Daniel: "Hey, welcome to Waiting for a Review, a show about the majestic indie developer lifestyle. Join our scintillating hosts, Dave and Daniel, and let's hear about a tiny slice of their thrilling lives. Join us while waiting for a review. Hey, Dave, nice to see you."

Dave: "Hi Daniel, how you doing?"

Daniel: "I'm pretty good, I'm pretty good. I'm super close to the microphone because I listened back to a recent episode of ours and it sounds as if I'm lisping. And the thing is I am very much not lisping. And so earlier today, I actually did a quick recording of myself and the like just in quick time and I just listened back to it and then it sounded okay. So now I'm just like trying to be very close to the microphone so the sound quality is very good and enunciating my S's."

Dave: "Yes, so we end up with sibilance, and I know that will be horribly essssse, I apologize. But yeah, I think I know what that might be, Daniel. We had the week where I had to drop back to the backup recording that we do, and I don't think it sounded quite as polished as it was we might have been sounding normally, so that might have been a factor in there too. So, yes."

Daniel: "Yeah. Oh, OK. Yeah, that might have been. Luckily, we do have backup recordings."

Dave: "Not that I, uh... We do, we do definitely belt and braces here in terms of making sure we've got things covered. And it's kind of funny as well because we count down towards podcasting with each other to check that the other one is ready to go because we've got a, I mean what is our time difference now 11 hours right? So"

Daniel: "Right now it's 11 hours."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah, and so listeners of the show might not realize, but this means one of us is ending up on the wake-up morning routine while the other one's kind of winding down in the evening, so we sort of come together at that crossover."

Daniel: "Yeah, I'm usually the evening part of the team and you're usually the morning part. And that kind of works out for me and I think for you as well."

Dave: "Yep. Exactly. Yeah, it does. It does. As long as I've had my coffee, it's absolutely fine."

Daniel: "Yeah, but we do that where I'm just sending you like a t minus one hour until we record and stuff like that. So yeah, of course we have a backup like backup launch window because we do lots of space jokes on these."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah. Yes. We do indeed. And so yes, I think today we were opening the pot bay doors, right?"

Daniel: "Yeah. And then I can say, Dave, I can't do that, which is just about perfect. The pod."

Dave: "Yeah. Hehehehehehe Yes."

Daniel: "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do hell, I can't do hell. It's been..."

Dave: "No, I can't do Hal's voice either. I can kind of do the dozy dozy, but probably nobody really wants to hear me do that. Daniel, what's been going on in your world? How have things been going since we last spoke?"

Daniel: "Hehehe Yeah. Okay. I have been romancing aliens and I have been interfacing with both Google ads and Microsoft ads. Which one do you want to hear first?"

Dave: "Okay. Yes. Um, I want to hear about the Captain Kirk style one, the first one."

Daniel: "Right. So about ages ago, I don't know when exactly, I bought Mass Effect legendary edition for my PlayStation. Mass Effect is a series of video games where you're in the space opera style. You're just some person who becomes captain of a ship and then needs to like, I don't know, prevent the destruction of the universe."

Dave: "Okay."

Daniel: "as is common. And recently lots of people have been talking about role-playing games, especially because Boarderskate 3 came out. And I've been too cheap to buy Boarderskate 3 because role-playing games are awesome, especially video games that are role-playing games. But they take a huge amount of time commitment and I don't have that. But recently I've been getting the itch to play something again on the PlayStation."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "And so I've just like idly been scrolling through my library. And I've discovered Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is a remaster, so the graphics are slightly updated. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to try this. I set the difficulty settings for the combat to super low. So because I just wanted to enjoy the story and also didn't want to spend 40 hours on the game. Um, and so, yeah, that's, and it's been surprisingly fun. Like the beginning was absolute slog because the thing is just, um, so it, at least in, if you reduce the difficulty this way, like that, like the whole game is like 10% combat and that's just like shooter combat, basically you like duck behind chest high walls and I shoot it, shoot at enemies and, um, 90% it's a conversation simulator."

Dave: "Ha! Okay."

Daniel: "and you then have stats and the stats kind of influence the conversation options that you can choose. And it's a slog at the beginning because the game needs to tell you, hey, this is what's been happening the last 200 years. Oh yeah, there are about seven different alien races and they all have cultures and they all have politics and you're very in the middle of these politics. You kind of need to understand."

Dave: "Right. Alright."

Daniel: "all the different institutions and how they interact and whatever before the main story can even like start off."

Dave: "I'm sort of picturing a little bit, and this is probably going to upset fans of either, but I'm picturing it a bit of a cross between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, in the way you're describing it."

