Building a Platform to Monetize Communities

Speaker 0: Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of I Made This. My name is Pedro.

Speaker 1: And I'm John. Thanks for joining us today. We also have Bryant here. Bryant, why don't you give us a brief introduction into who you are?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, guys. Thanks for having me. My name is Bryant Gillespie. I am a jack of all trades, I guess you could say.

I do a ton of different things. I've got a design background. Been in the sign and print industry for probably too many years at this point. I would say, like, 15, 16 years. Yeah.

I've worked in kinda all facets of that industry. Like, I previously ran and helped manage a sign and print shop for probably 5, 6 years. We grew that business, and I burnt myself out and was looking for the next thing. And then I got hooked up with a software company that made software for the sign and print industry. So it was a great fit there, but, yeah, I've got a ton of experience in just a little bit of everything from business management to design, marketing, even a little bit of sales at my former company there for a while.

And I've also got this development streak that I'm on at this point. I'm not a professional developer by any means, so let me preface everything that we talk about here. With that, Last 2 or 3 years, I've picked up JavaScript development. Mostly, like, working at a software company, I always wondered, k. How hard is it to do what we're talking about on the product side of things?

How challenging is it to build this certain feature? And, yeah, I've got a nasty habit of scratching my own itch that sometimes gets me bogged down into crazy projects like the one we're gonna talk about today.

Speaker 0: Awesome. And through that software development streak and kinda learning software development, is that how you found Directus, or what was your first touch with Directus?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I can't remember exactly how I came across Directus. I know hey. Like, the background story there is I used to be really heavy into Airtable, and I think it's a really great tool, great platform, great company. But I had a client that we built a really nice Airtable base.

And over the course of 2 or 3 years, this thing just kept getting more and more complex as any project does. And so when we first started, it was just simply, hey. Let's keep track of our orders. And then we started bolting on things like, hey. We wanna be able to send an online proof to our clients and let them approve the artwork for this order, and then, hey.

Let's let them pay for the order. And then it graduated into a full blown website where a the client could come on sight unseen and place their own order for decorated apparel. We as we kept iterating on that, things got more and more complex, and there were more moving pieces. And we rapidly started hitting the limits of Airtable, not just, like, what it was built to do. There's some API rate limits there that kind of affect how you call their API and what you can actually do with it.

But there's also, I think we were on one of the we weren't on the enterprise plan, and the enterprise plan at the time was probably, like, 3 dollars 1,000 a month, which is kind of out of reach for yeah. We did. Definitely chump change. Yeah. So it's kinda out of reach for a small company that has 15, 20 employees.

So that's a lot of money for them to spend on a platform where they were at maybe several $100 a month with all their employees on there and all the platforms and things that we had built around AirDance. That makes sense.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think you're on a similar journey, or I guess I'm on a similar journey to you. And if for anyone who's out there watching, Brian's face probably does look familiar because Brian also does videos for Directus. And so as I've come along on this Directus journey and as Pedro and I have started doing some videos, I also have an entrepreneurial spirit inside me. I've started several companies on the side and kind of have ideas that are floating around inside of my head too.

And so I've been on this similar sounding journey to you of exploring these other platforms out there. A lot of these platforms are great for what they do, and they all have their limitations as any software does. But, you know, the more I've been creating these videos for Directus and working for Directus and seeing what it can do, one of the nice things as I'm building out these platforms and some of them actually make their way to actual companies, whether they're small or medium sized, some of them fizzle out. One of the great things that I've kinda come to discover about Directus is there there is no limitation, especially if you're starting off in self hosted. You're not gonna hit that $3,000 a month mark right right away.

And so it it's so great for a beginner developer begin I have some experience in web development and websites and things like that. But as you're starting to explore, you're not gonna hit any wall in regards to pricing. You can kind of build it out and get a full fledged platform without having to worry about, oh, I can't get the full traffic tested. I can't gonna have to pay $500 a month starting off. I think that's kind of a similar journey that I've come to uncover and have more creative ideas flowing as I've been creating these videos for Directus.

