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Selling SDKs in the era of many Claudes (Interview)

110m 11s

Selling SDKs in the era of many Claudes (Interview)

In this podcast episode, Steve Ruiz from TL Draw joins to explore operating a software business in the age of AI-assisted development. The conversation centers on the dual emotions of excitement and fear brought by tools like Claude, which drastically accelerate coding—allowing tasks once slated for quarters to be completed in days. This speed introduces challenges: planning roadmaps becomes difficult due to rapid execution, team coordination grows more complex, and differentiating products is harder when competitors can quickly replicate features. Ruiz shares an example where AI built a starter kit in days instead of weeks, showcasing productivity gains. However, he also notes the pressure to continuously leverage AI to avoid falling behind, comparing it to a "fear of missing out" on opportunities. The discussion touches on broader impacts, such as adapting open-source contribution models and the potential for AI to reshape roles, emphasizing that while coding has become easier, strategic decision-making and positioning have become more critical.

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English
[Music] Welcome everyone, I'm Jared and you are listening to the Change Log. Where each week we interview the hackers, the leaders and the innovators of the software world. On this episode, Steve Ruiz joins us for a deep dive on TL Draw, a very good free whiteboard and the business he's built selling SDKs that help others build very good whiteboards and more with TL Draw's high performance web canvas. Along the way, we discuss the excitement/fear we share about keeping our agents busy. How SDK and Infra companies are affected differently by agentics software than SaaS companies? How Steve is approaching the coming era of internal tooling? What will happen when we equip LLMs with an infinite canvas? And a whole lot more. But first a big thank you to our partners, F-Ly.io, the platform for devs who just want to ship, build fast run any code fearlessly at fly.io. Okay, Steve Ruiz with TL Draw on the Change Log. Let's do it. [Music] Well friends, I'm here with my good friend Chris Kelly over at Augment Code. Chris, I'm a fan. I use Augie on the daily. It's one of my daily drivers. Now I use Cloud Code. I use Augment Augie. And I also use AMP Code and others, but Augie, I keep going back to it. And here's where I'm at. I feel like not enough of our audience knows about Augment Code, not enough about Augie, the CLI. It's amazing. I love it. What can you share? Yeah, what we often say, Augment is the best coding assistant you've never heard of. And that's both frustrating as to some of that works there and it's like very proud of the work we've done. But also like inspiring, like we want to go and sort of punch above our weight. We just like we aren't anthropic and we aren't open AI. And so the quality of the product itself, you know, with our context engine, when you do touch it, people are like just blown away by that. And so like that keeps you going every day. So not to break the lead here, but this is a paid spot. You are sponsoring this show to get this awareness. Now at the same time, we're selective. And I love to use this your tool. But there is in the world. So a lot of developers look at the space and they say, okay, well, how long can this work? How long is this sustainable in the case of cursor or a wind surf? Or you pick the name and you think this kind of tokens help me shape a lens for audience. I think it's a lot of awareness, right? Like cursor got a lot of publicity early on for like fast revenue growth, which well deserved. I think, you know, frankly, some of the media got the gets the story wrong. And that like if I gave you a dollar 50 for every dollar, you sent me, I'd be the fastest growing startup in the in the valley. And so when you're selling discounted tokens, yes, of course you're going to grow very fast. But all that money plus more goes to the model providers. So I think the real story is the story of Anthropic and you know, being an API provider. I think the market is just moved so fast. And there's so many pieces of competition out there that it's just hard to get noticed. So friends, I love augment code and I love using a gig and I highly recommend you use it. I love using the gig. I can hand a gig a well-defined specification, a well-defined pep as I call them in my world, an agent flow and it executes flawlessly. So the cool thing about a gig that I love most really is that context engine. And I can hand it a task and I can just churn away on my well-defined plan and just never bother me and accomplish the mission. It is so cool leveraging the latest models, the context engine and all the fun things behind the scenes in that awesome CLI. So yes, go try it out augment code dot com right in the top there is a CLI icon, a terminal icon, click that, install it, and change your world. It's gonna be awesome. augment code dot com. Friends, we're here with Steve Ruiz and Steve, I think the way it's best to kick off this pod is that we have had a couple Twitter DMs back and forth and one thing you said was you're kicking off this new year trying to figure out how to run a software company in the age of Clod's. I think we're all kind of feeling trying to run something maybe our lives, our careers, our software companies, our latest new thing, these new superpowers we have in the age of Clod. So how do you feel about that statement? When you share that with me, what do you feel when you hear that back to you? Yeah, right on. Let's just dive in right in. First off, thanks for having me on. I was just saying and listen to you for a while for years. I really enjoy the conversations that are here here. Yeah, running a company. So it is a weird time to be a programmer. I think it's also a weird time to be someone who's trying to decide what to program. There are things that were on my roadmap for 2026 that I finished in the first week of 2026 that I expected to take like a Q3 type of project. Essentially, every hard part about having a startup that has suddenly become harder actually, the only part that's become easier is the actual producing of code. But the alignment, the reviews, the how do I position this technical product? I sell the code. How do I make sure that we are picking projects that play to our strength in that position rather than producing the same thing that someone else could make? With a "Hey, Clod, could you please fix this or please add this feature?" How do I, how do I report to the community with regard to contributions and issues and things like that? TeelDraw is not open source in the normal sense. It's not like MIT license, but it is open. It is source available. Until very recently, we just took, like we participated in that contribution ecosystem just like an open source project would. But like that had to change as well. We could talk about that. And then all the communication overhead in order to know what we're all doing at the same time when you're running a team like this is just become harder because everyone's moving so quickly. And even the differences between how quickly people are moving no longer seem to directly relate to their seniority or anything. It's like suddenly everyone can contribute at a level that is much more impactful on the product and can just do more of that. It's just really hard. I don't know. I'm sure everyone else is experiencing the same thing. But just to put a name on it, it's weird and it feels very new and exciting. But certainly weird and hard. Weird, hard and new, exciting. Those are great adjectives to describe how I want to know, I think. It's kind of funny that you mentioned the roadmap you have for the year and in the first week. And then really just the paradox of choice really because when you have a to-do list that gets done in a week or two, well now you have a lot more choice because you maybe actually might have last potentially because you didn't plan well enough to have an exhaustive list. But for me, it's like a paradox of choice where you have so much to choose because you can go so many different directions. And without maybe some prior knowledge or some wisdom, you can sort of get lost in the oh my gosh, I could do so much. So I should do so much. So I do so much. And then you get the cycle that sort of just turns into your life in some way if you allow it to. I mean, I think everyone's had that experience of, well, hopefully not everyone. I've definitely had the experience of going to bed and being like, oh, what? I didn't queue up any work tonight. Like while my clothes are just going to be sitting there waiting for me to wake up in the morning, we better get them something to do. And yeah, I've had a couple of chats with friends of confused partners to be like, what are you, what exactly are you doing? And why is this important? And yeah, I think, especially for programmers who like, I don't know, I like to optimize. I like to like to play factorial. I like to, you know, set up, you know, machines that sort of run themselves. And now that I can do that with programming and with coding and really other things as well, like it's hard to not do that in a way. You almost feel ineffective to not have planned ahead to put a little Ralph loop going or something like that. I should write 17 specs today so that when I'm sleeping, Ralph can churn, you know, something like that. Might as well. It'll just be idle otherwise, you know? Yeah, I don't know if that's a good solution. But I do feel like that's a pressure on the aware, I would say it. Like not everyone has that awareness. There's a lot of folks who obviously are aware of the era of clause over in and the era of AI assist development and all that stuff. But somebody who's like truly steeped in the minutia of running multiple clause, that's someone who's like truly aware of the guilt potentially that you would play yourself for not playing ahead and not putting off the clouds in the motion. Is it guilt? I think it's fear. Yeah, I guess it's a version of FOMO. At least what I'm seeing in Steve, you can respond because it's your emotion. But I'm not saying you're personally afraid, but I think a lot of us are there's a fear not of missing out. but a fear of being left behind. And we've always said around here, open source moves fast and software will move fast. And I feel like in the last 12 months, it's gone from fast to like, you know, Olympic skiing downhill, you know, and they're just flying down that mountain. And there's a coming onslaught of software. I mean, you're already feeling it. I already see it. So many announcements, so many new things. Things ramping up so fast. I think there's a fear of being left behind, like with your product, with your skills, with your business, whatever it is, where it's like, I'm waste, you know, if I don't have my clothes running while I'm asleep, you know, somebody else does. So there's a sense of urgency that's not new, but I just feel like it's ramped up. And you can opt out of that, but then, you know, we have this fear of being like useless eventually. And if you're not doing something with something, then you're kind of useless, right? - So me else is, yeah. - Right. - Yeah, I think that that is the thing that's actually-- - But it's also seen with excitement as well. Like when you're flying down the ass, you know, I mean, I'm just watching the Olympics. So like when they're flying down the side of that mountain on these skis, and they're going for speed, right? Like they are, there's fear there, because you crash going 90 miles per hour down a mountain, like pain, but it's also fun. It's also exciting. They also enjoy it. And so it's not like a univariant emotion, 'cause also you're like thinking, wow, look at all the stuff I can do. That's an amazing opportunity. If I'm not doing stuff all the time, I'm missing out on more opportunity. And so I don't want to say it's just fear, but there's certain like this fear/excitement. This is why we use all the adjectives right now, 'cause we're just trying to describe how we feel about it. - Yeah, and I think that those two things in combination are really, really powerful. And kind of remind me a lot of like, gambling, you know, type of like toxic things that people will say about camp very much. - Yeah, like a little danger. - Yeah, like I mean, I go through phases of watching TikTok a lot. And I'm currently in a TikTok watching phase. And somehow the algorithm is, I must have watched one of these gambling addicts talking about their gambling addiction videos for more than 10 microseconds longer than the algorithm does actually. - Just a long mass again, another one. - Yeah. - Exactly. And there's a lot of like, you know, like, hey, you gambled way the house, you know, type of content. You know, where it was like, hey, at least I was trying, you know, like, you know, like, had I won, you know, that would have been a life-changing thing for our family. And I was doing it for us. And it's like, okay, that, that, like, I can kind of make sense of how that would make sense, you know? - Right. - And I think with, and there is a lot of this sort of like, fear and excitement mixed together. And yeah, when using these tools as a, absolutely, I feel like the, in the same way that I really felt the need at one time to learn TypeScript, like way early, you know, even when it was still like a, just part of like the Android ecosystem or not Android, what was it, angular ecosystem, right? That was using TypeScript. I was like, well, this is clearly the future. Like, this would be such a high signal, like, good thing for me to be good at because like, if I'm good at this, then, then, and the industry goes this way, like, that'll be just great for me. Like, I'll be able to do more. And there have been a couple of these times where I'm like, like, oh, well, this is clearly the most important thing for me to learn and to be good at, like an expert at. And using, like, yeah, coding assistance, using these tools without a doubt. Like, this is the most important. Like, if I wanted to become good at anything, this is the thing to become good at right now. Not because, I'm not even sure that the industry is gonna shrink in the way that we've talked about, but it's just like the amount of, the amount of, like, the stuff that you can, the amount of power that you can have within an