83: Use Your Brain  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mostly Technical]] - Full Title: 83: Use Your Brain - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8fe05320-78a5-4e4b-b3fe-042055baea6b ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Emergency Room Croup Story** - Aaron Francis shared a personal story about taking his youngest daughter to the emergency room for croup and breathing treatments. - He highlighted the risks of unvaccinated children exposing others in waiting rooms, stressing protective parental instincts. Transcript: Aaron Francis You know how I have a lot of kids? I heard. Somebody told me you had four kids under five? Under five now, which is just less impressive. It's weird. But, you know, we're doing what we can. It's blowing up your spot. We were at dinner with some friends on Friday with all the kids, which are brave, first of all. Chaos. And then two hours later, we were in the emergency room where we spent the night. What the hell, dude? Aren't you I freaking know i'm so sick of it yes i'm so tired so we were at dinner and our youngest girl had had a cough and it was just like getting worse and worse and worse and then it turned Into that wheezy breathing where it's like oh wow you you have emphysema um and so we called the nurse at the doctor's office called the nurse on call and she was like wow she have a fever Yes can you see her ribs when she's trying to breathe yes okay um go to the emergency room right now uh so i know so i took her to the emergency room. She's fine now. She just had a croup. But apparently the only place you can get this like, you know, nebulized steroid is the emergency room. And maybe maybe you can go to the doctor if it's during the week. But why would a kid get sick during office hours? Come on that's never happened silly yeah so i took her to the emergency room and ended up everything's everything's fine she had to get three breathing treatments to like you know open Her airways up um so i stayed i stayed until about 10 30 and then jennifer came up and stayed overnight because we didn't expect to stay overnight so like we didn't bring her pajamas or Her you know her levies or anything like that so we switched and then they came home the next day but yeah man i'm tired just why does this stuff keep happening well at least that's not too Bad it's not it's not too bad no and fortunately I was never like worried. It was never. It was never scary. No, it was just more annoying. And in fact. The breathing stuff is scary, though, you know, it's like baseline fear with the breathing stuff, you know, a little bit. Ian Landsman But yeah. Aaron Francis Yeah. But she was never. I don't I don't know. She was never visibly like scared. It was just she was noisy when she was breathing. And so it didn't seem like she was freaking out or having she wasn't like i'm gasping no she wasn't like i can't breathe right um so we were sitting in the waiting room and you know the we Did the check-in and the the nurse was like hey has she had the mmr vaccine measles mumps and rubella i was like i have no idea let me text jennifer texted jennifer and jennifer was like Yeah she's had it i'm like great yes she's had it and so we're sitting outside of the waiting room there you know there are a bunch of people sick people in the waiting room i'm like yeah I'm gonna i'm gonna wait out here and then i heard two nurses talking within earshot of me saying yeah there are some some kids that don't have MMR in the waiting room and they have a fever. And the other nurse said, well, they can't be in there. You got to get them out of the waiting room. And of course I'm like, oh, great. These, you know, we have the freedom to have measles now and they have exercised that freedom. Ian Landsman They did their own research. Aaron Francis Yes. And so the nurse starts looking around and there are two seats next to me. And I look and I don't know where I don't know where the audacity, maybe it was my fatherly instinct. She looked at those two seats and I looked at her and said, don't put them next to me. And she looked at me and I said, you're telling me they don't have they don't have their measles vaccine and they have a fever. Don't them next to me and she laughed and was like okay and she put them somewhere else send them out to the car or whatever like listen i'm like i'm sorry i know that this is rude but this Is my 18 month old daughter who can barely breathe right now and you want to breathe yeah you want to put the people that aren't safe enough to be in the waiting room right next to me? ([Time 0:02:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ff7707df-c1a8-4e8c-af9b-50d6daf2b72d)) - **Kind Words from Strangers** - Aaron received heartfelt praise from strangers for managing multiple well-behaved kids during a family breakfast outing. - This interaction uplifted him amid the exhaustion of caring for his sick child. Transcript: Aaron Francis So on Saturday morning, instead of taking the big kids to breakfast, I took the big