Spatchcocking w the Biz/Dev Bro’s | Ep. 204

This week’s episode of the Biz/Dev podcast is our holiday episode. 

A little reflection, a few predictions, and all the business and dev banter David and Gary can fit into one conversation. Graceful exits not included.

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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

[00:00:03] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, and we are talking to Scrooge McDuck, also known as Gary Voight. What's up, man?

We're keeping it with our tradition, this or that. Except for we have no guest because I'm sad. 'cause I don't get to talk to you. Now

[00:00:20] Gary: That means that I get to actually answer these, and you don't just you you answer em every time. You do. You stick your

[00:00:25] David: In and say, I wanna answer, let pick on me.

[00:00:28] Gary: Look at Mr. Thought Leader over here, like a fourth grader trying to pick on me

[00:00:33] David: That's fair. Fourth grader, I looked like a fourth grader. I'm about the height of a fourth grader. Alright.

[00:00:38] Gary: grade gym coach. No, I'm just kidding.

[00:00:41] David: For the great gym.

[00:00:42] Gary: I'm gonna buy you those bike shorts. Yeah,

[00:00:45] David: I'm wearing 'em right now. What are you talking about?

[00:00:47] Gary: dude. Have you been watching Stranger Things?

[00:00:49] David: No, I watched the first 

[00:00:51] Gary: then we will 

[00:00:52] David: I didn't pick it. up.

My daughter's 

[00:00:53] Gary: will not 

[00:00:54] David: I'm, I'm not into it. Okay. This or that. I,

[00:00:58] Gary: All right.

[00:00:59] David: just had Thanksgiving. It's getting to be Christmasy time. Are you the type who does. Traditional Turkey on both holidays or do you mix it up?

[00:01:11] Gary: Since I married into a family that is Italian, they have specific traditions around Christmas, since then, it's been like a Turkey Thanksgiving. And then Christmas is usually like pasta and maybe ham,

[00:01:25] David: Pasta and ham. Oh, 

[00:01:27] Gary: an elaborate pasta dish. And then maybe sometimes a ham or a pork loin as a secondary thing, not as part of the main dish, 

[00:01:34] David: it is not the main 

[00:01:35] Gary: to accommodate, the non Italian people who might be 

[00:01:39] David: I 

[00:01:39] Gary: us.

[00:01:40] David: Growing up, I was a double Turkey. That's my mom cooked like twice a year. 

[00:01:44] Gary: That's too much 

[00:01:45] David: it. Everything

else, it was a lot of Turkey,

[00:01:47] Gary: Your insides have to be able to hydrate back to normal after the first Turkey 'cause they're usually way too dry. Two turkeys in one year is

[00:01:55] David: Last year I'm gonna toot my own horn. Last year we bought a brisket and we bought a Turkey. And my Turkey was so good that no one ate the brisket. I'm just saying

[00:02:05] Gary: Yeah. If you do it right. It's acceptable, but 

there's occasions where it's just no one wants to go through all the prep work, so you just end up with a 

[00:02:16] David: It takes a good bit of effort. Spatchcock

it. That's what I

[00:02:19] Gary: Yep. Brine it. Spatchcock.

[00:02:22] David: Alright, are you a Christmas Eve present guy, or a Christmas Day present guy?

[00:02:28] Gary: All right. When I was a kid. The more I could open a Christmas Eve, the happier I was when my young children were young. Christmas morning was the main event. Maybe one on Christmas Eve, just to get 'em excited. As I've gotten older and they've gotten older, either way is fine with me as long as we're all able to be together for a little while.

What about very good. 

I 

[00:02:52] David: I always, it was, I had never known that you could do gifts on Christmas Eve until we went to my sister-in-law's house and they were like 

[00:03:00] Gary: your family kept that secret.

[00:03:02] David: We just always, my, like growing up, it was always Christmas day except for when I was with my dad. That was different. But with kids when it's always been Christmas day and then we go to their house

a few years ago and they were like

mad at us because we didn't wanna open our presents. And they're like, what are you doing? And I was like, what

are you talking about?

