S06 E10 - Knowing Your Audience, Making Mistakes, and Pricing Products vs Services with Jack McDade

Jack McDade 0:00
I’ve tried to be involved in a business where I didn’t like get the space. I wasn’t one of the people who would have used it. And as hard from like a marketing and branding sales perspective to just jump in, learn a new business and try and just like apply your gut instinct to it. It didn’t work like it. It crashed like I crash right back out again very fast.

Jason Resnick 0:33
Hey, Feasters, welcome to Episode 10 of season six of Live in the Feast. I’m Jason aka rezzz helping you grow your business by having a conversation with someone who’s been there had success and built the business designed around the life they want to live. That’s living the feast. If this is your first time listening, hit that subscribe button so that you get notified every time a new episode drops live in the feast is in your podcast app choice. If you’ve heard the show, why not go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or drop us a comment in on breaker or cast box. Today’s co host is Jack McDade. Jack is the founder and creator of static a CMS that makes building a website better and easier to manage. Jack started selling services and only stopped just a few years ago when the product side of the business became sustainable. on its own. You may be thinking a CMS is he nuts for going into that market. And in the show he actually agrees with you. However, as a WordPress developer myself, I could firmly stay that static is much better than WordPress in many respects. I’m not going to go into that here though. In this episode, we dive into his approach and strategy on pricing for products versus services mistake that jack made on pricing static that highlighted the way you use a product and the way you price the product and how they need to be aligned. And we talk about pricing priority. Just in case you are the type to not finish a podcast. Well, you may be interested to stick around until the end. I’m just saying. I think you’re going to love this conversation about pricing especially if you into retro video games tech and being a dad. So here’s jack and I

Hey Feasters! Welcome back to another episode of live in the feast. I’m super excited to have here. creator status me. Jack McDade. Welcome, jack.

Jack McDade 2:42
Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me.

Jason Resnick 2:44
Yeah, so let’s just dive into it. Right? Like, obviously, your branding, right? Because that’s, this is what I care about. Right? Like, so how did I this is really just, you’re an 80s kid, right? And like, I mean, fonts, the style, the colors, even a big graphics, if you will, or 16 bit graphics, if you will, of what you do. Why? Like, why is that your calling card?

Unknown Speaker 3:09
Oh, you gotta have one. I mean, if you don’t stand out at all, like you just part of the noise. But yeah, like 80s 80s, early 90s a little bit as to as far as the aesthetic goes, once things started getting neon and it was when he was still fun for a while, right, say by the bow and Fresh Prince. I mean, he couldn’t wear Well, I guess you could wear some of that stuff again now just now. But I mean, I was a, I was a big nerd growing up, I’ve, you know, I’ve played on the Apple computers and like, taught myself basic on old machines. And just, there’s like, there’s a simplicity to early tech. That is, I mean, it’s gone now, right? Like the way we build stuff and like our build tools and JavaScript and node and server lists, like I mean, it’s complicated to keep up with it back then you flip the computer on, you know, whether it’s a movie playing a video game, or like just like coding something, it was simple. You just like type something and just like it happened. like nobody knew what was possible. It’s a lot harder to imagine new tech now because there’s so much so yeah, just like that era in history is just, like, all possibility. And just like nerdy is how and I love it. I love that feeling of nostalgia and like that, that thing, just being simple.

Jason Resnick 4:18
Yeah, I love it too. I mean, I go back even further than you on my branding, like, I go back to like, you know, the 50s and even be beyond that. Like, you know, I love that industry to kind of like hey, like anything’s a possibility and like just that raw. wrongness? Yeah, Apollo code on GitHub. I mean, that to me, oh,

Unknown Speaker 4:37
yeah, that’s awesome. Like, me? Yeah, like that, that whole, like the 50s and 60s aesthetic, like madmen, and like the moon race, and all that stuff has its own, like, even more like quintessential, like, classical sort of feel to it. I mean, in terms of branding, if you lean anything hard enough, there’s just so much to appreciate. And, and, and borrow from kind of evoke the emotions in the people who are interacting with it in a way hopefully, that that’s intended. That’s like, tied to your brand somehow.

