Spicy Mode Bro’s with Biz/Dev | Ep. 191

David and Gary sit down to talk shop—this time turning the mic on themselves.

They swap thoughts on where tech is headed in 2026, from the real breakthroughs to watch to the hype that won’t make it past Q1. Along the way, they pull back the curtain on Teela’s pilot launch—why they built it, what it’s solving right now, and how it fits into the bigger picture of AI-powered software.

It’s an unfiltered look at what’s next in tech, the risks worth taking, and why building the right product at the right time still comes down to equal parts instinct and execution.

LINKS:

Big Pixel Website

David’s email: david@thebigpixel.net

David’s Linkedin

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Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Some of the modes it thinks forever and then other modes, it doesn't think at all. It's very quiet and then just code changes.

You're like, whoa. Then they give you a really brief thing. This is what I did. Gimme another task. Like it's super whoa, aggressive. I'm here. I'm gonna fix things. Get outta my way. It's like Batman has a ChatGPT 

[00:00:18] Gary: It's more Spock, and Batman had an AI baby.

[00:00:24] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host. Joined today, unfortunately only by Gary. No cool panels. No cool guests. Just you sad.

[00:00:39] Gary: Yeah, the

show is really going downhill and I apologize for that.

[00:00:44] David: only because you're here. Oh, I dropped my 

[00:00:47] Gary: I would like to go ahead and just. Consider the idea of replacing me with ai. 'cause it seems like every other company has to add AI to everything. So

podcasts are next, right?

[00:01:01] David: I'm gonna use Gro Grok spicy mode to make my new host. I think that'll be 

[00:01:06] Gary: They have a spicy mode. 

[00:01:08] David: Oh, have you not heard of Spicy Mode? Oh, dude. So basically,

[00:01:12] Gary: not be affiliated with Grok.

[00:01:14] David: oh, I, we, I don't use grok, 

[00:01:15] Gary: can make me perplex a Gary.

[00:01:18] David: Nice. The spicy mode is literally a way to, you can you say, generate an image and then you can animate said image and you can choose regular something and then spicy and basically it's just a.

Thing to take off clothes. It's just insane that this is a mainstream product that I don't think kids can get access to it. I think you have to be on the paid subscription at least. At least it's only adults in it. I'll fine, I don't 

[00:01:48] Gary: Yeah,

[00:01:49] David: to me. This is,

[00:01:50] Gary: centuries kids have never been able to figure out how to get into adult stuff, review adult

[00:01:55] David: well, a credit card is harder to, to you. It's not just saying, 18, you gotta pay 30 bucks a month for this thing. But here's the thing I, someone explained to me and it, I don't remember who it was. 'cause of course I can't attribute anything. It was someone on our team though, not someone famous. I was talking to him.

It might have been your brother. No, he likes Brock. That would not have been it anyway. I probably should cut that. No say that. Probably should cut that. Sorry man. Alright. No, 

[00:02:23] Gary: Yeah, Matt, take the Jeff as an Elon fanboy section

[00:02:26] David: Yeah, that we don't need that anyway. No, I heard that Elon is just simply trying to get attention and when you get all this free news about all these crazy modes with spicy mode and the AI avatars, they have the anime girl and now they have the emo boy that you can talk to and.

Flirt with. And eventually they take their shirts off and it's just a strange, but it's all just an attention grabbing exercise. And in that regard, it's smart. I hate it, but it's smart 'cause people are just, will try it. 

[00:02:59] Gary: You don't think he's getting enough attention for advertising full auto driving when that doesn't exist

[00:03:04] David: a different com, that's a different company. He needs a 

[00:03:06] Gary: No, but it's still attention. he needs the attention. He did just get $29 billion in a bonus for having

the worst sales quarter ever. 

[00:03:14] David: Okay. 

[00:03:15] Gary: What is this?

[00:03:17] David: but to be fair, I don't think it's personal attention. Like he's just trying to get attention for his products and he does it by just going for the most extreme in case Tesla's case is full self-driving five, eight 

[00:03:31] Gary: bait 

[00:03:31] David: that was possible.

[00:03:33] Gary: rage B

is more effective than standard advertising nowadays, so everything's got a tinge of that.

[00:03:38] David: Sure. I think. But it's funny you say that. We were talking before we got on, it's we're using products now, so we have Slack that we live on and this month, no, it was like a week ago, two weeks ago maybe. They turned on AI for us, we're not paying for it. We're not paying any extra for it.

It's part of the pro plan that we are part of now. You used to have to pay extra for it, like a good bid extra, I think it was $20 a month extra. And I'm betting those people 

[00:04:02] Gary: And nobody paid for it.

