Aeon Laser - Post-Launch Wrap-Up & Retainer Discussion

Andrew Booth: Really, like, fill in much here and here. So I can be really lazy and just like, slam that out in, like, three minutes. And then this obviously takes a little longer. So it's just laziness.

Chris LaFay: This is laziness right here also. Actually, all of this is laziness. Like, 100. All of it is lazy.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, I feel you.

Chris LaFay: And it.

Andrew Booth: It.

Chris LaFay: It grows really slowly. So I'm very thankful for that. But this is now the only thing I have to worry about, and that makes me very happy. Whereas before, I look like a Kermuff again, if I didn't shave for three weeks, that's how long it took to get a five o' clock shadow. I'm just saying.

Andrew Booth: Three weeks.

Chris LaFay: No, it was a little bit long. It's a little bit shorter than that, but.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: But I haven't had. I haven't. I've had the good. Obviously I've had the goatee for a very long time. But the last time I actually, like, went clean shaven was, I think, 200, like eight or nine. That was the last time that my chin has seen the light of the sun.

Andrew Booth: I was gonna say apogee.

Steven Hendrickson: You even had the doi.

Andrew Booth: Or you. You had it at one point and were also clean shaven at another.

Chris LaFay: That was right as I met Ally. I met Ally, and I was like, I'm gonna change up how I look really quick and see what she says. And then she was like, never cut it again. And so I never cut the goatee again. And then covet happened. And I was like, I can actually, like, let the beard grow out and see what it looks like. And so, you know, it's funny, I.

Andrew Booth: Did the beard thing or goatee thing before. COVID Yes. But then I shaved it when we went to Italy, because. I'm notorious for getting stopped at the border.

Dawn Audano: Because of all of your FBI stuff.

Andrew Booth: Truthfully, I think I'm just on list. I really.

Dawn Audano: Okay.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get stopped almost every time for, like, the dumbest shit.

Chris LaFay: Notice none of us. Neither of us said anything at all. You're only. It's fine.

Steven Hendrickson: It's normal.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, yeah. So it got to where, like, you know how, like, generally in a relationship, the man does a lot of the talking. When Brittany and I go through customs and border patrol, I stand to the side like the little bitch, and she does all the talking, and that gets us through so much faster.

Dawn Audano: You should let Caroline do all the time. You should be the one that holds the baby through security. They probably won't let you they're like, no, we can't just swab your hands. You need to go through the whole thing and pat down.

Andrew Booth: I got stopped and checked in Australia for bombs. Australia?

Chris LaFay: What?

Dawn Audano: Yeah, I would get stopped in Australia for trying to steal a koala bear, but I would not.

Andrew Booth: It was a random selection for bomb checked. And I was like, are you kidding me? Even Australia's doing this? Come on.

Chris LaFay: They share the list, apparently.

Andrew Booth: I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. Yep.

Dawn Audano: I just checked with Stephen to make sure we're on his radar. He might have thought that this was accidental and I'm like, no, no.

Andrew Booth: There's some minor tweaks that need to be made to mobile now that they've got other content in.

Chris LaFay: So speaking of retainers in general, I'm assuming what I. Basically the only thing I told him at the beginning was that our agreements are quarterly and he was very excited about that. Like, we do annual agreements, but they renew quarterly. I probably told him back during the sales process that a minimum starts at around two grand, but our average is around five, to actually move on stuff on a consistent basis. Those are the two things I told him and he liked both of those things. All of those things. So what are you all thinking in terms of, like, how much effort needs to be put into a retainer for what he wants to do?

Andrew Booth: Honestly, we don't really know what he needs post launch.

Chris LaFay: I know that he was treating this as like a V1 sort of thing.

Andrew Booth: So, yeah, a lot of the stuff that was done on the site first off was very last minute. They waited to the very, very end.

Dawn Audano: To start doing content last Monday.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, which I ended up having to redo the PDP page a couple times because they were like, oh, actually we need this to change by variant. And it's like, oh, that'd have been nice to know the first time. But I think based on what he said, what I think he means is we're probably going to iterate on the site is probably what it is. So we got it to a bare minimum based on did the site live, move away from their old distributor or whatever it was. And now I think it's going to be like, refine the pages, get new pages created, that kind of stuff.