Jason Resnick 5:07
Yeah. And I find it easier once you find that, right, like, okay, now, like, I’ve had people say, like, Oh, I know that this is your post without even looking at it. Like, you know, I’m social because I know the aesthetic of it. And so like, similarly to you like the first time I saw the stamp, I was like, Oh, that’s cool. Like, I’ve always like, I’m not a designer, right? Like, I just don’t do that. Yeah. And like, even in my early days, like, I tried to like, Hey, I’m, I love the way that this interface for NBA Jam is I wonder if I could retro fit into a witness? Right? And so like, yeah, you know, like I didn’t, it was always terrible. It always looked terrible. So the first time I saw you do something similar in that nature, at least, I was just like, and then I saw it again. And I and then your name kept. I was like, Oh, this guy’s got it. Like she’s this guy

Unknown Speaker 5:56
doing? Yeah,

Jason Resnick 5:58
I commend you. It does. I love it. Yeah, thank you, before we get into static and that product and products, come on top of that. Did you do any services work beforehand?

Unknown Speaker 6:11
Oh, yeah, for sure. Like, we only kind of just stopped doing it fairly recently, in the last like, couple years, I kind of started my career in the agency world doing web work for, like, bottom of the totem pole, doing work for giant companies like Chase Bank, and, you know, Southwest, like doing email, HTML templates, like in 2004. Like, that’s rough work, like I don’t, you know, you got to work your way up, right? You know, from there got into more like content driven stuff like early CMS, like WordPress expression engine, and then finally went out on my own about this point, maybe eight or nine years ago, the freelancing then started, made a couple of false starts trying to get like a little mini agency going like with different people have really found the sweet spot until I kind of anchored it off of a product. And so I started started making 2012. And I mean, it wasn’t a full time gig then, but it was, you know, some recurring revenue, and we could do some services around it and start to kind of have this, like, one feeds the other feeds back into the work feeds back into the product sort of approach and sort of build it up from there. So yeah, I mean, I still love designing and building websites, helping people out like, you know, I have a hard time saying no, when there’s something retro and 80s involved in someone wants my advice, or my input or a little bit of, you know, pixel work or something like, all right, all right. All right. I’m in, I’m in off it.

Jason Resnick 7:38
Yeah. Awesome. So that was interesting that you mentioned that, like you were doing the client work, and static was kind of there was the client work, essentially paying for the development of the product.

Unknown Speaker 7:50
Not always directly, and sometimes, like it would pay the bills, so that I could, you know, put a little bit away and not take a project and work on status. Sometimes they were one in the same like, I take a project and, like, needed a feature that I static didn’t have and was able to kind of justify building it more or less on the clock, because they needed it. And they were fine with it. But yeah, I mean, I never really like Rob Peter to pay Paul, I don’t think that’s the way to build a business. But whenever possible, I tried to get to kill two birds with one stone. Absolutely. I mean, if you can do that, and everybody’s fine with that you’re transparent about that. There’s some real wins to be had there. Did you go get clients that you thought would be a good fit for the product, like so that you could essentially say, Okay, look, I know, what’s that I’m I can do, I think this client would be an ideal client so that I could use that as the solution. I mean, in the early days, No, I was just kind of happy to get anything. Like you just try to get work like, oh, they’re gonna give me 10 grand, like, this is great. We have a kid on the way or whatever. And, you know, now, yeah, I mean, I can go after folks. Or like, if you try to grow the business and get more exposure, try and find some one in who could be like, I mean, I guess you’d call them like an influencer, or someone who just has a big reach and like TV and get them on static. Yeah. I mean, you put the logo in the footer. And they talk about a little bit like that stuff helps marketing, right. So like Justin Jackson site runs on static and help them get that up and running. And he, I mean, he loves it. Now, he’s been live streaming building his own company site on all of his own. That’s huge for me, like, that’s just free marketing. And you know, like, those sort of things like I can’t, that doesn’t scale, I can’t build, if you’re a big name, you get worked for free or cheap. Like that’s, that’s like a weird way to grow a business. But in certain phases of growth I get definitely makes sense. And it can make a big difference. So yeah,

Jason Resnick 9:40
yeah. So we talked about the services and products, right. One of the things I think a lot of people struggle with, at least as they start building their business, and it’s a couple of years in, they start to think about the product side of things. They’re like, Hey, I can build something that and again, I hate this term, but passively make money, which is never the case. But

Unknown Speaker 10:03
it’s not. It’s not a real thing. I know what I know, actually, as truly passive income.

Jason Resnick 10:08
Exactly. Yeah. I like to say leveraged, right? Because it’s an asset that you can know, again and again and again. Yes, it’s a very different mindset with products, then there is with services, both from marketing and sales, delivery, all the rest of it. Yeah. How did you adjust your mindset from one to the other?