Daniel: "I feel that's pretty on the spot actually, because it feels very Star Wars-y, but it also feels very Lord of the Ring-ish. The main place where you always return to is called the Citadel, and it's very cathedral style and then there's the council that will determine the fate of you and whatever. So anyway, the gameplay loop is they give you a ship and of course it's the best ship in the universe."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Right."

Daniel: "And then you got to do missions and like for further the plot. And also you're kind of picking up, um, like people for your crew. And then they will also fight with you, of course. And, um, like, so the main thing is basically like furthering the relationships with these people in your crew and they're kind of cool. And once you get into it, and once you like get over this hump, it is actually pretty cool because, um, the characters are well written. The, the, the dialogue is. Like."

Dave: "Yeah."

Daniel: "It's all spoken dialogue, so that's really well done. And I've heard that you can romance individual characters, and I was like, ha ha, I'm gonna romance every single person in my crew. Every human, every alien, whatever. So first disappointment, you can choose your gender at the beginning of the story. And well, you can choose either man or woman, so."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "And if you choose man, you can only romance the female characters. If you choose woman, you can only romance the men, which is all already like a very, um, kind of, kind of sand, sad. And then the other thing is also that, um, apparently the game will forbid you to romance multiple characters. Uh, either serially or at once, it doesn't matter. Like we'll just not work. Um, so I was like, okay, hmm, then I'm just gonna."

Dave: "binary. Mm-hmm. Okay."

Daniel: "talk to characters and not pursue the whole thing. But then... And the game actually made it easy for me because it turns out the human female romanceable character turns out to be heavily racist towards aliens. So I kinda dropped her in romance, the blue haired alien instead, which was very nice. It was very cute."

Dave: "Yeah, that sounds like a... hmm? I mean, yeah, that's whatever floats your goat, I think is the phrase at that point. But um... Oh. Ah. That's kind of funny because I had no idea it was a space game, and in my head it was something else. I'd actually got it confused with Fallout when I knew..."

Daniel: "and a bit spicy. Ha ha. Did I say blue haired? I mean blue skinned. Oh, yeah."

Dave: "When you were discussing playing this game and that it had a lot of investment upfront, and I saw you discuss this over on Mastodon, I was like, in my head, I was like, oh yeah, it's the game with like, you know, the, you're in the fallout chamber and whatever. And you know, of course it's called Fallout, not Mass Effect. Right. So, um, yeah, cheers for that brain, but, um, it took me a little while to come with you at the beginning. Like just, hang on a second. This isn't the, the nuclear one. Um, but it sounds."

Daniel: "It's not the nuclear one, no. Everything is very spacey and stuff. And it's very noticeable Unreal Engine, because the whole game looks exactly like, it's like three games, Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3, right? And even though all of them are remastered, the first one looks like Unreal Tournament, and the second one looks like Unreal Tournament 2. Like, ah, that had a 2011, 2010? The second Unreal Tournament had a gear number, and it looks exactly like that."

Dave: "Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep."

Daniel: "And so it's giving me all kinds of flashbacks back to my youth. And it's kind of nice."

Dave: "Right. that's cool. I don't game very often at all so unfortunately I can't match you on a gaming story right now, I have no gaming story. But my kids were playing this game the other night, it's Phantasmaphobia I think it is or something like that. You're basically dealing with ghosts in this game and if the ghost..."

Daniel: ".. Mm-hmm."

Dave: "wakes up, if it gets you, it grabs you and you sort of get killed off and turned into a ghost yourself and then you can't talk to your friends that you're playing this with this cooperative thing. And the reason I mention it is because they said one of the mechanics is that it's got its own voice system. You route your microphone and audio through their system and so you're talking to your cooperative people through their voice."

Daniel: "Oh, okay."

Dave: "voice chat, which is okay. All right. I wonder why that is. And it turns out they run a basic bit of sort of, um, speech to text detection. And they use it as a mechanic in the game for if you say the ghost's name, it wakes up. And yeah, and there's clues."

Daniel: "No way, that's cool. I was expecting you to say something like, oh yeah, if you talk too loudly, the ghost wakes up or something, you know?"

Dave: "No, no, no. It's like, and they leave clues as well. So you, you know, you'll be reading bits and go, Oh, I think the ghost name is I'd known Nancy or whatever. And that activates it. Um, yeah. Yeah. Um, I don't think they've realized, yeah, I'm not sure they've realized yet. They need to talk in code perhaps to maybe work around this. Like, like, you know, like we do to make sure the cats don't realize we're about to feed them."

Daniel: "Oh, OK. That's really cool. Mm-hmm."

Dave: "biscuits, that's a trigger word for our cats. So they get B words if we want to be quiet about it. But anyway, yeah, that was an interesting mechanic to me that they were using this speech to text and sort of AI on the audio. And that was the reason. The other reason is that when you get turned into a ghost, you get muted. You can't talk to your friends. So that again puts you in the mechanic the game wants you to be in terms of how you communicate."