[00:04:04] David: they're, someone did. And they're mad 

[00:04:06] Gary: Yeah. But I'm sure if they look. 

[00:04:07] David: for is now free.

[00:04:09] Gary: If they look at their broader customer base, I'm sure nobody will Like it was definitely not enough people. There's no way we would be getting it for free

if there was enough people paying for 

[00:04:16] David: There was a wave of products. Gemini was $20 a month. Copilot was $20 a month. Slack was $20 a month, even Clickup, that's our, project management tool. They had an AI version that was an extra $20 a month per person, by the way. So on, on our team, which at the time was 14. I think that minimum you had to sign everyone up at the same time.

So it was an extra $20 per month, times 14. That's crazy. Like we have one power user, Carl, at our company who absolutely will use the ai and I am more than happy to pay for him to have access to the ai. But I don't need you because you're rarely in Clickup. I don't need me. 'cause I'm rarely in Clickup to have ai.

That's so they've shoved that on us for a while and now they're just saying, oh my bad. Now it's free. But AI is everywhere because I think if you don't have AI in it, you're a loser.

[00:05:13] Gary: yeah, I mean it is starting to feel like while there is the actual, the path of AI that is gonna continue in progress and grow, there's like splinters of it that are starting to feel like the NFT grift. You know what I mean? Where

everybody's gotta have it, every sprinkling a little bit in there and pretending like it's the greatest thing ever. And if you don't use it, then you're left behind. You won't have a job and your whole family's gonna die.

That's the way it's being advertised.

[00:05:40] David: Let me split that into two. 'cause I think AI is legit, like you mentioned. I do think, we use ai, we are building AI into most of our clients' stuff now. In some capacity. Some little, some a lot. I it's real it's transforming our space dramatically, which I've mentioned several times. But I do think, and I see it mostly on LinkedIn.

'cause obviously we are on LinkedIn a lot. You'll see it, it sounds so crypto bro. E but it's usually I have a course that you or a sheet of some sort a walkthrough of a bot that I have made, which is usually used in some third party that it now makes it so that my sales engine is working 24 7, 7 3, 6 5 days a year, and AI is doing it all, and I'm just reaping 

[00:06:23] Gary: I'm getting new customers.

and closing deals in my sleep.

[00:06:27] David: Yeah. You know what that sounds like. That sounds like that little guy in the eighties who was on the boat talking 

[00:06:34] Gary: Selling the classified ads. Yeah.

[00:06:36] David: the old websites where, hey, you just turn on this website and it never goes to sleep. It never 

[00:06:42] Gary: Anything for a dollar. 

[00:06:44] David: it'll sell you all day. You're asleep and you're making money.

That was the thing. And he always had pretty ladies that he was a short guy and the ladies were tall. I remember this because this is TMI, my dad would wake up when I visited my dad. He would wake up for whatever reason, at three in the morning and had to watch television and we were in the living room sleeping on the pullout couch.

So he cranks up the tv and there's the guy, it was either that guy or some dude selling knives at two in the morning,

[00:07:11] Gary: and everybody knows all successful, like businessmen and enterprises always advertise at three in the morning on, local channels, so not syndicated or

[00:07:22] David: Here's the thing. That guy made gazillions of dollars. The poor Schlubs who bought his stuff, didn't make anything, but that 

[00:07:31] Gary: that guy eventually end up in jail for

[00:07:33] David: I don't know, man. I wish I could remember his name 'cause I would love to see what happened to him. 'cause he, I mean he's probably one of those guys who said he didn't have to pay taxes 'cause he was a sovereign nation or something.

It is interesting. But yeah, Scott just absolutely is no this model's trash. So he went back to cloud four, which is fine. Cloud four makes amazing code. But it is interesting the vibe of ai. One of the questions that Christie, she know Christie is our marketing person behind the scenes.

She writes all these beautiful questions for us to answer. And one of them is, Hey, what does 2026 look like? In the AI world of software. Boy I have no idea. Lemme just, I'll just tell you because I couldn't have told you what 2025 looked like. I will say that it's just gonna get frothier though. I think that's 

[00:08:17] Gary: More chaotic, more confusing and more I don't know. I think it's gonna, it might reach a point where there's just too many spiderwebs out there, branching out in so many different directions that they're gonna have to be reeled in. And then you're gonna end up having to choose between one out of four different camps of.

Where you're gonna 

take the direction of your technology. 

[00:08:37] David: I think you're gonna see some consolidation.

[00:08:40] Gary: Yeah,

[00:08:40] David: would not be surprised. Now here's a prediction for you. I would not be surprised if Apple bought one of the big boy companies. 

[00:08:49] Gary: Yeah. Like they, you're gonna see like the Microsoft, Google, apple, Amazon of ai.

