Reactor Reactor Podcast

Mark's streak app isn't done, but his attempt to build longer streaks of consecutive livestreaming days is paying off. He's published 5 videos within a week and its effect on his YouTube traffic has been remarkable. The rolling 28-day numbers are as follows: views +77%, watch time +75% and reach +109%. It hasn't translated into more money (yet), but that's not surprising given that YouTube views are high up in the Alchemist Camp sales funnel.

Justin's still making gradual progress on refactoring his Roblox game, Slider. He's added more instrumentation, gotten some expert advice and planned out some changes to the

We also talked about the equal pay for remote work topic that's been trending, the scalability of membership sites, Mark's Black Friday, and the psychology of pricing.

Today's Topics include:

Livestreaming
Analytics-driven game dev
Remote work
Scalability of membership sites
Black Friday
Pricing

Mentioned

Garry Tan on competition and gatekeepers
Phoenix Igniter
Matteo
DNC pocast
Trends.vc

Mark's goals for next time

Stream at least 3 days
Do the Black Friday email campaign
Start the new ebook

Justin's goals for next time

Create "the player shaker" for Roblox

Video version here

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/37

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-11-18

The results of Mark's livestreaming are in! It's taken some focus and effort, but it's greatly increased his production per hour of work. The quality of the screencasts is slightly worse, but his YouTube views are up by 50%, watch time is up 83% and he's picked up 11 Twitter followers.

Justin has continued working with Chris, the Roblox dev he mentioned meeting last episode, and it's been productive. He's changed the way Justin approaches the entire game. He's now taking a much more analytics-driven approach to increase player retention at every subsection of the game. A key part of this is looking at each player's success to failure ratio at each portion of race tracks.

We finished the talk with an extended discussion about livestreaming, working in public generally, why it's hard not to be self-conscious and how there can still be a big upside.

Today's Topics include:

Livestreaming
Analytics-driven game dev
Roblox
Matteo
Working in public
Livestreaming

Mentioned

Phoenix Igniter
Matteo
DNC pocast
Twitch Studio

Mark's goals for next time

Finish the streak app
Livestream for 5 consecutive days

Justin's goals for next time

Run a CTR experiment on Slider (and do the dev to prepare for it)

Video version here

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/36

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-11-04

Justin has met another interesting character in the Roblox dev space. He's released about 100 games, has interned at Roblox itself and has over a million monthly players on his own games. He's been checking out Slider and giving Justin some advice—primarily to make the game less linear.

Mark has also been inspired by a game dev on YouTube gotten some useful takeaways from him. His name is "The Cherno" and uses livestreams as a way to create graphics engine development screencasts for his audience. He records very long livestreams, gets what he wants to screencast figured out and then does them live in just a couple or usually in a single take! The quality of his screencasts dropped when he started doing this, but the recent ones are very good.

Justin also went on Startups for the Rest of Us for an interview, Starlink has some very eyebrow-raising clauses in its TOS and the NTD is getting strong.

Today's Topics include:

Roblox dev
Making non-linear games
Recording screencasts during livestreams
No code
Self-driving cars
Jurisdiction in space

Mentioned

Heyhi
Replayhero
Alchemist Camp
The AI Podcast with Lex Fridman
The Cherno

Mark's goals for next time

Record 4 screencasts
Livestream or otherwise build in public every day

Justin's goals for next time

Work out the game mechanic changes for Slider

Video version on YouTube

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/35

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Justin was up until after 2am working on his Roblox game and implemented area locking so that players need various keys to access tracks. He's also been meeting some other developer dads.

Mark got bogged down in planning out videos and coming up with ideas for drawings to support them. As a result, he's got a lot of plans but no videos :/

Friend of the show, Matteo had a successful product hunt launch for Heyhi!

In other news, Apple has just announced a new iPhone with lots of cameras. Also, Sidecar has started requiring 2nd factor authentication on both the Mac and iPad sides before it works (even when the two are joined by a USB cable.

Finally, US time zones are really, really strange. Do not handle them yourself unless handling them is "what you do".