Chris LaFay: Does any of that Samson work?

Andrew Booth: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think like page creation and stuff probably. I mean, obviously Samson can create templates too. I can create them faster with Claude, but he can do it. We need to have like a two hour training session with him on how to use plot to create templates.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Andrew Booth: Speed his life up.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Dawn Audano: I'm just gonna say it out loud is that he could do that with Claude.

Andrew Booth: He could,.

Chris LaFay: But train me on how to do my things better.

Andrew Booth: It. It definitely takes like, you know, a special mind of, like, depends on how your mind learns. Right. So.

Dawn Audano: Sure.

Andrew Booth: I don't think his does like that.

Steven Hendrickson: Okay.

Dawn Audano: That's fair.

Andrew Booth: Also, I think that his. The tech side of his mind is a little different because he learned programming through a boot camp. Yeah. Which, you know, they teach you a linear track of the bare minimum of what you need to know kind of thing.

Chris LaFay: There was a big push with those boot camps back in the day. Big old push.

Andrew Booth: There it is. They're not cheap either.

Chris LaFay: No.

Dawn Audano: See if he's read my email.

Chris LaFay: State Election Board 2.

Dawn Audano: He is not. Neither of y' all have his phone number to text him.

Chris LaFay: I. I called him and left a voicemail, but it was a very sound. Sounds stupid, but it was a very generic sounding voicemail. It didn't sound like it. I'm sure it was his, but. Yeah. I don't know if you actually got my stuff.

Steven Hendrickson: I don't.

Dawn Audano: Okay, it's three one do. Who wants to text him? Chris, you want to check them? Okay. It's 312-647-7294.

Chris LaFay: Let me see. Hold on one second. That was. Hold on. That was poorly timed. I was finishing a message. Give me one second. Stephen Hendrickson. Does it end in 7294?

Andrew Booth: Okay. Samson said, can you help me figure out what map I'm supposed to be bringing over that's on the ATS site? Yes. The one you did.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, it's just a. It's in the. It's in the repo.

Andrew Booth: I told him a week ago.

Chris LaFay: It's not in the freaking heck. One thing that drives me nuts about Ma, actually, I'm cur. I'm actually kind of curious.

Andrew Booth: Why?

Steven Hendrickson: Why?

Chris LaFay: Okay. He just responded to my text and said, okay, I will be there in a minute.

Andrew Booth: Okay.

Dawn Audano: Oh, hold on. My husband's calling. I need to take this.

Andrew Booth: One thing that drives you nuts about Mac Web.

Chris LaFay: So, like, you do like a Spotlight search so I can like search the whole computer. Like free form typing.

Andrew Booth: Yep.

Chris LaFay: And for whatever reason, and it's changed recently and I don't know if it's my setup or something in there, like indexing has changed. But like, normally when you start typing, like if I'm typing, if I want to go open cloud, I do command space or clau and Push Enter and it's Claude because it's an app. Most of the time apps sit at the top of the search and then all the random files like in your downloads folder, all that kind of fall at the very bottom. They're, they're less important. So like I've gotten into a habit of like, I know what the three letters are to go to Claude, not a zoo Command space where cla enter and it just goes. Because it's zippy now. Apps are not. Apps are not showing at the top of that list and they're delayed by like a second. So like my muscle memory of like CLA enter has to like wait a little while and that's just really weird to me. So I'm sure your Linux is. Yeah. Like that. Yeah.

Dawn Audano: What are you showing me? What is this?

Chris LaFay: Do you use, do you, you use like the Spotlight search when you're like opening up apps on your. Yeah, so mine. And this happened within the last week or so. Like I, it's very much muscle memory. Like I'll do like command spacebar, CLA enter for Claude and it's just, it's there. Claude is always the top result because it's cla, rinse and repeat for a lot of other things. Slack, Chrome, etc. Those apps are not showing up at the top of my list, they're showing at the bottom of the list. And so whenever I do my little like keyboard shortcuts to do Spotlight searches, I'm opening up random files or like settings panels rather than the app.

Dawn Audano: Why don't you just leave them in the bottom of your computer?

Chris LaFay: Oh, I do, but it's easier for me. I, I'm, I'm a keyboard oriented person,.