[00:08:55] David: You've got ChatGPT right? Right now the big players are ChatGPT Anthropic perplexity less. So you got grok out there and you've got, there's one more I'm missing. That's a big bot.

[00:09:07] Gary: Cursor and Gemini and

[00:09:09] David: Gemini, that's the word. Cursor is not a model, it's just a tool. But

Gemini was the one I was forgetting. And that's, but out of all of those, the only one that's built by a big boy company, oh, you have llama too, but llama's kind of fallen off the planet.

The only one that's really built by a big boy company is Gemini, that's built by Google. And you got ChatGPT which its valuation now is over $300 or $400 billion. So no one's buying that. That would, no one's got that kind of cash at all. You've got Anthropic, which is worth I think a hundred billion I'm putting big air quotes around that.

And then you got perplexity, which is worth like 50 billion, which again, these numbers are silly. Apple's the only person on the planet or company on the planet that has that kind of cash. But they're so far behind in ai. Like they do not have a foundational model. They do not have a deal, like 

[00:09:56] Gary: Yeah, but that's also a little, they are behind for sure, but they're also, a lot of the papers that have been written about why they're behind is because in order for them to use AI in its. Best capability and still be somewhat privatized within their platform. Like it's hard to do because it's always reaching out to

crazy places to get answers and pull in. So it's not so much that they don't know how to do it, it's a matter of trying to get it to work, like customers are gonna be used to without even using it yet. There's expectations, but then there's also the expectation of if you're an apple. Consumer of their products and platforms that you expect a certain level of privacy and personalization. 

So 

[00:10:41] David: Yeah, that's the 

[00:10:41] Gary: mix those two together is the hard part. But there were also recent rumors that they've found a way to do that with the perplexity. So there was rumors that they were gonna buy perplexity, but then again, that switched over to something else. But

yeah, I, think instead of them developing it internal, they're

probably just gonna scoop up a company and then.

[00:11:00] David: Or make one heck of a 

[00:11:01] Gary: Modify. Yeah.

[00:11:04] David: It's the same thing as search, right? 

[00:11:07] Gary: Yeah. When search started, 

[00:11:10] David: Yeah when they, when Google got sued, it came out that they had been paying Apple 20 plus billion dollars a year to say we only use Google search, which is insane, and that payday is gonna end, which is a huge bi That's a bigger deal than most people realize because that, I believe, is somewhere in the order of 40%, something like that of their profit.

Is that free check from Google. $20 billion. That's a huge deal. But anyway, they, but Apple did very well. Never get into the search business. Is there not a reason to think that they can't just be successful by making another deal with chat BT or somebody and just saying, you're the AI people.

We're gonna integrate you with these, all these hooks and we're gonna let you in this thing, but it's not ours. And you write us a check. Because we're gonna shovel mountains of traffic towards you. Is that not a viable option?

[00:12:07] Gary: No, that seems like it's already where they were dipping their toes in with the Apple intelligence being linked out to chat. CPT. You

[00:12:15] David: But that was such 

[00:12:15] Gary: click the little. Yeah, I'll allow it out there. But

that 

didn't really 

[00:12:18] David: bad integration. It's such a bad integration. 'cause it's like it's warning you, it's like you did something wrong. We're gonna go to chat GBT on your behalf. Is that okay?

[00:12:27] Gary: goes right back to my point earlier about, it's not like they can't do ai, they just can't get AI to feel like

[00:12:35] David: An Apple product. 

[00:12:36] Gary: feature. Yeah.

[00:12:37] David: Yeah. 'cause Apple's got a level of polish. You can't go janky, even though they are janky right now. Apple intelligence is just janky bad. Anyway, I, my prediction, do you have any predictions on what's gonna happen besides, everybody's gonna shove in AI in some capacity.

Good and bad. I don't get me wrong, I think AI really does have a place.

[00:12:57] Gary: I think while from a lot of the stuff that I use AI for is more on the creative side,

so I pay more attention, not to the coding side, but just to like the ability to, to. Research, write, create images and videos is what I look at too. And I think probably over the course of the next year, images are gonna get even better 'cause they have not been slowing down at all.

They're getting better and better prompting to create those images is gonna get more complex. So then there's probably gonna be a way to, like you're seeing a lot of the AI image gen companies come out with features like art director and edit mode and this and that, where. You can start with a prompt and then just build on it and build on it and build on it, but in a way that's not going to completely start a whole new image set all over again.

It'll isolate areas, so I think that might get better and better. Photoshop is doing that now, and it's actually pretty good.

[00:13:54] David: though not to get in the 

[00:13:55] Gary: No, I'm talking about the AI that's being used inside of Photoshop.

