WDD LIVE 083: Back from NYC! Q&A + Is This The FINAL WDD Live Episode?

Hello, hello, hello everybody.

I am coming to you today from the darkness, apparently.

Go ahead and let me know if you can hear me, because nothing else seems to work around here.

So yeah, drop a comment, let me know if audio is working.

I’ll wait for…

I’ll wait to see if anything else needs to be fixed.

Then I’ll explain the darkness, and then we will get into our normal content.

Can you hear?

Can you hear?

I’m waiting for somebody to confirm.

We can hear you.

Okay.

All right, good.

Looking dark and orange.

All right, so I just got back from New York City.

I was there for two days.

We flew up.

I was for my wife’s 40th birthday.

We flew up at…

We woke up at 4 a.m. on Saturday.

We drove to the airport.

We flew out there.

We spent all day Saturday, all day Sunday.

Woke up at 6 a.m. or 5 a.m.

And flew out Monday morning and then got back.

And then it’s just…

It’s kind of been 24-7 nonstop.

We did have a lot of fun.

We got to see a lot of cool stuff.

By the way, we took kids, took friends and their kids.

And it was a…

It was a…

It’s crazy.

It’s crazy.

Absolutely crazy.

Okay.

So I’m taking today off.

I’m taking…

I took yesterday off.

I’m taking today off to rest and recover from this experience.

Except for WDD Live, which we’re doing now, obviously.

But I get back in and I try to put on like…

I try to Chromecast.

I try to cast something from my phone to my TV last night.

And it’s like…

It’s on a huge delay.

It’s taking forever.

And then it looks like I’m watching on a fucking potato.

It’s like…

The quality…

It’s terrible.

I don’t even know if you could call it 4ADP.

I don’t know what it was.

And I couldn’t…

I was like…

I don’t understand what’s wrong.

And then I get down to do WDD Live today.

And I realize…

Oh, it won’t connect to one of the three Wi-Fi sources that I use.

So I have…

You know, these routers.

Okay.

So I don’t know what’s going…

I don’t know what’s wrong with it.

I don’t…

Is anybody…

Anybody in IT can explain this?

The 2.4 works.

And the 5.0 second one works.

But the first one doesn’t work.

So 5G1 does not work.

5G2 works.

How does 5G2 work when 5G1 doesn’t work?

And the 2.4 GHz one does work also.

So two of the three work.

I reset the router.

I upgraded the firmware.

I did all this in the last hour, by the way.

Trying to debug and troubleshoot this.

So the firmware is up to date.

The router’s been disconnected or reconnected.

The modem has been disconnected and reconnected.

Still, it comes…

Everything comes back to life.

Still, 5G1 doesn’t work.

5G2 works.

And the 2.4 works.

Here’s the thing.

These Elgato lights.

These lights right here are registered to the 5G1 Wi-Fi, apparently.

So they…

The software can’t find them.

So I had to, like, manually override and turn them on.

But when you manually override and turn them on, you can’t control their brightness.

So I’m streaming from the darkness.

Yeah, but it’s an unexplainable situation.

I’m trying to bring up the settings panel, system settings on…

In Mac, there’s a delay.

Why is there a delay?

When I…

Why is there a delay?

Bring up system settings.

What is going on in this area of the world right now?

Okay?

This is not working well.

We have multiple failures.

Multiple points of failure.

This is not good.

This is not good, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay.

Oh, is it skipping?

Hmm.

Nope.

David Haas says video is solid here.

Hmm.

No, the lighting does not look good.

This is not…

This is not good lighting.

I mean, it’s not…

This is not good lighting.

This is not good lighting.

2.4 gigahertz has a large range than 5 gigahertz.

Check the Wi-Fi frequency on the first five.

Maybe another device from your areas interfering with the frequency.

The Gutenberg network.

Okay.

Skipping for me too.

Hmm.

Well, I mean, let’s…

Here.

We can do something right here.

I will.

Because I’m on…

I mean, there shouldn’t be an issue with…

Here.

I’m going to screen share.

There should not be an issue with speed.

Let’s just double check.

Let’s just double check.

See what we’re at.

People do say things are good on their end.

Yeah.

I mean…

The speed should not be an issue.

Right?

What’s our…

What’s our…

Let’s see what our ping is at.

Everything appears to be straight now.

Some buffering.

Sigour says no sound half the time.

I mean, this is just…

This is just fun.

Look at how…

How does it upload twice as fast as download?

I don’t…

Something’s going on, man.

Anyway, I usually get…

Download, I mean, normally is like around 400, 500.

Right?

So there’s something…

Something is definitely impacting things.

I just don’t know exactly what it is.

But a lot of people are saying everything is fine on their end.

Yeah.

Packet speed.

Yeah.

I don’t know anything about that.

Whatever.

I am going to go reset everything.

I’ll call AT&T.

I’ll have them reset stuff on their end.

We’ll see if I can get it fixed.

I just can’t get it fixed for this particular stream.

Because I didn’t have enough time.

Because I didn’t realize until the last minute that things were not working well.

You leave for two days.

You leave for two days and nothing…

Nobody was here for two…

You can’t leave for two days?

I can’t leave and come back?

And things still work?

All right.

Let’s get into today’s main topic here.

I’ll go back.

I’ll just go back to…

We don’t need to screen share quite yet.

We’ll go back to that in just a little bit.

Let’s talk WDD Live first.

Then we’re going to go Web Design Q&A.

And then we’re going to go Alternatives to Loom.

Because I am looking for some Loom alternatives.

And maybe you guys would like to explore that a little bit with me.

And in exploring that, we can look at how I might make such decisions.

We can look at the copy.

We can look at the website.

We can do a little bit of WDD stuff as we look at these alternatives to Loom.

And if you get any…

If there’s any audio issues or video issues along the way, let me know in the chat.

I know a lot of people…

It could be you.

It could be you.

It doesn’t have to be me.

It could be you.

And like Gibran says, or Gibran, I don’t know how to pronounce his name, says, I refreshed on my end and now everything seems to be fine.

So there is that.

Sigour, I think that’s an issue with you.

The no sound every second.

I think that’s probably something to do with you.

Nobody else is reporting that.

Do you own your modem box or renting it?

I honestly don’t know.

I think it’s AT&T’s modem thing.

It’s from the original installation of Fiber when they first brought Fiber to this area.

Haven’t touched it since then.

Okay.

So WDD Live.

Let’s talk about it.

So I’ve been doing these WDD Lives every single week for the most part.

They are anywhere from two hours to three hours long.

That’s a good amount of time invested.

And I’m looking at what are we getting for that time?

Because obviously there’s a lot of things to do.

I could use that time to do any number of other things.

Now, there’s no question that there is an insane amount of value in these WDD Lives.

We’ve got 176 people watching live right now.

That’s like a, you know, maybe an average.

We’ve had well over 200, 300 on certain streams.

The record, I believe, was the first preview of ACSS 3.0 where we topped 900 concurrent live viewers.

The channel currently has, let’s go look at the channel real quick.

So let’s go to the dashboard and take a look-see.

So there’s 19,300 subscribers plus 261 in the last 28 days.

So 261 subscribers have been added in the last 28 days.

That’s very low, actually.

It’s very low.

So there’s some interesting things to note here.

One is with 19,000 subscribers, and you can compare with other channels, the engagement that we get on videos, the engagement that we get on live streams, the number of comments, the number of likes on regular videos, and the concurrent live viewers consistently week by week by week, is, I would say, it’s astronomical for the channel size.

It is very disproportionate.

If you look at other channels, there are channels with 100,000 subscribers who get way less engagement, way less concurrent lives, viewers on live streams, way less everything, way less everything.

So in terms of engagement, everything that we’re doing is very, very, very high, very good.

Now, the thing that concerns me, because I like to do live streams, I actually prefer to do live streams than regular recorded videos.

Because when you do regular recorded videos, there’s an expectation of edit, clean it up, do this, that’s, and I very, like, very minimally edit regular videos anyway.

I will, you know, take a chunk out here and there, or if I felt like, okay, that’s not as relevant, I’ll just take that part out real quick.

It’s very, very minimal though.

I try my best to not edit at all, for the most part.

And many videos do just get posted, unedited.

Because, number one is, I think it’s more organic.

I think it’s more authentic.

And I also think that it saves me a ton of time.

I just, I don’t enjoy editing.

I prefer not to edit.

And it’s, I can do more if I edit less.

Point blank.

I can do more if I edit less.

Okay.

So all of that makes sense.

If I could just do everything live, I would just do everything live.

Because that’s the easiest thing.

Now, here’s why I can’t do everything live.

YouTube, and I don’t know why this is, but YouTube does not seem to, the algorithm does not favor live streams.

At all.

At all.

When I do WDD lives, it doesn’t matter how much value is in there, it doesn’t matter how much engagement is in there.

YouTube, after it cuts off, essentially buries it.

It does not come up in, in recommendations.

It doesn’t, at least not nearly as much as a regular video.

Not to mention when people go to the channel, let’s say you send them to the channel.

Well, you send them to the channel and they’re going to see, well, you can set it up a number of ways.

You can say, show them what might be of interest to them or show them this specific content or whatever.

But in general, YouTube wants to show people recorded and published content.

It does not want to show them live streams.

And I think what it is, is YouTube probably feels like live streams for the most part is not evergreen content.

It’s probably time sensitive content.

They went live for a reason, whatever.

And that happened in the past.

And then we don’t really need to focus on that anymore.

So if I go live with evergreen content, which a lot of WDD live is evergreen content.

It doesn’t matter when you watch it.

It does.

It’s not relevant to just this week.

It’s not relevant to just this year.

There’s going to be stuff that could be watched three years from now.

That’s still dramatically relevant, but YouTube doesn’t look at live streams like that in general from what I can tell.

So what happens is we get a lot of engagement on the live stream.

We have a good, solid number of concurrent viewers.

The chat is really active.

People engage.

They interact.

They ask questions.

They yada, yada, yada.

You guys know what’s up.

And then effectively, it all goes dark.

After I turn it off, it all goes dark.

And the biggest negative impact, because I transitioned for a while, and I did this as an experiment of, okay, what if I do spend less time on prerecorded videos that get published to the channel like normal, and I just do more with the live streams, and I spend more time with real people doing real engagement, what will happen?

What will happen?

And here’s what happened.

The channel growth dropped off dramatically.

So, and if you go into the analytics and you look at what causes people to subscribe to the channel, well, that is videos that they find, okay?

So the videos have to be findable.

They have to be recommended.

And then lives just don’t match up with that.

The lives aren’t really findable because they’re not being recommended.

And thus, if you look at what causes people to subscribe, it’s the prerecorded published videos that cause people to subscribe.

That’s not to say that WDD doesn’t cause people to subscribe.

They do.

But they find the videos less because of the algorithm.

Thus, there’s less subscribers.

And it is a pretty dramatic drop-off.

So if I do three hours of live streaming every single week, that’s obviously a lot less time to do recorded published videos.

If I was doing more recorded published videos, the growth of the channel would continue going like it used to go.

I mentioned that it was plus 200-something subscribers over the last 28 days.

If I’m doing peak recorded videos, like at least one recorded published video every single week that actually feeds the algorithm properly, that number is usually around 600 or even more a lot of times, okay?

