate the conversation. And then I may add my own take on things, you know, after everybody else has shared. But then the next person gets in and they're like, you know what, I'm in this job and I really wanna build a SaaS, right? And you go, hey, have you heard of Bullet Train, right? And they're like, oh no, I haven't, let me go. And then you're right. And so then somebody else goes.

 

Oh, I use Bullet Train and it's really good for these things. Um, but you need to know these things about your product before you start. Right. And then the next person chimes in and says, um, you know, yeah, what so and so said makes sense for what you need to know ahead of time, but we also figured out that we had to do our marketing way earlier than we thought. And so, right. And so at the end, you have a much better game plan as far as any of that goes. And everybody just kind of helped kind of mind meld into that space.

 

Charles Max Wood (52:35.232)

Um, and I think, I think there are a lot of opportunities for that, right? Maybe having a, a freelance mastermind and a regular career mastermind or whatever. Right. But you, you get all the different takes from all the people. Right. Um, it seems like I've kind of had that over the course of my career, either through the podcasts or just friends of mine. And it's just like, Hey, you know, I'm working this contract and I'm not happy. Right. I'll complain about something that's going on at the contract.

 

And so then I'll get, well, have you tried this? Have you tried this? You know, maybe you should quit that contract and go get a different one that doesn't suck. Um, right. And so all the pros and cons get weighed out by people who are just, you know, working off of what I put out there. And then I get a much better idea of what I can do than what I get on my own. And so, yeah, just putting that out there as well, as far as, yeah, doing masterminds versus doing coaching one-on-one or group.

 

The group coaching is usually focused around, oh, you wanna start a podcast, okay, we're gonna have 10 people go through a cohort. Right? So anyway, but yeah, so I'm building up the coaching and then I'm working on the premium content and getting that going. And like I said, when I'm at Railsworld, what I'd like to do is I like to be able to go down around and say, hey, we've got four or five weeks worth of extra content on the Ruby premium stuff.

 

right, since I'm going to be at the conference and see if I can convince people to give it a look and, you know, sign up for a free trial or something. And that way I can start getting people into the system and start making that work.

 

Valentino (54:12.074)

Real's word, it's gonna be awesome. I wish I could have gone.

 

Charles Max Wood (54:14.492)

It is. Yeah, I've heard that from a few people and I've also heard from a few people that do I dare say I I'll throw I'll throw some bombs what the heck right so um Rails world seems to have a lot of the things that I used to really love about RailsConf that just don't seem to be there anymore and I don't know what the difference is but I'm wondering if we just need some fresh eyes on the big Rails event of the year.

 

Valentino (54:18.604)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (54:43.808)

every year and either get new people in there looking at it and saying, okay, how do we bring back the excitement and passion and, you know, things that, you know, a lot of times it feels like they're focused on stuff that's not really the, the technology doesn't really move the community forward or move the technology forward. And it feels like Railsworld has kind of captured a lot of that. I think the other thing that they have going for them is that there hasn't been a really large Rails conference in Europe for a long time.

 

And so a lot of people who could more easily get to a European conference jumped all over it. But yeah, I'd love to put together a Rails conference that's similar in size and scope to RailsConf, but create more of that experience that I just feel like RailsConf is lost, but I kind of have to pin down like what it is that they, I feel like they're missing. And I don't know. I don't know exactly what that is. I'm

 

kind of wondering if I'm gonna see it at RailsConf, or RailsWorld and go, oh, this is what it is. One thing that I think turned a lot of people off on RailsConf too is the fact that they kind of uninvited DHH for the last year or so. I mean, everybody wants to hear from him at the Rails conferences, even if you don't like some of his social or political takes. You know, he gets up and he's entertaining to watch and he.

 

He's got his thumb on the pulse of where Rails is headed. And so anyway, so I've thought about trying to put on a physical like a co-located event like that here in the US somewhere, kind of like RailsConf and just see if I can give it a little bit different take, a little different feel, recapture some of that stuff that I used to enjoy when I went to it years ago. And yeah, see if we can, you know, kind of bring back some of the excitement around Rails.

