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 Arvid Kahl, founder of Podscan. And I don't know, do you see the FM? Anyway, founder of Podscan or podscan.fm, podcaster, writer, programmer, bootstrapper, influencer guy, like all sorts of sorts of things. So Arvid, just kind of like tell us like, who are you and what you about? How do you tell people what you do?

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, thanks so much, man. I could go into like a 20 minute story right now. I usually do when I try to explain who I am and what I do, but yeah, I'm just a software developer who's a little bit entrepreneurial. And I had the big fortune of building a software business back in 2017, selling it in 2019, and then getting to a point where I could just do whatever I wanted, which is when I started diving into Laravel and into building web apps, more web apps, because you never stop building web apps, even if you're

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
if you have an exit, at least me, the kind of software founder that I am. So yeah, I'm German originally. I now live in Canada. I'm building software applications, currently Podscam, like you said, not with the FM. don't think, you know what, if we were in the dot com era, I would probably say it because, know.

Matt Stauffer:
Right. Yeah, but it's just not a thing we do so much anymore, right? Like, yeah, your domain's not a part of your identity. So it's Podscan. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, it really not. Yeah. And I do have, and this is one of the weirdest things about Podscan. I do have the .com domain, yet it still lives on the .fm.

Matt Stauffer:
I was one of the things I wanted to ask you. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
That is pretty wild. And I, it's all about the not wanting to do the migration. That's just that. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
And I wondered the same thing we we started as a dot-co we bought the dot-com and we're still doing a lot of things in the dot-co cause I was like I don't want to deal with moving it all over so.

Arvid Kahl:
Yes, the weirdest forwarding I've ever done is forwarding a dot com to a dot FM. But my domain rating at this domain is just growing and growing because I do a lot of programmatic SEO and a lot of people are connecting, you know, they're there, whatever links to my thing. So that works for me. And I don't think I'll ever change it because why would I? FM is great. It's a radio thing and it's about podcasts, you know, it's audio that kind of fits. But yeah, so my background is I'm an engineer always have been and now I'm kind of a solopreneur.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, it just makes sense.

Arvid Kahl:
And I've been building stuff and growing it and obviously also like talking about it in public. do a lot of building in public where I just share what I do on Twitter. I think that's what I still call it because I'm old.

Matt Stauffer:
Still Twitter. Twitter for life.

Arvid Kahl:
It will never not be Twitter because I'm not gonna fall for that stuff. yeah, I'm building pretty much anything I do in front of the people that I think either it's for or that are like me. So that's pretty much what I'm doing.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so I wanna hear the whole backstory to what got you here and everything like that, but I do wanna ask, the first question I'm supposed to ask, which I failed to do is, what is your business and how is Laravel involved in your business? So obviously there's lots of businesses, but Podscan is kinda your main thing right now. So what is Podscan and how is Laravel involved?

Arvid Kahl:
So Podscan is my attempt at transcribing every single podcast episode that comes out in the world as soon as possible and then making that transcription accessible for search, for alerting, for data analysis or whatever. So it's effectively a podcast data platform that initially was ideated as Google Alerts for podcasts. That was kind of the theme that I started with because I needed that for another project that I had.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm, yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
And it quickly turned into, wait, we can just have the world's largest transcript database that has full transcription with speakers and all that for every single show out there. That must be possible, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
So nobody's doing it. The competitors only track podcasts like metadata, like titles and descriptions, because effectively, the whole world of podcasting, and I'm already deviating into this whole space, but it's all built on the RSS technology. Podcasts you would think with Spotify and Apple is like walled garden stuff, but it really is just a walled garden sitting on top of open source technology as it usually is. And we know that well in the Laravel community as well. effectively, we scrape all those RSS feeds. We try to track all podcasts. And then we just ingest it using OpenAI's Whisper and other comparable models, transcription models to just turn audio into text.

And then there's a whole lot of stuff going on, lots of AI work as well to analyze and take this data and a big old database and an API. And that's pretty much what this is. So Podscan is both a thing for builders. I have a lot of the customers of this project are other founders who build on top of podcast data for advertising reasons, for PR reasons. If there's a conversation where a brand is kind of currently experiencing a lot of trouble.

That needs to be dealt with, right? So people need to know about it and need to handle it. So that's the builder side. And obviously marketing departments, PR departments use it just to track things, to search for things, to do research and all that kind of stuff as well. It's a pretty gigantic project and I'm effectively running it alone. And...

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so that was one of my questions because I just recently signed up for Podscan and it's impressive. It's very expansive. There's a lot going on. It's very easy to understand. And I was going to ask, do you have designers on board? Do you have other developers or is it mainly you?

Arvid Kahl:
So when it comes to development, it's all me and Claude at this point. It's always an AI involved at some point. But when it comes to design, I had a lot of help from Nick Grenfell. He's a guy who has been designing a lot of my projects. He's been designing my YouTube thumbnails for a while. This is UX designer and somebody who really knows how to do this kind of stuff. So he helps me a lot with that, too. Yet most of it is just me trying stuff out and stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, got it.