kids plus one small kid to breakfast. I got them all out of the house. It was great. We all went to the YMCA. And at breakfast, there was this nice older couple sitting in the booth behind me. And I know the wait staff, of course. And so they were like, oh, you brought one of the other ones. What's going on? And I was like, well, you know, my daughter's sick. So Jennifer's with her. And then as this nice older couple was leaving, the woman put her hand on my shoulder and said, I would sit near your kids any day. They're so well behaved. You're doing a great job. Ian Landsman And I'm like, I'm trying my best. Thank you. Aaron Francis I'm barely hanging on here lady i was like oh that means so much one of my kids is sick and she said i know i heard you're doing a great job and i was like oh thank you ma'am that's so nice that's Ian Landsman What i needed you get so much love out there in the streets man you know love you people ([Time 0:07:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8f3e72f5-1fa8-4f39-ace7-2516c04feec9)) - **Livewire's Niche and Strengths** - The Laravel ecosystem is smaller and more specialized compared to React, which dominates general frontend development. - Livewire remains supported and useful, especially for backend-focused Laravel developers preferring less frontend complexity. Transcript: Aaron Francis Brannick Wikes. Wix? Weeks. Probably weeks. Probably weeks. Brannick says on Twitter, Spent the last few weeks screening and interviewing Laravel developers. I was surprised by how many positioned themselves specifically as tall stack slash Livewire developers. This will be controversial, which has proven true. But I think it's an unfortunate direction for both developers and the Laravel community. And he goes on to say, basically, I view parts of the Laravel ecosystem as inward or outward. Livewire is very focused inward. I used Livewire early on and it's great. Kudos to the team, but we grew quickly and we outgrew it. TLDR, if you're debating learning Livewire React or Vue and looking for a job, I think React is a wise choice and I hope to see more of Laravel community push towards that. So to summarize, he's saying he's hiring Laravel developers. A lot of people say they're LiveWire devs. He thinks that's a travesty because the broader web dev ecosystem has settled on React and branding yourself as a LiveWire developer is holding you back. So saw this tweet. I don't hire developers. I'm not looking for a job. Doesn't super move me. But then Caleb did a one hour episode on an hour on this tweet alone, which was very interesting. So you've listened to Caleb's episode. You are a person who hires developers. Hit us with some high-level thoughts here. Ian Landsman You know, I mean, listen, there is, I sort of get the general gist of the idea he's talking about of, like, growing the ecosystem and things like that. But here's the thing. I'm with Caleb on this in that his point, his ultimate point doesn't actually make a lot of sense to me in the sense of if if you're looking at this through the lens of what's best for you To learn to get a better job I don't necessarily think that this is like the angle I would take but for the point Caleb made I went out and did a little research Caleb's point was like if if That's your goal why are you even using Laravel? Because Laravel is not the number one job sort of framework either. Like just pure raw numbers, right? So I went to dice.com, which is like the biggest tech specific job board. There's 23 Laravel jobs posted there. How many Java jobs do you think there are? 300. Are you freaking kidding me? 9,000 Java jobs and there's 23 Laravel jobs posted on Dice.com. Aaron Francis 9,000 Java jobs? Ian Landsman And now we know Laravel's killing it, right? So it's not like there's not anything negative about Laravel at all. But like this is the reality. If you're purely going on, where should I go? What language should I learn or framework should I learn to maximize the possibility I get a job? Like, you know, there's different angles there. But if you're just going on numbers, then you should probably learn Java because there's 9,000 open jobs and there's not 9,000 open jobs in Laravel. You know, now on the flip side, you can make the case that maybe you want to specialize more. There's less Laravel developers than there are Java developers, right? So like you can niche in there and all that stuff, which is kind of then getting at that point of like, well, like being a live wire dev is actually a sort of interesting niche that you know This technology that a lot of Laravel companies do use. So yeah, so that's kind of my take i'm kind of with caleb and that like ultimately if you're approaching it more as i think a lot of devs do like i'm going to use what i like to use and then try To get a job in that that fits with what i want to be doing all day long that that's then a little bit different like i went and learned react a year or two ago there and i haven't touched it Since it's like it's fine i get it like