Breakeven Brothers

Bennett Bernard (00:11)
Everybody. We're back with episode 12 of the Break Even Brothers podcast. It had been a bit of a break just with the holidays, Thanksgiving, and all kinds of stuff and travel. So, first off, we wanted to say a quick apology for some of the audio issues that we had on the last episode. We were trying to do a bit of a roadshow. Brad was in North Carolina. We were committed to getting an episode out, so we thought that it would still work, and...

through the editing process, it sounded okay. And then I think once the final product was put together, the actual audio turned up, so bear with us on that one. But now we're back in the saddle, back home with all the right equipment, and ready to record again. So Brad, how's it going? How have you been since our last chat?

Bradley Bernard (00:53)
It's been good. I mean, I was pretty disappointed when the audio was bad because I brought the microphone from LA all the way to North Carolina. The one thing that I was missing was the stupid dongle. So I got there, and I went to go plug it in, realized I only had USB-C ports, and I kind of went around the house looking for, you know, where is the stupid dongle? And turns out I didn't have it. So I went back to AirPods. It seemed okay. And then, yeah, like you mentioned, once they put it out there, the quality kind of sucked. So apologies to all the fans. I got a ton of reach-outs asking what was going on. So I just want to set the record straight. We're back in the studio. You can see it's right behind me. Yeah. So, yeah, we're back. Things are good. A lot of holiday travel, kind of settling back in, moved back up here to the Bay Area, and then just had a stint of three or four weeks of travel. I'm finally back home and rested for December. So not planning to do too much in December—just kind of chill, hang out with friends. Yeah, it's going to be a calm, quiet, relaxing December just to kind of wrap up a crazy year.

Bennett Bernard (01:57)
So when we last spoke, it was right before Thanksgiving, and of course, right after that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So I've been talking with people that, you know, I interact with daily, and I always ask them, you know, what deals or any things you picked up during that kind of usual sale that we have.

Bradley Bernard (02:13)
Yeah, the one thing I was really looking forward to was getting new AirPods. So mine frequently cut out, and there are a bunch of like scratchy noises that pop up here and there. So on Black Friday, there was a 30% off deal for the AirPods Pro 2. And if you're like me, kind of like an Apple fan, but also just not keeping up with everything, it turns out there are new AirPods, I think a few months ago, but they renamed all the AirPods lines. It's really confusing. Like the new one that came out this year is like a cheaper model. The original AirPods Pro came out with a new version last year. So I was initially confused. I thought I bought this year's model on a fat discount, but it turns out I bought last year's model with a large discount. Although that's kind of the one I wanted because it's a more premium version. So yeah, I got that for Black Friday. I looked around for a lot of things, but honestly, Black Friday, I've really tried to buy like developer tools I use on a yearly basis. So I kind of wait for the sale. I'll get emails like a week or two before saying this is gonna expire. So I know exactly when to buy. I've almost been trained negatively to wait for these things to happen because I'm on that annual cycle around Black Friday. So outside of AirPods, honestly not too much. How about you?

Bennett Bernard (03:24)
Yeah, I actually got a bunch. I didn't like say, it's Black Friday, I'm gonna get all these things. But I just naturally like just purchased them all right around the same time. I got this chair. You're seeing a new chair. It actually came at the recommendation of yourself. Do you have that same chair? Because I know you're talking about getting a new one. Okay.

Bradley Bernard (03:40)
I do. I mean, now that I'm looking at it in the video, I think, is this the same? Okay. It looks similar, not exactly the same.

Bennett Bernard (03:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, full disclosure, I sat in Brad's chair, and I was like, this is really nice. And he gave me the hookup. So I got a new chair, and then I got two pairs of new shoes. The reason why that's significant for me is I work from home, and I live in Arizona, where it's always sunny and usually warm. Even when it's cold, it's usually sunny. So I'm in sandals more than I'd like to admit, probably. And I was like, I need some new shoes, like just to not wear sandals everywhere I go. So I got some new shoes, and then I got—I guess this is like an early Christmas present from my wife—but I got a new grill, which has been fun. I made some barbecue chicken out there today. Yeah, it's like a Weber, the Weber charcoal grill. I was kind of debating getting or like asking for, and then ultimately getting one of those more premium pellet grills.

Bradley Bernard (04:24)
Thanks.

Is it a circular grill?

Bennett Bernard (04:40)
With like a smoker and everything. But, you know, for those that know me really well, I'm not a good chef, and I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't definitely say I'm working on my chef progress, if you will. So I just couldn't justify dropping that kind of change on, like, you know, I don't know, I'm still kind of just getting my grips and getting my gears with, you know, cooking in general. So the Weber charcoal grill was a nice discount at Home Depot. I've used those before. I'm familiar with it. So I was like, let me just get a new one and get all the fancy like meat eater or meter temperature probes and stuff like that. So yeah, I got all decked out with that. So it's been fun. I've definitely glad I got that. I've been using it a bunch. So yeah.

Bradley Bernard (05:13)
That's cool.

That are tuned in on the YouTube stream, there's one thing you'll notice, not only the new chair, but the new lighting. So that's another thing I picked up on Black Friday. We wanted to do an unboxing on the podcast. Unfortunately, we didn't make it happen, so I thought, you know, probably it's better to set up before the podcast, but I got Ben for Christmas an Elgato light.

Bennett Bernard (05:29)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (05:43)
And so I bought one of these a while ago when I was kind of investing in my work-from-home setup. And it's this giant light that you can mount to your desk. As you can see, it's shining off my forehead right now, but it's pretty bright. You get the nice light. The one regret I have for buying my light, which is different than the model that I bought Ben, was there's a really powerful version and there's like a smaller key light version. And I had bought the really powerful version, and I regret it because people said, get two of them, stick one on your left, one on your right and have them at like medium intensity.

Bennett Bernard (06:10)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (06:13)
So I have one giant one that's just sitting in the corner of my desk, like blaring in my face, but it looks a lot better than having nothing like the shadows. Everything. It's just really unappealing being on like video calls. And so yeah, pick that up on Black Friday for a nice discount. And yeah, now his lighting setup is even better.

Bennett Bernard (06:30)
Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, I have the two lights. So have the one that you got me, the key light air. And then I had this other desk one that I've been using. And yes, I have them both, like, I don't know what the right word is, like 45 degrees from me. So, but yeah, I mean, you're right. Like I have the brightness on this like at a quarter of what it can be. Like, it gets pretty bright. I was like trying to tinker with it and...

Bradley Bernard (06:43)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (06:54)
I think you and I, if the light's too bright, we'll just be shiny. That's not really what we're trying to do. We'll look like wax figures.

Bradley Bernard (06:58)
Yeah.

You can change the color too. It goes, I think from blue to like orange, and you can change the color. You can change the intensity. And I really have to play with it because at different times of the day, I can look very, very odd where, you know, I'm already kind of pale. This can make it look a lot worse. And I'd rather look pale and visible than like, you know, kind of troll and pale. So I sacrifice at times, but yeah, a good upgrade for those who are looking to improve the work-from-home setup. It's

Bennett Bernard (07:05)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (07:27)
Standing desk, chair, good headset, good microphone, good light, and a camera. And after that, diminishing returns, but we'd definitely invest in something of like a ring light equivalent. And Elgato has a few good ones. So Keylight Air, if you're looking for one, would definitely recommend.

Bennett Bernard (07:42)
Yeah, totally. So let's kind of get into some of the things that we want to chat about in this episode as you and I were kind of getting on. And I think the thing that everyone wants to know from us, we've gotten a couple of reach-outs about this, is what are our thoughts on UFOs?

Bradley Bernard (07:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I got a few DMs about it. It's been crazy. I mean, I've seen the user-generated videos on Twitter. People are just kind of like recording this out of the sky, a few lights flickering around, just weird patterns. People are coming out of the woodwork saying, you know, I'm involved in like airplanes, airlines, whatever, and this is like very odd behavior. So it seems like credible sources are coming out saying something is not right. And I think I've read a few stories of, I flew my drone close to this like fleet of drones, and it like, you know, blew up or it was uncontrollable. The battery was zapped immediately. So yeah, it's been crazy. I think it's hard to ignore a fleet of drones, especially, you know, hovering over like a certain area. I kind of wish I was out there to take a look at it because looking at the videos online, I'm a bit of a skeptic. I think there's lots of camera trickery you can do to make it look odd. And I don't think people are doing that intentionally, but

if you pull out your iPhone and you take a photo of something, it does so many color correction adjustments just to make it look good for you. And so the same thing applies for video. If you record something, it's definitely different than what the human eye sees. So yeah, I don’t know. Very, very interesting. I think the government came out and even said, like, we're looking into it, but we don't know. So yeah, I don't know.

