00:00:07 Sheri I love the idea of prompting and helping people kind of get there and formulate. I don't want it to be written by AI.

00:00:17 Bert You can do it with an algorithm without using AI.

00:00:21 Sheri So I just want it to still come off very authentic to the person contributing versus being very crafted with the help of AI.

00:00:32 Bert I 100% understand because my wife wanted to murder me for using AI. She thought I was using AI to write a Santa's note, but I wasn't. I was using AI to write the HTML document that would hold the Santa's note. So I said, this is the content, and this is how I want it. And then it did it, and then she's like... grudgingly accepted it. Yeah, but she was really mad at me. Like really mad at me. Like tears in the eyes, man.

00:01:07 Bert And I get that. So I think that especially with something like this, sensitivity would be in order because I think people that are buying your product—if they say "oh it has an AI helper"—but people that are using it are probably smart enough to know.

00:01:28 Sheri That if they can't figure it out exactly. So a couple of questions, and it's really more about Phase 1, Phase 2.

00:01:38 Bert I'm trying to think of how I would do that with just straight up algorithm. I think that I can give you the series of questions I would ask and then I would format it and say, this is what you said, and this is how we recommend you write it.

00:02:04 Sheri Yeah. So you know how Grammarly does, where it doesn't rewrite and give you an entirely new paragraph—it says, you know, "this sentence structure sounds a little bit better," or "maybe here's a synonym for the word you used that would make it better." It gives you a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of guidance without completely redoing everything that you've given.

00:02:26 Bert We could do AI for that on an API call. Can AI do that? Yeah. Yeah, because it does for Grammarly.

00:02:33 Sheri I mean, that's essentially just a version of it, yeah.

00:02:36 Bert So I think, first off, incredibly valid. You're right, flat out. The way that I would probably position that is: we do use AI, it's assistive, not replacement. We help. This is hard. You know, we're doing something hard. We're trying to craft a memory, and most people are very poor at this, and this is the reason that they don't write letters. It's the reason that they don't send notes, because they haven't practiced it. They've never developed the skill.

00:03:17 Bert So what we do is we have evaluated and found best practices. We ask you a couple of questions about them—we're trying to find out how you know them, how you're related to them, and pull a memory from them—and then allow them to write the memory. And then we can run it through something similar to how Grammarly does it, and say "maybe tighten this up," and that would be all. And I'll give you my best try at that.

00:03:50 Bert And then we dial it up or dial it down. So, it can be full-on fabricated crap, or it can be just like, "you should probably not tell them about Uncle Earl."

00:04:08 Sheri So, the other thing—a question about the difference between basic PDF core and print-on-demand integration. Tell me more about print-on-demand integration. I think I know what you mean, but I'm not sure I do.

00:04:22 Bert So, print-on-demand—we would actually go and find a company. There's a couple of them out there that you can choose, and we would send them a formatted output, and then they would print it in whatever format we want, and then it would literally ship to them. A PDF would be a digital format. We would pre-format it to not look like crap.

00:04:43 Sheri Yeah.

00:04:44 Bert Frankly, PDFs are a pain.

00:04:46 Sheri Yes.

00:04:48 Bert I'm sure you've dealt with that a lot.

00:04:51 Sheri They're one of the many banes of my existence, yeah.

00:04:55 Bert It's a little easier with AI now, but holy crap, PDFs are hard. I've spent two hours today screwing with something, putting it away, and I didn't want it to. And then I'm trying to change it to the point where I'm writing custom HTML, and it's like, "okay, it looks like this, now print it."

00:05:14 Sheri To try to make it look that way.

00:05:15 Bert Because that's what we're going to want to do. So it needs to, for you, it needs to look and present a certain way. I think that where it's going to be useful and powerful is that you can have a digital thing so family and friends—or the person if they're still alive—can look at it themselves on either a computer, or a tablet or a phone.

00:05:39 Bert And that's easy, because that's just a web page. When we go to a PDF, that's more of like, "do you want to print it yourself?" And if you want to print it yourself or save it digitally yourself, that's a little harder because we have to make sure that it renders well and then the page breaks all work and everything looks good. And to solve that we're going to have to basically do the same thing as if we send it to one of these companies who's going to then do that.

