FounderQuest: Recent Episodes
The Honeybadger Crew
Show notes:
Links:
Garrett Dimon
Minitest Heat
Heat Map Reporter for Minitest
Review
Starting & Sustaining
Sifter App
Automated transcript (only about 70% accurate)
Ben
Welcome to FounderQuest, this has been Today, I'm interviewing Garrett Diamond Star and josh are taking the day off and I get a chat with Garrett, who's a longtime friend of mine and fantastic entrepreneur and all around great person in the world, so I'm excited to have you here. Gary, Thanks,
Garrett
thanks for having me.
Ben
It's always fun catching up with you. I think the last time we chatted was business of software a few years ago, wasn't it?
Garrett
Yeah, not frequently enough,
Ben
so that was, yeah, definitely not frequent enough. One thing I most remember about that business of software was that was when the hurricane was coming through and so I was standing out there in boston with all the wind and the
Garrett
right, having grown
Ben
up in the south, that was kind of ironic that I was there in the northeast and getting a hurricane. Mhm. So have you been
Garrett
three, so just uh probably about the same as everybody else man, you know, just kinda one day at a time and keeping it going um and yeah, I just kind of dabbling and exploring and for once the last year just kind of let myself be undirected and just kind of followed what was interesting and pulled on threads and uh a little unnerving but also kind of nice and refreshing, I don't know, you know, so kind of bouncing around like a ping pong ball.
Ben
Well, that's, that sounds pretty cool. Well, let's talk about that in a minute. I want to catch people up so I'm sure most people know you, but just for those who don't. So Garrett again, it's been a long time entrepreneur I think. I think I first bumped into you with doing sifter, your, your, your app from a few years ago, you built that from scratch solo entrepreneur and then you sold that. Then you're, you're at post uh, postmark for awhile for that. Right.
Garrett
Well, wild bit at large, but primarily on postmark. Yeah.
Ben
Okay. Right. Right. So you're a while, but for a while and then I guess it was a couple of years ago now that you've left wild.
Garrett
Yeah, it's been about . years, I guess. No. Okay.
Ben
Yeah. And so I guess also during that time you kind of did the starting and sustaining books slash video series slash thing. That was cool.
Garrett
Yeah, I've been dabbling in all that, trying to share my battle wounds so that other people can maybe avoid them or less than them.
Ben
Yeah, that's awesome. I remember, I remember buying that. It's good, good stuff. So also linked in the show notes. Maybe we'll get a sailor to uh, you spoke, you spoke at Microsoft a few times or at least once that I can remember
Garrett
I can't even keep track now. Microsoft spoke once attended a couple of times. Yeah.
Ben
And so now you're doing some, some interesting stuff. So I remember, remember when you left a wild bit, you were, you're really interested in getting started on helping amputees have a community and so you started adapted, right? So, we're gonna talk about that for a second, and then we can talk about, you know, how that plan kind of changed for you with the passage?
Garrett
Um, I mean, so I'm a left below knee amputee. And when I was trying to make that decision, I couldn't find any information on what life is really like as an amputee, um, let alone specific information about, can I play basketball still, if so, how does that work? Or what other activities can I do? And there's just not a lot of detailed information, and with disability, even just within amputees, the range is incredible, like above me and bologna makes a complete difference in how you function and your body mechanics, and so I just couldn't find this information out there. And so that kind of planted the seed that obviously it's not out there and, you know, it's woefully under informed, which at first was kind of scary, it's like, oh, I guess nobody does any of this stuff
Garrett
and for me, the whole, ironically, the whole point of amputating was so that I could get back to doing things because of my ankle fusion was horrible and all that, it's just hurt and was miserable and through the whole thing, I was blogging about it, and what would happen is people would email me because they'd go on google and search for amputation, ankle fusion, that kind of thing, and then they'd ask me like, I'm, because I was the only person that came up and I would get these emails, you know, it kind of varies and go ebbs and flows, you know, to a month, once a week, you know, so frequently enough. Um, and uh, one uh, young woman that reached out to me, she actually amputated and then just won a couple of gold medals in the paralympics and like,
Garrett
it just blew my mind is like, how do you find the answers to this stuff? And uh, after being an amputee now about five years and trying stuff and just kind of figuring it out. Uh, my hope was originally, I was like, well, I'm a software developer, I'll build a platform so people can share that information, um, you know, and I figured I was really optimistic about that specifically, because, well I built sifter and rails has gotten way better and I learned a ton from sifters, it'll be way easier this time around, but I didn't really account for was now I've got a family and I'm years older, uh and so it's been more challenging at the end of the day, I'm just tapped on software because I'm doing that all day and my brain is fried.
Garrett
Um, but I've been doing videos kind of explaining this stuff to people about how legs work and the logistics of like how they change your body mechanics and um, how to do things like go to the beach and deal with sand in your foot and that kind of stuff. Uh, and I did that more is like an exploratory whimsical thing because that was the kind of content I hope people would create and put on the platform. So then you could filter and say, here's my disability, here's the activity I want to do. Give me all the information about that specific thing. Um, but I did it and it just kind of left it for a year, but it just kept going and then more people have been contacting me and so now what I'm doing is kind of
Garrett
stepping back from the software side of it and I'm just gonna keep recording videos for the next short term, um, and having them produced and that kind of stuff and hopefully increasing the quality and the depth and then doing interviews with other amputees and really kind of getting into more stuff, um, and then eventually circling back to building a platform to help people find the right things that meet their needs and that kind of thing. Um, so, you know, it's, it's, it's been tough. I think the toughest thing is realizing that nonprofit side projects are the hardest thing to make time for, um because it's never going to offset my income or anything. And so like
Garrett
now I've kind of been thinking, I guess I need to build a business again. So I've got more ironically more free time um, just because Sassen recurring revenue all that's so great that it would give me the flexibility to do that and to spend more time helping people and building um software and all that. So kind of just juggling things and figuring it out. And that's kind of where a lot of the exploration has come in. I haven't really prescribed where I'm taking things and uh um spending a lot of time dabbling and ruby and getting kind of deeper into it than I ever have previously. And uh exploring video and trying to help people with that stuff. So just kind of playing around and tinkering and trying to make ends meet at the same time and I'll figure it out, I guess
Ben
that's cool. There's a whole lot to unpack in there. So let's, let's talk about some of that. So, Some of the, some of the themes, well, at first, I guess I should say I can totally relate to you with the whole, you know, years later and now, there's. yeah, there's more demands on your time. There's less energy in the body and there's, you know, less energy in the brain probably is more importantly. Um, I've had that, that same thing I recently started picking up some side projects, you know, and like, yeah, they're just, you have fewer hours in the day that you really feel like being really into that kind of mode, you know, that your brain stuff and,
Ben
and I've noticed that uh I can tell like when my blood sugar is getting low and now we're like, I've I've used up too many brain cells, I gotta go back and recharge, you
Garrett
know? Uh
Ben
So it's interesting that dynamics, like, I don't quite have the appetite that I used to have to just dive in and, and, you know, slog away at the keyboard for hours. And then
Garrett
for me, it's also been awareness, like, I recognize it more now when I, when I was younger I would push through and be like, oh, grind and hustle and you know, and now I'm like, ok, I need to stop, this isn't, you know, if I don't stop, I'm going to be a complete mess tomorrow and not want to work and not be able to think. And so I catch it earlier and I just stopped and I hate it because I still, like, interested in whatever problem is in my head is still tugging on it and, you know, it's trying to and it's really hard to just turn it off and walk away. Um but I've gotten better at that a little,
Ben
One of the things that I've noticed as, as I've gotten older in this tech world. So I guess I've been doing it years or years or so, is that, um, uh, so that that energy for doing all the things is not there? Like it used to be, but it seems like the deep thinking is more refined is more home. So like you said, like you're going to be, you know, you're just not going to have the energy, you're not going to be wasted the next day. And I think I've seen that too. And I think it's not just from like the energy of working, it's from the energy of thinking deeply about what's the right solution here, right?
Ben
It's not so much like just powering through it. Okay, I'm gonna build this stuff and I'm gonna backtrack and I'm gonna redo and backtrack and redo now. It's like, oh, I'm gonna think about this and I'm going to get it right right? And then you apply that precision cut I guess.
Garrett
And for me, the struggle is having the wisdom to recognize they should stop, but I can't turn off the excitement or the interest, right? And so I do still want to work on it. I just know better. And it's hard when those two don't align. Yeah, that's, that's been a struggle.
Ben
Yeah, I've seen saying the same thing, but I think my living experience so far has been like the, the eventual outcome is better, even even when I have that, you know, I want to do more, but I don't know, I don't have the energy to more, But having that time to reflect more when I do sit down next time and have that minutes an hour or whatever, like that time is much better spent coming up with the right solution rather than
Garrett
just uh just the other day. I was and I mean, I think we've all had this happen a million times, but this just happened. I don't know, friday, I think banging my head on the desk for an hour and a half on this thing. That just makes no sense. There's a ruby thing like this doesn't make sense. What am I missing here? Like is there some really quirky ruby behavior I don't understand. Um And hour and a half and finally was like, I've got to give up, I've got to stop, this isn't getting anywhere. And it was only like , right? So I still was like, I had time in the day, I was like, I just got to stop The next morning. I sat down with in minutes,
Garrett
like solve cold, right? Like there's no, that was from the time I sat at my desk at the time, I solve the problem and it was just, you've got to step away and clear your head or you know, it just doesn't go well,
Ben
yeah, yeah, I've had that same experience so many times and uh I think a lot of times you hear people say yeah just take a break, go for a walk whenever you're like yeah what everyone's gonna power through it but it actually does work
Garrett
well for me. Walking doesn't cause then I'll just fix it on it too much and like I need to let go like my brain has to let it go. Um And so for me usually it's more getting a getting a night of sleep um is what kind of resets it for me at least from what I've found. But I've probably every three or four months. It's one of those where like This is going poorly and the next morning less than minutes it's solved. Uh
Ben
Yeah I have that too, like a good night. So definitely goes to reset. The one. The one problem I've had with that though is that then I will wake up at four a.m. I have the solution in my head, I'm like I got to go do it,
Garrett
I do that too and for better or worse I don't even fight the sleep anymore, I just get up and go start working. Um And then if I need a nap later or something I just
Ben
so be
Garrett
it. Uh But like that's so much of that like We're so indoctrinated that like is when people work. And that's been a really hard thing to let go of two and not feel that way every day and to basically, it's not about like working when you feel like it, but it's not like pushing back when the urge to get something done strikes, like go do it and then circle back, yeah, you know, and get some either for rest or whatever. Um you know, take a long lunch or whatever it is. Uh and that's uh I've found that to be helpful to just to try and not forced to work, but do it when it's fresh in my head and just go,
Ben
yeah, yeah, I love having that flexibility as a, as an entrepreneur or business owner and being able to work when it's most effective. So You know, if it's and then I take a break and maybe come back in a couple hours in the afternoon and then I'm done for the day, that's, it's cool. Right? So I wanted to hit on one other thing from, you're talking about there about with adaptable and you know, I love what you're saying about there's a, there's a software solution here, let me go build that, right? And then over time. Like uh maybe not. And I can totally relate to that because I feel the same way. It's like, oh if there's something missing in the world, there's, there's obviously assad's there that can satisfy that need, but
Ben
but in reality like salad, you don't have to go all the way to says, right, you can uh, you can start with, you know, youtube videos or uh, maybe even just a reddit, right? Maybe maybe you're hanging out in the community and on offering back and building up that stuff that you want to see in the world.
Garrett
Uh, so there's definitely still an element of that with what I want to do and uh, a lot of it is like, right now I'm focused on videos and more mechanics and uh, you know, here's things to think about if you want to get into mountain biking as an amputee or things to think about with snowboarding or, you know, whatever it is. Um, but there's this whole other facet or many facets really, um, of like limb care and recovery and you know, when you beat your leg up doing something active in a carbon fiber socket all day
Garrett
and then you get home and it's destroyed, uh, you know, you got to take care of it. And so there's things like that and there's a financial aspect that like insurance only helped so much with prosthetics and they help with basic, like daily kind of day to day prosthetics, but they don't help if you need more advanced prosthetics, um, for certain activities. And so for that, you're either on your own or you need to find financial assistance and there's a ton of great organizations out there that help with that, but they're all non profits and their websites are less than stellar and less than informative. Um,
Garrett
and in a lot of ways it's difficult to find the one that is right for you that will cover the type of equipment you need based on, you know, just your disability fall into the disabilities that they cover. Um, and so there's all these different requirements and details and it's difficult or you forget right, like life happens and some organization has an annual grant cycle and it's in october and then october blows by and you're like, oh crap, I totally forgot to apply for that grant and now you got to wait till next year. And so, you know, my thinking is that it's not just a tool to like educate people and help people find the information. They need something to proactively help reduce friction and remove the barriers that stop people with disabilities from being active.
Garrett
Um, and that could be everything from pain to financial stuff to simply, you know, needing somebody to talk to who's done it. Um, and there's just, there's so many solutions and everybody, even within a category of disability is unique, even if they're not unique from the disability perspective, the activity they want to pursue might be more unique. Um, and so it's just really difficult to make it all work and to find answers and you kind of just gotta go try and you know, from experience the first couple of times I try new activity is miserable because I'm just figuring it out and that takes a lot of the fun out of it. And a lot of people like this isn't for me and you know, until you learn
Garrett
kind of about that learning curve and how it exists and how it's a lot steeper than it is without a prosthetic or what have you. Um it's tough and it's easy to give up because it hurts and it's inconvenient and you know, there's just you're worried about your prosthetic, right? You've got this $, prosthetic that you need to survive day to day and you're like, oh I'm going to go paddleboarding, so what if it gets wet, can it get wet? I don't know, and there's just so many questions and so many easy reasons to give up or be intimidated and
Garrett
you know, it doesn't need to be that way because more more importantly, like once you're in that situation is more important than ever to be active and to stay active and to not let it just lock you down on the couch or something. Um but it's not easy, you know, it's way harder than before and I don't think it needs to be, it doesn't need to be as hard as it is. So yeah, I'm hoping could help people get answers and you know, do their thing, whatever it is that moves them figuratively and literally
Ben
yeah, yeah, that sounds like a tagline for the website
Garrett
actually. Right.
Ben
Right.
Garrett
Yeah.
Ben
Yeah. I I have uh so we have in our in our family some some experience with a kind of obscure medical issues like uh which is kind of similar to, you know, go into a prosthetic situation, right? Where all of a sudden you're into this community where you have to, you can get the speed really quickly on what does life look like now. And how do I do the things that I want to do and where do I go to find that information? And so often it seems that in our in our experience is that the only people who really know much of anything are the doctors that you're working with or the therapists or the nurses, right? And and they can connect with resources. But like if you just happen to have the wrong, you know, chemistry,
Ben
you know, with with someone or you don't just happen to the right person, you can just feel pretty isolated. And uh so I thank you for having having resources for, for that is is so helpful because I've told my wife a number of times like you could write a book on on all the things that you've learned, you know, through this experience. And and then my my my brother's family there was a significant motorcycle accident that left someone with, you know, just a lot of parallelization from the waist down basically and his his, you know, going through all the things that he went through two surgeries and the rehab. And so to get back to a point where he could walk, you know, uh, which was, which was assisted so much by the great people that he had around him.
Ben
But fortunately he had them right for those that don't, it's got to be a much, much harder rodeo
Garrett
and it's just all over the board. Um, amputations really interesting is what most most frequently right into with people is there surgeon doesn't want them to amputate and is constantly trying to talk them out of it. But after you go through it, I saw my surgeon, I mean, my surgeon, I had to switch surgeons. Um, but he saw me twice after my amputation. He's never seen me with a prosthetic. He has no idea what I'm doing now. And so these people are asking their surgeons about amputation. The truth is the surgeons, unless they're actively helping. Um, you know, in other contexts and volunteering. Uh, they have no clue what life is like after amputation. They might read some stuff,
Garrett
right. And you know, there's plenty of paralympians that are amazing. But then you wonder those people edge cases or you know, can anybody run and do that stuff again? Maybe not at that level. Um, and the, your surgeon just doesn't know. And so people are asking the surgeon because that's supposed to be the expert and then the surgeons giving them, I don't want to say bad information but incomplete information. And so it's tough for people because you can't get those answers, you know, and again, every disability so different how it affects people and how your doctor, what their background is in terms of how they understand like being active or you know, doing more than just day to day functioning. All right. Yeah. There's so many layers to it all. Mhm.
Ben
So, one thing I wanted to go back to was talking about, you know, the time that you spend on that, obviously it's it's tough when you've got a family, you're the breadwinner. You know, you're trying to build a nonprofit thing. And at some point it sounds like you realize, you know what, I just gotta I gotta do some work. I got to bring the money in the door, right? I can't spend all my time focusing on this this nonprofit platform. So it sounds like you're doing that in your spare time and that you're you're paying the bills of freelancing doing a bunch of bunch of rail stuff. But as you've been doing that, you've actually built some tools that I want to talk about. So it sounds it sounds like
Ben
you've been doing this work and this work has prompted you to build the review thing you've been working on. And also the heat map thing for many tests, let's talk about that a little bit.
Garrett
Uh Yeah. So the nice thing, the one the only intentional thing I've done the last . years is to try and make sure that whatever I'm doing at all kind of syncs up somehow um and for the most part that was always leading back to ruby and or rails um and you know, so a lot of my client work is helping with legacy apps that are profitable now, but they built the app quickly and there's some, you know, legacy pain that needs to be fixed, re factoring that kind of thing. Um And then there was adaptable where I was starting with a Greenfield fresh modern rails app um and one of them was fun and the other one wasn't and I'll let you guess. Mhm. And so a lot of what I started thinking more about was like how does an app that
Garrett
has all this legacy craft get from there to a point where it's not miserable to work on and you know, there's a lot of ways, there's a lot of paths, there's a lot of great books on re factoring um and a lot of that kind of stuff, uh what I started getting more interested in was how we've got all these great letters and static analysis tools for um security for syntax for just cleaning up code, right? And a lot of little auto correct and format stuff for you. Uh and the more I I dabbled with the tools previously but they were always so difficult to use because they're all command line um you know and they all have different syntax, different names for the same flags that do the same thing like Summer
Garrett
auto, correct, some are right, some are, you know, and so like you gotta then remember the quirks, they're using the wrong flags with the wrong tools and it just gets tedious, right or like you know, you want to use a dozen tools, but if you run them all at once, like it's going to take minutes to run through your whole project when really all you want is like just look at the files, I'm about to commit or uh you know look at the files, I just committed and let's do a pass it like with Robocop or whatever, clean them up and then I'll commit a separate one that's just pure clean up, you know, all these kind of things and but it was so tedious, I love these tools but I just wouldn't use them because there was too much friction.
Garrett
Uh and so with adaptable and like when I start a Greenfield project, I was like I've got to use these tools from the beginning to make sure that never gets into a bad state because once that ship sails it's too much effort to go back and too much risk to like make those kind of wholesale changes and uh so it started with just that it's like how can I make it easier to use these tools and remove the friction so that they're enjoyable to use and kind of in the back of my mind was because like Guard does a lot of this, right, if you're running guard constantly. Uh But Guard also drove me nuts because it would my fans would spin up and make so much noise and I couldn't concentrate. Um
Garrett
and so kind of and I still like guard, but my thinking was what if the tool could be so convenient that you didn't feel like you needed to use guard to watch files as you changed them and that you could do more than just have your automated test front, right? So like what if and I mean there's there's integrations for like Robocop and stuff, but like what if you change five files and you could just run a tool that will automatically run all of the relevant things you have against those files that you updated and potentially auto correct them if you want or um you know, this is all theory and it's it's come together and I'm using it on itself but it's not ready to like use in other projects yet. Um that's kind of the next step. Uh
Garrett
But yeah and that's what I just I wanted that I want to be able to take it on a project that's raw and has a ton of craft and then every time I commit basically start cleaning up there and just make sure it doesn't regress, right it only gets better, you know and basically it makes it easier to or hopefully it will make it easier to just make constant steady improvement, right? It's not you run it and then it's like you know the tool just throws up its hands, it's like this code base is a mess,
Ben
don't even
Garrett
use this tool. Um Instead I want it to be you know what okay make some progress, let's start there and eventually, you know, over the course of a year, two years you're gonna touch so much of the code and eventually it's gonna get cleaner and it's gonna get better right? And it's not just formatting but like you've got things like brake man and things that are for scanning for security issues and all this stuff and there's so much bundler audit right and all these things to make sure that your dependencies and you know there's a lot of great tools out there like code, climate for reporting. But what drives me nuts is when I commit and then it gets to see I
Garrett
and then the ci finds the mistake because the tool you don't run it locally like okay well now I've got to fix it and I gotta wait for ci again and like I want all these tools to be so frictionless to use, it never even makes it to see i like CS board because it never has anything to complain about because by the time it gets there it's already perfect. Um So yeah, so that's kind of the that's a reviewer um and it'll hopefully be more like the end of the year. Um And then I've also been obsessed with many tests lately because I used to use ours back and I just it never messed with me. It was too, I don't know, it's
Garrett
the way I've always described, feels like it's the only thing in ruby that I feel like is simultaneously very ruby and very un ruby and it's just never worked with my head. Um And all the I'm very dependency averse from years of you know dependency breaks or has a security issue and the chain reaction of things that need to be updated and can't be updated because and so I'm very dependency averse. Um and uh so that's another reason I've gone with many tests because it's just there there's fewer dependencies, it's simpler. Um But many tests output even with all the formatting options out there just always, I felt like I was doing way more work than I should have to to figure out what failed what went wrong and how to fix it
Garrett
and so what I've done is really over engineered to test reporter for many tests to uh when a test fails, it kind of catalogs what file was in the stack trace what line number in that file. Um and so what it's doing is in the background, it's kind of building up a heat map of everything that triggered a problem. And it's also differentiating between like failures and exceptions because if your test fails, okay, that's interesting. You want to start with the assertion, what was the assertion that failed? But if there is an exception, then the assertions kind of irrelevant. You want to go dig into the exception. But what if the exception came out of the test,
Garrett
then you don't want to waste your time and source code just fix the test. Otherwise you're not. And so it differentiates between failures, a broken test and an exception. And it presents the output differently to kind of guide you in the right direction based on those. And if you've got anything that's failing or broken, it's not going to harass you about skipped tests or slow tests, right? It suppresses those until everything's fixed. And it's like, hey, by the way, you've got four tests here that you've skipped, you need to go right? Those, uh, and actually won't bother you about slow tests until all your skip tests are fixed, Right?
Garrett
Uh, and so it kind of lets you focus on what's important at the time without reminding you of the fact that you've got a lot going on that is pending and problematic or whatever it is. Um, you know, so there's a lot of little things like that and like when you make that one change that breaks things across your whole project, you're renaming a class or whatever it is. Uh And then it's just you will go from like a perfect test suite failing tests like crap. Okay. Where do I even start? Uh And so the heat map will show you like look all of these problems come back to this one file, you know, whatever it is so you can get to the heart of the matter instead of having to like
Garrett
visually scanned through failures and try to find and recognize a pattern. Uh So it's kind of uh a proactive pattern matching reporter. Um you know with a few other tweaks to just help uh nudge and simplify kind of the output so that you can my hope be, you know, you see a test failure and you know exactly what you need to do to fix it before you even go back to your text editor because you've got enough context. Um And obviously that's not always possible, but more often than not and definitely more often than with just the generic reporter. Uh That's been the case and has been really helpful and saves me a ton of time fishing for what needs to be fixed and what what's worth fixing first and that kind of thing. So I have to think a lot less.
Garrett
I just have to go fix it. Ah And so both of those combined are going to kind of I'm hoping work in a way that you know you type R. V. W. And it's just smart and it says here's all your problems. You're like oh my gosh, everything's perfect. But you could stand to improve your documentation here in this file, you're like okay I can do that real quick. Um You know so it kind of nudges you in the right direction without like wearing you out about how horrible your code is. Um Because when you're one of those tools just raw, that's basically what it feels like. It's like oh my gosh I'm horrible. I have no idea, I have no business writing code. Uh
Garrett
And that's not a good feeling but if it's like hey you can fix this, here's how okay I can do that. Um You know there's a lot of really interesting ideas. There are like you know you ever run your test suite and it fails and you run it again and it passes. They're like oh crap what was the seed that it used when it failed? And uh so what reviewer does too in the background, it's recording a bunch of history. Um And so it will remember that last failed seed and so you can you be able to type our VW rerun and it would rerun just the failure and let you zero in on that and focus on fixing that. Um So there's a lot of little things like that that
Garrett
I just want to make it easier. I mean there's bisect and some great tools out there. Um, but sometimes they're overkill and slow and they take you out of the zone and I want to make it easier to stay in the zone and get things done and get back on track.
Ben
That sounds sounds really cool. Yeah, we um, remember having done some a few major rails version upgrades with the honey badger card base, you know, go from to or or whatever it is. And like all of a sudden half your tests, you got thousands of tests and like thousands of them. It's the
Garrett
most defeating feeling. You're just like, oh, okay, I quit for today.
Ben
Yeah. And then, and then, you know, you dive through all those things like, okay, these all look the same. It's all the same. It's all the same and go and try this thing here and that thing there and oh, I made this one change and now half of those failing tests are now passing okay. Now, you know? So yeah, having the heat map I think is uh, it sounds like a great idea. And then of course, you know, you mentioned, uh, if it's an exception, you know exactly where to go, like it sounds like honey badger, right? You get the context that you need to know what to fix, right, yep. Yeah. Although I must say I'm, I'm an I respect fan
Ben
have been for a long time and I've tried, you know, going back to many tests because I'll start your rails app like this, this new side project, I started a few a few months ago, like it's a new rails happen to me, you know, let me try any test again because that's the default and so I'll get in there for a bit. But then like one of the things I've come to realize is that I, what I love about our spec is despite how, you know, I can feel you about the dependency aversion, but at the same time our spec is kind of like a batteries included kind of thing. Like
Ben
you've got the mocking right? Not the stubbing, you don't have to worry about what I do. I do, I do many test mock or do I do mocha, you know, like all that's kind of rails itself, right? It's kind of kind of its own duck and it has everything included. So you don't think about, you
Garrett
know, and don't get me wrong, I don't dislike our spec, it just doesn't work with my head and like, I just get overwhelmed with how much it has. And so for me with many tests, like you're like, oh, which marked thing to use neither. Like if I feel like I need to mock something, I need to re factor it so it's more easy to test efficiently and directly. Um, because like marks, I mean that has all has its own issues, right? Like uh and so for me uh and and it was very much a mental thing. Like I just fully embraced accepted many tests limitations and now I use that as kind of a nudge to be like, all right, if this is really difficult to do,
Garrett
then it's not that I need better testing tools. It's that I need my code to be organized in a way that lets me test this appropriately And efficiently without getting to set up unrelated models so that it won't fall over. Uh And so that's kind of been more of a philosophical thing for me because previously when I drive many tests, that's exactly how to drive me nuts. I'm like, how the hell do I do any of this? Because my brain what little I did understand of our respect. I had learned to think that way about things. And so then I found myself doing all this like how do you mock in many tests and how do you, And it's like you don't, you know, use mocha or you know what have
Ben
you.
Garrett
Uh and so kind of accepting that and just saying, you know what, When it, when many test pushes back, I'm going to listen and I'll just re factor. Um and at first was a little painful. But now it actually has been really, really nice. Uh But I will say to a lot of that goes hand in hand with like I've been doing a lot of like deeper deeper reading on ruby and thus kind of understanding patterns, you know being able to see more patterns to re factor like oh this is why this is hard to test really. Just need to re factor using this pattern and take this approach instead or whatever. Um And so that's helped because otherwise I feel like I know I need to change this but I don't even know where to start. Um
Garrett
So you know, that's definitely been a philosophical thing I had to accept.
Ben
Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned code climate and I know, you know in the early days when kokonas started like it was basically a wrapper on top of flay and flaw right and eventually break man and stuff. Right? They assembled all these open source tools and put a nice ui on top of it, which is fine, you know, but you could just run off tools yourself, right? Um But review sounds pretty cool because you're basically giving that code climate kind of experience, but it's on your own right, in your own cli and you could I mean conceivably you could even use it like with left hook or something to do get pre commit kind of thing which might have its own problems but still it's an option.
Garrett
It's definitely on the radar, there's a lot of get integration that I'm planning on. So you can do like our VW staged and it'll just look at the staged files or R. V. W untracked, it'll just looked at your file that you haven't staged, That kind of thing.
Ben
Super handy. So do you do you see a path where review because there's some sort of commercial component to review or do you think it could always be pure,
Garrett
there's, I've got a bunch of ideas that I think could um I mean the core one is just gonna be an open source jim. Um if I do follow any model um you know, it's probably going to be something more like sidekick where there's the core thing that is helpful and useful and free for eternity. Um and then there would be more advanced, either team functionality or kind of sharing of configuration files. Um There's a whole ton of tools that I've thought about building to to um things like if you have an existing app, it kind of auto detect and suggest, hey you might want to use these gems, these tools um obviously it's built in ruby but the idea is that it has to be ruby centric. It's really at the end of the day, it's just a wrapper for command line tools
Garrett
that gives you some kind of either pass fail or score output. Um and so like if you've got tools set up, like one reviewer, I've just gone overboard. Like I'll use everything because I want to kind of test it, you know, and dog food it um And so like if one fails it doesn't bother running the rest of them. And so the idea is if you can figure in the order of priority, like start with bundler audit right? Because if you've got a gym that's out of whack, then you need to fix that because that'll ripple And so it'll just stop there, so you have to wait minutes for a whole suite to run on a huge project, it just fails immediately, insist fix this and then you fix that and then it runs
Garrett
um and then two and this is all theoretical at this point because I haven't played with it, but I've got some, I'm really excited about the idea potentially. Um and I hate to make it ruby three only, but playing with tractors and some some threading and stuff so that you can have Robocop running in parallel with, you know, especially with multi core processors picking up and all this kind of stuff, I feel like there's a lot of potential Like what if you could run tools in parallel and have the whole thing run in seconds instead of minutes and that could be really cool, There's other challenges there, but um you know that reporting obviously um like code climate, I feel like that's one of code climates really big things,
Garrett
but for me the reporting is gonna be more an afterthought, I wanted to be a local thing that you can use friction free and then if people like it, which I hope they will, I mean I'm really excited about, I love using it to build itself, it's been wildly helpful. Um you know, then yeah, I'd start thinking about, you know, what other options are there for, how it could be better um and do even more cool stuff for teams or people who are just really serious about using it or you know, what have you?
Ben
Mhm Yeah, I think, I mean I love, I love the sidekick model uh you know, give that great open source core that has great functionality and then build on top of that, you know, things that are useful to people who are going to use it more intensely and I think, I think the psychic definitely has that sweet spot, if it's it's an operations kind of thing where you're gonna be, you're gonna be running this forever in your production environment. So you want to pay that licensing fee, you know, every month, every year or whatever. And then there's also like the ASCII corp model, right? Where they have very, very good open source tools, you know, you can use Packer or Terror Form or whatever,
Ben
you know, never paying them a dime but they also have great team collaboration tools if you want to move to their platform, you know, and coordinate your Terror Form running or you know, your console, you know, or your vault or whatever, right? They have a pro or enterprise offering for every one of those that can do additional stuff enhancing it, you know? So yeah, some great options there,
Garrett
yeah, you know, I will say to a lot of my
Garrett
thinking since selling sifter has been, I don't really want to run a sas app again, uh and I'm sure you can guess all the reasons uh at the end of the day, the simplest thing um and I mean I knew it when I was running sifter but I didn't fully appreciate it was the degree to which I let it change me to notifications and alerts of problems and a never ending fear that as soon as I went camping or hiking out of cell service was the day it was going to fall over in a bad way and uh like it wasn't this like huge thing, but it was just in this like ever present anxiety and after I didn't have that anymore, it was just such a like epiphany
Garrett
that was like, I don't really want to go back there and if I build a SAS up, it needs to be something that can be designed in such a way that it's resilient and I know that, you know, if it goes into a certain state and it's like that for six hours or something, nobody's gonna be too upset. Um and I couldn't think of anything and uh so yeah, so then I just started building these gyms and I was like, I'm just gonna build the gyms and see where that takes me. I mean really, I feel like I'm just kind of pulling on a thread right now based on my personal curiosity and then just trying to also keep in mind like let's make sure this would also be useful for other people at some point, wherever that is.
Ben
Yeah, I'm of course totally with you on the whole like it's tough to run this as because yeah, it is and yeah, I think about this the other day as this, this side project, I'm working on it, like, well it's it's actually right now just for fun, but of course it's like well how would I how to make money on this if I wanted to? And I could run a sad and this is a sad thing, it integrates with GIT hub. And uh so it's it's definitely a web based kind of stuff you do. Um
Ben
but you know, if it went down for a few hours, people wouldn't be screaming like screaming about honey badger going down for a few hours. So like that's like that's okay. And then on the other hand, it's like, well it's it is very tightly integrated to get hub. So I could do a self hosted, here's a doctor image kind of thing, you go run this and it talks to your get up enterprise installation behind your firewall. Right?
Ben
So I think, yeah, it's really good for entrepreneurs today who are so low to be thinking about that because there are a lot of options. There's the, you know, there's a psychic model. We just give one some someone some code, right? They license it, they run it and it's it's all them right. Or maybe you build a SAAS app that is also a docker image that they can deploy themselves. Maybe the codes available, you know, as maybe it's an open source thing, even like a matter most right, you can they have a hosted option, they have an open source options, have a self host adoption. Um Yeah, I think really good to be thinking about these things as you're, you know, deciding what you're doing day to day because it does, does affect quality of life. Like
Ben
my first thought was, and I was when I think about this says I was like this side project, as I says, I was like, well then I got to have the laptop in the night time because
Garrett
I'm like, I think I would much rather have an imac, but like as long as I'm involved in anything that can go offline, I don't think I can survive with just an imac, I've got to have a laptop and like yeah, I don't like that, feel like, I don't know, I mean, I don't think anybody but uh Yeah,
Ben
Yeah, well that's, and I sometimes I think about a kind of metal level like oh that's a problem to solve, like how do you help? So the entrepreneurs run saAS operations without having to be, you know, always on like yeah, that's an unsolved problem. If someone solves that, that will be I think worth some. I mean Hiroko has done a pretty good job solving that problem, but it's not % solved yet.
Garrett
So Well there's
Ben
for me,
Garrett
like I built a job board for our community here in the valley um because tourism based economies like the turnover and stuff is high and ah and so like for me I was staying with that and I haven't done this because it's just not critical enough. Um but the only thing I thought it would be like with a job board, if you could have it fall into read only mode where it's basically heavily cached on the front end and that's something that could work. But most apps where you're interacting with them because posting jobs, it's not like you constantly post jobs, you post a job and if you can't post a job right now you can come back in six hours and that's fine. It's not the end of the day, you know, into the world.
Garrett
Uh but that's the only thing I've been able to come up with that has felt like it wouldn't be a huge issue as long as you designed and built it, right, so that I could do that. But everything else I'm like, nope, that won't work, That won't work. Like, I think that's why haven't start another business yet is because I've become really picky, like after selling stuff to, I'm like, what do I really want to do and not do again? And so much of the sad stuff while it's great. Um it was just like, it took a toll. Like, it made me not want to do so many things that now I love doing, like camping and hiking and like getting out of cell service. Um, and so I don't want to give that up anymore.
Ben
So I guess the moral of the story is do all that kind of stuff when you're in your twenties have plenty of energy, right? You don't hate it yet, right? And then try to come up with something different by the time you're in your s,
Garrett
use the experience to uh more wisely choose your battles.
Ben
Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, this has been total fun. Yeah. Yeah.
Garrett
Glad, Glad to catch up.
Ben
Is there anything that we should have talked about that we didn't?
Garrett
Oh, probably a ton of stuff. Uh, no, I mean, I wish this stuff was all in a better state. Many test heat is good to use now, I need to add a little bit more exception handling because now every now and then something goes wrong with many test heat and like you can't see your own test failures because it fell over. Uh so that's kind of my next step is to add some resiliency to that so that if it breaks, it says, hey many test heat fell over on this, but your things fine and have some like simple output. So you at least can see something because every now and then I have to go disable it and switch back to the regular reporter so I can actually see the the failure. Um but uh you know, it's ready to use, I'm using it
Garrett
every day on all my projects now. Um and it's been pretty, pretty fine. Today was the first time in like a week that I've seen any kind of issue that didn't work so that people can use it. It definitely needs some tidying up and improvements, but that's forthcoming, then reviewer will hopefully be the end of the year will kind of see how, how things shake out with the holidays and all that, how much work I'm able to get done, but um I'm optimistic because I want it, I want to use it on other projects, like every time I go work on reviewer, I'm like, I really wish I had this for my other projects where I've just got dumb scripts that just run the same commands in order and you know, it's close, but it's not the same. Um
Garrett
you know, I'm really excited about how much I know it's going to help my day to day work flow and I'm hopeful anybody else that's using rubio find those same benefits. Um And hopefully other languages too. I don't know. I haven't really tried, I mean in theory, javascript and a lot of that stuff will work like with the rails app. Um and like er be learning and and what night. Um So hopefully, but I haven't tried anything wholly outside of a ruby project to see if it could be useful there, but it should be, it's just a wrapper around command line, right? Strings. So hopefully
Ben
and then next step V. S. Code plug in right where it's all just running all the time
Garrett
code, right?
Ben
Yeah, maybe that's your thing you sell. I don't know.
Garrett
Yeah. You know, I haven't thought about that too much because most of them you can plug in on their own. Uh But then that gets overwhelming when you're trying to edit your file and it's like just yelling at you about everything. Like just let me think first, then yell at me after the fact after I've like figured it out. Yeah, I'm excited about it. It's kind of the most fun I've had programming in a long time. Um So we'll see.
Ben
I love it. Well, scratching your niche is always fun and if you can make some money while you're at it. Hey, even funny
Garrett
right? Well and so like that's the thing, like just kind of circle back and wrap it up, like part of it is in order for me to really pursue adaptable, I've got to have some kind of automatic income and like with sifter that would've been perfect, you know, it's recurring revenues, Great. And uh so a lot of it too is like, I'm really gonna unlock adaptable potential. I need to not be, you know, have an income tied to hourly rates. It's got to be divorced from how much time I'm actually sitting at my computer and uh so that's kind of been a driver too, but again, more just wandering and figuring it out, hoping it all comes together somehow.
Ben
That's, we're all in the same boat.
Garrett
Right,
Ben
well, we will definitely link up uh the heat map and review and uh definitely get some people check it out if you're ruby ist and we'll link up your twitter so people can follow you and keep track of what you're doing. Uh Thanks again, yeah, hanging out with,
Garrett
thanks. Great to catch up
Ben
and thanks everybody for listening Again, you've been listening to found request from the founders of honey badger. We're excited to continue to bring you exciting episodes on podcast and a fantastic product, honey badger of course. So check us out on the bed, radio and you know, as star always says, review as if you like and don't review us, if you don't like, have a great one.
Show notes:
Links:
Sweaty Startup
Hook Relay
Spider season
Write for Honeybadger
Automated transcript (only about 75% accurate)Ben
So I've been, I've been using Hook Relay over the past week and I got to say, there's nothing as useful as using your own product to make you see places where the product can be improved. So I've, I've opened a couple of issues. Yeah, yeah. And uh, I mean, they're not, they're not major things, but it's like, oh, it would be nice if this was different, would be nice if that was, you know, different. And it's been, it's been good. So I'm, I'm looking forward to having those things done making the product better. And we, uh, you know, we talked about spending some more time, uh, development time on really the other couple next coming weeks and months because I've had some, some customer requests coming in. So
Ben
it's always a good feeling like when people are actually using it and saying, oh yeah, I like it, but couldn't do this like, Oh yeah, I could do that. It's fun. I love it. I love being developer and just building stuff. So much fun. Yeah.
Josh
Yeah. Looking at our, our dashboard, we've got uh, got a few New year's is coming in. Got some a little bit more revenue than last time I looked at this, so that's cool.
Starr
Yeah, that's good stuff. You know, it's the season for it. The, the pacific Northwest summer is long gone and we're just into the dark, wet now. We've gone through a spider season. Yeah, I mean, right, you've got um, yeah, you've got the summer, you've got spider season, you've got dark with it.
Josh
Is that from that like list of pacific Northwest Seasons or whatever, that's like .
Starr
You can, you can call me out on that. I was hoping to um, I was hoping to plagiarize.
Josh
We should, we should put that in the show notes if we can find it though. That's a pretty good one.
Starr
Yeah, that's a good one.
Josh
I don't remember them all, but
Ben
I'm definitely, definitely more productive in the winter time because like, I'm not outside playing, I'm inside hunkering down from the rain, the cold, so I'm like, I might as well do some code.
Josh
Yeah,
Starr
I mean, personally, I kind of um like I kind of stopped going on my morning walks in the summer because there's too many amateurs out. Yeah. And I started again once the fall comes, once it starts getting dark and drizzly and those are my favorite morning walks.
Josh
Nice even in the rain.
Starr
Yeah, especially in the rain, get out. Yeah, that's why you have a nice like Gortex raincoats and my scoots. Yeah, it's all about the gear. Yeah, it's uh, I don't know, this is very pleasant. I like it. The, yeah, the summer here, like it's nice, but after a while, the sun just, just starts getting to me. It's just like, I can't escape it. It's just boring into my eyeballs.
