The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
All right, welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to business leaders who are working in and with Laravel. My guest today is Jack McDade, creator of Static and Radical Design. Jack, would you introduce yourself and tell us who are you and what's your business?

Jack McDade:
You got it. Hey, thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt Stauffer:
Thanks for coming.

Jack McDade:
I am, yeah, my main thing is Statamic. So, you know, I, as a designer and developer, I'm always working on, you know, like side project and side ideas, but Statamic has been my main thing, and which we launched Static One back in 2012. So it's been... 13 years, been on it full time since 2017. Like, it did not get traction right away. Part of that is because it wasn't on Laravel. So, you we don't even need to talk about the pre-Laravel days.

Matt Stauffer:
When was the LARO conversion?

Jack McDade:
It's when it was a piece of garbage. That was with version 2. So I want to say that was like 2015, 2014, 2015, something like that. Yeah, we were on...

Matt Stauffer:
Really? I remember it happening and I didn't realize it was so early.

Jack McDade:
It was early. Yeah. So we were on slim PHP, like initially, and the whole application was written in closures and it was under a meg and a half. Like my goal was like, let's build a CMS that fits on a floppy disk, which is like the dumbest constraint, it was, yeah, constraints helped you like, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
But sometimes you just need some kind of constraint, right? Well, it was that constraint. Yeah, sometimes it was that constraint, but it was also the fact that it didn't even have database access originally, or was it purely flat files? Yeah, so that that's also a constraint. Yeah.

Jack McDade:
No. Yeah, was truly flat files. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So yeah, in version two, we built it as a pre-built Laravel app. Well, it's in a package, so if you want to use stat and it goes like, this is your Laravel app. And we shipped it with like the composer stuff pre-compiled. This was like kind of before we all like fully embraced Composer, which is just insane to think about.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, and then since then, version three, Statamic came out as a actual, proper Laravel Composer package, and even that's now been five years, five or six years. So I feel like Statomic three is really like when Statomic really became like a real grownup thing for realsies.

And from there on, it's been, you the team's grown, we've been full-time, we're like up to six full-time people, two part-timers and a community full of tons of really great people who contribute, just like with Laravel, just people who contribute a lot of great stuff to Statamic from features and bug fixes and documentation, all kind of stuff. So yeah, that's my main thing.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. And you know that one of my first questions is always like, in what way is Laravel connected in your business? And we definitely already talked about this, but I have to remind myself, I'm not here to nerd out with you, I'm here to talk about business with you.

Jack McDade:
Sure.

Matt Stauffer:
And one of the things I'm curious about is, so Laravel's involved in your business because your business is selling a piece of software, well, selling in, it's open source and paid, but you're making money off things that is in the Laravel ecosystem.

Are you using Laravel also to run your store and stuff or you know, do you have, so you have your own, okay, got it.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, Laravel everything. Yeah, Laravel all the things.

Matt Stauffer:
Cause I didn't know if you're using something, something else like it, you're like, no, that stuff all runs on Shopify or something else like that. So yes, got it.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, it's not on WordPress, it's fine. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
So you've got at least one and probably more than one Laravel apps that are running your checkouts. They're running your membership stuff, some API, stuff like that. And then you also, it's all to sell and support a package that is in Laravel.

Jack McDade:
All of it.

Correct. There's not a single thing that we run that's not Laravel under the hood. It's usually Statnic on top of Laravel, but like generally always at least Laravel. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so when... I didn't prompt you for this question, but I'm just super curious as you think about the makeup of your team, are they split into product engineers who are working on Statamic and then folks who working on internal tooling or does everybody touch everything?

Jack McDade:
Really everybody touches everything for the most part except for me and Jay focus more on the design front end side now that the team's grown and allowed being able to...

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Jack McDade:
Not do everything. Yeah, the rest of the guys all kind of back end Laravel front end view and then design CSS tailwind. That kind of stuff tends to be like our design team, which is right now is me, Jay, Jay George. So yeah, I think that answers your question, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and you don't have any dedicated designers, right? They're designers, design engineers, like Designs Who Code is the highest level, right? Okay.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's fair to say. Yeah, we don't have any designers that only hand off comps, right? So like Jay writes CSS, I write CSS, and we both do JavaScript and stuff. So yeah, we don't have any pixel monkeys.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, got it.