Bennett Bernard (09:13)
Well, so you mentioned two things there that I wanted to touch on because it's in this era of like the time that we're living in 2024. You know, it's so easy. The first thing that you mentioned is like someone comes out and says they're a drone expert, and this is what they're doing. You know, I've seen that. I've seen videos like that all the time, and it's like an instant appeal to authority, which of course can be a fallacy because you don't, you know, even if they are like an authority in that space,

Bradley Bernard (09:29)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (09:39)
then they could still be wrong, like in what they're assuming or what they're estimating is going on. But then even to, like, you don't really have any way to like fact-check a lot of those. Or if you do some research, maybe you can't. Most people aren't fact-checking what those people are saying. But then even more so, you know, there's like data literacy. Maybe there's a better term for it, but just being able to like suss out, kind of what you were saying. There's a lot of camera trickery, but some people just believe.

Bradley Bernard (09:49)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (10:06)
Like, you know, you'll see like a YouTube video like top five ghost encounters, and it's like some, you know, clearly edited video with like, my gosh, like that's so scary, you know? And I think more and more that's like more common on the internet. And I actually saw like a good YouTube video— I can't remember what it was. I'll try and find it, but I don't remember exactly like who was doing the YouTube video and what when I was watching it, but it sticks out because

Bradley Bernard (10:15)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (10:32)
they were talking about like AI-generated images and how people like are going to get really like conned into a lot of these images. And they used an example as they went to a Facebook post by some like just random troll account basically, but it had lots of connections. And they posted a picture. It was like a really pro-America account, but you could tell it was like a bot farm essentially. And they posted a picture of like eagles. And they were saying like, "like this mother eagle hatched these babies" or whatever. And the babies look like baby bald eagles, like the white head and then the brown feathers. And so everyone's like, "don't know eagles look like that. So cute" or whatever, "like baby eagles." But then, like in reality, baby eagles come out, they're like gray. They don't look like they don't have the white head until they become adults. So, like, you know, but people don't know that. And they, you know, they just see the picture and then they go, "OK, now I know that baby bald eagles have a white head." It's like, no, that's just you were

Bradley Bernard (11:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (11:25)
tricked into that. And obviously that's a really innocent thing, but it could be more nefarious if people are using it that way. So it makes these news stories about UFOs and drones harder. And maybe that subtle manipulation was always there, but we weren't as keen to it. But I do think that with how widespread video editing and AI is that it's going to make it more common to have manipulation and then harder to tell if it is manipulation. So, you know, I've seen lots of those drone videos, how much of them are completely like real and not touched at all? How much of them are like, you know, dramatized and, you know, maybe manipulated a little bit? It's hard to tell. The one thing that I'd say too is—I'm not sure if you have this news on it. Maybe you haven't. And so I to get your live reaction to it. I heard that those UFOs are there because of like some nuclear radiation device that went missing. Have you heard that? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, we won't get too much into this on the podcast, but just some breaking news for Brad on that one, that they're supposedly there and like this has been confirmed by like a couple of government sources that there was like a shipment coming into New Jersey for like a—it was like a cancer treatment scanner. But it was like radioactive essentially. Like that's just how those things work.

Bradley Bernard (12:20)
I have not heard of that. That sounds like a hot theory though.

Bennett Bernard (12:44)
not a medical device expert, that's, that seems like what’s been said. And basically that has gone missing. And so the thought now is that those drones like are the government, and they're trying to scan and find like signs of those radioactive tells to try and find that lost device. That's the latest theory I heard, so we'll see.

Bradley Bernard (12:55)
Hmm.

I see. Remind

me of two kind of random tangents. One is I watched the movie "Carry On" recently on Netflix with Jason Bateman, I think, from Ozarks. Fantastic movie. Can't really give it away, but it's like a kind of like a two-hour movie diehard thriller. Super random. Honestly, I would tell more, but it kind of gives it away. Two, I don't know if you've heard about it. This may be news to you, but Google came up with some new quantum chip.

Bennett Bernard (13:30)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (13:30)
And part of that was like, it can perform computations that a normal computer would take like millions or billions of years. That's like big news within itself. But I think one headline that almost went uncovered or like unhighlighted was that in part of Google's blog post or research post about this quantum chip, they kind of like briefly mentioned that, hey, there's probably a higher chance than we think to have some sort of multiverse. So I don't know about you, but I think Elon's talked about this, of, we live in a multiverse. Every damn TV show or movie is running the multiverse, you know, to wit's end. And I, for one, liked it when I first encountered it. Then every movie is like, this never happened. I'll try a timeline, blah blah. So, you know, it's kind of frustrating and seeing Google talk about it, where they have some massively, you know, smart computer chip doing like quantum computation. And on top of that, higher chance of the multiverse. It made me think I was like,

Bennett Bernard (14:12)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (14:25)
maybe there's a multiverse, who is to say? But I think I gave a little bit more slack to all these movies and TV shows that are pulling that off because in the back of my head I'm like, I've seen no evidence that this thing exists. And if that is the case, pretty, pretty wild. So I think that was news. And they also talked about kind of breaking the modern cryptography equations for these computer chips. So all of like,

Bennett Bernard (14:36)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (14:50)
you know, modern cryptography with SSL or HTTPS so that when you're communicating with a website, what you transmit from your computer to the server is encrypted. And so no one can take a look at it. But if we have these super smart computer chips, I can just crunch a bunch of data, you know, in orders and orders of magnitude faster than a normal processor that we have today. It puts those things in jeopardy. So I think the first thing is encryption. The second thing is what's built off encryption, which, you know, it's kind of cryptocurrency.

And so I don't think there are any, you know, pressing concerns. I think this was a big leap from what we thought existed. But as far as I can tell, which kind of brings us back to the original point of having these experts, I found this Twitter thread. This guy came out of the woodwork saying I'm an expert on, you know, blank, blank, blank. And this is my take on the threat of this quantum chip, like ruining modern-day encryption. And I think what he had outlined, I'll try to find the tweet, but he had said, it's a huge leap. And, you know, I think.

they outlined the computation of something of like 10 to the 22nd or some large, large number faster. But I think what he was saying is like, it needs to be like 10 to the 40 or 10 to the 50, as in it's maybe halfway there or like, you know, a quarter of the way there, but that last, you know, 50, 70 % that it needs to improve on is humongous, and it's probably not going to get there. Like it would take, I don't know, thousands of years for the quantum computer to crack something like Bitcoin. I think people were scared that

Bennett Bernard (15:58)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (16:20)
it would take five seconds. And so I think he kind of settled that debate. Again, don't know if he's accurate at all. My fear was like, no, and then he kind of jumped into comments and reassured people, but pretty interesting, pretty cool. I think almost somewhat scary to think that Google could come up with something better than this and then just break everything overnight. It's like kind of in the UFO domain of like things can just change overnight. Like aliens, multiverse, end of crypto, who knows.

Bennett Bernard (16:27)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. I was the last thing on this and we could probably move on, but I've asked people that I've worked with. I said, do you think the squirrel has a better life than us humans in the sense that all the squirrel cares about is eating, finding a mate, and like not getting eaten by a bird or a coyote? You know, when you talk about parallel universes and multiverse and living in the matrix and simulation and, you know, then you have healthcare debates and, you know, CEO assassinations, I'm like, and sometimes a squirrel just just trying to find his nut, you know, that's all he's really worried about, you know. Is there a bliss to that that we can't, you know, can't comprehend and can't go back to? I don't know. But yeah, every time I hear about multiverse, my brain can't like understand what that even means. I'm just like, sometimes being a squirrel would be nice to be a squirrel, I think, and just not worry about that, but...

Bradley Bernard (17:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think it'd be nice,

but there is something very fruitful about, you know, chasing your dreams and your passions and doing things that a squirrel cannot do. But I feel you, sometimes the world's crazy, and thinking in simpler terms is almost better.

Bennett Bernard (17:49)
I bet you the squirrel, like a squirrel's dream is to like get to Central Park, New York, because you probably get all the food in the trash. There's lots of trees around, but you're still in the city to get some trash, you know? That's definitely the American squirrel dream. Yeah. Well, well, moving on from squirrels and UFOs and multiverses, I did want to, I guess, briefly talk about something that I'm doing.

Bradley Bernard (17:54)
Ha.

It’s like Hawaii for them.

I love it.

Bennett Bernard (18:15)
For say a family family friend. This person knows who they are, but I won't shout them out. But essentially, I'm kind of just helping set up a person's financials for their business, and they decided to use a system called Odoo. I hope I'm saying it right. It's not Odu, it's Odoo. But basically it's, instead of using QuickBooks or Xero or FreshBooks, kind of all the standard accounting systems that we see commonly used by small businesses. And so it's a weird system. And the reason I'm mentioning it is because, you know, having to learn something new. So QuickBooks I know decently well. You know, FreshBooks and Xero are all kind of similar. And so with Odoo, I'm going to go with Odoo until someone corrects me.

Bradley Bernard (18:58)
Sounds like something else that I won't say.