Ben
It is truly a thing around here when the sun has been out too long has been to many is people do get a little so crazy. Like I need some wet and so the first rainy day comes, you can just feel the relief. It's just, it's just, I don't know how to describe it. It's just a sense of community, like relieved that things are back to normal. There's, there's precipitation again.
Starr
Yeah, I came up with a theory and I have no idea how valid the series, so I'm just going to throw it out there because it's unfounded and I'm wondering, so like I realize this, this winter, this, yeah, this fall as I'm going out. It's like, okay, like the reason I, like this is because like everything is more muted, right? And I get over stimulated very easily. So, you know, noise and late and all that just kind of does it to me.
Starr
And but when it's like dark and gray, like for like, I don't know, this may just be my, my perception, but like the water vapor like mutes the sound a little bit or something. It's not quite everything. Like all the edges are more round and pleasant, nothing is quite as sharp and stab. E And so yeah, and Seattle Seattle is like the pacific northwest in general. It's just like, it draws in like all the computer nerds, all the, all the people who just like it here and like that kind of environment. So it's like, oh do we all just, you know, we all have like sensory issues. I don't know.
Josh
That's why all the tech companies are in Seattle. Yeah, probably. I think I need to get an office still because I think like, I think, I think Ben's right, like I I also would be more productive in the winter, but like working from home in the winter with with uh like Kindergartners is a a different experience than working at home in the dark by yourself. It's a bit of a challenge. So yeah,
Starr
when you turn on the lights while you're working, you don't just leave them off.
Josh
Yeah, sometimes I leave them off. Oh yeah,
Starr
that's because you're a real hacker, I've been doing more marketing stuff lately. So I turn the lights on. I use light mode.
Josh
I mean you probably forgot how to touch type, you know, and use them with you shut up,
Starr
shut up. Shut up, you shut up. I get to say that. Not you.
Josh
So you have to have the lights on. I'm sorry.
Starr
Yeah, I don't have one of those keyboard with a blank key caps.
Josh
Like truth be told. I've been um doing a lot less programming than I used to as well. And it's, it started to bother me a little bit lately. So I've been trying to find ways to get back into it because I'm like, if I'm gonna like forget how to build a rails app if I don't, if I don't like, you know, do some do some work.
Ben
We do have like items in our backlog for Honey badgers. It's true. She can find something to do. Yeah.
Josh
I don't know, it's just weird like having like a legacy rails out for so long um Like even when you are working, like even when you do work in it, it's still like, I don't know, like your, it's, you know, I'm like not utilizing a lot of the knowledge that I built up like, like we we all built up working on client projects, like where you're constantly solving new problems and like building things out. Like a lot of those decisions are already have long been made in a honey badger app. So it's like, yeah, it's, it's weird. It's a little bit different.
Ben
That's been nice about having the side project because like starting a new rails app and making new decisions and trying the new things and new toys like hotwire and you know, stimulus reflex, all kind of stuff. Like it's, it's been, it's been fun. But hey, you know, maybe uh you know, talking about client work like, hey, take on some client work, right? It could uh do something completely different and take on
Josh
an option for sure. Yeah, I thought that could be fun.
Ben
Good old days
Josh
build a green field, a green field ap Yeah,
Josh
this I mean, I think we're talking about like the problem of like what to do with your time when you're, you're like app is like nine years old and stable and, and you have all this time on your hands and you know, want to still build new things, right?
Starr
Yeah, I've got a question like for, I mean, y'all probably don't know because you haven't been freelancing for a while. But to all the freelancers out there, do do people still um do people still higher developers to build like, you know, facebook for x. Like it's like, I just remember working on so many like facebook for so and so um facebook for um nurses, facebook for, you know, whoever and it turned out the facebook for all those groups with facebook,
Josh
right? Was that before facebook groups.
Starr
I think so. Yeah. Yeah I think so it was. Yeah. It's just weird
Josh
because it's like I was our era I mean like for sure like our era freelancing was the facebook for ex Yeah
Starr
because like the social media like the social network had just come out that movie about facebook and so I really wanted to be the next facebook by copying facebook for some vertical.
Ben
I was just I was thinking back to the are kind of projects that we built you know, talking about the facebook for X stuff and uh I think I was like what was my favorite project and the one that I can remember maybe so I guess it's probably my favorite because when I remember the most and remember the most kindly is the Montessori project that we did. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. Remember started a lot of work on
Josh
that project. Still around you know.
Ben
Yeah, it's like still making bank. Mhm. It's gonna be like years older now by now or something. Yeah. That's awesome. I wonder if it's still on rails too.
Josh
Yeah Caitlin was doing some shopping for the kids last night and she was looking at Baden kids brand. There are many many Baden and I don't know if that name rings a bell with you Ben but it doesn't because they were one of the they were one of the affiliate shops with today shop flashbacks man. I'm much. Yeah I have all these like I've had all these like kids kids clothing brands like just like programmed into my brain for the last years now. And now that I actually have kids like they're all resurfacing. So
Starr
that's where that was like another that was like another um era which was the um it wasn't the facebook for X. It was the product aggregator. Like we're gonna make we're gonna make a website that aggregates lots of products across you know for different companies and we're just gonna be like an affiliate. We're gonna be really good. S. E. O.
Josh
Yeah it was like the um and and that trend was like kind of I mean amazon was definitely around then but it was like I think these days like amazon is now where everything is pretty much aggregated like that. So this was like I don't know it seems like pre pre amazon like at least in their current scale.
Starr
Yeah I mean amazon missed out on that. Sweet sweet. A sai Buri affiliate money though. Uh huh. Or it's like you got I don't know what it was like or bucks if he was an affiliate could like sign somebody up first. The scam a sai buri like subscription service. Well what it was just affiliates but it was a scan because it was recurring charge and people weren't familiar with getting recurring charges. Yeah so um well you don't
Josh
want to boost your health just once. Oh no. And then lose out on all those benefits. So you're really I mean that's like in the that's in the interest of the customer star.
Starr
Exactly. One of my friends worked um back then worked at a ah the call center for a bank and like half of her calls or just people like what the hell? Like why am I keep getting charged for this?
Josh
Like all of your support requests or start with what the hell you work in a bank.
Ben
Yeah. There's a lot of fun things to do when the projects are new and it's all green field. But then, you know, there's also fun things to do when the projects are nine years old. You know, like I was pleasantly surprised on monday morning to find that our database server had failed on sunday morning. You know, it's like, Oh really? That that happened. But our our high availability set up actually worked and the fail over happened and it's just like nothing, nothing happened. I mean these days of course you? Re wild, you would not even set that up, right? You just use already s or you would, you know, there's there's like a gazillion post graze as a service services out there now. But you know, back in my day, you know, we had to push the bits uphill both ways. Right. Mhm.
Josh
So yeah. Imagine if the database server failed in like year two. Yeah, back on, back on snickers.
Starr
Yeah. Yeah. Well our servers were named after candy bars. Candy bars were
Josh
still I love that. We're still on first name first name basis with all of our old servers.
Ben
Uh My favorite tricks though,
Josh
tricks. Yeah,
Starr
I mean it makes sense why that whole hosting platform didn't really work out for us because Trix are for kids been.
Ben
I know, I know, but then my kids were young enough then it made sense.
Josh
Yeah, these drinks, we should build a we should we should do a client project just for fun. I mean and obviously
Starr
obviously right,
Ben
your friends but of course is gonna be for money. Yeah.
Josh
The great thing about client projects is like you get to build them and then and then you get to like, never see them again.
Ben
It's like, it's like, it's like being grandparents right where you can send the kids back to the parents like oh we'll have some fun, will spoil the kid and then send them back to be the parents so you can grow this little rails app and you can have some fun with it and then send it off, you know? And
Josh
yeah, yeah. And then you're like, you're like, oh I wonder what happened to deteriorate.
Starr
Like a couple of years later, you were like, oh, I wonder what happened to little timmy and see a google him and he's dead. Uh huh.
Josh
Yeah. Four little timmy. Mhm. Yeah, there's um I unfortunately I think a lot of my old client projects are in that category, but I think that's just kind of the way it goes.
Ben
But you know, I remember the primary struggle that we had the with the ones that didn't, one that weren't reported means I was like, what do we do with it now? Because we like to building new things, but we didn't really like running them, you know, we didn't wanna be on the hook. And so it was like, it's great, you have this new app go enjoy, right? And they're like, yeah, but you know what about something breaks? It's like, oh, well, good luck, you know? Yeah, I
Josh
was thinking about that recently, like, like does that still fly? Like what do people do these days? Like, I don't know.
Ben
I would like to know
Josh
if you have a non technical, like, I don't like, to be honest, um you had a knack for like finding those people that seem to been because like, you find these people that are just like nontechnical. They they just have an idea like, you know, they're like, like Star said, like the whatever facebook facebook for X people, but like, they just have you just build it for them? And then yeah, they would kind of just be like, now I'm I'm like, I'm a tech founder now,
Starr
can I tell a funny story about um So I used to live in Tulsa Oklahoma is where I went to college and live there for a little while after and one day I was at like a local coffee shop and there was this guy who actually, I saw a couple times at the coffee shop who just um was chatting up the brief, such adding up everybody around him about this app idea. He had um called the love button, which is just, oh my God, like that, that name, but it's called the Love button. And uh basically it's not, it's not a dating app though, which is like, you know, you're winning when you have to explain that your product name isn't what people think it is originally at first glance, it's not a dating app. It's a uh
Starr
it's about like you can put in like what do I love to do? I love carpentry so I can press the love, but you have to press it, it's important. And then it um he didn't say this, but I was sort of imagine like a slot machine type, you know, spinning type thing, like whirling and then it pops up the people nearby you who also love that thing so you can stalk them. Uh huh
Ben
uh huh. I was with you right up to that Stockport.
Starr
I mean, well, I mean that's I had at that part, but I mean, it's like we've seen what happens to the internet, we've seen having to go,
Josh
it just like has their contact information. Like it's a
Starr
yeah, it's just, it's like, it's a way for, yeah, it's a way for people to have uncomfortable interactions. So it's like,
Ben
it's like chatroulette but in real life,
Starr
in real life. Yeah, I'm just sitting there like why the hell would anybody ever consent to that ever? But maybe I wasn't the target market, you know,
Ben
mm maybe, maybe not just trying to think. You definitely want to involve a map of nearby welded locations for people to meet up.
Josh
Maybe you just don't love anything enough to press the button. Yeah, maybe you like really have to be into something
Starr
and then it just shames you. It's like, hey, what's the matter?
Josh
I mean like to be fair like craigslist exists and like people, people do like respond to all kinds of things on craigslist and I'm sure are not in well lit locations. So you know, maybe this, maybe this love button app has like a, you know, has like a pivot or something.
Starr
Yes, I mean, I don't know, maybe he was going to pivot it to grinder, who knows?
Ben
Yeah, Well, you know, another option to just building apps would be buying apps right? We could hang out on micro require and, or flipper or someplace and uh, you know, for these for these developers who built the thing and don't want to run it. You can just buy it and then we can run,
Josh
no, I think there's, I think there's probably something there potentially for us because we, we have some of the experience now that maybe they don't, they didn't um, you know the people that someone that just build something to a certain point. So, and we have a marketing engine so we could potentially like acquire something and then plug it in to our existing systems. So that could be fun. Like, you know, I mean like this is like instead of, you know, like, like I got a friend in construction and him and his dad like flip houses, you know, like that's the, the thing they do but are, are flipping houses is like flipping flipping SAs apps I think because you know, that's like our, maybe someday you'll be um flipping saps with your, with your boys. But
Ben
mm hmm. Uh huh. We'll have a show on tv about that, you know, let's take it to the next level. Instead of just buying zaps and flipping it. Let's, let's get investors. Let's get some, some, some of the partners up in here and we can use their money to go buy the apps and then we'll run them for a while. Then maybe sell them. Then we can be like those cool kids that are out there like buying all these as apps and doing the investment thing, right?
Josh
Yeah, I like it. These are good ideas
Starr
are private and private equity firms. The cool kids. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I guess you're right for some value of cool, right?
Ben
If you ask the private equity firms, they will say yes, they are the cool kids.
Starr
Yeah.
Josh
There's a lot of new types of private equity these days. It seems
Josh
okay. Yeah. We need to take stuff.
Ben
Yeah exactly. Take advantage of this new micro pipeline like you know, tiny seed and calm fund, right? We need to, we need a pipeline like okay, those are the feeding into the pipeline and then we do some magic somewhere along the process, right? And then outcomes bigger companies and we make money somehow. It's kind of funny but I think we can make it happen
Starr
if you just took all those platforms up to each other in a circle, you get uh infinite motion machine, right? Oh. Mhm. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger until somebody goes to jail.
Josh
I thought you got like an R. Burrows. So I hear you pronounce that the snake eating its own tail.
Starr
Yeah.
Ben
Or we could go in a completely different direction. I saw a tweet from Patio this morning where he was uh he was referencing a tweet from sweaty startup and if you don't, if not familiar sweaty startup, you really got to go check that out because that's, that's some cool stuff. Like he hangs out and read it, his cool beans. We'll put some links in the show notes if you can check it out. But somebody started up dude uh he bought like a storage company, self storage company and like applied software to the process because like they were still like, you know, pushing paper around or whatever. It was old school and then really like juice that business and made it pretty cool investment and so
Ben
thinking, yeah, we could, we could do that, we could go, we could go old school and get all these old school businesses that are not online and apply our our marketing juice and
Josh
tear it up. I'm down to buy like a brick and mortar. Yeah or something. Um Just first of all though, you can't introduce what the startup guy as sweaty startup guy. He's the tomato guy right? Like this is the guy that was like trying to sell like it was like bragging about how he could like whatever like like grow a tomato farm to like a billion dollars. But he
Ben
was sweating startup guy before he was tomato guy.
Josh
Well because that was, you don't start that was an epic troll. Did you did you catch that at the end? Like it's it's pretty amazing like. Yeah, it turns out that guy really like that. Really not like he knows his shit apparently. And I mean like probably also know like I'm like having like followed him a little bit like seen some of the things he said like I might be inclined to like listen to him on the tomato thing,
Josh
Maybe I can make a fortune of tomatoes, you know. Mhm.
Ben
Mhm. As long as you don't live in Seattle where it rains nine months out of you.
Ben
Yeah, no sweat. He started like I've been following him on Reddit for the longest time and I just love, obviously not every idea is genius, right? But I do love his approach. Like get in there, do the work, do the work that other people aren't willing to do or that people are just haven't really caught on to yet. Like one of his, one of his classic things is like just go start a pressure washing company right? Go knock on your neighbor's doors and see if they want their driveway pressure washed and then and then pressure wash it right? And then you do that and you get some gaming experience and you provide a quality service and lo and behold now you've got a business, right? So I think I just like his his ethos of just go in there,
Ben
do the work and try to make it happen as opposed to right, You know. Mhm. Sit back and complain or whatever. You know, it's just kind of like the I just like that I would
Josh
I would hire that person by the way um because I could use some pressure washing like the moss around my house is just out of control
Ben
really. Again pacific northwest Yeah,
Josh
you know that's pretty cool. Um And I like the just the thought of like I mean they're so it feels like there's so many um little I mean there's so many business problems out there that are in the real world that will they need a software solution and um will eventually happen. Um It just like it seems like in order to solve those problems you have to have some sort of like actual like proximity to the problem. So like maybe the way to like get into those problems is just to go out and start doing more stuff in the real world and see where you know like see where the pain points are.
Ben
So you're saying if you want to build software for dentist you've got to become a dentist.
Josh
Yeah. I don't know like at least like yeah work it in reception or something or have a lot of cavities just go like do stuff for oh yeah, just be a repeat customer for this.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah. I just I just love how there's so many ways to make money on the internet. It's amazing.
Starr
Yeah but the sai buri opportunities are long gone. That started a long time ago unfortunately.
Josh
I think we'll see more. We'll definitely see more internet scams in the future though. So hope is not lost.
Ben
You mean like thank goodness.
Josh
Oh shots fired.
Josh
I like I really want to see just like a like a smart contract. MLM. I mean like I think there might be something out there, but like, I want to see one. I just want to see one succeed, you know? Um
Ben
Okay. You have to, you have to be the change that you want to see in the world job. Uh huh. That means you have to do it yourself.
Josh
I know. I don't know if I can, I just don't understand that world. Like, I don't know. Like, I'm sure I could go like build, yeah, like comprehend the technology. But I just, I don't know. I'm just not motivated to at all. Like I've kind of tried a little bit, but
Ben
yeah. Yeah. I'm still the old guy shaking fist at cloud stage of N. F. T. S. I'm like, I don't get it. Get off my lawn. Yeah.
Josh
Well, there will be something there. I'm sure the FTS necessarily just in, in the, in the technology in the future.
Ben
But my one of my sons who's really into tech and keeps on top of these things every time I say N. F. T. He's like money laundering. I think that's a really Matic response. It's like, well, okay, I'll trust you
Josh
get that kid. A twitter account.
Ben
Yeah. That's, that's interesting. Things like my kids not into facebook, not into twitter, you know, there's not
Starr
social network for old. Tiktok
Ben
absolutely hate Tiktok. Yeah, It's like, it's the opiate of the masses. It's like, well, okay, that's technically. True.
Starr
Yeah. I don't know. I really like to talk. It really depends on like, where um like what like you follow and all that. It's, you know, it's just like twitter and that really?
Josh
Yeah, yeah, I, I signed up for a Tiktok account recently just to check it out and see like what, where the rabbit holes go and um kind of scared me a little bit, but I mean maybe that's because I was like trying to see how bad it was versus how good it was. So maybe I should do a different experiment where like, I only
Starr
like the trick is to take on cat videos or whatever trick is to like follow the things that you like and then you'll get more of those and all the things you don't like, you'll get more of those,
Ben
yep. So you said it was scary was more or less scary than kid Youtube.
Josh
Uh I haven't really, I don't know like, I mean just the whole idea of Kid Youtube is scary, so it might be just different kind of different things, but just like the algorithm, like the algorithmic bubble that Tic Tac seems to create. Like, I mean, all of these, all of those services have that, but like maybe it's because like the videos are so short and there's so many like strangers that you can end up following or whatever, but it just seems like you could like someone who doesn't understand how that works, could easily end up in some sort of like alternative universe. Uh you know, Yeah, yeah, again, I have
Starr
used as um I don't know, it's interesting to me because it's like much more than other, much more than other services. You can really see the algorithm at work. Like be like, okay, you're, you're like testing me to see if I like this um carpentry videos where people take these very expensive, expensive looking hand planes and then like play like take minute lee thin shavings of very expensive looking wood. Um So you watch the whole video, so I'm gonna give you like three more of those. We're gonna see how you do on those. And um and then like sometimes it gives you things that you're just like, nope. So it's like, I just don't want the algorithm just just see that I'm watching this, so I'm just not even gonna try.
Josh
Yeah. You have to like, you have to tend to tend your algorithm. Yeah. But in order to do that, you have to understand that that's what you're doing. I think we're in a good position to do that. Yeah,
Starr
But also just like the tactic, the tactic, What am I saying? The content on Tiktok? I think it's in my brain, it's I'm just nothing I say is like everything I say is it's going to become some variant of Tiktok um the content I found it's like, I don't know, like, I I and much happier, like looking at Tiktok because it's like you know, I don't know, I guess I'm just looking at happy or content. The
Josh
content is so like the whole like the niche aspect of the content, like you said, like the narrowest type of video, like, like a hobby but where people are like, you know like whatever creating very thin strips of wood and there's some sort of like, you know, just like they can feed you very specific types of videos to see like and then you can get into that like specific like subset of like whatever woodworking video. It's not you're not even into woodworking at that point. You just ended this like very like Misha part of it.
Starr
Yeah. I don't know. That's well, see I'm sure I'll get bored bored with it eventually.
Josh
I don't think you will.
Starr
You know, it's ever renewing stream of just
Josh
delicious content. I trust trust algorithm, you trust,
Starr
I trust in the algorithm to josh to
Josh
keep you to keep you engaged. Yeah. Yeah.
Starr
Okay um you all have been listening to another episode of founder quest if you want to um review us on apple podcast or whatever it's called these days, go for it. Um You want to write for our blog and we've got to write first page on there at honey badger to I slash blog um scan for the right for us link, that's your first assignment. Um Until yeah. Until then. Um See you later.
Show notes:
Links:
Hook Relay
SSL Server Test
Second brand marketing tips Twitter thread
Xhtmlchop
Hook Relay Twitter announcement
Hook Relay blog announcement
Derrick Reimer & Corey Haines Product Hunt launch
Startup Director List
Indie Hackers launch repeatedly
Not very accurate auto-generated transcript:Ben
-
you know, last week I recorded a quick little message talking about why we weren't recording our podcast. That was in the middle of the let's encrypt ssl certificate fiasco that swept across the internet and you know, at the time it really didn't feel like a huge problem. Uh like from our perspective there wasn't much of an impact, but there was some impact, but then later on that day and the next day I was reading some articles and like apparently it was a pretty big deal for a lot of people. So uh yeah, wasn't wasn't just us, it's one
Josh
-
of those things like I could just kept seeing it more and more like just pop up in random places though to like, not, not necessarily in our world, but it was just like affected all kinds of different things.
Ben
-
Yeah, yeah, so shout out to ssL labs for their ssl testing tool to put a link to that in the show notes. Whenever you have a question about your ssl you should check that first because it does tell you when, when things are bad.
Josh
-
Yeah, I hadn't used that tool before and it was very very helpful on customer support. Especially like sending to people and we needed to like prove that we were, we were not at fault like you know, it gave us like a smoking gun that we could. Yeah. Yeah. Really great.
Starr
-
That's always a weird thing to do in customer services and it's like um it's like no, actually like I found the line in the library you mentioned. That's actually the problem. It does everything to do with this. Yeah. Yeah. And then um and then facebook goes down so I'm thinking I'm thinking we are like, like spooky Tober is starting up like things are starting to get witchy.
Josh
-
I kind of like I I was like checked out the day facebook went down so I like missed most of like the fun on whatever online and I guess on what the other social networks that didn't go down, twitter mostly. But yeah, that's kind of wild. The story that I at least what I picked up. Yeah, I'm not on facebook. So
Starr
-
my favorite part is how they house since everything was tied together, they couldn't get access to the building. They have the servers to do the like you know, manual physical reset then you had to do
Josh
-
because of that security.
Starr
-
Yeah. Like that's like I don't know that. It seems like it's out of some sort of movie or something. Yeah. It's just like a comedy.
Josh
-
They like accidentally deleted their private keys to the building or something.
Starr
-
Yeah. Or maybe like in oceans type movie where um like they like the crew does that like the cruise like well if we mess with their DNS records and they'll be locked out of the hotel for six hours, let's give us time to like airlift the loot out.
Josh
-
Yeah. Or what about like just like mission impossible. But with nerds. Uh huh. You know like trying to break into the building.
Starr
-
I mean that's what we are here at found requests aren't right. Mission impossible with.
Starr
-
Okay. Um So in addition to all that um just terrible stuff happening, there was um some good stuff happened. We had our, you know we have the hook relay, we did a little launch to our user base or honey badger user base. Um Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?
Ben
-
Yeah that was that was the day before the ssl problem. So
Josh
-
that was it. Yeah that's maybe that's why I was like the details. I was like trying to like remember what I did last week or whatever and I was like I could and then I remembered I'm like how did I forget about the hook really launch. But yeah, maybe that's I spent the next day, like on support.
Ben
-
Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, who really was impacted by the ssl thing. And so like, the day after our launch day, we had to deal with the on fire kind of situation. But you know, props to kevin very quickly finding that issue and fixing it. And uh, it's nice to have, you know, the service, uh, deployment that we have, pushing it out was quick. That was that was nice. But yeah, we, we were able
Josh
-
to help some people on twitter because we, uh, we did some crowd sourced troubleshooting and yeah, we're able to share our fix with a few friends. So that was heroes. Hopefully we
Starr
-
were, hopefully we think people like you for everyone.
Ben
-
Yeah, but I think think the launch went well. We had an email out to our, to leveling up mailing list and got a pretty good response right on that. We had put a banner up and on the, on the website and put a banner up on the app. And those had some pretty good click throughs as well. I'm just looking at the stats from Fathom this morning and yeah, it's a good good share of traffic from those sources. So it's nice to see that people care enough to click through and zero working on that was pretty cool.
Josh
-
Yeah, because I think, I think like the, uh, it was, I felt pretty encouraged by just the, you know, the level of engagement that we got from, from everything, like it seems like, I mean the worst that could happen is like you put out the, you know, you put out everything that's just crickets, like, you know, and so yeah, I mean people signed up, we got some sign ups and we started, I mean like we've our support and feature request throughput has increased for sure on like from almost zero to something. So, you know, we got, we got some feature requests coming in, that's that's all good.
Starr
-
Alright. I suppose we should mention what hook really is and why people should be interested in it. Um since, yeah, that's some people might want to know,
Ben
-
are you gonna tell the star what it is? Oh, I, I mean, I'm trying to find out
Starr
-
your, well, uh, I'm on the edge of my
Ben
-
seat over here.
Starr
-
There you go. I don't know. Hook relay is an enterprise level Blockchain analysis tool. It's not love it, look really uh, lets you have um, web hooks that are, you know, as high quality of stripes. Web looks like very high quality, very fully featured and just like a couple of minutes without much code or work. And um yeah, and honey badger. We have a lot of, you know, web hooks that go out and stuff and we use that for all of ours, I think right now for some of them at least. And yeah, so so that's what it is.
Ben
-
Yeah, great for debugging and in the past week I've been doing a little side project that has inbound web books and so uh since I don't have it's launched yet, it's been handling my inbound web books for me and just storing them so I can go back and you play the we play the payloads against my uh my test instance. And uh there's a there's a button in hickory. They that I think I think kevin added, which I'm totally in love with now it's the copy as curl button. And so I can just click that button and dropping my terminal and boom, now I have a curl payload that I can send to my my dove, you know, server great.
Starr
-
So you can be so so the the thing you're working on the like you can just like go do other things and will collect your inbound web hooks like just like your Jeffrey Bezos or something like you could be on the beach um doing whatever you want and then just um yeah, then just copy the curl
Ben
-
you got it. Yeah. And then and then even better once I do launch, I would just add my production U. R. L. As the hook relay in point and then we'll actually start delivering them. So I want to change anything with that web provider that's sitting in the stuff right?
Josh
-
Doesn't have as replay to right, Like if you if you have a bunch, can we do we do that add or? Yeah there
Ben
-
is a re send button so you can okay you can send it again.
Josh
-
So like for local development you could also like pointed out like an end rock like to your local host or something and replacing my books or something if you wanted to do if you wanted to do it in real time. Right? Yeah,
Starr
-
that's cool. Yeah, pretty heavy.
Josh
-
Maybe we should make like a like a hook relay native End Rock. They just like, you know, you can spin up your hook directly to your local host or something. That would be kind of cool.
Ben
-
I had the same thought this morning. Yeah like stripe provides you a cli tool that will listen to their web hooks and then relate it to your local instance while you're developing. I'm like oh yeah, we should have the same thing really. So they can just listen to your endpoint and suck it down and replay it for you with it on the feature list.
Josh
-
Yeah I do.
Starr
-
I mean what's there? There is a danger here though that like if you make it too easy for people like they might not feel like they're being productive or like they really bring much value. Like if you make it also turnkey for developers and so easy. Like the developer just might be like what what am I even here for What's my job?
Josh
-
You wouldn't feel like a hacker anymore.
Starr
-
No, no, like that's something we've got to watch out for as we move forward boldly.
Josh
-
Well how do you like write some like assembly code for a capture or something? Mhm.
Josh
-
So yeah, we got a lot of the ideas for the uh hook relay uh launched a honey badger customers through a tweet that I had sent out a few weeks before just asking like like what's the best way to um launch for, you know, for what company with one product to launch another product and let their existing customers. No, and ah asking twitter is always, I mean it's usually helpful at least in our indie hacker space, everyone's always got ideas so we got a lot of good ideas from people there um including I think one of, one of the ideas was like depending how far along we are, like, you know, do you make a separate brand or like how do you like, like how does it change the, like the parent company, you know, if you're moving from,
Josh
-
You know, a one product company to multiple products. That's all, that's all interesting. We opted just, you know, we're kind of like honey badger is the company and then it's hook relay by honey badger, I think it's kind of our our approach there but there's a lot of different ways you can do it.
Ben
-
Yeah the one the one snag on that has been the other day. I was poking around in stripe and I was looking at the email setting options. They have, you can, you know, have stripes and emails when a payment fails for example and then it points them back to a payment collection page. I was like, yeah, we should have that, it's like click the button to turn it on and I preview the email and the, it's based on the business name. So uh it says oh honey badger industries LLC, you know, payment page or whatever. And I was like, well people who are hungry customers aren't really going to recognize that name necessarily. Uh so I
Ben
-
can't have that. And so I went dug around the stripe settings and it's like, well you can't really do anything but the actual business name on that particular page, even though on the end of stripe settings you can set the credit card like, you know, that shows up on the actual payment thing, you can change that and uh so that's set in our case to hook dot gov but you can't change the the email header from to be something different from the business name and well we haven't registered cookery they as a business name because it's like yeah, it's just a, it's just a product, right? So I didn't feel comfortable changing that in stripe because like, well it's really not our business name so I think what can you
Josh
-
do like a D. B. A. Or something? Yeah.
Ben
-
Yeah that's what I thought it's like, well I guess perhaps it's time to register that? D be a for every day so I can actually change the business name and blah blah.
Josh
-
Yeah. It's kind of exciting though, like all the all these, you know, new problems come up, but it's because we have this new product that has to become more official. So um we're like we were also talking about like like now that we actually have some people using it, we're gonna need a way to like notify them of changes to the product or improvements or you know, all the all the little infrastructure things that we have for honey badger that we haven't quite gotten around to yet on hook relay. Mm
Ben
-
Yeah, these are nice, nice things to deal with as opposed to like crickets.
Josh
-
Yeah.
Ben
-
So glad that somebody showed up to actually use the app. Nice.
Josh
-
So next up for hook relay is this quarter, we've decided to do some uh spend some additional time on product development and implement some of those feature requests. I think that should be uh should be a good time.
Ben
-
Yeah, I think I think we have a backlog of like or so items and in good health, so I think we have plenty of stuff that we could keep us busy for the next few months on a greeting. It's cool.
Starr
-
Yeah and you were talking about taking a, um, and sort of multi lunch approach, right? We just got out of always been watching. Yeah, always be launching. So we're going to just have from now on every episode of this podcast, we're just gonna launch really, I'm gonna make people explain what it is. Uh,
Josh
-
next week is show hacker news.
Starr
-
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess at some point like you have to just call these things campaigns and instead of launches, but it feels very dynamic to call them launches.
Josh
-
Yeah. Well you got to call him a launch. Like for the sake of the whatever platform you're your campaign is speaking to because you know, you got to make them feel special first. It's the launch for them. It's, you know, it's, it's for them. It's, it's a, you know, it's the first launch ever. I've never heard of us before, I'm sure.
Starr
-
Oh, that makes sense. It's like you're launching the campaign,
Josh
-
right? Yes, you're launching the campaign. So I think we'll probably be doing, I will do a show H N. And we'll do a, we'll probably do something with indie hackers at some point. I imagine. Um, there's a list, I, I saw a list somewhere, I'll take it if I can find it, but just a list of like all those little, like all those, like a big list of platforms basically like that that you can, you know, forearms basically. But
Ben
-
yeah, you know, we should go, we should go old school and we should do regional launches. Like I used to work for a company where it was very much local and so like every, every few months would be a new city. We're gonna send the crew, we're gonna set up stuff and we're gonna launch in this city. So we should totally do that. Like we should start and of course here in the Seattle area and then branch out to California and then you move across the country and you're saying
Josh
-
we're gonna do a national tour.
Starr
-
Does that mean you like, can we get a bus, you lock access based on geo location? A very p
Ben
-
it's like, yeah, sorry, we're not in your area yet. Please check
Josh
-
back. Mhm.
Ben
-
Please sign up to be notified when we're in your area.
Starr
-
Nice.
Josh
-
Well if we do regional launches, we might have to have regional managers. Oh, you know, I gotta think about your chart. Mhm.
Josh
-
Yeah. So I think like the launch, you know, there's a lot of small places you can kind of launch to. Um, I think the big one that is on our um, on our radar is product cut. But I think we're quite, you know, based on the advice, we've heard about doing an effective like initial product launch. It sounds like maybe it would be better to polish polish the product hops and feedback feedback about it. Maybe like be a little bit more established or something. Um it just seems like the, the products lately that have been really had really successful product launches have been, have had like um they put were like a lot of work into the actual like launch campaign
Josh
-
before products like had a video and some of them almost seem like Kickstarter quality type campaigns or something, I don't know how over the top we're going to go, but I think that the current plan is to uh you know, kind of do some of the smaller things and implement some feedback and start to, you know, we might we're planning on doing like a redesign of the website eventually um with what we learn, so um then you have a designer in progress I think
Ben
-
Yeah, three years. Yeah, yeah, first I guess it's the first time we've had an external designer working on one of our products, so we have a we have
Josh
-
someone do, we had someone do the honey badger website at one point started, I think you did yeah, yeah, way back, I thought that was all star
Starr
-
um now I built it, I built the html but I built it based off of uh like pds or something.
Ben
-
Yeah, well this time it's being built so it's even more hands off, that's nice uh someone reached out to me on twitter and uh we mentioned a few episodes ago that we were getting this design done and I didn't know at the time what kind of built was option we had, whether it's going to be a tailwind, which is what our new hotness these days that we love or is going to be something else and it's going to be something else going to bootstrap, but even bootstraps as long as as long as we can modify it, that's that's my thing. Like, I remember back and way, way back in the day before a bootstrap when we were doing, you know, freelancing for people, we would get those designs from the designers and it would be a PSD
Ben
-
right? And then I had no, no way to really deal with that. And so I would send it off to this chop chop shot. Yeah. X. Html shop I think was the name of the business, I think they're still around even and and they would they would take the PSD and convert it into html and CSS, which was, you know, of questionable quality I guess. I mean it worked, but it's like, oh, it's ugly, like just like I don't ever want to touch that and uh and being able to actually have like a designer give you html CSS and it's actually going to be, you know, structured like in the same way because it's based on a framework like Duceppe like that's that's awesome. That's much as
Josh
-
an alternate, like tabs and spaces. Mhm
Ben
-
Yeah, the good old days
Starr
-
they just wanted to keep you on your toes josh.
Josh
-
I remember, yeah, I used to do why I didn't do, I wasn't a chop shop, but I used to, you know, implement my own Photoshop, um, yeah, designs and html and stuff and yeah, that was, that was fun. Like getting all the pixel dimensions and the, you know, in your overall Photoshop layout, piecing it all together. Kind of like, it's kind of like a puzzle. Like you're putting a puzzle together.
Starr
-
Yeah. I mean they called it a chop shop because like it was, they made a lot of, they made big use of the slice tool in Photoshop.
Josh
-
Yeah.
Starr
-
Where you basically, you basically went in and you know, you couldn't do CSS borders or drop shadows or anything like that. I mean, I guess you could do borders but not like nice. They didn't have rounded corners. They didn't drop shadows, anything like that. And so, um, you basically had to go and like tell Photoshop like, okay, like, like you could you tell it to split up the image in these parts and then like, you know, leave make this middle sort of a place for you to put some html so you can put stuff in the middle of your box and then, I don't know, it was just, it was not the best and so a lot of that bad. Html and CSS was, I mean, I imagine a lot of it was auto generated. Yeah.
Josh
-
Yeah. Yeah. There were even some, some tools just to like that, you know, you kind of like dry your borders and stuff and fill out, I don't know, like fill out some stuff in the app and then it just like generates the html page for you. And that was always like the worst, like the absolute worst thing you could go with. But you know, it, I guess the people's standards weren't as high in those days either. So you could get away with a lot,
Starr
-
I guess not.
Josh
-
But yeah, we'll, uh, we'll get to product hunt eventually. And uh, yeah, I guess if if you as a listener have a tip for us on how to get a good product launch, go and let us know. Um, and also we will hopefully involve, um, we're gonna want to like bring in our networks to this, I think eventually. So, uh, yeah, I hope that all of our listeners will, um, will help us when the time comes to, uh, to have a good product launch with lots of up votes and, you know, telling your friends and whatnot.
Ben
-
And, and maybe we could even get one of our listeners who might be interested in a half a particular talent for doing a product promotion. Like we could even just hand out to someone and say, hey, go go do that for us.
Josh
-
Yeah, that would be, that would be nice too. Because then we wouldn't have to do it ourselves. Yeah, like a product consultant.
Ben
-
Exactly, there's gotta be some out there, I mean product has been around long enough now, there's got to be specialists. Right?
Josh
-
Yeah. Well isn't that kind of uh Cory Haynes helped derek with for the cow? Right. Yeah. Yeah,
Ben
-
I'm sure Corey is really busy, so if someone wants to be like Corey do that for us, that would be totally awesome.
Josh
-
We just need a we just need a guru.
Ben
-
I was surprised on the day I signed up for the uh product hunt rss feed, I put that in my news reader and I was I mean I've seen you know probably things on twitter from time to time and I click through and I look at stuff but I never really followed closely, I was surprised how many launches there are products on every day, There's a lot there, so I think you really got to stand out in some way to be able to mix them, get some head space because there's just a lot of competition for things on the products on,
Josh
-
I gotta say like just the Indy hacker space, like not indie hackers dot com but like just the overall in the hacker community is just like wild lately, like I don't know about you but I feel like a total just like dinosaur. Um Like I feel like I've like like I'm becoming out of touch so I need to like I need to I probably need to pay a little more attention to like, you know what the what the new uh what the latest is?
Starr
-
I think it's inevitable that you get out of touch, right? I mean that's that's why
Josh
-
Yeah, but like people I don't I don't think there yet, like I don't I don't want to be there yet, I'm not ready for it start.
Josh
-
Uh huh
Ben
-
Yeah geriatric highly valued developers there we are
Josh
-
now we're we're you know, we're getting back out there. We did our we did our Emma or any hackers Emma.
Starr
-
Uh that's right
Josh
-
yeah, we'll have to do it, we'll have to do some Amas for uh for relay to like all that sort of stuff. I just like that. I love that. Like it just think it seems like the ecosystem is just much, it's so much more developed than when we launched honey badger. There's so many more places to go, especially if you have a tool that appeals to like the, you know, developer, you know, I guess just developers and yeah
Ben
-
and it feels like there's so many people in the community now who are, you know, identify in that group. Uh you know like there were three micro conferences in the past three weeks or four weeks right? There was to locals and then one in europe. So Uh that's just one indicator that there are a lot of people out there like us, you know definitely more than there were years ago who are enjoying this life of building things and sell them to people. It's nice
Josh
-
love. It's awesome. We should talk about um the Q one marketing campaign that we have in the works for Hook really? Because I thought that was an interesting idea. The I guess I'll just say it the the idea, I think this was been your idea uh to basically we want we want to like try some marketing like you know, putting some dollars behind Hook really and see if we can actually generate some, you know new customers that way. And um we already have like a marketing budget and um like a bunch of you know ongoing relationships and campaigns and stuff that we run for honey badger. So the idea was to basically just like have a swap.
Josh
-
Not I think we're gonna go with a quarter, not a month, like just basically try swapping out some of our advertisements for honey badger which are typically like um more like just kind of general awareness brand style. I'm like, you know, keep us top of mind sort of advertisements. Um you know like we do a lot of podcast ads and that sort of thing, newsletter sponsorships. So swap them out for a little while and just replace them with hook relay and uh you know, see how that goes um at this, you know, I guess a side benefit of that approach is that we we get to see what happens when we stop putting money into the honey badger advertising, which is always, I mean like that's a good experiment in its own like,
Josh
-
you know, so I'm interested to see how that how that turns out both on both sides. Like you know, do we, do we lose any momentum with honey badger? Do we gain a lot of, you know, how much momentum do we gain with hook? Really?
Ben
-
It feels like kind of like the pricing experiments that you're always nervous about doing because you don't know if you're going to like royally hose your business, you know, you won't and in our case you don't know for a while you have to let it play for a few months before you find out. Right. And so uh yeah, so switching the marketing like that feels like one of those experiments like well this could be really bad or it could be like there's no impact. And so it's like, oh well then maybe it's we re evaluate how we spend our marketing dollars for honey badger at that point, you know? So yeah, I'm pretty exciting, nervous and excited about trying that. Experiment
Josh
-
my prediction. I'll make a prediction is that I don't I don't really think it's I don't I don't imagine it's going to uh have a huge impact on honey badger, like conversions and sign ups and all that at least not if we do, if we do like a quarter, I would all kind of be surprised if we see any difference if we, you know, as long as we resume at some point. Um Just because like a lot of our advertising and we just we really don't have like clear, you know, like clear objectives necessarily. It's more just like brand advertising. Like and we see we do see a lot of sign ups like
Josh
-
of people coming to us because they heard us heard about us on a podcast, or they saw us in a newsletter, but it's not like click click through, it's not like a like pay per click or something or like click through this and you're gonna convert and we're going to track that. So I think like the it would be bad if we stopped advertising entirely for like a year or two because people forget about you. Like I think that's why we do advertising for the most part at this point, it's just like so people remember that we're here. Um and so that's my prediction is that I don't think we'll see a huge impact on honey badger. Um but I think that because no one knows about hook relay, it could potentially have a big impact for hook relay
Starr
-
uh side now. Um you know, just all of it, all of our listeners, you all should really um you know, enable tracking on your browser's disable your ad blocks and that will make life a lot easier for us because we will be able to um, you know, track funnels a lot easier. So
Josh
-
we can do, we can do marketing, do real marketing on the internet. Um we are using uh, we're using fathom on hook relay and they're like the privacy, whatever privacy first um analytics tool that a lot of people use these days and they're also indie hackers and I don't know, maybe twitter friends for some of us, but they're pretty cool. And uh, they have a feature that um, you can set up like a custom, like domain that like hosts, they're tracking scripts like, because it's all like GDR and like privacy compliant like by default. But even so like if they're added to like a ad blocker, you know, like tracking prevention thing, um you can't host on your own domain so that, you know, it's, it's, you're guaranteed to have accurate accurate results
Ben
-
except for those people who are still using links as their browser,
Josh
-
right? If they're using or Yeah, they're like if they're browsing from their terminal that or if they have javascript disabled. Um Yeah. You know, I mean, I guess if you're, if your audience, your
Starr
-
richard Stallman, if your
Josh
-
if your audience is Lennox, it's like arch Linux users, you're, you're kind of out a lot. Like no matter no matter what.