00:06:11 Bert So the only thing that is unknown for me is what sort of requirements they have for the file that we send to them, how it gets to them.

00:06:24 Tray In dealing with Nehemiah—because he wanted to do a print thing, he did the same thing already because he wants to sell his photography prints—and so it turns out that they are, in general, flexible with what they receive. Because it's their business to be. It's their business to have a flexible big funnel. So you can give them what's best for you, and they will make it work. They know how to do that. This is their job to do that because they want the business.

00:07:01 Bert What I would probably do is I would look—I'll help you—but we'll figure out which ones you like. I think have the best terms and prices and quality, because at that point you're trying to make sure this is a high enough quality thing that'll work.

I know a guy that does incredibly inexpensive book binding up in—I met him in Brookings, South Dakota, for whatever reason. Alyssa Schaffner, her wedding book, her welcome book, I got her that from him, and it was—I charged her like $35, which is stupid, because it's leather bound, beautiful book for her. So she got two of them.

But what we can do is, I think you do the normal binding, and then if you want to go extra, you could probably ship that to someone like that. I need to talk to the guy again, it's been a while since I've talked to him. But if we could find someone that was interested in doing the ultra premium, you could probably sell those for two or three hundred dollars. Because think about that—a leather bound book.

00:08:33 Tray I agree with that. As you're saying that—it's not how much do you want it, but how much value do they derive from it. When you start getting into that, there's a high value derived. Because it's a coffee table book. A couple hundred dollars can be fine. You reduce the amount of people willing to pay because there's always a supply and demand. But there is a point on it where it fits well. And that is not out of the realm—I don't hear that and go, "that's too much." I hear that and go, "someone will buy it, the question is how many." But we have multiple price points. So that's an awesome idea. That's really good.

00:09:12 Bert Because I think that one of the things that we can do with your initial run is we figure out, okay, how many. So with the printing, we can figure out the format that we're going to feed. Well, first off, we have to trace out the funnel. Okay, how's the stuff? How are we going to format it? What's it going to look like?

With that stuff, I can work. It's up to you to figure out how should this present. Because the guts will be run on probably Supabase or—you don't need to know the technical terms on it—but basically it's a database. You'll have the ability to log in, they'll have people to log in, they'll be able to send out an invitation. Cross-path so the security will be baked in and the role level security be baked in.

Because basically what you're going to do for each and every one of them is create—I would call it an organization, but it's not technically an organization. At the very top level, this is the super admin. And then for each of the people that buys from you, they'll have their own—this is the book.

00:10:22 Bert And you could have one person that owns multiple books, and they would be able to sign into multiple books. But then they would send out the link that allows other individuals to go in and enter into the book. And the question that you're going to have to decide is, do you want to allow them to see what other people have put in the book or not?

And you can frankly make it where the admin for that particular book can see everything that's in the book, and they can decide whether the people that are submitting at the time can see other stuff or not. So it's a decision that needs to be made.

00:11:04 Sheri Yeah, I want it to be the admin's decision to make those kind of decisions, right? Perfect idea. They own that thing now, and so it's on them to say, "do you want other people to see it?" And even like, you know, level of editing. Like, if they see somebody's told a story that might be a little bit questionable—because maybe it's somebody who doesn't have very good situational awareness—do they then have the ability to go in and take out a questionable sentence, or say to that person, "hey, I want to include this, but can't include this piece of it."

00:11:43 Bert What I would probably put in there is an editorial process. And say, before it gets accepted—where they can send back for revisions.

00:11:55 Sheri It's their ownership of what goes in and what the output is. So if they want Uncle Steve's slightly misogynistic, racist story in there, then that is on the admin. On the commentator, I love it.

00:12:11 Tray Freaking Uncle Steve. Good old Uncle Steve.

00:12:17 Sheri Well, I mean, I don't want to own any of that. That's on you. You are the person who signed up. This is now my baby. Pages with red edges are spicy. You can put a warning label on it. This is rated PG-13, like whatever you need to do.