So it sounds very similar to kind of the journey that you are ahead of. You've been making these videos longer than we have, but sounds like a very similar journey.

Speaker 2: Kind of

Speaker 1: creating you found Directus. You started using it. You started creating videos for it. More ideas come to light. Does that kinda sound right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. A 100%. And so like I was saying, we were hitting the limits of Airtable, and then it was like, well, what's the next jump? Like, where do we go from here? Hey.

This could be a stand alone app that we could have somebody program or develop the back end. And at that stage of the journey, I wasn't comfortable enough to say, hey. This is something I could take on myself. So I started looking at, okay. Are we gonna have a developer or an agency or somebody, like, build this into a full blown app?

Because we're running out of runway here on this no code tool like Airtable. And and I'm not knocking those tools at all, but, you know, like you mentioned, there's certain limitations that you run into that you you don't know at the outset. You don't know that you're gonna run into those things or we probably had I known where we were gonna end up with the tool, it probably would not have started where we did with Airtable. Yeah. But Fortunate

Speaker 0: enough that you grew at that pace. Right? Like, people underestimate their abilities and they grow a company or grow a software or an organization much faster than anticipated. So that's a good thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. So we were looking for the next thing and I don't know if it was through Product Hunt or Hacker News or some other group that I like, a random Discord or Slack group or something that I'm a part of. I had stumbled onto the Directus website and I saw I think it it was really close to when version 9 launched, I think. And I was, like, like, what is it?

This open data platform. And I saw the screenshots, and I was, like, hey. This kinda looks similar to the other tools that I'm used to, but it looks way more powerful because they're talking about a full SQL database that I own and immediate generated APIs and all the things that I could do through the UI, through the no code app that I'm used to doing in other platforms and more. So Directus did not work out for that particular client. We kind of made a few changes that extended the runway on their existing platform, but I kinda took up the mantle, and I was like, hey.

This is I could use this for all my other things, like my own personal projects and get a leg up because now this is actually going to scale. This thing is, like, I'm driving the Ferrari on day 1 instead of effectively driving the Pinto for a little bit and then trying to figure out, hey. Do we slap a turbo on this or get some new wheels or what do we do with it?

Speaker 1: Yeah. As someone who owns a Ford Fiesta vehicle, I feel I feel slighted that, you know, my car

Speaker 0: is great.

Speaker 1: It's a great car, but I would take a Ferrari over it. Yeah. And so I think that's a that's a good lead in because a lot of people you know, I I come I came into Directus just thinking you were somebody who created videos, but you've created a whole platform on top of Directus. So why don't you give us a look into the most recent project that you built on Directus because I think it's really cool. I think it kind of ties into a lot of what Pedro and I have heard on calls with prospects and customers as well.

So why don't you give us a little insight into the most recent project that you have?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Give me a second here, guys, and I'll share my screen. BetterSignShop kinda started when I left my previous company.

I was the head of customer success there. I managed a team of customer success managers that would implement and train people on how to use our software that was designed for sign and print. So I've got this this bug, shop manager, being the 2nd in command for 5 years and experiencing every facet of the business through that, and then working on the tech side as a software provider, I probably worked with 350, 400 shops directly over the course of 7 years at my previous company. It was one of those things. It's like, hey.

I'm it's time for me to move on to the next thing, and I immediately jumped into consulting with sign and print shops. Just that was the background that I had. That's where I've got the most leverage. Why not explore that? So that morphed into a lot of random projects.

Like, the best thing to come out of it was probably this platform that I'm gonna show you guys. But we started a podcast, we started a mastermind group where we meet once a month, we bring in like an outside expert that talks about a specific topic. Maybe that is online marketing for sign and print shops or how to hire sales reps because it's traditionally not a it's a it's a small business type of industry. There are some very large printers and very large sign companies in the world, but traditionally it's it's a small mom and pop type industry. Most shops have fewer than 20 employees.

So we had all these resources that we're putting together, and we said, hey. Let's build a platform to contain all those. So we had just a bunch of random stuff that we were building, and we were like, hey. How do we connect all the dots? Right?