organization within an industry, with, like, just being able to say, I can chip this much, this fast, based on this understanding, and allow us to have the time to iterate, like, you know, six, seven more, sorry, I'm, I have seven-year-old. Six or seven more iterations. (laughing) Then, then, then I would have otherwise, you know, and deliver this stuff that would have remained on the backlog, like, so much faster and everything like that. Like, it's just so high-impact, like, so high-end. - Right. - Absolutely, you gotta work out, right? And at the same time, if you don't, if I don't learn this, if I don't, like, develop these skills, if I don't become familiar with, like, how to use whatever cloud code and how not to use cloud code or something like that, I might become irrelevant, you know, like, those slow skills that I have right now just might be, or that the things just might jump ahead so quickly that I'm no longer able to make sense of the next jump. That's also a big fear for myself. One of our engineers, when, a year long kayaking trip, last October, and I'm thinking, like, my God, like, when Alex gets back, like, is it gonna, like, is it gonna be even possible to make that, that, will any of this make sense, right? - Still on the trip, or is Alex back? - Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, it's kind of different in other six months, you know? - Okay, I was gonna ask you, if you made the, you know, how it went, but yeah, still happening. - Wow. - I mean, I do think it's interesting that Peter Steinberger, right, the maker of OpenClaw, like, you know, this was like the first technical project that he's, he had the programming, you know, background, had worked on some incredible, like, developer products, like, before, but like, had also been on a, essentially, in retirement, like, not looking at computers type of thing, until, I don't know, six months ago, nine months ago, when he got back into, into programming AI, this might be apocryphal, actually, you know, that I think, and I'm saying it a lot, but like that, on the other hand, you know, maybe it's possible to come back into this with fresh eyes without that continuity and just be like, oh, yeah, here's how I'm gonna use these tools, but it is a fear of mine that, again, like, I'm able to make sense of that next jump, but I also, man, I love the fact that we can, like, the things that, last Friday, I was, you know, going into the weekend, and I'm thinking, you know what, we've been talking about doing this, like, comfy UI style, like, image pipeline, starter kit, right? Teal Jodts, it's a SDK, we all, you can make anything on top of it, but for, like, infinite canvas apps, but we also have, like, starter kits for, hey, if you're gonna make, like, a workflow tool, here's, like, a workflow starter kit, or if you're gonna make, like, a, embed this thing inside, like, a chat, like, here's a chat starter kit, or a multiplayer app starter kit, that type of thing. And we've been talking about doing one that was kind of, like, comfy UI, are you familiar with these types of, the software that, it's like a pipeline for AI image generation. So you say, generate an image of a cat, okay, like, generate an image of a landscape, use a mask to pull the cat out of whatever image you generated, compose those things together, and then make, I don't know, Instagram answers, whatever people use the stuff for, but, and it runs asynchronously, it's like a workflow thing. And we've been saying, like, you know, children would be perfect for that, let's make a starter kit for that, but we knew it would be complex, we knew it would be a couple of weeks of work, and, you know, okay. But last Friday, I'm just like, you know what, Claude, I can describe this to you, I can point you to, you know, six or whatever, a number of other products that kind of have these features and stuff, you know, come up with a minimum spec for the feature set of this thing, and then just build the starter kit, like go for it. And two hours later, I remembered that I had, like, fired off that, that Claude to work on this, and I've loaded up, and I'm like, my God, this is like 80% done. Like, you know, okay, I need to guide it, I need to, you know, make sure, that you can only get a percent left. - Yeah, like I still didn't write any of the code myself, but I just kind of steered the UX of it and the architecture and stuff like that. And we shipped it today. Like that was a four day, five day, like shipping cycle for something that I really expected to take weeks of a focused one or two engineers, you know, to really get across the line. And like, that's amazing. Like, I love that. Like, that's, like, like, forget the fear. Like, that's just awesome. Like, I want more of that. I'm like, I can't believe it. Like, pinch me, you know? - Yeah. - So, but how do you plan for that now that I have, you know, we joke about having a zero backlog at TealDRA, is that like, you know, we've gone through all the PRs, all the issues and stuff. We've identified them. We even had different AI's like, do some like research on all the bugs and everything like that. And it's just like, if in six months, there's still any issues left. (laughs) Like, like, would we be surprised? Like, is there any reason why we wouldn't be able to chew through all of this stuff? Either closing or ignoring or saying, we're not going to work on that. But even just building a prototype for some of this stuff, see if it works out. - Well, more so for more bugs for sure, but maybe not if you have a bug churner or something like that that sort of all it does is look for bugs. You know, even like deterministic simulation testing, like there's ways you can deploy that beyond the database, which is traditionally what you've seen at these higher level, higher order places. There's a lot of places you're going to apply that kind of thinking even to sort of in the background, try deterministic things seeded with an idea, just to try things you would never do. And now you might even actually employ or deploy that kind of tactic in your code base, which largely will just help you restructure a lot of things. Maybe you've written a poorly, maybe cloud wrote a poorly, maybe you've moved from a poorly, and now you gotta rethink how you're doing. you turn your knobs and levers, but now you can actually take the time if you hadn't done that from the origination of the project to comb through the project because you might as a human spend weeks just looking at your code base to see how you can apply DST to your project just a restructure so you can do. And now it's like, well, yeah, that's kind of like, let's just do that because I'm not looking at that code. I'm not gonna spend, I'm not gonna miss my child's birthday because I'm looking to the code. No, I've deployed some sort of infinite loop that helps me do that kind of thing and make that kind of plan. And so now maybe we have more code, but now it's even more possible to have more code and no bugs. That's a strange potential world. - It is weird. Like I used to use this kind of, I don't know, it's not really trick or a mnemonic device or something like that. I've just been like, hey, if I just fell off my bike and hit my head and just kind of like came to in this startup and with these, you know, the current state of like our code base and the current state of our customers and all this stuff. Like what would I think I should, would be the most important thing to work on, right? Like to try and clear the, just try the exercise of clearing all the sun cost or the momentum or the continuity and say like, okay, if I just started fresh right here, like what would be the most important thing to do or what would I do next essentially? And I'm feeling like I have to do that like every six weeks now of like, okay, wait, hold on, the parameters of what's possible have shifted. Is this thing that we thought was a good idea before or thought was a blocker or something like that? Or even like a principle of the company, like is that still relevant? An example of this has to do with our documentation, our change log and the way that we keep up communication around the SDK and around our releases. So, Tildredo, we ship the website, Tildredo.com every week and then we ship the SDK every month. And essentially we, the dot com, which is free, Tildredo.com free whiteboard that people can use and please do, it's really good. This is a lot like a Scaladron is how people subscribe it very often. Right. (laughing) Which is, you know, we're friends, don't worry about it. You probably predate as Caladron, don't you? No, they predate us. In fact, one of the reasons I started working on this project was I had implemented a contributor to Scaladron a bunch and implemented a feature there. And I was like, wow, this code base, because it was very organically, very open source kind of code based. Yeah. I'm like, this was harder than it should be to add this feature here. And like, you know, there are like 100 switch statements in this code base where you switch on, you know, like whether you're dragging an arrow versus like, you know, drawing or something like that. And I could kind of see the, I was already thinking in this mode, just based on my other open source projects, but like, I was like, I could kind of see the outlines of an SDK, right? Where all those things are pluggable rather than kind of hard coded. And yeah, I pulled on that thread a little bit and it turned out that there was a demand for it. So you had the SDK in mind from day one. Pretty well. Because yeah, the dot com was and kind of always, kind of still is like essentially a demo of the SDK. But it's a demo that has like, I don't know, I think like 130,000 registered users and like half a million monthly like users, because you can use it while logged out. So it's a good demo. It's a good, good demo. Yeah. Luckily, we get a lot of the infrastructure at reduced rates. So I must. So we haven't had any pressure yet to do it, but it is a good thing. It helps, we license the SDK. So it's awesome to have something you can send to your boss. But like, yeah, we release the, the dot com is part of what it does. It's a demo, but it's also a place for like, dog food, the SDK before we ship it, right? So it's like, yeah, let's have our, half a million people just kind of fuzz tests over this thing of report bugs and crashes and things like that. Rarely happen, but it's good to give us confidence. But the communication around like, okay, here's what's in the next release, right? That's really hard. It's really hard to maintain because like PRs are going in all the time. It requires this like manual narrative synchronization across like the team and sure, this is a problem at any team, right? And usually requires a lot of kind of like, middle management and product managers in order to, to be able to have a cohesive story of like, this is what's happening in teal draw for this next release. So this what's happening in the code base. But yeah, now I have an automation, a cloud code runs on a Mac mini in my living room every day that says, what are the PRs that landed in the last 24 hours? What is the current state of this like next.md file? And let me just create the, essentially the release notes that we would publish today if we shipped what was on main right now. And that just happens every day and it's good. And it like we spent a lot of time making it good, but it's still it's like the idea of having that document like as a startup, as a 15, 20 people like, that's terrifying. Like making a commitment to a high effort, like thing to maintain. That is not like test don't fail if our change log is wrong, right? There's no way to automate around that. And to say like to customers, yes, you can look at this document because every day it'll be up to date. Like that's the type of commitment I would never have made. Just because it's like, like if it's wrong, like I won't know it and like it's required constant like recommitment to the work there. And so those are the types of things that we just didn't do. And we didn't do intentionally like from the strategic level, we will not do these things that require all this maintenance. We need to do things that are automatable, that break loudly and so forth. But these days, in this case like wow, I guess we can just do that. Like we can publish docs every time we land a PR. We can like update the change log. We like there's a lot of things that yeah, it just changes what's possible I guess. This is all coming from somebody who, if I understand correctly, you are writing code daily. This is not like a you run the company and you're sitting behind the scenes, you're active in the day to day. What does that, what does that light to? I suppose not only be in charge, but also being charged and still write code on the daily. I guess direct code maybe is a better way to say it. It's not that different than how it's always been. I mean like this has always been, I mean there have been times where I've written less code because I don't know where we were fundraising or I was doing a lot of hiring or other things, right? Like or where to my great shame. Most of the code that I wrote would happen on Saturday mornings or evenings. There was a bizarre time where Teal dry went from being my Knights and Weekends project to my company back to being my Knights and Weekend project even though I still was running the company. But yeah, the thing that has changed the most for me is that there were a lot of things that I had to say like how to know to or like not now to because the time required to do it was a lot and because the work itself was very like opinionated or very like tasty, tasty tips of where it was subjective, right? It was like and Teal dry is full of those types of things. In fact that's kind of one of its value propositions, right? Is that like what does a good arrow look like? I don't know, a good arrow could look like anything. But you know what? I know what a good arrow looks like. And I will ensure that our arrows are great. And that's just one of those things that I'm using here as a by the way. - Thank you. - The best of our scene. - And the best years of my life went into those. (laughing) But yeah, some of those things like, okay they're just hard to work on because the iteration is gonna be slow or it's just gonna be like, it's gonna take multiple shots at this before I understand the problem really all that stuff. But they're not necessarily things that I'm super comfortable handing off to other engineers because they're, I don't know, they're, yeah, they're like, they're clearly a Steve feature. Like they should be a Steve feature, but it's really hard for me to commit to Steve features during the times where I'm most busy. But I feel like I can work on those features a lot better these days because the work of the programming, the work of getting it to a point where I can like, say that's, we're going in the right direction or not. And then doing another iteration or trying a different direction, all those things. That time is just compressed. And so yeah, like if it is a kind of a design feature, design interaction or something like that, we're not really sure how it should work. We just have to do a lot of different, like take a lot of shots at it, which is the place where I kind of add the most value as a programmer. That stuff has accelerated massively, right? 