Daniel: "That sounds really cool, like a really cool way of using the way people play these games with them. Because you gotta talk to your friends while playing the game, of course. And so yeah, just don't do it through Discord or whatever, do it directly through the game and then you can have fun with that. That's really nice. I like it."

Dave: "Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, so, uh, no, that's, that's quite interesting. It's, uh, I'm trying to think about what's been going on my side. Cause often we talk about, um, what we're up to in our indie lives. And I'm just thinking, yeah, my life has been not about the code very much at all. At the moment."

Daniel: "How's the new house looking?"

Dave: "New house is good, I've just about got this office set up which I showed you around actually on the video so I did this cool um a little bit I give you the shaky cam tour of my home office um but the house is good we're in we've moved everything we're basically unpacked um like all the boxes are unpacked and the immediate DIY jobs that I knew I would have to do are sort"

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "Like the other day it was putting pictures up on the wall, which is like tiny compared to the first one of the bigger jobs that I did, which was fitting new handles on sliding doors. Yep."

Daniel: "Yeah. I mean, Tiny is good, but that was pretty quick too, right? I mean, if I look at various moves that I've seen in my life, like people take sometimes like a long time to really take ownership of a new place."

Dave: "Yeah, we've just like leant into it. It's been what we've wanted for ages and my wife's been very, you know, motivated to get certain bits done and the kids have too. So we've sort of pulled together as a family and just got stuff as done as we can. But for me, with this, I've got this office room now because before I was talking to you from a desk that was in the side of our bedroom, this is a lot better. I can shut."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "rest of the house off properly. I've got a pegboard on the wall with all my test devices. I've got a little station desk sort of set up next to my main work desk so that I can set up my VJ app and actually play on it and I'm potentially going to do some live streams in the next few months. Yeah."

Daniel: "Oh nice, I gotta tune in to those. Because they will be in your evening time, so I can eat breakfast and watch you VJ."

Dave: "You can, you can indeed, yeah. I've got to figure a few things out and that will spur me on in developments of the app as well, so that's part of the plan there, is that I'm going to be dogfooding my work a lot more as well. But yeah, that's kind of the update on this side, it's been sort of all about the new house. I mean I've even been planting stuff in the garden and things like that as well. I've got a greenhouse so I'm..."

Daniel: "You touched grass. Literally."

Dave: "I have touched grass, not... yeah, yeah it's been there. I've certainly not stood on it barefoot though, it's still a bit wet and squelchy out there at the moment because it is... eventually. Yep, yep. But no, I think probably more relevant for the listeners of the show, I've been playing with a new app actually in the last few days, so I've just started to sort of come out of my non-dev cocoon for the house move."

Daniel: "I mean, summer is coming. For you anyways. Mm-hmm."

Dave: "And that's been fun. That's been fun. This will be the first one of the Lego apps that we talked about last month in terms of if I actually get it to the end, to the finish line and release it, then it will be the first one out there in this format. So yeah, that's kind of cool. I can tell you a little bit about what it is. It's a background removal app."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "So remember the point of the Lego apps is to have a single concept and to execute it well and to then share shared components between the apps I've got. And this one's concept is very much around okay you've got a picture, you want to remove that background or lift the subject of the photo out of the background and apply some effects. I'm making it very easy to do that. And some of this you can do, or you can do some of this already with, with iOS from iOS 16, right? We've had the subject detection and the ability to press on a photograph and copy only the subjects out of it built into the OS, uh, with iOS 17, that API is now open to us, to developers. So I've gone, okay, that's, let's have a play. Um, and the thing that I think is going to be really, really cool if I can get it working."

Daniel: "cool."

Dave: "is I'm going to do it to video. So"

Daniel: "So it will kind of plug into the Go VJ verse."

Dave: "Yes, yes exactly and one of the things I'll let it do once I get to this point is export videos with transparency around them so you've only got the subject of in each frame there and then I can make sure that Govj supports the transparency so when you've got that on the second layer it drops all of the pixels around it and you can use it as an overlay very easily within the app. So that'll be quite good because at the moment if you want to achieve that effect in Go VHA, you effectively key the background out in one way or another through the App's Blend mode. So..."

Daniel: "All right. Are there like video formats that allow transparency? Like I'm not up to, yeah, cool."

Dave: "Yep. Yeah. We got that on iOS properly with, um, have C, um, so with the, the Heath, um, image format, I know H E I F and then I'm talking about H E V C. Yeah."