That's a level better than Firefly. But when it comes to video. Man,

it just as smooth as it might look for two to three seconds. It just, it never feels correct

if you get past a couple of seconds, so then

I think there's gonna be a lot of attention to, it's gonna like the NFT thing where it's just, you're gonna get so bored of seeing eight bit recreations of famous artworks for $10,000. You know what I mean? Like you're gonna get so sick of seeing AI video that you're just gonna be like, nevermind.

It's a joke now.

[00:14:34] David: I just I still can't see AI and I'm thinking pictures, not videos. Because there's not enough videos out there. You don't see them very often. I, they have a place, like if you want some abstract background, you want a drone like video going around a, a city. You 

[00:14:52] Gary: Or if you're prompting like 10 frames and just telling it to fill in frames in between

[00:14:59] David: which is how video 

[00:15:00] Gary: that's good. Yeah.

But creating a video from start to finish based off a static image. Just one or just from a text prompt. Yeah. That's still goofy.

[00:15:08] David: And humans are still, we're back in the uncanny valley. 

[00:15:11] Gary: Absolute.

[00:15:12] David: Are tough. And I think it's so interesting that we keep trying, like we're really good at detecting bad humans. Like just really good at it. And that's why Pixar bailed 20 years ago, right? They were like, humans look like plastic people.

And that's fine. And that's where you got 

[00:15:28] Gary: So we'll do animated. Yeah.

[00:15:30] David: Yeah, so they're, they look fake and that's beautiful. It works. The Incredibles look amazing.

[00:15:41] AD: BigPixel builds world class custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects. Our design infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. From startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business. 

[00:16:09] Gary: other than Slack and Clickup putting almost useless AI features in just to say that there's AI in their product.

[00:16:17] David: Yeah.

[00:16:17] Gary: We've been using, our expertise to incorporate AI into products for other companies and their businesses and apps. And we've also dabbled in putting an AI product into some of our. Businesses hands that we've created. You mentioned it before. It's called tila.

[00:16:37] David: I've actually never said the name, so you just revealed it. Well done.

[00:16:41] Gary: you mentioned it before by not calling it Tila.

[00:16:45] David: That's true. No, I've never called it by its name, but that is so it's two things. Let me, before we get to Taylor, I heard a speech, and this is framed our AI as big pixel, how we use it for clients, how we use it for our own products, et cetera. I was on a, I was just an audience member. I was listening to a panel and this investor guy, again, attribution not my strength, that's my least superpower.

Anyway, really smart guy. He was an investor and he had invested in several ai. He worked for a bigger firm and he worked in several things, and he said, if you're just writing a rapper, meaning we are now Chacha PT for X industry, we're going to answer questions about X industry. He's that is not an investible product.

That is not useful because anybody can just go to chat chip t and do that. What is your moat? What is the thing that makes you unique and it makes it harder for someone else to compete and

[00:17:41] Gary: When you say moat, you mean metaphorically an actual moat around a castle.

[00:17:45] David: yeah. So if you think about a castle, the thing that kept people out was the moat, right? The big, where you had the alligators and whatever to keep 

[00:17:52] Gary: So what's gonna grant exclusive access to what you're creating that makes the value

[00:17:58] David: Can I tell you a story?

[00:18:00] Gary: Is that what you're talking about

[00:18:02] David: Yes. That is what I'm talking about. I'm gonna tell you a slightly related story. So I went to Europe last year and there 

[00:18:08] Gary: Wait. You said slightly related.

[00:18:10] David: it is, I'll get there. I'll get there. Give me, gimme a second. We're talking about moats. We'll give time about months. There is a castle. It's a medieval castle and it's a whole town.

It's called chess cromley. I'm mispronouncing that horribly. But 

[00:18:23] Gary: after Mr. Cromley. The Ozzy song. 

[00:18:25] David: well done. Their moat was bears. They had bears in their moat. That's how they kept people from invading their castle. They literally had bears. Huge big grizzly bears were within the moat and they lived there. They had a little place for them to live, and if you tried to invade their castle, you got eaten by bears.

[00:18:47] Gary: Unless it was winter. If it's winter, you just walk on through.

[00:18:51] David: They're very sleepy.

[00:18:53] Gary: We just put some picnic baskets out and distract them.

[00:18:56] David: Hey boo. Sorry that was my moat story. I have a picture of the bear. It's my favorite 

[00:19:01] Gary: back to the non attributed story about an investor guy

[00:19:06] David: So he says, you build a moat and the way you build a moat, see how fast I got there is with data is what is unique because no one can recreate your data, right? Your data is by definition yours. And so no one else has it. And so if you he used an example of a company that he had invested in.