Arvid Kahl:
sticking with the things that work, right? That's pretty much what that is. But it's a mostly solo run project. I'm trying to expand it a little bit, but not on the dev side at all. Like I've never hired a developer for this because it's, you know, you don't ever say anything is feature complete, but it is feature complete enough not to warrant like massive resources in terms of development. But what it's not complete is customer complete. You know, sales and marketing, that's what I need help with. That's...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so it's marketing sales, yeah. Do you find it, what's the experience like as a developer who's also doing sales and marketing? Because feel like a lot of us are just kind of like, I can build it and if they come, we're great. But the idea of getting the people to come is a very difficult kind of transition.

Arvid Kahl:
I had to fight a lot of my preconceived notions when it comes to what marketing and sales is. most developers, and I'm not sure if that is just my experience and the one of my peers or like a generalizable one, but most developers are kind of siloed away from the marketing and sales departments of the companies that they work for. Or even education. When I went to university for computer science back a couple of decades ago, everybody was kind of talking the business people down

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
and they were talking like as if, again, if you build it, they will come. We know that's kind of a warning, not a guarantee, right? So yet it was still perceived as if a product is good enough, marketing is gonna be so easy, the people who then do the marketing don't have to be as smart as we are building the project. That was kind built into my education as a developer, which is horrible. And I had to do a lot of deprogramming to understand, no, no, no, no, this is actually...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
a completely different yet comparably relevant part of the journey that you are on as a founder, right? As a developer, you probably will never have to touch marketing if you don't want to. But if you are a software founder, this is gonna be the bread and butter of how people get to know your product, how they get exposed to it, right? And you could do it in so many ways, building a public, one of them, if you have audience overlap, or if you have...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
the potential network effects where people can tell their peers that they know about your product and you get it in that way. That works too. But sometimes you just have to do paid advertising or you have to do content marketing. You have to write blog posts and it's going to be annoying because you don't want to. And developers never want to make stuff that doesn't immediately show

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
that it's working. At least that's what my experience as well, because we're so binary, things work, they don't work. But with some things, they work two months from now, two years from now, but we have to do them today. It's been a hard journey for me to understand that this is relevant. And I needed a lot of help along the way. Obviously, a lot of people in our community are really good at this. Like in the Laravel community in particular, there are a couple names and probably get to them in the conversation.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. 100%. Yeah. Yep.

Arvid Kahl:
as well, that just people, when people show up and talk about the thing, you see how much resonance that makes in the community and in their potential group of prospective customers. And if you get inspired by that, you're already way further than most people who just think this is crap. I don't want to do it. So yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well, and so one of the things that I think that folks in the Laravel community who've been super successful have had going for them is that they are building for the community that they already have a reputation in. And so, you you mentioned the idea of building in public. You either want to be building for people like you or for people who need the thing you're building. Were you already in the podcast world? Did you already have a name and reputation and connections there when you started building Podscan or did you have to intentionally insert yourself in that space as you were building it?

Arvid Kahl:
It's a funny one because Podscan lives at the intersection of the world of podcasting, which is its own industry and the world of people who have now started to become aware of podcasting as a potential target for their marketing or research efforts. So it's a completely disjoint yet also slowly overlapping group. Like the Venn diagram is moving into each other, right, those groups. So.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
It's not been as hard to go into the podcasting community because a lot of the people building podcasting products that I can integrate with, they are my founder peers, right? The Transistor fm, the Riverside people, like any of these tech companies that facilitate podcasting, hosting, creating, distribution, any of this, I already had kind of an in with them being a little bit of a vocal person in the software.

Matt Stauffer:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
community, right? At least I consider that because it was very easy to get to them because DMs were already happening. But the hard part for me is actually reaching the PR departments and the marketing folks because like a med tech company, some kind of health company and getting into their PR department for somebody who is never at any contact with this world, that has been the hard part. And that is the part that I struggle with the most. It's easy to sell to founders if your peers and your friends are founders.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah... Hmm.

Arvid Kahl:
Easy, it's never easy, but it's easier to do this. But to people who actually care about LinkedIn, know, like people who care about reputation and who care about the status games, and I don't want to belittle that, it's just part of the game that they play, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, just a different world. Yeah, yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
To get into that mindset and to fulfill the perceived need that they have, where, when I talk to a founder, it's like, do you have an API that has this? And I'm like, yes, I do. Okay, need fulfilled, right? But...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yes, I got it. Cool.

Arvid Kahl:
For somebody in the PR department, it's like, yeah, I need to be able to report this to my higher-ups within 20 minutes of X or else. That is their need. And to sell to them, so different. So podcasting and founder world was easy, but the other side of things, that's the hard part.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah, totally different set of metrics. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
And I guess that's always the hard part with SaaS, the moment you get out of your little early adopter bubble. It's so easy to sell to early adopters because that's literally what they like. buy new things and try them out. But for people beyond tachasm, that's a different story.