Ben
-
Just, just put ads on on slash dot and call it a day. Yeah
Starr
-
slash hot. That's that's a tragedy in that they really went downhill.
Ben
-
They're still around though. Like one of the cockroaches of the internet last time is still there. I don't know. I haven't looked at it for years, but you know, but back when I was posting my code to source forge, I was reading slash out everyday
Josh
-
source forage
Starr
-
source for it for ages
Josh
-
still there, isn't it? It's
Starr
-
really hard to use.
Ben
-
It's probably still there. I don't even know. Yeah.
Josh
-
And that was two cows
Ben
-
subversion instead of get we're just this this is the way back episode. We're going back to P. S. D. S. And S. V. N. And slash talk.
Josh
-
Every episode is kind of the way back episode. I mean, yeah, we're way back founders. So
Ben
-
I mean our our company name is now a vintage meme. So it's gotta be a way back. Yeah.
Josh
-
All right, okay. I just got like we had a marketing meeting earlier and Ben Finley, our marketing manager was like looking at R. S. E. O. Performance. He's like, Like we we could improve our website if we if we like if we optimize the three MB Jeff on the home page. I'm like wait we have like a three, we have like a chip on the home page and I remembered I had like this easter egg that if you click like the resolve button in the, in like the screenshot of our, of honey badger on honey badger. Yo it well you can go and do it and you can see what happens. Um We'll make sure we leave it in even if we optimize it. But yeah, that's how we roll is like, we just like kill our search engine optimization. Because
Josh
-
we had to have uh like, yeah, for the walls, we had to have this easter egg.
Starr
-
That's awesome.
Ben
-
Uh The the main thing reminded me that I have an interview being published tomorrow. I believe in Saas Mag at a link that in the show notes but had a great chat. Uh And it was funny because I was like, we were talking about humor and that's like one of our core values of the honey badger our business. And I was like, well, yeah, because like, I mean, we named our company after me, right? So like, you got to have fun in that kind of business, right?
Josh
-
For sure. We should, we should like send out a leveling up email that just is designed to rick roll our customers. I don't know if they'd appreciate that.
Starr
-
We should rename hook related berries and cream.
Josh
-
Uh huh. Yeah, that's a that's creative. You can do that. I mean hook really is kind of like, very like business business formal descriptive. So we could, we could definitely get weirder
Ben
-
for sure. Yeah, that was, that was not one of my more creative days when I picked that name.
Josh
-
I mean the other, you know the upside is that it actually tells people what it does. It's instead of, it is not just named after a, after an animal joke on the internet.
Ben
-
Yeah.
Josh
-
Yeah. Um also it has a proper casing.
Ben
-
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's you know, one of the things that's funny, I have this I now for whenever we write anything, like we're doing any kind of copy or a blog post or whatever and if we ever reference get hub without the capital agent. And I always catch it now because because of how many people miss capitalized honey badger, like so I knowing how much that like I catch that. I was like, I bet they get how people really appreciate what people actually capitalize their name properly. So yeah, it's like six out to me all the time.
Starr
-
Just for the listeners. The proper capitalization is one capital at the front because it's one word. It's not two words
Ben
-
and go,
Josh
-
yep. For honey badger.
Starr
-
Yeah, yeah, sorry, not get up
Josh
-
as uh two capital letters to capitals. Get lab. But I also now notice the companies that are like us where they have just, they have opted for the lower case in the second word as well. There's a few of those out there. I'm not remembering them off the top of my head, but they always stick out. I mean, I usually remember those now too if I'm familiar with them or I I know that I need to go check and I always go and like check when I'm writing their name at least usually.
Starr
-
And then if you just want to, oh I'm sorry. And then just like if you just want to like just set the world on fire, you can be stripe and have your logo, your name of the logo, low, all lower case. But then in your body text capitalize it. Like they just want to watch the world burn. Uh huh.
Ben
-
Oh,
Ben
-
they're probably trying to punk the new york times editors, you know?
Starr
-
Yeah, probably.
Starr
-
Well, um we're getting a little quiet. Are we reaching the end?
Ben
-
I think we are
Josh
-
depends how far you want to go because I mean like we've got a whole list of topics here, but we are already into this episode of ways. And uh I think like this has been a pretty good episode, you know, it's it's for once. We've actually like managed to stay on topic for the most part. Like this has been mostly a hook really episode. So I think we should probably quit while we're ahead. All right now. And you better you better wrap this up quick start because I'm like, I'm ready to like
Starr
-
dive in the rest of this. So you're about to explain this episode of founder class has been brought to you by hook relay a striped quality web hooks in minutes. That's awesome. Thank you. Uh, if you want to give us a review on Apple podcast, whatever they call it now, I don't know itunes, music to itunes. Um, please do that. If you want to. If you're just in writing for our blog, we are, you know, currently looking for um, ruby python, PHP writers. Um, go to our blog, honey badger to I. slash blog and look for the request page. And yeah. All right. So I will talk to you guys next week.
Show notes:
Links:
Umm...here's a picture of a Honeybadger sleeping on our 404 page. He's definitely sleeping.
Transcription:*Note, transcription is paraphrased with 1.3% accuracy
Ben "Expired certificates, yada yada yada, internet broke...no episode. Bada-boom-bada-bing, have a good weekend."
Show notes:
Links:
Felix Livni
Schedulista
Transcript:
This is an unedited, automated transcript, with only about 80% accuracy
Ben
All right, so, uh welcome the founder quest today, you have me, Ben, because Star and josh are taking the day off and we have Felix of me who is with us or with me chatting about uh founder related stuff. It's just one of our uh, intermittent founder interview kind of episodes where we're just going to have a great chat, talk about some stuff, so welcome Felix. Thanks. So, Felix was telling you tell me right before we got started about the differences of having an actual conversation versus a podcast conversation and you had a great great tip about email. So, if you don't mind, could you like, hit me with that again? Because I thought that's pretty cool.
Felix
Yeah, what I've noticed is if I write an email knowing that a lot of people are going to read this email, maybe it's an onboarding email that's going to be sent out to uh you know, many, many people, I don't seem to be able to write it in the same way as the emails I write to just that one person and I often feel that if I could just if I was just trying to sell to one person, I could probably do a pretty good job and I think the better attitude for me has always been to then trying to do that and then try and automate that and it turns out very differently than when I'm trying to to do the thing that is going to be automated right away.
Ben
So yeah, I like that, I've had the same kind of experience where it's like, well you spend a lot of time crafting, crafting, crafting and then it feels crafted right? It doesn't, it doesn't feel like a real email. So do you like uh Try to like email individuals for like times times first and before you get the final copy that you want to send everybody?
Felix
Yeah, exactly. And I think really not thinking about tools at all is really the right way to go about it um where all you try and do is think what is the best thing for this one customer and you do that for a couple of different customers and then you look for patterns and I would say when you do it a lot and this is the advantage you have with podcast is once you do it a lot, you kind of see some patterns as well, some sort of meta patterns of like how, how do the things that sound unnatural look versus the things that sound natural and I'll just tell you one that I've noticed, I don't know if this is something you've noticed, but when I write an email to a single person, it usually has one sentence in it, maybe two.
Felix
Uh but when I write something that I think is, let's say, an onboarding email of some sort uh it's not gonna be that short. Uh so that's definitely a pattern I've noticed. I think we we noticed that as consumers or business owners, when we see inbound email, we automatically filter emails that have just one sentence very differently than we filter ones that are multiple paragraphs.
Ben
Yeah, I never really noticed that. That's true. Yeah, because most of my personal emails are just like a couple of sentences, man, I was thinking back to the initial like set of onboarding or just stock emails that we had for honey badger, like, you know, you're building has failed or thanks for being a subscriber or whatever. And I was thinking back and like I wrote them and they're all like one or two sentences. I'm like, yeah, that's that's true. It's like versus this big long book, right? Yeah,
Felix
yeah. In general, I think I'm a big fan of looking at software, automating things that people already do. I think sometimes that's the best software and as opposed to sort of rethinking everything, because I think a lot of the time when you rethink everything, most things people can do just less maybe less quickly than it would be if it were automated. And so I think when you rethink everything a lot of the time, it doesn't fit as well as it seems like it might have back in the lab.
Ben
Yeah, true, we'll get back to that. I want to talk more about that, but I want to uh introduce you more fully since everyone might be thinking, hey we just dropped to the middle of conversations like yeah, you did just kind of jump in both conversation because Felix and I are old friends, we've been uh we've been hanging out and chatting about business for years now uh and Felix is an entrepreneur who is running a business called Schedule Ista, So Felix want to give us a quick rundown of what schedule list is.
Felix
Yeah, well before Schedule East it was scheduled to, it was sort of an idea of, hey I want to start a company that is a B two B sas company. And one of the very first conversations I had about that Was with Ben, I don't know if you remember, I was looking back through my email
Ben
yeah,
Felix
our mutual friend paul introduced us and the topic of conversation was marketing and BtB Sas um something admittedly I still struggle with, I kind of had it on in my mind is oh this is something I'm going to be bad at and I don't know how to get customers. Um maybe maybe I need to reach out and figure out how that happens. Um and I don't, I don't know if this is okay to bring up here, but I'm curious to know, I mean, tell me if my characterization of our conversation is correct, but that conversation way back then I think you were pretty pessimistic and or at least I think as a friend you were looking or as a new friend, you were looking out for me and you were saying kind of don't do this crazy thing. Um
Felix
Was that the advice you gave me and then if you were to meet someone like me today, would you, would you give different advice?
Ben
Yeah, my my memory of that conversation was not that I wanted you to not do it, but it was like, I I saw some concerns, some red flags and I wanted to save you some pain just in case you hadn't, you know, like considered like, because as I recall trying to, you know, rewind back to years ago, what that conversation was like, you're sitting across table from me and you're saying I want to build this business that's gonna require a lot of sales effort because I'm gonna be selling to some people that, you know, I can't really reach well online and here I was thinking, okay, so Felix is going to be like walking down the street, knocking on doors, trying to get people to buy his says and I'm like,
Ben
okay, sure, but are you sure you want to sign up for that? That's kind of but I remember is that is that kind of
Felix
remember, I think that's accurate and that's basically exactly what I did. And we even did some, some things like send out postcards. I might have mentioned that as an idea that I've had, I said, you know, I think uh well used to do that kind of thing and then it fell out of fashion, maybe there's maybe there's some wisdom there and I think um you realized how crazy I really was and how little I knew and there was nothing but love I felt coming from you, which made it even like harder to hear, I think.
Felix
Um so I believed you and the irony too is I think I would probably, so I don't you didn't tell me yet how your answer would change, but I would I tell people, I meet people all the time who say they want to start a bootstrapped company and my first inclination sort of out of love is to say, you know, that can be tough, it can be uh you know, I've seen lots of them fail. And is this are you sure this is something that you want to do? Yeah,
Ben
I'm totally with you on that. And uh funny, the funny thing is like, the postcard thing is stuck with me for years, like I still want to do a postcard mailing thing myself and I just never got around to doing it.
Felix
So we we did it um and it worked. It worked and then we never did it again. Uh I would say there's a pattern, everything that we have done has sparked actually just not that well. And I actually, this is one of the ways that I think about marketing is uh in a sense, it's stochastic or at least one way to view it is stochastic. So if you make a cold call, there's some chance that that the person on the other end is going to buy what you're selling, even if it's even if most people don't want it. Um
Felix
but it may not pencil, right? You may have to make so many calls that it just doesn't pencil. So in a sense everything works. The question is just how well does it work? And what we've found is almost everything does better than break even, but not by much and uh, you know, for probably for a variety of reasons, but we sent out, I think it was postcards. We scraped yelp. We looked at businesses that had five stars. They were only massage therapists. Uh and they were only in I think three cities and we sent, we didn't license the photography very right. All really. So I would, I would probably, it's hard to find
Felix
good photographs of you can license, but anyway, the photograph we sent out was this awesome black and white photograph that just looks so hardcore has joseph Pilates on it. So the guy who founded Pilates and he's in this weird machine that he built at home and it's so gritty and it would really resonate with the people that we were sending it to and so we sent out these postcards and we got one customer
Felix
that we knew of. The only way we would know about it is because if they were to type this long you're well that was on the postcard. If they just went to our site we would have no way to track it. So we have one. We got one customer, they're one of our biggest customers, we still have them today and it cost us bucks to send those postcards and get them printed and post digital that and yeah we you know had penciled I don't know if that proves anything but and I have had another conversation you know about a year after we sent the postcard. I talked to someone on the phone that was in Malta and this person
Felix
friend had sent them someone we've never heard of had actually emailed them a photograph of this postcard because she loved it so much and she had had it on her wall and she decided to give us a call. So I know that it had some you know impact and yeah there's been a lot of things like we've done like that that it's that we just never really try to scale but it does seem like it's got a lot of problems.
Ben
I love that. I wanted to answer your question. Uh, yeah. I think my answer today would be pretty much the same because it was like you said motivated from this place of love. Like hey, I just want to make sure, you know what you're getting into. Like sounds cool. But you know, and I love talking to entrepreneurs who have ideas and they want to run it by me and I always try to look for, you know, look for the good. Like, hey, yeah, that could really work. And also like bring some realism to the things like, hey, have you, have you thought about this because it might be something you want to watch out for, you know,
Ben
but it's never, I never want to say that out of like, oh, I shouldn't do that because like I don't know right? It's not my business. But uh, hopefully that's, that's taken well. Like, like, like you took it well. Apparently
Felix
I took it well. And I think the reason I didn't listen to you and I think it's the right reason was not because I thought you were wrong. It wasn't rational. I actually think there isn't a great rational reason to do these kinds of businesses a lot of the time. Um, just because I think we live in the world of tech, uh, it's pretty nice to go and work at a big tech company. It's extremely comfortable you get financially compensated great. I think what a lot of people overlook is the marginal value of any additional money that you might make is essentially zero. So doing financially better is just sort of not even interesting. So it has to be something that has to do with meaning in your own life. And
Felix
it's the kind of thing when you add up all the negative reasons to not do it, that you're gonna do it anyway. So I feel, I feel like that's another reason that I tell people, I don't tell them don't do it, but I essentially say, uh, you know, a bunch of things that are going to be really tough and I hope that they'll ignore me because I know that if they ignore me, they'll be doing it for all the right reasons, in a sense, at least in my opinion.
Ben
Yeah, totally. Uh, it's, it's so much, uh, I don't know if passion is the right word, but there's definitely passion in it. That's probably not all inclusive, but the, the idea that, um, once you hit a certain baseline of, of money in your life, like you're fine, like what's where's the fulfillment gonna come from? It's probably not going to come from other more money, it's probably gonna come from doing something that you really want to do. For whatever reason, maybe
Ben
like me, you're very independent minded and you don't like having a boss, right? Or you just, you see this need in the world and you can't let it go or it doesn't let go of you. Like when an idea keeps hitting me and hitting me and I know I'm like, oh, that's probably something I should spend some time thinking about. You know, I think this, this, this kind of selection process, not everyone is born to be an entrepreneur, but when, when you get that bug, it's kind of hard to shake it loose.
Felix
Absolutely all of those things you said resonate with me, I might add as well, being able to choose the people that you work with really carefully and also protect people. I think this this this makes sense. The kind of technology that you work with, it's no small thing to be able to say, I want to work on this cool new tech, just because I think it's cool. Which you seldom get to do that at a big company.
Ben
Yeah. Being all that self determination is huge for sure. So you picked a business so schedule, it's, it is a, is a scheduling widget that sits on websites that, you know, hair stylist or massage person can use to help, you know, schedule appointments online for their customers. How did you decide that was the thing you wanted to do? Because when you came to me, those years ago, like you pretty much already decided, I think you had some other ideas, but this was like at the top of the list for you,
Felix
how did
Ben
you get to that point where you're like, that's that's the thing I want to do.
Felix
Yeah. So uh I knew I knew a couple of things and I started this company with a friend of mine, Lowell manners, we were best friends, we work together. And so really everything I say here, we decided together, uh we saw the world pretty similarly, but we also built a lot of our theories about what kind of business we wanted to start. We built that together. Um and what we knew initially, I kind of was trying to remember exactly when you and I have that conversation and where in the timeline, I didn't know yet that we were going to do scheduling, but that's that's a good point that we had probably already decided that by then yeah, I knew that we wanted to do BB rather than a consumer product. I knew what we wanted it to be software and we wanted it to
Felix
be a bootstrapped company right from right from the initial uh, starting point. We knew that we wanted it to be bootstrapped. So we were we were intentionally bootstrapped. And so one of the core things we try to do is think about what is a bootstrap company, what makes a bootstrap company successful? How is it different from some other kind of company? And we came up with a a theory about her and the theory, I think is contrarian, But I also think that there's a lot of truth to it. So the theory was almost everything that is good about a venture backed company is the, if you take the opposite of that, it's good for a bootstrap company. So
Felix
I'll give you some example. I'm trying to find our original, I have my, because I was doing a little bit of research for this chat, I found our original slide that we made for ourselves and what we thought was good for VC backed companies was that there was a strong network effect, uh, that they had an idea that there was kind of a winner takes all when, when there was a product that there could be a winner takes all. That would be good. It would allow you to create a moat. Uh, and this would typically be in the form of a new idea because if there was an old idea that had a network effect, there was probably, there was too big of a mode to enter that
Felix
or it was, you could be a second mover, but you had something in your formula where you'd be able to kill the competition. So there's a, there's, there's this first mover benefit or the ability to kill the competition and then a lot of the time investors will ask how many competitors you have and they'll get worried if there's lots of competitors. So what we thought was good for bootstrap company was that they would be low network effects, that there'd be lots of winners, that there'd be no moat. That it was an old idea that was proven to work, that there were many late movers that did very well and that there were lots of competitors.
Felix
So if you pitch that to an investor, uh, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll be like, okay, you, you, you, you hit everything wrong here. Um, so we, we, that was, that was one of our sort of initial ideas and then we created a fitness function to evaluate a couple of things and I'm trying to remember what they were, but it was essentially how big of a network effect does this have. We were looking for a company that was for a product that was established, but not super mature. So it was right at that point where there were examples and we were specifically looking for examples of other boots trappers because we thought that other successful bootstrap, because we thought that that would be a good sign that we could do it too. So we were like opening up a coffee shop in Seattle
Felix
versus opening up a coffee shop where they've never tasted coffee. Those are very, very different. And there's difficulties for both. But at least when you open up a coffee shop in Seattle, you know, hey, there's gonna be people that are gonna enjoy coffee and you can look around and you can try and see what things work and etcetera. So that was kind of, you know, because we were bootstrapped and self funded, we thought that seems a lot less risky and that seems like an environment that we kind of have believed in. We like the idea that there could be lots of coffee shops and that they were in competition with each other, but not in a way that an independent coffee shop sort of desires that no other coffee shop exists.
Ben
Yeah, I like that contrary and take agree investor probably kick you out of the office for coming up with that. But I mean what you're describing is like there's a healthy market already, right? There are people who are already looking for this product, like you don't have to convince someone that hey, you want to drink coffee. So kind of my coffee shop, right? Ah and if there are a number of businesses already doing that, you know that
Felix
it's viable,
Ben
right? Uh people spending money in that marketplace because there's other people currently receiving that money. So yeah, I think that's some pretty awesome criteria there.
Felix
Yeah. So we, we wanted to come up with businesses and then evaluate each of these and then choose the one that we thought would be best for us and it wasn't completely scientific, but we did use uh, uh, you know, some numbers next to them and we had some kind of internal calculus that we did and I'll give you some examples like e commerce is an example that fits a lot of what what I mentioned, but it's too mature and so we thought okay e commerce uh there are, you know, since we started actually there's been some companies that are in the e commerce space that have done extremely well.
Felix
I'm not sure when Shopify started maybe a little bit before us, but around that time. Yeah, but around that time and there's other examples that didn't do, you know, aren't as well known as Shopify but still did very well and I think it's because they have all of those criteria that the investors would not be so excited about, but they don't have strong network effects. So I think this kind of contrarian idea does, does hold some does hold some water,
Felix
but so for us, e commerce was too mature then we thought of a bunch of ideas that they might have been like one or two examples of, but we thought it was too knew that it was just not yet proven and was a little unclear exactly where this was going to lead. So there were a lot a lot of ideas that we had around doing kind of online ordering from your phone that kind of dovetailed with how businesses already did business. So you can imagine you're sitting in like a T. G. I Fridays and you can order right from the menu from your phone or you could order from a from the waitress or you could be in a bar, you could maybe order some drinks at the counter and then at your table you can order,
Felix
you know, additional drinks. So we're looking at lots of things that kind of intertwined with how the real world does things, but automated some aspect of it. But we thought we can see a little of this, this was before a lot of the online ordering that we have today because this is back in . But I think it would be much more viable to do to do those things today as a bootstrap company. But a lot of these ideas I think are more would be more interesting as a venture backed company. So those ideas were lowered down on our list. I did think of an idea actually um called, I think it was tell the manager or ask the manager or notify the manager or something like that. And I pitched it
Felix
at a probably the only start up of the local and I ever went to was like it's night in Redmond and we went to this event and I pitched it and about six months later I was contacted by someone who said it looks like you never did that, do you mind if I do it? Uh and the person did it and did did well, so it's a funny story. So there might have been other ideas on the list that, that are still interesting. But yeah, so online scheduling really hit that sweet spot. It's very similar to e commerce in a lot of ways. I think in ways that maybe people don't really realize actually, but it's a lot less immature even now, years later. Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's, it seemed good to us and we were like, let's do it.
Ben
Yeah, I love it. And I like, I like the, I love the contrariness that's right up my alley. So you started this with bowl, You worked together, built the business at some point. I mean I've known you all this time and I know now that you're not working with low anymore on the business on a regular basis. So what, what happened like just in general, like what was that transition like and you know, what are some lessons learned from the co founder experience and now that co founder is no longer with you?
Felix
Sure. Um
Felix
yeah, let me, I don't know the best way. There's so many different ways to tell the story. I would say. One way to tell. It is to tell about how we founded the company. So we founded the company in my backyard, we had a conversation one summer day and we were drinking some beers and one of us said we should really just start a company and uh, I think I must have said that and Lowell said I'll quit, I'll quit tomorrow, let's do it. And uh you know, I knew he was joking, but as he left, I was like, okay, don't quit. Um Let's think about this, I'm really excited, but let's think about this. And the next day he, he texted me and he said I quit, have you quit yet? So
Felix
I then, you know, took about another two days and and quit. Uh
Ben
that's that's jumping on both feet right there.
Felix
Yeah, and I think sometimes, you know, the biggest decisions that I've made, I've made sort of the easiest and maybe Lowell doubly so ah and I would say that's that's kind of how we separated too. Um It was really, really, really, really good until one day it was um and I think, you know, when you start out on, you know, definitely when we started out and I think this was maybe more true for Lowell, who is significantly younger than me, I think if I had said, okay. Yeah, but there's one rule, we've got to do it for four years, he would have been like, what? Hey, wait a second, I need to think about this a bit more. So it was unclear like
Felix
we we thought, I mean, to be honest, we thought our first few ideas would fail and we were looking forward to that because we were thinking we would learn a ton, we were really aiming where the direction that we thought that we would get the most learning and there was no sort of long term commitment other than we just, we we thought we were gonna have a lot of fun. We did have a lot of fun. And I think that there was a point where there were some other things in that local realized that he wanted to do and when he, when he realized like,
Felix
oh there might be some more long term commitment involved in this, uh it didn't seem so great anymore and it kind of happened at a time that was extremely destabilizing for both of us. We, we had entertained an idea of selling the business and that would have come with kind of some golden handcuffs which kind of explicitly put into uh, you know, black and white, this kind of long longer term commitment. So I think it's a bit more complicated than that. But it wasn't, it wasn't something that built up for for years and years and years and just, you know, kind of deteriorated. It went pretty rapidly from uh this is amazing too. Let's not do this anymore.
Ben
Yeah, I would like to see that. Yeah, that makes sense. If if your expectation is to just, you know, do whatever and then all of a sudden is like, oh, you want me to commit to the next five years, whatever. That yeah, that could definitely put some cold water on it.
Felix
Yeah, absolutely. And it felt very different after he left, but it has a business wise, the company has done, has done great. I would say as far as how it feels today, I enjoyed it more working with him to be totally honest.
Ben
Yeah, it's nice. It's, I mean there's so many benefits to having a co founder, having the accountability is one that people often think about, but you know, just having the camaraderie, right, you're, you're doing the same thing, you're in it together. You know, it's uh,
Felix
yeah, to me, I think it's a lot harder
Ben
even even as as independent as I am and as self directors, I want to be, I do feel it's harder to do something so completely, so low because you just have to have all that motivation yourself and there's no one happening out.
Felix
Yeah, absolutely. I agree totally. I would never have been able to do schedule is to, without having role as a co founder, it is much easier to run a company that's already in place than it is to start something from scratch and there's just no way that I, that I could have done it and it's not from, hey, it's not so much that we complemented each other's skill wise or anything like that. It's just the, there are a lot of things that are psychologically difficult and doing that with someone else makes it possible, in my opinion.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same about honey badger. Like there's no way it could have been done with the three of us working together, there was just, I mean, first there's a lot of work, but also, yeah, getting through those times where it's just a struggle is Yeah, I think I would probably throw in the towel if it hadn't been to have two good co founders who helped me out.
Felix
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben
So I know from our conversations that we have from time to time, that you spend some time mentoring people who are looking to start businesses or who are just, you know, in the beginning end of this, this entrepreneur adventure. So what, what are the two or three kinds of themes that you see coming up time and again, people coming to you and you're like, uh you know, maybe maybe look at this, you know, so if someone today is thinking about something like, well, and they sat down with you, what are the kind of things that you would poke at their ideas and say, have you considered this or have you thought about that?
Felix
Yes, most of the people I talk with are looking to raise money. Uh and I actually have found out that there's another definition of bootstrapping that I wasn't aware of until I started mentoring. So to me, bootstrapping meant a company that doesn't raise money and is structured in such a way that will make profits and poor those profits back into growing the company. So there's a, there's enough that's not how the kids today are using the term bootstrapping at least the ones that are looking for venture capital to them. Bootstrapping is what you do until you raise money. So you're structured is a typical venture backed company, but you just haven't raised money yet either on purpose because you want to build, you know, a prototype or
Felix
or something else that an investor might see and you'd get a better deal or you just haven't managed to to put it all into place to raise the money. So most of what I do, actually, it's like, I love venture backed company, it's kind of funny that, you know, I'm so much of a bootstrap er but I don't know if I've told you this before, but one of my heroes is Craig Newmark and I don't know if you know that crate that craigslist started as a list of startup parties
Felix
because he loved the startup scene and here he, he loves everything about startups and raising money and all of this stuff and then he starts this company that's like completely counter to that. Um and I feel like he is a hero of mine in many ways, but I feel similar in personality in a sense that I love the start up world and I love working with these people and who knows maybe I'll do a venture backed company one day, but uh everything that I do in my business life is about bootstrapping, but all my mentoring is pretty much about venture companies. So I think a lot of what I do is I try and you know, tell them all of the things that are opposite of what I did with schedule is to, uh, and uh, I really problem in the other direction and
Felix
uh, it's, I guess everyone's different, I think I just try and help out where I can based on what I've seen. One of the things I love the best actually is working with other mentors, I love working with a founder with multiple mentors and so I feel I try to not do harm, you know, the Hippocratic oath of mentoring, but I think it's easier to kind of say what's on your mind when it's balanced out with other mentors. So I don't know, I'm struggling to think like if there is a single pattern or thing that I see that I would help people with, maybe I'm going to think about that for a second, We can come back to it.
Ben
Sure, well maybe maybe maybe this is a different way to look at it. Like if you could go back years and mentor yourself, right? You you come to you with your idea for schedule is to, what kind of things would you say to yourself with the experience now that you have,
Felix
okay, a couple of things popping in my head, I don't know if these are pop things, but one of the things I tell
Felix
new founders is about linkedin, how wonderful linkedin is. It's the only social network that I understand, but I think that I, which says a lot about me, but I think I understand it pretty well and I tell them you can reach out to people on linkedin who can help you. And it's not sort of like, hey, look for another mentor or look for people to give you advice about X, y and z. But let's say you're starting a business in the analytic space. And let's say that it's very similar to maybe some of these three other businesses, maybe these folks would be competitors, of course, I would say reach out to those people, which is so counter to what a lot of people are comfortable doing. But,
Felix
and I have a formula for, they think that they'll never hear back from people. I have a formula for how to reach out and link, which is you craft an email that there is only one person in the world that can answer that email and that's the person you're sending it to. So if you ask someone a general question, like, you know, hey, how should I market this business or something? They'll think to themselves and I'm not gonna answer this, anyone can answer this. But if you ask them a question that only they would know and you make that connection in a way that hey, you are facing something that only they have seen, they will respond. So that's my sort of, that's one of the tips that I share is
Felix
make those connections with other people in the industry that you're going to be in, ask them a lot of the time, you know, they'll have some plan And one of the things they want to do is understand each step of the plan. They call it the risking that's like the $ word. So I think one of the best ways to sort of the risk a plan is to find out other people who follow that same path and succeeded and try and map that path on to some other path that a business has followed and then talk to those people and and run what you're going to do by them and ask them if it's going to work.
Ben
I love it. That's great.
Felix
So I can say also another thing that I that I offered that I believe, and I don't know if you agree with this, but I think that there are far a few different business types out their business structures out there than people think because we're in tech. We often, and let's say we're a venture backed company, we're doing something that the world has never seen before. It's going to take, It's gonna be the next unicorn. It's by sort of definition, nothing like anything else out there. But we extend that to the business structure and what I mean by that is how customers are required. What metrics that you should measure, how growth will happen, how marketing will operate, how you'll get your first customer, your th customer, your th customer and what your channels are those kinds of things. And
Felix
I don't think there is that many different patterns out there. I think that there's just a handful of patterns and there are businesses sometimes that introduce brand new patterns, but they're very rare. So a lot of the time, what I encourage people to do is to figure out exactly what they think their business structure or pattern is and then map it onto another business that was successful. That has the exact same pattern and maybe find three or four of them And then figure out how did they acquire their first customer? How did they acquire their th customers? And sometimes that you can find that out by looking for interviews and things like that. But reaching out to people as well that I just mentioned can be very, very powerful. So innovate where it matters. But you know, don't innovate everywhere.
Ben
Yeah, that, that lines up with uh, you know, the technology world, we have this idea that you should use boring technology because like you only have so much innovation, you can do in your business. Just use a plain old database, right, Don't, don't go crazy with the newfangled hotness. Right? And yeah, I think I totally agree with you actually like use those well worn paths, Use those channels that everyone has done times before because it's, you don't need to innovate there.
Felix
Yeah, you can find so much depth in anything that I think there's sort of a fear that at least I have this fear I always want to orient myself towards whatever I think is going to be the most interesting life. And so, but I think if, if everything is interesting, that doesn't necessarily add up to more interesting, I think that sometimes, you know, a lot of things can be boring, like you can be steve jobs and wear the same black turtleneck shirt every day. He's not innovating in his wardrobe, but that doesn't mean that he's not innovating, He's not maximizing innovation. So I try and remind myself of that. I think it's an easy fall to fall into and really being intentional. I would say here's an advice that I would give myself that I thought of and that's kind of aligned with, with,
Felix
with, with what I've been saying so far, which is uh huh A lot of thing I kind of think separate sort of opportunities into inbound and outbound, so inbound opportunities or opportunities that come to you, they arrive in your email box. They, you know, there's a phone call, a friend tells you something over lunch. You see a cool movie that inspires you. And then there's outbound an outbound happens because of some mental model that you have about the world and you intentionally decided to go and do something. And I think all the time you get bombarded with inbound stuff and most of it is not that interesting. And then sometimes something interesting comes along and you think, okay, I'm going to follow up on that. I actually think if someone ignores
Felix
and I think it's more subtle than ignore, but if someone does not respond to all inbound, they're way ahead of the game. If you just sort of erase every inbound email and never read it, you're way ahead of the game. And if you do things that are that are only outbound for, for your life and for your business? I think that that is very, very powerful and by ignore, I don't mean like let's say you see a movie and it's about, uh, some people that move to Argentina and reinvented themselves and that really inspires you and you think, okay, I could move to Argentina and you do and it's great. That kind of stuff happens all the time. And, but I don't think it's optimal.
Felix
I think you should watch that movie and be inspired, but then you should figure out what is it about that's inspiring? Is it living abroad? Is there something about Argentinian culture that's really cool. And then you should come up with some kind of a fitness function and you should also think what is the opportunity, cost of doing this versus everything else. And then you should as an outbound effort figure out. Okay. So I'm really gonna do this abroad thing. That's going to have the following characteristics. Where's the best place to be? And I bet you don't end up in Argentina.
Felix
I love it. That's, that's
Ben
awesome. And, and this is why years later, like I still find every conversation with you secret productive and sometimes inspirational to
Felix
write on.
Ben
It's great. It's great job with Felix as always. Um, I think that's a great place to wrap it. Uh, do you have any parting thoughts?
Felix
Um, yeah. How different did this conversation feel from a conversation that you and I might just have,
Ben
you know, it's pretty close. Yeah. Obviously like we've got, we've got the world listening with us and so it's a little different. It's not quite as intimate as usual. And of course we haven't talked about any numbers and things like that that we usually get down in the weeds with you and I,
Felix
but yeah, pretty close to our usual
Ben
cars. What do you think?
Felix
Um, closer than I thought? But I don't know, I might listen to this back and just be like, I'm not going to send bend the wave file.
Ben
Well, my pro tip is, I never listen to the recording. So I mean that's,
Felix
that's, that's the way I do it. Okay, good. Good. That's actually I should do that too.
Ben
It's easier that way. He really is. Well, thanks, thanks so much for you. Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate you uh doing this for me and uh hanging out. I know that I've learned some things and I hope that people who listen to podcasts, I've also learned some things. If someone wants to reach out to you, where's the best place twitter maybe?
Felix
I don't know how to use twitter with twitter. You have to show me the ropes. Um I would say just you can send me an email. Uh you can find me on linkedin. How about Lincoln? There you go. Find me on linkedin and asked me a question that only I know how to answer
Ben
a lot. All right, Felix. Thanks again so much. So like Star usually does our outro is but I will I will try to fill in for Star as best I can and I will say you should, you know, go and review us somewhere. Give us those five stars on those podcast listening things that you do. And uh as always let us know if we can answering particular questions for you or talk about anything that you find interesting. Thanks so much for joining us and hope you have a great week.
Felix
Thanks Ben was awesome.
Ben
All right. So, you can stop the quicktime. We can stop
Show notes:
Links:
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Transcript:
note - this is an unedited, automatically generated, transcript with only about 80% accuracy
Ben
So I say we we just had a new customer signed up just like minutes ago and said that the reason they signed up was our podcast. So awesome. Good stuff. Good stuff. So pro tip for you says operators out there, put a little box and your on boarding, asking people how they heard about you or whatever. It's very, very informative.
Starr
Yeah, it does. And then do a podcast and wait episodes.
Ben
Those steps are optional. I really do like they're having like those, those uh onboarding introductions is what we call them. We have a channel in slack for them and having those show up periodically is like a little little endorphin rush. Like I love seeing those show up in our slack channel and you know, we also have a cancellations channel has the same thing with cancellation messages and that's not quite as fun. But thankfully we see if you are those messages that we do the onboarding messages, but I just, I really like having those things in slack. It's nice to see that throughout the day.
Starr
Yeah, definitely. So imagine this is gonna be a little bit of a shorter one because we just recorded um last week's podcast, like on monday in today's thursday. So I don't know if there's, there's not as much time that's passed to let um I don't know to let the hot takes regenerate themselves. Mhm
Ben
Right, well, I have a hot date for you and it's the grape, I guess most hot takes are great
Josh
what we're best at.
Ben
Uh so I'm working on an update to the Roku integration. So, you know, we haven't a clue add on and Uh we started to add on like, I don't know, back early, early days, it must have been like , or so. A long time ago. Well in , apparently Hiroki released an updated version of their API for partners like us and uh it has a new provisioning thing and you can actually call back to their API and get some information about like supervision to add on and stuff like that. Which is great. Uh We haven't ever really gotten around to changing our particular add on because it works just fine. So why bother?
Ben
But I've been looking at synchronizing the Heroku pricing with our current pricing because we've done a number of pricing variations since we launched the Heroku. And so now the two sets of pricing are pretty out of sync. So as I started to get into that I was like well you know well I'm here, how about I just you know update the A. P. I write classic classic rabbit hole. Right? And and and so I spent some time doing that and found you know some interesting quirks and so on about our integration and anyway it's all good like I got the work done and I did a pr and and josh and kevin like giving the thumbs up and I'm ready to deploy except
Ben
I have two questions for the Heroku people about about the migration because the migration you gotta be careful right? Because like the V one A P. I. Is not compatible with the V three Api And so you have to store different sets of data and the I. D. S in particular are different like they used to pass what they call a ready and now they pass an add on I. D. And you gotta you know handle the transition carefully or else someone you know maybe they can't add on the thing. Maybe they can't start being customer, maybe they can't remove the adult which would be a problem because you know or maybe they can't log in that would also again yeah prop trading right?
Josh
And so because they still get the emails
Ben
so so my questions for harajuku around this migration revolve around this idea and like handling sso and making sure that we can still provisions and provisions properly anyway. So I put two questions to them and support two days ago and that's my gripe because that's the holdup. That's the holdup I can't deploy it because I can't get answers to these questions apparently. So I'm just like oh okay I understand like people are busy and stuff but uh I would like an answer some time you know and there's no like there's no auto responder there's no we'll get back to you in X. Amount of time. No it's just like off into the void and I'm just waiting
Starr
did you maybe did you maybe use the legacy um support page Instead of the current ?
Ben
No no use the current one. Okay good question though. Good like that
Josh
this is just another example of like coding being the easy part. Uh huh.
Ben
Yeah and also a good example of like rd party integrations causing you know uh technical maintenance burden like like um oh for example like clubhouse that recently renamed themselves the shortcut. Right? And so we had to, you know, do a little bit of work there and renamed stuff inside of our app wasn't a whole lot of work but it was some work but you you add, you multiply that kind of work by the number of integrations you support and all of a sudden like this is ongoing maintenance work that doesn't, it's just you're just treading water trying to keep up with what everybody else in the world is doing. Right?
Josh
Yeah. And as new as new integration, you know, his new apps come onto the market and everyone wants to integrate with them, you just gradually expand until you, I mean you still have to support the old ones. Yeah, I think we're definitely getting to the point where every new little thing we add is like yeah, yeah, we're starting to feel it, we are starting to feel it. Yeah. And like the the depth of the integration is also I've noticed is like a big, big thing because like there's a few integrations that we like go a lot deeper with like get hub, you know, heroic. Who obviously is like a good example of that. We have a lot of issues with vera I've I've seen but who doesn't
Ben
um
Josh
but it does seem like the like I don't know, the more standardized something can be. Um and yeah, just I don't know when you're like integrating with a lots and lots of custom API's and stuff like that. They're going to switch it out on you at some point.
Josh
Yeah. Support. It
Ben
would be, it would be nice if there was like a happier plus plus, like a next level happier right? Where uh it just, it just abstracts away all these differences and you can just, you know, it's like a universal kind of thing and it's like, yeah, possibly be impossible. But
Josh
are almost like the pitch I get to the pitch there being almost like an LTs, like like an LTs contract for for integration API is like, you gotta, you gotta contract. This API isn't going to change for like years. Um and they'll just, you know, they'll do the and we'll do the internal migrations to keep the ap the same for you.
Ben
Yeah, there you go. That's that's an interesting idea. I wonder how that kind of service would cost.
Josh
I don't know, I know there's been a few um someone a micro, someone, a Microsoft had like a service that built like manage the integration side for you. Um was that Jonathan? Um Yeah, yeah, I don't know if that was like similar. I know it wasn't quite, that wasn't quite the idea, but like it was the idea that like, you know, they like give you integrations, you know, for free or whatever, like much easier to integrate with them.
Ben
Yeah, you just plug in and all of a sudden you
Josh
have immigration.
Ben
Yeah. Yeah. But the link in the show notes or see if it still exists. I haven't, I haven't
Josh
talked to Jon tester. I can't
Ben
yeah, sounds familiar.
