How to build SaaS software Gavin and Dennis here! And today, we’re gonna cover building dashboards and building software in general. And if you’ve never built software before, this is a great opportunity to learn from a lot of people. Waste a lot of money trying to build software as entrepreneurs, but they don’t understand things like this three-tier architecture I’m gonna show you. And I’m gonna show through examples of stuff that we have built for huge companies like Nike and Billy Jean. And Gavin will ask questions along the way. Yeah, Dennis is the expert here. I’m the student. So I’m excited to, learn and. So I’ve built some software for these huge companies and starting from Yahoo 20 some years ago. And you’re gonna see there’s the same framework. Now, this is independent of whether you’re using Pearl or PHP, Python, angular, JS, go, or whatever your favorite flavor is. This is about building things that actually collect data and actually do things. So Billy Jean came too. A few years ago. And he said, Billy chain, he’s huge on video. He’s got billions of views. And he said, I’m making all these fun videos and all this. And I’m spending a few hundred thousand dollars a month on ads, but I don’t really know what’s profitable. I know in general I’m profitable, but one day I could be down a couple hundred thousand dollars, or maybe my turn rates are higher, or this new campaign I launch is working or not working. I need a dashboard that can look at everything. So in the morning, I get a text message and it’s okay, this is how much revenue you have. This is what the lifetime value is. This is what your profitability is. This is how many refunds you have. This is your top campaign, just a few simple things. And he thought that this was a matter of just what most people think. Let’s just pull all this data from Stripe and Kajabi and click funnels and Google ads and Facebook ads. And just put it into a dashboard, should be easy. Something might just take a day or two. Actually, that’s not the case because. For some reason, I think if I open this up, you actually see that these are all animated. I wonder how I do that? Go to slideshow mode, maybe that’ll work. They’re all like gifts. Yeah. These are all animated. If I can get ’em to work. Whatever. So like anyone else that’s an info product seller or an agency or yeah, selling stuff. You’ve got lots of systems. So it’s systems for communicating, for buying ads, for CRM stuff, for processing payments. There’s also organic and paid social. So he’s across all these channels. And you guys remember he did a Facebook ads course, a YouTube program start your agency program. But regardless we wanna put it into three layers and this kind of wedding cake 3 0 2 architecture is something that you’re gonna see often. So this first layer is this data. So let’s get all the data he has in one place. All these different systems, a lot of ’em have APIs. For some of them, you can use API. Some of ’em, you can scrape some of them. You have to build your own integrations to get that data all in one place. And then that middle logic layer is where you’re doing calculations. So this is metadata formulas, calculating profit calculate, just business, logic, and rules. That is from the raw data all the way up. And then the UI layer is where you’re displaying it. That’s the application where people are clicking on things. Maybe they’re buying things. We have internal people, they’re doing reporting. We’re refunding people and customer service. People are using the application to integrate with the logic layer, which actually does stuff. The application layer all the way down to the data layer. So anything that goes in and out where a human. talk to the underlying database, and goes through the UI cuz people don’t want to program. They want to click on a button inside an app on a webpage, that kind of thing. So you have these three different layers and they’re separated. So let’s say we wanted to build a new UI, but we don’t have to rebuild the actual application itself. This is where all the processing occurs and we don’t have to rebuild the underlying databases and all the sources. Likewise, if we have this three-tier architecture, if we wanted to integrate TikTok ads, we could, that would just be another data source that plugs in and it fits in the overall model. We’d have to adjust our formulas, let’s say, calculating total spending it’d be Facebook plus Google plus email plus whatever, plus TikTok. So we’d have to have that other source. So other formulas and whatnot can adjust in this logic. independent of how it looks in the UI, like where all the buttons are and the landing page is independent of what happens on the bottom so this is an extensible three-tier architecture, pretty standard, right? Yeah. Okay. So we put all this data in here that Billy Jean had, and whenever you start building things if you ever built something like this, you’re going to always come into a situation where they say, oh yeah, it’s really easy. I have all the access everything’s already working. It never. It’s always a disaster. There’s always stuff that’s wrong. The logins are wrong. They keep changing, which breaks our systems. Cause then we’re using a certain login and then the password isn’t working. So it doesn’t bring in the data. So then we’re miscounting because the data are not coming through or there are other systems they didn’t realize they needed to use. So this whole thing about getting the data in, into one place and the data layer