The Best Open-Source Platform for Asset Management Using QR Codes

Carlos A. Virreira
Hey, let's build a open source platform for people teams to register their assets. Know who has access to what and let's capitalize on the creation of QR codes.

Mikael Hugg
We are interested in how you are actually growing this.

Carlos A. Virreira
QR code label. You can download it and print it. For instance, if you add the tag retired that something happens.

Artem Daniliants
It seems like this is easily done in shells.

Mikael Hugg
People can do whatever they want.

Carlos A. Virreira
Basically the small idea that we're trying to bring to the world.

Mikael Hugg
Super fun to have you here. You know, we already checked a little bit of of what you got. What is your business? And it looks really cool. So, you know, glad to have you here. And welcome.

Carlos A. Virreira
Pleasure. Pleasure. Thank you for the invitation, of course.

Artem Daniliants
Yes. And for our listeners and viewers, Carlos actually reached out to me via email and said like, hey, do you do like more than just marketing tools? And because, you know, I have an asset management system, does it really fit within your scope? And I'm like, Exactly.

Artem Daniliants
That's the type of, you know, stories and softwares. We want to also feature on our podcast because obviously it's not all about marketing. There are so many problems that we're able to solve with software or software as a service. I actually just a little bit of a background. I actually have a small Airbnb business that I do on the side. I mean, you know, once you've been hunted by this. Yeah, no.

Mikael Hugg
Of course. Small side hustle.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, yeah. Side hustle. Yeah. So, yeah, I just have a few, a few things that I do Airbnb wise and I'm kind of getting more into it. And one of the things that I realized is that I need to catalog everything I have across multiple properties. So and obviously as a hacker news, you know, addicted junkie, I'm always scrolling and searching for new cool stuff, interesting news and so forth. And I saw post, I think from you, Carlos, in the show Hacker News section where you mentioned self dot new and you also I think kind of you know highlighted that this is also a self-hosted solution or open source solution that you can either host yourself and not buy anything and or you can have a hosted solution where you take care of everything.

Artem Daniliants
And of course, the first thing that I did, I signed up for the free plan just to test it and see how it works. And it looks really promising, but I don't want to talk about your product. I think you will do a much better job. So Carlos, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, so.

Mikael Hugg
We're we're thinking together. Yeah. And what I just wanted to say is that, you know what it comes to that, you know, what is our scope is that we also, you know, we're talking about the marketing stuff. We can also talk about how you are generating traffic to your website and what is the way you've got your backlinks and all that stuff. So, you know, even though your stuff is not related directly to the marketing stuff, uh, you know, we are interested on how you are actually growing.

Artem Daniliants
So Carlos, could you tell a little bit about yourself, your background, and also the interesting part, how did you come up with the idea and also like where you at currently?

Carlos A. Virreira
Okay.

Carlos A. Virreira
Well, that's a lot of information to give. So, first of all, my name is Carlos Varela. I am a recently turned 33. I actually turned 33 yesterday. Um, and I am a person that was born in Argentina. I lived most of my life in Bolivia and I have been living in the Netherlands for around 14 years. So I've been in this side of the world and I studied here in the university. I did actually business and communication studies, so I actually did a lot of strategic business, creative business plans and so on and always had a fascination for programming. And together with one of my roommates, we decided to start a company. Already 11 years ago. So as soon as we graduated, we started a small code shop. So I would take the role of being the more, let's say, commercial driven human in the mix. I would talk to customers. I would try to figure out what they're trying to achieve and we would try to help them through our through creating like, let's say, designs and also build little tools for them.

Carlos A. Virreira
This is a path that I carried on for many years and it's a role I still have. As you all know, we had a pandemic and it can it cost a little bit of a shuffle in the ways that our companies work and operate. One of the consequences of that was that my team, which was in-house, which was in office on premise all of a sudden. Everybody wanted to go back to their hometowns. Everybody wanted to go back to their roots. And it meant that, first of all, had to adjust to that new way of operation. But also I really needed my staff to have proper working conditions, wanted to have good keyboards, don't no good, good monitors, good standing desks, good work computers, all this stuff. And what we notice is that our insurance rates are going up. And we were getting basically, let's call it a shadow pre-calculated insurance cost for our equipment. In which we started to have a conversation, it's like, Hey, how can we possibly reduce this? They're like, Hey, you need a proper asset registry.

Carlos A. Virreira
We need to know what your assets are like, how many desks you have, how many monitors, what are the serial numbers, what are the conditions? Who has access to what? Where were their purchase? And this usually used to be a little bit of a let's call it an accounting related task. You buy something, you want to depreciate it, but never an insurance driven task or let's call it productivity task. So we decided, hey, why don't we build something for this? And that's how we ended up thinking of, Hey, let's build an open source platform for people. Teams to register their assets, know who has access to what, and let's capitalize on the creation of QR codes because the whole market was driven by how do you call it a bar bar labels like barcodes.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. Yeah.

Carlos A. Virreira
So that's, that's, that's how it happened.

Mikael Hugg
I can I can notice that you actually have a QR code and on your headphones there as well. So my headphone I think you're carrying the example on how exactly.

Mikael Hugg
Absolutely.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yes.

Artem Daniliants
So what does it do? What does it do if you scan your headphones with a mobile device? What happens?