Bennett Bernard (19:02)
You know, but with Odoo, it's a whole different philosophy even. I mean, and it's weird. It has like a website. It has like a CRM. So it's not just an accounting system, but then it has like an accounting—it's like different modules. And so, you know, for me, I kind of initially just jumped in being like, I know accounting back in my hand and doing it for so long, blah, blah, blah. And tried to jump in and just get it all set up. And it was actually kind of mildly frustrating at first because it completely acts differently than like what I would expect, and I think it's also somewhat to do because I think it's like a European-based system. They have stuff about like value-added tax that we don't have here in the States, and like these things called SEPA credits. Not to get too technical or boring, but like it's just I think it's built from like a European frame of reference, not that it can't work for the U.S., but it's just very different from QuickBooks and those other systems. So but it's one of the first times in a while that I've had to kind of learn something brand new, I guess, and specifically like a system from scratch and kind of like, you know, go through tutorials and stuff like that. And I wanted to bring it up here on this podcast because I was curious when was the last time that you've kind of been in a similar boat where like you've been either given something or you were wanting to jump into something that you hadn't done before? And like, what was that process like for you? Or did you find like a course on, you know, Udemy or Laracast or like anything like that kind of ring a bell or you know, make a connection with?

Bradley Bernard (20:27)
Yeah, I mean, I think recently at work, I've been doing a lot more SQL queries, so just crunching data on experiments that we're kind of working on and trying to make like ship or not ship decisions. And part of that is using Google's BigQuery tool. And I had never used it before. It's a kind of clunky UI, hard to figure out. And I also had the same dilemma of do I get like one thing done and forget about it? Or do I sit there and learn the tool, you know, look up articles, find the right approach to become self-sufficient? So for someone who's new to the job, you know, sometimes you have these tasks where you do them, but you kind of understand it's not maybe a frequent job. And as I got to understand, like, you know, my weekly work, my monthly work, it sounded like I'd be doing a lot of stuff here. And so I invested the time to kind of understand what BigQuery is, how to use it, how to write good queries, how to, you know, kind of tinker with the UI. If you're familiar with any Google products on the non-consumer side, like AdSense or Google Webmaster Console, it can be really confusing. So much stuff is tucked behind buttons, dot-dot-dot menu, side panels, you name it. So I think that was a recent example where I had the decision, you know, figure it out and discard or dive deep and actually understand how to wield it. And yeah, it took time, but I think overall it's nice to try out a new system because then it just gives you more perspective on how to approach those things in the future, plus also to compare what you're already used to. It’s like joining from company A to company B. They’re good at one thing, bad at the other. The new company is bad at the thing the previous one was good at, and so you can kind of compare and contrast. And besides that, honestly, it's been a while. I think that's one of the things that I've really been trying to do more is learn. And, you know, think BigQuery was a nice area for me. And once I did that, I kind of felt the itch of like, it was nice to, you know, come from zero to like 50% understanding and then invest time to make that happen. So yeah, I enjoyed it. And talking about Odoo, I know very little about the accounting software out there, but I was a brief user of the Intuit one—QuickBooks. Yeah, I did QuickBooks for one month. It pulled in all my accounts. It was hell. So I backed out of that thing.

Bennett Bernard (22:37)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (22:44)
Why not QuickBooks, maybe?

Bennett Bernard (22:46)
I don't know. I don't know this person's reasoning. I think Odoo seemed like an all-in-one package, and it seemed like easier on cost as well. And I think this person had experience with QuickBooks before and wasn't a fan. And so they were looking for something new. So, you know, I think for me, you know, if I were to be doing it full time and, you know, having doing this kind of setting up people's books and managing the accounting, I would probably try and stick to like, I'm a, you know, maybe one or two system provider. I'm either a QuickBooks and a NetSuite provider. I wouldn't try and like, you know, what are you on? OK, I can help you with that. Like kind of stick to a specific lane, at least initially, because, you know, there is such a difference between the systems, especially like, you know, this particular one, because it’s like a European base and they just have a different philosophy of like how.

Bradley Bernard (23:23)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (23:39)
you know, accounting is accounting, but like a different philosophy of like how bank transactions should be reconciled and stuff like that. You know, it's interesting. I think what kind of hurts me a little bit, and I'd be curious to know your perspective on this, is when you don't know something, like when you go into learning something and you have no idea about any of it, it's almost easier to learn that than like if you know some of it and you're just going to go try and learn like a—like I don't know, it sounds like BigQuery is kind of like SQL, like you know SQL. And so you kind of go, I should just be able to kind of pick up BigQuery pretty easily. And like, that’s certainly how I felt with Odoo. I was like, well, I know QuickBooks, but doing accounting in the corporate world for over a decade. And so like, I should be able to jump in there and like, get it sorted out and like kind of skip through the tutorial stuff and kind of just go straight to thinking I had it. And so sometimes—and I think about that with like Spanish too. Like I took, you know, five years or so of Spanish at school.

Bradley Bernard (24:23)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (24:32)
And so if I were to do like a Duolingo or like a Babbel, like, you know, take a course, I would try to kind of convince myself to jump to like, you know, I already know all the easy stuff and like not kind of start from scratch. And so I think sometimes that bites you a little bit because it's like, no, just go to the tutorials. There might be things that you think you knew that you really don't know. And it just doesn't hurt to kind of get a refresher. But I think sometimes having a little bit of domain expertise in that area gives you the impression that you can just jump in and figure it out right away versus like doing the—putting in the time and like doing the tutorials or doing the research. So I'd be curious from your perspective too, is that similar? Like you said, I know SQL, so I'll be able to jump into this pretty easily. Or was it a bit more like, I'm going to come into this thing blind and kind of learn from scratch?

Bradley Bernard (25:16)
Yeah, I think having the SQL knowledge definitely helped, but navigating the Google tooling was frustrating and painful. They have different export sources. If you search for a table name within BigQuery, it only returns one table name even though there are multiple. So there's all these tips and tricks that I had to figure out on my own, plus the documentation that I'd read. So I think it was helpful, but it also reminds me of a different vein that as you have experienced in these, you know, kind of similar products—like for me, when I was building Split My Expenses, I tried to be distinctly different from Splitwise. I had so many people come in and say, you know, I know what Splitwise looks like. I imagine what your system looks like. And they were just asking for features from that side, assuming the new system would be exactly the same. And talking about, you know, Odoo and, you know, QuickBooks, it sounds like the European frame of mind. You know, it's probably different in terms of regulations and tax, but also they probably wanted to do something different to begin with. And as users come onto the platform, they think, you know, I know QuickBooks, I can do this. But I think there is a little bit of friction to make it different. And if that friction is worth it in terms of workflow, productivity, and results, definitely worth it. I think I'd battle with this on my own to say, how different do I want to be from Splitwise? How can I differentiate myself to make it better? And if I can't, if I want to be different for being different's sake, maybe it's not worth it to be different. And that area is like a solved problem. But yeah, I think overall it's like hearing your feedback about, think I should be familiar with this, but I'm not, or like I have some understanding, it ties back to both my experience and my product builder mind where I do want to be different, but there's sometimes a fault in trying to be different for difference's sake.

Bennett Bernard (26:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (27:04)
I've learned to battle with that because no one wants to say, what does your app do? It's like, you know, a clone of this. You say, that's boring. You know, and it's also boring to make too.

Bennett Bernard (27:24)
Yeah, and you know, and I'm no software builder, but have you read that book or like heard of that book at least called Blue Ocean Strategy? What was it called? I had to look it up here. No, no, it's blue ocean. It's not Blue Ocean Strategy. What is it? There's some book. I'll try and find it and link it in the show notes. I'm blanking on what it is. Let me look at my library app really fast. But basically it's like a book that talks about like a different kind of strategy for thinking about your business. And it's almost like you kind of don't worry about your competitors. You just kind of focus on like your own market and what you're what you're doing yourself. I didn’t actually like it, to be honest with you. I thought it was a bit too wishy-washy. Blue Ocean Strategy. There it is. OK.

Bradley Bernard (27:50)
Hmm.

I think I've heard of it. I think people have talked about it online, and I've caught glimpses here and there, but yeah.

Bennett Bernard (28:03)
Yeah.

I got like halfway through it, and I thought the message was good, but like it was almost too scientifically for me. But, you know, when I'm going back to what you're saying about Split My Expenses and Splitwise, you know, and like I said, I'm no builder of like, you know, software products, but like to me, you know, if I was to kind of go out and do my own service, you know, for accounting, I think I would think of it as like, I'm just going to solve this customer problem. Like I don't care what so-and-so was doing. This is the area that I think I can solve a problem for people and give them value. And it's almost like, you know, I don't know if that's like short-sighted or kind of being, you know, ignorant to like competitor research. Like, you know, every company has like competitor competitive research departments that they essentially kind of do all that scouting on. But, you know, for me, it's like, especially if it's just like a solo founding thing or if it's just like a small team like you being obsessed with just solving that problem and solving it the best way that you can, it almost kind of takes the brain cost or mental cost of like worrying about what your competitors do out of it in a way. But, you know, that's.