So that’s a third.

The channel growth is a third of what it should be when I’m prioritizing live streams, which absolutely sucks.

I hate that.

I really, really, really hate that.

It’s not good.

YouTube needs to do something about that.

So what does that say?

Well, obviously, if we keep going with this pattern, the channel eventually will start to become…

It needs to keep up a certain level of growth to stay relevant and accomplish the goals that we want to accomplish.

So obviously, you have to change something.

There’s different ways we can change things.

And this is what I want to ask you guys and see what you think we should do. because I don’t want to end them completely.

I like the format.

I like the time spent every week.

Now, maybe the time spent is less.

And I’ve tested various lengths, like three hours, two hours, 90 minutes, things like that.

And then, you know, we’ve started doing more kind of segments where it’s like, all right, we’re going to do 30 minutes of this, 30 minutes of this, 30 minutes of this, three different things.

It is…

I like the fact that it’s a variety show and that we can do a lot of different things.

And from week to week, it changes.

It’s not the same thing every single week.

That’s always good as well.

So I like the format in general.

And I like the time spent.

I like live streaming.

We just need to find a way to make it work for the channel and make the goals that we have for the channel still happen.

So one option, option A, is we just get rid of WDD Live.

We just go back to…

And then I just do like a monthly Q&A live stream or a monthly something live stream.

So, you know, I still get some live streaming in, but it’s every month.

That’s one option.

Option two would be we take WDD Live because it’s not doing anything for the YouTube channel in terms of growth, right?

Growth is…

We still got to have the growth.

So I could take WDD Live, which I enjoy doing and love doing.

And there’s a lot of value in, and we just move it to the inner circle.

So if you’re an inner circle member, you get a WDD Live thing every single week, and nobody else gets it, right?

That’s another option.

It’s actually maybe one of the options I’m leaning towards.

We can also do a hybrid option where I do three…

So every month, there’s three, essentially, WDD Lives in the inner circle.

And then one of them is public on YouTube.

So that allows one to still be public on YouTube.

It puts the rest in the inner circle.

And then the rest of my time…

And probably in the inner circle, I would cap them at two hours.

They might be 90 minutes.

They might be two hours.

But that at least frees up an hour of time where now I can focus on a, you know, published, recorded video for YouTube for that week.

Because that’s my goal.

My goal would be YouTube goes back to being one video per week for the channel.

Now, I also have the…

We have to free up some time somewhere because I’ve got a whole…

And I talked about this last live stream.

I’ve got a whole copywriting checklist of videos.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

There’s going to be like, I don’t know, maybe eight to ten of them by the time we’re done.

Those are all planned for the inner circle starting in January.

We’re going to be going through…

I’m not going to call…

It’s not a course.

I wouldn’t call it a course.

It’s just going to be a series.

It’s going to be a series of copywriting videos that are going into the inner circle that’s starting in January.

Essentially, I’ve been taking November and December off to rest and recover.

And then going back to regular inner circle content starting in January.

And then this is where one video per week will come back to the regular YouTube channel starting in January.

This is what we’re trying to figure out as we close out the year.

What we’re doing with this WDD Live concept.

Because one, it takes too much time.

Now, actually, it doesn’t take too much time.

It only takes too much time relative to what it does for the channel.

Okay?

So, if the subscriber numbers were off the chart, like the engagement numbers are, then I would just keep doing it as is.

But that’s not the case.

Engagement numbers are great.

Subscriber numbers are terrible.

So, can’t keep doing that.

So, I don’t know.

Yeah.

You guys get to sound off in the comments.

Or if you have an option that’s just like, oh, I have a different option.

What if we do it this way?

You could throw that in there.

It doesn’t have to be one of my options.

So, let me know.

Okay.

So, Rob says, keep the live streams and have an intern break them up into shorts.

Look at how pirate software blew up.

YouTube prioritizes shorts.

Yes.

I know YouTube prioritizes shorts.

We are going to be doing more.

I want to be doing more with shorts.

And I’ve talked to my team to see if anybody on my team is able to, that’s not on the dev side of things, is able to break these things up into shorts.

Or if I need to bring somebody new on to do that.

Manny says, do whatever you have to do to not get burnout.

Yeah, it’s not really a burnout thing.

It’s just a, it’s really an algorithm thing.

Like, I would keep doing things the way that I’m doing them now.

Because what I wanted to do is if the live stream stuff worked, this was what the test was going to be.

If I can prioritize live streaming and it’s, everything’s working, channel growth stays high, engagement stays high.

I would just live stream a lot of the tutorials that end up as published videos.

But literally, YouTube buries them.

It buries them.

You go to a normal channel, you try to browse through videos.

Most people don’t realize, oh, there’s probably a lot of good content in the live stream area.

They have to go to a completely separate tab.

To find live streams.

And it’s just, it’s really a bad user experience.

So, I couldn’t do it.

I was like, I want to live stream the normal videos I do.

So, I’d pick a topic, just like I normally do with a pre-recorded video.

And I would just live stream it and be done with it.

But you can’t do that.

Because then it’s in the special magic area.

Back to this, I am haunted by magic areas in life.

Why is this happening?

We don’t need these things.

Okay?

A live stream should just show up in the normal video feed.

Oh, here’s a pre-recorded, pre-recorded.

There was a live.

Here’s a pre-recorded.

Here’s a live.

Just show people the damn videos.

What are we doing?

Okay.

So, we can’t do it.

We can’t do it.

Yeah.

So, Tyree says, tried breaking up the content into shorts.

Kind of difficult due to the long form.

Yeah.

It is.

I think the best shorts are designed as shorts.

And I did one short as a test.

It got really, really good numbers, actually.

And I have a whole list of shorts that I have planned.

But here’s the other thing, too, is I feel like I’m not a shorts kind of person.

You know?

I feel like you’re just doing something to feed the current algorithm.

And we also don’t know if shorts are going to continue having the highest engagement and metrics and things like that.

So, I have to do it.

It just, it doesn’t, it’s one of those things that is not ultra inspiring to do.

They’re a pain in the ass to create, by the way, because the fucking aspect ratio is counter to the aspect ratio we all live by.

It reminds me of the whole, you know, it’s the vertical video thing.

Vertical videos is just, has everybody seen the video making fun of vertical videos that’s been around for like years and years and years now?

I mean, there’s a reason for that.

And so, now you’re trying to take web design content that needs a large monitor and you’re like, let’s make it a short in 16 by 9 vertical.

That’s, sounds awful.

That’s terrible.

It’s a, it’s a really bad experience.

They’re really difficult to make.

They’re really difficult to edit.

And, and why?

Why are you doing it?

You’re doing it to feed an algorithm because that’s what the algorithm says you should do right now.

I, I just, I hate playing that game.

I hate playing that game.

Today, the live stream did pop up in my YouTube feed.

Yeah, yeah, no, it, it pops up when I’m live.

That’s, when I’m live is not a problem.

It’s when you shut it off.

You shut off the camera.

You’re in the stream.

YouTube’s in fact, so like, all right, that’s done, gone.

Put it in the, put it in the basement, put it in the dungeon.

And then after that, the video just does nothing.

Does nothing.

I get comments to this day.

I get comments on videos.

I published two years ago.

I’m getting comments on them constantly.

Do you know how often I get a comment on a live stream after the live, after more than like an hour after the live stream is done?

Hardly ever.

Hardly ever.

Because people don’t know they exist.

They can’t find them.

They’re not shown them.

They’re not recommended them.

So you can tell just by that, that they just go into the darkness somewhere, into the internet ether, never to be seen from again.

Unless you send people to them directly.

That’s the only way is you directly link people to them in an email or social or wherever else.

That’s the only time they’re going to be found.

Okay.

Let’s see.

I found you through a recording of your streams.

Yeah.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen.

It’s not that it’s impossible.

It’s not that it never happens.

It’s not that the numbers are zero.

What I’m saying is they’re a third of what a normal recorded published video would be.

And we can’t afford that essentially for the time invested.

Okay.

So yeah, I’m not saying it never happens.

Can you do two recorded videos and then do one monthly live to answer questions about the videos, ACSS frames, et cetera.

That, that, yeah, that might be an option.

Okay.

Okay.

Let’s see.

So I get YouTube’s logic, but also understand your approach to live streams is different to the typical format.

Yeah.

I mean, there’s, I think there’s a lot of different formats that people use when they do live streams.

Yes.

Philippe says, say no to vertical videos.

You need to get the vertical TikTok kids over to your channel.

Yeah.

If I do shorts.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Listen, vertical video works for dancing on TikTok for sure.

Like it’s not a problem, but for anything else, like stuff that we do, it’s just not it.

You have to force it.

Like you have to do a lot of really special shit and force it.

Weird zooms or, or you put the video up here and then text down below for, I just, it’s just stupid.

It’s just dumb.

Okay.

Let’s see.

Yeah.

But you could have somebody speed run Minecraft under your video.

Exactly.

You got to do shit like that.

Like, why am I watching a video while some dude is doing cooking over here?

He’s doing some, he’s mixing stuff in a mix that has nothing to do with the fucking video.

Just because somebody’s eyes have something to watch while their audio that’s completely disconnected from that is running in the back.

People are playing this ridiculous game for eyeballs and eardrums.

And it’s not a long-term winning strategy.

It is, it’s the same thing SEO people do when it’s like, oh yeah, we won’t care about actual principles of what search is looking for.

We’ll just do all these little tricks to game the system.

That’s what shorts are doing.

That’s a lot of what shorts are doing right now.

And I don’t play that game.

It’s a very annoying thing that people do.

Okay.

But you’re about to make, what if you do them to the inner circle, then upload them to YouTube?

That way it would, it would not be a live stream.

Would that work?

Yeah, maybe.

But yeah, I guess, I guess.

I mean, we mainly are here for the engagement as well, which we would get that in, in the inner circle.

I mean, yeah, that, that, that could definitely, that could definitely work.

Um, maybe that’s a good idea.

Maybe that’s a good idea, Bob.

Maybe that’s a good idea.

Um, it doesn’t need to be shorts.

It can be segments 20 minutes long by videos by time.

Yeah.

I mean, that’s, that’s normal recorded videos.

That’s shorts are a specific thing.

They’re, I think they’re 60 seconds max.

They’re vertical format.

They’re, they go into a special section.

They also, by the way, have a magic area.

Um, but that magic area, unlike live streams is a featured magic area in YouTube because YouTube is trying to, this is YouTube trying to compete with TikTok and Instagram and you know, these other places that did it first.

All right.

Um, go to a dedicated streaming platform like Twitch.

I do.

I don’t think our audience is there.

I think, you know, yeah, if I was a gamer for sure, it would be great to, I I’m not convinced.

I mean, correct me if I’m wrong.

I haven’t looked into it lately, but I feel like there’s a lot of, of, um, it’s, it’s a specific kind of content that you have to be doing.

I don’t, I don’t think a lot of web designers and, um, the people we’re trying to reach.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitch, uh, or those channels.

So I don’t know.

Uh, you should test recorded video side-by-side with the WDD live instead of stopping it all together.

Uh, yeah, I’m just saying in order to do that.

I have to spend less time on WDD live, uh, WDD live for inner circle and YouTube live for one a month, uh, to bring the people to the inner circle.

