108: Database School Launch 🚀  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mostly Technical]] - Full Title: 108: Database School Launch 🚀 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6e67a69a-74f9-4bcd-9e08-79744e2d779a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Last-Minute Office Sleepover** - Ian slept in the office the night before launch and showered there the next morning to save time. - He did this because he needed every possible minute to finish launch tasks. Transcript: Ian Landsman So it was a situation where it's midnight right i still got a lot to do but i'm a sleepy guy because i'm 36 and not 26 and i was like okay well what do i do now and so i was gonna go to bed and i thought All right i'll get up at 4 30 so do i want to drive home and like change clothes, wash my face, get in bed, and then like bother Jennifer, set an alarm, bother her again, drive back to the op? And I thought, no, I don't want to do any of that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go right out there. I'm going to lay down on the couch in my clothes and fall asleep. And then I'm going to wake up and come back in here. And you know what? That is what I did. So, yeah. And, you know, just a few minutes ago, I just took a shower in the office. So I guess I live here now. This is my life. I was feeling a little, you know how when you're all sleepy, you feel kind of dirty because you didn't shower the night before. And it's like, boy, it feels so sleepy in here. And so I just went and showered. So. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm a tired but new man and everything got done. ([Time 0:00:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6fc183f2-898b-492f-9684-af24b4ac9bcf)) - **Weekend Sprint To Launch** - Ian worked through weekend nap slots and even sat in his car during church to finish migration work. - He and his team ultimately pulled the launch trigger at 10:01 a.m. Transcript: Ian Landsman Okay. So this weekend, I felt like I was close at the end of Friday. And what we're talking about is like the development side of DatabaseSchool.com. I felt like I was close at the end of Friday. And I knew going into the weekend that I only had four time slots available to me. And that is Saturday afternoon nap, Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon nap, Sunday evening. And I thought, okay, those four time slots, I feel like I can get there. Sunday morning comes and I'm feeling like I've got the two time slots left. That's not great. That's not great. And so don't don't tell anybody. But I sat in the car during church and just worked. Oh, wow. Yeah. I got all dressed up and walked into the church, pushing the stroller, dropped the kids off, you know, child care with Jennifer and then just sneaked out the side door and went and sat In the minivan until service was over. So, yeah. So, Adam, if you're listening, that's the pastor's name. That never happened. But yeah, I definitely sat in the car for like you know got another hour 15 hour 20 uh work session in which was very helpful um so videos are all done videos are all done and it was just the Aaron Francis Website or the website was done too no it was the website it was like the website logging in all the stuff like the team the team seats and the migrating of the previous purchasers to this Ian Landsman Platform and like the whole nine. So, yeah. So Sunday afternoon nap time rolls around. I asked Jennifer for an extra, you know, 30 minutes or an hour. So I come up here during nap time and get a bunch of stuff done. Not enough. And then Sunday night hits and I come back up here. Because I need, like, at this point, I need my screens. I got to have it all. Yeah. And it just kept going. The road stretched before me as it does. And so midnight hit and I'm like, I haven't even tested the Stripe checkout flow. Haven't even tested it that's important you might want to make sure the money can actually come in yeah and so you know i i let kelsey go she was helping me migrate some content i like i let Her go like you know seven or eight or whatever um and and she of course to her eternal credit is like hey i can stay what do you need and i'm like nothing that you can provide, unfortunately. And so I let her go and I'm just like working until midnight and then I get to be sleepy guy and I just call it. I'm like, this is doing nobody any good. And at that point, I hadn't tested. I had written, but not fully tested the full checkout flow, the team seat flow. So like if you buy a team of five, then you get to assign the seats to members of your team. And that may or may not include you if you're the purchasing manager, if you're like the, you're an actual someone who wants to take the courses. And then all the authorization and, you know, permissions checks around like, hey, did you buy Mastering Postgres back when I told you it would be forever? Well, you get it forever. But if you didn't, do you have a subscription or do you have, are you a member of a team that has, it's like, oh God. And so, you know, I'm doing all that. I'm working through content, getting all the captions and the summaries and all that generated all this garbage. So I'm, I'm back at my desk at five, you know, I had a, I had a little pause, a little pause on the alarm or snooze if you're from the South. And then I looked at Twitter for 15 minutes and then I got back to the desk at five, got the Keurig here in the office. So I'm crushing grade A coffee. And I start just like churning through it. And, you know, me and Jim and I and Kelsey, we eventually we got there and we pulled the trigger at like 10.01 a.m. ([Time 0:05:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/980ee028-67fe-46b9-be51-f81ad13daae2)) - **Test Payments And Seat