00:12:32 Bert Oh, my gosh. Well, we can do that. And we say, how do you want it laid out? And maybe we can give them the option—how do you want it laid out? Do you want one story per page? Do you want multiples?

00:12:42 Tray Can I make a feature suggestion? After the book is made or after it's paid for or after it's completed, give them a post—a template—that you can then post on a person's social media page dealing with what they did. Like, they made a contribution, right? So make a template of a post where they put it on their Facebook or on their Instagram.

00:13:13 Bert So "I just made a book with Sheri's Memory Book. Here's how that went," sort of like that.

00:13:20 Tray Right, so in two ways. The secondary part is just advertising. That's the secondary. The primary function is that they've done this and they put it in the book, but the book is for them to see. But most of us see things on social media. So as part of the book, give them the option of putting what they made on social media for them. Like their contribution of it.

00:14:06 Sheri That little piece, the pin drop.

00:14:09 Tray No, so the secondary is that it's advertising for the thing itself, right? First is that the purpose of it is to let them know how they feel about it, but we communicate this a lot via social media, so give them that too. It'd be very easy to do because you've already created the content.

00:14:25 Sheri Right, because once you input, unless you get the digital copy or you see the book, you're not going to see what you contributed.

00:14:35 Tray And for some, social media posts mean the world. For what you're trying to provide, it's an easy thing to go along with it, but probably will be useful.

00:14:48 Bert Well, I think, frankly, for—like you said earlier—some of those folks, all they're doing is on social media kind of stalking you. It's a little scary, but it's also a lack. Okay, those are all good ideas.

00:15:10 Sheri Templates and preview. Talk to me about what you meant by those two things. Again, that was in Phase 2.

00:15:17 Bert Okay, so the templates is... We need to contextualize that a little bit.

[Discussion about computers and Tray's setup]

00:17:18 Bert Regardless, let me go back real quick. Here's the Sheri tribute book.

00:18:02 Sheri So was this in the business case, the napkin session, or the proposal?

00:18:23 Sheri I believe it is in the proposal.

00:18:35 Bert So Phase 2 is SMS invitations, auto reminders, print-on-demand integration. Oh, okay. So the way that I would frame templates, Sheri, is that... How I want it to look and feel is not going to be the same for everyone. So the question is, how much customization do you want to have available to you.

00:19:11 Sheri So by templates meaning having more options for a variety of ways it's going to look. Yeah, and you choose which one is... Gotcha.

00:19:20 Bert And what was the second thing? Templates and... Preview. Preview is going to be pretty much once it's all put together, this is what it's going to look like when you approve it. Then it finalizes as an output format or it gets sent to the...

00:19:58 Sheri There would be a preview function for the digital—just, it's much more basic because you're not having that variety of—okay.

00:20:07 Bert And this would be basically the approval. So the normal view would be the preview mode. Yeah. And then once you approve it, it's set.

00:20:17 Bert But that ties back to what you had asked earlier about the editorial approval process. By the way, I think that's a great idea. The way that you were talking about it—do they need to make sure that, because this is their book.

00:20:32 Bert They should be able to say what goes in it or not. Very much in the way that you get to choose who shows up at your wedding, you know. So I think that's reasonable. But it would be draft, finalized.

00:20:50 Tray What's the tension between, let's say, an individual person contributes? And then, let's say, the person who owns the book doesn't like it. How much do they get to edit what that is? Because, like, on talk streams, right? A person shouldn't completely change the words of what another person has said, right? Like, you wouldn't want that. But then on the other side, you would want it to look correct for the book. You would want some control over what the output is. And so there are two extremes.

00:21:24 Bert So you can kind of choose your journey on that. The question is, do you want to allow them to actually edit the text, which would potentially piss off the person? Or do you want them to be able to ask for a revision.

00:21:38 Sheri That's a good question. I think asking for a revision. I don't think I'm... yeah, I think that's the better option. Their ability is to either completely include or completely exclude something, with the ability to ask for a revision as a way of still being...

00:22:07 Bert Now we could also say, "Can I ask for them to revise it, or I can make a suggestion and see if they accept it." It's also great.

00:22:17 Sheri I love that.

00:22:18 Tray I think that closes a problem.

00:22:35 Bert I'll have to go back and figure out where certain aspects of this fit in the whole phases thing because some of it's going to be easier to do than other stuff. That sounds pretty simple, but if you think about it from a workflow perspective.

00:22:49 Sheri It's actually quite a lot of components of doing that.

00:22:52 Bert Exactly.

00:22:52 Sheri Yeah. And that's, you know what, again, that makes sense to me that that would be a Phase 2, right? Because Phase 2 is about getting it a little bit more, a little bit fancier, a little more options, you know. The first phase is like, hey, let's throw this out there and see if there's even any traction for it.

00:23:18 Bert I wouldn't have—I would have told you if I didn't think it made sense, and I think you would too. It's just, I look at it from, it does make sense. And there's already some people that are competing in the market, but I don't think they're doing it very well. Welcome to the market.

00:23:37 Sheri I mean, I think the great thing is, like you said, people are doing it and it's out there. But for whatever reason, if it's not very widely known, I don't think the market is saturated at all. I don't think most people know it exists. And like, that's a problem. People should know it exists. I think that's the opportunity—to be like, "hey, this is here. Y'all need to be doing this stuff."

00:24:01 Bert Well, it's that—I think back, like my grandmother before she passed. My brother and I rode down there. We took a recorder. We talked to her for hours. And my wife and kids—I've got a couple sessions, I've got probably four hours of my grandmother that I need to transcribe and put into something.

A lot of that history in my family is maybe buried in documents of some sort, but the spoken word or the written word is just gone. Those stories that people could tell—I could frankly see this as being like, "tell the craziest story you know about Uncle Steve," and that book would need red pages all around it.

00:24:56 Sheri Right, yeah. And I think that part of the market has done well—the idea of a person sharing their memories and their stories. But it's the other side of it—other people talking about them—that has not got a huge piece of it. Like it's being done, it's being done well, not concerned about that.

00:25:17 Bert Oh yeah, I've seen what you're talking about—like "Word Here." It's like, this is a prompt and write this down, this is for your kids. I mean, I've done that.

00:25:23 Sheri For my godmother, we did it for my grandmother. Like, they now have a book with their memories written into it. It's awesome. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. I want that from the other side of the coin.

00:25:38 Bert Well, keep in mind exactly what you just told me. That should be the—if it's beautiful and it works and it looks the way you want it to and the quality of the output is where you want it, that's the bar that you need to hit. Like that's your minimum viable product. And then you want to do better than that.

00:25:51 Sheri So those were my specific questions and clarification. So I'm alive.

[Tray leaves to pick up Alexa]

00:26:46 Tray Maybe see you tonight. I've gotta manage my things. Between nursing homes and between funerals and between that entire end-of-life thing, man, you're gonna do very well. And that's not even branching into the mid-range of life.

I hear something very, very, very good that if other people aren't competing well, you're just going to go and push around the room and shut the door. And I'm very excited about that. I just want to tell you that. It's going to go really well. Especially with good execution, it's going to be beautiful.

00:27:26 Sheri Thank you.

00:27:45 Sheri Business case.

00:27:47 Bert So I was looking at the business case and kind of to what he said, you're not going to have to do a whole lot to actually get the thing off the ground. I think if you put it out there, if you've got a social network that you can leverage to say, "hey, is this going to work or not," you'll know pretty quick.

Because I think that—I'd put a couple of different tier prices in there. Yeah, I saw that. Because, you know, I'm always one of, like, let's run the math kind of guys.

But I definitely want you to be able to—we'll move away from the AI prompts, we'll use it more as AI cleanup, we'll keep the QR codes, we create the book, authorization, the login, the different groups, the contributor form, the ability to pay, the PDF, and then export would be that MVP.

And I think from that we'll be able to say, okay, you can do this. And Phase 2, I'll dig a little bit more into some of the stuff we're talking about here, like the editorial control, because I think that would be valuable too. I think that would be really valuable.

But this is one of those, what would probably happen is, like, you put this thing together and show it to a couple people, you get five, ten orders, you say, "yeah, that's good, it's in market," and you run with it.

00:29:19 Sheri Yeah. The other thing I would really like to do is, you know, at the very beginning, is, you know, like, pick five people in my network and be like, "here, this is not a cost to you, take it, and just do it and see what you think, give me feedback." Like, I want beta testers, essentially.

00:29:38 Bert 100%, please do that. That's very important.

00:29:43 Sheri Yeah, so that's something I want, you know, baked in at the beginning. To be able to be like, "all right, five unique codes, these five people are gonna run it, and we're gonna know how it goes."

00:29:53 Bert Basically, no cost to you at that point. And I'll give you the ability to—Stripe already has the ability to generate [discount codes]. So I can put 100% off as one of them.

One of the things that you'll need to do—I don't know if you're going to want to run this as—if you already have an LLC or if you want to run one.

00:30:17 Sheri I'm going to make it an LLC. Yeah.

00:30:20 Bert So set up an LLC. I use Mercury for my bank for digital stuff because it's very easy for me to create and remove cards when I'm doing digital payments and stuff.

00:30:35 Sheri You like Mercury?

00:30:37 Bert It's easy, and it's relatively inexpensive. You could also—there's a lot of functionality, like to be able to do the things you want to do with it. Exactly. So it's built for startups, which is kind of where I'm at. Mercury, like the planet.

I'll send you a code if you want, if you choose to use it. If you don't want to, I would ask you to evaluate it, decide if it makes sense to you. But you need a bank account. And the reason you need a bank account—so set up your LLC. Once you have the LLC, then you'll be able to set up a bank account. Once you have the bank account, then you'll be able to set up Stripe. And you'll need to be the one that sets up Stripe. I'll help you. And that's pretty reasonable in terms of how you put it together.

00:31:29 Sheri I had to do it for my private practice. So, yeah.

00:31:36 Bert So you've already done this as a business owner.

00:31:40 Sheri Well, it's a little different because for my private practice, it's just a DBA because it's a sole practitioner. So the LLC thing is new, but like the business account, you know, Stripe—like that part I'm fairly comfortable with.

00:31:56 Bert And then you need to register with the Williamson County Tax Office. It's like $50 to register. I did the city of Franklin and Williamson County and the state of Tennessee. And once you do those two things, you're golden. You pay them another 50 bucks every year.

00:32:30 Bert But navigating it's not too painful. There's a lot of companies that will say, "we'll do it all for you." Be mindful. You can get a tax ID number from the IRS for free digitally. You don't have to pay someone $200. Please don't.

00:32:56 Sheri Because there's so many scams out there. Yeah. If this was going to be some big, multi-factor, multi-person, all the things, I'd be like, "yeah, I'm not trying to take that on." But I know enough about or can learn enough about...

00:33:19 Bert Your godmother can use ChatGPT. You'll be fine.

00:33:25 Sheri Yeah, I actually, when I was setting up my private practice—I mean, it was a lot of man hours because I was just into everything—but I'm like, this is good. This is a good experience to learn to navigate all this stuff.

00:33:37 Bert It's overwhelming. It's why people don't do it. There's a huge number of people that are just afraid to act, and they're miserable. They hate where they're at. They hate what they're doing. They don't want to deal with it, but they're just afraid that if they don't do that, they won't have any money, and then they'll lose their house and all this other stuff. They could be doing so much more with their lives.

00:34:01 Sheri But it's a lot at the beginning. It's very overwhelming.

00:34:04 Bert It's traumatic. I mean, it's like, ugh. Just put yourself in learn mode. But I can help with some of it. Let me know if you have questions, if you get stuck.

00:34:18 Sheri Yeah, and I might. So I will. I may say, "hey, I'm looking at this and I'm not sure I understand what it's really about."

00:34:25 Bert The internet stuff's scary in particular. Like, if you're just trying to set up—basically, I'll function as your fractional CTO for this. So, the guy that sets up the internet stuff.

