Breakeven Brothers

Bennett Bernard (00:11)
We are back with episode 8 of the Breakeven Brothers podcast. I am Bennett Bernard and my co -host as always, Bradley Bernard. How are you doing today, Brad?

Bradley Bernard (00:20)
Doing okay. A little bit busy with the life situation, but feeling good. I did sign a job offer. So I think the last time we chatted, it was getting closer to that. So I'll have more to share today, but yeah, feeling good. feel like a weight's kind of off my chest moving forward with that offer. And then lots of life stuff in the pipeline, but yeah, overall feeling very relieved and excited. I don't start yet in about a month, but yeah, very, very looking forward to that. How about you?

Bennett Bernard (00:48)
Yeah, good. It's super busy. think, I think both you and I have been super busy for different reasons. Of course you're doing interviewing and then me just with my regular kids got stuff going on and all these extracurriculars and then just my regular, nine to five being more like a nine to seven. yeah, just super busy, but you know, sometimes it's good to be busy, but, yeah, I empathize with you a lot because interviewing and. know, getting job offers and figuring out what you want to do. It's been a while since I've had to like do that. And, it's just, I remember it being.

You know, it's exciting, but it's also stressful. It takes a lot out of you. You're always preparing. You're on camera all day, and it's like you have to present yourself a certain way. So I can see why you'd be happy to be done with that for sure.

Bradley Bernard (01:28)
Yeah, first free time I've had in a while. So that's been great. think last we talked was heading to Laricon, trying to figure out what to do there. So yeah, I came back from Laricon was a really fun event, met a ton of cool people. So I talked to people on Twitter and just, you know, kind of the normal reply guy stuff where they're building cool stuff. I'm just trying to see what they're up to talking with them. So when I went into Laricon, I was very much trying to go talk to those people I had mentioned or talked to on Twitter and probably.

met at least, I don't know, eight to 10 people. And maybe that's not great for some listeners, but for me, trying to put myself out there as like one person, that's pretty good. I had some really cool talks on day one, lots of action packed in the schedule. Then there's kind of the after dark event, which Laricon usually has just that one day after day one, that one event after day one, really to get people together that's outside of the conference venue. And so there are lots of good conversations. I also met up with

some people I'd met in the previous LairCon, which is cool. So I didn't come there kind of not knowing anybody. I had kind of a small community, then I had the Twitter community, then I had these people that I was like, I really want to go talk to them and see what they're up to. So happy to report back that it was a fun event, tons of activities, a lot of great food. It was in Dallas and downtown, pretty hot, but had good tacos, had good barbecue, surprisingly had pretty good Indian food too. Wrapped things up, met a ton of people. And yeah, it was a fun time.

Absolutely recommend to go to the Lericon Conference. It's lots of good people that the vibes and energy are right.

Bennett Bernard (02:55)
That's cool. Yeah, there's two conferences that I think I mentioned on previous podcasts that I'm looking at potentially going to. One is here in the Phoenix area, which is great. And it's like the mortgage bankers association, accounting and finance conference. So I'm thinking about doing that one. then the other one, it's actually right around the same time, I think, which is also, need to, don't know if they're the exact same dates, but they're pretty close together, is the digital CPA conference in Denver.

through like the AICPA, the American Institute of CPAs. So very different content, but still like accounting related. And yeah, definitely itching to go. The Phoenix one, of course, is easier being local to where I am. It's easier to go for, but to be honest, I'd kind of rather go to the digital CPA one just because I feel like I've done the mortgage bankers one a couple of times now, I think two or three times. So it's still great. It's great to network with people, but like it won't be as fresh as the digital CPA one, I think.

Bradley Bernard (03:50)
Who has the better community?

Bennett Bernard (03:52)
that's a great question. I don't want to disparage anybody here. They're both good. They're both different. Yeah, I think I love this is going to sound weird, but I love accounting. And so I think, you know, I like the digital CPA one a bit more because I think it's. You know, it's accountants for accountants. It's a bit more like about like practice management, like best practices. The mortgage one's really good, but it's very like.

Bradley Bernard (03:56)
If you had to choose.

Bennett Bernard (04:18)
It's a lot of information, which is great, but it's a little bit less like, it's just more like industry topics and like not so much like how to do things. It's a bit more of like an industry, you know, what's the right word? Like fire chat, fireside chat, you know, kind of catch up on like industry outlook, which is super, super interesting. But, yeah, I find that I think the connections and just the content and probably more, we'll look forward to more with the digital CPA one.

Bradley Bernard (04:33)
Mm

Bennett Bernard (04:46)
If I had to choose between the two, I'd love to go to both. again, I think they're right at the same time. Or even if they're like back to back, probably wouldn't be able to do both of them just with work and, you know, family priorities and stuff like that. yeah, but it's I'm trying to see if we can go. Obviously, Denver in December, you know, it's I'm not a snow person, so, know, we'll see. But yeah, the Phoenix one might be the one we end up doing. yeah.

Bradley Bernard (05:07)
Yeah, the mobile conferences that I went to, a lot of them were very much getting a pulse on all these companies and their kind of best practices for Laricon and the PHP and Laravel community. That one didn't, doesn't really draw a ton of large companies. So it's much more community driven, which I really like. Lots of people are on Twitter. They have this pretty solid community of people that help out share free content. Yes, there's paid content, but lots of it makes sense in the right ways. And so when coming to Laricon.

Bennett Bernard (05:24)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (05:34)
compared to the mobile conferences. The mobile conferences is like, hey, what is Twitter doing? What is, you know, Facebook doing? What are all these companies that are kind of like showing their best foot at these coding conferences to kind of catch you, keep you up to date on, you know, large scale mobile app problems. Whereas Lericon, it's much more community member driven, lots more passion instead of kind of profit in companies. I think that twist on it, when I asked about who has the better community, I can really feel that at Lericon where people are just there to have a good time.

Yes, the talks are important, but I think it's really connected with one another where I think the mobile conferences that I previously went to is like recruiting, making the company look good, trying to find your next job. I don't feel that as much in the Laravel conference at Laricon, but yeah, it definitely depends on what your goals are. I'm just trying to network and learn a few things with primarily network.

Bennett Bernard (06:21)
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a big difference. you know, for me, I what the two conferences I'm thinking about, I was just going to go like on my own as myself and not really affiliated with my company. And that does bring a different dynamic than like if you're going like as part of your company or like, you know, kind of not sponsored, but you know what I mean? Kind of like you're going relevant to your role to kind of go and get information. And, you know, I'm curious, you know, you just mentioned that you sign an offer and so you're

Sunsetting the kind of sort of like solopreneur lifestyle right now. And so I'm curious how you think or how it's been for you where you've gone to conferences in the past through your prior roles like Metta or PayPal versus like Larikon. Is Larikon the only one that you've been to where you were kind of doing the solopreneur thing or have you been to others as well during that time?

Bradley Bernard (07:10)
Yeah, I think it was just that one, that one twice this year and last year. The other one's where I go on the company dime. Definitely fun, but different. Like I already have a community. I don't feel the need to network as much. I'm also not paying the bill for, you know, the flight, the hotel, the food, whereas when you pay with it out of your own pocket, you know, you want to get the maximum value. You set a few goals. I think that are a bit more stricter than going on the company's dime. So it's, it's a different vibe and a different mindset. I think a bit more taxing because you have to spend a lot more effort to do that networking. If you're not a social guy.

Bennett Bernard (07:12)
Okay.

Mm

Bradley Bernard (07:40)
It's, you know, can put you out of your comfort zone, which can be a little challenging, especially when you like need to enter these groups of, you know, five or 10 people in a conversation. There's like good methods and bad methods. There's like lines of talking to people, but overall definitely really fun time. think going on the company's dime is also fantastic because you can share that knowledge back to the company. And that's a huge value add that one, you're interested in two, you're able to kind of summarize and distill that info. But if you do it for yourself, you know, you're learning in real time, you're applying these connections that.

might have a bit more of future payoff. I don't really know when these connections will play out and I don't make these connections for the sake of them being worth anything. It's more just they're doing cool stuff. I want to talk to them. When I approach people, it's like sometimes it's, hey, you're a familiar face. What is your name again? Or it's like, I know they don't know me at all, so I introduce myself. But had a mix of that at Lericon where, you

talking to the people that are more known in the community. Like it was a 50 50 shot if they remembered me, which doesn't offend me at all. Cause I'm sure they talked to a ton of people, but that 50 50 was better than, you know, 0 % and the last Lercon where I was a bit more of a nobody. Again, it's not my claim to fame to rise within the Lervel community, but it's nice to put myself out there and kind of get recognized at least to a small, small, small, small degree. And so that was like a nice win on my belt to be, you know, kind of knowing more people and being more in there with the people that

I think I have great ideas on doing cool stuff.

