Podcast
81: We built the product. Can we build the business?
September 15, 202638:50
In this episode, Mitchell and Gavin celebrate onboarding more than 1,100 World Police and Fire Games athletes into SixSides, unpack the infrastructure, HubSpot, Intercom and marketing work behind the rollout, and prepare the business for Mitchell’s five-week honeymoon and a short break from the podcast.
Links
- QF1 for you flight nerds: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/qf1/schedules/5863144608
Chapters
- (00:00) - Intro and a huge week for SixSides
- (01:39) - 1,100 athletes onboarded and counting
- (05:21) - Scaling our infrastructure for users around the world
- (08:21) - HubSpot onboarding, email campaigns and product-led growth
- (13:24) - Community sales conversations and the Gold Coast Council
- (16:36) - The new SixSides marketing site is live
- (20:25) - Intercom, MCPs and fixing our bus factor
- (23:36) - Planning the dev team for Mitchell’s five-week honeymoon
- (29:17) - AEO, pricing and turning a product into a business
- (33:22) - A podcast break and Mitchell’s Europe trip
In this episode, we cover:
- Onboarding more than 1,100 World Police and Fire Games athletes into SixSides
- Seeing community posts arrive from athletes around the world
- Preparing SixSides infrastructure for thousands of international users
- Debugging login timeouts and database transactions during a live rollout
- Using multi-region infrastructure to improve performance for global users
- Building HubSpot onboarding campaigns for new SixSides users
- Fixing DKIM and email deliverability issues after the first campaign emails landed in spam
- Turning event attendees into community organisers through product-led growth
- Exploring SixSides as a community platform for associations, councils and not-for-profits
- Conversations with Volunteering WA and the Gold Coast Council about building stronger communities
- Launching the new SixSides marketing website
- Using Claude to extend an existing design system and build new marketing pages faster
- Adding Intercom to SixSides for customer support
- Using MCP integrations with HubSpot, Sentry and the SixSides codebase to troubleshoot support issues
- Reducing the bus factor by documenting tools, logins and operational access
- Planning larger development projects so the team can work independently while Mitchell is away
- The roadmap for additional languages, user-generated content translation, speech-to-text and private chat
- AEO content, citations and SixSides' broader acquisition strategy
- Working out a future pricing model from free through to enterprise
- Moving from building a product to building a sustainable SaaS business
- Taking a short podcast break while Mitchell heads to Europe for his honeymoon
Got questions or topics you want us to cover? Email us at journey@sixsides.co
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Connect with us
- SixSides: sixsides.co
- Book a call with Gavin: call.sixsides.co
- Mitchell on Bluesky: mitchdav.is
- Mitchell on LinkedIn: mitchdav
- Gavin on LinkedIn: gavintye
- Gavin on YouTube: gavintye1
- SixSides on LinkedIn: sixsides
- SixSides on X: sixsidesevents
- SixSides on Bluesky: sixsides.co
- SixSides on Youtube: sixsidesco
- SixSides on Substack: sixsides
- SixSides on Skool: Community Builders Network