Matt Stauffer:
And we talk often, like at least in the Bootstrap founders world, we say a lot of people will be like, oh, I saw a need for realtors. So I'm going to build an app for realtors. And then we have to ask the question of, you actually like realtors? Do you like the idea of going to realtor conference and think about the things they value? And so for you, you're in this kind of world of marketing and advertising. And whether or not you like entering that world, you're clearly showing that you have the ability to empathize with their needs, Let's figure that out a bit.

Arvid Kahl:
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Matt Stauffer:
What are some things you've had to do that maybe you didn't expect? Maybe spending time on LinkedIn, maybe doing paid ads, but there are any other things? Do you go to conferences? Like, how do you even learn about that world and get connected there?

Arvid Kahl:
So I've never done a demo call in my life before I started Podscan. That's maybe the thing. Like showing somebody how to use software was so alien to me because I've always sold to people who knew how to use software. To me, yeah, this is self-explanatory. This button says export data. Obviously, this is going to export a CSV file. Like, sure. Why would you need another dialogue and click and select what you want? You could just do this right in your Excel or whatever. So selling to non-technical people often requires

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
building this foundation layer of trust that has nothing to do with software. And that was new to me because as software business to me is you sell access to software, people want software, people talk about software, people want the software challenges met and that's it. But in a world of less technical and more organizational data driven, I guess, is what these people are or result driven. You have to care about the job to be done more than the tools that it's done with. So that was a refocusing effort for me.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
to go away from, no, I can't just add another dialogue into my thing and expect them to find it. I have to figure out what their process is, what their actual input data, data transformation, output data process is, learn about the input data that they get, that they have to work with, learn about the output data that is expected of them, that they need to deliver, and see how they currently solve this problem, typical jobs to be done methodology, and try to map as much of my internal process that the software tool does right onto their process

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
while being adaptable, customizable, and flexible.

Matt Stauffer:
No big deal.

Arvid Kahl:
Super hard, super hard with an industry that you don't understand. That's the thing, when you said this just now, when you don't know how real estate works, or when you don't like real estate people. I don't think I would ever build for real estate people, not because I don't like them, but I certainly know that there's so much detail and intricacy to that world and so much human factor in there too, right? Where trust and reliability and connections and, pushing a thing there so you get something back from them later, that is super hard to map on software. Like software is a binary thing, but human relationships are constantly evolving. I would stay away from that market. Plus, you know, they don't have the best reputation. That's the other side of things.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, all different. Yeah, yeah.

Yep, there's that too.

Arvid Kahl:
But it's mapping your technical process or your vision of how to solve this technically into the messy real world version of that process that is actually extremely hard. Because there's a lot of hidden complexity in all of these things that you only get to see when people say, no, this is not for me. And then you have to dig and have to figure out, well, why is this not for you? What in there is the thing that is not working for you here that I thought was working for you, but it's not? What is the detail that I'm missing? Do you even know? Is it an unknown unknown? It just feels like it's not there? Super complicated.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, You're making me think of Michelle Hansen's Deploy Empathy and kind of for those who don't know, she's a big advocate of interviewing your customers and kind of understanding them better. And it's kind of weird that someone needs to be an advocate of that. Like, of course we do that, right? But I really appreciate what you're saying about like the level of assumption that we have that working with technical users, they are going to know the same things we do about how to use software and how software should be organized. And so.

I'm sitting here thinking that your work is just to find these people and convince them to use their app. And you're like, that's half the game that I have to make it actually work for them in the way that their brains think that is different from my way of thinking. That's wild.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, pretty much.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, they have to see that that's also a thing like adoption of tools like this. Like, Podscan or any tool that is an expert tool for another group of people, another kind of industry, people have to see that you get them in your product. And that's incredibly hard to communicate if you're not from that world. The lingo, like even just the phrasing, right? To me, I never understood certain things to mean a certain thing, but there's a lot of nuance between a list and a collection for people.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, huh. Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
who use this all the time, who use list building or who want to collect data. I think it's, this is a lame example, but like these tiny terms, they make up a significant part of other people's professional lives. And if you get one of them wrong, you're out, because you're not one of them. that AI helps with that a lot, because I can tell my Claude code or whatever I use to just look at this UI from the perspective of a professional XYZ.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's so interesting. Uh-huh.

Arvid Kahl:
and then tell me what the tools that they're currently using, what phrases they use, what terms they use, and if there is a miscommunication here or not. One of the tools that I use, both in my writing and in my software, my code writing, well, I write code anymore, I just say, yes, yes, this is fine, but let's get to that at a different point. One of the tools that I use is the devil's advocate version of AI usage. I just show it a thing and I tell it,

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Arvid Kahl:
if you are this person that I want to like this, what would you say is missing here? What would you say is not working? This works really well with blog posts, with articles. Like if you're somebody who's an expert nerd in the industry and you read this, what's your attack vector? How would you say this is a crappy article? And then you fix it. Same goes for code. Same goes for interface. Like if you're an expert here, what would you say is missing here? It's really, really useful. And it means you don't have to...

have your AI write a single line of code, it could just look at it and tell you something. So if you're a hardcore artisanal coder, you might still find use for AI tools this way in particular.