Bennett Bernard (09:05)
Yeah, that's cool. You mentioned there's a few of like, you think you said you call it like a small circle or small community that you met with or like really looking forward to meeting with you on a name drop or no, you don't have to. That's fine.

Bradley Bernard (09:16)
I probably won't name drop because I'll forget, there's definitely great conversations where, you know, it depends on how busy that person was, but it kind of went into my life, my decisions. I think the conversations I had at the time, usually when I approached these are, you know, what's going on in your life, what's exciting you, and then kind of on the flip side, what I'm up to. And at that point was doing the job search to kind of outline with a few folks of what I'm working with, what my decision making looks like. And then connected with them.

After I left the conference said, Hey, you know, was great chatting with you kind of outline a few key points for our conversation in case they forgot. And then they're like, you know, it was nice to connect with you and, excited to see where your job search ends up. So it was, just like a really nice group of people where, I think at this Laricon it being a two day event, they invited more JavaScript people. And I wasn't sure how that would end up given the PHP and JavaScript communities are just different goals, different VC funding amounts. It's just a different vibe.

And it actually turned out to go pretty well. They had a basketball game at the Laricon event. So the day before the conference, it was a basketball game with people who don't play basketball, of course, know, coders. mean, maybe some did, but the majority is just, you know, sitting at their desk working on code. And so I think it was Laravel people versus the JavaScript people. And it was hosted by Sentry, like an error monitoring tool, but it was a funny event. I caught a few minutes of a live stream where, I don't know, you just don't really see these kind of

Bennett Bernard (10:21)
Hm

Bradley Bernard (10:39)
spur the moment, stupid, funny, know, kind of lighthearted events. And so I asked a few people that were involved in it the day after the conference and said, Hey, how was the basketball event? Like, it fun. Like some people tried really hard, but like not in a bad way. It was just kind of a, a fun event to bring people together. So I think bringing the JavaScript people added a little bit of a spice to the community where people like, how's this going to react? What is it going to look like? And at the end of the day, turned out really well. think the JavaScript people and Twitter.

Bennett Bernard (10:42)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (11:06)
have a bit of a polarizing view and have kind of like hot takes. So feels like on the regular we're on Laravel, it's much more calm, casual. I'm sure there are some hot takes, but it's not as frequent. It doesn't feel as attention grabby as the JavaScript folks. And I think I was curious how they would act in person because again, it's a way different measure trying to get engagement online and try to win against the algorithm versus just having a one -to -one conversation.

I didn't talk to them specifically, but from the people I talked to and I asked about them, they said they're all great. So pretty cool to kind of expand the community, bring more people in. One kind of interesting fact that I realized was during the Laravel conference on day one, Taylor had asked at the final talk, he gave the final talk on day one. He said, raise your hand if this is your first LairCon. And I was sitting like in the back of this first section and there were so many hands that came up where I was shocked because

Bennett Bernard (11:36)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (11:58)
I'd also felt when you get to these large conferences, like, do I know these people? Like, you know, kind of navigating through a sea of heads. And I had realized there's definitely a lot of people I didn't know. And then seeing the hands pop up where it was their first LairCon, I was like, okay, the community is growing rapidly. And I think it's only going to continue. Like the small LairCons of maybe, I don't know, 2016 to 2019 aren't going to be a thing anymore now they need to kind of expand the size and focus on newcomers where, you know, people are less known in the community trying to make those connections.

Yeah, it was just kind of an interesting evolution. thought it'd be a lot more of like the original people. And I think they were still there, but the doors are open to a lot of new people, which is always great.

Bennett Bernard (12:37)
Mm Yeah, it's cool. Sounds like a fun time. What was the big, if you could summarize, what was the big one or two, did they do any new releases or exciting developments? What was the presentation that really grabbed your interest the most?

Bradley Bernard (12:46)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, there is two talks that I really liked. I I don't want to say I didn't like the others. I liked all of them. think two that stood out. Taylor gave a talk at the end of day one, announcing Laravel cloud. And so if you've heard of next JS, kind of the JavaScript framework that's built on top of react, they have a platform called Vercell. That platform allows you to deploy the JavaScript like web apps super easily.

And Laravel has two offerings to deploy your PHP app. One is Laravel Forge, where you bring a VPS virtual private server. It can do all that for you using your given server. There's Laravel Vapor, which is a serverless solution that's built off Amazon's serverless infrastructure. And then now they announced a third option, which is Laravel Cloud, which kind of sits what I imagine in the middle of those two layers. Laravel Forge is kind of more hands -on.

So you have to do a bit more work. Laravel Vapor is a bit more hands off. like it, know, kind of bring your own or they build your own infrastructure on Amazon. think Laravel Cloud is approachable from every developer's point of view where you can just take your Laravel project, bring it to their new product, Laravel Cloud, get it up and running, control a few things, but you don't have to worry about the underlying server that it's running on. So they're trying to make things like super easy to deploy and get it out there, which I thought was already easy. So it's not like...

I see it as a huge opportunity, but I think they have a different business sense on what that looks like. so that was a major, major release. think it was met with a little bit of criticism to understand how that would fit given they have two pretty solid product offerings in that area already. But I think people are excited because they've done historically pretty well. So I think they know what they're doing. The second talk that I liked was from a guy, Daniel Colborne, a little bit of like a technical talk, but he had described something called verbs.

And the consensus or kind of to sum up his talk was he had a project where people could upvote and downvote certain other people in this game that he had created. So he created a game for Lericon that participants could come and upvote and downvote other players. If you're at the top of the list, you won like $2 ,000 in cash. Like they came to the conference with a bag of cash. Maybe it was like 10 grand. It was this massive bag. They had posted photos on Twitter saying it's hard to get through TSA.

you know, having $10 ,000 and $1 bills. And so they had created this game to demonstrate his like verbs architecture. And what that is, is it's capturing what happens in your app and then deriving state from that. So you can think of two paradigms. One is like Brad upvoted Ben or Ben like downvoted Brad as like an action. Based on those actions, we'd have like an upvote count and a downvote count, or maybe just like an overall count, like a plus one minus one for an upvote and a downvote.

Bennett Bernard (15:10)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (15:36)
and so we could store that final account, is maybe like plus 20 or minus 10. What he describes is storing the actual action. So I'll store the action that I have voted you and you I'm starting the action that you downvoted me from that. can derive the final state of like the database or the game based on looping from start to finish and kind of writing logic for all those actions. And the reason why that's important is because he.

intentionally put a bug in his code for the game saying that you could actually upvote people multiple times when you shouldn't be able to. And so the state of the game is maybe I have 10 points, but five of those are fake. And so he had a bug fix in his game intentionally that says, I'm going to go look through all these actions that were like a logged history of actions and filter out these like malicious actions that had a bug. Either it's a malicious action from the user or it's just a bug in the code.

Then once he fixed that code, he like reran his script, which looked at all the actions, of like discarded the invalid ones and then drove the state of the game. And so maybe that wasn't as short as I want it to be, but what he's trying to kind of encapsulate is that not storing the final state, but kind of storing the actions such that if you can replay this history of events and you change your code, you're in a state where things are a little bit easier to fix because you're always going to have a bug here or there. if you

can't trace it back to where things went wrong and how to fix it. It makes it really hard to develop an application. so yeah, his whole talk was like store the actions, derive the state. That works out really well because if you have a bug, you can come back and fix things. And now you can just discard like invalid verbs or actions that you don't consider valid anymore. But if you store like the derived state without storing the actions, we wouldn't be able to know how to remove these like invalid votes after we have this final count. So those are the two that I like the best.

Bennett Bernard (17:06)
Mm

Yeah, that's cool. It almost sounds like I'm simplifying it a crap ton, I'm sure, but it almost sounds like just storing like really like detailed like logs almost like, you know, you have logs that kind of show the actions and sounds like he's basically storing that and using it in a useful way. So sounds cool.

Bradley Bernard (17:36)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, I think there's like metadata to like IP address. So if there's like a bad actor, they can filter out like replay all from start to end, excluding this IP or et cetera. So yeah, pretty cool system. He's not the first one to coin it, but I think he's developing a layer of a package that makes it easier to pull this off in large scale applications. So think that was kind of his introduction to the architecture at larger than his package on how that works.

