How to pick a CMS and the challenges of building part time

Small Efforts - with Sean Sun and Andrew Askins

In this episode Andrew tries to pick a CMS for the new MetaMonster website and talks about his dream solution. Then the guys talk about their ideal consulting businesses. Meanwhile Sean is feeling frustrated by how slow his projects are moving, and wishes he could focus on them fulltime for a bit. They also touch on the difficulties of balancing attention to design details versus just getting a product out the door quickly. Finally, Sean shares 3 businesses he loves.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
• ChartJuice: https://www.chartjuice.com/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
• StackWise: Coming soon...
• FigTree: Coming soon...

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00:00.01

Sean

Uh, yeah, I mean, I was going to talk about, well, I should have your record.

00:00:05.81

Andrew

Do you want to start over?

00:00:07.50

Sean

No, it just let's just roll with it. Hi, everyone.

00:00:10.80

Andrew

Hi, how's it going? Behind the scenes look at Andrew and Sean being a bit of a clusterfuck trying to figure out what the hell the pod about 30 seconds before the pod or five seconds after the pod.

00:00:12.65

Sean

Good.

00:00:20.21

Sean

We're very organized or we're incredibly organized. think, I think it's a good segue into, into like, we can talk about like other service business and I have a segue into it because I was kind of curious about just how your consulting is sort of going now that.

00:00:34.65

Andrew

Okay.

00:00:35.35

Sean

Yeah. but more importantly, some crazy, crazy, crazy tech Twitter stuff going on these days, huh?

00:00:42.87

Andrew

Oh, so when i when I said I wanted to talk about CMSs, yeah the WordPress drama, I feel like we covered a little bit last time.

00:00:42.94

Sean

Since the last.

00:00:49.11

Sean

Yeah.

00:00:49.88

Andrew

There's more updates. it's It keeps getting wackier.

00:00:53.21

Sean

Mm hmm.

00:00:53.72

Andrew

The WordPress founder took over a plugin, which is batshit crazy.

00:00:59.63

Sean

Yeah, I was just going to go from crazy batshit WordPress things into maybe Ghost and then CMS's house imagining.

00:01:08.50

Andrew

Uh, sorry, I totally fucked your, your segue there.

00:01:09.97

Sean

No.

00:01:13.12

Andrew

yeah, anyway, I need to build a website and I'm trying to pick a CMS and I want you to, to I want you to tell me which CMS to use and I'm gonna, I'm gonna like ignore you and tell you why you're wrong on every CMS.

00:01:22.11

Sean

squarepace Okay.

00:01:26.46

Andrew

Like, because they all suck.

00:01:26.71

Sean

Okay. Hit me. Hit me. They do all suck, but hit me.

00:01:31.00

Andrew

Okay. So I think I have it narrowed down. I wanted to use, so I'm trying to build a proper marketing site for MetaMonster so that I can get a little bit of SEO stuff rolling and then publish some content and just like have a place to do marketing.

00:01:51.26

Andrew

um want to build some free tools, want to do some other things to just start building building the list, our waiting list.

00:01:54.30

Sean

Yeah.

00:01:59.89

Andrew

So need to pick a CMS. would typically just build on Webflow. Like Webflow is so fast. It's what I built chart juice on. It's clunky, it's expensive, it has its problems. The CMS sucks if you're doing a lot of content, but for like early stage SaaS website, I don't know many things better. So would typically just do Webflow. But I know one of the marketing channels I wanna try is building

00:02:32.68

Andrew

some free tools to try to drive, get like SEO juice from, from free tools and like some traffic. it just aligns perfectly with MetaMonster, you know, having a free like, enter a link or copy and paste your content in and we'll generate a page title for you. We'll generate a meta description for you. Like it just makes too much sense. Um, and sorry, one second. Let me let my cat in.

00:02:57.67

Sean

got

00:02:58.58

Andrew

Come on in you dork.

00:03:01.38

Andrew

Okay. So yeah, I want to build free tools and like.

00:03:03.43

Sean

You want to build free tools. It's great. It isn't a monster.

00:03:08.40

Andrew

The process of doing that in Webflow is just clunky. I could yeah know i could build them, host them on some free thing like Netlify, and then just like run them on a subdomain.

00:03:19.66

Andrew

But you know if the whole point is SEO, then running it on a subdomain is a little counterproductive. you know It's not the worst thing in the world, I guess, but you're just like, do they now?

00:03:28.86

Sean

does it you I thought subdomains count as the main domains. like Yeah, I thought that was the whole thing.

00:03:38.16

Andrew

I feel, oh, okay, I need to look into that. Cause that would massively simplify my my problems.

00:03:44.34

Sean

right

00:03:46.07

Andrew

I always thought like best practice was to do everything on your primary domain and that like subdomains got treated differently.

00:03:52.10

Sean

I thought that

00:03:56.09

Andrew

You're looking it up.

00:03:57.51

Sean

Yeah, I'm looking it up. I feel like it was something.

00:04:01.40

Andrew

There was a Google update, like in this, one of these new big updates, they they started

00:04:02.81

Sean

Yeah.

00:04:06.13

Sean

Yeah.

00:04:07.62

Andrew

Mashing it all together.

00:04:08.89

Sean

Yeah. I mean, Ahrefs literally pulls shop.mistreins.com and mistreins.com into one thing now for me.

00:04:16.03

Andrew

Interesting.

00:04:16.97

Sean

So. I don't know. Yea...