'Cause at the end of it, I might throw all of those versions out and say, okay, well now I know what the feature should be. Let's even hand off that thing to get built by someone else or let's take that extra time. in order to review it or something. But like the sort of the decision making within the design phase of these features, like it's massively accelerated. Because yeah, I can run multiple coding agents at a time trying different things. I can analyze things really quickly. And yeah, just take more shots on goal, I suppose. - Do you find yourself wanting to be in those details more then? - Here's what I'm trying to go with this is that, I feel like there's this necessary slowdown, not because you can't go that fast, not you physically, but the organization given the new constraints and levers we can pull. I almost feel like folks will want to go a little slower, not to go slow, but to be in the details, to be in this deep feature, for example. Do you find yourself sort of like lifting off the gas, a little, not because you can't push it down, because you want to partially be involved in very particular Steve details. - That's an interesting question. I think it depends. I think it depends on whether I am working, if you can think of, especially with teal draw because it's an SDK, right? Kind of as a tree, there's the very core parts of the SDK and then there are the things that depend on it, right? There's like the kind of the teal draw.com being a thing that depends on the teal draw, kind of core library, there are these starter kits, right? That depend on the core library, but nothing depends on them. Teal draw.com needs to work because users depend on teal draw.com, right? But we have other things that no one uses. They don't have users, like the starter kits don't have users. Documentation doesn't have the same relationship to user data that the dot com has, things like that. When we find ourselves on those leaf nodes of that tree, like things that don't have any dependence. - Go fast, yeah. - Go fast, like full throttle. In fact, you should because it's like an opportunity to practice going full throttle, you know? - Yeah, you learn to trust the model, trust the system, you know, trust the letting go. - Even makes some mistakes, like, you might as well, because this is a place where you can do that and you won't be able to do that on the core or the more dependent upon parts of the whole operation. The other place is like internal tools. We have business intelligence tools that we've built for ourselves. I can, my sales guys can look at a summary of, oh, which PRs are landing, you know? And like, okay, put that in a language that I can understand or something. Like abstract this for me, tell me which types of customers I might even mention this too, right? Where we're putting in accessibility features. All right, well, here's how to talk about this to customers. And on the flip side, I can look at sales and I can see, you know, essentially just taking all of the CRM data and handing it to Gemini and saying, like, tell me a story about this, you know, pull out the stuff that matters. And also just tell me, you know, are there any product insights that have come out of these conversations or the meeting notes, et cetera? Just give me something to work with. And I can just refresh that anytime I want, which is great. There's this another thing that like, it would be insane for me to tap my account executive son, the shoulder and be like, hey, stop what you're doing and write me a 500 word essay about the deal that you're working on, you know? But it would be great to have, right? It would be great to have. It's just like, I would never do it. Now I have that. And it's not perfect, but it doesn't, it's not load bearing either. So it's like, it's still great. Those internal tools are another place where we've, we've just ripped like, and then sometimes they're broken, sometimes they're not broken. Like, to our friends out there running a distributed team, when was the last time you audited who could reach your internal systems from which device and from where? It's probably been a while. You know, most companies bolt on security tools, they do it one to time, a VPN here, access list there, maybe some endpoint monitoring if someone remembers to do that. And the result is a patchwork that technically works, but gives you zero centralized visibility and a whole lot of implicit trust. That is the exact opposite of zero trust. That's basically vibes basic security. So, normally I replace it with the patchwork. It combines VPN, access control, and threat protection into one platform built on zero trust principles, only the right people, access the right resources under the recommendation. It runs on Nord links, that's their VPN protocol. 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Again, NordLayer.com/theChangeLog. - It's definitely the era of internal tooling, I think. You can build so many things that help you move the data points. You have like, you're given an example here where things fall through the cracks, not because you don't have humans evolve because the clues usually have humans evolve, but it's that the synthesizing the data out of certain artifacts has just largely been impossible, not because it's been impossible, because spending the time on it has been impossible. And now you're sort of freeing up this data to you as a visionary and someone who has clear taste to make choices that you could never really make. Before you do that, you know the data available to you. - I didn't have the data, I didn't have the insights, I suppose. Like the yes, I think, like granola, like I use granola for my meeting notes and stuff, but I never read the meeting notes. Like it's cool to know that there's a summary of my meeting, but I just, I don't refer to it. The only time that I've ever used it is when I shove those meeting notes in a big group to some other LLLM and say, "Okay, can you pull out some, "how can I be a better, "how can I improve my one-on-one, "or something like that?" Because that's the type of thing where normally I would need a consultant or a coach or a, I don't know, therapist, maybe not a therapist, but like, you know, I need some other expert. - I know that. - It's a feedback loop. - Yeah, like to do some real thinking about these particular artifacts, which by themselves don't really mean anything. Like, or at least don't mean anything to me. The HubSpot, you know, the amount of information that goes through a CRM, every day is just massive, right? It's a working tool. It's just like a get, you know, a code repository. Like, things are coming in all the time. Like, you can't stay on top of it. You can work within that, you know, but like, actually zooming out is very, very difficult. And yeah, it's fantastic to have essentially an army of consultants that I can just throw at all of these things. Councilor, here's what's interesting about you're saying, is that you, as someone who's leading, you're able to stay in the minutia while zooming out, which has largely been next impossible to have the macro and the micro at the same time, without losing major context in your brain. 'Cause you can kind of like, just let granola do a thing behind the scenes and summarize 10 or 15 conversations you've had to some degrees to learn, for example. That's a macro. The micro is the day to day when you're in the minutia of, what is the feature, how are we moving things, you know, how I'm automating cloth, all these things. And you don't have to give up the other to get the other. And I think that's a unique position to be in. That's the thing I think when you have these AS skeptics out there, which I was an AS skeptic and Jared and I were both like, gosh, this hype wave is it real is it not? And we all kind of were there. And I think until you've gotten past that threshold to see what's beyond just the word AI, or the, I guess the acronym in this case. Yeah. That you can truly understand what is possible for someone who knows how to fully leverage and stay in the details, but also zoom out. I think I'm really lucky to be like a technical founder because I kind of know both sides of the problem, right? Where I'm learning both sides of the problem. And oftentimes these internal tools are a way for me to learn about a part of the company that I might not know about. So it is like, I didn't know how our CRM organized data were some of the routines until I was like, all right, well, I want to build a tool to help me visualize it. So it's to help me understand it, right? And just like anything else, right? That's like I'll learn the things that I need to learn in order to build the thing that I'm building. And oftentimes I try to build things that will, forced me to learn the things that I need to know, that I know that I need to know for other reasons as well. But also just like, yeah, I know the, like I'm, it's not that I know what the AI stuff is capable of, but I know the problem and I know the type of problem that I can solve with AI. And having a bunch of analytical intelligence problems, like where the bottleneck is cognitive work, is in a way a kind of like a luxury, right? Like it would be very hard for me to think of things to do with, like I have no problem finding use cases for using whatever AI models, because so much of my life is trying to get that macro, right? It's trying to get the intelligence or insights out of, even with only 15 people, it's still a complex system. Like we're producing knowable things like all the time, whether that's bugs or customer feedback or code or like, a cover situation with customers or, when you name it, or analytics and all that stuff. So at the moment, I feel very, very kind of like lucky to both have the problem which can be solved and can be, at least can be addressed with these tools, the ability to work with those tools, the capital, not to worry about the cost of working with those tools, which is fantastic, but enough of a problem to really sink my teeth into without having it be the same scale of problem that you might have, you know, I don't know, at a shopper fire, something like that, which, yeah, you couldn't really fit into your head, or maybe you could, I don't know. To boss me, may push back on that. If anyone can do it, it's to be, yeah, I think, speaking for the audience, to Boss Luke, the founder and CEO of Shopify who went from bespoke, random Ruby app store front to Shopify, ICO stock market massive, which is cool. Canadian powerhouse. That's right. Yeah, for sure. A feat of nature, for sure. Tell us about the SDK business. What is business like selling SDKs? It's like some advice that I got really early on when I started to start up, which is that, if you feel like you're doing anything really creative with your lawyers, then you're probably doing something wrong. If you're asking any original questions to your lawyers and you're probably like, stop because you're like, don't do that. Don't try and break new ground in terms of anything like that. And I think, similar advice with GoToMarket is that, starting to start up, or just selling anything, it's just so hard that if you find yourself innovating in the GoToMarket, or if you find yourself innovating in the thing that you're selling, you should ask yourself, is that really what I want to be doing? Or should I just be using a much more normal GoToMarket and just focus on differentiation, product market, all that stuff, right? Unfortunately, selling SDK, there's not a lot of great examples of companies that have gotten past, a certain size selling code, selling the MPM libraries, essentially, right? And so, yeah, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to innovate in how you do that, right? And an experiment much more than I expected. The good news is that we're kind of figuring it out, and a lot of the, and we'll talk about specifics, but when I started, I was really scared, honestly, that if I try to commercialize this thing that I sell to developers, then people will not accept that. If you require a license key in order to use an MPM package or something like that, then your adoption will go to zero. And if you put a price on something, then people will just immediately create an open-source alternative to it or something like that. Somehow, I think we've actually kind of made it out of that problem pretty well. And we're not break-even, but we're going to be close, and we're probably going to actually break-even like this year. Even with like 20 people, I think we're going to do that this year. But it's interesting. And I, some of the decisions that we made about changing our license, how we work with license keys, how we like identify people, all that stuff. In retrospect, I'm so happy that we did them. And again, I'll talk about the specifics, but like, when you look at some of the things that have happened this year, the kind of the big stories and open-source and big stories and like developer tooling, like they're not happy stories. They're mainly stories about how AI is like really disrupting the revenue channels, the kind of traditional revenue channels around open-core software. And that's not been the case for us. Our story is closer. It's not as good as Superbases, but it's closer to Superbases. And in the fact that like models recommend us, people use us, people like us, and then people pay us. That we're delivering value, and we have the mechanism set up to capture the value that we're creating. That's great. If I were trying to sell premium features on top of Teoldraw, which is one of the