Software Social - SoundSage

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The R&D Tax Credit still exists, and it might be able to help you offset the Section 174 changes. Michele talks to R&D Tax Credit expert Jonathan Cardella of Strike Tax Advisory to learn more.

Learn more:

What is the R&D Tax Credit?
IRS R&D Tax Credit rules

Please note: This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not tax advice. Talk to your tax preparer for advice about your specific situation.

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Colleen is ready to go all-in on Refine... and that means moving on from Simple File Upload.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

New supporters!

Lynn Romich from Konbini
Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - a community for Laravel developers under-represented due to their gender
Brendon from Feederloop
Pascal from sharpen.page
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Colleen and her business partner Aaron give an update on Hammerstone (Refine) in this crossover episode.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Lynn Romich from Konbini
Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - a community for Laravel developers under-represented due to their gender
Brendon from Feederloop
Pascal from sharpen.page
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Talking to other entrepreneurs made Michele realize that she hasn't talked about interplay of qualitative and qualitative data enough. Michele and Colleen talk about what that means in the context of feature requests and high-touch sales.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

New supporters!

Brendon from Feederloop
Pascal from sharpen.page
Lynn Romich from Konbini
Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Colleen's company was accepted to TinySeed, which means she now gets to work on Refine full time. That means she can finally make some hard decisions and push. (Note: Colleen and Michele were actually in the same place last week, so that's why the audio quality is different than normal!)

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Special thanks to our new supporters!

Brendon from Feederloop
Pascal from sharpen.page
Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Michele chats with indie developer Benedicte Raae about getting into public speaking through streaming.

Follow Benedicte on Twitter! https://twitter.com/raae

Benedicte's website: https://queen.raae.codes/

StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/

A couple friends of this pod have launched their own shows for entrepreneurs lately! Check them out:
Ship SaaS Faster (Simon Bennett + Volkan Kaya): https://shipsaasfaster.com/
Marketing Retro (Adrienne Barnes + Josh Ho): https://marketingretro.substack.com/
The Weekly Build (Marie Ng + Jesse Anderson): https://www.theweeklybuild.com/
This Indie Life (James McKinven + Dagobert Renouf): https://indielife.fm/
The Non-Tech Founders Podcast (Laura Elizabeth and Nathan Powell): https://nontechfounders.transistor.fm/

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Should indie founders take sick leave? Michele and Colleen discuss.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Michele continues her chat with Summit founder Matt Wensing about ways indie SaaS founders can think about moats and competitive advantages. This episode: cost advantages, size advantages (big and small), and false moats.

Recommended reading on competitive advantages: The Little Book That Builds Wealth

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments (Little Books. Big Profits 12)

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Michele chats with Summit founder Matt Wensing about intangible assets, switching costs, and network effects, and how they apply to indie software companies.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy fromHovercode and Rocket Gems
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Aaron Francis, Colleen's co-founder, swings by to chat about Refine.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Larabelles - the community for women, non-binary and trans Laravel developers
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Four things Colleen is super pumped about... and one thing she's not.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Chris of Jetboost.io
Daryl Shannon of Docamatic
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Colleen and Michele both have a lot going on.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Michele's trying to figure out how to approach charging sales taxes, and Colleen finally pushes to prod.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Jesper Christiansen of FormBackend
Matthew Wojtowicz of WorkCited
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Colleen's in go mode for Refine.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Colleen shares the secret to her recent productivity.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Should indie entrepreneurs take advice from VC-track folks?

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Learning new things, feeling like you're a bit out of your depth, pushing to the next level: that's the job of being an entrepreneur, and Colleen and Michele are both experiencing that in different ways.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Michele and Colleen catch up on Michele's conference talks... and try to figure out how to make her life work.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Folks seem to love our casual banter, so here's what Zoom captured on our backup recording before we started the actual recording for next Tuesday's episode.

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Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Follow Lucie! https://twitter.com/LucieBaratte

Check out Logology: https://www.logology.co/

See her husband Dagobert's memes: https://twitter.com/dagorenouf

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Josh Smith of Keyhero.io
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Follow Lucie! https://twitter.com/LucieBaratte

Check out Logology: https://www.logology.co/

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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Check out Hammerstone here!

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

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This episode was sponsored by Calm Fund, an ecosystem of founders and funders of profitable, sustainable, calm businesses. Calm Fund invests early in profitable businesses that want to maximize their chances of success and build for the long-term. Calm Fund was founded by an exited indie SaaS founder, Tyler Tringas. Michele Hansen is one of the many indie SaaS founders who are investors/mentors in Calm Fund.

You can learn more about Calm Fund at https://calmfund.com/ and apply for funding at https://apply.calmfund.com/, no warm intro needed.

Follow Damon: https://twitter.com/damengchen

Follow Michael: https://twitter.com/MichaelRouveure

Follow Calm Fund: https://twitter.com/calmfund

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Follow Vic! https://twitter.com/VicVijayakumar

EveryOak, Vic's preschool communications SaaS: https://www.everyoak.com/

Try out HeyTexting: https://www.heytexting.com/

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Team Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Simon Bennett of SnapShooter Backups
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Check out The Art of Product Podcast and Default Alive.

And of course, Colleen's favorite twitter thread by Nathan Barry. Also mentioned, Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on what makes the top 10% of founders different.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
And Mike from Gently Used Domains, who has a nice personality
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Moncef from Ruby on Mac
Steve of Be Inclusive
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
Mike from Gently Used Domains
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Proud MaMa from Oplnet, LLC
Anna from Kradl
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios
Mitchell Davis from RecruitKit

View Details

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
Mike from Gently Used Domains
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Lana and Alex from Recapsy
Joe Masilotti of railsdevs.com
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios

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Follow Dan! https://twitter.com/dr

See all of Dan's businesses: https://danrowden.com/

Follow James! https://twitter.com/jmckinven

See all of James' businesses: https://jamesmckinven.com/

Listen to No More Mondays: https://nomoremondays.fm/

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
Mike from Gently Used Domains
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Adam from Rails Autoscale
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik
Damian Moore of Audio Audit Podcast Checker
Eldon from NodleStudios

View Details

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
Mike from Gently Used Domains
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Chris from Urlbox
Caeli of Tosslet
Greg Park from TraitLab
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik

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Follow Zuzana on Twitter. Zuzana's website.
Check out Larabelles.

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
Mike from Gently Used Domains
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Cam Sloan
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik

View Details

Check out Colleen's new product, Refine: https://hammerstone.dev

Huge thanks to all of our listeners who’ve become Software Socialites and support our show! You can become a supporter for $10 a month or $100 a year at softwaresocial.dev/supporters.

Chris from Chipper CI
The Daringly Handsome Kevin Griffin
Mike from Gently Used Domains
Dave from Recut
Max of OnlineOrNot
Stefan from Talk to Stefan
Brendan Andrade of Bright Bits
Aaron from Tuple
Alex Hillman from The Tiny MBA
Ramy from Memo.fm
Jane and Benedikt from Userlist
Kendall Morgan
Ruben Gamez of SignWell
Corey Haines of SwipeWell
Mike Wade of Crowd Sentry
Nate Ritter of Room Steals
Anna Maste of Subscribe Sense
Geoff Roberts from Outseta
Justin Jackson, MegaMaker
Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis from Fathom Analytics
Matthew from Appointment Reminder
Andrew Culver at Bullet Train
John Kostor
Alex of Corso Systems
Richard from Stunning
Josh,the annoyingly pragmatic founder
Ben from Consent Kit
John from Credo and EditorNinja
Michael Koper of Nusii Proposals
Arvid Kahl
James Sowers from Castaway.fm
Nathan of Develop Your UX
Jessica Malnik

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Check out Zach's website: https://www.zachgoldie.com

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Follow Adam: https://twitter.com/adampallozzi
Check out Adam's new business, SleepHQ: https://sleephq.com

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This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Bento. Bento is an email marketing and automation company for more technical-minded marketers. If you're using drip MailChimp or Active Campaign, but wish it was a bit more developer-friendly, Bento's the email product for you. With libraries for Ruby, Laravel, Node, and JavaScript, Bento can help you create your dream customer journey.

Plus, you get access to an amazing community on Discord where you'll get direct access to Jesse and his team. You might say it's friendly developer-friendly email marketing, and Jesse's happy to help anyone tighten up their marketing in a free session. Just go to bentonow.com, hit book a demo, and mention Software Social.

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Follow Ben: https://twitter.com/r00k
Check out Tuple: https://tuple.app

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Follow Marie: https://twitter.com/threehourcoffee
Check out Llama Life: https://twitter.com/llamalifeco

Check out Marie's learn to code YouTube recommendations:
JavaScript 30 by Wes Bos
Dev Ed
Traversy Media

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Follow Anna: https://twitter.com/skulegirl

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Nate's website: speedshop.co

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List of Ukrainian indie businesses/OSS contributors/creators to support: https://ukrainianweb.biz/

Donate to World Central Kitchen: https://donate.wck.org/ and let Michele know your donation is part of her matching campaign (michele@deployempathy.com)

This is intended as additional help in addition to the many other places to donate to help Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, rather than instead of those efforts.

Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, everyone, it's Michele here with a, yeah, I guess a special message on the Ukraine situation. So, like everyone around the world, we have been horrified by what is going on there, and trying to do whatever we can to help.

And so I just wanted to update you on two really quick things that that are ways that you can help as well.

So the first one is, is pulling together a list of Ukrainian indie businesses. As we know, there's a lot of developers and designers and people in our community, not not not just in our sort of global human community, but really in our world and our community in Ukraine, and want to want to support them as much as we can. And so pulling together a list on Twitter, but also my friend, Matt Nunogawa, he turned this into a website now. So you can go to Ukrainian web dot biz, and you can see a list of all of these businesses created and run by Ukrainians. Everything from a, you know, open source contributors to figma icons to morning pages app, coming soon pages, builder, databases, test management systems, Mac utilities, like clean my Mac, data for SEO purposes. There's also a personal finance money tracker app called Five Cents, which the story of that one just really hit me particularly hard, because the the developer just launched it a month ago. And he posted an update on the other day that saying that, you know, his his his feed for the last month is all sort of our normal, you know, building public kind of updates when we've just launched something. And then he said that he had to stop working on it and spend his time trying to keep his family safe from the attacks. So, um, lots of good businesses here. I hope we can all help support them. And so that's Ukrainian web dot biz, but also if you if you have friends in Ukraine, I mean, so many of us have staff and contractors and everything else. And friends in Ukraine. So if you know if people who are creators are running a SAS are infoproducts, open source, you know what, whatever, right? Like, you know, definitely just reply to the tweet, and let's build that list.

The other thing is that so we on on behalf of Geocodio, we are are trying to raise $20,000 for World Central Kitchen. And so we will donate $10,000, we'll match $10,000. We've already donated $1,000. So this is on top of that, we're going to donate that $10,000 no matter what, but we would really love to make it more. And I'd love for you to help with that. Even if it's like five or $10 that that helps. Right World Central Kitchen is an amazing, nonprofit run by Chef Jose Andres who is a proud son of Washington, DC where I used to live, who goes around the world whenever there is a crisis to feed people. And his organization is truly wonderful. I volunteered with it myself during the US federal government shutdown couple of years ago when government employees you know, weren't getting paychecks and we're feeding them and so I've seen from my own eyes how wonderful giving of an organization it is, but also how well run it is. And Jose Andres himself is on the Polish border feeding people who are coming across.

Of course, there's many other ways to help as well. So I say this not as you should only help these efforts, but these are in addition to whatever else you might be doing. And yeah, so I hope you can help whether that's UkrainianWeb.biz or donating the World Central Kitchen and sending me receipts.

But also, if you have people in Ukraine that you're supporting your I know, Harris Kenny, for example of IntroCRM. He has a staff member in Ukraine who is working with a group to buy groceries for people in Kyiv that you can also reach out to him about, but like if you know of efforts going on please let me know happy to use whatever platform we have to, to share that and and try to help people.

So we'll be back to our normal programming this week. And sorry, next week. And yeah, thank you. Thank you for thank you for helping. Slava Ukraine.

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Follow Arvid: https://twitter.com/arvidkahl
Arvid's Twitter course: https://www.findyourfollowing.com/

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Read the post Jesse mentions about his daughter Leia: https://jessehanley.com/blog/2021
Follow Jesse: https://twitter.com/jessethanley
Check out Bento: https://bentonow.com/

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Michele Hansen 0:03
Hey, welcome back to software social.

Hey, everyone, just a quick note before today's episode. So today's episode is a continuation of the conversation that I had with Jesse last week. And it's quite a bit heavier than our episodes normally are. And I want to give you a heads up in case this is a sensitive topic for you. So as many of you may know, from following Jessie on Twitter, his first daughter was born last year, and she was born with trisomy 13, which is a usually fatal condition. And his daughter died soon after being born. And so we, we talked about that in any episode. And what it's like to be a founder throughout all of that. And I mean, it's, it's, it's certainly not a topic that we normally talk about here. But I think it's an it's an important one and in many ways I feel like this is maybe the most important episode we've ever done. Because you know, we are business people and but we are we are people right like all of those things are happening at the same time. And and people don't really talk about death nevermind death of a child. And so I feel like this is this is really important to talk about. At the same time. I also want to stress that it was fully Jesse's decision to talk about this, we. So we actually didn't plan out last week's episode. Colleen was sick, and I was supposed to be talking to a guest and they ended up having to reschedule which is totally fine. But then I needed somebody else to come on and had to record that day. And I was like, who I wanted to have on that is online right now. And reach out to Jesse and so he hopped on with 20 minutes notice, and he had published a blog post about this about a month back, but I wanted to leave it entirely up to him whether we talked about his daughter, Leah, and it didn't end up coming up in that conversation we had and it was really fun conversation. And then we kind of you know, we stopped recording and then Jesse was like, You know what, let's but let's talk about it. So, so that's what we dive into. And, and it was also important to to you know, Jesse and I talked about whether we should publish this episode and how we should publish it. And so it's important to him that there be this sort of content warning in advance knowing that many people do struggle with infertility and miscarriage and and the loss of a child. And it's also extremely important to me, I think, to both of us really to show that it's okay to be open about that. And that if you are open about it, you'll receive compassion and that it's okay to talk about it. So without further ado, here is the second part of my conversation with Jesse. You may remember we've recently had Jesse on talking about his incredibly fascinating background as a bodybuilder turn marketer turned developer who now runs a SAS called bento and lives in Japan and is if you missed that episode, go listen to it. It was so fun for me and so fascinating. He's incredible founder.

But something really struck me from that conversation was how his life for the past like seven or eight years has just been a series of changing major stresses from working at the small company to moving abroad and starting an agency and then having to scale it down and then scaling it up and starting bento and everything else so much else going on. And so I have Jesse with us again today. And we're going to talk about we're like the personal side

Jesse Hanley 5:30
of all of that. So welcome back, Jesse. Thanks. Good to come back.

like that thread, the yeah, there, there is a lot of stresses, I think, especially towards like the end of last year,

which we can go into last year, they had has been a pattern of that, there's also been a pattern of me, putting myself in those stresses or overreaching a lot. And then kind of, I don't know, not burning out, maybe burning out. But kind of like reaching the end of like, whatever amount of gas that I had in me for whatever that venture was, and then just trying to, you know, regain myself take a breather, and then kind of go back out there and overreach again, and I still don't really know. Maybe we can dig into it on this a little bit. But I still don't know really where that comes from. Basically, it's been present, I think, since after after school, you know, even like during the bodybuilding shows and stuff, that was a pretty insane thing to do at 1818. I think 19 was when I stepped on stage. But yeah, it's been, it's been interesting, but it's definitely been a pattern. It's been a pattern of constantly putting myself in, like difficult situations, burning out trying again, so a lot of stresses.

Michele Hansen 6:56
It seems like you're either running like full health, like sprinting, or resting. Yes, that's exactly new. There's two Jessi modes. And most of those, it seems like have been sort of like work related. But but if you want to sort of start with it, I guess the end of last year, you had a major personal stress.

Jesse Hanley 7:23
Yeah, around the star Molossia. Things were looking pretty, pretty great. Bento was like Stein to come into itself, the product was developing in a really good direction, like, we haven't really found in quite like product market fit. But the direction was going in a way where like, you're starting to click with people, mainly, we're going down the marketing automation route, which people are really excited about. And I felt my skills are getting better and like so from that business perspective, things are going good in terms of the agency, things are also going really good at that we like survived the pandemic. And we grew actually quite significantly over the pandemic, which was mostly related to having really good friends and people like, yeah, just basically doing all my work online as well, because all of our clients are either an E commerce or they're an affiliate. So as those industries boomed, we basically kept hiring writers to support those businesses. So that was pretty good. So the SATA last year, things were all looking good businesses, MRR all that stuff was nice, we're just moving into this, like, beautiful two story house in South Japan, right in the city, which, if you've been to Japan, or you know much about Japan, it's hard to find housing like we do. And the amazing thing was because the place was on the market for a bit, just because during COVID, or even the year before COVID, people weren't really moving. It's quite expensive to move in Japan. I think like all that for us to move from our apartment to this house. It was like, over over $10,000 that you don't really see back and that's just like key money and a whole bunch of stuff. So it's it's expensive. And but we did it we found this like beautiful house. It has a garden so like our dog and our cat. But don't tell the landlord like a dog and cat can like cat can roam the dog can play in the garden and stuff. Got really nice neighbors, all that kind of. It's like a really quiet, quite lovely Japanese life. So yeah, everything was looking really good. And then we found out that my wife, Mikayla was pregnant. And that was super exciting. It was, you know, we'll never will that kind of like thing I wrote in the blog post that I put up towards the end of the ICS that like nice kind of combination of like excitement and nerves, but around just excitement. So yeah, the start of the year was fun. The middle of the year was also fun. I started to have conversations with people about selling my business. One of those conversations kicked off incredibly fast with a client, previous client who wanted to buy the business Yeah. agents business, a previous client, I was with situations probably worth going to this story. A friend sent me a listing on Empire Flippers of a business at the same monthly revenue as me, and had $1 figure on it. And he goes, Oh, this is interesting, like, have a look at it. And we knew the guy who's listening it was and so it's just kind of like an internet class and B type stuff. And then, um, I saw the dollar value. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. And I spoke to another friend and I, who I knew was kind of, he said, offhanded jokes, like, I'd love to have your business. And then one day, I was like, would you love to have? Would you love to have this business? He's like, What do you want to sell it for? And I just said, the number that was on, you know, the other person's listing. And he said, Yeah, I'm kind of like interested in that. And what was going through my head at the time is like, I kinda was feeling that running an agency, a growing software business, and having a child, the three of them couldn't exist.

Arguably, starting a business and having a child can't really exist. But I know people that pull it off, and you put off your business. Yeah. So, you know, knowing stuff like that. I was like, I can do it with one. I don't think I can do it with two. Yeah. And also, because it's a people business, there was, um, you know, there's people's real lives, and I cared a lot about the team. And so I wanted the team to persist. And so I was kind of like looking for a new home. So I went to one friend, he went off, and he was really interested, and went back to the original person who sent me the listing that kind of gave me my sale price, which is kind of a weird way to go about it. I told him, I went, Oh, hey, like I spoke to such and such. They were interested, he replies, he goes, I'm interested, like, I can get an LOI on your desk. In 24 hours, I was like, Whoa, this is interesting. And that basically kicked off the sale process. And the two people, they ended up going on to acquire the business like the kindest people, and some of my like, kind of dearest online friends, plus our agency who had worked with them before, like, love them. And so it was, it was the perfect fit. So at that point in time, I've got an exit in a business for, for me, I was life changing someone money. With a great bio. I've got a software project I love. I have my wife who is pregnant. I mean, a lovely house. And it is summer, so it's very hot. And everything's nice. And then we end up going to I wonder if there's gonna be a one, it's gonna make me tear up? I don't know, we'll say we ended up going to the hospital. Well, actually, the clinic so in Japan, there's our clinics, and that kind of, I don't know, how to explain them, looking back at it, but clinics are basically hotels with doctors in them in Japan. Like, they do these extravagant meals and, you know, you get massages, and it's like a

Michele Hansen 12:50
labor and delivery Hotel.

Jesse Hanley 12:52
Yes, exactly. Sounds nice. Like, yeah, yeah, it is nice. But the dynamic is that if they notice a single complication, you get ejected immediately. And given that this was like our first experience with the, you know, the Japanese pregnancy healthcare system, I don't really know how to say it, but like that kind of funnel, kind of going down. It was very surprising. And, and then, like, one of the checkups, they're looking at the monitors. And I not the doctor, which I, which still ticks me off. I noticed like a black.on, like our child stomach. And I was like, what's that? That looks odd? And he goes, Yeah, that is that is odd. I'm gonna take photos, and then he takes photos and kind of looks at it. And over the next couple of visits. They write us a letter to go to the hospital, and then give us a deposit back. Which I remember sitting and going like, Makayla, why are they giving you money back? That's weird. And she goes, I don't know. But they're saying she speaks fluent Japanese. And so it's, you know, there's a lot of different ways. I know, Japanese communication is very different to Western communication. So on to it. Yeah, it's it's nuance. So they're giving us a refund, but not really saying anything, but there's so much implied in that. And so, and also my Japanese isn't good. So throughout all this, we had an English doctor which was nice to the clinic but throughout all this I'm kind of like reading the room, reading faces and trying to absorb energy and just quite a lot numbers open my wife's energy when she's actually known what's going on just awful. Anyway, we go we go to the hospital, and the doctor there who stayed our doctor throughout the whole thing. He was a man, she was just the greatest guy. He just be lined and found everything wrong with a child. And what's interesting is that like, when you detect one thing, and I think like this is an interesting thing as like, reflecting on myself and like how I looked at it is like Anytime that there was a problem that he would pick up, I'd be like, Oh, that's fixable in my head, like I was like, oh, that's fixable. Then as he gets like the fifth thing wrong. He's like, is is the fifth problem? You start going I think that's something bad. Yeah. So then we do the what is the MDS thesis? Yeah, amniocentesis? Yeah. Yep. Yep, that comes back with the diagnosis that like, I thought I was Trisomy 13. Now, also, this is going on, I'm doing due diligence in my business. I'm trying to sell my business, it's incredibly stressful, I find out my child has Trisomy 13, which is effectively like a death sentence. really brutal. And the kickoff is that were past the date, because we found out late because of the clinic, and I feel comfortable putting blame on the clinic. Because we're past the date in Japan where you can't abort. So regardless of the status, you have to carry full term no matter what. That's an awful that's all, you know, like, knowing that you have to let me just recenter myself. Yeah. Yeah, knowing that your wife has to essentially carry full term. And because the good thing is like you get you get closure. But it just sucks.

Michele Hansen 16:29
What were the odds you were given of? You know,

Jesse Hanley 16:33
survival? Yeah. It's it's like 90% die in seven days. Like that type of stats. It's brutal. Like yeah, it's it's, it's, it is a death sentence. What's kind of interesting is like, you turn on social media. So you look at Instagram and stuff. Make it Makayla was really different to me. She spent like a lot of time looking at stuff. I was trying to find answers, I realized they weren't no answers. So I kind of channeled my, my data a lot.

Michele Hansen 17:06
It's okay, well, it's not, I mean, it's not okay.

Jesse Hanley 17:12
I channeled my data a lot, and then allowed me to kind of like, get through it from like a stock pot, but didn't really process it. Like I kept trying to mimic him, which was good.

Michele Hansen 17:22
But it sounds like that's like sort of, I mean, it's what you're trying to do right now, which is steel yourself up against the emotion because it's, I mean, it's unthinkably hard to know that your wife is carrying a child that is going to die. And then, of course, we all know that our children are going to die eventually, we simply just hope that's after we are so so right. But yeah, and then you have all of this business going on. And you're someone who like takes, it seems like you're as a person, you're someone who looks for stress almost and kind of enjoys it in a in a way. But it's all previously the stresses you took on in your life were all things that you opted into.

Jesse Hanley 18:08
And yeah.

Michele Hansen 18:11
And you chose the stress of being a parent. And but this was not the kind of stress that you signed up for, like you were blindsided by the stress versus all of your other stresses seemed to kind of build slowly and you had time to adjust to them. And you could you could, you know, you could pivot away from them. Would you were in the process of doing with your agency business at this time? And then you're just you just, I mean, your life was just hit by a train like,

Jesse Hanley 18:45
Yeah, and you know, like, the interesting thing is, like, work work was work was my coping mechanisms. So like, for me, I just the bento product evolved, I think found product market fit, revenue was up, not gonna say my MRI numbers, but probably 3x What they were in a six month period, all whilst kopien like the graph is, looks like you know, those kind of hockey stick hockey stick meme Silicon Valley graphs, and that was cope if I'm going to be frank and the product was just evolving so fast and I had friends who didn't necessarily know what you're going through and then like they'll send me stuff that I like how you shipping stuff so fast. And it was just because like What else am I supposed to do it? Because you're you're walking this like bizarre march to the end. Because you know the outcome, right? Like most kids die at birth. If the if you want to extend their life, you have that option you have the optionality to but like, like what before you know it? I think it's more suffering for the parents. And, and with trisomy 13, that the children are non responsive. So they may be breathing, but, you know, nothing really else. So, yeah, you're walking this March. So it's like, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting, like I still remember getting like the often after the business transaction went through getting the lump sum, which was a goal since I was like 18. I, like wanted to hit a goal by the time I was 13. And the dollar amount hit my bank didn't, I felt really good, it was at the gym again, felt really good for about 30 seconds. And then I felt like shithouse which was this interesting, you know, hit a goal that I had my sights on for years, didn't really mean much.

Michele Hansen 20:44
Like to hit that goal for an Gavai life changing amount of money. And I don't know, I imagine that that probably felt bitter. You know, like, I people say that money can't buy happiness. And it seems like an experience where you stared that in the face that money indeed, cannot buy happiness, no matter how much you have.

Jesse Hanley 21:08
Those are console problems study on the happiness part, just console like sometimes money can solve so much problems. If I'm running into a Postgres issue at the moment with bento, which sometimes I am, I can throw more money at the problem, I can add more CPU, I can increase my storage, I can hire help. Can't do that here. So I think like for contacts, like when I'm 29 ACS, I think like the first time it was like a real, raw experience of like, no matter what I do, I can't solve this, like a con work my way into a solution. And I can't solve it with cash. And so really was the first proper instance where to kind of deal with that, which was just, yeah, super hard to kind of go through. Yeah, it's tricky. Tricky.

Michele Hansen 22:05
you coped by just, I don't know, throwing yourself into something that was sort of predictable and comfortable. And

Jesse Hanley 22:18
I could control it. Yeah. controllable. Yeah, I could make the graph go up. I could fix problems, I can make customers happy. But yeah, I mean, like, we went on trips and stuff, but they've got like, a kind of a sad cloud over them and stuff. So like, we tried to do stuff. And, you know, obviously, incredibly loving my wife and I were, you know, we love each other. So, we spent a lot of time just kind of like feeling emotions and stuff and just walking together. But then you do the birth? And then, you know, it goes away. It does. And yeah, and then you know, what's interesting, then you end up speed running the, it's probably a real weird stuff with social bond reflection, it's probably real weird kind of thread, and stuff to talk about. On the software, social

Michele Hansen 23:11
is real life, right? Like, you're not just this robot that runs a company, right? Like, you're a person who also runs a company who also sold a company at the same time, like, like this, it like, you know, for us, I mean, the story of God is, like, inter intertwined with the fact that we couldn't afford daycare and that's why we had to start a business like there's no separating those two, like our our work and our lives are in so many ways one of the same and yes, so it's weird, but this is real. And I mean, I feel like I can hear how hard this was for you. Just alone and the way you talk about it because I noticed that you keep saying you when you mean I Are we you're saying you know you go through the pregnancy knowing what's going to happen and you go through this and like you're putting this linguistic difference

Jesse Hanley 24:10
there great observation that's it and I

Michele Hansen 24:13
don't know if you hear yourself doing that but it just it tells me how like, understandably how hard it is for you to I need to I guess we should let the story finish because you know, I've I know the story but maybe people listening don't so do you want to

Jesse Hanley 24:32
Yeah, speed run through it because a little bit traumatic. So,

Michele Hansen 24:36
yeah, yeah.

Jesse Hanley 24:38
Yeah, he says, okay, yeah, so we ended up Makayla gives best to Leah. She passes away my arms. I was able to be there with her. Which beautiful bit? Yeah. Because COVID Right.

Michele Hansen 24:54
So was Leah alive for

Jesse Hanley 24:58
under 30 minutes or so? Yeah, but alive. And then and then she passed a doctor. If it was done during the day a doctor again, like I call it kind of like say enough good things about him. He was it he curated it in a way that I could be there with Mikayla, if it was during the day or any other time, he knew what outcome we wanted. And he knew. Yeah, he knew the outcome that we want to do. He wanted me to be there. And so he curated the delivery so that I could, so we're kind of like, indebted to him. And then you know, what, you go through the Japanese healthcare system, which is designed to give you closure in the in the fastest way possible. We met I think I wrote in like the post that I did the write up of like, we met this lady who we call the bones lady. So you know, we're in a room with our, you know, our child who's passed away. And this lady comes in starts commenting on our child's bones. She's like, Oh, she's got a long femur. And you just can't help but laugh. You're like, who? Who the hell is this lady? Who the hell is this lady? And I remember, like, the kid was like, Ah, she's talking about Leah's femur. Like, what he's like, again, okay, let's make fun. So she understands. But we don't know who she is. Like, even with Michaela, we don't actually know. She, she's, she's like asking about childbirth, we ended up finding out that she's basically like a salesperson for the crematorium, who's organizing the process. But just doing in a really bizarre way. Anyway, we made the bones lady, she got some details from us, we end up doing, like a ceremony with all the doctors which was quite beautiful. In the hospital, then they put us in a taxi with with Alia on my lap, and send us to the crematory with a taxi driver who's like, super eccentric, like making noises as he's taking turns because he's so excited to go to crematory the city commentary. Because it's like big and epic. And so for him, he's like, he's excited with devastate it. So just the whole thing is just bizarre. And then we get to the crematory, quite impressive. Never been on before. But you got a room you have time with your child. She gets taken away comes back, you're in a room. And we finally figured out what bones lady was about. And you know, you see your child's bones. And she was kind of asking like, did we want them crunched up in a certain way? It's just because in Japanese, you got to put them in a box, right? You got to put the ashes in a box, but the bones of that. So you got to put the bones in the boxes, just kind of asking. How big do you want the bones? It's just

Michele Hansen 27:41
and you're doing all have these weird decisions in the middle of being like in extreme grief and shock.

Jesse Hanley 27:47
Yeah, but you're you're just in shock. grief. You're giant.

Michele Hansen 27:52
Yeah, it's just, yeah, you're running a pilot at this point?

Jesse Hanley 27:56
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're like him. Like, if there is an opposite of flow, like an extreme opposite of flow, you're liking that, which I guess is a shock. So yeah, you are just focused on going from A to B to C, and you get home we've got, we walk up the road. Our neighbor sees us, she sees us with a box, she breaks down. We give her a hug on her hug. And then we go home, and we're done. And then we begin processing all whilst doing everything else that was going on in the sir. Yeah, it was. Hello, via Hello, hello over you.

Michele Hansen 28:32
And then meanwhile, you've probably got you know, waking up to like customer emails to get through and like, every morning databases to keep going and like Postgres all of that.

Jesse Hanley 28:47
Yeah,

Michele Hansen 28:48
you're dealing with this just I mean crater in your life.

Jesse Hanley 28:56
Yeah, and so that no, like, I don't think I It wasn't until I took Christmas off. To be frank like I like that whole year just been working, been working, been thinking been in shock. And so when I took the first week off during Christmas, because, you know, people aren't sending that much emails, they're away, which is nice. It was the first week that I could actually process which is when I like write up the post and I put on my side and stuff. I like relaunched my site on the cell and stuff which was quite fun. And then I just started writing is like, I just kind of wanted to document like the year and then kind of processor because I just really like hadn't done any processing at all. Also, something that I I realized was that when I did posts about it, particularly from men's, I would have a lot of men reach out to me. And that was interesting. Like, like, maybe honestly probably like 70 people a sir, I think probably reached out to me which I don't have a large audience. So I was kind of like, shocked that so many people had lost children had been dealing with infertility for like five years. And these were like, impressive business people that I like, admired. And and to find out that they had like, a beautiful family of four, and have lost three children. You know? Yeah, crazy. So, yeah, it was, it was interesting.

Michele Hansen 30:29
I mean, I think, you know, we have another friend who, who lost a child last year. And I think our society doesn't really teach us how to, how to talk about that, and how to support people who are who are whether that's infertility or miscarriage, or, you know, or, you know, losing a child after they're born. Like, me that you had 70 people reach out, and I noticed that the reaction to that post where a lot of people saying, you know, nobody really talks about this, and we went through this, and I didn't know what to say, and I didn't even know how to talk about it. And I think what you did was so incredibly courageous and important for making it clear that it's okay to talk about this.

Jesse Hanley 31:32
Yeah, thanks. I, cuz it is it is interesting, like, you'd have people then be like, I don't even like customers and stuff. They're like, I had no idea that you are like, you know, that maybe customers that like, would message me a lot, are like, really passionate, bent to customers. And like, they felt some sort of guilt, but kind of tried to tell them like, don't feel guilty. Like it was kind of like how I was coping. But I think like, what I'm realizing is that like, yeah, like, businesses and people, business, essentially, people and people are complex, and they have complex lives and stuff is either in their control or out of their control. And they're just kind of going through it. But I think, you know, online, you just kind of see like personalities, or you just see people being successful and stuff, and you don't really realize so much is going on behind the scenes. And it's not like you should know, like, you should know, but I think when you're going through stuff yourself, it's very helpful to know that, like, you know, you could look at other people's lives and kind of take their time horizon as your own, you know, like, for us, it's like, All right, we lost our first child, but like, you know, if we want, we can try again, and it looks like other people have, like, we've got some, some friends that have gone through, like the infertility process, and trying to resolve that for six years, seven years. And like, I've just become pregnant, you know, and, and seeing people's journeys on that. It's just stellar, just like so courageous. And, again, successful people, people that you admire, but they're going through these, like much larger battles behind the scenes, which kind of makes them all the more impressive, maybe. But also, yeah, it's just, it's, it's quite real, you know? Yeah.

Michele Hansen 33:22
It seems like you've learned a lot about the, I don't know, the benefit, or of being open about this, like you talked about how you reacted initially, and really just trying to steel yourself against it. And I can almost hear that there was like this transformation. And you now have, you know, you said you go for walks, and you feel your feelings together. And you've talked to all the 70 other people who reached out to you. I guess it sounds like you've you've learned that maybe there's other ways to process the grief besides forgetting it happening and burying yourself in work.

Jesse Hanley 34:09
Yeah, it's interesting. It has been really good talking about it. I think the reason I spoke about it as well as because Mikayla has always been phenomenal about talking about stuff publicly. So like when we kind of knew the diagnosis and stuff. After that was kind of confirmed we we started talking about it. So she started talking about it, and I think I I saw how she was processing stuff by like writing public things. And I just thought it was really impressive and like really courageous, but she she got a response from like, mostly women that were following her. And so I think I was kind of inspired by that. But then again, I saw her kind of healing from it, maybe I don't know it's a long journey to actually heal properly but it Yeah, processing, you'd have like healing properties of like talking about it publicly. And so by doing that myself, I definitely kind of felt that. And then it kind of was interesting after reading the posts that kind of draw a line in the sand for me that I could start healing. It also gave me permission to stand up for myself a little bit more like, and tell myself, I got to make sure that like, I look after myself this year. And so setting more boundaries on myself being more confident of saying no, when I know what my boundaries are, like, I've made a couple of decisions this year, around mostly around hiring like mostly about putting myself in stressful situations, again, I think like coming all the way back, when we were kind of talking about how I would constantly like select stresses, put myself into them, and just like, try and make it happen. Through going through all this stuff last year, I think I'm reflecting on that part of me, and I'm saying no to it more, there's been a couple of instances of stressful stuff that like I wanted to put myself into that I just kicked the can down the road for a year. And I think that's fine. Like a large ones like a database thing, like we were thinking about moving all of our data stuff to a single store or whatever, it doesn't really matter. But it's gonna be a lot stressful project who would take like a whole quarter to pull off? And would it be like a heroic effort by heroic effort by being call it and then I was just like, bugger, I'm gonna pay for Heroku enterprise upgrade, pay up front and not worry about it for 12 months, and decisions like that. A good. And I'm trying to make more of them. So I don't are even asking like, why am I doing this? Am I just like am I overreaching for the sake of overreaching, and I don't want to do that this year. So that's one part like giving my purse up self permission. Also, like for my customer base, we run like a lot of our customer support on Discord like a community channel, and telling people hey, I need to take this weekend off, or hey, you know, I'm overloaded. Do you mind just give me a bit of a pause in a public channel. People are super nice. And they're really understanding and they it's, it's a little bit better on that discord note, as well, I find that running a community based support people way more empathetic. You know, Hey, how are you? I got a question. If I was running in support event on email, I probably honestly would have just shut the business down. To be frank, you know, yeah, it's just like, I find that when I get support tickets on email, they're often ggressive if they don't know who I am. Whereas if they we encourage everyone to come to discord instead, when they see how many emojis people are using and our custom emojis and stuff way more friendlier, even if they don't know who I am. And so that was an interesting move by us last year, that has held incredibly well over the stressful period. And even now, so yeah, give myself permission to set up boundaries with customers and stuff. They'll be like, hey, like, I'm overloaded. Like, I don't want to build that feature, or I don't want to do that this quarter. Can we please wait, people like, Yeah, no worries. And a lot of them have read the stuff that I've put out. So they get it?

Michele Hansen 38:19
Yeah, the boundaries are so important. And you know, something you just underscored there, which sort of, you know, so I talk a lot about how when we're, you know, understanding what a customer needs, there's, there's functional social and emotional reasons why they decide to choose a product or not choose it, or change products or whatever. And I feel like I sometimes get a little bit of pushback on like, emotional, as if there is emotion in business. But I think what you just said, right there of are we going to spend a quarter doing this database project. Or I can just use Heroku and delay this for 12 months. Like, that's partly a business decision. But that's a huge context of that is the emotional context of you imposing boundaries. Yeah, I mean, and, and deciding not only what the business needs, but also what you need as a person. And I, I doubt you got into this whole story with the Heroku enterprise sales person, right. But like, and you don't need, you know, you don't need to and they shouldn't pull it out. But like, there is that emotional context behind it. Like it's still there's a huge part of the purchase decision, like and to act like it isn't there and there's only Oh, well, we just need a database thing. And there's only this functional element to it is just completely missing all of the context.

Jesse Hanley 39:49
No, I could not, I could not agree more. And like I love that you bring this stuff up. The emotional part is huge. I can like speak to it. outlinks for banter, but let's take the Heroku For instance, right, I also speed ran myself through this sales process. Because what I was doing by doing I was actually upgrading to the Heroku plan, you basically pay up front. And you know, I could I could haggle him down. But I was, I don't think I can say the rates because I find stuff that doesn't really matter, I paid double digit percent for premium support. Essentially, what that gives me a couple things takes me off the general population by going to enterprise, you go off their general population, like rails, so you don't get auto shutdown and all that kind of stuff, which I've seen friends, like it happened to them. So I actually saw a friend during Black Friday get taken offline on Heroku and be down 48 hours, because of it because of an automated glitch. Oh, and so I saw that, and I was like, that's never happening to me. Um, and another one was, they've got a, like, you know, after you pay for enterprise, that premium support thingy, blah, blah, blah, whatever that line item is, you get like one hour SLA whenever you want. Plus, you get to talk to like a database specialist. Whenever you want, you just raise a ticket. And so I was like, I need that, like, I want one out. If something goes wrong, I want one hour response times I like, I don't want to wait business hours, like my mental health is super important. And if I can pay, you know, double x percent for the bill, like that's why I was making the decision, you know? And to that effect, like, Was that a good decision? For me? Well, it was because I had a call last week with a guy called Jesse Soylent from Heroku lovely sky came on, he had a lovely big beard and amazing background that was animated. And I said, Hey, man, I'm really anxious about all these Postgres things. Like, I keep seeing all these, you know, things in my database, click, just go through everything. One by one, we sat down, he took an hour and a bit with me, went through every single thing 10 out, I had nothing to worry about. But because of everything that I went through last year, I like so many anxieties and like, manufactured stuff. And so by leaving on someone, even if it was paid, I was able to sleep well at night. And so, like, I may only have like one call this year, but Touchwood touch got a lot of wood in my house. So Touchwood there's nothing gonna nothing's gonna go wrong this year that I meet them again. But if however, many, you know 10,000 plus dollars, for this thing, for that one call, probably would be worth it for me. And so is entirely emotional on that side. And then bringing that to bento on a little less, you know, deep and introspective. People switch to bento, because they're emotionally unhappy with their other platforms, they dislike trip for whatever reason, or they don't like Clavijo, or, you know, a support person annoyed them in another tool, and they've got, you know, a boost of emotional energy to make this switch. And they connect with me, and they see that I'm excited about bringing them on board, and they know, they'll be able to talk to someone. And that's all emotional kind of transfer of energy, they're pulling on my energy to be excited and pumped, they know that I'm gonna, you know, well, hopefully, they'll see that I like, live up to my word, and I'm going to be there when they need me. And yeah, they're, you know, excited and happy to switch. And so, because it's a lot to switch to a CRM, like, it's a lot to move your email marketing price, not really a lot. But mentally, it's a lot, you got to change, you know, whatever codes, adding data into the system, and then you got to do your imports and stuff. But to get someone across the line, especially if they're spending like 500,000 bucks a month or more, it's purely emotional, to be frank, or its insecurities. You know, I'm a marketer, in a small Sass company. My boss is telling me to do email marketing, you know, between you and me, I don't really know what I'm doing. You know, there's a lot of I have a lot of those conversations and marketers that are in house that don't know what they're doing, they're nervous, and they can just talk to me, I've got access to a lot of sass companies. I've run, you know, email marketing for Sass companies, like I can help them I can talk to them. And so you know, their emotional energy there is that they're anxious, a little bit uncertain, they want a little bit of guidance. And you know, I can send templates and give them ideas and guides and stuff, and then they feel empowered and happy, and they become lifelong customers. So so much of the sales processes is emotional for a business like bento, but then there's also stuff which is finance. And I don't to be frank, I don't like those conversations. And those customers tend to just not be the best ones where they're coming over just for pricing reason or whatever. The best customers are generally the ones that are, you know, the summary of the nation. Yep. real frustration. Yeah, real anxiety, or something around the job to be done that

there's just some uncertainty there and, and, you know, me and the team Scott ash, we can, like, basically help them and make sure that yeah, they feel confident, happy. And if they've got a question, they'll be heard and they'll get an answer straightaway. So yeah, Sales is a huge part of sales, I think.

Michele Hansen 45:04
Yeah, I mean, we talked about that on the on the last episode you were on about the, that like rapport building with someone. And you know, I mean, that came up in the example customer interview that I did with one of Collins customers. So, you know, a much lower price SAS much sort of a lower hurdle to cross. But the person I interviewed Drew, you know, he said, you know, well, we're all junior developers, and we didn't really know what we were doing. And we're running into these problems with this other service. And all of a sudden, this one just worked and like, is impossible, but it was so easy, like, and, and, and, you know, because I think when we have issues with software, like we, sometimes we doubt whether it's us, like, I feel like at least once a week, there's a moment where I'm, like, struggling with something and I'm like, I swear I work in technology, why can't I figure this out? Right? Like, we blame ourselves for that. And then, and so recognizing that really, you know, you're basically selling sort of emotional relief. And, like, you bought peace of mind from Heroku. Which, like you said, he said, like that interview can be a headline, but like, it's,

Jesse Hanley 46:15
like, you said that interview with like, cleans customer, I thought was kind of interesting, because like, there's so much there. There's, it's not just like ease of use of our product or getting set up. It's like, if they're working for, you know, a client, they've got deadlines, they don't want to be messing around with, you know, there's

Michele Hansen 46:35
no stress there. Yeah,

Jesse Hanley 46:37
yeah, even if it's small, and even if it's something that they don't want to waste time, because they got billable hours, they got other people's expectations, and if you can help someone solve that pot, and you generally win the sale, but I don't think people are necessarily mindful of that. They just kind of, I don't know, they look at people like numbers, you know, a person slides onto their calendar, and they're just trying to like, get through the transaction, the sales transaction. But if you can get away from that you can kind of like look more at the person. And actually deeply try and solve that problem. Not just kind of, like, take things in one ear and out the other. It's real, it's really hard to lose sales often, like a kind of, I think you can look at is look at your close rate. For me personally, I don't know how would be interesting. He also, if you get on a call with someone, do you like have any idea of what your close rate is? Like how many deals when you personally get on the phone with them that like become customers? Potentially longtime customers?

Michele Hansen 47:37
I have no idea. I've never tracked that.

Jesse Hanley 47:39
I would imagine a tie. I've got a feeling.

Michele Hansen 47:43
Yeah, most like it's pretty rare that I yeah, I guess it's pretty rare that I have a conversation with someone like that, like there are very few let's put this way. The only way I would be able to track this is looking at my contracts folder and seeing which ones were only drafts and never made it forward. And I can only think of a handful. Yeah, in the last couple of years that are only drafts and I'm pretty much I'm pretty much always working on you know, a larger like negotiating a larger deal. It's it's pretty unusual for me to not have at least one going on at any given time.

Jesse Hanley 48:26
Yeah, which is interesting. You know, like that's, that's as far as the sales things cuz I'm like, that's a really high close rate. But you're naturally curious. You're looking on the emotional side of things. I think during the sales engagements, you're deeply trying to help someone and so yeah, you come to a deal and you do actually probably resolve the problem that they are trying to do in the best way possible and it's hard to lose deals like that if you kind of have

Michele Hansen 48:53
Yeah, you know to what you're saying earlier like about everything going on with Leah this year like you in some ways reacted to that by just trying not to feel the emotion at first, at first. And I wonder if people are afraid to recognize the emotion in a sales or business context because they don't want to feel the emotion right like if you don't know how to feel comfortable in your own body feeling stress and frustration nevermind crippling grief, or anger or guilt or blame or whatever all those things are like, if you are someone who runs away from their own emotions, then it makes sense to me that they would run away from other people's emotions in general. And to say that you have to recognize emotion even if that emotion is stress or frustration which are pretty mild compared to grief. No, they're all you know all emotions are valid right? Then it makes sense that they would avoid that element entirely and distress regard it as not being as relevant, as, you know, the functional elements of it like that, like that makes sense to me. Because, you know, even even digging to that level of Yeah, like, am I am I using this right? Like, and recognizing that someone's like feeling vulnerable or feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, like to be able to handle that carefully, especially in a sales setting and be like, Yeah, you know what, I think I think you got this, I think we got to kind of make some tweaks. And I think what we've got, like will work better, but like, you've got the pieces there, you know, like, reassuring them, right? Like, but if somebody's just been running away from their own emotions, then it's going to be really, really hard to handle that other person gently, which is what you need to do in a sale setting. And I think, you know, I think it sounds like to me with you, like you are really learning how to handle yourself gently. It sounds like you learn to handle customers gently first. And now you are applying that same empathy and gentleness and curiosity to you know, that you first learned with people who manage body building vitamin shops, to yourself and your personal life.

Jesse Hanley 51:23
Huh? You can't. So good, good observations on this? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I'm now just thinking about about a lot of that. I agree. I think I agree. You do? Yeah, I think something that I was thinking was you're talking about that is like, when I do talk to customers. I am generally pretty honest of like, how I'm feeling at the time. So like, sometimes, like, I, I kind of balanced the thing of like professionalism and unprofessionalism. I can be very professional, but I still like, letting people know kind of where I'm out. And I've always done this just before this stuff last year, like, I feel like I've always kind of done that. Because it does kind of cut a lot of, I don't know, like, it breaks the ice, but it just just cuts a lot. And it's nice when you're just talking person, a person about something. Or you know, if you pick up on certain energy in a call, actually talking about that energy is quite interesting. Like I remember during a sales call with someone and they seemed to hate me. And I remember just being like, this person, like, they must hate me. They've just made me this good. rather cool. You know? And I was like, okay, like, um, you know, just wanted to ask, like, um, what I said, just want to ask, like, um, I, like, Am I doing everything? I say, got the perspective, but wasn't confrontational. It was like, like, you, you know, is everything okay? You're okay to kind of like chat today. Kind of like a soft eye

Michele Hansen 53:04
check in, I refer to that book as, like, checking in with them being like, hey, like, is is, is now still a good time. And you don't necessarily say like, you seem super stressed. Should we reschedule? It's like, hey, like, is this is it still a good time right now like to talk about those like, solely fine if you want to, you know, like, just very casual,

Jesse Hanley 53:27
which is confrontational trying to ask someone that right, because like they meet, but they never go.

Michele Hansen 53:34
I don't know. I, I have had a few calls that stand out in my mind. Interesting, but only a few of the 1000s I've had, right? Like,

Jesse Hanley 53:45
that part at that point is a numbers game. And if it's a handful, they might 1000s. And I think it's mostly safe to ask. If your tone of voice I think it's really important. So you're kind of always like, hey, like, just want to ask, like, is everything okay? Like, would you like to like I'm just getting a sense that like, you know, maybe something's off? Would you like to go see something else in the product? Or do you have something else that you got to do? Because, you know, blah, blah, blah? Yeah. And the person was just like, I go into a fight my boss. You had nothing to do with me. But yeah, so it was important for me to ask that question. So then I was like, ah, I'd like lost the sale. But they're like, I don't know if my boss about blah, blah, blah. I was like, Oh, what about No, like, like, we it was very interesting because it played into like a banjo thing. They're like, ah, like, we accidentally sent a buggy like an email to like all list with the wrong like a test subject line or whatever. And like, they're upset and I was like, I was like, well, we've got we have features that that help with that. But it was just interesting. Like they're in trouble. They were not like the happiest. They had made a couple of mistakes. And that was actually one of the reasons they were talking to us is because the boss saw that we had this particular feature and ended up being closed the deal they became a customer it was all good, but I think like Picking up on people's energies in calls, being kind, and asking client questions and seeing where people are at and you get a response, either positive or negative, and come and take it from there. But realizing that like, even in sales sales, you're working with real people with real lives and a real stressful stuff. And so, you know, from a sales perspective, or just like a human perspective, like ask questions that account and you know, like, proactively do that don't be afraid to because like, you can allow people to set up their own boundaries and stuff as well. I don't know if that makes sense. But

Michele Hansen 55:34
I guess I mean, that really brings us full circle, right? You never know what's going on in someone's life and how they treat you and how they react to you, maybe four have absolutely nothing to do with you as a person, right? Like, there is so much going on behind the scenes that I'm, but we don't know about. And so, you know, be kind to each other, whether that's sales or personal life, and also be kind to ourselves. And that's a good place to end on.

Jesse Hanley 56:07
Yeah, I agree. Well said, well said, this is a good chat.

Michele Hansen 56:11
I will thank you so much for coming back on and for really baring your soul to us. I'm still just I'm in awe of the of how how you are willing to be so so vulnerable and public. You know, we as a sort of indie community, we talk a lot about building public but to me, I'm finding the people I am just just the most Admiral are the ones who are vulnerable in public and vulnerable for the benefit of other people. And you are in just such an example of that, and I'm so I'm so grateful for you.

Jesse Hanley 56:48
And thanks for being there. When I could DM you questions and stuff like even prior to the diagnosis, it was really lovely to be able to chat to you about family stuff, which I remember as like our first call right, and left an imprint on me expat parents. Yes, it's being expat parents. And I was so excited. And I got to ask you all these questions, so I really appreciated being someone that I could DM out of the blue and talk to about family stuff, because it meant a lot at the time. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 57:20
Well, I'm so grateful to be your internet friends, to the rest of my internet friends listening to this podcast. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

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Follow Jesse: https://twitter.com/jessethanley
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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey everyone, I'm so excited. I have our friend Jesse Hanley from bento here with us today. Good, bro. So, Jesse, you have, you're such an interesting founder. So you were a digital nomad for a long time as a marketer, right? Um, and for the past four years, you have been running bento, which is like, it's like email automation, like, kind of like you like compete with like, drip, right?

Jesse Hanley 0:31
Yeah, I mean, the easiest comparison for most people is like, customer IO and drip, those type of tools. But we've got a good product suite that also serves e comm. So if people are in E commerce, then there's another tool called Klaviyo. So kinda like a put ourselves in the middle of those two tools. But yeah, it's it's interesting bento has also been kind of like my passion project over the past like four years, which we can like, dig into a bit. But it's been all the things that I've wanted, as I've been working in marketing, and I just kind of like built the tools myself. Put them in a nice little package. And then yeah, no, I just flog them online.

Michele Hansen 1:06
Yeah. Love that. So. So you were a nomad for a long time as a marketer, running this agency. And then you put down roots in Japan. Like last year, two years ago,

Jesse Hanley 1:20
whenever a little bit before COVID. Like I, yeah, I made the decision to settle in, I met a friend down south, that friend is now my wife ran down south of Japan. And after like traveling for, I think, since 2015, or so, like, I'd spent half a year in Asia, half the year in Europe. And I was running all my stuff. And honestly, it's just it's not efficient. It's like quite a romantic lifestyle, because you're leaving out of hotels, and you're seeing cool parts of the world. But it's very fatiguing. And I think as my business is just starting to like kind of kick up just before COVID or the year before COVID. I, when I got the offer to move into this friend's apartment, I kind of just took it and it just felt like the right move at the time. And then then yeah, then the world shut down. Definitely was the right move, they're going to be locked in in Japan, because Japan is actually being quite nice during COVID to kind of like staying because I don't I love Asia, out of all the places I've been in the world. I love Asia as a region. And I really like Japan. So being kind of locked down here for the last two and a bit years is actually being quite nice.

Michele Hansen 2:26
That's really interesting. I feel like there's this we kind of talked about this a little bit last week of like, there's this as you said, romantic vision of like, what being a nomad is like, and you know, for those of us who do run our own businesses, but like, have kids, that's kind of not something we I mean, I guess I do know some people who are nomads with kids, but it's a little more challenging, but like, I like I've heard that like, you know, moving from place to place, like there's all this like, mental overhead of like, you have to figure out like, where to buy groceries and where to live. And like all this kind of stuff that like living in one place, you don't really have to think about like, like, how was your experience of that. Um,

Jesse Hanley 3:08
I mean, that's kind of like some of those problems like all the romantic problems. So like, not knowing where groceries are is like a fun Saturday adventure and like, knowing, you know, the good cafes, to work out is like another fun adventure or, you know, finding apartments can be an adventure, it could be like a horrible adventure. But it's, yeah, I don't know, moving around, it's, I don't know, all those problems, if you have the right perspective, are quite enjoyable. And they do kind of make things interesting, because when I was traveling, I was working Monday to Friday, 40 hours a week, if not sometimes, like, more, or sometimes less, just depending. And the way that I would do is just try and like live out my life normally. And then a lot of my exploring would be like on Saturdays and Sundays, and I would just go out and meet friends or whatever. But at the time, I was also trying to, you know, I was staying in apartments and staying in hotels. I did have a lot of friends that were also staying in hostels and stuff. But for me, it was really important that like, I tried to have as much of a stable life as I could. Yeah, it does get pretty expensive, though. Yeah, it was actually really offensive when I kind of look back on it, but it was worth it. And also, there was like a pretty interesting trade off a lot of the long term relationships and even like some of my best customers now all of them like I met on the road. And I reckon, yeah, I think about it. Like, I had a return from the people that I met on the road even though it's a really expensive way of life, if that makes sense. So, so yeah, you just meet a lot of communities like traveled around the US travel around Europe or Asia and you just meet so many wonderful, amazing humans that um, yeah, even during COVID and stuff like a lot of these humans were either clients, so we worked together or we did in our joint venture projects. Yeah, it made sense. For me at least

Michele Hansen 5:00
Yeah, that's all it was like an investment in your I don't know, entrepreneur community, which I think for, it's like, it's so important, right? Because like most of us don't really know people in our normal daily lives who do this weird internet job thing. And having that community but also globally is I mean, it's so valuable. I mean, I mean, I'm here in Denmark, and you're in Japan. Like, I think that's that's Case in point enough. And so. So you started.

Jesse Hanley 5:29
Yeah, sorry to interrupt you. But like on that note, we have like spoken a lot in Slack and stuff. And I think previous Jesse, like pre COVID, when I would have traveled to Europe, because we're chatting online, if your game like we probably would have met up or something. Because we have chatted a bit online, like it would have been easy for me to kind of go to Denmark and just kind of hang out. So that was how I was making a lot of relationships, I meet people online, meet people on Twitter or whatever, you chat. And you'd be like, alright, like, I mean, the country kind of close during a catch up, and then would kind of catch up that way. So a lot of my travels were guided, kind of like that, like I would meet people online, and then kind of catch up, which kind of sounds weird.

Michele Hansen 6:11
Like, there is this kind of like quick, like fast friendships sort of quick intimacy that comes especially if it's like someone you've been tweeting with for like, a couple of years, like there was someone that I think I had met them, like, once at a conference, and we didn't even really talk that much. But then like, they they live like an hour from us. And so like, last year, I was like, hey, like, come to our house and like, hang out with us for the afternoon. Like, let's do the firepit. And like, let's like, you know, like, hang out. And it was so interesting, because it was like, Yeah, I hadn't really hung out with them or, you know, their, their wife before or the like. But it was like we had so much to talk about, and we're so comfortable with one another. Like, like, like I had that experience to at founder summit where there was people who I had never actually met before, but then like, I'm, you know, going to find a place at lunch or whatever. And I'm like, oh, like, there's Ellen crane from homeschool boss. And I was like, oh, there's Ellen like, and I just sit down and talk to her. And it was like, we had been friends for such a long time. Like there's just this it's it's I don't know, internet friends are awesome.

Jesse Hanley 7:16
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah, that sounds nice. That experience of like having friends over who you've met online. I've had that a couple times. It's it is the best. So,

Michele Hansen 7:25
yeah. So okay, so you so your, your background as a marketer, right?

Jesse Hanley 7:33
Kind of, um, so I, yeah, so after school, I was really into fitness. And I did a couple of bodybuilding shows. And so I was like, alright, what am I going to do? I don't have any idea about university. So I am going to just start working. So I started working as a personal trainer, and then I worked in retail. And then when I was in retail, I was bored, because I was in the CBD, like the centre of Sydney. And no one really buy supplements in the afternoon. And so I was like, Oh, I'm not gonna play video games in the store. So I might build them like an e commerce website. That sounds fun. So I like Magento. And I spun up like an instance and I got going actually start to make some sales. And then my boss was like, ah, do you want to come down to Canberra, which was about three hours out of Sydney, and I had no other plans. I was like, Yeah, I'll move down. So I packed up all my stuff moved down to Canberra. And then when I was in Canberra, I rocked up to the inquiry office, and the office is like a bond in a farm. And he's like, this is where all the magic happens. And it was literally like the dirtiest warehouse like I've seen. And I'm from that began this like pretty crazy journey of four years working with this guy on this kind of cluster of companies and I kind of did anything in tech related to these businesses. So did all the calm self taught myself SEO, the sites are doing like quite significant revenue. potluck, I think it's the past like a million a year. Just doing like econ Rev. And then we're also speeding up stores and gyms and distribution businesses, I got to kind of play in the full commerce stack. Whilst I'm kind of having like free rein on whatever I wanted to do. Like I taught myself email marketing, I taught myself SEO, I taught myself ads I taught myself, you know how to set up abandoned cart emails using a cart hook. Like I think I was one of Jordans like first customers. I think that's how I started like, talk to him on support and stuff. And then then after a while, things start to get stressful because we're importing heavily from the US and by the way, is this interesting to talk about.

Michele Hansen 9:43
You are a former bodybuilder who's self taught themselves marketing and development and is a like Case in point of making your own luck. Yes, this is interesting. I'm just like sitting here wrapped listening. Okay,

Jesse Hanley 9:59
okay. To continue, so, um, what it was like the business as it was kind of growing pretty rapidly. We were, it was a full male team of bodybuilders. So quite a lot of energy in that room. So like

Michele Hansen 10:16
it builders, men, people probably taking testosterone. There is a lot of testosterone going on in this work environment.

Jesse Hanley 10:24
Yes, yeah. And so you know, and there's, there's huge egos right. And my ego was also starting to get like, a little bit tainted. And I was like, All right, like, what's my future, as well. So I started thinking about this, whilst, whilst I'm thinking about my future, the businesses are growing, there was a macro trend happening. And that macro trend was that the Australian dollar was tanking against the US dollar, at a rate of margins. So we were making 30% margins, the US Dollar was essentially like, getting stronger against the Australian by about like, 30%. So we started losing a lot of our buying power. And then the, the, the CFO was also my roommate. And so he, he had all the things he's like, I don't like the looks of this, this isn't really looking to fab. And so we both kind of like, you know, looked at the painting on the wall, and we're like, what are we going to do? And so, I think I was up to the chapter in like, The Four Hour Workweek, where it's like, negotiate with your boss to leave and work remotely. Like that sounds smart. So um, I went at a gym session, I chatted to my boss and told him that I wanted to work remotely. And I don't know, he was such like, he was at the gym, most gracious guy at the

Michele Hansen 11:39
gym. Or this is like you had your meeting like your heart to heart with him at like,

Jesse Hanley 11:45
the business owned two gyms. So we, we would do gym sessions during the day is very,

Michele Hansen 11:50
very, like you had your like, one on one with Him, basically, while you're like pumping iron, and you're like, I think I want to move to, you know, China or Japan or France or whatever. And like it was,

Jesse Hanley 12:02
I want to move to Yeah, I remember like, he's like he's doing like tricep extensions. And I'm like, I'm telling him, I'm like, Hey, man, like, I want to work from my laptop from early. I can do my whole job online. He just looked at me and was like, like, like, just disappointed. And it was like, do I have I think he said something along the lines of, like, do I have an option or anything? And I was like, nah, this is what I wanted to. And then we just continued working out. And like, that face that

Michele Hansen 12:33
disappointed face because he's like straining his muscles or because he's like, upset with what I'm saying.

Jesse Hanley 12:38
Yeah, exactly. And, and then, like, that was kind of it. I basically booked my tickets, and then started working. And

Michele Hansen 12:47
oh, wait. Okay, so sorry. I'm just gonna summarize. So you have this meeting with your boss, while working out and to ask him to if you can work from Thailand. And then He grunts at you. And then you packed up and did your job from Thailand?

Jesse Hanley 13:08
Yeah, basically. Again, to like, summarize that period, I think like the years that I was in that business, well, by far the most formative, like the amount of freedom that he gave me. And it was just, it was the most unconventional business. The amount of freedom that he gave me and like the amount of decisions that I was making it like 1920 2122 was just like, was ridiculous. And also like the amount of we had like a whole warehouse of like pre workout supplements or just like caffeine. So we took a lot. We conceived a lot of caffeine to get the work done. So we definitely overworked and burning the midnight fuel. But I was young. So like I could, like I felt like I could do that. But yeah, it just kind of was a catalyst for really unconventional kind of growth. And there was like a pursuit of excellence in the business, which like I quite liked, we were always trying to do stuff better. We're always trying to look for stuff to do. And no one was really a slacker and like when issues would happen. Like we would order. You know, too many containers for the warehouse. So the whole thing would have to be like restocked and done. Didn't matter who you were you you pick up, you know, you'd roll up your sleeves and you'd repack the whole warehouse. And I think it just kind of taught me a lot and so then I ended up taking a lot of that energy, I think on the road with me, and probably still have like a lot of it today. So I do thank him in particular just for like the freedom that he gave me in a lot of the unconventional mentorship that I got.

Michele Hansen 14:40
So What year was this that you have this pivotal workout meeting and move to Thailand.

Jesse Hanley 14:51
I'm going to go to quickly get a nomad list. Let's scroll to the bottom. Ah 2015 I think 2014 was when Then when the negotiation happened, and then 2015 was, yeah, when I started traveling around.

Michele Hansen 15:09
And so you move to Thailand. And then like, was T basically like, Was this your only client at the time? Like was your plan to? Yeah, guarding agency? Or was it just to like, work remote?

Jesse Hanley 15:23
Yeah, it was, I am switching from employee to consultant. And I just have to get everything done that I was doing before that that was the only kind of negotiation.

Michele Hansen 15:36
So then how did that grow into an agency?

Jesse Hanley 15:40
How did that go into an agency? Um,

Michele Hansen 15:44
like, what was the next evolution of that?

Jesse Hanley 15:47
Well, I didn't really know. Like, what? Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So I think like, I felt that there was also like a little bit of risk. Like having one client, which was my boss, who I knew the CFO and I, like, knew that the finances weren't like looking too hot. So I started to kind of like mentally hedge a little bit. But I didn't really know like, what I could package my skills up as. So I think like, the first version of like, Jesse's work online was just like, kind of like a handyman. It was like, if I found an opportunity or something to work with, where I could apply the same skills that I was using in E commerce and stuff, then I basically sold them to people. So if people had met, someone had an e commerce website, or I met someone online, or I met someone in like a forum or something, I would basically just help out the website with whatever they needed. You know, set up abandoned carts, welcome sequences, learning copywriting, and a lot of this stuff I was learning on the job, as well. So I would take up work that maybe I wasn't really qualified for, but I knew I could work, I could figure it out, and then figure it out. And I really cared about clients, I really cared about what I was delivering. So I felt like I delivered Yeah, kind of good work in those early years. And then it kind of evolved from there. So I kind of started niching, because they'll stuff that I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed the SEO side, I really enjoyed paid marketing, and so focused on that and then started hiring help. Yeah, you're like deeper on

Michele Hansen 17:20
it, like you did, like you didn't go to college, or university, as you would say, and so like, but it sounds like instead, you, you basically got paid to get this education. And it's, it's amazing, honestly. And that you somehow you convinced all of these people that you are capable of doing these things that you didn't know how to do, and then you just learned them on the job.

Jesse Hanley 17:48
Yeah, a lot of that was also um, in the company that I worked for sales was actually a really heavy aspect of it. And so like, you know, trying to call up a bodybuilder in a retail store, and getting to buy a product to put on a shelf is a hard thing to do. And, and I would pick up the phone and call people at times, and I would pick up the phone and try and sell and I read sales books and all that. So like, the sales part, has served me probably better than any other skill as well. Upon reflecting on it now, I think the sales part was kind of key because I could I could sell people that I could go to help them. And then I would obsess about trying to actually deliver good products, and then they would recommend me to others. And then you put in the work from there.

Michele Hansen 18:37
So let's do a little roleplay then I'm going to be pretend to be a running a bodybuilding store in rural Denmark, I will put on my best, tough guy voice. And you're going to call me and try to sell me some stuff because I'm really curious to hear like exactly how you would approach that pitch.

Jesse Hanley 19:01
Yeah, sure. So like if I was calling you. So let's say I went bring bring, and and you picked up and you say, Hello. Yeah, so that and then I say, hey, like, you know, my name is Jesse. And I'm from such and such, let's say Jesse's distribution company, you'd probably hang up. What do you want? No, you just hang up. Frankie. Yeah. So then what? So then what I would probably do, and what we had was, we had sales reps that were actually physical in all their different states. And so what what we would do is build relationships with a lot of these retailers. So I would physically go into the store. And like introduce myself, maybe give them a whole bunch of free samples. And we would fly

Michele Hansen 19:47
from where I guess you were in Australia at this point. Yeah. So you would fly from say, I don't know. Australia to like South Carolina or New York.

Jesse Hanley 19:59
Yeah, to the actual physical locations. Oh, yeah, it says, visit them in the physical locations. So when I was selling, it was generally like, we knew who these people were. And so I knew a little bit of background about them. So there's a lot of personal chatter, getting to understand them. Mostly talking about personal stuff, to be frank or gossiping about the industry. And then the sales stuff is generally it's kind of like problem solving. So it's, what do you low wine? What are your margins like with this. So in supplements, generally, it's like a commodity business, you have a whole bunch of different protein powders, all the protein powders are often the same, most of them come from the same, like, if you follow the chain up, most of them come from a company called Glanbia, which is like in New Zealand. And, you know, all the whey protein comes like from a couple of main sources, they're just kind of like repackaged, and all that. And so often, you're trying to work out what are the margins, you're trying to work out how to incentivize the other person to pull your units off the shelf, because you kind of got a double problem there, you got to push your units on that, they have to do a purchase order, and physically put units on their shelf. And then you got to work out a way to get those things off the shelf. Because if they don't come off the shelf, after they've been put on, you may get a call later, and they're like, take your units back, they're going to expire or whatever. And you don't want that call. So you've a lot of it's like how to get the units on the shelf. That's going to be like margin, or net terms or stuff like that. And then how are you going to pull it off. And that's in quotes, marketing, but it's not really marketing, a lot of like distribution businesses that didn't really do well. Often thought they could like run ads in their stores or whatever to get units off the shelf. But it was never that it was always encouraging the manager in the store to kind of take a bias on your products versus others. And that's either better relationships, kickbacks, giving way more samples than all your other competitors. Because if they've got samples, they can give free samples to their customers, the customers try the product, they'll come back and they'll come like a free trial in a SAS. Like free trial, no credit card. So yeah, it is interesting, the sales process is relationship building, first and foremost, less kind of classical, like American sales, boiler room type stuff.

Michele Hansen 22:19
I mean, honestly, the more I have learned about sales and done sales myself, the more I have realized that yeah, as you said that boiler room perspective on sales is like maybe that happens in a small percentage of cases. But what you just said of like, you know, building rapport and getting to know them as a person, you know, establishing yourself as a like, real human being who cares about them as a human being. And then and just being curious about what they're trying to do, and figuring out how you can solve a problem that they have. And being flexible with that, like, that is is what sales is it's not the like, you know, pounding on the table, like, kind of, you know, well, I hear you talking about bodybuilding. I said, the tough guy approach, right, like, of sales, like that's just, maybe some people do that, but most of the time, it's just just talking to people. With,

Jesse Hanley 23:16
with with you, how much is your personality and like natural curiosity? And then like, how much is concentrated sales skill that you have acquired? And then I guess the third pillar would be like, experience just talking to a lot of people?

Michele Hansen 23:37
That's a really interesting question. I've never I've never thought about that. Um, I think it's, it's like, I guess I have a natural amount of sort of, like curiosity and enthusiasm for people. And for businesses, like, sometimes I think I went to business school just to, like, get to do a lot of case studies and just really enjoying learning about businesses. Like, I remember when I was I so I had an early job that was also quite formative for me where it was like a 10 person agency. And I learned so much because I just could learn new things all the time. And it was wonderful. But I remember when I learned that he, like annual reports from companies were public. And I was like, like, you know, and I was like, Oh, what, like, you can get all of this information and it's just on the internet and it like it like, it almost feels like sort of acceptable voyeurism in a way to me like I just like love diving into a business. And so I'm so part of it is just that really natural enthusiasm and curiosity about people and in businesses. Like I just genuinely find it interesting. But then a lot of it is also it's very targeted, right? Because like, I could go off in a million directions without curiosity and it And it's a matter of like, knowing what's relevant and what's appropriate. And what is, you know, as you said, asking about, like, you know, what the margin they're getting from something is or, you know, what drives sales and knowing that that samples, like, really understanding what makes that business tick in a way that is relevant to what you can solve. Because I think there's, there's like so many, you know, every business has so many different problems, and you can't possibly know about all of them, and you can't possibly discuss all of them, and you can't possibly solve all of them. And so it's a matter of, okay, how do I pull out what they're trying to do that's like, kind of related to what we might be able to solve. And so it's, I guess, it's a combination of natural curiosity, but it's very, very steered, like I and I, and maybe I have a sort of natural inclination for understanding to steer my curiosity because like, like, I'm ADHD, like, I will bounce all over the walls if I don't steer myself. And that's something that I have had to learn how to do from a young age. Yeah, so but so I mean, I just like, I just love it when I get to dive into something. And but I think it's also a sales it's like, you know, you talk about like, building the personal relationship, like, you can't get too personal like, because like, people have their guard up. And it's like, so how do I respect? How do I respect their boundaries and make sure that we're not you know, from a business perspective, like they're not sharing too much. And like, there's this kind of dance to it that I think I really had to learn. It scared me at first. But I mean, no, I definitely would say I enjoy. I enjoy it quite a bit.

Jesse Hanley 26:39
Yeah. Interesting. Oh, it's nice to talk about all that. It's a, I think, like, for me, personally, I think, the curiosity pot, I think I'm probably like, hit more heavily index than like the other ones. And I think if you know, your business, and like the problems that it solves quite well, then the curiosity, it just, I don't know it like scopes in a certain direction. So like, if I'm really curious, I'm generally curious about new people when I talk to them. And then just because I, I'm very fixated on problems that like mentors, also whatever, my curiosity just tends to follow a certain path. And the inevitable line is, like, using bento to solve a problem that they have will make their lives easier. And that's kind of like how I navigate sell stuff. I don't do prep at all. Do you prep conversations before them?

Michele Hansen 27:26
Oh, a little bit. I mean, I mean, I make sure that I understand like, some stuff about the business, of course, like looking at their website, you know, sort of looking at as much information as I can about them also. So we we don't do any outbound sales. I don't know. Do you do outbound sales? All inbound? Yeah. Okay, so we're so we're all inbound to so it's like all, you know, people coming to us who are already interested in what we do. So I think that's where that like, combination of like SEO and sales comes in, because they're already looking for something that we do. But then, you know, try and, you know, if we have a call, or if it's, you know, over email, just trying to understand as much as I can. But I mean, a lot of times you walk into something blind, like, you know, I mean, I've had ones that reach out to me, and it's just like, from a Gmail address, and they don't tell me what their company name is beforehand. And I'm like, Alright, here we go. Like, you know, let's see, you know, like, how I approach that kind of a conversation is definitely a little bit more careful than I would if I have more information, I think, quite frankly, I think it's hard for me to tamp down my enthusiasm and bubbliness and like, you know, put on like my business, Michelle phase, because the way I talk to a friend or talk to somebody who I'm like, just having a social conversation with is like, it's just it's just, you know, it's a different mood, you know, a different different faces.

Jesse Hanley 28:58
Interesting. Okay. Cool.

Michele Hansen 29:03
Yeah, I mean, and so, so back on your story. So you had this so this was 2015 You're in Thailand, you're starting to get all these these clients diversifying away from that first client because of their their business. And then and then you had the idea to like roll up all these tools, but it basically sounds like you were building as you needed for your clients to like, roll them up into a SAS.

Jesse Hanley 29:29
Yeah, so um, as I was, yeah. So to kind of like speed up the journey like to bento essentially, like I do consulting like one on one, I needed help. So I hired people online, built like a kind of full service agency found the full service kind of marketing agency to be quite stressful at certain point in time. So ended up downsizing, finding everyone that was in the team jobs within actual like clients, or, like, actually work because it was a stressful time and I worked really hard to find people jobs. So I could probably downsize. And then I had a core team of that could help me relaunch the agency as a product service. And we just basically did content marketing and leverage point was that we do content marketing by hiring writers in predominantly Macedonia, we had a really amazing, phenomenal team, and a really cool source of writers over there. And downsize the company by like, 90%, and then kind of rebuilt it from scratch. And whilst I was doing that, I was teaching myself Ruby and teaching myself how to code. So like, had always known a bit of code from like WordPress and Magento. So just like basic PHP stuff, or just like, you know, you install a plugin, it crashes the site, you got to get back up again. That kind of stuff.

Michele Hansen 30:46
No, WordPress.

Jesse Hanley 30:48
Yeah, yeah. Just just like, like WordPress handyman stuff. And then, uh, um, like I did, like, I did software stuffing in school, like, I, I've always loved computers. And, you know, could sling some HTML and CSS around. But I was really excited about, like, learning back end development, and like learning Ruby, and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, like, as I was kind of growing the agency, I taught myself Ruby and like Ruby on Rails, and then built a lot of, you know, shoddy products that you know, like to do your to do list and your Pinterest clone, I think I was the first app that I learned to build, which is like on one month rails. And then I, because I was doing so much SEO, I got a rank tracker, which kind of blew up on itself, because like, I didn't understand databases properly, like moderato wrong. It was a really fun project. And then eventually, like, I kind of had this like, idea of like, oh, I want to build something that just helps me with consulting, you know, wasn't around the agency, like I just wanted something that could at the time, it was people would do stuff on a website, and I just changed how the website behaves. You know, they've been to the website a couple times, say, welcome back. That kind of stuff. I just wanted to build that. Tried to go to myself, wasn't really too hard at it. And so, one year, I forget which year, I met with the lovely Andrew Cova in Tokyo. I had just prior to that, boy, all the assets of the defunct bento company in San Francisco. Do you listen to that, like what's the podcast was called, um, startups. Do you remember that startups podcast?

Michele Hansen 32:39
Was that the one that came out of? That wasn't when they came out of the major thing? Right. Was that it?

Jesse Hanley 32:44
Yeah, you know, like gimlet media and those like the StartUp podcast? Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember the like, featured the bento company on that? They did. No delivery stuff? Well, I think they did. Um, they went bankrupt. And then they listed all their social assets on websites on Flippa. And so I bought them

Michele Hansen 33:07
that they probably had a lot of backlinks and stuff, right.

Jesse Hanley 33:10
Like it did. Yeah, from pretty big VCs. Wow. Yeah. So it was a good it was a good asset. So got the domain got all the social links and stuff. And so I had that, and had a shoddy you know, version. But you know, I wasn't doing chaos. I was just doing everything right, then didn't really have something that took the anadrol that kind of like, totally my idea. And Andrew, at the time, like had the idea about bullet train, like he wanted to basically build like a Rails starter app. And

Michele Hansen 33:41
he's the founder of turn buster. External, yeah. Excellent. And then he sold that right. Yeah.

Jesse Hanley 33:49
Okay. And then, um, yeah. And so like, I met with him. And he's like, the nicest guy in the world. And I just, I've got so much admiration for him. And we're talking and he was getting excited about my idea. And I was getting excited about his idea. And I was like, Can I just become like the first customer? And then, and he's like, yes. And then I actually brought him on as the first engine, like consultant engineer for bento. So basically, like, I paid him for bullet train. And then he helped build bento on bullet train for me. So I took funds from the agency, and put them into Andrew to help me build bento. And that was like, the first couple years actually, was was doing that. And it was so great, because like, there's a large risk for me, because for me at the time, I was it was pretty expensive. And, you know, a good chunk of like cash flow, but it was like mentorship cuz I've never worked in a development company. Like I've never worked in a large company. I don't know software engineering practices, but I could just pay for that personal mentorship from Andrew. And so I could learn best practices from him. I could see how he does these migrations. I could see how he modeled out all the schemer for everything. You know, I could learn from him by essentially paying to build what I, what I wanted, and then over time, I would just take on stuff, I would take on responsibility, I would learn how to add a, you know, a column to a model myself, I would learn how sidekick worked and not add a new work or something, I would learn what a Ruby gem was and add new features. And just kept taking over the codebase bit by bit whilst also running the agency and doing consulting. And then, um, did that up until up until COVID, because I felt like I and Andrew had some other stuff. And then I think that that timeline is right up until COVID. And then I started just being like, Oh, I think I'm good from here. Like I felt my skills. Were starting to get pretty, pretty solid. So then basically took over the codebase and ran it from that brought on some help from a guy called colored. And then he helped build some of the more complex features out like a workflow automation stuff and all that kind of jazz, learn react off him. And then, yeah, and then me and call it a being just hacking like crazy the last couple of years. And then last year, I don't do me stop, but Laci salt sold the agency that I built. And then that gave me a very comfortable cash pile. And then maybe full time on to bento in June last year, June, July last year.

Michele Hansen 36:25
Yeah, I feel like you're like this incredibly energetic piece of clay that is somehow infinitely malleable and full of like, oh, we'll do this over here. Okay, well, then we'll do this next thing. And then we'll do this next thing. And like just sort of building all of these things on top of each other all the time, and adding all of these skills all the time. Like, it's, it's pretty amazing. And like, as a, like a founder, personality is incredibly powerful.

Jesse Hanley 36:57
Thank you, I don't know how to respond to that. This, this weird dynamics, though, like I play with that if I'm going to be like real Frank, like, I was always doing stuff, because I was always I never wanted to go home to not cause like, I didn't have good stuff at home, I just for some reason, didn't want to go back to Sydney. So like, I always wanted to keep traveling, I loved Asia, or I love to Europe, I like didn't want to go back home, essentially. And I love my family, I got a really, I've got a phenomenal relationship, both my dad and my mom, and my sister, he's now in Melbourne. But I think after like I left school in Sydney, like to go to Canberra, there was like no real reason, like, all my friends are abroad. And so, and I didn't kind of get that close University type thing going on. And so all my friends were abroad, and like I just didn't want to leave, you know, that I identity is maybe the word. And so I think I just worked really hard to keep going. And then also moving to Japan was I think a acknowledgment that like, maybe I need to slow down a little bit. Because I think I was kind of like burning out. Just working too much and kind of taking too much on which I still do in Japan, but it's a little bit easier to kind of get a grip on it. And kind of bounce back. But yeah, in terms of like learning stuff, and always doing new things. It was just because I just wanted to keep the adventure going. I wanted to kind of keep traveling, I wanted to keep doing cool stuff. And I could do cool stuff. I don't know. I could continue doing cool stuff. I do want to kind of go bust and then have to kind of go home. Does that make sense? Yeah,

Michele Hansen 38:37
that does. And I mean, I feel like we could keep talking about this forever. Knowing that so many of our listeners listen to us while they are out running or walking the dog, their legs might be getting getting tired, or their dog might need some water. So I feel like I have to force myself to cut this off. But you're such a fascinating person. Like you should write a book someday. Like, I just I like your background is amazing. And just like how you have been able to build these businesses. And I feel like we even barely scratched the surface on what bento itself does. But suffice to say you are a wonderful human being and such an impressive founder. And people should totally like follow you on Twitter. You're always posting stuff about what you're working on. And oh, is that the dog in the background?

Jesse Hanley 39:30
Yes, the dog I think is a postman coming. So maybe it's a good time to raise up. Well,

Michele Hansen 39:37
we're dog pictures and code and founder stuff and Japan and everything else. Go check out Jesse Haney on Twitter. Thank you so much for doing this today. Seriously, so great to have you on.

Jesse Hanley 39:53
Thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for being so nice. I was really good. Too super spontaneous as well, which is fun.

Michele Hansen 39:59
Yeah. All right we'll talk to you or everybody else next week Ciao

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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen 0:01

Hey, everyone, I am super excited to have a guest with me today. Jonathan Mark Well, he is a strategy consultant, and also the host of empathy deployed a new podcast about customer interviews, or rather, I should say of customer interviews. So he's doing example, customer interviews, so you get to be along for the ride as he improves his customer interviewing skill. He is also a longtime listener of this show, and was one of the people I interviewed about my book when I was drafting it. So you could sort of say this is a new episode. It's like longtime listener first time caller, sort of episode. So welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Markwell 1:49
Thank you, Michelle. It's great to be on. Yep. It's wonderful to, to join you after, after listening for so long.

Michele Hansen 1:58
I'm really excited to have you. And, you know, so one thing that we have talked about a lot, and it was a very big focus for you is the podcast that you're doing. But I think if you if you could kind of pull us back to like, how did you even get interested in the concept of customer interviewing? And like, like, how did you start working with that in your work with with your clients?

Jonathan Markwell 2:28
Um, I think, you know, I've been aware of interviewing customers for many, many years, maybe 15. I actually did a postgraduate degree I didn't finish, but it was in human centered computer systems. And so an element of the user or customer research would have been customer interviews, or the star I think was quite different from, from from, from your style. And, and so it's kind of in the back of my mind, but it's not, it's nothing, something I've been particularly comfortable with. So admittedly just avoided it a lot. But then, as I've worked with more and more software businesses, I found actually some of the the biggest aha moments for us. In the end, the biggest chunks of progression that those businesses have made are actually as a result of what we're effectively customer interviews, although accidental ones. And so the more I realized that actually, maybe if we were doing this more formal and more systematically, like I probably know, we should have been doing all along, we might have, you know, made may progress significantly faster, and spent a lot less money, figuring out how to make these different businesses work.

Michele Hansen 3:53
Yeah, it sounds like you sort of had these moments where things kind of sort of unexpectedly learned things that were helpful to you. And you kind of became hungry to get more of that.

Jonathan Markwell 4:08
Yeah, yeah, hungry. But then still not. Not enough to get into the habit of really doing it. Every every time the opportunity came up, where it's like, you know, maybe if we did lots of customer interviews here, we might get us past this, this problem that we that we currently have. And I you know, I guess it's sort of only from listening to the, this, this podcast, and subsequently reading drafts of your, your book that I'm like, you know, it really, it's not that hard. I just need to get into the habit of doing it. I mean, not to say it's not hard. It's just that come on, John, you need to do Just get in the habit of doing it and learn this stuff. Because all the materials that you've got no excuse now, it's all laid out in front of yours is the is the how you can do it. And, and by doing it often, maybe I'll be more comfortable doing it when I need to do it.

Michele Hansen 5:19
So I'm curious, so when. So So you started listening to the podcast, you sort of heard me extolling the virtues of talking to customers as I am wanting to do. And so from that point where you started reading the newsletter in the draft, like, like, at what point did you start interviewing people again?

Jonathan Markwell 5:44
I'm not sure I know, I, it was definitely earlier this year, I need to look at my calendar. I didn't do very many. But I did a few here and there, using the the some of the early interview scripts that that you shared. And, and there were people that I already knew, but I really wanted to dig into some of the their approaches to solving their problems, which are customer interviews, things be very simple to fit fit well, with, they weren't my customers, they're people that I was interested in, if there was a product, maybe for them that I could help them with. So it's kind of like I used it, use it there. And then it wasn't until I had one client where that I started working with earlier this year, to May, June time where it was like, you know, to really understand what's happening here with this, you know, pretty successful, profitable product, but there's not growing so well, we need to need to really understand customers and start talking to them more. So then we got a bit more rigorous. And, and we interviewed over the course of a month, I think six or seven people.

Michele Hansen 7:04
So what were some learnings that came out of those interviews.

Jonathan Markwell 7:11
The I think the main thing, I did most of these interviews with the founder of that product on the call with me, so he was observing. And the best part of it was really him hearing firsthand just how happy his customers were with, with the product. And so you know, not having much of that feedback loop. Because it's a developer tool that he provides great support for, and as a lot of conversation with people via chat, and email, but very rarely. voice or video communication. And so hearing that those those people read it get a lot of value out of that it was a great product, I knew it to be as well, because I happened to be a customer of his in in the past. That was as pretty wonderful. And then hearing how they described the situation that they were in without the tool before and the experience that they went through to, to come to the conclusion that they needed his product and the you know, in settled on it long, long term.

Michele Hansen 8:33
You know, I think when you're like when you have a product like this can be one of the most sort of rewarding parts about doing interviews is you know, you get a lot of support requests every day, you're used to hearing about bugs, you're used to hearing what feature requests and all these kinds of things. And rarely do you get an email and sometimes it had does happen but rarely do you get an email from someone that's simply just them effusively praising the product and talking about what they use before and how this is so much better than what they were doing before. And, and I think for us, who are you know, founders who were, you know, wearing a lot of hats ourselves, it can just be just so motivating, to too, and rewarding to hear wow, like, we really are helping people and they, what they were doing before does sound terrible. And now this is easy for them. And they're grateful to us. And then it kind of takes you out of that mindset of just sort of, you know, seeing an endless parade of, you know, help tickets or GitHub issues or whatever that is. It's being like, hey, like, No, we're really making a difference for people.

Jonathan Markwell 9:45
Definitely. Yeah, and I, you know, I know and I, people that have worked in businesses that are much closer to people. My agencies are where there's a high touch, sell. So much of the energy that they speak People get is from that interaction with with customers and feeling that that loop. And it's yeah, it's strange that so many of us that are more working in very low touch sales or self service situations where often the customers don't want to get on the phone that you miss out on that, that whole back and forth. And, and don't get that benefit.

Michele Hansen 10:27
Absolutely. So let's fast forward a little bit to your podcast because I'm really curious about, you know, sort of the caveat of your, or another caveat with the conceit of your podcast, rather, is that you are learning alongside the listener, which I love. And, and so I'm curious. So you so you've done about, you've done it, you've done a handful of episodes at this point. And I'm curious what you feel like you have learned and what you've noticed, in how you do interviews in that time?

Jonathan Markwell 11:06
Um, good question. All right, it's, yes, it's good to take an opportunity to reflect on that, I guess. portion of the people I've interviewed I know quite well. So I started off with people that I knew quite well. And and so I found it really insightful learning things about that. I've known them for years, and yet I learned about how they making some of their decisions, and they're quite different from what I what I had guessed, or I expected to learn from them by going so deep into one particular topic and, and really listening. The there's also a bit of a strangeness around these, this particular approach to customer interviews, I feel quite different always. Because I know that there's going to be other people listening and the other the other people involved do so I'm not quite as relaxed. As, as I am, or I have been in other customer interviews that are just being recorded for, for me, and people know, well, to listen to take notes on afterwards. But yeah, I just, I love the fact that I just, I'm learning new things about people that I wasn't expecting to learn from, from each episode. And as I listen more critically, to my, to myself, I guess in these when I'm listening back, so I do, I'm doing all the editing myself, and I'm listening back, I'm very lightly editing really, I've had to take my dog out a few times who goes berserk. No one's at the door. But I guess I'm listening just as much more so to my approach to interviewing with these ones than I have with previous customer interviews. And so I'm kind of more kicking myself about things that I didn't ask. And hopefully, you're getting better at remembering some of the things to add in later. Also, realizing that I I'm using maybe some things as a bit of a crutch. And I've had I've had some feedback from people that maybe I I'm using the same response very often and it might not be helpful, helping people open up as much as, as, as they as they might if I tried a little bit harder with my responses or made them feel a bit more natural.

Michele Hansen 13:52
What is that response that you tend to fall back on?

Jonathan Markwell 13:57
I think it's, um, that makes sense.

Michele Hansen 14:00
I mean, it's one of my books. That's sort of a Yeah.

Jonathan Markwell 14:06
Yeah, so I, but I've had a specific as far as you know, if you said this in that situation, then you might, they might have opened up a little bit more. And I've actually, I've printed out I don't have them here now. But the I have a sort of crib sheet for each episode where I've sort of made a very big font, a lot of the affirmation or responses that you suggested in their in the book, and that one is the top of the list and his biggest because it's the shortest phrase, I think. So it's so easy to go to is like, say that to keep the conversation going. And, you know, the the conversation does continue and they've you know, I'm yet to hit the the the challenge that I know clean spoke about a lot where the conversation just just feels like it's ended after, after 10 minutes, I've experienced that once with a with a customer where it wasn't really set up so well as a customer interview. But I've, I've not experienced it on the podcast yet fortunately.

Michele Hansen 15:16
I think it's interesting. I mean, you're doing this in public, which, you know, is so vulnerable of you to do that, and opening yourself up to other people saying, Hey, you keep repeating that. But I think it's so valuable, because, you know, when I was learning to interview I had, you know, people I was working with, who were very experienced in this, to give me that nudge to have like, hey, like, maybe tried to say this instead, next time, like, it's so valuable to have that. And you're kind of turning that on its head a little bit by having an audience that is telling you like, hey, so you said, that makes sense. So can we turn to this other thing? Maybe you should have said, Yeah, I can see why you would do that that way. And then let it hang. Right. Like, you're still getting those nudges, but you're kind of getting it publicly. And and I think it's really interesting, because because I, I wonder if you're helping listeners realize what phrases they might say, often, when they're talking to people, and maybe as you said earlier, you know, you're kind of a little bit more nervous, because it's in public. And so you're just kind of jumping to that first, easiest, sort of most convenient phrase, when otherwise you might be a bit more natural.

Jonathan Markwell 16:39
I'd say. Definitely, like, I, one of the reasons that I really felt that I need to make this podcast and I made it happen is that every time I thought about it, it's like, it's a podcast, I wish I was I've been listening to for the last 10 years, and I wish I'd been recording for the last two. And I just know that, you know, even if no one listened to it, I would, you know, I have more insight. And I'd be better at doing this thing that I find quite, quite awkward. And you know, 10 years ago, me or 15 years ago, me if I had this to listen to I would have you know, hopefully, yeah, gain gained from it both in terms of understanding good and bad ways of, of interviewing customers, but also having lots of insights into some real situations, which maybe I could kind of build products for, or explored more deeply.

Michele Hansen 17:34
Now worst case scenario, you have an audience of one person, which is yourself, and you're getting something out of it no matter what. Yeah. I'm curious have you interviewed your own customers or your because your clients customers? Because Because you work with a probably like a handful of different small companies, right, like in this sort of indie SAS business kind of space? Like, have you interviewed their customers? Since you started the podcast?

Jonathan Markwell 18:06
Yes, I've interviewed the good to my clients, I've done it we've so one I've already mentioned. And another, less formally, so it's more that we've got an opportunity to talk to someone who may become a customer who is a customer, and I tried to make it more of a customer interview than a sales conversation, because I think there's more to gain from it. And everyone's happy to sort of have me lead in and do that for most of the conversation, which has been helpful to, to understand. You know, what, what they're what they're looking for. Yeah, and I haven't someone asked me this recently. It's interesting, because the sixth episode of my podcast, I'm being interviewed by someone who's interested in my experience of interviewing people, so it's a very meta episode. So this came up a little bit in, in that episode, which is that I realize I've not yet not yet formally customer interviewed my clients, or members of my co working space, which is a sort of side business that I run into is a co working community in Brighton, but I've not actually used it in those two situations. Yet, I have more informal conversations with them and, and I work so closely with the clients in particular that I'm not it might be a bit awkward. I mean, yeah, I don't, but maybe I should do that and, and put myself through that situation even though it's a bit too from, from what I've usually use customer interviews for, in the past, I should say two or three of the people I've interviewed are actually members of the co working space. It's just I've been interviewing them about their use of other products rather than them. Their use of the of the co working space.

Michele Hansen 20:17
In the hardly 20 minutes, we've been talking, I feel like I've heard you mentioned in different ways three or four different times this fear of something being awkward. And it sounds like that's pretty front of mind for you, when when you're having these conversations, or whether it's an interview or even something else.

Jonathan Markwell 20:42
Yeah, it's not my preference to talk to people, I guess. And I, I kind of,

I like burying my head in code. Like, I will spend days at a time doing that. And you know, making conversations happen on a one to one basis with people I just, for some reason, struggle with, and I've heard other people say, say similar things. And it may be an element of my own neurodiversity, or divergence, which is, it makes me feel that way. Or it might be the weird experience of the last couple of years. But I'm, I'm, I, a lot of people say that I'm someone that has quite a wide network. And I'm known by lots of people. And so therefore I must communicate and talk to lots of people and be able to feel very comfortable doing that. But I've, I've compact my way to doing it by organizing events or, or running a co working space. And that means that mostly people come to me asking me questions, and that starts a conversation. And, you know, it's always easier if it's over a few drinks or something like that, that can take the edge off of a more relaxed conversation. But when it's when it's for mine is picking up the phone, or organising a zoom call with someone, it's just not something that that comes naturally to me or something that I look forward to doing. I'm even guilty of that with family. To be honest. I'm very bad at speaking to family regularly. Yeah, usually the conversations are started by them, rather than me going, going out to them.

Michele Hansen 22:35
I think it's very normal, you know, to feel this awkwardness. And, you know, I'm just thinking back how, you know, it takes inertia to start interviewing customers, it feels it to everybody, regardless of how much they like talking to people, it feels like strange and very different. At first, because it's not really a conversation, and you really have to be convinced that like, it's something that's worth doing. And I'm all the more struck by, you know, now more deeply understanding your sort of

your perspective on on having conversations with people in general, that is, it's really quite remarkable that it must, it must have taken so much inertia have been those insights you got from those accidental interviews that you did, those must have been so compelling, in order for you to take on this effort of learning how to interview them and dealing with that awkwardness like that the the risk reward ratio there like it must have been like the, the reward of it right like must have been that great that you were willing to deal with all that and then now on top of all of that, you have a podcast about doing this and I'm just sitting here kind of like amazed and in awe of the transformation that you have gone through and how much you have stepped outside of your comfort zone and and really pushed you're pushed yourself to do this despite it feeling so against your sort of, you know, normal habits and perspective on talking to other people. It's just it's, it's remarkable and I don't know if you have stopped to really appreciate yourself for, for that transformation that you've gone through.

Jonathan Markwell 24:51
I mean, it's very, it's very kind to say I mean, you know, the probably quite selfish forces. Well, here I've, I've, we talk about the pull towards doing it. Like, I've tried other approaches to research, and I guess maybe I'm not as good as other people at detecting strong signals of sort of a willingness for, for someone, you know, a demand for a product or service from, from, from reading, research or, or doing all the other work that is required to really understand an audience that way. I mean, I've learned from people that are absolutely brilliant at this, like Alex Hillman, and ABI and taking their course was a huge, you know, leap for me, in my understanding of how people understanding how people view the world, and how they may become customers have a product or want a product, or you have a willingness to pay for something. And that actually really helped were identify a problem, and one of the businesses I worked with, but it was ultimately a customer interview. So it's the combination of the two that actually brought out because the audience that we were working with, we didn't really find them hanging out online and, and talking about this problem online. And it was when we went into an office of a few customers of a CRM that we had built, and talk to them about it, and really listen not to the people that we'd sold to, but the people that were being asked to use this tool that they told us, you know, we really want the reports that come out the other end, we don't want to do all the the building of you know, creating this, doing this whole workflow in the CRM to get there. And that's the the quick reflection, it took a bit more to really under understand that. But that turned a business that had 10 customers that were hardly using the product, and was probably going to churn soon. And we're really hard to onboard into a business that now has 1800 customers paying between $99.04 $199 a month. So you know, pretty solid business with 1010 employees as well, high profit, high margin, you know, the self service, wonderful SAS that any indie hacker would love, love to have. And so that there's, that's a pool, for me is the, you know, if you, if you can understand a problem that an audience are having, and really find that, you know, have those moments where you can see, that's actually what their problem is, it's not what you thought it was, that can just be so transformational, and can be very financially rewarding. And also, you actually just get to help out to people in a way they want to be helped, rather than trying to give them something you think they they want.

Michele Hansen 28:03
You know, sort of it's sort of ironic, right? Because you said that business is a self serve SAS with over 1000 customers. And, you know, I think that is the indie hacker dream. And, but the irony of that dream is that in order to build a business that people intuitively understand, they sign up for it without talking to you, they have minimal support requests, they just pay you every month, right? You actually need to get out and really talk to some customers, and it doesn't have to be all of them. But in order to build that kind of a business where people can just use it and pay you and not need to talk to you. Right? Like, you really need to understand what is it they're trying to do, and especially in those early days figuring out like, what are the friction points? And what do they really want to do? And and so you need to make this investment and, and, and talking to people. But you can still have a business later on where you don't have to talk to them all that much.

Jonathan Markwell 29:10
Yeah, yep, definitely. It's yeah. So it's an in pursuit of the dream of having the wonderful kind of product business that, that I think many people listening to this podcast would want. That, you know, doing some of that talking thing and the high touch stuff, which is what you don't want to be doing long time is the way to get there. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 29:34
So I'm curious, we've talked a lot about your podcast and your journey with customer interviewing. What questions do you have for me?

Jonathan Markwell 29:43
So very hopeful that I could get get more of your impression on the on the podcast and my approach to to interviewing and I'm trying to phrase this right. Because I know that you you don't want to be The police have of how people do customer interviews. But why

Michele Hansen 30:05
did you the police? Roll? I'm going,

Jonathan Markwell 30:09
but But I'm curious as to how, you know, there's some standout moments in some of the episodes that you listened to so far where you would have you would have done it differently, or you would suggest I could try it differently next time. In a similar situation.

Michele Hansen 30:27
I think I mean, there's always so many different directions you can go in, right. And I think you're the I think about your podcast is that you're not really interviewing anyone with an agenda, right? So you know, you interviewed someone about? They were like, they're a customer of a VPN service. Is that right? remember which one? And you know, if I'm thinking about creating a VPN, or I already run that company, that's the one he uses, right, like my perspective on what I want out of that interview, and the questions I'm going to ask are going to be very different. And how you steer that conversation. And so I wouldn't say that you've done anything wrong. And, you know, there's a lot of cases where you ask the question that I really wanted to know the answer to, and it's so it's always like, really exciting, because then it's like, oh, yeah, I really, I was hoping he was gonna dig on it. And then he did, yes. And I am I am interested in sort of understanding, you know, I think what that journey has, like been like for you, and, and it sounds like you have been getting that feedback from listeners of, hey, you know, you were saying that phrase a lot. And, you know, try this again, or, you know, try this other thing. Um, you know, I've given you some feedback on audio quality and whatnot. But I think that's, you know, that's very normal, especially for the early days of any podcast, I mean, this podcast, like, I didn't have a proper mic for like, the first two months, because I didn't know if anyone was gonna listen. And then it turned out people did. So I got a real mic. So thank you for suffering through that with me. You know, cuz I guess you're you're also you're learning customer interviewing, you're also learning how to, like, run a podcast as well. So it's like, you're, you're learning to separate skills at the same time?

Jonathan Markwell 32:28
Yes, it's been pretty painful. I mean, I, I knew audio was a challenge. And so I got recommendations for the kit very early on, and got myself a decent mic. But the my main failure point actually on on there, so if anyone else is starting a podcast with guests on his, like, briefly, guests, make sure you know, figure out a checklist for them to, to, to make sure their audio is as good as possible, like, make sure they're wearing headphones, and little things like that, because most of the people I've interviewed haven't been on podcast before. And they don't have any, any any professional kit for, for doing audio recording. So they need a little bit more help. And that's helpful customer interview, as well. I've had some customer interviews, which where the audio quality has been really bad, and I haven't, which has made it difficult, after the fact, take notes and things and, and so that that sort of briefing might help with in those situations as well.

Michele Hansen 33:30
Yeah, I mean, I think that's kind of a sort of a trade off to you know, doing it as a podcast, right is because I've definitely had customer interviews where people are doing the dishes, they're eating, they're driving, like they're. So there was one customer interview where someone was in a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean, and I was like, Is this still a good time to talk? They're like, yeah, sure, it's fine. We're just we're pulling into port. So I got like, 45 minutes to kill, like, no worries, like, and I was like, okay, like, and you know, the kind of signal kept going in and out and like, that's, like, that's authentic. Right? Like, like, background noise is authentic. And distractions are authentic. And that's what you might experience but for a podcast, you know, you need it to be as as quiet as possible. And so I think that's kind of a, like a challenge of, you know, of how authentic do you make it right? Like, you know, in a movie, you'd never see anyone going or talking about going to the bathroom, right? Even though that's part of everyday life. And so it's sort of like that, it's like, okay, well, if they had their air conditioner running in the background, like, that's authentic, and I was genuinely having trouble hearing them, but like, how much of that authenticity do we put the audience there?

Jonathan Markwell 34:50
Yeah. Yeah. So same with edit. So I'd be interested to hear what your your thoughts on this is like It's quite common I think in podcasts now especially, it's fairly easy with tools like descript to remove arms and ORs. From a from a podcast, it makes all this sound smarter and I know I an awful lot. There we go. So I kind of I was messing around editing early on, I think you should I take these out, I went and did a version that was taken out, but it just felt so unnatural. I probably went too far with it. And I'm not a professional editor. So I'm not sure if I should do that with these interviews or not my just gonna give them a very light touch. So far, yeah, I

Michele Hansen 35:38
think on that I would I would err on the side of not editing and not editing out the hums and ahhs because they are authentic. And also, I think I think you sent me two versions of one of those early episodes. And when it was edited to remove the pauses and remove the arms and ahhs like, there were points where it almost sounded like you were interrupting the other person and I was listening to and I was like, that just doesn't sound like how he talks and how he would run an interview. And nevermind, that's also like in an interview, like the pausing is really important. Like, you know, if we had edited out the hums and ahhs and pauses in the sample interview, I don't think people would have quite grasped how important not pausing is, right, like the pausing is almost a, you know, a form of speech in an interview, because you need to let things hang. Um, and so, I would, I would veer on the side of not editing, even someone's dog barking in the background like that, that happens. And, I mean, even I mean for this podcast, right? Like we we were editing out hums and ahhs for a little bit, and then we kind of stopped because it's like, you know, people are listening, because they want to hear a conversation between people who are two people who enjoy talking to each other. And in any normal conversation, there's going to be pauses, we're gonna say like, and, and, and all those other things like, exactly right there, you know. But I think there's sort of this. For you, I feel this like push and pull between authenticity and listen ability. And like, where is that line?

Jonathan Markwell 37:30
Yeah, I think I'm currently have the conclusion that I'm going to keep it very light. And I'm not, I'm not expecting anyone to really listen to every single episode, it's more of one to dip into where there's an a person that's in a role that you're interested in hearing from or we're talking about a software product that you're interested in hearing a perspective on, and you might dip in and out of it. So I'm just going to keep going and not really expect people to be listening to every single episode, as I do, because it's maybe it isn't an easy listening podcast, like many others.

Michele Hansen 38:08
So if people do want to listen, where should they go?

Jonathan Markwell 38:12
So you can search in your favorite podcasting app for empathy deployed, or visit empathy. deployed.com.

Michele Hansen 38:23
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming by today. I really appreciate it. And I'm really excited for the wonderful resource you were creating with the podcast.

Jonathan Markwell 38:39
Thank you for inviting me on. Thank you, thank you for all the things that you've been doing over the last year that's inspired me ultimately to do this and been so supportive of me doing it and even provided the name for the for the podcast. So thank you. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 38:55
I guess we should make it clear that I endorse you using a similar name to my, to my book, but I think I mean, I did that that's one thing that people kept asking for was more customer interview examples. And even you reached out to me asking for that. And I was like, That's a great idea. But I don't have time, you should do it. And then a few weeks later, you're like, Okay, maybe. Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Jonathan. It's been it's been really great chatting with you and excited for more episodes of empathy deployed. Thank you.

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Colleen and Michele chat with Nick Zadrozny, Founder and CEO of Bonsai.

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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Colleen Schnettler 0:02
Hey, Colleen, hey, Michelle. Good morning.

Michele Hansen 0:43
It's been a year. Oh,

Colleen Schnettler 0:45
it has been a year. Yes.

Michele Hansen 0:48
2020. Part Two. Okay. 2021. Part two is coming to a close

Colleen Schnettler 0:56
eye. That is hard to believe, isn't it?

Michele Hansen 0:59
Yeah. And so I thought maybe this would be a good time to reflect on the year that has been and think about the year to come.

Colleen Schnettler 1:13
I love this idea. Wow, that's so cool that we've been doing the podcast long enough that we can have a yearly reflection. We've been doing it more than a year. I know as to how a year and a half. I love it.

Michele Hansen 1:26
No. So okay, so let's start out with simple file upload. And I feel like it's been a while since we've like actually talked about simple file upload. So you know, as, again, if this was a professionally edited, produced podcast, this is where the heart noises would be. Coleen, can you take us back to where you were in January of 2021. With your business,

Colleen Schnettler 1:55
so in January of 2021.

So in January of 2021, simple file upload was in alpha, I believe in the Heroku add on store. And so that means it was not yet available for sale. You have to get 100 users, maybe it's beta, you have to get 100 users of your product in the app store before you're allowed to list it for sale. I've my years Right, right. Yeah, yeah, no, that was okay. It was that was 2020 2020. I launched it. Yep. It was January

Michele Hansen 2:35
of 2020. That it was in beta.

Colleen Schnettler 2:38
Right. It December, January, it was in beta. Right? Yeah, because I have the date as of February 4 2021, I was able to make it available for sale. So the product has been available for sale since February of 2021. Wow. And this is December. And since that time, it has grown to I'm not 1200 MRR, which is very exciting. And it has been a I mean, this year has been a wild ride professionally if I look back on it, because launch simple file upload. Learned a lot while doing that. And almost even bigger than that in August of 2021. I quit my job to join the Hammerstone team. And you took

Michele Hansen 3:25
a job and then you quite registered like because you were clear Soltan starting out the year. Okay, the next couple years like,

Colleen Schnettler 3:33
yeah, I basically went on this roller coaster up, I'd been consulting for years, then one of the companies I consulted for for years, convinced me to come on full time with them. And I had every intention of that being like a long term gig. It's a wonderful company. And then I think I announced on Twitter or on the podcast that I took a job and I got inundated with offers, which was pretty cool. And good to know if you're job hunting, you should probably hunt before you just take one. But then a couple months later, I had this really unique opportunity to join Hammerstone Hammerstone stone is the company co founded with my buddies, Aaron and Shawn that's building the Query Builder component and get paid to build that out and keep the IP so I had to quit the full time job in order to do Hammerstone full time and right now I'm doing Hammerstone full time paid. Yeah, so that's what that's what's going on.

Michele Hansen 4:40
I mean, that's a such a journey for you to go from consulting. And then like this sort of like how much consulting do I need to do like and there's kind of period of time where you're trying to go kind of full time or, like more time on simple file upload. Then kind of Just life necessitated taking a job.

Colleen Schnettler 5:05
Yeah, I think that's accurate. And I think a lot of people who are trying to build their own businesses can appreciate this. Like, I am super, super excited for those people that can go all in on their business. But I have a lot of bills. And I moved. Oh, I also moved from Virginia to California this year, gradually, Geez, what a year, man. Yeah, so I think the decision thing for me was I launched simple file upload, and the consulting the thing about what I was doing with consulting as I had more than one client, so it was just this incredible overhead of context switching. And the full time job offered me the opportunity, I had negotiated a four day workweek. So it had offered me offered me the opportunity to only have the two things I was working on. And that would have worked out great. I think, if I had stayed there, that would have been, that would have been a great choice, too. But the Hammerstone opportunity just felt too exciting and too big. It's literally exactly what I want to do to turn down. And so I want to say join them in August, and I've been working full time for the client that is funding the development of the product, it actually gives me less time on simple file upload, which is a constant, again, everyone with a job and a side project can appreciate this. It's like a constant balance, trying to find the time for all the things I want to do. But if you think about Michelle, if we go back to 2020, I don't have any products, and I have so many products, like I don't even have time for the ball. Like it's amazing, right? multiple things, right? So it's been, it's been really, really, really exciting and spectacular. And one of our friends, Pete, he's written a couple books. And he uses this phrase, expanding your luck surface area. And the concept is, like, really successful guys will always say, Oh, I just got lucky. How many times have you met someone who's running a, you know, half 1,000,002 million ARR business? It's like, Oh, we got really lucky. It's like, Yeah, but luck played a part. But this concept, I really love this concept of luck, surface area. Luck played apart, but you did all the things to position yourself to take advantage of the opportunity when it presented itself. Yeah. And so all these things we do honestly, like the podcast and launching products, and speaking at conferences, all of those things, I think, really increase the luck surface area. And so I feel incredibly lucky. But also, I also took a lot of steps to put myself in the position Hammerstone, I think is going to be the thing, Michelle, like, it's we feel the poll. I mean, it is exciting. So, you know, we feel the poll,

Michele Hansen 7:53
that's interesting, like so, I mean, being on something that's like moving and people are like customers are really excited about it. I guess how do you like contrast that with the response that you get from simple file upload? Like, does that feel like a contrast?

Colleen Schnettler 8:11
Oh, yeah. And I think simple file upload meets a very pressing need people have on Heroku. But outside of that, it feels like pushing, right? Like it feels like and this is this is part of growing a business like I'm not, you know, it is what it is. But it feels like, there's a lot of competitors out there. And I have to convince people to go with me, small solo business vers go with, you know, Cloudflare images, or, you know, file stack or some huge company that has servers or they're just at their disposal. And so it feels like a lot of hustle. And I don't I mean, it's a great all of it is a great learning experience. But Hammerstone I mean, people are basically asking us, they are asking to pay us for this thing that is not even done. Like, yeah,

Michele Hansen 9:01
like banging down the door. I mean, there have product market fit there. But it's like, it's like very clear that like it's going to happen.

Colleen Schnettler 9:11
I mean, our Early Access, based on a couple tweets my co founder sent out, we have like 200 people on an early access list. Based on we don't even have a landing page for this thing. Like it's amazing. It's really exciting. So it's been really I think Justin Jackson has this great article, I think it was this week, he sent it out, although I don't know if everyone got it this week, but it was basically about like, your market is going to determine your success. Like you can have one person who's hustling. It's not necessarily it's not just how hard you work, like you can work really hard. But it's also your market is going to determine your success. And so I don't know it just feels like so many exciting things have happened to me this year is what I'm trying to say So and I think like the Hammerstone thing wouldn't have happened if simple file upload hadn't happened. Right? So these things compound when you think about like, getting you're putting yourself out there and and, you know, the luck going back to the whole luck surface area thing.

Michele Hansen 10:17
Yeah, I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. And like the whole thing about market like, I feel like that's that's something that that Justin hits on a lot and and valuably, so because, you know, there's a quote from a famous investor that I forget who it is. But it's, you know, if maybe it's Paul Graham, when a you know, a good product meets a bad market market wins when a good team meets a bad market market wins when a bad product meets a good market market wins. And I mean, you guys have like, you know, wind is in your sails, and you are just flying along.

Colleen Schnettler 10:59
Yeah, it's, it's pretty exciting. And just to clarify, I am still, I still love working on simple file upload, simple file upload is so much fun for me, because there's such a tight feedback loop. Hammerstone is still in this phase, at least the stuff I'm working on where it's big, and it's it's kind of, it's not, it's not done, right. So it kind of feels like a slog, because it's just kind of brute force and getting the work done. Simple file upload is a joy, because every time a customer emails me a question, like I can iterate and improve it. And so I still I didn't mean to I'm not sunsetting it or anything, like I'm still way into it. And I still feel like there's a way to do both right now. Yeah, I just, it's fun, like people are engaging more, I think, if you go back to founders comp, which was in October, my I was I came out of that really excited. And my goal for simple file upload was to really push to see if I could grow it a little bit. And I had hoped to get to 1500 by the end of the year, and I'm at 1200. So that's fine, right? Like it is what it is. But I think a lot more people are engaging with me than in the beginning. Remember the beginning, I couldn't get anyone to talk to me. Mm hmm. I feel like a lot more people are talking to me now. And so I have all kinds of ideas with what I want to do with it. And so yeah, I'm just over overflowing with ideas right now. So it's cool. I think it's

Michele Hansen 12:29
valuable as entrepreneurs to also have like a, like a safe little sandbox to play in to experiment where, you know, if, if you want to try something, you can, there's nobody telling you, you can't there's nobody's job relying on you, no, you're not doing it, of course, you have customers and you're responsible to them. So you can't, you know, just decide to take down your infrastructure for no reason. But like, if you want to cut the prices, 50% like, you can do that, if you want to raise him 50% You can also do that, like and you can just kind of, like learn as an entrepreneur. I mean, that's how I, I kind of loved having a full time job and a side project for a period of time because it was it was just like my safe little playground. And I think it was really, really valuable to have it as just a side project and not intending to go full time on it, because it just took that pressure off it and it made it a joy to just learn how to run a business without that fear of, you know, this has to pay for our mortgage, and like all of that kind of stuff going into that which just adds a lot of pressure when you're already when you're learning a new skill and outside your comfort zone. Like having financial pressure on top of that is really for a lot of people not very helpful mentally, like it can drive you but it's it's it's a lot of pressure.

Colleen Schnettler 14:00
Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe it for me like it's a nice side income right now. And I am learning I mean that is what's so cool is tight feedback loop and I'm learning so much how to talk to customers, I made this change to my onboarding email which seems to have made a huge difference. So stop me if I told you this but my onboarding email used to be asking questions and now it's so it used to be can you tell me why you're using simple file upload and I changed it to be quick tips to help you get started fast or something like that. And that seems to really have made a difference so all these little things I'm learning that I can apply elsewhere have been really fun like I'm really enjoying it.

Michele Hansen 14:44
So we talked a little bit about at founder summit of like whether you sell the business or not. We didn't I feel like that conversation was that that was a pretty strong no that you that you really enjoy it as at you know, as this little playground So I'm curious, like, as you think about this coming year, and you know, bearing in mind that humans are famously bad at predictions, and this year had so many twists and turns that you did not expect going into the year.

Colleen Schnettler 15:18
Oh my gosh, right here. I

Michele Hansen 15:19
mean, not not like you set a goal or almost like, like, do you have like an intention that you would want to set for the year of like? Like, what do you mean, it's a big question, but like, what do you want out of?

Colleen Schnettler 15:34
out of it? Yeah, that's a fair.

Michele Hansen 15:37
Sorry, is, you know, your is your founder journey? Like, is that taking you more towards Hammerstone? Is that in like, less simple file upload? And I don't I I'm starting to answer my own question. So like, just,

Colleen Schnettler 15:58
yeah, I understand. So yeah, right. The end of the year, let's look forward, oh, this will be fun, because then we can look at the end of next year and be like, Oh, how well did we align? Okay, so we're going into what? 2022? That's crazy. Okay. So my vision for 2022 would be, I am getting paid by the client to develop this, this Hammerstone product, and we agreed that I'd go until August, I'm sure that can go plus or minus either side, they're pretty flexible. So my vision for 2022 would be early 2022. We're going to start launching hammers stone in Laravel. We're gonna see what the responses there and kind of see what the support burden is. And I will finish out the rails component. While I do that, I still want to put time and effort into simple file upload. I want to get it to I just want to see what does it take to grow it to 2k? Like, can I get to 2k? What does that even look like? What I do? I'm not I mean, I think I want to see you know, what it's capable of? And yeah, if someone wants to give me $200,000 for it, I'll sell it today. But I think just FYI, I'm open to that. But I think realistic or open first. I think realistically, I have a product now I did the first thing is so many people at founder Summit. Okay, I don't know if you remember this at founder Summit, we were on the bus to go to the balloon. And one of the gentlemen on the bus named Matt was talking about how he's in the market to buy a SAS and someone was trying to sell him their SAS and they kept telling him it had really low MRR, like maybe 500 bucks. And they kept telling him, oh, there's all these opportunities to grow it like, you know, you can grow it this way. And he was like, Look, if that but but it had been like this way for like four or five years. And it just been sitting at two to 500 MRR and he said something that has stuck with me. And he said, Okay, if they can really, if there's really opportunity to grow it, why haven't they done it in the five years they've had this thing? And he said it in a way that made me think, Oh, you can just you can do things to grow your SAS like, it won't. I don't know it, it was this point that like, I have control to some degree over whether this thing grows or not. And so I want to put in the work to see I mean, maybe I'll I'll timebox that maybe I'll put in the work until I think in February, it will be a good review point because it'll be a year old. If I put in the work, what happens? Can I grow this? Can I learn how to use Google Analytics and which I don't still don't know how to use? Um, can I learn how to write better copy? Can I learn how to make landing pages that appeal to my users, like, there's so much marketing, I mean, simple file upload is a it's kind of like a playground where I can learn all this marketing stuff. And that'll help me in all products. But I think my goal would be, you know, Hammerstone is going to launch in the in the spring. And then I should be done in the summer. And then we'll be doing the rails launch and rails onboarding. So I think the preponderance of my time will be on Hammerstone. But I don't know about simple file upload. I don't know if I'll sell it. I don't know if I'll continue to grow it. But I'm not going to grow. I'm not going to sell it before February, so reevaluate in February. So I have no idea what it looks like. Yeah, but I think I think the idea would be to focus more on Hammerstone and grow Hammerstone to support me, so I don't have to consult anymore. That would be pretty sweet.

Michele Hansen 19:32
I think it's also worth like reminding that when you launch simple file upload, you wanted to have a product. Oh, yeah. You also like you also did not want to be a solo founder like you have always wanted to be part of a team and I think that's something that drove you to take that job was being part of a team and why you had considered previous job offers.

Colleen Schnettler 19:56
Yes, I was lonely. Absolutely. Yeah, very social person. And so I was absolutely lonely.

Michele Hansen 20:03
Yeah. And so I think it would make sense if like, you know, Hammerstone becomes, you know, the the focus and the thing that you really want to go for but and simple file upload is just this, you know, cool thing you have on the side. And when you have time you learn, you know, new marketing skills to make it grow a little bit, but like, it doesn't like, it doesn't have to be the thing.

Colleen Schnettler 20:28
Oh, yeah, I don't I don't know, with my current time and energies. I don't think it will be. I mean, I don't see this thing getting to 10 km RR in the next year, right. Like, I just don't I don't think that's the thing I think camera showed is going to be the thing. And this will be the side project that, you know, I can continue to dabble in, or I can sell or whatever. But you're right. I just wanted to have a product. I mean, if you look back at this year, it's amazing how far I've come. Absolutely. Yeah. So that's a my self. Oh, totally. I totally am. I'm really happy with with the growth. And the stuff that I did this year for sure. So let's talk about your year in review.

Michele Hansen 21:15
Gosh, okay. January 2021. Um, I mean, I guess the point to start, there is really in February, when I started writing the newsletter book, whatever I called

Colleen Schnettler 21:29
February, so good month for us.

Michele Hansen 21:33
Yeah, right, we have a lot like, we should go back and listen to those episodes. They're probably

Colleen Schnettler 21:37
I know, we totally should.

Michele Hansen 21:41
So, so yeah, so I started writing the book, as a newsletter, I didn't really know what was gonna go. totally consumed my spring launched it in July. It's crazy. And like, I'd say, there was like, you know, in the beginning, it was like, you know, 9010, like, mostly geocode do and then just a little bit of book and then towards, like, May in June, it was like 7525. And then I feel like August to October was like, almost 5050. But I think as we kind of close out on the year, and all that I'm really realizing that, you know, so like, I wrote a book, but I don't want to be a writer. I am a software entrepreneur who happened to write a book, and not a software entrepreneur who became a writer. And I think that's an important difference. And I feel like I've been struggling with this a lot of like, should I do more books stuff? Like, should I do like paid workshops and courses? And, like, should I go, you know, like, give workshops at companies? And like, Should I do a mini book that's like the how to talk to people talk things should I do podcast should I do like, or like, you know, have a podcast for the book, like showed you all this other stuff. And I could, but I just, I don't want to, and I really miss, like, my company. Like, I really miss I like, you know, working on JUCO do stuff and just find myself really missing like SEO Marketing, rather than like Info Product Marketing. I miss working synchronously with Mateus. Because I feel like so often we're kind of working in the same office, but not actually working together, because my head is elsewhere on books, stuff and whatnot. And, you know, even if there's no pressure to, like, sell more like, like, I feel like, and maybe this is a voice in my head or from other people, or I don't really know where it comes from, but it's like people like, you know, it's like, you wrote a good book that accomplish the goals, I had to teach entrepreneurs how to understand their customers, and, you know, you know, teach them that everyone has a capacity for empathy, and that they should, you know, they could have more empathy for other people and for themselves and teach them how to do that. And like get accomplished that and yet I find myself, you know, refreshing sales reports and being like, am I going to feel like I accomplished what I set out to do when I sell 500 copies or 1000 copies or 10,000 copies and and no, because the book already accomplished what I set out for it to do. It's a all in one place. I can send other founders to learn how to understand their customers and hopefully to learn more about you know, having empathy for others in themselves. I think I'll still do podcasts about the book, but I think going into To 2022 I would like to do more geocoded stuff and less book stuff.

Colleen Schnettler 25:08
Okay, that sounds like a very, it sounds like something you've thought about quite a lot.

Michele Hansen 25:17
Yeah, it's it's been on my mind. I've been intending to journal about it. I didn't actually journal about it.

Colleen Schnettler 25:23
Oh, God.

Michele Hansen 25:25
Like, I should know this. And I, I did open my journal like once. Last week, no, twice. No, I opened it twice. Okay. And then I just have I've had a lot of things I've intended to journal about. And then

Colleen Schnettler 25:42
I thought about Yeah, like, in my head

Michele Hansen 25:43
kind of like drafting that in my head. That's like, I don't know is, you know, I feel like I'm sort of at a crossroads of like, do I want to lean more into this, like writers stuff? And like, right? I just sat answers, just no. Adults, could

Colleen Schnettler 26:02
you figure that out. I mean,

Michele Hansen 26:03
like, I liked writing the book, I had so much fun. writing it as a newsletter, especially and getting feedback as I went, and then like, interviewing all the people who are reading it, like, that was awesome. Like, I love the writing process, even the really hard parts where I felt like I was doing major surgery on it every weekend, like completely rewriting it, like, but all of the, the work of being an independent writer, like, you know, and I feel like I sound like you're, you know, sort of a very typical indie hacker when I'm like, Oh, I liked you know, creating the thing, but I don't like, like, Yes, I know, I hear that, thank you. But I don't know, I don't have to sell it, like I don't, you know, it's gonna, if it's a good book, people are gonna recommend it. Like, I'll still go on podcasts, like, I'm still gonna talk about it. But that's basically the only thing I found that doesn't really drain me. Like, I feel like I died a little bit inside when I was sending those emails Black Friday week about Lady sale. Like, it's just me, like, it's not that it's not like, that's a valid marketing approach. And it works for a lot of people, but it's just, you know, we like we kind of talked a little bit about, like, founder business fit. Yes, and I've sort of been mulling over this idea about founder marketing fit, which is that, you know, we design our businesses, right, you know, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, but fundamentally, every decision you make is a design decision in the business. And, you know, it has to be a type of business that that suits you and how you want to work and what you're good at, and, but also how you market it, that has to fit with you too. And like, for some people, you know, sending out like, sales emails, and having a cohort come in, like, whether it's for software or for a course or whatnot. Like, that's how they want to do things. And that really fits with how they like to work. For other people like me, that's like, I really like talking to people and then looking at analytics, and then writing stuff related to what people need. And then like selling that way, and actually, you know, doing active sales, negotiating with people, I enjoy all of that. And I feel like with God, I have a really, really good founder, marketing fit, like, the way we market the product works. And I feel good about it, and it plays to my skill set. And I'm always improving that skill set, but like, it's, it's very much in my wheelhouse. And I just feel like the way of promoting a book and it's just not a fit for me. Like it's just not. And, you know, I could promote it in other ways. Like, um I don't, I'm just I'm just so drained. Like, by so much of it. Like, the only thing that feels drained me is like, you know, talking to people on podcasts.

Colleen Schnettler 29:16
Okay, so I felt this way about the book for a while, it feels like you're asking permission to not market it.

Michele Hansen 29:22
Yeah. Because I feel like to me, like you know, there was there was this point when I was still in the drafting phase when somebody who had who had bought the preorder of it you know, made a comment I think on like LinkedIn or something that like, the book was not only helping them understand their customers better, but also helping them understand how to be a better coworker and spouse. And like, that was the moment when I knew I was like, Okay, this book has achieved what I hoped it would achieve. And then some like my like, wildest dream goal here. And now I just need to ship it. But to me like the book is a success, if I have one person have that response to it, like, I don't need to have a million people read this book, I don't even need to have 10,000 Read it, right? Like it's and it's also like this is, this is a long term asset, right? Like it's not going to expire. You know, it's sold almost 1000 copies in its first year, which is apparently a lot better than, than most books both published and self published. Like this is a long term thing, I can't exhaust myself on it now doing all sorts of things that I don't need to do that don't feel natural or like a fit to me. But just success is just not the number of copies sold. And it's not like anybody is asking for how many I've sold. But I'm like, oh, like spilled in public thing. I should be posting like a numbers update every so often. And I do that. And then I find myself like checking the sales reports every day, and I feel so drained. And it's just like, it's just, that's just not success to me. Like I just don't. I just don't, I just don't care about like, that was just not I didn't write it to make money or to sell a certain number of copies. I feel like I've kind of been stuffing down my own feelings about what success for the book looks like.

Colleen Schnettler 31:38
Right? So my thought here is, why are we even talking about it anymore? don't market it. Just let it be? Oh, no, no, that that's the right thing. Right. Like I said, Okay, well do what you feel comfortable with. I'm you know, podcast. So

Michele Hansen 31:53
booked on a bunch of podcasts like, Yeah, I kind of kind of like take like a month off from doing that. Okay, but like, I like doing that. Um, but even like writing the newsletter, like, has felt like a burden. And I think it's because I've been doing all this. I've been doing all this talking about talking to customers, but I haven't had time to actually talk to customers. Yeah, I feel like I have anything to say at this point. I mean, and the point of the book was to get everything in my head out. Right, I did that. And so now I don't really? I don't know I, at least for right now. I feel like I don't have anything else.

Colleen Schnettler 32:34
Yeah, well, I think that okay, so you know me very well. I am a pretty logical person. Don't read horoscopes don't go to psychics, not really into that touchy feely stuff. And I am a firm believer, despite all of that, this is totally out of line with my personality. I'm a, I'm an I'm a firm believer of like going with your energy. So if you are dreading it every time you send out a Black Friday email, I mean, you you've learned this about yourself, you know that that's not the right thing to do. So I for you, and your, you know, because you have income from another source, you can totally do that you are in no way dependent on this book income. I think it's great that you've kind of discovered this about yourself and made this decision. And you're just going to do the things that, you know, bring you energy and you love which it sounds like is the podcast promoting and just let the other stuff go turn off the notifications? Who cares?

Michele Hansen 33:25
Yeah. You know, I think for like, for me, like, my theme of 2021 was the phrase soul nourishing, and I love that doing things that I felt really, really nourished my soul whether that's conversations with people who have similar values, or ideas or dreams, or writing the book, and kind of fulfilling that lifelong dream of writing a book was one of them. I don't know what 2022 is going to be, but I feel like it needs to be not just my soul getting nourished because as we've talked about, I've neglected a lot of other areas of I don't I don't know the word I'm looking for here but like, there needs to be a sort of overall wellness. Focus, I think a little bit more of a holistic, nourishing. Okay, going on. And that includes kind of like, yeah, you're such a California girl, respecting my energy, you know,

Colleen Schnettler 34:43
I know right? Come over, I'll give you an SAE Bowl trophy for breakfast now. I didn't even know what else it was before I moved here. Now I'm like, Oh, I buy that shit at Costco.

Michele Hansen 34:53
Yes, I'm gonna show up and you're gonna give me like crystals and essential oils. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Yeah, I know, I, you know, it took me like a couple of months for that phrase like Soul nourishing to kind of crystallize in my head and be driving me. So it's gonna take me time for whatever this new phrase is going to be. But like, I'm very much in my head, like, like I like I went to get a massage a couple weeks ago because like, I need to work on my stress, I need to lower my stress levels, I need to go get a massage. And the massage therapist was like, I need to get you out of your head and into your body because you are so much in your head. Yeah. And and so, I don't know. I don't know. I'll let you know when I figure

Colleen Schnettler 35:38
out what Yeah, report back. But so for you 2020 To tell us more about

Michele Hansen 35:43
to like I was so outside my comfort zone this year between being in a country and writing a book and promoting a book and like, all these other things, like I'm so far outside my comfort zone that I really just want like, comfort and coziness in my life. Like I want yeah, I want it to be calm and peaceful and quiet. Like I find myself missing quietness.

Colleen Schnettler 36:15
And so you think for you that you don't know what that looks like, but you think that probably means more time on geocodes to working with your husband. And just chill out? Like you're kind of acclimating you've been there a year now. How long have you lived there? Gosh, when did you go here a year and a half?

Michele Hansen 36:32
Like, yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 36:33
the podcast. I can always no, that's because we're not

Michele Hansen 36:36
talking to each other. It's like, we need a weekly appointment to make sure we talk to each other. Let's make it a public appointment. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 36:44
uh, but I Yeah, okay. I know, you're talking about calm over there. And I have, for whatever reason, something you said just started all these ideas going off into my head that I'm really excited about all of a sudden. So. Yes. 2020 To be a calm year for Michelle 2023 I mean, refer to comfortingly. arity Yeah. push really hard for a yearly arity. No, I totally get that. I think, right, you worked. I mean, you hustled like, whoa, this year. So maybe this 2022 is a year where you relax into what you have built and grown for yourself. I mean,

Michele Hansen 37:27
and I also, you know, did expand my luck surface area to quote peeking again. And, you know, so that means, you know, maybe there will be conference talk opportunities or other podcasts or something like, I'm open to that. It's just, I'm just Yeah, I'm just so tired. And, you know, I like, I like giving talks, but I'm not gonna, like hustle and create this, like workshop package that I can sell to companies.

Colleen Schnettler 38:00
Yeah, you know what? I'm not gonna do. Okay, can I say something? Because I want to get it on record. Okay. So, earlier, you said that you were looking, you know, how drainie I'm sorry, how the marketing for the book is really draining, and you want to do things that really, you know, bring you energy. Okay, this is only 2021. So I'm thinking like, 2025 and I know, I brought this up a few times. However, now that I have a business that looks like it's gonna be really successful. Dude, we are so starting an incubator. Like we're gonna have our own venture fund, and then we're going to help people build businesses. 2025 You heard it here first.

Michele Hansen 38:39
I don't know if it's a venture fund or like, it's like our own on profit income. I don't know what it looks like or something. There's gonna be a software social something.

Colleen Schnettler 38:51
I feel like this is gonna happen. Like you talking about your energy levels. That's

Michele Hansen 38:55
taken but software social something is Yeah. Gonna have coming at some points

Colleen Schnettler 39:03
in the next 10 years. The future in the future. Yeah. Okay. I know, I brought it up before I just when you were talking about excitement. I was like, Oh, dude, this is this is something we're gonna maybe do someday. That'll be a good retirement job for me. Yeah, totally. Right. I mean, maybe it'll be years 20 years. I don't know. Someday. So that sounds good, though. I mean, that sounds like for you.

Michele Hansen 39:29
In my backyard those are my retirement you drink gin. Yeah, like dreamed about making a little like, gin distillery My oh my gosh, are so funny on our farms smell like they smell like apricots when you bolt them. And then I'm like, Oh, Nick, amazing. Like pine. Apricot. Gin. So I don't make it now. But that's again, retirement dream

Colleen Schnettler 39:48
retirement dream. Yeah, so it sounds like to sum up your money 52 Oh my gosh, to submit for 2022 It sounds like you are looking for a year of finding balance. Yeah, and all the things balance. I think I am looking for another hustle year. So 2022 is going to be another I know 2021 was a hustle year for me with Hammerstone launching and simplify, upload kind of not sure what I'm going to do with that. But 2022 for me is another hustle year I think

Michele Hansen 40:26
2020 was like a hustle year for you as much as like a ping pong year because I feel like all over the place kind of all over the place like both like physically and yeah, work wise. And like, I would love to see you really, really grow into this role of being a founder of Hammerstone. And like, and, and bringing that to life and helping that blossom and really leaning into that because I think you have so much more to discover about yourself as a founder.

Colleen Schnettler 41:04
Yeah, totally agree. I love it.

Michele Hansen 41:06
Cheers to 2022 Cheers to

Colleen Schnettler 41:09
2022 Oh, my goodness. All right, well, I guess that will wrap up this week's episode of the software, social podcast, Happy New Year to all of you. We'd love to hear what your goals are for 2022. Or if you want to hit us with the 2021 recap. That's always fun. We love to hear everyone's stories. You can reach us on Twitter at software slash pod. Talk to you next year. It's no my favorite joke. Remember when you were a kid and used to make that joke? Like like talk to you next year? It's still a great joke. Okay,

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Michele Hansen 0:36
Hey, everyone, welcome back to software social, Colleen and I have a friend joining us today. We have Josh whoa here with us. Josh is founder of Referral Rock, which is referral software. They've been around since 2015. Also in the north, a million air club and have 16 employees. And Josh is also co host of the podcast searching for SAS, which actually kind of a similar concept to our show with a sort of an experienced entrepreneur and then somebody who's transitioning from consulting. So welcome, Josh.

Josh Ho 1:20
Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, we're been a longtime listener and obviously have known you too for a while and are definitely our podcast that Nate and I have or was totally inspired by you guys. So it is extremely similar. But we've sort of diverged and done different things since then. But the concept was,

Michele Hansen 1:39
so we're so excited to have you here. So about Gosh, what was this like a month or so ago when we were chatting with Twitter on everyone about like, what, what should we even talk about on this show? And what do you find interesting. And something that came up was people were interested to hear more about some of the challenges and struggles and operations of running a larger business. And so we're gonna kind of dive into one of those areas today, which is something that I spend a lot of my time on actually more time than I do customer research, which is sales. And we're specifically going to talk about enterprise sales, since I feel like that can be kind of this like, I don't know, sort of like a scary topic for people to think about. And so we thought it'd be kind of interesting to sort of talk about how you do sales, how we do them. And then Coleen can kind of ask us questions about it. That sounds good. So too, so I guess I'll kick us off calm? Or do you? Do you have a question you want to start with? No, go ahead. Um, so can you just like, give us a sense, like, in a, like, like, how does an enterprise deal for you usually starts? Like, are you guys doing cold outreach at all?

Josh Ho 3:08
No, we don't do any cold outreach. And maybe it'd be helpful. How do you define enterprise sales? Because I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing as well. Are you talking like, like, sighs of customer size of kind of deal or, because like, we do all kinds of sales, and I would segment a certain area that I consider more enterprise than our some of our other types of sales as a SaaS business that has, like, the two three plan. Normal thing on the pricing page plus the

Michele Hansen 3:38
Yeah, I guess I define it and skipping to define it, because people define it really different ways. For me, it's when there's a custom contract involved, which usually means it's at least $10,000 a year, but usually a lot more. I know, you know, if you're talking, you know, venture back startup, like enterprise deal is like, you know, minimum 50 100 $200,000. We're not usually in that range. Most of our what I what I term an enterprise agreement, which is, you know, when you're dealing with, you know, five different departments on the customer side, they're a huge company, you're doing extended contract negotiation, like there's, you know, it's not just somebody goes to the website, clicks it and buys it, and then they use it. Right, there's more involved on our side. And usually those are in that 10 to 50,000 range for us for annual revenue.

Josh Ho 4:42
Okay, yeah, yeah. So when I classified that so it is that ask us where it's outside normal rails have the quick, you know, click to buy.

Michele Hansen 4:51
Yeah, like not self service. Basically, there's something special that has to go on

Josh Ho 5:00
Sure. So yeah, to answer your first question we, we don't do outbound. So we do all inbound, we have a strong SEO footprint. So we a lot of inbound requests that fall into two camps, we usually take them if you these are, quote unquote, are like lead magnets, you can either sign up for an account, or you can request a demo, at this point in our lifecycle. We are we attract people onto our site. And then essentially, there's like a 5050 split, we kind of, we have a philosophy on it now, which is saying, like, let a buyer by how they want to buy. Because you typically see product lead growth, like everyone funneling people to, you know, trials or to sign up. But we try to clearly say you have two paths. Because once someone determines that they do want to talk to someone, you know, it can easily get into the enterprise space, or it might just be like you were saying, a person that requires more of a relationship based sale, where they are talking to their internal champions they need to convince, they still need to go through procurement and all of those things. So for today, we can mostly talk about once they get into that demo track for us. And what happens is they can for us, some of those customers can fit into a standard offering. So like our, it might be an $800, or the $1,200 a month type of thing, usually paid annually. And on the first level, we sort of try to standard out bits of it, where it's like, and we can probably get into more detail of this. So is it our contract? Or is it their contract? That's like usually the first type of thing. And usually, if it's a scoped plan, we try to keep them. And in a regular price plan that isn't like, Hey, I have, you know, I have a million people I want to add to your form versus the 50,000, or the 100,000 kind of ones that are

Michele Hansen 7:00
a little interesting. So you actually you will start out at the point of using their contract because like, I mean, yeah. Okay, okay. I'm gonna start like, I mean, yeah, sort of count the number of times we have relented and use the customers contract with an extensive, you know, Addendum and scope of work on our side. Yeah.

Josh Ho 7:27
Right. Yeah, we try to keep them on rails of our stuff as much as possible, right, like whether, like first level one is just click checks to our checkbox, the checkbox that says I, your terms of service, on our website, level two is our standard contract. And then level three is like, they might have some alterations, our standard contract to which we already know, in scope, like, these are the things we're willing to bend on. So it's almost you have to build in or you know, what stuff you're going to be like, yeah, we'll give you that one type of things. And then yeah, level, I think I was on level three, level four is, okay, bear contract, but it is, like you, that has only happened a handful of times over the course of our of our existence, we and we fight like a lot, try to keep it in our other stuff, just to make it faster, because we don't have a large team, we don't have a I don't want to waste, you know, half of their contract on lawyers to try to get this out or get myself into into trouble agreeing to something that I clearly don't know. And I might have to use a lawyer just

Michele Hansen 8:42
it sounds like our sales, and like purchasing process is like really, really similar. Right? Because like, we are also entirely SEO based, we don't do any outreach. Everything is in its entirely inbound. And then yeah, that first level is, you know, can they can they click to accept the terms on the website and use an off the shelf plan and you know, pay with a credit card, like, great. And then you kind of go to the next level of okay, maybe they need the contract, but they don't need any modifications, but are okay, they need a contract, but then they do need not modifications. And then yeah, getting sort of more complex as you go. Which I feel I don't know how common that is, like, I feel like it's maybe sort of a I mean, it's definitely a very, like company, one style approach where we're trying to make the process as efficient as possible. And where our goal is not, you know, maximizing the revenue from every customer but it's like, how can we you know, get people to something that works for them. That doesn't take up too much time and resources on our end so that we can you know, get more customers it's very much sort of playing a volume game, rather than one where you're, you're trying to maximize revenue per customer.

Josh Ho 9:56
Yeah, I agree with that. It's just I even though we are You know, what it was for 16 people or so or more than 15 At this point, it's mostly because it's a diversity of skill sets versus necessarily like, Hey, I've got like all these people working for me, it's, it's because we have like a customer success area, we have people dedicated to content marketing we have, we do have salespeople. And we do have, you know, developers and product managers and QA, things like that. So there is it's more of, for us that size of companies stuff is more about like, clearly dividing roles and actually having some specialists because I can't, in the early days, I was doing it all and then way our business scaled was through, okay, I need to add add people to this. We aren't as as I would say, like I know your API based types of things, but there's, and there's probably an immediacy to the value someone can get with using your service. For us, it takes more onboarding, it takes people to set up a campaign set up a referral program, set up their rewards, all of those pieces require a lot more hand holding. And some people come in thinking, Oh, I'm just gonna click this and start and it's like, well, Oh, you want to set a reward, oh, the reward, your good rewards actually, like resonate well with your customers. So it may not be $5 off or a, you know, or like a discount or something like that. But it might be like a mug, it might be swag. So it's like helping people kind of understand how to use it. So there's like a longer track in there. That requires more people to be involved. So we've tried to keep it as tight as possible back to like, the contract and everything, knowing we're building a SAS and building it for the long haul. I'd say right now, it's everything about like, how can we scale it? How do we make it less complicated to then as we do add customers, we don't necessarily have to add staff in addition to it. So we've been pretty diligent on forcing forcing functions into our contract. Oh, that's great. You want to throw money at us? But you know what? That's not what we do. We don't do custom damn sure you get there's no custom def. Oh, we had this we can add on. Yep, exactly. So it's like we push back hard. And I'd rather continue to build a product. This from Shopify as approach to if you've ever heard, there's a great podcast they did a while back that I listened to, like, they only recently got socked to, like only, like, within the past year or two. And I was like, blown away by everything that especially from an enterprise standpoint, because they, but their philosophy was like, okay, great, we're just gonna keep building the better product and to make it so that the internal champions like we're the only option for them. So it's like, they could jump through hurdles over SOC to over contracts over things like that, because they just made a strong feel like you know, what, we're making a, almost a philosophical decision that we're not going to jump through your hoops, you're going to jump through ours. And we will sacrifice the dollars that could come in, and that's okay. And it took them I don't know, however many years before, they actually got, like, soku compliance, and it was like, they only did that last year. And, like, I'm considering that, but I don't really want to at all, like that just seems like a big waste of time or a big like, headache. And I'm like, well, could we pull that off to where our stuff is so good, or is so much aligned that the Intel champion is going to battle? Lawyers inside battle their bosses and things like that. So that, oh, just make an exception for us. When

Michele Hansen 13:42
sock two has come up, we have been able to, you know, have have the champions help us get around it. Whether that's because the so it's funny, sometimes you see those things? Like, it's a really hard requirement. You're you then you just are like, Yeah, we don't have that and they're like,

Colleen Schnettler 14:00
Wow, your sales process as it sounded like it was like early days,

Michele Hansen 14:03
clearly a no go without socks, you know, you're saying it's not important, or what it actually is important. So, um,

Josh Ho 14:12
if I go back all the way down, I was doing that it was started out with me having no idea what sales was. So it started out with me just thinking I was all I was doing was helping people on like chat support, and then I'd be just frustrated and annoyed because they would it would just I'd be sitting there like typing back and forth. And I'd be typing while they're typing. And you're just like, I just want to show you versus trying to have this asynchronous chat conversation. So it started with me just being like, do you want just share, do a screen share? I think this is pre dated zoom a bit like where's zoom was prevalent. It might have been like, oh, let's do a WebEx or something I don't remember. But we'd get on a call and then I'd basically kind of help them. So that was like very early. stage one, just still having people coming in bounce using the app. And once I started talking to people kind of got, oh, there's a lot of other questions. And they also figured out, they did need the manual help. And it wasn't just something that they could just sign up the app for so. And quickly after I realized how many more people were buying after I talked to them, and I'm like, oh, that's, that's interesting. Now, they actually know more about what we do, and how to set it up. And all of these things, and oh, lo and behold, it's like, half of the people bought, it's like, Oh, I gotta talk to more people, it just kind of was this natural, ergo, I want more sales, I should talk to more people. So that was that that base level finding. And then I went through trials of trying to find salespeople, I won't divulge too far into that side of the story. But eventually, we I found someone that joined me, and this is like, after post revenue, we were doing well enough to pay for itself and, and pay for a couple people. And I brought someone on slowly to like, slot into that into that spot. So I had a an early I would call him like a partner. Now, not quite if you go by strict definitions of founder, you know, he probably joined about two years after I started. So this was 2017. And he kind of took that over and level one was just slotting in and doing what I was doing. And then taking it further because he could be full time on it. So he was doing that he split up our customer success area, because naturally once people bought that it's like, okay, they need onboarding and support and all of these pieces. And then over time, we grew that to, to have, you know, like two salespeople under him as the inbound engine kept going, as we kept building out more SEO and trying to what I call, like being in the conversation, I think you and I have talked about that before from a marketing standpoint. And now, if we're speeding up now, tour now, like we talked about that whole, like letting buyers buy how they want to buy, and we started as our product approved, we could start steering more people directly to that, to that split between start in the product or start to talk to someone. And since then, we have also added another layer of type of salesperson where we've pulled from our CS team who is extremely experienced with onboarding. And actually just from a resource constrained perspective, we're like, Hey, these are really helpful people that know a ton about programs. So instead of a typical salesperson trying to get someone over the line, we're like, Hey, we're gonna do these demos, we're going to do these like one quick call consultation, almost like back to the roots of where I started, and then not any follow up, or just doing very more follow up. And we call that like our, like buyer assist process versus like a sales driven process. So tracking back when we had the sales one with two salespeople. That was like a traditional commission based model, like, like you have a salary and you have some commission, but over the past year, we have spun up a new like that, that middle area where we have a CS person that just does group calls just as really helpful. And, and has maybe one call with people and and and some follow up.

Colleen Schnettler 18:26
Nice. So this is a little off topic, but I'm intensely curious about what you're you have 16 full time employees. So the transition, where were you at your developer?

Josh Ho 18:40
Ah, yes, I was I started I built like the initial versions. Yeah. So I come from a development background and started with that. So how

Colleen Schnettler 18:49
did you learn how to manage hire, even like salary? Like how was that building it out? I mean, what was that transition, like for you going from software to people business stuff?

Josh Ho 19:03
Well, I did have a tip into kind of some business stuff previous to starting for rock. So I did have like some software consulting businesses with just just myself not large. I had maybe like two people, maybe two other developers working for me. So there's kind of that I could do my taxes, I can do all those things. So it's, you know, those those I do refer back. And then even pre, the consulting, I was a developer at another company and then worked my way up into be like to manage manage developers. I think the last role I had that was not paid by myself was technically I think I was the Director of Technical Operations at a benefits administration company that we built software for it was like a first step there. So I kind of worked my way over more towards the business side after after, like leading the dev teams and different stuff like that. So So anyway, if that helps,

Colleen Schnettler 20:02
just like, it just seems like a big transition.

Josh Ho 20:05
Yeah, I mean, I guess there was a lot, I'm probably, whenever people see me or meet me, it's like, I'm probably, you know, I'm older than I look with my Asian jeans, I suppose. But there's a lot of that. And then also, we've grown organically, right? So it wasn't like, boom, all of a sudden, two years into referral rock, I have six people it was, you know, people, if you talk to other founders that have been through this, it's, it's like, okay, first you are managing two or three people that were extensions of yourself. And then, you know, the next big step is like, Okay, how do I now perform this magic trick to where we have, like two people working in an area and person's like, kind of the lead and not really a team? It's like, where do you go from this flat structure into sort of a more hierarchical structure to where you have managers or you have leaders, and all of that has just taken time. And each, even each department or area that I've talked about, had gone through different parts of that, like, marketing was pretty much like me and one other person for a really long time. And then, like, I talked about how the sales and customer success area grew. And that one, you know, we sometimes we had to push forward to grow out of needing redundancy, and like coverage of time and things like that. And then, you know, another area for Dev was like me bringing on a tech lead. But that was actually I brought on my first developer, because I brought on a first developer under me who was just helping me execute. And then later on, I brought in a tech lead to kind of start managing the team and build out kind of more of the like, get to handle more developers to manage the other developers to put some actual structure in place versus, you know, me just get a push.

Michele Hansen 21:55
I have a question about something you mentioned earlier. So you mentioned how when you first started trying to hire someone to do sales, it sounds like it was a little bit rocky and took you some time to hire that the the person who ended up becoming a partner and becoming a really good fit. And I feel like it's worth drilling in on that, because I learned recently that that's a very common experience. I was talking to Harris, Kenny, and well, I don't know if it was at founder summit or is on Twitter, it all blends together at this point. But um, you know, he runs a sort of sales as a service kind of thing. And he was saying how most of his clients have several failed sales hires before they come to him. But it's like, it's like really hard to hire a good salesperson. And, you know, I recognize that you may not you may not want to dive too much into that sort of the specific situations of what happened with the people that didn't work out. But I'm curious, like, you know, is there anything you wish you had known about hiring your first sales person? That, you know, the the that took you some fits and starts to figure out that maybe you wouldn't have had to go through that if you had known it?

Josh Ho 23:16
Sure. I mean, that I'm perfectly happy to talk about it. I just feel like this is one of those topics I've talked about a lot in the past, but obviously on this podcast, but perfectly happy to dive in. What the first subtracting back in that part of the story. It was like after me. And that was the whole like, I didn't think what I was doing with sales. I just thought I was just being helpful. And I had that mindset of like, oh, like, like, the guy at the car dealership. That's like a sales guy. I've worked in organizations that have used, you know, that have had salespeople, and it was like, they go to conferences, they do this Patagonia, you know, this, like, like, Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a salesperson. I'm just like, I'm just like, I just built the product. And I'm helping people like that's and and so my first hire for that sales role. Pre the one I found that I said, that had worked out very well, was a person that looked and talked to like a salesperson, and, you know, they're like, Yeah, I could sell anything like I sell to SMBs. I think, if I recall her previous work was she would do SMB sales, she would go to restaurants and like, go to the restaurants and talk to them and build relationship Build, Build candor, build rapport, and, and you know, sell the product. So that was like her tact. And I was like, Okay, great. Let's that's your real salesperson. Let's give you a shot. So I like redirected all the demo requests to her. And I recorded myself doing some and then I kind of handed it off to her. And honestly, like, it was just what I realized what I didn't realize was how large gap it was in terms of her needing to understand the product to relate it to customers and all of these things. It was like, oh, okay, you, you really don't know much about the product. And I tried to explain it to her. And we went through all of these types of things. So, one, she was a traditional kind of salesperson now, could she have been successful if he had the right, like onboarding in place, or it wasn't just like, hey, you're just gonna slot in replace me, and this is what I did. So kind of just do what I did, or go do your thing. And it, there was like a large gap. And that was probably the biggest mistake. for her and for myself, just not knowing, like, just what that what, where, where the transition point really was. And then, when I did find the other person, it was more of the entrepreneurial type of person. His name is Mike. Oh, by the way, I don't. It's easier to probably say names since this person in that person. So Micah, who's still with me, you know, he came in and the biggest thing he kind of joked about was like, it's funny, if you ever meet him, he doesn't have like, much of a, like an ego, per se. But one of the first statements he said, he's like, I could do everything you could do. But Sal, oh, no, sorry, but Bill, but write code. And I'm like, okay, like, all right, like, let's say, you know, here's, here's the challenge, you know, go ahead and just hear some recordings and go wild. And the biggest thing he could do was be consultative and be adapting to the customers. And that also, that first thing of like, he knew he didn't know and would happily be like, I don't know, let me find out. And those were some of like, the early parts of the trades that he was just looking to relate to the customers look to bridge that gap between them. And I think the biggest challenge is like, that's not what I look for initially, like the whole thing. The other salesperson, I was like, she sounds like a salesperson, she's done a sales job. And coming into that realization that, like his approach was much like mine approach. And I was like, Oh, this is selling, this is like consultative selling, this is different. This isn't ramming something down someone's throat, and all these things, and this can work. And this can scale outside. It

Michele Hansen 27:18
sounds like it was important for you to realize that you the salesperson, I mean, in talking about our business is to like the salesperson not only needs to align with how you conceptualize sales, even if you don't have a particularly strong sales, you know, strategy or philosophy yourself, right. But also that you know, how your business is set up, right? Like a business that's very SEO based, that's entirely inbound is a very different business where then one where you've got to go out like pounding the pavement. And it sounds like the approach of mica is really one that just kind of jived more with the business model, as it already was, rather than kind of pivoting to more of an outbound approach. And and it being difficult for you as a manager to like really support that person in that role, too, because it because it just kind of wasn't aligned with with how you thought about just the concept of selling in general.

Josh Ho 28:19
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think it makes me like what as you're saying, it was like, I didn't know that. How important that the alignment needed to be at that time, because I thought sales was this black box, and I need a black box. Right. And so I think, once I did come to terms with what I was, what I was doing, is is a way of selling and again, that mica was in alignment from a like a cultural standpoint, from an approach standpoint, all of those things, then it kind of that was more important than the actual like, what, what I've been done the things I didn't know that I thought I didn't know if that made sense.

Michele Hansen 29:03
Well, thank you so much for coming by today. Josh. It's been really interesting talking to you about scaling up sales. We kind of set this up that like Coleen could ask questions and then we just talked together. But if if anyone has questions about for either of us about doing sales, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter. Now we'll talk to you again next week.

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Michele Hansen
Hey, Colleen,

Colleen Schnettler
good morning, Michelle.

Michele Hansen 0:45
How are you?

Colleen Schnettler 0:47
I'm doing great. How are you?

Michele Hansen 0:49
I am I'm working working through stuff.

Colleen Schnettler 0:52
Okay, can I start with the funny story? Sure. Our listeners. Okay. So if you listen to our podcast about Michelle's burnout, you might remember that I suggested some very dramatic things, like quit your job or move to a different country. So the next morning, Michelle texted me and told me she went for a walk. I made me laugh, because I was like, yes, you know, that's a good first step going for a walk.

Michele Hansen 1:22
Yes, I actually, I did go for a walk that day, because it was sunny for once in Scandinavia in the wintertime. So you got to take advantage of that. So yeah, so I, I just want to start by saying I like I've gotten so much support from so many people and so many stories from people about their burnout, or their spouses burnout, or just feeling really, really supported and appreciating it. So much. How much other people have been sharing with me and how vulnerable they have been with me. It's been, it's been kind of amazing, I guess I didn't really know what to expect, going going into it, like recorded that episode. And I was kind of like, ah, like, I don't have any advice for people like is, right, is that going to be like useful for people. And it turns out, I guess, sort of just feeling seen, and knowing that other people go through it was helpful. And I think for me, like, just saying, like, sort of raising my hand and saying I have a problem, like, for me is often the first step in getting through it. Like, absolutely, um, so so that was really helpful for me. And just being open about it, and then all of the support from people. As has kind of given me like a little bit of motion on it. I mean, so many people reached out to me offering to, like, have a phone call or something about it. And, um, I haven't taken anyone, because, like, I don't have enough time. But I really appreciate it. And I'm just kind of like, I don't know, I'm like marinating and everyone's stories, like, like, I kind of feel like, I don't know if you ever do this, but like, you know, you get like a steak and then you put it in the fridge with salt on it, and for a couple of days, and then it gets really tender. And I feel like I'm just a piece of steak sitting in the fridge. And like every story and and sort of encouraging word people have sent to me as sort of, you know, their each one little piece of Maldon salt that's just kind of working its way in and tenderizing me and this is a little bit of a weird metaphor, but like people who take their seriously know what I'm talking about. Like, I'm just kind of, you know, I'm sort of like, yeah, I don't know, something marinating is like totally the wrong word for that. But you know, I'm just kind of absorbing, I guess all of that. Okay. Um, that's great. And yes, I have started to try to try to make some changes, but I think something that really helps crystallize for me, in hearing so many stories about burnout was like, there's kind of it feels like there's kind of like two different categories of burnout. There's like, work burnout, and then there's life burnouts. Okay. And work burnout is, you know, that's like your, your burnout from your work situation, right. And then life is like, you know, everything else going on, right? I have life burnout. It turns out and so that has been helpful for me in framing this because then it's kind of like a sort of, like, it feels like sort of like the first direction sign. You know, it's like, do I turn left? Do I turn right? Is it work burnout, is it life burnout, okay, now we know which way to go. Okay. And then that's like a, you know, sort of like another step to go down. like researching how people get through this. So I think that that was really key and helped me start, I think start even just like thinking about changes to make, because it's one, it's like everything possibly that you have going on that you might need to change. Like, that's a little bit overwhelming. But at least knowing which domain to think about is helpful, I think.

Colleen Schnettler 5:27
So how do you know it's life burnout and not work burnout, what's the distinguishing characteristics?

Michele Hansen 5:32
So I think it's that, you know, for me, like, like, I really enjoy work to the point where, like, you know, most of my life, I have found work easier than life, quite frankly, like, I tend to escape into work or school or, you know, whatever that is. And I think actually, the, the fact that I was like, one of my initial stressors couple weeks ago was like, I don't have enough time to work was not actually a sign that I was burning out from work, it was a sign that I was going into one of my oldest tried and true stress responses, which is trying to disappear into work. And then the fact that I didn't have enough time to do so was stressing me out. And that like that that outlet was not available. So it's not that I didn't have enough time to work. It's that like, I didn't have enough time to neglect the rest of my life and just disappear into work.

Colleen Schnettler 6:40
Okay, I understand, I think, did we

Michele Hansen 6:43
did we ever talk about like the four archetypes of like, stress and trauma responses, we were talking about that. Okay, so we're talking about that. So there's like four main categories of these. And it's just worth sort of noting and it's like, not any of them are better or worse than others. It's just intended to be descriptive, and like, help you understand how you respond to stressful situations. And so the first one is anger, which is, you know, respond with anger, whether that's verbally or physically, you know, with violence against yourself against other people, against objects, right. And so like, if something really stressful happens, and you really want to punch a pillow, or a punching bag, like anger might be one of your primary stress, or trauma responses, most people are a combination of a couple. The next one is flight, which is you are leaving the situation that can that that can be physically or it can also be sort of mentally, but that often takes the form of workaholism so disappearing into work. Hello, me raising hand. Um, that can be exercise, like, so I was a competitive gymnast growing up. So that's also in the flight response. You know, it can be physically moving places, like, you know, like, when, like, COVID got really bad, I decided to move country. So that is also a flight response. Like, hello, all the bells are going off here. Right? Um, so that's like the flight response. I think especially like, in our community, like, I come across a lot of people with the like, workaholic flight response. And the thing like, is like, though, the thing about flight responses is that like, they can often be sort of extreme versions of healthy behaviors, or like socially rewarded behaviors, which makes them really hard to identify. Because, of course, you should exercise a lot like, oh, like having a good career and being ambitious. Like, that's a good thing. Right? So, like it kind of, yep, but at least you know, everything is bad and extremes, right? You know, even you know, anger is healthy. But having too much of it and hurting other people is not working is you know, we all need to work but like doing it to the point where it's how you deal with life is not there's a freeze response, which is I sort of think of that as the like hiding under a blanket watching Netflix for 12 hours and just being unable to move kind of a response. Like this is a reaction I heard from actually quite a few friends after January 6, they were like I was just like frozen for days. Like, like you just use completely like withdraw. And so maybe that's like, you get home from work and you just play video games for eight hours and you can't do anything else like playing video games is healthy. Everybody loves watching Netflix, including me. Okay, I know that I seem like totally like Little Miss, like Type A overachiever, but I do watch Netflix. Thank you very much. I'm currently rewatching our way through Parks and Rec and it is such a delight. Okay. So there's the freeze response. And then there's also the fawn response, which is basically when things are really bad for you, you go into the mode of like trying to rescue or help other people. And also that you try to like appease other people. So it's very much like the people pleasing response. So fights, flights, freeze, and fawn. Those are these four main stress and trauma responses. And I think it's really helpful to understand those like four main categories, because when we're talking about burnout, like how you experience the burnout seems like, like those kind of those themes come through quite a bit. And also how you deal with burnout is very different. And so like, for me, like, as a sort of person who's sort of primarily in that flight response category, like, for me, trying to all of a sudden start exercising and like signing up for a 10k like, would not actually really be very healthy or productive for me, because that's just furthering myself in that stress response category. And, and like that would just lend itself to more extremism in that same type of thing, if that makes sense. And so that was really how I identified like, this is actually, this is not a work problem, but the existence of me being like, I don't have enough time to work and like feeling stressed about that. And like, wanting to work like this is a sign that I'm falling into one of my, my oldest stress reaction paths. Like that was those that was really helpful for me. Um, and then so kind of taking some time to

think about things and made a couple of like, really small changes you had recommended to me atomic habits, like probably a bunch of times, and it's one of those books, I feel like everybody is like, oh my god, it's so amazing. And like, so then I didn't read it, because like, I felt like I'd read it because of everybody else had told me about it's kind of like, it's not the same way I feel about avatar. Like, I feel like everybody raved about avatar. And then I was like, I feel like I've seen this movie. Everybody's talking about it. Like, can we just please stop talking about this thing? Because like, all I've heard about is this is avatar. I don't know. Did you ever see Avatar? Do you know what I mean?

Colleen Schnettler 12:08
I did I know exactly what you mean. I was not impressed. I didn't see it till later till everyone was talking about it. So I agree. By the time I saw it, I was like,

Michele Hansen 12:17
so I kind of like had that. I was like, okay, everyone's been raving about atomic habits. Like, you know, I've read so many like blog posts to talk about it. And people do these homework essays. And I like felt like I had the gist of it. Um, but you recommended it. So I was like, Okay, fine. I'll get it. I think I bought it like a couple of months ago. And it was just sitting on my shelf collecting dust. And then we started like, getting kind of like tightening things up a little bit for like, getting ready to put Christmas stuff out. And I like saw it in my pile of books to be read, which, well, there's actually multiple of those piles in my house. But um, I was like, You know what, Colleen recommended that book to me. I should like, I should really read it. And I'm so glad I did. Like I am eating my previous words about No, I was so glad to read it. Kind of interesting, because I feel like you have said how you don't read self help books. But this is totally a self help book. It's like a self help book for people who don't read self help books.

Colleen Schnettler 13:12
I know. And that's the only book I've ever recommended to you. It was so good. It's like a self help book. But it's like so practical. Like some of the things you're just like, oh, this is like a practical thing. Like the habit chaining is so obvious in retrospect, but like, had never occurred to me how I could, you know, change the habit chaining and the identity stuff I really enjoyed too. So I'm glad that I'm glad that you're Are you finished? Did you read? Oh,

Michele Hansen 13:37
yeah. Yeah, I finished it today. I'm glad you enjoy me when I sink my teeth into a book. I finished it in like three days. Like, yeah, you just read it. I just Yeah, I just Yeah. So um, so one thing that I really enjoyed from it was this. And I'm going to see if I can find the exact phrasing here. He has his I think it's action versus motion.

Colleen Schnettler 14:02
Yeah, I think I remember that. Yeah. And actually,

Michele Hansen 14:04
I thought of you as I was reading that. So let me just find the exact. You're like, oh, I have done it. I'm

Colleen Schnettler 14:10
like, so excited. Well, I read it. It's one of those books that I actually like, bought on Kindle and then bought the freaking book because I liked it so much.

Michele Hansen 14:17
Oh my god. So I'm reading another book on burnout. It's called what is it called by yourself? The effing lilies, which is like, yeah, no, that's actually a title. And it's like so is this woman like talking about her her path through burnout and her like her burnout is very different. Like the beginning of the book, like starts with her, like, you know, waking up hungover after her 25th birthday and like, kind of, you know, she's smoking too much and going out too much and like drunk dialing her therapist and I'm like, Okay, we're in very different parts of our lives and like I had a two year old at that point in my life and was definitely not doing that. But I think her her ways of going through are actually really similar. Like her tactics like They both like both her and James clear want you to journal and I'm like, I don't journal. I know, your journal this morning pages thing. I'm like maybe like I bought my journal, I don't know. But anyway, it's actually been really good, but I was reading it on Kindle and I was like, I need the paper version of this book so I can like highlight it. So. Okay, so James clear on motion versus action from atomic habits. So, quote, I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two ideas sound similar, but they're not the same. When you're in motion, you're planning and strategizing, and learning. Those are all good things, but they don't produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outlined 20 ideas for articles I want to write that's motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that's action. So attendees, yeah, sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn't matter how many times you talk to the personal trainer, that motion itself will never get you in shape. So I think like as I was thinking about this, and he has a really great story in here, too, about like photography students, and how there was this professor who said, Okay, this group, you have to take as many pictures as possible by the end of the semester, and your grade is based on how many pictures you take. And this other group is you only have to take one perfect picture and turn that in the end of the semester. And the group that produced the best work was the group that just produced a ton of pictures, because they just kept doing things like they were constantly in action of doing things. And as you know, as I say, as somebody who feels like they have been marinating for the past two weeks, and you know, covered in salt,

Colleen Schnettler 16:50
salt.

Michele Hansen 16:54
I'm, like, I actually, so I was like you don't I have to start doing this as I read this book, because I can't just like wait until I'm done to start doing and I think this is what I really liked about this book is it's like, do a really small thing, if, you know, we talked about how, like I have allowed my physical health to deteriorate with all this. And it's like, okay, it's not I want to start working out or I want to work or join a gym or whatever that is, it's like, you have to switch the identity, as you mentioned from I want to start doing this to I am someone who does this. And then how can you do really small things every day, that prove to yourself that you do that, so that you build that identity. So he's like, just do a two minute habit, every day of whatever that thing is. But then also do the thing that you really uniquely enjoy and is easy for you that isn't for other people. And so for me, that was like, Okay, it's not that, like I want to start working out again, it's like, so that identity should have to do has to be I am a fit person, I guess. Or like I am a person who works out every day. And then so like I you know, I did a handstand for like, two minutes earlier today. And like, that's something that's very easy and fun for me, but makes me feel like oh, yeah, I guess I did some sort of workout today, even if it was really short. Um, so I've like started on these little habits. And I feel like I'm probably still in burnout. But at least now I'm doing things. You know, like, it just sort of got me it was reading atomic habits really helped me kind of like, okay, what are like small things I can do. As he says that, they're not going to make me 100% better, they're not going to take me from burnout to not burn out or whatever the opposite of burnout is. But they're going to make me 1% better. So like doing a handstand that makes me 1% better. That really probably only applies to me, you know, and everybody else that's going to be something different. Um, I've also started like plugging in my phone after dinner, downstairs in the office and making it unavailable so that I can't end up like aimlessly like scrolling Twitter or Instagram or whatever, like later on at night and like staying up too late at night. Um, my phone is still accessible to me, but it's downstairs in the office and stays plugged in. Like because I don't need it as an alarm clock because we got one of those like, Sun lamps that like wakes you up with sunlight because you know, hashtag Scandinavian winter you don't have this problem in California. We don't have enough I

Colleen Schnettler 19:37
don't wake up without an alarm. Because there's so much sunlight. That

Michele Hansen 19:41
sounds just lovely. Um, yes, we get, you know, just a little sprinkling of sunlight if that a day. Sometimes it's just gray. So I also got better D vitamins. Apparently they're more effective if you take vitamin K too with them or something and not better medical advice. That's just what I read on the internet. So I started doing that, too. I'm just like, you know, lots of little things. Um, I also like I got permission from my, my Danish school to only go into the class once a week and do self study at home the other day of the week. Ooh, that sounds like a big one. Yeah, so like, I was really nervous to talk to the head, the head of the school. And that's also something that like, you know, for anyone else, listening who's going through burnout, like, you're probably not feeling burned out with Danish school being a contributor to it, if you are, though, seriously, reach out to me, because we probably want to comment. Um, but yeah, just like reducing that to like, one day a week. And I was, like, Look, I've proven that I'm a good student, like, it's so much easier for me to like, if this is a six hour or five, six hour class, like, I would rather do one hour, every night. And I have my eight year old correct my spelling and pronunciation, like what she loves, then, like, have to be here in a class all day, like it just for my schedule, like, then I have four days, one day of class, and, and decided that I'm going to book a massage for myself after I go to the class to nice, um, which is, I think something else from atomic habits is like, if you have to do something you don't enjoy, like, schedule in a reward afterwards, so you know, and it took me like, a lot of research to actually like, find like to get a massage, because when you're, I don't know, expat, or in a new place. Like, everything is just, you know, you don't have those go twos for anything. So I'm just trying to make and that's not like a huge difference, because I was like, What should I drop out of that? Like, you know, like, do I take all these things? And do I get rid of them, right, like, and you know, because some people are, like, I was burned out. And so I went to Bali for three months. And then like, that sounds like it really worked for you. And it was awesome. And sitting on a beach for three months. Sounds amazing. But like, I have a family, I have a life like I like I like that's just that's just not an option for me. Um, and so there were some people I was kind of, like, DMing, with who were kind of like, you know, here's how I worked through it. Like, I didn't quit my job, like I, you know, I didn't move I didn't, you know, change anything about my life. I just kind of got through it with the existing structure of my life, that was really helpful for me to hear that, like, you don't have to just kind of walk away from everything in your life in order to burnout because, like, especially like, I feel like you read like burnout stories from like, for lack of a better way of putting it like San Francisco types that's like, I, you know, sold my company quit my job, and like, you know, lived in a camper van for six months. And I'm like, That's awesome. That That sounds like that was amazing, and helped you. That's just not my life. Like, I just like, That also sounds like flight response to me, which as we have discussed, probably not something I should do more, I need to do like, a moderate, like moderate things like going for a walk and yeah, getting sunlight. And, you know, kind of pulling back on things where I can and also like, recognizing, like, when am I falling into patterns that are not good for me and and whether that's like big things like throwing myself way too much into work or like small things like being on my phone way too much. I haven't done the habit inventory that I read a long time ago, I haven't done that. It's like you have to like list out all of the habits that you do and whether they're a good habit, a neutral habit or a negative one. So like, for me, like a bad habit is like waking up in the morning and, you know, checking my email and Twitter and intercom and everything else for like 20 minutes before I get out of bed. That was a bad habit. Like, maybe for some people, it's neutral. But like for me, like that was kind of just like the note I started my day out on. And it's probably better for my mental health. If I start the day with like five minutes of like, cuddling with my dog, right, like, right, that's probably much better than seeing, you know, whatever is waiting for me in my inbox. And so it's like going through all of those, um, I had kind of like, that feels this feels like a slippery slope into journaling. So

Colleen Schnettler 24:41
I mean, I cannot get I can't get so

Michele Hansen 24:43
resistant to journaling.

Colleen Schnettler 24:46
Like our job is in my nightstand. Like by my bed. I have like eight journals. They all have like three pages filled in. Because every year I'm like, Oh, this is the year I'm going to start journaling. Yeah, I've just accepted that about myself that it's just not my jam. I love

Michele Hansen 25:02
buying journals. And I know they're like, especially like the rifle paper ones like I'm a little bit obsessed.

Colleen Schnettler 25:09
Really nice but not Yeah,

Michele Hansen 25:12
so I but of course I have bought more journals and I don't have any morning pages thing like if there's anybody listening who does morning pages, which is the thing it's like you're supposed to like write when you wake up in the morning, you're supposed to write three pages. Now James clear is like, you should just write a sentence or like just write like anything and mourning pages is like you get up write three pages. Is there anyone with kids? Who does that? And like, how do you fit it into your life, like, and some people like to wake up at 530. And that's what I turned on them. Like, again, that sounds lovely. But like, every hour of sleep, I can get like, I'm going to take it like I am not going to like get up at 530 and light a candle and do yoga and don't like I'm sorry, that is just not me.

Colleen Schnettler 26:01
What is the benefit? What is the purported benefit of these morning pages?

Michele Hansen 26:04
So the by the I think Lily's book talks a lot about, okay, um, which is that it's sort of like a space to completely let your mind empty out. And it's kind of, you know, you know, how I talked about, like, customer interviews are where you're just there to listen to them without any judgement, and whatever they want to say, you know, you know, sort of on the topic, you know, is welcome, and you're not, you're just not judging anything they say, and it's just about their experience, and you're kind of you're holding space for them. And their experience is basically like doing that for yourself. Oh, my God, I have to do this. I can't like preach that you should do that to other people. And then not even. And that self empathy is important than than not hold space for myself. Goddamnit Ah,

Colleen Schnettler 26:56
let me know how it goes. I probably don't

Michele Hansen 26:57
want to turn it. Well, I have to wait at least like a week or a week and a half for all these pretty new journals. I ordered to arrive. Right, right.

Colleen Schnettler 27:06
Yeah, right. Yeah. Like,

Michele Hansen 27:08
yeah, report, and then I'm going away for Christmas. So like, realistically? Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 27:16
So Okay, but seriously,

Michele Hansen 27:18
if you journal, and you're listening, and you have to somehow make this work in your life, like, I want to know, like details. Not that like I do it every day. Like when, like, how do you fit in? Yes, I need specifics and logistics and details. Okay, sorry. You're gonna say something galling.

Colleen Schnettler 27:35
Okay, so let's go back to this and your burnout. So all of the stories, the majority of the stories I have heard are also those I couldn't work for six months after burnout. So do you feel with with the small steps that you're taking to try and kind of recover from burnout within the construct of your life? How are you feeling? It's been what, two weeks? I mean,

Michele Hansen 27:57
yeah, I still feel like I'm just kind of, I still feel like I'm in it. I feel like I have a little bit of motion because of the book. Okay, but, um, I don't know, I still feel like there's a lot of stuff that is not working. And you know, like so like that founder summit thing, for example, like that, that wheel thing we talked about where it's like, you rate your life for, you know, career and spiritual and physical, social emotional, there was like some other category there of like, how your life is going and all those different areas. And it was like, if there's anything below, like a four, you really need to focus on that. So I gave myself you know, I think physical was pretty low. But then also social was pretty low. Like, my family is wonderful. And I love them. I don't have any friends here, though. And like, so I think I also gave that one a pretty low rating, but like, I'm in another country. It's COVID. II, Europe is like terrible with COVID right now, I don't know if you've heard like, so that one almost like I didn't even like, it really occurred to me that I could do something about that. Because it's like, at least like physical it's like, okay, I can like do handstands and like workout every day. But like, I can't, like, go out and somehow, like, have all of my best friends here. Like, right, like, that doesn't really happen. So I think that is part of it. Like not having like a, as much of a support system as I used to, like, you know, can't just roll up to your house and like, hang out, right, like so I think that, that that that's going to be a bigger challenge that I need to work through. I mean, I think the social part is a challenge for a lot of people right now and like not feeling supported, like even if you are in your community like I think just With the pandemic, like so many people are burned out for various reasons. And I think something I have been thinking through, like, why did it get to this point, and I think part of me, like didn't really feel entitled to burnout. You know, like, you're still, you know, knowing people in the medical field, like with everything they have dealt with over the past two years, like, there is serious burnout in the medical field right now. And I think seeing that, and and, you know, being very close to people in that field, who are burned out from that, like, I guess I just, I didn't feel entitled to it. Or like, you know, there's people who scaled companies to like, 1000s of employees and billions of dollars in revenue, and like, they get burned out. And it was like, This feels like something that is for other people. And part of it was like, Yes, I'm special. It's not gonna happen to me, but also part of that feeling was, Who am I to think that I get to say that I'm feeling this way? Right? Like, does that make sense? Like, is this a feeling I am entitled to is this like, like, have I earned this title of being burned out? Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say, now that I've actually verbalized it. But yeah, I think that was contributing to it too, because I kept denying that it was going on, because I didn't feel like I deserved it. Interesting. And so I think kind of the last two weeks has been really important for me, and that not only accepting that I have burnout, but also accepting that

Colleen Schnettler 31:32
it's

Michele Hansen 31:35
it's something that I'm allowed to feel or allowed to describe myself as I guess, if that makes any sense. I think that's when it makes total sense. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 31:46
It's like, and I think that's, you know, that goes to a lot of other things. But like, You were absolutely entitled, you have, you know, to feel to feel that and to have your own problems. It's kind of like when your kid breaks his arm. Are you supposed to say Oh, it's fine, because other kids have cancer? Right? Like it's, it's Yeah, cuz daddy upset because your kid broke his arm, like it's, it's, it's relative. Sure. And it helps you keep it in perspective. But again, it is still a very real and very pressing problem.

Michele Hansen 32:14
I heard this very, in articulately if amusingly phrased once as someone else's suck does not make your suck, suck any less.

Colleen Schnettler 32:25
That's terrible. But yes, exactly.

Michele Hansen 32:28
Right. All problems are valid.

Colleen Schnettler 32:31
And all problems are valid. Yeah, see, we can again, but yeah, absolutely real, and you're feeling it? And you're in it?

Michele Hansen 32:39
Yeah. So I think that's the, I guess that's kind of how I'm feeling. I still, I still feel like a steak sitting in the fridge covered in salt. Just kind of kind of absorbing and tenderizing and whatnot. But I think atomic habits is like, it's helping me with it just just kind of giving I think the idea that I you know, I tend to do think everything like, you know, totally balls to the wall, right? Like the idea of doing something and doing it 1% better. Like I tend to do things like okay, how do I do this is like significantly better. And that was also part of that activity. We did it founder Summit, it wasn't trying to go from two to 10. In the next 90 days, it's tried to go to two to four. Right? Like, how do you get slightly marginally better? And I guess allowing myself to adjust my expectations down and say, and it just give me like ideas of okay, what can I What are little things I can do 1% Better that are, you know, are gonna are going to help me through this.

Colleen Schnettler 33:56
Okay, yeah, great. Sounds like a good, a good way to approach it with everything you have going on. Yeah, I've

Michele Hansen 34:03
gotten a ton of other book recommendations, but haven't gotten to any of them except this one. So I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna keep reading. But again, you know, I think talking about that motion versus action, like, it's important that I don't just like sit here and read and write, don't be stressed out and still be burned out. Like, I need to do stuff and just do lots of stuff. And maybe some of its gonna work and maybe some of it isn't, but it's all, you know, action. It's all, you know, maybe helping, it's better than nothing. So and I think that applies a lot to like, business. I just feel like it's really similar to the situation you were in a year and a half ago, where you were just reading about starting a software company and reading and researching and talking to people but not doing a lot of action on doing

Colleen Schnettler 34:56
it. That park that part have the book really spoke to me and I think I don't regret the path I took at all. Because even though when I finally when I launched something I kind of did it wrong, because I just launched it to launch it that motion or wait, that would be action. That was that was me moving from motion to action. And it was awesome. So I mean for me that I totally agree. And I love that, that distinction he makes between motion and action.

Michele Hansen 35:24
Did you read atomic habits around that time that you made that mental shift?

Colleen Schnettler 35:28
Maybe? I mean, I read it a couple years ago, so it might that that might have been part of it. Yeah, that might have been then. Interesting.

Michele Hansen 35:41
Well, I think that will wrap us up for today. I will continue working on these these 1% habits and

if anyone journals or also if you've used atomic habits to you know get through burnout or stress. Definitely would love to talk to you. Thanks for listening

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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT
Colleen Schnettler 0:02
Every doctor is concerned about your vital signs. But a good doctor cares about your overall health. Your website deserves the same care. And Hey check it is here to help. Hey check it is a website performance monitoring and optimization tool. It goes beyond just core web vitals to give you a full picture on how to optimize your website to give your users a happy experience. It includes AI generated SEO data, accessibility scanning, and site speed checks, with suggestions on how to improve and a number of various other tools to help you start a free trial today at Hey, check it.com

Welcome back to the software social podcast. I'm your host today, Colleen. Today I am super excited to have a special guest on the pod. Jordan O'Connor, the founder of closet tools is today's guest. Thanks for showing up today. Jordan, I appreciate it.

Jordan O'Connor 0:56
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me.

Colleen Schnettler 0:58
So I specifically wanted to ask you here because your Indie hackers interviews was one of my favorites. And I'm sure you hear that a lot. Do you hear that? A lot?

Jordan O'Connor 1:07
I've heard it a few times.

Colleen Schnettler 1:08
Yeah. Yeah. So for those who have not heard your Indie hackers interview, could you tell us a little bit about what closet tools is?

Jordan O'Connor 1:17
Yeah, so closet tools, I started closet tools almost almost four years ago now. It's basically an automation. It's software automation for Poshmark. So Poshmark is a retail selling platform. So it started out as mostly just people selling used women's clothes, it was mostly women selling used clothes on there.

And the way they built the platform is more like social media than it is like, you know, like, you know, like what you would think of ecommerce is like a storefront or something like that. And so the way to get exposure to your closet, your profile, you have to do things like sharing and liking and commenting and all these different social engagement signals. And that's how you get exposure. That's how you get followers. That's how you get, you know, eyeballs on your stuff, so that you can sell stuff. And so that takes a ton of time. And my particular customer, which would be like a reseller, they don't really have time to be on social media all day engaging and stuff like that, like they just want to sell clothes. Most of them sell on eBay, they sell, you know, on their own storefront. So they just want to sell stuff. And so that's what causes tools does, it does a lot of those engagement things for them, it'll share their items throughout the day, it'll automatically respond to different events that happen if somebody likes an item, it'll automatically send that person an offer with a discount stuff like that. So it kind of automates a little bit of the sales process for them. So yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 2:46
so Poshmark is like eBay, but fancy, right, like higher high end.

Jordan O'Connor 2:52
It's no, it's definitely it's definitely I would say it's not that eBay is high end, but Poshmark scales, low end to high end, you can you know, you can find, you know, you can find like really nice purses or whatever on there and stuff. Or you can buy, you know, a $5 You know, screenprint t shirt, like you can buy, you know, anything you want on there, most of the appeal is that most of the items on there are like used. So you're getting get a discount on some item that's lightly used that you would normally pay a lot more for. So that's kind of, you know, the the corner of the market that they tackled, there's also a lot of new items on there and things like that, too. So, but yeah, the thing that's weird about it. So like you have like a closet, it literally is like like Instagram, so you have your closet, and it has like all the images of like your items and stuff that you're selling. And each post has, you know, a common section, people can like it, they can share it themselves to their followers. And when you share to your followers, your item, they're basically when you share to your followers, that item shows up in their main feed. So like you can go into the app and you can like search specifically for like, hey, I want like Nike shoes, or whatever. And then I'll just come up with Nike shoes. But if you just kind of like go into the app, and you have like the main feed, just like any social media platform, whatever people are sharing is what's going to show up there. And so if you're not constantly sharing, then you're not going to show up in that main feed, and people aren't going to randomly stumble onto your profile. But you literally have to physically click like two buttons for every item you want to share. And a lot of my customers are actual, you know that this is their business and they have 2000 3000 4000 items. And it would take them an hour or two just to go through and click click, click, click click. So it and that could be time there's been doing other things like even literally just like packaging items to sell send out and stuff like that. So So yeah, it saves them a ton of time, and it ends up making them more money in the long run just because you know it's doing things for them. So it's pretty, it's a win win. It's pretty cool.

Colleen Schnettler 4:48
So how did you get that idea? Were you selling stuff on? Poshmark?

Jordan O'Connor 4:52
Yeah, so my wife started selling things on Poshmark at the time. We kind of need some extra income and she was like no One of her friends actually introduced her to Poshmark. And so she jumped on and she was starting to sell stuff. But then right away, I kind of was like, Whoa, you're spending a lot of time, you know, night sharing and doing a bunch of stuff on there. I was like, and it was right around the time I was kind of learning web development, things like that. I had already knew how to code and stuff. But I had never really done much web development. And I said, Hey, I think I can write like a little script that kind of like automates that for you. Like, you just press a button, and it just rifled through and shares all of your stuff. And so that's what I did. And so that's how I made the first, you know, like, kind of the first version. And for a while, I just, um, let her and her friends use it. And they thought it was awesome there was that it was really cool. And all it was was a bookmarklet. So like in, you know, browsers, you can just embed JavaScript code right in the bookmark, and you just click it and execute it. And it just like, yeah, you went through, it wasn't smart, or anything, had no GUI or anything like that. I just did it. And they thought it was great. And they were doing well with it. And then I blogged about it on my personal blog. And over the course of like, six months, I started getting like a hand few handful of emails from people saying, like, Hey, I found this, you know, this thing that you posted, like, how do I use it? Like, how do I get it working, because I want to use it. And even still, at that time, I had no intention of like selling it, or like making a business out of it or anything like that. So it was like, I was just trying to be helpful. I was like, Yeah, sure. This is how you use it, you just let you set it up. And so yeah, it wasn't, like I said, it was like six, between like six to 10 months before I was like, Oh, I can actually probably, you know, make a front end for this actually build some more features and make it a little smarter and actually sell less so.

Colleen Schnettler 6:33
So was this your first business idea?

Jordan O'Connor 6:37
Well, um, it was, it's my first like software business idea I had for a while before that, I was I knew I wanted to kind of break free of employment, I wanted to do my own thing. So I had already learned. I learned web development, I learn how to make websites, I learned SEO and I learned marketing, copywriting sales, I kind of like went down this like course track of just like, take a course learn a skill, do it for some people to practice it. And then I kind of like nail down all these things. Yeah, and the first product idea I had actually, it was related to my wife as well, she does art she does like water coloring and hand lettering, things like that. My idea was to make a black paper notebook. And at the time, none existed and none existed with any kind of like premium features. Any of the ones that exist over like, you know, construction paper or something like that was this like awful for artists. And, and that actually would have done really well. But I didn't really have the capital upfront to actually invest in, you know, a physical product. So I ran a Kickstarter, and I think I needed like 13k. And I got like, 11k I ran, I ran probably like, I don't know, I was like $1,500. In Facebook ads, I had a couple months where I was like doing Instagram stuff, and actually learned a ton from that. And I'm kind of glad it didn't work out. Because I feel like what I do now is a lot more. I don't know, it's just more the way I would like to do things. But I learned a ton from that. And that was kind of the first thing I didn't. So the closet tools, like the first thing that I made for my wife was kind of right on the heels of that. And so like it just kind of switched over from there. But yeah, I was trying a whole bunch of stuff even before that, what I was doing when I was doing take taking the courses and learning things as I was actually trying to make, like just do freelancing basically where like, I would learn SEO, and it's like, hey, I'll go out and like do SEO for people. But then it would always get this weird feeling where like, yeah, you know, like, especially with like SEO, like, if you compare some of the like the value that you can actually get out of it. It's like ridiculous. And I'm like, why would I do this for somebody else, I got to figure out how to do this for myself. And so that was I kind of kept doing that. And then I got to the point where I was like, Okay, I'm gonna actually do this, I'm gonna pull all my skills together and actually build something. So yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 8:55
So I'm really curious about this. I didn't realize when you said freelancing, I just assumed you were doing it as a developer. So you like, took an SEO course. And you're like, hey, let's see if I learned something. And you freelanced as an SEO you who are an engineer, freelance as an SEO consultant. That's right. Yeah, I

Jordan O'Connor 9:14
mean, I didn't. Yeah, I wasn't like, I was mostly just trying to get something to work. So like, I was just, you know, trying to do it. And also, I kind of just for some reason, I had this mindset of like, I need to practice this stuff. I need to actually get out there and do this stuff, if I really want to know it. So you know, I wasn't really like charging a lot or anything. Sometimes. Sometimes it was like, Hey, I just want to do this for you. And so, so yeah, it wasn't like I was trying to like establish myself as a freelancer, but it was more like, I want to try this. And if the freelance thing works, and it takes off, and this is good, then that's fine. If it doesn't, I'm going to learn these skills and I'm going to you know, use them later on kind of thing. So, but yeah, I was doing that for a while. And yeah, like I made a whole logistics trucking app. front end back end for a friend of mine, and he still uses it today for his trucking company. And so yeah, I did a whole, I did a whole bunch of stuff. Before I really got before I discovered that I wanted to make a product instead of like doing a service. And that was mostly just based on like personality, a lot of times, what would happen is I would start doing the work, and then they would have their opinions and their thoughts about how things should be. And I would be like, No, I'm kind of the expert. I think I know, I think I know what to do here. And they would, they would always contradict, and I just didn't really feel like messing with that. So I was like, the only way I'm gonna make money is if I if I can make a thing and sell it. And if people don't want it, then they don't have to pay for it. And then I don't have to deal with them, you know, in their opinions and stuff. So yeah, yeah. So that way, so I had to go on that journey too. So yeah, a lot a little a lot a little journeys. It was a Yeah, it was a couple years of just just doing stuff, just taking action, and then kind of landed on closet tools.

Colleen Schnettler 10:59
I think that's so important. You said it was a couple years. Like I feel like we have this perception in the indie space. There's so much information. I you know, I launched my first product in February, and I feel this hard like, some guys like I made $100,000 In three months. And I'm like, What did you make? I love so I love that you I feel like a lot of your messaging from the podcast and your Twitter is you are like, hey, yeah, this thing was super successful really quickly. But I had five years of background that helped me build up the business to what it is.

Jordan O'Connor 11:31
Yeah, yeah, I think I, I don't know. Yeah, I always, um, I always like to try to optimize for long term results. And a lot of those people are just, you know, really optimized on short term results, it is like this, like, oh, I made this much in one month. But then if you talk to them six months later, they haven't made anything more, it just, they had this little spike, they went up on Product Hunt or something, and, you know, whatever. And so like, to me that, you know, with a with a wife and kids, that's not really sustainable, like you can't just have a spike, and then like, kind of live off that for you know, the rest, you know, so I had to find something that was very stable and sustainable, and then actually grow over time. And I don't, I don't really know why I had that perspective, early on, I think it might may be just a personality thing. But I think optimizing for long term and actually developing great foundational skills, and then building on that organically over time, is so much better, long term, because then you build something that is just growing, you know, on its own. And you don't really have to do too much to it to make it you know, to force things to happen to you know, make it seem like you're making a ton of money or something like that.

Colleen Schnettler 12:41
So the skills you were talking about, like you said, you spent a lot of time in SEO, and you learned how to do Facebook ads. So he said, so So were there any other like pivotal skills, you think that really helped you see this opportunity and capitalize on it.

Jordan O'Connor 12:57
Trying to think of the different courses that I took, I think there was really it, it was web development, SEO, and then Facebook ads, Facebook ads was unique, because it taught a lot about sales without teaching sales. It was like it was it was like, you know, because you know, a lot of Facebook ads is mostly just like copywriting expertise, because you're trying to just get something really catchy. But most it was always this weird thing. For each space. It was always interesting, because like the web development course was like you're trying to teach web developers that want to get a job. So that was like the outcome of the course. But then like SEO, it was like, we're gonna teach you SEO, so you can start an SEO agency. And then like, the Facebook ads, it was like, oh, like you can use Facebook ads to sell someone else's product and get like, you know, affiliate revenue or something like that. So the outcome was always different than what I wanted. But I picked up the skills, you know, throughout that. And so because of that, I think I was able to glean a little bit of a different perspective on it. So like with the Facebook ads, I wasn't just trying to optimize my ROI, or I guess, what would you call it Roa? You know, ad spend. So, like, I wasn't trying to do that, I was trying to learn how to make really great, you know, copy and actually sell something to somebody that just saw it for the first time. And they're like, and when they see it, they're like, Oh, this is something I need. And same thing with SEO, I wasn't trying to build a big agency, I was trying to figure out the most optimal way to do SEO correctly so that I could just get organic traffic over time. And same for web development. I was just learning how to make websites, you know, for myself to make my own business not to you know, do it for other people. So yeah, so I mean, I think those are the foundational skills I think those three and then combined with writing over time over the course of the the whole well now it's been like, you know, five years ish, six years and I've been kind of doing that So I've been writing the entire time, I used to write a lot more personally back then. But it was more rambling, it was more like, this is what I think I want to do. And I'm learning this thing. And this is you know, so it's kind of documenting the journey, but also documenting some of my thoughts and emotions around what I was doing. But I think over time, I kind of honed and honed in on a good skill of writing. And I think writing effectively, is one of the best ways to save time in the future, especially when you make a product. You know, if you write really good documentation, if you're really good at communicating via text to your customers, if you're really good at copywriting and selling on your website, then you have to do less one on one sales and saves you time so that you can do other things. So I think writing is like huge. So I think those are kind of like my bundle of skills that I at least I do. And I advocate for other people have different personalities, some people really like going and doing one on one sales, I don't really like doing that. I've never asked a single person to use Clausa tools individually, you know, like they come to my website, they see whether or not they want to have, you know, want to use it. And you know, that's it. I don't have to talk to anybody or anything like that. So. So yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 16:10
that's really interesting. You mentioned writing. So I was at founder summit last week in Mexico City. And we had a whole workshop on writing. So tell me, do you think the thing that I think I struggle with a lot is, it's like when you have such limited time, and you have children? So you understand? What what is the best way to use that time? So tell me, do you think your personal blog helped you become a better writer and communicator and was worth the time that you put into it?

Jordan O'Connor 16:36
I do. I do. I think, um, I think it was a combination of that. And Twitter. For me. Twitter is interesting, because a Twitter is more where I used to kind of test writing, where it's like testing for feedback on writing. And especially in regards to like context and nuance because Twitter has absolutely zero context and nuance and most tweets. So if you can write in a way that has enough context and nuance where people get it and it clicks with them, then that's effective writing, because you can write very simple, clear small statements that actually contain enough information for people to like, get something out of it. And so I think that actually was really helpful for effective writing, but then having the blog to document the journey along the way, really helped me refine my thoughts, and then also keep my thoughts in line with like, Okay, this is a long term vision, this is what I'm actually doing. This is what I'm working on, here's how I'm actually progressing towards the goal. And so I think the personal writing, yeah, is more about like staying on track. And Twitter was more about writing effectively, and, you know, writing in a way that, you know, helps people understand, you know, what you're saying better with with a limited amount of text. So, but yeah, I think, yeah, I think writing is super crucial. And I think writing is, you know, just so foundational, even for any other form of content creation, you know, it most of the things can start with effective writing, if you have an effective, you know, piece of writing, you can make a movie out of it, you can make a video out of it, you can make an image out of it, you know, you can make a podcast out of it, you know, there's a lot of different things you can make out of text. Whereas the opposite isn't exactly true. Like if you, if you have a video, it might not end up being a great text piece, you know, like, it doesn't always go the opposite direction. Like even the transcript for this podcast isn't really ultimately that valuable, like you people still have to read through an hour long of text. Whereas if you have effective writing, like you can have just one idea, and you can make a whole hour long podcast episode on that one idea. So that's why I think I think writing is really, really foundational. I think it's, I think it's great.

Colleen Schnettler 18:49
Yeah, that makes that makes sense. So, when you started closet tools, tell me what was going on in your life at the time.

Jordan O'Connor 18:59
Um, quite a lot. So um, when I started closet tools, I actually was getting to the point so so if we backtrack a little bit, I, I went to RMIT college up here in New York, for electrical engineering. So I graduated as an electrical engineer, and I started working and I was making decent income was like 80k years, something like that. But right around the time I got hired on I got married, and then about and then we got and then we actually quickly had our first son, which was like, not really planned, but it wasn't like the biggest deal we were like, Yeah, we plan on having kids anyways or like whatever. But it kind of financially things kind of just kept eating away. And so like once I started to start paying student loans and then like I had a kid coming and there was just like all these expenses piling up and my income wasn't really like scaling to that like it was just fixed. So like more and more things are eating away my income and I have like no spare income to do anything with My wife, we had always planned on her staying home with the kids. And you know, like, now we're doing homeschooling and things like that. So that was always the plan. So I was like, I need to figure out something here to like, actually make more money. And so when I started closet tools, that was actually the last thing I was gonna try, it was either that or like, pick up a second job somewhere, like, do something to like, kind of just expand a little bit, so that I'm not in student loan debt for the next, you know, 45 years of my life or whatever. You know, like, that's, I just didn't want that at all. And so, so yeah, so that was like, kind of going on. So I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, I had some urgency to be like, Okay, I need to make something that works. And so I think that's partially why I went with closet tools, because I knew something was working. My wife really liked it, her friends really liked it, I was getting emails about it. So like, it was like this thing, where it's like, okay, I have all these signals that like, this thing is probably gonna, at least, you know, do something I can make, that my intention was to make $1,000 a month, I was like, hey, like, if this thing makes $1,000 a month, great, like, you know, help, you know, pay some bills, you know, and I can like, catch up on some stuff. And like, maybe, you know, it, put some, you know, put some money into savings and stuff like that. So, so yeah, it was a really, really a pretty desperate point in my life. But it was, it was, I was very stubborn, though. Because I really wanted something that I wanted, I didn't really want to, I didn't really want to get a second job. I didn't want to just like make money to make money. I wanted to do something on my own terms, where like, I had the freedom and flexibility to still spend time with my kids and my wife, you know, still come home in the evenings and have, you know, the time together with my family still do things outside of work and things like that. So it was like, I was very, it was a it was a pretty like urgent time. But I also was very picky and stubborn. So like, you know, you know, somebody might say, Hey, you could have just been less stubborn, and you wouldn't have had any of those issues. But like, if I was less stubborn, then I wouldn't have what I had now. So. So I don't know. So it was a little bit of a balance of that. And I think that's partially why it took a little bit longer to get to a point where something happened, that actually worked out really well, because I had to put all those pieces together to make something that worked for me personally.

Colleen Schnettler 22:06
Yeah. So and that that makes sense. So when you were like, What was your day to day like? So you had a full time job? You're married? You have a baby? Like, how did you do that?

Jordan O'Connor 22:19
Yeah, so I started right before my first son was born, I started getting up really early. At that time, it was actually really crazy. And I don't know, when I was younger than so like, I had some energy. Now I can't do this, but I was getting up, I was going to bed or like, you know, 1011 I was getting up to like for, like, you know, like, that's it. And so but what I would do is I would actually just work on side stuff, all morning until my day job. And so like, the earlier I could get up, the more I could spend time on that. And the reason why I did that there's a few reasons why I like getting up in the morning. I still do it actually, I get up at five every day. Yeah, there's actually a lot of reasons when you have kids. Nobody's awake. So nobody's like, you know, there's, there's not that like, you know, like, the family is like always distracting. And because they're always distracting, but there's no chance of a distraction, like people are sleeping, they're definitely sleeping, everybody always sleeps until like this time. So like, you know, there's no chance of distraction. So you can enter into work and get focused and understand that like, Okay, I have this block of time, that's, you know, undistracted. The other thing is, like, if you work in the evenings, typically you're pretty tired by the end of the day. And you're also just kind of, you're basically saving your worst amount of energy for this thing that you actually want to be doing. Whereas in the morning, you're pretty fresh, usually, I mean, as long as you just look good, you feel pretty good. You're pretty, you know, your heads, and you know, pretty, like, I'm pretty focused, you're not distracted by a bunch of things, you're not like responding to emails, or whatever your day job is and stuff. So like, to that morning time is pretty free to like, focus and do good work on whatever you want to do. And so that's what I did I for, you know, for the first couple years, I spent a couple months, you know, on each of those different kind of core skills that I learned web development, SEO, you know, Facebook ads, and things like that, you know, I would just take those first couple hours a day, whether it was like taking a course or it was doing the actual work for somebody to practice or doing the work for myself, or it was personal writing, you know, so like, it was like that. So really, I built most of everything in those couple hours every morning. And so that, that to me, like I was able to get a lot of work done in those couple hours a lot more than I was even able to get done like a day job. And so for me, that's kind of how I've modeled even causal is now like, I don't spend more than I don't know, maybe like three, probably four Max hours a day on it. You know, just because you don't really need that much time. In a day to be that productive, you know, the eight hour workday for you know, most jobs is mostly so that you have a window of time, if you want to reach out to like a customer or you want to, you know, be available for a customer to call you or like to reach out to a different company or stuff like that, like there's a window where you like you can do that. It's not actually like you need eight hours to get effective work done. I don't even think you can do Ultra focus work for eight hours, like maybe four hours max, before you're pretty burnt out. So So yeah, so that's, that's how I did it. So I say it all, you know, I used all of my creative energy in the morning to like, do that. And then I just kind of coasted at my day job. I mean, I basically, I got to the point where like, I did really well there. So I worked at Corning, and they make they make advanced optics, which one of the products you make is like a lithography stack. So it's like a stack of lenses that like Intel would use to image their processors. And it's pretty complicated. I didn't actually know anything about the optics, I wasn't an optical engineer, those guys are like nuts. So, but um, I was like in the testing department. So like, I would build systems that would test the quality of the optics. So I did like lasers, and I moved motors to like, move the lenses and stuff. So like, I got to the point where I had like really good autonomy in that position, because like I kind of had done all the things I needed to do at least one. So like most projects I was doing, I was reusing old things that I already did. So then they would still give me the same timeline on a project, they'd be like, hey, we need this piece of software and this like thing done in like a month. And I'd be like, cool, and it would only take me like a week. So then sometimes I did actually have time at work to you know, to do like causal stuff into like, you know, like, if something was broken, I could actually fix it right then. Yeah. And you know, as long as I was writing code, it looked like it was working. So like,

nobody really questioned it. So. So yeah, it was, you know, I, but I came to my management at some point. And it was like, annual review. And they're like, oh, yeah, you're doing good. Like, is there? Like, you know, is there anything that you you know, like, do you want to, like, go big? Or like, what do you what do you want to do here, I'm like, I want to be like, really low key, like, I don't want to do you know, I don't want to be the super save the company, dude. You know, like, I just want to like show up, you know, you give me my work, I'll do my work. And then I'm gonna go home to my family. So I kind of had this like, this vibe of like, almost like a little bit untouchable, where like, you could send me stuff and like, I'll do great work. But you're not going to like make me stay over time and like, do all this bunch of crazy stuff. And like, I'm going to do things at my pace. I'm going to do it, you know, so it's like a little bit of a, so he was just kind of like that. And so yeah, so I don't and I don't know, I don't know if that's actually advice to like anybody else that wants to, you know, do their own thing if that's what they should do. I have no idea. But I know for me, like energy wise, I didn't have the energy to do all that in the morning, and then go to work and then be like, you know, crazy and do a bunch of crazy stuff. So I had to balance it a little bit.

Colleen Schnettler 28:06
Yeah, I am a morning person. So you're speaking my language here. But I have not tried 4am That's pretty intense.

Jordan O'Connor 28:13
Yeah, don't do for now. I do five at least Yeah. So yeah. So

Colleen Schnettler 28:16
so when you were building the business, though, so you would do like four to eight and then drive. That's back in the olden days when we the drive to work. Work like eight to five?

Jordan O'Connor 28:28
Yep, yeah, yeah, that's what I would do. And I did it day in day out. And so I did that for close to two years before. Well, I did that. I guess I did that for like a total of three years. So I did that for like a year. And then I kind of want to start a closet tools. I worked a job for almost, it was like a year and a half that I worked at job and did closet tools at the same time. Okay, so So yeah, so yeah, yeah, that's, that's just what I did. And looking back, it was really crazy. But it Yeah, it worked. You know, so yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 29:04
Yeah, I love your point, too, about like your project, getting your best energy in the morning, as opposed to keeping your project till you know, seven to 10pm at night kind of deal. So, it sounds like with closet tools. There was a real poll from your customers. Like you knew you were onto something because people were cold. outreaching to you.

Jordan O'Connor 29:24
Mm hmm. Yeah, so um, yeah, I don't know if you want me to just elaborate that. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 29:30
go for it. So

Jordan O'Connor 29:31
basically, what happened is, I you know, I started learning the SEO stuff. So I had already kind of, you know, SEO optimized my personal blog. So when I wrote about this, you know, this topic on my personal blog, I titled it like, you know, like Poshmark automation or something like that. And I just had some instructions on how to you know, how to run this script on your own browser. And so, you know, a lot of those Poshmark related keywords were pretty easy to rank for. And my site had a little bit of a already, so it was pretty simple. But so like, because I had tapped into SEO vein, I already had that, you know, like kind of that in to be able to get people to see what I was building. And then my personal website just has my email and stuff. So like they were able to just email me or whatever. And so, but from there when I actually started closet tools, I actually went on Reddit, I went to the Poshmark subreddit. And I said, Hey, I have this free script. You can you can try it and keep it you all you have to do is sign up on this email list. And you can use this thing. And then what I want from you is I want to get feedback as to what you want built around this thing, like what other features would you want? How would you use this? You know what, you know, what things do you want to see that can help you sell more stuff? And so that's what I did. And I got around like 200 signups in like a day or two. Wow, for that free script. Yeah. And so and that was kind of the the start of everything. And so then what I did was, it was like, I did that post got the 200 signups people tried out the script. And then like a week later, I sent out an email to that list saying, like, Hey, give me some feedback. What do you want to see, and then I got a bunch of emails. And then I spent the next like, four weeks building out some of those features. And then I spent like, the majority of that time just integrating stripe, because I had no idea how to do it at the time. So I had to figure all that out. And then and then and then I lost it like a month later. And I had 10 paying customers right out of the gate. So it was like 300. MRR, like the gate basically. So yeah, so So the initial start wasn't based on SEO was based on Reddit. But I also got banned from that subreddit because they don't like the self promotion and stuff. So it was like kind of this one shot thing where I was like, I'm going for it. I'm gonna sell this thing, and it worked. So then from there, from there, I started writing content. And you know, the SEO, traffic started to take off more. And that's how I've basically built it to where it is now. So

Colleen Schnettler 32:06
yeah, and word of mouth to probably I mean, people love to the product. It sounds like

Jordan O'Connor 32:10
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah. So I say SEO, SEO is the only thing I had control over that, you know, did that. But certainly, yeah, word of mouth, everybody. You know, a lot of my customers have another friend that used it, and they refer to it and stuff like that. And then later later on, probably about two years, and I created a referral program, which is interesting, because like the referral program itself hasn't been like a, like a smashing success. I think it's brought in, I don't know, I think it's like 15k over, you know, a year or two, but like, the whole gross I've made like, I don't know, like 900k. So like, it's not like this huge percentage. But it did bring in a lot of word of mouth. But then also what happened is it brought in a lot of backlinks, which reinforced a lot of my SEO because when people posted their affiliate link, it just linked back to the website. So it was kind of this like a little it was more about the SEO engine for me rather than it was like, you know, the referral program. So yeah, but it also gave a reason for people to you know, talk about it, because they could get, you know, a kickback or whatever. So,

Colleen Schnettler 33:14
right. So it sounds like that was a win win, even if it wasn't a huge, like windfall. So let's talk about what your life looks like now that you know you are successful. Your business this is not that you weren't before. I'm just saying like

Jordan O'Connor 33:29
even that I am now I don't know. Yeah, that's what it's all relative. I guess

Colleen Schnettler 33:33
it's it is all relative. That is true. So when you're building the business, you had these super long days. What do you do now? What is your day look like now?

Jordan O'Connor 33:42
Yeah. So now we have three kids. We have another one on the way actually, congratulations. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. So February, that'll be you know, I'll be it'll be, it'll be interesting to see how much work I get done. But, so actually, now, like, we have a pretty strict schedule, now, we just kind of came up with it, we've over the course of like, the last year or two, we've been trying to come up with a schedule that works for both of us. And most of it centers around, like, my wife wants to feel put together and like, you know, like she has the house under control and like the kids under control and like you know, like that is gonna run smoothly. And, and but then for me, like, you know, like coming fresh out of like, you know what I was doing before I was like, oh, like I need like that whole morning to just do my best work and then like, you know, free food so but that didn't really work out for her too well, because like she would get up with the kids and the whole day was basically a mess from the start because it's like you're you get up and kids are demanding a bunch of stuff and you're just like, I don't know what I'm doing like, and so now I take the kids as soon as they wake up so I get up at five and I work for I work I kind of I don't know I go back and forth and what I use my morning time for now. And I think if I ever built a future business, I would take them out in time and do that. But now I use, I work from five to seven, and my daughter wakes up at seven, she, we have her train with a light that turns green at seven. So we have that, yeah, she would get up, like, you know, super early if she if she could. So she gets up at seven. And then so I have kids from seven to 10, I take care of breakfast, getting them dressed, and then I just kind of keep things picked up so that the house is at least, you know, in put together a little bit, and then my wife gets up around like seven or eight. But then she has time to, like, take a shower and like get breakfast, she can read, she can write, you know, she has achieved as a journal, she does like the bullet journaling. So she plans out today, you know, so like she has time to, like get put together. And that mostly like for our marriage has like been really awesome. Because it's like, it's just it, she's, she feels good. She comes into the day, the kids are already fed, they're kind of in good shape. And she comes down and it's like, okay, it's go time, like, you know, like, let's, you know, then she does school with the kids. And she you know, she takes him out to programs and stuff like that. So like, she has her, you know, a schedule and stuff that she does with them. And then so then that's when I work is like 10, like around 10am I start working. And then I go off at like three, you know, three or four. And then we kind of just tag team for the rest of the evening. So yeah, so I've worked, I actually end up getting, you know, like seven hours of working every day, so but those first two hours are kind of like free time or like personal time. Like if I have a personal project I want to work on or something like that. I'll do it during that time. So yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 36:41
that sounds wonderful. So what I'm trying to get out here, Jordan, this is the real question. Were the two to three years of the 12 to 15 hours a day worth it to live the life you're living now.

Jordan O'Connor 36:57
Yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. And I think the interesting thing is, I don't think I would have been able to do it now. It would, it would have been really hard. Right? Like, like, back then, you know, when I first started, we had no kids, but then like, we had one kid. But like, you know, even before they start walking and stuff, they're not really like that much work, you know, it's only when they become toddlers is when Okay, somebody's got to be hands on all the time with at least the kids. Yeah. So. So I had your head, that window of opportunity were like, Okay, I have, you know, I can do this, I can put on a lot of hours. Whereas now, I probably couldn't even put in that many hours without some serious strain on, you know, like the marriage and just like our health and things like that. But yeah, I mean, I think it was worth it, I think, um, you know, you kind of have, you know, those those choices in life, it's like, whether you're going to go for it, and you're going to do the thing, or you're just going to sit back and let life happen to you. And so I was like, Hey, I'm going to I'm going to go for it. I'm going to get control of you know, my finances and control over my time and control over my future. And so I did what I had to do to get there, you know, some people start in a different place, and it's easier for them. So people start in a way worse place, and it's a lot harder for them. So yeah, but yeah, I think I think ultimately, it was worth it for sure.

Colleen Schnettler 38:15
So you kind of made a joke earlier, like 30 seconds ago, when I said you're objectively successful. So I have met a lot of people like who are, are making quite a lot of money with their side projects, not side projects with their businesses. And you know, I've talked to people who are making, you know, $50,000 a month who still feel like they need to push, push, push, because it's not good enough. Where do you fall in that spectrum?

Jordan O'Connor 38:38
Um, I'm definitely not pushing, I'm not pushing very hard at all. Um, I think, I don't know, I think most of most of my focus right now is on minimizing everything else. So that I can maintain this lifestyle, basically forever, because like, right now, honestly, if anything changed, it would only be for the worse, like, this is kind of like almost as good as it gets. I have like, almost unlimited free time, I get to work on something I want to work on. You know, like my family is well provided for, like, we can kind of schedule our day, however we want it. So those are like, like, there's really no downside. So mostly for me, it's like, okay, like, how can we, you know, get rid of, you know, some of this lingering debt quicker? How can we pay off the house quicker? You know, how can we make sure that you know, like, we're investing and actually growing our wealth, you know, in the background, while we're, you know, in while I'm working so that in the future, you know, if you know, this whole thing blows up, I have, you know, some options and things like that. So, I think for me, that's more of my focus rather than like trying to like, you know, scale closet tools and maximize it and, you know, make a ton of money. You know, I think ultimately, you know, I, I could just go that route and do that. But I think when I have the you know, the three young kids we have a five year old a three year old and One year old. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So like when they're all young, you know, I want to be there with them. Yeah, I think once they get a little older, you know, they can get a little more autonomous, you know, they kind of can entertain themselves, you know, they have things they want to do. And they can go do that. But for now, like, they're super young, like, I don't, you know, I want to be there I want to be hands on. So I don't want to be like, you know, business dad that was never home, you know, like, off doing his thing. You know, I'd rather I'd rather have a balance of like, okay, like, yeah, I make a decent amount of money. But I also get to spend a lot of time with my kids. So like, why would I try to change that balance, you know, to, you know, for the worse, so. So yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 40:37
Yeah, that makes that makes total sense. And that's awesome. You're able to do that. Right. I mean, that's, that's amazing. So, yeah,

Jordan O'Connor 40:45
that's pretty fortunate.

Colleen Schnettler 40:46
Another question I had for you, I either saw this on indie hackers or Twitter, but you had, it was something like never take other people's advice when you are trying to build a business. Do you remember that?

Jordan O'Connor 40:57
Um, yeah, I can I can align with that. If I said that. I think you did. It definitely. Sounds like something I would have said. Yeah, I think um, yeah, advice is always so contextual. You know, like, even my advice right now. Like, like I was talking about, like, when, you know, I told my boss, like, Hey, I don't want to be the go to guy. Like, I don't know, if that's the right advice for somebody, maybe that's maybe they need to go hard. You know, maybe they're super lazy, and they need to go harder, or something like that. You know, for me, I was a good employee that wanted to take a little bit of a break, you know, so like, yeah, you know, but you know, so like, you know, people have different, you know, financial situations, they have different family situations that have different health situations, even have different personalities, like I was talking about earlier, where like, some people really want to do like one on one sales, and they really like talking to people and they really like, you know, like, being outgoing and stuff. Like, I don't really like that. So I have to build something totally different. That aligns with me. So like, I run a totally email based business, I don't actually do any calls with anybody. And if you want customer support, you email me like, that's it. Like, I don't have a phone number or anything like that. Yeah. So but for other people, like, you know, they want to be on the phone all day, they want to talk to people, you know, they want to do stuff like that. So, so yeah, I think a lot of a lot of business advice is very, very contextual. And I think until you actually dive in and figure out what works for you, then you're not really going to know what the best advice is, or what advice actually sticks. Because I think, even to a lot of advice, you know, people mean, well, and it does really work for them. But just because it works for them doesn't actually mean it's going to work for you, too. You know, and so like for me early on, like when, when I was taking those courses, you know, a lot of those people were pitching, you know, the the freelancing in the agency style stuff. And so like, I tried it, but like, it didn't work for me, like I was awful at it, like I was terrible at that part of stuff, like I had the great skills, but like dealing with people and like, you know, all that stuff. terrible at it. So like, I was like, I can't make this work, I have to do something different. And so that's how I, you know, got on the, and actually, it was interesting indie hackers launched. I'm trying to think it was about like, a few months before I launched closet tools. It was like, right around that time. So it's actually pretty fortunate because it was cool to, you know, see a group of people kind of doing the same thing that I was wanting to do. You gave me a little bit of confidence to kind of do that. So yeah. But anyways, yeah. So that I think that advice is is I think it most advice is, I don't know, it's mostly worthless. I do think it's interesting to hear people's stories. And as long as they give enough context, like I try to give a lot of context about like, my family, and like, what my financial situation was like, because like, that's the stuff that really matters. Because like, anyway, anybody could be like, oh, yeah, like, learn these skills, and then build a business and you'll make a ton of money. But like, you know, if you don't have the means to actually do that, then how are you? You know, how can you even, you know, attempt to do that? And so yeah, so I think if you can give them enough context, I think some advice can be helpful, or at least helpful enough to where they can be like, Oh, that doesn't even apply to me. You know, like, I you know, like, for me, I see a lot of advice from people that have like, no kids, and they don't like they're not married, they have no kids. And it's like, this doesn't even like you can't do that. Right. Like, I can't do that at all. So yeah, so I think that's important, for sure.

Colleen Schnettler 44:18
So what's next for you?

Jordan O'Connor 44:21
Um, I don't really know, I'm trying to figure it out. I think, um, I never saw clauses was as a long term thing, but it's sticking around a lot longer than I thought it was actually gonna stick around. So just kind of hanging out there. You know, I still actually I still build and continue to grow with it, you know, I still, you know, add features to it. And I still do marketing and things like that. But I don't know, I think I think I like I enjoy writing a lot. So I would like to do some sort of writing thing. I am writing a, an SEO sales book called rank to sell. So I'm working on that. Not that I think that that's going to be like my full time thing like Oh, I'm an author now. Because I think, you know, my code is pretty valuable, too. So, um, so yeah, I mean, some kind of hybrid of writing and code. In the future. I'm definitely on board with building more simple SAS products I have no, you know, I would like to do that, even in the same niche, you know, I can serve the same customer set with some different types of tools. And so, there's a lot of different platforms that these retailers sell on. So. So yeah, I mean, honestly, it's just kind of iterative stuff. It's not like anything like, oh, you know, I'm, you know, switching my whole life over to like something else. It's mostly like, hey, like, I'm here. How can I, you know, how can I invest a little more? How can I, you know, add a little more, you know, financial stability, a little more income, or, you know, another product or something, just something a little bit more iterative. And just kind of, like, keep the thing going, basically, it's kind of that's, that's mostly what it is. So, I've been thinking a lot lately about, like, some kind of business that I can get my kids involved in, but I haven't really come up with anything yet. I think it would be super cool to like, have them, you know, work on something with me, but I don't know. That's, that's honestly, that's kind of the dream for me is like, that would be cool. You know, but I don't know. I don't know what that is yet.

Colleen Schnettler 46:09
Yeah, that would be cool. Wonderful. Well, Jordan, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your story with us. And, you know, teaching us about some of the things that helped you grow closet tools. I really appreciate having you.

Jordan O'Connor 46:26
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Colleen Schnettler 46:29
And that will wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. Thank you so much for listening. You can find us on Twitter at software social pod

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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
Good morning, Michelle. Hey, Colleen, it's early here in California. But I am here for you.

Michele Hansen 0:42
It's late here in Denmark, it is dark. It is not even five.

Unknown Speaker 0:47
My goodness.

Colleen Schnettler 0:48
So I think this week, I would like to talk to something I talk about something a little more serious. And I want to talk about you. Because you have been going through some stuff.

Michele Hansen 1:02
Yeah, I have. It kind of occurred to me this week that I I don't I don't know, I might be going through burnouts. Or at least I have, like, way too much stress. Like, like, I feel like I'm DDoSing myself.

Colleen Schnettler 1:22
I love that line, by the way. So first of all, I guess your best friend and podcast host has been telling you this for like eight months.

Michele Hansen 1:33
Like, we're like you're gonna burn out. I'm like, I'm fine. And then our friends of ours were like, you know, after like, I launched something like, you know, especially infoproduct people, they're like, I went through like a depression after that I really burned out like, and I was like, I hear you but like, I'm special. I'm not gonna that's not gonna happen to me. You know, all think we're special. We all think we're special. And we all are special. But there are also things that everyone goes through. Um, yeah, I have so much going on in my life right now. And, and I think this, I mean, I Okay, so you've known this for a long time. But like, I I think it really started to become apparent to me that like, given everything I'm doing I have really like down prioritized taking care of myself. That was something I got really thinking about at founder Summit. And it's not just like a work life balance problem or a, you know, need to like join a gym problem. Like, I think it's like, bigger than that. But I don't really know, like, how do you unburn out? How do you do though?

Colleen Schnettler 2:43
Let's take a step back. When you say you haven't deprioritize taking care of yourself, what did you use to do that? You don't do like you have stopped doing over the past year. And like what led to that. I'm curious how you got to where you are.

Michele Hansen 3:00
I mean, so I really don't first of all, like I really don't work out as much like and I used to be someone who was like super active, like, I used to run to work, bike to work, play tennis, do gymnastics, soccer on top of that, like super, super active and have really become less active. And I don't know if that's the pandemic or like moving countries and my habits like change, you know, you have to establish entirely new habits. As I was talking to people about it founder summit who are nomads, they were saying that they didn't realize until COVID and they were forced to stay in one place. how stressful it had been to like, move places every couple of months and have to like refigure it all over again. Like oh, like where's the grocery store that I like? And like, can I get the food I like and you know, where's the gym that I like? Where can I work? Like all those kinds of like basic everyday questions become sort of stressful. Like I definitely feel like that like I didn't go to the dentist for 18 months. Mostly because it's like so like hack I have a package I've been trying to mail for three months and I'm just so overwhelmed by the idea of like figuring out the Danish postal system that it's still sitting at my desk. So like basic everyday things become really overwhelming when you're abroad. Yeah, I think like one of my habits changed but then I think I just have so much going on also that like you know I think the great thing about working for yourself is like if you want to take an hour lunch break and read a book like you can do that but like I have been feeling like I don't even have time to eat I don't have time to make myself healthy food like the idea of just like even cooking a piece of salmon or whatever like seems overwhelming and so like I have really allowed my health to like totally slip because I just feel like I don't have time for it but I also don't have those like sort of habit triggers I guess that I used to have you know if I was in my environment I was in you know, do Two years ago, for sure. And I think with everything that I have going on, that's like become really acute.

Colleen Schnettler 5:09
So and you would lump. I mean, that's your physical health. But also you said you don't read books for pleasure. I mean, I think that's what you just said. So that's not that's your whole, not just do it like I do. Okay. Yeah. I mean, have you also, like, what about your, your mental health are you also are you still not having time to do the things you used to love that brought you joy.

Michele Hansen 5:33
So I differentiate that, and I think this is like I've been, you know, so I'm obviously not an expert in this, I'm just somebody who's going through differentiating between burnout and depression, where, like, I actually feel like my mental health is pretty good. Like I've done I've done a lot of work on my mental health the past couple of years. Um, and, you know, depression is like, when you try to, you know, you try to get the energy to do the things that you liked, and then you don't get any enjoyment out of it, it's like the dopamine just doesn't even fire. Or if it does, it only lasts for a second. So whereas you know, a non depressed person, maybe you can go for a walk, and, and then you or you see a friend, and it kind of brightens you for the rest of the day, and at least helps you get through it. You know, when I've gone through depression, it's like, that enjoyment you get from that, like, you get like 30 seconds of enjoyment out of it, and then it's just gone. And you even feel worse than you did before, because you were expecting to make you feel good. And then it didn't, and then it just like spirals. I'm not in that state right now. It's more just like this constant feeling of stress. And like, I don't have enough time for anything. And feeling exhausted by that constant stress. But it's also not anxiety, either. Because an idea I guess I'm not I don't really know how to explain this. But like it's, it's not like worrying. And it's not like a tension, or No, I don't, I don't know how to explain it. But yeah, it's kind of it's gotten me to Google X. It's like, I don't know what this feeling is. And then I kind of, you know, I mentioned it to some friends of ours. And they're like, that's, that's the burnout. We were telling you was going to happen. And I'm like, oh, and then I'm like, so like, what is like the plan to like, get out of this? Like, is there like, what does your schedule look like when you were getting out of burnout? They're like, yeah, that's kind of like, you're trying to, like, make a schedule of it. Like, right. And one of our friends was, like, I Googled, you know, how to be a type B personality when I was going through.

Unknown Speaker 7:49
It's amazing.

Michele Hansen 7:51
Um, yeah, but I think it's kind of it's kind of weird. I was like, I don't even talk about this on the podcast, because it's like, I don't have a solution here. You know, I almost feel like, you know, I should have some sort of solution to give people but I don't I'm just kind of stuck in the middle of it. And, and just sort of talking it out, because I also, I don't, I feel like if people heard met, people mentioned, like having burnout, but like, and I guess if people know of like a good podcast or blog posts on the experience of burnout and how someone got through it, I would really love to read that. Because I feel like we don't really talk about it enough. So I'm kind of, I guess, trying to talk about it as a way of giving visibility to this thing that it turns out, a lot of my entrepreneur friends have gone through.

Colleen Schnettler 8:46
Yeah, well, I think it's, I mean, as much as you're comfortable, I think it's good that you're talking about it. I you know, the one of the things. One of my takeaways from founder summit was I actually talked to quite a few people who went through massive burnout. And it seems to be just something that happens to us in our field in modern day, a lot, probably because we can work anywhere at any time. So we could theoretically be working all the time. But also, I, again, I think it's I'm sure it's a very personal journey to get out of it. But I feel like you need to take like, a month off. Let's talk about that.

Michele Hansen 9:26
Yeah, and I think that's really where I'm struggling because I feel like I can't and but I'm also sort of, you know, somebody who's drowning and like, people are saying, hey, stop flailing. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, that like, and that just makes me panic even more. But like, so where I, you know, the stuff I have going on, like, you know, so we have to co do and like, I want to stress that like, I still really enjoy working on geocode do and I think actually Mateus and I were talking about this last night, and he's like, you know, we've been running this for almost eight years. And he's like, I'm even still surprised that we still find it interesting, we still find it challenging, we still enjoy working on it we enjoy the customers we work with, we enjoy, you know, helping them and like, it's still a problem we're really, like, excited about solving. And, you know, it does not feel like a drag. And so like, so I have to do going on. Of course, there's this podcast and all of my book stuff and like, and that's a joy. But also, I've been putting pressure on myself to sell it when I don't really have to, like, you know, like that. Like, there's not like I purposely didn't pitch it to a publisher, I purposefully didn't want someone telling me, you need to sell this many books, and you need to go out on this book tour and like, do all these things like I wanted that, you know, that decision for myself of how much time I spent on it. But now I'm in this situation where I feel like I have to justify all the time I spent on it some spending all this time promoting it. So

Colleen Schnettler 10:56
let's go back. So yeah, so my my business partners, you haven't even gotten through the whole list. But sure, yeah. Okay, so let's go back a little bit. So my business partner Sean has, in the past experienced incredible, massive burnout. And one of the things he said to you yesterday was, like, the number one symptom of burnout is thinking, you can't work less. Like, there's no way around it, I can't solve this problem, because I cannot work less. So I challenge that, first of all, okay, but I don't know if we're here to problem solve, or if we're just here to talk. So

Michele Hansen 11:32
we're kind of a mix of both. But I mean, so I think so here, let me get through the full list of things.

Colleen Schnettler 11:36
Okay, keep going. So just to go do,

Michele Hansen 11:38
there is what I term my extracurriculars, which is the book like this podcast being on other podcasts, like, you know, the fun business stuff. Um, and then there's also I'm in Danish class all day, Monday and Friday. Right. And then also, I have a family and, you know, another stressors on top of that is, you know, I'm in a foreign country, and, you know, again, talking to people founder Summit, you know, talking to other people who moved abroad, during the pandemic, there was a universal Zero out of 10, do not recommend on that. And then also, you know, we're in a pandemic, so like, there's all sorts of reasons to be burned out. But then the reason why I feel like I can't do less is because like, just I mean, quite frankly, like, for immigration reasons, like I have to be in Danish class, and I have to be working full time. And so I'm squeezing in basically, a full work week, you know, on the edges on Monday and Friday, and then working as much as I can, to say, Wednesday, Thursday, plus, you know, like, replying, the email, you know, when I wake up in the morning, and you know, at night, you know, normal entrepreneur, lack of boundaries with email stuff. And so like, that's why I feel like I can't work less because like, my life necessitate necessitates that I'm in language school twice a week, which feels like a part time job. And then, like, just for legal immigration reasons, like I have to be working full time at the same time. So I feel kind of backed into a corner almost. And then so then, like, the last thing to let go, because obviously, I can't drop family off of that. I guess one benefit of being somewhere where I don't really have a lot of friends in daily life is it like social is, you know, there's, there's zero there. So there's really nothing to drop. But I'm like this, doing this podcast and the book and everything. Like, that's the easiest stuff to fall back on. But that's the thing I like, really enjoying. And so I guess I could sensibly work less and not do this, but like, I quite enjoy this. And like, I enjoy talking to people on their podcasts. And I enjoy doing stuff about my book, and I enjoy talking to you and doing this podcast. And so like, so the only thing I'm left with is, you know, the taking away the thing I enjoy the most and I, you know, like, I wish I could only be in Danish class one hour a week, but that's just not an option. And I think that's the thing. That's the biggest drag on myself. But also there's just the general I mean, stress of the pandemic, right, like, you know, you've probably heard that Europe, several European countries are locking down again, like so it's like, are we facing another lockdown, where I have to balance between working and feeling like a bad parent, because I'm like, you know, balancing homeschooling and working and everything. And so that's like, even stressing me out even more because it's like, Oh, my God, I have to get even more out of each day when I already feel like I'm getting trying to get so much out of each day. And I think just all of that is just kind of making me feel just sort of stressed and exhausted. Just like

Colleen Schnettler 14:57
that's a lot. I mean, especially the foreign country. To me, we move to California. And it's so annoying slash stressful. Find a new doctors and dentists. And we're in the same country, they still speak English,

Michele Hansen 15:08
they tend you're in like constant sunlight. Oh, that makes a

Colleen Schnettler 15:12
huge difference. By the way, everyone should move to California, because I'm happy every day because the sun is shining every day. But no, that's a lot, Michelle. I mean, you end this has been so prolonged for you, right? Because it was the pandemic, and then you move to a foreign country. That was that was a lot to take on at once you left your friends you left, you know, the place where you were comfortable and you loved you left the language. You left the healthcare system, like everything that that was really American healthcare system you

Michele Hansen 15:42
like it's, it's terrible, but at least at least they knew how it worked. Yeah, at least you know how to go to the doctor, I could go to the doctor and feel confident I could communicate with the brain. But I wasn't like going, like practicing, you know? How to say, you know, yes, sure. I floss my teeth. You know?

Colleen Schnettler 16:03
The change over the past? Gosh, is it been two, three years now? How long has this pandemic been going on? The, the amount of stress you have taken on is tremendous. And I feel for you, because it's just it sounds really, really hard.

Michele Hansen 16:29
And everybody who said they went through burnout, like they're like, the thing I did was, you know, I fired all my clients, and I didn't work for two months. Yeah, or I didn't work for a year, like I just lived on savings for a year. And I'm like, I don't feel I can do that. And like also, like people, like, you know, I traveled or whatever. And it's like, I have a family. So I can't just like do nothing all day. Like, even if I wanted to, like I have responsibilities like that, you know, do not change regardless of how I'm feeling. And then, like, legally, I have to be working. And so I feel I mean, I don't know,

Colleen Schnettler 17:10
it sounds to me like you feel stuck, or trapped. Yeah. And the situation super

Michele Hansen 17:14
stuck. And I don't know how to get unstuck.

Colleen Schnettler 17:19
So it seems like the first step is decrease your stress level. Yes. I mean, here's the thing, you're in the middle of it. And so don't freak out. But let's just let's just think outside the box. Okay. So you're in the middle of this super, super high, intense, stressful situation. But I'm going to still say that a lot of it is of your own making. And yeah. And I understand that you don't want to give up the book promo, or you don't want to do our podcast less because these are things you really enjoy. But your health, you know, has to be your happiness. That should be number one.

Michele Hansen 18:02
But like why do I take away the things that make me happy? Oh, I

Colleen Schnettler 18:06
didn't say take them away. You aren't ready for Collins great ideas. Oh, God, what is Collins great ideas. Okay, so I'm just gonna throw these things out there not to scare you. Just to and I don't want you to problem solve or tell me why you can't do them. Just to show you that. Like, there are options even if they seem absolutely crazy. Okay,

Michele Hansen 18:28
are you ready? Okay, okay, I will I will play along. Okay, just play along with Romani. Okay,

Colleen Schnettler 18:33
you could move back to the United States. Now listen, one, okay, could sell geocoder do and take two years off and you don't work at all. You could hire someone to be you. And I know the onboarding of that you had you don't want it. You've told me a million times. I know you don't want to hire someone. But if you could get a system in place where you only work, you don't have to work on geocode do you'd still be working full time in the eyes of the Danish government? But you yourself wouldn't have to be managing the contracts and putting in the hours. There's like they don't you know as long as you're they think you're working ish. The full I have to

Michele Hansen 19:12
be working. Hello. Danish government people listening.

Colleen Schnettler 19:17
I wait. I mean, I would be working because you would be managing okay, you would be working. Because you would be managing a person who was doing the things for you? What if you just stopped doing what would happen? If you did nothing for God? Oh, except like legally required things like, like, you What if you just on your website, you go to your website today? You say we are not taking any more customers for six months. Shut it down. I mean, don't shut it down. But like, what if you were just like, No, no one else gets to come on six months. I mean, there's options. I know these sound crazy to you. Okay, no idea. Okay. I'm just trying to I'm just like trying to help you see that, like, roll their eyes.

Unknown Speaker 19:57
You're like, I see it. See?

Colleen Schnettler 20:03
You and I know you love promote. And so then of course, then there's the smaller things, but I don't think not like depending on your, your rate of promoting the book. Yeah, you could just totally stop again, it's a book, it's not going to go anywhere, totally stop for six months. Right? All this stuff will be here, once you are recovered, but your health and your happiness that is your life, this is your life. And Michelle, you have made it. And you, you're so stressed. And that makes me sad.

Michele Hansen 20:36
You know, I remember I always remember hearing, you know, money doesn't buy happiness when I was a kid. And, you know, he always interpreted that to mean Oh, yeah, you can't just you know, I don't know, go buy yourself something and then feel happy. And they don't tell you how bitter it is, when you're in a situation that can't be solved by money.

Colleen Schnettler 21:02
Yeah, that's intense,

Michele Hansen 21:05
even when you could have it and, you know, I mean, money by as, you know, therapy and coaches and, you know, help with cleaning the house and or, you know, employees for that matter. You know, whatever else, but you know, money truly doesn't buy happiness. And that is a bitter pill to swallow.

Colleen Schnettler 21:25
Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of other small things you can do, which may help but they might just be bandaids. And so I really think you need to take a good look at like you, you're so happy in in what you have built with your husband, the work your work environment, and what you are building with the book like, but it doesn't seem right now. And it's been this way for a while, right? This hasn't been a month, this hasn't been two months, it's been this way for a while where it doesn't seem like it's bringing you overall happiness to the extent maybe you thought it would, and it might just be have too much going on. But like, I'm worried about you. That's there. I said it.

Michele Hansen 22:09
I think the fact that I have so much going on right now is like bringing these other issues to the fore like we have talked in the past about how I really struggled with work life balance, and like, if like, like I really love working on giuoco do and both of us like we're not selling the business, we we both really enjoy working on it and working on it together. Like, but if I could work 12 hour days on do co do and book stuff like I would do that and be totally happy to do that. Yes, I could blame this on Okay, the extra stress of spending 10 hours a week in language school is like, really adding a lot of stress to this. But I don't think that gets to the bottom, like, like, I don't think I'm being honest with myself. If I say that, that is the problem like that is just like the straw that's breaking the camel's back here. That's, like I struggle with work boundaries. I struggle with, you know, prioritizing myself, like, and giving myself a break and feeling like I deserve a break. Like I think this is this conversation here is like, I don't feel like I can take a break. I don't feel like I deserve a break. I don't feel like it's something that's available to me. Um, I definitely consider myself a recovering workaholic and somebody who wrapped up way too much of their self worth and self identity in work. Which is not as bad as it used to be but like, like, I feel like those things are the real issues and like you know, we kind of talked about how doing that exercise at like well that exercise at founder summit, but also like when it comes to like business like I'm like super competent, and like confident and and like I just make decisions and I feel very self assured and I find it easy to move forward. You tend to like doubt yourself and do a lot of research and feel stuck and like really struggle with that but like when it comes to taking care of yourself and your work life balance and your social life and your your health and everything like you are like so decisive and confident and just make decisions and implement things and do things. And I'm like totally the opposite. Like we're completely opposite.

Unknown Speaker 24:38
Yep. On these two things,

Michele Hansen 24:40
and you're like, you have to have better work life balance and I'm like, like, how, how do like what's like, I don't know what that means. Like, I think I need to read a book on how to relax like, you know, like, Where where is this guide? Where is this schedule of like,

Unknown Speaker 24:59
I can Please be the episode of this. I need to read a book about how to relax. Please title the episode like, that's amazing.

Michele Hansen 25:07
Seriously, like, I feel like if you ever got to a point where like you were like I'm too stressed out, like you would immediately cut back on working and feel no guilt or shame or reservations and like just make it work.

Colleen Schnettler 25:21
Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe my I mean, I think my experience is a lot different from yours being a military spouse with three kids. If I can't, I have to take care. I mean, they're older now. But like when they were little, like if I wasn't healthy, mentally, physically, whatever, I could not care for all these little people. And so I think part of it is I learned that years ago, like, if I don't have my shit in order, this whole thing falls apart. Because Nick was gone all the time. My husband, you know, he travels a lot for a long, long, long period of time. So I have learned over the years how important it is to prioritize myself really. And it's my life. Right? Let's get back to that. Like, this is your life. Like, how do you want to live it? I mean, right. Not the way you're living it right now. Not with this incredibly burdening like anvil of stress on your shoulders.

Michele Hansen 26:19
Yeah, I mean, I feel I like something you said to me at founder Summit, one of our I don't know if this was our debrief knife, when we we ordered guacamole at midnight, I did some self pampering so good. That like you're like, you know, I met all these people who are super successful, and their businesses are where I want to be. And they're, like, I'm happier than them. Like, they're all miserable. Like,

Unknown Speaker 26:47
I'm a little embarrassed that you shared that on the podcast, but I did. So we can love you all, thank you for chatting with me. Because not all of your character.

Michele Hansen 26:59
Not all of them were miserable. But like they had a lot of, you know, business problems. And it created a lot of like, personal problems, and you didn't want to have those problems, like the stress of managing employees and just, you know, all this other stuff like, but like, you know, you're saying how like your work life balance is really good. Your family life is really good. Like, you've talked about how you're hesitant to work more because you don't want to disrupt how good your personal and then like family life is. And like Yeah, I like I just, I don't even I don't even know how to wrap my head around that. So that's it my family life is bad, or I don't like them. Like I do. Like it's just I don't know, like, it's

Unknown Speaker 27:48
a lot. You're like, well, I you know,

Michele Hansen 27:51
what if there's nights when you know, Nick wanted to hang out, and then I'm working and I'm like, What is this world where like, the default is not like, one of your like, is that what you thought? Like I said, your laptop? Like what is that? Like, I was just like, that's like so normal for us that like, you know, one of us has some sort of work to do we have to do all the time. Like and we're better than we used to be but like Yeah, and like, I don't know, hanging out with your spouse. Like I just I don't I don't even know like I don't know. i Our marriage is so funny. Our marriage is very different. Um, I just really I don't know, I feel very stuck. And I feel like all these solutions everyone is giving me I'm still like, Well, that was work wouldn't work because this and this wouldn't work. Isn't that like, I'm still I don't know what yeah, that but I'm being very obstinate. I'm not being very, very compliance person to be helped.

Colleen Schnettler 28:53
That's what I think that was Shawn's point about, like, when you say I cannot change anything, that's when you know, you need to change something.

Michele Hansen 29:00
Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 29:04
Yeah, yeah. And it's a whole mindset shift. So actually, I was talking to my other business parent, partner Aaron about this yesterday. And I said that same thing where I was like, I feel like I'm happier than most people. And he was like, Why do you think that is? And I had a couple I had many reasons, but like one of them to like, again, as, like we, as a military spouse, like our friends actually die. I mean, that's like, in real life, like people die. Close friends of ours have died. And I think, you know, when that happens, like my good friend down the street is a widow. She was widowed at 29 with two kids. That really gives you perspective. I mean, you know what I mean? Like, I think that really, really helps. I think I'm really good at keeping perspective because I live in this world that is so much more dangerous than everyone else's world. It's like what is really important. You get one life, you don't know how long it's going to be. How do you want to spend it?

Michele Hansen 29:57
It sounds like you take that perspective. Not as you know that your problems don't matter because you're not dead, or that your spouse isn't dead, it's more, which I think is often how that comes across. But it's more so that being surrounded by death, or having it, surrounded by it, but yeah, that was a little. Having it, having it be this kind of looming part of the community kind of like having having it be a presence in the community in a way that it's really not in mind. Like, it forces you to reevaluate those things, and to not take your time for granted. Which, you know, I mean, like, I mean, and, and I don't know, and he's also sort of an ADHD person thing, where, like, we struggle with the concept of time, and like, there's these great talks about how like, ADHD is this disorder of how you perceive time, and like, Hmm, you know, we let things expand to the amount of time allotted, and then some and so we need, like, deadlines for this stuff, like, and so if I feel like there's no deadline on me feeling better, or prioritizing myself, or whatever it is, like I just, I will just fill that time with other things because, and it has been externally set deadline to like, if I make up my own deadline, like, I will blow through it, like, it just, it's like, it doesn't exist, because I know it's made up, like I like outsmart the deadline, like, to my own detriment. Um, you know, but that doesn't, that time doesn't last forever. And it sounds like you get reminders that, you know, none of us are guaranteed any amount of time.

Colleen Schnettler 31:38
So, and to be fair, like, on the other side of that coin, I sometimes I'm not, I want to say convinced, but I am sometimes concerned that like all of my businesses will not be successful, because I'm not willing to sacrifice everything else in my life. And, you know, so there's two sides to that, right? Like, I might always have a SAS that makes $1,000 a month and just hang out here, because I'm not willing to work 8090 100 hours a week to make it happen. So you know, trade offs, but

Michele Hansen 32:10
I also I don't feel like I'm sacrificing everything because I still do have like, like, family life is also something I'm not going to sacrifice because I think it's something that I did in the past. And now I don't you know, I mean, like today's like, kind of a totally packed day for me, schedule wise. And I was like, you know, tonight, I'm just gonna, like, put our daughter to bed and probably, like, fall asleep with her. Like, but you know, we had

Colleen Schnettler 32:41
her, but it is 530 Your time right now already. So, you know, I have something after that. Right. And you're going to do another podcast as soon as we get off this podcast. So and I know a lot of that is timezone stuff. But

Michele Hansen 32:53
which suck. I hate them. Yeah. Like not being able to do anything with customers until like 8am at the earliest, or at sorry, like 2pm if they're an early riser, usually 3pm Six, if it's California, like, yeah, that is

Colleen Schnettler 33:11
rough. Okay, so let's go back. Let's circle back circle back to you. Because we got a little distracted. And how we get the circle back. I know we're running out of time to solve all your problems. So in 30 minutes,

Unknown Speaker 33:30
I think we have five minutes left till your next podcast.

Colleen Schnettler 33:35
But seriously, like, what what is your? I'm so happy. Okay, so when you brought this up yesterday with our group, I was so happy to see that, because it showed me that you were fine. You were finally seeing it. And so what is your plan?

Michele Hansen 33:52
Dude, I don't have one. I we I'm stuck in the middle of this like,

Colleen Schnettler 33:56
so you don't know. You're still young? No idea, I think. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 34:00
I mean, I was like, trying this week. I was like, maybe I can like, you know, dude, you could do stuff like Tuesday, Wednesday, and then do extracurricular stuff Thursday, but then it kind of ended up meshing together. And I'm like, actually, I really need to, like, sequester myself and like, get several focused hours of work done on like, Monday afternoons, like, I don't know, that just sounds like more like planning and scheduling. And when it does sound like that sounds like you know, sort of optimizing within the current bounds rather than like actually stepping back and taking time to like, reflect and focus on myself, which is just I think that's the bigger thing is I don't know how to do that. Like, well, and I was like, should I hire a coach, but then I was like, I feel like I don't have time for more meetings. Like, you know, it's just like a coach. I

Colleen Schnettler 34:51
hire a relaxing coach. How do I relax, coach? Yeah, I think you're right, like trying to over optimize your schedule is not the solution. You have to fundamentally changed the box, right? And I know

Michele Hansen 35:02
the paradigm is wrong. And I'm just working within the current paradigm because I don't know anything else. I just got it. It's not working.

Colleen Schnettler 35:11
Right? Like, I know those ideas I threw out, I know you're not going to sell the company or hire someone or move to the United States. But my point is like, you could I mean, there are other options that are available to me. So try to think outside the box because you have to change the box because the box is not working for you. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 35:31
Yeah. Well, that's a lot for me to,

Unknown Speaker 35:37
you're gonna think about it. You promise?

Michele Hansen 35:39
I'm gonna think about it. I'm gonna buy some books about stuff. I don't know. I don't know.

Unknown Speaker 35:52
Okay, I was giving myself

Michele Hansen 35:53
homework not the solution, either.

Unknown Speaker 35:55
That's not not the solution is read a book about how to relax, read a book about how to stop writing

Michele Hansen 36:02
about relaxing, right? Like, it's not like, relaxing without meditating. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 36:06
it's not the right word. You know,

Michele Hansen 36:08
I already meditate anyway. Like, it's not like it's, yeah, it's I don't know, I don't know what it like, I don't know anybody listening. You've gone through burnout. You have some the, I feel like at this point, I less need like solutions from people. And I more need, like, hope thinking about it, if that makes sense. Like framing a problem. Right? Yeah. So anyway, if anyone's gone through this, like, let me know, and you want to, you know, DM with me or something about it, and, or you have a book that like really helped you when you went through it. I feel like burnout is I've gathered that's very different for everyone. And the solutions are very different from everyone. So think I'm intentionally not asking for solutions, because that needs to be something that I figure out, right? Otherwise, because I'm just gonna sit here. Yeah, no, it's gonna work. That's gonna work and then I'm not gonna do what the problem, right? I need to I don't know. I need to think different think outside the box. You did new box.

Colleen Schnettler 37:13
You need a new box. Okay, well, I wish you luck. Keep me posted on how it goes. And I think with that, we will wrap up this week's episode of the software Show podcast. Please reach out to Michelle on Twitter. If you have any advice or you yourself have gone through burnout. I think those would be welcome conversations. And let us know what you thought of the show. We're at software slash pod till next week.

Michele Hansen 37:40
This episode was also brought to you by tele tele is a browser based screen recorder. For videos that showcase your work and share your knowledge. You can capture your screen, camera and present slides. You can also customize your videos with backgrounds layouts and other video clips. Tella makes it easy to record updates for your teammates, launch videos for your followers and demos for your customers. Record your next product demo with tele visit tele.tv/software Social to get 30% off tele pro

Michele Hansen
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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, welcome back to software social, I am super excited to have a guest with me this week. It is Matt wensing, who is founder of Summit, which is a tool for financial modeling. Previously, he was founder of risk pulse, which was acquired in 2019, which was an enterprise SAS. I'm also the co host of out of beta. Matt, welcome. Thanks, Michelle.

Matt Wensing 0:31
I'm really excited to be here, too. I'm a listener. And I just love it. So this is fun.

Michele Hansen 0:37
So I have been wanting to talk to you for a really long time. And there is one tweet that you sent out in particular, that made me really want to talk to you. So in January, you tweeted out some notes you had taken from customer research that you did for Summit. And you were working with what the jobs to be done world calls the forces diagram, which is basically this diagram we use to show the different pushes and pulls and anxieties and habits people have around the tools they use, and why they might be looking for something new, but also why they might stay with what they're doing right now. And I am so curious to hear kind of like how this came about, and how you have been using customer research as you explore summits. So can you kind of like take us back in time to when you first started researching Summit?

Matt Wensing 1:52
Yeah, absolutely. So it's funny that there's actually an overlap here between even knowing what jobs be done enforces progress is and that initial research. So I attend the business of software conference each year in the States, so there's one in Europe and the States, but every October, in Boston, folks get together, at least pretty COVID and cross fingers soon. And Bob molesta is a regular speaker there as well, who is not sure the godfather of the forces of progress framework in a lot of ways. And I just remember being this is probably Oh, man, time's flying, right. So let's just say five years ago, I wanted to say three and like now, it's not three, it's probably five years ago, I listened to him interview, an audience member, kind of a mock customer interview, live about purchasing a car. And the way that they were able to take a dialogue and really parse it into a framework that you could then take away from that, and then keep doing that with more and more conversation. It just was like, Okay, this is definitely a tool that I need to add to my tool belt like this is, this is amazing. What's interesting is then fast forward into Summit, like by that time in the history of my previous company, I was doing sales, enterprise sales, mostly it wasn't doing a lot of customer research, at least in terms of the early sort of genesis of the product. So I don't know that I got to use it a lot. Back then it was mostly just listening to like we did do enterprise deals where there were custom features involved. But really, I got to use it fresh, you know, when you're second time founder, a lot of times you're like, Oh, I'm gonna do this the right way, this time around and actually use more tools and framework things I've learned. And forces progress is one of those. So I wanted to build this tool to do financial modeling. But that is such an ambiguous target that I knew I needed to figure out the value proposition. What does that really mean? What do people want? So funny enough, I gave a talk at business a software as a lightning talk in 2019. And I kind of use that as a launching point. I didn't frame it as, hey, I'm selling a product. I didn't even have a product. I had a little prototype, basically. But I use that talk to share. Really, the problem, socialize the problem space, if you will talk about, hey, this is this is a challenge, isn't it? Like this is a pain. Here's a little tool I made to kind of deal with that pain. And I really tried to draw some business lessons out of it. But really, at that same time, I started to have conversations with potential customers and prospects. And as they talked to me, I started cataloger file their feedback into these different kind of buckets, right, kind of the tool that I had learned previously and yeah, I just kind of did that every you know a few months would kind of refresh my understanding of what they were saying and built up this. This list organized list of feedback which I guess I'll put a bow on it and say it really think helped me understand the product strategy, like what did the product strategy need to be, for me to go into this space that was otherwise very nebulous? Like, how do I have opinion? Like what should my opinions be about the tool and what it needs to do? Right?

Michele Hansen 5:19
Mm hmm. It's really it's really interesting that you use basically that talk as sort of a, I guess, sort of, in a way, sort of what Patrick McKenzie would call a friend catcher, to attract people to you to talk about the problem. But then because you had that experience with the forces of progress and with seeing Bob Maestas speak who, by the way, his his book, demand side sales actually has real customer interviews in it that are all broken down by the forces. And it's like, it's so good, like it should be on everybody's shelf. And then, but you you were able to process that. And I think that's so important, because sometimes there can can feel like there's this gap between for people who are new to research of how do I go from talking to people to actually designing value? And how do I figure out okay, I've talked to these people, I know what these problems are, I know what I'm interested in. But then what is the product? And it sounds like you were able to bridge that? So I'm curious if you can kind of dive into when you went from this point of understanding the problem space socializing the problem space, you kind of had a prototype, but like, how did the prototype sort of snowball with that? And how did you figure out where it was valuable?

Matt Wensing 6:48
Yeah, so to put a timeline on this, this was, what you're describing now is essentially the journey from late 20, October 2019, through probably April, May of this year, so you know, almost almost two years, essentially. And during that time, I've released multiple versions of the products, really knowing that this was not going to be it. Now I'm a developer, a full stack developer who can build full, I can build applications top to bottom, not as strong as they used to be on the front end, but like it works. And what I was essentially trying to do was understand, okay, so there are few risks of the business. And funnily enough, Patrick McKenzie was one of the first people I pinged about this idea, because was his work at stripe Atlas and stripe. And just in general, I knew that he would have interesting opinion. And his thoughts were okay, financial modeling is interesting. But it sounds like it could be transactional, like, somebody has a need, they do it. And then they're gone. And I knew I wanted to build a SAS. And so that was like, Okay, that's a great point. Because a lot of times, the use cases that would come up when I talked to people were, oh, yeah, I have this investor meeting, or Oh, yeah, I have this fundraiser. Oh, yeah, I need to figure this thing out. And it sounded like it had a pretty finite shelf life of utility. People come they use it, then they go away. I was like, okay, that's not a great recurring revenue business, you know, because it sounds like something you could just sell for $50 one time, and then people don't ever need to keep paying you anything. So I recognize that pretty early on that engagement was a key risk to the business being a sustaining recurring revenue model. And engagement is tricky, because as much as you want to do, you know, mock ups and kind of smoke tests and things that are not you don't want to over invest in engineering, it's very hard to de risk engagements with a paper mock up or a screenshot or a prototype, like, how do you know that they're gonna come back to it unless they actually get to use something. So I basically spent those 18 to 24 months, releasing, what I knew were really technically debt laden, let's put it that way versions of the product, where all I cared was that the front end was communicating what I wanted it to like, this is what this is, this is what this does for you. If you click this button, this happens, and it works, how it works less important. So I built a lot of basically throw away versions of the product, which was expensive, but I felt like it was the key to knowing would people actually come back and reuse it? And I guess let's pause there. That was my approach. And that was why I took that approach to de risking or, or getting more valuable feedback from people than just like, a conversation or interview right? And then I think I paired that with, do you use Excel to use sheets, you know, how do you do this today? But I learned, I just want to point out, I learned from both the usage of the early versions and the customer conversations.

Michele Hansen 10:12
I love how you underscored there, how the customers intrinsic behavior and their intrinsic needs, drive usage of the product, like there's only so many sort of engagement hacks that you can do to make someone come back to a product. But like, if they only need to raise money every 18 months, then there's nothing that you can do that will make them come back daily or weekly, because their fundamental underlying need for the product is infrequent. And I'm reminded of the pain and frequency framework from Dez trainer, which, you know, he said, you know, that that most, you know, painful and frequent is sort of the best quadrant to be in, because people have an underlying need for something and they're annoyed by it. But infrequent and painful, can be kind of a danger zone, it can be a space for good products, you know, I think, you know, I sort of think of like buying a house and getting a mortgage is very expensive. And it's so complicated. And it's, you know, expensive to get it wrong, but it's very infrequent. But other things that are infrequent and painful, you know, can maybe not be a great business, which it sounds like you had some indications that the underlying need for this, what you were originally thinking would not be frequent and and therefore people would not have a subscription. And so rather than staying with that, and going down the path, and then a year from now being like oh my god, I have this churn problem. How do I keep people to stay around? You pivoted towards something that was more frequent.