Josh
I don't know. I remember like having their like sticker in front of me at the table microscopes.
Ben
Yeah. I haven't uh you know, having, having not gone a micro comp or business software or anything else for a couple of years now it's like it's going to keep track of what people are doing and because usually that's where I see Jonathan,
Josh
you know, there was a Microsoft Microsoft local happened in Portland yesterday. I was kind of, I was kind of, I didn't go but in hindsight I kind of wished I had. But yeah, I saw, I saw a little bit of activity on twitter
Ben
yeah look like they were having a fun time and I had the same kind of feeling. I was like, yeah I wasn't really thinking about going but then after seeing some of the tweets and like actually would've been fun to me, you know,
Josh
wow I'm in the middle of like my kids are home from school this week because there was a covid case at the school and uh, so it's got yeah got that that's fine and in the school like was not as equipped as we hoped to like handle like the, you know right, just all the um coordination and stuff like the communication, I don't know, just they're still getting it together, it seems so it could be better.
Ben
Did you sit there and think there should really be an app for managing this kind of communication between that would be family. That
Josh
would be, yeah, that would be uh that would be something because yeah, it's like, like, yeah, not everyone seems to know how to use email. Uh huh
Ben
That could be problematic.
Starr
I've never gotten so many emails about like a specific thing is, you know, recently now that my daughter is going to school. Yeah, and they're not bad. They're just like, there's just so many of them about all these different aspects of things.
Josh
Do they do they put urgent everywhere because like I've got a whole inbox of urgent emails.
Starr
Oh no. Uh huh Like they seem to be pretty on top of it. Like they're kind of um like the whole covid stuff puts a whole another layer on top. Like, I'm sure opening school is already like a lot of work, but you know, they're scrambling around and like erecting tents in the, on the blacktop so the kids can eat lunch outside and you know, all this stuff.
Starr
Okay. So they've created an official, an official channel for parents to raised their safety concerns with the school because I think they were just getting bombarded. Bye Everyone.
Josh
Yeah, I think that's where we are and I'm hoping that's they come up with something like that like some sort of process for raising concerns.
Ben
Yeah. I wonder if you start seeing like a a school board or maybe a school level position right? Like pandemic coordinator, right? And that's your point. I
Josh
I really hope I hope it doesn't last long enough to like bake the position into society. But like I guess like yeah some sort of health coordinator. I could see that being a thing for sure. And I guess yeah I mean I could probably do other things when there's not a pandemic happening I imagine. Mhm. Still be useful.
Ben
Wouldn't be a full time job is what you're saying.
Josh
Yeah. Well
Starr
I was like I was surprised at like um the school does offer like free um like flu vaccine drive through clinics and like they do a lot of stuff, it's just not just directly school and that was a little bit surprising. I mean it's awesome but
Josh
maybe I need to move to Seattle.
Starr
Um Yeah.
Ben
Yes. Well um yeah
Ben
we'll help you find a house.
Starr
Yeah it'll only cost you like a million dollars
Josh
on the low end right for a starter house. Yeah man. Well um we could talk about one of the things that I've that we were discussing this week um was the you know the hook relay launch. And I thought one interesting conversation we had was because we've we're making a few improvements to the sales site um before we sent out this email and um like published a blog post and do some basic like you know launch to our customers um sort of thing. Um And Ben you had you've been working with like a contractor or you found a contractor
Josh
to do some website, like some redesign stuff because the website we put it together kind of like I don't know what is it, It's a tail end tail insight. Um Just like what like telling you I um fairly boilerplate and uh not really very polished. So we thought it would be cool to uh you know kind of polish it up and rethink some of the content and make sure like everything flows together in terms of like called call to actions and things like that. Um But we're at the we have a decision to make like do we do we kind of just like do a little bit of work to make it you know, launch Hubble and then launch or should we like go for this full redesign that the designer of course is trying to pitch us on. And
Josh
I'm thinking that like ship it is the way to go. You know make make it make it ship herbal and then uh come back and and we'll we'll do the big the big overhaul.
Ben
Yeah I I've heard smart people say that if if you're not embarrassed by what you ship then you waited too long. So
Josh
yeah so we're probably making a mistake by not just uh shipping it as is, huh?
Ben
So the current, like if you look at the, I mean there's only like four pages right? Of the sounds like uh and of those four pages, like the best looking one I think is the one that kevin did. That's the documentation page. Uh put a lot of good work into that. And then the second best I would say it's probably the guide that you wrote. So that's
Josh
that's job because because I copied kevin
Ben
copy,
Josh
kevin's work.
Ben
And then I would say the next the next in series is the pricing page. I think it looks okay, but that's like straight from tailwind ui Uh basically copy based, like we paid, you know what, $ for the components and then worth every penny, right? Uh And then I would say the worst of all the pages is the homepage. And that's the page. That's all me. Like I I put that together. So uh I think it's pretty clear who needs to stay away from design at honey badger. It's been.
Josh
But in your defense, like you put that together, like when the product was like, like barely even alpha and we were like, we should just like, we should really like buy a domain for this. And so you like wrote a little letter and put it on there. Um And we haven't revisited since, so that's kind of what we're talking about is just revisiting um you know, making a few small changes and then then we'll get around to hopefully making something more um professional or I don't know.
Ben
Yeah, but it's funny that, as I was, as I was working with that designer that we found to help us, as we were like, scoping out the project, it was, I felt a bit of deja vu but from the other side, because I remember as a freelancer, like, I was always, you know, pitching people on the project and I would give them the grand vision and, you know, and here's the price tag,
Ben
and they'd be like, oh, out, could you, could you cut, you know, x, y and z could get the price down to whatever, you know? And uh it wasn't about the price, in this case, it was about time we wanted to get that homepage done faster so they could get this launch done sooner rather than doing a whole redesign, but I still felt kind of guilty going back to design and say, okay, that's that's great, but could we, you know, cut like all those pages and just do this one, it's not
Josh
the it's not the price timeframe, so are they going to be able to you think they'll be able to do a quick ish turn around, like um so that we'll get to get to ship this thing.
Ben
Yeah, I think so, I didn't made the mistake of not actually setting a deadline. So I'm I realized that after I agreed and paid the deposit and all this kind of so like I don't actually know when he's going to deliver stuff. That could be a problem, but I figured I'd just wait a few days because you know, I'm thinking it should only take a few days. What do I know I'm not a designer obviously, but I figured after a few days if I see nothing, I hear nothing then I'll be like, okay, so what's the timeline? And hopefully it'll be something like, you know, next week, but
Josh
this project is just like is he is he already like is you just have access to the like get a repository or is he like working something up? Like some sort of prototype or
Ben
or something like that? Yeah, you should be doing a prototype. So st, st thing is he asked us do we want how do we want to get the design part? Uh So like the choices were a PSD or stigma. So I chose stigma because we use stigma. Uh and then the second part would be okay. And there also was a question and the on boarding was okay, you want me to build this out in html CSS And of course, yes, like yes, I want you to do more work for me, thank you very much. So, so the first version is just a design and stigma and oh, actually three. So he gave us the option of just doing one, like I'll do a design and you accept it or not? Or doing three designs.
Ben
I went for the three designs because I mean I'm a client now so I get to like, you know, be deciding and stuff. So that was that was slow us down a little bit obviously because there's gonna be three designs, that one, but we'll get those three designs. That's
Josh
for that's for like the big project. Right? Or or is he doing three for the initial bill?
Ben
Well, I think that I think for the further homepage Okay. I think that's basically, I think what I was trying to communicate, I think I communicated was we want to do is basically to stage project, like we want to do the whole design, but we want the first stage to be, Let's get the homepage set. So what I'm thinking is like the design that he goes with for the homepage will then carry through to the rest of the project. The rest of the pages. Gotcha. That's mine. That's my hope.
Josh
I don't do you know, I it sounds like he's more like he's going to be coding if he's coding this up in html and CSS like I wonder he's probably not using like uh is he using anything to start with? Like could he use could he do this in tailwind for instance because that might be useful in the future if we want to like, you know, take over if we want to like do some, you know, of our own design in the future, which, you know what we're capable of is basically tailender bootstrap.
Ben
Yeah, I didn't specify to use tailwind. I didn't really care at the moment. I just wanted whatever was fastest. Uh Right. And I figure if we decide to revisit and do some structural stuff, we can always adapted the tailwind ourselves, like that kind of thing I can do, you know, I can take an existing design and I can, I can rework it, you know? Uh so I figured just get it out the door, get it done as quickly as possible. I don't, I don't care what you do and then we can, we can revisit if we need to.
Josh
Cool. Well the, I mean, once we get the whole thing redone that, that'll be nice. I don't know. We've never really done that. We've on our current on, on honey badger. Io we've never like, we've always just done it ourselves.
Ben
That's new news. Something a new venture for us to try try this sort of thing. It's great. I like experiments. So we had, speaking of experiments, we had an experiment that did not work out and I suppose we should talk about that. Uh we, we decided that the sales, the outbound sales effort is not working out for us. So uh worked with Harris at interest there and we talked about this on the podcast before. Uh, and Harris is great interest. Um, it's great, % recommend Harris and his team. If you're thinking about doing some sales stuff and you want some training, some coaching or you want someone to help you do it. All those things are great. But after having done sales work with Harris, I just realized it's
Ben
probably not gonna work for us. Maybe it's maybe it's me, maybe it's our business, maybe it's our customer segment, maybe it's a combination of all those things, but you know, Harris and I, so I told Harrison and it's just not working out, we need to, we need to turn this down and turn it off. And, and Harris was like, yeah, I was getting the feeling based on the response rate, like which is zero, uh, just wasn't working. And so, and we also like on Tuesday, I had a great call with Harris and we just did a post mortem basically the whole project and like why why didn't it work? Like we were hoping it would work and
Ben
uh, and it was, it was a blameless postmortem, like I don't think there was a particular fault. I think there are factors like, uh, we sell primarily to developers and developers, primary that usually don't want to be talked to right, They don't want to talk to a sales person, they don't really want to get unsolicited stuff. Uh, And so that's a factor, I think also like the nature of our product, like you don't really need a salesperson to explain to you exception monitoring, right? Like it's, you know, it's like if you go to the car dealership
Ben
and you're looking for an accord, you don't really need to spend a lot of time with a salesperson as he explains to you what an accord does, like, you know what an accord does, right? It's a car. Like if I know I want an accord versus camera, like I don't need any help, right? Just just tell me the car and I think it's kind of some kind of thing here is like we're not selling something that's really complicated or that needs a lot of education or it needs a lot of configuration or whatever. Like it's not a solution based sales, which I think would be a better fit for that kind of sales process. So, and, and there are other factors. Um but yeah, so that's an experiment that I think is just, uh, does it work out?
Josh
It seems like we're really positioned to sell to the developers and it's not that we couldn't, I mean, we could try to sell ourselves too because it seems like, like depending on the size of team that's using a tool like this, like you get people in the organization higher up that get involved, like managers or product managers or uh, like engineering leads and stuff that are trying to do more of the like management and coordination um stuff and those are the people that like the dashboards and the samel and like all the more enterprise features, but we don't typically like lead, like that's not that's not how our um product is positioned to, we're not like we haven't positioned ourselves to sell to that level really, it seems. Um and
Josh
yeah, I don't know, that's that's kind of interesting because, you know, you wonder at some point like if the developers are deciding what tool to buy, do they buy the same tool as like their bosses and we're trying to give the developers what they want, it may be more than we're trying to give their bosses what they want, and you know, and then we try to build those features too so that we can keep everyone happy, but like um it does, there's like yeah, it's kind of a different, like you could see like trying to take the same approach with like, you know, someone up the higher up the ladder or whatever, I could see that not being as interesting. Yeah,
Ben
one of the things and there are other factors, like one of the things that Harris taught me about sales is uh he said the money is in the follow up basically like you need to keep reaching out to the same people basically until they tell you to go away and that's not what I'm about and I don't really want to do that to people. Like we email sequence and uh inherited like, well we need to do an email sequence like this and it's like in emails long and I'm like um how about two? We send one and then we send one more and that's it. And Harris was like uh so I think in many ways like I was tying his hands because I didn't want to do the kind of sales process that a lot of people do. Right?
Josh
Well I imagine like putting your face on those emails probably like you don't, you don't want like to make a bunch of enemies of developers that you might have to work with in the future. But like what if you like, did you consider just like making a completely fictional sales? Just like salesperson persona? And it could have just been like, you know, we could have put them on the, on the sales page and everything. It's just like this fictional person that takes all the heat for sales.
Ben
I never thought of that. That's a great idea. Name, bobby bobby, the badger.
Josh
Yeah, um maybe that's like a side like, you know, kind of an Upsell offering that Harris can can add to to his product eyes thing. Like, you know, if you don't want to take the heat, like we can create something for you
Starr
that's a
Ben
that's an awesome idea should afford that on. Yeah. Yeah. So the and another factor is like uh you know, because there are there are companies, we have competitors that are selling into the enterprise and do that sort of thing and um, I think I think you hit on a point there. It's like are we, are we selling to me selling the typical enterprise solution where the buyer has to be happy or are we selling something where the user has to be happy? Right. And and sometimes that they're both happy but and often times it isn't and in our case we're focusing on that and user and it doesn't make that user happy if we're pestering them with emails or you know, getting in their way of actually just trying the product. And so anyway, I think for now at least we are
Ben
Better served as a % inbound kind of company and maybe spend those resources on customer success or engagement or something like that. Yeah,
Josh
it's interesting but it
Ben
was fun while it lasted.
Josh
Well, I'm glad, I'm glad it wasn't a complete drag. You got to, you got to learn a little bit about sales. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I think like uh like competition, just like the, we're in such a like a competitive space and most of our competitive, our competitors also go for those like enterprise segments. Um so it could actually be, you know, it could be good for us to stay, you focused on the on the smaller, like, you know, the smaller, the smaller end of the market in a way because they're probably somewhat underserved at this point,
Josh
yep.
Starr
All right. So um when is the hook really lunch
Starr
or is this and how to fix fixed? Okay. So we don't know what to tell people
Josh
we're meeting, we're meeting next next week to kind of finalize it. But I'm imagining like we're going to push it out the door as soon as we have, you know, some I think we're going to wait for a few updates to the homepage, but otherwise we're going to ship it. And who knows? Like if if this project ends up kind of dragging on at all or anything like we could just decide to, you know, kind of just go what we have. It's not, you know, it's not it's it's workable. So maybe we should just like stop procrastinating, right? But we'll we'll decide next week at our um hook really marketing meeting.
Ben
Yeah, the good news is we already have customers who are using it who are paying us money to use it. So that's that's nice. Like it's not just burning cash with a bunch of a rack of servers doing nothing. You know,
Josh
So I would say it's in the next couple weeks.
Starr
Awesome. I'm sure when that happens we'll um be blowing horns and making all sorts of noise on this show and directing people to the right place. Uh huh. All right. Was there anything else you guys want to talk about? Should we should wrap it up?
Josh
We can wrap it. We can wrap it.
Starr
All right. Well, you all have been listening to um found request. If you want to go read us on apple podcasts or whatever the kids are calling it these days, go for it. Um And yeah, we'll catch you next week. Thank you.
Josh
Yeah, No.
Show notes:
Links:
Bold Badgers NFT
Mantis scooter
Ridwell
Write for Honeybadger
Transcript:
note - this is an unedited automatically generated transcript with about 80% accuracy
Josh: So we really are we doing this, uh, super quick. Do we need to like speed up our voices? Artificially
Ben: The chipmonk episode.
Starr: There you go. No, we should just, we should slow them down. So it'll um, we can just record a minute episode and then we'll take minutes to listen to it.
Josh: Yeah, yeah. That's right. That's what we've been doing all along. That's our life hack is it takes us minutes to record these episodes and you listened to them in minutes.
Starr: Yeah. So that's the, um, so I'll fill in our listeners. We, um, we miss our normal recording day on Friday, and so we're making it up on a Monday, which means like we're jam packed in with a bunch of other stuff. Um, so this may be a little shorter than usual and I'm sorry. I know you just have to have all of us all the time and we're just giving it all we can right now.
Josh: Yeah, it'll be just as off topic though. So, um,
Starr: I would thank God.
Ben: Yeah. Speaking, speaking of off topic, I have, I have a public service announcement to make. As, as you know, I've been getting more into the electric vehicles scene, uh, personal mobility, micro mobility, all that kind of fun stuff. And I, you know, a few months ago bought an electric scooter. It's a mantis for those who are curious, who are in the know, uh, and I've been really enjoying that, like riding back and forth to work and goofing off and that sort of thing. But the thing that's, the public service announcement is, uh, wear a helmet. If you're going to ride one of these pillars. I just, this past week saw two different people riding on scooters, similar to mine, like higher powered scooters, mixing it up with traffic, like on mile per hour roads and not wearing a helmet. And I just thought that is insane. Like, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, yeah, you should definitely wear a helmet if you're going to ride electric scooter at miles an hour, just saying that's my PSA.
Josh: I did go for, I went for a, my first ride on an EBI bike, um, last week and I must confess I did not wear a helmet. And, uh, I have to say it was, you know, it was kind of fun. Like, you know, little dangerous, there was no traffic. Like there was very little traffic, so in my defense.
Ben: Okay. That's a plus. Do you remember what kind of bike your Rover's like a super ? Like one of those models
Josh: I have, I have a very bad memory for names of things and I was told, but, uh, no, I don't know, but actually I was, it was with, uh, it was the bike of, uh, Mike Perrin, who is a friend of the show and creator of sidekick. So I'm sure he will, uh, hopefully listen to this and, and let us know. And then we can fill everyone in the next week. Maybe
Ben: I think, I think he has a super . It's a, and that's a pretty sweet,
Josh: It's like the super it's like one of the fastest ones on the market, he said, yeah, cool. Or something like that.
Ben: I'm going to have to get down to Mike's house and borrow some of his bikes. And
Josh: It was a lot of fun. I'd never, I'd never done that before. And I, I get the appeal now.
Ben: Yeah. So when, when I got my scooter, Mike was like, I don't know, scooters. They're kind of, uh, I don't exactly what he tweeted, but he's like, yeah, they're kind of sketchy because they're not very stable and stuff and he's right. They are integrated stable compared to the bikes, but it's still a lot of fun. So I just wear a full face helmet to counteract the wobbliness. Yeah.
Starr: Did y'all know I have a, an electric bike? No, it's called a Peloton.
Josh: You were so smug with that one.
Starr: It's the perfect bike for me because it doesn't move. Um, it's like all the, got all the nice things about the bike, like the workout, but you don't go anywhere. You don't have to Dodge any traffic. Uh, don't have to wear a helmet screen.
Josh: Yeah. Those sound, those do sound seriously though. Those, those, uh, look pretty, pretty nice.
Ben: Yeah. I have, I have a low-tech Peloton. It's just a trainer. I brought my bike on.
Josh: Is your bike on it? Yeah. Yeah. But I like, I don't know the what, from what I've heard of the Peloton , uh, those they've got all the bells and whistles right star.
Starr: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, really it's um, it's not so much about the actual bike for me. It is, as it is about having some like super enthusiastic person, like, um, playing really good music and just being like, you've got this, you were born for greatness and just like saying stuff like that at me. Um, while I'm like trying to, you know, read them a little bit,
Josh: You say that, but like, you know, like I, I try to, you know, give that experience to Katelyn, for instance, my wife and she just like, she hates like, she's like get, get out of here.
Starr: I think, I think it's easier. I think it's a little easier when there's not like an actual person there, you know, Just hire a social exercise
Ben: That started out live, get, you know, the, uh, the motivational speaker guy lives in a, down by the river. I'm just, I'm just thinking about Chris Farley, like standing by your exercise bike. You can do it. You've got this.
Josh: If we could get a, yeah. If we could get that, um, on the Peloton, I would subscribe like if he was one of the trainers, I mean, like, you know,
Ben: So just bring him back from the dead, have him record some such the Peloton and then, yeah, that'd be awesome. I miss Chris Farley.
Starr: So Ida likes to ride the Peloton too, that she's not big enough for it. Um, but she is a, her, her feet can touch the pedals. Um, but they can't reach all the way down. So she's kinda like kicks the pedal down and then catches it on the way back up. And so she asked me to put on a little video so she can do it to the music too. Yeah. Oh, I need to give an update about my, um, about the printing press. I know everybody's like waited, waiting the press breath about that
Josh: Date. I thought, yeah. I didn't know. There was news so, well, I
Starr: Mean, the news is I have given up on it. I went down to Tacoma. I went down to see it and it worked and everything, and I just really got a sense for like how big and heavy it was going to be. And, um, then I started, I measured it and I started actually trying to figure out how I would get it into my building. Um, because like, it's just, my, my office is in the backyard. It's, uh, it's, we're having our backyard redone soon, but right now it's just all bumpy and lumpy. And so it's like trying to like roll this thing. I would have to construct like a, a path out of plywood. I'd have to build a ramp up to my, um, the doorway, um, then to actually get it into the location where it's going to be. I would have to completely like dismantle all my shelving and, um, then like re assemble it once I had put the thing in place. And so if I ever wanted to move it again, I'd have to like completely take down all my shelving. I was just like, this is too much. Like, this is, um, like I can't, I can't justify this on it. Like I'm, I'm waking up early in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. Cause I'm like, how the hell am I going to like move this thing? It's like, no, that's not a good hobby for me right now.
Ben: That's too bad. Have you looked into typewriters?
Starr: I mean, quite the same thing
Josh: I would get into typewriters though. Just like aside,
Starr: I am looking into smaller, into a smaller press. They have smaller like desktop ones that are a couple of hundred pounds. Um, not, not like a thousand and looking into that sad,
Ben: sad to hear it didn't work out, but I let's get pictures of that in any one. If you get a small one, that'd be kind of fun.
Starr: Yeah. I just have to, I, uh, I almost saw him this weekend, but somebody swooped in before me. And so now I'm just going to have to wait like six months until another one pops up. Cause like it's, they're not very, there's not a very liquid market. It's not like in a, I guess, I guess there is a liquid market, I guess, I guess they just kind of get snapped, snatched up and then like, there's just not any of them. Yeah.
Josh: Do you still get to like, do you have to do like type setting and stuff?
Starr: Yeah. You do like, um, there's a couple ways to do it. Like you can do it the old school way where you have like the lead type and you like, um, you know, put it letter by letter and do like a composing stick and do all that. Um, I probably wouldn't do that just because I'm not sure I have the time and patience. Um, so there's a, an updated way to do it where, um, you can, um, you know, send a PDF off and they'll make a, uh, a plate for you and it's plastic and then you just use that. So, um, yeah. And you can make them yourself too. It's just, you know, takes more equipment and more, you know, you know how I'm work and stuff.
Josh: Maybe you could get like a specialized, d printer to like printer plates for you.
Starr: Cool. Do you use like, uh, um, people to use like a, a Glowforge like a laser cutter cool. Or laser engraver?
Josh: That's a, that's a fun hobby. That sounds, that sounds like fun.
Starr: Oh yeah. Oh, I went down the rabbit hole of reading all about laser engravers too. Like there's like this cheap one from China that you can get for like bucks. And then like, it's apparently got good internals, but like, you really have to soup it up. And so like that's some people's whole personality is they just do that.
Josh: Nice before we get off the topic of a paper and things that interface with paper. Um, I like ordered something off of Amazon that I was
like, I don't know why I was like this excited about it arriving. Like maybe I'm just like extreme, like my, you know, I'm extremely bored and needed something to look forward to. But like Amazon basics, paper, shreds, shredder, sharpening, and lubricate, lubricant sheets. And I get all, I'm not going to say that again. I hope you like got that. Um, I did not know that this existed though. Cause like I have like a paper shredder. It's like a cheap, you know, a cheap one, but like I never, like, I never oil it cause don't like just, I don't know how, okay. Like just the thought of like getting a, like a bottle of oil or something and like trying to like dump it.
Josh: Like I just, I don't know. So I like was like trying to figure out like, how do you oil these things? And it turns out they make sheets of paper that had the oil like in them and you just run them through the shredder. I didn't know. Like maybe everyone knows this. I did not know this was a thing. And uh, I mean it's like the perfect, it's like the perfect, uh, lubricant solution for your shredder because, um, you just, you know, it's like shredding a piece of paper, which is fun in and of itself. Like who doesn't like shredding paper. So pro tip, you don't need
Starr: Waiting. How do they work? Um,
Josh: My shredder might be too far gone from the lack of oiling, but I'm going to like, wait and see. Oh no, we'll wait and see. Luckily I did get the cheap one. So now that I'm like an expert on shredder maintenance, um, my next shredder maybe I'll even upgrade or something.
Starr: I actually, um, I bought an Amazon basic shredder. That is, uh, it's a, it's a fairly big one, um, for home use, but it's, it's uh, Amazon basics and it's actually really good.
Ben: That is a cross cut. Cause that's the key feature right there.
Starr: I, I think the cross cuts. Yeah. See
Ben: Mine. Mine's a cheapo one that just does strips
Josh: And that's, I mean that's the strips. Yeah.
Ben: Gotta have the crossover.
Starr: Yeah. They can always go in the strips back together.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: I was a little disturbed to find out though. My, my local trash and recycling facility, uh, our city requests that you not put shredded paper in the recycle, uh, I don't know why they can't handle the recycle shredded paper, but yeah. So if, if all the stuff that I shred, it has to go in the trash, which seems kind of wrong, you know, it's like it's paper cause then recycle. Right. But
Josh: That's because I'm pretty sure recycling is a big scam and none of it actually works. Like you think it does because like Kaylin, like Katelyn knows all about recycling and I am constantly trying to like be a good person and recycle things and she's like, no, that's not recyclable. Like you can't like, that's going to actually like, that's going to like make the recycling people mad because like they have to sort through this and like, you know, take it out before they can actually like repurpose. So yeah, it seems like there's very, uh, relatively little that is actually recyclable. At least in my experience. So far
Starr: We subscribed to an additional recycling service, um, read well. And uh, yeah. So they like, you can't recycle, um, just a normal city was like, when you can't put like plastic bags or any sort of like plastic film stuff. Right. So like they take that and um, like they'll take, uh, like fabric stuff, like clothes, um, and like batteries and light. And then they have like a rotating category where um, like once every three months or whatever, it's like, you can put your old electronic devices in there and they'll like, you know, have those recycled and whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty nice.
Josh: Yeah. Cause I'm everything I hear lately about like just normal recycling, just as depressing. Like it's like, I don't know. I hear like, you know, half the recycling isn't even like being taken care of taken,
Starr: You know, like they're like shipping
Josh: It to other countries or burying it in landfills anyways. It just it's like, yeah, it's kind of sad. It doesn't make me want to recycle.
Ben: Cool. Let's see. Maybe, maybe my municipality then is forward-looking because they know there's going to put in the landfill. So there's just saving a step, right? Yeah. Just put it in the trash. Cause we're going to put out the trash anyway. Right?
Josh: Yeah. And then
Ben: They actually did that for a styrofoam. We used to have a regular styrofoam collection event. Like every month you could go down to city hall and you could dump your old styrofoam and they would take care of it. And then like, you know what, we just can't even cost effectively handle styrofoam anymore. So don't even, it's not even worth driving down to the city hall to drop it off. Just put it in your trash. It's like, oh, that's so sad.
Starr: Well, the, the rebel also does styrofoam. Like it's um, that's cool. It's it's not included in the base like price, but they give you a big bag and they're like, okay, whenever you're done with filling up this giant bag, like it'll cost, I don't know, five or $ to recycle it.
Josh: Okay. Well we got to remember put it in the show notes cause I'm going to look at it too. Okay. Sure. I mean, it does seem like I'd rather the city, like if the city like legitimately can't handle it and they're just like secretly like just trashing it anyway. It's like, it's better just to acknowledge the problem so that a real solution, hopefully it can, you know, like maybe like something like this, like people can start to, you know, pay extra for it or, or whatever. But like, it just seems like ignore, like just pretending, like just, just so everyone can feel good. Like, you know, just keep the people, you know, let them feel like they're recycling when they're not, does not seem like a solution that's going to like solve any problems.
Ben: But you know, what's, what's free to recycle the bits that you send to Honeybadger. We recycle those things all day long. You send us those, those API bits and they get efficiently recycled right away.
Starr: I thought y'all were going to recycle those into NFTs.
Josh: Oh yes. We don't. Don't uh, can't
Ben: Spill the beans yet. Yeah. Like
Josh: Tell everyone our new business strategy. I think already I put that on Twitter already that we're pivoting into crypto and Airtraq and it's going to be a side business. Yes.
Starr: It might confuse people. There's already like a Honeybadger coin or something out there.
Josh: Yeah. And there's also like multiple Badger NFTs by the way. So
Ben: Yeah, just a little delight.
Josh: That was like a brave badgers. Brave badgers on Salada. I think there's one.
Ben: Yeah. Put that in the show notes. Make sure people check it out. Not officially endorsed by Honeybadger, but still cool. I
Starr: Think we should put out our own line of pugs.
Josh: Yes. Yeah. I mean like I'm surprised pugs. Aren't like, so someone's rolling an NFT for pugs, to be honest.
Starr: I wasn't making it come back. I hear.
Ben: Yeah. If we're going to, if we're going to go retro, like let's go all the way. Retro let's skip the whole collectible cards and stuff and go straight to playing cards. Right. I'll play for the two cards with different batteries on them. Yeah.
Starr: I thought you were going to say to me, light bulbs or something.
Josh: Absolutely. I've been, I'm curious. Have you learned anything about, uh, crypto or NFTs lately?
Ben: You know, no, I haven't really, I I've been, I've been watching people in my Twitter feed and it's, it's funny, there's this, there's this arc that I see, like their first tweet is like, what is this crypto stuff? And then their next tweet is like, this crypto stuff is crazy. And then a little bit later, there's another tweet. It's like, I'm going to look into this crypto set because I want to understand it. And then a little bit later there's like, Hey, check out this NFC I just bought. And then a little bit later, their final tweet is like, here, come join this, this core community and get into my mint.
Josh: And, and they have a new Twitter avatar that has like laser eyes.
Ben: Yeah. It's kinda, it's crazy. So, so I've like, I've seen this again and again and again, I'm like, okay, I'm not, I'm afraid. I don't wanna
investigate the Nazis because
Starr: So R oh, I'm going to get, I'm going to get, I'm going to get so much hate over this, but our, um, our NFTs just like, um, MLM for like tech rose.
Ben: Yes, totally. They are
Josh: Essentially,
Starr: That's like, I've got, I've like, I'll just tell my I'm essentially. I've got my sensory over here. My essential oils.
Josh: Yeah. Well spring as well. I mean like, technically I think you probably could code a MLM on Ethereum, so I'm sure it's already been done,
but maybe that, you know, maybe, maybe we should just go for it. Just go full a full billing. There you go.
Starr: That's it. Everybody you heard it. We're going full villain now.
Josh: Crypto villain. Yeah. I I've checked it out as well. A little bit. Um, I bought a, uh, an FTE on Solano just to see. And, um, actually I did not follow the pattern that you, uh, that you described Ben:, but I also did not let myself do this publicly, which I think is a big key. Like you people know, like you can create anonymous identities on the internet. Um, it's still possible. And then you can go explore, you know, like NFTs or whatever, and you don't have to like have laser eyes on your main Twitter profile. Um, but you know, I went and looked at it and uh, I'm still, I'm like still learning. I'm like, you know, I'm trying to update my, you have the whole crypto scene is a little bit, you know, a little bit dated. Like I checked it out, like after Bitcoin got, you know, it was starting to get popular and stuff, read some white papers, but I think it's, I mean, it's, you know, it's not going away regardless, so it's good to keep your view current at least. But, um, I am not, uh, you know, bought into, I have an eight in as the kids say,
Ben: Well, I mean, back to the two lips, I think I'll just wait until the crash happens. Right. And then I'll have a bias of nice to have those
Josh: Do that. Yeah. That's the, that's the cycle. I mean, you know, it's going to happen. That happens like in every, every, it seems like every new application of blockchain that, you know, comes out that goes through the same, like boom and bust cycle, um, and then levels out to, uh, you know, fairly regular boom and bust cycle.
Ben: I mean, you know, confessional here, but I'm actually a laggard when it comes to tech stuff. Like I'm pretty late on the adoption curve for a lot of things. Like, you know, my car is pretty old, my TV's kind of old, you know, I'm not really sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's just kinda, it's kinda weird. I'm in the tech world, but like, I don't really jump in on things like that. I'll just wait,
Starr: That's pretty normal. Right. There's like, um, I don't know. There's I saw some, I forget where I saw somebody say it was like, there's two types of tech people. One has the newest of everything all the time. And the other one is like still working on like a, a PC.
Josh: Yeah. Whatever.
Starr: Yeah. I don't know about y'all, but like, I don't really know a lot of like tech people who have like, um, like voice assistance in their home.
Josh: Yeah. I like that as much as like the consumer more than just regular consumers. Yeah.
Ben: That's because we know it's like I write software. I know how bad it is.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. That's why I don't like having them. So I don't trust, I don't trust software, but I don't know, like the block, the whole blockchain thing. Like, I, I, you know, I kind of get the, like the future application argument, like there's something here. Like I think it is like that idea of having like very easy, like making contracts easier, for instance, or giving software, the ability, like making it easier to write applications that are built on like contracts or, or even like financial applications. Like the whole idea of like, like code being able to hold its own its own actual currency or money. Um, because it's like, you know, it's just bits. Like that is interesting. Like, I don't know, you know, I'm not enough of a futurist to be able to like see the future where, you know, that's like ubiquitous, but like it is, I can see that aspect of it. It's interesting. But like the whole, like, yeah. I'm not like collecting a bunch of, uh, NFTs in the meantime.
Ben: Yeah. I think smart contracts. The idea is interesting. I think, you know, the stuff that's being loosely called web three, I think that's kind of stuff is interesting, but the, but the whole I'm going to buy a smart contract thing that represents a JPEG and then I'm gonna hold on to it and it's going to be worth a million bucks. That part of it doesn't really appeal to me. Like, yeah, I guess I'm just not yet.
Josh: Well, you're also not an art. You're not like an art collector either. I would assume that's true. I don't think you have a house full of priceless art. I would, that would be my guess. I mean, I don't want to like, yeah, like over assume, but I mean, like, I think that's the kind of person that this would, this definitely like appeals more to like the collector and, uh, I'm, I'm also not a collector. So, um,
Ben: Um, I do have one, I do have one piece of art in my house, so I'm not a complete, you know, Rube, but, uh, but yeah, I am not, I'm not a collector. Yeah.
Starr: I think the big, um, like, like I'm thinking about how like Bitcoin and stuff has been around and, you know, blockchain has been around for over a decade at this point. Right. Um, and like still now, like, you know, it looks a lot, I don't know, to me, just from the outside, it looks very similar to what it did back then. It's like, it's like, um, a bunch of people, very excited about it and what it means, and this kind of like vague way, um, that like seems like, you know, it'll pan out in the future, but we're not quite sure how yet. And like, I'm wondering if the big, um, I'm wondering if the thing that like blockchain is actually successful at is in, um, being very like evocative to a certain type of person, um, making a certain type of, you know, developer or a tech person, like feel a certain way. Like I wonder if that's the main success of blockchain, because that seems to be like, mostly what I'm seeing is like a bunch of people, you know, excited a bunch of people. Um, I don't know, like, like wanting to discuss the future of things and you know, being smart about it. And it's like, I wonder if that, um, that process is the whole reason that it stuck around. I don't know.
Ben: It's good, good point.
Josh: There's definitely some interesting stuff out there. Um, and some very, I mean, like, I think it's undeniable that there are some very people that have thought all this stuff up, like yeah. But yeah, I don't know. You're right. It's, it's been around a lot. Like the, it seems like the adoption curve as much longer on this one. If, if it is going to be the, you know, the next big thing, I don't know. It does. I don't know. It'll be interesting. But I figured in the meantime, like keeping, keeping an eye on, let's just try to learn more about it. But, um, I'm not really the, I try to avoid situations where I just like dive in and become a like true believer. So I'm, I'm learning from afar.
Ben: I'll just go buy some GME. That'll go to fix.
Starr: I dunno. I'm just going to go for AMC, myself. Like the movies, like the movies have been around forever.
Ben: Well, confession time I actually bought some AMC. Oh yeah. When the whole GME thing was going crazy and AMC got part of it. I went and bought some AMC. Cause I'm like, you know what, thinking about it. It's like, I wasn't really interested in the main stock thing, but I was thinking, okay, pandemics going to go away some point, right. People are gonna get back out and they're going to go to movies again. Right. It's going to be, and I'm actually, I think I'm doing pretty good on the whole AMC purchase. We'll see how it goes. Pandemic didn't end yet, but I can still close the fingers.
Josh: I mean, as a futurist, I do expect more things to become MIMA fide. So if you can like predict those trends, then go, you know, get in early because, uh, everything's going to be a meme on the blockchain. Eventually.
Ben: That's a good thing. Our business is based on a meme now. We're, we're, we're totally with it.
Josh: Yeah. All right. We're finally with it on the whole meme thing.
Starr: Well, as the present test, I think you should just enjoy it while you can.
Josh: You mean all the mains or I don't
Starr: Really know. I just want to get, it seemed like a pithy thing to say
Ben: It's apropos. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: Well, we discussed like, no, like I think we, I think we actually discussed like nothing related to the business this time and that is, you know, that's moving forward.
Ben: This is our Seinfeld episode, the episode about
Josh: Speed. Oh, speaking of Seinfeld, we finished the last, the final episode of Seinfeld, um, that like a couple nights ago. And it like, cause we've been like Kayla and I have been like going through it, like for like years at this point, like just slowly, like, cause it's not every night you want to watch Seinfeld. Like it's, it's gotta be like a Seinfeld night. So we finally, like, we didn't realize we were like at the end. Um, and it was kind of a, it was a little bittersweet moment kind of like
Starr: At the end of real Seinfeld when it aired. So, and you just heard that green day song starts swelling. It's something I'm predictive of your life. I know. So enjoy it while you can enjoy it while you can.
Starr: You've been listening to founder quest. If you want to give us a review, go to wherever you do that and do that. I don't know. I've never been given a podcast or review, to be honest. I don't know how you do it. Um, so I may just be sending you out to nowhere. Um, and yeah, if you're interested in writing for us, we are usually looking for authors and stuff for a blog. Um, check out honeybadger.io forward slash blog and look for the right press link and learn all about, you know, all about that. And we will see you next week. See ya. See ya. Bye.
Show notes
Links:Hey Dumpster Fire
Goatse.cx
Full transcript:
This is an unedited automated transcript which is only about 80% accurate
Starr
Yeah, well, sad news. Um I did not see my printing press last weekend because I I came down with a cold, it wasn't it wasn't covid, so don't worry, it's okay. Um But we're waiting for the test to come back. So you know the difference between now and the before times is now when you get a cold life shuts down and you can't really do anything until your results come back.
Josh
Well and you know the other thing about like during the pandemic, everyone's home like just the printing press market is just going wild right now, so like, there's going to be gone, I'm sure it'll be gone long gone by the time you're feeling better.
Starr
Exactly, everybody's going to print their manifestos,
Josh
right? Yeah,
Ben
well, you know, since my kid is able to take care of his own school needs and I didn't have to like sideline myself for that, like, like star, I actually got some stuff done this week, but uh but not going to tell you me. So I've been really get into this groove on having other people do things, so
Starr
it's not definite,
Ben
it's so nice, so nice. So shall I was able to deliver a feature that we want in Hungary there for a long time and that is being able to deliver to multiple your ills. So we give you a hook address that you post to and then you can say, okay, up to three different Charles will then get that delivery that post. So
Josh
that's pretty cool,
Starr
wow, Broadcasting broadcasting
Ben
your publisher, this is something that one of our customers asked for and something we've wanted for a while and, and uh I apologize, I think to shop because I kind of dropped the ball on, you know, helping this get this, get this feature over the goal, you know, he uh he had done some work a few months ago and I just was distracted and didn't really uh follow up on it, like, I should have, and then and then once I did follow up like I should have, then it's like, you know what, I don't think we want to go with this round, I think I want to go a different round. So we ended up re implementing the whole thing in a different way, but so I appreciate his patients but got that launch, That's feeling pretty good.
Starr
That's awesome. So um so hook really is a product that we're uh you know, we've lost, you can just go sign up for right now, right? Yeah. Ok. Yeah, so it's uh it's like magic for your wife hooks, so if you if you want to um if you want to send a web hook, you just send it to our service and then we make sure that it gets deliver, that's super reliable, that I don't know, there's just a lot of details that you have to implement around doing web hooks, right? And we do this for you. And so now it sounds like you can have that sort of broadcast to multiple points
Josh
also works for inbound web hooks. So no matter what the flaky services that is sending you sending you web hooks, I think what we're doing right now is broadcasting, by the way, um but yeah, no matter what the flaky service that you have to integrate with, you know, to send to receive data from them if your app goes or maybe your app is flaky, if if your app is going down, um you can just be sure that when you get back online, hook relay will be there to relay all the web hooks that you missed.
Starr
Well, I've got I've got a term for it, you can feel free to use this in your marketing. So that means that um since it does both outbound and inbound, that means you're full duplex
Josh
well, Duplex. I like it, I like it going to write it down, You know, like that would be an awesome, like if we did kind of like, you know, like, like I don't know, like s marketing theme, like with me on colors and stuff and we're like full duplex. Just that going well together.