Daniel: "Those names for the image parts are... Heaf. Oh, that's Keith. He's working on Heaf."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah, there's a ledger in there somewhere. No, yeah, so we got those formats the other year that allow the transparency in video, and I've yet to really play with it properly. So this is sort of a vehicle for a bit of that as well. Yeah, but it's early days. I'm kind of barely beyond hacking around the prototype that uses some of the demo code from Apple, and then I'm expanding it out with my own effects and other bits that it does. So it's not."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "not exactly that progressed yet, but I have all the stuff from the Lego app approach is already there. I've got a settings menu already set up. I've got my, you know, rhyme and reason to how the app is formatted and dependencies are injected. I've got a theming engine in there already, because I just went copy my test app, rename it, start building this one. And that was the idea with the Lego app approach. So it's already sort of paying back a bit. Yeah, so that's been me, Devon Housewise."

Daniel: "Fantastic. sounds really nice, and I'm looking forward to the app. Yeah, me, I haven't been programming that much. The programming that I've done is kind of a bit exploratory right now. Like I'm still hacking around with the Vision Pro stuff. I'm still experimenting with the Swift, like the Cine2DX Swift SDK, because I kind of wanna see if I can get, like,"

Dave: "Hmm?"

Daniel: "Can I send a telemetry signal every time the user navigates and then send the path that they navigate to and from? Because that would be really cool to automatically visualize paths through the app. But so far I haven't stumbled upon a really universal solution that I can really give people to like, hey, drop this into your app and then bam, it just works."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Right."

Daniel: "So I'm kind of exploring. But the other thing that I've been doing is I've been, I've been actually placing ads. Um, so this is not, not something that I have a lot of experience in or that is like super awesome, I think. But, uh, we like more people need to know about telemetry deck. And so, um, me and Lisa, we've been deciding, okay, it's time now to, to check out where and how we can place ads. We had a few experiments last year with Twitter, but then Twitter became evil. Then we did experiment with Reddit ads. Then Reddit became kind of evil. And so, yeah, Lisa said to me like, hey, we got to play some ads on truth.social or something. Oh no, because now I told the story differently. I said like, hey, then Reddit kind of..."

Dave: "Sensing a pattern here. They were already evil. Let's move on."

Daniel: "crashed and burned and then Twitter kind of crashed and burned. It makes way more sense this way. Anyway, so I don't want to say I'll never put ads on Reddit. Maybe I'll have to try that out again. But right now, I'm mainly putting ads on Microsoft ads. So you can see those on Bing, on Ecosia, and on DuckTek Go. Ecosia is like one of those very tiny search engines that kind of..."

Dave: "Right, yeah. Okay."

Daniel: "use being under the hood. Same with Dr. Go is a bit bigger and actually my search engine of choice. The ads that they show us are also like served by Microsoft ads. And I've also placed Google ads and those are like seen in the Google search of course. And it's been a wild ride because it's..."

Dave: "Yes."

Daniel: "you very quickly learn a lot of stuff. One thing that I've learned is that the user interface for Google Ads is horribly bad, whereas the user interface for Microsoft Ads is really, really good. And only once I've understood the concepts through Microsoft's interface, then I could use Google's interface. I also realized where are the holes in my tracking, because..."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "How do you redefine out if your ads are working? I can't just plop in Google Analytics or Microsoft Analytics into our software. We're using Telemetry Deck over there. And so I found two holes. One is the handoff between two different apps, because our main landing page is the website is a separate app from the app that you use to register."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "But the whole registration process is, of course, one process that should be in the same funnel. And so I solved this by passing on a session ID. And by that, we can identify the same user. And so now I do have a funnel, like a telemetry deck funnel, that shows me the conversion rates from, oh yeah, first visit on this landing page. Then the user clicks on register. Then the user actually fills out the registration form. And then they also."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "choose a plan or choose the free plan or just leave. And that's been really cool. So the ads convert pretty well. Like we have a click through rate on the ads of about 10%, which is not too bad. Like one in 10 people who sees the ad clicks on that, but like I'll take that. I wanna improve that, but yeah, that's a good way to start."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "Then about 20% of people who land on my new landing pages, about 20% actually click on register from that landing page. So that's also pretty good actually. And then registration is a start drop off. Only about one in 20 of the people who are land of the registration actually go through with the registration."

Dave: "Yeah that is."

Daniel: "So I've been thinking, yeah, maybe we need to make this a little bit easier, maybe with providing very single sign-up options through, I don't know, register using GitHub, register using with your Apple ID, or whatever, sign in with Google. I'm not going to sign in with Google, but sign in with Apple, sign in with GitHub, stuff like that. Maybe even pass keys. Pass keys would be cool."

Dave: "Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would still put that down the list at the moment. So I'm seeing that as being quite a slower adoption, but yeah."