Carlos A. Virreira
Okay, so a few things happened. One of the things that I'm very happy about is that. Depending on. Okay, so let's take a step back. So Forest is a traditional asset management system. There's a person that has an actual hardware device to scan them and then some some system opens up very rigid and very like inaccessible for people. What happens with our system is that anybody that has a mobile phone. Again, thanks. Thanks for en thanks to Covid. Now all phones have the capacity to scan QR codes, right? So anybody from your organization can interact with this. My staff members can scan their code and raise an issue, say, Hey, my laptop is not working properly. Instead of somebody getting called and say, hey, this this issue is happening, we can add those tags. So whenever you scan the code, we depending on your role within the organization, show you something else.

Carlos A. Virreira
So if I scan that code as an admin, two things will happen. First of all, on every scan we ask for location permissions and that allows us to pin in a map the last known scan location of the app, which makes this system works as a little bit of a hybrid between a passive and active tracker and a passive tracker airdrop.

Mikael Hugg
Sorry, like your airtag tag? Yeah. Yeah.

Carlos A. Virreira
It's like the cheapest airtag. It's like you can you can get that benefit without having to spend like a like 30 bucks per ask from weeks.

Mikael Hugg
Exactly.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yeah.

Mikael Hugg
She's like, you know, I could confuse everything. Not right now.

Carlos A. Virreira
It's like a wish tag. Yeah. Imagine handling with, like, a tag here hanging around. Like, it's just. It's just not practical. So, yeah, that's what happens when you scan the tag. We log the location, we grab the geolocation. API is a web native API actually, and we pin it. Actually we did tests even offshore and the geolocation is so accurate.

Carlos A. Virreira
The satellite network is so good and we can all tap into it. And moreover, we if you're an unauthorized user, we show you a contact form. Let's say that I actually have some props.

Mikael Hugg
Right.

Artem Daniliants
Oh, wow. You came prepared.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yeah. All right. So let's say that this is your hard drive and you have your tag with your company. And if lost. Call this number. But if somebody if you left this in an airport and of course, this is not the main benefit of shelf, but a side benefit is that whoever scans is called. Well, first of all, we'll ask the location permission. So we will be able to show you, hey, an iPhone, scan this in this geographic location. But they can also leave you a message. They can actually say, hey, I got this thing and then it's up to you how you are going to persuade the human to return you. The I. Yeah, but it's a side benefit from it. So.

Carlos A. Virreira
The assets themselves become. They're they're tagged. They're having a user to be authorized to use it. And if the case they get lost, they can they can let you know what's going on. But basically what we created is that. Each object that your company has that you want to track becomes an entry in a secure database where you can interact with it. And that's basically the small idea that we're trying to bring to the world.

Artem Daniliants
Well, that sounds really good. So if you think from the like the asset management perspective, it's not really aimed at things like, Hey, I have like 12 Forks, you know, in my kitchen or anything like that. So it needs to be, you know, at least the size of a QR code at least, and it needs to be something more substantial. So it's not really good for like basic inventory, for example, for like Airbnb where you have like 12 forks and you have 15 plates and then all of a sudden you're like, okay, now we have one plate less.

Artem Daniliants
It's not really for that. It's more, it's well.

Mikael Hugg
It's not plate tracking.

Carlos A. Virreira
Not all plates. And the thing is that I actually this is something that I think so deeply about. Really it. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's something that I know. Like what am I building, you know. Is this an ERP? Is is an inventory management system or this is an asset tracking system and I really want to create an asset tracking system. And I found a small way to describe what an asset is. And what I often say is if it breaks and nobody calls you is not an asset. But if it breaks in, somebody panics and calls you and say like, Hey, aka your coffee machine, you know, you have a coffee machine in your Airbnb. I need to drink many cups of coffee a day. If I read your property and it shows me a picture of a beautiful Nespresso machine or whatever and it doesn't work, I will scan that tag and I will maybe flag it.

Carlos A. Virreira
You will get a notification. The alternative would be I will give you a bad review or I will feel like you've left me without any method of of of correcting it. So there you go. Like, if I'm missing one plate, but I have one, I have three instead of six, I won't give you a bad review. But if they, let's say the. Something like the shower doesn't keep hot water or something. You could consider it as being a trackable thing or something that you might want to create and actually to continue on this. This is one of the ideas that I really want to introduce. I would love it for you to attempt to be able to set up redirect, post scan so if on shelf you can register your assets, but that when it's scanned not by you or any of your team members, that it directs them to any page. Perhaps you are so smart and you do a video guide of how to use every piece of equipment of your God.

Artem Daniliants
Oh my God, I like you.

Artem Daniliants
I like you already. Because my question was my question was and this is the reason why I love meeting people like you founders because you always learn something new. Last time I learned about Tripod Atlas and that you can really quickly incorporate in Delaware. So every time, like one of the selfish benefits from doing this is just learning, learning together and sharing experiences. But that was exactly my question. So because I'm a tech junkie, so to speak, I want one of my Airbnbs to have like smart home, right? So that, you know, iPad somewhere in the wall and you can control everything. And one of the things that I really hate when I travel myself and I've been traveling quite a lot and spending some time in different Airbnbs, I hate that there are very rarely any kind of instruction. So if you want to use a washer there, like you'll figure it out. Or if it's a if it's a coffee machine, you know, sometimes they can be a little bit convoluted. All of the sudden weird sounds coming out.