Logic** - Do test payment flows and webhooks before announcing a launch. - Verify seat assignment and post-checkout verification to avoid user confusion. Transcript: Ian Landsman A scaling issue. So I needed to do a little bit of database work on some of the configuration stuff that I should have done. But I was testing it and it was fine. And at that point, I'm sleepy brain. And so I signed up for Nightwatch, which is awesome. Love the Nightwatch. Emergency Nightwatch installation. Emergency Nightwatch. They should have like cloud flare a button you know cloud flare's got the under attack button night watch should have a under load did you blow it button and i'm like yeah i blew it help Me out man what size server were you on here decent size it was just i hadn't configured postgres since i set it up so like i set up the forge box just to be a landing page and like didn't even Have it like didn't even like it had a Postgres database on it. But I hadn't even looked at it since I set it up, which was like two months ago. And then me and Kelsey are testing it. We're like, Oh, it's great. And then we get, you know, 600 videos in there and all and then a bunch of people show up and i'm like did i ever tune those buffers no i don't think i did and i looked and i was like no i super Didn't um so that was all just you know i should have done it right when i set it up but i forgot yeah um so that was good that i didn't tweet it immediately because what i hate getting on launch Day is oh dude this is this sucks like this is broken why you database guy everything's slow and i'm like yeah i know um so i we launched at 10 um and some people had found it i didn't turn on The like password reset emails until like 958 and i looked in the logs i had the mailer set to log and I saw people in the logs trying to reset their password and I saw like I saw it was like Oh somebody found the off endpoints because they're obvious and tried to reset their password and I'm like I knew that was going to happen so I didn't turn on Bento until 959 and yeah it Went great we had no we've had no issues so far people saying like hey I should have access and I don't or like i bought and it's not showing up okay um so this time around we're using laravel Cashier uh which is laravel's first party stripe uh assistance package that makes everything really easy um and we are both doing like the interstitial screen when you come back from Paying on Stripe. So you come back from paying on Stripe and we pull Stripe to make sure it went through. And we're also listening to the webhook. And so this time there's no like, oh, you closed the browser before you bounced back or like you got lost in the internet pipes. And so hate that. So that all seems to be working just fine. The seat assignment is working just fine. ([Time 0:09:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/527bfbef-ed00-41d3-94b0-c8faf9beb7e4)) - **AI Accelerated Dev Workflows** - Gemini (LLM tooling) enabled Ian to generate admin UI, models, and forms quickly. - Automating repetitive code with AI cut surface-area learning and sped the build. Transcript: Ian Landsman Turns out I don't have to learn it. Gemini can just do it. Gemini knows. And so I just I just hit the voice dictation. And I'm like, hey, can you add a can you add a whole model and a panel and a form and do all this? And it's like, sure, I got it. And I've never even looked at the admin code. It's just like, yeah, it works great. So it's been it's been it's been a blitz. It's been a lot. But we're live. We got the tweet out. We got a blooper reel ([Time 0:14:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/512e1be0-a111-4b52-b6ef-9e93ce4c6c96)) - **Live Server Resize During Launch** - Ian resized his Forge droplet from a small plan to a much larger one mid-launch, causing brief downtime. - After resizing to 16GB/4 vCPU the site became noticeably faster. Transcript: Ian Landsman So I'm on doing it live, baby. I'm on four gig to vCPU. Premium AMD. So we'll go to eight gig to vCPU Premium. Aaron Francis No, no, no. More, bigger, bigger. More, bigger? 2 CPU. I don't want you to have less, at the minimum, 4 CPU. Whatever 4 CPU is, that's the absolute minimum you should go to. 8GB, 4 CPU. Should we do that? I mean, at the very least, I would go, if it was me, I would go at least 2 or 3 times that, but you should at least do that. Premium AMD. Why is everybody trying to save $5 around here? This doesn't cost up to make me angry. It makes me very angry. Ian Landsman All right, 16 for vCPU. I'm just making sure. All right, so we're going quadruple the RAM, and then we're going double the vCPU. Yeah, we'll do that. We'll do that. That's $80 a month. That's the minimum. All right, let's see what happens. Let's see if Forge just rolls it up. Well, that'll be interesting. All right. Chain will result in a period of downtime while it is resized. Yes. That's what it says. How long do we think that's going to be? I mean, it's not down yet. Well, I haven't pushed the button yet. Oh, I thought you pushed the button. Aaron Francis No! I mean, it's back to being fast-ish now. I mean, I don't know. But I don't like that you're out on one CPU, two gigabyte RAM server. That's a ridiculous childlike server. You should have at least four CPUs. Ian Landsman Never launch when you're a sleepy guy. Aaron Francis All right, let's do this. Resize server. Boom. Here we go. Obviously, you can go in there adjust all your workers' configuration. All right, we're down. So it's 315. We're down. Ian Landsman Boy, I hope this goes quickly. Aaron Francis At the end of the podcast, as you go off to see why it's broken. It's going to be fine. It's going to come back up. I got to tell Kelsey. Tell Kelsey. Me nervous. While you do that, I'm going to