Matt Wensing 11:58
Yeah, that's exactly right. So I often use the metaphor for the first version as like, because I didn't know what else to build. So I just bought, I just built, I built the version that I knew people would use at least that first time, right? Because then I knew it was gonna fail. I felt like it was gonna fail. But I was like, okay, but I have to figure out the bridge from here to there. Like, I have to take a step. And so I'm going to give them at least gonna give them that initial thing and then just see, will they tell me like, you know, what else would be great is if, you know, like, what else could I learn by doing this? And so I built kind of that coin operated version, I call it like a vending machine for a financial forecast. Because my original thought was, yeah, people need a forecast. That was the value proposition, how fast can I get them a forecast that that works. And people use that. But then again, it was the churn problem, it was the going away, it was the it was hard to build, you know, that raving fan base, that you need to get something off the ground? Because it just wasn't sustainable. So I realized that to build a SAS in this space, I was going to have to figure out what did they do regularly? You know, like, Okay, if you only close your books once a month, or even your maybe you don't even do that, because you have a bookkeeper or accountant that does that for you. If you only raise money every 18 months, like what is it that you do? That's close to this that is more frequent? And that's really how I got drawn into more of the modeling space meaning like, Okay, but what, tell me about what you do regularly, and if you look at what these founders made, if I would just have them, show me what you made, show me what you made, I basically got into this thing of like, you are spending time somewhere. Where is that? What are you doing, right? And they would show me, the spreadsheets that they were making, that were very ephemeral, like they were very, they were throwaway products, if you will, they would make this like, I gotta figure out if I can afford this higher. And so they would just come into a G sheet G sheets, not new, right? Create a little spreadsheet and then use it for like a day, and then go away. But then it's like, well, how many of these do you have? Say, Oh, well, I mean, I probably do that, you know, once a once every other week, once a week, twice a month, like sometimes multiple times. And I'm like, wait a minute. So you don't build like a giant, you know, official forecast all the time. But you are using spreadsheets a lot. And you are doing things with money in spreadsheets a lot. Like Tell me about that. And that started to inform our strategy of Wait a minute, you know, there's really two customers here are two potential users. There's the CFO, if you will, or the analyst who builds those. That's the founder, even if it's a founder that's a hat they were where they do it like every once in a while I have to get serious about finance and do this proper thing. And then there's the non CFO founder, I just need something to solve my question or answer my question, person persona, who actually kind of does this work that they don't show to anyone else? They're really embarrassed. They know it's not, you know, they know it's not. Right, like with a capital R, right. But they're doing it a lot. Like they're doing this to make all the little decisions about pricing and metrics and goals. And how much can I afford to pay this person, like, I'm like, wait a minute. Turns out, you're actually doing a lot of modeling, you just don't talk about it. And you don't, you don't show it to anybody because you're embarrassed, right? It's this like dirty little secret almost that you have that you build these things and make decisions. Because of course, you use numbers, nobody doesn't use numbers, but like, you just don't call this some financial model. So that was a key insight, realizing that there were these two personas that were actually living within the same person. And they had compartmentalize those very cleanly, but I was much more interested suddenly in the other person, right.

Michele Hansen 16:13
That's so interesting. Like, you know that what you just showed there is, I think it's such a key, a key point and activity based design, which is the idea that we're designing for activities that people do and not for a specific person. And so in my book, for example, I talk about, you know, everything is a process, and everything is an activity. And the activity of you know, for example, one person might both have a Carraig pod coffee machine, and have a French press. But they use the Carib pod coffee machine when they're trying to get the kids to school in the morning, and they're rushed, and they're doing a million other things. And they use the French press on the weekend when they have a friend over to chat. And to them. Those are two very different activities that they're doing. But they're being done by the same person. And so if you design for the person, that wouldn't make sense to you that they would own both, and would try to pigeonhole them into one. But really, they're a person who's doing many different activities with many different goals. And so you have this one activity where I need to create financial models for official purposes, to share them with other people, maybe for compliance reasons, maybe for sort of me in my official capacity reasons where other people are reviewing this. And then there's also this activity of, I need to make a decision that involves numbers. And it's basically this sort of like there's the official activity. And then there's the back of the envelopes activity, which is where this kind of I've heard people describe summit as like a whiteboard that does math. Yes. And that is also where that activity comes in. And that's more so replacing those those millions of spreadsheets and which other really fascinating about this is that so often is the core thing and jobs to be done. So often the competitors to a product is not actually another piece of software or another product product. It's somebody doing it. It's them making a spreadsheet. It's something in Google Docs, it's like them doing it by hand like that is as much a competitor as another piece of software. It's like, there's so many pieces. Yes, this is great.

Matt Wensing 18:37
Oh, yeah. And that's why, you know, I try to explain, like, this is such a journey, because you, we joke within the company, like, gosh, we did you know, we were so dumb a week ago, like how we thought we were so smart, but we knew nothing. And when I started this journey, you know, you just so in the dark, and then you take these steps and you realize, wait a minute, wait a minute. And so it is kind of a weird thing that you have this perennial sort of optimism as a founder that there's something here and you can you want to figure out that if you're wrong, you're wrong, but at the same time, people are not telling you. You know, and this is the thing I think so key like this is a skill to develop is people are not what people don't say is as important as what they do say and like learning to find out that wait a minute, we were we were standing in this room, if you will, in your mind talking about financial modeling. And here I am thinking that this is where the gold is, you know, this is trying to get all my answers. And you're telling me next door you've got like 12 spreadsheets with numbers and money in them and you're you didn't tell me about like, how did I How was I so close but yet like you didn't you know, like if I had just if I had given up them right. I would have missed the room that actually had all the gold in it right? But it was literally connected but in their mind at what it was a different room. It's like oh, you're asking Give me about this. But, you know, you're not asking about that. And so that's what's so kind of vexing for like, in hindsight, I just laugh because stumbling across the actual value is is something that you, you partly luck part skill and getting people to. And really I'll cut my rambling short by saying I think observation is more powerful in those cases than just question and answer because the real key for me was when I said, Show me, show me what you have today. And they had to, you know, at that point, they couldn't say, like, Why have nothing. But they did have to say, Oh, well, let me open up the store over here and show you what I have today, because I haven't been through a fundraiser, and I haven't, whatever, but I've got something. And it's only when I said, Show me that I got to see like, wait a minute, there's this whole other room here, that is exactly where I want to be. So we pivoted our strategy towards that other space. And it's been very fruitful.

Michele Hansen 21:12
And there's two really important skills for entrepreneurs there, that you just sort of, underscored without really stating them outright, that I want to, I want to hone in on for a second. The first one was basically thinking about how much of an idiot you were a week ago, and thinking about that, and not being embarrassed about it, but kind of being like, delighted that you have learned something, and that you have added to your understanding of customers. And, and kind of being able to like, not laugh at yourself, but almost sort of look at it with like this, this sort of it's almost a pride in a way of being like, man, I was such an idiot six months ago, like, and it's kind of delightful to have those moments of realizing how much you didn't know, but to be delighted by that, and not be embarrassed by that. And kind of as a company being able to say, like, Yeah, we had no idea we're doing. And now we six months from now, we're also gonna say we, you know, we don't know what we're doing. Right? Like, but you know, we are aware of that. And then also the curiosity, the combination of that approach to learning and being excited by learning and looking for surprises, and then allowing yourself to be curious when you talk to the customers, and not just accepting what they're saying at face value. But saying, Well, can you? What's what's in this closet over here, like, and just, but like, you can only get to that point if you have really built trust with them. Because as you said earlier, they were embarrassed by doing this back of the envelope math, they were embarrassed by their legions of spreadsheets of whether they can hire people because it wasn't real official forecasts done by a BI team, like maybe they they're so small, they don't even have a BI team. Right? Like, exactly. So. And so they don't want to show this anyway. But when you did the interviews, they trusted you enough, which tells me that the way you ran the interviews was when you ran them really well, because they were willing to let you in and poke into what you thought was a little closet. But it turned out they were like pulling out a books and a book. And then the whole bookcase like turns around. And it's like their secret lair full of spreadsheets.

Matt Wensing 23:36
Exactly, exactly. Was that they had made like yesterday, and then this one from today and that one from a week ago. And I'm like, wait a minute, you're not just doing this, like once every you're doing this, like, this is enough, guys, this is enough, you know? And like, what if you actually enjoy doing this? Like, oh, wow, you know, and so then it was like the opportunity to switch that negative emotion to a positive one and say, let's change embarrassment to fun and joy and just, let's embrace the informality of it by letting you do it this way. But we're going to level you up like we're going to make it better and faster and take out the tedium. So that's where I went back into my forces of progress. And I said, Okay, for this non CFO founder, what are their thoughts? And you know, they say stuff like, I'm embarrassed by my spreadsheet. I'm not very good at this,

Michele Hansen 24:29
right. Also, their spreadsheet, like they love playing in the spreadsheet. They

Matt Wensing 24:33
do love to play exactly. So they like the act of playing with it, right? It's almost like a child who's like, I love to finger paint and create things. But then it's like the kid who's embarrassed to show his parents or teacher whomever like well, you know, this is just for me. And so it was a very, like private activity. And so I was like, wait a minute, so this is an opportunity to say, Don't worry, we've got your back. Like, we'll make sure the math is right. We'll run the team will do the tedious parts for you. We'll make it look really well designed without you having to do the work of making it look professional. And we'll even help you use smarter, you know, building blocks to do this work. So you might not, you still might not use it to do that fundraiser, get that for an evaluation or whatever, like, you're still gonna have to create a spreadsheet, perhaps, for all those little decisions. Like, that's where summit wants to start, like, we want to be your tool for that, right? And I think over time, we can grow into the, oh, hey, you're really, you're really skilled at Excel? Are you really good at G sheets, and you have total, you are like, really confident and proud of your work? We'll get to you, but like this, then give us that shape of adoption that that's okay. Like, there's enough people. And in fact, there's more people. It's a bigger market of people who are a little bit embarrassed, a little shy and a little inexperienced, frankly, with this stuff than the other one. And oh, gosh, guess what team? Like, the feature requirements are completely different. Like, instead of having to build the enterprise, incredible version, that's going to win people away who are like veterans, right? We get to start with, like, the people who need the simplest things, you know, like that was the other exciting part is that, wow, you're just doing addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, basically, right? Like, okay, great. You know, I don't have to like, cuz I will say, you know, I don't want to leave this part out, like there was a pivotal moment in those 18 months where I was, hadn't decided yet that this is where we were going to go. And I found myself torn, trying to build more and more sophisticated tools and analysis for that really confident diehard user. And they were so demanding, and so exacting, and I was just barely getting, like, I'd say a b plus, with them. And it was causing me to almost have to go, Okay, this is going to end up being a consulting business, if I'm not careful, because I'm going to end up having to do a lot of bespoke work a lot of custom work for them, I'm going to end up, you know, having to get into the models that mean, I have to become a data scientist, like it was just so intense, that I realized, okay, this is not the business I want to build either like, this is just a bad fit from a, you know, I want a high margin, self serve SAS business. And I might come back to y'all. But this is not where I'm going to start. I can't I can't start here, because there's only one of me. At that point, there was one of me so. So I made the decision, then, okay, we're going all in on the other side. And that also allowed us to say, wait a minute, you know, all these opinions, we were baking into the product, all these best practices, all these things, we kind of need to like, lower that not come across as so proper and formal and the right way to do things, you know, you can only do things the right way, right? We actually need to be more invited, it changed our whole brand, right? We went through a rebrand where we said, instead of being serious and professional and discipline looking like Wall Street kind of style branding, you know, traditional financial branding, we actually said, what if we were playful and inviting and inclusive, and, you know, just warm and friendly with our branding, that would actually resonate more with these people who treat this stuff as their playground, right, like you said, and so it didn't just affect your product strategy, you know, really changed our whole positioning and brand identity, once we realized that this was the this was the side of the person we wanted to go after. Right?

Michele Hansen 28:48
Hmm. It's so interesting that there were multiple inflection points there. Were you really stopped to think like, is this the business we should build? Whether that's from a product perspective? Or from a, you know, like a business perspective? Like, is this the business I want to be in? And when those points came? In sounds like you were quite reflective about them. And, you know, you know what, when you're at that point where you realized, you know, that, you know, that people were not doing the modeling, you initially thought they were on the frequency that you hoped they would be. You could have been threatened by that discovery. And you could have decided to, you know, give up or dig your heels in on it. And you didn't, and I think that it's such an important mental shift that needs to happen in order to really do customer research well, is to be open to what you're going to hear and to follow it wherever it's going to take you. And so you initially thought You were building a serious financial modeling tool for, you know, say startups, CFOs, and founders that is polished and professional, and they can give it to their boards or whatever. Yep. And, and then it turns out, you're actually making this fun private playground for them to make decisions in, in a way that helps them do it faster, and maybe doesn't use all of the skills they have about, you know, you know, decision support systems they learned in business school, but instead, it's somewhere that's like, safe. And yeah, for them. That's a very different business than you thought you were building. And you allowed yourself to be, you know, sort of led by the customer, still applying your own, you know, analysis on top of that, still asking yourself, you know, of all of these different directions that customers leading me in, or I could allow them to lead me in, you know, are those businesses I want to be in? Are those products I want to build? Is that is that the future I want for myself and for this company? And you allow that answer to be No, right? You didn't just force yourself into it. But you said, No, and we're going to do something else. Because there's something else that's interesting here, like there's still something here. Yeah. And maybe that's not it, but there's something else, but allowing yourself to sort of just just sort of to go with it, but still be steering it at the same time. And I don't I don't know if I'm quite conceptualizing that very well.

Matt Wensing 31:40
No, yeah, it describes, you know, basically describes, I would say, December of 2020, in January 2021, where we just realized that I realized that this was not the right segments, this is not the right value prop for the right, you know, hats that people were wearing. And we were able to charge more money, but it wasn't going to grow the way I wanted to. So we rebuilt the darn thing, again, for hopefully the last time in April, May and June of this year, and then release the beta version in July. And it's really exciting. Now we've had three months of growth, we've had three months of consecutive growth, which had never happened before. Right. So revenue up each month, and retention. So we've actually had negative net negative retention each month, which has never happened before, either. So it turns out these people love it, it's doing what they want to the prices, right? And there's a lot of them. So I'm like, This is great. You know, you know, we have that we have a business and I will come it's funny, full circle, we now have some of our users who are founders, saying, hey, one of them, it blew my mind, he shared a screenshot of a zoom call with his board, where he did show summit on the call, which he never would have done with the G sheet that he created. Right. But because it looks like rigor, it looks rigorous. It's actually doing justice to his thoughts. Like he's a super smart person. But I think the problem before was like a mismatch between, you know, the tools that he had to express his logic and his thinking and his, his conceptual gifts, right, like, very, very talented, but like, you put them in front of a spreadsheet, and he would, you know, that just wasn't his native tongue. Right. It wasn't where he wanted wasn't the right tool for him to express those thoughts. Now that he and they have that they are starting to share them more on tweets, and with board meetings and like, which is great for us. But I think it's a testament to the fact that they're proud of their work now. Right. And that's really exciting for us. So yeah, it's it's a journey.

Michele Hansen 34:01
It sounds like it has been, I mean, an incredible journey so far. I'm I'm super excited to see where this takes you. i You know, I've had a little bit of experience with with you know, with working with analysts myself, because I used to work in sort of the the financial space and I definitely knew a lot of people who love their spreadsheets and, you know, like genuinely reveled in making discounted cash flows and excel and very proud of your macros. Yeah, thing. And, yeah, yeah. Like, just like, and I mean, I feel like I have a little bit of that where I like, you know, genuinely enjoy, like playing in a spreadsheet. Yeah. And it's been so cool to see everything that you're sharing about different kinds of things that you could do with it, but also people doing it for their own personal budgeting and like, you know, founders, like founder financial situations are always so like weird and different and like, figuring out whether, you know, can I? Can I do this? Can I send my kid to this school? Can I, you know, can I buy a house, you know, all of those sorts of different things. Um, really, really exciting stuff. And, and, you know, I noticed you tweeted recently that you feel like you're getting to that, that point where it's really, it's really starting to take off and have that. You know, you know, you feel like you have found the product, you have discovered the products, which is the hardest part, and that you're getting those rabid fans. And actually, I told you this already, but I was at a wedding a couple of weeks ago. And these table I was sitting at like the, you know, there are two guys who work in finance sitting across the table from me. And like one of them was like telling them like about summit and how awesome it was and how he had to get access to it and all this like stuff you've built with it, you know, and I was on the other side of this huge table, and I wasn't really part of that conversation. But I was like, What are they talking about what they think I think, you know, wow, like, Oh, my God, like the internet in real life happening at this table at wedding.

Matt Wensing 36:12
Founders delight right there. Yeah, yeah.

Michele Hansen 36:16
But I think there's, I think we're gonna be hearing a lot more of people using summit and stuff so you can do with it. It has been an absolute delight talking to you today. Thank you so much for giving us some insights into your customer research and product discovery process. I really appreciate.

Matt Wensing 36:38
You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Michelle.

Michele Hansen
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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen 0:35
Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 0:37
Good morning, Michelle.

Michele Hansen 0:39
It's so nice to see your face again, after seeing it in person. Last off at founder Summit.

Colleen Schnettler 0:45
I know that was such a wonderful trip. And just amazing that we got to spend that time together.

Michele Hansen 0:51
I keep thinking about how awesome it was like, I feel like they've set the bar really, really high for conferences in general as but especially post COVID.

Colleen Schnettler 1:04
Yeah, I also think I will be impressed if they can replicate that experience next year, because everyone I know now wants to go. And I think part of what made that conference so special was that there were it was capped at 150 people. And I'm sure they're gonna get a flood of applicants to go next year. So I don't know what they're going to do how they're going to handle that.

Michele Hansen 1:28
Yeah, actually, so Tyler tweet that he was like, oh, like, what if we did this in other cities? Oh, like to a year? Yeah. And I was like, Oh, that would be really cool. Yeah, good. Maybe we should talk about like, what made it so awesome. And like, kind of what are like, what are takeaways from it?

Colleen Schnettler 1:44
Oh, yeah, girl, I have so many takeaways, all the takeaways. Okay. What were what? What would you lead with? What made it so special for you? Besides me? Of course. It's too easy.

Michele Hansen 2:01
You know, so I mean, yeah, this is really hard thing to like, summarize. So I think it was, I mean, it was just so nice being in the same place with other people who are doing the same thing. You know, I think we've talked about how, you know, we initially connected one of the reasons was like, You're the only person I knew in my regular everyday life, who also did this, like weird internet business thing. And there's just like, aren't that many people in this world doing that. So it's just like, so nice to be around other people who are doing this. And you're not only not only do you feel normal, but like, it's such a good environment for like, throwing around ideas. And like, there was at one point when we were talking about, like, multiples for SaaS companies like making a couple $1,000 a month at one point, like on a on the bus to do the hot air balloon ride over to t Wuhan like, and I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I'm practicing so much. And we're like, you know what, we should just like, ask the bus, like this bus full of people would know the answer to this question and have a perspective on this. And like, and so that was really, really awesome. And I feel like there's so many people who introduce themselves. And then and then we like, you know, I'm so and so Oh, and I'm so and so on Twitter, and I'm like, oh my god, like, I've been tweeting with you for the past, you know, like, couple of years, and I finally meeting you in person. And. And so that was really awesome. And I mean, just getting so many ideas going about things. And also, you know, we had talked on our meta episode about how I want to talk more about negotiation, because that's something I do a lot of, and sales, but don't really talk about. And then a speaker was sick on the second day, and Tyler was like, Hey, can anybody give a talk this afternoon? And like, fill the spot and I was like, Yep, alright, I can do negotiation, talk and workshop. And, and, you know, just kind of kind of jumped at it. And it was, it was super fun. And I think I think the big thing I'm really thinking about that, you know, that activity did was like the, the, the, like the wheel where you had to, like rate different areas over your life from like, one to 10 like how they're going. So there was I think it was like occupational fulfillments like one to 10 which is work, right work. Yep. spiritual, emotional, environmental. Physical. Did I already say social? I don't think so. Social. Yeah, there was like five or six different things. Yeah, that's

Colleen Schnettler 4:49
six. Um,

Michele Hansen 4:52
and I think we both had really interesting results from that. Like they're very different like ours were like, Oh, yes, opposite one. And yeah, and really thinking about how like, you know, I like I gave like physical health like a one on that, right. And the goal of this activity was, you know, you give each area a score of one to 10. And then you set a goal of getting up to spots in the next 90 days. So not going from one to 10, which is often how I two things, just like totally like, balls to the wall focusing on something. But going, you know, from like, one to three, and so it's like, how can you have a plan to go from one to three or three to five? Or, or what have you in the next 90 days. And I remember you saying, when I was writing the book, you were like, Dude, you're like, moving so fast, like you're gonna run headfirst into a wall. And I did, and I haven't talked about that too much, but kind of like privately, I've talked to some people who definitely had this had a similar feeling after launching things. Yeah. Um, and yeah, just really, really thinking. I mean, like, literally even like today, like I got hiccups. 30 seconds before we got on recording, and I was doing literally everything I could to get them to go away, rather than being like, hey, maybe let's record another day instead, right? Like I make work happen no matter what. Even if it's at the the sacrifice of my physical health. And so I think that's something you know, I really need to focus on and I think, something Natalie from wild bit said on stage was like, you know, if the founder isn't happy, if the founder isn't healthy, then the company can't flourish. And so I think that's, that's, I mean, that's something I really, really need to work on. And it's like, kind of like work related, but it's like, it's not, but it also like it is in every sense of the word. So I think that's kind of been a thing I'm thinking about, but I don't I still don't really know exactly where I go with that.

Colleen Schnettler 7:07
Like actionable steps. That's what you're still trying to figure out. Because if you want a warning, pretty bad, so

Michele Hansen 7:12
yeah, it is. Yeah. I mean, I did order atomic habits, which is like one of those books that like I've never read before, never read a tie. No, it's like one of those books. I feel like that. And like Ray Dalio, his book, or like, books that everybody around me read and like, told me about, and I read about, so I felt like I read them. But I didn't, you know, like, I just didn't feel like I needed to, because it just everybody read it. And I'm like, No, I should probably like, sit down and think about like, not doing a whole scale turnaround, which is like, normally how I approach anything, and it's like, just just just way over the top. Yeah, um, but how, you know, how can I make small changes so that I don't get exhausted and like, move on to something else? And then then, which then exhaust me and then move on to something else? Like, it's, I see a pattern here. So, um, yeah, and I think I also thought, you know, a lot of people, even if they were in different groups really struggling with the idea of like, work life balance, and how do you, you know, how do you make it so that work doesn't become too much of your identity? And how, when when you really love what you do, like, it's really hard to pull yourself away from it, too,

Colleen Schnettler 8:28
right? Yeah.

Michele Hansen 8:32
I don't know. So I don't really have like, I'm just kind of all that's just still really marinating in my head. But it really, really got me going. And I think I really, really needed that push to like, um, I don't know, like, I guess like, prioritize my myself a bit.

Colleen Schnettler 8:52
Sounds great. I mean, it sounds like that. It's funny sometimes to how you you've probably heard that from me or your spouse or your other friends. But there was something about the environment where everyone was sharing and being open and vulnerable in that big group that I felt really helped some of those points hit home because you saw so many people in the same situation you were in.

Michele Hansen 9:13
Mm hm. And I mean, you're so like, you were totally opposite because oh, I have like a 10 for occupational like I feel like you know, for me, like this is exactly where I want to be like, last week I spoken in Mexico City twice. This week I spoke in Copenhagen I'm you know, like, like, this is just sort of in like the business is good. Like everything is really good there. But like you for occupational like I think you had like a 10 or a nine for physical health. But then you are much lower on occupational and that was the group that you were in.

Colleen Schnettler 9:49
Absolutely. Yep. I think something you mentioned to me, which I think is true and was kind of cemented meeting so many founders is like I'm pretty good at taking care of myself socially. mentally, physically, I prioritize that. And so yeah, all that stuff was good for me. But yeah, my occupational score was lower. So my goal is to get that score, what do you say to two or three in the next 90 days?

Michele Hansen 10:17
I'm just curious, what did you give yourself for occupational,

Colleen Schnettler 10:20
I honestly don't remember probably like a seven. I love what I do. So I don't think I mean, I think if I was still working a full time job that I didn't enjoy, it would have been much lower. I love what I do with occupational in terms of like my job. So it was still a high score. But I think I what I really took away from the conferences is I was challenged in a way I haven't been challenged in a long time. And by that, I have a lot going on as to you as everyone. And I'm doing really, really well one of the executive coaches there who I was talking with, she described it as an avalanche of abundance, which is like a great problem to have, right? Like, I'm not gonna complain about it. It's an amazing problem to have. And I have all the things and I'm very happy. But I think I haven't really pushed it all on the business stuff. I've just kind of been resting, but I'm not tired. I'm ready to push. Does that make any sense? I guess what I'm trying to say is, I could be trying a lot harder. That's it. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I think so I think that I'm not really trying. And I'm telling myself, I'm trying, but I'm not. So I'm going to start trying.

Michele Hansen 11:40
So what is trying look like to you. There's a couple of really specific things. I

Colleen Schnettler 11:45
think there's a lot of personal stuff wrapped up in here too. Like something I took away was like identity. For example, I have this, this interesting. You and Rosie talked about identity on the podcast. Mine's a little different in that my children get out of school 230 In the afternoon, I thought I was going to try you know, I'll pick them up at 230 will come home and they'll do their homework. And I'll continue to work. And that that set up like from a very practical perspective, like what can I practically do in the next 90 days, that setup is not working because I hate stopping work at 2pm in the afternoon. Like that's just, you know, you're in the middle of something, I pick them up, and they need to be supervised, like they can't just be free. We don't have a backyard here. So they need to be supervised wherever they are. We live in California, so I want them to be outside. So it wasn't that I was picking them up and having super quality time with them. It was I was picking them up. We were going to the playground and I was just hanging out of the playground. Mm hmm. Like, very practically speaking. So practically speaking, that doesn't have to be me, that can be another person doing that. And so I can get more of a deep work in my work day. And so I hired after school childcare, I found a nanny. She's lovely. She's already started on Monday, and this week has been really great.

Michele Hansen 13:04
Oh my god. Amazing. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 13:06
it's like, it's amazing. And the thing is, I you know, I was really worried about upsetting the balance of my happy family life, children marriage with working more. But that's a fake fear. Because, first of all, if if something starts to get gnarly, and I start to upset the balance, I can always change what I'm doing. And second of all, the kids are at the age, as I said, where they just want to play in the playground. They're not we're not like having some amazing bonding experience after school, or give them a snack, we go to the playground.

Michele Hansen 13:38
Does anyone have amazing bonding experiences after school? Like our like, our daughter gets home and she's just so tired. Like that, even like playing a board game is like, Yeah, but

Colleen Schnettler 13:49
just want to do they? I mean, my kids just want to play with their friends, right? Yeah, I want to do their thing. So. So the two very actionable things, I feel like I'm ready to push again, I think when I was learning to code, building up my kind of reputation as a Rails developer, you and I talked a little bit about this offline. Like, I worked all the time, and it was hard. And then I rested for like four years, like I just it was it was worth it that year to however it was probably two years of like, really intense work was worth it to have the four or five years of just getting paid a lot of money and doing good work, but like mostly being chill. And I feel like I'm ready to push again, is what I'm trying to say with all these words. And to do that, I see that as working. You know, I'm at my desk seven early, like I get here early. So working a long day, and then I'm picking two nights a week to work and I'm going to set those up with my spouse beforehand. So there's no there's no bitterness, or upsetness. Or I'm like, Oh, I got to work tonight. Oh, I got to work tonight. And he wants to hang out. So we've set aside two nights a week I'm going to work and we're going to do this for a month or two and see, see if I can move the needle on things. Just kind of like test it out. Yeah, right. Right. I mean, it's my life. I can Do whatever I want. So I'm going to try it out. I'm going to try I think I've been scared to try. That's the truth. I've been scared to try. Why have I been scared to try? I'm not quite sure. But it doesn't matter. That's what I've, so I'm going to change that up. And commit to working more. That's my goal.

Michele Hansen 15:19
Feel like one of the talks that you I think you may be said was the best one that I actually missed? was one on fear.

Colleen Schnettler 15:29
Right? Love this one. Do that a little bit? Yes, I'd love to. Okay, so this is a tomorrow's talk. Yeah, he is an executive coach. And he talked about so and I don't like personal development, like, I don't read self help books. Like I kind of roll my eyes at that whole area of study. So I just we're

Michele Hansen 15:53
so opposite. Like, I have like piles of like, books on on your, you're talking to the person with piles of books on like, empathy and boundaries. And like, all these kinds of

Colleen Schnettler 16:08
read that I read your book, because I love you. But generally speaking, that's not my jam. So, so I went into this talk with low expectations, not that I thought he would be, you know, not a good speaker, but just like, Okay, I'm not gonna get anything out of this. And, you know, he talked about fear, which everyone talks about, but I thought he was gonna get up there and say, Oh, you have a fear of failure. Yeah, everyone has a fear of failure. We get it. That is not what he said. He got up there. And he talked about three fears. The first core fear being uncertainty. And as founders that's applicable to us, because we become control freaks. And we won't hire. Oh, I'm giving you eyeballs.

Michele Hansen 16:49
I see. I see those eyeballs. I, I, hey, you know, whatever. What are the breakthroughs I had, I'm just just saying this in David's workshop on we should really use people's last names because they're so good. Yes. Um, but now if you like, you know, us know them. So anyway, so, um, David's workshop on, like, personal mission statements, but you also don't believe. And I was like, I've had a personal mission statement for 15 years, but also apparently never told anyone. But like doing that exercise with him, where I crystallize the thought that I am building a business, not an organization. And at this point in my life, I don't have the mental energy to run an organization. I love running a business, but dealing with like, people, politics and all that, like I mean, a lot of the stuff that like Rosie talked about, about hiring and people management, like I just I mean, with just managing, like the people in my own house is kind of the level of management that I'm like capable of. Anyway, yes. Not hiring. So that was the fear of uncertainty.

Colleen Schnettler 18:03
Well, I mean, there were other things in that, but just generally, with what we do. There's so much uncertainty, and that is also a core fear. So that's something you really have to learn to manage. And I think what you just said about David, David, David's workshop is really good. Because you, you realize that for yourself. And you've kind of always known that, but I don't know if you verbalized it or crystallize it before, in that knowing

Michele Hansen 18:26
that way. That workshop was awesome. Like, yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 18:29
I loved David's to David sherry. Yeah, everyone. Yes. I love Dave. Oh,

Michele Hansen 18:34
good. Yeah, it was basically like, people who are familiar with jobs to be done or who Google things about jobs to be done. The there's like the forces diagram working through the different like, pushes and pulls and anxieties and fears that someone has that keeps them in, in a situation from switching products. We basically applied that to like, our professional lives. And our companies. And it was yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 19:01
it was it was really good. Like I was also Pooh poohing the mission statement thing, but it was,

Michele Hansen 19:06
it was really, it totally called you out. In front

Colleen Schnettler 19:10
of everyone. Thanks. It's fine. We were like a group of friends. By that point. It didn't feel awkward. It was yeah, it was so intimate. Okay, it was so intimate. Yeah. Okay, so the second fear. So this is Itamar. His second fear was worthlessness, which is a second core fear which I think we can all kind of imposter syndrome. And I'm not good enough. And I think we can all identify with that on some level. And the third core fear was abandonment, which is what will people think if I fail, and then he talked a little bit about the ways that we we try to deal with these fears without actually dealing with them, which is obviously a big one is numbing agents and vices, whether that's Twitter or buying things or alcohol or whatever, procrastination And he also talked about the motivation fallacy where if you don't actually handle these fears, you'll like so many of us have gotten in this spurt will actually basically just describe this, but it's like, I'm gonna get it before I am every day. And that's cyclical, like you can't do that forever. So you can do pushes, but eventually that motivation is going to wane. Unless you handle, you know, the, the root of some of these fears. So the solution of this is to minimize your fear and internal resistance. And a lot of people don't do this, because they're unaware that they even have those fears. And that's kind of where I was coming from. Like, he said, these things. I was like, oh, yeah, that that all makes total sense. But I was kind of unaware that those were going on subconsciously.

Michele Hansen 20:42
Are there any of those fears that you feel like you really identify with as it relates to this whole?

Colleen Schnettler 20:50
I think I mean, I think for me, part of the reason I haven't really wanted to push is like I said, like, I'm very blessed in my, my life is really good right now. So I don't want to do anything that upsets the balance of the happiness that I feel right now. But I think a lot of that too, might be abandonment, and it's not abandonment in this great big, like, I don't care what the internet people think of me. But you know, of my family. Like if I'm going to work more, how is that? What, what are what's going to happen with my relationship with my husband and my children? And those are the most important things. So I think that might have been a core fear for me. Yeah. Oh, man, all of them. Michelle, like and I don't even think I would have been like, I don't have any fears. I'm fine. Before this talk. Uncertainty. That's a big one, too. Because, as you know, as independent as entrepreneurs, we are constantly uncertainty. I mean, it's constant uncertainty, right? Every day, like, what should I do? I don't know what to do. Is this gonna work? Is this gonna work? I have no idea. I have no one to ask. So that's a stressful thing. Like it's not a bad thing. But it is. It's kind of a constant stress. Like, I don't know if this is gonna work. Yeah. So yeah, I took away from it. And I was I was feeling it. I was digging it. It sounds

Michele Hansen 22:03
like it was an awesome talk. And I feel like I joined everyone else who wished that they had been at founder summit and having a little bit of FOMO, about missing that. But at the same time, it was like right after my, basically spur of the moment negotiations workshop that I had, like, maybe 20 minutes to plan out in my head during lunch. And I had so much adrenaline after that, that I got through the next talk, which was a great panel on sales for founders. But I like I had so much adrenaline I couldn't sit still. And I was like, I just like I have I have to go like walk like I need to like walk back to the hotel. And I ended up like walking back with some other some other people. And it was like a half hour walk. And I just like really needed that because I was like, jumping out of my skin with energy.

Colleen Schnettler 22:57
Yeah, well, you did a great job. I loved your negotiation talk. I learned a lot out of that, too. I don't know if I told you that. Oh, yeah. So it was interesting, because you set us up to do the sample negotiation. It's one thing to talk about negotiation, I think it's another thing to do it. So what's give a quick read, I'll give a quick recap, you basically set us up where we were the person who lived under the person who was a piano player, and the piano player wanted to play his piano every night at 10pm. And we had little children, and we wanted him not to play his piano every night at 10pm. And so I'm talking to the person I'm paired up with. And he's talking about playing his piano. And I immediately just got so angry, and like, I'm not really an angry person. And I like in my head, like, I can see I can see my my mental energy, like rolling my eyes, like, oh my god, he was pretending to be like, 20 right? He was not actually 20 But um, you know, just mentally rolling my eyes like, oh my god, millennials. Give me a break. Stop playing your piano. You're such a anyway. Yeah. So that was really enlightening for me. Because I think I pride myself on like, being very good at having self awareness about my emotions and controlling my emotions. And like, I could not I almost rolled my eyes at him. So

Michele Hansen 24:15
yeah, the the, the sort of setup was it was actually that that activity, we did it in my Danish class. And I was like, this is a great negotiation. Like, it wasn't the purpose of it. But it was, you know, you have one person who's a music student who can, because of their schedule, they can only practice at 10 o'clock at night. But per the apartment building rules, they don't have to be quiet until 11. And then you were the parent whose children are getting woken up. And then you you all had to like talk through it. It was it was really fun. And I think after that I had a couple people be like, oh, like, is this your next book? And like, I'm

Colleen Schnettler 24:53
like, no, because I'm taking care of my personal health. Not ready to write another book, but okay, that was not

Michele Hansen 24:59
the end. answer I gave you like, maybe should have been, why not? No. I mean, like, I started working with teaching people about customer interviews and customer research, like, four years ago, like, because like my friends and I ran a job speed on meetup in DC. And I started talking to other founders about it and stuff like that. So I like before I ever sat down to write, I not only had, you know, years of like, personal experience with it, and personal learning and learning from other people and whatnot, but also years of, of, of learning how to teach other people about it, and what are the common hiccups with it? hiccups? And you know, what, like, like, what resonates with people like all that kind of stuff? Well, before I ever sat down to write, versus like, I don't think I'm nearly the same level of, of expertise in negotiating. Like, I have a lot of practice in it. I've taken classes on it. Like, I guess that was, I don't know, I guess, like 334 years ago now. But like, that was the first time I have ever attempted to teach anyone else about negotiating.

Colleen Schnettler 26:19
And what great, did a great job,

Michele Hansen 26:21
thank you. Um, but I think I think I need to like a lot, a lot more time before I even get the point of of like thinking about whether that's a book or whatnot, though I am like, I did talk to other people there, who are also interested in like enterprise sales and negotiating and stuff like that. And so we actually will have some people on in the coming months, who will, we'll kind of like, talk more about that stuff. Because I think that's a big part of kind of going from, you know, the sort of stage you're in which I feel like is sort of like the under 10k a month, Mr. Phase, going 10 to 20 is really like for me, it was a lot about learning how to do sales, and definitely going from like, 20 to 50. Like you. I don't think I would have gotten to that point. Had I not had a better understanding of sales and negotiating. Yeah. So, so, yeah, I'm gonna I'm going to talk more about that. But But no, like, no book yet. I still haven't even hit your like, 20 podcast goal for promoting deploy empathy, like you're doing? Well,

Colleen Schnettler 27:35
I think you have been on quite a lot. 10 or so. Okay. 12 I

Michele Hansen 27:40
think I just recorded another one. The other day, I think, yeah, I just did one yesterday. And then I have two scheduled. Nice, I need to like have a spreadsheet and keep track.

Colleen Schnettler 27:57
Yeah,

Michele Hansen 27:59
um, you could do that. I could. Yeah. That would make sense. It's getting weirdly hard to track how many books I've sold, because like amazon online will only show me 90 days at a time. So I can't just go and like see all that's weird sold. Like I maybe again, if somebody like knows about this, like, let me know. But I'm in like the KDP reports dashboard. And then the reports beta and like, I sneak looks like I might need to like do it manually? Or at least like by month. And then. Yeah, so I don't I don't know. I'm also starting to give some more like, like, sort of private workshops with the book, like, I'm going to be speaking to an MBA class tomorrow online. And a friend asked me if like, I would speak to their marketing team, like do like a workshop. So we'll kind of see how that goes. I don't think I want to go too much in that direction. Like I don't want to be like, you know, selling like a day long workshop thing. Like we've talked about how I really don't want to do consulting,

Colleen Schnettler 29:05
right? You have mentioned that a few times.

Michele Hansen 29:10
But like maybe doing a workshop and you know, then they buy like 50 copies of the book. You know, I guess I'm cool with that.

Colleen Schnettler 29:15
Yeah, seems like a good use of your time. If you enjoy it.

Michele Hansen 29:19
Yeah, but I think I you know, I think for me, the big thing is like what does balance even mean? I mean, I I don't know.

Colleen Schnettler 29:29
Yeah, I understand the question. But I think it's James clear has this really interesting thing about the how balance isn't a real before burners theory, the downside of work life balance. Have you seen this?

Michele Hansen 29:44
Oh, that sounds familiar that like you have one burner going and then you can't have Okay,

Colleen Schnettler 29:49
ready? Here it goes. four burners like your stove. The first burner represents your family, the second burners, your friends, the third burners, your health, and the fourth burner is your work. The four burners theory says that in order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off to anyway, here's a whole article about it. It's an interesting, interesting idea. But the idea is there isn't a real thing such as balance, there are times where you shift your focus. Like, for example, you this would be a good time for you to shift your focus from work, because you've been working so much for 610 years, to maybe health or whatever it would be right. And maybe it's time for me to shift my focus back to work. But the idea is, it's like, you really can't have balance. It's a lie. You can just have, you know, areas that are shifting and priorities. I can't have everything on five. Right, right, exactly. You can't have everything on five. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. And it kind of makes us all of us who are so hard trying to find balance a little bit better, because you're like, oh, okay, this sounds about right. This seems reasonable.

Michele Hansen 30:56
Yeah, I guess. I mean, he's the habits guy, right. Like he's the habits guy. Yeah. So I guess I need to finally read that book. So yeah, so So that's our 90 day plan. Right? So you're gonna Yeah, you've got my herd nanny now. I mean, always, you've got your plan in action.

Colleen Schnettler 31:17
I'm an act and I'm gonna

Michele Hansen 31:19
continue marinating. Oh, my God, it sounds like you. You were like, I'm gonna read more about this and think more. Like, I was like, I'm gonna do this now. Already done. I did it before I talked to you. Yeah, happening?

Colleen Schnettler 31:38
I know, right? It's good, though, right? Because we both have, it's good, I guess. Yeah, I'm already in action. I've already posted more content. And I am making a video tutorial page. And I'm doing all kinds of things. And oh, the only thing I really got out of it, Michelle was a real focus, thinking more long term. So I think one of the things is we met a lot of people who have been running their businesses. I mean, I know you're kind of in this group. But I've been running their businesses for many, many years. And there were many people I met who aren't really trying to have some big exit, like they want to build a sustainable business that they can work on for as long as they want. And so that really helped me focus in terms of like thinking about where I want to spend my time and my energy and what I want my long term outlook from, like, for my career to look like? So I found that to be really beneficial.

Michele Hansen 32:33
Was there any, like insights that you feel like are? Yeah, I think his point,

Colleen Schnettler 32:39
what I found is, so I told you, I'm going to I'm really gonna push on simple file upvote, simple file upload for the next three months, simple file up vote, that sounds interesting. For the next couple months to kind of see what I can do with that if I really work at it. But I think long term, I am more interested in pursuing the opportunity, like really leaning into what to the Hammerstone team. Because when I think of the long term business I want to build, I can't think of anything better than doing really technically challenging work with my friends. Like I love as we've talked about when I joined Hammerstone, like I love having co workers or co founders. And that's really where I want to go. Right now I'm doing okay, splitting my time. But that's not sustainable in the long term. So I'm not sure what that looks like in a year. But it looks like my focus being more on Hammerstone. I think

Michele Hansen 33:29
something else we talked about was, you know, the fact that you like you guys are funded for a year. And like the fact that you are funded for a year made you feel like you can take a year to get some stuff done, and how you can get more than that done in a year, too.

Colleen Schnettler 33:51
So Jimmy from banal got up there talking about this was a founder summit about how to sell something that doesn't exist. Now his product is very specific, and it was very targeted was, you know, targeted to a very specific group of people. But I am not doing so I don't have the rails component for this query builder that I'm building with Hammerstone. But I also haven't really been doing anything to get the word out about it. And so yeah, we're funded for a year and I feel like the work is filling the time allotted. And the work doesn't necessarily need to fill the time allotted. I think I could be a little more efficient and a little more focused. Not that I'm not focused just there's more I could be doing on the Hammerstone side that I'm not and so it really kind of opened my eyes to like there's a lot of other opportunities here. You could get a content machine going now even if you can't sell it for six months, I could be writing articles about all this really interesting sequel stuff I'm doing whatever it may be point being like there's there's things I can put in place earlier. You know, as as I build this component,

Michele Hansen 34:52
you know, hearing you talk about like it being time to push it almost. I feel like you're conceptualizing it as like this, like, switch, you can flick, like that, like, Okay, now like now you're gonna push like, do you feel like that is? How it's gonna work? So I

Colleen Schnettler 35:15
don't know, but a little bit like, let's go back to simple file. I've been a little bit mopey about it, what should I do? What should I do on Monday? Like, I know exactly what to do, right? It's like, I haven't been really trusting my own intuition here. I've been asking for permission or advice. And these are all good things. Advice is good. But why am I asking people for? Like, I want someone to say that's a good idea. Colleen, you should do that. No, I don't need it. It's my business. I get to do whatever the hell I want with it. So, you know, people like you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't. Um, I Okay. I appreciate everyone's advice, and I solicit it. But also, I think I you know, I just really, it's a very small product still, like, I'm just going to go with my gut. And I'm just going to do what I think is best. And I haven't really been doing that, because I have been so careful about overworking myself, I guess.

Michele Hansen 36:06
And so I feel like that that I mean, that comes back to that like fear that we talked about, like waiting for somebody else. To say that your plan of action. Your idea is your decision. Good was a good one. Yes. subjective opinion, to massage your fear. That yes, it was totally and is that like, you know, uncertainty about the about the decision or all these other things? I don't know.

Colleen Schnettler 36:36
Yeah, no, totally. I think for me, I'm really worried about making a decision that is going to be a waste of time. That's what it's about. Because my time feels so So, so limited. So I'm like, should I write this article? Is this article worth writing? Like, if it's gonna take me three hours to write it? Is that going to be worth it? Right, I just wrote the freakin article on the airplane home for Mexico. Oh, while I was stuck in DFW for 12 hours and then and then flew to a different city and then bus to my city that I actually live in the graveyard.

Michele Hansen 37:03
Both took both of us 14 hours to get home yet I went across like, two continents. Oh my goodness. But also it was a bazillion times worth it to travel 14 hours to and from to be there.

Colleen Schnettler 37:18
And I think something else. Speaking of founders comp, being amazing. The quality of everything was just so much better than your typical tech conference. Oh

Michele Hansen 37:26
my god. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 37:27
everything was better.

Michele Hansen 37:28
The food was amazing. The venue like I loved how I mean, you were saying how like a lot of conferences, you're just in the hotel. And we were like, out and about in the city like everything all over the city. And it was such a cool city too. And I feel like we really got to experience like culture and and just in a way that yeah, you're you're not just like stuck in a hotel ballroom for three days.

Colleen Schnettler 37:51
Like, okay, so this is not a dig because I love rails comp. But I remember it was the last rails comp I went to before COVID. They're like, Oh, it's in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is a great city, blah, blah, blah, literally, you stay in the hotel, and then you walk through the breezeway to the ballroom, you never go outside, ever. And point being like yeah, of course, you can go outside but, but all of the activities are like you you never leave it you don't ever have to leave the hotel. And so I loved how founders comp really made an effort to get local venues, support, you know, local businesses, and actually see Mexico City loved it.

Michele Hansen 38:29
I I really, really hope they have it in Mexico City next year. Like dude,

Colleen Schnettler 38:33
I hope we get to again get in because there's going to be freaking every one is going to want to go it's going to add the fight to the death and who gets to go. Geez.

Michele Hansen 38:45
Well, I think I think that about wraps up our recap, though. I feel like we're gonna be talking about this. And like, Oh, yes. So many learning summit for a long time. Yeah, so many learning, and also having people come on the show who we met at founder Summit, and no, and no three founders Summit, too. Because there's also the the online community, which you should totally be in a mastermind group, by the way.

Colleen Schnettler 39:13
Yeah, I'm thinking about that. Like, I, I think that's probably a valuable thing. I'll probably do that. And I

Michele Hansen 39:18
think that would help with you're like, Should I do this? And then people are like, yeah, and you're like, Yeah, okay.

Colleen Schnettler 39:26
I feel like a lot of this is just trusting your gut, which I'm usually pretty good at. But like, with the business since it's all new, like I just haven't really just been doing what I think is best. Like I said, I've been asking permission just to random people, which is kind of weird, because I don't want to make a huge misstep. But the truth is, all of these things, none of them are going to be huge missteps and they can all be changed if it's a bad decision. So so that's really this week. I've been crushing some life, but by work work, is what I mean by that. Like, I've just been like, I've been I've just been like really crushing it and it feels great. So

Michele Hansen 39:58
it's awesome. Awesome well so next week I interviewed Matt wensing was super fun so then we will chat again in two weeks

Colleen Schnettler 40:12
sounds great talk to you then

View Details

Follow Kevin! https://twitter.com/SahinKevin
Check out ScrapingBee: https://www.scrapingbee.com/

AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
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Michele Hansen 0:39
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. We're doing another interview this week. I am so excited to have Kevin Sahin with me. He is co-founder of ScrapingBee. Kevin, welcome to software social.

Kevin Sahin 0:57
Well, thank you, Michele, I'm excited to be here.

Michele Hansen 1:01
So this kind of came about because I was on Twitter, as I often am. And I noticed, I think it was actually someone tweeted about MicroConf Europe, which I had been really wanting to go to, but conflicted with a friend's wedding. So we couldn't go. So I was just sort of following and watching everything unfold on Twitter and tweeted about how peer your co founder was, was giving a talk. And he mentioned how scraping DEA offered free API credits to customers who are willing to jump on a 15 minute call with them. And you guys ask them questions like, what else have you tried, and my interest immediately perked up. And really wanted to talk to you about those calls you had and what you learned from them, and what that added for the business. But before we jump into that, perhaps you should say for a moment, just what scraping be. Is and, and whatnot. And?

Kevin Sahin 2:09
Sure. So um, so basically scraping the is an API for web scraping. When you are extracting data from the web, you often have the two same problems, which are, there are more and more websites that are using JavaScript frameworks like Vue js, react, etc. And so you have to render the page inside a web browser. And this is kind of, it's a pain to manage, especially at scale. Because you have to, you know, there are lots of DevOps skills that you need. You need big servers, you need lots of things. And it's really handy to have, you know, a headless browser accessible with a simple API call. The other thing that you have to do when you scrape the web at scale, is to manage proxies. So you can you probably need proxies for many different reasons. For example, let's say that you are extracting data from ecommerce website. Well, most ecommerce websites are internationalized, meaning that if you access the website from an IP address in Europe, you will have the prices in euro if you access the IP address or the website from an IP address in the US you will have prices in dollars. So you need some kind of proxy management system. The other thing is IP rate limit. Some websites are limiting the number of pages you can access per day from a single IP address if you need to access more pages, you need more IP addresses etc, etc. And so we bundled this inside a single API which is scraping

Michele Hansen 4:04
so I love how you're solving that because we have felt that pain personally. So I've kind of talked a little bit in the past about how my husband dies first project that was what so the one well, not at first, but the one right before geocoder that basically funded Juco was this mobile app called what's open nearby where you could open it up and see grocery stores convenience stores and coffee shops that were open near you. And how we ran that in the back end was we had a ton of scrapers running of like grocery store, you know Starbucks, whatever like their websites, scraping the hours off of them and we like just all the time there's issues you know, the parsers breaking or you get blocked or actually the the sort of recent side project we did Keren, which allowed people to get an alert when a grocery pick slot opened up on a on a grocery stores website because of COVID and everything that was also powered by scrapers basically and the back end. And so I have I have personally felt the pain of, you know, the impacts when when when, you know, scraping goes wrong or you know it can get frustrating at times.

Kevin Sahin 5:29
Yeah, that's I mean, there are the, the story behind scraping is that we, we personally experienced some of those frustrations, because p&i like before launching scraping beam, we started our career in two different startups that were heavily relying on web scraping. In the business, I was working on a startup in France, which is kind of a mix between mint.com in the US and plaid.com. So for those who don't know, it's a bank account aggregation software's sublet, that comm is an API that allows third party to access your bank account. And means that comm is a bank account aggregation, personal finance management app. And so at this startup, I was really exposed to all of these issues. And Param, he was working for a real estate startup, a real estate data startup in France. And so there will relying on scraping lots of real estate portals. So we both, you know, experienced lots of these issues regarding how to handle headless browsers, how to handle proxies, how to, you know, handle blocks, etc, etc. So that was something we, we knew a little about,

Michele Hansen 7:16
I love how you started with a pain that you had. But also as, as you've run the business, you're also actively reaching out to your customers to understand what they were trying to do, what problems they were having, and how they were solving those problems. So I wonder if you can kind of take us back to when you like, how did those emails come about where you were reaching out to people like, like, what what kind of prompted that?

Kevin Sahin 7:47
Yeah. So that we quickly realized that we really knew when I say that we knew a little about it, it's not an a few million. Because we really knew a little about the different web scraping use cases each time. I mean, from the beginning, when we launched the API we like from day one, I'd say, we realized that some users, we're scraping, have had some use cases that we never imagined. So we quickly realized that we had to get them on the phone and knew more about about it, understand their businesses, what kind of data they they needed, what frequency for what we use case, etc, etc. But the problem that we had is that at the beginning, so we had we had the banner on the dashboard, covering that, if they had any question, they could schedule a call with me. But nobody was scheduling any call. So maybe, maybe the banner was wasn't, I mean, the copy wasn't great, maybe. The CTA wasn't clear, I don't know. But the fact is, nobody was getting any call with me. And we also had an email sequence where we, we had a few links to my county. But it wasn't working. I mean, sometimes we had a trial scheduling a call, but it was not very, not a lot. And and then we we had this idea of offering more 10x more free API calls. Then the trial offered. And then instantly, we started to get a lot of calls. So many that I had to, you know, delete some availability in my week, because I was just doing calls every day all day. And, and it was great because we will learn so much we, I mean, we will learn so many different use cases that we never thought about. For example, I don't know, we, we, we had so many diverse people. So for example, university researchers that were scraping the web for all kinds of research projects. We had government agencies that were scraping the web, to automate automatically detect security frauds. That's all those kinds of use cases we could never invented them, we like, I don't see any other way we could have learned all of this, then, you know, calling our customers and, and developing a relationship with them. And by the way, this, I mean, there are many benefits to these calls. It's not just about, you know, discovering their needs, but it's also building relationships, especially when you are one month old startup. Because, you know, it's really hard to sell your product, especially with enterprise customers, you know, government agencies, universities, etc, etc. When you say, yeah, we were launched a month ago, there's a bit of a trust issue. And developing the relationship, a relationship with them, really helped. Like, in the seven months, after our launch, we signed a big enterprise customer. And I think that we never could have done this without, you know,

having them on the call. It also helped in many other ways. For example, I mentioned the the, the university researchers, we granted them free credits to the API for their research project. And like a few weeks or months later, they mentioned us in the University website, which is great for many reason for SEO for authority, etc, etc. So, I mean, there was like, it took me a lot of time to take these calls, but the, the benefits is a like, it's really worth it. And I'm glad we did.

Michele Hansen 13:44
It's so interesting how you say that you You not only learn so much about why people need something like scraping be in the first place. But it also built this trust with your customers when you're very you're very new company, and they really didn't have a lot of reason to to trust you. And even though the purpose of them maybe was not, you know, making these sales, it really led to them down the road. All because you took 15 minutes to understand what they were trying to do and what they had been using before.

Kevin Sahin 14:23
Yeah. Most of the time, it was more than 15 minutes, by the way. Like, especially when the conversation was getting technical. Because even those scraping visas, simple REST API, there's a whole you know that they often needed. Advice advices about how to implement it on their side. Meaning how to you know Do the scraping pipeline, the scheduling, the data storage, the error monitoring, the maintenance of the scrapers how to what kind of libraries they could use, etc, etc. So I, we we spent a lot of time with this. Sometimes this was a bit too much like, for example, when you spend one hour advising the technical team of your prospect and that that at the end, they don't end up being a customer. It's a bit frustrating. But at the same time, it was really I mean, it was a as a two months old startup, it's a really competitive advantage, I'd say that to be able to take the time to really advise and guide the prospect in the implementation. So and it really helped us to sign the first customers.

Michele Hansen 16:24
I'm curious, do you remember the exact questions that you asked people?

Kevin Sahin 16:30
Yes, I remember. It's not. I didn't ask a lot. But I was asking them about their, what their company is doing. What? Why they want to scrape data? I mean, is it part? Is it something that is part of their core product core business? Or is it some side thing? The, the the kind of website that they needed to extract data from the frequency? And why like, what did they tried so far? Why did it didn't it worked? Why are your other looking for another solution? Etc, etc. So that, like these five questions, or the most important one, I think

Michele Hansen 17:35
it sounds like those questions came out of your own genuine curiosity, because you had some awareness of the some some things people might do with scraping from your own experiences. But you were aware that that was not the whole universe of things that people might possibly do. And so you genuinely did not know what the other things people why people might be doing it and what else they might be doing.

Kevin Sahin 18:03
Yeah, exactly. And, and we were pretty lucky to realize this early. Because, you know, you're always tempted to just see things through your own experience. But we, as I said, early on, we, we realized all those kind of use cases we had no idea about. And so we got pretty curious about it pretty early.

Michele Hansen 18:43
And in so many ways, that reminds me of how I got interested in customer research in the beginning, too, because when we launched geocode, do you know it? I mean, so it came out of our own needs, actually, because that that app I mentioned finding grocery store hours, it would show people a map, and we needed coordinates in order to show that map. And, and so it came out of our own need there. But we're not, you know, neither of us has a background in geography or geographic data analysis, GIS, any of that stuff. And when we launched and people were, you know, reaching out to us, and they're asking for us to do things, we would ask them why because we genuinely did not know because we were not do geographic information systems, people. We weren't steeped in this world. So it was as much about how do we expand our product? As you know, but what why do you want to do it in the first place? Because I just I just don't know. And following that curiosity, yeah.

Kevin Sahin 19:48
And so um, the geocode IO, you launched this how many years ago,

Michele Hansen 19:58
we launched in January of 2014. So we are Coming up on eight years this January. Wow, congrats. almost a decade of, you know, a couple more years. But yeah, it's kind of wild. snuck up on me.

Kevin Sahin 20:17
That's a that's cool. And so how did you when you launched in 2014? What, how did you get your first customers.

Michele Hansen 20:34
So we were our first customer for that app, because the app was making about like three or $400 a month in ad revenue. And basically, the idea of do codea was that, you know, we could basically if we released it as an API and threw a wall in front of it, maybe other people would pay to keep the server's going for it. And then we would, we could still keep our app going, and then not basically not be paying for for this geocoding API, rather than paying you know, a major provider, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars a year, which we didn't. So we had, you know, two little digitalocean droplets that it was running on for 20 bucks a month. And that was our goal was to make 20 bucks a month. So we then, you know, put it on, you know, we talked talked to some other friends who are developers and had them test it out, and then put it on Hacker News. And that was how we got that initial wave of feedback, we had 1000s of signups. Most I mean, that traffic doesn't stick around, like, you look at analytics graph, and it's just like, you just we basically have to filter out our launch, because it's just, it totally breaks the graph. And but we made, we ended up making $31 that month, that that first month,

Kevin Sahin 21:55
sorry, trade paid for the Digital Ocean droplet,

Michele Hansen 21:59
we were over the moon, because we had made more money than we spent on it. And to us, that was a wild success.

Kevin Sahin 22:10
And so how did you like, after this initial hack on your success? How did you continue to, you know, acquire customers and develop the company.

Michele Hansen 22:25
So I think in the early days, it was a lot of, you know, when people expressed that they had problems that we solved, trying to be there, so I spent hours, you know, replying to stuff on Stack Overflow. And, you know, whenever something came up on Hacker News, someone asking about geocoding, whatever, we would always like pop in there, or on Twitter, or just kind of trying to be in the places where people were already looking for something like this. Of course, we had we had a website, but I don't, it wasn't super built out, you know, with, you know, case studies and example customers and testimonials and, you know, stuff like that, basically, it's for like documentation for for a long time. But um, yeah, I basically spent a lot of time on StackOverflow trying to sort of, you know, neutrally, like reply to questions and kind of, yeah, keep people coming to us,

Kevin Sahin 23:33
and how, like, how did he did evolve? Like, right now, where, where does your customer are coming from?

Michele Hansen 23:43
That's a really good question. Because I don't always know. We don't do a ton with analytics. But pretty much we're very SEO based. So it's still that idea that someone is already frustrated. They're already trying to find something for geocoding. Or for you know, they need you need mentioned academic researchers. So we have a lot of customers who are academic researchers, because in the US, in order to connect to any government datasets, you need this thing called a FIPS code. And you can only get that FIPS code if you have the coordinates for the address. And then the government data will be at that FIPS code level, which is basically sort of like the block. So for example, if a researcher is they know they need FIPS codes to connect to some data, there'll be googling it and so is to have tons and tons of landing pages showing people how you need to convert addresses to FIPS codes. Here's how you can do with our API. Here's how you can upload a spreadsheet. You know, if you need congressional districts, here's how you can do it. If you need time zones, here's how you can do it. And it's very content driven. On the SEO side, we we still do a little bit of replying to stuff on StackOverflow I don't think I've done that for months if not, you know like not really Really anymore? Um, pretty much it's it's about, you know, being there when someone is already looking for something.

Kevin Sahin 25:08
No, we that's something that we, we also did in the beginning of scraping be. We answered Korra questions, not a lot, not a lot of Stack Overflow but a little bit, and then on forums on Twitter and indie hackers, etc, etc. And just like you like now most of our customers are coming from SEO, I'd say 90%. And we've been really focusing on that, since the beginning, we launched the blog, and even before the product was launched, so I think that our first blog was in May 2019. And we launched in August 2019. So you really treated SEO as a, like our main acquisition channel,

Michele Hansen 26:17
and seems like you guys are, I don't know if you're quite like freemium. But you I noticed on your site that it says you can get started with 1000, free API calls, no credit card required. You know, in many ways, I feel like, you know, I think I think it's, you know, freemium is not a pricing model. It's a marketing tactic. And I very much feel like, you know, that combination of SEO and freemium is a huge part of why we have been able to attract customers, because people can try it out without, you know, without having to talk to us first, they can see if this is the product they need, and then they're like, okay, like, we're ready to ready to sign up, and you don't feel like you don't have to sell as hard when you have that combination of SEO and freemium, because people can just figure out for themselves if it's what they need.

Kevin Sahin 27:22
Yeah, exactly. And there is only one thing that is very specific to API's. It's that in many companies, and so I learned this with the customer interviews, the developers do not necessarily have access to the company credit cards. And having a free trial without credit card is really something that can boost the activation. Because if the developer has to ask is n plus one or n plus two for a credit card? And maybe he's like, it's going to bother the developer, he's not even going to try the service, or it's going to slow things down because he needs the approval, etc. So having the free credits on the trial is really something that helped us. And I don't I don't see any, I mean, I see many drawbacks of not having it. I don't see many benefits of having, you know, a credit card. They will follow the trail when you're doing when you have an API business.

Michele Hansen 28:45
Yeah, exactly. And then you know, the developers they can they're trying to get their work done. They can try it out for themselves, see if it works. And then if it is something that's going to work for them, then like they're the one selling your product within the company. You don't have to be emailing all the CTOs and directors and everything being like, Hello, we're scraping me and this is what we do. Like, it's already there. Developers within the company who are like, hey, like, we've got this project. We've got this deadline, I need to use this thing. I already tried it. It works like can you like, like, yeah, give me the card. Let's go. Let's get this over with. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm curious when you did those calls, you said you gave them free API credits? How many did you give them for those calls?

Kevin Sahin 29:28
How many API credits Yeah, I mean, it was at least 10,000 acre grades, sometimes even more, depending on there. So the thing you have to keep in mind is that one API creates isn't equal to one API call. Because the the cost of the API call is depending on the parameters that you use with your API call, and it can cost up to 25 API credits per call, so it goes up quickly.

Michele Hansen 29:59
Yeah. So but so basically, I'm just wondering what the, the cost to that, uh, you know, there's the cost of those interviews, but also basically like, you know, because sometimes, you know, often recommend if you're doing call somebody know, give them a 10 or $25. Amazon gift card, and I'm just kind of curious like what that

Kevin Sahin 30:20
wasn't? It was not much, I'd say, but I don't have a precise figure to give you I don't know, but probably less than $1 per per 10,000. I mean, they don't even they don't like most of them didn't use the whole 10,000 free credit. So I don't think but not much. So these

Michele Hansen 30:48
customer interviews cost you maybe less than $1. Yeah, each, which actually wasn't a cash outlay, because you're just giving them credits. Half an hour, maybe an hour of your time, depending on how technical their questions were. But down the line could lead to these enterprise sales. And the customers really trusting you in a way that they maybe would not have had you not spent this time and given them those credits.

Kevin Sahin 31:19
Yeah, I can't even give you a precise numbers. The first month in August 2019, we signed our first enterprise customer for seven or $800, a month after one of those calls.

Michele Hansen 31:37
Wow. Do you know how many of these calls you did? You mean, you mentioned you to them over 18 months? But I'm curious if you have a

Kevin Sahin 31:44
I did a lot in the beginning, I'd say probably 200, something like that.

Michele Hansen 31:55
And I'm curious, you know, you said you you did this for? Like, are you still doing these calls? Or?

Kevin Sahin 32:01
I am but so right now, we don't offer free credits anymore. We just have some links in our email sequences. And on the website. If for the trial, period, when customers have questions that cannot be answered, with our knowledge base or recommendation. And now I would say that maybe I have four or five calls per week. Maximum.

Michele Hansen 32:38
Yeah, that's, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm still sort of, you know, the the calls came about because you were just you were curious about why does anyone need this thing we made this very similar to us. And I'm curious of, you know, as as, as you were, maybe thinking about doing that, like, like, the questions you asked, you know, are very much, you know, sort of quintessential jobs to be done questions. And I'm curious, what kind of understanding you had of customer research. Before you started doing this?

Kevin Sahin 33:25
I would say zero.

Michele Hansen 33:30
facet came out organically.

Kevin Sahin 33:33
Yeah. I mean, no, I, like, I probably read a few blog posts about how to do customer interviews. It's just not like it was a, you know, a bit of both customer interviews and sales call. So but I mean, I'm not I'm not a salesperson. I don't, I was just, you know, trying to see if, what the customer problems were and if scraping me was a good fit to solve these problems. And if it was, then I would honestly, tell them told them that I thought scripting was the best solution for them. And if it wasn't, then I just told them to. I mean, actually, I told them what if scripting wasn't the solution, I often told them what the solution was. So if I had to refer them to a specific software or consultant or whatever, I did it. And yeah, dog came, I'd say, semi organically. I had some notions about the customer. interviews and sales gold that no experience at all.

Michele Hansen 35:05
Fascinating you just kind of dove like head, you know, sort of headfirst into it. And I mean, it seems like it's really helped your your business and help you understand like, like why people need scraping and how you can help them and lead to these enterprise customers and you guys are in tiny seed like

Kevin Sahin 35:30
yeah, definitely it really helped.

Michele Hansen 35:33
That's awesome. Cool. So I'm curious, you had mentioned that you also had some questions about geocoding. And I wanted to make sure we got time to get Yeah, so

Kevin Sahin 35:45
So I'm curious about the letter. So first of all, where are you based?

Michele Hansen 35:50
So we are in Denmark now. But when we launched geocode, do we live? Actually, we lived in Washington, DC. We lived in Arlington, Virginia, which is just outside DC until July of 2020. So so now we're in Denmark.

Kevin Sahin 36:07
Alright, that's cool. And yeah, so the question I had is, you know, the usual what, what led you to? to geocode? So you've answered this a little bit, but what what were you doing before? How did you find the date? You know, did you did some consulting on the side? Was it a side project, etc, etc. Found the stories, always fascinating.

Michele Hansen 36:37
Yeah, so um, so I kind of mentioned a little bit. So we had this mobile app, which is making a couple 100 bucks a month in ad revenue. This is like 2012 2013. And we need a geocoding for it. And we ran into a point where we basically couldn't use Google anymore, because they didn't have pay as you go at the time, it was either 2500 for free per day, or enterprise contract, and we just needed 5000. So we had to, basically sort of rolled our own geo coder that was very rudimentary. And we kind of talked about this problem that we had, you know, not being able to store the data and whatnot. And, you know, developer friends had the same problem, made an API, put it on Hacker News, $31, the first month kind of vary, and got tons of feedback from people ask them, you know, why they wanted to do what they needed to do. So started, you know, adding those features as people needed them, like a big thing for us early on was was the ability to upload a spreadsheet. And I think we made our first sort of, you know, higher end sale, May of 2014. So a couple months after, and that was, I mean, that wasn't really adding that that we called the unlimited plan, which at the time was 750 a month was huge part of our growth. But so from that, the beginning as a side project, and it stayed a side project until I went full time, which is October of 2017. So currently celebrating my four year full time anniversary. I was I was a product manager before Okay, yeah, yeah, I was I was specifically like in Well, I was a first I was an operations manager that I was a technical project manager do work managing like WordPress website, builds that agency. And then I really wanted to to like dig my teeth into things. So I transitioned into being a product manager, which led into then doing product development, which is sort of where my heart is, which is how I got into customer research to is doing product development and launching a lot of stuff that didn't work out just like learning that you really need to talk to prospects and if you want something to succeed, learn that the hard way. me so I went full time 2017 and then my husband he and we're like, oh, you know, if I go full time, like it's gonna you know, maybe take some of the load off and make things a little easier. Except you know, I was full time so then our response to our customer response times got better, you know, and we actually grew more and so we're like, Okay, well now husband needs to go full time. And this is February of 2018. And he went to his boss and was like, you know, it's time for me to go full time on this thing. And his boss was like, No, and we're like, this is an interesting negotiating position to be in so he ended up going part time part salary but keeping health insurance which in the US is huge. And, but he eventually went full time by September of 2018, because I mean, basically the more we worked on it, the more you know, the better the product. Got. Yeah. And?

Kevin Sahin 40:02
And yeah, did you? Do you have any employees?

Michele Hansen 40:08
No, I have a VA, but we don't have any employees.

Kevin Sahin 40:12
Okay, so you are very lean? Yeah, yeah, we

Michele Hansen 40:15
we focus a lot on, you know, automating as many things as we can. And I think that's one reason, you know, we talking earlier about, you know, SEO and free tier and not having to, you know, sort of, you know, do cold outreach and reach out to companies. You know, partly it's because, you know, that's kind of the sort of workflow I like, when I'm starting up with a product, I like to be able to test it out, see if it works, not have to talk to anybody, like I hate when I have to have a demo to figure out if something is what I needed to do. But also, because we just don't have the time to be, you know, reaching out to people and pitching them, because it's just the two of us, but and that's also, like, a conscious decision on our part, like, we could hire another rep, or we could hire, you know, a salesperson or whatever. But we also just, we, we kind of like how calm it is with just the two of us. So So

Kevin Sahin 41:06
you said, Yeah, so basically, you plan to stay just the two of you and not hire in the future.

Michele Hansen 41:15
Yeah, that's the plan.

Kevin Sahin 41:17
Okay. That's, I mean, there are many founders that, like, this situation that don't really like to manage employees, etc, etc. So that's great, that's working for you.

Michele Hansen 41:37
I'm a very, I'm just very product driven. Like, that's what I really love doing is, is product work. And I also I do enjoy, like, sales work, too. So like my time, you know, my sort of favorite things to work on are both product and, you know, customer research and whatnot. And then also doing, like sales and negotiations. And, and yeah, if we had employees, you know, I would be spending time managing employees. And I just, I don't know, I just that that's just not really where my, my heart is. It's not in being a manager, it definitely is for some people. But

Kevin Sahin 42:20
yeah, I can relate to

Michele Hansen 42:21
that. Yeah.

Kevin Sahin 42:25
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, I don't have much experience managing employees. But for our blog, I worked with a lot of freelancers, you know, different kind of freelancers, constants, writers, editors, some Freelancer to help me with the SEO link builders, etc, etc. And I mean, it's really hard to hire, to manage to keep employees motivated. I mean, it's, it's pretty hard.

Michele Hansen 43:10
Yeah, it's a lot of time. And, you know, I think from my own experiences, and you know, those of you know, people I know, like, having a manager who doesn't love being a manager, who, you know, doesn't love, like developing people, and helping them grow, and all that kind of stuff, like, there are people who genuinely love that those people should be managers, those of us who, you know, are a little bit more reluctant on it and enjoy other things. I think it's okay, if we allow ourselves to, to not be managers. And, you know, I sometimes think that there's this, this assumption that, that, that you have to grow and that you have to hire in order to grow. Is this sort of this baked in assumption, and I think there's a little bit of like, judgment sometimes around companies that don't hire because people like, oh, like, you're not a real company, if you don't have any employees or whatnot. I reject that. Like, I think if you can find a way to run a company, and it's successful and gives you the life you want, and for some people that involves employees, and some people it doesn't, and that's Yeah, exactly. And some people you know, it involves, like, I think, I guess, you know, my, my VA is is is you know, a contractor, like a lot of people have a lot of contractors working with them. But you know, having that responsibility also of covering someone's paycheck can, you know, can lend a lot of stress to running a business and some people like that stress and some people don't and I don't understand that like that. Yeah, I think that that sort of leadership component of it is is challenging and I sort of, you know, I asked myself, like whether I feel like at some point I could want to be a leader like that with employees. But quite frankly, I don't feel ready. You know, maybe in another season of life, I will be but at this point, you know, yeah.

Kevin Sahin 45:25
Yeah. I mean, I, as I say, I totally relate to this, because it's, I mean, for me personally, I don't I don't think I totally agree with you with the fact that there is this assumption of growth and hiring and, and even sometimes raising funds, like, you have to you have to grow, you have to raise fund you have to hire, it's kind of, you know, a vanity metric in the startup ecosystem, how many employees do you have? To try etc. And, I mean, many companies that I mean, either don't hire at all or hire just, you know, a really small team, and that are doing totally fine, where the founders are happy, the employees are happy, everyone's happy. And, yeah, it's. And on the other side, there are many companies raising funds, hiring, and growing like crazy, whether founders are not happy at all, and stressed and

Michele Hansen 46:43
yeah, I think, you know, that's something we, as founders, we have the decision to run our businesses in a way that, you know, to design the business. Right. And, and, you know, and for me, part of, you know, designing that business is it's, you know, setting it up in a way that, that we're running it in a way that we enjoy, and we enjoy working together. And it sounds like you and I really like working together, too.

Kevin Sahin 47:12
Yeah. I mean, we've been, we've been, so we know each other since high school. So we, we've been working on many project, back in high school, and then side projects in college and the beginning of our career together. So yeah, it's been. And that's was the, it was great, because when we founded the company, we had this whole history of working together, of knowing how to talk to each other to, you know, divide the work based on, you know, what we are good at what we'd like to do, etc, etc. So it was pretty, I'd say, you know, a fluid, the work relationship.

Michele Hansen 48:09
Sounds like you learned a lot from that that first side project you did together with him about how you can work together. I'm curious what that project was.

Kevin Sahin 48:19
There were many projects, I'd say the most. The biggest one with a Chrome extension that we launched. I don't remember the year 2016, I'd say or 17. It was called shop tourist, it was a Chrome extension that could where users could save products on ecommerce websites that they were interested to buy. And our we had some scrapers in the backend that would refresh the price every day. And if the price dropped it send an email with a note with the with an alert that said, Hey, this product dropped 25% this night. You can buy it here. And then there was some affiliated links on the email. And like, we, we had some pretty good success marketing it on Reddit. Like we launched the we posted a Reddit post one day and it got 1000s of upvotes. And we like to overnight we got a few 1000 users on the app. And yeah, and the funny thing is that we realized Is that some customers? No, it was not customers, some users sorry. were added adding hundreds of products on their list. And we, we told ourselves, it's kind of strange, because why would I mean, unless it's, you know, the person is on the buying spree or is a has a buying problem. It's kind of weird to save, you know, hundreds of products with different variations of the same. I don't know, a T shirt or whatever. And so we realized that it was ecommerce owners that were monitoring their competitors, with our app, and they were doing it because our app was free. There were some b2b SaaS that were doing it, but it was very expensive. And so we saw an opportunity there. And we launched our first real company, pricing, but and it was a price monitoring app for ecommerce owner. And we did this in 2018. And it was a failure, we managed to get it from zero to 500, or 1000, in monthly recurring revenue. But we failed to grow it from there. And we knew nothing about marketing to ecommerce owners, or to ecommerce in general, except the previous experience we had with this little side project. And so we, we managed to sell it to one of the biggest player in this field, which which is priced to spy.com. And it's funded, what would become scraping be later. And the great thing about this failure is that with pricing, but we we had to scrape a lot of websites. So no, we had these those problems about JavaScript rendering, headless browsers, proxies, etc. So we like, we knew exactly that one, like this one kind of use case for scraping me.

Michele Hansen 52:48
So interesting. And I feel like I hear so many similarities in our stories, but something that stands out to me not only how you were, you were able, you know that so that pricing bot, you know, ostensibly failed. But you were able to carry through that expertise you built in building scrapers, and understanding how difficult that can be and the problems with that. But what also carried through is I'm struck by how it seems you have this curiosity about user behavior. And you know, people were doing something and you're and you're like, Oh, that's interesting, why are they adding hundreds of products all of a sudden, and you allowed yourself to follow that, and I think that's such, like, such a great quality, and a founder to not only notice when something is strange, you know, but but follow it, you know, you could have shut your brain off that like, Oh, these people probably just have a spending problem and basically judge, right? And you could have just sort of left it at that. But instead of stopping at judgment, you instead be like, I wonder why they're doing it and follow that thread, you know, follow this sort of cookie crumbs and figure it out. Oh, it's because they're doing this ecommerce thing. Okay, well, maybe we can like pivot into doing that and then it didn't really work out but you got acquired and then you're able to use that funds to start scraping be but you had that understanding of your own use cases for scraping. And again, you were like, Why do people need this? Let me go figure it out. And you just allow yourself to follow that curiosity. And I I just love that.

Kevin Sahin 54:33
Yeah, I mean, that was um, it was really a great experience. I mean, the the like, even though it was hard, you know, to fail, and both p&i we didn't. Like we had to fund the business ourselves. So it was a very hard Financially but the experience the learnings were really worth it.

Michele Hansen 55:06
Yeah. It sounds like it. I feel like I could talk to you all day about this. This has been so much fun. Um, thank you so much for for coming on. I I know from this conversation that this is not going to be the last time I talked to you. So So this has been really enjoyable.

Kevin Sahin 55:33
Thank you. Yeah, same for me. Thank you a lot. And maybe see you next time. I still have many questions around the geo coder, yo. And I'd like to, I'd love to talk more about it.

Michele Hansen 55:52
Yeah. Hey, I'm always always happy to talk about your cardio. Cool. So if people want to know more about you keep up with what you're doing on Skype and BMI and whatnot. Where should they go?

Kevin Sahin 56:03
They can go to my Twitter. It's @SahinKevin. And yeah.

Michele Hansen 56:12
Awesome. Well, if you enjoyed listening to this episode, please like Kevin, and I know. And you can find us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod. Thanks. Thanks, Michele.

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Michele Hansen 0:01
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Hey, welcome back to software social. I am so excited this week to have with us the woman the myth, the legend, Rosie Sherry. Hello. So excited to have you. So you were I founder of Ministry of Testing, lead community at Indie Hackers, which is probably how many people listening know you, currently leading community for Orbit. Also have your own thing going on Rosieland, which is a community about community. So excited to talk to you.

Rosie Sherry 1:30
Thank you, thank you. It's good to be here.

Michele Hansen 1:33
So I want I want to start out with something something I noticed when I think about your background is how you've kind of gone between being a founder yourself, and intentionally working for other people also having sort of other things going on. And, you know, on the show in the past, we've kind of talked a little bit about how sometimes there's this perception that there's this sort of like staircase of an entrepreneurs career where you start out working for other people, and then maybe you have an info product, and then maybe you do consulting, and then you do an info product, and then you have a SAS and then I don't know, and it's like this sort of like staircase. And there's this sort of like implied increase in virtue throughout all of that. And then if you're taking backwards steps, that's seen as like, literally like a step backwards. And it's like this ladder rather than being this kind of what I'm more see in people's actual careers, which is kind of moving between different things as their interests lead them and as their life leads them. I feel like I see that in your career. And I'm kind of curious how you think about these shifts you've made between working for yourself and working for other people? And like, like, kind of all of that.

Rosie Sherry 2:45
Yeah, it's kind of like steps going up and down, right? Or going up and down or left, I guess, an elevator? Yeah, I mean, I have like, no idea what I'm doing. But I guess like, I kind of go with the flow. When I when I stepped back from Ministry of testing, I had been doing that for 10 years. And I thought, like, as I was stepping back, I thought I'd never work for someone else's, like my plan was to take some time off and just like, take it easy for it. And just, I don't know, see what I wanted to do. And I knew I kind of wanted to, like focus in on community, but I wasn't sure how. And then, like, the opportunity with indie hackers came up. And I was like, Oh, you know, this could be fun. This could be interesting. I think I could learn a lot from how courtland has built community there. It's similar to ministry testing, in some ways, but yet, it's, it's really different. So I kind of just jumped on that, like, you know, earlier, earlier than I had planned. I was I was a contractor there for the whole time. And I was there for two years as a contractor. And basically, we just kept renewing the contract, like every three to six months. So it wasn't like it was the plan, stay there. And apparently surprised that I stayed there for two years, I thought I wouldn't last I thought I wouldn't be able to kind of work for someone else after like doing my own thing for 10 years. That was interesting. There's a lot of benefit, especially, I think, perhaps more these days where everything just seems I just feel like there's so much opportunity out there. And there's a lot of things that I didn't like about running a business. I didn't necessarily want to manage people, I didn't want to do the accounts, I didn't want to worry about money or worry about, you know, the future of, of the business. So yeah, I mean, this, you know, loads of things about running a business that I think people try to glorify, they try to hide, they try to not talk about it. But you know, it can be stressful. And I think my realization after running the Ministry of testing, is actually I don't, I don't want to run a company and employ people. I don't want to be responsible for someone's wages at the point of life that I that I am in at the moment. might might change over time, but right now Yeah, I'd rather like I guess, do something more for me something more, you know, focusing on, like my interest in things that that I need. And yeah, and I guess like contracting, bringing home a paycheck, that's great. But you know, for me, it's been, you know, it was great, I saved up a bunch of money, I didn't actually spend any of the money that I made in the hackers. So that was like a nice, consistent income for me to like, you know, get our family more and more of a safety net. Now, my Uber and I never, ever considered working for a startup people have it. Yeah, it's, it's new. For me, it's different from me. But this negative, there's a lot of pros as well. So I try to kind of be mindful of all of that. And, you know, there's days, I just want to pack it all in and say, I can't be bothered, I should just go back to being independent. But there are other days where I'm just like, no, this is actually really good. I'm enjoying what I'm doing this, you know, there's a great team that I'm working with. And again, you know, I get paid well, I don't have to worry about money, I don't have to invoice people the money every month in my bank account. And I'm like, Oh, this is nice. This is, you know, this nice not just to show up and do the work.

Michele Hansen 6:11
You mentioned how it was stressful, being responsible for people's paychecks. And I totally relate to that. I think it's one of the reasons why we haven't really, you know, formally hired here, right? Like, I have a VA, but you strike me as someone who you know, and this comes through so much in your work for indie hackers in your work on community who like deeply cares about other people, and supporting them and encouraging them and helping them reach their goals, and you know, and be that person they want to be. And I wonder if that almost made it harder to be running a company and responsible for people's income when you felt so responsible for those outcomes and really invested in them as people?

Rosie Sherry 6:57
Yeah, I mean, it's actually interesting, because I still own in ministry, testing, or co owner, when you're founded, you kind of like, I guess, the foundation of everything that comes later, to a certain extent. So like, the fact that I worked when I wanted, the fact that I had five kids, the fact that I just like took time off when I needed to the fact that I defined, you know, decided my own hours, all of those things, ended up becoming how things were done administrator testing, and it's become more apparent, I guess, as the team, I think about eight or nine people at the moment, at first, you know, I was only one with kids. And, you know, I was very much family friendly person, I would support, you know, everything about me is like, we need to live our own lives as well. We need to have flexibility, you know, work shouldn't stop us having having a family and doing things that we want to do. And at first, it was like, just me it was kids. But then like, as the years have gone, I think last year, there were three new babies born within the company, and as a team with like nine people that's like, oh, wow, how are we gonna manage this as like, as a company, even though it's not my responsibility anymore. There's a CEO running it. But he very much took on the philosophy of like, well, this is how Rosie has always done it. So this is what everybody else gets to do as well. So we let the mothers choose what they want to do. We let them you know, take the time off that they need to take time off, and have a say, and there's no there's no judgment for any of it. And we listen, and we care and we try to make good decisions, even even if it costs us money, right. And like, as a small company, and you have three of your people off on maternity leave is a big kind of hit. But it's not something that feels wrong, it very much feels right and like allowing everybody just to choose the time that they have off and pay in the world. And you know, making sure that they get a fair deal when they're often on maternity leave is to me, you know, I couldn't do it any other way. Because it would feel hypocritical. And for me, it's just like, I can't have once that rule to me and like different set of rules for For everyone else, even if I never took maternity leave properly. I believe like, you know, everybody else should have had that right to do that. I guess.

Michele Hansen 9:20
It sounds like a bit like Golden Rule management, like treating others as how you would want to be treated.

Rosie Sherry 9:26
Yeah, I don't understand why companies can't do that. can't comprehend it. And it's probably why I haven't. It took me I guess it's probably why it took me a long time to actually end up working for other people. Because without listen to the pandemic, because just like nobody was truly flexible enough in their thinking about how people showed up for work. And I've been working from home all this time on my own rolls, and then the pandemic comes along and I'm just like, still working the same way that I was working before. This ain't nothing changed for me day to day, but for everyone else. Or, you know, like a huge majority of people, life change and companies rethought their processes and what was acceptable and what wasn't acceptable. And the fact that we can all work from home now I think is is great, but at the same time is unlike Well, why couldn't we do this before we could have. But companies, you know, I guess like it wasn't urgent enough to think of our needs until the pandemic came along.

Michele Hansen 10:26
And, you know, you mentioned how your life didn't change all that much with the pandemic. Yeah, I want to detour for a second because I understand that so you have five children, and you unschool them and it would just be interesting for a moment just to talk about not only what does that look like but also you know, you mentioned your whole life didn't change much. And I'm kind of curious what does that home life look like between you and your husband with this sort of unschooling elements layering on top of also like your, your work life? Like how does all of that work together?

Rosie Sherry 11:02
Yeah, it's tough. I think like unschooling, I think the toughest part about unschooling, I think is, or even homeschooling is about making that kind of adjustment to life, like trying to instead of like, you know, if if kids go to school, you know, you have the six, eight hour block of time to kind of get work done and you can plan things around that with unschooling is like, well, you kind of have to plan for your kids. And then you have to plan your work around your kids, and you have to juggle things. With me, it's with my husband, we like have equal share on like, the kids in the house. And I just think that's the hardest part is like most people, probably, I guess I feel I feel privileged to be able to do that at the moment. But like, I guess, like, the thing I do is like, we're having this chat for me, it's in the morning. And that's like, not my normal schedule. So the like, normally like I'm online from midday till eight, and I'm with my kids from when they wake up until midday. And then at midday, me my husband swapped over. And that's those are the, that's the deal we have right now, to make things work. And so, in the morning, I would normally take my kids to a class that they have or a group that they go to, and it works, I guess, to try and to split that time, it changes all the time as as my work changes, or as my husband's work changes, we find ways to adapt and I guess that's the magic of unschooling, I guess like unschooling is like, we're always, I guess, we're always looking for things that our kids want to do to keep them active. So every day, especially our younger ones, who are between the age of three and 10. You know, getting them out out the house once a day is like basically our goal. And that happens in different ways at the moment, except for school, beach school, art class, sports, or football. And then other days that we hire, or we pay a friend to take them out for the day. She's like a single mom, and appreciates extra bit bit of income. It's tough, it really is tough. And it's like we have to say no to things a lot of the time, but I think at the same time, I think like the pandemic has kind of worked in my favor as well. Now that everyone's online, I feel like what's the right word? I guess previous to the pandemic, I felt like I was only one needing to have the flexibility. But I think like these days, it's it's more more acceptable. I guess, everyone's more accommodating, like having kids in the background is okay. Pre pandemic, that was not okay. You know, stuff like that, you know, despite COVID I appreciate how the world has changed. We feel it feels weird. I don't know. What do you think it feels? It feels weird to? Yeah, to say that. But I think you know, actually, there's been positives from COVID.

Michele Hansen 13:57
I think it's forced us to reevaluate things and maybe shifts that were happening very slowly, like you mentioned, you know, more work from home and maybe more flexibility shifts that were happening very, very slowly, or only in very specific corners of the economy were kind of thrust on everyone all at once, which was both traumatic and also sped up things that needed to happen to at the same time at great cost to everyone involved, Beto as you said, like, you know that it's acceptable to have children in the background or even a dog barking, like I remember two years ago, you know, before COVID, and I was having a call and my dog barked in the back because the mailman was there or whatever. Like, I always felt so embarrassed on the call. And, you know, I remember sometimes, you know, the people, you know, whoever I was having a, you know, customers having call with, or one of them being like, Oh yeah, you know, we have a dog friendly office too. And I was just like, Yeah, like, dog friendly office, you know, that whole thing of like being a really small company and not wanting? Yes, I'm actually like working from home like that being kind of like something to be sheepish about, you know, like that you were working from home because it was like, What? Like, can you not afford an office? Are you not legit enough to have an office? Like, do you not like it used to prompt so many questions, most of them not very, like, positively reflecting on the company. But then all of a sudden, you know, so many of us, you know, who were lucky enough to be working from home, everybody was working from home, everybody, you know, had kids in the background dogs in the background cats on their keyboard, like, you know, and we all just had to learn how to be a little bit more understanding with one another.

Rosie Sherry 15:41
Well, human right, I think like, we, we've learnt to appreciate and see that we all live in different circumstances, and we should adapt to that, and we should make sure it's okay. You know, almost like, I guess, like, the whole diversity movement, I guess, in the past few years is, you know, crept up. And, you know, to me, this is also like, part of it is like, we're all human, we're all people, we have different circumstances, that the sooner we can make that, okay for everyone to just like, be who they are opt in, opt out things, be able to, you know, not have shame for, for whatever it might be, I think like, the better the quicker, we can just like, move on and like, kind of focus on our work and get and get things done.

Michele Hansen 16:38
Using shame, just there kind of reminded me of what we sort of started this conversation with, which is, you know, in your career, you have sort of intentionally and consciously moved between contracting and, and being a founder and working for other people. And when people come to a situation where they realize that maybe consulting isn't working for them, or they're trying to get their own SAS off the ground, and it's not working, and the finances are tight, and they're thinking about, you know, going out and getting a job. Yeah, it seems like people often feel a lot of shame around that. And then that feels like failure to them. And I think what your story shows that, you know, it's not linear. And, and I'm just kind of curious what you would say to someone who is kind of maybe at that point, who is wondering, you know, just, you know, that thing, things aren't, things aren't working, or the finances aren't there. And they've they've got to go back and, you know, get a job, like, what would you say to them?

Rosie Sherry 17:56
I definitely felt this, like in the indie in the indie world, like, being immersed in that world. And, you know, people want to make it they want to be full time, indie hackers. And it almost becomes, like, a thing of like, what if you're not a full time indie hacker, then, like, you know, you're not a success really are there's only one way. And, you know, I almost, you know, thought that, you know, I thought even just like working in India, because I thought I wouldn't last I thought, you know, people, you know, I wouldn't make an impact. I wouldn't enjoy working with courtland, or all that kind of stuff. And even even when I joined indie hackers, the opportunity came up as a result of courtland looking for some social media help. And I was just like, at that point, I was just looking for something else to do. And like when I reached out to him, he was like, Yeah, but you're overqualified for this. I was like, Yeah, I know. But I'm, you know, I'm still like, yeah, I could do it. And, you know, I, I personally felt like I could learn from indie hackers. And that role ended up being more like of a community manager community lead role that he that he offered me. But did I feel shame, like doing that a little bit, but at the same time, as I, it doesn't matter, you know, I need to, you know, I really wanted just to have an excuse to do something else. And so yeah, I work for CEO, founder to social media and community manager, which is a step back, right? You know, on paper, it's a step back. But actually what it did for me was was huge, is like, before I joined India, because no one in the indie world really knew who I was. There's a few people here in there. But what it did for me was was massive. So I say I think a lot of the time choices, I guess, perhaps is that it's not all about money. It's not all about job titles. And we can dismiss job titles is not important. That's, you know, I think sometimes they can be but I think I think, if we think about, or like, the way I think about it is like, well, I want to do stuff, I want to learn stuff, and I want to work on things I care about. And does it matter if it's starting your own thing? or working for someone else? I don't think it really does. I think, at least for me, it's like, you know, five, finding, finding the right people to work with is, is key. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of jobs that I'm sure would be sucky. And I see I definitely see people struggle, working for companies and being like, part indie part, like, working for companies. So yeah, I don't think like anything is necessarily Perfect. Perfect solution. But I guess it's like more about like, finding your fit what's right for you? How do you get to do the work that you do? Enjoy? How are you growing personally? And, like all, but I think I'm growing a lot personally. And also in, in my, I guess, desire to kind of impact the community world, I think I'm doing that. And I get access to stuff that I wouldn't, if I was trying to do all, all of that kind of stuff on my own. So yeah, there's definitely like, the pros and cons. So yeah, but but it's easy to think because when I joined, obey, it was at the back of my mind is that oh, my God, what will people think? I've been indie for, for 15 years. You know, should I actually take this job? Is it is it in conflict with, with who I am? Those are all that was definitely in the back of my mind, I can't, I won't lie about that. Yeah, I was nervous about announcing that. I'm not sure what people would think. But I think, at the end of the day is like, I'm still sticking to, to who I am, I'm still sticking to my values, I'm still pushing for the things that are important to me in all of it. And if I don't get those, and it's going to become a problem. You know, say, I'm still being me, in every, every space that I show up. And, and that's what's important to me, is that, and if I can't get that, then that's where it becomes a problem. For me, I think, Patrick, my boss,

Michele Hansen 22:52
I noticed that you just said how you had this conflict around identity. And I feel like that's running undercurrent of a lot of time when people are having this struggle, is identifying as a founder, and all of the things that come with it, identifying as an indie hacker, identifying as someone who, you know, runs their own things and whatnot, and shifting identity into something else into, into, you know, who am I if I am not somebody who runs their own company? What does that say about me? Just who am I as as a person, I think in a world where we wrap up so much of our identity and what we do for work. That's a, that's a massive and can be quite a, you know, debilitating sort of shift and psychological process to go through. And yet what I also heard you say several times throughout the, the conversation is a reason why you took the job with indie hackers, or the contract with indie hackers, is because you wanted to learn and, and I wonder if that transition is a little bit smoother. When you think of, you know, there's you have this identity as an indie hacker, as a founder, you also have an identity as someone who likes to do other things. And one of those, I think, for you that really comes through is somebody who's curious, and who likes to learn and letting another identity almost kind of supplant that, that founder, one that's sort of, you know, taking a backseat.

Rosie Sherry 24:40
Yeah, it's interesting. It actually brings me back to like minister testing and like when I stepped back, it was like, Oh my god, like, Who am I? Who am I going to be now I've been this testing person, this person, leading the testing community for so long. I'm almost leaving behind. And much of that, obviously they I still keep in touch with people, but I'm not in that world anymore. Yeah, it was, it was hard, it's hard to shift away from that and to figure out how to how to kind of redefine your life and who you want to be. And how do you get people to, I guess, to see that to know that and, and yeah, it's, it's tough and I guess like, right now with the indie stuff like, you know, I do Rosi land stuff on the side. But even that, I feel like oh, you know, I see a lot of the indie stuff happening, I still keep an eye on indie hackers. But, you know, at the same time I miss in the hacking as well, I don't do nearly as much as I would love. And, you know, I struggle with that. So it's like, how much of these different people can I be? How do I? How do I separate that? Do I need to separate that? And I mean, I was I was employed over it was no full well, knowing that I had all this stuff on the side. And that that had to continue to exist when I joined over it. But yeah, I feel like I definitely feel less a part of the indie world. Because just because I don't have the time to spend in it. And that makes me feel sad. Definitely sad. And I want to do more, but I can't just because because of time. But yeah, I don't even know where I'm going with this. But this constant shift of identity moving on, almost like shedding skin. All right, is that I shed my skin from history testing. I'm shedding my skin a bit from indie hackers, but not quite. And, you know, moving through life, I think, like, I think we almost become different people as we grow up. I mean, I think I'm in my early 40s now, and am I the same person? I was 10 years ago. So yes, but no. And that's okay. Yeah, I don't even know where I'm going. But yeah.

Michele Hansen 27:31
It's interesting you say that I love how you dove into the identity shifts of that. And you're like, so even though you're no longer with, you know, indie hackers proper. I still think of you as the mama bear. The indie world is my head but like that's, that's it's you know, Rosie, Sherry mama bear of the indie hackers.

Rosie Sherry 27:59
Well, I like that. I'll have to put that on my Twitter. But it's interesting, right? People will always remember you for different things. So there'll be people from the testing community who will always remember me for ministry testing, and things I did, and nothing will probably change as much in a ton of indie hackers out there will remember me as being the mom of their I love it. Yeah, and like, the more I do all of it, orbit, the more people associated me not with being indie, but being more all about community. And that's okay, as well. Right? And what does it mean is that, I don't know. But But I think like, I mean, you know, I guess it goes back to trends, life, the world changing, no one has careers for life anymore. And this is you know, probably I guess a proof of it is like, let's, you know, change as we grow, let's be okay with, like, actually discovering things. As we learn about ourselves, and as we learn about the world around us, and, and adapt and we should Yeah, I think we should all be able to do that and make make it feel okay. And make it you know, not not feel like step backwards, is you know, it's not a step backwards. It's just like, as you as an individual, you you're doing what's what's right for you at any point in your life. And that's, you know, that's okay.

Michele Hansen 29:45
I'm reminded of the Walt Whitman, quote, I contain multitudes and, and I feel like what you're saying is, is about that we have many different identities and even the identities of us in other people's minds may be different than what we think of ourselves as or reflects a version of us in the past. And, you know, you're that that identity that you had as a founder, the identity you had, as the community person for indie hackers. As rosy land, as community person at orbit, like, all of those are valid, and they all exist, regardless of you know, what you're currently we're doing. And I feel like, what you're saying is, you don't really have to choose one, you know, you can still you can still have all of those pieces and so many more pieces of yourself. And, and it's okay to shift and change and grow.

Rosie Sherry 30:54
No, think like, as as, I guess, like an unschooling approach to things we encourage, everything we do is like child led learning. And, like, I live that, that same philosophy in life is like, you know, I think like, like, as I get older, I just, I just can't spend any time on anything I don't enjoy. And then when I look at my kids, I'm like, why should they have to spend any time on the things that they don't enjoy, we should, like, you know, focus, focus all our energy as much as is possible to do the things that we love, because that's, that's like a really special place to be. And, like, at the moment, like, like, you know, I've been working for 23 years of my life, when I started out, working. Man, it was just like, a different place. And like, where I am, now, I'm like, this is just such a better place to be doing work that, that I love that I appreciate that, that, you know, I believe I can have impact on. And if I look back at myself, like 20 years ago, and see see where I am now, I say, I would have like, I guess, never, never imagined that this kind of life is possible. The life I had then was about working in jobs that I didn't really enjoy that much, or for companies that I wasn't really, that interested in what they were doing. And now it's like, everything's flipped to like, I'm working for a company that I believe in what they're doing, I enjoy the day to day work, we're aligned in the things that we want to do. And that's just like, Whoa, you know, how, you know, how great is that, to be a part of that. And regardless of the outcome, whether, you know, I continue to rise up in the company where they continue to get pay raises, whether whether orbit ends up, you know, growing massively in IPO, and that that doesn't matter. To me, it's like what matters is, you know, being able to do do what I love, right now.

Michele Hansen 33:22
Follow the things you love, even if those things take you from entrepreneurship, to working for other people and changing your identity. And, yeah,

Rosie Sherry 33:34
I look at Patrick, my, one of the cofounders I see some of the things that he has to do as a founder. And I'm like, I'm so glad I'm not doing that. And like I can see it as the founders because like, not not to the same extent, you know, they've raised money, it's a different game. But you know, that the same principles applies, like, I don't have to do any of that stuff. And I'm very happy about that.

Michele Hansen 34:03
It sounds like you're in a good place. Now. I want I want to thank you for for joining us today. You know, we again, in this sort of indie world, we talk a lot about building in public and you know, I talked about writing in public. But something I am really valuing lately is when people are willing to be vulnerable in public. And I feel so much from that of that from you. And not only in on on Twitter, and your support of other people, but also here today. And, and I have a feeling that your story today is it's gonna make somebody at least one person feel feel less alone and feel feel better about their journey. Hopefully you know, less shame about Going from entrepreneurship to employment?

Rosie Sherry 35:06
I hope so. I hope so. I try. I think it's, it's hard, I guess. I mean, I don't know what your experiences but like women in tech when in business, whether it's like, I guess it's hard to stand up to certain things and be open about the challenges that we have. And so yeah, I try my best, I think my confidence increases over time. I will say, I don't give a damn anymore, like what people think. I don't know if that comes of age. But like, you know, I definitely wasn't this open about everything before. So, yeah, part of me like does it to, to help other people see, I think it's important, like, who I am a woman, five kids on schooling. I kind of want to show people that. Yeah, yes, I'm a bit obsessive with the things that I want to do. I'm, like, you know, switched on, like, all the time, pretty much. But But I spend lots of time with my kids as well, you know, I managed to make it work. And I guess that my hope is that in time, like more people can be like this, if that's what they choose, you know, if they, if they can see the possibility. You know, it's done me a lot of good. And I guess, like, there must be more people out there that want something like this. And for them to be able to see an example. I guess is, is what's in the back of my mind when I tweet when I write when I do my things? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 36:59
thank you so much for yesterday. I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Rosie Sherry 37:05
Thank you, Michelle. I appreciate catching up.

Michele Hansen 37:08
If you enjoyed this episode, please let Rosie and I know on Twitter. You can find us at software social pot. Thanks

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Colleen: Hello, Michelle.

MIchele: I feel like it's been awhile.

Colleen: It has been a while. It's been a few weeks. I

MIchele: Yeah. But like, so we haven't really liked formally talked or not formally, but, you know, but we have been like, I feel like we have been talking constantly about this podcast for the past couple of weeks at the same time.

Colleen: I would agree. There's been a lot of discussion about that.

MIchele: And we've been meaning to do like kind of a catch-up episode for a while too. And so it kind of felt this kind of feels like a good time to sort of pause and have a little bit of a meta episode where we sort of, I guess, talk about where we've come from and why w why do we do this in the first place and, and where are we going?

Colleen: Okay. I like it.

MIchele: So let's let's rewind. So if, if this were a fancy produced podcast, this is when you would insert harp noises. So just imagine that there's a harp playing in your head. So let's rewind back to July of 20, 20, Colleen. What were you doing in July of 2020?

Colleen: Oh, geez. Well, let's see July. So we were a couple months into the pandemic. I believe I was working a full-time job and I had a desire, a strong desire to launch a product.

MIchele: Were you consulting full time for one client or I thought you were consulting.

Colleen: Maybe I was still, yeah. Good thing. We have

MIchele: I feel like you can

Colleen: to.

MIchele: I feel like I remember sometime I think it was right around when COVID was heading. And I feel like I remember standing on your, like your like porch or your steps like talking through whether you should take a job and like, yeah. Like that was like right around that time.

But, and I think you didn't.

Colleen: I think

MIchele: And I,

Colleen: The first time they offered it to me, I think I said,

MIchele: And then I think you were consulting,

Colleen: I believe you're correct. I believe I was consulting for one client. So it was kind of that cadence of a more permanent job. But at that time I was not a quote full-time employee. I had not launched a

MIchele: I think you're like compromise with them. Was that like you would work for them. Four days a week as a consultant, and then you would get one day a week to work on like your stuff. But actually it had been like that for a while. Like, I feel like you would have this sort of, this is my phrasing here, this like Friday fun day where you got to just like do your own projects for a while.

Colleen: Yeah. that sounds right.

MIchele: Yeah. Yeah. But that was very much, I mean, now looking back on it, I guess that was like, The end of what I term your wandering through the forest period. Wondering.

you know, you know, if this was, if this is frozen too, for all the parents out there, this is when your power ballad of lost in the woods is playing.

Colleen: Lost in the woods. Yes. would be my lost in the woods. Power ballad period. Indeed. Agree.

MIchele: It was a pivotal moment. And then I think. I don't know if it was like August. Oh, so of 2020 that you were kind of on, I mean, I guess we could listen to our own show and figure this out. Again, this worry, fancy produced podcast with harp noises. We would know that and there would be a clip of it right now.

But I think it was like in August that you were like F like, I need to just. Decide, unlike one of these things. Cause like we had been meeting for a while. So like just context is like we were, we were meeting up every week for coffee for a long time. At a, so we used to live in the same place. We now live on opposite sides of the world, but we used to live in the same place, like a neighborhood over you were the only person I had ever like met in my daily life who was also doing this weird internet.

Business thing who was like in that world. And also like our kids went to the same school and we lived like two minutes from each other and it was like just perfect. Yeah. So, and then we started meeting up at a coffee shop called Northside social, which is actually how we ended up getting the name for this show.

And the show basically was, you know, I moved to Denmark to Denmark. then for us this year, you moved to California. So now we're really all over the place to keep us talking to each other, to keep those conversations happening. for a long time, we had been meeting up and you were playing around with like all of these different ideas and, and playing as like you were, you were taking it very seriously.

Like it wasn't play. There was some con like there's like a content analytics idea. I feel like, like, there's a one point. It was like, you were thinking about some sort of like, Competitor to H refs that was like for SEO consultants to like measure the value of their work. There was the, the, there was the stay at home moms doing babysitting and daycare for other the childcare thing.

And then, but like, so August of 2020, I feel like there was kind of this moment in early. Like I just gotta like pick something and go for it. And it's going to be this file upload thing, which annoys me.

Colleen: that's, that's pretty accurate. And I remember. Why was it in that stage of back to lost in the woods? It felt like every time we met, you would draw me that pain frequency graph. And, and I just, I was like, I don't know, like I just don't know where any of these ideas fall on the pain frequency graph.

So I'm going to take what feels like the smallest lift, which is a JavaScript widget, right. Something I feel like I can make in a constrained period of time. And I'm just going to do. I'm going to do everything wrong, but I'm just going to do it.

MIchele: And then you did it and then so

Colleen: yeah, But we launched the podcast before I had a product. So part of the McColl was like, oh man, now I'm telling the world about this. So I better freaking do it like a podcast with never having launched a product would not be.

MIchele: And so then last fall to goes through. You building it and balancing that with consulting and with parenting too, was all of the like, cause I guess your kids were in school, like part like the whole co COVID

school, like

Colleen: some COVID school, situation.

MIchele: And then, I think it was, was it December that simple file upload.

I remember you gave me that you gave me like a walkthrough of it in like September or October of last year, but then it was available in the Heroku marketplace and alpha in like October or so November. And then it went into beta in November, December, right?

Colleen: Betas when you can start charging. Oh no. You're right. Cause You have to do out. No,

MIchele: had to get like a.

Colleen: So you have to do alpha and then you have to do beta.

MIchele: it's like one thing where you had to get like 10 people, then you had to get a hundred or something.

Colleen: yeah, that's right. So Alpha's 10 people. Beta's a hundred. And then after beta, you going to general availability. So I think that timeline sounds a bit.

MIchele: So then you went into beta in December, and then you went into general availability in February, which is when you bought yourself a $20 bagel.

Colleen: Yes. I was still a good bagel.

I still think about it.

MIchele: And then at some point last spring, you got to this point where you were at like a thousand dollars MRR for like a couple of months there, but, you know, life and everything is kinda kinda happening and whatnot, and you needed more than that. And so you decided to take a full-time job. But then you took the full-time job and people are like, calling's on the market.

Like what? Hold on a minute. Like, and then like a bazillion people sent you job offers, including like your dream job of being a founder with people. So now you are, so it was a, we started this, this podcast, you were a consultant and not founder of anything. And now you are no longer a consultant and you are a founder of two things.

Colleen: Yes, it sounds so ridiculous when you, when you timeline

MIchele: That's pretty amazing. You've had quite a

Colleen: of

MIchele: 14 months. 15 months.

Colleen: man. I didn't think I did anything during COVID either, but apparently I'm kicking ass over here.

MIchele: Yes, you are.

Colleen: Oh yes. So I did end up at one point taking a full-time job and then kind of, as you described. A lot of opportunities came my way. So I left it to do the, to join hammer stone and we're funded for about a year. So that's super exciting. So Yeah.

I'm doing all the things, huh? Cool. You know, it's, it's funny in retrospect because you're like, man, I haven't made any progress, but if You really look back a lot has

MIchele: You really have. Yeah.

Colleen: Yeah.

MIchele: Yeah.

Colleen: So, that's my backstory. Let's talk about your backstory.

MIchele: So, okay. All right. So I told you a story. Okay. So now you tell my story. Okay.

Colleen: Do I get to tell your

MIchele: You do. Okay. Okay. But wait, hold on. Here's okay. This is Anne again, insert the harp noises. Okay. Calling.

Colleen: Duh. Okay. So as you said, we were meeting and you guys were going to go to Denmark for a month.

MIchele: Well, well, okay. Well, the original idea was that we would go to the Denmark for the summers and then COVID happened. And then we're like, if we can get to Denmark, we should just stay there for like a year. So, so I think like the last time I actually physically saw you. I was like may of 2020. Cause I feel like I dropped some baked goods off of your house.

Colleen: That was yes, but that was pandemic had started, so we couldn't hug

MIchele: right, right. Oh my God. I get to hug you at founder summit.

Colleen: I'm so, oh my gosh. I'm so excited. I get to see you in one week. Oh, Okay. Continue on.

MIchele: Oh wait, no, you're telling this story.

Colleen: Oh, right. I get to tell it. Okay. So you were going to go to Denmark for a year and you got there and it was such a good fit for your family. You decided you're going to stay for 10 years, which is a

MIchele: Oh, yeah, that was, yeah.

Colleen: in the United States. You basically decided you were going to stay for a while. And so we started the podcast and I think.

What's really important for people to know. about you is you and your partner founded geocoded, which is a very successful SAS, which we don't talk about as much as we should. Why don't we talk about it more

MIchele: I don't know. I

feel,

Colleen: so successful, it just runs itself.

MIchele: it doesn't run

Colleen: You should brag. We need to talk more about geocoding on this show, but it does.

Are you comfortable giving some kind of lower limit of what kind of revenue it

MIchele: Yeah. I mean, I feel like I have to give like something just so, yeah. I think in the book, you know, we Mathias and I agreed that we can say that we are over a million in annual revenue, which kind of seems to be like a, a key metric for people. You know, people talk about, you know you know, every SAS, founder you know, knows what, what the number 83,333 means which is multiply that by multiply that by 12 and that's a million dollars in annual revenue.

So so you were we're north of that mark, but that's as much as we're comfortable saying.

Colleen: Got it. So point being you and your, and it's just the two of you, which is really kind of spectacular. So you have basically already achieved the sass dream before we even started the podcast. Like you're living the SAS dream and, and I think that's important for people to know. So you're in a totally different stage of your company in terms of, if you want to hire, if you don't want to hire.

Ha, you know, day-to-day operations expanding to new markets, that kind of stuff. And, and so I think we started as a very, very, I mean, we're obviously very, very good friends, but we also started as a very mentor mentee dynamic on the podcast

MIchele: Yeah, I guess so.

Colleen: and Yeah.

I think so, like I was being, I was like whining about how hard it was and you're like, yeah, You should talk to people. My favorite dynamic though, is what I'm like. Don't you want to sell it for like $10 million? And you're like, no, I don't want to start over. It was hard starting over.

MIchele: This is the podcast you come to for encouragement.

Colleen: Right. Starting from the beginning. Sucks, man. Why would I sell my business? It's my favorite one. Anyway, so we have a bit of a dynamic. I feel like where I'm like, okay. What should you do to optimize for your happiness, where you are, and you're trying to help me get off the ground, especially when we started.

And now, I mean, you've learned so much, you guys have had geocode you've been full time for six

MIchele: four years

Colleen: It's okay. But the

MIchele: company's been around. It'll be eight years in January,

Colleen: a lot of

MIchele: wild.

Colleen: And so through, I think through our conversations and the feedback we got from, we mostly engage with people on Twitter. So the feedback we got from Twitter, we started talking more and more about customer interviews, which is such a hard thing for developers. And you have this depth of knowledge in that field based on running your own business and previous jobs you've had.

And somehow you wrote a book and like five months, like one day we were like, you should write a book and then you just wrote one. That's how I remember it going. No, you started a newsletter first. So you started the newsletter, right? And then you basically, I mean, the way you churned out content was just.

It was mind blowing to me like it was, what did you say? Like you had everything in your brain and you just needed to get It

MIchele: It was like cleaning my mental attic.

Colleen: It was like twice a week. You were sending these

MIchele: It was actually more than that. And people were like, please stop sending them, like I'm buried. And I was

like,

Colleen: can't read them. I used to have to flag them to be like, read later. I don't have time to read these 5,000 words today. So you brain dumped into a newsletter and you turned that brain dump into a book, which gosh, when did you publish the book? So the newsletter started in like end of February. And

okay. February 20, 21.

MIchele: And then the pre-order went live in July. No. Like early June. And then the book was basically done by early July, but then there was like all of the, like not book stuff to do. It's like, kind of like when you build a SAS and you're like, oh wait, oh, I need to do like billing and like user account management and like, like set up emails, like all that kind of stuff.

It was like, I had like buy an ESPN and all that stuff. And like, you know, you need a cover. So you need a cover. It's annoying, but books need

With one of the listeners of this podcast, Damien like was like, Hey Aman, do you need help with that? And I was like, I don't know how to do graphics. So so it was like July 20. Ah, 24, I think is what it says on Amazon. That it like went live that you could, you could buy it. Yeah,

Colleen: And this is October and you're basically crushing all of these records in terms of business books. You've sold many copies, it's been wildly successful. And you're now doing an audio podcast as a companion to the book? Yes. Okay.

MIchele: Yeah. I know I am.

Colleen: of quiet. I was like, you're right.

MIchele: episode. Yes. Yes.

Colleen: So somehow you are living in a foreign country where you're just learning the language.

You have a child, you have a business that does over a million dollars. ARR.

MIchele: Yeah.

Colleen: fine. It's totally normal. You know, it's someone said to me, okay, I

have to tell you this, Michelle, someone who listens to our podcast, who I will not name was like, this person likes to watch like trashy TV on Netflix. And this person was like, I don't think Michelle would watch this.

I bet she stays up all night reading business books. It's like, I think she does.

MIchele: I

Colleen: I'm like over here watching the vampire diaries or something and you're like reading customer books.

MIchele: I do watch TV. I will have, you know, Colleen, I do watch telephone.

Colleen: Sure you do. No one believes you. You're like I watched five minutes on Saturday.

MIchele: I watched Ted lasso every week. But now that the season is over, I will be reading more books. You know what, something, you know, you mentioned that, you know, we have this the early days, like the sort of mentee mentor kind of dynamic, but I think another dynamic that stands out to me is. For me, I feel like in so many ways you have been my cheerleader and you have really pushed me, especially when it comes to the book and been so encouraging.

And you know, and I'll be like, oh, I don't know if I should do this. I don't know if it's going to work. And you're like, it's obviously going to work. Like, why are you even questioning? Like, I like your perception of me is just like, so wildly different than my own perception of like my own abilities.

That, that, like, I feel like you're, you're like, you know, one of my biggest supporters and have been so enthusiastic for me as I went through that transition. Cause I feel like, I feel like launching an info product is very different than launching a SAS and going into this, you know, I feel, I feel very confident as a SAS business owner, like.

know, I, of course there's things I don't know, and I'm learning all the time, but like, I feel like I know how to figure those things out. feel confident in my abilities to run that business. And I thought that I was just confident as a business person in general. And then I started writing a book and I learned that I have no confidence when it comes to writing a book and launching an info product and felt just completely like a fish out of water and sort of constantly questioning the approach to it and marketing it.

Cause it's just like, everything is just so different and it was so many new. Skills that I, or things I hadn't really done in a long time or hadn't just, or just different. And and I feel like you have just kind of been the one, like standing in my corner being like, yeah, like you can, you can do that.

Like you can figure this out. Like you know, just kind of keeping me.

Colleen: oh, that's great to hear. I'm glad. I'm glad. I have been there for you. I really appreciate you sharing that with me. Cause that means a lot to me. Cause sometimes I feel like I don't bring as much, I mean, outside of our friendship. Right. Which obviously we're like best friends, but sometimes I feel like in our podcast and like our business relationship, if you want to call it that I don't bring as much to the table.

So I'm glad to hear that.

MIchele: Yeah. I feel, I feel just as much, I don't think mentored is. Word, because that implies somebody who has like, done that specific thing before. But I do feel like I have gotten so much guidance from you and encouragement and you, you have really been a force in my life for, for helping to make that happen.

And.

Colleen: that's awesome.

MIchele: Yeah. You know, on a sort of related to that, like I've had people, I think it was be like tweeted out. Like I wonder if you know Michelle and Colleen, like talk to each other outside of the podcast? Yes. If anyone else was like wondering, and we don't have that same dynamic, I think in our like personal life.

But like we're in like a group chat with like other friends of ours. She is so funny thing, like how, when we met it turned out that like one of our best friends was your study buddy in college. And you guys hadn't seen each other in 10 years and I like met you for the first time. Cause some other friends we knew through this, like, you know, Indy like SAS business world connected us when you moved.

To Arlington, where we used to live and I added you on Facebook. And I was like, wait, how do you know him? And you were like, we went to college together. How do you know him? And I was like, what? Like mutual best friend. This is weird. Okay. This is great. That was wild. I mean, because we were really, I was really good friends with that person in college. Hadn't taught, literally hadn't even thought about him in 10 years and you're like, oh, they're our best friends. I was like, what? It's like the stars aligned there. That was so wild.

Yeah, so, and ho, ho. Yeah. So, so now here we are. So we've been doing a lot of thinking about this podcast and, you know, as I thought about it, You know, an original reason for the show. And especially for me was, you know, to keep us talking to each other, like, and, you know, I had just moved to another country where I didn't have any friends.

And. You know, talking to you every, it was, you know, like I needed to schedule something to like force me to, to talk to people, you know, of course I'm on Twitter all the time, which I think is also related to like being in another country and, and not sort of physically having friends nearby, but of course, with COVID for like long time, you know, that's, that's kind of everybody's in that position to less so than it was.

But and so that was a big thing for me. Andy still valuing that. And then also kind of feeling like, I think, I guess I just, as this has like grown and it's not just us, like I remember in the beginning, like you were like, you should like get a mic. And I was like, we don't even know if anyone is going to listen to this, except our husbands.

Like, I'm not going to buy a mic, like.

Colleen: a Mike. I remember you saying that you're like.

I don't need a mic. I was like, I think so. I feel like you should get one.

MIchele: And so I love talking to you and something else we have also talked about is that we also love talking to other entrepreneurs and like other people who are doing this like weird internet business thing. And so like you went in a couple weeks ago, you were, you were. Telling me that I had to listen to the episode with Nadia from story graph.

And so I did, I did listen to that and I loved it. Like I was listening to it. And first of all, like this, like she's such a compelling speaker. Like I, and like I kept expecting to hear like the, how I built this, like music chime in. Cause I was like totally enraptured in it in the same way that I am with w with how I built this.

But also you're a great interviewer. And I was like, I like listened to that. And I was like, I want to listen to more of the show. Like I liked the show, like, how do I get more of this? And, and it was like kind of fun that it was like our show, but I didn't know what was going to happen in it. And like you and I would like, she would be talking and I would like have this question in my head.

And like, you would ask that question. And I was like, oh my God. Like it was so fun for me to listen to it. And so we've kind of been talked about like bringing more friends and people onto the show more. But I think also to kind of give ourselves a break too, a little bit. So we're both not in front of the mic ever.

Like we're still talking regularly, but recording every week for a year and a half

does

Colleen: we've done this every

MIchele: Yeah. We haven't missed a

Colleen: is a lot.

MIchele: I'm very proud of

Colleen: There's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about this. I love having guests on, and I think having a podcast, like what's the point in having a popular podcast? If you can't talk to people, you internet stock. I mean, that sounded really creepy, but I mean like all the people you follow on Twitter that are like,

MIchele: people who are doing cool things that you like talking to.

Colleen: Right. So I love having a podcast cause both I've had two guests on and I cold DMD. Both of them, Derek and Nadia. And presumably they didn't ignore me because I had a podcast. I mean, I'm sure

MIchele: Yeah. It's like an excuse to get interesting people to talk to you.

Colleen: So yeah, it's an excuse to get interesting people to talk to you. But there's two things.

I just like, if we go this direction, I just want to like be mindful and put out there. I, this might be all in my head, but I am curious to see if like there's a power dynamic with you.

and I, that, like, you're kind of, I mean, you are objectively more successful in this field than I am. So like both times I invited a guest on, I was very clear that you would not be there.

And I'm just wondering if like, people are going to be like, Oh,

I don't want to be on software show, show Michelle's now.

MIchele: I don't think so.

Colleen: I don't think so.

but I'm just letting you know. I mean, since we're gonna, you know, just chat on this podcast now that is something that's in my head that I'm like a little bit nervous about that someone's going to be like, oh, is Michelle going to be there? And it'd be like, no, and they're gonna be like, oh yeah, I'm not available.

Has not happened to me.

MIchele: I'm glad you shared that with me. Cause yeah, I, I, yeah. And when you get like a really famous, famous, again, not no one knows these people outside our little circle, like we say, famous,

famous or

whatnot,

Colleen: Very specific indie, SAS,

MIchele: niche famous.

Colleen: each famous.

MIchele: If you were listening and you were hyper niche famous.

Colleen: niece famous.

MIchele: But also if you're not hyper niche famous, like that is, I think something like with guests we have had on the past too, was like, there was a very intentional, like this person, like more people should know about the work this person is doing.

Like they are not like they do not, there are not enough people in the community who know about this person and what they're doing and what they've done. And like this person we're interviewing should have more internet.

Colleen: Yeah. So I guess for me, that is just something I want to like be, I don't know. I'm sure it won't be a problem. I'm just telling you. That's like one of the things that's in my head, like you're going to get the. Higher. I don't even know how to say this without sounding terrible. So I just won't that there'll be a kind of an incongruity and people who want to speak to you versus people who want to speak to me.

So I'm just throwing that out there as something to like, it's probably not a thing it's probably just in my head, but

MIchele: I'm glad you've let it out of your head and it's not going to like sit there and fester. I really hope that doesn't happen. But you know, if you, if, if you have that fear, I'm, I'm glad you said it rather than holding it in.

Colleen: Yeah. And there's some people you're going to have on that. Like, and this is weird too. Like there's some people you're going to have on that I'd really like to meet. So then if we both do it, but we only both do it for some guests, is that. If I'm like, you're, you're gonna, you're like, oh, I'm having XYZ person on.

I'm like, oh, I really want to meet X, Y, Z person. I want to do it with you. I don't know. These are

MIchele: I don't think. Yeah. I think sometimes we'll do it together and like, I think there'll be some times also it's like a mutual friend of ours too, where like, it

really. You know, but also like if it's both of us on like, you know, we don't both have to be asking the same amount of questions. Like it could be, you know, 80, 21 of us, like that's, that's also fine.

And I think just kind of communicating about who we're inviting on and, and being. Being very intentional about it, but also at the same time, like I've, so I've basically a hazard sort of talked about this as we're basically get to like run a test for the next couple of months and for the most part. So this is so people kind of know what's happening.

We're going to basically alternate weeks with interviews with people we think are interesting doing interesting things and then. And then Michelle and Colleen week for the Mo for the most part, like there might be like holiday weeks or something where like, you know, we have, we're not going to like record on Christmas.

So we needs record, you know, record in advance and it's kind of easier to do that with interviews and stuff. But I think we're going to try that out for like the next like couple of months. I mean, also the next couple of months for me are going to be kind of. Really busy and I'm like, you know, so you gave me this challenge of being on, oh, I always want to say it's 10 podcasts, but I know it's 20,

Colleen: definitely. It was definitely 20.

MIchele: this challenge of being on yes.

20 podcasts to promote the book. And oh, I don't think I haven't made it to 10 yet. Getting there. But I'm going to be on like a bunch of bulkheads. And honestly, I just like, I can't listen to myself talk like all the time. So. I'm going to need, you know, a break some weeks and you're going to need it, like, cause you're now a founder of two companies.

It's a lot

like any, you have life going on too. And we're going to founder summit and I'm giving like I'm giving three talks in the next couple of weeks. Two of which are in person, which is, I just don't even know how to comprehend that. So things are going to be busy. But I think, you know, kind of want to, I think we've said this a couple of times at sometimes we.

Lean on the social side of software, social, like this is the podcast about software. That's not actually about software. Like and I think kind of, you know, we've sort of like, I think about our show. I'm sorry. I'm totally rambling, but I'm going to keep rambling. So I think about our show

Colleen: You can do whatever you

MIchele: more ha so excellent.

Well, first of all, I mean, I love interviewing people, right? Like I interviewed two people, four episodes that are coming up and I like, you can probably hear that I'm a little bit froggy right now. I, you know, I did those interviews and it was so much fun. And afterwards Mathias is like, you are so energized, like way more than you have been at any point this week.

Like, and I was so excited and, you know, I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, this is probably a surprise to no one except me that I love interviewing people, apparently who would have thought.

Colleen: Who would've thought.

MIchele: But I like it was so jazzed by it. I really, really enjoyed it. Like just genuinely genuinely enjoyed that.

And kind of the way that I feel like I think about our show is, I don't know if you ever listened to car talk I used to.

Which you know, so it was like at this NPR show where national public radio, where, you know, these two funny guys from Cambridge, Massachusetts would, you know, people would call in these two brothers and they would talk about their car problems.

Now I listened to this show every week for a. You know, a good amount of my life through my child and Dean and even college years. I can't tell you anything about cars but it was fun. And, you know, listening to people who like talking to each other is enjoyable, no matter what they're talking about.

And so I think that's kind of how I think about these, like our show, but also the interviews is like, just listening to people who like talking to each other. It's just kind of enjoyable to sort of almost get to be a part of that conversation in a way.

Colleen: Yeah.

MIchele: I don't

know.

Colleen: agree. I love it. I love this idea. I think it's gonna work out. I think we'll see how it goes. I think the plan to do it for a couple of months. Another thing that we talked about a little. Is, I feel like this podcast was becoming started to feel like a chore and it felt like a chore because I felt like I had to always have like some really exciting update or some really awesome thing that was happening to me.

That was so wonderful. And like for four months, not four months for like four weeks. I didn't touch simple file upload. So I felt like I was coming on here every week with like, eh, I didn't do anything or just widening or whatever. And I feel like there was an, a little bit of pressure as we get more listeners to perform. And so like, I'm just going to put that aside, like, cause I, it was funny. About two or three weeks ago, we were very seriously, like, should we keep doing this? Should we not? And I went and had lunch with, and I was like, I don't have anything to say on the podcast. And that I wouldn't have had lunch with my buddy.

And I like talked his ear off for like two hours. And it was about all that. It wasn't about, it was about all the things I used to talk to you about on the podcast that I feel like, I mean, borings, I don't know.

if it's boring, but like stuff everyone's dealing with. Like, what am I supposed to about childcare?

And the context switching is killing me. That's what stuff you and I used to talk about and I kind of accidentally stopped talking about it. Cause it felt like we were just like, your book is doing so amazing and my product is doing so amazing. And I, I felt pressured to always. You know, be like, everything is so wonderful.

So I'm going to let that go and just go back to what we used to be, which as I'm showing right now is just chatting like we're together. Right. And again, just rambling. So I feel like for me, that was part of the problem is I felt like I always had to perform, like I had to be a certain role, like, and I'm not, you know, that added stress to the situation.

MIchele: I think, I felt, I felt that too. Because I felt like the book was the most interesting thing going on. You know, the thing about having a mature SAS is that. It's boring. Like the boring, this is a feature like, you know, there there's no, there's no surprises in the monthly revenue and that's like a ma it's like an amazing kind of boring.

But like I was like, do people really want to hear about me? You know, reconciling invoices and like negotiating contracts and like going back and forth on whether we should do like SOC two or not. And like that's boring. And, and then I like kind of like w when we were in the middle of this, like, should we, should we keep doing the podcast conversation tweeted out?

Like, why do you listen to this show? And, and really appreciate everybody who replied to that. And, but some of those things where like, you know, someone was like, oh, like I miss you guys talking about work-life balance. And S and I was like, people don't really want to hear me talk about, like, to do it SOC two and a bunch of people like, no, actually yes, yes, please.

Like, please, can you please talk about that? Like, we do want to hear about that. So, cause I started to feel like the problems or sort. Considerations that a, that a mature SAS might have, like, would not be relevant because a lot of people were listening for your story. And that, like, the geocoder story was not very interesting.

And like, I was tired of telling it, I thought everybody else was tired of hearing it. And then people were like, no, actually we want to hear about you. And I was like, Oh, okay. Like, it doesn't have to be like, like, I feel like we had these sort of like story arcs in a way of the show. Like very unintentionally, like last fall was like last fall.

And like the winter was like your journey into launching simple file upload. And then this spring and summer, it was with the book. And I think maybe we got, like, I think we, maybe we started to feel like we had to have like, Some sort of a story arc,

Colleen: Yes. Totally

MIchele: but then like sometimes the story is just like, you know, what do I, what do I do about context switching?

Or I like, you know, I don't know. I spent my week negotiating enterprise deals. Like, do we want to talk about that? Like, I love negotiate. Like this, the thing that you talked about, like, you know, the, the customer research thing, like I'm now known as a customer research Person. But I feel like negotiating is something that I spend a ton of time doing and like sales.

And I was like, I actually never talk about that on the podcast,

Colleen: No, you never

MIchele: ever, and people also don't really know how to do sales, so maybe I should talk about that. I think, I think this kind of like thinking about. Content. Like I remember in the beginning, remember the beginning, how we had this, like, notion of like all the stuff we would talk about.

And then we would like each come in with it, like for like, like each week we'd each have something where you're going to talk about. And we were going to be like 15 minutes each, but then we, like, I mean, we're totally doing it today, but like we found that we were basically like talking in paragraphs, like at one another.

And it wasn't really a conversation because we were so like rehearsing what we were saying. So then we could just kind of follow the. Stories that emerged. But I think what I really enjoyed about your interview with Nadia was that like, you're just kind of following her story. And I got to like, sort of, I don't know, get like a pony ride on your back and like, be like, along for the ride of like figuring out where Nadia story was going.

And like, that was like that, that was really fun for me. And to listen to that awesome. Well, is that a good place to wrap up for this

I guess so. I mean, I think I want to say that I hope people will kind of like chime in, like we do really genuinely love it when you tweet stuff at us about the episodes and what you're thinking about. And like, especially since it's just Colleen and I are talking to each other right now, like having that.

I mean, you all know that I'm somebody who likes feedback. But both of us really value that I think. And that's really something that keeps us going is knowing that I don't know, I don't get any satisfaction of seeing like numbers and a dashboard. Transistor has a very nice dashboard with lots of numbers that our advertisers appreciate.

But I don't really get anything out of that. What makes me feel like, you know, this is. Having an impact is like people telling us, you know,

Colleen: Yeah,

MIchele: I don't know how you think

Colleen: you, it was interesting because. Right before you sent that tweet out, what was that two weeks ago about what do you like about the podcast? That's where you were seriously thinking about, maybe we shouldn't do it or something. And then all of the responses were all the reasons we started the podcast and I was like, oh, okay, cool.

Rock on. We're doing what we set out to do.

MIchele: yeah. So, so yeah, we're gonna mix things up a little bit, but hopefully I think get back a little bit closer to, to what we wanted out of this and what we were doing in the beginning, which I think is to, I don't know, kind of show what it's like to start a SAS, you know, bumps and all, and now it's going to be, you know, running, running.

But also talking to other people who have done the same thing too, but I think, you know, something we really learned from Adam's episode a couple of weeks ago is that I really need to tell the stories of. And, and Cam's episode to really tell the stories of, yeah, this kinda isn't working, like, you know, that there's a place for the podcasts talking about successes.

Like I think we all need that for encouragement and motivation. And it's just, I think so good for the community to tell the success stories. But most people are not succeeding. And even if you are. It's can still be lonely and hard and there's stuff that you don't know how to do. And we've, I think that's something we both struggled with is like doing everything, you know, yourself or close to it with one or two other people.

It means you've got to learn a lot of new stuff all the time and that gets exhausting. And so, you know, to the extent we can kind of telling those stories and sort of in a way that, you know, are, and the way that we started out meeting in a coffee shop, sort of. Almost making the podcast itself, that coffee shop where we're kind of converging people regardless of what their situation currently is.

yeah, I think I, I think I have said a lot.

Colleen: I'm here for it. This is what I want to get back to where we just kind of chat.

MIchele: Yeah. I think me to be too right.

Well, so we're off to founder summit and I'm so excited

Colleen: So

MIchele: seeing you in person, like the first time in forever. Yeah, it'd be since ma like me standing on your doorstep with baked goods and may of 2020, maybe it was June. I feel like maybe I saw you in June before I left. I feel like I did. Yeah.

I feel like it did. And, then we're gonna have, we're gonna, we're going to have some interviews that I did spring excited about those. Those were so fun. and then yeah, we'll be back,

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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen 0:01
Hey, everyone, Michele here. Colleen is at a conference this week. So doing something a little bit different this week and wanted to give you a preview of the audio book podcast for Deploy Empathy. So as I've kind of mentioned on previous episodes, I am releasing the audio book every week as a podcast as I record it. Part of the idea of this was kind of to sort of sort of do like I did with the newsletter with the book and sort of you know, do it and you know, sort of chapters at a at a time. And so I didn't have to spend you know, two weeks recording which is just, I didn't didn't really have two weeks, you know, of full workdays to sort of lock myself in a closet and record it. So this is allowing me to record it as I have time. Which is kind of a challenge as I say this right now, my desk is literally surrounded and pillows from the last time I recorded which was like two weeks ago. So So yeah, it's been it's been kind of an interesting challenge. But I have been enjoying it. And it's also allowed me to get feedback on it as well. This is my first time recording an audio book. So if anything sounds weird, or whatnot, like people can, you know, give me feedback, and I get a chance to re record as I go. So, so yeah, so it started in I want to say the end of August. And currently, it's on Part Six, which is the how to talk so people will talk section of the book, which is maybe my favorite section of the book. I admit I was a little bit nervous going into recording these chapters because the tone of voice is so important. And I wanted to make sure that I got that right. And I think I got a little bit in my head about that. But I think it I think it came out Okay, so I think I think I'm happy with it. But so yeah, so So this week you're gonna get a chance to preview the the the private podcast, there are still spots in it if you want to join so it's limited to 500 people and right now I think there's about a little under 200 so there's quite a few spots left if you wanted to, to join along, but also you know what, once the full thing is recorded, which I don't really I guess it'll be sort of end of the year early next year. You know, it'll also be available as a regular audio book not quite sure what I'm going to do with the podcast I'm actually kind of curious to hear if people want that to stick around or whatnot. I don't I wonder if it makes it more digestible to get through but maybe that value is on the you know that it's coming out every week, right now. So yeah, hope you enjoy and Colleen and I will be next back next week.

Part Six, how to talk So people will talk. This is the most important part of this book. The tactics you'll learn build toward one goal, creating a bubble of suspended judgment, where the person feels comfortable being open. Throughout this part, you'll also find ways to practice these skills before using them in customer conversations. We'll go into each of these in depth one, use a gentle tone of voice to validate them. Three, leave pauses for them to fill for, mirror and summarize their words. Five, don't interrupt, six, use simple wording. Seven asked for clarification, even when you don't need it. Eight. Don't explain anything. Nine. Don't negate them in any way. And let them be the expert. Love it. Use their words and pronunciation 12 asked about time and money already spent. Lastly, you'll learn how to pull it all together by picturing yourself as a rubber duck. Trust me, it'll take you some time and some practice. But I think you'll notice a difference even in your personal life. By using these phrases and tactics. I want you to make me a promise, you'll only use what I'm about to teach you for good, you won't be manipulative, and you won't use what people say against them. deploying the tactics in this chapter can make someone open up to you much more than they otherwise would. Someone's confidence is a sacred gift. And it should be handled gently, respectfully and ethically. That respect should continue after the interview to I expect you to carry through the empathy you build for the customer well beyond the interview, and use empathy as part of your decision making process. Before we get into the tactics and phrases, it's important to understand just how much these tactics can transform a conversation. I got my start doing proper customer interviews in the personal finance industry. In America, people are generally very private about their personal finance decisions and situations. It's an extremely delicate topic. And because of this, I had to learn interviewing in a rigorous way. I didn't realize how much the techniques outlined in this chapter had woven themselves into my everyday conversation habits until I was at the grocery store a few years ago, I was in line with a dozen items and notice that the cashier hugged the woman in front of me, and they interacted with one another in a heartfelt way. I must have just finished an interview because I found myself asking the cashier about it. me with a smile. Oh, I noticed you hugged her. Is that your sister? cashier? No, she's just a longtime customer. I've worked here for a long time. me. Oh, you have? cashier? Yeah, almost 20 years. I'm due to retire soon. Companies changed a lot in that time. me. Oh hasn't. cashier proceeds to tell me about how the store chain was bought out by another chain 10 years ago, how they changed the retirement plan how she's worried about having enough income from Social Security, her 401k her old pension and retirement and how she's making extra 401k contributions. This was all in the span of less than five minutes. As she rang up the dozen or so items I had in my basket. It's important to note that this cashier wasn't just a particularly chatty person. This was my local grocery store. And I had been there a few times per week. For several years at this point. I'd been in this woman's line many many times. And we had never had more than a simple polite conversation about the weather, or how busy the store was that day. I went home and told a former co worker about it and joked Do I have Tell me about your retirement planning written on my forehead. I was amazed that a stranger had told me that kind of information in such a short amount of time. My former co worker pointed out that it was a sign of just how much interview skills had worked themselves into my everyday conversation style. And how I become so much more effective at digging into the heart of an issue without too much effort. For someone who's only negative mark in their first professional performance review was that I was abrasive and was diagnosed with a DD it'll 11 years old, it came as quite a shock to realize I now had an active listening conversation style without even realizing it. That experience taught me how we need to be careful with these skills, and to know when to hit the brakes. It's a person's decision what to reveal. But I always keep that story in mind and remind myself to back off or shift topics. When it seems like someone is on the verge of saying too much. It's possible to make someone too comfortable and safe. It's always okay to say thank you for telling me that I was wondering if we could go back to something you said earlier. I'm curious about something else. It also reminded me of how so many people don't have people in their lives who will just listen to them. Especially about things that are processes or tasks they complete daily or goals that are top of mind. The cashier at the grocery store clearly spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about the different sources of Income she'd have in retirement and whether they would be enough, but maybe didn't have anyone who would listen to her talk about that. I find that once you build trust with someone and show them that you're willing to listen, they will talk. Because no one has ever cared about that part of their daily life before. Maybe they grew up to a co worker about how long something takes, but they've probably never sat down and had someone genuinely ask them what they think about creating server uptime reports or following up on invoices, they've probably never really talked through where they spend a lot of time the tools they use, and so forth. They've probably never had anyone care enough to try to make it better for them. Just being a presence who's willing to listen is more powerful than people realize how customer interviews differ from other kinds of interviews. If you're already familiar with other kinds of interviewing, it might be interesting for you to read with an eye for how this kind of interviewing differs, journalistic interviewing, motivational interviewing and a negotiation based interview all bears similarities to user interviewing, yet they also have significant differences. The first professional interview I ever did was the summer I was interning at the Washington bureau of a British newspaper. the BP oil spill had happened a few months earlier. And my boss asked me to interview someone thinking back that was a very different interview from the customer interviews I started doing years later, in that BP oil spill interview, I was digging for information and I was looking for specific quotes that could be used in an article I already knew about the oil spill, so I wasn't looking to learn their perspective on it. Instead, I needed them to say specific things and say them in a quotable way. Customer interviews by contrast, are all about diving into how the other person perceives an experience and intentionally suspending the desire to validate your own ideas. Later, after the interview has finished, you can analyze the interview and see what opportunities might exist. We'll talk about that more in Part Eight analyzing interviews. Chapter 25 use a gentle tone of voice.

In Chris Voss, his book never split the difference. He suggests using a late night DJ voice in negotiations. You're listening to wb mt 88.3 FM therapists will often speak in soft slow voices as a method of CO regulation to calm their patients. These techniques help put the other person at ease and create an environment where they feel safe. These techniques apply when you're talking to customers to a customer interviews should be conducted in the most harmless voice you can possibly muster. Imagine you're asking a treasured older family member about a photo of themselves as a young person. There might be a gentle, friendly tone of voice, a softness to your tone, genuine judgment free curiosity. Or perhaps picture that a close friend has come to you experiencing a personal crisis in the middle of the night. You would listen to them calmly and just try to figure out what was going on. You probably wouldn't start offering ideas or solutions to their problem and would focus on helping them get back to a clear state of mind. use that same gentleness in your customer interviews. It's important to note though, that you cannot be condescending. I purposefully do not say to speak to them like you would a child because people have very different ways of talking to children. Think of your customer as someone you respect and you can learn from because you should and you can. Why did you do it that way set in a medium volume voice with emphasis on certain words could make it sound accusatory and put them on the defensive versus will lead you to do it like that. And a gentle, unassuming, curious voice will help them open up. Try this now. The next time a friend or family member comes to you with a problem. Intentionally use the gentlest voice you can muster when you talk to them. The next time use your normal approach. Notice whether the person reacts differently. Chapter 26 validate them. books on product development often talk about validation, validating ideas, validating prototypes, validating business models.

This chapter is about an entirely different kind of validation. It's a pivotal part of getting someone to open up to you. This chapter is about what psychologists and therapists describe as validating statements. These are specific phrases you can use to show someone that you're engaged with what they're saying. It's okay to have trepidation about what you would say in an interview, and how you would come up with follow up questions. Yet most of what you say during an interview aren't questions at all. Instead, you use validating statement It's that shows someone you're open to what they're saying and are listening. Your goal is for them to talk as much as possible. And you as little aim for the interviewee to do 90% of the talking in the interview. In a customer interview, you use validation, even when you don't necessarily agree with what they say. Or even if what they say sounds absurd to you. It does not mean that you agree with them. It is instead a way of recognizing that what they think and do is valid from their perspective. You cannot break that bubble of trust ever, even when something wacky cans, which I can. In a memorable interview years ago, the interviewee suddenly said, Sorry, I'm eating a case of beer right now, about 45 minutes into the phone call. Mind you, this person had given zero previous indications that they were eating. My research partner, the unflappable research expert, Dr. Helen fake, just rolled with it and said, Oh, you're fine. Notice what she said there. She didn't say no worries or not a problem or don't worry about it, all of which either hinge on negating a negative word, worries problem, and thus leave the negative word in the person's mind. Or invalidating instead told him he was fine. Not, that's fine, which is abstract. But explicitly putting the interviewee as the subject. And that saying that he is fine, which validated his state as a person. It was subtle yet next level of conversational jujitsu that will start to come naturally to you, the more you practice this, you also cannot say that you agree with them, or congratulate them, or do anything that implies that you have an opinion. Even if it's a positive opinion, this is probably one of the strangest parts of how to make an interview flow. And for many people, it runs counter to their built in instincts to be positive and encouraging. The person you're interviewing may ask you if you agree, and you need to purposely find a way to make that question go away. I can see where you're coming from on that. Can you tell me rather than Yeah, I agree. agreeing or disagreeing will remind them that you're a human being with opinions and judgments, and the trust will start to melt away, you almost want them to forget that you're a person. For example, when I was interviewing people about their finances, they would admit to doing things that a financial planner or portfolio manager would never endorse, even though we knew that we couldn't correct them. We also couldn't agree with them, either. We were searching for their internal logic and thought processes. And if we were introduced outside information, or agree or disagree with them, they would have shifted into trying to impress us and holding back information, examples of validating statements. That makes sense. I can see why you would do it that way. I'm interested to hear more about how you came to doing it that way. Would you be able to walk me through the context behind that? I can see what you're saying. It sounds like that's frustrating. That sounds like that's time consuming. It sounds like that's challenging. Sounds like you think that could be improved? Can you help me understand What went through your mind? When? Can you tell me more about? It makes sense. You think that? It makes sense? You do it that way? Sounds like there are several steps involved. I'm curious, can you walk me through them? Sounds like a lot goes into that.

When using validating phrases, I encourage you to use the word think instead of feel. Some people I've noticed will find it insulting to say that they feel a certain way. But think is interpreted as more neutral and factual. For example, you feel the process is complicated. Versus you think the process is complicated, or better. The process is complicated. And remember, most people like to think their job is challenging. years ago, I heard someone talk about their recent move to LA. their spouse was in the entertainment industry and this person was not. And they kept finding themselves struggling to make conversation at cocktail parties. But eventually they learned a trick. Whenever someone said what they did, they replied with that sounds challenging. Even if the person's job sounded easy or boring. People would open up because it felt like a compliment. And it would lead to an interesting conversation about the things that person did at work. What that person found was that encouraging someone to keep talking requires Turning the conversation back over to them. Rather than offering your own ideas. Try this now. The next time a friend or family member shares a problem with you and does not explicitly ask you for advice, say that makes sense or another one of the validating statements mentioned previously, rather than offering a solution. Sometimes people say I just don't know what to do, which sounds like an invitation to offer a solution but may not be. If that happens, ask them about what they've already tried. Chapter 27 leave pauses for them to fill. Several years ago, I was sitting in the audience at the DC tech meetup. I was there to support a friend who was giving a presentation. And something one of the panelists said stuck with me and it's something I remind myself about during every customer interview. Radio producer melody Kramer was asked what she had learned while working for Terry Gross host of the long running NPR interview show fresh air. She said that Terry Gross his interview strategy is to ask a question and then to wait and wait and wait at least three long beats until it is uncomfortable. Quote, the other person will fill the silence and what they fill it with will often be the most interesting part of the interview. I remember Cramer quoting gross as saying this tactic of saying something and then waiting at least three beats for the other person to fill it is something that I use in every single interview often multiple times. The length of what feels like a long pause varies from person to person. The research of linguist Dr. Deborah Tannen, shows that people from different American regions tend to have different conversation styles. A coordinator her research, people from the northeastern us may talk over one another to show engagement. While California and may wait for a pause to jump in. People from different continents can have different conversation styles to people from East Asia may wait for an even longer pause and could interpret what seems like a suitable pause to the California as an interruption. A three beat pause may seem long disarm and normal to others. I encourage you to experiment with us and add an extra two to three beats on top of whatever is normal for you. In addition to pauses, I also encourage you to notice whether you provide prompts and additional questions. What do you do if the other person doesn't respond right away? Imagine you're trying to figure out what kind of delivery to order for dinner with a friend or spouse. Do you say Where should we order takeout from and let it hang? Perhaps you had possible answers like where should we order takeout from? Should we get pizza? Chinese sushi? One of the ways people make a typical conversation flow is by adding these sorts of little prompting words, when someone doesn't reply immediately. Maybe the prompting is an offering answers like above. And it's just a rephrase without offering an answer like where should we order takeout from? Do you wanna? while adding gesticulation. In an interview, you need to avoid prompting as best as you can, lest you influence the person's answer. When you ask a question, you need to let it hang and let the customer fill the silence. So can you tell me why you even needed a product like your product in the first place? And wait?

Don't prompt. If they don't reply right away? Don't say was it for use case one, or maybe use case two? Just wait. I know how hard this is. In fact, there's a point in the example customer interview where I slipped up and prompted cool was there, or is there anything else? Did you have any other questions or?

Drew 24:10
No, I think that's everything I have.

Michele Hansen 24:14
Now, sometimes it might get truly awkward. The person you're interviewing may not respond. If they say, Are you still there? You can gently bring the conversation back to focus on them and say something that elevates what they've already said like, Yeah, I was just giving you a moment to think. Oh, I was just jotting down what you just said that seemed important. And then rephrase what you'd like them to expand on. Yes, I'm still here. Do you want to come back to that later? Oh, we just sounded like you're about to say something. If anything too long pauses and the interviewers phrases the follow, make the customer feel even more important and reinforce that they are in the dominant role in this conference. It puts them in the role of teacher which marketing psychology expert Dr. Robert Steele, Dini, has identified as a powerful way of influencing another person's behavior. You want them to teach you about their view of the process. And this sort of almost differential treatment through pauses, helps elevate them into that teaching position. To get the answers you need about the customers process, you need to create a safe judgment free environment, you need to hand the stage entirely over to the customer, and talk as little as possible. And leaving silences without prompting is one of the ways you can do that. Try this now. The next time you're having an everyday conversation, not a tense conversation, not appointed conversation. Notice whether you ask a question and wait. Chapter 28 mirror and summarize their words. I have a friend who used that a parrot named Steve. I remember listening amused as he told me about the conversations he had with Steve. This was years before I learned about active listening. And now it makes more sense to me why parrots are great conversationalist, even though their vocabulary is limited. What parents do is repeat words back at people and repeating words back at someone and rephrasing what they've said, as the magical power of encouraging them to elaborate. It's a tactic that therapists and negotiators use all the time. CHAPTER TWO OF never split the difference by Chris Voss is a deep dive on mirroring. And you can also learn about it and nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Consider this excerpt from the example interview, I wasn't

Drew 26:44
really seriously considering anything that had a paywall on it was I wasn't sure that it would ever pay itself back off. I knew there were other options out there that would either require moving our storage and our database altogether, which didn't really seem appealing, or having two different services, one to manage each. But then the storage still being just as complicated only somewhere else.

Michele Hansen 27:07
It sounds like you had a lot of things you were trying to like wave back and forth about whether you should sort of try to plunge forward with this thing that was already being very frustrating. Or then all of the the negative effects of switching and all the complications that that would introduce.

Drew 27:23
I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of time investing, you know, building up a new infrastructure for a new product for new servers to handle this one thing that I think the most frustrating part was that it worked in now it doesn't.

Michele Hansen 27:36
You'll notice there aren't any question marks and what I said as a follow up. I rephrased what he said as a statement, which then prompted him to expand on it. This is a combination of two conversation tactics, mirroring and summarizing, mirroring is repeating what someone has said. And summarizing is when you rephrase what they have said, and sometimes label their feelings, you can hear another example of mirroring in the sample interview, he describes himself running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops. And that phrasing is mirrored back for elaboration.

Drew 28:10
And Firebase Storage just did not work as easily. As it was we found ourselves running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops just to make the simplest things work.

Michele Hansen 28:22
Can you tell me a little bit more about those hoops and walls that you ran into? negotiation expert Chris Voss notes that it's important to say it rather than I, when summarizing, it sounds like is more neutral, then I'm hearing that since in the second one, you're centering yourself as the subject, but the first phrase centers the situation. For example, if your spouse or roommate comes home seeming frazzled, man, what a day, I had, like 10 calls today. You mirroring. You had 10 calls today. The other person? Yeah, and then my last one didn't even show up and I'd had to cut the previous call short to make it. If I'd known they weren't going to show up. I could have gotten this thing sorted out and then I wouldn't have to work tonight. You summarizing and labeling. Sounds like you had a lot of calls today. And because someone didn't show up, you're feeling frustrated that you have to finish your work tonight. Notice that none of these follow ups or questions? Oh, are you talking to new clients? The clarifications are simple restatements of what the person has said without added editorial zation of the events. Try this now. When a friend or family member says something to you about their day, try stating back at them what they've said. Then try summarizing what they've said as a statement. Sometimes a gentle upward tone implies interest more depending on the person

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Michele Hansen 0:01
This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Reform.

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Your brand shines through, not Reform's
It's accessible out-of-the-box

... And there are no silly design gimmicks, like frustrating customers by only showing one question at a time

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Colleen:

So Michelle, last time we spoke, you were rapidly approaching selling 500 books. So we'd love an update on the status of the book.

Michele: Drum roll, please. As of today 567 copies,

Colleen: Wow. That's amazing. Congratulations.

Michele: I'm, I'm pretty pretty excited about.

Colleen: Yeah. That's spectacular.

Michele: So I was thinking about this and, and talking about it with some friends because on my trip to the us last week and you know, talking to people about it and I realized like, why, why was the number 500? So big to me and I think it's because when I first started writing this, like, you know, the newsletter and everything else, I was like, okay, only the people on the newsletter are the only ones who are ever going to buy this book.

Right? Like, you know, worst case scenario, I'm writing this just to have a central place to send people when they ask me about doing customer research. And then as I sort of I don't know, admitted to myself that it was becoming a book then I was like, So only the people on this list are going to buy it.

Maybe like a quarter of them are like half, you know, that's like, it's going to sell like 5,000 copies, maybe like 200, like lifetime, like ever. But it's really only going to be people who have heard me talk about it, like, you know, who are basically doing this because I have implored them to do so, you know?

Cause I've been like, it's been really helpful for geocoding, so you should do it and they're taking my word for it. But 500 or 567, you know, that's like way more than, you know, the 30 odd newsletter readers that I interviewed as part of the writing process. That's more people than subscribed to the newsletter.

That's I guess about as many people listened to this podcast, as of right now on a, on a weekly basis, that's this way more than I thought. And that's only in the first two months And I mean, I feel like I keep quoting him so much that we really need to have him on, or just get a clip of him saying it.

But as our friend, Mike Buck B says that is stranger money. That is people who don't know me, who don't care about me, who, you know, aren't just buying the book to be nice. Because they're my friend, right? Like that's people who recommended it to other people who were bought it because somebody recommended it to them.

And that kind of feels like massive validation for like the concept of customer research to me, when, you know, I feel like there's all these stereotypes about, you know, developers not wanting to talk to people. And there's so many old school ways of doing business where people think that the only ideas come from, you know, sort of inside the building or that they're above talking to customers.

Right? Like it feels like repudiation of all of that for the concept.

Colleen: You've definitely reached outside your one degree of separation network

Michele: Yeah.

Colleen: in terms of the reach the book has had.

Michele: Yeah. That's super. I don't know. I guess when you set your expectations very low, you're always going to be pleasantly surprised. So I feel like, even when I had five people subscribing to the newsletter even I was like, wow. Even my friends are tolerating me on, like, that was even a surprise.

So, so yeah. Yeah.

Colleen: It's amazing. I don't know if you've had a chance yet to listen to the podcast with Nadia, but she talked about, she was on last week. I had her on while you were out. She did three months of customer research. So for three months. So before she built her alpha. I interviewed customers for three months. I was like, yes, that's amazing.

And she talked a lot about how that was. So she's been incredibly successful. She has 500,000 users and she talked about how that was the critical, like the critical piece to her building. Her business was taking that time out. And of course this is before your book existed, but like taking that time out to do that customer research, and she used this term called synthesis, which I loved.

So she would do. was like, she had read your book, even though your book didn't exist, she would videotape her customer interviews and then she would go back and she would said, and then I would go back and I would, I would, I think she said she would synthesize them, but basically what she meant is she would watch the whole interview over and really try to absorb and hear what they were saying.

It was really, it was fascinating. But to your point, the importance of customer research is becoming more and more evident. To all of us, especially developers who just want to build buildings and not.

Michele: I mean, I guess I want to clarify that, like, I, you know, I didn't invent any of this stuff. You know, it's been around

for

yeah,

Colleen: feel like, sorry to interrupt. I feel like the key is there's a hole, there's a hole in the market because we don't know how to do

Michele: yeah.

Colleen: mean that, that's the thing we know this is a thing we know this is important, but most of the. I don't know, literally what do you do? And I think your book meets such a need, cause it's like, literally, if you don't know what to say, say these words here are the words you can say when you get confused or lost or scared,

Michele: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like, there's a, there's an amazing, wonderful body of. Work on, on customer research and yes. So I always, I, I hear what you're saying. I always want to be very clear, like I did not invent this concept. And I've referenced a lot of that in the book and I'm more so I guess I'm, I'm re phrasing it and sort of, I'm reminded of a quote from GOTA that I'm going to garble, which is basically that all brilliant thoughts have already been thoughts and. Merely have to rethink them in our, our own experience and our own words. And I guess that's sort of what I have tried to do is to, to Yeah, Bring my own kind of voice and perspective to it for, for that, for that level of, of here is if you, if you truly do not know what to say, then here's what you can say. I mean rides we've went what Sean did too. Didn't he say that he did like hundreds of hours of research

before

Colleen: lot. I

Michele: he launched his stuff to,

Colleen: my head, but it was quite a lot of hours.

Michele: I wonder how you feel about hearing that, because you have said a couple of times in the past, how you wished you could just. I don't know if you wished it, but like you, you felt like you needed to like go in a cave for like three months and then just research. And I have been like, no, like do it alongside, which are already doing, like, you don't have to go quote unquote in the cave, you know, to to, to figure this out and see, but it sounds like you were her story left a really strong impression on you.

And I'm curious how that changes your.

Colleen: so her story left a really strong impression on me because she literally is taking on Amazon as a solo FA oh, she has a co-founder now, but as a solo founder. So I think the reason Nadia story resonated was because she. Found the problem that everyone said cannot be solved and she's trying to solve it.

So to me, that's really inspiring and it was the problem everyone said can not be solved. And so on her quest to figure out how to solve it. She had to talk to so many people. I feel like my problem is a little bit smaller, which is fine. And I do think for what I'm building, which is like really just a widget when push comes to shove, you know Doing the customer research alongside the development has been good because I can iterate quickly.

And there's a certain amount of validation that comes with making money from a product

Michele: But it sounds like from Nadia, you really admire her. I guess her tenacity and her courage.

Colleen: I literally cannot believe it. This is the most amazing thing she basically, and I think really her success, which is something we don't talk about as much. I think her success comes from, she described it like founder product fit, like she loves to read.

And for those who didn't hear the podcast, she is the founder of story graph, which is basically good reads, but a million times better, they have over half a million. Users . They've been featured in famous publications. They're basically on track to kill , good reads.

It's it's really fascinating to watch her journey. And I think the thing that inspires me so much is. This problem was just seemed like impossible. Like everyone's like, yeah, good reads kinds of sucks, but I don't know. I don't know how you would solve that. It's too hard. Right? It's too hard. And she just went for it with, and the reason she went forward is because she realized early, she loved books.

She loved the space and she just was so, so, so, so, so excited to work in this space. So she actually found like founder product fit before she found. Product market fit, which is interesting, but the founder product fit is what kept her going, you know, through the early, the first year, which sounds like it was pretty challenging.

Michele: Yeah. So as someone who loves customer research and reads a lot of books, it sounds like I should listen to this episode. you said it was on software social last week, right? And

Colleen: totally was. You would love it.

Michele: yeah, That's I mean, yeah, I've, I've, I feel like I've heard a lot of people talk about founder market fit, which is, which is really interesting because like, when I think about that term, You know, so for, from one perspective, like it's really important that you're, you're passionate about the space that that you're solving for.

But then there's kind of a point where like being too passionate about it and knowing too much about it is almost a hindrance because people come in with a lot of biases about what the solutions should be. And I tend to think more about it, you know, being passionate about. The customer in that space and having empathy for the customer in that space, you know, and, and it's not just being passionate about the concept of books, but the reader experience of books, which is the customer of books, which are, and those are, those are two very different things.

Colleen: right. Yep. And that's exactly, I think why she spound so much success because she was so focused on the customer, the reader of books.

Michele: I'm curious, like how you, you mentioned how you think about, you know, integrating customer research with simple file upload has customer research really come up with hammers?

Colleen: Not yet. I need to talk to my people about this, because this is an interesting thing because Aaron has been doing so much work to kind of be out there and be visible in the layer of L space.

So, so we've had like the informal, like, this is great. We totally want this kind of messages, but I wouldn't say that we've done any in-depth customer research yet.

Michele: Yeah. I mean, that's also a case where, you know, being one of the customers is really helpful because if you, if you are like, Aaron is like, so in tune with the customers and really one of them that you're releasing things that they're really excited about because you're really excited about it. Like that can play out pretty well.

I think in many cases, that's where we come from with, with um, But, you know, to edit at a certain point, like, like how far does that get you?

Colleen: right. So speaking of customer research,

Michele: Always speaking of customers.

Colleen: We're always speaking of customer research. So one of the things that has been one of the things that has been so great about simple file upload is I have zero support requests. It is apparently easily actually that easy to use because no one ever emails me.

Great. Right? No one ever emails me. So two weeks ago, We did another round of, will you talk with me emails with the Amazon gift card as incentive. And we got exactly zero responses. So people are actively using it, but again, it's only 2025. I have 2025 paid users. So I want to do something. I have a plan and I think what I should do is I should add additional pricing.

And the re the reason I think this is, if you think about how Heroku works typically. So for example, paper, paper trail, which is a law. App is really popular on Heroku. And what they do is there's a free tier, but you're limited you're log limited. So then there's like, then they have all these itty-bitty tiers, then it's like, oh, here's my $15 tier.

And then I get however much luggage storage I get, and here's my $30 tier X amount of log storage. So what, what happens to me, literally, every app, you sign up for the free tier and then you upgrade when you need it. Sentry I believe is the same way. Sentry gives you a free tier and then when you need more error reporting or logging or whatever you upgrade.

So I think I should offer a free tier and a $15 tier on Heroku.

Michele: So, I don't know if you heard my little keyboard strokes there, but I was pulling up your current page on the Heroku marketplace. And just for context, most of your customers are still coming from Heroku. Is that right?

Colleen: It's interesting most are coming. I think the split is yeah, probably two thirds are coming from Heroku, but the interesting thing is my non Heroku customers are like more excited.

Michele: Hm.

Colleen: that's kind of an interesting, like there, they talk to me a little bit more, but that's a whole nother thing. We are not going to have time to talk about.

I kind of think it was a mistake to release this, not a mistake, but I released it. I did Heroku and then I released it out into the world. And I did that because I thought. My people were going to be front end developers who don't use Heroku, so they wouldn't have to deal with AWS. And that has not proven to be true.

So that's a whole different thing. So, so, and now we have to now, Michelle, I feel like I'm trying to get out of that place where I feel like I don't have enough time, but I feel like I don't have enough time because now I have to maintain two completely independent billing sets. Because Heroku is deal is totally different than how you do Stripe.

And that is a lot, every time I want to make a change, it's a huge deal.

Okay. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about this pricing plan on

Michele: oh, there's like so many things in there. I want to dive into,

Colleen: right. So many things.

Michele: Oh, hold on a minute. Let's can we, we pull this back for a second. How many hours a week are you working on this Right now

Colleen: Right now I'm doing about one day a week, which is, you know, eight hours, maybe

Michele: Okay. Okay. And we don't want to spend all of those eight to 10 hours dealing with billing.

Colleen: right? That's the problem. Yeah. That was in

Michele: And I feel, I mean like months ago, I mean, even like a year ago now we were kinda going through like, should you do free tier, should you do free trials? Should you do just pay like, w like, should you do pay as you go, should you do a monthly, like all, like, there's kind of, it's kind of mind boggling, like how many different permutations of a pricing model you could go with.

And so I'm looking at the plans right now. So you. Just as it stands right now. And this is, is, is, is it the same on Heroku as on non Heroku? Like is, the

Colleen: it is it

Michele: Okay. So basic is $35 a month. Pro is $80 a month and then custom is two 50 and then need a larger plan. Let our customer success team help our customer success team of Colleen.

Colleen: I've Colleen.

Michele: And so what you're saying or. You think that does your, your hypothesis here is that if you add a free tier, then you will get more signup. That will then convert into paid plans, which means that your hypothesis of why more of the original Heroku users when you were in alpha and beta did not convert into paying users is because your free, your subscription plans were too high.

Does all of that sound correct.

Colleen: That sounds correct.

Michele: And your basis for this hypothesis is other services that you have looked at.

Colleen: correct. I feel like I need a free plan, like a free tier and it would be super low storage, so you can try it out. You can get, you know, do that and then maybe like a 15 or $19 tier.

Michele: So by super low storage, are you talking like one. Like basically they can

like, oh wait, like

Colleen: megs, like, like five

Michele: so they can like upload like Yeah. like five files and then be like, Hey boss, lady, give me the P card so we can subscribe to this.

Colleen: Yeah. Cause I think the problem is, I mean, I know I like to do this. I don't really know if you're looking at this. You want to try it out and right now you have no way. To on Heroku. Cause there's no free trial on Heroku. Like you have no real way to try it out on Heroku. So if I did a plan that was like, like seriously, like super low storage.

So it's maybe the equivalent of five to 10 files. If you like it you'll upgrade because you'll need more storage. And then if you don't like it, you know, and you got to try it and maybe I'll get more people to talk to.

Michele: So I think that makes sense. I don't think adding another basic plan makes sense. Those feel like the workflow that you're describing. I feel like adding another basic plan. Does not help you because adding, so what you described is basically what you're trying to do is a kind of, what we do basically is selling into teams without actually you know, having to cold email them and be like, Hey, developer needs this.

They found a thing by Googling. They can try it out for free. Then they get permission to pay for it from somebody without ever talking to you. Amazing sales process. It's hours. Love it. But then adding a $15 a month plan feels like going for a customer segment that has lower usage and is more price sensitive.

And I feel like that. Th that feels like it's solving a different sales process and a different customer type that's, you know, doesn't have as high usage doesn't have as high of a propensity to.

pay. And it sounds like the customer you're going after really should not blink at $35 a month or even 50 or a hundred dollars.

Colleen: right. Yeah, that's true. That's a good point.

Michele: I mean, you could always add the free plan and then see, are there people being like, wow, like this five files to, you know, 30 gigs, like that's a big jump. Like we, we only need 10, but right. now you're not hearing from anybody. And your problem is volume

of, you know, you need bodies basically. So I feel like if you were to launch those two at the same time, you would be muddling your results.

And I use results sort of broadly because there's not enough volume here to really get a, you know, sort of a statistically significant result or, you know, anything out of that data. But it sounds like you need more people coming in and you need like something to see if that.

Colleen: Yeah, but the idea behind this would be it's very similar. It's very common for Heroku and literally there's again, so many features I could build one to build. I don't know which way to focus my

energies. I just can't stop with the features.

Michele: can't stop. Won't stop.

Colleen: right. If I could talk to more people like, I really I've let go.

You remember, in the beginning I wanted to resize images on demand. I don't think anyone cares about that anymore. Now.

Michele: But you didn't add it.

Colleen: I did not add

Michele: Yay. You didn't

spend time on

something. People didn't

Colleen: People don't care about

Michele: that's a win

Colleen: that's a win I, my new hypothesis, however, is that people would like, some people would like the option to edit the images after they've been uploaded, like in the widget, which would be super cool.

But I, again, no one has asked for that. I

Michele: I was just going to say, has anyone asked you this or do you just think,

it's cool?

Colleen: I just think it's cool.

Michele: That's okay. You're allowed that. Let's just do.

Colleen: I just

Michele: Recognize that, but so did you say that it's like common on Heroku for people to offer a super low like testing plan basically?

Colleen: well, I don't know if it's yeah. I mean like if you look at would people expect that?

yeah, I think, I mean, that would be super low, but like century, paper trail, those are the two I use and. That's pretty normal to be like, oh, you have this amount, which is really not much. I should see how much they give you. Okay. So paper trail, see paper trail free $8 a month, $16 a month, $30 a month, $33 a month.

I mean, they have like the, the, you know, the difference is so small, but for example, Paper trail gives you the free plan is two days of search duration, which is like hardly 10, 10 megs log volume per day. The next one is seven days of search duration at $8 a month. And I think century might be the same.

So I think it's pretty common to have kind of like a staging plan. I could name it dev. I mean, it would be like named dev yeah. Centuries the same way. Only they go from free to $29 a month and you get 5,000 errors per month for free 30 days, a long history. And then if you jump up to their next tier, you get 50,000 errors per month.

So I

Michele: Yeah, I think that would make sense, like a dev plan that's free. That's I think also naming a dev makes it very, rather than like naming it dev rather than naming it. He makes it clear that it's just for

Colleen: Just, yeah, like this is a super small thing you have here. So yeah, I think, I think that's what I'd like. I think that would help me get more Heroku people in the door. I mean, I know it well because when it was free, I got signups like crazy. So I know it'll help me get more Heroku people and it'll be interesting to see what kind of conversion rate I get with Heroku.

Once I get that set up.

Michele: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that will be interesting.

So,

Colleen: I, God,

Michele: oh no, you go ahead.

Colleen: I don't have great metrics yet though, either. So I've been trying to like, get those set up too. So it just feels like there's a lot to do right now.

Michele: Did you feel good about it?

Colleen: What do you mean? Do I feel good

Michele: Like, I feel like last time we kind of talked about this, like you were feeling like working on. Hammer stone was taking some of the pressure off of you and you kind of had some space to explore and let simple file upload blossom a little bit on its own, sort of without the pressure of replacing your, your full-time income right away.

Colleen: That's true, but I don't really feel like it's blossoming fast enough, like, right. Like I just can't I'm like, I don't feel like, I think so I've been pretty flat on MRR, but it's actually really good because I had a couple people that were paying me $250 a month and they have all left because I never used it.

It was weird. So the people I have now. Our higher quality customers, I think less likely to churn because they're actively using it. So I have more customers now, lower price point actively using it, which is good.

Yeah. I guess I just feel, I mean, I know everyone feels this always, but like, I just want more time to do all the things I want to do.

Michele: You know, it's not a fun place to be in where your revenue is flat, but the fact that it's flat says something about the business that people are paying every month. It's not declining. You lost some of the, the, the big what do we call them?

The, the whale customers. Right. But. It's still, it's still coming in every month and okay. So maybe it was blooming and then the flower pedals froze a little bit and they've paused. But I think that, I think this idea for adding a dev plan is as really interesting, I'm excited to see where that goes.

Colleen: Yeah, I am too. I think it feels good to like, be able to continue to do things, to move the product forward. And I think this is better than building new features because I

Michele: Yes.

Colleen: will like, this is definitely

Michele: Seriously, like the, I mean like thinking back on like geocoding, like our big revenue jumps did not come from new features. They came from pricing

Colleen: pricing changes. Yeah. Yeah, I I think this will be good. Cause if I can get more people to talk to me, then I can get a better sense of what is important to people

I mean, that's really, the goal is I can't make the product better unless I talk to people. And that's what you've been saying for almost a year. What's it been like seven months, a hundred percent true.

Michele: Well, it sounds like you have your work cut out for you for this week. Yeah, it'll be interesting. Yeah. That's that, that'd be interesting to see how this goes.

Good chat.

Colleen: Oh,

Michele: Good chat. We'll talk to you next week.

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Colleen: Welcome back software, social listeners, Colleen here, and I am super excited to bring you a special guest today. Today on the podcast we have Nadia the founder of story graph. Story graph is a site that helps you track your reading and choose your neck next book based on your mood, mood, and your favorite topics and themes.
Nadia, thank you so much for coming on.
Nadia: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Colleen: I would love to start with a little bit about your background. You are an economist by trade, right?
Nadia: Right. So my degree was philosophy politics and economics, and I focused, I focused mainly on the economic side, I was moving to the math mathematical side of things and I was heading into investment banking, post university.
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: Yeah. And I was just lucky with the people I met in my final year of uni. I'd done a summer internship in the banking world and I was just very, not very enthused with it.
It just felt, I felt like there was more to life and I'm in my final year of uni, I met so many young entrepreneurs and people running social enterprises and charities, and I just felt like I've always felt entrepreneurial. And I just thought, you know, I want to go into that feels more like. And I'd also started a creative writing online publication called the story graph.
Colleen: Oh, I didn't know that.
Nadia: yeah. That had given me the first taste of running my own thing. And so I, yeah, and I was lucky to meet people who were in the tech space as well. And that's when I started to be familiar with, oh, maybe I should learn how to code. And yeah, essentially, I, I got, I want a couple of places on coding courses and that's how I got into software post universe.
Colleen: So, did you go work at all in investment banking or did you go right from college or university to learning how to code?
Nadia: So I had a graduate offer for bank and I turned that down and then I wasn't sure what I was going to do. And I'd applied for this entrepreneurship scheme and it got to the final round. And I remembered that when I was filling out the form, there was a checkbox that said we may be piloting a new coding course for women.
Do you want to be considered for this? And I was just like, why not check the box? I wasn't really interested. And I thought, why not? You know? And so when I remember I got the call from the, one of the people who run the program and they said, we've got good news and bad news. And I was like, I immediately knew I didn't get into the main program.
So I said, well, what's the, what's the bad news. And I was like, yeah, you didn't quite make it. And I was like, Okay.
what's the good news. And she said we're going to give you, we're going to do this program. It's called code first girls, and we're going to give you a place. And I remember at the time I was just so disappointed and not getting a place in this entrepreneurship program because it was meant to be my ticket out of not going into the bank.
That I just thought, what do I want with this coding course? And then I remember thinking about it and realizing that I was also. Like the next day, I was offered a summer internship at my college at Oxford where I was. And so I thought, you know what, I'm going to come to work at Oxford for a bit after uni, I'm going to travel to London twice a week.
I was from London, but I was at, I was in Oxford and and I'm going to learn to code and then figure it out from there. And it's so, I'm so glad I did that. And then while I was. Twice a week coding course, I saw a tweet saying we're doing a competition for someone to win a free place at makers academy, which was a new software boot camp in London at the time.
And I had a taste of this coding thing. I saw how powerful. It was. And so I said, I'm going to apply for this scholarship free place. And I got the scholarship. And so then I did a three month bootcamp at the beginning of 2014, immediately after. Well, at the end of 2013, rather immediately after the two months that I spent at Oxford traveling twice a week to do the part-time cutting costs.
So that's how I
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: into software from being like all along since I was like 12, 13, I was going down the investment banking.
Colleen: Wow. Did you get pushback from yourself or from your family to have invested so much time at Oxford? No less. And then be like, I'm going to go do this coding bootcamp.
Nadia: Yes. So it was actually quite funny. I come from a poor background and I remember that, you know, the reason why I was going down the investment banking route since I was young is because when I was at school, you know, it was always this typical doctor, lawyer and your banker or something like that.
And I remember we had this day where you could go with your parents or a parent to work with them. And I remember trying to go with my dad who's an accountant or like, um, my mom worked for herself at home and, and my dad was like, no, you should find someone who acts in a bank or something like that.
And so I went with my best friend at the time her dad worked at. And, you know, when you're 14, everything looks so amazing. And like I, so I remember going and seeing the trading floor and seeing all these, like men and women dressed up in their suits and carrying their blackberries. And I remember at the time thinking I want to be like them.
And it wasn't until I was doing the internship when I was in between my second and third year of uni that I was just disillusioned. And I was like, oh, like, this is not very fulfilling. This is not like, I feel like there's more I can do and give. And, and so that's when I got disillusioned when I was like about 18 and I was thinking.
This isn't really exciting. I'm not sure of the value that I'm bringing while doing this work. And I also just thought there must be more cause I was working so hard at, it was quite academic. I was working so hard at my studies and I thought, is this it? And so when this whole entrepreneurship software thing came up, it was very, yeah, it was so much more appealing and.
Colleen: Wow. So after you did the bootcamp, did you then get a job, your rails background, right?
Nadia: Ruby Rails So back then the, the main focus was Ruby rails and it was funny because I went to that was this jobs, fair tech jobs fair. And it was during during the course, the point of the courses you do the 12 weeks, and then they help you get a job. And I just thought I didn't plan to get a job.
I just said, let me go to this job fair and see what's out there. Even when I started the bootcamp in my mind, I still thought, oh, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what that meant. I was just like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. But you know, since I'll know about coding, I'll know how to talk to developers.
Like I had just, you know, stereotypes in my head of, you know, developers, don't talk to people, and I can never be a good developer anyway, cause I'm starting, you know, 19. But
Colleen: at like 32
Nadia: like 21, rather. Exactly, exactly. But I honestly thought, I thought that was it. So when I went to this fair, like I, for the first few weeks, I honestly thought, yeah, it's just going to help me be a better entrepreneur, but then I realized, no, this festival, I love, I, I enjoyed it.
And I was pretty good at it. I wasn't amazing, but you know, I could do it and I saw how powerful it was because I said to myself, you know, I also started to think about what being an entrepreneur meant. And I realized how empty that was. Without an idea something.
that I was keen to work on, or that was useful.
And so I said to myself, well, you know, if you focus in on this coding thing, then if you do have a great idea, you can build a prototype yourself. You don't have to hire anyone. You don't have to rely on anyone. But you know, if you don't have a great idea or whatever, you're working on, doesn't work out, then you have a skill that people always need and will pay for.
And so that's when I kind of like a month into the bootcamp, I kind of made that switch of, I need to go all in on this software thing. I should work as a software developer for a while. And yeah, I, when I went to this fair, I ended up, I didn't know how well known or big the company pivotal was pivotal labs at the time, but I got talking
Colleen: Oh, yeah.
Nadia: Yeah. I just went there. I was trying to find my way out and I saw this one, man. I kept on getting lost. And so I, I asked for directions out because I kept on going the wrong way. And as I was going to the exit, there was this one table that was very empty, but it was one, there was no one else there, apart from the people who are monitoring that table.
And I just thought pivotal. That was one of the companies that I like. I'd when I was looking at the list of companies the night before I'd listed it out. Why not just stop by? And anyway, long story short is I was invited to come in and then more and. I just got put into the interview process without realizing I did the proper interview process that everyone else did, but essentially the boss of the London office, his name is JB Stedman.
He said, come in for a chat. We were really close to makers academy. And so we organized this tack a couple of weeks later. And what I didn't know was that was the first round of their full interview process that their famous parent interview that.
Colleen: Right.
Nadia: so after that I got, yeah. Yeah. So in a way it was good. I didn't know Cause it wasn't, I wasn't nervous or anything like that.
I just was like, Oh, this is fun. I'm doing this, this, this pairing big. And and so when I went back to the office, after the fair and I said, oh, I I'm going to speak to the person who runs this office of this company called pivotal.
Well, the makers academy, people were like, what? Oh my gosh, this is amazing. We, we, a lot of our practices that we follow here have been inspired by pivotal. This is great. And so, yeah, before I finished the bootcamp, I had had a job lined up at pivotal and I worked there for a year and a half after the boot camp.
Colleen: Okay. Wow. That's pretty spectacular. It's pretty cool. Right. To go right from your bootcamp to such a good job. So then what happened? So were you just like, what was your next step in this journey?
Nadia: I'm someone who always has side projects. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are like this. I think you're the same. I always had something on the side that I. Even if I even didn't find time to work on it, I just have ideas in my head. So I was always kind of hacking away and it got to a point after about a year, I started to feel like, okay, I want to do my own thing now.
I think I got a bit tired of just being moved from project to project. Not, you know, not being able to like really craft a own a product and like see it through. And I also felt like, I know this is, this comes with, you know, working in different companies. There were times where I just felt like, you know, oh, I'm, I'm just like a book, a bit ability sort of tool.
And I'm just like, I'm a resource, basically. It got to a point where I felt like, you know, We're trying to, Pivotal's trying to be as biddable as possible and where does not you're fit. And, you know, I also ended up getting, and I loved, I loved overall. I loved my time at pivotal, but I remember I worked. I was, even though I was pivotal labs employee, I worked on cloud Foundry that platform as a service for a really long time.
So that's like, you know, cloud platforms, distributed systems. That side of things. And I felt like I was losing touch with my web and app development skills. I went into a niche, basically. I went from Ruby, veils, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, all that stuff to basically working with like distributed systems.
And I remember moving from Ruby to go and it was all super interesting, but I just felt like it was such a niche. And I was also worried about losing the skills that would enable me to kind of. The like flexible when I was trying to implement my own ideas later. And so those things meant that I actually ended up there was another colleague there who he was always, always hacking around on projects too.
And we got talking and then we started hacking around on different side projects. And at one point we got a good contract to do a little contract and we decided it was like a six month contract. And we thought, well, if we do this contract, we will then have enough money to. Do our own product afterwards.
And so after a year and a half, we both handed in a resignation and then went and ran this business
Colleen: And were you also at some point a co-founder on code newbies.
Nadia: Yes. So this, this could be a very long story, but the summary is that business I left, it just didn't work out the partnership. Wasn't Right.
We didn't have any product ideas that were inspiring. And we ended up running out of money and being staffed on a banking project.
We have to take a banking project and. Really good money. But I just wasn't fulfilled. And I just saw this world where wait, I quit. I turned down my banking job all these years ago to go into software and entrepreneurship. And now here I am and I was co-founder of this company, but I felt like I'd become a glorified consultant on this.
Bank where like it wasn't, it just wasn't the most fun felt very undervalued. And I just felt like I was wasting my potential. I just wasn't super happy. And so I quit that business without knowing what I was going to do. But because, yeah, but because my co-founder and I, from that business, we didn't, we were just saving our money.
We would just saving the money we were earning because we weren't gonna invest it in our own product. And so when I left. I took half of that money. I got half of that money, which essentially equated to five years of runway for me.
Colleen: Nice.
Nadia: And so, but I didn't know what I was going to do. And so Saron who runs code newbie was like, come and be my co-founder code newbie.
And I was like, really, are you sure? And so in the end I decided to give it a go and I was on the verge of moving to the states to do this thing for. But in the end, ultimately it didn't work out. And Saron decided that it wasn't the Right.
direction, that code was going in.
And so that after a year I was kind of like, you know, left in the lurch and like, again, uncertain with four years of runway.
Colleen: Right.
Nadia: And so I was like, well, I still, if we, as a runway and I couldn't offer having a year of dislike doing, you know, doing it was, it wasn't kind of my own thing, but being like a co-founder or something and trying to take something off the ground, I just thought, you know what I'm going to, and I'd had two kind of partnerships that didn't work out or companies that didn't work out.
And I was like, you know what, I'm just going to start something by myself. Now I've got four years of runway. And actually, I didn't even say I'm going to start a company. I just. You know, I have all these side projects that I haven't really been able to focus on in the last three, four years because of work and just other hobbies and things that I get up to outside of work.
And so I said to myself, so it was January, 2019, and I said to myself, I'm going to take the two. Side projects that I'm most excited about, and I'm just going to spend January hacking away on them. I'm not going to put any expectations. I'm not going to put any pressure on it. I'm just going to work. You know, I was like I said, I got four years, so was going to work on these two and I had two apps.
So one of them was a running app and it auto-generated running routes for you. So you would give your starting point and you would say, I want to run five kilometers, or I know in the states it's more miles, isn't it. Like I wasn't gonna run like.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nadia: Three miles. And it would basically give you a running rate that started and ended where you were.
And this was inspired by the fact that I used to, I don't want as much now because I do other things, but I used to run and I. I, when I figured out what 5k route was, or a 10 K route was, I would just do the same route and I would get like bored of it. And so this was a way to help me, you know, find new routes or when I was traveling for conferences, you know, it would be a way to go on a run in an unfamiliar place.
So anyway, that was one app that I was going to work on in January. And the second one was reading lists app where essentially. It was only meant to be a companion app to good reads. Cause I, I had been using good reads for eight years at this 0.7, eight years. But there was no way to create private lists or less that you shared with a select few friends that you could then track your progress through.
So say you you, you had a subject matter you wanted to delve into. So you put together a reading lesson and you would have a progress bar or, you know, I have a friend who, whenever she writes a book really highly. Those books. I would want to collect them in the less than see, you know, these 20 books.
How many of them have I read that kind of thing? And so I was like, I'm going to spend January of 2019 just working ping-ponging between these two apps. And so I got to like, I dunno, it would have been January 1st or January 2nd maybe. And I said, wait, which 1:00 AM I going to start with? And I said, let me start with the reading app.
And essentially I have never picked up the running up. I have done. Since from then to now, I've just been working on the meeting up and it's grown into a story graph.
Colleen: Wow. So, wow. There's so much in that that I want to talk about. Okay. So let's start with, you started working on the reading app and you never pivoted to the running app because you were having so much fun or like what, what made you see that this had potential.
Nadia: Okay.
So this is what it was, you know, how I, because this was a side project I'd had for years. So actually had a backlog with a friend set up in an old pivotal tracker. And so again, because this wasn't a, this is going to be a business. This is just a side project. I just spent a week. Yeah. I think it was a week just hacking through or working my way through the backlog.
I wasn't worried about customer research or anything like that. And I just had so much fun. Like I felt so alive and you know, they talk about the founder Porter. Yes.
this was the first time I was like, oh, like I need to work on books and reading. It was like the first time I felt alive, like Really?
like super passionate.
And so at this point I had this feeling like I need to build something to do to do with books. And so at that point, I then said, let me show you this prototype that I've built to. And so I got, you know, I did cause I know the importance of customer research. I'm always trying to talk to customers.
And so when I decided I'm going to be serious about this, we'll see, basically see if there's a need for something in this space. I was like, okay, let me do a customer research interview a customer research round and see if there's something here. So I, I lined up five people and I, I also about their reading and then I showed them this Demo that I'd built.
And essentially after those interviews, I realized that I had to stop that app. It wasn't compelling or exciting enough. There was a lot of this is cool. Yeah. I guess, I guess I would use it for this. Yeah. So I immediately was like, okay. Nope. So at that point I said to myself, okay, this feeling of when. On a book's product is super exciting, but this is not it.
And so I put that aside and I spent the next three months distinct customer interviews. So I didn't cause I was like, I don't. Yeah. I was like, I don't want to build. Something that people don't use or don't need. Like, I was like, if I, so I just started doing custom interviews. So the first round the hypothesis was, is there, is there any pain, but it was, it was more research gathering.
It was like, are there any pain points in the book space? So then off that round, I think I discovered, okay. People still find it hard to get consistent high quality recommendations from one source. You know, people would often have, you know, one or two trusted friends. If you didn't have any people in your network who ranked than it was even harder, you know, you might have some. Articles or like bloggers that you followed, but it was a lot harder. And so I was like, wow. Okay. Recommendations. Cause this is still just me on my own, like trying to figure stuff out.
And so then, then I started doing more research, being like, okay, what is not working with current recommendation systems? How are people currently trying to find books? And that's when I ended up on the whole mood. Aspect. I would, I would see, I started to get involved in the books community on Instagram as well.
And I started to see the language that people were using. They will say, I've just read this book. It made me feel this way. What other books like will evoke similar feelings or I'm a mood reader seeing this a lot. I'm a mood reader. And so that's when I said, okay, there's something in this mood space. And so then I started to go down that route and essentially it was three months of customer research until I felt like I had enough of a concept for an alpha.
And the alpha was just a straight up personal recommendation service, nothing else.
Colleen: So how many people do you think you spoke to during those three months of customer research?
Like ballpark?
Nadia: so let's think of, so maybe about it, wasn't like actually that many, so probably if I did it. Maybe full five rounds and maybe five, five to eight and eight. So maybe, I dunno, maybe in about 30 to 50, because, you know, I would, I would, I was quite strict with, I'm not going to do anything until I've done the customer research.
So say I had a round of five to eight people. They could be spread out over a week or two weeks, and then I would do my synthesis. And so I didn't try. And like, so even though it was like three months, It wasn't like every single day I was talking to a lot of people. Cause I also didn't want to feed back overload if you know what I mean?
Colleen: Yes, you said, and then you do your synthesis. What does that mean?
Nadia: So that, that's a way of basically drawing out learnings from the, from the research. So essentially It's a basic, Yeah. it's a way of like doing the analysis and then figuring out what's next. So for me, Yeah.
I do. I do it. I mean, you could do it in many different ways. One of my most common ways is to get like a virtual.
The sticky board with post-it notes and draw out the key points and what I, what I do by the way is I record the interviews, video, record them and watch them back. Cause that means particularly because I'm doing them by myself. So too, it means that I have. Write down what I think I heard as opposed to writing down what they actually said.
So I try when I'm interviewing by myself, I recalled, I always ask permission and I record the interviews and then I watched them back and take I take down what they say, bullet points. And then I group up across the different people. I grew up. The them into themes. And then I'm able to see, ah, people keep talking about, they can't find recommendations.
People keep talking about how they don't trust the ratings on good reads or like you would see patterns and that's what would help drive that would that's what would help figure out what the hypothesis or the question was going to be for the next round?
Colleen: Okay. And you also said you got involved in an Instagram book, books space. What is that? How so two questions around that. What does that mean? And how, like what pointed you in that direction?
Nadia: So they could have books to grab it's the books community on Instagram, and it's called books to go out.
Colleen: didn't know about that.
Nadia: And I think when I had said to one of my friends that.
I was. Looking in the, you know, I was excited about an idea in the books and meeting space. She said, do you know about the books community on Instagram? And I just thought I was like, No.
I don't know. And she essentially, I learned about, oh, that was the other thing I did.
You know, the three months of research, it was also not only did I do customer interviews. I also went to lots of industry events, like publishing events. I saw panels and to learn more about the industry and see if there were pain points on the, on the publishing side or the authors. And so it was mentioned in a couple of talks, then there's books to Graham growing community of Bookstagram 30 million posts on this hashtag.
So I just started looking through that tag and seeing different accounts and just seeing what they were posting, what they were talking about, what they were complaining about. So there was lots of complaints of being in reading slumps and saying, I just can't, there's all these books. I have all these books at home, but none of them are appealing to me.
And, and I was, and this was when I started to move towards, like, if I could, you know, build something that could help someone say, oh, this is actually the perfect book for you right now, given your mood and giving your reading tests. That would be amazing. And so that's the kind of my customer research was just kind of trying to figure out if that was a compelling, useful, valuable product.
Colleen: This fascinates me so much, because that is such a hard problem. Like Amazon can't solve that problem with all of their engineers and data scientist.
Nadia: So it's funny. You said that cause as you, so I'm still working. I, at this point and I definitely had people say to me, like peep up, maybe other founders who tried it or other, other people who'd worked in this space. And there was definitely a lot of. Good luck. It's basically impossible. And there's Amazon and, you know, I just, it was that founder product fit thing is probably the reason why I continued to during those times where I was like, you know, is this city a, I.
Am I, you know, going down a path, that's just not worth it. Well, I just couldn't let it go. So I just said to myself, don't don't think about Amazon. And I also was like, don't think about good reads. Don't think about what's out there. Just you focus on the next step each time. So that's why the customer research rounds were very grounding because I just said to myself, I'm not thinking about what I'm trying to build or this big, amazing product I'm going to build or that kind of thing.
And I'm going up against Amazon. I didn't even think like that. I just said, just follow. Follow the comms, follow the little nuggets and just take each today. And like, even sometimes I have to remind myself of that. Like now I have to be like, just take each day, Nadia, you know, keep going, just follow, just follow what the customers are telling you and what, you know, the pain points you see.
And if I had focused on, if I said at the beginning, Yeah.
I'm going to take on Amazon. I'm going to build an amazing recommendation algorithm and. It's going to be the best. I think I would have very quickly probably lost confidence and said, no, I can't, I can't do this. Although I don't like saying I can't do anything, but you know what I mean?
Colleen: Yes. I know what you mean. Yeah. Like that, coupled with the fact that you're selling to customers, like the number one piece of advice I always got was like never sell directly to consumers ever.
Nadia: Ah, so funny you say that because when I was reading about entrepreneurship while at uni and all that and even, you know, talking with entrepreneurs, I, I always had the thing of like, you want to get into a B2B space. It's like a lot better. You can charge more. And so again, when I was thinking about, I want to be an entrepreneur.
I was always thinking, I was always trying to gravitate towards B2B ideas and it was so funny. Cause I had this moment when story guff started picking up and I was thinking about the business model and all that. And I was thinking, oh, I'm in exactly the kind of business that I didn't want to do in terms of like the financial and also just daily dealing with customers is hard and it, you know, it can be very it's, you know, it's tough.
And so it's, so yeah.
it's definitely a hard business to be in.
Colleen: Yeah. So you said that one of the things you, one of the tactics you use to kind of deal with that is focus on one day at a time and focus on your customers. Has there been any points on this journey when you just want to quit? Like, it's just feels too hard, especially by yourself. Like weren't you so lonely in the beginning?
Nadia: Oh, yes. Like, you know, I was and Luckily because I live, I live by myself as well. So luckily pivotal was super friendly and I was still able to just go in and use a desk in the office. So once or twice a week, I would go in and you know, just be able to work with old, alongside old friends.
So that was super helpful. But the thing is, I definitely had moments of particularly when I was pre-product. I definitely had. Of Dao or CA you know, is this, do I have the skillset to even build something that would be compelling enough? Within a reasonable timeframe? Like I said, I really think I was just lucky with that.
I didn't have anything else that I would rather go and do at that, at that point in time, you know, I didn't want to get a job. I didn't have any other grand idea. And up until that point, nothing else had gotten me that excited from a product perspective, then the area of books. And so that is what, even in the moment.
Where I thought, you know, I'd hit a dead end or there was one customer research round where I was, it was, I was essentially trying to test for product market fit and the results were basically like, your product is a nice to have. And I remember it being so deflating and being like, oh, do I just stop here now?
This isn't it. This is never going to be more than a nice to have. And you can't build a business on a nice.
to have. Yeah. I just think it was, I just couldn't let it go. I think there was, that was kind of a gut instinct thing as well. That just kept on driving me through, I guess. And I think the other thing is even when I had those moments, like when I was when I had the alpha and the beta, there were always some people who are super excited even. Yeah,
And so. I would I would see an email from them or, you know, they would respond to, you know, my newsletter that I do. And it would always, there'd always be something that would just say, there's something here. Keep going. Whether it was happened to be something from a customer or just an internal kind of feeling like I'm like, no, you haven't.
As long as there was something that I could do as in whether it was a customer reset round to find the answers or you haven't implemented the things that you've learned from the customer reset around. It was, there was always just, I dunno, something that just kept me going and to say, okay, just do this next step before you, you know, pack it in and just do this now.
Colleen: So you did three months ish of customer research, and then you did an alpha and then what did you do from there?
Nadia: So it got to the point where I realized I had, like, I think I onboarded two rounds of people onto the alpha and again, talking, I would let people use it. And then I would kind of do, I can't remember whether I did video customer research or email. Well survey, but long story short is the, it got to the point where the feedback was pointing in one direction.
And that was, this recommendation looks awesome and looks perfect for me, but I'm not going to read it until I finished the book I'm currently meeting and the other five books. On my shelf. So it got to the point where, okay, this product is, is never going to be, it's not very useful. Cause the, the real pain point is not necessarily finding new books.
It's choosing your next book. That, that's what he is. Like people say, I've got all these books at home and this one now just goes into the list. So that's what I kind of pivoted the product to. Okay.
Definitely. Sometimes people need new books, but a lot of the time they just. Pointing in the Right.
direction for books already on their radar, or they know the kind of things they want to read about, but there's like 50 of them.
So how do we help them choose the best one for them? And so that's when I shut down the alpha, because it was a lot of work. Cause I was personally recommending books to people doing research and recommending
Colleen: wait, what? Wait, can
Nadia: Yeah. That was the alpha.
Colleen: You were, you were personally like, oh, they like these books. They'd probably like this one.
Nadia: I had a survey. Yeah, I did a survey, so they had like a profile and then, and then they filled out a form on the, on the, on the, on this website. And then I think they ha I had a deadline. You'll get it within this much time. And then they got an email saying your recommendations ready? And it was, it wasn't very manual,
Colleen: That is impressive.
Nadia: yeah.
So it got to the point where I said, I've learned enough from this alpha, so I'm going to shut it down and I'm going to. Three months building a Bita. Cause I'd done enough research by this point that I could put together a backlog. And actually that's when I started my newsletter because I said to myself, it's just me.
At home, I'm now going to get heads down and build this Bita. And I'm worried about losing momentum from like all the people who've spoken to me in my research rounds and been excited. I'm worried I wanted some form of accountability or some form of like, Okay.
if people are expecting a newsletter, an email from me every week, I've got to have something interesting to say every week.
And so I, I started the newsletter. I think it must have been June of 2019. When I started building the Bita and I think, I think the first issue is called, like building a Bita. And so, yeah, and so then I just spent two or three months building the spitter, which was a more fully fledged product where you could track books, you wanted to read and you could filter by mood and pace and all the dimensions that I learnt from my months of research, the people were really looking for when they were trying to find books.
Colleen: So almost six months from of customer research and playing with ideas and testing product before you launched the beta. Okay. And then is that what your product is now? That's that was about two years ago now.
Nadia: That code base is the one that's currently now live.
Colleen: Okay. And what did you find when you launched that? How did that go?
Nadia: So originally I launched it private, or I call it concierge, beta. I was manually onboarding
Colleen: I like
Nadia: Yeah. I was like, who wants to be part of my concierge? It's Bita. And I made, I made it sound fancy. And then, because I was, I was manually onboarding people. So I was manually adding in every single book in the, in the database.
I.
Colleen: Okay.
Nadia: I had to I remember people had to fill out a form and one of the, one of the fields was, so how many books do you have in your good reads library? And I sent you, you appointed people who had like 300 books or something. And so,
Colleen: You don't make you don't pass the test.
Nadia: yeah. And so I Yeah. I just onboarded people and then there was an ASP.
Of the product where, because every time I onboarded a new person, a bunch of new books got added to the product. And then I had these filter menus where you could filter by a genre or the mood or pace. And so I realized, wait, I don't peep, anyone could find this useful for book discovery. And so then I made the beat of public in September and.
Yeah, initial feedback was kind of like, Okay.
this is interesting. And that's when I realized that I needed to be very much more intentional about intentional, about who my customer was at that time, because I kind of said everyone come. And so I realized that when people were saying, Hmm, it doesn't really work for me.
I realized, wait, they're not my customer for the beater. So even though, you know how they say, like, you know, when you start a product. You wouldn't have a clear definition of who your customer is, and it's better to go more niche because you can expand out later. And so I realized, even though in my mind, I was like, this could be for everybody.
This will be for everybody. I was like, no, at this stage of the product, you can't pretend to cater to everybody. You have to filter like out. And so I remember starting with like avid mood readers. It was like, you read. And you're always reading multiple books and you, you stop and start books because you're, you're, you're maybe not in the mood for it now.
And that was super helpful on in boarding people who've really felt like the product resonated with them. Cause they, they felt, you know, there was a lot of finally a product for us mood readers like that. That was the original. And then as the, you know, the product developed, it's kind of now expanded to be.
But I also had a hypothesis as well, which was kind of underlying everything, which was. You know, sometimes they say like, what do you believe that not necessarily everyone believes, and this is not like some wacky idea, but I got, I came to the viewpoint. That really everyone's a mood reader. But even though, you know, I would have some people say I'm not a motivator at all.
Like, I, I just, you know, I stick to this list and I read it and that's it. But my like hypothesis was, I think everyone is on the scale of mood reading. Cause there are some times when you don't like a book and maybe if you'd picked it up at another time it might have worked for you or like in a different context.
There are some books that will never work for you. They're just not for you. But I do think that everyone has an element of mood reading in them. And so when I really, when I realized that that was it, I became a lot more comfortable with specifying this niche early on, because I knew that, you know, eventually the product would hopefully develop into something that had wider than.
Colleen: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I, I feel that way sometimes, right? Like, I wouldn't say I'm a mood reader, but there's, I have multiple books and sometimes I'm like, oh, I don't feel like reading this one tonight. So that was 2019 and cents, right? September, 2019. So since then you have hired a co-founder
Nadia: Yeah, I wouldn't. Yeah. W yeah. So
Colleen: as hired, not the right word.
Nadia: I was going to say, no, no, no, it's not Brought on Yay. I will say, because I say it's funny because I, I never even, we have someone who also works for us. Part-time and actually she, Abby came first before Rob did. But, but even though, yes, technically it's like, I'm in charge.
I never see it that way. You know what I mean? It's very much like, even with Abby, I'm like, oh, we're all colleagues working together. But, but yeah, so first actually came Abby, so it got to the point where one day it was while I was still doing the Bita. I don't know how this got someone did a tweet about the story graph, the Bita.
I remember seeing my Twitter notifications blowing up at essentially Scott Hanselman, who has like a quarter of a million Twitter followers or more retweeted this tweet. And I remember being like, no, not now need this. I need this exposure later. So I had a flood of users and a flood of requests to like add new books and, and add books that fit this category and that category.
And so I just said to myself, wow, I can either build the product. I can spend days doing these manual. Requests for people. And so that's when I was like, I need help. And so actually two years ago, tomorrow, exactly because I, I reached out to Abby on the 22nd of September, 2019. And he started on the 23rd of September, I believe.
And I remember this because my birthday's on the 24th. So I remember on boarding her and saying, just so you know, I'm not doing any work tomorrow. Cause that's my bad. So he's had two year anniversary tomorrow. So two years ago I said, I need help. I reached out to her, I'd met her. She was a well-known books to grammar and she was just going freelance.
It worked out so well and she reads a lot. So, you know, she had a wide breadth of knowledge in this. And I just reached out to her and I said, I need help. Is this something you're interested in? So she came on board and she started helping do a lot of admin and just tidying up of book data and just helping me do just manual requests for people to import them.
And then later that year it was, it was the one's husband who actually saw something on Twitter. We got. I spoke about how I was doing spending hours manually entering books and adding in the moves and the pace, all that kind of stuff. And he said, oh, I've been learning machine learning. I know promises, but maybe I can.
Help automate this for you. And Yeah.
like within two weeks he had some amazing first version and essentially since then, he's just, Yeah.
he's just been working on it. And I think four months after he first reached out, he'd quit his job and doing full time. And I remember being like, whoa, like I have no money for you like to see, you know?
And so, yeah, no, he just goes through equity and we've been working ever since. Yeah, he will be two years in February, two years full time. So yeah,
Colleen: So when you hired Abby, she was freelancer. So were you paying her out of pocket because you weren't charging yet at that point,
Nadia: so actively I, it was mostly I'll put on. It was mostly out of pocket. Cause I was mainly putting money into the company, but I did run a paid B2 program because when I sh yes, when I shut down the alpha product, I still bought in those personal recommendations to the Bita. But I was like, you know, I can't just be doing this.
I didn't want to just offer this to everyone. It D like it wouldn't scale. And it was a lot of time. And so I said, Pitched this paid beta program where you could pay five bucks a month and you would get a personal recommendation a month. And also you will. I think, I can't remember if you, I think you access to some extra features, but there's also a monthly call with me.
Well, there are two monthly calls with me, a group call and also a one-on-one call. And this was just basically having invested beta testers who were always testing out the product. The group who was great, cause people were bouncing ideas off one another and then the one-on-one call. There's nothing like a one-on-one call just to get the real, honest feedback and really understand how people use the product.
Some of that money basically went into paying API, but ultimately, yeah.
it was still, I still needed to, it was it that wasn't enough that could maybe cover a few months and then it was Yeah.
Money that I'd put into the company. And then when Bob joined, he started putting in money into the company.
Colleen: So it's been two years. How many users do you have now?
Nadia: So we have, well, we're close to half a million registered users, registered users active is about in the, in the two quarter of a million to 300,000 mark at the minute. But I'm looking at it cause you know, my birthday is three days and I'm like, Ooh, we're 4k off of half a million registered users. So maybe it will be a birthday present.
So yeah, we So That's how many registered users we have. So we have hundreds of thousands of users like active users. And we have we have, you know, thousands of thousands of users who hit the site or the app every day, every day we have like about over 20 million pages a month at this point.
So. Yeah, it's going well. And we're trying to, you know, we're doing our plus plan, so we're, we're on the path to profitability as well. So we've got over two, we've got 2,140 ish paying customers and we have a monthly pan and annual plan and essentially people get extra features. And so we're about basically at the break even point now.
And if the trajectory continues, we'll be able to be profitable. So we're hoping that that continues. And also that our costs, we can, we re we're paying close attention to our costs right now and how, because we've not operated at this scale before. And so we're trying to figure out, make sure things are optimized.
Cause we don't want to Walden, which it keeps growing the costs grow a lot bigger than our subscription fees come in. Cause that wouldn't be sustainable. So that's our main focus. My main focus Right.
now is the profitablity.
Colleen: And you guys decided to charge the users,
Nadia: So it's funny. Yes. I was going to say, it's funny, you make that point because when I originally I was going down this route of a book site cause I've always, you know, entrepreneurship is always like, you want to get to profitability or earning money as soon as possible. And so my original thing was okay, I'm going to be taught.
Doing publishers or authors something along those lines. And I remember I actually got, I was thinking like, you know, publishers, they want to advertise, or they want to, you know, the, the, the main way was like advertisers put their, have their books. Be highlighted amongst others. And I remember that one of the things I learned from customer research was that people didn't trust certain recommendations from certain places because they said it's always the biggest publishes.
It's always the same books. It's always the publishers with money. And so I said, well, I never want to have the recommendations be tainted by who like the publishers that have the most money. And so people don't trust them. I want them to. The best book for you. And so I kind of went off that track and then there was also a whole world around like data and like anonymized data, but trends and things like that.
But I was like, you know, people, that's a very, I don't know if I want to go down the route of like data, like reports in terms of like, you know, what people searching for looking for. Cause I know that's something publishers would be interested in too, but I know that, you know, like people like. I wanted to make sure that we run, I ran a high trust, like product and company.
And I also got some advice from a mentor that basically said the best company can get. Can get, gives so much value to the users directly that the users want to pay. And so I always said to myself, okay, let's test this. Can we build something? Even though it's very, it seems very unlikely. People don't believe it's possible because it's a book's website.
Good reads is completely free for users. I was like, can we like, let's just test it. So we, in October of 2020. The years are all messed up because of, you know, the pandemic. So I'm just in my mind, I'm like last year, the year before last,
Colleen: who knows.
Nadia: so Octavia. Totally. It must've been, we just put up a page cause we were out costs were going up cause we were probing and we were like, okay, we need to start thinking about how, you know, what I feel like financially, we're fine.
So I, you know, I had the few years still and, and what was fine. And so it was more that we're like, if we're going to make this as longterm sustainable business, we need to start thinking about profitability from that.
Colleen: Yeah,
Nadia: And so we just put up a page, a pre-order we said story golf plus coming next year, I said early 20, 21 purposefully gave myself some room.
And we just said, these are the features we're getting, just sketch them out. Didn't exist. $30. Pre-order it's going to be $50 and we had 1400 people pay.
Colleen: Wow.
Nadia: and so we were like, right, okay. Let's build this past thing.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nadia: Yeah. And so we it got to the point where, because we will, we officially launched January of this year
Colleen: Okay.
Nadia: It got off the launch.
I was like, right, okay. Now we need to launch the plus plan because we have all this money that people have paid us and they want that. Extra fetus. And so we spent, yes, I remember we eventually got it out just the end of February, beginning of March, if you were in the states, it was, it was February where I was, it was the 1st of March, early hours of the morning and yeah, the plus plan launched.
And so, Yeah. we've been, we had a kind of it wasn't uptake. Super great originally. And then we've just been again, I've been just doing customer research. So I've, I've been speaking to the people who use the product every day, finding what is it that makes them keep coming back? Because the product wasn't designed to be used every day, but I would see people tweeting and saying things like, I love story golf.
I use it every day. It's like, I need to talk to these people using the product every day. Even I don't use it every day. What are you doing? And so I learned, Okay.
These are the most avid readers. So that updating something every day, and then they're looking at their stats, they all love stats. So then it was like, Okay.
how do I, we enhance the stats piece and what do we give the most?
Active users also tended to be paying members. So how can we enhance the stats for them? And it was like, I was going down that route. So I've been involving the pro plus product. And also, yeah, just like just trying to continually improve the product, making it more visible. So some people, you know, we had so many people originally say, I didn't even know that was plus.
So now I then spent time adding little badges around the site. There's a plus feature here, or, you know, unlock this plus feature. If you, if you if you, if you're interested in like more advanced stats or if you want a special type of similar books, that's more focused on your preferences. You know, little tips around the product in a way that's, hopefully we're trying to get the balance between.
What people love about our product Right.
now is there are no ads or anything it's very clean and quiet. And so I didn't want to have suddenly big banners everywhere saying plus plus plus, but enough that people noticed it and you existed. And so things like getting an email when your free trial expires, like little things I've been doing and we've seen we've just seen like the uptake growing grow.
And yeah, we recently, we recently released a very powerful feature, which. It's up next to suggestions and essentially we recommend. From your two weed pile. And we give you a reason why, so we basically help you pick up. We basically give you specific suggestions from books. You've already said you want to meet and help you choose what you read next.
So we'll say maybe this one, because you a similar user to you enjoyed this one, or if you want something similar to the last book. Maybe this one, or if you're doing a reading goal and you're behind his like a short one to pick up. So this has been a very, this is added a lot of value to our paying members because it's just helped them actually work through rather than just adding a bunch of books that they want to read, help them actually read them.
And that, that's just an amazing when we get that feedback, when people are saying, wow, you're actually helping me read books that I've wanted to read for ages or cleared books on my bookshelf. It's such an amazing feeling to know we're actually helping enhance reader's lives in This
Colleen: This whole story is utterly amazing to me. It's like, you guys were never in a box. Like the rest of us are trying to get out of our box and you're like, I was never in a box. I'm going to do exactly what I want. You know, I think because like, I live very heavily in that indie SAS world. So I listened to a lot of indie hackers.
And if you listen to indie hackers, 9.5 out of 10 people, Cortland has on our developers making tools for other developers. Right. Like, we were all really tightly coupled and what you have done, like you did everything. I don't want to say wrong. That's not the right word, but like you did everything we've always been told not to do.
Right. You're like, don't care about your rules. I'm just going to do it because I love it. And I'm passionate about it. And I don't know. It's just so exciting for me to see you take this like really hard problem that no one thought they could solve and trying to. And now you guys are having so much success.
Like that's so awesome.
Nadia: Oh, thank you so much. I mean, I think I see what you're saying in terms of, it's not the it's like what you said, cause they say, you know, build for. What you know, and so that whole pattern of developers building for developers and, or even what you said, the bef what we spoke about before the whole business to business thing, as being a smart way, it's easy to kind of figure out what your price, much easier to figure out pricing and to also, you know, like, know who you're going to speak to and selling to companies, that kind of stuff is a lot, there's a lot more.
Over a playbook, I would say like every, every place is still different, but there's a lot more of a, a playbook and it's a lot easier to, I think, get to that profit profitability piece sooner. But I would say the one thing that I just think is just, if, if, if you do like you just have to do it. It's the customer research like that is the thing that.
Like you said, this is just such a big, huge space and it's a really hard problem. And you know, we've done a good job of solving it so far. We've we've got, we could take what we've currently got and make it miles better. Like even though people love it already and think it's great. We have got like a bigger vision with it and lots more we want to do, but just because we just stay to stick with that customer reset.
Really, you know, having a good process around it and being not shying away from it as well, and also not cutting corners with it. So there'll be times when I would do a recession. I'm like, no, you have to find the time to watch them back and do the synthesis, Nadia. Don't just, you know, like anecdotally be like, oh Yeah, people generally think this like actually do the research, you know?
And you know, I'll always find. Some new pattern or something, even if it was just confirming something, I had kind of guessed, but just, you know, seeing it and having the confidence to say, okay, this is what's going on right now. I just think that has been the, a big part of us doing well so far, I would say so far because you know, you never know with stuff like this.
Right. You know, hoping those plus numbers still keep going up, hoping people still keep loving the product. You know, it's, it's a. Even though. yeah,
We're two years in and we're doing, going well, I'm almost at half a million. I still, you still have the thing of like, you know, this could all fall apart or like just stop working.
You can start plateauing or, yeah.
So when we were trying to keep that in mind to just keep the stay focused.
Colleen: What is your long-term vision for your life and story graph?
Nadia: Okay.
I would love. So we're not. So we want to stay in D our dream is to stay an independent company that's possible. So Robin, I can have our salaries and we can invest back in the product, whether that's hiring a handful of people or hiring people who work with us on a short-term basis to, to help where we need like methods, design stuff, perhaps, or, you know product overview or accessibility.
That's something that I've been, you know, It's trying to always improve on all different facets of the product. But essentially, Yeah.
I just want to build a product that is it's known as a really excellent tool for tracking your reading and choosing our next book. It's basically known as I would love the product to be essentially seen as like your best friend that like, no.
All about your reading, but also knows about all the books in the world. So you just trust them. And it's just the, it's just a joy to use. And if that brings joy to readers, avid readers, it enhances their lives. And also inspires people who don't read or maybe used to read, to pick up a book and get into a meeting.
And then we're bringing so much value that we can stay profitable and independent and running from several, several years to come. That would be absolutely incorrect.
Colleen: Wow. Wonderful. Well, Nadia, thank you so much for coming on software social today and sharing with us your adventures in building story graph,
Nadia: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to have been invited.
Colleen: that's going to wrap up today's episode. Please check us out on Twitter and we'd love to hear your feedback. Thanks.

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Michele Hansen 0:01
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Colleen Schnettler 0:51
So Michelle, how are things going with your book tour?

Michele Hansen 0:54
So the book tour itself is going well, I did indie hackers build your SAS searching for SAS one end product? I just recorded another one. yesterday. No, no, no, today? No, that was I feel like I'm doing a lot with it. Because that's what says because I had I love it. Let's see yesterday, no Tuesday, I did a session with founder summit. And then I also had a call with someone about being on their podcast yesterday. That'll be in November, and then I've scheduled another one for October. And then I did another group session today. And then yeah, actually, it was when I got off of that and Mateus was like, you know what you just did? And I was like, What? Like, he was like, you just did consulting? And I was like, No, I did. Like cuz it was Yeah. No, I did. I was like, it wasn't personalized. It was just like a workshop and people asked like questions, like, I just, I just talked about the book. And I was like, No, it wasn't he was like, yeah, it wasn't like that. No, it wasn't. Um, yeah, I think I actually kind of need to like, Cool it a bit on the promotion stuff. Like dude, like, this week, I spent like two days this week, creating a Google Sheets plugin for geocoder Oh, it was so nice to like, be playing around with spreadsheet functions again, like, after doing all this like writing and then talking about this stuff I wrote like, it was very comfortable. It was much more comfortable than talking about.

Colleen Schnettler 2:42
Like, I don't know, it was your happy was when you went Excel.

Michele Hansen 2:46
It really is. Um, but actually, so I have another spreadsheet that doesn't have any fun functions in it is the number of books I have sold, adding up, you know. Okay. For 490 400

Colleen Schnettler 3:03
my gosh, that's amazing.

Michele Hansen 3:07
I know, it's so close to 500. And it's been so close to 100 500 for like days. And like, the other day, I was like, maybe I'm, like, tapped out the market for this at 490. Like, that's really good. Like the average book sells like 300. So like, that's really good. Um, and, yeah, so so I'm going to do like, I'm going to be on some other podcasts and whatnot. And like, I remember seeing once. Rob Fitzpatrick once, I think actually, it's in his new book. He has a graph of the revenue of the mom test and like, the growth of that book is I mean, a case in compounding.

Colleen Schnettler 3:52
Okay, so, right. So

Michele Hansen 3:54
you know, it's not all like in the beginning, and like, there's really positive signs, like people are recommending to other people, people are writing reviews, like, so. So yeah, I feel good. But man, I really want to get to 500. I don't know, I haven't been thinking about the numbers very much. I mean, it's only six but like, I really, I really want to get to 500. I don't know why, like it's like getting to like, you know, 1000 or what it like that's that's not even like remotely like a possibility to me, like I don't even really think about it. But now it's like so close. And like that would be so awesome.

Colleen Schnettler 4:25
I wager a guess that by the time this podcast airs on Tuesday, you will be at 500.

Michele Hansen 4:31
That's only six more books. Maybe Maybe. And by the way, if people want a free copy of this of the book, so if you are listening, when it comes out on on Tuesday or Wednesday, transistor.fm is running a little giveaway on their Twitter account. I think Justin saw my like, I think 490 is all I'm ever gonna sell. Okay. And I was like, no. So they're giving away five copies of the book. You just have to go retweet the tweets about the book. So yeah, nice. Yeah. If you just go to the deploy wonderful,

Colleen Schnettler 5:05
that'll help expand your reach.

Michele Hansen 5:07
Yeah, it was interesting hearing that I was like helping you interview people on podcast. I'm like, Yeah, I guess you could. I mean, it doesn't have to just be for. for customers.

Colleen Schnettler 5:19
Anyway, oh, yeah, your book applies to so much. So that's where the,

Michele Hansen 5:23
that's that's where the book is. But I gotta say, I think I think I need to give myself a little break on promotion. Otherwise, I'm gonna, I'm gonna burn out on that

Colleen Schnettler 5:33
for right now. Yeah, I was thinking about that when you were talking about like, how you're hitting it so hard. I was like, wait, Isn't this what happened with writing the book? And then afterwards, you're like,

Michele Hansen 5:43
Yes, I have a pattern. Yes. way overboard. And then I exhaust myself.

Colleen Schnettler 5:53
So maybe we should approach it like a marathon instead of a sprint? Yeah,

Michele Hansen 5:57
I think so. I haven't scheduled anything for next week. So I don't have anything scheduled until the first week of October. So okay. Yeah, kind of just, yeah. So so you know, hopefully by the, you know, yeah. Bye. By the time I'm on again, because I'm off next week. I vacation. Yeah. Oh my god, dude, I'm going to American, I'm so excited. So happy for you. Okay, um, I can't wait to just go to Target and Trader Joe's anyway.

Colleen Schnettler 6:34
So if you're not have target, and then we do not

Michele Hansen 6:36
have target, we have a story that's inspired by target or like more like, inspired by Walmart. But like, it's just like, there's just nothing like getting a Starbucks and walking around target. You know, it's just true story. Anyway, um, what's going on with you?

Colleen Schnettler 6:52
So I did quite a bit of work on simple file uploads. Since we last talked, I actually spent a good chunk of time doing some technical work, some cleanup work that needed to be done. But I have gotten the demo on my homepage. Oh, it's really exciting. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 7:10
the like, code pen demo thing that we've been talking about for a while, right? Correct.

Colleen Schnettler 7:15
Okay, instead of putting a code pen up, I actually just put a drop zone. So you can literally, if you go into my site, it just says drop a file to try it. And you can drop a file. Wait, so that is something I know. Right? So that's something I've been talking about doing for a long time, which I finally got done. So that's exciting. Yeah. And there was some other stuff with like the log on flow, that wasn't really quite correct. It wasn't wrong, it just wasn't really right. So I just spent a lot of time kind of getting that cleaned up. Oh, and the API for deleting events. So that was a real hustle for me, because I have someone who reached out to me, and they were like, Hey, we totally want to use your thing. But we have to be able to delete files, you know, from our software, not from the dashboard. And so that external forcing function of this potential customer just made me do it. And so I have that done. So I Oh, I feel now that I have like a completely functioning piece of software. Did they buy it? So that's exciting? Not yet. They claim that they're going to start their project like next month? I don't know if they will or won't, but we'd have developed kind of like, relatively frequent ish email communication and stuff. So I think it'll be good. Either way, it forced me to kind of do it. So I'm happy to have that because that is something I really wanted to do. Because I wanted to make sure I had that before I allow multiple uploads. So the question now Oh, and we had a huge I mean, a huge spike. We don't the site doesn't get tons and tons of visitors. But we had a huge spike in visitors because we're actually publishing content. Oh, yeah. So like things are I'm doing things. So that's exciting to get the documentation stuff

Michele Hansen 9:03
done that we talked about.

Colleen Schnettler 9:05
So I decided that it wasn't worth my time to completely rip out the documentation and redo it. So but I did go in there and try to take what I had, which as your to your point, I think last week or two weeks ago, is you said, you know, it's fine. It kind of looks like a readme like it's not beautiful, but it's functional. So I tried to make it more functional by adding more documentation. And then I hired a developer to write a blog post, I shouldn't say almost more like a tutorial, how to use this in react. So his article is up. So I've been putting a lot of content on the site the past week.

Michele Hansen 9:41
You are on fire.

Colleen Schnettler 9:44
I know girl, I'm feeling good. I mean, part of it is like hiring my own sister has been so good for me because she can call me on my bullshit, because she works for me, but she's also like my best friend. So she's like, just stop whining and just do it. I'm like, okay, I joke like she's part marketing expert part like life coach, like,

Michele Hansen 10:06
it sounds like you've got the fire under you now.

Colleen Schnettler 10:11
I do. I mean, I have not seen. Okay, so it's only been a week right. So we've seen an increase in the ticket people coming to the site. I have not seen any kind of great increase in signups signups are still. Well, actually, I have not seen a great increase in signups. But what I have seen is my file uploader hit 10,000 files uploaded this week, like people are using, right. Right. So what has happened is remember the beginning I was really concerned because all these people were signing up and then like 30% of the people were using it. So all those non users have turned. So the people who are paying me now are actually using it actively. So that's good. Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. So I'm not seeing an increase my MRR still bouncing around 1000. Again, nothing to sneeze at. Like, it's a good number. But I haven't seen any kind of great jumps. But I think part of that is because the people who aren't using it have left and then the people who are using it, you know, the people who have signed up or actually committed to using it.

Michele Hansen 11:14
Right. But new people have not come in that have replaced the people have checked who have turned

Colleen Schnettler 11:20
right, not really like a couple. But you know, at one point, I had three people paying me 250 bucks a month. Like That was pretty awesome that now I only have one person

Michele Hansen 11:28
is that is that the the whale that we talked about that like wasn't using it and wasn't Replying to Your Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 11:33
So I've had three of those people come in and come out. One is still there. Again, not using it not responding to emails. But I'm not trying to hassle them. So Alright, if that's what you wanted? Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out so I'm fit. I mean, the energy there is really good. And I feel like I've made a lot of I've done a lot of things. I haven't seen yet. The the response from that from a revenue standpoint, but I feel like if I just keep pushing in this direction, I'll get there. So I'm trying to decide what to do next. So why for so long, I had this list of things. And every time we talked, I felt like getting advice from you on what to do next wasn't really useful, because I hadn't even done the other things I was supposed to do. But now I have done the other things. So I'm trying to decide if you should focus on other ways to use it. So now that I have an API for deletion, I can open up multiple file uploads, which is kind of cool. I already do it for a client, like on the on the download secretly because I control their site, but I could. So I could write more content, showing people how to actually use it and like, and kind of go in that direction. Or I could make the UI more flashy and add a, like an image modifier editing tool, which would be kind of cool. Or I could, I don't know, that's what I got right now.

Michele Hansen 12:58
What are you? What are your customers Asia do

Colleen Schnettler 13:01
my customer search. So we are trying to do another round of customer interviews. So I did, we offered a $25 amazon gift card. And we're going around to everyone who's actively using it to see if anyone wants to talk to us. So we are doing that we are trying to do and that was another thing. Like I'm kind of proud of myself, just because when we moved here, our schedule is so variable, I couldn't really get like solid work hours like this is when I can work. But we did send out those emails requesting customer interviews. So that is on the docket.

Michele Hansen 13:34
Because like I could sit here and be like, Oh, yeah, like that sounds good. But like, Don't listen to me. Like I don't I don't know, like, you know, I have a question for you. That's kind of kind of a different topic, but I feel like you are so you're so enthusiastic right now. And I have to wonder whether working on stuff for your like, quote, unquote, day job, which was you know, the consulting before and then was the other company and now and now is Hammerstone like, like, I kind of have to wonder if like working on stuff during like work is like

Colleen Schnettler 14:15
if

Michele Hansen 14:16
if that is working on something you're excited about during the day is energizing you for your side project because I just feel like the energy that I am hearing from you is like so much more than it has been before. Like you're just like,

Colleen Schnettler 14:35
I fired up. I totally am Michelle, I someone had you know, all those there's always tweets like oh, all the things, the best decisions I've ever made in my life or you know, all that stuff. I saw one the other day and it was the two most important decisions you're going to make in your life are who you marry and what you do for a living. And I can tell I mean I'm literally for the first time in ever I'm in my late 30s first time in ever doing exactly what I have always wanted to do. And it's amazing. I mean, and the coolest thing is like the Hammerstone stuff. So I'm working on that I'm working with people I think are awesome. I go to sleep, and I wake up and my business partner has like, done this amazing stuff because he's just like cranking out code like a rock star. And I'm like, oh, Aaron's like, oh, while you were sleeping. I made this totally amazing thing. I'm like, glad I partnered with you, buddy. Because you know, what's up?

Michele Hansen 15:32
Every day, Aaron has like some new like, thing. And yeah, who is he? When do you sleep? Like what he was? Was twins. Yeah, like newborn twins. Like not just twins, but like not like, born like, I mean, I guess babies do some kind of sleep a lot at weird times. Oh, gee, I don't know. And he has been jaw. There's also like, there's kind of the like, we want we launched you akoto when Sophie was four months old. And I feel like there was like this, we got this, like motivation from it. Because it was like, you know, she would go to bed at like seven or 730. And then, you know, we knew she was gonna wake up at like, midnight or two or whatever. But it was like, Oh, my God, we finally have two hours to ourselves. Let's use it as productively as possible. Like this thing I've been thinking about this whole time while I was changing diapers, I can do it now. Like, and it was weirdly motivating, and also incredibly exhausting, and a blur, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Aaron, like, dude, you're a machine?

Colleen Schnettler 16:34
Yeah, it's so impressive. I think part of that too, might be you know, with that thing, if you only have three hours to do something like, you get that thing done in three hours. versus if you give yourself 30 days to do it. It'll take you 30 days. Yeah. But I think for me, I mean, my journey, you know, has been from a job, I didn't really like to all kinds of bouncing around doing different things, to learning how to code years ago, always the goal when I was learning how to code was to get to where I am right now. And I'm finally here. And it is super awesomely exciting. Like, I'm literally working with someone I have wanted to not, I mean, also Aaron, but like, not just him, working with someone I've always wanted to work with on something that's exciting. And it's like our business, I can't imagine a better knock on wood. I can't imagine a better work scenario for me. And I think that energy that comes from that scenario, absolutely bleeds into simple file upload, like, honestly, you know, a couple weeks ago, I was like, I should just sell it and be done with it. Like I was just kind of over it. And then hiring my sister really helped because she's really excited. And like, just having a higher level of energy in general, for this thing. It's been really fun. You know,

Michele Hansen 17:50
I feel like I've heard you talk a little bit about how when you were first starting out, and then working as an engineer, like electrical engineer, rather. And you were like talking to people at work about how like, you know, they had all these like hopes and dreams when they got out of college. And then like, those things never happened. And then they were it was 30 years later, and they were just miserable. And you were like, Oh my god, I'm not like, I can't do that. And I like I wonder what was the moment when you realized that? Like, your solution to that was like learning how to code like, what made that happen? And but like, inspired you to not only realize that it was possible, but like, but then you acted on it, like?

Colleen Schnettler 18:45
Well, I think part of it for me is I worked for a big, firm, a big company. And via I mean, that wasn't just like one of the middle managers that was like, all of the middle managers, right? Clearly these guys, they had started at 23 or 22, because they wanted to pay off college loans. They started working, it was a very comfortable job, right? They paid us well, we don't want to say we didn't work that hard, but we really didn't work hard. It was a lot of very bureaucratic, right, like lots of meetings, lots of organizing. And you know, before they know it, before they knew it, these guys were comfortable. And then they got married and they had kids and you know, most of them, their spouse stayed home. So then they felt that they were in this position where they were totally stuck. And they I mean, 30 years, I'm not exaggerating, like these guys had been there for 30 years. And they kind of it was just like this pervasive energy of like, real like, you know, the whole energy was just kind of like, everyone was just kind of bummed about their situation like no, it was sad, but they were definitely, like, felt the weight of this really boring job they'd done for 30 years. And so for me, it was really hard because like, again, it's so comfortable like they loved me. They paid me well. didn't have to, you know, wasn't all that stressful. But like my first of all, it wasn't hard at all, like your brain when you don't get to think or you don't get to be like, in you intellectually stimulated. It's just like murrah, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't know if I could, I mean, what I'm doing now has always been the dream. I couldn't see that eight years ago. Like, if you had told me I'd be doing what I did eight, I'd be here. Eight years ago, I would have been like, there's no way like, it felt like a freakin mountain to climb. I mean, like, it would never, I would never ever get there. And, I mean, I think a lot of it was just like, you know, obviously, all the work I put in seeing it as a vision I could reach and the community I was part of, and, you know, the communities I built along the way, but I couldn't see it. I mean, that's why, you know, I kind of make that parallel sometimes with what I'm doing now. Because like, back then I couldn't see I could not, couldn't see it. Like, just, I'm still amazed. And I can't see myself, my friend the other day, who has a business said, Oh, I think it's way easier to go from 1k to 5k. And I was like, I can't even see that right now. Like, that feels like a million dollars to me. And he's like, Oh, it's way easier to go from one to 5k than zero to 1k. And I was like, Really? So? I don't know. I mean, yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah, I

Michele Hansen 21:23
was thinking about the other day, cuz I was talking to someone who, who has had a hard life, but it turned out that they, you know, I was talking to them about what they do. And you know, they're, and, and they, and they're like, Oh, you know, but I kind of know how to edit videos, and, you know, do some graphic design and stuff. And I was like, dude, like, if you have a little bit of technical competency, and like turnout, they've done like little bit of like Python stuff. I was like, run with that. But I realized, like, I didn't actually know where to, like, send them. Like I told him about, like, indie hackers and you know, other stuff. And I was, but I was like, I was like, I don't actually know, like, where to send you to, like, learn how to like code or like, no code. Like, I think I said, I told him about bubble. And like, I mean, it was worth the reason why like we do this podcast in the first place is to kind of like, demystify this whole thing about like running your own little internet company, which is still a weird job. And, like, show people that it's possible, I guess, um, and that, you know, they don't have to be in a dead end job or selling leggings as you are.

Colleen Schnettler 22:38
Yeah, we watched the die.

Michele Hansen 22:40
Lula documentary, we started it. I thought of you the whole time. Yeah, I really, I didn't even know where to send them. And it just got me thinking about your story. And it's like, you're in a dead end job. Like, not only like, like, what? I don't know, like, what was that? Like? What inspired you to be like, yeah, I have to do something about it. And here's what I'm gonna do.

Colleen Schnettler 23:08
So I think for me, it was a lot of things happened at once. But it was I was at a dead end job where I had some real jerks that I worked with. And it was like, I don't have to put up with this. Like, I'm out. Yeah. And so then it was, it went when I decided to go back to work. They want to be back. I mean, they want to take me back with no, no interviews, like no hard shit, like, just come on back. And man, that was tempting, because the money is so good, was good. But I saw those guys, those guys were always in my mind, like the guys who never took a shot. And I was like, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to be that person who never takes a shot. But to your friends point. This is what is so hard about making this kind of career change. There is no roadmap. I mean, the reason people wanted to sell leggings is because they tell you what to do. Trying to like start a career in tech. There's literally no roadmap. There's no you. It's like, overwhelmingly hard. Not only everyone's like, oh, there's tons of resources on the internet. That doesn't help. There's too many resources on the internet. There needs to be a framework where it's like, here is where you go, this is what you need to do. Here are the steps. Yeah, because no one, everyone's journey is different. And there aren't any steps. And so what happens I see this all the time, because I mentor, some people that are trying to get into software, and they are totally lost, just like I was because there's no roadmap. There's no steps, like what do you do next? Like, sure, no code, what the heck do I make with a no code tool? Like what should I do? What are people going to pay for? How do I find those people? Like, it just feels like so nebulous? And I think that's why although you hear all these great success stories, I think that's why making the transition is so hard. And for me, I took a ridiculous pay cut for four years before I've now exceed my previous income but significant exceed.

But, I mean, that was years. I mean, there was probably three to four years where I had taken this, I mean, you know, ridiculous paycut to rebuild, and not everyone makes it on the rebuilding stage, like, there's just so many stages, you can get stuck, and you just can't. It's just not it's just not knowing the path forward, like now that I'm speaking this to you, that would be useful to people like,

Michele Hansen 25:37
where do you do? Yeah, like,

Colleen Schnettler 25:38
Where do you think I'm thinking?

Michele Hansen 25:40
Like, there's Okay, there's like, there's programming courses, you know, there's 30 by 500. Like, there's kind of all you know, there, there's zero to some, you know, our recalls book, but like, I mean, it's almost like, you know, there's so many things that go into it, and it's so nebulous, it's almost like you should be able to, like, go to college for starting an internet business, except you can't, because there's so many things that go into it. And like, so when you were so like you so so so let me understand this correctly. So you worked the dead end job. And then you quit, and you stayed home with your kids for a while. And then you went back to work. And then you did. So you didn't, and you decided you weren't going to go back there. And basically, it sounds like the real, like, the light bulb for you that you weren't going to do that was you know, your own self worth. It sounds like, um, and that you just couldn't do that to yourself. And you felt like you deserved better. But then so when you went back to work, did you get an engineering job? Like it like an electrical engineering job? And then like, did you learn to code at night or something? Like, how did you tackle this?

Colleen Schnettler 26:56
Yeah, so I never went back to work. So the first thing I did back what this 10 years ago now, I wrote an iOS app. Because this was back in the day when people were making millions of dollars off of stupid iOS.

Michele Hansen 27:07
Yeah, I was coming up in that era. And I think the most we ever made was 400 bucks a month.

Colleen Schnettler 27:13
Right? This was maybe 11 1011 years ago. So I wrote an iOS app. And, you know, totally taught from scratch, there was only like one tutorial site at the time, all of this other stuff, treehouse, and all this stuff didn't exist. There was this guy, I think his name is Ray wonderlic. He had this iOS. And this was before Swift. So this is like Objective C days. I wrote an iOS app. I got it in the App Store. I made $65. And I realized I could make money on the internet. And then I was like, oh, okay, there's something here. This iOS stuff, though, is not the path because not only would I have to learn Objective C, that's decent, I then would have to learn all of these other things about like, building and selling an iOS app. And that is way too overwhelming. In the beginning, trying to learn how to code and learn how to run a business, these are not the same skill set, like learning these at the same time, when you come from a baseline of zero, I do not think it's a good idea. I kind of feel like you should pick one or the other. So being technical minded, I picked learning to code. So I literally started listening to every inspirational learning to code podcast I could find. And in one of the podcast, it was one of those real tech bro guys who's like, you could do it kinda like Gary, Gary, what's his name? It wasn't Gary, what's his name, but it was someone like that. Who was like you can do it, you know, you can start internet business. All you got to do is learn Ruby on Rails. So I was like, cool. So I started, what was the resource Back then, I think I got a book on Ruby on Rails and started building some apps. And I'm still, you know, I'm doing this at night, right? Because I still have the kids, I have three little kids at home, or maybe two at the time, I guess I only have two at the time. And then from there, Women Who Code had a bounty bug program, so they would pay you $75 to solve issues. And this was like, tremendous for me, because the $75 that doesn't sound like a lot now. Right? That was huge. Because that could pay for babysitting for like, hour. Yeah. So I mean, it would take me under these things would take me like 15 hours, I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, like, but that was tremendous. For me also finding social groups, like I got involved in some open source. And the social groups are tremendous. And by social, I mean, you know, on Slack, and from there, and from there, I ended up getting a job as a Rails developer. So it felt like clawing my way through a path that did not exist is what it felt like, right? There was no like, as an engineer previously, it was like, go to college get a job. There was no you know, the path was very clear. Where's the path here? It was like I started contributing this open source. I got so overwhelmed. I just stopped And like six months later, one of the guys just reached out to me individually and said, Hey, I see you took this issue on six months ago and you haven't solved it. Do you need help? And I was like, Yes, I need all the help. Like, I am so confused. I didn't know what I'm doing. So that guy who don't know don't keep in touch with no idea where he is in the world, but like, he was tremendous in helping me not to quit. Isn't that amazing hack someone that you

Michele Hansen 30:26
don't know, over the internet just like shows up and is like, Hello, can I help you? And then you don't even keep in touch with this person or know them. But they had this like, massive v here without this influence on your life?

Colleen Schnettler 30:41
I should, I should hunt him down. Be like, Hey, remember me?

Michele Hansen 30:48
It's amazing.

Colleen Schnettler 30:49
Yeah, it is. It is amazing. But I also think like, to this point, to your friend's point, and to me, like trying to get help my sister figure out what she wants to do for remote business. There's no path. I mean, it's so hard because you don't know what to do. Like people can work hard, I think motivated people. Absolutely. There's so many people who could change their career trajectories, because people will work hard for what they want. But when you don't know which vector Yeah, you know which direction to apply the work. You just spin around in circles, like I would love for there to be a better way to help people start internet businesses, because from our perspective, having done this for like, you know, eight years now, or whatever, it's like, oh, you just do this thing? And no, if you don't know what to do, just start with something. It's so even, I mean, everything is hard in the beginning, right? Like, how do you send emails?

Michele Hansen 31:45
Like I we still don't send emails, so I don't know if I like we technically have tools.

Colleen Schnettler 31:53
I think you could think of like now that I'm talking to you about this, like a fully encompassing course, Oh, my gosh, great new idea. Here, were to build out a

Michele Hansen 32:02
course or something for like, for your, you know, learn to code instead of selling leggings, like you like that. Like, like that is like I feel like that is your like life's mission is to help.

Colleen Schnettler 32:13
I know, right? All about going down. But here's the thing is, this is kind of my life mission. Yeah, but But the thing that I think I thought I'd make a course to teach people how to be a Rails developer. The thing is, it's really hard to learn software, well, like it's not going to happen. And here's my new thought, Oh, my gosh, it's just coming to me, you're not gonna learn software? Well, in six months, especially if you have, you know, if you're working during the day, you're just not this is not, you're not going to become a good rails developer in six months. So originally, I thought, my way was to help people learn to code. But I think what makes more sense, is actually to help people learn using probably no code tools, how to build online businesses, because that more aligns with the demographic of people I'm trying to help. Not how to learn to code, but like, how do you like cuz, you know, the joke is, every military spouse is a photographer, it's like the most prevalent, it's a very prevalent occupation. But teach these help these people learn how to like, build a site and send emails and use a no code tools. So they can you know, accept payments on their website and like basic stuff, so that people who want online businesses can still pursue what their individual passion is, because I'm finding like, I push people to try learn to code, a lot of people don't want to learn to code that's not their jam.

Michele Hansen 33:36
You know, it reminds me of the something we say a lot. And then the sort of jobs to be done world is that nobody wants a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole so they can put a nail in it so they can hang a picture on their wall, right? Like learning Ruby on Rails like is not the end goal. The end goal is hanging the picture on the wall, which is building the business.

Colleen Schnettler 34:02
Right? And if you want to have a real business, you got to know how to use the internet's

Michele Hansen 34:10
how to use the internet. I think my university like nothing, I think I looked into like, like, oh, like, Can I take like an HTML or like, whatever, like class, and there was literally class that was like, This is the internet, you will learn how to use a browser and I was like, and then then, and then everything else was like C Programming. I was like, This is not looking good. Like

Colleen Schnettler 34:34
Yeah, Michelle. Think about this, though. You're absolutely right. Like, I approached it incorrectly thinking oh, I need to teach the world how to code. Well doesn't want to learn how to code world wants to make money doing something they're already passionate about, whether that is selling something they make or whether that is being a photographer or you know, running a home catering business. But that's what we could do. We could To help teach people how I mean, you could have a course. Okay, I have to learn I'm sure you know, no code. That's the whole point is it's not that painful, right? You could have a course that basically walked someone through how to use no code tools to set up a website where you can do things like accept money, and do things like send automated emails. Dude,

Michele Hansen 35:23
Do either of us know how to use the new code stuff?

Colleen Schnettler 35:27
No. Okay. But yeah,

Unknown Speaker 35:29
I mean, we don't have time right now.

Michele Hansen 35:31
When we put ourselves through, which is how to use No, you know, what I just realized? Is that like, you came into this conversation, like fired up, and then somehow you were even more fired up right now. And I didn't think that was possible.

Colleen Schnettler 35:47
I love this though. I feel like I'm adding shalon Pauline University. We don't have time for it now. But we're so first social University. Oh, my gosh, that's coming.

Michele Hansen 36:02
Um, well, before we get more, you know, ideas out there. Maybe we should wrap up also, for apparently a lot of people listen to this podcast while running. And I have been tagged in the fact that we're usually around 30 minutes is like people like great, I can go out and like, I know how long of a run that is. So we're already five minutes over, we usually plan for it. So.

Colleen Schnettler 36:26
Alright, guys, it's because of all my great ideas. Well, I

Michele Hansen 36:29
so I will see you in two weeks. So yes, yes, I will be drinking started wandering through target next week. So but I know Colleen has exciting plans and then we'll we'll talk to you later.

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Send Cam some love and support! https://twitter.com/SloanCam
Check out Hopscotch: https://hopscotch.club/

Michele Hansen 0:01
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Michele Hansen 0:01
So today, I'm so excited we have a friend joining us, Cam Sloane. Hello, Cam. So we invited you on today because you had tweeted the other day about how you're kind of feeling stuck right now. And we're like, you know what? Maybe we like we can chat about it and help you get unstuck.

Cam Sloan 1:17
Yeah, that was, I guess, shout out to Aaron Francis, who kind of like just was like, Hey, bring him on. And, and I was like, Yeah, let's do it. That'd be awesome. And I think that, you know, just speaking that tweet, it really seemed to resonate with a lot of other people, like other founders who are trying to do this. And because I had an outpouring of, you know, comments and support, and DMS, from people I don't know, and people that I do know and invite stuff like this show and stuff to just like, it's amazing, the community that has reached out to kind of say, like, well, all sorts of things I'm sure we'll get into today. So it's been really nice to it's always nice to have that because sometimes you're just going at this and you feel like super alone. So for context, I just feel kind of stuck in like, you know, do I keep going do I switch to something else? Or do I? You know, yeah, like, I've contemplated like just doing contract work. And you know, just make money that way, because it's a bit easier. So all sorts of stuff that is going through my head over the past few months? Because it's just slow, slow going.

Colleen Schnettler 2:32
Yeah, Cam to get us started. Could you give us a little background about your product? And how long you've been working on it?

Cam Sloan 2:40
Yeah, definitely. That would be helpful for listeners. So yeah, I am working on hopscotch. It's a user onboarding tool, specifically focusing on product tours, and kind of in app messaging and guides to kind of, you know, when a user signs up for your product, sometimes you want to kind of hold their hand a bit to show them what their next step should be, in order to help prevent them from churning by actually showing them to the thing that they want to do. And so yeah, I mean, product tours, to be honest, like, it's not the right fit for every every business. But sometimes, there are really good use cases, like if you have a complex product that has, like you get in like a CRM, or like an analytics tool that has like 10 options on the top menu and 10 on the side, and your users just get dumped, or, you know, Landon, this page with no idea what to do next, then a really good way to show them is to guide them, you know, and kind of say, you know, here's, here's what your next step should be, so that you can see value out of the product. So I've been working on this for, I mean, about a year since the inception of like, actually like the idea, but really kind of steadily since January of this year in 2021. And kind of focusing most of my time on it. Because outside of that I do freelancing contract work for you know, larger companies just doing web development work for them. And that kind of helps me to stay self funded to do my projects like this and, and hopefully grow my own software business.

Michele Hansen 4:28
Yeah, so. So I kind of want to propose a structure for this conversation. So I've mentioned a little bit in my book, how the sort of core questions that you're trying to answer when you talk to a customer can also be used when maybe you're helping somebody think through something, which are what are they trying to do overall? Why? What are the steps in that process they're going through what if they already Tried, and where are they stuck? And so I feel like you've kind of you've started to give us a little bit of overview on the what you're trying to do. And why. I'm curious what led you to be interested in building an onboarding tool?

Cam Sloan 5:23
Yeah. So the, you know, like, as I don't know, if you did this as well, when you were coming up with, you know, what business to go into you like make a list, you're trying to make a list of ideas, and like, most of them are pretty terrible. And, like, I had maybe 50 ideas. And this was kind of one of them that I didn't really think too much about until I actually I met someone who I, who wanted to hire me to build to work on their software company, and just doing web development for them. And we actually ended up, I didn't work for him, it wasn't the right fit for taking on that contract. But we ended up like really getting along well, kind of both having founder ambitions. And he was almost like, in the position that I'm at right now where he was feeling a bit stuck. And so we ended up saying, Hey, we should like try and work on something together. And, and we were thrown, like, what ideas have you been having, and, and we both checked kind of our lists. And, and this was one of them. So for him, he was actually experiencing, like, the pain point more than I had previously. So really, he was searching around for tools. And like came across intercom product tours and other app cues and realizing like, you know, he's a bootstrap founder cannot justify the price at like, $300 plus a month, and was looking for a tool that was maybe affordable that that could get them up and running. And we kind of ran with that together. In like, just real quick summary. Like he ended up going and building another business. So I kept going on hopscotch. And, yeah, like, as soon as I dove into the problem, like I really enjoyed it, both technically, because like you're you're kind of embedding your yourself into another SAS product by default, like by the definition of what these tools do. And so there's a lot of like, really interesting technical learnings that I've had to had to go through with that, like anytime you're dealing with like widget, embed scripts and other people's code, it's, it's a lot of interesting stuff on the technical side. But then also just realizing like that, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the human and business side of this as well. Like, I started soaking in resources from Samuel Kulik, and like the user less team and, you know, anywhere that I could find people who are talking about onboarding and realizing like how crucial it can be to a business's success. Because, you know, if you can reduce that initial churn in the first month or two, then then it can have a wild impact on the like, lifetime value of customers and how your product retains users. And so it just kept me interested From then on, which is why I didn't like end up going work on something else. After, after he, like my co founder went to do something else.

Michele Hansen 8:23
So let's talk a little bit about where you are now. So you launched in April. Is that right?

Cam Sloan 8:30
or me? Yeah. So I think so. Time is a blur? Yeah, like I because I've kind of been doing, like, I did a lot of stuff with early access of just onboarding one on one, like people who are signing up for the early access list. And at one point, I kind of let people sign up on their own, which April sounds, it might be even a bit early, it might have been just a couple months ago that I finally made it so that people could self sign up. And so, yeah, I think a lot of the customers I was speaking to back in April, and May and June, like I was kind of doing just they would express interest, find the landing page, and then we would jump on a demo call. And and some of them would, you know, try the product, others would just kind of like ghost off and and so that's kind of where, yeah, like I probably had about 40 conversations, demo calls and stuff. And you know, I'm setting with just a handful of like really just one main customer that is like paying me and has the product installed. And I've like kind of done a white glove service to help them get up and running with it. And then I have a couple like I don't know, like almost just like friends and family supporters or like people who have like paid but not activated. And so I don't like really even count towards the bottom line. They're like There's not a lot that I can gain from, from them, except they're $20 a month.

Michele Hansen 10:07
So, what's your revenue out? Right now? If you're comfortable saying that,

Cam Sloan 10:11
yeah, I'm at like 150 MRR

Michele Hansen 10:14
and what are your expenses to keep it running?

Cam Sloan 10:18
A pretty low. Yeah, like, I'm paying like 20 bucks a month for server costs and, and then it's really just a matter of like, I am trying to pay, you know, just paying my rent and stuff out of savings. And like all of that I have, like, the way that I kind of manage my cash flow there is just by doing a certain amount of freelance per year and then saying, I have to make this much. And then that kind of floats me on that side of things. And so yeah, it's it's like really quite inexpensive to keep it operating like this. But I have thought, like, I have quite a bit of cash in the business bank account from doing the contract and freelancing. There's about 100 and 120k. there that is kind of, you know, just setting as runway, but I have also considered like, should I be deploying this more effectively? Like, if I'm ready to work on this business? Like, which, I guess is a big question mark, like, do I keep going or not? But like, do I want to invest more in, I don't know, maybe trying some ads, or trying to hire someone to help with the content and things that I'm not doing. So hopefully, that gives a bit of a picture of the financials and stuff.

Colleen Schnettler 11:38
Can we go back to the 40 onboarding calls you did? and talk a little bit more about that? I'm really curious. So you actually got on the phone with 40 people who organically reached out to you?

Cam Sloan 11:51
Yeah, I would say, you know, somewhere in that range, because I had about 100 people on my, like, early access list. Well, this was over the course of several months. And so as they were joining, I would kind of do the playbook of like, you know, as soon as they sign up, or maybe a day or two later, sometimes depending how much like I was working on product, or if I was in learning mode at the time, I would, you know, jump onto calls with them, I did come out with like, a really early version of this product and sent it to like a handful of customers, and then you know, got feedback, like, oh, but it doesn't do this. And so I go back to product mode and, and rebuild and say like, here we go. But then, you know, maybe there were other other issues that it wasn't solving, like a huge part of that just felt like, maybe it wasn't a huge pain point. Because I actually went back to a lot of these, like, people and I plan to go back and even speak to, like, send some more follow up emails, because just this week, I sent about five or six of them. So yeah, where I guess I'm, I've been speaking with, you know, quite a few customers that would be requesting these features. And then I would, you know, go off take maybe a week or whatever it took to go and build the smallest version of that come back. And, and sometimes that was not really enough for they would just kind of ghost at that point. And, and just, you know, it. I know, it felt like the right thing to be it felt like the right approach and like learn from the people who are going to be our customers and you know, go build what they asked for. But then, but then didn't really see results from it, I do think still like most of what they requested and was like super reasonable and like did improve the product to where it is. Today, like where I think that people signing up today like have a much more useful product because it can do you know, an example of that would be like segmenting your product tours to only show certain ones to certain demographics of users. Like if you have a new user that is, I don't know, an agency versus a small business owner, they may have more, they might have a better understanding of tooling in general. And so they you would just show a different thing. So you want to do segmenting within the app. And so that was something that I really do feel helped with making the product better, but then yeah, it still didn't like end up driving those conversions in the way that I was hoping for.

Michele Hansen 14:29
Yeah. Did any of those people you talked like you said those were onboarding calls so had those people paid for the product?

Cam Sloan 14:37
And maybe I just like misspoke. It was more like demo calls I guess of like, you know, just people who had signed up for they would sign up for fill out the Early Access form. Tell me about like their use case. And then I would go and speak with them but you know, to be also just like, I don't know, just Be critical on that point. It's like a lot of these people who are signing up probably, were just following my journey of me building in public on Twitter and like, may not be like the ideal customer profile, either I have found that like, initially I thought hopscotch might be a great use are a great fit for, like, really small companies like originally was targeting like other solo founders, indie hacker types that, like, you know, to get them a tool that they could afford that they could use for doing onboarding, but really, like, you're not feeling the pains yet of having to manually onboard like hundreds of customers at that scale. And so where I'm now more leaning towards is like trying to target more companies that are kind of in the I don't know, maybe like two to three employee to 10 Plus, like 1015 employees, so they still, like feel the pains of like, apt uses too expensive, but they actually have like employees and revenue, and are probably feeling some of the customer, some of the pains of trying to manually onboard so many users. So I think it has, like, these conversations have been helpful to like, guide me slowly to where I need to be. It's, it's just slow moving still. And like, now I don't see as many people filling that pipeline by default, because I'm not really tweeting a lot. And so it's like, Okay, I got to go and like, chase my, you know, hunt my food, for lack of a better term, and like, go and, you know, either do some, you know, founder sales, like going and prospecting and doing cold outreach, or, you know, trying to work the SEO game. And, and this is kind of like, where I fall and get a little bit stuck of like, not knowing the next best steps, because they're, like, so many ways that I could go with this. And none of them show like immediate returns. And so and so I kind of get a little bit deflated, even, like, if you spend a week writing out two or three articles, or, you know, Docs or blog post type things, or like you go and fill out a bunch of Korra answers. And then there's not necessarily going to be immediate returns, these things kind of prove themselves over like 612 months. And and that can just be hard compared to I don't know, I'm sure you both can really have like, you know, going in coding a feature. And then you see that returns, like it works right there. So yeah, it's just, I feel like that's been the tricky part of where I'm at now.

Michele Hansen 17:32
Yeah, it can be really hard when you're at the point of making content investments, and you know, that it's gonna take months or years to pay off. But, like, investing in general, like, my head waiting for that payoff, and being patient is so hard.

Cam Sloan 17:54
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what, like, I noticed yesterday with so many founders resonating on the same points, and some of them getting through to the other side was really inspirational like to read about and hear that, like, yeah, they just, you know, keep, there's like an element of keep plugging away. But there's also like, you can keep plugging away doing the wrong thing, forever. And, and I am like, really trying to like, since day one, I've tried to avoid like sinking many years into a startup that's not going to ever see traction. And I've always been like, at a certain point, I just want to have like a cut off trigger, like wearing like a kill switch, where I'm like, if I'm not making this much MRR that or you know, have this much act like engagement in the product, then like, I should maybe switch to something that is a bit easier to get people activated. I'm still not convinced that that's not true. Like, there's been a lot of encouragement to just keep going. But I do think that this is a bit of a slow moving industry, it may be a bit more of a vitamin versus painkiller type of thing in for some people, or at least that's the way they see it. Because when I reach back out to some of those leads, and asked, you know, how did you end up solving this problem? Like, which competitor? Did you end up going with? They like, so far the answers have been nothing like we are still like just thinking about this problem. And we'd be happy to you know, some of them are like, Yeah, let's do another demo call or let's do another, you know, something like let's talk about it again and reopen the conversation. And that's since April, however many months that is like five months or something like going by without actually moving on the problem. And so that could be just the again, the customer like that type of customer or it could just be the way that people buy in the space. It's a bit of You know, kind of, it's one of those things that's like sitting in the background, we should improve user onboarding, but then a lot of people don't because like, but they don't really realize that there's like this whole element of churn and like, and like, the bottom line is so closely tied to user onboarding, and improving that experience, that there's a disconnect there. So.

Michele Hansen 20:25
So let's talk for a second about what is working. I'm really curious about this customer that you have at $99 a month, you said, and I have a couple of questions about them. First of all, is this somebody who knew you from Twitter? Or is this as our friend, Mike buckbee calls and I believe I quoted him on this last week. And Mike, you're getting quoted again this week? stranger money. So good.

Cam Sloan 20:54
I think it's like I it stranger money, like I know this person. Yeah. Okay. And I don't remember exactly how they like came into the waiting list, but they did like, stumble on there. But they were really looking for like, yeah, some managed service, kind of white glove service there. So I've been helping a lot to do the implementation and planning there, as well, which is important to know, it's like, not just by my SAS, like, pay me 99 a month, it's like quite a bit of hands on work for for it as well.

Colleen Schnettler 21:27
Oh, that's interesting. I

Michele Hansen 21:27
noticed. Yeah. And I noticed in the end, all the people kind of chiming in on the thread and offering support and advice and whatnot, that I'm Jesse from bento jumped in. And he made the suggestion, I'm just gonna read it, throw a managed account offering 899 and see how many deals you can close with that I have a feeling many people would rather you do everything for them versus do DIY, at 49 to 99. It was a huge unlock when we were stagnant at bento, so much learning. And I was curious about your thoughts on that?

Cam Sloan 22:04
Yeah, I mean, I can see a lot of value in that approach, because you're learning about the problem by actually implementing but you know, trying to solve it for them as almost like putting yourself in the consultants, shoes, I guess, part of like, part of even why I've been, I don't know, like, it's kind of been draining to do that a bit from this other for this customer. But again, I'm only charging 99 a month. And so there's not like the return on on all those hours invested. But it has proven to give me some better learning and understanding of like, how people want to think through this problem, and how to solve it for them. Yeah, and I do think like, yeah, if I'm gonna be justifying outbound sales, if that's like long term approach to this business, then you need to put a higher price point on it, which like kind of goes and partially removes, like, why I started this business in the first place, which is like to make a lower cost solution that like, you know, can be more affordable for people to get into. So yeah, it's been a bit. Like, I like the idea. And then I just don't know that I want to run that kind of business long term of like having to basically do a productized service.

Colleen Schnettler 23:29
So what I'm trying to understand with this one client that you have is the time you're spending with them. Is that making it more hands off in the future? Like, are you working on integration pieces that makes them like kind of will streamline it for your future clients?

Cam Sloan 23:46
Yeah, like, for us, a lot of this has been for learnings like I kind of agreed to take it on, so that I could, you know, write some better documentation out of it, like, realize what questions they have been having in the process and what we need to do to implement. So it will both be like product improvements that come out of it, you know, like just yeah, tweaks to the product, when I'm implementing for them. But also, oh, what questions Am I asking the client? And and then turning those into like help Docs or articles that maybe can help other people get up and running? Like, what do I need? What information do I need about my customer to like, make a product tour that is going to be effective? Or what do I need to know about my product and the like, audience that I'm serving to, to know if I need to implement a product or not. So I'm taking kind of those notes along the way, using it as a learning opportunity. Hence, not really like charging a premium. I was kind of just like, well, I get to learn a lot from this experience as well. But the I did say like after this initial implementation, I'm handing this back off to you and your team will have to run with it. So it's yeah I'm not like signing on for a forever job at 99 a month. And I Deeley not doing that for each customer. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 25:08
So does this customer fit into your theory that you need to go after slightly bigger companies? Two to three, what do you say three to 10? employees with pretty significant revenue?