[00:03:22] Gary: Yeah. As a kid the one or two gifts on Christmas Eve and it was usually like just a small stocking thing or something, it always just seemed like something kinda like you were getting away with something sneaky, in preparation for the rest of the gifts. Ooh, I get sneak, sneak a gift, but,

[00:03:39] David: Sneak an extra one.

[00:03:40] Gary: ooh, wait, I got one.

[00:03:42] David: Okay, go for

[00:03:43] Gary: It is not really a this or that, but Okay. Yeah, it is. I'll phrase it in a way. It's this or that. Did you try to sneak peek at gifts before they were wrapped or not?

[00:03:55] David: No. I actually was very anti, I like surprises and I like to be surprised when I opened them one year, I'll tell you a traumatic story. One year my brother, who's four years older than me, he went and did his little sneak peek and he opened my gifts. And a fit. He was mad at me. I cannot remember why I'm pretty young at this point, under 10 years old for sure. He is mad at me and he yells at me all of my Christmas gifts and I'm in a ball again thinking of me in a ball trying

to hold my ears 'cause I did not want to hear. So I am very anti peaking. I. It's gotten now to the point of how can we make the gift so different that you can't pick it up and notice it.

We'll put cans and rocks in a gift card, or we will open a Lego and hide

The 

[00:04:50] Gary: box inside of the box. Inside of the box. 

[00:04:52] David: Yeah.

We're like we don't like to spoil anything, so No, I'm very anti p peaking. Are you a peaker? You look like a peaker.

[00:04:59] Gary: When I was younger, let's just say I developed the skills of a cat burglar. 

[00:05:06] David: do you Untape perfectly?

[00:05:08] Gary: let's just say my mom used to wrap them as soon as they were bought to try to, make sure we didn't. Know what they were, but I would, I was able to take a razor blade to the scotch tape and cut it exactly at the seam and peek, and 

[00:05:23] David: Oh, wow. 

[00:05:25] Gary: and then tape exactly over the scotch tape again.

So no one knew I peak. It was a lot of effort for very little reward, and then eventually I was just like, ah, stupid, and I 

[00:05:34] David: it's not

worth it, man. No, that's I don't even like giving, letting my kids pick it up and doing the shake test. I hate that. It's like now become like a real, now my kids are old now, but when they were little, my son had, was really good at, he'd be like, Actor figure, whatcha doing?

I hated it anyway.

[00:05:55] Gary: Do you buy gifts for your dogs?

[00:05:57] David: yes, a hundred percent. 

[00:05:59] Gary: you gotta,

[00:06:00] David: We buy, so we keep chewy in business, it's just, we bought, recently, we bought the ball that vibrates.

[00:06:08] Gary: okay.

[00:06:09] David: and it's funny, my dog will play with it for five minutes and get scared and run away from it. So it's really great. 

[00:06:16] Gary: So since this is the end of the year, in a way instead of doing a formal like year in review, I was thinking maybe we could talk about what our hopes and outlook for the year was back in January, February, and then how it transpired actually and ended up what changed, what's different.

[00:06:37] David: So I, when I went into this year, I thought it was gonna be a normal year. AI existed. AI had started. It wasn't anything completely new, but then 

[00:06:48] Gary: because we were learning the pitfalls. We were promised a lot from the people creating AI products for us to use, but then we were also learning what it. Couldn't do, but it seemed to keep like advancing fast enough to where it was like almost there. Almost there.

[00:07:05] David: I think to me it's if you had asked me in January what the end of the year would like in terms of ai, I would've been completely wrong because to me, at the beginning of the year, AI would do. Completions and it would let you do research really fast and it would let you look up ai, do API documentation really fast.

And that was all very helpful. Did I think that by the end of the year, AI would be writing massive amounts of code? No. And that is what's happened. That's what I think is so interesting. We have changed so dramatically in one year. Like our entire industry is different than it was a year ago. I would not have foreseen

that.

[00:07:47] Gary: from the design perspective, we were promised a lot with image generation and image correction, and that slowly got better over the course of the year. But we were also I wouldn't say promised, but there was also this idea of AI creating designs and wire frames and full fledged high Fidelity software, UI 

and ux that still falls flat. Now we do have a lot of the apps that create stuff for you, Figma make and there's like lovable and all those other things that'll, they can pull UI elements from different libraries, even your own and try to put together like an app or some sort of UI and ux and.