There was a company that had. Gotten a hold of, I don't know how, but they got a hold of massive amounts of immigration, law, data, all the cases, all the lawyers, all the decisions, all the stuff about immigration law. So if you wanted to get access, if you're an immigration attorney or whatever, and you wanted to know about how this case turned out or whatever, there was one place to go and the unique thing is they made AI on top of that, make it so it was really easy to access this treasure trove of data. So the only way through was through this AI bot, which made it really nice. That was an investible company because if you're an immigration attorney, you 

[00:20:01] Gary: So you already, yeah, you already needed access to that data, but this product made it easier to interact with finding what you need from all that data.

[00:20:11] David: Correct. And it allowed you to find the cases and stuff like that with the a AI. Wrapper, but it wasn't the AI itself that was 

[00:20:17] Gary: quicker. Yeah. 

[00:20:18] David: It was that data that was awesome, but it made, it was just a leap in ui. If all AI is right now is a new ui, right? That's we're boiling down. You can, for the first time in history, ask a computer a question in your natural language and get an answer.

That's never been possible before, you always had to write in some weird code language. You had, like Google. Think of Google search. When Google got started, we called it Google fu, right? It was you were better at asking questions than other people. 'cause you knew how to use quotes and you knew how to use the weird things that Google would key off of to get you answers better.

And if you just asked a question like you wrote a, why is the sky blue? If you went 20 years ago, that did not work, right? It just, it failed. And it's gotten better and better. Now, it's mostly because of machine learning. You can do natural language. AI takes that to the extreme. You can now ask questions.

So I say all of that. So we are taking that and our little product that we call Tila that is taking that idea to that next level. So you have questions about your data. You are not a. A data person, you're not a developer. You don't know how to write sql. You don't know how to do that right now, if you're one of those people, everyone has a database, but the only way to get access to that database is have a developer like me build you a custom report.

Have a developer like me or someone else on your staff who knows SQL and can use things like Power BI and whatever. Or if you're really fancy, you could have a. Custom reporting engine, which is expensive and hard to use. Those are really your three options. And so what Teela is the fourth option, which is I am a subject matter expert.

I understand the data, but I don't know sql, so I know how to ask the questions, and then we will give you back the answers. And so it allows you 

[00:22:11] Gary: a subject matter expert

in the way you're talking about it

[00:22:16] David: was that a 

question? that?

[00:22:17] Gary: like a, 

[00:22:17] David: that? Did I miss 

[00:22:18] Gary: yeah. What do you mean by subject matter expert? Is that someone in a position within a company that just is like keeping an eye on logistics and sales and

[00:22:29] David: So it, okay, so if I'm a salesperson, everyone's a SA SME is what they always think of the little guy from captain Hook that is everyone's a, is a, you don't know who SMI is. Come on. He wear the little funny hat. He was the right hand of Captain Hook,

[00:22:45] Gary: we we're talking about Telo, so when you say little guy, I think Orco, sorry.

[00:22:49] David: So anyway, the A SME is someone, or subject matter expert is someone who is an expert in their field. Everyone is one. You are a subject matter expert about design, right? I am a subject matter expert about development, but it's also inside of every company. If I'm a sales guy, I'm the subject matter expert of my product and sales stuff and all of that.

If I am the logistics guy, you mentioned that I am an expert. On how our product moves from place to place if I am. And some of our clients, like our clients is a medical manufacturer. We have people who are, they are experts at these products, and they know these products backwards and forwards.

And so they, they can answer questions about them and they know that technical language that you would ask about these products, that is what a SME is. And and again, everyone's a SME in something. My, my son is a SME in Pokemon. 

[00:23:40] Gary: Ooh, embarrassing. Sorry.

[00:23:42] David: He loves Pokemon dude. Anyway, he's 19 and just loves it anyway. So it, I don't want it to be to the, you can't just be an average Joe working at the company and use Tela. You have to know, if you're asking questions about, you're a soap company, we always use a soap company. You need to know.

A little bit of how that you have a database about, let's say it's your e-comm database, right? You've been selling your soap online forever, and you need to know enough about that e-comm system to be able to ask questions about it, and then we could expose that data in a way that you don't need Shopify, for instance.

A good example is I have a Shopify database that's my database. It's not theirs, and I have access to it. That's important. But I have a sales database that says everything I've sold. I would, I have five reports that Shopify or whoever gives access to, but I want to know a little different, I wanna twist it a bit.

That's what 

[00:24:39] Gary: Customize like the results from the data without having

[00:24:43] David: if I did it this way, like we had a client, one of my favorite examples of Teela is and when we knew we had something, so we have a client, they are a services company like landscaping. And they have guys who are out in the field taking care of yards and landscapes and stuff like that.