Cam Sloan 25:19
Yeah, I would say they operate mostly like with, yeah, contractors and freelancers helping them out, but they are Yeah, kind of in that range of company size. Definitely not the, you know, initial indie hacker audience, which I think Yeah, like, is an easy thing to learn, like we like, like, indie hackers don't have a ton of capital to be throwing at tools, and they would rather go build things themselves or spend like, a week like, making their own solutions. And, and it doesn't, yeah, it's just I think not having the access to the capital is like, is a big challenge there. So yeah, I've definitely learned to like, a bit about Yeah, maybe I should follow this. larger company size, at least, that's kind of where I'm at. Like, I don't know, if I want to, I don't know if maybe that ideal customer is actually a bit bigger than even what I said, maybe it's, you know, 20 plus employees. I've definitely had some companies reach out that were like 500 employees, but they tend to have much larger expectations, like, want to do NPS scores, they want to do surveys through these tools, they want to have the tours, they want to do checklist, like there's a lot of product gap, like there's a lot of big gap in what the product offers now that they kind of want a whole suite, because they're kind of nearing on like, enterprise, or like really like the larger business. So I'm trying to, like fit into this kind of smaller area where people might not have like such high expectations or like needs out of a product. And really, they're just trying to focus on this one part, which is like activation. And they can use another tool if they need to do like, survey and feedback type of stuff.

Michele Hansen 27:09
Like our sponsor this month reform, for example. Love it. There we go, Peter, um, I'm interested. So you mentioned you know, you have other customers who are mostly sort of friends and family and like, indie hacker money, and as you've kind of alluded to, basically this sort of irony of, you know, indie hacker world is basically that usually, we're like, we're not very good customers for each other, for the most part. But a very good peer group community. But I'm curious, this 99 a month customer, you did 30 demo calls, you probably learned a lot about what people were trying to solve within onboarding, like what their products were like, and, you know, these things about company size, and the sort of sort of corporate demographic questions basically, but also the activity they're trying to solve and, and how complicated their products are, and and what the, you know, basically, what the cost is to them of having a poorly on boarded user. And so I'm kind of curious, like, Do you notice any differences in the kind of product or those sort of goals or whatnot, that your $99 a month customer is trying to do? That those other customers are not, that might be a clue for you on the sort of customer that you should focus on from a sort of activity based perspective?

Cam Sloan 28:55
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, yeah, the biggest learning I've had there is, you know, when you go into their product, there are multiple use cases for it, you may sign up for one thing or another, like you're not necessarily doing. It's not like hopscotch where you come in, and the single thing that you would like, use this product towards, but you come in, and there's a suite of products. And so when you have like this complex product that has multiple offerings, then you may want to guide the user to the next step. A good example of this would be like wave accounting software, but they also do so they have like, receipt tracking, they have employee like compensation, and they have invoices and all these things. And maybe you sign up and you only want one of those things like you may not need to know about every single part of that product and you may feel a bit overwhelmed when you come into a dashboard that has like 10 different options. Like completely different use cases. And that's where I'm finding that there's some, some good opportunity there to help, like with a product tour. And so for example, like this customer that I've on boarded, part of what we did is hooking to their onboarding survey to say, like, What are you trying to do with this product, which I think is really helpful for them segmenting what you're going to show them in a tour. And so, you know, if there so it's like an SEO platform, I won't get into too much more, I don't want to like, you know, just yeah,

Michele Hansen 30:37
that's fine. Yeah. But it's a it's a, it's a product that has basically multiple, different products within it that somebody has purchased. And maybe they know they need one of those but and they don't know what these other things are, that they're either they are paying for or the company would like them to start paying for. And so the value that you're providing to them in this in this case, is basically helping to introduce the customer to these other products and reduce, reduce sort of overwhelm that the customer might be feeling about coming into a complicated product. And the other the friends and family product, like those ones, were they more like single products without multiple products within them.

Cam Sloan 31:26
Yeah, yeah, more like single products, and actually just a quite a slight tweak on on the other one, because like, what users will actually do is come into this product, they'll sign up, and then they are, they may know what they want to do. But because there are so many options, they don't know what the next step would be to get to it. So instead of showing them the other options that they don't need, I'm actually guiding them more towards the one that they signed up and expressed interest for. So if they say like I need, you know, I'm interested in link building, whereas this other person might be interested in local SEO, then you want to guide them to that next part of the product that's going to be relevant to that so that they can take the next steps and see value out of the product there. And then going to your other point of introducing them to the other parts, like that is a great thing to do, like over time as people use like one part of the product, and then they come back to it, you can kind of use progressive disclosure to show things over time, Hey, did you know about this feature, hey, this, like, you know, and kind of like when you have software like figma, that maybe gives you a tip every week or something? And it's just like, Oh, I didn't know I could do that. But like, it kind of does some feature discovery is what it's called. And you can help users discover new features or features that they are not actively using. So So yeah, those are a couple use cases that that customers is using. So

Colleen Schnettler 32:52
ultimately, your product is about user retention, that's the value you're providing to your customer.

Cam Sloan 32:59
Yeah, I would say, kind of on the activation side, as well, where you're really trying to get them from, like, there's there's a couple elements, you know, but the very first, like the core part of the star is getting them activated and getting them to take that next step once they come into your product that's going to help them to get to the outcome that they want and what and so asking yourself, what is the like, what is the thing that your customer is coming in here to do, and then making sure that you can guide them right to that next step is like, is crucial. And so that that is more in like the activation world, and then retention, it can play a role in as well. But because if you don't activate them, they're not going to stick around as well. But yeah, there are also some other things that you could do like email drip campaigns. And like, yeah, like kind of knowledge draw, like kind of an email campaign that educates your users on how to do what they want to do. Like it makes us really well with that to kind of retain them. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 34:06
Right. So ultimately, though, when you say activation they've presumably like if I'm a user, I've already signed up for someone service because I wanted so when you sell it to the person I'm you know, assigned up with, you're selling it as we will reduce your churn, because they need to activate because if they don't activate, they're going to churn because they're not going to see value. Okay.

Cam Sloan 34:27
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's definitely like tied into that, I guess. You know, there are just some tools like I forget as it turnkey, is like one that is like specifically focused on like, the customers who are maybe about to churn out and then keeping them around or giving them offers. So this is like primarily, I guess there because there's a spectrum of like, you know, from activation to like retention that you may find custom like that you want to focus on within that whole experience, but yeah, but Like, it all kind of adds up, it all plays really like, together in, in giving a good experience to users that's gonna keep them around. And yeah, you're right like to really what I want to do is like help help my customers to show the value of the product to keep their customers around and get them, you know, activated and using it, versus maybe getting dropped into a product that is just so overwhelming, like Michelle said earlier where they don't know what the next steps should be. Yeah, I feel like that's, that's pretty much it.

Michele Hansen 35:39
So I used to work on a couple of products that had that we actually used hopscotch style tours for. And basically, the reason why we use to hopscotch it was I think we use a survey that then directed them into the proper hopscotch sequence was because the products were incredibly complicated. And we had limited ability to make those products less complicated. So it was a very painful problem for me as a product manager, who was tasked with driving retention metrics, but could not solve the foundational problems. And so we use hopscotch as a way to try to like, basically overcome the fact that the product is complicated. And kind of thinking about that, and thinking about what Colleen just said, of like, you know, what is the pain that you are solving for people, I just pulled up your website, and nudge your users to the aha moment. I like it, it's positive. But if you show that to me, when I was a product manager, you know, five or six years ago, that would not have been the problem I would have expressed to you. Right, like, reduce your churn, like, you know, your product is complicated. Your users don't have to be overwhelmed, like get them through it virt more trial, that type of thing, convert more trials, like what is that goal that someone is trying to drive that relates to what you're solving, or that's reducing churn, increasing activation, like, you know, stop losing users, because they're confused. Like, that's the problem. you're solving that people have value in their products, but because for whatever reason, whether those reasons are in their control or not, the products are complicated. And their users are, you know, their users thought there was value in it, but then they get to it, and they can't get the value back. And so like there's this mismatch, and speak to the pain, I'm not like, I'm not seeing I'm not seeing pain on your landing page.

Cam Sloan 38:04
Yeah, I think in that the h1 doesn't fully address it. It's something that Yeah, like, the thread yesterday, and everyone reaching out after like, definitely gave me so many ideas of like, where to go, and what to focus on improving for hopscotch. Like, there's a lot. There's a lot, it's not like, I'm coming here, and like, I'm all out of ideas now. Like, there's nothing more that can be done. Like, there's so much more that could be done to improve the state. And so it's been like, what do I choose from that? But that's a pretty like, yeah, a no brainer, is like the positioning of it, and kind of better. Focusing on the outcomes. I think you're like, absolutely, right there. I have, like, let's see, I, because there were, I don't know, 20 people that sent me, like, it was so great yesterday, like 20 people sent me DMS, and like, had like, great conversations with some other founders. And then and then I had some other people that kind of just commented and offered their suggestions as well. And I've been trying to just, like, go through that and, like make a list of like points of like, what I could explore and take away from that, like so that it's not all just like me airing my grievances and Twitter, which actually like go and take something away from from it. And, you know, there there was, I guess some of the pieces in there include, like, what you just said is like really like, you know, you should be focusing on the outcomes more like and someone suggested like, you know, increased child conversions, improved feature adoption. And so there's more that I could do to like really? Yeah, like reduce churn to make that clear. I think there's a positioning element and and just like communication element that could be improved upon. There's also just like, number of people aren't are not coming through like there's not enough people that are Coming through my site and through the signup flow to even make, like, great. I don't know, decisions based on like data driven decisions, you know, it's if I, if we're picking it into this, like one or two customers kind of thing, it's like you need more people trying this, you need more people activating. And so finding ways that I can do that through, you know, people have given some great recommendations of like, how I can go ahead and like build like a sales campaign, or use AdWords and SEO tactics to kind of like, grow this, I guess a lot of it ends up like there's a ton of things that I have taken from that. From from that thread of like, good ideas, and now it's like deciding which things that I can do. And I think it will come down to like evaluating which are the easy ones that I can like make changes to right now really quickly like this, on a playing with the communication and wording on the on the site. And then some of it will be more like long term investment. Other things might be more immediate, like running some AdWords tests, like $10 a day and just like trying out some different headlines to see what grabs people and then using the learnings from that to maybe further update, like what my content game will be, or what my you know, what my wording on the website should be like, based on what people click on those ads has, like it's been, it's been really nice to get some of that information. And then and then other people even mentioned about the pricing, maybe not being accessible. But again, I have to take that with a grain of salt. But there's, you know, people who are saying the jump from a free tier to $50 a month, and then $100 a month is too large. And so maybe there could be a price in between that, that becomes more accessible if I am trying to target like, smaller businesses as well. And then there's like the other advice, which is go and add a price deer on the other side, that is like $800 a month and you know, do manage services. So that's Yeah, there's just been almost it's been overwhelming, like, get all this new knowledge and information overnight.

Michele Hansen 42:25
It totally makes sense that you're, you're you're swimming in ideas right now. And, yeah, I sort of just added one to that pile there. And I always I'm almost reminded of kind of the situation that Coleen was in after she first started doing user interviews where like, there was like, so many ideas coming at her from customers, and she was having so many ideas. And then it was like, where do I go from here?

Cam Sloan 43:04
Yeah, I remember hearing like those episodes. And when you did, like the live, you know, customer call, where Michelle interviewed your customer. And and then yeah, a lot of trying to figure out what the next step should be. It does feel a lot like that. Like, there's so many paths to go down. What's the right one? And I think, you know, a big part of it has even just been like, does it make sense to keep going down pass like down these paths at all, or try some, like, again, like, try a whole new thing. And I think that's why I was like, was then maybe am scared to even go forward with some of this stuff is like, does it make sense to keep investing the time in, in what I'm building now? if, you know, is it gonna help me see returns in a year or two years time, versus switching to something else? It seems like a lot of people think that it's definitely a good idea to keep going. And, and so I'm leaning towards that, I still think I want to have like, some kill switch, like, you know, to avoid running three years without any revenue kind of thing. And I need to see some positive signals at some point. But yeah, that's kind of kind of where I'm at. But it has given me a bit more hope of like, this is a normal feeling cam like you are allowed to feel deflated, you're allowed to feel like you don't have like, you don't aren't great at sales and marketing just by default, you know, you have to work towards those and put a lot of work in and so it's okay to feel like this and it's okay to like. Like, it's not just that the product is bad or that the market isn't there. It's just this is a part of the process. So just coming to terms with that. has been really helpful over the past day and gives me a bit more. I don't know, just like, like, a bit more of my like, desire to keep going.

Colleen Schnettler 45:13
Alex Hellman has a great article on this. It's about, it's about all of the developers who take his course and how when they get to the marketing course, they all freak out. Because when someone is excellent in their field, starting over is so hard. So there's a lot of things I feel like I heard you say today, and one of them, is it, I wanted to ask you, is it that you just don't want to do marketing? Because you're convinced it's going to fail? Or, I mean, what what is your thought, like, all of this? Or do you feel like you should be making more revenue now and you're frustrated? And that's where this is coming from?

Cam Sloan 45:53
I think, you know, I think that it's like it's a mix of like, Yeah, well, the marketing, see fruits at the end of like, of all that investment, because because just you know, going through 4050 calls and and then only coming out with like one customer that I'm basically doing it all for them at the end, like is that the type of business that I want to be growing? Like, do I want to do a sales driven and like hands on business versus something more like, you know, seeing what Peter has done with reform of like, really, people are signing up and get going themselves, maybe you have to have like higher numbers, but like, it's more. I don't know, like, it's, it lends itself better to self signup, and self serve, where you can do a bit more product lead, you still have to do marketing, but like, the way that the business operates, is not like hiring a sales team. It's investing in content and other other parts of the business, which is more maybe the type of business so it's been that like, question mark, about the business in general? Like, is that kind of where I want to go with it? And, yeah, I mean, there are all sorts of fears in there. I think a lot of it is also just a fear of like, yeah, it like, do I know what I'm doing. And I actually, I worked in marketing for five years, believe it or not as, like, scary as like, I worked in music marketing, for concerts, it was a much different thing. And this was like, six or so years ago. And so it's a much different beast, but then SAS marketing. But yeah, like, even with that experience, it's still just scary to go out on your own. And like, I don't know, just feel you feel back at square one again. So yeah.

Michele Hansen 47:39
Yeah, I mean, towards us that I think that's a totally normal feeling. And this feeling of like struggling and like, this isn't working. And then also you get some more ideas. And you're like, Okay, wait, where? Where do I go? Like, what do I do next? And, you know, I noticed, like, you posted that thread. And I'm guessing that you woke up that morning, not not feeling so great. Yeah, you're right. And I wonder how you felt waking up this morning. After getting all of that support,

Cam Sloan 48:19
today has been much different, like it's been, it's always like, Man, it's so amazing to see that people are gonna be there to lift you up when you're like feeling a bit down, I think. I don't know. I've had I've, like, wrote tweets like that, and then deleted them because like, it's very personal and just like very open and you know, you're like, our potential customers gonna read this think less of me for like, running a business then not knowing what I'm doing. You know, there's all all sorts of like, fear in that. And what I'm realizing is, like, there's been a lot of appreciation for this open approach. So I, I wake up the next day with like, just feeling very grateful to have like that, knowing that maybe I need to, like, yeah, rely on community more and maybe get more involved with like, talking to other founders a bit and ideating with them, because working alone is very challenging to like, be in your own head all the time and see, you know, things moving so slowly. But yeah, at the same time, like the next day, having 100 people reach out and I'll give you like many ideas has been overwhelming at the same time. For like, what to do next. But I guess like the core of what my challenge was, or is is not so much like what to do next, because all of these ideas, I'll put them in a list and work through them one by one. That's the only way to get things done. It's like one thing at a time. But yeah, just like knowing it's more figuring out, like the conviction around like Emma is this the type of business I want to keep working Because in a couple years, the efforts hopefully will, yeah, show fruits for the labor. And then also I keep using that term, which I've never used before. Like, I don't know why everything's bearing fruits today, but but you know, like that kind of thing of just like, really? Like, will this be the business that I want to build? And I'm making sure that I'm doing that. And I think that's been a big part of the fear that I have of, of moving forward. So I don't have an answer to that yet. But I do have a lot of people who have been like really kind of offering advice. And so I think there's still some chewing on this idea to be done. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 50:39
And I think that question of, is this the business I want to build? I think that's that's a question that only you can answer.

Cam Sloan 50:48
Exactly. Yeah. I've i that is one thing I've noticed, like as much advice as you soak in or people give you, you know, they could all be right, like in their own ways, but then it comes down to like a deeply personal decision on like, what, like how you want to approach things. So T, B, D.

Michele Hansen 51:10
I guess that's a good point for us to wrap up today. Cam. Thank you so much for your vulnerability, both here. And on Twitter. You know, I'm reminded of something I heard. Nicole Baldy new co founder of webinar ninja say on her podcast recently, Nicole and Kate can relate, which is true vulnerability is when there is personal risk involved. And I think your tweet and thread about that really shows like there was that risk involved, and you took it and and people jumped in to help. And I think that's what's so amazing about our community. But so I encourage people to follow along with cam. You are at Sloan cam on Twitter. Your product is hopscotch dot club. Thank you so much for coming on cam.

Cam Sloan 52:14
Thank you both for having me. It was such a pleasure. I love the podcast. And you know, I'm always listening and tuning in and love following along your stories, because it's really it's encouraging as well to just you know, hear what you're both, you know, working on and so that always helps me feel a little less like it's just me and having, you know, some help on the way. So thanks so much.

Michele Hansen 52:39
All right. Well, Colleen, talk to you next week.

Colleen Schnettler 52:42
Bye.

View Details

Listen to the latest from Michele's podcast book tour!
Searching for SaaS: https://searchingforsaas.com/podcast/ep25-local-restaurant-app-to-geocoding-as-a-service-michele-hansen-from-geocodio/
One Knight In Product: https://www.oneknightinproduct.com/michele-hansen/
Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/224-michele-hansen

Michele Hansen 0:01
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Hey, Colleen,

Colleen Schnettler 0:51
hey, Michelle.

Michele Hansen 0:54
How are you?

Colleen Schnettler 0:56
I'm good. I'm good. How about you?

Michele Hansen 0:58
How goes week three now of doing Hammerstone and simple file upload.

Colleen Schnettler 1:08
It's going well, today, I'm going to dedicate most of the day to simple file uploads. So I'm pretty excited about that. I'm finally back into my theoretical four days client work one day, my own thing and never really works out that way. Because I make myself way too available. But I have a lot of plans. But I do want to talk to you about something. Okay. I am I have not had any new signups in six weeks. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not in the pit of despair, because I'm just generally pretty happy about everything else. But I haven't been really on top of I know, six weeks. Right. That's really. I mean, I

Michele Hansen 1:54
I hate to say it, but that does give me a little bit of like trough of sorrow vibes.

Colleen Schnettler 1:58
Yeah. I mean, I honestly, I hadn't even really noticed, which is a different a different thing. Has anybody been canceled? I don't know. Because I, yeah, so I don't track that as well as I should. And I think with everything that's been going on, I have been so busy that I haven't. Honestly, I've just been letting it run itself. I checked my email every day, but no one ever emails me, which is nice, by the way. So I hadn't checked it in a while a and I checked it in preparation to do this podcast with you. And I was like, Oh, crap. I haven't had a sign up since July. This is September 2.

Michele Hansen 2:39
So have I mean, has your revenue gone down? Like?

Colleen Schnettler 2:44
No, actually, it hasn't. So I've been pretty consistent. So without doing a full churn analysis, I don't think people are churning. But they're not signing up. Okay, that's not okay. Let me stop. That's not entirely true. People are putting their email address in and then bouncing. So people are still finding my website. But yeah,

Michele Hansen 3:12
I feel like it was like the people who are paying you is that mostly people from Heroku? or from your website?

Colleen Schnettler 3:19
It's mostly people from Heroku.

Michele Hansen 3:21
So are you still getting that like you had this problem where people were like, signing up on Heroku, but then not actually activating it? And like starting to use it, like, Are people still doing that first step on Heroku.

Colleen Schnettler 3:37
So people are using it. I actually had one person respond with what he's doing. So that was cool. In terms of like a new signup. So people are using it that sign up on Heroku, which is good. It's just a lack of new signups is really confusing to me.

Michele Hansen 3:55
Did you ever get that work done on the homepage like and Roku site like we were talking about the code pen and improving the documentation? And like, did did all that happen?

Colleen Schnettler 4:10
So I have a whole list of great things I'm going to do so what I have done this week last week is I actually started writing a piece of I wrote an article right, it didn't take that long. I should have what it doesn't matter what I should have done. I did it. So that's good. So I have seen on Google Analytics said that is getting a decent amount of traffic. Today, literally today. I'm going to get that freakin try it now on the homepage. That is my plan to do that today. Nice. I'm speaking it into existence. The documentation is a whole different animal because I don't think I mean, I really need to redo the documentation. But that's like a whole thing. Like it's not I need to add some things. I think I need to take it in baby steps because I added some things to the tech side that are not reflected in the documentation that are kind of cool. So I think, but of course, instead of just adding that to my existing documentation, which I don't really like the way it presents, like, I just don't like the way it looks. I want to tear that all down and make a new app just for documentation, which I will do someday, but

Michele Hansen 5:17
so it kind of sounds like you need to put away your laundry. But you don't want to do that. So instead, you're going to completely build yourself a new closet, but

Colleen Schnettler 5:26
my closets gonna be so pretty, and so organized.

Michele Hansen 5:33
Yeah, I'm sensing a theme where like, you have a task that you don't want to do, or it seems overwhelming to you or you don't feel like it plays into your strengths. And so your way to do it is to make it something that is one of your strengths, which is actually just throwing more hurdles in front of you actually doing the task.

Colleen Schnettler 6:00
Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, that's, like, it's funny, because before we got on this podcast, my plan was still to rewrite the whole documentation and make it its own site, blah, blah, blah. And as soon as I spoke those words to you, as I do, I've really is that really a super high priority, like, the higher priority should be getting the fact that like, I emit events on, you know, successful uploads, that's cool. People can use that. It's literally nowhere in my documentation that I do that. So I'm probably the priority should just be getting it out there with what I have. And then someday, when I have more time, I can rewrite the whole documentation site.

Michele Hansen 6:39
This is your problem with the documentation that it's ugly, or that people email you telling you that it's janky. And, like, difficult to use documentation specifically, or is it just an eyesore? It's

Colleen Schnettler 6:53
a it's an eyesore. I don't like the way it looks. I don't like the way I navigate with tabs. I don't like the tabs. Like I think you can still find everything no one has emailed me saying I don't understand how to use this. Hold on.

Michele Hansen 7:05
I need to like I'm I'm pulling look at it. So now

Colleen Schnettler 7:08
Yeah, pull it up. Okay, so if you go to simple file, upload.com, and then click on Doc's documentation,

Michele Hansen 7:15
you got that calm, like,

Colleen Schnettler 7:17
I know, I win it names. So if you look at it, I was like so I also bought unrelated simple file. Wait, what did I buy? I bought simple image upload calm. Hmm, I haven't done anything with it. I just snagged it. I was like, okay, that seems like what I should have. Okay, so look at this documentation page. Like, I just don't like the way it looks.

Michele Hansen 7:40
I mean, it's not the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Like, it's basic, but like,

Colleen Schnettler 7:45
it's fine. I mean,

Michele Hansen 7:47
it like has a little bit of an old school README file vibe, but totally does. That's not a bad thing. Because that's how documentation was distributed for, like 20 years. And it's still sometimes distributed that way. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is, is like, I think it's okay to like, give yourself that space to be like, you know, like, this is ugly, and I hate it. I'm throw the content in there now. But also, when it comes time to build the documentation, like, there's so many tools for this, like, Don't design your own documentation to you know, like, like, if you're going to build yourself a new closet for all this, like at least buy one from IKEA, and then you just have to assemble it, like, don't go actually go out and buy the two by fours. And you know, like,

Colleen Schnettler 8:42
do yeah, you're doing, I don't actually know what tools are out there to build documentation. So what do you guys use? Do you remember? Cuz I know you're right. This has got to be a thing. Like, you're absolutely right. I

Michele Hansen 8:57
think I know someone who, like just bought a documentation tool.

Colleen Schnettler 9:02
This is interesting.

Michele Hansen 9:04
Because, like it definitely I don't I don't remember what the name is of the thing that we use. But we've actually we've actually had people reach out to us saying that they really liked our documentation and wanted to know where we got it from. Like, I think we just got it somewhere. Well,

Colleen Schnettler 9:19
this is an interesting thing. I didn't actually I didn't even think about that. But absolutely, you're right, I should there's there's a better way to solve this problem than me. Does that make rewriting this whole thing? So what you're looking at now, the here's the real reason I want to redo it. What you're looking at now comes through the application page, and the application app does not use tailwind. My. My marketing site does use tailwind so that my thought would be to rewrite all of this documentation, put it on the marketing site

Michele Hansen 9:52
using tailwind because would you design it yourself with like tailwind elements or would you grab a template from tailwind.

Colleen Schnettler 10:01
Oh, totally. I pay for whatever that thing is with tailwind where I can just copy the code and put it on. I bought that. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 10:09
But it's worth it. It was totally worth anything is worth it. Totally Great. So yeah, there's I don't know, I don't know, read me.io. Right. Like there's all sorts of, is that what we use? That kind of looks like our docks?

Colleen Schnettler 10:23
See, I didn't know that. I

Michele Hansen 10:24
don't know. I don't think I'll have to ask Mateus. Right.

Colleen Schnettler 10:28
So this is this is a good point, though. I should, because I don't need API documentation too. So I need to think about, yeah, readme.io has a whole documentation tab. Ooh, this looks fun. Oh, all right. I'm totally gonna check this out after the podcast, maybe that is the right answer.

Michele Hansen 10:46
I don't know how much it costs. But yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 10:49
well, it's gonna be cheaper than five hours of my time. Right. Right. Like, there's no way it cost that money, your

Michele Hansen 10:55
time is not free. And this is See See, this is I always say that, like, you know, I studied economics and undergrad. And I'm always like, Oh, you know, it was interesting, but it doesn't really relate. But here is where it does. Because, yeah, opportunity cost is a very real cost. And that is a perfect distillation of it that your time is worth more than spending five hours rolling your own documentation. thing when this is like already a solved problem.

Colleen Schnettler 11:31
You're absolutely right. 100% agree with that. You're right. I didn't think about it that way. But that is a true statement.

Michele Hansen 11:39
But first, I'd really just like tell people about the stuff you may

Colleen Schnettler 11:44
think. Okay, so like, let's get actionable. Because AI, today is my day to work on simple file. So I think the first step, okay, I don't love the documentation I have, but I need to get the information out there. So the first step is just add something that's set like this things that people can use, like these event callbacks, or emitting events, like, that's useful information. So I'm just add it, you know, just adding it'll take all of 15 minutes. And like, I don't want to, you know,

Michele Hansen 12:11
I don't want to be like standing on my, like, high horse here that like, you know, oh, we tell users everything we do, because actually, something we were just talking about this week was like, oh, like, we need to, like, send out an email to people and like, tell them about the features we've added because we basically stopped sending product updates, email, like, we never so. And then also like MailChimp shut down their pay as you go at one point. And, and then we're like, migrating and all this stuff. And I think we sent out like one email since then. But like, we were just talking about this the other day, that's like, oh, like we added support for like, geocoding a county, like if you know, you like have like a street address plus, like Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, like in places that like, use the county rather than the city name. We haven't told anyone about it, because we haven't sent any product updates, email, and God knows how long so I'm all this is to say that I am. I also need to take my own advice. And maybe other people too, maybe there's somebody out there, you know, just tell people about the thing you made. The thing you made? Yeah. Just tell them. Don't Don't think about you know, marketing stuff and ads and get all in your head about that. Just tell people. Yeah, even if it's a plain text email, just tell them just Just tell me advice I'm trying to give myself and I'm, I am trying to manifest it into existence that we will do that whole step to send out an email to get people to opt in. And then after that, we send out an email that tells them with the stuff we did, maybe that can be one email.

Colleen Schnettler 14:42
Yes. So people tell people got it. I like it. That's good advice, your marketing advice. That's my marketing advice for the day I get to tell people. Yeah, so that's kind of what's up with me. I'm going to try And get those things implemented today. So hopefully that'll move the needle a little bit on signups. It was Yeah, it's definitely been a very trough of sorrow six weeks though I was like, Wow, that's a long time. eek.

Michele Hansen 15:13
So I mean, there's the reason why there is that product lifecycle, like chart that has the trough of sorrow on it is because the trough of sorrow is normal.

Colleen Schnettler 15:27
is normal. Oh, okay. This will be interesting.

Michele Hansen 15:31
Yeah, yeah. There's like this whole image that's like the I didn't know that. Okay. Yeah. No, I when I said trough of sorrow, I was referencing something. Okay. I'll have to, I'll have to find it and send it to you. And also put it in the show notes. So everybody else who's like, What is she talking about? And then like five products, people listening are like, Oh, my God, I know that. I forget where it comes from. I think it might be like, it might have been a business of software talk at one point. That

Colleen Schnettler 15:57
Okay, oh, no,

Michele Hansen 15:58
I think it might be the constant contact. Founder person.

Colleen Schnettler 16:03
Has she interested in her? I don't know. Okay.

Michele Hansen 16:07
Yeah, I'm gonna find it. It'll be in the show notes. So listening does not have to, like wonder

Colleen Schnettler 16:13
what it was to go dig through the internet to try and find it

Michele Hansen 16:16
like normal to have, you know, periods when you're like, Okay, like, nothing happened. I mean, granted, you said that you kind of weren't really doing anything with it. So the fact that your revenue didn't like crater even though you basically didn't touch it for six weeks, like, that's awesome.

Colleen Schnettler 16:36
Yeah, that's super awesome. Like,

Michele Hansen 16:39
again, you know, to our conversations of like, if you ever wanted to sell this thing, like the fact that you didn't touch it for six weeks, and it kept making money. huge selling point.

Colleen Schnettler 16:48
Yeah, yeah, it's super. so far. It's been super low touch, which is awesome. It's so funny, because years and years ago, I used to obsessively read. Do you know, Pat Flynn is smart, passive income guy? No. Okay. He's got this whole empire built about trying to teach people how to build passive income on the internet. Okay. And I used to obsessively read his blog. I mean, we're talking like 10 years ago. And here I am with kind of sort of passive income ish. And that's kind of cool. Yeah, you did anyway. So, yeah. Tell me about how things are going with the book and your podcast tour.

Michele Hansen 17:26
Oh, so they're going so I think you had challenged me to be on 10-20 I feel like it was 20. I feel like

Colleen Schnettler 17:37
I mean, it's been a while, but I feel like it was more than 10.

Michele Hansen 17:41
So okay, so I have been on a couple at this point. So I was working, I was on searching for SaaS with Josh and Nate which sweet By the way, so of like people like our dynamic of like, you know, somebody like who has a SaaS and then somebody who's like trying to start one and like different phases, you would totally love searching for SaaS, because Josh has been running his business for, like, quite a long time, referral rock, has employees like, and then Nate is kind of has like consulting and is trying to figure out a SaaS. So I was on searching for SaaS, they were my first one. Um, and I'm so glad I did one with like, friends, because I was so nervous about the whole like, and I'm promoting a book, but it feels like self promotion, and I just just like is uncomfortable for me. So. So so I'm really glad I did it with them first, and then I recorded another one. That's actually they told me was not going to be out for another three or four months. So we'll hear about that one when it comes out. Is

Colleen Schnettler 18:45
that a secret?

Michele Hansen 18:47
No. I mean, I just, I'll just tweet about it when it like comes out. But that counts, right? That's two. Yeah. And then I was on one night in product with Jason Knight, which came out a couple like, yeah, a couple days ago. That was super fun. Because that's like a podcast for product people. And we like really like dove deep on some of the different books and the differences and like, my fears around like people using this to like manipulate others was really it was really good. Um, so that's three and then I was on indie hackers, that that just came out. So that was kind of fun. I feel like I feel like I don't know like, I feel like it is like so legit. Like I don't know, it was kind of it was kind of wild. Indie hackers. Yeah. Being on the indie now.

Colleen Schnettler 19:46
Did you talk about Geocodio or do you talk about the book or both?

Michele Hansen 19:49
we talked about Geocodio a little bit but mostly about the book. Just kind of Geocodio as background.

Colleen Schnettler 19:58
Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah, getting on Indie hackers that's basically making it. Like, that's amazing.

Michele Hansen 20:05
Yeah. Like, can I be like, starstruck at myself for like,

Colleen Schnettler 20:09
yes, you totally can. Like, I just think like, that's like, you know, that's like my life goal. No, that's not really a life goal. But I'm like, someday I will be on indie hackers. Someday Courtland will ask. I know, if I just take a couple more years. No, I love that podcast. I think that's wonderful. And yeah, yeah. Now you're kind of famous like, totally. Once you're an indie hackers, you've made it.

Michele Hansen 20:33
I know, you're so funny. So like, I you're talking about this a little bit when when we add Adam on a few weeks ago that like, you know, I for a long time, like, like, so I didn't know that this whole community existed and that I knew about it, but I didn't feel like, feel like I was like, legit enough to like, be there, which was not true and was just my own imposter syndrome speaking. But for years, I had this like, sort of self policy that I would only go to conferences if I was speaking at them, because then people would come up to me and have something to talk about. Otherwise, I would be like standing in the corner, like not talking to anyone and like feeling like super out of it. Um, and so now I'm like, Okay, you know what, like, now if I like, go to something like, I feel like there's a good chance that like, one person, like, knows me, and we'll have something to talk about.

Colleen Schnettler 21:29
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's a benefit of sharing your work, I think the way you have been. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 21:38
yeah. So um, okay, so wait, so I lost count. Okay, so searching first as you're coming out in a couple of months. And Indie Hackers. Oh, wait, I think I forgot one. No, no, that's four. And then I recorded one yesterday. So that's five and then I am recording another one. today. So Wow, six. And then I'm scheduling another one. like trying to get that one on the calendar. Um, that person is also on pacific time like you and dude, it is so hard for me to schedule things with pacific time. Like, yeah, that nine hour time difference is required at the top planning. So I guess that's that's six I have either recorded or in the hopper. And I think there was more people who reach out to me, but I think they DMed me and I need to like, cuts through the jungle morass that is my DMs.

Colleen Schnettler 22:48
That's great. I mean, honestly, 10 would it be spectacular? Colleen said, I have really 20. I know, now that I'm actually thinking through the logistics? That seems like a lot. Let me out of this. That's really great. So my next question would be, have you seen any, any impact yet of being on these podcasts? In terms of sales or community engagement or anything like that?

Michele Hansen 23:15
Yeah, I mean, I guess the the biggest bump was definitely product times. Um, like, I think I saw like that day, like, I sold like 20 something. Or like, almost 30 copies, I think out of, I don't know, because I'm probably at like 350 now, or no, actually, it's more than that. Almost 400. So, oh, wait, maybe I'll be at almost 500 soon. That would be fun. Yeah. So So yeah, so there was definitely a little bump out of that. I did look this up for Josh and Nate from Searching for SaaS. And I sold three copies a day that one came out. So they were pretty pumped about that. I mean, I think it's the kind of thing where, like, not everybody, like listens to a podcast on the day. It comes. Yeah. Like, I was, like a regular listener of us. And like, they were like three episodes behind, because, you know, you've listened to it whenever you can. And there's other stuff going on. So in many ways, it's like, it's not really for the immediate hit of that in the same way that say like product time was,

Colleen Schnettler 24:27
um, yes, yeah, yeah, long game.

Michele Hansen 24:30
The long game there we go. Looking for. Um, so I mean, I guess we'll see. Right, because it's like, this is you know, this is not a like Big Bang. Launch. Right. Like, this is like the the book is hopefully designed or like written in a way, you know, to be a book that people recommend to other people they buy for their team. Like it's not like it's not particularly timely or relevant to like current events? So it's okay, if it doesn't, you know, sell like a bajillion copies in the first two months. Like, that's totally fine. You know, it's funny I was I was, I came across a tweet by our mutual friend, Mike Buckbee this morning, saying that, you know, validation for something is when you're getting stranger money. Like people who don't know you, they're not your friends. They're not the people that follow you. They're just like people who, you know, come across it for a reason. And then they buy it, and they're happy with it. And the book is definitely getting stranger money. So

Colleen Schnettler 25:42
wonderful.

Michele Hansen 25:43
Yeah. So So I so I think that's kind of a sign that it's, it was like, I mean, it was actually getting that in the presale. So. So I think that's a sign that, you know, things are in the right track, but it's just like, this is gonna be a slow burn.

Colleen Schnettler 25:59
Yes.

Michele Hansen 26:00
Yeah. So I mean, I'm happy with things, you know, again, like considering that, I think it was like most self published books only sell like 250 copies lifetime. And then most published books sell 300 copies their first year. Um, I've already, like smashed that. So anything on top of that, basically, is gravy. And but again, like those numbers, like are kind of like I look at that I'm like, Yeah, cool. Okay, like, but mostly, it's like, people tweet out, like, somebody tweeted out this morning that, like, they had their first customer interview, and it was delightful. And they learned so much. And like, they had scheduled it for 15 minutes. But at the customer's insistence, it went on for almost an hour. And they learned so much. And it was like, and I was like yes. Okay, like this. Okay, the book did what it was supposed to do like that. Yeah, that is what makes it feel like a success more than Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 26:49
that's anything that's really cool. Well, in the money. I mean, you know, I was thinking about, like, what motivates you Because for me, I want life changing money, you could get life changing money, any, anytime you want it like you You, you could just snap your fingers because you have a successful business. So that's something that I assume does not motivate you, because you kind of already have it. And so you know, when I think about the book, and like how you've been motivated, it really feels like helping people like really literally helping people learn how to be empathetic is what has driven this passion project for you.

Michele Hansen 27:27
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's been a very, like, personal sort of mission, because it's not just about talking to customers like, and, and I guess what I mean, so one of them's actually this will be coming out the same day. So I guess I can talk about it. But I was talking about this a lot with Justin Jackson, on on Build Your SaaS about how, like, he was reading the book, and it made him realize like, oh, wow, like, I can actually use this in my personal life too. And like, it's like, not just a business book. And I was, you know, saying to him how, like, I think I've told you how, you know, people don't put be more empathetic on their daily to do lists, but they put, write the landing page, improve the documentation, get more sales, like, stop churn, figure out if people can use the thing I bill, like, that's the stuff that ends up on your to do list, and you can use empathy to solve those problems. And then in the course of doing that, you realize that you can transfer some of these skills to your personal life as well. Then it's like a double win.

Colleen Schnettler 28:38
Wow. Yeah. So the other day, my 10 year old asked me what empathy was, and I literally handed him your book. Like, read this book.

Michele Hansen 28:48
Let me guys this because this is the question that I get from children and adults, but children generally their first question, why is there a duck on the cover?

Colleen Schnettler 28:58
He totally asked that. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 29:03
Love it. Love it. Well, you know, you can tell him that he will find out when he gets to let me just flip through it here. I believe it's chapter 34. Um, you know, never accused me of burying the lede here. To get 138 pages, you will discover why there is a duck on the cover.

It has been fun talking to you, as always, you too.

Colleen Schnettler 29:45
I'll talk to you next week. All right.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Noko. https://nokotime.com/

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Colleen Schnettler 0:52
Michele, it's so good to talk to you. So I have been following some of the things you've been tweeting about recently, and I saw that you did a Product Hunt launch for the book.

Michele Hansen 1:05
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 1:06
Tell us about that was quite a roller coaster. Yeah, I am fascinated. I want to hear all about it.

Michele Hansen 1:14
So um, gosh, I don't even I don't even know where to start. Because it was it was kind of it was kind of a spur of the moment thing. Like I've been planning to do a Product Hunt launch for a long time, but I didn't really know exactly when. And I think it was a we've talked about how my, like, original deadline for the book was before I started Danish language classes, right. I feel like we I don't know. But yeah, okay. So I actually started them last Monday. So you know, even though like, when I finished my MBA, I was like, I am done with school forever, like, never again. And you know, here I am again. Um, so I started Monday of this week. And so the 20th I was like, I saw I was starting, you know, the in a couple of days. And I was like, You know what, I just need to do this. Now I want to get this launch done. Before I'm like thinking about school again, cuz I'm not gonna have as much time. So that's basically like, why I did it on Friday morning. Now, apparently, when you launch on product time, you're supposed to get someone like, well known to basically hunt the product for you and submit it for you. And then I guess it notifies all of that person's followers, and then it helps with your ranking and stuff like that. I did not do that. I just submitted it myself.

Colleen Schnettler 2:46
Wait, okay. pause, pause, pause. Okay, so let's back up a little bit. So you were on Friday morning, you woke up and you're like, I should put the book on Product Hunt today? Is that like, what happened? No. No, I

Michele Hansen 2:57
needed to send out a newsletter that morning. Because I had I had something I wanted to send out. And I was like, you know, why don't I just throw it up on product time. Like, let's just get that over with and do it and like, so like, I just like wrote up a post, I took a couple of screenshots of like the book and the table of contents. And like, I like put it up, like, apparently people hire like consultants and pay them like 1000s of dollars to try to get a good ranking on on product ton. And they spend all this time recruiting someone to hunt it for them. And like there's this whole, like product launch a Product Hunt launch strategy that I was completely oblivious to. So

Colleen Schnettler 3:37
yeah, I've heard that. That's a hole that if you there's like so many articles about how to properly do product on and there's consultants, yes. Okay, so tell us what you did. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 3:47
I guess it didn't. I don't know. I it didn't occur to me to research it first. Because I don't know. I just didn't so I just threw it up there. And then I sent it out to the newsletter and was like, hey, like, you know, Product Hunt today. And so it was like going pretty well. Like I sent it out like first thing in the morning European time. And by like lunchtime or so here it had like 30 or 40 upvotes which was like way more than most of the other products on the homepage. And I started being like in the people started being like I can't find your product like I searched for it. It doesn't show up like it's not on the homepage like like she usually like reach out to them or something because something is wrong. And this is somebody on Twitter who jumped in and they're like, Oh, they shadow ban info products, because there's so many of them that they shadow ban them by defaults, if you're submitting it and you're not like a you know a sort of name brand person submitting it.

Colleen Schnettler 4:47
What is shadow ban mean?

Michele Hansen 4:48
Oh, so shot. Shadow banning is when you post it and it looks normal to you and you can send people the link, but it doesn't show up on the homepage and it doesn't show up in search.

Colleen Schnettler 5:00
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen 5:01
So basically you don't know you're banned from the homepage. So, so weird, but I guess there's like so many that I currently the logic is that there's so many info products that like, they basically want to cut down on the number of them going to the front page of product on. So and then I kind of like started tweeting about this and I'm not really sure what happened. But I like reached out to their support on their website and on Twitter. And then I think some other people also backchannel that to community people at Product Hunt. And then yeah, it was on the the front page. Like it just appeared at number four. And it was like, Oh, this is kind of fun. Like, we went from being like, completely invisible and thinking this was a huge waste of time. to like, now it's ranked number four. That's pretty amazing. And I just woke up and did this this morning. Like, this is fun. And that's all and then it kind of just kept going. Wonderful. Yeah. And I was actually I was getting like, last minute, like, you know, sort of, like, play by play advice from Arvid call in my DMS. I'm like, okay, like, here's what you do, like, make sure you reply to everybody, like, you know, all this stuff. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. Like, I was like, such like totally green at this. Um, and, yeah, it was it was wild. And then it ended up going up to number one. And oh, that's exciting day. And I just checked it a 512 up votes.

Colleen Schnettler 6:36
That's amazing. Wild.

Michele Hansen 6:40
Super wild. I've never really done a, like a Product Hunt launch. Like, we I mean, we didn't launch geocoder one Product Hunt. Like we actually launched before Product Hunt had their show h n launch, which when geocoder launched a show h n launch was like, what a Product Hunt launches now. I guess. Yeah. It was so funny. I remember coming across it in our refers for geocoder to and I was like, What is this product on thing and like, signed up? Um, so yeah, anyway, so that was, that was pretty crazy. Um, that's

Colleen Schnettler 7:20
really cool. Yeah, it

Michele Hansen 7:21
was it the whole thing about it, like, not showing up and like what was wrong and like, all these people kind of like rallying around it too. And like so many people tweeting out the the posts and commenting and like, I just felt like I was collectively being lifted up by people all over the world simultaneously. And it was, it was lovely. It was pretty, it was pretty surreal. It was it is

Colleen Schnettler 7:49
as bad. It's awesome. So have you seen the Product Hunt success? increase the number of sales of the book?

Michele Hansen 8:00
Yeah, so I actually did get a little bit of a nice little bump out of it. So I learned later that the benefit of being number one on product one is not only are you number one that day, but you're also number one in the newsletter. And so you get another bump after that. Okay, cool. And so if I just pull up the numbers really quick. So the the total have sold 344 individual copies, which excludes a bulk portfolio wide purchase that a fund made. So okay, so it's been 180 on Amazon 160 PDF copies total, including the pre order. And then for audio book only pre sell copy, so 344 total. And so of all of that, so 23 of those PDF copies are from since the Product Hunt, launch, and then 59 print copies since the product launch.

Colleen Schnettler 9:11
Wow. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 9:12
so it's a pretty good bump.

Colleen Schnettler 9:14
Yeah, that's great. Yeah. So how are you feeling about the whole feeling good, like

Michele Hansen 9:18
I'm starting to come across like podcasts of people talking about it or blog post they wrote about it, or people tweeting out like, I'm reading the book, I'm ready to do a practice interview, like who wants to pair up with me like, all that kind of stuff. But just that just gives me warm fuzzies when when I come across that kind of thing, and

Colleen Schnettler 9:42
I love it.

Michele Hansen 9:43
Like for so many years, I you know, I tried to write blog posts, and most of the time they would just like land with a thought like there was a couple that did okay, but most of time I would like I would fuss over them and have friends edit them and like, then they would just go nowhere. And so it's still like kind of bewildering and surreal to have people like, be excited about something that I wrote because I'm so used to just like being nothing. Um, so all of this is just this really delightfully surreal.

Colleen Schnettler 10:27
I love that. Do you think it's better, you didn't actually know you were doing Product Hunt wrong, because you would have not launched it, if you had realized how some people do it.

Michele Hansen 10:37
I think it might have been sort of intimidating to look at. It's like, oh, like, shoot, like, people hire consultants for this. And like, there's, they're like, producing videos for it. Like they have, like, this whole, like, strategy around it, like, but I think it also goes to show like, you know, I mean, the, the real power of building in public or writing in public, and, you know, like, the people in the community were part of this from the very beginning. And, you know, so No, I did not pay a consultant 20 $500 to get to the top of product and like, the book got there, because everyone's been a part of this process. And contributing to it from the very beginning. It was on the strength of community. It's, there's, it's pretty, it's funny, I've had people like DM me now. Like, oh, like, what's your advice for getting to the top of product? And I'm like to Don't ask me. Like, dude, like, don't do what I did. Like that was apparently wrong.

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's people who have written guides about this, and everything.

Colleen Schnettler 12:04
Oh, yeah. They're all over the I like someone recommended Product Hunt to me once. And I was like, Oh, okay. And I don't use Product Hunt. Like, I don't even think I'm on it. And so I googled it. And it was like, Oh, my gosh, there's so much information, how to do a Product Hunt, it needs to be Tuesday at 4pm. Because that is the optimal time. Like, it was a whole thing. And I was like, so this is so wonderful that it's worked out for you. And I also saw you are going to start your private podcast.

Michele Hansen 12:30
Oh, yeah. The first chapter already went out.

Colleen Schnettler 12:35
Sweet. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 12:36
I think I'm gonna roll them up like so I was kind of trying to like couple weeks ago, we're talking like, should we do one chapter a week or like, do like two different drops a week because there's 50 chapters in the book. And so we did that, then it would take a whole year to get that book, which seems very long time, it's very long. So it seems excessive. So this week, I dropped the the title and the chapter one as two separate episodes on the same day. But I think for next week, what I'm going to do is I've rolled up several chapters, and basically all drop, do one like episode a week, that is multiple chapters, with a goal of that episode being 15 to like 25 minutes. So it might be like chapters 234. And then the next one might be chapter five, and six, depending on how long those chapters are, because some of the chapters are pretty short. So

Colleen Schnettler 13:37
yeah, that makes sense. And try to make it like

Michele Hansen 13:39
normal. Normal podcast length, but more on like, walk the dog a little bit longer length rather than run three miles. Length if you run at my speed, which is not fast, depending on Yeah, so uh, yeah. So yeah, I think I'm gonna do that. So then it'll go a bit faster. But I don't want I mean, I don't want to like drag the whole thing and I already recorded like 18 chapters, I think. Wow. Yeah. So I'm going to do another recording day in a couple couple weeks. Maybe next week. Maybe I should do another one. I like surrounded my desk and pillows and like put a blanket gonna ask on my Yeah, I totally did a pillow for it. The NPR pillow for it. Yeah. of like, just surrounding my desk and pillows to improve the sound quality. And yeah, putting a blanket over my desk. So I feel like it should, you know, it should it should sound good. I don't want it to sound you know, homegrown and, or Yeah, you know, like I want it to sound Good question like people should pay for it. Yeah. So

Colleen Schnettler 15:04
yeah, totally. That makes sense. Yeah, it's well, that's really exciting. Um, you've had a really exciting couple weeks,

Michele Hansen 15:10
I've been talking to you a couple of weeks, and you have been doing seriously exciting, as we talked about a couple weeks ago. So you are now my cool kid friend, I moved to California and joined a startup. And totally,

Colleen Schnettler 15:21
it was crazy. I can't even tell you like, everything just went crazy. But it is super exciting. And I think something that has not been well communicated is we are basically being funded because we are being paid to me really, to build out this product. And so and we get to keep the IP. So this is really exciting for me. I can't think of what else I would rather do with my life. Besides, you know, normal life stuff with do with my career, then build a business with people I like, like, that's my whole life goal right there.

Michele Hansen 15:57
That sounds amazing.

Colleen Schnettler 15:59
It is. Yeah. So I'm super pumped. It is a lot of stuff of new stuff. But it's a really cool opportunity. The guys that I'm partnering with are great. I've known them for years. And I finally get co founders, which I'm super happy about because doing it alone is lonely.

Michele Hansen 16:17
So I feel like we should back up. Yeah, that's a very basic question. So So a couple of months ago, you took a job? Do you? Do you still have that job?

Colleen Schnettler 16:33
I do not. Okay.

Michele Hansen 16:35
So this is what we were talking about in decisions dishes and was should you? So you have you have that had that job? And then should you continue doing simple file upload? And how does this whole Hammerstone thing fit into it? And one of those options there we did not talk about was like, quit the full time job and like go whole hog and jump in headfirst on Hammerstone. So let's like,

Colleen Schnettler 17:07
yeah, it was, I mean, I just everything went a little bit crazy. I announced that I took that job. And maybe part of this is building in public. or part of this is just the market right now. And I am not kidding you. Within a week I had three other people offering me jobs. Like they're like, Oh, I didn't know you were taking a job. So everything got a little crazy. When I took that job, I had every intention of being with that company for years. It was a great company. I love the people. I love their mission. But this opportunity came up to do really exciting work as part of this startup. And I had to choose because there was no way this startup stuff is full time. I mean, there's no way I could do both. So I unfortunately had to quit the job I had for what a month, maybe two months, and go all in with the startup. So it's very exciting. But it was a lot of stuff.

Michele Hansen 18:04
Yeah, I mean, that must have been so much to go through in such a short amount of time. And then you're I mean, you're a very you're he You're a very reliable person who can be taken at their word and sticks to it. And yeah, for you to walk away from something after a month. I imagine that was very difficult for you. And also that shows just how excited you are about Hammerstone.

Colleen Schnettler 18:42
Yeah, and I think it was really hard. It was a really hard conversation to have with my boss, who was super amazing and gracious. But it was just an opportunity. I couldn't turn down. It was so I mean, and it's high risk, high reward, right like this could burn out. And I could just be back in regular consulting land. But you know, when you're basically offered to be funded for something, but like, I don't know, that's literally what I want to do. So I couldn't turn it down. Yes, it was really hard, Michelle, because I think especially with what I do, like my business is built on relationships. And my reputation is the most important thing I have in this business as a software developer. And so I absolutely need to be very careful of that and how I handle these kinds of situations. And so that's why it was so hard to make this decision. But ultimately, the opportunities with Hammerstone are just and the problem space is really exciting. From a developer perspective, like the problem space we're working on. It's really cool. It's just really intellectually intriguing. So that coupled with like the equity it was, yeah, I mean, it was hard decision, but I think I made the right one. If I'm crying on the podcast in six months, it means I did it. Just kidding. As a joke. I made a terrible mistake. know if I made a mistake or not. But I got to go all in like, I'm in a position where I can go all in. Because you know, we have health really because we have health coverage through my spouse's job. So, man, it was tough though, because I took the full time job with every plan to stay there for years, and this opportunity came up and it was just like, I cannot This is literally what I want to do is build businesses with my friends, period.

Unknown Speaker 20:25
Yeah. So

Michele Hansen 20:27
yeah, so there's two things I want to dive into there. The first is, yeah, like, what's so exciting about it? And what Hammerstone? Like, does and what you're gonna be doing for it? And then the second one, and I think I want to start there is is the funding side just to sort of, sort of distill that a little bit? So if I understand correctly, so there's the Hammerstone team, which is you, Aaron and Shawn, right? Correct. Correct. And then hit Hammerstone has a client that themselves has a client, then that that second level clients is paying your clients for Hammerstone, to build their thing into client number one's app? And then you get to keep the IP from that, is that? Right? That's,

Colleen Schnettler 21:38
that's, that's kind of right. Yeah, that's kind of right. So basically, you

Michele Hansen 21:43
know, if I dive I follow that fully, but okay.

Colleen Schnettler 21:47
So I think, yeah, so basically, we have a client, that's a pretty big client, and then there's a middle layer, and then there's, well, really, there's the client, then there's Hammerstone, then there's me. So we're still we were separated as three layers. And so now I'm joining Hammerstone. So it's actually there's one less layer in there. So it's just, it's just the client to Hammerstone. And so the client has agreed to basically fund the development of this piece of software, the software is a query builder. And that sounds so exciting. Like when I say Query Builder, people are like, what I don't get the big deal. But the nuance and like, the power of what we're doing with this query builder is really cool. It's just, it's such a constant problem, like everyone I have ever worked for basic, smart queries are really tough, you're usually putting scopes on the model, and you're trying to chain those scopes together, oh, here, they want this here, they want this. So we're basically trying to extrapolate all of that away, pull all of that out of your model, and allow you to define these queries in a filter. And we're going to provide both the front end and the back end interface. And it's, I mean, again, we need to work on messaging because no one is excited when I tell them what it is. But once you see it in practice, you're like, Oh, this is amazing. So

Michele Hansen 23:12
that's kind of the product. Can we back up for a hot second? And I want you to assume that I don't know anything about web development. Colleen, okay. Yeah, what's the Query Builder?

Colleen Schnettler 23:27
So, Michelle, what is your favorite online shop? store to buy clothes or shoes or whatever you're into?

Michele Hansen 23:34
j crew.

Colleen Schnettler 23:36
Okay, so if you want to go to the J crew website, and you want a V neck sweater in orange in stock in your size available at your store, tall order, that's a query. Okay, right. I mean, a lot of places kit. That's like a search, which is funny. Yes. Which is funny, because that's how I described it to my husband. I was like, show me the Nike website. And let me show you how we're gonna make Nike better, because that's his favorite shop. Got it. Okay. Um, so, you know, traditional, I don't want to get to it's like a search.

Michele Hansen 24:10
So are you like competing with like, like, algolia or

Colleen Schnettler 24:15
so it's actually no, because we're, it's actually how you build up. So we actually build up the SQL, so you'd still use a like, you could still use like, this client is using Postgres timescale dB. So you could still use a different service for for your database, but we're actually building up this performance sequel in so it's at the model layer, but it extrapolates the the querying the scoping, we call it scoping and rails, I don't know what people call it another languages out of the models, so it like extrapolates all of that away. So it but it builds it The cool thing is like it provides both the front end component and the back end component. So ideally, it will be a drop in piece of software, but you as a developer Like, okay, so I have a client, they do real estate, right. And so they have this huge problem with search because people want this super specific things that they want to search. And this is a constant problem. tuning the searches to be exactly what people want to find. But for example, they don't want you to be able to search based on I don't know, like what on who the agent is, let's say that's just an example. So this query builder is actually a drop in software component that I can put in the app. But I as the developer, when I integrate it can also say, Do not let them search by listing agent only allow them to search by this, this and this. So it gives, it's just really powerful. And where it really shines is like in relationship building, because that is always a problem, right? When you have to reach through all these tables. And then if you have these huge SQL tables, like trying to join these tables is a problem. So we're trying to fix all those problems. It's a really interesting problem space for me, because our client is like big data. And not I haven't worked with like super billions and billions of records. So I haven't worked with that kind of big data before. So it's gonna be really exciting.

Michele Hansen 26:06
You're really excited about this.

Colleen Schnettler 26:09
I know this is like, honestly, this is what it came down to with, like jabber, jabber about SQL. But I think when it came down to making this decision, which was super hard, because my job was so wonderful. It came down to this is literally what's gonna what's hap what happened. So the Hammerstone guys, were gonna hire someone to take over for me. And then I just couldn't let it go. I was like, Oh, well, can I like I just because the, to me, the problem space is fascinating. They were like, they were going to hire someone. And they're like, Well, you know, you could mentor him or whatever. And I was like, yeah, and then we should redesign it to do this. And we should redesign it to do this, and I just wouldn't let it go. And I think to me, that was a indication that the problem space was so fascinating for me, and I just really, really want to solve the problem. You know, when you get a problem in your head like that, and you're like, this is amazing. I must spend Well, yeah, of course you do you. This is like I'm speaking Michelle. Right.

Michele Hansen 27:04
Yeah, I know a little bit about what it is like to

Colleen Schnettler 27:08
to become obsessed with some Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's a huge change. Who knows if I made the right decision, but I made the decision that that I think is the right decision. I guess that's all that matters. But it's been a it's been a roller coaster of what? A couple three weeks here.

Michele Hansen 27:26
So yeah, so what does this mean for a simple file upload?

Colleen Schnettler 27:30
So simple, but it's still rockin and rollin? I think. So although i've you know, I'm working full time for these new guys, but it's gonna be kind of the same dear deal, wolf were full time is 32 hours per week. So I should still have that extra day per week to work on simple file upload. And I'll be honest, like now that I'm settled, I feel like a lot of energy for simple file upload. Like I feel I actually wrote a piece of content finally didn't take that long. I know, right. But um, I feel good about it, it's still not going to be super fast. But I feel good about putting energy into it and putting time into it and making it you know, keeping it where it was going to be, which was, you know, eight to 10 hours a week.

Michele Hansen 28:16
Do you feel less pressure with simple file upload? No.

Colleen Schnettler 28:21
Yeah, I do. I think I mean, if I had not that I would want to pick one to succeed. But I am super pumped to have co founders. I mean, I'm super pumped. The Hammerstone team is so great, because I'm going to do the real stuff. Aaron is like a layer of Bal Laravel. Laravel.

Michele Hansen 28:40
Yeah. superstar, right. Yeah, he's like, really light stuff. People are like, super Hammerstone Yeah, okay. Okay. I thought but yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 28:51
Okay. Yeah. So he, so he's kind of, you know, doing great things in the Laravel. World, he did torchlight. And he's trying to do some other things just to get our reputation out there as like a company that makes really quality software components. And then we have Shawn, who's our front end guy. And Sean also has a lot more experience from a marketing and success standpoint, if you will, because Shawn, in the past, has had a product that has been his only, you know, has supported his family. And so he's been there so he can actually see past that, which is really an interesting perspective. Aaron, and I is relatively, you know, we both have mildly successful products, but like, we're both kind of new to this. And so we're approaching it in different ways. So Shawn is like Yeah, sure. I think we can get to, you know, 200k or whatever. How do you get past your network? And Aaron and I don't have never gotten to 200k with a product so we can't even conceptualize that. Right. So I think we're gonna be a really good team.

Michele Hansen 29:50
You I feel like what I'm hearing is like you sound really fulfilled by this hair. We're stone work. And I think for a long time, simple file upload came out of that desire to be fulfilled where client work was, like paying the bills, but not necessarily super soul nourishing for you. And then you took the job. And it was, you know, it was you had all intentions of staying there. And making that work and, and everything else. But it did not feel like a calling for you. Which, you know, for the vast majority of people, their day job is not their calling, or something that's fulfilling, and that's perfectly fine. Um, but I feel and then it shifted that that simple file upload was then like your source of like, personal fulfillment. But I feel like now I'm hearing you sound super fulfilled by the Hammerstone work. And that kind of takes some of the financial and emotional pressure off of the work that you do with simple file upload.

Colleen Schnettler 31:07
Yeah, I think that's an accurate assessment, I think, yeah, simple file upload definitely fulfill that need when I was working clients. Yeah, I think I think you're right, like, it's really exciting to see where this is gonna go.

Michele Hansen 31:21
And I'm super pumped you because we don't do side projects just for the money. Right? Like, you know, very often they come out of that, like, it's certainly, you know, I've talked a lot about how do cardio certainly did. But then we've also talked about how, you know, the book for me was like, you know, it was not for money. And it was not because it was a good decision with my time it was because I enjoyed it. And I needed it myself. And I think sometimes that's a really good space for side projects to be in where sometimes you just need an outlet for fun. And, gosh, I guess given this last year, when you're stuck in your house, and you can't really go do a lot of fun outside your house, like, you know, side projects can fill that need, you know, in the same way that we talked about, you know, when you're interviewing someone looking for the, the functional purpose of why they bought something, but then also the emotional and social purposes. And, and I guess I you know, in for me coming off of everything with with Product Hunt, and all of that community support, like I'm really thinking about those social and emotional components of launching things. And I hear you talking about Hammerstone. And I hear that fulfillment, and I think you have said maybe three times in the last half hour, how excited you are to finally have co founders like that loneliness and struggle and having to figure everything out on your own has been a running theme for you with simple fileupload.

Colleen Schnettler 33:08
Yes, so I've basically figured out the rest of my life, because I'm now I'm wise. So I'm going to tell you, by my life, I mean your life to Okay, so you're absolutely right. Like, I kind of came to this realization. So this was a hard decision like agonizing, actually. And when it came down to it, when you're financially stable enough that you can make these kinds of decisions. As I think I said earlier, running a business with my friends, literally, if I could do that the rest of my career I'm in. So I think I've mentioned before, that when we started this podcast, I said, Michelle is gonna write a book, and I'm gonna launch a product and you were like, man, it is never gonna happen.

Michele Hansen 33:48
Okay, so now you are actually like a clip of that, like, do we have a recording of that somewhere? Or is that I don't like the two of us talking about it. And like, I don't know.

Colleen Schnettler 33:57
I know, like, I would love to go back. I've actually started listening to some of our all of our podcasts, which is amazing, by the way, kind of go back and listen to them, but I haven't come across it yet. But so Hammerstone is hopefully going to make me a ton of money. It's gonna be super fun. We'll do it for five years ish. And then you and I are going to start a business where we help people, women specifically start their own businesses. Oh, yeah. So you and I are definitely gonna start a business someday. It's like five to 10 years in the future. And it's gonna be an altruistic business. And we're gonna figure that out. But that is my life plan for us. You're welcome. For my life plan.

Unknown Speaker 34:38
You know, I feel like I'm here.

Michele Hansen 34:40
I feel like you like it. You like kind of dropped the idea of like software Social Fund, like a couple of months ago, like casually, and yeah, um, you know, something that I'm really intrigued by. So there's this guy Nick ramza in Maine who runs a nonprofit called Tor. labs, where he teaches people in rural Maine, how to have an online business. And it's a nonprofits. And these people are like making real money, real jobs, like, huge impact in their own lives. Actually, I've been meaning to have phone call with him. Hi, Nick. Um, so I mean, that's that's kind of the thing I feel like I think about, I don't think I would limit it to just women. Um, no, like, doesn't have to be evil. Yeah, yeah. But, um, but I love that if like doing an incubator, as a, like, a nonprofit or a, like, some sort of public benefit instead. But, but then of course, then you have to deal with like donor fundraising, and you still have to deal with investors, it's just donors and like, this, this is not happening anytime soon, because

Colleen Schnettler 36:01
they do not think about this. We're not doing these

Michele Hansen 36:06
years. Also, don't tempt us and send us offers to fund it either. Just like just not just know applications and just like, just just forget we, but

Colleen Schnettler 36:18
okay, I just wanted to get that on record. Because I see that as our future. Like, that's what I are apparently very

Michele Hansen 36:24
good at predicting the future. So like, when you say go buy here stocks and bet on some sports games, and heck, yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 36:32
sure, sure.

Unknown Speaker 36:35
So, anyway, well, that's fine. We're gonna wrap

Michele Hansen 36:38
up today with the conclusion that Colleen is apparently Nostradamus and things are things are. Things are happening in a way that I feel like all of it, you know, they say that there's times when nothing happens, and then there's times when everything happens. And I feel like both of us are in this time where everything happens. Like in the past month, I have launched a book and it is number one on product time and you have actually taken one job and quit it and then taken another job that you are super pumped about everything is happening and who knows what's going to happen in the future.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Noko. https://nokotime.com/

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Hey, everyone, welcome back to software social. So as you heard last week, Colleen joined the Hammerstone team. And she also just started a job recently. And she just moved California. So Colleen has a lot going on this week. And so for the benefit of her mental health, we decided that she should just take the week off. And I'm super excited because that meant that I got to bring a friend on the show this week. So I have Adam hill with us, Adam and I actually used to work together. He was the CTO at a place I used to work at. And he also has some projects going. So welcome, Adam. Hey, it's been a long time since we've caught. Yeah, it's weird. I should do this more often. No, no, when we had I had Murray pulling on a couple of weeks ago, the notion expert. And we like had that exact same conversation at the beginning of it was like, This is so weird. I talked to you online all the time. But we haven't actually spoken in a very long time.

Adam Hill 2:04
Right. talking over Twitter is a little bit different than hearing someone's voice.

Michele Hansen 2:08
Yeah. Yeah, it is. So so actually speaking of one of those conversations we are having so we were talking the other day about podcasts, and you were kind of thinking about maybe you start your own show or whatnot. But you said something in particular that I wanted to talk about? Because I think it is I think it's will strike a chord with a lot of people. And you said, I'm tired of hearing podcasts from people who don't struggle.

Adam Hill 2:41
Yes. Oh, all right. So no offense to you. And thank Colleen, because I think you guys do a great job of talking through the things that you're, you know, having problems with. And maybe this is just the podcast that I tend to listen to. But there seem to be a couple of categories. There's like, advice, podcasts, there are interview podcasts. And then there are kind of like two co founders, like talking through their last week sort of podcasts. And the advice podcasts seem to be more like, I'm an expert, I know what I'm doing. Here's 10 ways to get more traffic to your landing page, or whatever. The interview podcasts are more like, I just made a million dollars in the last year, like, asked me how I did it. And then the two co founders on a journey. Maybe that's the closest to like, these are the things that we're working through. And I'm having trouble with this or that. But even like, even Colleen, she's making $1,000 a month, which to me is like, That's crazy. Like that's, that's, you know, she's like having so much success. And, you know, maybe some of this is sort of like, everything is relative. I'm, I've tried a bunch of little side projects and startups over the years, and I've never gotten to $1,000 a month, but like, maybe she's looking at you and being like, well, Michelle is like Michelle and Mathias are supporting their family, you know, on their startup. So like, maybe it's just everyone is able to look at someone who is above them, quote, unquote, and see someone who is like, doing more of what they want to be doing.

Michele Hansen 4:40
I think what you're saying is is something that a lot of people feel, and I think that there's kind of this undercurrent of loneliness to a certain extent behind the sort of indie hacker indie SAS kind of world where you know if it's just your one person And working on something or maybe you have a co founder, like me, like, don't really have a lot of people in your daily life to talk to you about these kinds of things. And we're already sort of a lonely pursuit to like, try to start your own SAS on the weekend to then like, hear other people who are doing it, but to hear that they're like having the success that that seems elusive to you. Like that could reinforce that kind of feeling of loneliness. And I could understand how that might make you want to, you know, scream at your phone that like $1,000 is actually amazing. What are you talking about?

Adam Hill 5:40
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, Can you talk a little bit about, you know, I assume that it was very helpful for you and Mateus to be working on things together throughout the years, like when you were starting geocodes Oh, so like, was that your sort of like support system? Because there was no mic or cough at that point. And there was, you know, indie hackers, I don't think was around. Yeah. Can you just elaborate on on how that worked for you?

Michele Hansen 6:08
You know, we actually, we didn't go to micro conference till 2019. And we didn't go for so long. Because we didn't feel like legit enough to be there. Like, and I guess I didn't know that. Like the micro con growth side was a thing. But still, like, we didn't feel like we were, like, legit enough to be there even after we had gone full time.

Adam Hill 6:35
So when did you go full time? Was it 2017? So you didn't think that you belong to that community?

Michele Hansen 6:44
No, it existed really like so I remember actually, when I was when we started it like the only people we I don't think we knew anyone with side projects, really. And like we had friends were developers. And like, they gave us feedback on it. But like we didn't really know any, like, we knew people who were like freelance developers, who were like, you know, contracting, but like we didn't, I didn't know anybody who had like, started their own SAS and then ran it as like a one two person show. But so when I went full time in 2017, I remember really wanting community. And I actually started a meetup for like, people to work together from Whole Foods, I think, in DC. Yeah. Well, like it. Yeah, it was, I think I did like three, two or three times, like the first time nobody showed up. The second time. This, like other woman, who was a marketing consultant showed up and like, that was cool. And then we like sat next to each other at a table at Whole Foods. Yeah, didn't really talk. And I guess it was fine. And then and then the last time this like, got older guy showed up on like, pitched me how he could like we needed to get our business into China and how. And it was like, I don't know. And after that, I was like, this may, I don't know, maybe this isn't gonna work. And I shut down. And then I actually joined a co working space for I remember half a year but actually only went for like, the first three months, because then I really wanted to, like meet people and like, make friends and find other people in a similar situation. And like going to a co working space in DC there just really wasn't anybody doing that. Like, it wasn't 1776, right? No, it was actually so Okay, so, so context for the people who are not from DC. So 1776 I don't even know if it still exists, but it was like this, like, incubators, slash like co working space in downtown dc 1776 is actually where we did our buco to prototype testing. So we had friends who had a start up at 1776. And one day Mateus, like, you know, went there with his laptop and had people play around with the API and like, try to break it and you know, doing all the stuff about authentication and whatnot, that was actually at 1776. But I think they take a percentage of the company if you want to go work there, or they used to, I don't I don't I haven't really followed it and the last couple of years. Um, but yeah, and then and actually wasn't really until I kind of found the whole community on Twitter and like the whole micro content kind of world that I felt like I had, like community of people, but even then, if you find that community like it can be hard to feel like you are, like fit in like because I feel like people are super welcoming, but like I didn't know that from the outside. And then yeah, and then we kind of like showed up and then and then like we You start talking to people and everything and we like we kind of are like, Whoa, like, you know, we're not legit. And then you talk to people I was laughing Yeah, yeah, you know, in no revenue, like, you know, over a million, you know, like, and they're like, what, where have you been like you just came out of nowhere? Like you're like, Okay, I guess we could, I guess I guess we didn't have to have this like imposter syndrome about it for like, five years

Adam Hill 10:26
isn't gonna say imposter syndrome. I mean, that's what it sounds like. And I, we have a mutual friend, person who we used to work with, who has their own other startup, I went to lunch with him the other day. And you know, he's doing really well. And I was like, you could be talking about, you know, how well you're doing more if you want it to as sort of like content marketing or sharing, you know, your journey. And he doesn't really want to. So, I mean, that's interesting, because you said that you hadn't heard about micro comm for a long time. So I listened to startups for the rest of us which podcast for probably like 10 years, and sort of followed that journey. And then that podcast turned into micro Comm. And then it turned into tiny seed. So it's been fun to watch. That community is sort of like morph and change over time.

Michele Hansen 11:35
But we just kind of turned this about, like how I didn't feel included for a long time. But I think what we were intending to talk about was how you feel sort of alienated hearing about other people's success. And I recognize this is somewhat uncomfortable to talk about. But I also think it's important to talk about because I so many people feel this way, and not just about trying to launch a SAS but in general, like when you are struggling with something and all you see are examples of success. It is profoundly alienating and discouraging. And I think people think they're being motivating be like, look at me, I made, you know, like $10 million, or whatever, like last year and like, here's how you can do it by my course. Like, like those people have good intentions. But I think as as you know, like if you're in that position of being like, yeah, like my revenue is zero, and it has been zero for five years now. And I've watched 10 things like and you're like, what am I doing wrong? Is it me, like all these other people having success? Like, you know, it's like watching all of your friends get a boyfriend or girlfriend in high school, and you're like, what am I doing wrong?

Adam Hill 12:44
I think that, especially with some of the interview podcasts, the people who come on to talk are people who are, you know, successful in somewhere or other? Do you remember, there used to be a website when the.com boom, and bust was happening called f company? Um, I kind of want like a, like, what were the biggest mistakes that I made in my company or startup, I think that would be instructive and sort of helpful to show like, maybe that vulnerability of like, you are struggling with this thing. And, or I messed up this thing. And here are sort of maybe some takeaways or lessons from it. I think that would be sort of interesting,

Michele Hansen 13:45
huh? Yeah, I think people talking more about the, I think in the way that I think I'm quoting someone here that, you know, success is always contextually specific, like the specific resources and constraints and incentives and whatnot, that lead someone to be successful or not always, you know, immediately applicable to someone else, especially if they're in a different situation. I think it's also the success, the same for failure. And now, of course, it may be very, very difficult for someone who has had a failure to do that kind of analysis, but also breaking down those other things. Because then if you read that and be like, oh, like, they didn't have this resource that I have, like, maybe I could make this work, and I could overcome that. Is that kind of what you're thinking?

Adam Hill 14:36
Yeah, I think so. So sometimes, there'll be like a post mortem, when a startup goes away. They're always really interesting for me to read through. And I just wonder if, you know, basically, those are sort of like, there's one of them because then everything goes away after that. And, you know, it might be useful to sort of had a catalogue of those things. I don't know, I'm sort of just thinking off the top of my head,

Michele Hansen 15:14
it's almost like the inverse of, you know, say like, you know, indie hackers, for example, they do a lot of highlighting of people who have been successful and can inspire others. And there's, there's a place for that, and I almost was, what you're saying is like an inverse of that, that's like, here's my failure, or, like, here's my side project that I launched two years ago, and doesn't have any revenue, or, you know, it's been stuck at 300 MRR for a year, like, and here's what I think I'm doing wrong. And I'm gonna requires this like level of vulnerability that I think would take a lot for people to be willing to do that. And maybe they would want to do it anonymously. But then again, if they're on the show, and people are listening, then it's like, maybe marketing for their things. So I you know, but I think there really is something there because we all have more failures than successes. Like I think that's normal. It's also normal to like, hide the failures under the rug and be like, Oh, no, look at my successes look great. This was amazing, isn't it? Um, you know, like, I've watched stuff that failed. Like, I've like we've botched launches, like, like we've had, you know, customers wanting to, like, burn us down at points, like, maybe not for Juho do but like for other things like, absolutely. Like, it's, it's totally normal. In some ways, it's one of the reasons why I think I, you know, I'm, I want to hold on to God as long as I can, because like, starting a business is really hard. And like having to do it all over again. You know, the, the chance of failure is, is much higher. So I'm sorry, if you listen to this show for inspiration, because you're not getting it. You know, so I think is maybe enough on failure. I do want to talk about what you have launched, though, because you have done some really cool stuff. And I don't think you give yourself enough credit for it. So was it last year or the year before you launched Django unicorn, which is basically like Laravel Livewire for Django.

Adam Hill 17:37
Yeah, I think it was last year. And actually, I think it was a tweet that you responded to. I was like, I think I said something about, I wish you know, Laravel Livewire was for Django. And I think you said, Why don't you or something like that, so terrible. So thank you, I guess. Um, but yeah, so it is, um, it's a, it's basically a full stack framework for Django. So if listeners have ever used any, like front end framework, like view or react, they know that you basically, you have like your front end part of your website, and then you have the back end, and they sort of have to talk to each other. What, there's a couple of these out there, there's Phoenix Live View, and there's Laravel Livewire, and there's Django unicorn. And they basically let you build the interactive front end website easier, without having to basically build both pieces separately, and then connect them. It enables the nice user experience, quicker than having to build both pieces at the at the same time. So it's been a fun project. One thing that might be interesting about it is that it's all open source. But I have GitHub sponsors enabled on it. And so I do have a bunch of sponsors on it. Well, 10 ish, which for me is like more than a handful. That's awesome. So I don't know how you how you, you know, rank open source projects, but there's around 700 stars on GitHub, and nine to 10 sponsors. So for me, that's like, crazy successful. People are using it in production. So now it's, you know, responding to issues and bugs and trying to add features when I have time. But yeah, it's been It's been really fun to build it sort of, if you've heard of like the I didn't think about this at the time. But if you think about like the stair step approach where you like, you have like a small, little product, usually it's like a WordPress theme or a plugin for Shopify or something. Sometimes it's good to like, get your feet wet with that little thing before you like try to do like a SaaS product. It's been fun to sort of like, I have a whole marketing site for which we can sort of talking about marketing to developers, maybe if that's interesting, because I've sort of thought about that a bunch. But um, yeah, it's different than, you know, making a b2c startup for, you know, latitude and longitude, coordinates or, or whatever. Yeah, it's a, it's a whole different beast, I guess.

Michele Hansen 20:59
Yeah, I find the business model of open source really, really interesting. Because it's so different than, like, what we do, like we just sell to businesses who need what we need. And then that's kind of like it, like, we just have to be there when they're searching for it. And so you have I mean, sponsors on the project. I mean, it sounds like it is it is, like pretty successful. So to all of our talk about failure early on, and imposter syndrome, I feel like there's maybe a little bit that going on here, but I think it's like, so what do you want to like? Like, do with it? Like you mentioned that you're doing support? And like you're trying to add features when you have time? Like? Where do you want it to go?

Adam Hill 21:48
Yeah, that's a good question. Because I, I don't have a great answer for you. I think, you know, I'm maybe being naive, or like, super altruistic, but I really like the Django ecosystem, and Python. And sort of, I wanted to put something out there that people used and let them move faster and build things quicker, without a lot of pain and struggle. That was my initial goal. I enabled sponsors, sort of on a lark, because, well, it was the pandemic, and I had a lot of time. So I put a lot of time and effort into building out this framework, and then also all the documentation and marketing site. And so, you know, my initial goal was basically if I could pay my hosting fees, on Heroku, then it was a, you know, that was gonna be a win. And so I got that, which is great. It is interesting. So it's sort of like what I was talking about before where there's like, always someone sort of ahead of you that you kind of like look up to, um, I don't know if you know, the developer who does Livewire in Laravel. It's Caleb porzio. He is making a living off of Livewire and another JavaScript framework called Alpine. And so I kind of look to him as like, Oh, that's sort of That's crazy. He has enough sponsors where he can basically, you know, work on that full time. I don't know, that's not really my goal. But it's interesting to look at sort of the tactics that he is using to get that many sponsors and sort of do the things that make sense for unicorn as well.

Michele Hansen 23:53
Yeah, it seems like there's a couple different paths, you can go on with a product that is that is open source. You know, so I guess there's there's this sponsors approach. There's like people who sell courses and books on top of it like thing like tailwind, for example. I think the more like, classical example is like consulting services using it. And then there's kind of also like, what, what Hammerstone is doing, which Colleen is working on now, where I believe it's something like the back end is open, but the front end is not. And it's also there's also like, you can have sort of, like productized services on top of it. To where there's, there's like a, you know, like, I mean, a lot of Laravel stuff is like, there's there's a product that's, you know, that makes it easy to do all of those things. And so it's kind of interesting, I think about the different options like you could go down.

Adam Hill 24:49
It sounds like for Hammerstone. They also have a client who is sort of paying them to develop the thing and then to develop refine And then they'll be able to keep that IP. That's Yeah. From the last podcast.

Michele Hansen 25:07
Yeah.

Adam Hill 25:07
So yeah, so that's really interesting as well. So I know for, for Livewire, Caleb wrote a long article, which basically detailed all the things all of his sort of like, ways that he got more sponsors. So one of them was he gated screencasts for like how to use the product. So there was some of the like, elementary ways to use Livewire are free, and then for more advanced things they were yet to sponsor. And then he also did sort of a sponsor where model sort of like shareware where if you were a sponsor, you got access to a certain, you know, library or some code. And then once it hit a set number of sponsors, he then just open source that. So yeah, the sort of making money off of open source has all these different sort of approaches, which I think is really interesting. And sort of, you know, one of the things that I've kind of liked about this product or project is, I sort of, because I've been a developer for so long, I feel like I know how they think. And I'm scratching my own itch. So like, both of those things, make it a little bit easier to, you know, market.

Michele Hansen 26:42
I wonder, like, do you intend to waste like, like, I feel like this plays into incentives a lot. And it's where we started do Cody from place off, but like, from our conversations about it, it seems like you basically want to keep this as a, a side project. Like, it's, you know, it's sort of as much for you know, like, having extra money on the side is always great, like, you know, when we started to akoto, it actually came out of like, to be able to afford daycare, which, you know, context for the non Americans listening. daycare is like $25,000 a year and costs more than public college tuition in the majority of states. And yeah, so we're like, like, we can't just like magically start making $25,000 more from our jobs, we've got to get something going. And so it was, like, always intended to be a side project. And I, and I feel like I hear that from you. And I think one of the, the other benefits of that, aside from the extra money is kind of like giving yourself like a playground or like a sandbox to like play in outside of work that's like, just for your own enjoyment. And just as you said, like, doing something to help other people to make things easier for them.

Adam Hill 28:02
Yeah, so. So for some context, I guess, like, I really like my day job, like, I don't ever want to leave, I know a lot of sort of bootstrappers, or whatever you call these people. You know, they want to, you know, escape the nine to five, and they, they don't want a boss and whatever the other, you know, sort of reasons for for pursuing this path. But it is mostly a hobby for me, it's something for me to do, like you said outside of work, work on different things that I wouldn't get to do in my day job. So that has been most of my side projects have sort of scratched that itch. So my incentives are pretty minimal. And I do think about that a lot. I think one thing that is interesting for startups, or for side projects, is that once you charge people, you get feedback from the marketplace. It sounds like a level of

Michele Hansen 29:17
responsibility or obligation comes into that, like, you know, I've heard like Taylor, Hartwell and Adam wathan, like, talking about how mean people can be in GitHub issues and like really demanding and like, you know, if somebody sponsors you them feeling entitled to you building every feature they asked for, and replying to things right away and like paying customers has its own stresses, but also like having not paying customers or even like spot like that, that creates its own set of stresses as well. And you know, to You're saying about incentives? Like, I wouldn't say that you have no incentives you actually have, if you have a day job, you have incentives for an extremely low support volume, because you can't reply to anything between nine and five. And you probably don't want to spend all day Saturday and Sunday going through support tickets, because like, you've got a family, you want to do other things in your life. And as I mean, it's, it's a lot to think about.

Adam Hill 30:26
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing I think about is like, Why do I keep trying to do this? Because like, um, you know, it's, so when we started working, I was the CTO for a little while, at the same time, I had co founded a startup on the side. So that was sort of crazy, crazy time. And I a small child at the time, the two other co founders wanted to go full time. And, and I didn't, so we sort of split at some point. But even that, which was sort of like, more of a real startup, like, over the years, I have done side projects. And, and I just, I do wonder about sort of the psychology of like people who just keep trying over and over and over again, even if it doesn't really work out, like, I'm not trying to make a ton of money off of this. So that's not my incentive, it's more like, I just want to see how far I can go and how much I can do. And I do think that charging people sort of gives you a really like, clear answer of this is something that someone finds useful or not.

Michele Hansen 31:58
And then how you kind of work that in with the sort of multiple options available for an open source project. I mean, it's kind of in a way, like SAS is like, so much more straightforward. It's like you have pay as you go, you have a subscription, like maybe you have a, you know, you pay for onboarding services, or integration fees, and then you play as a tutor on top of that, like, there's not really as many things have, like, you know, like pay for this ebook about how to use this project, or, as you mentioned, with live wire, having screencasts about how to use it, or gatekeeping, you know, specific features like for so there's some of that in SAS, but like, it's very different dynamics. And do you feel excited by those options? Or do you feel decision fatigue, and kind of not sure where to go with all of that,

Adam Hill 32:50
I think I have a few things in my head of these are things I could I could do. There's a little bit of decision fatigue, I have done some screencasts. But I find it takes a really long time for me to do them. I know you've done a conference talk before. But like, I also did a conference talk per Django unicorn. And I spent so much time preparing for it and doing the slides and running through it over and over again. And a screencast isn't that much time, but it's similar, where I sort of like, need to figure out a script and write all the code and plan everything out. So getting motivated to do that is a little tricky. So other than that, though, there are a couple other ways that I could monetize Django unicorn. But I do feel like, I want to try more of a SaaS product, just to sort of not diversify my income because there's very little income, but like, sort of try something new. I do wonder if the side projects are a way to just try a lot of different things and see, you know, see what I can learn along the way.

Michele Hansen 34:19
I guess it kind of comes back to what you were saying about you were sort of like why am I doing this in the first place?

Adam Hill 34:26
Yeah, I you know, I don't have a good answer for that because I I asked them myself a lot. I look at it as a hobby. And you know, I I'm curious how you how you looked at geocode do at the beginning like you said it was to pay your their daycare bills, but at some point it pay the daycare bills and then sort of how did you think about it from that point on?

Michele Hansen 34:56
Well, then it went on to paying off my student loans. There's just more and more things that are paid off. More American, like financial debt obligations. Yes, that's basically the story. Um, no, I mean, you know, I'm personally very motivated by like financial security. But no, it was always like, it was a hobby, until it got to the point where it was like, No, this is actually serious. And like, this is actually you know, this is this is this is a business, I can trust that the revenue isn't going to disappear overnight, like like this, this other part that people don't really talk about is like, there's this first stage of like, nothing is working. Everyone is having success, but me. Okay, cool. We're having our hosting costs, awesome. And then like, kind of growing it a little bit like this is working, having fun throwing pasta at the wall, you know, unlike it work, like you can try something and if it doesn't work, like there's very little consequences for it at that stage. And you can, you have a lot more freedom to explore and for decision making, which is something that I really valued from it. But then there's kind of the stage when you have legit revenue, feeling like this could go away overnight, like a big competitor could come in, release something, and everybody's gonna switch and my revenue was gone. And like, basically, like I like I like, where I didn't trust the revenue, if that makes sense like that. I mean, the revenue is, I'm totally like anthropomorphizing it here. But trusting that it would be there, that you could rely on it. Like that took me a very, very long time, I probably I waited a lot longer to go full time, I think then other people might, especially people who are super eager to not have a boss anymore, and whatnot, because I was so afraid of that. And also, because, you know, in the US, when you fall, you fall hard, there is no floor, basically, to how far or how far you fall. And, you know, just based on my life experience and whatnot, that was something I was terrified of. And, but it took me a long time to really trust the revenue. And so it was like part, I think it was like it was a hobby, and it was my fun place to explore, where I got to make all the decisions. And I was the one doing the roadmap and is doing all these different things. And you know, I'm ADHD, so I love that I have to switch between, like all of these different things all the time. And we're all these different hats, because then I don't get bored. But I think saying I was a side project for so long, because it was a hobby, I think that would be lying to myself, because there's that other reason that I just didn't trust that it wasn't going away.

Adam Hill 37:56
So you've talked about not having, you know, other employees or anything, but can you talk about sort of, you could have had sort of a contractor who would help out with parts of geocode do. And that would have been a less final decision, I guess, then not getting a full time job again.

Michele Hansen 38:27
Oh, you mean like before I went full time, like hiring a contractor to work? Yeah, I never even considered that. I mean, it was just earlier this year that I even got a VA, like I had never occurred to me. I mean, even now, like the I don't, we don't plan to hire anyone full time. And for some reasons, it would be nice. But in other ways, like I like I don't feel capable of like fully managing and like taking on the hopes and dreams of another person. Like, I feel like I'm treading water at doing that as a parent. And so I questioned my ability to do that with an employee and give them the amount of attention that they deserve. And then also provide a career path of advancement for them. Like I take it very seriously that it's not just a year of employment for someone, it's, you know, if things work out 510 20 years, and we're I can't be certain that this company would never grow to be more than, you know, three people or whatever, like and then there's the co founders running it, like there's always a ceiling for those people and, like I would almost feel bad like bringing someone on to a company that I knew that they couldn't advance that or run like I feel guilty about that. Like it feels like wrong to me, even though I know there are people who like don't want to run a company would be very happy with that. Like, like to me like I can't like I just can't get over that. So, um, but yeah, I'm taking baby steps with VA, to talk to me again in five years, when maybe we have hired a part time support person or something.

Adam Hill 40:14
Yeah, I mean, I hear you on on the full time employee. I that sounds daunting. And, you know, there's payroll, and there's taxes, and there's, you know, all of that, at least in the States. There's, you know, human

Michele Hansen 40:28
side, though, that's the part that, you know, I don't know, I guess I don't believe in myself as a manager. So I know we can execute, need to

Adam Hill 40:41
get over your imposter syndrome syndrome. Michelle, and you can do anything. I don't know where I was going with that. Well, that's why I brought up, you know, contractor or, you know, a va or a part time, you know, support person. But that all makes sense, because you are less invested in in helping that person grow. Because, you know, they're not actually a full time employee.

Michele Hansen 41:08
Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I think I have to dive deeper. And figured that I think this might be one of the rawest interviews we have ever done on my side, and probably on the interviewee side. So maybe this is a good time to end it for today. Sounds good. Thank you so much for listening. Adam, thank you so much for being on today and talking about struggle, which, again, as you said, I think is a really common feeling. And people just don't talk about it. So maybe we're changing that a little bit. If anyone listening would be interested in a podcast where people talk about stuff they did that failed, maybe let Adam know. And who knows? Oh, gosh, I was on it, right? Because there's a difference between like, wanting to listen to a show like that, and getting to a fly on the wall of other people's feathers. But actually then offering your own up, like, there's a difference there. And if you would be the ladder, maybe let Adam know, because this could be interesting. I'm Adam, if people want to keep in touch with you. And learn more about Django unicorn, where should they go?

Adam Hill 42:29
Sure. So um, I'm on Twitter, and I tweet occasionally, every couple of days, probably So, but they can reach out to me there I am. Adam g Hill, on Twitter, and on GitHub.

Michele Hansen 42:44
And what about Django unicorn? Where can they find that?

Adam Hill 42:45
That's on Twitter as well, Django unicorn. All one word. And if you go there, you can find it on GitHub.

Michele Hansen 42:55
Awesome. We'll also put those links in the description for today's show. Adam, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks. And Colleen, we'll be back next week. So we'll talk to you soon.

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Check out Hammerstone! http://hammerstone.dev/

Michele Hansen 0:00
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Hey, everyone. So you may remember a couple of weeks ago, Colleen was facing a big decision about whether she should join an exciting project that some of her friends had started. So I'm here to tell you today that Colleen did decide to join that project. And we thought that you should hear about it from her and the team she's joining. So she is joining Hammerstone with our friends, Aaron and Sean. And you may remember Shawn from our episode a few months ago, where he was helping me learn how to market a book. So we thought we would let you listen to the episode that Colleen did on the Hammerstone podcast recently, where she's talking about joining the team. And after you listen, make sure to go subscribe to the Hammerstone podcast to get more updates about that really exciting project.

Unknown Speaker 1:54
All right, we are recording. And we have three people here with us today. So the third person you want to introduce yourself.

Colleen Schnettler 2:03
Hello, everyone. My name is Colleen and I have been working for Shawn and Aaron for about six months now. And this is my debut appearance on the Hammerstone podcast.

Unknown Speaker 2:14
Welcome to the show. Thanks. So Colleen has been working, she said for us. But now Colleen is working with us. Colleen is a part of the Hammerstone team now. She's the third partner.

Colleen Schnettler 2:29
Yes, I am super pumped. Super excited to join the team.

Unknown Speaker 2:34
Yeah, so I guess we've been talking about this client for like, a year or more. And we've mentioned Colleen several times, I don't think it's been a secret. And she's the one that's been doing. She's the one that's been doing the rails side of the Refine product. And so, Shawn and Colleen have been working on this client for a long time. And the client has kind of been like, hey, what if we just keep doing this for a long, long time, we're like, great, we, that sounds good to us. And so Colleen is gonna continue working. But this client for they just, they just love Colleen, they just can't, they can't get enough of you. So, yeah, she's coming on as a partner and Hammerstone and she's gonna own the rails side of things. And I own the Laravel side of things. And Sean owns basically everything else. Kind of kind of a huge change, you know, in a whirlwind the past couple of weeks, but welcome.

Colleen Schnettler 3:41
Thanks.

Unknown Speaker 3:43
Yes, super cool. So speaking of owning all the other things, actually, can you guys hear me the sound just cut out weirdly for a second? We're good. You're okay. Yep. Yeah, so we, since there's three of us now, Aaron, and I have been, as I put it on the call with the lawyer yesterday, just yoloing it for the last year with our sort of like, operating agreement. So we got to hammer that out, you know, and actually do that properly given there's three of us, and that's an extra level of complication. So, the, the thing that we talked about with the lawyer, which I wanted to bring up with you guys was so first of all, I brought on my lawyer, Dalia who's awesome, and the best lawyer that I know. And I was like, Oh, yeah, I definitely want dahlias represent Hammerstone that Dalia immediately brought up that it's a conflict of interest of her because she's representing me. I'm planning for aliens. And I was like, Oh, well, I'll just find another lawyer for planning for aliens. And that's when I realized like last night, I was like, do I want to do that? Like it's, I want Dalia to represent Hammerstone but I also like kind of still want to have Dalia around for other shit for me. So I think that she had mentioned this as a possibility where like, she could represent us both. And then if there's a conflict of interest step aside, and it would go to me by default, I think is what she said. And then Hammerstone would have to find another lawyer. How does that sound to you guys?

Colleen Schnettler 5:18
Yeah, so what I took from that conversation was exactly that, like, she can represent you, she can represent Hammerstone. But if the three of us as Hammerstone have a problem, she would then have to step back and then all of us would, like, if we're at the point where we all need our own attorneys, like something has gone terribly wrong, right? Like, we're probably just gonna want to Anyway, when we're talking about attorneys, that's all we're talking about is these horrible situations, right. So that is what we're talking about right now is a horrible situation that, you know, potentially could happen in the future. Get it? I'm not putting anything out of possibility. Like, I'm fine with that. I don't know, she had said something about how someone has to wait, like waive the conflict of interest. So you can ask her what that means. But I mean, I have no issues with this, because I just, I know, no one ever sees themselves in these situations, but I just cannot imagine a situation where that would happen. And if it did, then, I mean, you're so far gone by that point that, you know, I'm okay.

Unknown Speaker 6:29
Yeah, I think I think I understand the same thing. So she'll represent planning for aliens, which is your holding Corporation. Shawn, shall represent planning for aliens shall represent Hammerstone. And should, Shawn Colleen and Aaron ever need representation against each other not as Hammerstone against each other as individuals, then that's when we have to say conflict of interest, or, you know, Colleen, and I get our own lawyers or whatever. Does that seem right? That's exactly it. Yeah. Yep. I'm on board with that. That's fine.

Colleen Schnettler 7:02
Yeah, I'm totally fine.

Unknown Speaker 7:03
She'll give us whatever papers to sign about that. And then Alright, cool.

Colleen Schnettler 7:07
Sure. What I didn't understand from that call was the accountant thing. At the election, yeah, way into some tax law with a vesting schedule. For me, and that was kind of Whoosh. So

Unknown Speaker 7:24
So you got to talk to our accountant, like, so this is what we're talking about. We have our accountant, you could you could have your own, or you just use Aaron, I'm like, pushing, we just use the one accountant for all the stuff. I mean, it's not. He's an accountant. So I don't know if there's like, there's not like a conflict of interest, right? He's just gonna tell you like, what's the optimal thing to do?

Colleen Schnettler 7:43
Right? This is how you should structure it. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 7:46
Yeah. And, and my understanding, I never thought about this before, I guess, because it's gonna be like a taxable event, that you could decide, take the taxes now or take the taxes later. And I think that'll probably all depend on your whole personal, you know, finance situation plus, like, what you think's gonna happen with Hammerstone, etc. So,

Colleen Schnettler 8:06
right, so you guys have a Hammerstone accountant, who is also Aaron's personal accountant. It's my it's my personal accountant, but his name is Aaron is Aaron. Oh, hence. Yeah. Okay, so Shawn, you have an accountant named Aaron, who has been doing Hammerstone taxes and your personal taxes

Unknown Speaker 8:30
and planning for aliens. Correct. And he's gone. Hammerstone he hasn't done Hammerstone taxes yet. We just had no money last year. So we just write ourselves

Colleen Schnettler 8:39
and then Aaron, not you Aaron not accounting there. You then have your own accountant for your own stuff for your LSI

Unknown Speaker 8:47
I Aaron am an account I forgot. Yeah, yeah. So it makes it worse. I'm a CPA, however, I'm not our CPA, and I'm not my own CPA. I have my own personal accountant. For Jennifer's and my taxes. And I have a I have an LLC called bits and things. And so she does, she does bits and things she does our personal stuff. She does. And I've recently switched because my old one was terrible. So yes, I have my own personal one as well.

Colleen Schnettler 9:15
Okay, because I have an accountant, but I'm not totally crazy about him. So I don't know if it's easier to just switch like we're, I'm cool with that. We can talk about that more. But yeah, okay.

Unknown Speaker 9:26
I think I felt like the advantage for me if having Aaron jado match to my@aol.com do my personal and LLC or an S corp actually needs the one that set that all up is that he knows like how to optimize both and they both writer and they both come into play and otherwise there's going to be a communication point between the two of you have two separate accountants or find like DIY, my personal account my personal taxes. So just for him to optimize things and be more, you know, fluid in that. It was easier to just have him do it. And then like as far as my recommendation of Aaron, like, I feel like I have a lot less problems with there. And then anybody else that I've ever talked to about their accountants and like I have, he saved me automatically a lot of money the first year that I hired him, and I have not been audited. I was audited prior to this prior to hiring him, and hadn't been audited said so. Anyway, that's, that's my pitch there.

Colleen Schnettler 10:28
Yeah, not a pitch. It's really up to you. Yeah. But just not to get like two businesses. So like, my first accountant, had all these like, cool. I don't know if they're cool ideas, but he had a lot of ideas about how I should structure my LLC for like tax benefits. And then his wife died. And he retired and it was kind of dramatic. And then my new accountant who I've had for two years now, he's just not into that stuff. Like he doesn't provide recommendations. He like, I think he just puts everything in TurboTax and tells me what I owe. That's why old accountant Yeah, exactly. Nice guy. But I'm like, I can literally do that myself, like you are, you aren't advising me on like, structure anything. So I'm open to trying something new.

Unknown Speaker 11:07
Yeah, so with Aaron, I do have to, like, I gotta push a little, like, if I do nothing, he'll just do what he's got sort of squared away from me. And I think he makes by default, good choices. And he's not just doing plug it into TurboTax stuff. Like he's thinking through all the various implications. And if he thinks there's something we need to talk about, then he'll generally bring it up with me. But like, I do have to, like, I wish he would provide me with like, a prompt of like, here are all the things that you should tell me, because these are the things that are gonna like impact, you know, the taxes or whatever. But I've had to kind of come up with my own list. Well, that sucks. But generally, if I'm doing something that's potentially having a tax implication, yeah, I mean, I've reached out to him, like we sold our house, I have this money sitting around from selling the house and like, what do I What do I need to do with this? etc? He's good at all that stuff? Yeah. Very cool. I still feel like space in our in our community for like, a really good accountant that like, actually does their job, like high level high touch could charge probably twice as much, you know, as mine does. And like they would be so busy. It would be ridiculous.

Unknown Speaker 12:16
I agree. I think any any accountant that wants to book using savvy cow, I think you'd have a million customers. bootstrap customers, right? Oh, you you savvy Cal. You're not you're five years old. Colleen, is this accountant, the one that sent you like a 40? page? Yeah, organizer right here. Fill out all of your documents. And I said, you should just tell him No, I'm not going to do that. Is that this one?

Colleen Schnettler 12:42
That's the that's the one. Yeah, I was like, What am I paying you for? Like, and again, he's a nice guy. But it was just like, like, I pay you. So I don't have to fill out the 40 page document. Like I might as well just do it in TurboTax. If this is what we're doing, yeah, yeah. So

Unknown Speaker 12:59
yeah. Any other accounting lawyering? So one sided? One thing? Yeah, the one thing that the lawyer was saying we need to talk to the accountant about is the 83 b election, which I think determines when the taxable event, like when you recognize the taxes of your new part of Hammerstone. So I think, you know, just for context, that's what she was talking about. But I don't know too much else about that. The other thing she mentioned, which I thought was interesting, is his colleagues portion of the company coming from Sean's and my portion, or is the company somehow magically expanding to have more shares? And that's something we'll need to figure out because I have no clue. I think that's also a tax base decision, basically. I think it is.

Unknown Speaker 13:52
Yeah, but yeah, we're gonna have to explore all that cuz I totally get it either. Yeah, even though there was another Oh, go ahead.

Colleen Schnettler 14:00
I was gonna say even stuff, like invoicing. Like we invoice the customer, the client? Do I invoice you guys? Ask us guys, US people, US people? Or do I from my LLC? Or do I take a distribution? Like how you

Unknown Speaker 14:14
just did you just destroyed our bank account to yourself? Yeah. So we'll just invoice Amazon, you can just pay yourself?

Unknown Speaker 14:22
Yeah, I think that's right. But I don't know, actually, we need to check because I don't know if, you know, Colleen takes that as an owner distribution. That doesn't. That doesn't offset our revenue. So like if Hammerstone makes, you know, let's say Hammerstone makes $10,000 but actually 9500 Oh, call is a good point. We need to recognize that as an expense otherwise, hammer stones pay $1,000 Yeah, so not an owner. Just contribution. No, we shouldn't do it that way. That's right. So let's not do accounting live on air because this is something that's definitely definitely one we'll need to get sorted. I don't think anything changes. You've been invoicing us, and we've been paying you and I don't think anything changes but wanting to double check that. Yeah, fun stuff.

Colleen Schnettler 15:25
I know. It is like surprising. I'm sure we will be happy. We hashed all this out. But like at this point in the business, it feels frustrating, right? Because it feels like it's slowing us down. We have to have meetings, we haven't talked out lawyer to like, Oh my gosh, can we just do our work? Like, I

Unknown Speaker 15:40
don't want to write tests. I just want to write the products like, this is this is the testing of business. You have to do all this stuff you don't want to do. Yeah, that's funny, though.

Unknown Speaker 15:50
I don't mind it at all feels absolutely necessary. Really great. Yeah. That's wonderful. Oh, that gets a job that we have to do. I mean, got to do it.

Colleen Schnettler 15:59
That's interesting. Yeah, I just I don't know. I'm just like, let's just skip all this. It's fine. But it's good to do it. You're absolutely right.

Unknown Speaker 16:07
That's why we have you, Sean. So I think, you know, we have all this context. And this is actually a podcast, not just a Hangout. So I think it would be interesting to talk just quickly about how the three of us like how we ended up here. Because like Sean said, he and I have just been yoloing it and just like, yeah, we own 50% of the company. Let's shake hands. And that's because Shawn and I didn't just meet on the internet yesterday. And you know, bringing in a third partner is a big deal. But we didn't just, you know, meet Colleen off the street. So, Shawn, do you want to talk about how you and I met? And how long ago that was?

Unknown Speaker 16:52
Yes. Before Isaac was born, so probably eight years ago. And I was I just quit my job to start writing sketchy CSS and I went to the bacon biz conference, right? Is that what it's called? bacon bits. Yeah, yeah. Amy hoy. And yeah, anyway, now pixelmon. The other thing. The first one, actually, right. wasn't the first one. Yeah. So yeah. And you shared a room with Josh Pigford on that.

Unknown Speaker 17:18
Yeah, I did I share it with Josh Pigford. Because the way that I knew Josh Pigford was cuz I shared a room with him at micro comp. He was on. So micro comp and bacon bids were the same year that year, and he had posted on the micro comp thing like, Hey, does anybody want to share room I'm normal. That's like, I doubt you're normal. But I'll look you up. And I looked him up. And we had like a zoom call. And I was like, Yeah, sure. I don't have any friends there. And I need like, you know, when you when you go into a conference, and you don't know anyone, and it's terrifying and like you're in high school with no friends. That's how I felt. So I was like, Yes, I'll share a room with this guy. And then he went to bacon business. So we shared a room again. It's so funny that you remember that?

Unknown Speaker 18:06
Yeah, I met you. I met buckbee. I met Barry. Hmm, I think there was there Pete was there. I was not there. No, no, no, Pete wasn't there. He wasn't there. He wasn't. No, no, I didn't meet Pete in real life for a few years. Oh, wow. Yeah. But Pete was working on his stripe book around that time. And then and then Andrew had. So Andrew had a company called churn buster, Andrew Culver, a mutual friend of ours. So he had this company called churn Buster and turn Buster had a HipChat support channel, which he just had it so he would invite people to hang out with him in there. And then every now and then, is it chat customers or be his churn Buster customers would pop in and ask questions. And we'd be like, well, Andrew is not here. But like, have you tried blah, blah, blah. troubleshoot the problem?

Unknown Speaker 18:58
It was such a scam. We did all this support for him.

Unknown Speaker 19:02
Yeah. And there was also briefly, same in that same HipChat room, there was Patrick Collison a like yeah, that's right. It was in the HipChat room with us. forgot about that. Yeah. We've had people graduate out of Yeah. Yeah, but that's what we all met was that room like buckbee invited us from that conference. And then we started hanging out together there and then meet in real life every now and then, you know, it's making this conferences etc. So we just have this little community which has been growing and changing over the years. Now, it's a Slack channel. It's not Andrews. How to intercept or gel anymore.

Unknown Speaker 19:47
Yeah, eight years ago, and then Colleen, you met Andrew first. Is that right? Are you met Michelle?

Colleen Schnettler 19:54
Andrew? No, I met Andrew first Sean actually. Put Michelle and I Touch I believe. So I met Andrew, I was going to the Ruby on Rails meetups in Virginia Beach. And there were like three people that attended these meetups like it was not. They were not well attended. But Andrew came to speak at one. And this was maybe four or five years ago, I don't remember. Andrew came to speak at one. And afterwards, we all went out to get drinks all four of us, because he and one of our mutual friends knew each other really well. And so Andrew told me so this is like back when I'm in my just want to launch a product phase kind of that, you know, in the beginning when you like have that really strong desire, but you're aimless because you don't have any contact salutely Yes, yeah, that's back in those days. So Andrew and I were talking about business ideas. So he told me about the slack group. So then I joined the slack group. And then I started having weekly lunches with the Virginia Beach people. And that's kind of how I got to know everyone. And then I met you guys will show that I had worked on and off together. Occasionally we were on the same contract. But we never really worked together. I feel like we were always we didn't really know each other, even though we kind of worked together. And then I met you two, what, two years ago, in real life. I think it was two years ago in the dc, dc. DC was the first time so before that I had never met Aaron and you were really active Aaron in the Slack channel. So I like didn't even know who you were. And Sean I kind of knew because he was like the React guy that worked on the same contract I worked on, but we've never really worked on together. Yeah. And then I met you guys IRL, as they say, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 21:39
And we have another so obviously, we skipped the retreat last year. But we have another in person retreat coming up. Yeah, hopefully.

Colleen Schnettler 21:49
Hopefully. Yeah. We'll see. I'm nervous. I'm nervous about it. Yeah, same. I will say though, good.

Unknown Speaker 21:59
Saying that I feel nervous about it, too. I wasn't even thinking about it. But until recently, when all the sudden I've had to start having new, like, bubble conversations with my parents about like, Who's gonna watch Isaac if like, he has an outbreak in his class? And like, should we do the after school care for him where you guys want to commit to it? So he's not like with all these other kids? And I'm like, Oh, no, this is a retreat even gonna happen?

Colleen Schnettler 22:22
Yeah, I hope so. We'll see. But I would say like going back to the three of us working together, we never really got to know each other. Well, I would say until we started working together recently, about, what, eight months ago now. I mean, I think that I don't think I any of us, and I can just speak for myself, you guys would not have invited me in to this company eight months ago, right? Like, we didn't have that relationship. I mean, we had no context on each other, we had never worked together. So I think like us forming a partnership has really grown over that working together almost every day, you know, over the extended period of time. Definitely.

Unknown Speaker 23:00
Yep. I would absolutely agree. Yeah, I think. So. I think, just from my perspective, like the thing, the problem that we're working on, and maybe we should describe it, because I don't know that everyone has listened from Episode One, which you should. So the thing that we're doing is, it's like a visual Query Builder. So you know, when you go to, let's use ecommerce, because that's an easy example, when you go to an e commerce website, and you're like, I want shoes that are Nikes, in size 11, or 12, and are black and are under $100, and ship in two days. So like, you can build up your, you know, your perfect filter, just kind of like on the fly. We're building that as a component. So you can just drop it in to your Rails application, or you can just drop it into your Laravel application. And then the application developer can say, here are all the conditions that I want to offer my users, I want to offer them shoe size, and shoe color and price. And then Hammerstone, y'all figure out how do you show that on the front end? How do you do validation? How do you apply that to the database? How do you store that so that they can like, you know, generate a report and send it later. So that's like, that's the product we're building. And it's called refine, and that's what we've been working on for a long time. And I think, from my perspective, one of the reasons that I was like, Yes, we absolutely have to have Colleen is because you've spent like eight months or a year getting your head around this problem, which it takes that long, and I think you have an extremely good grasp on the problem space and it's like a very complicated problem. And you've got, like, you've got ideas on how to make it How to make it successful in the rails world, which I don't have, I don't have the context, I don't have the knowledge, I don't have the experience. And so somebody that has the whole problem set loaded into their mind and is really excited about it and wants to make it a Rails thing. I was like, Yes, let's do it. Bring her on. Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 25:23
Yeah, I think it makes sense. Because it makes sense. If we're, if we're just doing like a really small, like little project, that's gonna make a couple 1000 bucks a month. First of all, Aaron, you should just launch that without me. And then, but we're not like I think we have, I have at least a larger sort of thesis in mind for building a lot of different types of components like this. And we realized that like, we can build front ends that are compatible with different back ends, and we could build a Rails version level version of Python version, like, there's a choice for how we could like, expand our market, we could do, we could go down that route. There's other ways to do it. But like, that was a possibility. And here we are, we were presented with the opportunity to build a Rails version paid for by a client. And now we can have somebody take over that piece and own that, that's a no brainer for me. So it kind of commits us to the strategy of like, we're going for two different markets. And that's how we're going to, you know, like, increase our market size. But I also think that makes sense, long term. And it makes sense that Coleen run the run the rail side.

Colleen Schnettler 26:38
I think so I have listened to your podcast, I think you guys are really, like, I feel like your excitement, I don't know, I know, you can kind of see the potential. But literally everyone I have ever worked for could use this query builder. So it's just I mean, when you describe it, Aaron, I think it's hard to describe it. Because someone asked me, he was like, What is this thing you guys are building that you're so excited about. And I was like, I don't know how to describe it concisely. But the power like when you guys first, when we first talked about this, I literally thought it was just going to be, you know, a couple scopes, right? Like, you're just like, Oh, I'm going to scope the model, and I'm going to send you the string. And you're just going to scope the model on it. And that's not what it is at. All right. So I just think, I think we can grow this business with just this product to, you know, larger than any of us have done before, like, This product is really spectacular. I mean, it's just so cool. And I think it'll be cool to like, approach it on different fronts, it'll be really interesting to see how it does in Rails versus, you know, Laravel, and just kind of see the growth trajectory. And both of those ecosystems. Yeah, it's gonna be cool.

Unknown Speaker 27:47
Yeah. To get there, though, like, there's, there's some problems. You know, like, it's not, like, Yes, I definitely could, every entrepreneur could see how their product could be used everywhere. Like, that's 100% true of every entrepreneur who creates a product, like everybody should use this. But like, I think that for us, there's the obvious, like, low hanging fruit of, we're gonna get some sales from on the site, like you and Aaron are basically gonna do like dev rel, you're going to do like a little bit of content marketing, you're going to be building up the those relationships, and we'll get a few sprinkles of sales there. And those are going to be people that are going to buy it like because they're like, Oh, yeah, I was gonna build this, but instead, I'm going to buy it right. So they're already at that build versus buy decision point, then, and they already know, like, they need the thing. They already know, they need a query builder that they probably already, like, use that word or phrase even. So they're pretty far along in the process. In order for us to get out further and deeper into the market. That's where we have to start doing some convincing or pointing out to people that like, Look, you can, you could drop this into your product. Now you don't even see the need for it. But like, I could we then show can show the need for it. And I think that's a that's like another harder problem. So there's like, how far can we get on people that are going to make build versus buy decision? And how, how can we figure out systems to get in front of them right then? And then what's the next step, the next layer, like pulling in these other people that like you could add this into your app now. And it solves pains You didn't even know you had kind of situation, which is a lot harder. That's like a lot harder. A thing is possible. I mean, I've already had conversations with somebody who's interested, like they're just what are you doing? And I explained it to them. And then I explained it in the context of their app. And they were like, Oh, I need it. Right. So I know it's possible. But it's very hard. Which that's gonna be my job. Yeah, seriously.

Unknown Speaker 29:48
Yeah. And I think like, Colleen, you've worked on a bunch of different clients. So you're not just looking out and being like, oh, the world needs this. You're looking back on your clients and being like, no, the people That I did work for in the app, they need this. Is that right?

Colleen Schnettler 30:04
Yes. Yeah. And since they're my clients like I would, I mean, that's the nice thing about consultants. Right? I'd be like, you all need to buy this immediately. And they would. But yeah, to Shawn's point we how do we expand past our existing networks? Right? Like, that's basically, you know, we have we have pretty good networks of people in our community, people in the indie SAS community. How do you expand beyond that?

Unknown Speaker 30:31
Huh? Yeah, exactly. That's, that's the hard part. But if we do that, then we definitely have a business. But that's like one of these things that we have to that's, that's the hard part. Yeah. My my movies a couple

Unknown Speaker 30:44
years, my move so far has not been expanding beyond my personal network, it's been expanding my personal network. So like I'm trying right now, to gather up more and more Laravel like connections and eyeballs. And the way I've been doing that, as you know, putting out either open source projects, or blog posts or torchlight is another great example, something that something that's not gonna make us rich, you know, independently, but is getting a lot of traction within Laravel the ecosystem of people saying like, Oh, this is really cool, let me you know, follow the story, follow this guy who's doing it or sign up and use it myself. And so that's been my move so far. But obviously, that only scales, that only scale so far, but it's definitely like, it's definitely step one, I mean, might as well start with the inner circle. So

Unknown Speaker 31:45
I think there's been me is another benefit of having Colleen was, like, takes it I was gonna have to do what Colleen is doing now, like on the rail side, like what you're doing in Laravel, I was gonna have to do that. And I am a Rails developer, but it's, I'm not as well connected in that community. And it's a bit of a stretch, I could get there. But like the learning curve was going to be large. I was trying to figure out ways to like hire contractors to like, kind of get me there and like, So this takes that off my plate entirely. And then like, focus on the hard problem. Which is like where I've been, I have gotten to the point where I have a business that is selling products, paying my bills, doing what you're talking about Aaron doing the devil stuff. And like having doing content marketing and that sort of thing. I've been there getting past that is a whole other thing that I want to figure out and do. And that's, like, that's the goal for me at least.

Unknown Speaker 32:43
Well, I've never gotten to the point where I have a business paying my bills, like a product paying my bills. So I'm glad we have you beyond that, because you've been there I have not calling you haven't either, right? You have simple file upload, but it doesn't pay bills. And so to have your mind working on that issue, well, Colleen and I are doing other stuff, I think I think it's gonna work out quite just know

Unknown Speaker 33:10
for everyone. Like, I could just get you guys ahead of you and tell you how you're gonna feel a year from now. You're gonna be like, how do I make more money than this? I'm like, right on the cusp of like a real business. What do I do? Yeah. It's just the next step. Yeah. Well, hopefully you've got it all sorted out by then. Yeah, we'll have it all figured out. Yeah, perfect. I'll just have buckbee tell me what to do. Seriously,

Colleen Schnettler 33:35
that usually works. Yeah, that does usually work. Alright, what else? Nobody, nobody, nobody. I'm good.

Unknown Speaker 33:51
So we're gonna do, we're gonna do three people from now on, right? calling your game to join all of Yeah, yeah. Hope, right. That's great. Some, some weeks you and I can just talk technical the whole time. I think that's gonna be one of the fun things is, like, I've already picked up a lot of good stuff for the lair Val product from, like working with you. And I think that is going to expand beyond just the Refine, like, refine is the name of our product just beyond refine, into other, like, either open source packages or other products be like, hey, what? what exists in Laravel that doesn't exist in rails and vice versa. I think that'll be a fun, like cross pollination opportunity, either for content or for products. But I'm thinking right now, especially for content. Yeah. So, all right, well, so we just call it there.

Colleen Schnettler 34:57
Sounds good. All right.

Michele Hansen 35:00
Michelle again. That's all for software social for this week. You can go to Hammerstone dot dev to learn more about that project and listen to their past episodes. We'll talk to you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Buy Michele's book! https://deployempathy.com/

Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Noko. https://nokotime.com/

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Colleen Schnettler 0:51
So Michele, how are things going with the book?

Michele Hansen 0:55
They're going? Um, so I checked the numbers the other day and between the PDF and the paperback and Kindle editions, sold 210 copies so far. Wow.

Colleen Schnettler 1:09
Don't most books don't most self published books only sell 250 copies over their lifetime.

Michele Hansen 1:16
So Miss, like, I happened to like, slack that the other day.

Colleen Schnettler 1:22
Like you set me up for that one. So we could talk about how awesome you are?

Michele Hansen 1:26
Yeah, I was actually kind of like, I was like, okay, you know, that's good. Like, because I think I kind of went into this. And it was like, worst case scenario, like, everybody on the newsletter list buys it. Right. Like because other people are interested in what I'm saying. So that adds about like, 300 people on that list. So I was like, okay, like, you know, that's that's good. That's solid. And then yeah, and then I was, someone kind of prompted me to like they were they were like, that's really good. And I was like present. And it turns out the average self published book only sells like 250 copies total lifetime. And then the average published book, like publisher published book sells 3000 copies, two to 300 of which would be in its first year. Okay, wow. Consider that we're a month into this. I guess. It's pretty good.

Colleen Schnettler 2:16
Yeah, you're already you're already killing that record. That's amazing.

Michele Hansen 2:22
And if anything, is, I feel like I haven't really, like done anything. Um, I mean, no, I feel like I you know, I've been tweeting about it probably incessantly. And I sent out a couple of newsletters where I mentioned that. I think you challenged me to be on what like

Colleen Schnettler 2:39
1020 I feel like it was 20

Michele Hansen 2:41
podcast. Oh, I was hoping it was 10. But I think so I just, I've I've recorded two so far. None of them are okay yet. But which ones have you done? So I've done two so far. I have another one. I have two more on the calendar. Oh, okay. And then I was just someone was just like, dming me this morning about being on there's and there's one that I like I need to do my own recording. Like there's some things in the hopper, like, basically, when I like dm with people about this, then I like I've been emailing myself, the link to the DMS because I always lose my DMS and can't ever find anything. So I email it to myself with the link to the DMS and then I've been tagging them as podcast. And then I okay folder in my email. So it's about like, I have a list of like 10 ish so far.

Colleen Schnettler 3:36
That's great tennis a lot. Michelle, good for you.

Michele Hansen 3:39
So I feel like I haven't really started to promote it. Yeah. So you were saying the other day? How? Like you were trying to get some content out? And how you're, like struggling to get it out for like three months. Yeah. And one of our mutual friends said, Colleen, like, get it together. Michelle just published a whole book in five months.

Colleen Schnettler 4:02
That's literally what happened. It was hilarious. We were chatting. And I was complaining. I don't know if complaining is the right word, you know, lamenting the fact that I was struggling to write a piece of content, he very tactfully pointed out that you managed to write an entire book. Like I think you can write a piece of content. But on

Michele Hansen 4:21
that note at like, I think the rate at which I got the book out was I think it was so fast because first of all, I had all of it in my head like and it was just a matter of like I need to go find the reference for this thing. It's not like I needed to go find new references and find like I didn't really have to find any new content for it. But the other thing is, is I think I was kind of in a like hyper focus black hole but like a very extended one for like five months where basically all of my free time was getting spent on this and It's kind of I know like, last night, all of a sudden, I felt exhausted, like and not like physically exhausted. But I was like, Oh my god, like I'm, I'm, I'm tired, like I have been running full tilt at this. And now I'm tired. And it was, I mean, it's good timing right. So because out but like it was weird I had this moment where I was like, you know i, one of my favorite things to do is just like, while I'm eating lunch or whatever, just to like sit down with the New Yorker. And I usually read it. As soon as I get it, I even get it shipped overseas. And I have a stack of them a foot high still in the packaging that I have not read. And I like had this and I looked at it. And I was like, that's not like me, like that's really unlike me to hate. And I have like just like a stack of books I really wanted to read. And I haven't read a not a fiction book in like six months. I was like, This is all very unlike me, like and I was like, I think I'm like really close to getting burned out actually like, I'm like, I just didn't realize how fast I was going. I think my might sound kind of weird. But But yeah, I just I didn't realize it. And then so on. And all of a sudden last night, I was like, I'm exhausted. Oh my gosh, I'm yeah. And so I don't think the pace at which I wrote the book. I don't think it should be used as the standard. Because I don't think it was very healthy. And also, I already had all of it in my head. And I just

Colleen Schnettler 6:24
need so it was interesting to get it out. While you were saying that I was thinking about the episode you did with marine. And you both talked about how you had these tendencies to go into something Full Tilt, with no breaks. And I remember there was one part where you talked about like, someone would be talking to you like maybe your husband, and you'd be still be thinking about your book in your head. Yeah. And, and so that's really interesting. So for you it's like, the way it seems to be like this has been like such a sprint for you. And now your body's just like, Huh, like, what do they call it adrenaline fatigue, where your body's just like, Whoa, yep. So do you feel? I mean, how are you feeling about it? Now? Do you want to take a break from it? Do you just want to sleep for a month? Like, where's your headspace?

Michele Hansen 7:08
I'm a parent. So I can't sleep for a month. Yes, not not allowed. I mean, so I like going into this like in June, I was kind of like, oh, and I'll you know, I'll do the audio book in the fall. Like when school starts again, like I have a little more time like, well, we'll do that in the fall. And now I think with everything coming out, I've been like, Oh, I need to, like start recording that because like, I think it's this combination of like, genuinely enjoying that. And also getting a lot of positive reinforcement about it and just like failing to like, check in with myself of like, Am I taking care of myself? Am I doing the things that like, helped me feel like me and kind of calm me down on a daily basis? And the answer to that was, like, basically no, like, I realized I haven't even been on the trampoline in like two weeks. And I was like, What is going on? Like, and I just felt stressed like, constantly and I was like, Where is this feeling coming from? And I think I've been feeling like, Oh my god, where am I gonna get this time to like, record the audio book, like I keep not like, you know, just with, you know, child being home and lack of summer camps. And like, just, it's just kind of been sort of chaotic, and I can't find that time. And I was like, but I don't have to get it out. Like one of the reasons why I published this. Myself, like did self publishing was so I didn't have a publisher breathing down my neck saying, Okay, now you need to get this out, you need to go record this this year, you need to, you know, go give these talks or whatever, or do these interviews, like I purposefully intentionally did not do that. Like, I could have gone through the whole publisher rigmarole if I wanted to. Like, I'm sure if I had pitched it, you know, well enough, like I could have gotten someone to publish it. But I chose not to do that. Because I wanted to do it at my own pace and on my own terms, and because I am not in this to sell books. I'm just, you know, in it to help people. Yeah, and well, and that sounds alignment of incentives. And but like I think I lost track of that.

Colleen Schnettler 9:13
Yeah, yeah. Do you think so? I have a question for you. And this again, is based on what I heard you and Marie talking about. Could you have done it at a pace that enabled you to care for yourself and would have been a little bit slower?

Michele Hansen 9:28
I don't know.

Colleen Schnettler 9:31
Like I just wondering it though, that sounded like that's your that's kind of the way you work like you get sued. Yeah, is and you're all in bursty but to your own health detriment right and your own kind of like detriment a recurring problem. Right. That's what I was. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 9:48
I mean, cuz I think and I think this like, I don't know, I I always want to be careful when I'm talking about ADHD things because it's like, is this a me thing? Or is it an ADHD thing and like in recent years learned that a lot of Things that I thought were me things are actually ADHD things, but I'm not an expert in it. So I don't know. I think the thing about it is, when I do get focused on something, I'm so scared of that focus going away, that it like builds this kind of anxiety of like, Oh my God, if I don't get this out, it's never gonna get it's never happening, like, I'm gonna like, it's like, I have to take advantage of this focus while I have it. Because it just feels like this scarce resource that like might slip away at any moment. I don't know if that makes sense.

Colleen Schnettler 10:29
It does. So what I'm trying to lead into with this, this line of questioning is, when you start recording the podcast, are you again, going to be spun up into a don't sleep? Don't read a book, work every night? I mean, just what you know, of yourself, like, do you think that you're going to do that, again?

Michele Hansen 10:49
I think I need to not do that. And writing I need to like I maybe I should like dedicate a day where it's like, I'm only doing these recordings on this day. Because also, you know, it requires like, it sort of basically requires the house to be quiet and like, you know, so when I'm recording even recording this podcast, like Mathias can't be in the office, and, you know, Nigel, or dog, he needs to not be in the room. And so like he kind of needs like, take them like so it does require a little bit of coordination for us. So I think I need to maybe just do it like one a day, like, have like, one day a week where I'm doing it. And also I can't release like 10 chapters in a week because nobody would have time to listen to that. I think I'm sort of mentally thinking like three for the, for the private podcast for the book. So I think I need I need to like three a week.

Colleen Schnettler 11:43
Yeah, no, one a week, one a week. But if I did want

Michele Hansen 11:47
to well, if there's like 50 something chapters in the book, it's gonna take a whole year? I don't know. I don't know, I guess.

Colleen Schnettler 11:54
I'm just saying we'll see. Let's see. Let me know what

Michele Hansen 11:56
you think people like if you are interested in the private podcast of my book, that was basically like, just get it all get compiled up and turned into the audio book. So I'm doing a pre sale for it. If you would want to once a week or three times a week or twice a week, or if you don't mind it being a whole year tweeted me, let me know.

Colleen Schnettler 12:15
I think it depends on how long it takes you to read a chapter. I'm big on like 20 to 35 minute podcasts. That's probably two chapters. Yeah. So yeah, that's probably two or three chapters.

Michele Hansen 12:25
I don't I don't remember I did the I did a demo of the first chapter. And I think it was like 1520 minutes.

Colleen Schnettler 12:31
So okay. Yeah, I think that's that's probably good. About 30 minutes. So let's circle back to what, sorry, circle back. That's so quarter. And I know right? I'm so I can talk corporate like you were Lilly on that thing. synergy. So, but seriously, that let's circle back to what you were saying you were originally thinking you were going to do it in the fall. So and we kind of got off topic. So are you now saying you want to push it even more? No, I

Michele Hansen 13:00
think I'm gonna go back that I was basically originally Yeah, pull it forward. Right. And that's just not going to happen. Like, and I need and I don't think there's a need for myself. Yeah. Like, I'm just I am the one putting the stress on myself

Colleen Schnettler 13:14
for no reason. Yeah. Yeah, I totally think that is a good move, especially since this is a marathon, right? Not a sprint. And you already have tons of momentum. And your book is just selling itself. Like, it's really cool. Michelle,

Michele Hansen 13:28
I don't know if it's selling itself like it's I've mostly sold it to like people who know me or you know, some so

Colleen Schnettler 13:34
I'm while I was reading it at the part about stripe, all I could think was like Michelle should do a deal with stripe where they like buy 20,000 copies of the book and give it to like all the stripe employees. I don't know how many employees, they probably right. If you're interested in that, let me know. Because you reference them a lot like the way they try to, you know, facilitate and work with their customers. And I was like, Oh my gosh, you should just sell it to stripe Corp. Actually, I

Michele Hansen 14:01
did. I did do like a portfolio wide deal with con company fund, formerly earnest capital where they basically bought it and yeah, they just bought an unlimited license to share it with all of their portfolio companies. Nice. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 14:16
How did you figure out? I don't I don't know, if you want to share the amount you sold that for? If not, it's fine. But how did you even figure out how to price an unlimited license?

Michele Hansen 14:25
I was basically Okay, what's the price of my book times? The number of companies they have? And then let's just give them a nice discount on that. And it's gonna Yes, version two. It's not the physical copy, which would be a little. I mean, I guess I could do that.

Colleen Schnettler 14:42
Awesome. Well, it sounds like the book stuff is going great. And I'm glad that you, you have been, you know, reflective enough to see what it has done to you. Yeah, sounds terrible, but like to kind of see where it's put you and how you've stopped caring for yourself. So you can walk that back before you're totally burned out and you know, you have to hide In your raspberry bushes.

Unknown Speaker 15:02
I do love

Colleen Schnettler 15:02
By the way, I'm so I'm so jealous. You have raspberry bushes, raspberry bushes,

Michele Hansen 15:07
they are an absolute delight, like I was out there earlier and just like there's the bees are just being busy bees and just not stinging me yet, you know, but like just going around and then it's like treasure hunting because raspberries are just like, they're just these like sneaky little things that like hide behind the leaves anyway, if you want if you want to see some farmed we use Yeah. Yeah, so I need to I need I think I need to schedule it. Cuz I think again, that's sort of an ADHD thing is like, I do really well with structure. And I don't do well with internally provided structure like that, like because I can just move my own deadlines. Like, you know, I mean, the reason why I got the book out so fast actually, is because I was like, I need to get this out before I have to start Danish classes before I'm vaccinated, and originally the Danish vaccine calendar so that people in our age group would not be vaccinated until September. So i or i kept moving, but it was August to September. And so I was like, Okay, I need to get it out by August. And then actually, like, we were able to get vaccinated in May. But anyway, and then I was like, Okay, and then I need to start Danish lessons. And I'm gonna be starting Danish lessons in the fall. And so like that was that like, deadline that I had to get it out? Because once I start doing that, like six hours a week, like, I'm not gonna, like, that's where my free time is gonna go. So I, you know, I think your own content project, it doesn't have a like big looming deadline like that in front of it. And sometimes I need things to be urgent in order to get them done.

Colleen Schnettler 16:48
Did we talk about that last week, or two weeks ago, I told you about that podcast, urgent versus it was urgent versus important. And it was from some Eisenhower came up with it. I don't know if Eisenhower came up with it. But I think they used it in context of Eisenhower, I have to look up the podcast, but it was so good. It was just about the psychology behind something that's urgent versus something that's important. And I was like, Yes, I need to make it urgent, like, and how do you make your own deadlines? urgent, right? Like, how do you because you're right, if you can just move them like you have to do something? Oh, this could be like a whole nother thing. I mean, everyone's trying to figure this problem out, right? Like, how do you make your own things? You know, you should do health stuff, working out writing content pieces? How do you make them urgent? Yeah,

Michele Hansen 17:31
I think you can also, you know, you can make them annoying, too, like, like, I've seen a bunch of people talking about going out and running every single day. And it's like, just run for 20 minutes every day, it doesn't matter how fast or how slow or if you do sprints, or whatever. But put your shoes on first thing in the morning, and don't take them off until you've done running. So basically until you like, if you get annoyed by having them on all the time, then you just have to go do your running, get it over with. Right, like, this is annoying. I should try that.

Colleen Schnettler 18:05
Yeah, I think for me, the content stuff is. I mean, when Matt said that about how you wrote a book in three months, you know, and I couldn't, much nicer than that. But he was basically like, you haven't written a single piece of content. I it gave me pause, because I was like, you're right. Like, I am someone since I have been young, like hated English class, I love to read like, I'm a voracious reader. But I have never enjoyed writing like English papers. And I think with developer focus content, I have this mental block to start because I know it's going to take a long time. And it's going to take a long time. Because I am by long time, I don't mean five months, I mean, like a couple hours. And it's going to take a long time. Because when you write really in depth, the developer focus content, even though I already know these things, I you know, the ecosystem is always changing. So I'll have to go back and make sure this is still the best way to do it. And make sure that you know, I'm referencing all the right versions of Ruby and Rails and APA storage, and I get all the new stuff in and then you need screenshots and I don't know, it's just so it's this meant it will probably take me three hours. Like that doesn't sound hard when I say that to you, but man, I'm having a hard time blocking it out and just doing it would it be easier for you to record a video or a screen share of it and then make a transcript of that and then use the transcript to write the content? That's a good idea. Yeah, because then you get it out and because like I just do it Yes, I

Michele Hansen 19:35
get it. You're like okay, I need to reference the right version of this and I need to figure that out before I release it, but like you don't actually have to like that's something that you could just edit later and like basically just make your documentation expanded version of this video and like, some people genuinely prefer watching videos to reading something. I am not one of those people, but I'm told they exist. And I mean, that could, it might make it easier for you to create it.

Colleen Schnettler 20:05
That's a great idea. I need to just get it out. And I have this like, Oh, it's gonna be hard, I'm gonna have to spin up a new Rails app, not that it's hard to spin up a new Rails app, it literally takes five seconds, but it's just like, and then I'm like, oh, are my dependencies gonna be up to date and blah, blah, blah? I think that's a great idea. I think I'll just I'll just word screenshare. vomit something. And then at least I'll have the basic building blocks of Oh, my gosh, I have an idea. Yeah. So I have hired my sister. And I think we've talked about this before. The problem is she is not a developer. And so she cannot write me any content. But I could screenshare word mind dump. And then I could send it to her. And she could turn it into words. Yes. On a paper. Yes. That's a great idea. That's brilliant. It's brilliant. Michelle, we're going to do that next week, maybe? No, for real. Yeah. So that's, that's definitely something I want to do. That's a great idea. That's totally what I'm going to do.

Michele Hansen 21:07
Speaking of things that you're going to do, so last week, we are talking about the spake decision you're trying to make. And I don't want to pressure you. But I'm just want to kind of like wondering, what's what's going on there? If you've thought about that, since?

Colleen Schnettler 21:22
Yes, so I have decided to join this other startup that I mentioned. I am super excited. I can't talk about it too much yet, because there's just like, there's like lawyers involved. It's like a thing. And there's lawyers involved because there's real money involved. And there's three of us. So three co founders. I know, doesn't that just sound interesting. I mean, I have three children. And the thing about going from two children to three is you like, you know exponentially increase the number of relationships you have to manage, right? Like when you have two kids, you only have to manage one relationship. When you have three, you've got to manage all the different relationships between the three children. And so that's what I was thinking when I was like, oh, now there's three of us. But I know these guys really well. I've known them for years. They're good guys, I really believe in their product. But we are definitely at that phase. It's really interesting. Like we're at the lawyer phase. So we're lawyer, lawyer, bring out some of the details. So I can't talk about it too much, because nothing is finalized. Yet things could still change. But I'm really excited about it. It's gonna be really fun. Look at you

Michele Hansen 22:34
moving to California and joining a startup. I know I'm so cliche. You're in San Diego, and it's like a indie thing. But you know what?

Colleen Schnettler 22:44
It still feels a little cliche. Like, this is what you're supposed to do, man.

Michele Hansen 22:48
Live in the California dream.

Colleen Schnettler 22:50
Live in the California dream? Yeah, so I'm super excited. That's moving pretty quickly. So there's a lot of hopefully, in a couple weeks, I'll have an update on that. There's a lot of moving pieces, and there's a lot of work to be done. So it's gonna be an adventure. But I am, I am really excited to join their their team, because I am super pumped to have co founders. I have had people approached me before about becoming a co founder. And I just don't think it's something I would do with someone I don't know. Because there's so much involved in that relationship. And so I'm just like, super pumped to have people to talk to about, like, random nerdy stuff that no one else cares about. But us. That's fun. Yeah. So we'll see how it all how it all shakes out. But I think it's gonna be great. Obviously, I think it's gonna be great. And so I'm doing it. And I, you know, I

Michele Hansen 23:45
like that you're kind of going in as an equal, like, you know, cuz, cuz you're the only rails person on the team. Right? Right. And they're coming from other, you know, places or worlds or whatnot. So you're bringing something unique to the table that they don't currently have. And and since you know them, well, like, you know, it will be a, what's not a marriage of equals, because there's three of you, but three, a union of Yeah. of equals.

Colleen Schnettler 24:23
Yeah, and I felt that that was really important. When we talked about equity. I feel like for me to make two dues to commit the time and to do something like that, like, I've I, you know, I don't really want to work for anyone, like, I want to be an equal partner. So that that was that was definitely important to me.

Michele Hansen 24:43
Mm hmm. It's pretty exciting. I it's hard that I kind of can't share too much more about it.

Colleen Schnettler 24:49
Yeah, I think it's all gonna be fine. But like, I just want to be over that hump before I start talking details. Because if if something change, you know, sometimes when lawyers get involved, and you have To talk about these hard things like, things can get a little weird. I don't think they will. But you never know. And you add to what we were just saying about some of the challenges that you've had with simple file upload around. How do you price it and content and marketing it. And all of these things, like, there's a lot for one person to take on. And, like,

Michele Hansen 25:27
I think you have been feeling the lack of a co founder.

Colleen Schnettler 25:31
Oh, my gosh, Michelle. So after I made this deal, this just happened. My first thought was like, I should bring out a co founder for simple file upload, like co founders everywhere. Everyone needs to co founder. But seriously, so So obviously, so you know, I've been like, Okay, how am I gonna have time for simple file upload? And the thing about trying to everyone says, Oh, just hire like a contract developer like that. So easy. It's not like FYI, finding a good contract developer at my budget, which is, what, $1,000 a month to stay within my parameters of what I'm making. That's not, it's not really possible. Like, I feel like, it's really not something. I would love to hire someone to do all these things, but I'm just not there yet. So I don't know, I started toying with the idea. Okay. So if I don't have enough money to incentivize a really good developer to come join me, maybe I should just like, find myself a co founder for that. My getting crazy. Maybe I just need to take us take a beat and think about it. Like, I literally know who it would be. And I think he listens to this podcast, but I don't know if he knows.

Unknown Speaker 26:43
You. I mean,

Michele Hansen 26:44
and so now there's gonna be these listening, like, Is it me? Is it me? Oh, my gosh.

Colleen Schnettler 26:51
I shouldn't have said that. Um, anyway, it's something I've thought of, as literally just thought of yesterday, I have never thought of before. But I don't know, there's possibilities here. I mean, I just man, I just feel like I cannot. I cannot move simple file upload forward. at this speed, I want it to move forward. And so I'm trying to be patient with myself. And the thing about SAS, it's still just, it's like, just making me money. Even though I'm doing nothing but responding to support requests. Like it's like magical money. Michelle, it's so cool. So maybe on a like, if you look at it from a business perspective, it hasn't really what what's that hockey stick thing everyone's into? I haven't really hockey stick, but it's still pretty cool. So I mean, just it's casually making you $1,000 a month, which is nothing to sneeze, right.

Unknown Speaker 27:40
Like, that's fine. Like,

Michele Hansen 27:43
there's pretty people who would want to have that. And that's, and it's very, like, yeah, I'm just trying to support like, that's, that's a pretty big achievement.

Colleen Schnettler 27:53
Yeah, it totally is. It totally is. So I don't know. So I think I was just like, you know, excited about this other thing. And I was like, oh, maybe I should bring out a co founder for this, I don't think I'm going to make any moves to do that. I like having my own thing. I'd like to be able to run it exactly how I'd like. But it would be cool. If I could, I don't know get a little bit more help. And so maybe, maybe I'll decide that it's worth that and I'll put some of my own money into it and, and hire someone to help me. The thing that's cool about simple file upload is like 95% feature complete. So I just need a little more push to get it over the edge. And then it's just like little things I've noticed every time I grab a chunk of time to work on it. It's not like big architectural decisions, except for this sub domain thing, which is causing me infinite headaches. Besides that, once that gets sorted out, it's a couple I can, I can make an impact in like three to four hours on it, like I can do three to four hours, I can implement a feature. And you know, it's good. So it doesn't require that much time.

Michele Hansen 28:53
And the other thing is, if you're 95%, there, do the other 5%. And then if the stuff after that is stuff that you don't want to do, like marketing and whatnot, like, yes, you can hire people to do that. Or you can just throw it up on micro acquire and see what, you know, people bit like,

Colleen Schnettler 29:10
Hi, if so we talked a little bit about that last week, that is an interesting idea. I think I'm gonna see how this shakes out with my new my new company, and see what you know, how I am able to balance my life with them. And go from there, because that's an interesting idea that we talked about that I'm definitely you know, it's kind of percolating, but I also think that this thing is almost completely hands off. And as you just said, like, it just brings in some money. So that's pretty cool. So I think it's gonna depend on once we get rolling with this new company, how many spare cycles that takes and that might take all of them and so, you know, there might be something I don't know. It's like, all exciting though. It's like really all good, really fun stuff over here. All good things, all good things. Yeah. So I think last week, as part of my Keep myself accountable podcast, I said I was going to get a test, a test domain set up on my website, I still don't have that, because I'm having a very frustrating time with like architecture challenges. I did all the things I needed to do, I got rails to 6.1, I set up proxying through my app. But now I'm just having trouble like, with the sub domain, I'm sorry, with the CDN and the sub domains and the routing. And this kind of stuff like DNS and routing, and subdomains and CD ends are not things I am intimately familiar with, like they're usually things you just set up once and you let them be, and they're just hanging out. So this whole wildcard subdomain thing is new. I've never done it before. And it's causing a lot of headaches. So I'm hoping this week, it's going to be the same same goal. And this week, I'm going to add the goal of doing a screen share for my sister, so we can start pumping out content. Nice. Yeah, that was a lot of words. But yeah, that's the goal. Cool. I should write that down. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 30:58
Totally. All right. Well, I think that'll wrap us up for this week. Thank you so much for listening to software social, we will talk to you again.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Buy Michele's book! deployempathy.com

Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Noko. When you're bootstrapping on the side, every free moment counts. But do you really know how you're spending those moments? Which days you're most productive? If your product has time sings that just don't pay. Here's one way to find out. Noko is a time tracker designed to help you learn from the time you track. And Noko makes it frictionless to give yourself good data to you can even log time directly from your GitHub commit messages. Try Noko today and save 15% off every plan forever. Visit NokoTime.com/SocialPod to start making your time work for you.

Colleen Schnettler 0:50
So Michele, I went to purchase your book yesterday on Amazon. And I saw that it is the number one new release in business books.

Michele Hansen 1:04
Is this research and development. But yes. And I The crazy thing is is you were the first person to notice like I didn't know that until you tweeted.

Colleen Schnettler 1:15
Yes, that makes me so happy. So I was gonna text you but like my number one Google searches What time is it in Denmark? It was like 4am or something. So I was like, Okay, I'll just tweet about it. And she'll see it when she wakes up.

Michele Hansen 1:29
Thanks. I remember seeing that. And I was like, oh my god. Um, yeah, that was really, really, really unexpected. It's been, it's been such a week.

Colleen Schnettler 1:42
Yeah. So how many copies Have you sold? Okay, so

Michele Hansen 1:46
on Amazon, including paperback and Kindle 47. And then I also closed the pre sale on Monday. And so that was 127 copies there. Wow.

Colleen Schnettler 2:07
Yeah, that's a lot.

Michele Hansen 2:09
Yeah. So yeah, like over 150. which feels, which feels pretty good.

Colleen Schnettler 2:16
Um, and,

Michele Hansen 2:20
but, yeah, I mean, and it's kind of fun seeing the orders from around the world, like, you know, like us, Germany, Japan, UK, Canada, Australia. Like, I mean, I know, there's a lot of places where Amazon isn't. And I don't have that data for the PDF version out in Brazil, too. But, you know, I mean, this. I feel like this whole book was, like people from around the world, most of whom I have never met and had never met before. were part of making this book happen of encouraging it and sharing the newsletters and replying to them and sharing their own stories with me about their experiences with talking to customers and what they've struggled with and what's worked for them. And I'm just, I'm just so moved. Like, it's just, yeah, it's been. It's been quite a week.

Colleen Schnettler 3:21
Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm so happy for you. And I'm happy the launch has gone so well.

Michele Hansen 3:27
Yeah, and I think it's not like a like a sort of a big bang launch. here because it is kind of summer and you know, things are moving a little slowly. And also doesn't, doesn't have to be it'd be a huge thing. But so right now, kind of focusing on trying to get reviews of the book on Amazon before I tried to do a Product Hunt launch. I think that's kind of like, I feel like good right now with like launching it with the people who have been along for the journey and supporting it. And, you know, someone actually sent me some like, little, like, formatting quirks they noticed in their version. And so I kind of want to get those ironed out. Before you know, bring the book to people who may not be so understanding of, you know, yeah, seeing that. Some stray formatting or whatnot. Um, yeah. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 4:27
Does Amazon have analytics built in to their book publishing platform? Because you mentioned you could see where people were coming from?

Michele Hansen 4:34
Yeah, actually, I can pull it up right now. So the whole that the KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing is what they call it. They have this little dashboard, so I can see that. Um, so yeah, there's been orders from US, UK, Germany, Japan, and Canada, and Brazil. And it tells me like, what day they're ordered on and then also the Kindle reading percentage. Which I guess they use to determine the quality of the book. So like when you did on a Kindle, Amazon is kind of creepily like tracking that and basically, you know, but like, basically people buy this book, and then they read 10 pages of it, and then they don't ever open it again. Amazon takes that as a signal about the quality of the book. Oh, yeah, I mean, so maybe like, people buy it just to like, have it just in case. But so but it can show me for example, that super creeped out by that,

Colleen Schnettler 5:31
by the way, like gender weird. And

Michele Hansen 5:35
65 pages have been read. Total. And then I think it can also show me like the there's been 24 pages read today.

Colleen Schnettler 5:47
So Wow, that's wild. I didn't know that.

Michele Hansen 5:51
I feel a little so.

Colleen Schnettler 5:52
Yeah, a little bit. So tell me about the feedback you've been getting from people have a lot of people have been reaching out to you to tell you, you know, give you feedback on their experiences with the book.

Michele Hansen 6:01
Yeah, people have been so nice. Um, as I mentioned, a bunch of people were posting reviews, but I feel like you need more before I launch it on product times are kind of go on some big podcasts to promote it. Because like those people, they don't know me, they haven't been listening. They haven't been following along. Like, why the, you know, why the heck should they care who I am and what I wrote about, right. So, um, so yeah, people have been just so generous with their time and their energy of helping to get the word out about the book. And any, I've gotten nice emails from people, it's actually been kind of funny to get texts from my friends about it, because I haven't really talked about it much with like, my friends and family because it's not relevant to most of them. Like, I feel like, you know, I feel like I describe it. And I'm like, well, it's like, super nice. It's like how to, like, create software products and sell them and stuff like that. And Mathias is always like, no, everybody should have this book. It's so relevant. Everyone, like, you know, I there's like this little like group of like real estate agents in Canada who are really excited about it, for example. Um, and, um, but so like, even just getting texts from friends of mine, who I haven't really talked to about, it has been such a nice surprise, like, one of my friends sent me a picture of her two year old son flipping through it when it arrived. And apparently, he loves the duck on the cover. Totally warms my heart. But actually, oh, negative, um, there was somebody who tweeted something negative at me, like, what was it? They're like, like my first tweet, where I like tweeted out about how it was available on Amazon, this person that doesn't follow me, and I don't follow and tweeted that. They replied to me, and they said, aka manipulation for Dummies. And I like looked at it. I was like, really? Like, you come to like, somebody's like celebration of this, and you show up with negativity like that. And then I thought they made the wise decision and deleted it. So. Okay, um, yeah, it was like a little is a little weird. And I mean, it hasn't weighed on me too much. And I think it is a concern of mine. I have right that like, people will manipulate people with this. But I think like people who are manipulative, like, they have long figured out all of this and more, and they don't need an instruction manual. Like those people intuitively understand how to manipulate people and use it for their evil and they don't need instructions. So So mostly people have been, have been positive. And it's, yeah, it's, it's honestly gone. So much better than I ever could have hoped. And, really, it really never would have come to fruition. Never mind been like this, had I not done it in public and had it not started out, you know, as just a humble little newsletter. And, you know, I think if I had done the image I had in my head of what a writer does, which is sort of disappear into a cave for a year and not speak to anyone or, you know, like, see sunlight for that period of time. And then emerge with this, you know, glowing tablets of wisdom or whatever, like, I never would have published it. And I also don't think it would be getting received like this. And so I'm just, I feel like I keep repeating myself, but I'm just so grateful for how supportive people have been and how so many people around the world have contributed to this. Whether it was you know, leaving anonymous comments on those early drafts on help this book or You know, tweeting support or reading rough drafts, like, you know, reading reading copies of it, like writing reviews, like just all of that is just, it's it's really deeply moving. To me. That's wonderful. And your support to Coleen?

Colleen Schnettler 10:20
I'm taking full credit. I've taken credit. I feel like this was my idea. I feel like when we started this podcast, I said, let me tell you how this is gonna end. Michelle's gonna write a book and I'm gonna launch a product. And here we are, we went to podcasting.

Michele Hansen 10:34
Anyway, so speaking of that, I have to mention that today is the one year anniversary of our first episode.

Colleen Schnettler 10:45
Oh my goodness, can you believe it's been a year?

Michele Hansen 10:47
I can't. I cannot

Colleen Schnettler 10:50
unrelated to this where we like recap everything that is so

Michele Hansen 10:59
I just can't believe it.

I mean, it's, it feels like so long ago that we started with also doesn't feel like that long ago.

Colleen Schnettler 11:16
Yeah, it doesn't feel like a year to me. I was kind of surprised when you mentioned that. I mean, we've come so far. I think we talked about it a little bit last week or the week before when I was kind of bemoaning how I feel like I'm moving really slowly. Um, but if you look at what you've accomplished over a year, like it's, it's really been significant.

Michele Hansen 11:39
Yeah, and I mean, you know, talking about the book too, like Patrick McKenzie is talking about friend catchers of like, things that you do that, you know, get you get you friends, basically. And I feel like this podcast has been such an amazing friend Catcher in a year that has otherwise been quite lonely and difficult with the pandemic, to have this going on to not only like, sort of force us to keep talking to each other were like, just for like, we used to be basically neighbors and meet up at a local coffee shop. And then now we have a nine hour time difference between us like, we would not be talking this much like an actually talking and not just like texting had, like if we didn't have this podcast, and I'm grateful for that. And and I'm also so grateful for everyone who has kind of jumped on to this like weird little project of ours and and want to be a part of it. Yeah, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 12:42
It's cool. It's cool. Speaking of, I don't I haven't heard that term friend catcher's, but it made me think of something I wanted to talk to you about. So I have some friends who have a business, and I've been consulting for them for about six months. And yesterday, they offered to bring me in as a full partner. Oh, and I don't know what to do. I mean, I do know what I want to do. But it's it's like a lot. And I think that these kinds of opportunities. I knew these guys be independent of the podcast, but I definitely think like expanding my reach has helped bring more of these kinds of opportunities to my doorstep, which is really cool.

Michele Hansen 13:24
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 13:25
Yes. So so I don't know. So that's something I'm considering. If I go in with them, there'd be three of us, it'd be a company of three founders. They don't actually have a launched product yet. But they have they own the IP of something. They built at work that they want to spin off and turn into its own product.

Michele Hansen 13:44
Is this like, an open source? Like, I know you're involved with a couple of things? I think I might know which one this is. But they have some like open source stuff going on? Is it that one?

Colleen Schnettler 13:56
Yeah, it's that one?

Michele Hansen 13:57
Ah, sorry. Oh, a little bit cryptic here.

Colleen Schnettler 14:01
I don't know if I'm gonna say yes. So I don't want to. I don't want to like, name them yet. But um, it's a really cool opportunity. I am really, I think their product is spec. They're not it's not a product yet. But I think their IP is spectacular. And it's making waves to like, yeah, yeah, people are excited about it. What they're doing is really cool. And I love the idea of, as we've talked about, like going in with, with people, and I know these guys really well. So it's not like random people that I'd be starting a company with. Yeah, I love going in with people that are unknown quantity. So that's exciting. So

Michele Hansen 14:41
like, just sort of, like recap. So I mean, so so when we started this podcast, right, like you were working full time as a, you know, software consultants, and had clients and you wanted to start a SAS and then you sort of finally picked something and started launching that in September of last year, and then bi, which is simple file upload. And then by December, you had something that was logical, you got into the Roku marketplace, it went public and you're allowed to start charging for it in February, you've gotten to this about 1000. Mr. Mark at this point, now you've kind of switch gears a little bit, you're still doing that you recently took a full time job that you're working Monday through Thursday, to lower some of that stress of having clients and and have work be a little more predictable and give you that space to also to still work on your SAS but not have it have that pressure of bringing in your full time income. And so you can kind of just just like a little. So how would being a partner in this project change that? Like, what would things look like on a practical level?

Colleen Schnettler 15:54
I think practically, I don't know. So those are the details I'm trying to work out right now. Like, what would that look like? What would my involvement be? with them and selling their product? I think part of the reason is so so I built as, as a consultant for them, I built out a Rails or Ruby on Rails version of this product. So they kind of the reason they're asking me is because the bulls evangelist or the person who sells it to the rails community, essentially, because they cover a different a different back end community with their expertise. So I think that is a big concern is can I do all the things? I mean, that's, that's what I have to figure out. And I know we talk a lot on this podcast about trying to balance all the things. I want to do all the things. I need to figure out if I can do all the things and I can take advantage of this opportunity.

Michele Hansen 16:52
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 16:53
Oh, it's interesting, because as when when we try to grow like this, we always say, oh, I'll just hire someone, it is really hard to just hire someone. I think to find good developers, when I can think of the contract developers I know that I would hire to work on simple file upload, I think of two people that I have worked with before. And both of those people are incredibly busy. You know, like, I think when it's when it's your product, because theoretically, I could hire more help on simple file upload. And then I could try this other role with these guys on their product. But I'm hiring someone. It's not easy, like it's not, you know, I think everyone who's tried to do this can attest to that, especially good contract developers.

Michele Hansen 17:41
So I want to run through some hypotheticals with you, and you tell me how you're feeling about them. Okay. Number one, is, you have this this this job you're working on Monday through Friday. And then on nights, you work on tipo, file upload, and then on Fridays, you work on this other thing. Let's just picture that in our heads for a moment. How do you feel about that?

Colleen Schnettler 18:12
I don't feel good about that. Okay. And I think I think part of the background for folks that, you know, I don't know why you would know my life story. So I taught myself to code while I was working full time and had kids. And that was freaking exhausting. Like for, I don't know, two years, every sit if you go back in my Twitter history, like I used to do that 100 days of code thing, like, maybe not two years, but like, at least a year. I mean, every single night, I would listen to the code newbies podcast while I did the dishes, so I'd get pumped up about learning to code. And then I go every night and I was exhausted. And it worked out great for me, like, you know, I am exactly where I wanted to be when I did that. But that was really exhausting. And I'm in this really comfortable place now. And I want to be successful in my SAS. That's important to me. But I don't want to do that again. Yeah, I mean, it's just not not where I am right now in my life. Like, I don't want to be a slacker, but I also don't want to work 12 hours a day.

Michele Hansen 19:15
Yeah. Understandably. I mean, you you did that like, and you know how hard it is. And it makes sense that you would not want to go back to that. Yeah. Okay. Here's another hypothetical. You keep the the nine to five Monday to Thursday job. You list simple file upload on micro acquire and it fetches one of those insane multiples that people are getting for stuff making $1,000 a month I require right now. And then you work on this other thing on Fridays?

Colleen Schnettler 19:52
Yeah, so I thought about that. I feel like simple file upload though, is going to be so successful because I feel Like, I don't know. So I don't want to do that. The thing is, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to take on too many things that I do them all poorly, right? That's important. And I keep thinking, like the people who get what they want, are really good at focusing and not getting distracted. The people who spread themselves too thin no one wins.

Michele Hansen 20:18
I mean, it's one who runs a company has a podcast and just wrote a book. I beg to disagree.

Colleen Schnettler 20:25
You did them all spectacular. I don't know about that. But you know. So I think that I, so I thought about selling simple file upload, but it's almost feature complete, it's pretty much feature complete, and it just makes me money. If I don't touch it, it's just, it's just growing. Like, it's like magic unicorn over there.

Michele Hansen 20:48
I mean, we just described a like cash throwing asset that doesn't need a ton of work on it that people would want to buy.

Colleen Schnettler 20:57
Well, that's true. I mean, you could say that's why someone would buy it, because it literally, but I could also I mean, it's, I could just leave it my thought. Okay, so my thought is, what if I just leave it? Like, it doesn't need, we've talked about a lot of things like, my sister is working on some marketing plans for it, get it feature complete, there's like one or two things I need to add. I could just let it make me money, right. I mean, it's just or, or I turned down this other opportunity. And I go all in, not all in I mean, I continue with plan a plan A, which is focus on simple file, upload and see if I can grow it faster, while having that comfort and security of the full time job.

Michele Hansen 21:45
I don't know. Okay, before we sort of move into that, let's just run through the last hypothetical that I thought of, and there's probably more, but we'll just stick it out with this one. You keep going with the nine to five, Monday through Thursday job. You work on simple file upload on Fridays, and you turn down this offer to work with these people who you think are working on. Okay, I'm not going to bias your, your.

Colleen Schnettler 22:16
Um, so that's a good option, too. I feel like Okay, so let's let me take a step back and acknowledge the incredible, amazing position I'm in where I'm like, Oh, I have all these amazing opportunities. I don't know which one to take. So that's pretty spectacular. So I'm pretty happy about all of my choices. I don't think I can make a wrong choice here. I want to go in with these guys. Because I want co founders, I've always wanted co founders. I know it's hard it can it can bring conflict, and it's harder, but it's I think will be way more fun. And I think their product is really cool. I think it might be cooler than my product specials. So

Michele Hansen 22:57
how does the thought of not working on that and walking away from it feel?

Colleen Schnettler 23:03
I think I'll regret it. Because I think when they start selling their product, they're gonna be millionaires. Like no joke. I mean, I think I don't think it'd be bad though. Like, I don't think it's a bad choice to walk away. If I walk away, then they'll just keep keep on keep on in and I can, you know, cheer them on from the sidelines. And we could always decide later, you know, they don't haven't even launched their product yet. Like, just so you know, so we can always decide later, maybe in six months, I have more time. And they're like, Oh, we really need a salesperson. Now, if I come in later, they're not going to offer me a full third. I'm sure they'll be like, we'll give you x amount. But I don't think I'm shutting the door completely on that opportunity if I don't take it right now.

Michele Hansen 23:47
So they're offering you a full third. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 23:51
that is

Michele Hansen 23:53
interesting. Um, you know, to the the, I feel like that sort of brings us back to the option of, you know, you have a full time job, which is paying you then you have this SAS that basically doesn't need any work from you, where you casually make $12,000 a year, like without doing a whole lot like no big deal. And then you spend your Fridays working on this other thing. And maybe sometimes you have to put in some hours on simple file upload or you've got some help from contractors. How does that option feel?

Colleen Schnettler 24:27
That actually feels good to me. I mean, I, you know, I just, I want to make sure I'm putting good products out there in the world. So that is important to me to make sure that if I do something like that, that simple file upload is not getting the shaft because I feel that's my thing. And I feel very, very strongly about giving that product the time and attention it needs. But it is feature complete, almost. And so I could just let it ride, keep doing customer interviews. I mean what if I took the next six months Once you've been telling me to do this forever, instead of like, obsessing over what feature to add, I just talked to people, I just talked to my customers once a week, for six months, and then I have gathered, that doesn't take a ton of my time, couple hours a week, then I have gathered this amazing catalogue of data. And then who knows where everything will, will fall out in a period of time. And then after I've gathered this catalogue of data, I can decide what to do next with it.

Michele Hansen 25:28
I mean, I'm an advocate of doing, doing the research and doing the work at the same time. And, and doing, you know, doing the research on an ongoing basis. And, you know, you don't have to wait until you have a pile of data to make decisions.

Colleen Schnettler 25:43
I know, but I'm trying, I feel like you're telling me not to not to take on too much stuff. And just be aware of that, like, I feel like, that's the vibe I'm getting from you is you're like, I don't know, make sure you sort this out before you accept it.

Michele Hansen 25:55
It seems like it's, it's, it's justifiably important to you to be conscious of your energy and how you're spending your time. And also this sort of like pride in your craft and what you're selling to people and making sure that when you're selling them something, you feel like it's worth that money that they're giving you and you are not content to just collect a check.

Colleen Schnettler 26:18
Right. And I have to make sure it's good.

Michele Hansen 26:21
And and this is something where it, maybe it is a little bit harder for me to say sort of intrinsically understand this because I have to have multiple things going on. You know, we are we are different people with different neurological systems. And I think you're afraid that if you take on, you know, these three things, that you're not going to be able to give any of them 100%. And, and, and that worries you and and you took this job for your family stability, you know, to as part of being a provider for your family. And it seems like you don't want to stress yourself to the point where your work performance suffers, or your performance on simple file uploads anytime you're so proud of it that you don't want to sell it.

Colleen Schnettler 27:20
Yeah, I don't want to sell it because I'm so free, cuz you see the opportunity there too.

Michele Hansen 27:25
But the same time, there's opportunity there. And the fact that the foundry really pioneered people like well absolutely buy it. And like it might help if you you know, you, you decided to go, you know, all in so to speak for your side project time on this other thing, and then you were sitting on, you know, I don't know, a casual, you know, $20,000 or whatever. Um, or more Actually, that's really low multiple, like, probably like 50 or $100,000. I would not be surprised if you fetch that. Gosh, seriously, like I've seen stuff like, what's our episode last week or a couple weeks ago about multiples? They're, like, absolutely bonkers multiples going for these, like sort of low MRR? sasses, like, under like, 10,000 a month, like even under 1000 a month. Like, like, I thought I saw one that was like 24 times revenue, which is

Colleen Schnettler 28:19
wow, like, That's crazy. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 28:23
Now, if you're making 500 a month, like, but still that's like, that's a huge premium.

Colleen Schnettler 28:29
That's a huge Yeah, I don't know, I think you're right about, I think you're absolutely right about. I don't want to sell it because I feel very, I mean, it's my you know, it's my baby, like, I feel very invested in it. I'm excited. It feels like I finally finally, after you and I have been talking for years about my ideas, I found something that's working. So I then with me, their product is really cool. But they don't I think their products gonna work. I mean, it's pretty well validated because people have paid them to build it and let them keep the IP, but at the same time, they aren't actually selling anything yet. So they really haven't seen. Although I think you're absolutely right. It's going to be a, you know, a home run success. My thing is already working. So, you know, I'm hesitant to sell something that's working if I could just let it chill and get to it when I have time.

Michele Hansen 29:31
You know, I remember I felt that way about when we were talking about God Oh, at first because we had this mobile app that was like working we had ad revenue like it was it was making us money and, um, and we desperately like, needed that money. And, and then it kind of came up that we you know, we need a geocoding for it to keep it going. And it was like she you know, should we put the time into it to make that into a product? Or should we focus on the thing that's already making money and just like, let it be just sort of something internal. And I remember having a lot of discussions with Mateus about that. And I remember I was on the side of, let's do the thing that's already making money. Because we know that's working. And, you know, lo and behold that app, I think it may be grossed $10,000, in its two or three years of existence. And, you know, God makes more than a day. So, like,

Colleen Schnettler 30:35
it's, you know, these

Michele Hansen 30:37
things are really hard to predict. Yeah, you know, you were saying of like, I think you're trying to tell me to do this. I'm not trying to tell you to do anything. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to help you think,

Colleen Schnettler 30:50
think and

Michele Hansen 30:53
I can't tell you what is going to be the right decision for you. I can't tell you what's going to leave you with the fewest regrets. Um, you know, there's this other option where like, you know, these guys, maybe it's worth saying to them, like, hey, like, I love to come on is as a full partner. Like, if you're okay with me, you know, splitting my time between this and simple file upload for a while, like, I'm not ready to decide on what I want to do a simple file upload.

Colleen Schnettler 31:27
And,

Michele Hansen 31:29
you know, because the thing about getting on something that you think is a rocket ship, like, there's no guarantees and like, rockets explode all the time. Like, yeah, they do. Yeah, like, and if you like, you know, and if you got, like,

Unknown Speaker 31:44
you know, I don't know,

Michele Hansen 31:47
little like propeller planes that next there that you know, is going to get you from A to B, like might not get you to the moon, but it's you know, going to get you a hop, skip and a jump away to where you want to be like, sometimes that's a little safer, you know? Yeah. And I mean, I think if you were saying I'm going to quit my job and simply file upload and work on this other thing, I would be like,

Unknown Speaker 32:10
okay, let's, let's take a breath.

Unknown Speaker 32:13
Um,

Unknown Speaker 32:15
maybe you don't have to decide,

Unknown Speaker 32:17
right? Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 32:19
yeah, I think more conversations. I think that's the right answer. I think I need to think a little bit. I liked your hypothetical. What does that look like?

Michele Hansen 32:27
Yeah, just sort of went through it. Like, what are all different permutations?

Colleen Schnettler 32:31
Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, tune in next week to find out what kylene has decided to do with her life again. Alright, so on that note, let's wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on iTunes and we'd love to hear from you on Twitter.

Michele Hansen 32:57
And thank you so much for listening. Whether this is your first episode you're listening to or You have been listening since the beginning. It really means a lot to both of us. And I keep wishing we could have like software, social con or something. We're just like, get together and hang out. Because I feel like that would be really fun. So yeah, thank you for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Buy Michele's book!
Paperback and Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/173744660X (or search Deploy Empathy on Amazon)
PDF/ePub: deployempathy.com/pdf

Michele Hansen 0:00
This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Orbit. Orbit is mission control for your community, grow and measure your community across any platform with Orbit. Find out more at orbit.love.

Colleen Schnettler 0:14
Good morning, Michele. Hey,

Michele Hansen 0:17
Hey, how are you?

Colleen Schnettler 0:19
Great. So I hear that you have some new book updates.

Michele Hansen 0:24
Yeah. So we finalized the cover this week. And I just saw, like just today just submitted it to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Ingram Spark, which is another self publishing print on demand platform and filed for the copyright. So things are happening.

Colleen Schnettler 0:47
That's exciting.

Michele Hansen 0:51
Yeah, you know, I was thinking about our conversation last week, and how you were talking about how you felt like you weren't getting anything getting anything done? And I was like, man, I feel the same way.

Colleen Schnettler 1:03
Really? Has it just felt like for weeks,

Michele Hansen 1:07
yeah, like, I feel it? Well, you know, it's kind of it's like this weird in between liminal space where like, the copy has basically been final for a month now. And it's just sort of been kind of waiting on other things. And, and then there's also the, there's sort of the fact that it's summer here. And like summer camps aren't really as much of a thing here as they are in the US. Which, you know, I guess if like, most people who work for other people get four weeks of vacation, and they have kids, it's not really a big deal. But if you're self employed, it kind of is sure. Um, and so I, you know, I'm just sort of working at night and whatever. Or maybe I wake up early and get a couple hours in and like, man, I don't I don't know how parents in Europe who are self employed, do it. Like, I really, I really don't know. And like, just for weeks now I've been I mean, like, yeah, like, today's the day, I'm going to start recording the audio book, private podcast, I'm super excited about doing that. Now that the copy is finalized, I'm, like, ready to go. And it just like that time just keeps not happening. And I feel like I'm not making any progress. Um, but this morning, I did submit it and then not now it has to be reviewed. And I wanted to get a proof copy. But I think I might have done something wrong when I configured that option. And it just says your book might be published in 72 hours.

Colleen Schnettler 2:44
That's fast. Okay.

Michele Hansen 2:45
I haven't even like I wanted to, like, look at it and make sure the, you know, the cover looked right. And like, you know, the pages aren't upside down and whatnot. So okay, so I'm alone? I don't know. So maybe if you search on Amazon next week, you'll actually find it even though I'm not gonna tell anybody.

Colleen Schnettler 3:01
But it won't be a physical copy yet. That's just

Michele Hansen 3:04
so that'll be that the physical copy? Yeah, who would be a physical copy on Amazon, Amazon printed like, book to Amazon. I know, they could upload a book to Amazon. And then they print it whenever somebody buys it. Really? I know I was going, I was like, they let just anybody do this, like this? Wait, this is so

Colleen Schnettler 3:25
easy. This is crazy. I had no idea. So so you submit to them your cover art and your book. And then when someone buys it, they print it on demand?

Michele Hansen 3:34
There's some other stuff that happens. But basically, yes, that's cool. So I don't have to like go out and you know, buy, like, basically pay for a printer to print 500 copies or whatever, then mail them out myself, which I think is what you had to do before. Things like kind of KDP or Kindle on demand or Kindle on it was what they call it? Or, you know, sort of like Do you remember like cafe press in the 90s? Like, yes, people could make t shirts and then printed it whenever you bought one. It's basically like that for books. And then there's also in Ingram Spark, which is also print on demand. But I guess there's a lot of countries that Amazon doesn't serve. And also, I guess bookstores are more willing to work with Ingram spark than they are with Amazon because they can return books to Ingram spark because Ingram spark distributes a lot of non self published books to I'm learning all about this. So So yeah, so I uploaded it to them, and then they have to review it and like, I guess, make sure it looks good. Before it'll actually, I don't know, I don't know what's gonna happen next. So we're just, we're all going to find out together. I didn't really publish the ebook. I like, you know, Barnes and Noble and whatnot, like ebook platforms. I don't know. We will find out.

Colleen Schnettler 4:58
That's exciting. So you are telling me in a matter of maybe five days, maybe less people will be able to purchase a physical copy of your book. I don't know, theoretically, probably, maybe we're gonna find out cheaper than this before. So

Michele Hansen 5:15
I, originally I was like trying to give people estimates. And I was like, Yeah, it looks to me, like end of June. And then I just realized, I have no idea what I'm doing. Well, I knew that all along. But I realized that I have no idea what I'm doing. And therefore I should not try to predict what is going to happen next. Because that is just an exercise in folly to try to predict a process that I have no past experience with.

Colleen Schnettler 5:41
Sure. So does that mean from you will come out when it comes out? Does that mean from your perspective that it's finished? Like you're done?

Unknown Speaker 5:51
Ah,

Michele Hansen 5:52
I mean, yeah, like, like yesterday Mateus looks at me, he goes, you know, this is just the beginning. Right? What does that mean? It's like Kunkle in his I

Colleen Schnettler 6:01
started,

Michele Hansen 6:02
because, I mean, after the book is like officially out, then there's there's the, the audio book to record, right. Like, I'm super excited about doing that as a podcast and recording it myself. You know, because then I can really make sure that the, the tone of voice is coming through and everything. And I just, you know, right. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 6:25
Can I just say I'm super disappointed when authors don't read their own books.

Unknown Speaker 6:30
Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 6:30
yeah. Like, that makes me sad. Like, there's a prominent bootstrapping book, which was great. But it was not read by the author. And I was sad. I don't know why. Like, I understand why people don't want to read their own books. Maybe they don't like to talk that much. Maybe they have an accent. And then yeah, me with it. I don't know.

Michele Hansen 6:45
Yeah, exactly. I think people have different reasons for not recording their own book. But I am personally really excited to do it. And to do it as a podcast, too. Because, again, I feel like I never would have gotten the book out had I not written it as a newsletter, because for me, writing an email is a lot lower pressure and stress and just mentally, like cognitively easier than like sitting down staring at a blank cursor or thinking about writing a book. And I feel the same way about recording a podcast. Like it's like, oh, it's just a podcast. And actually, I don't even have to come up with anything to say I just read something like, great, versus the idea of sitting down to record an audio book for a 320 page book that feels daunting. But yeah, a bunch of podcast episodes for each chapter that feels easy. Feels written. They just have to be concatenated.

Colleen Schnettler 7:35
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So how is this been for you? You've been working on this four to six months.

Michele Hansen 7:42
Since end of February, middle, middle end of February is when I started the new Okay,

Colleen Schnettler 7:47
so four months. So how do you feel to me? Yeah, right. You just knock out a book and four months? Can I just say how ridiculous that is? By the way. That's not normal.

Michele Hansen 7:59
I feel like it was all in my head already. I don't really do any original research.

Colleen Schnettler 8:04
It's just funny because I feel like the arc of our podcast, like your story, and the arc of our podcast is we're chatting, we're chatting. I'm like, you should write a book.

Unknown Speaker 8:12
You're like, Man,

Colleen Schnettler 8:13
I'm like, you should write a book. You're like, yeah, and then you wrote it. And it's done. like four months later. It's like, wait, what happens?

Michele Hansen 8:21
When I commit to doing something, I do it. And usually very quickly, so but it might take me a while to actually get around to doing it.

Colleen Schnettler 8:31
How is this? Ben? Are you excited to have some time back? Do you feel like I mean, has it been quite stressful these past four to five months trying to work your full time job and write this book has been overwhelming.

Michele Hansen 8:45
No, it's been fun

Colleen Schnettler 8:46
because you love it. You love the material? Fine.

Michele Hansen 8:48
Like it's a little it's a little side project. And I need a little side projects. It's, you know, it's, I mean, I guess this podcast started out as a side project. And then this podcast kind of spawned the book. So like, you know, just side projects beget side projects. But no, I mean, it's been good. It's been a really good outlet for me, like most of that newsletter, writing time was actually at night, like, you know, after, put our daughter to bed and just kind of sitting in bed with my laptop and just sort of enjoying writing things out. And as I said, sort of mentally cleaning out my closet and just hauling out all of these things that mentally felt like old pieces of furniture from my head that were collecting dust or, you know, where were things I was referencing often, but didn't really have a good place to send people to. So it was it was a relief in a way to write it. And then I had so much fun interviewing people who read the early drafts. I think a really pivotal moment was when I got it into a draft and then I put it on health this book, which is Rob Fitzpatrick, the author of the mom test his new platform for launching books, and he also wrote a book that sort of goes with the the platform called write helpful books. That is, I think it's coming out now. But I was given a link to that on his help this book. Page. And that helped, that was hugely helpful for me. And then, and then, but actually getting the draft in front of people and then, and then talking to them about how they're using it and, and what kinds of books they find useful. And like, you know, it was just, it was, it was so fun. Like, I love talking to people about talking to people. And that was really fun. And then it was a little frustrating, I think, towards the end, like, I felt like I did a read like a major whole book rewrite of the book every week, in May in June, like, just like, that was probably when I did the most work. Like I was probably like, 7525 book versus giuoco do which was not super great. Um, but that was kind of what what I needed at the time. But yeah, I think I guess from like, now going forward, it's going to be lower lift things, like, promoting it. And yeah, we're podcast podcast. Yeah, the audio book and whatnot.

Colleen Schnettler 11:15
Well, that's super exciting. Congratulations.

Michele Hansen 11:19
It's not out yet. So I'm not gonna like,

Colleen Schnettler 11:21
have you have you sent it out? Or they hatch? I think your chickens have hatched? Yeah, whatever

Michele Hansen 11:27
it's for, it's getting reviewed. It's it's things are happening, things are moving, you know.

Colleen Schnettler 11:33
So very exciting. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 11:35
I think you're a lot more excited than I,

Colleen Schnettler 11:38
I'm just really impressed. And to your point, you had this stuff in your head already. So it wasn't like you had to spawn content for the book, you had all the content. But you turned out a book fast like you, when you started doing those newsletters. I mean, you were sending a lot of newsletters. This is a lot of information.

Michele Hansen 12:01
When I get really into something I like I go all in to the point where it can be a bit of a firehose, you know, like, so yeah, Marie Marie poulan. and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, where like, we sink our teeth into something, and then we just don't give up until we're done. Even if we wanted to. Um, I definitely I definitely feel like this has been an exercise

Unknown Speaker 12:34
in that.

Colleen Schnettler 12:35
Yeah. Well, I think it's really cool. I think you should be really proud of yourself for all the work you've put in, especially during the summer, that's hard. And you're working, you know, your normal job. And you wrote a book, super cool.

Michele Hansen 12:48
You're so supportive, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 12:51
That's what I'm here for.

Michele Hansen 12:53
I need you in my voice. You know, that voice in my head being like, you should be proud of this. You've come a long way, when I'm like, sort of knee deep and like filing copyright applications and stuff like that, and sort of not really able to see over the wall.

Colleen Schnettler 13:07
Yeah. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 13:10
Should I do a little numbers updates? Well, I don't think I've done one and

Colleen Schnettler 13:15
we haven't done one in a while. Go ahead.

Michele Hansen 13:18
So as of right now, I have sold 93 copies for the pre order nice. Which by the way, people can pre order the it's the you get the PDF, the notion and Google Drive script templates and access to the private forthcoming private podcast with the audiobook, the boy empathy.com. So 93 people have pre ordered it right now I know a bunch of people have said they want the print copy and like I'm there with you. I don't really buy a lot of ebooks, especially for something I might want to reference later. And I don't seem to be able to do a pre order for the print book. So Oh, but anyway, so 93 people have ordered and so just looking at sort of the overall revenue for that not including expenses or you know, processing fees or whatever. That is $2,697 and I added it up with expenses a couple days ago. And I believe that puts me around sort of 12 $100 in net revenue from that so my Sunday expenses

Colleen Schnettler 14:32
that's great for a book you can't that's not even available yet. I mean, I know it's available yeah order but that's pretty impressive considering it's not on Amazon yet.

Michele Hansen 14:43
It's kind of I mean, so I've like you know, I've heard about building in public for a long time and of course you know, I'm a big advocate of including your your customers in the in the process, but I've never really like built from scratch in public. And like just kind of outlined every step of what I was doing, you know, the, the highs and the lows. Yeah. And the massive amount of confusion in between. And so it's been a really, really interesting, like, I don't think I would have gotten to this point had I not started it as a newsletter and had that level of just motivation, you know, even from the, you know, the first five people who subscribed and would reply and say, Hey, this was great. Thank you for writing that, like that kept me going. In a way that, that I just would not have, like, actually, I think I started the book, right around the time of when, when that container ship was stuck in the Suez.

Colleen Schnettler 15:45
Yes, I remember,

Michele Hansen 15:47
little, that little part that nobody had on their 2021 bingo card.

Unknown Speaker 15:53
And I was reading a book.

Michele Hansen 15:56
Or there's a book I picked up off my shelf that I had been meant to read for years, I finally did, because of that called the box, which is a history of container shipping, which is a really interesting book, by the way. Hey, Peter shipping, revolutionize the world. And it's pretty new to like, since the 60s anyway, okay. Not what this podcast is about. So, but so I opened that book, and like the beginning of the book is The acknowledgments from the author. And it like starts out with the author talking about how lonely the process for writing a book is, and especially on a very niche topic. Yeah. And I think I had had some little like Inklings in my head of like, whether I should write a book at that point. And I remember reading that and being like, Oh, God, like that sounds really awful. Like, and I felt really bad for the author as I was reading this, because you've I've heard writers talk about how lonely of a process it is. And I like, and I think that turned me off from it for such a long time. But then it kind of like, occurred to me later that like, I can write a book, but I can do it my way. I don't have to do it the lonely way. Right. Like I could write it in public, I could include readers in the process and make it a social process from the beginning. So I didn't feel like I was just, you know, closed off in a windowless room for six months, because I think that's why I really never wrote a book before, like I was wanted to, but I was like, I don't think I could deal with that amount of loneliness that writers talk about. So yeah, it's been good.

Colleen Schnettler 17:37
That's awesome.

Michele Hansen 17:38
How are you doing?

Colleen Schnettler 17:39
I'm good. I'm good. Yeah. So in the spirit of our podcast last week, I'm, I took some notes, and I think I'm gonna break it up every week into like, what I did this week, what I'm struggling with and what I want to do next week, to keep myself focused and keep myself moving forward. Okay, my tangent is I listen to a podcast with Angela Duckworth. Do you know who she is? She's okay. So for those who don't know who she is, she's the MacArthur Genius Grant winner. She liked her coined the term grit. So I have this podcast I really like with her. And it's her and Stephen Dubner. And it's called no stupid questions. Anyway, this week, they were talking about the difference between urgency and importance. And they were talking about how, basically, that the summation was people don't do things that they don't consider urgent. So you can have these things on your to do list, like go to the gym, which is important. We all know, that's important. But without a sense of urgency. Like, I have to be at the gym at 6pm for my weightlifting class. Instead of instead of that, instead of being like, I'll go whenever I want. There's no urgency to it. So people just don't go, oh, that explains

Michele Hansen 18:55
so much.

Colleen Schnettler 18:56
It's so good. Like, I'm gonna send you this episode. It was so good. But yeah, so it was this concept. So I started thinking about it. In terms of my business, because I have all these things that I feel are really important. But I have no urgency behind them, right. There's no timeline for me, I can just sit here and this thing makes me money. And yeah, the ones setting the deadlines, right. And they're fake. I mean, and I'm not really even setting up. I'm like, oh, if I get to it if it's convenient for me today. So I just really liked this whole concept of something being urgent versus important, and how will we'll even do the less important things if we feel that they are urgent. And I say that because I'm now every week until I get to a place that I'm pretty happy with. I'm going to share with you kind of my goals. And so to make them feel a little more urgent, so I feel like I actually will do that.

Michele Hansen 19:48
So I like that.

Colleen Schnettler 19:51
Yeah, let's try it. It was really good. So one of the things I'm really excited about is this week, I finally got my app on rails 6.1. That's improved. To me, because I was patching in all of the CDN stuff for images because rails 6.0 didn't include that. So basically what happened is I had my app on 6.0, all the stuff was pushed on the rails master to handle CDN. And so I cherry picked it off of rails master onto my stuff, but I incorporated it as a patch to my app, which doesn't make me very happy, because it just feels brittle. So I got up to rails 6.1. So that's like a huge deal. And all of the things I have been telling you, I wanted to do, I wanted to do this first. Like, I feel like this is now going to set the stage for me to actually move forward to do other useful things. So I

Michele Hansen 20:42
feel good about that. It sounds like it's gonna help your development velocity,

Colleen Schnettler 20:46
it will. And I feel like some of these development blockers are really frustrating for me, like there's a really simple one, which won't take that long to do API access, but I didn't want to, I could have added new features, and then gone back and got it on 6.1. But it's smarter, in my opinion, since I have the time to get it on 6.1 before, you know, adding all the API stuff. So I feel like now that that's done, development stuff will go faster. So I'm pumped about that. And that was something that's like really kind of boring to do. I don't know if boring is the right word. But you know, like, upgrading is always kind of like

Michele Hansen 21:26
it's not shiny, right? Like developer happiness and infrastructure stuff. And, like, security kind of falls in this category to have like, stuff that's like really important. But it's not shiny, there's no, you know, revenue number, like floating over your head if you do it, right. It's more of a like, it's more of like a cost thing. It's like last time, you know, lost energy, like, it could be lost revenue, if it's security issues. Like, I think when we went full time actually, like the first thing we prioritized was like, What can we do for infrastructure and developer happiness stuff so that when we are working on stuff, it's more enjoyable to work on, more resilient, less brittle?

Colleen Schnettler 22:10
That's exactly that's exactly how I feel about it. So I said, it's transparent to my customers. But it feels really good to me. For exactly those reasons. My development time now going forward will go faster. I won't have to worry about writing something I'm later gonna have to rip out when I upgrade. It's good. So I was pumped about that. Something I'm struggling with this week. This is kind of funny. So you remember like a month ago, I told you, I hired my sister to help me do marketing. That's just been kind of an interesting challenge for us, because neither of us know what to do. And so I'm like trying to do my development stuff. She's asking me questions. I'm like, I don't know. So we're both kind of spinning around. Not quite sure what to do. Hmm. So what we did is we ended up having a call with one of our mutual friends who has his own podcast, his name is Josh Oh, and his podcast is searching for SAS. And he helped us lay out a SEO content, Google Search their Google Search Console strategy. Oh, yeah. So we are kind of excited to go down that path. What I originally had asked her to do was more traditional sales Safari. And it wasn't working. Hmm. Remember how Shawn came on the podcast? And he told us he spent 80 hours like doing sales Safari?

Michele Hansen 23:44
Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 23:45
yes. So my sister was trying to do that for my product. And we just weren't really, we just weren't really getting anywhere. It felt like we just weren't getting any useful information. So we are going to starting this week try to tackle this more from a content SEO perspective.

Michele Hansen 24:03
Hmm. You feel like the sales Safari kind of approach was?

Colleen Schnettler 24:10
I don't know I guess you you kind of already built something that's that's what Josh said. He was like, you're already you're already paying for it.

Michele Hansen 24:17
So it seems like you know, I mean, Salesforce is useful at many different stages. But it sounds like you need to get eyebrow eyeballs in front of this thing. And because there are people are willing to pay for it. There's clear there's a need a huge competitors went into the space, which tells you all the more that there's need for this. You just need to tell people you exist.

Colleen Schnettler 24:40
Yeah, that was his point as well. And I think that's a better use of our time is to kind of lay out a content strategy. So we're gonna try to do that I'm such a bottleneck in this process, though. It's hard to find developers to write content technical. Here's a business idea. technical content rating is really hard. I have a mutual friend who has a business way more successful than mine. And he hired a technical content agency to write some articles. They're not very good. So I'm just saying, I think that this is like a real bottleneck is like really good technical content. I'm gonna go on a limb here and say, technical content for developers has to be written by developers

Michele Hansen 25:27
or by technical writers, I know that we have at least two technical writers who listen to this podcast, okay, reading my book, and like they focus on writing documentation and for develop them to do the whole job. Yeah, to dm Colleen. Colleen. And actually, I mean, they get, you know, a lot of the work, they were telling me that they get frustrated, because, like, in big companies, they get really insulated from the customers, which inhibits their ability to write dry, good documentation. Yeah. Right. Because, you know, as you're talking about the challenges with getting your sister up to speed, like, it makes me wonder, like, has she gotten to sit in on any interviews with customers? Has she gotten to do any? Like? Has she got to hear from the customers directly about what you're solving and why it's important to them?

Colleen Schnettler 26:26
No, we haven't done any new customer interviews yet.

Michele Hansen 26:30
Get her in those? Yeah, I think that'll really help. And you might still be the person who's kind of guiding, you know, API documentation and whatnot. But if there's a difference between hearing about what something does, from somebody who built it, and hearing about what it does, from somebody who bought it, and is excited about it,

Colleen Schnettler 26:53
yeah, those are

Michele Hansen 26:54
two really different things. And for marketing, what she needs to communicate is, why you should buy it and why you should be excited about it. And the technical documentation is part of that. But she needs to be able to speak to what will get someone excited about it. Yes. And who better to hear that from than someone who is excited about that themselves, ie, a customer of yours?

Colleen Schnettler 27:19
Yeah, we have a whole bunch of new customers. So I think in a couple, probably starting next week, once my life's a little more organized. We're going to start trying to do more customer interviews and get back on that bandwagon because I haven't done any since I did them with you, almost three months ago. So that is definitely a priority to get that to get that going. Yes, so content is challenging, because I would love to just churn out some content. But I am struggling to find the time myself or find people that are making the kind of content that I need. So that is challenging, but I did I don't know if I told you so Drew, who we interviewed together, who was a simple file upload customer is a developer and so I paid him to write a piece for me. Oh, no. I need Yeah, do this. I was like, Drew knows how this works. Maybe he will do? Yeah, so that's it's not Yeah,

Michele Hansen 28:18
dude. Like hiring your own customers is really smart. Like, I think we talked about Chris from from webflow, our mutual friend we didn't realize was a mutual friend, a couple months ago. And his first support hire is one of his customers. And it worked out like amazingly well because like the person already understands the product. Yes, he knows how it works. He knows where it might go wrong. Like, that's like that is been in the back of my mind of you know, when we need to hire for something even just you know, for something on a contract. Like, who in our customer base could do that for us?

Colleen Schnettler 28:58
Yeah, I thought like, I was so pumped. So I threw you know, he said he could do it. I was like, Yes. I mean, that's the best. That's the best of both worlds. Someone who knows what they're doing as a writer. And as technical it was, it was great. So I haven't actually published it yet. Because see all these other things I've been trying to do with my life. But it's it's a guide on how to use simple file upload with react. And that has been on my to do list for four months. So let me tell you how great it felt to give it to someone who could do it better than me. It felt great. And he just got it done in like three to four days. I was like, Oh, you're you're amazing. So that was really yeah, it felt really good because you know all those things you're supposed to do. They they kind of like weigh on you and your subconscious like the things you haven't done and that is literally been on my list for four months only I have to kind of learn react before I can write about how like I kind of sorta know react but this this partnership I feel worked out really well. So that really He inspired me, it went so well with Drew, it inspired me to hire more people to write for me. But I'm definitely having a bottleneck, like finding the right kind of people, especially for the rail stuff, because I feel like I can do that better than most people. So it's a trade off.

Michele Hansen 30:18
Well, so. So first, I wonder if you could create some sort of pipeline where you create one piece of content, and it can be recycled in many different ways. And I wonder if even just that one piece of content from drew like if your sister can take that and with some understanding of what the customers are trying to solve, and where they're coming from and what the product does, and recycle that into many other pieces of content? What does that mean, risk can be used in other places to further improve your SEO?

Colleen Schnettler 30:49
I literally don't know what you mean. Like you mean, put it on? Like, like, yeah, so like, he

Michele Hansen 30:55
wrote up this, like, long guide? Yeah. Right. Yeah. So but then you can also have landing pages that are how to do this with react. And it's like taking like bits and pieces out of that. Like if she can read that and understand it, and then be like, Oh, we can use it in these other places. You can put bits and pieces of that on your homepage on other pages like, right and use that. You're probably trying to do this, like, Look, read that article, and then look at everything in Google Search Console and say, Okay, what are the similarities in terms here? What is the actual term that people are using per Google Search Console? What is the word we're using in this piece of content? Let's change that to the word that people are typing in? Are there five variations of it? Let's make sure in this article, we have headlines that use each one of those five different variations, like, use that on other parts of our site, like, so on and so forth.

Colleen Schnettler 31:44
This is the stuff we don't understand. Like I hear the words coming out of your mouth. Okay, but I'm a little confused. I mean, like, okay, so I set up okay, Search Console. So go me, I get that. So you've got keywords, right? Yeah, yes. Yes, it did. Keywords?

Michele Hansen 32:04
Yes. Okay. That is the most useful part about that for me, okay. Like before, until we started using h refs, that was what I used all the time. Okay. And so that tells you all of the different keywords that are leading people to your site, okay. It's very, it's very basic, but it's like, it's, it's enough. And I think you can sort it by volume, and you know, the number of clicks and stuff that you're getting right. And then basically taking that and so so in, like in that long article that drew wrote. So I was just, you know, publishing that as a web page, not as a PDF or anything. And then search engines pick up on the headlines. So if someone is typing in, you know how to do image upload, or file upload with react, for example, then your headlines need to be like step one, like, determine which files you want people to be able to upload with react, like with your react app, like step two, like do this thing with your react app, if you want to be able to have them, you know, import files, or like what like, use different variations of that. But like, use it in the headline. So like, we have a million of these things on our website. It actually if you go to geocoded I o. And then like in the Help menu, there's one that says tutorials, we've all these step by step guides, that are all in this format, which I actually learned from another friend of ours, who is a total SEO, like genius. And then each one is like bullet points of step one, determine which addresses you want to find the congressional district for step two, take the list of addresses that you want the congressional district for, and upload them to geocode, do step three, you know, like, and it's just using those same words over and over and over again, it's kind of like, you know, in the 90s, when you saw like, a huge block of like, tiny font text at the bottom of a web sites,

Colleen Schnettler 33:55
yes,

Michele Hansen 33:56
that is basically how this is done now, but use different versions of that of that text to because people might be typing in different things. Like we saw, for example, we'll see that people type in lat long to Congressional District, which is something I would not type in personally, like I think of address to congressional district. So we make sure that it says address to congressional district, it also says lat lon to congressional district to GPS coordinates to congressional district, like all of those, many permutations of it, and then having as many things in headlines as possible. So that that is what the you know, search engine picks up on.

Colleen Schnettler 34:36
Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah, we can work in that direction. And you're right. I didn't think about that. We already have this piece of content. So

Michele Hansen 34:43
yeah, and then just use it in many other places.

Colleen Schnettler 34:46
Okay, great. Awesome. Cool. That's exciting. Yes. That's something to to focus on a little bit. I mean, I think that's what's been challenging for us is we're just what do you do next? I have no idea. I mean, I told her I was like, we're both learning here, right? This is part of the fun. This is why we're doing it like this is part of the fun of the process. But it's definitely can be a little intimidating or confusing, and to what you said about

Michele Hansen 35:12
important versus urgent. I feel like important projects that are nebulous, get shoved to them.

Colleen Schnettler 35:19
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Like, totally. So we, that's great. We'll work on that. And then what I really want to do this week, is get a test sandbox environment set up on my website. You and I actually talked about this ages ago. And then when I talked to Derek Rhymer a couple weeks ago, he said it again. And I was like, I should really do this. But all this rail 6.1 stuff was the reason I hadn't done it yet. So I'm hoping I'll be able to get something like that up in a week. And basically, that would be kind of test sandbox. Yeah. So you know, if you go on to upload Cara cloudinary website, there's a big button that says try it now. And you can literally just try and like that, you can see exactly what it does before you sign up for an account, and all of that stuff. So that is something I want to go. Okay. Yeah. And I think that would be great. Because that's going to give me higher quality leads. And I think it'll encourage more people to use the service because I think my service offers some things that these other these other services don't offer. So

Michele Hansen 36:21
show them what it does.

Colleen Schnettler 36:22
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's I try I have the video, which shows them what it does. But people like to, especially developers, like at least I do, I like to put my hands on thing, like you make it look easy. Is it actually that easy? So I feel like I think that's a pretty common feeling. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 36:37
Don't tell me that it's easy. Let me experience how easy it exactly

Colleen Schnettler 36:41
like I want to actually do it. So that's my goal for this week. That's a little ambitious, because there's a lot of moving parts in that. But once I get that set up, I think that's going to be great for marketing, and potential customers and stuff. So

Michele Hansen 36:54
yeah, what are some of those moving parts? Because maybe if there's five steps involved, if you get three out of five, by next week, that's still pretty good.

Colleen Schnettler 37:02
Yeah. So the thing I have to do to do this, my plan, at least, first of all, if I have an open file uploader open to the world, I have to be really careful with security. And so I want to write a script that automatically deletes these uploaded files, like every 10 minutes. I don't know how to do that. I mean, I'm sure I can figure it out. But like, I've never done that before. So I have no idea. I don't just know how to do that. I, again, theoretically, it's easy, but I don't know. So I want to do that. And I guess I don't need a script, I can just do it in my app, but whatever. I also want to make sure those files go to a completely separate domain, like completely separate domain, then the files I'm serving for our production customers. Because if someone says it's open to the world, if someone were to upload an inappropriate file that could be that can be bad, right?

Michele Hansen 37:58
I mean, it's files. I'm vaguely remember remembering somebody's like, warning you about like that. Yeah, it was like I think on Hacker News or something like this. It happened to somebody it happened to someone else app. And yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 38:10
so there was, yeah, someone sent it to me on Twitter. And it was a there's this big Hacker News thread about it. Someone else who has a similar product didn't separate his domain. So he had everyone on the same domain. And so his whole site got blacklisted. Like he didn't even separate. I'm not saying he did, he didn't know. But he didn't even separate his app from his serving domain, like mine are already separate. So that's already good. But he had literally everything on the same domain. So when his site got blacklisted by Google, like, everything went down. Oh, yeah. And he said it. You know, the interesting thing, I read the Hacker News thread, and they didn't have problems for years. I mean, they had their file uploader open to the world for like, I think was like three years. And they didn't have any issues. And then one day, bam, everything, everything was shut down. So I've already taken many security steps. I have a wireless firewall, I have separate domains for my app and my serving domain. But if I'm going to open this to the world, I want a third domain for test files. So that's I already have that. I'm actually deleting the files.

Michele Hansen 39:14
Yeah. is smart, too. I don't know if that other person did that. But that disincentivizes people from using it for malicious?

Colleen Schnettler 39:21
Yeah, file. I mean, one of the good things is he wrote a really detailed what I learned I could just take all of that he's and that was one of the things is he was deleting the files, I think every 36 hours and he's like, that's not enough. Like you need to be deleting the files like every 20 minutes. Okay,

Michele Hansen 39:38
that's a great he's got like a step by step,

Colleen Schnettler 39:40
step by step. So what not to do, so. I want to make sure I hit all of those wickets before I open this up on my website. Absolutely. Yeah, but that would be a huge I'm really excited about that. Because I really think once I get that I really think I can I can push a little more and I really think that's going to help with my Yeah, so that's my goal for next week.

Michele Hansen 40:06
Alright, so next week we will check in on whether the sandbox is live on your site and maybe possibly my book will be ready. Who knows? Stay tuned.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Deploy Empathy: A practical guide to interviewing customers

View Details

Michele Hansen
Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 0:15
Hey, Michele. Good morning.

Michele Hansen 0:18
It's been a while.

Colleen Schnettler 0:19
Oh, I know. I've missed your face.

Michele Hansen 0:22
I've missed your face and your voice too.

Colleen Schnettler 0:26
Yeah, I think we haven't recorded in almost a month now.

Michele Hansen 0:29
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 0:31
Crazy.

Michele Hansen 0:32
It's been it's an every year in California now.

Colleen Schnettler 0:35
Yes.

Michele Hansen 0:37
And I guess we should catch people up. So the other day we were emailing about what time we should be recording since there is now a nine hour time difference between us. And it occurred to me as we were sort of trying to figure out scheduling and whatnot. I had this sort of thought for a moment of You know what, we've done this for almost a year. That's a really solid run. Like apparently, like, I think most 90% of podcasts only make it to like, what, three episodes or something like that. Maybe, maybe we've maybe we're done. Maybe we did what we did what we set out to do, and maybe we should walk out on a high note.

Colleen Schnettler 1:21
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 1:23
And then I said that to Mateus. And he was like, No, you can't stop the podcast, it's your thing.

Colleen Schnettler 1:29
By the way, thank you. saving the day. It's funny, you should mention that, Michelle, because a lot has changed in my life in the past month. And I had a similar thought, but not because of the time zones more because I'm like, sick of hearing my voice. I feel like I've been, I feel like I get on this podcast every week. And I just complain about how hard it is to start a business. And I'm not actually doing anything. Like, I feel like I've lost my bias to action. Like you aren't doing things, I guess I don't know, I just like colleagues, just do the thing. Stop talking about doing the thing and just do the thing.

Michele Hansen 2:08
It's so interesting that you listen back to it and you hear that you're not doing anything. When I feel like if you were to you know, I like I imagine you listen to some audio books on your long road trip from Virginia to I did California rather than listening through our entire catalogue.

Colleen Schnettler 2:30
That would have been funny, though.

Michele Hansen 2:32
Yeah, I imagine you celebrate our entire catalog. But I feel like I hear you did not have a side project going last summer. Like you spent the late summer in fall. And I guess it wasn't really until the fall you like decided to go all in on this. And then by December, right, you had something launchable. And you got it out there. You got into the training wheels phase of the Heroku marketplace. And then you were finally led out into the world in February. And last we spoke you were at like right, right around 1000. Mr. That sounds like a lot to me.

Colleen Schnettler 3:19
When you say it like that sounds really great. Go me. I just feel like for the past couple months. And to be fair, I have been single parenting three kids separated from my spouse, right in a pandemic. So it's been a little crazy. But for the past three months, I feel like I've just gotten on, and we've been recording, and I'm just like, Oh, I want to do this thing. And you'll say something brilliant. And I'm like, Yeah, I should totally do that. And then it takes me like, a month to do something.

Michele Hansen 3:47
But I think so make sense, given all of that. And maybe we should clarify that you were away from your spouse not separated. Like, Oh, right. That utilitarians? Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 3:56
totally separate. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 3:57
But like you I feel like you have gotten so much done. But also I think what you're saying of kind of, you know, when you're working on a product, especially in the early days, I feel like it's very normal to kind of look at everything that has to be done and be like, Oh, my God, there is so much to be done. This product sucks. Why is anyone paying for it? I have so much to do. Is this ever going to be like a real business Never mind something that I'm proud of? How am I possibly going to get all of the time to do all of these things and like beating yourself up for not having all of that time because you are a human being that not only needs to sleep and eat but has other other real life commitments like child rearing. Like I think what you're saying is totally normal.

Colleen Schnettler 4:50
Okay. Like I've been doing a lot of whining, like, Oh, it's hard to do these things or just shut up and do the

Michele Hansen 4:59
way like, you know, People ever do acquire us and then and then people like you, and then you can go start a business, another business and I'm like, Yeah, dude, that's hard. Like I have one that works. Like, I don't want to do that again. It is hard.

Colleen Schnettler 5:13
Oh, it's good to hear you say that. I just feel like I'm moving slowly. I think that's a better way to put it. I feel like I'm moving at glacial speed here. And it's a little frustrating.

Michele Hansen 5:23
Yeah, of course it is.

Colleen Schnettler 5:25
So speaking of having calls with people who want to acquire you, someone reached out to me, a small company that acquire small sasses. And we had a call. Oh. So that was very flattering, I guess is the right word. Hmm. I mean, I know that happens to you all the time. But it does not happen to me all the time. And he did not find out. He did not find out about me from the podcast, or any of the heat, even though I had a podcast, which is always funny when someone is like, Oh, I didn't even know that. He's like, what made you want to start the business? I was like, Oh, well, if you have 52 hours, you can go listen to my podcast. I didn't say it like that I was much more professional.

Michele Hansen 6:09
So you could put it on to x, and it would be half of that. But

Colleen Schnettler 6:15
I was pretty cool. To have someone reached out about buying the business. And just to kind of start the dialogue. We had a very casual, we did not talk valuation. We didn't talk specifics, but we did have a very casual chat. So that was kind of cool, I guess.

Michele Hansen 6:32
But you're you're, you didn't leave that like committing to sell it to them? Like, are you gonna go there call with them?

Colleen Schnettler 6:39
Yeah, so the plan is, I mean, I'm not commit, I didn't commit to anything. Okay. I feel like I should say that. We kind of did the get to know the situation chat. And let's have another call if you're interested in a couple months deal.

Michele Hansen 6:56
And a couple months. Okay. But it's not like right now.

Colleen Schnettler 7:00
No, there it was. It was no pressure. Like we were just, we were just you know, he flattered me, of course, like you were saying he's like, Oh, you know, you started this thing. I'm sure you're gonna start a lot of things. And I thought of you when he said that.

Michele Hansen 7:16
And you'd be like, No, actually, I am a one trick pony.

Colleen Schnettler 7:21
Yeah, I think it was a good call. But yeah, I think well, it was kind of a Hey, let's talk again in a couple months if if you're interested. So

Michele Hansen 7:30
I don't I mean, you know, investors are playing the long game, right? Like,

Colleen Schnettler 7:33
yeah,

Michele Hansen 7:34
I know. There's some investors who've been trying to court me for a while, you know, God, oh, for years, like, and I mean, so yeah, they'll wait a couple months. And have you ever isn't, there's a book about was it like, built? Built to Sell? Right, like,

Colleen Schnettler 7:51
yeah, I listened to that in the car. I didn't listen to all of it, because it's very long, but I listened. I got started on it in the car.

Michele Hansen 7:57
Yeah. Did you also listen to never split the difference?

Colleen Schnettler 8:00
No, I listened to April Dunford book. Oh, about positioning. Obviously. Awesome.

Michele Hansen 8:08
Yes. Yeah. The one. Was it? Awesome.

Colleen Schnettler 8:11
Yeah. I mean, I think you know, her book is aimed at a wider range. It's not specifically focused on single person sasses. But I really think the thing I drew out of her book and Harvard's book, what I forget what it's called, that's embarrassing. But um, it's like building to sell or something was zero to sold, thank you zero to sold was the importance of niching down. And so my focus, what I took from both of those books was I need to niche down, I need to position myself properly. And to do that. I'm going to focus on the Heroku marketplace.

Michele Hansen 8:45
Mm hmm.

Colleen Schnettler 8:47
So yeah, I enjoyed both of it. Yeah. I enjoyed them both.

Michele Hansen 8:50
It was good. Maybe I feel like we've probably unfairly built up some suspense at this point. So first of all, we are continuing with the podcast times. Oh, yeah. Colleen feelings about not getting enough. Done. aside. We are continuing. So if you have been sitting there worried that this is the last one, you're not. We are continuing. And Colleen, Colleen says has not been acquired yet. Right?

Colleen Schnettler 9:15
did sell it? Do you get asked? Do we have any other news

Michele Hansen 9:19
updates that we should bring people here?

Colleen Schnettler 9:22
While I'm up ending everything in my life. I do have some other things to say. Oh, so the reason, obviously, during this podcast I love and I love talking to you every week, as we've discussed before, even if no one listened. But the other thing is when we started this podcast, when I was trying to get this ass off the ground and I just was hitting every roadblock imaginable. This podcast kept me accountable. So since I'm kind of feeling that, like, I'm not progressing, I'm going to start kind of using this podcast to keep me accountable again, like this week, I'm going to do this thing. So that's something I want to kind of be more actionable on what I'm trying to do to keep Moving this business forward. Oh, yeah. So, so I did other thing. So I took a full time job. Oh, that's right. That's a big, it's a big update, which is so counterintuitive for like, indie hackers, because usually hear people like their goal is to get out of their full time job and get into consulting. So they'll have more time to work on their side projects, I found for myself, that was different, because I was getting really high value clients, and they're wonderful, but they're intense. So what I was finding was the intensity of the mental energy and space I needed to fulfill my client's needs was not leaving me with a lot of extra brain space for simple file upload. So the job I took is actually a company I've worked for before as a contractor a couple years ago, and I negotiated Fridays off, so I have a full time job, but I only work four days a week. So I'm hoping I can use those Fridays, to work on simple file, upload and be able to kind of give that my full brain space on Fridays.

Michele Hansen 11:18
That makes sense. That's nice that you got Friday's off.

Colleen Schnettler 11:21
Yeah, it's weird being in a W two. I know everyone's not in the US. I shouldn't say w two. It's weird to be back in a full time job, though. Like It Is it? It's just weird. It feels so because I haven't done it in cash, like 10 years, no, eight years. So it feels weird. But I know that I know the team. I know the guys, I know the product. So it's not it's not like that starting a new job stress. It's more just like slotting myself in and, you know, adjusting to the way they work and things like that. But yeah, it's still kind of weird, because I haven't done it in a long time.

Michele Hansen 11:57
Do you feel like you're gonna, like now have more of that, like mental space for those Fridays?

Colleen Schnettler 12:05
I think so Michelle, and I think so because the work isn't the work at my full time job is interesting. But it's not super high intensity, if that makes sense. So I think it's going to be just the right level of work to kind of, you know, give me some spare cycles, like spare brain cycles to work on my own stuff. And I found that just I know, the dream of some people, like I told a few people, and they were like, Oh, my gosh, why would you do that? Because I know the dream for most people is to quit their full time job and go into a more of a consulting contract role. But for me, I found like I said that it was just the clients I were getting, I was getting, we're just real high intensity. So it wasn't like, Oh, I'm just gonna work 30 hours a week, like that wasn't, they weren't real on board with that. And so although you know, you make more money, as an independent developer, I think the pace of this job is going to align better with my life goals.

Michele Hansen 13:07
And, you know, I found that when I was working full time, like, or, I mean, I work full time now. But like, when I was working for other people, I don't know how to, like, say that, like, you know, when you're working in another company, inevitably, you have a lane. And maybe if you're in a really small company, you have multiple lanes, but like, you don't have the whole pool in the same way that you would as a as an entrepreneur. And I found for that, like those first couple of years, the fact that I was constrained to only, you know, a couple of different areas in my full time job was like, frustrating, but I could channel it into geocode do because all of the other stuff that I basically wasn't allowed to do at work and like, I would have ideas about things and would be like, well, that's this entire other department. And it would be like, like, you can't do anything about that. Like, I could channel that into geocode do and, and it like almost becoming this way of professionally expressing myself. Yeah, well, to get to do things that I couldn't do at work. And like that was exciting and motivating in its own right of like being able to feel like I was bringing everything I possibly could to the table. Like I had an outlet for that.

Colleen Schnettler 14:28
Yep, that's exactly how I hope this falls out.

Michele Hansen 14:32
We'll see it took the pressure off of the business to to be that like full time income.

Colleen Schnettler 14:37
Yeah, and that's kind of nice, too. I think. Like I said, you know, you do make more as when you're independent, but the constant context switching, you know, a new client every six months to a year. It's kind of exhausting. Yeah. So yeah, so lots going on here. So hopefully, I have now arranged my life in a way that I will have some energy back to work on simple file upload, your, I

Michele Hansen 15:09
think we've talked in the past about how people, like, I think I saw somebody made some graphic ones of like, this sort of hierarchy of, of work or products or whatever, you know, that starts at, like, the very bottom is, you know, working for another company as if, like, you know, having a tech job is like this terrible bottom of the barrel. And then and then you go become a consultant, and then you have an info product, and then you have a SaaS product, and then you have, I don't know, like, something with cryptokey, like, whatever they feel like is the is the, you know, this sort of golden shining, like, point at the top of this of this hierarchy. And I reject that, you know, you know, like, I have gone from SAS like to infoproducts now, but I think there is like a value judgment that happens for people who go from having their own indie products back to full time, or who skipped steps to like, right, like, we never did the info product, quote, unquote, phase like, it's fake, like, that's not actually a process that people have to follow. And if your life necessitates that, like right now, having a like a part time, SAS, and a full time job is like where you want to be, and that consulting isn't fitting in that, and you're going to just zigzag on down and go your own path. That's totally fine. Like, you don't have to follow the same path that you know, someone on Twitter follows, like, make your own path. It's okay, if you need to, you know, hop around a bit and make it work.

Colleen Schnettler 16:56
Yeah, I totally agree. And it's interesting you say that, because I definitely struggled with some of those decisions. Like Wait, I'm not supposed to go back to full time work After establishing myself as an independent developer. And then I was like, Oh, wait, I can do whatever I want.

Michele Hansen 17:12
Sweet. Yeah, you're an adult, you can do what you want, you can make the decisions that are the right for you. And it's, there's, yeah, there's like this, it's almost like people should be ashamed of having to go get a full time job as if it's sort of like admitting defeat. When, and I just, I just reject that. Like, I don't think that's true. Like you're making the best decision for you, you have, you know, it's It's for your own mental health, for your professional health, for that of your family, who you're providing for, like, all of those things are important considerations. And it doesn't matter what people on Twitter think, like, yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 17:56
that I feel like I'm in a really good spot now. So I'm, I'm now geographically co located with my spouse, which sounds ridiculous, but that just means we're together again. Yeah, you know, so I got my husband back. I got my co parent back. I live in sunny San Diego, and I took this job. So it's a lot of change. Feeling like, so good. Michelle, and I'm so feeling like, like, I'm ready to kick some ass. Can I just say, I think you are. Yeah, so I'm super pumped about that. It's almost you know, and the other thing about this whole experience, success begets success, right? Like, it's like, as I've been building and public, and as I've been getting traction, things start to compound, like, I get this guy reaching out, and he wants to buy my SAS, like, I get random people on the internet sending me like really nice. Twitter DMS, just like that are like encouraging and telling me what a great man. I love that. Like, thanks, man. That's so nice. So I feel like this whole process compounds, but I think being visible, you know, I was talking to some people before I went on this call, because I didn't with the investor because I didn't know what to expect. And one person was like, Well, you know, you know, maybe you shouldn't tell him this. Or maybe you shouldn't tell him that. And I was like, I have a podcast, like everything about this company is like, public knowledge. And I know there's risks inherent in that, right. But I really think the benefit I have seen, especially as a social person has greatly greatly outshined the risks associated with that.

Michele Hansen 19:40
I mean, I would say the same for writing the book too, like it never would have gotten to be a book had I not done the newsletter and been getting feedback and encouragement and comments and stories from people in that very early stage and even just now like literally just before we were recording, I was on a call with someone Whose company is in earnest capital, and they're starting to do their first customer interviews and they wanted some feedback on the scripts that they had made based on the ones and deploy empathy my book. And it was so like, it was so exciting talking to them about it. And and yeah. And then we ended up having this really great conversation about using customer interviews as a way to basically like fuel content generation, and SEO, which is basically is our marketing tactic. But yeah, I think being open about about it can be really, really inspiring in a way that like we, like, you know, we got feedback from people when we launched your codea. But they were like developer friends of ours. Like it wasn't, like, during that whole developing phase, like we actually really didn't we didn't kind of have this like community element, but I think I mean, I feel like we both definitely have now but for very different different reasons.

Colleen Schnettler 21:06
Yeah. Speaking of the book, yeah, it's July How's it going? Um,

Michele Hansen 21:16
um, so, so I finalized the copy like, two weeks ago, which was was just really good moment. Like I actually like I genuinely have not touched the copy in about two weeks. And but had some like really good progress on it, like I ended up sort of at the last minute getting to interview a product manager at stripe, about their customer research process. And so I like to include a ton of examples in the book from stripe, which was pretty awesome because their their process or how you might see it in a team because different teams might run it differently. was so validating because like they, they also very much take this sort of customer first perspective and have from the very beginning like the calls and brothers were doing support in the very beginning. And that's just continued throughout the company, and I think really explains why they're such a fantastic company to work with. But so I was able to include a ton of different examples from stripe in the book, but then I had to get it approved by stripe coms before it was published. Interesting. Yes, like that took some time. I mean, it's totally worth it. Like that took some time. And then I basically took a week off. And then now I've just kind of been working on the cover getting some reviews. Um, and then but I think the cover is basically done at this point. And now I just need to like upload the whole thing to Amazon and get a proof copy. And then after we do the proof copy, then we'll open it up. Wow, that's an aside, I think I don't think we talked about this, I did decide to do a private podcast as a presale for the audio book.

Colleen Schnettler 23:14
No, we didn't talk about this. Um,

Michele Hansen 23:16
yeah, I'm kind of I'm kind of excited about that. Um, I love podcasting, As you have noticed. Um, and again like the the idea of sitting down to record an entire audio book feels like slightly overwhelming but doing it as a podcast where I release a couple of chapters per week and there's a small group of people who are following along and you know, can give feedback or encouragement or whatnot is kind of exciting to me it is summer so that sort of makes it hard to get that like truly quiet time to record. And I don't have like I want to have a booth eventually. But and when we were eventually able to build a headquarters but we don't have shed said headquarters at the moment so apparently I can surround my desk and pillows. I was gonna try that out for a future episode and is everybody

Colleen Schnettler 24:13
knows acoustic wall things too.

Michele Hansen 24:15
Yeah, there are there's also like some like cage thing you can get for a microphone to help with it. But because mine is on a boom and not like mounted on the desk. It doesn't work as well, apparently. So I might do the pillow for it approach really like NPR reporters will do if they're in a hotel room. And yeah, but yeah, so I'm going to do a private podcast and I decided to give everyone who has done the presale By the way, like so far access to that private podcast as well. Okay, so yeah, so So everyone who has done the presale of the the PDF, ebook copy of the book, they get that and then all of the notion and Google Drive templates and then also the private podcast which you know, well costing more if you buy it after the pre sale closes, so I guess we help people when that ends.

Colleen Schnettler 25:06
Yeah. Can you explain that I didn't follow. I didn't follow the pricing structure for that. So if you buy the book now on pre sale, yeah, you will get access to the private podcast.

Michele Hansen 25:16
Well, so you I mean, you get the PDF of the book, or or, you know, there's other ebook versions. There's also actually an online version, too. It's not really written for that. But there Yeah, there's an online version as well. And then there's, there's Google Drive and notion templates, basically, to make it easy to like, copy the script and then, and then make your own version of it based on that. And then also give them access to the private podcast. That will be basically the presale of the audio book. So eventually, that will all all of those podcasts will get wrapped up into an audio book.

Colleen Schnettler 25:57
Got it. Cool.

Michele Hansen 25:59
Yeah, I think I guess I might do like a separate presale for that once this main presale ends. Like I feel like such an imposter using all these words, because like we don't do any of this was a little bit like, yeah, this

Colleen Schnettler 26:15
isn't really my wheelhouse.

Michele Hansen 26:16
But I yeah, I Oh, yeah, I

Colleen Schnettler 26:18
buy. I often buy physical books and audio books. So I you know, I would buy things like April dumpers book, I have a physical copy. And I have the audio book. I do that a lot with a lot of books. And

Michele Hansen 26:32
so what is the physical book do for you? Well, like how would you use them differently?

Colleen Schnettler 26:37
I'm on Team physical book. Like, I always I hate I mean, I don't want to use hate. That's a strong word. I don't like books, I have to read on a tablet or on the computer. I want physical books. But I switched between them, which is a little weird. But like with with obviously awesome. I bought I bought the book, I started the book. And then I had the road trip. So I was like, Oh, well, I'll just listen to the rest of the book. And then I have both and it makes me happy. So you can like reference the physical book, write that for me, especially for business books for me. I've done the reverse to especially for your book, like I would probably be someone who would listen to your book, and then buy it. Because I like physical books for reference. But I like podcasts and audiobooks for what I'm trying to do other things.

Michele Hansen 27:27
Sort of building the like general base of the knowledge and then once you know that, there's like something specific that was interesting, then you can go find it in the book.

Colleen Schnettler 27:37
Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I do that frequently. I don't

Michele Hansen 27:41
listen to audiobooks myself, because I find that I don't retain information as well. And I only read books on Kindle, if it's a book that I would never want to reference. So it's been like, it's been really interesting for me. Actually, when I when I interviewed the 30 odd early readers, this was one of the questions I asked them was like, so how does it like what did those two different things do for you, like walk me through the context when we when you would use them?

Colleen Schnettler 28:12
Yeah. And of course you did. Good for you. So meta.

Michele Hansen 28:19
Always.

Colleen Schnettler 28:20
I did. I did try to use your customer interview techniques on the guy who was inquiring about my company? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was just trying to kind of understand where he was coming from. So I think I did relatively well,

Michele Hansen 28:33
Chris Voss and never split the difference talks about using empathy as a negotiation tactic. Like I referenced his book a ton in my book, because, you know, fundamentally, you want to understand where someone is coming from and why. So you understand, like, what, like, what they're trying to do. Yeah. And especially with an investor calls, like, you know, sometimes it could be someone who genuinely wants to invest in you, but like, you never know, if they're doing, you know, their own research for a company that they've already invested in, or they're doing right due diligence on a company they might invest in, and they're trying to talk to all the competitors, and get some sort of inside information. And so I mean, as you said, you, you didn't say anything that you hadn't already said in the podcast, which I think is really smart. And to get it, it's Oh, it's just smart to get them talking as much as possible and say, as little yourself as you can, even if this, you know, could end up being a hugely beneficial thing. And they could, you know, you could be totally aligned on interests like, but my I mean, my first step in any sort of negotiation, which this would be or is at this point, is to get them to talk as much as possible.

Colleen Schnettler 29:48
Yeah, okay. Can we play one game before we get off this podcast? Sure. Let's say I want to sell my company someday for $3 million because Okay, I want to house in California. Okay, ridiculous. What? And I know, there's like a million things that go into valuation. But spitball? What kind of revenue? Do you need to even be in that ballpark?

Michele Hansen 30:15
So it really depends, right? Like, I think the general multiples I've seen, which, you know, I like I'm not an expert in this at all. So I think I run into times revenue. There's probably somebody listening out there who actually like knows these numbers better than I do. But I think one and a half, two times revenue is pretty annual, maybe maybe up to an annual revenue of two times maybe for a small SAS like this. I did not plan to talk about that today. So I probably would have looked at those numbers first. But, um, but I think that's about the range. And no more than 5x, probably, annual revenue, and it really matters whether this is a like, is this a person who is acquiring the company to run it themselves? Is it a company that has a portfolio of small classes that they're running together? Or is it a strategic acquire, ie someone who is consolidating their market share, a strategic acquire will pay much more than the other two types of buyers? God?

Colleen Schnettler 31:27
Okay, we'll talk in a couple years. My revenues ever $1.5 million, then you can advise me on that.

Michele Hansen 31:38
Actually, you should just really hire somebody who advises people, right? If I can help you with negotiation strategies, but like, you know, SAS, you know, m&a is not my whole area of expertise. hire somebody who knows what they're doing.

Colleen Schnettler 31:55
All right. I'll check back in five years. We'll see. See him there.

Michele Hansen 32:00
Oh, it's been good chatting with you again.

Colleen Schnettler 32:02
Oh, so good to be back.

Michele Hansen 32:04
I missed this. I did, too. Alrighty. Well, I'll talk to you next week. All right.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Follow Derrick on Twitter: https://twitter.com/derrickreimer

Check out SavvyCal (which Michele uses and loves, btw): https://savvycal.com/

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Orbit. Orbit is mission control for your community. Grow and measure your community across any platform with Orbit. Find out more at orbit.love.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Software Social Podcast. I'm your host today Colleen Schnettler. Today I'm very excited to host a special guest, Derrick Reimer. Derrick is a serial maker and has successfully built many products. He's now building SavvyCal. Hey, Derrick, thanks so much for being here. I'm really happy to have you on today.

Derrick Reimer 0:34
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I've been a fan of your guys's podcast since it came out and have enjoyed following along with your respective journeys, and especially as you've been getting simple file upload off the ground. It's pretty exciting stuff.

Colleen Schnettler 0:47
So in a little bit of a change of the traditional podcast guest format, I actually invited you here because I want to talk about me instead of your product. You know, I would really like to talk to you because you are a technical founder. And I feel like you've done this five times now.

Derrick Reimer 1:12
Something like that. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 1:13
something like that. Quite a few companies. So I just kind of wanted to get your opinion on, like my product and my growth trajectory. And if this thing is gonna work, and I have so many questions like when to bail, right? Yeah.

Derrick Reimer 1:30
Yeah, no, it's, it's good. I'm happy to dive into this stuff. I love kind of strategizing. And, and, you know, talking shop with with other folks. So yeah, happy to have to dive in on some of those questions.

Colleen Schnettler 1:41
Awesome. So one of the things when I started simple file upload is I kind of made a lot of the mistakes, I think traditional or first time founders make in that I just built something I wanted to build. And I just wanted to ship a product, right? Like my first goal was literally make something that people could buy. And so that was like a really exciting time just learning how to create a piece of software I could sell to more than one person.

Derrick Reimer 2:08
Hmm, I think I remember when you were kind of just getting started on this and kind of talking about it. And, you know, Michelle would grill you a little bit on like, well, you talk to customers. But if I recall, like you do have, like some this intuition for the need for this came out of your own experience a bit, right, which is like, yes, that can be a dangerous place to start. But it's also I feel like one of the more like, it kind of sets you off on a good foot. In one sense, if you have a really good understanding of kind of the the problem like you've felt the problem deeply yourself. And so I feel like you were starting, maybe you didn't do all the customer interviews right out of the gate, but like you sort of had this intuitive sense, like as a as a consultant, and you've built this stuff many times before that, like, Oh, this is kind of I'm spending repeated effort on this problem. And I'm seeing other people doing that, too. Is that is that kind of characterize? Like, how the genesis of it came about?

Colleen Schnettler 3:07
Yes, definitely.

Yeah.

That's Yeah, that's really why I built it. And there's a lot of excitement in the beginning, right, just like getting your first product to market. And I think I made a really good choice to put it in the Heroku marketplace. And it seems to be meeting a need, I think I kind of Accidentally on Purpose found a hole, right? Because Heroku has the ephemeral file storage. So this is a problem. Literally, everyone who uses her Roku has, right. I don't really know, though. I mean, it's just fancy file storage. I don't really know, if it's a product that can even replace my job. Like, I don't know, if the How do I like even determine if it can get there?

Derrick Reimer 3:56
Mm hmm. Well, I think so part of that is, so you're kind of speaking to like market size, like how many, you know, how many dollars are flowing through this industry of people wanting to to solve this problem. And I did, I did a little bit of like, just scoping around before coming on here because I wanted to do do a little bit of my homework and it seems like there are quite a few, like, companies that there are kind of big name players like cloud Neri right that have sort of been around a while people use them for image storage like image manipulation or like optimization, right. But also like in looking at kind of their their marketing it seems like they're they've gone a little bit up market like they're they seem a little enterprise II to me from the looks of them, you know, like it's, I look at it as an as an independent software builder and I don't know if I'm perfectly in the target market for your product, but like when I look at Cloud Neri To me, it's like this looks a little long in the tooth like they like it's not something I would want to jump into putting into my stack because it looks a little bit too Little bit to enterprise. And like, like, I would want a fresher take on that. But it seems like it seems like there is there's a pretty decent sized market for, you know, file storage, image storage, image manipulation, CDN, like putting things on CD ends, and like making that whole side of things smoother. So I guess like my initial take is like, I think there is something here. Now the question is, which we can kind of talk through more like, is there? Is it something you're interested in? Like, really going after, you know, and like, and? Yeah, but I think there's, I think there is something there.

Colleen Schnettler 5:40
So what do you mean? Is it something I'm interested in really going after?

Derrick Reimer 5:45
I guess, like, it's gonna take, I think you're at that point right now where like, you've got some initial traction, you're in the Heroku marketplace. And actually, it's, it's really cool. I looked, I just searched upload in the marketplace. And you're like, ranked number one or number two, which is pretty amazing. Right? Yeah, that's a really good. That's a really good spot to be in. I was I was shocked that there was not more options there. Right? Yeah. Yeah, me too. And honestly, this is, this is a problem that I have, every time I build this app, I kind of go through this, this phase of like, relying on gravatar, only for avatars, because I don't want to build in the upload part. And then it's annoying. Yeah. And then like, gradually, I've gotten, I've actually pushed more and more towards just being on Heroku. And, like, I used to, like drip was on AWS and we just had like custom instances. So we already had s3 there. And it was sort of part of our tool chain already. But this time around, like I don't, I've been trying to stick to like a pure Heroku stack, keep things really simple. And it was definitely an awkward place when I needed to add this, like the ability for people to upload their own Avatar and like, Okay, so now I have to go like create an AWS account, like I ideally didn't want to do that. So I don't know. Yeah. all that to say like, it seems like there's a there's an interesting gap here. Now, it remains to be seen if there's a ton of people, you know, like me and like you who, who are like not wanting practically like not wanting to spin up a raw AWS account and start, like getting in there and manipulating buckets and doing all that kind of stuff. But I don't know, I think my intuitive sense is like, I think that there's, you know, and I mean, they're the risk is that, like, Heroku just steps in and solve this problem at some point. But I mean, they haven't been around a long time, and they still haven't done that. So I think, I think there's a, I think there's an opportunity. But I guess back to the original question, like what do I mean by Do you want to, like, really go deeper on this, I think it's like, it's gonna, it's gonna probably take figuring out some, like, we're experimenting with some, some repeatable, like, marketing channels and traction channels. And it's gonna require a bit of investment, and experimentation, and, and so it's gonna take time, potentially money, you can pull those different levers, you know, depending on, on which one you have more of, to play with, you know, but I think that's, that's kind of the point that a lot of a lot of like, first time founders, technical founders get to where it's like, you're really good at the, you know, building the the product. And so now it's like, applying energy towards the marketing side, and really trying to like, suss out what's going to work on that end. Because I think your product is is probably well poised to, to solve a real need. And it already is solving a need for 10s of customers. Hundreds of customers. 33. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 8:47
Yeah, you know, and the thing about trying to learn marketing as a developer, it's like, I feel like I'm just throwing darts at a board. Like, maybe this'll work. Maybe this will work. I have no idea what I'm doing, which I guess is part of the process.

Derrick Reimer 9:06
Right. Right. Right. I mean, that is, yeah, that is kind of what marketing is about. It's, it's a there's lots of channels. So I don't know if you're familiar with attraction, but I always bring this one up to founders. Have you have you? Okay,

Colleen Schnettler 9:20
it's a client traction.

Derrick Reimer 9:22
It's called traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Maris. It's been around a while, I think they've maybe revised it once or twice, but I have like a have an older copy sitting here. But it's basically like,

Colleen Schnettler 9:32
it's literally on your desk. Yeah.

Derrick Reimer 9:37
And because I this is one that I will just periodically revisit. And so because they start out with like, sort of running through this framework, they call it the bullseye framework. And it's sort of like it's just a little, a little exercise you can go through to sort of brainstorm each traction channel. They listen here and there's 19 different channels morality. PR and conventional PR search engine ads, social and display ads, SEO, content marketing. I won't list them all. But like, so they sort of start out the book with like, here's a brief description of each one, here's a framework for going through and brainstorming, you know, which ones do I think might work well for my product, and then, and then the rest of the book is sort of like going deeper on each one and how to think about like devising an experiment. So because like, I think I've done a little bit of, I just did a little bit of brainstorming ahead of this recording. And, you know, one idea I had was like, I feel like, there isn't like an SEO opportunity here. If people are, if people are really like me, and like you trying to like not go full in on like a manual setup with an s3 bucket for doing this. There might be some, there might be some some keywords that people are searching for typically, like, file uploads on Heroku, or something like that. And, you know, there's tooling you can use, like a traps or SEO, Moz, and a couple other ones that can give you some data on keywords like that. And so you can sort of, you know, you can, you can just do some research, some brainstorming, maybe make a spreadsheet, and then, and then kind of follow some of the advice in a book like this to kind of devise like, what's the minimal experiment, I could do produce maybe a couple pieces of content? And then see how see how that works? Without just saying like, yep, this is definitely what's going to work because you don't really know what's going to work until you actually experiment with it. Right?

Colleen Schnettler 11:40
So I think I have a psychological block here. And I think my psychological block is I feel, I feel like it's my product is maybe not that great, because there's so much it doesn't do I mean, it does what it says it does, and it doesn't really well, right. But like, I don't know, if that's just like the developer in me, or like, no one has asked for these features. But like, there are certain features that it doesn't have, and it kind of like, makes me more a little bit uncomfortable almost trying to market it. When I can't offer those features. Is that weird?

Derrick Reimer 12:19
That's a very common, I mean, that I've experienced that with every single product. I've had it talking to other founders. Yes. I mean, I think there's, I think the type of person who is likely to go on this journey, I think it's sort of a self selecting thing a little bit like there's, I think we tend to have this propensity to be be a little bit of a perfectionist about the products we make. And, and have a little bit of imposter syndrome to use the buzz word, you know, like feeling like, it's not, it's not as good as, as maybe we're making out to be I know, I've fallen in this trap. Many times of like, under marketing, or under selling what I've built. And when I've looked at other companies that are maybe founded by, like a non technical, like more sales type of person or something, they tend to, they tend to bias towards the opposite side, which is like, as soon as there's a little kernel of something built, it's like, let's sell, sell, sell. Yeah, and that's, that's not good, either. Like you want the product to truly match what you're selling. But I think I I'm hearing from you the same bias that I have, which is like, a natural tendency to, to undersell what you have, ultimately, like, it doesn't. Like, if it's solving a problem for people, then it is enough. It is enough, you know, and and so you have to be willing to, to push it and to market it. And believe me, if it's not, if it's not good enough for certain cases, you'll hear about it. Customers are very, very willing to to tell you when they think your stuff is not good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 14:04
Yeah. I think that has been like part of my problem is I'm just like, oh, but I should just and I know everyone does this, but it's still it's hard when it's your thing. Like, there's some personal I don't know, you know, wrapped up in that where you're like, oh, it doesn't do this thing. I literally was on a call with a guy the other day, and he was asking me about it. potential customer and like, I lead with that Derek. I was like, oh, but it doesn't resize. Oh, you can't sign it on the server. Like why did I do that?

Derrick Reimer 14:33
Right? Yeah, I'm not funny. That's why I mean, I've found Same thing with with customer support. I don't know if you've experienced this at all. When people will write in, they'll ask, they'll ask about something that maybe we don't support right away. But there's like a, there's sort of a workaround, that's in my mind. It's like not in my engineering mind. It's like this is not a pure good solution. It's it's a hack. Right? Like Like you train a support person, because a lot of times I have struggled to like to be the one to tell, tell the person how to do the hack. Instead, I'm like, Nah, sorry, we can't support that. But we're working on it. And I remember this when we first unleashed like, we fully trained our, our support rep, or support rapid trip, and there were all kinds of things that people just needed to do workarounds for and he would just tell people like, yes, we can totally support this. Here's how you do it. And you know, it was a paragraph worth of like, you know, what I would consider to be a little bit of a hack, but really, it was just creative problem solving. And the customer was like, nine times out of 10. super thrilled. And they're like, yeah, thanks so much. This is awesome. So yeah, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 15:40
Okay. Okay. Yeah, I can see that. I am. Okay. So the product has been live for five months. And I'm at like, 1300 MRR, which it's hard to know where that falls in the world of good, bad, mediocre. It's growing, but it's growing slowly. And I just kind of feel like I don't know what to do next.

Derrick Reimer 16:05
Sort of, it's growing right now off of primarily the Heroku marketplace. Is that right? Correct.

Colleen Schnettler 16:11
Yeah, okay. Yeah. Okay.

Derrick Reimer 16:14
Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know how much more it seems like you're like I had one one checklist on my on my bulleted list here about like to ask you about doing like kind of SEO specifically for the Heroku marketplace. Because this is this is sort of a thing like folks who have WordPress plugins, there are things you can do to to specifically, like optimize your, your plugin listing to increase the chances that someone will find you first. But then I like I searched upload and you came right up. So I think you're I feel like you're your SEO on this, like specific niche search engine, the Roku marketplace is actually really, really good. So I'm not sure yeah, I mean, it's it's it's someone else's platform. I don't off the top of my head, I don't know how much more you could really do. On that, besides potentially, like, you know, working on on messaging bear a little bit. Which is potentially something you could do I, I was curious. Just to hearing your words, like what do you feel like the primary pain point that you're solving for people is right now. And it was like, is it informed by your, your perception, from what you've heard from customers? A combination of both? Have you been surprised that other people have a different pain point than what you expected? I guess, kind of talk me through that a little bit.

Colleen Schnettler 17:34
One of the interesting things here is, so to get on the Heroku marketplace, you have to make your app free, and you have to get 100 users. And so when I did that the people who were free would talk to me like they they had all kinds of stuff to say, now that I'm selling it. First of all, I can't get anyone to talk to me, which is super weird. But but so people who were talking to me more, it seems like it met that need of the storage, because if you have to set up a I mean, you know AWS Iam course, like so much involved because it's a direct upload, there's so much involved in setting up direct uploads in an application, so the people, I think it's doing what I intended it intended for to do, which is it extrapolates away, file, uploading to the cloud, and I am even backing it up, which I probably don't even need to do but but I like doing it makes me feel makes me sleep helps me sleep better. So I I'm actually saving your stuff on to two completely different storage providers. And that's such a problem on Heroku. Because of their file system, I don't think it's as big of a problem outside of Heroku. But one thing I did is I made it expensive. And I made it expensive because I figured like I looked at cloudberries pricing and I went like 75% below that. And so one thing I have thought of is to do like a cheaper model, because then people who just need avatars like you're not going to pay 35 bucks a month just for avatar storage, but maybe you'd pay 12

Derrick Reimer 19:20
I don't know. Yeah, I think it is pretty interesting. I mean, I think I would probably pay 30 What is it? What is your base price? 3535 35 Yeah, I would probably I don't know if that's too much, honestly. Especially

Colleen Schnettler 19:42
successful people always tell me that they're like, it's not too much. Yeah, it's like a lot.

Derrick Reimer 19:47
I mean, so potentially there's a it is interesting to think about kind of the the on ramp that people will have to to like kind of getting started Using your product, because I think like, for me, I'm running a SaaS application, I'm very, I'm very willing to just throw down $35 towards something that's a critical piece of, of hosting infrastructure. Like that's not a, that's not a big deal. But if I were, maybe if I were really early on and still, like vetting whether my product was actually going to work at all, I might be more hesitant. And this is something interesting, it's an interesting quality of your product in that, like, this decision is usually made decently far up front in the cycle of a product, right? Like, if someone's building something and, and at least uploading an avatar or some kind of some file of some kind from the user is like a key part of their application flow, then they have to make this decision pretty early on in the development cycle. And like now that, for example, now that I have my kind of avatar uploading thing sort of working, I say, sort of because I'm, I'm not doing because I'm technically channeling the bits through my Heroku instance, which is not ideal, like, if, if like someone, you know, if it's a big file, and it takes too long times out, it's like not, it's not very

Colleen Schnettler 21:14
bullish. It's my judgment phase. steric, I'm just, ya

Derrick Reimer 21:17
know, as you should. I, to me, this was like a, this was like, a quick and dirty, like, there's plenty of server side libraries that are built to to handle this. And so it was really easy, it was quick and easy. But I also know, like, it's not, you know, as soon as I let people upload, you know, bigger files, like a, like a big banner image, for instance, like, this is probably not going to work. And I'll have to revisit, like, making this even better, and perhaps pull your tool off the shelf. But I think, you know, if people, if people don't do what I did, and they do it the right way, from the get go the right way, meaning like something that will scale, then they're probably more likely to just to not, not pull that out and switch, like once, or twice a step.

Colleen Schnettler 21:58
right about that. Yeah.

Derrick Reimer 21:59
So the, the question becomes, like, how can you catch people earlier in the process, like, at the point where they're, their project is still nascent? I see, you have like, a seven day free trial. And I wonder if, I mean, just, here's, here's one idea, you know, is potentially, like, retooling this to be like a limited usage based trial instead, or like a, you know, free for development and you like, automap, you automatically delete the files after, you know, 36 hours or something like that. So that's a

Colleen Schnettler 22:31
really good idea. Yeah, yeah.

Derrick Reimer 22:34
I love that. It's like a sandbox environment where you can just, you're just paying for bandwidth, essentially, which is pretty cheap. And if it becomes a problem,

Colleen Schnettler 22:42
you can always be a problem. Yeah, that's a great idea. Because then people, so the problem well, yeah, I'm gonna think about that. I like that idea. Like a sandbox mode omos, where everything, like you said, it's deleted every day or something. But then people could try it out and see if it was a good fit.

Derrick Reimer 23:00
Yep. Yep. And then, and then potentially some kind. I mean, yeah. So the, you could have a cheaper tear. I'm still skeptical about this, because it's like, people just need to, I just believe people need to pay for critical pieces of their infrastructure. Like that shouldn't be a problem. But again, like since we sort of have to, you don't want that to become a something that prevents people from adopting your, your tool either. So so maybe it makes sense. I don't know if you've gotten any feedback from from customers so far, when you kind of were making that jump from like, the free to the requiring people to pay phase, but like, did you sense a lot of price sensitivity from people directly? Or is it more like in your own kind of?

Colleen Schnettler 23:47
It's in my head? Yeah. I mean, I feel I have a couple people pay me $250 a month? Yeah. Yeah. Like that, like blew my mind. I wasn't even gonna make that tier because I was like, who's gonna pay that people are paying that?

Derrick Reimer 23:59
So what what kind of customer is paying? What's their use case? Who's paying that on that tier? Are they individual product owners? Are they like a consultant? Who's doing a lot of projects? Or what is the the nature of their work look like?

Colleen Schnettler 24:12
So I don't really know. Okay, that would be helpful information. Yeah, so I've got to get? Yeah, I don't really know. I'm still trying to set up some customer interviews with those folks to find out what their use cases.

Derrick Reimer 24:28
Mm hmm. Even like, yeah, is it? Is it tough to see from there? I mean, if you just kind of look in your database, like, how many do they have a bunch of instance, a bunch of separate instances connected? Or like, do you have any kind of or is it just or literally on your end? Is it just like you're seeing buckets with files flowing into it? And it's kind of hard to tell what they're actually Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 24:48
I just have it set up. So what I can see is I can see the buckets with their files, okay, net, okay, which I actually haven't really even looked at, but that might, that might provide interesting information if I did that, yeah, at least. Yeah. Cuz. And so yeah, another question I sort of had is like is I think you've maybe talked about on here a little bit, but remind me like, are you? Are you primarily trying to market this towards, like consultants who are constantly starting new applications for clients? As opposed to like, individual operators? Yeah, that's it. So that's kind of part of part of where I am right now, too, right? Like, I'm trying to figure out who my ideal customer is. I thought it was people like me. And I have a couple consultants that I know that are using it. And it's cool, because they've signed up their clients, you know, on individual instances. So it's like, one person has given me several, you know, several accounts, right. But I don't like I thought that they would be my people, but I only have a couple of them. So there's a lot of people who are less experienced developers using it. And they're just trying to build something. It's not like no code, but like, kind of in a low code, but still using Heroku space. They're kind of trying to like, put pieces together to sell a product. So like, I've got like real estate companies and nail salons and people like that. And I actually have more of those people than I have consultants. So it seems like because it's setting up AWS is technically challenging. My supposition at this point is that I'm going for people who are who have a store or building a product, who don't want to spend the time or don't know how and don't care to spend, you know, three days learning how to use or setup AWS.

Derrick Reimer 26:54
Mm hmm. That makes me think that like, I mean, no code is kind of a large, growing trend right now. Right? We're hearing this all the time. platforms like web flow. I don't know if webflow. I don't know much about them at all, unfortunately. But I know that they're super popular. And lots of people are using them to build things and sort of stitching together services. I don't know if that's, yeah, I wonder if your products, I feel like your product is in a is in a good spot for like, technical people who just want to who don't want to own the, the code that is responsible for doing the all the uploading and storage part, which I feel like that is a little bit different than people who are like, I literally don't write any code. Yeah, it's a different audience. You know,

Colleen Schnettler 27:44
you're right. It is a different audience. And my people are developers, I've seen like, none of the people I have talked to don't write any code, like none of them are. Pure novotest. Yeah. Yeah, they have to have some kind of code knowledge. Right.

Derrick Reimer 28:01
And so yeah, probably for that reason, I would probably put like, I would, I would maybe put a pin in the like, the no code piece. I think it would be hard to, to like market to both audiences at the same time, like, feels like a split focus a little bit.

Colleen Schnettler 28:16
Yeah, no, you're right. And I have a job and a family. So like, I don't have, you know, stuff, right, I get stuff going on?

Derrick Reimer 28:23
How much? How much time speaking of time, so like, How much time do you feel like you can, you're able to, to invest in, in this business on like a weekly basis.

Colleen Schnettler 28:34
So that has been a roller coaster of adventure. But I am trying to, I'm working on arranging my schedule. So I have one full day a week to do simplify upload. Which still doesn't feel like a lot of time but like this last consulting client, I had, you know, consulting Did you consult before what did you do when you started drip? Were you full time were you?

Derrick Reimer 29:00
Yeah, I actually haven't done a ton of consulting myself. I sort of hopped from like trying to start my own things to then working with Rob, my co founder of drip, like doing some like, part time contractor stuff with him. And then I kind of quickly moved into a full time with him. So I sort of skipped the consulting phase that a lot of a lot of us founders go through.

Colleen Schnettler 29:20
But you had a full time job before that. I actually

Derrick Reimer 29:23
was I was like, fresh out of college and living cheaply and nice, like competed in a startup competition and like 110 $1,000 one year that was like enough for my expenses. Yeah, basically, I was sort of just yeah, parlaying some savings and stuff like that. So it's sort of a funky little journey. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 29:44
So you never had a full time job.

Derrick Reimer 29:47
I didn't, I did. Actually, tail end of college. It was in a completely different industry. It was I was working for a small company that was selling landscape products to nurseries so It was like, it was a summer job. It was like a family friend, small business summer job turned into like a, I worked at it like full time tail end of college when I was thinking about getting an MBA. And it was actually some of the best work experience I had. Because, I mean, it's like, it's like brick and mortar business, like getting on the phone, calling truckers doing like handling, putting out fires, like in real time. It was pretty, it was pretty interesting, but not not in the tech industry.

Colleen Schnettler 30:30
Wow. So you, so that so you've always been doing this as your career? building businesses?

Derrick Reimer 30:38
Yeah, pretty much. But I started I mean, when I started out in when I was fresh out of college, and then trying to get stuff off the ground. I was, I was making all these classic mistakes. I was like, I was kind of a hobbyist developer, learning web development, started some things, never talked to a customer just like built a product and then was like, Oh, I need to actually think about marketing. So yes, I definitely like, like, went through school of hard knocks, learning those, learning those lessons the hard way until and I

Colleen Schnettler 31:09
don't know if there's a different way to learn it. Right? Like, I don't know. I mean, we all okay, so like, I can use this example, this is my first product. And I had a million ideas before this, none of them got off the ground. And I don't know, sometimes, sometimes it feels like you just have to ship something like for your first product or the early days, like you just have to build something and ship something and then see what happens and then learn. learn this stuff as you go. Well, I

Derrick Reimer 31:37
also think there's something to be said for like, especially in that early in those earlier days. For me, I was much younger, I had didn't have as many financial responsibilities. So it was a pretty low risk time for me, you know, but like, so yes, I didn't get a successful SAS app out of it. But I, what I did get was like a high degree of proficiency in Ruby on Rails, and learned a lot of like, what not to do more of what not to do than what to do camp in terms of like building a business. But that was still valuable experience that I took with me. And so even when, you know, I've built products that have not actually been commercially viable, like, yeah, building things, shipping things is still a valuable exercise. For sure. But I think I think that's not I don't think that's where you're at with this one. Honestly, I think this one is I mean, 1300 MRR, you you've proven it's, this is a, this is a business now, because you have customers, they're paying you. You've made it at least past that phase of like, Oh, no, did I build something that no one wants? So I think you're, yeah, I'm hearing in your voice that you're not sure if you've built something that like will actually that you could actually grow, I think you can grow this thing. I do think you can grow this thing.

Colleen Schnettler 32:48
I mean that and for me, that's kind of like, what, that's what I'm really unsure about, like, you know, going from zero to 1000 makes it feel like a real business. But like 1000 to 10,000 is a whole different ballgame. Right? Like that's, that's a lot of money. I mean, so it Yeah, so that's kind of the like, man, can I grow this?

Derrick Reimer 33:10
Well, the nice The beautiful thing about SAS though is it does compound right so so you have your you have a churn rate, we all have a churn rate. And but but they're definitely not churning out like, like, even if you stopped getting soft acquiring customers, he would still be kind of a slow progression down to zero, like these things, these things, that's why they have have this flywheel effect going. And so I mean, it kind of, you know, SAS fundamentals, you figure out where what your traffic channels are going to be, you go this is an oversimplification, but still like this is fundamentally what it is like you figure out what your traffic channels are going to be. And then you work on optimizing your conversion rate, top of the funnel to the next phase, all the way down to you know, trials, or what would have restructured all the way down to becoming a repeat paying customer. And provided you continue doing marketing activities that increase that top of funnel number of people coming to your website and trickling through like Plinko trickling through your funnel, you're gonna add customers, you know, each month, and before you know it, you know, you're gonna have 1000s of MRR 10s of 1000. Now, like that's kind of how these things grow, which is why I love SAS.

Colleen Schnettler 34:21
Can we go back to something you said earlier that I didn't hone in on but I want to I want to revisit real quick. You said you don't think I could market to both the no code space and the Heroku space. So my reading between the end you're right like I only have one day a week and I'm still developing it's an act of development like their stuff it doesn't do yet that it needs to do. And and I read between the lines there but I just want to verbalize so I should focus on the Heroku people right because I own those keywords. Yeah, I

Derrick Reimer 34:48
think so. I think okay, I would I would do is probably try to try to optimize the heck out of that and try to try to figure out now I know you're there. bummer. Is that like you get limited data from Heroku? I don't know. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 35:03
that is really frustrating, by the way.

Derrick Reimer 35:06
Yeah. I don't know if there's any, anything creative you could do to? Like, I would be curious how much traffic does your add on page get? Like? Do they share any kind of analytics like that?

Colleen Schnettler 35:15
They do. So once a week, they they Oh, no, you know what? They allow me to add a Google snippet. Oh, Google Analytics snippet to the add ons page. So I do see the traffic I get there. Okay, so I don't see anything else. But like, I do see how many visitors I have?

Derrick Reimer 35:33
Are you comfortable stating on air what the traffic number looks like?

Colleen Schnettler 35:37
So I get, so I do weekly, weekly reports for myself for pageviews. So last week, I got 275 page views on the Heroku elements page. And I mean, I've no concept of that a lot. If that's a little like, I don't really know how you even valuate something like that? Well,

Derrick Reimer 35:59
and it is. So it's, that's a small number, like in terms of like website traffic numbers, but but it is also like, presumably, it's pretty highly targeted, like these are people who they're searching in there specifically for a solution to this problem. So like, probably a view from Heroku is from the Heroku marketplace, like that is worth more, it's maybe worth I don't know, 10 times more than just a random like website visitor view, you know?

Colleen Schnettler 36:26
Yeah. What does it tell you? If I'm getting 275 page of views a week, but I get on average, two new customers a week? What is that from that page? Does that right? What would you take from that information?

Derrick Reimer 36:39
Um, so I, to me, that feels like potentially there's an opportunity to, to put some work into experiments experimenting with trying to optimize that a little bit. So it would be like, what's the kind of like, stuff you and Michelle talk about, you know, what's the? What's the language that's going to resonate the most with people? Can you you know, is there? I'm just kind of looking at your, your ad on page here. What does it do? Yes, some good images here. I like that file upload without maintaining infrastructure. That seems really good for what, for the hypothesis that we've discussed here on like, what people are really wanting, but I'd be curious, like, you know, if if, like, testing a different lead headline would potentially be a better hook? I don't know. Yeah. So I think there's some, I mean, it's, yeah, again, it's tricky, because you can't really do like a true A B test, the traffic is not traffic is not high enough, either, where you could do like a true like scientific split test. So it's gonna be a little bit more of like, just maybe a little bit of experimentation on on, kind of getting your tightening up positioning and all that kind of stuff. So I would maybe spend a little bit of time on, on playing with that. But, but aside from that, I'm not sure how much more you really have control over on this specific place. So then I would, I would probably start thinking about, I mean, still marketing to the same type of person who would be looking for this in the Heroku marketplace, but going outside of the Heroku marketplace. So right. You know, again, like I would I would kind of thumb through traction and see if see if anything jumps out as like, who I think I think that one might work for me. But like, I do think, you know, like, like, an example would be like, what if you wrote some guides on like, specifically targeting, like, keywords on uploading Heroku you know, like a guide called How to upload files in Heroku. And, and you could even funny that you could even, like, describe how to do it without using your product. And it would probably be like, it'd be a big old long article with a lot of details in it. That's, like, Oh, my gosh, is so terrible, then, like interspersed throughout you could be like, do you want to skip all this? Just click this button. You know, yeah. And,

Colleen Schnettler 39:01
and, you know, I think as I I as a developer, like someone's content, like, we'll get me to buy their product, like I like the autoscaler I use I bought it because he had a such a great content piece on picking your dinos. I was like, Oh, this guy knows knows what's up, like, I'm gonna buy this. Yeah, so that's a great idea.

Derrick Reimer 39:19
I like that. That makes that makes good sense. Um, have you this just came top of mind. Like, have you talked to anyone at Heroku By the way, like anyone in their sort of partnerships integrations?

Colleen Schnettler 39:33
Yes. So they, they require you to talk to them in the beginning, but I don't have to talk to them anymore.

Derrick Reimer 39:39
Okay. I'm curious if there's an opportunity to to potentially get featured somewhere like I don't know if they have a blog, a newsletter, kind of like a integrations highlight thing. I feel like you know, you're, you're one of the only people right now is actually filling this gap of like, uploads for their platform. So there might be an opportunity. I'm not sure what the name of this role would be just like somebody, somebody in the market on the marketing team or the content team or something, maybe go start with, like your kind of contacts that you initially had at at Heroku. But like, it seems like, I don't know, if you could get a newsletter feature from them. That would be Yeah, potentially really high value, or some kind of feature somewhere on their site. I'm not sure all the all the different ways they have to promote their integrations. But it's, I mean, it serves their their interest to, to, like promote this thing that's solving a problem that their customers have. So there might be like, a little co marketing opportunity there.

Colleen Schnettler 40:42
Yeah. How do you decide how to split your time between your marketing efforts and your development efforts?

Derrick Reimer 40:50
Yeah, that's a it's a tough problem. Because the context switching is, is it's pretty heavy. Like it's very different. Very different disciplines. I, I've experimented with sort of doing like, I don't know about I think everyone has their different like, way their brains work. For me. It's like I'm, I'm at my best in the morning. And then it's kind of all downhill from there.

Colleen Schnettler 41:18
Like, I'm a morning morning work person. Yes, yeah.

Derrick Reimer 41:20
So I used to, I used to do like, kind of slice the day up a little bit. And I would spend, and so naturally, I would spend my mornings on engineering stuff, and then kind of give the leftovers to marketing. And I found that was kind of hard to do. Like, for me, it didn't work that great. And usually, by the end of the day, I was sort of so burned out, like, if I was really good at my job in the morning, that just meant there was almost nothing left at the end of the day. So I struggled to make progress on that. So I've been a fan of, you know, trying to, like, use the Primetime for marketing on specific days, if I'm going to, if I'm really need to, like, do a heavy task, like write something or, or do like a lot of creative work on something some, some marketing tasks are just like, they're pretty rote. And you can just sort of slot them in wherever but other things, you know, require a lot of creative energy, right? And, yeah, coming up with with a plan or whatever. So I don't know, I I've, I've kind of liked doing sort of dedicating a day or two to that. But I think it kind of, I don't know, I've never I haven't come up with something very rigid for myself, like, like, Mondays are always gonna be marketing. It's just, there's, there's too many things changing all the time, too many dynamics and an early stage company that I haven't found, like for myself a rigid kind of cadence to work. But I do feel like trying to look at like, in the span of a week, how much did I invest into marketing and kind of have at least a gauge in my head on that, you know, if you go a week without investing anything into marketing, but then again, for you, you said one day a week, so maybe it's you might need to stretch that out and say, like, you know, one day on every other week, it's like, focus on marketing versus focus on product, like, that may be what you have to do. And that's perfectly fine. I

Colleen Schnettler 43:17
tried to do so when I was trying, I was trying to do like marketing an hour every day. And like, I do it first thing when I was fresh, but like the context switching, oh my gosh, it was killing me because like, you get into a tat and then you know, job. So I'd like get into a task. And then it was like, oh, but now I have to stop mid in this task and like, do this other thing. It just yeah, it wasn't working. So I guess I'll just play around with that. But I like to maybe every other week or something because it takes me a while to like get into the marketing. mindset, ya know?

Derrick Reimer 43:51
Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, like, the another area like I, I feel like your product is, is in a place where Obviously, these products are never done. There's always things to add, we all have roadmaps, but maybe I'll push you on this too, like you might need to spend like the next couple of weeks, for example, like really just thinking giving your best mental energy to kind of the marketing piece like, Alright, you're sort of at this place where like, I'm not sure what to do next. And that that might mean it's the time to, to, you know, set the product work aside for a little bit for a couple of weeks, even and kind of work through, you know, maybe working through this traction book or working through some other frameworks to kind of think about because yeah, it's it's hard to when you're just thinking about like, Okay, well, what should I What should I do to grow next, but you're only giving yourself like an hour or two. It's like, that's not enough time to really like, Alright, let's just we need you to like sit, sit back, open up your mind. Really just think for hours on this and it's hard to like, just sit sit down and like be like, I'm gonna think now for three hours straight. Like that doesn't work, obviously, but like giving yourself the room to just sort of Google around a bit and just kind of let your mind go free a little bit and sort of brainstorm and jot things down on a whiteboard or whatever works for you. And sort of think, like, marketing does require a fair amount of creativity, like just doing what works for other people blindly doesn't necessarily. It's not necessarily the most efficient path, like sometimes it requires like, like sitting back and trying to come up with those insights like, yeah, maybe a sandbox account or something like that, you know, like, yeah, and yeah, but you have to give yourself time to, to come up with those insights.

