Andy Milligan - 1:1 (0900)
Andy Milligan: Howdy duty.
Chris LaFay: It's Andy inside of a home. The new version of. It's a new version. It's currently. It's a rare version, but will become more and more common as the days progress.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: I realize now, after saying that I have this running joke with my wife that has been going on for years and years and years. She has two personalities. And so I pretend like it's like pulling a car Pokemon out of a pack. You just don't know what you're gonna get. And so, like, there's Common Alley, there's Rare Alley, and then there's ultra, ultra rare. One of one alleys that don't ever happen. And so I just had this running joke of like, oh, it's. It's common Ally. When she's, like, in a crazy weird mood, I'm like, that's Common alley right there. And she hates it. Lovingly hates it. But got.
Andy Milligan: Yeah, yeah. Usually I have a joke with my sister. Same way she's hungry. It's like, oh, it's hungry Katie. She doesn't like it, but it's funny.
Chris LaFay: So, hey, as long as the joke's funny, doesn't matter if people like it or not. Like, you know, if you speak in truth, that's all that matters. How was the weekend?
Andy Milligan: Not bad. Saturday was about 10 hours. I was working on the house, so. Painted. Painted the entire thing.
Chris LaFay: Did all the floors you painted on. You said you painted the entire thing.
Andy Milligan: Yeah, I had. I had. I had help.
Chris LaFay: That's good.
Andy Milligan: Yeah, that's good. Came up from Cincinnati and knocked it all out. So that. And the front of the house is fully jackhammered, so we just have to bring in a trailer and remove all the. All that. And then we have the tile to place in there. And after that, it's just a kitchen floor. And then we're. We're done. But, dude, it looks so much newer with the paint and everything to seal anything, walls, so.
Chris LaFay: It's amazing, dude, it's amazing what a little bit of paint will do.
Andy Milligan: I know, dude. It's crazy paint, too.
Chris LaFay: Like, don't get me wrong, like, I'm. I am not the person that's going to go and, like, do a lot of these things. Like, I. I am not. I would. If I lived near you, I would have offered to, like, come and hang out and do some of the.
Andy Milligan: This.
Chris LaFay: I enjoy doing manual labor with other people. That's fine. I will absolutely not do it with. By myself.
Andy Milligan: It's depressing. Very depressing. Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Andy Milligan: But it's Kind of like, kind of. Sometimes I've tried to find, like, solace in it. It's kind of like put on a podcast and kind of walk in. Oh, totally. It's like entrepreneurship, because it's like, all you see is there's so much stuff to do, and I get, like, really overwhelmed. And then it's like, after you finish painting, you're like, oh, my God, dude. Like, I own a house, and this looks cool. So it's. It's like constant emotional roller coaster.
Chris LaFay: I have tried so hard to get into that mindset of. Of enjoying all the part, like, being able to see, like, at the end of this, it's going to be amazing. And, like, really hone in on that. And I just have. I've never have been able to have.
Andy Milligan: Success with that, which sucks. Yeah. Well, the good news is that with buying a house, you only have to do it once, you know, Then, yeah, obviously I have to work on it a bunch, too, but, you know, overwhelming part in the way.
Chris LaFay: Yes.
Andy Milligan: How's your weekend?
Chris LaFay: How's the beach? Was fantastic. I definitely built out an entire system to run website projects through while I was at the beach. Like, start to finish. Yeah. You little freaking. Yeah, I have a problem. I know. Okay.
Andy Milligan: I would be the same way. People don't understand. I totally get it.
Chris LaFay: I'm gonna test it out tomorrow, actually. I literally. It has. It's one of the. One of the way I'm gonna hopefully treat it is it's like the forms that you fill out at the doctor's office. It's like, hey, ahead of our kickoff call, here's a packet of information. If you can go through as much of this as you can, it'll make our time together during kickoff a lot more beneficial. And then all of that's going to output into a thing. It's all going to output into a. Into my website builder thing that I've already had that I've been using for a lot, like, the last, like, few months already. It's going to output all of that into a file to where I can basically be like, process, go build me a website, and here's literally all the data that you need.
Andy Milligan: Go.
