When Webflow goes down

Small Efforts - with Sean Sun and Andrew Askins

Pre-Black Hat crunch time hits Miscreants hard as brand audits pile up and Webflow goes down for half a day. Andrew's new MetaMonster grid shows AI's bipolar nature - brilliant one moment, baffling the next. 🤖 Plus: positioning challenges, category creation in the AI era, and why Poboy the cat makes a terrible hide-and-seek player.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
• Margins: http://margins.so/
• Sean's website: https://seanqsun.com/

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:01.03
Sean
What's up?

00:02.39
Andrew
Your energy is different after we hit record than it was before.

00:06.79
Sean
I know, I gotta turn it on I gotta turn on for the podcast.

00:10.99
Andrew
What's going on, man?

00:12.23
Sean
I can't believe we both just went like double peace signs on an audio podcast, by the way.

00:12.40
Andrew
you're a

00:17.63
Andrew
We have video now, Sean.

00:19.07
Sean
We do, we do, and do. We have great intros.

00:20.91
Andrew
If if somebody would ever approve the latest videos to go live, then we would have even more video.

00:27.34
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. that sounds like That sounds like a job for someone.

00:33.60
Andrew
Oh, hey, we have a new episode up.

00:34.09
Sean
and

00:36.53
Andrew
Someone finally approved something.

00:36.57
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. I'm working on it.

00:40.65
Andrew
All right.

00:40.64
Sean
I'm doing it. It just sounds like a job for someone who doesn't have 30 hours of meetings a week right now. So...

00:46.70
Andrew
Jesus Christ. Yeah, I'm not going to lie I've been trying to meet with you and JJ at the same time lately and trying to find overlap where neither of you has a meeting is almost impossible.

01:00.43
Sean
it is It is pretty much impossible.

01:00.69
Andrew
Oh, boy, you sure you want to go out? Can we pause real quick?

01:05.95
Sean
Yeah, sure. OK, we'll come back. No problem.

01:09.12
Andrew
Thank you, thank you. Po'boy wanted out of the office, but also Wally, guy who works on our house, over. And so then Po'boy was immediately terrified and regretted his choice to leave the office and ran and hid under the covers of the bed.

01:26.62
Sean
Gotcha.

01:27.14
Andrew
It's pretty funny and kind of adorable. Like when our cat wants to hide from something, he just hides under the covers and it's like the most obvious lump in the entire world. So it's a completely ineffective hiding place, but he feels safe because he can't see anything.

01:42.68
Sean
Look, man, if I can't see you, you can't see me. That's how it works.

01:45.72
Andrew
He's an adorable, dumb little fuckhead and I appreciate him.

01:46.52
Sean
That's

01:52.19
Sean
the...

01:53.48
Andrew
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Trying to get time on your calendar right now is tough.

01:58.27
Sean
yeah Yeah, same. Me too. It's like you start the day with yesterday's to-do list, you have a bunch of meetings, and you end the day with a new compounded to-do list, and then

02:11.16
Andrew
So what's going on? I thought i thought you were like removing yourself from a lot of client work. And yeah, what are all these meetings?

02:18.30
Sean
ah so i am ish but i also am not because it's pre-blackhat crunch time and i really have like i think i need to be there like to help you just get things across the finish line we launched a site last week we just launched a site that today we launched a site like the week before we're another monthly sprint to launch like two more sites

02:45.30
Sean
Yeah. Plus every single client wants a brand audit because, you know, they work with us at the early stage. We built, we built them a brand. It works really well for the first phase and they all reach a point where like they need to advance it, which is fine. It's normal. It happens with every single client. They just all consolidated onto the same last couple of weeks.

03:07.59
Andrew
Interesting.

03:07.84
Sean
So

03:08.03
Andrew
So you're actually doing a brand audit of your own branding work?

03:11.43
Sean
yes.

03:12.20
Andrew
Huh. That's kind of cool.

03:13.24
Sean
Yes. Yeah. Well, it's because like...

03:18.53
Andrew
Sort of seems like a racket, but...

03:22.74
Sean
Fair. Fair. I mean, it's not like we're charging for them. So it's part of the retainer.

03:26.12
Andrew
Wait, why are you not charging for them?

03:27.78
Sean
It's part of the retainer. It's part of...

03:29.03
Andrew
Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.

03:29.02
Sean
It's, its you know...

03:30.39
Andrew
okay

03:30.35
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:30.90
Andrew
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:32.56
Sean
It's like it's time to evolve.

03:33.04
Andrew
You're charging for them, but you're not charging separately for them.

03:36.84
Sean
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

03:37.60
Andrew
Okay. Okay.

03:38.75
Sean
So it's like half a racket. No, it's, it's ah a you know, when you are in early stage company, you are asking for very specific things to get you up and running, right?

03:48.30
Andrew
Yeah.

03:49.09
Sean
and And over, you know, a year or so as you grow, like, lore gets built about your company more meaning.

03:56.03
Andrew
Hmm.

03:56.18
Sean
Your product changes, your content strategy changes, and all this sort of stuff. And, like, it at some point it evolves past that. what the branding that we did in the beginning can support and honestly what the branding they paid for can support, which is totally fine because it's like, you know, there's no reason that we start off and you pay us a bunch of money to do all this thinking about your brand for you to like possibly never even use it because you are still in that PMF stage, like finding PMF stage.

04:09.70
Andrew
Mm-hmm.

04:25.49
Sean
But yeah, a bunch of brand and and also competitors exist and the competitors copy you and it's like, and now, you know, At this point, we should just build invoices to some security companies because every time we do something, shows up on their site.

04:38.04
Sean
I'm just like, dude.

04:38.96
Andrew
Dang. Shots fired.

04:41.55
Sean
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:42.03
Andrew
You to call names?

04:43.42
Sean
No, absolutely not. No, security companies, we love you all oh equally. and But if you would like someone to just do, if you like work from the source, you might just, you know, hit us up.

04:54.89
Andrew
We love the ones that pay us money more. I think that's fair to say.

04:58.44
Sean
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. We do love the ones that pay us money more.

05:03.82
Andrew
You can buy our love.

05:03.86
Sean
Yeah.

05:04.68
Andrew
Yeah.

05:05.48