Colleen Schnettler 45:41
Yeah, a little space, I see exactly what you mean, like you kind of have the space in your brain? Yeah. And so I do have one more question for you. So you've sold a few companies? How have you made the decision? And I know, there's gonna be a lot of like, personal goals, and etc, etc. But like, generally speaking, how do you identify when the right time to sell is for you? And for the business? Things like that?

Derrick Reimer 46:07
Right. Yeah, so I've just talked through the things that I have sold like. So I started a product called code tree that I did kind of in tandem, when I was working at drip. And gradually, like, My role at drip sort of increased to the point where like, I became, like, I was fully invested fully in on this on this journey. So like, What started out as a side project, I was like, maybe this will be my next, my full time job. At some point, I'll kind of move on from drips like that, the dynamics of that relationship changed, I got more serious with my commitment to drip. So then I had like this product that was on the side that I wasn't really, that I didn't feel like I could really invest the time into. And I didn't have the motivation to like to work basically two jobs and like, do the nights and weekends thing. Like I was like, No, I'm not gonna do that. And so it was sort of just sitting on the side. And I determined like, I think, I think someone could grow this, I think this is still worth something. And since it was still growing a little bit, it hadn't, like, started to like, really contract and, and shrink. I was like, this is probably an optimal time for me to get it off my plate. Right. Okay. So that was one drip was obviously a much different situation. It was a fully scaled up applications. It was a strategic acquisition. And so that's sort of in a different in a different bucket. I feel like,

Colleen Schnettler 47:30
Yeah, I think so.

Derrick Reimer 47:32
I product that I started, kind of before savvy cow was called static kit. And it was like a tool, toolkit of products for static site builders, and I just never really never really got good traction with that. And so that one was like, Okay, I was sort of, out of ideas and motivation on how to grow it. And I was ready to move on to something else. And so I ended up selling that one, because it's like, well, if if I happen to have a competitor, and I felt like they were kind of moving in that similar direction, and maybe it would be worth something to them to, like, have a little a little jumpstart on some, some of this some of the code that I wrote. So that worked out. So it's sort of been like, yeah, the times I've sold things, it's like, it's either not a good fit with my, with my goals in my life anymore. Yeah, or I feel like it's, it's better to capture it, harvest the value now and like cash out now, as opposed to like, continuing to try to try to move it forward.

Colleen Schnettler 48:34
I don't know if this was your intention, but like, I'm feeling super pumped right now. Like, this feels like part advice, podcast part, like pep talk. Yeah. Like, the fact that that, you know, I just think some of the things we talked about, like seeing a path forward is is really great, because I have found through this whole journey, if you will, a lot of it just seems to be like managing my own psychology. Like, Oh, can I do this? Is this gonna work? Like Yeah, but epic failure. There's just so much of this like, like cyclical, like, Oh my gosh, I'm brilliant. I came up with the most, you know, amazing thing ever to be like, no one wants this. It's terrible. So, you know, I've really, I've really found that to be interesting, very different from like, working a traditional job is like, there's a lot of, like, personal you know, you know, personal stuff wrapped up starting a business.

Derrick Reimer 49:27
Yep. Yeah. No, totally. I mean, that's kind of the whole name of the game, honestly. And I don't have any great answers on how to manage that. Because it's, I mean, I feel like probably every founder is kind of in the same in the same boat on this one. And it's like, yeah, that's that's a tough one to solve. But having these kinds of conversations is good. I think, you know, like being, getting getting outside perspectives and talking stuff through doing your weekly podcast. That's all hopefully helpful in that Staying sane.

Colleen Schnettler 50:02
That's amazing. Thank you so much, Derek for coming in today. I had a wonderful time talking to you. Obviously we ran a little bit long, but like this conversation was super valuable for me. So I really appreciate it.

Derrick Reimer 50:15
You're welcome. I love talking through this stuff. So happy to happy to do it.

Colleen Schnettler 50:19
So that's going to wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast, you can check out Derek's product savvy cow and please let us know what you think we love it. If you enjoyed the show, if you would leave us an iTunes review

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Pre-order Michele's book on talking to customers! https://deployempathy.com/order

Marie's course, Notion Mastery: https://notionmastery.com/
Marie's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mariepoulin
Marie's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKvnOhqTeEgdNt1aJB5mVng
Marie's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mariepoulin/

Michele Hansen 00:00

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Michele Hansen
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. We have another guest with us this week. I am so excited to have my friend, Marie Poulin, here today. She is the creator of Notion Mastery, which is this amazing Notion course that has over 1200 students, averaging $45,000 MRR. Pretty amazing business that she has built up. Welcome to Software Social, Marie.

Marie Poulin 01:18

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat.

Michele Hansen 01:21

So um, people listening may know you from all of your YouTube videos and courses with Notion, which have been crazy successful, and only, only, since October 2019, since you launched it, but I actually want to talk about something else. So you had another business, a course business called Doki, and actually, the last time I spoke, like, like, like, actually spoke with you like, internet friend is so funny. Like, I feel like I talk to you all the time, but actually, like talk to you, talk to you, was you and your husband, Ben, were thinking about what to do with Doki and whether you should sell it or shut it down.

Marie Poulin 02:15

Yes, and you very kindly reached out with some suggestions on how we might handle that. And it, it sort of wasn't, I don't want to say it wasn't our passion anymore, but yeah, you know, Ben got offered a full time gig. So for anybody listening, my husband and I teamed up back in 2014 to, to run our company together. We built a software and we ran it for I mean, five-ish years or so, and I think neither one of us was, it was definitely our first software project. And it was that build a giant software project that does all of the things and, you know, kind of wishing that we had done something smaller when we learned about the whole software building all of the different pieces. And so when we first went to MicroCon, that was, it was just so eye opening how many things we had done wrong, and it was it was a really wonderful learning experience. But I think it kind of showed us that there were parts of that, that just, I don't know that either of us was super excited to go 100% all in on it. I liked the working with people side of online courses and actually shipping and working on their websites, and just all of, all the other pieces of it other than the software. And so the burden was really on Ben to build all the features and do customer support, and, you know, he was pretty much like the solo founder handling all of those parts of the software, and I was handling more of the consulting side of it. And it was a huge burden on him. It was huge. And so when he got offered a full time job, it was a chance for him to step into more of a leadership role, be challenged, be working with other people, and it just, he really flourished. And I think it was something he was missing. Like, when you're a solo founder, you're just, you know, you're wearing every single hat. You're making all the decisions. And if you're bumping up against stuff you've never seen, it's pretty tough. It's a tough life to be, to be solo founder. So I was really encouraging him to, to kind of explore this new venture, but it sort of meant that Doki got left in the dust a little bit. And so we kind of took our foot off the gas, and just in this year in January 2021 we decided what if we just kind of shut down signups and, and just kind of let it do its thing and just kind of keep supporting the clients that were still using it, more like our consulting clients and not really market at widely. And so we did and I was like, how do you feel about this? And he's like, oh, I feel I feel so relieved. And I think that was really important that it didn't feel sad. It didn't feel like oh no, we're shutting this thing down. Like he felt like no, this is a chapter of my life that was great. And now it's over. So it's been a journey.

Michele Hansen 04:54

So, I mean on, you know, on this podcast, you know, we talk a lot about like, getting a SaaS off of the ground, or I guess, in my case now, like, getting an info product off the ground, and then also running those companies. But there's this other phase of it, which is exiting, and sometimes exiting means selling a company, or, you know, being acquihired by someone, or it means shutting it down. And I'm wondering if you can kind of talk through that a little bit about how you guys decided to sunset it, rather than sell it.

Marie Poulin 05:37

Yeah, because we had gone through this conversation back and forth. And we even had, you know, several people who had made offers to buy, and it felt actually pretty close, like, that was something we were really seriously considering. And again, you're, it was just really, really valuable to get your, your insights on that, and to have somebody that, you know, not attached to it just kind of as an outsider giving us perspective on that. And so we, we had some meetings, and we definitely considered it, and I think the burden of what would have needed to happen to be able to make that handoff happen in a way, such that it could actually be successful for those who are taking it over, felt too big for Ben. I think it was, again, given that his attention was elsewhere, it there was just such a cognitive load associated with all of that cleanup work, and just, just kind of the whole process of that transition. And it's possible that it may not have actually been that much work. It's kind of hard to know, in hindsight, but I think the anticipation of that, and just, you know, when Ben does something, he wants to do it properly, and he wouldn't have felt good, I think to just kind of pass it off as is knowing how much legacy work needed to be rebuilt. And he, he just didn't feel comfortable with it. And I was like, you know, I don't know this stuff as well as you do. And if you feel really confident and happy to just kind of say, you know, what, we're totally cool to just, like, the, the amount just kind of doesn't match up with, with what it would be worth to do that work, and how much extra time it would have taken him outside of his full time job. It just, it didn't feel like it was quite worth it to do that investment of the work. So that was a decision I sort of felt it was kind of up to them to make as a burden was really on him, and I think he felt a huge relief, honestly, even just like taking the signup off of the site. And just realizing, like, our business has gone in such a different direction, and it's okay to say goodbye to this chapter, and so it felt good. And I think that was really important is can we stand behind this decision? Does it feel good? Does it release a certain, you know, energetic burden, and it really did, and so that we felt good at the end of the day, for us that, that was the right decision.

Michele Hansen 07:44

I'm struck by how much respect I hear in that. You know, there's the respect that you have for Ben, that this was something that he knew really well and what like, had, you know, that, that, that transition work would have been on on him and your respect for that. And then his and also sort of both of your respect for your emotions, and recognizing those as valid and worth prioritizing, and, because I think some people say, oh, well, I'll, you know, get a lot of money from this. So you know, screw my feelings, like, you know, just have to suck it up, suck it up and do it. Like, I mean, the the market for even small SaaS companies like Doki, like, like, just for content, like, how much was Doki, like, making when you decided to shut it down? I mean, Ben would certainly have a better sense of the numbers at that point that we made the decision. I mean, certainly the pandemic did have a big impact. And we'd already kind of stopped doing any new feature development, even maybe the year before the pandemic hit. So I would say, you know, at its height, maybe $50,000 in a year. So we had some months that were like 4k, maybe 5k, and so by the time we shut it down, it was like 2500 to 2000. Like, nothing to sneeze at in terms of it was very low maintenance and, you know, covers our mortgage and expensive, like, that's awesome. But there is that mental load that's required there that you're kind of always thinking about that uptime, or you're thinking about how long, how long can we go not adding any features and not doing anything to really kind of improve or support or even do any marketing. So in some ways, it sort of felt like there was a time limit on how long we could get away with just, just letting it kind of simmer in the, in the background and not give it its full attention, and so it didn't feel good in that way that it it did have this sort of energetic burdensome feeling, and so respect is is absolutely huge. Like, you know, both Ben and I are incredibly autonomous. Like, we have always kind of worked almost like two separate founders under the same brand umbrella. So even when we partnered up, we still very much had our own projects, our own clients, and there's a lot of trust there with like, Ben and I are very different people, very different types of projects, very different things that light us up. And so, you know, Ben has higher anxiety than I do, and when we first launched Doki, I know the feeling of always being on and having to answer those customer support questions, and I think it takes a bigger toll on him than, than it might other people. And so that has to be factored in, like, what's the point of building these, like, software and these businesses that support our lives when it's just adding to our daily stress? Like, that's, that's not the point, right? So I think for both of us, it does really matter. Like, what kind of life are we building for ourselves? And if, are we building something that just feels like another job, but we just kind of built our own jail? Like, that's, that's not really fun. So I think we have a lot of understanding and respect for, yeah, what kind of life are we building, and ideally reducing stress and not adding to it so that, that was really important to me that he felt really good about that enclosure and didn't feel like oh, this was a failure, or, you know, it didn't go the way we wanted. For me, I'm like, holy crap, we learned an epic crap ton. You know, we just, it was just absolute, you know, entrepreneurship school on steroids. Like, you know, you just learned so many different parts from your customer research and the technical capacity and all the decisions that once you've done it once, and then it's almost too late, like, the wheels are in motion, and you've already, there's already, like, technical debt as soon as you started. It's a wonderful learning opportunity, and part of us wishes we'd tried it on something small, but my gosh, the learning has been incredible. So I don't, I don't regret any of it, and I don't think he does, either. It's the reason he has the job that he does now. It, he's, he's just like, both of us, I think are just highly skilled people that are going to adapt whatever happens like okay, cool. That was an awesome chapter. Next. What's next, you know. You guys are incredibly emotionally intelligent and atuned, and, I mean, yeah, I mean, that you take that kind of focus is really, I think, remarkable and really commendable. And, you know, so after we had we had talked last fall, I guess, you guys were still kind of, you were unclear on whether you were going to shut it down or you were going to sell it, and I just tweeted out if anybody was interested in buying a SaaS, I think I said it had like 2.4k MRR. And I got so many messages after that, but I actually just got another one last week, and I got one, like, three months ago, like, the market for really, like really tiny SaaS companies is just, just bonkers. And I think it's so amazing that you prioritized how, like, not just the money, but how you felt about it. Now, of course that the notion courses making 45,000 a month and Ben has a full time job, like, that sort of makes it a little bit easier to make decisions that are not just guided by the financials, I imagine.

Marie Poulin 13:16

Definitely. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure that, that was a part of it was just, okay, we're not we don't have to make a purely financial decision right now, so what's going to feel, yeah, what's gonna feel the best? And I guess, yeah, I guess they didn't realize that maybe not everybody is as driven that way, but I'm definitely a very feelings driven person, and I know, we've talked about this a little bit with, with the sort of, you know, likely being an ADD or ADHD founder, and just, I didn't realize before, I think, how much of my decision making around how I've shaped my business has been, like, I've talked about it in terms of alignment and, you know, values-driven and that sort of thing. But I think part of it is I cannot muster up the energy to do stuff I'm not super freakin' stoked about. So I do kind of factor that into all my decisions. Like, I'm never going to design services that I'm going to be resentful of as soon as I'm designing them. It's like, if I already know I'm going to be resentful doing all these calls, like, I just cannot make that, that service available. So I do think I've gotten pretty tuned into like, alright, what's the stuff that lights me up, and how do I craft my offers so that I can be totally shining and excited about them? Because that, that's just, I guess, how I move through the world.

Michele Hansen 14:34

It seems like you combine this incredible self-awareness about what energizes you and prioritizing what energizes you with this huge sense of responsibility for the users of what you have created.

Marie Poulin 14:54

Yeah, I'd like, I'd like to think so. I mean, you know, one of the things that happened when we first launched Doki, was that people were signing up for it, and then they weren't shipping. Right? It's like anything now, like the time that it takes to actually launch a course, and I know you've had, you know, episodes with Colleen about this of just what it really takes to really grow an online course and actually make it a sustainable living. And so people would, would sign up thinking the tech was gonna solve that for them, and they're all, like, ready to go, and they they pick the technology well before they have their content created. And it didn't feel good that there were people paying us a monthly thing and they had never shipped a course yet. So, the first thing I did was like, well, we need to get people shipping faster, how do I do this? And I ended up creating a course that was run your learning launch that was trying to get people to like, get the shitty first draft of your course out as soon as possible, right. Like, co-create it with people. I'm a huge, huge believer, in co-creating products with your people. They are going to tell you what they want, they tell you what they need, and then the words that they use in those sessions, in those live calls that you're doing with people, that's exactly what shapes your, your sales pages and stuff. So I, I'm just a big fan of working with people on this stuff, and not just, you know, working in secret for six months building a thing, and then you know, putting it out into the world. Like, we know that it just it just doesn't work that way. So yeah, I think I do carry a huge, huge respect for, for the users that are signing up for my thing. It is a responsibility I do not take lightly. And so even right now with, with the course, I've been working for six months on the new curriculum. It's like, where can I look at all the places that people are stumbling, and maybe we overwhelm new, new people that are coming in like going, oh, my gosh, this course is so big, and then they get scared, and they run away and then they don't complete the course. Like, it does matter to me not just that they complete it, but they actually do experience some kind of transformation through that process. So like, how can I improve the learning outcomes? How can I design this better? I can't help myself, like maybe that's partly a bit of perfectionism. But it's like, I want this to be a really epic experience for them and be really memorable. And, in a way, that's my marketing, right? It's like other people sharing with other people, their experience of the course. To me that feels way better, and way easier than like, chucking a bunch of money into ads and just like getting it in front of people. It's like, no, I want the users to be so excited about it, that they are shouting it from the rooftops and getting people in the door. So yeah, that matters for sure.

Michele Hansen 17:20

It's so interesting, you're talking about like, building collaboratively with people, and, you know, I like I'm a huge advocate of talking to people and talking to customers, but I never really built in public, so to speak, until a couple of months ago, when I was writing my book. And you know, to what you said about, you know, getting early feedback from people and building it with them, that, that has been an incredibly, like, a transformative experience. And it's, it's really remarkable when you combine that combination of, as you said, something that you are super stoked about with other people who are stoked about it, like, you know, like to kind of, you know, talk a little bit about being like, you know, ADHD founder. So like, for so for, just to give us sort of a little bit of context. So like, I was diagnosed with ADD at 11, which I guess they don't diagnose people with anymore, because apparently, like, they were only diagnosing girls with it, or something. So now everything is all under ADHD. And you sort of are recently exploring, like, whether you're ADHD, and so but like, on this, this combination of, you know, working on something you're really passionate about, and then in the course of working on it in public, finding other people who are really passionate about it, who help you improve it, like, I feel like that puts my hyper focus in this insane overdrive.

Marie Poulin 18:54

Yeah. How do you how do you control that? I'm so, I'm so curious kind of what your,

Michele Hansen 18:58

I don't. I, yesterday, I was so annoyed that I had to stop working and make dinner. I was like, can't I just work for like, 48 hours straight, like, and, which is, like, not, like, I, like, my work life balance is a lot better than it used to be like, but I just like it's so, it's, like, painful when I'm really interested in something because it's like, yesterday, I was like, working on the book, like and it was just I was so, like, so fired up about what I was working on. And then I was like, okay, actually, like, we need to, we need to eat. Like, and I have you know, we have a family and like, my husband was mowing the lawn and like, you know, so I was like, okay, I need to like go to the grocery store like, I need to shift gears, but like, the whole time I was there like, you know, yes, I bought like lettuce and yogurt and whatever else we needed, but like, my brain was still like, writing.

Marie Poulin 19:48

Somewhere else.

Michele Hansen 19:49

Like, my brain like, was writing and I think, you know, to what you said about how you and Ben work very like, autonomously, like, Mathias and I work together for the most part, and I think this gets frustrating sometimes when I'm still thinking about something else, but I don't give any, like, outward signals of that. I'm just like, a little bit quiet. And like, he like, talks to me and like, I just don't know,

Marie Poulin 20:12

You're nodding and say you're listening, but you're writing in your head. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 20:14

Yeah. Like, I don't even acknowledge it or, like, I seem like I'm listening. And then he asked me 10 minutes later, like about what he had told me about, and I'm like, what, like, this is new, and he's like, seriously. Like, the hyper focus can be amazing, but also kind of detrimental at the same time because if I have to do anything else, I'm just cranky.

Marie Poulin 20:40

I definitely, I definitely relate to this, and I think this was, this was one of the the signs like, I, I thought, well, I couldn't possibly have ADHD because like, I've been self-employed for 12 years, and I have a successful business and I get things done, and, you know, I sort of had a lot of misconceptions around what it meant to be or have ADHD because my sister has ADHD, too. And she is like, the poster child of what what you think of when you think of ADHD, and very hyperactive, super distracted, extremely extroverted, just like, a million thoughts, like, interrupting other thoughts. And, and I was like, okay, that's what ADHD looks like. It was very distinct. And so because I get things done, I sort of thought, I just had a different perception of it, and I realized that the hyper focus binges that I go on that were like, oh, that explains why like, it can be really hard to tear myself away from, from the screen, and it almost becomes borderline obsessive, and it can be really difficult to manage. So that is one of the signs I started to be like, oh. It always happens in these super inconsistent bursts, right? Very, very wildly inconsistent. And I always, yeah, like, frick, if you just have a dial, you could, you could, you could turn that on when you needed to, but oh my gosh, so I can relate to that. Just, it's inconvenient, and yeah, it's also the thing that helps us kind of push forward and get things done, and it's a wonderful thing when it's there, but it can happen at the detriment of other parts of our lives. So that's definitely something that I struggle with, for sure.

Michele Hansen 22:13

You know, I, like, I relate so hard to that, because I can't possibly, you know, have ADHD because you get so much done. Like, when I was in college, I think there was like, a running joke about how many jobs and side projects I had at any given time. Like, I think it was like, I had, it was like, six. Like, I had a part time job, I had an internship, I had like, volunteering, I had, like, all of these like, side projects with my own going on, like, um, and, but when I, so when I was diagnosed as a kid, like it was very much presented as I had this deficit of focus. And then I had to overcome that deficit of focus, and then like, that was it. And like, I, so I was never like, really in therapy or any sort of treatment. Like I was taught how to manage that, like calendars, and like, planners became a huge part of my life. But when I was, this was when I was in elementary school. So when I was in middle school, I was supposed to have like, you know, a tutor, and like somebody who like worked with me on it, and like, a plan, they call it a 504 plan in the US, but I never actually had it because my grades were too high. And,

Marie Poulin 23:21

People always think you need the support, right?

Michele Hansen 23:22

Right. Because it was like, oh, like if you you know, if you have those, like if you have this deficiency, like, she's overcome the deficiency if she's getting A's and B's, so there's no problem here. And I didn't, really for me, it wasn't only until the last like six months or a year that I started understanding all of these other facets of it that, like, it's not just that sometimes I have trouble focusing on tasks I don't want to do. Like, there's all of these other things like, you, you know, that, there's the hyper focus you mentioned, there's the like, the perfectionism that you touched on earlier, you know, there are those kind of, you know, everyone's experience of it is different. But like, I, there's just so many things that like, I thought were me things that were just kidn of weird about me. And then it turns out, there's all these other people who are weird, like me, and,

Marie Poulin 24:16

To read other people's descriptions, and you go, are you kidding me? Like, that's a, that's a thing? I'm not alone? Or like, I thought it was just a family quirk, and then you're like, oh, or is it that actually a good chunk of my family also, you know, like sister's diagnosed and when you look at the behaviors, you're like, oh, yeah, like, it would explain why our family kind of operates this way. And, you know, the more you start to meet people, you're like, oh, okay, there's, there's maybe a reason, too, that, and I don't know if you if you feel this too, but that for example, people with ADHD seem drawn to my work or drawn to my, my style, right? Because I think in some ways you get attracted to different people's communication styles, and I realized, like, in certain calls that I would I have with people that were very energizing, I didn't realize this at the time, it's almost like, you know, when you like, once you see it, you start to see it everywhere, of all the people that I connect with that had ADHD that I didn't know, I was like, oh my gosh, that explains why when we get on a call, neurons are firing, and we're all over the map, and we're just like changing gears, like, constantly, and it just feels like this creative spark is just like, going and going and it's incredible. It's a very different experience with someone whose brain doesn't work that way, and I, I started to clue in, I'm like, oh, maybe there's a reason. And then when you start to look at the behaviors, I'm like, okay, like, it would explain a lot. You know, and you start to kind of look backwards and be like, oh, yeah, all those behaviors start to kind of click into place. And you see, actually, things with a new lens. And when I look at past behaviors, and maybe ways I've really, really judged myself, and I was like, oh my gosh, like, I just, I didn't realize, you know, and I think for me, a big part of that is workaholism, in a way. Like I thought, I really judged myself for being like, oh, I'm like a workaholic, a workaholic. And I thought, yes, and like, it's not so black and white like that. I am very driven by the work that I do because I've so carefully crafted work that I don't hate, and so I've designed work that I love. I'm getting to connect with people and ideas get to form, and I'm always doing new things every day. So of course, like it's feeding that dopamine, I'm like, yeah, it's like, I love this. And so, it is really difficult to shut off work. And so I think I carried a lot of guilt that I work on weekends, but also take really long breaks in the middle of the day and go gardening. And so like, I have found my own ebb and flow, and I think I was really harsh on myself with some of that stuff. And then I was like, well, what if it's actually okay, that my brain is a little more activated than the average person or, or it just kind of feeds off information differently, and maybe I want to consume more courses at a time than the average person. And so it's just brought up a lot of interesting reflection that I'm seeing behaviors and maybe a different light, and that I actually find I'm being a little more compassionate with myself to be like, hey, is that Maria's personality is that ADHD? Is that me coping? Like, it's still very much learning for me. So I'm still kind of just keeping an open mind and just really trying to reflect and notice those behaviors now.

Michele Hansen 27:20

You know, the, we are, you know, what's called sort of neurodivergent people living in a neurotypical world. And I think, from, you touched on sort of that, that guilt about not having sort of, quote, unquote, like, normal patterns for things and ways of thinking about things. And I think unpacking that shame that we don't fit the neurotypical box is so important, because, I think in, you know, education and kind of maybe, and like, when you're not working for yourself, like neurotypical is the standard, and people who don't meet that are kind of just outside of that. And so, like, there's like this, like, we blame ourselves for that. But if instead, you know, we can, like find ways to work on the things that we are passionate about, and that do energize us, then these, like, amazing things can be unlocked. And I think, like, I have noticed that I tend to find a lot of neurodivergent people in the kind of, like, indie SaaS courses like, internet biz world, and I wonder if that's because a lot of us have just felt like we didn't, yeah, like, we didn't really belong and like, but like, the way to, like really bring out like, what we are capable of, like, like, I remember when I worked, you know, in bigger companies, like I always, I would describe myself, like a pin and a pinball machine. Like, I just always felt like I was just like, bouncing around constantly trying to show like, what I was capable of, and like, what I was good at, and like, what I could do and what I could contribute, and that was always, like, way more and different than whatever the role I was in was supposed to be doing. And it was so frustrating. Like, it was like, deeply frustrating, you know, versus now, like, you know, I can focus on the things that, you know, sort of with, I guess, with a little bit of business knowledge, right? Because you can't just focus on things that don't lead to an income. Um, you know, like, yeah, the things that really energize, and like you've said, how this, like, managing your own brain in a way, it's kind of like, maybe what attracted you to notion in the first place, and then kind of prompted you to go on this path of making this amazingly, like, I'm so amazed by all the things you build with Notion, like this tool that, like, helps you not only steer your brain, but like express it in the way that it wants to be expressed that maybe is not really reflected and other tools.

Marie Poulin 29:53

Yeah, it's a, it's a weird and wonderful thing, but it does feel like this bizarre culmination of all of my weird interests and strengths, and like even the fact that it's kind of like a No Code builder of sorts, right? It's like I have a web design background, and so I think naturally I'm inclined to build information architecture, but do it beautifully. Like, that's what I did for clients. And so, and then even like my design thinking background, and how I've studied systems, or how I've had to find these productivity systems for myself that worked. And the way certain tools, you know, are very opinionated, and they, they sort of force you into, like, like Asana, for example, everything is a task, like, it sort of forces you into one way of thinking, which is great, it's a great task manager. But I'm like, my strategic planning doesn't really fit in there, and how do I connect that to, to, and everything just kind of felt messy. And, you know, as someone with ADHD that already, already feels like I'm everywhere all the time, for me, Notion was this place where like, suddenly I could see everything that was on my plate in one place in a really easy way. So this ability to like, zoom out, zoom in very, very quickly and have it all integrated was just like, ah, everything like has come into place. And it just kind of clicked, and I think I was just so passionate, so excited about it, it felt like you know, I said life was a shit show before Notion. Like I had tried to get to, like you said, lean on calendars, we like find the systems to kind of lean on like a bit of a crutch. But there were still some systems pieces missing that Notion, in a way, forced me to build my own in a way that really worked for my brain. And I don't think it's a coincidence that just so many of the people that have joined the course or that seem really excited about it and get a lot out of it have also mentioned their own ADHD. Like, I literally just saw a message pop up in the forum, like 20 minutes ago that said how they think notion is just an ADHD friendly tool. I'm like, What an interesting thing that, again, it wasn't even on my radar a year ago or two years ago. I didn't even really think about it. I didn't, I certainly didn't even remotely suspect that I would have had it. And yet, now that I'm aware of it, and I'm seeing more conversations around neurodiversity, really just seeing how Notion gives neurodiverse folks a place to be themselves, as kind of cheesy as it sounds, like, the fact that you can just make it what you want it to be. It can be a personal growth engine, it can be a place where you organize your files, you know, daily journaling, like, you name it, whatever you want it to be, it can be a place that inspires you. And so I just, I love to show people like, well, here's how I'm using it for my garden tracking, I just love there's just endless possibilities with it. And I think if you only look at it as a productivity tool, you know, people kind of poopoo it or they're like, oh, procrastinate, procrastinating on building their setups, and let you know, people have all sorts of opinions about it. But I actually think it is, it's a tool for managing your emotions just as much it is as a tool for managing your information. So I find it quite fascinating from a tool for making you more mindful about how you work and what you need, and just noticing your energy. And I didn't, I didn't know all that stuff wasn't stuff that other people did. It's not till showing it to people, and they're like, holy crap, this is the most organized thing I've ever seen in my life. And I'm like, me, are you kidding me? Because like, I see the baseline the scenes, right? It's like, it's, it's funny to me the things that it's only once, you know, to bring it back to your conversation about sharing in public, working in public. When you make your thinking visible, and you share what you're doing out there, that's where I think you start to see what are those spiky points of view that you have? Or what are the interesting ways that you approach stuff that people are like, whoa, I didn't even think of it that way. So yeah, I'm curious, too, in you sharing your stuff publicly, and doing the writing publicly, like, has anything surprised you that you put out there and you're like, oh, wow, I didn't expect that to really land for people or, you know, what did you notice in your process of sharing your stuff publicly?

Michele Hansen 33:53

Yeah, I mean, so something that actually has surprised me in the last, I've had two people in the last week, tell me how the introduction of my book made them completely rethink how they approach other people. And,

Marie Poulin 34:11

Wow

Michele Hansen 34:12

How they like, didn't even like, they didn't realize like, the extent of empathy and what it was and how they could use it and how it can help them be a better you know, coworker or person and, like, not just someone who's better at making landing pages or making product decisions. And I started out, like, I, so I, the the introduction, I actually originally didn't really have a very good introduction of the book. Like, I didn't define empathy very much or anything. And then one of my early readers was like, I think, I think you need to introduce this a little more. And so I did, and then like, it basically sounds like people are, some people like reading the first 10 pages and then being like, whoa, and then like, going on this other path. And then like, and then they're like, okay, well when I actually like, need to build something I'll come back here for the scripts. But like, having this, and, you know, like we've talked, like we've talked a lot about, like emotional intelligence here, and like, I've had my own journey with there and like, talking about, you know, workaholism, like, is that is that a trait? Or is that a trauma response? Like, it's kind of both, like, and like, so that has been a really important journey for me. By the way, if that resonates with anyone that's called the flight response, just Google that. And, and so that like, like, I have this kind of like, this, like, little dream that like, you know, like, people, nobody puts like, be more empathetic on their to daily to do list, maybe some, maybe you do. But like, nobody really doesn't. But they put like, you know, get more sales, like, write a new landing page, like, figure out which features I should build. Like, those are the things that come up on people's to do lists. And so I have this, like, kind of dream that like, in the process of helping people do those things they already want to do that they will become more empathetic in general and learn that this is a skill that they can apply not just to business, but to the rest of their life, because it's been such an important journey for me, because it's something that I really didn't really learn until my 20s. And, and, yeah, I mean, that's, I don't know. Yeah, it's been very, like, it's been very soul-nourishing for me.

Marie Poulin 36:31

The process of writing and sharing?

Michele Hansen 36:34

Yeah, I think like, in a very unexpected way, and, you know, kind of talking about ADHD, and so it sounds like what you're doing, like, you sound very much like a systems thinker. And you have built this sort of digital system that reflects your mental system, and in the process of doing so, you're helping people realize that, you know, they could build off of that to build something that reflects their mental system. And it's like, and you're helping them really like, blossom into, into expressing their thinking. And what I'm doing, like, I have, I have had feedback from people who have said, they are ADHD, or autistic, and they have said that, like, this is very, very different for them, for, I mean, for those two groups for very different reasons. But like, I've had people tell me, like, I don't think I'm capable of doing this because, you know, as you said, there's a kind of that stereotype of people who are ADHD that they, like, you know, talk over the people, like, can't stay on a topic, like, you know, just all of that, which, like, I mean, I think if we weren't doing a podcast right now, like, we would be excitedly talking over each other right now, like.

Marie Poulin 37:53

I was wondering.

Michele Hansen 37:54

I, like, am really holding back.

Marie Poulin 37:57

Which is exhausting, right? It's like, it takes a lot of energy to, like, tone it down, be normal, like,

Michele Hansen 38:04

Oh, I'm gonna go jump on the trampoline after this. But, like, for me, it's like this weird thing, because, because I didn't learn, like, this either wasn't built into me, or I didn't learn it as a kid, like, I've had to really focus on learning how to like, listen to people.

Marie Poulin 38:23

You're so good at it.

Michele Hansen 38:25

It became a hyper focus thing for me, like, so I feel like when I'm listening to people, like learning, like, I have to like, I think it's why people are like, oh, this made me realize these things about empathy I didn't even realize, because I had to, like learn empathy and listening at a level that most people don't have to. Like, I had to really understand it. Like, I had to really dive deep into it. Because I just didn't have that, like, I didn't, I was not born with that feature built in. So, and then, but like, I think it kind of became this thing that, like, I hyper focus on. And so like, when I'm talking to someone, like, I'm just like, I'm like, completely submerging myself into them, and like exploring their brain, and I think, you know, talking about like, systems thinkers, like, that's something I love is like, getting to understand the system of somebody else's head and like getting to, like, poke around and all the little corners and be like, oh, why is, what's going on here? Like, we're like, what do we got going on here? Like,

Marie Poulin 39:29

I compare it to like, looking at their underwear drawer. You're just like, you get to see like, it's very personal, right? And people are often like embarrassed or they feel a lot of shame because, like, their their space is really messy. But I love that, right.

Michele Hansen 39:42

I love mess.

Marie Poulin 39:42

It's so beautiful. It's, and I will say, like, in the call that we had with you like, I was so struck by how intently it felt like you were listening. I was like, I, it was like almost disarming. Like when I got off, I was like, I can't think of the last time that someone actually was just there to listen. Like, there was no agenda there. Like, you were you were really just there to be a helpful ear, and it was just quite impressive, I have to say, I was just like, holy crap, Michele is an incredible listener. I was really blown away. And so I love that you got nerdy about listening. So nerdy. I love it.

Michele Hansen 40:23

I mean, I grew up being, I think the thing, the number one thing I heard growing up was Michele, you never listened, like, you're not listening, you don't listen. Like and like, I have found complex, that I have found that the things that I'm really bad at, like, if I get over that, and then, like, I will, like intensely research it, and it will become a huge focus for me, like, I would like, so like in college, I studied international affairs and economics, and I remember in one of my first classes, one of the professors asked who knew what, like, Bretton Woods was, and, you know, I'm from New England, and I was like, I know, that's a ski resort, but like, I don't know anything else. And like, you know, it's it's the, the post-war monetary system that was set up after the war, basically, to prevent another war, economically. But I didn't like, know that, and I felt like really embarrassed. And I ended up like, really diving into the topic to the point where it was not only my thesis topic, but for like, two years, I wrote papers about related things in other classes, even when I wasn't required to. And now I have this, like, just all of this knowledge about, like, monetary relations in Europe, specifically focused on the US and Germany, like, between, like 1958, and like 1973, really intensely on the 71 to 73 period. And, like, I it's not particularly, like, for what I do, it's not really useful information, but like, kind of like, I feel like that's very similar to how I got into doing listening and interviews because, because I was so bad at it, because I didn't know what I was doing, because I was like, I felt embarrassed that I didn't know what was going on, or like, people had made me feel like I was deficient in that. Like, I think this is where that, like, that hyper focus comes in. It's like, once you like latch on to a topic, like, you can't get your teeth out of it, even if you, like, wanted to.

Marie Poulin 42:28

Painfully relateable. I love that you brought this up to you because I think I've done this throughout my my career to where it's like, oh my gosh, like public speaking this is like, I'm terrible at this, I'm so afraid of it, it's like, must hire three different coaches and take five courses and like, read every book, you know. Like, just go down these crazy rabbit holes to go to such an extreme to work on a skill that you know, I was maybe like, not, not that great at it wasn't terrible, but just didn't feel like a strength. And I think I've often felt self conscious of is it a waste of time, when I should be like focusing on my real strengths. And so, I just think it's so funny. There's, there's obviously a trigger there around feeling incompetent, or like, I hate that feeling stupid or feeling like something I'm really bad at is preventing me from succeeding in business. And I, you know, I've shared before a little bit about, like, fear of being on video and fear of being on stage. And so these are all things I've obsessively worked on. And you know, I'll share like a super vulnerable moment from not, not that long ago, but there was ,there was someone who shared with me, they spoke with someone who had taken the course, and it was an older woman. I don't know when she took the course, but maybe she took it like, early on in the course building journey. It's definitely gone through a number of iterations. But she she was like, angry. She was like, oh my gosh, she goes so fast. She's all over the place. She needs to read about adult learning. Like, she's a terrible facilitator. And like, if I showed you my Notion goals page, it's like being a masterful facilitator is literally on my, my big visionary goals. And I was like, oh my God, am I, is this just like a skill I am, I am bad at? Like, it knocked me on my ass and I questioned everything. I was like, oh my god, what's going on? And in the same week, I literally had someone say that my sessions were the thing that they look forward to every week. And it was so weird to get this, like, the most negative criticism I've ever gotten, and the most positive, and it was in that same week that I had actually discovered, that I started to realize I probably had ADHD and I realized that my presentation style and my exploratory show you the possibilities, it's, it's quite different than say someone who might be a little more neurotypical, a little more instructional in style. I know that my vibe, it doesn't jive for everyone, but it really works well for people that have ADHD, and so that's where I was like, oh, crap. So, hiring a course coach, a curriculum designer, a learning advocate, like, I went all deep, and I was like, I'm going to learn about facilitation, I'm going to learn about teaching, I'm going to learn about learning design, like, how can I make this experience so good that, like, nobody could ever say anything like that? You know? And like, fair enough, if someone, like, it doesn't resonate with them, I totally get that. But it just, it just felt holy crap, like, is this is this like, a giant blind spot that I'm not seeing? And, you know, after talking to a number of students, a number of people, it was like, no, like, you know, this is someone who's not very comfortable with computers. This is someone that, like, it doesn't make sense for this type of person to be using Notion. Like, I don't think Notion is the right tool for everyone, and I don't think my instructional style is is for everyone, and I'm okay with that. I've made peace with that. And there's room to to improve that. So I definitely feel you on like, ooh, rabbit hole, here we go. Let's work on this scale. Because like, no one can criticize this again, like I would go all in, just watch me.

Michele Hansen 46:04

Have you come across the term rejection sensitive dysphoria?

Marie Poulin 46:08

I have.

Michele Hansen 46:11

So it's this term for how, I don't, I don't have a good way of explaining it. But like, it's for how painful, like, that kind of criticism can be, and how it can either, like, prevent people from wanting something in the first place, or when you get that criticism, it i,

Marie Poulin 46:30

Highly motivating.

Michele Hansen 46:32

Yeah, but like, it's all-encompassing.

Marie Poulin 46:35

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 46:37

Like, it's, and then you said that somebody else that same week said how much they loved your course, yet, you're, You keep ruminating on the bad, right? Ruminating and obsess over and then hyper focus on that, and then go into this mode of, like, wanting to make sure that never ever happens again. And it's like this kind of extreme version of loss aversion, where, you know, we're so afraid of losing something, like, of losing that, in this case, like, that person's, you know, like, their positive feedback on the course or their, their positive experience with it, rather than focusing on the people who already had a positive experience and making it better for the people who is, because like, it's like, do you actively, like, frame your course, or some of your courses as being for ADHD people, or, like, neurodiverse people?

Marie Poulin 47:33

I don't, again, part of this is I'm not officially diagnosed. And, and, you know, again, I'm still learning about this stuff. And so I partly feel like a little bit of imposter complex around this whole topic to know I want to be very careful, you know, like, just, just being mindful about how I talk about it. And, and,

Michele Hansen 47:53

Everyone's experience is different of it, like, yeah.

Marie Poulin 47:56

Totally, totally. And so I just want to be very careful about it, and it is something I've considered of like, maybe it would actually, like, the number of people that have watched the, I have a YouTube video where I'm teaching my sister who has ADHD how to use Notion, and the positive feedback, and the people being like, oh, my gosh, it was so nice to see normal people, like, normal people like me, you know, other people with ADHD, just, just going through this experience. And it did make me wonder like, well, hey, knowing that this is the case, and knowing that it seems to attract these people, should I go in that direction? So it's been on my mind to some, something to maybe mention, and even kind of tease out a little bit, like, in my welcome sequence. When I'm introducing myself, I'm starting to, like, try out using some of the language. And I will say, I've gotten an incredible response. Anytime I've talked about it, it's been really, really positive. So, I don't mention it, but it is something I'm like, maybe like, and should I get a diagnosis to be? Does it matter? I don't really know. I'm not really sure what the, what the protocol is there. But yeah.

Michele Hansen 49:01

I mean, like, I have a diagnosis, but like, I, I feel like I don't really understand it very well, like, because I just kind of accepted it as this thing that was just wrong with me that I had to control. And then like, that was kind of it. Um, and I like so in my book, actually, in the original newsletters, like I talked about having ADHD and how, you know, focusing on people and listening and like, all that, like, were really difficult for me because of that, and I got so much positive feedback on it, but then I got it into the book, and I, like, one of my reviewers was like, you know, your experience of ADHD is not a universal one. And there's like, and they were saying there's kind of a difference between like writing it in a newsletter, where people know you and they start from a point of kind of the sort of familiarity, like, that they they trust that you come from a good place, but like writing it in a book, people won't know me people won't know like and even if I say this is only my experience of it, like, someone who has had a different experience of the diagnosis or, or like, doesn't, like, that they have the diagnosis doesn't let you know they have made been made to feel less than because of it, or worse. I think both of us kind of tend to view it as this, like, this thing that we could steer and bring out, like, bring out our true selves, so to speak. Like, so I ended up taking it out, but it also feels so relevant, like it, like it feels like this piece of information that people need to know that it's like, Yes, I was known for not being able to listen to anything, so then I focused on it to the point of it being like, this obsessive skill. Almost necessary base information.

Marie Poulin 50:46

Part of the story.

Michele Hansen 50:47

Yes. And the same way that like, and so I found a way to like, kind of tell that story that I had to listen, like learn how to do this, but like without using the diagnosis, but like, part of me, really. So like, maybe it's like something I can do in a talk or something like that, right? Like, there's not every, like, there's different forums for things.

Marie Poulin 51:04

Not every medium needs to, yeah.

Michele Hansen 51:05

And also where I can kind of explain, and if someone has like a question of like, well, that's not my experience of it, then we can talk about it afterwards. And they can know that I'm coming from a good, I don't, I don't know, I also feel conflicted, because I don't want to, like, I can only speak from my own experience. Like, I am, and again, maybe again this is maybe an ADHD thing, or it's like, I haven't hyper-focused on ADHD itself, so therefore I cannot speak about it.

Marie Poulin 51:29

Totally. Oh, my gosh, the hyper-focusing of watching all the videos about ADHD and like, it's just, it's it's so funny looking at all the memes. I was so dismissive of ADHD, because I was like, oh, well, come on. That's all of us for every single meme. And at some point, I was like, wait a second, like, is that all of us? And yeah, it took some digging, and I was like, wait a second here.

Michele Hansen 51:52

There's some tweets about this that I find myself referencing, and it was either people with ADHD need to stop being so relatable, or I need to go to the doctor.

Marie Poulin 52:06

Exactly.

Michele Hansen 52:07

I think, you know, my, so this is super fun talking and relating to you and like, realizing, you know, that we're both not weird. We're weird together. But my, the reason I really wanted to talk to you about this here is because I think people who are neurodivergent, who don't fit the box, like, tend to feel like we're not as capable of things as other people, or we have been made to feel that we're not as capable. And I hear from people that are like, I don't know if I could run a business, like, I can't, you know, like, if I can't focus on one set thing, like, and I'm all over the place, like, I can't possibly run a business. And I think what I like to show and, like, what you show, amazingly, is that not only can you run a business if you have ADHD or any other like, because I noticed all these, like, people in the indie community, like, they're people, like people who just don't fit the box. Like they have, they have disabilities, they have chronic health conditions, they are autistic, like, whatever those things are, like, they have been able to find a home in this place, and like, you can run a business if you're ADHD like, you, like, like, I present myself as evidence and I feel like you are evidence of that, too.

Marie Poulin 53:35

Absolutely. I think a big part of it comes down to you have to know yourself really well. Like, you have to know your triggers. You have to know how you're incentivized, how you best operate, so that you can either get the support that you need, or again, you can design your products and services in a way that, even though, for example, I've been a generalist for a decade, and it's really only in the last year and a half, two years, that I was like, I'm going all in on Notion. Like, I see an opportunity here, like, let's, let's just try this, I'm going to see, like, what's the worst that could happen? I make, I make some money for for this chapter and I get known as the Notion person and then I can, like, flip the chapter and do the next thing. I've been in general so long, I was like, whatever, let's just give it a try. And what again, what I love about it is my days can be so freakin different. Like, I am not doing the same thing every day even though I'm doing one thing and so you know, it's about finding traction with that one thing but if you can design your business in such a way that you're still getting, you know that dopamine hit or whatever it is that you need, you got to know yourself well enough to know, hey, I really thrive with routine or I really thrive with days that look very different, and then getting someone to support you on your team, like, maybe you have a small team. For me hiring my direct my you know started with a virtual assistant, who is now my, mou know, Director of Operations and having her is no doubt a humongous part of why I've been able to do the kind of growth that I've done. Like, I would have been scrambling wearing all these different hats. So to have someone whose focus is entirely operations and all the nitty gritty, like, export of CSVs, any of the detail work, I'm like, let's just be honest, Marie is not the details person. I've accepted this. And now we have someone who is a details person who frickin loves that stuff. And the stuff that makes me cringe is the stuff that makes her day, and like, what better? Like, that's all you can ask for, I think. So, even if you're just getting support in a really, really tiny way, you know, again, there's just so many opportunities, I think, to get creative with the way you design your business, that it is supporting you. But you do have to, to know yourself really well, I think to know how to do that.

Michele Hansen 55:51

And what I, you know, ADHD, the first two words of it, or attention deficit, and I find that you show is that it's not a, like, it doesn't have to be this thing that's deficient about you.

Marie Poulin 56:06

It's just a little inconsistent, that's all.

Michele Hansen 56:08

Like, it can be, if you sort of steer it and give it support, like, it can be this amazing thing that you bring to the world. Like, it's not a deficiency. Like, I feel like that's just kind of like, the message I can give to like 11 year old me, like, it's not a deficiency, like you just have to help it come out.

Marie Poulin 56:28

Well, hyperactivity like that, like you've said before, like the phrase, it just, it doesn't carry a whole lot of positive connotations. And so,

Michele Hansen 56:36

No, the whole thing sounds very negative.

Marie Poulin 56:38

It does, yeah, we're we're off. Like, there's something broken with us, versus hunter gatherer brain, like different types of brains, I think evolved for different purposes. And, you know, we all, we have our own incredible use cases, like I know, you mentioned in other episodes, the ability to form connections between really disparate stuff very, very quickly. Oh, my gosh, in companies to have that kind of strategic person who can really see those connections, there's no doubt that each of us kind of can plug in somewhere and we can really shine in different ways. But it's, it's tricky, like you said, if we are neurodivergent, in a neurotypical world, it might mean that we might have to take the initiative on that and, and take charge in different ways and kind of carve our own path.

Michele Hansen 57:25

But then when we do, like, other people seeing like, hey, like, it's not just me, like, you know, you mentioned the, like the Dani Donovan's ADHD comics. I don't know if you've seen those, like, I'm so appreciative that she's so open about it.

Marie Poulin 57:37

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 57:39

It just, I think, because we have been made to feel deficient or different, like we, you know, I know I tended to like hold this in, and I realized that even like, most of my best friends didn't know I had been diagnosed as a kid until a couple of years ago, because I just never talked about it. I just, like, accepted it, this thing that was wrong with me, and like, whatever, like, we don't need to talk about it. But then we talk about it, and it doesn't actually, yeah, it doesn't have to be. Like, it can really bring whatever our uniquenesses into the world.

Marie Poulin 58:08

Yeah, I'm hoping it's sort of becoming a little bit more destigmatized, and on Twitter, and it just feels like I'm hearing more about it, and people maybe are getting a little more comfortable talking about it. And even it seems like things that therapists maybe wouldn't recognize before, like, it's starting to become a little bit more known. And so yeah, I'm hoping that, you know, by sharing some of my own honest insights that that it does help destigmatize it. I think the more people, you know, like you and I talking about it, I do think it just kind of opens up the doors a little bit. So, if we can be part of that then you know, yay. If it helps one other person even just kind of embrace their their inner weirdness a little bit, then we've done our, our duty.

Michele Hansen 58:52

Yes. Exactly. Or embrace the weirdness of, you know, their loved ones, too.

Marie Poulin 58:58

Find your weirdos. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 58:59

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's probably a good note to end on today. It has been so fun talking to you, Marie. I feel like we've, we've gone on quite well, like, we normally run half an hour and we're quite over that, but I'm okay with it. I, this is so fun. I'm so grateful that you came on. And so, if people are curious about your courses, or about you, where can they find out more?

Marie Poulin 59:26

You can check out my website is MariePoulin.com. You'll be able to find the course on there, too. That's NotionMastery.com, pretty active on Twitter. That's that's probably where do most of my chitchat about business and founder life and ADHD and all that sort of thing. So @MariePoulin on Twitter, and if you're curious about more of the, more personal behind the scenes stuff, and plants and gardening, you can check me out on Instagram, too, so.

Michele Hansen 59:51

Awesome. Thank you so much, Marie.

Marie Poulin 59:54

Yeah, thanks for having me. Really fun.

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Michele Hansen 00:00

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Michele Hansen
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. I am so excited about what we have going on today. We have Nicole Baldinu, Co-Founder and COO of WebinarNinja joining us. Welcome, Nicole.

Nicole Baldinu 00:51

Hey, Michele. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Michele Hansen 00:54

I'm so excited to have you on. First of all, I mean, you guys have built such an incredible company. Just to give a little bit of background. So, WebinarNinja was founded in 2014. You also produce the $100 MBA Show, which won Best of iTunes in 2014. 23 full-time team members, 100% customer-funded, an amazing business. I am so excited that you're joining us today.

Nicole Baldinu 01:24

Aw, thank you. That's, that's really nice. It's almost like sometimes you forget, you know, where you've been. You just keep going and charging forward. It's like, yeah, we've been around since 2014. Must be doing something right. Some days, it doesn't feel like you're doing anything right, you know.

Michele Hansen 01:43

When in 2014 did you guys launch? Because we were also 2014.

Nicole Baldinu 01:47

Oh, WebinarNinja, like, around April.

Michele Hansen 01:51

Okay.

Nicole Baldinu 01:52

It was around April, yeah.

Michele Hansen 01:53

Wow.

Nicole Baldinu 01:54

I know. It's crazy.

Michele Hansen 01:56

It's kinda, so, we launched in January of 2014, and we are still just the two of us. And you guys have like, 23 people, and I mean, it's so interesting how many, like, different paths you can take.

Nicole Baldinu 02:14

Yeah, and the number of iterations, I think, like, yeah, I don't even remember version one, you know. It feels so long ago. But that's true. Like, I don't think we in, like, even intentionally set out to just grow, grow, grow. You just kind of take one, one step forward, and you just keep moving. It's like, yeah, we need help, like, you know. You're answering all your customer support queries in the beginning, and then it's like, no, you need some help. And then you hire your first teammate, and then it just, just keeps growing.

Michele Hansen 02:47

So, let's fast forward a little bit to, I guess, would be five years into it for both of us. We met at MicroCon in 2019 and were basically instant friends. Um, and I remember what, I think, I think you might have come up to me, and you were really interested in learning how to do customer interviews, which is, like, my jam.

Nicole Baldinu 03:17

Yeah, I loved that conference so much. It was, it was such a, I think for me, that was the first time, it was kind of the first SaaS-focused conference. I think a lot of the conferences I'd been to before were very, I don't know about you, if you've attended like, other conferences outside the SaaS space, but a lot of podcasting conferences, you know, I remember the first, do you remember NMX? New Media Expo?

Michele Hansen 03:45

The name sounds familiar, but I didn't, I've never been a huge conference attender, so I haven't been to a lot.

Nicole Baldinu 03:52

That was my first conference, and that was January of 2013. And that was literally when I, you know, that was my first kind of foray into entrepreneurship, and so meeting bloggers and podcasters, and it was all just such a new unknown, like world. But I remember like, MicroCon being just really special because I just felt like, that it was, it was kind of like, I felt people were really honest and vulnerable and authentic when it came to talking about, you know, the pitfalls and the challenges of SaaS. businesses. And yeah, and I remember I loved your talk because I just felt like, you did, what was it like a chat, like it was a 10 minute tactic or something, or?

Michele Hansen 04:41

Yeah, it was an attendee talk.

Nicole Baldinu 04:43

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 04:44

Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 04:45

And, and I still have your notes. I shared this with you last time we spoke. I still have your notes because I just thought it was so helpful, so practical, and the, the crazy thing is though, when was that? So that was MicroCon 2019, right?

Michele Hansen 04:59

Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 05:00

That's the first time I heard, I think that's the kind of the first time I really thought, oh, you can do, like, you can talk to your customers. You can do, like, this kind of user research. And I've only done my very first customer user research this year, three years on, but I still have your notes. And it was, yeah, it was just super inspiring. I just thought it just seems like such a cool thing to do. And, yeah, so I finally, finally took the plunge.

Michele Hansen 05:28

So, let's dive into that plunge a little bit because I think it's, I think it's totally normal that it would take you some time from from like having that moment of being oh wait, I can talk to customers, to then sort of, not just like, sort of working up the courage for it, but also the time and, like, fitting it into your schedule and thinking it really, really through and so, like, could you kind of take us back to earlier, I guess, earlier this year, when you really started to hit the ground on it?

Nicole Baldinu 06:03

Yeah, and I mean, I should, I should also say that we had done user research and customer interviews, but it wasn't me that had done it. So Omar, who's my Co-Founder, the CEO, also my husband, business and partner in life and business, he had done the first user interviews, and kind of, because he's more customer has been always more customer-facing. He had done user interviews, but it was something that I never felt that I could do. Like, I'd kind of be behind the scenes and reading Intercom, like support, you know, conversations and seeing what, you know, customers were saying and replying. But it was all very much chat and email never like, let's get on a call and let's talk about it. So recently, we've kind of wanted to, the whole reason behind starting to do this is because we wanted to kind of refine part of our offering and also look at a potential MVP out of this, this offering. And so I just thought, I don't know, and all of a sudden, I just felt like I want to do it. I don't even know what, like, why I just woke up one morning and said I'm going to do these, which is, like, really unlike me. But um, but I just decided to, yeah, I think I made that decision, like, I'll do the interviews. And then as soon as I took that decision, I literally went for my notebook from the, to look for the notes that I took from MicroCon. I then went and looked at all your blog posts and everything that you had on, you know, on the topic, as much as I could like, digest in like, I had a week, I think, before I was like, I scheduled the first one. And, and then yeah, and then I was just like, okay, I have got my questions now, thanks to like, you know, I looked up some of the sources that you had, you know, referenced. So I went in, you know, okay, I've got my questions. Now I know what I want to do, I want to know what I want to ask. And then it was literally the mechanics of okay, get a Calendly up, send out the blast, like, the blast out on Intercom to actually invite people to, you know, to be interviewed. So then all those little pieces, too, that I think, like, I was kind of procrastinating on, they just all fell together really quickly. It's like, okay, you just got to invite people, people reply. You just got to have a, you know, a sequence to, you know, send them your Calendly then it all gets done, then you've got your questions. And then it just, then they just started. And then as soon as I did my first one, I was really upfront with the first. She was she was lovely, my first interviewee. And that was great, because I was very nervous and I just basically said, you're the first person I'm interviewing. And so that kind of just made me feel a bit more at ease. And, and she was just lovely, and just easy to talk to and just answered all my questions. And then I just realized, after that call I was like, this is so much fun. I love this. I think when we talked last time, I was like, totally geeking out on just how much fun it is and what a positive experience it actually ends up being talking to your customers.

Michele Hansen 09:08

I think last time we talked, which was about a month ago, I remember you said that it had basically become your favorite part of your job.

Nicole Baldinu 09:19

Did I say that? Yeah, it's true. It's weird. It's totally taken me by surprise. I was thinking a little bit more about that, though. Why? I feel like it's a very positive experience. Because initially, I thought oh, you know, there's the potential that you know, the conversation could just turn into like, this is one of the things I thought it would turn into. I thought it would turn into a let's, let's ask about, you know, support for WebinarNinja, like, show me how to do this or complain about something that's not working as expected. I thought it would go down that path, but it didn't. It just ended up being very much focused on the questions I was asking and, which was really focused on what they do, like how they deliver their content, and, and about their business, and about why, I mean, the, my favorite question, and this, I think comes from your blog post, and I think this is what kind of, I see them light up and kind of lights me up is when I asked them, what's the big picture? What are they trying to do? And that question is just, it's, it's just my favorite question on the interviews, because it just brings out, yeah, it just gives them an opportunity to really share, oh, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. And they get to just, I don't know if I'm like rambling a little bit, but I don't know, would, have, you've asked that question before, right?

Michele Hansen 10:55

Yeah, I'm curious, can you ask me that question as if you were interviewing me?

Nicole Baldinu 11:02

Okay. So, Michele, what's the big picture of what you're trying to do?

Michele Hansen 11:13

And that's it.

Nicole Baldinu 11:14

That's it.

Michele Hansen 11:15

Like, that's only a couple of words. They're not very big words. Like, it's a such a simple question, yet you have found that that just lights people up.

Nicole Baldinu 11:28

There's only one person that kind of asked for clarification, and then when I had to reframe it, I just said, why are you doing what you're doing? Oh, my why? Oh, okay. But everyone, everyone else kind of, it was interesting, like, everyone else got it. And it all comes around to you know, they want to help, they want to share, they want to empower. It's just, it just brings out, yeah, it brings out their why, but without asking it in that way. Because I think if you say what's your why, I think if it's all, I don't know why that feels a bit more daunting than what's the big picture? Because the big picture, because sometimes I would actually expect from that answer that they would talk about what they're trying to achieve in their business. I actually didn't know originally where that question would go. That's kind of probably what surprised me. I thought it would be more focused on the business. Like they would tell me what they're trying to achieve maybe financially, or, you know, what their goals are. But it did kind of step back, for some reason it did actually generate the response of this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. That makes sense?

Michele Hansen 12:38

No, it does. I've actually been, I was thinking about this a lot the past couple of days, because one of my, my subject matter editors for my book was, they made a note in the, in their edits, that I had a couple of why questions, and they reminded me that those need to be what questions, and I've been thinking about what's and why's all weekend, actually, so I'm so glad you brought this up. Because when we ask someone a why question, we're asking, in some ways we're asking for causality. We're asking why they do something, like, and asking them to sort of think through the reasons why they do something. But if you ask someone the same question, but you rephrase it as a what, it's a much easier question. Like, why are you here versus, what led you here? They're basically the same question, but if I asked you what led you here, you walk me through the different steps that you went through, and the causality can sort of come through the details of that. Versus if I said, why are you here, then you have to sit and be like, why, why am I here? And like, like, you get lost a little bit in the question. And so asking a what question instead is usually cognitively much easier to answer. And, you know, maybe, as you said, some people may, you know, they may appreciate being asked a why question after the initial what question. But for most people asking, you know, I mean, I do this with my daughter, too, right? Like, you know, instead, instead of saying, like, you know, you know, what, like, why aren't you down here for dinner yet? Like, being like, be like, so what's your plan? Like, dinner is on the table, what's your plan? And then that opens up to, oh, well, I'm actually getting this ready. Or like, you know, this weekend, she's like, oh, I'm making a card for daddy for Father's Day. Okay. Alright, cool. Like, you're not, this isn't an intentional thing. But so, rephrasing as a what I think gives it also, as you said, it gives people options to where to take that question. And I think, I think kind of as sort of both of us just had a moment of earlier on when we were talking of like, wow, I guess we have been doing this for a long time, and it's pretty awesome, and how cool is that? Like, we don't really step back and think about that very often, and I wonder if when you asked that question it like, it sounds like you are prompting that same kind of reflection in people, which, in turn, makes them really excited to talk to you because you're making them feel good about themselves and what they do.

Nicole Baldinu 15:25

Yeah, I'm just blown away by that, just that little explanation about the difference between the what and the why, like, it just takes the whole process, the whole, asking those questions to another very sophisticated level, and just realize sometimes, like, I don't want to, I don't, sometimes I feel like I don't want to think too much about it, but I think it can be so sophisticated and so refined, the actual process of asking these questions and learning more about people. I guess this is my first run at it, and, yeah, like, even if it's, if it's not at that level, whatever I'm getting out of it, I feel is worthwhile. And I know that I can take it to another level because I love what you just explained, and I think it makes so much sense. But yeah, there's, there's so many layers to it. There's so many layers to it. And it's true, I do feel that it does, I do feel that sense of like, it's fun, like they don't mind, like the crazy thing is it's like, I don't know how long the tick, a typical interview should be, I should ask you that, but, you know, I said, you know, I don't want to take up too much of people's time. So I just said, okay, I'll just keep it to 20 minutes. They've all gone overtime. And there's not a sense of like, I need to get off this call. I have to initiate that let's get off this call, because they're very happy to continue talking because we're both actually having, I feel like it's an enjoyable experience on both sides, which is really cool.

Michele Hansen 16:56

Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 16:57

That really surprised me but,

Michele Hansen 16:59

So that that makes a lot of sense to me, because you are, like, you're hearing about how your product helps them and, which, you know, you mentioned you, you know, pop in on intercom support tickets and whatnot. Like, I think for, you know, us founders who do, like, talk to our customers a lot just by default, because you know, there's customer support their sales, like there's, there's all those other things. But interviewing someone is so, so different, because they tend to, like,, it's much more appreciative environment than, than like, hey, there's this bug or whatever. But then also for that person, like they get to talk about what they do, and they're actually, like, MRI studies they've done of people when they are, when they are talking about themselves or their experiences to another person, like, the parts of the brain related to motivation and enjoyment light up way more than they do, than if you were, than you were listening to someone else talk or you're talking about something that isn't directly related to your own experience. So it's, like, it is enjoyable for people to, to be asked these questions. I think as you kind of, as we were sort of talking about a little bit with the what's and the why questions like, there's, there's a lot of, like, levels here, but you don't necessarily need to know all of those levels in order to get started. You just need to be, I think, kind of like you did, to just sort of being willing to take the jump, which, you know, I think the first time feels a little bit like a polar bear dip and jumping in a freezing cold ocean, and you're like, okay, here we go. And then the next time you're just like, sprinting towards the ocean and excited for it.

Nicole Baldinu 18:48

Have you ever been, this is just going sideways now, have you ever been stood up on one of these interviews?

Michele Hansen 18:53

Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 18:54

Okay. Lots, or just?

Michele Hansen 18:56

So I noticed that that, like, it used to happen a lot when I was a product manager working in a company. Um, and I think that so, but when I'm from recruiting as the founder, like, people tend to show up. Like, it seems like it's more important to them. Like, when I was working in a company, we had someone who was coordinating all of the interviews, and so we had never spoken to them before we got on the phone with them, even over email. And I think it's easier to blow off, like, an anonymous person, rather than the person they're going to talk to, nevermind somebody who has a title, whether that's Co-Founder, or like, I mean, sometimes we actually invented titles just for the purpose of interviews, like,

Nicole Baldinu 19:42

That makes sense, though.

Michele Hansen 19:43

Like, I think we had some, like, Head of Customer Experience, which wasn't even a title at the company. And actually, Cindy Alvarez in Lean Customer Development talks about doing this, too, that like, it's much easier to know show when, when you don't feel, like, an attachment to that person. Um, so I think these days, if someone doesn't show up, it's usually because like, something, like, something legitimately like came up.

Nicole Baldinu 20:12

Yeah, no, I totally feel that because it's literally been just one person. And I do feel like there would be something that, you know, because I do recognize that sometimes I feel like there's an element of not intimidation, but like, oh, wow, I'm actually getting to talk to the Co-Founder, so it is a bit more special for them. And I do feel the first part of the interview might be a little bit stiff, but, yeah, maybe a little bit stiff until we kind of, you know, until I think a big picture question really breaks down the, let's forget that, you know, we're just literally two people talking. And then I think they do forget the interview setting. But yeah, I'd say like, you know, just one out of how many I've done, and it's not that many. I've done 13, so one out of 13. That's not bad. You can do the math. I haven't got a calculator, what ratio percentage that is. But, uh, yeah. Yeah, I definitely think, and the flip side of that, too, is the, the recognition at the end, which I get to feel really kind of special or feel so, it's so rewarding for me when they'll turn around at the end and say, you know, this is so good that you're doing this. Like, they really appreciate that a company would actually listen, take the time to talk to their customers. And they, you know, I've had people wish me the greatest success, and you're gonna do a great job, and this is gonna be amazing. And it's just, and you can, and I feel, I like, I genuinely feel like they're being authentic, because they felt like I've listened to them. I've, you know, taken the time to, you know, give them an opportunity to share what they need, what their pain points are, you know, learn a little bit more about themselves. And then I do feel there's that reciprocation of, like, I wish you well, and no, I wish you well. It's kind of cheesy, but it's kind of sweet at the same time.

Michele Hansen 22:17

You know, I find that people who I do interviews with, even though it's really not intentional, like, they will offer to do a testimonial for us. They will offer to be a reference like, like, or I'll notice on Twitter, like six months later, like, they're the one who's like popping in on threads when, when people need what we do. Like, it really creates this, like, incredibly valuable connection.

Nicole Baldinu 22:42

Yeah. Do you have any, like, do you do any follow up? Like, what's the next step? Because literally, I'm at like, stage one right now, where it's like, doing the interviews. And I've just hardly just, you know, started the analysis, and I haven't gotten very far. And then I'm thinking, well, what's the next step after that? Is there some other sort of, invite them to a focus group with, you know, and like, what's, what have you done?

Michele Hansen 23:08

So I actually, I want, I'm going to come back to asking you about the analysis because I'm super interested to hear about that. Um, it depends really on what it is. So for example, if they like talked about something that, let's say that we ended up deciding in the future might be a new product, for example. Like, I might come back to them and be like, hey, you know, this thing we talked about, and it might have been, like, three years ago, like, we're exploring this now, like, can I talk to you specifically about this particular element again? Or maybe we have a prototype of something, asking them to run through it with us or, you know, if there was sort of something that was unclear, or we needed to follow up with them about. Um, but sometimes there is no follow up. Very often, actually, they will follow up with me and be like, hey, like, you know, like, you guys seem really open to feedback, and so we're, you know, we're working with this other piece of data, like, is there any chance you guys could support that or whatever? Like, they will come back to us very often. But there doesn't, you know, beyond a thank you note, really, there, there doesn't have to be, there can be as much follow up as you need, right? Like if you're doing something early, like it might make sense to, you know, to ask them hey, like, can I come back to you for further questions if our prototype or maybe to help us prioritize different things, like, to go back and do card sorting with them? It really kind of, like, it sounds like you're talking to people who have been customers for a long time. Do we actually talk about that targeting you did to decide who to talk to?

Nicole Baldinu 24:40

I didn't, I just ran, no, they might not be customers for a long time. But they definitely are users and have an, I would say that the ones who've replied are all you know, they've had, they've used the product for some time, but it could be as little as like a month. It doesn't,

Michele Hansen 24:59

Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 25:00

Not longer than that. And then yeah. Yeah, we've had, I've had some more longtime users, but generally it's, yeah, just people that, because the question was quite targeted and asked a very specific question when I did the call out, like, do you do this and this? I'd love to talk to you.

Michele Hansen 25:19

Oh, yeah. What was, what was the exact question?

Nicole Baldinu 25:22

The exact question was do you run live courses or live training?

Michele Hansen 25:27

Oh.

Nicole Baldinu 25:28

I want to talk to you. And then so, that was the, yeah, that's how I got them in. So I think that specific question helped as well. I want to know if it helped.

Michele Hansen 25:45

You picked that question because you said you're exploring an MVP of something, and also sort of potentially repositioning or sort of tweaking your positioning towards that specific market?

Nicole Baldinu 26:00

Yes, because its current usage, it's a current way that the customers are using, you know, WebinarNinja to deliver live training and live courses. So I wanted, I want to learn more about how they're using it, and where their pain points are, and, yeah, and what we could do better in that, in that kind of space.

Michele Hansen 26:23

It sounds like it was a question most people would answer yes to.

Nicole Baldinu 26:27

If they do it, yeah.

Michele Hansen 26:28

Right. Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 26:29

But not all our users. So because I suppose you know, there's a lot of WebinarNinja users who are, you know, using webinar ninja for marketing.

Michele Hansen 26:39

Right.

Nicole Baldinu 26:40

And they're not necessarily delivering training.

Michele Hansen 26:43

Right. Yeah. So the analysis, before we talk about what you do after the analysis.

Nicole Baldinu 26:51

Oh, my God.

Michele Hansen 26:53

Like, what are you doing? Like, like, what does this process look like for you right now, and it may not be sort of conceptualized as a process.

Nicole Baldinu 27:04

Okay. So so far, it involves printing out the transcript. Step one. Step two is reading it with a highlighter. And, and so I guess where I'm struggling, or where I kind of want to refine the analysis is, what am I looking, because I'm looking for a few things, I suppose. I'm looking for, you know, words that they say or things that they actually do, actions they perform, things that are concrete. Then there's also the oh, I wish something that they don't do, but it's kind of aspirational. So. you know, how much weight can you put on, on, on on those kinds of, you know, it's like, oh, we should do this. But it's like, what, have you ever done that? You know, would, how likely are you, they don't know. They wouldn't know, right? If it's something just like, you know. And then it's also, yeah, looking at it through the filter of like a marketing message. How would I then communicate to resonate with people who are doing the same thing so that I could, you know, attract the same type of people as customers? So there's kind of like, three buckets, I suppose. And so yeah, and then so there's the highlighting. And then it's, because of there's these, kind of, three kind of areas, and I'm just kind of have columns, and I'm just writing out, you know, things that fit under those columns.

Michele Hansen 28:45

Do you feel like you're getting out of that what you were hoping for?

Nicole Baldinu 28:52

Um, well, I have to say so far from just the interviews themselves, I feel like I've gotten a lot out of it. But I want to see, I, I'm not sure. Yeah, I don't know. This is a little bit like, I don't know, early stages.

Michele Hansen 29:08

Have you, have you tried diagramming the process for them, like, trying to sort of identify what, you know, what their big picture is, and then just all of the different pieces of that? Even if they're not, you know, sometimes we think of a process as like a bunch of linear steps, but sometimes it's also sort of an ecosystem of steps that kind of sometimes all sort of happen in a jumbly sort of order at the same time. And I'm curious if you've been able to sort of figure out what that looks like, for even, for each person.

Nicole Baldinu 29:43

No, but you're obviously saying that I would do that diagrammatic kind of visual for each one, right? And then later, look at all the similarities.

Michele Hansen 29:55

Yeah. So some, I mean, if you're looking at people who are going through the same Sort of overall goal, then it would make sense to, to split out all of the different steps per person. And then to break them out by, did we talk about the different dimensions of problems? Like, the functional, social, emotional dimensions?

Nicole Baldinu 30:16

You, yes. But I was very, like, new to everything you were saying, so I was like, one process to everything.

Michele Hansen 30:24

That's okay. So, um, so I find this helpful, especially for, like, pulling out relevant parts that can be used for marketing or like, you know, sort of, wouldn't, like, quote them exactly, but like, the can inform like copy and whatnot. So there's a functional dimension to a problem, which is, you know, they, they want to run a sales training because they need their salespeople to sell more, or something. Like, so they need a tool that allows them to connect with their sales people remotely, for example. There's a social element, which is they are running this training, and there may be 10 people that they are training, and those 10 people have different levels of technology experience, and some of them have been with the company for a very long time, some of them are very new. Like, what are the different social factors going on, and how might they express that? Like, I want my team to feel like they're on the same page, like, for example, might come through and a quote, and then you say, so you hear that word team? And you're like, okay, well, what do they mean by team? Who exactly is on that team? Like, what, what is the story of all of how all these people came to be working together? And there might be an emotional perspective, as well, of like, how, how do they feel about the tool they used before? Was it frustrating for them? Did they feel like they were, you know, banging their head against the keyboard trying to get it to work, or to get their team members to install it? Or did they feel great when they get off of these trainings? Like, does this, do they find the tool, you know, easy to use? Like, and like, those are like, those also can come out in the quotes, too. And so what I find helpful is to kind of diagram the different steps, and they may be they may be linear steps, they may be, you know, concurrent, like, and then, and then, but for each one of those pieces of it, breaking out the functional, social, emotional components of it.

Nicole Baldinu 32:23

Okay. Okay, yeah. Wow. This is so cool because there's just, there's so much to unpack in, you know, in one person's experience. And then I suppose, as you see the commonalities, I guess, that's when you, you know, across more people saying, if they're saying the same thing, I guess that's when you get validation, that's when you get, yeah, the understanding that this is affecting, this could be affecting more people. So I suppose I've gone, you know, the experience of actually talking to one person becomes very, like, it's just you and that person, and it becomes very much restricted to that world. And then you've got to step back and go, okay, I've got all these people now, they've said all these things. Now I've got to make sense of it. So it's just, I feel like I'm still, I'm enjoying the first stage so much. Like, and I feel like I've gotten a lot out of that first stage. But now it's like, okay, now this data is so valuable. What do I do with it? And I want to make sure that, yeah, it's unpacked. And then obviously, I know this information, I'm going to be unpacking it, but then I've got to communicate it to the rest of the team, as well, so putting it in a way that's like, you know, I can share it with Omar and the product team and now CTO. So there's just so many levels to it, but it's you know, it's all doable. It's exciting.

Michele Hansen 33:59

I think the more people you talk to, too, you're gonna start seeing those commonalities in in processes. So like, last episode, I was talking a little bit about activity-based design, which is basically the idea of going a step beyond human-centered design and thinking about the different processes that people are going through, and then you can start seeing the, the commonalities there. So for example, when I'm talking to someone, and it turns out that they're using us because they're doing, you know, US government Home Mortgage Lending compliance, like, their experiences of that are going to be very different than somebody who is you know, working with getting the timezone back from tractors that are in fields. And, but if I talk to somebody who's doing the compliance, like, generally like, like, as I when I hear that I'm like, okay, now I have a better idea of what this process is, from an overall perspective. How can I learn more about this person's, like, their company's specific functional elements, their specific social elements, like, their specific emotional pieces? Like, what do they think of the other options that they've tried compared to the other people I've heard and getting more and more depth each time. But there can be a huge breadth and, especially as I think you guys also are a horizontal SaaS, right? So you're, you're selling across many different industries, and, and I think this is where customer interviews are so fun, because I get to learn about so many industries and like, I'm like, I didn't even know that was a thing.

Nicole Baldinu 35:45

I know, so varied.

Michele Hansen 35:48

Versus, you know, someone who's selling horizontally, sorry, vertically within one industry, like they might not have that sent, you know, it might vary based on, you know, company size, or stage or whatnot. Um, I'm really curious, you mentioned bringing your team into it, which, you know, as a two-person team, we don't really do as much, but so like, how have you been able to bring other team members into this, or like, involve them in what you're learning?

Nicole Baldinu 36:16

Well, so far, like, the first step I thought would be just okay, I'll put it, I'll make sure that I share the recording, the transcript, the details of the person I've used, you know, in like little folders on Basecamp. I've just basically organize it into little folders. And then as soon as I, you know, put up a new, a new interview, then I make sure that I share it with, so far right now, it's just me, oh my and our product, UX-UI designer, Maria, so I just share it, I say, hey, guys, there's a new interview. And I know they've been watching some of them. You know, I've highlighted a few that I thought, oh, this is super interesting. This person is definitely someone we'd go back to. So that's been just the extent of it so far. I feel like if I'm going to then, you know, share it, say, with our CTO, when it comes to more development time or, you know, when it starts to be a thing that's going to be fleshed out, or you know, if there's any development work, then I feel like there would have to be more, kind of, maybe a bit more of a traditional kind of a report where it's like, you know, X percent of people said this, or the majority are saying this, this is what, you know what I mean, it would have to kind of be backed up a little bit more by statistics.

Michele Hansen 37:29

I think they're, you know, I like to use qualitative and quantitative data together. And, you know, I, thinking back to when I was working in a bigger company, you know, we would say, like, for example, we see, you know, you know, 35% of users drop off on this page, and, you know, and then having a sort of data that like, this is important to the business for, you know, x millions of dollars reason, right? Like, if fewer people did that, then hello, money. And, but then we have like, quotes from people like, oh, well, it turns out that, like, they find this really difficult because that x, or they're looking for this other piece of information that isn't there, so they click the back button. And then here's a quote from someone that says, I really didn't know where to go, like, and then, and it's like, okay, so like, here's the picture, like, and now here, okay, great. Like, here's a project, like, here's something that a team can work on of, like, you know, the bounce rate from here is 35%. Like, let's get it lower because we have the, you know, we understand why people are doing that. We also understand why it's important to the business. Like, statistics, I find will not really come out of interviews, but interviews, explain why the statistics are what they are. Like, a spreadsheet of data will tell us what is happening, but it will never tell you why. Only people can tell you why, but you need both. Like it's, it's, I think there's sometimes people sort of think about, like, that you only use, you know, quantitative data, or, you know, I talk about interviewing and I think you only do interviewing, and it's like, no, like, porque no los does, like do it all together.

Nicole Baldinu 39:10

Porque no. Definitely los dos. Definitely. Well, yeah. It makes sense. And I think that's just, I think, why the process of actually, you know, literally doing a very manual printing out, highlighting actually gives you the opportunity to, to read because, you know, you're going to get one kind of experience when you're listening the first time and, you know, you're asking the follow up questions. But there's so much probably that's missed, even in on that call, until you actually go and read and, and highlight and just, yeah, analyze word for word, everything that was said. And there's a whole other layer there to unpack.

Michele Hansen 39:15

Yeah, I wouldn't, have you asked Maria, your UI-UX designer, to also read through them and do her own highlights?

Nicole Baldinu 39:42

No, not yet. But that, is that something you,

Michele Hansen 40:00

That might be interesting. And, and there is research that says that when, like, multiple people are analyzing an interview, they pull out more of the problems. So the, the sort of like the paper on customer research was in the, is in the context of usability testing was called The Voice of the Customer. It's from 1993, or 1994, and they did all these different tests on how to pull out customer problems and analyze them. And they found that multiple people analyzing an interview tends to bring out many more of the user needs than just one person doing it. That makes so much sense. Yeah. Because then, like, the way I'm thinking, obviously, I'm trying to do this as fast as possible, too, right? Let's get to like, analysis and presentation of like, here it is. This is what we need to do. I am trying to, like, speed that process up. But yeah, the risk there is that it's really then just my interpretation.

Nicole Baldinu 41:02

Right.

Michele Hansen 41:03

Right. And some, they might just watch a video and, yeah, I remember that. But that deep level of analysis is, yeah, is going to be missed if we don't give that opportunity. So, yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, we did that, I believe, like, with the first user interviews. We gave those to our marketing teammate. So, that's how those were used, I feel. But I definitely think if it's, you know, we're starting, you know, if it's an MVP, then yeah, you're right, like someone else needs to go, I think this is actually the problem, or yeah, I agree, or no, I disagree. That's not the problem. And I think, you know, organizationally, giving somebody else the chance to discover something, too, like, they're not just being told what the learning is, but they have it, like, chance to discover it for themselves and maybe see something that somebody else missed. And one thing I love in Erica Hall's Just Enough Research is she talks about how powerful it is to bring other team members into the process because they're, you know, when we do interviews, and then bring them to other people and we're so excited about what we've learned, sometimes people can feel threatened or intimidated by that. Because all of a sudden, there's this new information coming in, and now it's on them to learn it rather than they didn't get to experience the joy of discovery themselves. And,

Nicole Baldinu 42:29

Oh, my God, you're blowing my mind. Sorry.

Michele Hansen 42:30

And so it's more, like, if you can allow them to be in on the discovery process, whether that's as, you know, a silent listener on the call, or as part of analyzing the transcripts, or even, you know, collating transcripts, which is when you find, you know, let's say you find five common quotes, and then you're putting them all together have different commonalities. like they're part of the process, they're part of what's being learned, and they feel more invested and aligned with like, like, I just remember when, what like, when we, when I worked in a bigger company and we started bringing in the developers into just sitting in on usability testing, and not even asking questions or anything, just just listening, like, the level of team motivation and alignment, like skyrocketed because all of a sudden, everybody was learning.

Nicole Baldinu 43:23

So was, I just, yeah, I hear you. Like that, it makes so much sense, but I suppose it's one of those things that we just feel like, oh, we don't have time, you know, we got to move on. We got to keep, it's one of those things that does take time. But you're right, like, that excitement that I think is, like, this is so awesome. I'm having so much fun. This is so important. I'm learning so much. Just by sharing it, it literally is just my experience at that, at that point, unless somebody else gets to discover it for themselves now. Oh, man. How long, this whole process is gonna take three times as long. No, no, but it's good. It's good. It's so it's so valuable. But yeah.

Michele Hansen 44:06

And also the, in, the process doesn't have to ever stop. You know, it sounds like you're sort of in an intense phase right now, where you've been, I mean, when did you start doing the interviews?

Nicole Baldinu 44:20

Oh, my gosh. Would have been like, not that long. Probably just like, three, four weeks ago.

Michele Hansen 44:29

Okay. And you've done 13 in the past month, basically.

Nicole Baldinu 44:33

Yeah, less.

Michele Hansen 44:34

Yeah.

Nicole Baldinu 44:34

Is that a lot?

Michele Hansen 44:35

That's, that's a lot. Like, that's a really good number, like, um, you know, I guess you are doing a specific like, project. So I mean, usually the, what I, like, the general guidance is to do five and then sort of stop and pause and analyze and see if you need to change your targeting. So, it sounds like you're consistently hearing different things from different people, so that warrants talking to more people. But also making research not just something that happens when you have a specific question, but just as a general sort of, I think, I tend to call it, like, maintenance research, like just sort of, on a general basis. But like, that's, that's really good, 13 in that amount of time. And so it makes sense that it would feel a little bit like, okay, now I have to analyze all of this, and this is going to be a lot of time and like, where am I going to find the time for this, in addition to everything else, but I think, I hope that eventually, you can find a place where you're just kind of doing like one or two a week, and maybe you're doing one and your UX person or a marketing person or somebody, a developer even, like, they're doing another interviews, and then you've got just like two a week, and then it's like, okay, like, what did we learn? Like, you know, does this does this match what we've heard in the past? How does it differ? Like, what new have we learned? Like, is there anything else we should kind of, you know, consider digging, digging on in the future?

Nicole Baldinu 45:59

Hmm. I love that. I wish, I mean, frankly, like, the five would have been helpful if you'd told me that last time. Five? No, I'm just kidding.

Michele Hansen 46:12

I mean, you also don't, you don't have to limit yourself to five, right? Like, it's just sort of, that's like, the kind of goal. And again, that's, that is also based on research, too, that you can surface in the context of usability studies, but like, surface 80% of customer needs with five interviews, but that assumes a pretty defined scope. And where you started with a broad scope, it makes sense that you would need more until you feel like you're starting to hear patterns.

Nicole Baldinu 46:41

Yeah. And I love what you said, like, that it definitely, and I'm so passionate, I think the more I do this, and the more, like, I talk about this, and geek out on this, and just love this whole process, the more I realize how much it should be a part of just regular in processes within a company, like,

Michele Hansen 46:57

Amen.

Nicole Baldinu 46:58

Like you said. Yeah, I know, right? Like, I'm gonna spearhead the user research of the company. Well because it is, I mean, I don't know, like, like you said, we said at the beginning, it's like, it's one of those things, I think, as a company grows, you end up doing a lot more management, and, and that's great, because if you're working with great people, it's okay to you know, to do all those management duties. But this just becomes, you know, and then, you know, there's obviously always the putting out little fires here and there, whatever. But this, this has just been such a positive experience that I think, just really enjoyed it for that reason. So having this as an ongoing thing, I think is, would be great.

Michele Hansen 47:44

It sounds like you are I, I can just, I feel like I can see how inspired you are by doing, like, by how motivating it is. I am, I'm so excited to continue hearing about how all this goes. Um, and I feel like, I feel like I could talk to you about this all day because, like, talking to people about talking to people is my favorite topic. Like, like for my book, I interviewed 30 people because I just, it's just so much fun. But if other people want to stay in touch with you, what, what is the best way for them to do that?

Nicole Baldinu 48:26

Oh, like, to reach out? Just reach out, Nicole@WebinarNinja.com. There you go. You got my email.

Michele Hansen 48:34

And you're on Twitter, too, right?

Nicole Baldinu 48:36

On Twitter. I'm on Instagram as well. You know, they can contact our support team and ask them to call me. Yeah, I'm in there. I'm in there every day.

Michele Hansen 48:49

Awesome.

Nicole Baldinu 48:51

Yeah.Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. Like, like, like you said, I could talk about this for days, days on end.

Michele Hansen 48:59

Alright, well, that's gonna wrap us up for this week. If you liked this week's episode, please leave us a review or tweet at Nicole and I. We would absolutely love to hear what has made you think about.

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Pre-order Michele's book on talking to customers! https://deployempathy.com/order

Michele Hansen 00:00

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Michele Hansen
So, the other day, I totaled up how much I have made from my book so far, and all the expenses.

Colleen Schnettler 01:19

Okay.

Michele Hansen 01:20

So, as of that point, $1363 in presales, which is just, like, the number of copies times 29. That's not my actual payouts. It's just, like, the gross revenue.

Colleen Schnettler 01:34

Okay.

Michele Hansen 01:34

And then, so the expenses. So, first one, for the formatting, I have to use the software called Vellum, which is $250. I had to buy ISBNs, like, the little, like, numbers on the back of the book that identify it.

Colleen Schnettler 01:49

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 01:50

So, and I had to, you can either buy one, or like 10, and since I'm going to do an audio book, you need an ISBN for that, and like, a hardcover needs zone ISBN. And so anyway, that was $295. A barcode is $25. Proofreading $800, which is a lot of money, but I feel like that's the price of like, not being embarrassed that it's full of typos and you know, I feel like if I want to, like, have a book that, like, a manager could buy for their team, or like, people would recommend to their clients, like, it has to be professional. And so having, like, professional proofreading is the cost of that.

Colleen Schnettler 02:24

Yeah. I didn't know that was something. I didn't know that was a thing.

Michele Hansen 02:30

Yeah. Yeah, I spent, I think last week I mentioned how I was fighting with Grammarly a lot, and,

Colleen Schnettler 02:35

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 02:36

I just, I was like, I have spent like, two days fighting with Grammarly, just trying to get it to work, and like, and I was like, this is just, my time is more expensive than this.

Colleen Schnettler 02:47

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 02:47

So, I'm just gonna hire a proofreader.

Colleen Schnettler 02:50

Good choice.

Michele Hansen 02:50

And then, of course, you know, don't include hundreds of hours of my time over the last couple of months. But, so, the total for expenses so far is $1370.

Colleen Schnettler 03:01

That's wonderful.

Michele Hansen 03:02

So, when you deduct $1363 minus $1370.

Colleen Schnettler 03:11

Oh.

Michele Hansen 03:12

You get negative seven.

Colleen Schnettler 03:16

Yeah, I see. I misunderstood what you were saying. Got it. So you're in the hole seven bucks and hundreds of hours of your time.

Michele Hansen 03:25

Yes. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 03:26

Alright. Well, good thing it;s a labor of love.

Michele Hansen 03:28

So, I looked at that number, though, and I just had this moment where I was like, holy, forking shirtballs, like, I need to market this thing.

Colleen Schnettler 03:39

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 03:40

Umm, and actually, so like, I sold another two since then. So now, I am actually at positive $51.

Colleen Schnettler 03:51

Whoo.

Michele Hansen 03:52

Yeah, whoo. Umm, and of course, you know, we're only like, only in presale, and like, a ton of people have today said they want the hardcover or they want the audio book. So they haven't, they haven't purchased it yet, or they just simply want the finished version. Umm, But yeah, that was kind of a wake up call for me that, like, I've been, you know, we talked about with Sean like, I, like marketing a info product feels very different for me than marketing a SaaS.

Colleen Schnettler 04:19

Yes.

Michele Hansen 04:19

And also requires a lot more self-promotion, which I'm not comfortable with. Like, it makes me like, deeply uncomfortable to like, reach out to people and be like, hey, like, would you consider, like, you know, reviewing my book like, or, you know, can I be on your podcast and, like, talk, like, it makes me super uncomfortable. Umm so, so but I got to do it because like, negative $7, man, for like, four months worth of work is, you know, basically half of my time the last four months, certainly, last two months, has been on this book. And so I feel like I owe it to myself just for that, like, time to like, sell the gosh darn thing.

Colleen Schnettler 05:07

Definitely.

Michele Hansen 05:09

Yeah. So I like spent, you know, this week I was kind of working on, you know, like, I went through all of the newsletter issues and I, like, put in a link at the top to, like, buy the book because I've noticed that people are sharing the scripts around. Like, I can see the analytics that they're getting shared in people's Slack channels, or, you know, Trello, or Asana, which is a good sign that those maybe have some staying power. So, and just kind of thinking through a little bit more, a little bit more of the marketing and trying to arrange, you know, yeah, podcasts and stuff, but I gotta, I gotta market this thing.

Colleen Schnettler 05:52

Yeah, didn't Alex, who promoted his book on our podcast, didn't he do, like, 20 or 30 podcasts?

Michele Hansen 06:00

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 06:01

And how many have you done?

Michele Hansen 06:04

Um, I, well,

Colleen Schnettler 06:07

I already know the answer.

Michele Hansen 06:09

Well, I mean this one. I mean, I was on a couple recently where I talked about the newsletter. Like, I was on, I, yeah. Like, I was on the Get the Audience podcast, and I was on the Learn Neto podcast as well. But like, the book wasn't out yet. So those weren't really,

Colleen Schnettler 06:37

Right, you didn't have anything to sell at that time.

Michele Hansen 06:39

Yeah, it was just the newsletter. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 06:40

A good goal for you would be to try to book 15, you know, and get yourself as a guest on 15 to 20 podcasts to promote your book, because you can sell it now. Right? Even though it's not completely done.

Michele Hansen 06:52

Yeah. Yeah, I guess I guess. Yeah. I'm like scheduling one for the middle of July, like, so I'm currently, my goal is to publish it on July 2, but I like, I really hope that happens. But there may be like, you know, some people may need more time to, like, write reviews, and, like, making a cover and everything. So, it should be out by early July.

Colleen Schnettler 07:20

You're, when you say, I don't know. You mean the book?

Michele Hansen 07:22

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 07:22

I am little confused about what you're saying.

Michele Hansen 07:23

Yeah. So like, upload it to Amazon, and people can buy a physical copy.

Colleen Schnettler 07:28

Yes.

Michele Hansen 07:29

So I don't think I'm quite there yet. Like, exactly like, and I think there's some things that I'm just saying aren't going to happen for, like, this first version, like, a friend of mine, who is a UX research expert was reading it, and there's a couple places she's like, this would be a really great table. This would be great as a graphic. And I'm like, yes, it would be but I have zero faculty for visual communication, and that is not going to happen right now. Like, that can like happen when my brain has the space to like, think that through, but it is, it is not happening right now. But yeah, I guess I guess I should say, I guess that, I don't even know where to start.

Colleen Schnettler 08:13

No no, Let's go like straight Nike style here.

Michele Hansen 08:15

Nike style?

Colleen Schnettler 08:16

What is it, just do it? Just do it. That's my challenge for you. I'm not going to talk to you for a couple weeks because I'm about to embark on my epic road trip. So, my challenge for you is to reach out to, find and reach out to 25 podcast hosts that you think,

Michele Hansen 08:34

Good Lord.

Colleen Schnettler 08:34

And they’re not all going to say yes, which is like, hey, man. I know.

Michele Hansen 08:37

I'm sitting here being like, Colleen, and I really struggle with self promotion. And even, you know, one person was hard for me and you're like, go do it 25 more times.

Colleen Schnettler 08:45

25 times. I love that idea.

Michele Hansen 08:46

Coach Colleen says 25 more reps. So not fair.

Colleen Schnettler 08:50

Yes. So, that's what my challenge for you is, is to reach out,

Michele Hansen 08:54

How about five?

Colleen Schnettler 08:57

Really? I'm not impressed with your five.

Michele Hansen 09:00

I feel like everybody, I feel like everybody like, needs this person standing on their shoulder that's like, I will write one landing page this month. And you're just there. They're like, really?

Colleen Schnettler 09:11

Really? That's the best you can do?

Michele Hansen 09:13

That's, like, that's it, you know? Wait, like, why are you here?

Colleen Schnettler 09:18

You should try and, I don't know, just ask, ask one of our prominent friends who is a book author, Alex comes to mind again, how many podcasts he went on?

Michele Hansen 09:27

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 09:28

And try to hit that number. I mean, it's game time girl. Like, you wrote the book. You did the hard work,nd now it's a whole new set of hard work that you have to do because you're right, like, this is a brilliant book. You don't want it to languish because, no one's ever heard of it.

Michele Hansen 09:43

I didn't say it was brilliant. You said it was brilliant.

Colleen Schnettler 09:46

Well, here you go. It's brilliant. it's needed. It's gonna be amazing. So, I think you need to like, get in gear.

Michele Hansen 09:54

Yeah, I, yeah. Okay. I guess, I have to go, well, if you are listening and you want to promote me, then help me.

Colleen Schnettler 10:06

Maybe what we can do is we can, I have an idea. Okay, plan. So, just put a tweet out and ask everyone for their favorite business podcast. I bet you'll get a list of at least 30. And then you can just,

Michele Hansen 10:17

Yeah, I guess, yeah, like, but like it has to be for SaaS, for example, because like, Planet Money isn't gonna have me on.

Colleen Schnettler 10:25

Right, right. I meant yeah, SaaS podcast. I mean, there's enough of them that do podcasts similar to ours.

Michele Hansen 10:31

Make the internet do my research for me.

Colleen Schnettler 10:34

Yes, there we go. Harness the power of the internet.

Michele Hansen 10:41

So if you see a tweet from the Software Social Account soon about your favorite business SaaS podcast, now you know why.

Colleen Schnettler 10:50

The secret's out.

Michele Hansen 10:52

Yeah, the secret is out. Okay. Well, I will, I will try to book myself on some, some podcasts. I guess, I guess there's other ways I could promote it, too. Like, I could go on, like, Tiktok or,

Colleen Schnettler 11:12

No.

Michele Hansen 11:14

No, we will not do that. For those listening at home, I think Colleen just spit out her coffee. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have some marketing to do.

Colleen Schnettler 11:34

Yes.

Michele Hansen 11:36

Yeah. I think I have like, I've literally sent I think one email, maybe two. No, yeah, one email that mentioned that the presale was live, which basically goes against every best practice, like, some like, someone sent me some advice the other day, and they're like, send at least three emails a day on your like, launch days. I was like, okay, I've sent like, one in the last two weeks, and I sent out my newsletter the other day, and I actually forgot to include a link to the presale. So, I need to, like,

Colleen Schnettler 12:06

You know what, suggestion.

Michele Hansen 12:07

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 12:07

This is really cool. So do you know the Wes Bos is? He's, like, a famous JavaScript instructor. I bought like, all of his courses. But what he does is, he does, when he has a new product to launch, he does send a lot of emails, but he actually segments his emails. And to be fair, his list is probably like 30,000 people. But he segments his email, so you can unsubscribe just from the product launch emails, which I love, because I'm like, oh, I don't care about this product launch, or I already bought that, and then I can still continue to get all the normal newsletter emails. I mean, don't stress yourself out.

Michele Hansen 12:10

Yeah. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 12:14

But it's an idea. It's an idea.

Michele Hansen 12:20

Yeah, I'm only using review at this point for, so, I don't, like, I don't even have like, ConvertKit or anything.

Colleen Schnettler 12:50

Okay, set up.

Michele Hansen 12:51

Set up, so I, I don't, I probably should do that, but I haven't really,

Colleen Schnettler 13:00

Okay, so I think podcast. I'm still in editing, like, get it out the door mode, because there's still other like, launch stuff. Like, I have to like register the ISBN and like, I need to go through the whole process with Amazon of like, making sure all that's like, setup.

Michele Hansen 13:19

So, that feels like a July task.

Colleen Schnettler 13:24

July task. That's fine. It's halfway to July. It's almost July. So,

Michele Hansen 13:30

Yeah, so I, maybe I should, like, make a spreadsheet of all the different things and, like, have a goal for those.

Colleen Schnettler 13:39

I'm, I'm a big fan of measurable goals, right? Like, so, so I'm team, you know, write it down, keep a spreadsheet, keep track of it. Not that I've executed so well on my goals, right? It's easy for me to sit here and tell you what to do. It's way harder when it's you telling me what to do. So, you know,

Michele Hansen 13:57

Well isn't there, there's some business axiom about like, it's not like, like, like, achieving the exact goal is not important. It's the fact that you create one and then work towards it that matters. Like, there's somebody who has said something to that effect much more articulately than just said, but you know, it's like just you set the goal and then you go off on a journey to get there and you may end up somewhere else, but like, you have, you're at least doing something.

Colleen Schnettler 14:23

Right? You're making forward progress.

Michele Hansen 14:25

Yeah, and I should probably have a revenue goal, too. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 14:29

So, okay.

Michele Hansen 14:29

Even though I don't want one, I should, I guess.

Colleen Schnettler 14:32

Okay, I'm gonna get off topic, and I don't want to get too far off topic. But, so I'm a really big fan of, like, famous sports coaches, like,

Michele Hansen 14:42

Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 14:43

Like, this is, like, a thing. Like, I love reading biographies of like John Wooden and all these other really successful sports coaches. And one of my favorite takeaways from all of this information that I've osmosed is you cannot control the outcome, right? You can only control your effort and your attitude, which is why revenue goals are not very actionable. Because a revenue goal, like, you actually can't control that. What you can control is your attitude, right? How you approach the problem, and your effort, and how hard you work, and by aligning all of these steps in terms of effort and attitude, the revenue will come. But to set a goal, like, like, in the, you know, the basketball metaphors, like when the NCAA championships, you can't actually control that. You can just control how prepared you are, and your mindset when you attack the problem.

Michele Hansen 15:40

Oh, that makes sense.

Colleen Schnettler 15:43

I know that's, like, totally off topic, but I just read about it. And I'm like,

Michele Hansen 15:48

Yeah, so it's, so to what you were saying, like your goal of 25 podcast episodes. And, and rather than having a goal of say, you know, I don't know, like, $5,000, for example. Instead having it be like, be on 25 podcasts over the next six months to a year, about it, not including this one, because if we include all the episodes of this show then I'm like, totally hitting that, but I assume we're not. Um, and, you know, so like, being on a specific number of podcasts, or something else. I don't know, guest talks or something. Um, yeah, like picking like, specific actions that I can do that's like your equivalent. Like, it's like, write a landing page, right? Like, like, all these, like, things that are actions that I know are accretive towards,

Colleen Schnettler 16:51

Right. That's the idea.

Michele Hansen 16:52

Good outcomes, but like, I fundamentally don't have that much control over how much I actually sell. Like, I can keep my ears out for things that might sell like, you know, for example, I'm gonna sell templates, too, for $19 that are like, Notion templates of all the scripts and it occurred to me earlier, like the, the How to Talk So People Will Talk section like, people seem to really love that. And I was like, that could maybe be its own, like, mini book for like, $10. It's like, just like, so you want, like, you know, you, you want to get information out of people, and you want them to think you're like, trustworthy and you want to, you know, learn how to, like listen actively, then, a mini book or something, like there's other stuff I could do.

Colleen Schnettler 17:36

Right, I guess all of my points, all of that that you just described, that's effort, right? Those are things you do. You ultimately can't control your revenue, but it'll get there if you put the effort in. That's the idea.

Michele Hansen 17:46

But like, I if I set the goal of like, be the, I don't know, New York Times number one bestseller or whatever, like, I have zero control over that. It's also not realistic. And it's not it, in some ways it's like, de-motivating there have a goal that is not clearly achievable.

Colleen Schnettler 18:07

Exactly.

Michele Hansen 18:07

But being on 25 podcast is not like, like, that's like, those are very nebulous goals, because it's unclear what will lead to that.

Colleen Schnettler 18:17

Yeah. Exactly.

Michele Hansen 18:17

But being on 20 Live podcast in six months is concrete. And I ostensibly have control over that.

Colleen Schnettler 18:26

Yes. Nice.

Michele Hansen 18:28

Wow. So, it sounds like you are doing like a lot of like, business reading lately.

Colleen Schnettler 18:38

Yeah, um, not a ton. So I do have a couple audio books queued up for my drive that I'm excited about, business ebooks, Obviously Awesome is one that I've been wanting to listen to and I have purchased but I have not yet. This one I just really liked. This one was about, like I said, some of the famous coaches. First of all, I'm a sucker for sports movies, but, but I really liked that idea that ultimately you, you can't control, like, if you're going to win, but you can control all of the aspects of your journey, like how much time you put in, how much effort you put in, like, what your mindset is, you could, those are all things that you know, you can control. And as you know, for like, it feels like for a couple months now I've been struggling to move the product forward. Like, the product is doing well. I hit $1300 MRR.

Michele Hansen 19:28

Nice.

Colleen Schnettler 19:28

Which is, yeah, I mean, it's great.

Michele Hansen 19:30

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 19:30

I'm really happy with it. But it, I feel a little bit stuck. I feel, and I don't know if it's, I feel stuck because I haven't had the time, or if I feel stuck because I'm actually stuck. Like, I can't figure out if I feel stuck because if I, if I, let's say I gave myself a week and I just worked every day on it if I would get myself out of that kind of rut, or if there's really no rut to get out of and this is just the nature of the product. That it's just a slow burn, which is fine. I mean, it's going well, like I'm not complaining, I know some people can't, you know, haven't hit this milestone, especially not as quickly as I did. But, um, so there's that. So, I think what I want to do is I want to make a bigger push on content. Because I really haven't, I really don't have any content out there. So that's something I'm going to try and spend some time on, and like, there's just some things about the product that I want to keep iterating on, and I want to make better.

Michele Hansen 20:36

I mean, we were just talking about goals and the, sort of how difficult it is to have a monetary goal because you don't have control over it. And it's, it's awesome, first of all that, I mean, to have $1300 MRR means that, I mean, a month or two ago, we're talking about how you're hitting 1000. That means that like, that's, the thing, the thing about revenue for a subscription business is that revenue happens every month, like, this revenue that I have from the book, that happened once, and that's not going to happen again. But yours, people are paying you. So it's not just that you have made $1300 like, you, that is compounding and adding on top of each other. But I am sort of curious, like, there has to be some number or range in your head where you're like, I can stop consulting now. Or I can, you know, somebody offers me a full time job and I can just like, turn it down without even thinking about. Like, there has to be some number for you.

Colleen Schnettler 21:38

Absolutely. And I think like, and, and, absolutely. And I mean, I'm in this for the money. Like, just to be clear, that makes some people really uncomfortable. I don't know if they're not used to women saying that or what, but like, when I tell people that they get a little uncomfortable.

Michele Hansen 21:53

It’s like, your job, like,

Colleen Schnettler 21:55

Yeah, like, I want to make more money.

Michele Hansen 21:56

Like, of course everybody is in their job for the money. Like, yes, I'm doing this book as like, a passion project and like, which leads me to make all sorts of decisions that are confusing to people who prioritize money, like, but like you, understandably, are prioritizing money, because this is your job. And if this doesn't work out, then you know,

Colleen Schnettler 22:17

I gotta go get a real one.

Michele Hansen 22:18

I mean tons more consulting, or like, getting, getting a paycheck job is what you have to do. Like, this is not,

Colleen Schnettler 22:25

Yeah, so.

Michele Hansen 22:27

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 22:28

I mean, the thing I love about owning your own business is the possibilities are infinite, right? Like, I mean, I, from a personal perspective, you know, if I could get to 10k, that would be like, Oh, my gosh, I cannot, that would be, I'd be over the moon, right?

Michele Hansen 22:45

So that's the number.

Colleen Schnettler 22:47

The number would be 10k. But, you know, why can't I have a couple million dollars a year in revenue? Like, I want a business.

Michele Hansen 22:53

Why can't you have a million dollars?

Colleen Schnettler 22:56

I mean, I want a business. Like, if I hit 10k and stay there forever, like, I probably would be a little frustrated. Like, to me, the whole point of having your own business is the possibilities are, in, you know, infinite. And like, one of the things I've been able to do with my modest income, is I've been able to hire two people to help write content for me. And yeah, hired someone else.

Michele Hansen 23:23

Oh, you're, wait.

Colleen Schnettler 23:25

And, yeah, man, I'm crazy over here. I'm just, dollar bills.

Michele Hansen 23:28

Dude, and I'm like, 7 years into this and I like, just hired, like, a part time VA, like, three months ago.

Colleen Schnettler 23:34

Yeah, yeah. I feel like you're doing it wrong. But that's a different issue.

Michele Hansen 23:37

Probably. I'm doing it my way, okay.

Colleen Schnettler 23:40

That's right. So, and the thing I love about that is, I, with, with the people that I'm paying, I've been able to, you know, people who are kind of writing anyway, now I can pay them to write, it seems like such a win-win. Like, I feel like I'm, it's good for them and it's good for me. And it's something I really love. So like, ultimately, I would love to build this into, like, you know, a really successful business and hire a person and, and, and be able to have created this environment where I can work with who I want and buy my beach house and all that. I mean, I'm big on the beach house if I haven't mentioned that a few times already.

Michele Hansen 24:25

So the first, like, the first big goal, which I think it'll be fun to reevaluate this a year from now, is like 10k basically.

Colleen Schnettler 24:36

Yeah. I mean,

Michele Hansen 24:36

To get you to 10k revenue and then to like, the big, big goal is buy Colleen a beach house.

Colleen Schnettler 24:43

Buy Colleen a beach house. Yeah. But to me 10k, and I don't know if I have, and I'm still, I feel like I'm in that messy middle phase. Like, I hit 1k, which makes it feel like it's a real thing. Like it's, it's legit, but I don't know if I'm in, I feel like there's a, going from zero to 1k is different than going from 1k to 10k. Right? It's a factor of 10 more. Like it's a big, you feel like going from zero to 1k is one milestone and one to 10 is your next milestone. But one to 10 is way more than zero to one, right? So, I honestly don't know if I'm positioned correctly with this product to get there.

Michele Hansen 25:26

Which is why you’re reading Obviously Awesome.

Colleen Schnettler 25:28

Which is why I'm reading Obviously, Obviously Awesome. I just, I just don't know, if I'm in the right space, there's so much opportunity. I was talking to a founder recently and he talked about how he pivoted his company and moved into a totally different space, and they started growing, like they were kind of stagnant for a while, and then they kind of made this pivot, moved into a new space and their growth exploded. So, I definitely think there's a spot for me, I just don't know what it is, and I just don't know, it feels like a lot. Like the other thing that, that I wanted to just kind of bring up is when people talk about how to grow in your business. They talk about, like, building the product, as if it's this static thing that takes you like two weeks, and like writing good software is hard. And, it's a constantly evolving process. So it's something that constantly needs my you know, my attention, and that's not bad. I just feel like, you know, it's hard to balance, as most people who listen to this who are working and building a product know, it's just hard to balance all of those competing desires. So I just don't know if I have a, I guess the truth is, I don't know if I have a product that's going to get me to 10k. Like, I don't know, I don't know where it is right now. It's that product.

Michele Hansen 26:52

I mean, thinking back to where we were like I don't, I don't have our numbers in front of me, so I don't remember them exactly. But like, the thing that really made our revenue jump was not adding any one particular feature or one particular marketing thing. It was a pricing change, because we like, so we started out, I think we were like $31 our first month. And then I don't know, like, maybe maybe $100 the next month, and then like $400 the next month, and then in May of 2014, we had someone who needed, like, a crazy volume of usage every single day. And the only way we could make that work was basically to give them their own server. And we looked around and see what, you know, big companies were charging for these sort of really high volume, like, plans and we're, and I think we we figured out like, the cheapest one was like 10,000 a year, for, that was still like rate limited, I think to 100,000 a day, but we're like, okay, we can do like basically Unlimited, up to like 5 million a day for you for $750 a month, which worked out to 9000 a year. And adding that plan, which was like, slightly different feature-wise, but like it wasn't it wasn't like adding a feature to the API, but it was like a pricing feature, and a new plan, adding that one plan and then, like, we didn't think anyone else would ever take it, and then people started taking it. Like, that is what caused our revenue to really grow. And so I wonder if there's some space for like, you know, pricing evolution here. And like maybe there's some other way of packaging your products with the existing features in a way that's at a higher price point. But I don't like, I don't know why that is.

Colleen Schnettler 28:44

So I do.

Michele Hansen 28:44

It's your business, like, so.

Colleen Schnettler 28:46

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 28:46

But like, I think it's worth thinking about, like, the pricing aspects of, of this.

Colleen Schnettler 28:50

Yeah, well, and one of the things I do is my app has a lot more power that I'm exposing at the moment. So, I think the answer for example, like, I think I limit your file size to 50MBs, there's no reason I have to do that, like I don't, you know, there's there's a couple things someone reached out to me and told me that his company has a setup now where their customers upload files, like up to a gig(GB) through Upload Care, and then they, but they move them off the Upload Care servers, because it's so expensive, or it's a whole thing. I'm talking to him, I'm gonna, you know, have I have an interview scheduled with him to better understand

Michele Hansen 29:26

Whoo.

Colleen Schnettler 29:26

I know.

Michele Hansen 29:27

Music to my ears.

Colleen Schnettler 29:30

But I, you know, so my point is, there's the two things that I'm not doing, I think I've might have mentioned this last week, is multiple file uploads, which I can do. I'm doing it for one client, special, and large files. So it might just be that I'm not quite positioned properly yet.

Michele Hansen 29:46

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 29:46

In terms of I've really kept, I've kept a lot of that functionality close to the chest for no particular reason, just because I didn't want to like, release all the features at once and overwhelm everyone like, oh my goodness, but since I can't do those things, it seems like re, kind of revisiting, revisiting some of those options would probably be a good move for me.

Michele Hansen 30:09

Yeah, I think it's really smart that you're, like you're doing a big road trip. So you're, and you're going to be listening to this book in the car, right?

Colleen Schnettler 30:19

Yes, ma'am.

Michele Hansen 30:20

Like, I find that we do our best like, business thinking on road trips, like, I, maybe it's because, you know, you like, you, you can't be doing anything else, like, you are literally stuck there.

Colleen Schnettler 30:34

Right. You’re stuck.

Michele Hansen 30:34

And like, and I can't be looking at my phone in the car, otherwise, I'm going to get carsick. And, of course, it's the two of us and like, like, our go to for road trips is like, how I built this. So we end up like, really like, coming up with stuff on on, like, you know, I have, like, emailed myself of, like, conversations we've had on road trips. And so of course, it'll only be you. But, you know, those times when, like, the kids are sleeping in the back or whatever, and you can't have the audio book on and thinking all these things through, like, I think it'll be really good thinking time for yourself. And but remember to like, take notes every day on what it is that you think about.

Colleen Schnettler 31:17

Oh. That's a good point. I should bring a notebook. That's a really good point.

Michele Hansen 31:20

Like, a notebook or even just like, record a voice memo for yourself or whatever, if that's easier, just like, something so you don't, like, because there are times when when we've had like, an amazing conversation on a road trip, and then I didn't write it down. And then like, you know, a week later, we're back and we're like, oh, my God, like, what was that like, an amazing thing. And like I had this whole, like, like pre COVID, we were on a road trip. And I had this whole idea of like, our content strategy built around, like really unique address data. Like, for example, in South Carolina, there's three, there's like four towns called Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, all right next to each other, like, I was gonna, like, write about all of these, like, odd location, address things, and I came up with this great name for it on the road trip, and then I like, I still cannot remember what that name was, so take notes.

Colleen Schnettler 32:09

Yeah, I totally, I totally hear you. I know exactly what you're saying. I think that's a great idea. I think I have a lot of thinking to do. You know, I kind of feel like it was really exciting in the beginning when I was trying to launch the product. And then it's really exciting. And then everything is very, very exciting. And then you hit your first milestone, and then it's kind of like, oh, but now there's another milestone, okay, so I never really win.

Michele Hansen 32:32

Right. The goalpost just moves.

Colleen Schnettler 32:34

The goalpost continuously moves. So it's interesting to me, I mean, I have a lot to think about is like, is this a product that can get me to 10k? How do I, and how do I get there? Right? Like, what is what do I need to do to get there? As I just said, when I was giving you my little pep talk, like it's putting in the work, I mean, you know, it's not going to sell itself. So yeah, I'm ready to really, really give it some time to think about it on my epic journey.

Michele Hansen 33:01

Alright, well, on, on that note, I guess we should just sort of make a quick programming note that Colleen will be away for the next two weeks. And so we will, we will be leading on that social side of Software Social and have some guests coming up that I'm super excited about. And then I will be away the following week, so Colleen is gonna have a guest on, and then we will both be like, basically a month from now.

Colleen Schnettler 33:34

Oh my gosh. I won’t talk to you for a month.

Michele Hansen 33:35

Wow. That feels so weird.

Colleen Schnettler 33:37

Oh, gracious. That's sad.

Michele Hansen 33:45

I mean, you'll text me roadtrip updates.

Colleen Schnettler 33:45

Obviously.

Michele Hansen 33:46

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 33:46

Obviously, I’m so excited to see, like, cactuses, by the way.

Michele Hansen 33:52

Yeah?

Colleen Schnettler 33:52

In Arizona. Yeah. I'm so excited to see the great American West.

Michele Hansen 33:55

I've heard Arizona is, like, gorgeous.

Colleen Schnettler 33:57

Yeah, I'm super pumped to see a big cactus. Anyway.

Michele Hansen 34:00

Oh, I've been there. I was okay, whatever. We're gonna stop here for today.

Colleen Schnettler 34:07

Wrap it up.

Michele Hansen 34:11

I'll talk to you next week.

View Details

Pre-order Michele's book! deployempathy.com/order/

Michele Hansen 00:00

Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. Oh Dear does everything they can to help you avoid downtime like scheduled task monitoring, SSL certificate expiration notifications and more. But downtime happens. When it does, it's how you communicate in times of crisis that make the difference. Oh Dear makes it easy to keep your customers up to date during critical times. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Colleen Schnettler 00:35

So Michele, do you have a,

Michele Hansen 00:38

Hey,

Colleen Schnettler 00:38

Good morning. Do you have a numbers update for us on your book?

Michele Hansen 00:43

I do. So my presale went live about a week and a half ago, when our episode with Sean went live. That was my deadline. And, I've sold 43 copies right now. Yeah, it's kind of exciting. Um, it's not all people I know, which is exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 01:06

That's very exciting.

Michele Hansen 01:08

I love how supportive people have been. And it also, it makes me, it's just reassuring that people I don't know are buying it. But yeah, so that puts it right now, just, and this is just the raw, you know, number of times $29, which is $1,247.

Colleen Schnettler 01:30

That's amazing. Congratulations.

Michele Hansen 01:33

Yeah. Thank you. And I got my first payout yesterday, which after, like, taxes, and everything else, was $912.

Colleen Schnettler 01:41

Wow.

Michele Hansen 01:42

Which was kind of exciting, and gives me a little bit of budget to work with, with, like, you know, hiring a proofreader, and using some, like, layout tools, but, you know, so I was pulling these numbers, and because, you know, everybody loves numbers and whatnot. And I was thinking about it. So, so I got this, this message from someone yesterday, who had started reading the book, and it was actually someone I don't know. And if I can just kind of read what they, what they said.

Colleen Schnettler 02:25

Yes, please.

Michele Hansen 02:26

And so I had a personal aha moment reading distinction between sympathetic, empathetic and solution based responses. My sympathetic conclusion based responses are leaving no space for empathetic, something I need to address. I'm an engineer and an architect by trade, and I'm looking to do a better job interviewing the humans attached to our work. But I'm also thinking about your book from the sense that a better balance of empathy will help me be a better teammate as well. And, like, getting that was so moving for me because it made me think about how, you know, I'm not writing this book for the money. Like, yes, the book needs to make money, because I've been working on it for four months now and have, you know, there's a lot of time I haven't spent working on Geocodio. Oh, like, I've been a pretty bad Geocodio employee the past couple of months, like, full honesty, right? So like, I have to, like, it has to have been, you know, worth my time. But like, I am not, I'm not motivated by that, like, I am motivated by this, by like, you know, like, I have this like, secret dream goal. Well, I mean, it's not a secret cuz I've, like, tweeted about it, but like, whatever. You know, Mathias sometimes says to me, he's like, I know you were thinking about something because you tweeted about it. And I’m like, oh, I forgot to, like, verbalize that. Anyway, um, I have this dream that through the process of learning this for interviewing, and, like, product development and marketing reasons, people will understand how to be more empathetic and use that in their daily lives. Like, everyone has a capacity for empathy. Everybody can learn it, not everybody is taught it or shown it so they don't really learn it. But everyone has a capacity for it. And, but also, like, very few people, you know, put like, be more empathetic, like, learn how to learn how to use empathy, like on their to do list every day. But they put write a landing page, get more customers, build a feature, like, reply to all of those customers and intercom like, those are the things that end up on a to do list. And so I have this like, kind of, I don't know, like, naive dream that like people will read this and apply these skills to the things they're already doing, but in doing so, learn how to be more empathetic in their daily life or you know, as a as a team member or whatnot. And just getting this message really, it was so motivating, but also so soul-nourishing because it really made me feel like, like the book has done what I wanted it to do. Like, this is what I set out to achieve and, like, this message makes me feel like the book is a success, regardless of how many copies it sells. Like, so it was just like, it was kind of a, it was kind of a, like a moment, like it was, it also sort of like if you're having this effect, like you can, like, stop rearranging it, like, you know, I feel like I've done a rewrite every week for, like, the past eight weeks. Yeah, time to time to ship the gosh darn thing.

Colleen Schnettler 05:57

That is wonderful. So what I just heard you say is, this book is secretly teaching us how to be better humans, wrapped up in a book about customer interviews.

Michele Hansen 06:09

Yes, wrapped up in a book about which features you should prioritize, and how to, you know, pick a pricing model based on what people's usage patterns are, and, like, how to understand what people want and write better landing pages. All that stuff they're already trying to do. But then yeah, there's, there's this kind of bigger message. Like, I feel like so much of good UX practice is good human being practice.

Colleen Schnettler 06:35

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 06:36

Um, and, I mean, I, I really learned about empathy by doing interviews myself. So this, I mean, it's, it's, it's very personal for me in a way that, like, the book is, I don't know, it is very, very personal for me. And it's not just about showing empathy to other people. It's also about showing empathy to yourself, too, which is just as important.

Colleen Schnettler 07:06

So I have not read the book yet, unfortunately. Can you tell me briefly, what the difference is between empathy and sympathy that that writer wrote into you? Because we talk about it a lot, but we've never defined it, really.

Michele Hansen 07:22

Yeah, that's true. So empathy is when you, basically when you, when you try to understand the other person's context without judgment, and it doesn't mean that you agree with what they're saying. You're just trying to find the context behind what they're saying or what they're doing. Because, sort of, most of us, basically, we assume that our, there's this assumption that our actions make sense from our perspective. That is to say you wouldn't go out and do something if it didn't make sense to you, like, maybe very few people might, but like, for the most part, we have this underlying assumption that, that the things that we do make sense to us. And so you're basically trying to find that internal context for why somebody does something, and then you reflect it back for them. So for example, if you came to me and started telling me about how, like, I don't, I don't know something you were struggling with, like, let's say, you felt like you were banging your head up against the keyboard all week on some, like, coding problem and it was really frustrating for you. An empathetic response to that would be man, that sounds really hard and like you were working really hard on it and it was super frustrating for you. A sympathetic response would be, oh, I'm sorry you went through that. So a sympathetic response creates distance between the person who is speaking and the person who has aired something, and that might not be a complaint or a frustration. It could be like something positive, but it creates distance. And sometimes it's called fake empathy. Like, I feel like this is what you see in a lot of, like, really bad public figures, celebrity apologies. It's like, I'm sorry, that offended you. It's like, no, that's wrong. Like, like, that's not, that's not actually apologizing. And then there's also kind of this other element that I feel like is this sort of, like, solution-based responses, which comes from a place of caring, and I think us as product builders, I know me, like, we really fall into this, is someone, like, if you came to me with some, some problem. If I just said, oh, well, have you tried this? Which, I'm trying to solve your problem, I'm showing care, right? Like, I wouldn't propose a solution to your problem if I didn't care about you and making that solution better. The problem is, is that it doesn't validate your experience and it doesn't acknowledge your experience. So, while it comes from a good place, it's not empathetic because it doesn't say, wow, like, that was really hard for you. Like it doesn't, it doesn't fake make you feel seen or heard. And it could end up being, through the course of a conversation, you end up explicitly asking me like, do you have any advice for how I could do this? Like, what should I try? I feel like I've tried all these other things. But an empathetic response starts with acknowledging what the other person has gone through.

Colleen Schnettler 10:25

Okay. Okay

Michele Hansen 10:26

And then also checking in with them, like, do you, do you want me to listen to you about this? Or do you want me to help you brainstorm ideas?

Colleen Schnettler 10:33

Okay.

Michele Hansen 10:33

Like, so but I think that's, that's like one of those that really, like, it took me a while to wrap my head around that because the other thing about a solution response, especially in the context of a customer interview, or whatnot, is that you need all the context behind, behind why someone does something and why they went through something in order to really build something that solves the problem for them in a way that they understand and they're capable of grokking. Right? Because we need all of the context behind it, not just the functional context, but also sort of the emotional and social context of things in order to build a product that someone feels like is speaking to their experience and the problem they have. Does that make sense?

Colleen Schnettler 11:18

Yeah, it, it does. It's, it feels like a subtle difference, though. Like, when I try to understand your problem in your context, in your context, the sympathy for versus the empathy, like, it feels very subtle to me.

Michele Hansen 11:34

It is subtle, but like, um, I mean, it's, it's subtle. You know, it's the difference between, I'm sorry, that was hard for you and that was hard for you. Like, those are a subtle difference between them, but there is a huge difference between that and what someone would receive.

Colleen Schnettler 11:53

Yeah, I can see that.

Michele Hansen 11:55

And because when you say, I'm sorry, that happened to you, it emphasizes that it didn't happen to me.

Colleen Schnettler 12:01

Right, okay.

Michele Hansen 12:01

It actually, like, Brené Brown talks about this a lot. I'm sorry, that happened to you. It, it makes the other person feel more alone because it emphasizes that they are the only one who experienced that, and it makes them feel isolated.

Colleen Schnettler 12:18

Okay.

Michele Hansen 12:19

And she has a great way of responding, I'm sorry, of phrasing this, and I don't know if I'm doing it justice. But basically it creates that distance, and feeling alone and feeling like you're the only person who went through something is a really, really hard feeling, especially when you have just gone through something frustrating, and it doesn't have to be a big thing. It could just be, you know, the fact that I spent my week fighting with Grammarly, like, like that could be the problem we're discussing. And, but if you said oh, I'm sorry, you went through that, like, it reminds me that you didn't go through that.

Colleen Schnettler 12:55

Hmm. Okay.

Michele Hansen 12:57

And it was like, oh, yeah, that was like, maybe it was just me, like, maybe I was doing something wrong, like, am I using it wrong? Like is like, like, you know, it creates all of that doubt and feeling of sort of loneliness in it.

Colleen Schnettler 13:11

And so tell me the empathetic response again.

Michele Hansen 13:14

That sounds really hard.

Colleen Schnettler 13:15

That sounds really hard. Okay, right. So you're not, you're trying not to create that distance where they're an individual isolated,

Michele Hansen 13:23

Right.

Colleen Schnettler 13:24

And you're over here.

Michele Hansen 13:25

And it doesn’t start out with I, right? Like, the sympathetic response to start with, you know, like, I'm sorry, that offended you.

Colleen Schnettler 13:33

Okay.

Michele Hansen 13:34

Versus the difference between like, that offended you. Because when you say it that way, you're sort of asking for elaboration.

Colleen Schnettler 13:41

Right. Right.

Michele Hansen 13:42

Versus I'm sorry, I offended you just shuts it off.

Colleen Schnettler 13:46

Wow, I say that all the time. I'm sorry, XYZ happened to you.

Michele Hansen 13:50

I said it all the time, too, then I started learning about this stuff. And I was like, I’m accidentally like, a jerk, and I didn't even realize it. But so many of us speak this way. And we learn the way we speak from the people around us. And if the people around you, when you were learning to speak, didn't speak empathetically, even if they're otherwise nice people. like, then it would make sense why you think this way and don't realize it.

Colleen Schnettler 14:15

Interesting.

Michele Hansen 14:16

Like, it's totally normal to not realize that what you have been saying is actually not empathetic. Like, like, it is a, it is a learned skill for many people. I mean, the people who have it built in are the people whose, you know, parents really made it a focus when they, when they had their kid. Like, but for most of us, it's kind of oh, I guess I should stop saying that. Like, I remember how at one point, like, when I was in my early 20s, I was at a job and somebody was like, you know, you really shouldn't say well, actually. Like, I don't know if you realize how you are coming across. Like, I know you don't mean anything by it, but like, it's, it's kind of like, and I was like, oh, crap, I do that all the time. Okay, like, mental note, like, mental dictionary update: stop. Like, so it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that you're not a nice person or that you're not an empathetic person or that you’re not, you don't have a capability for empathy, it simply means that you haven't learned it and all of the various implications of it and we can call learn.

Colleen Schnettler 15:15

Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you for, for telling me about that. Like, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. I find that like, this whole thing, empathy and psychology, as I'm trying to, as I'm talking to people and trying to sell my product, I have found that it really, and I already knew this, but like, now I'm seeing it, it really makes a difference. Can I just tell you about this one issue, which I find so interesting?

Michele Hansen 15:42

Yes.

Colleen Schnettler 15:43

Okay. So the way my product works is you upload files to the cloud, and then I provide you a dashboard where you can see all of those files. I have gotten several requests now from people to allow them to tag the files.

Michele Hansen 16:02

Oh, yeah, like Drew asked for that. Right?

Colleen Schnettler 16:04

Yeah. So I've been trying to figure out why people want to tag the files. He's not the only one who asked for it. Some other people have asked for it. The reason these people want to tag the files is because they want to be able to mass delete all of the files they've uploaded in a development environment. Why did they want to do that? From what I'm understanding, they want to do that so those files, like, because those aren't production files, they're not, like, cluttering up their dashboard. So when those people have asked me about this, I said, well, look, if you exceed your storage, because I don't have a mass delete function right now, and I don't have that, I'll just give you more storage. But nobody likes that answer. It's like, and so I think it's like a mental psychological thing where they want, like, a nice, clean dashboard. I don't know, I just find this really interesting, because I'm like, storage is cheap. I'll give you more storage until I implement this. But, but it's like, it's, like, as human beings, they really want, like, to segment stuff. I don't know, it's like mental. That's kind of the way I've been, I've been thinking about it. Like, as human beings, they don't want files that they don't need on their dashboard, even if they don't have to pay for them. But I'm like, I don't know. So, so that's just kind of been an interesting one for me. I'm like, but you literally like, I'm not gonna make you pay for those files. It's fine. They can just be there in outer space. But no one, yeah, that's an interesting one that keeps coming up.

Michele Hansen 17:25

Yeah, it sounds like they, like, that clutter is creating a certain like,

Colleen Schnettler 17:33

Mental clutter or something psychological clutter.

Michele Hansen 17:36

Nervousness, or something. And then there's also this element of wanting to, like, mentally, like to mentally separate things like, I'm sort of, I'm reminded of one of my favorite economics papers called Mental Accounting by Richard Thaler, which is basically on how people like, they create different jobs for different bank accounts and investment accounts, and like, you know, for example, people might have one brokerage account that's just for, like, they have like fun money versus they have their serious 401k. Or like, some people have many different bank accounts for, you know, for different purposes. And it, there's, there's probably a broader term for this, but since I come from an econ background, that's, but like, people wanting to create these different mental categories, and basically, like, it's almost like they want to go, sort of, it's like mentally going to IKEA and buying one of those room divider shelves with all the different boxes you can slide boxes in and, like, being able to look at it and see that everything is in all of its little different categories and is in its place. And they know like, you know which things are in which box, and it looks all nice and organized from the outside.

Colleen Schnettler 18:51

Yeah, I am going to do it because I have found I use my own product for my clients, and I have found I desire the same thing. But I think you're absolutely right. Like, from a purely practical perspective, it doesn't matter. But from, like, a human organizational mental box perspective, like, it seems to make people happy.

Michele Hansen 19:11

Yeah, like, there's that functional perspective of it. But then there's the emotional perspective of feeling like everything is organized. And then I also wonder if there's a social element where like, maybe they're afraid one of their coworkers will use a file that was only for development, or because there's so many files and they're all in one list, someone will use the wrong file or, like, I wonder if there's any, any sort of elements around that going on?

Colleen Schnettler 19:41

Yeah. Could be. I didn't ask that. That's,

Michele Hansen 19:47

So when someone asks you for that, what did you say back to them, exactly?

Colleen Schnettler 19:52

Well, the first time someone asked me, I said, that's a great idea. I'm totally gonna do that.

Michele Hansen 19:58

Okay. That’s an understandable response.

Colleen Schnettler 19:59

I know you're over there thinking, like, have I taught you nothing, Colleen? You have taught me. That was before we were doing a podcast.

Michele Hansen 20:06

No, that was a starting point, and that's a perfectly understandable reaction to that. What did you start saying after that?

Colleen Schnettler 20:15

So the second request I got was via email. So I didn't really have the back and forth that I would have had when I'm talking to someone on the phone or on Slack. And, so this person, I asked them kind of what their use case was, and I also told them in the email that they, you know, I wasn't going to charge them for development files. So if storage became a problem, we could work something out until I had the, you know, a bulk delete API set up. And this person was looking to segment files so they could do a mass delete of the development files. And they also brought up they thought it would be great to be able to segment files, like via model. So you could have, here's all my avatar files over here, here's all my resumes over here, which would be really cool. I mean, that I can totally see the value because and then you're then in your admin, yeah, then in your admin dashboard, you could easily filter based on, you know, what your tag was. And it's really not hard to do, I just haven't done it. But I do like, I do like that idea. And that, to me, makes a lot of sense because I think people really like, like we just talked about, like, you like to have your stuff in the appropriate boxes.

Michele Hansen 21:34

I think it's hard sometimes when somebody proposes an idea that we get the value of because we would use it ourselves. It can be really hard to say, can you walk me through how you would use that?

Colleen Schnettler 21:46

Yeah it is.

Michele Hansen 21:47

Like, because their reasons may be different. And we really, we need all of those reasons because the reasons I would do something might be different than the reasons why somebody else would do something. But when we understand something, it feels very unnatural to ask for clarification, even when we don't need it. But it's so reasonable.

Colleen Schnettler 22:08

That's exactly what it is. It feels so weird, because I'm like, yeah, totally. That's a great freaking idea. Yeah, it is odd.

Michele Hansen 22:16

I sometimes feel like it's, I wonder if this comes from, like, conditioning in school where, like, I feel like the kid who asks a lot of questions is, you know, sort of branded as annoying. I was definitely that kid in math class. Like, I just always seemed to understand it two weeks after the test. And I wonder if it's like that fear that like, oh, God, like, am I going to be the person who asks questions. And then we have this like, sense that being the person who asks questions, even one that might be sort of a quote, unquote, like dumb question that's clarifying something. Get you like, like, I wonder if there's kind of this built in social conditioning around that, that makes us not want to ask those clarification questions. And we're like, okay, I think I can guess what they want, so I'm just not gonna ask further about that. But, but when we're building a product, you need to be able to, like, look in all the different nooks and crannies of how they're thinking.

Colleen Schnettler 23:08

Yeah, definitely. That definitely is valuable. To your point, you might use it one way, and they might want it for something totally different. So I really do think, like, throughout the course of this podcast, and since we've been spending a lot of time talking about customer interviews over the past several months, that I've gotten way better at it, because it's, it's my instinct, just to say, yeah, I totally agree, because I do totally agree. So why, I think for me, it's not like, I'm not I don't I'm not scared of asking clarifying questions. I think it's more like, I don't want to waste any more time. Like, I'm like, okay, cool. Let's not waste anyone's time, and let's just go do it. So I have, I do really think I've grown a lot in that, in that kind of sphere of pausing, slow down Colleen, because not really good at slowing down. And, you know, kind of dive into what they want and why they want it. So I think that's been good.

Michele Hansen 24:02

It can be kind of tough as like, I feel like we're both pretty enthusiastic and kind of like, like, have you ever been called bubbly?

Colleen Schnettler 24:11

Yeah, of course.

Michele Hansen 24:11

Yeah, I have been called bubbly, too. Yeah. So like, I like feel like enthusiastic people want to be like, yeah, that sounds awesome. Like, it's so, it's so counter,to like how I would interact with someone socially.

Colleen Schnettler 24:25

Yeah, I agree. So, so anyway, that was something, I was thinking about that when you were talking all about, you know, empathy and sympathy and psychology, is how much these kinds of factors play into product building.

Michele Hansen 24:41

Yeah and building an intuitive product that, that makes sense to people. Like it's, it's really hard to build something that's intuitive because it requires understanding the user’s mental model of how something works, and you can't understand their mental model unless you have, you know, really, you know, poked through every nook and cranny of how they think about it. And also seeing what are the similarities at scale across many different customers. You can't just build it for one particular person, right? Like this, I think this is like, do we want to do we want to do more definitions? Because now I'm excited to get into definitions between Human Centered Design versus activities under design. But if we are, we are feeling good on definition today, then,

Colleen Schnettler 25:29

I don't know what those are. Yeah, go ahead.

Michele Hansen 25:32

So like, you probably hear people talk about human-centered design, right?

Colleen Schnettler 25:37

I mean, no, but okay, I believe you, so not me.

Michele Hansen 25:40

So like humans, I feel like this kind of came really into it, like, especially in, in tech in the past, like, I don't know, 10,10-15 years, like, you like, think about the human behind it. And like, this is where a lot of like, agile stories come from, is like, as an administrator, I would like to be able to update the billing page, whenever we get a new credit card, like, like, those kinds of stories that if you've worked in the corporate world, you have seen the ads of so and so like, those kind of stories. And like, creating personas, and maybe there's like a picture of a person, and there's their age, and there's like, you know, like, all of those kinds of things that's very, like human-centered designs, and you're designing for people and understanding what those people need. Then there's activity-centered design, which is designing for things that people might be trying to accomplish, but not for specific people, if that makes sense. So it's like, so if you're thinking, I just used an example of like, a billing administrator. The human-centered design approach with a persona might be you know, this is Susan, and she lives in Iowa, she has been working in insurance for 20 years, she has a dog named Charlie, like she prefers to use her iPad on the weekends, but during the week, she uses Windows like, it's like that kind of stuff. Activity-centered design would be like, when billing administrators are going through this process, they want to be able to, you know, these are the different kinds of things they're thinking about, these are the different functions that they need to be able to do. Here are the different things they might be feeling. Like, do they want to be updating a credit card? Like, how does that make them feel, like, is that, is that enjoyable for them? Is that frustrating? Like, are there other people they're working with on this? Do they need to go get a p-card from someone else? Like, what is this entire process they're going through that is independent of them as a specific person and independent of the product? And then how does the product help them get through that entire activity, either easier, faster, or cheaper. I feel like I just dropped like,

Colleen Schnettler 27:54

There's a lot.

Michele Hansen 27:54

A lot.

Colleen Schnettler 27:55

I'm gonna have to re-listen to that one.

Michele Hansen 27:56

But basically,

Colleen Schnettler 27:57

So what's the,

Michele Hansen 27:58

Activity-centered is kind of the approach that I take. And that's the, the approach in the book is designing a process that exists regardless of the person and regardless of the process.

Colleen Schnettler 28:10

Okay.

Michele Hansen 28:10

The product, I think I messed that up.

Colleen Schnettler 28:13

Okay, so which one is better? Do you have all the answers, Michele? Tell us.

Michele Hansen 28:18

I am not going to throw bombs in the design world here. I mean, you know, there's, there's value in designing for specific people, right, and, and specific types of people, especially when you're talking about accessibility and whatnot. But fundamentally, you know, like, activity center design is okay, what it, what is the thing that someone's trying to accomplish? For example, 500 years ago, you may have solved, you know, entertain me at home, when I'm alone on a Saturday night with cards or dice, right. And now you might solve it with Netflix. But that fundamental process that you're going through to not be bored when you're in your house on the weekend, like, that process and that desire is relatively constant, which is the thing about activity-centered design approaches is that you're looking at a process that is consistent over time, because you're speaking to sort of broader, underlying goals. And this types of products, someone might use the different functional and social and emotional things that might be important to them are different, but the overall process is the same. And so this is what I think about a lot when we're like thinking about the process that someone is going through and designing something that's intuitive for them and building that mental model is understanding, okay, why do they need to be able to tag things and why do they need to be able to mass delete these things, and what is this overall thing they're trying to do? And it sounds like it's sort of, to feel like all of their files are organized and they can find things when they want to, and that desire to be organized is a relatively consistent desire.

Colleen Schnettler 30:03

Yeah, I think one of the things, one of the phrases we use at work is to surprise and delight the user. And I feel like this falls into the surprise and delight category. Like it's not necessary, but it's delightful.

Michele Hansen 30:19

You just used the phrase ‘at work’. Does that mean when you are working? Or?

Colleen Schnettler 30:26

Oh, just when I'm, just this company that I've been contracting for for a while likes to use that phrase.

Michele Hansen 30:31

Okay, gotcha.

Colleen Schnettler 30:32

So this to me feels,

Michele Hansen 30:34

I didn't know if you’d suddenly gone off and gotten a full time job without telling me.

Colleen Schnettler 30:39

Well, I'll tell you if I do that. I may be considering that. That's like a whole ‘nother podcast episode. I feel like we don't have enough time to dive into that.

Michele Hansen 30:50

We'll do that in a future episode.

Colleen Schnettler 30:52

Colleen's life decisions. But yeah, so, this feature, I feel like, is delightful. And when we talk about like design, you know, in the context, you were just saying, I think it does fit into the, the latter category.

Michele Hansen 31:10

Yeah. And I can, I can understand how someone, or you might even, or probably, I feel like if we had talked about this, like, six months or a year ago, the reaction kind of would be like, this feels like we're really splitting hairs over something that's super obvious, and why don't I just go build it?

Colleen Schnettler 31:29

Well, yeah,

Michele Hansen 31:30

Which, I think it's a very understandable reaction.

Colleen Schnettler 31:34

Yeah, I mean, I think the problem I'm having, and I know everyone in my position has this problem. It's just, there's just not enough time to do all these things. Like, one part of me wants to take like six months and just do all the things, right? And then the other part of me wants to balance my life with building this business, and is trying to be patient with, with my constraints as a human. So I know, you know, everyone has those, that struggle, everyone who's working and trying to do this. But yeah, I'd love to add all these things. Like, I want to do all the things of course I do.

Michele Hansen 32:10

Speaking of which, building the business, we started this episode with my numbers update. Do you want to give us a little numbers update before we go?

Colleen Schnettler 32:31

So I do want to tell a little story about this. Storytime. So, someone who's kind of a prominent bootstrapper had a tweet the other day about how for his SaaS, he just implemented file uploading using some JavaScript library, and it took him like, I don't know, like a day. So not an insignificant amount of time, but not a huge amount of time. It's a long time if you're a developer to take all day. But I saw, so, like, I saw his tweet, and I was like, oh, like, why didn't he use Simple File Upload? Like, clearly my product is crap. Okay, so this happened at like 9am. So then, like, later in the day, this just happened a couple days ago, I went to see if I had any new signups. And as you know, like, I've been pretty flat for like two or three weeks now, signups have been pretty flat. So, in one day, I got $325 boost in my MRR. One day.

Michele Hansen 33:19

What?

Colleen Schnettler 33:20

That has never happened in the history of my product, like ever. I was like, whoa.

Michele Hansen 33:25

So did someone Tweet it, like, add it to that thread, or, like what happened?

Colleen Schnettler 33:29

No, no one added it to the thread. And I didn't add it to the thread because he was clearly looking for a non-paid solution. So it seems like it wasn't that he hated my product or it was bad, he just wasn't looking for this kind of solution I was offering. I don't really know what happened. But a whole bunch of people signed up.

Michele Hansen 33:50

These two things happened on the same day, and you don't have any conclusively linking them, but it feels suspicious that they wouldn't be linked.

Colleen Schnettler 34:00

It's super weird, right?

Michele Hansen 34:01

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 34:02

Um, so I am trying to like, I'm just really starting to try and get into, like, Google Analytics and understand that. Anyway, so that was, my point of that story is like, you know, this is, we're never bored. I'm never bored, right? Like one day, I'm like, this thing is miserable. The next day, I'm like, I'm the most brilliant person in the world. Like, it's never, it's never boring. I guess my point of that story was it's all over the place. I'm all over the place with, with this product. And some days I feel like it's just not, not as good as it should be. Some days I feel like I'm charging too much. And then other days I have, like I realized I have, there's all this power in this thing I built that no one is utilizing. So that's something I really want to spend some time getting some content going out there and spend some time, like, showing people why it's more powerful than, than, you know, other solutions they've been using.

Michele Hansen 34:58

You seem really fired up.

Colleen Schnettler 35:00

I am. I, I've just had like, a, it's been, like, a really good week. I mean, from a work perspective. And although I didn't get to spend the time, you know, I got, okay. I don't have a lot of time to spend on the product the next month or so, so I'm just taking it in little bits, right. And so this week, it's a tiny thing, but someone pointed out to me, and I think this also plays into psychology. Okay, so my marketing site is built in Tailwind UI. My application site is built off of Bootstrap. Bootstrap and Tailwind are not friends. I can't just throw Tailwind into my Bootstrap site.

Michele Hansen 35:37

If it makes you feel better, the Geocodio dashboard was on Bootstrap, and the Geocodio marketing website was on Railwind for, like, a really long time, like, like, you, like, we were on the like, 2013 version of Bootstrap for, like, a very long time. And it wasn't until like maybe six months or a year ago that we actually got them both on Tailwind. So you're not the only one. Okay, so back to yours.

Colleen Schnettler 36:06

So this. Okay, so if you are on my marketing site, and you click through to sign up to get the free trial, here's the thing that happens. The nav bars are different.

Michele Hansen 36:17

Mmm.

Colleen Schnettler 36:18

Yeah, it's not good, and someone pointed it out to me. They were like, oh, I had to click back and forth a few times to make sure it was still the same application. And I was like, oh, my goodness. And so I can't, but it was like, it was, so it's just this visual thing. But this he pointed out, he was like, you know, that's, that made me think I was at the wrong place, it might make me close the window.

Michele Hansen 36:40

Yeah it might make them think something was wrong, or, like, they accidentally got led off to another site that wasn't the right one. And like, maybe it's, like, phishing or something, like.

Colleen Schnettler 36:50

Exactly, that's exactly what this guy said. And I was like, oh, my gosh. And so, so my, my Simple File Upload technical accomplishment this week, was basically like, and because I can't, my application is pretty complicated. I can't just pull out Bootstrap and drop in Tailwind. That's gonna take me forever. So I actually, like, just stole, stole is the wrong word. I grabbed some of the Tailwind styles and just over, you know, and overrode my Bootstrap styles just for the navbar. So anyway, the point is, now the nav bars look the same. And it's like, it sounds like a small thing. But like, I think the mental block for, if you sign up and I drop you to a totally different site, you're like, wait, what?

Michele Hansen 37:29

Like, yeah, it's like, something is, like, the brain is a little bit like, danger, something is different.

Colleen Schnettler 37:34

Yeah, exactly. So, so another, so it was another big CSS week for me, which is not my forte, but I got it.

Michele Hansen 37:41

I wrote JavaScript this week, which is not my forte.

Colleen Schnettler 37:46

Oh, jack of all trades.

Michele Hansen 37:48

Well, we wrote stuff that, that's not our forte, and you're going back and forth between feeling like it's amazing and you've built something super powerful. And then, also feeling like it's, really has a long way to go, and is it ever going to get there, which, honestly, is how I feel, like, I feel the exact same way about my book. Like, every day, it's like, oh, my God, this is a hot mess. And then I'm like, actually, this is amazing and I should just publish it now. Like, I think that's, I think that's just like part of building something, whether it's a book or you know, software. I mean, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 38:31

And honestly, I think it's part of the fun. Like, I honestly do, like I, it makes it interesting. Like, I've worked jobs that are really boring, and they're really boring. Like, this is way more exciting.

Michele Hansen 38:52

I think that’s the thing I love about being an entrepreneur is that it's always different. And sometimes it's different in ways that are super boring and require a lot of paperwork. And sometimes it's different in ways that are like, super awesome, and exciting. But the fact that it is so different all the time is, is what makes it fun and makes me feel like I get to, like, feel lucky that I get to do this as my job. On that note, perhaps we should sign off for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on iTunes or tweet at us. We love hearing what you think about it. Have a good one.

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Michele Hansen 00:00

Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear.

If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I'm passionate about customer service and listening to customers.

A few months ago, we noticed something wasn't working on the Oh Dear dashboard. We reported it to them, and they fixed it almost immediately. Everybody has bugs occasionally, but not every company is so responsive to their customers, and we really appreciate that.

You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Colleen Schnettler 00:35

So Michele, I'd love to hear about how things are going with the book.

Michele Hansen 00:40

They're going. Um, so after our episode with Sean last week, I realized that I kind of, I have to launch this thing eventually, right?

Colleen Schnettler 00:54

Yes.

Michele Hansen 00:55

And, you know, for, you know, I mean, for months I've been hearing that advice of, you know, do a, do a presale and like, start selling it beforehand, And, and I was like, yeah, I mean, you know, I, that's the best practice. That makes sense. And then just kind of be like, but that doesn't apply to me, right? Like, I couldn't make, um. It's, you know, it's funny, because it's almost, I feel like the way people feel about when they hear about customer interviewing, they're like, that sounds really valuable and like the right thing to do, and I'm just gonna act like that doesn't apply to me.

Colleen Schnettler 01:29

Yep.

Michele Hansen 01:30

So that's kind of how I was, and talking to Sean really kind of got me to be like, okay, okay, fine. I should actually sit down and do this. So I got a very simple website together, and then I actually did end up launching the presale.

Colleen Schnettler 01:46

Oh, congratulations.

Michele Hansen 01:48

Yeah, that was super scary. Like, because the book

Colleen Schnettler 01:50

I bet.

Michele Hansen 01:53

And, like, random places where it says like, insert graphic here.

Colleen Schnettler 02:01

So tell us how many books have you sold?

Michele Hansen 02:03

Okay, yeah, so I guess I get to do, like, a numbers update for the first time. This is fun. Um, so I have sold 34 copies.

Colleen Schnettler 02:15

Wow.

Michele Hansen 02:16

Presale.

Colleen Schnettler 02:17

That's a lot.

Michele Hansen 02:18

So, and that's not including for like, you know, platform fees and whatever. Just like, you know, $29 times 34, basically. $986.

Colleen Schnettler 02:32

That's amazing. Congratulations!

Michele Hansen 02:35

So close to that, like, 1000 mark, which, I was talking about this with Mathias earlier, and he's kind of like, I feel like that's like a, you know, that's like, the legit threshold, is 1000. Like, and I don't know why, but it's like, yeah, it's like that feels like, that feels like the, the, like, the first big hurdle.

Colleen Schnettler 02:55

I totally agree. That's wonderful news. Congratulations.

Michele Hansen 03:00

You know, I expected to feel excited, or relieved, or something positive after releasing it, or the presale, at least. And I gotta tell you, like, I just feel pressure. Like, I'm really glad I didn't do this sooner.

Colleen Schnettler 03:25

Really?

Michele Hansen 03:27

Yeah. Because now I have, you know, at least 34 people I can't disappoint.

Colleen Schnettler 03:32

Right.

Michele Hansen 03:32

And I feel like, just like, the pressure to make something that is a quality product, like, I already had that pressure on myself to put something out there that I'm proud of.

Colleen Schnettler 03:44

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 03:46

Now I have all these other people who are expecting that, and not that anyone has emailed me and said anything to that effect, but that's how I feel. And I was thinking about this earlier. And I was like, man, like, writing and selling this book has like, brought out all of these, like, vulnerabilities and, and self-doubt and everything, like all of this stuff that I like, thought I had dealt with and then it's, like, sort of like bursting out of the cabinet, being like, hey, I'm still here. So it's, you know, I mean, I have tools to, like, deal with that, but it's been like, oh my gosh, like, I thought I had dealt with, like, I never feel this way about anything about Geocodio, like, so.

Colleen Schnettler 04:33

So, this is interesting, because I, when I was feeling a similar way, many months ago, I don't actually know if I talked about it on the podcast, but I had a very high value client that I had a great relationship with that needed a file uploader, and mine wasn't quite done, and I had this moment of terror, panic, I don't know, where I was like, I shouldn't use mine because, because if I put it on my client's site, like, it has to work, right? There's no get out of jail free card, Kind of like, you've now sold this book. Like, you have to finish it.

Michele Hansen 05:07

Right. It's not just like, throwing it in a PDF and then like.

Colleen Schnettler 05:09

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 05:10

Oh, whatever, nobody paid for it. Like, it's not a big deal. Like, it's like, no, this is, like, this is serious now.

Colleen Schnettler 05:17

Yeah. And I think something that, that I'm thinking of as you're talking about this, I remember at the time, Alex Hillman had a really great tweet thread about you're not scared of failure, maybe you're secretly scared of success.

Michele Hansen 05:32

Mm hmm.

Colleen Schnettler 05:33

It was really interesting. Like, just when you think about, like, the psychology and all of these new insecurities coming to light for you, like, maybe you're scared of success.

Michele Hansen 05:42

You know, and it's so I feel like we should have them on the podcast more, because I feel like they are, like, Amy and Alex in some way are like characters on this podcast, they're just not actually on the podcast. But like, the amount we talk about, you know, 30x500 and everything. She had, I think, I think it was her, or maybe, no, or maybe it was Dani Donovan, the woman who does the ADHD comics. But I think it was Amy, had a thread, like, couple months ago that was like, you know, people with, or maybe, I don't know if she has ADHD, so I don't know if this was her. Okay. Somebody had a thread that was like, you know, people with ADHD, like, you don't ever feel accomplished when you finish something. It's just over. And then you're on to the next thing. And it was like, yes, like, I expected to feel something when I finally got that out there, and now it instead feels like, oh, now I have to put in the graphics. Now I have to do the cover art. Like now I have to like, like, it just, it didn't, there was never this, like, moment of, like, feeling accomplished or anything like that. It just, it just rolled into the next thing.

Colleen Schnettler 06:58

Interesting. I don't, I don't have that problem. Like, that doesn't happen to me. I mean, but it's interesting, I find that interesting because one of the things, for me, is when I accomplish something, even if, I feel like if I'd been in your position and I got the presales out there, I do feel that, like, internal satisfaction of hitting that goal, and that's what keeps me motivated. So, if you don't get that same kind of dopamine hit, doesn't that make the whole process kind of painful? It doesn't sound fun.

Michele Hansen 07:28

Well, what I do get that from is people, like, you know, positive reinforcement from other people. Like, so I've been asking people for testimonials to put at the front of the book. And on the one hand, that terrifies me, and, and then on the other hand, when they do come in, and people are talking about how the, the book and also sort of newsletter and like, like, all this, all this stuff is all sort of meshing together, has helped them, and what it has helped them do, and how they wish they'd had it sooner and everything. Like, that makes me feel good. That makes me feel like I am delivering the, like, a product that is worth somebody paying for, and that I can be proud of seeing how it's impacted other people. But I like I, I don't really get satisfaction out of achieving things, which is really ironic, because I think about younger versions of myself and I've like, you know, I describe me in high school as an achievement robot, like.

Colleen Schnettler 08:39

An achievement robot.

Michele Hansen 08:41

Yeah, you know, you're, like, just taking as many AP's as you can and your life is over if you don't get in a top college. You know, that whole, that whole song and dance that turned out to be a lie, because now I work for myself. Not at all bitter about that. Anyway, um, yeah, it's but, this, so that is really, like, keeping me going or like, people tweeting out you like, hey, like, what is the book coming out? And part of me is like, oh, my God, am I gonna get them by then? But like, I've been getting a lot of really good reinforcement from people, and that, and I think that's, for me, that's been one of the really big benefits of building in public is not, not necessarily knowing that, exactly that people are going to pay for it and how much they're going to pay and having that money up front, but knowing that I'm creating something that is useful for people. Like, that is what keeps me going.

Colleen Schnettler 09:31

That sounds great, too.

Michele Hansen 09:33

But now I got to finish the damn thing, so.

Colleen Schnettler 09:35

Yeah. Now you gotta finish it.

Michele Hansen 09:37

I was saying that the release date would be June 24. I actually just had to push that back to July 2, because I just, I don't think I have enough time.

Colleen Schnettler 09:44

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 09:45

I do have an idea for the cover. Like, I want it to be like a terminal printout that's like, basically like installing, like, you know, like installing like empathy and like, loading scripts.

Colleen Schnettler 10:00

That'll be cute.

Michele Hansen 10:01

Like, sort of corny. Developers aren't the only audience for it. But I also want them to know that this is a resource that is, like, accessible to them.

Colleen Schnettler 10:14

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 10:15

I don't know. I have zero artistic abilities, like, I can't even, like, think visually, like, so I have so many people who are reviewing the draft right now, which is pretty amazing. Some of them are, like, super close friends of mine who are harsh editors, and I'm super grateful for that. And others are, like, people I have never even met who are so, I guess, so taken with, with the idea of the book that they're, like, helping me edit it, and I have never met them before, which is just so moving. But anyway, so someone has been giving me a lot of feedback on like, oh, like, this should be a graphic and like, this should be a graphic. And I'm like, I'm so glad you're saying that because it would have never occurred to me that that could be a graphic because I communicate in speech, and in text, and there's -

Colleen Schnettler 11:01

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 11:01

Not a whole lot of pictures going on.

Colleen Schnettler 11:03

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 11:04

So, so, yeah, I gotta kind of get all of, all that together in the next couple weeks. And like, hopefully release the, like, the print-on-demand version at the same time, but it's unclear. And then after that, I get to do the audio book, which, honestly, I'm really looking forward to, because then I just have to read the book out loud and as a podcaster, I'm like, I got that. Like, this does not involve any pictures. Like, I am good.

Colleen Schnettler 11:32

No pictures required.

Michele Hansen 11:33

No art skills required.

Colleen Schnettler 11:36

Are you gonna hire someone to do the graphics? Have you figured that out yet?

Michele Hansen 11:39

No, I've been making them in PowerPoint.

Colleen Schnettler 11:42

Okay. I'm just saying there's -

Michele Hansen 11:45

Really simple. Like, there's not going to be like, pictures-pictures, like.

Colleen Schnettler 11:47

Okay.

Michele Hansen 11:48

If it turns out this book is a huge hit and I need to do a version that actually has pictures and like, somebody doing, like, professionally doing the layout then like, yeah, I'll, I'll do that, but.

Colleen Schnettler 11:59

Yeah, so.

Michele Hansen 11:59

I mean, so like, more like flowcharts if anything, or like, putting something in a box so that it's, like, called out like even that kind of stuff. My brain is like, doesn't.

Colleen Schnettler 12:09

Have you ever seen, there's a couple of people I've met at conferences that are developers, but they're also visual thinkers. And so they'll like, make sketch notes of someone's conference talk. Have you ever seen these? I'm going to send you some after the podcast. They're so cool. I mean, for your, for, you know, especially to hit, like, the developer audience, that would be, and that might be like version two of the book, but like, like sketch notes, or something would be super cool. Like, I could see a lot of cool opportunities here.

Michele Hansen 12:37

Yeah, I tried to use something called Excalidraw, and I think my problem is like, I just don't think visually.

Colleen Schnettler 12:47

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 12:47

Like, I never graduated beyond stick figures. My, my efforts that were beyond stick figures are hilarious. Like actually, like, yeah. Um, so I probably should, like, should bring that in, you know. But again, I mean, the book has only made, you know, just under $1,000. So I'm not, I'm not, I don't really want to, like, go out and hire an artist for a couple $1,000 for it. Like, I don't feel like that's a reasonable-

Colleen Schnettler 13:21

Not yet. Not yet. Right. I mean, that might be in the future. Yeah. I feel like that's not yet. I totally get that.

Michele Hansen 13:27

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's-

Colleen Schnettler 13:34

It's exciting. I'm glad we gave you that push. I mean, I kind of felt like I gave you that push when I was basically like, you're gonna have this up by the time we launch this podcast, right. I'm happy. I hope it wasn't too stressful. But I'm happy you got there.

Michele Hansen 13:49

I think I needed the external deadline because-

Colleen Schnettler 13:52

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 13:52

And again, this is kind of one of those, for me, ADHD things. Like, I need an external deadline because if it's a deadline I've come up with then it's not happening. But like, the reason why the book was, is gonna be out by July 2 is because, like, our, well, it was gonna be June 23 because our daughter finishes school for the year on June 25. So I was like, it has to be out before she gets out of school. But then I remember that she has a week of summer camp. So I'm like, okay, I have another week.

Colleen Schnettler 14:16

You have one more week.

Michele Hansen 14:18

No, it has to be done before she gets out of camp because otherwise then I, you know, I won't have as much time, so.

Colleen Schnettler 14:25

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 14:25

External deadline. Super helpful. Yeah. How's, how's stuff in Simple File Upload world?

Colleen Schnettler 14:33

So, things are good. I, you know, signups have still been consistent, but because I lost that big customer, I'm just below 1k MRR. So I haven't really seen that reflected in-

Michele Hansen 14:48

Is the big customer the one that, like, wasn't using it and you couldn't get in touch with them?

Colleen Schnettler 14:53

No, that person's still there, but like, I lost one person that was, like, a tier below that, which is, because I have three tiers. And so things are fine. I mean, I'm not seeing a big increase, or really any movement on the revenue because of the churn at that level, at that more expensive level. But I'm pretty excited about some of the things I'm going to be trying to do in the next couple months. My summer is crazy. So I had at first resigned myself to just not really working on Simple File Upload for a couple months. I was like, I'm just gonna let it sit. It's doing great. It requires almost no customer support. But then,

Michele Hansen 15:32

I mean, a thousand dollars a month, and then it recurs is like.

Colleen Schnettler 15:35

Right! It's like, I mean, okay, can we talk about how awesome this is? By the way, this is awesome. Like, after fees and stuff, after I pay my hosting fees, and my storage fees and my Heroku fees, I clear like 606, 650. Like, that's like, pretty cool.

Michele Hansen 15:52

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 15:53

It's like, I'm not so much. So I wasn't upset about this. But like, I just needed to see kind of where my life was and what I was doing. And I was like, I might just have to sit on this for a couple months because I don't have the time. But then I got an idea. So I am going to take, really what happened is I was really inspired talking to Sean last week about 30x500. I have never taken that course. But I read, like, everything Amy Hoy writes on the internet, and so I kind of feel like I get the idea behind Sales Safari, the idea being find where your customers hang out and find out what their problems are. Conceptually, it seems easy. I just haven't had time to do that. And him, he said last week that he spent 80 hours. Think about that. So he was trolling Reddit forums for 80 hours. That is a lot.

Michele Hansen 16:45

I mean, I probably already do that, and there's no business purpose behind it.

Colleen Schnettler 16:49

It's just no focus to it, right? So, so that's, so I really think I'm at this inflection point where what I have is working. It's doing great. I don't need to build new, more features until I know what features people need. And as we talked about, I think two weeks ago, different audiences want different features. As a solo founder, I do, with a job, I don't have the bandwidth to build all the features for everybody. Like, I'm not trying to take on CloudFlare, right. I really want to niche down and find my people and build for my people. I can't do that until I know who my people are, and I still don't really know. So, I am going to hire someone to do some of the Sales Safari research for me since I don't have time.

Michele Hansen 17:42

Oh.

Colleen Schnettler 17:43

Yeah. So I'm kind of pumped. And by someone I mean, my sister. She, yeah, so it's like, you talk about how, like, you love having a business with Mathias. I would love to have a business with my sister. Like, I would love for her to be able to work for me, for this to become a real company, and, you know, for us to do this together. So she is just coming off her maternity leave. She has decided not to go back to her job. So she has only a little bit of time because she doesn't have a lot of childcare, so she has, like, one day a week that she's going to work for me doing marketing research and Sales Safari, and I was to kind of trying to teach her, like, what I think is useful. We're both kind of learning as we go, neither of us really knows we're just making it up. And we're gonna do that for the summer and kind of see where it takes us.

Michele Hansen 17:55

Yeah. Wow, wait, so what is her background in?

Colleen Schnettler 18:35

She's an environmental consultant.

Michele Hansen 18:37

Oh.

Colleen Schnettler 18:40

So she actually, it's in no way relevant. But she's, so really the deal is she's a writer. So in her job as a consultant, what they do is they, they have to write these, like, epic report. So her background is really in writing. So originally, she was gonna write content for me, and she wrote me a couple pieces, but it's really hard to come in, since she doesn't have the technical background, it's, I, and my, my audience is developers, like, I need really technical content. So I don't think she's going to fit as a technical writer. But she's going to do, she's taking a class in SEO. So she's going to do, like, keyword research, and she's going to jump into the forums and Reddit and try and like, find out what people's pain points are surrounding file uploads.

Michele Hansen 19:24

You know, it sounds like you guys have a good working relationship together.

Colleen Schnettler 19:31

Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, all problems, this stuff that I was thinking about. All problems are people problems, right? So, if you want to control your business, and I'm just hypothesizing here, the number one most important people, but the number one most important thing is the people you work with, and I can't think of anyone else I'd rather work with. So, I think she'll figure it out, or she'll hate it and if she hates it, then she won't do it anymore. I'll find someone else. But that's kind of our plan. I'm pretty excited.

Michele Hansen 20:02

Like, yeah, you, if you have someone that you work well with, and you believe that they're capable of learning what you would need them to learn, then, you know, like, you trust them.

Colleen Schnettler 20:17

Yes.

Michele Hansen 20:17

And that matters.

Colleen Schnettler 20:18

Yes. Yes. So yeah. So this summer, for me, is really for, for Simple File Upload, I think, is really going to be a focus on figuring out what niche to serve. I was talking to another friend, and he just got a new job, and he works for a big event management company. And he pointed out, you know, he was, he actually mentioned you, because he listened to the podcast, and he was like, these huge companies, they don't care about the little guys who are making a million dollars a year. And his point was, they don't care. So he's like, if you can carve out a niche in one of these huge industries, like, you can be incredibly successful, and like, these big guys, they don't care.

Michele Hansen 20:58

No. And you know, on your sister, it might be really interesting to have her do interviews with people because she will be completely coming in with a beginner's mindset. Like, I find this is something that is difficult for people to adjust to like, like, we've talked about when, when someone says like, oh, like, could I do this? And you start thinking through, like, whether they could and how you would implement it, or you know-

Colleen Schnettler 21:23

Right.

Michele Hansen 21:24

Talk about what they wanted to do, and you just like, oh, of course, you wanted to do this because of this, and like, you don't even question it. But she, but she would be like, well, why do you want to upload a file in the first place? Like,

Colleen Schnettler 21:33

Right.

Michele Hansen 21:33

Well, how is that, how does that work? Because she's genuinely beginner. Like, I feel like, in some ways, the fact that I don't have a geography background has been an advantage for-

Colleen Schnettler 21:45

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 21:46

You know, for this because like, I don't come in, you know, with it, with all of these preconceived notions about why someone would want to do this.

Colleen Schnettler 21:56

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 21:56

So I think that can be really interesting when she gets her feet wet, and kind of a sense of what's going on, to try to talk to the customers.

Colleen Schnettler 22:05

I think that's a great idea. I hope we can grow into that. I definitely think there's opportunity there. I think of her as like you, and I'm like Mathias in the power couple building of a company. So we'll see. I mean, she wants to get into mark, we kind of are going down this route, because I don't have enough time. I want to do it, I need to do it, and she wants to, really she wants to transition into a remote career that's flexible, like most parents, and she's really interested in SEO and marketing. So, I think it's gonna be a fun little adventure. I'm excited to see what she finds out. Part of this was also, I think we've talked a lot about, I have an interest in no-code. So I had a call with the Jetboost IO founder, Chris.

Michele Hansen 22:51

Yeah, Chris.

Colleen Schnettler 22:52

Who, I believe, you know, as well, because you're a mentor and he-

Michele Hansen 22:55

Yeah, I mentor him through Earnest Capital. I literally just had a call with him the other day.

Colleen Schnettler 23:02

So I had a call with him, independent of your call with him.

Michele Hansen 23:06

Which we didn't know about.

Colleen Schnettler 23:07

Which we did not plan, to talk about opportunities in the webflow space. And, so I think one of the first things I'm going to have my sister, well, not the first, but one of the things my sister is going to try and do this month is really see if there's a need in Webflow. The thing about Webflow is, in 2018, Webflow introduced their own file uploader. So before that, there was a huge need for it. Now, they have their own file uploader. So it might be that what I provide is no longer, you know, something people need or want. So before I go and build an integration with Webflow, I'm going to have her do some Sales Safari research. They have really active forums to kind of see what people are looking forward to see if there's opportunity there.

Michele Hansen 23:54

Yeah, Chris was telling me that they have a, like, feature upload, like a feature up vote thing where people go in and request features. It's exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 24:03

Yeah, I think it's gonna be great. I think, I think it'll be fun. It'll be good to have someone actually dedicated to reading Reddit and Webflow forums and Heroku forums and whatever, to try to identify, you know, the need there and in the file uploading space. And then with the SEO research, you know, I can then either write the content myself or hire someone to write technical content, depending on my time commitments, my time, you know, what I can do, so. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that. I think, you know, the interesting thing about file uploading and Webflow is they have a maximum size of 10 megs, and I, you can't do multiple file uploads at the same time. So the question is, how many people really care? Like, who really, did, are there enough people that are uploading large files, or want to do maximum, or, I'm sorry, want to do multiple file uploads at a time that it would be worth it for me to make an integration into that space. So, so, you know, she's going to kind of dive into that and see what we can find out and like, this is just gonna be a fun marketing learning time because I built this thing because I wanted to build something, as you know, and I'm really happy that I built something to scratch my own need because it's worked out really well. But I still haven't really honed in on who I can serve best, and there's lots of opportunities out there, so.

Michele Hansen 25:42

There's a lot to be, I think, sort of learned and discovered here, and, and also that SEO work you can do, that, like, that can also inform the kind of feature development that you do, too, like, because there, I mean, this just happened to us the other day, like there was something that I noticed we had a couple of customers ask us how to do, and so I wrote up an article about how to do it, and then, but like, to basically do it manually. And then I just saw this morning that it's, like, our top performing growing piece of content and has like a 400% increase in clicks, and- Wow. And looking into like, oh, how might we add that? And it's like, okay, maybe we should like there's, you know, SEO isn't just for bringing in customers, but also for figuring out what, what people might want as well.

Colleen Schnettler 26:38

Yeah, and you've said before, I think that SEO is your number one channel? Activation channel?

Michele Hansen 26:44

Yeah. We, we don't run paid ads. We don't do any outbound sales. Like, we occasionally sponsor conferences, but that's mostly because, like, our friends run them, and it's just like, kind of-

Colleen Schnettler 27:00

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 27:00

To support our friends, like we're a sponsor of Longhorn PHP, the Texas PHP conference. But like, that's just because our friend runs it.

Colleen Schnettler 27:12

Okay.

Michele Hansen 27:13

It's not very, like, organized or intentional. It's just like, sure, like, we'll help you out.

Colleen Schnettler 27:18

Now, when you do SEO, do you do, like, now you just said, like, you were talking to a customer and then you got this idea of a good page, but do you do traditional keyword research as well?

Michele Hansen 27:34

Maybe? Like, we use Ahrefs.

Colleen Schnettler 27:36

Yeah, I don't, okay.

Michele Hansen 27:39

I don't know, I still don't know how to pronounce the name of that company.

Colleen Schnettler 27:42

I know, yeah, I don't either.

Michele Hansen 27:43

But yeah, Ahrefs, we use that. We used Google Search Console for a long time, which is honestly a really good tool, and it's free, because Ahrefs is, is pretty expensive. But yeah, you can do keyword research and rankings and referrers and all that kind of stuff. I don't keep a super close eye on it. Um, but yeah, whenever we're, you know, we, every so often, like every couple weeks or so we go in and look at what content is performing and what else we might need and whatnot.

Colleen Schnettler 28:19

Cool. Yeah, I don't know. I really haven't done, I've done absolutely zero keyword research. So I think it's probably worth our time to put a little bit of effort into that to see what people are searching for to get a better idea of how to use those tools.

Michele Hansen 28:36

Yeah, I mean, our approach is, you know, find those keywords and then write stuff that people might be searching for and show them how to do it with Geocodio, and I think I like that because I, and I think we talked about this is kind of something that I have struggled with with the book, is, like, I struggle with sounding salesy, like and writing, like conversion copy, like, it's just really something that I feel like I sound way too infomercial-y when I tried to write it. Like, you know, there are people who are really good at writing conversion copy and sounding like a natural human being when they write it, like, I mean, you know, Amy Hoy is one of those people. But I, you know, I might as well you know, be like, hocking something on the Home Shopping Network when I try to write it. So, so like writing be like, oh, you're searching for geocoding? Hello, we do geocoding. Here is how you can do it in like, like, all of these different ways you can do it and rephrasing all of those different things. And then here's where you can try it. And then here's where you can do it. And it's very, like, straightforward. That's like, maybe you need it. Maybe you don't. All of those options are fine. Not, like, buy this now or you will die.

Colleen Schnettler 29:56

Yeah, I'm hoping with our keyword research and kind of, like, since I haven't done this at all, you know, with what, the marketing research she does, as you've talked about, I think a lot of that is going to inform my content and building out future landing pages. So, that's really going to be a focus for me is like, trying to get content and you know, pages out there that appeal to people.

Michele Hansen 30:24

Well, I'm going to be spending the next week working on the book and you're going to be onboarding your sister and getting this research going. Sounds like we got our work cut out for us.

Colleen Schnettler 30:34

It's gonna be a good week.

Michele Hansen 30:37

All right. Well, I guess that'll wrap us up for now. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

View Details

Michele Hansen 00:00

Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. We use Oh Dear to keep track of SSL certificates. If an SSL certificate is about to expire, we get an alert beforehand. We have automated processes to renew them, so we use Oh Dear as an extra level of peace of mind. You can sign up for a ten day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Michele Hansen 00:28

Hey, welcome back to Software Social. So today we're doing something kind of fun. We're leaning on the social part of Software Social, and we have invited our friend, Sean Fioritto, to join us today.

Sean Fioritto 00:44

Hey guys. Thanks for having me.

Colleen Schnettler 00:47

Hi Sean. Thanks for being here.

Michele Hansen 00:48

So, and the reason why we asked Sean, in addition to being a great person, is that Sean wrote a book called Sketching With CSS, and as you all know, I am writing a book and figuring it out. And there is a lot of stuff I haven't figured out, especially when it comes to, like, actually selling the book. Like, I feel like that, I feel like the, writing the book is, like, I feel like I kind of got a handle on that. The whole selling the book thing, like, not so much. Um, so we thought it would be kind of helpful to have Sean come on, since like, he's done this successfully.

Colleen Schnettler 021:36

So Sean, I would love to start with a little bit of your background with the book. What inspired you to write it? How did you get started? Where did that idea come from?

Sean Fioritto 01:50

Yeah, so I wanted to quit my job.

Colleen Schnettler 01:53

Don't we all?

Michele Hansen 01:55

Honest goal.

Sean Fioritto 01:56

I always wanted to go on my own, be independent, run my own business. That's been a goal for a very long time. So, I tried various things, you know, in my spare time, with limited to no success for years and years before that, and I was just getting sick of, the plan was, you know, I'm like, okay, I have this job. And in my spare time, I'm gonna get something going and then, and that just wasn't working. So I was getting impatient. Anyway, I ended up signing up with Amy Hoy's 30x500 class. This was seven or eight years ago. So, I signed up for that class. Actually, wait, I'm getting my timeline a little mixed up. So, I started reading stuff by Amy Hoy. It's funny, I'd actually bought another book that she wrote, and she used her sort of process for that book. And I bought that for my, for my job earlier. And I was like, oh, this Amy Hoy person is interesting. And so I started reading her blog, and then she has these things she writes called ebombs. You guys are probably familiar with that term. But they're basically content that, it's educational content directed at her target, you know, customer, which she would call her audience. So I was just, she, at that point, she had started 30x500. I think it was actually called a Year of Hustle at that point. And so she had all this content, and I was just devouring it, because I was like, she gets me. She knows my problem, and this is awesome. So I was just reading everything that she could write, that she wrote, and, you know, finding any resource that she'd ever written about, like, what's her process, because she was talking about this mysterious process that she has, she, she would talk about it. And I was able to sort of reverse engineer part of her course, the main thing called Sales Safari. So I'm not, I'm at my job, coasting, doing a half-assed job, spending a lot of time doing Sales Safari, trying to figure out what, what product I should do. Not product, but that's not the way to think about it with Sales Safari, but trying to figure out like, what, who, what audience should I focus on? And what problems do they have, and what's the juiciest problem that makes sense for me to tackle? And then, and she would call them pains, by the way, not, not problems. So what's the juiciest pain that they have, for me, that was like, be the easiest for me to peel off, and, and work on. So I started digging, and it was like, alright, well, what audience makes sense for me? This is kind of the process, and it was like, you know, like web designers, web developers, because I was a web developer. And so like, what are the, you know, audiences that are close to audiences that I'm in is kind of ideal. So I started there, and then I just read and read and read. I probably put like, 80 hours of research time into that process.

Colleen Schnettler 05:05

Wow.

Michele Hansen 05:06

That's a lot.

Sean Fioritto 05:06

Of just reading and reading and reading and reading, and taking notes. And really understanding and whittling down and figuring out my audience, and figuring out, so the thinking, the benefit of that amount of time spent deliberately going through a process like that is that at some point, I became so in-tune with the audience that I could identify, and this is gonna pay off for you, Michele, this, this little story, because this feeds into like, how do you sell it. At some point, it meant that I could tell when a thing that I was, like a piece of content marketing that I was working on, was going to resonate very strongly with my audience and be worth the effort, if that makes sense. And it didn't really take much. Like, after I got done with that much amount of research, it was sort of, like, pretty trivial for me to come up with ideas for content that I could write that I knew people were gonna just eat up. And so that's, that's how I started building my, building my mailing list. And then that's how I eventually, Colleen, to your question, I came up with Sketching With CSS, which it was a solution to a pain point that I'd identified in my audience, which at that point was web designers.

Colleen Schnettler 06:37

How big did your mailing list grow?

Sean Fioritto 06:39

I have 20,000 people on my mail list.

Colleen Schnettler 06:41

20,000?

Michele Hansen 06:42

Holy guacamole.

Sean Fioritto 06:46

Yeah. So like I said, I got really good. No, no, no.

Michele Hansen 06:51

I've got like, 200 people on my mailing list, or like, 220. And like, for context, that's like, 200 more people than I ever expected to have on the mailing list, and hearing, like, 20,000 feels very far from, from 200.

Sean Fioritto 07:10

Yeah, well, let me say something that will hopefully be more reassuring. The, Amy and Alex, for example, they've been running 30x500, for years, and I think their mailing list is just now approximating, like 20,000 or so. And like, the, they have been making so much money with that course with a significantly smaller mailing list. And that's a really, like, high value product, too. So anyway, if it makes you feel any better, I really think they only have like, a couple 1000 people on their mailing list for a long time. And then, for me, I launched pre-sales of my book, at that point, my, I think I only had, boy, I used to, I used to have this memorized. But like, it's been so long now. But I think I only had like, it was less than 2000 I think. I think. So, and even then, I don't think you need that. I know people that have launched with much smaller lists than that, and, and it was fine. Because the people that are on your list now guarantee it, your, will be very interested in, in buying the book. You know, that'd be like a low, low barrier to entry, assuming like, your mailing list is one of the ways that you're thinking of selling the book.

Michele Hansen 08:26

Yeah, I guess. That's not a good answer. But like, I, I, I actually, I admit, I'm a little bit like, wary to kind of hit it too hard. Like, I would probably send out like, like, if I did a pre-sale, which I guess I should. Actually, I had someone a couple days ago, who has been reading the drafts, who actually I think is also a 30x500 student in the past, say that they wanted to, like, pre-buy the book and asked me how to do it. And I was like, that's a great question. I will figure that out. And like, so maybe do that, and then maybe one more when, like, the book comes out? Um, yeah, cuz, so I've been thinking about the newsletter as a way to draft the book because I find writing an email to be a lot easier than, like, staring at a blank cursor just, you know, blinking at me. And I guess I haven't really, like, and like, people signed up for it to read the draft of the book, so I guess I almost feel bad like, using it for sales too much. Like you know, I want to let people know that the book exists, but like, I don't want to. I don't know, does that.

Sean Fioritto 09:45

So, it's very considerate of you to think about that.

Michele Hansen 09:52

Another way of saying that another, also a way to not make any money off of this.

Sean Fioritto 09:57

Well, yeah, that, but also, it's kind of inconsiderate of you to not be thinking about all the people that really, really, really want to buy it and also would like to read anything that you're writing right now. Like, you're just completely leaving them out there to dry. And there are definitely people like that on your mailing list. So, they're like, there's like, some people on your mailing list are not going to be interested in your content if you're sending it too much, or, or just in general, really lightly interested in what you're writing about, or mistakenly signed up for your mailing list, which at this point, you probably don't have that problem. So like, to some extent, that's always the case, and it used to bother me a lot. I would send an email, and sales emails especially would result in bigger unsubscribes after every email, because you know, your little email tool tells you like, can, you know, so nice of it to tell you like, this many people unsubscribed after you sent this email. And it's always a big jump after like, a sales email. That used to bother me a lot. But then I started, kind of watching even my own behavior, and you probably do the same, and you probably like, look forward to some emails from some people that hit your inbox from some newsletters that you're looking forward to, and you'd very much like them to send you more. And then there's other people where you're like, well, I signed up for that, like, a couple years ago, and I just am not thinking about that anymore. And I need, like, to like, whittle down my content. So you unsubscribe. So then you become that unsubscribe number on the other end of the person sending the email, but like, you weren't annoyed, you didn't mind. It was just like, time to move on. And that's usually the case. So I think people can just unsubscribe as long as it's easy. I would literally put it at the top of my emails. So like, because I would send emails very infrequently. I was not disciplined about that. And I still don't think that that's a problem. But the, but because I sent them infrequently I put at the top like, hey, you know, you signed up for this, because you probably read this thing I wrote. You weren't interested in the book, whatever, if this is not for you anymore, just unsubscribe, like, first thing. So that always made me feel better about sending emails. And also, I don't know, I think that's the right thing to do so people just know, like upfront, that you know, oh, okay, there's the easy to find unsubscribe button when they're done. And then that's fine.

Michele Hansen 12:26

We did that for Geocodio once, like, I want to say it was like a year or two ago, and our lists had been like, super disorganized. And like I think we had, we were sending stuff like, we send like one or two marketing emails a year from MailChimp. And then we also had Intercom, and those things didn't sync up. And so like, sometimes people would unsubscribe in intercom and then like, not be unsubscribed in MailChimp, or like vice versa. And then, since we didn't send a lot of email, we used MailChimp's pay as you go. And then they just like, shut down their page and go option a couple of years ago, even though we had a ton of credit, which was a little annoying. And, and then, so like, the next time, and I think we migrated over to Mailcoach. And so the next time we send out an email, we actually like for some reason, we were like, there's probably a lot of people on this who have meant to unsubscribe. And so at the very top of the next email, we put an unsubscribe link and we also put a link to delete their account. And like, a bunch of people did it, but then our number of people who were unsubscribing later on like, went like, way down. So it was like, ripping off the band aid basically.

Sean Fioritto 13:36

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think like, I don't know, when people unsubscribe from Geocodio, at this point, it doesn't like, break your heart anymore, I'm guessing. Right?

Michele Hansen 13:45

No, I mean, we're like, we're kind of like jumping into something that has been very much on my mind, but I hadn't been wanting to admit that it was there and just trying to like, pretend that it's not there, which is all the dealing with rejection around either, you know, people being mad that they were being sold to or negative reviews. And I like, you know, it sounds like you kind of have a process for, like, accepting those feelings.

Sean Fioritto 14:19

It used to bother me a lot.

Michele Hansen 14:22

Like, yeah.

Sean Fioritto 14:24

Yeah, it used to bother me a lot. There are two things that I hated. I hated frontpage Hacker News, and I hated getting angry emails.

Michele Hansen 14:33

Oh.

Sean Fioritto 14:35

I also got creepy, tons of creepy emails. Once you get, like, past a certain threshold and the number of subscribers you have, the creepiness factor increases. Yeah. Yeah. But the, but I got used to all of that. I just realized, like, there's just some percentage of people that are just angry right now or whatever, like, whatever they're going through. And I know that, like, I am very carefully crafting things such that the most, most of my content is not self-serving, most of it is directly a result of research that tells me that this is a problem that people are having, and now I'm helping you. So I'm like, I never feel bad about those, and then even the sales emails, I started to not feel bad about those, too, because I'm like, this is also a thing that's helping you. But that took a while to get to. I mean, honestly, it did. And it got worse when it became my only source of income, which added extra, extra feelings. But yeah, there's a lot of feelings to like, get through. And now I have just developed more of a thick skin, you know. Like, I'm not terrified of having a super popular article anymore, or, you know, stuff like that. That doesn't, that doesn't bother me anymore. I think it just came with time, just like with you and Geocodio. I mean, I'm sure you are used to like, some fluctuations of revenue, which probably bothered you a lot at the beginning, but now, not so much. I mean, I'm just, I'm guessing, but that seems, you know, I'm sure there's some things they're that you've got a thick skin about now.

Michele Hansen 16:12

Oh, my gosh. I mean, for years, every time a plan downgrade came through, like every time it was like a punch in the gut. Like, and yeah, I think now that I, I guess I trust the revenue more, I'm not as impacted by it. It's more like, oh, I wonder, like, why that was. Like, did their project end, or like, you know, like, what happened? But yeah, in the beginning, especially when it was first our like, when it, when it became my, like, full time income. I mean, as, as you said, like, that is really painful. Like, I'm curious, like, so you, so like, when did you start writing the book?

Sean Fioritto 1705

Let me think, like, like the year, or a timing, like, in terms of the timeline?

Michele Hansen 17:12

Whichever one you want to go with.

Sean Fioritto 17:15

Yeah, I can't remember the year cuz it was a while ago. It was like, eight years ago.

Michele Hansen 17:19

Oh, wow. Okay. So you started,

Sean Fioritto 17:22

I think it was 2013 is when I started. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 17:24

You did the, sounds like you did 30x500 first, right?

Sean Fioritto 17:30

Yeah, I had the, I had started writing the book before 30x500. But like I said, I was ,I was following her process already at sort of reverse engineered it. And then I felt like I just owed her the money for the, for the course. So, plus I wanted to meet her, so.

Michele Hansen 17:44

Yeah, so you started like, the research process basically, like, like 30x500 like, was only one part of your, like, research. Like, cuz you said you had sort of, you had figured out what her process was based on the blog posts and whatnot before you took the course. Yeah.

Sean Fioritto 18:00

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 18:01

Okay.

Sean Fioritto 18:02

Yeah, and at that point, I had already generated the research I needed to see, to choose Sketching With CSS as a, as a product. I pretty much had, I think I had a landing page. I hadn't done pre-sales yet, but I was, I was gearing up for that.

Michele Hansen 18:17

You are so organized.

Colleen Schnettler 18:19

Michele, do you have a landing page?

Michele Hansen 18:22

There is a website.

Colleen Schnettler 18:24

Okay, I didn't know.

Michele Hansen 18:26

I haven't told anyone about it because I talk about,

Colleen Schnettler 18:29

Your secret website.

Michele Hansen 18:30

I actually have two. I thought of the domain name, or like, the name for it in the shower, and then I like, immediately like, ran for the computer to see if it was available. And I actually bought two, and then I think we put, like, a book, oh my god, I just typed it wrong.

Colleen Schnettler 18:55

This is the part where you tell us what it is.

Michele Hansen 18:57

There's nothing on it, and actually, if I say it now then we have to have something on it by,

Colleen Schnettler 19:01

Well, there's no way to pressurize a situation than to tell us right now.

Michele Hansen 19:06

So okay, it is DeployEmpathy.com. Okay, okay, crap, now I have it out. I don't even know how I'm going to sell it. Okay. So um, and I think I have another one, too. But yeah, we have like, a very basic like, WordPress template on it. Like, it's not, it's not, okay. While I was trying to figure it, so like, people keep asking me like, oh, like, when's your book coming out? And I'm like, I have no idea. I have never done this before. I don't know what steps are ahead of me. So, okay, so you started writing the book while you were doing research concurrently, and then how, and you were also,

Sean Fioritto 19:48

Oh, sorry, there's two types of research.

Michele Hansen 19:50

Okay.

Sean Fioritto 19:51

So, we could clarify that. There was my audience research and understanding the pain that I was solving, and then there's the research about the book. I didn't have to do as much research about the book. I mean, I already, like, the type of book I ended up writing, I already had, you know, the expertise I needed to write that book. So yeah, I was, audience research was already done by the time I was writing Sketching With CSS. So I wasn't doing research like that while writing the book.

Michele Hansen 20:16

Okay. And then you also had the landing page up, and you started building your list while you were doing this research and writing phase. Okay, so how long did it take you from, like, the time that you had the idea for the book to when people could, like, buy and download the book, like, just like, the big picture? Like, how long did that process take you?

Sean Fioritto 20:45

Well, I mean, keep in mind, that ton of the work was while I was still full time working, in theory.

Michele Hansen 20:56

I mean, I guess I am, too, right? Like, this is not my full time thing.

Sean Fioritto 21:00

Yeah, but I think like, from, from, from research to launch, like, book is done, it was like, in the four to six month range.

Michele Hansen 21:14

Okay. Okay. So I think I started at like, the end of February with the newsletter, and it's May, so that's like, yeah. I do feel like I'm doing a little bit of, I think what we have termed Colleen does, of putzing in the code garden, rather than selling things or doing marketing or whatnot. And I am totally doing that with my manuscript, I guess you could call it. Sounds so fancy. And just like, moving commas around and like, totally procrastinating on making images for it, like totally, totally procrastinating on that. Okay, so it took you like, four to six months to get to that point.

Sean Fioritto 21:59

Yeah, there was a, there was a launch in between there.

Michele Hansen 22:02

So when was the like, so was your pre-sale your launch? Or like, how does that work?

Sean Fioritto 22:08

You could do lots of launches.

Michele Hansen 22:11

This is like, the part that is like, just sort of like, you know, in my head, it's like step one, write book, like, step two of question, question question, and step three, profit. Like that's sort of where I am right now.

Sean Fioritto 22:24

I feel like you're already doing most of the things that I would do. The, the one thing, so alright. So you're, you're working in public, so you're getting interest via Twitter. You're writing to your mailing list. You're doing the right thing, which is writing content for your book that, you know, is also useful to your mailing list, like, independently. Like, like getting double bang for your buck is smart when you're doing this kind of business. So you're keeping your list warm enough. People are, you're building anticipation, people are telling you you're building anticipation, because they're like, hey, when do I get to buy this book? So, you know, you're basically doing all the things. As, you know, from from my perspective, looking in, it seems like you're just accidentally or intuitively doing the right, doing the right stuff. The thing that's missing between like, what you are doing and what I did is probably, I would press pause on book writing and do specific content marketing things just to build my mailing list.

Michele Hansen 23:37

But I love putzing in the code garden.

Sean Fioritto 23:39

And I'm not, I'm not, sorry, I didn't mean to say that as like, you should do that. That's what I would, as in like, I was doing that. And I don't know,

Michele Hansen 23:48

And you wrote, like, a successful book and sold it, and it was your full time job for a period of time. So you're kind of here because you're good at this and because I need to be told these things.

Sean Fioritto 23:59

Right. Well, I'm just saying what I did. But it's, it's really ultimately you get to pick and choose what you do. The, you know, I actually happen to very much enjoy the process of coming up with content that I knew would be popular and writing it and sharing it everywhere and doing all that stuff. And also, I knew I needed to because I was going to try and make this my full time living, so I'm like, I need more people on my mailing list. So that was pretty important to me based on the goals I was trying to achieve. The, the other thing is though, like, even with a small mailing list, your book as the, a lot of book sales are gonna come from word of mouth. Like, I sort of forced the book onto the scene. But like, it's not a, the Sketching With CSS is not like a, while the marketing theme is, like, the marketing message at the time, it doesn't connect anymore because the world has moved on from that phase of web development. But like, while people could read the marketing, the landing page and connect really strongly, and, you know, be interested in the book, the book didn't really lend itself well to word of mouth, because it's not like, it was not like a, oh, you should read this, like, it's this lightweight, like reading recommendation. It's got to be, you've got to be like, ready to commit to learning a bunch of code. So it's like, there's like, a smaller group of people at any given time that are like, at that point, does that make sense? Versus your book, it's, it seems like, it's like a higher level of value, like, it's a more abstract, then like, here are the, learn this code. Here's how to type in Git commands, here's how to do that. You know, like, I was really like, down at the, like, here's what you're gonna be doing day to day in your job. And you're giving them the same message, but like, in a way that can be, that is at like, a higher level, it's maybe easier to read, you know, in your spare time. It's like a business book, has the same qualities of, like, successful business books. So, I think that you may not have to do any of the content marketing stuff that I was doing is what I'm getting at, because, like, I can already tell, I'm ready to read your book, and I'm ready to recommend it to people, because it does it solve, like, a question that people have all the time, and a problem people have, and they're like, oh, I wish I knew how to, you know, talk to my customers more effectively, or understand, you know, the types of customers that are gonna be interested my products, or what problems they're having, etc, etc, right? Customer research, that kind of thing. That is a topic of conversation that comes up a lot in my communities that I hang out in, and so, you know, your book’s gonna be like, at-hand for me to recommend. That's, that's what I suspect. That's my, that's my theory for your book.

Michele Hansen 27:00

Yeah, I guess, I mean, there's parts of it, definitely.

Sean Fioritto 27:02

It's also got a catchy name.

Michele Hansen 27:04

Hey, I thought of it in the shower, and then I ran to register the domain, which is exactly what you are supposed to do when you have a good idea for something right? Like, this is the process.

Colleen Schnettler 27:13

Definitely.

Michele Hansen 27:13

Like,

Sean Fioritto 27:14

You already had a book though, so it's different. You're like, I'm gonna write this book called Deploying Empathy. And you already, like, wrote it. So I think you're good to go.

Michele Hansen 27:20

Yeah, actually I didn't have a name for a while. Okay, so, so something else I have, like, a question on, which you kind of just sort of touched on with that about, like, super practical elements. So some, some of it is you can, you can definitely sit down and, and you could probably read it in a sitting or two. But then there's, there's the stuff that's more like a toolbox with all of the different scripts, which, by the way earlier, when you were saying like finding the type of content that people are really hungry for like, that, like, those scripts are the thing that people are the most excited about. The problem is, there's only like, so many sort of general scenarios. So I've basically written the main ones, but, so something I noticed with your site, which is SketchingWithCSS.com, just for everybody's reference, so you have the book plus code, which is like, your basic option for $39. And then you have one with the video package for 99. And then you have another one with more stuff for 249. And then there's one with like, all the things for your team for 499. And so, something that people have asked me for is like, like, there's the book piece, and then there's also, people want to be able to easily replicate the scripts so that they can then like, use them to build their own scripts off of it, and like, modify them and whatnot. So people have said, like, well, that could be like a Notion Template, like, bundle that it's sold with, or Google Docs or, or whatever. And so I've been like, kind of like, how do you sell the book with this like, other bundle? And like, can you also do that, like if you sell like a physical book to like, if I did it through Amazon, like, could I also sell a Notion Template bundle or something? Like, I just, I'm kind of, that sort of like, something that's on my mind is like, I'm not really sure how to approach that. And I'm wondering if you could kind of like, talk through your approach to creating like, different tiers, and what you provided at those different tears.

Sean Fioritto 29:33

Mm hmm. Right. So, at the time, I know, I have a more sophisticated thought process about it now, but the, when I did the initial set of tiers, it was because Nathan Barry told me that I should have three tears because it tripled his revenue. So I was like, oh, okay.

Michele Hansen 29:53

I mean, that's a good reason.

Sean Fioritto 29:55

Like, we just happened to be at the bacon biz. That was the other person that I was, I bought his book. So here's the thing I always do, I would buy people's books that way I could email them.

Michele Hansen 30:08

Is that a thing? Like, if you buy someone's book, like, do you have a license to email them?

Sean Fioritto 30:13

Well, you get one. You get one email. And as long as it's, you know, not creepy. That's, that's the main thing. But yeah. So we had a bake in this conference in real life, and then, yeah, that's what he, that's what, he told me that I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. I think Patrick McKenzie was there, too, and he said something similar. So I was like, oh, because they did a landing page tear down for me at that conference. That's right.

Michele Hansen 30:36

Wow. Nice.

Sean Fioritto 30:37

Yeah. So anyway, so I did the, I did that, because somebody told me to. And in fact, it's true. Like, if I hadn't done that, you could just see like, the way the purchases ended up that like, that absolutely almost tripled my revenue. So,

Michele Hansen 30:53

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Sean Fioritto 30:54

Which is a big deal for books, because it's not like, yeah, anyway. The, the, the way, the way you were talking about it, though, because there's another way to think about it. I was thinking about in tiers with the book, but another way to think about it is in terms of a product funnel. So your, your book could be super cheap, and it is the entry point into your product, your little product universe. Because like, you're, what you're doing is naturally, because you're literally writing a book about this, listening to your customers and understanding that they have other like, you're really understanding what their, their pain is, and you see that there's different ways that you could solve it for them, right? Those things as a product. So you could bundle that stuff into your book, you could create tiers, like I did. And maybe it does make sense, we talk about this more, but like there's, there's, there's different ways to do tiers with books that, that makes sense, that aren't exactly what I did. But also, like what you're describing is basically different courses. So let's, so, like, people that run these info product businesses, like, what you end up with is like, you've got this world of courses, and you've got this world of content. And people come in from like, search, you know, or whatever channel that you've worked on, usually it's like an SEO channel, like through your content. And then they enter your automated marketing system. And then the first thing they do is buy probably your cheapest thing, your book, and then you're moving them on to the next level into your email marketing system to get them to start looking at, you know, your course, which is like a more in-depth version of the book, or whatever. So anyway, I'm just sort of sketching out, like how, how these content marketing businesses tend to work. So you kind of end up in their little universe and then you just get bounced around all their various email automation. If you've been in anybody's like, any internet famous person's little, like, email world, you'd probably notice eventually, if you're there for long enough, like, I already got that email. And so anyway, so let's there's like a different way of looking at it. You don't have to do tiers. You could just sell your book, you know, digital version, here's the hardback version, you make it cheap, and then, you know, lots of people, lots of people read it. And then you, turns out that this is still really interesting to you, you still like solving people's problems and you're like, you know what, like, I should release like, some recordings of customer interviews as like, examples or whatever, you know, and then you peel that off into a different product and you sell that, and slowly you build up this machine, basically. Also the guy to talk to would be Keith Perhac, who's in our group, too.

Michele Hansen 33:51

Oh, yeah, I should totally talk to Keith.

Colleen Schnettler 33:53

Did he write a book?

Sean Fioritto 33:55

Yeah, he did but also his, his job before running SegMetrics was with the internet famous person that you guys know of that ran these huge content marketing programs and had this whole product funnel thing and all this stuff that I was talking about. So Keith is like, expert on that topic.

Michele Hansen 34:15

I guess I don't know if I want to go that direction just now because I do, you know, I do have a job. Um, so I'm, yeah.

Sean Fioritto 34:28

You could just be like Amy.

Michele Hansen 34:33

So, I, yeah, so I guess I have to think about that, and thinking about like, like, where to price it and those bundles and whatnot. Actually, I have another super like, mechanical question. So, between the time you announced the pre-order, and when you, like, people could actually like, to like, first of all, like, what was the incentive for somebody to pre-order? And then, what was the time from like, when you announced the pre-order to when you like, people could actually get it? Like, how far in advance do you do a pre-order? And what do you like, do you have to give people something?

Sean Fioritto 35:10

Yeah, I can't, I actually can't remember. I can't remember, what did I do? I did a pre-order. I can't even remember if I gave him the book or not. I don't think you have to. Some people just buy it ready to go. I think I, I probably did give ‘em like, here's everything I got so far, and it's gonna change, but, you know, here's that. Here's what I've got. And, you know, whatever version, like, people don't care if it's like, not even formatted or, you know, give me everything you got. Because the people that are going to do that are ready to just devour it. And then also, some of them might be like, I'm not wanting to, I don't want it right now, but I had a discount, right? So there's like, the pre-order, it's like a little bit cheaper to buy it now. Because I knew I was going to be selling it at like, as, like, a $40 product. So the discount, I think I sold it initially for pre-orders for like, 29 bucks, or maybe less even. Yeah, maybe like 20 bucks or something like that.

Michele Hansen 36:08

Okay, and it's 30 now.

Colleen Schnettler 36:11

Yeah, it probably makes sense for you, as someone who, I'm using it and referencing it, even though it's not done, because those scripts, like you were saying, are so valuable to people.

Michele Hansen 36:20

Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess I sort of like, feel like everybody already has everything. I mean, reality like, they, they don't because everything has been changed so much. But I guess I need to like, set it up, too. Like, I need to decide on a platform to use to actually sell it.

Sean Fioritto 36:42

Oh, I didn't do that at first.

Michele Hansen 36:45

Okay. So did you just use Stripe?

Sean Fioritto 36:47

I think I used PayPal. I was literally like, here's my email, send PayPal money there. And then I sent it to ‘em.

Michele Hansen 36:55

How did you deal with that and sales tax and stuff?

Sean Fioritto 36:57

I don't think that existed. But also I would have just ignored it.

Michele Hansen 37:03

Okay, yeah, I guess I'm in the EU, so I kind of can't.

Sean Fioritto 37:08

It's the wild west out here.

Michele Hansen 37:12

'Murica.

Sean Fioritto 37:15

No, I had a really bad tax bill the first year because I ignored all of that stuff.

Michele Hansen 37:19

Oh, okay, so you're not advising. This is not financial advice.

Sean Fioritto 37:26

I'm just saying what I did. I'm not saying you should do that.

Michele Hansen 37:30

This may or may not be good advice, what you are hearing, just so you know. All of this may be bad advice. Okay, so I basically,

Sean Fioritto 37:39

I got audited, too, actually. I forgot about that. So don't, yeah, definitely don't do that. Being audited is not as bad as it sounds, it turns out but that's, anyway, that's a different story.

Michele Hansen 38:55

I was, I feel like I should do a, like a talk hear, hear, and be like, well, on that massive disappointment, thank you and good evening. Um, so okay. So you know, I feel, see, I feel like I look at you and you're like, you, like, have your stuff together about selling a book. And the fact that you had all like, you had these fears about, like, getting rejected by it, and like, put all this into it, and you did it without having done it before. And, you know, made mistakes, looking back, that you are now helping me not replicate. Um, I feel, I feel a little, I feel a little better about this. And also, I guess I have a deadline now, which is five days from now to have the website functional. So, that's fun.

Colleen Schnettler 38:51

You're welcome. I'm here for you, Michele. Just push you over the cliff.

Michele Hansen 38:56

Like, copy paste content into it, right? Um, I noticed actually that Sean, like, your site has a ton of testimonials, and that's something I have been sort of tepidly starting to collect. Like, I guess I'm a little bit afraid to, like, ask people for testimonials. But I've gotten a couple.

Sean Fioritto 39:17

So what you do is you write them the testimonial, then you email them and you say can I use this as your testimonial? And then they say yes, and then you put it on your page.

Michele Hansen 39:25

That's lower friction than what I've been asking for. Um, but, but that makes sense.

Sean Fioritto 39:32

I mean, I would also peel out, so they said something good in an email and I'd copy it and then change it so it sounded better, and then, can I use this as a testimonial?

Michele Hansen 39:39

Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Fioritto 39:42

I mean, when I say sounds better, I mean, just like copy edit, right?

Michele Hansen 39:45

I mean, I guess, like, we do that with Geocodio. And I think, like, Colleen and I have talked about this how, I guess I've like, gotten over all of these fears with Geocodio, and I'm so much more confident with it. And maybe it's because it doesn't have my name, like, directly on it, or it's just been around for like seven and a half years now. Versus this, I'm like, I'm so much more unsure. Like,

Sean Fioritto 40:07

You haven't done this in a long time.

Michele Hansen 40:08

I never have written a book.

Sean Fioritto 40:12

Well, whatever. Like, you haven't done a launch. Because you can launch anything. You could have launched Geocodio.

Michele Hansen 40:18

Yeah.

Sean Fioritto 40:18

You could've launched it this way, too. But you just haven't done that before. And it's weird, launch is weird because launch is like, everybody, pay attention to me now.

Michele Hansen 40:29

Yeah, I'm just super uncomfortable with that.

Sean Fioritto 40:33

Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's what it feels like. But then when I realized it was, if you're doing it, right, it's not that. It feels like it, but you're not actually making it about you. It's about them. And then for like, a couple days, you know, you gotta be like, here's the product, you can buy it, and you got to be like sending more emails than you normally. Lots of people will unsubscribe. But like I said, those people are not subscribing. Some of them probably hate you, but you know, most of them are probably just unsubscribing because like, they're, turns out, they weren't interested now that they actually see what it is. They're like, oh, no, that's not what I was thinking it was, or whatever. You get used to it, like, you definitely get used to it. I did it for a couple products. And over time, I just didn't care anymore. Like, I absolutely felt like I was doing a good for people. And I know that I was because I didn't get nearly as much. I think that some of my friends who were in that space would tell me that I needed to go harder, you know, like a little more salesy than I was. But anyway, the point is,

Michele Hansen 41:39

The thing is, like, I'm not like, I'm not averse to marketing, I think, I mean, this is something that like, we were actually talking about the other day, like people, like technical people being averse to like, sales and marketing and like, like, I have written the book with this in mind that like, hopefully, like, people will recommend it, like, like an audience of the book is like product leaders and marketing leaders who need to teach their teams how to do this. And so like, that's an audience I'm writing for because if they then they have like, buy the book for like five people, and then if they get a new job, or promotion, or whatever, in two years, and they need to teach the team like their new team how to do it again. Um, and so like, that is like, comfortable for me. But yeah, I guess as you were saying, like, hitting the sales hard is, is a little bit uncomfortable. And I guess I will just have to deal with a couple of days of like, that being awkward and like, doing the whole, like, you know, I don't know, like home shopping network style, like, and here's this book, and you can have it for the low, low price of $29. Plus, all of these bundles. Like,

Sean Fioritto 42:43

So, the thing that, okay, maybe this will help you, but they would help, it helped me, is I just focus on, on the, on the people that are, on your audience, and like your copy and everything is about them. It's about you. You're using, I know you're doing this, right, so you're gonna use the word you in your copy. Like, you never use the word I in your copy, right? So everything is about them. You've done all this research, you know, them, you know, you know, the problems they're facing, you know the pains they're having. And so you could just keep talking about that, talking about that. Launch, then, is then just like, more of those types of emails, like, a higher cadence than you're used to, which is still just about them. And then you're hitting them with like, okay, and now it's here. Like, you're, the whole time you're telling them it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then now it's here, here's what's in it, and you're gonna have these emails that just say, here's everything that's in it, and then here's questions that people might have, email that follows up, and then hey, this is gonna end in like a certain amount of time, follow up and then you got one hour left, you know, email. So you do these, you do this sequence of emails, but like, you have to remember when you're sending those that are the most uncomfortable that some people are really, really excited, and if you don't send them that stuff, they won't buy it and they'll, they'll regret it. Like, there's some people that genuinely are very excited and super thrilled to get those emails.

Michele Hansen 44:03

Can I run a, I have like, a tagline, or not like, a headline I have been throwing around in my head. Can I run it past you?

Sean Fioritto 44:12

Yeah. For an article?

Michele Hansen 44:13

No, for the book, but like, so like, this would be the like, main headline on the site.

Sean Fioritto 44:18

Yeah, yeah.

Michele Hansen 44:21

Your time is too valuable to spend it building things people don't want.

Sean Fioritto 44:27

Perfect. I mean, it's a little wordy, but yeah, like, the concept is perfect.

Michele Hansen 44:32

I will work on the wordiness.

Sean Fioritto 44:36

I mean, it's really, it's good, though. That's perfect.

Michele Hansen 44:38

It's good. I guess it's good enough, right? It's good enough for me to slap a site together in the next, checks watch, five days, and, and get that going.

Sean Fioritto 44:50

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, you could roll with that as an H2 on a landing page. Easy. Yeah. That would be fine the way it is.

Michele Hansen 44:57

Cool. Second image of the book. All right. There's all this stuff I'll have to do, but I guess I'll just be working away at this.

Sean Fioritto 45:04

You know what would be fun for you? I have an archived version of like, my old initial website, if you go to, oh, it doesn't work anymore.

Michele Hansen 45:15

Can I look it up on Internet Archive? Or it's like,

Sean Fioritto 45:19

Probably you can, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't. I used to have it just up so that I could, you could go to the URL. But yeah, so you'd have to go through the Internet Archive. But I had, and I did a, I did a write up on the landing page tear down and discussed screenshots from the, from the old version. It was truly, truly awful. But I sold $7,000 worth of book through it. So,

Michele Hansen 45:40

Can I ask you how much you sold overall? Do you reveal that?

Sean Fioritto 45:44

Yeah, yeah, of course. So it's actually hard to know because the, well, because as I've revealed I'm not fantastic about keeping track of my finances, or I wasn't then, but the, the book, through its lifespan, has made about $150,000.

Michele Hansen 46:06

Whoa.

Sean Fioritto 46:07

And most of that was the first two years because I was really, really actively pushing it. And then it just sort of, like, continued to make sales in dribs and drabs, and now it makes, probably, I don't know, I think I sold $1,000 worth of it last year, which makes sense, because it's pretty out of date at this point.

Michele Hansen 46:28

That'd be interesting to know why people are still buying it.

Sean Fioritto 46:32

Well, because the concept of designing in a browser is still something that people, you know, talk about from time to time. Should designers write code, or should they be using Figma, or at the time, you know, Sketch or Photoshop, I think all my copy is about Photoshop. So, you know, so like, I think that that concept is still valid. My copy is a little dated, the, the tech inside the book is a little, little dated at this point, though, still useful. So yeah, I think that is just the, so that was one of the things that I learned for content marketing was the, so if you want something to be really like, a really big hit, and to sort of like, make the rounds on the internet, you know, just those articles, it's sometimes just like, everybody's reading. The key to those is there has to be, well, there's like three rules. But like, one of the rules is, it has to be something everybody's talking about right now. And so at the time, everyone was talking about should we design in the browser? That was a big point of conversation. I would say now, like a similar level of conversation would be people talking about how much they hate single page apps, like in the Ruby on Rails community and trying to like, get off of that, right. So like, if you wrote a book about building single page app equivalents in Hotwire or something like that, that would probably resonate really, really well with that community right now. And you'd get a lot of free buzz when it's, people are already talking about it. So that's the problem. I think that that's why, like, hardly anybody's buying it now. But still, people are talking about that. So you get like, a little bit. And then also, I have all these marketing automated things that are still running. So like, I have some content that I accidentally wrote that has a lot of Google traffic, right? Like, I didn't accidentally write it, but I accidentally, like, did some search engine optimization on it. And so I get quite a bit of traffic from those pages, and then they end up signing up for, like, my tutorial things. And then they're in my little email automation thing that I set up, and eventually they get a pitch and then they, and then they buy. So there's some trickle down of that.

Michele Hansen 48:50

That makes sense. So, I guess, and this will be my last question. Um, is there anything else I should know about selling a book?

Sean Fioritto 49:02

Yeah, you don't have to do any of the things that I said, like. Like, well I think, I think you're already like doing all the right things. I was pushing really hard to make it my business. And so that, and frankly, once it got to the point where it was my business, that was a distraction for me. It made it hard, harder for me to stay relaxed and focused on doing the things that were the best for my customers, like, once money became this, like concern. So to me, you have this advantage of like, you don't have to, you don't have to worry about that. Like, each one of the things that I did, like it feels like you should bone up a little bit on how to do a launch, though that's not too difficult. You don't have to do like, the greatest job ever, and you maybe even already know how to do that to some extent. But other than that, I don't know, like 200 people on the mailing list, probably enough already. And you'll get more as people are more and more interested. And, you know, do you have an email subscribe on any of your content at all that you've written?

Michele Hansen 50:16

So it's all in review, so I think it all has a subscribe link at the bottom.

Sean Fioritto 50:22

Perfect.

Michele Hansen 50:23

I think I have one on Twitter, like, on my pinned tweet is a subscription to the newsletter.

Sean Fioritto 50:30

Yeah, yeah. Cuz like, by the time I was doing it full time, I mean, the number of, I was doing so many other things that we didn't even talk about, for marketing, which it's like, we don't, we don't even need to go there. Because you don't, you don't need to do any of that stuff. I think you're doing everything right. And I would think carefully about, like, what your goals are with the book, and, for both you, you and for your customers, and then kind of size it right size it accordingly. And don't feel guilty about not doing all the right marketing things, because the right marketing things, just as long as you're focused on your audience and the people that are going to be reading your book, you're doing the right thing.

Michele Hansen 51:13

Hmm. Well, thank you for that, like, boost of encouragement.

Sean Fioritto 51:19

You're welcome.

Michele Hansen 51:21

I guess to wrap up, we should mention, by the way, that you have your own show. And you're actually getting something off the ground right now. Do you want to talk about that for a second?

Sean Fioritto 51:34

Yeah. So my friend Aaron Francis and I, we have a company called Hammerstone, that's at Hammerstone.dev. Our podcast is, is linked to there on the home page. We have, like you guys, it's kind of like a ride along podcast, and we just do our weekly check in we record it as a, as a podcast. And what we're working on is a drop in component for Laravel. The component allows you, allows your users to build, dynamically build queries, which they can, you could then use to display reports, etc. to them. Yeah, so that's, that's our new thing that we're working on. That's a new thing for me. I should probably have a whole other podcast and invite you on, ask you about how I should be marketing my software business.

Michele Hansen 52:30

So by the way, so, the podcast is really good. We finished it on a road trip a couple of months ago, and you should totally start at the beginning because, like so, so yes, like, the software part is interesting. But there's this whole other element that Aaron's wife is pregnant with multiples. And the podcast started in like, December, right?

Sean Fioritto 52:52

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 52:53

So, and she was due in April. And so there's this like, whole, like, tension of it of like, oh, my god, like, are they gonna get to launch stuff before, like, Aaron goes from being not a parent to the parent of multiple children overnight? Like, is it like, is it gonna happen? And I found myself as I was listening, I was like, oh, my god, like, like, it really added this element of suspense that I have not felt while listening to another podcast, and it made it very enjoyable.

Sean Fioritto 53:24

You know what's frustrating. I just realized your audience actually overlaps with the audience of my product. And I just did a horrible job of pitching it. I was like, I could just sort of half-ass explain it here. But,

Michele Hansen 53:34

All you Laravel people, like, just check it out.

Sean Fioritto 53:37

Yeah, that's good.

Michele Hansen 53:40

Just take my word for it. This has been really fun, Sean. Thank you so much for coming on.

Sean Fioritto 53:50

You're welcome.

Michele Hansen 53:51

I really appreciate all of your advice. And I, I don't know what you call the, the anti-advice. You know, don't ignore taxes. And encouragement and perspective, that really means a lot to me.

Sean Fioritto 54:08

You're welcome. Thanks for having me on.

Michele Hansen 54:11

This is awesome. So if you guys liked this episode, please leave us a review on iTunes. Or let us know that you listened on Twitter, and we'll talk to you next week.

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Michele Hansen 00:00

Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. We recently refreshed the Geocodio website, and it was really helpful how Oh Dear alerted us to broken links and made it clear what we needed to fix. Broken links are bad for SEO, and so I really appreciate those alerts from Oh Dear. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Colleen Schnettler 00:28

Good morning, Michele.

Michele Hansen 00:30

Hey, how are you?

Colleen Schnettler 00:32

Good. How are things in Denmark today?

Michele Hansen 00:36

Well, this week was kind of a challenge, um, because on, I had a super productive writing day on Monday. So I read Kathy Sierra's Badass over the weekend.

Colleen Schnettler 00:52

Oh yeah, I've heard of that book.

Michele Hansen 00:53

I don't know, have you read that?

Colleen Schnettler 00:54

I have not.

Michele Hansen 00:54

Okay, you've read that. Oh, you have not read that.

Colleen Schnettler 00:56

I've not read that.

Michele Hansen 00:57

It's really good. So in so many ways, it's, I think of it as, like, jobs to be done for people who don't know what Jobs To Be Done is and have never heard of that. Like, it's basically like figuring out like, you're not just building a thing for the sake of it. You're building it because somebody wants to do something, and they don't buy it for the sake of it. Like, they want to do something better. And so it's, it's kind of aligned with StoryBrand in that regard. It's like, you know, your user is the hero, not the product. But it's a little bit more, um, it's, I think it's just a different perspective than StoreBrand. It's very, very practical. And it, the whole thing is kind of written like a PowerPoint. There's like, lots of like pictures and comics. Actually my seven year old, like, while I was reading it, she came over and she was like, oh, what are you reading? Like, pictures. So, you know, she wants to learn how to make a product. I'll leave that one laying around. Um, it's really good. Um, but, so I was reading it because some people had mentioned it in the interviews I did as a book that they liked.

Colleen Schnettler 02:05

Okay, great.

Michele Hansen 02:06

And yeah, and, and so I read it just sort of as like, reference material. Um, but actually, it ended up like, helping me kind of have a breakthrough with the book on Monday. Um, and so I spent like, the whole day. Uh, yeah, no, all day Tuesday, actually. I spent the whole day Tuesday writing. I didn't get any writing time on Monday, really. And then Tuesday, at like, four o'clock, I was, um, like, signing on to a Zoom, and then my computer crashed.

Colleen Schnettler 02:35

Oh, no.

Michele Hansen 02:36

Like, died, and crashed and like, gone to join the choir invisible like, is now an ex-laptop, like, just totally got like, it was just restarting itself for like, three days. And,

Colleen Schnettler 02:51

Oh.

Michele Hansen 02:51

So, it is now embarking on a lovely journey to the Czech Republic to be repaired, um, and I did not get a lot done the rest of the week, because it was like, trying to figure stuff out with using the, like, the iPad. Like, it was just, yeah. So, you know, but that's real life, right?

Colleen Schnettler 03:15

Yes, that is real life. So true.

Michele Hansen 03:19

Oh, so how's it, how's it going for you?

Colleen Schnettler 03:23

So I got a lot of time, I blocked out a lot of time this week to work on Simple File Upload, and it gave me great joy. Like, I have to say, you know, it's funny because people are always talking about self-care, and in the mom space, like you always see things like go get a pedicure, and I'm like, my self care is like, six hours alone with my laptop with no one to bother me. Is that weird?

Michele Hansen 03:44

Heck yes.

Colleen Schnettler 03:45

Like, I love that. So like, on Monday, such a weirdo.

Michele Hansen 03:50

It's so true. Like, it's so true. Like, so much of self-care is like, people just wanting to sell you stuff, and like, reality is it's sometimes it's just leave me alone.

Colleen Schnettler 04:01

Right? Just leave me alone. So it was, I really had a great week. I got to spend a good chunk of time implementing this feature request, which was something that I thought would be easy, and ended up taking way longer than I thought. So basically, my uploader uses the default styling that comes with drop zone, DropzoneJS, and so I got a request to allow it to be smaller, like 50 pixels by 50 pixels, which I thought would be no big deal. But it turns out once I started digging into the source, the styles are all pinned to 120 pixels by 120 pixels. So it was like, a huge thing to change this because I basically had to rip out all of the static, you know, statically defined CSS and put in, um, flexible CSS, and it was fun. I mean, it was, it was so cool because it was something I enjoy doing, um, something I don't do a lot. I think one of the huge benefits to building your own product is you get exposed to things you wouldn't do in your day job. Like, every job I've had, I have a front end guy, and I have a CSS guy, and I don't really do that very much. Um, it's not a core skill set of mind. So it was kind of fun to get to dive into it and like, learn some new stuff and, and uh, and to ship it. So that made me happy. That brought me great joy.

Michele Hansen 05:27

It sounds like it did, despite the, the frustration. I'm curious, why did the person need it to be 50 by 50?

Colleen Schnettler 05:35

Avatars. So, so many people are using it as avatars, and using it for avatars, and it's pinned to 140 by one, or 120 by 120, which is big. I mean, you look at it, and you're like uh, it's kind of big for a, um, um, a form factor. So, yeah, that's what that was for

Michele Hansen 05:56

So are we talking about when someone uploads a file, it's turned into that size, or the actual size of the upload, or when they put it on their site?

Colleen Schnettler 06:05

The actual size of the uploader to fit into, so he actually sent me his form, like, sent me a video of his form, which is really cool. So I could see exactly what he was doing. But his product, um, uses like, avatars, and so he has a small little square where he wants, he wants to enable his users to drop in an avatar, and his form was designed in such a way that that had to be a small square, and the styles I had at the time, like, couldn't support that.

Michele Hansen 06:32

Oh, so he wanted the uploader to be the actual size of the sort of finished image that would go up.

Colleen Schnettler 06:40

Yeah, a little bit more like that. Okay. Yeah, so it would, it would be more seamless.

Michele Hansen 06:45

Right, so it implies to his user that the image going there should be 50 by 50, because if he had a huge box, they might think that they could upload a huge image.

Colleen Schnettler 06:54

Yeah. So that was fun.

Michele Hansen 06:56

Gotcha.

Colleen Schnettler 06:56

I enjoyed that. I also, like, came to this epiphany, as I've been talking to people, and when I say it, everyone is gonna be like, that's so obvious. But it just occurred to me yesterday, actually, and I've been a little bit frustrated when I've been talking to people because the things people are looking for, and one are all over the map. I mean, it's, it's completely inconsistent.I haven't been able to find a lot of consistency. But what I realized is, front end developers want all of the direct uploading, and the AWS integration, and all of the magic on the back end. Backend developers do AWS all the time, so they don't really care, but they hate doing design. I don't wanna say hate, that's a strong word, but they don't really like design. So they want the pixel-perfect UI on the front end, which makes sense now why front end developers are asking me like, oh, are you gonna make a headless component? And, you know, am I gonna get my images sized perfectly? And then the backend developers are asking me for theming and things like that. So it's two different, like, it makes sense, but like, for some reason this just clicked. So I kind of need to decide, I think, like, which direction I want to go, because it seems like, like I said, the feature set is not the same, and I'm, there's only one of me, so I can't, I, yeah, of course, I'd like to build out all of these things, but I can't do that right now. Um, so I kind of need to decide which direction I want to go as I continue to build out this feature set.

Michele Hansen 08:33

Yeah, so I'm, I'm curious. It, it sounds like you've heard a lot of different things, uh, from people, which by the way, is like, is totally normal, especially at this point where your reach is, is pretty broad, and you don't you don't have a defined focus. It's, it's normal that you would hear a lot of different things. It doesn't mean you're doing something wrong, like, that's, that's totally expected. But it sounds like if you know you have these two broad categories with different sets of needs, have you like, like, I'm wondering how you might categorize the feedback and suggestions and, and processes you've heard about so far, into those different user types. And then, and then it would be interesting to see if, if one of those groups has a higher propensity to pay versus another or like, I mean, and it might be too broad of a group, like, like, front, like, frontend developers and backend, like, those are those are pretty broad groups, right? Um, but it might, like, like, it might be interesting, or just to think about like, whose needs do you currently serve better?

Colleen Schnettler 09:44

Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely, yeah, I definitely have to dive more into this, um, and think about it. I like the idea of kind of trying to, uh, kind of box the feature set based on the skill set of the user because I really liked the idea of, of who is more likely to pay for it. I mean, that seems relevant for sure, right? That's why I'm here.

Michele Hansen 10:07

It's always a good thing to know, right?

Colleen Schnettler 10:08

It's a good thing to know.

Michele Hansen 10:14

Did you ever get in touch with that, uh, the customer we, I think we have called the whale? The, uh, the one that was like, what was it, like, two or three hundred.

Colleen Schnettler 10:22

This guy is paying me 250 bucks a month, or person, I don't know, I don't want to, but um, this person is paying me 250 bucks a month, and this person has still not cancelled and it's still not using it. I don't, like, I don't know what to expect here.

Michele Hansen 10:36

Alright.

Colleen Schnettler 10:38

I keep expecting a nasty email like, I didn't know I was paying that money. But it's been like, almost six weeks now, I think. So this person has paid that bill at least once. So yeah, no idea. I got nothing. But what I have noticed, so something else we talked about last week was changing my onboarding flow. So I did change the onboarding flow. And, um,

Michele Hansen 11:00

Oh, you had all those people who were like, it like, wasn't clear to them that they would have to pay for the free trial, so they were, Right. Getting through to the email setup, but then bouncing, and it's like, why hold on to their emails if it's not worth anything?

Colleen Schnettler 11:14

Yes, yes. So, I changed that. So, now the signup link dumps you to the pricing page, and then on the pricing page, like, the wording is still kind of rough, but it basically says a credit card is required to sign up for the trial. Um, so that should help me I think get less like, kind of emails I don't need in terms of onboarding.

Michele Hansen 11:38

Oh, you did change that this week.

Colleen Schnettler 11:40

Again, I did that yesterday, so it's too soon to say if, um, what difference that'll make. Like, it might take my signups, but at this point, I mean, it's, it's funny, because like, there's so many things I want to do, and there's just one of me, one of me who has a job. So, um, I, I think I have to let this one go. I have to let the extra email addresses, like, I looked at, this morning before our podcast, and saw all the email addresses of people who bounce at sign up, and I'm like, man, like, someday I might be able to, I realize it's like 15, I mean, just from couple days, it's like 15 people. It's like, I have those email addresses, but I'm just gonna let them go because where I am right now in trying to build this, like, I just don't have the bandwidth to try and hunt down people who might never want to pay me at this point. I need to serve, I think I need to serve the people that are paying me and, like, really focus in, you know, on those, on those folks.

Michele Hansen 12:37

Hmm. I think we, you know, we've talked about it a couple of times how it is just you, and you are one person with a job, and a family, and everything else going on, and you have so many ideas, and I'm curious how you are keeping track of all of those different things that you want to work on. Because it, because it sounds like that, like, mental load of carrying around all of your own ideas and the feedback you're, like, that, like, that, that is a mental load.

Colleen Schnettler 13:14

Yeah, so right now I keep track of all of that in Notion. But you know, I've gone back and forth in Notion. I know, some people love it, and some people hate it, and like, I don't know, like, a couple years ago, maybe a year ago, I really spent a couple days getting a setup I liked and I used it really, really diligently, and then when things get really busy, that's when you should rely on your tasks, you know, on that the most. But yet, I tend to just let it go because you have so many competing priorities. So I do have a list, but do I actually look at that list? No. I mean, I just, I just am like, I should do this thing next. And then I do the thing. But I do have a list so I don't lose like, these ideas.

Michele Hansen 13:59

I think I, like, it might be helpful to try to like prioritize those. And also I remember when we were talking about this last time, you had to do that was like, you know, improve the landing page. And it was something that was actually like, 10 steps deep and it like, wasn't one task, and I want I wonder if that would help.

Colleen Schnettler 14:21

Yeah, being more specific. Um, I do. I do think that would help. I also think,, like, this thing with the, the small styles I mentioned, that ended up taking way longer than I anticipated. So, that's why, like, task management can be challenging, I think because you just, as you know, in software, you just want to have that, you just want to block out like, three days to do whatever you want to do, and it's just sometimes hard to know how long these tasks are going to take. But generally speaking, yeah, breaking them down is, is good. But like, so here's a problem I'm having. Okay, and here's a business idea for anyone listening. You know how Stripe, I know, business idea. Maybe I shouldn't share it, I should just build it. But I don't have time to build anything else. Um, so you know how Stripe provides really cool analytics, like, you log on to Stripe, and I know there's like many, many analytic platforms built on top of Stripe, but even Stripe is nice because you can log on, you can, you know, see what your churn rate is, you can see the lifetime value, you can see all this information about your customers. Heroku has none of that. Like, so I'm not even really tracking people who churn on Heroku. So if you asked me, like, how many people have signed up and then cancelled, I can't even tell you. Like, I mean, if I tried really hard, I could figure it out, but I love how when you sign on to Stripe you, like, get that dashboard right there, like, here's all your information. That would be super cool for Heroku. So, I'm at the point where I'm not even exactly sure because if you churn, I delete your account, so I have to like, go find that information. And of course, of course I say this and every software developer listening is like, yeah, that's so easy to build. Yes, it's so easy to build. So are the other 5000 things I want to do. So to me, like, I know if I was listening to this, I'd be like, well just write that. That's so easy. But um, yeah, I mean, it's such competing priorities. So like, that's something I want to know but not something I have time to build, and what I have, what do I have 20, 20ish, 25ish paying users. With such a low percentage, with such a low number of paying users, it just doesn't seem worth my time right now to really care about that.

Michele Hansen 16:38

I think you just hit on something really important, which is that sometimes building something is much easier than more marketing it and figuring out who needs it and why and pricing it. And, you know, building is not easy in its own right, but there there is a real, like, you're going through this challenge right now, and I mean, to me, it makes sense where that's where your comfort zone is that now you have something going but there are definitely some frustrations with that. That the prospect of going to build something else is sort of a shiny ball that jumps out at you.

Colleen Schnettler 17:25

Oh, totally. And I've given myself a little more permission to do that now that I have paying users, so I know that is a thing. You know, even doing these customer interviews, like, I like people. I like to talk. But before every customer interview, like, I get a little nervous, you know, because it's someone you don't know. You're basically like, cold calling someone asking them for their time and then try not to talk over them. Like, I have just found it to be a really interesting exercise to try and, and do all of those marketing activities. But like I said, this week, when I had my couple days of just coding, like, that's definitely sparks joy. That's my sparks joy place. Like, I love talking to people and meeting people, but I do find that that is harder, and requires a totally different skill set and energy level.

Michele Hansen 18:13

Absolutely. And, and I notice that you said you, you find yourself nervous beforehand. You said you were nervous, and, but there's different reasons for that, like, you're sort of partly afraid that, you know, they're not going to want to talk to you, sort of like a cold calling sense, but also that you're going to talk too much.

Colleen Schnettler 18:33

Okay, this is my thing. So I think that I'm like, if anyone who has met me in person, like, I think I'm good in-person with a one, one-on-one. Like, I think I'm good with, like, getting to know someone and like, developing a connection with someone. But I do that by echoing what you say and by like, just getting excited about whatever you're saying. And when I'm doing these customer interviews, something you and I've talked about a lot is like, don't get overly excited and be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that, or oh, you're totally right. But I like to agree. I don't want to say I like to agree with people, but if I agree with you about whatever you're talking with, my natural inclination is to be, is to, uh, fusibly agree with you, right? That forms our bond as friends, as people, and, you know, I agree with you. And um, so what's hard for me is if you're like, oh my gosh, I hate setting up buckets on AWS. That's a good example, because that has happened. I want to be like, I know, it's the worst, like, CORS configuration. Everyone forgets that. But I'm not supposed to do that in a customer interview. So like, me just being like, oh, tell me more about why you hate setting up buckets on AWS or whatever it is, um, is a challenge.

Michele Hansen 19:50

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. And, you know, I almost sometimes find myself having double tracks of thinking in my head, like, when someone says something that gets me really excited, like, um, I'll have, I'm like, oh my god, yes. So good. And then you have to be like, can you tell me more about what you find difficult about working with those buckets? Because the thing that you want to find out in the interview is not just that they think it's difficult, but why it's difficult from their perspective, and it's going to be difficult for different reasons from your perspective. And the point is not to build a shared bond over the fact that it's difficult. It's to understand their perspective on it, which may be similar to yours, but is different. But I mean, but it's also, it's normal to get excited, you know, I was, I was listening to an episode of Hidden Brain a couple of weeks ago, where the linguist Deborah Tannen was being interviewed, and she was talking about how people from different regions in the US have different conversation styles. So, people from the Northeast, which includes me, we will talk over other people as a way of showing excitement and engagement with what they're saying.

Colleen Schnettler 21:06

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 21:06

And that is a way of being involved in the conversation, versus somebody from the Midwest or from California, like, they might have to wait and pause naturally before the other person stops speaking in order to share their own perspective on it. And apparently, like, you know, I was, I was talking to someone who sort of studies cross-cultural communication, and they were saying that the way you know, so, so a Californian may interpret that how someone from New York speaks is interrupting. But somebody from Japan may interpret that the way that people from California speak is interrupting.

Colleen Schnettler 21:43

Right.

Michele Hansen 21:44

So all of these things are relative, but I think that kind of conversation style, like I especially find that, like, that, that took me years to tamp down. And I think for me, like, I didn't start tamping that down when I first started doing interviews. Like, that process happened, you know, once I moved from Boston to DC, and you know, that with people from, from the south and the Midwest more who are, who do not use that sort of excited, um, way of talking over people to show engagement. It's very, very different. Like, having people tell me that I was rude forced me to kind of reevaluate that. But of course, if I, if I talk to somebody from New York or whatever, like we're excited and talking over each other, and it's so fun and chaotic, in a way that I just can't do with someone from, you know, Washington State, for example.

Colleen Schnettler 22:38

Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that's true. And I definitely think it's a skill and, you know, I'm working on it and, uh, trying to learn it. But it's definitely different, like, whole different skill set and energy level than working on features, or working on code.

Michele Hansen 22:55

Yeah. And sometimes I find it helpful to remind myself and other people that I'm trying to teach this to is that it's helpful to try these things out in conversations with people. Like, so you might normally start relating to someone, but to try this out just, just to get used to it, but then you don't have to change your conversation style, like, in a social setting. Like, there's nothing, there's nothing that says that one style is intrinsically more valid than another. Like, just because there might be relative differences doesn't mean that one is any better and that there's anything wrong with the way you talk, but it can be helpful to try this out in a social setting at first, just so it feels a little more natural when you're talking to a customer.

Colleen Schnettler 23:41

Yeah, that is a great idea, and I will continue to practice. It's good to practice on your kids, because they talk a lot anyway. So I feel like, at least mine do. I've been practicing on the kids.

Michele Hansen 23:56

One of my favorite references from my book, actually, is the book, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and How to Listen So Kids Will Talk, because it's technically a book on parenting, but really, there's so much more to it. And especially for people who find this is really, really counterintuitive and strange to them, I think it's probably because they were spoken to differently as a child, and this kind of way of just, you know, validating what someone is saying and, um, you know, it's, may not come may not come naturally, but, but it can be learned.

Colleen Schnettler 24:34

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 24:34

How do you try it out on your kids? I'm curious.

Colleen Schnettler 24:37

Like, when they tell me something I've tried, literally do it. Like they'll tell me something, I'm like, well, tell me more about like, why this was a problem with Jimmy, or why do you think, you know, like, I'm just trying to be like, cool, calm and collected, which I mean, I mostly am but I try not to get overexcited when they tell me about what their friends did or whatever. Like, oh, okay, tell me more about that. How did you feel about that? You know, stuff like that.

Michele Hansen 25:02

Yeah. So, before we wrap up for this week, I have to ask, how are the numbers?

Colleen Schnettler 25:08

So, they're flat. Um, I hit 1k. I didn't actually calculate the exact number, but I think I'm right around 1k. I didn't have any new signups this week, and, or I did, but then this is what brought up the churn discussion. I did have a new sign up, but the person on the $85 a month plan churned, which is unfortunate, um, and there's just, that's why I'm like, there's just so much I want to do. But I think right now, I think for this week, okay, all I can do is plan one thing at a, one week at a time, right. I have a long, I have a list of all the things I want to do. But in terms of staying focused, especially with my time constraints, like, this week, my goal is to get a demo on the homepage because I want to increase signups, like, that's what I want to do right now. So, um, that's my goal for this week. Like, another thing that happened was I went to go put the demo on the homepage, and,

Michele Hansen 26:06

It was the CodePen thing, right?

Colleen Schnettler 26:07

Yeah, but I want to pull it off of CodePen. It, yeah, it's on CodePen, which is fine, but I want to pull it off of CodePen and literally put a fully functioning demo, like, drop your file here and I'll alert you the URL or something. But the reason I haven't done that is because I had to write, so I had to write all these monkey patches, because I am still on Rails 6.0, which doesn't support CDN serving a file, so I'm patching through it. So I go to put it on the homepage, and then I was like, well, while I'm, you know, while I'm doing this, I should just upgrade Rails, which is, like, not an insignificant task. So then I spend quite a lot of time going through the upgrade of Rails and, and that's really, I think my struggle is I do need to upgrade Rails because as soon as I upgrade, I can pull out those monkey patches, which gives me warm fuzzies, because I don't like to patch rails if I don't have to, right. And the patches are literally, like, the pull request on Rails 6.1, so I know that they're correct. But still, I'd like to upgrade and pull them out. But, um, you know, that's, that's not insignificant. So then I start, I start upgrading, and then I'm like, oh, well, if I'm going to upgrade, I need more test coverage. So then I start writing more tests. And you see how this just snowballs right? Like, until like, I'm like, oh, wait, I literally wanted to put a thing on the web page, and here I am trying to upgrade the whole application, and like, fill out the rest of the, like, write these other tests, and, oh my gosh. I mean, it's fine. If this was all I did with my life, but I have other things to do.

Michele Hansen 26:40

This feels like the equivalent of like, going to put away a basket of laundry. And then you're like, well, I'm here, I should just organize the sock drawer.

Colleen Schnettler 27:46

Yes.

Michele Hansen 27:47

And then before you know it, you're actually sorting out all of the winter clothes and putting them away and making a donate pile and then bringing out the summer clothes, and then you turn around two hours later, and there is still a basket of laundry sitting on the bed.

Colleen Schnettler 27:59

That's literally it, Michele, that's literally what happened to me. Like it was, I was like, Colleen, stay. And it's not that I'm not focused, like, these are all good things, and it's exactly right. I'm like, well, I'm in here. So I should fix this thing. I did that with the CSS stuff, too. I was like, well, I'm in here, so I'm just going to rewrite the whole preview template because why not, like. That is my struggle.

Michele Hansen 28:20

It sounds like those things, though, like, those things for you are, I feel like soul-nourishing is a little bit of a stretch, but like those are, you know, they spark joy for you.

Colleen Schnettler 28:33

They totally do. I mean, and that's why,

Michele Hansen 28:35

It's very focused, like what like, like, focused kind of attention and like, total, like, flow, right? That, like, that's the word I was looking for. It sparks flow.

Colleen Schnettler 28:47

It totally does. And like, I am amazing at focusing. Like, I can sit down for six hours, and like, not even get up, which is not good for my body, but I mean, it, I love, now I sound like a weirdo, but like, I love that. Like I've love, like, I wasn't kidding, like, give me six hours in my laptop and no Slack and no, like, none of that. Um, because it does spark joy. I can like, I really getting these flow states. And I love like, I love doing it. So I think that is relevant because I think I have been really focused on customer interviews, which is great for my business, but kind of draining for my person. So I think spending some time, like, in that flow state is really good for me because it does spark joy.

Michele Hansen 29:32

You have to recharge your batteries.

Colleen Schnettler 29:34

Yeah, that's exactly, that's a really good way to put it. That's exactly right.

Michele Hansen 29:38

You gotta have like, balance, right, like, you know, I think that's one of the things about being an entrepreneur and especially as sort of a you know, small scale entrepreneur like we are, like, there's so many different things we could be doing at any time. And some of those things will spark joy, and some of those will spark the opposite of joy, and all of them are necessary. And we have to find a balance between them. And, like, I've been talking about this lately as, like the concept of reward work, which is like wok that we let ourselves do when we've gotten through the stuff that we didn't really want to do as much or it was more draining, and it sounds like this kind of, um, I think I dubbed it putzing through the code garden for you is like, and sort of just like, weeding and, you know, cleaning things up and repainting your garden shed, like, those are the things that are like the reward work for you.

Colleen Schnettler 30:40

Yep, totally.

Michele Hansen 30:44

Well, I think that's probably a good place to end today. I feel like this turned into our like, Real Life Episode, like, your numbers are flat. You had somebody churn. My laptop died, and I didn't get anything done, like.

Colleen Schnettler 31:00

Oh, one of those weeks.

Michele Hansen 31:02

Yeah, that's how it goes. Alright, well, we'll talk to you next week. Thank you so much for listening, and, um, we love when you tweet out that you're listening to it, or if anything jumped out to you, so we'll chat with you on Twitter.

View Details

Michele Hansen 00:00

Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by Oh Dear, the website monitoring app. As an Oh Dear customer myself, I particularly like how easy it is to make SLA reports with Oh Dear. They're professional and sleek, and they make it easier for us to service enterprise customers. And I actually requested this feature myself last year, and I'm so delighted with how open to suggestions they are. You can sign up for a free 10 day trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Colleen Schnettler 00:32

So Michele, how has your week been?

Michele Hansen 00:34

It's good. It's good. You know, I was, I was doing some writing this morning, which is funny, I've realized it's, like, my reward work. Like, you know, when I get through all the other stuff, like it's like, oh, like, now I have some writing time. And,

Colleen Schnettler 00:47

That's amazing because I remember being in high school and, like, English, like whenever I had to write a paper, it was literally my least favorite thing to do. So I find that fascinating that, for you, writing is your reward work.

Michele Hansen 00:59

I, five paragraph essays are, I don't think anyone looks forward to writing those. Like, this is very different than, than that. Um, but so I was, I was writing and I started thinking about this framework that I know we've talked about, and it occurred to me that I have a very tangible example of that.

Colleen Schnettler 01:20

Which framework? StoryBrand, or something else?

Michele Hansen 01:22

No, so it's a Marty Cagan framework.

Colleen Schnettler 01:25

Okay.

Michele Hansen 01:26

So, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna back up first. So, there's this misconception, I think that people sometimes have or fear about customer research that if they start listening to their customers, then they have to do everything the customers ask them for. And they're basically, like, giving up control over the vision of the product to the customer.

Colleen Schnettler 01:47

Okay.

Michele Hansen 01:48

And that's not true, right? Like, you'll always have to weigh it against, um, what makes sense for you to do. And so, there's this one framework that I particularly like that was developed by Marty Cagan, who is kind of, like, the the product guru, like, he's the head of this consultancy called the Silicon Valley Product Group. Like, he is like the product guy, and in order for a product to be successful, he says how it needs to be valuable, viable, usable, and feasible.

Colleen Schnettler 02:26

Wow, valuable, viable, usable, feasible.

Michele Hansen 02:30

So let's, let's break it down a little bit. So first, it has to be valuable for the customer. Like, it has to be something that is, you know, accomplishes something for them and helps them do something, right. Because if it's something that doesn't help them do something that they would want to do, then they wouldn't use it. Like, the example I kind of think of for this is what was that startup that would, like, squeeze a bag of pureed fruit for you? Like Juicero, or, like, it was some, like, they raised like billions of dollars or whatever, for, like, a smoothie machine, and everyone is like, why? Like, not really very valuable to people.

Colleen Schnettler 03:04

Right. Okay.

Michele Hansen 03:05

I'm sure they had wonderful ideas, and they were great people. It has to be viable, which means it has to be, like, commercially viable, like people have to be willing to pay for it. So like, I could make something that's super awesome and useful, but if no one is willing to pay for it, then it's not a viable product, right? Like, if I'm solving a problem that no one experiences painfully enough to, to pay someone to solve it, then it's not going to work out.

Colleen Schnettler 03:30

Okay.

Michele Hansen 03:30

It has to be usable, which may be the easiest of all these words, to understand that, like, they have to be able to figure out how to use it. So,

Colleen Schnettler 03:39

Okay.

Michele Hansen 03:39

You may have heard this in the context of usability testing, which is basically, like, if I make a website that you can do something on, but you can't actually figure out how to do that, and it's confusing, then it doesn't matter if what the product does is something that's valuable to you. If you can't figure out how to do it, you're going to move on to something else.

Colleen Schnettler 03:57

Right.

Michele Hansen 03:57

And then the last one is it has to be feasible, like, it has to be possible for you to produce this product. So, So this would be the equivalent of being, me being like, Colleen, I really need a spaceship. And you being like, that's awesome. I can see that's valuable for you. Maybe you have the ability to pay for that. I don't, but you know, let's go with it. I can build it in a way that, that you can use it. You know, you're an engineer, right? Any kind of engineer can build any kind of thing, right?

Colleen Schnettler 04:05

Oh, okay. Sure.

Michele Hansen 04:25

Yeah. Like, you could build a bridge. No, I'm, I'm, for all the certified engineers out there, I'm aware that they're not all transferable. But it wouldn't be feasible for you to build that.

Colleen Schnettler 04:37

Right.

Michele Hansen 04:38

So, so this framework of valuable, viable, usable and feasible is something that I always keep in mind when we're getting feedback from people because you don't necessarily act on every single problem and every piece of advice that you hear, and, like, and that's okay.

Colleen Schnettler 04:55

Yeah, okay.

Michele Hansen 04:56

And so, a specific example of this that relates to the book and to something we have been talking about quite a bit is consulting and whether I should do consulting related to the book.

Colleen Schnettler 05:10

Right.

Michele Hansen 05:10

It's something we've talked about, and I've gotten quite a few requests from people about. And, you know, as I thought about it, okay, so clearly, this would be valuable for people. Like they, they feel like they need help getting started with understanding their customers. They seem to be willing to pay for it. I don't know what that would be, like, I, granted I haven't told anyone, like, cool, here's, you know, an invoice for, I don't know, $500 for a 30 minute conversation, or whatever it is people charge. But like, people seem to be willing to pay for this, and they've told me that they pay other people for this. So there's clearly an ability and desire to pay there. And then usable, like, I feel like I would be able to deliver it in a way that would make it useful for them. But it's not feasible.

Colleen Schnettler 05:56

Why not?

Michele Hansen 05:56

Time zones.

Colleen Schnettler 05:59

Oh.

Michele Hansen 06:00

And also the fact that I already have a business that I need to keep going. So I, like, I already have a pressure on my time in that regard. But I basically only have one hour of decent overlap with the US, which is from,

Colleen Schnettler 06:15

One hour?

Michele Hansen 06:16

From nine to 10am Eastern.

Colleen Schnettler 06:19

Wow, because what time is 9 to 10am Eastern in Denmark.

Michele Hansen 06:22

So that's 3pm. So our daughter gets out of school at 3. So,

Colleen Schnettler 06:26

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 06:26

Making anything else work requires a huge amount of schedule gymnastics for me. And I already have customers that I need to have, you know, calls with anyway. Like, and, and so if I were to do consulting, then I would have to say that I could, like, do it for everybody except North America, which totally doesn't make sense because, you know, if you assume that the audience for this podcast is a pretty good overlap with the people who might want me to consult for them, that'd be like, 80% of the audience would not be eligible, and people might find that a bit off-putting, or frustrating. But like, I mean, I just can't do it. Like I can, you know, 8am Eastern is a great time for me, because that's 2pm here, but like, that's, that's a bit early for, for business conversations. And most of the time, like, if I have to have a call with California, like, it ends up being at 9 o'clock my time. And,

Colleen Schnettler 07:21

Yeah, that's rough.

Michele Hansen 07:22

Even 9am is a bit early. Like, I've worked in companies that, like, had like, a basically an official, like, no meetings before 10, but really not before 11 rule. Like, if you got a 9am meeting, I was like God, like why are you punishing them? So it's just, it's not feasible for me. So,

Colleen Schnettler 07:42

Okay.

Michele Hansen 07:42

Maybe it will be in, you know, 15 years when I don't have a child at home, and I can, you know, just blow through dinner time, like, and work and like, honestly, it's probably not gonna be good for my work-life balance, like, but it's, it's simply not feasible.

Colleen Schnettler 07:59

Is this something you want to do? Or is this just a, like, convenient reason not to do it because you already don't want to do it?

Michele Hansen 08:07

I was trying to dive into like, why the thought of it was even, like, immediate, no in my head.

Colleen Schnettler 08:14

Right. Okay.

Michele Hansen 08:15

And I think that was kind of, and like, the reason was like, I don't have time for that. And then it's like,

Colleen Schnettler 08:20

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 08:21

But I do, like, I, I have time to work already, so why wouldn't that fit into my existing work time? And it's because it wouldn't happen during the work time. Now, I could be like, oh, I'll just consult for people in the UK, but like, I, like, most of my network is in the US anyway. So, and I think it's just easier just to say no to everything. But again, as we kind of talked about, like, I could always do this 5 or 10 years from now. And people have asked me about courses too, which is easier to make work across time zones, but I'm not really a natural teacher. So I admit that that, like, that kind of scares me because I feel like I would not only have to learn, like, how to create a course. But I would have to learn like, how to teach, which is, you know, a skill set that people to go to school for for four to six years to learn. Like it's not a, it's not an insignificant thing to learn how to do.

Colleen Schnettler 09:21

Yeah, well, you already have a lot of demands on your time. So, I don't know that adding consulting would be good for you even if you were in the US.

Michele Hansen 09:29

Yeah, that's true. I mean, you actually used to have a course, right? Or you were starting one, or?

Colleen Schnettler 09:34

Haha, yeah. So one of my many, many business ideas. I was going to do a course, and holy cow, it was so much more work than I anticipated. So I decided not to do it, and that was a good decision.

Michele Hansen 09:52

I think when we first met you were, like, getting that course going.

Colleen Schnettler 09:58

Yeah, I think I did a couple videos. I mean, my, my idea had been to do Ruby on Rails course for beginners and try to, like, incorporate some more advanced topics, so like an advanced beginner course. But, and I know some people have a lot of success with courses, but you know, I started doing it, and it was just like, because I was trying to do a video course. It was a tremendous amount of work, and I found that I, this, this was years ago, too, right? This was a couple years ago, and I didn't have any audience or network so to speak of, and I think to be successful with a course, a couple of things have to happen. You either have to have the right course at the right time, so you're releasing a course on something that is new and hot, and everyone wants to learn about, or I think you have to have a really well-established network and audience, and I had neither of those things at that time. And, and also, you know, people talk about being on, like, the content treadmill, so the thing about if your business, if your primary business is a subscription video service, or, you know, subscription courses, like, you have to constantly be producing content, and that wasn't really something that I wanted to do either. So yeah, the course was just, the video course was just so much work, like, the editing and the trying not to talk over myself, and the, oh, my goodness. So it wasn't a good fit for me. Not saying it wouldn't be a good fit for you in the future. I mean, there's tons of opportunity there.

Michele Hansen 11:33

I'm curious, how long did you work on that course from like, when you had the idea to when you ended up giving up on it?

Colleen Schnettler 11:41

I don't remember. So, I started with a couple intro videos, and I mean, we're talking like 10, 15 minute videos, and they would take me hours. That was the first problem. And then I actually was going to do it with a friend who has a really successful Ruby on Rails template. So he and I recorded, I mean, Michele, we must've recorded 10 hours of video.

Michele Hansen 12:03

Wow.

Colleen Schnettler 12:03

Yeah. I mean, we have, I still have it. So yeah, for the Rails listeners, it's the guy who developed Bullet Train. And Bullet Train is like a really opinionated, Ruby on Rails, SaaS kind of template builder to start with. And he's been doing this a lot longer than I have, and so I really was fascinated in terms of like, there's some more advanced concepts that you never really get in the material that's out there. And a big one he feels really strongly about is domain modeling, and like, how to do your domain modeling. And this is a thing, I found that as a developer, like, there's tons of entry level courses, and as soon as you get past entry level, it gets harder. Like, when you get to the point where you can't Google the answer for what you're trying to figure out, there isn't a lot. It's more about, like, learning and problem solving, and there aren't a lot of courses or examples or things that can, like, draw you in to these more advanced concepts. So, Andrew and I had talked about doing a course, like, kind of teaching people about domain modeling, which was really cool, because I really love the way he's done it in Bullet Train. And I've worked on a lot of different apps, and typically, it's kind of a mess, right? Like, because you don't, you don't really think big term. I mean, things grow and things, and things evolve, and that's the nature of software, whereas Andrew's, the way he tries to handle it is it's top down, like you know, you don't think you're going to need teams and users, and, you know, join tables, but you should start there.

Michele Hansen 13:36

We thought that. Retrofitting that later is painful to the point where we haven't, like, fully, like, we, like, have done it, and we need to do more of it. And it's, oh god, just retrofitting, like, user access controls like that is, that's like one of those things, if I can fly back to me eight years ago when we were building this, it's like, just build that in from the beginning. People are gonna want a billing user. They're gonna, you know.

Colleen Schnettler 14:06

Right, that's literally exactly what, what it was about. It was about that, because when you start you don't care, right? Or you don't think about it, because you're like, I, I don't need to get that complicated. But if you start from the beginning with that framework, when you're where you guys are, it's so much easier to retrofit in all that stuff because it's already there. Anyway, now that I'm talking about it, I'm getting excited about it again.

Michele Hansen 14:27

I can tell. Like, you really do see a void for this. But I think, like, I think it's important to bring up though, because you, like, you tried a bunch of stuff before you found something that's kind of working, right. Like I mean, we like we launched stuff that didn't work. Like, I think people kind of you know, you listen to like podcasts like this or whatnot, and you're like, wow, like, this person has everything figured out and they're just amazing, and there's something about them that like makes them what they make successful or whatever, and I'm like, no dude, like we've had stuff that failed. Like, that's normal. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 15:04

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 15:04

I don't think there's anybody out there who has launched something successfully and not had 10 other things behind it that were either total duds or like just completely, you know, never got off the ground or were soundly rejected, or panned on Reddit, which one of ours was. But anyway, speaking of remotely successful products, Colleen, is it time for our weekly numbers update on Simple File Upload?

Colleen Schnettler 15:35

Your weekly update for Simple File Upload. Yes, so this week, I crossed the 1000 MRR mark.

Michele Hansen 15:42

We have totally buried the lead.

Colleen Schnettler 15:47

I know right.

Michele Hansen 15:47

Oh my god!

Colleen Schnettler 15:49

I'm super, I mean, it was really exciting.

Michele Hansen 15:53

Oh, my gosh, yes.

Colleen Schnettler 15:55

Yeah. So that really makes it feel like a real business, if you will. I mean, $1,000 that's like real money.

Michele Hansen 16:02

That is real money.

Colleen Schnettler 16:04

Yeah, like, even after I pay all my you know, I do have the, the hosting fees, and the, Heroku takes a cut. But yeah, it's really exciting.

Michele Hansen 16:13

Wait. So I think last time we, like, really dove into the numbers on it. Your costs of what, you know, what we would sort of call in business jargon the cost of goods sold, which is like, you know, servers and everything that you have to pay for in order to make the app run, that was like $200 a month, and you thought it would be pretty, like consistent.

Colleen Schnettler 16:41

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 16:42

Are you, is that still true?

Colleen Schnettler 16:44

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's still true. Now I do, so it's, that's, that's probably an estimate of all the, the fees and like you said, server hosting storage. And then Heroku takes 30%, because I'm in their marketplace, much like the App Store. I know, it really hurts, like, you're just like, oh, ouch. But, I know, but you know what, I mean, I still will bang the drum, or whatever that phrase is on this, for ,launching this in a marketplace was just such a good idea because if I look at the users I have coming from the open internet, versus the users I have coming from Heroku, like, far and above, the majority of my paid users are coming from Heroku.

Michele Hansen 17:27

So, so if your cost of goods sold is $200 a month, and for purposes of this, we're pulling out that processing or like, you know, sort of marketplace fee, which is 30%, so then basically your margin is like, $500 a month. Does that sound right?

Colleen Schnettler 17:47

Yes.

Michele Hansen 17:48

Wow.

Colleen Schnettler 17:49

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 17:50

That's pretty good.

Colleen Schnettler 17:52

I know, I was pretty excited. Um, yeah. So it's, it's good.

Michele Hansen 17:58

That's really interesting for when, you know, if you're able to get to a point, eventually, where you're selling outside of Heroku, like, that, you know, if we were to assume an 80% margin like that, that's pretty good. That's where a lot of software businesses are. So it's, I mean, it sounds like your, your fundamentals are pointing in the right direction.

Colleen Schnettler 18:22

Yeah, I think, I mean, we've talked a lot about, I think last week I was a little frustrated because I still can't really identify my ideal customer, or people who are even using it. But I think one of the huge benefits of being in this marketplace is people are signing up. So the more people I get signing up, the more chances I have that someone will actually, that I'll be able to talk to people and kind of figure out my value proposition. I'm finding a lot of people, a lot more people are finding me on the internet. So I'm getting a lot more signups that bounce when they see you have to have a credit card upfront. But I mean, on the, on the plus side, that means there's clearly a demand for this. This is clearly a thing people want because a lot of people are signing up. Now, will a lot of people pay for it is always the, the, you know, the thing you're trying to figure out, but I'm seeing quite a lot of people putting in their email address, putting in their email addresses on my non-Heroku site.

Michele Hansen 19:23

How, like, upfront does your non-Heroku site make it that people have to put in a credit card for the free trial?

Colleen Schnettler 19:30

So the way it works right now is you sign up and then, then you go to the pricing page. And then you click the button to say sign up for this plan, and then you have to put a credit card in.

Michele Hansen 19:42

But like, on the landing page itself, does it make it clear that a credit card is required for the trial?

Colleen Schnettler 19:48

No.

Michele Hansen 19:50

You should probably do that.

Colleen Schnettler 19:52

Yeah, I thought about that. But I was looking at other people's landing pages and no one really, like, that doesn't seem to be a thing people do. Cuz it feels, like, where would you put it? In like, small print under free, free trial? Free 7 day trial, credit card required for sign up?

Michele Hansen 20:07

Yeah, I, you know, something that I noticed with that is that when somebody has a free trial and no credit card is required, they always say that.

Colleen Schnettler 20:17

Right, no credit card required, right. But when they do require a credit card, they don't say anything.

Michele Hansen 20:23

Yeah. And that, that tells me something. Now,

Colleen Schnettler 20:27

Yeah, no one wants to pay,

Michele Hansen 20:28

A lot of big companies like, they'll you know, if you, if you are a marketing person who is incentivized for email signups, then yeah, you're gonna want to hide the fact that a credit card is required because that's how you hit your metrics. But also, the incentive should be redesigned in that case. But I think it's worth at least having that somewhere on the landing page, because as you said, then people are bouncing, and so there's no point in you having this pile of email addresses from people who aren't going to pay for it unless you want it to try to monetize them some other way. But that doesn't really seem to be like something you want to do, and also with, like GDPR, and CCPA and all of those privacy acronyms, like, it could be, you know, a liability for you.

Colleen Schnettler 21:21

Yeah, I was thinking about it, because I've seen so many signups recently. So I think that's a, but I, the reason I didn't put it was because I've never seen it. And I was like, is that a huge turnoff to be like, credit card required for signup. But I agree, I'm not doing anything with those email addresses. I mean, in the future, maybe I can remove it and try a different kind of, you know, when I have more time or a little bit bigger, and maybe try to learn more about those people. But at this point, it doesn't do any good, like, I'm not keeping their email addresses or anything. So I'm just seeing that there's a lot of traffic.

Michele Hansen 21:54

I wonder how, so I signed up for Savvy Cow recently, speaking of all of my timezone issues, like, I had to make this little redirect basically, so that when people request to have a meeting with me, if the browser detects their timezone, and then it sends them to the calendar based on their timezone, because like, I'll only do those 9pm calls for you know, people on the west coast, for example. But, so I signed up for for Savvy Cow, and they have a 7 day free trial with a credit card required, and now I'm looking at their website to see how clear that was, because I remember that, like, I knew that it would be required, and like, that, they would just automatically charge me after that point. And I'm actually looking at their landing page. Oh, okay, actually, it just, it just, just say get started for free.

Colleen Schnettler 22:48

See, no, no one says that.

Michele Hansen 22:50

But maybe they, like, maybe isn't an automatic, maybe it was an email they sent me instead that, um, oh, okay. Okay, so here's how it works. So it says what you can, zero cost to create an account, but then once you're ready to start sharing your calendar links, then the one week free trial starts, and then that has automatic billing.

Colleen Schnettler 23:12

Where did you get that, in an email?

Michele Hansen 23:14

It's on their pricing page.

Colleen Schnettler 23:16

Okay, I'll look at that. That's probably a good idea. I like that, like, yeah, it's, it's free to create an account. But if you actually want to upload files,

Michele Hansen 23:23

Sure, you can give us your email address, but if you want to do anything, but I think that, you know that, that makes sense for like a product. Like this, where like, there, there is some amount of stuff that might need to happen before you actually use the products, like, people might need to have internal discussions or like, you know, with this, like, you have to kind of set it up, and there's also this positive effect, where, if you've done all of this work to get it set up, then you are more bought in to the product. Like, this is the approach that TurboTax uses. Like, I don't know, if you notice that they,

Colleen Schnettler 23:55

I know, I know.

Michele Hansen 23:55

They don't, they'll be like, well, it's free to file, but then it's you know, 19 or 29 or whatever.

Colleen Schnettler 24:00

It's free to do your taxes,

Michele Hansen 24:01

Whatever, but to actually file your state one, or to have us automatically send it to the IRS or whatever it is, like,

Colleen Schnettler 24:08

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 24:09

Then you have to pay for it. And all the people listening in other countries, like especially anyone in Denmark, where you can just file your taxes online, like for free and like, you know, you don't have Intuit, with this massive lobbying budget, making it complicated. Yeah, I mean, so so there's definitely some benefits to that kind of model, and I think as long as what you do, just like, making it really clear what that like, make it clear what's going to happen to people.

Colleen Schnettler 24:41

Yeah, I like the idea of putting it on the pricing page because I don't want it on my landing page because that's gonna look bad. But like, if you click sign up for a free trial, I like having another pricing page because again, it doesn't do anyone any good for, I don't care about your email address if you're not interested, and you are annoyed because you fill out the welcome to my thing form, and then you have to enter a credit card, and you felt you know, you didn't know. So, I, um, I like this idea. I think it's a good idea.

Michele Hansen 25:06

Yeah, I think, so your call to action, it says try it now, sign up for a free 30 day trial.

Colleen Schnettler 25:13

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 25:14

And I also wonder if, you know, changing out from like, sign up to be like, you know, start free trial or whatnot, like, because I think people really do grok the difference between free trial versus free tier. And, and I saw that when I scrolled all the way down, there's a free 30 day trial, but I don't actually see that above the fold on your site. And so I wonder if making it clear that it's free trial would help with that.

Colleen Schnettler 25:46

Okay. I like, I like changing it to start, start your trial or something.

Michele Hansen 25:50

Yeah. Because they're actually, there's no button either, like, right below the header. There's like, there should be a button there that's like, start your free trial.

Colleen Schnettler 25:59

Oh.

Michele Hansen 26:00

There's no call to action button.

Colleen Schnettler 26:02

Wait, below the header.

Michele Hansen 26:04

So it says add File Uploading to your app in minutes, like, integrate file uploads in your website, no service required, blah, blah, blah. Like, where's the button? Give me a button.

Colleen Schnettler 26:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

Michele Hansen 26:17

But hey, while I'm looking at SimpleFileUpload.com, for anyone who is listening, there is a testimonial there.Yay.

Colleen Schnettler 26:26

Yay, I did. I got a testimonial up.

Michele Hansen 26:31

And it looks awesome.

Colleen Schnettler 26:33

Yeah. So I'm happy about that. Yeah, you're right. There should be a call to action button right here.

Michele Hansen 26:39

Tell me what to do, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 26:41

Oh, my gosh. See, this is, like, the stuff I don't know about. You're absolutely right.

Michele Hansen 26:44

Tell me to sign up.

Colleen Schnettler 26:45

Tell me to sign up, start trial now. Nice. Okay, I like it. Good point.

Michele Hansen 26:52

And I guess, yeah, you just want to like work on that wording because like, as you know, the Savvy Cow example, like, the trial doesn't start until you actually do something. And so it's like, does the trial start like, right from the time they sign up? Or just, you know, wherever you can, like, make it clear what's going to happen to people.

Colleen Schnettler 27:09

Yeah, so I think, so right now, if you click on sign up, it takes you to a nice signup page. But then after you hit the signup page, it takes you to the pricing page. I wonder if I should switch those since I'm going to require a credit card, and instead of taking you to the signup page before the pricing page, sign up, pricing page, which explains that you have to, you know, pay, not pay I'm sorry, that you have to enter your credit card and then a start trial button.

Michele Hansen 27:45

Okay, so I'm actually going through it right now.

Colleen Schnettler 27:48

Yeah, okay.

Michele Hansen 27:49

Um, so let's do it live. Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 27:54

Usability testing live with Michele.

Michele Hansen 27:57

F it will do it live. Okay. So, select your plan, try it out with a 30 day free trial, up, upgrade or cancel at any time. Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 28:06

So if you go back, though, if you start from the homepage, okay, if you go to Home. So go to home.

Michele Hansen 28:10

Home. And then sign up.

Colleen Schnettler 28:12

Michele Hansen 28:13

Yeah. So then it's just like a login screen.

Colleen Schnettler 28:16

Right.

Michele Hansen 28:17

Yeah, I wonder maybe, maybe you would, you could also experiment with when you click sign up, taking people to this pricing page, and then when they click start trial, then they create an account, and then they add a credit card and everything.

Colleen Schnettler 28:35

Yeah, I tend to wonder if that's a better workflow because again, I don't need to collect or want to collect information for people who don't want to put their credit card down.

Michele Hansen 28:45

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 28:47

So I think I'll do that. I like that. I like that idea. Yeah, and then they can go, if signup would take them to pricing, and then under where it says select your panel have something like, it's gonna be a seven day trial, but I'll fix that, try it out with a seven day trial credit. I mean, it sounds so bad, credit card required when you are ready to use the service or something. I don't know. I'll figure that out.

Michele Hansen 29:07

And I also noticed you have a 30 day money back guarantee. So a 30 day free trial,

Colleen Schnettler 29:12

Oh my gosh.

Michele Hansen 29:12

And a 30 day money back guarantee? No.

Colleen Schnettler 29:15

Okay. I do, but I shouldn't.

Michele Hansen 29:17

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 29:17

Cuz this is like, I need to change that. Oh, my gosh, it's so funny that you said that. Because basically, like, this, the framework for the SaaS is built off of the Bullet Train app, which I mentioned earlier that Andrew and I were going to make a course for, and this is just, like, their default wording. And I literally, like forgot to take it out.

Michele Hansen 29:39

Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 29:40

So I don't want to do that. I just, no one has asked for their money back. So that's good.

Michele Hansen 29:44

That's also a liability for you, so.

Colleen Schnettler 29:47

Yeah, no, I need to get, where did you see that?

Michele Hansen 29:49

When I clicked on start trial from the pricing page.

Colleen Schnettler 29:53

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I need to change that.

Michele Hansen 29:57

Well, it sounds like you now have a lot of work on your plate. So,

Colleen Schnettler 30:02

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 30:03

I guess I should let you go.

Colleen Schnettler 30:05

Plenty of things to do. Yeah. Great. This is good, though. This is good. I haven't really thought through that onboarding workflow in a long time. So, I'm glad we took a look at it.

Michele Hansen 30:15

Awesome. Well, I guess that'll wrap us up for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, please tweet about it or write us an iTunes review. That means a lot to us and, yeah, we'll talk to you next week.

View Details

Colleen Schnettler 00:00

This week's episode of the Software Social Podcast is brought to you by Hopscotch Product Tours. Hopscotch Product Tours allows you to improve user onboarding with helpful product tours that guide your users to success. Also reduce frustration by helping users learn how to use your product without the need for demo calls, visit Hopscotch.club today and start delighting your users with Hopscotch Product Tours.

Michele Hansen 00:28

Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 00:29

Hey, Michele.

Michele Hansen 00:31

How you doing?

Colleen Schnettler 00:32

I'm doing pretty well. I had a pretty uplifting week over here in the Simple File Upload world.

Michele Hansen 00:38

You know what? That's good to hear. Because I feel like last week you were, we talked about how you were kind of feeling like you were in the void.

Colleen Schnettler 00:44

I totally was. And, you know, I still feel that but I'm trying to, two things happen that changed my perspective. One, I got another check from Heroku. So that always helps. That doesn't hurt. And I'm kind of just trying to focus on my mindset as I approach this business. I have to say the check from Heroku because unlike Stripe, where you just get paid randomly when people, you know, when people pay, you only get paid once a month. So I've been telling you I have $800 MRR for like three weeks, and I haven't seen that money. So I just saw that money yesterday. So that was pretty exciting.

Michele Hansen 01:21

Nice

Colleen Schnettler 01:22

Yeah, I think I remember telling you my very first check. I got like I had enough leftover to buy a bagel.

Michele Hansen 01:28

Yes. The bagel, the $20 bagel.

Colleen Schnettler 01:30

The $20 bagel. Well, this time it was it was quite a bit more so I could could have bought quite a few bagels. So that was pretty exciting.

Michele Hansen 01:37

And I saw you tweeted out earlier this week that the Stripe payouts, I was just like payout, payout, payout.

Colleen Schnettler 01:45

I think what must happen is like people must have signed up, there were, like, four or five people who signed up like one day apart. And so the all of their invoices hit like right after each other. So I like signed on to my email every day, and it was like payout payout payout. It was awesome. It's very exciting. It was a lot of excitedness in terms of actually seeing the fruits of my labor on this product this week. So that was fun.

Michele Hansen 02:10

Yay. Internet money.

Colleen Schnettler 02:12

Yay, internet money.

Michele Hansen 02:13

So where is your MRR at now? So I just checked and I'm at $975. I know. What? Oh my god, you're almost at the $1,000 MRR mark, and it's been, like, three months. Yeah, I guess it's, yeah, three, oh my god. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 02:35

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 02:36

That's, that's not common. Like, just for everybody else kind of like, listening like that is, that is very uncommon. Like, you're you're not like ending up on $1,000 after three months like Coleen like that's, that's normal. Like, I think it took us like six months, and even then that was kind of fast for a little project. Dude, 975. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 02:57

That's real money. It's real. That's why my last check. Because if you look at my checks from Heroku, and once again, I only get those once a month. It's not like Stripe. It was like the first one was like 150. The second one was like 250. This last one was like $570. I was like, that's like, real money. Like I could do something with that money. That's cool. Yeah, so, so from a monetary perspective, it's going great. I think I, I was struggling a lot. And I still am kind of struggling because I don't have a good feedback loop. I have been kind of unsure what to do next, and how to push the product forward. And it's funny because I like I think mid last week, I was just in a funk. And I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna build it the way I want to build it. I'm gonna develop all these features. I don't care what anyone tells me. Like, I'm just gonna do what I want to do. And you know, of course, everyone I talked to is like, that's a terrible idea. And the best way someone phrased it to me, they were like, what if you do go and you spend a couple months and you build all these features you feel like you need, you're still not going to know who your customer is. Like, I was complaining because I don't know who my customer is. And she was like, even if you spend this time to build that out, you'll be three months down the road, and you still won't know who your customer is. So have you made any progress? And I was like, oh, that's a good way to put it. So, I did a few interviews this week, which was really great. I'm really gonna take a pause on any kind of development work, and just talk to people. I mean, talk talk, talk.

Michele Hansen 03:01

Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 03:02

I know, I know.

Michele Hansen 03:04

You're done putzing around in the code garden and like, you're out there in the town square.

Colleen Schnettler 03:29

I'm convinced. Like, between the, I mean, I probably five different people had to tell me this. But like you guys have convinced me that I just need to talk to more people. I just need, I don't know. Like, if you ask me who my ideal customer was, like, is, or who this provides value to, I can't identify that person, and casting a net of all developers is way too broad and too vague. So, that's really what I am focused on. In the next couple months, I think another thing is I need to calm down a little bit and slow down and be a little bit more patient.

Michele Hansen 05:21

You said that you could go off and build something for three months, and it sounds like this person you were talking to, kind of helped you realize basically, like, you wouldn't know who you were building for and why you were building it and how they needed any of that to work.

Colleen Schnettler 05:39

Yeah. And I think that's exactly the thing. So, so this week has been great. I spoke to three consultants, I have another one today, and I'm trying to get to five consultants, which I'm sure I can find one more person. Here's the thing, Michele, they all want different things.

Michele Hansen 05:56

Oh.

Colleen Schnettler 05:57

So, unless I have the team and the budget of a CloudFlare, I can't build one product that fits the needs for all of these three different people.

Michele Hansen 06:09

You know what this sounds like?

Colleen Schnettler 06:10

No.

Michele Hansen 06:11

It sounds like the very beginning of a research loop to me.

Colleen Schnettler 06:15

What's a research loop?

Michele Hansen 06:16

Okay, so it's basically this idea that, like, you do a group of like, five interviews, and then you sort of analyze that and say, okay, of all of these different problems I've had, or rather, I've heard, which ones both sound, people are already paying for them to be solved, and they're unhappy with the way that they're being solved or in, they can also be paying in terms of significant amounts of time, like that counts. And then which of these problems do you think are relatively both feasible for you to solve, like, it would be possible for you to build something, and could also be like, commercially viable for you to sell, like, people would be willing to pay enough that would justify the time that goes into it. So basically kind of analyzing what you've heard so far, based on you know, how, how well those needs are already met, or, or not met?

Colleen Schnettler 07:07

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 07:08

What they're already willing to pay for. And then, and then doing another round, focusing on those sort of top priority problems to figure out where you should go next. Like, it's completely normal that you would talk to five people and hear five different things. That doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, if anything, that's really exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 07:30

Oh, that made me excited. I felt like crap. Now, I don't know what to do.

Michele Hansen 07:35

Oh, yeah, that makes sense. And you do it kind of like a pyramid, basically. You start out with a really wide scope in the beginning because you're casting a really wide net, like, you're just talking to all software consultants, which is a pretty broad, big net. And then you just sort of narrow it down based on where your capabilities are, and where people are willing to pay for stuff, and they're not happy with what they're currently doing.

Colleen Schnettler 08:02

Yeah. Okay. So that was, that was really good. You're right. It's good to hear the details of what people struggle with, what their pain points are, how frequently they have those pain points. But yeah, I was only three interviews. So nothing magical came to light, like, oh, if I just did this one thing, I would have the product everyone wants, like, there was nothing like that. Everyone was building or wanted to build kind of a specialized solution for their needs. So, I guess the answer is just continue to talk to more people in that situation.

Michele Hansen 08:38

Yeah, and, you know, also making it flexible, too. Like, if you genuinely hear that everybody wants something different, then, you know, making it so that they can customize it to their own needs is another route you could go on. But, I mean, it does not surprise me at all that you would not be hearing commonalities after just three people.

Colleen Schnettler 08:58

Yeah. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 09:00

That's totally normal.

Colleen Schnettler 09:02

Yeah. So, I think, I mean, before I start, like, what, I really want to go build an integration for this thing, or build an integration for that thing, but I think before I do any of that, like I said, I'm, you know, this is, there's no finish line here, right? Like this is this is my life, like, this is what I want to do. Even if I sold my company, I'd want to build another company. So I'm just trying to be a little bit patient and take my time and really figure out who the customer is and, you know, learn, learn about what they need and figure out how I can customize this product to their needs.

Michele Hansen 09:44

It sounds like that, for you, like, that is almost the opposite of your instinct. Like your instinct is to go and build for three months.

Colleen Schnettler 09:57

I mean, that's what I want to do. Like, let's be clear. Like I love people, but this process of like, finding people and like the, the whole, the whole logistics of it, you know, it's a lot. It takes a lot out of your day, I found that I'm a little nervous before I talk to them. it's a lot of emotional energy to like contain my own excitement, while I'm talking to them. And listen, like, that takes quite a bit of concentration as a beginner.

Michele Hansen 10:24

It takes concentration for me. It takes emotional energy for me. I mean, this is why I have this rule for myself that I don't do more than two in a day because the amount of energy that's required to sort of just, you know, I picture myself like this sponge that is just there to absorb whatever the other person says. Like, that requires a lot of energy, and, you know, a couple weeks ago, when I was first starting to interview all of my readers about my book, and my very meta interviews about customer interviews, I did six in one day, out of enthusiasm for this and, and at the end of that I was like, I heard so many amazing things. But I was also like, okay, now I remember why I've had two per day rule.

Colleen Schnettler 11:10

Yeah. Yeah, so I think that's kind of, uh, definitely goes against my instincts to slow down and try and identify my customer. But I think the point that I want to build all these things, but until I know who I'm going to be serving, I don't even know what is important to build, and I can't know what is important to build, until I talk to people who need this product, who I, to identify them and talk to them. So that's going to, that's going to mean that I need to be a little more aggressive in finding people. I can't just like, I mean, I put a thing on Twitter, and I found five people, but I was only looking for five people. Like, I want more than I want a lot of people. So I think I'm going to try some of those strategies, you know, go on Reddit, and the strategies you write about in your book, actually. If you'd like to, I mean, you talk about this in your book, I reference your book, even though it's not done, like I haven't, I'm looking at it all the time, just so you know.

Michele Hansen 12:06

You know, one thing I want to note is that doing development work and customer research work, like, they're not an either, or. It doesn't have to be this switch, where you're only doing one at a time. Like I think, you know, the best cases are when this kind of research is just integrated into what you're already doing. And, you know, it does take time and focus, and like, context switching is difficult so you couldn't, you know, just like, you know, write code for like half an hour and then interview someone then right? Like, you can't sort of just switch back and forth super easily, but integrating it into your process. And maybe it's not that you, you know, don't go out and build these features for three months in a cave, or also that you don't go out and just talk to people for three months. It's that you do you know, both, you know, it's like, in the same way that, that people often ask me whether they should talk to people or whether they should look at analytics, and I'm like, porque no los dos? Like, do it at the same time.

Colleen Schnettler 13:07

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 13:08

Like, you could, you know, like, for example, I remember you talking about something you came out of the interview with Drew where you wanted to pull the code pen forward on the marketing side?

Colleen Schnettler 13:17

Yes.

Michele Hansen 13:18

Has that happened?

Colleen Schnettler 13:20

No.

Michele Hansen 13:21

Oh, I don't mean to, like call you out or anything. It's like, you know, there's like,

Colleen Schnettler 13:25

Developer calling me out on my own podcast, Michele.

Michele Hansen 13:28

I'm sorry. Like, there's development work you can do,

Colleen Schnettler 13:32

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 13:33

That you'll find in these things as you go.

Colleen Schnettler 13:35

Yeah. And I think that's, that's really the key. And that, that's will keep me in like a happy psychological state, too, because I'll get to, I'll get to do a little code, I'll get to talk to a little people. I get to do a little code, I'll get to talk to a little people. So I think, I think that you're absolutely right. Like that is a good path forward. I think, I guess what I'm trying to sort out, so when I built this thing I built it like to do one very specific thing, right? Like, it was designed to help you get public files from your users onto your site, and I was actually making, I was using it for brochures. We were doing real estate brochures, and people have started using it and all kinds of different ways, and that's been really instructive. So, even that piece of information is interesting, and a good thing to learn. So, yeah, so I think it's just keeping an open mind and making those kinds of changes that are kind of obvious, like, the code pen more accessible as I go forward. That's kind of, kind of my plan. Oh, and I wanted to say, so what I've been doing, I think I read this in your book, too, is I've been recording, obviously, with their permission and then dropping it in Otter.ai to get a transcript, and it's so awesome because now I can just read. It takes me five minutes to read instead of watching the 30 minute video, and I have the information, like, right there at my fingertips. I love that.

Michele Hansen 15:07

It's awesome. Yeah, and Otter makes it so easy to do a transcript. It's actually what we use for this podcast. I should totally like, reach out to them and see if they'll sponsor us or something.

Colleen Schnettler 15:19

I have a paid subscription.

Michele Hansen 15:21

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 15:21

Because I was like, this is so worth it. Like, it's so cool.

Michele Hansen 15:24

Yeah, then you could just, like,

Colleen Schnettler 15:25

That's been,

Michele Hansen 15:25

Print it out and highlight.

Colleen Schnettler 15:27

Yeah, well, that's been such a great way to collate the data, because I was like, okay, if I want to get serious about this and talk to, you know, 15, 20 people, what, am I going to go back and watch all those interviews? I really don't want to. So, that's been a really cool way to get the data. I'm, like, pumped about that. And so, yeah.

Michele Hansen 15:46

Yeah, if we were doing this, like in a sort of serious, like corporate, you know, company setting, what you would do is actually like, take all of those transcripts, and then clip out like, specific key phrases and key words, and sentences where someone is really clearly describing their different use case and then, I mean, I feel like there's this sort of this meme about how much like, UX people love post it notes, and like rearranging post it notes on boards. And, like, those, you know, all of those quotes basically end up as post it notes where you're making a timeline of the user's journey through trying to do something, and you're evaluating it on functional social and emotional levels. And like, everyone in the team is like placing post it notes in all of these different areas from all the different interviews. Like you might have one color that you use for a particular customer or a particular interview, for example. It's super time intensive. It's also really fun, and yes, it brings amazing results, but even if you're not doing that, like, even the fact of getting the transcript made, going, reading through it, pulling out the key phrases, and then just, kind of, knowing where to find that information yourself, or like, jotting that down on a card, or whatever that is, wherever you're keeping information so you know what to go back and reference later can be really helpful.

Colleen Schnettler 17:03

Yeah, yeah, I'm pumped to go in this customer interview journey, I think I'm going to approach it the way you kind of describe where, of course, I'm not going to not touch the code, like there's going to be, there's going to be both, I'm gonna do them in parallel. But I really want to kind of identify who, who it is I can provide the most value to, and I want to be specific about it. So,

Michele Hansen 17:22

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 17:23

That's kind of my goal going forward. And that's going to take a while. I think that's the other thing I have to remember is like, that's not going to happen in a week. That's going to take me a little while. So,

Michele Hansen 17:33

I mean, in some ways, it's never over. And I don't know if that really, I don't know if that helps you. Like, I don't know if that's something I should tell you now, but like, you know, I'm a firm believer that research should be just part of your ongoing workflow and sort of building this bank of customer understanding that is a living, breathing organism. And it's not that we do a research project for a month and then build stuff for three months, then do a research project. Like, it's just always happening.

Colleen Schnettler 18:00

Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of all the wonderful info I got from your book while I was doing these customer interviews, how is the book going?

Michele Hansen 18:09

It's good, it's good. I feel like we're, we're getting into the more serious editing phase. I'm kind of,

Colleen Schnettler 18:17

Didn't you have a picture this morning of like, the book on your desk with a bunch of pens on Twitter?

Michele Hansen 18:21

Oh, yeah, I did, I printed it out, and I started reading it, like, as as a book and editing it, and I have four different colors of pens for my editing. And I used to do editing and print layout professionally, and I've sort of volunteer edited other people's books before.

Colleen Schnettler 18:40

So random.

Michele Hansen 18:41

So yeah, no, it was like, stuff I did when I was in college. So, um, so, so yeah, I'm really pumped, because actually, this is a phase of it that I feel like I understand the best. And I know, like I have seen where, you know, there was one book that I helped edit that went on to win a major like, international prize and like, I didn't have anything to do with that, but like it, I saw what that book was in its early stages, and so I know that like, the fact that I'm tearing this to shreds right now is like a normal part of the process, like, and even really amazing books, like they everything starts out in a rough shape. I'm really appreciating how different writing a book is from writing a newsletter, like, how much of a gulf there is between that.

Colleen Schnettler 19:27

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 19:28

Um, but, but I'm having fun. I feel like I have torn like the introduction absolutely to shreds. I mean, I had like four introductory chapters, and like, I think that was too many. Like, I was really burying the lead. So it's good. You know, I've brought in friends who are outside of our little bubble in tech to help me edit who were people that I know who will be harsh and honest with me, and they trust that I'm not going to be offended, and so I'm so grateful to have their help. And I've interviewed about 25 ish people now as part of it. So it's, it's going along. It's good.

Colleen Schnettler 20:11

That's awesome. I'm excited. And I also heard, and by heard, I mean, you told me, that you took your live chat widget off of your website.

Michele Hansen 20:22

I'm so excited.

Colleen Schnettler 20:23

Talk to me about that.

Michele Hansen 20:24

Okay, so this, so, this is something that has been building for a while, and for a long time, not not just since we moved here, but for a long time, the pings of live chat have been really stressful for us.

Colleen Schnettler 20:43

I imagine.

Michele Hansen 20:44

Yeah. And even, like, when we were in the US, like, we were on eastern time, and we would stop working around 4:30 or 5 on any given day, and we would still be getting requests, you know, through eight o'clock at the minimum, because of the West Coast, if not later, because of Hawaii and Alaska. And so we were sort of used to getting pinged from customer support at all hours of the day. It was not necessarily that there's a volume problem, because, so we have this idea that every support ticket only happens once.

Colleen Schnettler 21:18

I think you've mentioned that.

Michele Hansen 21:19

So this is kind of this principle that we operate on that whenever somebody, whether it's a bug or somebody is confused about something, like, if there's any way that we can make something clearer, or fix something, or basically prevent that ticket from ever happening again, we do that. So nothing gets closed until it's fixed. And, and so we operate on that principle, and that has really reduced our support volume over the years. But also, but still throughout that, and I think especially being on a European timezone serving North American customers like, that gets really difficult because you know, our daughter gets out of school at three o'clock, and then our customers wake up at three o'clock, and then it's just, like, it's just chaos, and having live chat specifically, like, people don't know when they can expect to get a live response versus when they have to wait. And I have experimented with so many different versions of copy on the little live chat widget, and none of them really seem to communicate that it's, like, it may not actually be live.

Colleen Schnettler 22:30

Okay.

Michele Hansen 22:31

And then on the flip side, some other people assume it's a robot and like, don't even use it.

Colleen Schnettler 22:35

Yeah, that's me. But keep going.

Michele Hansen 22:37

I've seen that come up in usability testing, like, when I've had people screen share, and go through our site. So um, you know, a couple months ago, I was telling this to some founder friends, and what, what came out of it was basically, you know, live chat was really important for our growth, especially in the early days, like, I'm thinking like, like, 2016, 17, 18, especially when we're going full time. And, but the things that you do to grow are not necessarily the things you have to do to maintain and be a stable business, right? You know, we're growing. Like, we grew 56% last year, even though we didn't really try to, but growth is not what we optimize for. We optimize for stability. And so those things that we did in the early days to grow, like, could use different tactics now, and where the live chat kind of stresses us out and doesn't work for our family, but also like, it creates this expectation mismanagement with our customers. And people are still getting a reply directly from the founders, and just this morning, somebody emailed us, and then we got back to them an hour later. And then the response we got back was, "Wow, I'm so amazed that you were able to give me a helpful answer so quickly." And like, that was an hour versus immediate, and they still had that, like, positive reaction. So, we just did this the other day, we'll see how it goes. But, but I'm kind of nervous, excited, relieved all the same.

Colleen Schnettler 24:14

So you still have the widget, it just says,

Michele Hansen 24:18

No, we got rid of the widget. We removed the widget. So there's no widget at all? Yeah, I mean, it's still, like, popping up in random places. So we were like, going through the codebase and trying to find all the different places we have that launcher. But, no, but we're still using intercom and the platform, like, so all the email is still coming into intercom, but we don't have the live chat bubble in the corner, and we don't have any prompts that say, you know, contact us if you have a billing question. Like, if you click on Contact Us, it doesn't pull up intercom chat widget. It instead creates an email.

Colleen Schnettler 24:50

Okay, so if I am on your site, and I want to contact you, I now have to scroll to the bottom to the footer, or wherever, click contact us, and that'll pop up in my email so I can email you?

Michele Hansen 25:00

It's in the header. And,

Colleen Schnettler 25:01

Okay, but,

Michele Hansen 25:02

And then it's,

Colleen Schnettler 25:02

Okay.

Michele Hansen 25:03

It lists all the different emails. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 25:06

Now tell me about some concerns you have about making this.

Michele Hansen 25:09

I think I, like, a concern I have is that, you know, people will be upset, right, that they may have expected an immediate response before. But, you know, at the same time, like, most of our long term customers, like, they email us anyway. And actually, most of them have our personal emails, and like, they don't expect an immediate response. You know, our, when I was talking to those friends a couple of months ago, they were like, "You guys are providing way too high of a quality of customer service. Like, I know that you guys pride yourselves on it. Like, even doing the customer support as the founders yourselves is so far beyond what most companies do, nevermind doing it live 24/7." Like, they're like, that's that, that doesn't make sense. And like, you guys can be, you know, be gentle with yourselves, basically. Um, you know, people have been like, "Why don't you just hire someone?" And the problem with it is that because we have solved all of the easy support problems, like, the ones we do get are fairly complicated. And if someone else were to take this over, they would need to be a support engineer, who, you know, is capable of debugging people's problems, but also like, able to negotiate contracts and do billing issues and like, like, they would need to somehow be a clone of the two of us. And it doesn't really seem reasonable. So, so yeah, I think, and again, it's, it's not the volume, that it's the problem, it was really that cadence. It's when someone is, you know, chatting and saying, "Hi, are you there?"

Colleen Schnettler 26:47

Right.

Michele Hansen 26:48

Is the API working? My API key, my API key is, you know, it's doing this like, and it's like, and it's like, every, like one like, ping every minute versus someone sending us an email that's like, hey, like, so we're trying to use it earlier, and then this is what happens, and here's the error message. Like, people tend to be much more verbose and email. So,

Colleen Schnettler 27:05

Yes.

Michele Hansen 27:06

I'm nervous. But we'll see, we'll see how it goes. I think that this is, you know, an adjustment that we need to make.

Colleen Schnettler 27:13

I don't think anyone will care. I think you will get absolutely no, I think this is all upside for you. I mean, it's gonna be so good for your quality of life. I don't, I literally don't think anyone's gonna care. I mean, I think you're gonna find that it doesn't have any impact on your business.

Michele Hansen 27:29

We'll see. We'll see. But, you know, we're kind of operating under that idea that the things that we needed to do to grow, are not necessarily the same things that you do to, when you have a stable, secure business.

Colleen Schnettler 27:43

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 27:44

Yeah. Which is kind of weird, like, also in the software world, cuz I feel like, you know, we talk about this all the time, that if you're trying to build a, you know, sort of, quote, unquote, like, Calm company, right, like, you're not going down the unicorn route. Like, like most of the advice and growth tactics, and everything out, like, business advice is geared towards those companies that want to be huge, and less so towards us little one, two person companies. Like, the things that make sense for us, or, you know, we have a totally different set of incentives and resources and constraints and goals. Like, all those things are so different, that the fact that we're all in software is, is almost sort of beside the point.

Colleen Schnettler 28:29

It is complete, it is wild, isn't it? Like how different the tactics are.

Michele Hansen 28:34

Like we have more in common with a small retail business, but we also don't fit in with them because we're not a physical business. Like, it's like, I don't know, small SaaS. We're like, we're just a weird breed, man. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 28:50

Well, I hope it I hope it alleviate some of that pressure and stress. I imagine, especially with the timezone issues since you guys have moved, that's got to be just challenging.

Michele Hansen 29:02

Yeah, my friends who also, you know, run SaaS's out of Europe with North American customers, like, I have talked to them a little bit about this and they're like, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's tough. It's really tough.

Colleen Schnettler 29:18

Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, I'm, I'm glad. I think, I feel like, this is gonna work for you.

Michele Hansen 29:25

We'll see. Maybe in six months we'll be like, oh my god, we don't have any new customers and everybody cancelled because we don't have the chat thing, but I hope not.

Colleen Schnettler 29:33

I mean, honestly, and I know you said they, they come in two groups, but I just assumed there will not be a person on the other side of the chat widget. So, if I hit your chat widget, I just assume I'm going to send you an email. You know what I mean? I think you'll be fine.

Michele Hansen 29:47

Yeah, I think people have totally different expectations. And what we have tried to communicate is that we're not making it harder to contact us, like we're not, you know, offshoring our support. Like, you can still go to the header and click, like, contact. You can still email us, like, it's still the two founders doing the support. It's just one of the tools we use for that is going away.

Colleen Schnettler 30:13

Yeah, cool. I can't wait to hear an update on how that goes. All right. Well, I guess that'll wrap us up for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please tweet about it. That always makes us happy, and we love hearing what you think.

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Michele Hansen 00:00

Hey, welcome back to Software Social.

This episode is sponsored by Oh Dear. Oh Dear makes it easy to monitor uptime, SSL certificates, broken links, scheduled tasks and more. They send out notifications when something is wrong. All of that is paired with a developer friendly API and great documentation. And I can back them up on that because we use Oh Dear for Geocodio and are happy customers. You can sign up for a 10 day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app.

Michele Hansen
So I have kind of an announcement to make.

Colleen Schnettler 00:35

Oh, I love announcements. Do tell.

Michele Hansen 00:38

We are no longer a bootstrapped company.

Colleen Schnettler 00:42

What does that mean?

Michele Hansen 00:44

So, I've been getting more feedback on my, on my book, and, and I’m getting so much amazing feedback from, because I ended up sending it out to like, 200 people last weekend. And I decided to open it up to some friends of mine who are, like, like, work in tech, but not in kind of, like, bootstrap world or in VC world. So that, so, they like, aware of what's going on, but also kind of outside of this little bubble, because I want to get their, their perspective on things. And there was one comment in particular that I got that really made me reconsider things. And in the intro to the book, I'm describing how, you know, we're this, you know, bootstrapped B2B SaaS. And they said, that was complete jargon, and also consider using a less racially-loaded term.

Colleen Schnettler 01:44

Oh.

Michele Hansen 01:45

Yeah. And I had this real moment of sort of looking in the mirror and realizing, oh, wow, like, people outside of this bubble, have a very different definition of this word, and a very different meaning from that word, than we do. And I've had reservations about it for a long time, and like, wanted to switch to a new word, but didn't really have one that I felt like worked, because everyone kind of recognizes what that means. But this was kind of shocking to me of, like, you know, getting outside of my bubble and seeing how people outside of it react to that.

Colleen Schnettler 02:27

I honestly didn't know there were negative connotations around the word because I've only heard the word used in our little context, you know, people that are in tech starting businesses.

Michele Hansen 02:40

Yeah, I imagine you're not the only one who is surprised by this. So, I kind of dug into the phrase a little bit. And the problem comes from the fact that the phrase pull yourself up by your bootstraps is where it comes from. Now, historically, apparently, when this, this word, the phrase first came around, it was actually intended to imply that something was impossible, because if you can just sort of picture someone wearing old fashioned boots with, with loops on them, and then trying to stand up while holding their own bootstraps, like, they would fall. So it was, so it's kind of a funny image, if you can sort of picture that. But then it sort of, in specifically American political discourse, where, the phrase is originally American, it came to sort of be combined with all of these sort of self reliance and sort of the rugged individual American man who doesn't need help from anyone, and kind of all of these connotations. And as I sort of dug into people with outside, who are outside of the community, they all had this very negative reaction to it, that was very politically tinged, and to them, felt like we were sort of making this like, political statement. And I was like, whoa, like, that is not the intention at all. But you know, the sort of, the politics of it aside, I realized that within the community, we're not even clear on what it means. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 04:14

Yeah, I guess that's a good point.

Michele Hansen 04:16

Like, I was emailing with a customer a few weeks ago. And, and for some reason, I happened to ask them if they were bootstrapped company. I had just gotten the sense from their website. And their reaction back to me, that I've been thinking about was they're like, I wouldn't say we're bootstrapped because we're growing. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like, when they heard bootstrapped, they thought that it meant a company that doesn't grow. And then, and I did some polls on this a while ago. You know, some people think that it can mean that a company doesn't take any funding at all. But what do you like, what about debt? What about using credit cards? Is that funding? What if you take funding from something like TinySeed or Earnest, which aren't like the big VCs, but like, you're still taking money and maybe giving away equity, like, is that bootstrapped? But then also like when we started out, you know, part of our funding capital was $1,000 in AWS credits for the first six months. Now, that technically showed up as a marketing expense for AWS and not as an investment, but to us, it was the same thing. And so, I think it's this broader point that none of us are truly self-reliant. Like, we all have a community that's holding us up and helping us at every step of the way. And seeing how people outside of this world react to that world react to that world was a really kind of shocking moment for me. And I was like, you know what, maybe, you know, maybe there's another word that I can use that is both more descriptive and less potential for offending people outside of this little bubble.

Colleen Schnettler 06:01

Okay, so what did you settle on?

Michele Hansen 06:03

Customer funded?

Colleen Schnettler 06:05

Oh, that's good.

Michele Hansen 06:06

But then somebody pointed out to me that people might think that it meant that we did crowdfunding, or like one of those Regulation CF campaigns that, like, Gumroad did.

Colleen Schnettler 06:16

When you said that, like, it is a little confusing. Customer-funded is a little confusing to me, too. And then what about people who don't like, people in the beginning, like what word? I mean, if you think about language, which I think is, this is really good that you're bringing this up. But we don't really have a word for people who aren't making enough yet, you know, like,

Michele Hansen 06:35

Right, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 06:37

Self-funded, I guess?

Michele Hansen 06:45

Yeah. I mean, I guess self-funded is another word. I mean, I, I've been thinking about this, and I don't really have an answer to this. So I'm kind of curious what other people think. There is, like, we as a community, feel an importance to note that we are not VC-funded SaaS. We're also not all SaaS, right? Cuz there's people doing courses, there's like, like, there's all sorts of other things going on here. And we can't define ourselves by what we're not. And we do have a, like, we have a unique perspective as a community. And so some people call this, you know, sustainable business, but then like, people tend to think about the environment, too, which, you know, like, like, sometimes that is, is the case, but like, you know, most of us are not sort of sustainability-focused companies. Or there's also calm companies. Though, I feel like that, kind of,

Colleen Schnettler 07:34

I don't really like any of those. I don’t think any of those,

Michele Hansen 07:37

It kind of discounts, like, the, like, kind of crazy hours that people are, you know, it, it's like, it's like a milder version of lifestyle business, it's just not said, it's not said with the intention of being offensive, which lifestyle business is. So I don't know what that word needs to be, but I sort of invite everyone to consider, like, like, what are we as a community, and what do we call ourselves? And I, I recognize that it may come as a shock to you that there are people who find that word offensive or off-putting, and, and I think that's okay, and you sort of have the reaction like Colleen just had. But I think we also, we do want to be a community where all sorts of people feel welcome and feel like they can start a business. And I think for so much of us, this is about, you know, the liberation from the pressures of corporate life, from, you know, from the pressure that trying to run a high growth company can, can come with. And so, what, like, what is that, what is that word, and how do we define ourselves? I don't I don't know what that answer is. But, um, but I feel like we can find an answer to it, and finding a different word, you know, I think it, it doesn't discount, right, any of the hard work that any of us put into this, like, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong about that, or about us for using a word that, that other people find off-putting. But I think it's something for us to grapple with, especially if we want to be a force within the business community at some point.

Colleen Schnettler 09:16

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 09:18

I feel like you're just kind of shocked. You're just like, where did this come from?

Colleen Schnettler 09:20

I'm just sitting here processing, Michele. Well, there's a couple of things running through my mind. The first, the first thing I would like to say is this shows the importance of getting, this word is overused, but diverse opinions. So I mean, if you hadn't sent your book out to people outside of our community, I never would have, I wouldn't have had a single comment on that word. So I think this shows the importance of that and as, in a larger sense, if more tech companies tried to get more diverse ideas and opinions, you know, they would avoid the pitfall you almost fell into.

And the other thing I was thinking is I feel like Courtland has, has really come up with a good term, Indie Hackers. But that is, of course, a brand name as well, so we can't really take that. But I tend to use that word the most, because I think that most represents what I'm trying to do, which is build a business without taking funding while hustling, but also trying to build a business that fits into my life. So, that's kind of the term I use a little more frequently. But I love this idea of trying to think of, you know, a new way to kind of brand ourselves as a community.

Michele Hansen 10:29

I feel like Indie Hackers is a really good way of describing developers who are trying to start their own companies. But to me, it sort of feels like that's where the definition ends. And like, I love participating with Indie Hackers, but like, I wouldn't classify myself as a hacker. There's also, you know, tons of people who have really negative reactions to the word hacker, right?

Colleen Schnettler 10:52

That’s true, too.

Michele Hansen 10:53

Like, that word is, you know, is very loaded in its own right. And someone brought up indie SaaS, which kind of reminded me of indie rock, which, you know, started out meaning independent of record labels. And then it meant just, like independent record labels, as opposed to major record labels. And then it just meant like, a style of music and more broadly, a culture. I guess I would be fine with indie SaaS, but for me as a former sort of, quote, unquote, indie kid, when I was a teenager, like to me, like indie just sounds a lot like music. And doesn't, I, but maybe, like, maybe it's just like, you know, the little 15 year old hipster still in me that thinks that and like, everybody else thinks it's fine. Like, I like I would be fine with that, I think but it is, you know, with language, it's important to, to have something that is instantly like, recognizable for people, but, and language is always changing. I think that's the, sort of the fun thing about it. And, and changing words is hard. But, but there's many examples throughout the decades and centuries of people adapting language. So yeah, I'm kind of curious to hear what, what people will, will come up with.

Colleen Schnettler 12:19

Me, too. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Michele Hansen 12:20

Yeah. Let's move to something a little lighter.

Colleen Schnettler 12:25

That was pretty heavy to open the podcast with.

Michele Hansen 12:20

I know. I dropped a bomb.

Colleen Schnettler 12:29

But this is my first cup of coffee. I just woke up.

Michele Hansen 12:31

Did you get a testimonial up this week, Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler 12:34

I did. I got a testimonial up. So, I'm pretty happy with that. I ended up buying Tailwind UI, which was such a good decision. It's so I mean, I should have bought it six months ago. Like, it's so funny. But I bought Tailwind UI, and I use their testimonial blocks. So, and I wrote one and I got it up. So I felt pretty good about getting that done. It’s a small thing, but you know, baby steps. What I've really been thinking about, I feel like, although my optimism is still high, I have felt kind of directionless the past few weeks. And so, and I think the thing that we have talked about and that I've been struggling with is people are obviously using my product and paying for my product. So, there is a need for my product. But I have not yet honed in on who those people are.

Michele Hansen 13:30

That’s okay. It’s been live for like, you know, with paying customers for like two months now, right? Like, that's okay.

Colleen Schnettler 13:40

So, what I want to do in order to, like, tailor my marketing and my content and, and kind of figure out who's really using it is I want to go back to basics. So when I built this, my original thought, I built it for myself, right? So, at the time, you know, if we go back almost a year now in the podcast archives, I was like, oh, I'll sell this to other consultants. I have no idea if this is something other consultants want. So I am trying to go back to basics here. And I'm gonna, I want to speak with other consultants to find out what their needs are and what their pain points are in the file uploading space. So that's my plan.

Michele Hansen 14:24

Hmm. What's driving this feeling?

Colleen Schnettler 14:28

Because I feel, here's the thing with Heroku is these people aren't, no one's emailing me back, which is fine. I only have, what do I have, like 18-ish paying customers? Of those 18-ish paying customers, only 60% are using it. So I feel like those people that aren't using it will churn, and Heroku is like, choppy, right because they prorate. You could sign up for two days and then cancel. Now people aren't really doing that, but I don't know, I feel like it's coming. And I feel like I want to know where, what to do next, right. As we've talked about a million times, like, we've talked about all the different things I could do next, and so I need to, I need some focus. And I feel like before I start diving into all these other communities and, and stuff, I need to know what my value proposition is here, like, who am I providing value to? What do they need? Because part of me hasn't want to made, part of me has not want to make the push to new communities because I feel like there's a lot of features I'm lacking. But the question is, like, no one has complained about me not having these features, like, do I need these features? I don't know. I just need to, I need to figure that out, I think. And so that's kind of why I think I want to go back to my original audience and see if what I'm providing is actually something consultants want, because I'm starting to think maybe it's not. I'm starting to think maybe they're not my people, not because I don't know, this is just a hunch I have just based on, like, the minimal feedback I've gotten so far. So I don't know, I feel like I've been bouncing around kind of unsure of what to do next, and so when in doubt, talk to more people. Right, coach? Isn't that the rule?

Michele Hansen 16:219

That is the rule. You know, what? I wonder if there's this feeling that we had for the first couple of years, and I wonder if this feeling is running underneath what you're feeling, which is this fear that everything could go away overnight.

Colleen Schnettler 16:42

Oh, yeah. I mean, definitely, I think part of that is like, okay, so my 18-ish paying customers, maybe 11, or 12 are actually using it. Yeah, I mean, sure. They could all just change their minds, because they're like, she doesn't have, you know, image resizing or batch deletion, or whatever it is that I don't have that they need. And that hasn't happened, but it might because I just don't know enough about what people feel like they need.

Michele Hansen 17:13

Yeah, there's this, there's this real, I think, I don't, I don't know what the word is that I'm looking for. But there's this precariousness of a product that runs underneath, right? Like, like, for a long time, we would just be like, all this revenue could go away overnight. Like, we just operated as if it could all go away. Which made us really hungry, in the way that you are, to try to figure out okay, why is this working?

Colleen Schnettler 17:47

Right? Right? Why is it working? I don’t know. That's fundamentally the problem.

Michele Hansen 17:53

Is it working, and why is it working? I mean, there's also kind of, I think, in this, this feeling, I feel like I'm hearing from you, which is also something I have felt, which is, why did anyone sign up for this when it is lacking all of these features that I thought were absolutely critical, like, you know, and basically, you know, like, I have definitely had products that I think of I'm like, this product sucks, like, why is anyone using it? Like, are they, like, are they okay, like, did they realize that this is terrible? Like, like, there's this, I mean, it's, it's like an insecurity, right? Because you don't have security and knowing why people are there, and why they're staying.

Colleen Schnettler 18:40

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That's such a good, that's the perfect way to put it, Michele. Like, clearly this is working because I'm not losing people. And I'm getting, you know, about one sign up every one to two weeks. So, something is working, but I have no idea like, how it's working. I have no idea if they feel like they're getting their money's worth. I have no, I have no idea what value I'm providing to these people. And so absolutely, if I, you know, let's say every single one of them talked to me and showed me their side and was like, this is how we're using it, and this is how it saves us money, then I'm sure I would feel very differently. But with no people talking to me, I've literally no idea. So I expect them to all cancel tomorrow because I just don't know if I'm providing them value.

Michele Hansen 19:23

So I think that's a rational feeling.

Colleen Schnettler 19:25

Okay.

Michele Hansen 19:26

Yes, and I think you were doing the right thing. By listening to that feeling, right? Like, you're not just kind of like, running from that feeling and saying, no, I'm just gonna act like that's not there. And whatever and put my head in the sand. You're saying, okay, where is this feeling coming from and what can I do to answer this, right? It's, why is this working? And because, because without knowing why it's working, you don't know what to do more of, or less of. Like, it's impossible to prioritize when you don't know why things are happening. And this is one of those things that like, you can look at signup metrics or, or traffic metrics and see that something is happening. You can see what is happening. You can see that there's new signups every week. You can see that there's revenue. You can see that, did that whale customer like, did they, did they cancel yet, by the way?

Colleen Schnettler 20:19

They did not cancel. They are still paying me $250 a month.

Michele Hansen 20:23

So you can see that they are still paying you. But those metrics will never tell you why. And you can only figure out the why by talking to someone. And this is why we use both qualitative and quantitative methods with customers to figure out the why. And so, so, so your approach to this, it sounds like, you want to start with going back to the people you were originally building for. That's kind of where you're thinking of going. Like, it sounds like you feel like you can't get your customers to talk to you.

Colleen Schnettler 21:01

Right. So, and to be fair, I just I think it's a, it's a volume problem. Like when I had 115 customers, because when it was free people signed up like crazy. When I had like, 115 customers, I could always find someone to talk to me, which was great. But I only have what, what’d I say like, 18-ish paying customers, and none of them I've, you know, none of them have responded to requests to chat, which is fine, right? I don't want to harass them. So I've been thinking about, we've talked about me wanting to explore other avenues like, other, other markets, but I'm already in the Heroku marketplace, and I want to make sure I'm taking advantage of people who already use Heroku. And so, when I originally thought of this idea, like, I was like, this is perfect for people who have to do multiple sites in a year for consultants, right? Because it speeds you up so much. So I'm trying to circle back to those people who do like, full stack web apps, like the consultant people and talk to them, because I actually never asked any of my consultant friends if it's something they would use. So I figure I might as well start there, since that was my original intended audience and kind of see what I learn because I have a hypothesis that the consultants are going to want something very different than the no-code people. And so what I look at, like what feature like, what I need to add to my product, I have, I have theories about it. And before I start building anything, or you know, really pushing into another marketplace, I want to see if my theories prove correct.

Michele Hansen 22:45

You have an email that triggers people when they start that prompts them to talk to you, right? Do you have another email that triggers people who haven't acted? Like, you said only 60% have used it? Do you have another email that triggers like, if they haven't started using it within a certain period of time?

Colleen Schnettler 23:04

I do not.

Michele Hansen 23:06

I would be curious to introduce that. And that's a fairly common practice with online services and software, is to have something that, say like, if you, you know, based on, so if you look at those 60% who did start, if you can get the numbers on, let's say, the median, or average time it took them to upload a file or to into like, like, can you get that data?

Colleen Schnettler 23:33

I don't know. I mean, the data is there somehow, I'm not quite sure how to extract it. I'm sure I can sort it out.

Michele Hansen 23:38

Okay, so if you could find that data, then let's say it's three days. So then, after five days of, so three days in sign up, so let's say five days after sign up, triggering another email that says, you know, how can I get help you get started? Like, and, and, and not necessarily asking for a call. But again saying, you know, are you having any problems with the integration? Are, you know, I'm happy to help you or, you know, alternatively, if there's internal barriers you're facing to integrating this, like, I would love to hear more. Because it could be that like, they're waiting for the project to start, or they need approval from someone or, like, there could be all sorts of things going on that do relate to the product, like, maybe they're banging their head against the keyboard, and they didn't want to tell you, or there's just some internal thing going on. And that would at least give you some context, maybe, and it might be easier for people to reply to. Now we'll have to like, work on the copy a little bit and make sure that those are questions that are easy for people to answer, and probably not a yes or no question. So that all kind of takes some, some work but I think, I think that could be interesting to explore.

Colleen Schnettler 25:02

Yeah, that seems like, like a good idea. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 25:07

While you're doing this other exploration too, right? Like, we don't just have to do one thing at a time.

Colleen Schnettler 25:15

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. I think that's relatively easy to implement, and then maybe I can get some more, you know, feedback from folks as to why they haven't gotten started yet.

Michele Hansen 25:27

Yeah, talk to the existing customers, talk to the people who you thought would be customers. And I think the more information you gather, that can help you start building that sense of security, but like, like, I've really had that feeling of this could go away at any minute, or, you know, a major company could come in and just wipe us out, like, all the time for like, three years. Like, I mean, that's, it's a very real and common feeling.

Colleen Schnettler 26:00

Yeah. Yeah. And I think your point about, since I don't really know the value I'm providing, I mean, that's the first thing people always ask me, you know, when I, when I'm talking business with people, and I'm like, well, I don't really know who my customers are. So there's that.

Michele Hansen 26:20

What else are you working on? I know, this stuff is kind of a, like, this is the not fun work, and you would rather be, you know, putzing around in the code garden.

Colleen Schnettler 26:32

Putzing around in the code garden. Um, yeah, really scheduling. I'm trying to schedule five calls. And it's funny, because I thought I knew like, tons of consultants. But now I'm like, do I really know that many independent developers? I don't know. So you did 17, so my goal is to do five.

Michele Hansen 26:50

It’s not a contest.

Colleen Schnettler 26:51

Oh, it's a contest, Michele.

Michele Hansen 26:53

It’s really not like, it's not, not a contest. I don't think that's like fair, like, I had,

Colleen Schnettler 26:59

No, no, that’s why I need to do like,

Michele Hansen 27:03

And like, six years headstart on how to talk to customers. Is that fair? I don't think so, like.

Colleen Schnettler 27:10

So I really want to talk to people. I really want to talk with the consultants, because as I said, I really think they're gonna want something different than like, the no-code community. So I'm going to start there. I'd like to talk to five people who are independent web developers, you know, who work on more than one client project.

Michele Hansen 27:28

If that’s you, reach out to Colleen. I think if that's you, reach out to Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 27:31

Yeah, if that's you please, please, please send me a message. And then, you know, I want to do that. And then I want to do the no-code folks. And I feel like just as we, you know, talking to more people is going to give me a better idea about what people need. And like, how I can, I can help them achieve their business goals, right. Like that is the ultimate goal here is to help other people achieve their business goals. So that's kind of my focus. That and like, we talked about, I love the idea of adding the email, like, why haven't you, nicer than that, but kind of like, can I help you get started? And, yeah, that's like, the stuff I'm working on now.

Michele Hansen 28:12

Do you feel like you're in a good place?

Colleen Schnettler 28:15

No. I mean, it's so funny. Like, I think it was Alex Hillman, who has all these tweets about psychology, right? He's always like, it's the psychology, it's business, what does he say? Like business is easy; managing our own psychology is hard.

Michele Hansen 28:28

Oh, yeah, I know how like, we build software, but like, software is used by people, and people are the hard part.

Colleen Schnettler 28:37

Yeah. I mean, my thing is, I'm, I'm in this place where like, I'm not exactly happy with my product right now. And I'd like to have the time to just like, dive in and do all these cool things to it. And I know, two things are true. One, you know, it doesn't, that's probably not a good use of my time right now because I could make the perfect product, but if no one's gonna buy it, no one's gonna buy it. And like, I literally just don't have the time. Man, there's so many things I want to add to make it better though. So, so that's kind of been my challenge recently is like, is this product any good? Like, I mean, is it useful? Is it helping people? It doesn't have this feature, like, how can we work around that? Like, I don't know. I kind of feel like I've been pinballing a bit. So I'm trying to regain focus in terms of what I should be doing and you know, marketing.

Michele Hansen 29:35

It almost seems like you feel like you're sort of working into a void and like, not knowing whether what you're providing is providing value. It's sort of like, dents the motivation a little bit because without knowing that you are helping people, it's like, it's hard to keep going because, because it's sort of, where do I go?

Colleen Schnettler 30:03

Yeah, absolutely. Like these things I want to add, not a single person has asked for them. Like, let's be clear, but no one's talking to me, right? And I can't say, oh, if I add all these features, I'm gonna get, you know, all these signups coming through. I have no reason to believe that's true, right? Like, like, I have had no one say, oh, I wouldn't buy your product, but I want this thing. So this is just like, things that I want to do to make my product better. But also things that I don't know if anyone cares about. So to your point, I want to spend time on these things. But is that just, you know, what is it, yelling into a void? You know, like, is it? Yeah, I just feel like I'm kind of in a void. I'm not talking to enough people. I can't figure out why people are signing up. Um, so it's not bad, right? Like, this is a good, mostly good problem to have.

Michele Hansen 30:54

But it’s an unsettling problem.

Colleen Schnettler 30:55

It's unsettling. That's a good way to put it. Since I don't know that I'm providing value, iIt's hard for me to one feel like my work is meaningful, and two, feel like all these people aren't just going to cancel tomorrow.

Michele Hansen 31:09

This has turned into a really heavy episode, like, like, I'm pulling apart language and Colleen is in a void. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 31:21

What is that about?

Michele Hansen 31:25

It’s like, uh, do, The Good Place like, Janet's void, like I'm just picturing it. This like, cool, like, fun place and, we’ll make your void an enjoyable place to be. And hopefully get you out of the void. And if you haven't seen The Good Place, and you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sorry. We'll get you out of the void.

Colleen Schnettler 31:47

Yeah, I like it. I'm here for it.

Michele Hansen 31:49

I think that's probably a good place to wrap up for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. If you liked this episode, it would mean so much if you, to us if you just like, tweeted it out and why you liked it. That's always super helpful and motivating to us so we don't feel like we're podcasting into a void. But yeah, we'll talk to you next week.

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Colleen Schnettler 00:00

This week's episode of the Software Social Podcast is brought to you by Hopscotch Product Tours. Hopscotch Product Tours allows you to improve user onboarding with helpful product tours that guide your users to success. Also, reduce frustration by helping users learn how to use your product, without the need for demo calls. Visit Hopscotch.club today and start delighting your users with Hopscotch Product Tours.

Michele Hansen 00:28

So Colleen. Cloudflare.

Colleen Schnettler 00:33

Oh, Cloudflare.

Michele Hansen
This week, Cloudflare introduced their images beta to simplify your image pipeline, a simple service to store, resize, optimize, and deliver images at scale.

Colleen Schnettler 00:54

Yeah, I saw that. So that's a big disappointment for me because I really, when I had been thinking about how this was going to go, in my mind, I was gonna launch in Heroku, which I've done, and kind of get my product exactly where I want it to be, and then launching Cloudflare. Because I have launched a small free app in the Cloudflare marketplace before, and they have millions of users. So the distribution channel there is spectacular. So I'm a little disappointed because I felt like I had a really, really good opportunity in that marketplace. And now that they've launched their own service, like, I don't think I'm going to be able to compete with that.

Michele Hansen 01:37

So this came out, and you know, I saw this, this blog post, and I thought of you immediately and it's interesting. The post they have on it, they outline the difference, they call them the four fundamental questions you might answer: Where do we store images? How do we secure, resize and optimize the images for different use cases? How do we serve the images to our users reliably? How do we do all of these things at scale while having predictable and affordable pricing, especially during spikes? And what strikes me about that is there are some similarities with what you've been solving, but also there are differences. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 02:12

What do you mean?

Michele Hansen 2:!4

So, I remember you talking about images and whether you wanted to go in this whole direction of resizing and optimizing images. And your product is called Simple File Upload. It's not Simple Image Upload. And so this is like, part of what you're solving, but at the same time, you're doing other stuff, too.

Colleen Schnettler 02:40

Right. And when I originally launched the product, that was a big reason, is because all of the big players predominantly handle media files, and I kept running into this problem where I needed PDFs, or I needed Word docs because we were doing resumes. So that is part of the reason I started focusing on files in general. But as more and more people use it, I see pretty consistently, most people are using it predominantly for images. So I really did feel like my growth trajectory was going to be in the image space. So I am different from Cloudflare in that I would, I do multiple files, but they even have good pricing. Like, they even have, they're going to, this is going to be incredibly successful for them because they even have straightforward pricing is what it looks like. And so it doesn't make, mean I'm not gonna have a thing, right? It means maybe when I launch in Cloudflare, I focus more on the file aspect than the image aspect because they currently offer all the things I want to add, but have not yet added, right? Like it'd be, it is so frustrating as a developer to read their blog post and be like, oh, my gosh, it'd be so easy for me to add these few things they offer. And man, if I had just beaten them into the market. But you know what, it's a big market. Like, there's literally millions of people, I believe, who use CloudFlare. So, it doesn't mean there's not space for me. But I do think it means when I write my CloudFlare app, I focus more on other types of files, since they will now have, you know, this easy to implement solution that fits right in with their existing CDN’s and stuff.

Michele Hansen 04:16

I think that's such an important point that there are space for multiple companies in it for any given thing, you know, and I don't know if this is a result of kind of the, the sort of narrative that we're living in around companies, and especially what, you know, venture capitalists might look for in a company is they want the company that is going to become the monopoly that can charge the highest prices and have, you know, the highest profits and just eat everybody else in that industry. And that is, you know, in so many ways, the opposite of what we bootstrappers try to do and believe in and, you know, also now the US government has kind of onto tech, and all of that sort of monopoly-building. And, but I think living in that environment, we forget that like, it's okay to have a big company come into your space, or to already have big companies competing against you, and there can still be space for a small, successful company there. And, you know, I offer us up as evidence. Like, we've been competing at Google since day one.

Colleen Schnettler 05:31

Yeah, and I think that's one of the best decisions I made when I finally launched this product. As we've talked about before, I've been coming up with ideas and trying to launch MVPs of different things. And a lot of the things I was trying to do were like, big, cool new ideas. And as a single founder, like, in an untested market, I could not get a big cool new idea off the ground, like props to you, if you can, that's awesome. But people looked at me like I, like, they looked at me sideways when I was like, I told people, like developers what I was making, they were like, so you're making what? And they list like five other companies that do the same thing. And I was like, yes, I am. And now they're all really surprised at how successful it's been. And I think that just goes to show, like, the market was already proven for what I was doing. I focused on a really small group of people. And so far, that's been working for me. And again, I don't know, like, how that'll grow or scale or whatever. But I don't know, it's working for me right now, going into a tested market, even with big players, because the big players, if you have a customer support request to a big player, they're gonna send you to their forums, right? I know, because it's happened to me. You're like, oh, I have this problem. Can I do this thing? They're like, first thing is you get the automated chat widget that says, ‘Go look in the forums,’ and you're like, nah. And I had my first support request this week, by the way, which is kind of fun. And the person was like, it was so great. I think they were so surprised that I responded so quickly. And I, like, literally fixed the problem in a day. I think, I think the person left with like, a really positive, I mean, they told me they had a really positive experience with me. And so, kind of what you talk about what Geocodio, I think, by focusing on a small group of people, and by keeping my customer support high, hopefully I can still find a place, a space in this ginormous market of a file uploading.

Michele Hansen 07:27

I think you can. And to go back to what you were touching on earlier, you mentioned that you have been successful so far. And I have to ask, Colleen, how successful have you been so far? What is our numbers update for this week?

Colleen Schnettler 07:47

So since last week, I, one more customer converted from the free trial to paid. And so I'm at $835 MRR. Right? But curiously, that person who is paying me $250 a month has neither emailed me back nor uploaded any files. So that is a most interesting thing. So I am prepared. I mean, I'm hoping that that person sticks around, and they're just trying to get going. But I am prepared that like, if you have someone at $250 a month churn, like that's gonna hurt. So we'll see what, what that person does. But like I said, I'm just trying to offer a high level of support and keep on trucking. I do think, though, with the Cloudflare thing like, this might change my whole strategy in terms of whether I've been launched in that marketplace. Like I certainly haven't, I haven't finished serving the Heroku marketplace. There's still a lot of people in there. And, as we've talked about in the early days, is I still feel like I could do a lot in like NoCode, I just have not had time to dive into it. So this might change my growth strategy from Heroku to Cloudflare, which was my original plan. I might now do, like, Heroku to NoCode to see if I can serve those people better. I don't know, I got to talk to more people and kind of get a better idea.

Michele Hansen 09:09

You've been really interested in serving no coders.

Colleen Schnettler 09:13

It's cuz I just, I just, they're so happy when you give them file uploading. Like everyone I've talked to, in that space, like, it makes file uploading so easy for them, and kind of similar to the interviews we've had, you know, we had with Drew, where he was struggling, it's so rewarding to be able to help someone like that. To be like, oh, you this thing will take you like three to five days, and like, I can just get out of your way get, you know, do this for you, get out of your way, and then you know, you're up in five minutes. Like, I don't know, it just seems to make them really happy. And I feel like they're, they're like the hotness, right? But I feel like in this particular arena, they're an underserved market. Like, I haven't, I've only started talking to a few people using NoCode, but they're like, uploading to Airtable. So I need to find out if Airtable is backed by S3 or if Airtable, I don't know what Airtable is doing. I got to figure all that out. And I think the best way is for me just to start building things and kind of immerse myself in that community. I just feel like that's where my opportunity is because I feel like those, those folks trying to build with NoCode, they're trying to make, they're trying to make products quickly, right. Whereas developers are trying to optimize usually for the most beautiful code, which is fine, like, that's cool. But my product is ‘helps you move fast’. And those people I think, are trying to move fast.

Michele Hansen 10:35

So I think you said that the market is underserved. And some markets are underserved with a willingness to pay and some markets are underserved because they don't have a willingness to pay. And I'm curious if you have been able to figure out what people are currently paying for, for image upload in NoCode, or, you know, because it's not possible, they're not paying for anything or like, like, what like, what the deal is with that.

Colleen Schnettler 11:08

Yeah, and I am just dipping my toe into that. So I'm trying to get more involved in,, in the no code community, but my understanding and this, okay, my understanding is based on one person I spoke with who's really involved in the NoCode stuff, and, and he said, like, for people who have a lot of uploading needs, they tend to use Uploadcare. And we've talked before about how Uploadcare is both expensive and has that really nebulous pricing. But I have not actually reached around and talked to any of those people who are using Uploadcare yet. So if I want to go down that path for growth, like, there's a lot, there's a lot I have to do to get to that community and start talking to that people and see if I really do have an audience or a market there. I don't know yet. It could be that the people dabbling in NoCode aren't making money yet, and because they're not, they don't, they won't pay for file uploading. So it's really too soon for me to say. I just, I have a gut feeling that that's a good space for me to be in, that my people are going to be there. But you know, things are going great with Heroku right now. So I definitely don't want to just like, stop focusing on Heroku. Like, that's been a great traction channel for me. So it's just as we've talked about. I just got to keep talking to people and, and see what I learned, and hopefully, you know, that'll lead me down the path of which direction to grow.

Michele Hansen 12:28

You mentioned you've talked to one person so far, and you did just say that you need to talk to more people. I always caution that you, you know, don't make any major decisions until you've heard the same thing from at least five people. And I wonder if they're, you know, in the sort of the, you know, as Amy Hoy calls it, the digital watering holes. If you could find people like, on the Makerpad community forums, or on Reddit, or like, somewhere else where people are already talking about how they do this, and reaching out to those people.

Colleen Schnettler 13:08

Yeah, I totally need to do that. I think I'm still trying to figure out, that's like a step B. I mean, right now, I'm still trying to figure out the people who are actually using it. I don't even have a good idea of the Heroku people who are actually using it, who are paying me. So I think I would love to, I mean, I don't know, what is that 15, no 20 ish paying customers. Like, it'd be so cool if I could get you know, 25 to 50% of those people on a call to find out what they're doing. So I'm kind of still struggling even to figure out what people who are using it now are using it for. So I really want to exhaust the resources I have there before I start reaching out to new people.

Michele Hansen 13:50

Yeah, that makes sense. And, you know, for context, like, the best I've ever gotten my recruitment emails to get someone to talk to me is like 8 to 10%. So,

Colleen Schnettler 14:01

So that's good to know.

Michele Hansen 14:02

I think it's just a volume question for you at this point.

Colleen Schnettler 14:08

Right. Right. So, so that's, I mean, I gotta I gotta pound the pavement. I haven't, I haven't been pounding the pavement as much as I would like. So, I think there's a lot of, a lot of that in terms of just like going on Reddit, going on these forums, reaching out to people, seeing if people talk to me, and figuring out, you know, where my audience is. But I did want to get your opinion. So last week, my accountability goal for this week was to get a testimonial up on my website. So I took very small baby steps to make that happen, and I wanted to run the testimonial by you to see what you thought of the language.

Michele Hansen 14:47

Did you already run it by the person that it, that said it?

Colleen Schnettler 14:52

No. I mean, I will before, it’s not on my website. I asked him, I asked him, I said I'm gonna write something and then I'll send it to you to approve. So if he doesn't approve it, obviously I won't put it on my website. But um, I just kind of wanted to get, I have two things, and I just kind of want to read them both to you and see what you think he said. Is that cool?

Michele Hansen 15:14

Yeah, sure.

Colleen Schnettler 15:16

Okay, so the first one would be: I got Simple File Upload up and running in minutes. The software has allowed my team to focus on what matters: supporting our customers, and leave the details of file uploading up to the software.

Michele Hansen 15:28

Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 15:30

Okay, now, that’s the first one I got. The other one I have is: Simple File Upload allowed my team to stop fighting with file uploading and focus on what matters: our customers. We have the uploader up and running in five minutes. It really is that easy.

Michele Hansen 15:44

Oh, I kind of like the second one. It feels a little more, maybe it's just me, but it feels a little bit more authentic. And, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 15:53

I mean, that's more actually what he said. That's, that's more of a direct quote. Okay, cool. Yeah. So I'm gonna add that today. So I get that, that testimonial up on my site. And, man, there's so much to do. Like, it's all fun things, but like, I think of all these things we talk about I know, we talked about this last week, but it's like, oh, my gosh, I can think of like, 100 things I could do right now.

Michele Hansen 16:17

Do you have that list of like, tasks?

Colleen Schnettler 16:20

I do. I do. So I took, from last week, I took the testimonial. And it was like, like, it was like little itty bitty baby steps. Like, one day I asked someone if I could use their testimonial. The next day, I bought Tailwind UI. The next day, I put the testimonial block on my site. So it's been baby steps, but it's progress, right? I mean, you got to know when you're at a time in your life where you can just take baby steps, and that's kind of where I am. So for next week, my goal is to get the, this is a bigger, bigger goal, but like, to get the preview that, like, you can practice, you can use it up on my site. And I'm gonna break that down into lots of little tasks and kind of do the same thing I did this week, which was like, one baby step at a time. And keep moving forward.

Michele Hansen 17:04

I hear, like, optimism and a sense of direction in your voice.

Colleen Schnettler 17:10

Isn't it amazing? Okay, so here's the thing is, it's like, I didn't do that much more this week than I did last week, but I'm feeling so much more optimistic, and I think it's because these tasks I did this week were tiny, right? Like, some of them took five minutes. But just that sense of progress, like, just that sense of like, I've been talking about putting a testimonial up for three weeks. And it was like this mental block, and I just couldn't do it. And so this week, kind of what we talked about, like, I broke them down into these five, literally, they're like five to 10 minute tasks. And I had a busy week, and I was tired every night, but I was able to wrap my brain around doing a tiny task. And because of that, I've made progress forward, and that feels good. Right?

Michele Hansen 17:56

Yeah, like, you feel accomplished.

Colleen Schnettler 18:17

Yeah, totally. So yeah, so I'm feeling, I'm feeling good about, about that. So, I would love to hear about your 50 people interviews. Have you done 50 interviews?

Michele Hansen 18:11

I have not done 50. I have done, I think 17 or 18 this,

Colleen Schnettler 18:17

Wait, I talked to you last week, last week. You've done 17 interviews? Oh my gosh.

Michele Hansen 18:24

I mean, it's been like it's, it's, it's been, it's been amazing. Honestly, I like, I'm so, I'm so moved and so grateful that so many people were willing to talk to me, like, about this. And yeah, I'm just, I'm just filled with this enormous sense of gratitude for people literally all over the world helping me with this. And I mean, like, talking to people about talking to people is just to me, like, the greatest topic. Like, I like, just, every person, I feel like I could talk to them forever, and you know, on so many of the calls that kind of ends up being like, well, I don't have anything afterwards. Like, do you have a few, and then like, then we're like, continue chatting and like going over, and I did six of these on Monday. I did five on Tuesday, which, like, I have this rule that I will only do two in a day. Because more than that, you know, the energy that goes into kind of just, sort of fully absorbing someone's perspective and kind of, you know, sort of mentally like, peeking through their closet and looking at all the nooks and crannies, like, it just takes a lot of focus. And I, it can be tiring. And so you know, years ago, like, there was a, there was a day when I did three hour-long interviews in one day, and I was just like, I was so beat. And so since then I was like, I'll only do two in a day. And then I, in my enthusiasm about this, I did six on Monday. And I was like, oh now I remember why I have that rule. But it's, it's been so like, it's been so good. And I've been learning so many things. And like, there's all these things I didn't even think about. And it's, I'm so excited.

Colleen Schnettler 20:10

Give us an example of something you didn't think about.

Michele Hansen 20:12

Okay, so one of the things that came up is that, so I had this sense that, that, you know, my audience was kind of, like, mostly people who were, you know, basically people like you, who are trying to learn how to do this, running their own companies, haven't had a chance to really talk to customers before. And then like, a little smaller audience was like, people who need a book to recommend other people who are new to this that was very practical. But that was a smaller audience. And what I learned is really, that, like, consultants really need to work with something like this, to either do this work for their clients to explain what the work is, or to teach their clients how to do it, and then, so that they can offer other higher value like, add-on services. So it's like, not only while I do the interviewing, but then help you with the analysis part run workshops on, you know, making product strategy decision making, and like, a copywriter is saying that they, they wanted to move from just writing copy to helping make product decisions, for example, or consultants who work with small software businesses who need to teach people how to do this. And so that was really exciting, because I hadn't really thought about that at all. And, you know, people are saying, oh, if you have some sort of bundle that's for consultants, that makes it easy for me to share and adapt this like, that would, you know, that would be super helpful. And I really hadn't thought about that at all. So, so that's pretty exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 21:41

Yeah, that's awesome. So I noticed you had a tweet this morning. And that tweet said, “If I release this book, and get tons of requests for consulting, I will consider the book of failure because it wasn't actionable enough for people to apply on their own.” Tell me more about that.

Michele Hansen 22:02

Yeah. And I guess I should clarify that, like, I would feel like I have failed the reader, rather than the reader themselves failing, if that makes sense. Um, I, you know, I started out in tech working at an agency like, like, doing consulting, working with clients. And I did that for four years, and, and then I kind of at one point, I decided I really wanted to be in a product business. And I've been in product businesses since. And so I personally, just, I don't want to do consulting. And, and like, there's nothing wrong with consulting. Tons of people do it. Like it's just, I'm more personally suited to a product business than a client business. That's just something I know about myself, that I enjoy a product business more. The other thing is I also like, like, I have a product business. And if I start this consultancy, like, that's going to distract me from this business I have that's already working and needs my attention. And writing this book is already distracting me enough. And then if it leads to all of this consulting work like, that does not bode well, you know, for the future of the company. And so I, so, so, so these conversations this week were really interesting because it's gotten me think of, like, how can I empower consultants to use this? Like, because I definitely see that there is space for people who would read something and then say, okay, I don't have the time to do this myself, or I need some more help in implementing this. And that, and that's valid. I don't, I don't see myself as that person. Like, if people email me with questions about stuff, or like, hey, like, what do you think of this email? Or, you know, like, whatever, like, I'm happy to reply to that. But, so I'm kind of thinking about, like, how can I empower consultants and also product leaders to work with this? And, you know, so one, one thing I've talked about is like, the frequency of a problem matters, right? And like, we've talked about this in the, in the context of file upload, right? Have like, who has a frequent need for this? It's people who are, you know, freelancers, and consultants who are making lots of sites. For this, what's interesting to me about that, too, is that the consultants and product leaders, they're the ones who have a more frequent need for this. Like a developer starting their own company, they only need to buy this book once, but a product leader who is training their team on how to interview and they might need to buy the book for their whole team, and then they change companies in a year and a half. They're going to need, they're going to need another book to recommend to that new team or consultants who are always working with new clients. And so, people like that have a recurring need for a book like this. So, which, for a book that is going to have a marketing budget of zero, it isn't going to be helpful to have that kind of, you know, rely on those sort of existing behaviors and ways of spreading the book. So I don't really know how that's going to come together, but it's definitely interesting and just, you know, goes to show how talking to customers leads to business opportunities that you never realized were there.

Colleen Schnettler 25:10

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because, as a developer, as a consultant developer, the joke is kind of like, you should write a book so you get higher value consulting, right? Because it gives you, you know, domain expertise. You're like, oh, I wrote a whole book on this, and so you get higher value consulting. So that's why I was kind of surprised when I saw your tweet because I would think the book gives you so much clout that, like, you could almost name your price going in as a expert in this field.

Michele Hansen 25:42

Yeah. And I think it's confusing to people that I don't want to do that.

Colleen Schnettler 25:47

I think it's confusing to people. I think it's just because generally speaking, I think it's just confusing, because you're not optimizing for money.

Michele Hansen 25:56

Yeah, this is totally a labor of love.

Colleen Schnettler 25:58

This confused, this confuses people. Right. Yeah. No, I totally get what you're saying. And I'm, I'm curious, too, how it has been balancing. I mean, if you did 17 customers interviews in a week, you clearly don't have time to do anything else. Are you feeling like this is taken away from Geocodio? Are you guys like, it's been fine? Like, how has that been impacting you?

Michele Hansen 26:23

I think it's actually been, been fine. Like, I, I did still do a lot of Geocodio work, like, you know, especially like, so I'm having calls with people all over the world. And so, you know, a couple of those calls have been at 8am. Like, if I'm talking to India, or Australia, a bunch of them have been at 9pm with the US, and those aren't times I'm normally working, like, let's be honest, at eight o'clock in the morning, when I sit down at my desk, like, I'm just like, reading the news, and like, putzing around on Twitter, like, I'm not doing anything, really. So, um, and then also, um, you know, we so, like, we got started with it with a VA about a month, month and a half ago, like, I finally got someone from Squared Away, and she's been so awesome, and I had her write a bunch of landing pages. And I think those landing pages were too good, because like, our inbound volume from, like, new customer support, and like, you know, sort of business development or like, sales inquiries, like, has been really high in the past two weeks. So it's almost a good thing that I didn't like, you know, write any more landing pages or whatnot this week, because it's like, this is, this has been working too much. Like, we need to stop.

Michele Hansen 27:40

Yeah, so, so, but like, I can't keep doing this forever, right. Like, I can't be spending hours talking to people about my side project, especially where, you know, if a call is at nine o'clock at night, and you know, sometimes goes till 9:30 or 10, like, I'm, I'm tired, I'm not getting time to relax, and that takes a toll. So, I have more calls next week, but not nearly as many. Um, and I'm more so focusing on writing, like, I'm on the third, not version, but like, you know, I've got the third draft out there as of this morning. So you know, it's

Colleen Schnettler 28:20

Wow, that's amazing.

Michele Hansen 28:22

Yeah, I’m getting a ton of really good feedback. Like, I'm super, super grateful. And like, people are being honest with me and being like, you know, this isn't working, or like, this is confusing, but also when they like stuff. So, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 28:33

Wow. So are you still going for 50? Are you going to decrease that number?

Michele Hansen 28:38

I think, I intentionally made that number high, so that it would make people more comfortable in talking to me. Like, because 50 is like, really high. So it was, it very much creates this like, like, not only do I want to talk to people, like, I need to talk to you if I'm going to get to this number. And so I will end up around 25 people. And that's half of that, but I'm, honestly I'm, like, I'm thrilled with that. And I am, I think it says quite a lot that so many people are willing to talk to me. And then at the end, they're like, thank you so much. And I'm like, you're the one who's giving me valuable information. No, I mean, I just, I have this notebook, like, sitting next to me on my desk right now. And it's just like, full of notes. And I have so many recordings and yeah, it's, it's, it's been amazing.

Colleen Schnettler 29:33

Awesome. How are you feeling, like, how's your imposter syndrome with the book because I know you said last week you were feeling kind of the, the stress and anxiety of doing this is, this is something totally new for you.

Michele Hansen 29:47

Yeah, I think, you know, I've been able to drill in on it a little bit more. And I don't think it's imposter syndrome. I think it's, it's finding a way to market this in a book that aligns with what my goals are, and is done in a way that I feel comfortable with. So I don't know what those goals are, right? So, I'm literally just doing this because it's something that, that I have needed. And, and, and I think I also, I have this kind of you know, that, when you're selling a product that people don't need, or they don't know they need, that's very different from the product like, from how Geocodio was sold. People already know that they need geocoding, or they need Census field, like, they need, they know they need that, and they're just looking for something that does that. With a product that people don't know they need, that lends itself to a different set of marketing tactics. And quite frankly, some of those can be very scammy, and making lots of promises to people and not always delivering on them. I'm not saying that that's always how it is, but there are many examples of that. And I think that's where that reticence comes from, is I have just, I'm just like, allergic to anything scammy, and so I want to find a way to do this in a way that delivers exactly what has been promised to people, or more. So, and I think I can do that. And I think that's not necessarily about the actual tactics, that's more of how things are structured, and how I market it. And you know, to what I was saying earlier, like, if I can rely on existing behaviors to sell the book, like, you know, product leaders recommending it to their teams, like, that’s a sale of five books, and that didn't require me, you know, bombarding someone with emails, getting them to buy like, a package or whatnot, like, which, you know, can work but like, I just, I don't, that just doesn't feel like me. So um, yeah, I think I have a lot of thoughts on that. But I think I will find a way. And actually, there's a friend of ours who I've, who I've asked to, like, come on in a few weeks to kind of like, coach me through it, because he wrote a book, like, self-published a book. And, the other, so the other thing about this is people are like, oh, well, like, what about doing a course or like, a video course, or like, all this stuff, and I'm like, I hadn't even thought about that, like, so that could be something that comes later. I feel like I have to get the base content out. And then I can sort of reshape it, like, I can repackage it in different things. But I have to get that core product of the book out first. But there could be lots of different things, and you know, some people learn better over audio or video than they do reading. So, um, so yeah, there's kind of space for lots of different directions to go with this.

Colleen Schnettler 33:12

I mean, Michele, it sounds like you're starting another company. You realize that, right?

Michele Hansen 33:16

I know, I know. I need to like, not do that. That’s just, like, that’s the problem.

Colleen Schnettler 33:20

Exactly what it sounds like.

Michele Hansen 33:22

I need to not do that. This needs to be like, a little fun thing, where I feel like I'm contributing back to the world, and I am, you know, compensated for the time that I have put into it. And like, you know, it's always nice if you know, I'm, you know, something I like, think about developers how, you know, if you guys ever, like lose your job, or whatever, like, developers can just go start consulting. Now, there's more complications that it's not like, it's, it's easy, but like, people recognize the skills of developers, and it's an easier hill to climb to go get a client than somebody coming from the product discipline like me, where, you know, like, knock on wood, like, you know, I don't know, company collapses tomorrow, like, I don't feel like I could just go out and like, be like, hire me as your product consultant person.

Colleen Schnettler 34:15

Yeah, it's kind of nebulous, like, what is a product consultant? What is their value?

Michele Hansen 34:20

Exactly. But it's like, this is a very concrete skill, and so in a way it's like, and, and like I said, I hope it never comes to this, but you know, like, it's almost a professional insurance policy that like, I can decide right now that I don't want to do consulting. But if it turns out that this book has done well, like, I could decide 5 or 10 years from now that I want to, and so it’s, yeah, it's kind of like, I don't know if that makes sense, like thinking about it as an insurance policy, but, so who knows?

Colleen Schnettler 34:49

Well, let's wrap up today's episode of the Software Social Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. You can reach us on Twitter @SoftwareSocPod. We will talk to you next week.

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Michele Hansen 00:00

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Michele Hansen
So, last time we talked about the numbers for Simple File Upload was about two weeks ago, and you hadn't really looked at it much for a few weeks because you had been moving. Um, and it was at $515 in MRR, and it's been, like, two weeks since then. So where, where ya at?

Colleen Schnettler 01:46

So, I checked this morning and I am at 800.

Michele Hansen 01:50

Whoa. Dude. No, I am like almost 1000.

Colleen Schnettler 01:52

I know. MRR. I know. that feels like almost 1000, and like 1000 feels like a real business.

Michele Hansen 02:02

Holy buckets of guacamole, Batman, like 800 dollars!

Colleen Schnettler 02:06

Yeah, it was it was um, it's exciting. Now, like, the caveat here is the reason I had such a jump because I'm averaging about a customer a week, which is a wonderful growth rate for me. But someone signed up for my custom plan, which is $250 a month.

Michele Hansen 02:23

Hey, oh.

Colleen Schnettler 02:25

Michele Hansen 02:26

What is your custom plan?

Colleen Schnettler 02:27

So my custom plan is basically like, whatever you want. I don't actually even remember if I put like, what the limits I put on it. I should probably check to make sure this person is set up properly. But basically, the custom plan is, is the idea that I will set it up for you. Um, so that person is signed up, and I have, I'm sure it's a company at that, you know, it's through Heroku. So I'm sure it's a company. I have reached out, but I haven't heard anything back yet. So they're just paying me. So hopefully, I can help them out. Yeah, hopefully I can help them out. So yeah, that, that's that plan. So that's why there's been such a big jump over the two weeks, because that really made a difference. But it’s very exciting.

Michele Hansen 03:10

That's so exciting. And I really hope that you can, you know, get in touch with these folks, and figure out why they bought that so you can sell a lot more of that.

Colleen Schnettler 03:22

So I can sell more.

Michele Hansen 03:23

Like, let's do that. Like, let's sell more of that.

Colleen Schnettler 03:26

This plan.

Colleen Schnettler 03:28

I want everyone on this plan. So yeah, so that was a nice surprise. I have, as I said, I finally have a little more time to work on it. So this week, I pushed through like, just a few small things, a few email onboarding changes. I wasn't getting a very good response rate to my email. So I just tried to make a few changes. I just pushed them through this week, so I won't know if they work for a little while to see if I could get some more responses. And I think, you know, I'm still, I'm still in this weird place where I'm really busy, and I don't have quite the time I thought I would. So I'm really just trying to focus on small, persistent, small, consistent effort over time. And I was reading a tweet by Paul Graham, and I know a lot of people have like, mixed feelings on Paul Graham. Okay, but I still like his tweets. Anyway, someone was, was talking about when Y Combinator started, and they were talking about how the thing with Paul Graham is, he used to like, intensely focus on one thing. So if you were in his Y Combinator batch, and you were supposed to do this one thing, like, every time he saw you, that's all he would ask you about. And I like that because I think in this stage, there's just so many things, right? There's so many things pulling my attention. Like for example, I went to do these emails, which should have taken 30 minutes, and I ended up spending four hours because I was like, well while I'm in here, I'm gonna fix this thing and while I'm in here, I'm gonna write some more, I'm going to get these tests passing and, and while I'm in here, you know, and then it was like, the half day I had, I had set aside to do this stuff got taken up with, like, all those little things. And those are all good things to get done. But Michelle, it's been like, three weeks since, or four weeks since our interview with Drew, and I still have not taken the feedback we discussed, and put it on my freakin homepage. Like, I just haven’t done it.

Michele Hansen 05:28

That’s okay.

Colleen Schnettler 05:28

I know, but I, I think that should be my number one, I think that should be like my number one thing to do. So until I get that done, I should stop getting distracted by oh, but my email copy could be better. Oh, but this thing could be better.

Michele Hansen 05:43

So, can we talk about your email copy for a second? So I'm curious, like do you have what the copy was before? And then I'm just curious what you changed it to.

Colleen Schnettler 05:54

Oh, you know what, I'm only saving the ones that I have now. So I didn't save the old ones.

Michele Hansen 06:01

Can you read us the new one?

Colleen Schnettler 06:03

The new one says, “Hi, I just wanted to personally reach out and thank you for trying Simple File Upload. Would you mind replying and let, letting me know two things? One, are you working on a business client or personal website? Any links you want to share are encouraged. Two, what are you hoping to accomplish with Simple File Upload? I read and respond to every reply. Thanks, Colleen. Simple File Upload Founder.”

Michele Hansen 06:28

Can you, can you walk me through the sort of, some of the changes you made? Like what were you thinking?

Colleen Schnettler 06:36

Yeah, so before I had something that was more like, “Hi, thanks for trying Simple File Upload. Please let, please reach out. If you have any questions, or you need any help getting set up.” I think I had something like that before. I don't have the exact text, but it was something along those lines. So the goal in this email copy change is to try and make it a little more specific, like, the questions. So you know, oh, and then at one point I had, are you using? I had one question. So I started with, I think the very first was just, you know, thanks. Let me know if you need any help. I think the second one was, can you let me know if you're using react or JavaScript? That one had a decent response rate. And then I went back to the old one, which was, let me know if I can help you. And where am I now. And so now I'm talking, I'm doing that curious to hear what you're working on one that we just discussed.

Michele Hansen 07:25

I'm interested to, to hear what the responses are. And you said that the customer who signed up for your custom plan is probably a company. And I feel like at some point, months, or I don't know, a while ago, that you had decided to focus on people who are working with clients, because they need something like this much more frequently. And it was kind of like you, like, wanted companies as customers, but it was kind of like, if you don't get in the beginning of a process, like they're basically not going to use it, they're already set up on us three, like, they're good. Like, let's focus on the people working with clients instead. And so I'm kind of, like, something interested in like, a little shift there. I feel like that, um, you know, a little, little shift in the wind there that I feel like I just picked up.

Colleen Schnettler 08:26

Well, I want to work with whoever will pay me. I mean, I don’t know if it has-

Michele Hansen 08:30

I know I was like, sort of like your like, marketing and how you were structuring things you were like, let's go after these people first. And then if we get those, like company, customers, like, great, but, be, it seemed like from what you had done from your research you had picked up there was kind of like a bigger lift and like, a little bit harder to get those bigger companies as customers.

Colleen Schnettler 08:54

Yes, I would agree. I think that's true. So I don't, I don't really feel like it's a shift, I feel like that, that is still, those are still my people, or my ideal customer is still kind of like, the smaller businesses just getting started, consultants who have to do this over and over and over. Those are still probably my primary market. But I am very curious about this one company that signed up. So I feel like the new email copy more accurately targets that market because it's kind of more lightweight. It's kind of more like, hi, I'm your friend and I want to know what you're working on.

Michele Hansen 09:32

It'll be really interesting to see what the responses are you get back and what people say they're working on and I would be so excited to, to you know, try to talk to this new customer and figure out like, are they switching from something else? Are they using this for an entirely new project? Like, like, where, like, what like how does this fit with everything? Like, are they using this for everything, or, and why are they switching to something new? That's always a question that I find so insightful to get the answers to. It's why it’s one of the first scripts I wrote for interviews, but I think that could be, like, really, really helpful for you to figure that out.

Colleen Schnettler 10:14

Absolutely, I, um, am a little worried that they're just gonna say they did it on accident. That's normal, right? But yeah, I will let you know when I hear back. I haven't heard anything back.

Michele Hansen 10:27

There’s always that fear, right, like, if I email, email the customers like, maybe I'll remind them that they signed up for it. And then they didn't mean to, or, like, they'll decide they actually don't like it because I got this email. And you know, I have never found that to be the case. But that, that fear is real, right. Like, that's a real fear. Like, you know, the bear, right?

Colleen Schnettler 10:49

Yeah. Exactly. Like they're, they're paying me $250 a month, maybe I should just leave them alone. Yeah, I do think, so back to, I mean, I think this is something I really need to hone in on because I still feel like, no, I'm sure, I'm still kind of bouncing around in that kind of high churn. Some people are using it, some people aren't even though they're paying for it, which is weird. But I definitely feel like I haven't found my target market. And so the people I have talked to have all been so far, as we just discussed, like, either they have a small business, or they are just getting started on something with a lot of potential, and they just want to get up and starting quickly. So I definitely still think like the consulting small SaaS people are my people. I actually had a, stop me if I told you about this, I can't remember, but I had a prospective client, customer, prospective customer for Simple File Upload interview last week, or two weeks ago. Did I tell you about that?

Michele Hansen 11:52

I think you were gonna have that interview, like, right after we talked. So I don't know if I heard about that.

Colleen Schnettler 11:57

Yeah, so what happened was, he was pair programming, like totally random. This guy was doing some pair programming with Drew, you know, the guy who came on and uses simple file upload, he saw it. And Drew said like, he wasn't, you know, he didn't draw attention to it. But this other person saw it was like, that's really cool. I could use that for my project. So he reached out to me, so we had a call. And, yeah, so I really think like, those kind of people who have like, a really, you know, a fledgling startup, you know, they're just getting started, like, and they realized they need to Simple File, or they realized I need file uploading, are kind of my people. And what, exactly what he said was, he said, I just need this to get out of my way, right? Like, I don't want to spend two or three days doing file uploading. I want to focus on my core business, and I need this to just be done, which is like, exactly the market I'm going for. Those are my people.

Michele Hansen 12:54

It sounds like that's like, the reason why you built this right, was like, to get it out of the way that you know, nobody wants to spend all their time dealing with file upload, like they want to do something else. Nobody wants to just upload files, they want something else, like, it's just part of the process they're going through to do whatever it is they want to do.

Colleen Schnettler 13:12

Yeah, absolutely. And so I've been thinking a little bit, too. I mean, I've been, as I said, busy with other things, and I haven't given this a lot of attention. So we started this podcast, I use this podcast as like my accountability to make sure I shipped a product. So now I have shipped a product. So now, I want to become accountable to you that I'm going to continue marketing, because there's a couple things we've been talking about for weeks. And I just haven't managed to get them done. So this week, my goal is to, I'm close to getting my DNS and my bucket set up to do on the homepage, like we've talked about, like, have a demo right there. I'm close, but I'm not quite ready. So my goal is to focus on that goal, not get distracted by my code for four hours, as long as there's not an error. And there haven't, you know, I haven't had that problem. That's my goal for this week is, is to get that done and see what that does for signups.

Michele Hansen 14:13

It sounds like, sort of putzing around in the garden of code is really where you're comfortable.

Colleen Schnettler 14:18

Yes. Oh my gosh, it's the worst. Like, like, you should see me with this mail thing. Like it was my hour of marketing. I was like, I'm just going to change the email copy. That should take me 20 minutes, and it was just like, oh, but this, this test should probably be passing, even though this test whether it passes or not, has like, no bearing on my like, my product like it really doesn't. It was like a thing I'm not even using, but I just wanted to get it to pass. And then I'm like, futzing, I'm like, Oh, well I could reorganize this a little bit. And wouldn't it be nice if this, you know, if I refactor this and I'm like, oh no, stop. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 14:57

Do you have, like, a list somewhere of all the stuff you want to do?

Colleen Schnettler 15:01

I do have a list. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 15:02

Is that, like, how granular is that list?

Colleen Schnettler 15:08

Not granular enough because I get so, I mean, I don't typically get distracted. It was just this. It was a little frustrating, though. Um, I don't know, it's kind of big at the moment, especially the marketing stuff, right? Because that's all kind of like, you should do this thing. And you’re like, okay.

Michele Hansen 15:24

I think if you broke it down, those tasks more, like, you know, into not just like, you know, make a landing page, but like, you know, which specific one? What specific things are we putting on there? Like, what do we need to do? Like, and so like, can we like, what is the top priority marketing item? They're like, are they all prioritized? Or are they just kind of there.

Colleen Schnettler 15:50

They are not. They are just kind of,

Michele Hansen 15:51

They're just floating in space. Okay, so let's, let's take one that feels kind of important.

Colleen Schnettler 15:56

Okay, so for me, the important one is, the most important one is on my main page, I want a, I want to get testimonials up. And I want to get a try it now, like you can try it like as soon as you hit the page.

Michele Hansen 16:14

Is this one task in your list?

Colleen Schnettler 16:17

Yeah, yeah. Landing page update.

Michele Hansen 16:19

Okay, that sounds like more than one task. And at the, you know, risk of sort of being somewhat of like a to do list pedant here, like, I think we should, like, slice that one up a bit. Right? Like, make them all individual, because I think where this, you know, when you're doing something new, that's scary. Like finding a sense of progress when you're just spending all this time learning, like can like, I'm here right now, like, I feel like, I had like fish out of water, figuring out how to market and sell and layout and everything else like a, like a book like, I’m so there. Just breaking it down and giving yourself a sense of accomplishment. And so like, you know, from what you said there, like, I believe it was getting testimonials on the homepage and adding the code pen. So the testimonials and the code pen, those sound like two separate tasks to me, and then also getting the testimonials, that sounds like a combination of tasks. Because unless you have those already off the shelf and ready to go, you're going to need to reach out to people to get them, get the, to write some copy, get them to approve it, get like, an image of them or whatever that is, and then you have to load it. And so there's all these other tasks there. And so it, like, makes sense to me that you would look at that and kind of be like, ah, I'm just gonna go do some weeding and refactor some stuff. Like, because that task is not like, like, if a product manager or project manager handed you that task, you know, on a Trello board and you're, you know, in a suit and tie kind of job, you'd be like, this task is not properly scoped. It's not ready to be taken in.

Colleen Schnettler 18:14

I totally would, too. Be like, yeah, no.

Michele Hansen 16:19

And so apply that to your marketing tasks, too. Like, and I think that'll give you a sense of progress when you can start checking stuff off at least, and seeing these differences too.

Colleen Schnettler 18:14

Yeah, I absolutely think you're right. And I had kind of been feeling like, well, I don't want to change anything until I can change everything. But yeah, I think that, that I think you're absolutely right, like, a testimonial is like at least five steps. And my code pen is at least five steps because I got to get, you know, I got to do all these things we talked about a couple weeks ago to protect myself. So I've got to make sure I'm cycling a delete on the files every five minutes. And the domain is independent from my other domain. And like, it's not insignificant to do that. So yeah, that's like, that's like 10 tasks total. So you're absolutely right. I love that idea.

Michele Hansen 18:50

The first, the first step on the to do list is the bingo card free space. It's breakout all of the tasks in the to do list.

Colleen Schnettler 18:58

Your first task on your task list is make your task list.

Michele Hansen 19:01

It’s very meta, but it's so works, like.

Colleen Schnettler 19:04

Okay, I'm totally gonna do that. I'm usually really good at this. And I think this marketing stuff is just a bigger, you know, because it's, it feels nebulous, as we've discussed before.

Michele Hansen 19:13

Yeah. And when something feels nebulous, it's so easy to just be like, I'm going to do this thing I understand. Even if it's not the most important thing I could do be doing because it's the other thing feels a little bit like, ah.

Colleen Schnettler 19:24

It's so weird how you can like know, know this, know this about yourself and know you're doing it and still do it, isn’t it? Like, I literally when I was doing four hours trying to debug these specs, I was like, I knew this was a waste of my time. I was like, these specs have no bearing on my product at all. And they will eventually, right? It's a future task. It's like when I get API stuff set up, but like, I'm not anywhere near that.

Michele Hansen 19:50

It's like your brain is like getting away with something that another part of your brain doesn't want to happen. It's like, sneaking off in the corner and it's like, look at me, I'm just gonna refactor now. You can't see me.

Colleen Schnettler 20:00

It's totally true. Like it, I knew it, right, you're like, this is a waste of time, just stop, but you're like, but it'll be so nice when they're all green.

Michele Hansen 20:09

And it feels good to complete things. And so work in that, like, I, I'm always amazed when I know the psychology of to do lists that like, I just get a little dopamine hit from checking things off. And so I put things off on it that's like, you know, make the to do list like, you know, walk the dog, like, oh, my gosh, I've gotten five things done already. Look at me. I'm amazing. And then like, then you can power through the rest of it.

Colleen Schnettler 20:31

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I like it. I'm gonna do that. And, and like I said, you know, I'm just going to focus on little tasks, compounding over time, right. Like, like, this is going really well. Just go really well. So I just got to keep at it, and I can really make some progress.

Michele Hansen 20:50

Yeah, dude. I mean, you're at like 800. MRR like that's,

Colleen Schnettler 20:53

I know.

Michele Hansen 20:55

I think it took us like, six months to get above like, like, 500. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 21:03

That's encouraging.

Michele Hansen 21:06

Yeah, this is, this is very, very encouraging. Like it you're like, so you were so chill about it. And you're like, yeah, so that was great. And I hope they use it. And I'm like, I would be like, I don't know. I would not be, I was, I was really struggling to not swear in the beginning of this episode. Like, because we have to, like, flag it that it's, you know, not safe for, you know, and I was like, do not swear, because that's Oh, my God. Amazing.

Colleen Schnettler 21:33

Yes, yes. And I am super pumped. So, Michelle, earlier when I was telling you about this new customer, I have, you mentioned the switch script for customer interviews.

Michele Hansen 21:43

Yeah, one of the scripts I have, which is one of the most common ones. You know, like thinking about that, like, whole project, because it's so like, I just, I keep feeling like I'm in the position you were in, in like, August and September, when you're like, spending all this time and you're like, is this even gonna amount to anything? Like, is this gonna be worth my time? Is anyone gonna buy this? Is, you know, how much do I need to get done now, versus how much do I get done later? You know, so I feel like I have the scripts done, which is pretty awesome. Like, I feel like I had like, 90% of the actual written content, like in a rough draft form. It does need surgery, like it needs, like, there's some structural changes that need to happen. But um, I don't know. Yeah, it's, it's so, it's, it's doing, doing the new stuff, as you've been saying is, is challenging and trying to like, break that down.

Colleen Schnettler 22:44

I can't believe how much you have done.

Michele Hansen 22:48

I'm Marie Kondo-ing my brain. There's a lot of like, there's a lot of stuff in Michele's mental attic here. We're just pulling it all out. You know, I'm not building new pieces of furniture, we're just bringing down, you know, the old secretary desk and putting it in the yard. That’s what I feel like I’m mentally doing.

Colleen Schnettler 23:01

Still, most people talk about writing a book and then it takes like two years, you're gonna be done in like, six months.

Michele Hansen 23:07

I actually don't know how long it's gonna take. Like, I was trying to ask friends who've written books, like, how long did it take to go from like, rough draft to actually publishing something, and it seems like there's a huge variability and also like getting responses from people and they're like, oh, well, then we send it to my editor once we finished every chapter, and I'm like, okay, I don't have an editor like, I'm, like, I'm gonna, like, print out this whole thing, and go through it with a red pen. And I have a couple of friends who I know are, you know, good editors, who will not be nice to me. Like, they will tell me when something doesn't make sense. They aren't in the target market, open it up to other people, as well, a ton of people from the newsletter have been interested in reading it. Um, yeah, I have no idea how long it's gonna take until it's actually, and then also, okay, so this is something I'm trying to figure out. And maybe you can, like, sort of help me think this through. So in my head, I realize that I've been like, okay, so I'm gonna have an e-book and a book book, and like, I guess, an audio book, and then do I need like, you know, maybe it'll be good to have some sort of, like, package that goes with the e-book or something. And then like, but as I think about, like, creating all of that would take me so long. And so it's like, what do I do first? Like, like, which one of those is launched first? Like, I feel like I need to even do that. Because, because if I start thinking about, you know, recording an audio book and stuff, like, like, I mean, this just this to the position that you were in in September like this, I could just keep adding features to this forever and then never like,

Colleen Schnettler 24:45

Yeah, yeah. I mean, how hard is it to actually get a physical book made?

Michele Hansen 24:51

I don't know. That's a great question.

Colleen Schnettler 24:54

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that process.

Michele Hansen 24:56

Yeah, I mean, so I've been trying to, you know, like, Alex Hillman has been super helpful sharing his experiences with Tiny MBA, and our friend Sean, who wrote Sketching with CSS. He's been giving me some advice about this, too. And yeah, I need to, I need to like, calm down and just finish writing, I think, and then deal with that, when it comes to it. Actually, I did something kinda crazy this morning.

Colleen Schnettler 25:26

What?

Michele Hansen 25:28

So I emailed everybody on the list, which is 175 people.

Colleen Schnettler 25:33

Oh, I saw it! I saw it.

Michele Hansen 25:34

And I asked them to set up a call with me.

Colleen Schnettler 25:36

50 people, I know, wanted to bring that up with you. I read that this morning. I was like, What? What is she gonna do?

Michele Hansen 25:41

Yeah. And my goal was originally 100. And then I was like, that is too many. That's just ridiculous.

Colleen Schnettler 25:45

You're gonna get, okay, wait, wait, backup. For those that are not, who are not subscribe to Michele's newsletter, one, go do that right now. Two, so the newsletter this morning said that your goal is to talk to 50 people. Does that mean, like, get on a call?

Michele Hansen 26:02

Yes.

Colleen Schnettler 26:03

So you're committing to like, 50 calls. Holy cow.

Michele Hansen 26:08

In the next few weeks.

Colleen Schnettler 26:10

Oh my gosh, girl, that is some crazy town. Jeez.

Michele Hansen 26:12

So I have been having so much just like, nervousness about like, you know, is this all gonna be worth my time? Right? Is anyone gonna buy this, like, you know, I have this, like, you know, this is totally a labor of love. And I feel like people, like, people are capable of building great software. And they need to be able to understand their customers to know what those customers like, need in their software. And so I just, I feel like I need to get this out in the world. But also, you know, if I launch it, and like, you know, it sells 10 copies, like, you know, okay, I have something that I can, you know, give to people when they ask me for advice about this stuff. But I don't know if I would feel like that was really worth all of the time I put into this. And so I've just been having a lot of like, nervousness about that. And I decided this morning, you know, I was like, you know, I'm gonna like, I'm going to just sit and like, I'm going to listen to that fear that nobody buys it. And like, what does that fear have to say to me? What, what is under, underneath that? Rather than just trying to run from it.

Colleen Schnettler 27:14

What did you discover? Is this a thing I can do in my life? Anyway, keep going.

Michele Hansen 27:17

Listening to your feelings and not running from them? Yes.

Colleen Schnettler 27:21

Okay. Tell me about the fear.

Michele Hansen 27:24

And I was like, you know, what, if I have this uncertainty about whether people would buy this, and whether this content is useful to them and whether they've been able to use it, or whether they haven't, or whether they tried, but they didn't know if they were doing it right, and they didn't get the response they wanted back. I need to ask them. I'm writing a book about asking people whether things worked for them. I need to ask the people about the book about whether talking to people like, I need to ask them about that.

Colleen Schnettler 27:51

Yeah. That make sense.

Michele Hansen 27:53

And I was like this, this is the way to, you know, assuage this fear and this anxiety about it, is to talk to people and use that anxiety to help me make it better, and not just like, run from it and put my blinders on. But just lean into it. Full throttle, like, do something crazy, like schedule 50 phonecalls in three weeks, which is actually, it's been super fun, though, like, because there's always people I've been like, talking to on Twitter for a long time. And I’m actually gonna have phone calls with them for the first time. And I mean, time zones are just like, a hot mess. Like, it's just, it's gonna be a mess. But it'll be, you know, the nice thing about at least being like, in Europe is like, I can, like morning time here is like when Japan is awake, like Singapore and Australia, like I can talk to people there. And then, you know, sort of later in the day is, is when I talked to North America, and it's like, so I can like, I feel like I can kind of slot people in as long as I'm willing to do you know, like, some 8am’s my time with Australia and some 10pm’s with California, like I can reasonably cover like a lot of people. But I have calls scheduled like all over the world right now for the next couple of weeks. And I'm going to be so tired, like, you're going to talk to me next week, and I'm going to be like, I have no voice. But, I’m excited.

Colleen Schnettler 29:07

Yes. You will be. I can't wait to hear about it.

Michele Hansen 29:09

Because like, I want to make it really practical. Like, I want people to be able to read just a couple of pages and feel like there is something that they can take from it because there's so many good books about jobs to be done and user interviewing and everything, but so many of them are so heavy on the theory, and the theory is, I find it really good and really interesting, and I'm such a like, a dig for the why’s kind of person that I love going deep on the theory. But like, if you're in your position, like, you just want to sell something. You want to build some like, you want to know the stuff to build like, like, if I were to write a book that has 100 pages of activity theory in front of it before getting to the really practical stuff, or is you know, like, most of these books are written for people in 1000, 100,000 person organizations. Like, you’re just not going to read it. And so I'm trying to think like, hey, like, what are the tools I can put in this book to make it something people like, okay, I can at least try this on my spouse tonight and like, see how it goes. And then they can kind of slowly build that, that confidence and in doing it. But that's what I'm trying to figure out right now is like, what are the additional practical tools I need in it? Like, is it more sample dialogues? Is it worksheets? Like, is it like, like, what can I do to help people grok all of this. So I'm trying to figure out.

Colleen Schnettler 30:36

I love it. I think that’s a great idea.

Michele Hansen 30:37

And that’s why I’m going to talk to 50 people.

Colleen Schnettler 30:40

Oh my gosh, I like, that's so funny, because I saw that this morning. And I was like, what, she's gonna talk to 50 people. Good gracious, that's wonderful. I can't wait to hear how that goes.

Michele Hansen 30:53

I feel like I'm gonna learn a lot from it. That's, that's the idea. You know, follow my own advice, right? Like, don't make decisions based on one person. Right? You know, you need to hear at least, you know, sort of similar things from at least five people before you sort of decide, okay, this is, you know, something we should do. And yeah, I, you know, I'm so excited. And so I had a lot of people, by the way, who said, you know, I'm under newsletter, but you kind of send them a lot and they're piled up in my inbox. I do listen to the podcast. And you know, so if you are more of a listener than a reader, that's totally cool. Like, I've, you know, and I think there's probably some overlap with people who would be interested in an audio book there. I would love to talk to you, too, and you can just, you know, DM me on Twitter if you're interested in talking to like, I want to make it very clear that people don't have to have read every single issue. Like, I think the only person who has read every single issue is my husband. So, it's totally fine if you've, you know, you've skimmed them or you've missed a whole bunch. That is actually really useful information for me, because that tells me okay, what is the kind of information that jumps at people? What like, what grabs them, what doesn't? And, you know, how can I, how can I make all of it something that feels useful and approachable?

Colleen Schnettler 32:18

Wonderful. That's exciting. Like, this will be just phenomenal research. I can't wait to hear about it.

Michele Hansen 32:24

A crazy couple weeks I’m doing.

Colleen Schnettler 32:25

That is gonna be a crazy couple of weeks. Yeah, that's gonna be busy. Well, that's gonna wrap us up for this week's episode of the Software Social podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on iTunes, and you can reach us on Twitter at SoftwareSocPod.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
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Colleen Schnettler 0:58
So Michele, this week, I had a prospective customer interview, which was a new experience and a lot of fun.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah. And so what in order to prep for that interview, I had to search through all of my emails to find all of your customer interview scripts.

Michele Hansen
I know it wasn't too hard to search.

Colleen Schnettler
Well, the problem is, is you also email me as Michele the human so it was like I was like how do I feel? Sure, like human turtle shell the robot was like how where's my Deploying Empathy, Michele's Customer Research filter. But you know what I was thinking as I was sorting through my emails trying to isolate all of your scripts.

Michele Hansen 1:41
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 1:43
I was thinking it'd be sure be nice if I had this in a book format.

Michele Hansen 1:49
You aren't the first person to say that, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 1:52
So tell me your thoughts on it.

Michele Hansen 1:54
So you know, it's kind of funny how the newsletter came about, because I think I had just gotten off of a mentoring call with a founder. And I realized as I was sort of sending them, they wanted to know about doing customer interviews. And I was typing up this email to them. And it's like, 10, paragraphs long. And it's like, this book is really good. But like, only these chapters are relevant for you. And like, this book doesn't go in enough detail. So like, listen to this podcast, but then also like, here's this worksheet, and it was like, so disorganized. And I also felt like I was writing the same email over and over and over again. And I was like, You know what, this is this, maybe this is a book. And then it was like, but everyone who has ever written a book has told me not to write a book, and that it's very lonely and difficult and, like, sounds like an awful experience. So maybe I shouldn't write a book like, and, and then I grant it, like, tweeted out, and everyone's like, Oh, my God, write a book. And I was like, okay, so I was like, You know what, I'll read it as a newsletter. If people like it, it becomes a live rough draft. If not, it's just a newsletter, and like, I can stop doing it. And like, no one's paying me for anything. And so as it's gone on, I have accepted the fact that maybe it is a book. But I've never written a book before. I've never marketed a book before. I've read a lot of them. I have not read books about writing or selling a book. Um, so it's been it's been kind of an interesting experience. It's a whole new world for me.

Colleen Schnettler 3:33
Yeah. Because you don't have any other informational products. Right?

Michele Hansen 3:39
Okay, like, I guess this podcast is technically an info product. I mean, but really, it's just forces us to, like keep up our weekly meetings. Like, I mean, like, I guess we have advertisers like technically but you know, it's like, really, that's why we're doing this, like, we love you, listeners. But truly, this is just for Colleen and I.

Colleen Schnettler 4:01
So it seems like so I obviously subscribe to your newsletter when you started it. You have more content that I can read? Like, it seems like there's a there's just so much in your brain that you want to get out about this.

Michele Hansen 4:14
I feel like I'm Marie Kondo in my head, like I'm just getting it all out. You know, like it's just like cleaning out my closet and it's like all of these things have been just like sitting there marinating for years now and kind of coming out sporadically as as necessary. And of course, he like sort of use them and build on them in my work. But yeah, it just feels like I just have all of this stuff. And it's like alright, here is like Michele's mental yardsale, my book about customer research.

Colleen Schnettler 4:45
So how do you feel about turning all of this information into a book like how's the process been and how are you feeling about it?

Michele Hansen 4:55
So if I tell myself that I'm just writing a newsletter and not a book, great. If I tell myself that I'm writing a book, and then I open the Google Doc and I see that blinking cursor, terrified.

Colleen Schnettler 5:10
Too much pressure.

Michele Hansen 5:11
I don't know, it just feels like a lot. Like and it's just something I haven't done before. I'm probably way under estimating how long it's going to take to go from like, newsletter rough draft to actual finished product, nevermind even having something that's just like a straight PDF, right of without any illustrations or any like, they're like, there's so many steps to this.

And I've been trying to read about it. Like Alex Hillman published a lot of great stuff after writing his book, Tiny MBA last year, that's been really helpful for me. But yeah, I mean, it feels overwhelming, and kind of like we were talking about last week, but I think having ADD sort of plays into this, because like, you know, partly, like I love having multiple projects at a time, like, I can't just have one thing I'm working on. And so that's partly where the newsletter comes from. But also then staring down a huge task that I have never done before is really, really intimidating to me.

Colleen Schnettler 6:13
Yeah, and I assume, like the mechanics of writing and selling a book is totally different than the mechanics of building and selling a SaaS or selling.

Michele Hansen 6:24
Yeah. Like, you know, like, with a SaaS, I feel like, you know, all people are googling for what they need, right? Like, they're like, how do you do this. And then as long as you have a landing page that says, Here's how you can do this, like, and then you do that, and then they pay you like, and it's very straightforward in terms of like delivering the value to someone.

I feel like with a book, it's a lot harder, like, I feel like I have to convince people that they need it. I mean, especially like, this is a hard thing that I'm trying to get, like doing interviews is, you know, to how I feel about it being you know, writing this book being this huge, monumental task that I don't know how to do that feels scary. A lot of people feel that way about interviews. So I can definitely, you know, empathize with my own reader about about that, that kind of feeling.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's very, very different than what I've done before. Just a lot of the marketing techniques are very different. And I admit that I, you know, when I start thinking about it, like, part of me is just like, I'm just gonna, like, print the Google Doc into a PDF and post it on my blog for free and go hide in the corner and call it a day. Like, I'm not actually like marketing. But then I'm like, No, you know, what, I prefer physical books. And I can do the Amazon print on demand thing. And if there was this book, I would want it in a physical book. And so that should at least like drive me through, like I keep reminding myself of what I want out of this.

Colleen Schnettler 8:01
Yeah. So are you is what do you say your motivating factor is? Because you've gotten so much demand for it? Or is it because this is something you want to do for yourself?

Michele Hansen 8:12
This is so it's mostly -- this is like 75%, this is something that I need myself, like, as I mentioned, like, having mentoring calls with people and needing to, like have one place to send them, that's a good book for basically for bootstrappers and really small teams on understanding their customers, I just, I don't feel like I have that book that is in enough detail and is at the right level and has the right combination of information. So it's like partly saving myself time in the long run by having that book. I think for a long time, I've had a feeling that I like, you know, I had a book in me somewhere. So there's like a little bit of that going on. But but mostly it's it's that kind of having one central place to send people for my own purposes. It's been it's been really interesting what people have said in response to the newsletter, too.

Colleen Schnettler 9:06
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 9:08
Yeah, so that's kind of that's helping me keep going, though I have I've started to appreciate how lonely writing is. You know, I feel like you hear writers talk about writing and they just they talk about how lonely it is. And I'm not sure if this is like validating each other's experiences or you know, kind of this like badge of honor that they went through this lonely process or like their hazing other would be writers to like scare them away. There's a mix of things going on.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah

Michele Hansen
But I feel like writing a newsletter makes it more social, right? And so like, whenever I encounter things that I'm like, Oh my God, this feels scary. like turning all this into a Google Doc like editing it all down and reformatting it like spending a month in a Google Doc on my own. And then I'm like, wait a minute, I don't have to do that. I decided I was doing this in public. I decided I was going to take what is apparently normally a lonely process and make it a social one. Like I can send You know, when I have edited something into what feels like a full chapter, I can send that out, right? Like people have subscribed knowing that this is a work in progress. So yeah, and they're not paying for it either. So they can just unsubscribe. Right? So.

Colleen Schnettler 10:14
Right. You said earlier that you felt that marketing a book was totally different than like marketing your product. What I don't what's the nuance there?

Michele Hansen 10:24
Yeah, I feel like books are, you know, sometimes I'm looking for a specific book, but but very often, you you there's some kind of convincing that has to happen.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah

Michele Hansen
You I think something I'm thinking about, as I as I write this, and I've heard this from people who are experienced UX researchers or product managers is that they don't feel like they have a book to recommend people who are who are like, at this sort of stage. And so I think kind of, like, writing it to be something that's recommended to other people, but not necessarily used by the person you're selling it to was really interesting. But you know, you see a lot of people doing just different tactics, like, you know, having a, you know, marketing campaign that drips out, you know, a chapter a day and induces someone to buy with a discount. And like, all that, kind of like we we don't do any of that. Like, we don't do write any sales emails, we don't send sales emails ever. Like, we'll be like, Hey, we have a new feature like, cool. See you in six months. Like I think we have literally sent one marketing email in the past year. We do a lot of SEO instead. But so but we don't really ever do stuff with like, here's this bundle, where you get, you know, the the ebook and the audio book, and then you get access to these five interviews and like, I can see the value of that kind of stuff. But I have never done that before. And so that, yeah, it's just a whole new kind of work for me.

Colleen Schnettler 11:53
Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, honestly, even when I know I'm being dripped to I love a good drip campaign, like they remind you every week that you love them, I do and like me at all, like, I bought someone's book, and he's got a great drip campaign. Like, it's like, it's like on a random interval. It's like, every 13 days, he'll send an email. I'm like, Oh, I like this. I don't know. It doesn't bother me.

Michele Hansen 12:19
I get satisfaction out of unsubscribing to things. And I've actually I've had people like I had someone sign up for the newsletter yesterday, and saying how much they appreciated that I wasn't upselling them in the newsletter, like so these reinforcing my like, like, wait, make money? Yes. Make a PDF and hide in a corner approach.

Colleen Schnettler 12:41
No, I think it's gonna be afraid. I mean, this new.

Michele Hansen 12:46
I'm freaking out, man.

Colleen Schnettler 12:47
talked to you. Are you like, I talked to you every week, and I still get value out of what you send in the newsletter.

Michele Hansen 12:57
I appreciate that.

Colleen Schnettler 12:57
I mean, what makes you freak out about it just the way you said it wasn't the pressure. It's it's that kind of salesy deal.

Michele Hansen 13:04
Yeah, a little bit of that. I think it's just, it's just a very big project, like, and I think there's a -- to come back to that, which I think, you know, a question that I think you I guess, is a question you've had, and a lot of other people starting a company have, which is can I deliver something that is valuable enough that I feel ethically okay, taking people's money? Right, like, Can I like is what I'm doing something that is worth them paying the money? Not less a question of, can I make something they will pay for which, you know, is a question to figure out, but more of that sort of I don't know, that sort of existential level of is what I'm making, like, is that worth them paying for? And I think that's something that, you know, I don't struggle with that in SaaS, but for some reason, I struggle with that with an info product. Interesting.

Colleen Schnettler 14:01
Well, I for one, am looking forward to it. And when you think about it, so I was thinking about this after my interview on Wednesday. I know you don't know what you're going to price your book at. But if I get one sale, out of like, for one piece of useful information, like my minimum price is $35. So if your book is less than $35, which I assume it's going to be like, it's already valuable to me, right? I only have to get one person to make that worth my worth my money.

Michele Hansen 14:30
Yeah, I guess. So. I was thinking about pricing yesterday. And I think someone convinced me that it should be $29. So for both the ebook and the physical version, and I guess there would be an audiobook in there too. So yeah, I guess the price point is right.

Colleen Schnettler 14:49
Yes, I love this idea. I can't wait to continue to hear about this. And I would like to say, I feel like I told you to write a book six months ago. I feel like yeah, it took hold. So I'm super pumped. And I also really, really like physical books. Like, I want to hold it in my hand, I want to put post it notes on like the customer interview script pages, like.

Michele Hansen 15:13
Yeah, I got it. Like I actually I was sort of working on the intro this morning. And like, I have something in it that's like, go ahead and dog ear the pages, like write on it like, and then I even have a guide at the beginning that tells people how to skip around through the book based on what they're trying to do.

Colleen Schnettler
That's awesome.

Michele Hansen
Like I get I'm trying to design it in a way that's like, Okay, how do I get out of people's way? Right, because I think a lot of books on this are written like that, like, they're really good, but they have a lot on the philosophy of Jobs To Be Bone. And if you're just trying to increase your MRR, from like, 100 to 200 a month, like, you do not want to read an academic tome on activity theory. I do. But like, I just have, I have no illusions that that is not what you have come here for. And so maybe like, how can I make like, you know, sort of power packs for this book that's like, okay, go here, go here, go here. Maybe you'll come back to the book. Maybe you won't, but hopefully you at least get something out of it. Yeah, yeah, there's this really interesting blog post that someone sent me on, like giving a presentation and thinking of yourself as a user interface. And like, when you're doing a presentation, it's like you are a UI. And your job is like people aren't there to see you. There's they're there to like, get some outcome out of it. And so how do you structure how you present that as a UI, right? I'll have to link to it in the show notes. But it was super interesting. And it's definitely helping me structure this, which I think is helpful for something that feels overwhelming is like structuring my thinking.

Colleen Schnettler 16:50
Yeah, and I have to say, like, I have purchased and read, not quite as many as you but a lot of books that are aimed at like early stage founders. And the problem with all of these books is none of them are really focused on what I'm trying to do, which is a small single person, founder, they're all trying to either walk the line of addressing both. But like books, we've talked about, like Lean Startup, it's a great book, I don't have $10 million in venture funding. Like that doesn't mean we're in two different places, right? I just bought another book, which is about positioning, which is good. But again, the author is trying to address like a more like larger companies. And so the things that she suggests, like I don't have a data analysis team, I don't like you, I don't have my own UI/UX person, like, you know, so I love that you're so focused on like, here's -- I loved the scripts, I think that's probably like everyone's favorite. I bet if you took a poll, that would be everyone's favorite, because it's like, here is literally what you should say.

Michele Hansen 17:51
Like, that's, like, a bit of big motivation for me is that there are so many good books on this and and you know, to what you're saying, from the UX side, a lot of them are like, so, you know, the first thing to talk about is getting a budget for research consultants in this might be $100,000 to $200,000. If you're doing remote interviewing, you can be and it's like, dude, like, this is not the situation like we're in and I feel like that really turns people off. But yeah, give it like, an even the best books will be like, you know, here's what you say like, Don't interrupt them and ask follow up questions. And it's like, Okay, what what are those follow up questions like, what, like, you can't just pick like, bullet points on this for, right. Yeah. Anyway.

Colleen Schnettler 18:37
Well, cool. Well, I'm sure everyone, myself included, is will be anxiously awaiting, to see how this turns out for you.

Michele Hansen 18:49
You can all follow now it's my turn to be the like, the person who is trying to figure something new out and is sort of wandering around, lost and freaking out.

Colleen Schnettler 19:00
So there was something else I wanted to talk to you about today.

Michele Hansen
Okay.

Colleen Schnettler
You mentioned to me privately, that you have been getting some people interested in acquiring your company.

Michele Hansen 19:13
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 19:15
So are you gonna be a bazillionaire? and move to Hawaii? Like, what are you gonna sell?

Michele Hansen 19:21
No, we don't want to sell, which I think is so this is something

Colleen Schnettler 19:24
Yeah. Tell me more about this.

Michele Hansen 19:26
Yeah, I think that always surprises people that we, we don't want to sell and, you know, we don't have anyone externally who has any sort of, you know, incentives or say in this so so we don't have to. Yeah, we had to separate people, you know, and it wasn't they didn't write us an email that was says, Hello, here is $10 million sign, you know, it was like a meeting and chat and get to know each other and you know, everything and we're like, though, like I'm not gonna waste your time. Like we're not interested and hey, people are always really surprised that like, we don't have a number and that we don't want to be acquired, we just, like want to do what we do.

Colleen Schnettler 20:11
I would love to know more about that, I feel like, it seems like a lot of the people in the small business world, that's their goal is to become acquired. And I wasn't kidding. So they can have a lot of money, and just go do I don't know, whatever. So tell me more about you guys not wanting to be acquired ever.

Michele Hansen 20:30
I mean, we, we like what we do, you know, I consider it, you know, I feel like I have achieved the success I want to by being able to work from home, with my spouse on something I enjoy for customers that I enjoy working with on something where I feel like I learned new things all the time. And you know, who knows, I may look back, you know, at some point and be like, Oh, you sweet summer child, you should have taken that money when it was offered.

I feel like that's like, the peak of professional achievement, for me is like, getting to work from home with my husband like that. That, to me is great. And, you know, so I mean, there's a lot of people who want to get acquired, and you know, they want that kind of financial freedom. And those are all valid things to want. And we're all allowed to want different things, and we just know what we want, and that getting acquired. Like, it would not only not give us those things, it would actually set us backward, because then we would just have to find another business to start. And that's hard. Like that just starting a business is hard, right? Like, there's no two ways about it. And like, we already have one, so I don't know why I would put myself through that again.

Colleen Schnettler 21:51
I love that.

Michele Hansen 21:52
You know, and then I have people who are like you people don't believe me, when I say there isn't a number like I remember it was giving a talk to an MBA class a couple of years ago. And they just could not believe that there was no number and they're like, what if it was $100 million, like $500 million, $5 million, you know, whatever it was, and I was like, I just, I don't know, like, I don't need that. And you know, I've had people say like, well, then you could start your own charitable foundation like, I don't need I don't feel the need to do that. Like, I love when people do that. That's great. But like, I don't need more.

So a couple weeks ago, we're talking about the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. And he has this story he tells at one point in the book, which so you know, there was one time when when Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, the writer, were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island. And he said, Kurt Vonnegut said, "Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch 22 earned in its entire history?" And Joe Heller said, "I've got something he can never have." And Vonnegut says, "What on earth could that be Joe?" And Heller says, "The knowledge that I've got enough."

Colleen Schnettler 23:22
That's nice.

Michele Hansen 23:24
Yeah, I don't I don't need to be a billionaire. Like, I'm, I'm cool with that.

Colleen Schnettler 23:30
Okay, did you at least find out what they were going to offer you? Or does it not only get like.

Michele Hansen 23:34
I don't know, I don't want to waste everybody's time. And besides, like, some of them are in California. And if I want to do a call with California, that's at nine o'clock my time and I only do those for customers? Like Yeah, why? Like I could be reading a book.

Colleen Schnettler 23:48
This is fascinating to me.

Michele Hansen 23:51
It's the Michele's psychology episode.

Colleen Schnettler 23:53
Right? Like, I want me a beach house. That's what I want, like. So this is just like, fascinating to me. So basically, you guys are just like, no, like, we're happy. I mean, that's wonderful, too, though. We've talked to people who have sold their businesses. And it does seem to put you in kind of like, what do I do now state? Not that that's bad. But I can definitely see like, you love what you're doing. So why would you change it?

Michele Hansen 24:19
Yeah, and I mean, you know, our business isn't perfect, but like, basically, anything I might want to change is is solvable. And it's not solvable by other people's money. Right?

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

Michele Hansen
And so this is just how things are and you know, I can never know what's going to happen in the future. Like, we want this business to run as long as we can. This may not you know, we'll probably have multiple businesses in our lives, right. But where we are now we we don't have a reason to change. And sometimes people build companies to have them be acquired and like that's cool. That's, that's valid. And, but but they don't and I think, you know, I think so much of the conversation about software is dominated by it's still dominated by the, the, you know, the Silicon Valley kind of approach to things where, of course, you need to exit like, that's part of your business plan from the very beginning. But right, like, it's okay to do something different. Like we have a different set of incentives at play here.

Colleen Schnettler 25:28
Would you describe your business as a lifestyle business?

Michele Hansen 25:33
Oh man, I hate that phrase.

Colleen Schnettler 25:34
Really tell me? Because like, I've came across that I want to say in the lean startup, and like, I didn't really realize that was a thing.

Michele Hansen 25:42
I feel it is so condescending, because it's like, it does. Okay, because I don't want to spend like my whole world, like my life, you know, flying around the world for sales meetings and having my, you know, working 70 hours a week, like, it's apparently a lifestyle business, like, why should I apologize that I can, like, be here when, you know, my daughter has a sports game, or like, when she's home from school? Or? Like, I don't know, I think it's people projecting their own you know, the downsides of the approach they have taken onto other people, and they don't really think that's fair.

Their approach is valid, like, I like 20 years from now, I could want to start a business that requires funding, and I could be doing that whole, you know, flying around for sales meetings. And, you know, I don't think I would build a company that requires me working 70 hours a week, or certainly does not require anyone working for me to work 70 hours a week. Yeah, but no, I don't. Like, I don't want that. And I also don't consider that the next level either.

Like, I think that there's people kind of think of this like ladder of products, where, you know, it's like, you start out with affiliate marketing, and then you go to info products, and then you go to consulting, and then you go to like SaaS, and then and then like it, but you go to bootstrap SaaS first, and then you go to venture or whatever, and like, and there's kind of this, like, moral superiority increase at each level, right? I reject that. And I guess, as someone who is, you know, currently going from SaaS to infoproducts, like, you know, some people might say, I'm going backwards. I reject that paradigm. I think whatever you want to do as a business, provided you are doing so ethically and making something that is valuable for people and you know, genuine, then that's fine. But I think it just goes into other people's set of expectations and allowing ourselves to reject those and have our own world view of it instead.

Colleen Schnettler 27:44
Yeah, well, I love that. I love that you guys know what you want. And, you know, you're not like you said, You're not even gonna waste their time by having a meeting.

Michele Hansen 27:54
Yeah, I'm sure I'll run into these people at a conference or whatnot, like, there will be opportunities to meet them. And, but like, we're not, we're not in a rush. There's nobody who is telling us to sell and, you know, and and it really helps that we're both agreed on this, like, I've heard of a lot of co-founder conflict coming from one party wanting to sell and the other one not wanting to. Yeah, but like, thankfully, we are both 100% agreed on this.

Colleen Schnettler 28:26
That's great. Probably helps it you're married. I mean, in terms of like, co-founder conflict, do you think there's less of that? Because you're married

Michele Hansen 28:32
is such a funny question. Because, you know, I tell people who don't run businesses, with their spouses that we run a business together, and nine times out of 10, the reaction I get is, Oh, my God, we could never do that we would kill each other. And I'm like, Oh, I don't know what to say to that. And then you like, most of the time, what I talked nine times out of 10. When I talked to people who do run a business with their spouse, they're like, isn't it the most amazing thing? Like, and it's just, you know, every there are some people who it doesn't work for. But I was just talking to someone yesterday about this. Yeah, I mean, we work together because we work well together.

Michele Hansen
Right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And we have a way of working through discussions in a way that's productive.

Colleen Schnettler 29:20
Well, in similar similar life goals, as well, right. I mean, I could see a situation where one co founder, like wanted an influx of cash, or you know, and then the other one was just if they weren't married, right, and then the other one had a different life situation. So he or she wanted something else. So yeah, I

Michele Hansen 29:35
think that makes sense. You know, I was listening to How I Built This with the founders of Atlassian. Last week, and they were they were talking about how something that really was such an interesting company because they are bootstrapped until they went public. But they didn't know that. Yeah. Isn't that cool? Wow, that's cool that they were both at similar life stages throughout their early journey and that really helped because, you know, when they were both, you know, Young and single and like living on, you know, pizza, like, the like the neither of them really needed a salary. And then when they were both having kids and like getting married, like they, you know, they were able to make adjustments and like they always understood each other. And I think that is helpful, but at the same time, there's a lot of couples that have conflict over money and one like that, that is a very, very common source of marital conflict. So I, you know, I'm not gonna, like, say that that's. And that's something people experience, right? And I can't speak to what other founder couples do. We just don't, we don't really fight with each other. So it works.

Colleen Schnettler 30:43
Well, I think that's, that's great. And I'm so happy you are open to talking about this.

Michele Hansen 30:48
This like the Michele's Life Episode.

Colleen Schnettler 30:49
I love it. Well, you always make me talk about my feelings. So I'm here. I want to know about Michele's feelings today.

Michele Hansen 30:59
I don't know if anyone's anything useful out of this, but at least you know me better now.

Colleen Schnettler 31:02
Sure they did. I just think the the idea. So I mean, honestly, Michele, before we started talking about, you know, started talking in depth about business stuff, I just assumed, like, just because the internet teaches you, the whole purpose of starting a company is to sell your company and go buy your beach house, and I still want my beach house. But, like, just being our friendship, and our conversations over the years have really made me rethink that. Because to your point, like, you love what you do, you can support your family with it. You're happy? Like why? Why rock the boat for even if it was $10 million? Like what do you need $10 million for I already had to guess.

Michele Hansen 31:43
Like, it's like, it's a cabin like, but like you don't like it's like I don't know, I don't want material like more material things. You know, like, we actually like talking about this the other day, and I realized that my winter coat is more expensive than my most expensive piece of jewelry. Like, I just, I don't feel the need to like, have to live an expensive life. Yeah, some people do. Like that's, you know, that's, that's okay. Right. Like there are, you know, there are luxury brands that need people to buy their stuff. And that's cool. And those serve purposes for people, but I don't know, I'm, I'm good. And I know that's not gonna make sense to some people. And I am. I've always been weird. I am okay with people, you know, my approach to things not making sense to other people. That's okay.

Colleen Schnettler 32:40
All right. Well, I think that's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. You can reach us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod. We'd love to hear what you thought about Michele's life. Just kidding. We don't want to do that.

Michele Hansen 33:03
Talk to you guys next week.

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Michele Hansen 00:00

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Colleen Schnettler 01:17

Hey, Michele, it's so good to talk to you.

Michele Hansen 01:19

I feel like it's been forever.

Colleen Schnettler 01:22

It has. I think it's been three weeks since we've recorded together.

Michele Hansen 01:26

So I'm not gonna lie. I am dying to know how things are going.

Colleen Schnettler 01:35

Sure. So as I have mentioned several times on this podcast, the past couple of weeks have been really busy for me. We have moved and work has been just very intense. And so I honestly didn't even check my numbers for like three weeks, which sounds ridiculous, but I just wasn't in the mental space for it. So in preparation of today's podcast, I did check. And I'm now at $515 MRI.

Michele Hansen 02:04

Dude!

Colleen Schnettler 02:06

Right? Yes, I think the beautiful thing about this -

Michele Hansen 02:10

Wow.

Colleen Schnettler 02:10

Yeah, no, I just feel like the beautiful thing about this is just, I was able to just let it sit. Now to be fair, I always check my email. So even when I was on, I don't have time for this mode, like I always check my email just in case of you know, someone and my match, not my metrics, but like my stats to make sure everything is up. So it wasn't that I was neglecting the product. But I was definitely neglecting, like even checking how many people were signed up. And so that was like a great surprise. Like, just really cool to see.

Michele Hansen 02:43

Last time we talked you were at like, three something. Right? And you were like, kind of like some right?

Colleen Schnettler 02:51

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think I think this shows that getting too obsessed with like, checking every week. Like, I like to check. I mean, I check every week usually, but becoming too obsessed with it really can swing, you know, emotionally high and low. So it was actually kind of nice to just like, sit on it. And then see it increase.

Michele Hansen 03:12

That's pretty awesome. Wait a year, like six weeks into this now? What was it?

Colleen Schnettler 03:21

It was February fourth.

Michele Hansen 03:22

Feburary fourth you were able to start having paying customers.

Colleen Schnettler 03:25

Yep. So it's two months. I'm over 500 MRR in two months.

Michele Hansen 03:28

That's faster than we grew.

Colleen Schnettler 03:31

Oh, wow. That's cool to hear.

Michele Hansen 03:32

Yeah, I think it took us like, I don't know, five or six months to break 500.

Colleen Schnettler 03:38

Oh, my gosh. And now you make all the money. There's hope for me.

Michele Hansen 03:46

That's insane.

Colleen Schnettler 03:47

So that's really cool. Yeah, I'm feeling really good about it. Yeah, so I think it's kind of also, you know, when you're stressed about other things, this is all - self doubt always creeps in. And so last week I was I was kind of in a little bit of a self doubt spiral, not spiral. That's the wrong word. But like, kind of in a self doubt, place, thinking that this like, again, was like, I don't know if this is going to work. But then I checked my numbers and things are going really well. And I haven't even implemented any of those amazing ideas you shared in your last deploying empathy newsletter.

Michele Hansen 04:25

So your revenue grew without you adding any new features.

Colleen Schnettler 04:31

Yeah, how about that?

Michele Hansen 04:34

Isn't that interesting?

Colleen Schnettler 04:36

It's like someone said that might happen. Who would have given that great advice to stop adding features.

Michele Hansen 04:44

But you're also like you were doing customer support during this time? It sounds like.

Colleen Schnettler 04:48

Yeah, I'm always - well, no one emailed me because no one ever emails me. Wait, hold on. So your revenue increased and nobody needed to talk to you.

Michele Hansen 04:58

That's exactly correct.

Colleen Schnettler 05:01

Right, like it's pretty cool. I feel pretty cool about it. So, yeah, so I'm feeling good. And I'm like kind of reenergized once I'm back at work next week to really focus on some of these marketing tasks and, and to start asking people to do customer interviews again. Because I still feel like I have momentum.

Michele Hansen 05:23

It sounds like it.

Colleen Schnettler 05:25

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's what I've been up to.

Michele Hansen 05:30

So what is like some of the first things you're going to work on next week for those marketing.

Colleen Schnettler 05:35

So what I have noticed, so I've talked to a couple other people who have, okay, only one other person who has a file uploader, but I'm at a totally different, different customer base. But he was saying that, like, one of the things that really helps people convert is being able to try it out. So on my landing page, you cannot try it out. To find the code pen. You have to like, dig through the documentation. And you talked, we talked to Drew about this. And you mentioned in the, your newsletter about like, what do I, like, what do you do after the customer interview, that obviously actually trying it, for Drew, was what helped him make the decision that it would be a good fit for his site. So I want to get that up front and center. But there's a problem. So there was this Hacker News thread, it was, must have been a month ago now about someone who has a similar product. And what happened to him is he has been running his site for three years with no problems. And Google has become very Trigger Happy on blacklisting sites. So his site got blacklisted. And he thinks the reason his site got blacklisted is because he has a free tier essentially. And so what happens is because everyone is sharing that same domain, that you upload files with, someone put malicious files onto his storage, and it shut down like, his entire business. So first of all, I'd like to say three people sent that article to me, which I'm really grateful for, because I don't read Hacker News. So thank you, if you sent that to me, so I so I know about it. And I was aware that like Google blacklisting is a potential problem, and they become pretty aggressive with it. And that's why I don't have a free tier because I don't want anyone, I don't want to take the risk of someone abusing the upload service to put malicious files, inappropriate files, whatever. But I do have to figure out now how to find the balance between having a demo on my website and protecting my domain.

Michele Hansen 07:46

So with the demo, can people upload files and what would they be able to access them later?

Colleen Schnettler 07:53

That was kind of the idea. I mean, the idea at least this guy's service he was deleting. So he had it set up. So you upload files to a different bucket on your demo, and he was deleting them every 24 hours. But I guess that wasn't enough. Like that wasn't quick enough to protect him. So I think that, you know, I just have to figure out before I add, I guess my point is like, the first thing I want to do, I think the most important thing for me now is to change my homepage to basically be like, here it is, try it out, see how awesome it is. Before I do that, I have to figure out what I'm going to do to mitigate this Google risk, because it's a pretty big risk if you're using Chrome.

Michele Hansen 08:33

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Colleen Schnettler 08:36

So I think that's the first thing is figure out how to mitigate that risk and get that up. And then that'll just be a complete redesign of what is now considered my homepage. Like, I'll probably leave the other landing page up. But that is going to be kind of the first thing I want to do. I also have learned being new to SAS, that people put in fake credit cards that get through Stripe. Like, that's, I didn't know, that was a thing. Like I was like, how did it get through Stripe? How is this like, charge failure? And it hasn't happened for maybe it hasn't happened for a ton of people, but I naively like, have no nothing in place to handle that. So I gotta fix that too.

Michele Hansen 09:20

Yeah, I think I was looking at this the other day, I don't know, like you can, you know, sort of the traditional methods are doing you know, like AVS, which is address verification of weather. Basically, the zip code matches the one on file with a credit card. I think Stripe has more sophisticated ways of doing it. Like they'll do things, you know, like, proximity of like, where the card is being used versus where the card address is registered and all of these other things to do it. But yeah, I mean, there's all these complications that you enter into when you have freemium, or what I mean, when you're accepting credit cards online like this is a very, is a problem that people have been dealing with for a long time. It's one I've been dealing with since the first product I -

Colleen Schnettler 10:09

Yeah, so that's, that's good because I only have a, it's not good, but it's good that I'm learning that now while it's only happening to two or three people before it starts happening to a lot of people.

Michele Hansen 10:21

Are those?

Colleen Schnettler 10:22

And like,

Michele Hansen 10:24

Are those people adding fake credit cards? Are they are like, are they stolen credit cards? Or are they like adding gift cards that don't have a high enough balance? So I feel like those are all like, separate issues.

Colleen Schnettler 10:37

I have no idea. Do I have to handle all of those issues?

Michele Hansen 10:41

Those are all things we've run into.

Colleen Schnettler 10:44

Wow, I have no idea. I just know that a few people, a handful of people signed up for the free trial. And you have to enter a credit card that Stripe says is okay to get through the free trial to sign up for it. And then when they're trial expired, I'm getting the cannot charge card failure notifications. So it could be any of those things like probably not stolen. But I guess it could be any of the other things you said that you've seen before.

Michele Hansen 11:10

I wonder if these things are related like people, they're just entering a fake credit card in order to just to see how it works. And I wonder if bringing the code pen forward would help with this credit card problem, too.

Colleen Schnettler 11:25

Yeah, I think bringing the code pen forward is a, I mean, like I said, that is my highest priority, like people have to see how it works. And I have done it, right. So I literally have it both in react and with pure JavaScript. And I really feel like getting that up front and center. So people can try it is going to help a lot. So I mean, I might just even spin up my app on a completely different domain. I don't know. But I need to solve that problem. And solving that problem is a high priority. Because I think that's really going to help with conversions because people want to try it, right. Like, I'm the same way, like I want to try something. So I just have to figure out a way to let people try it safely, without compromising the integrity. And it's hard to know, too, because this guy ran his site for three years and had no problem, right? So. So you can't you don't know. Like maybe it won't be an issue. Maybe I'm stressing over something. That's that's not a real issue. But I feel like since I can put mitigation steps in place now, whether I do a fake uploader, or I just put it on a completely different domain. I feel like that's the way to do it. So I don't have this problem in the future. And that could be a selling point to like, use this other guy's thing. And he got blacklisted by Google. But we're on a completely different domain. So only our test site would go down. If that happened to us. I think we're at low rate, I think we're, it's just me, I think I'm at low risk for this happening. But I do want to like, kind of be out in front of it. Because it could it's pretty bad when it happens.

Michele Hansen 13:02

Yeah. And that sounds like the kind of thing that's easier to change now, especially for the way you have set up the company where there is a free trial rather than a free tier. I think you're less exposed to this problem than he might be. And if you can change it now so that the test is simply, like, is totally separate, then that could you know, help prevent this problem from coming up for you? You know, knock on wood.

Colleen Schnettler 13:33

Yeah, knock on - right. So I think that'll be great. If I could get that up this week, that would be super awesome. I also so taking three weeks off from like, looking at my numbers made me realize I'm not tracking churn at all. Like I literally have no idea. Because I hard delete you when you de-provision the add on unless you go through stripe, you know, a stripe tracks all that for you. It's really nice. They're like, Oh, here's your lifetime value. And here's your churn, but Heroku doesn't use Stripe. So I don't have any of those metrics available to me. And so although this is not a huge problem yet. I have no idea in those couple weeks, I wasn't checking every day, how many people signed up and then cancelled. So that feels like I should know that eventually.

Michele Hansen 14:22

Yeah, that seems worth keeping track of.

Colleen Schnettler 14:24

Seems worth keeping track of right? Like, like before, I just did it manually. And I’d just write it down. But I was like, Oh, this it was nice to be able to not check the numbers every day. But because I wasn't, I wasn't on top of that. So I think that would be, that's something else I got to figure out. I mean, again, not it's not hard, I just have to do it. So I want to add that so I can get a better idea of really how many people are signing up like right now I don't have a good organization system for who's coming from Heroku, who's, who's putting in their email address and not converting like, who's doing a free trial and converting or not converting. So just a little I like I need a little more organization on my side. As I get more people signing up, which is awesome. This is a great problem to have. So I can kind of manage what's happening with my users.

Michele Hansen 15:14

Yeah, these are, these are all good problems to have.

Colleen Schnettler 15:16

I know. It's so funny. Like, it's still it's just so cool. Still, like, this is so cool.

Michele Hansen 15:22

One more good problem for you to have is that, did you ever get that privacy policy written?

Colleen Schnettler 15:28

I did.

Michele Hansen 15:29

Okay. You'll just want to make it clear in your privacy policy that if people deprovision the app, like you will save information about right the fact that they had an account, and you know, just, just make that clear, like you might still have people who want you to delete that entirely, which is totally fair. But just you know, whenever you're dealing with people's data, like, tell them how you're using it, and give them the option to not have you use it.

Colleen Schnettler 15:54

Yep. And that's why I was hard deleting. Because I didn't really want to worry about that. But you're absolutely right. It's not a big deal. Like there, I even have a whatever, a specific alias email for GDPR stuff. And so if someone wants their data permanently deleted, they can just send me an email. But you're right, I do need to update my privacy policy, if I'm going to keep their email, after they deprovision the add on. That's a really good point.

Michele Hansen 16:21

A lot of exciting stuff going on a lot, a lot of good problems.

Colleen Schnettler 16:28

Yes. Still, like good energy, and like, it feels ripe with possibilities, you know, that feeling where it's like, the world is my oyster, it just feels like this has so much potential. I just have to put in the work. And I'm really committed to doing that. And I'm pumped for, to see where this where this takes me.

Michele Hansen 16:46

I'm excited for you.

Colleen Schnettler 16:47

Thanks. So how have been How have things been going with you chugging along, you know, continuing to work on the, the newsletter, and, it was funny. So we took a little mini trip, we did like a little road trip this week, to, you know, we drove ourselves. It was to a campsite. It was very COVID friendly. Didn't really go anywhere. And on the way, I had my husband listen to the interview episode we did. And then I interviewed him about it afterwards. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 17:28

Oh, that's so fun. I love that.

Michele Hansen 17:29

Shameless about that. But, but live listening to that. And, and the recap episode again, reminded me of - I feel like there's something I should say about that. So in the, in the recap episode, you made mention how I said something to the effect of if someone who is as ADD and bubbly as me can contain themselves to do these interviews, and anybody can do it.

Colleen Schnettler 17:59

Yes, I remember.

Michele Hansen 18:01

So, I just wanted to kind of make it clear that I like wasn't being glib in that when I said that. Because I know that like, throwing around diagnose, like, people kind of do this casually. And then that can be hurtful to people who have them. And I just wanted to make it clear that I actually, like, was diagnosed with ADD. It was when I was 11. And it's always been something I've just, you know, like more recently, I've tried to, to work with it. I think for a long time I worked against it. And I just wanted to like, talk about that a little bit. You know, there's been some conversation lately on Twitter about having ADD as a founder, like, Matt Stauffer has had a thread about being diagnosed as an adult a couple of weeks ago. And I feel like that kind of thing is worth talking about. Because like, I think especially as kids getting diagnosed with ADD, like, some people can be made to feel like, you know, it's it's, it's basically a fancy way of saying you're dumb or annoying, and having your potential questioned. And, and I think it's important for us founders with diagnoses, whatever those are, to be open about them, and show people that those things don't have to hold you back and in fact that they can be an asset.

Colleen Schnettler 19:23

So you said that you - first of all, I think that's really great that you're clarifying, you know what you said, and really awesome that you're willing to open up and talk a little bit about this, because I'll be honest, I don't know much about it. When you say you're learning or you have learned to work with your ADD, what does that mean?

Michele Hansen 19:45

So so so when I was a kid, for example, I had to you know, learn how to organize like, learn how to remember to do things and using planners and all of that kind of stuff. And so it was but it was very much like fighting against the differently organized ADD brain. It was very, you know, forcing myself to focus, forcing myself to sit down and do things like, and I think as an adult, I have learned to allow that to be an asset. Instead, I still, I still need to channel it in some way. So like interviewing for example is is a huge example of that, because Dani Donovan, she has some really great comics about the ADD conversation style. And there's some of the hallmarks of odors are interrupting people and jumping from topic to topic and very excitable. And so I have to sort of tamp that down a bit. But like one of those things is, is like, my brain is really good at making associations between things that seem really distant and unrelated to other people. And I find that super helpful for making connections during product development, like when I'm interviewing people, like making connections between things that they have said and things that other people have said. And that that seems, you know, lots of people are good at that. But that is sort of a trait of the different way that the, the ADD brain organizes things, it's, it's much less linear, than, than, than might be found in someone who is neurotypical, if that makes sense.

Colleen Schnettler 21:31

Okay, okay. Well, I mean, I think that's, it seems like a great progress that you've figured out kind of how to work with it and make it, make the way your brain works, help you be successful as a founder. Have you found that it's harder as a founder, because of your ADD?

Michele Hansen 21:55

No, I think it's actually easier to be a founder than it is to be an employee. So as you know, I get to decide what I work on. And largely, I get to decide when I work on it. So like how I tend to work as you know, I will research something intensely for a period of time. And then I will completely stop working on it. And I basically let it background process for a period of time. And then I will sit down and like intensely do it, once my brain has done whatever background processing it needs to be done. Like, this is how I feel about the newsletter. It's like the gears of background processing. And now I'm sitting down to intensely write it. Or I can work on something for five minutes and then switch to something else, and then switch something else, and then switch to something else. I'm not going from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting. I'm not meeting other people's deadlines. Like I'm not having to work around other people as much. I can more work in a way that, you know, suits the fact that I like to jump from thing to thing and topic to topic. And I don't have to be sort of molding myself to what other people need me to be as much now i i do you still have meetings, I you know, do customer support, like, you know, we talked to you know, Mathias and I rather as the we that what we're doing but like, largely, I get to be more self directed. And I find that to be so much more helpful rather than trying to force my, fit myself into that square corporate employee box.

Colleen Schnettler 23:23

So, I don't know a whole lot about, as I mentioned, about ADD. But is it I think of it, and this is probably just from like that my childhood growing up in the 80s - I think of it as it's really challenging to focus, like, people with ADD have trouble focusing, is that true?

Michele Hansen 21:55

So, so I will say that I'm not an expert in ADD, I'm to someone who has it. And I also have ADD and not ADHD. So ADHD would be Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Okay, I honestly don't, I don't like the word ADD all that much because it literally has the word deficit in it. And I don't think of it as like an attention deficit. I think of it as I have very focused attention. Some people actually consider it to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, because you know, people with autism are known for hyper focusing on specific topics. Um, I don't, I don't know all that much about that side of it, but I can, I can see the association there. Um, I will say like, like, you know, Mathias is neurotypical. We, we work in very different ways like I am, I am much more bursty than he is like, he can sit down from, you know, eight to five and just work straight and not have any distractions. My brain on the other hand, it almost needs the distractions in order to finish thinking about things, like I need to be thinking about multiple things at a time in order to make process on those things and it from the outside. It looks very distracted, it looks very disorganized, and, you know, a deficit of focus. But it's just how my brain works. And I just I'm, I'm, I'm always reading multiple books at a time, I'm always doing multiple tasks at a time, like, and I'll hyper focus on one, but have multiple in the background at the same time. I don't know if this makes any sense, like, I am gathering that you are neurotypical. And so this is probably, you're probably like, what on Earth is she talking about?

Colleen Schnettler 25:35

Well, I'm, you know, more and more people that I know, have, have been sharing similar diagnosis. And so I just like I said, like, I just want to learn, you know, so I can support people in their, in their work in the way that works, the way they work that works best for them. So I think, yeah, that's interesting. Like, it's interesting, it almost sounds like you just said, like, being a founder is actually better than having to do a typical nine to five butt in chair job.

Michele Hansen 26:08

Absolutely. I mean, and I'm always kind of surprised by how many people I meet in the bootstrapped world, who, you know, who are neurodivergent, or they have disabilities, or they, you know, there are other features of them that make having that, that button chair kind of job really just either difficult or frustrating or unfulfilling or unsupportive for them, and bootstrapping is less of a calling for them, and more so just something they do. Because, because the traditional work world, the traditional educational world are not set up for neurodivergent, you know, physically divergent people, like whatever our differences may be. Yeah, I feel like we're getting very deep on things that are, I'm only scratching the surface on. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, I made the decision to sort of be radically open about all of these things about, I don't know, six months ago, because I think we're all human beings. And I think there is this ethos that emanates from a certain part of the world, that founders have to be focused, and they have to hustle. And they have to, you know, somebody tweeted out that, like, if you're, if you aren't in perfect physical condition, then you're not able to be a founder, right?

Colleen Schnettler 27:35

What? That’s so random.

Michele Hansen 26:37

Like, of course, that's, like an awful and like, incorrect thing to say, right. And I feel the need to be a little bit louder about the struggles that I have had to counteract all of those people who are saying super hurtful and unhelpful things. And also for, you know, I've had people tell me that they listen to this podcast with their teenage children, like, if you have something that makes you different, that doesn't mean you're not going to succeed. Because I very much felt as a kid, like, you know, when I had to have a math tutor sitting next to me, because I was really bored. And then I later turned out that I only pay attention to math when it involves money. You know, I studied economics, like I can pay attention to math. I hated it in fifth grade. Like, but I felt like it meant that I wasn't going to be as successful as the other kids. And I was made to feel like add was this thing that I had overcome, that I had to push away from me to be successful. And I have learned that you can still be successful and have something that makes you different, whether that is ADD, or anxiety, or autism, or something or a disability, like something else, like it doesn't mean that you can't be successful. It just means that I'm basically that the corporate world is not set up to help you be successful. That's my rant. I'll get off my soapbox.

Colleen Schnettler 29:10

I think that's, that's wonderful that you're willing to talk about it and, and be so open and honest. And like you said, try to be kind of loud about it. Like, I think that's wonderful. Because I think, if people don't see that they don't know.

Michele Hansen 29:24

Yeah, and you know, and also, like, if, if you don't have any of those things, you can also still be successful, too. Like, you know, let's not -

Colleen Schnettler 29:32

Everyone wins.

Michele Hansen 29:33

the other direction. Right? Like, you know, I wouldn't say I'm, you know, been able to have this business, right, because I have ADD or because of all of those other things. No, it's because, like, I put the work into it, put the time into it. Like, I was lucky. You know, but but whatever. We all bring different things to the table, right?

Colleen Schnettler 29:55

Yeah.

Michele Hansen 29:57

And I think what you do is, you know, that's really what counts.

Colleen Schnettler 30:00

Yep. All right, well, I think that's going to wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social podcast. You can reach us on Twitter at @SoftwareSocPod. Thanks for listening.

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Michele Hansen 0:00

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Michele Hansen
Hey, everyone, so we're gonna do something a little bit different this week, Colleen is moving. And so we decided that was an opportunity to bring on one of our listeners to workshop their business challenges this week, and hear all about what they're working on. So I am so excited to have a guest with us today. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Rosssveth Lopez 1:29

Yes. Hello, everyone. I'm Rossveth with. I'm from the Philippines. So I'm really, really excited to be here. And it's an honor to be on your podcast.

Michele Hansen 1:45

I'm so excited to have you. So can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on?

Rosssveth Lopez 1:50

Okay, so actually, it's been just the several weeks that I've started. So I've had this idea, or maybe a little bit of a background. I've always wanted to bootstrap a business. And I, like, signed up for blogs, you know, the money making bags, and I stumbled across selling, selling printables, like digital designs on Etsy. And so I ventured in that. And being a non graphic designer, like art is not my main thing. So I can come up with designs, but it really, it takes me a while to even select fonts. So it's one of my pain points. And I, and I figured you know, this could be improved or my process could be more efficient. So I researched, like, font viewer tools. I guess some of you have seen, like, the famous ones, web apps, but I feel like there's something more that could be done. So I've used those tools, actually. So I select the fonts that I like, but then when I go back to my design, I still think that I need to do, or I need to select a few more. So, I keep going back and forth, and, and that's, that's when I thought of this idea. Like I could do a font viewer, but it would be more. So it would be you could preview the fonts, but it would be against your background. So you would have your, your background or your design and you have the selected fonts already, like five or 10 of these. And you can see it in one place. So, and then in like, in an instant, or just for a few seconds, you can already see how the font, like, would look with your design. And then you can select from there. So all the tools I'm saying, Oh, it's only been, like, plain texts.

Michele Hansen 4:03

Gotcha. So just to recap, so you, you had an Etsy store where you were selling printables, like custom printables. I think we were talking about this earlier, and I bought some Christmas ornaments, for example for family members who had lost pets last year. And I was able to customize them with the text on it, but I wasn't able to see what it looked like. And so basically your idea is that if Etsy store owners can have a tool on their shop to show customers or themselves just what one of those custom pieces would look like before they purchase it that maybe people would buy more from their shops or it would simply be easier for Etsy store owners to make proofs for their customers. Is that right?

Rosssveth Lopez 4:55

Exactly. So, so my plan is the basic one would be it would be for the sellers, for the sellers themselves, the ones who do the design, it would help in their process with the designing. And then that would be the added feature when you can share that design or share your customized designs with your, your customers, your clients, so they could see that, so they could see it themselves. I actually came across several sellers who had experiences where their customers wanted a refund, because they did not like how it turned out. And yeah, so it, that's one, one, like, problem that that can be solved. And I, I’ve tried to research. They, some stores, each had their own websites, just to put the, their designs and with the fonts that they like, that they were offering. So they created their own. And I thought like why not, you know, offer this as a service. I've seen services like you do the designs on their platform. And you could share that, the links, but this, what I'm thinking of would be different. It would be your designs, you can create them from anywhere. And then you just display the fonts that you offer. So, yeah.

Michele Hansen 6:30

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess we should probably back up a little bit and talk about your, your background a little back. So you're a developer, right?

Rosssveth Lopez 6:38

Yes, yes I am. So.

Michele Hansen 6:38

Yeah, how did this come about?

Rosssveth Lopez 06:45

Okay. Well, I've been in the software industry for like, 14 years or something. I recently resigned from my corporate job about three years ago, after I had my third son. So it's, it's been a goal that we had as a couple that we would, like, we would stay at home, take care of the kids, but then pursue also a business. So I've just been stuck with finding that idea, that $1 million idea to start to work on. And it was only like very recently that I learned about indie hacking and bootstrapping. And so the blogs that I signed up for, those were just like the ways I wanted to get ideas how to, how to start my own business. And, and that's, I've never heard of Etsy before. And like you could sell printables as a passive income you created once, and then you can sell it forever. And so I was like, amazed with the idea. And, but when I, like I, I also stumbled across tech Twitter and how the people left and right, were creating businesses, like simple projects, and they were making money. So that really, really amazed me.

Michele Hansen 8:16

It sounds like that was really like a lightbulb moment for you.

Rosssveth Lopez 8:19

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know, growing up, I've always wanted to start a business. But you know, you compare it with, like, tech giants, like, like the big companies being famous all around, having these great ideas impacting the world. But I never really know, or maybe I did not come across it in my, like, experiences or with my colleagues about just, you know, starting a business, starting a bootstrap business that you can do it on your own.

Michele Hansen 9:02

How long ago was it that you discovered the idea of bootstrapping?

Rosssveth Lopez 9:06

I think it was like, late last year, probably. October, November. Just very recently.

Michele Hansen 9:13

Awesome. And so you are, you're hitting the ground running. And so I want to, I want to dive in a bit more on this idea for this sort of, I guess, what, what do you call it? The, the principles preview tool, what is your name for it?

Rosssveth Lopez 9:31

Actually, like, I already have a domain, like, I bought it in December.

Michele Hansen 9:38

Ok. Buying domains is like, the first thing, like, before, we've talked to any customer, written anything, like, done any sort of research on it, it's like, hold on, let me buy a domain first and then, and then we all have, we all have a closet full of domains.

Rosssveth Lopez 9:54

So I don't have a specific name for it. I know it’s a font viewer, but it, it's more, more than a font viewer. I asked, actually also planned to, to include like a font storage on a cloud. So they upload their fonts. And they could organize it as part of their account.

Michele Hansen 10:18

So someone could use this, like, to run their business like, repeatedly, like that kind of like, sort of keeps, that sounds like that would be sort of a sticky feature feature that would make them come back to using this tool, but also sort of creates, you know, the need for this to be an ongoing subscription. If they are, you're basically hosting something for them. And then whenever they get new clients who want to preview what they've ordered, they go back to the same tool, and all of their fonts and maybe images or whatever are already, like pre-loaded for them, basically. Does that sound right?

Rosssveth Lopez 10:57

Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Michele Hansen 11:00

So it sounds like you've talked to a couple of people about this, or you, you came across Etsy sellers who were encountering this problem, can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Rosssveth Lopezer 11:11

Actually, it's more of a passive, passive research. I've just been stalking Facebook groups, learning about their problems, and I looked at their stores, how they were managing it. So I saw, I saw them, like, hire people to create the website specific for that, to showcase their customized designs. But yeah, yeah, they actually hired someone, because,

Michele Hansen 11:40

Like, they went and hired a freelancer to build them a website for what you want to make as a service. Oh, that's interesting.

Rosssveth Lopez 11:48

Yep. Because most sellers, like, especially during the pandemic, there were really new ones who went into crafting. And, and they're, they're not, I mean, they're, they're excited with the idea, but they're not familiar with all the technologies yet. So. So, so, so, so.

Michele Hansen 12:12

Oh, that’s so interesting.

Rosssveth Lopez 12:13

Yep. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 12:15

It sounds like you're taking the approach that, like you know, Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman propose of the sales safari, where you're going, looking at places online. Arvid Kahl is also a champion of this approach, specifically with Facebook groups. It sounds like you've been doing a lot of research to try to figure out what their, what their process is, and also experienced it yourself, too.

Rosssveth Lopez 12:39

Yeah, exactly. Actually, I will be using this, I mean, for my business as well. But I really think that the, that this niche is very underserved in terms of, in terms of this aspect. There are, like, tools for Etsy sellers for, like, research and SEO, but I haven't seen a lot, like, on design-specific and customized things. So last week, I actually posted on Reddit, also, like, I was telling them about my problem, how it took me, it takes me so much time selecting a font, like, does anyone, could anyone relate to this problem? And I had very good engagement there. So yeah, yeah. So it was fun. Like, many people were, were, could relate, like, and they also do the tools themselves. I didn't propose my idea yet. It was just getting feel of what they were trying to achieve, how they solved it. So.

Michele Hansen 13:51

So did you come across other people who are also paying to solve it? Whether that's like, having a freelancer build it or, or something else? Or just simply with their time?

Rosssveth Lopez 14:02

No. I, I only found a few of that. But I haven't, like, reached out to them directly yet. I just, like, saw them post on message groups.

Michele Hansen 14:17

Are you planning to reach out to them?

Rosssveth Lopez 14:23

Yes. Yep. As soon as I have this up and running, or maybe, I don’t know.

Michele Hansen 14:31

Do it before. Because that’ll help you figure out, like, how to price it. And I think it would be, it'd be really interesting if you can kind of quantify either, like, how much time people are spending on this, like, it sounds like it is fairly time consuming. And so being able to speak to, you know, save hours of, you know, managing and selecting fonts, or someone paid a freelancer for this and they spent a couple 100 or $1,000 for that website, right? Like, that's a really, really interesting signal. And it could kind of help you figure out like, okay, what, what are the features I have to launch with versus what can come after?

Rosssveth Lopez 15:16

That's a really good suggestion. Yeah, I’ll look that up again, the ones I encountered. I’ll reach out to them.

Michele Hansen 15:24

So from this Reddit thread, it sounds like that, like, went well. And like, other people were saying that they had this problem. I'm curious, like, was there anything that came up in there that surprised you?

Rosssveth Lopez 15:36

Um, not really. I think what I got there was like, people were just, like, satisfied, like, like, they were just, they acknowledged a problem. But they, they were not looking for ways to improve it. But they acknowledged that it was really a pain, like it was time.

Michele Hansen 16:06

So they, basically, they, it has not occurred to them that there could be a way to solve this another way. Except for their time.

Rosssveth Lopez 16:15

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 16:18

Yeah, it's kind of interesting thinking about this market. Because I wonder if, in this context, Etsy sellers are more like, B2B, or B2C? Which like, like, do they behave more like consumers or more like businesses? And like, how could we find the Etsy sellers that are, you know, behave more like a business? You know what I mean?

Rosssveth Lopez 16:43

Um, yeah, I haven't really thought of that yet. I see them more as some, like B2B. I know several are willing to, to subscribe to tools that would help their stores. Like, like, there's SEO tools, writing tools. There's websites that you can purchase fonts, which is a monthly subscription, fonts and graphics. Yeah. And they, and they, and they spend, like, they spend money for those.

Michele Hansen 17:28

Okay, okay. So that’s a good sign. So, so you said, like, in the last couple of weeks, you're kind of getting closer to launching it. And, of course, you got the domain first. So, so talk to me a little bit about, like, you know, the, the process of building it and trying to get towards something that you can launch.

Rosssveth Lopez 17:46

Okay, so, um, so I'm a developer, but I've always been, like, with Java or Android. So that was my previous job, mobile applications. And the tool I'm creating is web, web-based. And I haven't had much experience of that. But I've always wanted to learn about it. So I've, I've done some courses. I'm using React, and a bunch of other tools. And so far, I've been loving it. But that is one of the challenges I have right now. So web is, like, basically new to me. I mean, I know programming, I know development. But web is entirely different, like platform. So I am still getting the ropes. But I think I plan to just provide an MVP, like the simplest product I can launch because I want really want to validate if, if people will use this, and if they are willing to pay for it. So I have started with a framework already. I have the app running, but I still have some problems with font management. So I'm working on that, that part, but I think, oh, I hope I hope to be ready in a few weeks earlier.

Michele Hansen 19:22

It's challenging, you're not only building a business and trying to figure out whether people will pay for that, and what that product should have in it. And then also learning a, you know, a new set of tools to build that.

Rosssveth Lopez 19:40

Yeah. So, so, I mean, I’ve read that you should be able, I mean, you should start somewhere where you're familiar with, but I felt like the mobile approach is, is not a good fit for this idea. So, although I plan I have other ideas, I have other projects that are mobile based. And, but yeah, I really, I guess wanted a challenge.

Michele Hansen 20:17

You are familiar with the Etsy seller side of it, though. And, you know, I think the, the valuable thing that also brings here not only some customer understanding and ways of finding those potential customers, but is also that you probably have some familiarity with running the business side of it too, just in terms of the sort of operational things about, you know, accounting and the, you know, those more things that that can also be sort of an unexpected challenge and a new skill for people to learn.

Rosssveth Lopez 20:54

Yes. This would be hard for me if I didn't know about, like, running an Etsy shop, or, or the ins and outs of having a printable business. So having that shop really gave me that insight, as well as being involved in the groups, like, knowing their, their behavior, how, like, what are the issues that they have, and that I've experienced as well in my own shop. So, so that's why this idea, I, is something that I, like I'm really close to, I actually did Arvid Kahl’s Finding an Audience for your Side Business. He had, like, this step by step guide, how to select your niche and identify your projects or ideas for that, and this came out, came out on top. So, so that was what like, like, a sign to me that I should push with this.

Michele Hansen 22:02

Oh, so you had other ideas that you were working through, and trying to figure out which of them you should pursue? And then Arvid’s guide helped you do that? Can you say? Like, like, what are, more about that?

Rosssveth Lopez 22:16

Yeah, I can't, sorry, I can't remember all the steps. But he had five steps. And it's on his blog in the Bootstrap Founder. So you identify the different niches. And then you, you give a score, like, which ones are willing to pay, which ones have, like, problems that are solvable, and which ones that you would be, like, be able to provide value more. I think there, there were five, but, but like those steps, and reading and having the score, and then you rank them, and the overall score, you get the top, and then you, you, you, you select the, the idea that comes out on the top.

Michele Hansen 23:19

That makes sense. Something you were saying earlier, I would be so interested if you could get this in front of someone from those Facebook groups, like maybe the, you know, the people who are already paying for things for their business. Like if there's some way that you could either like, screen share with them, or just get them on a quick call and do some of that validation work while you are also working through building it.

Rosssveth Lopez 23:47

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I can do that. And get their insights beforehand, even before the, okay. I’ll add that to my list.

Michele Hansen 24:06

And, you know, asking people like, how much they would pay for something is always challenging. Because I think when we're, you know, there's always a sort of this, this feeling, it's like, it's a kind of a social situation, and you say, oh, would you you know, pay, you know, whatever for this. And people may not want to disappoint us by saying no. But I find if you ask, like, what are they currently paying for this, like that person who hired someone to build them a website for their portfolio of different options, or they're, you know, they're paying in terms of their time, and their time has value and especially when they're, you know, crafters and they may only be able to work on one item at a time. It like, like that, that their time has a real cost to them. And so seeing if you can somehow quantify that, and seeing, well, what are they charging for the item? And then if you can save them a half an hour per item, you know, what is that worth to them in terms of other sales they can make? And like, coming up with your pricing that way?

Rosssveth Lopez 25:18

Yeah, yeah. And those are really good points. I haven't even thought about my pricing, pricing yet. So yeah, I’ll take note of those.

Michele Hansen 25:29

Pricing is a complicated and tricky topic. Like I think it's, I think of it as one of the hardest parts of having a business and trying to figure out, okay, you know, there's, you know, you can go the approach of, well, this is what it costs us, and then let's put a markup on that. But it's really, it's like, Okay, what, what is the value someone is getting out of that? And then how do we use that to inform what the, what the price is? I think trying to see how much, how much time they're spending, or if they're hiring other people to do this right now could be a starting place to give you some ideas. What else are you still trying to figure out?

Rosssveth Lopez 26:13

Well, um, one of my challenges would be the payment merchant, the, the gateway. So I'm still researching what's best. I really wanted to go with Stripe. Unfortunately, it's not yet available here. So yeah, that's one big challenge. They have a program if you are from outside the US, but I'm still trying to figure out if the cost would be, I mean, I can handle the cost. So.

Michele Hansen 26:54

Oh, that's challenging to, yeah, I feel like stripe is kind of the default for everyone, us included. But if they're not in the Philippines yet, then that is a problem. Oh, interesting. So it sounds like there isn't.

Rosssveth Lopez 27:07

They have what they call a Stripe Atlas, where you pay them so they can create, like an LLC, or, I'm not sure if it's an LLC, a company in the US on your behalf.

Michele Hansen 27:32

Oh, yeah. So there's also, you can also use Firstbase. Yeah, Firstbase.io, yeah, to incorporate in the US. And so I guess if you were incorporated in the US, and you took payments in US dollars, could you like, could you use stripe? And then like, would you still have a way to transfer them? I guess yeah, you could probably just put them in a US, you need a US bank account, which I guess Stripe Atlas gives you, and then you just use TransferWise to get it out of your US Bank Account to the Philippines. Which is one of those weird, like, we're dealing with this too. It's like dealing with exchange rate risk like this, which is normally something that you know, only like large international corporations who, like, deal with exchange rate risk, right? Like, it's like, no, like, small businesses dealing with this.

Rosssveth Lopez 28:23

Yes. So yeah, I've looked at Firstbase as well. I think they can also create a bank account for you. But yeah, I haven't dug deeper on that yet.

Michele Hansen 28:39

Yeah, that's, that's complicated.

Rosssveth Lopez 28:45

Yeah, cuz it would be a bummer if I can’t like, I mean, I could put that as a call to action. Are you interested, but then I can’t, like, provide them the payment service. So. Yeah, yeah.

Michele Hansen 29:02

Yeah, I mean, the other thing, if like, you know, sort of, from a product perspective, like, if it's ready, like, I mean, you could kind of do like a free trial period, for, you know, like, just like, have a sort of beta period, basically, and get a couple of people using it. And, you know, getting feedback from them while you're dealing with all of the sort of administrative stuff to get the payments set up. And then you could, you know, get more feedback. And, but, but not be sort of actively developing as you are now, which sounds like that's, you know, you're using a sort of a whole new set of tools, and so that requires a lot of mental energy. And all of this sort of administrative stuff also requires a lot of mental energy, but in an entirely different way. And I'm wondering if it might, if you could kind of stagger those and use that as an opportunity to get more feedback and also, you know, build some like early you know, happy users who could champion the product to the rest of the, you know, creator community. Maybe that could work.

Rosssveth Lopez 30:11

Yeah, yeah. I've thought about that, having a beta first. And, but yeah, right now I just really need to work out on the development side. So I could have a product back and I can offer us a beta.

Michele Hansen 30:39

Yeah, so, I'm curious, like, Is there anything that you were hoping to ask me that we haven't covered?

Rosssveth Lopez 30:52

Let me see. So I signed up to your newsletter, but I haven't gotten to them yet about the customer aspects stuff. So I might, I mean, if it's okay with you, I will, I would love to go deeper on that. Like, because that's one of the topics you're really master with. So, right now, yeah, I haven't read a lot on it, on it yet.

Michele Hansen 31:21

That's okay. I've, I've had a couple of people tell me that they are kind of like saving them and would rather like, read them as a PDF, like as a book. It makes sense to me. And that's kind of my little bit of my thinking is, it's like kind of writing a book. But if I tell myself, I'm writing a book, it's going to feel overwhelming. So I was like, I'm just writing a blog, it's fine. It's whatever, like, it's not a big deal. And then I'll probably sort of slap them all together into a PDF and send that to people whenever I've gotten through this, like, burst of writing. Like, cuz I'm publishing two or three a week right now. And I think once I get everything sort of drained out of my head and onto paper, that I won't be writing nearly as much. So that, like, that totally makes sense to me. I think, I've, you're not the first person who has said, like, you know, I'm saving them to read them all in one go.

Rosssveth Lopez 32:15

Okay, so, so while you were saying that, I actually thought of a question. So you and your husband are, are bootstrapping your business, and been doing for years. Any tips on time management? It's one of my, like, challenges right now. I only get like, one to two hours a day, I wish I could do more. My two year old, they're all boys. I have three boys, and it's just crazy. So yeah, any tips to time management?

Michele Hansen 32:57

So we launched Geocodio when our daughter was four months old. So, I, I definitely sympathize with you on the time management thing. You know, I found that, you know, the thing about having a young child is that you, you really only have an hour or two to yourself a day. And so, I found that that made me more motivated, because I was like, okay, if I only have an hour to myself a day, like, I need to get the most out of it. Um, and for me, that meant working on side projects. Now, I'm not gonna say that everybody should do that, or if that was necessarily, like, mentally healthy at all times. Um, but that I mean, that definitely is a challenge and finding that space and I think as long as it's something that you're excited about, that you enjoy looking forward to, I think you'll find the time for it. But it's, it's, it's possible to start a business working on it an hour a day. Like, we did it, I don't know if everybody, like, it would work for everybody and um, you know, I can only speak from my own experience, right? Um, but you know, we did it and I mean, it took a long time like for that to become a full time business like, it was, it was three and a half years later that I went full time. Like, that was a long time and we had full time jobs so we could be sort of patient with it. And not everybody is in that position of having a full time job and being able to be patient with it. I mean, something that did help is what we would trade off with each other. And so, you know, on Saturday mornings, I would take our daughter to an art class or something and then take her to the grocery store. So we were out of the house for three hours so my husband could get some work done and then you know, in the afternoon he would you know, they would go on these long trips to like get an ice cream at IKEA, which was an hour drive away, like, just so that like I could have time like, to work during the day? Um, I mean, it was definitely a balancing game, and I don't, you know, it was not, I don't know if it was always easy or healthy. And I don't know if this answer is at all helpful for encouraging you. Um, I mean, I think that's why I'm so, like, passionate about getting involved with things like Earnest Capital that helps people go full time faster. Because it's like, it's it's hard, like making that jump from having a side business to a full time business is, is hard and finding the hours for it is hard. And it's mentally and physically taxing. Um, I guess my, I guess my advice for you is that you're not the only one who finds it hard. And I don't know if that brings you any comfort at all. But that it is normal to only be able to work on it an hour a day. But there are businesses that are, you know, quote, unquote, real businesses that were, that were launched and run on an hour or two of work a day.

Rosssveth Lopez 36:10

Thank you. Thank you for sharing. So, yeah, I really need to have that focus. Yeah, I'll be improving more of that, especially now that I've started with my project already. So I need, I need more of that.

Michele Hansen 36:26

Sounds like you have a lot on your plate, so I will let you get back to it.

Rosssveth Lopez 36:33

Okay.

Michele Hansen 36:35

I really enjoyed talking to you today.

Rosssveth Lopez 36:38

Thank you so much. It's really been an honor to be on your podcast. Thank you.

Michele Hansen 36:44

So when it's launched, whether that's the beta or the full launch, definitely let us know. And we will happily share it out. And similarly, if anybody else listening is, you're launching something or you've already learned something like, just, like, let us know and we're happy to, you know, retweet you and help you get the word out in our own small way. So, thanks so much for listening. And Colleen will be back next week. So we'll talk to you then.

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Listen to The Customer Interview: Part 1 https://softwaresocial.dev/episodes/customer-interview-part-1-the-interview

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
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Michele Hansen 0:31
Last week, we interviewed a user of Colleen's product, Simple File Upload. And this week, we are going to talk about that interview. So, Colleen, to help me What do you think you're after that?

Colleen Schnettler 0:48
Oh, my gosh, it was so much fun. It was so hard for me. So I turned off my video, and I muted myself, which was good, because I got very excited during the interview. And like, it was like, I was like sitting on my hands. I was like, Colleen, you have no lines. You have no, you may not speak. I just thought it was it was really great. Some of the things I noticed that he talked about that kind of surprised me, was actually one thing that surprised me a lot was he was struggling with his current storage solution for three days.

Michele Hansen 1:27
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 1:28
And then when offered, offered when when he remembered I guess, like that I have a thing. He didn't it was almost like there was an emotional attachment to the struggle that he had already put in that he didn't want to throw that work away right away.

Michele Hansen 1:43
Yeah. sunk costs. Absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler 1:46
That really surprised me. Yeah, yeah. I was really surprised about that. I didn't see that coming. You know, there were several times I thought to while you were doing the interview, where if I had been doing the interview, I would have been like, Okay, great. Like the end. I feel like you were able, I think the interview was about 2030 minutes. I feel like if I had been interviewing him, it would have been about seven. Because I would have been like, hey, do you like simple file upload? And he would have been like, Yeah, it's great. Like, okay, cool.

Colleen Schnettler 2:20
Like, that's how I I mean, even writing down these questions. I I still just it's I usually, I don't know, I struggle with like the the circling back. Like, there was one point where you like circle back, I think to something he had said earlier, like re asked the question, and you got more information from him? Yes. That was solid work.

Michele Hansen 2:47
Yeah. So that is something we do to basically like, rephrase what someone said, and then just say, like, do I have that? Right?

Colleen Schnettler 2:55
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 2:57
I actually know people who will do this, they will purposefully mistake what someone said so that they correct them and add more detail on

Unknown Speaker 3:04
interesting. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 3:06
yeah. And actually, when I first started interviewing, basically, I would think of this as effectively playing dumb, which I think was in some context was effective. Like, for example, especially when I was interviewing, you know, if I was interviewing, say, 80, or 90 year old men about their retirement, most of them didn't take me very seriously in the first place. And so I could use that to my advantage. And basically like, oh, like, what do you mean by that? I don't even know what you're talking about. Yeah. And it like it worked really well. But then being a founder, like you don't want to, like, you don't want people to think you're, you're done. Really well, like, I sort of like matured out of that strategy. But yeah, but it's saying like, Oh, so I just heard us like, you just said that you struggle with that for three days. And then you just say that, and then they add things to it.

Colleen Schnettler 4:06
Yes. I mean, things we've talked about before, but what I really noticed in this interview is you were very, you were very call and very quiet and slow. Which is I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. But like, it seems like you're very you're you're you're almost monotone in your tone of voice. And you left huge gaps, which we're not going to edit out so you can get the full experience everyone listening, but like huge gaps. And I'm like over here, like she gonna say something like, Is he gonna say something? Giving him really the opportunity, I think, to expound on whatever it was he was talking about.

Michele Hansen 4:47
Yeah, I think, like, I like to think that. You know, I see the interviews aren't like acting. They're not a conversation. Rise. You almost want the other person Forget that you're a person like that you have opinions that you have thoughts about things like you are just there to absorb whatever it is they have to say and to help bring that out. And it's it's so funny that you say I was so calm and like, because I mean, like, you know me like, I'm not like that, like, if you get me at my most truly relaxed, like I am, like, bouncing off the walls, like I'm interrupting people. I'm excited. I'm making puns all the time. Like, I am very much not sitting there like quietly listening, which is, which is why I think that if I can learn how to do this, anybody can learn how to do this.

Colleen Schnettler 5:42
Yeah, I think and I think I mean, I think for me, it's just gonna take practice. But like, one of the things he said, that really struck me, and there were so I think it would have been hard for me because he said so many things, which were literally the reason why I built it. So I would have been like, so excited. Like when he was like I just he said something like, I just wanted to build my product. I didn't want to, you know, waste any more time on file uploading, I want to be like, yes, that's why I built it. You know, like, actually, I was fortunately I was on mute. So you guys couldn't hear me. Real noisy over here. So, you know, that, I think is a founder. And then and I wonder too, like, you're almost an impartial third party here. I wonder at when you do interviews as a founder, do people treat you differently? Because I know it's your product?

Michele Hansen 6:39
Yes, and no. I mean, so obviously I haven't I haven't had the experience you've just had of having somebody interview one of my customers while I'm there and seeing how differently they take it. Yeah, um, I don't I don't think it's been a detriment. Like, you know, to what I was saying earlier about, like, people not taking me seriously, like, I don't run into that issue anymore. Right. Like, I don't I, I have been in scenarios where I was treated dismissively, or even insulted. Thankfully, it's not that many like that, like, the actual number of interviews where I've been truly insulted was like, two out of the 1000, or whatever I've done. Um, so I, I don't feel like that. Because again, like, these things are fairly like, you're just asking questions about someone's process. And that process is like, digging into that process is going to be the same. And if anything, actually, when I like I've had a couple of times where I interviewed someone, and I think they appreciate it so much that they asked me if, like, it could become a testimonial afterwards. Oh, wow. Which never happened when I was in neutral third party, which where I think this is just it's so powerful when the founder themselves, does it because people like, wow, this is a company that actually listens to people which, right. We're just used to not being listened to. Yeah, I don't think it's been I don't think it's been a detriment.

Colleen Schnettler 8:16
Okay, cool. So some of this was good. Oh, you go ahead. I was gonna say some of the questions you asked, I wouldn't have thought to ask, do you have? Had you worked out a lot of those questions beforehand? Or did you just have some, like, extra questions if it got too quiet?

Michele Hansen 8:32
So I, I have a script. So if you're, you see my newsletter, it is the relatively new customer script. So I just threw that in a Google Doc. And I can, I mean, I could probably just scan it and put it with the podcast, just so people can see it. But so I took notes as we were going for each question. So I started at the top. And then those questions in the in the article are purposely as bullet points, because sometimes just the flow of the conversation, you end up needing to jump around. And so I actually skipped a bunch of questions. Like I skipped, like, a couple because or, um, it came across another another questions, so I didn't have it. Like, I didn't have to go and ask that question. Again. Um, it would be interesting to see whether like, the number of things I said, like, which of those were actual questions, and which of them were just follow ups, like, as you said, like, you know, the sort of, can you tell me more about that type of follow ups?

Colleen Schnettler 9:34
Yeah. Yeah. It'll be fun to go back and re listen to it. Like I'm looking forward to that to kind of watch or to listen to how you did that again. And, you know, it was great because I got so much useful information out of it. Like one of the things he said, which I thought was kind of hilarious was he was like, he didn't believe it was that easy.

Michele Hansen 9:55
So I have the I don't know if you can see this, like I haven't written down here. I have that underlined because like this is one of those scenarios is like, this should be the headline on your website is, it really is as easy as it seems. Yes, I'm gonna write like, that is like, like that is a sort of a perfect example of finding something very actionable that we can pull. Like, out of this out of this interview. The other thing was like he was talking about, like, he knew he needed to find something else. Or he was, he was like, resisting the idea, he needed something else. But he was like, getting to be open to it cuz he was really frustrated. But then he looked at all of your competitors, and their pricing was so complicated, that he couldn't figure it out. And he, he was, you know, anxious about moving forward with those because you had no idea what he would be charged. And so that's something that's really powerful that we can also use it when you're talking about your pricing is, you know, that it's, there's sort of some peace of mind with it. Right that like, you know, they're, you know, be charged for it. Um, yeah, it's so interesting how he said, Is it really this easy, because you'd heard other people talk about issues with s3. And he, I think, maybe this is a scenario because he knew you were on the phone that he maybe didn't want to say how doubtful he was, but it was really, like, I felt like I had to like work to pull that. Yeah. But that was that doubt was definitely there. Yeah, that and it makes sense. Like, it's not like he spent three days working on it. So it makes sense that like to then believe that this is something that can be done in five minutes is like that, in and of itself is sort of a disappointment, right? Like, what do you mean? So he's excited that it that he was able to solve it in five minutes, but also, he had spent three days working on something and then it turns out, it could have just taken five minutes like that, like, so I was I was purposefully being kind of careful around that to like, so there are times in an interview where I was like, Okay, I really want to dig into this doubt, I really want to like, I really want to pull all of that out. But it's like, okay, there's there's this disappointment there too. And I purposely didn't dig too much into that. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 12:15
I yeah, I did not. That was I think the biggest thing that surprised me was that I didn't, I've never considered I totally get it now that he said it. But I didn't really consider that if you've worked on something for a day or two days. And it's not working the way you want it to, to walk away from it. There's probably some emotion surrounding that, like, Oh, this other thing, oh, wow, I spent two days on this. And it could have been 10 minutes, five minutes. And there's

Michele Hansen 12:40
a social component to like, he mentioned that there was like sort of a, I don't know if it was a meeting or conversation or whatnot, where like, he was talking about it with his team and talking about, you know, this isn't working, we're having problems like we need try something else. And and then there was a group, sort of informal decision about whether they should move forward with something else. But like that required him to go to his team and say, like, I can't get I tried to do this. And it didn't work. And even though no one would blame him for that. Like there's also this social component involved in switching products, which is why these questions around. Did you talk to anyone else before you considered using it? Or was there anyone else who had to weigh in on whether it was something that you could use, like, those sorts of social elements are really important? Like, if he was in a big company, we could have heard? Well, I had to go talk to procurement first. And it's like, well, if that's a six month process with procurement, like that might kill us as a little as a little company. Right? Um, but so like, those sort and like those sorts of things, I feel like, we as like technical people, like we have a tendency to overlook the emotional and social side of things, sometimes absolute, and just focus on like, Oh, it's only about the product features, or it's only about how it performs. And it's it's not it's about this complicated human situations we find ourselves in whether those are in our own brains with the work that we've done, or with the people that we work with, or our broader peer community on Twitter or on slack communities.

Colleen Schnettler 14:14
Yeah. Yeah. And I also got out of that, that he was kind of unsure that it really worked as as described, because it sounded too good to be true. And so he used the code pen, and the code pen is like, buried in my documentation. Like, while he asked he said that I pulled up my website and it's like, three clicks, and you have to know where to look. So I feel like that's super actionable, too. I should put that I should put a demo on the main page. Like

Michele Hansen 14:45
you're like the age like one should be it really is as easy as it seems. And then try it right

Colleen Schnettler 14:51
right now. To that, how have I not thought about before,

Michele Hansen 14:57
I don't know it's okay that you didn't think about it, but you surface Get through an interview like this, and we get things

Colleen Schnettler 15:02
in front of other people. Right? That to me, it was huge. That was a really big revelation to that. He He's a developer he wants to see at work. Of course he does. And so

Michele Hansen 15:13
I should your reaction to that reminds me of a couple of weeks ago, when you said that the first thing you do before you're going to use a product is to read the FAQ. That had never ever occurred to me, because I never read FAQ. So it's so funny, like, and so it's just but we don't find these things out about how to other people make decisions about things. We talk to them about it, because the way we make decisions is, you know, every human is different. Yeah. And so I'm, I'm curious on another topic. So at the end, when I asked the reaching for the door question about, you know, is there anything else you think I should know? And he asked this question about a specific feature. Yeah. And I'm curious, how would you have responded to that question?

Colleen Schnettler 15:59
Haha. Okay, so I almost I really that's what that was the first time in the whole interview, my finger was hovering over the mute button. I was like, it's a question for me. It's a question for me. I would have, I would have responded differently. I would have said I would have asked clarifying details. But I think it would have just been like, like, sure, like, What do you want? Whereas you said, How do you like, Why? Why do you want this feature? And what the thing I really liked, because he's describing the feature he wants, and I still didn't get it. And then you said, how will that help you achieve your goals or something like that?

Michele Hansen 16:39
Yeah, I said, like, What is the situation when you when you when you

Colleen Schnettler 16:42
need it? Because he's trying to describe this feature? I'm like, What is? I couldn't really figure out what he was talking about. But if I had answered it, yeah, I would have been like, I would have immediately started thinking of like, the technical details, how would I implement that? Is that something I can do for him?

Michele Hansen 17:00
Which makes sense,

Colleen Schnettler 17:01
right,

Michele Hansen 17:02
like, but the question we'd like, like, whenever somebody brings a feature request to us, like, our question is always like, oh, like, can you tell us a little bit more about like, like, why, why you would need this? And like, what kind of situation you would need it in?

Colleen Schnettler 17:15
Yeah, because he's describing it to you. And I'm still kind of confused. But like I said, I want to take it in a different direction, I would have said, Sure, you know, I could let you tag your image. I mean, to be so easy, I can totally do that. Right, I can let them add a tag on to their images. And then I can segment them in the dashboard. But imagine I had based on that conversation gone and spent however many hours to implement it. And then I implement it. And they don't even use it because they don't really need it. Because it was just an idea they had you know what I mean?

Michele Hansen 17:43
Yeah, I wasn't able to dig into like whether they wanted to do it, or they thought it was required, or, like it was kind of it was kind of unclear to me too. And I think when those things come up in an interview, you can always put a pin in something right? Like, yeah, we got some information about, you know, the sort of activity where they would need this thing, and we got some details about it. We can always email him a week later and be like, hey, like, you have that idea. Last week for this way to tag files. Can we get on a call for like, 15 minutes, and I just want to understand that a little bit better. Also, like, I don't think people will mind. In fact, they might feel complimented, that you remembered what they said. And now they're you're reaching out to them again, for like more details about this great idea they had.

Colleen Schnettler 18:28
Yeah, yeah.

Michele Hansen 18:31
I think that's one thing that we have tried to be so purposeful about is that whenever people bring a suggestion to us, like, we're really appreciate it, right, because like, someone went to the effort of like thinking about that, and then if they're emailing you like that was work on there. And like, maybe it was only two minutes of typing something out, but like, they had an idea that they thought was worthy enough to send you. And that deserves to be recognized. And again, like going back to like being a company that listens to people, like those, like small things, like make a difference, right? Like, I mean, how many times have you requested a feature and then you never heard something? The reply you got back was, well, actually, like, yes, you know, this is why it wouldn't work, right? Like instead of someone just saying, oh, like, definitely tell me about why you would need that or when you would use it.

Colleen Schnettler 19:26
Yep. Yep.

Michele Hansen 19:28
I know basically all of the like bad customer experiences I have myself, like my personal mission to do the opposite of them.

Colleen Schnettler 19:39
I mean, I think we're not perfect but like, my biggest takeaway from this interview with Drew is, so he is someone who is using my service and is happy with it. So I have had, you know, customer interviews with people who are using my service and are happy with it and they have lasted five to seven minutes, every time. Cuz every time I go in with a list of questions, but like, I don't know, I think I think I'm just too excited, or I'm too quick to wrap up. I don't think I'm waiting for the silence quite enough. Because if it had been me, Andrew, it would have been like, I don't know, I probably would have been like, Can you tell me how you're using it, he would have told the thing about allowing companies to upload their logos. And then I would have said, how does it work for you? And he would have said, great, I love it. And that would be the whole thing. So the takeaways for me from this are to be quiet. That's my big takeaway, like you're doing right now being quiet.

Michele Hansen 20:40
You also want to you know, you're asking questions specifically about the product? Yeah, the questions I were asking are, what did you try before this? Right, what are the other alternatives? You looked into? Who were the other people, you talked to you about alternatives? Like you had these expectations for how the product worked? Now that you've used it, did it actually do that? Like, would you use it again, like, like, because all of those sort of situational factors that are beyond the product like like, this is the really important thing is thinking beyond your product, like our products are inevitable? They're just one stop that somebody is on in order to get this broader project or work or job done? Yeah. And how do we build out our understanding of what the rest of that story looks like? That they're going through?

Colleen Schnettler 21:35
Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to practice. I mean, you've done 1000s. I mean, you've done hundreds, if not 1000 of these, right, like you've been doing this for

Michele Hansen 21:43
I have no idea. laughs I've Yeah, it's probably it's in the 1000s. Wow. Okay. Yeah. This was so fun. Because, like, I was going into this, and I was like, I actually like, I mean, I talked to you about your product, but I don't really know that much about it. Um, and so it was like, like, not being an expert in the product I was talking to you about someone was so fun for me, because, like, I got to be genuinely curious about his process, because I have no idea like, what what that process would look like personally. Yeah. And I think that's the thing about these. doing interviews is kind of like suspending your own understanding of something, and then just like just plunging into what it looks like from somebody else's perspective. And like, imagining that you are hearing about this process for the first time. And like going into it sort of wide, childlike eyes, man. Oh, like, so why did you do that? Oh, and then you try that. Okay. But okay, then what did you do there and sort of just sort of slowly painting the picture of like, what this whole thing looks like from this person's perspective. I like I genuinely enjoyed it.

Colleen Schnettler 22:52
That's awesome. That's awesome. It was great. I'm so glad we did it. Like I said, I got so much usable, valuable information from him, especially like things I can do immediately. In terms of up the headline website. Yeah, the headline, the headline and the code pen code. I'm also gonna ask him if I can put him as a testimonial on my website.

Michele Hansen 23:15
I think Yeah, idea. When he said, I had it working in five minutes, and I would have shouted from the rooftops or the mountaintop, Georgia, not the rooftop. Like, like that is that is a good testimonial. And but the key about it is that when he said that, it's like, Oh, great. Like, I'm so glad to hear that. Like, can you tell me why you felt that way? And then it's again, it's a couple of days later, we say, hey, like you said the other day, that you had it working in five minutes? Like, is there any chance that I could put that on my website with, like, a picture of you and your, you know, your name? Like, is that okay? Like, like, we asked about it afterwards, because during the interview, we want to keep that complete feeling of trust, and like, we don't want to like sort of break that's like the equivalent of breaking the fourth wall, which we like, we don't want to ask for the testimonial or for, you know, get talking about like implementation details of a feature request, or or say, you know, yes, we can do that. No, we can't like, all we want to say is, tell me how you would use that. How would that work for you? Like, why do you need that?

Colleen Schnettler 24:23
Interesting.

Michele Hansen 24:24
It's really, really, really important. Like, it's the same as like, you don't want to like you can't try to sell someone on one of my calls, which is so tempting. And I have been in that situation. I mean, so many times where I want to be like, Yeah, actually, we have this product that does that. And like you I can send it to you like right now and like, does it solve the problem you're talking about? Like, but then it's like, wait a minute, the fact that they don't know about the product that tells me something? Is that something about our marketing? Is that about where that product is placed on our website? Like, how can I use the fact that they don't know about it, to build more understanding of how they perceive the product or the problem or like why is it they haven't come across it yet? Or where would they expect to find that? Like, because maybe where we've put it is not where they would expect to see it. Like, is there something about their process? We're not understanding? Like, anything they say is is, should we take in with curiosity and trying to learn more, rather than turning it into an action? I guess that's kind of the better way to summarize. Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 25:28
that's actually a great, you know, that's a great way to summarize it, what they are saying, don't immediately turn that into an action and try to solve the problem in your head, because that's, that was a big thing, while I'm listening to him, listening to him that I wanted to do was like, Okay, how do I solve that problem for you right now. And the key takeaway is, you don't need to do that right. Now. That's something that can happen later. But right now, we're just we're just receiving information.

Michele Hansen 25:58
Yeah. And I think it's hard to suspend that, you know, especially if you're someone who cares about other people. And your way of helping them is by creating things for them and solving things for them. It's so hard to suspend that. Yeah, like, let me just do it for you right now. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 26:19
the weird, let's

Michele Hansen 26:20
talk about it. Let's dive into it.

Colleen Schnettler 26:21
The weirdest thing is this doesn't sound hard. Michelle, like, like I can take direction like we have talked about this before. And it's just, it is a surprising challenge I have found, because I love people. I love talking to people, I thought I would be like epic a customer interviews. And to be fair, I've only done a handful and I'm not terrible. But I definitely This is a whole different, like you said it's not a conversation like this is a whole different way of approaching your customer. And it's actually in practice, it's harder than I thought it would be.

Michele Hansen 26:58
But if somebody who is as ADD and bubbly as I am can manage to tamp themselves down to do this, then anybody can do it.

Colleen Schnettler 27:10
Yeah, no, I think I can get there. I just, I just seem surprised. It's been this hard. How about that? Like, I'm surprised. It hasn't been easier. And I just think it's a skill. I think that's the difference. Like, I'm not just having coffee with my buddy, right? Like, this is a skill. So it's a skill you can improve upon with practice.

Michele Hansen 27:30
Yeah, I mean, and like you have not had the opportunity to observe someone like this is really the first time I know, it was so exciting, by the way, observe something new. And when I was learning how to interview, first of all, I was learning in a very high stakes scenario of like talking to people about their finances, which is something we hold, you know, pretty close to our chest and like, don't talk about with people. So we really had to do it. Right. Yeah, the second thing is, like, I probably observed, like, I don't know, 15 or 20 interviews before I was actually on them on my own. And like, the people I was observing were, I mean, they're genuine experts in this one of them basically has a PhD in user experience design. Like, they're genuine experts in what they do. And so, like, I had the opportunity to learn with them, and then be paired with them on interviews for I mean, I don't know, like probably another 50 or 100 interviews too, and like doing partner interviewing as well, which is easier than then doing it all on your own. So it is a hill to climb, like and I think you should give yourself credit for trying to learn this whole new skill without having, you know, basically a coach there to stand with you and and help you through it like, but I think you can do it.

Colleen Schnettler 28:48
Yeah. Well, and that was the best part of doing this is because I thought about what I would say in response to everything he said, I was trying to be really cognizant of what I would have said in response. And so it was interesting to counteract that with what you were saying. To kind of, you know, show me kind of guide me on maybe a different path.

Michele Hansen 29:13
Yeah, so I mean, it sounds like you you were able to pull a lot from this.

Colleen Schnettler 29:17
Oh, yeah. This is super great. Like I'm super pumped now to go practice who wants to be interviewed? Send me.

Michele Hansen 29:25
I sent out a practice scripts the other day that you can use on anyone does not just about your product like you could I tell you, I guess it's hard during like COVID times, you'll have to find someone who will get on a call with you. But like just interviewing someone about the last product they bought. Oh, it doesn't have to be something technical. Like I did this. I in a workshop a couple of years ago, those co workers that I mentioned that we did interviews together. We ran a meetup for a while and we did a workshop on teaching people how to interview because it is hard. And it is weird, right? Like it's not a conversation. And and we just did it, you know what, what was the last product you bought, and I ended up talking about a bottle of shampoo. And, and even though the person interviewing me had like she was kind of nervous about it, she didn't really know how to do it. She was able to pull out all this information about like, why I had gravitated toward this particular shampoo and what I was hoping would solve for it. And she told me about why she was she'd switched phone plans. Like so you know, it. Those are fairly like innocuous things to talk about. But there's like, there there is we don't change anything we're doing in life unless there is struggle, right? Unless there is a reason. Yeah. And so when someone has just switched to a new product, what we're trying to find out is what was that struggle? And what made them like this product, click and like what were they thinking? And then we can pull out those aha moments? Like, is it really as easy as it seems? Spoiler alert, yes. Like, that's really where this stuff comes up. But so like, you don't have to start on your customers, which might understandably freak you out. Like, you can just start on, you know, a friend of yours or whatever. And just because because like the the flow of the of the conversation is just is very, very different.

Colleen Schnettler 31:24
Yeah. Awesome. Well,

Michele Hansen 31:28
I guess that wraps us up for this week. Thank you so much for listening. This has been a really fun little series to do. And definitely let us know what you think how your own customer interviews are going if you've tried them after listening or reading my newsletter, and we'll talk to you next week.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
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Michele Hansen
Hey, everyone. So we're doing something a little bit different this week. We've had a lot of conversations lately about doing customer interviews. And so we thought that it might be helpful to do a demo of one so that you can all understand what goes into one. So we have someone who has agreed to be interviewed. Who is using Colleen's product, Simple File Upload. And so I'm going to interview them today.

Alright, so here we go. We're gonna get started.

Michele Hansen
Hi, Is this Drew?

Drew 1:24
Yep, this is Drew.

Michele Hansen 1:26
Hi, Drew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.

Drew 1:30
No problem. Thanks for having me.

Michele Hansen 1:33
So before we get started, I just want to ask if you had any questions for me?

Drew 1:38
I'm not off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll find some along the way.

Michele Hansen 1:42
Okay, feel free to ask any questions that might come up.

Drew 1:45
Okay.

Michele Hansen 1:47
And just before we get started, I just want to make sure that it's okay, we record this interview.

Drew 1:51
Yeah, absolutely.

Michele Hansen 1:53
Okay, so um, so just to get started, Could you just tell me a little bit about like, how you came to even needing something like Simple File Upload in the first place?

Drew 2:05
Well, I'm, I'm building a product that is going to play currently has a, it's a job listing platform. So we wanted companies to be able to upload their logo, you know, to sit next to their listing. But our stage two of that we're actually adding in some more verbose user accounts, where users will have avatars, they'll be able to upload resumes and stuff like that. So we just really, we really saw that we were gonna need something that would allow us to upload all the files and handle them easily.

Michele Hansen 2:42
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I'm curious, have you tried anything else to do this?

Drew 2:51
Yeah, we were using Firebase Storage, because we were using firestore as our database. So we started using Firebase Storage. Just because, you know, they, they were right next to each other seemed like an easy enough fit. And it was working at first. But we recently started going through a big migration to next js, which has, which is you know, some things are just handled a little differently from a code perspective. And Firebase Storage just did not work as easily. As it was, we found ourself running into a lot of walls, jumping through a lot of hoops just to make the simplest things work.

Michele Hansen 3:36
Can you tell me a little bit more about those hoops and, and walls that you ran into?

Drew 3:44
I'm trying to think a specific case. So we were we're really just trying to load the image before the component was loaded. You know, so it would be there when, when the page did load. But because of because of how they give you access to it with promises, and you know, all that fun stuff. I don't know if it's because we were implementing it wrong. Or maybe they just weren't ever really meant to work hand in hand, but we would get we were getting errors that, you know, it couldn't it couldn't do what we were asking because the data it needed, wasn't there yet when it was asking for it. And we really started to feel like we were just putting band aids on things to make something work. And this was really kind of our big push to make the platform more stable, not less. That was probably the biggest one.

Michele Hansen 4:45
Sounds like that was like frustrating. A lot of like, fits and starts for you guys.

Drew 4:51
Yeah, it really was because there we had it working. And it you know, it took a little bit of work to get it working that first time and Most every other piece of the code kind of just transferred one to one for the most part. And this, this part just did not. And we already had, you know, we had a decent amount of files in the stores that we wanted to get to, but for whatever reason, be it user error or stored there. It just wasn't happening.

Michele Hansen 5:24
Yeah, I'm going to do remember, like how long it was, like from from the time when you just started, decided to start using Firebase Storage? And then until you decided, like, wasn't going to work? Like, how long was that?

Drew 5:42
Oh, we started, we started using it around a year ago, the it was working fine. We started, we started working on this big rebuild about maybe a month and a half ago. And that was probably when we started realizing that it wasn't gonna work. And I think it was, I think I spent probably three days trying to wrestle it before I've just relented.

Michele Hansen 6:08
Oh, man.So it took six weeks of try of trying to get it to work, and then you intensely worked on it for three days, and then it still wouldn't work.

Drew 6:21
Well, the six weeks wasn't fully working on trying to get it to work six weeks was, you know, getting all the components moved over. And all that other stuff set up for the new environment. And then, but you are correct, it was three intense days of trying to make it work.

Michele Hansen 6:37
Man, there must have been super frustrating.

Drew 6:41
It was and I was I was at my wit's end.

Michele Hansen 6:48
So when did you start thinking like that, maybe use something else.

Drew 6:57
Almost immediately, I wanted to use something else, but I didn't know what else would be out there at the pricing model that they provide. Um, but I guess, free free always comes with caveats. And I found those caveats early on.

Michele Hansen 7:12
Oh, so Firebase Storage was free if you were using firestore.

Drew 7:17
Yeah, they have their, they have this whole platform set up where it's, it's free up until X amount of requests, but that number is like really high. So it's really, it's really enticing when you're trying to just, you know, when you just want to get something up and moving. The widget, we just kept hitting brick walls with the storage.

Michele Hansen 7:38
Yeah, it sounds like it. So. So you were, you had like three days of intensely trying to work on this. You wanted to use something else? And then you you didn't know what other options there were? Did you start researching other options? Or like, Can you can you walk me through that a little bit.

Drew 7:59
Um, I didn't really researched too many options. Just because where the product we're building is, you know, it's not generating any revenue, and it's kind of a side project first status. So I wasn't really, I wasn't really seriously considering anything that had a paywall on it was, I wasn't sure that it would ever, you know, pay itself back off. I knew I knew there were I knew there were other options out there that would either require moving our storage and our database altogether, which didn't really seem appealing, or having or having two different services, one to manage each, but then the storage still being just as complicated only somewhere else.

Michele Hansen 8:51
It sounds like you had a lot of things you were trying to like wave back and forth about whether you should sort of try to plunge forward with this thing that was already being very frustrating. Or then all of the, you know, the the negative effects of switching and all the complications that that would introduce.

Drew 9:10
Yeah, I really, I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of time investing, you know, building up a new infrastructure for a new product. Or, you know, for new servers to handle this one thing that I think the most frustrating part was that it worked in now. It doesn't.

Michele Hansen 9:27
Yeah, that's such a letdown. So, I just want to ask about something you said you said you didn't want to consider anything with a paywall. And when you say paywall Do you mean like something that has like a free tier and then it goes to to like pay as you go or something that you have to pay for upfront or just, I'm just wondering if you can see what you meant by that.

Drew 9:54
Um, but the ones the other options that are newer out there usually had like Up front paywall that I'm not well, I guess not a paywall, it was kind of a pay as you go, depending on what you use. And I didn't know what those numbers would equate to. So where we were in the project, I didn't want to invest too much mental overhead, and you're trying to figure that out, I really wanted to stay focused on just building the thing.

Michele Hansen 10:26
That makes sense. Yeah. So it sounds like the like the pricing models, like, based on what you were doing, it was unclear what you would have to pay for those if you had to pay for them.

Drew 10:40
Yeah, exactly.

Michele Hansen 10:42
And you were already kind of, you just wanted to get this thing that you thought was gonna be easy. Out the door, and kind of just the thought of doing all those calculations was was not really where your head was at.

Drew 10:55
Yeah. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 10:57
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, so so let's jump to so simple file upload, can you can you just let me know how you how you heard about it.

Drew 11:14
I heard about it through two different ways. I heard about it in a virtual coffee community I'm in. And then I also heard about it through the twitterverse.

Michele Hansen 11:27
And so can you tell me when you first heard about it? Like, what what did you was this around the same time that you were trying to wrangle this whole Firebase thing? Or was it after? Or is it before? Or?

Drew 11:42
It was? It was a little bit before? So I think I first heard about it, when we were at the very beginning of the big, you know, I guess it was a it was a framework migration is what we were doing. So it was kind of at the beginning of that when I heard about it, but at that point in time, our current solution worked. So I wasn't really, at that point. I wasn't really looking for anything else.

Michele Hansen 12:10
That makes sense. And then going into you had those sort of three days of struggle. And and then it occurred to you at some point that you could maybe use simple file upload for that, does that right?

Drew 12:26
Oh, no, it never occurred to me, I was gonna continue banging my head on the keyboard. But a friend in the virtual coffee community said, Hey, why don't you just try this thing? Because I'd already heard about it in the virtual coffee in virtual coffee had already seen heard about it on Twitter. And at that point, I was so like, you know, white knuckling to holding on to our current solution that the thought hadn't even registered. Yet, so someone else recommended. And as soon as they said it, I was like that. This is it. This works.

Michele Hansen 13:05
It sounds like you, like you put so much work into trying to make the other thing work that you were like, he really wanted that to work. Like you didn't want to have to, like walk away from all of that frustration that you went through.

Drew 13:20
Yeah, I did. Yeah. I was being very stubborn.

Michele Hansen 13:24
That That makes sense. I mean, it sounds like you poured a lot of effort into it. Um, but then so this friend that you heard about simple file upload from like, had they used it themselves? Or?

Drew 13:39
I'm not sure if they I'm not sure if they use it themselves. I know he and Colleen both work with Ruby. So maybe they were just maybe he was more familiar with it because they had they chatted about it from that perspective.

Michele Hansen 14:01
Did you like look for you said you had heard about it through these groups you're in? Did you look for any other places for information about it before you decided to use it?

Drew 14:16
I looked at the website and kind of like skim the documentation as somehow we came across a think it was a code pin or some type of like little code snippet that let me like kind of test drive it. And based on that, I was like, if it's really this easy, then I don't see why I wouldn't use it.

Michele Hansen 14:41
So before you started using it, was there anything you were like sort of like it sounds like you were unsure if it was actually as good as it seemed? Is there anything else that you were unsure about? Or like what like you weren't able to figure out before you used it.

Drew 15:01
Um, I was I don't want to say unsure of how like the the Amazon s3 buckets and stuff worked like I knew I knew that that's what it connected to and like, that's how it worked. But I've heard a bunch of people get frustrated about how complicated that would be. So I was I guess I was curious as to whether or not it actually made it that simple.

Michele Hansen 15:29
It sounds like you were almost like, doubtful whether it could be that easy.

Drew 15:36
Yeah, probably just, it seems like from what I've heard about s3 buckets, that that's such a big problem that it'd be, that wouldn't necessarily be an easy thing to wrangle into a simple solution.

Michele Hansen 15:50
So have you gotten the chance to use it yet?

Drew 15:54
Oh, yeah.

Michele Hansen 15:55
Okay, so how did it go?

Drew 15:58
I think I had it working in five minutes.

Michele Hansen 16:02
And how did that make you feel?

Drew 16:05
Oh, man, I was I was elated. But I would have if I didn't live in South Georgia, I would have shouted it from the mountaintops.

Michele Hansen 16:17
I think you still could.

Drew 16:18
Yeah, absolutely.

Michele Hansen 16:22
Wow. And so and so you were able to sort of drop it in where you previously were using the the Firebase Storage?

Drew 16:32
Yep, there took a I don't even really think there was much configuration needed. I get the. So I'm specifically using the React component version of it. So I just kind of got my account set up, dropped in the React component. And there really just worked.

Michele Hansen 16:53
And so it sounds like it's it's really work for you. And you had looked into some other things. And I'm curious, like for the, the site you're working on, or you're working on that with other people?

Drew 17:09
Yeah, so there's, I guess there's, there's a team of five of us. But we're, are we call it a side project, first priority last thing that we're working on. So there's five of us that work on it, but no, one of us may be full tilt for two weeks straight, and then you won't hear from us for a month or two.

Michele Hansen 17:34
Gotcha. So when you were, you know, sort of in that in that period of knowing that what you were doing wasn't going to work, even though that was sort of hard to admit to yourself, understandably, and then deciding to switch to simple file upload. Was there anyone else you talked to about that decision? within the team, or the company?

Drew 17:57
Um, I mentioned it, I mentioned it to everyone. I guess I guess, was never really put to the table for a vote. But I was just kind of like, Hey, we're, we keep running into problems with this current thing. I'm going to give this a try and see what happens. And I think I think everyone, I think everyone on the team had already heard about simple follow up load because they're in the same virtual coffee community. So I want to say it was a it was a unanimous, yes.

Michele Hansen 18:31
And Was there anyone like outside of the team who needed to weigh in on that or, or anything like that?

Drew 18:39
I'm not really we're kind of a it's a. Right now. It's a small project, small team. So

Michele Hansen 18:52
gotcha. So you've gotten to implement it. And to so you have it working on the site now with the the logos.

Drew 19:04
Yep. It's working. It's up and working. And it's beautiful.

Michele Hansen 19:11
Yeah. Yeah. So do you think you're going to use it for the the applicant photos as well?

Drew 19:22
I believe so. Yeah. We haven't working in this instance. Or we haven't working in the way we need it now. So I can only see it making the other places we need. File Upload. Better.

Michele Hansen 19:37
Cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and I, I've learned so much from you. Is there anything else you think I should know?

Drew 19:54
Um, I guess maybe maybe now that we've been talking about I do have a question around. And is there would there be this would probably end up being like, a feature request more than anything. But is there plans in the future to, from the simple file upload dashboard to be able to, like, section off different stuff from? You know, maybe this is type A files is type B? Or is that already they haven't seen it?

Michele Hansen 20:24
So I can't speak to that, because I don't work on it and myself, but I, could you walk me through, like how that would like, fit into your process, or like how that would help you.

Drew 20:37
Um, we're going to be rolling out some user accounts, there's gonna be two different types of accounts. And so one of the account types is going to have avatars and PDFs. Um, it may or may not even be necessary, because at the end, all we just need is the URL anyways. But if for whatever reason, we do need to go to the dashboard to see those files, it would be nice if they could be sectioned off from you know, these are our user accounts. These are our company accounts.

Michele Hansen 21:16
Oh, got it. So the first one, are the users like people uploading resumes that right? And then the second one is the companies and then all the images associated with the companies.

Drew 21:28
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 21:29
Which will be the logos.

Drew 21:31
Yeah. And that may not even be necessary. So because we're really just taking the URL and piping it in somewhere?

Michele Hansen 21:38
Yeah. Could you like, could you just like, tell me a situation where you would, you would need to do like, like distinguishing between those files like what what would that help you do? Like, what's a situation where that would be helpful?

Drew 21:55
I can't think of one off the top of my head. But when when we first started working towards the getting user accounts someplace that was actually a question. One of the one of my team members brought up was, you know, when we send this too simple out file upload, do we really have to specify that it goes to this file or this followers that all those same places? And it's kind of got that? That's a good question.

Michele Hansen 22:23
And did that person want them to be differentiated?

Drew 22:28
I don't think they necessarily wanted them to be differentiated. As much as they were just making sure that they weren't doing it the wrong way by not specifying somewhere.

Michele Hansen 22:39
Gotcha. Gotcha. They wanted to make sure they were using the tool, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. You had mentioned with Firebase that you guys were kind of unsure whether it was like user error, versus the limitations of the tool. And so it, like it kind of makes sense that you would have questions about like using it, right.

Drew 23:04
Yeah, because we're, we're mostly junior developers building this. So we're making it up as we go.

Michele Hansen 23:12
We all are.

Cool.

Was there or is there anything else? Did you have any other questions or?

Drew 23:26
No, I think that's everything I have.

Michele Hansen 23:29
Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this today. I really appreciate it.

Drew 23:35
Thank you. It was my pleasure.

Michele Hansen 23:37
All right. Thank you so much.

Drew 23:39
Thank you.

Michele Hansen 23:41
Bye.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
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So you remember a couple of weeks ago how I was reading the Jobs to Be Done Playbook?

Colleen Schnettler 0:59
Yes, I sure do.

Michele Hansen 1:01
I'mstill reading that book. But I'm also reading another book. And I want to talk about that other book.

Colleen Schnettler 1:07
Okay.

Psychology of Money

Michele Hansen 1:09
So I finally started reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.

Colleen Schnettler 1:15
Okay.

Michele Hansen 1:16
Which has been on my to-read pile for about, I don't know, about six months or so now, since it came out early last fall. And it's such a good book, like I mean, even if you're not a finance person are particularly interested in personal finance, like, it's a book about money that's not about money. And it's and it's so good. So but there's just one quote and that reminded me of stuff that we talk a lot about together. So I'm just gonna read it to you.

"In a world where intelligence is hyper competitive, and many previous technical skills have become automated, competitive advantages tilt toward nuanced and soft skills, like communication, empathy, and perhaps most of all, flexibility."

Colleen Schnettler 2:08
Hmm, interesting.

Michele Hansen 2:10
And this reminded me a lot of what we talk about, because it's kind of like we've been talking about as it relates to your business. The one of the like, the biggest challenges for you is not the engineering side, it's like, knowing when you should, you know, change directions, or be flexible with with like, what your image of what the business and what the product is. And also like communicating with people about what it does and what it is and pulling that information out of them. And then and then how do we use empathy to figure all of those things out, which is, which is a really big focus for me, and I read this and, like, grabbed the nearest writing utensil near me, which normally I only write in pencils in books, like I will underline things, but I only had a pen, and I was like, This is so amazing, I'm gonna underline it and pen because I'm not gonna regret that, like. That just really stuck with me.

Colleen Schnettler 3:09
Interesting. Why was that in your psychology of money book?

Michele Hansen 3:13
Oh, I mean, so I don't know if you've ever read Morgan's writing.

Colleen Schnettler 3:16
No.

Michele Hansen 3:16
He writes a lot about the sort of psychology of business. He's a very different business writer. And I used to work with him so I've sort of been been around a lot of his thinking for a while. And I'm really sort of grateful for that, because he has a very unique perspective on things. And you know, it's not very often that you read in a best selling business book that the key is empathy. Right?

Colleen Schnettler 3:42
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 3:42
Running a good business. Right.

And it reminds me a lot of something that I have been working on lately, too. So you know, we've talked about like getting people to reply, when you are trying to talk to them about the reasons why they use your product, which can be difficult.

Colleen Schnettler 4:02
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 4:03
And I think I mentioned a couple weeks ago, how we like so on our NPS survey like that, that pops up, I think, you know, relatively soon after someone uses the product, but not the first time and it's, you know, just rank us one to 10. And normally, we just look at this just to make sure we're getting mostly nines and 10s. But then it also has a question that asks as a follow up, and that survey and the question have a really high response rate. And we were previously asking, 'what can we do to improve?' And I changed this question. First of all, we were you know, we're getting a lot of like, boosts out of it. Like people were saying, like, no, you're awesome, and like, that makes us feel great. And like as -- you know, it feels nice. But also, we were kind of like asking people to do our work for us by telling us what we should improve. And so I changed it instead to 'What did you use before you used Geocodio?' And this is just reminding me about how we, you know, you know, competitors, at first blush, they seem like other companies, but in so many scenarios, and I think this applies to your business a lot too, competitors are people figuring something out for themselves or like some, like manual process where they're patching things together. And it is so fascinating to see the variety of responses I get from people. And how many of them say 'nothing' like that they used no tool and that they were like, hunting and pecking, or they had something internal, or they were like stringing together different solutions. I mean, our approach to competitors is so much more like relaxed than this, I think for, like, the traditional kind of business approach is like, you know, you should know everything that your competitors are doing and like, you know, know exactly when they have new features and like, be copying their features and everything. And I'm like, Nah, dude, like, I'm going to talk to my customers, because my competitors are all the time that they spend doing it themselves.

Colleen Schnettler 5:59
It's this, it kind of the same thing with my business where a lot of people in the beginning, they were just weren't really doing it, or they weren't, you know, they were just, they were just putting, like piecemealing kind of half a half usable open source solutions with with, with other things. So So to your point, like your competitors, really not the other people offering the same service, but what the user was doing before.

Michele Hansen 6:26
Yeah, I mean, there's so much space in software to have products that do things that are similar to somebody else's product, because so many people are just doing things themselves.

Colleen Schnettler 6:40
So one of the things from that quote, you read from the book that I thought was interesting was flexibility. And what do you think that means in a business context? Does that mean pivot? Does that mean, let go of your idea that you're super passionate about because it's not working?

Michele Hansen 6:55
I think it means both of those things. I mean, if you remember, a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about the Adam Grant book, I was reading Think Again. And there was a quote, I read from that in that episode, which is talking about the values of taking an experimental approach and how entrepreneurs who were open to experimenting with their idea and like they, they had higher revenue in the period of that study that was done. And I don't think it necessarily means like forcing yourself to walk away from something when you're really passionate about it. But being passionate about the problem that you're solving, or the people you're solving that problem for, and less. So your like, specific implementation idea of that problem, because I think like we, I feel like ideas for products have these kind of two parts to them. There's like the problem you're going to solve. And then there's the way you're going to solve that problem. And I think, so often those things are sandwiched together. But if you pull them apart, and then you just really focus on like, what is like, why am I trying to solve this? What is that I'm trying to solve? And then there's probably 10 different ways to solve that. And so you know, you go out and talk to people and figure out what that is, and then not being so anchored to that one specific idea that, you know, came floating down on the cloud from the gods. I think that's kind of what I pull from that about flexibility.

Colleen Schnettler 8:27
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think something too, is I've, I've tried to change kind of the content I consume from less blog posts, not that blog posts aren't helpful. But we've talked about how there's also quite a lot that, that, you know, paint unrealistic expectations to more actual books. And something I've noticed about reading these actual books, is the timeline is longer usually, then I would have originally guessed, like when I first started learning about like bootstrapping, and indie hacking, when people talk about pivoting, for some reason, I thought that was like, like, you do it after two weeks. And then I'm reading the lean startup and some other books, and they just talk about like, you can't, you should probably shouldn't make big decisions based on 10 customers, and you know, being in business for two weeks, like they talk about these longer term, kind of like looking at data over a longer term, as opposed to a shorter timeframe.

Michele Hansen 9:25
So I think context really matters there. And I'm reminded of another point that Morgan Housel makes in his book is that you need to define the game that you are playing, and then only take advice from people who are playing the same game. And I think what that means in this context is that the thing about a lot of business advice is that it's not necessarily written for bootstrappers in mind, right?

Colleen Schnettler 9:55
That's a good point

Michele Hansen 9:55
Like this is basically kind of what's leading me to like write my own newsletter about customer research right now because I have all these resources that I send people, but I'm like, but you know, caveat, like this book assumes that you have a multimillion dollar research budget, and you can write consultants for it.

Colleen Schnettler 10:09
Right.

Michele Hansen 10:09
And so I feel like, like, like lean startup is such a, I think there's a lot of things I like about that book and like concepts. And if you're, you know, a 25 ,50, 500 person company that is thinking about pivoting a product, that is what all of your employees are relying on for their salaries, then yeah, you're not going to make any decisions about pivoting that product with like, major decisions without six months, or, you know, a significant pile of data, right, like,

Colleen Schnettler 10:45
right

Michele Hansen 10:46
that, you know, that would be unwise to just change it on a dime, and not having evidence for the change. By contrast, if you've only launched something two weeks ago, or if it's a relatively small or like, insignificant feature, or if it's just you, and you're just trying to figure it out, I think there's there's more wiggle room for changing based on feedback, especially if you have really strong signs that there's something wrong and like what you should do instead. But I think, you know, I think some of those, like those business books are good, like, conceptually, but like,

Colleen Schnettler 11:20
yeah,

Michele Hansen 11:20
But on the ground, as it relates to the to not only the specific situation of being a bootstrapper, but also the incentives at play. Like that's like something that's so different between being a company of people versus a one person. I mean, that's the thing we loved about it in the beginning was like, we could just

Colleen Schnettler 11:38
do stuff

Michele Hansen 11:39
Try stuff, like, throw pasta at the wall and see what stuck, like, and there was no, you know, there were no real consequences of that.

Colleen Schnettler 11:46
Yeah, I think I think my context is, so I've had this has been live for about a month that I had, I had like 13 paying customers, and about three or four of those churned out. And one of the people who actually emailed me back, thank you, thank you, person just said it was too expensive for what he was doing. And so then like, this is like feedback from one person, I only have 13 paying customers. Then I started, I was like, hey, maybe it has too expensive could I could I do a new tier that's cheaper? Should I do that? And I kind of tried to stop myself, because I was like, okay, practically speaking, I don't have the time to set that all up right now, as we've talked about right now is a busy time. And I've literally only been in business for a month. So maybe I should just pause and you know, get more than 12 playing customers and see, you know, what the churn rates are then.

Michele Hansen 12:40
Yeah, and I think something critical that he said was, it's too expensive for what he is doing.

Colleen Schnettler 12:47
Yes. And he did say that it was a small budget ecommerce thing or something.

Michele Hansen 12:51
Yeah. Did he tell you more about what he is doing?

Colleen Schnettler 12:54
He did not. Unfortunately, I should have asked.

Michele Hansen 12:57
Did he tell you about what he is going to do instead?

Colleen Schnettler 13:00
No, that's a fascinating piece of information. That would be really nice to find out, I should ask him.

Michele Hansen 13:07
Because the thing I find with, like interviews like that, like, I mean, you've learned something valuable from that, which is that unless so that he as a person and more that he as someone with this type of use case is not your customer,

Colleen Schnettler 13:23
Right

Michele Hansen 13:23
That it's to get like compared to alternatives. You are too expensive for whatever those alternatives are. So what are those alternatives? And then how I usually take from that is okay, like, more so than less so how do we change our product to make it so he would have stayed and more so how do we change our marketing, to make sure that we're not speaking to his use case? And we instead are, like, if we can get our happy customers to talk to us? What are their use cases? And how can we speak to their use cases more so that we attract more of the would be happy people and attract fewer of the would be churning people? Just based on their use cases.

Colleen Schnettler 14:03
Yeah. And I think you would ask me last week, if I was getting a lot of Gmail addresses, or a lot of company addresses, and it's been pretty much a mix, but you know, obviously, my ideal customer is a small business, not a person because my price is expensive for a side project, you know.

Michele Hansen 14:22
Yeah, I mean, something without any budget is -- paying for anything is always.

Colleen Schnettler 14:28
right.

Numbers Update

Michele Hansen 14:28
And if we can just check in here since everybody always loves numbers, what are the numbers right now?

Colleen Schnettler 14:36
So they're exactly the same as they were last week. I had two people churn out and two people sign up. So it's like MRR is like $340.

Michele Hansen 14:48
But you also didn't you get your first like, check from Heroku this week?

Colleen Schnettler 14:52
Oh, yeah, that was so fun. Okay. It was so fun because I put this like you get a notification from Heroku when your app is available for sale, and then you set up plans, and you know you, you decide how much they're going to cost. And then people were signing up and I was super excited. But you have no indication outside of the fact that people are signing up that like, you're actually going to get paid. So, I mean, I knew I was supposed to get paid, but I kept being like, did I did I forget, I set up the plan wrong, and it's really $0. And I'm not gonna find out till the end of the month. Like, it was very exciting to get my first check from Heroku. Because I knew that people were actually paying for it. And plus, with Heroku, as I've said, unlike stripe that pays you up front, like I get paid at the end of the month. So someone signs up March 1, I don't get paid till the end of March for that particular person. So yeah, that was really exciting.

Michele Hansen 15:49
So how much was the check again?

Colleen Schnettler 15:51
It was like $250. Well, okay. It was like 250 bucks, but they take 30%. So it was like 140 bucks. And then it costs me like 100 bucks just to host it, and then maybe 20 bucks in storage. So I'm net $20. And then I bought a $20 bagel. That's my whole month. That's what I did.

Michele Hansen 16:16
I think that's awesome. Um, I'm really curious by how you said that there's no like way to, like track the revenue within Heroku or like to see that things are actually working.

Colleen Schnettler 16:28
it's just not like real time. Like, okay, I could see that things were working. But they have. So basically, if you go into your add on, they have a revenue graph, they'll show you, but it's zero for that whole first month. So I would check my revenue graph, and it would be zero. And then I would check my signups and I was like, someone signed up, it shouldn't be zero. And it's just the way they do their accounting. It's not like stripe that gives you that like real time feedback, Heroku gives you feedback once a month. And at the end of the month, so it's not like all exciting where you get to see Oh, real time signups. It's like, wow, I hope. I hope they're tracking this properly.

Michele Hansen 17:07
So I wanted to dive in a little bit on those numbers, because you, you said that you had about $100 a month to host it. And so you, you basically netted $20? Is that right?

Colleen Schnettler 17:23
Yeah, something like that was like 20 or 30 bucks.

Michele Hansen 17:26
Okay,

Colleen Schnettler 17:26
yeah.

Michele Hansen 17:27
So that tells me that you're that? Well, I guess my first question before I decide what that means. Is that cost going that hosting cost, is it going to increase as you get more customers? Or is it going to decrease as you get more customers.

Colleen Schnettler 17:42
it shouldn't change. I mean, when I set it up, I set it up.

Michele Hansen 17:45
Ok.

Colleen Schnettler 17:45
So it's pretty robust. So I've already paid for like the workers and stuff to do all the image posting to AWS. And so that should be pretty flat. I mean, I'd have to get like a million customers for that to be a problem.

Michele Hansen 17:58
So your margins should get better from here, then.

Colleen Schnettler 18:00
correct, my costs should not my storage costs will go up a little bit, but generally speaking, my costs will not go up significantly.

Michele Hansen 18:08
So from a sort of, a, I don't know how to describe this, a sort of structural perspective of the business, that is a very good sign, when costs do not increase with the amount of customers you serve, like, that is really good. And that's a very unique situation is one of the reasons why software is so awesome.

Colleen Schnettler 18:36
Right?

Michele Hansen 18:37
But like, you know, think like, um, you know, think about like, at like a store, right? Like, they can only sell as much inventory as they have already purchased. And if they have 100 customers come in, like they need to have stuff to serve 100 customers, like they have to buy that right, like they have rolled out an inventory, or if it's a one to one relationship, like those will all proportionally increase. Now, you can have great businesses that that just by virtue of you know, the prices they charge and the volume they have, like, the cost do increase like so I'm not saying those aren't necessarily good businesses. But it's really amazing when you have a business that can serve a lot of customers and keep the the cost of the goods sold. Like that flat like that is very interesting.

Colleen Schnettler 19:30
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do have storage costs. So it's not a you know, a zero sum game. But yes, unlike having physical goods. It's definitely a better margin then than that. Signups have it feels like signups have slowed down a little bit. Well, it's interesting. So paid signups have slowed down. A lot of people have started entering their email address to do the free trial and then they're bouncing when they see that they need to enter a credit card. So that's just an interesting data point. Like I said, I'm not going to change anything this month. But I have noticed that more people are hitting the site and more people are putting in their email addresses. But not converting. Well, converting isn't the right word, but not putting in their credit card.

Michele Hansen 20:13
Hmm.

Colleen Schnettler 20:14
But I think you're right. Like, I really need to figure out who my ideal customer is. And I need to figure out how to reach them. Right. It's like the number one problem everyone has in SaaS.

Michele Hansen 20:26
I think that, you know, people talk about having the ideal customer. And I think that almost like starting out, that kind of puts pressure on ourselves to find the ideal customer. And when you're starting out, if you can just find a customer that will reliably pay you every month..

Colleen Schnettler 20:44
That's pretty good.

Michele Hansen 20:45
They're like, we don't have to find like the, you know, the perfect customer, you know, they going back to what you're talking about, like the business books and stuff about customer research, right? Like, there's so many great books that go through all of these ways to diagram, you know, who like, who is the customer? And who are the other stakeholders involved? Like, what is the whole, you know, process they go through to like, accomplish a job and like, all of like, it's so great. It's so robust, but like, when you're a one person company, you're like, Yeah, that's great. But like, that's not like, like, Yeah, I don't I don't have no, no, I don't have six months to just do a research project about this. Like, I need stuff now. And I need people paying me now. And so I think using whatever insights you can get from people, and and I -- like the guy you said who churned did he was that over email? Or did you get a chance to actually talk to him?

Colleen Schnettler 21:37
That was over email?

Michele Hansen 21:39
Okay. Do you think maybe you could see if you could get him to talk to you?

Colleen Schnettler 21:45
I will, I think, you know, as we've discussed before, and I believe you addressed in your newsletter, finding people is hard, like getting people when you I mean, again, I have what 12 paying customers. So getting people to talk to me is hard. Now, when I had the free plan, I had 120 customers, and I had a much better success rate. But the thing about the people I spoke with that were on the free plan, is they were people who would never pay for the service anyway. So you know, I don't want to reintroduce the free plan just to get more people. But yeah, I am I am struggling getting people like willing to take that time.

Michele Hansen 22:27
So with people who have churned, I find that offering an incentive is critical, in the same way with with people who aren't a user yet, like I remember when you did, you had your

Colleen Schnettler 22:41
Yes, the Amazon gift cards.

Michele Hansen 22:42
Your child care idea, you gave people gift cards. And I think like that is absolutely critical. When you're trying to talk to someone who's churned it's like, because like, you know, they signed up for your product, hoping it would do something and then it didn't do that, or it wasn't fit for them. And so like there's an amount of disappointment there that is difficult to overcome. And this I mean, this is kind of what I tend to say that churned or like former customer interviews or like expert level of interviews, because there's so much more negative emotion there than there would be with someone who's just signed up or someone who has never even used your product. But I think if you offer them like $25 Amazon gift card, and you're like, hey, like I know, it didn't work out, like I understand. And I would just love to hear more about like, just like what it is you're doing in general. And just just so I can just understand that better. And then kind of like framing it from a perspective of so that we can make sure that nobody else has the experience that you had.

Colleen Schnettler 23:42
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 23:44
It's still like it's delicate. And a lot of people will say no, but I find if you frame it from that perspective of like, here's a way for you to help somebody else not go through this. And here's $25 to Amazon, like yeah, you know, you combine altruism with with straight up self interest, like, yeah, that is the highest likelihood to get through. But like, they can just be really delicate. But I think that would be valuable to figure out like, okay, like this, this kind of use case is not my customer.

Colleen Schnettler 24:17
Yes, that's a great idea. Yeah, I'll do that. Because I do I do need to know why, you know why those people signed up added files and then bounced, like, that would definitely be helpful.

Michele Hansen 24:29
Yeah. And it may not be something anything about your product or the functionality of it.

Colleen Schnettler 24:34
Right.

Michele Hansen 24:35
It may be that you know, your marketing somehow grabbed them, and maybe you need to tweak it so that you don't grab more people like them.

Colleen Schnettler 24:42
Right, right. I can target the marketing.

100 Days of Marketing

Michele Hansen 24:45
Speaking of marketing, how's your 100 days of marketing going?

Colleen Schnettler 24:48
Terrible.

Michele Hansen 24:50
Really? Is it still going?

Colleen Schnettler 24:52
Well, no, I'm not I'm gonna still do it if it takes me a whole year but I mean, I had I had thought that I could organize my day in such a way where I could do an hour of marketing a day. And I have found that to be really challenging when I'm working on deeply technical projects, because it's like a context switch, like I've been trying to start my day with the marketing hour. But then like, you're almost done. But then you stopped to go work on your other project, I'd almost rather I'm thinking I might try and reorganize my time. So I'm doing one full day on simple file, upload marketing stuff, and then can just do my other work the other days. And I think we talked about last week, but just like some of the stuff that shouldn't be so hard, like the terms and conditions in the privacy policy and the GDPR policy, you're just like, jeez, this is a lot of stuff.

Michele Hansen 25:45
I mean, it kind of makes sense that you would like it takes it you know, the context switching like that is hard. And then you sort of like, I feel like I can hear that you sort of like you have to like work yourself up to, to work on this. Like it's not something you're looking forward to. And then you finally get into it. And then you're almost done with something and then it's time to switch. That's exactly what really frustrating

Colleen Schnettler 26:07
is that's exactly what it's like, because you're right. I don't I mean, who loves reading privacy policies? No one. So maybe you do love reading, practicing?

Michele Hansen 26:17
No. Privacy lawyers might write like, users definitely do.

Colleen Schnettler 26:23
So I think that you're absolutely right. That's what it's like, like, I love the idea of committing a little bit of time each day to it. And that keeps it Top of Mind, which is great and lets it not fall on the backburner. But you're absolutely right. Because it's like, I try to do my hour. And then I'm like, 80% done. And then I got to switch to do like, my consulting work. And then the next and so it just feels like I can never quite get it, whatever I'm working on over the finish line. So yeah, I think maybe baby, hopefully this week, at least I can organize my week in such a way that I get a whole day to work on it. And then I can just knock out all this stuff I've been wanting to do because I've wanted wanting to do you know that terms and conditions and all that get that up. And I want to do an FAQ because I love FA Q's. And there's some questions I keep getting asked that clearly, I'm not communicating effectively enough. So, you know, I want to get stuff like that done.

Michele Hansen 27:17
Do you as a user, you like FAQ's?

Colleen Schnettler 27:20
Yes. I love FA Q's. That's like my first thing. As a developer, that's like the first thing I do. I usually go there before I read your docs. Love them.

Michele Hansen 27:28
Oh, that's fascinating.

Colleen Schnettler 27:30
Is that weird?

Yeah. Because that's fascinating. That's because I want to see where the problems are gonna arise before I even jump into your thing.

Michele Hansen 27:40
Oh, that makes sense.

Colleen Schnettler 27:44
Yeah, it's like my favorite thing. So I want to put it on my website.

Michele Hansen 27:49
So I wonder like, are you sounds like you. Like, this is a new skill for you. And it's just more mentally tiring to do new skills.

Colleen Schnettler 27:58
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 27:58
Than it is things we're familiar with. And I wonder if having a whole day, like, knowing that you have a whole day of it, like, could could also, like feed into that dread of it a little bit? If you know, you have to spend a whole day on it. And I like I almost wonder if you're saying like, an hour is not enough, if you do like, are Pomodoros are like, are they 45 minutes or 90 minutes? I forget.

Colleen Schnettler 28:24
I mean, you can do them however you want.

Michele Hansen 28:25
Yeah, but like me, I mean, maybe just trying with like, ninety minutes and see like, because if you if you like, you know, say, okay, Fridays are marketing day, and then you spend the whole week being like, Oh, my God, I have to spend like Friday doing marketing. Ah, I could see that like not like, you know,

Colleen Schnettler 28:42
I see what you're saying, Yeah, I got to experiment with it, I have found that an hour is too short. That's what I have discovered. So I need to find kind of that optimal period of time where I can feel like, you know, like many people, I like to finish something. So the optimal period of time where I can finish these tasks. But yeah, you don't want it. I mean, I don't dread it. But it is a new skill set. And it's it's kind of nebulous, and you don't really know what's going to work. And so I have a list of all these ideas of things. I would do give an infinite time, but obviously, I can't do them all. So yeah, I like I like the 90 minute maybe try 90 minutes and see if that's more effective.

Michele Hansen 29:22
Because I think it It helps to time block it.

Colleen Schnettler 29:26
It does, because then you know.

Michele Hansen 29:27
You're only signing yourself for an hour or 90 minutes of this struggle.

Michele's Customer Research Guides Newsletter

Colleen Schnettler 29:32
Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I like that idea. So tell me about your newsletter. I love getting your newsletter I think I've gotten two now.

Michele Hansen 29:44
Um, so I, I launched it last week.

Colleen Schnettler 29:48
Yeah, it's brand new,

Michele Hansen 29:50
um, and I'm actually just writing it for myself. Which seems kind of funny, but so I find you know, I talked to people who are starting, or running businesses pretty often. And I find myself giving the same advice over and over again. And also saying the same things about the resources I send people like, as we mentioned earlier, being like, this book is really great, but like bear in mind, like x, y, and z, and like, this isn't going to apply and like, but the concepts here are good and like, and then there's this blog post. And then I really liked this podcast, like, no, here's the thing over here, and it's like, it feels very disjointed. But I also hear myself saying the same things over and over again. And so I'm basically writing it to sort of have this like virtual library for myself, and just kind of get everything out of my head and onto you know, quote, unquote, paper. Just just so that I have this one like consolidated place to send people.

Colleen Schnettler 30:51
Very cool. I like it.

Michele Hansen 30:54
It's been really fun.

Colleen Schnettler 30:55
Good.

Michele Hansen 30:57
It's definitely like productive procrastination for me.

Colleen Schnettler 31:01
Productive procrastination, I love that.

Michele Hansen 31:05
Like, when I should be doing my SEO work, I'm like, let me just just read this article really fast. Like, no, but it's, it's been so fun. And and, you know, I so I was, like, I was having a call with an entrepreneur a couple of weeks ago, and I was, you know, thinking about, like, there's all this stuff that I say every time and I don't have, like, I don't have one book, I can, like send people that is relevant to the bootstrap experience,

Colleen Schnettler 31:34
right

Michele Hansen 31:36
Of trying to understand your customers. And I was like, I was like, should I write a book, like, and I was like, Oh, my God, like, I think everybody I know, who has ever written a book is, like, Don't, um, or, you know, has says, you know, you had to had some warnings there. And, and so I was, like, you know, I think signing up for kind of, you know, worrying about like, signing up for a whole day of marketing feels a little bit daunting, like,

Colleen Schnettler 32:03
Yeah

Michele Hansen 32:04
The idea of signing myself to write a whole book, and like doing so kind of on my own for, you know, six months, or whatever that is, that feels like, very daunting, and not fun to me. But this is just, this is just been fun. And, yeah, I think there's like five issues out now. And kind of the idea is like pulling together, a lot of the scripts we talked about, so like talking to someone who's a happy customer versus somebody who has just started using your product and trying to figure out why they are using it, versus people who have turned versus kind of like keywords and phrases and stuff and sort of also kind of writing that for the like, I find that a lot of UX books, like don't go into super nitty gritty detail on what you actually say in an interview. And so, you know, kind of writing it from the perspective of someone who might find this difficult or daunting. To give them everything they need to get started.

Maybe that's a good point to end on this week. Um, you can get actually just go to my Twitter, and then there's a link to it there. But yeah, the newsletter is free. And it comes out whenever I want to publish it, which I think it's been like three times this week. I have two things scheduled already for next week.

Yeah, we'll talk to you next week. This has been Software Social, and you can find us at @softwaresocpod and we absolutely love it when you tweet at us with what you thought of an episode. So thanks so much for doing that.

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Transcript below. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/cfeXNzWwAEc

The hosts of the SaaS Podcast Award nominated Software Social Podcast join Rob to chat about all things SaaS, early stage marketing strategies, and more. https://microconfonair.com

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TRANSCRIPT

Rob Walling 0:00
Welcome to this week's episode of MicroConf On Air. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And as always, every other Wednesday at 1pm Eastern 10am Pacific we live stream for about 30 minutes, we cover topics related to building and growing ambitious SaaS startups that bring us freedom, purpose, and allow us to maintain and value healthy relationships. We know that Silicon Valley way to raise buckets and buckets of money and go big or go home. But we believe in bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped founders who are making a change in their lives, maybe not changing the world, but at least changing their little corner of it. Thanks for joining me. Welcome back.

I am excited today to talk about the talk about Software Social, it's a podcast if you're not listening to it, you should be it got nominated for the Best podcast in the best podcast category in the MicroConf SaaS podcast awards. And I have the pleasure of having the co-hosts of that podcast on the show today. And we'll be talking about have some questions for them about getting started and the benefits they receive from podcasting and that kind of stuff. But if you are watching this, please chime in with your own questions. We'd love to have the listener engagement. And that's why level level and your engagement. And that's why we do live events like this, instead of just doing them asynchronously through a podcast feed. Before we dive in, I want to mention MicroConf remote, which happens at the end of the month, March 23rd 24th 25th. It's gonna be pretty amazing event producer Xander is really outdoing himself on this one, MicroConfremote.com if you want to get on the list for that, and we'll be putting tickets up for sale here in the next few days. It's an early stage event. And it's aimed at folks trying to get their really their first 100 customers and it's going to dive deep into four specific early stage marketing tactics. We're going to have folks on who have done a specific tactic to get early stage traction and example App Sumo or posting on Producthunt. And we're gonna have a founder or subject matter expert on who has done that very thing and we'll share as many numbers with us as they can. So it's going to be a real barnburner especially if you're early stage. I look forward to seeing you there here towards the end of the month.

With that, let's dive into Software Social. My two guests today are Michele Hansen. She's a co founder of Geocodio. And you might remember her from Startups for the Rest of Us Episode 524 called Bootstrapping a Commodity SaaS when she and her husband Mathias came on and spoke to me about their journey of growing Geocodio to a pretty amazing bootstrap business. They started that company in 2014 as a side project, she went full time in 2017. And as I've said, she's cohost of the software social podcast, which was nominated in several categories for 2020 SaaS podcast awards. She also recently launched a free newsletter about customer research for bootstrappers. So check her out at mjwhansen on Twitter, if you want to link to that.

And her co host is calling Colleen Schnettler who is @Leenyburger on Twitter. She's a Ruby on Rails consultant. She's spoken at both Rails Comp and RubyConf and loves being part of the dev community. She recently launched her first product, Simple File Upload, excuse me, which is in the Heroku app marketplace. If you haven't been following their story, it's super cool to hear this going from zero to $360 MRR in the span of about a month with this file uploader app. So again, software social podcast if you want to check that out. Colleen is a mother and a military spouse and loves chatting about all things software and business. Ladies, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me today.

Colleen Schnettler 3:45
Hi, thank you for having us. Yeah, it's great to have --

Rob Walling 3:49
issues are great had issues. Anders, it's great to have you here, as I read the outline where Xander says the internet is causing causing issues. So let me start with this before I try to figure out if I have to troubleshoot my internet or whatever it is. But I want to start with this question of when did you start your podcast? And what made you decide to do it?

Colleen Schnettler 4:12
So I have actually been on Michele for a while, like I had been asked gel for a while if she was interested in starting a podcast. Because Michele and I used to always casually meet about once a week to talk business and I was in that really hard idea generation phase where it just feels like you're just slamming up against brick walls like you have a great idea and then you just can't get any traction or you can't ship it or you can't find someone to purchase it. And so we were already meeting and that was great. But then COVID hit and she moved across the ocean.

Rob Walling 4:53
You want to take it from there, Michelle?

Michele Hansen 4:55
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it came out of it because we wanted to stay connected to each other. And we had some friends in the bootstrap community who had prodded us about it and had said, Hey, you guys should have you should have a podcast. And so we're like, you know, we'll just take the conversations we were already having. And worst case, it just like forces us to keep meeting every week. And I think during COVID, that's been really helpful to have to schedule in interaction with other people. And so it really just started as something that we were doing for ourselves. And I think we've joked that we expected that we would just have a couple of pity listeners, like our husbands and some friends of ours, and it would just sort of just be this thing we did for each other. So it's been really fun.

Colleen Schnettler 5:47
Yeah, I think for me, what happened was, I was trying to stay motivated. And I was searching the internet for bootstrapped founder podcast, and there's 1000s of bootstrapped founder podcasts. But I was listening to one show, and I distinctly remember, the guy was talking about, like, how he got in his car and drove to California. And he was just such a different place in his life. Like, I was like, where the parents like the mothers and the people who are trying to build sustainable businesses, while raising a young family? And while working a job like I was looking for an approach that was would fit more like in our life, and I didn't feel like a lot of people were podcasting about that.

Yeah, love it. And that's really why a lot of us I think started is we started podcast or even why we started MicroConf was that we looked around for other people trying to do what we wanted to do in the way we wanted to do it. And I like calling you just said, I want to start a startup or I want to start a product that fits around my life. and not the other way around, I'm not going to be able to I have three kids and a mortgage, I'm not gonna be able to hop in a car and drive to California, and sleep on this on the side of the road in Santa Clara, like some people do, it makes a great story. But that's not a lot of our reality. And that's frankly, the name of my podcast is Startups for the Rest of Us. And we named it that because we we this is 2010. And we wanted to talk about building ambitious, but like ambitious startups, but that also worked with our goals and our life. And it was for the rest of us for all of us who can't, you know, uproot and sign up for Y Combinator and maybe move to San Francisco for three months, because that's just has never been a reality. For me, I love the I love that you guys started at because a we need more bootstrapping, podcasts and B, I just love to see more diverse voices coming into this space. It has been something I talk about every state of independent SaaS is something we focus on with MicroConf get in terms of of getting more attendees and more speakers who are just under represented. And so I love you started and I've been listening to it since I first heard about it. I'm curious, have you been doing this podcast now? For how long?

Since early August, July?

Rob Walling 8:01
Okay, that sounds right. Seven,

Michele Hansen 8:03
I think early August was when we first launched. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 8:07
I'm curious, maybe start with Michele. What benefits if any, have you received from the podcast? Or has it really just been we wanted accountability and to have some fun? Or do you feel like, yeah, I guess what benefits have come your way because of it.

Michele Hansen 8:24
Something that's really important to me as a person is that when I go through something difficult that I make it easier for the people who come after me, but just just something that's always guided my life. And so I doing the podcast, I feel like I'm thing we'd have this goal of demystifying it.

Rob Walling 8:45
Right.

Michele Hansen 8:46
So a lot of people want to start a company, you want to bootstrap a company, they don't really know where to start. They're in that exact situation that Colleen was in, not in anymore, but wasn't of spinning their wheels and trying to stop consulting. And just it's a really frustrating place, but a lot of people are in it. And so I think there's opportunity to to just, I don't know, show people that it's normal to struggle. And just normalize that, I think, and it's been fun.

Rob Walling 9:24
So fun, plus the benefit, or the value you get out of it is feeling. It's like purpose almost. I would if I were just looking for you. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. How about you Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler 9:37
I've gotten tremendous benefit out of it. Part of the reason I wanted to start it was so I didn't quit and I actually launched something. Why is it so hard to launch something? Anyway, part of the reason I wanted to start it was just to get over the finish line and keep chatting with Michele since we couldn't see each other in person anymore, but I feel like it's been tremendously beneficial in terms of weekly accountability.

In terms of just more interaction with people on the internet, there's been like this whole community of people I didn't know existed something I noticed when I was listening to all these other bootstrap podcasts, they'd always talk about their, they had some word form. They're like their mentor groups, they have a better word. What do they call those group mastermind?

Rob Walling 10:19
Yes, that's it.

Colleen Schnettler 10:20
I was like, Why is everyone in a mastermind? Where's my mastermind? And so I found Michele and she's like, she and the random people on Twitter have become like, my mastermind group. And it's spectacular. It's been so much fun.

Yeah, yeah, I'd like to call that out. There. I have this phrase, I say doing things in public creates opportunity. And whether that's publishing blog posts, or starting a podcast, or just shipping, some code shipping, an add on to whatever, it has never ceased to amaze me the number of people that I have met, because they start shipping things. And a lot of it is podcasting. I look at a lot of the early, just the early friends that I made, were through MicroConf, and then people starting their podcast, a lot of the early like angel investments. When I first started angel investing where people was like Jordan Gaul with cart hook, because he had bootstrapped web, there was just a mcgillicutty fuse, because he had zero to scale. I believe their podcast was, I don't know, there's just something about it that it feels when you're listening. I think it always feels it always felt to me, Will I ever be able to, to do this, or it's like this coveted spot. And then once you start doing it, you're like, wow, I'm going to include already it was way less work. And way easier. I think that I thought because there just aren't that many people who are doing what the two of you do, which is to get on the mic every week. And to do it even eight months. Most people don't last that long. And I think you should Pat yourselves on the back for making it this far. I am curious, Colleen, you're sharing revenue right now. And you're sharing progress. And the transparencies is awesome, because it allows you to really follow your story. What I've seen, I've seen a pattern where folks are transparent to a point and then when they hit they usually hit 10 or 20 K and then it's I don't think I'm going to do this anymore. I'm going to shut it down. Have you given any thought to that about whether you'll continue to share perpetually, whether you'll decide when as you get there, or whether there is a mark where it's time to start hiring employees and people. If you wind up doing that, or once I'm making my full time living off of this, it's perhaps too dangerous may invite competition whatever reason, have you given any thought to longer longer term with that transparency might look like?

So I have not. But as you bring up the question, it seems to me there's probably not a lot of benefit to sharing past a certain point, Michele has deliberately chosen not to share so she could tell us why they made that choice. But it seems like it's so great to share in these early days because you get so much bad press on the internet saying you're going to get 10,000 MRR your first month. And that's just not the reality. So I love being in sharing their like small MRR growth. But I definitely think there's going to be a point where there's it's not value added to the community anymore.

Yeah, we have a listener or a viewer question from Pablo. And maybe I'll throw this to Michele first and calling you can add any additional thoughts? How much time and or money do you dedicate to the podcast outside of the time spent on air?

Michele Hansen 13:16
That's such a good question. I guess we'll start at the beginning. So every week we record and we try to keep it to 30 minutes intentionally so that somebody can listen while they're driving to and from the grocery store or walking the dog or whatever that is. We block off an hour for that. And that includes us like chit chatting, like what people don't hear is that like Colleen and I having social hour after we get off recording, we actually don't prep for the podcast we did initially. And we would like both come into it with something we wanted to say and plan to each talk for 15 minutes. And we found that we were both talking in paragraphs and sounded very stilted. And something that has been important to us is that it sounds conversational and social. And so we found that that sort of imposing that structure was inhibiting that. And then so there's editing time, and I'll let Colleen go into that because she has been handling that. So I'm going to start handling that in a few weeks. And then there's also the posting time. So we have transcripts made from otter.ai, which is super fast, but like you need to clean it up a little bit. But I do a prelisten, before we publish anyway. And it's it's not nothing I can't do in that time. I'm listening. So I don't know, that probably takes me about an hour, 45 minutes or an hour total. And then in terms of costs, we have a subscription to Transistor. And I think that's what $20 a month or something like that.

Colleen Schnettler 14:48
Yeah, it takes me about an hour to edit. I was slower in the beginning because I didn't know what I was doing. But I would say probably an hour for each of us outside of the hour we spend to record so it's really low.

Yeah, that's been my experience too. And in fact, we, when we started sort through the rest of us, we edited first I think 15 or 20 episodes. And then we found an editor on Upwork, which was called, what to call back then. Remember freelance? Elance? No. Elance and oDesk. Camp.

Michele Hansen 15:21
oDesk.

Rob Walling 15:22
Thank you. That's called oDesk. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, anyways, Upwork 15 bucks an hour. This was before podcast motor, right? This was before the productized editing services, or we would have just gone with them. So I think similar to you guys are too similar to the two of you. I spend time on the mic. And then and for me, it's only about it made an additional half hour of prep, because I pay for all the other stuff and pot to give you an example, because Pablo said, I have a friend. I have a similar regular conversation with similar software social and I've been thinking of turning it into a podcast, too. It was Oh, he's trying to think through Yeah, so it's not if you have a bit of budget, you can throw it out at 75 bucks in episode for like podcast mode or to do your editing and posting. Or you can do it on your own like Colleen and Michele are doing but it I don't feel like it's an insurmountable amount of work, especially if you do keep the episode shorter start going to 45 or a minute or an hour episodes, it can get a little more cumbersome.

Michele Hansen 16:20
But honestly, the thing that takes the most time is talking to people on Twitter the day when an episode goes live. And that's also the most fun part about it, too, is just chatting with people about what they thought and what it made them think of and questions they have. That's one of the best parts as Colleen mentioned earlier.

Rob Walling 16:41
When you so the day it goes live, you tweet the episode out, and then two folks respond and say, Hey, this helped me do you have a cool example in the past month or something? Have someone like bringing something up specific that you felt like our work here is done? Achievement unlocked?

Michele Hansen 16:56
Yeah, I mean, all the time. Pretty much every episode, we're getting positive comments from people on Twitter. Just yesterday, we had someone send us an email thanking us for doing it. It's, I have been so moved by how willing people are to show us that they enjoy it. It's so nice.

Rob Walling 17:20
You have similar interactions. Michele, I don't think you've had any guests on yet. Have you ever planned to have guests come on.

Michele Hansen 17:28
So we had Alex Hillman on in September. And then we had Michelle Penczak from Squared Away, which is gonna be the does military spouse virtual assistants. And then we also had Danielle Simpson, co-founder of Feedback Panda on a couple of months ago, or about a month ago. And then we have another guest coming up in a few weeks, Colleeen us moving. And this time, I'm really excited. It's a listener who's joining us, and we're going to workshop, their business. So I'm really excited. Yeah, we're very deliberate about how we do guests, I get pitches for guests all the time. And we are only bringing people on when we feel like it's something that really aligns with our mission for the podcast, which is really fun. Like we bring people on because we think they need more visibility or because they're saying something that people need to hear. It's, it's been really fun when we've had guests on, I can be so deliberate about it.

Rob Walling 18:29
That's the thing. It's nice bit the way your you've set up your format is he the two of you can just talk every week. And so you have the luxury of just only handpicking guests that you want on that really have something to say at the moment you want them to say it and I that's something that I've enjoyed with my podcasts as well is that we didn't have guests on for a few 100 episodes. And then we had a bunch of guests on and I didn't really like either of those extremes. And being able to maybe have a guest on every once a month or twice a month, I think is a nice balance. But we Okay, we're having having some questions and comments coming in from the audience. And I think calling Hey,

Colleen Schnettler 19:06
Holly, thanks for joining us again. Yeah. So maybe we'll start with Colleen on this one since I just asked Michele a question. He says I believe producer Xander is that his quote as well. He says I heart Software Social exclamation mark, a little bit of love for there. And then and then he says how do or how did you foster a growth mindset? How did you develop the mindset to ship things without the need for immediate payoff?

philosophical like it. That's tough.I mean, when he says that, I'm like, Wait, do I have that? Man, I have struggled to ship something. And so I think social accountability helps a lot like when I learned I'm a career changer. So I'm a self taught coder. When I learned to code, I did 100 days of code, and I got involved in as many coding communities as I could because that social accountability really makes a difference. And I feel like shipping a product, it's been the same thing. I hadn't really found good community, although I had been trying. So Michelle and I, I don't want to say we started one. But it feels that way. Because now I have Michelle, who I talk to every week has been very successful and can keep me motivated. Then I have this also this random group of people on the internet who tweet about their success and their MRR. And they're all building and public, and I'm building in public. So just like seeing that has really helped me ship and not just ship because this is the developer problem is we ship something and we think we're done. So it's like shipping now.

Rob Walling 20:46
Nice. How about you, Michelle?

Michele Hansen 20:50
I think something was you can see with Colleen story and with ours is that we started with things we needed ourselves. And I find that motivation is so much easier to come by when you're not building something for other people that really, you're just building it, because it's a pain point that you have in your own life. And worst comes to worst. nobody uses it, but you use it and you have solved a pain in your life, whether that's something that took you five minutes or five days, you have removed that frustration from your life. And so maybe this product is something that becomes something that other people use and you grow it. Or maybe you've just removed frustration from your life. And that frees you up to think about something else you could improve. And maybe that will become something that other people will use.

Colleen Schnettler 21:38
Yeah, and the only thing I want to add there was don't there's so much information and advice on the internet that is 100% in conflict, like people told me do not solve your own problem. I kept hearing that over and over, they were like, go do the whole pre sells in the marketing. And I don't, that's great. I just didn't know how to do that. And maybe my next product, I'll do that. And then Michele was like, yeah, that's cool. You should just make the thing you want. And then if no one buys it, you have the thing you want. And that for me, the pre sale thing just didn't work for me. I couldn't wrap my brain around how to do that. And so if I had just continued to follow that advice, I probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere. So I think different advice is appropriate for different people and different skill sets to.

Rob Walling 22:21
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree that's something I've been harping on for years is don't listen to everyone who's talking about how to do what you want to do, how to start a successful SaaS app or, you know, software product. Find the one or two, maybe three tops who really resonate with you and who you feel like their approach matches with you or like they're where you want to be. I have some I'll call them virtual mentors or people who I look up to people like Jason koa and Hayden Sean says, but when I look, I don't Jason Cohen runs WP engine or he's co founder. I don't have the desire to build, essentially, what is going to soon be a billion literally a billion dollar business with 500 employees already and they've taken no response capital. That's what he wants to do. And he's doing an amazing job at it. And but I don't particularly have that desire myself. Now I can take and choose some of this stuff when he talks about bootstrapping, when use that in my own portfolio or in my own kind of mental models. But in addition, I think finding someone who has done it, hopefully done it a couple times, because oftentimes it's you have to determine whether, you know, did they? Did they have a lot of luck? Or do they really have the chops? And have they are they really executed on this for a long time, and finding someone that resonates with you and someone that I think you respect? I think the other like, I've heard folks idolize whoever you want to whoever you want to say, who's a business person who maybe some people might not like an Elan Musk, or Jeff Bezos, and it's if you're not willing to do what they were willing to do to get where they are, then maybe that's not the path you want to travel either. Maybe they're not the folks to idolize, if you want to build a 500,000 or a million dollar bootstrapped startup. Should I really be listening to either of them even though Yeah, arguably, they're great. They're great business people, and they've built amazing empires. It just doesn't feel like it necessarily fits. So I like what you're saying about there are at any given time, there are 1000 people telling you how to start your app and who how are you going to narrow it down? How are you going to figure out who resonates with you and what advice to take? You guys have other Michelle, do you have other thoughts on that topic of like, how you maybe filter advice that that you take or how to narrow down to who the folks are that you really listened to and trust on the internet?

Michele Hansen 24:35
It's funny, I don't actually read a lot of the kind of advice that Colleen does, I'm trying to think about. So who am I like business heroes and I think of Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow. Like I tend to gravitate towards books that give me frameworks and mental models for thinking and finding out how to make better decisions and I do read a lot of books on customer research, because I'm always trying to improve my chops there. But yeah, Colleen and I are so opposite on that. But I think I think we're now both in agreement that hustle porn is pretty toxic. And that there's a lot of people out there who are, as you're saying selling advice that doesn't necessarily relate to the bootstrap founder.

Rob Walling 25:25
You have any other thoughts? Coleen?

Colleen Schnettler 25:28
No, I think I think one of the things Michele mentioned is, she consumes a lot of books. And originally when I started, I would just read a lot of blogs. And they're both useful ways to get information. But thanks to her recommendation, I've been reading some of these books she's recommended. And I think that those have really resonated with me a little bit more. I think when you start to feel like you're never going to make it, you start to get on the internet and read things on the internet. And that can lead you down. Maybe not the most productive path.

Rob Walling 26:01
Here here, I agree.

Colleen and Michele, thank you so much for joining me today. And thanks for starting Software Social being nominated for the Best podcast and Microsoft's podcast awards after what, six, seven months on the air is pretty cool. So folks, again, want to find you on Twitter at mjwansen with an E. And @leenyburger.

Thanks for joining me.

Michele Hansen 26:28
Thanks for having us.

Rob Walling 26:32
And with that, we'll wrap up for the day. Oh, yeah, I saw live guys. I'm having internet problems. Sorry about that. Again, MicroConfRemote.com cheat codes for early stage marketing strategies. We have an interactive video game environment. That is pretty dang cool. So I would encourage you to go check it out. MicroConfconnect.com you'll see the dates on the screen. It's March 23 through 25th 11am to 1230. Eastern time. There is also there's an interactive pass and then there's a video only pass if you just want to do the live stream but I've really you should check out this thing. We've I think again, producer Sanders outdone himself on this one. MicroConf mastermind applications are open again periodically, every several months we open them So MicroConfmasterminds.com if you want to be paired up in a mastermind, and thanks again to Hey and Stripe as always for being our headline partners for the year. Thank you so much. I'll see you in two weeks.

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Colleen Schnettler 0:00
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Michele Hansen 0:46
So Colleen, you launched your SaaS, Simple File Upload, in December. And for the past couple of months now, we have been tracking how it's doing, how many people are signing up, your revenue, all those things. So last time we talked, you were on track for $325 in MRR and I think the previous time we had talked about before that which is maybe like two weeks before that. You're at $120 MRR. And so I'm curious, like, where are we now?

Colleen Schnettler 1:29
So since we last spoke, I had one additional signups.

Michele Hansen
Nice.

Colleen Schnettler
So that puts me at $360 MRR. And I really I mean, I feel like I've won the lottery, Michele, like it feels amazing.

Michele Hansen 1:39
Isn't SaaS great?

Colleen Schnettler 1:41
So I mean, it was so hard to get to this point. But right now it just feels good. I think it's important to note that I couldn't charge for it until February 4, which was three weeks ago. So in three weeks, I've gone from zero MRR to $360. That's why I feel like I've won the lottery, like it's just.

Michele Hansen 1:59
That's amazing. Have you annualize that yet? like have you let yourself like multiply that by 12. And just like think about that for a second?

Colleen Schnettler 2:05
Too much. It's too much dreaming. I'm not quite ready to dream that big yet. But it feels really great. I mean, I am kind of floored --

Michele Hansen
$4,000 a year, by the way --

Colleen Schnettler
I could fly to Europe someday with that money when it's safe to fly. Yeah, so it feels really amazing to see this growth. And I have mentioned that I've been really busy the past couple weeks with with real paid work. And so I haven't put a lot of time or energy into this and people are still signing up.

Michele Hansen 2:43
So this is real paid work the differences.

Colleen Schnettler 2:47
Yeah, I shouldn't call --

Michele Hansen 2:50
You don't have to be sort of like a like button chair, in order to make that revenue and make those sales, right like cuz whenever you get a consulting client, this is where these are so different. You have to work for every single customer in order to make that happen. Like you have to be out meeting people and making contacts and landing each client. But when you have customers, and they can just sign up whenever they need it. And they don't have to talk to you or do anything with you at all, before paying you, it's a huge shift.

Colleen Schnettler 3:30
Yes, I mean, it's it's ultimately, you know, right now I trade my time for money. And as a consultant, I'm very, very aware of my time almost to my own detriment. And with this, yeah, I mean, of course, I put a ton of time in upfront, but people just sign up in the middle of the night and sweet. Like, that's awesome, I didn't have to do anything!

Michele Hansen 3:52
So I'm curious. When you were when you had a you know, sort of we call them corporate jobs like were you? I wonder if were you a consultant like were you time tracking?

Colleen Schnettler
No.

Michele Hansen
Oh, okay.

Colleen Schnettler 4:05
So I've done them. All right. I've done the salaried not time track to time tracking as what I do now. And now the product. So it's exciting.

Michele Hansen 4:14
Yeah, it is exciting. I just remember when I went from working at an agency and having to, you know, time track three minutes spent replying to an email to then working in a product company and not having to time track and it was like, Oh, my God, this is -- this is amazing.

Colleen Schnettler 4:34
Yeah, it feels totally different. So I'm, you know, I'm trying to enjoy it. And I'm also trying to think about, like, how I can continue to try and find -- I don't really feel like I found any kind of real product market fit. Like I've definitely found a pain point because people are signing up. But, I mean, I think that that there's a lot of opportunity to find deeper pain points in more specific niches. Because not everyone is this is the weirdest thing I know I keep bringing this up, but like people are signing up, but only about 50% of the people who sign up and they have to pay me when they sign up, are using it. And I'm emailing them. And I'm trying to see if I can help them. But if they don't use it, they're going to churn. So I feel like I'm a little I don't want to say concerned, but I'm cognizant of the fact that I think I'm going to have a high churn rate this first month, because people are going to be like, why am I paying for this thing I don't use?

Michele Hansen 5:27
Yeah, I think that's something worth diving into. And you mentioned that you're emailing people. And we've talked a little bit about different approaches, you've taken to those emails, in terms of copy and subject lines, and all those sorts of things. And so I'm curious, if you've been, like trying anything differently, or if you've had any more people get back to you. And you've kind of gotten any more insight into why that might be happening?

Colleen Schnettler 5:53
Nope. I mean, I can't get anyone...

Michele Hansen
That sounds frustrating.

Colleen Schnettler
It is it's frustrating. So in the beginning, I had a free tier, which I no longer have, there's no free free option. And the people in the free tier would would engage with me a lot more and and they seemed it was seemed like because they were very grateful. I mean, most of them expressed gratitude that I had solved this problem for them for free. No one emailed me back who was paying me money. Now to be fair, it's only what 1012 people that are paying me money, they don't want to talk to me. So I'm right. Have you been

Michele Hansen 6:30
Like, can you like look at their email addresses and see like, are they Gmails that are signing up? Or like people at companies?

Colleen Schnettler 6:38
There are Gmails? It's both. It's a combination of Gmail and custom domains. And it you know, I haven't even been looking to see if they're, you know, what, it just occurred to me, I haven't even been checking to see if those emails are opened. So there could be something else going on, or they just don't want to talk to me, which is is what it is, I think, though, like why I just I don't want to stress about it. But like, why would you sign up for something you have to pay for and not use it? Like did i know.

Michele Hansen 7:07
I think that's a very valid concern. And something that's worth diving into like that's, you see that when people aren't using a product, they are more likely sure to cancel it like that is that is very fair.

Now there are some products that people buy, and they buy them aspirationally. And whether or not they use the product is sort of almost tangential to whether they're getting value out of it like so, for example, like gym memberships are a great example of this. Like, there's a there's a great Planet Money podcast on i think i think it's Planet Fitness, this business model.

Colleen Schnettler 7:47
And, like, they

Michele Hansen 7:48
know that most people who sign up are not going to use it. And they sign up for that because they want it to be because like it's aspirational. And they have this whole thing, or I like this, why they have like monthly bagel days and pizza days or whatever. So people like come back and they feel like they're getting value out of it. And they're like, Oh yeah, I'm gonna like, I'm going to start coming to the gym, like, I'm going to do it. But in actuality, if everybody who had a membership showed up to their gym, they would not have nearly enough equipment or spaces for them. And so it's baked into their business model, that people will not use it.

However, I don't think anyone is buying cloud storage aspirationally...

Colleen Schnettler 8:27
and don't either. Feel like you get it because you want it.

Michele Hansen 8:31
Why aren't you buying my files? Like I really liked this, my New Year's Resolution is start storing my files. Um, like, I mean, maybe there's, you know, cases of that with like, people who were, you know, saving important documents or whatnot or photos, like personal photos, but I think in a business context, you know, I I don't think that whole building in intentional non-users/inactive accounts, it is like really relevant.

But yeah, I mean, but yes, especially with a subscription business, if someone is not using the product. In general, especially in a business context, especially for something that's designed for regular use, like if this was the kind of product that people only need once a year, or they have a subscription, and then it's, they only use it when they have like a specific acute problem. But your product is designed to be used, you know, daily or weekly, or, you know, at a fairly frequent context. And so, so yeah, I think you're justified and trying to figure out what the heck is going on there and see, yeah, I'll

Colleen Schnettler 9:45
tell you what, why they aren't using it. So I'm trying to follow up with those people to figure out what that's about. And you know, it's just consistently on this, this journey to try and find where it fits the best. So one of the kind of fun things I did, I think I've mentioned before that you can either install it with a JavaScript snippet or a React component. And I have been trying to speed learn React, so I could maintain the React component, because I don't actually know react. And so one of my friends has a really cool site protege.dev, and they correlate junior developer positions. So it's kind of neat, because it's something I'm really like excited about, because I, you know, you know that I'm really passionate about helping people get into tech. And so they have need for a file uploader. So he is using Simple File Upload the React component. So it's and they do live streaming it live, live, twitching, live streaming, what's it called? You know what I mean? I went live twitch live streaming. Yeah. Anyway, it's becoming this really cool thing in this community, I'm in where a bunch of people are participating, and working on the site together, and they live, switch, Twitch, stream it, and they're using my uploader. And it's great, because he's talking to me, right? So. So he's using the React component. So I'm getting really good feedback on the React component. And he's incorporating it into his like, beautiful, really professional site. So I'm really getting an opportunity to test that component really deeply. And, for example, he pointed out, he brought to my attention that it wasn't keyboard accessible, which I hadn't even realized until he brought that to my attention. So I was able to fix that quickly. You know, because it's just me, so I can just fix it. So that was cool.

Michele Hansen
That's so cool.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, I'm excited about it. Like because I am, I'm dogfooding this on several applications, so I'm using the heck out of it. But I always use the JavaScript snippet. So it's nice to have someone like testing the React component as well.

Michele Hansen 11:51
So do you have your own clients as paying customers?

Colleen Schnettler 11:55
I do.

Michele Hansen
Hey-oh

Colleen Schnettler
I disclosed that to them. Just so you know, this is my upload. Like, you won't get better customer service. And then

Michele Hansen 12:11
I wonder how like, do your clients react to that? Or are they, you know, kind of like, Oh, sweet, like, we just saved you, you know, six hours of consulting for this monthly fee? like whatever, or

Colleen Schnettler 12:21
Yeah, they didn't seem to really care. They just wanted it to work. Like many people are like, okay,

Michele Hansen 12:27
They just want the job done.

Colleen Schnettler 12:29
they just want the job done. Oh, my goodness, that makes me think of you had some tweet about Jobs To Be Done this week. And I thought about, but it was like, it was so funny, because here we are every week and you tell me about Jobs To Be Done. And I hear you, and I hear you. And it's like, I can't internalize it. And I was thinking about no one responding to my emails. And in your tweet, you said something about don't ask the customer how to solve the problem.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
And I realized, despite my weekly coaching with you, I think I'm still doing that. Because I'm like, What feature do you want? Like, would it be better if we had multiple file uploads? Where's the focus? I need to refocus on what are you trying to do?

Michele Hansen
Yes!

Colleen Schnettler
So yeah, it's so funny, because you tell me that all the time. It's like, just like, it didn't sink in until I saw that. I was like, wait, I'm asking them what they want in terms of like a feature set. But that's not, that's not the problem they're trying to solve. Right? Whatever I offers a feature set is, what are they trying to do? Like, you know, how do I help them solve their own problems?

Michele Hansen 13:38
Yeah, and how you figure that out as listening to their problems, but it is your job to figure out what features they need. And you figure out what features they need, by listening to what their problems are, and listening to what they are trying to solve. But and I'm so glad you brought this up, because I think this is where a lot of people trip up on customer research, or they've kind of had a bad experience. Because, you know, they're like, well, we asked the customers what they wanted, and it wasn't useful, or they didn't tell us anything good. Or they all wanted different things. And it's like, well, that's because you asked them the wrong question. You can't, you know, ask them to basically do your work for you. And, you know, I, one of the objections I get from people sometimes is, oh, well, if you know, if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse, not a car at you know, as sort of a way of dismissing talking to customers that, you know, customers are not going to come up with innovations. And it's like, well, yeah, like your job as the entrepreneur is the person to come up with those things and to listen and pull from that not that customers are asking for a faster horse but that even if they say they want a faster horse, what they're saying I want to be able to go places faster. I don't want the expensive taking care of a horse or it's expensive to take care of, of a horse like, like, those are the things that you listen to and then hearing out from many different people, you you piece together. Okay, what are the problems? And then how does that drive me towards a solution? And maybe that's something that's hugely breakthrough, like a car, or maybe it's a marginal improvement, that it's still okay.

Like, I think it's like one of my pet peeves is like, you can have a company and not change the world. And that's okay.

Colleen Schnettler 15:34
Yeah, for sure. I have I think, like many small-time founders, like I have this, this is a little bit of a tangent, but whatever. I have this dream of getting funding, like, like small.

Michele Hansen
Do you!

Colleen Schnettler
Well, okay, so let me just tell you...

Michele Hansen
You never told me that!

Colleen Schnettler
Well, because it sounds like it sounds like the the easy way.

Michele Hansen 15:54
I mean, I know it's a really, does it sound like it, like make you like legit, like at all, it's like a

Colleen Schnettler 15:58
Well first of all legitimacy. Absolutely. Legitimacy. And then also like, it, it, I mean, it would be awesome. But we talk a lot about time pressures on this podcast like, man, if I didn't have to do other work, like, I feel like I would have so much time to do this work. Like, it would be amazing.

Michele Hansen 16:18
Colleen, you know, I'm an investor in Earnest Capital, and their whole thing is giving money to bootstrappers. So they can go full time on their SaaS products that already have revenue.

Colleen Schnettler 16:28
I do not I told you that.

Michele Hansen 16:32
Like, and they don't require referrals. Like it's not like a traditional VC where, you know, like, you had to have, you know, gone to Stanford with some guy, whoever who can connect you like, you know, they're not like that. But I'm just gonna throw that out there. Cuz I guess we've never talked about this before, even though I talked to you every week for like, what, two or three years?

Colleen Schnettler
For a long time. Yes, we've never talked about that. But it's kind of an interesting thing. When you look at something I had been, of course, this is like, okay, so maybe not, of course, because you didn't know. But this is like a secret dream of mine.

Michele Hansen 17:03
Is it? Oh, let's dive into this.

Colleen Schnettler 17:05
Well, but it's interesting. So if you think about it, so someone who has received funding, and kind of made a video about like how the numbers play out if you get funded. And it was really interesting, because he was talking about, like, if you just want to grow your business to $10K MRR and sit there, you should definitely not take funding, because the way you would have to pay back that initial investment, like, you know, it doesn't make sense. It's if you want to grow your business to like $100k MRR? Like how big do you want to be that that? Where's where is the balance? In terms of like, what kind of business you want? So I've been thinking a little bit about like, what kind of business do I want this to be? Do I want to go all in full time? And like, take a run at the big guys who are making $60 million a year? So there's space in that market? Or do I just want like a little like $5 a month software business?

Michele Hansen 18:01
I think that's a fair question. I also think you could have a bootstrapped $100K a month company, I'm sorry, sorry, my dog in the background. That's Nigel, some of you may have seen pictures of him. He also just because like if you don't take funding now and you grow it to $100, $150, $200k a month company, like you could take funding at that point, like wasn't it last summer that one password took like a ton of funding, after being bootstrapped the whole time. And also, like, I think Atlassian, like Atlassian was completely bootstrapped until they went public.

Colleen Schnettler 18:38
This is a fun dream world to live in.

Michele Hansen 18:41
I'm just saying like, you don't necessarily have to take the funding right now. Or at $10K, or 50, or $100K or like, whatever that is. And like, you also don't have to decide what kind of company you want now, like, like, you mean, you can dream about it? And you're the you know, you're more than allowed to do that. But you don't have to feel like you're, you're committing to something that's not changeable in the future.

Colleen Schnettler 19:12
Yeah, I see what you mean. And I'd like to clarify for my listeners, and no one is offering me funding like, this is not something this is just my dream world, right. No one's offering it.

Michele Hansen 19:22
Why do you feel like you need it?

Colleen Schnettler 19:25
so I could stop consulting, and I could work on this. I just feel like and it's because this month is really busy. Okay, to be fair.

Michele Hansen 19:33
So it's like personal stress that's kind of driving that.

Colleen Schnettler 19:36
Yeah. So my background to the side project, which I don't know that I ever shared is I have always wanted to do this. And so I consulted pretty hardcore for a while and then I saved up a bunch of money so I could have taken almost up to a year off been able to pay my bills and worked on my project, but then COVID hit and we had a lot of unexpected financial stressors, so I had to start working again. And I enjoy work. I enjoy consulting, like, I don't mean to make it sound like a terrible thing like actually really like it. But what I had really wanted to do was do side projects. So right now, especially this month, because we're about to move and work, consulting work is really busy. I just feel the pressure, like, for example, I launched this thing it's doing so well. I mean, I think it's doing well. And I don't have any time to work on it. Like, like, I just feel like if I just had more time, there's so much I could do with it. So for me, it's a time pressure time financial stress. That's, that's why you know, you like for me, like that's why i would i would do something like that.

Michele Hansen 20:40
You mentioned that you have this, you know, the sort of like financial stress going on right now. And I'm not going to make you go into that. But what I am curious about is, is that a temporary thing? Like, is that going to, you know, mitigate in a couple of weeks or a couple of months? Or does that look like a permanent thing that will keep you consulting?

Colleen Schnettler 21:07
I don't know, it's hard to say. I mean, it's not going to go away completely, because of some life changes we're making. And so there will be there's a but but you know, it's not tremendous, like yeah, I don't know,

Michele Hansen 21:27
Does what you're doing right now not feel sustainable?

Colleen Schnettler
What do you mean, what I'm doing right now?

Michele Hansen
Like, like working and like, like consulting and working on Simple File Upload.

Colleen Schnettler
So it's like trying to do those things? Is it a matter of like, you feel like you cannot do both of them, or you aren't giving Simple File Upload as much attention as you want to.

Colleen Schnettler 21:51
It's a combination of both. It's so funny, because I got on this other podcast last week, Virtual Coffee, great group, great podcast. And I taught I gave this like long soliloquy about work life balance, and how I take the weekends off. And I cannot take the weekends off, and consult and work on Simple File Upload, like just not possible. Now, what I can do is I can work hard consulting for a couple months, scale that back and have more time for Simple File Upload, which is probably the right answer, and then I can just do more 50/50 it's just been a little crazy this month, I think I think I'm just feeling the stress of everything going on in my life right now. And so it seems like the get out of jail free card if someone just handed me $200,000. Sweet.

Michele Hansen 22:36
I had a conversation with someone a couple of weeks ago, who has a SaaS who, you know, said they're feeling some, like financial stresses and feeling you know, like they weren't growing as much as they wanted to, and like things would be easier if they were growing more and everything. And actually almost came close to taking funding. And like basically like, you know, had the offer for the check, like, in hand.

Colleen Schnettler
interesting.

Michele Hansen
And, and they turned it down.

Colleen Schnettler
Interesting.

Michele Hansen
Because it turned out that that kind of stress was going to be temporary.

Colleen Schnettler 23:13
Yeah. I mean, honestly, for me, it's probably temporary. And it's probably just like a knee jerk reaction to everything that's going on. Yeah, because because it does seem to change. Like you said, you can always change your mind. I just wish I had more time. I feel like I'm in this really cool place where I finally have launched my product, I have definitely not found what they call it, you know, product market fit. I don't think I've found that because I think I'll know when I find that because I'm still pushing, but it's only been a month. So I feel

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it's so early.

Colleen Schnettler
It's so early. So I feel like I'm at this critical juncture right now where it's either push and make this a thing or just let it kind of marinate in the you know, 300 to 500 whatever it's going to be dollar range and let it sit there and I really want to push and make this a thing and so I think I'm just feeling that pressure of like I really want to push this and I just don't have the time.

Michele Hansen 24:06
So I I also don't know if there's really enough data there for it to like to get a valuation of the company and to know what would be a fair price for some percentage of the company. But it sounds like thinking about funding is helpful for you because I think you said this or maybe it just popped into my head but like did you say it's sort of like a get out of jail free card, but it feels like okay, for the stress that you're dealing with right now. And so what you can do is say, I'm going to reevaluate this in three months.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, that's a good idea.

Michele Hansen
Like write down how you feel write down the you know the reasons why right now like if if you know I said here calling here's a check for what, what amount of money what would make it worth it for you like $50,000, $100,000.

Colleen Schnettler 25:00
Yeah, something like that. Okay,

Michele Hansen 25:01
let's, let's, let's say that Okay, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna be the, the Oh my god, what are the Danish? The let know that the the TV show The Shark Tank, right?

Colleen Schnettler 25:13
Oh yes.

Michele Hansen 25:14
They call it Lion Den in Danish. And I'm like, kind of a lion. I'm like, like, you know, here's the check, like, what would that do for you right now? And what would you do with that? And also, how do you think it would change your approach to the business? I just write all those things down and then go and look at that. Okay, like, two or three months from now, like, capture all of that feeling? Because I think that

Colleen Schnettler 25:41
that's a great idea. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 25:42
Like that stress you're feeling is valid. Like, that's real. And that's, like, totally normal. Like, it's very stressful to have a job and a side project and like that, that's normal. So, you know, honor that feeling. But, don't necessarily make a decision from that position of stress right now, especially when you're so early. And you have all these other factors that aren't normally going on.

Colleen Schnettler 26:07
Yeah. And again, no one is offering me money, like no one would offer me money with... What I know, you asked you. I never know. I'm not gonna ask because you're right,

Michele Hansen 26:16
that you're gonna get angel investors sliding into your DMS after this.

Colleen Schnettler 26:18
Angel investors. Where are you? Did you hear? So? Um, no, I think you're right. I think that, first of all, again, no one's offering me money, but also making that kind that's a big decision and making that kind of decision from a position of stress. I think I've mentioned casually that we are we're making a big move. I mean, not across the ocean like you did. But still, it feels like a big move --

Michele Hansen
Across the country.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, we're moving in about four weeks across the country. So I think I'm feeling the stress of that. And work is actually going great. I'm loving what I'm doing consulting, so that's not a problem.

Michele Hansen
And you're still getting people signing up, even though you're like doing, like, quote unquote, nothing.

Colleen Schnettler
So this is the beauty of SaaS, right? It's like magical, like, yes, someone signed up, and I did nothing. That's awesome. At first, I was really trying to, like temper my excitement about it. But honestly, Michelle, the other day, I went back and I listened to one of our first podcasts. And like, it is just so cool. To see for me going to just being like, I can't think of anything. This is so hard to like, like, I can't even have met six months ago. I can't imagine myself here. You know what I mean?

Michele Hansen 27:24
Yeah, like, it's so amazing. It's like, I've gotten like a front row seat to this and it's just it brings me so much vicarious joy, like to see this.

Colleen Schnettler 27:37
Yeah, I can't even like listening to one of my early podcasts with all I wanted was to just launch something. I mean, I just it's so cool. And so I hopefully like I can't even see what six months ahead of me. Right? Like, like, that's kind of how I'm thinking about this position. I'm in like, yeah, I could totally this could become a non-thing like this could not work. But I you know, I --

Michele Hansen
Early signs are good.

Colleen Schnettler
Early signs are good. Yeah. And I think I've gotten better since we started this to it filtering through the the, the bad internet, SaaS information and the good internet SAS information.

Michele Hansen
What do you mean by that?

Colleen Schnettler
I mean, like so before, I was following people on Twitter who are like, Oh, I started a SAS and I made $10,000 the first month, like, that's not helpful, because that almost never happened.

Michele Hansen
Hustle porn.

Colleen Schnettler
That's what it's called hustle porn. Yeah, I was probably way too much hustle porn. And so now I'm following people who are like trying to build long term sustainable businesses. And what I've noticed is one compared to them, I'm doing really well. Sorry, guys, I love Your love your tweets. And too, like, this takes a long time. Right? Like, this takes a long time. That's just how it goes. Like you. You just can't give up and you just have to keep learning and learning when to pivot and trying to find like, where you fit.

Michele Hansen 28:57
Yes.

Colleen Schnettler 29:02
I'm coming around to it. But um, but yeah, so I think for me, the biggest thing, like I said, I've just been so busy. I haven't had time to work on this.

But I have so much to do marketing wise, like I haven't done like they're such, even this little business stuff. No one tells you about like, trying to get a terms and conditions. Like, why has that been so hard?

Michele Hansen 29:23
Oh, why has it been hard?

Colleen Schnettler 29:24
Well, it's been hard because I do file management. So I paid a company online to create a terms and conditions for me. It was like 50 bucks. And it was like just, like not specific enough. I had thought they would give me more opportunity to customize it. So it just wasn't really quite good enough. And they were really nice. I asked for a refund and you know, and when they asked me why I cancelled I gave them a very detailed answer I thought of you and I thought it would be nice of you. Now as I said, I said a very nice lady, or--

Michele Hansen 29:56
Paying it forward, or, refunding it forward.

Colleen Schnettler 29:59
I said Yeah, he or she, but or, I don't know, but if they a day, right like I don't I don't mean to presume gender, but um, I responded with a detailed email while I was looking for this particular clause and you didn't have this, and I was looking for this particular thing, and you didn't have this. So but there's like, I mean, just little stuff like that. And then someone recommended a service like, I don't want her I'm not i'm not big enough to have Terms and Conditions for service service as a service. Yeah, so they hosted for you, but it's a monthly thing. Oh, hmm. Who knew? Like, just sort of, it's like, when I started consulting, just sorting through all this stuff is annoying. I need

Michele Hansen 30:39
I will say one thing that, you know, someone told me, once that I have found is relevant is like looking at your competitors Terms of Service. And then, you know, sort of using those as a starting point, quite frankly, usually making them friendlier to the customer. Yeah. But using that at least as a as a starting point for the different kinds of issues that they are, you know, bringing forward and putting in there. And I mean, quite frankly, competition on Terms of Service is actually a huge part of our business and why we get customers coming to us from the major players. So, yeah, it's it's not something to overlook, and it can actually be a competitive advantage for you.

Colleen Schnettler 31:25
So it's just something I didn't realize I'd have to spend time on. You thought I thought I'd be at like five minutes, like, go grab one, put it on my site, and it just hasn't hasn't turned out that way.

Michele Hansen 31:34
I think I need the we talked a little bit about how things that are not engineering tasks require more mental overhead. And yes, yeah, because that's not your your, you know, sort of home domain. And it I mean, it makes sense that like, you know, these these, sometimes they feel like you're sort of like running around swatting flies. And it's like, I have to do this, and I really just want to be doing something else, but I'm just swatting all of these things. But yeah, I mean, I would not I, it takes some mental energy, but I would not overlook that and use those terms of service to see if there's a way to make your service friendlier to the customer. I mean, one of our major competitors' Terms of Service was like, literally, you know, like, it's on trial in Congress this week. So you know, there's there was a hearing about it, so don't overlook that. It's a it's a that that that can as much be bizdev as having a call with someone.

Colleen Schnettler 32:42
Yeah. Yeah, I just wish someone did all this for me.

Michele Hansen
You could hire a lawyer to do it, too.

Colleen Schnettler
But I mean, I'm not there yet. Right. Like, yeah, like I think eventually.

Michele Hansen 32:49
So it's a couple thousand dollars. 1,000 and yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 32:53
Yeah once I'm once I'm big time, ask me again. I will hire a lawyer and get one that's specific to my company. But now being little time like I need something. But

Michele Hansen 33:03
And a privacy policy.

Colleen Schnettler 33:05
Yes. And a privacy policy. Yep.

Michele Hansen 33:06
All that stuff. So and it probably you need a GDPR policy.

Colleen Schnettler 33:11
Yep, too. I

Michele Hansen 33:12
mean, maybe you can work in like GDPR and ccpa. The California one? Yeah. People, I guess you wouldn't need a DPA a data processing agreement, right, because you're not necessarily. I have no idea. Presently, as a GDPR thing, maybe, maybe, sorry, I'm just making you were like, I'm overwhelmed by this. And I'm like, let me throw out a bunch of acronyms and make it more overwhelming.

Colleen Schnettler 33:35
Thank you, Michele. Now I'm overwhelmed.

Colleen Schnettler 33:47
All right. Well, after that stellar advice, thank you. I think. I think that's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review. And you can reach us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
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Colleen Schnettler 0:42
So Michele, I saw a tweet you had the other day where you just casually dropped that you were quoted in Adam Grant's new book, what is that about?

Michele Hansen 0:54
Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. So Adam Grant, who wrote Originals, has a new book out called Think Again. And a vignette from my application to my old job, actually is in the book. It's kind of crazy.

Colleen Schnettler 1:15
So how did that happen?

Michele Hansen 1:17
So he gave a talk at the place I used to work. And the talk was on sort of unexpected findings and learnings. And there was just one particular story he told that prompted me to go ask him a question and talk to him afterwards. And I love that story, if I can just tell it for a second. So he was saying how there was this startup that was pitching some venture capitalists for funding. And in addition to all of the slides, you would expect about, you know, the problem they're solving and how they're doing it, and why they are the team to do it, and how they're taking over the world and all those kinds of things. They also had a slide in there, that straight up said all of the reasons why their company may not work.

Colleen Schnettler 2:08
Hmm. Okay.

Michele Hansen 2:10
Yeah. And it's not something that people normally put in a slide deck. And what really stuck out to me was he said that instead of the VCs going, Yeah, you're right, like, this idea sucks, your company's never going anywhere, your team isn't qualified, like, all right. Instead, the VC started problem solving with them, and talking about how they could help the company overcome these problems and avoid these pitfalls. And it went from this kind of, I don't want to describe it, like pitching as an adversarial relationship, but it's definitely like a weird, icy dance. To one that was really collaborative, and they were diving in together and and those sort of veneers were dropped. And, and he was talking about how, you know, they they said that it wasn't going to work out. And then that made people more interested in and talking to them and helping them.

And so I went up to talk to him afterwards, because that that kind of reminded me of the application that I had written to the company. Because I had written in the application, basically, that I was probably not the candidate that they were envisioning, and that I didn't meet the qualifications they were asking for, but that I had other things that I was bringing to the table. And so he, you know, tells that story. In the book, I was also on his Work/Life podcast a couple of years ago telling that story.

Colleen Schnettler 3:50
It's so cool. Yeah, it's,

Michele Hansen 3:51
it's kind of

Colleen Schnettler 3:52
weird. You're like secretly famous, and you never told us? Like you should have.

Michele Hansen 3:57
I don't I don't know if I'm, I'm sorry, Colleen. Yeah, it's, it's it's pretty wild seeing my own name in print. But anyway, so since I'm in this book, and also I just enjoy his books in general. I figured he should read it. Yes, choice choice. He did send me a free copy of it. So and I absolutely loved it.

Actually, there was some the part in it that kind of reminded me of something that you've been going through, and is something that's really common that I see in entrepreneurs, people who are starting out and also people who've been doing it for a long time.

Colleen Schnettler 4:39
Which is...

Michele Hansen 4:40
So I'm going to if you'll bear with me for a moment, I am just I'm going to read from the book. I have it in front of me here and it's a couple of paragraphs, so just bear with me here.

So he's talking about if you can train people to think more like scientists and do they end up making smarter choices. And so, he says:

A quartet of European researchers ran a bold experiment with more than 100 founders of Italian startups in technology, retail furniture, food, healthcare, leisure and machinery. Most of the founders businesses had yet to bring in any revenue, making it an ideal setting to investigate how teaching scientific thinking would influence the bottom line. The entrepreneurs arrived in Milan for a training program and entrepreneurship. Over the course of four months, they learned to create a business strategy interview customers build a minimum viable product and refine a prototype.
What they didn't know was that they had been randomly assigned to either a scientific thinking group or a control group. The training for both groups was identical except for that one was encouraged to view startups through scientists goggles. From their perspective, their strategies a theory, customer interviews help develop hypotheses, and their minimum viable product and prototype are experiments to test these hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make decisions on whether their hypotheses are supported or refuted.
Over the following year, the startups in the control group average under $300 in revenue, the startups in the scientific thinking group averaged over $12,000 in revenue. They brought in revenue more than twice as fast and attracted customers sooner too. Why? The entrepreneurs in the control group tended to stay wedded to their original strategies and products. It was too easy to preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of alternative options and politic by catering to advisors who favored the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often, when their hypotheses weren't supported. They knew it was time to rethink their business models.
What's surprising about these results is we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong minded and clear sighted. They're supposed to be Paragons of conviction, decisive and certain. Yet, evidence reveals that when business executives compete in tournaments to price products, the best strategies actually slow...Okay, I'm going to stop there. But what he's really talking about is the flexibility to change your mind and being open to new perspectives on things.

And this reminded me of how when you were originally building your, your file upload tool, it was originally only for files, and then you keep talking about images and like, do people need images and you're talking to people, and but the really like, the core idea of this is, you know, we wrap up so much of our own feelings in the idea that we have, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
Like, we attach the validity of the idea to the validity of ourselves, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yep. Definitely.

Michele Hansen
And the person who, if the idea is valid than the person who created the idea is valid, right? Like, there's this sort of unspoken connection between those things. But if we can detach our, you know, our feelings from it, and our sense of identity from that, and like our original idea, and we can say, okay, like, what does this actually, you know, how does it actually work in the real world, and how many other people think about it, and being open to how other people think about it, and pivot, then will be much more successful.

And it just really reminded me a lot of the kind of different struggles you've had around, what should I build and your initial idea versus people are telling you what they're using for it? And? And then what do you do with that information?

Colleen Schnettler 8:39
Yeah, and it's interesting, because the very first iteration of my product was completely different. It was actually designed to be like shared files in the cloud for teams for you to use on your website.

Michele Hansen
Oh yeah

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, that's how, cuz that's how I used it. So I like to have all of my files in the cloud. I don't like to package anything in on my servers. And so I was always dropping like, if you go to my website, simple file upload.com. I serve that video from my simplefileupload.com

Michele Hansen 9:11
dogfooding. Nice.

Colleen Schnettler 9:13
Yeah, I serve that video from my cloud storage, right. So I like to serve everything from Cloud Storage. So I had first set it up to be static files for websites, and no one cared. I mean, that was, so that first, that was hard. I know. And then just the other day, someone was like, wow, wouldn't it be great if we had a service? And I was like, they were like, if we had a service for static files, and I was like, Yeah, I built that. And no one wanted it. Change. I totally agree. But I do think it's important, something that I have really struggled with, is giving up too early.

Michele Hansen
Mhm.

Colleen Schnettler
So I feel like in my previous ideas, because I did a deep dive on several things. I think, you know, I did the babysitting thing I wanted to do. Then there was the content marketing stuff. That was gonna do like a deep dive on your content marketing, then there was, I don't know, there was something else. But each one of those looking back, I feel like I could have succeeded with any of those ideas. But I gave up a little too early. So I think the difference between like, this is a terrible idea. And pivoting is important to keep in mind too.

Michele Hansen 10:22
I think there's also a lot more black and white there. And I think the ideas you had were good ideas. It just may be a question of, like, Are you the right person to do them? Is it the right time to do them? You know, I remember what you mentioned, as your babysitting idea was actually like a pretty good idea for, like military moms to watch other people's children as a way to make money because it's really hard for military moms to work. And like it was a regulatory problem in Virginia that you ran into.

Colleen Schnettler 10:56
Like, so someone did something like this, but no funding. Yeah, he got funding. But he so I internet stopped him, not in a creepy way just to find out more. And he got VC funded. Like he's deep in this. He did. Yeah. Because but but I see why for that.

Michele Hansen
But I think it needed it.

Colleen Schnettler
Like you needed funding, because it's a marketplace. And it's, it's just big, like you said there was regulatory hurdles with getting people like licensed and it's the whole thing. So I guess my point is, I don't think any of my ideas previously were bad. But like, the other one, that content marketing, there's someone doing that that's doing really well. But like, that just wasn't, it wasn't a great space for me.

Michele Hansen 11:37
Yeah, because I think it wasn't your it wasn't your like niche, and you were building a lot of knowledge on that. And you were pounding the pavement, interviewing people for it.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh man, I was.

Michele Hansen
But everything requires background knowledge. And if you don't have the background knowledge of that field, it's just really hard to break into it. And so it doesn't mean they weren't good ideas. It just means it wasn't like the right fit. Like we've had stuff that didn't work out. And it it, I think that's like, the really important thing that I pull from that quote is that it doesn't mean anything about you as a person or your ability to generate ideas or your ability to execute on them, you just have to be willing to understand, okay, maybe I should work on something else. Or like, people, I initially needed this for sharing files, but then other people really want it just for this other purpose. And being willing to change to that is, is really, really valuable.

Colleen Schnettler 12:40
I have to say, though, while you were reading that, and I know the purpose was to point out the pivot, the success of the pivot, but all I could think was if someone gave me four months and a team, I could like take over the world. Like right now I'm trying to raise kids, like, move, have a full time job and do this side project thing. Like, Oh, my gosh, how luxurious would it be? to just have all that time?

Michele Hansen 13:03
Do you ever read the Myth of the Man Month, or whatever, I think I'm butchering the title of that book, but I mean, it's, among other things, it gets into this idea that it's like, it's not just a function of people in time about executing and succeeding on a problem. It's, you know, all of these other things we talked about, like building the right thing, and having the right skills. You know, of course, like, you know, it doesn't mean that you have to be an expert in what you're building for, right? Like, I am not a GIS person. And, you know, I say this now, and people are like, you have a geocoding service. You're a GIS person, I'm like, okay, yes, fine. But like, you know, I took one geography class, in college, like, I never took a GIS class, like, I don't have any, you know, advanced degrees in GIS, like, I don't come from that field. But I do come from it as a user of that information. And that's been really helpful because a lot of the GIS tools out there, geographic information systems, tools are built for GIS people. But there are a lot of people who are not GIS people who need geographic information, like marketers, and data analysts and developers, like all sorts of other people. And so building it from the perspective of a consumer of that information, like has been really helpful in that regard, even though I was not a subject matter expert when we set out on this.

Colleen Schnettler 14:30
And maybe even better, right, because it you know, because you didn't have a deep knowledge of it, like you were able to design a product that appealed to someone like you who needs it, but doesn't have a deep knowledge of it.

Michele Hansen 14:44
Yeah. And so I think that also counts as being a, you know, quote, unquote, expert in a field, you know, to your SEO idea. Were you doing much in SEO either as a developer or as a as a content- like you're not? How did that even come about?

Colleen Schnettler 15:06
The content marketing, I think it was a great it came about because it felt like so it felt like a solution that could be solved with software. Because if you look at these midsize companies, they have content marketing managers. And to have a successful content marketing strategy, you should do like kind of a analysis of all your content. And there's so much you can do with your content. And I learned a ton about SEO while I was doing this. And people almost never do these, like annual reviews of their content. And so you have stale content that can hurt you, you have like, you have all kinds of stuff. And people were doing that manually, like they were building these content strategies manually. I mean, takes a ton of time. Like if you could extrapolate some of that manual content building into software, like I think you'd have a really great product. And I found some companies that were actually doing it. But it felt like it was good because people with small SAS is don't know a lot about content. Like I still think it's a good idea. Yeah. Right. Like you have a small SAS, you don't know a lot about content. So what if there was a software that could instead of you having to get a subscription to a h refs and spent hours every week analyzing it? What if something just spit out for you like what your keywords should be? And what you should write about? I mean, it would be so great. Yeah, it would

Michele Hansen 16:23
be.

Colleen Schnettler 16:25
I just didn't know, it seems like it would be so great. But I interviewed content marketing managers at mid sized companies. And they didn't like it because their companies were big enough that they wanted, like tight control over what their content strategy looked like. And people at the smaller sizes were totally into it. But like, ultimately, it came down to it was a cool idea. But I couldn't build it without someone else. Because I just don't know enough about content. And then you start getting AI involved. And it was like it was cool. But that would definitely be something where I would need a lot more time. It wasn't something I could just build in a couple months. But think about it if you spent the same. What if you could spend the same amount that you spend on a href? And I know it's pretty expensive.

Michele Hansen 17:14
And it would just like we barely, honestly, like I feel so guilty about it. Like I wish I used it more. I feel like it really makes sense for people who run ads, and we don't run ads. So we should use something else. Yes, thank you, I should say close my books for the year. And I'm reminded of all of our expenses, that one that one does come to mind as one that's like, I should do something about that.

Colleen Schnettler 17:39
Yeah, so I think I still think the content thing was a good idea, I still think there's opportunity in that space. But ultimately, I didn't care enough because I didn't really understand the problem.

Michele Hansen 17:49
Well, now you have the humility to admit that. It's such an underrated quality of entrepreneurs to like, you especially we have this, you know, there's this whole cultural image of, you know, the, the Steve Jobs like entrepreneur and how, you know, they, they stand on top of the mountain and these amazing business ideas are beamed to them from the heavens, like a lightning bolt like, and it's just like, come on, I think that holds people back because they're like, Well, I'm not a Steve Jobs person, you know, I don't have the personality for this or whatever. And it's like that. You just have to have the curiosity to go out and notice a problem. Talk to people about it. Admit that maybe you don't know everything about it, learn about it, right, like this, this kind of humility that you have exhibited. And then sometimes you say, Okay, I'm not the person to build this. And sometimes you are.

Colleen Schnettler 18:49
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 18:51
But being willing to listen to other people and listen to your own instincts on that is, is really key. And, you know, good businesses do not come down like a gift from the gods, you know, floating on a cloud, right? Like they are built by solving genuine problems that people have and how you find those problems is being curious about them, and listening to people about their problems.

Colleen Schnettler 19:20
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the best thing, I probably spent six months on this content idea. And the best thing I did is I didn't write any code. I just talked to people, like I thought about it, like, how could I build this? I saw what else was out there. But I'm so glad I didn't spend two years writing something that would have been a bad fit. So that was that was useful.

Michele Hansen 19:43
You just reminded me of a great tweet I saw the other day from Val Geisler. She said, "A lot of people will tell you to talk to your customers, but they don't tell you what they really mean is listen to your customers. The hardest and most important part of customer interviews is shutting up."

And you just reminded that when you were talking about, you know, you spent six months talking to people, you spent six months listening to people. And, you know, thinking about where you were from when you first had the idea about military moms making money through babysitting. And now something you have gotten really good at, in the last year and a half, or two and a half years, is listening to people.

Colleen Schnettler 20:30
Yes, I definitely think I have gotten better. And the content marketing thing, I probably spoke to 10 people, at least, like I spoke to a lot of people, I was really emotionally tied to the idea because I thought it was so brilliant. But person after person was kind of like, I'm not interested. And then but you know what? I thought Michelle, I then thought about Steve Jobs. So it's funny, you just mentioned him, because I thought, you know what they always say about Steve Jobs. He doesn't listen to people. He just tells them what they want. Well, that's great for Steve Jobs, but like, Steve Jobs. So yeah, so I finally after talking to 10 people realize, literally not one of those people was excited to you know, seem to have this problem. It's kind of like, oh, okay, so this is not for me to build.

Michele Hansen 21:19
That takes humility to admit that.

Colleen Schnettler 21:21
This is why I love the dogfooding build something for yourself idea. You'll see a lot of people say don't do that, because they're like, you don't really know what the market needs. But it's worked really well for me. And I never use your own product. Yeah, like, I'm using it, I have this product I'm using it across. And it's really nice. Because you know exactly how it works. I don't know, I think it's worked out really well for me, and you don't lose motivation when you're building it. Because you're so motivated when you're your ideal customer.

Michele Hansen 21:53
Yeah, most of these days when I'm using our product, it's to, you know, like, validate an issue a customer saw, like, there have been some times for various volunteer efforts. I've been part of that I've actually used it. And those have been so exciting. And I end up being like, okay, one actually, we really have to fix this. This is super annoying. And this took way too long. This is awesome. But I what I need is be able to do this. And like, but like we have these really excited like jam sessions after that where we're rapidly improving the product, because you're seeing it firsthand. And yes, you are not the customer and you need more customers than yourself. That is no question but but sort of like we are reading an Adam grants book. Part of that is going out and talking to people and understanding what they need, and pivoting or just, you know, making slight changes and expanding your understanding of the problem based on what they need.

Colleen Schnettler 22:52
Yeah, I do have to say, too, in the early days, when you're either idea generating or you have a nascent product like I do, it's hard to find people to talk to and I think that's, that can be hard when I got started, like all the advice was always to talk to people. But even that can be hard. You know, when you're when you're starting

Michele Hansen 23:12
This this actually like on that topic. You know, I remember that you for the babysitting idea, you interviewed people that you found on military base Facebook groups, right?

Colleen Schnettler
That's right.

Michele Hansen
Like that's when you found that people and then you were talking to kind of like a community of people we know who are bootstrappers. And this makes me excited to read Arvid Kahl's upcoming book, which is apparently all about this kind of embedding yourself in communities and engaging with people and, and learning about problems that way.

Colleen Schnettler 23:50
Yeah, yeah. So for the first thing, I found, like you said the babysitting thing, I found people on Facebook for the content marketing, I hit up SaaS owners, but I think I still think the content marketing thing is a good idea. But I hit up small SaaS owners like small one to two person companies. And I think you know, that was the wrong size company for a product like that. You'd need a midsize SaaS and I just don't have access to those people. And even now for my file uploader. I'm having a hard time talking to people, like I'm talking to anyone who will talk to me, but but I, if you ask me who my ideal customer is right now, I don't exactly know because it's

Michele Hansen 24:29
okay not to know.

Colleen Schnettler 24:31
Like, people are signing up, which is amazing, and people are using it. But very few people are talking to me and they're still people are still like kind of across the board in terms of how they're using it. So even now, I'm still kind of like, Huh, who is my ideal customer? I don't know. I find

Michele Hansen 24:49
it you know, asking the right questions that get the information that's useful for you is a hard thing and it never stops being something you have to improve. And actually so this one We changed something. So we have a little like NPS survey that pops up for people. And so we'll see them come through. And I'll say, you know, someone gave us a 10. And then we have a little question that says, What can we do to improve. And sometimes, like people will put in something like that went wrong, or like they have a suggestion. But most of the time it comes, you know, it, it posts to slack. And then if they put comments, and it comes into intercom, and it'll say something to the effect of 10. And you know, what we can do to improve like, nothing like Keep up the great work, which like, is really nice and makes us feel good, but isn't necessarily giving us something that we can use to improve. And it is, you know, it's, it's not fair of us to ask our customers what we can do to improve like, that is our job. To know that right? Like, that's basically asking them to do our work for us. And so I changed that question this week to what did you use before you use geocode? Do not, and it has been so interesting. And I have gotten to jump straight into those conversations about people's processes and what their frustrations with the other tools are, and what they're trying to create overall, like, What does their end project or product look like? And and why weren't they happy with the other things? And what are they coming to us for? And, and I can get that out of a one, even if they give me a one word answer that says, you know, the Census geocoder, I can be like, you know, can you tell me more about that, like, why we're using that versus you're using us now. And it's a really good springboard into a conversation. But it's, it can be hard to ask the right questions to elicit the information that's both not too taxing on the person you're asking the question to, right. like asking them how we can improve is kind of a taxing question. Like you're asking them to sit down and think about it unless they had something like just right now annoyed them, that might be a difficult question to answer. So they just put nothing. And also gives us information that we can work with. And so I'm excited about this new question. I'm asking because it's giving us really good information that we can use as a springboard. But it's also a very easy question for them to ask.

Colleen Schnettler 27:14
Yes. So I thought about that. So as I said, it's hard. I mean, I'm hand emailing everyone, right? Literally every person who signs up, and the response rate is really low. And then one guy emailed me back, and he's like, Sure, I can answer your questions. And I emailed him, like, for detailed questions, and he never responded. And I'm looking back at that email. And it was like, way too much of a cognitive load for this poor guy to answer. I mean, I should have emailed him one question, like, I feel like, because the questions we've talked about, like, what are you using it for? And like, what did you use before this? Have you paid for Cloud Storage before? And like the guy just bounced, which I get, because it was probably way too overwhelming, it would have taken 30 minutes to respond to all my questions.

Michele Hansen 27:58
Yeah. So I feel like a call would be better for that. When you have

Colleen Schnettler 28:02
one on one I always, yeah, I always go call first. I always asked for call first. But a lot of I don't want to say a lot. Very few people have taken me up on the call maybe four, which is still better than zero. People are so scared by sales calls, like especially I feel like technical people like worse.

Michele Hansen 28:22
We're so you know, sort of shell shocked by it. Like we're so used to sign up a service and you get the call from the sales guy.

Colleen Schnettler 28:29
And you're like, you hate it. And no, I hate that.

Michele Hansen 28:32
No, I don't want to have to give you my phone number to sign up for your service. Like, I just want to use your $10 a month plan, please leave me alone. Like, and I think people are just are so has been so burned out by companies with, you know, bigger sales departments than product departments that that somebody asked me to have a phone call right after you sign up for something? Is it like red flags go up? Like I used to say explicitly in the feedback email, like no, this is not a sales call. And then I realized that my response rates were going down further because I think because I use the word sales for sale, like had that like anxiety feeling. And they're like, and like ran away. actually putting in like, I put in mind, yes, this is an automated email, but I will respond to you personally. Like and basically just like, try it out. Come on, like test me. And people seem to like that. I've gotten some good comments on that.

Colleen Schnettler 29:32
So I have set up, I have like five templates that I'm just randomly assigning to different people to see if I can get a better response rate on like one template versus the other. But I think as we've talked about, it's just kind of a playing around with different language and you know, figuring out what people will respond to

Michele Hansen 29:51
and I have 5% back that's really really good, by the way, like the most I have ever gotten is 8%. So You know, keep keep that in mind. Like if you get one person out of 20 people, you're you're doing pretty good.

Colleen Schnettler 30:05
Yeah, I think too. I hate email. So I get that, like, I totally get it. I am email overload, like, I will not respond. If I got that email, and I wasn't having any problems, I would not respond to it. So I mean, I totally get it, although maybe I have more empathy now that I'm actually trying to build my own business. Maybe next time I get that email. I will, I will respond. But yeah, I feel

Michele Hansen 30:31
like we could talk about customer interviews and strategies to get people to talk to us forever. But I am curious. So how is the business side of everything going this week?

Colleen Schnettler 30:43
It's so good. Michelle.

Michele Hansen 30:46
Okay, what are we like burying this lead, like 30 minutes in here?

Colleen Schnettler 30:50
they are not still here. You don't get to hear.

Michele Hansen 30:54
Congratulations on making it this far.

Colleen Schnettler 30:56
Only the committed listeners. Things are going really well. People are signing up. Okay. So it's funny because I think I put something on Twitter the other day saying I was going to shorten my free trial. Yeah. 30 days to seven. And the way it's set up with stripe right now, as we've talked about, I don't have any time to do any dev work. So I had two people that were either gonna convert or churn, they both converted, by the way, nice. Oh, no. And then I was gonna change it to seven days, but four people signed up. Right before you changed it right before so I can't change it till those people convert or churn or I have the time to figure out how to do it properly. So that was really funny. Like, I don't know if that was just a total random fluke, coincidence. Or if someone like saw my tweet was like, I should sign up now. So I get 30 days. But

Michele Hansen 31:48
yeah, I think I retweeted it from the podcast count, maybe I shouldn't have. So time was like, You were like, $120 a month in MRR? Can I ask you where we're at now? Or you're at what is that a week? This is a you?

Colleen Schnettler 32:04
Yes, you can. $325 Heck, yeah. Right. What is happening? That's amazing. It's amazing. Now, as we have discussed, this is all fake money until the end of the month, because I don't get paid till the end of the month. So I have only seen 10 of these dollars. Okay, so you

Michele Hansen 32:24
have, like, $10,

Colleen Schnettler 32:27
I have received this $9.50 whatever to Stripe. So I have received real money from a real person that is not me. That amazing. That is amazing. But based on the signup rate, like things are going really well. But again, like I don't really count that because I think the Heroku people are gonna have a high propensity to churn. Because if they don't use it, they're gonna see it on their bill at the end of the month. And you know, the culture, you get

Michele Hansen 32:55
paid, even if they don't use it, right, like you get paid once they start, like once they enable it, then that starts the charge, even though that's rolled up at the end of the month, like like if someone signs up right now, and then decides they're going to cancel on March 1, you would still get paid for that period of time.

Colleen Schnettler 33:16
That's right, prorated amount, so I don't get paid for the whole month.

Michele Hansen 33:20
But yes, every minute, I want to keep an eye on that. But that's like, yeah, you get that money.

Colleen Schnettler 33:25
Every minute, they have the thing provisioned, like I get paid. So I'm gonna get paid something. So it's very exciting.

Michele Hansen 33:31
dolla dolla bills, y'all,

Colleen Schnettler 33:32
right. So I think my goal, so my goal before had been to get one new signup a week, like that is a growth rate that I think would be really great. And I'm far exceeding that. So I think my kind of modified goal is to get one signup plus actually uploading files a week, because once they upload files, they're much more likely to stick around.

Michele Hansen 33:55
So, you mentioned you have all these emails going out to people? Do you have an email that's like, Hey, I noticed you signed up, but you haven't uploaded any files. Let me know if I can help you.

Colleen Schnettler 34:05
Yeah, I do. That's one of my so every couple days, like I don't do it right away, because I'm still doing that manually. But every like two or three days, I check it and I send out all those emails to people who have not uploaded files, that sort of thing to do. It's actually good. I'm so busy with work because I'm not obsessing over it like and so I'm spending the time on it that I can, which is not a lot right now. But it's really giving it some space to breathe, I think. And I think with that space, I'm going to learn I've gotten some really good feedback. Like one piece of feedback that didn't even occur to me is someone mentioned that he really liked how you can see all your files and your admin dashboard. And one of the really frustrating things about s3 is you can't see your me you log into your AWS account, you can see your bucket and then you can see like your folders. So you have to go in every folder and then you don't even know what image it is unless you click on it and it's a whole thing. So he I never even he was like Oh, I didn't know I was gonna have this feature. This is super cool because I don't talk about it. Yeah, reading of delights. So yeah, so things are things are going really well and just gonna keep on keep on.

Michele Hansen 35:08
All right. I think that's gonna wrap us up for this week. Thank you so much everyone, for listening and we'll talk to you next week.

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Colleen Schnettler 0:00
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Michele Hansen 0:44
Colleen, can I ask you a question that you're not supposed to ask people?

Colleen Schnettler 0:50
Are you going to ask me how old I am?

Michele Hansen 0:52
No, I'm not going to ask you how old you are. I am going to ask you how much money you have made on your side project.

Colleen Schnettler
Ohhh!

Michele Hansen
Because we had talked about this a couple weeks ago, right? Like you had said that somebody had paid you $10 yet and that you had a bunch of people who would sign up on your free trial, and that their first charge was coming through in the middle of February. And now we are in the middle of February. And so I was curious if you would share with us what it is looking like, from a revenue perspective right now.

Colleen Schnettler 1:29
Okay, sure. So to customers were up middle of February, one churned and one paid the $10.

Michele Hansen
Nice.

Colleen Schnettler
So that's always exciting. Yeah. But the real exciting boost for me is, as of I think about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago, it's been live on the Heroku App Store. And I've had a couple people sign up and there's no free trial. So they're signing up at $35 a month.

Michele Hansen
Sweet.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, it's actually really exciting. I'm trying to not get too excited. But um, I think the important thing to remember about Heroku though, it's not like Stripe, I don't get paid up front, you're pro-rate build. So if they sign up to try it out, and then they deprovision it or, you know, cancel it, essentially, I only get $1 or whatever, you know, the 35 amortized over the number of days in the month.

Michele Hansen 2:21
Oh so it's month after? so if I say...

Colleen Schnettler
yes

Michele Hansen
February 1, for example, I would be billed March 1 for it. And if I cancel February 15, I'm billed on February 15, for two weeks worth of usage. Is that right?

Colleen Schnettler 2:34
I think that's correct.

Michele Hansen
Okay

Colleen Schnettler
So I haven't actually seen any of that money yet. And so but it is really exciting. Like, I wasn't sure once I made it, you know, paid if anyone would sign up for it. And I've had a handful of people sign up. So it's really exciting. Yeah, it is, um, it is very exciting. And I kind of don't know what I should be tracking. I'm kind of struggling with that. Because I'm not actually tracking churn right now. I don't know if that's important to track, like I see if someone cancels, but I don't not like tracking that metric over time.

Michele Hansen 3:14
I think more important than then the numbers and percentages right now is why did they churn, right?

Colleen Schnettler
I know. I emailed them.

Michele Hansen
Okay, good, good. That's what you should have done, right? So right now you say, okay, 50% of the people cancelled, which looks really bad on the surface. But that number, knowing that one out of two people canceled, those numbers will never tell you why that happened. And so, yes, it's a good idea to be attuned to those numbers. But at this stage, the most important thing is to try to figure out why.

Colleen Schnettler 3:50
That's what I figured is like, the goal here is to talk to people, so I am

Michele Hansen
Oh, my God. Finally,

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, my goodness. Lately, I've come around to it.

Michele Hansen 4:00
It's fluttering hearing you say that!

Colleen Schnettler 4:02
I mean, you know, I was thinking about something this morning. So if none of these people churn and they probably went, like I said, people are trying it out. But like, I'm at 120 MRR. I mean, that's amazing, right? Like, a lot of people never even launch a product. I've launched a product and that's amazing. 10 days, I met 120 MRR. So I'm trying like,

Michele Hansen 4:25
Dude, you have been working towards this for like, so like, I feel like there's so many milestones that you've gone through. And, you know, people like listening right now. Right? Like, like you're hearing Oh, my God, like Colleen, like got this thing launched. And she got it in the marketplace. And then she went through all these hoops and now she has people paying her like -- it has taken you years to get to this point.

Like, like a year ago, when we were still having our in person, weekly business chats before the pandemic and we were both in the same place and all of that, like you were trying, whatever you could even find a product find a problem you could solve, like the idea of like, if I had told you one year from now, you will have you know, 100 and something people using your product paying you 100 and something dollars for. Like, I think I don't know what you would have said you either wouldn't have believed me, or it'd be like, Can we just like fast forward to that?

Colleen Schnettler 5:28
Right, can we fast forward?

Michele Hansen 5:30
This is like this has this is the culmination of years worth of work for you like, yes, it looks like it's only been in the last three months. But you have been working towards this for such a long time.

Colleen Schnettler 5:42
Yeah, and I think that's super important to remember. Because I was thinking about, like, I was trying to in my head, I was fast forwarding to a year from now. And probably when I tell my hopefully success story, it'll be Oh, I launched it, you know, February 4 2021. But to your point, like, that's totally a lie, I have been working on ideas and talking to people for years. I mean, the whole reason I learned to code was so I could have a product business. So this is, this is really a lot, you know, a long adventure in the making.

Michele Hansen 6:14
I'm so happy for you.

Colleen Schnettler 6:15
I'm so excited. So I'm trying not to I mean, this is really where the work begins. This is where a lot of people stop working, I think. And I think that's why I know so many software developers that can't quite get their products off the ground. For me, this is where the work begins. Like I think I made a joke the other day to my husband, I was like, I thought having children taught me patience. What's really teaching me patience is having a business. You know, I have to like, avoid. So what I'm trying to do, what I'm focusing on, or what I'm just trying to do mentally is not attach my personal happiness to whether people sign up or not. Oh, god,

Michele Hansen 6:53
oh, that's such a, that's such a hard one. And like not attaching your I don't know, self-worth

Colleen Schnettler
Self worth

Michele Hansen
to like somebody cancelled and you're like, just stab me through the heart. Like, you know, like, it's that that is a normal feeling to feel like take it personally, when people aren't signing up, or they're canceling like, it is. I think it's okay to like, make space for yourself to like, take that personally. But like, put that feeling in a box, keep it somewhere safe, put it off to the side, and then say, Okay, what am I doing that like I could have more people signing up? or Why are these people canceling? Let me attack this objectively, but making space for those feelings of like rejection and hurt that come with that. That's, that's totally fair.

Colleen Schnettler 7:44
Yeah, I mean, I found myself the other day, I was just kind of in a blah mood. So I was like, Oh, well check my signups and someone had signed up. So I got this dopamine boost. I was like sweet, it was great. But just as easily someone could have churned or I could have had no signups. And what I have internalized that and like exactly the opposite way, so I'm trying not to obsessively check my signups. I'm trying not to do the funny thing though, right? Like, Oh, my gosh, Michelle, take from it. To your point. Like, I can't, I mean, there's so much work to do. But Holy crap, look where I am, people are paying me money for this thing. Like, I have a real product, that people are paying me real money. It's very exciting.

Michele Hansen 8:27
It's amazing. I mean, like, so you should you allow yourself to enjoy those dopamine hits, too, right? Like you have earned that, you have worked for it. But I think the you know, yeah, the hard thing is, is the reverse of the dopamine hit whatever that is called. And, and not letting that get you to down and, and taking everything, both when good things happen. And when bad things happen. Both of those are learning opportunities. And to your point that, you know, raising a business has challenges on the level of parenting.

Colleen Schnettler 9:07
You said raising a business, did you realize that? It's amazing.

Michele Hansen 9:13
If I ever write a book about business,

Colleen Schnettler 9:14
that's going to be called raising a business.

Michele Hansen 9:16
Yeah. You that, like that's one of the hard things is to say, Okay, how do I learn from this? And you know, so one of the things to say about parenting is like the things that are hard now, like you will figure them out, but then you will have new hard things to figure out.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And someone said that much better than me, and I just completely butchered it. But I think you know what I mean? Like, you know, getting your child to sleep is a problem that you eventually solve and then is replaced by another problem, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And, and I think that's very true. But if you are able to respond to those challenges as opportunities for growth that will serve you well.

So you have this revenue. And this is also recurring revenue too, right? Like, this is the amazing thing about SaaS. Right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And once but it will theoretically recur in the future.

Colleen Schnettler 10:15
Yes. As long as you know, again, we'll have to see if people stick around. It's only been a week, so they could be trying it out. But yeah, this is recurring revenue. So I feel like I've achieved a really exciting for me level of success in these, like, 10 days since it's been live. And something interesting happened. I'm a casual internet acquaintance, which is pretty much all my friends these days. I mean, like, if we have one Talk, I'm like, true friends.

Michele Hansen 10:46
It's COVID. It's true. Like we have a conversation on Twitter and

Colleen Schnettler 10:49
Twitter,

Michele Hansen 10:50
like mutual follow up to that. And I'm like, Oh, my God, we're best friends.

Colleen Schnettler 10:52
So a casual Twitter acquaintance, sent me a DM with some interesting information. And he said, he said something that that I am actually a little not uncomfortable to share. But whatever. He said, Colleen, you know, congratulations, like you've had so much. It seems like you're having so much success. In the last episode of the podcast, Michele said, quote, obviously, you found a hole in the market, and quote, and he told me a story about how years ago, he had a podcast, and about his business, and someone copied his business, like, word for word. And he was just kindly trying to like, give me a heads up that, you know, you're not that far ahead. You don't really have an established business yet. If someone wanted to fill this hole, especially someone with a team, they could catch up to you in like two months. And it reached me out.

Michele Hansen 11:52
That sounds like that really scared you.

Colleen Schnettler 11:55
Well, I mean, it's going so well, I almost don't want to tell people, it's going well, because any of these not that any of these big companies know anything about me. But you know, anybody could just build one of these things and be a direct competitor. And they know what I mean, because of the podcast, like there's this huge benefit of building and public. But because of the podcast, they literally know exactly what my service does and what it doesn't do. And so yeah.

Michele Hansen 12:24
So I think you're justified in being freaked out by that. And I think the person who brought this to you It sounds like they're being very well intentioned, and trying to be helpful to you, but this has understandably freaked you out.

Colleen Schnettler 12:37
Yes.

Michele Hansen 12:38
And I would like to remind you that you have something that those big companies do not have. The thing about big companies is that they are extremely difficult to turn, you are a the equivalent of a little Sunfish, you know, those little tiny sailboats that have like one person on them, at these large companies you're competing with, they're a cruise ship, they may be able to throw a team of 20 people at something, they could put 20 developers on something and launch something into two months if they wanted to. They have bureaucracy to go through, they have departments to go through, they have department heads who all want to weigh in on things. Big companies do not move quickly, even if they have the bodies. And they also only pivot that giant cruise ship for big opportunities, like we compete with Google and Microsoft, and now Amazon, like all of these huge companies. And yes, that's a little bit scary. But also, I know that we have so much less bureaucracy than they do. We also have way lower overhead. So like, you know, I think I think one of those companies, someone told me once, they will only pursue a new opportunity, if it will create at least a billion dollars in business. And wow, your product is awesome, and it's making money. I don't think you're gonna make a billion dollars anytime soon. I'm sorry to break it to you. I don't know if you want it to be the female Elon Musk.

You are nimble. And the other thing that you have, which is often missing in big companies, is that you intimately understand what the user is trying to do, and why they would use you and why they are not satisfied with current options. And not only do you have that personal experience with it, but you're also going out and talking to other people and building your understanding and building understanding of other use cases related to this. And, I mean, that's where our advantage comes from is that we care about use cases that other companies don't care about. Like there are things we purposely don't go after that are compelling that our competitors go after. Yeah, it's it's scary thinking about competitors. And it's scary thinking somebody could copy you in, you know, two months. Like, that's, that's scary. And I mean, we've had people completely copy all of our website, but also they don't have other things going into it. You know, that they can't see that we have, but Yeah, dude, like, I totally understand why you would be scared by that.

Colleen Schnettler 15:25
Yeah, it's definitely like, building in public has been such a benefit to me I mean us in this podcast and being online, that has been nothing but good. But now, you know, it was just an interesting kind of other side of the coin of how well maybe it could be kind of bad. Down the road, I don't know, I guess we'll find out.

Michele Hansen 15:49
I mean, like what we'll find out, I mean, you know, somebody could already be working on something and they happen to find the podcast and but the thing is, like listening to the podcast is not going to give them the technical skills to build this, it's not going to give them the level of empathy and concern that you have for the user that drives how you make pricing decisions and strategic decisions and marketing decisions. Like, you know, I often see things floating around on Twitter of, you know, people offering ideas for projects, or whatever. And, you know, I do this occasionally, myself, because I was very frustrated about faxing the other day. But the thing that you that doesn't come from just having like a list of ideas, what doesn't turn those into good businesses, is all of those things that you have, like that level of concern about a problem, right, because like, if you're not deeply concerned about solving a problem, you're not going to get up and work on it every day. Like, I think that's what led you to work on this for six months was that you were building something for yourself that frustrated you so much, that you're willing to work on it in the dark and launch it even if you were the only person who had ever used it because it bothered you so much. And yes, somebody listening could be like, Oh, well, I could go hire a team of 20 developers and build this in two months, but they are not going to have that level of feeling about the problem. And that level of empathy for the user. And I think that's such a powerful thing that you shouldn't undercount.

Colleen Schnettler 17:29
Yeah, okay, you're right. And they're not going to go after my, you know, $100 a month, or whatever it is. It's low, low hanging fruit for people who have a team. So

Michele Hansen 17:42
you don't have to sit here and tell me I'm right. And act like you're not freaked out by it. Like, it's

Colleen Schnettler 17:46
I am though, like, cuz I've come to so. And it's not really big companies. It's I'm worried, gosh, this sounds so bad. It's not that I'm worried. But it's, it's not big companies, because you're right, like, they're not going to go after my tiny little slice of the market. It's like other other people like me, like other indie hackers who are searching for an idea who are like, oh, I'll just take Kelly's idea. Anyway,

Michele Hansen 18:10
I'm probably those people who have maybe thought about that, I would encourage them to be introspective about their problems as you have about the different processes they go through every day as part of their work. And notice when they are frustrated, and direct their energy towards that, because I think it will be a much more productive endeavor. If you go around just trying to copy people all of the time. That's very, that's very frustrating. And you'll be spinning your wheels, and maybe you find something once in a while that sticks, but start with solving your own problems.

Colleen Schnettler 18:46
I like it. I like it. All right, I'm gonna I'm gonna put that somewhere else in my brain, I'm not going to worry about that, that becomes a problem. I'll handle it when it becomes a problem. So something else I want to talk about was distribution. So you had you had a tweet this morning, maybe about? What did I tweet? It was something you were just explaining how you got customers. And I think you said SEO was was the number one thing. So I'm kind of wondering. I'm getting a lot of customers through Heroku. Like just through their, their marketplace. But I am always I have a lot of people asking me about that. Like, I have a lot of friends in the rails community who have built products. And now they want to know how to sell their products. And they're trying to figure out if they should buy ads, if they should write content. And I'd love to talk a little bit about if you remember like, I mean, I was thinking of you because you guys just launched into the like regular internet. I mean, if I had launched into the regular internet, I would have like zero signups. So do you remember like how that got started? And how people find you now?

Michele Hansen 19:57
Yes. And I will caveat this because the way our launch went, I don't think was very typical. So we launched and we basically just threw it on Hacker News. So when we launched like Product Hunt didn't exist, like, I don't know, if IndieHackers was around, maybe it was I didn't know about it. So we just put it on Hacker News, and then asked a couple of our friends who are located in different places to upload it. And then, to our huge surprise, it, like took off and was on the front page, sometimes in the number one position for a whole day. That was really unusual. Now, there's a combination of luck there. There's also that we clearly launched something that people really needed. And so you know, how much of that was luck? And how much was that? You know, launching a product with genuine demand. But that traffic fell off, like right away. Like, actually, people want to see the graphs on this. Mathias and I gave a talk at Laracon like three or four years ago, we talked about launching it as a side project. And you can see the Google Analytics chart like this massive spike on the first day, and then it just like drops off. And whenever I look at our Google Analytics, I have to filter out our launch because it distorts everything so much, we had so much traffic, and then it was all gone, like a week later. Okay, so. So I'll sort of start with that. But really how we get customers. And this is basically been this way from beginning like, like our first month, for example, you said that you have hit what you define as success. So I remember when we launched, I defined different levels of success. And a, like a baseline success was we launched it, we can use it, we can keep our projects going that we needed this for a like, I don't know, I don't remember what I called it, but like a sort of a next level of success was that we launch it and some people pay us for it. And it covers the server costs so that we don't have to pay to maintain the servers, which were to DigitalOcean servers. So that definition of the second level of success was $20 a month. And a wild success was that it more than pays for its servers, not like to go full time The next day, or like anything like that it was it pays for it servers. And so we made like $31 our first month with $20 in expenses. And so we were over the moon because we never expected to be that successful. But our revenue was I mean, pretty, pretty low, like like under $1,000 for a long time.

Colleen Schnettler 22:51
I remember how long, I'm just trying to get like realistic benchmarks. I mean, one month, three months, so I think it was like,

Michele Hansen 23:00
four or five months later, quite a while, okay, broke 1000. But then it took a really long time to like, you know, break 5000 right, like, and it would like have months where it was kind of felt like it was stagnating. So, but how we have grown basically since then is you know, the, the just the rod distribution and acquisition angle has been has been SEO like, we also did a lot of things like you know, we'd post on StackOverflow, or Quora, or other places where people were asking about geocoding, we don't really do that as much anymore. But it basically just comes down to, you know, having landing pages that speak to the problem and then tweaking the words we're using on those landing pages and improving them to match what people are typing in, paired with a freemium model. And I think that's a really important piece for us, because people can try it for free. So there's less legwork that we have to do to convince them to sign up.

Colleen Schnettler 24:01
So I have been working in my marketing power hours this week, every every day, I've been working on my landing page, I tried to improve the copy. And you just said, tweaking our landing pages based on what customers put in or something. So how do you two questions? What do you mean? And how do you know that your landing page is actually resonating?

Michele Hansen 24:26
So one of the tools I use for that I use Ahrefs a lot these days, but for a long time, what I use was Google Search Console, which is totally free and you can set up on your site, and it tells you the keywords that are leading people to you. And so if I would find that the words people were using were not the words we were using. So for example, like we use the term reverse geocoding a lot which is turning coordinates to addresses and like what I found from Using Google Search Console, for example, was that people were typing in GPS coordinates to address. Like, I would never describe it as GPS coordinates, or address to GPS coordinates, like I would not use that term on my own. And so that's, that's an example of something that we would have how we would change it.

Colleen Schnettler 25:22
Got another question there?

Michele Hansen 25:23
Did I answer that other question?

Colleen Schnettler 25:25
How do you know it's working? I mean, do you do so I'm Oh, I don't so.

Michele Hansen 25:28
So this is this is the thing, like, I mean, I check in on these things like, maybe once a month or so like there are people who are much more attuned to their metrics than I am. Like, I fundamentally know whether it's working like are there more people reaching out to me about these specific things. So for example, last year, we had someone, someone in one of my feedback, emails mentioned that they were using as not forgetting coordinates, but to find the county for an address. And I was like, Oh, that's really interesting, because this is a feature that we support. But we've never really talked about it very much like we were turned that with all of our results, but we don't, we don't really talk about it too much. And so then I made a landing page, that was a step by step guide to how to add the county to addresses. And then I noticed the next month when I had people reaching out to me for feedback of new customers, like a whole bunch of them, were saying, Oh, I needed to add the county to addresses and I was like, okay, that page worked.

Colleen Schnettler 26:30
Got it?

Michele Hansen 26:31
Yeah, I tend to not look at the numbers too closely. Like, I know that we're doing the right things, if our revenue is stable, or increasing, if we're, you know, still getting new customers, but like, I'll look at stuff on on h refs, but I, I am not the person who sort of, you know, spends a lot of time looking at those numbers and trying to get them to move.

Colleen Schnettler 27:02
Okay, because I so I'm trying to rewrite the my landing page, kind of in a different tone, more value proposition focused. And I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole by accident where like, these ABX testing websites, they're like, Oh, you could do this landing page and this landing page. I was like, Whoa, should I be doing that? Is that should i and i think not where I am. I'm so early. And I'm just getting going. I think I don't I don't want to I was just wondering if if you were doing anything like that.

Michele Hansen 27:30
I think for testing a value proposition, I don't think I would be doing a B testing like that, because AV testing is really great for when you're only testing one thing, so that you can determine which is right like so it's really great for for submit buttons if you have an order form and you want to change that button to submit versus purchase versus I'm in versus You know what, like, whatever you want to test a different version there and see if it has a higher conversion rate, or you want to specifically test the headline, or you specifically want to test only the subhead copy, or you specifically only want to test like several like paragraphs of copy. Like I think that's really good in those scenarios. But if you're trying to test an entirely different approach, and like a different layout, and like there's like there's so many variables going on that you can't, like, if it worked? How would you know which variable was it

Colleen Schnettler 28:28
was? Yeah, if you change the whole diet, it doesn't do you any good? I get it.

Michele Hansen 28:32
I think for for testing a value proposition I would more so just put that in front of someone and have two options like have two options completely mocked up and say, okay, narrate, look at this page, tell me what you think you can do here, narrate your thoughts out loud, as you're going through it? What questions do you have? What does this have? You know, does this sound like something that would work for you? And then do the exact same with the same person? Do the other landing page with them? And then ask them? So which one of these Do you like more? Why? Like,

Colleen Schnettler 29:03
what?

Michele Hansen 29:05
With you? What other information? might you be looking to find that you can't find here? If you had a magic wand, and you could change anything about this page? What would you change? Like? Questions like that? Okay. Yeah. Because what you're really trying to figure out is, why does someone want this? And how can I take why they would want it into language that would communicate to them why they want it, if that made any sense? Yeah, and I don't think AV testing will tell you that but I think talking to people well.

Colleen Schnettler 29:35
Yeah, cuz, so this last week on my regular page, so not my Heroku page, so my regular page is a lot harder to find because it doesn't pop up in the Google search results. I had 95 visitors and three people signed up. But all of those people bounced when they saw they had to enter a credit card. So I had zero signups this week, from that page, so I'm just wondering If 95 people visit it, only three are interested enough to try it. I feel like maybe I'm not communicating well enough.

Michele Hansen 30:09
Yeah, I mean, that could be possible, it could be possible that for people specifically working with Heroku, like they experienced this problem more acutely than these are that's true, they definitely come across the landing page. And so there is a danger to focusing on Heroku. And this is something we've talked about. And yeah. You know, one of my, something I find myself saying is, don't build your house on someone else's lawn? I don't know if I've ever said that to you before.

Colleen Schnettler 30:39
No, but I like it,

Michele Hansen 30:40
it causes a lot of problems for people when you're overly reliant on one marketplace, or one channel or one vendor. And like, this is really common with people who build their product off of somebody else's platform. And then Yep, they make an API change, and boom, like, bam, you're out of business, or your business is significantly curtailed. So that's a long term problem, though. Yeah, you don't need to think about long term problems right now. Like, okay, I think when you're at, you know, 1015 $20,000 a month in revenue from Heroku. And you still have zero from other sources. That's when we might be like, okay, like, let's really think about diversifying into other markets or other marketplaces or, yeah, but I think as long as you have a website that is professional, that speaks to the same problems as the Heroku page, like even sends people to their Heroku page, like, don't necessarily need to focus too much on that right now. Because you do have a choice. Okay, it's working. And it's okay, it's okay to you know, build your tent on someone else's lawn, not the house.

Colleen Schnettler 31:57
Got it? I like it. Okay, I like this. This is this is great advice. For where I am now. Like, I'll focus on on the Heroku traction channel, because that's the one I'm using. And yeah, when I get to $20,000 a month. Okay,

Michele Hansen 32:11
I gotta be there. We're talking about where you're gonna be a year from now. Like, you may not be there a year from now, but you you might be like, get

Colleen Schnettler 32:17
there. It does seem it seems

Michele Hansen 32:23
like if you had told me that I would be working on this business full time, in a matter of three and a half years from when we launched it. I would have thought that was utterly absurd. Like, wrong. Amazing. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 32:36
I love it. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 32:39
I think you can do it, though. But yes. What's the I think that is a future calling problem? And let's

Colleen Schnettler 32:45
Yeah, okay. Got it. That's what I need to problems right now. Okay. And, okay. So I think for this week, for my marketing stuff, I think emailing people personally has really been good. Because I've gotten I got another guy on the phone. another segment. I did. It was a another 10 minute conversation. But it was good, though. Like it was, I feel like I know, on the free, the free tier at least, like I kind of know how people are finding me, and I know how they're using me. And this was exciting, because he's using node. So the two people I have talked to are not neither of them are using a language that I have specific documentation for. But both of them sorted it out. Yeah. And he was like, it was super easy. And I was like, sweet. So that's really good. So yeah, so I'm gonna keep keep pounding the pavement on trying to get people to talk to me. I think that's, that's where I am.

Michele Hansen 33:34
Yeah. And, and one more, I feel like I keep like trickling out these pieces of advice to you about interviews. And I promise at some point, I will tell you everything, and I'm not doing it intentionally. When you talk to someone on the phone, especially in these early days, it is so powerful if you can send them a handwritten thank you note. Now, you may not have time for this, you may not have good handwriting, like you, you know,

Colleen Schnettler 34:02
I do a reading.

Michele Hansen 34:04
people listening may not you know, I don't want to make them feel bad. We receive such little mail lately that is meaningful, right? Like it's bills or it's junk mail or catalogs, like getting something in the mail that somebody else like personally, hand wrote to you, thanking you for doing something is so powerful, and I think it'll be really powerful for you at this stage. We started doing that when we like finally had stickers made and I would include stickers in it and like people would excitedly like, send us pictures of, you know, our sticker on their laptop, which is just the coolest thing. That's so cool. But I think it's really, really powerful. If you can just send someone I think you know,

Colleen Schnettler 34:49
okay,

Michele Hansen 34:50
cool. At the very least, and email is good.

Colleen Schnettler 34:54
Yeah, that's a that's a great idea. And it's such an obvious thing. It didn't I'm kind of surprised. It didn't occur to me until You just told me so I'm going to do that immediately. That's a great idea.

Michele Hansen 35:03
Yeah. And then if you later like make any changes based on what they said, whether that was, hey, like, thanks for talking to me six months ago, I just wanted to know that I added documentation for installing this and node and I really appreciate you taking the time to share that suggestion with me. Like, people really appreciate that.

Colleen Schnettler 35:24
So that's gonna wrap us up for this week's episode of the software social podcast. We love to hear from you. You can reach us on Twitter at software slash pod. And if you enjoyed this something that would help us a lot would be leaving us a review on iTunes.

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Link to the marketing to developers article Colleen mentioned

Michele Hansen 0:01
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Colleen Schnettler 0:49
So Michele, are you at your computer right now?

Michele Hansen 0:51
I've always at my computer.

Colleen Schnettler 0:55
Okay, I would like you to go to Google. And I would like you to Google file uploading on Heroku.

Michele Hansen 1:01
Okay, I'm typing right now.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

What came up first thing?

Colleen Schnettler 1:10
First Google result.

Michele Hansen 1:14
Wait, is this because I've gone to it before though? Like,

Colleen Schnettler 1:17
that's what I thought I was like, is Google biasing my response by incognito. Ok, do it again.

Michele Hansen 1:25
Does it file upload on her while

Colleen Schnettler 1:27
uploading on Heroku?

Unknown Speaker 1:28
Still number one.

Unknown Speaker 1:32
Amazing. That's

Michele Hansen 1:33
amazing. Like,

Colleen Schnettler 1:36
I just want to capitalize on being the number one Google response. I don't really know. Yeah. But I was super excited to see that. Yeah, that is like my exciting news for the week.

Michele Hansen 1:47
That is really exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 1:50
Yeah. I and you know what the best part about this is, I didn't even know. And I was having a customer interview. And I asked him how he found out about we'll talk about

Michele Hansen 2:02
this, you're burying the lede here? Well, I don't know. It's all exciting. There's like multiple news stories here.

Colleen Schnettler 2:12
Yes, it's all exciting. So this is exciting. I am the number one. Number one hit on Google for file uploading on Heroku. Your number one brilliant,

Michele Hansen 2:21
your number. I

Colleen Schnettler 2:22
know, that's awesome. Like, I just I don't want to breathe on it in case

Michele Hansen 2:27
Google changes their mind. Okay, this means you do shouldn't work on your documentation and just don't touch it.

Unknown Speaker 2:33
Don't touch anything.

Colleen Schnettler 2:36
Don't breathe on the website. So I think that was really exciting to see. And I definitely want to make that landing page that you dropped to better to kind of pull in the people who are reaching me now from Google. So that's something something I'm working on. But what I alluded to is I found that out because I had a customer interview. So last week, I emailed I think I told you, I would do it ages ago. And I finally did it. Thanks to you know, the positive encouragement I received from you and friends on the internet. Thank you friends on the internet. I emailed 14 people. And as I told you with Heroku, I can get their application name. So in the subject of the email, I said, simplify, upload a end, and I put their application name. personalize it. That's smart. Yeah, I figured I'd get a better response rate, like people would actually open it instead of just saying like, simple file upload. Yeah. So of those 14 emails, I got three responses. That's great one. Yeah, I thought free for 14 isn't bad. One guy said he didn't have time to talk. But it was the best file uploader on Heroku. And I should do more marketing. Nice.

Michele Hansen 3:48
I always love it when customers tell tell us to do more marketing. Like it's such a an unexpected kind of feedback. Because it's like, wait, you want me to be louder?

Colleen Schnettler 4:05
So I responded to him and asked him if I could use that as a testimonial. And he said I could. So I haven't put those I haven't put the testimonial on the website yet. But that is something I want to get to do.

Michele Hansen 4:15
That's awesome. testimonials are so good for growth, like when you like if you've got people clicking on it from Google. And then they come to and it's like not only it seems like it's what they need, but there's some other person saying this is exactly what I needed. That's so helpful for getting new signups. They've been really good for us.

Colleen Schnettler 4:36
Yeah, I think it'll be good. So So I will add that I just haven't added that yet. So I'm going to add that to my site. And two people said they would get on the phone with me. So you'll know that this is the first time I've actually done this right.

Michele Hansen 4:51
Yeah, that's that's so good.

Colleen Schnettler 4:54
Yes, so it is good, but so the first person I see spoke with he was actually in Japan. So I had to do it like in the evening here, and it was morning in Japan and he was so nice, but the call lasted 10 minutes, that's okay. I feel like I totally like, I don't want to say I bungled it like it was really great. But at the same time, like I thought about you talking about how I should schedule an hour, and it was like 10 minutes, and I just ran out of things to say. So,

Michele Hansen 5:28
like, I've had interviews that were, you know, 10 minutes, like you said, and then ones that were like, an hour and a half, I usually came for about half an hour. Okay, but like, 10 minutes is fine. Like, if you got a really good nugget of information, or you found something out about, like, how they found you why they were looking for something different, what they were using before, which may not have been another service, but like, it could have been, you know, a combination of manual things or patching things together, whatever. Like, if you got that information, and you feel like you got something out of that conversation. That can happen in 10 minutes. Like, that's okay. Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 6:12
Because I got off the phone and my whole family. So it was dinnertime, here. So I told the kids like I have this call, I'm gonna be there for an hour. And I'm back like 10 minutes later, and they're like, Why are you back? Well, I guess I'm done. But it was like a great, it was a great interview, the person I spoke with was really kind. And I got a lot of information. As I said, that's how I found out like, he found me, because he googled file uploading on Heroku. And that's the first thing that came up. So that was exciting. Yeah. And it was also great, because he's using flask with Python. And I don't have any documentation surrounding like Pike, Python, specifically, like I have generic documentation. But it was nice to see that like, he didn't have any trouble. Theoretically, it should have worked. But I don't actually know anyone who's tried it. So I was it was good to see he didn't have any trouble integrating the add on in his application, because he's actively using it. And so that was like, really useful information.

Michele Hansen 7:11
Yeah. So I have to ask, Did I ever tell you about my favorite most critical interview question? No, it would have been a really good thing for me to tell you last week. Okay, so. So you have your questions that you've prepared in advance, right? Like, I always suggest having a script, you don't necessarily have to stay to the script, but it's it just helps like, organize your thoughts. And I also, I used to print them out with, you know, maybe 10. Returns worth of space so that I could scribble down notes as I was going through it. But so in addition to those things, that sounds like you got like, how did you find out about it? Why were you looking for something? You know, what were you using before? And how do you find it? The question I always end with is something to the effect of, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I've learned so much from you. Is there anything else you want me to know? And then you wait. And you just let them fill that silence. And I tend to find that will be where some of the best information will come out of the interview because you've gotten them primed to thinking about this and their their their brain is on the topic, and then you basically just let them kind of freeform with it.

Colleen Schnettler 8:37
Okay, okay, that's a great idea. I have another one coming up this week. So I will get to continue to practice nice.

Michele Hansen 8:44
And by the way, so getting two people on the phone out of 14 like that, that's pretty good. Like, I think that's about what you should expect, I think my own feedback requests, which are actually our new customer ones go out once a month, and mine just went out the other day. So it's been really fun. This week. hearing back from people, I think my the best I've been able to get my response rate is like 8%. And then the percentage of people who actually have a phone call with is like, much lower.

Colleen Schnettler 9:19
Okay, wait, what emails are you taught you send out monthly? Will you talk with me emails?

Michele Hansen 9:24
Yes. So for so the way our pay as you go plan works is that we roll up all of their usage and charge it on the first of the following month, which saves us money and credit card processing fees. And we also give them a volume discount. So it's kind of a win win for everyone. Because like if you know somebody is using the API and for example, they're building up 10 cents worth of usage every day. Like it doesn't make sense to charge them every day. And so I have emails that trigger to people who have are being charged for the first time to understand why They started using us or why they've recently started paying us.

Colleen Schnettler 10:05
Interesting. So do you also email them at the beginning of that cycle? Like as soon as they sign up, you email them, I assume.

Michele Hansen 10:11
So they get a like, generic, like, here's how you, you know, hello, here's how you use the service, like, let us know if you have any questions when they sign up be like, because we have a free tier, it's really hard to distinguish between who is going to become a paying customer and who's just trying it out, or who is Oh, I see. And I just, I would love to talk to every single person. And we used to talk to every single person. But that's just not feasible at this point. So now I only talk to people who have paid us something. But it's for the first time I have other specific projects. I'll do if I have like a specific question I'm curious about. But that's my sort of ongoing work, work work that I do on that. And I had like, I have a phone call next week. But I didn't have any this week.

Colleen Schnettler 11:03
So what is that? Usually? Like? How many people does that usually end up being that you're talking to a month?

Michele Hansen 11:10
I don't know. What did I end up talking to you? So I don't actually know how many I end up sending to, I want to say, this week, it was like, there was like 15 or 20 people who I ended up replying to and I will say because of like lockdown and time zones, I have steered the email in the direction of getting people to email me back. Yes, I've also gotten better at asking the question so that I can get more from the email.

Colleen Schnettler 11:43
Right. Okay. Yeah,

Michele Hansen 11:44
that's I mean, that's taken a couple years worth of a b testing on that. Yeah. I mean, at the beginning, it was like, Hey, we noticed you signed up, like, tell us why you're using it. So and then I have a call with someone next week, because what they mentioned, relates to a broader question I have been trying to figure out, and so we're gonna have a call at some point next week. But yeah, I mean, I'll get, you know, emails back that are like five, six paragraphs, or sometimes it's like two sentences. One I responded to this morning, as if I was a real person, which was so awesome. If you're listening, you know who you are. And that made me laugh. But yeah, I mean, I always love that, that people are like, Wait, is the founder really emailing me? Or is this just like some automated email that's going out? Yes, I remember when I first bought a mattress from one of those mattress startups, I get in the early days of mattress startups. We bought from one of the smaller ones. And I got an email that's like, Hey, I'm the founder of the company. I'd love to hear like, why you why you bought it. And you know how you found us and whatever. And I was like, Oh, my God, this is so exciting. I was like, I love being on the other side of these, because I feel like I take so much from the world and getting other people's thoughts that I that I love to participate on the other side. And so like, I spent all this really long email, and I got a reply, but it's from a customer service person. And they were very, very nice. But I was kind of like, Oh, it's not really very nice. But it was like that was kind of a trick. And so I definitely get emails back to like, are you really the founder of the company? And like to be like, yes, yes, I am a real person who is actually not tricking you. And people really appreciate that. But we were talking about you and your customer.

Colleen Schnettler 13:34
So right, so I have another one next week. So I mean, the thing that I think we've talked about before that I really struggle with is the the overexcited ik responding. And, you know, there's the guy on the phone with me, like was very complimentary about what I had built. And, you know, said it really helped him. Because Heroku has this problem where you can't store your images, like with your app, because they have an ephemeral file system. So everyone on Heroku, who wants user uploaded files needs to store them somewhere else. And so it was great. Like, it was a really good chat and, but I do think like, it's hard for me not to be, that's really my struggle, cuz I'm gonna be like, yes, that's why I built it, or, you know, I get really excited. So, so that's something I'm going to work on. I have another one on Wednesday. And that's something I'm gonna work on for my next talk. My next customer interview on Wednesday, but I really think at this stage I I'm in trying to get as many of these as I can, is a good move.

Michele Hansen 14:36
Yeah, absolutely. And like it also makes sense that when someone says, This is so useful, and really helped me and thank you for making it that you would feel oh my gosh, like like that feels so good for you because you worked on this for so long without any feedback. And you worked on other things for so long without them really going anywhere like this, and so it makes sense why, like that would catch you. And you want to sort of revel in that feeling rather than being able to like file away the compliment to store it for later. And then I'm not trying to make storage ponds here that just happened accidentally. But like filing that away for later and then saying, oh, like, Can you tell me why it was helpful? Like, like, we're specifically like, it makes sense that you wouldn't be able to take it to that sort of, like completely unemotional level. And instead you're like, Yes, I help someone. This is a minute. Like, that makes sense.

Colleen Schnettler 15:41
Yeah. Yeah. So I think we talked last week, I talked about dedicating one day a week to marketing. But that's still really hard for me. So I'm doing one hour a day I'm committing. Because we talked a little bit last week too, about just like kind of sitting in that uncomfortableness of like, what am I doing, starting something new and trying to learn a new skill? So I am going to do one hour a day. And I'm going to tweet about it to help me stay accountable. Nice. A Yeah, that's like how I learned to code. I did 100 days of code a couple years ago, when I was trying to learn web development. And it was great, because you know, no one cares what I tweet about. I'm not Twitter famous. And and it was a good thing for me to be able to go back and see like what I had done and keep myself accountable. So I'm trying really hard to do that. So and as I also said, work, like actual paid work is going to get really busy. So I just don't have time to obsess over this. So I'm trying not to obsess over it.

Michele Hansen 16:38
So what did you work on in your marketing Power Hour, this week.

Colleen Schnettler 16:43
So the marketing Power Hour this week, I did the thing where I emailed everyone that took like an hour to get 14 individual emails, I also worked on the landing page. I'm really, as we talked about, I think before landing pages are hard for me, because it's just not a skill set I have. And so I'm really like I pulled out a whole bunch of text, I really tried to simplify. And kind of market a little bit more towards developers, I found this great article, my friend shared with me about marketing to developers and what they want to know. And so like, there's things I haven't added, but like I kind of came up with a plan. Like I want to add like, as a developer, when you're looking for a piece of software, you want to know how I was talking about I but like, you want to know how it works. You want to know if it's gonna work with your stack. You want to know that other people have used it. So to me that looks like I now have a heading on my Heroku elements page. It says what does it do? Like? That's what it says involved? What does it do? Because that's the kind of thing like how does it work? Right? Like, what do I have to do? I tried to make it simpler to explain, like, What do I have to do as a developer to integrate it? Like what do I have to do? So once I had this like really flowery language, it was like simple file, upload uploads all your files to the cloud and returns the CDN URL and has, you know, multiple cloud storage providers for redundancy. And it was like three sentences long. And I got rid of that. And now it just says how to apply how to how to use it in five easy steps.

Michele Hansen 18:10
Nice. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull up your website right now. So I just want to say that, you know, the more you do these interviews, that'll help with your copy a lot, because you'll be phrasing it in the terms that people are using that people are typing in when they're looking for something. I mean, it sounds like file upload on Heroku is, I mean, you've nailed that. And yeah, okay, so I see this how it works button here. Does that meet? Take me to the documentation? Oh, interesting. It takes me to a video.

Colleen Schnettler 18:41
Yeah, so I was thinking of take taking that video maybe and putting it See I just have a splash image like a, you know, one of those free images on the right here. So I was thinking, making, maybe making where it says see how it works. And it opens a video and a modal. Like I was thinking of maybe putting the video on the right. So you could just play it in the frame there.

Michele Hansen 18:59
Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I think that makes sense. And then like, I might even add the like you said, the first thing you want to know is, how does it work? And will it work with what I'm doing? So I might even put a documentation button right there as a call to action?

Colleen Schnettler 19:19
Well, I have one in a navbar.

Michele Hansen 19:21
Yeah, but now is different than a immediate call to action. Like it's there. But like, if you're saying that your thought process when you find out about something is what is it? Like, you know, does it do what I wanted to do, which is you're gonna have that video sitting right there. And then yeah, does it work with what I'm working with? Like, how does it work? I think it might make sense to have the documentation.

Colleen Schnettler 19:44
Yeah, I don't think the documentation really answers that question in a succinct way, which might be a different problem. Because if you were to go if I did have a documentation link there, it would jump you to documentation. Well, maybe I should. I was thinking more of like adding a You know, like another section under the header that just like said, like answered those questions that you just said like, will it work with my stack? How does it work? Yeah, I was thinking putting that here on the homepage, or the landing page, whatever

Michele Hansen 20:12
you call them. So I, you said earlier that one of the people who got back to you said that you should do more marketing? And I'm curious, like, Did you follow up with them? And say, like, Can you be more specific? Like, what what kinds of things would you like to see us doing? Oh,

Colleen Schnettler 20:28
I did not. That's a good that might

Michele Hansen 20:30
be helpful, because like, I've had people say that and it turned out like they were they were looking for some documentation, or they were looking for like, how to guides about things or, like they wanted to send it to a, like a co worker, for example, who was less familiar with this? And they needed something that would have explained a specific thing to them. Like, it might be just worth digging in there a little bit.

Colleen Schnettler 20:54
Okay, because I have a lot of ideas, right of what I should do. Like, I want to make a react. Well, I told you, I hired someone to make me a react thing, but it needs a little polish. So I'd like to get that out there. But I will reach out to the person who said that to see to see if there was something specific he was looking for that he couldn't find. But yeah, I think on this main page, I just want to add like I was thinking of adding a block, right before it says seamless file uploading that just says like, like, will it work with my stack or something like that? And then having icons of all the different languages that works with Oh, yeah. Right. Because visually appealing, someone suggested that to me, but it seems like a good idea. So I was thinking of adding that. And then the testimonials. Yeah, that's that's kind of what I'm thinking.

Michele Hansen 21:43
So it also I noticed that in from Google, when you click on it, it doesn't go to that like splash page that you had on Heroku, it goes to something that looks a little bit more like documentation.

Colleen Schnettler 21:56
Yes, so the Google results take you, I think, to the Heroku documentation page, which is different from my apps documentation page. Because the Heroku documentation are specific to Heroku. And that's like, part of the requirements when you submit an app to Heroku is to have that page. So that's why that's why it takes you there on that that page. I mean, I have three pages I'm talking about here. Okay, I have the Heroku documentation page, which is where Google drops you. I have the Heroku elements page, which is like my landing page for Heroku. And then I have my regular landing page. So there's like three places that I need to be mindful of how I'm communicating my message. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 22:39
And you as I'm on the on the main Heroku, add on page, I guess. I am reminded of how last week you said you raise the prices. And I'm curious if that had any impact on your signups this week.

Colleen Schnettler 22:53
So it didn't, it became approved yesterday, because there was some like, yeah, work. Yeah. So now this is like an interesting thing to talk about. Because I did raise the prices based on some feedback from you and other people. And so it was only yesterday. So I have had one person sign up at the higher price point. Nice. So that's cool. Yeah, yes. So that's exciting. And I still like I hate that I can't do a free trial. But Heroku isn't set up to do a free trial. So you can do one, but you have to manage all of the like signup logic on your application to do that. And I just don't have the time right now, like I said, with work, and all this other stuff. Like I don't have the time right now to set that up. I think if you're getting people signing up without a free trial, even at a higher price point,

Michele Hansen 23:47
run with that, like, see how far that can take you maybe you don't need a free trial, because it sounds like there is a pretty big gap in the market for file. top result, there are literally a gap here.

Colleen Schnettler 24:03
Already the top result, and I've had this for like six months, maybe four months. Yeah, so that's what I'm going to do. Because I just, I have a lot of demands on my time, like work, and I have a big project, and then we're moving. So there's a lot going on here. So I don't think I'm going to do a free trial. And if you know we check in in a month, and I only have two people signed up, then I can reevaluate. But I just I think you're right. Like I think the overhead of that right now with what else I have going on in my life is not is not something like I really want to handle. But it's something I can always revisit in the future. Right?

Michele Hansen 24:38
Yeah. And I think it'll be interesting over the next few weeks as you have a bunch of those for free trial. Users converting into paid and I guess like, when we talk last week, you had 117 people who were actively using the Add on so like, do they get to use it for free forever or do they get converted into a plan like how does that work, so they

Colleen Schnettler 25:03
won't convert to a plan unless I force them to convert to a plan. And I'm, I'm torn, like, like I said, like a lot of the people who are using it are not using it heavily. So what I did is I put an upper limit on the amount of storage they can have. And if they hit it, they'll have to upgrade but I'm not, at least not today, right now, again, maybe in a couple months. When I see where I am, I'll change my mind. But I'm not going to force those early adopters to upgrade. Now I might be able to use this as to my advantage to email them and be like, hey, there's no longer a free plan. But if you have a conversation with me, I'll let you keep your free plan. I don't know. I feel like there's opportunity to like kind of be like, hey, if you talk to me, I'll keep I won't kick you off. Even though I don't offer a free plan anymore. I'll let you keep your free plan, I think I don't know,

Michele Hansen 25:56
I think it's reasonable to let them stay on the free plan as a legacy thing. As long as you have a limit there. That's, you know, that that's, like, sustainable for you. I don't know if you necessarily need to incentivize them to upgrade because, you know, I was talking to somebody about this on Twitter the other day, right? Like, I feel like those are the kind of tactics that really work in consumer when you're trying to convince someone to do something, but a business process exists. And you can try to incentivize it, but like, it's just, it's going to exist, how it's going to exist. And that that's a hard thing to push. And so yeah, I think you can just kind of let those people float there for the

Colleen Schnettler 26:43
for the time, but yeah, they're not there. Like I said, none of them are using a ton of storage yet. So I'm just mindful of like, the amount of storage they're using, but I think I think I'm gonna let them let them float. Yeah. So this week, this upcoming week, my goal is I really liked spending Monday, individually emailing people, because it did result in to customer interviews. So I'm really excited to finally have these customer interviews going after dragging my feet so long. And I'm really excited to talk to more people.

Michele Hansen 27:12
I'm excited for you. And you know, so talking about things that we have promised each other we would do and then dragged our feet on. So I finally did something that I think you and my husband and other people have been telling me to do for a long time, which I have resisted. Which is delegating.

Unknown Speaker 27:38
Oh,

Colleen Schnettler 27:38
did you hire someone? Michele?

Michele Hansen 27:40
No, no, no, but okay. So since our episode with other Michelle from Squared Away a couple of months ago, like I remember getting off of that and being like, Oh my god, it would be so amazing to have a virtual assistant. Like, it sounds so awesome. And my husband was like, Yeah, like, you should totally get one. I was like, No, no, like, I like I don't need one, like, you know, and it just like, it felt like, you know, like a luxury to me, you know, like the business equivalent of like, I don't know, buying myself, like a designer watch or something. I was like, No, that's like, that's not for me. Like, I'm not gonna, you know. So, um, but then, you know, I've spent the last couple of weeks like in total, you know, closing our books, like, spreadsheet mania, and like, that was like, you know, what, I don't have to be doing all of our bookkeeping anymore. I have some other like, random projects I have to do with like, updating addresses on contracts and stuff like that. And, like, you know what, maybe I should like, get a VA to do this. But then I was like, but that sounds like so much work just to get them set up. Like, I'll just do it myself. That's where I was like two weeks ago. And then as I was waiting through the spreadsheet again, this week, I was like, You know what, actually, I should get a VA. So I finally like emailed squared away to inquire about getting some help.

Colleen Schnettler 29:12
Nice. I'm so proud of you.

Michele Hansen 29:14
You know what you do with delegating?

Colleen Schnettler 29:16
I know you do. Like I feel like that's another theme of our podcast is huge. As I tell you to hire someone and you tell me No.

Michele Hansen 29:25
I don't know if I'm just like, scarred from like too many high school group projects or something. But like, I have, like a lot of trouble with with delegating, and like, you know, I think when you're overwhelmed with something like to me the idea of like spending all of the time to get somebody else started on a task. I'm like, I could just do it and like half the time, it's like not even, you know, but then I end up with a million tasks and I don't need to be doing all of them. And I you know, I like I think we are at a point where I can hire someone for like 15 hours a week.

Colleen Schnettler 30:00
So is it working? Is it working out?

Michele Hansen 30:03
Well, so I haven't actually hired them yet. Like I have only I, I submitted. Oh,

Colleen Schnettler 30:09
you don't get the gold seal? Yeah, no, I

Michele Hansen 30:11
did it. I did expect the contact form submission to like burst out and confetti and say like, Congratulations, you've taken the first step towards delegating. Yeah, like you get confetti when you buy a stock on Robin Hood. Like why not? When you you know, try to get a va? We should give Michelle that some feedback. I would like some very serious need, like some good petty petty, and cowbell. No. So, so we'll see. So that'll be like something for me to, to work on over the next couple of weeks.

Colleen Schnettler 30:43
I think that's great. I think this is gonna be so good for you.

Unknown Speaker 30:48
I think so too.

Colleen Schnettler 30:49
I look really hesitant. But I'm proud of you for taking this first step.

Michele Hansen 30:53
I took the first step. So and I have been like promising you or probably not promising you just brushing it off for a long time.

Colleen Schnettler 31:04
Oh, yeah. From like, since we've started this podcast, I've been like, why don't you get some help? And you're always like, no one could do

Unknown Speaker 31:10
it as good as me. That's not what I said, when we made

Unknown Speaker 31:14
this kind of when she said

Michele Hansen 31:17
they could probably do better quality, but I know that I can do it quickly.

Colleen Schnettler 31:23
Well, I hope I don't think that's just you know, I hope this gets going for you. And the time to help your VA get setup is worth it. And hopefully, you know, once you guys are rolling, which I guess will be in a month or so you'll have found that it is lifted some of the burden. I mean, you have a lot going on in your personal life right now. So I feel like lifting this a little bit of your burden is going to be great.

Michele Hansen 31:45
Yeah, and I think I can like I can spring for this, you know, it kind of feels like you know, the equivalent of like, getting a personal trainer or something except for my business life. Like it feels like a luxury but also it's like, also I need to do this for my my sanity. So yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 32:03
yeah. Awesome. Well, that's great news. I'm excited to hear how it goes.

Michele Hansen 32:07
I guess on that high note, we will end this week's episode. I just wanted to thank everybody for all of your nice things you said on Twitter this week, like I mean, it was seriously amazing. I feel like every time I opened Twitter, there was somebody else saying how much they enjoyed last week's episode. And that just makes this podcast really fun to do. So thank you. We'll talk to you next week.

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Colleen Schnettler 0:00
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Michele Hansen 0:36
So Colleen, the last time we talked about your SaaS, Simple File Upload, you had 89 users on Heroku 40 of which had uploaded files. And in order for your service to be released into the broader Heroku ecosystem, you have been working for months to get to 100 users. So it's been two weeks. Tell me, did you get to 100.

Colleen Schnettler 1:07
I did 117 users. Last week I was approved for what they call general availability is when you can sell it in the marketplace. So my vendor documents are pending with Salesforce. Awesome, by the time this podcast airs, it will be available for sale.

Michele Hansen 1:27
That's so exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 1:29
Yeah, I'm super excited. It's really interesting though, Michelle, because this is a huge milestone, and you'd think I would get have gotten like a ton of energy and excitement about this project. But I've really been struggling the last two weeks, I have really kind of been down on myself thinking that this is a terrible idea. I need to start something new, and I need to find a new idea.

Michele Hansen 1:54
Where do you think that feeling is coming from?

Colleen Schnettler 1:57
I have no idea. I mean, it's, it's this really exciting time I've reached the milestone I've been trying to achieve. And so you know, I stumbled across this article by Amy Hoy called, why what's it called? Why Women Entrepreneurs Fail. Oh, and yeah, like speaks to me. And it's not just applicable to to women. But she does say in the article that she sees it a lot more in women. And let me let me pull out a few gems from this, quote, I'm tired of sitting by while you ship your thing and refuse to market it. Or you make a few sales your first time out, but it's not enough sales. So you sink into a funk and quit. Or you make it to the 90% mark, you tow up to the line of doing something, then refuse to cross it. I mean, that's like, right where I am, I'm finally getting some success. And I like want to run away and hide. And it's almost like I'm scared of my own success. It's super weird.

Michele Hansen 2:54
So you say it's weird. But also, you know, Amy was able to write an article describing this. It makes it sound normal.

Colleen Schnettler 3:05
She must see it all the time. And she wrote a whole article about it. I mean, I don't know her. She didn't write it for me.

Michele Hansen 3:10
So does it make you feel better to know that this is a common feeling?

Colleen Schnettler 3:16
Yeah, I mean, it totally, it was so weird, because I'm not kidding. Like two weeks ago, I was like, this is a terrible idea. I should shut this down. And I had just reached 100 users. And so I mean, the psychology sometimes we kind of talk a little bit about a psychology of trying to start your own thing. But, you know, I thought I was above that. sounds terrible. Like I didn't think it was going to impact me because I got my shit together. Everyone is above average. Right. And I'm above

Michele Hansen 3:45
you. It's so interesting. Like, it's so interesting. And and as you said, I really think that does apply, you know, to both men and women. But maybe it's more acute, because the standards were held to are so much higher, you know, especially in an in a male dominated field. Right. But I think anybody could feel that way.

Colleen Schnettler 4:07
Yeah, I think so. I don't know. So I it's been really interesting. And like I said, I really just wanted to throw the whole thing away last week. And then I found this article, and I talked to a lot of other people in the space. And those people were like, you're doing really well. Why would you walk away now? And I think it's a fear. So I think it's just a combination of a fear of failure. Like, once you start to have some success, like is that actually going to translate into something? It's a fear of learning a new skill set, there was this other great article I stumbled upon? Yeah.

So Alex Hillman has a great article called The Fear of Beginning Again. And this article is about how all of the developers that take his class, like freak out, because now they have work. We're kind of experts in our field, right? And we spent years building up, you know, this career as a developer. And so now we have to learn how to do like sales and marketing. And it's like starting from scratch, because we don't know we're doing and it's hard and it's scary. And that's where I am right now.

Michele Hansen 5:07
That totally makes sense, especially if you're switching from going from a consultant who has a defined scope. And you know, there's a little bit of sales, a little bit of accounting involved in that. But the vast majority of your time is spent on engineering work. And now running a SaaS, engineering work is a huge percentage of that. But it's no more than 50% of the work of the business. There's marketing, there's sales, there's, there's customer support, there's all of those other things that weren't really skillsets that you would have done in a developer job or really as much in a consulting setting. So it makes sense that it's scary to to feel like you're starting from nothing in totally new fields, and that this project, unlike past projects, does not just hinge on your engineering abilities.

Colleen Schnettler 6:10
Right. I think that's the biggest thing. I've always been able to kind of prove myself, quote, unquote, from an engineering perspective. And so this is a whole This is a whole different skill set. It's like a whole different ballgame.

Michele Hansen 6:25
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Colleen Schnettler 6:29
Okay, well, you're my pseudo business psychologist. So it's good. We have this podcast, so you can you can remind me not to quit when I'm like, this is a terrible idea. Probably not a terrible idea. No, I thought it like it's a great idea. Like, it's a proven market. It's like, I don't know, 100.

Michele Hansen 6:46
People, you started out with like, zero people. And I remember when you first launched it, you're like, well, maybe I can get a couple of friends who don't actually need it. But use Heroku to use it. And like that's your first milestone was 10 people, right? or something? Yeah. And it's like, okay, like, none of them are really using it. And like they're just kind of pity users. And,

Colleen Schnettler 7:11
and but like, nature, though,

Michele Hansen 7:12
like so last time, we talked, you had 40 people who had actually uploaded a file. How many people have uploaded files now?

Colleen Schnettler 7:20
56. So people are using

Michele Hansen 7:24
Last time we talked to someone paid you $10 outside of Heroku. Have you gotten paid anything else since then?

Colleen Schnettler 7:34
Nope. I've had a couple other people I want to say to additional people sign up for the free trial. So we'll see if they convert. It's funny, though, because all those people aren't emailing me back.

Michele Hansen 7:47
Interesting.

Colleen Schnettler 7:47
So yeah, but they're using it. So I guess they're happy. Maybe.

Michele Hansen 7:53
So how many credit cards on file Do you have right now then outside of Heroku? Six, six. And that's a one month free trial, right? Yes. Okay. And so when does that when are we coming up on the first charge for most of those people,

Colleen Schnettler 8:11
like February 6 through 10th ish, people will have to turn out by then if they don't want to pay.

Michele Hansen 8:17
Okay, so by the middle of February, then we will have a little bit of a sense of whether people want to pay for it or not.

Colleen Schnettler 8:29
So I did some interesting things, which, which is basically the story of this whole thing of this whole product, I just do things. So I am about to become really busy with some consulting work. And I'm really looking forward to it, because it'll be kind of a nice break to just dive into doing something I know how to do. But because of that I was working on this like, three, three days a week, I'm gonna have one day a week to work on this. And so I did a few things. I raised the prices quite a bit, because I don't,

Michele Hansen 9:00
Yeah, taking some patio11 advice there!

Colleen Schnettler 9:04
Why not? I mean, I might as well come out of the gate high. And if no one signs up, then that that's, you know, that's a lesson learned. But I'd rather have five users at $40, then, you know, 50 users at $8. Exactly right, because I am one human like, and now I have a job that's going to pay me money that's going to take up most of my time. So I'm not gonna have a ton of time to spend on the uploader. So yeah, I'd rather have fewer customers at a higher price point. So I raised my price from I think was 10 to 35 for the intro tier. So that's pretty significant. So it'll be interesting to see if anyone signs up at that price point. And what else did I do? So I tried to do a little marketing work since I last spoke to you. So I actually hired someone from people per hour to make me a react application using my uploader.

Michele Hansen 9:57
Oh, interesting.

Colleen Schnettler 9:59
And that was Whole thing like people for hours, like a race to the bottom, have you guys ever used that? I know, it was, it was a weird experience. Maybe because like, I just didn't spend enough money. But it was like, I felt like, I don't know, like people were just sending me messages, I must have gotten like 50 messages from these people and like the people started working on it before I had agreed to pay them. And it was just, it was a really interesting experience, to try to hire someone to do to get

Michele Hansen 10:28
something usable out of it.

Colleen Schnettler 10:31
ish. It's mostly usable. I think it's not kind of what I would like it to be. But it's I think it's good enough that with my teensy, tiny minimum react skills, I can make it good enough. It wasn't good enough to put out there on my documentation page yet. But I feel like I can get it there. If I spent a little time on it, but that was a weird experience.

Michele Hansen 10:56
That -- yeah, I mean, I think there's when you use services like that, you know, you get what you pay for.

Colleen Schnettler 11:09
And yeah, that's what I think, too.

Michele Hansen 11:13
yeah, it's just it's just, it's just tricky. And I think if we ever needed something that we didn't have in house, we would just, you know, see who our friends are in our network could do it. And probably pay more, but you know, have a have a good result that you can use from the get go.

Colleen Schnettler 11:32
Yeah, I definitely think so. And I absolutely think it's because I'm not making any making $10. So I'm not making any money. So I'm really hesitant to put money into that. And I absolutely think that's that was part of the issue. It was like, I think I paid 200 bucks. So what do you expect to get for 200? bucks Colleen? Like, really? It was interesting. So that marketing, that's such an interesting

Michele Hansen 11:57
point, though, I just want to ask you. So you said you spent $200 on that, aside from your time, which actually has a cost that you can pretty clearly calculate because you do consulting work. I'm curious, what is your Do you know what your total investment in? The product is? so far?

Colleen Schnettler 12:19
So I don't really want to know, because I think it'll freak me out. In terms of the opposite leg. If I include opportunity cost. It's ginormous. So if I, I mean, without opportunity cost is low, maybe 500 bucks. But if I include the opportunity cost of my time as a developer, it's kind of a scary number. I don't know a lot.

Michele Hansen 12:41
Yeah, this is it's just interesting, because I think we were talking about this a while ago, right about how much it cost us to get off the ground. Because it's a big thing about bootstrapping, right is like you're you're funding yourself. And I want to say it was in about that, like, four to $500 range, not taking into account, you know, free AWS credits and stuff that we got, and of course, the opportunity cost of your time, which is not free. So I think this will be really interesting when you are forced to only spend one day a week on this, you know, you've talked a lot about how you have a tendency to read as a substitute for doing or to avoid doing, right reading about entrepreneurship and marketing. As a way to procrastinate on actually doing that task, though you may we'll be learning things. And I think it might be interesting, because if you only have one day a week, you only have one day a week to get stuff done. I know, it might be good for you.

Colleen Schnettler 13:48
I think it will. So I have a plan. Do you wanna hear my plan I do want to hear. So here's the thing is, like all developers everywhere, all I want to do is add more features. We talked about this every week,

Michele Hansen 14:01
you want to do engineer, I only if

Colleen Schnettler 14:03
I want to do engineering, I only have one day a week to work on this. So here's the deal, it works great. It doesn't have all the features I'd like it to have. But it works. So my plan is to spend that one day a week, only on marketing. And it's going to be really challenging for me. But I spent these past two weeks there were just like a couple little bug fixes I had to get through security stuff, and things like that. So I spent these and like email stuff. I spent these past two weeks, like just knocking that the tech stuff out. So now it works well for what it does. So my plan is that those Fridays are just going to be marketing days. And that's a little bit scary for me. But there's no point in me spending another you know, 100 hours or however long to implement new features if no one's buying it in the first place.

Michele Hansen 14:53
Right. If a feature is launched in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, was it really launched?

Colleen Schnettler 15:00
Yeah, that's amazing. By the way, I love that. So, like, that's so good. So I'm really, really kind of struggling, but also excited about this decision. It's like, I'm going to stop half assing marketing because like, everyone, I've been half assing marketing, I'm like, Oh, this landing page is fine. When it's not really like people are giving me suggestions, and I'm just ignoring them, because I don't really want to do it. So Fridays are gonna be marketing days for me marketing, sales, whatever you want to call it.

Michele Hansen 15:32
They're different. They're two different things. They're

Colleen Schnettler 15:35
different. Oh,

Michele Hansen 15:36
should we talk about how they're different? shirt, or different? Okay, so for So, so marketing is this the kind of stuff you've been doing, like SEO, writing landing pages, you know, working on the design, writing your documentation, you know, running ads, but you're not doing but those those are kind of like marketing things. Sales, people would usually conceptualize as sort of a direct one to one interaction with a customer to try to convert them. So that might be like, you know, some people do cold emailing, for example, like that would be sales, or having a phone call with a potential customer about, you know, trying to pitch them on an on a contract, or whatever it is, negotiating on a contract, those would be sales functions. And, you know, kind of like going back to what Danielle Simpson was saying last week about the system they built at feedback panda with what was it like 50, something 52 rolls in there to company, like marketing and sales, you know, they might sort of, you know, feed up to the same VP, but they're different functions.

Colleen Schnettler 16:53
Okay, so at this point, where I am now I'm getting a good number of signups through the Heroku traction channel, which has been great, but I am going to start charging. So I expect that number to go down. What are your thoughts? I have a lot of ideas about how to spend my next Friday my sales slash marketing day, like what are your thoughts on how to maybe approach this or what's a good way to get started?

Michele Hansen 17:17
You mentioned that people have given you feedback on your landing page and other places, lots of feedback,

Colleen Schnettler 17:25
and lots of feedback.

Michele Hansen 17:27
any criticism like is it actionable? Or is it like your landing page sucks? Like, is it?

Colleen Schnettler 17:33
No, no. Okay, super. It's super actionable. I am scared of Okay, here's the thing. I am scared of landing pages. This is this is truth telling. here's, here's how I do a landing page, I go find a template, I copy the template and I put my words and images in the template. So when if you ever tell me like, Oh, you should do this. So let me let me give you some step one. Okay.

Michele Hansen 18:00
Copies Stripe's homepage, step 1.

Colleen Schnettler 18:06
Me and everyone else. So here's some feedback I got, which is really good. And I'm really want to implement it. But it's funny how I don't even know how. So yesterday I was introduced to this concept of pain, Dream fix. And it's this concept of like, what is the customer's pain? What is their dream about how their life would be better if they and what is your Fix? It's a lot you know, about what we've talked about?

Michele Hansen 18:35
It sounds consistent with Storybrand.

Colleen Schnettler 18:37
Yeah, it's very consistent with everything we've talked about. But it's a lot like here's the real so everyone's giving me this great feedback on Oh, you could do this pain dream fix. And that's really good. But like, I literally don't know how to put that on a on a webpage without it looking terrible. Because it's so many words. I mean, it's like basic, like design stuff. And I'm just like, wait, there are three blocks. Wait, what I don't know what to do.

Michele Hansen 19:01
That's not a design problem. That is a copywriting problem. And okay. And I think you also might be running into something that I think is pretty common. When you hear things like that. They're like, Oh, yeah, of course, that's so obvious. Like, yeah, I'll do that. When you're, I think especially working in this space, we're in of b2b SaaS, which is, honestly, like, pretty boring. You know, we've talked about how we're not building, you know, businesses that are going to take over the world and everyone's going to use them and like, you know, talking about the dream when it comes to making business processes faster. It requires a little bit of creativity. And I think, you know, releasing ourselves from the idea that people are, you know, accomplishing all of their dreams with us, right. But I also think it's, I think it's probably possible and you also but you don't have to, like hit them all within like, the top of your homepage. Like I think it's pretty common to you know, just like speak to the pain first. And then as someone keeps you know, you, you kind of show them what it is and then you introduce the the dream and and the pain further down contextually like it doesn't have to be everything crammed above the fold.

Colleen Schnettler 20:29
Yeah, so I think something I have never done before is like really pay attention to landing pages, like I just don't pay attention. So there's a couple like Twitter threads people sent me of everyone's favorite landing pages. So I think part of my work as starting something new here, which is, you know, learning about marketing, is to actually look at landing page examples and try and get some ideas. And it feels so much like starting from scratch. And I'd put more time and put two hours into my landing page, like it's okay. But I just threw up a template and threw some words and got some stock images and called it a day. So I really think that's a good place to start. And I think next week for my first marketing Friday, I'm going to work on that.

Michele Hansen 21:18
Yeah, so I think something else that you could do is, if you, you mentioned that it's hard to get people to reply to you, but you have had some people reply to you and give you feedback. And I wonder if those people who have given you feedback on the landing page, if you could reach out to them and basically do a usability test with them, where you're on a screen share with them, and they are narrating their internal thoughts as they look at your landing page. And you say, okay, like, that's what the copy is, can you like, tell me why you use this product, like what, like what excited you about it, and like have a conversation like that, you might even want to record it. So you can listen to it later and use those words for your copy later. But I think that can help you like if you have people who are willing to give you feedback, and willing to help you improve that, right because like, if you make this into a real business and keep supporting it. And they prefer to use it over the other options out there, they're going to benefit from it too. And so maybe if you can see if you could get one or two people just be willing to do a screen share with you for half an hour each. And just go down to just narrate what they see and just ask them questions about it. Ask them Why did you choose this over other things? Like, you know, this is what it says but like, let's have a conversation with him about it.

Colleen Schnettler 22:44
Okay. Okay, I did one person I asked over email. And I guess it wasn't landing page relevant. But he said, he picked my product, because it seems fast and easy. Which is kind of what I'm, that's great. Going for good. Yeah. So that's kind of what I'm going for. Okay, that's a great idea. You think I should do that with people that are using it?

Michele Hansen 23:04
Yeah, I think you know, like this guy who said, he picked it because it's fast and easy. Like, see if he'll do a call with you. And just say, you know, as can be, or even just say 1520 minutes, you may not even need a full half hour, I find it's pretty easy to get people on the phone for the most part. Especially in that kind of a scenario. Like I have been amazed with how generous people have been with their time when you are building a product that truly does make things faster and easier for them. People appreciate that.

Colleen Schnettler 23:36
Okay, it's interesting. Another thing while I was having this little two weeks of self reflection, something I realized is you keep telling me to talk to people, and I keep emailing people. But I haven't actually asked any of these people to get on a call with me yet. Oh, and I keep saying I'll do that, but I'm lying. So and you just lied to you, my dear friend, Michelle. It's so funny because I thought this would be something like I'd be good at but, and I think I will be but it's just interesting to like discover your own hesitations. I'm sure it's like a fear of rejection or something that has that has prevented me from actually asking people to get on the phone. But I'm going to do that too. For real.

Michele Hansen 24:18
He was what we were talking about earlier about having a lot of this sort of pent up stress around like learning marketing and, and all of these other functions that go into making something a full fledged business that can support you full time. It makes sense to me that you would have hesitations about that. And it's like it's so common that people are afraid to talk on the phone with other people and ask them these kinds of questions that you know, I think we've talked about, you know, it's you're, you're asking for somebody's pain points, right? And first of all, you can't say what are your pain points, but second of all, Just we don't have vocabulary around talking about pain and struggle, really, like we don't say, Hey, how are you struggling today as a normal conversation topic, like it just doesn't happen. And so it's totally understandable that you would have hesitations about that. And, and something I want you to remember, is that what you say? And the specific questions you ask, I think people get really worried about that about having the right script, those are less important than how you treat the other person. Because if you treat them in a way, that shows them that they can trust you, and that you're going to respect what you're saying, you know, respect what they are saying, you know, if you simply just listen to them, like, remember that with all of these, as I said earlier, boring business processes that we are solving. These are things that people are doing every day or every week, and they have probably never talked to anyone about, like, they have probably never sat down and had a conversation with their spouse, or their roommate, or whomever it is about, like, tell me about, like how you're struggling with file upload. Like, they have probably never been asked that question. But if somebody had asked you that question a year ago, you would have said, Oh, my God, let me tell you, because I have so much to say about this. And like you would have never realized you had something to say about that. But you never had someone sit there and say, tell me about this, and then just listen to you.

Colleen Schnettler 26:43
Yeah, you know, you're so

Michele Hansen 26:44
powerful, right? And so you don't need to have a million questions. And you don't need to, you know, I mean, maybe you feel like you need to somehow impress them or show them that you're a real business or something about this. Leave all of that at the door. The most important thing is just to listen to them about something that nobody has probably ever listened to them about. And that is really powerful. Okay, okay. I'm on my soapbox. I'm sorry.

Colleen Schnettler 27:16
It's funny, because like, you keep going to your soapbox and I keep pretending that I'm going to do it and then not doing it. So. So I'm gonna what's uh, what are you? I don't know. I don't know, Michelle, this whole experience is you know, a weird psychological introspection.

Michele Hansen 27:35
Leaving your comfort zone.

Colleen Schnettler 27:36
It's I know, in my comfort zone was so warm and cozy. It's a nice in here. Nice in his comfort zone. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's just such a different skill set. I mean, you're literally cold emailing someone asking them to get on a phone call with you. I mean, it's 2021. People don't talk on the phone. So it's just a lot of things. I don't know why I just put it off. Like, every time this week, I thought about reaching out to someone. I was like, oh, but I got to finish. I got to fix this part. First, I got to fix this part first. I think it's like a fear of perfectionism. I'm sure right? Because there's gonna be negative feedback, presumably at some point. And so it's just just learning how to not internalize that in a personal way.

Michele Hansen 28:19
There's always going to be negative feedback. There's always going to be mean people like, but I mean, of the probably 1000s of interviews I've done like, I can really only think of like, two or three that made me uncomfortable, and only one where someone straight up insulted me.

Colleen Schnettler 28:47
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen 28:48
Yeah. And actually, that one where the woman insulted me. She ended up giving me the most amazing information in that interview, because she thought I was stupid. And so she explained things to me about how she thought about things on the most basic levels. And it was so good. Like, and I actually when she, she, she, she basically called me stupid, and I was doing it with a co worker. And and I heard that and I was like, oh, now she's gonna she's gonna say everything. Like, she's going to over explain everything. And I you know, I threw out basically like a touchdown sign to my coworker. I was sitting there when I was like, here comes the good stuff. And I was so excited. Um, you know, I mean, don't take it personally. Right? Like, it's just business like, they're, yeah, they're not insulting you. Like if they're saying there's stuff you need to work on, then. You know, you say, okay, thank thank you so much, can you can you tell me why that would work better for you? Like, everything is an opportunity for you to learn more about what their process is so that you can make the assumptions that you have made in your product better fit, whatever their process is?

Colleen Schnettler 29:56
Yeah, I definitely. And it's not even that. I'm worried. People be mean, per se, like, I assume people that get on the phone, you know, we'll be fine that get on the phone with me, we'll be fine. It's just, I don't really know. But I think I just need to rip the band aid off and start getting people on the phone. And so this is part of like you said, I'm, this is way out of my comfort zone. And so here's a growth opportunity for me, and I'm never going to be successful if I don't do it. So now I'm telling you today, like when we talk next week, I will have made a real attempt to get at least one person on the phone who's using my product to talk to them about their pain points around file upload. That's like my small but but still important weekly go.

Michele Hansen 30:41
So when does you're only working on Fridays, or one day a week? I guess I just assumed Friday, one day a week start.

Colleen Schnettler 30:50
Next week,

Michele Hansen 30:51
what day of the week, is it going to be?

Colleen Schnettler 30:54
Well, it was going to be Friday, I think I'm I think Friday. Okay,

Michele Hansen 31:00
it's a good day. Okay. And I think I think this could be really good for you, because it'll also force you to time box things. Like you could say, okay, like, this is the marketing hour. And this is the hour when I'm going to slot in my customer interviews. And this is the hour when I get to have, you know, fun playing around in the magical forest of new feature development. And yes, you know, like, our building in time for those things so that you know, it's going to happen and that you know, that you don't have to sit in that discomfort for very long, right. Like, if

Colleen Schnettler 31:36
you love that only

Michele Hansen 31:38
an hour, like it's only an hour of torturing yourself with new things that you don't know how to do, that are mentally exhausting, because they are new like that, that is totally normal. That is a well documented psychological phenomena that doing new things, and learning new things is more mentally taxing than something that's familiar. And, and I will also, I think it could be good for you too. Because this tendency of reading instead of doing the work, like you have the whole week to plan out that work. And so if you're like, I want to work on the landing page, and so maybe at night, or whatever that is like during the week, it's like, Okay, I'm going to scroll through Harry's marketing examples on Twitter, and look at landing pages or whatever, like just like small things to build yourself up to it.

Colleen Schnettler 32:33
Okay, that's a great idea. It's funny, because you just, you just totally called me out for not doing the work. And I'm doing the same thing with you. Like, I'm asking you every week about customer interviews, and I'm, I'm internalizing all this great knowledge You're giving me but I have yet to actually do the work and it's so weird, but it's okay. Like,

Michele Hansen 32:51
it's a thing. It's not something you have any background or training or anything. And like, that's okay to be scared by it and procrastinate, because you don't even know what the work is to do like that. That's

Colleen Schnettler 33:08
okay. The problem is, when you're, you're entering kind of these new these new fields or these new areas, it's like you don't even know what the work is.

Michele Hansen 33:15
And you're a solo founder to like you don't have somebody else who is bringing in that kind of experience, like, you know, Mateus and I had that advantage because we both come at it from from largely different disciplines Now, like I was a product person so I also had to learn marketing and and sales though. And accounting but but it like it was there, you know, I had time to explore those things because because because that was just falling in my domain.

Colleen Schnettler 33:53
Yeah. Okay, I love the time boxing idea. Before we record again, I will pick a day and I will time box out some hours to actually do this. Let's start doing it.

Michele Hansen 34:04
Let's do it. Yeah. All right.

I guess I guess that'll wrap us up for this week. Thanks so much for listening to software social, we, by the way we seriously love when people tweet out about you're listening to an episode and you liked it or it just it just makes my day when those things come through. So if you liked the show or our show, definitely tweet at us and let us know or post a review on iTunes. Thanks so much.

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Michele Hansen 0:00
This episode of Software Social is brought to you by Balsamiq. Balsamiq decided to support the Software Social community by donating their sponsored airtime to some of our listeners.

This episode is sponsored by GetTheAudience. Every entrepreneur has the same problem. Find out who their audience of their product or service is, what they talk about a need, and when to engage with them in a fruitful conversation. Get the Audience helps entrepreneurs to understand and develop their audience much easier than before. It's a web based tool with a monthly or yearly subscription, created by a bootstrapped founder, Matthias Bohlen. You can get GetTheAudience at gettheaudience.com.

Thanks again to Balsamiq for generously sponsoring our listeners this way. If you'd like to receive a promo code for Balsalmiq, visit balsalmiq.com/go/software-social.

Colleen Schnettler 0:55
We are super excited to have a guest on today's podcast. We are joined today by Danielle Simpson, the co-founder of Feedback Panda.

Danielle Simpson
Hi, Colleen. Hi, Michelle.

Michele Hansen 1:07
Hey, Danielle, I am so excited to have you on today.

Danielle Simpson 1:11
Thank you for having me.

Michele Hansen 1:13
So, so excited. So I want to give a quick background on you. And then we're gonna dive right in.

So Danielle is the co-founder of Feedback Panda. And how this came about is Danielle is a classically trained opera singer, who moved to Berlin. And while she was singing, she started teaching English online. And part of that process for teaching the students is to provide them with feedback. And her she and her partner Arvid Kahl who many of you probably know from Twitter, figured out that the process for this feedback could be much more efficient. And there was actually a software solution in here to make that easier for teachers. And so they launched feedback panda together. And then they sold feedback panda in 2019. And so I am so excited to have you here, Danielle, because I feel like there's so much for us to learn from from you. And just so many different points, whether that's, you know, starting a company based on your own needs, scaling that company, figuring out what other people need, even you know, selling that company, and then what do you do after selling that company? There's so much in your story that I think really resonates with people. And so I'm so excited to hear your perspective on everything.

Danielle Simpson 2:38
Thanks. Yeah, it's my privilege to be here and to share it with you.

Michele Hansen 2:44
So my first question, you started Feedback Panda based on your own needs. And this is a recurring theme of our show, it's where Geocodio came from. It's where Colleen's Simple File Upload came from. It's where a lot of great bootstraped companies come from. And in those early days, it can be really hard to prioritize your different needs. And when you're solving something for yourself, you know, there's a million things that could be done. And so I'm really curious to hear more like, like, when you first started it, how did you even figure out what you should work on and what you should work on next?

Danielle Simpson 3:22
So thank you so much for asking this question. Because it's definitely, you know, if you didn't bring it up, this was something I really wanted to share, about how we prioritized work. In the beginning, it was really easy to divide the different work because Arvid was the programmer and, you know, I would have the ideas, I have the knowledge about what the teachers need, what I needed. So I could tell him what to build. And then he would build it. And then so we work super closely. In this kind of like feedback loop where he would build something, I would test it out, I would give him feedback. He iterate on that. And so before we had customers -- super easy, super easy to just kind of build a prototype of a product.

And then about a year, no, sorry, about four months in when we actually had customers. And before this, like adrenaline of something needs to be done and you just are like on autopilot, you just figure out a way to do it. We actually made this pretty expansive chart of 52 roles that we thought our company had. We're a company of two, but we got really specific about different departments, different positions in each department. And then what job what responsibilities each of those, call them people or positions had. So whenever we were kind of stuck for, okay, there's a million things that need to be done today, but what role hasn't seen some attention from us? Or what role kind of gets forgotten about because there's customer service is always something that's like super prominent, because it's actually somebody on the other line that's wanting your attention. But so in that kind of part of the company for, you know, customer experience and customer success, of course, the person on the desk is getting a lot of attention. But what about, you know, who's building the knowledge base? Is that getting a priority, and then, you know, that's going to help the person on the customer desk. And so we got super specific on these different roles. And also, who was going to be responsible for them, which was important that Arvid knew what he was responsible for, I knew what my responsibilities were.

And, and so I think part of the the issue with priority is that we don't always know what the work is, we don't always have this clear understanding of what is this role? And I know, I need to work on marketing, but like, what does that mean? I don't know. So, getting really specific about what the marketing role is, or, you know, the content writer, or all of these different, who's posting to Instagram, all of these different little jobs, even, we're little roles that our company had. So we were very, we had a very clear picture, visually, to consult to when things were getting a bit overwhelming, then we could just look at this and see what needed to be done.

Michele Hansen 6:47
That's so fascinating. I've never heard of anyone doing that for a two person company. I mean, it's it's ingenious, and, and it sounds like as much as it is defining what the roles and tasks are. Because I think that's a challenge I definitely face into a lot of other people. face too is, you know, figuring out what even needs to be done. And you're also defining what that role isn't, right, like you defined 52 roles, but not 100 roles, like -- there you are, you're scoping the company itself. It's, it sounds like, not just tasks.

Danielle Simpson 7:27
Absolutely. And then this also became kind of the the structure of who do we want our first hires to be? You know, this role is taking up so much of our time, is it time to bring somebody in, of course, long story short, we never ended up hiring anyone. But you know, we had that layout that structure so that we knew where we could possibly, you know, substitute ourselves out and put someone else in.

Michele Hansen 7:57
That makes a ton of sense.

Colleen Schnettler 8:00
So when you guys were this far along, were you both full time by this point?

Danielle Simpson 8:05
Not quite. So we did this for months after launching this big, you know, 52 person company, chart, but we went full time. I guess it was about 10 months, 10 months in. Let me just check my math. Yeah, it was about 10 months in when Arvid quit his job. And I, I had been scaling back on my own teaching, I was still teaching. But then in February of 2018, was when I taught my last class.

Colleen Schnettler 8:41
So you guys, were still working other jobs and running your company. While you were trying to prioritize these kind of 52 roles within your company? That sounds like a lot.

Danielle Simpson 8:55
Yeah, I mean, 52 roles sounds like a lot, of course. But, but I really think that once you actually have clarity on something, and like that's sometimes half the work is just understanding what the work is. So once we could really be agreed. So once we could really be intentional about the time that we had to spend on feedback Panda, then I felt that it was pretty clear. You knew Wednesday, we're spending time on Feedback Panda, then what job you were supposed to be doing.

Colleen Schnettler 9:35
Yeah, I love that because you don't spend a ton of time spinning your wheels in this. You know, I'm like way in the beginning of this process. And I have a list of what feels like hundreds of things to do. And the problem is like without a focus on what is this, to your point, what is marketing mean? Like, what path, what bandwidth? Do I have to go down that path and how do I do it? It's kind of like all over the place. So I kind of I've really actually love this idea of defining the work and defining the roles really specifically.

Danielle Simpson 10:06
And I should clarify, there were a few roles that we both said, I don't want anything to do with this. Like, I didn't want to have to do anything tax reporting. I love bookkeeping. I didn't, I didn't want to, you know, be responsible for anything to do with the government or the FinanzAmt is what it's called in here in Germany, I, you know, really wanted to avoid that. Arvid is also very happy to let somebody else do that. So that was a position in our company, we said, but really, it was just our tax advisor had working for us. And then, and then also, bloggers, were one of the first people that we contracted to do things for us, because I wanted to have some content on on the website wanted to have a blog. But I find the whole process of writing quite laborious. So that was something I was happy to have other people to do.

Michele Hansen 11:10
You mentioned a couple of times how you would talk to the teacher community. And you would talk to them on these different formats, whether that was Instagram or other places, and people talk a lot about choosing an audience. Actually, I think Arvid talks about this quite a bit on Twitter and might be writing a second book on this, if I'm not mistaken.

Danielle Simpson 11:31
That's right -- Audience First, coming to you, we'll see.

Michele Hansen 11:38
And I think what's so interesting to this, to me is that, you know, you didn't really choose an audience, you you were the audience and, and so I love this idea. Because, you know, we talk a lot about about using customer empathy, and you had a how do we use empathy for our customers and translate that into priorities and tasks and a successful business. And most of us naturally have at least some amount of empathy for ourselves. And so it's, you know, it's sort of straightforward to translate that into other people who are in a similar situation as ourselves. And it sounds like you were in that situation, being so close to the English teacher community online.

Danielle Simpson 12:25
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, also has to be said that Arvid was seeing this as well, through my work. Even as a child, though, I remember looking at teaching as a profession, and thinking, wow, these are people who put their heart and soul into their work, and they will do anything at any hour to help their students succeed. So immediately, I felt when, you know, I had the idea that this could be something that could be shared to help other teachers, it felt like something we were compelled to do, like, a way I really wanted to help an audience, you know, quote, unquote, that was quite underserved, and sometimes undervalued.

Michele Hansen 13:22
I love how you mentioned that Arvid saw this too. And I think this is such a critical point. Because developers need to be near the user, they need to be able to interact with the user and understand them. Not just as a user, but as a person. And you know, Colleen, you've talked about how, in your college engineering classes, there was not a lot of focus put on understanding the user and building empathy for the user. And even still, there's so many companies that really, they either hesitate to put developers in front of users, or they just think it's a waste of a developer's time. But it's not. It's so incredibly powerful when you can get the person who is using a product in the same room with the developer. And can you just talk a little bit more about that? Like, what like, what was the experience like for you seeing him learn about your community?

Danielle Simpson 14:24
Yeah, so I think, of course, it started with me, being the first to us are the first customer of our product. But Arvid was also heavily involved with the customer service and having conversations with people we had. At the very beginning, we used a small chat tool on the website, and then eventually changed it over to Intercom. But we always had this direct line where we could talk to users who were on the app. And so at the beginning, it was mostly me leading through that leading them through just, this is my idea for what we have to offer you. You know, how does it match up with, you know, what you think we're offering this kind of conversations, but also, those were kind of sales conversations as well, you know, like, having, explaining what we were offering. And so I think he learned a lot of how to communicate with our customers through those original conversations that I was having. But then he just jumped right in and, you know, had lots of conversations with teachers as well. And yeah, I mean, part of it is just who he is, I think that it came very natural to him. So it's hard for me to kind of like, pinpoint what he was doing. But I think definitely having that direct line of communication on the website, where if there was something that teachers needed, a lot of feature requests would come in there. And, you know, we would both have those conversations, one on one, you know, with whoever was talking to us, but then we would come together and talk about them together. So he was very much a part of the community and the teachers just adored him. Because they were not far from a magician who could just make you know, their wishes come true. And help them with their teaching.

Colleen Schnettler 16:40
I love this, because I feel like, just from this conversation we're having now, you were driven to create this product, like as altruism, because you really felt like it would it would help these people and improve their lives. And I feel like in the in engineering, and in development, sometimes we're taught, not explicitly taught, but kind of internalize it. Like, that's not how you make money, right? Like there's this focus of you make money this way. These are two different things. And I just love when someone can build a product that enriches people's lives and makes money makes me really happy.

Michele Hansen 17:16
Yes. Yeah. Like it just, it's that whole, like, yeah, it's the whole Conscious Capitalism thing. Like I think I, like you mentioned on episodes ago, the Lapsed Anarchist's Guide to Building a Great Business, which is one of my favorite business books, but it, it also hammers down that point of like, you can approach business, from an altruistic perspective from a perspective of helping people rather than, you know, exploiting them and taking as much money from them as possible, like, you can run a business that that helps people and provides a living for you. And those two things can work together.

Danielle Simpson 17:53
Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, it was also such a wonderful thing to have this direct conversation with customers with people who have to think about all of the subscription fees that Arvid refunded, or, you know, just gave grace periods for because people were having trouble making ends meet or, you know, were waiting on a support paycheck, or whatever it was he he really was about a human approach. It wasn't just numbers. And yet the bottom lines. It was always about serving another human being.

Michele Hansen 18:41
A human approach to business.

Colleen Schnettler 18:45
So I have a question about the early days, you were your first customer. And so it sounds like the two of you were really able to create a product you knew would be would well serve these teachers. Did you have any trouble finding customers? Or did you find that the teachers were so excited about it, they just kind of showed up out of the woodwork.

Danielle Simpson 19:04
That's a nice image. It really was that way. You know, I had been there was multiple communities on Facebook, or, you know, in private spaces that the company hosted, where people were having problems, just keeping up with the number of students, the number of reports that we had to do, and developing systems to deal with this extra work that we had. So I was observing these different communities and how people communicated and you know, just the dynamic in them. So when it came time that we were ready to actually share the product. I just went to the communities and shared that we had a product that could help them with some of these issues that you know, they were looking for solutions for their already looking for solutions. So it was quite welcome when I presented one.

Michele Hansen 20:06
I want to go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago, you said when you were talking to customers, especially new customers who might be coming to you from from one of these groups, that you would say something to the effect of, you know, "Here's what we think we do, does that match what you think we do?" And this struck me because it sounds like something that Colleen is going through right now. And I'm curious to hear you say a little bit more about that. And, and, and, and how those, you know, would that match up? Or would people think you were doing things differently? And how would that change your thinking about what your product did for people.

Danielle Simpson 20:45
Um, so I have to say that I was quite confident in my solution, I was quite like, I was confident that what I'd built worked for me, so there would be others like me. I wasn't so in this really beginning phase where I was trying to build something that maybe like the mass wanted, of course, this is always a really good idea. I don't want to dig myself into any holes here, because this is really important. But it was also just about, like, getting this idea bank for, okay, what kind of features we might want to add on in the future, or, you know, are people thinking about our product this way, because this is the only thing that exists for them yet. And now I can just like, blow their minds with the new wave of doing something. So that's a little bit. I won't judge myself there. But I think that's pretty confident in what we built.

Yeah, so what was really interesting from those conversations was the features that we hadn't built. And yet, most of the teachers really liked what we were offering. And I was also pretty, like non-offended. If it wasn't what they thought it should be. I understand like, there's so many different human beings, we're all so different, if this isn't how you visualize feedback, your workflow, whatever, it is totally fine with me. But there was some really golden ideas that came from early conversations, and also staying involved in Facebook groups, where people were talking about our product, saying, I learned a lot just from kind of being a fly on the wall. I think that can also be super useful. And one of the features that teachers kind of expected to be a part of our product was template sharing, feedback template sharing among teachers. Because this was something that existed in like a Google Sheet, and where people would just put in different templates that they had for different courses. So they kind of were hoping that would be a part of Feedback Panda's offering. And this was like, a no brainer, just with this stickiness of template database, if you can, up the whatever you're offering. Yeah, there was like a variable reward part of the business there, where people could change other templates. And so this was a really, really great feature that neither Arvid nor I had thought of that came from observing community, talking to teachers, getting their feedback about, like, how they might want it implemented, and building it quite quickly. I mean, like I said, the teacher thought Arvid was a wizard, and that's because he built up this feature, you know, in a month. This is like template database is what we call it.

Michele Hansen 24:05
I love how that, you know, came from the conversations with the customers. And it wasn't something that you guys, you know, had ever really occurred to you. But then as you said, it was something that not only helped the teachers, but made your product stickier, and to what we were just saying, you know, that is something that had both an altruistic end result, and also one that helped your business and made your product stickier for them because it was more valuable to them.

Danielle Simpson 24:32
Exactly.

Michele Hansen 24:34
I want to fast forward a little bit. So you guys sold the company in 2019. And I guess can you can you take us back there? Had you guys you intended to sell the company?

Danielle Simpson 24:54
I think it was always kind of an option in the back of our minds. But You know, we were two years in, we weren't really thinking about selling at that point. But we did build systems in the company that made sense to keep running it and, you know, made it efficient for us to stay a small team and keep running it. And this also happens to be what makes it very attractive to potential acquirers. So. So yeah, I think it was always an option for us, like the door was open pretty well, but but we didn't, we weren't looking for for acquires or anything like that, at this point.

Michele Hansen 25:43
And, you know, given your close connection to the community, and how you had come out of the community, you know, I think people think about selling their company, and they probably think more, you know, about the paycheck that comes, but not so the other things that that come out of that. And I'm curious how if you can say more about how that impacted how you perceived your role in this community and to your users.

Danielle Simpson 26:16
So I was -- both Arvid, and myself, had kind of become almost like rockstars in this ESL community, because this is a community of entrepreneurial teachers. So our success is also very inspirational to them and showing them what they could possibly do. A lot of teachers had Teachers Pay Teachers shops, a lot of people were referring a lot of other teachers to these platforms. So these are really cool group of teachers, very entrepreneurial. So when we sold after we sold it, I kind of, or I shouldn't say kind of -- I very much felt disconnected with this community suddenly, because I didn't feel like I could engage with them in the same way. I always was engaging with them as the representative from Feedback Panda. And I was careful. Going back to your previous question about whether we had thought about selling, I was always careful not to build too much of a brand around myself, as the founder of Feedback Panda, because I thought that would make it just more difficult to transition the company if I wasn't the CEO of the company anymore. So I was still hesitant of that. But it still happened, because it's just such a wonderful inspiring story to build to have a teacher, a fellow teacher built this company. So after we sold, I did feel like I lost that. That authentic way to engage with them, because I didn't really feel like, like I could, I didn't feel like one of them anymore.

Michele Hansen 28:18
That makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like that was really hard for you.

Danielle Simpson 28:23
Yeah, it was hard. Not the rock star part. But I think the hard part was so much of what we woke up and did every day, brought so much value to other people's lives. It was so gratifying. And it was very clear how we were helping people. You know, still people would, you know, two years and people would have just discovered Feedback Panda, go to a Facebook group or write to us directly on Intercom and just thank us. So, you know, teachers, we had wonderful, wonderful customers and very grateful customers. So I wasn't really prepared for how much I would mourn that, that just clear purpose. Just you know, how you're helping people in the world today. And it feels good.

So after selling the company, even though I had read, you know, many the few blog posts, actually that there are for bootstrapped companies that have sold and, and reading about people's experiences through through the sale and afterward, you know, you kind of see, okay, yeah, there's gonna be maybe this dip. So I, I'll be prepared, because I know that's coming. This little dip where you're not really sure what to do. And of course, it helps if you know what you're going to do next. But even though I kind of knew it was coming, it's still hit pretty hard, I did fall into this melancholy, I would call it, it's just where you're not quite sure what you're going to do next. And that kind of purpose for what was so clear, you know, every day when you were waking up to do to do good in the world, it kind of went away. So. So that was that was strong. Last year, I would say.

Colleen Schnettler 30:32
It's interesting, because I think what you have achieved is the goal of a lot of founders. But the more founders I talked to who have actually successfully exited, share similar feelings as yours is, it's they, they had so much purpose. And they exited in a way they wanted to, but it's not like life is suddenly perfect. It's it's your starting over. And what do you do now? And it's just really interesting to hear that, because there's so much, you know, rainbows and sunshine surrounding most people, most of these people's stories, like most people just want to tell you the good parts. And you don't hear a lot about, like everything else that comes with that.

Danielle Simpson 31:14
And yeah, absolutely, I think there was also a lot of celebrations and feeling proud of ourselves. And, of course, there was, yeah, just a feeling of accomplishment. And, like, we had left something good in the world, even though we weren't, you know, steering the ship anymore. It, it was also it was kind of like this, where you kind of oscillate in between different states where you're just you can't believe this happened. And then you're very proud. And then you're like, Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do next? What, what am I going to do? Well, I'm not doing anything kind of feelings. But I still do, even though this really intense melancholy came, I still feel that it was the right decision. And I know we sold for the right decision for the right reasons as well. Because I, I even though I loved helping the teachers, it felt like that phase was done for me. Like I was ready to move on to something else. But I also just think I'd look back at other experiences I've had, whether it was coming off of a show run, you know, doing recitals or doing shows, and you have all of this excitement, and all of these positive emotions that are associated with this performance. And then after the performance is over, then you go through this like a lull, it's like you really go on the other side of the wave. And so it makes total sense now, looking, you know, hindsight. And I think the bigger and more gratifying our experiences are, maybe the more intense that wave on the bottom end is going to be, but it also comes back up again. And and that's what I keep feeling like now, I'm, I'm in the building stage, I'm in the Okay, I'm clearing out any blocks, anything that's gonna hold me back next time, all the things that I've learned from running Feedback Panda. And I'm, like, riding the wave up again.

So sometimes I feel when we're in that low, we're scared that it might last forever. Or we're scared that it's just got us and it's gonna hold us down. But, yeah, I think there's work that we can do. And you know, we see the other side coming out.

Michele Hansen 34:15
I just love the way you put that and how you put that in perspective of other experiences. Like it's really beautiful how you phrase that.

And, you know, you're reminding me of something one of our previous guests, Alex Hillman said a couple of months ago, he tweeted out: "Almost every person I've ever met who sold their company needs therapy. That's not snark. I genuinely believe it should be part of the package. Money doesn't overwrite the grief that comes out of founder exits."

Danielle Simpson 34:46
Absolutely. Where is this? I need to put that somewhere where I can remind myself.

Michele Hansen 34:53
I'll l put a link to it in the show notes.

Danielle Simpson 34:55
That's so wonderful. And I think I really appreciate hearing somebody else sharing that experience, because a lot of what keeps us down in that low point is also just shaming ourselves for having these negative feelings out of something so positive. So yeah, there's liberation and knowing that other people have been there before.

Michele Hansen 35:22
Absolutely. And you talked about how you feel like you're on the other side of that curve now. And so I am curious, what's next?

Danielle Simpson 35:33
I don't really know. That's something I'm getting more comfortable saying, Yeah, I I'm doing the work is what I say I'm doing the work, which means making a practice of things that are important to me. And clearing away this kind of negative voice that tells you that you're not enough or that what you want to work on isn't really worthy of your time. So unlike, in other years, I'm actually approaching this kind of work. Getting to know myself, getting creative. I'm approaching this like I would like, as a college course, or as starting a company, you know, diligently with routine with a schedule making that big priority for me, because I think in this past year, where I did feel lost, I kind of wanted to skip this phase, where you skip to the "I already have a product, I already know what I want to work on. Okay, let's get talking to people and start building something." But actually, the work that comes before that is really important. And that's kind of where the magic happens, where you can actually come up with whatever it's going to be, and I'm not sure really what that looks like, if it looks like another SaaS or it looks like putting out an album or you know, like, painting, I'm a terrible painter would never be painting. Whatever that could look like. I'm really saying that that has value, that doing that kind of work, getting to know myself. And what I want to do next is is a value and I'm not sure how long this phase will last. But I think it's an important one.

Michele Hansen 37:48
I admire you for sitting in your discomfort and rather than running away from it, you're exploring it and seeing what it has to teach you and and in that discomfort. You're seeing so much confidence in you and how you talk about that and how this this period for you, even though you don't know what is what's going to come, what strikes me is those outcomes you talked about as possibilities. All of those are run by you. You have a founders perspective now. You you know that you can do it, you know that you can run a company or launch an album, which I'm sure is just as complicated and time consuming as launching a company is.

Danielle Simpson 38:33
Oh, absolutely.

Michele Hansen 38:35
You believe you can do it now. And you're you know, we talked about how Colleen for a long time was looking for a product to build. And I think we described that on more than one occasion as sort of wandering through the woods and Colleen finally emerging from the woods and having a product and but you're not wandering, you're just sort of sitting there meditating in the woods and just allowing yourself to be consumed by that. But knowing that when you leave, you will not just be walking out, you will be leading your own way out and building your own future and not being reliant on other people for that. And that's just incredible and so admirable.

Danielle Simpson 39:19
Thank you. Thanks. I think that kind of stillness, I guess I could call it too. I like this idea of just meditating in the woods. It takes a lot of trust, to trust that there will be something if I put in the work, if I put in the hours, then something will emerge. And so yeah, I think it's about trust.

Colleen Schnettler 39:53
Can I ask what does that actually look like? Like I don't know how to sit in discomfort very well. So like, what would you say? Like put in the act like what are you actually doing?

Danielle Simpson 40:04
Um, so I have lots of quirky habits, that, that I think are quite meaningful and actually help. A lot of the work is like clearing away the BS, the BS, like voice in our head that tells us that we can't do what we want to do. And some people it's like, really strong and other people, you know, it's like very small, and so they don't really have to do that much work. But for me, it's like setting healthy routines. waking up every morning and I, I do this practice called Morning Pages. It's actually just like stream of consciousness writing. And that, okay, helps clear away. Negative voices that can cut sometimes inhibit you. And so I do that every morning, I have a yoga practice that is very important. I noticed when I don't do it, it's always when you haven't done the different practices that you start to notice. But then it's also about not waiting until you feel inspired to actually create something like, Oh, I have a great product idea. Let's start. I don't know, what's the first thing we do buy a domain or like, check Instagram to see if the handle is available. But actually, just like, I don't know, if you're a writer, just sit down in front of a computer and write something every day, if you want to make an album sit at your piano or whatever, in front of the computer, and like, just dedicate time to actually doing those things. And then I think, if you create that practice of already creating then, then you create the space to become inspired. Right? It's not waiting for the inspiration, and then I'll do the work. It's I'm going to, I'm going to do the work. And then maybe I'll be inspired in the middle of it. So I'm thinking about like a lot of creative work, like designing things like this, like don't wait for a job, just start building your portfolio, and then maybe a job will come from that or, you know, yeah, I think I think there's many different ways. It's just like the artistic ones that are coming to mind.

Michele Hansen 42:39
Colleen, that reminds me of when you like decided that you were going to be serious about trying to build your own company and get out of consulting. You designated one day a week for your side projects. And you didn't necessarily know what those projects were going to be. But you're like Friday is my day. And that's the day that stuff is going to happen.

Colleen Schnettler 43:01
Yeah, absolutely. And it made a huge difference. And, you know, this, this first product came out of something that I wanted myself, and I still don't know if it's gonna work out if anyone else wants it. But I think to your point, Danielle, like, I did something and that was better. I'm someone who's gets stuck reading and reading about how to do things like I just read about how to do them. But sometimes it's hard for me to pull out from like just reading to actually doing so once I dedicated more time to just doing and tried to set aside some of my perfectionism tendencies. I made a lot more progress.

Danielle Simpson
Absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler
What you said about like self and self worth really touched a chord in me I have a post it I keep on my desk that says everything you want is on the other side of fear. And like, I just really struggle with like letting go of the BS, like you were just saying, and it's just weird. Like, sometimes I think for me my inability to get out of my own way. So I love this this concept of like making space and kind of sitting in that discomfort to sort it out.

Danielle Simpson 44:09
I love that. That's a great Post It, and it's nice if you have these little things that you can be helpful reminders to keep them close, keep them in a space where they remind you or inspire you.

Michele Hansen 44:27
You know what you said about the post it note? Was it everything you want is on the other side of fear is that right?

Colleen Schnettler 44:33
That's right. That's what I wrote.

Michele Hansen 44:34
I love that I think there's there's people have so much fear I have so much fear and and you know to what Danielle is doing in such an amazing way of sitting with the discomfort and allowing it to be there. I think if we allow the fear to be there, that what we've built isn't good enough or that a competitor is just going to come in and crush us and all of this will be for nothing or whatever that is, we have to face it rather than because if we run from it we we haven't built anything.

Colleen Schnettler
I love that, it's such a hard but important lesson to learn.

Michele Hansen
Danielle, it was so amazing having you with us today. If people want to hear more about the story of Feedback Panda, your partner, Arvid Kahl wrote a book called Zero to Sold. He's also writing a new book called Audience First. But you are on Twitter as well. And we will put a link in the show notes to your Twitter account.

Danielle Simpson 45:34
Awesome. Yeah, I'm at SimpsonDaniK, da and IK on Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a privilege and a pleasure to speak with you both.

Colleen Schnettler 45:47
That's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social podcast. If you enjoyed our podcast, we would love it if you would leave us a review. You can also find us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod.

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Colleen Schnettler 0:00
This episode of Software Social is sponsored by Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Wireframes, everyone's favorite low-fidelity wireframing tool.

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Because they're already well known in our community, Balsamiq have decided to donate their airtime to YOU, listeners of this show, starting with the next episode.

If you want a promo code for Balsamiq, visit balsamiq.com/go/software-social/

Michele Hansen 0:43
So as you may have just noticed, we have a sponsor now. So exciting. I mean, we, even we so we got we got reached out to you by balsalmic in October, to our official podcast email address, which I actually never checked, because I didn't expect anyone to email us and I found this email sitting there in December. And I was like, Oh my God.

Colleen Schnettler 1:10
That's funny. I had no idea that they they did that. Yeah, I've never checked our email address either.

Michele Hansen 1:15
We check it now.

Colleen Schnettler 1:17
Yeah, it's really it. You know what I'm really happy it was balsamic because I do use them. And I just think it's really cool to have a sponsor. Although now my podcast about my product is making more money than my product.

Michele Hansen 1:29
You'll get there. It's okay. I don't

Colleen Schnettler 1:32
get there. I did have one more person sign up. stripe paid me $10 I know $10 I went That's awesome. Wait.

Michele Hansen 1:42
We straight paid you $10? Is that the first money you've gotten for it? Yes, ma'am.

Colleen Schnettler 1:47
It sure is.

Unknown Speaker 1:48
That's a huge moment. Oh my gosh,

Colleen Schnettler 1:50
it is a huge moment. It's It's exciting.

Michele Hansen 1:54
I wish you could tape $1 bill to your terminal like

Colleen Schnettler 2:00
I should ask like, can you like send me like $1 bill from this? tape it up on my wall.

Michele Hansen 2:07
So this is really exciting. We're really excited to have a sponsor. But you know, this reminds me of something else, which is, it's really hard times right now in the world. Like there's, there's just no getting past that. And if you're listening to this show, you're probably interested in running a bootstrap company, or you're trying to start a side project yourself. And, and I, and I just want to say for a second how, like, yes, this is amazing. And we just got a sponsor. But I also don't want to add to this perception that sort of that I pick up sometimes it's sort of everybody else is doing well, except for oneself. Right? Like, I feel like, you know, on Twitter and everywhere else where the, the community kind of congregates. Like, we tend to share positive things more than we do. things we're struggling with. Right? Yeah. And and I've noticed in a couple of smaller communities I'm in and sort of private places. This this past couple weeks that I've seen more people saying like, Wow, it feels like everybody's killing it except for me.

Colleen Schnettler 3:16
Yeah, I agree. I think there, there's so much when we share publicly, you know, we're protecting ourselves, and we're protecting our ego. And so we share the good things, and we don't share the challenging things. And it isn't really challenging time. And, and I agree with you, it's important to remember that things are hard. And everyone's coping with the situation differently. Like, just three days ago, I was lamenting how much I missed my full time job because it was so low stress, like it was so much easier than this. And, and you know, some of my friends were able to give me a pep talk. But I was just like, this is a terrible idea. I'm wasting my time. So So I think those emotional highs and lows are, are normal. And I think they're exacerbated right now because of external stresses.

Michele Hansen 4:01
Absolutely. And, and so I just kind of want to say that, like, if you're finding yourself, not able to focus and are feeling like you're spinning your wheels and things aren't working, like that's okay. And you're okay. And you will be okay. And also at the same time that if you find yourself working compulsively and unable to stop working to the point of, you know, working instead of being your friends and family or things like like like that is also a trauma response in the same way that not being able to do anything is as well. And we all respond to trauma and stressors differently. And no matter how you're reacting, you're okay. And other people aren't sharing the full story of what's going on in their life. So it's not just you that struggling. Other people are too but this is not a current events podcast. It's not a mental health podcast. We're not gonna go into that too much more. But I did just want to make a note of that since I mean, like the last few weeks have been just really hard. But you do have good news, right? amidst all of this, there are somehow good things happening to which is also just mentally confusing.

Colleen Schnettler 5:21
Yes, so I, you know, I just did mention that emotional swing I had this week, I was like, this was a terrible idea. But, um, things my signups have been pretty steady. And I did get one more customer who has signed up, put a credit card down outside of Heroku. So that makes four or five now. And I have 89 Heroku users. So anticipate being ready to start charging in the Heroku marketplace in a couple weeks. Since I'm averaging. so far. It's been about Yeah, it's pretty exciting. Like I think we're super excited. So of those 89 people or teams, I 40 have actually uploaded files. So for me, what makes it sticky is using it right. So considering how easy it is to sign up, I'm not upset. I feel like that's actually a pretty good number. I'm trying to take each week and focus on one technical thing and one marketing thing.

Unknown Speaker 6:18
So

Colleen Schnettler 6:20
because I'm just really struggling with like, I feel like we talked about this every week now that I've launched something is how to prioritize my time, I have to actually figure out what to charge because I'm going to be charging people. Hopefully in two weeks,

Michele Hansen 6:31
you said you had to the stripe signups for those people who added their credit cards, but they don't have they haven't incurred a charge yet.

Colleen Schnettler 6:38
No, they had I mean, it's $10. But some one of my friends recommended I changed, I changed the price significantly. His argument was that I'm not really a commodity, I'm acting like a commodity when I talk to you when I think of it in my head. But I'm not really a commodity, because I'm not just providing storage, I'm providing all of this architecture, around storage to help you deal with your files. Like I'm not just reselling AWS buckets, there is someone who does this, by the way. It's you know, and his point was my closest competitor is charging $89. So I should have he his suggestion was just charge 75% of that. Interesting. Yeah, it was an interesting thing. I think that I mean, and you know, I don't know a lot about pricing, but what i what i have heard, and what I've read is that, you know, it's probably easy, if I start out way too high, I can always come down. But if I start out way too low, and I realize I'm I'm incurring a lot more charges than I realize it's going to be harder, not impossible, but it's going to be harder to scale up. So I just need a starting point. And you know, I think I can adjust it. So I kind of been thinking about how I want to do that. Yeah, and I got to sort that out.

Michele Hansen 7:51
So I was think about this the other day, you said you only have one close competitor, and they they don't even really do like fully do the same things that you do.

Colleen Schnettler 8:04
Well, since this is this is becoming a, this is this thing I am building is becoming different than what I had intended. And I thought of you because I keep explaining myself by saying, Well, I didn't intend for people to use it with images, I intended them. You know, I intended for them to use it with, you know, all the other files on the internet. But what I have learned from the 40 people that are actually using it is people are predominantly using it with images. So I am slowly rebuilding this, this other service that a lot of rails developers use is called cloudinary. And they're a great company, but they provide this like huge architecture ecosystem, that's just kind of a lot to figure out. If you just want you know, minimal, you know, if you just if you just need a couple files here and there, like using their services, kind of exhausting. But I'm slowly it feels like I'm slowly rebuilding their service, because what I'm finding is people are using it for images. So I just I think and that makes me a little nervous because I'm not trying to compete with you know, this company that is $60 billion a year or something, maybe it's million, a lot of a lot of dollars a year in business. So I don't know. Okay, now I'm kind of off topic, but but I've been trying to think about, like, what who is my market? Who am I trying to serve here? Because I am more and more approaching a similar, you know, a similar service to what they offer. So like, how do I distinguish myself from them? And who can I serve that they are not serving? Like I said, they're predominantly as I understand, like, they hit a lot of rails developers. So you know, maybe once I move to other marketplaces, I'll have more opportunity. And maybe this is all a terrible idea. It's not a terrible idea. This is how I got to like, Oh, this was a terrible idea.

Michele Hansen 9:52
Why did I do this? That's a perfectly normal thought to have many, many times. Like, I mean, that's a thought I have pretty much Every time I, when I go hiking, and then it you know, afterwards I'm like always, like, that was so great, but like, you know, it's getting dark and you still have three miles to go and you're like, why did I think this was a good idea? That's what building a product is like. So these people who are signing up with you, you said that cloudinary is also focusing on rails developers, these rails developers are signing up with you instead, have you been able to, like grok from them? Why they are signing up with you and not cloudinary?

Colleen Schnettler 10:36
I have not. And I need to figure that out. That is actually not you know, now that you say that, that is such an obvious thing to try and figure out my, okay, I know I talk a lot on the show, but my hypothesis, and you're always like, Go ask the customer stuff.

Michele Hansen 10:50
Yeah, it's okay to have hypotheses, I have them all the time, but you have to go test them. That's it's the first step in the process.

Colleen Schnettler 10:56
So when I think back to why I wanted to build this, as opposed to using cloudinary, it was because there are two things and this may have even changed. But cloudberries focus is not on their upload widget. As far as I can tell, their focus is more on on, you know, the whole ecosystem surrounding handling your images, but not really how you get your images into the store. So they have a widget, but the UI, I think the UI of it is really icky. icky, that's a terrible word. I think the UI that is it's not what I wanted, and the setup, just like I mean, they must have 1000 pages of documentation, because they provide this amazing set of features, but just trying to I set it up on this client's website. And you know, just the setup took hours. So my hypothesis, which I have to test is that people sign up with me, because of the five minutes setup, they set it up, they don't have to do anything else, it is super fast. So if I think of how I can compete with them, I got to pick a different market. It's easy, and it's simple, I don't want to offer 5000 features like they have right like I want to keep my feature set tight. And I want to you know, I also they don't they at least they didn't allow you to have multiple widgets on a page and the product I was working on needed, like multiple widgets on a page. So so there's like little things like that, but I think distinguish, but I think the biggest factor is the ease of setup.

Michele Hansen 12:23
And so you mentioned they're focusing on like a tight set of features. And on, you know, eight, it sounds like you really want to focus on on a type of customer that is not very well served by them. And, and that's such a critical thing to figure out. Because, you know, if you were to go and just like look at their site, and literally just build a copy of their service, that would probably be a failure, because you're not building the insights of why people don't just use them why they aren't willing to go through that process and put up with that price for it. And so and so I'm curious, like, like, do you feel like you have gotten more commonalities in what people are telling you about why they're using the service. Last time we talked, you had kind of all these different things, and you had people from different functions with with different purposes, and some people within companies and and some people with consultants and front end developers and back end like and like this whole like mix of people. And I'm curious if you've started to hear similarities in your conversations with customers,

Colleen Schnettler 13:37
in terms of their industries, or in terms of what they're doing

Michele Hansen 13:40
in terms of the activity that they're trying to do. So like putting this in those the jobs to be done terms, which very much looks at rather than looking at customers by function or industry and you know, looking at things like market size, and all that kind of thing. You instead look at customers by process similarities and people who are trying to accomplish similar things or who are going through similar sets of steps in order to reach their end points. And so I'm curious if you've seen any similarities in those steps? Well, I

Colleen Schnettler 14:13
think instalment, this is not exactly what you mean, what I'm seeing, which again, I didn't really anticipate, I probably should have though was most people are using it for images, and they're using some people the image collection is a primary goal of the service and the other like it's a secondary goal.

Michele Hansen 14:33
I think you need to be a little more gentle with yourself and forgiving that you did not first see this coming. I think that's totally normal. And that means that you're that means you're learning and that's valuable. And you know, I think this sometimes there's this perception and sometimes this is how products are built that people just gather in a conference room and decide everything it needs to do and that's everything the customer is going to want and You know, then you spend a year and a half building it. And that's it. But I think that you're learning, right like that, that's, that's valuable. You took what you were struggling with. And now you're learning what other people need to do this with. And so that's, that's exciting. It's a weird feeling. But that's totally okay, that you're learning that people are using it for something else than you had originally pictured.

Colleen Schnettler 15:26
And what I'm seeing too, and I think there's, like, have a mental block here, too, is, this product is not going to be particularly unique, right? It's not like, like, going to be some cool new hotness that no one has thought of, it's gonna be another like way to handle files. That's okay.

Michele Hansen 15:40
That's a common thing. Oh, it's just developers needs to do all the time. And if you can save them from wading through 1000s of pages of documentation, and let them do it in five minutes. People appreciate that. But I

Unknown Speaker 15:54
want to be special. Michelle?

Michele Hansen 15:56
Look, I'm not doing a cloud AI internet of things take over the world service here either. Okay. Like, not all of us can take over the world. And quite frankly, many of us don't want to, it's perfectly okay to have a boring business that a business will reliably pay for every month and have it be something that gets you blank stares at cocktail parties, or cocktails, or whatever it is we have now. Right? It's okay to be boring.

Colleen Schnettler 16:32
Yeah, and I think so I think for me, you know, I think for me, it's really with this product, if I'm going to make this work, because there as I get more and more into the image space, there are more and more competitors. And so I think if I'm going to make this work, I have to there's some things I can do. But I have to find the right audience. And I don't know who that's gonna be yet, but I think that's gonna be some trial and error.

Michele Hansen 16:59
Keep talking to people, you have people coming to you, which is amazing.

Colleen Schnettler 17:05
Yeah, it's good. And I have a couple, like just a handful of people who are really into it. And we're like, constantly chatting with me about feature requests. And, and so those people are fun. I really enjoy that back and forth of how they're using it and how it's helpful for them. And things like that.

Michele Hansen 17:21
So you said earlier that you have about 80 users right now is that 80 total signups or 80, people who are actively using it. So I know for Heroku, there's like this rule that you have to have, you have 100 100 people who are actively using it, in order to be allowed out of the, you know, the little protective garden and be able to sell it.

Colleen Schnettler 17:47
So it's 89. And so I only have to get 11 more people. But those

Michele Hansen 17:51
are all those people are actively using it, or they're installed or what would

Colleen Schnettler 17:56
they have installed it, they have gone through the process

Michele Hansen 17:58
of installing metric that Heroku cares about. Right, okay.

Colleen Schnettler 18:06
And so this other thing, so I spent a lot of time this week. So I think we talked about a while ago, when someone installs it, they have to make it to the second step, single sign on in order to get like all the good stuff. And I spent a lot of time this week wrapping up the Heroku platform partner platforms API, because using that API, I can actually get their email address before they hit single sign on. But it's like, it takes like four API calls. It's ridiculous. But the cool thing I discovered when I was playing around with this API, I can also get their website. Oh, so tell. Yeah, so tell me if this is cool or creepy. So I was thinking of like, one of the things I should do is I could do my goal will be like maybe five to 10 people a week, I'll like hit the API, I'll get their website. And I'll actually like, check out their website, see how they're using it, and then send them a personalized email about like, Hey, I saw you're using it this way. And, you know, I was, you know, as, like details. Is that awesome? I think that's brilliant. Is that really?

Michele Hansen 19:08
Yeah, I think so. Like, you know, if somebody is using a corporate email address, and it's the, that's the website, where they're using it,

Colleen Schnettler 19:16
it's nothing like secret like this is a

Michele Hansen 19:18
web I think that's cool. Like, you know, I mean, being like, hey, like, I checked out your site, like I would love to hear more about how this fits into your process and what you're trying to accomplish.

Colleen Schnettler 19:28
So when I target those people, should I target the P i? You tell me what you think that I'll be back? Should I target the people who are already actively using it? Or should I target the people who are not actively using it? I mean, what do you think? Or just go through them all?

Michele Hansen 19:43
I think you could do both like and you know, there's the the already signed up and using it email could be something along the lines of, Hey, I noticed you've, you know, you started using this service. I would love to hear about what you're working on and how simple file upload fits into Your process and what your overall project look looks like. And then the people who are getting started, and I noticed you just signed up, I love to hear more about what you're planning to use it for, and why you've chosen to use this over alternatives or what other alternatives you're considering to try to do whatever it is you're trying to do. Because I think that question of why are people choosing you over alternatives will tell you so much about your audience and what your product should focus on?

Colleen Schnettler 20:30
I'm a little afraid if I asked them, they're gonna ditch me and go pick someone else.

Michele Hansen 20:35
That's okay. I mean, that's it, that's it,

Colleen Schnettler 20:37
they're gonna be like, Oh, I didn't even know about this other service. I'm out of here.

Michele Hansen 20:41
You know, I mean, that's, you know, that's the the fear of you, you go to the prom, and your date sees everyone else there. And it's like, why the hell am I with you. And I think as most of us can attest, that doesn't actually happen. You know, people might be doing a, you know, ai process to evaluate vendors. And if they're doing that, and they'll tell you that, and they'll tell you, which other vendors they're looking at, and how they're comparing them. That is a goldmine of information. Like, that's really valuable, like the reasons why they choose somebody else, like, the thing is, is somebody says, Well, we want with this other service, because they do X, Y, and Z, and you don't do that, that could, like with that information, you have a choice with what you do with that, you can either decide to go copy those features, or you can decide, you know what, this doesn't sound like a customer. That's right for me, like, it sounds like they're doing trying to do something that for whatever reason, is not something that's within your your wheelhouse, or, you know, the, you know, if they tell you that they went with another provider, because they're SOC two compliant, then that's not like, that's like, okay, that I wasn't going to get that customer anyway. But if they tell you, it's because of some simple difference in the feature, then that's something that's very actionable. You know, unfortunately, for you right now, there are, you know, product based reasons why people, especially like teams, and, you know, operational people within a company will choose a product. And then there are also, you know, procurement and operational reasons why they will choose something else that have little to do with the actual features of the product. And I think it's really critical to try to distinguish between those, because some of them are actionable for you, at the moment, and some of them may not be and are just kind of things to just file away for later. But getting some detail on that can be really helpful.

Colleen Schnettler 22:40
Yeah, I mean, more information, I think, at this stage is, is good, yes, as much

Michele Hansen 22:45
information you can get from your customers like, and that's why it's so key to get them on the phone and get them comfortable talking to you. Because people will be more open. Talking on the phone. And I specifically say talking on the phone, even though it may be over zoom, because if you can, when you're doing the calls with customers, schedule them as a call, not as a video chat. First of all, most people are so tired of video chat at this point. But I find that people are more willing to be open with you when you're like disembodied voice and they can't see your face, then they then they are in video. Now there are some cases where you know, you need to walk through something with someone or you need to see their screen or, which is also really helpful. When I when I'm scheduling things, I purposefully mentioned that it's going to be audio only. And I find you know if you can get your customer rambling about what they're trying to do, like that's a dream scenario, like, you know, yeah, get as much information as you can and and take notes and find some way to make that information usable in the future, even if it's just throwing it into a Google Doc. So you can control a search it later on for keywords.

Colleen Schnettler 24:01
Okay, yeah, that's, that's a great idea. So, yeah, so I'm really just trying to prioritize what to do next. I'm trying to do one marketing and one technical task a week. But I'm finding like, especially in this early stage, there's a lot of technical work like I was having the server timeout issues because of the way I'm processing thumbnails. So I had to deal with that this week.

Michele Hansen 24:21
There's always technical work. I don't

Colleen Schnettler 24:23
want to get too sucked into that to the point where I forget that I need people to sign up. Right. So that's always the balancing act. I think as developers too, you're so tempted to work on all the technical things and just push the marketing things aside. And when I looked at my day, when I when I looked at my week to review for this podcast, it was mostly technical and like one tiny marketing thing. So next week, I want to hopefully flip that a little bit and do more marketing. I am trying to decide like kind of what I should do next. I'm thinking more documentation. I was thinking Maybe I shouldn't make them put a credit card in maybe for the for to sign up. I was thinking, what else was I thinking? I was thinking I should go on another marketplace, like I'm all over the place with what to do next. Any suggestions?

Michele Hansen 25:15
Have you had people bring problems or issues to you that could be solved by more documentation?

Colleen Schnettler 25:22
No, but you can't really access the good documentation until you have signed up. So I Hi, I am someone myself, before I sign up for something, I want to read all your documentation, because I want to know if it's gonna work for me, before I go through the signup process. So on my main website, I don't have any documentation, you have to actually sign up and go on to your customized dashboard to get like the good the good information.

Michele Hansen 25:48
Yeah, I'm looking at this right now. And I'm seeing that and our documentation page is consistently one of our top entry pages.

Colleen Schnettler 25:57
Okay, I think that should probably I think, again, I know, we talked about this when I did documentation last time, but you know, you tend to kind of draw you I tend to kind of drag my feet on it because it feels monotonous. But I added this feature for someone and I'm not even documenting it anywhere. So no one else can use. It sounds like that's no good. So I think for this week, like my goal will be to shore up some documentation.

Michele Hansen 26:21
Yeah, I think that's great. And you the other things you talked about around not reclaiming your credit card or changing the pricing level. Those are really important things big, big things that that. I mean, people will test all the time. It sounds like this documentation thing is something very concrete, that you can get out there easily. And where you're saying that it's more difficult to gear yourself up for doing marketing work. I think that makes a lot of sense to start there. Because it feels like something you can easily like check off the list and it feels done.

Colleen Schnettler 27:01
Yes. And it's not that I don't like the marketing work. I think what I really want to learn through this process is how to do market like part of this, you know, a lot of people who in you know, while while I was getting my pep talks, a lot of people mentioned that maybe this isn't a great idea. But most people who are successful eventually, it's because their emotion. So for me personally, being in motion is better than sitting around reading about other people being absolutely, yeah, yeah. So the marketing stuff I do want to learn, but I've gotta be honest, like, it's all new to me. And I'm just kind of tired.

Unknown Speaker 27:39
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 27:40
Tired learning, like so as we talked about, like earlier, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It's hard to, to focus on like growing and learning and finding the mental space for that when things are not stable is very difficult. And, you know, I find it tough, sometimes you just need to focus on things that are tasks and like that you can just bang out tasks, like that's what I find a lot of myself doing, right, because like, like I had to plan some very deep work projects for the next couple of months. And because of locked down in school closures, I've I've had to shelve all of those. And so I'm just doing those small task type things. But that's still productive work. It's you know, the the technical work you're doing is still helpful. As long as you're not kind of going down. Wild Goose chases of things that are very tangental to what you're trying to do.

Colleen Schnettler 28:49
Yeah, yeah. And that's why I think the documentation this week is a great goal for me, because it is very, very needed and very kind of easy, you know, it'll take a chunk of time, but I know how to do it, I can just do it and check it off. And see if that moves the needle on signups.

Michele Hansen 29:07
It'll take some time to show but that's really it's a really interesting insight that you like noticing your own behavior when you are looking at a service yourself and making mental notes of Okay, what am I doing here? What are the different things that I'm considering? What are the different behaviors I'm doing like the firt? You know, the first thing I'm going to look at the documentation. And then using that to improve your own product, like being able to sort of sit on your own shoulder and observe yourself and then use that information for your own product is a really valuable mind shift.

Colleen Schnettler 29:44
Yeah, totally.

Michele Hansen 29:46
That's gonna wrap up this week of software social will talk to you next week.

View Details

Michele Hansen 0:00
So Colleen, you launched your new SaaS -- actually your first SaaS -- about a month ago, Simple File Upload. And you launched it first on the Heroku marketplace. But you also launched it off of the Heroku marketplace so that people who are not on Heroku can use it as well. And I was thinking about this. And I'm really curious if anyone has signed up off of Heroku, and how that's gone?

Colleen Schnettler 0:30
Yes. So I got the most wonderful surprise yesterday, when I actually checked my subscriptions and saw that there were three people who have actually put their credit card.

Michele Hansen
Oh, my gosh!

Colleen Schnettler
I know, super exciting. The funny thing is, as I think I've mentioned before, Heroku requires you to get 100 users before you can charge. So I have been so focused on getting that 100 user number. I hadn't even been checking my Stripe subscriptions. So I logged on the other day. And I have it in my admin dashboard. But I literally never check it. And I saw like three subscriptions. And I was like, That can't be right.

Michele Hansen 1:09
So are these people paying you or they just added their credit cards to Stripe?

Colleen Schnettler 1:14
They've added their credit cards to Stripe, I am currently offering a free 30 day trial. And so they may cancel one of the people has already reached out to me, and we've had a pretty in depth email conversation about her needs. So I anticipate she'll stick around. But I have not actually heard from the other two people yet. So we'll see. I don't know.

Michele Hansen 1:34
Tell me more about this email exchange you had.

Colleen Schnettler 1:37
Yeah. So based on our conversation last week, I significantly changed the email, I changed, I got rid of all the graphics, I tried to be more concise and what I was asking and give a little more context. And you were right people like when you have more context, I think. And so I've been hearing back from people. So I've actually been spending a good part of this week, like handling email stuff and talking to people and listening to their feature requests. But there's one person who actually put her credit card in, you know, she actually shared with me her application, and there was an error. It was like a really subtle bug in the React component. And it actually worked with the bug, like it still worked most of the time. But she was running into an issue where it was not working consistently. So I was able to troubleshoot that and get that fixed. And so you know, we've kind of had had a dialogue going, it's been very exciting.

Michele Hansen 2:34
It sounds like you've been able to build a rapport and a little bit of a relationship with her.

Colleen Schnettler 2:40
I'd like to think so. I'd like to think so every time someone gets beat, every time someone emails me, I get super excited. So I'm still at that phase where I'm like, tell me about your thing. Like what's going on? What are you working on?

Michele Hansen 2:54
I'm still in that phase. Like, honestly, I mean, anytime someone replies back to one of my feedback emails, so I have them going out with after a couple of days, the first time we charge someone, and I have different emails that go out based on, you know, different plans, they're on and whatnot. But every time somebody replies to one of those, I'm always like, Oh my god, somebody replied, like, this is so exciting. And then they're giving me this feedback. And I always learn things about industries that I had just, I never even realized existed like, and they're doing things I didn't even realize was happening. And then, like, somehow we're part of that process. And it feels so magical and exciting. And I feel so you know, like privileged that they've let me into their little world and told me all about how they're, for example, need to get timezone stamped reports back from tractors and how we make that easier for them. And I'm just like, yes, this is so cool. Like I'm, I think I'm just a huge business nerd. But and and i love i think that's

Colleen Schnettler 3:59
awesome learning about business.

Michele Hansen 4:01
So you know that that phase has, you know, been going for? Oh, wow, seven years now. For me.

Colleen Schnettler 4:10
Wow. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 4:11
Oh, wow. Geocodio turns seven this month. So, so tell me tell me more about about what you talk to.

Colleen Schnettler 4:17
Ya. So it's been great. Like I said, I changed an email copy. And some people like reached out to me on Twitter. I love I love hearing from people. Thank you. I love ideas and shared with me the email copy they use. And like I said, so people started engaging. And I got a lot of good feedback. I got one person who was like really excited, who was like, Oh my gosh, Heroku has a file system, you know, was really troublesome. And so this is just what I needed. I got a lot of feature requests, which is something we'll talk about in a minute. I got one guy who was like, Oh my gosh, thank you so much for emailing me. Okay. So it was really fun. It's still just a handful of people, right? But I love it. Like I love hearing from people. And some of them, like I said, are comfortable sharing what they're working on, which has been cool, too. And there have been a lot of suggestions for utilizing the uploader in a way I did not anticipate. Ooh, so yeah, so this is like, the next thing. And I know I remember months ago, you said something about every new feature request should sit out in the rain on the porch for three days.

Michele Hansen 5:27
Yes, I think that is taken from one of the early Basecamp books getting real, badly adjusted adjacent free, yeah, that new features should have to stand on the porch in the rain for three days before you let them in.

Colleen Schnettler 5:44
And so I appreciate that. But at the same time, I feel like that's more appropriate for mature products. This is just a little baby product. And I'm trying to turn it into something amazing. And I think so. So I mean, when you're only talking to eight to 10 people, I think that every feature request, you know, I should really consider now I understand, like I was preparing for this podcast, I tried to look back at what I did this week, because I had, I didn't really do many things on the list of things I wanted to do. And it's because I spent so much time like doing these emails and talking to people and looking into their feature requests. And so I don't want to just throw them out there as quickly as possible. But I do think the product really has space to grow. And I love hearing what people are asking, and some of them are not too hard, like I can do, but I don't know, it's just it's just a struggle of like balancing all that, like do I impure, I have active people. And again, it's like a people who are talking to me. And so when they request something, if it's within my ability, and I think it's going to make the product better, because then other people might want that same feature. I want to do it. But of course, I'm balancing that with trying to do marketing and trying to do documentation, which I really need to do more documentation. So it's just like the challenge of balancing Oh, and you know, my paid work, balancing all of that.

Michele Hansen 7:13
So it sounds like you're balancing a lot right now. And I'm curious with all of those feature requests coming in? are you saving them like, like, how are you sort of digesting those feature requests? And, you know, potentially saving that information for later or categorizing order? Or are you not doing

Colleen Schnettler 7:36
sure I am I you know, this is something else that's that's challenging is just how to keep track of all this. So like, you launch your product. And then there's all of this tooling you need around the product, which is like a whole nother thing. It's just, there's so much stuff, like, I just want to focus on my product. Yeah, I just have a spreadsheet, and I'm just putting the person's name, email feature request. And like, if I think it's a good idea what my timeline for considering it is, I mean, they're all really good requests, like all things I would like to do eventually. Some of them are like bigger chunks than others. But for example, one thing I don't support that I want to support in the future is multiple file uploading. So one of the people, one of the customers is doing that with the sim with the single uploader. And just kind of basically what happens is you drop a file into the uploader, and then he's got, like a grid view of all the files you've dropped. So he has found a creative way to take my single file uploader and make it a multi file uploader. But I default show you the preview of the file after you upload it. So he would like me to not default show you the preview, he just wants it to go away. So that seems like a really good idea. Because then you can kind of use it as a multi file uploader, even though it's a single file uploader, because every time you drop a new file, I still upload the file, I just don't have like the UI for multiple file upload errors. So that's one. Another one is smaller sized images, which I bring up every week, because my thing, right, but that's a lot more work because I'm gonna have to write an external API that they can, they can hit, and I'm gonna have to figure out how to authenticate them. And I'm gonna have to figure out how to charge them for that. So that one's kind of like, definitely something I want to do eventually, but I think that's a big one. So an another person didn't even want an upload, or he just wants to storage, which I thought was the first request to address that. Yes. They're all over the place. So right like I'm like, these are all great ideas. I would like to be able to help all these people achieve their goals, but they're all different.

Michele Hansen 9:44
So when they bring these feature requests to you, are you able to get to the level of asking about what their processes and like what the broader context they're in that you know, helps you understand where this feature request comes from and, and how that fits in with what they're trying to do. So then you can make parallels to what other people are trying to do, like see if they're in similar process patterns?

Colleen Schnettler 10:14
Yes. So I have a little bit I haven't gotten anyone on a call yet, but I have like, kind of ask those leading questions. And, yeah, so I don't know, they're not all. So I did ask like anyone who is comfortable to actually share the application with me, a lot of them are in the beginning stages, which makes sense because it makes more sense to me. And in the in the beginning, as opposed to when you already have something set up. So a lot of them are in the beginning stages. And of this group of people, there were two that are working that are like doing this at work. And one person who's doing it as a hobbyist. And like, the smaller file sizes is because the one person is having is allowing the users to download files, which I hadn't even really thought I don't you know, if I don't do it like that I hadn't really thought about like allowing your users to download files, which is not something I hadn't really thought about. So that's like, a good point. And then the multiple file uploader. Like I knew that was an issue, because I have a event site that I want to I want to allow multiple file uploading. So I don't know, am I answering your question? I feel like I'm rambling a little bit.

Michele Hansen 11:28
It sounds like you're figuring things out. You know, last week, we were talking about how you had some hunches about different things that might be going on, about, you know, hobbyists, or whatever. You just told me, okay, you know, this person was a hobbyist and these people were doing it at work. And I, what I think is really interesting is you said people are bringing you on at the very beginning of a project. And that sounds like a critical insight to me.

Colleen Schnettler 11:57
Yeah, and that's really good. And you know why that's such a great insight, Michele, that is such a great insight. Because when I first launched this, one of the things I was really concerned about was moving people from their existing storage solution to my storage solution. And I was like, Oh, I'm gonna have to write, like, all these scripts to help people move and, and, as I see right now, at least for the people who are talking to me, that's not really something I need to spend time on right now. I need to focus, I think I need to focus on these people in the beginning stages of their product. One person, you know, wasn't a developer. Well, he was kind of a developer, but like, he wasn't, you know, he was, and, and I thought that was relevant. Cuz he was like, this is great, because I have been asked to implement this thing at work. This system, it's like a database system where they store stuff. And I'm not really a developer. So this was, you know, really easy, because I didn't have to figure out all the AWS stuff, those are the people I'm targeting, like, in my head, that's always what who This product has been designed for. You love the no code crowd. I do I love and I really, okay, so I really want to build something with no code, excuse me, I really want to build something with no code. I just feel like, oh, man, like, I love everybody. Like, don't get me wrong, but I just feel like the opportunities going forward are in no code. I feel like it's such, like, everyone is going to be starting a website and starting a business, I think in the next 10 years, like, I expect my personal trainer to be selling stuff online in like, a couple years. And so I feel like getting a now is is the time to get in. And so I still on my list of things to do is still like build something with no code to get involved in the community to learn more about it. I just think their options are so limited, as far as I can tell, like, the they're the main players in that space charge, like 100 bucks a month. And so, yeah, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in the no code space.

Michele Hansen 13:57
I think it's worth, you know, you noticing how much enthusiasm and sort of natural empathy you have for this group. You know, I mean, even in your own looking at your own work, you've done a lot on you know, helping people learn to code and and some previous businesses we had talked about that didn't really work out were around, you know, like teaching stay at home mothers how to code or, or like other sorts of things that help people build things. And I see that thread running through your interest here. And your product will probably have many different audiences. But I think it's okay to, you know, love one a little bit more than others, especially if it really motivates you, right, because there's going to be times when you're, you feel mired and bugs and knowing that you can reach out to one of those customers or somebody in that group and and Just get that motivation and get that reminder of Oh, I'm helping them do something that they literally could not do before, period. That's really rewarding. And and, you know, the, you know, I think the secret of staying motivated is to talk to people and hear how you're helping them. And it sounds like you get a lot of that from the no code crowd.

Colleen Schnettler 15:26
Yeah, I haven't thought about it like that before. But I think maybe that is one of the reasons I'm so interested in this particular space is because, yeah, like a personal passion of mine is helping people get into flexible remote work. And if they can start a business, you know, if they can start a business with web flow, and they can use my thing, then that's extra motivating for me. So tell me what has been going on with you this week.

Michele Hansen 15:59
So despite, you know, Denmark going into lockdown, again, in schools closing and the coup, I somehow managed to read in the jobs to be done book.

Colleen Schnettler 16:10
Oh, nice.

Michele Hansen 16:13
I'm feeling proud of myself considering everything else going on. So so there's this one story from it that that I thought something's up so well. So for anyone who's reading along, I'm in chapter two this week in the jobs to be done playbook. And the story goes this, a traveler came upon three stone workers arranging bricks and asked them what they were doing. The first replied, I'm laying bricks. The second answered, I'm building a room. When the traveler got to the third man, he heard a different response. I'm building a cathedral, the stone worker replied, of course, all three answered correctly, it's just a matter of perspective. I love that story. And as I was, so I was reading this while helping my daughter with her homeschool, work. And I read that to her. And what I love about that is, you all of them are correct, right? Like, you could be laying bricks, or building a room or building a cathedral. All of those are true at the same time. And it's just a matter of perspective. And, and I think what that says to us from a business perspective, is that there are different levels of doing things. And when we talk about customer needs, and processes and situations, and all the kinds of things that you've been talking to your customers about, you might get a different level of perspective. And you might ask someone how they're using your product. And they might give you an answer, that's the equivalent of I'm laying bricks, or they might give you the equivalent of, I'm building a cathedral. And then it's about sort of building out that whole picture and figuring out, okay, there's a cathedral being built, that's the broader job that's being done. And then there are specific people who are doing that. Within this. There are specific tasks down to mixing mortar to planning out a specific room, like those are all at different levels. And but they're all happening, too, and where does my product fit in? And but what are they trying to do more broadly? Yeah, I just loved that story.

Colleen Schnettler 18:36
So you're basically saying when we think about our product in like, a development lifecycle of a business, someone else's business, right, because both of our products are inserted into someone else's business, we should kind of see how they fit in to the bigger goal.

Michele Hansen 18:54
Right? So for example, nobody's job is to geocode a spreadsheet, like that's not a broader goal that they have, the job is something that is, you know, much larger than any one particular step or one particular process. But it'll have many different sub steps to it. And so the book defines this, as you know, there's an aspiration, an ideal change of state, something the individual desires to become. So in this example, with the bricks and the cathedral, it might be to, you know, bring religion or community to a specific area. That's a very broad goal. Right, right. And then the big job is to build the cathedral. The little job is to build the rooms in the cathedral, and then the micro job is to lay the actual bricks. So I think my product is sometimes it's it's a micro job, but sometimes it's also playing into a larger one. For example, if someone's goal is to To create a map to show a congressperson, all of the supporters, their nonprofit has in their district, for example, that may be, you know, much closer to their goal of getting a an elected representative to take them seriously. But on the other hand, if they're doing a huge data analysis process, like we are just one step in that process, and pretty far removed from whatever their end goal of creating AI based simulations that help real estate executives make better commercial real estate decisions, like we're really far removed from that end step. Does that make sense?

Colleen Schnettler 20:43
Yeah, but I'm trying to figure out how that like, I'm trying to take what you said, which felt kind of general and figure out how to directly apply that to business to actually my business specifically, like, does that help you with pricing? Does that help you? I mean, so let's say it because I also am probably a micro step. Does that mean I should charge less? Does that mean? How do you kind of take that information and work it into your workflow?

Michele Hansen 21:10
So that's only one step have jobs to be done. There's a whole bunch of other pieces to this. And, and what I find helpful, so with this, this chapter is like a very broad view of things. It dissects the different pieces of this. I mean, so you're a developer. So you've probably worked with user stories before, right? Like, yes, as an administrator, I would like to be able to update billing information like like things, it sounds like that are pretty common, especially in the Agile world. And what this chapter is doing is, is laying the framework, not only for that, that hierarchy of tasks and activities, which is very important, but also for the different types of jobs that are going on at the same time. So you have that big goal of, for example, making more sales, right? Or for you, if you're you might be working with a developer who's building a website for a client like that is their end goal here. And there are many different things. So they're going through a process, right to build that website, they have different needs as they go through that process. For example, one might be making the steps of that process, or accomplishing the steps in that process as quickly as possibly, right. There might be different circumstances they're under, they might have six months to build this website, or they might have a week. There may also be emotional and social jobs going on too, like they want to feel competent as a developer, or they want to show their client that they can get quality work done. So there are all these different things going on. And where this helps specifically, it does talk about you know, in marketing, for example, if you speak to the overall job too broadly, it's just too vague. And I think that's when we get to websites, or a product and you're like, what do they even do? Like, it's not even clear, like, Yes, I want to retire comfortably. But it's very unclear to me how your app remotely gets me close to that. And so thinking about needs differently than the broader goal that someone is trying to do. And But mostly, where I find that this applies to my own work, is really understanding the process. And and this is something that the author talks about, in the beginning of the of the chapter, he talks about Copernicus, and how that revolutionize things going from the earth being the center of the universe, to the sun being the center. And his framing is that jobs be done forces companies to go from my product is the center of the universe. And that the customer's job is the customer's goal is to interact with my product and interact with my company, to instead that, you know, our company's job is to help people get things done better. And he actually framed it in a way that I had never heard anyone say before, which is that companies can buy customers, which makes so much sense and he doesn't just mean that literally in the terms of you know, you can go on Facebook and buy ads and buy customers that way. But he, you are you are the one who is going out and, you know, solving their needs and and buying them as a customer, which I thought was very interesting. Now I feel like I'm the one who's rambling. I don't know. Have you gotten anything useful out of this?

Colleen Schnettler 24:39
I Not really. I know I'm excited about this book. Let me just say I mean, I know you're excited about this book, and I know this is your, your strength lies in this customer empathy stuff. And I feel but I feel like the words that You're saying are very hard to translate into actionable actions that can help me grow my business. Like I just there's a to me what you're saying makes sense like I understand you, I feel like it's kind of the same thing they say in story brand, which is your your cost, you are not the center of the universe, your customer is the center of the universe and but outside of being like nice and answering people's questions. I, you know, having a background in engineering, so no background in this stuff, and really struggling to turn that kind of like pros into actionable stuff.

Michele Hansen 25:42
So I think you can actually see that you're turning it into actionable things. In fact, you have too many actions based on it. Yeah, we were, we were working on your email copy. And you weren't really getting enough useful information, actually, people weren't replying to you at all. And now you're not only getting feature requests, you're also getting understanding about the context that they're in, and the process they're going through to do that. And I think in this case, you know, your, your product may be the equivalent of laying the bricks. And while it's great to know that people want to lay bricks, they don't want to just lay bricks forever, right? The the famous phrase about this is that people don't want to drill, they want a quarter inch hole. And I would like to add to it, well, they don't actually want a quarter inch hole, they want to hang up a picture of their family on the wall so that they have something nice to look at when they walk by and they feel a warm feeling inside. Right? Like, it's not just about your product. And so what you're getting out of this is understanding of that broader process that they're in. And that information, helps you make decisions about what you should build next, it helps you understand, yeah, who might be a customer for me, who might have a higher propensity to pay me versus based on how often they need something like this, or how urgent their need for it is. All of those things can be dropped from using this kind of thinking. But I can definitely see how this sort of thinking. It takes a leap. And I admit, you know, when I when I was first exposed to it, I was like, we don't have time for this like with like, with like, I have deadlines. Like, right, like you want to add another, you know, like, I mean, I was, I remember when someone came to me about first even doing, you know, usability testing on you know, and we were, we were on pretty tight launch schedules that we didn't have control over. And, and I was like, you want to add another week until we can launch this? Like, did you go negotiate with the people who give us our deadlines that we're gonna do that? And they're like, No, and I was like, so what do you want me to do with this information, like, this sounds great. But like, I don't see how I can do anything with it. And, and I admitted, it took me a while, like maybe, you know, probably like six months or a year until I really started to get it. And after I had some launches that were you know, I wouldn't call them failures. But you know, we spent a lot of time doing things and it didn't have the effect we wanted and getting getting frustrated with that and feeling like we're spending all this time building stuff, and not having the kinds of effects that we had expected to have based on, you know, reading the tea leaves and spreadsheets, about what we should do. And, you know, it took me a very long time to come around from there to having interviews and and this kind of jobs to be done driven customer empathy, be the be the core of what I do. But it's it's it's just been so revelatory for me. But yeah, I absolutely empathize with the situation that you're like, what the hell is this? And why do I care? And I have stuff to do, like, just tell me something. Tell me how to raise my prices and get more customers? Like I don't I don't you know, that makes sense to me.

Colleen Schnettler 29:07
Yeah, I am. I think we talked about this a lot. Like, I feel like this comes up a lot. Because I think what we're learning from you is that's really the secret to a successful business. I mean, you guys have like a geocoding API, no offense, but it's not really sexy. It's not like,

Michele Hansen 29:24
yeah, it's really boring. Like, actually, I say, what I'm talking about this job's done stuff. I I'm like, you know what, like, coordinates are not stamps. Nobody collects them for the fun of it. They're trying to do something else with it. Like it's so boring that it's abundantly clear that it's not the end goal. I think that's almost a gift in and of itself.

Colleen Schnettler 29:49
But I guess my point is, we talk about this a lot because somehow, despite I don't want to say despite it it's a great product, but it's a boring product, but you have great customer loyalty. And that is because of you. And it's because of this way of communicating and empathizing with your customers. But those of us who are kind of not kind of who are totally new to sales, and our engineers, you know, I'm not really known for my patience or my empathetic nature, right? I'm like, let's just write it down and get it done. And so it's, it's a fundamental mind shift, I think, to be like, okay, slow down. Like, let's try to dive into these, you know, these castles, these people are building and really understand these people. And I feel like it's slowly sinking in. But I feel like it's gonna take a while like, and I'm learning as I'm doing right. So I told you last week, I sent that email that I thought was brilliant that everyone hated, because no one responded. So you know, we changed the language and thought about it a little more. But I do think it's a process. Like, I feel like I'm learning it, but it does feel like it's a process.

Michele Hansen 30:51
I feel like if we can build a business, in a commodity industry, where we are competing with billion dollar companies, then anybody can do this. And the secret to how we do that is using jobs to be done. Understanding what people are trying to do, understanding their whole process, and then making it faster and cheaper for them to get through that process and eating off other steps of the process to help them get done. What ever it is they want done.

Colleen Schnettler 31:29
Yeah, it's just a completely different mindset. I mean, there's so many developers trying to start SaaSes. And I think this is like the piece we are missing. Because I think it is a fundamental mindset shift. And I think you have to practice it. And we're not used to practicing that.

Michele Hansen 31:47
And I think that starting with your own need is a really helpful springboard into this. Because you naturally have some amount of empathy for yourself, maybe we don't all have 100% empathy for ourselves all the time. But you have some empathy for your own problems, you're able to understand how long it took you to do this and how annoying it was to have to build a file uploader every single time. You had that empathy built in, and you could see that need and what process that fit into and what the end goal was. And you were able to use that as a springboard to launch something. And now you're you're learning about what other people are trying to do. And I'm just so excited for you that people are bringing suggestions and problems and situations to you that you had never even thought of before. Like that's the most exciting thing for me when I sit down to interview someone. And I think we're going to talk about one thing and then we end up talking about something else that I never even realized would come up and it's so fun because it shows me how many more opportunities there are even in a super boring, commodity highly competitive industry.

Colleen Schnettler 33:03
Well, that's going to wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. please reach out to us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod for your questions or comments. We'd love to hear from you. Hope you enjoyed the show.

View Details

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
Hey listeners, Colleen here. This week I lead off discussing the positive uptick in my signup numbers, tempered by the fact that none of those new signups responded to my welcome email, Michele and I discussed what I'm doing wrong. And we also talked about how I should be prioritizing my time, every bootstrapper's most challenging problem, at least in the beginning. Michele talks about a detailed customer feedback email that brought her great joy. And we discussed the new book she is reading called Jobs To Be Done in the context of small business. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Colleen
So I have been keeping track of my numbers every week for how many people are signing up for my service. And this week, I had quite a few signups. I had 39. Yeah. This week, I had 38 new signups.

Michele Hansen 0:48
Whoa.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
I how many were the previous week? The previous week?

Colleen Schnettler 0:53
I had 18.

Michele Hansen 0:56
Okay, so then the week before that,

Colleen Schnettler 0:59
I just started recording the past few weeks.

Michele Hansen 1:05
hey, that's almost 100% growth week over week for two weeks. That's That's pretty good. I mean, not long ago, you had, like 18 ish users total.

Colleen Schnettler 1:16
Yeah, I'm really happy with the number of signups I'm getting, I think part of it might be because of the holiday break. I've noticed because my service is free. And it's in the Heroku marketplace. I get a lot of hobbyists. So I'm wondering if people are like trying it out because they have downtime. But I've also done a lot to improve the documentation. And so the other thing that has happened this week is a lot more people have actually converted. I think I mentioned a week or two ago that I was getting so many signups and then only like 10% of those people were actually using the single sign on to access their custom dashboard and install the JavaScript. And this week from those 3817 made it to single sign on, which is huge compared to the numbers I was seeing before. Yeah. So I'd like to believe it's because I've added more documentation so people know what it is. And, you know, we worked out did we do it on the podcast where we worked out some of the copy on my marketing page. Yeah, yeah. So some of the things we put where we like put numbers and we're like, here's the three step process. I'd like to believe that's, that's been part of the reason this is working and more people are converting.

Michele Hansen 2:30
So you have what you would like to believe about why it's working. Have you asked anybody about that?

Colleen Schnettler 2:37
Why can't I just say, Oh, they converted? Can I just go with what I'd like to believe?

Michele Hansen 2:42
Hunches are great. But that's not a substitute for going out and finding the answer.

Colleen Schnettler 2:49
I've had this great number of signups. But something else interesting has happened. And this is not good. So I think I mentioned answer my question. No, I don't know. No---

Michele Hansen 3:04
I have tried not to talk over you. But you did not answer my question of whether you have tried to figure out know why people are converting that answer is -- and so as much as we need to figure out why people are canceling and why they're not converting. And we ask them a million questions about why you canceling why you're not doing this, why you're not doing that. We also need to ask them about why they are doing things so we can help more people do those things and find more people like them who will do those things.

Colleen Schnettler 3:31
So this is interesting, because I've had all these signups and I mentioned last week that I was going to start doing transactional email like a welcome email. Since I have started the welcome email zero people have responded to it. Zero before when I was hand emailing people, like maybe 10 to 20% of people responded. So my professional looking welcome email with like a footer and branding seems to be turning people off.

Michele Hansen 4:01
You can just do a plain text email. I think that's gonna be that there. That's more likely to get caught in a spam filter if it has graphics in it.

Colleen Schnettler 4:09
Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Because I was really surprised. I was like, Oh, I'm getting all these signups and these people are converting, not a single person has responded to an email.

Michele Hansen 4:18
Plaintext tends to have better open rates than graphical email like this is why that most, if you've ever had them made the mistake of signing up for a political campaign's email list, you will notice that even the most well funded campaigns will have plain text emails. This is something the Obama campaign discovered and then just proliferated throughout the industry that the fewer images and formatting and everything in an email, the better open and response rates you're going to get from it because there's just fewer barriers to people getting the email and then you know, formatting and everything else in it. I send most of our especially feedback emails, I always send those out plain text.

Colleen Schnettler 5:06
Yeah, I'm going to, that's my next step. Because I was really surprised to see such a poor response. Now, it's kind of a little bit funny, maybe not funny. So when I went to get my transactional email set up, for some reason, I got kicked out of Sendgrid. And that was just I don't really know what happened. So I'm actually sending it from my Gmail. So I don't have open rates right now. So I can't see how many people are actually opening it. But I am going to get that sorted out. And I like the idea of going plain text because no one is responding right now. So I have no idea why more people are converting I guess I should ask them.

Michele Hansen 5:42
I think it's a, you know, it's a, an easy thing to fall into. On a recent episode, we talked about loss aversion and how human beings are so much more motivated to try to avoid losing money, rather than making money. And I think feedback really plays into that, because most companies asked for feedback when somebody cancels, or if they give you a negative NPS score, or something like that, but not as many companies ask for feedback from people who are happy, which, you know, trying to find more people who are are happy, like your your current happy customers with similar processes and needs is much easier than trying to fix all of the people who don't like it. Like that's a tough hill to climb.

Colleen Schnettler 6:33
Yeah, so I definitely will reach out to those people. I guess one by you know, I'll just, there's only 17 people, I can just email them and ask them.

Michele Hansen 6:43
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 6:44
it seems like I get better responses. If I don't ask open ended questions in email.

Michele Hansen 6:50
What are the questions you're asking?

Colleen Schnettler 6:52
So my first email which I was hand typing, which got maybe 10 to 20%? response was, Hey, my name is Colleen. From simple file upload. Do you need any help installing the service? Question mark? Please let me know. Thanks. And that got some responses. So then I was trying to be clever. And I thought, all right, people are more likely to respond. If it's just as simple at least I am. Like, if it's a simple question. So then this automated email I'm now sending out is completely different. It just says, hey, it's Colleen. I'm the creator of simple file upload. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Can you answer one question for me? Are you using the JavaScript snippet or the React component? Thanks, Colleen. No one has responded to that.

Michele Hansen 7:37
That's interesting.

Colleen Schnettler 7:39
And I thought that was I don't know, I thought it was easy, right? Like, because they could just be like, oh, like, that's an easy thing to respond to. But 35 people have gotten it and zero responses.

Michele Hansen 7:49
But maybe it's not a meaningful question to them. Yeah, maybe they don't. Yeah. And is that a meaningful question to you to like? Is the is the answer about their projects? And how they're finding it? Like maybe, maybe if that's even if it's a more difficult question, if it's a more meaningful question to them, and to you, maybe that's the question to ask, rather than an easy one that doesn't have as much impact.

Colleen Schnettler 8:15
Okay, so I wanted to know, because I'm trying to decide how to spend my time. So I'm trying to decide. The reason I asked the question is, because I genuinely want to know, so throughout the customer interviews I was doing before the holidays, the people most excited about this seem to be front end developers, because that way they can, they never have to touch back end, they can literally get the CDN image without any configuration. And front end developers these days, a lot of them are using react. And so my react component really could use a little bit of work. And so I'm trying to decide if it's worth it for me to, to invest my time into working on the React component, and really beefing that up or if I should continue to focus on, you know, just marketing and installing with the JavaScript snippet. So that's why I asked that question, because I just genuinely want to know.

Michele Hansen 9:09
So you're trying to figure out how to prioritize your time.

Colleen Schnettler 9:14
Yes, basically, yes.

Michele Hansen 9:14
You sometimes -- I find that actually saying that to people in the email saying, hey, like, you know, are using this one, you know, I asked, because I'm trying to figure out how to prioritize my development work between those two things, and hearing about how you're using it will help me understand how to make it better.

Colleen Schnettler 9:35
That's a great idea. I'm gonna write that down,

Michele Hansen 9:37
And also makes people feel important, and like their opinion is going to be what shapes this company. And that makes people want to reply.

Colleen Schnettler 9:44
That's a great idea. You're right. I think that's a great idea. So I'm gonna go plaintext. And then I figure I'll try maybe a new one every week since I'm getting you know, 10 to 20 signups on an average week. I'll try a new email this week. So I'll do plain text. And I'll tell them, that's a great idea. Like, Hey, I'm wondering if you are using react or JavaScript, because I'm trying to figure out what is the most important thing to work on next? What do you think? And then maybe they'll tell me what they think the most important thing to work on next is, so maybe I will get like, maybe it'll start a conversation.

Michele Hansen 10:19
Yeah, and I would try to find a way to phrase that, that makes it clear that you want to work on the thing, that's the most important for them. So not just that, I want to find the most impactful thing to work on next, I want to find the most impactful thing to for you, for me to work on next. Yeah, like, which is, you know, that framing is almost like more like client language like, and they're like, in the right, the way you would ask a client, hey, I have a choice between these three projects, like, which is the most impactful for you to meet to work on. But you can say it in this context, too. And even if you're asking 50 other people the same question, and you know, you're going to synthesize all that information and figure out, okay, you know, is it front end developers? Is it some other opportunity? Like, like, Where should I be focusing? But asking people, hey, what is the most impactful thing I could do for you? I find that makes people more willing to, to give feedback and, and give really constructive, nice feedback to like, they're appreciative of that.

Colleen Schnettler 11:25
Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm definitely going to work on that. And I'll try that out to see if I can get more engagement on that. I, it's been really nice. So I've taken the entire week, I took the entire week, between Christmas and New Year's off. And it was really nice to get that space. And just kind of step back from all like the buisiness. I, this has been in the marketplace for about a month now. And I am feeling the developer challenge of just wanting to build more things. Like it irks me so much that I don't I don't optimize the images for you, like like that is hurting my soul that I'm not optimizing images. But I'm doing that for a very specific reason. Some people don't want me to optimize images. I think we talked about that. A couple weeks ago, some people aren't even using it for images. So for me to put the time in to do these particular things that might not even be a use a good use case. I'm trying to fight the urge. So so I'm really trying to fight the developer urge to like build more things. So I've been I've been really thinking about, like I mentioned, like how to prioritize my time in the most efficient way. And I've really had so much success with this marketplace, this traction channel, because I have had now it probably 50% of these people have, you know, removed the add on because they were just playing with it. But 90 signups in a month through Heroku and four signups in a month from the internet, like going through my site. Yeah, that's a huge difference. Yeah, so I've been trying to think I've been trying to one resist the urge to build more features until people tell me they want or need more features. And I've been trying to look at other marketplaces that I could get into because I feel like this is essentially a widget. I mean, this is like this would be great in like, the WordPress marketplace or something like that. So yes, I've just kind of been looking at other avenues to, to launch the product and try it, like I said, just trying to figure out how to prioritize in terms of that.

Michele Hansen 13:35
What is the threshold from Heroku that allows you to start charging people for it one to 100 to 100,000.

Colleen Schnettler 13:41
It's 100. But they have --

Michele Hansen 13:44
Wait, so you're 10 people away from being able to charge people.

Colleen Schnettler 13:46
No, because they have to be active users. So I'm 55 right now. So I'm averaging about 10 a week that stick around. So I'm hopefully in five more weeks. But five weeks is a long time. And there's a lot I could be doing in those in that time. There's other marketplaces that don't make you hit that threshold. And so I have all kinds of ideas. And I'm trying to, like, narrow the funnel of all my brilliant ideas.

Michele Hansen 14:13
What is the growth rate look like in the Heroku marketplace? So we've mentioned how you're adding people like is it? Are you steadily getting 10 people to activate a week? Or is that rate increasing?

Colleen Schnettler 14:25
So this week, it was a significant increase. But again, I don't know if that's because it's a holiday week, so more people are like playing around with it. Before this week, I've only been tracking it for three weeks. So it's hard to say. I can't tell if it's linear or not like based on this week. It's not linear. And I'm hoping us I know I said hoping a few times and hope is not I think I told you hope is not a strategy last week. But I've been kind of hoping I'm getting more signups because my documentation is better. But I am going to reach out to those people. So I don't know if it's listed. I don't know if it's exponential, I have no idea what it's gonna look like, since I only three weeks of data.

Michele Hansen 15:05
So let's sit back for a second. You just told me that you took the entire week off?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And you still had all of these signups?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, ma'am.

And as someone who has been making their income from client work, where you have to, you know, sort of be button chair in order to make money. How does that feel?

Colleen Schnettler 15:28
Feels amazing. Can you imagine if Now, none of these people are paying me yet? But it feels amazing to get there.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
And to have I mean, this is it's like I'm tasting the, you know, it's like I'm tasting it, like I'm tasting the the freedom of a product based business, because I build hourly when I, you know, when I work as a developer. And so like, this just feels like, it's gonna be freedom. And so much work, you know, has gone into it in the beginning to get it working. But it works. It works pretty well, not having any complaints. And so all I had to do was I checked my email, maybe except for Christmas, like, I would check my email every day. But generally speaking, like to have that many signups I was shocked, I was really excited. Like, wow, 38 people signed up in a week.

Michele Hansen 16:13
That's amazing. And so what that tells me about your prioritization of thinking about which channels to go on, is that you could do basically nothing on Heroku, for the next three weeks, explore maybe another marketplace, I would caution you against spreading yourself too thin. But spend a couple of weeks on another marketplace, and then come back, and maybe you'll be out those 100 people, you know, a watched pot never boils, right.

Colleen Schnettler 16:50
Yeah, I'm kind of thinking the same thing. I think like tweaking the email, like, there's a few things I can do now, in the Heroku marketplace that I haven't done so I can tweak the email, like we just discussed, there is a way to get people's emails, before they hit single sign on, you have to use there, they have a platform API, and it's a little convoluted, but I almost have that logic done. So I can hit them earlier in the sign on process. But outside of that, I think I was just gonna let it rest. I'm just gonna let it rest, obviously be available and try to email people and get as many people talking to me as possible. And so I have this like, kind of crazy, ridiculous idea, but I'm excited about it. Can I tell you?

Michele Hansen
Yes.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, so here's something I've been thinking about a lot with SaaS businesses, especially in my space, like building widget, we're just not you guys. You guys fall outside of this category. But a lot of people in this space are just developer selling to other developers. But really, that's not a huge market develop. We, we if we could take our development skills, and sell to people that aren't developers, we'd be able to access so many more people. So what I was thinking was, I want to get into another marketplace. I don't know any other marketplaces like I know what they are. But I don't I'm not familiar with WordPress Dev, and I don't want to get into WordPress, I hate WordPress, I don't want to be in their marketplace, or any of these other platforms. So I need to become familiar with one if I'm going to get into it. So I thought it would be super fun to start my own Shopify store. So I have already bought the domain. You're looking at me funny, but think about it. Okay, so I can start a Shopify store. Most of shopping a Shopify app. Yeah. Yeah. Like a store, like sell t shirts. Like, I want to sell t shirts, or whatever you want.

Michele Hansen 18:44
I'm confused.

Colleen Schnettler
Wait, what?

Michele Hansen
Cuz I know there's like a Shopify. Like, there's whole Shopify apps as a whole, right ecosystem, like, okay, thing, but I did not think you were going to sell t shirts direction. So you're gonna have to walk me through how this relates to.

Colleen Schnettler 18:58
Okay, no, this is what happens when I take a week off. I have all these ideas. I'm like, I should do these things. But seriously, I've been thinking about this one for a whole week. And I think it's a good idea. Listen, so here's what we do. What if I started an actual legit Shopify store, like selling t shirts, I can drop ship t-shirts. Like I don't have to actually hold inventory. But it's not about the store. Like the point is not to have a Shopify store. The point is to build one, and then I'll blog about it on another domain, then I can also concurrently learn, you look stressed, just stay with me, Michelle, stay with me. Don't No, no, no, just I can concurrently learn Shopify development. So I can put my file uploader in the Shopify App Store and then I use my own file uploader on my Shopify store as an example of how to use it.

Michele Hansen 19:58
There's a lot going on there. And I, when you're talking about getting into a new marketplace, I thought it was going to be a no-code thing like bubble or Zapier or something like that. I love the enthusiasm for this. But I think this is one to maybe like, throw it in Notion, put down all the enthusiasm, all the ideas, but put down all the ideas and that same list for things you could work on next, and then take a red pen to it and be brutal about your prioritization and find the things that are the least amount of work, and the most bang for your buck at this moment, and the most focused on what you're trying to do.

Colleen Schnettler 20:50
Yeah, I don't disagree.

Michele Hansen 20:53
I'm not saying don't do this. But I'm saying, you know, I tend to find that, like, when I get really enthusiastic about an idea, like, it's almost a bad sign. It's dangerous to like, get so enamored with an idea. And then it's like, then you're kind of, you know, bouncing around, you're like, I need to do that. And I can do this, and then it's like, hold on a minute, there's something much smaller, that we can do first, that will actually honestly have a lot more impact towards what we're trying to do, even though that other idea is very exciting and shiny, right?

Colleen Schnettler 21:28
Well, it's very shiny, you're right. But also I was don't lose it,

Michele Hansen 21:30
Like respect to the enthusiasm, respect to the idea, respect, the fun you had with generating that, capture all of it, like, make a whole board for it and outline all of the different things you would have to do. But I imagine there are things that are less tangential to, to what you're trying to do that could maybe come first, right.

Colleen Schnettler 21:55
And that's the challenge is I don't want to be jumping into a new idea to the detriment of what I am currently working on. And you know, I don't want to always be like, Oh, I'm going to build a new thing, I'm going to build a new thing. But I've really liked this idea, because I get in the Shopify marketplace. And I know a couple like just randomly. I know a couple people who are like Instagram influencers. And those are the kind of people who are hustling to make money. So if I could actually have like a blog, it would not be for developers, it would be for like, Instagram influencers or something, I don't know, I'm just making it up as I go. But the idea would be almost to reach a different audience to be like, hey, there's all these people trying to hustle to make money. Like, let me show you how to set up a Shopify store.

Michele Hansen 22:39
So there's definitely a space for finding a new audience, like we definitely started out with developers and then branched out from there. There's a lot of value in sort of fully saturating that audience until you move on to a next one.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And like we started out very focused on developers only only an API, really serving what they need, and understanding their their use case and their frustrations with other options. Before we really bridge into other things. So like, you know, half of our revenue comes from our API, and half of it comes from spreadsheet uploads, which is mostly like marketing people. And you know, people who don't want to work with an API for whatever reasons, oftentimes, developers if they have a huge list, but we maintain that developer focus early on very purposefully, because we wanted to make sure that we were slowly solving the problem for one group of people, before we moved on to something else rather than half or quarter, solving it for them, and then quarter, solving it for another group and quarter solving it for another group, because the problem that happens with that is that you need to wow those customers in order for them to tell other people about it and for you to grow. And if you're not fully solving their problem, then you're never going to get them to that like wow point where they're enthusiastic about it, and they're helping with your growth. And so I think this is really interesting. And you've had a lot of interest in serving non-developers, whether that's no code people or Instagram influencers. There's definitely market to be had there. But pick one group first. And even what we're talking about earlier, and you were saying how new is there difference between people who are using the JavaScript versus React and like front end developers versus back end developers? Like it doesn't even sound like the developer audience has been fully fleshed out as a customer group and fully solved yet.

Colleen Schnettler 24:47
Yeah, that's true.

Michele Hansen 24:48
I think you still have a lot more runway there to, to explore and grow into before you spread your wings a bit.

Colleen Schnettler 24:56
Yeah, that's a really good point. So I'll keep you updated on All of my brilliant ideas. So what's been going on with you guys this week?

Michele Hansen 25:07
You know, so your comments earlier about getting feedback from people and how to get good feedback from people reminded me of something that happened earlier this week. So something in question we've talked about in the past is how do you deal with feature requests?

Colleen Schnettler 25:23
Right?

Michele Hansen 25:24
And this is a big one that comes up, especially for the reasons we've just been talking about of how do you focus? How do you know what's important to people? All of that, how do you prioritize them together? And so somebody reached out with a feature request. And, you know, I asked him a couple of questions back, and their response was so good, like it was such catnip for us. And it really made me think about how like asking the right questions like we're talking about in the beginning, is, is really important, and how it's how hard it is. And so I thought I would kind of share what those questions were, yeah, that I asked. And then, and then we can talk a little bit about the book I've started reading.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
So somebody reached out to us with a feature request for a specific data append. So, you know, like, as you know, so we don't just do geocoding, we also work with all the other types of data that are basic-- that are basically only available if you have the coordinates. So the coordinates are sort of a doorway into other pieces of data by location, like, the time zone, for example. And so that's kind of a niche we focus on in the industry. And so someone reached out to us asking for another data append. And so I replied to them, and I'll just, I'll read you.

My reply to them. I said, Thank you for bringing this to our attention. You're the first person to ask us for this. This is really exciting. We always like to understand more on a deeper level, when people ask us to add data points, would you be able to shed some light on the context and use case here? In particular, some things I'm interested in? One, what is your current process for working with this data? How long does it take, which vendors and tools do you use and so forth? And to what is your end goal of getting this data I imagine it's for the sort of use case, but I'd love to hear more detail from your perspective.

And so I sent this back to them. And they sent me this response back that was so amazing that like walk through their full process, and like the struggles they have the current options and why they they don't like those options, and why they would like us to do it differently, and how this is impactful for their business. And it was so it was so awesome. And such a great example of using jobs to be done thinking for product development. And so I want to talk about the book I started reading. So I mentioned this a couple episodes ago how I've started reading the Jobs To Be Done Playbook by Jim Calbach. So this book was recommended to me by a friend who works at a Fortune 500, who I talked about UX stuff with a lot.

And and, and so jobs to be done. Basically, I'm going to do a quick little overview. Is that okay?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, go for it.

Michele Hansen
So it's this concept of basically understanding customer needs. And it's relatively new in the past 30 years or so. And the term really comes from Peter Drucker, who is a famous management thinker. And so he wrote in 1985 book, "some innovations based on process need to exploit incongruities, others demographics, indeed, process needs, unlike other sources of innovation, do not need to start out with an event in the environment, whether internal or external, it starts out with a job to be done." And so basically, the the the idea of this is that you have a process that you're trying to accomplish.

So I don't know if you've ever heard of the term milkshake marketing?

Colleen
Nope.

Michele
Okay, so this is a famous example from Clayton Christensen, who was a Harvard Business professor, who was one of the foremost was one of the foremost thinkers in in jobs to be done. He unfortunately died in early 2020. And, and there's this case study where he was working with McDonald's, and they were trying to figure out how to get more people to buy their milkshakes.

Colleen
Okay.

Michele
And they did some research and they found out that people were buying them first thing in the morning. Hmm, that's weird. And so they said, Why are you? Why are you buying the first thing in the morning and it's like, oh, well, people wanted something that they could eat on the way to work while they're driving. But that wasn't messy, like a bagel was too messy and a donut was too unhealthy. So they would get a milkshake and so They have this that. So their job there is to be fed on their commute, right? Like they have this commute anyway, and this is a big thing about jobs to be done is that we all have all of these activities and jobs that we're doing all the time, that exist, regardless of the product. So for example, 200 years ago, people may have hired cards and games to keep them busy on a Saturday night when they're at home. And now, we might hire Netflix for that same job. But that job has existed throughout time. And that's what makes it really interesting as a framework, that it's completely product agnostic.

And so you're not asking for feedback about a specific product, you're instead asking for feedback about a process and how somebody gets something done. And so that milkshake example is a really famous one, though, as this book points out, which I love that McDonald's didn't actually use the feedback. And like if they had really used it, they would have introduced a protein shake, which they never did.

But basically, the book defines jobs to be done as the process of reaching objectives under given certain circumstances. So you may have a job every day of, well, I guess, before the pandemic, like commuting to work, or making dinner like that's like you, these are things that you're trying to accomplish, and that you have a process that you go through all the time for these. And then where the real business opportunity comes in is if you can find a way to help people get that job done, faster, better, easier, or cheaper, then you have a winning product, right? Like a really simple example of this is like microwave dinners, right? Like, maybe we can argue that it's not a better way of accomplishing the job of eating dinner. But it's certainly easier and cheaper than assembling a meal.

Colleen Schnettler 31:51
For your questions that you asked in his email, which of the questions you asked is specifically trying to identify the job to be done?

Michele Hansen 32:00
Yes, so the whole thing. So really, the the job to be done at the end is what is the end goal of what you're trying to do, right?

Like, I always try to remind myself that, you know, geocoding, and are working with our product, that is not some somebody's goal is not to like get it set up with geocoding. Their goal is to make more sales or, you know, get a project on at work or what like whatever that is like we're just one stop on this train that they're on that's going to some end destination, right? And then so really understanding that whole journey that they're going through, like what is their process for working with this data? Where are the other places they're going to get it, where their difficulties with it? Where are they spending a lot of time because if we can do something that cuts off another one of those steps in the process, or makes it easier for them to get through the whole process, then we want a customer. And so, so this week, I just read the first the chapter and the intro. And I think you can tell how enthusiastic I am about it and how much I already love this book. So so so just like a quick highlights from this.

So first one is people employ products and services to get their job done not interact with your organization. So the goal is not for them to use your code to the goal is not for them to use simple file upload, their goal is to do whatever it is they want to do that is independent of your product, right? Like if, if my goal is to eat dinner, like it doesn't necessarily my goal is not to have, right. Like it's, it's there's a need there that I'm trying to fulfill.

Another one is that jobs are stable over time, even as technology changes. So I think you know that we just had Christmas, right? Like we can see how the, the job of being entertained as a child has been fulfilled in so many different ways over the year, years, whether that's hula hoops, or a Nintendo Switch, but like fundamentally, that same need to play is still there. And then people seek services that enable to get more of their job done quicker and easier.

And then another really interesting thing that I love about this is that jobs to be done is not limited to just one discipline. So it's like not just a UX framework, not just a product strategy framework, not just for marketing. It can be used in all the different areas of a business and thinking about new features, thinking about how you deal with competitors. It definitely influences my thinking and all of that.

And something I'm particularly excited about with this book is that they specifically said this book is for people who have limited resources and would like to use jobs to be done and lightweight manner, which I love. And I'm so excited to see how they unfold that in the book, because there are so many books about this that are basically trying to convince executives to hire really expensive consultants to figure this out for them. And as a bootstrapper, that's not really the situation I'm in. And so it's exciting to see a book that that recognizes that. That is not just a consultant trying to sell a book, or also a book written for companies with 100 person UX and research teams that can really spend the time on this. So I'm pretty psyched, though.

I think I just dumped a ton of information on you. And you're looking at me.

Colleen Schnettler 35:45
Yeah. Okay. That was a lot of information. It was good information, but it was a lot. So let's take what you just talked about, can you read us the email again, that you sent this this job that you got such a great response on? Can we circle back? Yeah, questions? Okay, go?

Michele Hansen 36:01
Yes. So the person asked for a feature. So I replied, saying, one, what is your current process for working with this data? Okay, how long does it take, which vendors and tools are using and so forth? Okay. That's telling me about the process. If we're talking about the milkshake here, that's me asking, What time do you leave for work in the morning? What road are you taking? How long does it take you? What are you listening to? What are you thinking about? What what are you doing at that time? What aren't you doing at that time? What is the process you're going through? Okay? The second one is, what is the end goal of getting the data? Okay, so I'm so if we're talking about a commute here, the person's goal is not to sit in their car. It's not even to make it more enjoyable to sit in their car, it's to get to work,

Colleen Schnettler 36:47
right.

Michele Hansen 36:49
So I'm trying to figure out what is their equivalent of getting to work? And then what is that whole process for them? Because I know that they're stopping with my products some way along the way. But I know they're also going other places. And so how do I figure out what those other places are? And then if I can remove some of those steps and make it easier for them to get there faster, or with less hassle or less frustration, then that's a winning combination. Right?

Colleen Schnettler 37:17
So you didn't actually ask them what they're doing with the data, when you describe jobs to be done. I interpreted that as like, what is the long term job? Like, what are you doing with my data?

Michele Hansen 37:32
Well, they got into that. Okay, so in this case, it's, you know, related to sort of real estate and, and some sort of, like financial needs around it. Okay. Um, but yeah, that that is what they're using the data for. And because I think when you ask those process questions, and the goal questions, those sorts of answers tend to naturally come out, okay. It's like, Okay, well, here's why I'm really doing this. And anything is really interesting to note, like their initial email to us, was, please consider adding the ability to indicate like this, like x y&z it was one sentence, which I know from a developer perspective can often be like, What am I supposed to do with this information? Like, what does this mean? Like? Like, how does this prioritize compared to other things? How does this fit into, you know, like, my conception of who we are as a company, and like what we do and how we, how we help customers versus how competitors help customers, right. And so those questions made it very easy for us to hone in on. Okay, like, what, like, what unique opportunity is there for us here? Because making it easier for people to connect to different types of data is something that we really focus on. Again, it's because it's a very process driven perspective. On on product strategy.

Colleen Schnettler 38:58
Yeah. So what I'm hearing from this, I'm loving this, like this, this makes great sense. And the way you described it, I think, is really good. So my takeaway for me for this week is going to be to try to get someone to respond to my emails. I'm gonna take I was actually writing down a few, a few tricks, a few tips when you were describing that. So I'm going to kind of take the information we were just talking about, and put it in an email to see if I can get get people to respond and kind of see, you know, if trying to, you know, focus on the job, per the book, right, the job to be done, will help engage people in in letting me know what they need.

Michele Hansen 39:39
And I don't know if you would conceptualize it of this, but I very much see jobs to be done and what you are trying to do, and how the whole point of simple file upload is to make this process easier for people and how your frustration was driven by you're looking at your whole process of trying to build a client website. This one particular station on that journey was repetitive and time consuming, and just really annoying. And you decided to make that particular station easier. And so now the question is okay, how can we make sure that that station is, you know, it's sort of fully built out, and it does what it needs to do. But then also, are there other places along the way that are adjacent to that, that you can nip off so that you're only just eliminating one step? you're eliminating three steps, right? And making all of those so much faster and so much easier?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele
And and I just find this makes prioritization so much easier when I can see Oh, okay, they're doing this other thing, right before and that vendor makes it super hard to get the data, the one after us, like, you know, it takes a really long time. Okay, that's a unique opportunity for us that nobody else is focusing on. And yeah, like, that's really frustrating for you. And I find that really motivating too, because it really, you know, a lot of people talk about using empathy in business, but there's not a whole lot of resources on how you actually apply that. And I find jobs to be done to be a very concrete way of using that set of tools to figure that out. And then how does this apply to a business? How does this give you a strategic advantage?

Colleen
That's awesome.

Michele
So I'm super psyched for this book, I promise that I will talk slower next time. Because this is the stuff that just like, you know, hits me in the heart and, and and I love working with because it was it was just so transformative for me when I first learned about it a couple years ago, so it's exciting stuff. And it helps us ask the right questions, which is, I guess, something we both are trying to do.

Colleen Schnettler 41:53
Absolutely. Well, that's gonna wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social Podcast. Thank you for joining us. You can reach us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod

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Michele Hansen 0:02
So you remember a couple weeks ago how we were talking about competitors nipping at our heels?

Colleen Schnettler 0:07
Yes.

Michele Hansen 0:09
So, recently, we had a new competitor, enter the space.

Colleen Schnettler
Ooh, interesting.

Michele Hansen
Amazon.

Colleen Schnettler 0:18
Oh, no. That's fair.

Michele Hansen 0:22
I mean, it's inevitable. Um, and we already compete with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and you know, all of these huge companies. So it's not, it's definitely not unexpected. Like, it's definitely been one of those. It's only a matter of time, things. But yeah, I, that that that happened, they launched their own location services. And, interestingly, they're just reselling to other providers, they're reselling s, ri, and here. And it's very focused on fleet management and asset tracking, which kind of makes sense based on what they're doing. Like, they're tracking packages and trucks and like, that's crucial to their operations. So it's almost kind of funny, because, you know, looking at that, and whenever people are asking about, you know, how do I bootstrap my own business? Like, where do I start? How do I get an idea? One of the most common pieces of advice and advice that I give is just start with something that you need yourself and go from there, which is what you have done. And it's also what Amazon has done here, too. So, so it's, like, I look at it, I'm like, Oh, this is clearly something they built for themselves, and now they're gonna have people paying for it definitely does, does a, you know, not a totally welcome surprise for us, right, because, um, fleet management and asset tracking is an important vertical for us, because it's expressly forbidden by some of the other major geocoder. So we do have an important amount of customers in those spaces, and overall, Amazon's pricing is much higher than us. But for asset tracking, it's, it's very favorable for that use case, because instead of paying per basically per ping from a GPS, imagine, like a truck might say, send back a GPS paying every 100 feet, for example, instead of paying every time for the new coordinates of that you only pay per asset. So you know, so I imagine we will lose some customers from this. But at the same time, what I think one of the great things about being in b2b SaaS, but especially the kind of space we're in, is that we're so diversified across industries, that we have tons of other verticals, in addition to fleet management and asset tracking. And it makes me really glad that I do that semi annual customer portfolio analysis, because I know exactly how much of our revenue is from that sector. And looking at this now and knowing Okay, there's this huge, well funded, competitor coming into the space. I can see pretty clearly like, how much revenue that directly puts at risk. But yes, certainly an interesting week.

Colleen Schnettler 3:33
Yeah. So when you do your semi-annual customer portfolio, do you break up your customers by industry? Is that the purpose of that?

Michele Hansen 3:43
Yeah. So basically, I look at our customers, as a portfolio, as an investor might look at, say, a mutual fund portfolio, for example. And I split it on a couple of different metrics. So I basically take the top 90% of revenue, and I look at the customers from it within that space. And I look at them by industry. So so there's like fleet management, but also say real estate or insurance, health care, things like that. By industry, I try to get a rough sense for company size. So that I can just kind of, you know, have a little bit more understanding there. And then just really trying to understand, okay, based on these different industries, like how much of our revenue is dependent on any one given industry, and should we think about diversifying whether we want a you know, a higher percentage of revenue in a particular category, we want new customers there, or do we want to purposefully pull back from a certain industry or simply just not emphasize it as much if we feel like there's too high of a concentration there, and also making sure that we don't have any high customer concentration and any one Given customer, so something an important metric for me is, you know, what are our largest customer, what percentage of overall revenue are there, they and basically making sure that that number is below 1%. And again, this also comes out of sort of investor style thinking where, you know, for example, if they're analyzing a company, and they see that a company has, say, 40% of its revenue coming from one particular customer, that's a huge red flag. Right? versus if it's highly diversified, then then let that's less of a risk. And yeah, that's, that's something I do about twice a year. And, and that's kind of one of those things are sort of had to create for ourselves, you know, I'm obviously not creating the concepts, but I think applying them in this way, is because, you know, as we've talked about a lot of the content out there on running a SAS is very much focused on growth and, you know, more well funded approaches to business that don't necessarily emphasize stability or profitability, or things like that. And so, rather than managing for growth, we manage for stability. And I find that this customer portfolio analysis is a really helpful tool for me. And, and matea stew in sort of like us communicating, okay, what are our priorities? And how do we create a more stable business and just kind of giving us a high level of that?

Colleen Schnettler 6:37
So you do that as a manual process?

Michele Hansen 6:40
Yes.

Colleen Schnettler 6:41
So do you literally hand Google?

Michele Hansen 6:44
It's because I'm a I'm a glutton for punishment, apparently,

Colleen Schnettler 6:46
I know.

Michele Hansen 6:50
You probably like the like the week, you know, the the week I spend on this every six months, I actually like genuinely is like

Colleen Schnettler 6:56
your favorite. Yes.

Michele Hansen 6:58
Making all my little pivot tables and everything and like, Oh, my gosh, I am. Yeah, it's actually really fun. Yeah, I basically just google them. And then, but a lot of them I've also had conversations with. So that's where I can fill out the rest of the picture to sort of so it's this combination of quantitative and qualitative information that we use for prioritizing. And, and this is really like kind of the first big moment I can think of where something happened. And my first thought was numbers from that analysis. And then it like made me feel better when when this happened.

Colleen Schnettler 7:39
So when we talked about competitive analysis last week, the reason and this wasn't we were talking about Amazon, we were talking about some of your other competitors who had launched new features. And we talked about you guys competing on some very specific in some very specific areas. So with this Amazon launch, are you saying that now at least for the fleet management sector, you do not compete on price.

Michele Hansen 8:09
So it's, it'll be it'll depend on the on the customer. So their price for pay as you go geocoding is much higher, they are $4 per 1000, versus we are 50 cents per 1000. If you want to store the data there, 50 cents per 1000, if you don't want to store the data, to anything, I read it more of a as a shot across the bow at Google than you know us. I mean, we're so small like that, you know, Amazon doesn't care about us, like, just kind of one of the nice things about being a bootstrap business. So of course, I mean, people from Amazon, like us, us like they're a customer of ours too. So it's like one of those really weird scenarios where we also have people from Google who, you know, pay us too, but it's just a different department. So it's kind of, it's kind of a funny thing, I mean, it totally makes sense that they would be going into this and there's a lot of stuff that their service is doing that we don't do and that we don't plan to do. So for example, it's very built around asset tracking. So it also includes drive time, and like all these like geo fencing, like all these other things like so, you know, knowing when a truck has entered the area of a delivery center, for example, you might use geo fencing for that. We don't really do that we don't do driving directions or drive time or or radiuses like things like that. So yes, it's a new competitor in this space. But you know, I also tend to think but this kind of data, like there's so much need for it, that there is plenty of space for lots of companies. And I think it really says something about the space that this announcement came out and, you know, you know, the first people I talked to about it, you know, obviously Mateus and then my like, core group of other bootstrapped founders that I talked to, and then the guy who runs another bootstrapped geocoding company being like, Wow, what an interesting day how like, and we're like kind of analyzing it and like, what does this mean for us? And it's, you know, because we all do something different. And like, there have been many times when I've sent people over to his company, because we weren't the right fit for them. I, maybe that's a sort of uncommon approach to competition, but I feel like there's plenty of space for everybody like we, we purposefully like, we don't want to be a monopoly. I don't think that's, it's just not what I want to be. And I don't think it's good for capitalism. Anyway. Um, so So I think there's space for more competition, but it is, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's scary when one of the big guys comes into the ring? Absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler 10:39
Sure, I could totally see that.

Michele Hansen 10:44
One thing I was talking about, when we were talking about the competitors was how, you know, we don't really change much when our competitors do things, and how we tend to just focus more on the customers we do have, and you know, towards that overall goal of stability? How can we make them happier and and keep them with us? And so it reminds me of a book, I'm actually going to start reading called the jobs to be done playbook. And so I think we've talked a little bit about jobs be done right?

Colleen Schnettler 11:23
halfway.

Michele Hansen 11:25
Okay, so jobs to be done is a framework for doing customer research, and understanding what it is that people really want to do overall. So and I actually have an example of this from from my life this week. So earlier this week, I was getting our holiday New Year cards out the door, which I guess for us are less of a holiday card and more of a like New Years where By the way, we're moving to a different continent card. Which side note, actually, I realized as I was doing those cards that I think I announced it on the podcast that we had moved, like before I had told some of our podcast listeners, yes, you are, you are in my inner circle. So um, so anyway, so we had to, you know, we have to send out cards to tell people we moved, so and then I found a service online that you can create your cards, and they will send them all out for you, which is really necessary because mailing them from Denmark to the US would be ungodly, expensive. And so I'm just going to pay a little bit extra to have a company mail them out for me. But I have to have a spreadsheet of addresses that I upload to the service for them to send them out. And they have a specific format for the addresses. And my spreadsheet where I keep all my addresses normally has them all in one column, like so the whole address is in a single cell. And they needed it split out into Street, city, state and zip. And I first thought I was like, Oh, no, it's gonna take me so long to like, manually do all that in the spreadsheet. And then I was like, wait a minute, I have a tool that parses addresses, and literally does this for people like I should use my own product, which, so it's like, I honestly find it really fun to get the dog like dog food, our product is just kind of, you know, the term people use for that. I don't know why it's called dog fooding eating your own dog food.

Colleen Schnettler 13:31
And that's weird, by the way, but

Michele Hansen 13:34
that's what yeah, that's, that's what we call it bootstrapping and dogfooding. And we've all these, this whole weird language of our own. So, um, my, my seven year old is actually sitting here with me while we record this, and she just started laughing into a pillow when I said dogfooding. So, um, so, so I uploaded it. And while it was processing and the 30 seconds it took to process. I was like, You know what, we should have a landing page about this, I don't even know what I need. So like, I just I quickly wrote up a very, very sparse landing page. And I was like, feeling all good about myself. And I'm like, Oh, this is I'm getting Christmas cards out. And also, like, I'm being so productive and adding landing page. And this is awesome. And then I downloaded it, and it was actually kind of a nightmare. And it wasn't a good use for what I was trying to do. Because it because we split out the street number and the unit's type from the address, and I needed those in the same column as them. So for example, if it was, you know, 17 Main Street, 17 Main Street, would all be in separate columns, and I or rather it would be 17 would be in a separate column from Main Street, and I needed those concatenated and also the units were all split out from the unit numbers and I only I could only have one column for address to information. And I did it manually, even though material This letter was like, why didn't you just read a concatenate function. And so it was kind of a funny thing. But like talking about jobs to be done, like the whole idea of jobs done is that it's not just the one thing that someone wants to get done, there's a broader job they're trying to accomplish. So in this case, my goal was not process a spreadsheet, my goal was not get the addresses in the right column format, my goal was get out these cards to a fulfill my social obligation of sending out holiday cards with my family photo on it, and be tell people that we have moved in, give them our address. And so there was kind of this, like physical job of actually getting this physical piece of paper out, there's a social job of informing people that we have moved and, you know, send it, you know, sending a card reciprocally, as they would as well. There's also sort of an emotional job of me having the relief that this is over with, on the long holiday to do list. And so. So that's what like jobs we don't really get that is that it's not just that one thing that people want to do, it's there's some broader goal that they have. You know, most times when people are using Juco, to for example, it's they want to make more sales, they want to track where their trucks are going so that their customers are happy with them so that they order from them again, like, it's not just about tracking the truck, or, you know, putting their customers on a map, like there's something else they're trying to do. And so how do you dive into that? How do you get that kind of information out of a customer? And then how do you use that information, to make decisions to write landing pages to have sales conversations, you know, like, how do you use that to really run a product run a business?

Colleen Schnettler 16:56
Yeah, I love this. Because last week, we were talking about how I have started doing all these customer interviews, and how I was getting so excited talking to customers, when they gave me suggestions. And they showed me how they want to use my product. And you pointed this out last week, you said something which kind of struck me. And you pointed out that I missed an opportunity to understand the bigger picture of what they were trying to do, and why they wanted to do it. So I was just thinking about the small potatoes, which was you're trying to get a file on your site, you're trying to get a file in the cloud, and you pointed out these discussions are an opportunity to figure out why why do they need to do that? What is their their bigger process? What are they trying to achieve? So when you describe this book, it sounds exactly like what we were talking about last week in terms of customer interviews.