It's still very rudimentary and very basic, like it gets the idea in the most basic way and things just don't seem to go together as promised. So there's a, an impressive amount of improvement in image generation and editability, but not enough improvement in the actual ui ux generation that I expected.

[00:09:01] David: I would say when it comes to design, I have been very disappointed

[00:09:07] Gary: Yeah.

[00:09:08] David: in the promises versus like in a, in AI software development, man, it's. It's been amazing. It's truly changed everything. And if you're not doing it, you're behind. You are that we're to that point it's not mature, but it's maturing and it's changing and it's, our world has changed dramatically.

Design hasn't. Yes, those image generators are neat and I think I've mentioned before, I used to be building a video game and when I was playing with it, I can't draw. I have no artistic talent. But I would always be hamstring 'cause I'd have to go buy other people's art. And you can use image generators for simple things like that.

When I was doing, it was 2D, so it was flat, simple images. But the idea that I could say, go from one of your figma designs and turn that into code, like, that was the big promise. 

[00:09:56] Gary: Yeah, that was the 

[00:09:57] David: that doesn't 

work. That doesn't work at all. I mean, like,

not any, I don't even see how we get there. We're so bad. Like what you can do, what is interesting, right? If I am a developer who didn't have a, Gary, I might have a very different view on this, because what you can do is say, make me a nice looking login form, and it will do that, right? It'll make you a pretty nice thing and it might add some really cool little animations and things and make it look nice if you're not a designer, right? And you could build an entire app that looks better than what you could have designed before on your own because you don't do design. And that's neat. And so maybe if I was looking at it from that angle, it maybe it has advanced more. The problem is we have a Gary who makes these gorgeous designs that went and I have this button and literally there's a button in Figment that says, turn this into code. And the code it makes is poo poop. It's useless. You cannot use it. You have to start

over. It's so bad. And that's where maybe I'm spoiled in one way because I have you making these amazing designs. But if I, what didn't have you? If I was just a dev shop without a Gary, which is very common, most are like that. It actually, I wonder if we're short changing it like Teela when we didn't use you initially to design you up with color palettes and stuff like that. And Teela turned out pretty nice. It's simple, but it turned out nice and now you're coming back behind to add your worldly gigs and pretty stuff on top, which is just a very backwards way of we normally build things.

So that's 

[00:11:25] Gary: refining it overall 

to make it more consistent.

[00:11:29] David: Make it more consistent. Make it look good. And that's one thing, and now I'm rambling, but that's one thing I would say AI is really bad at, is consistency. And that's 

[00:11:36] Gary: Yeah. I was gonna ask like how hard is that process 

[00:11:40] David: you have 

[00:11:40] Gary: that AI's already created and then just making small tweaks? Do you have to do it on a like screen by screen level or can you. Make like a universal change to the design system or like spacing 

system page structures or.

[00:11:54] David: If you built it it has a that's the thing, when I, when you see these things that say, Hey, write a prompt and it'll make you an app, that's a lie. And even if it does build something, there's no consistency there. Every screen will have its own header and own footer and all this stuff.

It's kinda like you went back in time. And so making changes like that is a real pain. But if you beat on AI and you tell it and you make it follow rules, you can make it consistent and then you can make global changes to a point. Relatively straightforward. Like when you give me something fancy to put in, like my sidebar is a component that can be reused.

And we have, I've been very careful to make sure it's a reusable thing. So I change it in one place and it changes everywhere. Great. That's how software is supposed to work. But if you just leave AI to its own druthers, it's gonna make 17 side panels.

[00:12:40] Gary: Yeah.

So then while AI's getting smarter, we're. Getting smarter about how to use it better to make it That's been the big thing, getting better at AI

[00:12:50] David: is a skillset. And I was telling somebody the other day, he was a new developer and he was like, what skills am I learning now? I don't feel like I'm not writing code anymore. And I said. Very matter of factly. Do not sell short the skills you're building to talk to ai. Just like there were skills to talk to Google, just like there were skills to do any of these new things, there will be people who can use AI effectively, and there are people who cannot, 

that will be a huge

divider.