Daniel: "Lisa said this to me this morning."

Dave: "Not that I dislike Paschis, I think they're a great idea. It's just that I'm seeing the general perception and adoption is quite slow still at the moment. But, um."

Daniel: "Yeah, no, it's definitely like, I would like to have it. And I tried this, I'm using Stripe, right? And so Stripe offers additional verification by passkey. So that means when I log in, instead of having to enter a two-factor authentication code, I just plop down my finger on the, like the thumbnail reader, no, fingerprint reader, and then it just works and that's really cool. And I would like to have that for telemetry deck as well, but yeah, it's..."

Dave: "Yeah. Mm hmm. And it just works. Yeah."

Daniel: "pretty far down on the list of priorities right now."

Dave: "GitHub makes sense, I think is a good one."

Daniel: "So yeah, it's all open auth. So if I support one of them, I can support all of them with no real additional work. But yeah, so the question right now is how much work do I wanna put into single sign-on or other improvements to the registration page? Yeah."

Dave: "I was trying to work, so I'm very sorry Daniel, I was trying to work out mentally the, um, your conversion rate from the top to the bottom. Is it about two and a half percent? Was I right? Hey, my mental maths not so bad."

Daniel: "I can tell you. It is about 20% yeah. Hang on, where's the funnel? I have like this app, it's called Tenementry Deck. It actually works perfectly now with Sonoma's new web applications thing. Because I did a bit of work with it, but not a lot, actually. And I just have it in my doc now, and it's really nice."

Dave: "Oh, that's nice. Yep. So you've turned it into a PWA. Is that? Yeah."

Daniel: "Yeah, that's correct. So, okay, I sent you a screenshot. The screenshot is two different telemetry deck files. I actually 1% or 2%. And the two different funnels are for different landing pages. I have one landing page that's called telemetrydetect.com slash Swift. And the other one is telemetrydetect.com slash web. And the Swift is the stand in right now for all app analytics. But I'm gonna branch out into Swift Kotlin."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Oh, I've got you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep."

Daniel: "I don't know, Flutter, React. But so far, I'm just going to, the ads that speak about, or the ads that speak about app analytics will go to that URL, and then the ads that speak about web analytics will go to the other one. And yeah, because I have that funnel, I can now have these, I can now make better decisions. And I think for now, I don't want"

Dave: "Yep. Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "uh, the actual telemetry code, not this week. I think this week I want to continue on putting more people into the top of the funnel and especially the right people. Because right now, if I look at the keywords that I have, some of these are like, obviously like people click on the ad and they come from, from the search query that says, I want to say, um, privacy certification in Mexico. And I'm like, very cool. Like probably popped up because privacy was in there. But I'm gonna have to try and like, make the app not show up for that kind of query because I want to massage the like, because this, the person who searched it for that is probably not interested in an app analytics service right now. And so like, I'm just paying like, I don't know, 30 cents for that click without like..."

Dave: "Yeah."

Daniel: "getting a customer there. So I think the first step has to be just like working on that, on that targeting, like just having the right keywords, the right positive keywords and also negative keywords where you can like say like, okay, as soon as people search for this, like just don't show them. Because I think that will put in more people into the funnel and that will benefit of course, the registration numbers as well, but also it will... it will refine the people that come to us. And I think that will also help with registration and funding, but also it will keep costs down. Because if, like at the very beginning, well, before, like when I just like, the first day I just tried a very naive approach. I was like, okay, just worldwide people who search for privacy analytics should just go here. And it brought a lot of visitors to the page, but they were from backgrounds where they obviously didn't have a technical background. They were from countries that we can't serve right now. They were using technologies that we can't serve right now. We had a lot of registrations that day. but nothing will ever come. Those people will never buy a paid plan. So yeah, it makes sense to refine this at the very source. And I think that's gonna be my strategy. Ask me again next week, of course, but I think that's gonna be my strategy, just refining from the left to the right on this funnel."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's interesting because I think the other side of it is you almost flip it on its head as well as another way of doing it where you then go, okay, so based on the people going in versus based on the people getting to where I want them to be, what are the commonalities? Like what defines the people who've signed up as a group at the other end? And then when you know those things you sort of start to build up a bit of a pen portrait."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "as it were, of the type of customers you're seeing through at the other end."

Daniel: "Yeah. I had a talk with Lisa this morning and she gave me like a really important, uh, word to keep in mind or phrase to keep in mind that which was search intent, like what, like it's not, not about what are the people entering in, in the search box. It's about what are people, what are people's intentions really? And how does, does that, like, if you know people's intentions, then you gotta kind of, can, can try to figure out like, what will they then enter into the search box? Um, and the intentions have to, like, we have to align with those intentions."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "Um, yeah, but of course, yeah."