Chris LaFay: So I have a kickoff call tomorrow that I'm not gonna send it over to them today. I'm gonna actually just use it as a, like, we're gonna go through this together sort of thing, work and work out some kinks before I submit it, send it over to somebody completely cold and be like, here's your login. Go fill this stuff out. But overall the trip was very relaxing. My sister in law's kids do not understand the word no.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And that's, that would be hard for me.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Like this gives you one tiny example. My sister in law had a screaming match with her kid, one of her kids, 6 years old. And it was over dessert about the contents of dessert. We had ice cream and kid did not want ice cream. And so it's a screaming match. 45 Minutes later they come up from downstairs and the kid gets ice cream. And I'm like, wait, but I thought you threatened like five times that if she raised her voice one more time she, she wasn't gonna get dessert. And she got dessert. Rinse and repeat that. Like just not screaming matches obviously, but the, the essence of that over and.
Andy Milligan: Over and over again. So.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I love them. They're fantastic people. Like their, their kids honestly are really not that bad. But they. Living with them in the same space is hard because the kids get everything they want and, and that is hard to, to be a part of.
Andy Milligan: So. Would not be a good parent in my phase of life. Got a little bit of growing to do. So.
Chris LaFay: I, I talk a big game. I think I would be a decent parent, but I have no desire to test those waters. I am very much content with where I'm at, needless to say. So. Yeah. So what's the plan for this week, Mr. 30,000 Dollar Website Proposal.
Andy Milligan: That I'm supposed to hear back from her today. So hopefully it goes well. We had a really good like check in call on Friday and Oh, dope.
Chris LaFay: Good.
Andy Milligan: Yeah. She came ready with a lot of questions and she's like, all right, I'll let you know. She'll be ready to go soon. So I didn't want to get another call on the calendar. I offered to get another call on the calendar, but it, she's like, no, I should meet you soon that we can schedule. And I let her know like this would be our kickoff call date and then two official one meetings throughout these. So it's kind of out of my hands at this point. I've done everything. I'm traveling on Wednesday and Thursday to a conference. I have to get ready for that. So try not to stress out too much about it, but we'll be fine.
Chris LaFay: What are you stressed out about? Why are you stressed out about a conference in general?
Andy Milligan: No, it's a good question. I'm not stressed out about it. I'm apprehensive, I guess. Kind of the travel logistics. I'm gonna drive so it'll be like I have to leave at like 4 in the morning and it's about 2 hours and 15 minutes of drive. Yeah, I don't want to get another hotel. And then all day on that ferry and then.
Chris LaFay: You haven't told me why you're apprehensive about this conference.
Andy Milligan: I'm apprehensive about every time I travel. You know, stressful. So that. And I'm going to spend today reaching out to some of the people beforehand, getting more, I will say AI. Basically I gave it a PDF of like the. All the locations, my goals and it gave me an entire. I just built an entire HTML website with like an entire plan. So this time of the day we check into this hotel, call this person the event organizer. These are the people you need to connect with on LinkedIn, send these messages. So yeah,.
Chris LaFay: Can you send me that HTML file? I'm just, I'm genuinely curious what that is. I understand the word you're saying.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Is it a self contained HTML file? Like is all the CSS inside the. The file itself?
Andy Milligan: Yeah, I published it as a, A quad artifact, so I had a link, but I have it in HTML.
Chris LaFay: Oh yeah, send me the link to the artifact. I don't. I'm. I just am genuinely curious what this looks like because I. That's a really cool.
Andy Milligan: And this was when I was ideating on sweeping in the car, but I did get a hotel at the cabin for 70 bucks. So. Yeah,.
Chris LaFay: Load. Load or download. That's fine. Be a butthead about it. Freaking heck yes.
Andy Milligan: Allow.
Chris LaFay: What in the world is happening?
Andy Milligan: You don't have a lot of money.
Chris LaFay: Who has a lot of money?
Andy Milligan: Oh yeah. Wick signature swar alien. You know what? I might, I might leave after. After the one o' clock on the second day after the one.
Chris LaFay: It gave you directions. Dude, this is. What the heck. Are you really gonna sleep in the car?
Andy Milligan: No, I bought. I said I ended up getting a hotel or I ended up getting one.
Chris LaFay: Of the cabins, but oh yeah, 55 bucks in it. Yeah, of course.