Jack McDade:
Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, sure, but it's just not the way you're laid out.

Jack McDade:
Not the way we run.

Matt Stauffer:
And that's part of what I like kind of hearing is that everybody sets up their team differently. so you said you've got a team of six full-time, does that include you?

Jack McDade:
Yeah. Yep.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, do you have people managing ops or is it just basically a bunch of developers and you and you're running the all the business aspects?

Jack McDade:
Bunch of developers and me, and I play catch-all. Yeah, Laravel Forge is our ops, know, it's dev ops anyway. And I'm biz ops and marketing and you know, all of it, all of the other things. Me and chat GPT.

Matt Stauffer:
HR and everything like that, yeah.

Got it. This is not legal advice.

Jack McDade:
No, absolutely not. Do I use it as a legal advice? A hundred percent, maybe.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so as you think about the challenges that you are doing...

Jack McDade:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Obviously you could kind of nerd out really deeply because one of the you know what if we're talking about what are the challenges you're having technically. But I think especially for you since you are such a technical founder I'm really curious about what are the high level technical challenges that you've had recently that are less, you know use this package but are more kind of like for example have at some point you said, maybe Vue is not the way to go. Or you said in version three, in version one to two and two to three, you made massive re-architectures based on what it made sense. What in that category of thing have you dealt with recently, if anything? Or is it more like things have been kind of smooth sailing for the last year or two?

Jack McDade:
The challenges have been big, but our team is so good that they don't feel like these rocks that you're bashing your head against. It's just like, this is a problem we tackle now. So Statamic, we're about to, by the time this episode airs, Statamic 6 will be out, should be out, if it's not out. There will be a post script to this story where something bad happened. I mean, we're ready to go. So Statamic 6 will be out, and from the five to six upgrade,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
vue 2 to vue 3 for the control panel. We were like the last holdout. It was mostly me because I love vue 2 so much every time I popped open that composition API. like, is this nightmare? Let's just use vue 2 forever.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Forever. Yep.

Jack McDade:
And then, you know, then all it takes is like someone give you the light bulb moment and you're like, I get it.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh I get it. Yeah.

Jack McDade:
Although this is like...This is, a lot of ways, in a lot of cases, much, much better. All right, let's do the conversion. So we did that. I mean, we've been off and on working on that. Well, the Vue 3 conversion was maybe two months, a month and a half, really, of like...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
Really even less, like, it's working, right? And then just fiddling through and then kind of going through a lot of the JavaScript and just making sure it's done the Vue 3 way or takes advantage of a of the new stuff in performance optimization. So that was definitely the, when you have a really, really, really big Vue 2 app, going to Vue 3 is, there's a lot of work involved in that, but we'd allowed it to also, as long as we're touching every file, let's just have a conversation about every component. Say, does this do something it doesn't need to do anymore? Is something that you do? And it allowed us to clean up. We deleted more code than we kept.

Matt Stauffer:
Mmm. I love that.

Jack McDade:
It was, Oh yeah. I we just have like, you know, those commits are just like. 200 green, 30,000 red, you're like, yes, so good.

Matt Stauffer:
That feels so good. I love that.

Jack McDade:
It's just like, it's taking the junk drawer that you have in your kitchen and you just like throw it all in the garbage and put one pair of scissors in it. You're like, oh yeah, oh, it's good. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh man. Yeah, and especially if you've done like, you you've done a couple of massive rewrites, when you're doing massive rewrites, you're just trying to get the thing working. But you said it's been five years since your last massive rewrite. And so you can get the thing optimized after that. And that's a very good feeling. So you guys are about to launch. No, go ahead.

Jack McDade:
Yep.

Correct. Yes, yes.

Yeah, I would say the other, I mean, if we want to nerd out on like the hard technical challenges,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, love to.

Jack McDade:
like we've done some really gnarly cool stuff on like the parsing side with like Blade and Antlers interoperability and component level kind of stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
What's antlers, Jack?

Jack McDade:
So Antlers, Antlers is our kind of proprietary template language because we started, we needed one before we were running. So we actually started this at what's called Lex, which was written by, I can't forget his name now, it's been so long, Phil, Phil something?

Matt Stauffer:
Phil Sturgeon.

Really? I don't know that.

Jack McDade:
Yes, I think it was Phil Sturgeon. Yeah, or like at least he was heavily involved in it, but we're talking, this is back in 2009, 10, 11. So we started with that, of forked it, made it our own, and kept growing it. And like, blade wasn't a thing yet. And so, Antlers kept growing and kept growing as a regex parser until Statamic 3 when John Costor helped us rewrite it as a full AST style.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm.

Jack McDade:
So there's a lot of things you can do in antlers that you can't do in Blade or like most template languages because once there as an abstract syntax tree you can do things out of order that doesn't parse like top to bottom like it parses it and then it like creates this is a technical podcast right or is it this is business podcast anyway we don't need to go too technical.

Matt Stauffer:
It's business... Yeah. Yeah.

Jack McDade:
Anyway, it lets you do things out of order and do a lot of really cool and crazy stuff. So that has been a really fun thing. And now we're building in features where Blade and Antlers kind of leak into each other. And we can't, we don't want to get rid of Antlers. Blade is great. Blade has gotten so good and LiveWire is so good and the tooling is excellent. But like there's still things you can only do in Antlers that we want to keep around and have that option for people.

Because like Statamic doesn't have like a controller layer by default, or you can run without controllers. like your templates and your naming conventions are what drive URLs and what data gets injected in the view. So your template code needs to be able to say like, go get that page or that collection or that stuff in a really clean, simple way. And that gets hairy in Blade just like you get like, know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, and Blade is not built, and you know, this is technical, but it's technical from a ways where you make different technical decisions depending on the context.

Blade is built assuming that it has data passed to it from controller, which means it's going to have, you know, what makes sense there and not have what doesn't make sense there. We built, at Tighten, we built a static site generator with the intention of it just being traditional Blade and discovered very quickly, you're missing some of the ability to pull things, we had to build our own kind of layer on top of it. And that kind of gets to an interesting topic of conversation, which is where Statamic it came from. And the story I have, which is very simple is we had the expression engine world, we had code igniter, the backend PHP libraries started proliferating and also around a somewhat similar time period, the...

Jack McDade:
Yep.

Matt Stauffer:
PHP based CMS's that are generally in the same expression engine world also started proliferating. And I don't actually know if that's the true story. Like I definitely remember you and Craft CMS coming out at a similar time. But like, were they actually at similar times? Were you, you know, like what's, and can you just kind of tell us like, what's the story behind Statamic? You know, what were you coming from? What motivated you to make it?

Jack McDade:
Yeah, the actual true story, that's very much it. There's just more detail to it.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that.

Jack McDade:
So I was working at an agency from like 2006 until 2000 or 2007 or eight until 10 or 11, 12, 13, something like that. 12, 11, a while. And we were building expression engine sites. So that was my tool of choice back then, because I never got WordPress. I just hated that way of building sites. I custom fields and templates I could pull that stuff in. It just didn't exist back then. So building expression engine sites, expression engine not having all of the features that we needed, so I started building or taking over and maintaining some expression engine add-ons.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
One notable one was called Structure, on with another guy, Travis Schmeiser, ended up working at Square for a long time as a UI designer. He's a really cool guy. And so the two of us will work.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm sorry, you did structure?

Jack McDade:
Yeah, I did structure.

Matt Stauffer:
Sorry everybody, I had no idea. I love structure. I don't think we knew each other at this point. I use structure on everything. That's awesome. That's so cool. Yeah, you just put it on every single install, no question.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, it was like the, I don't know, top three add-ons for Expression Engine back in the day. Yeah. It was like, kind of like wasn't like worth using Expression Engine without it, in my opinion. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Wow. Cool. Okay. Sorry. Back to you. Uh-huh.

Jack McDade:
Yeah. So that was, that's where I started. Yeah. And so I'm like, all right, I love this flow, but like why, when I quit my job at the agency and I was like, well, I'm old Expression Engine sites by myself. And.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
And then you're also the account manager and the business guy and you're like chasing down the accounts receivable and all this stuff. And then clients like, Hey, can you, I want to add a blog to my site or I want to add a newsfeed. And you're like, all right, cool. I'll start working on that. But then the problems of being as a one man show, the client would be like making changes on production, right? You log into the production site. Like people did or still do and change stuff. And then all the stuff I'm working on locally now like conflicts because you've got a database. And so like, please stop touching it. Or now I've I pushed the template code and I just recreate everything in the control panel clicking clicking clicking clicking and like making it over again and copying and pasting stuff it was like taking like half my time was redoing stuff I'd already done once because the client wouldn't stop like this is just This is text literally. We're just talking about text here. We're talking about template code. We're talking about configuration files Why does this even have to be in a database? This is like this is not a lot of content. This is not a lot of text I want a version control it.

Can I, is it possible, because as far as at the time, like no one had done it, is it possible to make a CMS that just skips the database and just does it all in Git? And then as I started hacking on the idea, Stacey came out, which is like the first little hobby flat file blog engine thing. I'm like, oh, someone else did it. Didn't do a lot, but like someone else has done it. Now I had some ideas to like kick around and that's where it came from.

So once it got far enough, I kind of let all the expression engine stuff go like I it was weird to have My own CMS, but still be in one I'm like I have to commit like I either have to like let's am I go and just commit one way or the other. And at the same to roll back just a little bit while I was building Statamic, Craft CMS was also being built at the same time was called Blocks back then by Brandon Kelly And he called me he's like hey man because he built like all the other really popular add-ons for

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Jack McDade:
expression. So it was like he built everything, I built structure, and between all of us like there was probably not one site that ran that didn't use at least one of our, if not all of our, add-ons. It's like hey I'm building a CMS, let's give me like expression engine but better. Here's what I'm thinking, I heard you're working on a CMS, do you want to build it with me? And I'm like this is just a better expression engine but it's like still the same exact thing.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Jack McDade:
It's the same exact paradigm and I'm like, I feel like the future is gonna be flat files. The future's definitely flat files. So I'm like, nah, I'm out. So we went and hired his number two, I think his name's Brad, Brad Bell, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Brad.

Jack McDade:
And they went and they've done gangbusters, they've been great. Flat file, turns out it's hard to teach someone about a whole new product category.

And while there was a lot of value and people loved the flat file aspect of it, being flat file only was a problem also because it meant that site would get to a certain, certain size or scale or certain type of site where you're like highly relational data or just like lots and lots of data even though it's very simple and just like the flat file thing, we don't, the files don't really benefit us anything more. We want to optimize our queries. We're like, all right, we'll to go back to the drawing board, build the database layer in.

And now it does both. And so we have this abstract layer that lets us, you can do anything you want for data. You can write a driver for anything. You can imagine Firebase, like anything. You put it on the blockchain, shouldn't, but you could. Maybe you should. Maybe that's where public bills and things should be.

Version control. Yeah, that's one of those like really big challenges that that evolved over time. But that's the that is the origin story. That's how it started. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, and I mean, so at the beginning it was the, know, if you want a PHP based CMS that, you know, is flat file. I don't think that's your sales pitch today.

Jack McDade:
No.

Matt Stauffer:
I don't often ask people this, but I'm actually really curious. Like, what is the elevator pitch for Statamic today?

Jack McDade:
That's really good question. It changes and I usually need to gauge like what they're... because it's different. Who are you? A

Matt Stauffer:
Who are you? What's the context? Yeah. Yeah.

Jack McDade:
Are you in Laravel? Are you a Laravel person? It's easy. You want to drop a CMS into your Laravel app in like two seconds. Boom. Done. Like that's it. Drop it in. Composer install. Done.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jack McDade:
You can use a little of it as you want. can use it with Filament. You can use it with, you know, Nova. You can use it with whatever, like, just drive the content portions of your site. It's a very simple pitch. Outside of the Laravel world, it's a little different because...

you know, they don't care about Laravel, which is a huge selling point for Statamic. So then we have to go up against, it's either, it's a flat file CMS, which is a huge selling point for some people in some types of site.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Jack McDade:
Or it's a extremely user centered, like a user experience driven CMS with a great UI, great developer experience, very, very easy to use. It's like WordPress without the crap that you never touch. And so that's generally how we sell it to like the agency world outside of Statamic. And then there's Enterprise, which then yeah, that's a different elevator pitch entirely. So yeah, we're still kind of working on that one.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Sounds like the guy who has a million different hats to wear and things to juggle while running a small business.

Jack McDade:
I just... No one told me it would be hard. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, speaking of which, great transition. I imagine when you created it, you were not, and you tell me if I'm wrong, you were not setting out to say, is gonna be my full-time job. I'm gonna run a business. I'm gonna hire a whole bunch of people. You're like, hey, I'm like gonna make a thing, right?

Jack McDade:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
When did it go from, hey, I'm making a thing to like, this is like, this is a business. And then from there to, I'm a business owner and my job is as much to run business as it is to write code.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, so since we started in 2012 again, it was I think 2016, 2017 is when I'm like, we're a company now.

Matt Stauffer:
Like it or not.

Jack McDade:
It's a thing, we're accompanying, it's time to get business-ing. That was when I got an email from Andre Basset at De Spiegel, which is one of the biggest news companies in Europe, in Germany specifically, and they said, hey, we love your CMS. I had never even heard of them. Hey, we love your CMS, we want to show you some of the stuff that we built into it. Maybe you want some of the features or we just kind of want to show you some of the cool stuff that you can do with Statamic. We kind of have a feeling you didn't think you could do.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
I'm like, I'm like I was gonna just like that feels fake. I'm gonna delete that but real quick let Real quick. Let me just Google der Spiegel and I'm the setback. I'm like It's like the New York Times of Germany. Okay. All right, let's take this call and you know, we hopped on they showed us all this like workflow stuff and they were running on it on a database Which we hadn't done yet and like all this stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
It was just like me and Jason at the time and we were looking at each other like on Slack virtually with eyeball emojis. We were like, what is, okay, I guess.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, with, uh-huh.

Jack McDade:
we've made it to like a new level. And so they flew us to Germany and we spent a week with them looking at all the stuff they built and dreaming with them. It was, you we came home so fired up, we fired all our clients or let them go gracefully and just went all in, started like, you know, just, I never knew is it time to deploy the precious little, you know, capital reserve that I've scraped together and like say, let's use it as a runway and go for it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Jack McDade:
I just never was sure if this was the idea and the last one became a real business. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, I love it. Back to the things I actually told you we're gonna be talking about ahead of time. You have several employees, and I know that hiring your employees is not just hiring a Laravel developer, because you're probably gonna hire people who actually have Statamic experience specifically, but overall, what has your experience been like in hiring developers for your team?

Jack McDade:
Yeah, I would say that everybody I've hired so far has, they've come and made the job that they wanted. That's...

They, hey, I'd love to work for you. Dude, you're such a great developer. We're not hiring right now. Okay, that's fine.

Matt Stauffer:
Just want you to know.

Jack McDade:
Is there any open source stuff I could hack on? Is there any little things? I just love static, what can I do? And so it was people like that where they were just made themselves, they just kept diving into my inbox with PR requests and it got to the point where when it was time, like, all right, we actually can hire somebody. The obvious choice is Jesse Lee. The obvious choice.

Matt Stauffer:
Uh huh, yeah.

