Alright. Well, I don't think there's, like a smooth way to start this episode, but let me just dive right in. First of all, it's about 07:00 in the morning because now that we're parents, having the small bits of time to do things, you really squeeze it in around when the baby's sleeping and any parent listening to this will tell us that's obvious. But any non parent listening to this, just wanna let you know all the little free time you have, boy, really soak it in. Really soak it in, friend.
Jason:Just enjoy it. Okay. Let me just get into this. I was actually doing some other work, and I happened to pop into our podcast hosting, company. And I was just like, oh, when was the last time that we uploaded an episode to the Growing Steady podcast, whether it was just me talking solo or even like our combined episode?
Jason:We haven't recorded a combined episode together this year except for one in January, which was talking about our kind of like beginning to being parents. And then we've done a couple solo episodes. I think it's literally like four total, three of mine, one Caroline that I told, like asked her to do. And the last one was three months ago. And I looked and what's really funny is the episode before the one three months ago, so four months ago, was like, hey, we're launching our first app of the year.
Jason:And we've since launched a whole other app. And I have been rebuilding Tea Tree, our other app. And so I just felt like, wow, there's so much that has gone on. Now I know that our podcast audience here is reasonably small and probably the majority of you find out what we're doing through our Growing Steady newsletter or through, if you're a Weimar, you find out through those updates. And then maybe just through randomly being like, hey, what are the Zooks up to?
Jason:And then you go to our website and you click around and you find things. But I figured there might be a small subset of people who haven't heard anything that we've been doing, and maybe this would be a good place to just kind of share some unfiltered thoughts while baby Leon starts to start her day. So let me see if I can just kind of rip through those because I know I don't have more than like fifteen minutes here. So I'm gonna do it fairly quickly and just kinda catch you up on everything and just kind of like a a stamp in time of where things are at. So let me start with the smallest thing that we're working on, which is Scene Roll, the first app that we launched this year.
Jason:And a very quick recap on that is that we had a public vote on our vibecoding.2 website where we had users choose or people choose to pre fund the idea for $20 It was Scene Roll, which won, and there was this other screen recording capture video, which basically no one voted for. And so we built the first version of that app. And so that started in Lovable, which is a vibe coding app that is still very popular. We don't use it at all, FYI. And then we basically went through like a couple week journey building that, and it was just kind of a nightmare.
Jason:I just I ran into like all these little stumbling blocks. We actually went back to The US for a trip to visit family and introduced Leon to our family for the first time. When we came back, essentially this model from Anthropic had released called Opus. I think at the time it was 4.6. And everybody was basically saying like, this is amazing.
Jason:This model is actually really good. It's it's a big step forward. And we couldn't use that specific model in Lovable. You you still, I don't think, can choose the model that you use. So I basically was like, okay.
Jason:Well, I guess I'm gonna have to figure out what, like, Claude code is. Now it's funny saying this in late July because those of you who have been doing any vibe coding or anything at all, you'll be like, we've all been in Claude code for quite a long time. But it's really only been, like, four months that we've been using Claude code, which is funny. There are obviously people who've been using a little bit longer, but I think the majority of us, such a short period of time. Anyway, got into Cloud Code, built Scene Roll, got a working version finally, still had some hurdles, did a launch.
Jason:We sold it via Credit Pax. And this was basically like May, April, and the product was functional. It did do some of the things we wanted to do, which is you upload a voice memo. It transcribes it. It gives you this kind of transcript, and you can add b roll on top of your voice memo, and you can export that video and then up, you know, upload it to Instagram or TikTok.
Jason:Very simple application. That was the whole point. It's supposed to be very simple. And I had other ideas for features that we wanted to use. We wanted to have you be able to upload a talking head video.
Jason:So like a standard, you know, like a roll video, and we wanted you to be able to add captions and just a bunch of other features, bunch of other things to kind of clean up. But every time I tried to work on it as good as Cloudopus 4.6 was, it just it could not do it. Cloudopus 4.7 came. I tried one or two things, still really couldn't get anywhere. Then Cloudopus 4.8 came, this was supposed to be a huge step forward.
Jason:But at this time, we had to move on to our second app, and that was mostly because we just saw the writing on the wall that selling Steamroll as a business, it was just never going to generate enough consistent revenue to be the thing that got us to our vibe coding goal this year of $100,000 And so we sat down and we came up with our second idea. And our second idea hasn't even been mentioned on this podcast, which is really funny because it feels like we've been working on it now for like two years, but it's literally only been about three months. And so that idea is solo content studio. And this idea was born out of the fact that Caroline creates the majority of our content in businesses, And she was assembling Claude skills. I'm not gonna bore you with explaining what Claude skills are, but it's essentially these instructions for, let's say, how to write a newsletter.