Artem Daniliants
There is water coming. So then you're like, What the hell is going on? So my idea was I will have QR codes and the QR codes will allow you to report an issue or see a video tour or video instructions on how to use that item. So as it sounds, based on on what you have articulated, it seems like this is easily done in shelves.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yes, it's a feature that I'm trying to push for it to be released fast, but basically inside of each asset object in your database, you should be able to define what happens when each users can sit. So if you scan it, you get to see the asset edit page, right? You might want to change some information. If it's a team member, maybe they want to flag an object, perhaps you increase your operations. You have, like Michael said, hundreds of Airbnbs. You might have a maintenance crew and they they should go to check and flag it. Or maybe somebody.

Artem Daniliants
Right. Or maybe a cleaner if she notices that, for example, vacuum cleaner is is dead or something.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yeah. So those are the those are that infrastructure layer is what I want to provide to the world and do that very well and not try to take the spotlight on any other areas of like asset counting, let's say, or, or doing or more. Yeah. Like just stay topically in this in this length to try to make this like the best one. So my goal is to find companies that are very, let's call it process and excellence focused, and they really want to give the best experience to their customers and they see how to integrate this technology layer to their to their work processes. So yeah, that's what we're building.

Artem Daniliants
That's pretty awesome. I think we have enough startups who just, you know, integrate and say like, we will revolutionize the world. I think, I think you're solving what I like about your product is that you're kind of like scratching your own itch, you know? So basically you became your first customer in a sense. Absolutely. And you have a team of people who are constantly testing your product because they're using it, reporting and so forth.

Artem Daniliants
Another thing that really, you know, would be interesting to hear is that you decided to go open source route. That's not very normal when it comes to SaaS startups. Usually it's just like, hey, let's create something a little bit of react NodeJS, whatever, push it to Vercel and let's charge $15 and see what sticks. But you decided to go right from the beginning open source route. You give an opportunity to host it yourself, do everything yourself and then you don't have support and so forth, but you're able to use the software free within certain specific limits. So why did you choose to open source your product? A lot of people before you answer, a lot of people, especially software developers, many times they don't want to release their product as open source solution because they're kind of afraid that somebody will somebody will look at their code and like, this is spaghetti madness. Like this is not really good.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yeah, Yeah. It truly feels like working with my dirty laundry behind me to have the whole code base exposed.

Carlos A. Virreira
But yeah, Artem and Michael, like, what can I say about open source? Uh, from a philosophical point of view, I believe that I wouldn't have achieved anything in my career if it was not for open source. So I always had the desire to create something of immense value. So let's say give 100 value units and be comfortable and sleep well at night knowing that I might capture only one out of those 100 value units in monetary in monetary value. I always looked up to Matt from WordPress. I think I made most of my money in my first ten years as an agency building WordPress sites, and I never paid $1 to this guy. Thanks to the ecosystem that he created the open source CMS, a whole market came to be and I as a person just just loves that. Like I just when I first encountered that, it just really fascinated me. So I always had in the back of my head that if I were to build a product, it would have to be open source, because I believe that if software is eating the world open source software is going to eat software.

Carlos A. Virreira
And it just has to do with the fact that there's more developer support, there's more momentum that can be made in honestly, I believe that. Going for. NON-proprietary proprietary open source solution makes that the people that are intrinsically motivated to improve the code to be critical about it, like those are the best people you want to have in the beginning looking at what you're doing. So yes, it's a very scary thing and I believe that my parents think I'm crazy. But on the other hand, it's gotten me to meet very, very smart, intelligent people. And I feel like that's very valuable. So that's why we decided to go open source. Just just just put it out there. And right now, I think there's like 54, so there must be 50 people that are running their versions of chef. Many people that I don't know, maybe they just get cloned and they're just running their own instances. But every once in a while there's some issues that come up and people are like, Hey, why don't you do this? And when we check, they know our code base very well.

Carlos A. Virreira
So. It's a new it's a new world for us.

Mikael Hugg
You know, when we're comparing your stuff to WordPress in a way. Is that you're still, you know, you have all sorted paid plans. So it's not just giving everything for free. You know, people can do whatever they want. You can also generate a cash flow there and oh, you're really generous when you know, I'm looking at your pricing science. You know what you're giving for the free. Yeah, free plans. But I also think that, you know, the $19 a month for the plus membership, you know, I mean. That is. I think that should be a quite no brainer for people who are really looking into this asset management software.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. And you'll be getting that $19 for me for sure once I start renovating my my apartment because I just I just felt the only problem that I encountered in your software is that I couldn't get the map functionality to work correctly. I gave it addresses in like 14 different formats and I was like, Come on, come on.

Artem Daniliants
No, I even gave like geolocation and stuff like that. But the beauty is because it's open source, I could actually go in and see how you actually are working with the addresses. And that I think is a very powerful thing. You just go in, you see like, Aha. So this function is responsible for getting the address. Okay, now I know which format you expecting, so I really love that approach, but I think it's, it's a balance, right? You want to give stuff for free, you want people to be able to host it, but you also want to create a business model so that you can continue doing this for very long time. So it's a fine balance. I also I don't remember if you had like a Docker image, like ready to go.