Like, we were doing interviews with industry experts. We had 100 of we had a 150 members inside a private Facebook group. We've got some calculators on, hey, should I buy that piece of equipment, or should we keep outsourcing this service? So we had all these things, and the challenge was, like, what do we do with it? Like, how do we bring it all together?

And that's when we decided to create this platform, My Better Sign Shop, to bring it all together.

Speaker 1: I like that you chose a color scheme that fits with Directus, the purples and pinks and

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So how I got into this industry was as a graphic designer. So everything I do, I've got that designer OCD type of thing going on where I always hate working on my own stuff because it's so hard for me to pick something. And when we started this, I was like, like, I'm just gonna go wild with this.

Like, we gotta go over the top. So my kids, my 3 daughters are into pink and purple, and I said, let's leverage that, and we'll just own those colors. Hey. If you see pink and purple in this space, like hot pink, that's gonna be us. I like it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Why don't you why don't you give us a quick walk through kind of how you built it out in Directus and then maybe even an insight into what did you build the front end? What did you build the actual website with? You know, what what technology Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. So I the thing about Directus, it was so nice building out the data model. And I've you know, I since I graduated from Airtable, like, I I was kinda used to already, like, how do I map out this data relationally? How do I make sure that I'm not duplicating data that that I could just link using a relationship?

So the first piece that we started with was probably like the LMS, our learning management system, because we kind of had this course called Profitable Sign Pricing that I was working on prior to this platform, and we just kind of rolled it into the platform. Platform. So inside Directus, I'm not sure if you guys can see this, I could probably zoom in just a little bit. We started, that was the piece that we started with first. So and maybe while we're See

Speaker 0: your nice custom icons as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, that's the design OCD part where everything has to be nightly nicely organized. Yeah. The system, we did all module based because, like I said, it was originally just a bunch of stuff that we had built. And we were like, hey.

Let's give people one simple way to access it. So I'll just throw some of these out. And then we have our so we've got our library here, where the library has some resources that are, like, downloads for you guys. Hey. What questions should we be asking to qualify customers?

So building this out, it was a really super simple indirectus. If I hop into, like, our library data model here, this is just a folder where we put all of our other collections. So we've got our resources, which are just kind of one time offerings, and then we have our courses. So the data structure here, we have a course that sits at the top level. Then each course has several modules, and each module has lessons.

So if we open up the course, we can see we've got, hey, is this a free course? What's the status of this? Is it published? Is it draft? What's the title of the course?

What are we gonna use for the slug, which is the URL that we're gonna access that at? The description, we've got a featured image. Then we have the modules for that course. That is a one to many relationship that links to the modules. And inside the modules very similar, title, status, what's the course that this module belongs to, what's the description of the module, and the lessons for that module.

So the meat and potatoes is probably in the actual lessons. So we've got the module it belongs to, stylus, title, slug, description. And then we have some interesting things like content, which is the WYSIWYG editor in Directus, which is super nice. Other platforms that I've used, Airtable specifically, like, it does not have a WYSIWYG editor. So doing long form content there does not it's just not helpful.

We've got a video input. So this is just a string. On the front end, we've got, a function that will clean this up. So you can paste Vimeo, you could do YouTube, you could do Loom videos. Whatever that is, it'll clean that up and generate, like, an embed code.

We also have, like, a form schema here. So some of the courses that we are going to do, we've got let's actually just flip over to one of the lessons maybe here.

Speaker 1: So you're saying a school or a university could build an entire learning platform modernized indirect us. So, you know, that's kind of what you've built here in one one module of your platform.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. A 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0: We actually have a university.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Could be yeah. School, university, anything, really.

Speaker 0: We actually have a an LMS use case for one of our one of the clients that I work with. I don't know if I'm allowed to say their name or not, so I just won't I'll avoid that. But they've built essentially in a very similar schema with the modules, the courses linked. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And eventually, I think we'll add, like, some completion percentages and some niceties onto this. But, yeah, you can see here, this is one of our lessons here. And I on the front end, we've also got, like, this profitable sign pricing course has it's almost like a calculator, like a worksheet type of offering. It's not like a quiz per se.