Jason:And you can kind of over and over again use the skills so that you get kind of the same output. So you don't just say like, hey, write me a newsletter in a Claude chat, and then it like drifts off and like doesn't know your voice and doesn't know the things about your business and it kind of like pulls randomly. And so these skills are helpful. But for someone like me, I use AI all day long. I'm in these chats all day long, but I just find it so cumbersome to think through what skill does what?
Jason:And then I like, where do I? What did I call it? How do I like, oh, I asked it to write this newsletter, but I didn't call the skill. Or even if I was in the project that had the instructions, oh, this changed. And now I need to go update the skill, but now it wrote this.
Jason:And it's just like, it's just kind of a mess. And I do think it's very powerful. But Caroline, she essentially had this idea for organizing all your skills in one place and then being able to create content off of them. But it would still involve using the skills and you still would have to take the skills into your personal Cloud account or even in GPT. And it just, it felt really friction full to me.
Jason:And so we sat down and we were chatting about it and essentially what we came to was what if we just built a AI powered content app, but in the backbone of it, we essentially put all these skills into place And it would be more kind of like firmly rooted in all these things about you, your business, it knows your specific, what we were calling at the time specialists. So these are your newsletter writers, blog writer, your YouTube outline writer, like all these different things. And it would know all of them, and it would understand everything about your business that you would teach this application. But you to call wouldn't them. Like you wouldn't have to say, hey, use my newsletter writing skill, and then, I need to update this thing.
Jason:You would just use this newsletter specialist that you had, and you would just say, write a newsletter draft for me. And you give it a very short prompt, and you just do it every time. And so the proof of concept of this app came together pretty quickly. As we were sharing early on with people, people were saying like, Oh, this is a great idea. Some people said genius idea.
Jason:I'm just I didn't, we're not saying that I said that. I'm just people said that. And it gave us a lot of signals that yeah, people agreed kind of with me, and that skills are cumbersome. They're not the real, like, easy way to do this, like it's still kind of as a pain. And that we were going to solve this problem of trying to create all of your content faster for your business, and have it all be organized.
Jason:Because the other thing that I think about a lot is, I don't know about you listening to this, but I have like a million chat windows in my clawed account or in GPT, and it'll go from like, hey, give me a spaghetti recipe one chat to like my laundry machine smells in another chat. Two, Leon has this weird bump on her leg. Here's another chat. And then also, hey, invoke that skill to write my email newsletter. That's another chat.
Jason:But then they all get lost. Like all my business stuff gets lost amongst all my life stuff. And so solo content studio, one of the problems we want to solve too was like this is where you go to create your business content and it doesn't get lost in all the sea of all the other spaghetti messages that you're creating. So we hunkered down, we worked on solo content studio. I was doing a lot of kind of like the development work of it.
Jason:Caroline was doing obviously all the brand design, thinking through the kind of like, how do we make the skills work? Because that was what she was really good at. And we worked on this really hard for basically a couple of weeks. And then we decided we were going to launch this one slightly differently than what we did with SceneRoll and that we were going to do a cohort based launch. So basically take what we have done for years with our coaching program and launching digital products, but use it for a software product like Solo Content Studio so that we could potentially earn a little bit more money.
Jason:Because if we're selling Solo Content Studio as a monthly subscription product, $99 per month, there's really no incentive for someone very early on to join. Like you would have to do some type of founding deal. You have to do some type of, you know, really good offer to get someone to say, yeah, this is a brand new app. I've never used it. I'll give you money for it.
Jason:And so what we decided to do was this live cohort where we would get on a couple calls with these members. They would get access to Solar Content Studio for a couple of months, and it would kind of all be baked in. And then we would have a community inside of the app itself so that you could talk, ask questions, go over things, you get as much direct feedback from us as possible. And just kind of like a better, kind of more hands on experience, if you will. And we ended up having, I think it was 40 cohort buyers at a price of $300 and then it went up to $400 a week later.
Jason:So we did a two week launch. And so we ended up making right around like $14,000 with the initial launch of solo content studio, which was great. We didn't have high hopes for it. I think our logo was actually like $10,000. And so we were happy to get past that logo.
Jason:And we were also happy just to have like a bunch of people who believed in this idea, who were willing to pay money for it. Because again, if no one's willing to pay money for your idea, then the idea is probably not good enough to pursue and you have to figure out how do you pivot, what do you do next. So Solo Content Studio officially launched. It was on May 11 that we kind of opened the doors. We let people into it to use it.