things that one does with this type of thing, I would be terrified right now because, oh, it's just some code on top of a known open-source library. I can do that all day. I can have 10 of my clods doing that at once. But if it is, you know, like all right. So anyway, selling it as decay, the way that we do it, Teoldraw is, we distribute it on NPM. Again, it's like source available. You have to sign in the CLA. If you want to contribute, yeah, but it's not MIT license, it's under essentially commercial license. Which license do you actually choose? You said source available. Which one did you choose? Was it self-made? I think we adapted one that Microsoft used. I don't want to interrupt. I just wanted to get that clear when you were going to the site. No, no, no. It's the Teoldraw license. It's a, I think the important thing is it's not HEPL. It's not like BSL or, you know, the kind of common ones. Honestly, for most organizations, either it's MIT or it's Apache or it's nothing or it's okay, we'll talk to sales. Like, either it's like fully permissive in a way that is not going to complicate your next funding round, you know, when the lawyers do due diligence and they say, "Hey, why are you using this library? Do you have a license to use this library?" You know, if it's not totally compatible, like, fully, you know, don't worry about it. It's on my team. Just go nuts, like do whatever you want with it. And it's not HEPL or GPL where, yeah, there's requirements on the parent's organ, like that your app needs to be open source as well or something like that. If it's anything else, it's basically all the same. Which is that, okay, we're going to have to have, like, buy a license. We're going to have to arrange an alternative license that we can use. So, Tiltron's license has its, like, little particularities, but essentially it's not permissive in the same way that MIT or Apache is. So, yeah, there we go. Everything else kind of fits in the same bucket, which is, like, not permissive. Anyway, what it is is like- Being source available and choosing your license is super important to run an SDK business. That's why I wanted to get that clear because the license you choose and to make your source available is where the rubber meets the road in terms of adoption and even experimentation. And obviously converting to a customer if you're a true, if you're beyond the, you know, the development. Now you're actually in production with it, for example. But continue, I just want to get that clear before I deeper. Yeah, yeah. Gosh. so we are SDK business. This this could be a a mass power fireside of like how just the story of how this thing, about I'll tell you the current. You know what? Now I will actually go into a brief, brief history of it, right? First like the V1 of Tildar was MIT licensed. It still is if you want to use that version when I, when I formed the company, we basically rewrote the thing and that version was like in alpha and that alpha was public under Apache license, but there was always a statement basically like we were probably going to change our license when we hit 1.0 unless we just decide to do something completely different, but if we're going to maintain this, this is going to be the product like the project of Tildar, which is the SDK like we're going to change the license. And yeah, when we did the or the 2.0 of that, that when we released that version of it, it was just a non-commercial license. It's just like you can use this in academic work, in student work, in things that don't make money or, you know, inside of companies that don't make money. Or maybe not inside of companies, but if if you wanted to use this in any commercial settings, you need to buy a license. How much does that license cost? I don't know, talk to me. Then we would just put that out there and cross our fingers and hope that anyone would show up and I was shocked that a ton of people showed up. And we did almost a million dollars in revenue in that first year with like such a bare bones, like go to market, license structure, you know, sales structure, anything, right? It was just like, let's negotiate every single deal and try and figure out how much value we're providing and argue that Teoldra is a valuable thing. And we have this very simple like you can't use this in a commercial setting, you can use this in a commercial setting, you know, under these sort of conditions. All of the licenses that we sold at first were perpetual, meaning like you pay, you get a year of updates and then if you want to buy another year, like you get another license, otherwise you can just keep using those updates that were released within that year, like forever. Don't care. It's really like the most generous type of like commercial license that you can imagine. But I needed to know whether anyone was even out there. Like if we had sold, you know, $100,000 worth of licenses with the most generous terms possible, then you know, we could only sell less than that essentially with more restrictive terms. And that's the way that we did it in the first year. And I say we, but it was just like the way that the six of us came up with as a way to do this that would make sense. And we needed to validate this because there was no guarantee that anyone would be willing to pay for this. But yeah, by the end of that year, we had switched to a system where you could use Teoldra even in production, even in commercial apps for free, but it had a big made with Teoldra in the corner. And that was our kind of like V3 watermark license. If you wanted to get rid of this made with Teoldra, then you'd have to buy license. But you could use it. Anyone could use it, even in a commercial setting with this watermark. And part of the reason why we did that was we needed to know where this thing was being used. We started to realize that we were bottlenecked in selling the SDK and just knowing who was using the SDKs that we could talk to them. And there was no license enforcement for the V2 or the V3, I think. No, for the V3 there was, but it was all local. We're not pinging a server or anything. But I made sure that that little SVG was hosted on a CDN. And we could look at that CDN and say, OK, who is requesting this little watermark SVG? And that gave us at least some idea of which domains we're using this. Who is using this? We should go talk to this company because they're clearly using the watermarkers of like that. Maybe they're going to want to become customers. But it was bad. It was a bad idea. It was a bad idea because when we did talk to customers in that setting, they wanted to pay much less for Teoldra than they would have before when there was no difference at all within the SDK except for a piece of paper that said you could use the Center Commercial App or not. And it was because in the minds of the customers, the conversation we kept on having, we're like, oh, well, that sounds like a lot of money just to get rid of a little SVG in the corner of the canvas, right? Because that we had essentially anchored the price that we were charging to the pain of this little watermark rather than the value or whatever of the canvas. People were building, like investing. You could be like 20 people working on top of Teoldra and stuff. They're putting millions into this project. But that SVG really didn't feel like more than $10,000 a year type of thing. And so we, the summer of last year, we kind of did the next iteration of the license, which was much more restrictive, which said, you need a license key to use this thing in production. It will not work in production without a license key. You can use it locally. As soon as it detects that reactives in production mode, if you don't have a license key, it'll just disappear, right? Which was pretty extreme. We balanced this by saying, if you have a hobby project or a non-commercial project, you're just something that is student project or anything else. I'll give you a license key forever for free. I don't care. And if you have something in between a commercial project, not commercial project, you're kind of evaluating it. Here's a 100-day license trial license key that you can use. And at the end of that trial license key, either you can decide not to use this or you could say, actually, this thing is just going to be a hobby project. I'll give you one of those licenses or you talk to sales. And if you're using this in a commercial app, you can do that. The reason why we did that and the reason why this was so important, besides the fact of removing that low anchor to the price point, was that it allowed us to know who was using this. If a person signs up for a license key and says, here's my email or here's the domains where this license key needs to work, that is such a-- we don't blow up their inbox right away, but that's a person we can talk to. We didn't really have that before. We were just constantly trying to chase like, OK, where did our watermark load and all that stuff. Now, of course, the developers who are using this, the developers who are getting like login keys and are on our discord and stuff, are usually not the people who decide whether to buy TealDraw, right? They're the experts who are going to bring this into their organization. They're the people who are going to answer the question, how do we build this thing? Do we build it ourselves or not? But they don't always have the company credit card, you know? So oftentimes, we don't even ever talk to the actual developer who, like, you know, whatever got a license key or something like that. We don't care about that email address, but it gives us enough information or to start looking at, OK, well, who in that organization is properly running this project? Who should we reach out to? You know, who should we try and get an intro to? And they're, yeah, I don't have a huge sales team, but like-- and I think I have a really good sales team. So that's the type of work that they do in order to actually make deals happen out of this interest. And all of those things currently are working really well. And you know, we have like some-- like, like, Google's using TealDraw in our product. Shopify is using TealDraw, and they're internal products. Like Autodesk is using TealDraw. Like, we're growing within these companies. And like, almost all of the AI design tools that are out there right now are like using TealDraw for their Canvas. It's awesome. Like, it's really good to see something that I didn't think was possible at all, which is to make a venture scale, potentially venture scale company based on front-end tech, right? Actually start to kind of like, you know, for the engine to at least turn over, you know? And it's really, really-- yeah. It's encouraging, exciting. And see, even more interesting, the distribution is via NPM. You know, you're not even really having to pay for your distro. You just-- You don't pay for it. In the sense that you don't have to go to the infrastructure, right? The things that we don't have to care about are insane. Right? Yeah. I mean, like, SuperHamArton's-- for a while, the biggest cost to TealDraw apart from developer salaries was DocuSign. Just because, like, the cost of doing business for a product like this is so low. Now developing it, expensive, of course. Engineers are sure. Yeah. So other infrastructure is expensive. Our biggest marketing tool, TealDraw.com. We have really great relationships with our cloud providers and things like that, our cloudflare. But, you know, it's still-- it's like, compared to a normal marketing budget, totally reasonable, really acceptable. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. How many hours has your team spent on a marketing site that could have been live in an afternoon? Be honest. You picked the framework. You debated SSR versus SSG. You wrote a custom CMS because the existing ones were not quite right. You set up CICD. You designed a component library for a site with four pages. And it still not launched. Oh my gosh. That entire YACSHave is exactly what Squarespace replaces. 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You know, this is a weird analogy. I just literally thought of this in this moment because I want to make this point too, compared to SaaS. That's my point. Like, I get your argument and I 100% agree with it, but my suggestion is that it's largely margin based in a much higher scale because you're not SaaS. And it's kind of like the concentrates that don't ship at the water kind of thing, you know? I just heard that minute made is no longer making their frozen, cylindrical thing that they would sell you as a concentrate anymore. And I thought it was kind of cool because like here you got minute made, shipping this thing you've had in the freezer, probably is into your child. Right? Maybe that too. Maybe a 20 year old version or something like that. Probably the same, the same too, but yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But you got this concentrate in this tube that ships without the water, so you got less cost, right? You got more than you can fit into the case, maybe dramatically less weight, so a lot easier to maneuver around inventory cheaper. Yeah, of course. Yeah, all the things right now they're caboch in this thing and I'm like, well, how is that a thing? Because like that's like an SDK versus SaaS. Like SaaS is me giving the whole bottle with the water and everything. And the SDK is like, here's your concentrate version of it. Do what you want. You know, like you don't have to put it in water. You could put in something else you want to. So this is like the SDK version of it. I mean, I think the, okay, so there's another conversation that I've kind of been watching happen, which is about the impact of AI coding and other things on SaaS is like, why the heck would I pay for this if I could essentially build it a weekend, that type of thing? Which I'm going to prevent myself from diving right into that even though I think it's really, really, really interesting and it will have an impact on tail draws future as well. I think selling an SDK, yes, absolutely. Our margins are good, right? It's just that you can sell a, if you add the water yourself, you can sell it for three times as much, right? And all those other problems about inventory efficiency and things like that, they're solvable problems, right? They're complex, but they're solvable. And I think SaaS, similarly, like, oh, it will require a lot of infrastructure. Yeah, okay, we can solve that. Like, but reliability