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I'm Jacob Litzow, your Elixir mentor and welcome to another
exciting episode of the Elixir Mentor podcast.
This is where we discuss everything related to Elixir,
from interviews with enthusiasts, pioneers in the
community to innovative projects and libraries shaping Elixir's
future. Enrique is joining us today,
founder of Prende Cafe in Chile, and he we're going to just talk
about e-commerce and a subscription business.
And I believe everything you're using Phoenix, correct?
I am using Phoenix Live. Yeah, so we got a lot of fun
stuff to talk about. Can you tell us a little bit
about yourself? And I like how do you go from
like ad tech to running a coffee business and being a developer?
Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
So fun story actually, I'm not coming with a software
engineering background. I am, I started business and
then marketing a master's degree and I spend my whole career in
kind of the business side. And I, I went, I, I work in an
insurance company. Then I worked in a big agency
and kind of jump back and forth between different kind of works
or job specifics. And my last job over there was
managing the web development team.
And I remember the agency did a bunch of stuff in workpress.
And I remember one time that we, we had a big development about
like it was kind of a you, you place bets on what a player was
going to win. It was a like a survey type of
thing. But we have in the middle of a
football game, Chile versus Brazil.
It was the kind of Copa America. We had over 1000 people joining
in the website at the same time and it collapsed and my
everyone. 'S nightmare.
Then I was on a vacation with my wife.
We were kind of celebrating 7 years of marriage, something
like that. And my phone kept ringing and I
remember kind of in the postmortem I said I'm never
going to touch workers again. So this was back in 2018 and I
started researching and at least here at the time was kind of
nation. We, there was recently kind of
Phoenix launch and I remember like we had three or four years
like very productive in the community where there was like
machine learning and kind of nerves and a bunch of different
areas. And I was so excited, but my job
was never kind of coding. So Fast forward a few years, I'm
very proud and happy to be launching Brende Cafe using
Elixir. It's kind of.
Yeah, that's awesome. It's live.
You can you can take orders and everything right now.
Yeah, Yeah. How long?
How long have you been up and running?
So I started with a workers site because my brother who is my
business partner, he wanted to have like the website like this
weekend. And why?
I'm curious, why didn't you go with like something like Shopify
or something just off the shelf easy to use for e-commerce?
Well, I wanted to put my hands in the licks, you know, and I I
said OK, if I'm going to spend another Friday night like
troubleshooting something because something broke, like
foreseeing that I don't want to do it now they're. 01 second we
might have lost you. Oh, no, we lost Enrique.
Let's see, We'll get him back one second.
Guys, just hang in there with me.
No. Oh, we got you back all right.
Awesome. Yeah, Peace of Mind, actually.
Like if I needed to stay up at night troubleshooting something,
I'd rather do it any leaser than any other language.
Yeah, I get it. That's so like I feel like I
just like faked it till I made it like an elixir.
I couldn't get elixir jobs for a while so I just started building
all my own stuff in Elixir. There you go.
'Cause like once you touch
Elixir, you don't you don't want to work with anything else.
It's a It's a big problem. I know and actually my brother
who is, he's a lawyer and he doesn't get kind of all the
complexities of like the languages.
He was like, why don't we choose Shopify?
Like you click three things and you're connected already to
Mercado power like the pavement. Yeah, that is true that like I
was curious like why you why you didn't go that route 'cause I
feel like you could have the e-commerce site up like
overnight with with Shopify. But you can actually, honestly
you can build pretty quickly like with Phoenix and Live View.
That's true. And like the ultimately I wanted
to learn Elixir and the best way to do it was to launch
something. I had some experiences back in
the kind of I launched something at Dell internally.
It was something very specific for active like an internal tool
and but kind of all the rest of the members in the team said
like we don't know Elixir, we know Python, we're going to
rebuild it from the ground up. So.
I'm curious, is Elixir the first language you undertook to learn
too or no? No, no, no, actually I I was a
PHP programmer. OK, Yeah.
Back in 2014, 2015 and you believe.
There's still PHP developers out there.
I know, I mean Symphony is is a very big framework.
I know it is. I've heard it's not so bad
anymore. I've heard they've had some
pretty good updates and it's not it's not a chart working.
That's I I wouldn't know because when I learned PHPI learned it
like kind of just to build websites and E commerce's.
I kind of move, I wanted to move away from Warpus because I had a
customer that had a very difficult process of
manufacturing. It was like at this
manufacturers of roller blinds and in Warpus, you have these
websites where the, the purchase page it likes forces to to
forces you to choose in three different steps what you want
and you are paying already. But if you're manufacturing, you
need to be very thorough in what you're kind of the, the input
that you're requesting from the user.
Like how is the wing, the kind of the blind?
It's stuck to the ceiling or to the, to the, to the wall and
kind of you have a bunch of decisions.
So we actually changed the the process like from three steps to
10 steps and it it kind of tenfolded the sales like they
were selling 2 million and they started selling 20 million with
just that change and it was country intuitive.
Yeah, that's I was going to say that's insane because like
adding steps seems like a pain point.
It's not when you. So there's a book very
interesting called Don't Make me Think and it's about UX.
And in this book, like it says that you have cognitive loads
and you have kind of motor kind of if you need to click things,
it's not as challenging as thinking and the Woogie skull
don't make me think. So when we had this three-step
process to check out, the user needed to think a lot.
What's the input? But when we split it across the
10 different steps, you were just pointing and clicking.
And my, my wife's a graphic designer, so she did a very
amazing kind of illustrative way to decide.
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome.
Like it's that's, it's hard to think of UX.
I feel like sometimes without getting your hands, at least for
me, like I have to go through the process and if it feels
clunky, then it's good. But like, if you were just to
tell me adding steps is the solution, I'd be like, that
doesn't sound right. But then I'm sure, like if I
went through the flow, I'd be like, yeah, this makes sense.
Well, there's another book, this is now in the marketing space.
There's a book called Demand side Sales and it's awesome
because it helps you like have you heard of the concept of?
So the book for focuses on three different frameworks to
understand consumers. And one of them is understanding
the sources of energy. And it says that you have like
emotional energy and kind of functional energy and so on and
so forth. So when I think about UX, I try
to take in consideration what's draining me.
If something is draining me, then I have an opportunity to
improve it with the sign. And that's why we kind of
changed this three-step to 10 steps.
And it, but what I wanted to say, you were asking me about
PHP back at, at that time, I was only focusing on getting this
website ready. And I didn't know about the kind
of the inner workings of like the oriented programming.
And when I started learning Elixir, I would say it took me
like 5 years to understand Elixir like well, And obviously
I read some books and I, I, I kind of listened to podcasts,
like we have a awesome community over there.
And even though I was not kind of working with code, I was
learning through kind of just being active and listening and
kind of the same thing that you're doing now, like
educating, but I was consuming this type of content.
Talking to people that have done it helps, helps the like the
architecture brain, right? Like absolutely.
Especially with like, yeah, especially with like LLMS these
days, like coding is becoming less important.
Not not, I mean, it's still important.
Like you still have to know if trash is being generated right
or if the LLM is hallucinating, which I I've been seeing less
and less of. But you still have to know how
the whole system works and functions.
Because when you start to scale things and you know, you get
more and more users, that's when things get difficult.
And if you don't build it from, you know, if you don't build a
solid foundation, then your whole system crumbles and you
get interrupted on your anniversary vacation.
Exactly. Your whole system crashes
because it's just PHP, Yeah? Yeah, exactly.
We have YTCL source saying prede cafe is fire.
Amazing. Thank you.
We have a very active Elixir community in Chile and Camilo is
one of the leaders over there that's.
Awesome, very cool. I love that.
Can you talk about like what your stack looks like?
Is it? Is it live view?
Are you using postgres? What are you doing for
deployment? Yeah, like I would say it's the
basics. I'm using live view, I'm using
Postgres. We have the website today in.
It's not dockerized or anything like that.
I just kind of build the release and push it through GitHub
Actions into digital option and so I have a cool CICD thing
where I just need to kind of push, commit and merge to the
main branch and then it's updated.