if i was like specifically looking to get hired you know i'd probably be more aware of it like i know livewire and i'd probably know react also which Would make me flexible to like go either way or whatever but i also think it's also just not that big a deal like if i got hired like who are these people he's hiring that he can't teach them Enough react like i don't know it just feels like if this is really important and you have a dev you think is really good and then they know live wire but they don't know react i don't know Is that really going to be like a two-year process i feel like it's going to be pretty quick you can get them up to reasonable speed if you already have a team of other laravel react developers Aaron Francis Like that's not a huge issue i don't't think. So, yeah. I don't know. What's your take on it? My take is 9,000 is crazy. I got to start teaching people Java. What the hell am I doing? Ian Landsman Yes, that's actually a good idea. SQLite for Java. I mean, that's probably just a thing. That sucks for me. I don't think those are all active. It did say like 300, 400 were active. I don't know how it distinguishes this, but the total Laravel was 23 active active and the total java was 9 000 versus like 400 or something so yeah well i think the i think the point that Aaron Francis Caleb was making about laravel probably stands that if you want like if you want maximum hireability you should probably learn something else. You should probably learn Next.js. As stupid as it is, a lot of people are hiring for it. Or some normal thing, C Sharp or whatever. Yeah, something like that. But I think I somewhat agree with Brannock's point just about the branding, just like branding yourself. I think branding yourself as a niche of a niche is probably bad strategic branding, unless the job description says we're a Livewire shop. And then you say, great, I'm a Tallstack developer. That makes perfect sense the if the application doesn't say that i would personally brand myself as a laravel developer because the application says that i mean we talked as before Ian Landsman But i have a huge beef with all these people out here who do not customize their resume and their cover letter for the job if you don't see livewire in that job you really shouldn't be talking About livewire like you could add it as another thing, you know, right? But like it should not be the thrust of your job application. Yes. Because that's just dumb. It has nothing to do with Livewire or not. Like it's like if they're not looking for a Livewire developer, why are you going to present yourself as Livewire developers? Correct. Use your brain. Yes. Use your brain. Use your brain. That's on the devs there to like not be stupid and sending resumes that are not customized to the job. Yes. Aaron Francis So as usual, I've sidestepped to the main question and answered some other philosophical question. Here, I do think to the actual question, I think React has won, which fills me with great dread because I don't super like it. And that may not be fair. Somebody asked me why I don't like it the other day. And I was like, you know what? Maybe it's just Next.js ([Time 0:29:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef201d10-94a6-44d6-9129-6abebaaf0996)) - **Affiliate Marketing Success Tips** - To succeed with affiliate marketing, promote aspirational products that essentially sell themselves. - Actively reach out to relevant blogs and influencers to create meaningful affiliate partnerships; don't just set up a program and expect results. Transcript: Ian Landsman It's a little bit different. It's not like just a pure affiliate. Lara Jobs has an affiliate program, which is okay. Like, I mean, I think initially it did help a little bit because like it was on Jeffrey's site and it was on larabelle.com and like, and they were affiliates or whatever, but they would Have linked to us anyway. So I't even know like um like lara jobs has when we open to the public a year or two back it's like well let's try it right everybody's like let's try affiliates and it pays a lot it's like You can make a hundred something dollar 150 dollars a job or something like more than like a lot of these things that have affiliate things sure nobody pushes it it's like nobody does It because i think the thing is so i mean you have transistor which i know did really well with affiliates you have like kit which did really well with affiliates to me the thing i think My analysis that i've distilled down after thinking about affiliates a lot is like you need the product that is aspirational and so it basically sells itself and it's just like then The distributors the internet grifters can just be like oh if i just put this aspirational thing in front of people, a reasonable number will buy it and they'll be worth it. So like people are aspirational about starting a podcast, right? People are aspirational about starting a newsletter. So these things kind of work a little better, I feel like. So maybe screencasting.com. Screencasting