Matt Stauffer:
And that's very valuable because I'm constantly asked by prospective clients, how do you guys use AI? And I'm constantly asked on podcasts and stuff, do you think AI is going to take all our jobs away? And I tend to be more conservative when it comes to use in AI and generating code and also in generating content. But one of the things I've seen as a trend is people talking about, regardless of what you think about from a generation perspective, from a review perspective,

Arvid Kahl:
yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
it is helpful to do a first round of, you might have missed this, or if I were a newcomer, I wouldn't understand this, or the rest of your application has this particular type of code in place and this particular piece doesn't. And to me, that's very interesting because A, it preserves the humanity and creation, and B, I think it fits better with what LLMs are capable of doing, which is saying, I'm looking at your code as pattern and I'm looking at this other code as a pattern or I'm looking at this writing this pattern I'm looking at writing your competitor app as a pattern whatever and I'm just telling you how these patterns do or don't match. I'm like that that puts AI more in useful tool category which I love and out of magician that's going to completely transform your life category which I just don't think is the right way to think about it. So that's I really appreciate you bringing that up.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, it's not taking your job anymore if it makes you way more effective at your job. But you still are required to drive it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah...

Arvid Kahl:
It's a pair programming situation. And I think that to me is how we're to be using AI going forward in a normal capacity, not as an expert tool to do the things for us, but as a constant kind of wise mentor sitting beside us. helping us with everything. And that is not just for coding, that is for cooking, that is for any activity that you might need some expert insight on, you can always ask, right? These tools are effectively free, comparatively, right? In terms of what they cost. So having somebody like, let's stay with coding here. Like whenever you have, whenever you commit, whenever you push your code to your main branch or whatever, why not run an AI security sweep right before it?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
Why not have a prompt that says, check whatever I've changed here for glaring security holes? It costs you 30 seconds, but it will spot. Like yesterday, I had this. I was deploying, two days ago. Let's be honest. Two days ago, it doesn't matter, right? But I had this situation where I built something where I have a search bar that I wanted to put on my homepage that directly integrates with Podscan Search, which is sizable. I have like...

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Arvid Kahl:
45 million podcast episodes somewhere in an open search cluster that full transcript that our search so it costs a lot to do a search so I wanted to build a system around this that Is capable of preventing abuse or at least making sure that people can't overuse it, right? So I had the caching system and I was counting how many searches coming in per session and all of that I had all of that built it was great and then just before I committed it or before I pushed it I was okay. Let's do another security sweep and it and I checked and it said

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Arvid Kahl:
Well, your cache timeout is zero seconds because I'd set it to zero for testing locally so I wouldn't run into my own limits, but I hadn't set it back. So it was saying, this is great. You have a cache and all that, but if somebody were to hammer your system, it would take one client to start like a thousand searches at the same time. You might want to change it back. And I was like, few, because that was my doing, right? I programmed this yet it found my own forgetting to set it back to an hour or a day or so.

Matt Stauffer:
While you're testing it. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
This is so valuable and you can completely automate it away. It's quite useful.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because historically I would, and I think this is still the case, I would expect that a policy that would have a Tighten, which is that every line of code needs to be seen by another person. So normally that happens through code review, occasionally through pair programming. So we catch those by saying, hey, every person should review their code again in a different user interface, usually the GitHub pull request interface, and then also have somebody else see it. But to your point, you're a solo developer. You don't have that ability to have, hey, have your other programmer look at it. Well, what if it's just me?

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, that's right. And that is my other everything. That is my marketing helper. That is my cold email proofreader. That is my blog article fact checker with research mode or whatever. Anything that I need a second, third, 100th pair of eyes on, I have some agentic tool to help me with. This has been the boon for bootstrappers. AI agentic systems are, if you overuse them, they vibe code you into oblivion, obviously, but.

Matt Stauffer:
That's your other programmer.

Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
if you use them just right, right, the Goldilocks AI zone, then you have some extremely capable, not like, not a genius because these things are still guessing and what do I call them? They are gaslighting engines, right? That's kind of what these things are. But if you pre-prompt them well, if you tell them not to gaslight you, it's kind of the fix this, don't make mistakes kind of prompt, but you know, like if you tell them to be...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
as critical and as aggressively contrarian as possible, then you don't have your sycophantic machine that those things tend to be. And then they are extremely helpful because they will point out the flaws that a person that you pay to point them out would probably not point out because even though you pay them, they still want to keep getting paid. So you have your 80-20 there. it's quite helpful to have this extremely honest when correctly configured thing helping you do things

Matt Stauffer:
keep getting paid.

Arvid Kahl:
that otherwise you would have to pay people a lot of money to do.