 

Valentino (56:41.694)

Yeah, it should be great. I just love the new community leader behind. I'm forgetting her, I'm blanking her name right now. Yeah, Amanda, she's been doing an awesome job. I know that she got a lot of flack for a slow start, but completely unwarranted. It's just like incredible what's coming out. I'm excited for her.

 

Charles Max Wood (56:48.724)

Amanda. Amanda Perino.

 

Charles Max Wood (56:53.128)

Yeah, yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (57:00.872)

Yeah, well, the thing that's interesting about, yeah, I saw that she got some flack. If you're trying to build momentum when there isn't any, so like here in Utah, I'm pretty involved in politics and you know, I've gotten involved in the party. I'm actually vice chair of the county party for one of the major parties. And there was a lot of momentum and trying to get that momentum going is hard.

 

It is really hard to get a lot of people to come together and build that kind of momentum. So the fact that she's been able to do it and has been effective that way, especially given how much of it she looks like at least she's had to do on her own. I mean, kudos to her.

 

Valentino (57:46.078)

Yep. Yeah. I mean, I know reals world is just going to be like a small start, right? Like there's so much more that will be in the pipeline. And I'm excited to see, you know, I I'm excited again about reals. A real world is like, you know, it's consolidating all of the things that I've been watching from the community and like what's coming up. And it's got a great lineup and it's garnering another, you know, good like rolling wave back into it. And it's funny.

 

Charles Max Wood (57:56.256)

Yep.

 

Charles Max Wood (58:05.441)

Mm-hmm.

 

Charles Max Wood (58:09.397)

Yeah.

 

Valentino (58:15.498)

you know, some recent events to see all of this, you know, rails can't scale after all this time, uh, kind of commentary. It's like.

 

Charles Max Wood (58:22.932)

I know. Well, a lot of that came out of David coming out and saying, hey, we're moving off of TypeScript. And then people are like, yeah, well, you're the one that made the decision to build Rails. And yeah, it was just funny. I mean, I honestly, people were dunking on the post where he said, hey, look at all these big companies that started on Rails. A lot of people were saying, hey, but those people moved off of it.

 

And he pointed out, and I think rightly so, yeah, but Rails gave them the tools they needed to innovate and build what they needed to build without worrying about all of the other stuff. And then, yeah, when they got big enough that they needed to optimize some of their infrastructure, it made sense for them to move on. But that didn't mean that Rails wasn't the right answer when they got going.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:14.571)

So.

 

Valentino (59:15.262)

Yeah, I just think of all my Django friends. And they're all always asking, I see that there's this thing in Rails. Do you know if there's anything in Python or? You know, or is there anything in Rails that does this specific thing? And I'm like, oh yeah, here. Like, and they go and port it to Python, right?

 

Charles Max Wood (59:20.384)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:28.456)

Right? See, I always...

 

Charles Max Wood (59:34.697)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (59:37.96)

Yep. Right. The one that I think is funny, I have a really good friend and he is just Gaga over Laravel. And so he's come to me, I can't tell you how many times, he's like, yeah, he's like, you should switch to Laravel because it has, and I can't remember all the features, but you know, he listed off like six features and I just looked at him and I said, Rails kind of invented those, right? We've had them for a long, long time, almost 20 years. Oh.

 

right? And then he'll come back with something else. You know, I mean, PHP, you know, it generally runs faster than Ruby, but I mean, I don't know that you can really claim a ton else and Ruby is catching up.

 

Valentino (01:00:17.782)

You know? Maybe maybe we should have a yeah, yeah it is. Maybe maybe we should have a Rails feature episode in the build up to Rails world right where we just find a feature of Rails. You know, have somebody that you know is an expert in that particular thing or has done a ton of stuff with it and just have him on and just talk about the features as we get to Rails world would be a lot of fun.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:00:29.33)

Oh, that would be so fun.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:00:41.512)

Yeah, it'd be fun too to kind of do the, have you seen, I'm sure you've seen this. Well, so you go and you like, you're gonna sign up for some SaaS product that does a thing, right? So they list all the features, right? It's like we have check, check. And then their competitor, right? And it has these features, check, x, check, x, right? And it'd be really fun to go through some of those and just, you know. And I think some of them that Rails doesn't have, you know, it would be asterisk.