will be a problem. Security will be a problem. All right, we have people, we have capital, we'll solve all those problems and then we'll be able to sell our Canvas, you know, like a, like a mirror or something like sell the whiteboarding experience for millions of dollars a year for enterprise, right? Make sense. Certainly, house made sense from a how hard is my life perspective? Selling an SDK is easy. What's your security, Steve? I don't know what's your security. I'm not, I'm never going to touch your data. Like, I don't care. Like, what do you, like, I don't know what you're doing. That's a great response. Yeah, I don't know what you're security. Exactly. I am not involved in that problem. Like, that's the, as part of the whole point. You can at least, I don't know. I don't know. Like, hey, can you build this feature? Like, well, no, but you can build that feature. In fact, here's how and here's a thousand examples of how to do it. And especially these days, like, it's trivial, you know, to customize this stuff in some really deep, deep way. It's like, that's exactly what we've built this thing to do. So much of the normal places where, like, support, like all this stuff is just, it is crazy where we don't have to spend time compared to almost every other product that I've ever worked on because we are one step removed from users, right? Like, we're not even exposed to the same risk that the, our customers are, right? Like we sell a lot into edtech. Edtech is brutal. Oh my God. You're on the line for, you know, a government changes the way that it distributes, you know, funding within a school district and like, and you just lose that customer. Like, or you lose all of the customers within that state or something. It's crazy how hard those people are fighting. Nothing but respect for people doing business in education technology. But we're not directly relate, like, we're not as exposed to that problem as those customers are. We're providing the tooling for them to build their product, right? And our customers take on that, I suppose the investment, the risk of bringing them us into the product and it's our job to make sure that we do the best we can at the thing that they brought us in for. But like, every now and then we're like, how many people are on teoldraw.com? You know, like, how many people have registered? We're like, oh, I don't know. Let me go check. Like, oh, cool. It went up. Our attention is towards things that are, the C's are a lot calmer in selling an SDK. It's just not obvious how you sell an SDK. Have you done a master class? And then we got the short version here for listeners of the pod. But is there, is there like, here's how to sell an SDK.com? Or do you have anything with that? I'm sure there's others that would like to skip to the end because you went through a heck of a process to get there. Yeah. I'd like to talk more about that. And that's something that, that myself and I had to go to market, Phil Lo also talk about a lot, which is that like, man, there, this is new information in a way that I didn't expect to kind of be producing new information kind of to back to what I said at first is like, these are not the problems that anyone wants to have. But they are the problems that we have. The places where anyone wants to innovate, but it is a place where we've innovated. And yeah, I'd like to talk more about it. I spoke recently with like the CEO of like, AG Grid. AG Grid is like a data grid component. Almost the exact same story as us with regards to the code of market. 100% inbound ourselves, 100% inbound, right? Trying to change that, trying to change that. I mean, like we have a lot of differences in terms of how we price. That's the other, you know, pricing is a really challenging part of this. But the, you know, there's there are companies out there that are doing the same type of thing, but there's not a lot of like literature on it. There's not a lot of like best practices or anything like it's still a very, very new way of running a business. Just on the pricing, there are so many ways of pricing, of charging for like an SDK use, use like this. And kind of fellow travelers here would be maps like map box, right? No one's going to build a map. We're going to buy that or they're going to license it. Text editors, data grids, kind of charts and diagram libraries. Like if you're doing a lot of automatically laid out charts or even mermaid JS at a certain point, you would want to be customer of them. It's kind of like front-end infrastructure. Yeah. But that needs deep thought. It's not something you can probably do some of it over a weekend, but you have to have extreme institutional domain knowledge that you've obviously got. Yeah. But my line is always like, look, you guys could do this. I mean, I think we're a pretty special team of people. I've tried to build that special team, but like at the end of the day, where programmers, you guys are programmers, like you could build Teal Drop. You just want to take a while and then if you got it right, let's, let's Steve do that. Please. Let's Steve do that. Even if you got it right, like no one would notice because that's just the way that the canvas is supposed to work, right? Like I could build a text editor. If I did my job right, you wouldn't be able to tell that I built it. Yeah. Right? That's a terrible-- Not the best use of my time. No. And there's enough bad canvases out there that I can point to or at least some part canvases out there that I can point to to say that like you might not get it right or you might have to ship it early and your users will know. And here's something that you can use today. It's a strong value proposition for companies I know that they want to use this type of thing. But how much is that worth? How much are people willing to pay for that? The biggest number that we put in front of a customer was half a million dollars a year. Our average geosize floats, but it's not half a million dollars a year. Yeah. What was the response to that offer? Yeah. Well, I think the conversation with the half a million dollars a year, your guy was like, We are. a consultancy that builds large projects and we only have one customer. Basically, we were consultancy with one client and I was like, that's an interesting, like, who is your one client? They're like, it's the US Department of Defense. That's pretty common actually. Yeah. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. And they described this project and I'm like, man, this is like, it's all the things that we would want to have. It's like, well-funded, yes. It needs to work and needs to be good and needs to be something that they can rely on for the next 10 years to be thing. Basically, like, all of the, all of the boxes of the things that would, you know, would, would lead me to believe that Teal Draws can be a, like, major part of the loop, like, whether this deal even happens or not, right? Whether this project happens or not. So, not every project is like that. Obviously, there are a lot of projects where Teal Draw plays a very small role, even in a big project. But yeah, there's a number of apps that just would not exist without Teal Draw, just because of the, the kind of the lack of alternatives number one, but also just a unviable, it would not be viable to build this themselves and then build their product on top of it. So, those, those people have probably just would have done something else. Anyway, yeah, how much is at worst? Well, we're figuring that out. We'll talk again in a year a lot. Okay. I'm trying to have a better answer for that. That's part of the detail to be in those negotiations, because like, when you're in those sales negotiations, it sounds like you're learning too about your customer, how, like, how your value permeates into their, their software stack and truly what your value is. Like, that's, I think, like, I was kind of like, taking it back by your desire to negotiate every deal, but that's also a learning process you have to do for a measure, could it be a year or even two or potentially a whole entire version like you've done, because that gives you a learning process. It gives you a learning process. I think everyone should try that as well, because it also gives you an opportunity, really low friction opportunity to just ask for more money. And everyone says, like, oh, you should raise your prices, raise your prices, but like, it's a lot easier to just, you know, come off of a call being like, all right, those folks agreed pretty quickly to the number that I put out there. Maybe on the next call, I'm going to, you know, ask us for a bigger number, right? And there's nothing, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, that is the process, right? You can just iterate on it faster. Everyone does it, but it's, you don't have to change your landing page. The other thing is that like, one of the things that we took away, just kind of, again, like, the, how do you sell an SDK thing? When I first started talking to customers, I would be pricing based on how big the customer was, right? And a lot of, like, a lot of SDKs will do this. They'll say, like, EG Grid prices based on the number of developers who work on the project that's going to have this feature in it, right? That's going to use the EG Grid code base, right? Or like, how many times will this component load? Or how much, how many minutes will this thing be active? Or how many connections are all that, right? And what I found was that the pricing based on the size of the company did not make sense. A lot of times, we're talking to small teams at a really big company. And we want to be in that company. We want to sell to them. We want to have them as customers. But in order for that to work, we have to bring that price down. But now we're going to give that whole company a license to use the product for a small price. And so the genius unlock was just saying, like, all right, this is because we were negotiating, because we had that ability to make these steps and moves, we could say, hey, your large company, let's just limit this agreement to just that feature or just that application or just that part of the product. And I'm happy to give it to you for whatever price that seems would seem out of fit with the size of the company, right? Like, right. But hopefully you like it. And hopefully like other people at the company like see this and say, oh, I want that my part of the product or hopefully it grows. And then we have different agreements with those teams or those other, or we renegotiate this agreement next year or do whatever we have to do. But that type of thing would have been really hard to do with like a pricing calculator on our landing page or something like that. That would have been really hard to do with a number of connections per charging per connection or something like that. So it's terrible because like again, as a programmer, I like to automate things. As a software guy, like I like to set up systems and nothing could be further. Yeah. So just negotiating time for you know, but it's you just got to do it. Otherwise, you're yeah, no. I think once you find your deal repeating itself, that's when you're like, okay, I've done 20 of those. Let's turn that into potentially a package or I've done like gosh, I got to customize this proposal again, but it's been the same thing the last 10 times. Maybe it's time to dial in that particular type if you're absolutely able to. Yeah. That's where I found it. Is selling an SDK similar or exactly the same as self-hosted? They've the same clock question cut differently. I don't know. Oftentimes what I see with self-hosted is that there's a commercial app, right? Like Century would be a great example, right? Like you have a hosted commercial version of the product that you can also self-host. I think cal.com is similar. There's like, there's a lot of these. And I think it's a good model, right? Because you get a little bit of the best of both worlds. You get like broad adoption that will tell you what features are really important. Like there's no people will request anything, but once they start building it for themselves, then you know that they really need it. And so having some sort of open source or some sort of hostable path is a great way to learn about your customers. I have nothing else. And I think having your code be open and were available and self-hostable, all that kind of keeps you honest. And I think it leads to a higher quality code base leads to a higher quality product. You can't really hide in the same way as that you can. There's reasons for it. And some people just want to like care about open source in ways that I wish I could, I wish the model works for us as well. Because I also do care about these things. But in that case, you're giving a full product and you're saying you can put this product on your servers, right? It's different than an SCK. The SCK is like, here's the engine. Go build software on top of it. It's like the thing that you get when you get used teal draw is that engine. And of course, in order to make it easier to adopt, we've built a lot of these starter kits and modules and things like that that you can use to, for example, do multiplayer collaboration. Really good as well. We nailed it with the backend. And that backend is not a service. That is, here's code, put it on your server or deploy it to cloudflare yourself. Like, I don't want to ever touch your data and I won't. But it's, yeah, like it is all the things that are kind of sitting around this SDK that help move it. But like, hey, we want to build a comments feature on top of teal draw. And is that part of teal draw? And I have to say, no, that's not part of teal draw. Or can we just have teal draw.com? But inside of our own internal organization, I have to say like, no, actually, you have to kind of build that layer yourself. And I have to say, after like four years of saying no to that, I'm having second thoughts about whether I should be saying no to that. But the interesting thing is, here's what I was talking about about like AI kind of eating SaaS products or changing the way that SaaS products work. At the beginning, the companies that were asking for teal draw, kind of like, in a box, like, can I just have like an application around this SDK? They were almost all motivated by concerns of data sovereignty. So they were like, German or like, you know, or, or, or, or, you know, European and they were, maybe they were part of a university