Unknown Speaker 10:28
That’s a really good question. I guess the the approach that I took is on the product side, really just trying to speak to whoever my target audience was, like, whether it’s literally speak to them, or write content that they’re looking for. And not just, you know, I think people tend to look at a big player in the app space, like, like a Dropbox or Instagram or slack or something and just kind of do what they’re doing like whether Lyft Look, look their tone, and they’re so big, they’re speaking to like, literally hundreds of different like audiences, right? Like, if you kind of break it down into niches, you may only be able to speak to one niche, but you only need a couple hundred customers to make a living, depending on the way you’ve got your product price, right? So if you can speak to exactly the person you’re trying to reach, like, literally your homepage is the answer to the question they’re googling for, that will give you a totally different experience, compared to like a really broad net, where you’re trying to be something to everybody. So I mean, it’s okay to be like a hyper focused product. Not that every niche can work, not to every product fits into a niche, but when you can, and that’s what I what I ended up doing is like targeting freelancers, and small couple person dev shops who are just building lots of websites for people. So if I could get one person who built a dozen websites a year, that’s 12 licenses that I could sell over the course of that year versus one super company, that would be wine, right? And so that approach made a lot more sense kind of going bottom up, I’m not selling to, you know, CEOs or CTOs, I’m selling to like the guy on the bottom of the totem pole, like cranking out sites keeping the lights on, I got I can’t build another web WordPress site like this is painful, you know, and have got something that may be better take a look. And if it is, sales.

Jason Resnick 12:27
Yeah, no, I mean, you point them in. So it is it’s like while the marketing and pricing and we’ll get that in a minute, but marketing sales and all the rest of it is different between services and products, there’s still a real real understanding that you have to have and knowledge that you have to have about the customer or client. Yeah, I mean, that that’s pivotal in order to do that. It’s what I talked a lot about on the show, especially when you know guests as well and talk about it too is that you have I understand pain points. I mean, you mentioned it there WordPress, I come from the WordPress space. But I also came from the Ruby on Rails space Java development, like, I looked at it as all of those tech stacks, if you will, as tools to help me build a solution for clients. And so, you know, while magenta was a behemoth, and it was a problem for a lot of people and woo commerce was a lot more simpler for some clients and things of that nature. So I swung that route. Wow. You know, I still work very heavily in the woo commerce space. But in our amongst itself, WordPress is not an ideal fit for a lot of people. And there are other options like static and others. But, you know, I always try to fit the the tech into the business and not the other way around. Right? And so yes, to hear you say pretty much the same thing, you know, that, hey, this is the sweet spot, this is where the product exists. And if I can help solve a problem, then their sales, right,

Unknown Speaker 13:59
right, exactly. And I’ve On the flip side, I’ve tried to be involved in, you know, partnering in a business where I didn’t like get the space, I wasn’t one of the people who would have used it. And as hard from like a marketing and branding sales perspective to just jump in, learn a new business, and try and just like apply your gut instinct to it, it didn’t work like it, it crashed, like I crash right back out again, very fast. And so you know, I know who my my people are the problems I’ve literally been in myself, like, how do you manage 30 or 40 different client websites, when they’re all trying to get ahold of you and Mike, they’re making changes in production, I’m like, stop making like, stop, I gotta turn the database off, so I can get it. So I could like try and work on a local, you know, like those problems. So built a product to solve that. And like that worked for me. And I decide like, I’m going to stay in my space more or less than it’s a like developers as a big audience. There’s a lot of us. And so if I can build some thing that helps them great.

Jason Resnick 15:09
JACK highlights one mistake he’s made. And he’s going to dive into another here in a moment. But he talks about something we hear a lot from other co hosts on the show. And that’s knowing who your ideal customer is. It’s really such a critical component to a sustainable and profitable business. So important that it’s what the foundation of feast is built on. Inside of feast, you’ll have access to everything you need to build your ideal client, not solely based on demographics, but based on you your personality skills, and the potential market that awaits you as their go to person. If you want worksheets, exercises, and the ability to create that ideal client effectively, so that you can then go ahead and be their go to resource and build business that’s targeted. To help that specific client, head over to feast course.com. Today, as a member, you’ll get the processes the templates, not only to figure out who your ideal client is, and the services that you can provide to them, you’ll also learn how to figure out how to price that’s why I want to invite you to check out feast by using the code static, you can get your first month for only $20 feast is the community and resource hub for developers and designers ready to get off that project searching hamster wheel and actually run the business that you set out to build feast helps position you in the market with what you do, who you help and build the processes and systems for client management, sales, marketing, delivery. And of course pricing, your business isn’t the same as everyone else’s. And it’s essential for me to meet you where you are. And make sure sure that you are getting the exact tools so that you don’t get lost in the shuffle. The moment you sign up for feast, we’re going to have a chat one on one so that I can create a custom syllabus of resources that are within feast to meet you where you are. If you want to stop chasing down that next project all the time so that you can start living your life, go to feast course.com today, and use the code static at checkout and get your first month for $20. So before we were talking, before we started recording, rather, we were talking and you mentioned something which intrigued me, you mentioned something about mistakes that you made in pricing. Would you mind sharing some of those?