[00:13:23] Gary: A friend of mine, and I had this conversation just the other day where he's so do you see the whole junior developers like not having jobs anymore? I'm like only if the junior developer decides that they're gonna learn one language and stick with it, and they're not willing to go any further because that's just a mindset thing.

Now, a junior developer's job description is just different. Now, they might

not have to learn a specific code, but they might have to learn how to use ai. So a junior developer is just gonna be how good you are at knowing like the framework and structure of programming and developing and what goes into it, and then how to use AI in order to achieve that.

[00:14:03] David: One of the things I'm actually really excited about in 2026 is we are going to try an experiment and I'm gonna flat out call it an experiment 'cause I have no idea if it's gonna work. But what I, let me back up. I only bring this up because you mentioned junior developers, and boy, it's a bad time to be a junior developer right now. It just is a bad time. You're coming straight outta college. That is a rough place to be right now. And I really feel for that because I'm really big into the pipeline and that's for all sorts of things, like hiring the next generation of coders so they don't look like me, i'm really big into that. I really think investing in that next generation is important, and I think AI is becoming part of that investment. So one of the experiments we're going to do is see how this works. We haven't hired a junior developer in many years because we bury them. Just There's, other people train the juniors.

We take the seniors. Now I'm, I feel this onus. Since other people aren't training the juniors, I feel like maybe we need to step up. So what we're thinking about doing as the experiment is bringing on an intern and trying to create our own AI coder like you. You are

a junior coder, and we're gonna see, all right, you're gonna work with our seniors, you're gonna work with Scott and our leaders, and we're gonna make you use AI and become a good coder using ai.

This is the next generation of coders. It might fail miserably. I have no idea. But that is something I'm excited about. To try, I want

to see can we do that? Because I think, because the truth of the matter is if there are no juniors, there are no seniors in five years. If we stop training the Ns, we don't get seniors, and that means we all start suffering. That's just something that as a, as an industry, we've got to solve. And I think that's true for more than software development, but you need copywriters. You need, you need junior copywriters, you

[00:16:03] Gary: I think

[00:16:04] David: everything.

[00:16:05] Gary: it's just a lot of the job descriptions are changing because you're still gonna have to have levels. People still need to be able to learn in advance and move forward. I think it's just a matter of how we incorporate the AI into each one of those job types, and how productive that person can be based on how much knowledge they have.

Not just of the subject matter, but the subject matter with the assistance of ai. And then, like you said, going from junior to senior is probably just gonna be how good they get at utilizing. The AI tools to their advantage and being more consistent and but the foundational stuff is still gonna be relevant in any aspect of those jobs. 

[00:16:47] David: You still gotta know how to code. And that's why we can't just let 'em off and say, go build some stuff with ai. 'cause it'll it'll be trash. Ai, slop is real, man. And. But I think there's something to that. So that's something I'm very excited about. Alright. I got one for you. 

[00:17:04] Gary: All 

[00:17:05] David: Hot

takes for 2026. Do you have

[00:17:09] Gary: You want me to put my future hat on Conan O'Brien and Andy in the year 2000?

[00:17:15] David: here's my hot take. And I'm not, this, my caveat to

[00:17:18] Gary: In the year 

2026. 

[00:17:22] David: Oh my gosh. What is happening to

[00:17:24] Gary: Okay. Anybody watch Conan gets it. You're just lame.

[00:17:29] David: Fair. I'm not gonna say that this is a 2026 prediction, but here's my hot take. I am more and more convinced that open AI is the Netscape Navigator of AI companies,

[00:17:43] Gary: Okay. There's two things happening with them right now that are really making me mad at them.

[00:17:49] David: So here's, let me give you, for those who are not nerds, let me give you some context. Netscape Navigator was the very first commonly used browser. It was made by a company called Netscape, who I wish I could remember who the founders were, but their big names in today's world. Um, they made a bazillion dollars and that was supposed to be the future.

