[00:00:09.430] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.820] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.300] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.250] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:14.480] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And we are getting to the big number. Number 100 is coming up very soon. This is 98 I believe.

[00:00:33.240] - Taylor
I think so.

[00:00:34.020] - Gordon
And yes, gosh. I'm not sure we have anything planned for 100 but it will be a big milestone for us, 100 episodes. So this week is a bit of a short week for us because it's a bank holiday Monday this week, just gone. So the working week is a shorter week for us and it's quite weird actually to have a bank holiday because everyone does what we do basically. They sort of stay at home and find things to do, and it stops us from doing what we normally do. Anyway, do you have any news, Taylor?

[00:01:13.280] - Taylor
I don't.

[00:01:14.220] - Gordon
Okay, we've got the Apple announcement coming up on the 7 September, that's been confirmed now. I don't know what they're going to be talking about. It's likely to be a new iPhone.

[00:01:26.880] - Taylor
That's good.

[00:01:27.790] - Gordon
They are talking about other things as well. Possibly a VR headset is something that they've been talking about, but they've been talking about that for a while now. Be interesting to see if that does actually happen because we are both Oculus or Metaverse I should say now, Meta users, Meta Quest 2 users, and really enjoying it. I bought a new game today.

[00:01:52.600] - Taylor
Did you?

[00:01:53.170] - Gordon
Yeah, I bought Angry Birds which is a game that I've had for a long time on my iPhone and they've got it in VR now.

[00:02:01.780] - Taylor
Wow.

[00:02:01.780] - Gordon
And it's really cool because you get to hold the slingshot and pull with the other hand and you can point, and it's really quite cool. Stand in different places and look around it 3D. Really good. Anyway, let's get to today's topics. Would you like to go first or second?

[00:02:19.470] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.

[00:02:20.830] - Gordon
Okay, off you go.

[00:02:21.980] - Taylor
So my topic for this week is Good Enough is Better than Perfect. Now what do I mean by that? Well, I started a side project probably about a year ago now called "Snippet Club." And it was going to be a tutorial website and Snippets website where I store, it'll be a membership site where people can subscribe and get access to premium tutorials that I write, and kind of like code and solutions that I come up with. Now, I spent a long time building the actual site that people were going to use, and I just spent so much time on the small intricacies of everything and never launched it. And then it got to a point where the market that I was going to be kind of going towards kind of like dipped off a bit and I'm now in a different kind of market for the tools that I use, so a different group of people. And so after, now that I'm doing a lot better health wise I decided I'm going to get this done. I'm going to get it launched. And so in about a week or so; just over a week. I am about a page or two away from being able to launch it, which considering I spent a couple of months on the previous version is very good and this time I'm just going to say good enough is better than spending hours and hours and months on it that no one ever sees. So yeah, I want to get to a point where it's usable and it's a standard that is good enough that people were going to take it seriously and not going to think "oh, they've done this in an hour or so." That's my goal and I hope to launch it very very soon.

[00:04:24.320] - Gordon
I've come to the same conclusion actually through experience and this is from a perfectionist here, and I understand what you're saying. Get it out there. Because if people don't use it, if people don't like it then they won't use it and you can then change and move your time and efforts into something else, rather than spending all this time launching it and then nobody ever uses it even though you think it's perfect.

[00:04:56.360] - Taylor
Yeah. I think it's very prevalent in start-ups and things like that where you've got your time to market and the window in which you have gets smaller and smaller every day because someone else could come along and do something very very similar and basically take away your opportunity to be, not only the first but the only person, and the kind of leader in that sector in that area; and so yeah I think people that are looking for investments and things like that know that time to market is crucial because if you spend too long then the window passes. Bit like Formula One really, you have a time where you can kind of pit which is ideal and if you don't you could end up missing it and it ruins the entire race.

[00:05:45.530] - Gordon
There is a fine line though. You need to make sure that it is good enough.

[00:05:50.100] - Taylor
Exactly.