I need to, I need to automate my process a little bit because I'm
like I'm always SSH ING into my server to build it and I always,
oh man, I'm always lazy on the CICD stuff.
But clearly I need to do that because that would make my life
a lot easier. It would, yeah.
I mean, what I like about that is that hopefully when I build
the tests and kind of I can prevent things from crashing
before they are uploaded, it's going to be like smooth.
Yeah, yeah, I do run my tests with CI and like Paraxial make
sure I don't put anything on insecure in my code base.
So I have those protections, but I need to now add the deployment
step. I'm actually talking with with
paraxial as well. Like right?
Now. Oh nice dude.
Michael's awesome and their products, their products,
amazing. And it's first like a breeze to
to implement like we have a phone.
It's so easy, yeah. I made a video for Paraxial.
I don't a couple years ago now so I don't know how relevant it
is anymore, but it's super easy to integrate into your projects.
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I'm having so much fun,
like and he's like very open to discuss things and teach.
What are you? Are you just using Stripe or
what are you using for payments and?
Well, Stripe is not accepted in Chile, sadly.
Oh OK, so do you have a solution similar or did you have to roll?
Out, yeah, yeah, no, it's called Mercado Pago, which is it's,
it's, I'm not sure how what to compare it with, but it's kind
of an eBay OK. It's very big in Latin America
and they are kind of they have a very kind of super cool
development team. They have a cool APIs, they have
an MCP. So it was easy for me to connect
to kind of cloud code and say kind of implement this.
And I was, I had already implemented some kind of
services using Node. And I actually started with a
micro service in Node that kind of was connected with my Phoenix
app and it was kind of routed through nginx.
But then after a while, a couple of months later, kind of when I
started kind of received more requests, I killed a thing and
and developed it in Elixir using the MCP.
So. Oh.
Nice, now it's everything in Elixir.
Yeah, yeah. That's good.
Yeah, I'm using the CUI as well. OK, yeah, I am very.
I mean Killswitch has a lot of JavaScript because I'm doing a
lot of client side stuff, so that's the only sad part.
I do have to still write JavaScript from time to time,
but for the most part everything is Elixir and it makes my life
happy. Well, I, I saw a couple of days
ago that Korea soon started kind of sponsoring hologram and I
think hologram is. I saw that.
That's that's very cool. So like isomorphic And yeah, I
think it compiles to JavaScript. I haven't seen it yet but cool
to explore. If you're I've had I've had
hologram in my 2-2 check out lists, I have a a tab open and I
have not yet, but it looks like a really cool project.
Yeah. Yeah, I want to get.
It's Bart I believe, right? I would love to get him on the
podcast and talk to him about Hologram.
That'll be amazing. So so he can give us like a
quick review of how to get our toes.
Yeah, exactly. Like what do we do?
Maybe I need to have him come and do just like a live stream
coding coding stream with me. That'll be amazing, yeah.
Yeah, I'm pretty excited. I don't not this in two weeks.
On Saturday we got Hugo and Alex Kotos coming on and we're going
to do a little tide wave, tide wave stream, and that'll be a
lot. Of.
Fun or not? Not Saturday.
We're doing it Monday evening. I forgot.
Like I tried to always push the coding stuff to Saturdays but
they were only around during the week so we had to make it work.
Are they also writing the Nerves book?
Yeah, actually, yeah, I believe they.
I think. I think Hugo's like the editor.
Yeah, I think. And then Hugo Hugo's involved in
everything 'cause he's. Involved in Tidewave?
And so it'll be good to finally meet him.
I've been trying to get him on the podcast too, but I haven't
been successful yet. I'm sure I'll get him one of
these days. That would be great.
I'm gonna keep an eye on that because I haven't played with
Tidewave yet, but yeah. I.
Feel it's constantly evolving and I need to catch up fast.
So I'm kind of curious with, with coffee, are you, are you
roasting your own or do you outsource?
That. Oh, OK.
So you have like operations inventory, like you got the
whole system. What's the What was the most
difficult? What's the most difficult part
of Prende? I I wouldn't say something is
difficult because it just need, it takes time.
And the good thing about being in the coffee business is that
like everybody's happy when they're getting their coffee,
you know, So it's a, it's a very cool vibe.
Yeah. There you go.
You need to send me your address
and I'm going to send you a package over there.
Oh, if I can order some Prende coffee, I'll definitely do it.
That would be awesome. I was just thinking, you know, I
was just thinking I need to find a new coffee.
But yeah, I'll happily accept a a care package.
Absolutely, Absolutely. So cool thing.
My brother married a Brazilian woman, she's a very friend of
mine as well. And they started travelling a
lot in their vacations because like they wanted to go to see
the family that she has over there, her parents and
everything like. And after a couple of some
travels, he was like, how can I make this trips like more
fruitful from a business perspective And so make.
It a whole write off. Start a business.
And he started the live kind of taking wines to Brazil and
selling them over there. And after some trips we did
together kind of we went to one of the, it's called Fassanda,
the where they grow coffee. We met kind of with different
kind of people growing the coffee and we selected a couple
of them and we imported and given that he's a lawyer, he's
very kind of he, he did all the jobs of creating the
certifications and kind of understanding what were the
requirements. I would say that's a difficult
part, especially for. Even an attorney as a business
partner is very helpful, I'm guessing especially for
importing. I would say absolutely,
absolutely. I mean, it's taking a lot of
weight out of my shoulders. Yeah, yeah, and all.
All you have to do is build the tech right?
Yeah. That's that's the easy part.
And smashing some cafeterias, if you see the kind of the
Instagram where I'm smashing some of the commercial.
Oh, it's funny. Yeah, I love it.
So we bring coffee, we import coffee, we have a little roaster
which is like for 1K. And whenever we have some big
kind of order, we go to some other partners that we have like
the coffee industry at least in Chile is small is kind of they
have very good energy and you can kind of outsource whatever
in the process so. OK, So you can outsource
roasting larger batches. Yeah, exactly.
Now, like if someone orders from you, is it pretty, is it fresh?
Are you roasting per? Order.
Yeah, it is given that we are, we are kind of the the coffee
when you're importing it, it lasts for I would say a year in
of mint condition. After that it starts kind of
declining the quality. And so our first import was big
enough to have like stock for the year, but we're already kind
of starting to import again or or buying locally as well.
We also learned that when you import, you're kind of
committing with a kind of big part of your cash and it's it's
staying over there in your warehouse.
And sometimes consumers also want to have a little bit more
of variety. So the good thing is that given
that we have big quantities in our warehouse, we are also
selling to cafeterias and we have a very big B to B business
going on and we also sell to consumer.
So when we sell to consumer, it's roasted within the month
and all the baggages go with their date when they were
roasted and things like that. Yeah, that's awesome.
I love that. Yeah.
I feel like I used like, manufacturing is hard because,
you know, you have to order your raw material in bulk and then
like, and then put a shelf life on it 'cause it's coffee or
food, you know, it, it can make it difficult.
I didn't realize it is growing coffee in in Chile.
Is that a big industry or no? Like no, no, I didn't think so.
Grow, no. So you have like this belt
around the world where where you can grow profit and it's between
the the kind of what was the name like the Tropicos, I forgot
it. It's within the equator.
There's a belt where you can only grow coffee.
So you don't, for example, you can't grow coffee in Italy and
Italian coffee is very well known.
So what did, when you're buying an Italian coffee, what you're
buying actually is somebody in Italy importing the coffee,
roasting it there and sending it to you.
So it's not very fresh. It might be like a good quality
coffee, but it's not fresh versus if you look, if you buy
to your like local roaster, most likely they are sourcing like
green beans and they are roasting it and it's, it has a
better quality. When you roast it, you need to
wait for a couple of weeks. So it's kind of perfect for you.
It keeps kind of releasing some gases in those early 2 weeks,
but something that you can talk about with your local
roastering. It's fine.
No, that's cool and I'm sure you have it down to a science at
this point. How long?
Like what is a typical roast process for like your small unit
you have? How long does it take for a?
Batch roasting coffee. It's super fast.
It doesn't take more than 20 minutes.
Like wow, that's way faster than I thought it'd be.