Carlos A. Virreira
No, we do not. But we're talking with a party that's going to help us maybe like do a one click like environment for, for shelf and stuff like that. But we started shelf like less than a year ago and it's it has been picking up and actually you mentioned Hacker News and that's another of these talks that I did not know anything about Hacker news like not much and just posted it there and like as a link and it picked up a lot and what it did give me, it made me realize that asset management is an it's, it's an activity that many people wanted to do but that there was no clear like obvious.

Carlos A. Virreira
There was no clear, obvious winner in this category. If you are not like of course enterprise, like you can go to or IBM, Maxim or whatever, like these guys will give you stuff, but very hard to buy, very hard to know what what the tool does. So yeah, I think it's important for us to do it right that we're working on better documentation for Self-hosting so that it's like much more accessible for you to like spend a few hours and set up your, your own instance. But there's also the balance that we am currently talking with a lot of very interesting people and they have a lot of demands and I'm trying to ship very fast. So it's the balance of like, okay, let's ship fast, but also make sure that people have a clear upgrade path for their for their installations. That's some super exciting stuff. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, just. I have a synology, you know, server if you're familiar with Synology. Nas. So basically it's yeah, it's a file server that is pretty powerful.

Artem Daniliants
I think have like 16 gigs in it and, and a very powerful CPU. So actually run different Docker instances and I became, you know, a big fan of self-hosted solutions and there is like a really good Reddit community self-hosted and there is like nowadays you can get pretty much pretty much everything like in, in your own server if you want. So there's pretty much solution for everything. And I really like the idea of having your solution as a self-hosted option so that I could play around with it, you know, see how it works. And then, you know, that's why I was asking about Docker image, because Docker image is so much easier to run on. Synology Yeah, you just point it to an image, click go and you're up and running.

Carlos A. Virreira
Now for sure. It's an area we have to work. And indeed, as you said, it is like the balance between giving something, but also making sure that there's enough runway or or funding to keep fueling this. So for now, as you said, it's a no brainer.

Carlos A. Virreira
We have many. Many migrants from other systems that are helping into ours. They're taking the compromise that mean the other tools had, what, ten years to to to to get to the point where they are. And we are like less than a year. But we're trying to take the best, smartest moves and they're appreciating some of the features. But we have a backlog. We have a lot of stuff to do. I can tell you actually one of the stuff that we're going to be working on, it's called Bookings and Reservations. So for instance, let's say that you have a you have fixed assets, you have fixed assets, but you might have a gear room full of expensive camera gear that you would want people to see. Reserve and book ahead of time and maybe even sign off so that area. We have to work on and has to do a lot with like time zones and like availability of assets and stuff like this. But I think that it will be the next step in order for me to be able to localize this in Spanish and go to some universities in South America, say, use this thing because let's say you have an audio visual department where you have a lot of camera gear, recording gear.

Carlos A. Virreira
You have students that need to get access to this, just use it, just run this and you have an infra that is way better than managing this with pieces of paper or excel sheets. So that's, that's an area I'm very interested in in building. But yeah, there are every day defining and scoping out new stuff. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
One thing that again made me interesting, I actually ran into a founder of pickup pods pick a pods. So pickup pods and really, really interesting guy. And he basically offers a very intuitive and easy to use and most importantly, like dirt cheap hosting for open source software. So you just log in, choose the software you want from the list, click go. And he does everything like spins up the instance, sets up, you know, SSL certificates, all of that good stuff, very good. And it's about like I pay about $1 per instance a month or so. Of course, it depends. It depends very much on the requirements of the software. Some software requires more memory and so forth.

Artem Daniliants
But I definitely think that you should once there is like a clear, like a Docker version of the software or something, you should reach out to people like to companies like Pickup Pod so that they can support your system so that you can go to that Spanish university or whatever. You can say like, Hey, you can host it yourself or you can use our partner and just host it like for two bucks or like three bucks or whatever that is Exactly.

Carlos A. Virreira
Uh, my dream would be that there's small firms that that do implementation services of shelf and they actually maybe skim them and create their own like very industry specific versions of shelf. It's like we've, we've, we've, we've used this and we've spun it up for like the cleaning industry. And actually we have all these modules that are for this in the end of the day that that's what would make me the happiest but also try to give like a great experience to all our cloud customers. Of course that would be also very nice.

Artem Daniliants
So maybe just a little bit about the business.

Artem Daniliants
You mentioned that you had a co-founder at the beginning and you started like a coding shop, like a software development shop with your with your roommate, if I remember correctly. Exactly.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Artem Daniliants
And so where is that agency at this moment? Like where it's at?

Carlos A. Virreira
So that agency is still alive, but let's say it's the shelf. Is more default alive at the moment because like both me and him are putting a lot of effort into shelf. So the agency is still running. We have like a lot of legacy clients that we build software for them and we're just like maintaining it and we're, we're, we're doing the transition, you know, like we still are trying to maintain a lot of ownership of shelf. So we don't want to sell too much equity to investors or anything like that to have runway. So. We're basically also doing consultancy work and still maintaining stuff for people so that we pay our salaries and we continue working here until we really cannot manage it anymore. And then we might be looking into Stripe Atlas.

Carlos A. Virreira
It's like setting up a company or something like that, and you have the good infrastructure for selling shares. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
So basically what would be really interesting is how many people did you have creating Shell? Like, is it just you and your co-founder?

