Jan 30 2025 54 mins
In this episode Andrew talks about his recent struggles with ADHD and feeling like MetaMonster is moving too slowly. Meanwhile, Sean is planning to build a new SaaS product within Miscreants. The guys talk about the challenges of maintaining focus on a new product while running an agency, and how to set up the project for the best chance of success. Sean gets deeply uncomfortable, it's great!
Links:
- Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
- Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
- MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
- Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
- Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
- Sean's website: https://seanqsun.com/
For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.
Transcript:
00:00.79
Sean
Do you play Starcraft? Have you played Starcraft?
00:03.15
Andrew
No, I've never played Starcraft. I'm not a big gamer.
00:04.71
Sean
and
00:06.24
Andrew
Like the most time I've ever spent on video games, like my top games are like Pokemon, like Crystal.
00:13.03
Sean
That's true. You're like an actual sports like healthy touch grass person. I forget that.
00:17.74
Andrew
i I'm not an there I'm a watch sports and then touch grass in like nerdy hiking ways, not like Boy Scout touch grass.
00:27.01
Sean
Yeah, but I'm like, ah ah I'm like, a you know, watch eSports and touch Minecraft grass sometimes, every guy.
00:34.57
Andrew
Why do you ask about Starcraft?
00:35.44
Sean
I've been I may have gotten really into stuff. It's been like two days, but I may have spent a lot of hours into Starcraft over the weekend. But it's because, well, first of all, it's really interesting because like,
00:48.14
Sean
I see how it's like a groundwork for a lot of other games that have been really bad at and I see the difference between people who are good at like played Starcraft and then we're good at other games like League of Legends versus not. More importantly, it's because my brain has been on like like agents, agent systems, Starcraft is like RTS where you manage a bunch of little tiny things and that move around the map.
01:06.11
Andrew
Huh.
01:08.75
Sean
and And like, so for some reason, my brain has that connection.
01:11.48
Andrew
Yeah.
01:11.58
Sean
Oh, so it's because I've always been really bad at it. And like my best, one of my but best friends is like, was top 200 in the US. So, it's, it's not that impressive.
01:19.07
Andrew
whoa Whoa.
01:21.89
Sean
I'm i'm pretty sure it, I think it's like, you know, top 200 snapshot in time, never went pro.
01:22.08
Andrew
Oh.
01:26.65
Sean
Oh, so it's in the US. So he's Korean, but.
01:28.07
Andrew
I mean, I mean, it's so impressive. Like why you gotta, why you gotta hate on your friend? Like your friend sounds, that's cool.
01:33.85
Sean
that's what we do okay okay fine fine fine he's pretty good he's pretty good at it anyway he's been rolling me constantly it's but maybe I'm just salty that he's been fucking destroyed like cool
01:42.52
Andrew
I played Civ three for a while. Is that like similar vibes where you like, you send all your little people to go do things and you have to constantly like be like, okay, do this.
01:50.93
Sean
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly yeah
01:52.07
Andrew
Now do this. Now do this. Now you, you guys build this and you guys build this and okay. Cool. Yeah. I could get hooked on some, some Civ three back in the day.
02:02.67
Sean
Nice, nice. Yeah, some Age of Empires, some Fred Alert.
02:06.05
Andrew
Yeah, I never got beyond Civ III.
02:06.19
Sean
and um Okay.
02:08.67
Andrew
Again.
02:08.70
Sean
Alright, alright. I mean, I need discovered football. That was my weekend. um um Amongst like some other random things, but how about you? How you doing?
02:18.77
Andrew
I'm all right, man. i I am feeling a little stressed because I feel like the last couple of weeks, we just have not made much progress on MetaMonster at all.
02:29.67
Sean
Hmm.
02:31.04
Andrew
So there's a handful of of things at play here. Austin was trying to buy a house. Yeah, which just sort of consumes your life while you're doing it.
02:36.98
Sean
Oh, sick.
02:41.38
Andrew
And it all happened like way faster than he was expecting.
02:41.66
Sean
Sure.
02:44.48
Sean
sure
02:45.51
Andrew
It ended up falling through, like they decided to pass on it.
02:44.87
Sean
Sure.
02:47.47
Andrew
So he's he's not buying the house, but he was going through the motions.
02:48.03
Sean
Okay.
02:53.13
Andrew
And I think it was just eating up all of his like attention as it would.
02:58.84
Sean
right
03:00.29
Andrew
So that was going on. And then I've talked about robotic season. The build season of robotic season like takes up a lot of my free time. like you know, one to two weeknights and all day Saturday basically are spent at robotics and that eats up a lot of time. we've been having to fight with our landlord ah like getting our heater worked on. He keeps saying there's not a problem. We try to tell him there's a problem. We have been fighting with him on that. and then I just think for the past like two or three months, I've been in a season of like
03:42.79
Andrew
higher ADHD, like my ADHD feels like it is has been harder to manage for the past couple months. And so I have had more days where I'm just like,
03:55.63
Andrew
staring at a screen, trying to get started, trying to get over that initial hurdle, and then just like not getting anywhere with my day, other than like to get the most urgent things done.
04:08.02
Andrew
Client work is great at like kind of forcing you to get over that ADHD hurdle, because there are deadlines.
04:12.14
Sean
For sure.
04:13.37
Andrew
And so there's like that added pressure. So my client work, I'm i'm getting done. My MetaMonster work, not so much. And so like the result is that I feel like I'm just crawling on the marketing side. And then, yeah, Austin has also been been busy the last couple weeks, so we haven't gotten, and we're just like dealing with some crawler issues too. trying to We've made the decision to switch to a paid crawler service, but like we're trying to get a couple features out before we make that switch, because we don't know how long that switch is going to take. and so
04:50.04
Andrew
i just i I'm feeling a little discouraged. I'm feeling a little like we're just moving more slowly than I would like.
04:58.08
Sean
Yeah, i mean we missed our first episode in a long time last week.
05:01.06
Andrew
yeah Yeah. Also, my cat got into the basement and hid under a pile of insulation in the crawl space. So I had to spend like two hours one afternoon like tearing apart the house, finding him. So that kind of derailed derailed my day last week too.
05:17.58
Sean
Yeah, yeah. Oh, Paul is okay, which is good.
05:18.37
Andrew
so But boy is fine. But boy is totally fine. I was pretty pissed off at him, but he's cats are curious.
05:21.66
Sean
Yeah.
05:26.21
Andrew
And if you leave a...