Let me just, show it to you guys, and I'll go back to the side by side here. So this is the front end of the application. We've got our main navigation over here, and it's divided into the different modules that we have. This my shop is a new one that has not released yet. So I'm giving you guys the local flavor here that's got the latest updates also so I don't break anything.

And then we have, like, a community module, some other things. But if we enroll in our course here. Okay. Alright. So this is what the initial view looks like.

You can expand these modules over here. But I'm going to show you the same calculating your shop rate lesson. It looks like I've got the wrong video here, but I'll just go ahead and hide this menu so we can go full screen. So the format here, we've got a nice video that they'll follow along with. We've got a short description.

And then this particular one is all about calculating their shop rate. So in custom sign and print you're building a custom order every single time. Your unit of work there is your time. So how much should you charge for your time? Big question for everybody.

So here, basically, we give them the ability to go in and enter in their monthly expenses, how many days a week they're working, how many team members they've got, how often those team members are working, and

Speaker 1: I don't work 7 hours

Speaker 2: a day. And what target profit they want and then it will spit out what their hourly cost is to operate. We got 2 guys working 6 hours a day. We wanna make a 100,000 or 30,000 in profit at the end of it. Shows us their hourly cost, so this is what that what it costs to keep the lights on, and then what they have to charge per hour or per day to actually make those profit numbers.

So those are the things that we're putting together inside this platform, and it's all dedicated to helping sign and print shop owners grow and improve their business.

Speaker 1: That's awesome.

Speaker 0: That that's sweet. And I noticed that the front end takes a lot of visual cues from the back end. Is that intentional? And what technology do you use for the for the front end of the site?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you picked up on that because Yeah. Yeah. I like, when we started down the road of modules, I was that's a kind of a design challenge.

It really is. And Directus has done such a great job with it of, like, how do I show hierarchy? How do I make sure that people know where everything is at? And I kinda took cues from that. Yeah.

We used intercom a lot at my previous employer. They've got, like, a similar, hey. Our modules are on the left hand side kind of set up. And I thought that was a great design pattern. But, yeah, a lot of this has been taken cues directly from the back end inside Directus.

That's awesome.

Speaker 0: Yeah. We've even seen people, because of the way Directus is designed on the back end, using the back end as if it is an internal tool for a business, like, using the back end as an actual front end as well. It's just like this is the tool that we log into as employees.

Speaker 2: And that's it's easily doable. Like, you can log in and you can white label this. And if you wanted to be a little more stingy about it, you could even turn off the documentation where, like, it didn't have any, like, references to direct us at all. But Right. Yeah.

Speaker 0: From And then using roles and permissions to just hide everything that wouldn't be relevant to that user or that group of users.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. And that that was, like, an option that I considered. That would've dramatically cut the time to get something launched, but I like, being design oriented,

Speaker 0: I Yeah.

Speaker 2: That OCD kicked in. Okay. We're gonna build a custom front end on this.

Speaker 0: That looks great.

Speaker 1: So And I think that's one of the I think that's one of the beautiful things about Directus is if for any reason in the future you decided to move away from Directus, if your front end was also the back end, you're kinda stuck there. But with your front end being built separately, you can pull that SQL database because as you mentioned, it's just your it's your SQL database. You could pull that information out. All the tables are there. Directus had injected nothing into it, and you could move to another back end.

So I I think that some people find the benefit. We we do think Directus can fit long term, but it is nice to sometimes separate those front end things out because if for any reason you needed the SQL database for somewhere else, you could put it somewhere else as well.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, this is my actual SQL database here. Right? Everything Directus is namespace there. Again, like you said, that's this is just the kind of metadata that enables Directus to do its thing.

So, yeah, we've got books. We've got all the lessons. Like, they're all there. Directus, none of this is intertwined with the Directus system data, which it which is very nice. Yeah.