Carlos A. Virreira
Just just me and my co-founder and one of the guys that works with us in our agency that does like UX, UI design. Basically, I was scoping out features and giving him requirements and he was translating them into like desktop, mobile device device designs. And then we were coding this like just in-house my with my, my co-founder Nikolai. So he has like 90% of the code submissions on the repository, the whole brand, the whole marketing pages, comparisons, blogs, everything. We just, we just produce them ourselves. A bit of trial and error there. But yeah, so I would say two and a half people were building a shelf.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, just like the TV show Two and a Half Men.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah.

Carlos A. Virreira
Well, because this guy works half time for us, so. Two and a half. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
And how. Well, sorry, Michael, please, go on. Yeah.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. So what am I. You know, I noticed you have a bit over 2000 backlinks right now. So what are your methods on how you being generating those? Only like 98 of them are nofollow. So basically they are pretty good ones.

Carlos A. Virreira
I would be lying if I if I would know exactly where I got those. Let's say that I've been like ten years building websites and building a network on this. So I've, I've asked some favors. I asked some some people like, hey, send me like, help me like increase the for for this property. I dabble a little bit around SEO but. I think that things like X now or Twitter, it's a great place to connect with other founders. And I started from the beginning this like found the hashtag build in public. And I was like, okay, let's go all in on this.

Carlos A. Virreira
I'm going to tweet how we're building this thing and. Basically building the least sexy startup in the whole building public community because everybody was, as you said, building like really cool AI, GPT rappers like or image profile spinners or like all this very cutting edge stuff. And I was trying to solve a very boring problem. But it doesn't matter. I'm just going to continue talking about this. And over time it managed to pick up some steam. I connected with some people and then you notice that. Either they mention you on their blog or or once you launch on product hunt, you get some backlinks. You talk with some people that want to contribute to the code base. They put you on their profiles, or maybe they have their own little dev sites where they show their portfolio and they're also linking to you there. Uh, but I have not reached like a really good PR 90 link, let's say, or like a really good one.

Mikael Hugg
By, by a bunch.

Carlos A. Virreira
Or by a bunch or pay to win.

Carlos A. Virreira
I must admit I do get regularly, uh, emails in which they're like, Hey, you can buy Forbes Africa link insert for $2,000 and I'll be like.

Artem Daniliants
Wow. Yes.

Carlos A. Virreira
I wouldn't know what to do. You know, like what? What should I do now? So. But either know.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. Think. Think. Your approach and building your startup in public is is very good. Creating blog content talking on Twitter, you know, and maybe just doing content marketing makes a lot of sense. And you did mention a couple of times that you are solving a boring problem. It's a boring startup and in my opinion. Most successful startups or companies in general are solving real but boring problems. So the sexy startups, you know, the AI, you know, like Whisper API, OpenAI and all the good stuff that they do and all those, you know, cool mobile applications. I think it's like maybe the 1,015% of the market and everything else. Once you go to the enterprise mode, it gets very boring, very mundane, but it solves real problems.

Artem Daniliants
So ERP systems, PLM systems, we worked with one client who provided a PLM system for fashion industry. It wasn't really a sexy solution. It was very much just, you know, making sure that the product lifecycle is all mapped out and planned and so forth. But they signed some of the biggest companies I know. Like.

Carlos A. Virreira
Yeah, I don't know if you know this guy, Ravi Kant. Yeah, He's like, Yeah, he's like one of my heroes and he's one of these fantastic. Yeah. He's like, such a he. I really look up to him. I should have his picture hanging on my wall. But he said something. That you got stuck in my head. And he says. Play long term games with long term people. And when I was thinking about shelf, I was like, Hey. In software. If you're really gonna go for asset management, if you're really going to register everything, if you're going to go through the trouble of producing like hundreds of these labels all for each of your assets, honestly, that's a long term game and that's the people I want to play with.

Carlos A. Virreira
I want to play the entrepreneurship game with long term people. So it's really made me think like, I'll work on shelf, work on shelf. I had these guys voice in behind my head saying like, Hey, work on this problem. So indeed, I don't know if we're going to build like a very remarkable company, but I do think that if we build a company where other teams deeply rely on it and they care about uptime, they care about like the availability of the tool, I'll be very happy. And I think that I've been running my agency for ten years with the most ugly, antiquated bookkeeping software ever. And I think that there's certain tools there, certain software categories where the churn is low because the switchover cost is just so painful. I'm not trying to create a switch over vendor lock situation here. You can export everything, but I do believe that. I will have a longer engagement with my accounts than if I was doing. Let's see how our baby looks like a generator. You know where you put, like, pictures of a couple and it's like, oh, this is how your baby's gonna look like.

Carlos A. Virreira
Think those ones you get. You get a hockey stick, but then it goes down to zero real fast. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. There are trends, you know, like 3 to 6 months trends, right? Something blows up on TikTok and everybody is doing it. And then in like six months, you don't even remember it. And there are mega trends. So like sustainability, conscious consumerism, you know, that kind of stuff that is going to be here in like five, ten years. And I think, you know, making bets on long term stuff just makes a lot more sense. And I have a really funny story regarding the UI. Um, I invest in a small well, in the grand scheme of things, a small investment companies fund here in Finland and I'm a big fan. It's like an index fund and like very low cost and stuff like that. So and I'm very like, I'm very busy with my work already. I don't want to invest into something that requires me to constantly keep track of how things are going.