Jason:And it wasn't just us using it and kind of creating projects within it and generating all these drafts. And in the meantime, scene roll was just sitting off on the side and nothing was happening with it. Also at this time though, I came to the conclusion that I really wanted to give Tea Tree a huge push. One really big, let's call it like chance to be the application that I want it to be. And that really spurred from the fact that Opus 4.8 launched, which was another new model from Anthropic.
Jason:But this model actually felt like it gave me hope that it could do really hard tasks and it could do really complex tasks. And while Tea Tree in itself, the idea of the application is not that difficult because it's really just a database of content that gets, you know, it's a bunch of rows of content that gets shown as a course in someone's dashboard and a student can buy it and a user can update it. That's really all a course platform is no matter who's building it. There's a lot of the what makes it look good, what makes it feel good, how do you edit it, how do you customize it, like all of those things that are very tricky to do and they're very time consuming for a developer. Say if I ask them, hey, we have courses, I want to now add products.
Jason:That in itself, that problem of saying, okay, now we have this like new thing to do. That's a weeks long adventure for a developer to set up. Not because it's hard to set up a new database and add new rows, but it's just all the things that go into how that product is served to a user, how people customize it, etcetera, etcetera. So at this time, I'm basically splitting my time where I'm starting to think about what do I want Tea Tree 4.0 is what I'm calling it to look like. And I did talk about that in previous episode here on the podcast where I kind of like started thinking about that.
Jason:And I started to really explore a bunch of different things. I originally built a prototype in Lovable because this was like, I was thinking about it earlier in the year. And then I started working on it with Claude Code to basically build like another prototype, mostly because the one in Lovable, it was just so hard to update or change anything. And so that was actually really good for me because it actually got the first next version of Tea Tree 4.0 in a place where I felt like, oh, this is actually kind of interesting. I'm liking the way this feels to work on this.
Jason:It's not just like a nice UI that I can kind of click around in Lovable. It's actually a functioning app where I can see things happening and I can see the future. So I have been since, know, like I think April is when I really started working on Tea Tree 4.0 multiple hours a day splitting my time. I have really been pushing this forward and I have personally spent, I mean, can't even guess the amount of late night hours now that I've been working on this, but fast forward to where we are today, it's in a whole different place than when I first started working on it. But that's what it takes with these projects.
Jason:And that's what it takes with a huge project like Tea Tree. You're never just going to vibe code a new version of Tea Tree, which is why there's a whole topic of conversation right now online about like, is SaaS dead? Are these software as a service businesses going to die because people can vibe code whatever they want? I think we're gonna vibe code a lot of small tools and like little things, but I think that big tools like Tea Tree that are very complex and very hard to build, you're not going to vibe code your solution. You can certainly try.
Jason:And I definitely, anybody who doesn't want to pay for a platform like Tea Tree and you want to build your own course platform, you can do it in Cloud for sure. But you're going to very quickly start to run into issues when you start to have customers and you need to manage recurring payments and you have to figure out how to deal with access to things and what happens when a customer changes just a simple thing like their password. It is one thing after another that's very hard to deal with. But what I wanted to share is where I'm at now. So you kind of get it from the standpoint of vibe coding, what I've talked about, whether you're using Lovable or Cloud Code, you're just prompting in a box and you're getting a result that you can see and you're just constantly iterating on that product.
Jason:The interesting thing that has changed with what we're doing for Tea Tree 4.0 is we're essentially using what's called a harness, and I'm not going go into the intricate details of how that works, mostly because I'm too dumb and I don't know. But the way that it works is you essentially put AI, and in this scenario we are using Claude, you put Claude in a box and in that box you tell it there are many jobs that you do. You are a planner, you are an implementer, you are a code reviewer, you are a browser reviewer, and then you are a kind of QA specialist. So I go back through. You also do design, like it's all these different roles.
Jason:And what it does is I will write a feature. So let's just say we have this new memberships feature in Teachtree 4.0. I want someone to be able to drag and drop the sections of the membership around. Normally you would just type this in a box and Claude code, it would do it, you would see it very quickly. But when you're working on a project as big as Tea Tree, you can't have all the random code bloat that Claude will write.
Jason:It has to be very good and it has to be very reusable and you can't just like make new components for everything you want to do. So essentially what this harness does is you give it that issue is what you would call it and you say, hey, think about this. And it comes back to you and it thinks through all these edge cases and asks you a bunch of questions and then it goes, great. Do you want me to now build this? And you say, yes.