I like that aspect of it. I don't see moving this from Directus because, like, the speed at which I can put something together is that's the craziest part of this whole thing for me. I'm not being a professional developer, I'm, like, self taught developer. I've mostly played, like, the get it done guy role, is what I like to call it. Every company that I've been in or even on my own stuff, I'm the guy that if I don't know or I if I don't have somebody that'll do it for me or if, you know, there's a problem, like, I'll figure it out however I need to.

And that's what led me into development in the first place. But Directus gives me that tool, like, you know, almost almost too easy for me to go down a rabbit hole and build something.

Speaker 1: Did you say go down a rabbit hole on purpose?

Speaker 2: I didn't. No. But that's the bunny puns could come easily, though. So, you know, this new module that we've been working on is basically like a knowledge base of Oh, awesome. SOPs and standard procedures.

Yeah. Like I mentioned, a lot of these small shops are they don't have things like this in place. So we're gonna give them a template for this. K. Here's your employee handbook.

Go in and customize the pieces that you need, but we'll get you 80% of the way there. And using Directus, like, building something like this out, is super on the back end, I probably spent the most of the time here to build this feature of like cards and collections. So if I open up one of these cards, here's what the back end of this card looks like. Probably the most time spent was just trying to map out how I wanted the data to look. So here we've got collections that hold the cards, collections could be nested into each other, so coming up with that schema, like on paper was probably the hardest part about it, but as far as actually getting an API that I can use on the front end it probably took me 10, 15 minutes to put together these 2 collections inside Directus and actually start building something on the front end, which is huge.

Speaker 0: This is really cool.

Speaker 2: If I would have done something previously, I don't have the back end knowledge or skill set. So I would have either been mutts trying to learn that and put that together and maybe something like Laravel or Rails or something that gives you a leg up or been paying somebody 1,000 of dollars a week probably to build something like this. And just like the speed and flexibility that Directus gives me. K, if I've got an idea and my girls are off shopping for the weekend, which is exactly how this feature came about, You know, it's it's easy enough for to build something that's gonna deliver value in in a weekend. Yeah.

Speaker 1: So so people just need to take more trips away from their family and you could do more projects.

Speaker 2: Is that

Speaker 0: what you're saying?

Speaker 2: I'm not saying that at all. No. If you get a if you get a random weekend where and you have 3 kids and your wife takes them shopping, use that for project time. 100%. Yeah.

So seeing

Speaker 0: this seeing this knowledge base really gets my gears turning on a lot of different ideas that you could start implementing. And I'm not gonna impose any of those on you, but I'm sure you have a lot of ideas and future plans around this project. Could you maybe Oh, yeah. Fail some of those or other things you plan to add on to the this project with Directus?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I I mean, even yeah. Like, we've got onboarding checklists that are

Speaker 0: Oh, wow.

Speaker 2: Like a thing that we're putting into this. So one of the big things in any business really, is how do you onboard new employees? And this is specifically generic enough that it doesn't have to be used for onboarding. But, you know, since we're focused on the team aspect, that's the primary use case here. But, you know, we're working on this onboarding checklist structure where, hey, Whenever we hire somebody, we want them to be able to go in and have just a, hey.

Here's how your next 6 weeks or your first 6 weeks are gonna go with the company. And not only does that improve morale, but, you know, it it's easy. It improves retention as well. Like, if you start a new company and you've got the 1st 6 weeks laid out for you, here's everything you need to do to be successful in this new role, that's gonna skyrocket retention. So we've got this set up where you can assign the specific user to a task within the checklist in case, like, a manager needs to be assigned to a certain task instead of the new employee.

You could set up due dates, all of that, And then you just run the checklist, and we'll have a couple dashboards in here. This is still very much a work in progress, but that's, that's probably the newest thing. We've got tons of different ideas of what we're gonna implement in the future, but, you know, that's kinda what we're working on at the moment.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I can see this specific feature being really useful for a lot of smaller startups or companies who just don't have the time to build this. Do you have any plans to list the setup or at least some sort of instructions in the upcoming marketplace. You could be able to to list this up there for other companies to be able to use this as well. Have you thought about that?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I'm totally open to it. I need to learn more about the plans there and how we could make that work.

Speaker 1: Or you could just send people use the your platform too.