Yeah.

That’s what I was kind of thinking.

Mm.

Mm.

Let’s see.

Just going through the chat real quick. either re upload or extract three to 10 minute clips from it and upload those.

You can involve the community, ask people for clip suggestions.

Um, I think if live goes, my engagement would be less.

I only search for topics I’m specifically looking for.

I like the live options because it’s a lot of time I set aside for this.

Yeah.

Well, that’s the thing is if we’re still doing it in the inner circle, then, um, and then re uploading to YouTube.

I actually think that’s a good idea.

Um, you can still get that.

You can still, you can still join me every single week.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Digital algorithms also says do live and then re upload.

I don’t want to do that all on YouTube though.

WDD is great if you join live, but sometimes finding the golden nuggets are hard to find or remember in which recording it was.

That’s actually a problem with every single video.

I get that all the time.

And we’ve tried our best to one thing you can do, uh, is you can go to Gary.co, uh, and you can go to videos.

And the, the only reason this helps tremendously is because see, see my internet.

Look at this.

Look at this.

What am I, what is, what is this?

I’m on like poverty internet all of a sudden.

What’s I gotta, I gotta call.

Let me turn off these.

Let me turn this off till this evening.

Okay.

I gotta call AT&T, man.

They need to send somebody out.

We got work to do.

Can’t be, can’t be, uh, can’t be watching this dial up action.

Okay.

So the reason, uh, this helps is because these are transcripted, which means when you search for them here, if you’re searching for something specific, you’re more likely to find it because of the text transcript.

Um, then if you’re searching on YouTube, for example, or something like that.

So if you are looking for something specific, we went to the extra length of doing transcripts for all these videos that get published.

So I would definitely use that as your search tool first.

And if you don’t find it there, you know, it’s probably not findable.

You can go in and ask somebody if they remember which one it was in.

That often works quite well as, uh, also, but yeah, I would be searching here, not on YouTube.

If you’re looking for something specific.

All right, let’s go back to chat here.

Have you tried turning your internet off and back on again?

Yes.

Yes.

That was the first thing I tried.

That was the first thing I tried.

Uh, digital algorithm says, forget about shorts.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Streamers usually cut content from their streams and upload into YouTube.

They have their live and videos.

Yeah.

We can do this all.

Like we could, we could record it live on in the inner circle, upload it to YouTube, clip it and make it to shorts.

It’s a lot of work.

It’s a lot.

I need somebody dedicated to doing that.

Um, why do we care about the algorithm?

Pretty sure it’s not the algorithm that got most of us following Kevin and buying his products.

But it kind of is, it’s like you, if you have, let’s say you could have two thirds as many people finding your videos as they do now.

I mean, wouldn’t you elect to do that, right?

You should elect to do that.

Or, or you went from what you were doing before, which was getting you a thousand new subscribers a month or 800 or 600, and you switch to this other format and now you’re getting 200 is that good for the long-term prospects of what you, because the more people we reach, the more people we can help.

That’s the whole goal, right?

So you would not opt into reaching less people.

Now, do you want to have to play games to reach them?

No, I don’t want to have to play games to reach them.

Like YouTube shorts is a game.

I think that’s a game.

You’re playing a game to reach more people.

I don’t want to have to do that, but that’s not what I’m suggesting.

What I’m suggesting is let’s go back to what I was doing before.

Before was working.

When we made the switch to live, that’s not working.

So this isn’t playing a game.

Okay.

To feed the algorithm.

This is just going back to doing what I was doing before, which is normal recorded video tutorials.

And then things should go back to normal, right?

Theoretically.

All right.

There’s also the advantage of getting subtitles with automatic translation and other languages as well.

Yeah.

And that’s happening, you know, either way.

What’s the downside to doing both?

I’m pretty sure you can stream both to YouTube and other platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, if you want.

If you stop WDD live, your engagement goes down.

I don’t, I don’t know.

I think you could, you could easily have, I could easily have 200 people probably in the inner circle.

If we were streaming in the inner circle, we could probably get very close to the same numbers.

So I, I, the engagement would be the same.

We would just have the advantage of, you know, that content.

First of all, being findable in the inner circle, because I can actually put them in a dedicated section that people can find and they will show up in the main feed and yada, yada, yada.

Right.

The second thing is if we did re-upload the, to YouTube, this is why I keep going back to this idea because I like it more and more.

Right.

Then you re-upload it to YouTube.

It goes into the normal feed in YouTube.

And then it does the same thing it would do.

It would actually do more on YouTube than it would have done as a live stream.

But if you want it live and you, and it kind of actually makes sense for the format that people who pay to be in the inner circle actually get to be the ones engaging and asking the questions and, you know, coming up with the suggestions for, Hey, you know, I want to see you do this.

Right.

So if you’re watching for free on YouTube, you don’t get to be part of that.

It makes sense for the format.

So I, you know, I probably lean more to that.

Now we’d still do one, I think one for free on YouTube every single month.

But the rest would go into the inner circle.

So one of the live streams would happen on, on YouTube.

It’s a lot, it’s a lot to think about.

It’s a lot to think about.

It’s not an easy, it’s not an easy thing to decide.

And I might try it one way and see how it works.

That’s again, you got to test and you got to look at the results that you’re getting.

Right.

But what I do know is we have to bring normal videos back to YouTube.

We can’t just do live streams.

And even if you do it, the, the other downside of WDD live is like people have mentioned, if it’s two hours long and it covers three different topics, it’s hard to find the thing that you want to find.

Whereas if I say, okay, this video is about X, Y, Z, and it’s 30 minutes long.

And I just publish it.

That’s not a problem.

Anybody is like, oh yeah, that’s what this video is about.

There we go.

We’re good to go.

And they watch it.

And then they comment on it.

They share it.

It’s also, also more shareable.

Think about WDD live where it’s like people try to share it.

They’re like, oh, go, go to two hours and 20 minutes.

That’s where you’re going to find this one thing that I recommend you watch.

That’s much harder to do.

Okay, so we have to go back to 30 minute, 45 minute, 60 minute tutorials that are directly related to one single topic and that teach one single thing or one little group of things.

That is by far the most shareable.

It, it works for the algorithm.

It gets recommended.

It gets engagement.

It gets everything that you want it to get.

We have to go back to doing that for sure.

The question is, what do we do with WDD live?

Okay.

I think WDD is a nice format, but I personally missing the recorded tutorials where I know what they were about from the title.

Yes.

See, I think that’s important.

I don’t want my web dev friends to get to know your channel.

Come on, man.

It’s not, look, if everybody’s getting better, a rising tide lifts all ships.

Okay.

So don’t hide it from them because I don’t want them to be better than me or as good as me or what I, just a rising tide lifts all ships.

You have to have the attitude.

The attitude I have is like, it doesn’t matter what they do because they’re not going to keep up.

Okay.

You have to have a, it’s a work ethic thing.

It’s a, you’re getting your brain constantly moving forward thing.

You just have to set that pace and just realize, Hey, it doesn’t matter.

They’re not going to be able to catch up.

What percent of your live stream audience do you think is in the IC already?

If high, you’re not losing much by trying IC live with YouTube after.

Yeah.

I think it, I think it’s high.

I think it’s high.

I think a lot, a lot of the people that show up every single week and they’re already, they’re also IC people, right?

Okay.

I don’t think the live streams, even if as a re-upload will perform on YouTube as well as actual recorded produced video.

Yeah.

I don’t think either.

I don’t think either.

So I, but the thing is, is you can justify doing them in the IC because right now I’m doing them for free for everybody.

You can justify taking that much time to do it in the IC because it’s only, it’s for people who are, um, they’re, they’re paying for that.

Right.

So you can, you can justify the time spent.

That’s why we have timestamps and AI can help you easily timestamp your videos.

No matter how long, there’s no timestamp, not sitting around for three hour playback for sure.

Um, yeah, I mean now AI maybe can, I don’t know, do you have a, which platform does AI timestamps?

I I’ve, I’ve seen some people, AI timestamp their videos.

The timestamps are horribly inaccurate.

So if it can’t do it accurately, then it’s still no value.

Um, but yeah, that’s why we did transcripts because transcripts do help with search and they do, they do help for finding things.

But yeah.

Curtis says we all need to start sharing the content more.

Well, yes, that, that would, that would definitely always help.

Do WDD live for IC cut them up into 15 to 20 minute clips of one topic and upload that to YouTube?

Uh, maybe.

Yes.

Maybe.

The thing is, is videos need specific intros and outros too often because that’s what viewers expect.

So if they just, if you just come in halfway into a lot, it’s like, oh, it’s clear.

Like, hmm, this is clearly clipped.

Right.

And I haven’t seen the larger thing.

And it’s just kind of, I think more people drop off at the beginning of those videos versus if it has a proper introduction that kind of sets things up, which then you’re going to be like, well, I’ll just record the introduction separately.

I get it.

I get it.

You can do an infinite amount of extra work to play these games, to get things to, to be a certain way.

But that’s not the point.

And that’s not what we’ve done from the beginning.

The channel is a turn on a camera, talk and record and turn off the camera channel.

It’s not a highly edited, highly polished, do, do things a certain way to feed algorithm.

It’s not what the channel has ever been.

And it’s not what I want it to be because I’m not interested in doing that.

I am not in the business of recording videos.

I’m in the business of teaching things.

And so, and showing things and demonstrating things.

The faster I can get to doing that and the less steps before that and after that, the more things I can do, the more things I can teach.

So I don’t want to be in the business of highly editing and doing specialized workflows to, to get things the way that certain people want them or YouTube wants them.

I just want to turn on the camera, teach, record, turn off the camera, publish and be done and move on my life and then do another one and another one and another one.

And the more I have to do games, the less I can actually do the thing I’m supposed to be doing.

Let’s see.

As much as I don’t like WDD live, stopping on YouTube.

I was searching for an AI to scrape WDD live videos and pull out what topic was covered.

Did you find one?

And guys, if you think watching a two hour video is, is time consuming, imagine hunting for good clips within that and then actually doing the editing work to get those extracted.

And then imagine maybe trying to record it.

Dude, it would be, we, I just, we’d be done.

I would, I would have no more time left for anything.

No more time.

Cause this isn’t, remember, this isn’t what, this isn’t my main thing that I’m doing.

Right.

I have to work on automatic CSS.

I have to record other tutorials and trainings for the inner circle specifically.

I have to work on frames.

I have to, cause I want to be involved in those.

I don’t want to just, okay, team, you do, you do frames.

I’m not doing frames anymore.

Right.

I’m not doing automatic CSS anymore.

I enjoy doing those things.

I like doing those things.

I want to be involved in those things.

I don’t want to be a professional YouTuber.

That’s not the goal.

The goal is not to be a professional YouTuber.

Currently watching this live, but I’ve always had to watch these after the stream.

The lives benefit the people in a time zone that can watch them live.

Yeah.

That’s, that’s always true as well.

For sure.

Intros are overrated.

I like channels that get straight into it.

Yeah.

I mean, an intro can get straight into it, but it, it, the intro lets you know this isn’t like just clipped from something else, you know, and you’re just randomly watching the middle of a, of obviously from a stream or something else.

I put all your prerecorded videos at zero seven 75 as you talk really fast.