Artem Daniliants
I just want to invest in something boring and forget about it. So but I really like their company and they have like the most boring website, like the most horrible interface. And I was like, I reached out to them and I said like, Hey, you know, let's talk about, you know, UX, let's talk about making your website better. And then I met with I think it was like managing director or somebody like that or business developer, like in charge of a person in charge of business development. And I said like, Hey, I'm ready to do this. Maybe even for like no money for free because I want to build my portfolio. I was just starting out and so forth. And they said, No, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. And I'm like, Could you explain? Could you elaborate? And he said, This is all done by purpose. So we don't upgrade and our website looks like it came out of like 90 on purpose because it creates an image that we are not wasting money.

Artem Daniliants
And we are very, very lean. We just want to get things done. And we pass on the savings to you. If we had a beautiful website animation everywhere, it would feel like we are not the cost efficient solution that we are. So I thought about it for a while and I was like, Wow, that's that's pretty cool. So maybe, yeah, this software that you mentioned that has very, you know, minimalistic and maybe ugly interface, maybe that's on purpose as well.

Carlos A. Virreira
It concurs very well with their with with with their price let's say like it reflects the price but I can understand that you know like the whole notion of like keep the main thing the main thing. So the main thing is like low cost, like we're not going to I think there were brands that were built on this stuff, like the Dollar Shave Club that was like, are razor blades are cheap because we're not paying this guy. Federer like a couple hundred million. So there you go. That's why it's cheap.

Carlos A. Virreira
But yeah, I can, I can I can understand that. But for me it's more like the, the, the like a category in which you might have a more long term vision. Moreover, I do agree with you about the the trends and trend I see. So I live in the Netherlands and a year ago I could just buy a can of Coca Cola for the price that I would see. Now I have to buy the can of Coca Cola, but when I check out I have to pay $0.25 on top of it because actually they want me to recycle it. So if I look at this. Companies are not being asked to be mindful and resourceful with their assets. Honestly. Companies are buying stuff left and right and they're just leftover anywhere in a storage. There is not a focus of let's increase the visibility of your assets. Let's extend the lifetime of your assets because it's literally not a great practice to be producing so much e-waste or to have so much waste wastage. So if my tool can help companies at least see and visualize what they own.

Carlos A. Virreira
Without the accounting side of things, but just pure asset visibility. I think I'm contributing to this trend which I see is going to happen. I think that companies will start being asked to be more responsible with their purchases in the stuff that they acquire.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. One thing that came to mind just like a second ago, imagine, and this is just me dreaming a little bit, but imagine if you like added, I don't know, like an old, you know, MacBook to your system, right? Like an old one that is maybe from like year 2018 or something. Imagine if you crowdsource what all the cool stuff you can do with this MacBook, right? Like you could, for example, donate it to developing country. You could format it. Absolutely. And turn it into maybe like a home automation device. So I think in many cases there are many uses for specifically like devices that are old school, like maybe old tablet. Many people don't even know what you can do with an old tablet.

Artem Daniliants
Like if you don't want to sell it because it's too, you know, too cheap, you don't want to bother with it. What can you do? Like, how can you make use of the asset that you don't no longer need?

Carlos A. Virreira
Man. I see so many opportunities in. I think that the the database like, you know, it's kind of part of the life cycle of a of an assets like the disposal is also an important part and I think that what if but then again like this is also me thinking way ahead of time. Like what if there was an actual fiscal incentive for your company to recycle or dispose your your assets responsibly, that that could actually offset some some tax costs or that can be an incentive for that. A lot of companies will start registering everything, of course, right? Like, it's like if you want somebody to do something, you just text them and they'll they will start moving in that direction. But it's not the primary reason why we build. It's just that, as you said, like, I just really like talking with people that have to deal with this with these issues.

Carlos A. Virreira
And it's it's just nice to try to give somebody a you know, like you guys do like marketing content growth. And we're being offered the most shiny, coolest tools every single minute because we're just like a very interesting target market to, to, to create beautiful products for. But if you're an asset manager, you're a facility manager, your office person, like it's not like you're getting approach with like beautiful, cool stuff to work on on a regular basis. So it's also nice to be able to. To. To reach out to those people. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. One thing that also comes to mind when it comes to running a successful business. I was really impressed. I signed up for Checkley HQ. It's basically like a smart service monitoring tool where you can define your own scripts. You can write the playwright scripts, for example, that test your software. They run it every single minute from different location data centers, all that good stuff. But what really surprised me is it's a substantially large company, in my opinion, already.

Artem Daniliants
Maybe they have 100 employees already and they have like serious backing and stuff like that. But once I signed up for their premium plan, so I switched from free to paid customer, I received an email from their CEO saying like, I want to have a short interview with you if possible, and then, you know, a link to his calendar. And the CEO actually met with me for half hour, asked me what problems I'm trying to solve, where are my pain points? Very good. You know how I'm using the software now, why I'm not making use of that vast features. And then he was like, Good, thank you. I really appreciate and have a great day. So I think this is the right approach long term, talking to your customers and solving real problems because it feels like every time there is a new framework coming out, there is something really cool in the Python world. ChatGPT is killing and we kind of lose track that we are solving problems for real people. And unless we solve it well and in the way that actually allows them to do what they want to do, it will not be a very good solution long term.