Unknown Speaker 17:53
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the way static is priced. Now, both in the beginning and now but for a short period wasn’t this way, is a per site license. So I think, wow, I love owning myself my own software, I miss the days when I could buy Photoshop, and it would be in a box and a stack of CDs. And they’re like sat there like a cool looking box and was on my desk and like yeah, it was like 600 bucks, but it’s mine forever. Like I don’t, there’s some few software actually own now forever. And so call me altruistic or whatever. But I think you buy these licenses data me You should be able to own it. And that’s, that’s how I wanted to position it. So for for your site, you buy a license, you can run it on that site forever. There’s no like recurring, you know, upkeep or anything like that there’s no like recurring pricing. But for a little while, we experimented with static, unlimited. So we had a monthly subscription, where as long as you were paying for the subscription, you could build as many sites as you wanted, you have to worry about having a license for a site. And it seemed great, because we now had guaranteed recurring revenue, right. So we’re not waiting for someone to build a new site, then buy a license. They’re just, you know, whatever they want. But what will happen is I don’t know there’s a communication problem in our side, or just kind of people trying to take advantage of the way validation works. And all of that just people to turn it on, they would turn it off, they would turn it on, they would build a bunch of sites, they would turn it off. They would try to like circumvented, like the way the tears were based on number of developers, it was like one to two developers in your company. It was, I don’t know, 100 bucks a month in three to five developers. It was 200 bucks a month I can it scale that way. Like, well, what if we have one developer and like one freelancer, just a freelancer account? And so I’m answering all these questions like, what is it developer? Like? Well, we don’t have any developers. So is it free? Like, well, how are you going to use it? I don’t know. Well, just like Google and try it ourselves? Well, you’re the developer, right? So like, it was over and over again, all these questions. And our revenues kept going down, because some of the people who would have happily paid $200 for the license, because they know it goes right back in the product, it’s the only way we make money makes the product better. They like the product in a $30,000 site project like 200 bucks, you don’t even notice it even on $1,000. One, if it lets you build it five times faster than the next platform, you can build five times as many websites it still makes sense, right? So that’s, I mean, that’s the idea. And so those people who were would have happily paid or passed the console on were like, well, I guess this is what they want. They want the recurring revenue. So we’ll sign up. And yeah, I mean, we like our revenue kind of went in half. And I was like, was not enough to run the business. So now we’re doing like con like projects on the side to, like, building sites for our customers. And then like trying to, like, we’ve already been here before, I thought we got past this. So we had to shut it down. And, you know, we learned that the way you use the product, and the way you charge for the product need to be in line. And that just there was this friction point where, you know, they were kind of incentivized to, like defeat the system. And it didn’t work. Yeah,

Jason Resnick 21:00
yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I know, you mentioned Justin before on his show, build, build your sass. You know him and john talked about what metric they’re defining as essentially the key metric that’s going to help their customers essentially grow their podcasts and on transistor right now that they’ve been wrestling around with that pricing, right. And it sounds like you went through something, a similar phase in the business. And so now, how does it look different?

Unknown Speaker 21:28
Like, what specifically are we doing now? Or how’s it working? working out? Yeah, both. It felt like it is a one price now. It’s just 200 bucks per site. That’s it. And it’s working really well. Like we’ve got back all that business we lost. And then some we’ve doubled in the last year, and things are going really well. Could there be another way to do it better? Probably sure. But maybe not without building yet another side of the business, right? Like, sure we could, we could have a hosted solution. But you’re building a hosted solution. Now we have two apps, there’s a product in the app. And I want to be incentivized to work on the thing that we’re selling, like, I don’t want to take money from this column, and then move it over here, right paid for like pay for hosting. So we can work on the product. No, I want to I want to sell the product. So I can work on the product. So I can sell a product, I can market the product. And ideally, that would be the best way to work, right? Like if if all of the new sites, you’ve just paid for the news, they wrote the news, you paid for the news, and they wrote you some news. Like I feel like they’d be better sites, instead of this battle we have now with like, well, I don’t want to pay for the news. So now we deal with like, you know, running the gauntlet of pop ups and everything else, you know, doesn’t always work for your audience. But so far, it is for us.