Jack McDade:
is Duncan McClain. They had to be hired. There was no other option. so they just, they said they'd love, you know, that's what they did. They made the job for themselves. I've got the next one or two people queued up that I know, like for sure I know who I want to hire next. For sure. Yeah. It's...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's a great position to be in, right? You're not just hiring your buddies, but you are hiring people who have shown them spells to be active and involved. And also you're like, I've seen your code. I know what working with you is like. This is easy.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, it's like we're already working together, but I'm not paying you and I feel guilty about it. Like, right? You know, when you've got, like these great PRs come in and all these like, they just collaborate and they're like, dude, you're not getting anything for this. It's like, well, either they do this for fun or they do it on a client project because they needed it. And you're like, dude, like, ah, it would be so great if we could just do this full-time. This is part-time you, let's go full-time you, you know? Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, right? Let's see what that looks like. that's awesome.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, so that is the opposite end of the spectrum from a thousand resumes and you trying to figure out, do I only read the cover letters or do I, like, what am I doing here? You know? Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, 100%. So as you have kind of gone from being, I'm a programmer to I'm a business owner, business renter, you all those kinds of things. What things have helped you make that transition? Are there books? Are there articles? Are there podcasts, conferences, mentors, or anything else where you're like, this was an important piece of me learning how to do the business side, not just the coding side.

Jack McDade:
Yeah, probably the most important part was a couple of really close friends that run their own businesses that we would meet up. Back when lived in New York five years ago, we were all local up there

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm.

Jack McDade:
and we would meet up, we'd call it a whiskey business. We'd have a glass of whiskey and we would talk business. Sometimes we would watch episodes of The Prophet. You ever watch that with Marcus Limonis?

Matt Stauffer:
I haven't seen it, no.

Jack McDade:
Okay, it's older now, but it a great show and he would come in and basically acquire businesses and turn them around.And so we'd watch an episode and we'd pause it halfway before he would make the acquisition offer and take a guess at what he'd offer and why. We're just like, we don't know, we don't know what we're doing, but if we can validate ourselves against an expert, that's kinda how it started. And then, all right, so what are you running into in your business? What are you into in your business? And we realized, even though our businesses are different, they are the same in other ways. Funnily enough, one of the guys in that little trio was Tom Jagger, who now owns expression engine and lives 20 houses down. So like we literally have the same business product type and we still do it. We still talk.

Matt Stauffer:
That's so funny. I love that. Okay.

Jack McDade:
Yeah that was very very instrumental and then yeah just other just being able to tap people on the shoulder like I think you know Twitter it's not the same as it used to be anymore, but like social media in general, Like then it was Twitter. You could just reach out and poke someone and be like, hey man, can I like pick your brain about like a weird, like I did that with Taylor, I did that with Adam, I did that with Jeffrey, I did that with a lot of people that now are like looked at as the leaders in our space. And we were all, you we knew it was coming, but like we were all just kind of guys back in the day and learned a lot from those guys too.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, in terms of books and educational resources, what are you reading right now?

Jack McDade:
Ooh, right now. I'm just reading fiction right now. I can't do business books all the time.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah.

Jack McDade:
I definitely burn out. There's a few go-tos that are just my absolute favorite. Everything by Austin Kleon just kind of like does it for me. He's got these three little books that come in this like awesome, you know these?

Matt Stauffer:
Got it. Yeah, Uh-huh. Yes, I have.

Jack McDade:
You've probably seen these on shelves, right? They're not necessarily about like business business, but they're kind of like the... What's Derek Cyberg's book? Like anything you want, right? They're like inspirational and they talk a lot about, know, like how, and then look at that. It's just like really easy to read. Really great ideas on how to, you know, where to get creativity, how to like get through like the grind and the sloth of, you know, when you're like not getting the feedback you want or your idea is not getting traction, how to put yourself out there. Those have been really, really good.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Jack McDade:
And although I never finished it, I think I'll never got this far, this book I think about almost every day. The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. And the idea that when you hit something that feels like it's blocking your path, find a way to make that the thing. You know, if you were at Laracon, this, you know, a couple weeks ago, Adam talked about this very idea. It's like, just build anything. Like literally build anything. You could possibly just build something.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah... Yeah.

Jack McDade:
And then when you run into a wall and you're like, I can't do the thing I want to do now. That's the thing. That's the idea. Like the fixing the obstacle becomes the business.
that presents itself in so many different ways in life too.