pay some bills. Please, because I got to walk around. All right. First of all, thank you to my friend over there at Bento. A brand new website over at Bento that I know he did with Gemini as well. I think I saw him tweeting about that. I really like how the homepage hero turned out there. So just go to bentonow.com and check out the homepage hero, but also check them out. If you're into email marketing and will need a CRM for your marketing that you're going to love, it does your product email, does your marketing email, does your transactional email, All in one spot. I'm now a customer though. I haven't actually set up yet. So check out bentonow.com. So by our friends over at Flare by Spotsy, all in one error tracking and performance monitoring for your Laravel application. Check them out at flareapp.io slash performance dash monitoring by itty bitty. Media APIs for developers convert, compress, and extract intelligence data from your video, audio, and image files with just a few lines of code. You can start processing for free at IttyBitty.com, which I had somebody contact me today that they became a customer of IttyBitty from the show. So surely it's called IttyBit, right? Ian Landsman Isn't that what it's called? Oh, shoot. Aaron Francis Did I say IttyBit? Surely. Ittytybit.com i'm distracted that much i know ittybit.com i do love that name though um okay and no compromises the laravel dev subscription if you have a successful laravel product But it's accumulated layers of technical debt over the years resist the urge to type Laravel new, and instead have Joel and Aaron make a little bit better each month until it feels as Good as new. Check them out at nocompromises.io. Very cool service by two very long time and experienced Laravel devs. So check that out. Ian Landsman Okay, we are back. Did you do all the ad reads? Did you do them all? I was actually freaking out a little bit. I thought, why did I do that? No, do it live. We are back. And it is fast. It is remarkably fast. It's like 10 times faster than it was. Aaron Francis Everybody makes this mistake. Everybody. This is like business dad's rule number one, is don't cheap out on computer hardware. Don't skimp. Whether it's your personal computer, just buy the absolute best one with the most RAM, whatever, blah, blah. Whether it's your servers, just buy a bigger one than you think you need. There's literally no downside. You went from $5 to $80. Who cares? That's half of one subscription. Just pay it. Because the other thing is, why you need to leave it this way too, is you're going to get put on Hacker News or whatever, and you're going to miss 30 sales because the thing goes down because You were trying to save $50. I got to tell you, this is way faster. It's way faster. It's like instantaneous. Now, there's probably some like Cloudflare caching games you probably need to optimize for. Ian Landsman Yeah, and I need to do Inertia SSR, especially on the homepage. There's a lot I need to do. ([Time 0:29:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/10a71134-fece-49b1-ada5-64656d0c0b13)) - **Use Monitoring To Debug Launch Issues** - Use performance monitoring and replay tools to diagnose production slowdowns. - Nightwatch and logs help trace issues you might miss until traffic arrives. Transcript: Aaron Francis Yes, you went and installed Nightwatch. You did all that stuff, which Nightwatch is great. We love Nightwatch. It's great. We love it. That took you a whole bunch of steps. You just did this in two minutes. But that's all right. Nightwatch is good because now you'll be able to go back and see why it was slow for us 10 minutes ago and fix those things. The thing will be very fast and that'll be cool. Nightwatch is, this is the first time I've used it. It's really good. Yeah. I want to get in there. I still haven't had something to actually it on, but someday I will. ([Time 0:35:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/960f2a26-4649-4034-9f4f-3198cd30b60e)) - **Make A Compelling Teams Page** - Create a dedicated page that explains why teams should buy your product. - Use that page to justify higher ticket team sales with clear team benefits. Transcript: Aaron Francis Is I could use a section on why a team should buy this. Why should I buy this for my team? Because if you want to sell those teams, those teams are where the real dollars are, right? That's where the money is, yep. I think it's more than just like, hey, here's a discount for your team, which is fine. I think it would be nice to have like a compelling case for the team. I don't know if it's on this page. I don't know if it's a separate page for teams where you can maybe go into more depth on it. And then here, there's like a little call here to that why your team page or whatever. Yeah, you're not wrong. But I think something about the teams, push the high ticket dollar amount a little bit more would be nice. ([Time 0:41:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fbf57a2a-f068-4866-9040-eb5e8280e9a5)) - **Slow Development Can Improve Product Strategy** - Letting the product 'simmer' led to a subscription-first launch that feels more sustainable. - The slower approach enabled better decisions on pricing and structure. Transcript: Ian Landsman No, I don't think so. I think it took a lot longer than I had hoped. Aaron Francis So it's fun and funny to hear you say like, wow you're here like you did it it's like we were just talking you did it you did it in november wow that's amazing and i'm like god shoot i wanted To have this done so long ago um see hold on this is what the thing it's not like we talked about letting it simmer has caused you to, I think, in the end, make a more forward-looking product That is subscription. That if it works, I think will