Dawn Audano: So I'm bringing Steven in.

Andrew Booth: Sounds like a map settings problem because I'm on Linux Fedora and obviously you saw it works great.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: Hey, Steven. Oh, you're muted.

Steven Hendrickson: Oh, hey guys. How are you?

Dawn Audano: Good. How are you doing?

Steven Hendrickson: Good, Good.

Dawn Audano: I wanted to, I realized I should have probably followed up after Go Live to let you know that we were still going to have this call in the books at least this week to make sure that we closed out some final tasks and that you were in a good spot. And then I asked Chris to join as well, just for ongoing support questions. So kind of want to see from you how everything's going, what else you need at this point for this week just so we can make sure that this week goes smoothly and that we kind of close out that first project and then kind of see where we're going to land starting next week.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah, perfect. Perfect.

Chris LaFay: Awesome.

Steven Hendrickson: Well, yeah, the site went live and I think everything seems like it's working. We had our first. We've been having orders go through, so that's good. So that's perfect. Okay. All right. So. So I think we're all. All good there. I know, Andrew. We. I think we had a. There was like a couple of those little, like last tweaks. Right. That we're still going through or there are.

Andrew Booth: Yep. So from my side, I've got the couple of fields on the PDP page that just need to be converted to metafields for variants. And then I also checked the site on like Thursday or Friday after it was live. And yeah, I've got a bunch of content on there now. There's a few sections that I need to tweak specifically for mobile. Now that content's on the site, just on mobile. There's some like, weird nuances I'm seeing. So. So just a few tweaks on mobile and then that's all that I'm currently aware of. Cool.

Steven Hendrickson: That's awesome. Yeah, I noticed there's a little bit on mobile, I was wondering, is that what we still have to go through and add in some photos and banners in some spot? Are there. Does Shopify have alternate. Does it pull alternate banners or photos depending on mobile or browser, or is it one? It.

Andrew Booth: The answer is it depends. The longer answer is it depends based on the section or block that was created or that is being used. A lot of times, unless we build a section or block to specifically say, have a desktop version and a mobile version, it's not going to pull a different version because Shopify largely uses what's called Image Source set, which pretty much just says based on whatever screen size is requesting the image. Shopify does some magic on the back end. So when it delivers the image, it actually delivers an appropriate size. So it's not. In the case of loading a desktop and a mobile version, you actually end up loading both images on the page regardless of desktop or mobile is loaded. You just don't show them. What that apparently does is it loads two images every time, which adds page load time and wait and things like that. It's generally not advised. There's definitely use cases for it. Obviously, if you quite literally want to show a different image, that's the long explanation, I guess.

Steven Hendrickson: Okay. I guess when we're making photos and banners to update the site, we just need to have just kind of see how they work on mobile as well and tweak from there?

Andrew Booth: Generally speaking, yes. If there's cases where like you quite literally need to use a different image, then, you know, we could look at the section and maybe make some changes to the section and add a secondary like mobile specific image in there. It's weird because I can't say, like there's a one way that you should always do it. Like, it just depends. Right?

Steven Hendrickson: Okay, cool. Okay. Yeah, I guess we'll work on that. I guess we'll see just how rest of the mobile stuff shakes out and go from there. But yeah, I mean, I think everything. It looks like it's going well. I added in for people that when we don't have a machine in stock that they can pay a deposit. So that that feature that add on seems to be working well. And we had our first, I think we sold our third most expensive machine with that mechanism over the weekend. So that's good. So the proof's in the pudding now that people will buy a $30,000 machine off the website. So it's exciting.

Dawn Audano: Excellent. Well, so we'll close out. I'll have Andrew, I'll make a list kind of of what we need to finalize and I'll put that in my recap email. Once all of those tasks are complete, this project will be finalized. So that'll be the end of that. I'll complete it in asana and then for next steps, for any additional work. Chris, do you kind of want to recap what. Actually, Stephen, if you want to start with what type of ongoing support you'd like, I'll have Chris kind of make sure that his initial proposal matched that and then we can kind of tweak and adjust.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah, Perfect.