Bennett Bernard (17:50)
Mm

Yeah. Okay. That's cool. Very cool. Glad you had a good time at the, at the conference and, surely we show you be back to other ones. It seems like you're, sounds like a, coding ambassador is in your future. Maybe, know, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Cool. What, so I asked a couple of things going on in my world. was gonna just bring up to speed and maybe just complain about, if nothing else. So I made a error on my CPA license.

Bradley Bernard (18:16)
yeah.

I'd like to give a talk one day. Don't know when but it's coming.

You

Bennett Bernard (18:36)
So I am licensed originally from California because that's where I'm from and where Brad currently resides. I moved to Arizona a number of years ago and so I transferred my CPA license over to Arizona. And basically I thought, and this is just my own lack of reading, so no one to blame it myself. I thought if I just kept my license active in California, it would like reciprocate in Arizona. And so when the renewal came up,

Just by pure nature of California sending me their renewal letter in the mail first, I just said, OK, I'll just renew that. You know, I still, you know, go to California all the time. You know, who knows where the future leads? And so I'll just keep that active. so was like, OK, I'll pay the three hundred fifty dollars and do all the like continuing education stuff you have to do for that. And then Arizona is probably going to reciprocate it. But then like a month later, I get the letter from Arizona saying, hey, you need to renew your CPA license.

with Arizona and like basically said in the letter, like if you're a resident and like you live in Arizona and you work in Arizona, like you need to register in Arizona. You cannot like reciprocate from another state. Yeah. So I had to pay $650 instead of just $350 for just the same thing. So lesson learned, such as the nature of state, you know, regulatory licenses, sometimes it's not very flexible. know, the DMV has never been known to be flexible and the board of accountancy is no different.

Bradley Bernard (19:39)
So you have both then.

Oof.

Bennett Bernard (19:57)
But yeah, I just went through all that rigmarole this week of like getting the Arizona package ready to mail off and then I got to mail the check for 300 bones over to them. So yeah, that was a fun moment for sure. I was just like, damn, I was going to call them and plead my case, but it says in black and white ink, you know, can't do it. So.

Bradley Bernard (20:18)
Yeah, we don't have any certifications over here. come, come over here and, know, can have an arts degree, can have whatever degree, no degree, bootcamp, get a job, no certifications, small pitch right there.

Bennett Bernard (20:28)
A true, a true meritocracy. Yeah, I know. It's interesting because, know, accounting, I think a lot of people that are, you know, accounting professionals who, you know, potentially listen to this, you know, you are, you feel pressured by like industry standards and norms to get your CPA license, even though, you know, I don't do anything in public accounting and I haven't since 2016, really. yeah, 2016. So

You know, it's but you still feel and you're kind of like subtly told to like keep it active and you know, it's it's great and it is great for your resume because it is a really difficult designation to get. But it's a weird one because you're kind of told to keep it around. It's really good for you. But like if you lose it, there's not really there's no reason you need to keep it active other than just to keep it on your resume and your cover letter. So.

Bradley Bernard (21:17)
Do have to set a calendar reminder for that? I mean, they send you a mail.

Bennett Bernard (21:19)
You get, yeah, you get letters saying, Hey, you got to do, you know, 40 hours or 80 hours of continuing education for each like two year period depends on your state, of course. and so keeping up with that throughout the years is better than like waiting till the very end in doing, you know, 80 hours of CPE and five hours, you know, that doesn't, doesn't make sense, but, you know, self study lets you do that. but yeah, so they can't keep you honest with it throughout the year, but

Bradley Bernard (21:34)
Mm

Bennett Bernard (21:46)
It's just something that I think if you fortunately, you know where I work now and places I've worked before, you know, if you are in an accounting or where there is a lot of CPAs like that just work there, then a lot of times they will try and do like company hosted like events where you can get credits. So that way you're not doing a bunch of learning, you know, outside of work. You can kind of, you know, learn something at work that's relevant to your topic and then it gives you credit for, you know, your license. And so they've been doing

Bradley Bernard (22:04)
Hmm.

Bennett Bernard (22:14)
You where I work, they've been doing that for the last like year and a half now. And it's actually been super helpful because it just makes it easier to get the credits at the end of the year. So yeah, that was something that's been been going on. The other thing that I've been kicking around was I'll show you this book before we got started here as the fundamentals to data engineering. Hopefully I covered my mic there. Riley. Yeah, they get you. They get you bad. And, know, so basically the backstory on this.

Bradley Bernard (22:34)
Gotta love an O 'Reilly book.

Bennett Bernard (22:42)
I don't plan to like know everything in that book. Okay. But the real reason, and we've talked about this a little bit on the pod is, you know, the emphasis on like using modern tools, the technology to like solve the accounting problem for companies. And I've said before that, you know, basically a lot of accounting, not all of it, but of a lot of accounting, especially at like larger companies that have like different systems, like you, maybe you have Stripe, maybe you have

you know, like net suite as like a, general ledger system, you have all these different systems and a lot of accounting these days is moving data from that system, doing a little bit of manipulation and then putting it into your general ledger, into your financials, which at the end of the day, if you boil it down, is like a data engineering problem at the end of the day. Right now, accountants are very human involved, manually involved in that, where we take it from the system, do the manipulation in Excel or Google sheet.

Bradley Bernard (23:30)
Mm

Bennett Bernard (23:38)
and then upload it into the next system. And so, you know, it's, my strong belief and this is not, you know, unique to me. This is a very, it's popular, but not as popular as it probably should be, but it, but it, you know, it's, gaining traction is that, you know, there is better ways to do that. And, know, in my opinion, data engineering, the whole process of like extract transform load is exactly where I think that's going to head at least a big part of it. And so, yeah, so I got this book. it's a pretty light book.

I'm actually a couple of chapters in already. I got it the other day. You probably can't tell how thick it is. Yeah, it's not very thick. It's more like a

Bradley Bernard (24:12)
My guess is 190 pages.

Bennett Bernard (24:17)
No way off to lay off

Bradley Bernard (24:18)
Yeah, I don't read I just I'm a digital guy

Bennett Bernard (24:21)
Yeah, it's like 400 pages. Yeah, but yeah, it goes into some good stuff. think Let's see if I can find a couple of things the chapters. I like highlighted to go into

Bradley Bernard (24:23)
Really? Okay. There you go.

Are you a bookmark kind of guy or do you take notes on the side? What's your kind of thought process on approaching that?

Bennett Bernard (24:39)
Yeah, I do take notes and I highlight a lot. So like APIs, I have stuff on APIs and like transaction databases and stuff like that. yeah, like let me show you. I don't have good ones in this one, but. In this book, there's another book I'm reading. You actually can see my bookmark here. There you go. And my wife makes the bookmark. That's why it's got the pink fluff on top. So this book is building a story.

Bradley Bernard (24:57)
Mm

Bennett Bernard (25:06)
brand. So it's about like marketing. And, know, I think personally, maybe it's just the accountant brain in me that marketing is like, to me seems like the hardest part about running a business. Like, and you can probably relate to this too, like you might build an amazing product, you might offer an amazing service, but if no one finds it doesn't matter that no one cares. And so like marketing, something that I realized is probably a blind spot for me. And just, you know, I had like one marketing class in college and then I, know,

Bradley Bernard (25:16)
Mm

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (25:33)
I knew I wasn't going be a marketing major, so I just did what I needed to do and moved on. So definitely a blind spot.

Bradley Bernard (25:37)
It's funny you say that. Yeah. Cause when I was at Laricon, I had described the journey of me working at companies, then starting my own thing. And surprisingly enough, there was a lot of people in that camp that, you know, we're at a company that did freelance or that started to do their own thing. the common theme that I had told people that I struggled with was marketing and the resonation on the other side of engineer to engineer talking about the success of their business and their products boils down to effective marketing and product placement and all these little things that.

you think are an afterthought, but once you get in the trenches, you built out this cool product. If you haven't thought about it, it really comes and hits you on the head and just say, you know, how are going to pull through this? Cause so many people I talked to you kind of ping pong back and forth said, I got enough money from this job for me to go start my own venture. Didn't go as well as I wanted. So I hop back to a job and I've only worked at companies and this is my first venture.

you know, doing things on my own that I have signed a job offer. So we'll be starting shortly, but you know, it could be something in my future that I do go back and forth on. sounds a little bit unstable to go so often. And I think the more responsibility and dependencies I have, makes it less likely, but I like, I applauded everybody that, you know, told me their story said they were fighting and I think they recommended a few different marketing books. I don't remember them off the top of my head. I think there is the SAS playbook, from Rob Walling that was

more or less modeled after a different book. can't remember the name, but it was like 16 ways or 30 ways how to market things or different strategies that you could apply to your product to see if it worked out for you. And I thought if I had that book, you know, when things were starting for slip by expenses or chatty Butler products that I think are built correctly, but might not have the perfect marketing plan. And when I say perfect marketing plan, there was never a marketing plan. So that's probably the first step that I didn't do super well on, but I think these books.

highlight things that you never think of and give you like the first step into that journey. So you talking about doing the marketing book makes so much sense. I think it's like, it's one of those things you don't want to say you're not good at because you kind of, the one you say that it speaks it into existence. And so as I built these apps and websites, I thought, I'll get to it later. But really when I stopped and think about it or thought about it, I was like, yeah, I'm just not good at this. And I hate to say I'm not good at something because I'm always trying to be good at stuff and marketing.