Jason:And it is, I will tell you, it is a much slower process than vibe coding, but it is a much better process for a big application like Tea Tree where you can't have a bunch of just like sloppy code. Like we can have sloppy code for scene role. We can have sloppy code for solo content studio, but not for Tea Tree 4.0 because there's just too many users. We have a million students that use, that go into courses in Tea Tree. Up to 4,000 users now are creating courses and products on Tea Tree.
Jason:You can't have just like janky code. So I am currently at this very moment, very far along in the TTree 4.0 process. It's very interesting because the developer who's helping me do it, because I don't know how to run this harness, but it's a developer that I've worked with for years with TTree and he's very good. He's been doing development for a long time. But his takeaway basically right now is that developers' jobs are essentially moving to running these harnesses.
Jason:Like this is what he keeps telling me. He's like, this is what I think I'll be doing for the next five to ten years. Like I'm not gonna write any code. He's not gonna write a single line of code for TTree, not one. And he's just gonna look at the code that Claude's outputting and make sure that it's correct and make sure it's not sloppy and make sure it's not overwritten, make sure we're not redoing all of the components over and over.
Jason:We're making very reusable things that are done the right way. This is very boring for a lot of you, know, but I'm just sharing with you kind of the journey of how these things are being built. And so just to put kind of like a final note on where Tea Tree 4.0 is going, I'm very excited about the version that I can see right now. Like I have been using it quite a bit. It has new features of memberships.
Jason:It has new features of community. It has new features of this growth dashboard that I just started working on where it actually takes a look at all of your customer data, your products, your courses, etcetera. And then it crunches numbers to show you like, hey, this customer, John Smith, might be a good fit for this other product because of this purchasing behavior we've seen him do in your account. And so that's really powerful. I don't think I've seen any other course platforms that are actually doing that.
Jason:And it creates some one click buttons where you can send like an Outreach sales email to have that customer buy another product. Or it'll think through adding an upsell on a payment page where you don't currently have one, but that payment page is kind of popular, so it might be a good place to do it. And you could add X amount of revenue that we estimate based on the activity of that payment page. Really cool features, really interesting things. I'm just scratching the surface on kind of that part of what I think Tea Tree 4.0 could be.
Jason:But as of recording this on July 30 at 07:20AM, as my daughter does start to stir, I can see her moving so I gotta wrap this up. Tea Tree 4.0, the goal is we will launch in October. This will be a brand new platform fully kind of separated from existing Tea Tree. However, we are going to have a way that our existing users can migrate everything to Tea Tree 4.0. The design and customization great in Tea Tree 4.0 but it's different from current Tea Tree meaning it's not going to be able to look exactly the same.
Jason:There are some different constraints in the design so there will be some design changes if you're a very design forward person who uses Tea Tree now. There are going be a little bit of limitations there. We are going to strip back some of the design capabilities. There is going to still be custom CSS and you will still be able to control some things, but to standardize and to make sure that these courses look good for a long time across all browser devices, we do have to make some of those small decisions. But I don't think it'll be as impactful as you might be thinking if you're someone who has a very designed course.
Jason:It's still going to look great, still going to be beautiful, and it's still going to look like your brand. But yeah, October is the goal to launch. Right now I'm in the final push of we're going to do our first price increase in twelve years, which is crazy to say because who can say that if you have a software company? But we are going to sell the Tea Tree Lifetime deal all the way up until the launch. It is gonna raise in price on August 15 from the current price of $5.50 up to $7.50.
Jason:And that $7.50 price will go for one month as kind of like a founding members deal. So it's kind of like a small price increase before you can get into the product. And then once the product launches, we will do a kind of new lifetime price that's $950 for Tea Tree, and then our monthly and annual plan will go up. And we haven't decided fully on those prices, but somewhere I'm thinking around in the $60 to $70 per month and then $600 to like $700 per year for the annual plan. Yes the lifetime deal will probably still be available but I can't guarantee that it's going to be available long term because I do want to get Tea Tree back to a monthly recurring SaaS business that is a little bit more predictable.
Jason:It's a little bit more easy to sell and doesn't feel like you always have to be just finding new customers to buy the lifetime deal, which is what we've been doing for the past almost two years now, which has worked out okay. But it is kind of a hamster wheel of business where you're always trying to find the next new customer. And I think the product is going to be good enough that we don't have to rely on lifetime deals. And just to make sure it's clear, if you do purchase a lifetime deal, you get access to Tea Tree 4.0. There's no upgrade, no fee, You're not paying any new price.
Jason:That's just a bonus for you taking the risk on purchasing a lifetime deal. Okay, let me wrap things up here and just say that Scene Roll is actually at an interesting place because the launch of Fable, which I didn't even talk about with Anthropic, was pivotal for Scene Roll to be able to be worked on again. It basically went two months without a new feature or anything else. When Anthropic released the Fable model, I decided to give the a roll feature idea a chance for Scene Roll. And essentially in one night of working on it, I got it working.