[00:05:50.880] - Gordon
To be out there and to be usable for people and they don't get frustrated and just get annoyed and decide not to use your service or your website or whatever it is, but without it being 'everything is perfect.' Because you can always change it and add to it and tweak it once people are starting to use it.

[00:06:10.040] - Taylor
I think it's finding the balance between minimum viable product and kind of good enough. I think that's the area you need to be in because minimal viable product sometimes can cause issues because people think "oh, this isn't a fully fledged product" or it's missing lots of important or crucial features that needed to be in there and if you'd waited a month or so and got them in there then your conversion rate might be higher or whatever.

[00:06:38.750] - Gordon
Yeah, I agree. I was going to say something about this. Oh, yes. One place you could look at putting your Snippet Club is on AppSumo. You could potentially put it on there as a membership site for Lifetime deal. If he decides to go that route, or he has a lifetime deal of any sort, then maybe he'll talk about it on this channel; and so you can get in on the ground floor. But it's a nice idea, it just needs to get out there.

[00:07:13.610] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:07:13.610] - Gordon
Yeah, you need to start using it. I think that was all I was going to say on that. Is there anything else you want to add?

[00:07:21.740] - Taylor
No, I think that's everything. It's just for me, just a reminder to make sure I just get something out there and yeah, don't wait too long.

[00:07:31.250] - Gordon
Yeah, that's good. The other thing, I just remembered what I was going to say. The other thing that you can do is if you get people on board at the beginning, they can then offer suggestions and improvements, and it makes them feel like they're a part of the journey and a part of the product, so they become very loyal to the service; and then you've got loyal people going out telling everyone else about it, which is great. So, my topic today is something I don't know a great deal about, but I am starting to look at and starting to learn, and that is a "Raspberry Pi." Now, for those of you who have no idea what that is, it's Pi spelt P-I. And it's a little tiny computer that will sit in your hand, okay. But it's a really unusual computer because it's only the circuit board and the chips. That's all it comes with. You want to have a power supply, you buy a power supply. You want to buy a heat sink, which is a bit of metal that takes all the heat and dissipates it from the main core CPU. Yeah, you need to add one of those in.

[00:08:47.290] - Taylor
You want to see what you're doing, you need to hook a screen up.

[00:08:50.560] - Gordon
You hook a screen. It's got HDMI, so it's got lots of ports built into it, like USB, HDMI, Power, Ethernet. It's got Bluetooth, it's got WiFi all built into it. But it's designed for people who want to get sort of this hardware and mod it, or use it for a little project that they want to do. And there are thousands and thousands of different projects that are powered by Raspberry Pi. And I thought I would get one just to have a little play with it, really, and see what it was all about. I like to have enough knowledge to know what's possible, because then if I get asked by someone else or I want to do something myself, then I can just use the experience that I've got to just go, "right, well, a Raspberry Pi will do this. We just need to get a camera kit, or we need to get this or we need to get that, add it to it and then it will do what we need to do."

[00:09:56.080] - Taylor
Yeah, I think a good explanation would be kind of, it's a little pocket device that you can set to do normally one thing, and it's cheaper than having a big computer sat in the corner to run this one task, whether it be... You set up a photo frame, so you connect to digital display and you just have it looping photos for example.

[00:10:22.450] - Gordon
And it's actually very much cost effective to be able to do that as opposed to going out and buying a photo frame because you have a little computer and it's got the software and the operating system which you can upgrade. Which you can't do with an all in one photo frame for example. And what's really nice is there's a big community of people who use it, and they create their own kits that you can add to it. It's got like a load of pins with outputs and inputs that you can just use jumpers to give the information into the computer.

[00:10:59.900] - Taylor
LED lights.

[00:11:00.750] - Gordon
Run the software. Yeah, one of the ones I remember seeing is a Christmas tree lights, where the guy had... I mean, this is just phenomenal, what he did. He basically had a Christmas tree. He put Christmas tree lights all the way around it. There were thousands of lights on this. And he would then hook it up to a Raspberry Pi, and he managed to take photos of each light, so he would basically, he had the ability to turn on lights individually. And they were LED lights, multicoloured LED lights, so they could be in different...