or governments, or they just felt very strongly about this. And they were like, we can't use these SaaS products that are based in America because of the data requirements in our country or in our organization, right? Or we have to use open source software. We have to use software that we can modify ourselves. Or they were like in air gap facilities, you know, like we're in an engineering facility that is, 200 feet underground. And we need to collaborate. We still need to do these things. We're still a technical team or a business, but we just can't use SaaS because we can't access the outside, you know, internet. I'm calling you from the parking lot type of conversation. That was how things, that was the type of inbound that I was getting before. And that's not very motivated. That's not very interesting. Like, there is a market there, but it's not a It's not the most interesting market to go after. I'm not going to pivot the company because of GDPR. Not a want to be the GDPR alternative to Miro. Doesn't sound super interesting. It is an opportunity and there is actually a GDPR. I'll think the market is so thin. Anyway, whatever. These days, the recent Y companies are coming to us saying, "Hey, we want Teoldra in a box or we want to have an application around that." It's almost entirely because of AI. The way that they describe it is we are building these really cool internal tools, these agents within the company. They're great. I'm summarizing pretty heavily, but they're great, but they're bottlenecked on two things. They're bottlenecked on context. How much do they have access to essentially? They're bottlenecked on agency. What can they actually do? The external SaaS products, wonderful. They solve the problem. The minute-made comes in the bottle, you can just drink it. You don't have to worry about whatever. But you have no control over the API surface. You have no control over the feature set. You have no control over what they allow you to access for do within the application. As an example, we use notion. I really like notion. I've been using notion for eight years now or something like that. They have an API. That API is really good. They have an MCP server. That MCP server is really good. But I noticed that they don't let you get the past versions of documents. You can get a page, but you can't get the history of updates to that page. It's in the application. Notion UI lets you see that. And notion's own agents can tell you about the history of a page. But if you're using it programmatically with an AI, an MCP server or just the API, you can't get that information. And I was trying to build a thing that would summarize, here's what changed in our notion this week. And that was just like the end of that story. Like I could not get that information. The only other way that I was going to get that information was doing a daily cash of like pull every page that has changed. And I'm like, this is silly, right? And tail draws a small company, right? Like the cost of that bottleneck is relatively small, right? I'm not relying on that agent. I'm not relying on that feature that would have used Notion's history to generate revenue for the company or something like that. It was just intelligent. It would be cool for me to know. But for a lot of companies, yeah, like the fact that maybe their entire whiteboard that they had during the onboarding session or something like that is essentially in a black hole on some online whiteboard SaaS product, that's a problem for them. That's a big problem. They can't get that information. They can't access that knowledge. They don't know the systems that they're building just don't work as well as they could if they had access that information. And maybe they want to write into that same situation in a way that isn't so mediated by the API surface of the SaaS product. Anyway, those are the types of conversations that I'm having these days with teams that are looking into, OK, what would it cost? What would be reasonable if we wanted to replace this external product, this SaaS product, with something that we owned ourselves? And that's a much more interesting conversation in my opinion. So I want to be as key in that case. I think that's a great example. I want to throw a potential target into your head. And I might be wrong. But the next best thing to a whiteboard is a remarkable, so a personal whiteboard. And I know this very clearly because I love my remarkable. And I'm sad because it's downstairs. It's not right here. And I'm really sad about that because I usually note take and do to I'll write your name 17 times. It's just, I don't know, it's a muscle memory thing. You might think I'm over here not paying attention, but I'm really just drawing and having fun. And it's how my brain processes. I'm an audible learner. And I learn by writing things down as strange that might be like this analog process. And so it's my personal whiteboard. The cool thing about a remarkable is that they do have a developer mode. But it's kind of like you're going off this beaten path. You kind of like they kind of treat you a little weird in the remarkable. But it runs Linux. And so right now one of the things I'm doing is I wrote, because it doesn't have an API, I'm like, well, I can install a go binary on there. And I can act as the API because I can traverse the path and it's Linux and so I can be the, I can make my own API essentially. And so I have my, I have my own that I'm working on right now. A remarkable API that I've just dropped on this thing. And it's doing some cool stuff. But by and large, like it's sort of in this black box. And I think it's something that'll change that feature. And I'll kind of be on an island again and not have my go API remarkable thing that's sitting there doing some cool stuff for me. But this infinite canvas is totally a remarkable. Like that's how it works, right? And all you have to figure out is do you want to be a hardware company? And do you care about E. Inc? Those are the two things that are really cool. Anything else you seem to be able to build upon. And I love their principles. The SDK nature, the ability to give people sovereignty over the thing that they get to build with your tool. Like you have that lens. You have the street cred and the reps on that front. So if there's a mark you want to compete with, I would say hardware and remarkable because they are not cheap. They're fairly expensive. $600, $500, $500, $800 is like the measure between them. But by and large, they pay themselves off. Because like the note taking I've been able to do has just been tremendous more than I've ever done before. And I go back to them. But the go SDK in particular, or sorry, the go API I put on it, is really helpful for me because it can actually take that OCR. It turns into real notes elsewhere and do all these cool things for me that now I can throw into large language models, things that I can automate just by writing down. When normally it would just be a piece of paper that just goes into the ether because that's what we do with paper. It's sort of this is unlocked. But my suspicion is at some point they're going to change that developer mode. They're going to change how they feel about developer mode people and lock me out of that feature set because it's not core. They have remarkable cloud. They want you to pay for it. And I'm cool with that except from like that's largely overpriced. Can you just give me the device with Linux on it and let me do my own thing like I can't a computer? And there are intros. No, because they want to sell you this platform, this rented platform. I think we're all kind of pushing back on this rented platform aspect in this new era. That's why I asked you about SDK versus self-hosted because I feel like sovereignty and SDK and self-host will become the words of 26, 27, 28. Like we're not we're not all want those things because we can largely control our world more. I think there's something new that we're going to see. And by the way, like, boy have I been tempted by my hardware. Well, the money you do put me on the list, okay? We'll put me on the list now. If you have an Android tip, I have a daylight computer like an Android tablet that uses a, it's not an e-ing, it's like a transphlexive screen, but it's black and white and it's, but it's like 60 frames per second and it's really good. And there's a new, the actually the team who works on this at Android, a new ink algorithm API in whatever Android jet pack, new alpha ink thing, whatever. Fantastic, like super good code, super fast low latency, predictive, all that stuff, right? Think of pencil kit for swift, but honestly better for Android. They actually came to the office to show me this stuff when they were in London. And I last year, at some point I've I've coded like an Android, my first very first Android app that uses these things just because I wanted to draw on this daylight computer. And yeah, I, I, I, I flatter myself by saying I think it's the best drawing experience that you, you would ever have on an Android, even at 60 frames per second, even on a fairly low spec. It's a hardware. I just haven't released it because I'm not actually an Android developer. And I don't know how to do these things. But if you do have one of those, I'll send you the, the insider link from the Play Store. Yeah. But no, I think that there's something actually new that we're going to see. And I'm like every week, there's a question of like, how much do I want to bet on, on this being, being true or not. Self-hostible software is also different from an SDK because the self-hostible software, it might be well architected, but it's not really designed to be extended. Any more than just like the application itself might be designed to be extended, right? Like hopefully the code is good in ways that allow new features to be added without having to rip everything up. But in the same way that like, I don't know, Excalibur, it was really hard for me to add new features to Excalibur because it was just an app. You know, like at the end of the day, it was just like, built like every other app that I've ever worked on. It's like kind of a little bit of complex, whatever, under the hood, but it worked. An SDK is built entirely in anticipation of third party code. And that has such a huge impact on how the thing comes together. And it's just very, very different type of code based than you would have with just a normal application. I've never seen that same approach taken at the level of an application. Because why would anyone design a whole application in anticipation of third party code? That's just not a thing that you often see on the market. And anyway, that's not that, who would buy and then build on top of a maybe like white label solution? But even then, you have a pretty narrow API surface layer, right? But I could totally imagine, and we're going to try this, but to say, okay, you know what? Let's build that layer around TealDRAW. With the assumption that people are going to hand this to their whatever AI coding agents and say, well, in our organization, we need distinct to be tied into HubSpot because we're constantly like sorting deals and looking at org charts. We're going to need all these extra features on top because that's the way that we collaborate. Those are the features that are unique to our company. Or, you know, I know that the software has organizations and then teams and then members of those teams and whatever. But in our, you know, agency or whatever, we also have a lot of external people that we need to have certain permissions. And I know that's different than what this codebase has, but like make it happen, right? And that the rather than using an SDK and building everything around it, you might just have these situations where like, here's a CRM or here's a notion like competitor knowledge base that works out of the box. Like you could use this kind of vanilla, but you know, the thing that you're buying is source code. And the thing that you're buying was built with the expectation that you are going to build on top of it. And then you're going to kind of complete it and you're going to add the water yourself, you know. It's just bigger. It's just like, it's not just a little part. It's not a component. It's like, here's the whole application. And it was designed that way. It was architected that way. It is distributed and priced and everything like within that expectation, which is different than an SDK and different than a self-hostable thing and different than SAS. I don't know what to call it. I bought the domain mostly.software. It's the same sort of like, yeah, it's mostly complete. It's there. But like, you know, it's fundamentally unfinished because the presumption is that you and the consumer will finish it yourself. But currently not using that domain, but we'll see if I put something else out there. That's kind of the thesis. You call your, your remarkable, you should call it mostly mostly. I don't know if that's a good name or not. Struggling. I like the word mostly. Me and a friend used to say mostly a lot. It was just a thing, I guess. But it can take a little bit. It doesn't make any sense here, but it was funny to us. All right. If it's a, if it can be a meme within the, within your friend's circle, then it can be hot. Or just start a race. For sure. Yeah, exactly. I know we're here, like, basically at the, at some what I would say a version of the end because we're getting close to time. But it seems like you're at a mature state and you're in optimization where you're like able to dial in things that you may be able to. I actually had my agent dual examination of your code base and one of the things it thinks that you're optimizing for you can create me if I'm wrong. Or if they're wrong is you're optimizing replacing low dash is equal with an optimized set comparison. So reworking your draw shape and coding to binary things like that. And then maybe sync collaboration, maybe an enterprise play a pluggable thing, things like that. Or SQLite storage versus cloud flared or objects. Can you share any details around how you're, if that's true for one and two, if how you're optimizing. I think our backlog was a lot of optimization stuff that we knew was possible that we just, you know, it's not that it was low priority. It's just like it's not feature work. And so optimization sometimes like kind of slips that said for the last three years every January we've done optimization work. So it just