Matt Stauffer:
So I know that you create an incredible amount of content. You've created courses about how to use Twitter well. You've created courses about, I remember you had a podcast episode recently about how you use AI throughout your whole business. If someone is hearing, let's just kind of wrap up the AI part. If someone is hearing your AI approach, is there one resource? Would it be that podcast episode or is there somewhere else where they're like, if I want to learn about how Avid uses AI, this is the place to go.

Arvid Kahl:
Yep. I think my podcast generally is a good resource of the things that I'm doing because I just yap about whatever I'm doing at any given moment every week. Like that's kind of what this is for. I try to put it into a topic, kind of a sensible, you know, scoped thing. But yeah, that episode, if we can put that in the show notes or something would probably be very helpful because it's a good starting point, right? You don't need to do everything, but you can do certain things and they're very, very, very easy if you do them like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I appreciate that. So one of the things that we're often trying to focus on as podcasts is figure out why do people choose to use Laravel? And then if somebody were to want to get to where you are, what would it look like for them to get there? So those are kind of like the two angles. So let's let's focus on the Laravel for a bit and then we'll go to that, like how people can get where you are. You your first big hit, you said, you know, it happened, you sold it and then you learned Laravel. What motivated you to get into Laravel at that point?

Arvid Kahl:
It's pretty funny because my programming story, well, it began with Torbo Pascal. Let's be real. That's like school time coding. We actually learned that in high school. We had a 50-some-year-old teacher who just understood enough Torbo Pascal to teach it to us. And obviously, we outpaced the people who cared about this within hours of picking it up. But my actual real first programming job was in PHP back in 2000.

Matt Stauffer:
Let's go the whole way back there. Let's do it.

Uh-huh.

Wow.

Matt Stauffer:
really? Okay. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
one or so. So we're talking PHP4. We're talking typo3. I was writing typo3 back end extensions. That was as horrible as it gets back in the day. It was not juicy. It was not flashy. It was just building. We didn't even have Git back in the day. We were building on top of not even SVN. We were building on top of CVS. That's how far back we

Matt Stauffer:
I was just going to say it was at CVS. my gosh. Yeah. huh.

Arvid Kahl:
Yes, we were not FTPing into our server anymore, at least not all the time, but we were doing that. So that's kind of my first foray into programming was web programming, at least was PHP in an older version. And then I took the JavaScript train like so many people did, which funny enough led to my first Silicon Valley job, which was great. CoffeeScript got me there. So can't complain about that. Right, yeah, back in the day, that's...

Matt Stauffer:
Also have not heard that word in a long time.

Arvid Kahl:
2012. Yeah, that's that's pre Angular. That's that's pre react and all of that. It was good times. And at some point, I ran into a company that wanted to build an IoT platform. And they were looking at Elixir. They were looking at the Elixir language, which is kind of sitting on top of the Erlang VM. So it's it's the Erlang language, but kind of better with some Ruby esque syntax. It's still

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
functional programming, like the complete, it's the complete opposite of PHP, right? It is compiled, it runs on top of a VM, it's highly functional, it has a rather small community, you have to spawn a process to run it and all of that. I mean, we do that too with FPM, but doesn't matter, right? It's completely the opposite of how we deploy PHP. And it was great. It helped me a lot. It helped me to understand functional programming, which is really interesting. Like data transformation at the core of coding is really fun to...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.

Arvid Kahl:
to always think in how to transform data and just shift it around. That's cool. So I worked for that company for a bit. That's like 2015 or so, a couple of years. And then I started building a side project, which was Feedback Panda. And Feedback Panda was the business that I ultimately sold for a couple million dollars. That's my big exit that I had. And that was built in Elixir Phoenix as well, right? Phoenix being the framework.

Matt Stauffer:
Did not know that.

Arvid Kahl:
So it was built in that because that was the language that I was building in at the time. And I was like, hey, I do this for work. Might as well moonlight with the exact same toolkit because I know exactly how to get things built. And I built that and I deployed it and I got horrible problems like finding a good host to run this on and all of that, figured all of this out. Got several thousand customers. We got to 50 some thousand dollars MRR with that business. And then we sold it two years later to a private equity company.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Arvid Kahl:
and had a big exit and life was great. Like that's pretty much that story. It was really cool.

Matt Stauffer:
Love it. Fantastic. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
And so once that happened, I fell into the void of not knowing what to do, which is something that happens to a lot of founders. And I started writing the Bootstrapped founder, which is my blog and my podcast and all that stuff started happening at that point. I just started sharing my memories, my experience from before. And built on top of that, just, you know, every week I wanted to release something, tell people about something that I'm either thinking about now or thought about in the past. It's kind of how the podcast and the blog and the newsletter started media business journey, I guess, which is by, by far, by far now my most profitable endeavor because of sponsorships and that kind of stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
The Empire.

Arvid Kahl:
Funny enough, right? Podscan is not as profitable yet as that other thing, but that other thing is also since 2019. So, you know, that's six years in the making.