Yeah.

I just, I thank you for dropping more frames.

The dev is ramped up in my opinion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we’re, we’re constantly releasing new frames.

We have kind of more people working on them now.

And I think we’re going to, you know, we may have a couple more coming.

That’s really the main thing.

What also helped dramatically though.

Oh, this is a good update for frames people, by the way.

Let me go to, let’s go to get frames at IO slash layouts.

Here’s what helped dramatically with, with producing more frames.

Dude, look at this.

Look at this poverty connection right here.

Look at this.

Let’s take your time.

AT&T.

Okay.

Um, so when we did the new website, we were afforded the opportunity.

Here’s one.

See, this is this Tobias did this frame.

I didn’t do this frame.

Tobias did this frame.

It’s nice.

It’s nice having other people produce frames.

Okay.

Um, and yes, you can get out more this way.

And Tobias does a lot of e-com stuff.

So he’s heavily involved in the WooCommerce frames and we’ll be in the Sherkart frames and things like that, which is nice.

Cause I don’t touch.

I, I, I try my best.

To never touch e-commerce related things in life.

Uh, I just, I’m not a big fan of doing e-commerce development work.

Um, so we switched to this new format, right?

For the layout where you can, you can get a quick preview.

You can click here and you know, we’ll wait for the poverty internet to kick in.

You get a, you know, the live view here.

It’ll tell you the original published date, the last modified date, all that kind of stuff.

Uh, but what’s not here is that all that documentation that we used to have to do.

And I know some people have complained about that, but here’s the thing.

Here’s what we’re going.

You just got to listen.

Okay.

Because we are bringing back documentation.

We’re just bringing back documentation in a different way.

But what this does, this layouts area, and this is huge.

This was critical to being able to produce more frames faster.

This is completely automated from the source frames website.

So we run a cron job every single night that goes in and looks for new frames that have been published and it auto publishes them to this feed right here.

Because what we used to have to do, I used to have to screenshot the frame and then I’d upload it to the source site and I would do all the configuration on the source site.

And then I would have to go to the get frames.io marketing website and this library.

And I would have to manually do all of that again.

And so, and then on top of that, write documentation on this site.

And then anytime we edited a frame on the source site, we had to go back to the marketing site and edit the documentation over there.

And it was a tremendous amount of extra time.

And so what we did is we completely refactored that to where everything happens on the source site.

And this marketing website is updated automatically.

Okay.

This website manages itself.

Now to bring back documentation, we are, we are adding a element to the frames component library called notes.

And this is actually going to benefit you also.

There’s going to be a notes element that you can drop into any, any bricks, anywhere in bricks that you want it to be as many of them as you want to have.

Think of it like the code block element.

Okay.

But what notes is, is a rich content block and you can drop it in and we’re going to use it for documentation, internal documentation.

So you insert a frame, there’s a notes block.

The notes block has the documentation in it.

Now you’re like, Kevin, I don’t want to, I don’t want to have to delete blocks and before I publish and all, you don’t have to, because the notes block doesn’t output anywhere.

It affects the front end zero.

It does not get output on the front end.

It is simply an internal block.

Okay.

So you’re going to get documentation in that notes block for the frame that you’re working with.

And you don’t even, you can just leave it there.

Now for you, you might want to do this on your own layouts in certain places or, or your own pages of here’s, here’s why I did something a certain way, or here’s how this works.

Okay.

Or here’s what this is tied to.

You just drop a notes block in, write some notes to yourself or your team, and it stays there and it lives with that little section or whatever it’s inside of.

And it outputs nothing on the front end.

So you never have to worry about deleting it or commenting it out or anything else.

You don’t have to worry about its visibility.

It’s just a, it’s a cool little notes block.

Okay.

Notes block.

Is that what, is that what’s on the admin bars website?

I have no idea.

I haven’t, I haven’t looked at that at all.

I saw he published something.

I isn’t his in the WP admin dashboard.

I’m pretty sure his is WP admin dashboard related.

This is a bricks element that lives anywhere in bricks that you want it to live.

And it will import automatically with every frame.

We’ll have potentially a notes block, not the basic ones.

I mean, we expect that you can use the basic ones just out of the box, but if we do something special where it’s like, okay, people are going to need a little help with this.

We’ll drop a notes block in and the notes block will explain exactly what’s going on.

Okay.

Let’s see.

Any news about some mega menu frames?

Yeah.

I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, I can keep saying they’re coming.

So we want to have a menu builder.

Now, what we’re doing is we are going to build a menu builder for etch.

What we would like to do is we would take, extract that menu builder into a free standing plugin almost and sell it as a menu builder for WordPress because there aren’t any good ones.

They all suck.

Accessibility is atrocious.

Uh, UX is atrocious with all of it.

We would like to find a way to do it.

Right.

We want to do it the right way.

Uh, and then release that as a standalone because here’s the thing, building a mega menu with the bricks menu is atrocious.

It’s a horrible, it’s just a horrible experience.

It’s one of the worst elements in bricks, uh, for being honest.

And I think so many people agree with that.

It’s just a terrible experience.

It’s a, it’s really difficult.

It’s annoying.

It’s a lot of things that it shouldn’t be.

And so doing, you know, mega menu frames, yes, we could do them, but they’re headaches.

They’re nightmares.

We would rather do them with our own thing.

So that’s kind of the plan and that’s for the future.

Now, why are we not prioritizing that?

Because you shouldn’t be prioritizing mega menus.

Mega menus are, it’s, it’s another look at me feature.

Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at what I did as a web designer.

Look at me, look at me, but it doesn’t actually benefit the user.

Okay.

Test after test, after test, after test shows that if you can, the more you can simplify a menu, the better off it is for the user, the better off it is for navigation, the better off it is for accessibility, the better off it is for conversions.

Okay.

Test after test, after test, the more you mega menu wise things, the more you’re making it more difficult for everybody.

And usually you’re dropping, uh, conversions also, and people actually finding and navigating the websites.

So simple is better.

And we should all be trying to make things simpler, not saying, how can I do more mega, more mega things?

All right.

Quit doing that.

Okay.

Go back to simple wins.

At the end of the day, simple consistently wins.

Uh, bricks has notes already, or is that an AT add-on?

Uh, probably an AT add-on.

I don’t know.

I don’t know anything about it.

You know, Maxime has 8,000 features.

I don’t keep up with them.

I don’t use AT.

I don’t watch the latest and greatest, you know, release videos.

Uh, all I know is people said, Hey, you need to bring back documentation.

And I said, I mean, you could go look at the conversation that I had.

I could screenshot it in our internal chat, uh, discord where I said, I’m not bringing back documentation.

If we have to go back to publishing them on the website, I, it has to be something that lives with each frame.

And that’s where we came up with the way to do notes.

And since we were going to do it internally, I said, well, let’s just make it part of the frames library.

It was a very organic, obvious discussion.

This is not a revolutionary thing.

Okay.

Um, so it’s, and everybody wants to read so much into these things.

It’s like an obvious little, it’s not, I wouldn’t even consider it like a, an element that by frames, because you can put notes in things.

That’s not like it came out of exactly what we need.

And it’s the most minimal element you’ve ever seen in your life.

Um, it’s not something that we’re like advertising is, Oh, look at the next great frames element.

Uh, notes.

It’s not, it’s not what’s happening here.

Uh, let’s see.

Mega menus can wait, but the menu builder should be top priority.

Yeah.

Uh, it, it is.

We’re just building it for etch first.

Um, because etch is going to need a menu builder, obviously.

Uh, so we can kill potentially two birds with one stone.

You build it for etch.

You make it great.

You package it up as a standalone plugin.

Everybody can access it and use it.

And then, um, we have something that can actually, again, be extended to the entire WordPress ecosystem because that is a valid void right now.

There is no good third party menu builders for WordPress that I know of.

They’re all, they’re all terrible.

They’re all just really bad, really bad.

Okay.

All right.

We talked about that.

That was a little bit of a tangent, a little bit of a side quest.

Um, I got good feedback that I’m going to go and re-review in terms of what we’re going to do with WDD live.

I’ll make an announcement on that soon.

I’ll kind of give you the plan, at least the plan for like the next six months.

We might just, Hey, here’s what we’re going to do for six months.

We’re going to see how everything works out.

Um, okay.

What else?

Oh, we wanted to do, we wanted to do finding a loom alternative.

Uh, so we’ll probably go into that.

Actually, no, we need to do the Q and a, we’ll do the Q and a, Q and a, then the loom alternative.

I’ve got, I’ll just tell you right here.

We’re going to do this kind of as an old school WDD where we look at design.

We look at cop, look at this, look at this poverty internet situation.

Uh, we look at copy.

We look at design.

We look at how am I making this decision on which of these alternatives to choose?

What, what is that?

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Let’s, let’s just grab this URL.

Let’s kill this tab.

Um, we’ll, we’ll just do this in, uh, after Q and a, let me, let me kill this tab though.

I’m bringing it back.

I don’t want to lose this one.

Okay.

Got to have all of our options here.

So we’ve got Tela.

We’ve got Zite.

We’ve got.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

Mm.

Can already tell.

Not a fan of that branding.

Uh, mm-hmm app.

Uh, and we’ve got cap.

So we’re going to look at all these and we’re going to, we’re going to try to make a decision together, but let’s do some Q and a first.

Okay.

Hashtag Q.

If you want your question answered, it’s got to have hashtag Q.

All right.

Let’s see.

Instead of killing WDD live.

What about streamlining to say every two weeks and have guest whole, uh, hosts fill in?

I could do that as well.

We could just skip a week.

We just do them every two weeks and that would give me a free week, uh, to do, you know, my normal videos.

That’s that, that could be an option as well.

Don’t you need to get to 20,000 subscribers before January?

Yeah.

I mean, that was a goal.

Um, obviously we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re not going to get there, uh, because of the WDD live situation.

It was well, you easily on track.

Um, you know, if we were doing normal videos, we would have, that’s the thing.

We would already have been there and done that.

Right.

Uh, so yeah, we’ll see.

What’s your suggested best practice for font family maintainability and bricks ACSS?

Suppose we want to use a font other than the default in the counter or nav modules and then change it later.

Uh, hmm.

Hmm.

Um, trying to wrap my brain around exactly what you’re asking.

Let’s go to zip.

I mean, I, I’ll show you what I would maybe recommend here.

Huh?

What what’s with the audio now?

The audio is going in and out of my head.

Are you serious?

Dude, I’m being attacked by like fucking electronics gremlins today.

All right.

Let’s go to.

Um, Oh, November.

November’s still here.

Okay.

Let’s open that.

Oh, that one’s only got, what’s that?

23 hours left on it.

It’s going to, it’s going to self-destruct in 23 hours.

Okay.

Let’s go to visit site.

So the first thing that you do is let’s go back here to the bricks magic area of custom fonts.

So you will upload any fonts that you want to use into this area right here.

Now you can declare them in automatic CSS.

Okay.

Uh, let’s keep this on the left because it’ll never be in the way of my head.

That’s, that’s good.

So we can go to typography.

Uh, so your headings, you have your, your font.

You can declare right here.

You have text, which you can declare a separate font if you want.

Um, now some people do have like a tertiary font and we could call this maybe like an accent font or something like that.