Since I spent no effort, didn't prioritize it, I suck at it. And I'm happy to say that now, although it's a sad fact when I was deeper in the trenches.

Bennett Bernard (27:59)
Yeah, well and it's interesting too because I feel like marketing, you know, the more I understand it now and I guess reading this book and I have another book, I grabbed another book here that I'm reading. It's called The Accountant Marketer. So marketing like for accounting professionals.

Bradley Bernard (28:16)
You gotta write one of those.

Bennett Bernard (28:18)
yeah, I know I, yeah, that's a that's a good, point. We'll talk about it later. but, you know, basically it seems to me like a lot of marketing is like compounding, like you kind of, you know, you can buy leads and you can buy like Facebook ads and that might get you some traction. But in reading both of these books and they both have different philosophies are not related. They're just books about marketing. one's very general. The building a story brand is a pretty general book.

and then the other one is very specific to accountants, course, but both of them kind of describe in a way of just like this, you have to kind of compound, you have to kind of do it for a while, be consistent and be patient. Like you don't go viral overnight in most cases. Now some people do, of course, but like the 99 % of the population of products or services, they don't go viral and it just takes time and know, consistency. And then also the right message too. But, yeah, I, I'm a big fan of reading.

books and trying to like use those to get better, like just for my own personal self. The one thing it's funny, there's some classic books, right? Like the seven habits of highly effective people. I'm sure you've heard of that one. There's yeah, I have that one, but there's certain ones like the seven habits. There's a few other ones or atomic habits is a good one, too, by James Clear. When I read those books.

Bradley Bernard (29:26)
Mm -hmm.

how to win friends and influence people, right?

Mm

Bennett Bernard (29:41)
It'll be like, you know, go do something like, kind of put this into play like and it gets you all motivated and you're like, I got to stop reading. go do this. And so I get through very little of the books because I'm like, wait, this isn't effective. Like I need to go do this. You know, like, yeah, it's then it kind of stresses me out. I'm like, I'm not doing this. I got to go do this right now. And so like some of those books, honestly, they're great books, but I got to like take a chill pill when I read them sometimes because.

Bradley Bernard (30:02)
Yeah, the compounding effect, think in your head makes so much sense, but to be able to be that consistent is so hard. Like diet, exercise, like improving on anything could be stretching, whatever. It's, makes sense to do like a little bit every day, even building a business, like a little bit every day. But you know, once you slip up on one day, know, maybe I won't do it the next day. It's like so hard to make that happen. I think it's easy on paper and it gets you excited when you read those books, but really pulling that off, like the 75 hard challenge or these challenges that really.

Bennett Bernard (30:09)
Mm

Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (30:31)
Holds you to your commitments at a long duration. Those are so hard. I've never done one, but I can only imagine like the mental fortitude it takes to set those goals, go hard on them for, you know, many months and then see that pay off. So I'm sure once you got there, if things worked out, you would be in a good spot. I think when I started my marketing efforts for split my expenses, I told myself like, Hey, February is going to be the month of marketing. And I think I spent maybe like two days on it, writing a few blog posts, researching stuff. And I was so.

not excited about it in a way that was like, I'm doing my own business. I want to have fun and do things I like. Yet I'm sitting here looking at marketing like a giant elephant in the room. That's going to make my life hell. And I think I had substituted the happiness of my day -to -day work with like the success of the business, which can work on the short term, but doesn't work on the long term where, you know, these, the stuff that you have to do, although not exciting, you can't put it off forever. And so I think I probably spent, I don't know, a week max working on things. And at the end of that, I was

both disappointed in myself and also just frustrated at not really understanding the results of marketing. Cause it's something you put in that effort, but you don't see till later and that later it could be months. could be, you know, super long tail efforts. When I'm coding something, I can build it, test it, deploy it all within a day or a week. And I know there's value added there, but the marketing side, that was really hard to wrap my head around because I don't have the skills. don't.

Bennett Bernard (31:39)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (31:56)
really evaluate things that well in terms of if I wrote a new blog post, am I getting more users? Am I getting more paid users? It didn't feel as connected to the core business metrics and probably could have a better job there, but the mental disconnect of me putting an effort and seeing a result and the marketing side of things felt really off and I didn't really love that.

Bennett Bernard (32:14)
Yeah. Well, you know, it's it's almost like. You could hire out to do those kinds of things, like if you really say, do not find any enjoyment out of this, like this actually stresses me out. I hate this as a matter of fact, then that's a good thing to like hire out. But then, of course, you need to pay someone for and a lot of a lot of businesses, especially when they're starting, don't have that cash to do that. But yeah, you know, I'm curious to hear. another book that I have like on my reading list, I haven't started it yet, but

Bradley Bernard (32:21)
Mm

Mm

Bennett Bernard (32:41)
I listened to a podcast where the author was talking about the book and it's a very popular book. It's called a company of one, I think is what it's called. And it's by Paul Jarvis. I want to say, and I'll link it in the show notes here if I get anything wrong. But basically it's about, you know, this, this person who was working in corporate, he might've been a marketing person, actually, if I remember correctly. he was like working in a corporate environment and he just wasn't his lifestyle that he wanted. And so he left and

started his own business, but was very intentional about like not growing it beyond a certain amount to where like it would stress him out. So basically like not having employees keeping it, you know, at a, like a meaningful number of revenue for him to be able to live off of with his family, but like not be obsessed with growing it. And, you know, it's interesting to hear that kind of thought because again, a lot of companies and know, startup companies, of course want to grow, grow, grow, you know, you want to.

get a nice valuation if you want to sell and get a nice million dollar exit. Great. Or if you just want to, know, there's no ceiling on your income when you have your own business. So you can just keep growing, growing, growing. But it's interesting to hear him talk about that being like an intentional frame of mind or like a point of view when he was building his business to not like do that and not let that consume him. And I'm curious, as you were kind of going up, doing the solopreneur journey, had you thought about like lifestyle at all? Were you just like

I actually want make products and like this is my only like thought process at the moment.

Bradley Bernard (34:12)
Yeah, I definitely thought about it. I think the VC funding route is a different life and it doesn't fit with a company of one approach of lifestyle business. It's kind of the VC funding is you have a large bet. It's B2B, lots of opportunity, lots of obstacles that you could make a ton of money like the Ubers, the Airbnb's of the world where, you know, there's a large market. When I was building the stuff that I was building, I realized these aren't VC funded.

idea. So I could either pivot and choose one that would fall under that category and try to find interest there or keep doing what I'm doing, understanding that the market is smaller. The impact can be less, but I can have a great product in a smaller niche area. So I think I thought about, you know, going this larger company route, but I really wanted to see what things would look like if I kept it within my reins and only built stuff by myself without having external pressure.

I had the internal pressure. wanted to build cool stuff. I didn't need extra pressure. And I think at the end of the day, when it came down to finances, if things worked out, I'd be well off on my lifestyle business, which is, you know, non VC funded. I didn't need the big hit. think the folks that go the VC route are looking to have more fame and notoriety. And I think some ideas lend themselves to that. So it's not a hundred percent that, but I could care less if nobody knew my name, but they worked, they loved my product and tons of people used it.

That's where I found the joy and the value versus being like, know, Bradley just raised 5 million in a series a here's like a photo of me in a leather jacket with my two co -founders, you know, in the San Francisco vibe. Don't really care about that. I think it could be fun, but it's not. I don't look up to that saying that's our one to be you. So I was very much with the products that I had, I knew the opportunity scope was limited to not fit in that. So could I have an idea that could fit in it? Maybe and likely, but I wanted to see what things look like.