And you need to be very mindful of like the, the kind of the
heat that you are and, and you have like it, it depends on the
roasting machine that you have. There's are some that you can
roast with air, some with roast like with convection, like
heating up some metal plates. And each of them has their
benefits. And actually like I would say
8090% of the flavor that you get from the resulting coffee comes
from the roasting process. And that's actually one of the
business insights that we got a few months ago when we, so we
were selling in the e-commerce and it was only like take out,
right? You click kind of button, you
get your product delivered. But now we're opening
subscriptions and what we want to do is to show to kind of the
all the Chileans who are the people roasting coffee in Chile
because each of them, even though they might rely on a very
good roasting machine that has some preset curves, there's also
some kind of romance in the process of roasting the coffee.
And you can document the process.
You can there's a couple of clicks like like when you're
popping popcorn that you hear it's called the crack.
That's things. So even though you might be
following a predefined curve of roasting for the profile you
want to get, you need to be very mindful and kind of constantly
looking at how is the process going on.
If the rain is too dry, it might kind of pop faster and you need
to kind of be ready to kind of intervene.
Yeah, OK. Wild.
Did you roll out like your own solution for inventory and like
orders and then like the shipping integration?
What are you doing for? That yeah, I'm not doing
inventory, not. So order comes in and you're
just filling it. Yeah, but that's a like a
business decision. First, I didn't want to create
something from the ground app like that complex.
I wanted to start selling coffee.
And yeah, I mean, that's why I ask, because an inventory system
can be pretty involved. I know, I know.
And, but essentially we started with three different types of
coffee profiles and we had like very unlimited amounts of it
because we were roasting in this big batches at the time when we
didn't have the little roasting machine.
We were outsourcing with a partner that had 15 kilos at a
time. And we, I don't know, we roasted
at least a couple of those. So it was like 60 batches of
coffee, 60 kilos and we were sending that throughout, kind of
the different. So I didn't have an issue with
the inventory. I think it's important for
everyone listening when you're starting a business, you don't
have to implement everything immediately, just start selling.
Exactly. I think that's the hardest part
is dialing back your feature list.
And I tell people all the time, like you ship with the bare
minimum and the second you have a product, that's when you start
selling. Exactly, exactly.
And so for example, one complex scene was the the coupons.
And to your point in Shopify, you just click three buttons and
you have coupons activated. And having coupons is hard
because sometimes we wanted to have coupons for a specific kind
of like let's say I roasted too much of one of the varieties of
coffee and I have overstock. We want to sell that kind of
with a, with a discount. And so I wanted to have the
discounts at a SKU level, like at a product level, but also at
the, at the site level, shopping cart level.
But also sometimes I want to do discounts only for, I don't
know, conception right now, which is one of the affected
areas. And all of that takes some time.
So it's when I need to prioritize because we have some
marketing activity that we're launching.
I most likely end up kind of going back.
So you can't leverage like subscriptions or coupons through
your payment processing. You have to do it all.
No, you have to do it all. That's a good question.
I'm not sure if you maybe you can and.
I didn't like with Stripe I, I leverage subscriptions and and
coupons at least at the checkout level, right?
Not per Well, I guess I could do it per product as well.
So yeah, I leverage Stripe for everything.
It makes my life really easy. No, I don't think you can.
You can I, I do think you can take coupons, but it's at an
order level and, and I'm, I'm, I'm actually relying on them on
the subscription. It's a different API and you,
you know, sign up with your account of Mercado Bago.
You have your cards already connected there and people just
click three times and then they're subscribed.
It's nice when you don't have to focus too much on the, the
payment systems because a lot came wrong there.
Like I and like every, everyone that's like building their own,
like ledgers and stuff. I'm like, use a solution that
already exists because there's a lot that goes on in Ledger
systems. I mean, without even considering
that you need to kind of inform your local in, in Chile, it's
called Servicio in Puerto Cinterinos.
I think it's the kind of the IRS over there.
OK, Yeah. Taxes.
Yeah, we're IRS. Yeah.
Mercado Bagos submit submits the the sales, the kind of all the
payments that they receive. They issue like a little invoice
for the end consumer. So it's connected to the IRS of
Chile something? Like that yeah, that's nice like
I did AI did like an affiliate program with kill Switch.
I mean, it hasn't been used yet because I'm not going live until
next week, but I used a third party because one, giving people
money like through payment systems, especially when you're
leaving your country of origin, it's like very difficult to know
the paperwork that needs to be filed or, you know, distributed
like you have to like give I don't, I don't remember the
forms, but I don't have to do it because I'm using dub.co and
they do it for me. So.
That's amazing. I didn't even think about that.
That's true. Yeah, well, because, all right,
I suck at marketing. We were talking about this a
little bit before and I feel like a lot of a lot of
developers who can build sweet solutions, they they go a little
brain dead or they get ADHD and they don't want to do the
marketing side of things. And like the simplest solution
for me, like obviously I have to do more marketing than just an
affiliate program, but I was like, if I get a few super
involved people in my affiliate program, they can make a lot of
money and it's like a free salesman, you know, it's just
going, going and going and they just make 20%, which I feel like
is, is a good number like. I mean, yeah, if if you're like,
if you're somebody who are like somebody's watching right now
and they are a good content creator, yet maybe you upload a
couple of videos and you have another income, that's amazing.
Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I'm really
excited. I just got, I just received my a
new product video that I had made and edited and it is so
awesome. Like I'm not a good editor.
So I outsource that and it turned out so good and so I'm
stoked. I was waiting.
For. Launch.
How did you? How did my what?
How did you outsource it? Oh, I found.
I found an awesome lady that just does product SAS videos on
Upwork and did she knocked it out of the park.
I didn't even have to hold her hand.
She like went over my website. She fully understood my product
and like I gave like the smallest bits of feedback like
and it she just. That's so cool.
Yeah. Because that's a big dialogue.
It's kind of a resource that you can kind of repurpose over and
over. Yeah, exactly.
Yep. And I feel like it just, it does
it. It just makes my product look so
much more polished too. Like you come to my landing page
and it's right there. I have a high quality video and
yeah, it's pretty awesome. You want to talk about kill
switch and kind of do a little marketing session?
Yeah, why not? Yeah, so.
Kill Switch is, it's basically a zero knowledge encryption
storage with a dead man switch, right?
And yeah, I'm launching next Wednesday and we'll see how that
goes. I feel like it's the,
everything's exciting for me up until launch and then 'cause
you're always nervous. Will all my systems work right
when I go live? It works in beta, but will it
work out of beta? You know?
Yeah, yeah. Well, the first thing I I like
asking people when I do kind of coaching sessions about
marketing is understanding positioning.
Have you heard the concept of positioning before?
Yeah, for sure. It's like the space that your
brand like the space it occupies in the mind of the consumer and
it obviously can move around and what not.
And there's a very cool book from a lady called April
Dunford, which is called, I think it's Positioning OK.
And I better make a note of this positioning.
Yeah. By April.
Dun. Dunford.
Alright, cool. And it's it's super cool because
she has some pillars that you can quickly review.
It's a book that you can read in a couple of hours.
And the first thing that asks is like, if your product didn't
exist, what would your customers do?
And my understanding of that when I was reading about kill
switch, like I obviously I have two kids.
I feel like the constant burden of what happens if I die and I
haven't even thought about like what happens with all my.
Passwords. It's a dark angle to think of,
but it's also you have to think about it, right?
It's like writing up a Will you think about it?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's, it's
because of that I think I'm part of your target audience.
Perfect. Yeah, I will.
The problem is so my problem, and sorry to cut you off, my
problem is like niching down the target audience because I've
like, from my perspective, it's like it's for everyone.
For everyone. Exactly.
You know, So like, then who do you target?
Well, that's a a very complex topic in marketing.
There's kind of there's been these studies where with kind of
the explosion of digital advertising, people starting
kind of targeting very broad. There's a couple of good
interesting cases. I don't know, Airbnb started
kind of they removed their performance marketing and
started doing branding and it paid off for them.