How would you do that?

Well, you can go in here very easily and you can just go to root by the way.

Um, Oh, this one doesn’t even have the updated version.

I, cause I wanted to show you guys that now this is important to keep this updated.

Let’s go to update.

Now.

Uh, we can update this while we’re at it.

Okay.

Let’s go back to the front end and refresh reload.

And let’s see.

Okay.

Let’s put this back on the left-hand side.

And now let’s go.

This should be now.

Look at this.

Look.

Oh, now you get all the real estate you want for writing your, your custom CSS.

And if you have it pinned, it’ll keep the rest over here, the rest of your website, or you can unpin it and it’ll float over your content.

In this kind of case, I like to, um, I like to pin it.

Okay.

Um, so let’s go, let’s dock it.

Let’s pin it.

We’re good to go.

So what was I saying?

Root.

And I think, you know, we, we call it like heading font, text, body font, whatever.

You could call it like tertiary font and then just, you know, my font sans serif or something like that.

Uh, you may want to put that in, in quotes like that.

And then you could just use, you can call that font anywhere using the tertiary font variable.

Like it’s very easy to create custom variables for things.

Um, that’s probably what I already, I already had a root up there.

So this could be actually moved, uh, up here.

But if you didn’t know, if you aren’t aware, you could have multiple of these root statements.

You can break your things up.

So you could have one where you’re like typography and here’s all your typography tokens.

And then you could have another one that’s for like colors like this.

Okay.

Um, so that, that’s always an option as well.

By the way, if you use three of these for people that don’t remember, you get a navigation that will automatically be generated as well.

Um, so it’s a nice, easy way.

Like you could say, this is for homepage styles.

Oops.

Got to put three.

Um, and then you come in and look, you can navigate straight to any section of your custom SAS, uh, which is nice.

So yeah, that’s how I would handle like a tertiary font situation.

Cause most people have like a heading font and a text font.

I often combine them together.

Um, but if you want to get really fancy, you have like a heading font and a body font.

Okay.

You declare those in the ACSS dashboard.

Then you just come in here and create a tertiary font like this and use that wherever you want to use it.

Now, how would you use it?

Let’s go into the builder.

I’m not going to save because I don’t want that on here.

And that’s not a real font anyway.

Okay.

Let’s see how my poverty internet goes today.

All right, here we go.

And we will go into, so let’s say this is some sort of custom element that you’re working on.

Style, typography, and font style, uh, font family.

Here we go.

Um, the problem is you can’t use the tertiary thing here in the UI.

You have to come down here and you have to say font family.

And then here’s where your, you know, tertiary font, uh, is declared and use.

Okay.

This is why it’s important for builders to allow custom CSS because their UI is almost always lacking in these little areas that you don’t realize until you really need it.

Um, yeah, this is, this is the problem with UIs in general.

So that’s what I would recommend that you do now.

Unfortunately, you know, you have to do some stuff in custom CSS and not in the panel.

In a builder like Etch, this wouldn’t be a problem because those two things sync back and forth.

And okay.

So that’s how I would do it though.

You asked me.

That’s what I would approach it with.

Have you considered Rumble?

Yes.

But I, I, you know, like having an audience.

I don’t think, I don’t think Rumble has a gigantic web designer WordPress audience.

What transcribing platform do you use?

I don’t know.

Uh, my team does it.

I can’t remember what we decided on.

Uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, have you considered posting videos to X?

No, I really haven’t.

I post about them on X, but I don’t post, I don’t like upload the video to X.

Would you re-upload the IC screen to YouTube then?

Okay.

Okay.

A lot of these are related to the conversation we were having earlier.

Maybe PB 201 should be introduced doing more complex things with ACF, et cetera.

Um, I just want to do random video.

I, I, courses are not a, a, like, they’re not a good format for the kind of work that we do.

Um, I think that fundamentals thing, but I’m going to have to re-record that again in like two to three years.

Uh, it’s going to have to be all redone.

Cause I think so many things have going to, are going to change.

So I think one-off videos that can just be found and watched are just as good as a course.

Will the menu builder for etch be base will be base or an add-on?

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Like for etch, it’ll, it’ll just be an etch.

But if you want it out, if you want to use it outside of etch, uh, it would be an add-on.

But for etch, it’s not going to be an add-on.

It’s going to be, uh, in core.

Will you be publishing F4F training videos in the near future?

Yes.

Any way we can import or manage icon sets in bricks.

That way we can import from Figma and upload all in one go for the whole project.

Uh, I mean, you already, you already can.

I mean, what, the way I recommend icon management in bricks is you just upload them to the media library.

Um, so if we go back here to this magic area, you go to media, upload properly formatted SVGs into a folder called icons.

Don’t, I don’t like icon libraries.

I don’t like CDN, uh, icon libraries, things like that.

Just upload the SVGs that you need.

Make sure they’re all from the same library would be ideal.

Uh, and then you can use them in the icon element or the SVG element inside of bricks.

If you’re using the icon framework and automatic CSS, they’re very, very easy to control the styling and size and all of that good stuff.

And with the icon framework in ACSS, you can even mix and match between, um, you know, font style icons and SVGs.

And they’re still all going to be perfectly consistent.

That’s a nice, uh, part of it.

But yeah, that’s how I recommend icon management.

What do you use for dynamic QR generator?

I don’t really use QR codes all that much.

Uh, but any of them should do the trick.

Okay.

What does the frames plug-in standalone do if I can set up frames inside bricks settings?

What does the frames plug-in standalone do if I can set up frames inside brick settings?

I’m not sure what that means.

So if you could re-ask that question or if somebody else maybe can deduce what they’re trying to ask.

I mean, I just tell you off the bat is the template library is accessible from inside bricks using the, the plugin and the license key.

And then all the components.

If you’re going to use the components, you have to have the plugin.

That’s what has all of the JavaScript for all of the components.

So, um, I don’t, beyond that, I, I’m not sure what you’re asking.

Where can we define, define the value for icon fill color?

It’s, it’s always in custom.

Well, it depends on if you’re using the icon framework or not using the icon framework.

And then you have to keep in mind that because the icon framework is experimental right now, it’s not officially released.

All the frames that use icons are on old icon stuff.

They’re not on the icon framework.

Eventually they’ll be all on the icon framework.

And then, uh, it’ll all be standardized and global.

But for now you would find it typically in the custom CSS area of that icon or look for the parents.

We always put CSS as a, in the label in the structure panel to denote where the custom CSS is found.

A website I started on Elementor when I was a beginner and grew with me into bricks and ACSS still has files from old plugins and themes in the database.

Is that a problem?

And how do I fix it?

Uh, I mean, I, I think it’s a problem.

I don’t like that stuff lingering around.

You can do database cleanup stuff.

If you’re good at MySQL, you can go in and do stuff there.

You could, you know, it’s, it depends.

It depends on your skillset, but I think you approach the project the wrong way.

If you have a site on Elementor and a bunch of plugins that are reliant on all of that and you’re rebuilding, you should rebuild on a clean install.

You should not like try to remove stuff, add bricks, try to do stuff in that install.

Just clean install, build from scratch.

And then you do things like, okay, remap URLs, uh, put a redirect file in, yada, yada, yada.

But that starts you with a completely clean database to work from.

And you build from the ground up using best practices.

And then you do any URL restructuring stuff that you need to do, uh, with redirects and you publish and you call it a day.

And then you don’t have all that baggage and all that mess left behind.

Do I need the frames plugin or within brick settings will work fine.

Again, I don’t know what you mean by brick settings or anything like that.

Are you planning to do a video using the centralized taxonomy you used, uh, on the new frames website?

Um, I did one video on it.

I don’t remember if it was a video or a live stream.

Uh, I don’t remember much past what happened this week.

If I’m being honest, um, some things I do and some things I don’t.

I, I, but I know I did a video on that.

Uh, so if that wasn’t enough for whatever reason, I know we explored it.

It does have one problem.

It’s not suitable for every single project.

Um, and I can’t remember what the problem has to do with relating certain content to other content using that structure.

It’s, it’s really just a limitation of WordPress.

We are, again, we’re working in an archaic CMS that doesn’t work the way it should work.

And that is built by people who aren’t interested in fixing the problem.

So we’re going to have to do our own.

This is why etch kind of bypasses a lot of the bad parts of WordPress.

Um, to what extent we can fix that with etch.

We’ll have to see, but there’s a lot of like media, media management.

You like, does anybody like managing media and WordPress?

And this isn’t even native WordPress that we’re looking at right here.

But does anybody like this?

Does anybody like, like this, all of this that’s happening?

Does anybody, nobody likes this.

Nobody enjoys this.

So with etch, you’ll be able to manage media in our media manager.

In etch, you won’t even have to go to this magic area.

So you kill two birds with one stone.

Not only do you not have to go to a magic area, you also get better media management.

And there’s a lot of things that we can just, because I know for a fact, guys, you have to listen to this very carefully.

I have talked to the contributors.

I have met people at the top in real life.

They are not interested in fixing these problems.

They don’t think they’re problems.

They don’t think that these things are problems.

And when they do fix them, eventually they’ll get around to, you know, oh, we’ll have a different UI for the media library.

They’re going to fix one or two little headaches.

And it’s not going to be nearly enough of a fix, right?

It’s never going to be a really great user experience.

Because one, they’re not super interested in listening.

Number two, they don’t think that these things are problems.

And number three, even if they did believe that these things are problems, and wanted to fix them, it would either one, take them seven years to do it, or two, it would just be committed again.

And so everybody, they let everybody have their opinions.

And then everybody’s little pet tweak and adjustment would be put in.

And it would just kind of go back to being dog shit.

It’s the nature of how this thing is built.

This like open source contribute.

There’s no leadership.

There’s no leader driving.

There’s no visionary driving the ship.

Everybody’s working on the thing that they think needs to be worked on at the time.

And then trying to stuff it in.

And then I think somebody comes along and either approves or disapproves of certain things.

But it’s not clear on who that person is or what knowledge and experience they have.

I mean, these are people where I get on a call with them.

And they’re still talking about how, for example, restaurants should be heavily blogging and doing like old school, like 2010 style SEO stuff, content marketing stuff.

That does absolutely does not work in this.

This is the world these people live in.

They don’t know really what they’re doing or what we’re doing.

They don’t know what modern agencies and freelancers are doing for clients because they don’t work with the clients that we work with.

They are developers that live in their own little developer world and have their own like theories about how WordPress should work.

And they’re not really into it.

It’s odd because they should have the self-awareness to be like, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not an agency.

I’m not a freelancer.

I don’t work for clients in the real world.

But here’s the other thing.

Here’s the other problem.

You know why they don’t care?

Because they should have the self-awareness to go, we need to really talk to agencies and freelancers and listen to what these people have to say.

Because they’re doing this work in the trenches.

They’re using WordPress in a really important way.

The reason they don’t think that is because they don’t believe that you contributed to the growth of WordPress.

They think that it’s what they’ve done.

They think it’s a blogging platform.

They think that putting this blogging platform out and all these people coming to this free blogging platform is the sole reason WordPress is the way WordPress is.

And so when you come along and say, well, that’s not how we’re using WordPress.

They don’t really care because they don’t realize the truth.