Talking about Company One, I was just Googling while you were mentioning it. Paul Jarvis was like, I know that name from somewhere. And he is the co -founder of Fathom Analytics. So shout out to them. It's Jack, Ellis, and Paul Jarvis. They created a Google Analytics alternative because Google Analytics sucks. And I think GA4, which came out a few months ago, made collecting data and working with the data really hard. And Fathom Analytics is like a easier.

Analytics platform that these folks have built together and they have their own podcast. think it's called like above board that they do Multiple episodes on so yeah when he had mentioned that I was like Paul Jarvis It's a very unique name So I to see if it's the Paul Jarvis that I had seen on Twitter and on Fathom and so I googled Paul Jarvis Fathom landed on the page and says hey He's also the author of company of wants. It's like cool. See I quick quick shout out to them I think they're a cool company if you're looking for analytics

in the Indie space. I think it's like 15 bucks a month for a decently large package. If you have to pay more than that, you're probably doing well already, so it shouldn't really matter. But yeah, it makes sense because from the Twitter conversations that Jack has, the co -founder of Fathom with Paul, it really seems like they're trying to keep it to just themselves and build out a small team that makes great revenue and profit and building in public too. Their CTO or co -founder Jack does a bunch of cool stuff in public with Wairvel.

Bennett Bernard (37:16)
Mm

Yeah.

Yeah, that's crazy. I didn't know that. And at first, I was going to be like, I feel betrayed. Because if Alium Analytics is a company of more than one, I feel betrayed, Paul. But it sounds like they're keeping it small. So I guess we can give them a pass on that. Yeah, that's a small world. Yeah, so I mean, it's interesting. think, again, getting to that growth and when people leave their jobs, it's like they want to just make up

Bradley Bernard (37:30)
Mm -hmm.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (37:51)
what they were making. I'm sure that was part of the case for you, but then also, you know, want to go further and be more successful. But, you know, it's interesting hearing people who, especially if people who leave for like the lifestyle reason, you know, and it's always, you know, I always hope, and I've seen this on LinkedIn and in my own network of people doing that. And you always cheer for them because usually if it's, you know, for a lifestyle reason, that's like, that's most important thing at the end of the day. People are happy and content and fulfilled. And so you always want to see people in that.

Bradley Bernard (38:16)
Mm

Bennett Bernard (38:20)
being successful in that kind of pursuit for sure.

Bradley Bernard (38:23)
Yeah, the trend I've seen recently on LinkedIn has been insane. Like Feepee is leaving to start their own thing. Engineers leaving across the board. I've seen so many different engineering levels or even non -engineering roles really starting their own companies. I don't think I was early because people have been starting forever, but I think the wave of folks that, you know, if you see a coworker leave and start their own company, like, that can become more of a reality for me. Like it's not that far off. And I think it's kind of cascaded to an effect where

Bennett Bernard (38:29)
Mm.

Bradley Bernard (38:50)
Lots and lots of people are doing it. think Gen .ai is ripe and all these new models are coming out that people feel really empowered and excited about building. Then seeing the people next to them making that leap of faith gives kind of that ammunition to say, you know, it's possible for me too. yeah, every, I don't know, every month maybe on LinkedIn, I'll see a post that pops up on my feed that, know, XYZ starting their company. I take a look at their profile. They're at Big Tech or other, you know, known tech companies. I'm sitting there like, that's awesome because

When I started my career in 2017, I don't think I saw that as much. People were very happy with like, I'm going to go retire at Facebook or Google, not do anything crazy. And I think people now are taking that risk to go try something out. Because there's not an AI revolution every so often. This feels like a unique moment. And I think people are capitalizing on that. And yeah, like for me, I'm going back to a corporate life.

I had tried my best to get there. I don't think it's a closed door per se, but it was definitely harder once you get there than what you imagined. But I think bringing that excitement, energy and opportunity and giving it your 100%, 110%, that's like all you can ask for. So I'm kind of following along silently as a follower for some of these stories and companies and projects. And I know it's just cool. It's cool to see that energy. And I think I'm really happy for all these other people that are.

Bennett Bernard (39:46)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (40:08)
doing that because it's not a small decision. It really changes a lot of things. But at the same time, like I found a job 12 months later, you can easily hop back into it if you spend that time to prep for interviews.

Bennett Bernard (40:20)
Yeah, yeah, and at the end of the day, you know, try and maximize your lifestyle, your own happiness, because life can be short for sure. Yeah, cool. One other thing I've been kind of working on is Camtasia. So Camtasia, I'm not sure if for those aren't familiar Camtasia is like a screen recording, like software and like editor. And honestly, there's a bunch more stuff that I don't know completely what it does, but what I'm

Bradley Bernard (40:28)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (40:46)
why I'm bringing it up is because I don't know how to use it I'm learning how to use it. So I'm trying to record some more like screen sharing videos of me actually doing some of this accounting automation stuff with cursor actually. So we talked about cursor last podcast or two ago. And so I actually started making videos about this and I was just using Visual Studio. That's my preferred text editor and I was doing it in Python. And so I have a bunch of videos where I've

kind of walk through and done these kind of like, OK, here's a script. Here's what it does. We're going to show how we can make an Excel file and put it with all this data. so walking through all that. then I thought it'd be a great idea, since we've been having these conversations and since the kind of release and adoption of Cursor for me, to do it in Cursor and basically walk through the script and then say, OK, now we can ask Cursor and show you how quickly it can be done, even without needing to understand all the fundamentals first.

What I think people need to understand, and this is true for any skill, but speaking as an accountant who learned some programming, like you don't need to understand all the computer science. You don't need to understand like memory management and all that kind of stuff to be able to build cool things. Like, sure, if you love it and you go deep into that field, you will learn it. But like you don't need to get do that to get started. And so I'm trying to like walk that line in my videos of like.

Hey, this is what this is. This is how you can use it. You can use Cloud, or can use Cursor to kind of ask it questions. And look, it'll do that code for us. But if you want to know what a tuple is, and what a dictionary is, and the underlying API behind all that, there's lots of better videos out there for that. But if you want to learn how to transfer data from one Excel to the other Excel, I can do that for you. You know what I mean? So I've been really enjoying.

Bradley Bernard (42:31)
And who doesn't love that? I feel like that's the get stuff done mentality. When I was building web apps long time ago, I just was Googling the problem that I had. And I'm hoping with your videos, it'll solve the need of, I want to do something in Excel in Python. And like, just, I'm going to land on Ben's video and watch it. I'm not going to be bothered by like the memory and all these technical aspects that yeah, you can understand and they'll help you in the longterm, but you just want to get stuff done. You know, that's, that's the fun part about programming.

Bennett Bernard (42:36)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a distinct part I remember in the video that I was working on where, so in Python, there's a library called SLSX writer. and you know, in the code using that library, it's like, you know, workbook is a variable called a workbook. And you say equals, you know, capital like W workbook, cause it's coming from the library, from the SLSX writer library. So I was kind of, you know,

long story short, trying to explain, well, this is coming from the library, and then it's making this object. But I'm like, you know what? If you are interested in that, go look it up, because they can find a better explanation online, surely, or another video that explains Python libraries. But if you want to just get this thing to work and are less concerned with the why immediately, then just keep watching this, and we'll go through it. So yeah, walking that fine line. And actually, one of the samples

was, you we have a friend, shout out to Tyler. He had like a real case example of like he had like one sheet that he had like update once a month or once a quarter with like this other sheet. And, know, he was kind of doing it manually, like V look up being V look up being things from one place to the other. And so, you know, went into that, wrote a script that kind of does it all. I didn't cursor and I just said, hey, make this better.

add some comments, explains why it does what it does, and go through the steps, and ship it over to him, and it works. It's amazing. I'm just like, that's a good sample walkthrough to do, because that's a very common exercise that people do in Excel. And if we can just show how to do that programmatically, then maybe someone will find it useful.

Bradley Bernard (44:36)
How many lines of code did that end up being?

Bennett Bernard (44:38)
I'll tell you, I'll tell you Bradley. Let me see here, we're this up live.

Bradley Bernard (44:41)
Keep it minimal, less is more, folks.

Bennett Bernard (44:45)
So I added comments in there. So it's 26 lines of code with comments. There's six steps. Import pandas, the pandas library. Read the Excel files. There's two Excel files. Merge the Excel files in code. then, yeah, it's pretty basic. yeah, excuse me, 26 lines of code. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (44:51)
With comments? that's short.

That's cool.