 

Valentino (01:00:45.346)

Have you seen?

 

Charles Max Wood (01:01:10.188)

There are gems that do this, right? Or maybe some of them that's just like, no, you have to build this one on your own. But it'd be really interesting, yeah, to just kind of run through that and say, hey, you're dunking on rails, but it does all the stuff that you want, so.

 

Valentino (01:01:27.754)

Yep. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how many times I've been like, Oh, yeah, real stuff. You know, it's like started building it and then been like, Oh, there's got to be something. Oh, it's in there. Whoops.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:01:32.513)

Yeah.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:01:37.288)

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, right. What's the gem that does this? The gem is you already installed that it's in your gem file because it's part of rails. Yeah. All right. We've been going for about an hour. I don't know if I have anything else to really share. So, um, you want to do picks?

 

Valentino (01:01:43.999)

Right.

 

Hehehe

 

Valentino (01:01:58.73)

Yeah, you know, it's been fun. You know, it's the picks. I recently got this book from Vladimir Dementyev from Evil Martians. I'm sorry I butchered your last name. I feel terrible. But it's a layered design, yeah, for Ruby on Rails application. He gave the most incredible Rails talk, RailsConf talk, basically, you know, giving a peek at this book.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:16.412)

I saw that book. It looks interesting.

 

Valentino (01:02:27.962)

Layered Rails application design and just it's incredible. I I've been picking it apart and just loving every bit of it So that's my pick for today Hopefully I can read more of it and give a more detailed analysis But yeah, I've just been really enjoying it and so many great insights in there

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:40.524)

Good deal.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:02:47.332)

Awesome. I'm going to throw out a board game pick, just because I don't want to disappoint anybody. Let me look it up real quick so that I can give you the.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03:00.664)

the game weight and stuff. It's called Canvas. It's more of a card game. It does have a board that goes in the middle of it, but it's just basically a place to put all the stacks of cards. Anyway, played this with some friends of mine a couple of weeks ago. The way that it goes, it says it's one to five players, takes about 30 minutes. I think we took longer because we were learning. There were only two of us that had played it before.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:03:30.292)

What you do is you have three canvases that you're putting painting elements on, and your paintings get judged according to certain criteria, which are kind of randomly selected at the beginning of the game, right? So it's like you have so many of this kind of thing and so many of that kind of thing. So there are five colors, and you... Anyway, you have a sleeve on your canvas card and you slide the element cards in.

 

And then whatever's showing at the bottom on those colors is what you're graded on. And so you get so many points for each one, right? And so for each thing. So we had like, for every two triangles you had at the bottom, you got a point, or two points or something like that, I can't remember. Another one was for every one of a certain kind of symbol, you got a point. There were also elements you could get that said

 

that would give you just on that card would give you points for every one of those elements you would get, or you'd get a ribbon, sorry, and those ribbons were worth two points apiece. So anyway, the scoring is pretty straightforward, it's pretty simple. Sometimes it was a little bit tough to figure out which card you wanted to grab. And so once you have five cards in your hand, you have to paint a painting. Otherwise, you're just building your hand up. You can paint whenever you want, right? So if you feel like you have the cards, you can paint

 

that are going to be the right cards for one of your canvases. You just paint it and then you get all the ribbons for it and then at the end you score it. So one of the other ones was for a certain, if you had a certain number of elements, like the first two, if you had two you got three points and then if you had the fourth one or the third one then you got, it was overall worth five points instead of two points, right? So the next one was worth three points. And so anyway.

 

Super fun. Board Game Geek weights it at 1.65. So, like I said, it's a pretty simple game. The board game says it's for ages 14 plus. The community on Board Game Geek says that 8 plus can play it. I think that's probably fair. You could play it with younger kids. One of the other things that was fun was that the different cards that you put in for your canvas have a name or have

 

Charles Max Wood (01:05:56.512)

words on them. And so at the end, whatever's showing on top of that bar is the name of your painting. And so then what you wind up doing is you wind up explaining what your painting is of, and you have like random stuff in it, right? Random elements. And so you've got like a dog sitting on a pedestal looking over a rose garden with curtains in front of it or something, I think was one of the ones that we had. Right. And so, you know, you have to explain why that painting matches up with the name. And that's just pure fun, right? You don't get scored on that.