And Microsoft came in and said they use their power in the business world to say we're gonna make a browser. We're gonna put stuff that makes it so things only work in our browser. That was Internet Explorer. And so since they had all this business clients using Office and Windows and all this, they put on all these things.

They said, Hey, your business software works better on IE six. You should use it. Or it was IE two or three or whatever it was back then. And it got, came to a head to the point where it's so bad that they got sued from being a monopoly

[00:18:38] Gary: Do you wanna know who the founders were?

[00:18:40] David: apart. Oh. Who were the founders?

[00:18:42] Gary: An Netscape, mark Andreen, 

[00:18:45] David: There he is. Yep. That's 

[00:18:47] Gary: I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Mark Anderson and James H. Clark. Jim 

[00:18:52] David: So

Andreessen is Andreessen Horowitz, who's one of the largest investors in the planet. He's the andreesen of that. I knew that. I knew it was one of those huge names. Anyway, the other guy, I don't think I know off the top of my head. So my prediction

is that open ai. Which everyone thinks of Cha Bt as the, as ai, right?

Most people think of it, um, as that's the, they don't even know

[00:19:15] Gary: They become the Kleenex of ai.

[00:19:16] David: They're the Kleenex. Yeah. They go and you chat. You go to chat. It's gotten to that point. Like my mother-in-law, she's 80 years old, very tech savvy for an 80-year-old, but she goes, I'm gonna go chat. And she AI questions all day. She has no idea there even is a claw. She has no idea that there's a Gemini except for Google. Constantly tries to sell you. You want Gemini? Now? How about now?

[00:19:37] Gary: Yeah.

[00:19:38] David: so my prediction is open AI is going to go away. Someone's gonna eat them. And here's why I say that. I read an article, this it was like The Atlantic or New York Times, and they did the math of all of the contracts that OpenAI has made for the year up to 20, 2030 So four years from now, they are, they have committed to various companies, $620 billion. In compute contracts, meaning they're buying that much room on data centers, $620 billion, I don't, you would need like a trillion dollars in revenue to be able to meet that.

that commitment plus all your other expenses.

[00:20:24] Gary: That's why they're gonna today there's a trillion dollar revenue

[00:20:27] David: company. Say again,

[00:20:29] Gary: They're putting ads in the chat now. 

[00:20:31] David: that is not a trillion dollar business model 

[00:20:34] Gary: No, 

[00:20:34] David: I'm not even talking about valuation. That's what's important. There's not a single trillion dollar annual company right now. Not NVIDIA, not meta, not Apple. None of 'em make a trillion a year.

They're worth trillions. NVIDIA is worth just over five right now, but no one's making a trillion a year. So that means that to do this, everyone is betting that open AI is going to make more money than any company currently in existence. I just don't think that's possible. And I think Microsoft, my call is Microsoft's gonna eat them within the next five years.

[00:21:06] Gary: Maybe they're just gonna make it in Bitcoin and crypto. That way it doesn't really have to 

[00:21:11] David: NFTs to you. 

I'm just saying, dude my hot take. I've told that to a couple people and they think I'm crazy.

Maybe I am. I'm

[00:21:18] Gary: Well, we're starting to see it every time they come out with something new. A couple weeks later there's another article written about like how much power their data centers are consuming, how much power, just there's stupid little Sora app that's just like a promotional piece of the video, the ai, TikTok or whatever, like how much data and money that consumes for almost nothing back for them, 

[00:21:38] David: It made no 

[00:21:39] Gary: and they're not making any revenue. So they're thinking, throwing ads in there, like how Google made a ton of money off ads in their search. That's, they're doing the same thing. They're 

[00:21:48] David: And but, but even if you

do that's the thing. Even if you do that and you

[00:21:52] Gary: As soon as they do that, someone's gonna leave JGPT and look for something else. Because they're gonna be like I came here 'cause I'm sick of Google's ads. I don't get any results. I got four pages of ads before I get results. That's probably what it'll turn into,

[00:22:04] David: The key to no one was mad at Google for many years. Google got greedy. 

There is a a book out, it's called Ification, which is a great word. And it's the

process in which companies go from good to bad. And it's really interesting 'cause you can, once you hear the process, you it may, you'll start to know the companies that did this.