Bradley Bernard (29:14)
Yeah, I try not to like, you know, worry about others, but I think part of it is understanding what exists out there today, like you're saying, doing that research. Once you see something, it's hard to get it out of your head. For example, if I'm working on a new feature and Splitwise has it, I'll take a look at it for research. And then now that I see their flow, their UI, et cetera, I go, okay, that is a way to do it. And then when I think about creating myself, I say, is there anything wrong with that? Have they landed on that approach after years of tests and customer feedback, or do they also do like 99% of other apps do, build it once, never iterate on it and ship it and call it a day? And so I try to think deeply about, you know, the background behind it and understanding if I can make it better. But it's almost sometimes I wish I'd never seen it because it's like hard to get out of my head. Or when I recreate it, I kind of think about it, you know, whether consciously or subconsciously, then if it ends up being too close, I almost have this doubt of, am I copying? You know, I would hate for someone to copy my app, but it happens, and it happens with every business. But it's almost sometimes like, I wish I'd never seen it. Because I have built plenty of features where I just had my own inspiration, my own vision. It came out well. And then I've seen competitor features, and it's better. And I've seen competitor features, and it's worse. And so it's a mixed bag. I think if I spent all this research doing things and then approach whatever I wanted to build, probably be the best version, but maybe it would bias a little bit towards what others are doing, which, you know, at the end of may not be horrible, but for someone who's trying to kind of flex their product builder slash creativity, it's kind of fun to think of things without the confines of seeing exactly how your competitor handled it.

Bennett Bernard (30:14)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (30:42)
you know, at the end of the day, it might not be horrible.

Bennett Bernard (30:54)
Yeah, well, yeah, you make a point. It's like if they've added a new feature, generally it's probably because it's been asked from them a lot or like people have requested it, and they've done some research. I think that's totally a valid point. And it's almost like if there are some new features, like being aware of like what competitors are doing just to kind of get a pulse on like your customer and almost bringing that back of like, does this new feature that they, you know, announced or launched or does that like help my mission of helping customers? Is that part of it or is that something separate? That's not really in my like scope for the problem I want to solve for customers. But like you said, doing it for the sake of, well because they did it, I need to do it. I think that's probably the one that can get you into some trouble, especially if you're like not, like if you're like, Splitwise did this and I don't really care about, I'm not really interested in that, but you know, it's there, so I must do it to copy them. I think that's probably the wrong approach, but it sounds like you're not really, never thought about it that way anyways.

Bradley Bernard (30:54)
Yeah, I honestly find more inspiration from people who are also in my category fighting the big beast of Splitwise where there's a billion bill-splitting apps out there, whether it's a website or a mobile app, finding what they do because they're also looking at Splitwise or other apps. It's like, you know, kind of doing research on people who are doing research and seeing what the new people come out with because the old person maybe came out with this 10 years ago and hasn't touched it.

Bennett Bernard (31:57)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (32:13)
And so I get—we get a lot of inspiration there. And honestly, I've been doing some Split My Expenses work after work and like in this past two weekends. And it's been kind of energizing. I definitely miss it. And when I started working full-time at Snapchat, it's something that I didn't have a ton of energy for initially. I, you know, work nine to five, which was different. I'm working in office four days a week, which is different.

And then coming home from work and doing things on the weekend—moving, doing all that—didn't have a ton of energy. But recently, I've been picking it up a bit more, been building a few features here and there. And at this point in terms of building features and timing, I'm really only building things that people are begging for. And I say begging for in context of I have a user feedback form. Anyone can go there, submit their ideas, upvote, downvote, comment, you name it. After months of people asking for a feature and having a ton of upvotes. And then I start working on it. When I was originally building Split My Expenses, I had a ton more time to ask for way more feedback, almost too much. And three built features off like, you know, one or two people asking for it, because at that point, I just needed something to go off of. And now it's like the complete opposite. I will be almost too late to build something mostly due to time. you know, if I wasn't working nine to five, I'd spend more time on it. But one, I have way less time and two, I really need a ton of people to tap into that same idea and say, this is what you need to build. And so I've been doing that recently. The last thing that I was iterating on is like email notifications. So I don't do a ton of this today, but to kind of summarize it, I send out like a monthly balance reminder saying, "Hey Ben, you owe like Brad $5 in this group." And so it just reminds you to go settle up. And the next thing I added, which was a pretty simple feature, is if you archive a group or you delete a group, it sends an email to all group participants saying, "Hey, XYZ group has been deleted or archived." Really, really straightforward, and Laravel basically supports that out of the box with minimal configuration, but I’m kind of ramping up my notifications because in the future I'm going to have the React Native mobile app on iOS and Android. So I'm kind of doing the plumbing work right now to increase notifications, which I think gives more transparency and visibility. I don't do a ton of emails right now than in the future. Once the mobile app is here, which I told myself April this year, and look where we are, it'll come out eventually. But once it's here, we're going to have tons of notifications flying in of like, "Hey, this person added an expense. This person settled up." I think it's going to be great. And almost thinking long-term about this, working on SME, working on the mobile app, I have this grand vision. My grand vision is that once these pieces are done, done—the mobile app is out, you know, like billing is synchronized across the mobile app and the website. So if you pay for it on one area, you have it on the other. Like the mobile app will enable people to do it on the go. I have this hunch and I've been wrong before, but I have this hunch that things will have a large uptick in terms of usage and maybe that's paid usage too, I'm not really sure. But I feel like I've invested in the right areas over the past 12 months. I think the mobile app will be kind of the final piece of this puzzle. And I'm really, really hoping that this takes off. And again, I don't know what that'll look like. I don't know if that'll be like two times free users, you know, 20% increase in paid users, but in the back of my head, all the work that I'm working on on nights and weekends is really aiming toward this dream and picture and vision that I have—that there is a mobile app, there is a web app, people are expecting things and I'm delivering them, although at a different cadence that I hoped for, it'll still be there. And so I think that that vision is really propelling me to like work on it more where I see the end in sight, where I know, at least in my head, I've convinced myself that once this mobile app is out, it's going to be in a really good spot. You know, people won't complain that much. People always complain, but not that much. And so I don't know about you, but that really gives me the passion and the drive of, yeah, you know, I work on nine to five, and I've really enjoyed my work recently—like been in the office working on cool stuff. And then when I come home, again, haven't had a ton of energy, but it's picked up. And I think part of that's fueling me is this vision of delivering on things that I've wanted to deliver on and then to hopefully seeing that result pay off. And it'll probably be a long time until I can work on it full-time again, but it maybe gets me closer to that.

Bennett Bernard (36:45)
Yeah, I think two things as you were saying that one. I just jotted it down because I didn't want to lose it as you were talking. So you mentioned React Native, and that's going to serve or kind of solve the problem for both an iPhone and an Android app. I guess just for the non-technical folks that listen to this. I guess, I don't know, maybe this is technical, but you know, used to be primarily just Swift programming at—

Bradley Bernard (36:59)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (37:12)
you know your prior jobs, right? At LinkedIn and PayPal, right? And that was primarily geared towards like Apple development, right? And I believe Android is primary used to be—maybe this is dating myself a little bit—but I think Android used to be like Kotlin, right? Is that the language that they would use? Or okay. So I guess, does React Native kind of solve the problem of like needing two different languages to build an app that, you know, can be used on both platforms? Like does React Native, I guess, kind of date those two languages in your mind? I'm just curious as you were talking.

Bradley Bernard (37:52)
Yeah, I chose React Native. I wrote a whole blog post on it that I can put in the show notes, but the end all be all for me is I—like you mentioned, I was an Apple developer by trade for many, many years writing in their native languages. So that's Objective-C, which is kind of legacy now, and then there's Swift. And then on the Android side, there's Java, which is kind of the Objective-C equivalent. That's legacy, and then Kotlin. And so Swift and Kotlin are kind of side by side. They look the same. They act the same. It's kind of a readable language and then Java and Objective-C look very different, but they're both kind of considered legacy for that device platform. And so I chose React Native because I wanted to build one app in one code base. And what React Native allows me to do is build that app in JavaScript, build it in React specifically. So React also works on the web. You can imagine React Native means you're building these same kind of UI components, but they render to native platforms. So, for example, on the web, if you're familiar, there can be an “a” tag which links you to a resource, you know, makes your browser navigate from one URL to another. In React Native, you can have an input field. And this will render like a native input field on an iOS device and a native input field on Android. And so it's the reason I chose it—just to move fast. I don't want to have a whole Java code base, a whole Swift code base, or I guess in today's world, Kotlin and Swift. It takes a shit ton of time to build one app, even a web app. It takes way more time to build a mobile app because people want it to be offline. All this like crazy functionality, push notifications, blah, blah, blah. And so I told myself, I don't really want to use React Native. If I'm being honest, the quality of the app is not that great in terms of React Native in general compared to native. You can feel it. The UI is different. Like I built Chatty Butler in the beginning of my Voxby 12 months, and the app feels great. It looks native. When people look at it, they're like, you know, it looks pretty good. I'm not a designer, but I try to make it look better than average. The problem with React Native is since you're writing in JavaScript, the UI is all kind of bare metal. You're not getting a lot of system UI out of the box. And so it makes the app feel and look different. And to the average user, you might not notice it, but for someone who's, you know, a heavy app user, the feeling of performance of UI, of animations, all those things are just not as 10 out of 10 as like a normal stock app. But you trade that off. That's the trade-off to have one code base to ship on both platforms. And so that's why it's kind of like a well worth it trade-off for me as one person. And then on top of that, talking earlier about our podcast, I never done React Native, and I just dove in and said,