Artem Daniliants
So no.

Mikael Hugg
And you know, yeah, well, right now everybody's caring about getting new clients and nobody cares about the old ones. So this also, you know, when they're just trying to attract new ones, you know, they try to be nice for a second. But yeah, they don't ever ask any of the of the current clients like what's up and how it's doing. Every time when they contact, they always contact, you know, because they try to sell you something more.

Carlos A. Virreira
And I think people people notice this stuff. You you you kind of expect that and notice it and it's just like. I think that there. There are options and there are ways to to be a bit more kind or more human or more like solution driven when it comes to your to your product offering, Show your intention as well. Of course, like we need to keep the lights on, but I think you can pick your pick your flavor, pick your style. And I think like item, like that endorsement you just gave to the CEO and this company is fantastic.

Carlos A. Virreira
That is the right leadership that I expect from a company that is trying to to provide a solution. We're not selling papers. It's not a commodity yet. So we're selling Post-its. And yet you don't need to contact the person that much. You just buy in bulk. But it's like very specialized solutions. Very important to talk. Yeah.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah. So how do you talk to your clients?

Carlos A. Virreira
I literally do like a very similar thing that you say I started recently, so I think we have like 800 user accounts, so it's hard to, you know, like I'm in the, in a different time zone that most of our users, most of our users actually are in two are in two places. So I would say that 20% of our users are from Japan.

Artem Daniliants
Wow.

Carlos A. Virreira
And we got featured in some kind of like PC mag stuff and. Apparently in. In Japan now, like if you live in us in a home association, like in in a complex, in a building complex, you must do maintenance of it.

Carlos A. Virreira
And they're looking for solutions. So they found yourself as being a very easy way to generate the codes and to track maintenance because we have this notepad. So. I'm not managed to talk with many of these Japanese users, maybe two. But what I do is that I send a mail, introduce myself. I ask. I'm very curious about what sort of problem you're trying to solve with our solution. And I send them a cal link instead of Calendly, which is like the open source version of Cal Calendly, and I try to just talk to them for like 15 minutes to half an hour.

Carlos A. Virreira
To understand. What what problems do they have? I've talked to people that are building contractors, like they are responsible for buildings and they're like, not we're going to put codes on all the fire extinguishers and so that we can like get a notification if we need to do something. Or I've talked with production companies, they're like, Guys, we're broadcasting live TV shows. We need to make sure that we have a full overview of how much equipment we have and who has access to it to like some universities that are like, Hey, we want to like work with you on making this whole like, reservation.

Carlos A. Virreira
So mostly digital, mostly via calls and try to do us stuff asynchronous as possible. So a very similar play as you did at Send a Lone video once. There's an interesting signups and a lone video and introduction in a Cal link and try to take it from there. And sometimes take some late night calls, let's say here from my garage where I'm currently at.

Artem Daniliants
Awesome. By the way, a really good background, like Christmas lights and whatnot, right? Yes.

Carlos A. Virreira
Exactly.

Artem Daniliants
Looking very good. So maybe before we wrap up, maybe you would like to demo the product. I think it's always beautiful just to see the product and especially getting a walkthrough from the founder is always, always awesome. So if you could do like a short demo, the most important features of your product, I think our viewers would love to see that.

Mikael Hugg
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Carlos A. Virreira
No, absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. So let me see. I'm going to share my screen. This is like the asset inventory view from shelf where you basically see the count of your total assets just to run you through it.

Carlos A. Virreira
We have a couple of features as like you have a workspace where you can add team members, team members. We use them to give custody of of an asset. So for instance, let's say that you have a laptop, you want to check it out to one of your employees. You can use this tool. Say that this person has access to this object. Moreover, we just are releasing a couple of custom fields so you can add new custom fields to your objects. Right now we have text, but on our test environment we have like date pickers, long text, booleans, multi-select and stuff like this. Moreover, we have a couple of concepts like you can create locations. Locations are places where you can, let's say group assets, for instance. In this environment that have opened. We were talking with a construction company that has a couple of job sites and. This is a good way for the asset manager to be able to see all the assets that are supposed to be in one location.

Carlos A. Virreira
They can manage them. So move the assets from location to location around. For instance, this wallpaper steamer, in this case, it's in the location pro shop and you can click it and it will just swap the locations. So. You can also manage your assets like this. Additionally, we have like a couple of features like tags. Tags are things that you can add to to your asset, unlimited tags and actually with taxes that I want to start creating. Like different tag workflows. Like, for instance, if you add the tag retired that something happens or pre-owned, you can create them yourself. Uh, additionally, we have categories. Categories like just like any other CMS is like a singular, uh, grouping of your assets. And all of that results in, in having like an asset inventory page. One of the things that we've done to help our customers, let's say, locate their assets faster is that, um, sometimes the inventories are pretty large actually. This is small environment, but we have users that have like let's say a thousand assets.

Carlos A. Virreira
So sometimes two. Find information is a bit tricky. So what we're working on is to create a very good like let's call like a central search bar where you can ideally find everything. So for instance, in this case, I can look for a team member like owner his name, and I can run it and see all the assets that he has access to. I can also use a tag pre owned. It should load two assets. I can also do a combined search here so I can do crane category. Well, it's only one, but let me see. Let me put something like hand tools. I think hand tools, we have a few so I can type hand tools. It should pull something. And then I can also add space and add a name of a person like Igor. You should locate that one asset. Moreover, I think that we have released that you can also search inside the asset field. So let's say that you added a serial number. Um. Like a, b, c.