Bennett Bernard (45:09)
Yeah, that kind of stuff is just, you know, fun. made like a little read me markdown file too. That like explains, you know, like you have to save the file in a certain spot and like, you know, it's going to be looking at based on the file names, make sure the file names are, you know, actually what they say they are in the code. So, yeah, it's there's tools out there that are super powerful and people have a fear to learn new things, but you know, they need to shelf that and realize that they're more capable than they probably give themselves credit for. And even if they don't necessarily want to learn it.

Bradley Bernard (45:30)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (45:38)
Just like you mentioned with the kind gen AI revolution, like now they probably should start learning these things just because it's going to be quicker than ever to kind of get your skill set outdated if you're staying on top of something and constantly learning, I think.

Bradley Bernard (45:51)
Yeah, it's like when I was looking for a job, there was lots of gen AI, like prompt engineering roles, which didn't even exist a few years ago, at least weren't mainstream. And now you can be a software engineer working on mobile apps, working on web apps, whatever. But now you can be a prompt engineer. And it's this whole study where optimizing what you get out of the AI. So pretty fascinating. And the pay is great. I could see it, people getting really into that and actually making great money with it.

Bennett Bernard (46:13)
Mm

Mm hmm. Yeah. Similarly, there's been, you know, if you just look on LinkedIn these days, it'll say like there's a lot of jobs called like accounting transformation manager, accounting system manager, finance, finance, transformation manager. And basically it's like this recognition that like these are systems that, you know, finance and accounting teams use are getting more complicated, but they're getting more like modern and like, you know, web based or cloud based and like they have APIs and stuff like that. So.

I think there is in companies, you know, across the world, really, there's like a recognition with that role that like, hey, like finance, like needs some kind of engineering to not just, you know, traditional software engineering. And even roles like, you know, finance, like financial analytics or finance analytics or, you know, like financial engineers. Like there's a whole, you know, you can kind of go down the rabbit hole of like

The finance world and a lot of companies like needs an update to or needs a refresh to and I think you start to see that position. I've seen that position more and more, you know, as of late than I probably did three or four years ago. So it's definitely trending in that direction.

Bradley Bernard (47:29)
It's a good time to get close to AI in any way you can. If it's on the job, outside the job, like chatting daily with Claude or OpenAI's chat GPT. I think the more exposure you get to that, the better well suited you are for the changing market. That's maybe not coming this year, but it's really getting close. Like OpenAI just dropped a new model yesterday. And their whole pitch on it was that it has complex reasoning and logic. So traditionally you'd have to prompt the AI with a really good prompt.

Bennett Bernard (47:32)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (47:57)
So you have to say, this is a problem that you're looking to tackle, act as this kind of person, think carefully step by step, recheck your work. So basically these phrases I would instruct a human to make sure that they're doing things carefully and open AI release their model. I think it's called O1 and O1 mini. And these models actually flip the script a little bit and say, give me a simple prompt. So, you know, categorize an expense by description, which is something I do on split my expenses.

Don't dive in deeply on how that's done. The model itself will take your simple task and make sure it produces a high quality output internally. And so I think what they do is they take your prompt, make sure, you know, they run through a bunch of layers and filtering to make like a crazy prompt under the hood. And then that gets evaluated in a pretty deeply logical way. That gives you really good output. I think the main difference here is cost. Cost goes back up.

And inference time, so how long it takes for you to get an answer from the AI is much longer than like the traditional way. So it's mostly used for really complicated logic problems. Like, you know, Hey, you have three people, one went to the store, one's taller than the other, blah, blah. Like these conclusions based on other data. Whereas if you're asking it to do a simple task, like categorize an expense or, you know, categorize something or summarize something. Not.

that complicated and probably like the GPT -4 model is probably best for that. I think just exciting times having AI being a focus and then these companies neck and neck releasing a really cool model, a really cool logic model, a really fast and efficient performance model on the Google side. the competition is fierce as ever. think OpenAI came out swinging yesterday and showed up in a big way. And I think every time these announcements come out,

It's cool to see that this is only the beginning. know they say it every time, but truly, whatever they released today has hopefully been under wraps for the past six to 12 months. And so we're kind of getting the previous generation while they train the new one, which is so cool.

Bennett Bernard (49:48)
Mm

Yeah. So one thing that I'm glad you mentioned open AI because I saw something that went kind of semi -viral and viral in my circle on X was if you ask open AI how many Rs are in the word strawberry. Have you seen this? Yeah. Okay. It insists that there's only two. so you can and like it will not budge off that at least in my experience. So like

Bradley Bernard (50:09)
Hmm. I have seen it, yes.

Bennett Bernard (50:20)
I've had like a fallen conversation where it's like, okay, spell all the letters of strawberry and I'll go through and it'll say the three Rs and see say, okay, how many Rs are in strawberry? And it says two. It's like, no, you literally just spelled out three. So it's just funny. I mean, it's still undoubtedly a super powerful technology and it's not going anywhere. It's going to be coming more and more prevalent, of course, but stuff like that. You go, what the heck? Like, how does it even, how could that trip it up? You know what I mean? Like how could that trip it up among all the other incredible things it can do? You know?

Bradley Bernard (50:49)
Yeah, I think the, the consensus there was that there's, takes your text that you type in and then it tokenize it. So it takes like three or more characters and like chunks it up. That then goes into the raw model as like numbers or vectors or integers, and it outputs the answer. I think the tokenizer is a big system component to the LLM and that strawberry query like highlights the tokenizer is kind of internals in a way that

Bennett Bernard (50:59)
Hmm.

Mm

Bradley Bernard (51:17)
as a human when you look at it clearly there's three but the tokenizer reads it as two. And so there's certain questions like you mentioned that each new model release people are kind of throwing these questions that should be easy but aren't to see the intelligence upgrade over time. And I think there is a model that came out from this guy maybe two weeks ago and it answered it correctly. And that was kind of the flag to say, my God, this model is better. Like what are they doing that they can answer three Rs in strawberry on the first go, you know.

Bennett Bernard (51:30)
Yeah.

Mm

Bradley Bernard (51:47)
And it's just funny that these things exist because I would never think of them, but somewhere someone came up with these very specific prompts that pry at the underlying knowledge and data and storage and mechanisms that give you the weak spots of the LLM. And then as these LLMs improve, do those weak spots exist by just retrying that query on each generation? So yeah, there's a few of those out there that I've seen that are very interesting to look at.

Bennett Bernard (52:12)
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. The tokenization thing, you know, cause I'm again, I'm not technical person. So I was like, how does that work? But, it's just seem to hear the actual like under the hood theory about what's going on and like the tech side of why it's doing that.

Bradley Bernard (52:26)
Yeah, I don't know if it's a hundred percent. That's just what I've heard. Again, I'm not, I'm more of an application developer, but I do try to dig in, you know, where I see fit, but that's, that's kind of the theory, I guess. And there was different models that came out from folks and each company has its own tokenizer. So if someone has a model say based on Claude, you know, for Anthropic or based on open AI, you can kind of understand the responses based on the tokenizer. And so those certain queries give you access to what the tokenizer behaves like.

So if you're given some random model, you can ask it the strawberry question. If it doesn't get it right, maybe it's not Claude or maybe it's not open AI. like there's certain questions that give you a deeper insight in the tokenizer. Each of the companies have a different one such that you're able to kind of get a feeling for where this model might exist. Cause I, talked about it while ago, but there's LMSYS this leaderboard where they rank LLM outputs.

Bennett Bernard (53:08)
Mm

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (53:20)
And what companies have been doing now, OpenAI in specific, and even Google have been putting these new models into this arena and they don't name them. They give them GPT -2 unnamed chatbot. And so anyone can upload it with any name and these models are scoring really well and these benchmarks and people are saying, who is this? Like, is this Google? Is this Facebook? Is this OpenAI? Who put this out there?

And then, you know, the companies come out after two to three weeks and say, Hey, it was us, you know, we tested it for three weeks in their arena and it scored highly and here's our data. But I think what people try to do in the meantime is ask it these specific queries to say, is this open AI because they're tokenized or access way, is this Google, cetera. And so, yeah, it's kind of interesting seeing people go deep in the weeds to get this extra data or information out from these models that really isn't supposed to be there. But, you know, as an LLM, you do have raw behaviors and capabilities that

can be kind of forced out given the right query and that's what these people are doing.

Bennett Bernard (54:16)
Yeah, cool. Very cool. Interesting stuff. Awesome. Well, let's start wrapping this up. I know you had something you wanted to chat about as far as the interview. So why don't you take us away with that.