Michele Hansen 17:47
Yeah, and something I think about that took me some time to learn with customer interviews is that they're not a conversation, and ways that you would act in a conversation where if somebody says something, and then you're just to agree with them or to disagree with them, or, or whatever that is, in an interview, you can't do that. Do it, you instead say? Can you tell me more about that? Why are you looking to do that? What were you doing before that? What would you do if that wasn't available? Like you asked these sorts of questions that you just don't, don't really ask and sort of normal conversational style. You know, there's actually I, I was I was preparing to give a talk at micro con last year, so 2019 on this, and I was talking to a friend beforehand at a cookout about what I was planning to talk about. And he goes, you know, that reminds me of this improv class I took where whenever somebody says or does an improv, no matter how crazy it is, you just have to build on it. Like you can't react to them, you instead build on what they have done. And so if they put on a cowboy hat, and like, tell you, they're an astronaut, like you have to just go with it. And you you can't like question them about that, right? Otherwise, the whole thing falls apart the whole dance. And so it's not a conversation, it's acting. And the way that you would talk to a friend is very different than the way I would talk in in a customer interview setting. Also, at the same time, though, like, you know, these are, this is a set of tools and in if you use these tools outside of that context, it can come off as the wrong way or not be as effective. Like, for example, I wouldn't do this in a sales setting because people have their guard up and are less vulnerable in a sales setting. justifiably Yeah. And so you don't want to dig too much into their emotions and their goals and everything else like it's it's very surface and has its own dance entirely. But yeah, I'm really excited to read this book. And if anyone else wants to read along with me, it's called the jobs to be done playbook by Jim kobach. And like so a friend recommended this to me who was a UX director at a at a big company. The reviews for it alone are from some of the big names in the jobs be done world Des Trainor, the co founder of intercom, Melissa Perry and author of Escaping the Built Trap, Bob Moesta, who is like a just a rockstar in the jobs to be done world. Tony Ulwick. Same He also wrote a jobs to be done playbook himself. So I, I'm so psyched to read this book, you know, seeing all of these people that I that I really respect recommending it, and of course, my friend recommending it as well. So this is something I'm going to start diving into over the holiday break. We you know, we are in a second lockdown now. So it seems like a good time to start a new book. But yeah, it's, it's even for somebody like me who's been doing this for years. I love diving in and learning more, there's always more to be refined. Nice.

Colleen Schnettler 21:13
So with the holidays coming up, I wanted to ask you, what do you guys do to take a vacation? Or do you not like what is your honor, we talked a lot about like your customer support cycle. But I was thinking about this this morning. Because what I did just for context, like I am down to one client, which they're wonderful. But I told them, I'm going to take two full weeks off, but now I have this product. So I'm obviously not taking I'm going to check it every day, except maybe Christmas, right? And I was like, oh, Is that normal? Is that what Michelle's doing? So what are you gonna do?

Michele Hansen 21:45
Yeah, our approach to vacations is just hope nobody reaches out to us. Which is not healthy.

Colleen 21:56
Yeah, kidding.

Michele Hansen 21:57
You know, we were having actually a conversation with some friends last week about this. And one of them pointed out that, you know, the things you do for growth are different than the things you can do when you're at a stage when your goal is stability. And that really got me thinking that, you know, there's things that we did to drive growth, especially when we were trying to transition to full time or, you know, maintain confidence in our transition to full time. And that we that we did to drive growth that maybe we don't need to do now that we feel like we're at a point where, you know, things are more stable, and we don't have to be so aggressive on that front. And, yeah, I'm totally not answering your question, which is that we don't know, again, you. Okay, that's what I'm really good at avoiding that question. Yeah, yeah. It's just that we just hope nothing comes up. But I think I mean, it's gonna be more challenging this break with with us in second lockdown. And, yeah. It's a, it's gonna be tricky. Yeah. But yeah, that's kind of what we do in general. And I don't think I would recommend that other people. So don't do what I do.

Colleen Schnettler 23:18
Well, and I'm, of course, in this position, where I'm trying to get customers and retain customers. So I'm in a totally different position. But I definitely feel like I need to, you know, be on top of things even during a you know, vacation. Because I'm in such as I'm in such a critical stage. So what you're telling me is even where you guys are, where you're very stable, you still you still do check in every day, even when you're on vacation, to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Michele Hansen 23:50
I would say it's less that we check in every day. And it's more that, you know, if an email comes in, like we still reply to it,

Colleen Schnettler 23:57
I met you check your email every day.

Michele Hansen 24:00
Like I yeah, like, Intercom still pops up. Like I think this is the kind of the difference between having clients and having customers is that you can tell your client, like, I'm not going to be checking my email, or I'm only going to check it, you know, every three days or whatever. And then like they can like grumble me like whatever fine. Or I'll be like, our offices are closed too. So it doesn't not a big deal. You know, we have you know, 10s of 1000s of people who could email us at any time and hopefully, they're taking a break to us usually holidays are pretty quiet for us. But especially especially with Christmas and New Year's because those are more common around the world than say Thanksgiving is which was pretty quiet for us. But we still had stuff coming in from other parts of the world. But yeah, we we don't have a good approach to taking breaks. And I think we are at the point where maybe that's something we can give ourselves. I mean, but It's just one of the trade offs of running your own company is, you know, working half an hour or an hour a day, during the holidays, but getting to take that time period. I don't really know. I don't really know where the line is there, quite frankly.

Colleen Schnettler 25:22
Well, fingers crossed. You guys don't have a lot of support requests, and you have a wonderful new year. Well, that'll wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and we look forward to connecting with you again soon. And just as a reminder, Michelle is going to be starting the job city jobs to be done playbook. If you want to read along in that book. We'd love to hear from you at @softwaresocpod on Twitter.

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Colleen Schnettler 0:00
Welcome to Software Social. I'm Colleen. This week, Michele and I discuss my progress getting my first product, a file uploading widget to 100 users. Why 100 because I'm going to sell it in the Heroku add on store, and I need 100 users before I can start charging. We also do a deep dive into what makes a good customer interview. And Michelle gets really excited about something called Prospect Theory. Enjoy the show. So I'm excited to share my numbers with you this week. For the past couple weeks for those that are new. I have been sharing with Michelle the numbers of signup, the number of signups I have for my new widget simple file upload. And as of this morning, I have 47 active signups.

Michele Hansen 0:45
Oh, it was like 31. Last time, right?

Colleen Schnettler 0:50
Yeah. So I really think using this marketing channel of the Heroku add on store has been tremendous for me. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm super pumped. So it's interesting, though, because when I first looked on, when I first signed on to my admin dashboard, it said 75 teams, but then I have to cross reference that with the people who have deprovisioned or kind of like, ditched it. So I'm still seeing a lot of people click the button to sign up. And then deprovision the add on but still 47 isn't bad. I'm pretty pumped about that. That's almost halfway to my 100. I need to get to actually make it a viable product.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah! So that's good news. I and I also spoke with someone who has a really successful add on in the marketplace. And he showed me this somewhat convoluted way where I can get the user's email address, even if they haven't gone through the single sign on process that I've mentioned in the past. So something I want to set up this week as I want to set up a wrapper so I can get the person's email address as soon as they provision the app and send them an email right away to see you know, if they're having any trouble setting it up, I think. I think that's where I'm losing people, but not that many people are communicating with me. So that's my best guess right now.

Michele Hansen 2:10
So you said 47 current signups?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Or current current user, so and then. So that's 16 new people since last time we talked. Do you have a sense for like, how many of those have have gotten to that, that crucial single sign on step and like, have actually added it to?

Colleen Schnettler 2:30
Yes, so of those 47,34 have actually gone through the single sign on. So 34 might actually want to use it for real is how I look at that. Only 16 have actually started uploading images or not, I shouldn't say images files. So there's a pretty big gap between showing intent and actually using it. So I really want to work on closing that gap.

Michele Hansen 2:57
Yeah, and it kind of makes sense to me that there would be a gap for that, when, in order to see how it works, people have to install it first versus services that you can see whether it works first, and then sign up for it, would have a lower drop off in that conversion.

Colleen Schnettler 3:19
Exactly. One of the things I want to do -- I have a long list of things I want to do, but they're all small, but they are there is quite a long list. I want to put because the Heroku documentation has to be formatted in this really specific way to comply with the Heroku requirements. Once you single sign on, I have the documentation and what I consider to be a much more user friendly format. So one of the things I want to do is on my normal marketing site, I want to add the user friendly documentation. So someone can see the documentation before they install the add on to see if it's a good fit because I know I'm someone -- if I want to install like a piece of software. I want to see your docs first because I want to see how good they are. And I want to see how hard it really is and how it actually works.

Michele Hansen 4:06
Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Colleen Schnettler 4:08
I also -- in very like I haven't taken Amy Hoy's course but like in very I had, you know I subscribed to her email is in very Amy Hoy fashion. As we've discussed, I launched this with a lot without a lot of boilerplate things. And one of the boilerplate things I didn't have is I don't have transactional email setup. Which means what I've been doing is, every night I've been signing onto my admin dashboard, copying the email addresses of people who signed up to an Excel sheet, literally emailing each person, one by one from my support account in Gmail. So in the beginning, that was not too cumbersome. It enabled me to see exactly where they were in the process like have they added files have they not have added a lot of files and kind of customize the email but now that's getting way too cumbersome and time consuming. So one of the things I really need to get up this week is transactional email. Yeah, it doesn't even take that long. It's, I'm somewhat like I do it all the time. It's just, I find it very mundane, because it's a very boilerplate thing. But it's such a, it's not such a pain, but it's kind of a pain, right? And so I tend to procrastinate the boring things like, like maybe most people, I'm like, Oh, I want to work on this, this this other feature, that's going to be so great. Instead of set up transactional email, but I'm losing people, right? Because if I don't email if you sign up, and I don't email you for 24 hours, like your path, you're over it, you have already made that decision, like your motive when you think of like a human motivation, at least for me, if I want something I want right now. So if I sign up for your software, it's because I want to use it right now. So if I can't figure...

Michele Hansen 5:50
So is this the welcome email?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, there's no welcome...

Michele Hansen
Here like this as like, here's the documentation. And here's what you've signed up for. Like, gotcha, okay. Yeah, I think I could help like, I know, our URL. Like, I don't think we had welcome emails to start. And we also, I think we manually emailed everybody who signed up. But it was so good for feedback like that early feedback was really critical for us. And it was part like, Hey, here's your documentation. But also, like, let us know if you have any questions about getting set up. Or if there was, you know, if there's anything else you're hoping that we do that we don't like, let us know. And we can see if we can add it.

Colleen Schnettler 6:27
Yeah, that's exactly where I am. So basically, not even well, I mean, it would be a welcome email. But I want to get that as soon as they sign up. I want to fire off that email. Like, here's how you contact me, here's how I can help you. Let me know what you need. Let's let's do this. And yeah, hopefully I'll get I'll get more engagement, if I catch people early in the process of provisioning the add on.

Michele Hansen 6:52
Yeah, that I think that sounds like a plan.

Colleen Schnettler 6:55
Yeah. Okay. Good plan. So let's talk a little bit about the people I've talked with, I mentioned that I've been doing customer interviews, which has been super fun, I'm really enjoying it. So I did a walkthrough with a friend who's a UI/UX designer, like a very senior designer. And he gave me some tips that I really took to heart. And I thought they were great. And so actually, this week, was mostly all technical stuff. This week, when I worked on Simple File Upload, I was, I was kind of heads down trying to implement some new features that I really think are going to be great for the product. I believe I mentioned last week that I'm implementing the ability for the user to change the color, and the text color, the background color, the border color, I also am going to allow the user to add their own custom icon. So they can completely customize the look of this. And I'm going to allow them to add their own custom classes right in the dashboard. So I think that's going to be a really nice feature change. I'm actually done with that. But I haven't pushed it to production yet. And also, I'm really kind of excited about this next one, it's going to auto populate the drop zone preview box with whatever image you have saved in your database. So I'm excited about that one. Because I really wanted that I think I mentioned that I was doing this thing where I used it where it's like, you show the image, then you click a button to open the drop zone. And I really didn't like that it felt kind of clunky. So I'm really happy to have this preview feature, which I just got that one done. Again, I haven't pushed it out to production yet. But I'm pumped that that that's working. And I'm excited about that.

Michele Hansen 8:33
Yeah, that's pretty exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 8:35
Yeah, so so lots of like technical work, just trying to make the product a little bit better before I really do a big marketing push. I do want like I am still doing the marketing study. But I have not spent any time on my marketing site. Because I've just been trying to get these features out. I also spoke with -- another interview I did was with a front-end developer and he was pretty jazzed about it because you don't have to do any background configuration. So as a front end developer, he can completely allow his users to upload files and access those files, and he doesn't have to do anything on the back end. So it made me think if I'm going to niche this down further, which I might, I might do, like the front-end developer community, might be where I want to be.

Michele Hansen 9:19
I'm really excited to hear that you are enjoying these conversations. I think a lot of people have fear around talking to customers, whether that's a fear that they're going to say something negative about your product, or simply fear that you're not going to know what to say to them and it's going to be awkward and so it's it's really encouraging to hear that you're enjoying it and I'm curious if you can like talk more about how you have approached those conversations.

Colleen Schnettler 9:49
Okay, so the first thing I have to say is of all the people I've talked to only one person has been excited about it. Everyone else is kind of like pointing out stuff but it hasn't been all positive feedback. But the people who are pointing up stuff are trying to help. They're not you know, they're not being jerks.

Michele Hansen 10:06
It's helpful. Like, I mean, if you talk to someone, and they're like, they say everything is amazing and perfect, and then they don't actually give you anything to work on. It's kind of like, well, that made me feel good, but didn't really help me do anything. But I mean, it sounds like you're getting a lot of productive feedback out of these conversations.

Colleen Schnettler 10:25
I totally am, I totally AM. And yeah, but it has been like, not exactly affirming. And to your point, I think we talked about this weeks ago, you don't want your customers to just tell you everything's perfect unless it really is. And where I am, it's definitely not perfect. So I have really appreciated everyone giving me like really honest feedback, I've tried to approach these conversations, kind of, like I think I talked about last week, it's nice to have a starting point, like I've been able to reach a lot more people, because now I have something very specific, I'm trying to share with them. Whereas in the idea generation phase, you don't even have, when you're just trying to come up with ideas, the customer interviews are really hard at that point. Because you don't even have a process identified that you're trying to solve. So you're trying to walk these people through their day, and, and hone in on a process that they might not even know they're struggling with. And that's, that's nearly impossible is what I found. Whereas now that I actually have a product, and I'm looking at this very specific thing, people have been much more generous with their time, and much more generous with their feedback, telling me about what they do, what they have done what they want. And so I really think that's, that's helping my customer interview skills. That being said, I get really excited, like, you know that maybe listeners of the podcast have noticed that sometimes I'm literally like sitting on my hands, so I don't interrupt someone with my excitement. So I don't know why that works. But I'm like, Colleen, just be quiet, let them talk, let them talk, let them talk. So sometimes that's what's going on in my head. So for me, tempering my excitement, and my desire to agree with them, has been a little challenging.

Michele Hansen 12:19
That totally makes sense. And, you know, when I'm coaching people, and I'm doing interviews, that's always one of the things that comes up so common is that if somebody says something, whether you agree with it or disagree with it, you can't jump in and share your own perspective, because in order to get someone to be as open with you as possible, you need to hold back all of your thoughts about what they're saying, both enthusiastic ones and disagreement. And I find that one of the hardest things for founders, when they're doing interviews, is when somebody says something is broken, or that it doesn't work, right, or that they expected it to work a different way, to be able to say, "Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me how you expected it to work?" Rather than saying, "Well, the reason why is I built it like this, and I did that, and then I couldn't do it this way. And then, and then eventually, that's how we got around to this way." But really avoiding doing that second part. And so I'm curious if you have found yourself falling into that when people people are pointing things out.

Colleen Schnettler 13:27
So I tend to agree, but I think I agree a little too enthusiastically. For example, if you said to me, wow, Colleen, this is cool. But I really need it to have this styling. I'm someone who's gonna be like, yes, that's a great idea. Like, literally, that's how excited I will be on the call with you. Like I'm like, Yes, that's a great idea. And then you have the you know, these people have never met me in real life. They have like, no context for me, I probably terrified them. They're probably like, Okay, calm down. So I think that I tend to get really excited. And I tend to agree. So far, everything people have said to me is really good. And they're right. And it was actually affirming something I had already kind of knew was a thing. But in the in the effort to actually ship as we've discussed, I didn't implement all these other features. So So my challenge, so yes, I'm falling into that trap of like being overly agreeing. And so my challenge and what I'm trying to work on in future customer interviews is to listen and take in their feedback, but go one step more. So let's say for example, someone said to me, "Hey, this is great. I am a designer, I need to upload these huge super huge files, because we need these files to be you know, five gigs. They weren't five, they were like two gigs. They're huge files." And so I my recent That was like, Yes, you That's exactly what I was thinking of when I built this. It's for people like you who need these huge files. And what maybe I could have done better would have been to get some more context, I could have been like, okay, I forgot to ask him what he's doing now. Like, that's kind of critical. So I didn't ask him what he's doing. Now, I didn't ask him what, you know, impediments he has for what he's doing now. But contrast that with another person I have talked to, and this other person wants something totally different. He is like, I'm using these for images. So I want to be able to resize and crop and use all the image magic stuff on these images. And when he was saying that, I thought, Yeah, that would be great if I if I did that. But these two things are directly in conflict, right? I can't pre pre optimize your images and give you full image sizes. I mean, you wouldn't if you don't, you know, these two people wanted different things. And so, but I loved both of their ideas. So I don't know if I made any progress there.

Michele Hansen 16:05
I think you did, because you identified some things that you might do differently in future interviews. And it stuck out to me that you said that when you're responding to what someone said, and you responded with all this enthusiasm for them. You did not dig deeper into their process. And until you just told me about those two different types of feedback, what what I didn't hear was, Why do they need that in the first place? What is their broader goal they're trying to accomplish? What is the process? What kind of context is this in? are they building client websites? Or they're building somebody else's websites? Like what kind of websites are they like, like, really, really digging more into what it is they are doing? And it strikes me there's a, I have a favorite book about interviewing one I've several books about here. But one in particular, I don't know if I've ever recommended to you is called Practical Empathy by Indi Young, I've ever recommended that to you.

Colleen Schnettler 17:05
I don't think so.

Michele Hansen 17:05
It's as much as a book about how to interview people and how to pull these things out of them. But it's also very useful for being in meetings or talking to friends or family in general of really trying to understand what someone is saying what they're experiencing and putting yourself in your shoes. To understand how the world looks from their perspective. It's such a good book, I just reread it last summer. And I found myself just constantly underlining and and nodding as I was reading it, and just, you know, one of those books you read? And you're like, yes, yes. Like, I agree with everything she's saying. Such a good book. It's, I think it would be amazing if you know, every founder read that, read that book, read Practical Empathy. It just gives you tools to conduct interviews, and meetings and everything else sort of in general, in a way that really helps you understand why people are asking for things and how to figure out what that context is that drives them to have these feature requests. So then you can understand how those things fit together and how to prioritize them.

Colleen Schnettler 18:14
Well, that sounds like a wonderful book. And I think I'm getting to the end of StoryBrand. So I think maybe that will be my next book that I read and share about on the podcast.

Michele Hansen 18:24
Do we want to do a little bit of story brand, then?

Colleen Schnettler 18:27
Sure. Let's let's jump into this week. So I am on the chapter after calls to action. And this chapter is that helps them avoid failure. And the principal, each chapter has this principle that the StoryBrand author's trying to get across is that every human being is trying to avoid a tragic ending. The kind of the the way this is framed in a marketing context is he talks about, you need to identify what the customer will lose if they don't buy your product. If there are no stakes, there is no story. People are motivated to loss aversion. Emphasizing potential loss is more than just good storytelling. It's good behavioral economics. So then he talks about this study that identified this thing called Prospect Theory. Have you ever heard of this?

Michele Hansen 19:18
Yes, I'm, I'm like, I'm sitting here trying not to bubble over with excitement. I'm just like you were talking about with your interviews because I'm a like, I'm a huge fan of behavioral economics and like, and I'm like, Oh my god, Is he good? Is Is he gonna talk talk about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Like, yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 19:36
Yes! That's exactly. That's exactly what he talks about.

Michele Hansen 19:39
Is it the study where it's like, would you rather have a 50% chance of losing $100 or a 50% chance of winning $1,000 or no, not losing? $100? Right. And then we'll pick not losing $100 doesn't exactly what he talks about. Behavioal Economics. Amazing. Okay. Yes. Okay. So how does it talk about what does it mean in a Storybrand context?

Colleen Schnettler 19:58
Okay, so this is all new to me. Unlike Michele, I don't study behavioral economics in my free time. But that's cool that you do. So this theory exactly, by the author Michelle was just talking about, it's called Prospect Theory. And it argues that people are more likely to be dissatisfied with a loss than they are satisfied with a game. So people hate losing $100 more than they like winning $100. So loss aversion is a that's so wild, by the way, I've just never thought about it before. It's not something I've ever considered.

Michele Hansen 20:33
You know, actually, this came up for us this week, because and actually, so I wrote a little like, a blog post about this a couple of years ago, on this on this topic, so we have people like signing up for our site, and we have a free tier.

Colleen Schnettler 20:49
Yeah, and

Michele Hansen 20:50
and we will occasionally see like people creating multiple accounts and abusing the free tier. And so for a period of time to prevent this, we had everybody had to verify their email before they could process a file. But then that, first of all, it can credibly, like decrease conversions and made things more complicated for for legitimate users. Actually, I think what it did was like there was like a maximum of like five accounts per IP address, and then it had to be manually overwritten. So how it worked with a signup a couple of years ago was that in order to to prevent all of these sort of abusive signups, we would have a limit of five accounts per IP address. And then if they needed more than that, then there was a manual override we had to do. But the problem was is like people would be like in a class, for example, like so the Red Cross uses us in their disaster relief trainings, or a lot of professors use us in their GIS classes. And so then they would be like, oh, we're getting blocked from signing up. And so we would have to go in and like try to do this. And like it was actually hurting these legitimate users or people we wanted signing up. And so we realized we were spending more time thinking about how to prevent these abusive signups then we were on like, growth and like new customer acquisition, and but really like, because it hurts, like what people are abusing a free tier in this very visceral way. And we just saw this again, in the past week to where last week we had someone create, like 75 accounts all within the same day. But then we looked at like, okay, where are they doing it automated, like, I like, how is it happening? And this person was like, literally, like manually going in and creating these accounts every five minutes. And I was like, well, they spent like, a solid 15 hours doing this, and their time is not valuable enough to pay us the $25, it would have been like, should we really go in right now and spend hours of work on trying to prevent this from happening when this person wouldn't even have paid us in the first place. Though, actually, then a day later, it turns out, we do have to prioritize this work, because this person was using fake email accounts, and they were doing it over several days. And we're sending a welcome email, we're going well, in this episode, we're sending a welcome email to all of those fake email accounts, and it caused our bounce rate to go way up. So then we got a warning from intercom saying, you know, your bounce rate is really high, and you need to get it down. Otherwise, you might get shut off from email. So now we actually have to prioritize this work. But like, that's something that that loss aversion principle is something that we talk about, often, when it comes to free tier users, and like, how aggressive do we want to be in preventing someone from getting $5 $25 worth of free usage, versus spending those, you know, five, six hours of time it would take to work on that for something that could get us 1000s of dollars in new customers? It's an easy trap to fall into. And, and I think knowing about that study is so helpful because I can see that pattern of because it's a natural pattern of thinking, you know, you're perfectly normal for for thinking that way. And so, so recognizing that pattern, and then not falling into it. It's it's hard, but it's necessary.

Colleen Schnettler 24:18
Yeah, I was fascinated because I have like I said, I had not been introduced to this idea before. So I thought it was really interesting.

So the author of the book talks about creating a four step process which he calls a fear appeal. Now, to his credit, he does talk earlier in the chapter about how you don't want to fear monger, you're not trying to terrify or create a false sense of fear. You're just trying to show your potential customer what they're going to lose if they choose not to go with you. So the four step process is one make the reader know they are vulnerable to a threat. Two, since they are vulnerable, they should take action to reduce their vulnerability. Three, let them know about a specific call to action that protects them from risk. And four challenge them to take this specific action. And he doesn't I mean, he says, again, not a lot of fear, just a quote, pinch of salt was the way he described it. So you need to look at what are you helping your customers avoid? So my list that I made, what am I helping my customers avoid? So what is the opportunity cost of not working with me? For what I have built, I think it's a tremendous amount of time wasted. You won't lose your files because I have backup storage, when most people create their AWS accounts in their s3 buckets, they don't create a backup service, you won't lose users because of your crappy interface. And that's all I got.

Michele Hansen 25:52
I think that time one is a big one.

Colleen Schnettler 25:54
I still think the time when is a big one, I should add something about the direct uploads because my files don't touch your server. Because you know, sometimes, if you don't use direct uploads, you go from the the browser to your server, your server to your cloud storage provider, and I go right to your cloud storage provider. So not having to write that architecture is again, though, really, that's a time thing. Really, that's just going back to ease of use.

Michele Hansen 26:19
Yeah, I think time saving is your big loss that people might experience if they don't use your service.

Colleen Schnettler 26:26
Yeah, I agree. I think I think time saving as well. So that was that chapter. That's what I read this week.

Michele Hansen 26:32
Well, I guess that's a good time for us to end this week. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you again next week.

View Details

Michele Hansen 0:00
So we had kind of a wake up call this week.

Colleen Schnettler 0:04
Oh, what happened?

Michele Hansen 0:07
So we're looking at some of our competitors websites, and we realize either their employees don't have kids, or they don't care that their employees have kids or what, but they have gotten a lot more done this year than we have.

Colleen Schnettler 0:24
Oh, okay.

Michele Hansen 0:26
I mean, we feel good about what we've gotten done considering everything. But it was definitely kind of a moment of, whoa, okay. Like, you know, should you know, we have this information now, like, should we do something with this knowing that some competitors are nipping at our heels a little closer than they were a year ago?

Colleen Schnettler 0:47
So what does it mean for them to be nipping at your heels? Are they releasing new features? Are they like, what exactly did you see that made you go, Oh, we need to up our game.

Michele Hansen 0:58
So it's, it's partly new features, I think it's one of the most visible things, there's also some administrative type features, like, you know, certain compliance, and certifications. And you know, it with this kind of thing, though, you know, you have that first moment, it's like, oh, like, they now support something that they didn't before that we do. And so that makes us tighter competitors. But also remembering that we compete on so many different levels. And like, we have no one true one to one competitor, um, which, which I think is good for us. And it was, the other thing is like, we don't really pay much attention to our competitors, which I think is somewhat unique. Um, you know, I get the sense that that most companies, if you ask them to how they divide their mental headspace, and research time, and all of that between their competitors and their customers, I'm gonna bet that most companies are somewhere around at 20 in favor of looking at what their competitors are doing, what their features are, what their pricing is, you know, what their marketing is, like, all those kinds of things. And then 20% on the customers, and even like, really great companies that are known for focusing on their customers, which most truly great companies are, are probably more like 5050. And I think we're more like 9010 in favor of listening to our customers and letting them guide our roadmap. And then it's really maybe only once or twice a year that we really check in on what our competitors are doing.

Colleen Schnettler 2:46
Okay, so you were checking out some of your competitor sites? And like, what's your reaction? Are you concerned? Are you worried, you're gonna start? Are you seeing, are you seeing higher customer churn? Because people are going to your competitors for these additional features?

Michele Hansen 3:01
No, that's the thing. And our growth is, you know, perfectly healthy, it's, you know, beyond a level that that we, you know, sort of, quote, unquote, need. And so all of that is healthy, and we're really busy. So we're not worried about it. And I think that's what I have been thinking a lot about is okay, you know, we have this moment of we have this new information. And whenever we get new information, there is there's the question of, what do we do with this information? And the answer to that question can be nothing, we don't do anything different. Which I think is an under appreciated answer. In business many times, and old boss of mine was sort of famous for, you know, his do nothing approach. Because, you know, we're not going to sort of run around like chickens with our heads cut off to launch a new feature. When, you know, it turns out that oh, well, the competitors pricing model is actually not as customer friendly as ours, and based on some other things are, it's very clear, they're going after a different market segment than we are. And maybe there's a small percentage of customers that view us as a one to one comparison, but it's really very few customers who do, but it's a tricky thing, right?

Colleen Schnettler 4:34
Yeah, I can definitely see that. So I was talking to a friend the other day about his last SaaS, which did really well, he grew it and he sold it for a good chunk of money. But he was talking about like the emotional upheaval every time a competitor launched. And I thought that was really interesting, because that's got to be like, you don't know what to do. Should you implement these features like there's got to be a lot of tension there in terms of how you approach this kind of new information you have?

Michele Hansen 5:02
Yeah, and and what I tend to think about is, when I get those feelings, I pull it back to Okay, what what are the dimensions that we are truly competing on? And how many of those have really changed, and how many of those are present in this competitor, and how easy is it for this competitor, to replicate our model, because that's what makes a business unique is it you know, all the different things that go into it that make certain you know, price points possible for some companies that aren't possible for other ones, for example, you know, so we, we not only compete on the price itself, we also compete on the pricing model. So we have free tier daily free tier plus pays, you go plus subscription options. And then you know, all sorts of other more custom options after that. You know, some of our competitors are, for example, one of the major ones, they have a free tier per month, but you have to have a credit card on file. Some of them are much lower free tier per month, some of them have a free tier per day, but it's only for a three month period, like there's all and then like some of them have pays, you go on top of that some as we were talking about with you a couple of weeks ago, some of them maybe have paid you go on top of that, or they have subscriptions within a certain band on top of that, or they jump straight to enterprise after that. Um, and so the price and the pricing model are one way we can eat, then, of course, there's the the data itself, like so in our space, it's the coverage, you know, where US and Canada and some of our competitors are us only some of them are worldwide, but not at rooftop level. Some of them are rooftop, like some places rooftop some places not like all sorts of different things. And then also the different data appends that we have. So adding congressional districts, adding census data, all that kind of stuff, which most of our competitors don't have, only one has a couple of those things. So there's the data and the coverage. There's also things like the features. So we have an API, we also have the ability to upload spreadsheets, like massive spreadsheets, most of our competitors don't have spreadsheet upload support, most of them don't have batch geocoding support. And some of them actually expressly prohibit batch geocoding. Only one of them has some sort of spreadsheet support, but it's actually like copy paste, and it's very limited. And then there's also Terms of Service, which is probably the hardest one for anyone to replicate, which is our extremely permissive Terms of Use. And most of our competitors have very restrictive Terms of Use, and you know, you can't store the data, you can't reuse it, things like that. And so when we have a, you know, a new competitor Come on, or a new a competitor, add, you know, features or things like that, we're always thinking, Okay, like, how does this? Yes, there's that initial feeling of like, oh, oh, like, okay. But then what does that actually mean for us? And how does that change our competitive position? And usually, it's, you know, what, this, there's more competition, that's fine. We're still okay, we're still going to keep focusing on what we do.

Colleen Schnettler 8:19
So you're looking for like specific data points, like you would be maybe concerned if a customer changed to a similar pricing model, or if they decided to let you cache your data or let you keep your data. So you're looking for things like that are more specifically competing in your competitive advantage? Exactly.

Michele Hansen 8:39
Yes. And especially the combination of all of those things, too, which is something that thankfully, none of our competitors have, at this point. And, and the thing about competitive advantage, even in a commodity space, is that we still have some advantages, like we have seven years now of working with this data, and have happy customers who are willing to vouch for us who who talk to other people about us, like, those are advantages we didn't have at the beginning. And now our data is much, much better, the user experience of those features is much, much better, which in a commodity space. You know, you only have so many levers to pull prices, the most obvious one, but user experience is a big one too, because if you can make it easier for someone, and it's the same price as something else, they're going to use the one that's easier to use. And so we have years under our belt of making those things easier, for example, some of our competitors, like maybe they have international data, or they do have rooftop data or whatever that is, but you have to hit multiple API's to do that. And so that's an infrastructure decision that has informed a competitive advantage for us because it's easier to use our API because you only have to make one request and then you get everything back all at once. And so there's a lot have like strategic level decisions like that. That may just seem like an engineering decision or a legal department decision with Terms of Service, for example, that I think really do change, competitive positioning and competitive advantages.

Colleen Schnettler 10:20
So part of this makes me think about something we've discussed before. And it's just as this decision on how and when to add new features. Do you guys use a product to help you with that? Or do you have a product roadmap, you guys review every six months? Like kind of, besides looking at, you know, where you're competing? specifically? How do you handle new features.

Michele Hansen 10:43
So we do not have a product roadmap, I think that was something that we honestly, were kind of excited to liberate ourselves from when we went full time on this, because you know, we don't have a board of directors to report to we don't have other departments that need to coordinate, we don't need leadership that's on board. Like, because we are the leadership, we're also the operators, you were the investor, like we're everything. And so we don't have a roadmap, which is, just makes it really simple with the two of us, because we're always, we're always learning together. And so if something starts to shift that like, oh, like we should, maybe we should add this particular data append, or maybe we need to rethink the user experience of a particular part of our service. Both of us are kind of evolving at the same time. It's pretty rare for us to be in a situation where one of us thinks one thing is really important, and the other one thinks something else's, is really important. I think that's really where working respect for your co founder is really important. We do though, generally, like we'll talk maybe over the next three months. And how we tend to work especially when it comes to new features, is we will do sort of sprints and rest periods. So fours, everybody knows the term Sprint's from agile and all of that, and this term drives me nuts. Because anyone who has ever run knows that you do not sprint constantly, you can't sprint for two weeks, and then sprint two weeks sprint for two weeks that you're going to be exhausted, you live your body physically cannot do it. And so what we will tend to do is we will sprint on a particular feature, or something that we're trying to improve or trying to do. And then we purposely have a rest period, we might take a couple of weeks where we're just doing maintenance work, you know, we're doing all the other things that go into running the business. But we're not doing that energy of new creation, which is kind of exhausting and like requires a lot of mental energy to work through. Okay, well, what if, in this scenario, what happens there? And that way this could go wrong? How do we handle these three, you know, cases that come out of that, like all of that sort of thinking is very resource intensive, from a mental perspective. And, and so we purposefully will sprint for a period of time, and then have a period where we're, you know, fixing bugs and doing accounting things, and then and other things like that. But we usually don't plan more than maybe two months in advance, like what we'll have a general idea of what we're going to be working on over the next couple of months. We are rarely in scenarios where we have a specific deadline for something, especially for a feature like I can only think of one time in the past two years that there was a customer that was coming on board. And there was a particular feature that was a requirement for them to start. And we you know, we gave them a timeframe for that. And we basically had a due date for it. But pretty much all of our due dates are always self directed.

Colleen Schnettler 14:02
Very cool. It sounds like a great way to run a business. I mean, it sounds like you guys have a good a good balance there. And you're far enough along that every time a competitor launches, you know, a new feature. It's not like oh my gosh, we're gonna go out of business. Like it sounds like you're in a pretty comfortable position.

Michele Hansen 14:18
It definitely was like that. In the beginning, though. Um, you know, we have to close our eye on things. And yeah, I remember we had there was somebody who launched something similar for Australia, and they like copied our entire website. And our price like they copied literally everything about us. We had another competitor who copied our tagline and I think they might even still have it. Who knows, they might even be listening. Um, if they pay attention to competitors, like most companies do, they probably think this podcast is a great source of competitive intelligence and corporate espionage.

Colleen Schnettler 14:59
I love it. You said corporate espionage but so fancy,

Michele Hansen 15:05
I don't, I tend to be more relaxed about this stuff, you know, we like we see the competitors Come on, we see them do things. And I think, as a business because we are so in touch with our customers, and because it's so important to us, and because we know we're doing the things that are important to them, I think as a business, we tend to have a certain amount of quiet self confidence, we don't feel the need to be looking over our shoulder, you know, wondering if our customers are going to go to the new hot thing and leave us behind like we, we know them, they know us. And, and we listen to them. And, and so far, that seems to be working. Now, there's no guarantees that that will continue to work. And there could be some, you know, crazy funded company that's going to completely come in washes away, that certainly happens all the time, especially to small companies, having a big well financed competitor come in. So that's something that could happen in the future. But for the time being, you know, we're gonna keep doing what we're doing.

Colleen Schnettler 16:11
Awesome.

Michele Hansen 16:12
So what's up with you?

Colleen Schnettler 16:13
So I have been working, I've been busy working on all the things, it's still a lot of fun. It's nice, even now past the idea generation stage and having actually shipped something. It's nice to know what to do next. Like I have a lot of things to do. But I know what to do next. And you know, that kind of feels good after floundering for so long with like, oh, what about this? What do I do now? What do I do now. So customer levels about the same as it was last week, 30 ish people signed up, I think I've 10 that are actively using it. But the great thing is, because I've been able to talk to some of the 10 people, I have seen some issues with the product that I really want to address have already addressed, you know, by this week, and the first one was deleting and that I already told you about. So I did that. The second one was customizing the widget. So it looks great on my site, because the branding is obviously designed to match my site. And so someone sent me his production site where he's using it, and he has like this dark theme, and it looks terrible. White, I know, I was like, let me fix that for you immediately. So it's cool. So I added a section now where as the implementing developer, you can now set your all your different colors, you can upload your own icon, you can completely customize it to match your site branding. So I was pretty excited about that. Especially since you know, that's an immediate like gratification thing for people who are using it. I'm also I have it running on two of my client sites now. And I'm seeing some issues with like the ease of implementation, like that's my big tagline, right is that like, it's easy. And I'm seeing that there are some things you may want to do that are, you have to have like a deeper level of JavaScript for. And so I want to kind of, I think not everyone's gonna want to do it. Basically, for example, let's say you're using it for your avatar and your avatars uploading photos, what would happen is because the drop zone doesn't have a memory, per se, if you render the form, but it's an edit form, instead of a new form, the previous image is not going to be on the form, you as the developer have to write the image tag to put the previous image in the image tag. And then the drop zone would be wherever you put it on the page. But that's kind of that's, that feels kind of clunky, right? Because you have your image, and then you have a drop zone below it. So just things like having it pop up, when you click a button and having it hidden. You know, I'm just working through some of the UI stuff. And I'm trying to give people options. So yes, it takes five minutes to implement it. If you also want it to pop up here and do this and do that. Here's a snippet you can use to make that happen. So I'm kind of trying to work through some of those kinks.

Michele Hansen 19:23
I mean, the great thing about having early users, even though it's not a lot is like I can see how people are using it and you can get which is so bad from people not only as Hey, like can you do this but do what you're talking about with a dark mode like the the feedback of oh my gosh, this is amazing. Like thank you so much you fixed it like that is some of the most powerful motivation and like, like affirmation that you're working on the right thing, which, you know, said for so long, you felt like you were kind of floundering looking for something to work on and didn't have that that kind of direction. And we're really just trying to find something and now to be in a place Where you have people using it, and you're using it yourself, and you're seeing these issues and you know, on the one hand, it can be a little bit overwhelming to be like, Oh my God, this product has such a long way to go. But also you get those little moments of Oh, wow, you fixed it. Thank you so much like, just hearing someone appreciate you is, I find that to be so motivating.

Colleen Schnettler 20:25
Yeah, it's been really cool. And I've noticed too, like in the beginning, you know, you and I've been friends for years and have been doing these coffee chats pre podcast for years. So you remember me just desperately trying to find an idea. And I would interview people. But I have found that now that I actually have something, people are much more open to talking to me about it. So I have like, I've had a couple calls this week, I have calls with friends. They were just friends that are developers, but I can be like, here is this thing. What do you think? How does it integrate with your production applications. And I feel like I'm getting a lot of really good feedback from from that. So it's actually really nice to go back through with follow up with people I've talked to before and been like, Oh, so I built this thing. And you can get really specific feedback, which I think is cool. And so that's been, that's been a lot of fun. So I've been doing like a lot of calls and just talking and talking and talking to people about what they need. And about the feature thing too. At first, when this guy sent me his site, and I saw this white drop zone on his blue background, I was like, Oh my gosh, I am so embarrassed that I shipped a product that you can't change the color of. But then the more I thought about it, I was like, I just really needed to ship something and it works. You know, I didn't ship a piece of crap. Like it works, it does exactly what it says it will do. So I'm really glad you pushed me to ship it, even though it didn't have some like things that are really nice to have. Because once it was shipped, like once it's out there, the hardest part was all the AWS architecture, right? This stuff is easy, like this stuff I can do in a day. And so I'm really glad, like, that's all that would be my you know, if you're in that early stages of a product, and you have one that works, but it's not perfect shipping anyway. Because then to your point, you'll hear from people, you'll see what people want, and you'll be able to, you know, riff on that.

Michele Hansen 22:18
And I feel like, what I hear you saying is how, you know, you said you, you were you felt like you were floundering for a long time. And it was hard to get people to talk to you about that. And you didn't say this, but it but it sounds like that was kind of a lonely process. And now that you have someone, something out there, you have all these people to talk to you and they're excited about it. They want to give you feedback. And yes, there's like some embarrassment that like oh my god, like, like, you can't do the background. Oh, this is terrible. Like, we definitely had those feelings of like, Oh, my God, our product is terrible. Why would anyone use it? Um, and like, but you have connection now with other people. And so you went from this kind of lonely place to one where you do have conversations and people want to talk to you because there's like something tangible that you can talk about with them. And so I think your story is, you know, so inspiring for people who, who may still be in that looking for a problem looking for something to build phase because it's okay, if you're feeling kind of alone in that stage. Like, that's, that's perfectly normal. I think your story of just, you know, building the thing you needed, even if it's not the most exciting thing in the world, it's not going to be the next Uber, like it solves your problem, and you're happy with it. Um, and yes, there's a little bit of embarrassment about features of it when you when you launch, but you got something out there, and now you're you collaborating with people on it like you can get there.

Colleen Schnettler 23:56
Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. And you know, I was thinking about this. So I told you, part of the reason, like I listened to a lot of podcasts, and I listened to a lot of these two founders starting a business podcast. And so I've been listening to them a little more closely. And it occurred to me, that of the four I listened to, not a single founder is on his first company. Oh, like they've all started something before. Yeah. Well, I mean, whether it's been like an info product, or they haven't all started, like super successful sasses. But like a couple of them have sold, they've all sold something outside of their consulting before. So I think also, I think part of my part of the thing that is lonely and can feel really frustrating when you're trying to get started is I'm listening to these guys on their podcast. And they'll just like casually mention, the other company they sold, or they'll casually mentioned, they're backed by tiny seed. And I'm like, well, we were backup like, what about us that are just starting from the beginning. So yeah, so that's just like my little pep talk if you're just starting from the beginning. So am I And, and it is lonely in the beginning, especially since you're so like, you're so directionless. Right. So like you said, Now I have a direction. This might, as we said, I don't, I don't really know where it's going. But now I can talk to people and I collaborate with people. And I can really find out the pain frequency of this problem, which is something we have discussed before, too.

Michele Hansen 25:22
It sounds like you're in a good place right now.

Colleen Schnettler 25:25
I am like, this part is so fun. Another thing I've been thinking of is like, as we've discussed before, as well, this is like what I want to do, right like this is this is the path I want to go on. So I've tried to kind of implement strategies to not work myself to death ever thinking, I'm just going to be, you know, once I, because I used to think like, Oh, I just launched something like everything will be perfect. I think Amy has a great article about this, too. Like, if I just make my first sale, like everything will be perfect like this is I want this to be my job. Like I want this to be, you know, something that weaves itself into my life in a really manageable way. And so, you know, this is a really fun time right now. So I'm just trying to enjoy it.

Michele Hansen 26:07
I'm so happy to see you in a good place like, new, as you mentioned, like we've been having these conversations for years now. And it's just so gratifying for me to see you so like happy and bubbly and full of tasks and things and directions. And like you're on the path, you may have just gotten your foot on it, but you are on like we have gotten you to the trail, you are no longer wandering through the woods like there, there will be rivers, there will be cliffs like this trail is not going to be just a walk in the park. But we found the trail. And that is such a huge part of the journey. And I'm just so happy to see you at this place now. Like it's so gratifying for me.

Colleen Schnettler 26:55
It's awesome. It makes me happy too. And thank you so much, you're the best. So Oh, and so really this upcoming week, I need to work on my marketing page. It's funny how like, I just have been really slow to get that done. It's not that it's particularly hard. I just have to do it. So I need to I need to fix up my marketing page. And like, just keep talking to people and just keep iterating and reaching out to folks. Yeah, so so that's kind of where I am.

Michele Hansen 27:27
So are you reading Storybrand?

Colleen Schnettler 27:29
I am. And so this week's chapter was actually so it felt so obvious. Like I almost didn't want to share it this this week's chapter was not a big like, Oh, it was a call to action. And it's basically like, don't forget to tell people that what you want them to do. But that was the whole chapter, like don't like call to action like they need to you so you do all this work to you know, get them to trust you and establish yourself as an expert and an authority in the field, you understand them you understand their problem. Now you have to tell them what to do. And so you have to call them to action. Oh, yeah,

Michele Hansen 28:05
I remember what I was reading this chapter. And I also thought that it was something that was so obvious. And then I looked at our website, and I was like, wow, we actually haven't done this. Like there are a lot of places where it said, you know, it said sign up when really the action was upload a file or create an API key or, like, not just telling them do something but do this specific thing.

Colleen Schnettler 28:27
That will wrap up this week's episode of the software social podcast, we'd love to hear from you at on the Twitter on Twitter, at software slash pod

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VOTE FOR US! SaaSPodcastAwards.com

Colleen's Heroku landing page: https://elements.heroku.com/addons/simple-file-upload

Michele Hansen 0:00
So I got a pretty exciting email yesterday. We were nominated for the MicroConf SaaS Podcast Awards!

Colleen Schnettler 0:09
That's amazing.

Michele Hansen 0:10
In three categories.

Colleen Schnettler 0:13
Wow, that's so funny, Michele, because when we started this podcast, I was pretty sure no one was gonna listen to it except for me. So I can't believe like people listen to it. I feel like a little uncomfortable that people listen to it actually.

Michele Hansen 0:30
Yeah, we kind of expected it would just be like our husbands and some close business friends of ours. I'm totally floored and surprised and so honored that people are listening, and you guys nominated us and really, really, genuinely touched by that. So it's kind of a fun thing that's going on.

But there are also other fun things going on. With Colleen, because you're now in you know, the Heroku marketplace. There's people using it. And I think I saw you mentioned this week that you even got feedback from like somebody you don't know using it and they have something positive to say?!

Colleen Schnettler 1:13
It's not my friend. Actually.

Michele Hansen 1:16
that's always awesome.

Michele Hansen 1:19
A total stranger using your thing. That's a milestone.

Colleen Schnettler 1:20
That's a milestone. So I feel like this is just a really exciting time in terms of launching a product. So the product has been in beta, I think for about seven to 10 days. And as of this morning, 31 teams have signed up,

Michele Hansen 1:38
Dude!

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, but...

Michele Hansen
You're a third of the way there!

Colleen Schnettler 1:41
Well, 31 teams have signed up, but they're not all right, that's true for the I have to get 100 like I'm a third of the way there. But what is interesting about this is the way the Heroku cycle works. So if you are in the Heroku marketplace, you're going to search for I don't know file upload, you see my you see my add on, you click a button to install it. Then, if you want your personalized instructions, you have to go to the dashboard for your application, and click on it again, in your application. And that's the single sign on. So they provision the application which they can use it without ever doing single sign on. But most people use single sign on because then the directions are personalized with their API key. So of those 31 people 13 have actually made it to single sign on. And of those 13. Six have actively uploaded files. So for like a week, I'm feeling really good about these numbers.

Michele Hansen 2:42
Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 2:44
I think there's just a huge benefit to being in like using this marketplaces attraction channel, I think that is just been a huge benefit. Because I know so many people who have launched products, and they literally cannot get anyone to sign up. And that would be that would be tough. So basically, what I'm doing is I don't get a contact email until they hit single sign on. Now there's one team that never single signed on. And they're just using the documentation from the Heroku. Doc's so good for them. So I don't have contact information for them. But the other 13 I do have contact information for so I have hand emailed all 13 of those contacts of the 13. I emailed three have emailed me back. So that's pretty good. Not bad, right? I don't know. Like I myself tend to ignore emails. So

Michele Hansen 3:37
Like my feedback emails, I think the highest I've ever gotten the open rate to know the open rate is like something like 60%. But the reply rate is usually in the eight to 10% range. So that is good.

Colleen Schnettler 3:51
Yeah. And I was just kind of asking, like, I just have an email. It's like, hey, do you need help setting it up? Let me know. So that's like, a really exciting first week. I mean, I feel like things are are going well, I've been hustling. Hold on. Wait,

Michele Hansen 4:05
tell us what they said though. Like, don't skip that. I want to hear what these people had to say about it.

Colleen Schnettler 4:12
So the first person had a feature request, which is like a totally reasonable request. The second person had the same feature request. And the third person. Yeah, I mean, it's okay. It's embarrassing. I shifted. Okay, now I have to tell you, so I shipped a file storage solution without giving you the ability to delete files.

Michele Hansen 4:34
I mean, everything is a feature. Like we shipped a product without the ability to charge people

Colleen Schnettler 4:40
It seemed like like, everything is a feature. I'm not charging them. So you know, it's not like they're paying for it. If I was asking them to pay for it, then yeah, I would have let them I would have shipped it with the ability to delete. But since I'm not charging them it doesn't matter.

Michele Hansen 4:57
But when really get feature requests, like explicit feature requests for something specific, are our processes always, you know, whatever it is we always capture it. And so how this works for us is we just create an issue and GitHub related to intercom, it's not the cleanest way to do it, but it works for us. And then if somebody else or like multiple people ask us for it, then we look into it. So it's pretty interesting that you've already had two people asked for the same thing. Now granted, as you say, it's a fairly table stakes kind of thing. But it's, it's always interesting when you have multiple people asking for something, because that is pretty clearly indicates interest.

Colleen Schnettler 5:38
Yeah, so I'm obviously gonna add that. I mean, I didn't add it for a very specific reason. And the reason I didn't add it is because I'm concerned, like if a user drops up, if a user adds a file, like let's say they add their avatar, and then they add, drop it again. Now, I don't know, why would they would do that. But let's say they do. So let's say they drop the same file twice, that actually gets saved in my service as two different files, because I have no way to know that that's the same file, because the font because I don't want to overwrite file names, right? Because your file might name might be avatar, and mine might be avatar, so I'm not overwriting files. And so if that happened, the developer who's implementing it is going to be saving the most recent URL in their database, so they can access that file in the cloud. If they then go into their admin dashboard, and they see two of the same files, and they delete one, and they delete the one they have linked in their database, then they're no longer going to have access to that file. Does that make any sense? I feel like I need to like whiteboard that. But basically, there's a way where if two of the same, same images get uploaded, but the URLs are different. And they have one database URL, one URL in their database pointing to the file and they delete the wrong file, that file will then be gone.

Michele Hansen 7:05
So you're trying to make it sort of human error? Yes, fault tolerant, right? Yeah, they would have, like a timestamp or something to help them differentiate between them, like someone who has, you know, a scren shot saved at 10 1530 2am versus 10 1530 5am.

Colleen Schnettler 7:27
That's actually a great idea. So there's a couple ways I can implement deletion. Or every time the user drops a file, I can just overwrite the previous file. I didn't do that, because I want to give myself the ability to expand to adding multiple files. But I like the timestamp idea that could just be like, here are the same files have the same file name? And here's the most recently updated one. So if you want to delete one, delete the old ones, yeah, I'm just worried that's a mistake, or like an operating system would add 123?

Michele Hansen 7:52
You know, yeah...

Colleen Schnettler 7:56
I checked the problem is, yeah, I mean, there's ways I can do it, I have to think about it a little more. Because I don't want users I don't want my admin users to inadvertently delete a file they have referenced in their database. But you know, I'm learning more about how people are actually using it. Like some of the things I thought people would ask for, they haven't asked for yet. Some of the things I didn't even think of people are asking for, I mean, all three people that responded to me, but it's fun to get feedback.

Michele Hansen 8:23
On the the duplicate files. Yeah. Have you asked the people how they would want this to work? if they if they uploaded a duplicate file?

Colleen Schnettler 8:32
No, I think I'm going to though, I think that's a great idea. That's I have to explain, I think I'm going to explain to them that. That is why I have not done it yet. I need a good way to like, I really do think I should make like a image or something. So people understand what's going on behind the scenes. But that's a great idea.

Michele Hansen 8:53
Did we talk about I think it's called whimsical, it's like a flow charting tool.

Colleen Schnettler 8:56
We did not talk about whimsical.

Michele Hansen 8:59
Okay, maybe someone else I was talking to, but it's a it's a really cool little flow charting tool that I learned about a couple months ago. And it's just super fast to make a flowchart. And, and, and, and maybe that would be good for this. I also like using whatever that sketching app is on the iPad is, is pretty fast, too.

Colleen Schnettler 9:19
Yeah, that's it.

Michele Hansen 9:20
Yeah, I think and I think when you talk to people and say, like, you know, here's some like scenarios I've thought of, can you think of other scenarios, and then, like, here is like, and we want to make sure that this is you know, understanding that people accidentally delete stuff like it like it happens and and just kind of have a conversation about them about things going wrong. Because designing for when things go wrong is a huge part of design.

Colleen Schnettler 9:49
Right? Right. That's why just and so for the initial rollout. I was like, Look, I'm not charging for storage. It's going to be cheap, even when I do so storage is cheap. I'm just gonna not worry about But, but it has been requested a few times. And I can see why you'd want to do that. Because in your admin dashboard, you can see everything that all your users have uploaded. So if both of them are testing it out both of the people who requested this feature, so you know, the person was like, hey, I want to delete all these files, I'm just testing it, like, I don't want them sitting there. So even maybe like for your visual organization, as you look at your dashboard, it'd be easier to be able to get rid of those files, you know, you're not using,

Michele Hansen 10:28
I guess another like, thing there is like, does it? Does it erase the record that it was ever there in the first place? Like, can they see that there was a file uploaded? And then at that file was deleted later? Like, is there going to be a record of that for them? And I would just, it may not be something you need to add right this moment. But I would just surface that with the customers just in case. I know, like audit logs, were something that we had requests for for a long time. Yeah. And they also ended up helping us where if we had a customer say, Why did I get charged for this? I never uploaded this file. Now we can be like, actually, you did? And then you deleted it a week later. Are you like trying to fool us that you didn't upload it? Yeah. But also just for their own purposes, that Oh, like that file was uploaded, and then we accidentally deleted it, but like, not something you need to do at the second. But while you're talking to them about the file deletion process, like kind of just work through with them other scenarios where this information is useful?

Colleen Schnettler 11:35
Yeah, that's a great idea. What do you think of email versus trying to get these people on a call?

Michele Hansen 11:43
I might have it on a call if you have the time to do it. Because I find that talking it through might be helpful. But then again, they might be the kind of people who like to sit and consider something on their own. But I usually find it very helpful to have people talk me through a process.

Colleen Schnettler 12:06
Okay, well, I'll just email them and ask them, like, what they're proud kind of explain and see, see what their preferences because I, you know, I can obviously make time for a call. But um, yeah, so that's, that's all great feedback. And that's, that's kind of where I am so far with this

Michele Hansen 12:21
week, what the third person say,

Colleen Schnettler 12:24
Oh, the third person heard me on a different podcast and wanted to try it out and told me that he would give me feedback, which I was excited, hey, if anyone wants to just try it out and has a Heroku account, it's free right now. So just try it out? Let me know what you think.

Michele Hansen 12:42
So do you have a limit on how much people can use? Like, it's free right now? But like, is it basically your free tier? Or is it like just, you know, totally, like wild west free?

Colleen Schnettler 12:55
No, it's, it's just the free tier, I do have a limit. And if you hit the limit, it when you go to render the UI, you just get a little message that says you've hit your limit or something. No one is even though like I'm checking every day, and I thought people would upload bigger files, the majority people so far, and there's only six, right? Well, I mean, 10, because there's me and other people who were using it before it was in beta. So I thought people might use bigger files, but people are still predominantly doing images, and not particularly large images. So no one's close to even like busting through their, their limit. But something else I want to talk about is I worked hard to make it available off Heroku. So by the time this podcast airs, it will be available off Heroku. And so it was funny, because last week, by the end of our recording of the podcast, I was convinced I was going to do a free tier. And then I was editing our podcast. And by the end of that I was convinced I should not do a free tier, I should do a free trial. So I was so funny. So I did all the work to make a free tier. And then on Sunday, after I was finished editing, I was like, No, I need to do a free trial, not a free tier. So I went back and changed it to just be a free trial. Just some of the things you said about like, I need to know if people are gonna pay for it. Right? Like, that's why I changed my mind. At first I was like everyone does a free a free tier. That's the best way to get people hooked the like it and then they'll want more storage and they're going to upgrade. But I don't really want to support a whole bunch of people who aren't paying me. And if people won't put their credit card down then they probably never I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, so since I since I did it on Sunday, I changed it to now be a 30 day free trial. Hit me with your thoughts.

Michele Hansen 14:56
Sounds like you're worried about adverse selection basically? Attracting people who aren't going to pay you in the first place.

Colleen Schnettler 15:04
Yeah. And and hear here in this stage, it's fine, right? Like, I have my 100 Heroku users who So sure, hopefully, I'll get enough feedback from that group to kind of see where I stand. But I don't want to then set that out to the rest of the world and have to support every person who never ever has any intention of paying for it. Because like, this has to be a business or not be a business like this isn't gonna be this isn't open source software, right, like storage is not free. So kind of

Michele Hansen 15:34
interesting. You're basically AB testing your pricing model.

Colleen Schnettler 15:38
Yeah, I've got zero people are going to sign up for the the free trial, because you know, how stripe has it set up like so. Or at least the way my code base is set up, is even with a free trial. And this is how most SAS is work, I think you have to enter a credit card, because that's the easiest way to get everything set up on stripe. So my free trial, okay, now I'm going to further complicate this, my free trial is actually a free tier. So if you, Michelle, sign up for my free trial, at the end of 30 days, I'm not going to delete your files. At least that's my plan right now. So you can keep your files you just can't upload any more. So it is kind of like a fake free tier. You're looking at me funny.

Michele Hansen 16:25
Okay, so Well, I guess the deleting the files wouldn't happen after 30 days. Because at that point, do you automatically charge them at 30 days? Yeah. Or do you instead turn off their account, because that's also know that like some people, most people automatically convert it? Yeah, but some people require you to opt in to upgrade it.

Colleen Schnettler 16:47
So the way it is set up right now is you are automatically converted at 30 days to a paid plan. And I made it really cheap, I started at 10, the cheapest plan is $10 a month. But if you cancel, let's say you use it for 29 days, and you cancel. I'm not gonna delete all your files, but I might change my mind, I don't actually have that in my in my copy anywhere. Just for now let's see if anyone even signs up. Because people do not like putting their credit card down. I get it. I don't like putting my credit card down. Like, I totally get that. But some

Michele Hansen 17:23
different scenarios there. Right, like so like, somebody has an account, they let's say they upload one file to test it out. And then they forget about it. And then do you. So you let's say you charge them right, so and then they cancel after you charge them. So that's one scenario, then there's somebody who say you upload, they upload a file, they cancel before you charge them, they upload files, you charge them, the payment fails, and you're never able to get it to successfully go through. They upload files, they up, they upgrade or you upgrade them, and then they stay on the plan like so there's a couple of different scenarios there. There's all assuming that you have an automatic conversion. I guess in the cases of somebody who cancels, I question whether you would you should hold on to that, because they may not want you to hold their data forever. I feel like there should be an expiration date like that's like It Will you know, your account will be deleted within 60 days. Because that's a liability for you to be Yeah. Holding on to somebody else's data.

Colleen Schnettler 18:38
Yeah, that's a good point. I think what I have now with Heroku is I have a two week grace period. So if you sign up with Heroku, you upload some files, and then you change your mind or you don't like it or whatever, I delete all your stuff in two weeks, I'll send you an email and I'll be like, Hey, I'm going to delete all your stuff in two weeks. I'll probably just do the same thing with this other with the other customers that don't come from Heroku I guess I mean, I need someone to sign up first. So I'm not too much. I'm not really worried about it. Like I can literally do it by hand at this point. I can kind of I

Michele Hansen 19:11
think the tricky thing with billing, right is like all of those. Okay, so you know, in your head, you're thinking okay, oh, somebody puts in their credit card, and then they or their use it or they don't. And when it comes down to it, there's like all these other weird ways that things can happen. And it's like, well, what if the credit card fails? What if they cancel before the renewal date? What if they cancel after the renewal date? What if they forgotten about it? And then three months later, they asked for a refund or what if they like it? You know, all of these, like different things can happen. And while you're flowcharting it may just be like again, you don't have to build for these things right now. Yeah, but just so you're thinking through some potential avenues people could go down of like What like, what are the different touch points of? So it's like they create an account, they add a credit card. Also things can go wrong at that stage, like, what if their credit card is invalid? What happens then? And then and like, how do you do you try to figure out if that credit card is good or not like, like, you can or you cannot like that that's an option. And then they upload files, and then what is their upload or cancellation flow look like? Like, what are all the possible options from there?

Colleen Schnettler 20:30
Yeah. Yeah, I will definitely keep all of that in mind. But yeah, first, I gotta get someone to sign up. I have a lot of work. Like I've been doing a lot of work on the landing page. Yeah, yeah, static sites are not my bread and butter. Like, some something about static site, you're like, there's all this blank space that I have to fill it with words,

Michele Hansen 20:59
that has been doing like a static site in terms of like, a new site, or like, now

Colleen Schnettler 21:02
I got it, like the landing page. I

Michele Hansen 21:04
like, okay,

Colleen Schnettler 21:05
netlify, it's deployed with, okay. natla phi, um, but basically, like, it's just a simple file, upload calm, which is like my landing page. I also want to add, like a documentation section. And I don't know, I mean, people, I think, I don't know if it's too hard to use, or if it's normal for 35 people to sign up and only six to use it in the Heroku marketplace. But I wonder if it's just still confusing people. Like if I need to do more documentation, I basically what I'm trying to figure out, what should I do next? Should I do more copy as terms of like, why people need it? Should I do more documentation and focus? Since I'm clearly getting people from Heroku? Should I really focus on the integration from the Heroku? side?

Michele Hansen 21:54
So you have 31 people who have signed up for it right? And then Ember j said you've had, what, 10 or 12? who've gotten to the sign in part of it?

Colleen Schnettler 22:05
Yeah, yes. Yes. So

Michele Hansen 22:06
you have about 20 people who have kind of dropped off in the early part of the process. Correct? Have you emailed them saying, Hey, I noticed you, you know, indicated an interest in using simple file upload. But I noticed you haven't gone through that. Can you tell me why?

Colleen Schnettler 22:25
So I don't have their email addresses? Oh, because it's that two step process. So to configure to provision it, it's provisioned on their team, but the way that Heroku the way the Heroku communication works, they don't give you any team identifying information about the team that provisioned your add on, not until they go to single sign on.

Michele Hansen 22:46
So what is the process? Like for the user? When? Like, can you walk us through those steps of like they see you on the Heroku marketplace?

Colleen Schnettler 22:57
Yes, so they see me on the marketplace, there's a one click Install button. So they can do that. Or they can install from the command line. If they install from the command line, they will see basically, what I do is I set my API key and their environment variables. So there's two ways let's say they click the button, because I think people like to click buttons, right? It's, it's fun and friendly. If they click the button, they and then they never go in through single sign on. So they just click the button, they would then have to go into their Heroku config, get the environment variable that is their API key, they would then have to go to the Heroku Doc's page and figure out how to install the add on or to use it on their site with their API key in their application. One team has figured this out and has never single signed on, but they're uploading files. What typically you would do as a Heroku user for something you really wanted, you would click the button to install it. And then you go to like your, your overview page for your application. And there's a little section under your resources tab that has all of your installed application, or all of your installed add ons. So that's like Postgres Redis, whatever other kind of stuff you have mine would be in that list, then you have to click on simple file upload in, in your resources tab. And that is your single sign on that takes you to my application. And if you do that in my application, I have your dashboard where you can see all the files you've uploaded, and directions with your API key like in the script. So you can literally just copy the script tag. You don't have to like put the API key in yourself.

Michele Hansen 24:43
I imagine you're not the only person with an app on the Roku marketplace, who has this problem of people clicking the button and then not actually fully completing the install process. So I'm curious Have you been able to like find anything from other Heroku marketplace developers on how they handle this drop off.

Colleen Schnettler 25:05
So apparently, you can add Google Analytics to your elements pit, your Heroku marketplace page, which I need to do, and I haven't done yet. So I could at least see what kind of page views I'm getting. I don't know if you can do like a full sequence, you know, like, Oh, they dropped off here. And I need like a little club with people who have add ons. Roku marketplace club. So I don't know, I need to reach out to the people I know and see if they do anything about this. And if they see similar numbers, because that just feels like a really low conversion number. I mean, just because it's not a low conversion number for like the random internet. But someone clearly clicked on a file upload, like, Yes, I want file uploading. So why would they click on the Yes, I want file uploading button and then not install it? Because my initial thought is because they don't understand what it does. They don't understand how to install it. They hate JavaScript. I don't know. Like, there could be many reasons. But there could

Michele Hansen 26:09
also be people who are listening to the podcast who want to show support for you. But who don't necessarily need it like that. I that could be a couple of people in there.

Colleen Schnettler 26:19
I mean, we don't have that many pockets, listeners,

Michele Hansen 26:22
dozens!

Colleen Schnettler 26:23
and dozens of people. I think but I think those people because I've actually talked to a few of those people who have reached out to me on Twitter, PS, if you listen to this, and you want to try it out, reach out to me. Those people are more motivated to install it. Like Like that one person who emailed me he was like, Hey, I heard you on this other podcast. And I wanted to, you know, check it out. And I was like, sweet, I think those people are more motivated to to actually go through the entire install process. Because although we don't know each other in real life, like we internet know each other. And, you know, I would do that for someone else. So I don't know, I don't know, if people are confused. I feel like it's probably a problem with my documentation in that either they don't understand what they are getting. Or they find it too painful to install.

Michele Hansen 27:16
I feel like maybe we should like workshop, your landing page on the Heroku marketplace. Yeah, and kind of think through like, because because it doesn't sound like you have a whole lot of control over what happens after they click that button. And so you need to find a way to make it clear to them that's like, okay, here's what you have to do for the process. And here's what you do next. And basically so that they know to go back there to find the instructions for getting started.

Colleen Schnettler 27:51
Yes, I think that's a great idea. I tried, and I've been updating it just this week, like using some of the story brand stuff I've been thinking about. Like before I had a paragraph and now I have a list, you know, to make it seem like even easier. Like here's the list of things you do. Man, I know. It's just I wish I could. You're right. I don't have control between when they click the button, like this install button to why they don't actually install it. Yeah, I would I would love to go over the the landing page with you.

Michele Hansen 28:23
Yeah, we can totally do that. So I am now looking at your page on the Heroku marketplace. Yes, I see this button you have been talking about

Colleen Schnettler 28:34
install.

Michele Hansen 28:35
That's the way I do that. And the little flowchart you've made of how the process works. But I noticed that it's not until I scroll to the very bottom that I see the documentation links for it. And I kind of Yeah, I kind of wonder if that should be somewhere near the top at least that's like, I mean, something that basically says like after you click to install this, like here, here's the documentation, kind of making that it doesn't look like you can really make it above the fold per se. But

Colleen Schnettler 29:13
no, so I have control of that image, that image I made with snappa. I have control of all of the language right below that that image that says cloud storage pleasing UI with built in error handling CDN direct uploads. That's what I have control of so I can put links I could also put a link to my real website, simple file upload.com in there, and if I put the documentation there, maybe that would be more helpful get them off, like get them to a page that you know they're more comfortable with or something.

Michele Hansen 29:44
Yeah, yeah, I think I do you have to have this region availability section two, like do you have control over where this

Colleen Schnettler 29:52
uh, I do here I do not have control over that. As far as I know. I have to I have to have that.

Michele Hansen 30:00
Gotcha. Okay, so But does that have to be the first section? Yellow? The copy?

Colleen Schnettler 30:06
I think so I'll double check, but i think i think so. Okay.

Michele Hansen 30:10
Yeah, I mean, maybe just you have a great description here of like, what the process is once they have installed it? Yeah, but less. So what the process to install is. And I feel like I have seen other people with Heroku apps, like, can you have multiple images? And this hero?

Colleen Schnettler 30:33
Yeah, I have that space. So I can do whatever, yes, multiple images, I can do whatever I want with that space.

Michele Hansen 30:39
So maybe you could just have one that describes the process for for getting started, like, you know, you click the button or use command line and you look at our documentation, and then you, you know, like, yes, like a very broad overview.

Colleen Schnettler 30:54
Okay, I know exactly what you're saying. Because because that's kind of what on the left here, I said, I say number one, install the add on to create an input type of file three, add JavaScript snippet, or react component. But maybe I should even break that down more. It'd be like one, click the button. Get your API key, even.

Michele Hansen 31:15
Even where you haven't right now, just step one, install the add on. I mean, that's multiple steps itself. Yeah. But I maybe even just having parentheses. docs with a link. What? Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 31:27
that's a great idea. Yes, yes. Yes. And you know, the cool thing, if they do install it from the command line, they can open their single sign on from the command line. And that's not obvious to someone who doesn't do that. So even that would be helpful. Yeah, now that I look, again, I'm seeing ways I'm seeing I'm seeing ways to make it even easier to to show people how to get started with it.

Michele Hansen 31:52
Yeah, you've built things that you're basically not talking about.

Colleen Schnettler 31:56
Yeah. Okay. I love that idea. I love that I'm making Yeah, break it down even more a link to the docs, I can link to my page once I get that up, like my landing page, which will also have documentation on it, but like, like, click the button, open Single Sign On this way, copy this JavaScript snippet.

Michele Hansen 32:16
And I guess we can throw a link to the page in the show notes. So if people want to take a look themselves, and like, maybe they have some thoughts on how to make it clear how people get started, or if if something seems unclear, maybe that would be helpful.

Colleen Schnettler 32:34
Yeah, I would love that. I'm open to all suggestions at this point, especially people who might go through this process or like, wow, this, this is unclear, or I thought it did this thing, but it does this thing. Or something like that. Okay, that's a great idea. I love it. Yes, cool. Cool. All right. Well, I kind of commandeered this week's episode. Sorry about that, hey, this is exciting stuff is fun. This seems like a really fun time. Like, right? There's something about this period of time in building a company that I just think is really exciting. So someone mentioned to me it was either on Twitter or Slack. I don't remember. He started a few successful companies. And you know, he was like, this is the most exciting time like initial launch and getting people to use it and like, every customer is exciting. And I was like, yeah, that's exactly where I am. It's super fun.

Michele Hansen 33:29
It's so exciting. All right. Well, I think on that note, we're gonna end for today, and we love to hear your feedback on Colleen's landing page. You can tweet at us at @softwaresocpod, and thanks so much again for nominating us for the MicroConf SaaS Podcast Awards. It really means a lot to us.

View Details

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
So Michelle, I saw that you recently published a blog post a little bit about the founding of your company. And I haven't read it, because I want to hear the story fresh from you. And I, this is something I've actually wanted to talk to you about, frequently, and you've always kind of just been like, Oh, yeah, you know, we just started it. And then it just, you know, happened. So I'm super excited to dive into this with you, especially where I'm coming from, like, where it seems so far away to have a successful SaaS. So tell us a little bit about how you guys got started?

Michele Hansen 0:31
Yeah, this is something I get questions about, all the time. And I wanted to dive into the story and the numbers a little more. Because I think that's helpful for people when they're getting started, like yourself, to see that you don't have to have success the first day, or the first month, or the first three months or four, six months, really in order to make something work. And then also that if something, you know, does okay, but not great, you can always chase that and snowball it into something else.

Colleen Schnettler 1:10
So how did you guys get started? What was your very first product?

Michele Hansen 1:15
Well, my very first product? Or our very first product?

Colleen Schnettler 1:18
I don't know what gave you the bug, like, let's go back, just let's talk about about you.

Michele Hansen
Oh!

Colleen Schnettler
What was your first, like, What gave you the bug?

Michele Hansen 1:25
So, so this actually, this isn't in the post, but my first business, if you can call it that was basically a blog that I started with friends, my freshman year of college, we called it an online magazine. And the whole idea of it was college kids from around the country, with different perspectives on politics, all writing about politics together and collaborating together. And that was really one of the first things that introduced me to running something online, in a sort of organized way, because I had little projects before, like, you know, we also started a satire blog at one point, but like, we didn't put our names on it. And it was very much for fun. And like that project, talking about how to use Blogger, and then this other one that we launched, that was a bit more serious, and like something we ended up putting on our resumes, was on WordPress, and just how it happened was I ended up being the person doing all the WordPress admin. So managing the site, and, you know, customizing templates and stuff like that, um, you know, my introduction to coding was MySpace. So HTML, you know, for a certain generation of us was a key skill as a teenager. And that carried over, but I think those projects, my freshman year of college really gave me the bug of like, you create something, and then you get a, like, a reaction from people. And you, people tell you, they enjoyed it. And then and then, you know, just kind of keeps you going like that. And then actually, a year later growing, though, so that blog actually never made any money. We had ads on it, but then I don't know, something happened. And it didn't work out. And we didn't make money. Um, but then we actually ended up turning it into a consulting firm, like a social media consulting firm. So that was when I was 20.

Colleen Schnettler 3:39
I mean, that was 2010 ish. So that was like before, that was a big thing, right? Social media consulting wasn't the powerhouse it is now.

Michele Hansen 3:47
Yeah, it really wasn't as well. And so what are our angle was, was reaching out to PR firms that were, you know, very experienced in PR, but didn't know how to use Facebook and Twitter. And that was really where I earned some more business chops, in terms of like, actually, like operating a business and writing proposals and pitching and doing sales and things like that. You know, I'd had a little bit of experience with that, like, you know, when I was a kid, my mom had an art business, and I would spend Saturdays as a teenager helping her sell her art at art and craft shows. But really, in a kind of, you know, a context that is the closest to now, it really wasn't until college. And then we actually made money doing that, but then shut down the business about six months later, because basically, the purpose of the business was to allow us to skip several layers of terrible internships and get to the ones we wanted, faster. So there is an exit strategy from the beginning. And, and so actually, by the time that we made the, Mathias and I made the products that ended up being the one that funded Geocodio, that was actually my third business. Okay. And I think all of those little experiences, you know, really added to just having more comfort with what it takes to launch a product, even if those other efforts were not quite as organized, or structured, as at you know, as the as the projects that Mathias and I have launched together.

Colleen Schnettler 5:38
Yeah, yeah, well, even you were talking about, you know, back in your college days, like reaching out to ad agencies and things like that, like, for a lot of us who are just starting businesses, this is the first time we've had to do any kind of software sales or sales. Really, I was thinking about that today. Because this is just something that like, I don't do a lot, like, I'm comfortable with people, and I like to talk to people, but like, I'm basically cold emailing everyone who has signed up for my service, to be like, Hey, can I help you? And that's like, a little thing, but just, it's still outside my comfort zone. So you starting those lessons 10-15 years ago, you know, they just compound I'm sure to bring you guys to where you are today.

Michele Hansen 6:20
Absolutely. I mean, it's totally useful, you know, on Mathias aside to his early projects, one of which was the precursor to when the first one we launched together, you know, he was funding those because he was a magician as a child. And so he had his, like, he was running his own business, like, as of the age of seven or so eight, was when he started performing magic. And so he always had that money to fund, you know, other projects that he wanted to do, or, you know, buying the latest and greatest tools and whatnot. Yeah, it's not just the most recent business, it's a history of having that, as you said that that bug of "Hey, like, this is, this is fun, and I can do it." And also, like, making a ton of mistakes in the process, like accidentally not monetizing our blog. I mean, it was or like, I think we did, but then, you know, some of our friends, like, we had ads on it. And some of our friends knew that if they clicked on them, we would get money. And so they clicked on them. I think we got shut down for having like, suspicious clicks on them or like something else going on. Like, you know, I mean, we were like 19 and idiots. And, you know, but you know, it introduced me to things like that. And it got me you know, more comfortable using a modern web tools like WordPress.

Colleen Schnettler 7:54
Yeah. So then you guys, you and your husband decided you wanted to start something. And you just use the phrase, the thing that launched Geocodio. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? What was that?

Michele Hansen 8:06
Yeah. And you make it sound like we just had this idea one day, and we're like, oh, like we're going to launch thing something. And the reality is, is that we were pregnant. And we knew that daycare was going to be expensive. But once we figured out just how expensive it was, which for an infant in the DC area is about $20,000 a year for a very standard, no frills in-home daycare that might not even be licensed, like, really expensive. And so we were scared out of our minds by that expense. And we were like, you know what, we can kill it at work, but like realistically, in the next, you know, six months are we going to get raises and bonuses equal to $20,000 a year. Like if we want to be able to keep our standard of living, we need to be launching stuff.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
So it's with that motivation as the backdrop that we finally stopped spending our weekends watching TV shows and started working on stuff.
So this came out of an app that Mathias had launched in Denmark before he moved to the US. And the app was called What's Open Nearby. And the idea of it was that if you needed milk at midnight, or a coffee at 3am, you could pull up the app and it would have a map of all of the stores that were open near you. So that you could just go to the one that was open rather than having to like remember what stores were near you and type it into Google and then go to their website and go to their store locator and find the one that was near you. And then like look at their hours. Now right now you can go to Google and type in Safeway hours, and it all pops up there. But the Google Places API was really not as robust in 2013 as it is now, and it wasn't as integrated into the Google search experience. So, you know, this would eliminate, you know, 10 clicks when you're tired in the middle of night in and out of toilet paper.

Colleen Schnettler 10:13
Sure.

Michele Hansen 10:14
launched this in Denmark before he came to the US. And it was really successful. It was based on a need that he had himself. And it was regularly in the top charts in Denmark, and it got to about 500,000 downloads...

Colleen Schnettler
Wow!

Michele Hansen
...Which is something like 10% of the Danish population. And how he monetized it was, people would pay to have their store listed in the app, got it.

Colleen Schnettler
Got it.

Michele Hansen
But that really only worked because it was consistently top 10 in the Danish App Store and had all of these downloads and so companies wanted to be in it. By contrast, we knew that launching in the US would be much more difficult. And, you know, a much larger country not nearly as close knit, as Denmark is. So, um, so we decided to go with an ad supported route.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
So we started working on the app in January of 2013. And we ended up launching it in October of 2013.

Colleen Schnettler 11:29
So that's a that's a good chunk of time that you guys were working on it. Was that predominantly development time, or was it predominantly like customer research time, like, what was happening during those months from conception to launch?

Michele Hansen 11:42
So it was a couple of different things. So one of them was, we had to localize the app to the US. We did a redesign of the app, I'm not quite sure. I don't quite remember why we did that. But I know that there was some issues with the Danish app. And I like remember, we had to design a new bug reporting flow, like if people had issues with the hours, so like, people could like take it. Like if the hours we had in our app were different, like they could take a picture of it, if they're standing at the store, for example. So we were also we also just had to pull all of the data together. So a big part of the app was automated parsers that were scraping the store hours websites. And so we are building all those parsers. But then we also wanted to make sure that we had a lot of smaller stores in there as well, because that works really well for big chains, but a smaller store, it didn't really make sense for us to build a parser for that, because we'd only get one or two locations rather than 50 or 100, or 500 from a big chain. So we spent a lot of time just building the data that goes into the app. And that was most of what consumed us.

It wasn't until August of 2013, actually seven days after our daughter was born that we incorporated formally.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, okay.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. Um, and started doing the administrative side of things.

And so I was actually so you know, so we talked about bootstrapping, right. And bootstrapping is, is is fundamentally a form of financing. If you're taking the null option, right, which is you don't take financing, but, you know, you self-fund it, and so towards that, and I kind of dug through our financials from that first year, to look at how much we spent, and how much we made because this self funding period is really difficult for a lot of people.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Um, so first, one thing I want to mention first, is that in the spring of 2013, we did a couple of hackathons. And like, you know, big sort of sponsored ones, they don't seem to be as popular anymore. Maybe I'm just not paying attention to it, but I remember it being kind of a big thing. And, um, we got an $1,000 AWS credit as a reward from one of the hackathons. I think that might have been from a like Facebook-Gates Foundation hackathon that Mathias did with one of his friends in California. Anyway. So it was like one of the prizes for that. So we had that sweet $1,000 credit from Amazon. Now they give these out as a way to, you know, promote people to switch to AWS, right. And $1,000 is not really a lot of money for an established business. But for a nascent businesses just coming into existence, $1,000 is huge. And that paid our server costs for the first couple of months. And I think that was really important for us because it took away a lot of the pain of self funding the product. And so we basically, you know, you could say that we took, you know, non-dilutive non-debt funding from Amazon to get started.

But we had other expenses as well. And so this is something I was sort of looking at, okay is like, how much did we really spend? So, I mentioned that we had to incorporate the business. We had, we were paying for servers for the Danish app. So even though we didn't have a regular income stream from it, we were still supporting it. And we needed SSL certificates, icons, sort of all sorts of things. So September of 2013, is the first month like, sorry, August of 2013 is the first month that we really started having expenses.

So we had $416 in expenses.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
And 20 cents in ad revenue.

Colleen Schnettler 16:04
But that was your very first month, right?

Michele Hansen 16:06
Yes, that was our very first month. And and you know, as I look at this right now, you know, the server costs -- I don't know how your husband feels about this, but I feel like when you marry a developer servers are going to be part of your family budget, no matter what.

Colleen Schnettler 16:20
We have servers in our garage. It's fine. It's not weird at all.

Michele Hansen 16:24
You know, I mean, so you know, I remember going in as me like, okay, we're always like, servers are just gonna be a family budget line item. Um, but you know, so yeah, that was like, $400 is a non-insignificant amount of money, especially to us at the time.

Colleen Schnettler 16:39
Well, you had a baby. Right?

Michele Hansen 16:41
Right. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 16:42
So, so wait, before you keep going with your numbers. So that first month, here you are, you guys are still both working full time?

Michele Hansen 16:50
Mm hmm.

Colleen Schnettler 16:50
You have a brand new baby, and you're just out 400 bucks. Do you remember how that made? You feel?

Michele Hansen 16:56
No. I don't remember much from that first month.

Colleen Schnettler 17:00
I mean, I'm just wondering if there was like panic, if there was, you know, kind of a known sense of patience. If there was a this is a terrible idea.

Michele Hansen 17:08
No, I think if anything, I remember being super motivated. And I think that's the biggest thing I got from becoming a parent was motivation. And that, you know, the idea that, you know, when you have a kid, like you have maybe an hour to yourself a day, if that, like, you no longer have, you know, the evening doesn't stretch in front of you after work, right. And in, you can't do whatever you want on the weekends, and you have no control over your time anymore. And for both of us, that was really helpful, because it was like, Okay, if I only have an hour to do what I want to do today, then I'm going to make it worth it.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
And, and as a procrastinator, you know, it was really helpful to have things be time box like that. And you I remember, you know, sitting in the nursery, which was like part nursery part office, and she was sleeping, and we were both working, and it felt like really great. Like it felt it felt good. It felt like what I wanted to be doing. Um, and we knew it was going to be expensive. But I think because we had had that success from the earlier version of the app, we had a lot of confidence going into it, that it would be successful if we did the work.

Colleen Schnettler 18:28
Okay. All right. So then what happens next?

Michele Hansen 18:31
Okay, so October of 2013, we finally fully launched I think, in September of 2013. We're only you know, friends and family launched. Um, and, yeah, I'm not quite sure, actually, cuz I don't our Apple developer subscription wasn't until October of 2013. And I remember that being very painful. That was $100. Right off the bat. And that was -- that hurt a little bit. Um, so October of 2013, the month we launched, we made $6 and 66 cents.

Colleen Schnettler 19:07
That's not concerning.

Michele Hansen 19:10
No, right? So, but we were hustling pretty hard. Like, you know, I was spending all of my free time -- that free time I didn't have -- emailing and tweeting at reporters in the DC area trying to get them to pick up on the app. And in November of 2013, we actually ended up getting picked up by DCist and by the Washington Post's Express. So Express is like the free newspaper that they hand out at the metro and in 2013, and quite frankly, probably still today. Service is terrible in the metro tunnels. So a lot of people actually read the free newspaper, and they had this like beginning section of the paper where it was like Quote snippets from people. And we had posted the app on Reddit. And then people had commented on it on Reddit. And so they had posted one of those Reddit comments in the, in the newspaper. And that was huge for us. And that month, so November, we had $155 in revenue. And then December we had $515.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow!

Michele Hansen
So we went from 20 cents to $515 dollars.

Colleen Schnettler 20:31
Yay. That's great. That must have felt so amazing.

Michele Hansen 20:33
Yeah, we were so excited. And I mean, I remember we spent Thanksgiving week basically the whole time, like, updating all the parsers and making sure we had Thanksgiving hours in and I emailed like 100 local business owners trying to get their Thanksgiving and Christmas hours. And we spent so much time on this, but really felt like it was paying off.

Colleen Schnettler 20:57
Yeah, that must have felt amazing.

Michele Hansen 21:00
Yeah, it was, it was really exciting. And I think though, the exciting thing about doing a consumer app too, is that your friends are using it.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And so I was getting messages from people I know being like, Hey, this is so cool. Like, thank you for making this. This is awesome. And you're like, yeah, this is awesome. Like I'm making something that helps my friends, this feels good. Versus in B2B, you doesn't really happen quite as much. Um, yeah, it felt so good.

But we started to have some problems.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
So I mentioned how the app, you open it up, and it had a map to show you all of the stores that were near you. So we could get 2500 locations for free from from Google. But then, if we added more stores, beyond 2500, we could only cache them, this was sort of the problem, we couldn't store the coordinates in a database, we can only cache them.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay,

Michele Hansen
So we had, so we needed more than 2500 coordinates, we didn't have any options.

Colleen Schnettler
Ahh.

Michele Hansen
Because it was either 2500 for free. Or you could have an enterprise plan that was like $20,000 a year, 100,000 a day. And we're like, we have 5000 stores in the app, like we don't need 100,000 a day. And we're certainly, you know, we're feeling pretty good about our $500 in ad revenue here. But that's not remotely justify paying for an enterprise contract. Like that's insane. So what we did was, we built a very, very rudimentary geocoder out of this, just to support the app. And as we talked about this with other friends of ours, who are developers, they said to us, "well have you guys considered, you know, slapping a paywall in front of this and, you know, letting other people use it. And, you know, maybe you can get enough people to use it that the servers will, for it will be effectively free for you?" And we're like, oh, like, that'd be really interesting. Like, if you know, we can just get enough people to pay for it, that we basically don't have to pay for it ourselves. Like, like, that would be cool. And then we can keep our apps going, because these apps are making money and they're working. And so we did a month or two of testing with other people. There's actually a really awesome picture of Mathias with our daughter at three months old at 1776, which is a co-working space in DC with with tons of startups, they're like meeting with our friends here and test it out. I feel like it's very emblematic of our family and our marriage. And so then we launched Geocodio in January of 2014, with our definition of a wild success, being that more people paid for it than it costs us to provide it.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
I remember making a spreadsheet of this. I can't find that spreadsheet, but that was a wild success was.

Colleen Schnettler 24:10
Sure. So what happened?

Michele Hansen 24:12
Well, so then we so we launched Geocodio.

Colleen Schnettler 24:14
Right, okay. And right. Okay, so, wait, yes, that point, though, were you you guys had both products? Or did you sunset that? I mean, that one product was making you 500 bucks, which felt like a million probably. Were you? Yeah, both products at the time?

Michele Hansen 24:27
Yes. So we're absolutely maintaining both our focus was very much on the app. And in January of 2014, we made $514 from the app, so it was still like that was the same as the previous month, but we still felt pretty good about that. Um, and we're pretty focused on both though the success of the Geocodio launch really took us by surprise. Like we ended up being on the front page of Hacker News all day, which was a huge surprise to us. It was, it was pretty surreal. Um, and so we ended up having $31 in total revenue for that month or about $27 after fees.

Colleen Schnettler
okay.

Michele Hansen
And Geocodio was running on two tiny little DigitalOcean droplets, one web server one database server. And so we were was gross margin perspective we netted $7, which was absolutely amazing. Like we were surprised, like we hadn't even written the, the code that would trigger the billing code to charge people because we had not expected that people would want to pay us.

Colleen Schnettler
That's amazing.

Michele Hansen
But so so but then that next month, like the the ad revenue continued to drop off. And we kind of learned the hard way that with consumer businesses like marketing has to be constant, like you have to constantly be in front of people, otherwise, the attention is going to drop off. It's not like a business where if you sign them up, and then they have a recurring need, they're going to keep having that need. So I posted all of the revenue charts on the blog posts, and you can kind of see that the last month where the app and Geocodio made the same amount of money was April of 2014. And then from there on Geocodio do just takes off like a rocket, and our ad revenue goes down quite significantly.

Colleen Schnettler 26:32
That's amazing. I love that story. Like I love that Geocodio was born out of something, you guys needed yourself. And you didn't even think it was going to be that successful. And now it sustains your entire family.

Michele Hansen 26:45
Yeah, and any other app we had came out of our own needs as well. And I think there's some similarities to what you are doing as well there. You know, we should always validate our ideas against what other people are trying to do. But especially for a first project, it can be so helpful to do something that just scratches your own itch does, it makes you feel good. And yes, you, you get that motivation going. And as much as you can, you know, snowballing the revenue from one project to another, snowballing the motivation that you're getting and a positive reinforcement you're getting from one project is so helpful for the other one, because like a geocoder is not a very exciting project on the face of it like and few people would sort of jump into that right away. We only arrived at that is because it's something that we needed ourselves.

But that in turn ended up being such a great way for us to start a business because we were developer first from the very beginning. And we were out to solve the things that frustrated us about all of the other services out there. Like the whole thing about only being able to cache the results rather than store them in the database very early on, we decided you should be able to store them, like we don't want to stand over customer shoulders, telling them what they can and can't do. Like we just don't believe in that, we're not going to do it. That is a formed a lot of decision that we make, or we're going to have a free tier and we're going to have a pay as you go model to make sure that it's affordable and accessible for people, regardless of how big their project is like. Those are things that are really important to us. And you know, something that we ask ourselves, every time we're making a tough decision is okay, if we were the customers, what would we want to happen here? And how would we want to be treated? And sometimes the answers to those things are not the immediate profit maximizing decision that a larger company might make. But one of the reasons why we do this is to solve our own problems. And we don't want to create a product that creates problems for people, people already have enough problems. They don't need a product to create new problems for them, like being only able to cache things or all sorts of usage restrictions or whatnot. We just don't believe in that.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And so as a and that really wasn't a perspective that I had on business until we encountered this product like you know, I don't I don't think I believed anything negative about treating customers but I didn't really have I hadn't really felt that pain myself of "Wow, like this really, really sucks but you want to use a product to get something done and then the product creates problems and hassles for you, like why is this happening? It's already hard enough to create something." And so that that idea that we are ourselves the customers really drives what we do and I always find it so fun when I you know, create new little side projects here and there that happened to run on Geocodio. Because we always end up coming across new ideas or like, oh, like, yeah, we should, you know, we could do this or, or we could do that, like, I think you remember the the app we made in the spring to help people find grocery store pickup slots. So that had geocode do in the backgrounds. Yeah. You know, locating unit, you know, the nearest Wegmans, or Harris Teeter to help you find a pickup slot.

So yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been fun. But it certainly required a lot. A lot of initial initial investment from us, like, you know, I think back to that, like $416 on 20 cents in, in revenue, that's a lot of money. I remember at the time like, that was basically our car payment. So that was a non-insignificant amount of money, we had a child, so we didn't have a lot of time. But also, we were fortunate enough that we had full time professional jobs, and we didn't have to have second jobs as just a part of our normal life, you know, this is a choice that we made, and we had the luxury of being able to spend our free time on this. And as children, we had, you know, the opportunities to learn about business or play around with coding. We didn't have to be working, you know, have to be working as children. And so we had that time to explore. And so that's something I always think about that. Yeah, we had several years of not a lot of sleep, and not a lot of free time. But there are so many advantages that we had going into that. And I think that's also something that inspires me too, you know, not only to feel like I'm making the most of those advantages, but also to try to inspire other people to do this as well, recognizing that, you know, maybe other people didn't have parents' businesses to observe as children like both of us did. And, you know, things like incorporating a business or doing sales are much more intimidating for other people. And so to try to demystify those things and make it easier.

Colleen Schnettler 32:08
Well, Michele, thank you so much for sharing your origin story of how you and your husband started started Geocodio. I've really enjoyed hearing it, and I'm sure our listeners did as well.

Michele Hansen 32:21
Yeah, if anyone else has follow up questions, you know, always feel free to tweet at me. I'm certainly happy to talk to you about it and see if I can help with what you're trying to do.

Colleen Schnettler 32:34
So that's going to wrap up this week's episode of the Software Social podcast. Feel free to tweet us your questions and comments at @softwaresocpod. Thanks for listening.

View Details

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
So one of the things I kind of wanted to talk about was a few weeks ago on the podcast, I sat here and I told you that what I really want is a job where I only have to work nine to five. And I bring that up.

Michele Hansen
Yeah?

Colleen Schnettler
I seems great. But my husband totally called me out on this, he pointed out that I have had jobs where I've only had to work nine to five, and I have quit them all.

Michele Hansen
Really?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. And so it just got me thinking, you know, as I go on this journey, and I, I tried to get my mental, like my headspace aligned for what I want to do in the future, I really don't want to go back to a corporate job, I think about this side project thing that I'm doing as something that like, I'm trying, and if it doesn't work out, I'll go back to a regular job. But I don't want to do that, like ever. So I think that's just an important like mental space for me to be in like, this is what I want to do, I want to build a business. And so you know what this might be a huge failure. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give up and I'm fortunate and that I can consult like fill in the gaps until I get there. So I follow this VC on Twitter, her name is Elizabeth Yin, and she had this great Twitter thread about marketing and, you know, starting a business, and one of the things she talked about is like, if you're an entrepreneur, that that is a career and some people you know, you can get five to 10 chances to get it right. And sometimes you can be brilliant and get it wrong. And sometimes you can be not so great and get it right. So you just have to keep trying.

But for me, that's a total mental shift of how I think about this process. Like, instead of thinking of this as a thing I do in my free time that might work out, I'm changing my mindset to like, this is the thing I want to do. And right now I can't afford it to do more than I can't afford to do it more than in my air quotes free time. But long term like this is the path I want to be on. So I just wanted to share that because I thought that was like important that, you know, as we go through this process.

Michele Hansen 2:00
I remember pre-pandemic, you were working on your consulting Monday to Thursday. And then you were devoting Fridays to side projects, getting your own business going. So it was like, like an 80-20 split between consulting and I'm curious, has that shift? I mean, shifted in the last couple of months? Since you you really started focusing on your in an image management service?

Colleen Schnettler 2:29
Yes, it really has, I think one of the things, you know, almost all developers will say is like software is harder than everyone thinks it is. And it's just like, all of these things you have to do. And you have to do. So I would say I've almost shifted that balance. I'm doing 80% file uploader and 20% consulting, maybe, you know, probably something like that. Maybe two days a week, I'm doing consulting. But I really, the thing is, I think it's important, remember, like, I really enjoy it. Like I really like this side project, I'm really having a good time. And I'm really learning a lot. And so yeah, it's just, I've just been giving it a lot of time. And I feel like you know, that's something if I'm going to try it, I'm going to try it. So that's what I'm doing.

Michele Hansen 3:16
Something I hear in your voice is how excited you are about what you're working on. And when you mentioned your conversation with your husband about the times you had a nine to five job and how much you hated them, it sounds like there was no passion there. And so yes, the hours are important, but it sounds like something you value is being challenged. And it sounds like you weren't getting any of that challenge or excitement or newness in those nine to five jobs or even really the responsibility maybe that that comes with running your own project, which, you know, we all know in large corporations, it's the hard thing to find.

Colleen Schnettler 4:03
Yeah, I totally agree. And it, it really hit home for me that what I really want is -- I mean if I had to pick between being bored and being stressed, but like being challenged, I would pick stressed and challenged. I mean, for me that's that's just who I am. That's what I want. I can relatively I don't wanna say easily, but like relatively, you know, painlessly get a job and that's just not what I want, at least for now. At least, you know, for as long as I see it for the next couple years. I have time. Right there's all this internet propaganda that makes it seem like if you don't have you don't start a business and you're not successful in a year, it's never gonna work for you. And like I have time you know, I can just keep keep working on it until something works.

Michele Hansen 4:48
I think it's really an advantage is having time and being able to be patient, and I saw that Twitter thread you mentioned as well. And you know what stuck out to me from that is that is that your first business may not be your, your business for the long haul, right? And you know, I was actually just writing about this, how we snowballed small mobile app into Geocodio and basically funded it with that. That mobile app made 20 cents its first month.

Colleen Schnettler 5:22
Wow.

Michele Hansen 5:24
I know. It's impressive, right. And if we had been set on quitting our full time jobs as soon as possible, we would not have had the patience to go through basically the year and a half it took to get that up going, that app making enough revenue that then we are exposed to the problems that led us to creating Geocodio and then that app funded you Geocodio and then eventually that app [was] surpassed Geocodio. Do. But if we had been impatience, that would not have happened, but at the same time, you know, sort of what you said we were excited by it.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
It was thrilling in a way that we weren't really getting from the rest of our work. And that excitement was enough to carry us through even when the revenue maybe wasn't there.

Colleen Schnettler 6:21
Yeah. So last week, we talked about me making this software available off of Heroku. Because Heroku is going to make me wait till I have 100 users before I can start charging for it. So remember you, you told me I need to figure out if anyone's going to actually pay for it, which is great advice. Great advice. So I actually sat down. So last week, I kind of like talked in generalities about pricing, but I actually like sat down and tried to figure out how much to charge. And I have no idea like, No, I can't. So I looked at these other competitors. And there's like no consistency in their pricing. I'm -- like, I have no idea. So you have to have the people we talked about are like the big image management companies and their first tier are at $89 and $45, respectively. But there's also an add on on the Heroku marketplace now. The guy just resells S3 buckets. So he doesn't help you upload your files, he literally just gives you an S3 bucket. And he starts at $5. So I feel like there's this huge range. I have no idea like, how should I start with this?

Michele Hansen 7:35
You have some people you've talked to who asked you if you're planning to make this available off Heroku?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
Have you asked them what they are currently paying for this, whether that's a service or simply a three are their time? Like, have you gotten a sense of that, from that?

Colleen Schnettler 7:51
I have not asked them that.

Michele Hansen 7:54
I think that would be a good place to start.

Colleen Schnettler 7:56
Okay. And you're just what if they're not using anything right now that they're paying.

Michele Hansen 8:02
So that can be a good thing, and a red flag.

Colleen Schnettler
okay.

Michele Hansen
It could be a good thing in the sense of if they are only spending time on this. And that time is a painful amount of time for them, like multiple hours per week, for example. And they're really willing to pay for it. That can be a good sign. But if they're not currently paying for it, and they say it's they're spending time on this, but it turns out, that's an hour every six months, then that willingness to pay may not be there.

Colleen Schnettler 8:38
Right. Right. Well, and the cool thing I think about the foundation I've built with this is this thing can I mean, I'm not changing anything yet, I remember what you said about features having to sit on the front porch. But what I can do with the foundation of what I build is like pretty much limitless in terms of like file sharing.

Michele Hansen 8:57
Yeah, cuz I think the the question for you is, you know, do you want to go on a sort of pay as you go model, which it sounds like the big competitors do, even if it's a subscription model, where they're basically pre paying for a certain number of credits, that then don't roll over? So do you want to do a subscription model with limits? Or do you want to do a pay as you go model? And I think the big questions there are, what are your customers currently paying somebody else for? And then also, what is their usage look like? Is there any way you can model out what their usage on another competitor or doing it themselves would be? versus like how much that would even cost you? I mean, of course, looking at what it costs you to provide a service is a very rudimentary way of developing pricing and most people would not recommend going that way more of a value based way of pricing, but I think it's helpful to at least know what that is. Just so you know what your floor is for providing the service.

Colleen Schnettler 10:09
Yeah. And it's interesting because as I've been thinking about this, you'd almost and this isn't, I'm just throwing this out there, it's almost like, you pay one time, I think that to give the person the most value, like you pay one time for the software, and then you're just paying a maintenance fee or something to keep your stuff in Cloud Storage. I don't know, I just don't know. Because ultimately, I'm repackaging cloud storage in a pretty box. And cloud storage is cheap. But I look at what these companies are charging for their uploaders. And I'm like, wow, they're charging a lot. So that's all really good business advice you just gave me. But can I just like, throw a price tag on it to try it?

Michele Hansen
Sure.

Colleen Schnettler
I mean, that's kind of what I was saying. And then, and then see if anyone uses it. And from there, I will just kind of see what happens, and adjust accordingly.

Michele Hansen 11:07
Have you looked around on like Reddit and Twitter and other places for people complaining about your competitors, and see if they have any complaints about the pricing of them?

Colleen Schnettler 11:18
So I have done that. But I haven't looked specifically -- when I first started building this, I look specifically for complaints about the service. But I did have not looked for complaints about the pricing structure. So that's a great idea. I like the idea of not going pay as you go. I like the idea of a fixed rate. Because I think one of the frustrations with Amazon is you never know how much your bill is going to be.

Michele Hansen 11:42
You can also do that more transparently than Amazon.

Colleen Schnettler 11:45
That's true. That's true.

Michele Hansen 11:46
Like we have a pay as you go model and people who don't have a lot of usage really like that, because they only want to pay for exactly what they use. And they don't want to feel like they're leaving money on the table by paying for up to 300 credits when they only use 257.

Colleen Schnettler 12:03
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 12:05
So if you find on Reddit, for example, people talk about using these services and what they're paying for them, I would encourage you to reach out to those people and say, What would you prefer instead?

Colleen Schnettler 12:14
Yeah, I think this is a good, this is a good, this is a good circle back to trying to find people again, like I know, I did this in the beginning, which gosh, we've had this podcast for 16 weeks now. So something like that, so quite a while ago. But this is a good time to circle back, I think. And I also I really think I still really think my space is going to be might be in like the no code space, because it feels like there are not, there's not a lot of options in that space. So I will look for those people who look for people using web flow, see what they're doing. Now, I'll look for anyone using Upload Care, or Cloudinary, or any of these other services now and kind of see see what they're saying.

Michele Hansen 12:53
Sounds like a plan.

Colleen Schnettler 12:54
Awesome. So in addition to this, trying to get trying to actually get this available off Heroku and having to figure out pricing, I have continued to read the book we've been working through, which is StoryBrand, which is about for those just joining us story brand is basically a marketing book, it's about clarifying your marketing message. So customers will buy your stuff. And I'm on chapter seven, and I have theoretically established myself as the guide, the customer is the hero. And now I need to provide a plan. So this seems pretty obvious. This was not eye opening in any way the author talks about. He says making a purchase isn't a characteristic of a casual relationship. It's a characteristic of a commitment. When they place an order, they're saying, I believe you can help me solve my problem. And I believe it's so much I'm willing to part with my hard earned dollars. So he talks about literally making a plan minimum three steps maximum six steps. And, you know, uses that that quote he uses frequently, which is if you confuse, you lose. So yeah, so I made a plan. And the idea is, you know, you make it simple enough that you were trying to alleviate confusion. That's the goal here. So my plan, my four step plan is one, sign up for the service to add the JavaScript snippet to your website, three, use the new file in the cloud for x. Okay, now that I'm reading it to you, it sounds really bad. Okay, let me try that, again, sign up for the service. That's the first thing you do to you add the JavaScript snippet to your site three, your user adds new files in the cloud, but that's not really something you do. So I'm going to remove that from my plan, delete

Michele Hansen 14:46
That is part of them getting value out of it.

Colleen Schnettler 14:49
That's true, your user your user uploads files.

Michele Hansen 14:54
And if you go with a pay you go model, which you know, I know you may not, if they don't using the product, then you don't get paid. Which is a nice alignment between you and and the customer.

Colleen Schnettler 15:07
This is interesting, I had not really thought about pay as you go. This is definitely. It's definitely interesting. I'm going to think more about this. But your points valid, like if no one ever uses it. Maybe you never have to pay anything. That seems like a win win, right?

Michele Hansen 15:21
Wasn't there a step four?

Colleen Schnettler 15:23
Yes, step four, was access your files in the cloud. So that's my, that's it. That's all that's my process. Like that was a whole chapter make a plan.

Michele Hansen 15:33
So, so last week, thinking more about about pricing a little bit. So you were undecided on whether to go with free trial versus free tier? And if you're going free tier, what that free tier was? And I'm curious if you did any more thinking on that?

Colleen Schnettler 15:54
Yeah. So I think because of what I do, I feel like a free trial is not really fair to the customer. Because you're really, I mean, my service is sticky. If you use it, it's a pain in the butt for you to migrate off of it. Because you have to go and you have to download each file, and then you're gonna have to put the files somewhere else, and then you're gonna have to change

Michele Hansen 16:14
That's the sign of a really promising business, when it's hard to leave it.

Colleen Schnettler 16:19
You cannot leave. So I feel like a free trial, like, I'd be annoyed with that. If after 30 days, they were like, you have to pay me now because that's a huge pain. Although now that I'm saying it out loud. What after 30 days, I sent you an email, and it was like, here's all the files your users have uploaded. I mean, maybe there's a way to do it without being a jerk, like a gentle way to give them a 30 day free trial. And if the users you know, and then you could be like, hey, you've uploaded one gig here, all your files. And maybe I, I don't know, maybe I could let them stay at that level. But be like, if you want to continue using the service and upload new, maybe what I could do is I could keep their files, so they could still access them. So I'm not totally screwing them over. But then I could say, Oh, this is interesting, what if I ended but if you want to continue to service, now you have to pay for it, versus just a free tier, which is like you get five gigs of storage for free. You can have forever and ever and then when they surpass five gigs of storage? Um, I don't know.

Michele Hansen 17:28
That's interesting. So free trials work well, when using the product requires legwork from the person who is signing up for it. And basically, you're punting the point of payment until the user has so much sunk cost going into this in terms of their time that they're like, okay, fine, I'll pay you. So like, a great example of this is TurboTax, where you go through the whole thing of uploading your W2s and your mortgage and whatever. And then it's like the very, very last step that they're like, oh, by the way, this is gonna be $49. And you have the file in three states and as an extra $19. And you're like, ah, fine, I just want this to be over with.

Colleen Schnettler 18:14
Yep, that's me, been there, done that, TurboTax.

Michele Hansen 18:15
So that can be really effective model where, you know, it sounds like with your plan you just made for the user requires four steps for them to go through in order for them to get value out of it, because they're not going to really sort of see it in action until their user has uploaded something. And then you can see that, and that requires work on their end. Yeah, I think that could. That could be interesting. And and when you have talked about Cloudinary, and whatnot, you've mentioned how you've only used the free tier for those companies and never paid them. And then when they if you have a site where they would actually need to pay somebody, you just build it yourself.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
So I wonder if you would sort of bias towards people who wouldn't have a lot of usage by having the free tier bearing in mind that we have a free tier and I'm a huge believer in them, but like anything, it it has to make sense based on the context.

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

Michele Hansen
And I think what you described maybe makes sense that a free trial instead. Now the question is, if you're going to go with a free trial, why a month, why not? Five days, 10 days, 45 days?

Colleen Schnettler 19:29
Okay, So to your point, I can Oh, you're right, there is a it's not a hard setup, but it's not no setup, either, right? You're gonna have to spend 20 minutes, 10 minutes, depending on you know, how good you are adding the JavaScript snippet and saving the URL, generally not hard. But yes, there is by and they have to do something to make this work on their site. So they're not going to see value in it until their users start to upload files. So for them, how long is that going to take? Or maybe Could you do a free trial up? I mean, I guess I can do whatever I want. But I could also do it up to like a certain file limit, right, like file like storage, like you've had 25 users upload files. Mm hmm.

Michele Hansen 20:10
Yeah. I think that would make sense. Like, or, you know, a certain storage limit.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
I wonder if people would be adding this during the development phase. And so it may actually be six months or something until a site goes live?

Colleen Schnettler
Ooh, yeah.

Michele Hansen
But if they can do you know, it's, I mean, well, then we're talking about a free trial, really, or not at frontier, but a free tier, yeah. Which is, you know, up to a certain low storage limit, it sounds like the cloudinary limit may be too high, almost. And then they have to switch over, which basically means they can use it for free during the development and demo period.

Colleen Schnettler 20:49
Yeah, I kind of like that I like I like a free tier up to a certain storage amount. And I could do it based on the file size you're allowed to upload. So you know, maybe on your free tier, you can only upload three MB files. I like that, because I feel like that gives people enough buy in to see you know, and then when they want to add video, or when they want to add some kind of ginormous file, they'll be tied into my software, and they'll be willing to upgrade it. Because they'll already like it, like I go back make having this conversation makes me go back to think about why I didn't like the Cloudinary solution, because a lot of people recommended it to me. And I just found that it was so painful to use. And the widget was so ugly, that at that time, and this was years ago, we were like, we're just gonna build it ourselves. So I feel like to decrease the barriers to entry, which is what I'm trying to do might as much simpler. And I think it looks nicer. Like maybe that will be that will be good like that will draw people in and then they'll use it and they'll see it's easy to use, and then they will continue to use it. And then they'll want to add big files, or then they'll have a lot of users that want to use it or something like that.

Michele Hansen 22:00
So to recap, we just bounced from whether you would have a free portion at all to having a time limited free trial to having a free tier and then having a free tier with a you know, with a storage limit that is not time limited.

Colleen Schnettler 22:21
Yeah, I have this all under control. Can you tell?

Michele Hansen 22:23
So I think when you go find people on Twitter, or Reddit or wherever that may be asking them about what they're using, this is a really important thing to ask them. Like, you know, if there was a service that was much prettier, and was much easier to use and get started with. And you got up to I don't know 25 megs of storage. And then you pay for an after that, like, what do you think about that? Or would you prefer something that is you get up to 25 or so you get up to 50 Meg's of storage, but for one month, and then you have to start paying for it after a month and ask them why do you like that? Why don't you like that? What do you wish it would do instead? Yeah,

Colleen Schnettler 23:07
I think developers are so bad about buying software. I mean, we do but i, this throughout this process, I have run into this over and over and over, where I'm like, I could build this thing that makes your life easier. And the developer I'm talking to is like, Yeah, but I could build that. And I'm like, yeah, of course you could, but you don't have time, you don't want to. Anyway, I The reason I thought about that is because when I first tried this on Reddit, everyone was like, Oh, yeah, I just do this ridiculously complicated process to do it myself. So I will look specifically for users, for people who are already using a different service, just to kind of see where they are.

Michele Hansen 23:46
And something we talked about a while ago is people tend to be much stingier with their own money.

Colleen Schnettler
That's a good point.

Michele Hansen
The developers can build a client for this directly, rather than it being them having to eat it as overhead as part of the project. I think that would make people much more willing to pay for it.

Colleen Schnettler 24:08
That's a really good point that I have totally forgotten about. But I know with my clients, they would every single time, rather pay for a service that's $20 a month and takes me 10 minutes to implement versus paying me five hours or three hours or whatever, to do a custom solution that then they have to maintain or I have to maintain, it's still cheaper for them in the long run. And it's easier for them to if they if they are on Heroku it's easier because then they have one bill so they don't have to pay an AWS bill and a Heroku bill and whoever else bill.

Michele Hansen 24:39
So the tricky thing about this, then is that you not only need to have a pricing model that is acceptable to the developers who are installing it but also to their clients. Because what you just said was, the client would rather have something that they pay $20 a month for then XYZ and so then The question, also to figure out is, is a client comfortable with knowing that there will be a range of costs that it will be somewhere between five and $25 a month? Or would they prefer knowing that it is always going to be $20 a month and that $20 a limit is is much higher than they would ever possibly need? And they know exactly what that cost is going to be?

Colleen Schnettler 25:23
Yeah, that's a good question. And I don't know the answer to that question. But my intuition is telling me they'd rather have a fixed cost. That has been my experience with clients is they even if the fixed cost is $20, a month more expensive, they'd rather have a fixed cost.

Michele Hansen 25:41
I would verify that against these people, you're going to go out and find in the wilds of the internet.

Colleen Schnettler 25:47
Oh, yay.

Michele Hansen 25:49
But that's it that's worth thinking through is, okay, you have a free tier with a certain limit. And then, rather than having pay-as-you-go, you have monthly subscription plans on top of that.

Colleen Schnettler 26:03
Yeah, that's what I think that that's kind of this conversation is leading me down that path. I like the transparency of that. I like that you know exactly what you're getting. But I agree that like I need to talk to people.

You think only people who are paying for something or everyone who's I mean, everyone's doing it. But do you think I should focus on people who are currently paying for a solution?

Michele Hansen 26:25
Maybe try to find half and half. Okay. And you know, I say that saying? Try to find five people who will talk to you. So you need two and a half people on either side. Um, you know, maybe try to find, you know, two or three people who are paying for it, and two or three people who aren't paying for it, but who expressed that this is a pain that they do, and they have this wildly complicated process that they do. Okay, who experience some amount of pain with it.

Colleen Schnettler 26:52
Yeah, yeah. It's just like, I was thinking about this as I'm trying to make it available. You know, as I'm working on it, I'm just like, no one's gonna buy this. Man.

Michele Hansen
Oh, don't say that.

Colleen Schnettler
And the thing is, people are paying for services like this. And I think it was just like, that's part of this process, right? Like, you build something, I'm still excited to use it. And it was kind of cool. Because like, one of my clients not knowing anything about this podcast, or anything about what that I've built this thing. One of my clients asked me, he was like, would it be so great if they could just dropped their file there? And I was like, Yeah, what I can do that for you in 10 minutes, it was awesome.

Michele Hansen 27:30
And that is the hero moment. It really was the, the product making you the developer, the hero, that is the moment you want to get all of your customers to.

Colleen Schnettler 27:42
And that like, that's literally why I built it. Because I was like, Yes, people ask me this all the time. And I'm always like, Oh, it's gonna take a couple hours. And this drop zone code isn't compatible with this drop zone code, and I gotta set you up on AWS. And it's a whole freakin thing. So that was like, a really happy moment for me when he said that because I was like, Yeah, like, it's gonna take me 10 minutes. Sweet.

Michele Hansen
That's amazing.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, it was cool.

And that's going to wrap up this week's episode of software social. We'd love to hear your feedback. You can reach us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod!

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Colleen Schnettler
Hey Software Social listeners! Colleen here. For their first time ever, MicroConf is putting on a SaaS podcast awards. Michele and I would be so honored if you would nominate us at saaspodcastawards.com! And here's today's show.

Michele Hansen 0:02
So I think I already know what the title of this week's episode is going to be.

Colleen Schnettler 0:08
Oh, that's funny, because I don't know, please tell me.

Michele Hansen 0:12
See, normally we don't decide on the title until I've loaded everything into Transistor and cleaned up the transcript and everything else. But I think today is going to be the pricing episode.

Colleen Schnettler 0:24
Ooh, that sounds fun.

Michele Hansen 0:27
Because you were saying last week, do you want to talk about pricing today? Right.

Colleen Schnettler 0:30
I did say that. But I don't know if I'm quite ready yet.

Michele Hansen 0:34
Well, it's been on my mind a lot this week.

So there's actually can't it kind of came out of a conversation I was having on Twitter yesterday. And just talking about specifically talking about what to do when you raise prices, and and how to treat customers who would win with you for a long time versus business needs to change pricing models or, or increased prices. And then, of course, something that happened recently, which is a company that many of us use, raising their prices on us. And so all of this got me thinking about ways of dealing with prices, and how pricing model itself can be an advantage over competitors, especially entrenched competitors. And then also how there's a lot of advice about pricing. And I think all of that needs to be couched in the specifics of your own business and your own understanding of your customers. So the context here is that stripe is raising prices on their subscriptions product. So basically, you can use, you know, stripe to create your payments. And if you have products set up as subscriptions now, previously, their subscriptions API was free. And when it was announced, I think in 2018, or so the announcement they sent out was basically that it was going to be free forever, and just included in the product. And then this morning, um, this just showed up on Hacker News. I mean, maybe it was yesterday that the post actually went up. And I just saw today that they're now going to be charging a point 5% fee on any subscription, which doesn't sound like a lot. But if you extrapolate that out to making, you know, 1000 hundred thousand a million a year like that, that adds up very quickly. And I think something that's really rubbing people the wrong way is first of all, they told people at the get go that this was going to be included and that they weren't going to charge for it. And second of all, that we never even got an email about it. And we're just finding out about it on Hacker News. Yeah. And so this actually ties into a conversation I was having with Simon Bennett of snap shooter on Twitter yesterday about this sort of idea of quote, unquote, grandfathering pricing.

And I say, quote, unquote, grandfathering, by the way, so I know this is the term that people generally use. But we stopped using that term this summer. Because the concept of grandfathering, that the term comes from, after the Civil War states instituting voting policies that said you could only vote if your grandfather could vote. So which basically disqualified former slaves and their descendants from voting, and I always thought this was just like, one, like, one way the term had been used and wasn't like the origin of it. And so like, you know, once we found that out, we we change the term, how we talk about it to be loyalty discount, which I also think really more communicates what you're giving the customer and makes them feel good about themselves, rather than thinking about relatives and stuff like that.

Um, so anyway, so So Simon was talking about this, because he's saying, you know, I've left so much money on the table by by giving these loyalty discounts by by not raising prices on on old customers, and we're sort of, you know, talking about, but you can get value out of that and other ways like, like as a SaaS company, it's so valuable to have long term, customers who will reliably renew like that, you know, they're already on boarded with your product, the support volume is much, much lower. They like you, they're presumably happy with your product. You know, those are the customers we reach out to when new customers are looking for our customer reference, which especially happens with bigger companies. So, so I want to bring like two different resources that kind of helps us think about this, but then also how we think about them differently. So one of those is an article by Amy hoy, which I feel like I referenced her so much on this podcast that like we have to have her on.

Colleen Schnettler 5:09
Aren't you guys friends?

Michele Hansen 5:11
Like Twitter friends? Yeah, I think we like met at MicroConf. Um, yeah, through the twitterverse. So this article, such a great title, One Weird Trick to Raising your Monthly Price Without a Customer Revolt, which is basically what Stripe is looking at right now. And you know, Hacker News is full of people saying, you know, should we migrate off of stripe like up like, all this kind of stuff. So in this article basically goes through, like, you know, you see a company raised prices, there is a revolt, it scares you away from raising prices. The problem with that is that companies may need to raise prices, especially the situation you're in right now, where you may pray something right now. And then it turns out as you learn more about your customers, and what their cadence of needs are, and, and how you know how their behavior needs to be matched with a pricing model, you may need to change things in six months, or a year from now or two years from now, whether that's the actual pricing model itself, or the price levels. And so how do you do that in a way without making people revolt. And so one of the key points she makes, you know, here is that it is possible to raise prices without a revolt, like you don't have to be afraid of that. And there's a good way to do this, I think the way stripe has done it is not a good way, which is raising the prices on something people are already using for free, and then not telling them about it, those are two strikes against you.

One of the most popular ways of doing this, which I think Bugsnag is doing. I think I think we're just talked about this a couple weeks ago, and we I mean, Mathias and I, is that you basically get locked out of new features, so you can keep your price for forever. And I think Basecamp does this as well. But you don't get new features, you don't get new functionality. And so you know, eventually, you know, the percentage of their actual product that you're using is lower and lower and lower. But if you're only doing simple things with a product, and you're happy with the price you're paying, and you don't need more, that can be a really good thing. Another thing is, you know, like designing new plan levels, so you change those those different levels. And, but I think the really important thing to hear, to think about here, you know, your job as a founder, whether that's one who is just starting out or, or like me, or someone who's been doing this for 20 years, your most important job as a founder is to know your customers better than anyone else. This informs the kinds of features you build, how you structure your products, and how you price them. And all of that informs, you know, the kind of service that you're delivering, and and most importantly, how you price that product. And so as you learn more about your customers, you may find there are more optimal ways to do things and ways that are they're ultimately friendlier to them. You know, for example, I think we've all been in situations where there's a company that's trying to make something a subscription when you really only need it once. And it's just super annoying. You're like, I only need this one, I don't need a subscription. Like why, like, why can't I buy this without a subscription? Or, you know, I only need 100 units of this, but I have to buy a subscription and the minimum level is 300. And like, why am I paying for more than I'm using like, like all those situations, like as a customer don't feel good. And so what we try to deal with pricing is to not put customers in those situations, but at the same time balancing that with the needs of the business and the fact that you know, if we gave everything away for free or priced at very, very cheaply, like we would go out of business and then we would not be serving our customers right so like there's a there's a give and take there.

Colleen Schnettler 8:55
So how do you think a company like Stripe, which has some of the most competent developers and marketers screwed this up so badly?

Michele Hansen 9:05
I I don't know. You know, I I will say you know, having some been someone who has worked in larger companies that have raised prices with varying levels of customer communication I mean it's a difficult thing to to message and certainly being the one responding to the customers is not a fun situation to be in so I do commend Patrick Collison for like jumping in on this Hacker News thread and just opening himself up to the firing squad that is Hacker News commenters because let's be real like Hacker News commenters are mean the the most brutal commenters out there like if you're gonna destroy someone send Hacker News comment there's after them. Um, you know, so I mean, it's it's tough, like raising prices is always tough, but I can talk through how We think about it because we raised prices last year.

Colleen Schnettler 10:03
Yeah, I would love to hear that I, especially in my situation where I'm just kind of making up a price when I start that seems reasonable. And I may have to change it down the line, depending on my customer needs and my business needs.

Michele Hansen 10:17
So actually, I guess I should start with in the beginning, so. So from the launch point, we got our pricing model, basically by copying it from competitors, because they offered 2500 for free per day. And we're like, okay, that's just, that's the baseline. So that's what we have to offer. Like, why would anyone switch from a competitor to us when we were less generous, though, actually, one of our competitors does have a less generous return. But anyway, so we took that, and then we're like, what our problem is, is we need to be able to pay for 5000 a day rather than just 2500. So we gave it a pays you go model. And I don't remember how we actually set the price for pay as you go Come to think of it. I think we originally set it as $1 per thousand, I have no idea how we actually came to that price, I should look through my notes and try to find that. I don't even know if I did some back of the envelope math on Okay, we've got these two tiny little digitalocean servers, you know, one server with one database server for $20 a month. And you know, this is how many customers we would need. So then, so we did that for a while. And then but I think the real The thing that really kicked off our growth was introducing the unlimited plan in May of 2014. And it's funny and I say Unlimited, because one of the go to resources on pricing that basically everybody should reference is Pricing Low Touch SaaS from Stripe Atlas guides written by Patrick McKenzie, which is just probably one of the most referenced pricing articles for bootstrappers, along with Amy Hoy's writing. And in that article, he says never sell unlimited anything, which I find so interesting, because we actually do sell something unlimited. And I think, and this is one of those things where you know, your job as a founder is to know your customers better than anyone else. And it's also to know your business better than anyone else. And if you have competitive advantages that other people don't have, like, you've talked about how you're switching and storage providers, because they give you an operational cost advantage, rather than using AWS, like if you have those advantages using them. And so in May of 2014, we had a customer come to us and say, you know, I love your product, but with your pricing model, like that doesn't really work for us, like we need to do a ton of geocoding Is there any way you can give us something that's like, that's higher volume. And what we ended up doing was like, you know, we can just, we can just allocate one server to you. And then you're going to get your own instance of the platform, and we manage it for you. But your API key, rather than talking to the public cluster, is just only going to talk to that server. And then you're just responsible for basically not DDOSing yourself, you know, using DDoS in a very broad term here, but basically not, you know, not overwhelming the server. And so your limit is the capability of the hardware. So we introduced that unlimited plan. And I and we set it at 750 a month. And I think we set it there because at the time, one of our major competitors enterprise plan was $10,000 a year for I think 100,000 a day. So you're still getting a lot more, but they had a much better quality product. And so we wanted to price it below it. Because again, I think we didn't have very much confidence in the beginning in terms of what also was somewhat realistic that our product was really not very good. And so we wanted to price it accordingly. It's much better now. So, so once we introduced that we you know, we learned how much companies love flat pricing, like they just they larger companies really don't like variability and pricing. And that was a huge, huge engine of our growth was introducing that plan. But that price stayed at 750 a month, for a long time, even when our competitors were charging much more for it. And we actually had customers say like you guys should really charge more because it makes you seem not as legitimate that it's so cheap. Like it seems suspicious. And we're like that's really weird. And then we had other people say it too, and we're like, I guess maybe we should figure out raising prices. But something it was really important to us was those customers who've been with us for a long time. We wanted to make sure that they were Still getting the best price for it. And I think that really comes out of my own experiences, you know, you know, talking about the stripe situation like being on that side myself in the past and having to defend a pricing decision, maybe even when that I didn't make personally but having to be on that side of messaging it like, I saw just how destructive it was for people's belief in a company. And, and their opinion of it and how they're like, you know, I've I've been a subscriber for 20 years, and I'm not getting the best price, the new people coming in the door are like, Whoa, like, What is this, and we got that all the time. And so I really didn't want to replicate that experience. And so we decided was that people would, we're gonna raise the price to $1,000 a month. And, but people who had an active subscription, they could keep the 750 price as long as they had an active subscriber subscription. So that meant that if anybody who was currently an unlimited subscriber as of November of 2019, was this 2018, I think was 2019. We did this feels like forever ago now. So they would keep that price as long as they had an active subscription. But talking about like cadence, like, sometimes we have people who are, for example, academic researchers, who like need to do one really big batch once a year. And so they'll just use it for one month and then cancel, they would pay the higher price because it wasn't a continuous subscription. And that's also really why like framing it as a loyalty discount, because we're rewarding them for seeing with us. And if they stay with us, then then they will continue to get the best price. But nobody, you know, nobody who comes in new is going to get that price. And I think it's just really important, psychologically to reward that, because when people see that new customers are getting a better price. And then for a product they've used for a long time. People get really upset, they get justifiably upset. But it's it's a tough thing to message. Absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler 17:16
So are you guys gonna move off of Stripe, what's your take on the whole situation for your business?

Michele Hansen 17:22
We had a conversation about it this morning. Um, I think the thing to weigh there is it's not just the extra money that we would be paying Stripe for this. There's also the opportunity cost involved. And as a two person company, our time is our most valuable asset. And to spend three weeks now migrating over to a new payment platform or simply migrating off of the subscriptions API and handling more of that in house, there's all that time upfront plus there is all the time on an ongoing basis, um, to to manage all those things that stripe is managing. So I think we're thinking about it, there also seems to be if you get to a certain volume, that stripe will negotiate with you on on the rates so I'm kind of unclear on what those levels are and whether they will actually negotiate with you. I'm not totally where I stand on it right now. Though, that is a very strange way of thinking about it. But this is my own personal mental accounting when there's a product that I pay a lot of money for and I actually like like the product or I recognize that there's this lock in there right because this is like you know the amount of time to switch to a new payment provider creates substantial moat for stripe and that's it that's a barrier to entry for you know switching off of some switching costs. That's the word I'm looking for. So I'm I sort of I comfort myself by buying their stock. So unfortunately stripe is not public yet. And neither is intercom those are probably the two companies were the most locked in with it wouldn't be the most hassle to switch off of them. They're not public yet but I will buy their stock when they're public. But it's kind of thing like you know Progressive Insurance for example, like you know, we buy Progressive Insurance and I also own their stocks I'm like you know what I feel like I'm like whenever I get a dividend notification I'm like I'm getting a little bit of my money back It's so weird. It doesn't make sense and and my friends who are into the psychology of finance will find that hilarious but that but that's how kind of how I think about things like even actually today I was looking at I was doing some analytics on payments. So I was trying to map out the path to becoming an unlimited customer and like you know how long are people pay as you go customers are most people pay as you go customers first or they jump right to it like just sort of figuring some of those things out. And, and I was also emailing people who should switch to unlimited because they will save money. And it turned out that one of those companies on the list was like a law firm that exclusively works with Virginia, local governments to make sure they're capturing all of their revenue. And I was like, This is hilarious, because I've been going back and forth with our local Virginia government on taxes, and it's like, okay, you know, and I pay them a lot in taxes every year. And I'm like, I'm getting a little bit of that money back, because this person is a vendor to them is paying us and it's this beautiful cycle of the economy, right? where, you know, money is kinetic and wants to be moving. And money moving is a beautiful thing. So, so that's kind of how I think about it. That's, I think that's where I will end up going with this. But it remains to be seen on Hacker News, it did seem like they were willing to negotiate with some people and at least extend the free nature of the subscriptions API until the end of 2021. So I think we will, we will reach out to them about that. Because I mean, it is a great product. Like it's a it's a really, really good product. And as someone who personally dealt with managing your own merchant account, and dealing with the banks, and and all that stuff at an old job, like that was such a headache. And stripe takes a lot of that away. And if you know, our most valuable asset is our time, stripe does give us a lot of our time back. And maybe I just have to suck it up that they are pricing for it after I mean, Patrick Mackenzie's whole thing is charged more in the works for them. So I can't really blame them. Yeah, I think that the communication on it is a you know, so some people say, you know, act as if your actions could end up on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow, or, you know, act as if they could be blowing up on Twitter or on Hacker News. I think that's the modern version of that.

Colleen Schnettler 22:12
To me, it seems like the real problem here is that it used to be free. And we we being the people who use it, were under the impression it was always going to get rolled up in the entire in the price. And that has changed. I mean, I think it's a great product, but I literally put someone on the subscriptions API three months ago. So that is frustrating.

Michele Hansen 22:34
Yeah, and then there's a whole thing about it was free, or you know, you were you were paying through through the other fees already paying stripe. And now it's something else on top of that, like, so when we launched our Geocodio Maps product. And I think this was 2018 or 2019. And we like we already had a free sort of like basic preview map that we generated for people for a long time. And then we made this more more advanced mapping platform that's sort of like you could call it like Tableau-light, specifically focused on maps. And we went back and forth quite a bit on how do we price this, how do we integrate it with the product, like, we really didn't want to take away that thing that was free for people. Because we didn't want them to exactly have that feeling of Wow, this used to be free, and now you're charging me for it, but it hasn't changed and, or even if it has like, I only wanted the basic thing like that was fine for me. Like we really wanted to respect that some people only needed the basic map. And people who wanted something more advanced could go somewhere else and pay for that. Now that's created all sorts of other headaches for us about integration of the products, and we'll probably be integrating it more into the product in the future. But still keeping some amount of free because I think once you release something, especially if it's free, it's really hard to claw that back. Which is why you know, we were talking about this last week or two weeks ago, you're talking about what your your free tier would be, and all that kind of stuff like that is a really, really important thing to get right in the beginning. Are you doing are you doing free tier are you doing free trial? Like what are those? What are those amounts? And also, what are you getting out of that right? Like basically what you get out of a free tier is not having to do as much marketing and sales as you would if you had to pitch everybody upfront before they can use the product. But being very deliberate about what those free tiers are because as as we're seeing with stripe if you make something free, and then you charge for the exact same thing later, or you charge for it plus a whole bunch of other people, features that people don't need. People are going to get upset? Yeah, rightfully so I think.

So you mentioned that you kind of have thought a little bit about pricing, but not enough to really talk about it. So let's talk about.

Colleen Schnettler 25:13
Okay. So I looked at a few players in this space, the ones I'm familiar with are upload care and cloudinary. cloudinary is one I've actually used before. And it's very popular in the rails community, they have a pretty generous free tier. So their free tier, you get 25 monthly credits, and a monthly credit is described as 25,000 transformations, or 25 gigs of storage, or 25 gigs of net viewing bandwidth. And I assume you can mix and match these three aspects of their service in any way you want to hit that 25 k number. That being said, it's really hard to know if you're going to go over that number or not. I mean, that is pretty confusing. If you look at that, like how are you supposed to have an idea of if you're going to exceed that with transformations? If you're allowing your users to do transformations and different file sizes? I'm not sure.

Michele Hansen 26:15
A combination of the How do you like Do they have examples. It's like your user uploads an image and then they decide to rotate it and and change the colors and inverted and everything.

Colleen Schnettler 26:28
They might, it's kind of hard to tell from this pricing page. And as I mentioned, at the top of the episode, I didn't really do my homework on this yet. So it might be somewhere in this documentation. But at first glance, it is challenging to see exactly how that's all gonna stack up when you actually put it in your application.

Michele Hansen 26:49
Like, do you know what your customers are actually paying for this like, like when you as a developer have built a website for people, you've said that you've used some of these services? Do you know what they're actually paying?

Colleen Schnettler 27:02
I don't, because I have used the free tier of cloud Neri but for file heavy applications. And I have worked there's one company in particular, and we were really file heavy, heavy. We rolled it ourselves. So our costs were the developer time to set up the system, the upload system, and then the cost of storage in AWS and then the cost of, you know, egress bandwidth, those kinds of things as users use the service.

Michele Hansen 27:35
So it sounds like what you're competing with, then is the developers time to build something themselves plus whatever they would be paying s3 for the storage.

Colleen Schnettler 27:48
Yeah, I think that's reasonable. And I think that's a more realistic comparison to comparing them to these big players like the upload care or the cloudinary. Because I don't provide any of those extra services like the transformations in the AI and the filtering. So yes, I think it is more accurate to describe it as the developers time. And whatever the you know, current storage and CDN fees they're paying right now,

Michele Hansen 28:17
it is important to note that competitors can be as much companies as they can be processes. And, you know, a competitor can be the amount of time someone would take to do something themselves. So that talking about that pain reminds me of our ongoing segment here, which is calling read story brand. Yeah. And so talking about the pain the user faces and the problem they're going through, makes me curious for what you read and StoryBrand. This week, and how it relates to your nascent business.

Colleen Schnettler 28:57
Yeah, so this week, I read the chapter on guides. And so the author of this book talks a lot about how everyone is the hero in their own story, a lot of brands come in, and they position themselves as the hero, they're going to solve all your problems. But that's not what you should do. You as a brand should position yourself as the guide. So your customer is the hero, you are the guide, and you are showing them the way that's going to lead them to a solution. So the author talks about two characteristics of a guide. One is empathy, and the second is authority. And he says that three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard and understood, which pretty much also sounds applicable to parenting and life. I think that's pretty reasonable. Right? So we talked a little he talks a little bit about empathy. Let's start with empathy, because that's the first thing you have to do. So how do you show empathy? Again, is this a course on business or a course on life? I don't know. Anyway, a few examples he gives an empathetic statements are we understand how it feels to, nobody should have to experience like you we are frustrated by. So first step is establishing empathy for me specifically for my brand, I think frustration might be one, like you, I am frustrated by having to do this annoying process over and over and over or like you, I am frustrated that this is just such a pain. And then he talks about authority. And he distinguishes between authority and competence. Because you don't want to come off as a braggart, you don't want to come off as a no at all. I don't want to position myself as well, you used your root API keys, that was stupid, you know, I don't want to position myself as a jerk, like, I want to position myself as competent, empathetic and competent. So you'd want just the right amount of authority, not so much that your customer feels belittled. So he gave four examples of how you could you could do this. One is testimonials. Two is statistics. And who doesn't love statistics?

Michele Hansen 31:09
Most people, but go on...

Colleen Schnettler 31:11
three awards, and four is logos of companies that have worked with you.

Michele Hansen 31:16
Yeah, like I mean, numbers are very convincing. Unless they're too good, though. Like, like our NPS score is stupidly high. Like, it's somewhere in the 90s. And at one point, we had it on our website. And people were like, I don't think that's real, like, Where is that and I can make sure we get like an NPS site that like people that actually like feeds it, and like it says it's clear. And then we're like, we'll just, we'll just take this statistic off, instead, do logos and testimonials.

Colleen Schnettler 31:47
So when the author talks about positioning yourself as a guide, he talks about the first impressions, both with people and with businesses. And he says, a great first impression is made by doing two things, the first thing someone is going to do when they meet you, or when they interface with your business is can I trust this person? or business? And can I respect this person or business? So the empathy we're showing early on in this process, leads to trust. And so our goal as a company is my goal as a company, I guess, is to guide the customer or the hero to the solution. So I am not the hero, I am the guide.

Michele Hansen 32:33
Yeah, your business is Mr. Miyagi. And your customers, The Karate Kid. It's already reading that book. Like after reading that book. I was like, Oh, my gosh, I'm seeing this whole, this guide, Hero motif everywhere.

Colleen Schnettler 32:49
Yes, I'm seeing it in movies. I'm seeing it in successful businesses. I'm seeing it everywhere. So something else I wanted to talk to you about is my software product, which has finally reached beta status and Heroku, which is really exciting, because now it's available on the general Heroku marketplace. But it's kind of sad, because it is not available for sale, the way it works is I have to get 100 users 100 before I can actually try and charge for it. So that is like a great milestone that I'm excited about. But what I want to talk about is what I should do now. And I'm going to give you a multiple choice test. Okay, so what should I do next, a more tech stuff. I want to build more stuff. There's another feature I want for myself that I want to build me make it available as a standalone product, like on its own website and its own world. See do marketing on Heroku. So focus on my Heroku marketing page d a lot of choices sorry, D make available on another marketplace like a CloudFlare or II II, II make a marketing website.

Michele Hansen 34:07
So I think those options were a focus on Heroku be focus on non Heroku plot like D platforming it entirely. Option C was further integrating with Heroku like something about Heroku right, and option D was putting it on cloud flares platform. And then option he was building a marketing website. Did I get that right?

Colleen Schnettler 34:38
Yeah, that's pretty close.

Michele Hansen 34:40
Okay, so stop building at this point. So I think like, at least at this point, you're focusing on you're focusing on distribution and marketing, which is really good.

Colleen Schnettler 34:50
I knew you were gonna say that.

Michele Hansen 34:53
Colleen, you need to do some selling first.

Colleen Schnettler 34:55
I know you're gonna say that.

Michele Hansen 34:57
Right and You know that this whole thing about Heroku not being able to charge for it until you have 100 customers, I think that could be dangerous for you, because it allows you to punt on pricing. So just to challenge you, I'm gonna say option B, or the C or D, whichever CloudFlare, right? Like, depending on how important you think channels are, like those channels are going to be for your distribution, like, do you think you can have your own distribution? Or do you need to rely on a marketplace, selling it somewhere else, which will force you to develop pricing, also to like, get people paying for it, which is both the most financially rewarding part about it and super motivating, which will encourage you to keep working on it. But I think it's time to step away from Heroku for a little bit and try to actually go out and sell the damn thing.

Colleen Schnettler 35:58
And I know that just because someone uses a free product does not mean they're going to pay for it. So is anyone actually going to pay for it?

Michele Hansen 36:05
Exactly. And you need to figure that out now before you spend more time on the tech.

Colleen Schnettler 36:12
Yeah, I think that is excellent advice. And you're absolutely right, because I've kind of been in this perpetual state of not being able to charge for it. I've really haven't had to sort out any of these issues like we'll be we'll pay for it. How do I find people all the normal issues when you're trying to sell a product? So all right, that's my goal. That's what I'm going to work on. And that's going to wrap up today's episode of the software social podcast. You can reach us on Twitter, at @softwaresocpod. Thank you for listening. Send me all your good vibes.

View Details

Michele Hansen 0:01
Can I ask you an honest question?

Colleen Schnettler 0:03
Of course, I love honest questions.

Michele Hansen 0:05
Did you actually get any work done this week?

Colleen Schnettler 0:09
Oh, my goodness. So it has been very challenging. For me to focus this week, I've really struggled with it. How about you?

Michele Hansen 0:19
Between, you know, all of the checking Twitter and phone banking and everything else that has consumed this week. I have gotten some things done, though. Weirdly enough, things that require deep thinking and are complicated and less so tasks, which is really surprising because for me, as an ADD person, I tend to find that it's easier for me to churn out tasks when I'm having trouble focusing rather than thinking through something complicated, but instead, my brain is doing the opposite. And everything is just crazy this week.

Colleen Schnettler 1:01
Yeah, I have found that I did better this week, like a deep work as well. I mean, I ended up working almost every night this week. And it was partially because I felt like it, but I think a lot of that too, was just like to give me something to focus on, so I didn't have to worry about everything else going on.

Michele Hansen 1:21
I admit I've been spending more time on hobbies this week too. On Tuesday afternoon, I ended up spending a couple of hours sewing masks with my daughter because I just I couldn't be anywhere near a computer. Like I knew that if I was at my computer, ostensively replying to emails and everything else I would be looking at the news constantly.

But so that thinking I did do, is was working through this big, complicated thing that we're dealing with right now that some listeners have asked us about, which is this whole moving to Denmark thing.

Colleen Schnettler 1:56
That's big. Yeah, it's a big deal.

Michele Hansen 1:58
Yes. And a big deal of that is how it relates to the business, both how it relates to our US business, and then setting up a business here. So one of the big things to figure out is like, obviously, our business address needs to change, right. So before it was our house, it can't be our house anymore. So one of the tools we're going to use, which seems like a lot of people who are running remote companies who are US citizens, but outside the country, or even non US citizens running from outside the country, a tool called Earth Class Mail, which I hadn't heard of until six months ago and has been so awesome. And you basically just get a mailbox, you can send things to. Some of them are PO boxes, some of them look more like a real address, you know, like a suite number instead. But the big thing we're trying to figure out, which relates to the mail, too, is our incorporation in the US and whether we have to change that.

Colleen Schnettler 3:00
Yeah, this seems like a really complicated topic. So your mail, your Earth Mail, is that a PO box in Denmark that you physically access? Or is it just like a fake address to use on business documents?

Michele Hansen 3:12
So it's a virtual address that we use to receive mail both personally and business in the US. So we're having...

Colleen Schnettler 3:20
But where does the actual mail go? Where does the physical mail do it?

Michele Hansen 3:24
So it goes to a PO box in DC, and then it actually gets shipped to Earth Class Mail's facility in Beaverton, Oregon, and then they scan it. So we basically get all of our mail as email. So whenever someone sends us a letter, or even like, we can even deposit checks like that, like it'll scan the contents of an envelope and tell us when there's a check in it. And then we can deposit it. And it you know, I mean, it takes like a week or two, but it's like, other than that, what would we do? So currently, that's going to DC, but our business is registered in Virginia. And so what I've been trying to figure out is do we need to stay incorporated in Virginia? Or do we need to go through the process of dissolving our Virginia Corporation and then reincorporating in another state that is more friendly for remote businesses?

Colleen Schnettler 4:19
Okay, first question, do you have to be incorporated in the United States at all?

Michele Hansen 4:24
Yeah, I think for a lot of the services we use, like in our insurance and everything else, like it makes sense to probably -- what we're going to do is have a US company, and then just have a Danish subsidiary, but basically only for payroll purposes. That is at least according to our Danish accountants, though, our conversations with them have been somewhat delayed because our accountant and her entire family got COVID.

Colleen Schnettler 4:45
Oh!

Michele Hansen 4:46
She's doing better now. Thank God. Yeah, it's been. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't hear from her for a couple of weeks. And we're like, why? And then, oh, my gosh, and we felt like absolutely terrible for wondering why she hadn't followed up with us.

Colleen Schnettler 5:00
So my first question not knowing a lot about taxes or business and corporations, why wouldn't you incorporate in a state like Florida that doesn't have state taxes? So that's income tax, isn't it?

Michele Hansen 5:10
Yeah. So that's, that's personal income tax. I mean, so so this, this decision matters. What you decide to do is different based on your situation, because we're in Denmark, and we're going to be end up paying so much in taxes here that we're not going to have any US tax liability, it doesn't really matter a lot, we still have to file taxes, but you know, that the tax rate here is, you know, starts at 42%, basically. So, um, so actually was the way I looked into this, right. So, so in Virginia...Virginia has two really annoying taxes for businesses. So the first one is the business tangible property tax, where they will tax every piece of equipment that you use for the business. For us, that meant desk chairs, and desks and computers and everything else, and you have to pay sales tax on those every year. However, we won't have any physical presence in Virginia. So that won't be a problem. The other one we've been trying to figure out is, do we have to pay the what is called the B Paul tax or the business professional, an occupational licensing tax, which was instituted to pay for the war of 1812. And is still here?

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
Yes, yeah. It's actually it's really funny. Like, looking into the into all of the rules for that tax. It lists out all the possible Aki occupations. And town crier is listed as one of the possible occupations. Wow, he just says a lot. And the most grating thing about that tax is that it's a gross receipts tax, which means it's based on total revenue, so you don't get to deduct your expenses from it. Now, of course, the tax rate is very low as because it's such a broad tax. But this is also why economists hate this tax. Because it's so broad and was supposed to be for a war 200 years ago, and it's just stuck around magically. Trying to figure out if we would still be liable for this, if we're incorporated in Virginia. Seems like maybe not. But just in case, I've been kind of running down some rabbit holes of, to your question, should we change our state of incorporation, which is a process.

And so I consulted a couple of different places for this. And one that I found kind of helpful, is the service called First Base. And I guess before I talk about it, I should disclose that they are part of the Ernest capital portfolio, which is we are investors in it. And that's really the only way I know about them. But basically, they help people abroad set up companies in the US and they have this helpful little tool that you don't even have to sign up for that you figure out like, which state does it make sense for you to sign up to establish your business. And the two they recommend is either Delaware if you are planning to raise money and issue stock, and if not, Wyoming, for ease of doing business low, you know, low overhead, low fees, can do things online. Stripe also has a service that does this to Stripe Atlas, I believe they only incorporate you in Delaware. And I guess I should also disclose that Stripe owns Indie Hackers, and we're now part of the Indie Hackers, hackers Podcast Network. So lots of disclosures there. If you're still with me, congratulations. So, um, so yeah, so I've kind of been looking into that, um, it seems like maybe we won't be liable for that War of 1812 tax in Virginia, if we don't have a physical presence in Virginia. But I want to make sure that we don't have to, you know, file some paperwork every year saying that we're not liable for it. Or the other thing is with Earth Class Mail, they don't have an address in Arlington, where we are incorporated. They only have an address in Norfolk. So do we have to change to Norfolk? Like I have to... I don't I don't I don't really know. And the thing is, is when you Google anything about this, and then you add the word remote to it, any Virginia government website it it's just stuff comes up about remote learning, and it's not like they're, you know, this is kind of the thing like with so many things about being a bootstrapped company, like we're so weird in so many ways, like, like we defy a lot of the conventional ways of doing business, right. Like we don't have a ton of assets. We don't really have employees, we don't really issue stock like we don't raise money, like we do all of this stuff that businesses are started tend to do and governments tend to assume that businesses do. We don't do any of that. And now we're also running it from abroad, but it's the same company. And so I need to figure out that. Yeah, and so for some reason, this is what my brain has been like, this is a more pleasant thing to think about than the election.

Colleen Schnettler 10:21
I don't know, Michelle, this whole conversation makes me want to take a nap. And not cuz I don't love you. But like, because it sounds so horribly boring and painful, like to sort this out.

Michele Hansen 10:31
But it is less painful than biting my nails about the election.

Colleen Schnettler 10:37
So that's true. That's true. You've been able to channel your energy into something productive. That's good.

Michele Hansen 10:42
Yeah. And that just the weird thing about it is there's not doesn't seem like there's a ton of resources out there on converting from a work from home remote within the country business to a remote from out of the country business. I haven't really found any good resources on that. So I mean, if our listeners happen to know any, I would love to. I would love to see them. Because it seems like most remote companies outside of the US are established outside of the US from the get go, rather than transitioning. Yeah, it's kind of a weird thing.

Colleen Schnettler 11:22
Yeah, it's funny, because one of the things you said is the way your business is structured is so different than the way the government assumes businesses are structured. But the way your business is structured makes perfect sense. You actually make money instead of just take other people's money, right? You don't raise funding, you are two people who are married, who sell a service and product that people buy, like, it feels so simple. You have like a basic business model. And our system is not set up in any way to support that. It's just blows my mind.

Michele Hansen 11:52
I hope maybe in 10 years, someone will listen to this and say, Wow, can you believe that businesses, you know, had to deal with that and governments were so behind on the whole, you know, remote work and and bootstrapped companies angle.

Colleen Schnettler 12:08
I've been thinking a lot about your future, Michele. And I feel like we're gonna be referencing this podcast when you run for Congress. And like ten years.

Michele Hansen 12:15
I don't think I can run for Congress now that I've moved abroad. I think they'd be like nahh, she's not loyal enough.

Colleen Schnettler 12:21
Yeah.

Michele Hansen 12:23
They'll call me a socialist for being in Denmark.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, they would. Yeah, yes.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. Um, enough about politics. So are you out of are you into beta yet? Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 12:37
So for those just catching up, I am releasing my first software product, and I am releasing it in the Heroku marketplace. So I did a lot of work this past week, unfortunately, I am not out of so in the Heroku marketplace, you first are an alpha, and then you progress to beta. And once you're in beta, you can get up to 100 users. I am unfortunately not in beta not from anything I have done wrong, just because they have taken for forever to review my documents. So they Heroku has to come in and review the documents and approve the documents before you're in the add on marketplace. So unfortunately, that has not been done yet. But I have reached out to them. And they promised me you know, promised, but they assured me they were going to get right on it. And it should be done relatively quickly. But it hasn't been bad. Because with some of my first, I have 10 initial users. And I've been working through some things with some of my initial users.

So I actually got a lot of work like, like big changes kind of architecture changes done this week. And as we've talked about before, I don't want to over architect something that maybe no one is going to want. But it is something I want, so it needs to meet certain standards. And so what I actually did this week is I worked on splitting up the domains for security. So before I was serving files from the same domain, as my application was on so now I have a completely different domain to serve the files from. So that is going to help with security possible security issues. And I kind of rearchitected the file storage. So I think two weeks ago, we talked about how I was thinking of moving to lower cost storage. And at the time, I was unsure if it was worth the pain to move but you and I talked about it. And as you know this will be a commodity it yeah can win on price. So I moved to a lower cost storage provider, which also enabled me to use a third, a different storage provider for backup. So now when you upload a file, it goes to this primary storage provider, which is cheaper than AWS and it backs up on a different a completely different storage provider in the background. So I feel better, I feel good about good about it, like I feel good about it. Because now, you know, I have your file, I have a backup of your file, I'm serving your file from a new domain, I got, you know, serving your file through a new CDN from a different domain. So I feel like architecturally wise, I feel solid with what I have. So I'm happy about that. So yeah, so it's been a lot of work on on kind of sorting that out this week. And a lot of little things, too, that I'm just kind of trying to like, kind of knock out as I have time, like, for example, now, something I've really been concerned about is whether I should actually delete your stuff or not. Because if you're my customer, and you say, I don't want to use you anymore, if I delete those files, they are gone forever. So I now have, you know, at least an email that I send you. So when you delete the add on, it'll say, Hey, don't do if you do this, it will delete your files forever. And then I, you know, I haven't set up to send you an email to say, Hey, I'm going to delete your files forever, in seven days, contact me, if you don't want me to do that, just so just things like that make me feel a little more comfortable, as I scale up the number of people that are going to be using it.

Michele Hansen 16:13
A couple weeks ago, you had talked about how you were talking to someone who was using the service? And...

Colleen Schnettler
Yes

Michele Hansen
They were saying how they liked it for images. But they're also excited about it for PDFs. And I'm curious if you also played with the idea of expanding to other file types?

Colleen Schnettler 16:35
Yes. So I really, I'm really starting to think this is my win space, because as we've talked about, like, there are really good providers out there for images. And those image providers do all kinds of other fun stuff for you, they'll resize they automatically downgrade this size, they'll they'll let you pick the ratio, you know, I don't do any of that, like that's not really the space I want to compete in, at least not now. So yes, a big reason I wanted to move to this lower cost storage provider was because I'm going to open it up to other kinds of files. And I think those files tend to be bigger. And so I think that's why I think the lower cost storage with a higher limit. So I don't know, I guess next week, we're gonna have to like sort out what plan sizes I'm going to use. Because hopefully by next week, I'll be in beta. But I don't know what that size is going to be. But like, for example, you know, maybe your competitor, lets maybe the competitor lets you upload a five MG file, well, I can let you upload like 100 meg file if I want. So that's kind of kind of something that's been in my mind, too, is allowing like bigger file sizes, so they can use other kinds of files.

Michele Hansen 17:45
So it sounds like you've started a little bit to think about pricing and what you're going to charge for this.

Colleen Schnettler 17:54
Yeah, a little bit. I really, I really, that is definitely something I need, we need to we need to sort out because, you know, Heroku requires you to get 100 users, which is a lot of users, before you can charge for it. But as you and I have talked about previously, I'm not going to wait on that, like, I'm going to continue to try and get it ready for you know, the open world, if you will, to allow other people to use it. So my thought was all of these file upload services have a free tier. So my my thought in terms of in terms of trying to figure out pricing would be the first thing would be figure out what they're doing, they're being competitors, for their free tier, and exceed that, I guess, and then sort out the pricing from there.

Michele Hansen 18:45
I don't think you necessarily need to be more generous on your free tear than the competitors. I'm curious like, like, if I was doing this, I would make a spreadsheet of all of their different pricing. And I would write down like what is their, you know, the company, what is their free tier? You know, what are the different features they have? Like, how do they do their pricing? Is it is it free tier? And then metered? Or is it free tier then bands like so for example, you know, say, you know, so and so for $10 a month and then double that for $15 a month or like or is it pays you go? Or is it does it jump to subscription only, um, I would just see what everybody else is doing. But when it comes to features, I wouldn't say you necessarily need to exceed it.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
You know, when we launched Geocodio, we set our free tier at 2500 free per day because that's what Google's was. And now there's is like 40,000 per month. So it's so, so we didn't purposely exceed that because really the help for us was being able to to pay on a pays you go basis. But I would also be curious to know, like people who are using those services like, are they also happy with that pricing model as well?

Colleen Schnettler 20:08
Yeah, because I think one of the things I've noticed, and as a user of some of these services, at least the image services, there's like a, you get a certain number of credits. And then each request you send to their back end is a credit. But it's very confusing, because for example, to upload a file is so many credits, but then if you're going to resize a file, like that, or if you want to run a, you know, a filter on a file, because all that hits their API, so they charge you these, it's really hard to figure out in my opinion, so they charge you like these credit this, like weird credit based system. So one of the things since I'm not offering any of this resizing, filtering stuff, like one of the other ways I want to compete is just simplicity, I think like it's going to be, you know, we're not going to have to guess how much it's going to cost, you're going to know how much it's going to cost every month.

Michele Hansen 20:56
And, you know, in a commodity space, competing on pricing, simplicity can really work. Especially if, if some of the competitors are trying to do you know, their pricing with obscurity, basically, and try to make money relying on people not knowing how much they're going to be charged, which I, quite frankly, I think that's pretty, pretty scammy business behavior. And you're above that. And I think people appreciate it when you treat them like adults, and you say, here's what it's gonna cost. And we recognize that the other folks are trying to pull the wool over your eyes, but know exactly where you're gonna be charged. That can be a competitive advantage.

Colleen Schnettler 21:46
Yeah, and so I think that spreadsheet is a great idea. So I think that'll be something I'll work on this week to chat more about, because hopefully, like I said, it'll be in beta next week. And so I'll really be focused on how to get it out there. And what I want to charge,

Michele Hansen 22:02
it might be interesting to simulate with all of their complicated models, like what it would cost with a competitor versus what it would cost like, and then kind of think through what that would cost for you, or how you might charge for that. Because that can also be you're basically writing the bones of your marketing copy saying hey, like, if you've got so so many files, and they get resized, and all these sorts of things, you would be paying x with our competitor or y with other competitor, but you're gonna pay, you know, x minus 25%, or whatever, with us.

Colleen Schnettler 22:38
Yeah, that's a great idea. I will definitely do that.

Speaking of marketing, and marketing copy, I've been working through the Story Brand book, and this week was chapter two. And so chapter two is about finding the villain. And he describes the villain is like, the thing you know, the thing like that's against goes is in your customers way of what they want. And something I really pulled out of this chapter was, companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but customers buy solutions to internal problems. And that really struck me as we're all humans, we all have these like internal problems that motivate us, even though we might verbalize an external problem. And so we talked about step two in this process of clarifying your copy and clarifying your message is deciding what or who is your villain. And so, we talked about what makes a good villain. So one was a villain is the root source. Frustration is not a villain. For example, frustration is what a villain makes us feel villain should be relatable, he said people should immediately recognize it as something they distain villain should be singular, you can only have one. And then of course, villain should be real, like you don't want to fear monger. So I've been thinking about who my villain is, and I really want it to be AWS, but I don't want to call out, right, like AWS, the bane of my existence. Just kidding, you guys are great. Um, so I don't want to like call out AWS specifically. But when I think about my villain, in my in this story, and my customer story, I really think it's like a cloud storage provider, because they're hard to use. Their pricing is confused, confusing. Just like they're hard to use. There's so many ways you can screw up in terms of like permissions and and file sharing and object habit 10 excuse me, and object tagging that I feel like they're a good villain.

Michele Hansen 24:54
And you're the villain creates something that people are willing to pay for, which is the villain causes people to spend all of this time and mental energy on something and people want to have that time back. And so by reminding people of the villain, you can remind them what they would rather have, which is not having to deal with all of these super complicated things and go through the gymnastics of somebody else's pricing to figure out what they're going to be charged for something and how to set it up.

Colleen Schnettler 25:30
Yeah. Agree. So one of the things he talks about in the book is how people have three levels of problems. And the reason a lot of companies aren't successful is because companies focus on only one level, they focus on the external problem. So the external problem is the obvious problem you're trying to solve. But people also buy things to solve external problems, internal problems, and philosophical problems. So I have tried to take that and put that into what I'm building. So for me, the external, this is what I'm thinking, at least the external problem people are facing is they need a way to allow their users to upload files, save those files and serve them quickly. The internal problem is people feel intimidated by setting up drop zones, file, drop cloud storage, they want a simpler interface. And there's so many choices when you're trying to set this up. It makes them feel insecure. So the internal problem is they actually feel insecure, or imposter syndrome in their ability to be a good developer. And philosophical problem is you shouldn't have to be a DevOps engineer, to set up file uploads.

Michele Hansen 26:39
I like it. I can tell you spend a lot of time working on that.

Colleen Schnettler 26:41
I did, I was real proud of myself. Because I always struggled to work on this kind of stuff. Because as we've talked about a lot, like as a developer, I just want to keep tweaking the code and keep writing tests and just keep coding. So I'm really, really trying to take the time to work through this book and to like, get ideas and hopefully start implementing them. Because there's no point in having a product if no one's going to buy it.

Michele Hansen 27:06
I will encourage you to think a little bit more on that second, the internal problem, yeah, really honed in on the developer who is somewhat new to this. And I think that user is there. It strikes me that your motivation for creating this product. You are not creating it because you were a novice developer who couldn't figure these things out, you're creating it because you are an extremely experienced developer who's having to do the same problem over and over again, and you were frustrated about the amount of time you were spending on a repetitive task when you felt like your time was more valuable, or it could be used in more valuable ways. And so I would encourage you to think more about that type of user as well. I mean, you may have multiple types of problems that you're solving for people.

Colleen Schnettler 28:03
Yeah, that that is absolutely an excellent point. And I didn't occur to me, but you're right. The reason I'm building it is because I'm sick of setting it up over and over and over and over. Yeah, so that is definitely I guess, my internal problem, there would be frustration, like frustration and loss of time and just annoyance, like it's not fun to do slightly different. But the same thing for every client.

Michele Hansen 28:29
I mean, that's kind of similar to what we do, right? Like our tagline. And this could definitely be improved, is hassle free geocoding, right, like, in a way that you talk about AWS sort of B or major cloud providers being the villain. With how complicated it is, I think we're kind of in a similar space where the terms of service and pricing and usage restrictions, and just general usability of our competitors is such a hassle for people, that we don't necessarily call out the villain directly. But I think we absolutely are speaking to that internal problem that people are tired of the hassle of dealing with other options. I don't know if we really hit it a philosophical problem, though. I'll have to think about that one. I guess sometimes we do, like it, you know, you shouldn't have have to have a GIS degree to figure out geocoding. Other companies are making this overly complicated. It doesn't have to be so complicated and you just want to get the data and get on with your life.

Colleen Schnettler 29:36
Yeah, like it.

Michele Hansen 29:37
That wraps up this week's Software Social. We'd love to hear what you think! You can tweet at us at @softwaresocpod!

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Michele Hansen 0:00
So last week, Colleen, you said something to me that really seemed to resonate and jump out at a lot of our listeners. And that was that you aspire to have a business that is in the position that our business is in, but that you don't want our lifestyle.

Colleen Schnettler 0:23
Yeah, so I felt a little bit like a jerk when I was editing the podcast. And I heard myself say that, and I almost cut it out. But it's true. And I'd love to discuss some of that with you. Because kind of my vision is what I want as a solo founder is pretty specific. And you guys seem to be in a whole different place than what I envision my success looking like.

Michele Hansen 0:49
Yeah, and I would love to talk about that. And I'm so glad you didn't cut it out, because it was echoing in my head all weekend. And I really appreciated your honesty about that.

Colleen Schnettler 1:02
Okay, if you say so. Still feel mean!

Michele Hansen 1:06
I appreciated it. And it really seems to resonate with a lot of people listening to that. The fit of founder and business and lifestyle is so important. And I think you this is something that is worth diving into, because it's not just about the founder and the business fit, having the expertise and the sort of know how and you know, environmental knowledge and whatnot to make a business happen. It's also about having a business that fits the kind of lifestyle that you have, or that you want. And you know, Lord knows I hate the term lifestyle business. Right. But that is one of the things about this is you basically get to choose in a way, what kind of life you're going to have. And I think that applies even if you have a corporate job, right? Like, do you want a lifestyle where you are flying to a client site four days a week and barely see your kids? Like, that's a lifestyle, that's a lifestyle choice. Do you want a business where you're home, but you are maybe managing email over dinner, which you may do as a solo founder, or you may do working in a corporate job somewhere. I think this is really worth diving into and the fact that like my business, and then the way we run our business may not be something that you want. And in an environment where we're conditioned to look at other people. And there's this expectation that if people are successful, everyone wants to emulate what they do. That's not always the case. And we need to leave way more space as a culture and as a group of people that one person's success is not somebody else's success, and may even from a certain perspective look like failure because of compromises they're making in order to get to that success.

Colleen Schnettler 3:20
Sure. So my first question for you is, I feel like Geocodio kind of built up around your family. And it seems like, you know, you guys got on a trajectory where things moved pretty quickly. After you got a foothold in the market. What do YOU want? Like if you could go back and and think about how you would design your business that fit into your life that provided you the opportunities you you want, like, what would that look like for you?

Michele Hansen 3:53
That's a really interesting question. I've never thought about that. I think partly because, you know, I wonder if we had changed something, maybe things wouldn't have worked out as they did. Like, there's certainly things along the way that were difficult. But I don't know if, if I would choose to not do those things or do things differently. I will say that we -- Yeah, we it has grown up around our family. You know, we launched the business when our daughter was four months old. A big reason why we even got started launching our side projects in the first place is because we had the bejesus scared out of us looking at the cost of daycare. I mean, it's more expensive than college in a majority of states. And you know, being pregnant and realizing that got us us supposed to be like, we can't be spending our weekends watching Game of Thrones anymore like we got to start launching stuff because...

Colleen
Yeah

Michele Hansen 4:45
this is this is you know, we're gonna be pretty close to paycheck to paycheck without something else happening, you know, and, and I remember just like us talking to each other and being like, we can kill it at work, but we're Still not going to get the kind of raises we would need in order to comfortably afford, you know, $20-25,000 a year in daycare alone, plus all the other expenses that go with having a child. Like, it's like we knew it would be expensive, but what can we just, you know, until we started researching it, like, we just didn't have a concept for how bad it would be. And, and you know, that first year, like, I don't even know how much we made, but I think it was barely enough so that we didn't get charged a maintenance fee on our business bank account. So not very much. So we see we wasn't at the point where we're really making that, you know, quote, unquote, like, daycare level amount of money for a while. Um, yeah, our family absolutely grew up around it.

And I think I probably would have given myself more permission to not feel like things had to be handled immediately. In terms of like customer support, things like that were happening at night or dinnertime. But at the same time, for every time that there was something blowing up on Intercom that we need to deal with during dinner, there was something blowing up on Slack at our regular day jobs that was also getting in the way of family life. I don't think our business has gotten in the way of family life more than a, quote unquote, full time job would in fact, I think it's much more flexible, because it means we can take time off or you know, snow days aren't as much of a big deal, of course, I mean, lockdown was just awful for everyone. I mean, I guess now we sort of stare it down again. But I feel like I'm rambling.

Colleen Schnettler 6:45
So try this on for size. So you've done that. And now you're in this position where you have said to me privately and on this podcast, like growth is not really a primary motivator, you don't want to be acquired, you don't really care how quickly you're growing. So what do you want now? So you kind of done the hard like trenches work to get you in a comfortable position? Like, are you are you happy with the status quo? Like, do you have ambitions to if it's not to grow to work less? Or what are you thinking now.

Michele Hansen 7:20
So we do have goals, they're just not other people's goals that you would normally hear about, I guess. So I set some goals last year after doing my sort of semi-annual customer analysis from from a high level of our data. So basically, I, I look at all of our customers like a portfolio. And then I evaluate that based on industry and company size. And some other factors, just basically just like an investor would a stock portfolio, and try to see how it's balanced, you know, making sure that we're not getting too much of our revenue from one individual customer, or even from the top 90%, or the top 80% of customers. And so trying to manage for different risks that way, is more how I think about goals. We will have goals based around industry. So for example, this time last year, maybe like last summer, looking at our portfolio of customers, I realized, like 20% of our customers were in real estate. And I felt like that was too much. And so, no, it wasn't purposely going to try to get rid of those customers or anything like that. But instead, I was like, you know, I would like to focus on some industries that are maybe more stable than real estate and try to focus my marketing efforts and sales efforts on industries that are more stable than real estate. So we made a conscious decision to try to focus a little bit more on banking and financial services, and also on health care as well. And so that was a goal we had of getting the percentage of financial services customers up to a higher percentage. But it wasn't it's not a growth, overall revenue growth goal or a user goal. It's the percentage of our revenue and I'm always keeping an eye on things to see. Okay, let's make sure that, you know, no one customer is more than 1% of revenue. That's something that's very important to us that requires growth. Because also very often we have ARPU growth or observe average revenue growth in those, those top 80% customers. But we're not necessarily chasing a number around number of users signing up per day or per year, or credit cards being added to account or even really even the number of high level customers specifically sort of on a user level. It's more on a portfolio level that I have these goals.

Colleen Schnettler 10:02
Sure. Um, can you talk a little bit though about like, your personal goals and how they tie in when we talk about like business founder, lifestyle fit? Like, what do you want?

Michele Hansen 10:17
Did you just ask a question about feelings, and I answered about numbers?

Colleen Schnettler 10:20
Yes, that's exactly what happened. That's all very interesting. But that's definitely not what I asked you.

Michele Hansen 10:28
Our goal is to keep doing what we're doing as long as we can.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay

Michele Hansen
We are happy with the kind of life that we have, we feel very grateful that we run our own business, I don't think it would be a fit for everybody, you know, in terms of lifestyle, like the number one thing I get feedback on about lifestyle, is people saying, "Oh, my gosh, you work with your spouse? How is that even possible? We would kill each other? like, Wait, how is your marriage?" and I'm just so uncomfortable, whenever that happens. And like, I feel like you're projecting a lot of your own marriage on me, and I'm not quite sure how to react to this. Because for us, like, like working together as a dream.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Like, there's no drama, you know, I mentioned like, you know, slack blowing up on at night, like, who hasn't experienced that we have none of that, like, we have none of that, like interpersonal drama going on. And it's awesome. But it's also because, you know, we're a fit together as people, and if we weren't a fit together as people, and that wouldn't work. And I think both of us handling this, like we, you know, we know to trade off and, and sometimes it's, Hey, can you handle this, because, you know, I need to go get our daughter from school, or like, one of us is making dinner and the other one is responding to someone, and we can balance things off of one another in a way that I think a good marriage should be able to have, you know, can you feed the baby now, because I need to go do this other thing, like, there's always that give and take, and maybe we just negotiate that, like particularly well. But we really like working together, we think that's the perfect optimal scenario.

And there's always things that can be improved. You know, I talked about customer support last week a little bit. One of the reasons why we hold on to that is we actually enjoy it, like I like talking to people, I like feeling like I'm helping people, I like the amount that I learn from that, like, I get so many ideas for how to fix our product, or how to make something easier for people or just learn things from talking to customers. And that's in a, in an interview setting that's in a chat setting as well. It's probably not ideal to be responding to that kind of thing at 10 o'clock at night. And I'm working on, you know, managing my own need to, to do that. But yeah, what we want out of our out of all of this is just to keep doing this. And so I guess, you know, I mentioned those portfolio level goals I have really that goal is stability, right? Like I you know, my first week of college was the 2008 financial crisis.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
So that was incredibly traumatic, like, like everybody walking around, and being like, Well, my college fund is gone. And knowing we're gonna graduate into a recession, like economic stability, and calm is so important to me. And that is much more important to me, than, you know, getting, I don't know, millions of dollars from being acquired, or having some growth numbers that would impress people like those kinds of things aren't important to me. What's important to me is stability, and stability for our family. And so making decisions that lead to more stability is how we tend to think about things.

Colleen Schnettler 13:55
Yeah, I think, kind of what was you were talking last week, what prompted my comment was for me, I went into consulting to give me more flexibility, right, like, so I am never on call, like, I don't work with people that want me on call. No thanks. And I have a lot of autonomy in who I work with. And all of that has been great. And so for me, I've always thought that the next step with the product business would be even more flexibility, right? Like, oh, you make money while you sleep because someone's buying your product. But it's interesting, because as I talked to more and more solo, or couple founders seems like there's a lot involved in off-hour support requests. I mean, you're not the first person to say this, that you're working at 10 o'clock at night. So it's just kind of an interesting. It's it was a really kind of interesting thing for me to think about like okay, right now. I have a great situation with client work. Everyone's pretty chill. Like I said, You're not allowed to call me in the middle of the night. No one has my phone number. I don't check Slack -- it's not on my phone. Like it's pretty good. And so I wonder is as I make the shift into like product based business. It'll be interesting to see how that changes. Now, to be fair, when I was growing the consultancy, like, in the beginning, I was hustling, like I was working all the time, I would work my normal job during the day. And then I would work till 10 o'clock every night. I was exhausted. Maybe I did that for 18 months. And that was worth it to put me in the position I'm in now. And I'm just, it'll be interesting to see if like, I grow a product business. And it's like a lot of hustle up front. And then I mean, really, my goal is to work four hours a day, like, that's, that's kind of where I want to be maybe six, and spend the rest of the time doing whatever I want. That is my appeal that in the autonomy is what appeals to me in a product business. But it'll be interesting to see is like, I go through this process, if that actually materializes.

Michele Hansen 15:47
Yeah, having truly passive income that you don't have to do any active work for, I think, the dream of a lot of people.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
The only situation I really seen people actually get that is, you know, when they have a portfolio of dividend paying stocks, but even then you have to worry about, you know, the value of them going down, and then you get less from the dividends, and you have to research new ones. So there's work involved there.

You know, I also, like I will admit, like, I am definitely a recovering workaholic. And I don't say that to be glib, like, I used to work a lot at night and on weekends, because I was, you know, trying to show what I was capable of, and trying to prove to other people that I was capable of more responsibility and doing more things, and so hungry for, I guess, a sense of approval, right.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And it was so scary to walk away from being in a corporate environment where, you know, you're getting that kind of feedback and criticism all the time and having performance reviews and almost like an academic environment where you're getting graded, to going to one where you are working for yourself, and there's no one standing over you telling you how good you are, and aren't doing -- that was terrifying at first. But then, you know, it was liberating, because I realized I didn't have to get that approval from other people. And I didn't have to work all weekend anymore to show that I was capable of doing the caliber of work that I thought I was capable of. And so now, when I find myself working on the weekend, like it's pretty rare, and but I really don't mind, because that is the price for having the freedom. That is the price for not having to impress somebody, and to show them what I'm capable of as a human being. That is the price of our family getting to go on vacation whenever we want, or getting to, you know, live this life where we have literally just picked up our life and move to another country.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And yeah, there's definitely been complications, but not as many as we would have. If I had to go get a job somewhere. There, there's always a cost. And I think you could maybe design a business where you only have to work four hours a day. I don't think that's what I want, though. Like I genuinely enjoy working with my husband. And, you know, people always ask us, well, why don't you just, you know, sell the business. And then you can do whatever you want. And I'm like, because then we would have to find another business to start. And that's a lot of hard work. But also like, we we just enjoy working together.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And that may not be true of a majority of couples. And you know, we've certainly all heard horror stories of people who worked for couples that should not work together. But that's not the case for us like that, that cost of doing stuff at night or on the weekend. It's worth it. Because as you said, you want the autonomy and you want the freedom. And it seems weird that freedom could involve replying to something at two o'clock on a Saturday. But at the same time, also, I have the choice, like if I don't reply to that, and I decide to wait until Monday, and as a result of that we lose the customer. You know, who might get upset about that? Me. There's nobody else who's going to tell me who's going to say you should reply to that on Saturday. And as a result, you're not getting your half a percent bonus this year, right? Like, that is not going to happen. Like if I decide to not reply to something and then we lose that customer, I am out 100% of that money. And I am the only one you know, or you know, my husband and I -- like we're the only one who decide whether that was an appropriate decision to make. There's nobody else who is lording over us telling us that we should have done something differently.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And that is great because I feel like it is a choice to respond to those things. At midnight or, you know, it doesn't so much feel like a choice when you know a database server goes down at three o'clock in the morning and we get the blaring alarm and stuff has to happen, though. How is that really different than having a baby baby? I mean, so it's everything is a choice.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Everything is a choice. And and yeah, that that autonomy comes at a cost, but to me, the benefits of the autonomy are worth it

Colleen Schnettler 20:14
well, and also being directly responsible for the amount of money you make, like if you were working, if you're on call at a normal web development job, and you have to answer a call at 2am, you don't get paid extra for that, right. Whereas if you're answering a client and you get a new client, like that's directly impacts you and your business in a very tangible way.

Michele Hansen 20:34
You get all of that versus when you are, you know, it's your turn to be on Pager Duty for the weekend, and you have to handle a bunch of stuff. You don't get paid extra for that. Like maybe you can say in your performance review, like, well, look at all of these weekends I worked and here's all the value I led to the company, and then you maybe get a raise or a bonus because of that. But when it's your own company, you can say like, hey, like, because I work that weekend, like I made an extra $3,000. Is that worth it to me? And you can decide whether you want to do that next time. And maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But you have that full responsibility, and you get all of the benefits of that responsibility as well.

Colleen Schnettler 21:14
I think those are all really good points you're making.

Michele Hansen 21:17
I think sometimes you don't, you don't really know what you're getting into when you're getting into it.

Colleen Schnettler 21:23
That's kind of how I feel.

Michele Hansen 21:24
Like I don't know what kind of business you know, as you said, you know, you would love to have a business where you only work four hours a day. I think it would be kind of challenging possible, but challenging to say, going into something and saying I only want to spend four hours a day on this, or I want a business that only requires four hours of me every day. And, and then finding a problem that is solvable in that amount of work per day. And as you're saying, I think it's a fluid thing, where, you know, you said you were hustling really hard for the first 18 months of your consulting, and then you were able to scale it back a little bit. Like I definitely work less now than I did four years ago, when I had a full time job, like plus the side project, like I work way less, and I have way more family time.

Colleen Schnettler 22:14
For me when I say four hours a day, I just kind of think when I've been thinking about building a business, and each step I have taken has gotten me closer to independence. And what I value the most as a military spouse with three kids is my flexibility. And I really have built that with the consulting. I mean, consulting has its own drawbacks, because I have different clients who have different needs. And that can be frustrating, but ultimately, I've already built this flexibility into my life. And when I think about starting and having a product business, I really want the product business to reflect that. So I don't mean that like I only want to spend four hours a day. I mean, I want to be able to own you know, to work in a way that like fits into spending time with my kids and my spouse and going on vacation and do these other things. And this in no way like what you're saying, in no way dissuades me, like I definitely can see how you could build your business a different way. I just am interested that you've chosen to build it this way. And it's you know, I think from our conversations, I've learned it because you love what you do. You take great pride in it. And it's it's a really fulfilling endeavor for you. I think, when if I ever get to where you are, I will have structured things differently. So it'll be interesting. Let's check back in five years. But it'll be interesting to see I can see myself just being where you are, and, and just structuring things a lot differently. But I guess that's that's an important point, right? Like, people are different. And people want different things and have different priorities.

Michele Hansen 23:43
I think what I'm hearing from you is that you want to be able to work when your kids are in school. And then yeah, and have to work and be able to be with them when they're at home, which is really reasonable and incredibly screwed up that that isn't the default for like work. Like so, you know, being in Denmark now. Like one of the things really struck me is how most businesses you, you know, they don't open or you can't even get them on the phone until 10am. And then they are closed at four. And that is a hard stop.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
And the school especially for elementary aged kids, like they go until four o'clock. They go from eight to four. And the work day is you know, from from nine to four, or 330. And it's pretty fixed. And there's definitely no differences in that and tons of self employed people as well. But it's really fascinating to me that it's not like well, you know, the workday ends at four but really like we're working until 5:30 like it's fine as it is in the US where it's pretty common to be at work until six o'clock and even then that's like a badge of honor.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Here, it's like no, everything is closed at four. If you need to hit Handle it during the day even stores close at five, six o'clock.

Colleen Schnettler
That's so weird.

Michele Hansen
But it's great, right? Like that is like, like you have work time and you have family time. And you're not just spending 16 hours a day exhausting yourself. Right? Like, I mean, this is a fundamental failure of American culture and life right now is that so many people have to have multiple jobs in order to afford life like I mean, what drove us to create our business was we couldn't easily afford daycare, like a basic necessity of having a child. It should be that you can have a job or have a business and work when your kids are in school. That seems like a very, very reasonable goal to me.

Colleen Schnettler 25:56
And it's not really attainable in my field, like as a software developer, like, No, you can't show up at work at nine o'clock and roll home at four and then not check your email Slack or whatever the rest of your right like, it's not something our culture here, especially in tech, is not structured in a way that allows you to, that's all I want, right? All I want is to work with the kids are at school and be with the family when they're not at school. But like our our life, here is not structured that way like it, it's just not. And I've been dealing with a lot. I'm glad we're doing this feelings episode today. Because I've been dealing with a lot of feelings, because we're about to have some more financial stress and pressures. And so I've been trying to figure out how I can cover that. And I've been kind of vacillating between, consult more, which is kind of the easiest solution, get a full time job, which is maybe even easier. But to do that, like I'd have to give up side projects, or at least decrease them even more. And oh, man, it's just a lot of trade offs and drawbacks, and each in each area. But I think a fundamental problem here is all of these things I want to do require a lot more than working from eight to four.

Michele Hansen 27:08
I am so glad you brought that up. Because I think that's such a common thing of thinking that getting a full time job somewhere, will give you more stability or more income when you know, the thing about bootstrapping your company is that it takes time, right? And so I would sort of think about like, how soon really is this financial situation changing? And is that is it right now? That happens sometimes, but if it's three months from now, maybe you've got a little bit of time to get your business going, maybe do a little bit more consulting, as a padding, though, that's also that's, you know, consulting, you're charging for your time. And so there's a fixed amount of money that you can make in it versus with a product business there really isn't. But, you know, as you said, Your goal is being able to work when your kids are in school, or when they are in front of their laptops at home doing virtual school.

And and I gotta say like, that's something I love about the bootstrapped world is these kinds of goals that we have. The rest of the sort of the tech world is very, there's this prevailing ethos that you should always, you know, be hungry and hustling and, like, you should be working 20 hours a day. And if you're not, then you're you're weak and pathetic, and you're whatever, whatever. There are certainly lots of, quote unquote thought leaders out there who will preach at you for not working all the time. And something I love about the bootstrapped world is there are so many people who I get into talking with them and it's really because they wanted to be able to spend time with their families, or they wanted to be able to live in a place where there aren't really any tech jobs, to be close to their family. And so they work from home and they have their own business. And it's like such a family focused avenue of tech that was so unexpected for me being around that very hustle porn sort of sleeve of it that is so predominant, that that goal that you have is maybe even need a little bit more money, having your own business that fits with a sane life.

Colleen Schnettler 29:22
It's feels hard to get there. And I feel like with building this product, you're absolutely right. I do have a little bit of time. Man if I could just get this going. And I can. I know that I can but it man it just feels comparing this balancing this a side project that I hope turns into a bigger than a side project with consulting and the pandemic and managing you know, family feels overwhelming right now. And so if I were to make a choice right now, the easy button does seem to be like just to get a job. But that's I, you know, I've, I've read before that, you know, and I've seen this a lot like, people who get what they want, know what they want. And I know what I want, but I'm just sometimes -- The truth is, I think I'm a little too scared to go after it.

Michele Hansen 30:24
I'll tell you how we grew. It was just listening to people. We got something out there. And then we listened to people about what they were trying to do. And then we did that. And we asked them, okay, does that work for you? Why or why not? What else you trying to do?

You know, you mentioned that you started this out thinking about images. But I think it was in last week's episode, you were talking about how you had people say to you, Hey, this is really great for images. But I also really need this for PDFs. And there's like really nothing for that. Listen to people. Do that. Just slowly build it by getting it out there listening to people, doing something about what they tell you. And then take it from there. And then maybe you'll find something that works. You know, there's no guarantees. But I have found that if people are willing to be open with you about what they need solved, and you listen to them, and you do it, they'll be very appreciative. And they will pay you, especially if it's a frequent pain that they have that no one else is really solving. And so that does take time, that does take evening hours, that does take sacrifices. But hopefully you can get to a point where you're doing something that nobody else is doing, even if it isn't a commodity space that is possible. And having that kind of, you know, income, that that you need and finding a way to negotiate that with your life, and figuring out how your hours fit into all of that.

Colleen Schnettler 32:01
Yeah, no, that's great advice. I, I needed a little pep talk. Yeah, that's great advice. And I think that's, that's what I'm really going to focus on as at least for these next couple months. You know, some people I've heard, they're finally successful in their business where they don't have another option, right? Like, like, what it's like, oh, man, like, I really need to this to work because I really need to make, you know, to increase my income. So maybe a little pressure is just what I need, you know, to turn me into a diamond.

Michele Hansen 32:31
I think that's a good note to end on. People want to stay involved say what you think about our conceptions of business and lifestyle and product and all of that, please feel free to tweet at us softwaresocpod. We'll talk to you next week.

View Details

Colleen Schnettler 0:00
So for those who are just joining us, I am in the process of building my first software business.

It is a small software widget that I am trying to sell. And so right now it's invitation only in the Heroku marketplace. So I was sharing this idea I have, and it's a product, with a friend of mine. And he brought up an interesting point. And I don't think of what I'm building as a commodity, right? We all want to feel special. But at the end of the day, I am repackaging cloud storage and selling cloud storage. So we were discussing, moving to a low a more low cost storage provider. And the storage providers claimed to have S3 compatible API's, of course, like it didn't, it wasn't really compatible. So I'm trying to determine if it's worth my time to sort it out. I mean, these guys are so much cheaper than AWS. And there's two big players in this space right now, in the file management space, they can't move to a low a lower cost storage provider, right? They're like entrenched, but if I do it now, then I can just be cheaper than everyone else.

Michele Hansen 1:13
That can be an advantage.

Colleen Schnettler
Right?

Michele Hansen
Especially in a commodity space.

Colleen Schnettler 1:17
Right? So I again, like I don't like to think I'm a commodity, but really, it's like cloud storage with a bow on it. Right? Like, I'm like --

Michele Hansen
It's okay to be a commodity. We're a commodity.

Colleen Schnettler 1:23
it doesn't feel special. I guess you are.

Michele Hansen 1:28
There's some businesses that are commodities. And I think it's just knowing what you are, and then knowing how to compete in that space, right. And in a commodity business, if you have an operational cost advantage over the competitors, even if those competitors are huge companies, then that can be an advantage that you can build on.

Colleen Schnettler 1:52
Yeah, and I think like these, these low-cost storage providers, they just released these S3 compatible API's, like last year. So I feel like this is kind of a untapped opportunity is that no one is really, as far as I can tell, no one's wrapping them up and reselling them yet. And they're much cheaper. So AWS, you're looking at point, you're looking at two cents a gig on AWS on this other provider, you're looking at .005 cents a gig,

Michele Hansen
Wow.

Colleen Schnettler
A lot cheaper. Of course, you know, when you don't have a lot of storage, like I don't right now. It's like, Oh, it's like $5 versus $3. But if I want to really be a storage provider, like this could be a cool opportunity. And I was thinking about the solutions that are already out there are very, very image heavy. And I had been thinking that way, because I approach this problem as an image problem is well, but there seems to be a hole in the market for other file types.

Michele Hansen 2:47
Like PDFs, CSVs, and stuff?

Colleen Schnettler 2:50
Yeah, there's doesn't seem to be anyone kind of like helping or optimizing for -- Yeah, I mean, someone, the person I was on a call with wants to host static webpages on it, custom 404 pages. So there seems like there might be an interesting hole in this space to handle non image files. And to handle image files at a cheaper price point. I've been kind of thinking is like, I'm like the Southwest of image management, the airline, like bare bones, I don't resize your images for you. I don't give you user crapping on the front end, but I deliver a simple service with no frills. And it's easy to implement.

Michele Hansen 3:27
I think that's a good place to start. And you're kind of reminding me of where we started with Geocodio -- even when you said Southwest, you know, my first thought was not airlines. But you know, deserts and our branding from the beginning was Geocodio, rhymes with rodeo and we had all of this Southwest style branding.

If you can find a way to be cheaper than everybody else, and be easier than everybody else like that worked really, really well for us and then differentiating into other adjacent categories that are neglected by major providers. And the way someone described this to me once, you know, I was like, "Well, what if you know, one of the big companies add that adds this and then we're out of business?" If you're doing a business, that's $500,000 a year, a million dollars a year, that's not a big enough opportunity for the big companies to go after it. And if there are people in that space who have something they need, and they're not satisfied by the option, the current options, and you can build a business that makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That is a great income for a one person company and not really big enough to be a threat to any larger company so that they might go into your space, it can be a good spot to be in.

Colleen Schnettler 4:49
Yeah, that would be an amazing spot to be in. So the only thing I have a little bit of a psychological block here because I have worked on the technical side of this for quite a while now. And now I have to potentially learn a new API to integrate with these third party storage providers. And I'm just like, I started doing it yesterday. And I was just like, I don't want to, like I'm tired. So convince me that it's worth it. It's worth it to do now. Right? Like I should do it.

Michele Hansen 5:16
Well, let's talk about the downsides too.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Sounds like your brain is in downsides mode. So one of the risks here is a vendor lock in risk, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Like, if you switch vendors.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
Because they're six times cheaper, if they raise their prices by six times, that creates a lot of risk for you that one of these vendors, raising their prices, or changing their policies, like you are dependent on another company to make your company happen. Now, there's a lot of people who build their companies off of another company's platform. But you're, you're creating substantial risk there.

Colleen Schnettler 6:03
But I have the same risk if I stay on AWS, and I feel like AWS is way more likely to raise their prices, because everyone is locked. Not everyone. But they have such a lock on people, right? Because they feel more reliable. I was actually looking at the stats. So my first thought was, maybe these other cloud storage providers aren't, don't have the same kind of uptime AWS does, but they do! People act like AWS has 100% uptime. And they don't always so they just have this reputation because they're the biggest player in this space. But either way, I've got a lock in, right, like I can't, I mean, I can't, I'm going to do a probably a mirror service. So I'll use two storage providers to help but ultimately, my primary storage provider is going to be locked in. I think one of the concerns, though, is these companies. I mean, they've been around for a while, like they're not materializing out of thin air. But as I mentioned, they've only had these S3 compatible API's for like a year. So I'm putting a lot of trust in a company that doesn't have the AWS level reputation.

Michele Hansen 7:02
And that's another risk too. Like, we get this question, sometimes from customers too, right, because they're like, why would we go with you over a big company? Like, how do we know you're not just going to shut down tomorrow?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And when I dive deeper into that question, oftentimes something that's driving that fear is, they have integrated a critical vendor, and then that vendor got acquired, and was shut down by their acquirer. And so we used to feel somewhat sheepish, I guess, when we got this question. And in the last couple years or so, we found that it's an advantage to be a small company and say, we're not venture backed, we're not trying to exit like, this is our livelihood. This, this is our company. We're in this for the long haul. And so I would suggest digging into those companies like why have they launched this product? Like, does it, you know, what would you do, basically, if they shut it down, and just think through that through from the beginning. And then also a way to manage that risk is knowing like, this product, it could be a springboard to another product, right? Like, if this product gets going, but maybe gets to a point where it makes, let's say, $10,000, after a year, you can use that money to then invest in something else, if it looks like revenue is declining for this, or there's new competitors in the space that you can't compete with, and you and you can always use it as a springboard to something else and to seize the opportunity now. It doesn't have to be your forever product.

Colleen Schnettler 8:49
Yeah, that's great advice. So I think I will take the time, it might, it's frustrating to be so close to like launching something and be like, "Oh, it's gonna take two more weeks, because I have to sort this out." But I think I will take the time to sort it out now, because it's a lot easier to sort out now than to sort it out, you know, a year, six months down the road when I'm storing a lot of data, because then you have to migrate everything. So I will take the time to sort it out. Because I think cost is such an easy way to compete. And if I can compete on cost so aggressively. Like, as I said, like I'm Southwest airlines have file management, right? Like you don't get any snacks. But it's cheaper.

Michele Hansen 9:27
Actually, I think they gave out whiskey to people in their early days.

Colleen Schnettler 9:29
Nuh-uh! Did they really?

Michele Hansen 9:30
Yeah, no, this is a real story. Like in order to get people flying on Southwest I'd like they would something about how they would give them all miniature bottles of whiskey that's actually used to get the perks in the old days. And now it's the big companies you don't get the perks from.

Colleen Schnettler 9:45
Isn't it funny how things change? Right? Yeah, the ecosystem has changed.

So that's where I am with that.

And I want to talk about something else too, as we've been talking a lot about marketing and positioning. I feel like I think my first like marketing thing was Hey, this simple file upload where we do all these things for you. And I listed out all the things I did. And so I've been reading this book Building a StoryBrand, which you recommended to me.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
You recommend it to me a couple weeks ago, and it felt like a light bulb reading this book. Because my initial, what do you call it copy? Why do they call it copy? Why don't you just say words. But anyway, my initial copy was simple file upload handles all the heavy lifting of uploading, uploading user files to the cloud, returning a CDN URL for you easy to integrate with a JavaScript snippet for whenever you need the URL. Okay, that basically makes like me want to throw up in my mouth. Um, so I've been reading this book, Building a Storybrand. And he talks a lot in this book about clarifying your message, he talks about how like, he goes through the components of the story. And he defines them as seven components of a story, you have a character, which is your customer, has a problem and meets a guide. And he suggests or says, suggest is not the right word, my product, instead of being the hero, or the character in the story, my product is the guide, my product wants to help the character achieve their goal.

So the whole flow, his character has a problem and meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action that ends in success. And so I've been thinking a lot about that, in terms of like, what exactly does my product do to solve your problems. And I read that copy, initial copy I had. And so I've been thinking a lot about that. And really, my product, if I had to distill it down, it gives you your time back. Like that is what it does, it's time. That is the service I'm providing to you. So he has seven chapters. And each week, I'd like to go through a chapter two and tell you kind of like what I got out of out of that chapter. So the first chapters is a character. And the principle number one is the customer is the hero, not your brand. And so I've been thinking about that, as I said, and I'm selling all these things like I can give you my five point, 10 point bullet list on why my thing is great, but ultimately, what I'm giving you is your time. So that was kind of my revelation, as I went through the first chapter.

Michele Hansen 12:32
I love that. And I think it would be great to go through it every week, fine. If listeners want to follow along. The book is Building a Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller. We'll put a link to it in the show notes.

Colleen Schnettler 12:48
Yes. And so one of the there are a few things that jumped out at me in this chapter one and one was companies tend to sell solutions to external problems. But customers buy solutions to internal problems. And it just kind of like reading this chapter kind of reframed the way I think about people and reacting with people and what drives people to purchase. So when I first thought, like, What am my customers want? My initial before reading this chapter, I thought, well, they want an easy way to add files to their website. And they want to not worry about AWS, and they want to not have to configure their own cloud storage, and they don't want to have to figure out how to connect to the cloud storage. But really, like I said, What they want is they want less hassle and more time. So that is kind of my my workshopping for chapter one. And I will report back next week with what I find out in chapter two. And hopefully, by the end of going through this book, I will have reframed my very cluttered, challenging to understand message. And something that people can actually understand.

Michele Hansen 13:49
You going through that just now makes me wonder if there's a way to visualize all of the steps that someone would be going through almost like a checklist of like, you have to do this, then you have to that then you do this, then you do that. And visualizing that and putting down that checklist and instead saying you could do this to manage your images. Or you could just do this and then it's just your snippet, right.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, that's get really clear.

Michele Hansen
And it's because you had all of that sense in your copy. But what you really want to get at is, stop wasting time on this thing you don't even want to do in the first place. That takes up a ton of time. People are spending a lot of time on this. And so remind them how much time they're spending on it and then show them that there is an alternative. Be the guide so they can be the hero.

Colleen Schnettler 14:39
That's awesome. Yes. So yes. So this week I'm going to focus on as I said, I gotta do some technical stuff in terms of storage, but I'm also going to keep reading this book and kind of focus on how to reframe My message to show people like what I'm really providing and kind of like tighten down my elevator pitch.

Michele Hansen
Awesome.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, so let's talk about your week, what have you been up to with your business and your life?

Michele Hansen 15:05
So last week, I sort of mentioned in passing that we have recently moved to Denmark, and a couple of people picked up on that. And were wondering if I could talk a little bit more about what that transition has been like.

Colleen Schnettler 15:21
Okay.

Michele Hansen 15:22
So, it's been sort of an interesting thing, because we were initially only here temporarily. Or at least that was the idea. But now we're transitioning into staying here full time. And, and so there's been a lot of different things that have come up and trying to transition from being a, I guess, a remote in the US company, like, you know, working from home, rather than being remote from abroad. And, and really, one of the the the biggest struggles we've had there, which relates to work, something I've worked on this week, has been the timezone shift.

Colleen Schnettler 15:59
Are most of your customers in the US?

Michele Hansen 16:02
Yes, US and Canada, we do have a small percentage of customers who are outside North America. Usually they are companies or consultants to companies in the US or Canada, they're working with that data. So for example, it might be and you know, development teams in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe, pretty often we do have customers in other parts of the world, but they're usually they're all working with US data. It's always been that we will get customers and work requests pretty much at any hour of the day, you know, the Middle East workday starts on Sunday. And so pretty much Saturdays are really the only quiet day. But that's actually when you have people working on hobby projects reaching out to us. And pretty much normally from you know, 7am to midnight, we're getting stuff and then overnight. But but the shift that's been more difficult is that, the US doesn't wake up until three o'clock local time here. And that's also when our daughter is getting out of school. And so one of the nice things is we get tons of focused work time, from eight to three, we can get so much done, and really not have any meetings, any requests coming in, and it's great. But then the other thing is all of the requests start around three o'clock, and pretty much don't stop through the through the night. And that's that's family time. That's dinner time. That's bedtime, and like we can't be working during those hours as well. And, um, and it's definitely been a shift to not work from 8am to 11pm and exhaust ourselves.

Colleen Schnettler 17:51
So how do you handle that? Okay, quick first question is what kind of response time do you think is reasonable into your clients and customers request a view?

Michele Hansen 18:03
So this is a difficult one, because I think our own standards for what's reasonable is a lot higher than our than our customers. And, you know, if someone has a critical issue, like, you know, we have alerts that will wake us up in the middle of the night for, you know, a database goes down, or a server fries or whatever, like, those things wake us up in the middle of the night. Thankfully, they don't happen very often. But I think if you look at our Intercom stats, it like our actual, you know, median response time is something like under two minutes, like, it's really, really fast. And so part of it has been being more understanding of ourselves and seeing we actually don't need to be responding to things in two minutes most of the time. And the other thing is also what can we do to reduce the amount of tickets? And I, I have this this sort of guiding belief that every ticket should only happen once. Right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Like nobody really wants to talk to customer support, because if you talk to customer support, it means there's a problem, right? Like, nobody wants to be standing in the customer service line at Target.

Colleen Schnettler 19:19
right? You just want it to work.

Michele Hansen 19:21
Exactly. You want to not have to end up in their first place. Now there's a small percentage of people who are you know, maybe they're they're lonely or whatnot, and they enjoy talking to customer support people. Were you know, anyone who's ever answered the phone has had frequent fliers and whatnot. Thankfully, I don't know why. But we're not really in that situation. I think maybe because of what our businesses is and being in B2B like people have a problem. They just, they just want to get it done. Like, I've only had one time when I had someone say, Hey, what's up and I was like, how can I help you? And they're like, "I'm just waiting for something to deploy. Like, how are you? I want to see if there was a real person here." And I was like, That's funny. Like, cool. What We're going to talk about something like this the only time that's ever happened.

Um, and so, so every ticket, we try to take it as a signal that like something needs to be fixed. So whether that's, you know, I geocoded, this address, and it came back, and the result was a mile away from what I expected, or, you know, what is the price for this or whatever, like, we try to make sure that each issue only comes up once. And we're not perfect about that. But we take those as hints for things to improve.

And so this came up this week, we're talking a couple weeks ago about how we launched a HIPAA compliant product, remember.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
And how Initially, it was kind of a kind of a rocky launch, because some of our expectations for for that product. And our research didn't totally reveal all of the complications with that, primarily how long the sales cycle is. And so because the onboarding process we had built for that was basically all online, you know, assuming there wasn't a lot of stakeholders involved. And that didn't match these companies, you know, because you have to talk to procurement, you have to talk to legal, you've stuck to security, like, all these things, they can't just go through a online signup process, boom, boom, boom, and get started like they can with the standard product. So instead of having people go through the onboarding, and get themselves set up, we just had them contact us. We set it so that it would fire off a message to us a chat message saying, I'd like to get started with Geocodio+HIPAA. And the problem is, this would this would lead to a lot of conversations, but we actually like weren't getting a lot of context from people. Like, we weren't getting details on what they knew about the product and what their reasons for it were. And if they knew about the pricing model, and that we don't have a pay as you go version, all of these things, it's we're having lots of conversations, where it turns out that, you know, if we'd had better information on the website, they probably wouldn't have needed to talk to us.

So one thing I finally got around to this week was changing that flow a little bit. And we would like to eventually redo the onboarding. But what we're doing for now instead is instead of having everything, go to an Intercom chat to us, I made a page on the website, that is okay, here's how you get started, and basically says, The path to getting started is as complicated as your company will make it. So when someone sends an email, I think there's less of an immediate reply expectation than there is with online chat.

Colleen Schnettler
Agree.

Michele Hansen
So we're hoping that when people reach out to us, they're more familiar with not what the product is and what they can get, but also what they need to ask us for. So we'll see I just released it yesterday, and completely changed it. So I mean, all over the website, we had these little Intercom prompts, that instead of going to a signup flow, people would be prompted to open up Intercom. So we just changed it yesterday. But but that's something I have been wanting to deal with for a long time. And I've been kind of putting it off. So I'm like really the right way to do this would be to redo the onboarding, flow and redo all of my, you know, my journey mapping and like, do a bunch of flowcharts. Figure out what the real processes like all is basically, these things that you would do from a UX perspective, if you were in a bigger company, rather than, you know, somebody who's managing 50% of everything that's going on in a business. So sometimes you have to be a little scrappy. So I was like, You know what, having some copy on the website that at least tells people what the path forward is, let's, let's see how that goes.

Colleen Schnettler 23:41
Well, that sounds like a great way to handle it. Right? Less requests more information on your site. So hopefully, that'll filter down to less requests, which is less stress for you guys.

Michele Hansen 23:52
Yeah, and I mean, like, we don't mind replying to stuff at night, like, that's when we started this as a side project. So that's pretty normal to us that, you know, you're sitting in bed at 9:30 and something comes in and you just deal with it like that. That's how we've always been. But really trying to take that perspective of every ticket should only happen once. Like, if it's repeating, then there's a problem. And, and I think giving myself permission to put out a solution to that that is not the perfect solution, which would be completely redoing this whole experience, instead, just having text and see if that is a step in the right direction.

Colleen Schnettler 24:35
Yeah, that makes me think of, I have that same philosophy with software, if we get an error once made, and it didn't have test coverage, write a test. So you know, you run it every time so that same error never reoccurs so that seems like a great way to handle it.

But you know, the thing, the thing I want to bring up here, Michele, is I feel like in my opinion and kind of things we've talked about part of the reason of having your own business Is it gives you autonomy, it gives you flexibility, it's supposed to give you some of your time back. And you just said, "Well, we started this as a side project. So we're used to working at 9:30 at night." It's not a side project anymore. It's a real grown up business. And it might I don't know, have you thought about, like trying to tackle this in in more grown up business ways?

Michele Hansen 25:21
Like hiring someone?

Colleen Schnettler 25:23
Yeah, of course, that's, of course, what I'm trying to say. I just like, I just can't wrap my brain around why you won't hire someone. I know, I keep bringing it up. But...

Michele Hansen 25:31
Our episode with Michelle from Squared Away, like got us thinking about how awesome it would be to have a virtual assistant. And we're like, oh, my God, if we could have somebody who is, you know, on West Coast time, right, and they can manage everything starting at 3pm. Like, that would be amazing. And you know, even if it's like, you know, a military spouse, somebody with kids, like, it only needs to be like six hours or something. And then really, but the thing is, is because whenever issues come in, we fix the underlying problems, all of these simple underlying problems have been solved. So when somebody reaches out for your support or sales related, like it's something complicated. It's something that we have to handle ourselves.

Colleen Schnettler 26:20
Right. So you're you're saying that your requests coming in are all high quality? You're, you're generally thanks to, you know, your diligent work on your site, or not getting people saying, How much does this cost? Or what are my plan options. So even putting a person in front of you like to filter requests isn't going to buy you a lot, because that person is still going to be sending a lot of the requests to through to you guys, because they're high quality request, I get that. Okay. And I have one more thing that I thought of, have you thought about removing Intercom? I mean, I don't get why everyone loves it.

It's so annoying that as a user. well, even as a user, it annoys me, right? Like, like, yes, like I, if I I don't know, as a user, it annoys me because now your situation is different. So if I'm having a real problem, and nine times out of 10, the bot or person on Intercom cannot solve it. and nine times out of 10. It's a bot anyway. So then when you do get a real person, it's exciting. But usually it's that first layer person, as we just discussed, so they can't help me anyway. I don't know. I just, I'm just not a huge fan. That's all.

Michele Hansen 27:20
Yeah, we get a lot of surprise from people that were a real person and the founders of the company. Yeah. But I like to think that's part of our marketing, you know, our appeal that like, wow, like you get, you know, I've heard people say to us, I can't believe I get a real person who can actually do something about your problem.

Michele Hansen
That's true. That's true. That's very rare.

Colleen Schnettler
But maybe, I mean, we're providing that level of service for everybody. And, you know, I've looked into it, and a lot of companies charge extra for life support or charge extra for support period. But the problem is, it's been so great for our growth, yeah, that we really can't justify not doing it. And especially since how a lot of our sales model works is we starts out with somebody within a team has to get a project done, they do it for free, or very low cost, maybe they need some help getting started. And then later on, they upgrade to a later plan or just integrate us and use us for years on end. And if we deny them support, when they're only using it for a low volume, then we might lose them permanently.

Colleen Schnettler 28:29
Right. I'm not talking about denying support. I'm talking about email. So it's just a suggestion, like maybe you can just downshift to email like just don't hide it be like, here's our support link, we'll get back to you in 15 hours or 24 hours. It might depressurize some of the the night especially with you guys being overseas. Like I know, you said you don't mind working late at night, but that can't be good for you know, your work life balance and mental health.

Michele Hansen 28:55
No, it's definitely not. I sometimes I wish that we could just have Intercom turn off at a certain point in the day. Like it'll say on it, what office hours are, but you can't like make the chat go away. And I think the chat experience implies to people that there will be an immediate response,

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
When in actuality, it's just emailing it to us.

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

And we've thought about that. But I'm I'm wary to take away something that that customers like and has been a positive for our growth as a company. But then as I said, I've said before, why do we need to grow more?

Colleen Schnettler 29:29
Right, so Okay, so I think and we are running out of time today, but I think in a future episode because this is also what I'm thinking about. We need to talk about the goals, right? Because like I feel like where you are in your business, that's kind of where I aspire to be. And no offense but like your lifestyle right now is not really where I aspire to be. I don't want to build a business where I have to work at 9:30 at night. So I am just I would love to have a future episode kind of about what your goals are and and your growth goals and you know where you want to go Where you guys see see yourself going and how that fits into your life.

Michele Hansen 30:04
Sure, and let's do it in a couple of weeks because my honest answer is that we don't have any goals. We just want to keep doing what we're doing as long as we can.

Colleen Schnettler 30:18
That's amazing. No goals, just chillin. We're good.

Michele Hansen 30:20
Yeah, this is the startup podcast with no goals. Nobody's trying to get acquired. We're not gonna be on the front page of Wired. Like, we're just gonna do our thing. As long as we can.

Colleen Schnettler 30:34
Awesome, awesome.

Michele Hansen 30:36
Well, sounds good. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that again in the future.

Colleen Schnettler 30:40
Yeah. Well, that's gonna wrap up today's episode of the Software Social Podcast. You can reach us on Twitter at SoftwareSocPod, and we'd love to hear what you think.

View Details

GUIDE: Michele wrote an in-depth companion guide for this episode. Read a more thorough rundown of the different health insurance options.

Michele Hansen 0:00
Remember how a couple weeks ago, you were saying, you're really excited to get feedback and questions from our listeners.

Colleen Schnettler 0:08
Yes, I do.

Michele Hansen 0:10
So we got a really good question from someone recently that they asked me to address. And it is maybe one of the biggest obstacles that entrepreneurs in the US face. Can you guess what it is?

Colleen Schnettler
Healthcare?

Michele Hansen
Yes. Is it healthcare, it's healthcare. Yes, healthcare as an entrepreneur in the US is absolutely insane. And I had gone through so much getting health insurance for us, and had tweeted out a really long thread of the process, because I think people who aren't entrepreneurs don't realize just how crazy and expensive and difficult it is. And so I thought today that I would share some of the things I learned as we went through that process, the different things that we we use, and some of the tricks that I found to, you know, even convince health insurance companies that we qualified for health insurance with them.

Colleen Schnettler 1:16
Great.

Michele Hansen 1:17
So I want to start, because this is one of the big inflection points for people is when we were first considering running the company full time, right, so we, you know, we started to co do as a side project and ran it for three and a half years as a side project. And I think we ran it as a side project for longer than probably most people would, because we were afraid of, of health insurance. And you know, something that's really important. As an entrepreneur, I find it is understanding your own psychology. And, you know, we talked about this with Alex a lot, I keep, I feel like we keep talking about that interview. And even when I was a kid, my dad was a consultant. And so we had our own health insurance. And I remember my parents would refer to the company that we got health insurance through. And I think it was called US Healthcare, as US Health Scare. Because it was just so terrible to deal with. And they were as they're always talking about things about, oh, they wouldn't cover this or that, or this was crazy expensive, or this doctor, we need one actually take it and like, I just remember, it was just always a topic of conversation. And I remember when my dad finally went in house when I was 10, or so, like one of the big reasons was, they wouldn't have to worry about health insurance anymore. I'm sure there are other reasons but my 10 year old self that was that was one I picked up on. And so I think I always had that in the back of my mind thinking about our own company and having a family and I just had this idea in my head that getting your own health insurance as a self employed person is really difficult then when you do get it the insurance you get is awful. I still have that in my mind.

Colleen Schnettler 3:11
I mean, that's a huge driving force for it. You know, it is for my spouse awry. One of us will always have a like, quote, corporate job just for that reason. I mean, that's exactly what I think.

Michele Hansen 3:26
Yeah, I guess because you guys have federal, or, or VA Health?

Colleen Schnettler 3:28
Yeah, we had, we had health insurance under my previous full time employer, which was Blue Cross Blue Shield, and now we have it through my husband's job. But especially with kids like that, to me, would be the biggest, like scary point of us both going independent.

Michele Hansen 3:45
Exactly. So that was the big scary thing for us. And so when I went full time, the plan was that I would go full time, and then my husband wouldn't, because he had insurance through his job. And that only worked for about six months. And just things were growing and growing. And we couldn't stay on top of it with just me. And so he went to his boss and said that he wanted to quit. And his boss said, No. And we're like, well, this is a good negotiating position to be in. So he ended up negotiating down that he would work three days a week and reduce his salary, but keep his full benefits. So we didn't have to lose health insurance, which was so so great. And then six months later, like we were just growing so much more getting a lot of enterprise customers and like if stuff goes down and you can't respond to it immediately, you're going to lose customers, especially the big ones. So we end up going fully full time, two years ago, September.

And so what we did for the first 18 months, which so again, talking about this inflection point of "when do I go full time," which is kind of the next big one after, "How do I get something that works and makes money?".

We did Cobra for 18 months. So Cobra is a basically a federal program for continuation coverage. So for example, if you lose your job, then you can continue getting health insurance, you just have to pay the full premiums that the company would be paying for you. So you know, usually when you're an employee, somewhere, you pay maybe 15, 20, 50% of the premiums instead with COBRA, you get to stay on their plan. But you pay the full premium amount. And it used to be that you could be on it for 12 months. And then with the Affordable Care Act, this was extended to 18 months. And so I think for us, this was about $1,100 dollars a month, which is a lot of money. It was less than the Marketplace plans we looked at that time. And it was also made it easy, right? Because we kept our doctors, we right, we knew what we paid and co pays and what like it was a known thing. And then we had to buy dental insurance on top of that, which I think was about 150 or so a month. And that was actually really easy to buy, you can just like go on Delta Dental's website and just buy it. You still end up with huge bills, when you go to the dentist, though that was really annoying. So.

So first we did COBRA, and I was just if people have this option, it can be a really good one to just look into it. For us, you know, like family premiums were $1,100 dollars, but think about that, it is a business expense. So if you have a business that is running and is is profitable, then yes, you're going to take a hit on the health insurance. But it is a business expense. And so you get to write that off. And hopefully, since you're working full time on your business, it can grow more, you can get more customers, and you can recoup that.

So the next big inflection point for us came when COBRA was running out. And this was March of this year. And I dreaded that for 18 months having to go to the Marketplace plans because they are insanely expensive and terrible at the same time. I don't know if you've ever like looked at them just for fun. I mean, why would you look at no for fun, but..

Colleen Schnettler 7:43
I would not do that. No.

Michele Hansen 7:51
I remember I went and and I was like, Okay, let me figure it out what it is like, like, what is a plan that is, you know, like, takes our doctors like, that was the one thing we wanted. So at least like we didn't have to switch pediatricians and stuff, right? Because like where we live, like it's really competitive to get into pediatricians and you know, they all have waiting lists and and like, let's just keep them. So I went to look at a plan that would take our doctors and the cheapest one that our doctors accepted was $3,057 a month with a $6,000 deductible.

Colleen Schnettler 8:33
Oh my goodness, that's awful.

Michele Hansen 8:36
Yeah. Oh, and so we could switch doctors and go with an HMO like Kaiser for example. But that still had a 1500 dollar a month premium with a $3,500 deductible.

Colleen Schnettler 8:49
Wow. Wow, jeez.

Michele Hansen 8:54
Which is absolutely insane. Yeah, like we would like for one of the plans we would had 50% coinsurance with like for an ER visit after a $13,000 deductible. Like, and so if you had a $100,000 hospital bill, you would still be out $63,000.

Colleen Schnettler 9:17
Oh my gosh, this is insane.

Michele Hansen 9:18
And so we're looking at this and we're like, so that that plan that our doctors take $45,000 a year in premiums and deductibles alone, not including dental not including prescriptions and co-pays and everything else. And so at one point I realized I was like that is an entry level employees salary. Like so as a business we could choose between paying for health insurance or hiring someone.

Colleen Schnettler 9:50
Oh my gosh, that's crazy.

Michele Hansen 9:52
We actually -- kind of sort of on a tangent here. You know, people will often outside the US look Give us like, Why do you have this crazy system where your health insurance is tied to where you work? And, and I will never forget being in an economics class and in grad school ones, and professors, do you know who we have to thank for the structure of the US healthcare system?

Colleen Schnettler 10:20
Oh, I know. I know. I know, FDR. Is it FDR?

Michele Hansen
No, it's Hitler.

Colleen Schnettler
What? World War Two?

Michele Hansen
Yeah. Okay.

Michele Hansen 10:28
Came around in World War Two. Yeah, yes. So the reason why they did this is because they needed to incentivize people to go work in the factories for the war. But normally, the way you encourage people to work from an economic perspective is you raise the wages. The problem with raising wages during a war, is that you then get inflation and inflation on the homefront is a really, really bad thing during a war because it ruins morale, and it gives your enemies, you know, inroads into the population and you know, cuz people are upset because their money isn't worth as much. And so they're like, how can we incentivize people to go into the workforce without paying them more? And knowing that a lot of the people who they would need to get into the workforce were women who would be concerned about their families, offering health insurance was the way to get people in without raising wages and causing inflation.

Colleen Schnettler 11:24
Yes, so This American Life years ago, when Obama was president had a great podcast on this exact topic for anyone who is interested, wants to learn more. Anyway.

Michele Hansen 11:35
So back to us realizing that we could hire someone for the cost of health insurance, we actually consider going down that path. So we're like, like, we had heard that you can't get health insurance. If you're just a founder a couple and we just kind of took that as it as a given we're like, Okay, well, what if, like, we could hire someone and then get cheaper health insurance? Because I mean, there's there's company plans, like that HMO I quoted, like, you could get that for like, seven or $800 a month for a family on an employer group plan.

Colleen Schnettler 12:09
Okay, can I can I pause you here, but you are a company? Why can't you get company plan?

Michele Hansen 12:14
Because it's a spousal only group. So there is there gonna be some key words I'm going to drop in here that are like things you're going to need to Google if you're looking for health insurance. That is one of them -- is a spousal only group, which is specifically like, you know, like people think of like mom and pop businesses.

So oh, and so one thing I forgot to mention on COBRA, by the way, you only qualify that if you work for a company that has more than 20 people, companies under 20, people don't have to offer Cobra coverage, which really sucks if you work at a small company.

Okay, so we are a company which I was like, we're a company, we should qualify for health insurance as a company. But because we were a spousal only group whenever we went to go talk to all the PEO, so these are companies like just works and Gusto has a PEO and like they'll basically administer all of your benefits and an HR for you. They would not work with us as a spousal-only group. You had to have at least one employee of who, who was not, you know, like married to the founder on the policy.

Colleen Schnettler 13:27
That seems completely arbitrary.

Michele Hansen 13:30
Yes. So, so we realize we're like, Okay, what if we, like hired someone like part time for like,

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
$15 or $20,000 a year? And we ended up getting connected with sort of an acquaintance of ours through the, you know, MicroConf, Laravel entrepreneur world. And, you know, they had had issues with health insurance. And I was like, Oh, you don't like like we can hire, you know, our acquaintance's wife, and like, she can work while the kids are in school. And like, they need health insurance, because they they had been doing, which a lot of people recommended to me, were called health shares, which we'll get back to that. And so we like looked into this, but then it ended up being like, way too complicated, because we still wouldn't have qualified because not only they, they're, they're in a different state, which meant that we would have to be incorporated and paying taxes in that state. And then we would have to have a separate plan in that state. And we have to qualify for not being just a founder, only spousal group in other states. So it actually would not have solved our problems. I think they were in Missouri or Arkansas, and we're in Virginia, and so that didn't work out. But we actually went down the path of thinking about hiring someone just because of health insurance.

So then the next thing we looked into because they had talked about health shares, was like okay, maybe this is something we can do. Have you ever heard of health shares?

Colleen Schnettler
No.

Michele Hansen
Or health ministries are sometimes called?

Colleen Schnettler
No.

Michele Hansen
So they are basically these organizations that it kind of functions like health insurance, except that isn't. So everybody pays into it. And then whenever you have to go to the doctor or whatnot, then they pay out of that sort of central kitty of money. But they're much, much cheaper like $500 a month. The so the catch with them that they're not insurance, usually they're run as a ministry. So there there's like, usually specifically like Christian organizations, and I got some, some people have had really good experiences with them, some people have had really bad experiences with them. For me, personally having to certify that I was Christian in order to get health insurance felt like the most screwed up version of American capitalism possible. And I like just could not wrap my head around, like, coupling those things together. And, and some people had some real horror stories with them, like not paying out, they also oftentimes they won't pay for, you know, therapy or, or other things like that, like they have some, you know, specific things that they they don't believe in, and they won't pay for. And so I decided that wasn't the route for us, but it is the route for some people. So I'm just going to mention that it's kind of worth looking into and seeing if that's going to be a fit for your family.

So at this point, I was feeling pretty dejected. And then I had a had a breakthrough.

Colleen Schnettler
Yay. Tell me.

Michele Hansen
So I learned that there are a handful of states that allow small business owners to qualify for small business health insurance as a group of one.

So basically, they allow something that grammarians would would absolutely balk at that it considers one person, multiple people. Or there's also a spousal-only group of one because you're legally considered one person. And so you're also a group of one if you're if your spousal-only. And so I found this chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is associated with Kaiser is a nonprofit that does health research. And it goes through every single state that says whether they have what what their definition of a small group is, which is usually two, but some states define it as one. And then whether they are guaranteed issue insurance for a self employed group of one, which basically means that does the does the insurer have discretion on whether they will grant you coverage? Or do they have to grant you coverage like they would a larger company? So this table I want to say is, is slightly out of date. And but it's a good start. So like, for example, is that you know, in Connecticut, like a group is one person versus in California, it's two.

This was a really good start learning this specific language, "self employed group of one spousal only group," this was this search term, that got me off on the direction of actually finding out that in my state, because those Marketplace premiums have been skyrocketing the last couple of years. Um, the state actually passed legislation that made it so that for the purposes of health insurance, spousal only groups of one could be considered for employer health insurance. And this law in Virginia had passed in 2018 and became valid in like the middle of 2019. But I remember I even I had to like email the and call the state insurance commissioner, the state representative who wrote the bill and my state representative, who I believe voted for the bill, to confirm that spousal only groups qualified for this because there had been previous legislation about groups of one that specifically exempted spousal-only groups from qualifying for it.

Colleen Schnettler 19:23
Geez.

Michele Hansen 19:23
Right. So I actually ended up getting like like a, like a letter from the Commissioner of Insurance in Virginia or an email saying that like yes, specifically like spousal- only groups qualify as as groups of one and can purchase employer health insurance.

So then I went back online to healthcare.gov. And and it was like, oh purchase small business health insurance. They have their own rules for purchasing health insurance, and we did not qualify to purchase small business health insurance through the Marketplace and I still don't understand why. And there are all these different rules about it. But we couldn't purchase it through the Marketplace. And I was like, This doesn't make any sense. Like it says that I can purchase it. But this is also saying that I can't purchase it. And so it's crazy. So I ended up emailing a broker I had worked with years ago, because I'm years and years ago, I was the Operations Manager for a small digital agency. And I was responsible for buying the company's first health insurance plan. And I have to say, like, if I had gone into this process, without that understanding of the health insurance industry that I learned from that, like this, this would have been totally overwhelming, which is why I'm doing this podcast.

Colleen Schnettler 20:42
I'm overwhelmed just hearing a story. Like this makes me never ever, ever want to have to find private health insurance.

Michele Hansen 20:52
I think I need to write a blog post because this is probably --

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Total, you know, this is so overwhelming word vomit on insurance.

So, so anyway, so I ended up emailing this broker, and I was like, I was like, Can you just help me understand what this means? And like, can maybe, can I buy insurance from you? Like, am I allowed to buy insurance for you? And, and he was super nice. And and he was like, you know, we usually work with larger companies. But, you know, here's a here's a broker that works with small businesses and and, you know, I have some clients who work with them. And, and, and maybe they can help you. And so I talked to this local broker, which I had, I guess, I had initially been kind of afraid to do cuz I was like, Oh, we don't qualify, like, we're just gonna waste their time. Like, I don't want to even bother with that. They ended up being super, super awesome. And they said, No, we like we have had had clients who are able to get insurance as a spousal only group of one, you know, we can work with you.

In order to get through underwriting with them, which is basically like the health insurance company then, you know, thoroughly goes through everything with a fine tooth comb, kind of like how when you get a mortgage, you get a pre-approval, but then you actually have to send off all your tax returns and bank statements and everything for them to, like, fully vet it. So it was like stuck in underwriting with the health insurer for like two or three weeks. And I ended up having to send that paperwork that I had from the Commissioner of Insurance, like I had, there was like a policy letter I had found online, and like something from the state representatives I had talked to, and then that email I had, specifically saying this spousal only group of one qualifies in Virginia, and then having to send it to them and in convincing the insurance company of what the law was and telling them what the law was.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
Because they didn't even seem to know it. And it also it just changed six months earlier. The insurance company did not seem super eager to work with us, but we were granted insurance.

Colleen Schnettler
Tada!

Michele Hansen
And that took effect in March. And I think we actually got dental included with that. So I think it's about like $1,300 a month.

Colleen Schnettler 23:12
With what's your deductible?

Michele Hansen
None.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, okay.

Michele Hansen
Yes.

Colleen Schnettler
So it's better than your Cobra cover. Sweet.

Michele Hansen 23:18
Oh, way better than Cobra coverage. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I think we're actually we're saving like $100 a month or something because because the dental and everything else was was included so it actually ended up being pretty awesome but then of course the pandemic hit which is you know, on the one hand really great to have insurance but also you know, we stopped going to the doctor and to the dentist and everything and then and then we ended up moving to Denmark this summer and so now we have to pay for insurance through our taxes and so we never even used this amazing health insurance that I fought so hard to get but yeah, that is the saga. "Spousal only self employed group of one" are the search terms people are going to want to use when they are tackling the unruly dragon that is us health insurance. Um -- it's awful man.

Colleen Schnettler 24:19
How many hours of your life do you think you wasted trying to sort this out?

Michele Hansen 24:23
oh my god like hundreds of hours and then also there's the expense of it right? Like if you're thinking about you know, running your let's say your product is making your salary, right, it's matching your salary which is a time when a lot of people considering jumping into full time. If you have a family you need to add $15, 20,000 on top of that to really you know, plus you know, whatever you're paying in taxes right like to get at what is your you know, what is your f-you money number, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
It's crazy. It's I think it's the number one thing that holds people back from becoming entrepreneurs in the US. And then it gets even more screwed up when you realize that that's actually the point. Like the point is for people to not work for themselves, the point is for people to work for companies, because again, the, the whole point was to encourage people to work for companies without raising wages, which is, quite frankly, I mean, it's a crazy thing to look at a chart of wages in the US since the 1970s, and see that the cost of having an employee has gone way up for a company, but wages have stagnated because benefits costs, especially health insurance, have skyrocketed.

Colleen Schnettler 25:45
Yeah. So can I summarize, for those that are thinking about making this leap and trying it? First thing, use your COBRA as long as you can. So you can have time to sort it out.

Michele Hansen
If you have it, if you work for a company with more than 20 employees.

Colleen Schnettler
if you have access to it.

Colleen Schnettler
Second thing, get on the internet, and see if your state qualifies for this group of one company health insurance.

Michele Hansen 26:06
Self employed group of one. And if it's only you, you might have to add a spousal only self employed group of one.

Colleen Schnettler 26:17
And then once you sort that out, you have to go to the marketplace and try and buy it. But they might not let you buy it there, because they don't even know the laws?

Michele Hansen 26:27
I wouldn't even they don't know the laws, if you don't have an employee. It doesn't seem like you can buy through the Marketplace, even if your state allows you to buy Small Business Health Insurance without an employee.

Colleen Schnettler 26:36
So you have to find an independent broker and write them. And then you're going to email them that email you got from your state, maybe telling you it's legal. That sounds great.

Michele Hansen 26:46
So they're not using a broker at least is that you don't pay extra on top of that, like there's all sorts of kickbacks going to the insurers. It's kind of like when you buy a mutual fund or life insurance, like you're like you don't pay a fee to your agent, like they're just getting a percentage fee. Which is also -- this is also why you should be cautious about financial advice from somebody who works for a company. But that's a topic for another day. But basically, your broker is going to get a get a kickback from the insurer. And they will show you they should show you plans from from multiple insurers as well. Be -- don't be afraid to go find a local broker. And if you have a friend who you know works in HR, for example, for a company near you, in your state, maybe ask them who they work with. And maybe that whoever they work with can get you off on the right direction. You can also just Google it, but I feel like with such a complicated thing, people like to work with people who are recommended.

Colleen Schnettler 27:44
Yeah. Wow. Well. eah. Glad you guys sorted it out, essentially,

Michele Hansen
It's a saga. Gaga.

Colleen Schnettler 27:50
Yeah, no kidding.

Michele Hansen
And it's so expensive. Like I just said, If policymakers actually wanted to encourage small business creation, reforming health insurance and making it not so ungodly, complicated, and expensive with what I would say is the first step.

Anyway. Did you get your 10 users yet?

Colleen Schnettler 28:15
I did -- got them yesterday.

Michele Hansen 28:16
So to catch everybody up. Because we had our interview last week with Michelle, which was so amazing, by the way, like I really want a VA after talking to her.

So Colleen got her image management service done and ready and into the Heroku marketplace, which is the first place she's launching it. And in order to get it out of out of beta -- or into beta --

Colleen Schnettler 28:42
So it's an alpha. It has to go to beta.

Michele Hansen 28:45
In order to get it into beta with the Heroku marketplace where like other people can search for it and sign up for it. She needs to get 10 users of it. So, did you get your 10 users?

Colleen Schnettler 28:58
Got them.

Michele Hansen
Yes!

Colleen Schnettler
Got it yesterday! Victory!

Michele Hansen 29:00
Sliding in under the deadline! I had written in on my calendar today ask Colleen if she got 10 users. And you're like, "this is my goal, hold me to it. And you did it."

Colleen Schnettler 29:12
And that's one of the things I love about our coffee chats is, as this is a side project I'm trying to fit in between work and life. It helps to have our weekly catch ups. So I'm like, Oh, I got to do this. Because I told Michelle, I was gonna do this. So yesterday, instead of just like throwing it into the ether, like, I targeted specific people, I knew that I knew how to Heroku accounts. I was like, "hey, do you want to sign up?" People like personal invitations, and it worked. So I got my 10 users. So the documentation is almost complete. I wrote it once. I gotta go and add some documentation for other languages because I wrote it. It's very Ruby on Rails specific right now. So I need to go back and add some other language support. And then I submit the documentation for approval, and then I believe I had to talk to a real person, which should be fun. And then it's in beta. And then it's I can't charge for it yet at that point, but it's open. And it's available on the marketplace to allow users to sign up and try it out.

Michele Hansen 30:15
So a couple of weeks ago, we're talking a lot about documentation. And I'm curious -- if kind of had almost a mental block around it.

And I want to say, or you just really weren't looking forward to it. Like, it was very much a chore. And I'm curious if we made any progress on it.

Colleen Schnettler 30:33
I find that for me, writing documentation is like writing an English paper was in high school, like, I hated starting. Now, once I started, it was okay. But man, starting was just challenging. And documentation is the same way. Two days ago, I started two days ago, so better late than never right? I sat down, and I started writing it. And once you start, it's okay. Right, you get into it. And so I wrote my first draft of it. And then I was reviewing it today and realize I hadn't -- I needed to include this for, you know, different languages. So it's almost done. So it should be done by tomorrow. So by next recording of our podcast, I will definitely be in review, I would have hoped they can turn it around faster than a week, we'll see.

Michele Hansen 31:21
It sounds like. You said it's boring, like a high school paper, but you didn't treat it like one, you know. I mean, I didn't start English papers until the night before. So you, and you've actually you're editing it and you're editing it, you're going over it, you're I mean, maybe you were super conscientious in high school.

Colleen Schnettler 31:42
Once I started getting into it, it was fun. Because I was able to like, take a step back and try to put myself in the shoes of someone who's never seen this before. So it was good for me to approach it in that way, to really try and spell out all the details of what's happening, how it's happening, and how you can work with it. So it was actually kind of fun. Once I started, man, there's just something about starting that's tough with that, for me, I don't feel that way about writing code. Like I love trying to implement new features or whatever. But there's something it's, you know, I don't blog. And that's probably why. You know, there's a lot of talk in the developer community, oh, you should blog. I've written like five...

Michele Hansen
There's a lot of talk in the developer community that "you should blog, you should have side projects, you should know why..." you don't need to do any of that.

Colleen Schnettler
Let me just say you don't need to do any of that. If you don't want to do that. The blogging thing, especially like I love that other people do, and I appreciate it. But it takes a ton of time. And it's just not something I've ever been into. So...

Michele Hansen 32:47
But you know you are into, is like solving your problem and not having to deal with this anymore. And I wonder if you can kind of put yourself in the shoes of Colleen six months ago who was slogging through image management manually on a site and like, imagine that you are talking to yourself six months ago, and explaining this really cool tool that you have just found. But you have to tell past you how it works.

Colleen Schnettler 33:19
Yeah, totally. And so I'm trying to approach it in that way, like, and it's funny because so I have to write it in other. Like I said, I have to use other languages. And I don't know Node. I've never I mean, I know JavaScript. But I haven't written anything with a Node back end. And so a friend of mine, jumped on a call with me today to talk a little bit about the node ecosystem. And how if you have a Node application, the ways in which you might implement this. And it was great to see his perspective coming in from like, a completely different language. And it also he was like asking me how something worked. And this particular part I had written like six months ago, I didn't even really remember I was like, I don't remember if I preserve the ID or the name of the tag or both. So I had to go back in and check. So I added that to the documentation. So when I forget again, in six months, I can look at my own documentation.

Michele Hansen
Nice!

Colleen Schnettler
So it's good. You know, another thing that I'm thinking about, but it's a little premature to do is I told you it's everything is written in such a way that I can pull it off of Heroku. And I have more people interested in this that do not use Heroku. So my original plan had been to like go through the entire Heroku pipeline. But the problem with the Heroku pipeline is you have to get 100 people to sign up.
That's crazy.

Michele Hansen
That's a lot.

Colleen Schnettler
That's a crazy lot of people. Are you kidding,

Michele Hansen 34:49
Like, I mean, if I can, like if you're getting basically five people a week. Like that's gonna take you 18 more weeks. Right,

Colleen Schnettler 35:01
like it's gonna take forever. So I don't, I don't, I'm not there yet. Like, I've got to get my documents approved. But as soon as I'm in beta, I'm also going to, maybe we'll see, we'll talk about it.

Michele Hansen 35:11
Like 18 weeks? How, like, how many more Perpetual Marches is that, I don't even?

Colleen Schnettler 35:17
it just seems like I don't know, if I'm missing something I, as I said, I think I actually get to talk to a human. So I can be like, hey, human, really. Um, so I've got I've had a couple people that are not on Heroku asked me to use it. And I'm tightly integrated into the Heroku ecosystem, because I'm a Rails developer. But I know a lot of people who are pure JS developers, and they're not. They're not using Heroku. So some of them are, but most are not. So I'm thinking maybe once I get everything rolling with Heroku, I will take the steps to release it into the wild. We can we can talk more about that. But I've been thinking about that, as more and more people have kind of been like, Oh, I want to try it. I'm like, Oh, well, right now. You can only sign up for Heroku. They're like, Nah, I don't use Heroku.

Michele Hansen 36:03
Well, guess what's being off of Heroku? You can also charge for it right away.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, girl. Sure can!

Michele Hansen
So maybe, to kind of, you know, yeah, as you said, once you get everything sort of set on Heroku. I mean, also, you're removing your platform risk, right, like we talked a little bit about the whole, don't build your house on someone else's lawn risk, and you are diversifying that risk right away and can potentially start bringing in paying users faster. Sounds like a win win

Colleen Schnettler 36:33
Yeah. So yeah, that might be that might be a win win. So I'm thinking about that.

Michele Hansen 36:42
Well, we'll be excited to hear where you are next week.

Colleen Schnettler
Awesome.

Michele Hansen
And if anyone else has any other questions for us, or things that you would like to hear us talk about, definitely feel free to tweet at us. You can find us at @softwaresocpod.

View Details

Michele Hansen 0:00
Hey, welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 0:04
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michelle Penczak
And I'm Michelle Penczak, the CEO of Squared Away.

Michele Hansen 0:09
We are so excited to have Michele with us our guest, another Michelle. She. So she said she's the founder of Squared Away, which is a company that employs mostly military spouses to be virtual assistants. And they have over 130 remote virtual assistants working for them. So Colleen and I are super pumped to have us joining our virtual table today to learn more about her business and what they're working on.

Michelle Penczak 0:47
Thank you guys for having me. I'm excited to chat with y'all.

Colleen Schnettler 0:52
So Michelle, I have just so many questions about how you started this business and grew this business. And I would love to like kind of hear a little bit about the beginning of your story, I read some of your Medium articles about how you were a virtual assistant and you got laid off. So most people, when they get laid off, you know, they try to find another job, or they just don't find another job, but you decided to start an empire. So can you tell us a little bit about that.

Michelle Penczak 1:18
I wish it started and found that cool. But um, I it kind of sounds like a really bad country song getting started. Um, I was a virtual assistant for zirtual in 2015. And this is where the sad country song part comes in. My husband had deployed two weeks before I was three months pregnant with my first little boy. And I was actually on a family vacation when it happened,

Michele Hansen 1:51
Oh my gosh.

Michelle Penczak 1:52
So literally woke up one morning, five years ago, and couldn't login to my email. And that's when I found out along with 399 other people that we did not have a job.

Michele Hansen 2:05
Oh my gosh.

Michelle Penczak 2:07
I still am like, Oh my god, I can't believe that happened. even five years later, it's kind of crazy. But, um, I called one of my clients who was to be honest, my favorite client at that point, and I kind of had a mini meltdown on the phone with him. And he was like, "You know what, it's going to be okay, because we're going to get you more clients, and I'm going to keep working with you." And he told me that and I was like, You know what, yes, I'm going to kick ass regardless of what's happening right now. And I'm going to do my thing. And I did that and started my own independent contractor business as a VA. And I worked literally, my husband will tell you, I worked up until the moment I got my epidural, with my four year -- now-four-year-old, but I was literally like, putting my out of office email up when I was going into labor. And I took a grand total of two weeks off. And because it was just me, at that point, supporting my clients, and worked with them with a newborn and that whole thing and becoming a new mom and all the craziness that goes into that.

And in true military fashion, Colleen, I'm sure you are familiar with the military fun, um, my husband came home one day and was like, hey, guess what, we have orders to Hawaii. And I was like, shut the front door. Get outta here. I cannot even entertain this idea right now. And, um, I can't, you know, working with my clients. Um, I told them when we were getting ready to move to Hawaii that I was taking a week off to move. And I took a week off, we moved to Hawaii, and I started working with them like normal. I just started getting up at 3am to work Eastern standard time hours with them. And still had, you know, a nine month old at that point. And I told my husband was like, I am either insane, or I have way too much of a coffee addiction to stop this. And he was like, you know what it's working. And I did that for about six months before Squared Away was kind of implanted in my brain.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen 4:31
Can you talk to us about how you're, you're in this state where you are waking up at 3am every day with a newborn, navigating everything that comes with having a baby and attempting to work and then you decide to create a company and -- talk to us about that. So I like I'm so excited to hear this, I have to say cuz like we started Geocodio when our daughter was four months old. And people always think we're crazy. And I don't think I've come across anyone else who started a company with a baby. And so I'm really excited to hear from you about how that came about.

Michelle Penczak 5:26
I, so my co founder, Shane, he was one of my clients, and his company was doing really well. And he had always told people about, you know, the glory of having a virtual assistant as a resource on your team. And he was like, you know, what, I need you to scale. I need you to clone yourself. And I was like, Huh, this is as good as you get like, you get me. And he told me, he was like, you know, we need more of you. How can we do that? And I said, I told him, I was like, let me think about it. And I called him a couple days later, I said, I figured it out. We're good. We can do it with military spouses. Because I had always heard, you know, in my journey, as an assistant, how can you work? How can you have a baby and work? How can you still be able to do this as a military spouse? And you know, I would tell people, hey, I work as a virtual assistant. And they would say, Well, how will How can I do that? How can I get into this, and I didn't really have a good path for them I, at that point, I just kind of fallen into it with my circumstances. And this was a really clear cut path for me to say, this is what I did. This is how I provided help provide for my family. And this is how we can make a path forward for other military spouses as well. So yeah, it all kind of happened by circumstance. But um, my when the idea came about, I'd been in Hawaii for about six months. And my son was thriving, he was going to preschool. And I was like, You know what, because I don't get enough sleep as it is, let's take this journey. Squared Away started, was officially formed in March of 2017. And I brought on my very first assistant, who is now my director of operations, in July of 2017.

Michele Hansen 7:26
That's amazing. And I think I think maybe, almost with both of you, it's probably worth diving in a little bit more on just what it's like to be a military spouse and how hard it is for military spouses to work. Because I think, you know, being sort of like non military, myself and not coming from a military family, like, this isn't something that that you really come across. And like the unique challenges there.

Michelle Penczak 8:00
Yeah. And I, I can speak to the pilot side of the house, I know calling you said your husband's a Navy pilot, as well. So their schedules are so unpredictable. Like sometimes they're flying in the mornings, sometimes they're flying in the afternoon, sometimes they're flying at night, and they're just kind of all over the place. And when you have to be that constant for your family and for your kids saying, Okay, well, I'll pick you up from school, I'll do bedtime routine, and all that good stuff. That's something that's very fluid with every single day. And it's not predictable, and the following week, and being able to say I have this job or career that I'm working towards during the day and being able to support your family is huge for a military spouse, because a lot of times it's so reactive to the military members schedule that, you know, you can't typically work a regular nine to five job in an office or even you know, as a teacher, sometimes it's really hard. And one, one of the "safe" jobs, I guess, for military spouses, so is extremely challenging, because, you know, there's just so much unpredictability there.

Colleen Schnettler 9:13
Yeah, not to mention the moving on top of that.

Michelle Penczak 9:17
Yes. All of those things. Plus, you may move every couple years. Absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler
Which is, I mean, that's why I got into software, because I could do it on my own time remotely.

Michelle Penczak 9:27
Exactly. And that's something that you don't have a set schedule, because in my experience, most employers were either like, Oh, well, you have to work this schedule. If you don't, then we're gonna let you go. Or on the flip side, Oh, we don't want to hire you at all because you are a military spouse and you're only going to be with us between two and four years is that so? There's so much stigma that goes along with being a spouse, especially when you're applying for a job and I think what I've found is that people who are you know, I've seen a lot of companies that will say, Oh, we support military spouses. But then when it actually comes down to hiring a military spouse, they always find a reason not to.

Colleen Schnettler 10:12
Yeah. So you decided you wanted to start growing squared away. What was your first step? Did you go for clients first? Did you look for talent first, like, how did that kind of evolve from you and your partner to this hundreds of employees?

Michelle Penczak 10:27
So oh, I wish I had a really good answer for that. But it was more, we're on a teeter totter. So the more popular we became with clients, the more assistants were able to hire. And it's kind of still that way on now, we hire between four and six assistants a week, just depending on our client demand. Um, this time, last year, we had about 60 assistants. And now as Michele said, we have over 130, which is great.

Michele Hansen 10:57
Wow! Over 100% growth in a year, that's amazing.

Michelle Penczak 11:04
The pandemic was extremely terrifying at the beginning, but we found with everybody moving remotely, um, you know, we did have a tough couple of months where we weren't bringing on assistants, we didn't have very many clients coming on board. But then we started to get back to where we were, and continue to grow, which quite honestly shocked the heck out of me in the middle of this pandemic. But our team is amazing. They're extremely talented, they have found so many different creative ways to work with their clients and support them. And most of the time, just being a listening ear and saying, hey, let's brainstorm together, more so as like a partner than a typical assistant.

Colleen Schnettler 11:50
What I'm wondering is, you started this process five years ago, with a baby, as a military spouse, and now you've you've grown this very successful company. Was there ever a time you wanted to quit?

Michelle Penczak 12:04
Oh, yeah. More if I wouldn't be lying. If I said there wasn't, I'm there. This time, actually, um, I had my second little boy in May of last year, and my husband was deployed. And it was just me and my four year old, my mom came out for about six weeks to help me. But after she left in July, it was so hard with a four year old and a deployment where he was finally understanding what it looked like to have daddy gone. And I was getting used to mothering two, instead of mothering just one, and Squared Away was really starting to boom, then, and I was so tired, I was so frazzled, and it was just hard. And I wanted to quit so many times, I would call my husband and say, How can I do this, I'm literally it's literally just me, I'm in Hawaii, I don't have anybody other than my friends and, like, family from afar. And it was hard. It was extremely hard on me, it's been hard at points in time on my marriage. And it's hard to for my kids, because, you know, they is a struggle to be present sometimes when I'm trying to balance, you know, the needs of my team and the needs needs of my kids. So I would say that there's definitely been a lot of points where I've really taken a moment and said, Is this something I really want to keep doing.

It's so funny that every time that happens, somebody will come to me and say, "Thank you for this opportunity. It's doing amazing things for my family." Or, "Michelle, I just want to tell you, like, this is an amazing company. It's so supportive." Like some type of comment will come through even just like a message in slack or something, just saying, thank you so much for having me on your team. And when I take a step back and look at how many people we have, and how much value they're feeling as an individual spouse, it makes it all worth it. And that's something I wouldn't trade for the world. And I hope it teaches my boys a solid work ethic and, you know, taking care of people and how important that is.

Colleen Schnettler 14:30
Yeah, it must feel amazing to have a business where you're actually like a profitable business where you're actually doing good for the world to, that's like a win win.

Michelle Penczak 14:36
Yeah, I I literally have to like pinch myself at least once a day and say, Oh my gosh, this is happening. This is incredible. And we have assistants who are from Poland to Japan. We have them all in between. And that's just something I never would have imagined that a few years ago.

Michele Hansen 14:58
I think it's interesting how you say when you're having those tough moments, nice comments from people that you work with, come through and really motivate you. And this is something that Colleen was talking about last week how she just got her first customer for her new service, and how the the journey to that point was so long, but then you get to that point when someone appreciates it, and I find that in our, in our business to where I feel like there's so many blog posts and everything about staying motivated working on your own company. And, and I think what I see in your story, and in ours as well, is that that motivation is as much internal as it is external, from people simply appreciating you and what you do.

Michelle Penczak 15:58
Yeah, it's, and it's not just from assistance, either. It's from clients, it's from people who've, you know, we've had clients who've been with us for two years, and they're just like, I can't imagine my life without my assistant, who is my right hand. And, you know, even from new clients who have had their assistants for a week saying, Oh, my gosh, like, my life is changing because of this person, like, those small comments means so much, especially when I am personally struggling with, you know, the conflict of, you know, family versus business. But the really great thing about Squared Away, I think, is that, you know, our mantra is, we're a family first, we're business second, and I have 130 people who I can say, "Guys it's a rough day, let me just tell you, what my four year old did." And we'll all kind of commiserate together and we laugh together, we cry together, we pick on each other, like, it's very much a family. And that's something that, you know, I have team members tell me all the time, like, it's so hard to log off with Slack and have boundaries, because I always want to know what's going on with people. And I think that's great, because, you know, we have that internal and external support.

Colleen Schnettler 17:15
So when you started to grow Squared Away, do you have a business background? Or were you just learning on the fly?

Michelle Penczak 17:22
Totally on the fly, um, I had my background is actually in political science and history. So I can teach you all you want to know about history, but I couldn't tell you what MRR was three years ago, to save my life. Um, I was totally learning on the fly, I still am learning on the fly a lot of times, but I always, um, my rule of thumb is to always be transparent with my people and tell them what's going on. If they want to know if we're having a bad month or a good month, or, you know, if we've had a crazy client situation or something like that, I'm always like, this is what it is. And this is what I'm thinking moving forward. I'm behind number one is also my mantra, transparency, number two, like, and going with my gut. So those are my top three things. And I feel like they've taken me this far and will continue to take squared away as far as we want to go. But those are, that's my background, I don't have any type of business experience whatsoever.

Michele Hansen 18:31
As you've learned about business over the past couple of years, and, and clearly have sort of discovered an innate propensity of yours. for business. Are there any resources that you have found useful in that journey?

Michelle Penczak 18:50
Yes. Oh, my gosh. Um, so my favorite resource is actually a book by David Marquet. It's called Turn the Ship Around. It's about building leaders.

Michele Hansen
Yes!

Michelle Penczak
Have you read it?

Michele Hansen
Such a good one.

Michelle Penczak
Oh, my gosh, yes, it is one of my favorite books, but he is incredible. And it's teaching, it teaches you to empower your people on your team and not ask for and not have them ask for permission. So my team knows but you know, never go to Michelle and say, Can I or may I? Hey, this is what I intend to do. And I would love your feedback kinda thing. Um, but that's how Squared Away is built out completely, is based upon that. And I would say that's been my biggest and most helpful resource.

Colleen Schnettler 19:36
So were there any -- when you were building this business were there any or you're still building this business, I guess? Are there any communities that really helped you that you were a part of any like groups or anything like that, that kind of helped you on this journey? Yeah,

Michelle Penczak 19:50
Absolutely. So I'm a part of a few different ones. So the first one I would say is Dreamers and Doers. It's It's an amazing group of women who are just badasses in and of their own right. And they're building all types of different businesses out there. And their resources have been phenomenal. We have a lot of clients who work with them. And they're just women empowering women, which is always amazing and such a joy to be a part of. So that's a huge one. And then I'm a part of several different military spouse Facebook groups. That, you know, it's teaching women how or spouses how to find work as a spouse, and the different companies that are military spouse friendly. And I'm just sharing type different types of resources for resumes and different free resources out there.

Colleen Schnettler 20:51
So when you are selecting people, like, that's got to be really hard, I imagine because I imagine everyone wants to work for you. And you want to keep your quality high. Like, can you talk a little bit about that process?

Michelle Penczak 21:04
Yeah, absolutely. So there's like, I want to say, like five different steps in our application process. And it's something that we have just improved over the past few years, based upon who we've seen improved, or just work really well internally, um, with most of our assistants have a bachelor's degree or more, we have a couple of PhDs internally, which is really cool. I just have a bachelor's so I'm always in all of how smart they are. But um, we asked for that. They have to have certain details in their profile like -- one of our random questions, what's your favorite flower. If you don't provide your favorite flower, then you don't make it through the application process, because we are a details business. So if you can't get all the details, obviously. They also do an interview with Kelsey, who is our Director of Operations. And if they make it through her then they interview with me, and then we offer them the opportunity to train with us. Not everybody makes it through training. They realize that it's not exactly suited for them in their talents, or it's something that they didn't expect. But typically, we also have them do two to three training tasks to make sure that they can actually make it through to the interview.

Colleen Schnettler 22:36
What kind of things do virtual assistants do?

Michelle Penczak 22:39
Oh, my gosh, you name it. Um, we have done everything from basic admin scheduling to planning yacht parties in the south of France. Um, and literally, that was an actual test. Finding a small, the smallest boat in Cannes and filling it full of ice and champagne. And having a saxophonist on the dock real and true task that we had.

Michele Hansen
Wow.

Michelle Penczak
That was actually something from my co founder that he will never live down. So that actually happened and the probably one of the only times I've spoken spoken French since college.

Michele Hansen 23:25
So, so something we tend to talk a lot about on our podcast is that we workshop, whatever is going on in our businesses and what we're working on that week. And so I'm curious what were you working on this week?

Michelle Penczak 23:41
This week is actually pretty unique. Um, we I've actually been focusing on the Military Family Caucus Summit. It's a virtual summit that's taking place tomorrow. I'm the keynote speaker is actually the Secretary of Defense. And I'm going to be talking about military spouse employment. So that's something of its focusing on this.

Michele Hansen
Wow.

Michelle Penczak
I'm excited to talk more about military spouse employment, it's gonna be it's amazing.

Michele Hansen 24:09
It's a huge issue, right? Like, I mean, Colleen has said a couple of times that you know, one of her goals in life is for military spouses to never have to sell leggings.

Michelle Penczak 24:21
Praise be. Yes. leggings and hair stuff. Like that's where I'm at with that or face. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 24:30
It always hurts so much to see that because you can see that people have so much potential and and so much capability and are completely getting taken advantage of by those companies. And I think that's really what attracts me to to your company and what you are building because you are enabling people to find fulfilment in a way that is not exploitative.

Michelle Penczak 24:58
Exactly. And That's something I've trust me, I've had my fair share of people paying me for leggings and hair stuff and everything in between. And to me that just, I feel like they're preying on military spouses because they are so susceptible to those, because they do want to be able to provide for their families, but there are not enough legitimate opportunities out there that people are saying, or companies are saying, Yes, we can work with you when you PCS. Yes, we can work with you, when you go on maternity leave, or paternity leave. Yes, we can work with you when you know, you're having a rough day because your husband or your wife just deployed, like, those are things that people want to know, hey, you know, my husband's coming home in a week, or two or a month, depending on when the military decides to tell me the exact date is. And, you know, companies don't always work with that. And that's something that our assistants prep us ahead of time they prep their clients. And we have a process in place so that they can take that time. One of our assistants just got her husband back after 10 months. And that's something we absolutely wanted to make sure that she had the time to do. And she was still able to step back in after she took that time with her family. And that to me is worth its weight in gold. Because I can't imagine like working with a company that didn't support that.

Michele Hansen 26:36
So in that case, like, would you have another assistant fill in for them? Or?

Michelle Penczak 26:42
Yep, the process with that is, the assistant essentially preps covering assistant ahead of time, the client knows it will be coming, they might not know the exact day depending on when the military is telling the spouse, but they walk through what their client needs, preferences, all that good stuff, so that it's extremely seamless whenever one assistant steps out. Um, and they still have that support without, you know, losing any downtime with their business.

Colleen Schnettler 27:16
That's awesome. Have you guys raised money, like funding? Are you good? Have you thought about it?

Michelle Penczak
We have thought about it, but it's not for us.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, can you? I'm always curious.

Michele Hansen 27:27
Can you talk us through why it's not for you?

Michelle Penczak 27:30
Number one is, I don't think unless we had a military spouse or someone affiliated with the military, that they would truly get our mission. And that's something I never want to hand over to somebody who doesn't truly get it. And I always want our people to feel like we're a family. And if we were ever to raise money, I would be extremely particular about who we brought in, to be able to continue to fulfill that mission and that support system. And quite frankly, I don't know what I would do with more money right now.

Michele Hansen 28:07
It sounds like with your business, you know, if you have clients coming on board, and what not, as long as you can keep a balance between the number of clients you have and the number of assistants that you cash flow would seem seem to balance. But I guess you know, what happens if you have a client that drops? And then what do you do with their assistants.

Michelle Penczak 28:31
So our assistants will go back into the pool, or assistants who are actually available to work with clients. So if we did have a client cancelled, then they would be able to pick one up pretty quickly afterwards.

Michele Hansen 28:45
And so when that happens, like for example, do you email your existing client saying that someone is available and try to place them and basically, sort of increase the average revenue you're getting per client in that scenario, or what happens?

Michelle Penczak 29:00
if they cancel, then we wish them well on their journey outside of Squared Away, but then the assistant will go back into our pool of available assistance. And then our client relations team essentially plays matchmaker with our new incoming clients. So we're not really losing a whole lot there. Um, and we have a 30 day cancellation policy. So we know well ahead of time, if clients or clients are going to cancel.

Michele Hansen 29:30
How would you say the split is between virtual assistants in the company versus other support staff, like you mentioned, you have a director of operations and you have a client support team and I'm just curious if you can get us give us a sense for the percentage in the work staff.

Michelle Penczak 29:50
So right now all of our assistants have clients except for my directors, which is myself and our director of clients relations, client connections, our finance director and our director of operations. So the five of us are the only ones without clients right now. Everybody else has clients that they work with. And they do might have a different role. So -- one of my assistants that comes to mind, she actually has two clients. And she's also a team lead, which means she made manages a team of between six and eight assistants. And she helps to facilitate any issues that arise in the client relationship. She's kind of their support our first managerial support when it comes to our tiers. So if any client issues arise, that's the first resource for our team.

Michele Hansen 30:52
It sounds like you've got a pretty well oiled machine at this point.

Michelle Penczak 30:56
It is they I took some time off a couple of weeks ago, and I am extremely type A where I feel like I had to kind of always know what's going on. And I was like, Oh, my gosh, you guys could rule the world. Without me, this is amazing! So they totally blew me out of the water. And they're just every single one of them is it are just incredible what they do.

Colleen Schnettler 31:21
That's amazing. I'm so impressed. Like, this is so cool. So my Michele -- Michele Hansen,

Michele Hansen
Me?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, you're my Michele. My Michele knows that. Like, as she mentioned earlier, I mean, like my personal mission, I see all of the same struggles that you see, right, I've been, we've been in the military for 15 years. And it's such a frustrating situation to see women who want to be there for their children, because to your point, husband can't pick up the kids because who knows where he is. But they also want to work and they want to feel valued, and they want to contribute to society, and they want to support their family. And so they sell leggings. And this just drives me crazy that they can't find another path to employment. So it just what you have built is so cool. I just think it's the neatest thing.

Michelle Penczak
Thank you, thank you.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm so impressed how, especially without a business background, you just like built this thing. Like, with this whole structure

Michelle Penczak 32:16
Totally flying by the seat of my pants. I'm like, okay, we we need to do this. But it's, I wish it were as easy as it worked. I truly do. But I just, every time I hear the numbers of military spouse, unemployment 300,000. That's insane to me.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michelle Penczak
A year ago, actually, the unemployment rate for military spouses was 24%. And that's what it was during the Great Depression for the entire nation. 24%. And that blows my mind, especially when these are spouses that are supporting their service members who are like, pledge their allegiance to our country. And it just it breaks my heart that there are companies out there that say Thanks, but no, thanks. You're a military spouse.

Colleen Schnettler
So what do you see as the future for Squared Away?

Michelle Penczak
Oh, my gosh, I would love to just continue to watch our team grow and grow and keep just doing more badass things for their clients. We literally have assistance in every niche that you can imagine. We have clients who are New York Times bestselling authors, we have people in the entertainment industry, we have venture capitalists, we have CEOs of startups, like, we literally are working with everybody right now. And that's really neat to see. I tell everybody, I'm like, you know, we have so many spouses with so many different backgrounds. We have yoga instructors, we have real estate agents, we have teachers, we have a couple of nurses. And you know, the yoga instructor works really well with the venture capitalists, which was really funny. Um, but these are people who are just so able to mold themselves to these businesses and support their clients, like nothing I've ever seen before. And it's just incredible to watch them, you know, bloom on their own after we've kind of put them in that spot. So I'm very, very proud of them.

Michele Hansen 34:23
I just have one more question for you. Is there anything that you wish someone had told you when you were starting this business?

Michelle Penczak 34:31
I wish somebody had told me to have better boundaries. In all honesty, I would say that's the biggest thing. As a mom, it breaks my heart to tell my four year old "Mommy has to go on a call right now" or "I have an email to check" or something and I wish somebody had told me in the beginning you know, enjoy the moments with your family, your business will still be here. Because you know, even then they see the good work ethic, they also see me not having good boundaries for family. And that's something I wish I'd been better about. I would say that the biggest thing.

Michele Hansen 35:13
I can say that like I have been there. And, you know, that's something my husband, I talk about that, you know, sometimes our daughter who's seven, now she'll say, Can you guys stop talking about Geocodio because it's so boring, and I don't want to hear about it. And I'm sure your kids recognize the work ethic that you're teaching them. And, I mean, you're giving a speech tomorrow and sharing a platform with the Secretary of Defense, which is amazing. And they will probably find out about that later. And they will be amazed by you. And I think they will understand.