Matt Stauffer:
Really?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, fair, yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
And that's the first time I got into contact with the Laravel community, must have been around 2019, 2020 on Twitter, right? I was starting to build a Twitter presence and a Twitter audience. And I started seeing obviously people like Taylor and other people in the community, just talking about this PHP thing that I had completely forgotten about, right? Because once you're in the JavaScript ecosystem, everything is all for JavaScript.

JavaScript on the front end, JavaScript on the back end, JavaScript on mobile or whatever. Everything JavaScript is the greatest language ever, right? For people in that community. And I think for them it probably is. Yet, you know, if you take a step back, it's this weird thing where you set up your setup tool so you can set up a setup tool to then deploy your code somewhere. Maybe. It's complicated. And Laravel is not complicated. I figured that out immediately. So I was looking for a new project to build to get into Laravel because I really wanted to.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
So I built a thing called podline.fm, which is not podscan.fm, but it is a, I wanted kind of a voice recording tool to allow people to call in and, you know, message me and I could play that on my podcast. Cause I love the Seth Godin Akimbo podcast, where he has a lot of people calling in and asking questions and he goes to them and answers them. And I wanted something like this, but I looked at the tool that he was using.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
And it looked like it was made from the nineties, like in the nineties, just from the tech. And I was like, I can do this as well. And I can probably do it better. So I built it in like two weeks, you know, people tech tech people cannot stop us from rebuilding software. It's already there. And I deployed it and I had a couple of people trying it out, but I wanted to find more people. And I was like, where do I find all of these, these people that I can sell this to? Well, probably on podcasts where people are already asking for.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
send us a voice message or, you know, leave us a message at this number or whatever. We use the, what was it called? The pipe, voice pipe or something, SpeakPipe. SpeakPipe was the name of the competitor. And if somebody were to mention SpeakPipe, I would know that I could reach out to them and say, we have something better. But there was no such scanning tool for podcasts. So that's what Podscan was. So now I had built a Laravel tool with Podline and I already had transcription in there because I took messages in, transcribed them real quick.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Okay.

Arvid Kahl:
on the CPU and then sent that as an email to the owner of the podcast. So I just built another Laravel application that would try and fetch all of these podcasts from their RSS feeds, download the MP3, transcribe them, and then save that to a database, make it searchable, make it alertable. And what came out of it was a single instance web server, which is still my main application, some AWS EC2 instance that runs podscan.fm and a fleet of Hetzner servers, like probably 20 or so, that are also Laravel applications.

But all they do is communicate with my main server back and forth to fetch URLs, transcribe them locally because they're GPU enabled servers on Hetzner. They cost me like 200 something bucks a month or 180 euros or something, which is almost nothing for a GPU that you can run a month long. They do 24-7, they transcribe.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Arvid Kahl:
and analyze with a local LLM. And sometimes if it's too complicated, they go to OpenAI and back. And they get a URL and they send a transcript back to my main server. And they fetch a new URL. It's a message queue, So that's what Podscan is. It's one big Laravel application that handles all the logic, the user interfaces, those components, and the recurring stuff. And a fleet of servers all deployed on Laravel Forge, or through Laravel Forge, I guess.

Matt Stauffer:
That's it. Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
that handle all of the transcription and that kind of stuff. This is pre-level cloud. This is all still kind of self-managed, but works pretty well. And it's extremely cheap to run. Like the hardest and most expensive part to get right was the database, because this is now a six terabyte database, right? This is all text information, sure.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Can we talk about that? What was getting that right? What did it look like? What are you even using for your full text search?

Arvid Kahl:
getting that right was orchestrating a kind of a split in the data. So I have all the original text saved in this main MySQL database on Amazon AWS like RDS, which is extremely expensive. This is by far the largest part of my expenses. Also the reason why it took me so long to get to profitability, if you pay $5,000 a month for your one database, right? That's just what that is. So that's where I'm at.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Adios. Mm-hmm. I can imagine.

Arvid Kahl:
And the search, the full-text search is an open search cluster also running on AWS that is kind of bifurcated, that is split. Like I funnel all my transcripts in there. I don't have all the information in my open search cluster, like all the metadata. I don't need that. I just need the transcript, the title, and the description. And these get synchronized all the time.

What do I use for that? Scout. I use, again, Laravel has everything. That's the great thing about this framework is that, just Scout, there's an open search library for Scout that adds another provider. Right? First, initially, I used Miley search a lot, but the data set just outgrew the capacity of the ingestion of my Miley search cluster. Not the search. Search was super fast. But if you throw 50,000

Matt Stauffer:
There we go. Okay. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, not even in search. Really?

Arvid Kahl:
one megabyte transcripts into a Miley search cluster every single day. It just gets stuck trying to ingest them, at least at the version that I did back in the day. I think I've been working with the Miley search people to make it better and more feasible. And some parts of my product still use Miley search as well. But I have an open search cluster because, you know, Elasticsearch open search is just what you use for search if you have massive data sets like this. Yeah, that's my level. That's really what that is.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, got it. That's the Laravel backstory. So one of the things that often comes out of this podcast is somebody hears somebody and they're like, oh my gosh, that's the life I want to be living. And I mean, even personally, like I would love for Tighten to be 40 % product. And I, you know, I'm just still working on that sales and marketing hook that you're talking about, you know, like I can build a product, but I'm still working on that. So if someone were to want to at some point in the future, be where you are.

If they want to be a solo bootstrap founder, if they want to kind of make their own thing. Can we talk about influences that got you here? And I'm talking books, podcasts, YouTube's experiences, just like what got you to where you are today that somebody else could kind of say, yeah, okay, I'm going to do that.

Arvid Kahl:
My biggest thing, name, book or whatever that comes to mind is a person and that's Rob Walling, like of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. I've been to a lot of microcomps and I've chatted with him a lot and I've read his books and I've listened to his show, his shows, right? And his presence on other shows, the microcomf community and all of that, everything he's been building has been extremely useful for me and people like me.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
So like that is a person that I would unequivocally follow and purchase every single piece of product that he releases from because he is kind of one of us from the very first hour. Like he's been building up the terms that we now use in the solo founder of Bootstrapper Community through his work and his presence in the field. So he recently, recently, couple of ago, a year ago, so released another book like his third or something...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
forgot the name because I'm really horrible with titles and names, which is funny for somebody who works with podcasts, names and titles every day. But the most recent book, any book by Rob Walling, is something that I have like very, close to whenever I need it. Right. That his work is paramount to consume when you're building a software business, just to get the lay of the land. That's the one. Yeah. The SaaS Playbook, even though that is actually for like later stage.

Matt Stauffer:
Is this the SaaS playbook that you're talking about? OK, got it.

Arvid Kahl:
Right? Start small, stay small is also one I highly recommend. But the actual oeuvre that he has is the podcast. Like follow along with the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast and you will not forget things along the way because he brings them up reliably. Every year around you find refresh, renewed versions of this stuff coming into your ears. Highly recommend it.

Matt Stauffer:
People don't answer that often enough and that's always my answer too. And even folks at Tighten where they're like, you know what, like I know how to build an app, but I want to become more of a product person. like, I learned what I know about product by listening to startups, the rest of us religiously for years. So I'm like, just go do that. I don't know if you should start from today or you should start from back then, but like just go listen to that podcast. I have not read the books though. So you put something on my reading list. So.

Arvid Kahl:
Yeah, I mean, the great thing about the podcast too, if you start like with episode one, which is like, what is this now, like 12, 15 years ago, it's been a while. You also see somebody building a media business from a pretty crappy microphone to what it is now, right? This is also inspirational if you are in your own media journey, if you want to do your own podcast, if you want to do your own writing, your own authorship, your own online presence, your own influencer situation, even though we don't like to be called influencers.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
in our community, but people are influential if they have a sizable audience. That's what it is. But if you want to see that journey happen in front of you, you look into like how these podcasts started, like same for me, right? My first episode sounds like I recorded it through a potato, but it still is valuable, useful, and a story that to this day resonates with people. So it's, that's something I recommend. Other book recommendation, I'm just going to throw that in because it's such a controversial pick, I guess.

is hooked by Nir Eyal. It's how to build habit-forming products. That's the subtitle of the book. And Nir Eyal, it's an interesting story because he talks about how to get people hooked into a product. And if you look at the reality that we live in, with all the gamification and all the triggers and the variable rewards that we get, all this loot boxes and people opening mystery boxes and stuff.

That is the underlying principle of how people gamble all the time and how people come back to things that are maybe good for them, maybe hurtful to them. So read this book with the perspective that what you learn in there is either going to be very helpful for your product or very hurtful, potentially if abused, for large parts of society. That's why it's a controversial pick.

Matt Stauffer:
Or could be both helpful for your product and hurtful for large swaths of society, right?

Arvid Kahl:
And that's the thing, it's not exclusive. it's important though to understand how this works because this also helps you step out of it, which is funny because Nier Eyal wrote a second book, is called, what is it? Uninterruptible or something, which is how to step out of the hook cycle. So, you know, it's a pretty funny one, but that's also a recommendation that I would like to drop because it's about product and about consumer psychology. And we don't think about that enough as tech founders.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's fun that I just got to onboard into your application just very recently. And one of the things that you did really well was recognize that during your trial, you really want to get them hooked. You want to get your end user to say, during this trial, I have found the value. And so, for example, I wasn't getting any alerts. And I get a, I think, automated message. Although it might have been you personally. But regardless, I get a message from the system that says, hey, it's been a couple of days. We're only three days into your seven day trial. You haven't got any alerts.

Arvid Kahl:
Mm-hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
here's something you could do to potentially expand your alerts to be less narrowly focused so you can actually see some content because you know that if I see my name popping up or Tighten's name popping or whatever, I'm like, this is a valuable tool. And if I spend seven days and there's no alerts, I'm be like, you know? So I thought that was clever. I definitely could tell that you paid attention to it. It didn't feel like it was a manipulative thing. I felt like you're like, if you're doing the trial, you wanna get value out of this tool, here's ways to get more value.

Arvid Kahl:
Cool.

Matt Stauffer:
So it's helpful for me to think about like an ethical way of trying to make sure that people are able to get value out of this tool.

Arvid Kahl:
Cool, well, let me pull back the veil for like a second here, because that is both a manual and an automated thing at the same time. So I have built a system that just lists everybody who comes into my product and what they have done, right? Have they set up an alert? Did that alert find any mentions? Like, have they played with the API? Have they turned this on, that on?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
And I have all of this data available because I track it internally using like the activity log. I think that's the name of that library or something. Just every activity in the system gets a log. So on that list, I have the name of the person email and when they joined and all of that and all the activities could condense into a couple numbers. And then I have a button that says generate email. So there's a prompt that pulls all the activities you have and have not done into plus your email address plus your name.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's really clever.

Nice.

Arvid Kahl:
And the thing that we think you do into a chat GPT or a GPT for something prompt comes back with an email, which I then manually read through and fix. Like some of the things I put into your email were from OpenAI and some were from mine, because I knew about you, right? Some were just me thinking that would be a helpful thing. And then I sent that email out from the system at that point. So we scanned the domain that you sign up with.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Arvid Kahl:
figure out what is on that page and give you a good suggestion from that through AI. That's one of the other useful uses of AI is to do some background research on your customers and suggest good things to them, like from what you think they might do and they might need.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, and I love this idea of you using AI to augment your personal processes. Like it's the same as you said at the beginning. Beginning it was, you know, I'm writing the code, but I'm getting AI to review it. I'm writing this blog post, I'm getting AI to review it. And now you're saying, I want to write these sort of emails, but it would be prohibitive for me to write these sort of emails to the number of clientele I have, unless I have a non-AI automated tool making the list, pushing content into an AI tool.

Arvid Kahl:
That's exactly right.

Matt Stauffer:
generating the email and then I, human being, I'm now augmented in my ability to email all these people by the fact that my automated AI and non-AI systems get me something that I can act on. I'm like, I'm doing the same with VAs. You know, I'm just like, I can't do all the things I need to do, but if the VA does 80 % of the work or my business development manager does 90 % of the work, I can do the last 10%. So I'm just like, yeah, I get it.

Arvid Kahl:
It's kind of that's the thing, right? The last 10 % and pretty much the first 10 % as well. Somebody has to start and figure out where's the priority, what should they do? And then they do it and then you kind of do the review and condensation and figure out if it's right or not. And I think that's what AI, smart AI usage is about. Like the first 10 and the last 10 % are yours, input and output really, like confirmation and prompting or whatever. And in the middle, the agent, be that a human being, a virtual

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
agent or a real agent, a fake agent, know, we're made up agent, whatever that might be. That, that work can be done in the middle. It's like a 10-80-10 kind of rule. think that that generally that that worked before AI, right? That's how we used executive and virtual assistants forever. But now we can map that onto the artificial process as well. I think that makes a lot of sense too.

Matt Stauffer:
That makes a ton of sense. I told you this at the beginning and what I told you was, we're gonna get to the end of 45 minutes and I'm gonna say, we have a million other things to talk about and that's where we are. But there's one question I always end everything with and it is most fun to ask this question to people who've had a successful exit before. The question is, if somebody were to offer you $100 million for your product today and just said, here's $100 million, walk away with your product, what do you start doing tomorrow?

Arvid Kahl:
I know.

Arvid Kahl:
I build another product. What else would I do? Like, I enjoy this. Like, obviously the process of building something for people and figuring it out is always fun. It's just much less strenuous when you have some money, right? Like, why do founders get into the serial founder mode? Well, because every single time they step up into more financial security, the risk of failure becomes less of a problem. I've personally financed Podscan for many, many months before we got some funding from the the com company fund and...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Arvid Kahl:
That wasn't much, but it was enough to kind of stabilize the business to get it into profitability. If I couldn't have gotten it there, I probably would have tried to de-risk it and build something else, right? So you just pick a little riskier of a project next time around, but I would still code. Love this. I want to sit in front of my monitor and tell it what to do. This is great.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

That's brilliant. Arvid, I had such a great time talking to you. I really appreciate you hanging out. Thank you for sharing all of this. If somebody is interested in continuing to learn from you, you mentioned the podcast and Twitter. Are there any other ways, anything else you want to plug or anything they should do to keep connected to you?

Arvid Kahl:
And I talk about Podscan all the time on my Twitter thing. Like tbf.fm is where my podcast lives and podscan.fm is where Podscan lives if you want to look into podcasts and figure that out. But yeah, just follow me anywhere. You will, I will not stop yapping. That's for sure. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Matt Stauffer:
But it's good stuff though, so keep it up. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you. Of course, and for the rest of you, we'll see you next time.