could maybe be. See, I think the Postgres courses and stuff, I don't think it's going to work because I think it's like that's how i feel you have to want to learn this thing it's not like on a whim i'm gonna Be like oh i mean everybody knows there's postgres you know i mean like i don't know i just don't feel like it's got that hook of like i'm gonna on a whim buy it if some youtuber says it to me Screencasting.com is different that's different that could work it could work because that is like yeah like I have a course on, I have a YouTube channel on video editing. Hey, like you should go do, check this out because this, you know, teaches you everything that I've shown you, but in greater detail. That could be something. Aaron Francis Yeah. Maybe that's the one we try it on is screencasting.com because that is aspirational or could be aspirational. It is, for those things where it's like i want to start or a youtube channel or i want to do a course on a thing i know and make a bunch of money and okay do you have a youtube angle on screencasting Ian Landsman Like is there some videos about youtube specifically not really oh you got to do that i feel like you need that yeah we might we might do like a like a short thing like you know five or ten Videos one ten minute video just like have it on there so that then the affiliates can like lean on that more it's okay like this is for you you want to start a youtube channel you want to Start tiktok whatever you probably need all those but at the very end you youtube so like i know youtube you can start with youtube and that's the big dog anyway there's gotta be a million Aaron Francis Channels that are like start your own youtube or tangents there are there's so many like and you can get in there channels but they all they all want to sell their own like get started on Ian Landsman Youtube stuff yeah sure i bet you though it's like i'm into a lot of like photo photography YouTube, right? And like they're every single one. And I mean, literally every single one is sponsored by Squarespace. Like Squarespace is just the universal sponsor. If you are making like lens reviews or you're talking about photography or whatever, they're all sponsored by Squarespace. So there's something there for that, too. Now, I think those are just paying money, right? Yeah, it's not affiliates. But also for Screencast.com, I feel like there's some angle there because the ones who aren't selling their own thing are are doing brand deals because like they're making money one One way or the other right they either have their own course type thing or they have brand deals some combination i mean doing a lot of brand deals would be expensive but like i don't know I feel like there could be something there screencasting is the widest net for sure so like there's something to all that and getting in some of those circles. Aaron Francis Yeah, I think I think we got to figure out some sort of affiliate play for screencasting. Ian Landsman A lot of a lot of the thing with affiliates, too, that's kind of been hurt is part of the I think benefit was people would sign up for affiliates. Like I saw this a lot, even like when I years ago when Trans was doing really well with theirs and maybe justin could speak to this but i feel like they had a lot of people who were just going To be able to get better seo results than transistor itself could and because they built up whatever the right keywords and the right website for five or ten years before that and so it's Like okay i have this SEO positive site. I can now build blog posts around different affiliates and I can rank for them better than the company itself can. Correct, yep. And so that's the play I'm going to make. It's not an ongoing thing. It's easy. It's not even taking it away from other stuff I might be doing because it's just like one blog post that Google is sending people to, which is totally unrelated to the rest of my site even. Whereas like with SEO kind of dying, I feel like that's also the, maybe there's a little less draw on that end of people who are looking to be affiliates and take that angle on things. I mean, the upside is it like almost never hurts to do these affiliates. It's like, whatever, we have an affiliate program. If it takes off, great. Hopefully you can like get people interested in doing it. Aaron Francis But if it doesn't it's not the end of the world but yeah maybe i need to go find these like uh like make money from home blogs like you know smart passive income used to be like the one um but Maybe i need to go find a bunch of those types of blogs and reach out to them and offer offer them an affiliate deal on that yeah i do think that's a huge mistake people make too is like you Ian Landsman Just sign up for the affiliate program software right and you start your affiliate program and then you never actually put a link in the footer and then that's it yeah yeah so i think if You want to be successful with it it definitely takes more work than that um as with everything so