Andy Milligan: Watch it. Yeah, I thought it was going to be like on, on the. The ones that are on the, on the island are like 250 bucks. Like.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, well, yeah, that makes sense.
Andy Milligan: But that's what I thought about. Dude, have you ever seen like, I love Subarus and I know I'm not a lesbian. Everyone makes that joke. But I like the way, I love the design of Subarus because they're like super adaptable to like they're meant to do Camp and drive in like the.
Chris LaFay: Yeah, I like the Bruce as well too.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: This is interesting. This is cool.
Andy Milligan: That's what I'm saying. It could either be a totally awesome. It's mostly for referral partners. Not going to be direct clients there. But this could be.
Chris LaFay: Is this the event that maybe a month ago.
Andy Milligan: Yeah, you were invited but it felt like a really like internal thing.
Chris LaFay: I mean like it's only specifically for healthcare folks and there's not gonna be a lot of agency folks there. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay. Okay. Are you. Wait, are you exhibit. Are you exhibiting?
Andy Milligan: No, I'm not exhibiting. I just attending only so.
Chris LaFay: Okay. Because I saw at the top it said status exhibiting both days. I'm like. I don't think that's the case.
Andy Milligan: Yeah, they did. I would. I didn't have a chance to sponsor. It would have been like 3K.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Andy Milligan: Which terrible. But it's not worth it, I think.
Chris LaFay: No.
Andy Milligan: For a logo.
Chris LaFay: Not for. No, it's not. No. It's hard to make sponsorships work and the first few that you do are going to suck no matter what.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: I would even like give you like LinkedIn links there for what the.
Andy Milligan: Wow. Okay.
Chris LaFay: That's dope. Yeah.
Andy Milligan: All I do is PDF itinerary and then it's pretty cool upper week. A little bit of stress, but I still gotta pack stuff.
Chris LaFay: Yeah.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: Interesting.
Andy Milligan: Okay. What you got going on this week, man? It's a big priorities for today and.
Chris LaFay: I have closed a deal while I was out last week, $15,000 website. So I got to get the contract for that sent over today. So I'm doing that. I have a kickoff for another client tomorrow that I need to prep for. I also have my. Actually my meeting with Chris on tomorrow. I am. I have my first. Not my first coaching call. I have. Chris Dubois has been out for a while with army stuff. So it's been about a month since I've talked to him. And so I have a meeting with him tomorrow. My regularly standing meeting. And so I need to get my. Get my house in order because I haven't done as much as I probably should have and then I leave Wednesday morning. So like I have. Also have a couple of. I have a couple of projects that I need to circle back up on. There's a 45000 Shopify site that we're bidding that I had need to circle back with. We have a small little eight thousand dollar mini project that will hopefully close this week and a race website like a. Like a 5k or marathon website. It's called Gordy's Pumpkin Run. It's literally all pumpkin themed. And I was like, okay, great. This is gonna be. This is gonna be like some like, you know, Bob and Susie thing. They have like 50 to 60 thousand dollars to spend on their website. I was like, what is this? Who are you?
Andy Milligan: There is a lot I just did. I literally just yesterday when I applied for a half grand done. They were. It was the. It was the worst experience ever. So it's. It's a good experience. It's a good. It's very experience driven rather than like the checkout flow and making sure it's like. Because there's so many complexities with like this race of like the forms and everything. It was terrible. And I had to like create an account and then send me to the wrong. So yeah, just do it. Right.
Chris LaFay: Yeah. Well the thing is they have all their race sign up on a third party site. Like one of those like there's like. It's kind of like Ticketmaster in the race world. I don't know what the. There's like two or three that are the big players but I. They sell a ton of merchandise and that's where they make a lot of their money is the merch. Which makes sense. I get it. So I have to need to send out some. I have four or five things I'm sending out reminders for. Not reminders for, but check ins for. I'm about $200,000 in the pipeline of which I feel decent. About a hundred, 100k of that. So make him inching my way up to the half a million mark. So.
Andy Milligan: Are you good, dude?