Ben
Do you remember speaking of the eighties, remember back and when you connect with your modem and it would be the wrong duplex setting. And so everything you typed would be double right? You get every care, it could be a double f. You know? And they're like, oh man, full duplex. I gotta reconnect at half duplex. Yeah,
Josh
we should we should do like a, like a marketing, like, like a Youtube video, you know, like this little sketch or something of you trying to connect to your modem. Yeah,
Ben
awesome.
Josh
Yeah. So
Ben
yeah, in fact, I used, I used to create this morning for doing an inbound hooks setting up. So we're working on the broadcast emails, that's the task, that's another task has been on our to do this for a long time. Uh I was working on that this morning and uh we use postmark for our email delivery and when one of the things uh they did recently a few months ago they had this new feature and their product called announced broadcasts, announcements, broadcast exactly what it's called. But basically before this feature, post Margaret, just about transactional email, like it could only send things that were triggered by a user, right? Like a password reset email or you know, in our case we send a lot of notifications for errors, you know, to individual users,
Ben
but then they launched this new broadcast feature which allows you to use their infrastructure for, you know, kind of marketing, like emails like maybe announcements about your, you know, new products or your new features or maybe have new terms of service or whatever. So more and more of a broadcast email rather than an individual email. And uh one of the features that they have and the reason why I was using the web book is they can they have, we'll add an unsubscribe link for you at the bottom of the emails that go out. And so of course the person may click the unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from us anymore, which would be, you know, totes sad, but it happens
Ben
and then it goes to postmark and then postmark records that unsubscribe intent and then sends it can optionally send a web hook to you. And so uh yeah, so I set up a cookery, they target for that postmark web hook so that even if our app goes down, which of course it never does, but if it did then we would have all those, you know, web hooks from postmark happily saved in Hungary. They uh getting along of it to see is nice. I wonder
Josh
like the go ahead. Sorry,
Starr
I was just going to say. So you can um the inbound web hooked payloads get saved and then you can just pull them down whatever you want. That's convenience. Like I want I want that inbound with a hook data, but I don't want to build a web hook right now, I don't want to build like something to like get that right now. I just want I just want to know that the data someplace and get it later.
Josh
Yeah. Yeah. I wondered like the utility of that feature might be pretty, pretty huge depending on like what people are doing with web hooks these days, you know like I don't know like receiving, you know, recording payments or um activated subscriptions. Yeah,
Ben
or you know if you're if you're building a feature that's gonna accept the web hook but you don't it is not launched yet or you don't know exactly what you're going to get because you know sometimes your provider might say, well this is what we're gonna send you but you actually really be sure. Right. So you can, you can set up the cookery. They link first start getting some real web hooks from them. See what they're like before. Well yeah actually we
Josh
don't have an option. Yeah, we have an option to like to not just receive but not forward. Right. Right. Yeah. So he's a sort of as like a interim development.
Starr
Can we have an option? Um do we have an option to receive and just immediately discard just for you know, just when you're just fed up with that website provider?
Ben
Yes. I think we actually do have that. So we have like this. Yeah forget this. We have a disabled button so the link still works like I can still post to it but it won't, nothing will happen with the payload is just goes into it either devon all
Josh
you can set up like that. The dumpster fire thing like like a base camp did well back where we, you know, we have someone just burn it for you. I mean it's probably like, it's like yeah environmentally responsible to
Starr
like get sense to like it gets sent to a, did you see that star? We just take the exact yeah I didn't see it. No.
Josh
Okay so it was pretty awesome. Like they yeah, I forget like what was the, what were the emails like it was, you would give you like they had an address that you could um, email at? Hey, right. Hey dot com. And like they had someone actually like with a printer set up in a webcam and everything. Like they were just like, like they would print out your email I think and like just burn it like in front of the camera or something like that, Wasn't it? Something like that. Yeah,
Starr
That would be a weird job.
Josh
Yeah. Well, it was, yeah, it was definitely start. Yeah.
Ben
Yeah. We should definitely something that I don't know. Maybe every time you get a look at it, tickles a honey badger. I don't know. I can think of something.
Starr
Yeah, that's an even weirder job. I don't think I want to do that. Good.
Ben
Yeah. So I got, I got a tweet dM today um, from someone uh, asking about something from a previous founder quest episode in which we talked about. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. That was cool. So, you know, everyone's always welcome to do that because that's fun for us. The uh, the message was a question about, were we talked in the previous episode about the automation, the automated monitoring that I added for our sake too, compliance stuff. And the question was like, you know, did we go with a particular provider? And yes, yes, we did. We went withdraw to, so we looked at van to and looked at secure secure frame and we looked at Dorada and uh, they're, they're pretty comparable all three of them. But are we, it came down to, we really liked draw to just a bit more than secure frame,
Ben
which would be perfectly fine solution I think to you, we almost went with him and then an advantage was kind of like in this kind of distant third like they're okay. But what I really like drought and secure frame. So I don't know why. I didn't say who he selected before but there it is in case anyone is curious and didn't feel like actually asking uh there you go,
Starr
awesome. And remember the, the answer to the first security question is all of the above. Mhm. Oh my God, they're gonna drop us as a customer now. I just violated the terms of service haven't giving
Josh
out the answers.
Starr
Maybe it's none of the above. Hopefully they switch out the questions.
Ben
Uh speaking of questions, we got a we got a vendor questionnaire, security questionnaire the other day and I was looking at the answer. I was going through and answering the questions and there was this whole section about card data. And I thought to myself, oh how quaint like back in the day when we had to actually worry about securely storing credit card data. You know, these days, you know, we use stripe and we don't care. We never touched a car or data. And so I was able to, you know, Mark in a to all those things. But I just, it's kind of a blast from the past to see questions about, you know, do you, do you ever send credit card details via email? No, no, we do not. Our whole
Josh
payment system, man. Yeah.
Starr
Business card data though. We just like have those in a box in the closet.
Ben
Yeah, we secure this to our
Starr
business cards.
Josh
Well, they're apparently there are vendors that are still doing it that way. Yeah.
Ben
Yeah. Which is kind of scary when you think about it.
Starr
You know, it's funny like with the compliance, I've been um there's been a couple of times where um, well, I've got to explain my setup. So I've got a little office in my backyard. I'm the only one here. Um and there's been a couple of times where I'm about to like go into the house or whatever my computer's on and normally like I'm just going to leave it running and stuff. And then I was like, nope. I, and the compliance says I've got to lock it before I leave my office from which I uh and it's like, okay, it's like, should I leave the door open the office? No, I gotta lock it, compliance says I've got to have, you know, adequate physical security measures
Josh
like you want, like one of the squirrels getting in there. Okay, finding it unlocked?
Ben
Well, I appreciate your diligence star. That's, that's going above and beyond right there.
Starr
Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's, it's ridiculous. But yeah.
Ben
Well on that note, one of the things that has annoyed me about the compliance requirements is that they prefer that you have um your screen saver lock Within, you know, x minutes, minutes or whatever it is. Right? And they actually check that we have an agent that runs on each computer to make sure that we actually have that enabled and I surveillance. I never had that enabled because you know, like you like who's who's here? Like it's just me, like I'm the only person here, right? But now I have to have this screen saver that locks and
Starr
sometimes you want to read things so that takes a little while or like watch a video or something. Mhm.
Ben
So, but you know, it serves the greater good. So
Josh
I already had my screen saver set because I have perfect operational security.
Starr
What's that outside that window, josh behind you? Is that Massad? I think it's Massad,
Starr
but they can't get in. They can't get in. Okay. Good. Just banging against the door.
Josh
I got the dog patrolling the perimeter right now.
Josh
Yeah, well I learned to keep my screen lock at a small time window when I shared an office with my brother because we would like actually, I don't know, I don't know if you ever actually got me, I think I like one time I like installed a Cron job, like a random crime job on his computer that like remember that it played like uh like read out like a random random spot quote I think with, you know with the with the speech to text, text to speech thing in backup in Mac. Os. Yeah, I remember after that I was like he is going to retaliate and I need to, I need to like up my security game. So
Starr
that would be one way to like um to harden an office. It's just like encouraged employees to prank one another.
Josh
Well that's where I think it started. Like I think we're kind of like doing that a little bit and yeah, it is a I don't know if I should if it's recommended but it is hilarious.
Ben
That sounds, that sounds perfect for like an internal security team at a large enterprise. Like they should give prizes for the best pranks, you know, that actually expose security weaknesses like that, you know because you know they do these things like they will send an email to everyone in the company and like click on this link and then someone does and they're like, oh gotcha, you weren't supposed to
Starr
click on that. It's fishing
Ben
and everyone's like, oh you suck. You know? But if they made a crowdsource it.
Josh
Yeah, get everyone involved.
Ben
Yeah, totally.
Starr
It's like whoever the best rick roller is gets a bonus
Josh
a hackathon where everyone's a target.
Ben
Maybe maybe you have to maybe have to put some parameters around it like maybe it's only the week around april fool's right. And so you know, people can be on a higher guard. I don't know
Starr
how it makes sense. Otherwise you'd have foster a climate of like continual mistrust. Yeah, it's like, just just see that important business document I sent you bob. It's like good try Jeff, try
Ben
not falling for it.
Starr
That's fallen for it. You got one of those word, macro viruses in there. I know it.
Josh
Do you see like someone on twitter posted like this Apparently rick Astley got rick rolled on Reddit like a few years ago. Obviously that like you just Yeah, the person, the person that did it got like, I think like, like, like a century of Reddit gold or something like that. Like you just you just win the internet totally like Yeah, that's yeah, that is winning the internet right? Like that's the ultimate prize. Yeah.
Starr
Are giant Zoomer fan bases. Like what? What's rick rolling? Mhm.
Ben
Even my kids, You know what rick rolling is Oh, they do. Okay.
Josh
It's just one of the ones that just never goes, Yeah. People are just never going to give up.
Ben
It's going to persist through the generations of time until the sun has the heat death.
Josh
That's that's that's heavy.
Starr
Yeah, I guess it could be worse. It's not go to see
Josh
Oh man. Yeah,
Josh
that was, I don't know like there was like there's that thing goes around like always like, like date yourself by like the earliest mean, you remember or whatever and I think goats, he was one of the earlier once. I won't forget it. So
Starr
there was a time before they called the means like maybe that, I don't know.
Ben
Yes.
Ben
Well do either of you have any last hurrahs for our lovely summer season before the weather turns cold and gray and rainy in any plans to do something fun? Don't
Josh
know why we have kids in school now. And so our plans are to drive them back and forth
Ben
repetitive lee.
Starr
I'm just trying to survive. That's basically it and it's trying to get through,
Josh
I mean, and get, yeah, we'll probably like, I've been like, the weather has been nicer outside lately. So I've been trying to enjoy the yard while I can because like, yeah, it's just the weird like pacific northwest thing now where like most of years rainy and what used to be the thing that made it worthwhile was the wonderful summers is now like half of the summer is also now cloud covered in smoke and, And like °. So, um, like right now everything is like picture perfect pacific northwest and I've been really enjoying that.
Starr
Yeah, last in the past. It's pretty nice. I'm, I'm looking forward to the drizzle coming back because there's just too many people out on walks, you know, like I like, I like, I like to be solitary on my walks and these amateurs only come out when it's nice outside. Um you know, so yeah, I can't, I can't wait for a little bit of drizzle where I got my raincoat and I can go and you know, walk through my neighborhood and be alone
Josh
is we are kind of at the point where like you start, you start to like, uh like not dread fall or so much. Like I'm kind of looking forward to it again and like, you know, seasons, seasons are nice, but then like you halfway halfway through the winter, I'll be like ready for summer and summer will be a long ways off. But I'm looking forward to fall right now.
Ben
It's kind of kind of funny like there's definitely this uh there's a sense of angst when there is too much, when there's too much sun for too long. You know, when people like, I, I need I need some grey, I need some rain and then, and then the grain grey comes and the rain comes and you can just feel this, this uh you know, things are back to, back to where it should be. You know, it's just kind of fun and of course, yeah, february comes around like, oh, it's a son,
Josh
you know, and see, I just want, I just want all of this on like a light switch, so I can just change it depending on the mood that I'm in. Um
Ben
you know, Yeah, we really need some weather management technology.
Starr
Uh We just need to get in with the movers and shakers that control the weather.
Josh
Yeah, I think, I think it's the folks over at DARPA from what, from what I hear from the internet, you know,
Ben
or you just, you know, take a vacation. I mean the old fashioned way you just go to some place, warm
Josh
vacations,
Starr
vacations, That's
Josh
so that's so pre that's so pre . We we stay in one place and control the weather now. Yeah. Mhm.
Ben
Yeah. It sounds like a lot more fun actually
Josh
and it does.
Josh
Yeah. Well I don't know, I've done stuff this week but I don't remember. Me neither and what not. So
Starr
yeah, sure you make this a short one. I guess we should. Okay, well you have always been. Sorry, let me do that again. Um You have just now, just in this very moment finished listening to found request. If you want to right to serve you go do that. Um If you're interested in writing for us, you know, check out our blog honey badger dot I. slash blog and look for the writers page. Well the right for us link I mean and just yeah, stay safe and we will catch you next week.
Ben
Have a good one. Thank you
Show Notes:
Links:
Micromort
Noblesse oblige
Josh's dotfiles
GitHub Code Spaces
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Yeah. I've been holding out for the new MacBook Pros. The M1 is pretty tempting, but I want whatever comes next. I want the 16-inch new hotness that's apparently supposed to be launching in November, but I've been waiting for it so patiently for so long now.
Josh:
Will they have the M2?
Ben:
Yeah, either or that or M1X. People are kind of unsure what the odds are.
Starr:
Why do they do that? Why did they make an M1 if they can't make an M2? Why do they have to keep... You just started, people. You can just have a normal naming scheme that just increments. Why not?
Josh:
M1.1?
Ben:
That would be awesome.
Starr:
Oh, Lord.
Josh:
Yeah, it would.
Ben:
M1A, Beachfront Avenue.
Starr:
So last week we did an Ask Me Anything on Indie Hackers, and that was a lot of fun.
Josh:
It was a lot of fun.
Starr:
I don't know. One of the most interesting questions on there was some guy was just like, "Are you rich?" I started thinking about it. I was like, "I literally have no idea." It reminded me of when I used to live in New York briefly in the '90s or, no, the early '00s. There was a Village Voice article in which they found... They started out with somebody not making very much money, and they're like, "Hey, what is rich to you?" Then that person described that. Then they went and found a person who had that level of income and stuff and they asked them, and it just kept going up long past the point where... Basically, nobody ever was like, "Yeah, I'm rich."
Josh:
Yeah. At the end, they're like, "Jeff Bezos, what is rich? What is rich to you?"
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
He's like, "Own your own star system."
Starr:
So, yeah, I don't know. I feel like I'm doing pretty good for myself because I went to fill up my car with gas the other day and I just didn't even look at the price. The other day, I wanted to snack, so I just got a whole bag of cashews, and I was just chowing down on those. I didn't need to save that. I could always get another bag of cashews.
Ben:
Cashews are my arch nemesis, man. I can't pass up the cashews. As far as the nut kingdom, man, they are my weakness.
Starr:
I know. It's the subtle sweetness.
Ben:
It's so good. The buttery goodness.
Starr:
Yeah, the smoothness of the texture, the subtle sweetness, it's all there.
Ben:
That and pistachios. I could die eating cashews and pistachios.
Josh:
There you go. I like pistachios.
Ben:
Speaking of being rich, did you see Patrick McKenzie's tweet about noblesse oblige?
Josh:
No. Tell me.
Ben:
Yeah, we'll have to link it up in the show notes. But, basically, the idea is when you reach a certain level of richness, I guess, when you feel kind of rich, you should be super generous, right? So noblesse oblige is the notion that nobility should act nobly. If you have been entrusted with this respect of the community and you're a noble, then you ought to act a certain way. You got to act like a noble, right? You should be respectful and et cetera. So Patio was applying this to modern day, and he's like, "Well, we should bring this back," like if you're a well-paid software developer living in the United States of America, you go and you purchase something, let's say a coffee, that has basically zero impact on your budget, right? You don't notice that $10 or whatever that you're spending. Then just normalize giving a 100% tip because you will hardly feel it, but the person you're giving it to, that'll just make their day, right? So doing things like that. I was like, "Oh, that's"-
Josh:
Being generous.
Ben:
Yeah, it's being generous. Yeah. So I like that idea.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
So-
Starr:
So it's okay to be rich as long as you're not a rich asshole.
Ben:
Exactly. Exactly. That's a good way to bring it forward there, Starr.
Starr:
There you go. I don't know. Yeah. I think there's some historical... I don't know. The phrase noblesse oblige kind of grates at me a little bit in a way that I can't quite articulate in this moment, but I'll think about that, and I will get back with you.
Josh:
Wait. Are you saying you don't identify as part of the nobility?
Starr:
No.
Ben:
I mean, I think there's a lot of things from the regency period that we should bring back, like governesses, because who wants to send your child to school in the middle of a COVID pandemic? So just bring the teacher home, right?
Starr:
Yeah. That's pretty sexist. Why does it have to be gendered? Anyway.
Ben:
Okay, it could be a governor, but you might get a little misunderstanding. All of a sudden, you've got Jay Inslee showing up on your doorstep, "I heard you wanted me to come teach your kids."
Josh:
I don't know. I'll just take an algorithm in the home to teach my kids, just entrust them to it.
Starr:
Yeah. Oh, speaking of bringing things back, I told y'all, but I'll tell our podcast listeners. On Sunday, I'm driving to Tacoma to go to somebody's basement and look at a 100-year old printing press to possibly transport to Seattle and put in my office for no good reason that I can think of. It just seems to be something that I'm doing.
Josh:
Do you like that none of us actually asked you what you were intending to do with it? I was like, "Yeah, just let me know when you need to move it. I'm there." I just assumed you were going to do something cool with it, but ... Yeah.
Starr:
I appreciate that. I appreciate the support. I'm going to make little zines or something. I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. If I get a lifetime subscription to your zine-
Starr:
Okay, awesome.
Josh:
... that would be payment.
Starr:
Done. Done.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
Yeah, sign me up, too. I'll be there.
Starr:
Well, I appreciate that.
Ben:
I mean, who could resist that invitation, right, because you get to... If you get to help with moving that thing, you get to see it, you get to touch it and play with it, but you don't have to keep it. It's somebody else's problem when you're done with the day, so sounds great to me.
Starr:
There you go. Well, I mean, if you read the forums about these things, this is one of the smaller ones, so people are just like, "Ah, no big deal. No big deal. It's okay." But I was happy to hear that there's no stairs involved.
Ben:
That is the deal-breaker. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. But it-
Ben:
If you ever get the friend helping you to move their piano, you always ask, "Okay, how many flights of steps," right?
Starr:
Yeah. Oh, I just thought of something I could do with it. I could make us all nice business card to hand out to nobody.
Ben:
Because we're not going anywhere.
Josh:
I just think of my last six attempts at having business cards. They're all still sitting in my closet, all six boxes of-
Starr:
I know. People look at you like, "What, really, a business card? What?"
Josh:
Yeah, like all six generations.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
I hand out one or two per year. Yeah, just random people and like, "Hey, here's my phone number." It's an easy way to give it to somebody.
Josh:
Just people on the street?
Ben:
Exactly. Like a decent fellow, "Here you go." Thank you.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's like, "I've got 1000 of these. I got to justify the cost somehow."
Josh:
We got to move these.
Starr:
We could start invoicing our customers by snail mail. I could print a really nice letterhead.
Ben:
I think we have a few customers who would be delighted to receive a paper invoice from us because then they would have an excuse to not pay us for 90 days.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Isn't owning a printing press like owning a truck, though? Once people know you have it, everyone wants to borrow it.
Starr:
It's going to be pretty hard to borrow for a 1000-pound piece of iron.
Josh:
Well, they're going to want to come over and hang out in your basement and do their printing. This is the Pacific Northwest, like-
Starr:
It's their manifestos.
Josh:
Yeah. They got to print their manifestos, lists of demands.
Starr:
They don't want the establishment at Kinko's to be able to see.
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
I don't know. It's got to put you on a special kind of watch list, though, if you have a printing press in your home, right? All of a sudden, some people are really interested in what you're up to.
Josh:
It's like a legacy watch list.
Ben:
I'm just flashing back to, yeah, in the 1800s when cities, towns would get all-
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Well, yeah, because they're like-
Ben:
The mob would come out and burn down the printing press building and stuff.
Josh:
If you wanted to be a propagandist back then, you had to buy a printing press and then you get put on a watch list. That just never went away. They're still looking for those people. They just don't find as many of them these days.
Starr:
Yeah. It's so inefficient. It's not the super efficient way of getting the word out, though, I hear, unless you want to be one of those people handing out leaflets on the side of the road.
Josh:
Well, you could paper windshields in parking lots.
Starr:
Oh, there you go. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, that's how they used to do it.
Starr:
No, look at my beautifully hand-crafted leaflet that you're going to throw in the gutter.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
I think you just settled on what your next adventure's going to be after Honeybadger. You're ready to put this business aside and focus on printing up flyers for your local missing cat.
Starr:
There you go. There you go. Band flyers, that's big business.
Josh:
But you could get into fancy paper. That's a whole thing up here. It's pretty cool, actually.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. Really, I was like, "Oh, it'd be cool to have a big thing to tinker with." I'm learning about myself that I like having just a big physical project going on, and I'm pretty... Like, I built this backyard office, and that took up two years of my time. Ever since then, I don't have a big physical thing to work on, so I'm thinking this might fill that niche, that niche, sorry. I read a thing that's like don't say niche, Americans. Niche.
Ben:
I don't know, Starr. Maybe you should think of the children and then think about 50 years from now when you're dead and Ida's cleaning out the house and she's all like, "Why is there this printing press?"
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Have to move it.
Starr:
They'll just sell it with the house.
Ben:
There you go.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, the funny thing is, is that it is wider than the doorway, so I would either have to dissemble it partially or take out the door. I put the door in, so I know how to take it out, so there is a good chance the door's coming out because I have less chance of messing something up if I do that one. But we'll see.
Ben:
Echo that.
Starr:
Well, thank you.
Josh:
You should've put one of those roll-up doors in there.
Starr:
I should've, yeah.
Josh:
Those are cool.
Starr:
What was I thinking?
Josh:
You really did not plan ahead for this.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, walls are really only a couple of thin pieces of plywood, and you can just saw through it.
Josh:
Just a small refactor.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And that would-
Josh:
Did y'all see that someone listened to every episode of this podcast in a row?
Starr:
I know. I feel so bad. I feel so bad for them.
Josh:
Speaking of-
Starr:
We're sorry. We're so sorry.
Ben:
I was feeling admiration. I'm like, "Wow, that's impressive," like the endurance of it.
Starr:
I just think we would've made different decisions.
Ben:
I don't know. But not-
Josh:
Maybe it's pretty good. I haven't gone back and gone through it all and never will, but-
Ben:
Well, I mean, not only did they say they listened to every episode, but then they were eager for more. They were like, "When are you getting done with your break?" So I guess-
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
... that net it was positive, but-
Josh:
We must not be too repetitive.
Ben:
Must not.
Starr:
Stockholm syndrome.
Josh:
We're sorry.
Ben:
Well...
Starr:
I'm sorry. I don't have anything informative to add, so I'm just going to be shit-posting this whole episode.
Ben:
Well, I've had an amazing week since we last chatted. I kept reflecting on how I couldn't remember anything that I did over the past whatever months. Well, this past week, I can remember a whole bunch of things that I did. I've been crazy busy and getting a bunch of little things knocked out. But today, today was the capstone of the week because I rolled over our main Redis cluster that we use for all of our jobs, all of the incoming notices and whatevers. Yeah, rolled over to a new Redis cluster with zero downtime, no dropped data, nobody even noticed. It was just smooth as-
Starr:
Oh my God.
Josh:
I saw that.
Starr:
Awesome.
Ben:
It's going pretty good.
Starr:
Just like butter?
Ben:
Just like butter.
Starr:
They slid right out of that old Redis instance and just into this new... Is it an AWS-managed type thing?
Ben:
Yeah, both of them were. They all went on the new one, but... Yeah.
Josh:
It's, what, ElastiCache?
Ben:
Yep. Smooth like a new jar of Skippy.
Josh:
I saw that you put that in our ops channel or something.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, that's the topic in our ops channel.
Josh:
So it's the subject or the topic, yeah. We're making ops run, yeah, like a jar of Skippy.
Starr:
Why isn't that our tagline for our whole business?
Ben:
I mean, we can change it.
Starr:
I don't know why that's making me crack up so much, but it is.
Josh:
Skippy's good stuff.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Josh:
Although we-
Ben:
Actually-
Josh:
... usually go for the Costco natural brand these days.
Ben:
Well, we go for the Trader Joe's all-natural brand that you have to actually mix every time you use it. I prefer crunchy over creamy, so, actually, my peanut butter's not that smooth, but... You know.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's okay. But, yeah, I love our natural peanut butter, except for the whole churning thing, but you can live with that.
Starr:
We're more of a Nutella family.
Ben:
Ooh, I do love a Nutella.
Josh:
Ooh, Nutella.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), that's good stuff.
Josh:
We made pancakes the other day, and I was putting Nutella on pancakes. I did this thing, like I made this... We have one of those griddles, like an electric griddle, and so I made this super long rectangular pancake, and then I spread Nutella on the entire thing, and then I rolled it so that you have this-
Starr:
You know what it's called, Josh.
Josh:
What is it called?
Starr:
That's called a crepe.
Josh:
So it's a crepe, but it's made out of a pancake.
Starr:
It's a Texas crepe.
Ben:
Texas crepe.
Josh:
Yeah, a Texas-
Starr:
A Texas crepe.
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
Is it really a Texas crepe because that's... Yeah, so, I-
Starr:
Oh, no, I just made that up.
Ben:
That sounds perfect, yeah.
Josh:
Well, it is now.
Ben:
Yeah, it is now.
Josh:
It is now, and I highly recommend it. It's pretty amazing.
Ben:
Throw some Skippy on there and, man, now it's a... That's awesome.
Josh:
Peanut butter's also good on pancakes.
Starr:
That's why people listen to us, for our insights about business.
Ben:
Yeah, there was this one time, speaking of pancakes and peanut butter...
Josh:
How did we get on pancakes? Like, oh, yeah, ops.
Ben:
This one time, I went over to dinner at some person's house, and I didn't know what dinner was going to be, but we got there and it was breakfast for dinner, which I personally love. That's one of my favorites.
Starr:
I knew that about you.
Ben:
So they're like, "Oh, I'm sorry. Hope you don't think it's weird, but we're having breakfast for dinner." I'm like, "No, no, I love it." So eggs and bacon and waffles, and so I'm getting my waffle and I'm like, "Do you have some peanut butter," and they're like, "Oh my goodness, we thought you would think that was way too weird, and so we didn't have the peanut butter." They whipped it out from in the counter. It's like, "Oh, shew, now we can have our peanut butter, too." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, peanut butter on waffles, yeah."
Josh:
Everyone had their hidden peanut butter.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And that's how you level up a friendship.
Ben:
There you go. So, yeah, the week was good. The week was good. Bugs got fixed, things got deployed, and, yeah, just a whole-
Josh:
Yeah, you had a bunch of PRs and stuff for little things, too, which-
Ben:
Yeah. And got some practice with the whole delegating thing, got Shava doing some stuff, too. So, yeah, just all-around super productive week.
Josh:
Nice. I got Java to run in a Docker container, so my week's going pretty good.
Ben:
And that took you all week?
Starr:
What do those words mean? I don't...
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Was your audio cutting out? I don't know. I just heard a bunch of things I don't understand.
Josh:
Well, for your own sake, don't ask me to explain it.
Starr:
Yeah, it's like better not looked at.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Why would you subject yourself to that sort of torture, Josh?
Josh:
Oh, well, because running Java on an M1 Mac is even worse.
Starr:
Oh my Lord.
Josh:
Well, actually, running it, period. But, yeah, like just our Java package. I mean, I've spent half this podcast ranting about our packaging, so I don't need to get too deep into it. But every time I release this thing, it's like it just doesn't work because I've forgotten my... I've changed my system, and Java and Maven package repository are just like that. So I figure if I can make some sort of reproduceable development environment using Docker, then in two years everything will just be smooth as a jar of Skippy.
Ben:
Skippy. Yeah, yeah.
Starr:
Well, I had a chance to-
Josh:
I reckon.
Starr:
I had a chance to dig into some numbers, which is one of my favorite things to do, and so... I don't know. There was this question that was just bothering me, which was... Well, let me just back up. So we've had some success, as you guys know, in the past year. We've almost doubled our rate of new user sign-ups, not new user sign-ups, like conversion to paid users. We've doubled our paid user conversion numbers, rate, whatever you call it. And so, obviously, revenue from users has gone up as well, but since we are a... Our plans are basically broken down by error rates, right? So what happens when people upgrade is they get too many errors for their plan. It says, "Hey, you should upgrade if you want to keep sending us errors," and they do.
Starr:
I had this weird situation where it's like I wasn't sure... In our system, revenue from users was coming just from whatever plan they picked when they signed up, and so I was wondering, "Well, what if they sign up, and then a week later they upgrade? That's going to be counted under upgrade revenue instead of new user revenue," which, really, it really kind of should be. So I got to digging, and I found that it doesn't really make that big of a difference. Some people do upgrade pretty quickly after converting, but they don't... It's not really enough to really change things.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Then, also, just sort of offhand, I took a little sneak peek. I've been running this experiment to see if lowering our error quota for our basic, our free plan, it would increase conversions. So I took a little sneak peek at the data. It's too soon to know for sure, but so far the conversion rate, I think, is going to end up being higher, which is what I would expect, so that's good, and-
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Yeah. And when we're done, I'm going to look at sign-ups just to make sure that they are still in line.
Ben:
Yeah. Anecdotally, I've seen a smaller window from trial to paid conversion. Well, not trial, but freemium to paid conversion. I've seen people who are signing up, getting on the basic plan, and then within some short time period they're actually going to a team plan.
Josh:
Oh, that's good to know.
Ben:
That's happening more often than it was, so... Yeah. So that's-
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
I'm just saying the same thing Starr said but without real data.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, we need a little bit more time to see how things pan out, too, because it's... One thing I figured out that I will share with our readers, our readers, I'm used to doing the blog posts, I'll share with our listeners that I figured out that you really have to pay attention to, on free plans especially, is comparing conversion rates between time periods. So if you make a change and then you wait for a month of data to come in and you're like, "Okay, let's look at the conversion rate for the past month after the change with the conversion rate for the time period before the change," that is really an apples to oranges comparison because on the one hand you've had people who have maybe had a year to upgrade versus people who've had a month to upgrade. So you have to be really careful to make it apples to apples, right, where you only compare... If you have a month worth of users on one side, you compare it to a month worth of users on the other side, and you only count the conversions that happened in that time period.
Josh:
Makes sense.
Starr:
Yeah. So, anyway, that's just my little freebie data analysis thing for our listeners.
Josh:
We should have Starr's weekly data science tip.
Starr:
Starr's data corner.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Love it.
Josh:
Yeah. We could move the podcast to segments. We've never done segments. We could introduce segments if we need to spice things up on FounderQuest.
Ben:
Yeah. Totally. Well, speaking of spicing things up, I had a brilliant idea this morning.
Starr:
Oh, I want to hear it.
Ben:
Yeah. So one of the things that I keep an eye on is how much we spend on hosting because that's a good chunk of our expenses. We always want to make more money, and one way to make more money is to have fewer expenses. So I had this brilliant idea on how to cut expenses. We can chop our AWS bill in half by just not running everything redundant.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Brilliant.
Starr:
Would you say the AWS is the sixth Honeybadger employee?
Ben:
Yeah, pretty much.
Josh:
Yes. That's a good way to put it, actually.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, in the early days, before we were paying ourselves a full salary, I remember we budgeted 25% for Starr, 25% for Ben, 25% for Josh, and 25% for hosting.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I don't think we ever exceeded the 25%, which is good. That would be a bit high. So, yeah, AWS is like our sixth employee.
Starr:
Yeah, it's funny because do we even have other expenses?
Josh:
No.
Ben:
I mean, salaries is definitely the biggest one, and our health insurance is not cheap either.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Advertising.
Starr:
I was thinking like marketing, advertising. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Advertising and marketing, that's the next one.
Starr:
That's the next 25%.
Josh:
Can we make AWS our seventh and eighth employee, too?
Ben:
Eventually may. Yeah, I did some... Oh. Oh. So I told you my great success that I had this morning. Well, your comment just now about AWS made me think about the one failure, just amazingly huge failure that I had also this week, migrating a bunch of data from Redis to DynomoDB. So we have this situation where it's one of those seemed like a good idea at the time kind of thing where we're doing a bunch of counting of people and individuals that hit errors, and we're counting that in Redis. I'm like, "Okay, great," because Redis has this INCRBY and it's easy and it's atomic and, boom, you're done, and I just never paid much attention to it until a few weeks ago, and I was like, "Yo, you know what? That's actually a lot of data in there, and we're keeping that forever, and so it's probably better to put it someplace that's not Redis." So I'm like, "Ah, I know. I'll do DynamoDB because it has an increment thing and...
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So I put a table together, and I wrote a migration script, and I migrated a bunch of data. It took two days. It's great. Everything is beautiful. Had buckets of data inside DynomiteDB, and then I went to go query it, and I'm like, "Oh, I can't query it that way because I don't have the right index." Well, that sucks. All right. So you can't create a local index on DynomiteDB without recreating the table. I'm like, "Okay, well, that sucks. I just lost two days worth of data migration but oh well." So dump the table, recreated it with the index, and started redoing the data migration, and I'm like, "Yeah, it might take two days, no problem." So I check on it every half-day or so, and it's not going to be getting done after two days. Three days go by, and I'm checking the work backlog, and I was like, "It's just flat."
Ben:
Turns out because of that local index, now Dynamo can't really write fast enough because the way they do the partition throttling and stuff because we have some customers who have huge chunks of data. So their partitions are too big for Dynamo to write very quickly. Hot partition keys is the problem. So I just gave up. I'm like, "All right, fine." Drop the table again, recreated it, and now we're just double writing so that, eventually, given six months from now or so, it'll be there and I can replace that thing in Redis.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
So this is my life, the ups and the downs. So, yeah.
Josh:
And just waiting six months.
Ben:
And just waiting six months.
Josh:
Yeah. That's funny, but that is kind of a pattern in the business. In some cases, we need to just wait for the data to populate itself, and we just have to basically wait our retention period because data tends to turnover and then we can drop the old database or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. Yep. But, luckily, nobody noticed my big fail, so it's all good. It didn't impact the customers.
Josh:
I didn't notice.
Ben:
So, yeah, busy weekend.
Starr:
I noticed, but I didn't say anything because I wanted to be nice.
Ben:
Thank you, Starr. Appreciate that.
Starr:
Yeah, I [inaudible].
Josh:
Starr was over there just quietly shaking her head.
Ben:
Just judging. Just judge-
Starr:
No, sorry.
Ben:
So, Josh, I'm going to get back to this Java thing because I'm curious. I remember, I don't know, a year ago or something, we're kind of like, "Maybe we should just not when it comes to Java anymore." So I'm curious what prompted this renewed activity to do a new release.
Josh:
Well, I don't know. I figured... I don't know. Didn't we say we were just not going to do any releases?
Ben:
Yeah, it just-
Josh:
It's not high on my list of development. We're not spending a bunch adding stuff to it, but there are dependency updates that have been getting merged in. I merged the Dependabot PRs and stuff. There's something else. There might be some small PR or something that someone submitted that was sitting there on release, and I just can't handle just unreleased code sitting on the pane. So it's just one of those things that's been sitting on my backlog halfway down the list just gnawing at me every week, so I figured I'd dive in and at least get some sort of quick release, relatively quick release process down so we can just continue to release dependency updates and stuff, like if there's a security update or something, so...
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Some people still do use it, so I want to make sure they're secure.
Ben:
Make sure they're happy. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. But, yeah, that's a good point. We are not treating all platforms as equal because we just don't have the resource, so we need to focus on the stuff that actually is making us money.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, it's tough when very few of our customers are actually using that for it to get a whole lot of priority.
Josh:
That said, we have already put a lot into it, so as far as I know, it works well for the people that have used it.
Starr:
So are y'all encouraging our customers to do more Java?
Josh:
Yes, switch to Java. Then switch to Sentry
Ben:
Ride a wave.
Josh:
... or something.
Ben:
So I've been contemplating this new laptop showing up, right, whenever Apple finally releases it and I get to get my hot little hands on it. I've been thinking, well, the one big downside to getting a new laptop is getting back to a place where you can actually work again, right, getting all your things set up. Some people are smart, like Josh, that have this DOT file, this repo, on GitHub, and they can just clone that, and they're off to the races. I'm not that smart. I always have to hand-craft my config every time I get a new machine. But I'm thinking-
Josh:
Oh. Take the time.
Ben:
So, yeah, I'm not looking forward to that part, but GitHub has released Codespaces, and so now I'm thinking, "Ooh, I wonder if I could get all our repos updated so that I could just work totally in the cloud and just not even have a development set-up on my machine." Probably not, but it's a fun little fantasy.
Josh:
Well, then you could have any little... You could work on your iPad.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I don't even need a laptop. Then I could save the company money. That's brilliant, Josh.
Josh:
Yeah. You could work at the library.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like, "So your main ops guy, I see he's primarily working from a five-year-old iPad."
Ben:
At a library.
Starr:
In a library.
Josh:
An iMac.
Starr:
When he gets paged, he has to run to the nearest Starbucks and get that wifi.
Josh:
Yeah. I got to say, having your DOT files all ready to go and all that is pretty good. Also, I've got my Brewfile, too, so all of my Homebrew stuff is automated in that.
Ben:
Well, that's clever. I never even thought of that.
Josh:
It does make it very quick to bootstrap a new machine.
Ben:
Yeah. Maybe I should take this as initiative to actually put my stuff into DOT files repo and get to that point.
Josh:
Careful, though, because you might... I've had four computers between your current one and now, so you might end up switching more often because it's easier to do it.
Ben:
Appreciate that warning. That's good.
Josh:
Yeah. Speaking of the M1s, I love the M1 MacBook Air that I have. But the battery has been... I don't know what happened, but the battery was fantastic, I don't know, first few months. Ever since then, it's been kind of like it hasn't been lasting. I've been surprised at how fast it's draining, and I go and look at, whatever, the battery health stuff, and it says that health is down to 86% and the condition says it's fair, which does not make me feel warm and fuzzy.
Josh:
It has 50 cycles, so I think it might be defective, and that sucks because otherwise this machine is maybe one of the best Macs I've had. I guess... Yeah. I've had a few compatibility issues with the architecture, but it's not too bad. I mean, I'm not a Java developer at least, so...
Ben:
Yeah, I think you need to take that in for a service because that is way soon for that kind of degradation.
Josh:
Yeah. I might need to do something.
Ben:
That's a bummer.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know. I might have to ship it in because I think our local Portland Apple Store is shuttered currently.
Ben:
All those protests?
Josh:
Yeah. It's got eight fences around it and stuff. Downtown Portland's a little rough these days.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, I mean, you can always take the trip out to Seattle.
Josh:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Or there's other... I forget. There's an Apple Store that's not too far outside of Portland. It's where I bought this, so I could take it down there.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm sad now because I bought my second MacBook from that store in Portland.
Josh:
Yeah? It's a good store.
Ben:
Speaking of you coming out to Seattle, I was thinking the other day that maybe we should do a company-wide get-together sometime soon. Be fun to see everybody again in-person.
Josh:
It would be. Now that we're all vaxxed, we're all super vaxxed. I don't know that Starr is even down for that, though. I'm just looking at Starr.
Starr:
I don't know. Like, I-
Josh:
You don't look like you're too stoked on that idea.
Starr:
I don't know. I'm just-
Josh:
What with Delta lurking.
Starr:
The problem is, Josh, is that you have not been reading nursing Twitter.
Josh:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Starr:
So I don't know. Yeah, it's doable. Currently, I think the CDC just released a thing that said vaccine efficiency of preventing COVID infections... It's very good still at preventing bad, I don't know, disease, health problems, whatever, keeping people out of the hospital. It's very good at that. With Delta, it's about 65% effective at preventing infections, and so if you get infected, you can transmit it to other people.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah. So it's not impossible. It's just like we're just back to this fricking calculus where every possible social interaction you just have to run it through your spreadsheet and your risk analysis and... Ugh.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's like, "Are you worthy of the hassle? No. Sorry, can't make it."
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, "Okay, so what's the probability that meeting with you is going to send my child to the hospital? Okay, that's low enough. Sure."
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's just such a weird world.
Josh:
Wouldn't it be funny if when you get into your car in the morning, it reads out the probability of you dying in a car accident?
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Do you know about millimorts?
Josh:
No.
Starr:
Oh, you should go Google millimorts. A millimort is a one in a million chance that you will die, and so there's tables and stuff that you can find online that have different activities and what the number of millimorts is about them. So you can compare, and you can be like, "Okay, so going skydiving has this many millimorts as driving so many miles in a motorcycle."
Josh:
That's awesome. Okay, we have to link this in the show notes because I want to remember to look this up-
Starr:
Okay. I'll go find it.
Josh:
... so that I can depress people.
Starr:
I think there was a New York Times article, too.
Ben:
Yeah, I totally have to see this because I just signed up for a motorcycle training course and I'm going to get my endorsements so that I know exactly what kind of risks... Though that's probably part of the course, where they try to scare you out of actually getting your endorsement. They probably...