Dave: "Yeah, when I say about flipping it that way, I guess the thing I'm thinking is you may see patterns of the people who end up where you want them to be, that differentiate them from the ones who didn't, and then you can tune your adverts and that sort of stuff at the top of the funnel to try and get more of those folk, right? So you might see things like it's..."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "I don't know, 80% of people who signed up because of us are actually based in Sweden, for example. And you know, close inspection, you find out something's happened there in terms of data law. And a bunch of people are searching for privacy analytics because of that or some story like that. And that will then let you do very focused ad campaigns if you drive it out that way. But it's..."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "It's cool. It's also interesting because you're using these tools and wiring them up to everything else you've got."

Daniel: "Oh, yeah, I have one more though. I haven't implemented this yet, but both Google Ads and also Microsoft Ads allow you to report back an actual conversion, however you define that. And then they can update their ad algorithms and add targeting accordingly. So that would be really cool, right? Because if you're someone who uses Google Analytics, then you can just say, oh, yeah, we're defining this action. Maybe a sign up. Maybe a."

Dave: "Yeah. Aha! Yes."

Daniel: "registration for a paid plan, we'll be defining this action as a conversion. You can even add a monetary value to that conversion. And then that will automatically report back to Google. And then Google can even better use their algorithms to target possible customers. So that's really cool. But we're all about avoiding Google Analytics. And again, through Microsoft, I came to a solution because"

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "in the Microsoft documentation, which is way better than Google's, I stumbled upon a thing that's called offline conversion. So I'm like, okay, what's that? So it turns out, Microsoft will give you a click ID. And if you store that click ID somewhere, and then you can up to like, I want to say 30 to 90 days later, you can go back to Microsoft and say, okay, this click ID just had a conversion action with us. Like maybe"

Dave: "Ha ha"

Daniel: "Like something that happened not directly on the website or that happened even like in real life or whatever. And, but you're reporting back. Oh yeah, this was, this was a good click. And you can do this. You can, you can upload a CSV file with, with just the click IDs or there's an API that you can post to where you can say, Hey, this click ID was good for us. So I'm reporting a conversion for this click ID. And so I'm like, Hey, this, I can do this. This is like something that I can do."

Dave: "Okay. Yeah, yeah that's much less creepy on your side at that point, that's it, yeah."

Daniel: "Um... Exactly, because the click IDs themselves are also not... I got to check with R.L.R.S. about this, but my idea right now is that the click ID themselves should not be directly tied to a person as well, at least not on our side. So I'm gonna check, but my understanding right now is that if this click ID is not personally identifiable information, then I can store it, and then..."

Dave: "Yeah. Yes."

Daniel: "later use my user telemetry query to build a report that I can upload there. Or maybe even build something that, um, that automatically posts to the post API."

Dave: "Yeah, you kind of want it like webhook style so it just sort of sends it off at the end of it or something, but yeah."

Daniel: "Right. So that would be really cool. And it turns out Google has the very same architecture. It's all called differently, but even there, they have an API where I can just pause to or upload a CSV into our form. So yeah. So this is, I think, this is going to be a project that I want to tackle, not as my main project, but just as a side thing where I want to be able to."

Dave: "Right."

Daniel: "I want to be able to use all these ads without compromising the privacy of the users more than strictly necessary. And I think that's also a good use case. If we can really do this and if I can document this, then other customers can do this as well. And then that's another really cool thing. We can just showcase on the website. Because that makes it... that removes one objection that people have against us, which is like, oh yeah, but like, if I use all the Google tools, then like it's all one ecosystem and it works way better. And if we can play with this part of the ecosystem, then like we remove that objection, but still have a huge advantage in privacy."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Yes, yeah, because you're airlocking, airlocking the individual users privacy and what they do. But that's, that's very, very cool, actually, if that all comes together. Yeah, yeah, I love that. And obviously, this is all about getting the word out and that side of things with telemetry deck, which is an important part of where the business is at right now. So, you know, I mean,"

Daniel: "Yeah. Let's see if it works. It would be cool. Yeah."

Dave: "I think you've been around, in my head, you've been around forever, right? In terms of like this product, it's not, it's still very young. And part of being very young still is, you know, not as many people know about you as could know about you. So I think there's a lot of value there in that."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, tell all your friends. Oh, by the way, this week we're giving away way more signals. So this has been the case for a long time actually. Like if you use Telemetry Deck and you invite someone, you can do so using a referral link and that gives you free signals for, how do I say this? Like usually you get like, if you use a free plan, you can use up to 100,000 signals per month. But each time someone clicks on your,"

Dave: "Ah."