But I think the the cool thing about this positioning book is
it says that if you can narrow down and own a category, if it's
niche, it's easier to get kind of conquest that and then start
expanding. So you don't think about it as
I'm narrowing down my market. It's just you're saying this is
the first step that I'm conquering before kind of
expanding to other areas. Yeah, all right.
I got to put this on pause real quick.
And for Mike Hostetler, I'm sorry, I haven't recorded this
yet, but I have to do my little sponsorship for GTO Forum coding
Elixir with AI or building AI into your Elixir apps.
The Elixir AI Collective discord is your community for both.
Link is in the description below and you can go to agent gito dot
XYZ forward slash discord. And it's an awesome Discord
community that he's trying to build around just using Elixir
and taking basically taking LLMS and agents to the next level
because everything on the beam and the ability to spin up
processes is like the perfect fit.
And he's building all that tool. And so go hang out in that
community if you're getting into this LLM agent stuff, it's
pretty cool. I actually want to play around
with Cheeto. I mean, this whole coaching
session that we're doing, I have it like very well parameterized
and I think it's easy to, yeah, I'm going to play around with
that. You should.
It'd be really awesome. I for like elixir mentor, I've
been doing some recruitment stuff on the side as well and I
built like a really it's ghetto now because I I built it quite a
few months ago before things have progressed, but I basically
have like a bunch of like clawed agents that all have different
skills, right? And it's how I did the like
basically the first sweep through take home projects
because like, I don't want to say this, but like 80% of them
are usually kind of trash and they're not worth my time to
even look at. So this kind of knocks out the
80%. And then I have the 20% that I
manually go through, make notes, comments.
But like so it helps like dwindle down my workload and I
want to kind of rewrite that now using Gito and I think it would
be really cool. I think what's cool about that
like if you're not or if you're cutting 80% of applicants, is
that right with Jido in your LLM, you could actually tell
improvement plans and it could be a part of.
Yeah, and like I can still like, so it does like create like
feedback document like I have generate, I generate PDFs and
stuff. So when it's like complete
trash, I give them like good feedback.
And I feel bad. I shouldn't say complete trash,
but like not not the level of what the companies are hiring
for, right. So like I give them good
feedback and I always verify that it's correct feedback.
But that's not like I feel like with like, like Jido agents,
it's really cool 'cause I can like, like I can have like
documentation specialties. So I can be like, this agent is
just Elixir documentation. This is Phoenix documentation
and whatever it may be. And so I can make sure
everything is written to best practices, you know?
Amazing. But going back to the feedback
to of the candidates, I think one of the constant fears that
people have when learning Elixir is will it have job like
available for me? And I, I don't have that problem
as an entrepreneur because like I'm working in marketing and I'm
doing this side job. So I'm programming like my own
company. But I do see a lot of people in
the Elixir community like trying to make their profile more
attractive to the job market. It's hard.
It's marketing yourself, right? Like it's not the easiest.
Thing. Yeah, like, I don't know what I
I just started a YouTube channel and then a podcast.
There you go. Just do that, guys, and then a
couple of years later it'll pay off.
Exactly, Yeah. I do the slow road for
everything. But the fun Rd. as well, you
know. Yeah.
You got to be a lot missing people as well.
I did, I mean, honestly, this is like my favorite thing to do
because I just get to talk to people doing cool things and I
feel like like I like the I've had like a couple guests now and
I've been I mean, I still have like framework people and like,
you know, people building tools that are really cool.
But I think having like the more entrepreneur mind, come on, is
interesting because I get to pick their brains for like all
my weak points because like like what was the hardest part for
launching prende for you? Like was it was it building the
e-commerce site or was it marketing or was it getting
coffee beans? Like there's so much of doped I.
It's I would say there, there if you, if you look at the value
chain of coffee from where it's produced to when it's kind of
bought at the, at the, at the cup, you have a lot of different
intermediate steps and you can be a part of all those steps.
You can produce coffee, you can be a coffee trader like people
only buy and sells containers of coffee which is a very
lucrative. Commodity trading with coffee
bans. Yeah, yeah.
Like if you want to buy a container, I can ship you a
container. We are in that part of the chain
and we started exploring this industry kind of going deep into
a lot of those different stages. So we, we, we have a physical
cafeteria and the business of having a kind of a cafeteria is
different to the business of selling coffee in the website.
And it's different from selling like coffee to like in B2B to,
to another cafeteria. You need to position your brand
in a different way. Like if I'm selling to in my
cafeteria, I need to bring people in.
So the challenge is different than selling in B2BS because you
need to sell that bulk, you need prices and you need to be kind
of on point when when you're delivering like I'm going to
sell you or I'm going to deliver 2 kilos of coffee every Tuesday,
for example. Do you also, do you have a
physical location for a cafe? We do.
We do and I think that's the the most difficult part of the
business because it it forces us to constantly think about ways
to be a part of the culture of people.
So given my brother and I, we train for Iron Man, we do some
Iron Man's. Oh, not, I used to do that.
I haven't done one since 2012. But yeah, I used to.
I used to be super into marathons and triathlons.
It's amazing. It's amazing.
Like I started swimming a couple of years ago and I I would say
it's one of the most interesting sports.
It's it's hard. It is.
I feel like like if you constantly like once you're in
Iron Man shape, if you can keep the training regiments up it, it
makes it a lot easier. But I got, I got a little burned
out because I was doing like 2A days for I don't even know how
many years, but and then I just stopped.
I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do CrossFit,
mountain biking and rock climbing like.
That's perfect. That's perfect.
Yeah. I mean, we also need change,
yeah. We do.
Yeah, Yeah. It's a lot of fun commitments.
My, my problem, I think I, I don't like Rd. cycling enough
and it kind of like burned me out, but like, and I get it.
I get why people love it, but mountain biking is so much more
fun for me, You know, not hitting trees, you know, it's a
little more exciting. I really like the Viking.
Here in Chile, we have a lot of kind of bike lanes and it's very
cool. Like I come biking to the office
and it's I, I like it as a hobby.
Yeah, that's awesome. And it keeps you in shape,
right? Yeah, exactly.
But So what what I'm saying is the hardest part is not focusing
enough. So we have the cafeteria we need
to bring people in. So we are, for example, meeting
with all the clubs that we know that do triathlon and we start,
I don't know, running in the mountain and then we finish in
the cafeteria on a Saturday. That's awesome.
So you started a run club essentially and it brings people
right to your door. Like we, we affiliate with that
do that. That's awesome.
Yeah, I, I do like, I do kind of miss that.
Like when in my marathon days I would always do, I was part of
like a Saturday run club and we would always end at a cafe that
had amazing food and coffee like.
Exactly. That's the idea.
But that that requires energy,
you know, and energy that if you put that energy over there, then
then you're a little bit more burned to kind of get in the
middle of Saturday evening to start coding.
So I would say I would say the most difficult part to answering
your question is not having focus enough.
Yeah, fair enough. I feel like a big question that
I get asked a lot because I do a lot of things and you're doing a
lot of things, right. You're running a side business,
you have a day job, you have a family.
And I get asked a lot too because I have a lot, you know,
I do elixir mentor. I do kill switch now.
I work for Colex And how do you balance your time?
Like how do you set your priorities and how do you
balance your time? Well-being, very mindful, Like I
learned, I learned in the kind of in the pandemic years that if
you don't have a focus on what you're going to be spending your
time in like the year flies by. Yes, it does.
Even when you are, even if you have a plan, the year flies by.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
But at least at least if you have a plan, you're more more
mindful of kind of the second that's passive.
And I started kind of a journaling book and I remember I
did an exercise of kind of documenting what the year was in
kind of two sentences or one sentence.
Like 28 was this for me and 2012 was this and so on and so forth.
And then I got to 2023 and I was like, what do I want this year
to be for me? And I, I usually struggle to
balance my time because I have a bunch of different hobbies.
I like to play piano and guitar and kind of run and swim and
kind of being with my family. And I like to do barbecues and
kind of drink some wine with my brother and so on and so forth.
And I, I do need to kind of prioritize too.
But one thing that took the anxiety away is that I have some
goals for the year and I can collapse to this is the goal for
this month. And I have goals that are longer
term, like this is the decade where I'm going to be, I don't
know, launching one song that I can sing in piano, for example,
and that takes the outside your way.