Josh:
By the way, I'm really glad my morbid humor or my morbid joke landed because for a minute there-
Starr:
Oh, I'm sorry, it's a micromort.
Josh:
Oh, a micromort. Okay.
Starr:
I was like, "Isn't milli 1000?"
Josh:
Minimort, like-
Starr:
Milli is 1000.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, that grated at me. I know. My old chemistry teachers are just giving me an F right now.
Ben:
Yeah, I got to see that.
Josh:
Well, I'm sure you'll be all right, Ben. I mean, the risk of a motorcycle is much higher than a car, but you just can't think about that all the time because the fun... I'm sure the fun is much...
Ben:
[inaudible].
Josh:
It's worth it.
Ben:
It's worth every hazard. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. The risk is worth the reward.
Ben:
Yesterday, I just hit 250 miles on the odometer on my scooter, so loving that. It's a lot of fun.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
That's a lot of miles for a scooter.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
I guess you just love to scoot.
Ben:
I love to scoot. Well, there you go, Starr. There's our happy ending after that slight dip there.
Starr:
That slight delay into reality.
Josh:
I like the dark humor. I don't know. It's always a gamble, though, with depending on... Yeah. But I think, Starr, you're always down to get dark.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. I'm down with the darkness. All right. Well, should we wrap it up?
Ben:
Let's wrap it.
Starr:
Okay. This has been a very witchy episode of FounderQuest, so if you liked it, go give us a review and... Yeah, if not, just keep listening to us. Make it a hate listen. You got to have a couple of those in your line-up.
Show notes:
Links:
Snohomish Centennial trail
Indie Hackers AMA
Intro CRM
Full transcript:
Starr:
All right. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. So we took a little break. We're going to have her hot vax summer, but that-
Josh:
Hot vax summer.
Starr:
It turns out that was the mirage. It turns out that was a mirage.
Josh:
Well, it did reach 112 degrees in Portland. So it was hot.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah. The summer never existed. It was just an illusion caused by our overwhelming thirst for lots of things.
Josh:
Mirage.
Ben:
Well, there were a couple of weeks there that I thought, "Yeah. This is going to work out. And then Delta.
Starr:
Yeah. It was a couple of nice weeks, wouldn't it?
Ben:
Yeah. It was. It was.
Starr:
Except for the panic about, "Oh, crap. I need to learn how to deal with people again."
Josh:
Wouldn't it be wonderful when we can just look back on those two weeks and just remember those last good two weeks?
Ben:
Yeah. Went 112 in Portland. That's pretty bad. It got to 116 in my garage.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's pretty warm.
Josh:
Yeah. That's like melt some things if you're not careful.
Ben:
I did not know this until well, at the beginning of the pandemic, that there was actually a special class of freezer called the garage freezer because at the beginning of the pandemic I wanted to have a freezer in my garage. I'm like, "Okay. I'm just going to go to Home Depot and buy a freezer." Oh, no, no, no, no. You can't just buy a freezer to put in your garage. You have to have a garage freezer to put it in your garage. So we have a garage freezer and even with 116 in the garage, the stuff stayed frozen. So I guess it actually works.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah. My freezer survived as well.
Starr:
I mean, not having a garage freezer in your garage is almost as bad as wearing white after labor day, or is it before labor day? I forget.
Josh:
I don't know. I never wear white.
Starr:
I just don't wear white.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Starr:
Stains too easily.
Josh:
I just always dress like I'm going to a funeral.
Starr:
All right. So today's going to be a little bit of a short episode. So we should probably get to the content.
Ben:
I thought we were already in the content.
Starr:
I know our reader.
Josh:
Yeah. It might be short. I don't know.
Starr:
Oh, we are?
Josh:
Our podcasts tend to have a mind of their own.
Ben:
That's true.
Starr:
Well, that's true. But we've got this Ask Me Anything schedule.
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Starr:
20 minutes from now.
Josh:
Well, the great thing about asynchronous ask me anything is that they're asynchronous so you can post them even while you're on a podcast and answer the questions whenever you want.
Starr:
Yeah. Maybe you can, but my brain does not work that way.
Josh:
Oh, I've got it all queued up.
Starr:
I've got a one track mind.
Josh:
It's just a button press. We're locked and loaded.
Starr:
Oh, you're like Kramer. You've got the button.
Josh:
No. I'm ready to go.
Starr:
Sell sell sell!
Josh:
So yeah. At 10:30, we're recording this podcast. It's 10:08 right now. Pacific. And we're going to be doing an ask me anything AMA on the indie hackers forums.
Starr:
Yes. And it's a last minute affair as of 20 minutes ago. I didn't have an indie hackers invite code. We're running around scrambling.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. Ben wanted to try a new podcast recording software, and I'm just like, "No. I can't handle this amount of change in my life right now."
Josh:
We need to title this episode, live from the indie hackers backstage, by the way.
Josh:
[crosstalk]
Starr:
Oh, yeah. I don't know if you like a live album.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
We're doing it live.
Starr:
Well, so Ben suggested, when you talk about one work thing and one vacation thing we did. And I guess, I'll start because I didn't actually have a vacation. I just got sick a lot, which I didn't get COVID, but there was some sort of bug that was going around and I got it and I was out for a couple of weeks. And so I guess that was my vacation. I don't know. I just played a lot of Diablo III.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
We got our worst vacations in Diablo III.
Josh:
Yeah. We got away for a few days. We went to this lake up north of Spokane in Washington and just five nights or something. But on the trip there, we're looking at our friends who were already up there, sent us the fire map of Washington. And we are traveling, literally our destination is in the middle of six fires.
Starr:
Oh no.
Josh:
We're like, "Should we be turning around?" I don't know. But it turned out all right. We breathe too much smoke the first couple of days, but it cleared up and-
Starr:
Yeah. After the first couple of days you hardly notice it.
Josh:
I only got a minor headache.
Starr:
Your nerves just die. The nerves in your lungs.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's okay. We have good health insurance.
Josh:
I'm an ex smoker. So I'll just tack it on, it's just like adding a couple of days.
Ben:
It's like getting that upgrade package when you're buying a $30,000 car. And it's like, "What's another thousand dollars?
Josh:
Yeah. I've already got the risk.
Ben:
Yeah. I stayed closer to home. I read a bunch of books and I got out for a nice bike ride, went to the Snohomish Centennial trail. So it starts in Snohomish and it goes up through Arlington and it's rails to trail conversion. So there used to be railroad tracks there, but now it's a paved trail. And the thing that's neat though, they have a bunch of trail heads and a few of them have the recreations of the old train stations. So it's like, you can act like you're getting on board that train and actually getting on-
Josh:
Oh, that's nice. Really nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
That's a lot of fun. Let's see, a work thing that I did. It's a blur.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I probably migrated something somewhere at some point. And back-filled something-
Josh:
You were busy.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. You did a lot.
Ben:
Yeah. I can't remember what I did.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things, right? We're working with that sales consultancy, what is it? Intro CRM people?
Ben:
Yeah. Did do that.
Starr:
Have you done some outreach? You got some replies even?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It's been kind of a mixed bag. So I've gotten some replies, but also the outbound stuff has not really been all that productive. So I'm questioning my life choices at this point.
Starr:
Have you had any overt hostility though?
Ben:
No overt hostility.
Starr:
Oh, you're not pushing hard enough then. You want your OH metric to be at least 10%. At least 10%, you want death threats.
Ben:
I will take that under advisement.
Starr:
Okay. That's how you know you're really-
Josh:
Really selling it.
Starr:
Yeah. I would say coffee's for closers, but you don't drink coffee. So there you go. Oh, cool. On my end, I don't know. We published our first batch of Honeybadger intelligence reports and I don't know. Loyal listeners might remember from last time, I mean, if you don't remember how loyal are you and how much should I even trust you, but yeah. You might remember that we were working on these things. Basically, they are quarterly reports for a certain programming language where if you kind of need to keep an eye on, I don't know. Front-end JavaScript, but you don't want to just inhale the feed of news that's constantly coming out, you can just look at this beautiful quarterly report. And we are publishing them quarterly now on our blog. And the first batch went out three weeks late, maybe a month late, I don't know. I didn't give myself enough time to get them ready for publication. And then I got sick for two weeks and just could barely crawl to the computer. So I'm sorry. I'll do better next time.
Josh:
If that's you're going to say, if you don't want to inhale the whatever weekly newsfeed, you can inhale it once a month or once a quarter. Just all.
Starr:
Well, no. We're not just collating everything together.
Starr:
[crosstalk].
Starr:
We're concatenating together.
Josh:
It's like a curation of curation.
Starr:
Yeah. We're not just a pending three months worth of Hacker News together. We're going in and applying some real intelligence to it. We have real domain experts.
Josh:
Editorial.
Starr:
Curating.
Josh:
Occasionally?
Starr:
Yes. Providing you the choicest morsels.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Hand crafted morsels of information.
Starr:
Yeah. Maybe I should be doing these outreach emails.
Ben:
Yeah. I think so.
Ben:
I've got the wrong person writing this stuff.
Starr:
Yeah. They'd be like, "Are these people even professionals?"
Josh:
Well, that should be obvious from our website.
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
I'll let you decide which way that goes.
Ben:
Wow. I've been sitting here while you're talking, thinking, what did I do? I'm like, "This is not good. If I can't remember doing anything useful for the past three months, that's probably a sign that I'm doing the wrong things."
Starr:
I mean, it could just be, you did a lot, Ben. I can remember things you've done. Can we got set up in a new compliance automated thing?
Ben:
Oh, yeah. Then the compliance-
Starr:
Yeah. An automated compliance thing. So you don't have to juggle all that stuff manually.
Ben:
Yeah. We got our SOC 2 type two report done. So we're legit now. We're officially doing the things that we said we would do.
Starr:
We're enterprise.
Ben:
Yeah. Full on enterprise.
Josh:
That's amazing.
Ben:
Yeah. And it wasn't a particularly painful process. I mean, it wasn't pleasant, but yeah. We survived.
Starr:
My favorite part of that was that, so as part of this automated security, your automated SOC 2 compliance stuff, all of the employees I guess, have to do mandatory security training once a year now. And it's this automated quiz where you have to read something and then it asks you questions. So it was a really weird big business moment, where I just felt, okay. I'm watching this training video. It should have 50s music in the background of it. And I hate to admit that I got stuck on the first question for 10 minutes. For 10 minutes. Because it was an easy question, but it was one of those things where it's like, "What's the correct answer? Choose one or more." And the correct answer was all of them. But for some reason, I had selected them all with my keyboard and that wasn't good enough. I had to click on them to show I really meant it because hackers generally use keyboards. So they're not really trustworthy devices.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Starr it was like a JavaScript bug.
Starr:
So eventually, I literally tried every combination. Eventually, I was just like, "Okay. I'm just going to try the first one again," and it worked. So there you are. There you are.
Ben:
I can't believe you're giving away the answers to our security questions on the podcast. That's a breach of security.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, I think our security questions have some security vulnerabilities if, you can manually brute force them. You have four binary options. That's what? Four factorial combinations? You can knock that out in an hour.
Ben:
Starr is hacking the mainframe.
Starr:
I am hacking the planet.
Josh:
That's how Starr passed the security test.
Starr:
Yeah. That's also how I got such a great score on the SAT, by the way. You just take it, I don't know. 128 factorial times and then you just brute force it.
Josh:
Nice. How long did that take you?
Starr:
I don't know. I still haven't graduated from high school.
Josh:
I sort of graduated from high school.
Starr:
Well, you can tell you've been away for a while. Because I just have all this bullshit that I've saved up for you all, and it's just all coming out now.
Ben:
So I was surprised to learn. I don't know why this surprised me, but it surprised me nonetheless, when we had our all hands meeting recently that we have three Honeybadger employees that have children starting kindergarten this year.
Starr:
Oh, my God. Yes.
Ben:
That's pretty wild.
Starr:
It's pretty terrifying. It's pretty terrifying. I'm glad that I live in Seattle. You guys don't. Josh and Kevin don't, but I mean, you all live in fairly reasonable places where governors aren't banning masks in school.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
As they themselves are going to get advanced treatments for their COVID infections. Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's okay. We love you Texas. We just don't love your governor.
Ben:
Speaking of Texas. So this random tidbit I saw the other day, Austin, Texas of course, you know the housing market has been crazy. As far as prices go over the past several months, people have been overbidding regularly on how to just be able to-
Josh:
Oh, I read that.
Josh:
A hundred grand?
Ben:
Yeah. So Austin, Texas.
Josh:
That's what I'm asking.
Ben:
A hundred grand over asking price. So you have a $400,000 list price, but you actually got to pay $500,000 to get the house. That's crazy.
Starr:
That is wild.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I had to drop off my car at the mechanic to get its normal service and I was walking by, and this was this morning and there's this kind of older condo building. It's not great looking or anything. And it's two bedroom condo, 900 square feet is now selling for the same price that I bought my single-family house with big yard and everything three blocks away. And that was five or six years ago? Six years ago?
Ben:
Crazy stuff.
Starr:
It's bizarre. Totally. I don't know. It's the sort of thing like it feels kind of gross even. Just because I was able to scrape together a down payment for a house, suddenly I get, I don't know. A hundred grand a year extra just in appreciation.
Josh:
You just hit a jackpot.
Starr:
Yeah. But it's just like, okay. I literally did nothing to deserve that. And meanwhile, people who could use that or I mean, I could use it, but I'm not in dire straits. I don't know. It's just like, "Wow, this whole system is just kind of backwards and weird."
Ben:
Yeah. It's to the point I'm getting unsolicited offers to buy my house, right?
Starr:
Oh, me too.
Ben:
I'm getting these letters in the mail like, "Hi, I'm Bob and my wife is Alice and we'd like to buy your house." And I'm like looking at the letters, "Is this is really an automated thing or do they really write this by the hand?"
Starr:
I've had people call me on the phone, in person.
Ben:
They called you?
Starr:
Yeah. They called me. Three houses on my block have been demolished in the past two months, three older houses, one of them was just really messed up. But two of them were these small houses on big lots. And essentially what happened is a developer bought almost every house on the opposite side of the street from me and is now basically filling up the lots with as many units as they can. So I think they're going to end up with like 18 units out of these five or six houses, which is fine. I guess. I don't mind density and everything, but it's just so wild because it's like, "Oh, it finally caught up with us." Because for a long time we were just over the edge where things were nice, we were just one block over from the nice stuff. And it finally caught up with us. So we're going to have to move now because we're not fancy enough for the neighborhood anymore.
Josh:
Yeah. Just cash out.
Ben:
Yeah. Move to Kansas.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, that's the problem though. It's like, "Okay. Great." I get all this appreciation, but if I ever want to get a new house, it's like, "Okay. I've got to pay those new prices."
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah. We've looked at that too, or you could sell and rent for a few years and see if anything happens. That would probably be a gamble.
Starr:
That would be a really bad gamble I think. I mean, I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Considering no markets decline anymore.
Starr:
I mean, they, they could decline, but you're trying to time it.
Josh:
Time the housing the market?
Starr:
Yeah.
Starr:
Maybe it'll decline, but yeah.
Ben:
This got me thinking, real estate agents, they want you to trade up, right? You buy your starter house and then you buy your bigger house and then eventually you downsize again because hey, why not have another transaction that a real estate agent can take a commission on, right? And it just got me thinking, why don't we have that for businesses? Why can't you trade up your business, right?
Josh:
Like trade it?
Ben:
Yeah. It's like, "Honeybadger, that's a nice little business. Why don't you trade it on up to a bigger business?
Starr:
So we sell Honeybadger and then by a larger business.
Ben:
Right. Right. Like that. Rolled into a down payment for a bigger business, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I'm not sure if you're very good at that.
Josh:
I love it.
Starr:
I don't know.
Ben:
Maybe this is a new marketing thing we can try. We can figure out new business models.
Josh:
Because we're getting trade-in program like the private equity firms.
Ben:
You're slapping the top of your business. You can fit so many customers in here.
Josh:
Might be our best bit yet.
Ben:
Well, I guess, we better get ready for our ask me anything session. Got a crack the knuckles and get ready to type.
Starr:
Crack the old knuckles.
Josh:
Almost time.
Starr:
All right. Okay. I will sign us off. All right. So this has been FounderQuest back from hot vax summer, back from vacation or being sick or whatever we call it these days. If you want to give us a review on Apple podcasts, whatever they call it, go for it. If you want to look up this AMA we're about to do on Indie Hackers, we recommend that and yeah. Otherwise, just stay cool, stay safe, and we will see you next week.
Ben:
Catch you later.
Josh:
See you.
Starr:
Bye.
Show notes:
Seriously, this is just an announcement to let ya'll know we are taking a summer break. We'll be back, pinky swear!
Show notes:
Links:Write for us
Maybe
Josh Pigford
Flu data
Full transcript:
Ben:
And today we don't have Starr, because Starr is on vacation this week, fireside chat.
Josh:
I will be on vacation next week, and the week after.
Ben:
Nice.
Josh:
I don't know if you saw, I extended my vacation.
Ben:
I didn't see this.
Josh:
Yeah. So, surprise!
Ben:
Two weeks back to back. That's a record.
Josh:
Yeah. I decided I'm feeling it and I don't think a week is going to be enough. So just thought I'd go for it.
Ben:
Yeah, I get that. I get that. It's funny, I was looking... We started this vacation calendar, recently, since we are looking at transitioning away from Basecamp, where our vacation calendar was, we are now putting a vacation calendar in Google calendar, because we use G Suite for all of our stuff. And I set up this vacation calendar, and I noticed that Starr put one on there, and then Josh put on a vacation and then Kevin put on a vacation. And then, Ben Findley, just week after week after week, it's like everybody's taking a vacation. I was like, all right, so I put myself on vacation.
Josh:
Yeah, you got to put yourself in there. Yeah.
Ben:
I did. Yeah. I added myself yesterday, for the week after Ben Findley's vacation.
Josh:
I don't know if you went and... I went in and just put a bunch of vacations for the rest of the year for-
Ben:
I saw that.
Josh:
... myself. Yeah.
Ben:
That's awesome.
Josh:
I mean, they might change, but I figured, if I at least put them in there, that'll force me to think about it and decide. Because that's been an ongoing problem, I always wait too long and then, finally, take the vacation when I just desperately need it, and I want to avoid that cycle, like we're supposed to be. This is supposed to be sustainable.
Ben:
This is a calm company. It means, lots of vacations.
Josh:
Yeah. We should be calm if we're running a calm company.
Ben:
I like that idea of putting on these dates tentatively and just planning on it. I might try that.
Josh:
Yeah. You should just plan them out. Also, yeah, I put our traditionally long winter vacation on there too, which I think is currently the last two weeks of December and the first week of January, which we can always move that around or sometimes we do the Hack week or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. I've come to cherish that tradition. I like having that-
Josh:
It's nice.
Ben:
Knowing that's going to be downtime. You know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I mean-
Josh:
I like the first week of the year off is kind of... there's something about that, where you don't have to go back to work the day after New Year's or whatever. That feels really nice.
Ben:
I mean, in reality, we're still on call. So if something broke, were going to work, but, yeah, it is nice not having that expectation of showing up and doing actual productive stuff.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. It's the low bandwidth mode.
Ben:
Yeah. It's also this past winter when we did that, I used that to just experiment with some stuff, work-related stuff like Elasticsearch and whatever, so that's kind of fun. It's a tinkering... even if we don't do an official Hack Week, it's still a good time to do some tinkering and get some of those creative juices going.
Josh:
Read some books on computer science or something like that, get excited about it again.
Ben:
Well, going through the SOC 2 compliance thing, the type two for the first time audit, one of the things that I came across that was new was this continuing education tracking thing. So the auditor wants evidence that we're actually doing continuing education for our employees. We always do conferences and stuff, but 2020 was a bad year for conferences, and we've never really tracked continuing education. We just like, "Yeah, let's do this conference," or whatever, and it's kind of ad hoc. And now it's like, "Oh, we need to track this, it's a good idea to plan something." So yeah, digging out those old computer science books or taking a course or doing a conference. Got to do it.
Josh:
Which is, well, you got to do it, but it's also, to me, that's one of my favorite things to do. I really like learning, so even in my spare time, that's what I like to do.
Ben:
Same.
Josh:
So I realized even with, yeah, my perfect workweek is a couple of hours maximum a day of doing the day-to-day things that you have to do, and then spend the rest of the day reading or learning something or working on improving your skills.
Ben:
Yep. Yeah. I to-
Josh:
That's what makes me happy.
Ben:
I don't try to do that every day, I like the idea, but I try to do that on Fridays. Friday to me is like the decompression day, I'm cruising into the weekend now. And so I try to put aside all the normal stuff and just something kind of interesting. Before we got on this morning, I was playing with some Docker stuff, not that we use Docker, but maybe we will someday, and just fiddling with it. You know?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
I think it's kind of fun.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I like that.
Ben:
Until we get one of those customer requests that come in, I'm like, "Oh, I have to do some actual work now." And so, love our customers, but sometimes they can be kind of inconvenient, legitimate complaints about things need to be fixed.
Josh:
Or when there's an ops emergency, and so I drop everything and fix it. You had some of that going on this week. I know.
Ben:
But with both you and Starr got to experience those ops emergencies. It was actually a funny, so Starr, is on vacation, but the Starr was still on call for part of that time.
Josh:
The first night. Yeah. Because she had scheduled me to take over, was it yesterday? Whatever day it was-
Ben:
But in the morning.
Josh:
... but it was the night before. Yeah. It was like-
Ben:
Yeah, so I imagine in the future she might schedule you to swap a bit earlier, but-
Josh:
Yeah. I feel bad, because she said that, I guess, they had to get up early for a road trip and it's like 2:00 AM or something, or actually it was like 4:00 AM, I think, by the time the alerts died down.
Ben:
Yeah. The bad part was that there wasn't really anything to do. There was this spike in memory usage on our Redis Cluster, but it resolved itself, but only after sending some alerts saying, "Hey, somebody better pay attention to this," because that's a critical part of our infrastructure.
Josh:
Well, I mean, that's happened to me a few times. I mean, that's usually my on-call experience to be honest, and if it's worse than that, there's a good chance I'm waking you up anyways. But I mean, that's part of... You have a system well-architected, at least to the point, where if there is something, it does usually resolve itself, but still you need someone to sit up with it and babysit it until it does, just to make sure. And I mean, it would be totally unfair that you're the one who builds the system and also has to babysit it all the time, so our on call schedule is like a babysitter rotation.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that, because I was looking at this vacation schedule, it's like, "Oh, when should I take vacation?" So I went and looked at the PagerDuty rotation to try and schedule my vacation away from my rotation on PagerDuty, so I didn't have to swap. And PagerDuty has changed their UI a little bit since the last time I looked at it, and I logged in and it's like, "When are you on call next?" And it says, "You're always on call." Because I'm the-
Josh:
Because you're level one.
Ben:
I'm the backup schedule. Yeah.
Josh:
I know, and that's a problem. I've been thinking about that, so you're not the only one worried about that, but, yeah.
Ben:
It was just kind of funny. I mean, it hasn't been a quality of life issue for a long time, because we've had so few problems, but still I am that backup. If it goes, what is it, more than half an hour or something, then I get woken up. But it was just kind of funny to see, you're always on call.
Josh:
Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'd say that's the major downside of our business is just the nature of that. And also just the nature of expertise. I feel like when I leave, it's much harder on the team, solving a lot of the customer support issues that come up related to our libraries and things. And I mean, that's part of the reason we've wanted to bring more people in the business, but then you end up with more people in the business, and then you're tied to a management role that you can't leave too. So there's trade-offs there.
Ben:
Yes. It's the struggle of all the bootstrap SaaS operators that are small like us, how do I get time away when I'm the solo founder? Or maybe it just two co-founders, how do we take a break? Justin has talked about this with their customer support for Transistor. They felt like they were always just having to stay on top of that, and they could never take a break. And so, they hired someone to help out with that. And having Kevin around has really helped spread the rotation out, and he's taken up a lot of the ops stuff and gotten familiar with it. So-
Josh:
Yeah. He's taken an interest in it, which is good.
Ben:
Yeah. It's been great for me.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. It's a hard problem to solve, because, I mean, yeah, you could add people, but then you got to pay those people, and so your profitability takes a hit, so it's a balance.
Josh:
Yeah. And I mean, I think, I don't know about you, I prefer to stay small. I don't think... I've moved past the idea of I want to have a company with tons of employees or whatever. I think that actually would make... I wouldn't be as happy with that situation, probably, as with our current situation, with a few employees and small team. We probably spend a lot more time trying to solve these problems than larger companies do, because they just throw people at it. But yeah, I feel like-
Ben:
That just introduces a different set of problems, right?
Josh:
It does.
Ben:
You really just have to pick which set of problems you want. Do you want to be tied to the business? Or do you want to deal with the layers of management and the people problems that come with not being tied, personally, to the business?
Josh:
Yeah. So, yeah-
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I don't know, over time though, I think I tend towards wanting to spend less time on the business or at least, when I say, on the business, I mean, less time on those things that I just have to be doing and don't want to be doing. I want to try to always be doing the things I want to be doing. And yeah. I mean, I know just general management stuff does not fall into that bucket of what I want to be doing.
Ben:
It's not your dream in life to be a manager.
Josh:
Nope. It's not even my dream in life to be traveling the world 200 days a year or something, and preaching the gospel or something.
Ben:
Yeah. I've thought about that recently too. Looking at companies that get really big, whether they take a bunch of money or not regardless, but they turn into tens and then hundreds of employees. And I think about what would that be to be a CEO of that kind of company? And I'm just like, I just don't know that I would really enjoy that. There would be a certain set of excitement, yes, no doubt, about having that kind of business.
Ben:
I can think of right now about Tobi at Shopify, because I remember when Tobi started at Shopify, and watch that grow. And just thinking about, it's got to be pretty fun and in some ways to be Tobi, to be on top of this organization and doing these cool things and seeing the impact that you're making. And they've gone public, there's a whole lot of cool stuff there, but there's also a lot of annoying stuff there. That come along with those cool things. And it's like, ah, I think I'm happy where I am. I don't think I need to be the CEO of Shopify or something that size to have that fulfillment in my career right now.
Josh:
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that you find new ways to guard your time and it just becomes even more, that's why no one can reach the CEO, usually. But, I mean, it's all... Yeah. It just puts you in an even more critical position. The pressure and responsibility must still be pretty, it just must be massive. But-
Ben:
It must be.
Josh:
Yeah. I guess, I don't really know, because I've never been in that position. I'm just guessing.
Ben:
Right, right. And life phases might change somethings and maybe when the kids are grown and gone, maybe you'll feel like, ah, I want a new challenge, something bigger. I think you see that a lot with founders, like us, who build something, sell it. And they're like, "Huh, let me try a bigger swing. Let me try..." Like Josh is doing right now, he did it did Baremetrics, he sold that, and now he's building out Maybe, and I think he's definitely thinking bigger scope kind of stuff.
Josh:
It looks like it. Yeah.
Ben:
Or you can just go buy a ranch somewhere and just chill, right?
Josh:
Right. Well, I think it's kind of... I mean, yeah, those aren't unsimilar to me. I mean, I think the big point is or the major thing is, if you're financially set and you can, again, do whatever you want to do, then, yeah, go do it. But again, even, say, if we sold the business and didn't have to work another day in our lives, we could just go buy that ranch and just kick back on it. If I decided to go and start another company, I wouldn't want to start a company that is going to demand my time and involvement, like most companies do.
Josh:
I'd probably try to go start another Honeybadger or something, maybe, you could go larger scale, but something that solves for those problems. Yeah, and I don't know what that looks like, but I feel like some companies of the future are kind of like... The ones that GitLab, that take a more open source approach. I don't know exactly what being in charge of GitLab is like, but I'm sure it's not a walk in the park either, but experimenting with new ways to spread responsibility around. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. And maybe the answer is, that's a scenario where you do have to take a bunch of money, so you can get those employees to make that lift, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I think if we sold Honeybadger and we did something new, I think it has to be different in some dimension or otherwise, why did you sell?
Josh:
Yeah. It would have to be.
Ben:
And so maybe it's a different audience. Maybe it's a different size. Maybe it's venture backed versus doing it from scratch. I think it would have to be different in some significant way for it to be interesting enough to actually do versus just spending the rest of my retirement tinkering or whatever.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I guess, getting to that critical point with employees is the thing that's hard, going from what we have, which is kind of like where we're so small that we have things we have to still be here for, but we can just disconnect whenever we want to, for the most part, like take a week off if we want to, and just do customer support or be on call. But jumping from that to the point where, say, you have 50 employees or something and you're the CEO, and you can just be like, "Okay, everyone, I'm going to be gone for a week, carry on." Which I think you can do when you have other people managing people.
Josh:
But in between that, there's a very... it's like if you're growing out your hair, there's that weird, you know, the annoying stage where your hair, just like you hate it. And it's like, it just doesn't work. And you're... Yeah, it just seems like that exists when you're trying to grow a business where it's hard with 10 people, all 10 of those people are looking to you for leadership on a regular basis. And you're still connected to the major centers of the business.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I hadn't really thought of it that way, and that makes total sense to me. There's those growing pains that you would get going from one phase to another.
Josh:
And I guess, I'm not sure, having been doing what we're doing as long as we have, I'm not convinced that I want to go through that pain that I know is there to get to that stage where I know that we probably would be in another... we'd be back in the position where we could probably have more freedom, or hire a CEO then to just run the business, which people do.
Ben:
Well, I mean, I wonder, so two thoughts that I have. I wonder, if you're a venture back startup, if you start from scratch with a bunch of money in the war chest, do you avoid some of those growing pains? Because you can just, right out of the gate, hire a bunch of people, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
So I wonder that, and then the follow on-
Josh:
Good thought.
Ben:
Yeah, I have no idea. And the follow on thought is, well, like in our situation, we've been around for a long time, we have profitable business, we're great, what if we take on an investment now, and then that gives us that money to hire a bunch of people? To help you accelerate through that growing pain phase, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
If you had one or two people here and there that's painful, but if you add 10 or 20 people, I don't know, maybe that's a different kind of pain, but maybe it's a better kind of pain. Because it's like ripping the band-aid off, because you did all done at once.
Josh:
Yeah. No, that's a good point. Yeah. That's something that I hadn't factored in, in that line of thinking. So, yeah, I think he could be right, that that is a common use of funding and capital investment and all that.
Ben:
Yeah. I would be open to that idea, if we had figured out the sales machine. If we could say, "Oh, we can deploy X amount of people, and we know that X amount of revenue would come in, because we'd be doing these Y activities."
Josh:
Totally.
Ben:
But we haven't quite got there yet. We have a really strong inbound, but we don't really have an outbound or we don't have a process even for dealing with inbound sales, because everything right now is hands-off, right?
Josh:
It's not scalable. Yeah. Yeah. So, we're doing this to ourselves, to some extent, just in our own lack of knowledge or experience in those areas, but that's part of the learning process. So-
Ben:
Yeah, you're right.
Josh:
... we are... I think it's smart though, to be focusing on those areas now, to open up those possibilities in the future. So that if we change our minds and realize that we could scale the business to a point where we can, again, have the same thing that we have now only potentially better because we don't have those, even the small responsibilities, that drag us back in, on a regular basis.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. We're still choosing to grow slow and to keep it pretty calm, keep that calm company.
Josh:
Yeah. That's the point of calm-
Ben:
Right. If we take it big chunk of money, we could hire the VP of Marketing, the VP of sales, the VP of engineering, right? And then we could-
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
... presumably step back once we got these people set on the, here's the goal, now get it, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But, yeah, that would be a less calm company, for sure.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
At least for a while.
Josh:
Yep. And even if that's to the extent that that's possible, yeah, I don't know, I mean, you still have to build the idea of the calm company into that business. Otherwise, you'll just end up with 30 to 50 people that are chaotic and-
Ben:
Right. Yeah.
Josh:
... calling you all the time or emailing you. Yeah. So I guess I'll revise my statement, it's like, I'm not willing to grind it out to get to the next level. If that's what it comes down to, I'm happy, let's just stay where we are for... I'm fine, we run the business as an asset and try to build the lifestyle aspect of it more than anything else. But if we can find a way to scale the business and then maybe invest in it so that we can accelerate the jump, or a hair faster, so to speak.
Ben:
I like that.
Josh:
I'm terrible at metaphors. I feel like this one might actually be working, but Starr's the metaphor person. So I feel like I'm really on... I'm going to risky position right now.
Ben:
Better stop while you're ahead, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
No more metaphors for the rest of the day.
Ben:
I think that the hair growth thing works, just have to take care of not to offend all of our bald listeners, you know?
Josh:
Right. Yeah. So I went to a Starbucks this week and did some work inside of it-
Ben:
Whoa.
Josh:
... without a mask.
Ben:
Wow. That's brave.
Josh:
I still did the distancing stuff just because it seems smart. I wasn't hugging everyone, but, yeah, they've got it all posted, it's like, if you're vaccinated, the mask is optional. Plus I was drinking a beverage, so... But yeah, I had a Zoom session at the Starbucks, and it was a novel experience.
Ben:
Very nice. Yeah. I went to a Target this week for the first time in a long time, and yeah, I just put my mask on out of habit. It's like, get out of the car, put the mask on, go in the store, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And I'm walking around and I don't know, maybe a quarter of the people there didn't have masks, it's like, oh yeah, it's not required anymore, really. I'm vaccinated. I'm like, huh, cool. And I'll just get a long my way, but it's like, I have to get used to this new reality of not having to wear a mask.
Josh:
That not everyone... Yeah. Although I still suspect that a large portion of the people that are going to take them off or aren't going to wear them are the people that were always not wearing them.
Ben:
Yeah. Although I will say, if I were still doing mass transit every day, like I used to do, I would definitely be still wearing a mask, if it was any time cold or flu season-
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
I'm not going back to that prehistoric animal way of not covering myself during germy season.
Josh:
Well, there's that flu statistics that I guess have been coming in from the CDC, since the season is coming to an end 2020, 2021 or whatever, and it seems the whole social distancing. Masking situation, hand-washing really drastically improved that situation. I don't know, I forget what the numbers were, but it was ridiculous.
Ben:
Yeah, it's dropped like 99% or something crazy.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Something like that.
Ben:
It's nuts.
Josh:
Which is-
Ben:
It's awesome.
Josh:
... wild. Give it a little time for the data to get worked out, I guess, because just seems prudent. But I mean, either way, it seems like it's a massive thing.
Ben:
Yeah. I would definitely need to normalize mask wearing during germs, no doubt.
Josh:
Yeah. Yep. I'm cool with never getting sick again.
Ben:
Totally. Well, and on that note, this fall kids will actually be going to school, and it'll be an exciting adventure. All those, snot nosed punks running around getting each other sick again.
Josh:
Yeah. That'll be the real test. That's just going to knock us out. Yeah. Yeah. My daughter's, Tatum's starting kindergarten in the fall.
Ben:
Wow.
Josh:
And that'll be her... We did preschool at home. So yeah, that's going to be wild.
Ben:
First school experience, huh?
Josh:
Yes.
Ben:
Yeah, that's-
Josh:
I'm entering a new stage. I feel like, a new phase.
Ben:
Yeah. It's bittersweet. You're like, oh, that's so exciting. And it's like, oh.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. I remember those days with fondness.
Josh:
What's also going to be weird, because it's going to force me to start interacting with other parents in the community, which I think that's my biggest thing right now is like, oh, no, I-
Ben:
You better watch out, next thing you know, you'll be the president of the PTSA. You'll be organizing bake sales, and-
Josh:
Yeah, we're definitely going to be the... I think we'll be the weird parents, in our area, anyway.
Ben:
It's funny. I've noticed this, this arc, your first kid goes into kindergarten and you're so into PTA and PTSA. You're like, "I'm going to take care of all the things. I'm going to volunteer in the classroom." And you're really engaged and involved and it's so good. And then over time you start to back off a bit. It's like, "Oh, I don't really need to do all the things, there are other people that help," you know?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And then by the time they get to the tail end and they get close to graduation from high school, you're just like, "I don't even care what they're doing anymore. Educate yourself, kid. You figure it out."
Josh:
Right. Yeah, yeah. I mean I had to basically educate myself, so you can.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Totally. It's funny seeing the new wave of parents come in every year to the PTA, and then all of a sudden they go out, again, as the new wave comes in.
Josh:
And you having been there for a while, that sounds kind of like, oh no metaphors. Like if you go to a gym regularly and every New Year's, like the first two weeks of January, that's what it sounds to me.
Ben:
Yep. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.
Josh:
Because everyone comes in and is just super dedicated, and then over the next couple of weeks, it's just, they all filter out again and you're back to the same 10 people in the afternoon or whatever.
Ben:
Right. Yeah. And all the regulars get annoyed because of it. They're like, "Oh, all these people crammed in one place."
Josh:
Yeah. All this exuberance is just... Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So gym, that's a open question for me right now. So I still have a gym membership. I haven't canceled it, but I haven't been since the beginning of the pandemic. And even though I'm a 100% vaccinated, and I'm feeling invincible, still, the gym is one place I'm like, I don't know. I still feel kind of uncomfortable at that. Still trying to decide whether or not I'm going to keep that membership, because I really enjoy going, but I don't know, I don't really want to wear a mask while I'm exercising, that just sucks.
Josh:
Yeah, that was mine too, I just didn't... Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. And wiping down everything, I'm not a super sweaty person, so I'm not the kind of person that really needs to wipe down the equipment as soon as I'm done with it, because it's like, I just touch it. I didn't have a bath on it. And so I'm just... I don't know. I don't even know if they have a kitchen cleaning procedure that you have to do now, because, again, I haven't been to the gym, but I don't know. It's tough.
Josh:
I haven't been to the gym, because I got my home gym in 2019, the end of 2019, and so it's been that long. But I do sweat and I was used to just wiping down the equipment in between, it's not that bad. Especially if you... you can even carry a towel with you if you want, but most gyms have the whatever clothes-
Ben:
Yeah. Wipes.
Josh:
... and spray bottles and stuff. It's not the end of the world, but the mask thing, yeah, the idea of working out in a mask does not appeal to me. Even though it could be a plus for some people, like the people that are training for high altitudes and stuff. Some people wear the mask on the treadmills and I'm sure those people are like, "Sweet, that's just extra challenge."
Ben:
Right, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So I'm still doing the home stuff and it's just not as-
Josh:
You should-
Ben:
... awesome.
Josh:
... give it a try.
Ben:
Yeah. I guess I should. I should call them and say, "Hey, what's the deal down there?"
Josh:
I mean, I figure from what has been reported, the vaccines are very effective.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Josh:
And I mean, I understand the hesitancy, give it some time, obviously, that's prudent, the wait and see approach is completely valid. But after that, I mean, if you're immune, you're immune. So at some point you have to start-
Ben:
Living again.
Josh:
Yeah. Getting back out there, putting yourself back out there. But I mean, it's not a bad thing to be cautious, so I understand.
Ben:
Yeah. Just get back in the habit, I guess.
Josh:
Yeah. And I mean, to be fair, I'm also not at the gym with a bunch of people spitting in my face. So just to be clear, I'm giving this advice from my bunker.
Ben:
Yeah. You've got the sweet home gym set up. I'm jealous.
Josh:
Yeah. Actually, I've reduced my routine a little bit lately, and I've actually been doing more yoga and flexibility things, because I always go really hard with the weightlifting, and I'm not getting any younger. And so injuries are more frequent, and so I've been doing two days, two days a week right now just to keep up the major lifts and stuff, but kind of taking a little bit of a break.
Ben:
Have you done any of the Apple Fitness stuff?
Josh:
Yeah, I did one of the yoga sessions on it, when I was just... because I did yoga last year, when I had some injury stuff, and it was good, and I should have just kept doing it. And so, that's why I tried when I first started getting back into it this year, and it was really good. It was a little intense though for a beginner like me. So I've been doing this more beginner training, learning the actual postures and stuff. But then my plan is just to use the Apple Fitness stuff after that, because they seem like they have a lot of good just general-
Ben:
Yeah. I really like the Apple Fitness stuff. I've done some of the yoga. I didn't do the 30 minute stuff. I did the 10 minutes stuff, because I'm a super beginner, and so I did the really easy yoga, which was great for me. And I've done their high intensity stuff, which was pretty good. I'm not really an aerobics kind of person. I run and I ride, I figure I get enough aerobics that way. But when it was raining and cold and stuff, I just did the high intensity stuff, and that was pretty cool. I really liked that. And I've done their cycling, which is okay, but it's geared, at least the ones that I did, were geared towards being on a indoor cycling machine where you can adjust the intensity easily and stuff.
Ben:
I'm not, I'm on my own bike on a trainer, where the wheel is propped up and it's on that little roller. And so a lot of the instructions in the thing were, "Okay, let's dial up the resistance." And it's like, "Well, okay, I don't have that good of a setup here. I can't just dial up the resistance." So I had to alter it a bit, but it was still nice.
Josh:
You got to get your weighted boots on.
Ben:
I mean, but they do have trainers like mine that actually do have remote control, and so you can do that, but I don't have one. But anyway, I really enjoyed them. The fitness things are cool, and they're set into 30, 20, 10 minute intervals. And so you can like, "Oh, what kind of workout do I want today?" Yeah, I really like it.