Carlos A. Virreira
One, two, three. If you hit enter, it should find the asset that has. Uh, serial number inside the descriptions. But when it comes to the search part. Then when you open the asset page itself. You were working on this layout a little bit. But some of the stuff that you can see here I'm going to zoom in is that each asset has an availability status. This asset is available. Why is it available is because nobody is currently. Possessing it. You can at any point give custody of an asset to a team member and then it becomes. Unavailable or in custody. It also shows you in which job site it is, and then you can leave notes like on GitHub, you can write markdown and you can write any sort of. Information that you might want to have. Moreover. Each asset in your database will create its own QR code label. This QR code label. You can download it and print it, but you can also in a future update, just use a thermal label printer and just click P and it just prints you a tag that you cannot touch on the object.

Carlos A. Virreira
This tag is what allows you to interact with your database from like the physical world. Um, additionally, you can see here that you have like the information of the assets that you defined, like the category location, the tags, the owner and the last scan location data. Like unfortunately I'm using my phone also camera, so I cannot demo this, but this is a. A scan that I did on my office. So you can see a little town called Arnhem. Um, and I scanned it on a safari browser running iOS from this coordinates. So this helps you determine whether the location where the object should be matches the location where it was last scanned. So this, in essence, is what our tool does. And of course, there's a lot of other stuff like you can you can change everything about the about the asset and operate all of this from your mobile phone. But this is what we have also we have like exports and imports of the whole database, which unfortunately these are part of like one of our paid plans.

Carlos A. Virreira
So yeah, this is the tool that we have for now. And as I said, like we are trying to work out a lot of the behaviors of what happens once you scan these codes. There we have a whole pack of files that should be available for you. But. Yeah, this is. This is what we have for now and, and in the features and functionality we have like I'm just super excited for the what you call the, the bookings and reservation module of the, of the application.

Mikael Hugg
Yeah. To me, you know, your dashboard actually looks really nice. So you've been doing a good work. It really looks very professional, very clean.

Artem Daniliants
It's very clean with a dash of color. I really like it. It's. I think it works well. Well, on mobile devices because it's very. Yes, very simple in a sense. So it works well when you are in responsive view. Awesome. So I think this is pretty much it. There's been a pleasure and I am already, since I'm moving now from one apartment to another, I am going to document everything.

Artem Daniliants
I could use it for that as well, right? I could document all my stuff when I'm moving.

Carlos A. Virreira
I actually think you can you can do like actually this is a use case that I really like and maybe something that I can announce here we're going to in order to monetize self into not ask people to pay us for subscriptions, we're going to create the concept of. Orphaned and linked codes that you can buy on Amazon, for instance. So you can buy 200 asset tags that you can put them on a box. Let's say you put a box, boom, you stick it on a box, you put all this stuff there, you scan it and you add it to your database and you say, Oh, this is full of shoes, a red hat, this and that. And with this search that we have, you could be able to say like, Where's my red hat? Oh, it should be on box three because. You registered it there. So, yes, you could use it for for moving and for inventory of of your boxes.

Carlos A. Virreira
Of course, it's not the intended use case. What I also see it as a. As a as a powerful way to use a technology.

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, before we wrap up, what is your goal for the next couple of months? What are you working on in terms of your business? You mentioned a few features that are coming coming out soon, but like for you personally, like what milestone are you trying to get at?

Carlos A. Virreira
That's a very, very good question, a very confronting question. I would say that for us now we are trying to incorporate self properly as a company. So it's a milestone to reach that to become to to continue some of the conversations we've been having with investors. And for me, I would say that at the moment we have like, let's say 750 accounts. If by the end of the year we can like get 1500, like I'll be very happy. So a doubling on the user base I think we can manage, I think will have to do a lot of clever content, a lot of clever appearances like this.

Carlos A. Virreira
And just to create some smartphones and try to do that. But on the other side, these like many of the demos I take, I know that we're missing that last 20% of features. So I really need to push to to get those going. And then I think we're going to reach our targets a little bit better.

Artem Daniliants
That sounds like a plan. Carlos, it's been a pleasure to have you on our podcast. It's been really, really insightful. I made a lot of notes in my notebook, so I have some stuff to think about later on.

Carlos A. Virreira
Where where are you guys most active at? Are you most active on Twitter, on LinkedIn or YouTube or like, where do you want to be most?

Artem Daniliants
Yeah, LinkedIn for me as well probably. Yeah, yeah. Also LinkedIn. LinkedIn probably. So let's connect on LinkedIn, make sure we stay in touch. But Carlos, thank you so much and good luck with your project. It looks awesome and I think you will have one more paid user very soon.

Carlos A. Virreira
Nice. Thank you guys. And well, you have one more subscriber and I'll happily hype you up and I will send you an intro to to to Sandra, which I think it would be really nice for you to.

Mikael Hugg
Oh, absolutely. Thank you very.

Artem Daniliants
Much. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much. No problem. All right. Have a good one. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.

Carlos A. Virreira
Joe.