I've had a lot of health issues over the last couple of years and they are proving to be the new way forward. It's like it has made my life so much better by figuring out what's going on and spending time and effort on taking care of myself in ways that I didn't used to. And so like my future now is thanks to this obstacle that came into my path. So I literally have no idea what the second half of the book is about, but the first half...

Matt Stauffer:
It was real good.

Jack McDade:
That was definitely, definitely did something for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that. Okay, other things I'm curious about your daily day process. This is one I've just added. What are you doing, if anything, with AI? And regardless of how you use it in a day to day, is there any way where you have used it recently? You're like, that's really creative, Jack. I did a good job on that one. I should tell more people about it.

Jack McDade:
That's a good question. Definitely using AI, I think it just feels like we've reached the point where it's like inevitable. Most people are probably using it for something. I find in a coding developer context, it's most useful for me and us and the team to do menial tasks that we've already established convention or patterns around.

Like, Hey, I've refactored this component. Can you look at these five other components and do the same thing? And most of the time it's like, if it's not perfect, it's so close to you. Like that's awesome.

Very little luck getting it to do things from scratch the way I would find it to be useful. Like if like, make me a new component that does such and such. And it's like, I'm literally wasting my time. Like, doesn't help. So that, that kind of stuff converting, doing menial tasks, like, hey, put, here's a giant spreadsheet, convert this into markdown file so I can like import it into stat. Like it can do great stuff like that, but.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yep, yep.

Jack McDade:
And I'm sure it'll keep getting better, that's like, technically that's how we use it. And then I use it a lot for research and just like ideation, but I don't let it write for me unless it's like a, like a formal letter to Geico complaining about, you know, a claim on my literally thing I did the other day and I had a claim that it's not me. So like, write me the thing, boom, done. And they called me an hour later. I'm like, dang, that worked. Sweet. I didn't have to think about it. So yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that. Got it. that is very creative, because I've certainly never used it for anything like that. That's very, the idea of using it for things that actually interact with real people doesn't, I'm not a big fan, but I love the idea of using it to navigate systems that we're not the experts for interacting with. And like, you can go figure out that legally, so.

Jack McDade:
Yeah. Exactly. Like TLDR this for me. Do that all the time. Yeah, for sure.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's cool.

Okay, are you hiring, or do you plan to be hiring anytime in near future?

Jack McDade:
I would love to hire in the near future, but I already know who I want to hire and I've already talked with that person about it and it's probably gonna work out, I hope so.

Matt Stauffer:
You did mention that, Good, love that.

Jack McDade:
So don't take this as license to think that you can squeeze in.

Matt Stauffer:
I don't know. think what you just did was you told everybody exactly how to get a job with you and it's show up and do a bunch of really excellent free work. So I know I almost did. I almost didn't. I was like, no, I'm just going to that.

Jack McDade:
That sounds so bad when you put it that way.

Matt Stauffer:
No, it is that one of the best. We've we've had other people say this in the podcast. One of the best ways to find great people to work for you in a space is to go see the people who are doing open source work there. And most folks haven't been you, but you know, a great place for you to find these people is to hire the people who are doing great work in your world. And it doesn't have to be people doing unpaid work. They're just not paid by you.

Jack McDade:
100%.

Yeah, it's not exploited. didn't ask them to do it. I think you know what we're saying.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, I just had to give you a little bit of crap there.

Jack McDade:
Yeah. I don't, it was warranted. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I know that you said by the time this comes out, because we're recording this in August and I think that's coming out in late September, early October, the latest version of Statamic is going to be out. So I do want to ask, is there anything you want to plug? And if it's plugging that, what does a plug for Statamic look like for somebody who's hearing this and has never used Statamic before? What is their next steps look like?

Jack McDade:
I mean, if you've never used Statamic before, just go to satimate.com. Like it's, we've built a really nice site that tells you all about it.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay? Okay.

Jack McDade:
That's great. It compares it to other CMSs and it shows you all the features. There's a demo you can click on the button and play around with it. let the site speak for itself. We've already talked about it lot.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, any other plugs?