Bradley Bernard (54:25)
Yeah. Yeah. So if people are still around, hopefully you waited this long. So, big news drum roll, please. I accepted a job offer at Snapchat. So I'll be joining in October end of October. I'll actually be moving back to the Bay area. Had a short stint down here in Orange County, moved down to Orange County in January, then actually heading back up to Bay area, specifically, I kind of San Jose area, in October. So yeah, it was.

A wild ride. I'm very, very happy I got here. think the company is definitely an exciting spot to be with really good mobile engineers. So when I started my job search, I really didn't know what I was looking for. I think I say that in both a positive and a negative way. I had started applying to places, you know, from startups with eight people to, you know, big tech like Meta and Google. As I got through that process, I think...

If I pull up my stats, give me one second. I threw it through Claude saying, hey, you know, here's my interview spreadsheet that I had kept track of. So I named the company, the location, kind of the stage in which I was at, if I got an offer or not and what that all looked like. I threw it through Claude while we were talking to kind of give me some facts to share with the POGs. I thought it'd be interesting. And so I'll just kind of give you the high level point. So it told me.

Bennett Bernard (55:18)
Yeah, sure.

Bradley Bernard (55:41)
which I'm not gonna fact check, but it's probably decently correct. I applied to 54 different companies and 54 is a ton. I've never applied to that many in my whole life. And I think partly it was due to because I'm down in Orange County, there wasn't a bunch of tech down here. So it was remote, it was LA, it was Bay area, which given all those different buckets allowed me to do a lot. But also at the same time, I didn't know if I wanted a startup, I didn't know if I wanted a mid -size company, I didn't know if I wanted big tech. So that 54,

which sounds mind bogglingly large now that I look at it, you know, came over time. So it's not like I shock and immediately, but it was something that I eventually got to. And so I started applying. looks like, let me pull up the doc. June 19th was my first application. So like, you know, 80 days ago or so and

I definitely went in waves like applied to the first wave and maybe, you know, eight companies waited to see the next week kind of went further and further. Yeah, it was, it started a while ago. it's, it's been a long time looking at other facts. So, Claude pointed out referrals. So on my job application spreadsheet, I usually don't go for referrals cause I, don't know. I feel some intrinsic value to be like, Hey, I cold applied and I got in. I think it's a stupid way to do it when I.

Bennett Bernard (56:59)
Hmph.

Bradley Bernard (56:59)
talk about it out loud, but something in me feels like, I made it, you know, not having to rely on other people. And in this job market, in this day and age, there's less positions, more cost cutting. think getting that foot in the door through an acquaintance, ex -co -worker, friend, family, et cetera, I would definitely lean on it. So I think I got maybe eight referrals and those eight referrals were to companies that were pretty established and companies that I wanted to be at.

Definitely, definitely lean on that. Claude is also pointing out I had a mix of rapid progress and slow progress. And to break that down, I had interviews where I'd apply to the company, maybe June 19th. They would reach out to me June 20th saying, hey Bradley, let's get you on the phone with a recruiter. I'd go through their full process, you know, maybe in like two to three weeks or essentially they were moving really, really fast.

Bennett Bernard (57:44)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (57:51)
On the other hand, it outlined slow progress because I updated my sheet yesterday. There's a company that I had applied to in June that reached out to me today or yesterday to set up a recruiter call. So I'd emailed them and said, Hey, thanks for reaching out. have more than wrapped up my job search. I even sent them like a funny dig. was like, I think you guys might've been the slowest to respond. Everybody in my job search, but I appreciate it. You know, maybe next time.

Bennett Bernard (58:10)
Mm

Hehehehe

Bradley Bernard (58:20)
And it was just crazy to see the speeds and velocities of like hiring precedents and trying to fill a role because some companies were on top of it. Like the smaller companies move really fast and I value that. And the bigger companies were, you know, hiring committee, 15 different approvals, you know, got to go through CTO, CEO, et cetera, which works out sometimes, but at the end of the day, you know, it can be a little bit much. so yeah, rapid progress and slow progress. The next bullet point outlines is multiple offers. So I think across the.

Bennett Bernard (58:28)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (58:49)
54, you know, around that ballpark, I think I had maybe eight or 10 offers, which was really good. I, I'm happy to say that I did a ton of interview prep. I did a ton of interviews that helped me with future interviews. So part of that 54 was becoming familiar and understanding how to do an interview well. And each time you kind of relearn that skill. so that probably earlier chunk of those interviews, some were

Bennett Bernard (59:07)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (59:14)
more on the practice side, but lots of them were pretty serious and understanding where I wanted to go. So at the end of the day, had a really good handful of companies, both remote LA and Bay Area that I did have offers with.

Bennett Bernard (59:26)
Nice.

Bradley Bernard (59:26)
And then, yeah, I have a few more. I'll pause there if you want to jump in. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I, another one that Claude kind of pointed out was diverse roles. So again, in my job search of today, it was remote LA Bayer. It was mobile, which we're talking more iOS application side or web. the third one that added to the mix was react native. So I picked up react native to work on for split my expenses to get this mobile app out the door. react native is important because I get iOS and Android in one code base.

Bennett Bernard (59:30)
No, no, no, continue.

Bradley Bernard (59:54)
So usually when I do my job search, it's iOS only. This time I added web, given I've done a of Laravel recently and React Native. So not only across locations, but actual job responsibilities, I included like two additional ones. So that gave me even more opportunities and it was great. I think it was good to do that because it kind of gave me a feeling of what my life would be like if I did more Laravel or did more PHP or did more TypeScript and React and React Native. And ultimately I did land.

at Snapchat with more of a specialized iOS role, which I think is what I'm looking for, but it took me a while to get there. and then it talked about persistence, which I like this one, despite facing several rejections, you pursue new opportunities and to break down the rejections a little bit applying to 54 spots, getting 10 offers. It sounds like I got slaughtered. just to be honest, lots of these roles, I had felt like these companies weren't fully hiring at times. So I had applied to roles.

that were open maybe on LinkedIn for two months. Maybe heard back within a week or two saying, hey, we moved on to other candidates. And to be frank, my other job searches, I was always given at least an interview. I felt like a lot of companies in this round either weren't hiring or didn't see me qualified in a way that made me very confused or, know, I think letting people through the door is the first step. If you fail the interview, that's totally fine. It happens to everybody. But there's a large chunk that made me scared that this job search was different.

And I like how Claude pointed out saying, hey, you got rejected a lot. And if I could probably break those down out of all the rejections, maybe 80, 90, 93 % were this role is filled, we're not hiring or we found a better candidate. All of which it's really hard to say where things went wrong. And so having a bit of grit and moving through that was really important for this job search. Talking about the other side.

Bennett Bernard (1:01:40)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (1:01:47)
I'm not perfect. got a lot of great offers, which I'm very fortunate about and helped me get through the interview process and also make things a little bit difficult in a good way on how to choose. But I did fail interviews. I think off the top of my head, thinking back, probably at least four interviews that I failed between those four, which I'm super happy that it was only four or around that ballpark. Half of those are ones that I went in the interview, was excited and energized and just things didn't click either. You know, me translating.

Bennett Bernard (1:02:14)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (1:02:16)
the solution I had in my head to code didn't work out as I wanted or having that right solution just wasn't happening that day. And I would get out of those interviews thinking, you know, I didn't like that feeling. I'm sure they didn't like it either. I'm kind of struggling in real time over video to get something to work and it didn't work. And half of those were, I know I got rejected and that sucks, but that's life. And the other half were, I thought I did pretty well there. You know, I'm pretty sure I'm going to move past it. And then getting that rejection, it was like, you know, did I, did I not read that right? Like I'm.

Decently sure I did well, but you know for whatever reason they felt that a better candidate was there or I didn't perform in the same way that I thought because when you look back on things you have this kind of warped view when you're in the middle of it you like stress trying to get it done when you look back on it you're like did I actually do as well as I thought so I'd say probably 50 % I know I failed and it sucks, but it's okay and the other 50 % was a little bit of a surprise when I got their email rejection of being like Darn like that sucks. They're a company. I wanted to

Bennett Bernard (1:02:55)
Mm

Bradley Bernard (1:03:11)
to potentially work at and getting that rejection was like, I need to study more and do better there. But yeah, that was kind of all the things that Claude had pointed out. I think at the end of the day had like eight or 10 offers from some from big tech, some from startups, some from middle size. When I thought about all the offers that I had, lots of it came down to location. So staying in Orange County or moving to LA or Bay Area.