Dawn Audano: Okay.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I guess one of the things, like, I don't know what, I don't know with the ongoing like website support, I do know we're probably going to have, you know, the next round of things. We probably want to add some more features to the site. You know, like, I know we want to have like a blog. We want to have, you know, we, we do want to add this functionality for like a demo room. I think that's a page that they were testing on in China where, you know, essentially we have these different, these different like, like people that, like around the country that, that can do in person demos. So we're trying to. And I could send you guys like some functionality of like how some other companies do it.

Chris LaFay: Um, yeah.

Steven Hendrickson: And you know, just like some of those, you know, I think that's like our next round of wanting to add some like the next layer of functionality to the site. Like, I know from like what we call it, like resources or blog or something, you know, the, the, the marketing company, they're going to want to have a place to, you know, create some of these knowledge articles or content articles, depending on our marketing campaign. So just having some kind of section of the website where all that, all that new stuff can live and we can link it to landing pages and you know, just that whole game.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, so there's some features. So I think one of the things we talked about at the beginning was we do annual agreements, but they renew quarterly. So kind of, you know, we can kind of go up and down on a quarter by quarter basis. Um, we typically start out at two grand. That's typically mostly kind of, I won't say maintenance because that's not really true. There is development hours in there as well too. But for folks that are adding in new features on a regular basis, we tend to see around a five grand a month retainer get that cadence that they need to get in order to add in new features on a, probably in every three to four week basis, we're building some type of a new feature on top of doing smaller things as well too. And so we could go one of two routes that, that five grand a month retainer gets us somewhere around the lines of about 25 development hours. That includes dev, a little bit of design, all project management, the whole nine yards. And so you can effectively kind of cut that in half for that $2,000 a month number. So it gives us, you know, that even that lower number gives us a little bit more than of, you know, a day and a half, two days worth of actual development time. Those are all kind of rough numbers. We do kind of, we can do these things on a sliding scale, but we typically start out at 2 and our average ends up being 5. And so for what I'm, what I'm hearing is if you already have some ideas on what some functionality that you want to go ahead and build out in this next iteration, probably somewhere closer for the first quarter, being closer to that 5k number would probably make sense. And then looking at quarter two, possibly maybe pulling back to that close to that two thousand dollar number might also make sense. So that's my gut reaction. But we could get, we can get that rolling as soon as you want to. Basically.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Andrew's had a couple of projects wrap up and so we could get started. Basically, if you send over some of those Samples. We can kind of take a look at those different pieces of functionality you want to do. Andrew and I can talk about them and then give you kind of what a Q1 monthly price would be for that.

Steven Hendrickson: So.

Chris LaFay: Plus all the other stuff that would pop in as well.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah, I can get all that kind of finalized on whatever the, you know, something like those other feature pages that we're looking for. There's a few things, you know, and I. I knew kind of going into this project that we were going to get some, like, initial functionality and then we. There's going to be like, you know, round after round of other stuff that we need to start adding in. But, you know, in terms of, like, our, you know, initial. The initial launch is like, as long as we can have all of our tracking mechanisms in place and we have a way for people to buy the machines online, we're good. Like, we're, we're, you know, that gets us into, like, a functional phase.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, exactly. That'll make sense. Yeah. If you send that over the next couple days, I will be out of town most of the next two.

Andrew Booth: Two weeks.

Chris LaFay: So this week I'm in. But then following two, I won't be here. So if you could send that stuff over at some point by maybe like Wednesday or so, that will let me and Andrew have some initial conversations. And you and I could try to schedule time Thursday, Friday to chat. If that doesn't work, Andrew and Don can also talk to you about the details because at that point we're just talking about functionality and ballpark pricing at that point, so.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Perfect.

Steven Hendrickson: That's great. Yeah, awesome.

Dawn Audano: And if. If that's the case, I'll plan to keep this Monday call just for the time being. And then if we don't need it or we need change it to bi weekly because of whatever the retainer amount is. We'll do that, but I'm just going to keep it on the schedule for now, too, and then we can touch base next Monday on what the proposal says and any questions you have too.

Andrew Booth: Awesome.

Dawn Audano: The last thing I wanted to ask, and I hope it's not awkward with Andrew on the call, is I wanted to get your overall feedback on how we, as a team did for the website. If there's anything that we could use for a testimonial or that you would recommend or. Andrew, do you want to drop off so that. This is weird.