I need to be better at writing my goals down.
I so like. I use Obsidian for all, like my
notes and stuff, and I created a daily template that I haven't
started using, but it's more like a bullet like, but I have
that like, I know I want to do it now it's, you know, doing it,
But I, I want, I've been trying to do like a bullet point daily
journal, but like my daily goals, what I accomplished and
just like a quick thing like where I what I want to
accomplish today, what I ended up accomplishing.
And then, you know, just do that daily and then like I like the
like do the year and the month and then have your micro points
to those two. But yeah, it's good to do 'cause
like right now, like I'm pretty good at like I keep everything
up here, which probably isn't the best, but like I'm very like
self motivated. So I'm always moving forward and
I my answer or like when I, if I answered that question for like,
how do I balance my schedule? I just tell people that they're
probably wasting a lot of time because like, even though like
I'm doing a lot, I still have a lot of time to be lazy and like
enjoy myself. So if I even wanted to do more,
I could. So like, like after, you know,
after my day job every day, I, I'm working a couple hours every
evening on my projects, you know, and you have to just like
don't waste your time watching, binge watching Netflix.
Like look at all the things you waste your time doing and just
stop doing those and be productive.
Yeah, well, my wife did a training in something called the
Flow Research Collective and it's a very cool company that
teaches people how to go into flow.
And I remember one of the the kind of challenges was remove
the blockers like turn off your notifications in your phone like
my. Phone does not do any
notifications. Like I look at it enough, I'll
see the batch and I can answer it when I have time, you know?
Any like when I watch the phone and I have some notification
popping up like I get like suck into it and then.
Yeah, it's very disappointing. Half an hour passed by Super
Super and. I'll find myself just like
opening Instagram or X and I'm like, no, I gotta stop because
if I do that, I'm going to be in it for 30 minutes.
So you're like close it, close it.
I open it and close it because it's like like why am I doing
this to myself? Yeah.
So if, but if you look at the time and you say I'm going to be
active like for half an hour on, I don't know, LinkedIn, which is
the social media that I use for doing marketing stuff, Yeah,
it's easier. You do that for prende LinkedIn.
No, I do it like for so the advertising technology kind of
it's a very subject matter expert type of job and there was
with the GDPR kind of do you remember the Cambridge Analytica
scandal where Facebook there was a, a company called Cambridge
Analytica that kind of harvested out a, a lot of data that
Facebook provided. Oh yeah, I do remember that,
Yeah. Yeah.
And then they did it for political targeting.
That was kind of the stone that started kind of rolling down and
created a snowball. And then GDPR happened and
companies like Google, Facebook and the big companies that kind
of supports the advertising world removed some identifiers
that were stored in a cookie. You know, and for years like
2020 to 20, early 2025, Google said that they were removing the
cookies like from Google Chrome, the advertising cookies.
And in March last year, they say, well, like we're not going.
To take it into our profits too much.
Exactly. Yeah.
So it, I would say it has taken, taken a lot of turns and for a
marketer today, it's, it's very hard to know if you're targeting
your intended audience because like, I don't know, Safari
doesn't use cookies, Firefox doesn't use advertising cookies
and Opera and Brave and there's a bunch of different browsers
that they don't use advertising cookies.
So if your target audience is using one of those phones,
you're maybe not engaging with them with your ads.
It's a very specific thing. It's kind of don't waste your
advertising budget type of thing.
And I like to keep, like, be active on it because it's, you
know, my day-to-day job. Yeah, that makes sense.
What's your go to advertising styles for La Prende?
Well, we do a lot of Instagram and.
Paid ads or just post in. Paid ads, no, I don't have any
posting, but it doesn't hurt to kind of be in front of more
people. We haven't really exploded the
marketing budget yet. We are kind of in the process of
understanding what's easy for us to produce in terms of content
and we are learning that before scaling it up.
Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like making the media is
the hard part, the content creation.
Well, it's so the because of this technology changes, there
are constant changes in the in how the platform decides where
to show your ad and who to show your ad to.
And right now the the big companies are prioritizing like
the variety of content. So if I want to launch a
subscription, I'm going to have a video like speaking to the
camera and saying, hey, we're launching subscriptions and you
know, now you can pick your roaster and you're going to have
new kind of beans every month and whatever.
But then I have another one. Oh no, go ahead and finish.
Sorry, no, go ahead. I have it in.
I was. Going to say, I'm curious, do
you find that like the editing quality matters or is like
turning the camera on and doing a selfie video talking about a
product good? You need variety, you need
variety, you need to have low quality videos, and you need to
have high quality videos. Interesting.
And and then you need to see which one of them kind of took
off. And it's good that you can kind
of copy a lot of things that others have already done and
kind of, you know, it's working like you have food a bunch of
different ways to kind of perfect it.
But in I so I started a TikTok channel like myself.
I bought a gaming computer that I have for like the, it's the
server of the company where we store all the media and I used
proc smokes and I started kind of creating containers and
networking and things like that. Super cool.
And I started kind of recording it TikTok and it took off and
it's, it has a lot more views than what I'm doing with the
coffee. So that's what I'm saying, yeah,
variety, you know, you need to have like create content until
you see something hits and kind of use it to your advantage.
Yeah, that's the hard part is I don't want to do any of that and
I know I have. To well, but you can outsource
it. I mean, if you're if you're good
enough recording and you have kind of in similar to this lady
that kind of did the video, you have some kind of people that
are more I don't know. We have a member in the team
that she's 25 years old and she's like native on this thing.
I'm 38. So I feel like even though we
are close in age, we have a gap and it's.
No, there's a big difference between that.
Well, like 10 years, you know, like, just like when we grew up,
when we grew up, say I'm older than you, so don't feel, don't
feel bad. You're young.
Yeah. But it's just like the like the
culture we grew up in is very different 10 years apart, you
know, like our childhood cartoons versus like 25 year old
childhood cartoons are very different things.
Absolutely. And that that's why, for
example, I have like, what brings me energy and joy is to
play around with the server, right?
I, I don't get a lot of energy like creating a video for social
media, but I can record myself and I give it to her and she,
that's all the hard work. So I was having a team that you
can leverage and lean on. It's a fundamental curse.
Yeah, yeah, I'm fine with like just recording.
Maybe that's what I need to do. Just I just need my editor and a
social media expert. Exactly, Yeah.
Maybe both? Like one person that does all of
that would be ideal, right? Well, and I have to our previous
video conversation and similar to your thing about kind of the
job postings where you filter out and connect with and
everything. I have already like 10 different
like agents created that I like. I'm still not in the automation
part. When I have like when I need to
write a brief for them, I start writing down what I have in my
mind and I copy one of the agents and say kind of and act
as this agent and this is your role and this is your input and
your output. And then I get something that I
kind of share more easily and it's well structured.
And I have some for creating social media video and another
for understanding like the culture of some topic and it's
kind of so on and so forth. Nice.
OK. When, like you're saying, create
a social media video, is it more like a description of what the
video should be or are you actually editing video?
No actually creating the script of the video.
OK, gotcha. Yeah, nice.
Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that.
Yeah, it's a guideline. I mean, you can have because
like I can create a subscription like myself just talking to the
video like. So it's organic enough.
But if you have a previous thought about it and you created
a script, it's easier to kind of keep to the content that you
want to produce. Yeah, it's very easy to ramble.
As everyone that watches this podcast knows.
I always, always go down rambling rabbit holes with my
guests. Yeah, but in that conversation,
it's fun, you know, if you're watching it now and rambling.
The net, yeah, back to just time, right?
Time is our most valuable asset. When do you decide that you're
writing a new feature on your e-commerce, implementing
something or focusing on content creation or marketing?
Like what? What drives that?
And then what does your brother, your partner do?
Does he fill in any gaps there with marketing and content?
Yeah, he's full time working on. So we we are a family business.
One of the companies that we have is spending Cafe, the other
companies called Colabot, whichever at this offices.
And he given that that he's a lawyer, he is the CEO and he
offers legal services. And the kind of what what the
company does is they take companies for example in Brazil
that wants to expand and through his legal services and business
services, he offers kind of the expansion and growth.