Bennett Bernard (40:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (40:38)
this is the solution I need. I don't know what the heck to build with it or like how to build with it successfully. And I've really learned, I've made a few mistakes as I've been building this, had to like gut some things because it didn't work correctly. But overall, yeah, the strategy is to have one code base. It works on both platforms. The maintenance is not as bad, since it works on both app platforms, but it's also really hard to debug and upgrade to the latest iOS and Android versions because you have like the Android platform and the Apple platform. Then you have one platform above it on React. And so you just have more moving pieces and more complexity. But at the end of the day, it allows you to ship faster. So far to get myself a timeline—maybe I'll put it out in the pod. Now I'm going for before I'm going H1 next year. So before the middle of the year, the app will be out and released. I don't know if that'll push me to like, you know, do a ton of work at near that timeframe or all kind of spread it out. But I want to tell myself now, like, let's get that done, you know, let's build it and let's ship it.

Bennett Bernard (41:41)
Yeah, you know, I was talking about, you know, React Native into being on Java or JavaScript. I've dabbled in a couple of different things. Like I've, obviously like Python has been like the one that you know is usually easiest for beginners, and that's where I've spent most of my time kind of just making my own projects, whether it be for work or for, you know, outside of work.

But I did take a class in college, and it was just like a general programming class, and they used Java, and I hated Java. Like, I hated it. I had another class where they used C, and I understand that. Like, it was, you compile it, and then you run it like that. But the Java like virtual machine and like public static void nonsense, just, I never, never could get there. Even we've talked a bit before in other episodes like

Bradley Bernard (42:09)
Ha ha ha.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (42:30)
I can't stand, I shouldn't say can't stand. I know it's a me issue, but like JavaScript and like all those frameworks now with like React and, you know, Vue and gotta download Webpack and you gotta download Babel and you know, just got download Node. It's just like geez. But yeah, so that's always been like my— that's a personal hang-up I have. But the other thing that I thought about as you were saying, because we talked about it a little bit on the last podcast, I think. So I was going to put you on the spot.

Bradley Bernard (42:38)
Yeah, bundling.

Bennett Bernard (42:58)
Since we're talking about Split My Expenses, have you thought more about niching or niching at all? Or are you just going gung-ho with the general audience?

Bradley Bernard (43:08)
I was listening to one podcast recently, and I think they were mentioning build a great product for a few people instead of building an average product for a ton of people. I think it was even like an Airbnb Brian Chesky quote on how he kind of drives Airbnb forward. And it kind of struck a core because I was like, I really find myself in the divide of building features for the masses while also having a strong paying user base with a certain profile and characteristics.

But it almost feels like these free users who are not the profile of the paid users drive the paid users eventually in some sort of funnel. To answer the question directly, no, I haven't had enough time to really figure out what the strategy would look like. I think I have a very long road ahead of me to get the mobile app out, and probably along that road will solidify myself to be more general instead of niching, but that's just because I'm playing catch-up with the website. I think ideally, you know, the website would be out and done and not touched, and I'd work on the mobile app until it was out. But what I've been kind of doing is the mobile app, I work on it, and nothing shifts until it's fully done. So I spend months and months of effort. No one sees a damn thing change. Really frustrating because as someone who wants to do like month-over-month improvements, although they might be small, people want to see activity. They don't want to see, you know, a bill-splitting app appear. It's great that it dies. And so I've been slowly trying to add more web functionality as I've been building the mobile app. So I have something to show, but that doesn't get me any closer to the mobile app. And if things change too much on the website, the stuff that I built on the mobile app needs to be updated as well. So that's why I kind of told myself like no web app features—all mobile app. And I don't really love it because I can't ship anything. So maybe like a 20/80 split on that: ship something that's like email notifications, super straightforward, not sexy, but it's useful.

And then on the mobile app just catch up with UI. That's kind of my strategy right now.

Bennett Bernard (45:05)
Yeah, well, if you ever do decide to niche, I'll give you an easy one that I think would be great for you. I think international travelers I think would be a good one for you.

Bradley Bernard (45:08)
Hahaha.

I like that.

I mean, I think there's plenty of ideas that could be had in like the travel space, and I have too many written down in my notes. But yeah, until I can figure out with more data, I'm probably full steam ahead of them.

Bennett Bernard (45:26)
Fair enough. Fair enough, cool. I guess the last thing on that, you know, outside nine to five kind of like work that you're doing, I was going to just say too, like sometimes even if you have the time, like, so like you get home, you have dinner, and it's like, you know, whatever eight o'clock and you don't normally go to bed until like 10 or 10:30, 11, whatever it is for you. Sometimes you're just drained from the day. And I know certainly in my case, you know, especially with two young kids and

Bradley Bernard (45:50)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (45:55)
all the extracurriculars—like I was at singing earlier tonight and then the other one's at dance and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes I'm like, I have the time to do something, but like honestly right now I just can't put my best effort forward on that, and so I'm just gonna do something else and maybe I'll come back to that another time when I'm more ready to go.

Bradley Bernard (46:26)
Yeah, that's been happening frequently, and I've almost tried to convince myself to just like push through that because I feel like that happens more often than not where I have like ambitious goals, and then I get home and I'm like, you know, like. But it'd be so nice to have the final result. I think that's why I've been telling myself a lot of if the pieces are done, things will look great. And sometimes the process to get there is not super fun.

Bennett Bernard (46:38)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (46:52)
Especially building the mobile app, I'll be quite honest, it's extremely boring work just recreating UI and React Native. However, I think at the end, it'll be very, very nice to have. And so I think I have energy to build, I don't necessarily want to spend time on the mobile app, but it's my top priority. And with that divide comes like, should I work on it or should I play some games? Should I watch some TV? Should I just like...

Vegetate and do nothing? There's lots that go on. But I think I've been trying to do a larger uptick and pushing forward and saying, yeah, I might not love it, but there's certain areas that I do love. And if I can get past this at least spend, you know, 30 minutes every day or 20 minutes every day, I can really compound. And so it's like almost mentally convincing yourself, yes, I'm tired, and I'm over it, or, you know, could be a long day, but you know, just 20 minutes won't hurt.

Bennett Bernard (47:32)
Yeah.

Yeah, you're like the David Goggins of coding, sounds like, know. Just push through it—10 more lines. 10 more lines of code, yeah. Cool, yeah, that's cool. I'm excited to see you ship those things in the first half of 2025. We'll clip this and come back to you.

Bradley Bernard (47:44)
Seriously.

Yeah, seriously. Speaking about first half of 2025, I was asking on Twitter, what is the best iOS conference to go to? So I try to go to one every year when I'm employed by other people. Last year, as I was self-employed, I went to Lericon. That was a lot of fun, but again, different when you pay for it. Feel like a different mental dynamic, financial dynamic, but 2025 I will be employed by Snap.

And definitely looking to see what's out there for iOS. So I asked on X, and interestingly enough, I did sign up for Blue Sky, and I got a few responses on X saying, go to this conference. I got one reply on Blue Sky, which is my exact same account on X, same profile picture, same bio, whatever, but I don't really post. This person tagged me saying, "Hey, I saw your tweet on X. I'm responding here on Blue Sky, and this is my thoughts." Super odd. I mean, I guess maybe that's how things go now. This, this individual is just kind of looking at Twitter, like responding off-platform. If you have an account, maybe a side tangent, but at the end of the day, the top recommended conference was Deep Dish Swift, which I've heard about. I think it's in Chicago in the end of April. So I'll probably move forward with that one. There's not a whole lot out there, but yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's nice to travel on the company budget. It's nice to meet people. I think the best-case scenario is to go to the conference that everyone else is going to and hearing everyone point their finger at this one was a pretty easy signal for me to say, okay, this is at least where I should be. So I'll probably talk to my manager, you know, in the next few weeks and say, "Hey, you know, this is what I want to do. Is there a budget to put me out there?" But yeah, pretty excited. I think it's like different being employed and going to these conferences. And it's always fun to bring back the knowledge. Because when you work at these, you know, tech companies,

Bennett Bernard (49:25)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (49:43)
sadly, a lot of times you're not using the latest and greatest tech. And when you go to these conferences, it's half a mix of the latest and greatest tech and half a mix of how big companies and larger tech companies do things. And I think the best learnings I find is, since I'm not working with the latest and greatest all the time, what are people that are pushing the boundaries doing, and how do they do it, and sharing that information? Then I could take it back to, you know, Snapchat and say, hey, this is what people are doing. I think we can adopt some of this. So yeah, really excited. Probably go out there in April. Haven't bought a ticket yet, but good speaker lineup, and lots of people are giving a plus one on Deep Dish Swift. So if you're an iOS engineer listening to this, hopefully, I’ll see you out there in 2025.