Speaker 2: Yeah. No. I for me, I don't see this I don't wanna get this thing outside of sign and print. So this is probably gonna be, like, a really niche thing, but, totally, what we built here, it's like, there would be nothing stopping you from taking this and either generalizing it to any company or, for me, I mean, like, you could take this and and focus on your if you had a specific intersection, and that's kind of my philosophy of where I bring value anyway is at the intersection of sign and print and tech, automation, integration. Hey.

Bringing those 2 together is like a space that that I have, bring the most value. So if you're out there and you're listening to this and that's that describes you, you got a passion on the tech side, you've got some industry knowledge, you could take something like Directus and build a tool that will help bring in recurring revenue for you or, honestly, if I were to focus on this full time, it could probably be a full time business that that we could grow and scale. But, yeah, I've got a few other priorities, and I quite like the lifestyle aspect of

Speaker 1: it at this point. That's a perfect segue because I was gonna ask you guys as we kinda start to wrap this up, advice for those people who are building platforms or similar platforms. You obviously have access to the Directus team directly as you kind of work with us week by week. But did you research things on GitHub, or did you reach out to people on Discord? Or did was it kind of just playing around?

What advice would you give to those, either new or relatively well versed in direct us? What did you run into that you would advise people to sidestep or hop over if we use a budget plan?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I've always been, like, action oriented, and I don't know if that's sometimes that's a fault. A lot of times, I think that's a strength because and I know, like you said, you were getting into development, John. There's a lot of, like, courses out there on here's how to become a full stack developer, here's how to become a Vue JS developer, and it's just module after module after module after module. And I've tried those, and I discovered that it didn't work for me because it it's either a project that we're building that I don't care about or it's just too abstract in the moment.

The it's like, I don't know when I'm gonna use this. That's the same reason that I couldn't give you if you gave me a calculus test right now, I couldn't tell you the first answer on any of it because I haven't used any of that stuff in so long even though I learned it. So the first thing that I would say is, hey. If you got a decent idea or one that you think could be a good side project or a business side. Get into Directus.

It's simple enough to build out your data model. I've even got if you're looking for a starter on the front end, where is this thing? So our platform is built on Nuxt, which is based on Vue. Js, but if you need a good starter that already has the plumbing connected with Directus, we've got a starter that you can use as well. So you can pull this down, it's just Brian Gillespie slash nuxt3 dashdirectus dash starter on GitHub.

It's getting a little popular, I think. Not that 55 stars is anything compared to the 18 or 20,000 at Directus, but this is a good starting point. Like, just set up a couple collections inside Directus, start building something. And then as you run into challenges, the direct to stocks will be your best friend. Shout out to Aaron on that side of things.

I've seen a lot of great improvements on the documentation recently. I really love this cookbook section, like some of these things, how to do a content hierarchy. This was kind of one of the things that probably tripped me up when I first started with Directus, some of these more specific things, which I'm sure that's a challenge for you guys as well because Directus us can could do so many different things.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Like, how do we tell people how to set these things up? And then the community has been great as well. Even even before I was doing the videos on YouTube for DirectUs, if I would run into any gotchas, k, I I don't know how to do this. I think Brain Slug was one of the guys that reached out and helped me before he was working with the team as well. Yeah.

Like, initially, I was trying to set this up and, like, tenancy is a big question that came up as well, and it was one of the things that I had trouble navigating of, like, how do I set up not just, like, an account inside here, but each account has many different users. So, how do I manage all of that inside Directus? I know Directus will do it, but how do I figure it out? And the guys in the community, guys and gals, I should say, were very helpful in that regard of just hopping into the discord, which I like a lot more so than, like, a support forum or some of those other it's nice just to hop in and just kinda post a question and see who's already had experience doing this thing.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Shout out to BrainSlug as well. I'll second that. I think his name is the one I see the most in Discord, and I believe he was on vacation a couple months ago, and it got a little quiet in Discord. I'm like, we need brain slug back.

So shout out to him.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And there's quite a few names that I see popping up time and time again. So one of the other kinda nice things that I really like about Directus here is the insights module, where I've just been able to set up, like, a quick dashboard that shows me our accounts. So this was back in October.

That was when we initially launched, and I could see how many accounts are being created each day, the total number of accounts. So we've got a free plan, and we've got a pay plan. I could see how many people have published their shop listing within our community, what our recommended book numbers come from, and this is all community driven stuff. Hey. This is one of my favorite vendors to work with, or this is a book that I recommend reading.

But Direct has made this really easy, whereas, again, like, if I wanted to do this, I would either be exporting the data from Directus and doing a pivot table and some charts inside Google Sheets, which would be a

Speaker 1: blast. Pivot tables.

Speaker 2: Or I would have to build I would have to build the same functionality somewhere into my own app, which would be kind of a pain to do. So Directus makes this super simple for me. And this has this has been helpful to share with the other guys that are working on the podcast and this platform with me just to give them motivation. K. We signed up 3 accounts today, and we've done very little promotion on this thing at all.

So

Speaker 1: Have you played around with flows at all? I know for me, flows can get pretty technical pretty fast. Yes.

Speaker 2: Yes. So we do have several flows going on. One of the cooler features that I really like about the, like, the community module that we have, in addition to like the list view of here's all the member shops that we have where you can browse what their capabilities are. Hey, if I are you UL certified? Which means, hey, can you do electrical work?

Or do you have a wide format printer? One of the really nice things here is this map view. Sign and print is locally, it's mostly a regional, local type market. You're not gonna, with the exception of really large signage, if you want a banner or something simple, you're probably going to be dealing with a local person. So this is another thing that I stole from Directus.

You guys were using Mapbox on the admin side for geolocation. Previously I'd used Google Maps and I found Mapbox to be a lot easier, but I wouldn't have known about that had it not been through Directus. But being able to, like, filter these based on a map, tremendously helpful. Okay, I'm located in West Virginia, who around me has a bucket truck that can go do an install, so here's a couple different options that I can find. So it's all about collaboration.

But on the Directus side, when somebody edits their listing, and it looks like I've managed to break something there, when they edit their listing they add their address information. So on the flow side of things we've got a Flow set up that will send that address to Mapbox and pick up their latitude and longitude geocode data anytime that listing is updated. So if they go in and change the address, that will store their location correctly. See I've got so many different modules I can't even find them. Directory.

You need

Speaker 1: a little map icon. You're all iconized, you just need a little

Speaker 2: map. Yeah. That's what I need. Yeah, so the geolocation data here, it will automatically generate this for us. So that was been a that was a huge, like, one up for using flows, so I didn't have to, like, custom code any of that or do it manually.

Some of the other flows that we've got on our Mastermind calls, We've got, let's open that up. So we've got these thumbnail images that show when you go through and browse through these previous calls. That is a flow that is set up whenever the recording is posted for that previous call it will go out to Vimeo and capture the thumbnail image so we could show it here. And I've also got just a nice little anytime a new user account is added, it will ping us inside Slack. So let me see if I can open this up for you guys just to give you a taste.

Yeah. So we've got an inbox inside Slack that whenever a new user and a new account is created, that happens through flows as well.

Speaker 1: Very cool. I assume you used a little bit of just toying around till it worked, which is what I do. I just kind of change one thing until it works. Probably a little bit of the dots. Is that kinda how you figured some of those out?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So my new method for flows is basically taking it step by step. Like, I will create the initial flow or, like, the trigger setup, and then I will trigger that flow to make sure to see what data I've got coming out of it, and then I will just kind of march step by step after that. That kinda makes it easier for me to stay focused instead of building, like, 30 steps at once and then trying to figure out why I'm not getting what I want at the end of it. I've also my wife makes fun of me.

I've got sausage fingers. So a lot of my trouble with flows is usually just just because of typos that I'm not paying attention to.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I think the I think I was working on a flow on one thing that I'm kind of toying around with here yesterday or the day before. I think I had about 70 iterations where I was just changing 1 step by step like you kinda do, but also why isn't this working? Okay. Let's change this one thing.