sort of was the time. And a lot of the development and teal draw also kind of ties into. Honestly, like our social media also is like what do I want to tweet about right now in December. I wanted to tweet about performance. That was just like part of the messaging that I wanted to do around the canvas. We were doing this like AI stuff at the same time I wanted to be like balancing the whimsical kind of crazy AI fairies on the canvas. I don't know if you saw this that might make any sense, but little AI agents flying around the canvas, which is great. It was super fun. But I wanted to balance that was something that was like really grounded. And so I looked at some of these these PRs. And that that related to performance. And yeah, like we're doing some like super gnarly stuff of looking at. Like we've replaced our. One of the layers of like two of our canvas is made of normal. It's like a racked DOM app. Like there's everything you see is like divs and things moving around and SVG. It's not it doesn't use like the canvas element. It's like just normal web stuff, right. It's crazy, but it works. But we were starting to optimize the performance of the canvas by finding places where we actually could use normal like canvas rendering. In order to just reduce the cost of rendering essentially. So all of the overlays and indicators and you know blue shape that shows up when you hover something. We started moving that into into canvas as part of doing that. We discovered a several bugs, I suppose like places where we could optimize. One was yeah, we were using low dash to do a set comparison with an array. And the way that low dash does that is it turns the set into an array. And then does the comparison and then and it's just like it's just making tons and tons of these fairly large arrays. And it was just like a very wasteful. So we were affected that our draw shape was storing the points, the individual points using Jason. Just like well, just normal objects, right. X, Y, Z, yeah objects. And we're like, actually we can we can make this much more efficient just by using 16 bit floats, you know. And having a fixed size for it would we'd still be able to pull out individual points if we wanted to just because those the bits are known. So we'd be able to like slice into different places. And but that would would change the how accurate or how precise you know the numbers are in that thing. But so we'll have to change fix that problem, we fix that problem, all that type of stuff. Those are just the types of fixes that you get after like four years of working on a problem. And a lot of them are just like this is the this is what works and lets us validate it and let's us ship it. And then we we feel confident in. And then okay, let's let's continue to kind of look at that flame chart and and you know pull up 5,000 images or 5,000 shapes and like move one of them around and be like, oh, hey, look. This thing in the flame chart shouldn't be there, whereas too big or like let's just pick the biggest problem that we can recognize and just fight it. And we've been doing that for a long time. And what's really fun is that a lot of these optimizations like actually change the user experience, but in ways that aren't noticeable. So for example, if you move your mouse around, we need to find out which shape you're hovering, right. And if you if you move your if you like pan, if you scroll the camera, then you know a shape might come under your cursor. And so we're kind of like we need to know whether like the hovered shape is no longer under the cursor. We need to you know, it's still participate in that even though you're moving the camera. Moving the camera means that the shapes which are cold, which are off screen might need to come back on and things like that. And so there's a lot of performance work going on. Those are really busy frames when you're panning the camera across. And we we found out that well, in certain cases, you wouldn't notice if you were hovering shapes or not because it would change too fast and things like that. So we could actually under certain circumstances just not check for hovered shapes while you're moving the camera. As a result for that actually on a big big canvas, busy canvas like that reduced like the frame length for you know as you're scrolling across the canvas or something like if you flick your trackpad or something like by by half, you know like that was an expensive operation on a big board. But now it's like now we're back to 100 frames per second or 120 frames per second, which got help us is our target, right. Even with a react based canvas like you know shooting for that eight milliseconds. And again, yeah, like these are those things of like yeah, you could build this. You just wouldn't but like trust me we're obsessed with the problem like we we we will you know. Put nails under your fingernails like was the what's the analogy they say like something about your fingernails like don't do that not the chalkboard that's not the long tail. But like I don't think you want to put nails under your fingernails. I mean that's an interrogation technique. Yeah, just don't do that to me like this. I haven't seen your price for for my organization on your license, but for the most part I'm thinking yeah let's just go ahead and buy a tilde. draw first is try and build it build the parts of the app that people are going to notice and attribute to you in your product and then buy everything else. That's what I do as well. Yeah. I use clerk for off I use whatever, uh, versel for DevOps and all that stuff like, uh, but, but yeah, I make the canvas. Cool stuff, man. Yeah. Anything we did not get to ask you that you're like, man, I really wish you asked me about that here in this moment or close. I didn't have a chance to talk about the, uh, the type of actually using the AI stuff with the canvas itself. I mentioned a little bit the, the fairies. I think this is going to be a big year for that. We've been, we've been kind of experimenting with everything that I've seen so far about the depth of feature set is incredibly encouraging. Like people like chat because I can chat with you, right? I can chat with people and I'm good. I know how it works. If a bunch of people are working on something really complex, you jump over to a whiteboard, right? Uh, and it turns out that that works so well with a, um, that, uh, I think this year more and more people will be just like shocked that we hadn't seen this earlier. Like I was like, wow, this really, really, really works. Any particular like clear application you can mention or describe like in a, in a multi-personal whiteboard scenario, I guess, and in the case, like, how does that permeate into, how does the AI fit into that? I can kind of understand what do you mean by that? I mean, we've had situations where like, uh, again, the, the fairies sort of represented our, our spatial presence AIs on the canvas that you could talk to and say, Hey, you know, clean this up or tidy this up or draw me a picture of a cat or turn this code into a lot of candle. Blow out the candle. Yeah, you see, you know my content. Uh, the, uh, but like, you know, we would have a, our whole team jumped into a board, 14 people and every one of them had three of these little fairies with them. And we were all collaborating together like, like 14 people plus whatever, uh, 42, uh, AIs. And like it was just like, Oh, yeah, this just works, right? 14, I'd never been 42 AIs. I'd never been like on anything even close to that, you know, uh, in terms of like collaborating with people in AI at the same time. Uh, like we're only now starting to see like, Oh, like kind of group chats with a chat GPT or something like that. Uh, and for that to work and for that to feel so normal, like, like just all the, the UX around the collaborative canvas just translates almost perfectly to, to working with AI. It was really, really cool. The, the use cases where we've started seeing this already is education, like, you know, I want to have a tutor. I want to be working on something teach me about this, uh, because you know, it can, it can build on the canvas. You can also see what you've put on the canvas. It can modify what you, this is just like another person, right? Like all the expectations are the same. And that's, that's, like awesome. Uh, the things of like, you know, you can kind of take mermaid, uh, JS and create a diagram of it. But it's really hard. And you can even generate mermaid diagrams from, from code or from descriptions of a problem or something like that. But it's really hard to get that data back into the AI is saying, like, actually, no, I want to change this up and rewire this thing, right? Uh, and then to say, okay, now give me the code based on like what I've changed, right? Like we went from code to diagram. Now I want to go back from diagram to code. Uh, that's something that like an AI agent with access to the canvas can do very easily. Um, it, like, like all sorts of these sort of like back and forth, um, between the canvas and then other artifacts can, can absolutely do just using that as an input or reference point to like, uh, for a coding agent to say, like, oh, no, here's, here's what I want the UI to look like, you know, um, or like, can you build out some next wireframes based on like what I've built here? Or can you just finish this thing that I'm making all that stuff? And, and then for that to also be collaborative with other humans at the same time is, you're going to, I think you're going to see a lot more of it this year. And, uh, I think hopefully we have a, have a role in that as well. But it's, um, and I feel very privileged because I've had these experiences and I know that like, uh, maybe a hundred people on earth have had those types of experiences, uh, but they're, they're good. They get cool. You'll like it. Yeah, it'll be a thing by the end of the year for sure. What's, what's my quickest path to the experience? How can I have that experience? Probably the closest thing is we have a, one of our starter kits actually at Teal Draw is, essentially looks like cursor, like a panel on the right hand side and then the canvas. Um, if you, if you go to like Teal Draw, Agent starter kit, there's a demo of that. Uh, and of course you can, whatever clone it or, you know, NPM create Teal Draw and, and select that one. Um, but it's, uh, the only thing that that is missing is the sort of the spatial nature. There's nothing flapping around on your canvas, but it is like having a cursor style like Agent next to the canvas and you can go back and forth and, you know, yeah, draw the cat and say, uh, whatever, make this draw candle and make the cat blow out the candle. Or, you know, here's some code. Show me it on the diet, you know, build out a state chart that represents this stuff, stuff. Um, I can do. But we should have, uh, we should have fairies dot teal draw dot com launched by the time that you, uh, you released this, which is our, um, we, we did the fairies feature on teal draw dot com for one month. Uh, and then we pulled it out and now we're just going to kind of put it on various net teal draw dot com. It's its own little, uh, demo, demo site. And so maybe that'll be out as well by the time that this launches. But if that, then soon after very close trying to get fat, figure my way to teal draw dot com. I mean, all it is is a blank canvas. People go, they're like, okay, cool. Kind of, kind of underwhelming, this also after this conversation, very overwhelming underneath. Yeah. If you want, if you want to learn about the, uh, the SDK, you go to teal draw dot dev. Uh, and we should be making it more obvious that those two things are related to each other in the near future. But, you know, what? Absolutely. Tl draw dot dev, Tl draw dot com. If you want to go right to it or do, I guess it is a teal draw dot dev slash starter dash kits slash agent or Google it, as Steve mentioned. Thank you. Steve so much for, you know, fortunate new path. And, uh, I'm looking forward to the masterclasses, Jared alluded to. I know this is a micro version of it. I'd like a long version of it. If there's an email list for that, just put my name in there. I'll, I'll sign up. I want to, I want to hear more about your plans for SDK domination and how you do what you've done. Cause you've clearly, you've gone down a road. Not many people have and you've been successful doing it. So that's pretty awesome. And, uh, thanks for being a listener and a fan and willing to spend your precious time here with us. I mean, you're not driving an agent in this moment. So you must have anxiety like, oh my gosh. Will these guys be shut up and let me go back to coding? You don't know that, man. You don't know what's going on. You can't work. Time to go babysit. No, I've got, I've got 15 agents running agents in the office. Um, all good. Uh, and yeah, um, I post a lot on Twitter. I should say that. Uh, if you want to follow me on, uh, Twitter or X, um, Steve Ruiz, okay. And then Teal Juh also on Twitter is like our primary way of sharing dev logs and gifts and all that stuff. So, yeah, I pay attention to you on YouTube. Uh, I've checked out several times on there. And then I love your talk at, uh, it was Ian World's Fair. I love that talk. Oh, yeah. Um, it was a good talk. I think, uh, I think I'm doing the one in London later this year. Maybe I'll do San Francisco. Yeah. That would make sense. Cause it's like your backyard basically. So, yeah. Listen, we'll link up all the things Steve mentioned. We obviously link up to websites and Twitter's slash X's slash. I don't think YouTube, maybe YouTube, but we'll drop in the show notes for sure. Uh, we'll make sure this then show notes for you. Well, so to get the show notes to five, if you want to go and learn more about Steve, Teal Draw, etc. Thanks again, Steve. It's awesome. Thank you. It's creepy. Nebo. Steve stuck around and revealed even more details on T.L. Draws business. He opened up so much. In fact, that we had to believe a small section. It's all good, though. It gave me a great excuse to use some of BMC's newest joyd sounds. That 15 minute bonus is in store for Change Log Plus Plus members. And if you aren't a member, check it out at changelog.com/plusplus. Thanks as always to our partners at fly.io, too, Greg Master, cylinder for the beats and to you for listening. We love that you stuck around all the way to the end. That's all for today. We'll talk to you next time. Bye. [Music] (upbeat music)