So the way it works is you come out with a product that customers love, just they love it and they start using it and using it. And then you as the company say okay, they're hooked. So we're now gonna focus on the business side and focus on our business users. The guy's making us money. Great. So the customer experience goes down a bit, business goes up a bit because now they are getting their stuff. Now they're both hooked, the consumers are hooked. The businesses need your product to live. So now we don't care about either that you're both stuck. So now we start turning the gears somewhat and we make all the money and that all the stuff goes to making it that. Everything Is for us, not for the consumer, not for the business, but for us. And you start to see those gears turn and now everyone's addicted to your product, but we all hate it. Google is a great example of this. Amazon has done the same thing. Google was a of the best searching and ever, and then had all the, and then had ads and no one really minded the original ads, right?

They were fine. They were over in the 

[00:23:26] Gary: is in that space right now. 

[00:23:28] David: Adobe's definitely in that space. You've got the, but you, if you look at Google, you had the ads on the side. No one minded that Google made billions of dollars doing that, and then they started making it. Oh, the business people want more ads. Okay, let's put 'em at the top. Okay. People still were fine with it. And then it was, okay, now the business people are so addicted. We're gonna turn it now. We're gonna advertise our products. Now everyone's stuck. They're all here, so we don't care about you anymore. You, where else are you gonna go? So they turn the screws again. Now they advertise all their own products and everyone hates it. That's that flow. You, now that you've seen that flow, it makes so much sense. Facebook's done it. Amazon's done it, 

Google's done it. They all do it. And I think chat, GBT is still in the consumer phase. Right. However, it's free, it's magical. I can ask all my questions. He's all great. He's so great. You're right.

Then they're gonna start adding some ads, and then they're gonna start adding more ads, and then they're gonna start advertising their own products. And it's just a self loop and everyone hates it. All right. That was my long-winded hot take. Did you come up with one in my long-winded ramble ness?

[00:24:32] Gary: I thought I joined in the hot take. You're just joining into my hot

[00:24:36] David: take.

[00:24:37] Gary: All right. My separate hot take is we're still not gonna have self-driving cars.

[00:24:43] David: Oh, okay. Okay. I'm gonna challenge you. Waymo is going to supposedly go from five cities to 100 cities next year. Is that self-driving cars to you? 

[00:24:57] Gary: No, no one's 

buying it and driving wherever they want in the city. No. 'cause those are going to be, they're gonna be self-driving. And they're gonna navigate a predetermined area, but they're not going to be the promise of you. Get in, put it into the destination, and cameras and AI are gonna get you there safely.

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[00:25:52] David: It's funny when it comes to all this technology stuff I know I'm getting old, but even my kids who are not old 19 and 17, they are struggling to keep up. And it used to be if you went back a hundred years ago, your life versus your grandparents', life wasn't much different.

[00:26:12] Gary: Yeah, I was just thinking about that. Like my parents had vinyl and eight track and then cassettes, and then slowly from there, like they were a little older, but then the CDs and stuff like. In my generation, I've seen all of that plus now all the way into like high speed streaming and stuff, like 

just small things like that.

The advancement is just, it's getting 

[00:26:34] David: it is. It is crazy and to the point where I think we're gonna see these massive. Changes more and more often, which it's like how do you humans need time to adapt? And that's what's going to be very interesting. And you know it, you had color TV and then you had what? The internet. Is that probably the next big jump?

Maybe personal computers? No, I'm missing personal computers.

[00:27:00] Gary: Yeah. 

[00:27:02] David: you're talking mid, late eighties.

What's that?

[00:27:05] Gary: That was a big thing back when that happened. Kors 60 fours, 

[00:27:09] David: Sure. Personal computers, your IBM in your house, being able to do that stuff, Excel, windows, all that stuff. Big deals. And then you had the internet, then you had mobile, and now you have the, you have ai. I think how large each of these shifts are. These aren't small things like, even black and white to color, not life changing.

Amazing, but not like the whole world just shifted. 

[00:27:34] Gary: Right.