Josh:
Yeah. I like the high intensity stuff for cardio a lot. And otherwise , yeah, I don't know, I could get into running, I think, but I really like walking, so I'll go for super long walks. But again, time is sometimes a factor that... sometimes I'll even just go for the afternoon and just start walking and end up back home at dinner time or something like that. I like that, but I've never been like going out too much. I've gone through a few running phases, but it never really stuck. So I like the high intensity stuff, because as far as I understand, it gives you some of the same benefits without having to run for an hour or something.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I too love long walks.
Josh:
Yep. I think that's a great way to spend some of your just general workweek. That's the good alternative to sitting and grinding away at the desk-
Ben:
No doubt.
Josh:
... for eight hours a day or whatever. This morning I was wrestling with my kids and stuff. And I was picking them up individually and lifting them up and then throwing them on the bed. And then I was like, "Okay, now I have to go, I have to go back to work." And they're like, "No, no. We just, we want one more." So I was like, "Okay, I've got one more." So I picked them both up, one in each arm. And I do, basically, a lateral raise with them. And as I do this, I don't know what they weigh, but Tatum's over 50 pounds, and of course they're unbalanced, but my entire upper body, just like... I hadn't done any stretching or anything, so my entire upper body just cracks all over, and Caitlin, she's like, "Are you okay?" Apparently it was like, she was concerned for me. So, yeah, I realize, man, it's not the good old days anymore.
Ben:
You're getting up there in years.
Josh:
Not that out there, but at the age where you start to notice these things, right?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
But I'm not past the point of trying.
Ben:
So did you do anything this week? I didn't do a whole lot actually. Well, I mean, I did responding to those urgent issues-
Josh:
Like working, you mean?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I did not get a whole lot of work done this week no. Yeah, no, you're good. I figure, yeah, I mean, again, yeah, I'm ready for a break, so I've been trying my best, but-
Ben:
You're coasting into that vacation.
Josh:
Yeah, it's been a struggle.
Ben:
That's awesome.
Josh:
But I mean, I think, we need to learn not to feel bad about that. Having a "unproductive" week. And I mean, if I'm... Yeah, honestly, I did things this week, it just wasn't as much work things. Dealt with things at home, read some books, that sort of stuff, that's still being productive, right?
Ben:
Totally. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.I thought a lot about our project that we mentioned last week on the podcast about working together with Kevin on, I had spent a fair amount of time thinking about that. And that's one of the things that you can do on those long walks, it can still be working.
Josh:
Thinking.
Ben:
Thinking.
Josh:
Yeah, thinking is totally work.
Ben:
Thinking is totally work, so I did a lot of thinking this week, and responding to urgent stuff, but also, nearly, nearly done on the compliance thing. I think I have 11 out of 150 evidence requests left to complete. So-
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
... yeah, it's almost there. Next week, I'll be actually talking to the auditors and-
Josh:
Awesome.
Ben:
Yeah. It's almost done. That's nice.
Josh:
And you've got ideas for making it easier next year.
Ben:
Yep. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, yeah, just plugging away.
Josh:
So I guess we're cruising.
Ben:
Yeah, no worries. Well, I guess we can wrap it.
Josh:
Yeah, wrap it.
Ben:
They're getting a good one. This has been FounderQuest. We're still coming at you mostly every week, and we really enjoy it. And if you enjoy it, hope you give us a review at iTunes or wherever you can review podcasts, because I never do that, so I have no idea. But if you're into that, please do, and, yeah, check out Honeybadger, of course, because we love having more customers. And I guess we'll see y'all next time.
Josh:
Catch you later.
Show notes:
Links:Twist
Hook Relay
Ben Orenstein
Tuple
Write for Honeybadger
Full transcript:Starr:
So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.
Ben:
Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going on. I'm like, "Oh, I think probably the car is a better place to record today."
Josh:
Well at least you'll have some new friends soon.
Ben:
True, true.
Starr:
Yeah. Well I'm glad you made it, at least. And so what's up? I missed a week of the podcast and you guys invested our entire Honeybadger savings account into Bitcoin.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And I'm not sure that was the most prudent investment decision, y'all. I just wanted to say that.
Ben:
Yeah, the timing could have been better.
Josh:
Yeah, we really pulled a Roam Research on that one.
Starr:
Oh yeah. What do you mean by that?
Josh:
They invest in Bitcoin, apparently.
Starr:
Oh, they do? Okay.
Ben:
Of course they do.
Starr:
Of course. It's just a dip. You're supposed to buy the dips, Josh. It's just what, like a 30% dip? 40% dip?
Josh:
I wasn't watching it, but I read that it had recovered pretty quickly too.
Starr:
Oh. I have no idea. I didn't even follow it.
Josh:
As it does.
Starr:
I don't even follow it.
Josh:
Yeah. I just read random people's opinions.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
I forget where we left it last week, but I just wanted to state for record that I think I mentioned I made some accidental money in Bitcoin back when I was learning about block chain technology, but I have not bought any Bitcoin since, nor do I intend to, and I do not really view it as an investment asset.
Starr:
This is not investment advice.
Josh:
I just need to state my opinions for the future so I can look back on them with regret. If I don't say what I actually think, I'm never going to have anything to regret.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
I'm just going to commit.
Starr:
So you've decided to die on this no intrinsic value hill.
Josh:
Right. I'll let you know if I change my mind.
Starr:
Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, I don't really check. Last week y'all did the interview with Mike, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah, it was a good conversation.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't really pay attention to it, except occasionally I'll look at the chart. It's the same with GameStop. Occasionally I'll look at the GameStop chart and then just see what wild stuff people are saying about it. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, GameStop was hovering at about 150 for a while, but now it's up to like 170-ish, 180. Something like that. Yeah. I peek at it every now... it's on my watch list when I log into my brokerage account, so I just see it. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Cool." And then I move on and check out my real actual stock portfolio.
Starr:
Oh yeah, yeah. I'm not going to buy it. It's like a TV show for me.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Josh:
Yeah. To be fair, I really don't have much of an opinion either way. I still don't understand it, so I don't know. I just feel like I probably shouldn't be buying it.
Starr:
That's really good advice. I don't understand anything though, so what am I supposed to do, Josh? Huh? Huh?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Just buy the index fund.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't even understand that.
Josh:
I don't understand that either though, if you really think about it.
Ben:
That's actually, there was a good thread or so on Twitter. I don't know if it was this week or last week, but basically the idea was if you feel really confident in your own ability, in your own business, given that, you're probably spending most of your time in that business, right? We spend most of our creative time in Honeybadger because that's where we feel the most potential is. So you're investing basically all of your personal capital in this one business. How do you diversify that risk? Or do you diversify the risk? Do you double down? Maybe do you take investment to diversify, and so you buy out? Let someone do a secondary and so you take some cash off the table? If you did that, then where would you put the money? Do you just go, "Okay, I'm going to go buy Bitcoin. I'm going to go buy an index fund," or whatever. And if you do that, is that a better use of your money than having just kept the equity and just plowing more time into your business? Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's an interesting thought exercise. It's like, "Hm." The whole investment mindset of your business is interesting to me.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that was interesting. I think I saw that conversation, or maybe I saw a similar conversation where they were talking about even just 401Ks and for founders who are already fairly... have at least made it in whatever sense that means. Is it the best financial move to keep maxing out your 401K versus investing in your ability to generate revenue in your business?
Starr:
So a little bit of real talk here. If you are a founder who's made it, maxing out your 401K isn't really a blip on your financial radar.
Josh:
It's not a big... yeah. That was kind of the same thought I had. It's not like you're putting 50% of your income into it.
Starr:
Yeah. What is it, like 20 grand? Something like that?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's a good chunk of change, but still. It's not like...
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know.
Starr:
Yeah, that's interesting. I think I'm just going to go all in on Pogs. I think they're due for a comeback. I think that's going to be how I diversify.
Josh:
But I think it's probably a good move to invest in yourself if you have the ability to build businesses. That definitely seems like a good investment, in any case. Probably still have a 401K. I tend to do everything, except Bitcoin.
Ben:
A 401K is a nice backstop. Just keep stocking money away, and later it will be there, hopefully. But in the meantime, really, really spend your time and your energy on making your business even more profitable. Speaking of making your business more profitable, so this past week or two weeks, I've been working on our SOC 2 type two audit, so I'm doing the evidence collection.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Ben:
So that in this case means I take a bunch of screenshots of settings, like the AWS console and G-suite console to show yeah, we have users, and yes, we have login restrictions, et cetera. All the 150 different things that you're supposed to check off the list when you do the audit. And as I've been going through this process taking all these screenshots, honestly it's getting a bit tedious, and it's surprisingly time consuming. And so I'm like, "You know, there are services for this sort of thing. Let me check them out." And so in the past three days, I've had conversations with Vanta, Secureframe, and Drata. These are three providers that what they do is they provide almost SOC 2 in a box. Basically they help you connect all of your systems and get the evidence that you need for an auditor in a more automated fashion. So for example, they'll plug into your AWS account and they'll pull out information about your security groups, your application firewall, your AIM, all the access permissions, all that kind of stuff, and pack that up into a nice little format that the auditor can then look at and like, "Yeah, they're good on all these different requirements." So you don't have to take screenshots of security groups.
Ben:
And I hadn't really looked at them before because I was like, "I don't know if I just want to spend that kind of money," but actually sitting back and looking at it, looking at the time that I'm spending on this and the amount of time I'm paying our auditors to audit all these screenshots that I'm taking, actually I think it would be cheaper to go with one of these services, because your audit is a bit more streamlined because the auditor knows how that data is going to come in and it's an easy format to digest, et cetera. But the thing is that after having gone through some of the sales pitches from these vendors, I'm thinking I really wish I would have started with these back the first time, because I think it would have been much easier just from the get go. So I think I've been doing the SOC compliance on hard mode, unfortunately, but lessons learned.
Starr:
With my experience, that just seems to be how projects are. You do it one time and you don't really know what you're doing, and you just push your way through it, and then eventually you figure out how to do it better and easier and all that. Because when something is new to you, you don't know what you can safely ignore. You know?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well plus you're pumping up the value of FounderQuest.
Starr:
Oh, that's true. We got a lot of content out of that.
Ben:
That's true.
Starr:
At least $100 worth.
Josh:
That's useful knowledge. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, so I think the short version is if you are interested in doing SOC2 compliance and you have no idea what you're doing, talk to these vendors first and maybe just start with them. They will help you, because they have customer success people like SaaS does. They have people on staff who are there to help you have success with their product. And if you don't get compliant, then you're going to stop using their product, so they're going to help you try and get there. And it's still pricey. It's still going to be five figures a year, but it will definitely save you some time and maybe even save you some money.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yeah. So next year, our audit should just be smooth as silk.
Starr:
Just butter.
Josh:
Love it.
Starr:
So if we-
Josh:
What are you going to do with all that extra free time?
Ben:
I made an executive decision.
Starr:
Oh really? What's that?
Ben:
Yes. The executive decision is we're going to have more teamwork at Honeybadger.
Starr:
That's ironic.
Josh:
Instead of what? What we have now, which is anarchy?
Ben:
We pretty much do have anarchy, I think. We are coordinated, we do make our plans, and we do have things we want to get done, but yeah, we are very independent at Honeybadger. We work independently. You might even say we're kind of siloed. We go off in the corner and do our own thing for most of the time. And I was chatting with Kevin about this, and I think we're going to try an experiment. So I think we're going to try to actually work together.
Starr:
Kevin is our developer.
Starr:
Yeah, so you all are going to be developing features together. Are you going to pair program? Are you going to use Tuple?
Ben:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there.
Starr:
Are you going to mob program?
Ben:
Pair programming, that's maybe too advanced for us, I think. Maybe actually we'll chat in Slack a little bit here and there and maybe have a Zoom call.
Josh:
Yeah, so you're talking about you're both going to work on the same project at the same time.
Ben:
Right. Right.
Josh:
Mostly independently, but coordinating.
Ben:
Right. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think that still can fit into our anarchy model.
Starr:
Yeah. It still seems a little bit independent.
Josh:
It's more like mutual aid or something.
Starr:
There you go. We should make a conference talk about mutual aid development.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
That would go over well.
Ben:
Using NATO as a model for your development process. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. I'm looking forward to it. I think I've been feeling a little lonely. I don't know if it's the right word, but maybe just off doing my own thing. I was like, "Oh, I think it will be nice to have some collaboration, some coordination." Maybe we'll even get to a level of synergies.
Starr:
Synergies.
Starr:
That's a blast from the past.
Josh:
Yeah, I think it's a good idea.
Ben:
Yeah, so more to come on that. We'll keep you posted. It's a bigger project. May not have results for a couple months. Don't really want to spill the beans on what it is right now. Competitive information. Don't want to leak it to all of our competitors.
Starr:
I like that. I like that. It's going to keep people on the hook for the next episodes.
Josh:
Totally.
Ben:
But yeah. That was my week.
Josh:
Yeah. Well my week, I took some time off, had some family stuff going on, so I was not very productive this week, but what I did work on was I've been working on this little guide for Hook Relay. I'd love to get the marketing machine, the fly wheel going on that at least, so we can be moving that along with everything else. And so yeah, working on some content and such.
Starr:
What is Hook Relay?
Josh:
Well you tell us what Hook Relay is, Ben. It's your baby.
Ben:
It's my baby. Yeah. So Hook Relay is a tool for managing web hooks. So you can record web hooks as they go out. In our case, to Honeybadger, we send a lot of web hooks, and so we built Hook Relay to help track all that web hook action. So we logged as pay loads that can go and diagnose issues that are happening, or maybe replay them as necessary, and of course it also handles inbound web hooks. So if you were handling, let's say, a post pay load request from GitHub about some activity that happens in your GitHub account, you handle that web hook and we can give you a place to store that, and then you can replay that, send it, forward it onto somewhere if you want, or just store it.
Josh:
Yeah. I think one of my favorite things about Hook Relay is just the visibility that it gives us into what's happening with the hooks, because otherwise we never had a dashboard. I guess we could have built one internally to see what the activity was and what's failing, what's actually... what requests are... because you're connecting to thousands of different people's random domain URLs, basically. It's really nice even for debugging and things like troubleshooting to be able to see what's going on, in addition to all the other cool things that it gives you out of the box.
Starr:
So you might say it's even like turnkey reliability and visibility for web hooks. For all your web hook needs.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, we modeled it on Stripes web hooks because we loved-
Starr:
I'm holding up a box up. I'm holding the TurboLinks box up and gesturing at it with my hand.
Ben:
Vanna White style.
Josh:
We should do our own channel, do our own infomercials.
Ben:
Yeah, I really wanted experience of Stripe. If you set up web hooks in Stripe, you can go and you can see all the web hooks they've sent you. You can see the pay loads, you can see whether they were successfully delivered or not, and I wanted that experience for our own web hooks, and also I thought it would be cool if developers could just have that without having to build the infrastructure. And so if you're building an app that send a bunch of web hooks on behalf of your customers, well now you can give your customers visibility into that web hook activity without having to build that tracking yourself.
Josh:
Yeah. That's pretty cool. So basically this content guide I'm working on is how to build web hooks into your application, including all the reliability and stuff that Hook Relay gives you for free. And the idea is that if that's what you're doing and you just want to save some time, Hook Relay will be a large chunk of that. You've just got to sign up. So I think it will be useful to everyone, even if they don't become a customer. If you're going to build your own back end and handle all the retries, build dashboards, and all that. But if you want it all turnkey, then Hook Relay is a big chunk of that work just done of you.
Starr:
So is this live? So can people go and sign up now?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Hook Relay, yes. It is.
Josh:
Hookrelay.dev.
Ben:
Yeah. In fact, we have enough customers now that it's actually paying for itself.
Starr:
What?
Ben:
Yes. So sweet.
Josh:
It's wild. That's wild.
Starr:
That's amazing.
Ben:
So Josh, is your guide going to have... are you going to dive deep into the architecture of here's how you build a whole web hook system, and so we're going to show you all the stuff behind the curtain so you can build your own? And then, "Oh, by the way, if you want it just done for you, here it is." Or are you going to just keep it more high level?
Josh:
I'm starting more high level. Yeah, I was planning on it being more high level. More like a high level architecture thing, or specification. Like these are the parts that you'll need to build, but you're going to have to solve some things, because it's not going to be specific to one system. It's not going to be like, "This is how you build web hooks for Ruby and Sidekick, or if you're going serverless." It will have suggestions on stacks or technologies to use for the back end, for instance, but yeah. I was thinking of leaving that to the user to figure out, but just showing the things you need to think about that a lot of people don't think about until they encounter the problems that might arise, like retrying and all the error handling that you add later, and validation for security reasons and things.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
This is giving me flashbacks to a whole two or three year process after we first launched.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It was just like, "Oh, crap. There's an edge case here that we didn't think of because we're not used to doing web hooks at this scale." And that just went on for like three years.
Josh:
Yeah. And it's nice having the two products because Hook Relay came out of Honeybadger and it's basically part of our web hook system. This is basically just documenting Honeybadger's web hook system for other people who might want to replicate that or whatever.
Ben:
Totally. I think that will be cool. A great piece of content, a great piece of SEO juice. And if you did decide to go deep into the technical side, like if you explain the entire infrastructure that we're building, that would actually be kind of cool too because you could maintain your technical documentation for the system internally and use it as a piece of content for marketing.
Josh:
That could be cool. Yeah. That's not a bad idea. Yeah, I was thinking just because I want to get something out there. I'm thinking it will help with both, having a resource for people who are already on the site to see this is basically how you will implement this. It's kind of like an implementation guide, really. But then also SEO. It should help get us in more search results.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
And I also want to credit Ben Orenstein and and Tuple. They have a great pair programming guide which was an inspiration for this idea. I just really liked the format that they used, and I just think it's a great idea if you have a product that's highly targeted or focused on one specific thing and doing it really well. I think it's maybe even a great alternative to a blog, for instance. You can get some of the same benefits of having a blog, but without actually having to create a blog with a lot of different variety of topics and things.
Ben:
Speaking of the blog, I was talking to Harris, our sales guru, about our blog strategy, and I said, "Yeah, it's basically like a flypaper strategy. We want it to attract developers that come and see the content and they love it and they're like, 'Oh, let me check out this Honeybadger thing.'" Not particularly novel, but I like the flypaper idea.
Starr:
That's a good metaphor. And also for a long time, I poo-pooed SEO because in my mind, SEO was very scammy. I don't know. I learned about SEO in the days of link farming and all that, and I just didn't want to be involved in that. So I'm just like, "We're just going to put out good content and that will be enough." And it is, yes, but also I've looked at some metrics since then that make it clear that the majority of good things that happen because of our blog actually are people entering through search queries. That really outweighs people sharing articles and doing stuff like that, which I guess is obvious that it would be that way, but my own bias against search just made me not see that for a while. So maybe trying to pick some possible low hanging fruit. We've tried to make our site search engine friendly, but we having really done any explicit SEO type activities.
Josh:
Yeah. I went through recently through our documentation and just tweaked just small things on a bunch of pages, like headlines and some of the meta tags and stuff, but mostly headlines and content on page was what I was focusing on. And I wasn't using any particular tool to measure before and after results, but it does seem like it bumped us up in some of the results for people searching for more general terms like Ruby error tracking, for example, which are typically pretty competitive terms. But I think we rank pretty well for some of those terms these days. I think we've been around enough and we're one of the options that come up. So it does seem like if you already target the terms, it actually does what they say it does, which is good to know. You've just got to pay attention to it.
Ben:
So the moral of story is there is some value in SEO.
Starr:
I guess so.
Josh:
Yeah. Well and I think documentation sites. Your documentation, I think it's a great place to optimize SEO because a lot of times, especially for those... maybe not for the long tail searches. A blog is great for that, like what you were talking about with the flypaper, Ben. But for people who are actually searching for what you do, I think a lot of times documentation pops up first in a lot of cases when I'm searching for things, so don't overlook it like we did.
Starr:
Yeah. Well this week, I guess the main thing I did was I got our authors lined up for the next quarter of intelligence briefings. So if you haven't been playing along at home, we're having some intelligence briefings created. Basically everything that's going on in a certain language community for the quarter, and this grew out of Josh's need because he's basically in charge of our client libraries. And we have libraries in a variety of languages, so keeping up with those languages and what's going on is a real pain in the ass, so we were going to make these guides originally for him, but then also we were like, "This would be really great content to publish."
Starr:
And I've already got this system with authors who want to write about programming languages, and so let's see if we can make some authors make these summaries. And so far, yeah, I'm pretty happy. We had four or five of them created, and we're not publishing them because they were for a previous quarter, and this is just a trial run to see if the results are okay, and I think they were. I think the results were pretty good. We go some feedback from you two, and I updated my process and updated the template that all the authors are using, and so we should be getting round two done. I'm setting the deadline a week after the end of the quarter. My hope is if they get them to me then, then I'll have a week to get them up on our blog or wherever, and then they won't be too out of date by the time people see them.
Josh:
Yeah. That's cool. I'm excited to see the next batch. My favorite thing from the reports were the ones where they wrote some original content summarizing things or sections or whatever. That was super useful because there's a little bit of a story element to it that's specific to the quarter or whatever that you don't really get from just... if you just aggregate everything, all the weekly newsletters and what happened on Reddit and what happened on Twitter. If you just dump that all in a document, it's a bit of overload, so it's nice to have the summary the story of what the community was interested in.
Starr:
Oh yeah. Definitely.
Josh:
Here are some articles that they talked about.
Starr:
That's the whole idea, is to have somebody who knows the community explain to you what's going on, as opposed to... if I wanted a bunch of links, I could just write a little script to scrape links from places.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And it wouldn't be very useful. What's useful is having people who know the environment being like, "Hey, this is what's going on. This is why it's important." And yeah, so that's going to be something I guess I need to look for explicitly when I get this round of things of reports back.
Josh:
Start calling them secret agents or something instead of authors.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
Or detectives.
Starr:
Operatives. Yeah. Assets.
Josh:
As our detective service investigators.
Ben:
I think having that analysis of why this news is important or why these things are important that they've collected is really handy, because the links are great. Like you said, I could just write a script to collect them, but having someone with that context in the community saying, "Okay, and it's important because, and this is why you should pay attention," I think that's really helpful to someone who's maybe not as deep into that every day.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. And also knowing what to surface, because there was one report that it really seemed to just dump every single link or article that was discussed or was in a newsletter or whatever, and I think it's more helpful if it's on a quarterly level, if you know what is actually the important things that you really want to know about.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. I just made a note for myself to go back and explicitly just mention that to people, because I realized I didn't put it in the instructions anywhere. I put like, "Here's where a description of the content goes," but I didn't really put what I want inside that description, I realized.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So I'm going to do that.
Ben:
We're iterating in real time here.
Starr:
Oh yeah, yeah. This is where the work gets done.
Josh:
Yeah. Well and pretty soon, we'll have hopefully some good examples that we can show future authors, or detectives, or whatever we're calling them.
Starr:
Oh, definitely. Definitely. I'm going to call them authors because they're already in the blog system as authors and it just seems like-
Josh:
Agents?
Starr:
I don't know. I've got to be able to talk to these people with a straight face.
Ben:
You could call them research specialists, but then you might have to pay them more.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Research. Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know. I think I'm paying pretty well. Honestly, I think I'm paying pretty well for looking at... I don't know. How many weeks is a quarter? 12? 12 weeks of newsletters and just telling me what's going on. I think I'm paying pretty well.
Josh:
Yeah. You don't need to talk to them with a straight face though. You need to talk to them with sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette in a diner.
Starr:
Oh that's right. Yeah.
Josh:
Or a dive bar somewhere.
Starr:
Those people aren't smiling. Those people aren't smiling. Oh, that's right. I can do that. I just realized that it's two weeks since my second vaccine, so I'm ready to go out and recruit secret agents.
Josh:
Ready to party.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm very anxious talking with people in public now, but that's not a topic for this conversation.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll ease back into it.
Starr:
Oh yeah. Yeah, we're going to have dinner with my sister in law on Saturday, and I'm just like, "Okay Starr, you can do this. You can do this."
Josh:
Cool.
Starr:
Yeah, and I guess the other thing that we did this week is we are doing a trial run of Twist as a replacement for Basecamp messages, the message board on Basecamp. And yeah, so basically the long and short of it is the whole Basecamp BS just left a bad taste in my mouth in particular. I think you all's a little bit, or maybe you're neutral. I don't care. That sounded really harsh.
Ben:
You can be honest with us. We can take it.
Starr:
No, I didn't mean to sound that harsh. I just mean I'm not trying to put my opinions onto you, is what I'm saying. I just felt gross using Basecamp. Also if I'm being honest, I never really enjoyed Basecamp as a product. It's got a couple things that just really rubbed me the wrong way.
Josh:
We were having some vague conversations in the past. We have posed do we really want to keep this part of what we're using Basecamp for? And we were already using a subset of it, so yeah. It wasn't totally out of the blue.
Starr:
Yeah. And we were using maybe 20% of Basecamp, just the message boards feature.
Josh:
And the check ins, which apparently we all disliked.
Starr:
And the check ins, which nobody liked but we all kept using for some reason. Ben is like, "Can I turn off the check ins?" And I'm like, "I thought you were the only reason we were doing the check ins, it's because I thought you liked them."
Ben:
I think I was the only reason we were doing the check ins.
Josh:
It's because... yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, because I remember when I started it I was like, "Yeah, I really don't know what's going on," because back to that siloed, independent, off in the corner thing, I was like, "It would be nice to know what people are doing." But yeah, lately I've been like, "This is just a drag." So I'm like, "Would anybody be upset if this went away?" And everyone is like, "Please take it away."
Josh:
Everyone is just passively aggressively answering them.
Ben:
Everyone hated it.
Josh:
It wasn't that bad, but-
Ben:
I get it.
Josh:
Kevin used them too, but yeah.
Ben:
So I finally gave everyone permission to tell me that it was not okay, and now we no longer do it.
Starr:
There you go. And we're just like, "While we're at it, just ditch Basecamp." So yeah, so we've been trying a new system called Twist. Twist is, essential it's... I don't know, it's like threaded discussions. I figured this out on my own. I'm very proud of myself. So you have lots of threads, and you twist them together to make yarn or something or some sort of textile, so I bet you that's why it's called Twist.
Josh:
Beautiful sweater.
Starr:
Yeah. A beautiful sweater. The tapestry that is Honeybadger. And so far, I've really been enjoying it. I find the UI to be a lot better. There was one bug that we found that I reported, so hopefully that will get fixed. It doesn't really bother me that much. Yeah, it's amazing sometimes how the UI of an application can just be like, "Oh, ah. I'm having to parse less information just to do my task."
Josh:
It's much nicer.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
It does feel like a lot less friction for our use case.
Josh:
Yeah. Well we talked about that, just the structure. The way that you structure conversation and organization things in a management tool like that makes a big difference. In Basecamp, we would create Basecamps for whatever. They call them Basecamps, right? They're the projects.
Starr:
They're like projects. I don't know.
Josh:
We'd create different ones, different projects for each project, but then there's five of us, so we'd basically just add everyone to every single project that is in there. But all the conversation is siloed off in each project, and with Twist, it's just much more of a fluid... it uses what, like channels? But yeah, it just seems like it's all together. It's kind of like a combination of Slack and a threaded message board or something, to me.
Starr:
Yeah, or like Slack and email or something.
Josh:
Slack and email. Yeah. It's a nice combo.
Starr:
Yeah. It has inbox, which I like, where it shows you any unread messages, and so you can just easily just go and scan through them, and it's all in the same page. It's a single page application, so you don't have to click out to a completely new page and then come back to the inbox and do all that. Basecamp had a similar feature, but it's like a timeline and it had a line down the middle of the screen and then branches coming off of either side of it. And for some reason, I started using the inbox in Twist and it was just like, "Oh, this is so much better." For some reason I think having things on different sides of the screen just doubled the amount of background processing my brain had to do to put it all together. And yeah, so I don't know. I do like it. Also, it's got mark down. It's got mark down.
Josh:
The mark down editor is so nice. It reminds me a lot of just using GitHub, the editor on GitHub, with the mark down mode and preview. And you can drag and drop images into the... I don't know if you knew that, into the mark down editor, like you can on GitHub, and it automatically inserts the image tag and uploads it for you.
Starr:
Yeah, it's all really slick. So I don't know. I imagine in maybe another... I've got vacation next week, so maybe after that we'll get together and compare notes. But I don't know, it seems like people like it so far.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, it's been good. It's interesting-
Josh:
If I had to decide today, it's a keeper for me.
Ben:
Yeah, I would go ahead and switch.
Starr:
Oh yeah, me too.
Ben:
It's interesting to me, you alluded to this, Starr, as you were talking about comparing it to your products and how they approach... it's interesting to me the UI, even if it's the same kind of functionality, how much different takes on the user experience can make a different experience for the user. How it just feels different. Like, "Oh yeah, it's basically doing the same thing, but it just feels better for whatever. My mentality or our business." Fill in the blank there, but I thought about that many times. Honeybadger versus competitors. It's like, "Yeah, they're doing basically the same thing, but we do have differences in how we approach the UI and different use patterns that we think are more emphasized by our UI versus the others." And sometimes it's just a matter of personal preference. It's like, "Oh, this just feels better to me." One night I tried Python before I tried Ruby, and Python is like, "Oh, that's interesting," but then Ruby really clicked my brain. It's like, "Oh, it just feels better." And I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but I don't know. It's weird to me and fun to think about the human part of these products.
Josh:
Yeah. And it's surprising, the strong opinions that people pick up just based on those experience things when they're basically the same, if they're doing the same thing. Some people, they either love it or hate it based on that.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. Maybe it all goes back to whatever business apps you used in childhood. It's just whatever your mom made you for lunch, you're always going to love that.
Josh:
Yeah. It's like a nurture thing, nature versus nurture. You were exposed to these apps when you were young, and so it's just what you're drawn to.
Starr:
Yeah. I remember putting my little friend's contact details into Lotus Notes.
Josh:
Right. I had to program Lotus Notes.
Ben:
I got my first dev job because I knew Lotus Notes.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
Lotus Notes was an important precedent at the time, I think.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It was the bomb. You could do some pretty serious stuff.
Starr:
Yeah. I kept having these jobs that weren't technically dev jobs, but ended up being dev jobs just because I knew how to write V basic macros for Excel. I'm sure a lot of people had that experience.
Josh:
The thing I remember doing in Lotus Notes was setting it up to ingest email from the outside world into whatever, the system. And thinking about it now, that project I've done over and over and over since then.
Starr:
It's Basecamp.
Josh:
And I'm still doing that project.
Starr:
It's Basecamp all over again. Oh no.
Ben:
If only there was a service that took in emails for you, and then you could just bring them into your app data.
Josh:
Yeah. I bet in 20 years, we'll be writing programs to accept email.
Ben:
Process emails, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. When is this stuff going away? Technology changes all the time. When is email going away? They've been killing it for years. It's like fricking Rasputin. When is it going away?
Ben:
It's the cockroach of protocols.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
After the singularity, they'll still have to have a way to import it directly into your consciousness, and yeah, I don't know.
Starr:
Yeah. I hope the spam filtering is really good then.
Starr:
All right, well it was great talking with y'all.
Ben:
Likewise.
Starr:
Yeah. So this has been FounderQuest. Go to the Apple podcast and review us if you want. If you're interested in writing for us, we are always looking for fresh, new talent. Young authors looking to make their mark on the world of technical blog posts for SAS companies. And yeah, just go to our blog and look for the write for us page. I don't currently have any openings, but who knows? People flake out. So if you're interested in writing these reports for us too, get in touch. These quarterly intelligence briefings, if you want to be an agent for our intelligence service. All right, so I'll see y'all later.
Show notes:
Links:
Mike Mondragon
CRDT
Ship of Theseus
Exceptional Creatures
Shiba Inu
Full Transcript:Ben:I'm just gonna dive on in there. I'm so eager. I'm so excited. It's actually weird because Starr is the one that typically starts us off.
Josh:
Yeah. I thought we were just going to start with our just general banter, and then not introduce the guest until 30 minutes later.
Ben:
By the way.
Josh:
It is also our tradition.
Ben:
Yeah. Well we're getting better at this thing.
Josh:
Where we say, "Oh, by the way, if Starr doesn't sound like Starr..."
Ben:
Right, yes. Today Starr doesn't sound like Starr because today's star is Mike Mondragon instead. Welcome Mike.
Josh:
Hey Mike.
Mike:
Hey.
Ben:
Mike is a long time friend of the show, and friend of the founders. Actually, Mike, how long have we known each other? It's been at least 10, maybe 15 years?
Mike:
Probably 2007 Seattle RB.
Ben:
Okay.
Josh:
Yeah. I was going to say you two have known each other much longer than I've even known Ben.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So you go back.
Ben:
Way back.
Mike:
Yep.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Because I think Ben and I met in 2009.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Or something.
Mike:
Okay.
Ben:
Yeah, Mike and I have been hanging out for a long time.
Mike:
Yeah.
Ben:
We've known each other through many, many different jobs, and contracts, and so on. It's been awesome.
Josh:
Yeah, Mike, I feel like I've heard your name since... Yeah, for the last, at least, 10 years just working with Ben. You've always been in the background. And we've realized this is the first time we've actually met face to face, which is crazy. But it's great to... Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
... have a face to put with the little... What is it, a cat avatar? Is a cat in your avatar? You've had that avatar for a really long time I feel like.
Mike:
Yeah, that's Wallace.
Josh:
Okay.
Mike:
So I'm Mond on GitHub and Twitter, and that cat avatar is our tuxedo cat, Wallace. And he is geriatric now. Hopefully he'll live another year. And if you remember in that era of Ruby, all of the Japanese Rubyists had cat icons. And so that was... I don't know. That's why Wallace is my icon.
Josh:
Yeah. Nice.
Ben:
So, so do Wallace and Goripav know each other?
Mike:
No, no, they don't. They're like best friends, right? They had to have met at Seattle RB.
Ben:
Yeah. Internet friends.
Mike:
Internet friends, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So, Mike is old school Ruby, way back, way back, yeah. But the other funny thing about the old Rubyists, all those Japanese Rubyists, I remember from RubyConf Denver... Was that 2007? Somewhere around there. I remember going to that and there were mats and a bunch of friends were sitting up at the front, and they all had these miniature laptops. I've never seen laptops so small. I don't know what they were, nine inch screens or something crazy.
Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
I was like, "How do you even type on that thing?" But it's a thing. So I guess... I don't know. I haven't been to Japan.
Mike:
There are laptops that you could only get in Japan and they flash them with some sort of Linux probably.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Okay. I wonder how long it took them to compile C on there.
Mike:
Yeah. So, about the orbit with the founders. So, I think I'd put it in my notes that I... And I consider myself a sliver of a Honeybadger in that I did have a conversation with Ben about joining the company. And then in 2017, I did do a little contracting with you guys, which is ironic in that... So we're probably going to talk about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin protocol is, essentially, on a four-year timer. And in 2017 was the last time that we were building up to, I guess, an explosive end to that cycle. And I had just been working at Salesforce at Desk.com, And I left because of Bitcoin. And then this year, four years later, I, again, just left Salesforce, but I just left from Heroku. And I didn't leave so much because of Bitcoin, I just got a better opportunity, and I'm a principal engineer at Okta, and I'm in the developer experience working on SDKs, primarily, the Golang SDK.
Mike:
So I think one of the things that they were happy about was that I had experience carrying the pager, and knowing what that's like, and they wanted to have an experienced engineer that would have empathy for the engineers to main the SDK. So I'm really excited to be here, because I'm not going to be carrying the pager, and it is the fun programming. What I imagine, listening to the founders, about the kind of fun programming that you guys get to do, working with different languages and whatnot. So, obviously right now, I'm starting out with Golang. We don't have a Ruby SDK, because OmniAuth provider is the thing that most people use. But, there's also PHP, and some Java, so I'm just looking forward to being able to do a bunch of different languages.
Josh:
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. We don't know anything about SDK teams, Honeybadger. But yeah, it sounds like we have very similar jobs at the moment. So that's cool. We'll have to trade tips at some point. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I'm excited that you're there, because I'm definitely going to hit you up on the SAML stuff, because SAML's a pain in the tuchus yeah, I'm sure you'll have some insights from your time there.
Mike:
Well, that was how I was even open-minded to talking to Okta, was the recruiter had contacted me and I think actually it was the recruiter... I don't know the structure of how this works, but a lot of companies have a prospecting recruiter. And I think that a veteran oriented prospecting recruiter contacted me. And so being a veteran, I'll usually entertain those cold calls. And so then when I was at Desk, I wrote... So Desk was a big Rails monolith. I wrote a microservice to break some of the SSO off of the monolith itself. And in writing the API documentation that was on desk.com, I actually used Okta as one of the examples as a SSO identity provider using SAML. So yeah, I have had a little bit of experience from the outside of Okta with SAML. And so maybe I'll have more experience here to answer your questions.
Ben:
Yeah. We'll have to have you back and we can just do a whole hour on that. It's a fun world.
Josh:
After we do an hour on SDKs.
Ben:
Yeah, and your code that you wrote for us still lives on in Honeybadger.
Josh:
Yeah. Was it the webpack? That was some of the work, right?
Ben:
Some of it, yeah.
Mike:
Yep.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And some GitHub integration work.
Josh:
And the integrations, yeah.
Mike:
Yeah, well if I remember correctly with the GitHub integration, I did do some GitHub integration, and it tickled your enthusiasm, Ben, and then I think you went in and like refactored that a little bit.
Ben:
Well, if you have a monolith like Redo that's been around for as long as ours has, things don't... It's like, what was that Theseus' ship, it's goes around the world but you replace things as it goes, and it's never the same app, right?
Mike:
Yeah, that's the thing, we had discussed this in the prelude around just software engineering in general and how hard it is to maintain a monolith, especially as a company grows and as developers come rolling into a project, you get all of these... Over time you get engineers with different goals, different techniques, different styles of touching your code base, to the point that it becomes very hard to maintain a project. And I think, I don't know if we're going to talk about Heroku at all, but I think that Heroku suffers from a little bit of that, where there's very few original Heroku that are involved in the runtime at least. And I just came from being on the runtime in the control plane. And, definitely, the code base there is... There's maybe one or two people that are still around that have touched that code base from the beginning.
Ben:
Yeah, let's dive into that, because that's fascinating to me. I know that there's been chatter on Twitter recently that people feel that Heroku is stagnated. That they haven't really brought a lot of innovative stuff to market recently. I remember, actually a funny story, I'm going to tell it myself. I can't remember what year this was, it were way... I don't know, I don't know, early 2000s. I was sitting as part of a focus group, and I can't reveal a lot of information because secrecy and stuff. But anyway, I was part of this focus group and I was asked as part of this group, what as a developer working on Ruby applications and Rails applications, what I thought about this new thing called Heroku. And had it explained to me, "Oh, you just get push", and "Blah, blah, blah", and I poo-pooed the idea. I was like, "Nah, I'm not interested", because I already know how to deploy stuff. I've got Mongrel, I got a DVS.
Josh:
Say Mongrel.
Ben:
I know how to use SEP, why do I need this? Like Math, never going to catch on. And so don't follow me for investing advice.
Mike:
Yeah, totally.
Josh:
I got my Linodes.
Mike:
Yeah. Or even back then, I wrote all of my own chef, so I got my own recipes I can-
Ben:
Right, exactly.
Mike:
... bare metal at will.
Ben:
Exactly. So, what do you think, you've been at Heroku, you've seen this process of people having to maintain this code base over a long period of time. What are some tips for people who might be a little earlier on the process? Looking down the road, what do you suggest people think about for having a more maintainable application?
Mike:
That's interesting. I really think that there is not one size fits all, and actually some of the things that are specific to Heroku, and actually to desk.com when I was there previously, that some of the issues actually stem from Salesforce culture and the way that Salesforce manages its businesses. And so, I guess the thing that I've always liked about Rails, specifically, is that the conventions that are used in Rails, you can drop an experienced Rails developer pretty much into any Rails app and they're going to know the basic conventions. And that saves you so much time to ramping up and bringing your experience into a project. Whereas when you get into bespoke software, then you run into well what were the architectural design patterns 10 years ago compared to now? How much drift has there been in libraries and the language, depending.
Mike:
And so that is... I don't... That's a very hard question to nail down in a specific way. I would just say in spit balling this, conventions are very important, I would say. So as long as you have a conventions using a framework, then I think that you'll get to go a long ways. However, if you start to use a framework, then you get the everything is a nail and I'm going to use my hammer framework on that. Which is its own thing that I've seen in Ruby, where if you start a project with Rails, I don't think everybody realizes this, but you are essentially going to be doing a type of software development that is in the mindset of Basecamp, right? And if you have an app that is not quite like Basecamp, and then you start to try to extending Rails to do something different, then you're going to start running into issues. And I think that... It makes me sad when I hear people talk poorly about Rails, because oftentimes people are just pushing it into a direction that it's not built to do. Whether they're, like in the old days, like monkey-patching libraries, or whatnot.
Ben:
Yeah, I think we saw that with the rise of Elixir and Phoenix, right? José just got frustrated with wanting to do some real time stuff. And that really wasn't the wheelhouse for Rails, right? And so he went and built Elixir and Phoenix, and built on top of that. And that became a better hammer for that particular nail than Rails, right? So now if you come into a new project and you're like, "Well, I'm going to do a lot of highly concurrent stuff", well, okay, maybe Rails isn't the best solution. Maybe you should go look at Elixir and Phoenix instead.