Bennett Bernard (50:22)
Yeah, we get you on the speaking tour next time—next year, twenty twenty-six. Yeah, that'd be cool. That's cool. Yeah. So speaking of 2025, you know, at this time of year— you know, it being in the end of twenty twenty-four, you know, I set some goals. Generally, you know, set some goals with work for my nine to five. Then also too, like, like anyone else, you have, you know, New Year's resolutions. You have things that you want to kind of say, OK, for this year, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z.

Bradley Bernard (50:25)
I know, I need something.

Bennett Bernard (50:51)
So I figured let's spend a couple minutes kind of just going through and just brainstorming some 2025 goals, ideals if you want to call them that. You know, things that you do differently from 2024. And we'll kind of just, I think we’d maybe just alternate a few different kind of sections of this, kind of kicking it off. So for career, I'll start and just kind of say, this is gonna—you're gonna be like, this is a cop-out—but I just want to keep growing. You know, obviously like anyone else, I want to continue to grow at where I work. And I think for me, growth specifically means getting into like lots of different things and things that I feel like have the most impact. I've been pretty consistent in telling, you know, the people that support me and people on my team that like I get the most fulfillment in my job when I'm doing things that I know or that I feel like matter to the company, to the strategy or whatever. And so that's kind of where I feel like my sweet spot is, where I come in every day, and I'm excited to work. And so getting as much of that as possible is definitely, you know, always what I'm aiming for. Now, granted, you can't always have 100% of like things that you like that you work, you know, something that you have to have a couple of those, you know, mundane or admin tasks, right? But just continue to kind of get more work like that. So.

Nothing too specific that I guess I want to go that, you know, into as far as like on this pod, but just continuing to grow and continue to get, you know, work that I feel like is meaningful to the company and to where the company wants to go. And so I think that's kind of what I'm circling on the career side. But what about you? We'll snap.

Bradley Bernard (52:30)
Yeah, I like that. I think two things come to mind. One is the engineer kind of lifecycle and lens of automate everything. So I think during my nine to five, there are plenty of mundane tasks that I have to do that are outside the coding domain or even within the coding domain. And I've really taken an interest in AI and how do I apply that AI to my daily workflow or weekly work?

And so what I'll do is I'll do the manual process, and I'll think, how can I interject AI in here to make it efficient? Instead of spending 20 minutes, I spend one minute. But again, maybe it takes 50 minutes to set up that pipeline for me to automate it. But I think it'd be worth it. And so that gets me closer to the latest and greatest AI. And two, it also gives me more experience to understand how to fit these workflows into AI because I feel like that's a long-term trend of building a SaaS product in 2025. It might just be AI-fying lots of these different workflows. So really important to me. I think it's also pretty fulfilling to automate things and doing it throughout your daily workflow just feels like you're a magician. You just press a button, things happen. You're like, yeah, I spent like five hours to automate a five-second task, but you know, it’s fun.

And then I think two is being the dumbest person in the room and also working on things that I'm not familiar with. So, you know, I've done a lot of PHP, done a lot of Swift, but I really like finding things that I have no clue what to do, and I'm kind of like fish out of water. And then relying on other people to kind of get onboarded and situated and to become proficient at maybe that language, that system, getting like a deep understanding from start to finish. When I was at Meta working on the Messenger app, the Messenger app architecture was definitely complicated, and I wouldn't say a few people, but not too many people understood, you know, from start to finish how things exactly worked. And I think joining Snap, understanding I'm going to be here for quite some time, I really want to get in the nitty-gritty and be put in an area where I don't know, and then figure everything out about it to have this full picture understanding. So I think 2025 will be a lot of, I want to be pushed. And then two, let me figure it out. Let me automate it and let me become an expert and a domain owner in various areas.

Bennett Bernard (54:43)
Do you have an area that you kind of like have an interest in or you kind of open to whatever comes your way, that you mentioned AI, but I guess other—like besides AI, some kind of like a meta—not meta like the company—but a meta coding thing. Is there any specific like coding area or programming area that you're interested in?

Bradley Bernard (54:51)
Yeah, I mean, the team that I'm on is mostly tied to media—like how do you render videos? How do you optimize that? So for me, I haven't done a ton of that, and I think I already feel like the newcomer in the space. And so I'll probably dive deeper into that and become very familiar with efficiencies and like video transcoding, understanding how to optimize it on device. So

Yeah, probably media, whether that's images and video. And if you think about the Snapchat app, there's like lenses and different effects. All these things need to be efficiently processed to then upload to the server. So probably in that domain, although I'm really open to anything, honestly, if that is not the area that my team or my org needs, I'm happy to kind of pivot and be the owner in certain areas.

Bennett Bernard (55:35)
Hmm.

Yeah. Sorry, I was just cracking up a little bit because I was just thinking of you doing compression with the videos. You know where I'm going with that. Yeah. Okay, so like a little Pied Piper action going on. Yeah, that's a great show. Sick chain, Dinesh. All right. I won't say any more of that quote. I guess other things

Bradley Bernard (55:51)
Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (56:09)
that kind of going on for 2025 or things that we kind of typically kind of circle or highlight is—and we kind of talked about yours a little bit already—but like, you know, I guess side projects or just things, you know, things going on outside of work that are not like social specifically. You know, I'll kind of kick it off with mine just because you can already touch on yours a little bit, but then feel free to come over the top and add some extra flavor if you feel like you want to want to. But I think for me...

Bradley Bernard (56:25)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (56:37)
Nothing really specifically with like side projects at this time. You know, I am like I said, I am helping a family friend or family member with their Odoo accounting. So that's been a great experience because like I said, it's been more learning than I kind of anticipated when I first was like, yeah, I'll do that. It'll be super easy. And it's a lot more learning than I anticipated. But also, too, it gives me a better depiction of like how much could I actually do like on the side, like with the hours that I do have, without getting burnt out, without feeling tired or feel like it's, you know, like interfering with my life more than I want it to. So it's been a great like litmus test to kind of understand like, you know, that's probably a lot more work than like you might think it is. And like those last two to three hours that you have in the evening, like, you know, it's sometimes it's hard to like keep grinding through, you know, and getting that work done. So it's been a good,

Bradley Bernard (57:19)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Bennett Bernard (57:30)
I guess it's been a good kind of like bearing and like benchmark to be like, OK, like this one kind of just family, you know, client that I'm helping. If it's taking this much time, you know, like I might have thought it would take me only an hour or two a week, and it's taking me four to five hours just as an example. That's more than I thought. And so therefore, like, you know, that just kind of changes how would think about if I wanted to add on other family or friends to that kind of service.

Bradley Bernard (57:58)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (57:59)
You know, so right now I'm still kind of very much balancing the work-life hobby balance, if you will, because you know, just busy time of my life with kids being the age they are and stuff like that. So, yeah, so right now, TBD a little bit on that. And like I said, I'm enjoying the stuff I'm doing with, you know, the Odoo accounting process, but it's definitely been a good learning experience, not just for like the actual learning of like the system, but then learning how to manage all that, of course, outside of, you know, my regular work and family commitments and stuff like that. But what are you, anything else that you'd add?

Bradley Bernard (58:34)
Yeah, I like that. I, yeah, I was going to say, I really like how you put kind of the final hours of your day, not to sound grim. But it almost always exists, or at least for me it always exists. I don't have kids, but making the time and effort and like pushing through to do what you want to do, I think is a whole different understanding. And yeah, it takes a lot of time and effort. But I think for me on the side projects side, yeah, probably just continue to invest in what I've built.

Make sure nothing goes down. I think it’s top priority. I mean, ideally the mobile app is out, you know, first half of the year. And I think second half of the year, if I were to focus on anything, if you asked me today, probably be monetization. Once that mobile app is out, kind of tightening the screws on what the pricing should be, how to upsell users, and then making that actually valuable. So it's not a dud to sell. So I think it's getting the mobile app out, figuring out how to make

more money off of it, although it won't be anything close to what I'm earning nine to five. But at the end of the day, it's like a passion project turned into making money. And I've spent tons of time, effort, you know, probably way too much time if I think about it, but yeah, probably a monetization mobile app and kind of packaging, Split My Expenses, up to like really, really good sale. Like I want to look back on 2025 and say, yeah, like I'm damn proud of where it came from.