[00:27:35] David: These are world shifting technologies and they're happening on a cadence of every five, 10 years now. Oh, that's a lot, man. Now I know I

need to pull out my walker and go, take a

[00:27:48] Gary: No, it's like one of those pivotal moments, and I think there's, there was a, someone who had a video an anthropologist who was talking about like the 80 year span of like life changing events in the. Just in human society and we're right in the middle of the pinnacle of where that's gonna change and progress really fast into the technological future.

Like one of the other examples was the industrial revolution. This is the technological revolution.

[00:28:16] David: I, there was a poster that showed me, I just saw this a few years ago. It blew my mind the difference between the Wright brothers. Space is less than 60 years.

[00:28:29] Gary: Yeah, it was like yesterday.

[00:28:31] David: That's crazy. I don't know. It's interesting when you get to, when I get to the end of the year, I always get like waxing nostalgic and thinking of stuff like on, on a bigger picture.

And it's crazy. And again, I know I'm old, but dude, it is tricky. Now, I will say I have not enjoyed coding. As much as I have this year in a very long time. 

[00:28:53] Gary: You mean you haven't enjoyed it until this year? Like it's more 

[00:28:58] David: I mean, I've, I love

coding. I've been a coder for 25 years. I've it's what I do. I love it. But I got off the tech train five, eight years ago. I stopped learning new languages 'cause I had people to do it for me. That sounds weird, but that's true. They were younger and

[00:29:16] Gary: You had to run the business, so you Yeah. I had other things to doing the actual coding. Yeah. 

[00:29:21] David: So this year I decided that I was gonna learn AI and how to lead my company through AI and become an AI dev shop. And I'm the canary in the coal mine. So I'm the one jumping in making the mistakes so that the team doesn't, and that process has been. So much fun for me. And I was I didn't expect that. I really enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It does come with some black eyes for sure. I've made mistakes. And you just own them and move on. 'cause it's what it is. But I think we've created something pretty unique. Um, I think one of the things, I think maybe I've said this before, but I saw a study that the average AI empowered developer, however you wanna say, that gets 20% faster. Using these tools, we have clocked, our guys are 33% faster,

[00:30:11] Gary: Yeah.

[00:30:11] David: so we consider that a competitive advantage. We can move fast, we can do better code, more code, better code, more secure code using these tools than a lot of our competitors. And that is just because we're just diving in. And that's so much fun and there's so much there and it's never stopping.

That's what's tiring about it, but. It's just been a real one heck of a rollercoaster. I don't even remember what I was answering, but there you go. It's been a lot

[00:30:37] Gary: You were getting nostalgic because you said at the end of the year you always get nostalgic, so your nostalgic waxing was how much you like coding again.

[00:30:44] David: It is been a lot of fun. It really has. Building Teela has just been so much fun's.

[00:30:50] Gary: Speaking of Teela, do you want to give a prediction of where you think it's gonna be, say. By April.

[00:30:59] David: Let's see. So I, this is not a secret. We are aiming to release version one into beta early next year, January of next year. Will that happen? I don't know that. So by the time you guys hear this, it'll be pretty far along. Getting very close. We're testing it. We have our pilots going. So my hope for spring would be that we are in full fledged beta with real beta clients that are paying money to use Te Teela not, we're not gonna charge full rate.

I don't even know what full rate means yet, but we're gonna charge a discount if you are willing to jump on board with us, right? That's what we're aiming for this beta thing. And so we're, you're gonna hear a lot more about Teela. On LinkedIn, which is where we put most of our stuff, but it, we're launching our own a site for it. It will have its own page on LinkedIn. We'll have socials for it that's gonna hit the ground running in January. So we're all prepping that now, trying to get ready. So that means no pressure, but I have to get 1.0 ready to go. No, no pressure. But I'm really excited about it. I couldn't be more excited about it.

'cause now we're waiting in to the side of. Software that I don't personally know. I am in the dark. I've never launched my own product before, so I'm relying on Christie and other people who are ahead of me in this 'cause I don't know, I just learned what the word ICP means just the other day, which means ideal customer profile, by the way. But I 

[00:32:22] Gary: Oh, good. For a minute, I thought you were gonna tell me. You're an insane clown Posse fan. And I was gonna 

[00:32:27] David: Oh my gosh. Wow.