Jason:And I couldn't even get it close before that. Like it wasn't even close, which is this is incredible to me because this makes Scene Roll a much more powerful product. Then a couple days later, I was just like, let me see if it can do captions. And then boom, we have captions now in Scene Roll. And I was like, oh, we've had this idea for this remove repeated takes.
Jason:Like if you're recording something and you mess up and then you're like, oh, I gotta do that again. Okay. I'm recording something. Oh, no. I messed up.
Jason:And you say that in the recording multiple times, you just click this repeated takes button and it scans through your transcript and it removes all the bad ones and just leaves the last take. It's really awesome. Caroline has used it for a bunch of her videos because she creates a lot more content than I do. And she was like, this is an amazing feature. Like it takes what would be thirty minutes of editing to go through all these different takes, and it takes, I mean, seven seconds when you press the button.
Jason:It's so fast and it's so good. So Scene Roll is at this really interesting place where the product actually is so much better. It is much more powerful. Oh, added overlays. So now you can do like overlays of GIF stickers or other videos or images.
Jason:It's just Fable has changed the game for Scene Roll. The thing I have not had time for with Scene Roll is to market it. So I think we have like three active paying customers for Scene Roll, which is almost nothing. And maybe I'll record another episode soon on just how we're thinking through how do we manage all these businesses, how do we market all of these things. But yeah, that's for another solo episode here.
Jason:Talking about solo, solo content studio, we are at a really cool place with this business. And again, it launched essentially three months ago now almost by recording this. We had that first launch. We have a monthly plan of $99 per month. We have a pro plan of $199 per month.
Jason:And we've had consistently, I would say about one new trial every other day is about what it breaks down to. And people are canceling quickly. People are staying on for maybe a month. And we basically were at like $500 in recurring revenue for a month and a half. And the really cool thing is that our cohort buyers, they all had the option to continue to pay for Tea Tree or for Tea Tree for Solo Content Studio at a discounted rate that was locked in for a year.
Jason:And out of the 40 buyers, 29 of them wanted to continue on. I think it's at 26 now. We did have a couple other people cancel. But that took our monthly recurring revenue from $500 to now up to $1,700 which is amazing because if you can get an app up to multiple thousand dollars in recurring revenue in just a couple months, you're doing something right. There is something really, really good there.
Jason:And I think Carol saw on Reddit that it was like most brand new software apps don't get to a thousand dollars recurring MRR in the first six months. So that feels like a really great milestone for us. I give Caroline a ton of credit because the content that she's creating on Instagram for solo content studio, a, is great, but b, it is the thing that is actually marketing and driving people to the business. So we're really excited about that. We have another chunk of potential people who might be upgrading here in the next couple of days because our WAM members get an offer to get a reduced rate as well.
Jason:So that is gonna maybe kick in and that might actually take us over the $2,000 recurring revenue, which would be really cool. But we're just continuing to work on that product. Caroline has so many ideas. She released a series feature, a planner feature. You can go to solo content studio to check it out and learn more.
Jason:You can start a free trial if you're interested and this is maybe the first time you're hearing about it. And specifically, we are trying to help coaches create content for their business because that's who we were for eight years and we know that very intricately and well. So you'll see that when you go to the website. That's very much who it is catered to. Alright.
Jason:I have tried to cram so much in here in like twenty five minutes. There is probably another three hours that I could discuss just on everything that's going on, how we're juggling all of this, how we're managing it, how many Claude subscriptions I have. I'm up to four right now, which is wild to say, but at $800 per month total, it's the best set of developers I've ever paid for. No offense to all the human developers that I've used over the years, but it's absolutely insane what we're doing with just $800 a month in development fees. It's pretty crazy.
Jason:So, okay. I think that's it. I'm gonna wrap this up because I can see that Leon is stirring and I want to get her up before she gets upset. And also it's like the cutest part of the day when she's just like standing in her crib. She's 11 now.
Jason:She's just standing in her crib saying, know, babbling when you walk in and smiling. So that's very fun. But yeah, maybe I will try to do another episode and it does help. If you want another episode, send us an email. Hello wandering aim flea.
Jason:Tell us you want another episode and maybe if I get enough responses from people who really want another episode, I will record another one soon. And feel free to ask any questions of things that you want me to chat about. And I'll try to sit down here at another 7AM chat and just catch everybody up on everything here on the podcast. Okay. That's it for me.
Jason:We'll talk to you soon.