[00:11:40.900] - Taylor
So you could basically paint on the tree.

[00:11:41.570] - Gordon
So he took pictures from different angles so that the computer knew where every LED was; and then he could create patterns and the computer would know which lights need to be on and what colour they need to be to create the patterns. Which yeah, okay, not a very useful task in the great scheme of things, but the ability there was for him to take a little computer and write his own software.

[00:12:13.570] - Taylor
Another one I've seen is dotMatrix. So for people that commute, someone created a dotMatrix train board style screen, essentially, using the dotMatrix screen sorry. And they would have the latest bus or the next bus or the next train scrolling across the screen, which is quite useful in the morning because it saves you having to check your phone. Obviously, you normally know the times, but it's good to know if there's a delay or something and you can just look over it and go, "okay, the train's going to be five minutes. It takes me three minutes to get there." So...

[00:12:56.090] - Gordon
And the nice thing about these is because they're very small and they're getting more powerful every time there's a new version of it. They are actually quite reasonably priced as well. So a Raspberry Pi 4B, which is the latest version, should run you about sort of £70 or so, depending on the amount of memory you want to add to it. So you can have sort of 2,4,6,8. Not sure that's quite right actually, maybe it's 2,4,8. But either way, the more memory you have, the more expensive it is. And these are quad core processors. However, because there is a shortage of chips at the moment, Raspberry Pi's are very difficult to get hold of, and they are out of stock at most of the big Raspberry Pi places. There are online stores that only sell Raspberry Pi and kits, and they don't have any. But I managed to buy a Raspberry Pi 400 kit which comes with a mouse, it comes with a power supply, comes with a micro HDMI to normal sized HDMI, so you can hook it up to a TV. And it's one of the latest Raspberry Pi's and it's actually built into a keyboard, so it is just a keyboard, but it's got the computer inside it and all the ports are on the back; and that's what I've chosen to purchase, because I want to have a play and see what's possible.

[00:14:33.340] - Taylor
There's another one, which is a smart mirror.

[00:14:38.030] - Gordon
Okay. This is a project, you mean?

[00:14:41.270] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:14:41.530] - Gordon
That someone's used it for.

[00:14:42.710] - Taylor
Yes. What someone's done is they've taken a computer screen like a monitor and they completely like strip out most of it. So taken off the backing and the front black screen thing, and then they put a kind of translucent mirror on top of it and you can see the display shining through. So you can just create a website, essentially, that has the latest weather, your calendar, and all it's doing is it's just showing the web page when you turn it on or if you've got it on all the time. And obviously you could interact with it if you hook up a microphone, and you could watch videos or whatever you wanted because the possibilities are endless. But it's quite a nice idea because it brings a bit of interactivity and it's a fun little project.

[00:15:34.520] - Gordon
Yeah, and there's lots of them, there's weather stations, there's all sorts of things. So I'm going to be having a look at this and I suspect I will report back to you at some point with some ideas or things that I would like to try or have tried. So yes, I shall come back to you on that. That's me done.

[00:15:55.990] - Taylor
Great.

[00:15:56.440] - Gordon
Anything else you want to say?

[00:15:57.830] - Taylor
No, I think we've covered both of our topics.

[00:16:00.170] - Gordon
We have. So a nice sort of quick one for today as opposed to our normal sort of 25 minutes or so. We're down to about 16, which is good. So, as always, you can like, subscribe, follow, share, YouTube, Facebook... Just go and do it. Don't forget, if you're on YouTube, click that subscribe bell because then when we do a new episode, it will actually tell you about it.

[00:16:28.980] - Taylor
Yeah. You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:16:35.990] - Gordon
Until next week, Friday at 1p.m. We will see you then. My name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:16:43.170] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:16:45.790] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:16:46.360] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes