On this episode, we speak with Mike Mirandi and Todd Schiller of PixieBrix. PixieBrix is a browser extension which believes that everyone should be able to customize their software even if you're not a software developer.
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SPEAKERS
Mike Mirandi, Brent Sanders, Mark Percival, Todd Schiller
Brent Sanders 00:06
So today we have Mike and Todd from PixieBrix. So, Mike, I think you reached out, we started a conversation and learned about PixieBrix in the last week or two, we were able to get a demo of this product. And it was super interesting. So we want to have you on the podcast, talk about the product, talk about, you know, your background, all that. And the part that we found to be most interesting was, you know, just approaching automation from an attended perspective first, which to give our listeners some context, you know, attended automation is typically automation that is kicked off by the user and then you guys may have a better definition. for me, we think of it as you know, our end users gonna be able to kick off some sort of automation, some process that's going to save them some time, save them some steps, maybe it's going to process data that they're looking at in a faster way, but essentially, the model where the end user is in control and running different automations. So you know, backup First off, thanks for joining us. And maybe you guys want to give us a quick background on how you got into this business.
Mike Mirandi 01:13
Yeah. Awesome. Mark, Brent, thanks for having us on. This is Mike Mirandi, one of the co-founders here at PixieBrix and our chief customer officer. Well, my background has always been on the business side. So formerly in my career, I was a consultant at Bain and company, I focused on projects around PE due diligence, corporate strategy. I did that for a couple of years out of Boston, and then moved to New York and really pursued my passion, which is all around joining earlier stage companies. And so I got involved with different enterprise SaaS companies, always in growth oriented roles. So things like go to market strategy, sales, marketing partnerships, one of those companies was called mocha analytics. And that's where I met our other co founder, Todd.
Todd Schiller 01:57
Yep. And I'm Todd Schiller, I'm the CEO and co-founder of PixieBrix, my background is more technical. So I actually did a PhD in computer science. We like to say that PixieBrix goes back to an internship I had in 2006, I was actually an equities analyst internship. But really what that was supposed to be was I was supposed to take some data from Bloomberg and then copy it over to a spreadsheet, because there wasn't any export functionality for that data yet. I was actually mortgage backed security data. And we all know how that turned out two years later, oh. But uh, so luckily, I actually had a little bit of background in high school and on programming, and even things like customizing games and other stuff. And so I kind of Jerry rigged the system where I would take a screenshot of the screen, pass it through some off the shelf OCR software, and then use a script to add that to the spreadsheet. And so what's interesting about that was it was this project that was supposed to take the whole summer ended up taking a couple days instead. And so that was, that was really like the first glance into Wow, there's actually a lot of value in the business world for being able to kind of have control over the software that you're using, and be able to automate things. And so even after I got out of grad school, I was working more in the financial industry. And then later in business analytics. We're seeing this all the time, right? Where there's this massive divergence between people who have coding skills and people who have control over their software versus people who don't. And so that's really where Pixie bricks came from where we believe there's sort of three things we believe in first, we believe there's no such thing. As an average user, we believe that everyone should be able to customize their software to give themselves superpowers, not not just software developers. And then finally, we believe that computing should be delightful and that when you're using a site, it should be a good experience.
Brent Sanders 03:44
That's great. Yeah, I mean, when it comes to automation and, and looking at, you know, turning a summer long project into a day long project, or a couple day long project, you can see it in this product. So to give some context, you know, this isn't a video podcast, but definitely go check out the PixieBrix site. I'm sure you guys have some examples of this, maybe some video, but it has an interesting twist in the first thing that I thought was, I should say the most interesting thing about the product, at first glance was how you can kind of assimilate, you know, an existing application. So you guys gave a demo of like, here's a LinkedIn profile. And using Pixie bricks, you can add buttons and functionality. And it matches and sort of falls in line with the styling of whatever site you're using and if you don't own the site, like you don't have the ability to, you know, post code to LinkedIn. But with your tool, you actually are able to insert things into the DOM and kind of take over some of the classes that are already being used in the layout. And you know it. I know you guys are framing this as like a lower code or no code tool, but it just seems like a really smart way from our perspective of like, how do we Where do we put the interface controls for automation? Because that's, you know, in our, even our current engagements we're running into, we still run it as problems like, Well, how do we run the bot? Who's gonna have the controls? How do we, you know, how do we initiate things in a sensible way? And, you know, putting aside some of the problems we run into, which is like, Okay, how is that going to affect license fees, and, and all the other pieces of it, but I thought it was a really creative idea. How did you stumble upon the more, you know, front end approach? I would call it?
Todd Schiller 05:29
Yeah, so some of that is just my background. And in terms of my engineering background, I've always been a fan of browser extensions, user scripts, everything running the gamut in terms of my own productivity tools. But really, from a company perspective, I think we come at it with a different framing in terms of how you should approach attending automation. So a lot of companies on the market right there, they sort of pitch it as a digital assistant or sometimes it sort of looks like a conveyor belt, we're exceptions are going off to one side for people to deal with. We view it fundamentally differently, we think it should be more like an exoskeleton or more like augmented reality. And so that's, that's kind of the framing that we take when we go to build PixieBrix.
Brent Sanders 06:09
That's great. Yeah, that's how we see, I think, on this and, yeah, we think of this as like automation is a tool belt, right? It's like this awesome set of tools that can be custom built to just superpower people. So they can, you know, lift really heavy stuff and do the work of 10 people.
Mark Percival 06:25
It's interesting when you first brought up the extensions, because essentially, right, the installation of PixieBrix is an extension. Right? And then you have this idea of you're basically customizing then, almost like, you know, they used to have this thing for Firefox, it was a Grease Monkey. Do you remember this?
Brent Sanders 06:39
Oh, yeah, forgot about that.
Mark Percival 06:41
Yeah, no idea was that you could write your own scripts for, you know, a website. And I think this is actually a really interesting tool that you guys have built, which is you can do that. But you don't have to be that technical. So it's kind of the same thing. But you get that advantage of writing a script for you know, LinkedIn or any site that you want to say, add a button to or call to an API and make some change or make it or, you know, pull some data from it. But you can do that, you know, in a low code way. And that in that browser, which I find really like, it's kind of fascinating that you get it. That's all there was that at some point in time that was popular, the idea of a Grease Monkey script, patching a website.
Todd Schiller 07:16
And it's still popular, and they're a big inspiration for us. I think there's another distribution now called Tampermonkey. And other ones, right? So we sort of view ourselves as, as user scripts by using Lego, Lego bricks, right? And they can just snap together. And so there's a lot of good properties from composability, to security and other things that fall out of that.
Mark Percival 07:35
Yeah, I mean, I think that, on the attended side, you either have the tithes, historically, you would come at this from a UI path standpoint, you know, I'm going to run some scripts, it's going to open my browser and do something. But by being able to kind of go in and do this on the browser side entirely, it really opens up a lot of options for building these automations, I think before would have been still challenging even in the attendance space. Right.
Mike Mirandi 08:00
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And when we think about RPA, I mean, Pixy bricks provide a really good mechanism to interact with RPA bots, because you can embed functions right into the websites you're already using. And so that naturally lends itself to attending automation. And so that's been pretty powerful for us to go into, we think RPA is a pretty interesting adjacency. And we're seeing a lot of traction in that front already.
Mark Percival 08:27
Yeah, and, you know, it's unfortunate, we don't have this as a, you know, a video podcast, because I, you know, you ran us through a demo that I thought was really compelling around license tag, OCR and that type of Auto Attendant automation. But where does, you know, if you had to, say, some grades, you can highlight some use cases where you've seen this just work really well, I think their audience would, would enjoy that. Because I think that gives a good, you know, baseline of, you know, what, this is how this works.
Mike Mirandi 08:55
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the vision is very broad, right? And the vision is to democratize UX customization for anyone, no matter how technical you are. So I'll give a few examples of use cases. But really, the vision is, is everyone's going to be using Pixie bricks in the future. When I think about what some of our early customers and design partners are doing, it runs the gamut. We have one company that uses Pixie bricks to process traffic violations. And that's, you know, there's a lot of repetitive motions in in that because when you see you know, a driver violate a rule, you need to find out who's driving that car and it requires you to navigate government databases, look up names, license plates, Pixie bricks is really good at taking all of the repetitive motion out of it. So the human being can really focus on the things where they need to use judgment. You know, we've got a call center using Pixie bricks. That's a classic example where attended automation is very helpful in where Pixy bricks is interesting is that you can actually use it to integrate some of the actions call center agents would do right into You know, the applications, they already live like Salesforce service console, we have companies looking at Pixy bricks for things around compliance. So if you have a button where you're supposed to click submit for some sort of form, or next, making sure that you actually checked the boxes that you were supposed to check, you know, before doing that, you know, a bank looking at something around anti money laundering. So, the use cases really run the gamut. But, everything I just mentioned is more, you know, more enterprise focused, when I think about just people like you and me every day. I mean, it could be as simple as you know, students looking for an internship. And that requires looking at websites like LinkedIn, and indeed, and monster and Simply Hired Pixie bricks is really good at bouncing between those and helping users find and collect information could be, you know, retail stock investors yesterday, you would just look at Yahoo Finance, but today, you're going into Reddit, and these things don't integrate. But with Pixie bricks, they are data scientists, you know, we hear a lot about different models, data scientists develop like customer churn, well, that's an actionable analytic, and you need to serve that up to someone so they can action it. And that might be an account manager. Now you can embed that analytic right where that sales or marketing person lives in the Salesforce service console, or HubSpot, or pipe drive, wherever that may be. So listen, I think it's a mile wide, and I gave you use cases all over the place. But that's part of why it's exciting to me,Todd and the group.
Brent Sanders 11:21
How do you guys see this play out in the projects that you guys have done? You know, I know you want to gear this towards, and I'm just gonna preface this, everybody's trying to gear these automation tools to be citizen developer friendly, that's the best way I can put it. I'm trying to be like, anybody can pick them up and use them. I mean, I demoed the product. And it seemed like what I think Mark and I have, and this is more of a statement than a question now that I think about it. But one trend that we've seen happen, we've kind of dug into Power Apps, we've dug into some of the other lower code tools. And it seems like, you know, while you don't need to code, you still need to, like become an expert in something. So, you know, we've had some of these platforms on the show before tonkean. I mean, they're their tools, right? They have features that you need to learn your dungeon while working. You know, how, how do you think about getting somebody onboard in something like Pixie bricks, and you know, making them an expert, you see, like, your clients may have a stakeholder that's really into it, and they become sort of the expert at the company. And then it may spread as more people use it, or will it tend to be used by it? And they like it? Because it's easy, but it's still somewhat like you need to understand how HTTP requests work? Like, where does it fit into the spectrum in most organizations?
Todd Schiller 12:43
Yep. And there's a little bit of a difference between where we are today to where we're going within the next 30 days here. So where we are today is that for more complicated workflows, like Mike mentioned, you're probably going to have an RPA developer or a developer building things out, sort of our philosophy is minimizing the set of new things that someone needs to know. And so allowing people to use knowledge that they have around how the rest API's work, how do like what, how does Jason work, regular expressions, things like that, that they probably already know, and leverage those skills without having to know anything about browser extensibility. Right. So that's kind of where we are today, especially if you're building something more complicated. And then for some of these use cases that Mike talks about, in terms of even empowering individual professionals or data scientists, the workflows are a lot more simple, because you're just trying to surface information or just trying to take one action. And so that's where we get into the phase of, actually, you don't need any specialized knowledge, there's going to be a premade brick for here's a place where you can place a button on LinkedIn and the data flowing through it. And then you just choose what action you want to perform. When you click that, whether that's search YouTube, and customize what query you want to do with it, or maybe search on Reddit, or search on Google, etc. And so you're just snapping things together. So it definitely runs the gamut. For the more complicated, more attended automation style, attended automation. use cases. We definitely work more with developers today.
Brent Sanders 14:15
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, and I think that's the right way to, to think of it from the start to where it's like, I don't know, if you over optimize for the wrong use case, and try to make that super simple and then realize, Oh, this is not what people wanted. I mean, I also, you know, I, as a developer, I'm a little skeptical of the idea of like, Oh, this is entirely low code. And I would definitely classify experts as low code, right? It's not, I'm not, I'm not writing the right browser extension myself. You guys have tools in place, which is helpful. But it's like, what's the difference at the end of the day ? You've still got to become an expert. And so have you certainly seen a learned tool? It's almost like, you know, like using Photoshop or like you need to understand and spend some time to kind of learn a new tool, which I think is fair to expect. I mean, I think You can't go so far as to just expect someone to hop into your product that does something unique or novel and just be able to use it. I mean, I don't know, maybe that's the Holy Grail. But I'm curious, you know, shifting gears a little bit, you know, how did you guys find your first clients on this?
Mike Mirandi 15:15
Yeah, absolutely. And that that sort of happened earlier this year, it started with exactly what you would expect reaching out to people in our network, word of mouth. You know, that's how we found really our first design users or their people we had worked with in the past who knew us and were completely bought into the vision and decided to give it a try. I would say from there, something that we did that worked really well, I mean, Pixy bricks is interesting in that there are a lot of adjacent technologies out there. And we already touched upon one, which is RPA. And so it was really testing which communities would be interested in being early adopters of Pixie bricks. And we were, you know, we found very early on that RPA developers and people who are focused on, you know, working with the big RPA platforms definitely want to try out Pixie bricks, we offer several integrations with different RPA companies. And so that was a place where we saw a lot of pull very early on. And then, you know, really, what's interesting about PixieBrix, right? We're all about customizing the UX of any website, SaaS application that you use, that's very visual, you can see that in videos, it's harder to explain over a podcast, but just putting out some simple marketing content showing, really the art of the possible in 60 seconds, 90 seconds, started to drive inbound, and people had questions, and they hadn't seen another company doing things the way, you know, they're solving similar problems with maybe in different ways. And, and even just creating some of that content generated a lot of excitement out there for us. So you know, we were certainly hustling trying different things. It happened faster than we thought it would.
Brent Sanders 16:52
Yeah, yeah, it looks really good. I mean, I think you guys are touching on something that's unique to this space, and in solving in a novel way, which I think you're gonna see success, you know, whether you see it on the scale of, you know, immediately, but I just, I have a lot of confidence that after, and I'm a skeptic, I should say, like, I'm not, I don't usually see things and I immediately start to identify what does it do this? And how can it do that? And but I definitely see, and by the way, Mark, and I took a crack at this problem, we, we had an episode about what we call bot commander, which is an internal tool we've been using to trigger bots, like didn't give business stakeholders, but this was like, Oh, this is a way better ID. This is much smarter. So I gotta give you guys a lot of credit, because it's, you know, putting things in the context that you're working on it. And it's, it's like, oh, yeah, like, because who wants to have to log into a new system who wants to like, you know, we built an interface that's like, great for maybe an IT director to monitor their bots and be able to trigger them manually and help debug problems. But for the end business user, giving them a new login is not fun. Like, it's just another thing you're gonna forget. And, you know, we were using what we use, like OS zero to Yeah, to avoid that. But you know, still it's, it's having things in context,
Mark Percival 18:12
I think. I think it also acknowledges how much what kind of drove us on Baka Manor was the idea that we wanted people to be able to fire off these bots, because that's where a lot of this stuff actually takes place, you have an employee that needs to launch some process. And I think doing it in the browser makes a lot of sense. Because typically, you know, you're doing a task already in that place in the browser and then going somewhere else to launch it doesn't make nearly as much sense as actually doing it for you know, from that page that you're on with all that context.
Todd Schiller 18:40
Yep, yep. Yeah, there's definitely advantages to both ways. And I think they're, they're very complimentary, we'd love to see a backmatter demo at some point as well.
Brent Sanders 18:49
Yeah, it's been a fun thing to do. And it's, it's funny, like, you know, the main reason we've been doing a lot of consulting has been to kind of prove out that tool and prove out like, our have our notions been accurate, about, like, where we think this industry is going and how the actual use cases are going. It's, you know, essentially dogfooding a product that, you know, before we have a bunch of use cases to support. So I'm curious how that process has gone for you guys, you know, from inception to, you know, trying it out on specific use cases. I mean, any interesting revelations once you get users actually on the product.
Todd Schiller 19:27
Yep. Yeah. And it's good that you mentioned dogfooding. So we've sort of started dogfooding from day one, right. And that's what's been driving a lot of the features that we build. So even things like at the time, I was doing some consulting work for a genetics company, and this company had like probably 10 or 15 different internal systems, and they had consistent entities across those. And so it's like, Okay, if you find an issue with one system, and you need to go look it up in another system, you're opening up a new tab, trying to remember what the URL is searching for the thing going to that page. Until an early use case, there was actually me using Pixy bricks to build something quickly to jump between the different systems whenever I saw a product code or an entity code in one particular system. And so you look at things like that, even using it at our own sort of Mike can speak to how we use it on our growth marketing team and things like that. But it's really that dogfooding from day one, and making sure that we're even providing value for ourselves.
Brent Sanders 20:26
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean, I think we see that use case on almost every project where there are multiple systems. And, you know, we were just watching, I was just watching process videos that we took a client and, you know, they have to have three tabs open in order to check across these different systems. And that's the three tabs just for doing investigation work, while Meanwhile, they have another tab open for the actual work that they're doing. And it's so yeah, we immediately see use cases with how Pixie breaks and again, this is not like, Hey, I have to train these people on, you know, either a command tool or, you know, run an assistant program and get the assistant program installed on their machine. If we just say, Hey, we're gonna add a button to your software. And, you know, it's as simple as, like, we're, there's a new button in your interface and just click this in an old talk to the other system. It's like, oh, oh, that's great, that, that closes the gap so much faster than adding more software into the mix.
Mike Mirandi 21:25
And I think, you know, PixieBrix, at least for me, it helps me stay organized, because I do have so many tabs open. And so when I think about it, you know, I do a lot of research, and that requires scoring on different websites. And it might be simple things like, who are podcast hosts that, you know, I want to get in front of, or where bloggers that I think are really good. Well, those all have to be written down in a list somewhere. But with PixieBrix, you know, you could highlight the blogger's name, right click right from the context menu, and send it off to a Trello card. And then, you know, suddenly, all of this research, there was information that was everywhere and hard to structure and became really easy to collect and stay disciplined around. And so that's, that's a simple use case that I use today.
Brent Sanders 22:07
Yeah, oh, man. And that's such a good point. It's like, we were doing a lot of that in the first quarter of the year doing a ton of business development. I built some bots, you know, on RoboCorp to trawl through Sales Navigator and put lead lists together. And it worked, right, we ended up getting a bunch of deals from it. And I've managed to completely destroy my LinkedIn account by cold emailing people. But, you know, the idea of not having to, I guess the context, being able to be in the browser is a great place to play. And so on that note, on the downside, like, do you guys have a solution? if, let's say we had a client, a lot of their stuff is browser based, but then they have sort of native applications? Is there a way to make PixieBrix work with some of these native applications that are out there, like, you know, a homegrown Windows application?
Todd Schiller 22:56
Yep. So today using PixieBrix, you generally can't. So this is where we kind of lean on our adjacency with RPA. So if you want to use UiPath, automation anywhere, and any of those others, that works great, or you can even have many apps today that support sort of what are called URL schemes where you can actually perform actions on the app by opening up a URL in the browser. So one of them that I use, for example, is if I want to create a new task in OmniFocus, or note in drafts, sort of you hit the URL, the URL with the special scheme, and then that goes in, and does that action in that native app. And so I think there are sort of lightweight ways. And then there's also heavier weight ways when you get into the calling into RPA.
Brent Sanders 23:43
Yeah, interesting. That's a good plan. You know, do you see this request a lot? Are we seeing that you're seeing it kind of going away, where, you know, I, we see a mix, we see some, some of our customers, they you know, they had something built, or they bought some piece of software, and they've kind of stuck with it. And then everyone else kind of has more like the Salesforce model where it's cloud based, web based applications.
Todd Schiller 24:06
We do hear it. I think Mike can talk a little bit about this. But we generally try to target the situations where we know we're going to be more of the right tool for that situation, right. And a lot of that is reaching out to even if they're potentially newer companies or newer, newer engagements, they might have a little bit less of that desktop legacy.
Brent Sanders 24:27
When it comes to this is something I probably should ask them to demo when it comes to running in different browsers like organizations that hey, we have to use edge or can this I mean, I, I always use Chrome and I think we download it in Chrome can this work in in other browsers?
Todd Schiller 24:41
Right now we officially support Chrome. You can use Firefox not for offering things, but for running most things. Oh, cool. And then in the near future, pretty much every browser is based on the same underlying technology as chrome now which is like the chromium project and so you'll be saying things like the new support for the new Microsoft Edge or a brave browser very soon.
Brent Sanders 25:03
Great. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I think you guys are in a great spot, I would commend you for the innovation, I think this is something that we're going to see more of. And to me, this is where, in my mind, this is more interesting than yet another RPA vendor, right? It's like you guys are blending, you know, finding a real problem solving it with a novel approach. And, versus I think what we've seen in the last couple years is an explosion of, you know, platforms. And that, as we've talked about, in past podcasts just feels like it's becoming more and more ubiquitous, and there's going to be in my personal vision, just a race to the bottom right, license fees are gonna drop, everyone's gonna be chasing each other on price. And eventually, all these platforms will be free, and they're going to charge in different ways. But yeah, I would commend you guys for a really creative solution. I mean, I think we definitely wanted to introduce it to our audience. So I'm assuming you guys have some demos up on the site. I actually don't recall it. You know, last time I checked the site was when we first spoke, but do you guys ever post any of your use cases on YouTube or anything?
Mike Mirandi 26:11
Yeah, we have a YouTube channel, actually, we taught actually posted a video this morning of, you know, on LinkedIn, have an interesting use case that we actually heard from a, a UI path services partner where, you know, they wanted a side panel that showed UiPath orchestrator stats, so the user could see those, you know, from from certain screens and filter them by certain screens. And so that's actually when we posted today, but you can check out videos, right on our website, or on YouTube as well. And, you know, again, as I mentioned, the products are really visual. So sometimes the easiest way to learn about it is to watch a 92nd video, and jump into some of our tutorials. And we're going to continue to put you know, a couple out every week. And we certainly love it when people reach out to us and say, hey, can Pixie bricks do this. And then instead of responding what we like to do is respond with a video every time we can so that definitely welcome that.
Brent Sanders 27:04
Awesome. Why don't we just talk before wrapping up? Let's talk about pricing. So the other thing, and I say I think you guys have a really good pricing model, but I'll let you guys explain how you. You think about it currently, because it's evolving, right? I mean, you guys are fairly new with this. And you're, that's always something hard to nail the first time out.
Mike Mirandi 27:22
Yeah, absolutely. And so as I mentioned, the vision is to democratize UX customization for everyone, no matter how technical and so what that means is, anyone can come and use Pixie bricks for free, you don't have to pay anything, there's no limit on how many automations you can create or how many, you know, Windows you customize. And so that's really what we're focused on is getting free users, we have a freemium model. So getting free users on the platform, learning, building things, making it a two way conversation, so we can learn from our users as well. We do have different team features around you know, sharing and security. And in that model, we have, you know, a proceed based pricing. So similar to a lot of sass apps, or even attended automation that you see today. And so those are sort of the two models. As you mentioned, we are testing different things, it's very early days for us. And a lot of companies are going towards consumption based pricing as well. But what we're really focused on today is we want people to come on, we want them to use the product for free, and help us make an even better product than we have today.
Brent Sanders 28:29
Cool. And typically like what's your excuse me, if I'm pressing you, but you know what's typically like the dollar amount per seat you're, you're going after.
Mike Mirandi 28:38
So in the US, we've seen things from 30 to $50 per user per month, depending on volume. But we actually have a lot of users that are outside of the US, especially as we work with different companies like bpos and call centers and in that world, we're certainly happy to come down below that $30 per user per month price. We want to make PixieBrix, you know, a win win for everyone and make sure the ROI is there whether you live in a high cost geography or low cost geography and so I guess that's a that's a bit of a non answer in saying that it's flexible but that's that's the true answer.
Brent Sanders 29:12
No, that's exactly what I was hoping for. I mean, so the reason I wanted to get the dominant is it seems really reasonable. So based on the value in in our engagements in the dollar amount, and you know, we're we're playing at least we're working with small to medium sized businesses and this is something where I think you guys are right on the money because frankly, when you were doing demo when we got to pricing, I was a little nervous. You're gonna say like it's $3,000 a month you know, it's beyond our reach for our clientele, but I think you're going about it the right way. It's a good price point in my opinion, I'm giving you, you know, live product feedback, but I think it's the right way of going about it in order to get in people's hands because I'm sure there are other ways to, you know, capture revenue once you have adoption. But I think this is a really good way to price for, you know, people to try out. And you know, $30 is a nice, low sort of barrier to entry in my mind. So I think you guys are doing all the right things.
Mike Mirandi 30:15
Yeah, and I did want to mention, Brent, something that we haven't touched on as much is, you know, part of getting people on the platform is, is something that doesn't quite exist today, but will exist tomorrow is, is we're building a marketplace, where now you can create things and share them, you know, author different bricks, share those third parties can come on and use those. And, you know, for us to get that network effect and to get people really energized around the vision. It's not about making revenue today at all, it really isn't. It's about getting people on the platform, having them teach us what good looks like and creating that two way conversation. And so that's what we're laser focused on today.
Brent Sanders 30:51
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, that's, that's the only way to, to actually be successful as just, you know, hit a critical mass of users and understand, you know, if the product market fit is there, so I'm glad you guys are, I'm not, I've seen a lot of more like, we haven't gotten this deep into conversation. But we've seen a lot of other products, not necessarily the attendance base, but sort of like ancillary RPA tools, automation tools, and they're everyone's been going after this, like three to $500. And I shouldn't say everyone, but the ones I've seen, it's been a lot of three to $500 per month, and they, you know, monitoring tools or support tools, things that, you know, I think they're their customer bases tend to be, you know, large corporations that have adopted RPA that are having problems, managing it and scaling it. And so it's good to see somebody taking more of what I would call, like more of a startup approach versus an enterprise approach in this space, because I think we have a lot of people that are wanting to play enterprise software, and do, but it's just getting a little crowded. And I feel like it kind of stifles innovation a little bit.
Mike Mirandi 31:53
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we talked to different companies as well. And I think, you know, you can convince companies to pay different amounts for different software. But for us, we want to keep the price low, the product does the selling, and it's about what you just said, getting the community on there and getting people energized around the vision. So yeah, I appreciate you agreeing with that approach. And it's working well for us so far.
Brent Sanders 32:17
Any challenges you guys are running into as you're scaling up? Like any technical product challenge, any things that have been difficult in the journey?
Todd Schiller 32:25
Yeah, I think there is. Part of what we're trying to do, right? And why other people haven't done it yet is because there are technical challenges, right. So even building for the browser, because of the browser security model. There's interesting things that you need to do from a software development approach. And then modern web pages are actually quite complex. So like, if you think about the Salesforce service console, there's actually tabs within the actual application itself. And so there's sort of an interesting life cycle, things that you need to take into account. And so there's, there's kind of the fun, interesting technical challenges that we're overcoming. And then, right, as a small company, there's always just prioritization and strategy is the big thing, right? It's always that you have less time and less resources than you would like, but trying to move fast and do the right things and just have fun along the way. I think on that note, we are kicking off some hiring, to help build out the platform around the authoring tools around sort of the web browser extension infrastructure, as well as back end engineers for helping us build out that kind of scalable marketplace. So anyone that is listening to this podcast that thinks they can help we're definitely willing to have an open to having a conversation.
Brent Sanders 33:42
Awesome. Awesome. Is there a specific stack you guys are looking for on the back end?
Todd Schiller 33:46
So on the back end, we're a Python and Django shop.
Brent Sanders 33:50
Nice,
Todd Schiller 33:50
But I think we're really just keen on getting the right people in place. I think a lot of the skills there are transferable.
Brent Sanders 33:57
Yeah, definitely.
Mike Mirandi 33:58
And then on the front end, we're a TypeScript and react shop. But again, it's looking for the right people.
Brent Sanders 34:05
Well, those are really popular and enjoyable tools to use. So I'm sure you guys have good luck. So well, thanks for coming on. I think this has been great. Definitely, to all of our listeners, go check out PixieBrix. This is a product, you know, we don't really do endorsements or anything. And we're definitely not getting paid to do this. But this is a unique experience. I think we have been demoing this product and it's definitely worth your time to go. At least check this out. Because this is, I think, where we're gonna see more of the creative innovation in space. So check them out. Thanks, guys for coming on the podcast.
Mark Percival 34:38
Thanks guys.
Mike Mirandi 34:39
Thank you for having us on.