work for you long-term. Whereas the other model, I just don't think would work long-term. Now, maybe it would work. Of course, you could still be on that treadmill of like you do a big launch and try to make 100 grand and like whatever but that's not really the sustainable business you are ultimately Trying to do so this is your shot at that this is well executed i feel like you're going to be able to know if this resonates with the market and yeah if it doesn't it doesn't whatever that's You deal with that but like you're doing it it's here It's out pretty quickly in my estimation. You gave it the time to come to, I think, a better decision. And now we're rolling. Ian Landsman We're moving. We're rolling. Yeah. Well, that's encouraging to hear. I agree with all of that, except for the part that it feels fast. It feels really slow and late to me. Oh, it feels fast. But that's probably, I should probably talk to josh that's my counselor's name i should probably talk to josh about that because i never feel like i'm doing anything fast enough but You know this is a fun show let's keep it light um so yes i feel like letting it simmer and letting it like i started working with jamie which is her proper name months ago, getting this stuff Going, getting the branding going. And like, obviously, the chalkboard took 1000 years. And then even building out the site took a long time and just all this stuff. But I do feel like this is the final product that I was looking for, which is a good like that is a good feeling. There are things obviously I want to improve even like on the site with the videos, with everything. ([Time 0:44:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/326307f9-17a2-4f78-b246-c6294d679641)) - **AI Orchestrates Cross‑Stack Changes** - The CLI-driven Gemini workflow produced coordinated code changes across backend, admin, and frontend. - That orchestration reduces manual linking and catches missed integrations. Transcript: Ian Landsman I have been a notable AI lukewarmest. Never been a hater. Never been like, this is, you know, going to change my life. I think this past week I moved way towards change my life. And this is all with Gemini 3 using the Gemini CLI. So all these people are like, oh, you got to use Cursor. You got to use WindSurf. You know, I actually tried anti-gravity, but it just kept bombing out on me. It was like, hey, did you have a thought? Oh, well, sorry, we're overloaded. I couldn't even hear the first thing out of your mouth. But the command line wasn't? Interesting. The command line, the only thing that ever happened on the command line was it said, bro, you got to like slow down. We're going to put you on hold for a few hours. And I was like, the heck you are. Aaron Francis And I switched to, I went and got an API key and switched to api key and paid my request can you do that in the command so you can't do that in anti-gravity so like you're just like it's like Ian Landsman You're locked out too bad and you're just like that's it you're so i i like i navigated the byzantine google uh you know payment structure and like managed to sign up for ai ultra which Apparently gave me youtube premium which i already had so it's like i don't know what to do about that um so i signed up for ai ultra and then started using the cli and then i got i got put in The penalty box and that's when i went to the like the cloud billing console and made a project and got a key and then off with my key um yeah and switched over to key mode. But it's kind of expensive. Once, you know, a couple hours had passed, I switched back. Yeah, so I didn't use, I tried open code for the first time when I got put in the penalty box and it was like, I'm just such a noob on this like agentic coding that it's hard for me to separate What's the model and what's the like the scaffolding around the model. And I use Gemini 3 in open code and I was like, I don't feel like this is doing it. It wasn't hitting the same. And so that's when I got the API key. But I just needed somewhere else to like get requests from. So yeah, I'll use Super Whisper, which I've used forever just to talk to Gemini. And I can just say stuff like, hey, can you create this model and the filament panel for it? And it would just go off and like for like three, four, five minutes, just work and come back and it would all be right. It was all, and it would like, I would go in and I'd say, hey, this part on the homepage, can you tighten up the spacing on that? And it would go in there and it would change it on mobile and regular. And I would say, hey, can you add this attribute to this model? And it would go and add the attribute to the model without me asking, add it to the filament panel, add it to the HTTP resource and add it to the TypeScript definition on the front end. And I'm like, this is really, really good. It's just, I am blown away by how I would have never, ever gotten this done if it weren't for Gemini. ([Time 0:49:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/851f33a7-60a9-4732-84d4-4e894615bb4c)) - **Dictate Small Tasks To AI While Interrupted** - Ian used short voice-dictation bursts to instruct Gemini while doing other tasks. - He iterated by dictating changes, walking away, and returning to completed work. Transcript: Ian Landsman I mean, that I, during, during my non-work blocks on Saturday or maybe it was Sunday, I just had my laptop on the counter and every time I would walk by, I would hit, you know, option space, Lean down and dictate something to it. And then, you know, option space, enter, walk away and I would come back and it would like, it would be done with the thing. That's crazy. It's crazy. So ([Time 1:00:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/11263705-7cd6-4d8e-8232-fb4203bed93c))