81: We built the product. Can we build the business?

In this episode, Mitchell and Gavin celebrate onboarding more than 1,100 World Police and Fire Games athletes into SixSides, unpack the infrastructure, HubSpot, Intercom and marketing work behind the rollout, and prepare the business for Mitchell’s five-week honeymoon and a short break from the podcast. Links QF1 for you flight nerds: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/qf1/schedules/5863144608 Chapters (00:00) - Intro and a huge week for SixSides (01:39) - 1,100 athletes onboarded and counting (05:21) - Scaling our infrastructure for users around the world (08:21) - HubSpot onboarding, email campaigns and product-led growth (13:24) - Community sales conversations and the Gold Coast Council (16:36) - The new SixSides marketing site is live (20:25) - Intercom, MCPs and fixing our bus factor (23:36) - Planning the dev team for Mitchell’s five-week honeymoon (29:17) - AEO, pricing and turning a product into a business (33:22) - A podcast break and Mitchell’s Europe trip In this episode, we cover:Onboarding more than 1,100 World Police and Fire Games athletes into SixSides Seeing community posts arrive from athletes around the world Preparing SixSides infrastructure for thousands of international users Debugging login timeouts and database transactions during a live rollout Using multi-region infrastructure to improve performance for global users Building HubSpot onboarding campaigns for new SixSides users Fixing DKIM and email deliverability issues after the first campaign emails landed in spam Turning event attendees into community organisers through product-led growth Exploring SixSides as a community platform for associations, councils and not-for-profits Conversations with Volunteering WA and the Gold Coast Council about building stronger communities Launching the new SixSides marketing website Using Claude to extend an existing design system and build new marketing pages faster Adding Intercom to SixSides for customer support Using MCP integrations with HubSpot, Sentry and the SixSides codebase to troubleshoot support issues Reducing the bus factor by documenting tools, logins and operational access Planning larger development projects so the team can work independently while Mitchell is away The roadmap for additional languages, user-generated content translation, speech-to-text and private chat AEO content, citations and SixSides' broader acquisition strategy Working out a future pricing model from free through to enterprise Moving from building a product to building a sustainable SaaS business Taking a short podcast break while Mitchell heads to Europe for his honeymoon Got questions or topics you want us to cover? Email us at [email protected] If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5-star rating and a review on your favourite podcast app. It really helps us reach more people! Connect with us SixSides: sixsides.co Book a call with Gavin: call.sixsides.co Mitchell on Bluesky: mitchdav.is Mitchell on LinkedIn: mitchdav Gavin on LinkedIn: gavintye Gavin on YouTube: gavintye1 SixSides on LinkedIn: sixsides SixSides on X: sixsidesevents SixSides on Bluesky: sixsides.co SixSides on Youtube: sixsidesco SixSides on Substack: sixsides SixSides on Skool: Community Builders Network