And it’s in a really, really good spot. Like I don't really need to do anything large because the mobile app is large. Monetization changes are pretty large. So just small items by the end of 2025.

Bennett Bernard (1:00:06)
Yeah. I guess speaking of you mentioned that you put a lot of hours into it into that project. Is there anything that you would do less of in 2025 that you did a lot of in 2024?

Bradley Bernard (1:00:21)
Hmm. That's a good question. I don’t have anything directly off the top of my head. I think probably one of the things I had in 2024 was be almost like less on call for Split My Expenses. It's a big shift for me, and I don't really like talking about it publicly. But I think I've come around to just understanding it's the way things are going to be, since I have a nine to five. Again, kind of like I mentioned earlier, I used to be available on chat. People used to reach out. It used to be very, very open, and asking for feedback. Now it's almost like a closed book. Like I have chat, just to be frank, don’t respond that often. I kind of wait until it piles up and then I'll get to things. And I think it's helped a lot with the mental health because people used to message me, you know, 9 p.m. on the weekend, like I'm hanging out with friends. And when you see a message come in, you know, it could be, 'Hey, this app is great,' and I'm like, dopamine hit, or it could be, 'This app sucks. Delete my account.' It's like, yeah, you know, there are people out there, and I would say I have relatively thick skin, but it's just one can be annoying and two just like, you know, not super exciting to see. And so what I've done recently, especially you know, joining full-time, was like muted all these things, not really taking a look at it, which for our core product sense is probably not the best, but it's almost like one of those things where if you go on vacation for a week and you work at a company, you go look at your email inbox. There's maybe 50 emails in there, but they all kind of resolve themselves, like with or without you. And I kind of look at the same with customer feedback where if someone says, 'Hey, this is broken,' or 'I couldn't get my file upload to work,' either they never figured out and they left, or they figured out on their own and didn’t respond. And if they left, you know, they left—that's kind of the trade-off that I'm doing there. But I think the moral of the story is that I was very, very responsive like 24/7 online for customer support. And I think it worked at a certain time. Now with my obligations, with my work-life setup, it does not work at all. It does not fulfill me in any way possible. I also prefer to turn it off completely, just work on things I want to do and keep the user feedback form open. That specific chat component, doing much less of that, and kind of continuing what seems to be me ignoring it or just kind of checking in like every two weeks, I think that has really, really helped in making sure I have more free time and not being like, quote unquote, on call from my passion project."

Bennett Bernard (1:02:45)
Mm-hmm. Have you ever thought about like hiring like an admin to kind of just deal with the chat? Like, you know, you can find usually like an admin offshore to kind of do it for, you know, don't know, 20 bucks an hour or something like that. So has the idea of hiring someone come into your brain at all? Because I know you're usually such a, you know, a lone wolf on these kind of endeavors. So, you know, and I think it's great, you know, even successful with them. But like for things like that, where it doesn't really require the founder to kind of come in and address the issue—just curious if that's something that's ever kind of crossed your mind or not really.

Bradley Bernard (1:03:06)
Yeah, I would say not really. I think one is it doesn't make a ton of money on its own, so I feel like I would pay someone pennies and to me probably wouldn't be worth it. It would probably be an equity setup, which I don't really love and don't know what the future of Voxby looks like, so I feel uncomfortable. Then, two, you know, half of them are kind of like, 'Hey, there's a bug here,' or 'There's an issue here.' And for someone who's built it themselves, like as I look in the chat, I can guess pretty quickly if that's a user error—although it might be a user error and a lot of people run into it—or it's an actual bug in the system. And so I respond to things that are like critical bugs like a quick glance that, you know, my app just adds up totals and in simplicity. And if that doesn't work correctly, you know, shit hits the fan. And so I have tons of automated testing in my PHP and JavaScript codebase to check that it works. So it's highly unlikely anyone out of my like 12,000 users runs into anything I haven't seen, but it still happens.

Very, very rarely a big issue comes up. And so I think part of that customer support is like the 95% or 99% maybe is non-urgent, and that 1% is. And when that comes in, it's really hard to identify that because I know the code like the back of my hand and I know which parts are weaker and which parts are stronger. So if they say, 'Hey, I did this and I did this and I did this and then this broke,' and they outline it for me, that can say, I knew that part was weak and you hit it—that confirms I need to do something there. But I think if I had a customer support agent, they might like message me or like respond with like a knowledge-based article. And it doesn't give me the insight to find these kind of weak points that I knew might exist, but get confirmation. Because when you have 12,000 people use your app over the course of a year, they're gonna find things that you never thought of, and they're gonna find the bugs that are tucked away in areas that you have to do written there. So I don't think I would hire anybody. I think if it made more money, it would be probably exist as an option. I think that's one of the biggest blockers. But again, I think just having familiarity with the codebase and not having any knowledge docs out there, it's like my own task. For me to hire somebody, I have to write all this stuff, give it to them, keep it up to date. Not the end of the world, but just have them...

Bennett Bernard (1:05:34)
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Cool. The last thing that I wanted to chat about, and then we can circle back with you if you wanted anything you want to add on the 2025 before we kind of end it with our bookmarks. This is just, you know, one of those things again, we'll clip this and check back in with me. Be our own little accountability partners here. But I mentioned earlier that I took like five years of Spanish. It took like two years in high school, I think, and.

Bradley Bernard (1:05:50)
Clip it.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:00)
Three years in college, and you know, I can understand it reasonably well when people are speaking as long as not speaking too fast, but like just normal kind of speaking. I can understand it okay and pick up like other context clues, but you know, I can't speak it nearly as well as I would like to understand it better, of course. So, you know, trying to pick that back up. I've always kind of had Duolingo downloaded on the phone and I would do like a week of it here or there.

But I just never really felt like it was a part of me. I guess what I'm trying to say is I would sometimes think like this is going to be worthless because AI isn’t to come and it’s going to instantly translate everything. Or it’s going to basically all speak one common humanoid language in a weird way because everything’s to be instantly translated or whatever. So I had that kind of thought even for years now. But there’s something about putting in the time and like

Bradley Bernard (1:06:38)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:06:51)
training your brain in a different way that I’ve kind of grown to appreciate a little bit. And it’s nice to kind of have that for something not work-related, you know? Because I think especially I think you and I are very similar. Like work, whether it be like our nine to five or, you know, in your case, when you were doing Voxby, like it can kind of consume you a little bit like you think about all the time, like you think there’s this hurdle that you need to clear. And once you clear that hurdle, you build a relax, but you never get to that hurdle because you always find the next hurdle to jump. And so

Bradley Bernard (1:07:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:07:22)
Like having something that is like trying to learn, but there’s no like career or like monetary pressure to learn it is kind of a refreshing thing. It’s almost like a couple, I think about a month or two ago, I mentioned on the podcast, I bought a book on knots and I was just like learning how to tie knots. It's like, it's like that kind of a similar itch where it's like, hey, I just want to learn this just because and, you know, I'm going to kind of stay disciplined with it.

My kids now can tie lassos, and we lasso my dog's leg. It’s all very gentle. Don’t worry. But we lasso her leg and she tries to like bite it off. You know, stuff like that where it’s like it’s nice to like learn and put some focus into something that’s not work-related. And I’ve always like enjoyed Spanish. I just lacked the consistency to like retain it, you know. So I’m trying to stick with that. We’ll see. We’ll circle back in the first half of 2025 and see how that progress is going, though.

Bradley Bernard (1:07:50)
Hahaha.

Mm-hmm. I like that. I mean, it essentially boils down to having a hobby, which, you know, at times I feel like I play video games, but something can be said about, you know, you come home from work, you maybe had a long day, you play video games, and in a competitive setting, it’s not the most carefree, you know, stressless thing in the world. I’m sure you can attest to that. So I do think I would also like to find some activity that keeps me motivated and interested, you know, has nothing to do with Voxby or my nine to five.

But still gives me that drive and motivation and energy to go do something. And I think a language is a good one. I've also very much enjoyed learning a language, and I went to Mexico recently, used my Spanish, and it was like really nice. Like again, my Spanish is not great; I only took a few years, but like the satisfaction I got speaking, you know, Spanish to like native Spanish speakers, them understanding at least half of it was amazing.

You know, I was like, this is super, super cool. And like all that stuff was worth it. And I think that’s the hard part about Duolingo for me is I, it sounds super cool. I just can never keep up with it because I'm like, what am I going to use it? You know? What am I going to use? I think with AI being so powerful, that argument is honestly so true. But when you go out, you know, to these countries and use it, really, if that AI translation is there, you're speaking English to a phone.

It translates and does like the computer voice in Spanish. And like, that is not the same at all. Like, you know, they're going to think differently; you're going to think differently—way, way different. Although it's probably really efficient, we'll get the point across, there’s nothing better than speaking like the native language. And yeah, I found it super fulfilling. So I don’t have anything to share for 2025 in terms of, you know, new hobbies to pick up. But I think there is a hole that I’d like to kind of fill something that’s pretty chill, pretty interesting, and something that keeps me motivated and is hopefully more social. I think that would be a fun one, like a fun social activity to get friends together and meet new people and do something that’s not super competitive but still entertaining enough.