Jason Resnick 22:47
Yeah, awesome. Yeah. I mean, for me, to your point, I’m very much the same. Like if I see a product, if it’s a trial, whether it’s free, whether it’s a paid, and it’s useful to me, I want to know that the company that’s backing that thing, if I invest in it, it’s going to reinvest it back and build that product even better, right. And so I have no problem. You know, like, I have a podcast, this podcast, it’s hosted on transistor, because I know, I have a relationship with Justin. And while Lipson or any of these other platforms out there may or may not have a better platform, Justin, I know what know him, and I know what he’s about in his business. And so I know that they’re going to put that money back in. And that for me is just as a customer, it makes me feel better, right? It makes me feel safer to know that I’m ready to pull the rug out from under me and I don’t want to be hanging there for especially in the software game, like, all right, this software going to be updated anytime in this decade, you know, like, are they doing this now? Right. So I get it, I appreciate that. So I saw something a long time ago, or maybe not so long, but months ago, where you talked about and there was this conversation for a while, it seemed on Twitter, various different channels, their various different people. And for whatever reason, it was a lot of people that I was following, or having kind of guy with with in different columns, like nobody was crossing over. But it was about purchasing parity, like across the bow. Yeah. Right. And so yeah, can you speak a little bit more on your philosophy and your take on that?

Unknown Speaker 24:28
Yeah. So I mean, the whole idea of purchasing parity, or purchasing power parity, is that you sell something in the US dollar, but that dollar doesn’t go the same distance and all other countries, right? So in the Philippines, it can go a whole lot further, or like, or the local currency doesn’t match up to $1. Based on, you know, how much you work. And it’s tricky, especially in the software world, because we you know, I’m I live in New York State, which is a super expensive state to live in. I’m not in the city, but even still, it trickles upstage me,

Jason Resnick 25:01
down state to a low guy.

Unknown Speaker 25:02
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. You know, it’s an expensive state, you know, it’s to run an American company is not a cheap thing. There’s a lot of paperwork and taxes. Although I feel like I’d rather do that than the UK with all the laws lately. But it’s a complicated, expensive thing to do. But it’s at the same time to charge only rates that can be afforded by other people in the same situation cuts out a large chunk of the world who might be able to use your product, right? So $200 sure. I mean, it’s not a big deal to like a fair amount of us in the US who are working, you know, they charge $200 an hour or $200 an hour $50,000 projects. Sure, great. But what about the people in like India and the Philippines, and like Taiwan and Mexico and South America where, you know, maybe rent is 100 bucks minus $200, I get these emails like this cost more than two months of rent, is there anything you can do? And so I, you know, you do some research, and you figure out the best way to price that out. And I built a calculator. It’s based off the Big Mac index, which is done by the economist, I believe, and it’s what does a Big Mac cost around the world? Like, it’s, I don’t know what it is I $4 in the US 350 or something. You know, it’s like $7 in Switzerland, because like, our our cows are really important in their grass fed, and we don’t touch them. And you know, and then you can’t get one in India. So I mean, it’s not exactly like a perfect analog, but it does work pretty well. So if you kind of run the price of your product through the calculator, and it comes out the other end, like this is what it would cost them in the Philippines. What if you charged this other price? And it would feel about the same? So like, What is $200? Feel like when you make eight grand a year? All right? Well, maybe that’s 11 bucks, if you if I’m fine, letting them have it for 11 bucks, like I’m going to give them the discount. And you know, just about anybody who asks for it, I’ll kind of go out of my way to like, make it work for them for whatever country, it’s a hard thing to automate. Because it’s not perfect, right? And it can definitely be exploited. And how do you validate that they’re from that country and this this whole thing? So right now, I just do it on a, like a personal basis, and I just make them a coupon code. And I’ll just I’ll do that for as long as I possibly can and tell there’s maybe some better way to automate that. Maybe somebody will solve that, like maybe Google? I don’t know. Maybe?

Unknown Speaker 27:21
Maybe not? Probably not.