And then they have the client, and the client says, I pay you, a hundred dollars a month for these five services. And then the guys go out and they have an app that we built that says, I did this service. And that was all very cool. But what we never could answer, because it was really snarly, was how many services does Gary have?

He's paying for five. How many did he actually get this month and how many did he miss? That's the hard one. How many services did, should Gary have gotten that he didn't? And we asked that of Teela after we trained the data up and it answered. And I will tell you, we're not SQL guys by nature. We were trying to make this query for a year at least.

And when we saw it, finally we understood why. 'cause it was massive. And, but it allowed us to say that Gary should have gotten these five, but he didn't get these two last month. Now that doesn't mean that they didn't do their job. You might not needed fertilizing that month. That's fine.

But at least you now know, hey, and then for the last six months you haven't had fertilizing.

Wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. Why is, why are we not fertilizing Gary's yard? That was a huge thing. And that allows you to, that's a that's information from your database. That you can act on, you can make money on that. Because now that means Gary is not getting the service he does.

You don't even know Gary's mad. But now you can be proactive and say, Hey, we're not doing a great job here. Let's go be proactive and get, make sure Gary's happy, right? That's actionable data and that's really where we want to be. We wanna help them get that out. And so that's what Teela is in a nutshell.

A year ago, if you wanted that same report, you had to know how to write this ungodly 50 line SQL query.

That you've got that guy on staff, that guy is 75, $80,000 a year minimum to have that guy to write those queries for you. Or you could pay someone like me thousands of dollars to write you a custom report. You could. You could have that. That's, so the idea is now I can make a hundred of these with tila without having that level of sophistication internally.

That's the idea.

[00:27:04] Gary: And a lot quicker.

[00:27:07] David: It is a lot quicker. It's not instant because it's gotta go and think about it, but

It's way faster. And what, and it's fun is we've never built a product before in 12 years of doing this. I've built other people's products, but 

[00:27:18] Gary: In fact, I believe if you go back in the podcasts, I don't know exactly how long, but you could hear David saying, we don't ever plan on building a product.

[00:27:28] David: It's true.

[00:27:30] Gary: That's not our 

goal. 

[00:27:31] David: years. I have said that for 12 years. I've ruminated on this idea for a while to use it for our clients and when we built it, just the very first version, very rough. I could immediately see, oh, I could add this feature and this feature, and now there might be something here.

And so we've might as well throw our hat in the ring. We've never, I've never been bit by the bug as much as I have been recently. Because I can see legs here. It's, I like building other people's products. That doesn't change, but it is fun sitting on this side of the fence going, how do I let people know that this exists?

How do I, I'm now on that side rather than people come to me. How do I build this? How do, what do I do? What, what features do I need? I'm good at that. What I'm not good at is getting people to care. I'm in the slog. Look at me. I'm pre slog right now, honestly. But.

[00:28:21] Gary: if you go on LinkedIn, you can buy these courses that are generated by AI bots to tell you how to generate marketing for your AI bot.

[00:28:30] David: All I need to do is push a button.

[00:28:33] Gary: Yeah,

you 

[00:28:34] David: funny though. What, when 

[00:28:36] Gary: You've already, you were already behind. You're waiting too long. We're already behind.

[00:28:41] David: I'm already using Chachi, BT six. What are you talking about? I'm already using it. I, you get my course. What, here's what I, it's funny though because I know this is a need for me, right? To get this out, to learn this stuff. I've never done this before to get the word out, to get people to carry, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not a marketing company. I've always said that. I look at these courses, these stupid promises. And I'm like, oh, is that a shortcut? I could totally see why 

[00:29:05] Gary: are no shortcuts. Yeah. 

[00:29:06] David: I totally see why people buy these stupid things. 'cause it talks to me. 'cause it's something I know I need. And I'm like, but for $30 they could solve everything.

And I'm like, dial it back, dude. That guy's lying to you right now. But I totally see why they sell these stupid courses. Anyway.

[00:29:21] Gary: Yeah. I can tell you like you fell for that early on before we had Christie and before we actually put time and energy behind our marketing, paying for a Reddit ad. That gave

[00:29:32] David: We never actually paid for it.

[00:29:34] Gary: oh, okay, you were

about to, 

[00:29:36] David: close.

[00:29:37] Gary: but yeah, you were like, it's gonna be seen by so many people. We're gonna get so many people looking at us.

So many people are gonna, not one person click on it

[00:29:43] David: It's funny. The only reason I know we didn't pay for it, because just recently, it's funny you said that. I got an email from Reddit, their asking, when are we gonna go live with

Yeah. They were asking, Hey, we saw you got close, but you didn't actually get an ad that happened last week. That's so funny. You 

[00:29:59] Gary: Oh, okay. Okay.