The truth is agencies and freelancers are responsible for onboarding millions and millions and millions of WordPress users who would never have used WordPress, who didn’t even know WordPress existed until they hired an agency or a freelancer that says, I build on WordPress.

WordPress is the platform we’re going to use.

And they were like, oh, okay.

And then now they’re on WordPress and they’re a WordPress user.

You know who takes credit for that?

WordPress takes credit for that.

They don’t give you credit for that.

They take credit for that.

And so when you come along and say, man, this is not really working for our workflow as an agency, they don’t give a fuck.

They don’t care.

And they’ve told me this to my face many, many, many times.

Hey, this doesn’t really work the way it should work.

Oh, well, we think it’s good.

We think that’s how it should work.

Oh, okay.

So what are we left to do?

Well, we’re left to utilize the one aspect of WordPress that we can, that is good that we can utilize, which is the ability to build on top of it.

So we’ll just build the experience that we know agencies and freelancers need because the core WordPress team is not listening to you.

And they don’t care to listen to you.

Now, they will claim that they do care, but they will never get around to actually doing anything that you want.

So we just have to sidestep.

And I used to rant and rave about this.

I used to, you can go watch my old Gutenberg videos.

And then I just came to the realization, I was like, oh, this software is not designed for us.

It’s why I stopped ragging on Elementor.

It’s why I stopped ragging on Divi.

This software, you just have to come to the realization, this software is not designed for me.

So either I can use a different experience on top of it, or I can just go somewhere else, right?

So yeah, that’s what we’re doing.

I don’t have to rant and rave about it anymore because I don’t need them to fix it.

Honestly, it can continue being dog shit because I’m not going to use it.

I’m going to use my own builder.

I don’t have to complain about Gutenberg.

I’m going to use my own builder.

I’m going to use my own media management.

I’m going to use my own custom post type solution.

This is going to be built for freelancers and agencies.

And then a bunch of agencies and freelancers are going to also come to the same.

You know what?

I’d rather use Etch because it’s actually designed and built for me.

Okay.

Easy decision, right?

You should not use tools that are clearly not designed for you.

Same thing with Elementor and Divi.

You can go to Elementor and Divi all you want and say, hey, you know, we’re doing this thing over here that lots of professional agencies and freelancers do.

Elementor is not really facilitating it right now.

I mean, can you guys, and they will just point blank tell you, I’m sorry, our tool is for beginners.

It’s not really for you.

Now, they’re not going to tell you that to your face, but that’s really what they’re thinking in their head.

Well, this is not our target market.

We’re for everybody.

We’re for the layperson, okay?

If we do these things for them, laypeople are going to be confused and lost, they think.

And so they’re just not going to do it, right?

Why hasn’t Divi fixed the divception thing?

They don’t give a fuck.

They don’t.

People who use Divi, right?

The laypeople that use Divi don’t even know what a dom is.

They don’t.

They’re not going to inspect the code.

They’re not going to look under the hood.

They’re not going to know.

So they haven’t fixed it, right?

They don’t care.

They’re not going to give you classes.

They’re not going to give you anything that you actually need to do professional work because it’s not for you.

So we can all have lower blood pressure if we just go, oh, okay, it’s not for me.

So I won’t use it.

Use something different, okay?

You can only complain when the tool’s like, yes, we’re building it for you and it doesn’t work.

Okay, then yes, that’s when you should be complaining.

But when a tool tells you, oh, we’re not for you, then just listen.

Stop beating your head against a brick wall.

That’s why I just, I listened.

Okay, it’s not for me.

I agree.

You’re not building it for me.

Good.

Now I’m going to do my own thing.

And here’s the thing.

I wanted WordPress, this is what was frustrating.

I wanted WordPress to listen because I think it’s like to reject the group that is most responsible for actually getting WordPress to where it is now, to reject them is horrible.

It’s horrible, right?

And so that’s why I kept fighting for as long as I did because I don’t think that’s a good thing, right?

It’s not a good thing for WordPress.

But eventually you just accept it and you just be like, okay, well, you’re going to neglect them.

Guess what?

I’m not going to neglect them.

I’m going to go build the thing they actually want and need.

And then they’re all going to come and they’re going to use it.

And that’s going to be fantastic.

And you’re going to be out of the picture.

People will, the world will be, you install WordPress and you install Etch.

You don’t dick around with core WordPress.

Even though all of our content gets mapped back to core WordPress, you never have to use that terrible experience.

Okay.

So that’s how it’s going to work.

And a lot of people like that idea and a lot of people bought into that idea.

And that’s what we’re building.

And that’s perfectly fine because it’s well within the architecture of the WordPress philosophy.

So we’ll see.

We’ll see how it plays out.

Do you know how much therapy sessions will cost us if WDD Live ends?

Yeah.

Well, that’s the thing.

It’s not ending.

It could just be in a different place.

So you’re not coming to the next YouTube creator call.

I mean, as much as I love just, you know, wasting tons of time.

Yeah.

I just, you know, they’re going to have to do something different to convince me to attend.

Because, you know, from what I’ve seen, it’s a waste of time.

You know, the dinner was nice.

The dinner in Portland was nice.

And I like the people.

But at some point, you just realize, ah, okay.

I mean, are we all in this for dinner in Portland?

Or are we actually trying to do something important and, you know, have an interesting conclusion from all of this?

And I’m not sure that that second part is happening.

Okay.

If you’re also in the inner circle, I’m about to tell you the story of how I turned down a fairly large paycheck from a fairly large platform.

And why?

You know, they wanted some sponsored videos.

And I was geared up to do them.

And I was, I had a nice angle to do them from, even though it’s a platform I’ve been very critical of.

I had a good angle to do them from that I thought was very authentic.

And, you know, it was going to be, you know, a good, a good chunk of money.

And I ended up just saying, I can’t, I can’t do this.

It’s just not, it’s not going to work.

So I just said, no, I’ll, I’ll post about that.

And I’ll, I don’t want to write that up publicly, but I’ll write it up in the, in the inner circle.

So, yeah, I think the point is like, you know, this is everything that I do from content to products to everything is for very important reasons.

It’s never for, oh, that check looks good.

Oh, that check looks good.

Oh, that, that, that, that.

Don’t really care about that.

Because that, I’ve said this before, like you can’t win the long game playing that way.

You, you, you have to do things in the short term that apply to the long term, that feed the long term.

They can’t detract from the long term.

Because you’re, you’re just building on quicksand, right?

Um, that, that’s, that’s why I do everything the way that I do it.

That’s why.

Mm-hmm.

The disappointment of thinking it was just a steak sandwich and just mushrooms.

Oh, yeah.

They’re talking about the Portland, the Portland dinner.

Um, yeah, that was, yeah, it wasn’t, um, was it even a dinner?

Could it, could we call it a dinner?

Wasn’t it just like, it was snacks or something?

Dinner.

We didn’t, we didn’t even get dinner, guys.

We didn’t even get dinner.

We got snacks.

The fucking cookies were good though.

I’ll tell you that right now.

I’m, I’m a sucker for a good, a good cookie.

Some good ice cream cookie or brownies.

You know?

You know?

Not everybody’s on the same page with me with desserts.

I, I, I tell my family all the time.

They’re big like fruit people.

You know, they’re big.

They, they like fruity stuff.

And I just tell them all the time.

I’m like the, the number one way.

Let’s just stir it up right now.

The number one way to ruin a dessert is to put a bunch of fruit on it.

Okay.

It’s not what we’re here for.

We’re here for the chocolate.

We’re here for the ice cream.

We’re here for the goods.

Okay.

We’re not here for the, I can get fruit anywhere.

I can just eat fruit by itself.

Okay.

It doesn’t need to be paired with my dessert.

Okay.

Let’s do, let’s do, let’s end with, um, this is good on time.

Cookies, brownies, ice cream, no fruit.

A hundred percent D one 23.

See, we’re on the same page.

This is how dessert is done.

Okay.

Matt will publish a fork of automatic CSS, similar to how SCF was published.

He won’t.

He won’t because it’s not in the repo.

Um, and that’s why my products, by the way, are not in the repo.

Uh, I mean, you could read the terms and conditions.

Okay.

That’s always been a thing.

That’s always been a thing.

Finally, a dessert opinion I’m on board with.

Uh, yep.

Oh, look at this.

There’s many, much more in agreement, uh, as I thought there would be.

Okay.

Well, this is great.

I mean, I’m, my family’s definitely, I’m going to have them rewatch this.

Uh, and I’m gonna have them read the comments as they rewatch.

Cause this very much solidifies, uh, what, you know, my personal truth.

Okay.

Let’s go to loom alternatives.

Okay.

Why am I looking for a loom alternative?

Well, I just, I don’t know.

It’s like, here’s loom right here.

It can never find.

Okay.

You see this?

And this is only because of the last few updates that started happening.

Issue with your mic.

Your mic can’t be found.

This is the mic I’m talking to you guys on right now.

Loom can’t find it.

Loom thinks it’s not working.

Okay.

Even though I’m talking to you guys right now, I can pull up any other piece of software and select the same exact mic and it works.

Loom insists that it doesn’t work.

So I can’t, I can’t even use it right now.

I, I don’t know of a workaround.

I don’t know what to do here.

It’s just telling me this doesn’t work.

So loom is failing.

And so I was like, you know what?

I’ve been using loom for a long time.

I mean, I, they think pretty highly of themselves with regard to their pricing and all this others.

Maybe it’s time to look for some different options.

So we’ve got cap, which we’ll talk about the name of that in just a second.

Okay.

Not really sold on that.

Hmm.

Which I, the minute, let me just, let’s just be honest.

Okay.

The minute I see a fuzzy logo, I’m, I’m almost out.

I got one foot out the door.

Okay.

You got a fuzzy logo.

I’m a one foot already is out the door.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

We’ll take a look at that.

We’ll take a look at Zeit.

Don’t know what that means, but whatever.

It’s aggressive.

Zeit.

I feel like that’s, is that German?

Zeit.

Tela.

Tela.tv.

Okay.

Never heard of it.

We’re going to take a look.

We don’t need this.

We can close this out.

Close this out.

We were talking about our videos there.

We can close that out.

That’s dope.

That’s okay.

It’s not important anymore.

Close that out.

Okay.

I think that’s it.

So we have Tela.

Zeit.

I feel like I got to yell it or something.

You got to say it very aggressively.

Close this.

Close this.

Okay.

Let’s start with cap.

Let’s go into UI and I, I use Zeit.

It’s just meh.

Okay.

Oh, what does this have to do?

Okay.

Cause people are like, Hey, use screen capture or whatever.

Okay.

I have, where is it?

Where is it?

Where is it?

I, you can tell.

Screen studio.

Okay.

You can see how much I use it.

That won’t work.

It’s not just for screen recording.

This is, I use Ecamm for doing my trainings.

That’s not what this is for.

When I have, oh, and then the other one, uh, which I already installed to test out is called jam, which I’m going to show you a cool feature of jam that I didn’t realize when I, before I, before I signed up.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

So we got jam, tele, zeit, zeit, and, uh, and cap.

Okay.

It has to host the videos.

It has to host the videos.

And it has to easily give me a shareable link.

Cause these are for videos where I need to answer people’s questions, like in the forum, in the community support and all of that for ACSS and frames.

