Thomas Rolley 00:00
How to spend a lot of money quickly.
This has been an experience that I've jumped into and learnt quite a few lessons; I ran into a problem.
And that is, even though I understand systems and understand processes, templates, and how all of those come together to get the one thing that we want, which is results, what I found was that the unfortunate difficulty of any system is that they're still human beings using them.
And what I learned quickly was that the chances of being accurate and detailed enough, while trying to get the work done using systems were very difficult for most people, that the number of small little changes that if they weren't done would lead to major difficulties.
It was clear that there was only one solution.
And that was software.
Now, I've never done software before.
And I looked at, well, how am I going to build this thing? And it was, it was daunting, it's overwhelming.
It's like, Oh, my goodness, how on earth do you build software that runs systems? It sounds easy enough.
But there's a lot of details, a lot of gotchas.
And I'd never built software.
So I went, Okay, well, start talking to some software dev houses.
What I found from my initial conversations was that software developments have come a long way.
And that the cost of coding is so high that a lot of work has been done into having great prototyping tools, things as Adobe, XD, or Figma.
And so I was like, Okay, well, hey, this sounds like a good idea.
And so I went ahead.
And I actually did two things.
Number one, I said, you know, what, how about, I just take some systems that I know that work that is valuable, that solve problems for businesses, and I'll turn that into software, this will give me an exploration of what it's like to build software.
And secondly, I'll have a go at these high-definition prototypes.
Now, this was pretty fun.
I had a great time, I was working with a team in Ukraine, and we made a wonderful high def prototype, like super cool, and looks amazing.
Then I found out the next thing you got to do is you got to go through and label every button.
Like every button on the prototype needs labelling; this is called scope.
And then this, this was expensive.
This is pretty expensive.
Like just to get to that stage.
From my perspective, at least I presume it's not for many, if you're just used to coding software law, yeah, that's, you know, several $100,000, several 10s of 1000s of dollars, several $1,000, whatever it is, just like money just flies out, you're like, wow.
Thomas Rolley 02:35
And then we started coding.
And I found out that coding is really expensive.
What I thought was that the high def prototype, which substantially does shrink the amount of time that it takes to code, and it does, but it's still massive.
And I could see from the amount of work that had got done for the amount of money that was going out, I was like, hang on this, we need to need to stop this isn't going anywhere.
So the overall experience of this is that without finished software, all of that money has been wasted.
Essentially, it's like, okay, this, this isn't going anywhere.
And the only way to retrieve that is actually gone you know what, I need to know the full cost of development upfront.
And then I can make a decision say, all right, yep, this is a go.
Now, don't forget, not only on top of the actual software, you still have to I still have to consider the cost of marketing, because teams, the cost of selling the thing, the cost of fulfilling on it, it rapidly moves up.
Now, am I disappointed in my decision? No, I'm not why because I did something.
I got some movement.
And in doing these things, even though it didn't work, I've learned, and things are showing up now that I don't know that they would have I'm learning new ways of doing software Dev, my Oh, wow, check this out.
There is whole amazing developments in software that are going to make it possible.
That makes it possible right now to do apps substantially cheaper than I have been through with this model.
This is very cool.
This is very exciting.
Nonetheless, if you would like to spend a lot of money really quickly, then get into software development.
It's intense; it's crazy.
And definitely take my lessons and say, you know what I want to know, you want to know I want to know how much this whole thing is going to cost so that you can make a good decision about whether this is the opportunity that you want to once you take Alright, that's all I got for you today.
So a little lesson in systems and software.
Software is challenging you I did have a great time like that was super fun making software is fun if you're into it.
And but there are many lessons as well to be learned that's all I got for you today.
I hope you enjoyed this beautiful sunset behind me, and I hope you are getting some results using systems and processes if you need a hand with that, head over to systemio.dev, look forward to seeing your next episode as we continue this journey into systems getting results See you then.