And so he's the CEO and kind of Brende Cafe is one of the
companies that are the how to say it, the way to show that the
methodology works, you know? Yeah, yeah, I like.
That it's like, it's like part of your best portfolio, you know
it's. Like proven, you're walking the
walk with your own company using the.
Same. There you go.
I like it. So he's the CEO and we have a
bunch of team members. We have two at least your
developers as well. So my involvement in it is more
like architectural, I would say. Like I go into GitHub and I
create like the issues. And more often than not, my
brother is the one saying, hey, we need to launch this and that
and he's kind of overseeing the business as a whole.
And so we prioritize with the 2 developers like what to build
and then they are proficient enough and autonomous enough to
actually do the work. That's great.
You're keep you have enough work to keep keep 2 developers busy.
Yeah, Yeah, that's awesome. Very cool.
Yeah, because because they they work with my brother in
collabor. So like I'm helping them focus
on what we need to build on Prende and whenever we they are
out of time because they're focusing on collabor, I kind of
go in the night. You fill in the gaps a little
bit. It's it's what it like so.
Yeah, what's what's your end goal?
Is your end goal to do like that the prende and that stuff full
time or do you like having having?
The. I don't think so.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think so.
I think I think I really like the coffee business.
It fills me with energy and. But if I have.
Literally, it fills you with energy, right?
Exactly. But if I if I kind of think
about 3 or 4 years ahead, what I really like is Elixir.
So after this kind of first check that I have in my life
like I have a business in Elixir, I want to Start learning
nerves and it would be amazing to create the first like coffee
machine. Like in nerves, like, I don't
know enough. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't have electronics, but this is the year that I'm gonna
learn electronics. There you go.
I have a cool little like fully automatic espresso machine and
it's the best thing I've ever bought, you know?
And it's not powered by Alicia. Not yet, no.
Not yet. Yeah.
I'm waiting for your for you to build 1 for me.
So that would be like a long term type of thing.
I would like to kind of. That's cool.
There is something cool about the like IoT, the physical end
of products with programming. I do miss that.
Like in a different life I did a lot of manufacturing automation
and bringing it to like a microcontroller level would be a
lot of fun. Amazing.
Yeah, we have a like a in the cafeteria.
In a couple of weeks, we're going to have an event where
Camilo the the the CL Celauser. I forgot this Nick.
YTCL Source. I think so, yeah.
CL Source. So he is a professor in a
university and he teaches electronics.
And Elixir is one of the few universities in Chile that
teaches Elixir. So kudos to him.
And he created a blueprint for creating like, a little
gladiator. Like, you buy a car and you put
inside like some servos and you start kind of poking the balloon
of the other car. And we're going to have a fight
in the cafeteria in a couple of weeks.
That's awesome. I love that it's.
Like I'm giving my clothes in the IoT portal.
It's like what what do I don't know.
I don't know if this was just AUS thing but do you ever
remember battle bots? BattleBots.
No. Oh my gosh I think it still
exists but I don't like watch TV really anymore.
It was the coolest show. These guys would just build
robotics that are made to destroy each other and so like
whichever one was left standing and moving would win the fight.
And it. Was it was so cool?
Yeah. Like they'll have like spinning
saw blades and things and like crazy shit and just tear tear
the other robot apart. Amazing.
Yeah, this is the I would say 3 levels down or 10 levels down,
but. But you're getting there.
You're gonna have to it'll you'll have to step it up
eventually, but that's still cool.
Like pop, pop in the balloon and controlling the car.
I love, I love that. And we were just discussing a
couple of days ago how Atom VM can be compiled in an ESP 32.
And you know, you can use Elixir in ESP, so yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, that is really cool. Yeah.
You got your own. Yeah, fully embedded Beam VM.
Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.
So I would say that's that's the goal, keep learning, continue
kind of understanding all the things that Elixir can provide.
I would love to kind of dip my toes as well in, in AI and ML
with Jido or like orchestrating or even GO-1 level deeper like
using Bumble D and kind of creating a local model.
And I would say it's a for me, it's still a year of exploration
and kind of getting a better grasp of what the language can
provide for me as a business. Yeah, for sure, Yeah.
My goal is to get a little more involved with actually writing,
like, agent code and using Jido, but I have a long ways to go to
learn. But I feel like there's like so
much potential there and like just seeing what people are
doing already in the Elixir community is so impressive.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I, I saw that like last
week, there's a library called Rufus.
And what it does is it helps you run Cloud code in a loop.
And some people are kind of creating a specification and
getting the thing running at night and next day they have an
MP. Is that the the wealth, the
Ralph Wiggum? Is that what you mean?
Or is it just another? One I know, maybe that's the
one. Yeah, yeah.
And I I saw like, I haven't really dug into this, but I know
like, MM Hostetler's got a big project called like wreck it and
it, it looks fascinating. I need to make time.
I need this is the problem with time, guys.
You got to just, I don't know, like my focus has just been my
day job and then getting kill switch out the door at night.
So one thing at a time I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you're launching this week then?
Yeah, I'm going to launch on Wednesday, so January 28th.
Amazing. I know I got, I got a lot to do
before then, but I got to just pull the trigger.
Otherwise I'll just like, stay in beta testing forever, you
know? Exactly, exactly.
And you have a like a queue list of people who are kind of
joining already. Yeah.
So like I have let me pull up my my numbers.
I forget right now I think I have like 18 users, which is
pretty cool. 18 beta test users. Where's my dashboard?
Yeah, I have 18 -, 1 'cause I'm one of them.
So 17 beta users. OK, amazing.
Yeah. Yeah, but like, honestly, I've
had a lot of awesome feedback. People don't really give you
feedback the way you would expect them to, right?
Like, because it's not their baby.
But like, I have a handful of beta users that have been like,
amazing. So I'm very grateful for them.
That's cool, that's cool. So I think it's cool.
Everything seems really stable and everything's working.
So it's it's, it's, it's ready to go.
And what are you using to automate?
Like sending the emails if somebody doesn't like log in.
Inside scheduled Oban Oban jobs. Yeah, yeah.
And at first, like, at first I was and then like talking to
other people about what I was doing, at first I was running
like workers that would just, you know, query my database
every 15 minutes and if it was with it, if it was expired, it
would launch, you know, notifications or whatever.
And then talking to other engineers, I was like, yeah,
there's definitely like you could hit a point of not being
able to get through your batches within your 15 minute window.
So it's not consistent. And then, you know, you could
have a kill switch trigger or a deadman switch trigger and it
might be 15 minutes late. So nothing was like super
precise. So I didn't like that.
And then I ended up just doing OO band jobs, scheduled O band
jobs. So now like when you check in,
it just reschedules them all and cancels the old one.
And I think it's a pretty solid, solid system.
Cool, I haven't tried that one yet.
I haven't had oh. Dude I love it, it's such a good
library. Cool.
Yeah, it's so. Easy.
Like yeah, I highly recommend it.
Go use it. I have it on my on my kind of
bucket of things to do. Yeah, move that one to the top.
It's pretty good. You'll.
Love it. OK.
Yeah, I'll take it. Because it just like if you have
any Genservers or processes, just if you have to code in your
own like retry solutions and like how to like handle failures
and things, it's just like already there.
Like they did all the hard work, you know?
That's cool, yeah. I think I can use that.
I think I can use that with the kind of the payment subscription
because somebody can unsubscribe in the in the kind of in their
account in Mercado barrel like the equivalent of Stripe.
And even though I have a webhook, sometimes the webhook
does not connect, not sure why. And I don't get the update.
So what I'm doing right now is I'm querying like that API on a
daily basis and identifying kind of the status.
So you're like truing up data once a day?
Yeah. Yeah, use O band dude.
OK. And you'll just have a daily
worker and you like set it up like a Cron job and it just
goes. And then you can look at their,
they have an awesome dashboard. You can see if jobs are
completing, failing, scheduled. It's amazing.
That's cool. That's cool.
Yeah. Now you gave me work for my
Saturday. Yeah, you're welcome.
Just in case you didn't have anything to do.