And then I got to send things to my team.

Sometimes I just need a little thing that can easily let me screencast, generate a link for other people to watch.

And if it has some other goodies, then it’s great.

And if it’s affordable, it’s great.

Okay.

So let’s see if any of these fit the bill.

If it doesn’t auto generate a link and host the videos, I don’t want to mess with it.

Cause it’s going to slow me down.

Okay.

Cap.

Beautiful screen recordings owned by you.

The open source alternative to Loom.

Now, as far as the copy goes right here.

All right.

I don’t know what owned, like owned by you.

Like, I don’t really give a fuck.

I don’t care if I, I’m just doing little clips to share with people, uh, for, you know, very specific part.

I don’t, I don’t, I don’t need to be open source.

Okay.

Doesn’t need to be open source, but they do say alternative to Loom in their copy.

What am I looking for?

I’m looking for an alternative to Loom.

Oh, that’s fantastic.

So that kind of speaks to me.

Lightweight, powerful, and stunning.

Record and share securely in seconds with custom S3 buckets.

Yeah.

I don’t know how secure do I, I’m not sharing my bank.

Yeah.

I’m not online screen recording my, my, my bank records or anything.

I don’t know.

What would, do I really care about security?

I don’t know.

Okay.

Um, yeah, that’s cute.

Whatever.

Starts out with some social proof.

But again, I see Tesla, Microsoft coin, but I’m not them.

I don’t, I don’t really care in this regard.

I don’t care if IBM uses the tool or not.

Uh, crafted for simplicity.

Okay.

That sounds good.

We believe great tools should make your life easier.

Not more complicated.

Cap is crafted to streamline your workflow.

So you can record, edit, and share without jumping through hoops.

Yeah.

I don’t want to jump through hoops.

I definitely don’t want to jump through hoops, but I see this kind of thing.

I don’t know what this means right here.

What?

Uh, I don’t want to deal with that.

That’s a fucking hoop right there.

If there was a hoop, that’s one of them.

All right.

So, um, yeah, I don’t know.

It’s a little bit of conflict here.

And let’s just go to the brand name, Cap.

I don’t know what era you’re from, but this era, Cap means bullshit.

It means like, uh, that’s Cap.

Okay.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

I don’t know if that’s the best name for this.

It’s like you’re associating the screen recordings with bullshit.

And then people can be like, that’s Cap.

That’s confusing.

My street homies are not going to like, this is going to be very confusing to them.

All right.

So I don’t know.

I don’t know if we’re going to go with Cap.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

I already said one foot out the door because it’s got a fuzzy logo.

Uh, is this a PNG?

Are you PNGing me right now?

Is that what we’re doing?

Mm-hmm.

What is this?

Mm-hmm.

What is this thing?

I don’t even know what it is.

Save ass.

It doesn’t even have an extension.

I don’t even know what it is.

I don’t care.

But it’s fuzzy.

Why is it fuzzy?

Okay.

Um, let’s go to the homepage.

All right.

The best way to present and record yourself.

Impress your audience whenever the camera is on.

The best way to present and record yourself.

That doesn’t look like a screen recording.

Mm-hmm.

In all honesty.

Okay.

But we’ll keep going.

Read life into meetings.

Make presentations.

I’m not doing presentations with this.

Uh, record better videos.

I’m not trying to record better videos.

Okay.

Just share your unique voice.

I’m not interested in that.

I don’t, I’m not telling a story with these videos.

I’m just trying to record my screen and share it with somebody.

Stand out from the presenter crowd.

I’m not trying to do that.

We got a little bit of a disconnect in the copy.

Okay.

Um, but so, so what this does when there’s a disconnect in the copy, if I really want to find out what’s going on, I got to dig deeper.

I got to dig.

You’re not helping me.

So I have to dig deeper and I’m running out of patience.

Look great.

Every time you’re on camera.

It’s not what I’m concerned with.

It’s just not what I’m concerned with.

Present with style and captivate your audience.

Also not concerned with that.

I’m very rapidly running out of patience.

Make every video call more.

Okay.

I’m out.

You’re not telling me anything that I care about.

Zeit.

Zeit.

Um, record a video.

Let AI do the rest.

Now, see right off the bat.

I’m just thinking it’s another AI tool.

Is that what they’re on about?

I, I, I’m not really interested in what AI is going to do for this.

I don’t care that Salesforce uses it.

Save time.

Smart actions, smart chapters.

I don’t know what smart actions are.

I can’t even, you’re telling me something I can’t even know the value of because I don’t even, it’s like an insider terminology.

I don’t know what an action is.

I now have to go in order to find out what smart actions mean.

Like what’s a normal action.

I don’t understand.

I don’t know.

Smart chapters.

Okay.

I guess that’s like what somebody was talking about earlier.

Maybe timestamping things automatically.

Auto summaries, auto transcriptions.

Great.

Auto titles.

Nope.

I, I’m going to title my own thing.

Thanks.

Uh, all right.

Translation is good.

I can do screenshots and annotations.

I can screen record and edit.

These are all good.

I can make gifts.

Great.

Fantastic.

It is gift by the way.

Okay.

Don’t come at me with GIF.

Don’t, don’t.

It’s GIF.

It’s, it’s a hundred percent GIF.

And I, and I know the history of the, I know, I know what the owner of the, or the, the creator of the thing claims to think.

Okay.

Overriding him.

It’s, it’s GIF.

To the day I die, it is GIF.

Automate the pain out of making videos.

Reduce meetings.

Get everyone on the same page.

Now we’re talking.

These are things that, that speak to me.

Um, now it feels a little corporate-y.

It feels, and when, and when you go sales chimp, mail, uh, sale, uh, sale, sales chimp.

That’s a, that’s a new brand.

Anybody can do that now.

Uh, Salesforce, MailChimp, Intercom.

I, I, I, I’m not them though.

And is this like a super corporate-y kind of tool?

I don’t know.

What’s the pricing look like?

Um, very standard.

I mean, this is kind of like, feels like loom, loomy kind of pricing, right?

Okay.

We’ll come back to that.

I’m not, I’m not counting it out, but I’m not super excited about it at the same time.

Record incredible videos.

The screen recorder that edits for you.

I’m not going to be doing much editing, so I don’t know how much that speaks to me.

Um, but when I watch this, I notice he’s zooming in and doing some of that.

Maybe that kind of, that’s kind of some, um, screen studio type stuff.

That might be cool.

That might be a good addition to these videos.

Recording rethought.

I’d probably say reimagined here.

Maybe not rethought.

Uh, say goodbye to long single takes.

Say hello to clips.

Ah, okay.

So they’re introducing a new concept.

Okay.

What is this concept?

Record your videos in small manageable parts.

Edit and rearrange later.

That’s intriguing.

Uh, speaker notes, never drift off topic with speaker notes, jot down ideas.

I’m, I’m wondering how those are done.

I assume they’re not in the final video.

So I’d like to see how that gets done.

So I’m intrigued.

It’s creating some intrigue here.

Edit with zero effort.

Design for regular people, not video nerds.

Okay.

That’s fine.

I mean, I’m a video nerd when I want to be, but I don’t identify it.

Like I don’t want to be that for this case.

So that’s good.

Transitions, two clicks to keep viewers engaged.

All right.

Zoom effects, backgrounds.

I do also like this background type thing that could be useful in certain situations.

Cut without the chase.

No endless seeking and scrubbing.

Okay.

All right.

Depending on how accurate that is, that might be helpful.

Publish with power.

Your videos have been to share them instantly with a link.

Ah, that’s what I was looking for.

Share them instantly with a link.

That was on my list.

Or download in 4K.

These are, this is checking boxes.

It’s sounding intriguing.

It’s sounding enticing.

So far, this is connected the most.

Okay.

We’re going to try this in just a second.

We’re going to try it together.

And then we have Jam.

And I’m going to show you one thing that Jam does that I think is really cool for what we do in our work.

Okay.

One click bug reports devs love.

So immediately you see a clear distinction in the copy.

The copy of the others was like, record your screen.

Do AI.

Do, this is like a one click bug reports devs love.

So it’s automatically speaking to anybody that’s on the, on the dev side of things.

Again, we go in and we see Dell, but we see these other smaller brands as well.

Okay.

And maybe dev related kind of brands.

Never explain another bug.

Auto captures all the info engineers need to debug, including device and browser, console logs, network logs, repro steps back in.

Oh, this is reproduction steps.

Back in tracing AI.

Okay.

Now, now, Hey, Oh, this works.

I mean, this might be because it comes with all these extras built in.

That might, this might, this is why I downloaded it already before we did this.

As easy as taking a screenshot.

Never write steps to reproduce again.

Capture what just happened with instant replay magic.

Ah, that’s interesting.

Annotate blur, edit and share.

Okay.

Great.

Works with all these tools.

Your team already uses.

Look at this.

We use notion.

We use GitHub.

We used to use JIRA.

We use linear.

Oh man.

You see that like, this is good copy.

I mean, they could have gone the route of like, Hey, record your screen.

But they’re hitting the things that I’m interested in.

We got social proof.

We got cute little branding.

I’m not, I don’t really like the logo.

I can live with it, but I don’t, I get what it is.

I don’t, I don’t love it.

I don’t love it.

Um, but it’s fine.

It’s fine.

Okay.

So let me show you real quick.

This is the jam interface.

Then I’m, I’m going to also sign up for the only two I’m interested in are Tela and jam.

I’m not, Zite feels too corporate-y and somebody else in the chat just said Zite’s not great.

So we can just count them out.

I don’t want to cap.

I don’t want to produce cap, you know?

Uh, so we’re, we’re going to cut out cap.

We’ve got jam and we’ve got Tela.

Here’s jam’s interface right here.

I was playing around with it earlier.

Um, the only thing I didn’t like about this, you might’ve noticed.

I just clicked this.

This is a dropdown.

Um, and I felt like this because it’s a pill.

I felt like the whole thing was a button, um, for like accessing this dropdown, like a normal select element would be.

That’s not actually the case.

If you click over here, it actually goes into like capturing a screenshot mode.

Um, if you, you have, if you want the dropdown options, you have to literally click the icon.

Um, and then it’s just kind of meaningless stuff.

Like take it after three seconds, take it.

Okay.

Whatever.

I just don’t like the UX of that.

Um, but record tab and record desktop are, are both very easy to use.

I don’t know what instant replay is or how it works yet, but I’m going to go record desktop to show you guys.

And then I’m going to say entire screen and I’m going to just choose the screen that I want and share.

Um, I don’t like that.

It does this sharing your screen before the jam actually starts.

Uh, but yeah, we’re just going to let this run for just a second.

And then I’m going to show you what’s cool about it.

So we’ll end recording.

Okay.

It comes up in a new little window right here, which I don’t know why this is like grayed out.

It’s not grayed out when I’m not live streaming, but it’s grayed out right now, but I’m going to grab a link you can share.

I don’t even know if it’s grayed out for you guys or just for me.

Um, and I’m going to say create and copy link.

Okay.

And then I’m going to take this to a new tab and we’re going to click on it together.

And okay.

It’s uploading the video, but check this out.

Look, it’s got the info.

Where, where was the URL timestamp operating system browser, the window size.

It’ll show me what was happening in the console.