So let me ask you a question.

You said you put on LinkedIn a couple of things about the creation of this app and what you might do with it or where it's gonna go. And now am I allowed to say that we're probably looking for some people to play with it, 

[00:30:19] David: yeah. Yeah. No, that we are actively looking for pilots. These are free. We're giving away Teela for a while. I, my, you're paying me with your feedback. That's how I'm looking at this. We're looking for 10 pilots. We have a few already just from our clients and some people who know us, but I'm trying to get 10, so I've got room for several more and I want them, so the idea is I give it to you for free and you will pay me, quote unquote by meeting with me a couple times a month while you're using it to give me, Hey, what works?

What sucks? What's awesome? All those kinds of things. I'm trying to get that feedback. To me that's worth more than money right now. Hey, what features should I build? What features are you never using? They're stupid, those kinds of things. I'm trying to get 10 people to who are interested, and if you are interested, just email me, right?

Or you can go to my LinkedIn. It's funny you know how to get ahold of me it's why you're listening to this podcast. But if you are interested, just email me, justDavid@thebigpixel.net and it is free. The only thing is I wanna stress it's not. We gotta train your data, right? It's not a click and go.

You, you have to train your data. It's relatively easy, but that's one of the things I need feedback on. 

[00:31:33] Gary: I guess we should also mention here that. If it's trained on your data, you're the only one that sees the results of your data. That

[00:31:40] David: yeah, it's all private. We're very big on security when it comes to your data. We, it's only read only. We cannot touch your data. We can't change anything in your database. We have no interest in that. All we're doing is 

[00:31:51] Gary: No other TLA customers have access

[00:31:53] David: No, no one else has access to anything. Everything's encrypted, all that good stuff.

The technology we have. But yeah, it's important to know that we are very serious about that side of the security. But if you give us access to that, we start answering questions for you. The when it ends as a pilot is when you start saying, man, this is really, I'm getting business use out of it.

Then we start talking about. Some sort of payment, but you would be a discount regardless. 'cause you're helping me early on. We're almost getting ready. I wouldn't call it one. Oh. But we're getting to the point where it's usable by people besides me. So we're trying to get some of those pilots in.

And we're 

[00:32:29] Gary: So who would you suggest, I know you said subject matter experts in this and that, but if you were to say like what a good fit, what a, a use case that would be a good fit for what Tela can offer, like either industry, business or someone within a company. What would you say is a good fit for a

[00:32:49] David: For this initial pilot stage, I would say you're more technical than not because the product is rougher on the edges, right? Yeah. Ideally, we get it to the point where less and less technical people can use it, and that's not a problem. And we're talking about setup. The using of the product once it's set up is built from the ground up to be easy for non-technical people to use.

That's the whole point. But setting it up requires a certain level of technology and you have to understand a little bit like. You gotta be able to gimme your database credentials, right? You're not just a regular Joe who has database credentials. So these pilot people need to be relatively technical.

Once you're set up, you can unleash it to other people in your company that don't have to be technical, but I would say right now the best people are a CIO of a small-medium sized company. Not a startup necessarily. But someone who they know they've got this data, they've been around for a couple of years and they've gotten a few reports, but man, they're getting tired of having to ask all these, to develop more and more reports either to take my dev team off and build me reports, right?

That kind of stuff. That would be an ideal. CIO of a small to medium sized company. I would say any A CTO of any sort, as long as you have data that's in some sort of relational database. Again, I'm getting nerdy here, but it's specifically talking to people who might be interested. We support three kinds of databases, sq, MySQL, SQL Server, and Postgres.

And so if you have data and you want access to it in a way that you currently don't, you are a perfect candidate for Teela Did that get too nerdy? Sorry.

[00:34:23] Gary: No, that makes sense. And yeah, they would have to know what the different types of databases are. So it wouldn't

just be anybody running like a small little business out of their garage selling crafts or whatever.

[00:34:35] David: Realistically, yeah, you, if you're doing that you have a Shopify site nine times outta 10, and I'm not gonna be able to get access to that database because it's their database. Generally people who need us, you could have. I don't support access right now, but if you're really small, but I don't, again, it's meant for an enterprise kind of business.

This is B2B software. It's when we do charge for it, it's not gonna be like $9 a month, right? It's gonna be a business software. So it is for an established business who needs access for their data. And what's fun, what, where I know this has legs is every time I talk to somebody that is in that space and they understand it, whether it's our clients or just some friends of mine who are in that space.

They immediately start selling it to themselves because once they realize they can start asking questions, they're like, gosh, I've had, I've always wanted to know x, I've always wanted to know y oh, and you could ask this. And they start talking amongst themselves and selling them themselves, the product.