Exactly. Exactly.
But yeah, I need, yeah, I don't really have a good like
marketing launch idea. I'm going to do product hunt.
I'm going to do that and I'm going to hit my e-mail list and
then all my social media. But I haven't gone down the
route of paid ads or anything. And maybe I should.
I don't know. What's your opinion there?
Yeah. I, I, I, I don't start with paid
media, especially if you're not kind of depending on this to
kind of be your first income. Yeah, it's definitely, you know,
my side hustle, you know, So, yeah.
It's a huge. Priority to make it money.
And I would say I, I always try to push people to leverage their
assets. Like you have a very strong
YouTube channel and perhaps creating a like in this podcast
that you're doing right now or is kind of kind of getting to
know the community of Elixir. And I'm very grateful to be a
part of, of this chapter. So thanks for the invitation.
I I am so thankful you came. I love all all my guests willing
to come chat with me. Yeah.
And you could have another like that are 10 minute chapters
where you interview people who are actively using kill switch
to get to know why there is a kill switch.
And for example, if I was a part of that, I would tell you that
my main goal would be to kind of have a way to get the data to my
wife and kids faster than what a will could do.
I mean I will need to do it as well, but this is faster and I
well. But you can also, you can have
the digital version of your will just automatically get
delivered, right? They're not required.
Like. What if they don't know?
Like what if you store everything in like a a safe or
something and I'm sure your wife would have the combo but for
whatever reason she doesn't. You can still get her the combo
then with kill switch, right? Yeah, I saw an interesting
thing. So someone actually, so I
announced my launch date on X yesterday and some like, I
didn't even know this, but apparently there's a Chinese app
that's like called are you alive?
And it's like for elderly people and it like and it's essentially
the same concept. So it's really cool seeing the
proof of concept in the product fit.
And apparently it was like the most paid app from the App Store
the last month. No way.
So that's wild, right? So I didn't know that and now
I'm like extra excited. I'm like, well, I have this
awesome idea that, you know, is great.
And then he also, so he was a crypto person, a crypto guy.
And a lot of people, I guess store like their seed phrases
and things in what do you call the banking, the bank lock
boxes. The wallet, yeah.
Yeah, like physical locations, like a bank lock box.
And apparently banks are starting to just close down
their lock box division and they're making people come and
collect all their crap. And I'm just like, what?
Like, that's wild. Like, I don't know what the idea
is behind there because you still have like, physical things
you want to keep locked up. And so there we go.
So there's another use case there.
People can put all their seed phrases and crypto info.
Yeah, like the. Storage on kill switch.
Yeah, exactly. And then you can have a secure
note that explains how to use everything for someone that
might not be familiar with crypto.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing.
I mean you you have several use cases that you can do.
See, that's the thing, I there's so many like it's everyone
should use it. But that's why it's interesting
like as a marketing asset to leverage that and to interview
people. Like yeah, I do like that.
Yeah. Maybe I should start as Kill
Switch YouTube channel and just have shorts of asking people how
they use it. There you go, there you go.
And if some of those take off, then you can put paid ads behind
that. OK.
Do you think it's better to make like organic content like that
and then just promote that kind of stuff?
Yes, just because it gets your feet going on, you know, it gets
a ball rolling. Like I would say from the the
kind of when I talk to entrepreneurs that they don't
lime or they don't have a marketing department or they
don't know about marketing enough.
I would say it's, it's interesting when they get the
click of Hey, I can actually do this, like I can document stuff
within my week, things that maybe are not so interesting for
them, but it's some it's interesting for somebody like I
have a very good friend that has a, they have a business for over
12 years going on. It's called Manglad.
They are in the hardware space. They are makers and they, they
from their point of view, they suck at marketing.
But what I'm trying to help them to understand is that they don't
suck at marketing. They just don't have the right
process to kind of get on a Monday to Friday recording
enough stuff that can get the ball rolling and organically
that and but right, try new things, try different things.
The thing that like always like is daunting to me is having a
TikTok account, an Instagram account, a YouTube account, an X
account. Like do I should I be making all
those accounts just for kill switch?
It depends on your favorite audience, right?
It depends where your target audience is spending money.
So if you're targeting older people, I would advise to kind
of talk to a local newspaper or or perhaps go and kind of speak
at some radio events or. I think older people might be
hard just because technology, right?
But like, I think, you know, 50s and lower cause like those
people could be more like crypto enthusiasts and they, they see
the need. So like, I don't know, like.
Facebook, but maybe? Boomers and then.
But maybe it's targeting like my mother, you know, my mother is
like 63 years old and her mother is alive, my grandma.
And maybe she wants to monitor if she's alive, you know, And
maybe the kill switch needs to be also a physical thing, a
button that they can click and it syncs something, you know?
Yeah, now see now I need a nerves project just for this.
Exactly. Yeah.
Oh man, One thing that's really cool that I got from a beta
tester, shout out to Ryan out there at first, like I was like,
you know, text message and e-mail, like hey, check in and
it was a link, but it was taking you to the physical kill switch.
So if you weren't logged in, you had to log in again.
And so it's like it turned into a multi step, you know, thing
that should be a lot easier. And I didn't realize that
because like testing, I'm always logged in and I was like, oh,
this isn't bad, you know, 2 clicks and I'm done.
But what I ended up doing because Ryan was like, it needs
to be easier. Like you should just send an
authenticated link. And so now I send an
authenticated link that can only reset the switch and it just
tells you it's reset but nothing else.
So if you want to like go into the app, you still have to log
in, but you can just click that link and it automatically resets
it now in one action. No way that's missing.
So you encapsulate the the authentication logging.
Yeah. So I basically I create an like
an authentication token in the URL, but it can only reset that
specific switch, yeah. How cool is that?
It's cool, yeah. Yeah.
And then I, I actually rolled out my own because it, like
having a bearer token in a URL is incredibly long.
So I actually rolled out my own link shortening.
Really. So I make my own link shortening
feature and what's really cool is you can reuse the same link
for that switch every time so it gets updated with like a new
bearer token that's not expired because I expired in 15 minutes.
But the link is. Safe.
The link will always work because it'll get a new token.
OK OK, awesome. So fun things like that, you
know? Yeah, so people can have a
shortcut in their phone like and click that.
Yeah, exactly. Like if you have one switch that
you just want to make sure you're always checking into, you
can bookmark it or, you know, add the shortcut to your home
screen and just go into that link.
It'll reset. OK.
Yeah. Do you plan to launch an app as
well or it's only a web app at the moment?
I, I'm on it's, it's so it's, it's very like mobile
responsive. So I don't have a reason to
build an app yet. But maybe at some point I've,
it's been on the, it's been in the back of my mind.
But I don't know, 'cause I've thought like, and the same guy
that gave me the feedback for making the one link check in
like he heard me talk about on my podcast, like eventually it'd
be cool to make it a full password manager and then just
using the password manager keeps you checked in.
But he's like, he's like, I think that like is so out of
scope and it's really hard to make a password manager that
works well. You shouldn't do that.
And like, I kind of agree with that feedback.
So it just depends what I want to turn this into.
And I kind of like, I like the fact that it's like you set it
up once and you keep it updated like you like every six months
or a year. And then you don't have to log
back into my app, you know, you just check in from the links.
So like my goal is you don't have to be in my app all the
time. You literally just have to check
in from a text message and you're done.
So it's like, not even. You don't have to think about
it. That's amazing.
Yeah, so I'm building an app that I don't want people to use.
Like it's like the opposite of social media.
Like I don't want people always in there doing shit.
Just. Well, just perhaps that perhaps
a social component will follow naturally.
I mean, maybe they start getting people that are want to have
this for their parents. Maybe they want to have some way
of, I don't know, saying a message to them every day?
One thing I need to do is I need to get this, I need to get this
in the hand of like intentionally older people, I
think, and see if it's as easy to use as I think it is.
I guess that would be, that'd be the true test, right?
Like, because like my goal is like with UX, I don't want to
make documentation how to do everything that's annoying.
Like if you don't, if you can't log in and just kind of like
intuitively understand what to do.
I feel like I did it wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's hard.
That's hard. Yeah, it is.