Um, here’s your network tab, other stuff going on for dev related stuff.

Um, I mean, this is, uh, there’s some business stuff that you might need for, for extras.

Okay.

But we’re always having to ask people, Hey, what operating system, what browser, what version, what’s this, what that, if they use something like this, they would get what’s, are there any console errors?

You know, what’s going on in the console?

This would log all of that stuff automatically.

And when we’re doing internal sharing between teams for this kind of stuff, it’s going to automatically, uh, have that content attached to what we’re doing.

So this really, really appealed to me and it was good.

It doesn’t exist as standalone though.

It’s only in the browser, which that’s a problem.

Okay.

Uh, because it’s not going to work for everything that we need to do.

So that is a problem.

That is a problem.

As far as I know, they don’t have a standalone.

That’s kind of one of the other requirements.

And I don’t know if Tela has that or not either, but let’s get started.

Um, okay.

Kevin Geary, Kevin at digital, digital gravy.co.

Okay.

Let’s continue.

Okay.

Good.

Um, let’s, let’s just use, let’s just use one password to do this.

Okay.

Uh, I started using the, the Mac passwords thing and now both things are competing with each other.

Shouldn’t have done that.

Shouldn’t have.

I was just testing things out.

Okay.

Let’s do that.

Okay.

Great.

Great.

Great.

Got to go get a code from my email.

Where is.

All right.

Let’s bring this over to this screen.

All right.

Um, let’s go.

I know you guys can’t see what I’m doing right now, but that’s okay.

We’re just going to go grab.

I got to get all the windows out of the way.

Verify with Tela.

All right.

Tela, Tela, Tela.

Here we go.

Paste it in.

All right.

All right.

Oh, pick your role.

I hate doing this.

Next.

Does that even matter?

Are they doing anything to the app differently based on my answers here?

Where did you hear about us?

Google.

Okay.

Your plan.

You’re on a seven day free trial.

No credit card required.

Great.

Take me to Tela.

All right.

Can I download something?

Like is there.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Ah, here we go.

Tela for Mac.

Tela.

Tela.

Okay.

Tela.

Tela.

Tela.

This is fun.

Wait, why isn’t it not in the finder?

All right.

Let’s go to, let’s just open it from here.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Camera.

Oh, here we go.

First permissions.

Camera.

So you can explain stuff.

Allow.

Microphone.

Allow.

Screen recording.

Open system settings.

Tela.

Check it.

Password.

There we go.

Quit and reopen.

Got to do the same song and dance every single time.

It’s fun.

Yes.

I want to open it.

Okay.

Oh, I got to log in.

Okay.

Fantastic.

You’re signed in.

Open Tela.

Let’s try again.

Allow.

Hey, look at me.

Look at me.

Okay.

What is this little interface?

This cute little interface.

All right. 1080p.

New video.

Rodecaster.

Duo.

Main stereo.

I see.

I see.

Yep.

I see the audio waveform is actually responding.

Hey, it’s better than Loom so far.

Found the mic that Loom can’t find.

Okay.

But I don’t know what else I’m doing in here.

Check for updates, preferences, speaker notes.

Go to.

What’s going to happen when I click this red button?

I do.

New video.

So.

Oh, gosh.

Where do I share my screen?

New clip.

Oh, dear.

This is.

Oh, screen.

Off.

Allow.

Okay.

Screen off.

LG.

Okay.

It’s this screen right here.

But why don’t I get to choose?

I have two monitors.

Why don’t I get to choose?

Is it based on the screen this thing is on?

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

I don’t.

Where do I?

Oh, oh, where are we at?

Oh, oh, we’re somewhere else.

Okay.

Let’s go to back to Tela.

All right.

Where do we choose?

There it is.

Okay.

We got a little hidden up arrow.

Okay.

All right.

I can choose the other one.

That’s nice.

All right.

Let’s see how our screen recording is doing.

So let’s go new video.

Now this is another thing that’s going to be in the way.

Oh, but does this mean when I, when I, um, edit, can I put myself anywhere?

Does this correspond to where this ends up in the video?

Maybe it does.

Maybe it doesn’t.

That’s what we’re trying to figure out right now.

Let’s go ahead and stop.

Okay.

Let’s go to preview.

Now we’re in the editor.

Oh, look at this.

You are signed in.

Uh, okay.

It’s going to be in the way.

Oh, but.

Oh, okay.

Oh, that’s a clip.

I can add a clip.

How do you want to use, use Mac?

Oh, you can add, oh, you can add more.

Okay.

Fun.

That’s fun.

Oh, look at all these layouts that we can do.

Oh, this is exciting.

Okay.

I do.

I do like that.

You can add this after the fact, because you know how many times I’ve recorded videos where my damn head is in the way of something.

And you can do it by, by, by clip.

Like this clip could be like this.

And then another clip could be like this.

And another clip could be like this.

Oh, this is fun.

This is fun.

You can do a camera only.

Oh, after the fact, you can do this.

I’m liking it.

I’m like, oh my God.

Oh, you could.

Guys.

We were talking about the shorts.

We can do the shorts like this.

We could do the shorts like this.

Oh my gosh.

Well, well, well, well, well, what have we here?

Hmm.

This may come in handy.

We could do some different backgrounds.

We could do borders.

We could redo.

Getting a little tingle.

I’m getting a little tingle.

Okay.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Oh, wow.

Look at this.

We’re experiencing this together for the first time.

You know, I liked what I got with Jam, you know, the technical side, but I got a new, got a new choice here.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think, I think, I think we’re going to, we’re going to rock and roll with this for a while.

I might do my regular videos with this, honestly.

Who needs, who needs Ecamm when you got this?

You know what I’m saying?

Oh, I’m going to, I’m going to, dude, my headphones are, these are brand new.

What are you doing?

They’re, these aren’t some cheap Chinese knockoffs.

No, I mean, no, you know, no disrespect to anybody in China, but this is short.

I mean, maybe they’re still, I don’t know.

What is going on with this?

These are, I’m just, the, the, the gremlins, the electronics gremlins are out in force today.

Guys, you, you might, you might see this very short.

I am like this actually.

Like this makes me want to go record some shorts right now.

You might see a couple of shorts coming out in the next couple of days just because of this.

This, remember what I told you earlier?

I was like, there’s such a pain in the ass to record and edit.

Oh, this is a done deal.

This might be a done deal, my friends.

Okay.

You have seven days free trial.

So try it out.

Oh, they had a Black Friday deal.

Oh, let’s, yeah.

Let’s see the pricing.

What do we have for pricing?

I mean, I almost don’t care at this point.

Settings, profile, probably under profile.

Where would we guess that it would be?

Would it be under profile or would it be under settings?

Ah, ah, let’s try profile.

Well, failed right off the bat.

Oh, here’s what that was.

Oh, come on.

Now plans and billing wasn’t even an option on the other screen.

Okay, plans and billing.

Pro is 19 per user per month.

Premium is 49 a month.

What do we got for this?

Unlimited, unlimited.

Check, check, check, check, check, check.

Oh, oh, I don’t need 60 frames per second.

What are we fucking shooting sports videos?

We don’t need that.

Okay, so that’s not a big deal.

4K export I can do.

Oh, they’re going to get me with the custom branding and the custom domain.

They’re going to get me right there out of the gate.

As much as I wanted to be on pro, I’m a sucker for the custom branding and the custom domain.

I don’t know that I need video analytics.

I definitely don’t need SSO or anything else.

That one thing, they did this well because they knew they were going to get me with this.

They knew when I came along that they were going to get me with this.

I am a sucker for it.

Yeah, yeah.

I’m going to be on the 49 a month plan.

You guys can probably be on the 19 a month plan.

I’m going to be on the 49.

How much discount?

I get 20% off going for the year.

I’m going to tell you right now, this is my strategy.

I’m going to go for one month.

And if I love it, I’m immediately going to the annual.

It’s going to be good.

It’s going to be good.

What can we do in branding?

Well, look at this.

We get a little preview interface for this logo.

Oh, look at this.

You can even come in and check this out.

All right.

How are we going to do this?

How are we going to do this?

Go to Geary.co.

Let’s go to YouTube.

Videos.

Branding.

There we go.

2023.

I had too many of these things.

I think it’s this one, even though you can’t see it right here.

It’s probably this one.

I don’t know where I put it, though.

Oh, is it up?

Oh, it’s up there.

It’s up there.

Okay.

I see now.

Does this mean it’s going to be in the…

It’s…

Okay.

All right.

I don’t know how they’re going to use this.

All right.

Let’s go…

Yeah.

All right.

We’ll figure that out later.

Definitely brand color stuff.

Hold on.

It’s not…

Oh, okay.

This is the background of the video.

That’s not part of the branding.

Okay.

It’s just the player.

All right.

We’ll just have to figure out some of that stuff.

Should be easy.

Domain.

Yes.

This would be…

Ooh.

We can do, like, videos.digitalgravy.co.

Okay.

All right.

I wouldn’t do root domain.

I would go subdomain route.

Right?

Yeah.

Video.digitalgravy.co.

Yeah.

Something like that.

Yeah.

That’d be nice.

That’d be nice.

Okay.

They got me.

They got me with the branding in the domain.

Okay.

Shorts in six hours now.

Yeah.

No.

It looks like it’s going to be pretty quick.

Even 19 a month feels too expensive for screen recording.

If I was going to do it for Loom.

Here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing.

Yes.

If I was going to replace Loom, 100%.

100%.

Okay.

But what I’ve just discovered is this could actually be a tool for lots of the videos that I do.

And opening the door for shorts.

This is a…

Like…

Again, you’ve got to think about ROI.

What is the ROI on the tool going to be?

Not this price compared to Loom.

Because I don’t use Loom for anything other than like short little support videos and things like this.

But if I could use this to expand into shorts.

If I could use this to solve a lot of the problems that I’m currently having recording my trainings in Ecamp.

That’s what I’m comparing to.

I’m comparing ROI.

And I think that this is an easy decision to make if it does those things the way I need them to be done.

And replaces Loom.

That’s the other thing.

Does it give us a short link?

Does it give us a short link?

Here’s all videos.

Okay.

There it is right there.

There it is right there.

It’s just easy.

Okay.

New window.

Paste.

And this is where people are going to get the branding and they’re going to get…

Okay.

It’s going to be white labeled.

This is going to be great.

This is going to be…

This is very promising.

Let’s put it that way.

Very promising.

Must have custom domain.

Yeah.

The old custom branding.

Gotcha.

Yes.

Okay.

A few times already, but fair.

This looks streets ahead in terms of functionality.

Yes, it does.

All right.

Actually, I got to cut this stream off because I got to go play with this.

Okay.

So I got to go see if I can make some shorts.

I’ve got to…

I told you I had a list of things that can be shorts and I was dreading recording them because it’s too much hassle.

I’m going to go record some shorts.

I’m going to post some shorts.

Okay.

I got to get out of here.

I will update you guys very soon on the future of WDD Live, what we’re going to do, the decision that we are going to make.

And yeah, that’ll be…

And then January is probably when those changes are going to be into effect.

But thanks for showing up today.

Thanks for being a part of this.

As usual, I’ll be back again very, very soon.

Love you guys.

Peace.

Thanks.

Thank you.