Andrew Booth: I was gonna say I can drop off and then transparency can happen.

Dawn Audano: Yeah. Andrew, you leave, we're gonna all talk about you behind your Back. It's not tinnitus. It's just we're talking about you.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: All right.

Andrew Booth: The one other thing I did think about, I was just gonna asana that is still on my plate is setting up the risk order capture. So if an order is. Is flagged as potential risk for fraud, it doesn't auto capture the payment. One thing I'm not sure about, though, is how that would interact with the order piece, so. Okay, yeah, let me do a little research on that before I put this into play, but I did just want to call that out. I'd still have that on my plate as well, so. Okay, cool. All right, catch y' all later.

Steven Hendrickson: Awesome. All right, I'll see you, Andrew.

Dawn Audano: And if you want me to drop off too, so you can just talk to Chris, I'm cool with that as well. Okay.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah, I. I don't know if I really have anything too much to say. I mean, I think everything went pretty smooth and just kind of worked through the. The different stages on it. So. Yeah, I mean, it, you know, going into, you know, I know I didn't, like, have a very well defined, like, this is exactly what I'm trying to do. So, you know, so it's hard for me to have like, a real, like, measuring post next to anything.

Dawn Audano: So I'm going to give you measuring posts real quick then. All right. I'm going to say on a scale of 1 to 5, how did we do on hitting the timeline that you wanted as far as our deadlines go and making sure that everything proceeded in a timely fashion with 1 being we absolutely did terrible, and 5 being it was good. It was exactly what I needed.

Steven Hendrickson: Yeah, I'd say four, probably four on that. I think. I think kind of going into that final phase, like, I think the week leading up to launch, like, if we. If we'd had a little bit more, like, things finalized. So that way, like, like, on the first, it was like pushing live. I know we were still wrapping up a lot of things on the first, so. But I mean, I mean, we only missed it by, you know, 48 hours maybe from really, like, kind of being ready. So it's like, all in all, it's not bad in terms of hitting the deadline, so.

Dawn Audano: Perfect. And then overall communication throughout the project, did you feel like we were available, communicative, you understood what we were saying or what we needed from you? Was everything pretty clear? One to five being not clear at all? Five being. Yeah, I always knew exactly what needed to be there.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Steven Hendrickson: Five. Yeah, definitely five.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Steven Hendrickson: That was good.

Dawn Audano: Excellent. And then the overall quality of the site that you got, is it what you expected or exceeded expectations or was it kind of subpar, which is why we have more work to do now?

Steven Hendrickson: I think it was great.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Steven Hendrickson: No, I think that the quality is great. Like, I'm really happy with what the, like, the look and the feel and the, like it feels. And the site's well built. Like, I don't feel like a janky, you know, like, reskinned, like, template. So. And I feel, I mean, I know it's a template, but I feel it feels like it's a well built, like it came together. So, you know, we actually have, like, something that we can. We can build off of and it's a. It's a good, like, face. So.

Dawn Audano: And then my last question is, if you had another friend who needed a new Shopify site and needed a team, would you recommend us?

Steven Hendrickson: Yes, I absolutely would.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Dawn Audano: Excellent.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic.

Dawn Audano: Chris, do you have any other questions?

Chris LaFay: I don't. That's my normal. That's my normal cadence of questions. You took care of all of them.

Dawn Audano: For me, so I wrote them down. So I had it on my list.

Chris LaFay: It's like, we've done this for a decade. Shocker. That's great.

Dawn Audano: Well, Stephen, I'll follow up with the task list of what Andrew needs to close out, and then Chris will follow up. Or if you can follow up with us and kind of let us know what your first month of work looks like. I imagine if you get that over to us this week and there are some items that we can do in the next couple of weeks before June closes out, we're going to try. We would try to use up the full hours in June, so we wouldn't do like a partial month. We would just try to push through and use it all up. So whenever you get that quote to us, we'll will get you our estimate for your quarterly support and we'll just start it as if we started on June1, but we'll just work all the hours in the second half of the month.

Steven Hendrickson: Perfect. Awesome.

Dawn Audano: All right, thank you so much. Great.

Andrew Booth: All right, bye.