I'm like, my job here is done because I know everyone has this ev there's so many databases out there, and you only get access to what someone built for you. And now I'm basically taking those chains off. It's very cool.

[00:35:39] Gary: So now that we've actually said the name, do you want to tell 'em how you came up with this? Amazing, wonderful, just so highly technical and,

[00:35:48] David: The name

came.

[00:35:50] Gary: looking for? Almost like epiphany of a strategic market, fit of a name.

[00:35:56] David: That's right. It took a lot of market research and hard work to come up with this name. No. It actually was an accident. So we were building, we were originally building this for a client, like I was saying before, and it was an internal project so we could name it whatever we wanted. And one of our devs who was helping me with the initial prototype, he said something in Slack I have the power.

And he put a picture of Heman and that just got me going. And so the API became battlecat. The UI became Tela, which is the, there are two girls in Heman Tela and Evil Lynn, who's the bad girl version of Tela. I guess there's three. There's the Sorceress. But anyway she was the bird lady. 

[00:36:38] Gary: This is not crossing over to the Shera universe. That's different.

It's not crossing into the Shera. 

[00:36:44] David: was a wannabe, no, Shera was totally different. She was the cousin of He-Man. She. She was, no, she's not real. She was a cash in because He-Man was successful. They wanted a girl version that was just 

[00:36:59] Gary: she was 

[00:37:00] David: is the original. 

[00:37:01] Gary: created to be the Barbie of the Masters of the Universe.

[00:37:04] David: Yeah, she's the spinoff. She's the joey of friends.

That's what I'm saying right now.

Anyway. 

[00:37:09] Gary: Oh, you mean Joey's show? Okay.

[00:37:11] David: Joey's show. Joey's show. like, don't make fun of Joey. But yeah, his 

I love Joey. His spinoff show was trash anyway, so yeah, so it came be, Tela became the ui, and then I liked, I started calling it Tela just because it was easy to, and I kinda liked the name and so we kept it going. And I did find out, 'cause I, everyone asks, isn't that copyrighted?

It's just a name. There were actually people named Tela. So you can't copyright just a name you know what I'm saying? I the Heman people, as far as I know, won't come after me. I'm not going after I'm not naming everything after all the Heman characters. I should admit though, our admin thing does have Stratos inside of it, which is another Heman character who was my favorite.

He's the guy with the wings. Anyway, he was gray.

[00:37:55] Gary: And now the fact that your son is a subject matter expert in Pokemon is not so surprising.

If anybody out there is 

tired of listening to us talk about ai, but is interested in maybe piloting a program that we've created with AI that uses ai, email, David,

[00:38:15] David: email. David, meDavid@thebookpixel.net.

[00:38:17] Gary: You could find that in the show notes here.

Anywhere else. You get this podcast somehow,

[00:38:21] David: Seriously. If you don't know how to get in touch with me at this point, and you're listening to this podcast right now, I don't know what to tell you.

[00:38:27] Gary: Look up David Baxter. We're a big pixel on LinkedIn. You'll get there.

[00:38:31] David: It's everywhere. Alrighty. Thank you everybody for listening to us ramble. Once again, this has been a lot of fun. Even though Gary was here, I should just do this alone. Let's be honest. I could totally 

[00:38:43] Gary: sounds like a plan. Next week, I'll just

set you up the studio and press go.

[00:38:47] David: Just push the 

button. I'm pretty sure that would go very poorly 'cause it, then I would have to look 

[00:38:52] Gary: You'll start in one subject and you'll go

on so many tangents, and

at the end you'll be like attributed to, I don't know, 

[00:38:59] David: I would probably just clam up, like when I do an ad or something, that's probably what would 

[00:39:04] Gary: I'll just put a picture of my face in the screen that you're looking at.

We don't have to record my side of it, but at

least you'll pretend to talk to me 

and I won't be saying 

anything, so it'll be pretty normal. Yeah.

[00:39:15] David: Pretty normal. That's right. That's right. And we're on that note. We are out. Thank you all for joining us. We'll be back next week.

[00:39:22] Gary: See you guys. 

[00:39:24] OUTRO: That Wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast, and this time you get me, Scott Bailey. I'm the lead dev over here at Big Pixel, and I know what you're thinking. I thought David did all the work. Well, I'm not exactly. We have an awesome team of people to back him up. Biz Dev is a production of Big Pixel, the US-based provider of UX design strategy, and custom software.

This podcast is edited by Audio Wiz Matt McCracken and Christie Promto, marketing guru for Big Pixel. Want to connect, shoot us an email at hello@thebigpixel.net, or you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and LinkedIn.