Daniel: "referral link, that number goes up. So like refer a few people, and then suddenly you have way more like, like room to play with without having to pay for telemetry day. Or if you pay, then this also gets added on top, which is kind of cool. So yeah, this week we're kind of doubling the amount of signals you get gifted for each referral. So for both you and the person who gets referred, or the referee, the referrist, whatever."

Dave: "Yep. Referee, I think. It doesn't sound right, but yeah."

Daniel: "So yeah, that's another way we're trying to get the word out. And also, can I tell you about our new landing pages? So if you go to telemetrydeck.com, that kind of looks the same, right? But in the menu bar at the top, there's new entries. One that says for apps and the other one is for websites. And if you click that, Then you go to the landing page that the ad viewers are currently seeing. And that is a bit more interactive, because I finally managed to integrate our chart library into the landing page website. So I have chart animations and hover states and stuff like that. And we have 3D transforms, which is kind of cool. So we have this cute card stack. And"

Dave: "Yep. That's really cool."

Daniel: "This is the way I'm trying to explain how telemetry dig works. So the"

Dave: "Hang on, what's the URL again to see that?"

Daniel: "telemetrydeck.com slash swift."

Dave: "have a look. Oh, okay. Yeah. Very, oh, that's looking very, um, Vision Pro actually for that 3D transform. That's sort of..."

Daniel: "Ooh, yeah. So I have a. That's kind of where the inspiration came from."

Dave: "Yeah, that's cool."

Daniel: "Yeah, and my buddy Flo helped me a lot with the actual programming because he's a CSS wizard and does all these, like can do all these like 3D transforms and stuff. But yeah, I'm kind of trying to visually explain how it works. So on the left side, we have like three cards that are kind of like 3D stacked on top of each other. And the leftmost card is just the Swift code that is being used to send a telemetry"

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "And in the middle, you kind of see the signal represented as a table. So it just basically just gives you the signal name and then various signal metadata properties to show kind of like that even though you only gave us one property, we also add all the device-related properties. And then,"

Dave: "Yep. I love that it's interactive as well, they're moving around under my mouse and yeah."

Daniel: "And then, yeah, you can scroll that thing. And then on the right, you have a chart that just does something with the signals received in that."

Dave: "That's brilliant. That's really rather cool."

Daniel: "Yeah, and then further down, I have also lots of tiny charts, and all those are also interactive, which is nice."

Dave: "Yeah and you've got all the app icons as well which is really cool at the bottom."

Daniel: "Oh yeah, I've even more. You can like scroll through them and stuff."

Dave: "That's fantastic."

Daniel: "Even though a few of them are doubled, because I've been too lazy to de-duplicate them."

Dave: "That's fine, some of them are so good you want to see them again actually."

Daniel: "I mean, some of them are just, I'm just really proud of. Like some of them are like, I'm like, oh wow, this is our customer. Like I am really, really happy for, oh, I bought that."

Dave: "Heh. Yeah, yeah, there's quite a few in there that I recognize. That's lovely. Shout out to Dark Noise from Charlie Chapman there."

Daniel: "Oh yeah, like telemetry would not exist without that app."

Dave: "and uh gift wrapped from jelly as well yeah he's awesome um i work i work with jelly elsewhere so that's it's kind of a thing uh secure shellfish um oh wow yeah and i recognize that giraffe over there that's posture pal anyway somebody should have listeners of the show should go take a look rather than listen to us shouting them out but uh"

Daniel: "Oh yeah. Also secure shellfish. Yeah, jelly is great. Oh yeah, they have a scene better."

Dave: "Yeah, that's cool though. We don't want people necessarily navigating to that URL if you're tracking ads or. So we're going to go ahead and do that."

Daniel: "Oh, they can. That URL is, no, that's totally fine. Like go there. That URL is even clickable in the top navigation. You can just navigate there. No, what I wanna do is I think I wanna migrate that 3D stack of apps or 3D stack of cards. I wanna migrate that to the main homepage though, because it turns out it's working pretty well. So I think, like the whole thing is very modular now. So I can just like."

Dave: "Okay. Yeah. Yep."

Daniel: "pick and choose the different blocks basically. So yeah, I think I'm gonna migrate that to the thing. But if people go there, if ads go there, there will be various parameters. Like for example, UTM underscore medium equals, I don't know, CPC or Google ads or whatever. So yeah, you're not destroying analytics by going to that page, that's totally fine."

Dave: "Yep. Okay. It's looking cool, really cool. Yeah, I love that. The only gotcha on there is I wish I could put on a pair of Vision Pro, put on my Vision Pro, which I do not have and will not have for a long time, but and see it pop out of the website in that 3D space. It's looking cool."

Daniel: "Thank you very much. That is something. Oh, guess who's going to the Vision Pro Developer Labs next week."