Today's Topics include:

Roblox dev
Roblox's margins and upcoming IPO
Sidecar
Roblox

Mentioned

Planet Milo - Roblox Channel
Heyhi
Roblox will IPO
No Starch Press
NIST

Mark's goals for next time

Record 4 screencasts
Continue studying from the No Starch books

Justin's goals for next time

Create a locking mechanism for a "grand finale" round in Slider
Get the orb challenges working.

Video version at https://youtu.be/YYunEPknwgg

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/34

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-10-14

Justin's been following the election news closely, and the president's covid case in particular.

In contrast, the issue dominating Mark's social circle and former co-workers has been H1-B visa changes. In his opinion the effects of the new regulations raising the minimum salary will be fairly nuanced and minor. The minimum salary requirements are going up, but not to nearly the level they initially were (adjusted for inflation). The number of applications in the lottery will probably decrease total number won't change. Most importantly, and unfortunately, H1-B holder's residence permission will still be tied to their employer.

tldr; small win for skilled applicants and the largest tech companies, and a huge loss for low-end outsourcers who were flooding the system.

Using WASM feels like living in the future to Mark, but Roblox development feels nostalgic to Justin... because it's rapidly developing and booming. Having been around computers and the web as they've exploded over the past few decades, rapid change itself is nostalgic!

Speaking of Roblox dev, Justin's never done this kind of of dev work before but has gone from zero to a playable and mostly "finished" graphical game. Of course with this kind of thing there's a lot of work to polish a game until it's profitable, but it's looking really good for such a new project. Justin says this is a counter-intuitive market where it's better for a bootstrapper to build the actual thing instead of selling picks and shovels.

Sometimes the best language updates don't add much in terms of syntax or functionality. They just make things faster and improve the tooling.

Today's Topics include:

Presidential covid
H1-B visa changes and who wins and loses
Humble Bundle
WASM
Roblox
Micropayments

Mentioned

H1-B discussion on HN
Programming Web Assembly with Rust
Shanda
Heyhi
Elixir 1.11

Mark's goals for next time

Record 4 screencasts
Do a full-day fast

Justin's goals for next time

Get Slider built to where levels are unlockable (with in-game keys)
Resume the trampoline workouts

Video version at https://youtu.be/tUYd6xTWLjU

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/33

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-10-07

The weather has been fantastic in Taiwan as it always is around Halloween, but Mark's been really feeling the pressure to meet the requirements to renew his entrepreneur visa. He suspects that the easiest route will be to earn enough to hire three employees, or possibly to to set up a local company and spend a required amount. . Justin thinks the best bet to hit that goal is to work hard on his starter kit—Phoenix Igniter.

Nugget's star pupil, Mateo, made his first sale on his project Heyhi! This is great news for Justin since he's been looking for the right case study. It could start with how he heard about Nugget, how he went through the lessons, started building experiments and finally profitable apps. Justin has basically boiled down the lessons from Nugget into a single sentence: "Hyper iterate on the product, talk to people and make what they need".

Alex Hillman and Daniel Vassallo had an interesting debate on Indie Hackers about the value of an email audience vs a Twitter audience. We thought they both made a strong case, but leaned towards email for long-term safety if nothing else.

Justin explained quite a bit more about how strange and interesting the Roblox dev environment is. Multiple devs and builders can all work on a game simultaneously and see the effects of each other's efforts in real time. It also wraps up client-server communication in a way that reminds Mark of 2013-era Meteor.js with Mini-mongo available in the browser's dev tools. The competition in Roblox dev is intense and it's fairly alien for a web dev, but Justin's got some big goals.

Today's Topics include:

Poor quality election debates
Mark's visa renewal requirements
Nugget's star
Black Friday and Humble Bundle
Roblox development

Mentioned

[Recursive Quality Factor]
Julia Evan's Zines
Heyhi
Kutty Tailwind Components
Render
Twitter Audience vs Email Audience
Phoenix Igniter
Alchemist Camp
Nugget Academy

Mark's goals for next time

Record 4 screencasts
Awesome October
Hold off on Phoenix Igniter

Justin's goals for next time

Keep working on the Roblox game
Exercise 15 minutes a day

Video version at https://youtu.be/TRNv3XsI0hs

Comment at https://reactor.am/podcasts/32

On Apple Podcasts at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/reactor/id1500109358

Recorded on 2020-09-30