Oh, let's change this let's change it to another thing. That's my method of figuring out how it works. Because you you kinda mentioned just starting Yeah. I yeah. I think you get

Speaker 2: you learn how to

Speaker 1: do it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I yeah. I think you get you learn how to learn at that point. That's probably the biggest skill is, like, you could go through and you could certainly read all the docs or watch all of the YouTube videos that you guys have done or the ones that I have done. But until, like, you actually need that knowledge, like, you may forget some of that.

So, like, I really prefer, like, an action oriented approach where you just dive in and try to figure it out, and then there's plenty of resources available when you get stuck.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, Pedro. I think even as sometimes when we're filming these from the field episodes that are also on our YouTube, I think sometimes people ask questions and on those phone calls where sometimes those questions are asked, our engineer, Jonathan, will answer them. And so when we have to kind of go back and reanswer them on from the field, we kinda have to play around with it until we figure out how to answer the question. Is it the same for you, Pedro, or is it just me who's, we'll figure it out?

Speaker 0: No. Absolutely. I mean, that there's a little bit of decoding there and going back and reviewing things as they're asked on calls and from the community trying to clarify those things. So definitely feel the pain there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. There's some of that for me as well where, like, I'm trying to distill a feature into a video. So I've I've got to for me, like, the nuts and bolts of it. Like, you've gotta get into it and do it yourself to actually be able to translate it. So I've it's certainly the it has to be the same way for developers using Directus as well.

One of the strengths here is obviously this is no code app that anybody can use, not just, like, the technical members of the team, but, you know, I've got my guys on the podcast. They've got access to this. So if they wanna go in and upload a resource or they wanna upload set up a new meeting for the mastermind calls, they can. And it's simple enough for them to do that.

Speaker 0: Alright. Awesome. Well, Brian, we thank you very much for being a part of the I made this podcast or video series, whatever you wanna call it. And thank you for giving us a deeper look into better sign shop and everything you're doing there and all the work you've done within Directus. I guess maybe to to leave this off, what, the last question would be maybe what would you like to see from Directus that you haven't seen yet?

Or is there a feature that you've just been dying to see come to Directus?

Speaker 2: That's a loaded question there. You're getting you're getting me into trouble, Pedro. No. Yeah. I've been consistently impressed with everything that Directus has done.

And I had this conversation with Wrike, I think, on one of the calls that I was looking for some guidance on. Hey. How do I do this one feature? But I was talking to Wrike, and I was like, man, you're doing the right abstractions. There's that balance that you've gotta strike of, like, hey, flexibility and and just, like, not taking not putting too much magic into it.

I as far as what I would like to see, I think Flows could probably use a little more work on the developer experience side, like, making it easier to figure out what's gonna come out the other end of it. It. That that would be a tremendous help as I get more into flows. What else? I and I I think I saw this on maybe one of the roadmap pages, like an Airtable like spreadsheet view layout where I could edit a lot of data at once would be very helpful.

I think there is probably what, like real time, like websockets maybe in the future. I don't know that we have a ton of application for that. Maybe in the future, there'll be, like, a BetterSign Shop chat module where these guys could talk to each other through the app.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Create your own little discord.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to to play around with that, certainly. I a lot of times now, I feel like a kid with just, like, a a nice set of Legos. Like, I've got the $100 set of LEGOs, not like the cheap $10 set.

Like, Directus gives you that nice LEGO set that's got all the pieces where you just build whatever you want out of it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, I'll thank you for your time as well. I will second that flows. All of that you the things that you mentioned, I think, are in the works.

But as someone who has already said in this video that flows can get pretty technical pretty quickly, I will second that. We need some one one click easier options for us nontechnical people, but I do agree that it's very powerful in a good and dangerous way for someone like me who can break things. But thank you again for your time, and thanks to everyone who's been watching this. We'll see you on the next one. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us either on YouTube, Discord, via our website.

Follow along and subscribe. Also, go and follow Bryant on his social media accounts as well. We'll put those in the link and description. Thanks again for your time and we'll see you on the next one.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1: And scene.