Dave: "Ooh, ooh. Ha ha ha."

Daniel: "And yeah, I got to try out if the browser actually, because those are CSS 3D transforms. So there's actual 3D data there. And so semantically those elements should be 3D. So I really want to check out if in the browser they're actually are 3D. I could probably check it with a simulator or maybe I'll do that then."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Yep. Oh, that'll be an interesting. Yeah, awesome."

Daniel: "But yeah, that's what I've been playing with. I hope that wasn't too non-appy, but I think many of the things that I've been learning are also applicable to app store optimization, stuff like that."

Dave: "Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the route you're talking about with, with ads through to privacy-orientated analytics is one that I will be interested in potentially ultimately for some of my apps because you're aware I'm likely to take the VJ app over the next year or two. Um, one of the strategies for that is going to be getting the word out a bit better about what it does and actually optimizing for where people are searching."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm."

Dave: "Um, we'll, we'll see at the moment. My only story in that regard is about trying to optimize for the app store, but I'm aware that's not the only place people are searching to try and find this sort of application. So interesting to me. I want to see you get this sorted."

Daniel: "Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think the takeaway is really try to measure your funnel regardless of what it looks like. It might be an app store to search to download funnel, or it might be a website to app store download funnel. And try to measure this as well as possible. And then if you know the steps and if you know the rates of conversion between those steps."

Dave: "Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "then you kind of can decide which step to concentrate on. And of course you want to kind of concentrate on the steps with the steepest fall off, maybe, but also maybe you want to like look at effort versus reward and also like just if possible, try to find industry standard conversions. Like for example, landing page to register, if like, if that's like 20%, that's actually pretty good for..."

Dave: "Yes. Mm-hmm."

Daniel: "like industry wise, say with the click through rates. I still wanna optimize at the start of the funnel first because that will influence all the following steps. So yeah, I think I wanna start at the start of the funnel and then optimize until I get to the point of diminishing returns and then kind of move on to the next step. I did kind of skip the first step at first because I did the landing pages first. But those were like a few months ago, we had ads, we ran an ad on hacking with Swift, which brought a huge amount of visitors to the page. And almost none of those actually clicked register on the, so I already knew that the landing page needed to improve. And so this is, I actually asked you for feedback and a few other developer friends, and this new landing page is kinda the result of that."

Dave: "Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, as you said, it's doing better. You already know that's, that's doing better. So that's."

Daniel: "And so, yeah. So, oh yeah, I actually handled that one. Oh yeah, okay. So new landing pages are like around 20% conversion rate. Old one is 3.9."

Dave: "Awesome."

Daniel: "So there is a difference. That's what I want to say."

Dave: "Yeah, yeah and you know again at volume that makes a lot of difference as well that uplift."

Daniel: "Oh yeah, that's a lot. So yeah, I'm going to try to migrate various elements from the other ones. The question is just like, do I do, because I have the 3D stack of cards, I have that for the web version with web examples and for the app version with app specific examples. So the question is, which one of those do I put on the front page? Probably the app one."

Dave: "Hehehe"

Daniel: "Or maybe that's too technical. Maybe I need to find something different for people who just come to the front page. Let's see."

Dave: "Possibly. I don't know. I like the app one. I like the, I'm biased though. I'm an app developer, right?"

Daniel: "I like the AppOne too. It's also more specific to what Telemetry Deck really does, because there are other web analytics platforms."

Dave: "Yeah. Ah, well, you've been far busier on your work than I have been in the last few weeks. Um, although I've, I've hoped to have some more stories to tell in another, another show. I'm certainly getting back into it all now. But, uh..."

Daniel: "I'm looking forward. I've been just like seducing my crew, which is highly inappropriate for a workplace really."

Dave: "your blue aliens. It is, it is. You need to curb, curb that my friend. But anyway, before we go, Dan, because I do have to go, I've got to get my day started over here, but yeah, before we go, where can people find you online?"

Daniel: "Hahaha Oh yeah, people should definitely go to telemetrydeck.com and look at the various landing pages. But people should also go to Daniel at social.telemetrydeck.com, which is where I do the socials. Dave, what about you?"

Dave: "Pretty similar to be fair, you can go to lightbeamapps.com and that'll show you all about my apps. And to find me on The Socials, you can find me at dave at social dot lightbeamapps dot com."

Daniel: "Fantastic. Right, Dave, have a wonderful and fantastic start of the day. And I hope to see you soon. We had a bit of a break from recording, but I'm hoping we can get into the groove now."

Dave: "We'll do. Gonna grab some more. definitely back in the groove and yeah, I'm gonna go grab myself some coffee, get started and catch you in a couple of weeks, Daniel."

Daniel: "All right, byeeeeee."