Jason Resnick 27:22
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I commend you for that. And I respect you for the doing that. Because a lot of people don’t, a lot of companies don’t, they’re just like, that’s the price. You know, I don’t, I can’t do anything for you, I apologize for that. Likewise, I’ve done similar things with my coaching program, where folks from the Philippines that have been interested in they’ve emailed me and said, like, Hey, I can’t afford one hour of your coaching, or your coaching program, or whatever. So I, you know, scholarship, it, you know, basically create a coupon code and figure out works, will definitely link up the calculator in the show notes, obviously. But yeah, it brings a perspective to you, especially if you’re living in the US, or, you know, Europe or, you know, where you almost take it for granted that you’re going to get like a $10,000 or 10,000 pound project. And $200 is a drop in the bucket, because it’s just that $200 saves you 10 hours of work, your course could invest in that. And so it puts things in perspective,

Unknown Speaker 28:24
I think it’s nice if it in your case, it’s even trickier, because you are directly trading your time for dollars, right? With a software product, if you don’t ask us a question, right? If you don’t take away our time, or, you know, with support questions, you didn’t actually cost us anything. I mean, maybe you know, some server paying, you know, some like database rose or whatever, but not a big deal. But if you ask us a lot of questions, and we spend hours and hours like for that $11 or $50, whatever it is, you never know exactly how it’s going to play out. But I think in our case, we all try to say is like Alright, so we’ll give this to you at your you know, PPP rate, in return, if you could help out other people in your country, you know, like whether on the forums or on our server or in our discord chat, you know, we have different rooms for different languages, that’s a way that they can kind of offset that effect on our time. Because, you know, our time is US dollars, you know, American time American costs, which you gotta capitalize on, if they can help each other, then we’re even able to offer more those discounts. So yeah, I mean, if there’s a way to let that side of it scale on its own, that’s even better.

Jason Resnick 29:35
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure, yeah, I’m sure that they were happy to do that, like, Hey, I can answer Oh, yeah, my language, you know, probably better than you, you’re probably in Google Translate or whatever.

Unknown Speaker 29:46
That’s exactly what’s happening. You know, like, I can’t tell by looking at Russian if it’s spam or not. You know, I, I’m like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. And you mean, like, Oh, it’s a legitimate question. Okay. Fantastic. Actually, it’s a very good question. It it’s so bizarre sometimes what happens in this world?

Jason Resnick 30:03
Yeah. And to your point to I mean, there’s other ways in which, you know, you have videos to support, you have knowledge base, you have Google and Stack Overflow to answer some questions and things of that nature. Yeah. While it is my time, a lot of times, you know, I, again, have the mindset of like, Hey, I’m just trying to do good and help people where I can when I couldn’t get help from other people? Absolutely. I’ll do it for as long as I possibly can. So awesome.

Unknown Speaker 30:33
Same here.

Jason Resnick 30:34
So what I like to ask everybody is take a step back, what has been your defining moment in life so far? Oh, I

Unknown Speaker 30:42
think definitely being a dad mean, business is great. But my family life is the most important thing to me. And it’s probably a common answer, at least I hope it’s a common answer for anyone who has kids. But even more recently, I’ve, if you’re anything like me reading a lot of business books, and you’re trying to keep up on whatever, Seth Godin, and whoever Alice’s writing, I always am applying that information to how I can make my business better. But more recently, I’ve been trying to reread the same content, but think about it in terms of my family and my kids. Does this information, like help me be a better Dad? Is there anything that I can take from this about how to teach my kids better? Or how to be more involved and more present, focused and debugging my family or whatever? Right. And so it’s been interesting, it doesn’t always apply. But sometimes it does. And yeah, I mean, that moment, becoming a dad has been like, the biggest life change. And I love it, like, we homeschool our kids. You know, I work from home where I’m around all the time. And I could not imagine being away for them for more than a couple of days. You know, like you try. I hate traveling, right? Even though I like I like the physical act of traveling. I just wish my family was with me the whole time. That’s definitely been the biggest change of my life.

Jason Resnick 31:49
Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Likewise, here I come. Now I have two kids under the age of three. So our house is acid flux of chaos. But yeah, I mean, same with me. And it was funny, too. And I don’t know if this happened to you as well. But now running a business when my first son was born. It was like a, it was like a point at which like, there was like this hyper focus that happened, because I wanted to spend time with him. But like, I thought I was focused before as like, all of a sudden, now everything I do, has to get done has to I don’t care about anything else, then I’ll get distracted, which had the back in the first place before but it was like, Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 32:26
like the luxury of thinking around on on Twitter, or Facebook or Reddit. Like I don’t like that’s not going to help my family out. If I got my business out. I don’t have the luxury of doing that. Yeah, most of the time.

Jason Resnick 32:39
Yeah, I mean, and you know, not to get too far off on a tangent. But I similarly, I’ve been listening to listen to a lot of dad podcasts, and reading books. You know, one thing that I just like, this is podcast, front row dads. And it’s really, the host is really about, you know, just being intentional about being present with their kids and family and raising kids to be good adults and good contributors to society and all that stuff. And he had a guest on, I guess it was a couple of weeks ago by daddy Saturdays, it was just all YouTube channel. And I had no idea that this thing existed nice, like all of these things. But likewise, they apply what they do in their business life to their family life and try to figure out the best way best foot forward. Right. And we’re all trying to figure this out together.

Unknown Speaker 33:26
Yeah, yeah, we’re I mean, we’re like, in uncharted territory as a society. Like we’ve never. I mean, how has there ever been this many people who work from home before? That wasn’t a farm, right? I mean, besides right, the family fine when you had to have 14 kids, because you couldn’t afford to hire anybody. You know, it’s a, it’s a different world. And, you know, I was homeschooled growing up, but it was not cool. Then Mike, it was very much like, oh, you’re, you’re one of those families, you know, like, Oh, yeah, our clothes are totally made out of the drapes, just like Sound of Music. But now, it’s like, there’s almost an hour like this. There’s almost a feeling like, when you don’t homeschool, do not love your children. Which is ridiculous. And you things kind of swing so far the other way sometimes. Yeah, we’re just trying to do the best we can.

Jason Resnick 34:11
Yeah, tough. I mean, it’s hard. Even like, when we asked the doctor the other day, like, both my wife and I were we work from home, you know, I have a split schedule, I basically do lunchtime, and all the rest of the there and she does the morning and early afternoon or whatever. But like we’re sitting in front of screens, so we’re kind of like restricting his screen time, like, it’s two and a half now. For him to sit in front of an iPad or anything like that. And even totally now and so, especially when we’re engaging with him. So, like, we asked the doctor, when can we introduce a screen to because we don’t want to, like stumped him. But like,

Unknown Speaker 34:47
and you know, they’re gonna have to use that screen. Right? Unless like the zombie apocalypse happens, in which case, you know, that family member you’re going to spend time with event unless that happens. They’re gonna have to be permission. And yeah, it’s a tough, totally, it’s a tough balance. It’s

Jason Resnick 35:01
a weird thing. Like, I didn’t have that, like when I was a kid. It’s just, you know, and that’s only a generation behind like, right? And so like, Yeah, but kudos to Apple, like whatever they did with iOS, like, the other night, like I, you know, I installed new few lights in our living room. And, you know, it’s the hue app is nice and simple. It’s, you know, it’s just whatever colors you want, and you just put the scene or whatever he never saw before, but yet, he’s still new to push up and down. And for school, I’m like, Where did you learn this? You know, you have an iPad? Yeah. It’s like instinct. You know, it’s crazy. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 35:32
you kind of take it for granted, because we’ve been using this tech for like, a decade now. Right? Since like, the first iPhone or whatever. But they I mean, they if you read their design guidelines, right? The human interface design guidelines, HIG, or whatever, they’re not kidding. Like, it is like humans, just like intuitively know how to use it. And you hand it to a two year old, a one year old. Within 30 seconds. They’re swiping and opening apps and closing them again. Like they’re not even thinking about it. Now. It’s crazy. It was a lot harder than that to us. Like my goals. Apple to be like, there was a couple more steps. actually getting anywhere. Yeah, Vic

Jason Resnick 36:05
20 that I said the whole thing. Oh, yeah. Like, judges? I mean, forget it. That was not Yeah, I the type in the commands launch Voodoo castle, like Ben the game?

Unknown Speaker 36:18
Oh, yeah. I mean, you get the magazines on you like typing in basic, like 10, space, space, space space, and then you go to, like, you know, you’re like, I’m going to type in my game. So I can play this thing, or even know what it is yet. There is that exploration part of it, I kind of miss and that’s what I love. Like, why just keep coming back to like the 80s. And the 90s. It was it was we just didn’t even know what was possible yet. You’re still figuring it out. And I hope I can find ways to have those experiences for my kids. Because if their first introduction to coding is like getting web pack running, like oh, my God, but there’s no way they’re gonna want to do it. Like this. There’s a couple of steps that come before that. But sometimes Doc’s won’t tell right here, like it’s super easy, just like run this new program. I know, it’s way harder than that.

Jason Resnick 37:04
So what’s next for you in the next 612 months?

Unknown Speaker 37:08
Yeah, we’re working pretty hard on that to make version three, which is, it’s a pretty big evolutionary jump in terms of like, what our platform will be capable of. And really excited about that, if you’re big into level, it’ll be a level package, you can install on two existing apps. So it could kind of be like a bolt on CMS without having to run like side by side. You know, a lot of times, now you have an app. And we also have a marketing site and the blog. And so sometimes, you got like three different apps like WordPress around the blog, and you’ve got static stuff, like you might be able to blend all that right into one, you know, one app, which is great, there’s so many possibilities that opens up. So working hard on that. And other than that, literally just just growing this business, seeing where it goes like I’m I’m hardcore into bringing static into the future and whatever that means, like, you know, updating the brand and getting on the conference circuit, all that kind of stuff. It is there’s a lot to do especially like post launch right now. It’s kind of a little heads down focus, writing the code getting stuff done, but it’s going to be a busy year, for sure. Awesome.

Jason Resnick 38:12
Yeah. I mean, that sounds great. I mean, for me, I’m always about the tool. And as long as the tools helpful, yeah, go check out static. It’s great platform, great piece of software that’s going to help you save a boatload of time. I mean, bottom line, why reinvent the wheel here? And why get bogged down with a whole bunch of other stuff that you need to patch together? That is all in one anyway. Right? You have this year.

Unknown Speaker 38:36
And don’t build your own CMS. Like, it’s not that I’m a I’m not really afraid of competition anymore. There’s so many, just save yourself a heartache. It is a hard, hard thing to build. It took six years to make it a profitable business. So if you’re, if you’re thinking about starting a business, and you’re like, oh, CMS sounds easy. I mean, good luck, but tried tries try something else first. Maybe? I don’t know. Yeah.

Jason Resnick 39:02
I mean, I, to be honest with you. And like I said, I came from the Ruby on Rails. And I used to just roll my own, like for clients like, Oh, they want to manage their website. All right. I’ve just built a CMS a quick one, right. And it got to a point where I was like, all right, this client came back to me from six months ago. So okay, well, I are all outdated at this point.

Unknown Speaker 39:22
Yeah, and those those home roll by those like Homer, old CMS as well, they work for the site, they don’t survive a redesign now, right. And that what’s that’s one of the biggest problems is that you, you want a CMS that can survive a redesign, like your content, you don’t want to lose your content for SEO reasons for everything else. And then the amount of work that you’ve put into that, assuming you put work into that side note, you should put work into your content. Assuming you’ve done that work, you want it to survive redesigns, and keep continuing on and on. And so you can just throw away your HTML and rewrite your front end layer and just pull your content back into a new site. And I mean, that should be the way we do things. We should stop throwing everything out every time just killing time.

Jason Resnick 40:00
Yeah, absolutely. Well said for sure. So, jack, where can folks reach out and say, Thanks?

Unknown Speaker 40:06
Oh, yeah, I am still kind of hopelessly addicted to Twitter. I try not to read everything. I have a lot of neat filters. I hope that’s okay. Don’t be offended by that. I just I miss the old days. Yeah. So Twitter twitter.com. Slash jack McDade or you shout at jack media. com That’s like my open email address. And yeah, it can reach me there. That’s it those two places that’s fine. That’s enough.

Jason Resnick 40:29
And static calm

Unknown Speaker 40:31
and static calm. Yeah, check it out. Use it if you need it. If not appreciate how much neon pink and purple there is. Right?

Jason Resnick 40:38
Yeah, if you haven’t already, check out his design aesthetic just from his website and all that like flower cons website like all of the different websites he does. I mean, if you into a bit 16 bit and 80s video game stuff, that your jam right there.

Unknown Speaker 40:53
Yeah, thank you.

Jason Resnick 40:54
And for anyone listening to this point and show, which if you are thank you for that. I know, jack, thank you for that. Thank you, I would love to be able to help you and support jack at the same time. So if you write a review on this show, and screenshot the review and send it to me and mentioned jack, for the first two people that do this, I will buy you a single site license of static, nice. So if this is of interest to you, and you want to try it out and test it out, go ahead and do that for the first two people that do that. I’ll be happy to do that. So jack, thank you for your time today. I do appreciate it. And let’s stay in touch.

Unknown Speaker 41:31
My pleasure. Absolutely.

Jason Resnick 41:32
everyone out there. Till next time short time to live in the feast.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, I can speak for both jack and myself. By saying that we’d love to hear the one takeaway you got from this episode. It’s super simple, actually, in the podcast app of your choice, presumably the one that you are listening to right now. Drop in a comment or a review, or go ahead and share it in a tweet and tag me at brands. And also don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so that you’ll be the first to listen in next week. When we’ll be back with Mor Cohen of FlixFrame. We’re going to talk about how being a designer in today’s market is much different than five or 10 years ago, and how that shift has played into the success for those that have adapted. Until then it’s your time to live in the feast.