When should you charge your first customers?

Small Efforts - with Sean Sun and Andrew Askins

In this episode, Sean's Shmoocon trip got spicy 🌶️ 🥵 and Andrew is riding the high of a great prospect call for MetaMonster. Sean gives feedback on the experience of using MetaMonster, and Andrew debates when (and how) to start charging early customers.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
• Sean's website: https://seanqsun.com/
• Worth Driving: https://worthdriving.com/

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00.38

Sean

How's your poop?

00:01.58

Andrew

Oh, fuck you. yeah

00:05.86

Sean

I'm sorry, we can cut this out.

00:06.93

Andrew

No, no, no, it's all good. Everybody poops, man. I didn't actually poop this time, but I do poop.

00:10.21

Sean

yeah oh I hope so.

00:13.46

Andrew

Poops are great.

00:17.43

Andrew

Poops are great. Well, I that was not expecting that. Okay.

00:22.77

Sean

Sorry, sorry, how's robotics?

00:26.27

Andrew

Robotics is great. Yeah, we're I think two weeks into the season. And this is going to mean nothing to anybody who hasn't been involved with first robotics, but we're making a big switch from tank drive to swerve drive this year and from time based to command based robot programming.

00:46.76

Andrew

So.

00:46.34

Sean

Whoa.

00:47.88

Andrew

Yeah, pretty cool. Pretty cool. Tank-based is kind of what it sounds like. you know If you imagine how a tank moves, it's like two tracks moving at the same time. um And so it's simple, but it's also like not very precise. Whereas swerve drive, you have four wheels that can all move independently, and so they can and they can rotate. So you can move forward, backwards, left, right.

01:14.66

Sean

Hmm.

01:15.53

Andrew

diagonal you know you become a queen instead of a ah ah rook and it's uh does that metaphor make sense it's nerdy as fuck but it makes sense

01:27.02

Sean

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it does, it does. It was just not, it was just not the metaphor. Like, it just took me a second. and I was like, I didn't, my brain did not go to chess. I was like, what is it?

01:42.87

Andrew

And then, yeah, but the the flip side is it's just way more complicated. So Swerve Drive, you have because you have you go from like four motors that are basically doing the same thing you have to control and to eight motors that can all operate independently. And there's a lot of like tuning and.

02:04.02

Andrew

PID controllers, which are this like math thing that you use to like set a location on within like robotics. So you have to tune like your PID controllers and set your like encoder offsets and just get everything be very precise about everything. And then it's also like strongly encouraged that you use command based code which is like a little things are a little more like obfuscated away from you versus like in timer based you're like there's a timer running throughout a match and you're just constantly getting

02:41.44

Andrew

hitting the same function over and over again. And then in command-based, it's a little more abstracted. And so it can be like just a tiny bit trickier to debug things. So we've just like we have taken a big step up in complexity of our electronics and programming. And guess who's the electronics and programming mentor on the team?

03:02.00

Sean

Austin.

03:03.27

Andrew

yeah

03:05.38

Sean

You, you.

03:05.70

Andrew

I wish. Dude, I wish Austin was on the team.

03:06.88

Sean

That'd be crazy.

03:07.90

Andrew

That would be a blast.

03:09.98

Sean

That'd be the coolest robot there. That'd be cheating for the kids.

03:14.81

Andrew

Yeah. But yeah, it's been super fun. And I you know finished up workday and then went and spent two and a half hours at the robotics center yesterday and spent that whole time trying to tune our surf drive. And it is still not doing what I want it to do. So I'll be going back tomorrow night.

03:35.90

Sean

How many kids do you have to work with? Like just on your team?

03:38.99

Andrew

Yeah, so our team, the first year I did it, we had three kids. The like most competitive teams often have 40 or 50 kids. so And they often have tens of thousands, if not six figures of funding.

03:48.64

Sean

Whoa.

03:53.94

Andrew

And we had our first year like two grand. So that gives you an idea of like scale. This year, we're up to, I think, 15 kids.

04:00.80

Sean

Yeah.

04:06.77

Andrew

We've got a handful of eighth graders who were having them build a separate robot so that they can get a as much hands-on experience as possible.

04:15.39

Andrew

then we have a couple of seniors and like a junior who were who are super involved. And so I've got one senior who is interested really interested in programming and electronics.

04:28.12

Andrew

And so usually he and I are working together with a random eighth grader.

04:33.22

Sean

Nice.

04:34.05

Andrew

Yeah.

04:34.64

Sean

Nice.

04:35.16

Andrew

Yeah, it's fun.

04:35.57

Sean

Cool.

04:36.45

Andrew

It's cool. Also, our team's all like Hispanic, and like half of them don't speak English. Well, not half. yeah This year, we've only got a couple who aren't very comfortable speaking English.

04:48.20

Andrew

But like everyone on the team speaks Spanish, a couple of them like prefer to speak Spanish over English. And so yeah.

04:56.65

Sean

Sweet.

04:56.81

Andrew

I get to try to practice my Spanish, and they get to make fun of me for how bad my Spanish is.

05:00.37

Sean

Sweet.

05:02.81

Sean

cool nice nice i was thinking about going back...