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The podcast discusses the impact of AI-assisted development (like Claude) on software companies, highlighting both the excitement of increased productivity and the fear of being left behind.
  2. AI tools enable rapid completion of complex projects (e.g., a starter kit built in days instead of weeks), but also create challenges in project planning, team alignment, and maintaining competitive differentiation.
  3. There is a tension between leveraging AI for efficiency and the risk of skill irrelevance, alongside the need to adapt business models (e.g., handling contributions in source-available projects) in a fast-evolving landscape.

Summary:

In this podcast episode, Steve Ruiz from TL Draw joins to explore operating a software business in the age of AI-assisted development. The conversation centers on the dual emotions of excitement and fear brought by tools like Claude, which drastically accelerate coding—allowing tasks once slated for quarters to be completed in days. This speed introduces challenges: planning roadmaps becomes difficult due to rapid execution, team coordination grows more complex, and differentiating products is harder when competitors can quickly replicate features.

Ruiz shares an example where AI built a starter kit in days instead of weeks, showcasing productivity gains. However, he also notes the pressure to continuously leverage AI to avoid falling behind, comparing it to a "fear of missing out" on opportunities. The discussion touches on broader impacts, such as adapting open-source contribution models and the potential for AI to reshape roles, emphasizing that while coding has become easier, strategic decision-making and positioning have become more critical.

FAQs

TL Draw is a free whiteboard tool, and the company sells SDKs that help others build high-performance web canvas applications, including whiteboards and more.

It makes producing code easier but increases challenges in alignment, positioning, and communication, as everyone can contribute more impactfully and move faster.

Developers often feel a mix of excitement and fear—excitement about increased productivity and fear of being left behind or becoming irrelevant.

AI tools can drastically reduce development time; for example, a project expected to take weeks was completed in days by guiding an AI to handle most of the coding.

Augment Code is a coding assistant with a powerful context engine that can execute well-defined tasks autonomously, leveraging the latest AI models through its CLI.

TL Draw is source-available but not fully open source; it previously engaged in contribution ecosystems like open-source projects but has adjusted its approach recently.

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