And, and I will say, you know, as someone who, whose parents were also, you know, like running companies as I was a kid, it was so good for me to be exposed to that as a child and seeing that it's possible, and seeing all those different day-to-day things that come up when you're working for yourself or trying to get something going. It's so valuable for kids to see that. And it's so clear how much you love your kids.

Michelle Penczak 36:25
Oh, yes, it's, I would say, that's the biggest thing, I just, I want them to always know, you know, I bust my ass every single day for them. And for our families that we're out there, you know, providing employment for and that's something that will always be here dear to my heart. I just said hope that that's something they recognize the older they get.

Michele Hansen 36:47
Maybe one more question here, so maybe someone listening is thinking, hey, having a military spouse as a virtual assistant actually sounds pretty awesome. And I need to scale myself a little bit better. So if somebody wanted to start using Squared Away, like, like, how does that process look like from a client's perspective?

Michelle Penczak 37:08
they can always email me or me at Michelle@gosquaredaway.com or they can submit our contact form on our website. And they can definitely get started with our client relations team and walk through the process of finding their perfect VA match.

Michele Hansen 37:26
That's awesome. Well, thank you so so much for joining us today. It's it's been really great talking to you. And I'm so excited to see where you and the company go from here.

Michelle Penczak 37:39
Well, thank you guys so much for having me. It was such a pleasure and I am always thrilled to talk to another military spouse. So thank you, Colleen and Michelle both for having me.

Colleen Schnettler 37:49
We'd love to hear what you think of the episode. You can tweet at us at @softwaresocpod and we will chat with you next week.

View Details

Michele Hansen 0:00
Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 0:03
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen 0:06
Hey, Colleen!

Colleen Schnettler 0:07
Hey, Michele, how are you doing?

Michele Hansen 0:10
I'm good. I'm good. I had a pretty productive day today. Little ADD in the morning, but it was good.

Colleen Schnettler 0:16
What does that mean?

Michele Hansen 0:19
Well, so I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid when I was 10. And so it's always been something that I have to work with, you know, working against it is not going to happen. And you know, recognizing the procrastination of it is really just me being a perfectionist in a lot of ways. Um, you know, it can also make for a fun morning, though, I made some good memes, I think.

Colleen Schnettler
Nice.

Michele Hansen
No, actually, I actually, I got a lot of stuff done. You know, a couple weeks ago, when you asked me what I was working on, I mentioned landing pages. And then, and then I was kind of like, Ah, that actually wasn't what I was planning to talk about. And, and I feel like you were kind of disappointed. But I actually did a ton of work on landing pages this week. So we can talk about that if you want.

Colleen Schnettler 1:11
Oh, yay! Yes, I do.

Michele Hansen 1:13
Yeah, so this is a huge thing for us. Because we don't do any paid marketing. We don't do any outbound sales. We just do SEO.

And a couple weeks ago, we were talking to Alex Hillman. And something that really stuck out to me from his book, Tiny MBA was, you know, when done well, marketing and teaching are almost indistinguishable. And I think that's so true. Because a lot of what we do when I'm writing a like landing page, is just explaining how our service works, and how to do something, or, or how to do something in general, that happens to relate to our product.

Colleen Schnettler 1:59
Okay, so can we take several steps back here and talk about landing pages?

Michele Hansen
Sure!

Colleen Schnettler
Because people talk about landing pages, like they're these things, they just throw up real quick. And so I kind of want to talk about strategy. And like, practically speaking, do you have? Do you always use the same template? Do you try to, you know, like, when you're marketing towards a specific group, like how do you tailor your landing page for that group?

Michele Hansen 2:25
There's a lot of different types of landing pages. So what I'm doing is generally very product focused. There's a whole huge segment of landing pages that is sales landing pages and writing conversion copy, which is --

Colleen Schnettler 2:46
Conversion means I convert, I buy something from you?

Michele Hansen
Exactly.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen 2:50
The idea is, you know, basically, you run some ads for people who are looking at a specific search term, or you or you have, you know, SEO targeted to that search term. And then you bring them into a sales page. And there's tons and tons and tons and tons of copy. And there's a story and like all of these sorts of things. And there's there's like these calls to action that are building up to it, right, like, and then they want you to convert and buy immediately from that page.

That that is a whole school on its own. And not really something that we do, because we don't really need to do a lot of convincing for people since we have a free tier and people can just try it and figure it out if they need it or not, before they even buy it.

So when I'm talking about landing pages, it's generally very product focused copy that is sort of either describing features of the product, or is like a step by step how to do something with the product, or is somehow just better describing what we do. Very often that comes out of conversations that we have with customers in Intercom where, you know, if we get the same question more than two or three times, we usually take that as a sign that either we need some more copy on that or, you know, maybe we need to fix something in the product to make something more discoverable (that is, easier for people to find it). Or add affordances, which is the ability for them to do something. That's generally where we focus when it when I talk about landing pages.

Colleen Schnettler 4:34
Okay, so do you have specific rules like in your head, like from a design like should it only should it fit on a visible window? Should they not have to scroll? Do you even think about these things? Are they not important at all?

Michele Hansen 4:47
Yeah, I don't really think about that, actually.

Colleen Schnettler 4:50
Okay, I don't know. Like, that's why I'm wondering like, I've never I'm telling you for me. Like I feel like I could write a whole back end system API to do whatever but you asked me to make like marketing page and oh, my gosh!

Michele Hansen 5:02
It's scary, right? Like I blank page is very intimidating.

Colleen Schnettler 5:07
And it's like, the whole thing, where do I put the images? What do I say?

Michele Hansen 5:15
Like, yeah, how far it's a lot, I have so many hang ups around this because I'm so afraid of coming off as spammy or, like too heavy handed of a sale that when I'm trying to write copy, it sounds so boring. Like, it's just so so dry.

And what really helped me was thinking about marketing as education.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And thinking about it, okay, maybe this is just, this can just be a step by step how to do something, you know, for example, how to add metropolitan statistical areas to a list of addresses, which is something that, for example, somebody who works in sales might do because they need to know which of their customers live in and around Boston, and in and around Chicago, because they're planning a trip during normal times when you go on trips... For example, and so it's just like a step by step list and and then there's, you know, the SEO tactics, bringing into that, like, you know, all of the, the list items need to be headers and saying, first, organize your spreadsheet of addresses that you want to add the Metropolitan Statistical Areas to, like, the next step, upload the list of addresses that you want the Metropolitan Statistical Areas for to Geocodio, it's like using the same words over and over and over again, so that, you know, Google or search engine will pick up on that using those terms in the URL is a really basic one. That is easy to overlook.

I actually I realized this morning, that we had someone reach out to us asking about features of our unlimited plan. And I realized, like, Oh, my gosh, I typed like the same reply multiple times a week. And we don't actually have a page on our site that is just devoted to this plan that I can send someone and the same way. We also don't have any page, specifically devoted to free geocoding or our pay as you go tier. And so now, almost seven years into doing this, we finally have a URL that is geocod.io/free-geocoding, which is the number one search term that brings people to us and it like never occurred to me until this morning, that we should have a page with the you know, h1 and URL of free geocoding. Like sometimes it's just so, so obvious.

Colleen Schnettler 7:57
So you mentioned a little bit in there about, like your varsity level, right landing page builders, so you're --

Michele Hansen
Oh, no, okay.

Colleen Schnettler
Junior Varsity.

Michele Hansen 8:09
I mean, you know, we we occasionally walk by the bench they sit on...no, marketing is my weaknesses.

Do you have, like you met you threw out a couple SEO things that I know a little bit about? Because I was reading about SEO for fun

Michele Hansen
As you do Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler
Like, right, I'm so weird, right?

Michele Hansen 8:31
Do you have non-business related hobbies?

Colleen Schnettler 8:36
They're called children. Those are my non business related topics.

So there's, so do you have a list? Because, you know, I was doing all this, like marketing research, I was reading about SEO. And it seemed like all over the internet, there were like little snippets of here's a couple things to do. But I didn't find like a good comprehensive list. Do you just have your own personal list that you have found worked for you guys? Or do you just keep all this stuff in your brain and try to remember it?

Michele Hansen 9:04
It's a combination of things I absorb from other people. And things I you know, I might see online in various places, but actually, I was asking a friend about this a couple of weeks ago, who is an SEO expert themselves and like, it's their full time job. And I was like, is there you know, a book or an ebook or, like, something you can send me that is like a, you know, a sort of soup to nuts kind of guide for SEO, not only from the high level but also specific tactically. And they're like no.

Colleen Schnettler
Interesting.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it's very all over the place. And and I think, you know, something is difficult being a bootstrapper is that a lot of content is written for much bigger companies, or companies that are much more flesh than we are, which is difficult because they have very, they might have very different goals, like their goal might be to get, you know, people to sign up with their email address or to submit a particular form because their goals are feeding into somebody else's goals, because there's another department that's actually going to try to convert them into a paying user and all those sorts of things. So, and I run into this with UX stuff, too. A lot of that content is geared towards people who are, you know, on a team within a larger organization, and part of that for them is like managing the politics and the incentives of other people. So no, I haven't really found one good guide, like I wish there was an ebook or something I could send people to that that was a good all in one resource, both tactical and strategic level. Mostly, it's just, it's just things I've learned, you know, I will go in and poke into ahrefs. Every so often, probably not often enough, given how much we pay for it.

Colleen Schnettler 11:14
Michelle, can you tell those of us new to marketing, what Ahrefs is?

Michele Hansen 11:19
So Ahrefs is this tool that you can use to basically diagnose how good the SEO is on your site and on a particular page. And so it will tell you, the keywords that are leading people to a page and your referrers, which are other websites that are linking to you, which is a very important part of SEO and building reputation, like the age of a URL is really important. And so like, if you can get a really old website to link to you, that's really helpful for your SEO, because then the search engines basically think you're reputable. Um, it also talks about like general keywords, leading people to your site, and then how easy it is to rank for particular ones. I think you can also see what your competitors are ranking for as well. And so maybe finding opportunities there.

Quite frankly, there's so much going on in Ahrefs that I feel like I have only scratched the surface. And most of their instructional content is in videos, I really hate watching videos, I would much rather prefer like text because I can read really fast. So I always like oh, I'm gonna spend time watching Ahrefs today. And then I just, I just want to be busy, I want to do stuff, I don't want to watch a video. So I just pay a lot of money for something that I don't fully utilize. So that's, that's your business advice for today, don't do that.

Colleen Schnettler 12:55
So it sounds like so in your head based on people you know, and your own experience, you kind of have some SEO tactics and ideas that you weave into your landing page. So when you're going to make, when you're going to make a new landing page, how do you even start you start with like, I know, you guys target specific sectors, like real estate agents, I assume and Census Bureau people? Do you start with your target audience in mind, and then like, word data mine or whatever you you know, look for the popular search terms and then build a page around that?

Michele Hansen 13:30
Sometimes.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
So, for example, that page I was talking about with people adding specific types of Census data that just came about because I had a customer asked me how to do that. And I was like, Oh, we should just have a guide that tells people how to do this. So that the next time somebody asks this question, I can just send them a link rather than spending 15 or 20 minutes going back and forth them on Intercom. Um, sometimes I will be targeting a specific vertical--

Colleen Schnettler 14:01
By vertical you mean? industry? industry?

Michele Hansen 14:05
Yeah. So for example, you mentioned real estate websites are customers of ours.

But I usually don't work on those specific pages very often, more so it's how to do a specific thing. And, you know, it might be that people in sales need the Metropolitan Statistical Areas, for example, but people in all sorts of other occupations need those too. And so we don't generally target that kind of educational content to a specific type of person because the number of people who work with, you know, Census FIPS codes, for example, in their work is so incredibly vast that I would inevitably lead be leaving people out if I tried to only talk to one specific use case and also, I don't know, all of the different tools they use. Like every industry you know, every function has their own specific set of tools. And so we actually try to be as general as possible. And, and not talk too much about industry specific tools. Because you know, spreadsheet is a general word. And if they're downloading something from their CRM or whatnot, it's it's going to be a spreadsheet.

Colleen Schnettler 15:17
So the way you're describing this is -- I think maybe my definition, my head is different than the way you're describing it, as I'm thinking of what you're describing more as content marketing. But they're really this for some reason, in my head, a landing page is like that, that, like, has a big "Buy Me Now!" on it, and you know, is like,

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
I think of it as is like that, but you're basically using that definition to encompass anything that they land on.

Michele Hansen 15:44
Yeah, I guess so. I, you know, I, you know, again, I'm, you know, so I also I like I think of content marketing, like I feel like we don't really do content marketing.

Actually, before the pandemic, I was super jazzed about starting a whole content marketing initiative, kind of like, do you know, the site Priceonomics? So they are this, I think they're a Y Combinator company. They're like a data studio. And they will write all these really interesting, quirky articles on things that they find in their customers data when they're analyzing it. And my idea was kind of to do something similar with all of the address data that we find.

So like, for example, in South Carolina, there are towns named Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway, all right next to each other. So like, just kind of like writing articles about things like that, like I even came up with some cutesy names for it. Like, I really wanted to name it CurioCities, like, cities. Ah, but somebody had already taken that night, then I came up with some other name and forgot it. So that was very productive. Um, yeah, I wanted to do stuff like that. And then, you know, the pandemic hit and, and just everything fell apart, in terms of voluntary initiatives nevermind, you know, barely staying on top of the stuff that you have to get done.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
I would love to do something like that and do more, like creative writing, I think that's also something I struggle with, with doing. SEO writing is it's just not. It's not very fun. You know, it brings people to us. And so it's necessary, but I enjoy creative writing. And so I would like to do that. But it's also, it's harder to justify from a business perspective, like it's fun, but like, is that really going to bring in customers, but then again, we're bootstrapped. We don't have to focus just on the bottom line. And if I want to do something fun, that's basically a side project within our main product, then, you know, I'm my own boss, I can do that.

Colleen Schnettler 17:58
Awesome.

Michele Hansen
Anyway, what's going on with you?

Colleen Schnettler
Well, for those who are just joining us, I am in the process of launching my first product. So last week, I had a couple customer potential customer interviews, yeah, which was really fun. I've really enjoyed it. One of the people I spoke with is actually using it now. So I know, that's pretty exciting.

And it's interesting, because the way I've written it, it doesn't work with React, which is a modern front end framework. And one of the guys like, just kind of hacked the JavaScript to make it work with his stuff. And he's like, cool, I'm gonna try it out. So that was really exciting. And so now there's two people using it, me and this other guy. And it's funny, because as soon as, you know, he was like, "Oh, I'm gonna use this!" I was like, great. And then of course, I thought of all these things, I was like, Oh, I gotta do this, I got to do this, I got to do this. And--

Michele Hansen 19:00
Were those new features or like, things that you...?

Colleen Schnettler 19:02
know, so it's stuff on my end.

Michele Hansen
Okay.

Colleen Schnettler
So I had, I have focused so much on getting it working, which is great. It works great. As far as I can tell, no problems yet. But as you know, as you know, I kind of didn't pay too much attention about tracking everything, not tracking everything. That's not the right word, too much attention about how I'm going to charge the customer eventually, and things like that. And so, for example, I keep track of all of the storage each customer uses, but I don't get I don't email myself every day, like how I don't have any automatic stop gaps if they go over their limit, you know, I don't have anything like that. And it's, you know, so just kind of like things like that. I was like, Oh, I should probably I should probably figure that out before I actually get too many people using this.

So yeah, so just like back and stuff like that, like should I email myself every day so I can keep track of what everyone's doing? Should I just check my dashboard? Should I put an automatic stop gap if you know, someone uses too much storage, things like that. So nothing like super crazy important right now. But as I do ramp up, I need to kind of have that sorted out. Because you know, it's storage. Like it's not, it's not free.

Michele Hansen 20:24
So, yeah, I think it's basically like, you know, buying yourself insurance to protect from that downside risk of somebody running away with it. And that doesn't really matter if nobody is using it. So it makes sense for you to not build that before the launch.

Colleen Schnettler 20:43
Yeah, cool. I agree. That's why I didn't. And again, it's just, it's, it's not, it's certainly manageable now where I can, you know, just look, every day, I have about five people who have like, signed up, remember, I told you, since I'm first releasing it in the Heroku, add on marketplace, I need 10 people to sign up. But I have not, I can easily get the other five. So I am not worried about that. I'm not worried about getting that number to that number 10. But all I need to do to get it to beta. And beta is when like, I can accept everyone and I'm show up in the what they call the Elements Marketplace, which is the Heroku Marketplace. So I have to get all my documentation done to so I did a couple customer interviews, I got a couple people signed up. And now I want to like fix a few things. Nothing that impacts a customer, but like stuff on my side, like I said, like I you know, like basic stuff, like how am I going to track this. And then it's just the documentation. And they have really extensive requirements for documentation.

Oh! I remember what I want to tell you! This was really cool. So remember, when I told you I was like, you know, my documentation is really terrible. Like this is this is not going to work. But it was, it was really nice, because the couple people I spoke with on the phone, our developers, and they figured it out in like two seconds. Like, I don't have to explain anything, it was so great. Just because I'm so used to as a as like a consultant, I have technical customers, but I also have a lot of non-technical customers so I'm used to like having to explain things in intricate detail to, you know, help my non-technical customers kind of understand. So it was kind of cool, because I was like really prepared to go into intricate detail. And the people I spoke with, like they had it sorted out in like a second, they were like, "Hey, I just add this thing and this thing, and I'm good." And I thought, you know, it's like, oh, this is gonna be hard to explain, because there's like five steps, it was fine. So that was good.

Michele Hansen 22:43
And you're like talking about SEO, our documentation is consistently one of our top ranked pages. Because when people are searching for how to do something, that is the page that is describes how to do something, and absolutely, the way to do that thing, once you find the product should be as intuitive as possible. And that's such a great sign that like it was so intuitive for them to figure it out. But the documentation is, is almost more marketing than it is user onboarding.

Colleen Schnettler 23:16
That's interesting. I never thought about that. But that makes total sense. I think that's one of the good things about starting because like my app is set up, that I can just like change a few things. And it can be out in the wild. Like I don't have to go through the Heroku add on our marketplace. But I like it because for like a first step, because it's really constraining me in these ways. And I know, if I wasn't doing it, I'd be like, "Oh, it's good enough. And I just feel like it's free into the world." And I think it's going to take a while to write all the documentation they require. So I think the discipline of that is gonna to your point, like down the road, I'll have it right then I'll always have it once I write it.

Michele Hansen 23:55
That's a great thing that like you, you can start out on the Heroku Marketplace, but you're not necessarily tethered to it.

Colleen Schnettler 24:04
Yeah. Oh, not at all like I which is which is exciting, which is good for long term.

Michele Hansen 24:10
I mean, too often, you know, see products that are really dependent on a particular platform. And it'd be so great to use a platform or a marketplace to get a product off the ground. But whenever I come across the those products or have people ask me for advice on those products, I always come back to the saying of "Don't build your house on someone else's lawn." Like if you can't decouple your product from that marketplace or that platform, or they would make you know, any any change and you would be cut off or significantly impacted. That's a really dangerous place to be and so it's, it's so good that you're starting out on the platform, but you can see future off of that platform and you were not going to be dependent on the Heroku Marketplace, even though it will be a good place for you to launch and get customers and whatnot, you can survive without it.

Colleen Schnettler 25:12
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I just feel like I've just been like heads down working, working working, right. I have a lot going on, which is exciting and fun. And there's a lot, you know, more I got to do. But I don't know, two weeks, maybe, maybe that's my goal to be in review by the Heroku team to be in beta, which would be really exciting. So that's, that is my goal. I'm speaking it aloud.

It's funny, because I always feel like we have our podcast recording, and I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I have a whole week, I'm gonna get all these things done. And then the following week, it's like two days before we're going to record and I'm like, oh, shoot, where did my time go? Like, did I get enough done? So I don't know. Time flies, I guess is my point. But, uh, yeah, so I think two weeks is kind of a realistic goal for like, applying for beta. Yeah, so it's exciting. Like, I'm pumped.

Michele Hansen 26:08
I'm excited for you.

Colleen Schnettler
Thanks.

Michele Hansen
You've been working towards this for for so long, just not just this particular product, but working towards having a launch and having a user of something that you made. And I just sort of have to ask you like, how does that feel to finally have something that somebody else that someone else is using?

Colleen Schnettler 26:31
It feels amazing. Like, honestly, I know, I know, the advice from from everyone and yourself included is to talk to a bunch of people before you build something. And I know why people give that advice. Like, that is great advice, you should absolutely find a market before you build something. But I think it's easy for aspiring entrepreneurs to get stuck in this cycle of never making kind of any progress. And sometimes this is more of like a small win. So like, it's funny, because when I tell my friends, this is my like, product, my non-technical friends, they are like, so underwhelmed. They're like, so you can put images on the internet, like, doesn't everyone already do that? You know, they expect me to be making something big and amazing. And I'm like, I get it, I get it's not sexy, but it's, for me, it's a stepping stone, like it's a small thing I was able to build in my extra, I don't want to say spare time, but you know, kind of in my extra time, put it in a marketplace. So it takes care of a lot of the overhead details and someone's using it and hopefully more people will be using it. And that is such a huge win. Like it just feels feel so good.

Michele Hansen 27:44
I feel like can hear the relief of I don't it's like relief or just like excitement. Like it's like relief that you're finally feeling that feeling.

Colleen Schnettler 27:55
Yeah. I mean, and everyone is like, you know, you've read people are sending me this videos about the SaaS slow on ramp of death or whatever that video is everyone loves. And that's, that's interesting, like, and I get it, but like not my problem right now. And these are like all good things to learn when you actually have people using your stuff. Right? So I mean, ask me again, in five years, maybe I'll be like, oh, that image thing was a waste of my time. But I don't think so. Because I think for some of us, it's just important to get going and you got to get out of your own head. You got to put something out there. And if it's a flop, it's a flop and you learn from it. And so like it does, it kind of does feel like relief. Right? Like, okay, this is a little thing I can do. You know, it's out there, almost out there. Like, that's really cool. That's so cool. I'm excited. I still have a lot of work to do, like I said, to get it out of this, like invite only phase. But it feels manageable. Right? Like, like when you're thinking of a new idea, and it feels like this big, huge thing. And it's just you and you have all these other responsibilities, like you know, work, kids family, I think you can start and then you stop because you get overwhelmed because it's just not like a manageable thing. Right? It's too much. So like, this widget is like a manageable thing. And, you know, it's I don't know, it just feels great to have something out there.

Michele Hansen 29:21
You know, in the same way that like Alex Hillman and Amy Hoy talk about Stacking the Bricks in terms of a product and businesses right and slowly leveling up, I think the same applies emotionally and to one's own energy right? And like you're taking the energy and enthusiasm and motivation that you are getting from this very small product, this one brick, and using it to either improve that one product or maybe send you off in another direction that adds to that but taking that little tiny bit of motivation and allowing that to propel you and knowing that, you know, maybe this isn't going to be a huge company, you none of us are, you know, even trying to build a huge company in the first place, right, but that little bit of motivation and that feeling of accomplishment, and just building those on top of one another is so, so powerful.

Colleen Schnettler 30:23
Yeah, I totally agree. Like, that's what it feels like. It feels like a little brick. But it's a big brick for me. And I need that to keep me motivated.

Michele Hansen 30:33
It's your first brick! Well, actually, no, it's not your first brick because you're consulting. So that's you have some,

Colleen Schnettler 30:37
I guess consulting was the first brick right.

Michele Hansen 30:39
I don't know if they're bricks. Maybe those are two by fours. I'm not quite --- I'm, I'm getting lost in this metaphor here. But I'm excited, I'm excited for you two weeks from now, looking at my calendar, looking at my calendar, writing it down. Ask Colleen about the stuff she said two weeks ago. Till halfway through your goal.

Colleen Schnettler
And halfway through my goal.

Colleen Schnettler 31:07
We'd love to hear what you think of the episode. You can tweet at us at softwaresocpod and we will chat with you next week.

View Details

Michele Hansen 0:00
Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler 0:03
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen
Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler
Hey, Michele!

Michele Hansen
How's it going?

Colleen Schnettler
I'm doing well. I'm excited to hear what you have to share with us this week since we didn't get to share last week since we did my little video intro. So what has been going on with you and your business?

Michele Hansen 0:22
Honestly, not a whole lot.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, fair enough!

Michele Hansen 0:28
You know, I was thinking about this. And, and I think that's kind of one of the things when you get to the stage that you have weeks when you're just kind of doing, like, normal work, you know, dealing with invoices, and cleaning up stuff from the past and responding when customers, you know, report an issue or bug with something and answering questions. And, and, and not a whole lot happens. And that's kind of what's going on.

Colleen Schnettler 1:03
I still think that's good for people to hear. Because I think when you, like me, as we've discussed, read a lot of like, these really exciting startup stories, it makes it sound like it's so exciting all the time. And ultimately, it's still a job, like you're still doing kind of mundane, but important work.

Michele Hansen 1:19
Yeah, I mean, it's the big project, if you can call it that, that I was working on this week was a lot of things dealing with invoicing. And, you know, we've been migrating customers over from QuickBooks to Stripe, which is just as thrilling as it sounds, let me tell you, but it's also super necessary. And it's the kind of thing that you write really have to do when you've got a business that's going and it's working.

And so for, for a long time, we had it set up so that if customers paid us with a credit card, they paid via Stripe, but if they paid us any other way, you know, a ACH, paper check, carrier pigeon, like that was all through QuickBooks. And I don't know why we did that. I think it's because we weren't using invoices for Stripe for a long time. And but that's created all sorts of accounting issues where when we actually want to make our financial statements in QuickBooks, which, you know, things like insurance companies and whatnot want... It always made such a mess in QuickBooks, because there was like, some payments would be counted twice. And then like we didn't really have one true source of revenue numbers. And I was always like manually patching it together with spreadsheets. And so that just you know, involved a lot of thing of, you know, setting up new subscriptions and checking once and twice and three times that everything is set up. And, you know, like, it's interesting, you do a lot of things early on that don't scale. And you do that intentionally because you don't know if you're going to be successful. And then when things do start working out, you you kind of have to, you know, basically bat your own cleanup.

Colleen Schnettler
Mm hmm.

Michele Hansen
And I did a lot of that actually, in my in my first job. And I think that was such a valuable thing, because I think it's something every business goes through, especially as they grow.

Colleen Schnettler 3:14
Yeah, I absolutely know what you mean, because I'm right in that very beginning stages where I don't know if this is going to work. And so I have absolutely made decisions that might be hard to change later if I have, if it is successful. And I can see that now. But I can see it now. But it doesn't seem like it's worth the time to put this really impressive architecture in place for you know, my three customers. So I can but I could definitely see you know where to work out down the line, I'd be like, "Alright, we got to really beef up, you know, change some of the things we made."

Michele Hansen 3:48
Exactly, I think we're, we're looking at doing something like that pretty soon with how we handle failed payments. So I mentioned you we have most of our customers are paying us via credit card. And when those payments fail, like usually the process right now is we just go through manually and follow up with them. Like they get emails from Stripe, they get emails from Intercom. Sometimes I have to, you know, oftentimes email them personally, like from my own email, but I've had to go as far as like calling the front office and asking for the accounting department, DMing them on Twitter, like finding any random contact information, finding people on LinkedIn.

Colleen Schnettle
Wow.

Michele Hansen
And yeah, and it's always so satisfying when you finally get it paid. And you're like, wow, but I spent what, like six hours chasing that down for $150 like, was that really the best of my time? And so we've been kind of thinking through like, how we might, how we might like automate some of that and any, you know, introduce kinds of things like you know, Your Account isn't paid. Like, you can't do anything until you've paid up or, like, actually, as of right now, even if you have an outstanding balance, people have to contact us in order to pay, like, there isn't a way to do it in the dashboard. Like all of those small things, I think if you're using a product, you don't realize that like, every single one of those is a feature, there's no like real, you know, there's no just sort of out of the box that comes with every single feature that you might need, like deleting an account and changing your email address and updating your credit card and paying a past invoice. Like, every single one of those is a feature and you're prioritizing that against something that's going to get new customers or have existing customers, you know, pay you more add more features for them, right. Like there's like boring business improvements, versus things like new features, and, you know, marketing related initiatives that are shinier objects.

Colleen Schnettler 6:01
Yeah, that's actually kind of interesting that you guys are this far along, and you're still handling all of that manually. I also think there's a way and we've talked about this quite a lot, like what do you need to ship. And there's always this, this temptation, I think, is a good word, to put everything in place before you put anything out there. So it's encouraging to me, I guess, is the right word to hear that, like you guys are still handling some of that manually, like those are things that you have been able to handle manually for quite a while.

Michele Hansen 6:32
We didn't even have billing code when we launched!

Colleen Schnettler
That's amazing, by the way.

Michele Hansen
Like we had integrated amazing Stripe, like we literally didn't expect anyone to pay us. And then you know, and we had that sort of like monthly payment cycle. And the first of the month came a couple of weeks later, and we're like, oh, we have to charge people today. Oh, we forgot to write the ability to charge people.

Colleen Schnettler 6:59
It's amazing.

Michele Hansen 7:01
Yeah, I mean, all of those things are just, you know, gradual, like, like, for a long time, actually, I think in Stripe, we were the way we were creating the payments was literally as individual payments, they weren't as invoices. And so if a payment failed, we had to manually go through and recreate the payment and retry it.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh wow

Michele Hansen
And it was like that for like, three or four years.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
So every month, I would go through and recreate all of the payments when they failed. And then if those still failed, then like a week later, I would do it again. And now at least since using invoices like Stripe will retry them. So it's it's amazing when you use the features of the products that are there already there. Right. Like it like I think, you know, you kind of talked about this with like AWS sometimes it's like, there's so much there that it's, you can't possibly do all of it at once.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it's an ongoing improvement. But I think, especially once you get to a bigger scale, those kinds of things really add up, monetarily and also in terms of time, right, like, whereas, you know what, when we first launched, if we had five failed payments, and it took me an hour to total to follow up with all of those, then that's not a lot of time. But if you you know, if you've got, you know, 15 or 20, whatever, like each one of those, if you're spending half an hour on it each, right, like that adds up very, very quickly. And thankfully, we usually have diligent customers who are businesses who are fine with paying us right, this is much, much more challenging when you're doing B2C. No operational improvements are automatic and and they have to be weighed against the the shiny objects that that often win out until boring stuff gets to a point where you're like, Oh, this is this is gonna break or this is broken. Oh, man, we have we Okay, fine, fine, we'll fine. We'll do this now. Fine. Like, that's usually how that conversation goes like, you're right. All right.

Colleen Schnettler 9:09
Well, it sounds like you were productive this week.

Michele Hansen 9:11
Yeah, I did a lot of boring stuff. And you know, what the boring stuff is good. The boring stuff, you know, makes the accountants happy, makes makes the insurer happy. Makes me happy because I don't end up going in six months later and be like, Oh my gosh, like, that was never paid. Or you know, we've been allocating resources to someone and they actually canceled three months ago, like, those are the kinds of things that you know, everybody gets sloppy on them, but you can you really can only be sloppy on them once or twice, but otherwise they'll really start to to hurt.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
But it's also kind of normal. Like, you know, you know, as I mentioned, I dealt with this in my first job, and I would say that one of my favorite activities was what I just simply called finding money, which was when It turned out that we had to accidentally, like not billed a client for six months like, because things hadn't been centralized before I was in that role or other things. And I would just go into my boss's office and be like, "Guess what! I found $3,000 today!" Like, it's just, it's so satisfying when you can close those things out. Yeah, it's a tough balance between the boring and the exciting.

Colleen Schnettler
Yep, sure.

Michele Hansen
Enough about my boring stuff Colleen. What do you got? This is this is the good stuff that people want to hear about right now.

Colleen Schnettler 10:36
Well, I feel like I'm in a really exciting, you know, phase of this building a business, right, like, just launched. So it's invite only. I'm trying to get my I haven't really started trying, I'm gonna try next week to get my 10 users and it you know, I'm full of energy and optimism right now. And, and so that's that's kind of a nice feeling. Although I am aware, as we've discussed before, like, now is when the real work begins. But one exciting thing that happened to me is, a few people watched our video podcast last week, and reached out to me and asked me if they could help me test the product.

Michele Hansen
Yeah?

Colleen Schnettler
And so yeah, isn't that awesome?

Michele Hansen
That's so awesome.

Colleen Schnettler
I thought so. And so I asked them if they would do a call. And they agreed. So I have two calls next week, with people who might want to use my product.

Michele Hansen
That's so exciting.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, I'm pretty excited. I'm really happy they did that. Yeah. If anyone else wants to use my product, please let me know. I think it'd be really nice to kind of get it in front of people see what their problems are. And see if this is a solution that can meet other people's needs, as well as my own need. So I'm kind of approaching it -- we've talked about the difference before on this podcast between customer interviews. And what do you call it user interface? You guys were changing your dashboard. And you were like.

Michele Hansen 12:15
Oh, yeah. Oh, actually, we released that this week. And that was kind of exciting.

Colleen Schnettler 12:18
That's exciting.

Michele Hansen 12:21
Yeah, so there's usability testing, user interviews. But then there's also sort of user onboarding, which may be these calls sounds like they're more like onboarding and sort of trying to figure out what what what they're trying to solve, but but in a very solution focused kind of way, rather than a, the exploratory solution agnostic way that a customer interview often is.

Colleen Schnettler 12:53
Right? Yes. That's kind of how I'm approaching it. I hope to, while I'm chatting with them to Yes, see how the onboarding is at the moment, because it is very shaky. I mean, the documentation, I just started reading the documentation, right. So the documentation is very sparse. And I, the nice thing about starting with a marketplace is that they force you to write really extensive documentation. So it's almost like it's kind of forcing you to have that discipline to actually write it down. Like I know, people with great products and no documentation, and they wonder why they can't sell it.

Michele Hansen 13:32
Like, what? How do you launch something without telling anybody how to use it?

Colleen Schnettler 13:37
I don't know. I think it's common with developers because we make this because it's the shiny object syndrome, right? It's fun to make the thing. It's not fun to spend hours and hours trying to write down how to use the thing that seems obvious to you because you created it.

Michele Hansen 13:52
When you're an electrical engineer. When you were in college, did you ever have to write technical documentation? Like instead of having English class, did you have like, tech, technical documentation writing class?

Colleen Schnettler 14:08
No.

Michele Hansen
really?

Colleen Schnettler
That wasn't a thing? Well, that was almost 15 years ago. And I think they have since learned, and I'm pretty sure they offer technical writing now. But I've been thinking about this a lot, because I'm about to start this marketing journey. And I don't know anything about marketing.

So Alex Hillman has a great article about this on Medium called The Fear of Beginning Again, and it's about how with the course he runs with Amy Hoy, how so many of their students are very talented designers and developers. And they're taking these designers and developers and they're trying to teach them a completely new skill, and how so much of the challenges their students face are psychology based. And one of my favorite quotes is he says, quote, but when these creative pros sat down to learn a new skill from scratch, where very few of their existing skills translate, they lose their freakin minds. And that really resonated with me because it's hard to start over. And you've worked so hard to get where you are in your current craft or trade, you know, this whole concept of Wow, now I have to start over again and learn this new thing. So it's not bad, I'm excited about it. But at the same time, I've worked so hard to build competence in a specific field. It's almost like I'm changing fields, and starting again, anyway, so there's just a lot of like, ego and like self evaluation, I'm finding kind of going down this path. It's really weird.

Michele Hansen 15:42
Yeah, I think we all do a disservice when we discount other types of expertise, especially as bootstrappers when, you know, you have to wear many different hats and sew your own hats as well.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes

Michele Hansen
Like, you have to be able to do all of it. Like, you know, I like my background is, as a product manager. It's not an accounting. But I have to do that. And that's also something that my husband has to deal with as well, because he's dealing with Stripe, like he's not, you know...you have to do a lot of different things and be able to appreciate that things outside of your sort of home expertise are worthy, and complicated, and capable of being interesting or even beautiful in their own right.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
To get us back on track, I know that you are a huge reader of books, and there's a voracious reader when it comes to doing anything new. And so I'm really curious what the resources are that you have honed in on as you start this marketing journey.

Colleen Schnettler 16:55
My resources are named Michele.

Michele Hansen
Oh, okay, well, I have some books for you...

Colleen Schnettler
Do you have any suggestions? Because I'm, like, totally new to marketing. But I know that I don't wanna say it's easy to make good tech, but it's kind of easy to make good tech, everyone has good tech, this is what's gonna make or break it, whether it's this image service, or whether it's a whole other business, like, I have to learn this stuff, because this is gonna make or break me when I you know, if I want to real business. So let me know your recommendations.

Michele Hansen 17:20
There's a really good one that a lot of people recommend, as well called, Obviously Awesome. That's all about writing, copy. And framing. Another one I really like, is Creating [sic: Building] a Storybrand which you may seem like for a technical product, like, how does that how does that apply? Right, like, you know, I think is very clear how it applies in B2C. But in, in, in B2B, it applies as well. And basically, the idea of that is that your product is not the star of the show. It's actually the user and the person buying it like they are the hero. And your -- what your product does is it elevates them to do what they do better or, or faster. And, and it's so fascinating, because it goes into how storytellers you know, people who write movies and books and whatnot, how they construct stories and how you have the main character of the story, but maybe they have a goal, or maybe they don't know what it is, but then they meet this guide, who helps steer them in a direction and helps them refine their goal, and they, the hero goes through a journey and whatnot. And it's basically saying that, you know, your product is not the hero. Your product is the guide. And so how do you frame that in your copy that it's not just, this is an image management service. This is spend more time on things that are impactful for your clients or, or like whatever those sorts of things are, you know.

I'm reminded of, actually, I'm reminded of my -- one of my brother in law's he launched a sort of handyman and lawn maintenance business in January of this year. And like talking to him about like, what his slogan should be and whatnot. And I remember some of the early drafts of it were things like, you know, we handle all the things you don't want to or we can do all of this or and it was like very much framed out like what the company could do, right? And we're like, but how do we frame this from the customer's perspective. And the slogan he ended up coming up with I think, was along the lines of "Your house can look good." Because it's something that people want it to believe about themselves, they want it to believe about their house, but they need a guide in the form of his company to get there. So it's not that his company is the hero that comes in and saves the day, which, like a lot of products kind of frame themselves that way that like, we're going to save you from what you're dealing with right now. It's instead No, like, you are capable of more. And our company will just give you that little push that you needed to get there. Like it was already within you, you I might talking about The Karate Kid or whatnot right now, or am I talking about landing pages, right? And so and so Obviously Awesome and and Storybrand are two really good places to start. They're not going to be super in depth on like, you know, these are the parts of a great landing page. And, and this is how you optimize for SEO and, and all the things like that. But they'll give you at least a good start to thinking about it from your customers perspective and the kinds of things that you need there and the way you write about them, too.

Colleen Schnettler 20:59
Yeah, I took a stab at trying to -- after we did our video podcast last week, I felt like I didn't explain it to you very well, like rewatching it. So I took a stab at kind of like narrowing down those bullet points. And that's what I was like, Oh, this is really hard. Like, I know why is great. But But how do you frame that in a different way? So that's awesome. I'm definitely gonna check that check out those resources.

Michele Hansen 21:22
Do you have any drafts of that framing that you've come up with so far?

Colleen Schnettler 21:27
Well, yes, I do. Now, I was not intending to share this this early. But this is what I got so far: "Dead simple file, uploading and storage. Simple file upload handles all the heavy lifting of uploading user files to the cloud returning a CDN URL for you to use whenever you need!"

Michele Hansen 21:46
Do you think that frames the product as the hero or the guide?

Colleen Schnettler 21:51
The hero. Because I'm not now that you've just said that? Like, I'm not saying anything about how I'm guiding you to have a better life.

Michele Hansen 21:59
Yeah, and yeah, I just thought of one of my favorite places to find examples of good marketing is actually Good Marketing on Twitter, I think they just changed the name to like Harry's marketing examples, or what it was called good marketing for a while. And he basically just does a ton of product tear downs, I'll take up the exact link to the Twitter account and, and put it in the transcript. So good, like, like he goes through different landing pages has like, this is why this is good. And this is what they're doing here. And, and I get so many ideas from that.

Colleen Schnettler 22:36
Awesome. That's exactly. I feel like I need to start immersing myself in that world because I like I don't interact with that world at all. So yes, that's the kind of content I want to be getting into now is like that kind of stuff to get an idea, because I'm telling you that little snippet sentence that was not impressive. I was like, that took me a while. It was not as easy as the marketing people make it look.

Michele Hansen 23:01
It's hard. And I'll say like, I looked at marketing examples for a long time. But until I read those books, I didn't really get why they worked. And I didn't really know how to frame things myself, like, you know, take those examples, and then transform that inspiration into something that works for our products. It became a lot easier, like having those those books as the underpinning and especially if you're already doing customer interviews, you're going to have a library, whether that's, you know, in, in Notion or in your head, of what are the things my customers are saying? What are the things they're frustrated about? What are the ways they describe what they're frustrated about and ways they describe their process? And how can I use those words that they are already using to create marketing that puts them as the hero? It's, it's really, really hard. I definitely don't think I have it figured out by any means.

Colleen Schnettler 24:04
Yeah, well, and like I said, I'm hoping that talking to these guys next week will just help me figure out, you know, if their problem is that did they frame their problem in the same way, for all I know, they're framing their problem a completely different way, or they're attacking it a different way. So I'm really excited and grateful for their time and excited to kind of see how this impacts them in terms of what they want to build. The interesting thing is they're both fellow indie hackers, they both have small SaaSes. So it makes me think I had originally thought and this is only two people. Okay, so this is not to base a decision on. But one of the things we talked about with my product specifically, is it's aimed at developers. But most developers, especially developers with like a full time job, they're going to have some really complicated solution they spent hours on and probably already works, whereas what I'm building might be more appropriate for people who are trying to get something together quickly people who have a SaaS, as we discussed many, many episodes ago, people in the no code space that just want a thing they can just throw in there. So I'm kind of like I said, I'm excited to kind of start looking at these different avenues and, and see, see where it goes.

Michele Hansen 25:19
Yeah, I bet there are some no coders listening to our podcast. I mean, that's a huge thing now. And I'd be really curious to see if if they experienced this problem, too.

Colleen Schnettler 25:31
Yeah, yeah. Because I that's an avenue, I really want to learn more about because I don't do a lot with no code. So I'm pumped to kind of learn more about that. And see what that's all about.

Michele Hansen 25:44
And don't make decisions based on two people.

Colleen Schnettler
I won't.

Michele Hansen
The absolute men is five people, before you really like and that's and that's if you've, if you've heard the same thing, basically, from those five people, then Okay, that that's a pretty strong, directional signal. But I mean, I've had so many times when, you know, when, especially when I first started doing user interviews and user testing, like you put in front of one person, and it doesn't make sense. And then you change it. And then you do the next person. And actually, they needed another way. And you're like, ah, I could have saved myself so much work just by being patient.

Colleen Schnettler 26:16
Yeah, that's good advice. So I got to get my 10 people signed up. So I hope to do that next week. And you know, of those 10 people, how many are actually using it, as we talked about, and how many are just like being nice. And being my friend and getting me into beta? I'm not sure. But of the people who are actually like, interested in using it, I'm going to try and talk to as many of them that will talk to me. Because I think, you know, that'll really help me just kind of see where people are and where their thought processes are.

Michele Hansen
Absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler
So yeah, so that's what's been going on. So like the launch is, it's just exciting. I mean, it's just kind of nice. I think we've talked about this before as well, like, I just needed the psychological win.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Like up shipping, something I totally get the the concept of you should definitely talk to people before you build anything. I understand that. And when I hear about really successful businesses, most of them did that. Right. They talk to customers before they build anything. But I am just at a point where I just need to psychological when of shipping something. And so I'm pumped. So I'm good. Like, I'm excited. And I hope that you know, when we talk next week, I've at least signed up to 10 people. I can't get to beta till I'm done on my documentation. So that's quite a lot of work as well. Like they have very specific requirements and like ways they want you to structure your documentation in the marketplace. So I don't think I'll be in beta next week. We'll see how everything else goes in life. But yeah, I'm like in that kind of fun, exciting just getting rolling stage.

Michele Hansen 27:52
Exciting. Well till next week.

Colleen Schnettler 27:54
Yep. Thank you for listening. You can reach us at on Twitter at softwaresocpod and we'd love to hear from you. Thanks.

View Details

See Colleen's product! Video at https://youtu.be/vdO7uFT63dw

TRANSCRIPT

Michele Hansen 0:00
We're doing something a little bit different. Colleen's product is ready to have a little walkthrough of it. So this will be the first time I'm seeing it. So we're doing something different. This week's episode is going to be a podcast as normal, but it is also going to be a video. So you can see what Colleen's product looks like. So hopefully this is just as enjoyable as whether you're listening to the podcast, or you're watching the video, we'll put a link to the YouTube video in the shownotes. Definitely let us know what you think of the format. And hopefully, it's interesting.

Colleen Schnettler 0:49
Okay, this is great. I'm super pumped to show you this. Michele, I'm going to share my screen with you so you can see it. Alright, can you see my screen? Yes. All right. So let's start from what the very beginning kind of what I'm trying to accomplish here. So this window right here that says new listing details, let's say this is your existing user interface. So your user is adding listings for I don't know, an event or a real estate site or something like that. So what you a typical kind of quick, easy implementation is just your typical HTML file tag, which is what you have right here. Now, I have found this to be like, really ugly, and I just don't care for it the way it looks. And plus, even if you're importing a file, this way, you still are responsible for setting up your cloud storage account, as we've talked about ad infinitum I know, but basically, you still have to get all the other back end stuff set up. So what you do is you would go to Heroku, you'd provision my application, and then you'd sign on to my application. And I would give you this script, like so basically, and I have not finished or like really worked out the documentation yet. But basically, I'm going to have a site, like once you've signed up for my application that says, Put this script in the head of your file of your website. So then you add this script to your site, save it, I'm running this locally, so we could see the changes kind of as they're happening. And now you get something like this. So Oh, thanks.

Michele Hansen 2:29
Well, there's a drop file.

Colleen Schnettler 2:31
Now there's a drop file, boxy

Michele Hansen 2:33
way of having, right.

Colleen Schnettler 2:35
So and I think one of the things that's really important here is I think, Heroku, I could be wrong, but like, it's mostly like Node and Rails developers. So there's people that are more focused on the back end. So anything I can do to make the UI less painful for you, is what I want to do. So So I worked for an events company at one time, so we had to deal with tons of images. And we implemented a drop zone like this, but we had so many problems with users trying to drop files that were too big files of the incorrect, you know, format, things like that. So what this does for you is if I wanted to drop some images, so if I try to drop a file, right now, I want to say I have a two Meg limit. And I'm probably going to change that I haven't worked out that detail yet. Let's say I have a two Meg limit. So if you try to drop a file that's bigger than two Meg's you're going to get this exe. And it's going to tell you the files too big. And then it's going to remove the file from the drop zone. So your user can drop a new file.

Michele Hansen 3:36
Ah.

Colleen Schnettler 3:38
okay. So I mean, even that I have a lot of like thoughts about like, right now you drop it, you and it's a timeout, like, I don't know if I should wait and let the user exit out. Or, you know how

Unknown Speaker 3:51
little

Michele Hansen 3:52
quick I didn't get to fully read read it the text until the second time. You did it, because you

Colleen Schnettler 3:59
need to look for it the second time. Yeah, I

Michele Hansen 4:02
didn't really know what was going to happen. But I knew there was some errors. So yeah, I would probably try to upload it twice just to see what that error was.

Colleen Schnettler 4:13
Okay, that's good feedback. And again, I can slow it down. I mean, maybe I should slow it down a little bit.

Michele Hansen 4:20
I also wonder about accessibility for that.

Colleen Schnettler 4:24
Right. That is an excellent point. I will look into that, because that's definitely something I need to address. That's a really good point. So that's kind of what I have now. And those are two good comments for a bad file. But what I really have gone back and forth, and left and right about is what about a good file. So let's drop a good file in here. And so there's all kinds of things I can do here and I'm probably just overthinking it, but like how opinion Am I going to be like that little green checkmark? Should that stay? Should I go? Should I keep the reason I kept I went back and forth on keeping this dashed blue line. And the reason I kept it was to show you if you change your mind, you can just drop a new file in there, right? You can,

Michele Hansen 5:18
yeah. And I guess, to me, a dashed line around the image implies that it's in a draft state and that they need to do something else in order for that to be saved.

Colleen Schnettler 5:29
Okay, that is what you think. Okay. Yeah, cuz I went back and forth on that. Like, should I read, because what I had originally, is I actually removed the drop zone and just put the image on the page. But when I removed the job zone, I then had to add a button so that they could bring the drop zone back up. So it started to get more complicated.

Michele Hansen 5:53
And I noticed that it shows the file size, even when the file size is an acceptable size. Yes, you walk me through why that is?

Colleen Schnettler 6:03
I think that's partially like, you know, when I started this, I was just trying to kind of keep track. So I would know immediately, like, Oh, this one is one fits, this one doesn't fit. But I, you know, have no strong opinions about whether that's helpful or whether the user even cares, which probably they don't care, right. They just want to know if it's successful or not.

Michele Hansen 6:28
Yeah, I, I would be curious to I mean, maybe there are people who get value out of that, maybe I won't discount that.

Colleen Schnettler 6:36
So I was showing this to a friend of mine. And he has a few apps on Heroku. And he suggested accepting other file types. Because his point was, if you have a really image heavy site, you're probably already using one of the big players in the image, site market. But there's a huge problem with like, if you want to email someone a PDF, or, you know, you're collecting resumes, or all the other kinds of file types that people might want to upload. So that kind of gets interesting, because then I was thinking, Okay, let's say we want I have a PDF here for my children's school, welcome newsletter. So if I try to drop a PDF, that works, but I don't ever have any kind of preview image. So you think that I mean, should I just leave it like that? You have thoughts on that?

Michele Hansen 7:24
Is there some sort of icon you can use for the image or file type like,

Colleen Schnettler 7:30
like a PDF icon? Yeah, that's a good idea. pdf. And maybe like, same thing for like a Word document or something like that.

Michele Hansen 7:42
I, you can even just have an icon that just represents a document in general.

Colleen Schnettler 7:47
That's way easier. So this is what I'm talking about. I like it, simplify one.

Michele Hansen 7:51
One, I upload something that isn't a document, like an Excel file, or

Colleen Schnettler 7:58
Well, I'm not. That's what I got to decide to. And maybe I don't, I'm not at the point now where I really need to, to, like, specify that. But I can just touch like, this is

Michele Hansen 8:10
really where you listen to your early users, right? So like, yeah, somebody who starts using it. And, you know, somebody sends you a support email and says, Hey, I love this, but I really need it to support Excel files, like Can you do that for me? Thanks. And what I would do, when that happens, is saying, thanks so much for reaching out. Can you tell me more about why you need Excel files? And like, how does this fit into your process? And like, what you're currently trying to use and why it doesn't work, and really drill into what their use case is. And it could turn out that somebody with weird file types that you haven't thought about, or I mean, Excel is not a weird file type, but it's not an image. Right. Right, um, that they could have a use case that is actually much more valuable to you as a business owner than something else. Yeah. I mean, it's a good sign that, you know, if you're getting feedback like that, I wouldn't necessarily need to say you need to support every single file type under the sun. When you launch. Yeah. Especially if that first hurdle is getting 10 users. So like, you know, find people who need images or you know, adding PDFs is something that someone has already expressed a need for. Then Then do that, but

Colleen Schnettler 9:29
Okay, yeah, no, that's, that's great. In a way,

Michele Hansen 9:32
yes. add things to the pile before launching,

Colleen Schnettler 9:35
right. And this is, you know, I think I even tweeted about it, like, I feel like that is that is part of this journey is trying to just decrease the scope, decrease the scope, like just get something you can get out there. And then if people use it, see what they have to say about it. Okay, so I want to show you something else. I've gone back and forth on a lot. And I actually had this different than I changed it. Okay, So let's say you have an image great. Woman in pink dress.

Michele Hansen 10:06
Okay, so what is going to ask you what happens if you try to save it without naming it?

Colleen Schnettler 10:13
Well, that would depend, I mean it so the image is still going to save. So this would be that would be dependent on the clients on the client's back end, like, I don't have anything to do with that, all I'm doing, what I'm really doing is I'm just replacing your file input with this drop zone. And your image, if it uploads, like it gets, it gets saved. So even if it's, there's like a failure on the client side, the image will still exist, so they can still save the image, even if they don't have a name for it. Like I don't, I don't have any requirements that you have a name for, because I'm keeping track of the name for it

Michele Hansen 10:49
like mine, you're just using their file name. Yeah. Okay.

Colleen Schnettler 10:52
So this is something I wanted to show you, let's say that you go in, you have this in your form, your user drops an image, it's good. And they create, okay?

So little slow, because I'm running it locally. Okay, so let's say this is, so this would all happen. This is pretend this, this site we're looking at is a user's website, right. So they can choose whether to show the image here or not. Now, if you go into edit it, look what happens. So I went back and forth on whether to send the image in here. And the reason I decided not to is because if the user wants to show the image, they can just add an image tag here with the image. Like I say, user, I need to I'm gonna use the term client to refer to the person putting this in their website. So let me show you this. So I can like make this more. So this is like, all you had before. Now, if you want it, you can add the image tag if you want. But that's something they would have to do in their HTML. That is not something I am doing for them. The reason I didn't is because I thought I didn't want to be that opinionated about what the image should look like. So let's say you want to show the user the image before they change it. But what if you want a bigger? What if you want a huge image right here? or what have you wanted smaller? So you have to add your own image tag? And what if it's a PDF document, you don't want to show anything? Because you don't have a preview for that? So this is all I'm providing right now.

Michele Hansen 12:38
So are you providing this edit functionality? Or is this just a functionality of the demo? No, you have created

Colleen Schnettler 12:46
this is just let me show you something. So, um, let's just like, I just want to show kind of show you what I'm talking about. So let's say you upload an image. Alright. So what's happening is your image is getting put to, you know, put behind a CDN, and I just give you a URL. So you, and by you, I mean, you're my client, you are responsible for saving that URL on your listing associated with this listing ID. So I am not providing like any of the Edit functionality, literally, all I do is I find your file field input, and I replace it with the drop zone. And then I take the URL, and I put it in the value. So you can save it in your form like usual. But I'm not providing like extra, like, so if you came in here, like I said, so this is the thing. Okay, I'm looking at my listing, I hit Edit before, this was a file field. And so I'm just replacing that file field with my widget, and I'm just accepting whatever you drop.

Michele Hansen 13:57
And so there is no one can say there would be like, they can show the image, right? Like the client can decide to show the image to the user and have that functionality instead be replace,

Colleen Schnettler 14:10
right? So the user, the user can choose to show the image, but they would have to put it because it's not button activated. They would have to like, it's it's kind of not great, because they would have to like put the image here and drop a new image here. I have no way right now of showing the image in the existing drop zone.

Michele Hansen 14:35
I guess I wouldn't expect to see an image in a drop zone because a drop zone is an empty vessel. And as long as you know, the client, I guess that's the person who is using your service as long as they have the ability to show the file themselves.

Colleen Schnettler 14:59
Yes, which they Do

Michele Hansen 15:00
its storing the file, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, they can recall the file. Like they can design whatever UI they want. But like thinking about drop zones we have on geocode do. Like none of them have any content in them. Like they're designed to just be some somewhere that you

Colleen Schnettler 15:19
drop a files. Okay? Yes, that's kind of what I've been going back and forth on is how opinionated should I be? And I kind of came to that same conclusion plus, like I said, that gives them more control over the size of everything and the aspect ratio and whatever else they want, whatever else they care about. But yeah, so they would show the image like right here, or they could show it wherever they wanted. And then you could just have an update image. It's not button activated, because I didn't want it to be button activated. But it's another thing that I was like, Should I add that functionality? So you can open it with a button? Or should I just show it?

Michele Hansen 15:58
What do you mean by open it with a button. So

Colleen Schnettler 16:00
instead of having a drop zone here, I think in my first time, I just had a button that said, upload file, and that then populated the drop zone here?

Michele Hansen 16:11
Oh, so it opened up the person's file is sitting on their computer, and then they have to search for it. Rather than dragging something in?

Colleen Schnettler 16:19
Well, no, it like there was a button here. And you clicked it. And then it put this here. Instead of starting with it here, like because right now it loads. The drop zone is already there. When it loads instead of most of the widgets do a thing where like, you have to click a button. But I don't like my users don't like I don't know

Michele Hansen 16:39
why you would put another step in between. But I guess I do wonder about people who aren't familiar with drop zones.

Colleen Schnettler 16:50
But you can still click here. Like I just shortened the language. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to drop it. It should as I say that, yeah, you should just be able to click it. And it'll open your local file system. There you go. So yeah, so that's kind of where I am with all of that. I mean, you know, so much of it is opinionated, like, what does it look like you What if you don't like the color, I go back and forth, so many times between allowing them because they could theoretically specify all of that. But I'm trying not to get ahead of myself and give them right now they have zero configuration options, just because that makes their integration super easy, right. And I think I call it a calling it simple file upload. So let's not give you 100 options.

Michele Hansen 17:38
I think at this point, allowing them to change colors is not an essential feature, like the ability to change the colors on the widget, maybe important to some clients or you know, really to the clients, clients who, as I mean, people who have both dealt with clients, we know that clients can be very opinionated about colors, and especially the matching branding and everything else, right. But is that a feature that will prevent you from launching to 10 users now and determine whether people find the functionality of the service? And ultimately, the time savings? and frustration savings of the service valuable? Does the ability to customize color impact that? I don't

Colleen Schnettler 18:29
think so? When so I was trying to think back to like, what are the most frustrating things for me with this process that I'm taking away from you. dropzone, some callbacks, like errors, checking for all those errors. That's kind of always been a pain and getting the you're getting a UI that you like, with with error checking. And then again, like this, in this way, you don't have to set up the cloud storage, you don't have to set up the CDN. Like that's all already provided for you out of the box.

Michele Hansen 18:58
Can your customers specify what the maximum file sizes like? I can let have a reason.

Colleen Schnettler 19:05
I mean, I can let them I thought about that. I don't think I'm going to do that now because I want to keep it small because you know, I'm happy to say that

Michele Hansen 19:14
music

Colleen Schnettler 19:18
but I mean they could theoretically yeah I guess I'm just stuck in all these like loops of like, should I do this? Should I do this? And like I kind of just I kind of want you to tell me it's fine just the way it is. What do you think fine, just the way it is?

Michele Hansen 19:33
No, um, no. So like, let's go through those things. Okay. Now, right that like you said, You've been going back and forth on the the ability to replace the images it but it sounds It sounds like you have a you know, a strong reason why the image should not populate in the drop zone. You talked about the error messages and kind of going back and forth on on that, and maybe there's a little bit needs to be done there. And and I would probably say the accessibility just think that at least looking into that should be should should be checked before you launch. Okay, um, what else is an outstanding? going back and forth on it item at this point?

Colleen Schnettler 20:24
Do I need to allow them to have more than one on a page?

Michele Hansen 20:30
I think that's something you could ask them?

Colleen Schnettler 20:34
Well, I don't have any of them yet. because no one's using my theoretical balance. I mean, I could just the problem is net, what would happen now I like,

Michele Hansen 20:45
couldn't they?

Colleen Schnettler 20:46
They can I just have, it's actually not a huge deal for me to do it. I just have not implemented that yet. I mean, that's not even a ton of work.

Michele Hansen 20:54
on it, I guess I'm wondering like, why, like, what is the scenario where they would have multiple on one page?

Colleen Schnettler 21:00
Oh, so I have a client that does that. And they do it because they allow. They allow their users to upload multiple images, but they have it set up. So they can like upload an image here and give it a caption, and then an image here, they have like five of these things next to each other, whether that's a good UI, or not as a different question. But um, so they, they haven't like, you upload one, and then there's like a box here. And so you're right, you know, your caption, then you upload another one, and you write your caption, then you upload another one, and you write your caption.

Michele Hansen 21:34
So one of the fundamental jobs of this service from a sort of job span perspective, is to reduce your frustration when dealing with your clients. And you saying, oh, one of my clients has an experience where people need to be able to upload multiple ones on the same page. And it doesn't totally make sense. But they want that, and it's how it's set up. That to me says that's something you should add, because that goes for your core reason for creating the service.

Colleen Schnettler 22:09
Yeah, that's an excellent point. Yeah, I'm excited to actually get to use it myself.

Michele Hansen 22:20
It's gonna be so great. And that'll give you so much motivation to like, keep going.

Colleen Schnettler 22:25
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I absolutely think so because I continue to refine it. As I said, like, even if I'm the only one using it, like, it makes me happy. And, you know, since I'm using it, I can continue to refine it. As as I go forward, and kind of figure out what what I need to do and what I want to do.

Michele Hansen 22:44
So what else is kind of outstanding? You're trying to think about or stands in the way of you watching at this point?

Colleen Schnettler 22:51
Um, let's see. I mean, nothing really, I got my AWS budget set up. So AWS isn't going to screw me over. And and

Michele Hansen 23:08
how did you budget?

Colleen Schnettler 23:10
Ah, well, I applied for one of their Are you starting a new business grants? And if I get it, it should be like $1,000 towards AWS services? So that would be helpful. I don't know. I guess I should be more worried about it. But it's like a What is that thing? It's like a Lamborghini problem. And like, I don't have any Lamborghinis. Right. My problems are small. I have like Toyota Camry problems. Like, I just want someone to use it. They're like, Oh, when you get 100,000, you know, when you get thousands of customers, and I'm like, that's great. Like, I just don't know if that's anywhere in my future. So I'm not worried about it yet.

Michele Hansen 23:49
As someone said to me once worried about success when it happens,

Colleen Schnettler 23:52
right? That's how I feel like I put enough thanks to, you know, to some kind people in some AWS research, I put enough stopgaps in place that if something goes rogue, like, I can handle it, and I did a couple things up front that enabled me like I'm using a custom domain so I can switch off of AWS if I have to down the road. But like, I, you know, I'm not, I'm not worried about it. I'm worried about this first step. And this first step is 10 people pretending to use it, you know,

Michele Hansen 24:21
so towards that first step, I noticed that the partner portal in Heroku is open in your tabs. shez. Is there a reason why that's there? I mean,

Colleen Schnettler 24:33
it's there. Look, no add ons. Bam. It's there, man. Like I could Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. So I could theoretically like get my 10 people today. I mean, I could get my 10 people today. I mean, it's there it works. Um, so yeah, so it's already there. I've already done the integration. As I told you last week, I was going to my goal was to get that integration done. So I got the integration done by Yeah, like I've done the what is stopping me really like I need to look into accessibility are 100%? Correct. But no I can. I don't want to get my 10 people until it works cuz I get maybe five seconds of their attention. So if they try to install it and something goes wrong, then I lose their attention

Michele Hansen 25:18
to what we were talking about last week, I think it's worth remembering that in a professional context where if there's somebody who has similar frustrations as you, they might be willing to send you a support email and say, Hey, I was really excited about this. I really wanted to use it. But I noticed that I went to install it and x happened, or I tried to use it in this case, and it didn't work. Like they will have motivation to use it in a way that if you're doing a consumer app, that's that is often not present.

Colleen Schnettler 25:57
Yeah, right. You're saying yes.

Michele Hansen 26:00
And, and so I think that's, like, we still have bugs that we're squashing like no fire? I don't

Colleen Schnettler 26:07
believe you. Oh,

Unknown Speaker 26:13
yeah.

Colleen Schnettler 26:15
No, I, I understand your point, like,

Michele Hansen 26:18
the 4:30am. Phone calls we get from different, not too often.

Colleen Schnettler 26:25
Oh, my goodness.

Michele Hansen 26:27
Not right, like nothing is perfect. Like, that's how it is. But if you have built something that somebody needs, or they can see is going to reduce some frustration or friction for them. And it turns out that there's, you know, something is wrong with it, and you need a week to fix it, and you come back to them in a week, like, their process that annoys them still exists. Right? And you're not just making you know, something for consumers, that is entertainment, where I mean, we both been, that's a good point, you have them for five seconds. And then if you don't help them right away, they're gone. Gone. That is not this scenario, and that's something I love about being in b2b is that you are like creating things that are just making existing processes better or cheaper, or faster or less annoying. And and so that process exists, regardless of whether your product exists, or not. Right? Mm hmm. And, you know, of course, in you know, in consumer, they need to be entertained or whatnot. Like those things always exist, but they are filled in so many different ways. But right, if somebody is creating a product for a client, and they need these image uploads, and then they have some more frustrations as you then then I think they would be more willing to give you some time to fix it. That then you might be able to imagine,

Colleen Schnettler 28:00
okay, I'm open to that. I like it. So I really think that like then there's no reason I can't start getting people like Monday. So I like doing weekly goals. I like doing weekly goals with you. Let's say by next Thursday, when we have our next podcast. I will try to have gotten those 10 people or at least be looking for them.

Michele Hansen 28:25
You will be live in the

Unknown Speaker 28:29
store.

Colleen Schnettler 28:29
Ah, that's so exciting. Yeah, that's super exciting. Yeah. All right. So that's my goal for this week. That's awesome.

Michele Hansen 28:39
stuff will go wrong. But stuff will go right. Yeah. And the most important thing is reducing your frustration with this problem. Right? Right.

Colleen Schnettler 28:49
Yeah, absolutely. That was the whole this was the whole reason.

Michele Hansen 28:53
Even if you're the only user.

Colleen Schnettler 28:55
Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks, Michele. I really enjoyed going through this with you. And I really appreciate your feedback.

Michele Hansen 29:05
I love doing this. Like, I love workshopping with people. And you know, I always find that when I'm creating something. I don't ever really fully appreciate it or understand it or see all the issues with it until nobody else is looking at it. And you know, having a friend that you can do a tear down and then demo and everything with is. Yeah, it is just always so helpful.

Colleen Schnettler 29:31
Yeah, awesome. Yeah.

Michele Hansen 29:34
Okay, so listeners, we hope that you've enjoyed this little walkthrough of Colleen's simple file upload service, soon to be available on Heroku. And we hope you enjoy the video podcast component of it as well definitely. Let us know what you think.

View Details

Michele Hansen
Welcome back to software social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm Colleen Schnettler. So Michele, what's been on your mind this week?

Michele Hansen
So after our conversation with Alex last week, which, by the way was so fun, I feel like we got to talk to him about like, a 10th of the things I wanted to talk about. I have been thinking a lot about what I got out of my own MBA, because his book, The Tiny MBA, and we talked about this a little bit about the differences between between that and and it's just made me reflect on some of the things I got out of mine. And one of those things is negotiation skills.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
I really learned in that program just how much of a wuss I was at negotiations.

I got to do this trip to India and the UAE and we were visiting factories and and whatnot and part of it, you know, being an India, was going to the markets. And our professor was very keen that we learn how to negotiate and I remember we would, you know, go out and buy things and our graduate assistant student in the program was from India and we would always go to him and be like, hey, like, you know, I got this scarf and you know, I got them down from from this price to this price. And he would always like, shake his head and be like, you could have done so much better than that, like you just got totally ripped off. And I remember feeling like oh my god, like and, and I realized that experience -- getting my ass kicked by India -- made me realize how little I knew about negotiation. And, and so I ended up taking a class on it.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, when you were getting your MBA, you took a class specifically on negotiation?

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, that's awesome.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it was awesome. And we got to do exercises, simulating negotiations and learning about different styles of negotiation, and different tactics to use.

And the really, the big thing I got out of that was that you don't have to be a hard negotiator, you don't have to be mean, in order to be a good negotiator. And, and I feel like this is something that we don't have a lot of cultural exposure to negotiation, right. You know, unlike my, you know, fellow student who grew up in India and buying groceries or buying anything involved, negotiation and haggling. I didn't really observe a lot of negotiation as a child or as a teenager, right? Like, Can you recall observing that very much?

Colleen Schnettler
No, the price is what it is and you pay for it or you don't.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, exactly. So, um, and so I think my understanding of negotiation was very much guided by pop culture figures who are known for being you know, hard charging and you know, screwing the other side basically right like, and so I just kind of I always shied away from negotiation. But negotiation is really, really important in running a business, especially once you start dealing with enterprise customers who pretty much always want to negotiate. They're not going to, you know, just sign up for a plan on the site and then just pay for that, especially on an annual basis and then things like that. And, and so I learned that you can be a good negotiator and get what you need out of an agreement. But you don't have to be mean and you don't have to, like bend over to them, either.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, so let's dive into this cuz...

Michele Hansen
Yes!

Colleen Schnettler
I think negotiation is a fascinating topic, especially for women. I have negotiated salaries and I remember like the first time I negotiated a salary, it was like, you should always negotiate But to your earlier point, like I have no experience in negotiating. So you just kind of pick a number. You're like, Oh, this is my number. Like, let's talk a little bit more about some of these tactics and like, how does one negotiate without being a jerk?

Michele Hansen
Yeah, so one of the most important things to remember in negotiation is knowing your BATNA.

Colleen Schnettler
What's a BATNA?

Michele Hansen
Your BATNA is a best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

Colleen Schnettler
Did you make that up?

Michele Hansen
I did not make that up. This is actually a term that like is in every piece of negotiation literature. Basically, you know, some people think of this as leverage or as your power or but it's basically your alternative, right? Like if you don't negotiate this, like if you walk away from that job, what is your alternative? And, but you always have to think about your BATNA and then your counterparty's BATNA, and maybe way to think about this is it has The word bat in it, right? Your BATNA is what allows you to fly away.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, so let's use your example. I like concrete examples when I'm trying to understand this. Are you comfortable? Like you can make up numbers? But let's say you're negotiating with an enterprise client. So when you say BATNA, you mean that is your number you won't go lower than.

Michele Hansen
That's a reservation price.

Colleen Schnettler
That's different reservation price. Okay?

Michele Hansen
So um, so your BATNA is basically your alternatives. So, for example, let's say that you...Okay, here, here's an example. Let's say you run a customer support platform. So these things out there like intercom and whatnot. So your customers, your customers' BATNA, right, so their alternative is are there they can use one of your competitors. But maybe they don't have all of your features like maybe, let's say, you do chat and email and knowledge management. They can use one of your competitors, but they don't have one of those features. So that's their best alternative. Or they can use three different services that will cost them a lot more money than using your one service. So that's probably the simplest example is that their alternative to using your service requires them to use three other services that end up being more time and hassle for them. By knowing what their BATNA is, or what their alternative is, you have a stronger negotiating position. You don't have to give up as much. And also you can remind them Yes, for example, let's say $5,000 a year sounds like a lot of money. But if you were to not use this service, and use x, y and z instead you would be paying $15,000 a year. So you have actually just created a net positive for them of $10,000 and you haven't moved on your price at all.

Another thing that is really important in a negotiation and part of not being mean another way to put it, it's actually a book that Alex recommended last week that really piqued my interest called Just Listen. And he had mentioned how this is a book used by hostage hostage negotiators. And that really got me interested because they are some of the best negotiators out there. And one of the concepts of it is you just listen for what is important to the other side. So for example, in your salary example, what may be important to you is the number but there may be other benefits that are really important to you, that are ancillary to the salary itself, that actually aren't very difficult for the employer to give you.

So for example, let's say that you're negotiating on a salary of $100,000, and they're only willing to give you $95K. You can look at the other pieces in the negotiation and see if you can play things off of each other. So, for example, you could say, well, I'm willing to take $97K If you give me 21 days of vacation rather than 14. For the HR person, it's much easier for them to give you 21 days of, of vacation rather than 14 because they're not taking a cash hit from that, right, like understanding what their alternative is and what they are being measured by. Which in this case, it might be keeping salaries down, they can give you other fringe benefits that help sweeten that deal for you that that bridge that maybe more than $5,000 to you. So whether that's vacation time, or I was almost going to say commute benefits but that's not really a thing here right? Or, or other things that aren't cash, right? Because that's what they're being measured by, then you can increase the value of the deal to you, even though it's not increasing the actual cash value from the other party side.

Colleen Schnettler
That makes sense. So let's take your example of an enterprise customer comes to you and says, Hey, we'd love your service, but I see you're charging $10,000 a month and we only want to pay seven. Like, what's the first thing you do? Do you when you're faced with that kind of negotiation?

Michele Hansen
So in that scenario, I would first of all say they're taking way too big of a cut and I, I wouldn't even entertain going that far. There are a lot of purchasing managers though and managers in big organizations that may be measured based on how big of a discount they get. So whether that's like 5% or 10%, I believe a lot of them are expected to get a 10% discount on services. And what you can do in that scenario is trade the discount for the number of years. So to you, especially as a small company, multi-year deals are really valuable, because then you know that revenue is going to be there. Especially if you're a small company, and you're just building your company and you want to know that you can make investments and make decisions and the revenue will be there. So if they came to me with that, I, you know, I would say, you know, really the lowest we're willing to go is $9,000 for a three year minimum commitment deal, you know, and then you can negotiate back and forth and whether that's paid up front entirely, or they get to pay every year, I might do less of a discount for that. And it's pretty common in SaaS to buy, you know, a three year subscription and paid all of it up front. Like in the real enterprise, world of enterprise non enterprise. Yeah. So you can trade a discount in exchange for length, the length of contract.

And there can be there's always other things you're negotiating on an enterprise scenario. So for example, the invoicing length, whether it's 30 days, 45 days, 60 days, or whether you get to use their logo on your website, you maybe you can give them a discount in exchange for that. But in a negotiation, you always want to figure out okay, what are the, you know, five, 6, 10, 20 different issues here that we're negotiating on? It's not just the prices, the price, it's the length of the contract, It's, I mean, details down to what is our choice of law, what is the jurisdiction, or is it where we are established or is it Delaware or New York or wherever that other company is established? This is like something that every enterprise wants to change in a contract. They always want choice of a law to be wherever they are incorporated. But all of those other things and then thinking about how you can play those off one another and try to understand what are the what is really important to them at the end of the day, and how can you put something together that gets what you want out of it and also helps them hit their most important thing.

But going back to that, that book, how you figure that out, is you just listen to them. And one of the negotiations in my class that I learned the most from was actually probably the most scared I have ever been in an academic environment. We did all these negotiation activities from buying a used car to being a zoo negotiating for pandas. And, and one of them was a group of people in a neighborhood negotiating with a construction company about a new development going up at the end of their neighborhood. So you basically have a bunch of angry angry townspeople with pitchforks against these two corporate representatives. In my case, I got to be the corporate representative, and there was only one in my group. And then there was all the people who had all of their different concerns. And this was basically my nightmare, like, just going into this scenario, and just gonna have a bunch of people yell at me. I was really freaking out about it. And I did all that research, I was looking at all the different issues. The corporate representative is really not in a good position in that negotiation. But the one thing I had on my side was that it was time limited. And so I think it was we were limited to about 20 to 30 minutes of negotiation in front and it was actually in front of the rest of the class too. They couldn't participate or no actually, I think they could heckle us. Yeah, it was. It was a fun one. What was in front of everybody else. And so I realized I was like, okay, all of these people are upset. If I just make them all talk and I avoid saying anything, I don't have to give up anything. So if there was six people, first person would air their grievances. And then I would say, it sounds like, what you're saying is this and then "So and so I haven't heard from you in a while. What do you think about that? I thought you might have had some concerns about that." And I just kept doing that and saying, "I think this other person had concerns about this, but they were slightly different." Would you be able to tell me more about that? And so we got to the end of it. And we're doing a debrief in front of everyone else. And the people who are who are the townspeople negotiation, really struck me they're saying things like, "Oh, you know, I felt like we really got a good deal here." Like, you know, we like we really like we're heard and you know, all of these things, and then somebody else goes, wait a minute, she didn't actually give up anything. We just talked the entire time.

And so I was using it in that sense, sort of, you know, sort of to their disadvantage, but just genuinely listening to people is so, so powerful. And that's how you understand, okay, of all of these different issues in this negotiation, which ones are the most important to them? What are their alternatives? Like how strong is their negotiating position, right? If they don't have any alternatives, their position is quite weak, and you can push them harder on those issues. And then understanding what your own perspective is on it. And so that book that Alex recommended is such a good introduction to this. But if anyone just Googles BATNA, you'll get like tons and tons of stuff on negotiation. It's even something I would suggest finding like an online workshop for or something because I really learned so much from that. And it's, it's one of the big things I got out of my MBA was that confidence going into negotiations that I know it's important to us. I know what I can't back down on. But I also know where I can give them space.

Colleen Schnettler
That's awesome. Yeah, I'm definitely gonna read that book. By the way, I have already ordered it since we talked to Alex.

Michele Hansen
It's so good. Like I, I just started it yesterday and I'm already 15% of the way through and recommending it to people. And it's, it sounds like, you know, it's some business books can be really quite a slog. This one definitely isn't. I mean, you know, it has examples from hostage negotiators and other scenarios that really give you a tangible understanding of how this can be applied.

Colleen Schnettler
Whatever negotiation you're thinking of that made you want to discuss this topic, how did that end up going?

Michele Hansen
I would say that all of our negotiations have gone well. Some of them are definitely harder than others. You know, like I was saying in that scenario with the townspeople, there have been quite a few scenarios when it has been just little old me versus a team of corporate lawyers, that's pretty much how all of our negotiations are. But because I've done that training and that research into negotiations, and I've understand how it applies to our business, I feel confident in those scenarios. And the thing about our knowing my BATNA is that there are negotiations that we've walked away from. And those have been those have been very difficult, but we knew we would be able to make up the revenue elsewhere. And what they were asking us to concede were things that we just could not concede, you know, I can concede, choice of jurisdiction, but there are, there are other things that we just simply can't and if a customer or potential customer asks us to concede those then we have to walk. But we have a good BATNA in most scenarios and It's just a matter of sticking by that and knowing what makes us unique.

Colleen Schnettler
Great.

Michele Hansen
So what's on your mind?

Colleen Schnettler
So, update from last week, I'm just trucking along trying to get my add on configure to add it to the Heroku marketplace. I got some help today with a technical problem that's really been given me a hard time. So that felt really good. Because right after we had our podcast last week, when I was like, I'm done, I was like, Oh, no, I have to have this one more thing.

Michele Hansen
Oh, no. Scope

Colleen Schnettler
I know.

Michele Hansen
Scope creep!

Colleen Schnettler
Oh my gosh. So I wrapped it up today actually, like I am done with a feature set for now. I'm going to put it in the Heroku marketplace. I have looked into the details. So the way it works is, you put it in a marketplace you get 10 of your friends. Are people you know, to test it out with you, then once you've done that you have to request to be moved to beta status. And beta status is 100 users. A hundred! So you've got to get 100. I know that's a lot of people, right? That's a lot of users. So you got to get 100 users in the beta status to use it. And then after that, you can request to go to general availability. You can't start charging for it until you get to general availability. So this is, you know, just something interesting as I get along here. And I think once I get a couple people using it, I'll be able to get some more feedback. But also, I looked up the AWS free tiers, and the AWS free tier is five gigs of storage. So with 100 users, that's 50 MG per user. So if they each have, you know, 10 users, and the each of those Users upload a 5 MG file, like I'm already going to bust through my storage. So practically speaking, I don't really know how that's all gonna work. But you have to actually speak to someone from Heroku. I think before you go from alpha to beta, so I guess I'll just ask them like, Am I just supposed to eat that cost? I guess I just eat the cost for a while. I don't know, if it's like you get 100 users and right away, you can go or I'm still working out those details.

Michele Hansen
You know what that sounds like to me? a negotiation.

Colleen Schnettler
Haha, yes. Excellent. Excellent. I'm going to read this book then. And I'll be ready.

Michele Hansen
I imagine they must have some leeway on that, especially if it's a scenario where you are incurring a genuine cost for all of those users. I have to imagine that they would be willing to work with you on that.

Colleen Schnettler
I think so too. I mean, I just don't know how you can not. It's there's got to be a way to do that.

Michele Hansen
Don't be afraid to ask.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, there you go. And that and that's an excellent point. And so I'm not too worried about that yet, but I did want to like kind of look that up and it seems like something kind of has to happen there to make that feasible.

It's interesting because now I am trying to do well now as in like, I just started thinking about it, but I at least need like a basic marketing site. And I tell you what, this is something as a primarily back end developer, like making a marketing site makes me want to just hide under the covers, like logos and colors and I'm like, mah! So yeah, so I got to do that.

Michele Hansen
How much do you get from Heroku marketplace? Like I cuz I've seen other products on it and like, do you customize the whole thing or do you get sort of a template that you're working with?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, you have a template you're working with. I was also going to do... so the way I've written this, I was also going to just kind of have the front page like kind of like a splash page or whatever you guys call it, like, you know, a basic marketing page that would then link you back to the Heroku elements marketplace, I don't have to have that. Because Heroku does provide -- like you can do this whole thing without any kind of webpage outside of your app your application. So I guess I don't have to have one now that you say that. I could skip that for now. It's not like, I don't know, what do you think?

Michele Hansen
Well, if you only need 10 users for the initial phase, it might even be good to not have a huge presence for it. Because, as you said, you're going to get feedback from the first 10 people using it and that will really help you guide what kind of instructional content you need to have on that page. And if they're giving you a template, that's reducing decisions for you. And that could make it easier for you to launch.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you're right that this is great. See, this is why this is great. This conversation. I don't need to spend time on that. Right now. Right now I need to focus on getting good documentation for people who are going to use it and getting it available in the marketplace. Because you're right. I mean, there's no real point like to that page. So I'll start with my 10 users and see, you know, see where it goes from there, I guess. Try to get feedback and see if it's even something people want to use.

Michele Hansen
Do you have your 10 users lined up?

Colleen Schnettler
No, I know, I can think of maybe five people I know who use Heroku for personal projects. I'm hoping between like the people I know through my network of rails developers, because it's a pretty popular platform. That I can get 10 people, but no, I can think of maybe four or five. Right now.

Michele Hansen
Do you think those people who said use the Heroku platform? I'm curious, maybe they're connected to communities as well, if they would be able to recruit people -- sort of pyramid scheme style, it's not. Um, you know if each of them can bring in one more person if they're if they're willing to retweet it or send something out to a listserv or something like that, that could help you get to that first inflectioon point.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, I definitely think so. The only thing I'm kind of concerned again, about and, again, maybe it's just too early to be concerned about this. But let's say like, you sign up with Heroku because it's free to sign up. You could install my add on without ever installing it, and I would get credit for you installing it, which is cool, but I actually want people to use it. So it'd be even better if I got people who actually used it. I don't know if I need to worry about that now, or what your thoughts are on that.

Michele Hansen
I think that's gonna happen with any platform, right? Like, I think, I think Zapier is kind of like that. I remember when we were launching our zap a couple of years ago that like, there was all these people who installed it, but they didn't actually install it and...

Colleen Schnettler
Exactly.

Michele Hansen
And we never really got a lot of feedback on it at the time. Um, I mean, you know, people buy things and don't use them all the time, or they sign up for something, even if it's free and don't use it. But it at this point, if you can get, you know, five solid users of it, who are giving you feedback. We're giving you ideas for documentation, for tutorials, for use cases, that's really valuable and, you know, maybe you limp over the finish line and Not all of those 10 users are actually active users. Um, but I think that's okay. Um, I think it would be more of a concern if you can't even get to 10 people.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah. That's telling it of itself, right. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. So based on this discussion, next week, I'm going to focus on getting it in the Heroku App Store. And then just talking to people in my network to see if I can get people to start trying it out.

Michele Hansen
Have you started writing the documentation?

Colleen Schnettler
So what I did is, I'm using it. Well, I'm almost using it. I'm using it on a site I own right now. So I've kind of been taking notes as I integrated it with this existing site. So I have not comprehensive documentation, but I think I can pretty quickly put enough together based on these notes I've been taking to do basic documentation, but this is something I think would be really cool. Like a really cool way to do it would be like a video, you know of how to integrate it into your site. And like I should have a sample -- what I also want to do is have a sample project on GitHub, which is something I've got a got to make. So I was going to do that so people could see really quickly how to integrate it in their site. Things like that.

Michele Hansen
Do some basic text documentation to launch right with all of this, pull back the layers, launch with the absolute minimum, you would need. I mean, I think we just started doing tutorial videos like six months or a year ago.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, okay.

Michele Hansen
Like there's so great to have. But I wouldn't say that you need to throw that hurdle in front of yourself as something that you need to do before you launch. You need to be removing hurdles at this point. And so making a video that shows how to do it is awesome, but that can be done after it's launched. Having an example project on GitHub. That's a really cool idea. That can be done after it's launched.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
Simplify.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah. So so here's something I want to talk to you about, too, because I, you know, we've had a lot of conversations about how my own perfectionism and scope creep are getting in the way of me launching a product, right? But I don't know if I ever told you in like, 2011 maybe I put an app in the iOS App Store. It was terrible. And so um, I think I think I'm a little gun shy about that because that was something like I launched too soon. And when you first launch something, you get some like excitement because you tell people about it on Twitter and, and you know, you tell people in your network about and they check it out. And if it's terrible, then they don't check it out once you fix it the second time. So so I'm always stuck in this conflict of like, Is it good enough? Is it not?

Michele Hansen
So, a couple of things come to mind there. The first is there's always going to be somebody who's mean. Like always, there's always gonna be somebody who's like, "Oh, this is dumb, like, you could just do this yourself by doing these 10 steps that are totally completely obvious to everybody." Not, which is like, I mean, if you launch something, and that isn't the top comment on Hacker News. I've never seen that. I mean, you know, the famous example is somebody saying that about Dropbox and about, you know, how all these you can do all this gymnastics with Linux and stuff to do it. I mean, we got that comment, right and about "Oh, is terrible. They don't have international support." And you know, like, there's always gonna be somebody who finds a problem with it. Right. And, you know, we also had an app that we got it, we got an article on DCist, which is like sort of the big, you know, DC local blog, and we totally screwed something up. And it never really recovered from it. We still launched stuff, we launched Geocodio after that you know after that. And it's fine. You just got to get it out there and you know, people who are going to be mean and rag on other people's projects, like they have bigger problems than just your app. There's one person or two people who are rude, but the vast majority of people are being super positive and supportive. And just because there's one person saying something mean, it doesn't mean that that negates all of that positive feedback that you got, like that one mean person does not deserve to live in your head, right? Like if they were a friend of yours, you would not be friends with them for very long if they said mean things to you anymore. So why do we give this attention to Hacker News commenters or people on Twitter or whatever that may be? You just screw em, like, you know, haters gonna hate, right? Like just read it out there and people don't like it like They're not your market, whatever they can do their other process. They have something else that works for them.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
Don't let them keep you down.

Colleen Schnettler
That's That's great advice. Thank you so much for your support and encouragement. I appreciate it.

Michele Hansen
Always there for you, Colleen.

Colleen Schnettler
All right. Well, that's gonna wrap us up today. Thank you so much for joining us. Tune in next week to hear if Colleen has finally launched her product or not. And to hear what's going on with Michele. We are on Twitter at @softwaresocpod and we would love to hear from you.

Michele Hansen
Also, if you wouldn't mind leaving us a review, we would absolutely love that. Thanks so much.

View Details

Michele Hansen
Welcome to the Software Social podcast. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Alex Hillman
And I'm Alex Hillman.

Michele Hansen
And we have a special guest with us today, which is very exciting. Alex has recently released a book called The Tiny MBA. Colleen and I have both read it and we are super excited to talk to you today, Alex.

Alex Hillman
Um, thank you for having me. I've been enjoying listening to this show. And I feel like I got invited to the the cool kids lunch table to hang out and and talk business. So um, thank you.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, so let's dive in. So so the book, I really like how you structured it with a bunch of sort of a bunch of nuggets of wisdom, many of which you get the sense that those were hard won on your behalf.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, the hard won is a good way to describe it. And I think talking to folks have since read it, a lot of folks find themselves nodding along nodding long and going, "Oof, ouch. Yeah, I've been there for that one. I wish I had heard that one sooner." And so I think for folks that haven't encountered it yet, there's maybe some warning signs.

And then on the other side, it's it's stuff that I think people do know, including myself, but don't necessarily hear or hear often. And sometimes they just need a reminder or to hear it in a new way. So one of my favorite ways I've heard this book described so far was from a friend of mine, who is a pretty storied entrepreneur and has spent time in sort of all different categories. He's done the big venture back thing. He's done small bootstrap stuff. He's done publishing, he's done software. And he really, really enjoyed he's even been involved in reading books with entrepreneurs, so he's sort of seen behind the scenes. And he, he's like, this book is so different from other business books and there's sort of three kinds of lessons: There's one third is stuff that maybe you've heard before, but it's in kind of a new way. You know, the constraints of these, you know, everything about a thing is kind of on one page. And you don't even have the whole page in really any case, it's really a couple of sentences. There's another third, that is what he called next level thinking. And I'm not super comfortable calling it that, but what he was really describing was more, you know, a different way of seeing a thing that people have a sort of a commonly held perspective. And this was an alternative that is maybe equally true, but less commonly heard. And the third part was a kick in the ass, and something that he's heard before but needed to hear or needed to hear in a different way and to challenge himself and go, why am I doing this the hard way? And, yeah, I mean, it's, I think there are books out there that do each of those things, but it's been really nice to hear from folks that are at lots of different stages of their business, that it can do one or all of those things kind of in one sitting.

Colleen Schnettler

So Alex, you talk a lot about psychology in the book. One of the quotes is the most valuable books aren't business books. They're books about human psychology. So, you know, my background is engineering and development. And I know a lot of your audience I believe, as well. And I, I was just like, man, now I gotta learn about humans? That sounds really hard.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, I'm curious, like, Why? Why does that seem hard to you? Because I hear that and I feel that and look, people are frickin weird. So I get it. But like, from your perspective...

Michele Hansen
I love how weird they are!

Alex Hillman
I do too. I do too. From from you, like when you say? Like, what's, how does that read for you? Like, what it what actually makes it feel hard to you?

Colleen Schnettler

Well, I already feel like I'm better with humans and most developers, but still like they're just humans are tough. I mean, they're just irrational. And you know, they don't make logical decisions. And so trying to get in someone's head and find out like, like, what I took away from the book is I really need to figure out how I'm providing value to my customers. And you know, you really just want to make them happy, which is something I've talked about with Michele before too, like you, you want them to feel like they're winning. But then I just, I just really struggle with like understanding human psychology when you get people who really aren't logical thinkers.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think there to your point, there's, there's the rational behavior and the irrational behavior, and which one someone's gonna be deploying at any given moment is not always consistent.

One of my favorite ways to think about psychology is -- because I come from a software development background as well. I didn't explain, I kind of said that in the book, I guess. But one of the reasons I find psychology fascinating is it's kind of like having a debugger for people because people break in wildly unpredictable ways, but they do it at wildly predictable times. Or sometimes it's the other way around, they break in unpredictable times, but in relatively predictable ways. Or no, I say break. It's not always bad things, they respond positively, consistently, just not always in the exact same way. So, you know, for, for me programming kind of clicked when I realized, "Oh, this is about patterns, right patterns and, and systems." And if you start thinking about people as patterns and systems also, I don't, I mean, I think you can get pretty far into the weeds with psychology and things that are useful, but maybe not instantly deployable. If you really just think about what are people's behaviors as patterns, like it's not just what do they do. And it's, it's also why do they do it? And then is there any consistency to why they do things or is there inconsistent consistency? And if there's inconsistency is there consistency within the consistency, so you can start to see how when you sort of pull apart the layers, it really does start feel like debugging a person.

And, you know, I think one of the other pieces is sometimes you're debugging yourself. It's like, "Am I making a decision or not doing a thing because of my own psychology?" I think that in some cases is even harder. However, I also think, you know, one of my favorite books and it's recommended in in the Tiny MBA is a book called Just Listen by an author named Mark Goulston. And Mark is a clinical psychologist. But the reason he's famous for -- famous enough to write a book that I would be recommending in a business book -- is he's a lead hostage negotiator, trainer for the FBI. And in the book, he talks about sort of the neuroscience of why we, why it's hard to listen and and why it's hard to get other people to listen to us in a really, really systematic way. And he teaches you some really specific techniques for, and he uses, he teaches these techniques to hostage negotiators. And he also uses them in his private practice with, you know, husbands and partners and wives and families who aren't talking to each other. It's all the same basics, you know, brain science, but he does this, this interesting thing where, you know, it's not a good idea to teach somebody a psychology tool, and then have them go use it on their friends and family. Bad things are likely to happen. But instead he teaches you how to use these tools on yourself. And by practicing them on yourself, you start recognizing your own internal voice, your own internal conflict when you're not listening to yourself. And you get to sort of practice the techniques in the book on yourself before you ever take it to your partner or your kid or your teammates or a client, whatever it is. So it's really, really hard. Really treats it like debugging. He frames the process. It's a 10 step process called from "Oh, fuck" to "Okay." And step one, before you do anything with the other person is figuring out where on that process of conflict they are. And you can't get somebody from oh fuck => okay if "Oh fuck" is a 10, you've got to get them to a nine, then from a nine to an eight and eight to a seven. And if you don't sort of go through those stages, it becomes difficult if it's possible at all, to get somebody to do a thing. And he's all like, you can't get somebody to do a thing they don't want to do you have to figure out what they do want to do, and align your interests with theirs. And that's where I think things come back to business. You can't make somebody buy something they don't want to buy. What you can do is figure out what somebody's interests are, what they care about, how they think about it, how they communicate it, earn their trust and prove to them that you're aligned and then you're not convincing them to buy anything, you're showing them that you are going to help them do a thing that they already want to do. And these are the steps to do it.

Michele Hansen
I'm totally gonna have to read that book now.

Colleen Schnettler
I was just thinking that I'm definitely reading that book.

Michele Hansen
You know, so when I was reading the book, I also highlighted that quote, Colleen. But when I saw that there was a reference for a book, and in it, my first thought was, oh, I wonder if this is going to be Thinking Fast and Slow, which is one of my favorite books about irrational thinking and understanding when people are making these sort of rational irrational decisions, how contextual those are and the psychology of it. And so actually, I like flipped to the to the to the end of it being like, Oh, this is like totally Thinking Fast and Slow, and it wasn't and I was very surprised. And now I'm delighted and definitely gonna go check out that book. I'm curious, Alex, if you've read that I have

Alex Hillman
Thinking Fast and Slow is an absolute favorite. I was kind of intentional about picking my book recommendations, too. To try and give folks stuff that they might not come across in another another setting, they think Thinking Fast and Slow is a common recommendation among business books, even though it is absolutely yeah, yeah. And so, you know, Just Listen, I don't think is positioned as a business book at all. But my actual my favorite interaction, I recommended it to my brother in law who's in, he's in advertising sales. So like, maybe and he would be okay with me saying this, maybe some of the slimy sales that exist some on the planet. And, but he's, he's an honest guy, and he's really good at his job. And he loved the way this book broke down. The psychology of what he experiences in building sales relationships. So I think it's an uncommon business book. But I think it's useful to to lots of different kinds of business people.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. And so speaking of sales, and marketing, one of the quotes that I find myself thinking about is, if done well, teaching and marketing can be nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Alex Hillman
What does that show up for for you? Like? I mean, sounds like that's it, you said it resonates with you and you think about that? Is that how you approach your marketing? Or what? What about that quote landed for you?

Michele Hansen
I think there's a lot of truth in it. And earlier this week, I came across a tool for the first time called Bubble, which Colleen might be familiar with, since it's a no code tool. And what was so impressive about it was, you know I went to their site bubble.io, and a lot of their marketing is, like tutorials on how to create other sites. So it's like how to create Uber with with Bubble and no code or how to create Netflix or how to create like Hulu like all of these like different things I didn't even think would be possible, and it's just a tutorial guide on how to do it. And it was so cool because I came to that site for the first time and I was like, What is this? Like, what can I even do with it? And then it's like, Okay, this seems really powerful but it's kind of intimidating. And then getting to that point with all of those different use case tutorials was like, wow, this is like super cool. Like I could do this if I wanted to. And it really was education as marketing and you know, meeting someone, someone where they are and marketing not having to be this, you know, slimy thing that like some people have to engage in but it really just being genuine education about a tool, helping you do something you already want to do, but do it better.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, that's such a really great example for a couple of reasons. The first thing that stands out to me is, you know, anytime I'm I buy something new, or like a new piece of software, a new piece of technology, a new really anything, or if I'm trying to do like home repair the like, I almost never go to Google anymore. I go to YouTube. Because YouTube is like the biggest searchable compendium of how to do literally anything, like I needed to figure out how to diagnose a problem with my dryer, right? I was able to find a video not of how to fix it, how to figure out what was broken, I was able to learn that in like seven minutes on YouTube, and you know, that was a DIY person doing it. But if you think about that is a really common pattern for a lot of people, is to look up how to do a thing and if I'm looking at how to do a thing, I'm not necessarily looking for a product but if I learn a thing...if I have a problem and you teach me how to do it. The next time I have a problem even kinda like a guest who I'm going to think of you because you helped me last time.

I built a deck this summer, turning quarantine. I've never built a deck before, I'm not as handy as I might be making myself sound, and I'm the -- before we built the deck, I was doing some research on YouTube, you know, techniques, process materials. And I watched somebody who, there's no way that person was smarter than me, build a deck in very similar scenario with like, uneven ground. And here's the thing. Home Depot and Lowe's also had videos about how to build a deck. And I watched these very polished, professionally shot videos, show me how to build a deck in perfect conditions, with all the right tools, and everything comes out perfectly. And I watched them and I go, no way. I just don't think it's gonna work that way and like, and so I went looking for others. And meanwhile, I find another video from a person who runs into problems, solves those problems, I get to kind of watch them go through it. I trust that video more. In effect, I was selling a guide or have referral links to products I would click those links because he earned my trust.

So I think about what is the job of marketing, why do we do marketing, I think there's two two reasons. One is to get the word out about our thing, right? That is the sort of the top level, the top line goal. But once somebody has heard about your thing, is that enough not to make a sale, even if they really want the thing. People are looking at their money, they're looking at their bank account, they're looking at the thing going, how badly do I want it? Do I want to spend that money? Do I? Is this really going to do the job? But if you've earned their trust, with a tutorial video that makes them believe, "Oh, I've now seen it done by someone who's not any smarter than me, if they can do it, I can do it." If you've got somebody in the mindset of if they can do it, I can do it. And their wallet is anywhere nearby, you're so much closer to a sale than if they simply knew you existed. So the last piece about that is you know, we're sitting here talking about it, right. And so when somebody learns something, and they get a win, they trust you they feel good about themselves, and they're going to talk about that experience. And that's that elusive word of mouth marketing that people want. How do you generate that? You get people to talk about their wins, not your product. And that's kind of counterintuitive to figure out, like, how do you engineer that? There's no shortcut to earning trust and making that happen. But the closest thing to a predictable path to make it even possible, I think is is teaching people something that they already want to learn.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, absolutely.

Colleen Schnettler
Still talking about people. I feel like we're doing a lot of talking about people, which is an interesting, you know, outcome of this book. So you have this question about money psychology. And I know we already talked a little bit about human psychology, but you said, if I gave you this same assignment to make $5,000 in the next seven days, how would that make you feel? And so I read that and I thought, how is that supposed to make me feel?

Alex Hillman
Well...

Colleen Schnettler
Terrified! It makes you feel terrible, Alex.

Alex Hillman
Excellent. I think that's, that's I mean, the goal of the question is not to make you feel terrified. The goal of the question is to make you aware of how you feel, however that okay, right. So somebody read the Tiny MBA and said, "You know, this was really great. But I have a question. I paused for quite a while on page 12, where you said money, psychology impacts that how does that make you feel?" And they said, "It would terrify me," literally using the exact same word you did. "Do you have any advice for how to go about learning about my money psychology?" So that's the reason for that question is not to teach you a thing. It's free to identify what your money psychology might be and interrogate that and go, Well, why does that scare me? Is that is that a rational feeling? Is that an irrational feeling? Is that something that that fear is keeping me from doing something that maybe could help me make those $5,000 Whatever it is.

So I gave him the following assignment. I said, you know, try to spend some time just you with a journal or whatever it is, and answer these questions. The first one was, what exactly are you terrified of? Is there something that happened in the past that would make you feel that way? The second question is, what's the worst case scenario if you tried? The third question is, what are the facts about your situation? What resources do you have that you might not be thinking of in that moment of terror, but that if you step back and go, I actually have these resources. I have knowledge, I have the email list, I have professional relationships, I have the ability to create things, you know, what resources do you have that could be useful in reaching that goal? And the fourth question was, what resources could you create now so that next time you get this challenge, it's less terrifying. There's no right answers to any of those. It's more of a self evaluation exercise. So, you know, I'm curious if there's, as I was asking those questions, are there any, any of them that made you made your brain go to a place? Or, you know, now that I've kind of explained the goal of sort of interrogating that terror, do you have an idea of why that's terrifying for you?

Colleen Schnettler
My initial instinct is like, okay, like, I actually thought about it. I was like, okay, based on my hourly rate, if I work this many hours, like, I could do that, but that sounds miserable, right? Because I would just be working, working working. And so it kind of made me try to like, reframe it into, wait, I should try this. And I should not, you know, work my consulting hours, I should do something else.

Alex Hillman
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
And I think one of the cons, I guess there's a lot of pros to starting a little bit later in that, like, you already have an established network and you already, you know, have established skill sets. But like, one of the cons is there's a huge opportunity cost for me to take a week off.

Alex Hillman
Mm hmm.

Colleen Schnettler
And so that's been a consistent challenge for me and you talk about this in the book about being comfortable, you get really comfortable, even though you know, you want something else, like, you know, you want to diversify your income streams. And you know, you want to have a different maybe life experience in your business like, man, when you're working as a developer, it's comfortable.

Alex Hillman
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
And so that is always that's challenging. For me, that's kind of this time, I'm, I'm not gonna fall back into that comfort. But I've kind of been on this journey for many years. And I keep just kind of falling back when it gets hard, or when it gets scary. I mean, I think scary is a good word, which I haven't thought of before this conversation.

Alex Hillman
And I want to sort of pick apart one other thing there. I think your point about, you know, the opportunity cost of taking that week off is, is real and calculable. Right? So I look at a problem like that in a couple of different ways. One of them is all right. "What if I don't need to do a week in order to get started?", right, what could I do in a day or maybe I can't do the whole thing in a day. But if I were to take four Fridays in a row, if not Friday, whatever day it is. And you know, if I now I've got timebox, like, what could I do over those four Fridays? So that's -- where that fourth question is, is what could you do now, with that week so that the next time it's a little bit easier, right? That's where the business that that Amy and I run is called Stacking the Bricks. That's kind of the metaphor is, like if you don't have an advantage now, what can you do now to build the advantage for the next time through? Because your your point about comfort, I think is a real one, especially when it comes to these kinds of business income streams that are not trading your time for money. Time for money is super powerful, because to your point, it's easy when you're doing it. But the trade off is as soon as you stop working. There's nothing happening. You are not building any sort of asset, you can't resell the time. Where things I think get kind of interesting is where you go -- like starting to look within your work. Obviously you can't sell work that you've done for clients, but other things that you're learning on the job that is sellable. Even if it's not, you know, I think so I'm talking to two software folks as well. So like, I think people with software skills think that in order to start a business, I need to sell software. You can, if you want, but that is one format, one mode and selling software, you know, starting software and having $5,000 worth of sales at the end of the week is, you know, it's not a hill to climb. That's a vertical line. It's it's near, honestly, it's impossible because some folks have certainly done those sorts of things, you know, a tiny app or something like that. But if you're starting from scratch, you know, to work to use those constraints and say if I've only got eight hours, every Friday for the next four weeks, what could I be doing over those over those times to build advantages that I don't have yet. So could that be you know, trying your hand at scoping, like a really small workshop to teach some skill. And that could be a technical skill. It could be if you are, if you're a freelancer, that could be a business skill to teach other programmers some, you know, client related thing. If you were in a job, it could be, you know, a team related thing. So like, I think it's widening the scope of what it could be, and narrowing the scope of how big it needs to be in order to be a thing starts to allow things to take a little bit of a different shape and sets up an opportunity to build with build which you can with the time that you have, rather than building the idea in your head with the time that you have, which is like that's, that's a that's a road that stretches off into infinity. A lot of times for a lot of people and it's where it's easy to get discouraged and feel like this is hard. The tech consulting work or a job is easy. Why am I doing the hard thing again? To say one last thing on that is, every, everything comes in difficulty modes as well. And so I think like building choosing to build software as your first product is on hard mode. It's like the analogy I use this and one of the lessons in the book is like, you play a video game on hard mode it is way harder to beat, you can beat it, and the game is going to award you extra points for it, but when it comes to business, if you make a choice that has you playing on hard mode, instead of easy mode, the trade off becomes, you know, is the game going to give you more points whether it's you know, internet points or real money? No, it's not. The game doesn't care how hard you're working, it's how well are you serving them. So I think choosing a difficulty setting when it feels hard, I think that's a real feeling and it is a real reality is there an easier version and I guess believing yourself that an easier version is not a lesser version, it might just be the best version that you can do now to set yourself up for, again, the advantage you need to do the slightly harder version in your your next pass through.

Colleen Schnettler
That's great advice. Thank you.

Michele Hansen
So I have a question that's a little bit of a different track from things that are specifically in the book. It's about something that isn't in the book.

Alex Hillman
Cool.

Michele Hansen
So the book is called the tiny MBA. And one of the big values of an MBA in addition to the learning and especially the system's level thinking and and the practical level learning, which is all in this book, is community and being with people who are excited about the same things as you but coming at it from different perspectives, different industries, different roles, and then also getting access to people who are more experienced whether they are running their own companies or touring factories or things like that. And you're a big community guy. I mean, you run Indy Hall like, like, how does community factor into this? And like, can you can you give us any insights there?

Alex Hillman
I love that you asked this question. And I want to come back to the, the MBA component to it as well. This is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about because you do have an MBA.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Alex Hillman
And I was, there was a slight hesitation in calling this that. Because I'm friends with Josh Kaufman, who wrote The Personal MBA which is an excellent book, and I you know, I know Josh, I know the book. I know people love the book, and Josh has negative reviews are, "This isn't a replacement for an MBA." And he's like, "Of course, it's not that's not the point." And so, you know, I was really good. Not with not with trepidation, I think a little bit of trepidation, really curious what people who have gone through the MBA experience how they see this as a compliment and what are the things that this does that are different? So we can talk more about that if you would like.

But to answer your question about the community side of things, this is something, that there is a reason there isn't. And I will caveat that with there isn't there, it's not there yet. So one of those sort of...

Michele Hansen
I was hoping that was the answer.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, so one of the core philosophies of our work and I think work in general is to, you know, is to ship a tiny product first. And this is not my first product naturally. But that lesson kind of carries over to ship the tiniest version of the product first. So this book is tiny. I -- this is not my first attempt at writing a book. It's my first time finishing it. So getting, like having the book product finished also taught me that writing the book is not the hard part of publishing a book, everything else that comes after the, the core of the book is done is actually took way more time. Knowing that I was going to have a bunch of things I had to learn, I wanted to focus on making the product great. I wanted -- this is our first time doing a physical product we're working with this new print and distribution partner, had to learn that, we were using the Kindle Store on Amazon, I learned a lot about that. And but I was thinking the same thing. I was like, if if this book is read the way that I hope it's read, there's sort of two versions. One is where it sits nearby. It's you know, near your desk, it's at arm's reach, and you flip through it, you know, once in a while and sort of almost like a magic eight ball, see what comes up. And the other is using it as a tool for sparking conversations like this one. And I feel like you know, a mastermind group or a community setting being able to sit down everyone having either read the book or pick a few of their favorite of the pages and come up with a couple of prompts to say, you know, what did that remind you of? If you were -- if you experienced that differently, why do you think it was differently? Again, it's sort of an interrogation tool. So that lends itself to a community experience. I just think doing it at launch was just, it was just one more thing that did not fit in the scope. And I've been doing community long enough that I know better than to do it unless I'm going to take it seriously. For as hard as it is to ship a book, building and running a community is way harder. I've seen so many people launch communities alongside books and products, that just kind of like you know, they're really exciting at the beginning and they kind of flounder off. And Indy Hall, the co-working community you mentioned, we just turned 14 years old. The subtitle of this book is 100 very short lessons about the long game of business. If I'm gonna build a community around this book, I want to do it in a way where it has the best chance of lasting. And doing that, while also launching the very first version of the book and a bunch of new formats just wasn't practical.

But this is not the first time I've gotten the question. Sort of two things that have come up one that is near term because it requires very little of my immediate energy and effort. And that is some tools for helping people run, run book clubs and masterminds and stuff that they might already have, to use the book as a tool for sparking discussions and doing this again, this is sort of interrogation. But I think an online community space where people can discover each other people, you know, the book is an alignment tool. So if people are aligned, exactly like you said, knowing who those other aligned people are, create some really exciting, you know, things far beyond what the three of us could imagine. What I know from Indy Hall is, there is incredible potential on that. I want to build the foundation first. So yeah, a tiny MBA community is certainly on the horizon. I, I'm hopeful we launched something along those lines before the end of this year.

Michele Hansen
It totally makes sense. And you know, when you were talking about how you want to launch the book first and then get it out there and how writing the book, while difficult was almost the easiest part of it. And then there's all the other stuff to actually get the book in people's hands. It reminded me so much of what Colleen is going through right now, with her image management service. Like we were just talking about this recently.

Alex Hillman
Catch me up, tell me about that. What's the what's the, what's the correlation, here?

Colleen Schnettler
I am in that phase where I'm so close to shipping something and I'm just trying to ship it right. Like I am just right there. And it's feature. I mean, it's, it's what you just talked about a little bit ago about like, like thinking about your idea. Well, I have. I'm cutting features aggressively and I just want to add one more thing. And so I'm trying to just stop and just just ship it, right? That's all that's where I am right now. Got it?

Alex Hillman
Yeah, no. The discipline, it's hard. It's hard, but uh, I mean, even we're working with the designer to finish the book. And one of the last things that we added to the book was the how to read this book section. And I had, so the designer that I work with Hannah is amazing and she I've been so happy to be able to pass along compliments from people who love the design, love her work. But there were definitely periods where I was like, doing that last little bit of fiddling, like just one more thing. And I could tell where I was like, I was pushing up against some of the boundaries where I was like, I promise this is the absolute last thing but this how to read this book section I think is important. So she helped me get it in but yeah, that if you don't have... it's, I guess for me it's the line is like, if it was something I wanted to add, versus something that I felt so strongly that the customer would have a significantly better experience -- like they will get more out of the book. This is not a ooh that will be nice when we have it, this is a step function improvement. Where if somebody goes through this and doesn't have the guidance to pause on a page, reflect and go, what does this actually mean for me, and they just read it cover to cover? That's not the experience I want them to have. So that was my my final scope creep. Books can have scope creep, too. Yeah. So I feel you.

Michele Hansen
I'm curious, when did you finish the text for this book? Or you know, sort of 99% done.

Alex Hillman
The stuff is on the the numbered pages, like the actual lessons was finished in December.

Michele Hansen
Wow. And then so it went from December to August to do all of the, the get it in people's hands.

Alex Hillman
Well, and I mean, I can break that down a little bit. If it's interesting to you what happens so real And also wrote the all those lessons in public. The original drafting happened on Twitter. That's why their Twitter length. And the feedback loop of writing and public was a big part of the creative. I wasn't writing a book at the time, I was writing a Twitter thread, where my goal was to write 100 things that would be useful business advice, perspective lessons, things like that. And the instant feedback loop of what people were responding to read, tweeting, liking, but also commenting asking for clarity and things like that. Writing in public is its own kind of terrifying. But the value was astronomical when the thread was done, it was Christmas basically. And I went offline and went on vacation with my wife and came back a few weeks later, and it was some six or seven weeks later that those tweets were still getting quite a bit of action. And that was when I made the decision to say, maybe there is a way to package this up into a book. And so that was like mid January or so. Maybe late more like late January, and so the turning the effectively the manuscript that I wrote in public on Twitter into a book was everything from hiring and talking to the designer, figuring out the the details of what it was going to contain, getting that going, what was the additional editing that was needed (those tweets were written on Twitter, so they need to be edited a little bit). Everything I wrote stayed in, they were just cleaned up a bit. Figuring out who I wanted to ask to write the foreword. And my friend Nilufer graciously said yes, so framing it for her, getting the response from her. Her first draft was incredible. It's pretty darn close to exactly what's in the book. Doing the book recommendations, all that so it was like everything after the core took that long. And you know, there was a pandemic happening in the middle. So like, Indy Hall was in kind of a funky state. So that took my attention for a while and Hannha was dealing with some of her life stuff. So we I'd say we pressed on pause for a solid six or eight weeks somewhere in the spring, pick things up again, intensely in June. And the like the final design stuff was basically done mid-to-late July. The final production, all this stuff for getting it ready for the Kindle Store, getting it ready for the the printing and fulfillment, setting up the Shopify integrations, building the landing page, that all happened over the course of maybe three weeks or so and then and then you get to the actual marketing. Right and so it's the, there's a marathon. Absolutely. And I was not you know, working on it full time. Because I have other other projects, other businesses, other products within the businesses, but for the for a effectively a side project within the business all the way through. If this was the only thing I was working on and everybody else I was working on it with it. I still think that this would have easily taken three, three months minimum. Because...

Michele Hansen
It sounds like that that extended timeline was actually helpful, because it allowed you to reflect on the content of the book and make sure that people had everything they needed to really get a lot out of each page so much more than they would in a tweet of references and understanding how to really get the most out of the book.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, the I sent out about two dozen early reader copies, like advance reader copies. It was a pretty even split between people that I knew and people that I didn't know. The people I didn't know I was most scared of. The people you know will always be nice to you. The randos on Twitter, they found me through somebody retweet. They might be a nice person, but they might say a mean thing.

Michele Hansen
Did they?

Alex Hillman
Nobody said anything. mean, I got one message. And this was after launch, I got one person who said, this was the most disappointed I've ever been in an ebook.

Colleen Schnettler
Ouch.

Alex Hillman
And all I could do is think to myself, what did you expect from an $8? ebook? And what's going on?

Michele Hansen
I guess they've read a lot of really good ebooks?

Alex Hillman
I don't know, I don't know. But like that that person was like, Here's your money back, I really hope you have a great rest of your day.

The closest thing to a negative wasn't a negative, it was folks saying that they were surprised, which given the kind of strange format is a completely reasonable response. There's something about a book that people sort of have an expectation, especially a business book, you get an idea of what a business book is going to be. And so you buy a business book and you open a business book, and it's three sentences on a page. "What is this?" And then you actually read through it and they were like, I got a lot out of it. I really liked it. But I was just kind of confused and disoriented at first and that was the feedback that made me go, strangers who don't know me don't know my work are going to read this book them telling me about me isn't going to help them at all. Me telling them what I know about the way that people who are reading this book and getting a lot out of it. That's the thing that will set the expectation. That's what sets the stage.

I watched a comedian. Oh, Hannah Gatsby. Have you seen Hannah Gatsby, she has a new comedy special on Netflix and she does a bit at the beginning. It's called Douglas is the name of the show. It's brilliant. She spends the first 15 minutes of an hour long special telling you how the show was gonna go beat for beat. And that's part of the joke. She's like, I'm going to tell you how the show is going to go. And you're going to see it coming. And then you're going to forget and that will make it even funnier. And she tells you what, she's telling you that she set up the show in a certain way and that she's explaining the show. Like the metal layers to it were unbelievable, and I didn't even think about it until we were talking about this just now, I might have been like subconsciously inspired by the way, she spent 15 minutes of an hour long special in the same way that I spent, you know, five to seven pages of a 110 page book, telling you how to read the book. She told you what came next. And her explanation for why she did that was because her first -- it was not wasn't her first special, but her previous special was a massive runaway hit. And it was it was a kind of genre breaker and comedy. And she's like, well doing a follow up to that show is weird, because I don't know what you all expect from me. So I figured the easiest way to ease you into this, I want to tell you exactly what to expect that way you can't be disappointed. And I think I'm thinking about that now and going. That's definitely what I was channeling when I wrote this book when I wrote that intro is I want to tell you what to expect because I know this is weird and that way when you get to a thing that is unexpected. You can't be disappointed. You can be challenged, but too disappointed unless you're that one person who said this was the most disappointing. they've ever read. Can't please them. All right. But yeah, I mean...

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I mean, like a few minutes ago, you're saying how you would have some hesitancies around using the phrase MBA in the title. And I'm wondering if that relates to what you're just talking about here right now?

Alex Hillman
I think so. I mean, I think there at the end of the day, I think like, nobody likes surprises. I mean, people that people like, you know, good surprises, but even good surprises, like, sometimes I would have liked to have known right? And so I feel like if you can help people avoid feeling disoriented, especially in a book where my goal is to challenge your thinking a little bit, if by putting you on guard with a weird format, you don't feel safe enough to really do what the book intends you to do. So I think it's helpful to make it clear, like I what I want for you and if that aligns with what you want for you, this goes back to our sales conversation before, then, like, come on a ride with me, this book might be a good time for you. And the response has been, overwhelmingly that. Which is which I'm really, really, I've enjoyed so much hearing.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, I loved how it depressurize the whole reading of the book.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. And you were, of course, you know, tweeting about the book, and I had, you know, downloaded it and, and I was excited to read it, very, very curious what your take on it would be. And then somebody tweeted out, like, "Oh, you know, I read this over my lunch break." And I was like, oh, like, I don't actually have to, like mentally, like, carve out time for this in between all of the other, you know, two 300 page books I'm reading right now. Like, this isn't one of those? Like, I was kind of expecting that. Like, it was actually pretty refreshing.

Alex Hillman
I love to hear that. Yeah, I mean, does the world need another one of those 200, 300 page books. I don't know. And to be fair, I mentioned before I've tried to write books before. And they fail, I failed to finish them in part because they were heading in that direction, where I kind of saw it coming in. I was like, "No one wants to read this. I don't really want to read it. I barely want to write it!" And so like, that's not a good place to be starting. It's also made it really fun to, you know, back to like the marketing and promotion, when you're asking people to do you favors. You know, I'm reaching out to for two people to review the book early and busy people, people I admire. Actually, this is one of my favorite stories so far, and something I'm pretty proud of. I've been pretty heavily inspired. And actually, this book and a lot of ways was also inspired by Derek Severs. You know, Derek's, I think most famous for his like mini TED talk about starting a movement, that crazy person dancing in a field turning into a dance party. Derek, I find is such an interesting, interesting person. And his business books also are kind of mold breakers and a bunch of his recent books are these. They're not books, they're like short essay collections. And I've kind of always admired his confidence to do stuff that's like, this is the way I did it. If it's useful to you, cool. I wrote him an email and I was like, Hey, your books have have been really helpful and inspiring to me over the years. I also dropped the Brian Eno, you know, reference the Oblique Strategies, because I know he's a musician, and that would would resonate. I said, Look, I've got this book. I know I'm sure people ask you to read books all the time. And I do not expect you to say yes, but this book takes about 30 minutes to read. So if you'd be interested, I love to you know, send you send you a copy. And the guy who's famous for the "hell yes or no" modality of decision making. He responded with "hell, yes.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes!

Michele Hansen
Nice!

Alex Hillman
But how like, that's the it's the, Yes. I was like, I was just, I mean, I literally stood up in my chair and you know, yes. And so you know, you know, Derek's a busy dude and he can do things on his own time. I'm excited to hear what his response is when he reads it. But to be able to approach someone who I know is busy, who I know gets hit up with books all the time to say this is, I don't know if you're gonna like it and I think you will. But most importantly, I'm not asking you to invest four to six hours. You can read this over lunch and, and, and maybe even faster.

Colleen Schnettler
So Alex, I feel like my main takeaway of the book, if I had to distill it down into one was, it's really not that hard if you just get out of your own way.

Alex Hillman
I'm glad that that's the takeaway for you. There's, I think, a large portion of difficulty and failure are our own doing. And sometimes it's just because we don't know better and sometimes because it's variations of pride and perfectionism and self sabotage. And I think the mistake is to feel guilty about it. The professional move is to acknowledge it and try something new. Even if it is a little terrifying and uncomfortable. I think you to your point before Colleen, about being a professional, who's been doing what you're doing for a while, and you're good at what you do, to trust yourself enough to do a thing that you know, you're good at what you do, you're used to feeling good at what you do to trust yourself enough to do a thing that doesn't feel good instantly, I think is a gift we can give ourselves that maybe we don't give ourselves often enough. And this happens to be a gift that quite literally pays. So it's a good one. But no, I'm really happy that that's your takeaway that's theirs. And I would be super interested to hear what if like if that takeaway changes or what that takeaway looks like in six months or a year, you come back for a skim through when the process out, you've got some customers, you're working on the next like, whatever, wherever you are in six or 12 months. How does the book look differently then? I mentioned before I like email. I would love for you to email me.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Alex Hillman
Tell me tell me what that looks like.

Colleen Schnettler
I will. Cool.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I think I mean, talking about how how it resonates with us, is something about the book, right? It's very small pieces of wisdom. And I found out you know, I, I sort of whipped through it on a lunch break. And then it was a week later, as I was thinking about that marketing quote, or is thinking about the ones about psychology. And I think that's something that's really, really interesting about the book and about the short format is that you're not taking two to 300 pages to make a point you're giving yourself one page for each point. And it's interesting to see what sticks out with individual people at different points.

Alex Hillman
Yeah, and I you know, I think your point about something kind of warms way into your brain. And, you know, shows up again later, now. You read 400 pages of a book and the, then you hope that that lesson is useful now or that you remembered in the future when it will be. But the ability for, I feel like, I feel like a kind of get a chance to plant some seeds. And even if you don't know exactly what it means yet, or how you're going to use it, or, or even how you feel about it, it's like it's in there. And it will show up at some point and you're gonna be like, Where's that damn book? I got it. What was he talking about again? And so like, I don't know, that's for me. That's really exciting to hear. So I love hearing that that's, you know, a few days after you read it, there's, you know, something kind of, really, you know, still resonating in your brain or a question that you're still asking yourself to me, that's, that's yet another version of the book doing its job. So that's super cool to hear. Thank you.

Michele Hansen
This has been really fun talking to you about it, and I really enjoyed reading the book. I love how you're trying to make business education accessible for more people. I think that's one thing about an MBA is that it is not accessible to everyone, but there there's value in, in systems level thinking and challenging your own thinking. And I really like how you are approaching that even in a tiny way in this case.

Alex Hillman
Brilliantly said. Thank you. Uh, yeah. You know, and one of one of my hopes for folks to, you know, to read through this, even people who are brand spankin new, right. So there's a bunch of folks that... I got a message from somebody who they said, I just started my LLC yesterday, and I'm signing my first freelance client tomorrow. I did not expect this book to be useful to me today. And it was so useful. And so you know, that's just like, you know, we've got...

Michele Hansen
Amazing

Alex Hillman
I was like, that's the cool. And for somebody to read it and feel like a sense of confidence going into their first client project, like that confidence is so much more valuable than a lesson I can teach you. Because you'll build on it, and you'll make mistakes anyway, because that's unavoidable. But when you make a mistake, you'd be like, "Oh, that's what Alex was talking about." Instead of thinking that you are an idiot, or something is wrong with you, you'll be like, "Oh, that's the thing that happens when you do this other thing," because it is!

Michele Hansen
This is something that every business owner experiences, and you are not wrong for experiencing that.

Alex Hillman
Exactly. And to your point, Michele, it's all systems, right businesses or systems, not magical boxes where you put an effort and money comes out. Some I think some people are just like, you know, confused about what that is, and just to show give people an idea of like, oh, there are systems here that I'm a normal person, I can understand them. I can practice them and I can get good at them. This book isn't going to teach you all the things but it gives you sort of those, those shapes for you to grab onto and go, Okay, now I know what this is, I'm going to go find an expert in that thing, right? And go deep on that. And you know, find your areas of expertise, where you need to grow and find that expert on the internet, go search YouTube for the How To Video find the podcaster, or the writer or the other independent author and fill in those gaps. Yeah, no, it's it's been a blast. And I've super enjoyed talking with the two of you as well, this is, you know, the different places that each of you are in your businesses is, like I said, it's been fun to hear that myself, but it hasn't all been in one conversation. So it's kind of neat to have it all packaged up and I hope that's useful for people to hear. And yeah, thanks for you know, thank you for taking the time to read it. I'm glad it was helpful. And thank you for inviting me into your coffee chat show. Feel feel very honored to be here.

Michele Hansen
So if people want to buy the book, where should they go?

Alex Hillman
tiny dot MBA is the website. You can buy the paperback, it ships worldwide, and get it delivered anywhere you are. That paperback includes the ebook. So while you're waiting for it to be delivered, you can give it your first read. Or if you like to just get the ebook, you can grab that there as well. And keep your eyes peeled for the Yiny MBA community down the road as well.

Michele Hansen
Definitely will.

Colleen Schnettler
I'm super excited about that, by the way I'm already playing in my head with that's gonna be like, cool. Well,

Alex Hillman
I look forward to seeing both of you in there before the year is out.

Colleen Schnettler
Great. Thank you so much, Alex, we loved having you. You can find us on Twitter at @softwaresocpod and we'd love to hear your feedback and comments on this week's episode.

View Details

Michele Hansen
Welcome back to Software Social. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen
So what's going on, Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler
I have so many things I want to share today. Yeah. I, yes, yes, I am super excited. Because I have finally finished my image management widget. I need a better name. By the way. Image management widget is like the worst name. I need something snappy, like cool image uploader. Anyway, I'll work on that.

Michele Hansen
Naming is one of the hardest parts honestly, like, naming and pricing.

Colleen Schnettler
So I have finally finished what I ended up doing was, I think I was listening to a bootstrapper podcast years ago, and I remember the host said something about how he was like, Well, you know, sometimes you need to just go to a hotel for four days and finish something. And that's entirely impractical for people, you know, who are responsible for spouses and children and other things like that. So I wasn't actually able to do that, but I did manage to block out like three solid days, and I got it done.

Michele Hansen
Nice!

Colleen Schnettler
So I'm super pumped about that. Yeah, I'm super pumped. So that's exciting. So my next steps are, you know, kind of, not kind of my next steps. My next step is getting it deployed. And I've already deployed an app in the Heroku Store before so I know the process. So hopefully that will not be too painful.

Michele Hansen
So when you say it's done, is it the product itself is done? Or is also like the commercialization of it done in terms of making it something people can pay for and have accounts for and stuff like that?

Colleen Schnettler
What do you think, Michelle?

Michele Hansen
I'm just asking!

Colleen Schnettler
if it was funny, you say that because I was literally thinking as I was finishing up, I was like, Alright, so now the real work starts. This was like the fun work. Now I actually have to do the real work and my plan is to deploy it in the Heroku App Store. So there is some glue, I have to work with the Heroku API, and things like that to make it available to customers. So my plan is to start using it for my own projects and my client projects immediately. And, you know, maybe after I've been using it... I think the way that Heroku App Store works as you'd have to put something in the App Store, and then you know, you have to it has to be free. And you have to get like a lot of users, I forget how many, but you're just in this alpha stage.

So that's, that's kind of my plan to kind of get it out there. But like, really, the hard work behind this now is documenting how to use it and figuring out how to use it for different use cases and all of that kind of stuff. Which yeah, like I said, that's probably the real hard work, right?

Michele Hansen
I mean, that's the work that never ends right? Like so much of marketing is here is how you use this and here's when you would use it and...

Colleen Schnettler
I just -- and I could be wrong, but I feel like I am uniquely equipped to handle that because I think a lot of developers who do things specific like this, especially something is technically, you know, unique, I guess, they don't really do a good job of making it easy to use. They're like, Oh, here's this thing, but you also have to go get an AWS account and set up your own IAM account. And you have to, you know, put it behind a CDN, and you have to do with all this other stuff. So, so I hope and I think that one thing I am good at is I'm really good at taking complicated processes and distilling them down into simple explanations. So that's really my goal. So

Michele Hansen
if people wanted to use this to add images to their project, would they only need to use your image management service for this? Would they also need their own AWS account or because you'd mentioned a couple weeks ago that it would just be under your AWS account?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. So it's one service. I thought about doing it as to services. It would have actually been easier on me to do it as to services, but I don't think that's what the customer ultimately wants. Especially as we talked about is if I put this into even less developer, you know, friendly terrain and start to try to use it in a no code tool or something like that. You've got to extract that away, because like the AWS console is a bear, especially if you don't know what you're doing. So yeah, so it's just one service right now.

Michele Hansen
And so you said that for the time being in the Heroku marketplace, it'll be an alpha that can only be free.

Colleen Schnettler
There's yeah, I actually don't all the details yet. Because I wanted to finish it, but it's something like that, like you put it in and it has to be free for a while. And you have to have -- I think it's a lot I forget, there's a certain number of people you have to get trying it. So I'm going to beg all of my friends who ever used a Heroku.

Michele Hansen
Listeners...

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, if you use Heroku, please, please, please send me an email or a tweet or I will let you know when this is in the App Store. Please download it!

Michele Hansen
But hold on. So is there a free tier from AWS for what you are effectively reselling?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, so that's that's the rub. Um, there's not really.

Michele Hansen
Oh no.

Colleen Schnettler
So it's not it sounds bad, but like, it's not that bad because I can rate limit everything. And so what I did was I got a new AWS account. And with new AWS accounts you get -- I forget how much -- but you get a certain amount of free stuff that first year. So under my new URL, like URL, email and stuff, I got the new account, so I get X amount free. But so this is like a really interesting, this will be a really interesting kind of pain point, right is because yes, if it's required to be free, Cloud Storage generally isn't free. I don't really know how it's all gonna play out. But really, I don't actually expect to get a whole bunch of people that it's going to become a problem yet.

So I was reading this blog post by Amy Hoy, the Fine Art of Flintstoning. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or read it. And she talks about -- like so sometimes you just she talks about how it took her six years to ship something, which by the way makes me feel way better. And she also talks about how there's a point where you just you just have to ship something, right. So she uses this term "flint stoning." And she uses it to mean some stuff you're going to do manually. So she was talking about when they first launched Freckle, like, if you wanted your email reset, like you, they had to do that manually. And so there were the certain steps she had to do manually TO ACTUALLY SHIP her product. And that's kind of where I am right now. Like, there's a lot I want to do on the AWS side to monitor this and, and, you know, watch the billing, but I started to get like lost and all of that. And so at least for the first couple months, like I'm just gonna have a simple script that runs independent of the app, or I'll just look at it with my own eyeballs to kind of keep track of where I am.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I think that kind of custom monitoring and all of that. We were doing that all manually for quite a long time. Time I want I want to say like three plus years.

Colleen Schnettler
Really?

Michele Hansen
We had various services that we used, you know, for, for in terms of having a one central dashboard where we could observe everything. At least you know, specifically where you're talking here in terms of server health and those sorts of things. Yeah, we didn't have like, you know, a full dashboard with all of the different metrics on them. I mean, of course, with AWS, you want to keep an eye on what you're being charged. So yeah, that's important. I mean, even just manual things in general, like she, you know, she mentions changing an email address, and I think for Geocodio, do we, we didn't actually add a way to delete your account on your own through the dashboard until like, last year, or two years ago, and it wasn't because we are trying to be evil dark pattern people. It was just, we just hadn't designed a flow for it. And there wasn't enough people asking to do that, that they could just email us and we always responded promptly.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, so I'm, I'm going to take on so there's a certain amount of risk. And it's interesting like going into this, because I, as we talked about last time, like I started to, there's so many things I can do with this. So I started to aggressively cut features. And I'm just basing the feature set on what I personally need right now. So I'm aggressively cutting features, and this was this, this AWS thing was a big one for me, because I really wanted to have a cleaner like interface for myself, you know, just to manage everything on the AWS side, but I read that article and I got all inspired and I was like, you know what it's done. Like, I can manage that myself, at least for the first couple weeks. And I mean, honestly, like, I don't anticipate -- people are not knocking down my door for this product. And I'm not saying I don't think it's gonna succeed. I just don't anticipate I'm gonna have a whole lot of people in the beginning. So I feel like the first couple months, especially since I'll be using myself, will be a great time for me to do this stuff on AWS and figure that all out. And, you know, kind of see how people are using the product, if they're using the product, what features, you know, are important or aren't important. So, things like that.

Michele Hansen
So what are those specific thresholds that let you out of alpha and then allow you to charge for it in the Heroku marketplace?

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, I don't know.

Michele Hansen
I would be very interested to know what the thresholds are.

Colleen Schnettler
So that's a good idea. Um, I will have that information for you next week. I will let you know. Um, so yeah, right now, you know, it's interesting, because like, I'm just kind of like riding my high of letting of having this thing working. But like I said, like, I know, the real work is now kind of, it's a little more of the drudgery work, right? Because it's like hooking up hooking it up getting in the marketplace writing all the time...

Michele Hansen
It's making it a business!

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, exactly. It's making it a business.

Michele Hansen
So It's interesting that you describe that as drudgery.

Colleen Schnettler
Is that bad? Does that bode poorly for my future?

Michele Hansen
I didn't say that was bad! I just said it was interesting.

Colleen Schnettler
Well, yeah, we'll see. Maybe I'll love it. Maybe I'll hate it. I don't know.

Michele Hansen
yeah, we'll see something that seems to really drive you in. This is the frustration that you feel with facing this problem repeatedly. And I think that once you get that groundwork laid, you get it in the marketplace, you've got some documentation, you've got a little bit of copy around how people can use it, and then you actually start getting people using it. I find that such a huge motivator to keep improving something and keep going and get you through all of the drudgery is seeing somebody else, use something that you made and seeing the impact that it has on their work and in their own frustration with it and when and when they you know, express to you how much frustration it's removed for them.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. And I think that'll be like my energy cycle. Like building it is a lot of fun. But there's a lot of like lows and highs and in that cycle because there's things you know how to do, things you don't know how to do. And I think that the documentation stuff like, that's a little bit of a, you know, a little bit, a little bit boring, but important, but I also think like, I love people, right. And I love talking to people. And I think to your point, like, if someone actually if literally one person besides myself, uses it and is like, Hey, this is exactly what I need. This is awesome. That's all I need. Getting to that point, we're actually going to talk to people again, and everything is mostly in place, and I'm just improving. Like, that is my goal. My goal right now. That's kind of where I'm trying to get to.

Michele Hansen
We'll get you there. I think you can get there.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. Yeah. So another thing I wanted to tell you. So I have another great idea. And I am, this is my thing, right? I think I just get a lot of energy from ideas and I have tons of ideas. So as we had discussed again every week, my focus right now is on the image management stuff. But I have another idea. I'm not quite ready to talk about it yet. But I actually had a person tell me he would pay for it...

Michele Hansen
Oh...?

Colleen Schnettler
Which is more than I've gotten. Yeah. How about that? It's more than I've gotten from anyone, any of my other ideas. So, so that's kind of in the back of my mind. So I'm just trying to like, you know, marinate on that a little bit. But I do have two people who have already agreed to talk with me about this other idea. So I'm going to get to, I'm going to get to practice all of my customer interview skills, hopefully, get those scheduled in the next couple weeks.

Michele Hansen
Sounds like you're really on a roll.

Colleen Schnettler
You know Michele, I think this whole process is managing your own energy levels. Like I went on vacation, and I came back and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm gonna take on the world.

Michele Hansen
You know, we always find that like we have our best business conversations when we're on a road trip.

Colleen Schnettler
yeah, it's just there's something about not being in I don't know not being in your house or like, I went on vacation and what I didn't say at the beginning and this makes me sound like a super nerd but because there are a lot of demands on my time at home with the kids. On my vacation, I actually took three days and ditched my family to finish my image management service. Now everyone who listens to this podcast knows what a nerd I am. But it was a boy -- you know, right. Like the kids have been home for six months, it is almost impossible to to get the kind of deep focus you need. And I am like, a deep focus person, like put me in a basement. And like, like with no sound like I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's my like, happy place. So yeah, so I ditched my family for three days on vacation. It was and I just worked and it was, I don't know, it was glorious. It like really made me happy.

Michele Hansen
I think that's a pretty normal feeling, especially, especially with side projects, right where and if you're not getting a whole ton of fulfillment out of your day-to-day job that the side project itself like feels like a vacation from the things you're normally doing because you have you have total flexibility and independence and latitude to do what you want to do -- which whether you're consulting or you're working for a company, you're rarely in that scenario and if you genuinely enjoy your work -- which you definitely do -- be at the side project even though it's work it's it's it's also a break from work at the same time. It's a very weird thing.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, totally agree. And the only other thing I wanted to say on this me having all these ideas all of a sudden, is I did want to share with with people who are struggling with idea generation because I know in a lot of the groups I mean, this is a common problem. I started a habit, like two and I used to never have any ideas. I started a habit like two years ago, where every morning I would write down two ideas like with my coffee before I turned on my computer. And there's so bad. I mean, 99% of them are terrible. But it kind of got my mind engaged in a different way, where I just started seeing things more often than then before, like just changing my mindset.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I think once you start looking at the problems in the world, not as problems but as different opportunities to be solved, it's hard to turn your brain off from thinking that way.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah. So anyway, that's my very exciting news. I hope next week to have -- to stay on track and have another great update. So Michele, what's been on your mind this week?

Michele Hansen
So I was thinking back to some of the episodes we've done so far. And you have been so open and vulnerable with us about all of your struggles with launching your new product. And the things I have talked about have not exactly been struggles. So, so I wanted to dial in on something that we do struggle with, and we do talk about that we haven't figured out yet.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, okay, what, what is this topic?

Michele Hansen
Hiring?

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, I've always wondered about this with you guys. Please tell me more.

Michele Hansen
So it's something that comes up fairly often. Actually, that other people will ask us about, you know, I feel like there are these ideas that you're not a real company unless you do X, right.

Colleen Schnettler
Mhmm.

Michele Hansen
Like how many of us have heard you're not a real company unless you take funding, or you're not a real company unless you have employees. And so this is something that we, we hear fairly often, but honestly, we really like the simplicity of not having any employees of it just being the two of us.

Colleen Schnettler
So I know people who run bootstrapped businesses of comparable size and almost all of them have employees.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I think something is a little unique about our business, though maybe not so much for a bootstrap company, is that since it was a side project for three and a half years, which I think actually is a little bit long for a side project to be a side project, we definitely waited a lot longer than I think many people would, like we were well past the replacement rate of our of our salaries, mostly because we were terrified of paying for our own health insurance. Um, and so during that time, things that other people may have hired for, like customer support, we found ways to automate them away or handle them with our design. You know, so things like resetting passwords or cancelling plans or all sorts of other things. Whenever we had repeated questions, we just designed our service better so that people didn't have to ask us those questions, right? Because no one really wants to talk to customer support, like, it means you have a problem. And so we try to preempt all of those things. And then once we went full time, it became so much easier for us to handle things and to make improvements and reduce the number of tickets and, and all that kind of stuff. So that that kind of moves off of the radar. Of course, there's many other things you can hire for besides customer support, though.

Colleen Schnettler
This is interesting to me because I had a friend who listened to our podcast, the episode on the HIPAA stuff, and he runs a venture backed company, and he had like a whole business plan set out for you. He was like, Oh my gosh, she's doing it all wrong. She should hire all these salespeople and like, he had you guys like a $500 million company in his head in like 20 minutes. So it was interesting, like, you guys haven't hired anyone, like you don't even have one salesperson. I mean, tell me more about that decision.

Michele Hansen
Something that's really important to me, is incentive design in a company. And I think this is something that can get overlooked. So, for example, when you take funding, you're creating a set of incentives for yourself, you now have investors that you, you know, you need to impress them and and meet their expectations, right? You're, if you have employees, you're giving them shares. And so everyone is having incentives towards specific outcomes. And something that I really treasure as being a bootstrapped business owner is that we can make decisions that are in the best interest of the customer, that are ethically aligned with what we believe, and that we don't have to chase growth at all costs, or we're not struggling to meet metrics that may be externally imposed on us. And instead, we have our own metrics. And some of those are financial and many of those are not. And so designing an incentive structure is a really important part of scaling a company. And I don't feel like I have figured out what is an incentive structure that aligns with what I believe in and how I want to run the company and how I would want to run the company in the future that satisfies sort of all those different concerns I have.

You know, I do a lot of reading on ethical business, like people may be familiar with the book Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey written before Whole Foods was acquired by Amazon. There's also The Lapsed Anarchist's Guide to Building a Great Business run by the people who founded this little deli and Ann Arbor, Michigan called Zingerman's. That's such a fantastic book. And both of those books really talk about this incentive design and how having goals like, you know, aggressive sales goals or you know, having a huge team and you need to pay their salaries, like that creates incentives. And are they always good? The answer is probably, often not.

Colleen Schnettler
So why is this a touchy subject for you? Do you feel a lot of pressure amongst like your peers to hire, to grow?

Michele Hansen
No, we don't. We don't feel pressure to grow. We certainly have people expect that of us. And then they get confused when we tell them that we don't have any growth ambitions. And even though we are growing, I mean, I shared those numbers a couple of weeks ago. I think something that we we really enjoy is yes, it does feel like it's that next step, right. Sometimes I think about it in terms of you know, people will often ask couples like when they're going to have their first child or when they're having another child as if this is like sort of a, like, normal non-invasive question you can just ask similarly, you know, how did you you know, enjoy the weather today, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Pro tip: like don't ask that question.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, just for anyone asking, like, that's not a friendly question. Like, don't ask.

I feel like it's kind of a similar vein because people ask Oh, so what are you guys hiring and you know, you don't know what that company situation is, you don't know what their perspective on things is but quite frankly, I think something that I I also really treasure about our business is just how simple it is. Right? So my husband and I created the business together. And it's always funny talking about that with people who don't work with their spouse because I find there's very polarizing reactions to that like, like the people who don't work with their spouse. Give me this like deer in the headlights horrified reaction that's like, "Oh my god, like, don't you guys fight all the time. That must be horrible." Like, or they're just like, oh, how do you like disconnect from work and like, and, and they assume it's terrible. And I'm just kind of like, we wouldn't have done this for six and a half years if it was terrible. And then on the other side are other couples who run companies together. And they're like, isn't it so great? Like it's just so easy. It's amazing. It's actually this is one of my favorite things about being MicroConf last year was meeting other founder couples and us talking together about how like, nice it actually was compared to how chaotic people assume it is. Which is kind of a funny thing. But it's just so simple with the two of us because we work so well together like we met at work. Professional respect for one another is one of the foundations of our relationship and we just work so well together and it's so easy. And yes, we could grow more if we had, you know, people doing marketing or we would grow a lot faster if we had a sales team or you know, things could run smoother if we had engineers, but we feel like it runs smoothly enough and we grow enough that we don't have to bring in those other elements.

Colleen Schnettler
But isn't the whole point of building a bootstrapped business so you can hire someone and only work four hours a week, like Four Hour Workweek? Michele?

Michele Hansen
I've never read a Tim Ferriss book.

Colleen Schnettler
Really?

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I don't know if I'm the only one. Um, no, I don't see I don't even know if that's the goal, right? Because I enjoy what we do. And I think this also confuses people. I think a lot of what I do confuses people, because we, we like serving the customers that we do and and helping them and doing what we do. You know, I'll have people ask me "Oh, like, Are you trying to get acquired? Like, you know, what if I gave you..." you know, I was giving a presentation to some business students, probably about a year year and a half ago. And I was talking about how we don't have any plans to get acquired and actually how we just offhandly reject offers to to get funded or get acquired because we're just not interested in it. And they're, and they didn't believe me. And they're like, what if I gave you $10 million, hundred million dollars? And I'm like, What would I do with that? Like, I would just have to go figure out another company to start and I already have one that works. And I don't necessarily aspire to work four hours a week. Like I enjoy working and maybe that is confusing to some people. I can certainly understand how that would be but I don't know.

Colleen Schnettler
It just seems like you guys work a lot and I know you love to work. But you do work a lot. So it seems like if you could find the right person to bring on board, it would take some of the, you know, the pressure off of the two of you and give you a little more breathing room.

Michele Hansen
That's something we've thought about. You know, I mean, it's, we had someone actually reach out to us this summer to be an intern, and she seemed so awesome. And she actually lived nearby, so we could have even had sort of over the fence meetings with her. She sort of got like, we actually took it seriously. We even looked into you know, how much we would need to increase our workers comp by and stuff like that if we took on a part time employee. You mean, it's sort of as an aside, I think it's the highest compliment you can pay a business owner to tell them that you want to work for them and work for their company like it just it's incredibly moving every time. I consider that a huge responsibility. I know there are a lot of companies that you know, they hire people and they delay them off or... They don't feel like they have a responsibility to the employees, they feel the employees have a responsibility to them. And I feel very strongly that it goes both ways. And if we were to hire someone, I would not only want to make sure that we had a job for them six months or a year from now, but like, five years from now, 10 years from now, because I feel like you're making a commitment to them, and their family, that there is going to be something for them, there's going to be a role for them that they're going to be able to move up in that role, which is another thing I have questions about because it's the two of us running the company and so there's a set ceiling for someone going going into that role and someone's like, you know, how good of an experience would that be really if they knew that they could never move up like that, that would be a very frustrating scenario for them. And then there's the other element of Okay, you know, the the kind of person we would need to bring on would need to be very highly skilled. And so we're probably looking at least $100, $150,000 a year including benefits. And then how would, going back to incentives? How would that distort my own incentives? What I feel like we need to grow more aggressively? What I feel like we need to change our tactics? I'm really proud of the fact that we don't have an aggressive sales team. But if we had a staff would I feel backed into a corner? And like we needed to, you know, to do things. And I, and I feel very strongly that we should run the company in a way that is in the best interest of the customers and I question whether I would be able to do that if I had salary pressures on me.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, that makes sense. I tried to hire someone maybe two years ago, but all of the things you just said that's the reason I never built a consultancy. Because hiring trying to hire someone was incredibly painful, like especially engineers, trying to vet engineers and then I felt the same way like... you know, I've had a pretty good stream of income. But if you're responsible for someone else's livelihood, like it kind of changes the whole game. When you look at, when you validate contracts, and you try to figure out what kind of business you're going to take, because you are now responsible for someone else. And that is a huge responsibility. So I definitely see where you're coming from.

But I think there's a lot of opportunity for you guys, you could have an incubator, you could have like a cool internship program. I mean, there's so many people trying to start businesses in this space. I feel like there, you might find other ways. If you had more time, you might be surprised, you would find other really cool ways to use your time.

Michele Hansen
So I'm actually participating in something soon that relates this because I do love mentoring people and helping other business owners and I feel very, very strongly that I have a responsibility to help other business owners try to do what we have done. And so I'm actually going to be a leading a cohort group with Founder Summit later this fall. This is through Earnest Capital. And I love doing that. Maybe it's because I get all of that the fun part of having employees and helping helping them grow and nurturing them without all of those pressures of being responsible for their family's livelihood.

Colleen Schnettler
Awesome.

Michele Hansen
But yeah, I you know, we haven't ruled it out. I imagine that we will take baby steps in the future like hiring consultants -- like we've never even hired a freelance designer for anything. I mean, we have really never hired for anything. And I imagine we will at some point, but I want to share that as a genuine struggle that we have. Something that we we haven't figured out in the business, less it less it sound like we have figured everything out, which we certainly haven't.

Colleen Schnettler
It sounds like you're pretty happy with where you are right now. In the choices you've made so far regarding hiring.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I think the the idea is sort of we want to be able to keep doing what we're doing for as long as we can. And we know that's going to change in the future. But where things have been for the last, you know, last three years, it's been oh my gosh, because my full time anniversary is coming up in October. We, yeah, we enjoy it. It's simple.

Colleen Schnettler
Awesome. Well, that's gonna wrap us up for today. You can find us on Twitter at @SoftwareSocPod, and we'd love to hear any feedback you have about this week's episode. Until next week.

Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

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Michele Hansen
Welcome to the Software Social podcast. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm Colleen Schnettler .

Michele Hansen
So Colleen, tell me what's going on this week.

Colleen Schnettler
So I unfortunately have not had a whole lot of time to work on my side project this week, because life has been crazy. I've been swamped with client work and family stuff. So I didn't really do anything.

Michele Hansen
That happens! Right? Especially during COVID times.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes!

Michele Hansen
How much free time does anyone really have right now, especially if you have kids?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. Balancing the kids and the clients and the work and the side project work has definitely been quite a lot.

Michele Hansen
You've basically got two sets of clients because the kids themselves are, you know...

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah!

Michele Hansen
...Pop in every 15 minutes and need things.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes. And I'll work for three hours. And then they'll be like, Mommy, why aren't you spending any time with us? I'm like, only worked for three hours. It's because you're here all day. You're not at school where you're supposed to be! Anyway, anyway.

Michele Hansen
So the small amount of time you didn't get to spend on your side project.

Colleen Schnettler
So the small amount of time I did get to spend on my side project, I was chatting with a friend of mine about some of the technical challenges I'm having. And I'm having this really one specific problem where uploading multiple images is not working the way I want it to. And he suggested I ditch that -- he thought that having a multiple image upload was beyond the purview of an MVP. And I should just get it working with one image just to get something out there. Right just to get my foot in the door.

Michele Hansen
Hmm.

Colleen Schnettler
What do you think about that advice?

Michele Hansen
I was gonna ask you what you thought of it first.

Colleen Schnettler
I think it's good advice. Because one of the things I've one of the problems I always have is taking that first step and getting something out there because I just continually -- as I've been going through this, I continually want to add features, I got totally distracted with my lambda API gateway stuff last week. And that stuff is really cool, but totally beyond the initial scope of what I was trying to build. And I think for me, like I kind of got to get in the game, like, I've just got to get something out there to keep me motivated, and to get people using it and see if people want multiple image support.

Michele Hansen
And also to get you using it right, because you've mentioned that you would use this with your clients and your time is at a premium. And so if you can start using it, that will be a form of feedback on on the product.

Colleen Schnettler
Right? Like I am going to be hopefully my own best user of my own product, because I will get to use it and see like where the errors are. I know I want multiple image support. But what I can put out now is still better than what they're using. And I can still use it, you know, adding one image at a time, if I want, or I could use my part for the single images and use something else, a custom solution, for multiple images. I just feel like this is something that is taking me forever. And it's not really taking forever, but it's just something I need to get out there. And I was reading this article about like, what makes a good MVP and it wasn't about having a ton of features it was but it was also not about having a crappy product, like you need a tight product, you need a really good product with the minimal amount of features to make it viable.

Michele Hansen
It's a tough concept, right? Because there there's this graphic that I I'm gonna have to share it because I'm gonna totally butcher it. But basically it's you know, the MVP of a car is not, you know, four wheels with a platform. The MVP of a car is a scooter because it still gets you from A to B like that's the the job of the product is to transport you from one place to another. But it's a very simple version of it, you know, it doesn't have features like a roof or, you know, multiple seating support, right? But it still gets you there. But there's very often when you see MVPs built, it's, you know, something that is a shell of what the product was supposed to be and isn't actually useful.

Colleen Schnettler
Right! So that's my goal.

Michele Hansen
So I think there definitely, there is that temptation, though, to sit on it until you've built you know, a Tesla, right? And you need to get it out there sooner than that and get feedback and I think there's also a certain pressure to not put things out there until it's perfect because I think we get afraid that it's gonna, it's gonna be criticized and people aren't gonna like it and they're gonna tell you how it's incomplete in ways that you already know. And I think it's really easy to build up a lot of fear around that, I mean. I'll tell you that like, features that people told us were boilerplate when we launched, we still haven't launched them, and we may never launch them. So...

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. Like we don't have global support. And it has not been a problem for us. But that was something that people asked for on day one. And if we had waited until we had global support, we never would have launched.

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

Michele Hansen
We launched with just what we needed, which was coverage for the US, and honestly was not that great when we launched it either. But we launched with that, which was very simple. It was what we needed. And then we took it from there. But we didn't wait until it was totally perfect mirror image of major competitor products out there.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, so I think for me, what I have now for these guys is single file, upload one at a time, and so I can build it as a single file upload one at a time. And I can utilize it on my existing application. And it could still be useful for people. And then I could, I mean, I could get that version out there. And then I could work on the multiple file support. And some of the other things if I decide that I need it.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, and if there's demand for it, and, you know, of course, there's always the complication of when you build something, it's not always easy to build other things on top of it that it wasn't built for. And so, you know, something to keep in mind that you know, at some point, you're going to want batch support, and so making architectural decisions that won't inhibit that, but also not committing yourself to that and the architecture at the same time is a tricky thing to do.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, I think I can do it with this, with this setup that I have now. So I think that'll work. So I think that's my new plan is just to finish it. Just to finish. So that's my short but sweet update for this week. So what have you been doing?

Michele Hansen
So I've been thinking a lot about customer research which, you know...

Colleen Schnettler
This is my favorite topic.

Michele Hansen
This is MY favorite topic!

[laughter]

So we are going to be launching a new version of our dashboard. So our dashboard is where people can, you know, update billing settings, create API keys, look at their usage history, sort of administrative functions like that. And our dashboard. Speaking of when we launched on Bootstrap was super cool at the time. So everything was Bootstrap. And the dashboard is still Bootstrap and I think we upgraded it at some point a couple of years ago, like maybe two years ago, and I don't even know what version it's on, but does it even matter because it's still on Bootstrap. And that has really inhibited a lot of the functionality we've wanted to add and and usability improvements we've wanted to add like so for example, on our billing page, it's just one long, massive page because there's no like good support for a sub menu in Bootstrap. And so it's like, we can roll our own but, do we really want to do that? And like so? The answer is no. And so we're moving everything over to Tailwind has been awesome.

Colleen Schnettler
Of course! That's the hotness.

Michele Hansen
It is and, you know, and our marketing website has been on Tailwind for a long time now and it's been so great and it makes it so easy to add new elements like I was mentioning last week how I was working on adding landing pages. And like I actually finished all of our all of our landing pages have content pillars now, which is something I have been working on since last fall, which were...

Colleen Schnettler
tell us what a content pillar is, please?

Michele Hansen
Yes. So this is something I learned about from a mutual friend of ours, Michael Buckbee, who helps me with some SEO on our site. And one thing he mentioned was content pillars, which is basically just related links at the bottom. So, for example, on our website, someone might be looking at a customer page about real estate. So it talks about why people in real estate use Geocodio and then it has some customer logos, and then it has a testimonial, and then there's a call to action. The content pillars are at the very bottom, and then they link off to related content. So maybe it's like creating an API key or fetching FIPS codes at the same time. So like other things that that type of customer might want. And then you go to any of those pages, and you see the related content to the bottom. So for example, on our security page at the bottom, the content pillars are going to our privacy policy going to our terms of service, stuff about infrastructure, things like that. So everything is all linking together, which really helps with SEO, because it gives those other pages visibility. And it also helps when customers are coming into the site for the first time that they can see related content. Anyway.

So after I had I had talked to our friend about this, I asked Mathias my, my husband and co founder, if we could add these and because we were working with Tailwind on the marketing website, it was like super fast at it. And I was totally blown away. Because normally when I asked for features like that, it's kind of difficult, right? Especially if it was on Bootstrap. So that's the case on the on the dashboard.

So even though it's only a cosmetic redesign, it's not we're not actually changing or removing any functionality. I really want to do user testing on it.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
And It's always good to use your testing on it, though, I think. I've noticed that, when you're doing cosmetic redesigns, it's pretty common for people to not really warn users in advance. But early in my career, I got burned from this. We made some cosmetic upgrades to a website that had been the same for a very long time. And the users were not happy about it. And I really don't want to go through that again. And you know, if you're using a website every day, and all of a sudden it changes. that's pretty disorienting, right?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, it's pretty annoying.

Michele Hansen
Like, it's kind of like, I don't know, like, remember, like when you're in high school, and like, you'd go into a classroom and like, the teacher, like, rearranged the desks and everyone is like, WHAT HAPPENED?!

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, right.

Michele Hansen
So like, it's kind of like that. And you know, I don't want to like freak out our users so I'm excited too, though, because I haven't done any user testing since the pandemic started.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen
Like Yeah, like or interviews. Um, I had the last one I did was Monday, March 6, I think it was like the Monday before school shut down and everything. Um, because as were talking about earlier, you know, when you've got kids running around at home and everything, it's really hard to get into a state of focus. And I find that the, the level of empathy required in order to do a good customer interview or usability session, like do you really have to, like submerge yourself into that person? It's very Being John Malkovich. Less creepy. But, you know, it's like you really have to get into their brain and understand how does the world look from their perspective and how do they perceive things and where were are difficulties, where are they spending a lot of time, what do they like, what don't they like.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, so I know a few questions about this.

Michele Hansen
Okay.

Colleen Schnettler
Question is I feel like you are approaching this differently than your typical developer. What are you going to do? A/B testing first, are you going to talk to people first?

Michele Hansen
No talk to people first.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, that's interesting.

Michele Hansen
So AB testing is good for when you have a very clear difference between things. And you've already gotten the feedback leading to it. So for example, if we did, like sales landing pages, for example, we don't really do but this is a good use case for AB tests, where you have one landing page. And then let's say you have the exact same sales landing page, but you want to test whether you add more call to action buttons throughout the page, rather than just at the very bottom. Does that increase or decrease conversions? You have a very clear change between the two. And you have a very clear metric for measuring that. When you're doing anything that involves qualitative changes, there's multiple changes involved it, and I think a B tests are a bit messy and I think over-used. Like there should be a lot of tools in your testing toolbox and AB tests are a great one to have in there, but they are not the right fit for not only every every question and also the life cycle of every question, right? Because it might come in at a later stage. But no, we're not gonna AB test it.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay, so now you're going to discuss this change with your users before you make this change. What kind of questions do you ask? Because I feel like the aesthetics of a dashboard are so nebulous, qualitative, right? Oh, there's no good metrics to tie in there.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, so what I'm going to be doing is basically what what UX people would call a top task analysis.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
So this is when you have like maybe 10 different activities that you know, someone should be able to complete on a website. And you want to see how easy it is for people to complete it. So you're testing how easy it is for people to understand what they can do on the website. So that's called discoverability. Right? See, so can they discover what they can do on the website? And then you might have different pieces of or different features that help them do those things called affordances. And you want to see, do those? Do they help them right? Or do they need them to function in different ways?

So for example, one of the things on the dashboard is, we have seen that people don't realize that the clicking on their email address in the top right hand corner is actually a menu that pulls out things like adding team members to your account and or deleting your account things like other features like that. And because of the elements we're using with Tailwind, it's actually moving to the bottom left hand corner. So first of all, I want to see if they can even find that account menu. And then if I were to ask them just looking at the dashboard itself, you know, I would say for example, "Can you show me where you might add a team member to your account?" And then I will give them some time to do that. Don't prompt them, don't lead them in any way, and you're testing the website, not them, it's always a very important thing to stress. And then if they can't, then I take notes and be like, okay, we need to make it more obvious that you can do, you know, adding a team member to your account, for example. And so I'm going to make a list of about 10 different tasks. The number of tasks that you might have for top task analysis may vary. So where I worked previously, we would send out surveys asking people, what are the different kinds of things that you want to be able to do, we would look at, you know, website traffic data, seeing which pages are getting the most traffic, you know, and use that to determine what the top task list was. We're a much more simple operation than that. So I'm just going to come up with a list myself based on our understanding of our users. There's, and there will probably be something that we don't test for. Um, so you know, there will be opportunities for free, you know, expression in the interview and then I would also like to send out a sample clickable version of the dashboard to all of our paying customers before it launches as well just so that they know what's coming, and we're not going to do that whole, you know, teacher-rearranges-the-desks thing on them.

Colleen Schnettler
So earlier, so the way I envisioned this away, you're describing it as you get on a call, like a Zoom call with one of your customers screenshare and you just watch them. Is that what you actually do?

Michele Hansen
Yes, yes. So I have video off so this is...Yeah, so and we will have a demo clickable version of the dashboard they can go through.

Colleen Schnettler
So earlier, when you when we started this topic you were talking about how you need a lot of empathy and what would you say melting melting into them or emotional? Like, like it seemed like it was really explained that? That was a little confusing to me.

Michele Hansen
Feelings mumbo jumbo!

Colleen Schnettler
I don't understand feelings.

Michele Hansen
Right? So, basically what I mean by that is that you have to submerge yourself into how they perceive things. And you have to leave your own perceptions of something at the door, and you're going into it trying to just understand how things look from this person's perspective. So whether that's a usability interview and understanding, how do they use their computer? How do they use the service like, right, like, those are all different from person to person. I mean, it's fascinatingly different, right? Like, right um, and I think there definitely is a perception sometimes that especially, you know, people in the tech world have that everyone is as tech savvy as us, even our customers. And that is often not the case.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
And so these are really great opportunities to expand our own understanding of how other people use technology. And by being empathetic and how we develop and design things and understanding that other people have different skill levels and different comfort levels and different ways of processing information, we can create products and services that are better able to serve people, because I doubt there are everybody out there is building a product that is just for, you know, tech people under the age of 40, who are all digitally native, like maybe that's who you're starting out with. But hopefully if you're successful, your market is going to expand and you're going to need to expand beyond thinking like yourself and understanding how other people who are very different than yourself think. So whether that's in a usability session where you're trying to understand how they use a website or a service, or an interview where you're trying to understand how they get through a process and how how they feel about that and and how long it takes them and where they're struggling and where things are spending a lot of time and why they're even doing it in the first place.

Colleen Schnettler
That's really interesting. I feel like as an engineer, I really struggled with that. I've done probably 15 customer interviews in these various products that I've been trying to build over the past couple years. And I always have a script -- well, not a script. I always have a list of questions, which is good because I don't forget anything. But I think I've really missed that nuance because like I asked the question, and they give an answer. And then I asked the next question and something I noticed when we got on the call today is I was telling you about how I might change my image thing, and what did you think about it? And you said, What do you think about it? And I was like, Oh, that's an excellent question. And so I kind of I feel like that kind of empathy, empathy for other people's thought processes or other people's like emotions tied to things. It's a challenging, it's challenging for me to really tap into that. Do you have any advice?

Michele Hansen
Yeah, so people are always looking for, you know, verification or confirmation from others. Right. So that that happens fairly common in an interview where someone say, don't you think or right or...

Colleen Schnettler
Yes!

Michele Hansen
Yeah, so they'll use some phrasing that you makes you want to agree with them. And you have to deflect like, you have to say, what do you think about that? or can you tell me more about why you do it that particular way? or How did you come to do it that way, right? If you're very, very careful in phrasing things in a way that is not judgmental. I was fortunate enough to learn from two incredibly skilled and talented user experience researchers, one of whom has a basically has a PhD in this and getting to observe them for my couple first couple of dozen interviews. And, and having them in the room with me when I was learning really helped because there's so many times when people will not only ask for your opinion on things, they'll ask for your perspective on things. They also might insult you or say something that you personally find offensive or more often they'll say something that you think is ridiculous, or it sounds overly complicated and you want to jump in and be like, Well, have you thought about doing it this way? You can't do that, right? Because this whole purpose of it is to understand how, how they do it, what their process is, and then your job is you afterwards when you've had a chance to process it, take that later and say okay, they told me that when they're trying to accomplish this, they're doing these certain steps. And if I can target them with some marketing, when they're in this step, they might be interested in switching to using my product, because I know that they're doing these steps, even though those steps do not make sense to me and seemed very complicated to me, there's a whole reason why you have built whatever it is you have right to make something easier for someone else.

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

Michele Hansen
But in order to understand how to get them to understand that it's easier for them, you need to know the kinds of words that they're using their kinds of phrases using and then the whole process that they're going through. Otherwise, you're just targeting yourself, which is really useful in the beginning when you're building but not if you want to sell to other people.

Colleen Schnettler
Right. Okay. Yeah, that's really good advice. Like that is definitely something I I have struggled with and I'm I'm working on I'm working very hard because I think that's how you connect with people, especially if it's someone you don't know, like some random user random person on the internet. You want to form you want to form like a level of connection by being an agreement on things, because it forms I feel like a level of trust. But I think if that goes too far, we're just, you know, echo chambering? Or like, Yes, I totally know what you mean or Oh, do it this way instead, it it does not enable you to actually find out, like how they could be your customer or where in their process you can help them.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, and learning how to interview has taught me a lot about conversation in general too like, my natural conversation style is very enthusiastic, I really want to, you know, tell people when I agree with them and share my own experiences and build that kind of rapport, right. And what I have learned through doing this, actually is that people will have more affinity for you when you let them talk more, which is really surprising that it's doesn't actually come from sort of proving to them that you have, you're in agreement with them, but just being listened to is so powerful. And I think, especially these days, people aren't used to being listened to by companies, right? Like, I mean, how many amazing customer support experiences have you had versus how many have you had that were really disappointing and frustrating, and you felt like you weren't being listened to by the company?

Colleen Schnettler
Mostly frustrating.

Michele Hansen
And so when you're really listening to a customer, you can you can build that affinity by simply listening to them, and then you're going to do your own work with it later. And you'll have notes and you can use that for product development, marketing, you know, what have you. But in the moment, the strongest thing you can do to build affinity is, is just listen and let them talk. As much as possible. I think there's even some psychological studies on this that when people talk about themselves the parts of the brain related to enjoyment and pleasure and all those kinds of things and also social connection light up more than they do when they're hearing someone else talk. It's wild, I've noticed that users we do interviews with tend to become our most vocally supportive customers, even though that's not the intent of it at all.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow. That's amazing. I mean, is are you a customer interviewer or are you a therapist? It's kind of hard to tell. Kidding. So this has been really great. Michelle, thank you so much for sharing.

Michele Hansen
I am always happy to talk about this. The irony, right? You know, talking about listening to other people, it's not lost on me.

I just want to say how much we've appreciated everyone's positive feedback. So far, the number of nice tweets and emails and DMs and everything we've gotten has been really, really surprising and incredibly nice and really motivates us to keep going. So thank you to everyone who has reached out to us or posted a review. It means so much to us.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, thank you so much. All right. Until next week.

View Details

Michele Hansen
Welcome to the Software Social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen.

Colleen Schnettler
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

Michele Hansen
How's it going, Colleen?

Colleen Schnettler
I'm doing well. It's been a pretty exciting week for me on a tech front. So I haven't had as much time this week. I'm really trying to commit to talking to more people. I mentioned that.

Michele Hansen
Yeah!

Colleen Schnettler
And it's kind of funny, because I've been talking to more people and they don't really care about my image management solution.

Michele Hansen
Oh :(

Colleen Schnettler
Well, it's okay. This this kind of interesting thing has happened, where they care at there. They don't care about that, but they're really excited about the work I'm doing with AWS and Arc. I'm, I'm moving my tech over to go from kind of a monolithic Rails app to like AWS, Lambda serverless functions and everyone is really interested in that?

Michele Hansen
Really?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, it's kind of been a funny thing where I've wanted to talk to people about image management. And they want to talk to me about how I'm using lambda functions to do manipulations on images.

Michele Hansen
Really...

Colleen Schnettler
And so, yeah, and so I there's a few things I'm trying to be wary of here. One is, I feel like it's not a good idea to use new tech on a new idea. Because you're, it's like a double uphill battle. You have to both build something, ship it and learn some new tech. But this AWS stuff is really cool. I love learning it and the architecture with it really is better. It just feels cleaner. I'm I'm not a huge microservices person, but this particular, what I'm building really lends itself well to these lambda functions. So that's been really fun. But it has been an interesting thing to find out that people are more interested in that. So as you know, one of the things I struggle with is jumping too quickly from idea to idea. But I'm seeing this opportunity where everyone wants to learn how to write lambda functions in the cloud with Ruby. And I'm like, Oh! Well, that's interesting.

Michele Hansen
Did you course business at one point? I forget.

Colleen Schnettler
I thought about it. I know that would be, that would be no, I thought about it. And I started doing video courses. I think I did like three or four. And it just got, I mean, it's kind of a slog to do that kind of thing, especially if it's not, it was I was building something that was more geared towards beginners. And so it was pretty boring for me to actually make them because you have to really go back and I felt like there was a lot of beginner course content out there already. So I never I never really gave that a good shot. But this is an interesting thing, because I am really when you hear these people who are successful, they're like, Oh, I was interested in this thing. And I blogged about it everyday for a year. And then boom, I'm the expert in this thing. And I have a product and this thing. I don't know, it's just I don't want to be jumping, right? This is I need to really focus, which is one of the things I struggle with. But I'm really tempted, I'm really tempted to like, get more into this AWS in the cloud serverless functions stuff. That seems to be more interesting to my developer friends.

Michele Hansen
Maybe it's not jumping if you just hang out on a particular stepping stone for a little bit. Maybe there's like a mini course here or something or even if it's just a blog post and people get excited about that. But maybe there's, you know, a little a little stop along the way here.

Colleen Schnettler
So I'd really like to get the image thing done. Because I think as we've been talking every week, I feel like I'm just so close.

Michele Hansen
And you need it. Like for your sanity. On the projects you work on.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, I need it, I'm going to use it on my clients. And I just want to finish something like I just want to finish a side project. That's just where I am. It's like graveyard of abandoned side projects. So I want to finish it, and I'll use it. And I think it'll make my life easier. So that's great. But I wonder this is something I'm kind of like putting in the back of my mind and kind of tabling as people are interested in this, they want to learn more, they want to learn, you know, how you can use it. And the other thing, there's, I feel like serverless is huge, and there's so much opportunity for growth. And I don't know if there is like, I know, AWS has a marketplace, but I don't know anything about it. But so for example, this one serverless function I have all you do is if your images in my bucket, you can just send query parameters for the size you want of the image and it returns the image already resized and optimized and things like that. Wouldn't it be cool if you could have like a suite of little serverless functions that you could somehow bundle together? Like a whole bunch, I don't know, you'd have like, I don't know what it would look like you'd have like five different API endpoints you as my customer could hit that would handle all of your different image manipulation, like, or I could have one for video and one for images. I don't know. I feel like there might be something there. And I don't know what that looks like. But it's definitely like tucked away in the back of my mind, like what I'm working on. Now. I want to finish first. That's important. And it's so close. But I think after that might be a good time to start blogging about all this stuff I have learned in the AWS ecosystem. And once I don't forget it, but also, you know, to see if people are interested in that kind of information as well.

Michele Hansen
It sounds like they are and like, I can't tell you how many projects and products come out of setting out to do something else. Like just earlier this week, Adam Wathan did a huge thread on the development of Tailwind. I don't know if you saw it. And he mentioned how they were working on another side project, but like the CSS was driving him nuts. And so they just he just made that. And then he open sourced it. And people were super psyched about it. And they were really surprised by that. And then it like led to this whole thing that is Tailwind. I mean, that happened with Geocodio too. To to like we set out to make an app that told you grocery store and coffee shop opening hours and ran into problems with geocoding. And you know, we got some good, good traction and some excited users on the grocery store app. But man, when you find a problem that developers have, and you solve it for them, people get really, really excited about that.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah. So when you guys launched Geocodio did you do that through some kind of existing marketplace, or were you just out in the free world?

Michele Hansen
Hacker News. That was the place to launch in January 2014. Product Hunt like wasn't even a thing. Yeah. And we did a ton of, you know, posting on like StackOverflow and Reddit.

Colleen Schnettler
And how did you know when you were ready to put it out there for other people? Had you guys been using it for your grocery store app for a while?

Michele Hansen
Yeah, I think at least six months or so.

Colleen Schnettler
That's quite a while.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. And it took a good friend of ours to be like, hey, like, you should just slap a paywall in front of this and see if other people will pay for it. And then at least you don't have to pay the server costs for it. And like maybe enough people will use it that that server is effectively free for you. And we're like, oh, yeah, that would be amazing. It was we -- were making three or $400 a month in ad revenue off of the app. And so we thought that was an amazing, huge success. I remember we had these conversations about how like, this is what's making money. We should focus on this, like, this geocoding thing is a distraction. I mean, I can't tell me how many of those conversations we had over the years. It's like this is the thing is making money. And this new thing is shiny and a distraction. And we need to make sure we focus on things making money. And this is, you know, the only thing that really ended up being a thing. Yeah, so many things come out of, you have another idea and you run into this foundational problem. And it turns out that everybody's more excited about that.

Colleen Schnettler
I and I've always felt like there's something in the AWS ecosystem.

Michele Hansen
It's so complicated.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, it is so unnecessarily complicated.

Michele Hansen
Like, I don't know why we pay what we do for AWS. Like I literally like basically, there's no way for me to figure out why we are being charged what we are, and there's like third party websites you have to go to to even know what their pricing is? It's insane.

Colleen Schnettler
Yes, I agree. And so it feels like it's a huge that's always -- that has also been a pain. For me like this whole, this whole images, of course, but also all of the AWS stuff, so people are seem to be more excited, I have to say, like just talking to people and not that I've talked to tons of people, but I'm just trying to engage more in the communities I'm already a part of. And the image thing, as we've discussed, for most people, it's not frequent, it's painful, but they set it up once and they're done. Most people don't consult, so they don't see a lot of different clients. So they don't have to set this up over and over and over.

Michele Hansen
If you work for a big company, like you said, right, you said then you're done.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, exactly. But the AWS stuff is always evolving, and people seem really interested in the serverless stuff. And maybe that's just because it's a cool new hotness, but it seems like it's gonna work really well for me, and so, still focused on finishing what I'm working on, but I could see maybe getting -- writing a little bit about some of the struggles I've had with that and what I've learned with that once this image thing is complete.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, why not? Sounds like there might be something there.

Colleen Schnettler
Also, as a side note, our podcast has launched since we had our last episode. And so my non technical friends, my non technical friends have listened to the first episode, and they're so excited. And they say to me, Colleen, what is your idea? And when I tell them, they are so disappointed, like this huge. They're like, expecting me to be like, Oh, I'm gonna build the new Facebook or cure world hunger. And I'm like, Oh, I'm gonna help you put images on the internet. They're not impressed. It's been funny. It's been a funny response. So anyway, I think my goals for this week, I'm really, I'm really deep in the technical stuff. And I just want to get like I said, I'm just trying to get that done. So I think that's my goal for this week and just to keep engaging with people and talking to people.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, that's what you gotta do. Talk to people. See if your idea has interest.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, definitely. So what has been going on this week with Geocodio?

Michele Hansen
Gosh, well, you know, today was actually a really good day. I got two landing pages out which...

Colleen Schnettler
Nice!

Michele Hansen
Is it kind of work I enjoy. It's kind of weird though, because it defined scope. So it's good for if I want something I can knock out in an hour or so. But I don't actually find out the results of it for like, another month. So it's kind of funny to see Oh, wow, that landing page I wrote three months ago is actually doing really well. Like I should do more of those.

Colleen Schnettler
That's because it takes that long for the SEO to get back to you.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it just takes time.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, so when you're doing a landing page, what do you use for that?

Michele Hansen
Uh, we just have a very basic Netlify CMS. And it's just, you know, it's just text and some screenshots. It's nothing fancy. But hey, that was just today, so I wasn't really thinking about. So I was just I just like enjoyed my work today. It was just kind of fun.

So what I was really thinking about this week. You know how a couple weeks ago we talked about projects that failed, products that failed, right? Like, we were like, Oh, we should do that another episode. So what actually ended up thinking about this week was products, like almost failed and then came back from the dead, but they didn't really die. And I don't know if that makes any sense whatsoever. I feel like I should back up here.

Colleen Schnettler
So maybe I'm a little confused.

Michele Hansen
So okay, let me. The high level where I got to what I've been thinking about is, recently I saw this Wall Street Journal article talking about how companies after the pandemic hit in March, they pulled back their software and r&d spending to the tune of 27% on an annualized basis. So software, r&d, etc spending is negative 27% since March, and I used to work in investing and one of the things I absorbed from that was that you should, you know, compare yourself to the market, right? So, you know, any, you know, portfolio manager or a fund you look at, it's always what what is their benchmark, right, like the S&P 500, or whatnot. And so I looked at that, and I was like, Oh, interesting, like, looks like a benchmark. I wonder how we did over the same time period just for accountability. You know, I always look at our numbers every day every week, but it's only once or twice a year that I really step back and look at like growth rates and what our customer portfolio looks like and think about goals for diversifying into different customer areas. So which is maybe a topic for another podcast, too. So anyway, I was inspired to run the numbers this week on our growth rates so far for January through the end of July of this year. And I gotta say, like, I love being knee deep in a spreadsheet, like it has been, it has been kind of like refreshing and kind of fun to be able to really like focus and just nerd out on the data like that, like, I really love it.

Okay, so where this gets to like dead products. So, you know, I calculate over our growth rates and everything, okay, really got me thinking about this was, somewhere we've seen a lot of growth this year is in our HIPAA compliant product. So, you've been to the doctor's office, you've probably signed a form about like, data and how they can, you know, access information and there's like HIPAA Privacy Practices and stuff like that. You've probably signed this form with every new doctor visit you've ever gone on?

Colleen Schnettler
Yes.

Michele Hansen
Yes. So this is this is basically, you know, GDPR for healthcare data in the US. And so two years ago, yeah, August of 2018, we launched a HIPAA compliant version of Geocodio thinking that it was basically the same product we were doing but a new market and there was a lot of potential because there weren't really any good HIPAA compliant geocoding options available. And so for example, if a doctor's office wanted to put their patients on a map, the coordinates are considered personally identifiable information under HIPAA and so they can't just use an off-the-shelf service for it. And so kind of like 2017 actually, right after I'd gone full time, we were thinking about like big projects to chew on. And it was either, do we go worldwide, or do we do HIPAA, we had gotten requests for it for years. And we decided you know, we're small team the world is big complicated place it's probably more straightforward for us to go into a new market but we already have the product all built out and everything at least from a you know, a UI and functional perspective and we had some interest. So we spent about a year rebuilding the product from the ground up working with a security consultants like we, like you know, it looks the same to the to the customer but it it everything under the hood is different, like data centers are different because we have to have special data processing agreements with them and all this stuff. So anyway, so I spent, you know, months and months and months on this, from the customer side of things, you know, gathering interest in it. Running surveys, figuring out pricing, like generating interest, all of this stuff.

So we're feeling pretty good about it, we launch it and August of 2018. And after like a month, no one signs up for it.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, wow.

Michele Hansen
And this is a problem. Not only have we spent a year of our time on this and, and hours, like an hours of work. So the way our service works is we basically for the most part, we have two separate ways of accessing Geocodio. We have this public cluster, which if we have a pay as you go plan, the requests go there. And then we have unlimited customers who each have their own dedicated server. And they can basically run as much as they want on that for a flat rate. And it's also we pay a flat rate for that, so it works out for everyone. And what we really wanted to do is launch a pay as you go option for HIPAA and make it like super accessible and easy for people to do this. But that requires us to be paying for this public cluster. And we didn't have any customers.

Colleen Schnettler
Oh, I see.

Michele Hansen
And what is the first rule of bootstrapping? Always make money. You always have to be cashflow positive, you're not burning somebody else's money. You are burning your own money if you are losing it. And so we're like, oh, god, like what happened? And, you know, I ran some testing on the homepage, because I was like, What happened here? Like, like, where did we go? Like, we talked to all these people. We've done these surveys, like, where, you know, we had years of demand from people, like what happened? And so it turned out that, you know, I'd go through the website with everything, everything was fine. Okay, what would your next step be if you wanted to sign up? Like, oh, I would go talk to my legal department. And then it was like, Oh, no. So this is what I had underestimated, was that the sales cycle is not, somebody just signs up and they and they get going. It's it has to go through security reviews, it has to go through legal reviews. It has to go through lots of phone calls. And so I didn't realize this at the time, but it like it can take us a year to 18 months sometimes to sign on HIPAA customers.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow. That's a long time.

Michele Hansen
And when normally our average time from someone signs up to add a credit card is like less than 12 hours.

Colleen Schnettler Right? Wow.

Michele Hansen
But the median time to first add a credit card is less than 12 hours. So that sales cycle is really long. And this is something that can kill you. And I think this is something that the founders of Binomial have talked about quite a bit too is like sales cycle can be killer, especially for a small company. So anyway, we were like well, alright, so we had basically we had to shut down the pay as you go option for the product. We didn't have any customers on the Unlimited side, so the product was basically dead a month after we launched it because we couldn't burn money on these servers.

Colleen Schnettler
Sure that makes sense.

Michele Hansen
Yeah. So that's two years ago. And, but we kept it open sort of as an option, someone reached out as an unlimited option, which, you know, we only pay for the infrastructure, if somebody is actually using the product is actually, you know, has a subscription. So that works out for us. So, so, you know, it's sort of been very, very slowly growing over the past two years, but in March, we had a big uptick in interest in it. Understandably, there's a lot more interest in health related data. And so when I was crunching the numbers this week, one of my first thoughts was, what percentage of this is HIPAA related? Like and what would our growth numbers look like, if we didn't have that product? So do you want to dive into some numbers with me?

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. Okay.

Michele Hansen
So compared to January to end of July 2019. Our growth this year so far was 59%

Colleen Schnettler
59%?!

Michele Hansen
Revenue growth, that's revenue growth came.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay.

Michele Hansen
Bear in mind, this is not, I'm not talking about net income, right. I'm not subtracting costs from it, and it's more expensive for us to run, you know, HIPAA, but this is just sort of...

Colleen Schnettler
Sure. That seems great, though.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, right. I was like, No, that's break really weirdly good. And I almost feel guilty that we're like, doing well and everything is terrible. So I was like, okay, that's so that's really good. Like we're comparing your benchmark is negative 27% like that's... That's good. So that's I was like, what would that be like without HIPAA? Like, like, has the pandemic really like and like how much has that contributed to this growth? Like, because we had one customer who signed up who -- whipped through everything and they got started in a day, which never happened before. They were like, We need this right now. Like get us set up, like somehow everything got approved, like overnight and it was it was that... you ever hear people talking about, you know, you have product market fit when people are literally taking the product out of your hands.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
I was like, wow, okay, I've never experienced it quite like before.

Okay, so if you take out the HIPAA customers we have gotten since March, our growth for January to end of July is 41%.

Colleen Schnettler
Okay

Michele Hansen
So it dips but it doesn't go all the way. And then I was like, let's go back all the way.

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

Michele Hansen
So like we launched this product. You know, there are these issues with sales cycle where like, Oh, this is a colossal mistake and a waste of a year and and we are full of regret and angst about all that. So last year just for this was just the same time period, it's not full year. So our revenue would have been down 7% last year [ed: 7% lower]

Colleen Schnettler
without HIPAA?

Michele Hansen
Without it right. Without those numbers, I'm trying to like what happens if I pull out all of those customers basically, okay, in the data. So and then, so then if I took them all so if I took them all out entirely, then looking at 2020, our growth would only be 27%.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
So without this product that we thought was a colossal failure when we launched it, and was a waste of a year's worth of work. Actually, has made a huge like 32 point percentage difference in our growth this year.

Colleen Schnettler
That's amazing. So my first question for you, you have a background in economics, don't you?

Michele Hansen
Yes. How could you tell?

Colleen Schnettler
So isn't the first rule of economics...

Michele Hansen
The dismal science!

Colleen Schnettler
Isn't the first rule of economics, the sunk cost fallacy, like,

Michele Hansen
Oh, God, yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Why did you guys walk away after after did not like what -- how did you make the decision once you were so far into it, to not walk away and to not give up on it?

Michele Hansen
Well, we basically did.

Colleen Schnettler
Right, okay. Right, because we shut down your public pay-as-you-go.

Michele Hansen
Yeah we shut down the public cluster. And if anyone wanted to sign up, they had to be on the unlimited level, which is still the case today. I mean, we maybe we could launch a pay as you go, but I'm just just given the sale cycle it's not... I feel no urgency to do that. I'd like to make it more accessible. But yeah, I mean, sunk cost fallacy is you've put a lot of time into something you know, the first rule when you're in a hole, stop digging.

Colleen Schnettler
Right.

Michele Hansen
So after a month, we pulled the plug on it.

Colleen Schnettler
Because it didn't cost you anything.

Michele Hansen
Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
So so because it didn't cost you anything to have those two because you only pay for the private servers if you don't have the clients, right? Customers.

Michele Hansen
Exactly. Yeah.

Colleen Schnettler
Well, that's amazing how that worked out for you guys.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, it's just kind of like wild to see like something sometimes something fails. But, like timing is a huge part of that. Like, it reminded me how people talked about companies like Blue Apron and whatnot where I mean before I guess I haven't looked at them recently, but like before the pandemic I mean their expenses were out of control, like they're the unit economics on it, which is you know, the taking into account the what they spend on each customer in terms of the product but also in terms of marketing and then how much money they get back. were terrible. But now, things like Blue Apron or food delivery, right? Like people are seeking out those products much more frequently than they were before, like the need for those products has changed. And so instead of having to market all the time and give a lot of stuff away for free people are seeking them out and their unit economics are improving. And so it's like sometimes like the product is not necessarily a bad idea but the timing for it isn't right and it's a question of, if you can survive until the timing is right you know, it's kind of like that stock market quote what the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid. I think I butchered that. But you know, so yeah, I don't know if you like the product like came back from the dead or what happened.

Colleen Schnettler
That's really interesting. Because it's so hard when you get started, or probably at any point in your business career to figure out when you've given something enough, because you hear so much, you hear so much advice that says you have to know when to walk away. Right? You have to know when this was a bust. Don't sink any more time in it. But then you hear stories like this where it took you guys two years to actually see a return of an entire year of work. If you didn't already have a successful business before that. You probably would have been even more upset when it didn't take off.

Michele Hansen
Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think the only thing that really kept it alive was that we could, you know, sort of throw it in the deep freeze for a while until some customers came along.

Colleen Schnettler
Well, that's great. That worked out.

Michele Hansen
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and you know, now I need to, you know, make sure I'm double checking all of my net income numbers. I'm sure they're, they're not going to be nearly as amazing because a big part of that is AWS probably.

Colleen Schnettler
Those jerks.

Michele Hansen
It's wild to think about it. And we launched it basically exactly two years ago. And it just it took, it took a lot of time for that product to grow into its own.

Colleen Schnettler
And I think that's something that I struggle and I think I've mentioned this before, and I think other people struggle with is things take time. Just in general, like, things take time.

Michele Hansen
And that's okay.

Like it took us right, three and a half years to go full time on Geocodio -- just me.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
But the key thing was is that we were not burning money through that time. Like we were always making money, even if it was only god -- I think our first month our margin was $10.

Colleen Schnettler
Wow.

Michele Hansen
Like, as long as you're not spending as long as you're not spending...I know, it's very impressive.

Dude, as long as you're not spending more money on it, then you're making and you're enjoying it.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah.

Michele Hansen
...Then you can keep going. But if you're losing money, and it's your money. That's, that's, that's there's some tough, tough decisions to be made there. Yeah.

Well, I guess that's about it for this week. Thank you so much everyone for listening, by the way, as Colleen mentioned earlier that the podcast just went live this week, and we're pretty floored that people want to listen to us. I think me I'm speaking for myself, like, I'm pretty surprised that it's more than just a couple friends of ours listening. And so if you enjoy our show and want to help other people find it. We'd be incredibly grateful if you tweet about it, or can write a review for so it would mean so much to us.

Colleen Schnettler
Yeah, thank you so much everyone for listening and we would love to engage with you. So please feel free to reach out to our podcast Twitter handle which is @softwaresocpod, or either of us [@leenyburger, @mjwhansen]. We're both on Twitter and we'd love to hear what you think and any questions you have about the show.

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MICHELE HANSEN
Hey, and welcome back to software social. I'm Michele

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
and I'm Colleen.

MICHELE HANSEN
And we're inviting you to join our conversation about what's going on in our businesses.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Michele, do you want to get started today?

MICHELE HANSEN
Yeah, so something I'm thinking a lot about is the golden goose of software: enterprise software.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Oh, man. Okay.

MICHELE HANSEN
Yeah. So I mean, you had mentioned a couple weeks ago how you have this dream that if you had a SaaS business, everything would be roses, and amazing. And there wouldn't be any problems. Right?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Correct.

MICHELE HANSEN
And so the next level of that dream that a lot of people have is if they could just sell enterprise software, where, you know, the companies would never cancel. And they have these giant expensive contracts and like, everything is amazing, right?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
Yep.

MICHELE HANSEN
Yeah. So I'm thinking about this a lot, because I feel like there's a lot of different ways to do enterprise and there's a lot of granularity in it that gets lost. And at a high level though, what I want to talk about first is how, one of the reasons why SaaS and especially small customer funded SaaS works and a company like ours, which only has my husband and I running it, but we have tens of thousands of customers is because our work has a one:many relationship. And so if you can picture that, every time we do work, we add a new feature, we add a landing page, you know, anytime we're doing work on our service, most of the time that work has a one:many relationship, we add a feature and it helps tens of thousands of people simultaneously, right? Or we add a new landing page and that helps us attract thousands of customers simultaneously.

COLLEEN
Sure.

MICHELE
The thing about enterprise work on the other hand, it has a one to one relationship. There's a lot of custom work that has to be done. And so in that way, it's almost a little bit more like freelance work.

COLLEEN
Okay.

MICHELE
And so that's important because when when looking at enterprise software and serving enterprise markets, there's all these different things that companies have as requirements. And very often those things can be things that maybe only that one particular customer has, or if you're doing something like on premise, that's a one:one relationship. And as a really small company, we need to maximize for work that has a one:many relationship. If I'm sure any sense at all, stop me.

COLLEEN
Yeah, no, you're making great sense. I just, I am curious why you're even thinking about enterprise software. And I say that because I used to work for a Fortune 500 company, and, man, we bought really expensive software, but you probably had to sit in 20 meetings before we agreed to buy it. So I know that there's, I guess, like, why are you even thinking of it? Is it is it just to have a different revenue stream?

MICHELE
We reached out to buy big enterprises.

COLLEEN
Oh, I didn't know that.

MICHELE
This is my next sort of thing, that there's different ways to serve big enterprises. And so the traditional way, as you mentioned, is 20 meetings, you know, three golf outings, you know, five fancy dinners, right, like all that kind of sales cycle, right? So there's that level of it. We're not doing that level. But we do have people in large organizations who reach out to us but this has some different flavors. So one of my favorite ways of serving enterprises is basically when someone within a team has something that they need to get done as part of their everyday work. And for whatever reason, they need to do it faster or they need to do it better. They don't like the tools they have and so they go off and find something themselves. And then they make the case to their boss or to their leadership, that you should use the product. And this either gets put on that team's credit card, called a P Card in most places, which might have a say a $500 monthly limit per service, which is why people like Patrick McKenzie, recommend that price point so often, $499 or $999, because those are sign off levels for price points, actually. So enterprises have a word for this, they call it "shadow IT" which is this kind of like derisive name, because they're implying that it hasn't gone through the big procurement process and the security reviews and everything, but it's a great way to sort of shortcut into a big organization that has reliable ongoing needs, that's going to keep reliably paying you.

And then the other way that we often get it is people reach out to us and they do need to use it across the entire organization. And we have to go through security reviews and contract negotiations and whatnot. And this is all my mind because I realized the other day that I probably spend about a third of my time on this kind of work, whether that's having phone calls or negotiating contracts, or any of those other details that go into it. But that I don't think we've ever had a single customer with a custom negotiated contract cancel on us.

COLLEEN
Ah, yeah.

MICHELE
But you don't necessarily have to have a big sales force to get that kind of thing that kind of plan levels through, but it does, it does take a lot of specific work. And the thing is, is when I'm doing that, when I'm having a call with one huge customer, or I'm negotiating contract with them, that's work that's going for just that one customer. It's a one to one relationship. And so, this is where this really comes into play for a small SaaS company like us, is when we're talking about things like on premise where it's a one to one relationship. But so any work that we might do on that, or like help, we might need to give them with their installation of it, that's all one to one and needs to be priced accordingly. But the thing is, is customers who request that often have these, you know, compliance requirements, you know, whatever industries they're in, that they can't get around it. And so they have to pay a lot more for something.

So I'm thinking about all this, but there's a there's a great site that I found recently called enterpriseready.io. And it goes through a lot of the features that enterprises might require. And it was interesting looking through this, you have things like Single Sign On, audit logs, integrations, things like that, because absolutely, these are things that big companies require. But we don't have all of them. And we're selling to big companies all the time. And so my point here is that you can be selling to enterprise without necessarily doing that whole enterprise song and dance on the sales side. And you can say like, you know, we'd love to work with you, here's what we have. We don't have single sign on, or we don't have, you know, SOC2 audits, or we don't have audits of our financial statements every year. And if the buyer in the organization loves your product enough, maybe they've gotten to try it for free or on a lower plan with their boss's P Card, they can advocate to their legal department and actually get through those things. And you don't even need whatever those requirements are. Doesn't happen all the time, but I think it's really helpful to look at a list like this, and then also remember that it's not necessarily all requirements that you might need before you try to launch into that space, which I think is a headspace that people get in in a lot of different ways of, "My product doesn't have every single feature that someone could possibly ask for. So I'm not going to launch it yet."

COLLEEN
So So do you guys ever reach out to enterprise?

MICHELE
No, we do not do any cold sales whatsoever.

COLLEN
Wow. Okay. So what would you recommend? So I feel like in the bootstrap space, most people avoid enterprise because of that list you just described. So like, what I'm hearing from you is, is if you have a great product that they really want, there might be a way around kind of going through their formal long sales process.

MICHELE
Yeah, so if you have a product, that is something they really need to get their work done, you know, as long as I'm talking here, specifically things to get a process done right. Rather than say if you have process change software that's selling them a benefit, but not necessarily a need that they have that might be a lot harder, you might have to go through the regular channels. But yeah, since we started, I want to say within six months after launching, we had people at big companies signing up to use us. And sometimes I mean, their usage is really low like somebody, someone and a huge company, and they just have a small project they need to get done. And they pay us, you know, $40 once and that's the end of it. But what we've also had scenarios where it's it's a specific team within a huge company, and we're only dealing with that specific team. And for some reason, the security people have just never cared or found out about us, or legal. And then we also have times when we seem to meet with, you know, every department in the company. And the other thing is, it's not necessarily huge companies, like we have had security reviews and legal reviews and all those kinds of things for really small companies, but but they had compliance reasons why they had to go through all of those processes.

COLLEEN
So do you think you said you guys have done some on premise work, which I didn't realize you do?

MICHELE
A little bit. We try not to.

COLLEEN
Yeah, do you find as a team of two that is a good investment of your time and resources.

MICHELE
We try to avoid it because it has that one to one relationship, right? So it's, it's not as scalable for us to do that. But we understand that there are scenarios where a company may have to have an air gapped solution. So we don't even put it on our website. And we don't really talk about it unless people really need it. Also, we, because it's so much more expensive for us to provide it from our time perspective, we price it much, much, much higher than any of our other plans. And so we always like to run our business in a way that is in the best interest of the customer. And so we don't want to steer them into something that's more expensive than they actually need. If there's a way for us to avoid that.

COLLEEN
Yeah, I just I've always just, it seems like a huge red flag. Like from my perspective, it always just seems like oh, enterprise, it would be terrible. But the fact that you guys don't do cold sales like that's a big determining factor, you'd probably have a whole different experience if you were reaching to them, right?

MICHELE
Yeah. Oh, yeah, that's a lot more work. And my broader point here is there are a lot of ways that people write on the internet about how a business should be run a lot of assumptions they make. And not just in this specific regard, but there are a lot of unspoken rules about running a business that you might think like, oh, if I want to sell to enterprises, I need an enterprise sales staff that you know, full of professional golfers who can land these deals for me...when you don't actually need that. You can still sell to companies of any size, it'll be more difficult and that you know, they have requirements that are not just features but are you know, compliance related that are much harder to meet but you can find scenarios or you know or find ways around those things. If your a buyer is motivated enough, if your product is good enough.

COLLEEN
Awesome.

MICHELE
But i but i think you know, a lot of the startup literature, right like it implies that or it assumes that you know, you've got you've got a salesforce, you've got a whole engineering team, you've got, you know, all these resources, you've just got to burn them all to grow as fast as you can. And that just doesn't apply to small companies like us. And so it's important to break down those those assumptions and realize when they really don't apply and then there's more than one path to selling.

COLLEEN
Very nice.

MICHELE
I find it it seems to intimidate people, you know, when they when you see startup writing written from the perspective of unlimited resources. Anyway, that's, that's what's on my mind this week. What about you?

COLLEEN
So, I kind of had an interesting week in the world of side projects. I thought I was done. Okay. Like I thought I was almost finished with my project, and I was really excited, and I log on a Monday and I was like, I just got to wrap up a few more things. And at the timing is really, really perfect because I have a client that basically needs what I'm building.

MICHELE
Nice!

COLLEEN
Yeah, so I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to get this deployed, and then use it with my client. But of course, I come in Monday full of energy and enthusiasm and hope. And I just started running into some technical roadblocks. That were very frustrating. And, you know, eventually you always solve your technical problems, right. I think the thing about business, especially if you have a background in software is, eventually you'll figure it out. But man, it was kind of an emotional roller coaster being like, I'm almost done. I'm gonna get to use this on production to "Ooh, nope, it's not ready." So yeah, I've just kind of had to manage my mental energy with that excitement and then realizing I had a potential issue that I had to fix. So I'm trying not to let it get me down.

But because of this, I actually started in like kind of learning a little bit more about one of the big players in the space, their product. And I actually got to use their product and play around with it. So that was actually good experience. On one hand, it was like, "Wow, their product is so good!" But on the other, I have the perspective that I'm kind of trying to attract a different audience than they are. They're looking, you know, they serve big businesses and, and things like that. And I'm kind of trying to make the simplest solution for a common problem. So there was just some, you know, technical challenges, like I said, and just kind of managing energy with not having that done. By the time I thought I was going to get done. So there's that.

But also, I've been thinking a lot about what we talked about last week, which was customer interviews and talking to people.

MICHELE
Yay!

COLLEEN
Right?? And so, I got a Reddit account, and I started posting a little bit of it on Reddit. I didn't get a lot of engagement. But I think with these communities like you kind of have to build engagement. I don't think it's something that just happens.

MICHELE
Maybe depends. I mean, yeah, what what did you post?

COLLEEN
I was asking people what they do with their images, like how, okay, I basically went into the rails forum and the Heroku forum, and just put up posts to be like, hey, how do you guys handle it? And everyone that responded, which wasn't, but a handful of people was rolling some kind of custom solution. And then it got me thinking about what we talked about, another thing we talked about was pain and frequency. So I think, for at least the people I know, this is painful, but it's not frequent. So if you work at a company, like a standard, you know, mid-sized company, this is something you really only have to set up one time. Now people like me, like we talked about who work for a lot of different organizations, a lot of different applications. Yes, you have to set it up over and over and over. But as a consultant, I don't know if there's an incentive because if you bill hourly, like, what's your incentive to purchase an add on that takes out, you know, takes away five hours of your, of your billable hours.

MICHELE
On to the next project?

COLLEEN
Well, for me, it is like, I like to finish things, right? So for me, yes, I could roll this for every client. But I like to provide -- so much of consulting is about your relationships with your clients. So whenever I can say, Hey, I can put you on this plan, that's 50 bucks a month, or, you know, I could spend however many thousand dollars billing, creating it myself, I feel good about when I feel like I'm providing them value. I'm saving them money. And I like to get it done. Right. So it's, it's always for me, it's a win win, but I don't know. I don't know if other people will feel the same about that.

MICHELEE
As a former project manager at a web development agency, something that saved us half a day's worth of work that would be billed directly to the customer as part of building the website. That sounds like a clear win because I mean, you know, at any given time, I mean, this was a while ago, so things are probably structured different now. But like we had a one to two back end developers, one front end developer, one to two designers, and if I could cut off half a day of development time for something we were doing with every single site, that was a huge win because then we could do more sites and make more money. And if we just bake it into the project costs or the hosting cost for the customer and tell them you know, you're going to pay this much per month on for you know, what does that WordPress hosting site [note: was thinking of WPEngine] and you know this for your image hosting and, and whatnot, then the customer is like, okay, yeah, whatever, fine. And we say five hours that would have been awesome.

COLLEEN
Awesome.

MICHELE
But it sounds like midsize companies are not your customer, but maybe, maybe agencies are?

COLLEEN
Yeah, so one of the things I've started doing -- which I think might be the smartest thing I've done yet -- is this big player in the space like they have a really active forum. So I've been kind of hanging out on their forum to see what people are complaining about.

MICHELE
Mm hmm. You know, that's great, that's the Amy Hoy Sales Safari approach!

COLLEEN
Thank you. Thank you. So I'm kind of trying to figure out like, what kind of frustrations people are having with their product. So I can, you know, kind of incorporate those fixes into my product.

MICHELE
Nice.

COLLEEN
Yeah. So that's probably the best thing I've done. I do have. It's interesting, because I have a lot of other consultants in my network. But I have not really started interviewing them yet. About if this is an actual problem. I think the real people I'd want to get a hold of would be one of those conflict consultancies, right like businesses that are consultancies. So I know a couple people that work in consultancies, so there might be an opportunity to talk to them. But this is something else I wanted to talk to you about. Because you probably remember six months ago -- I've done two rounds of customer interviews with previous ideas -- Okay, so the first round was for the kind of the childcare thing that I was looking at. And that was determined to be a bad idea. And that worked great. The second set of customer interviews I did was with small SaaS founders. And at the time, I was trying to kind of come up with a Google analytics dashboard solution.

MICHELE
Yeah, for content auditing, right?

COLLEEN
Right! Content. Yeah, it was a content audit. I was I was kind of the idea was like content, content audit for like site SEO and stuff like that. And, you know, I talked to a lot, I don't know, maybe five people, but I've been reading more about how when you talk to someone, you're supposed to, like, just listen and let them tell you their problems. And I must not have been asking the right questions because everyone told me they had no problems. Yeah, like example, can I give you an example? I'd be like, hey, like, people were just like, Oh, we don't use analytics. And I was like, Don't you want to grow? And then people, you know, we're like, No, not really. It's like, maybe so I, I feel like when I do this next senate interviews, I need to either work harder on my questions or not talk. I didn't think I was talking too much. But I was really having a heart -- even with with you. I think I interviewed you. And I had a hard time pulling problems out. And I just I don't not quite sure why that was.

MICHELE
Maybe you were baking assumptions into your questions.

COLLEEN
Yeah. Or maybe I was like, pushing my thought like -- maybe I was pushing too much in terms of what I thought they should do. As opposed to letting them just tell me. But it was just odd because I distinctly remember that people weren't sharing a lot of frustrations with me. And maybe because I was focusing on analytics, and like, they just literally didn't care.

MICHELE
Maybe there weren't frustrations there.

COLLEEN
Yeah. And well, maybe that's it right, I was really focused on content and analytics. And maybe that just wasn't the right place to be focused on maybe they were not too stressed about analytics.

MICHELE
The other thing about interviewing people is that people will rarely tell you explicitly that something is a problem, which is kind of funny, because all of the literature and I say this, you know, is "find the problem," right? And then find the main and writing and frequency, right, right. People will rarely say that. And usually when I am listening for a problem, it starts out with, talk to me about your process for understanding what content is working. And then I just have them walk me through the entire process. And then you deduce where the problems are, and the problem may be in the form of, they're spending 12 hours manually creating a spreadsheet, that's a problem, that's a lot of time. Or they have to use a vendor for something. And they really don't like that vendor for some reason, or that vendor is really expensive. Or there could be a whole host of other things, that they may not articulate as a problem, but is something that is costing them time or money or is genuinely causing frustration. And they have to, you know, hit three different analytics API's to get this one number, right, like those things are all problems, but someone may not articulate them as a problem. Yeah. So you just have them walk you through their entire process. And just in that process of saying, Okay, tell me more about that step. That step you were creating that that spreadsheet for 12 hours, why were you creating that spreadsheet? Who was it for? Where did that come from? What are you getting out of that? What do you wish you could do instead? They may, it may have never occurred to them that there could be another way to do it.

COLLEEN
Yeah. Okay.What are your thoughts on? So like I said, I'm building this image thing. I'm excited about it. I'm learning a ton. I'll use it. But I don't actually know if it's like a business-business. So I'd like to keep my eyes open for other opportunities as I'm talking to people. So what are your thoughts on just talking to people when I don't even have an idea?

MICHELE
Yeah, talked to them about their processes, if there's a specific type of process where you want to solve things, and you can just hunt for things. I think what you're doing with going on competitor websites, and seeing where people are frustrated with their products, that's an awesome way to find a niche product. If there's an area where you have a particular interest in a type of technical problem or a solution space or an industry vertical, whatever that is, just hunting around in general for those frustrations, and again, they may not be verbalized as my problem is that I spent 12 hours making a spreadsheet. It's, you have to get them talking a little bit more and understand the entire start to finish process to see where those pain points are, and those points, maybe multiple points as well.

COLLEEN
Yeah. So I was listening to a different podcast and they were talking about a book called The Mom Test. Have you read that?

MICHELE
Oh, I hate the title of that book. I've never been able to get past that.

COLLEEN
I hate the title too!

MICHELE
I just... isn't the the idea of that book is that you shouldn't share your product idea with your mom because she'll be nice to you?

COLLEEN
I mean, that's what I garnered from the podcast.

MICHELE
So many stereotypes about mothers and about relationships with mothers and women as these docile people that... I've heard great things about the actual content of the book, but the framing of it is -- whew!

COLLEEN
Yes, I agree.

MICHELE
Needs to be updated! YIKES.

COLLEEN
Totally agree. But one of the things they were talking about was, in the book, he talks about kind of what you were just saying, which is just like pulling, pulling the pulling information from people without pushing too much of like, here's my great idea, and you want to use my great idea, and things like that.

MICHELE
Yeah, you're not going to get honest feedback. If you say, hey, do you like this site I made? "Sure, yeah, it's great." But, and, yeah, that's just a terrible idea to do testing like that in general. And even then, if you're putting something in front of someone, it's usability testing, and there's a whole field of user experience devoted to specifically to that and how you frame questions in that kind of a context rather than a exploratory interview like we're talking about here, right here.

COLLEEN
And that's the phase I'm in. I'm in the exploratory interview phase like I'm not in terms of the how do you use this phase yet.

MICHELE
It sounds like you're looking for a direction right now, your rudder is kind of changing.

COLLEEN
I'm always looking for direction! So here's the thing. here's, here's the thing is, in the past, I think I have let go of ideas too quickly, because my time is so valuable. And I mean that in terms of like, especially now with the pandemic, right, I got it. I have so little time I have clients, I've kids at home, I have a family that wants to hang out with me. And so I'm terrified of making the wrong decision and not because I'm scared to fail -- like I'm okay with the failure. I'm not okay with putting in 40 or 60 hours or months and months of work for whatever I build to be a disaster. Not a disaster, but a huge flop because I feel like I just don't have time for that like. I'm not 20. I'm in my late 30s. I'm ready, let's go!

MICHELE
Do you need to be productive, right? And there's that very real pressure of like, if you're spending this time on something. And so use that high responsibly. I feel that.

COLLEEN
That's exactly that. Yeah, that's exactly where I'm coming from. So, but but on the other hand, I feel like because I'm, I'm so scared of wasting time that I don't feel like I have. I drop ideas really quickly. Like, I'm not going to lie to you on Monday, when I hit this other technical hurdle. I was just like, man, and then when I tried the big, you know, the big company solution, and it's pretty good. I was like, man, I should just throw my stuff away. And so, yes, you know, I think that's been one of my struggles is like quitting too quickly. Tell me your thoughts on that.

MICHELE
I think the way to prevent that 60 hours of wasted development time, is doing what you're doing now, which is doing the research. You were irritated. I don't think it's the medium or large size company. Maybe use this big industry standard competitor out there. But maybe there's a space to make things better for, for agency developers or for freelancers. And now it's "Okay. I know these aren't my customers, but maybe these people are." So you're just on to the next step. It's not. It's not failure. It's not spinning your wheels, you're just getting more specific. That's progress.

COLLEEN
Yeah. And this is something I was thinking of is like, I don't know what I don't know a lot about the no code community. But something like this would be perfect. Like a drop in thing for the no code community would be awesome. Like, there's all these forums out there, like you can integrate in your no code, and they just email you stuff. So there could be a way -- Yeah, I don't know enough about it. But when I really think of where this could be useful, because that's what I'm trying to build, like, server side cloud image management with pretty much no code. So on your end, so yeah, I haven't given it up and even this idea, and this is why I didn't quit on Monday. Because even if no one uses this, I'm going to use it. And I have learned so much while going through the process that it has felt good, like, it still felt good. But yeah, sometimes it's just exhausting.

MICHELE
No matter what, you've saved yourself five hours per project, and that's a huge one.

COLLEEN
That's huge, right? Like, for me, that's a huge win. Like, that'll be great. And it'll be consistent because that's like another thing when you switch from client to client, they all have different things. It's like, which one is it's, it's exhausting. I feel that this is kind of an inflection point in the past where I would have just thrown up my hands and been like, yeah, this was a terrible idea. No one wants it. This time, I want to commit a little harder to talking to people and getting in the community and seeing what's really going on.

MICHELE
You're learning.

COLLEEN
Yeah, so much!

MICHELE
You've learn that it won't be a fit for one type of customer. Now you can learn if it's a fit for another type of customer.

COLLEEN
Yes. All right. Well, That's all I got for this week.

MICHELE
All right, well, we'll catch you next week.

COLLEEN
Thank you for joining us.

View Details

Transcript

MICHELE HANSEN
Hey, Michele here. Just a quick note before this week's episode, in the second half [NOTE: starting @ 12 minutes] I talk about a controversial topic and use some strong language. So just a heads up in case there are little ears around.

MICHELE HANSEN
Welcome to the software social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly discussion about what's going on in our businesses.

MICHELE HANSEN
I'm Michele Hansen.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

MICHELE HANSEN
So Colleen, tell me, what's going on with your business this week?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER
So Michele, last week, I told you that I am building an image management service. And you asked me if anyone wanted that service. Do you remember what I said?

MICHELE HANSEN
You said maybe but at the very least you want it [yourself]...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER

Right. And also, I haven't really asked anyone if they want it. So I kind of think, what I want to start doing this week is in conjunction with building the service -- which is pretty much almost done -- I want to start finding out if anyone wants it. So, right, it seems like such an obvious step [Michele: Magic words!] that I should be taking. So my commitment is to spend one hour a day trying to figure this out. First problem. Who are my customers?

MICHELE
And where are they?

COLLEEN
And where are they? How do I find them? So since I'm building this as a JavaScript plugin, my customers or other developers, probably developers like me who do consulting so they want to optimize for time. I don't know how to find these people and ask them.

MICHELE
Have you looked in places yet? Like what have you explored?

COLLEEN
So here's what I've explored I put something on indie hackers literally no one okay. That's a good start. That's what I thought but literally no one responded.

MICHELE
No, I you know, I so I love any hackers but also I find that it can be very much like unless you get to one of the bigger threads there, it can be kind of a drive by with like people just putting their projects and there's just like so much and a lot of it's really good. Yeah, that it can be a bit tough to filter.

COLLEEN
Yeah, I've really I've, I've posted on Indie Hackers a few times, and I've never gotten any kind of engagement. And maybe it's if you I've noticed that the posts that are like, here's how my business was so successful, like those get a lot of engagement.

MICHELE
I wrote one of those (laughing)

COLLEEN
But there's nothing wrong with that, like, everyone loves those, right? Those are inspirational, like I love those posts, and I love getting advice from successful founders. But it feels like there's just not a lot of engagement with people who are just starting out. So that didn't work. So I tried Indie Hackers, I think I put something on Twitter and I had like three people respond, which is better than no better than no people. Right? What do you think? Like let's say I'm starting from zero and I'm also like, open into seeing what other ideas are out there as well. As we as you know, I've kind of been plugging away at idea generation for quite a while now. I'm definitely making my image management service, because I'm almost done. I'm going to use it for my clients. But I'm also open to hearing about, you know, other problems and other ideas. I like targeting developers, because I like using existing marketplaces, to try and sell what I'm building.

MICHELE
Have you looked at Reddit?

COLLEEN
So Reddit confuses me...

MICHELE
It is one of my favorite places to recruit is it really can be a little bit. Yeah. Because if you find the right niche within Reddit and Reddit has, I mean, there are so many weird corners of Reddit, right? Which I think is part of what makes it a little bit intimidating from the outside. But there's so many great niches within Reddit that are so great to recruit from. There's also some really big communities. So there's, for example, the webdev community. There, but there's also some really small ones. You know, for example, when we were launching a HIPAA compliant geocoding service couple years ago, we wanted to do some usability testing. And there was a health GIS subreddit with like, 5,000 people in it. And I posted something saying I wanted to do some testing with people. And I'd give them a $25 Amazon gift card if they participated. And I got 70 responses. Wow. Like all from our target market customers. Like it was -- I was floored.

COLLEEN
Wow! That's amazing.

MICHELE
Yeah. And so I think if you find the right, you know, the right community within Reddit, and you have, you know, a good, genuine post, explaining who you're looking for. And you have some sort of incentive there. I think even $10 to Amazon, or whatever, is, is probably good, you know, because people's time is valuable, and they're giving you something valuable, so I feel strongly that there should be something there. But you know, you really only need to talk to five people just as a baseline. So you're looking at $50 worth of investment plus your time, which could, you know, save you weeks or months of dev time that, you know, ends up getting wasted, because it wasn't what people wanted.

COLLEEN
So how would you recommend? This is like, this feels like Cold Calling Strangers like this feels very awkward, which is fine. I like people. But how would you like even recommend going about that?

MICHELE
Yeah, so if I found a community...so let's, for example, say you doing web dev, though, that might be too broad of a community and I'm not super active on it myself. So I can't really speak to community norms. Some for example, don't allow you to, to post various things, so just always check their rules. Okay. Um, but I would say something to the effect of, you know, I'm building an image management service, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is your -- you know -- and I need feedback. That's your post. And then in your, sorry, that's your title. And then in your posts, say something effective, you know, Hi, I'm building the service, like, here's what it's aiming to do. And I'm looking for some people to give me some feedback on it. If you can give me a half an hour of your time, I'll give you a $10 Amazon gift card, just send me a PM with some details about, you know, what kind of work you do and what interests you in trying the service and, you know, and make it very clear that it's not a sales call or anything like that. It's strictly for the feedback, because people sometimes are, justifiably wary that that it's not what it purports to be, right. Also, I would recommend creating a Reddit username specifically for this, whether that's your real name or your company name or whatever. Just so some weird post you made 10 years ago doesn't mean that surfaced with your name attached to it, you know. Yeah.

COLLEEN
Okay, that's great. Okay, so that will be my, my weekly goal this week will be to actually talk to people who might be potential customers and see what they have to say.

MICHELE
Do you know what you want to ask them?

COLLEEN
Well, I guess I'd kind of want to drill down on is this really -- to me, it's a pain point. And like I said, every client minus maybe two has had this problem. And there's so many different ways to solve it. And they're all kind of none of them are super easy. So I guess the answer to your question is no, I don't know what I want to ask them.

MICHELE
It sounds like you want to find pain and frequency.

COLLEEN
Yes. Right. I mean, how big of a problem is this for them? Yeah.

MICHELE
And how frequent Is it because pain and frequency are a good guide to whether someone is willing to pay for something, something isn't frequent, and it's not painful, then, you know, they're not gonna be as aware of the problem. And when they do encounter it, it won't be very annoying. But if it is something that happens often, then they might be willing to pay for that. I do normally recommend that people do this kind of research upfront before building something, but considering this is something that you needed yourself and would use regardless, you know, you can kind of kind of skate by if you're, if you're okay with the idea that you may end up being the only user for it.

COLLEEN
Yeah, I'm okay with it. I and I think yeah, if nothing else, like I think this is a tool that could really help newer developers who don't have the time or energy to like, learn about Cloud Storage. And so even if it's just something that like, helps some new people and they they roll on the AWS free tier I provide. I'd still be at this stage in my journey like obviously, eventually, I want to build a business but like for right now i'd be okay with it. Because it's something that is a frequent pain point for me. The thing is, if you are an employee, and you only work on one app, this is not a frequent problem at all, right? You set it up once, and you're done. I'm kind of unique because I work on so many different applications. I don't really know if there's a lot of people who do what I do, who have a lot of different clients in this space, because I have to do this all the time. Like it's like, every couple months, I feel like someone needs to set up. Oh my gosh, again.

MICHELE
There are a lot of agencies out there. And a lot of developers out there like yourself. The problem with agencies, the problem you might run into is paying for it, right? So when you're an agency, or when you're working on clients, if you have to pay for a service to help you with the project, you want to be able to bill that to the client. You don't want to have to eat that as overhead. And so how you build for this is going to be very important, I think that's something you would want to ask your your customers is or you know, your potential customers in your interviews is, you know, would you be willing to pay for this if it's a flat $5 per month for your entire company? Or what if it's $5 per project? And then they get to pass that cost on to their customer? Are they more willing to pay for it in that scenario? And I think this is where a lot of mismatches happen between companies and then client-serving companies.

COLLEEN
Well, the ideal, right, so my ideal solution is they can upcharge it and pass it through to their customer, right?

MICHELE
Mm hmm. So then that that's your your, your pricing model could be make or break here.

COLLEEN
Yeah. Okay. Okay, that's definitely something I have to I have to think about. Because the nice thing of if I offered as an add on to an existing deployment solution or like an existing CDN solution, then it will bill through almost like it's part of your web hosting. But then again, if they bill hourly, they are probably not incentivized to decrease their hourly load, right? Does that make sense?

MICHLEE
Well, but they may they may have, you know, done a done a flat project cost that is -- so it's if it saves 10 hours of development, you know, up to 10 hours of development time for you know, X number of dollars and...

COLLEEN
Yeah, okay. This is great. So I think I think I love the idea of going through Reddit because like I said, my Twitter I got a couple people, Indie Hackers, I got zero people. I think I need to find agencies and other people like myself, and I know a few of those people in real life that I've actually met at conferences before. So I actually have a few real life people I already know I can reach out to, and I can you know, I'll pursue that avenue so that I think is going to be my goal this week is to talk to five people. That's a measurable goal. Talk to five people about this and look at my pain and frequency chart.

MICHELE
Awesome.

COLLEEN
I love it. All right. So that's enough about me, tell me what is going on with you.

MICHELE
So something that the two of us have have talked about a lot in the past, on the benefits of running your own software company is autonomy. Right? Right. Like not only are you -- you're your own boss, right? You get to decide who you work with. You get to decide what do you work with and, and what you want to do. And, and that's one of my favorite parts of my job.

And I'm thinking about that a lot the past week because of something that happened last week. We had a customer -- potential customer, reach out to us and we rejected them off the bat.

COLLEEN
Ooh, that's interesting.

MICHELE
This has never happened before. You know, we've definitely had situations where we've sort of quote unquote "fired" a customer. But normally those were only situations where someone was being rude to us or they were being way too demanding and even then it's you know, we're always polite to them, right? Like we just simply recommend that they use a different service or we tell them that we're not a fit and quite frankly, if you were to compare the emails we send them to ones for customers who were perfectly nice to us but weren't a fit like those emails look the same right.

But so so yeah, the the autonomy is something that I think about a lot and especially because we are completely customer funded, right? Like we don't have investors. We don't have you know, loans from a bank or anyone. We don't have anyone else who is putting goals are metrics on us that we have to meet. You know, we don't have a certain sales goal. We have to every month that's pressuring us into making decisions. Yeah, so it's a benefit that I've that I've always thought about but really became starkly in focus last week because ICE reached out to us.

COLLEEN
Wow, really?

MICHELE
Yeah. Yeah. And it was not only ICE, it was their enforcement and removal division.

COLLEEN
Oh my gosh.

MICHELE
Now, I don't think I'm betraying anything other than, you know, by saying that they simply reached out, right, I guess I'll find out right. Um, you know, and we didn't even take the call. I mean, I got the email. And they didn't even describe what they're doing, just you know, we want to reach out to you and get an account representative see if we can talk to someone about using your service. And my first thought was, abs-so-fucking-lately not. And you know, my husband is my co-founder, and that was his reaction as well. And you know, the hardest part about it was was finding a way to politely phrase the email that telling them that we didn't even want to take the call. You know, but if I was, you know, at a large organization, you know, for example, this has been a big issue for Microsoft and GitHub, right, because they have a contract with ICE. Yeah, I wouldn't have the choice here. You know, if I had a sales goal every month, and this was the way I was going to meet my sales goal. You know, the incentives would would back you into a corner to take that contract. But we don't have that over our heads and, you know, I can say, I'm going to reject this customer, and purposefully work harder to get more to replace whatever that revenue would have been, but being okay with that.

COLLEEN
That's wow -- that's amazing. Yeah, but I was just gonna say I've always really respected that about you, since I've known you, is you really seem to lead your company with what your moral footprint. And there's so few companies that do that nowadays. Like, that is something that is incredibly attractive about getting to make your own decisions.

MICHELE
Yeah, and it, you know, I was reminded of a favorite quote of mine from DHH, one of the founders of Basecamp, and of course of the creator of Ruby on Rails, which you code in, but one of my favorite quotes, I think this was him was, "What's the point of having a f-you money if you don't say a f-you?"

COLLEN
Yes!

MICHELE
Like, you know, that is, you know, that is incredibly right, you know, and I don't certainly have DHH level of f-yoo money, but you know, I don't have a sales goal over my head and, and when there is a decision like that, where I can make a decision that aligns with my conscience. You know, I mean, it's it's not hard to put two and two together of what ICE's enforcement and removal division would be using geocoding and like location tracking for Yeah, I mean, of course, and then seeing this week [week of July 20] what they're doing in Portland, because those are ICE officers apparently. There are very, very, very few organizations that I would reject off of the bat. They might be the only one. Yeah, it's just it's just wild.

COLLEEN
That is wild. Well, the great thing like you said, you don't have investors, you don't have to answer to anyone. Like you can do what you want. That's amazing. Now I do have to ask you...

MICHELE
We answer to our customers.

COLLEEN
Right, like so I do have, you know, friends that work at GitHub and other companies that have been embroiled in this ICE controversy and how do you deal with the argument that well, they're just going to go to one of your competitors anyway. So it may as well be you?

MICHELE
Nah, I don't want their money. Yeah, you don't care. I don't care how much it is, I don't I don't want their money.

COLLEEN
Well, good for you.

MICHLEE
Who knows now maybe they'll knock on my door or something else and I'll have problems with them because I disclose this, but I hope they're getting used to it. You know, I think that's something that we, we have a responsibility to do, right. Like we see things that are so drastically going wrong. And you said, you know, we'll, they'll just go to one of our competitors, and I've almost had thoughts this week of, I should post on Twitter that they reached out to us and that they're looking for a vendor for this and encourage all of our competitors to publicly state whether they're going to take that contract. Because if ICE doesn't have location data, can't track people, right? They can't remove them. You know, of course, they can use an open source version or something. But I don't want to make, you know, I don't want to make anything easier for them. I want to make everything harder for them, I want to make them go away.

COLLEEN
So are your competitors public or private, or a mix?

MICHELE
Combination. So our competitors range from Google and Apple and Bing, Microsoft. So who knows maybe they'll end up there. To two really small companies, another bootstrap company called geocode.earth, Smarty Streets, which is a small company out of Utah. But we all kind of do different things as well. And so what's interesting is there really isn't like a one to one competitor for us. So when we do recommend people to go to competitors, it is often because they are genuinely a better fit. There's enough differentiation which is a little bit weird because we're in a commodity industry. So it's kind of unexpected, but we all do something slightly different.

COLLEEN
Well, awesome, good for you. Like, I'm glad, like you said, it's nice that you have the freedom and autonomy to be able to do that.

MICHELE
Just keep thinking about the, "There's no point in having a f-you money if you don't say f-you."

COLLEEN
I love that.

MICHELE
Not that I plan to make a habit of this, you know, we have tens of thousands of customers. And normally we, you know, we never, you know, get involved in anything like this, but you you're presented with these situations sometimes in in your professional life. And if you work for someone else, whether whether that's, you know, as an agency like we were talking about beforehand, or in a bigger company, if there's a client or a customer that you disagree with, you're stuck with it. I mean, maybe you can try to lobby the company to drop them but you know, good luck getting a raise or a promotion after that. Yeah. You know, if you want to be able to really speak your conscience, you have to be able to have your own company and not be beholden to external powers, whether that be, you know, attempting to get acquired by a big company or investors or, or your boss.

COLLEEN
Yeah, I think that's one of the underrated things about having your own company, even as a consultant like, obviously on a different scale and a different level. But I, I have turned down two in particular, companies that were just doing things that they just, it just wasn't what I wanted to do. Like I just didn't agree. It wasn't quite as dramatic as that, but I just didn't agree with like, kind of the fundamentals of their business. And I was able to say no.

MICHELE
Yeah, so when you have your own company, you can make decisions not only about the specific companies you want to work with, but also the kinds of customers you want to work with. So for example, we fairly often have people reach out asking us for data on individual people, so the kinds of things that a, you know, a credit agency might look for, you know, data on specific people and their income and data about them. And we say no, and that we have no plans to ever add that data because I don't believe in selling data on individual people. We sell, you know, data at the Census level, which is basically at the neighborhood level for an address. But that's a conscious decision that we have made that is another example of, you know, if we had investors or a boss breathing down our neck, we might have to make a different decision and maximize your revenue, rather than what feels morally right to us.

COLLEEN
I mean, you can get it get up every morning and go to sleep every morning like feeling good about the choices you've made, not feeling pressured to work with someone you don't want to work with or do something you find morally ambiguous. I think that's huge, especially in tech, especially in this day and age. When so many things seem like they are teetering on being just a little bit shady. I think that's wonderful. And I think actually may have already said this, but um, since I have known you, that has been the way you have run your business, and I have always really respected that and admired that about you, because, honestly, if you guys sold individual income information, you would, I mean, I imagine that's very valuable, right? Like...

MICHELE
We would make a lot of money.

COLLEEN
So the fact that you were like, Nope, I don't believe in that. We're not going to do that. I think that is inspiring. And it also shows again, in this day and age that you can run a tech company with values and morals and not being beholden to making as much money as possible.

MICHELE
Absolutely. And especially when you don't have any sort of huge goal that you are beholden to, you know, like going public or getting acquired. You don't have to make as much money as possible like, right? Like we only have to make enough money to sustain our family. And that gives us choices, that gives us the freedom to make decisions like this that align with what we believe in. Yeah.

COLLEEN
Yeah. Awesome.

MICHELE
I think that's about it for this week. But that's the big thing I've been thinking about.

COLLEEN
I love it. Thank you for sharing that.

MICHELE
Sounds good. All right.

COLLEEN
Well, we'll catch you next week. Thank you for joining us.

View Details

MICHELE HANSEN: Welcome to the software social podcast where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: And I'm Colleen Schnettler.

MICHELE HANSEN: So tell me, Colleen, what's going on with your consulting/transition-to -product business this week?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So, I have been stuck in the idea generation phase of trying to start a small business for quite a while. And I've had a lot of different ideas that I've chased down and they really have not amounted to much. So I've decided instead of continually searching for something, I'm going to build something that I want that I know I will use with my clients and throw it out in the world and hope it sticks. Exactly.

MICHELE HANSEN: Dogfooding!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: This, really, for me like a lot of the literature, I read about startups -- and I read a lot of literature about startups -- says not to code before you have an established market. But the truth is, it's something I want, it's something I know my clients will use (because I am their developer!), and I'm sick of kind of spinning my wheels. I feel like I need to take more action.

MICHELE HANSEN: So, Colleen, what is this idea you're working on?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So I am working on an image hosting platform, I hate to use the word term platform, it's not really a platform. Basically, what I'm trying what I'm building is something that's going to be a JavaScript widget that you install into your site that's going to provide you with a drop zone UI, and then your users can drop their images into your drop zone UI. It puts them -- it's going to create cloud storage for you, and it's going to save them to the cloud, and the cloud will be under my business. I don't know if I explained that well. Well, it'll be in the cloud. I'll put them in front of a CDN. Because I think the CDN part's really important. And it's just going to return the URL. So that's my plan. And there's a lot of image management software out there. Actually, there's a ton of image management software out there. But there's nothing that's just really easy. Like when you're working on a small SaaS app, in my opinion, you just want to move forward as quickly as possible and you want to make progress and the stuff out there isn't bad... but I just want to make it dead simple, especially for like newer developers or developers who don't want to deal with a lot of image management or they don't want to figure out how to use AWS. When you're a newer developer, you're just learning how to develop, you don't want to then have to go spend hours and hours figuring out AWS, in my opinion. So it's just gonna make the process simple. It's gonna be a five minute install. You just drop the snippet in, you put the button on, and it will provide your users their drop zone and all you have to do is save the URL of the image. So now you automatically have your image hosted on the cloud. So you don't have to worry about that. Like I said, I have not yet, but my goal is to put in front of the CDN so you don't have to worry about that. And then you can use the image, you know, like you would any cloud image.

MICHELE HANSEN: So have you talked to other developers who have talked about their frustrations with other image management platforms?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: No.

MICHELE HANSEN: Colleen!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So here's the thing I know. So here's okay. I know but like, I have come every client I have, I have this freakin problem and it really irks me that there's not a better solution.

MICHELE HANSEN: That's worth something.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: That's worth something! And so when I do talk, okay, that's not fair when I first started to talk to people, and there is -- I did talk to other people.

MICHELE HANSEN: Before the pandemic, we talked to other people, right? In general...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yes, before when I could TALK to people. So I have talked to people about this. And a lot of them use big. So so the people I know like they use big powerful solutions like enterprise-level solutions because they work for enterprise-level clientele, right. So a lot of my friends work for big, you know, fancy companies. And so they have these big enterprise solutions. And so I have looked at those solutions. And they're not bad, but they're a pain to set up. It's way more like there's one that's really popular in the Rails community. And it's fine, but like, it's just way more overhead when you just want your user to be able to add a couple images, right? Like it's a huge overhead to import this third party library and configure it, it's a whole thing. You got to figure out how to use it. It's a whole thing. Like, it's just too hard for what you're trying to do. So I am trying to take this thing that almost every application needs, your user usually has some kind of avatar most applicant. Most applications use some kind of images. So I'm just trying to take this thing that everyone needs and make it really, really easy. Like, just simplify the heck out of it.

MICHELE HANSEN: It sounds like this is something that you experience frequently and is pretty annoying for you, which is a great place to be for a potential product is something that a user experiences frequently. And is something painful, you know, if you had if you had an idea, and it's something that isn't very painful for people and doesn't happen very often, that's usually kind of a red flag. But if you can find something that's pretty frequent and pretty painful, that can be promising.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, so the first iteration of this I built was just for public images. So it was like for your static assets. And I built that because like images are just a pain point for me because they're just annoying, right? Users -- they take these like they have these huge files, your designers give you these huge files. And you have to, you know, compress them and resize them and all this stuff. But the first thing I kind of built, which is this, the building blocks to what I'm working on now, was just public image hosting amongst teams. And that was cool. And I like that. But like, no one was really interested in that because no one cares so much about web performance. Very few people care so much about web performance was my experience that they're actually going to, you know, resize all of their images that are just their static everyday images, or they're just going to throw them behind a CDN anyway, so they don't care. But this problem, I think the thing about this problem is, it's a common problem. And there's many, many, many different ways to solve it. And I have seen as a consultant, I work for a lot of different companies over the past years, and I have seen all these different kinds of ways to solve it. And there's just no, but it just doesn't feel like there's an easy, consistent way like you'll have one app that uses this gem then one app and you and then one app that does it this way. And I feel like we're taking this problem that doesn't have to be so hard and making it harder than it needs to be.

MICHELE HANSEN: And you know, as I hear you talk, what I what I think about is you were mentioning earlier how you consume a lot of startup literature and talks and advice on starting a business. And something that always comes across in those kinds of venues is how, you know, you should be passionate about it, you should be passionate about the business and you should be passionate about about what you're solving and whatnot. And, you know, I don't think there are any, you know, eight year old kids out there saying, "Mom and Dad when I grew up, I'm gonna solve image management software." But what does drive someone is experiencing a problem so often, that you are passionate about solving that feeling of pain, and I think this is something that really gets lost in that, you know, startup literature, hustle porn, whatever you want to call it -- is that the pain of something, and really the empathy you feel for yourself and for other people who are experiencing that same problem. It doesn't have to be the specific problem itself. But the idea of taking away some amount of pain, whether that's for you or for other people, that is a huge motivator. And I think that's one of the great things about dog fooding is that you're solving a problem for yourself, so you are motivated to fix it. And like worst case scenario, if nobody else uses it, you have solved a problem for yourself. And you have eliminated a frustration in your life and you just have more brainpower that you can focus on things that you would rather think about rather than this super annoying problem that you're facing all the time.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Right. And I feel like this idea like, I think I said, I mentioned that I got, you know, I kind of was stuck in this Ferris Wheel of ideas without really getting anywhere. So the other thing that's nice about this idea is it's a it's a small thing. I don't see this becoming like a business like, you know, that grows into like a big thing

MICHELE HANSEN: It doesn't have to be!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Who says, right? I mean, I mean, I'm at the point. Well, I guess no one gets, like, you know, and I'm at the point where I just wanted to put something out there because I feel like I've been, I've just been spinning my wheels for a while now. And I just need to kind of get back in the game. And yeah, you're right, this is a frequent problem I have I all I would like to just have a consistent way to solve it. So next time I come up with something, because I get a lot of these applications that are halfway done or almost done or need to be fixed in what I do. I'd like to just be able to like, Alright, I don't know what this architecture is, but I'm putting this little little widget in here and it's gonna solve all our problems. And I don't have to do the one of us dance again.

MICHELE HANSEN: One less problem you have to deal with in that specific area..

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: And I really think to like, the beauty of, of a marketplace for rails developers like Heroku is, it helps people that are new to coding get get up to speed quickly. And I feel like image storage in the cloud can be a really challenging issue for people who are new to coding, because they just learned how to write a Rails app and deploy it. And now they have to figure out you know, cloud storage and how to manage that and how to resize their images and, and how to put them in front of a CDN, and it's just a lot. So I really do feel like this is a real problem. I don't know that it's a real problem that people will pay for. But it feels like a real problem to me. So my challenge now is twofold. Like, I'm gonna do it. I'm like, 90% done. And you remember what they say about like the last 10% takes 90% of the time or whatever. So, of course, I you know, I've just onboarded a new client that I'm really excited about, and they just announced that the kids aren't going back to school. So I have a lot on my plate right now. And so really my goal is to to prioritize this because this is really where I want to be like. When I look at my life, this is...

MICELE HANSEN: This is giving you satisfaction!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: This what I want to do! YES, so much satisfaction!

MICHELE HANSEN: Hope! Hope that you will solve this problem -- which is lacking in a lot of other elements right now.

COLEEEN SCHNETTLER: YES! I have hope! l I have hope. And so, my goal this week is my goal this week is really to prioritize getting this done. I'm so close. But of course, like everyone, like, I always want to add one more feature....

MICHELE HANSEN: Don't do it! Just get it out there. Bare minimum. You know, the, as you said, like stuff like, you know, creating an account or creating an API key or all of the stuff that actually lets you launch something like that will probably take more time than you realize and we'll have more complications than you realize, but at that point, as you said, you're so close to being over the finish line that you can just bang it out.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, and that's my goal. Like I really like it. Well, I do need to, I want to finish it right now my goal is just to finish it, right. And I know that again, and then I don't know if anyone's gonna buy it. But I'm so close to getting it done. I just really want to get something out there. So, like my goal for this upcoming week, and like, my priority is going to be to try and give myself the time. It's so hard as you know, a human that has children and a spouse and all these all these demands on your time. It's so hard to like, prioritize that time. And so my goal is to find a way to prioritize this time the next week because I'm so close to finishing it and I just want to get it done. So that's what's going on in my life. Let's talk about about what's going on with Geocodio.

MICHELE HANSEN: Yeah, so something I have been thinking a lot about this week is pricing.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Ooo, pricing?

MICHELE HANSEN: Pricing is the hardest part of having a business like can, time and time again. It's the thing that we're banging our heads against the wall to figure out. And I think it's underappreciated as a difficult element. But it's every time you launch a product or doing something new, or get a unique request from a customer. Pricing is always the thing we spend the most time on.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So what is so hard about pricing? Like, that's a serious question. I don't know. Can't you just be like...?

MICHELE HANSEN: So there's a lot of stuff that's tough about pricing. I mean, the the big thing is that, right, like from a very basic level, you want to not only cover your costs, but you want to make some money on top of that, right? So you have your costs and then you know off the bat, whatever the price is, you're going to lose, I always just ballpark 40% to taxes and other various expenses like that. So then just figuring out where your breakeven is alone, like, that's just the first step of it. But the hard thing about pricing is you need to price it for the value the customer is getting. And that may not always be clear to you. And the value that a customer gets from it may not be entirely apparent, it may be difficult to parse out. But also, you need to figure out how the customer perceives the problem, and what they understand like what they express as the problem and how they would want to solve that. And that has to be expressed through the pricing. So like a really basic example of this, for example, is Slack where they charge you per user if you're on a paid plan, which makes it easy to figure out, Okay, we have 20 people in our organization. And it's, I think it's like $5 a month or something like that, we'll just say that. And so we're going to be charged $100 a month, I have 20 people, I can very easily calculate what it's going to cost me to use this, right? This is a metric that I understand and I can see the value of having all of these 20 people be able to talk to one another on this platform -- ostensibly, even though Slack is, you know, a huge problem for my own productivity.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, so um, and me too.

MICHELE HANSEN: So you know, so I was struggling with pricing a lot this past week, because a customer came to us with a, a problem that's adjacent to what we do, and it's something we actually have an internal tool for, but we've never productized but we've considered it and they asked us to productize it because they were really frustrated with their existing options and due to some limitations and the pricing of their current vendors for it, they weren't able to use those tools with as many customers as they wanted to. And they wanted to really expand that and they were like, you know, we really love your terms of service and your pricing and how you guys do things. Like is there any way that you guys can help us with this? So, you know, we're kind of looking at it and and as we... One of the first steps looking at pricing is always like looking at competitors. So how are the competitors pricing. What kind of structure are they using? You know, very often you see the kind of starter/professional/enterprise like tiered pricing, right? That's, that's pretty common. And so I just find it helpful just you know how how to competitors. frame the pricing, because that helps you see how they understand the customers problem and the kinds of features that they are launching for specific customer problems. So for example, with Slack, you only get compliance reporting at their highest paid plan because the people who need compliance reporting are able to pay for it. Those are banks, those are, you know, regulated organizations that have to report on it. Right. So it's only at the very highest tier, they're capturing that value there for that feature. But something else I was looking at was, you know, how, how do they perceive the customer's perception of the problem?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: How do your competitors perceive the customer's perception?

MICHELE HANSEN: Yes. How do they understand the customer's frame of reference, like I have just heard myself on the phone from the customer, how they understand the problem? How is this being then expressed by the competitors and what I noticed which is really strange, actually, was that all the companies out there for this specific service, were pricing it basically based on their costs. So all of the pricing was based on their own bandwidth costs and then effectively a markup on top of that. And so this is for for map tiling, which is you need in order to load a map on a website, whether you get it from, from Google or from from somebody else. And most companies charge based on the number of interactions that a particular user has with the map. And so that's basically the number of tiles that have to be sent from the CDN. Since our CDNs episode, I guess. From the CDN to load, load the all those little squares on the map, which is why when you're like zooming in really far in a map, sometimes you like see, like squares loadings, it's literally squares of the map loading. Right? And so how they charge for it is the number of tiles that load and so how much the person interacts with it. The problem with that: do you know how many map tiles you required to load last time you were looking for a dentist or trying to locate the nearest grocery store, right? So somebody can go, you know, they do their analytics, they can see how many users they have. But they don't know whether one person is going to be 15 map tile loads, or 50 map tile loads, right? But the way these things are charged is based on the map tile loads. And I was trying to ask our customer, you know, are you even able to tell me like, like, how many users you have, or, or you know, what you're currently paying for anything, and they weren't even able to, like translate those numbers very well, because these companies made it so hard for them to figure out even what they're being charged and why.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Ah, much like AWS!

MICHELE HANSEN: So the hard thing about that was like, wow, we know the customer is frustrated by the fact that they can't even predict right? It's not like that. We have 20 people and that's gonna be $5 a month and those are terms that I understand. This is like we have 10,000 users, and if they have 10 maps, higher loads, or they have 50, map tile loads, and we actually have no idea, companies don't like when their pricing is unpredictable. They really like stability. And so it was taking that and figuring, okay, we know the customer likes away for stable pricing. So technically, how can we figure out what a stable, consistent monthly price is? But then how can we figure out a way to price this that is, in terms of the user understands, that is not charging them for this metric that they don't use in any other scenario, that we're basically marking up bandwidth costs on top of it. How do we how do we frame it as something that they understand? And so that's something we're thinking about a lot this week and, but just keeps reminding you that pricing is so so hard, and it's so easy to get to get wrong. It's also easy to change it and test it...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER:
So what do you guys do now for pricing?

MICHELE HANSEN: We have a couple of different pricing options. So this product I'm talking about here, we haven't launched it yet. And we're...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: oh yeah, this would be for a new product

MICHELE HANSEN: For Geocodio, in general, we have, we have a freemium model, which actually people describe, it's not a pricing model it's a marketing model, which is totally true. So we have a free tier, which is actually something we basically inherited from Google, when we launched, they had 2,500 free lookups per day, free address lookups. And so we're like, if that's the industry standard, we have to do that. So we did that. But then what really frustrated us was that you couldn't just pay for whatever you needed on top of that. It was either 2500 free per day, or like 100,000 a day for a like $10,000 a year enterprise contract. And we're like, that's not us. Like we just need 5,000 addresses per day. And actually, so pricing was something that that encouraged us to start Geocodio. And so we have, we have the free tier and then we have pay-as-you-go on top of that for people who have lower volume usage, then we have an unlimited tier, which is for people who have much higher usage, usually about 5 million per day. And then we have all sorts of customizations on top of that. So we have people that we're running custom clusters for, because they need to process 20 million a day. We have on-premise customers -- like we kind of have a, a wide mix. And then we also have our Geocodio Maps product, which is monthly subscription only, but we're probably going to change that in the future and merge it in with the main product. And then we're gonna have this map tiling product and that that's also maps and so what are the names of things -- naming and pricing? Honestly, like, we like the pricing we we, we suck at naming. I think everybody thinks they suck at naming.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, naming and pricing. There are hard.

MICHELE HANSEN: Sometimes harder than anything technical, quite frankly.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER:
So have you come to anything -- Are you still like working it out? Have you come up with an idea?

MICHELE HANSEN: For the most part? Yeah, I mean, we sent the customer proposal, we spent the whole weekend talking about it, which our daughter loved. And...

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER:
she's gonna be so business savvy now ---

MICHELE HANSEN: or she's gonna rebel and be like a communist artist who doesn't believe that business should exist. Because, you know. Yeah, so, we send them a proposal. Actually, I need to get back to them. It's, you know, you were talking on the last episode, or no, was it this one about how you feel like you're 90% of the way there and it's just like some polishing touches, like, have you figured out the pricing for your product yet?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Oh, gosh, no. But mine will be like, like, I haven't even thought about that. But mine will be Cloud Storage. So I mean, I was just gonna go with mark up whatever cloud storage cost you are using.

MICHELE HANSEN: I mean, and that works. I would almost consider you to be like, Is there a -- We can charge for like the number of images someone has, even though you're going to be paying by the storage size, yeah. Which is, you know, measured in gigabytes, right, right. Like if you can somehow charge for a metric that the customer understands, like 10 images. Yeah, they understand that they may not understand how their images translate into size into Yeah, into bytes. They may not get that.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: No, you're totally right. And I hadn't given it any thought. But now that you say that, it makes way more sense to be like, you have this many users, each user gets to upload five images, that's your fee based on you know, the number of images because the customer understands that

MICHELE HANSEN: and if they need more, like, always be like, yeah, email us.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: That's a great idea.

MICHELE HANSEN: And then you'll you'll probably have some customers who, you know, if you like mentally decide, okay, I'm going to, you know, I have this many, you know, gigs on my plan. So this is how many each customer gets, you will have some customers who will go over that, but you'll probably have some who are below it. And as long as it all averages out, and you've calibrated that, then it'll be okay. And you can just have tier and be like, then, you know, here's the tier where you are.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: That's a great idea. Because you're right, like, like pricing something in a way they understand is that makes so much more sense.

MICHELE HANSEN: And make it easy for them to explain it to their boss to write, like, I always try to picture it, like how would my customer go to their boss and explain, you should pay for this service, we've determined this is necessary, you know, it's better than what we're using right now or the other competition. And you know, we've got this many page views per month or this many users or this many, like transactions we're processing or whatever that metric is that your customer is using internally, that they would talk about with their boss to sell their boss on buying your software. Try to figure out what that term is. Talk to your customer. And try to find a way to price it in a way that matches the language that they're using. And but not only the language, the mental model they're using of why they need to use the service in the first place.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, that makes great sense.

MICHELE HANSEN: And it's hard. Like I will not undersell it, that it is difficult to crawl inside other people's heads and other people's you know, sort of organizations and try to figure out how they think about things. That's very difficult. But if you can get it right, it's it's very powerful and and you don't have to get it right the first time you know, you can keep iterating it you know, companies change their product, their pricing models all the time. You know, Amy Hoy has some some great content on that. It's possible but it deserves a lot of time.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER:
So for your, your new product, I don't know if you can, you can share, but did you decide to charge based -- did you find a metric? That set you apart?

MICHELE HANSEN: I think what we're gonna do is, we are going to we are going to charge by bandwidth. But it seems like pretty much all of the companies out there right now are only charging as paid as you go even on like enterprise tiers. So you might end up paying Google like $6,000 a month. Yeah, but on a pay as you go model, so it's going to be variable. So we're gonna do it tiered and we're going to start out with just one tier. And then we've set it you know, we've set a price for if you need more, here's a, here's an additional cost, and we'll just kind of see how that goes. And, and we're, we want it to be clear with the customer: it's like we may change this in the future, but we'll make sure that whatever we change it to you're not going to pay more. Like if those tiers end up making it so that the the amount you're getting right now is more expensive, you know, we'll keep you at the current cost, okay, which is always a good thing to do always, always let people keep legacy pricing.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER:
Well, thank you for sharing that. That was really illuminating pricing. Very hard.

MICHELE HANSEN: And by the way, I want to mention that Stripe has a good guide to pricing as well. And Patrick McKenzie wrote it in the in the Stripe Atlas guides and that's something that I consult often on, like thinking about pricing, and he kind of dissects a couple of, of different pricing scenarios for some companies so you can see real life examples of pricing critiques.

Well that covers this week's software social podcast. We hope you enjoyed sitting at our table at the virtual coffee shop this week, and we hope you'll join us next week.

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MICHELE HANSEN: Welcome to the Software Social podcast, where we invite you to join our weekly conversation about what's going on in our businesses. I'm Michele Hansen,

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: and I'm Colleen Schnettler.

MICHELE HANSEN: And this week we're giving you an intro to what this podcast is about and who we are and why we're doing this and why we're hoping you'll join us.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So Michele can you start by telling us a little about your software business?

MICHELE HANSEN: Yes, so I am a co-founder of Geocodio (https://www.geocod.io/) which is a software as a service company. We do geocoding for US and Canada as well as data matching, and my husband and I started it about six and a half years ago now as a side project and we have run it full-time for the past three years.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So you're basically living the dream, is what you're telling me?

MICHELE HANSEN: Some people would say that, I bristle at that a little bit, there's definitely a lot more dream to be had. But yeah, people do say that to me, especially people who are looking to create their own software businesses. Which is kinda the boat you're in.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Much like myself! I am a Ruby on Rails developer, I've kind of had a varied career. Always in tech. I started as an electrical engineer, stayed home with my kids for a few years, and then I started learning Rails and I built up a really successful consultancy. And that has been amazing, and a really wonderful journey for me, but I have always wanted to start a product business. There is just this dream of having a product business that you are in charge of your own life and your own business, you get to make your own decisions. That's something I've always wanted. And man, it's hard!

MICHELE HANSEN: It is hard!

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Right? You know, I read a lot of startup content. I have read a lot of books and I follow a lot of successful startup founders and there's so many stories out there that make it seem like -- I mean you don't hear about it until they're successful, so it makes it seem like it's easy, and I'm at the very beginning of this journey, and you know, I'm just getting started! So part of my impetus for doing this podcast with you is obviously to learn a lot about what you can teach people who are in the early stages of their business, and also to stay inspired and to share with people what it's really like to start a business.

MICHELE HANSEN: I don't think you give yourself enough credit, Colleen, in saying that you're just at the very beginning. You have been working intently on this for over a year now -- I remember it was last summer when you came to me and you were so excited about an idea and this passion you had that was leading you to toward that idea, and you started doing user research on it, and having something that you're passionate about, and doing the work to see if there's legs to it, and then realizing that there aren't -- that is work. That is valuable productive work.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: I hope so! Because it was quite a lot of work. And so just a brief overview, I had an idea to do something with the childcare industry. And I had a founder, someone I was going to work with, and she and I interviewed quite a few people who would have been in our target market. So we kind of took the steps you learn about with idea generation and honestly the truth is -- we put in a lot of time and effort and found out it really was not a profitable business idea. So it's hard to get really excited about something and climb that mountain and then realize -- up! no one wants to buy it.

MICHELE HANSEN: Right

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: You know? At least we found that out before we started writing code.

MICHELE HANSEN: Right

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Didn't you guys have some side projects before Geocodio?

MICHELE HANSEN: Oh, many. And we had many projects in between that, too, that we've launched in the interim. And it's -- there's no lying that it's hard to find something that sticks, and as you said, no one cares about something until you're a success -- which is a really really lonely place to be for a very long time. You know, our first month we launched Geocodio, we made $31. We thought we were a ridiculous success because we were shocked that anybody wanted to pay us. We thought our product was pretty terrible. And we were we were truly -- we were so shocked that we hadn't even written the code that would tell Stripe to bill people. That was how surprised we were that anyone wanted to pay us. And we worked on it as a side project for a very long time. And it wasn't until just before I went full time, that people started kind of noticing what we were doing and asking us to talk at conferences or, or being a podcast. There's that was a very long time. Where Yeah, exactly like you were saying, you don't hear a lot of those stories. You only hear the stories when people are successful. And I think what we're hoping to capture here is some of that granularity that goes in week by week when you're launching something. And then also the kinds of things you face on a daily basis when you have launched something and it's gotten to the point where you can work full time on it, what what are the kinds of things that you might be facing at that point, and and how do we tackle them

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: So you guys had the business for a few years before you went full time, right?

MICHELE HANSEN: Yeah. Yeah, three, it was like three and a half years until I went full time. And then my husband went part time, six months later. And then full time, six months after that, like, honestly, we were terrified of paying for health insurance on our own. And that was a big thing that kept us from going full time. We probably could have gone full time a lot sooner. But given the experience I had just a couple months ago trying to buy health insurance, I'm glad I put that off. But it's possible -- not to scare anyone. But there's a very real fears that come into it. Even when you do have something that works and you have customers and your revenue is increasing. You're going to have a whole new set of anxieties to face so -- congratulations! Yeah, no. Everything is solvable.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: I think when you're where I am in this process it seems like so far away right like like it seems like "Man, if I could just make a product that people want to buy my life will be rainbows and sunshine and easy every day!"

MICHELE HANSEN: I can see that and also you know our everyday is we've got something that's that's launched that, you know, has recurring revenue and you know supports us and everything and every day there's still people who are upset with us. Every day we discover things with our product that we're like, "Oh my, that is so obviously bad. Like we need to fix that. Like how is that been like that for so long? This is embarrassing." Like that, that happens to happened... today. It happened yesterday. And the same time you know some of the things you were talking about earlier that the dream so many people have for having a product business. Being able to be your own boss, getting to make decisions, getting to have that level of autonomy and authority and direction over your own work. That doesn't go away. And that definitely keeps me going. And really, what makes it worth it when not everything is rarely otherwise.

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: Yeah, I imagine you're a parent as well as am I? And I imagine it goes both ways, right? Like I imagine the flexibility you have with running your own business is amazing to help you parent. But on the other hand, can you ever take a vacation?

MICHELE HANSEN: Yes and no. You know, I mean, like, we started this as a side project, right? And, you know, we both had, right, you know, full time, like tech jobs, but in the early years of the business, like I remember the first time that we like took a vacation with money we had earned from the business, which was I think about two years, two and a half years in. And I remember we were driving on these beautiful roads on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. And it's just like these rolling hills and it's just, it was so gorgeous. And I was replying to someone on Intercom at the same time. Because, you know, an issue had come up. And that's just been the case the whole time. And my perspective on that has always been, we're only able to have the life we do because of the business. And so yes, like, very often one of us is dealing with something for work at the dinner table, or when we're on vacation, or when when when we have life going on or especially with the pandemic and being at home with other things going on all at the same time. And that has pros and cons. At the same time, you know, working in a corporate job I think all of us can speak to there's always some issue that's blowing up on Slack off hours that you have to deal with. And so it's not really that different. The only difference is that when you are responding to that customer, or, you know, once we took a call with a potential large customer while on a road trip through Belgium, was that we, we got all of the money from that, right? Like, it wasn't that like we would have to prove to our boss at the end of the year like, look at all this time I did when all this work I did when I was on vacation, all this time I put in on the weekends and at night, like so hey, like, you know, give me a 2% raise, right? Like, you don't have to do that. Like if you land that contract and you sacrifice a part of your vacation. You got the money. It's very clear cut. And so that makes it worth it for me. I feel like my daughter might have a different perspective and sometimes she's like you guys need to Stop talking about Geocodio at dinner, let's talk about something else, something else is not boring. So. So you know, I always joke that if you know, maybe our business talk will either make her adept at business herself or she can totally rebel and not want anything to do with it. I mean, you've got clients. I mean, that's not like, you don't ever get to fully log off either, right?

COLLEEN SCHNETTLER: No, I really don't. So as you know, in my consultancy, I am a single point of failure. Like I have one really large contract really big client that I share with another developer, which is nice. But yeah, it you know, if something goes down, or you know, they, they want something I'm usually relatively accessible. It does make it hard to I mean, you know, it's interesting, it does make it hard to really take a vacation. And it's interesting because I have never been a good office employee. I don't like Working for other people. I don't like sitting in meetings. I don't like other people to tell me how to do my work or when to do my work. So consulting has really been great for me. But there is this this joke that like you spend all your time trying to go from employee to consultant and then as soon as you're a consultant, you're ready to jump to something else. Sometimes it feels like you have multiple bosses, right? Because you have like several different clients, they all have different needs are all contacting you. So it has given me immense flexibility with which, you know, I couldn't work an office job right now with a pandemic. And now apparently, we're homeschooling the children because they're not going back to school. So I have to have this flexibility. But, you know, it does feel like I'm always it does feel like I always have to be plugged in, like I always kind of have to be on top of it. And if I am a single point of failure, so if I can't figure it out, or I can't get it done, like it doesn't get done. So sometimes that does pressurize the situation. But I imagine much like having a product business. I still like consulting more than I liked a traditional office role.

MICHELE HANSEN: Oh, absolutely. And so I guess you know, in, in closing with this podcast, what we're hoping to do is bring you in to our conversations, conversations like this, that Colleen and I are having regularly anyway. And considering the different stages that we are at, and how that plays off in one another. Maybe you'll find this helpful. Maybe you're looking to start your own business. Maybe you're looking to branch out into other things. Whatever that might be, we want to invite you to sit at the table with us. We take the name of the podcast from a great little coffee shop in Arlington, Virginia called Northside Social where we used to meet up before the pandemic and, and so we're inviting you to Sit at our table and and listen in and hopefully share your own thoughts with us on on all of this.

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Michele Hansen & Colleen Schnettler