Chris LaFay: Yeah, it's really not bad. It's really not bad at all. The other thing I haven't done is I have not done my monthly like retro for the last like not even 30 days for like for almost 60 days at this point because we're almost at the end of June. I didn't do a monthly retro in May and I didn't do a monthly retro. Well I will basically be gone the rest of the month. So I'm a little bit behind on planning, budgeting, etc and also my EO thing again this year. That's the other thing I have to figure out. I don't know if I want to.
Andy Milligan: Like an in person year thing.
Chris LaFay: The just EO in general, like just being a part of entrepreneurs organization. Like do I want to spend $6,000 or not? And I. It's steep, it's deep. But they've also were the ones that like, got me out of my. My holes. Like, I. Putting into words what that group has helped me do over the last two years is very hard to des. Describe.
Andy Milligan: Yeah.
Chris LaFay: And I don't want to lose just when life is getting good. It's like, oh, hey, cool, we helped you through all this stuff and now you're gone. Now that life is better.
Andy Milligan: So yeah, I will say, was it. Was it the group or was it the people? So would you be able to maintain the relationship with the people and I'll.
Chris LaFay: Be able to maintain the relationship with the people, absolutely. But it'll be a lot harder to get time with them if I'm not a part of their day to day stuff. Not day to day, but week to week, month to month stuff. So. So pros and cons. At the end of the day,.
Andy Milligan: I'm.
Chris LaFay: Gonna take a picture, dude.
Andy Milligan: Something you should try is a tool called Ship Studio. Ship Studio, Shift Studio. I dude. It is the best way to build with AI like websites. It is. It's like webflow with AI in it. Basically. It's. It's there now. So this was a guy that I had on the podcast a while back, used to work at a company called Member Stack and he went out on his own. And it's basically, it's an IDE with a visual interface on the right side and you can open like multiple agents. You can open as many instances of Quad on the left and the terminal all appears there. There's a visual editor in it for small tweets and it is, it connects. It has integrations with. With GitHub so it'll automatically create a repo. Connects to Vercel instantly so you can publish and like one interface and it connects to Cloudflare, connects to Sanity and it uses it like all in one. Like easy to use workspace, has a tab for your assets. It is really cool. Like literally it is like I am. I went into one of my old webflow projects and I just exported the code as a zip, put it in there and it rebuilt it perfectly, 100% an entire. It's like this look. It is literally. This is one shot of the entire website. Kept all the completely responsive.
Chris LaFay: Is it all in webflow?
Andy Milligan: Yeah, no, this is in Shift Studio. This is what it is. So you open everything here. You can open as many apes as you want. You can choose whether it's Codex Quad code and then you can prompt within any of them and it'll work on the same site and you can change like responsiveness Change types Here you can use a visual editor for CSS changes. You can change text directly. This isn't as robust, but they just added it and it can connect to create a repo. We can connect to GitHub.
Chris LaFay: So that's like a flat HTML file. That's a flat. Like what it actually output for you is flat. Oh, okay, gotcha.
Andy Milligan: Okay, cool.
Chris LaFay: I see, I see.
Andy Milligan: And you can go, you can view code directly too and work from the code editor. You can go to different pages and then can use a code editor directly and see how it's built. But it's, it's really cool because it's like webflow but using Quad and I've been really enjoying it. That's how I built the entire Columbus marketing organization site.
Chris LaFay: So are you going. Are you wanting. Because that can't build directly in. That can't build directly in webflow. So are you thinking about building a like a statics like for one of your clients like building like a static site.
Andy Milligan: So yeah, I mean this is like the whole conversation. So for smaller sites it's not worth having webflows hosting, you know, it's not worth it at all. Especially when it's, you know, 30 bucks a month to host a one page site.
Chris LaFay: Are you entering the one page sites right now?
Andy Milligan: No, not really. But like we had one Medicare. But it's interesting because like with, with new projects it's like, I mean webflow has, you know, the reliability, the ease of use and the client adds infrastructure, everything like that. But I can see a future where a tool like this has better security. It's an interesting time. I'm still always use webflow for new projects but for personal stuff and landing pages and ideation and just having a visual editor for existing projects that are in GitHub. It's really interesting to see where this goes. I'm trying to be a fly on the wall. I not bury my head in the sand.
Chris LaFay: You know I would. One of the things I was thinking about is. Engine.