00:34:37 Sheri I don't even know what that means.

00:34:38 Bert So, Chief Technology Officer. Gotcha. So, you've got employee one, and he's the computer monkey.

Basically, what I will do is help you with the hosting, help you make the decisions on where you want to—which services to use—and I will give you as much information on that issue if you want or need. And I will document it as well, so if I get hit by a bus you can still go back and see what happened.

You'll also have the ability to—I'll give you the credentials you need to log in and use the super admin for everything, so you'll be able to work with it as well.

And as you've noticed, I like to write dashboards. So there will be a dashboard that will allow you to control everything. It will also include your development plan for the whole thing, your roadmap. So as we get more concise about what we're doing, we'll have it documented as well.

I don't go for the whole sprints thing and Agile development and all that sort of thing—you're planning it all out—it doesn't work when you're talking about small teams or giant teams. They just, it becomes kabuki theater, and they spend a lot of time doing a lot of nothing. I'd rather just do the thing. And if you have a problem with it, you call me and we talk about it, we figure it out. It's like, "I can deal with it in two weeks." It's like, no, I don't work that way.

00:36:06 Sheri Hey, you want to go to Waffle House? So obviously I need to put the business stuff together. As far as building, talk to me about what you're thinking as far as next steps for beginning to build. Talk to me, what do you think that looks like?

00:36:44 Bert I don't think we need to actually choose your website domain yet, but think about it. I've already got a prototype up right now—that one that you sent me to try out. Yeah. So that's, that is actually, it's fully functional.

And it actually, if you go to that site forward slash signal, you'll see all of the information that I was talking about, the back end. Okay. And what we can do is we'll keep that until you have your domain that you want to use, and then we'll create the custom domain for it.

And I'll add a login capability for you to be able to go in and do this stuff as well.

What I'll do next is I'll take this recording, this note here, make a plan, break it into what Phase 1 is. We agree on Phase 1. I'll send you an invoice for that. And we'll start building out that.

And then it depends on how fast you're ready to move on stuff. It could be—actually, I could probably have some in a week or two.

00:37:52 Sheri Yeah, that's reasonable. Like, I don't—I'm not in a hurry, but I want to go ahead and move, if that makes sense. Like, I'm prepared. I've decided. I can support Phase 1 without injuring my family too much.

00:38:06 Bert And you want, you know what's an investment. And it's a question—does this seem like a good idea? Am I willing to risk it?

00:38:12 Sheri Right. Because I've got six months before a little bit of it has to come back to me. So I figure, six months seems reasonable to have a partial return on investment. Not the full thing, but you know, just a little bit. I'm hedging my bets. Okay then.

00:38:31 Bert Let's try to get the first step—we can cram as much in there as we can to make it saleable. So this is something that we'll do and we think that this is worth however much—40 bucks or however much you decide to sell it for.

See if you can get some pickup on that. And when you take it to your beta testers initially, any pushback that you get is actually great because it tells you exactly what you're missing.

00:39:00 Bert I think that's it. Does that make sense?

00:39:02 Sheri Love it.

00:39:03 Bert Any other questions?

00:39:06 Sheri Not at this point, no.

00:39:07 Bert I'm excited. This is going to be cool.

00:39:13 Sheri Yeah, it is.

00:39:15 Bert I really want to help you make it. And at the same time, I'm like really nervous because it's like—it's a friend I'm working with. And there's always that.

00:39:26 Sheri But I think—personal is very straightforward and clear and honest. And like, there are very few people—I don't like to mix things. Right. But I feel like we're going to be totally fine.

00:39:47 Bert And we will. We'll figure it out. I will make this. I will do my best effort to make it.

00:39:54 Sheri I know you will.

00:39:56 Bert To the point of being a crazy person, because that's...

00:39:59 Sheri And I need you to remember that you don't have to be a crazy person. It's okay to dial it back a little. It's going to be all right.

00:40:07 Bert True. All right, well, I'm going to go get myself situated.

00:40:10 Sheri Awesome.