No, that you just dated yourself. Something fierce right there. But it's really 

[00:32:34] Gary: No, it's n no. It's always prevalent to not like them.

[00:32:38] David: Oh gotcha. Um, I've just never had to wade into this side and like doing, um, pitches. I've never made a pitch deck. I have never. Marketed my own stuff. I, that's not true. We do big pixels, so that's a lot of similarities there, but it's just, there's a lot

[00:32:57] Gary: Marketing a service versus marketing a product are a little bit different. Yeah. I.

[00:33:01] David: Oh yeah, very.

You're very right. Very right. And in my mind they're easier. I might be wrong in that, not once I weighed into that, but to me, once you, a widget is much easier to sell than a service. 'cause a service by its definition is custom. At least what we do it's a custom thing. It doesn't exist until we do it. A widget is a widget, right? I can know everything about this widget. I can know all its features and sell you this without even knowing how it works. I can sell you a car without knowing how it works. But if it's a custom car, I gotta know how it works. That's the way I've envisioned. But ask me next year, 'cause we'll have done it for

a year and I might be like, I was totally wrong. This was a horrible thing.

[00:33:40] Gary: We talked about a lot of a lot of great ideas come and go and just not live up to the hype. And then a lot of other things exceed what you might have expected.

So I'm looking forward to, believe it or not, there's not a good like wire framing, like low fidelity ui, but high quality ux, like builder. There's a bunch that use templates and there's a bunch that give you some stuff. There's good ones for websites. I will say like Loo has one where you can describe the website and it'll give you site map and then it'll give you like a wire frame of pages and what could be on those pages.

And then from there, of course you can develop your high fidelity stuff, but there's not really good ones for software and apps. Past your websites. There's so many websites for AI to look at and just sample structures from so many templates that are already built. But what we do with the custom software, a lot of times we just gotta go many different ways than a.

You can't just copy an app, you can't make the Airbnb of an app that does something. 'cause there's gonna be things that are different every time. So the flows have to change, the customer journeys have to change, stuff like that. So it'd be really cool if we could have a ray or loo style like wire frame builder that does not all the hard work, but say you feed it a spec and you're just like, I need a flow to go from here to here.

Nothing fancy visually, but just make sure that all the elements that need to be there are there and that they connect in a way that makes sense and just spit out those 

[00:35:20] David: I, 

it'd be so much easier. To do that versus what they're trying to do now, which is,

I'm gonna go from a prompt

to a fully realized high fidelity working app.

[00:35:33] Gary: yeah, that's, that doesn't help people like me in our industry that like we know how to make a high fidelity yet. That's the fun part. That's what we enjoy. We don't want you to take that away from us, but the research and development and the wire framing and fixing the flows and make sure everything's there like that takes a lot more time in the front.

So if you could make that shorter and we could spend more time on the high fidelity and the cool, like experience level animations and interactions and stuff like that, the little things that make people happy to use. Software and app apps like that could be really awesome. That could be really amazing.

[00:36:09] David: No, I like that. I don't think I've thought about that and that's surprising. What an interesting hole. 'cause getting AI to do boxes and squares and arrows. That's chump change compared to what the it can already do.

[00:36:22] Gary: And some, there are some, and I didn't mean to say that doesn't exist. It exists for websites and can be done pretty well for websites. But again. It will give you the standards, like hero section, feature section, details, testimonials, CT, a, footer, like those things. But if you're making custom flows like within apps or custom software, that's where we don't have that yet.

[00:36:48] David: Nice thought provoking. On that fabulous note.

[00:36:53] Gary: See you next year.

[00:36:55] OUTRO: That wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast. Thanks for listening. Let us know your thoughts. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at hello@thebigpixel.net or connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and LinkedIn. Biz Dev is a production of Big Pixel, a US-based provider of UX designed.

Strategy and custom software. This podcast is edited by Matt McCracken. Yes, that is his name. And me, Kristi Pronto, marketing guru for Big Pixel.