yeah i like that idea like if you reach out to some known kind of entities like that who Do a lot of affiliate marketing and are have big audiences and who cares if you have to give them a cut it doesn't matter right if they need if they want to take 50 great who cares like you'll Pay it doesn't even matter 75 yes you could literally pay anything because like it's all incremental revenue. So found money. Yeah. Yeah. So you just and just even the value of getting your name out there and how, you know, that's going to build beyond what they directly send you, you know, so that part is right. Getting them on our list so we can sell more of our things with no cut later on. Yeah. Yeah. People they bring in will then talk to other people about it in some format or another and send you people who are now unaffiliated, right? So, like, all that kind of stuff builds up. But there's something there. Screencasting is definitely the play, I think, though. I think so. I think you're right. If you're going to put the work in on it. Aaron Francis Yeah, and we can do it. We can do it very simply at the beginning with just like Stripe coupon codes. No affiliate software, just like calculate who used the code. How much do we owe the affiliate? Pay them out or something. Yeah. Yeah. If you have a small number. Fine way to start. Yea... ([Time 0:53:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/94c68962-e96e-4f6c-b381-d02660c47534)) - **Use Teardowns for Marketing** - Offer video-based asynchronous or live teardowns to help customers improve while creating shareable marketing content. - Consider low-price flash sales for volume and require permission to use videos publicly to boost outreach. Transcript: Aaron Francis And, or it would be nice to offer like, you send us in a screencast of yours and Steve and I will get on a video call with each other and tear down your screencast for 15 minutes and then send You that video back. Right. And so these are these are services. And we didn't have a concept of a service in the data model to be able to purchase. And I realized like, you know what? The data model perfectly works for services. So I just went in and I added a new, I added a new entitlement class, which was basically, basically, it's just an email entitlement. And whenever, you know, someone purchases a product, it sends an email and it sends an email to like the person who bought it, CC's me and Steve and it was like, great, let get this going And then you just create a stripe product that's like you know tear down the entitlement is send this email and i published it and i was done it took me like 30 minutes to like write the entitlement Class deploy it and then go on prod and create the actual stripe product like this is the sign it's cool this is a sign that we modeled something correctly that we can add this completely New thing in under an hour. I like that. And just the service itself, I think it's a cool idea. Ian Landsman What are you going to charge for this? Aaron Francis So the 15 minute asynchronous teardown, $250. Okay. And then the one hour synchronous hands-on, I think we put it like $1 and forty nine dollars or something like that. Interesting to say. Because it'll be me. It'll be me and Steve for an hour. So hopefully somebody buys it and hopefully not too many people buy it. So that's kind of a spot we're trying to throw the needle. Ian Landsman It could be a fun thing. I always think about like harlow who i was talking about before the horse girl horse girl she does cameo so we can do a little cameo whatever people have harlow you know congratulate you On your win or wish you luck in your next uh event or whatever like i wonder if you guys could do something like that like maybe not always available like cameo but it's like hey we're running A special it's like a thing you could push it's like we're gonna do a five minute teardown for 50 bucks or whatever just so that you make 50 of them right just you actually you want to get A lot of them that's an interesting idea host it right up on on twitter and everywhere else oh man i got these guys to do the breakdown it's really cool yeah maybe you require, maybe you Auto post them all anyway or whatever, but like, it's like, you're making it cheap just to create the volume to get the volume to it. Aaron Francis So it's really more like marketing. Yeah. That's interesting because in, in the, uh, teardown email that we send after they purchase, we say something like, Hey, we might want to use this as material in the course. Is that okay? But that might be cool to do a flash sale, low price with the stipulation that we do get to use this as material in the course. Ian Landsman Yeah. Yeah. Not even in the course. I mean, the course is fine, but I even think like you want to outside the course, like put it on YouTube. Yeah. Like this is like marketing or like you highly encouraging them to share it and you're going to share ([Time 1:01:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/65116023-7a12-4cf7-a6c8-d6afad5ee951))