And I think I did it, but I also, I built it.
So of course I think I did it. They're biased, yeah.
Yeah. I'll, I'll get it.
I'm gonna try it and I'm gonna send you my my.
Yeah, sign up for beta and I'll get you added.
And then I'm launching in less than a week, so that'll be
exciting. Amazing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you excited?
Yeah, I'm excited and nervous, you know?
Yeah, I can. I always have the fear it's just
going to blow up but like that in a good way, like in A and I
crashed my own server way but I don't think it'll.
I so for me it's interesting because I don't use a password
manager. I'm not sure why I've I've never
tried to use a password manager and I use different passwords
for every like app that I use. You need a password manager?
Come on man. I know I have a logic to create
passwords and kind of, I use a combination of a bunch of
different things. So they're long enough to not be
breakable. But like, I cannot kind of give
the framework to my wife and and trust that she's going to
remember, you know. Yeah, so I mean, if you don't
use a password manager, which I think you should, I use one
password. It's amazing.
I've also heard good things like about bit Warden and things like
that, but it's definitely like, I don't know any of my
passwords, they're just random. Amazing.
Completely the opposite. Yeah, but I do have a, a kill
switch already set up for full recovery of my 1 password
account that goes out so and I also so like since since kill
switch is a zero knowledge thing, it has to be password
authenticated, right? Because I, I can't decrypt
anyone's files. It's impossible for me.
So I have recovery codes that are generated now and those you
have to save. But so I downloaded them as APDF
and then I have that dead man switch trigger before my other
ones to other people trigger just in case I lose access to my
own account. It'll send my recovery codes to
me and then I can recover my own kill switch account.
OK, OK, I didn't. Think about that.
So it's a kind of a how do you say it?
It's a layer of protection before.
Kind of before my other kill switches, like most my kill
switches are like 30 days, right?
And then my my kill switch one for my own recovery codes is
like 15 days. So I get it early.
And how? Like what were you doing when
you said I need to build a kill switch up?
Dude honestly. So this has been a an idea of
mine for probably 10 years and. When you are doing triathlon and
stuff. Yeah, yeah, dude, yeah.
Running. You come up with the.
Most. Most.
Ideas, right? And also the busier you are, the
better ideas that come into your head.
It's it's a horrible thing because then you just want to do
everything and you have to be like, no, I can't focus.
But yeah, it kind of was just an idea forever.
And I was like, yeah, that'd be cool, but I don't have time.
So I just like, put it off, put it off.
And then something reignited the idea in one of my meetings.
And I was like, oh, dude, I used to have this idea where you
could just like, you know, store encrypted documents.
And then if you don't check in, you have your own kill man, your
own dead man switch. And then I was like, I need to
build this. And now that I know Elixir, like
the patterns just made more sense.
Like it's way easier to schedule the triggers and the
notifications. And I just like had the whole
architected plan in my head already.
So I was like, all right, I'm going to build there you.
Go, there you go. I had the same thing with the
coffee. So I said I'm not going to do
any Shopify which I regret sometimes but it's fun.
It is fun and like and you get to work in Elixir.
Otherwise, what are you going to do with Shopify?
Like right in Liquid or whatever the hell their language is like?
I don't know. I haven't even.
I was overseeing. I didn't write this code and I'm
glad I didn't. But before like a couple, like a
couple years ago now, I was running a consultancy and we had
to build a Shopify app and luckily my partner took it on
and learned Liquid and all that crap.
But I have no interest. It is a cool, it's a cool
platform. I'm not knocking on it.
It's just like I don't want to do it.
No, I have. I have a friend that she creates
like this very lovely baked stuff and cakes and whatever.
And she builds her site in Chubby Fight.
And the guy that created the the the account for her downloaded a
bunch of apps that were not connected between each other.
And so you need to put your kind of address to see if you had
like a delivery close enough to the store when you saw the
product, when you added the product to a shopping cart, when
you were paying, you needed to input the thing three times and
it was a nightmare. No.
And I was like, dump this thing, like kill it and do something in
the midst here. For real.
And like if you guys, if Stripe is where you live too, it just
makes e-commerce and any SAS products so easy.
Like I don't have to think about finances and that's the most
critical part, right? You can't.
You can't mess that up. That's cool.
That's cool, yeah. Payment processing is a
difficult problem to solve. Yeah.
And it was easy for me as well. Like given that it has this MCP
thing, it I say it was like a week of work kind of going at
home and kind of connecting these.
But when it was connected like I didn't need to think about it.
I'm curious, have you used Tidewave at all since you?
Haven't I haven't used Tidewave. No, it will blow your mind like
the browser version. You can literally click on like
components and divisions and be like I don't like this or it's
not working right and it will fix it.
Amazing. I started.
So I I did try it, but I tried it, I don't know, four months
ago when they only had like cloud code integration with the
API. So you need to buy token.
Now, now you can use like the Max plan and stuff.
So it's like, it's so awesome, yeah.
I need to try it out but I haven't had the time to
prioritize that. But that's going to be like.
It's worth it because you know, actually get Tidewave
implemented into your project and then add Oban and it'll do
it for you for the most part. No way.
OK. Yeah, that's even better.
Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's mind blowing how
well it works. It's I like, I mean like I'll I
review all my code but I'm like rarely correcting it.
At this point, it's pretty good. That's amazing.
Like the developer tuning of LHC was one of the things that.
Kind of. Was fundamental for me deciding
to go into this thing. Yeah, and for whatever reason,
LLMS love elixir and no one really knows why.
Yeah, yeah. It's like I had a boss in the
kind of when I was working in the agency, and he always said
that the kind of the suits, the suitcases were invented in kind
of the old Egypt and the wheels were invented as well.
Kind of very old back in the day.
But humans put wheels on suitcases like in 1970
something, you know. Yeah, I feel that's, that's
what's happening with LLM and how Alicia was like the
philosophy of Alicia, it took off right.
It it had a very strong architectural way of doing kind
of the ecosystem. And I love how it works.
I remember 10 years ago when I was building things in in PHP
and I wanted to learn React and kind of every month or so you
had a new framework coming up and the.
JavaScript world is so difficult to keep up with.
Yeah, and you're almost forced to because of like security
vulnerabilities as well. I know.
I know the React thing, yeah. Oh yeah.
Reacted and what happened? I I think it's similar with the
lexer. Like it's difficult to keep up,
but it's because it keeps opening new fields for you.
So if you learned Phoenix and now you have like but will be
like, you can put AIML in in your project, but you need to
learn it first and then nerves and then so on and so forth.
So I think it's a different kind of learning curve that you have,
which I like. Yeah, no, it's pretty cool.
All right, I think we can wrap this up.
We've been going for a while. Do you have any words of wisdom
for people that want to build a SAS side project or something
and and aren't doing it? I would say just launch it.
And what there's there's the the, the cost of inaction.
Sometimes it's bigger than the cost of action.
Now that we have, Yeah, now that you said, like I.
Know there's a lot of haters out there with LLM.
So many people claim that they don't, they don't work well.
I haven't experienced that and a lot of a lot of developers that
have been in this game longer than me 20-30 years are seeing
the light too. And I think it's opening the
doors for like single team entrepreneurs to be almost
everything you need to be at a certain scale, right?
Like if you're building a bunch of micro SAS products, like it
opens a lot of doors for, you know, A1 to three person team
and you can do a lot exactly and outsource.
Whatever you need. Like, yeah, that's smart as
well. I don't if if you're, if you're
feel good and it gives you energy to sit down in a computer
and do coding, just do coding, right.
And if you're not kind of if you're, if it takes energy from
you create videos and content in the marketing stuff.
There's a bunch of people that are super qualified.
It's getting cheaper like because there's a bunch of
people like getting into the field, trying to be more
entrepreneurs themselves and getting outside business out of
it. So I think it's just get the
ball rolling. That's it.
Yeah, man, I love that. I agree.
All right, guys. Well, thanks for everyone that
tuned in. I hope you guys have a good
weekend. And Enrique, thank you so much
for joining me. This was a lot of fun.
It was awesome meeting you. Thanks for having me man, super
fun.