Bennett Bernard (1:10:20)
Yeah, sounds good. Cool. So we wrap this up with our bookmarks.

Bradley Bernard (1:10:26)
Yeah, let's do it. The one I got—you know, I've been on Twitter not super often recently, but if you're unfamiliar, OpenAI is doing a 12 days of Christmas or 12 days of Shipmas. I forgot what they called it, but essentially for 12 business days, they're releasing one thing a day. And my bookmark is not about OpenAI, surprisingly, it's about Google. And the reason I bring that up is because they are so neck and neck. If OpenAI releases something, the folks from Google will tweet the next day trying to one-up each other. It's the giant AI race. And the thing that came out recently is that Google has support for native image input and output. And so what you can think of this as a listener is, you know, if you've used Photoshop, you open up a photo, you have the magic AI tool so you can highlight things. An AI box will pop up. You can describe, change the car's color from yellow to blue if you select the full car. That now exists inside of Gemini 2.0 Flash natively. And so you can think one of the use cases I thought for Split My Expenses, just as a tangent was people upload receipts. Maybe once I parsed out the receipt, I could go ask AI saying, this is the original receipt. These are the extracted items I know exist. Can you improve the receipt quality and legibility to make it just look better? So you can imagine a voice-prompted Photoshop, for example. And the cool thing is you can text prompt it so you can describe in the car, change the color from yellow to blue, or you can circle it as if you opened it up on Preview on the Mac, like annotated the image to circle something and say, change this color from yellow to blue. So it does both text input and native image input. And I don't think people really understand how powerful that's going to be.

Bennett Bernard (1:12:07)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (1:12:14)
Not out yet, but they just kind of like teased it. Super cool. Not sure what I'm going to build with it, but I’ll definitely be tinkering with it once it’s out. But yeah, Google’s killing it.

Bennett Bernard (1:12:29)
Nice. That's cool. Awesome. The one I have—this is not nearly as cool or interesting, but it is just the nature of the accounting world, I guess. So—and I'm not like an expert on this act at all—please don't take what I'm saying here as like gospel—but you know, some time ago, let's say 2021 maybe, or 2022, can't remember the exact year, but there was like a law that was passed that basically required is called beneficial ownership information.

So BOI is the abbreviation, and it basically required that business owners essentially have to file with this organization called FinCEN, which kind of tells like who is a beneficiary of this business. So like if you own an LLC, you have to file a, you know, a BOI report—I don’t know what the exact report is, but you have to file something with like the U.S. Treasury Department, I think is ultimately what FinCEN rolls up under. And it was a big administrative headache, not because it was difficult by all the kind of accounts I've read. It's like a 15-minute process to just create an account with FinCEN and file. Especially if you just have a simple business, like if you’re just a single member LLC or something. But it was a bit of a like, you know, it depends on what side of the political aisle you’re on, I guess. But like the consensus, I think, you know, majority wise, that is a bit of an overstep in terms of like corporate transparency. Like, you know, why should my LLC—like why do I need to file this? I already filed my LLC with my state; it has all my information. You know, I don't know what Voxby is, but like I have an LLC here in Arizona, and, you know, I filed it with the state of Arizona. They have all my information.

You know, it was like kind of an overkill, I guess, to like have this federal agency that you had to report to as well. I think it was kind of the contrarian viewpoint on this rule. And so the reason I bring it up now is because you used to have the file report, I think, by the end of this year for you if you own an LLC, if you own a business. But there recently just was a like a judge I think somewhere in Texas that ruled that like—and I don’t know legalese at all—but like they had like an injunction, which basically said, hey, this is like temporarily on hold because it like violated—in our opinion it violates some statute or whatever. And so it’s interesting because I bring it up because like accountants that were providing a service, like helping clients get ready to file these BOIs or had helped the clients file these BOIs, you know, get this whiplash because the government, you know, or a judge in this case changes its mind and says, hey, we no longer need to do this, at least not right now. And so that's a relatively new development that that judge issued an injunction. I'll link it in the show notes. You know, who says accounting is boring? You have these weird rules that come out, and then they get reversed for some reason. And, you know, have clients, you know, that are asking questions like, do I need to file this? Do I need to, you know, ignore this? And so I think I saw someone on Twitter call it the lawyer-accountant industrial complex, or we just, you know, create all these weird rules to keep us all having jobs. I don't believe that, but it was a funny way to put it because, yeah, like—

Bradley Bernard (1:14:48)
Job security is great, especially when you create it yourself.

Bennett Bernard (1:15:13)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But yeah, so I'll link some of that stuff in the show notes. And, you know, I guess, PSA, if you do have a business right now, as of today, 12/17, I don't think you need to file a BOI, at least by the end of the year, until this whole thing gets hashed out. So there's a little PSA. Again, don't rely on that. Do your own research. I am not an absolute authority on this subject. But that's what I think is kind of happening right now.

Bradley Bernard (1:16:10)
I am not a lawyer, but this is my advice.

Bennett Bernard (1:16:10)
Yeah, well, I should do the TikTok of, you know, I'm an accountant with a decade of experience. This is what I think is happening with the reporting, kind of how the drone people, you know, yeah, yeah, right. And just to hell with it if it's right or wrong, who cares? At least I'll get a 20,000 views, you know? That seems to be the play.

Bradley Bernard (1:16:17)
You should. Yeah, you really should.

I have one last closing question. I know you've been posting on LinkedIn more for 2024, and you've really come out with some viral posts in my mind. Do you have any goals to set for 2025? Again, it doesn’t have to be a long answer, but I'm just curious if you've thought about the number of posts, virality metrics, or just like frequency—any of those.

Bennett Bernard (1:16:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'll save the long answer for another episode, another podcast. But what I would say is, you know, I did have some posts go like semi-viral. We talked about that on the show. And I think for me, I haven't posted a little bit, actually. And part of the reason for that is I kind of want to rethink some of like some of what I'm posting, I guess, because I want to make sure that at the end of the day, it's useful and—

Bradley Bernard (1:16:55)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett Bernard (1:17:15)
That's like the hill I'm gonna, I guess, kind of hitch or hill I'll die on. Because, you know, I think it's all good to build community and more like generic posts and like, you know, talk about like accounting-isms, you know, that go on, and those seem to get a lot of traction. I, like I said before, I do enjoy that, but I really want to like have something that you're not seeing elsewhere.

And so that’s kind of what I'm trying to gear towards. So I haven't posted in a while. I kind of want to, you know, I might post maybe once or twice here by the end of the year, but I'm kind of trying to plan for a bigger, you know—not bigger, but a more specific kind of type of post in 2025. And it might be less frequent, but more information-packed that would be useful to either one or two target audiences is kind of like my rough thoughts. But I'll save that for the next podcast.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:06)
Cool. Some more strategy, it sounds like.

Bennett Bernard (1:18:09)
Yeah, yeah, because I think before I was kind of, you know, just tweeting—not tweeting—but posting kind of whatever was kind of on my mind or what I was kind of like, you know, resonating with in that particular day or that particular week. But, and I got good numbers and I was happy with it. But, you know, I think for me, like long term, like why am I on this platform, whether it be LinkedIn or X or whatever? Like, you know, I want to be very specific about like what I'm posting there so it attracts the right kinds of things that I'm ultimately doing it for.

If that makes sense.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:34)
Yeah. Well cool. Well, this was a fun episode. We'll get it all posted up on the socials and everything. So good stuff, like always, Brad. And yeah, I will talk to you later. Until next time.

Bradley Bernard (1:18:47)
Yeah, wait, wait, wait. I have one last note, one last note. This will be the last episode for 2024. So shout out to all the—

Bennett Bernard (1:18:56)
Okay.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:01)
Happy holidays, everybody. Happy New Year. We did 12 episodes in total in 2024 on track to do one every roughly two weeks, but again, life happens. So there'll be quite a few episodes coming your way. I can't do the math—I've already tried. There'll be plenty.

But yeah, subscribe on YouTube, follow us on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. 2025 is gonna be a great year. If you're not a Breakeven Brothers fan, you should be, and we're gonna come out with merch next year, so get ready for the hot drop. It'll be out there for Black Friday, so yeah, just be ready.

Bennett Bernard (1:19:34)
Yeah, a pair of socks or something. Break Even Brother socks, because that's always what everyone needs. Cool.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:39)
And some coffee and some midnight juice.

Bennett Bernard (1:19:42)
Yeah, absolutely awesome. Good stuff, Brad. We'll do this all again next time. Cool, see ya.

Bradley Bernard (1:19:44)
Cool.

Bennett Bernard (1:19:46)
Sounds good. See ya.