 

Anyway, it was pretty fun. We had a good time and had a good laugh, right? Because you've got to explain away this random crap on your card. And I mean, my deal was I was just trying to get people to laugh. But yeah, anyway, so Canvas is the card game that I'm going to pick. And then, yeah, as far as the rest of this goes, I'm just going to pick some of the rest of the tools that I'm using. So for podcast hosting, I'm using Red Circle. I like their player.

 

I've had, they've been finding me some sponsors. I don't always love the sponsors, but it's nice to get paid to do the podcasts. But most of them aren't like code tools or things that you would, you know. I mean, I'd even sell like, if there was like a place that sold like fun desk toys or something, I think people would buy them and that'd be fun. But yeah, so some of theirs aren't great as far as sponsorships go for our kind of shows. But you know, if you're doing a more generic,

 

show. I could see trying some of them. I did like one of theirs. They had a sponsor called Factor and they sent me some food. The food was pretty good. So I did like them. But anyway, the other pick, so I'm using Red Circle to host. I've custom built the website for the podcast on my own in Rails. I'm kind of wondering if something like that might not make sense for like an XJS or something like that.

 

The reason I did it in Rails is because I could build forms that my non-technical podcast team could use to put them in, right? Because I tried doing the markdown Jekyll kind of thing and I lost people that way. So, right, it's great for the technical folks and it's not great for the non-technical folks. So I'm gonna pick that and then like I said, hero.fm is for the premium podcast feeds. And the way it works is,

 

Charles Max Wood (01:08:19.592)

It takes you to a form you put your email address in and it emails you a link to add the feed to your Apple Podcasts or Overcast or whatever. And so I like it, it's pretty simple. And then passion.io is kind of a course platform. The main difference between it and like Thinkific and some of the others is that it allows you to provide your own app, right? So when I get it up, it'll be a top end devs app, right? It won't be a...

 

Hey, you downloaded the Kajabi app, but now you have to pick which of our customers you're using, right? Which is the way that theirs works. It's top end devs. And then, yeah, you can just scroll through the courses and you can tap it out. And then, right, so you just tap into the course and then hit the lesson and then you can confirm that you finished the lesson, go to the next one. And then I'm looking at using ClickFunnels to sell it, or to sell the app or sell the courses. And the reason is, is because passion.io

 

It only allows you one sales page. So you effectively wind up listing everything on that sales page. It's just not an effective way to sell individual outcomes. And so if you go into ClickFunnels and set up a funnel, then people who come in, they can go there, they can sign up for your course. And then what happens is, is it, you know, it goes through Zappier and it gives them access to the feed. And so then they get that email, right? You're going to get an email that

 

gives you access to the premium content feeds, and you're going to get access in the Top End Devs app. Here's how to download it so you can get access to your course. And that way, I can sell a, hey, you're stuck in your career and you want the career advancement course, or hey, here's a podcasting for programmers course, right? And that way, I don't have to, oh, we'll go to the sales page. And if you scroll up about 8 million times, you'll find it. So anyway, so those are my picks. I'll put links to all that stuff in the show notes.

 

But yeah, that's what I got.

 

Valentino (01:10:22.211)

Awesome, well it's been great hearing what's coming here.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:10:25.576)

Yeah, yeah, I think it's going to be good. I think it'll help a lot of people. I'm planning on putting some other content that'll be free if you get the app, and the app will be free. And I'll put that in there too, so we'll just kind of see how that all goes. I think a lot of the replays for some of the, I'm putting together some workshops and stuff for online meetups, I'm gonna see how that works. So that's another thing that's on my radar that I don't quite have a plan for yet.

 

And so a lot of that stuff will wind up in there paid or free. So anyway, yeah, it's going to be fun.

 

Valentino (01:11:02.819)

before we do it.

 

Charles Max Wood (01:11:03.88)

All right, well, till next time, folks, Max out.