The other half is what would my career look like if I joined that company? Would I be more iOS focused? Would I be more web focused? And what is the work life balance? What are the products that I work that I'm working on? And what is the compensation? So those are probably the main factors. And talking with me and my fiance, it was really hard to understand if location would be kind of the end all be all because looking at 10 offers, it's hard to slice those and making a location slice makes my life way easier. Having everything be equal weighted.

Bennett Bernard (1:03:47)
Mm

Hm

Bradley Bernard (1:04:03)
while they're not fully equal at the end of the day, like that location piece is really hard. And I had kind of decided, I'll do remote. my starting the job search, I was, hey, I'm going to find a remote job. No ifs, ands or buts. Like that's my goal. Once I got down to the wire, I was thinking, there's really cool opportunities out here that I just want to go try out. And they're not in Orange County. They're not where I'm at today.

That was a really hard mental obstacle to kind of tell myself, you know, I kind of decided early as I got here, it's not really the case. So what do I do? Do I give up these good offers that aren't remote? Or do I take a remote offer that's still pretty good? Cause to be honest, there was really solid remote offers that I received that, you know, if I didn't get these other ones in the Bay or LA, it might've been a different story. But having lots of good things to pick from presented a problem, although a good one.

Bennett Bernard (1:04:35)
Mm

Mm

Bradley Bernard (1:04:56)
At the end of the day, super happy. Snapchat, think, aligns with my goals because they're iOS. They're building some really cool stuff. It's a very specialized team that I'm joining more in the media side of things. So something that I don't have a ton of experience in media, but I think with Gen .ai, like being media focused, like generating video, generating images, audio, et cetera, and also exploring something new on the infrastructure side. I've mostly been on the product side, but done a bunch of infrastructure for mobile apps throughout my kind of 10 years at LinkedIn and Meta.

Bennett Bernard (1:05:22)
Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:24)
And I think the team and the culture is really aligned with what I'm looking for where they're intense and they're focused, but they're not, you know, working weekends or anything crazy like that. So I think it's a good fit. It's hard to say. I've talked to a ton of people throughout each of these companies. I'm really excited, looking forward to it, but yeah, it's, been a hell of a few months. I had tons of rejections, laying on something I'm super, super excited about. So I'm more than happy to tell the pod that, you know,

What's done is done. I wrapped it by 2024 job search folder on my Mac, put in like all the details of the offer letter, all these documents, went through kind of the HR process of background check. Everything looks great. No surprises there, but yeah, kind of lined up to start end of next month. I'll be moving back to the Bay area, which is a little bit crazy, but you know, for this right opportunity, I think it makes sense. Then yeah, going to be out there working on some cool stuff in the Snapchat world. So.

Bennett Bernard (1:05:55)
Mm -hmm.

Mm -hmm.

Bradley Bernard (1:06:19)
Super, super, pow.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:20)
Yeah, very cool. Congratulations. It's exciting. yeah, I'm again, probably a huge relief to get it all done and close that book, I'm sure.

Bradley Bernard (1:06:23)
Thank you.

yeah, I had to celebrate and probably a few times because I just, it hit me multiple times like, wow, like I looked at my calendar for the past, I don't know, six weeks and it was onsite, onsite, onsite, interview, interview, interview. And I was used to it at the time. Like I built up the muscle and mental fortitude to get through it. But now looking at my calendar, I'm like, okay, I got to plan the move, got a few life events in the works, but looking forward past that, I'm not going to have, you know, crazy booked calendar. I'm going to be,

in office, you know, meeting with cool people. So I think I'm kind of getting through that hurdle and seeing the other side is an incredible feeling where, you know, I didn't know how long this job search would last. I think I said, I'd sign an offer and start in August and signed in September and starting in October. So clearly that was way off, but at the end of the day, happy with how things ended up.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:15)
Yeah, yeah, very cool. Awesome. All Well, let's let's wrap this up with our usual bookmark kind of recommendations here. So I'll start and I have to but I'll make them fast. So the first one is actually from a paid newsletter that I subscribe to by a doctor, not like an .D., but I think like a PhD. Could be wrong. Sorry.

But Dr. Julie Gerner, she has a newsletter called Ultra Successful on Substack. And basically she puts out a bunch of great stuff. But this is just the one I happened to most recently print out and highlight a bunch of stuff here. You can see it's upside down. So it just talks about it's called Get Your Fire Back, which is, you you can probably guess what it's about. It's kind of just about, you know, pushing through hurdles in your life. If you have like a roadblock or, you know,

You're just feeling like you need some traction. You know, you can't get past a certain hurdle. And so it's a great, great read talks about like the importance of, you know, see if there's something I highlighted here, seeing things like the glass half full approach, you know, kind of visualizing things in a certain way, super important and underrated doing something physical, you know, like don't neglect getting out there and going for a jog, a walk or going to the gym. And then also.

Bradley Bernard (1:08:27)
Mm -hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:08:31)
Another one that she had was like adopt a five minute rule, which is basically like no matter how busy you are to spend five minutes on that thing that you are really trying to do. Just spend five minutes. You know, if it's you don't get a lot done in that five minutes, but just spend five minutes on it. Yeah. And you'll just little by little you'll you'll make some progress on it. So that was a great one. Again, I'll link it. It's behind a paywall, but, I'll link to the sub stack and you can kind of, you know, see what she has out there. And then the last one I had was it's actually from a couple of weeks ago, but

Bradley Bernard (1:08:44)
I like that one.

Bennett Bernard (1:09:00)
It was a short book by a CPA, an accounting firm owner who she's kind of doing. And I don't know her personally, but just from her LinkedIn posts, kind of doing like a lifestyle accounting business. So her name is Erica Good, I think. And she wrote a book, I think it's called The 15 Hour Accountant. Let's look it up here. I don't want to misspeak to what it is.

Yeah, the 15 hour account. So it's like a short book and talks about like her journey into, you know, starting her own firm, but then kind of like Paul Jarvis and we had talked about earlier being like really intentional about, you know, how much time commitment that was for her. And so it was a great read. She was pretty transparent about like the numbers and like how long it took her to get there. So you always have putting yourself out there and being vulnerable when you share, especially numbers. That's like one of the things people really get.

You know guarded for and I can totally understand that but she kind of put it all out there and it really made a lot of Traction, I think in like the accountant community and so I'm part of a group like an online group that You know really read that book and had a lot of positive feedback about it So I'll try and find the link to that book as well. It was on her LinkedIn I think she just had like a download and it's again probably like 30 20 pages with some with some graphs and diagrams in there so

But I just loved how transparent it was and how like just thoughtful people again, this kind of goes back to people doing what they want to do for like for their own life and making their life fit them. So it was really cool, really cool read, I think.

Bradley Bernard (1:10:41)
That's cool. Nice. Yeah. I'll talk about mine. So mine's from X like always, and it's from Jonathan Para. And he's talking about mobile app paywalls. And so he created a thread on X outlining the kind of impact surface for mobile apps. So when you think about a mobile app, you're designing these features, pushing them out, iterating on them. But not a ton of people talk about having this paywall and iterating on the paywall. Iterating on a paywall means the design. So how you communicate.

the value of the features to the user. Also how you communicate the pricing, whether there's a trial or not, whether there's a weekly plan, a monthly plan, a yearly plan. So Jonathan works at Superwall. Superwall is a company that gives you a remote configurable paywall. And he had outlined he's on multiple calls a week with tons of important apps and all these apps are doing price testing. And kind of the TLDR of it is there's no one size fits all, which is a huge bummer.

looking at these things as a mobile app developer myself, it'd be great if I could apply the best practices and move on with my life so I don't sit there iterating on my paywall for six months. Unfortunately, what he told the world in this Twitter thread is that you could probably increase revenue by 30 or 40%, which is huge, but that's gonna give you at least two months of testing to get to that result. And again, there's no one size fits all. So definitely take a look at it, highlights what he has found successful.

And also what is kind of temporary. There's a few things that work. There's a few things that don't. And then his insights on what is working right now, which again, doesn't make it any easier, but at the end of the day, it's kind of on that marketing side. If you spend time to build a great product, but you don't have a marketing and conversion funnel, you got to spend time building that. And I think Jonathan gives you great insights to get you closer to having that maximum revenue from your mobile app.

Bennett Bernard (1:12:28)
Very cool, we'll check that out. Awesome. All right, well, good stuff, Brad. Good as always, happy to get back on. Again, life has been super busy for us, so happy to get back on the podcast train. yeah, we'll do all our linking in the show notes and everything, and then we'll get this one up there on the socials. Cool. Awesome. Take it easy, everybody.

Bradley Bernard (1:12:39)
Mm -hmm.

Sounds good.

Bye.