Jack McDade:
V6s have a lot of new features, new UI, VJS, all these new components, all sorts of great stuff. you're not a developer, it's going to be awesome. If you like a good control panel, it's going to be sexy tech. So yeah, there's a lot to love in V6 and yeah, it should be out by the time this happens.

Matt Stauffer:
If I'm not a developer and I think I need a blog and I'm gonna add Statamic to my list of potential, you know, blog or CMS type things, where do I find a good Statamic developer?

Jack McDade:
It's statamic.com slash partners. We have a partner directory full of, can sort it by country or region and freelancer and agency. And so you can kind of narrow it right down and kind of have an obvious choice of who would be like at least the first person to contact and see if they're available.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Jack McDade:
Really, really great people. have a certified partner program where we do code reviews, we talk to their clients, we have one-on-one calls with them. So when we say they're certified, it's like if we needed work, we would literally hire them ourselves. That's what we're saying.

Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool.

Jack McDade:
So if you, that generally means you're not gonna get someone for 20 bucks an hour. It means you're gonna pay fair rates, but if that's fine, which I'm assuming if you listen to this podcast, it's probably fine. Those are gonna be your best, best developers because they do code. They build goods.

Matt Stauffer:
Good. And you're not going to call them back later to do 10x the work to fix the mistakes they made in their initial $20 an hour work.

Jack McDade:
Correct, if you can't afford to do it right the first time, how are you going to afford to do it twice? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's good. Okay, before my final question, I want to ask you, is there anything you wish we'd covered today that we didn't get to?

Jack McDade:
I would like to plug a kind of unrelated thing. It's unrelated except for that it's also a podcast. So I'm starting podcast. I record the first episode on Tuesday so by the time this comes out we'll probably have, I don't know, one or two episodes out so you can go check it out. It's for this audience but it's not about technical stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay? Alright!

Jack McDade:
It's called Recovery Mode and I've got a really, really great co-host and we're gonna get into literally how to take care of the bodies we've damaged by hunching over at our computers for the last 20 years. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I love this. All right, that's great.

Jack McDade:
We're gonna get into all sorts of stuff. science, what actually works, screw affiliate codes. Like this is like just cut into the heart of it. And I'm really excited. Like actually went out, got a lead, like I've got a studio office that's going to be all built out. And so we're really going for it. Yeah. Should be fun.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. I'm really excited to check it out.

Jack McDade:
Yeah. So check that out. Recovery mode.fm. That'll make any money from it. So buy Stata make, and then listen to recovery. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, link will be in the show notes, of course. There you go, love that. Okay, my last question for you, which is what I exit every podcast with is, if somebody showed up with $100 million today and just said, give me Statamic, here's $100 million, what do you do tomorrow?

Jack McDade:
I would...help as many people as I could.

Matt Stauffer:
Sweetie.

Jack McDade:
I would probably leave the keyboard behind, I'd be done. And I would lean into helping people with...helping people who have the sort of problems that I've had over the last couple of years with, which we'll get into on my podcast, but a lot of symptoms that are around like anxiety and...brain fog and dizziness and heart racing, heart heart palpitations, all this kind of stuff. Turns out it can often come from something very physical, posture driven.

So many people don't know that the symptoms are coming from something avoidable and something you can fix. And I've been able to help a lot of people that I know in real life, just local friends and people online. And I would just lean into that and see how many more people I can help.

And then spend a lot of as much time as I can with my family. Yeah, and give a lot of it away because a hundred million is way more than I'd ever need. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that. Beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because some people I asked they're like 100 million I don't know if that would motivate me maybe you know up from I'm like, are you kidding? We are different people if that's your response to 100 million, but you know what? That's there's lots of different people in the world. Alright.

Jack McDade:
Yeah. Yeah, man.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, Jack, thank you so much for hanging out and really looking forward to your podcast. Like I'm like, oh great. I can't wait to hear it. And yeah, thanks for joining us.

Jack McDade:
Thanks.

Jack McDade:
Thanks for having me, man. Good to see you.

Matt Stauffer:
Rest of you we will see you all next time.