Mike:
Yeah. Yeah. So, with Heroku, I just want to say that it was so awesome to work at Heroku, and the day that I got a job offer to work there, it was like... I still, if I'm having a bad day, I still think about that, and the... I've never used hard drugs, but I would think that somebody that was cocaine high, that's probably what I was feeling when I got the offer from Heroku. I started using Heroku in 2009, and it has a story within our community, it's highly respected. And so I just want to say that I still think very highly of Heroku, and if I was to be doing just a throwaway project, and I just want to write some code and do git push main, or git push Heroku main, then I would definitely do that.
Mike:
And we were... And I'm not very experienced with the other kinds of competitors right now. I think, like you pointed him out, is it Vercel and Render?
Ben:
Render. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mike:
Yeah. So I can't really speak to them. I can really just speak to Heroku and some of the very specific things that go on there. I think one of the issues that Heroku suffers from is not the technology itself, but just the Salesforce environment. Because at Salesforce, everything eventually has to be blue, right? And so, Heroku, I don't think they ever could really figure out the right thing to do with Heroku. As well as, the other thing about enterprise software is that if I'm selling Salesforce service cloud or whatever, I'm selling, essentially, I'm selling seats of software licenses. And there's no big margin in selling Compute, because if I'm buying Compute, I expect to be using that.
Mike:
And so, as a salesperson, I'm not incented to sell Heroku that much because there's just not margins for me in the incentive structure that they have at sales within Salesforce. So I think that's the biggest thing that Heroku has going against it, is that it's living in a Salesforce environment. And as, I guess, a owner of Salesforce being that I have Salesforce stock, I would hope that they would maximize their profits and actually sell Heroku. Who knows, maybe a bunch of developers get together and actually buy the brand and spin that off. That would be the best thing, because I think that Salesforce would probably realize a lot more value out of Heroku just by doing that, even if there's some sort of profit sharing, and then not have to deal with all the other things.
Ben:
Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. The thing about billing, and then selling per user, versus the compute- That's definitely a different world. It's a totally different mindset. And I think Josh that we have now been given a directive step. We should acquire Heroku as part of Honeybadger.
Josh:
I was going to say, maybe we can acquire it with all of our Doge profits in five or 10 years from now.
Mike:
Well, yeah. Somebody spin a Heroku coin, a ERC20 token on Ethereum and get everybody to dump their Ethereum into this token.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mike:
Get that pot of money together. And then that is the Heroku Foundation. Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Okay, yeah.
Mike:
The Heroku Foundation that buys the Heroku brand. I know that we're laughing about it, but actually this is what is possible today. And, I was telling Ben... Well, let me just say a couple of things about the FounderQuest and how it relates to me, is I've been listening to FounderQuest from the first episode, and I'm an only child, and I like to listen to podcasts. So I'll be on my afternoon walk, and I'll be hearing you guys talk, and I'm having this conversation along with you guys listening to the podcasts.
Mike:
And so, I think, in January, you guys were talking about, or maybe Ben was talking about, $30,000 Bitcoin, and you guys just had your yucks and laughs about it. And it actually made me think critically about this, because I've been involved with Bitcoin since about 2012, and it's like, "Do I have a tinfoil hat on?" Or what do I think? And so, I'm not joking about this, listening to you guys actually has helped me concretely come up with how I feel about this. And first off, I think, I'm bullish on technology. And this is the first epiphany that I had, is all of us have had a career close to Linux, close to Ruby, building backend services, close to virtualization and orchestration. Fortunately, that's been my interest, and fortunately that's been where our industry has gone. And so, when Bitcoin came out, as technologists, all you ever hear, if you don't know anything about Bitcoin, you just hear currency. And you're thinking internet money, you're not thinking about this as a technologist.
Mike:
And so that was the thing. I wish that Bitcoin had been talked about as a platform, or a framework.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mike:
And not even called it coin. Because that confuses the issue-
Josh:
The whole coin thing, just... Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah, totally. And mining the metaphors-
Josh:
That alone.
Mike:
... just totally throws everything off. Because we are talking, we're laughing about it, but this is really possible today. We could come up with a Foundation to buy Heroku with a cryptocurrency, and it would... Yeah. So that's one thing that Ben helped me realize in my thinking around Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And I think I'm just bullish on technology. And so to me, again, across our career, there's been so much change. And why would we look at Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies any differently than any other kind of technology? Even a hundred dollar bill with all the holograms on it, that is a kind of financial technology. And so we're just talking about a digital technology, we're not talking about coins I guess.
Josh:
That's the appeal, a lot of the Altcoins, right? They give everyone a way to invest in those companies, whereas before you would have to... Whatever, be an accredited investor or something to be able to get involved. Is that part of the appeal? I'm probably showing what I know about crypto, which is very little, but I'm excited to... Yeah, maybe you can...
Mike:
Yeah. Yeah, so I feel like these projects are... I'm not a VC, and I'm not an insider, but from what I can see from afar, in Silicon Valley there's a close group of people that have access to all of these ideas. And there's Angel clubs, and VC clubs, and whatnot, that are funding these startups. And to me, I feel like these crypto projects are the same kind of thing, except for they're just available to the public. And so, I think if I was speaking to another technologist that was interested in cryptocurrencies, is you probably need to get your hands on some of the technology in order to get experience with it.
Mike:
And so if that means you figure out how to maybe mine some coin on your laptop, or whatever, or you actually pay for it, you should at least have some in your possession, and at least learn about the custodial part of it. Also, there's different software libraries now to actually do programming against it, and platforms, I believe. So that'd be another way to at least tickle your curiosity, is by actually touching the technology and not thinking about the value. So yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. That, to me, that's one of the most interesting things about the whole coin thing. My younger son is really interested in the crypto space, in the coin and in the other parts of a distributed ledger, and what does that mean, and how does that work? And before I heard about NFTs, he was talking about NFTs. And so it's really interesting to me to see this coming from him. Just yesterday, we had a conversation about CRDTs, right? Because we're talking about how do you merge transactions that are happening in distributed fashion? Right? I was like, "Oh yeah", and it's so weird to have my teenage sons' world colliding with my world in this way.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But it's a lot of fun. And I've got to say, Mike, I got to give you back some credit, talking about the whole coin thing. As you've heard, we're pretty coin skeptical here at Honeybadger, the Founders, but you made a comment in our pre-show conversation. And maybe you didn't make this explicitly, but maybe it's just a way that I heard it. But I think... Well what I heard was, and maybe you actually said this, was basically think about this like an index fund, right? You put dollar cost to averaging, right? You put some money into coin, you put a little bit, it's not going to be your whole portfolio, right? But you don't treat it like a gamble, and you just treat it like an investment, like you would other things that may appreciate in value. And of course you may not.
Ben:
And so, as a result, I decided, "Okay, I can do that. I can put a little bit of my portfolio into coins". So just this week, and this is the funny part, just this week-
Josh:
I'm just finding this out now, by the way.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Josh is like... I told my wife about this last night and she was like, "What's Josh going to say?" "Like, I don't know". So anyway, just this week I put a little bit of money into Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that was... When did Elon do his thing about Bitcoin? Was that Thursday morning?
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
I bought, two hours before Elon did his thing, and Bitcoin lost 15% of its value.
Mike:
That's awesome.
Ben:
I'm like, "It's okay. It's okay, I'm just putting-
Josh:
Yeah, you don't sell, it doesn't matter.
Mike:
What was your emotion? What was your emotion?
Ben:
Yeah, totally. Yeah. In fact, my first buy, I used Coinbase. And Coinbase was like, "Oh, do you want to do this periodically?" I'm like, "Yes, I do. Every month". Boom.
Mike:
Oh.
Ben:
I went ahead and set that up like so, yeah.
Mike:
Oh, I did not know you could do that.
Ben:
I'm in it to win it, man.
Mike:
You should get a hardware wallet. That's the next thing, is you need to learn how to handle your own custody, so-
Josh:
Right, yeah. You got to... Yeah.
Mike:
Not leave it on the exchange. Interesting.
Josh:
Get those hard drives.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Ben's a veteran indexer though. So you can handle some dips. Some volatility.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
I actually, I did make some money off of Bitcoin back in the day, and probably if I would've just held onto it, I would've made a lot more, of course.
Mike:
Same.
Josh:
So I accidentally... Back, I don't know when this was, it was maybe five years ago or something, when Bitcoin was going through one of its first early hype cycles, and I was like, "I'll check it". I was learning about it, of course. And so I went and bought some and I think I ran a blockchain Elixir app that someone made, to see how the transactions work and stuff. Read some books on Bitcoin. But I bought some Bitcoin, I can't remember how much, but just left it. I think this was after Coinbase had launched, I'm pretty sure I bought it through Coinbase. But yeah, I just left it, and then that was when it was in the first huge push of Bitcoin where it went up to 20,000 or something. And I remembered that I had it, and I went and looked and oh yeah, I made five grand or something. I put hardly anything into it initially. So I forget what I actually bought with that money. I just sold it and it's like cool, free money.
Mike:
So you just sold it this year? Or you sold it...
Josh:
No, I sold it back-
Mike:
In 17?
Josh:
I think I sold it at 20... Yeah, this would have been at 17 that I actually sold it, probably.
Mike:
Did you report it on your taxes, your capital gains?
Josh:
I did, yes. Yeah, I did.
Ben:
That's the benefit of having an accountant, because your accountant reminds you, "You know what? You did have some Bitcoin transactions, you should probably look at those".
Josh:
Can I say on here that I actually put some of it through a Bitcoin tumbler though, just to see how those work?
Mike:
Yeah, I mean...
Josh:
And that was a very small amount of money, but I didn't actually report that on my taxes. Because I think I actually forgot where it was or something.
Ben:
You'll have to explain what a Bitcoin tumbler is.
Josh:
So a Bitcoin tumbler... Well, I'll try, and then maybe Mike might explain it better, but a Bitcoin tumbler is basically how you anonymize your Bitcoin transaction. If you have some Bitcoin and you want to buy some drugs on the dark web or something, you go and you send your Bitcoin to this tumbler, and then it distributes it to a bunch of random Bitcoin addresses that it gives you. And then you have those addresses, and they're anonymized, because they've been sent through a bunch of peoples' wallets, or something like that.
Mike:
Yep. That's basically it.
Ben:
So it's basically money laundering.
Josh:
Yeah, it's laundering.
Mike:
Yeah. But if your privacy... I mean, okay-
Josh:
Yeah, no, I get it. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Because part of the appeal of Bitcoin is some people are just like, "Oh yeah, good money, credit card transactions are so... The governments are recording them and stuff, the NSA probably has a database of them". So Bitcoin is anonymous, but it's not. It's not anonymous. And yeah. So that's why people do this, right?
Mike:
Yeah. Well that, to me, that's if you want to... So the value of Bitcoin, if you want to get bullish on the value of Bitcoin, the traditional outlook is yeah, the silk road was going on and there's all this illegal stuff going on. Therefore it must be bad. But actually, to me, that's the thing, you know it's good if there's illicit stuff going on, because what's the number one currency that's used right now for illicit transactions? It's dirty US dollar bills. And if you're a drug dealer in central South America, you are collecting, dollar bills United States. You're paying some sort of transport probably at 10, 15% cost to get those dollars back to wherever you're going to hold them. And so, if you're using Bitcoin, you're probably not going to pay that fee. So, to me, it's like okay, that actually proves, at least in my mind, that there is value. That it's being used, right?
Josh:
Yeah. And you also, you don't want to see... Some people are fanatics about cash going away, even just because as more people move to digital transactions, whether it's just through, whatever, traditional networks, or through crypto. People are using less and less cash. And I feel like, whatever... Like Richard Stallman, he pays for everything in cash though, because he thinks that cash is going to go away someday. And that's a problem for privacy, because you do want a way to pay for things in private in some cases.
Mike:
Yep. I agree.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
My only real beef with Bitcoin, well, aside from the whole requiring power plants just to do a transaction, is that there is Badger coin. This company that is named Honeybadger, it's all about Bitcoin. And they have these ATM's in Canada, and we constantly get support requests from people.
Mike:
Oh really?
Josh:
Is this the reason that we've been so down on cryptocurrencies in the past?
Ben:
I think so.
Josh:
Because ever since the beginning, since people started making coins, Badger coin came out and then it's been our primary exposure to be honest.
Ben:
It has been, yeah.
Josh:
Throughout the past... I don't know how many years it's been. Has it been six-
Ben:
Yeah, six-
Josh:
... to eight years?
Ben:
Yeah, something like that. It's been nuts.
Josh:
I'd say.
Mike:
You should send them an invoice, and they actually-
Ben:
Yeah, so what happens is they had these kiosks where you can buy Bitcoin, right? You put your real money in, and you get your fake money out, right? And the name on the top of the kiosk is Honeybadger. So, someone puts in some money, real money, and they don't get their fake money, then all of a sudden they're upset, right?
Mike:
Yeah.
Ben:
And so they... For whatever reason, it doesn't go through, right, I don't know how this works, I've never bought Bitcoin at a kiosk. But so, they're like, "Okay, Honeybadger". And so they Google Honeybadger, and the first result for Honeybadger is us. And so they're like, "Oh, here's a phone number I can call". And they call us. And they're like, "Where's my Bitcoin?" That's like, "Uh, I really can't help you with that".
Josh:
They do.
Ben:
"You stole my Bitcoin". It's like, "No, that's not us".
Josh:
Something just occurred to me. I wonder how many of them are just confused over the fact that Bitcoin transactions can take a while to arrive now, right? It's not always instantaneous, where it used to be a lot faster, but now I know that it can take a while to clear. So I wonder how many of those people are emailing us in the span... Maybe that's why they eventually always go away and we don't hear from them again. Maybe it's not that they're getting help, but it's just that their Bitcoins are arriving. Yeah. I have a feeling that there's some sort of... I'm guessing these are mostly regular normies using, and interacting with this very highly technical product and experience, and even if you're walking up to a kiosk, but there's still a highly technical aspect of it that, like you said Mike, people are thinking coin, they're thinking... The way this maps to their brain is it's like dollar bills. So they're looking at it like an ATM. Yep.
Mike:
Yeah. When it comes to cryptocurrency and the technology, I don't want to have to think about custody, or any of that other kinds of stuff. It'll be successful when it just is happening, I'm not thinking about it. They're already... In some... I don't know all of the different mobile devices, but I do carry out an iPhone. And so, the wallet on iPhone is pretty seamless now, right? And so I'm not thinking about how that technology is working. I had to associate an Amex with it originally, right? But once I've done that, then all I do is click my button to pay. And there you go. And so I do think that the cryptocurrency technology has a long way to go towards that, because if normal people, the non nerds, have to think about it, then it's not going to be useful. Because in the end-
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
... humans use tools, right? And so, whatever the tool is, they're going to use it especially if it's easy and it makes their life easier.
Ben:
So what I really want to know, Mike, is what are your feelings about Dogecoin? Are you bullish on Doge?
Mike:
Well, I'll answer that, but I wanted to come back to the bit about the NFT, and just talking about the possibilities with technology. And I think that you guys could profit from this.
Ben:
I like where it's going.
Mike:
You'll have to do some more research. But I think what you could do... See, I love the origin story of Honeybadger. And maybe not everybody knows about the Honeybadger meme from what is... When was this, two thousand...
Ben:
2012? 2011?
Mike:
Yeah, okay. So not everybody... Yeah, bot everybody knows about the meme. I guess, just go Google-
Ben:
I can link it in the show notes.
Josh:
It's long dead. This meme is long dead.
Mike:
Is it? Well it's still awesome. I still love it.
Josh:
It is.
Mike:
So, there's so many facets of this that I love. The first one is that... Can I name names on competitors-
Ben:
Of course.
Mike:
... in the origins? Okay. So the first one was is that Airbrake, an exception reporting service, was doing a poor job with their customer service. And you guys were like, "We're working on this project, we need exception reporting. It's not working". It's like, "Well, can we just take their library, and build our own backend?" Right? And to me, that is beautiful. And in thinking about this episode, in Heroku, the same opportunity lies for an aspiring developer out there where you could just take the Heroku CLI and point it at your own false backend until you figure out all of the API calls that happen. And I don't know, you have that backed by Kubernetes, or whatever orchestration framework is...
Mike:
There is the possibility that you could do the same Honeybadger story with Airbrake SDK, as there is with the Heroku CLI. So that's the first thing I love about the Honeybadger story, and the fact the name goes along with the fact that Airbrake had poor customer support, and you guys just were like, "F it, we're going to build our own exception reporting service". Now, in the modern context with NFTs is... I have old man experience with the NFTs in that GIFs, or GIFs, and JPEGs, this is BS that people are gouging for profit. However, the technology of the NFT... This is the thing that I think is beautiful, is that... And I'm not sure which of the NFTs does this, but there is the possibility that you could be the originator of a digital object, and then you sell that digital object. And then as that digital object is traded, then you, as the, I guess, the original creator, you can get a percentage of the sales for the lifetime of that digital asset.
Ben:
Yeah.
Mike:
And, I'm not sure which of the NFTs allows that, but that is one of the things, that's one of the value propositions in NFT. So what I was thinking is if you guys did an NFT on the shaw of the original Honeybadger Ruby SDK check-in, that this could be the thing that you guys have an experiment with, is you have real skin in the game, you're playing with the technology and see if that works. And, let me know if you do that, because I might try to buy it. So, we'll see.
Josh:
Well, we've already got a buyer, why wouldn't we?
Mike:
Yeah, so..
Ben:
Indeed, yeah.
Josh:
See I was thinking maybe you could own various errors or something in Honeybadger.
Mike:
Yeah, I mean... Whatever digital signature you want to... Whatever you want to sign, and then assign value to.
Josh:
Yeah, we could NFT our Exceptional Creatures.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
Have you seen that, Mike? Have you seen that project?
Mike:
Yep, yep.
Josh:
Okay.
Mike:
I'm well aware of that. Yep.
Ben:
Yeah. I'm thinking what about open source maintainers, right? Let's say you have this project and someone really wants a particular feature, right? Or they're really happy about a particular feature that you've already done, right? You can sell them that shaw, that commit, that put it into name, right?
Mike:
Yeah, totally.
Ben:
You are the proud owner of this feature. Thank you.
Mike:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I was hoping that I would come with some ideas. I hope someday in the future that I run into somebody and it's like, "Oh, we heard that podcasts were where ideas were free ideas that were worth a lot of money were thrown about. And I did this project, and now I'm retired. Thank you, Mike". Honeybadgers.
Josh:
Wait, so Ben are you saying that, so as a committer, so say I commit something to Rails, submit a PR, so then I own that PR once it's merged and it would be like I could sell that then to someone? Is that along the lines of what you're saying?
Ben:
No, I'm thinking the owner of the project. So, if you commit something to Rails, and you're really excited about it, and you for some reason want to have a trophy of that commit-
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
... on a plaque on the wall, right? Then the Rails core group could sell you that token.
Josh:
Okay. Gotcha.
Ben:
That trophy, that certificate, like, "Yep. This is your thing. Commissioned by..." It's like naming a star, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
You buy the rights to a star, and it's fake stuff, right? We're naming stars. But that's the same idea.
Josh:
Yeah. So you could use that same idea to incentivize open-source contribution. So if you make the PR to Rails and it gets merged, you get this NFT for the PR merge, which you could then actually profit for if it was... Say it was, I don't know, turbo links or something, whatever. Years later, when it's a huge thing and everyone in Rails is using it, maybe Mike's going to come along and be like, "Hey, I'll buy... I want to own the PR for turbo links".
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah. And of course then, you, as the owner, would also profit from any sale between parties later on too. You'd get that little percentage.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, so when somebody comes up with committer coin, just remember me, I want to airdrop of some committer coin.
Josh:
We have a name. We've got a name for it. Commit coin.
Ben:
I've got a new weekend project ahead of me.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
Cool. Well, that helps me understand NFTs.
Ben:
Yeah, I really like the idea of being able to sell ownership rights to a digital asset. That I think a good idea. I don't know that the current implementation that we see on the news is a great implementation of that idea. Buying the rights for a copy of a JPEG, it feels kind of sketchy to me. But maybe there's some sort of, I don't know, PDF document that has some sort of value for some reason. And you can give that, sell that to someone. And to me, it's not so much about the profit, or the transaction, it's the ownership. You can say I am the owner of this thing. Yeah, there can be copies all over the place, but I'm the person that has the ownership, quote unquote, of this thing.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. But then you've got to define value Ben. What is value? Okay, so, what makes a PDF more valuable than a JPEG?
Mike:
Yeah. Yeah. Bring this back to Dogecoin, and value propositions, and whatnot. What is valuable? When you're talking about the value of a JPEG, this reminded me of a conversation I was having with my son. He's 10 years old and he wanted some money to buy, I don't know what it was, and old man voice came out of me and it's like, "That's BS. I don't think that's valuable". And he looked at me and he was like, "It's valuable to me". And it's like, "Oh, you just put a dagger in my heart. I'm killing your dream". And one person's value may not be another person's value. So, on the Dogecoin, that's interesting. Dogecoin is very interesting to me, because I feel like I'm in a quantum state with a Dogecoin where it is a joke, but at the same time it apparently it has value.
Mike:
And I don't know where I stand on that threshold. I know how to trade Dogecoin. And I know the behavior of Dogecoin, and the behaviors, from a trading standpoint, has changed substantially in the last six months. Before it was a pump and dump kind of thing. Well, actually, you know what? When Dogecoin was first created, its purpose was highlighted by the community. People in podcast land don't realize this, but I'm wearing a 2017 Dogecoin shirt from when the Dogecoin community sponsored the number 98 NASCAR. And the thing of the community was like, "Oh, we have all this money, and we're just being altruistic and we're giving it away". And so they were exercising their belief with this currency, right?
Mike:
And from then, till now, there was a bit of a cycle to Dogecoin where you could, if you acquired Dogecoin for say under a hundred Satoshis, this is the Dogecoin BTC pair, that was actually a good buy. Just wait for the next pump when somebody does something, and Dogecoin goes over 200, or 300 Satoshis, and then you dump it. And that's basically what I did on this in the last six months. I had a small bag of Dogecoin waiting for the next pump and dump. And I actually did that, but it kept on getting pumped, and then it would stabilize. And then now we're at the point where apparently Elon Musk and Mark Cuban are saying that there's value to it.
Mike:
And to me, I actually put a lot of credence to that, because these are two public persons that they cannot... If they're pumping things in the public domain, then they have risk, right? And so you can't be those two people, and be pumping, and not run the risk of the FTC of the United States government coming in and saying, "Hey, why were you doing this?" So there's the, I guess for me, a small bit of a guarantee that maybe there is something to Dogecoin.
Josh:
Yeah. See, the way I think, when you first started you were saying it is a joke, but you're in this dual state, and my initial or immediate thought was it is a joke, but this is the internet, and the internet loves to make silly things real.
Mike:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Especially these days.
Ben:
Yeah. It's pretty funny for all those people that made a bunch of money on GameStop, right? Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah. Well that's the thing, is in Dogecoin, Doge is, of itself, from a meme from the same time period as Honeybadger, right? The Iba Shinu doggie, right? So, the other thing I don't understand, or the thing that I understand but I don't know how to quantify it for myself, is that, to me... So there's no pre-mine on Dogecoin. There's no one person that owns a lot of Dogecoin from the beginning. Whereas if we're talking about Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, the founder, or one of the founders of Ethereum, they pre-mined Ethereum, and there's a ton of Ethereum that's owned by the founders. Whereas you compare that to, say, Litecoin, Charlie Lee cloned Bitcoin and created Litecoin. He sold all of his Litecoin. I believed in him when he said he's sold it all. He's a software engineer, just like us. He was Director of Engineering at Coinbase.
Mike:
He doesn't seem like he's wearing tinfoil hat out there, doing conspiracies. So when he says that he sold his coin in 2017, all of his Litecoin, I totally believe that. Yet today, he is the chairperson of the Litecoin foundation. And so, to me... I actually do have, I placed some value in the benevolence of Litecoin and Dogecoin, because there's not any one person that actually controls it. I guess Charlie Lee, he probably has a stronger voice than most. But he doesn't control the levers.
Josh:
Not financially.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah. And so then with Dogecoin... So Dogecoin, it'll be awesome if it gets above a dollar, but the structure of Dogecoin will be such as they cannot maintain that.
Josh:
Right.
Mike:
Because it's an inflation-
Josh:
There's no cap, right?
Mike:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
It's inflation. And so, I don't know the number, I think it's a million Dogecoin are minted every day. So, 10 years from now, if Dogecoin is worth a dollar still, then that means Bitcoin will be worth a lot more than that. So I guess that'd be awesome if Dogecoin stays a dollar. However, the point I'm trying to make is actually there is value in having an inflationary currency, especially if we're talking about living in the structure of our current financial... The way that our current financial markets work, where there is an inflation.
Mike:
And so if I want to be transacting with a digital currency, I don't want to have to be, say, like having an Argentina kind of moment where my one Dogecoin is worth $5 American today, and then maybe only $3 American a week from now. So to me, I think there is value in Dogecoin in that it's inflationary, and that it will not be as susceptible to speculation bubbles as other currencies. And so, I don't know if that answers your questions on the value of Dogecoin, but those are a couple of reasons why I think that Dogecoin is valuable. Now, am I going to be holding a big bag of Dogecoin in 2022? Probably not. Just to be honest.
Ben:
We're all about honesty at Honeybadger. I love the episodes where we have to have a disclaimer, this is not financial advice. Please consult competent professionals before investing, et cetera, et cetera. Mike, it has been a delight to have you with us. We appreciate your counterbalance to our coin pessimism that we have amongst the Honeybadger fan base.
Josh:
Yeah, I think we needed this.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
We really needed this.
Ben:
We really did.
Josh:
So thank you.
Ben:
It's been good.
Mike:
Yeah. Oh, I got one more idea out there. Hopefully, somebody can run with this, is I've been trying to get motivated to do some experimentation with the Bitcoin lightning network. We didn't really talk about these a layer two solutions for scaling, but I think that there is a lot of potential in coming up with an interesting project that lays within the Litecoin network, it has its value in and of itself, but there's a secondary value of being a note on the Litecoin network where if there's transactions going through your node, let's say, I don't know how you'd instrument this, but let's say that Honeybadger actually was... That you guys were taking your payments across your own lightning node, then all of the transactions that are going across the lightning network, you're getting a small fee, right? So I think that there's the possibility of a micropayments kind of play there, like for instance, paying by the exception. I mean, literally-
*Editor's note from Mike - "in my excitement talking about the Lighting Network I slipped and said Litecoin a couple of times between Lightning Network. Lightning Network is a layer 2 protocol that is primarily intended for scaling Bitcoin and that was what I meant. However, Lightning can be implemented to run on top of Litecoin and Ethereum."
Josh:
That has come up that has come up in the past, I think at one point.
Mike:
You can't do micro payments on a credit card.
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
Right? But you can do micropayments on lightening network. And I'm not selling you guys on this, but I'm saying that there's going to be some nerd out there that it's like, "Oh my God micropayments are here, I can do micropayments on lighting network". And then they're going to do well on that product, but then they're also going to do well on the commission that they're earning on payments going through their node.
Josh:
This could be used for usage base software as a service billing model.
Ben:
Totally. And then you get the skim off the top, just like a good affiliate does.
Mike:
Yes.
Ben:
I love it.
Mike:
Yes.
Ben:
I love it. All right. All right, Mike, we're going to have to do some scheming together. Well, any final words, any parting words besides go by all the Dogecoin that you can?
Mike:
Yeah. Don't put all your money into the cryptocurrencies. Yeah.
Josh:
Seems like good advice.
Ben:
Be smart
Show notes:
Links:
Threads.com
Bluey
Vogmask
Twist
It’s a Southern Thing
If I had a front porch
Full transcript:
Josh:
How y'all doing?
Ben:
I'm doing.
Starr:
Yeah, about the same.
Ben:
I've been riding my scooter to work all week.
Starr:
Oh, how's that?
Ben:
It's a lot of fun. Got a little electric kick scooter and top speed about 25 miles per hour. I was concerned about it being able to get up the hill that I have to go back up on my way home. It does drag a bit on that hill. I only got a single motor. Guess I should have gone with the dual motor. Otherwise it's fun. It's nice to be out in nature, I guess, air quotes, because you're still on the road and you're still a victim of cars and stuff. Being able to see the sun coming up over the hills and down to the valley and while you're just feeling the wind on your face, it's all good.
Josh:
It sounds nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, sounds awesome. I don't know. It seems terrifying to me, but I'm sure it's a lot of fun.
Ben:
It helped that I have done a lot of bike riding on roads for the past several years, so I'm already comfortable with the idea of mixing it up with cars and weaving in and out of traffic and realizing that people aren't going to see me and things like that. I think if I had just gone from driving a car straight to riding a scooter in the bike lane, that would be a little more terrifying.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Josh:
Next you're going to have to upgrade to one of the electric skateboards or a Onewheel or something, just remove the handle bars.
Ben:
Right, right, right. Get one of those Onewheel things.
Josh:
This is leading up to-
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
We're just working up to hoverboards. I mean I commute to my backyard office, so maybe I should get a zip-line or something from the main house.
Ben:
I like that, yeah.
Starr:
... then I could be extreme.
Josh:
We want a zip-line at our place out into the forest.
Starr:
That would be fun.
Ben:
You could do a zip-line from your deck to the sandbox, send the kids out to play.
Josh:
The kids would love it. Well, I was thinking more for myself though. Screw the kids. They don't need a zip-line.
Starr:
There you go. That's actually not a bad idea. We're going to get-
Josh:
That would be cool though.
Starr:
... a deck in the fall.
Josh:
Oh, nice.
Starr:
I had thought it would be fun to put a fireman pole on one side or something so kids could slide down it. It's raised up a little bit but not that much. It's like a kid's sliding size.
Ben:
That would be totally awesome. That would-
Josh:
We have been loving our new deck that we have had for a month and a half or something now. It's a new deck. If you have a really old, rickety deck, a new one is a big upgrade. Also ours is a little bit larger, too, so it's like a bigger house almost.
Starr:
Oh, that's great. We don't even have a deck it's just like a little stairway.
Josh:
I think you're going to like it, Starr.
Starr:
I think so, too. I know, deck life. It's going to be covered. I was just like-
Josh:
It's just the small things.
Starr:
I know. All I want is to be able to go out on a nice evening or something and sit and drink a cup of tea and be outside.
Ben:
And think about all-
Josh:
I was going to say, where do you drink the sweet tea in the summer if you don't have a front porch?
Starr:
Yeah, that's the main problem with houses up here in the Northwest is there's not real front porches. We have one that's like a weird nod at a front porch. It's like somebody maybe had seen a front porch once when they were... They were like, "Oh, maybe I'll try and do that from memory," without really knowing what it's supposed to be like.
Josh:
Some of the ones in Portland have them, but they're boxed in usually, and they're the older houses-
Josh:
... like the old Craftsmans or whatever.
Starr:
The stately grand dames.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Well, here in Kirkland we're destroying all those old houses and putting in-
Starr:
Thank God.
Ben:
... townhouses.
Josh:
Hell, yeah.
Ben:
I drove by one this morning. This morning was the first morning since I got my scooter that I actually didn't ride the scooter because it was raining and the ground was wet. I was like, "Ah, I don't want to deal with that this morning." So I just drove. I drove past this house that... Well, yesterday it was a house. Today, it's a pile of sticks because they sold the lot, and they're going to split it into probably, I don't know, four lots and put in some townhouses. It's always a sad thing, but people got to have a place to live.
Starr:
Yeah, it's a shame. They tore down a house on my block, too, except it was a condemned house. It looked like a gingerbread fairy house that you'd find on just a random stroll in the woods where you'd go inside and you'd find just a delicious meal laid out on the table just waiting for you. So I'm a little sad it's gone just for, I guess, the storytelling aspects, the mythology of it. I guess it's probably best not to just have a condemned structure hanging out.
Josh:
I still do feel like Ida's is missing out with your telling of that story. I feel a little sad for you all.
Starr:
I know. I know.
Ben:
You're totally missing the threat possibility there. Like, "Don't misbehave or I'll send you over to the gingerbread house."
Starr:
Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, lots of great ways to traumatize my child.
Ben:
Speaking of traumatizing children, I was going through Twitter the other day, and the Washington State Department of Health had a tweet. I don't remember what the tweet was, but they had a GIF embedded in it. It was Stimpy from Ren & Stimpy as a scene from the show. I was like, "That's from the Department of Health? My generation is now in charge."
Starr:
With the Twitter account at least.
Ben:
We're now putting in-
Josh:
Yeah, exactly.
Ben:
That was the weirdest... It's like, "I'm an adult." That was a weird, weird experience.
Josh:
It is kind of strange when the people in charge start looking more and more like you until you realize they're just like-
Ben:
They're just little kids, just like I am.
Josh:
Then you wonder why the hell they're in charge.
Starr:
I'm getting like Paul Ryan listening to a Rage Against the Machine vibe from this.
Josh:
That's what I'd be playing if I was in charge of the Department of Health's-
Starr:
There we go.
Josh:
... Twitter account.
Starr:
I think this week has all been a little bit... I don't know. We're all maybe a little bit having a hard time focusing. I know I have a little bit just. It seems like that happens every spring as soon as the weather gets nice and it stops being nice, then it gets nice and it stops being nice. You're waiting by the door with your kayak. You just got to get the jump on it before everybody else gets to the lake.
Josh:
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Also allergies have been kicking in lately.
Starr:
Oh my god, yeah.
Josh:
I was really on top of it this year, but then I ran out of my Zyrtec or whatever. It was on the list to replenish the supply or whatever, but I procrastinated and missed a few days. That's a huge mistake.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
That was this week. Now I switched to Claritin, so we'll see how... That's the big news of my week.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. I'm getting vaccinated later today, my second dose.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Congrats.
Starr:
I think I'm still going to keep wearing the KN95 respirators outside, though, just for the allergies.
Josh:
It's probably a good call.
Ben:
I was helping a neighbor with some yard work and doing a bunch of weeding and had the weed whacker out, and there's just dirt flying everywhere. I'm like, "Man, I should really wear a mask." Like, how ironic. I've got like, I don't know, a thousand masks in my house, and I'm not wearing one as I'm doing all this dusty stuff.
Josh:
That's a good thing to do.
Starr:
Oh, this is reminding me, I need to stock up before fire season.
Ben:
A few years ago when we had the really bad fire season, we got some Vogmasks. This was before the world knew that you were supposed to wear masks. Vogmasks are fantastic. They're a fabric mask that have the filtering stuff on the inside and highly recommend. I'll put a link in the show notes.
Starr:
Cool.
Ben:
Good stuff. When the pandemic hit, of course, they were out of stock immediately because everybody and their brother wanted one, but they've been back in stock. They're nice masks. They're really nice.
Starr:
Well, one thing that we have been doing is casually just checking out alternatives to Basecamp for our internal company's message board. I don't know. I feel like we're just perusing the alternatives. Honestly, it's been a little bit difficult finding just a system out there that's just a simple thread and message board without a million complex adjustments for running a forum that has thousands of people. Somebody on Twitter yesterday recommended Threads. I don't know. I think we're currently evaluating that one but no decisions yet.
Josh:
Is that like Twitter threads? You just-
Starr:
Oh, yeah, just Twitter threads.
Josh:
We do all of our communicating but just public threads.
Starr:
No, we're just going to use Twitter stories. We're just going to take some pics of ourselves in different-
Josh:
If we're trying to go to the opposite direction of Basecamp, we could just... Well, I guess this is like Basecamp, just do all of our communication via thought leadership.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
What if we did all of internal communication via TikTok?
Starr:
Okay, I'm getting this. I'm on board with this. We're just going to be influencers. Whoever's the most influential is going to-
Josh:
You know what? If our employees don't like it, too bad. You're getting a Twitter account, and it's getting verified.
Starr:
Yeah, they can interpret our really random TikTok video and try and figure out what it means. That's how they'll discover our disapproval.
Ben:
On the Basecamp thing, though, it was interesting as I was looking at it this week and realizing that the only thing that we use in Basecamp is messages along with the files. We sometimes attach files to our messages.
Josh:
Or email forwards.
Ben:
Yeah, occasionally we do an email forward. But we don't-
Starr:
Usually we do calendars, but we also have Google calendar.
Ben:
And Slack.
Josh:
And Notion.
Ben:
And notion. So we don't do to-dos. We don't do hill charts. We don't really use the project management side of the project management software that we're using. As I was looking at alternatives this week, I looked at monday.com and ClickUp and, I don't know, a few different ones. They're all these project management things. It's like, well, we don't really manage projects. We do that via chat or via a Zoom call every once in a while or via Notion. We don't use a project management tool for that. So it's like, yeah, all we really need are threads, conversations.
Starr:
It's the sort of thing where you could just do it in email, but it's nice having that archival ability, the ability to go back and check things out and not have it dependent on, "Oh, maybe I deleted that message by accident or whatever."
Josh:
Well, you could do it in Slack, but then you end up with the weird history aspect of it, and you'd have to have some sort of... You have to create a channel for it with the rules so it doesn't end up being just a chat. You have to say, "The rule of this channel is every message is a thread or a post or whatever."
Starr:
You kind of have to do it manually.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I did look at Twist. That was pretty cool, pretty close, but it also has chat. It's like, "well, I don't want a second chat since we already use Slack." We're not going to ditch Slack.
Starr:
Basecamp has chat, too.
Ben:
Right, and we don't use that. I guess you could use Twist. Twist is pretty nice.
Starr:
I think we need threaded messages, we need everything to be archived, and we need some way to see what people have been writing on lately, see what the latest activity is. That's basically it. I don't even use notifications. I get them, but I don't really... Usually by the time I see them... That's not my process. I don't look at my notifications and be like, "Oh, I'd better check this out." I check out the messages at a set set time basically.
Ben:
Then, like you said, the forum software, like the discourse, and it's just way, way too much. It's like, "Yeah, we get it." We just need a message board. We don't need all the dials and knobs. It's totally a dials and knobs application. I saw it in the settings, and I was like, "Whoa, okay. I'm just going to back away slowly."
Starr:
It could be fun, I don't know, if we want to be passive aggressive, we could shadow ban people. We could just do all sorts of fun things.
Ben:
But I suppose we don't have the hard requirements supporting BBCode.
Starr:
Isn't that a negative requirement? Supporting BBCode, I think that's a detriment. But we do have a chance to maybe, I don't know, maybe... One thing that I've always really... This really annoyed me about Basecamp is that it doesn't support Markdown, and everything we use supports Markdown, so everything I have is in Markdown. So if I write something in my personal notes, it's going to be in Markdown. If I want to transfer that to Basecamp, I got to manually format it, which is just like, "What am I? What is this? Who do you think I am?"
Josh:
That's my number one gripe with Basecamp, like the editor, is just a WYSIWYG editor that... I constantly... even just when I'm writing and I want to make a list and I just type a dash like I normally... in most things these days, and it just doesn't do anything in Basecamp. Then I remember, "Oh, I have to get my mouse and click on the bullet." It's a huge hassle.
Ben:
I can imagine your quality of life being dramatically affected by that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
You know we're developers when we're complaining about things like that.
Josh:
This is why I'm wearing wrist braces.
Starr:
Or dual wrist braces.
Ben:
I totally get what you're saying. I want to be able to type star, space, stuff, stuff, stuff and I get a list. Yeah, totally.
Starr:
It looks like threads.com, it does support Markdown, which is nice. I don't know. I haven't really played around with it a ton. Some aspects of its design, I'm not super happy. I wish the column widths were a little wider and stuff, but also I don't like certain aspects of Basecamp's design. So it's kind of a toss up for me.
Ben:
I did an export of our Basecamp content, and I got to say their export is fantastic. They give you an HTML page that links to a bunch of other pages per topic or project or team, whatever they call it, and the files are there. It's really well done. So I think if anyone's looking for inspiration on doing exports in their app, they should totally look at Basecamp. They nailed it. It's actually usable. You get this zip file. You open it up and bam, you can just browse through all your stuff.
Starr:
That's pretty great. I guess I should declare, I think maybe I started this casual looking for alternatives just because I've seen a lot of stuff online about people are angry at Basecamp. It's like, I'm not really angry at them. Well, this isn't really the point. I'm sad and disappointed in them. But also a lot of the reason why I think they have had our business and they had my business, I've stored personal stuff in a personal Basecamp account, it's just because they're trustworthy. That feeling of trustworthiness has gone down a few pegs for me.
Starr:
Also, I just kind of felt gross logging in there. If you haven't been keeping up with this, part of the deal is they were making fun of people's names and stuff. I don't know. Are they making fun of my name? I've got a weird name. Are they going through my stuff making fun of it? I know they have access to pretty much everything that I put into Basecamp. I don't know. Even if they're not doing that now, are they going to do that in the future? Because it seems like they're going in that direction. I don't know. It seems like they're shutting down people trying to hold them internally accountable for that sort of thing. I don't know. It's just like a gross feeling. I'm just sad about the whole thing.
Josh:
I personally I kind of doubt that that's like... I got the feeling that the list was more of an artifact from the past, and it had stuck around for too long. I didn't get the feeling that they're condoning that sort of activity really, but I get what you're saying. Also for me, a big factor of it, it's not even just that I'm mad at them or something, they did lose 30% of their company, and they're supporting two products now, one of which is a major infrastructure product but basically is like email. So they have operation overhead and stuff. They did just lose 30% of their company including their, what, head of strategy but basically head of product. So I just wonder, where is the product going from here? It was already, I felt, a little bit stagnating. I don't know. I think they've been working on the next version of it is what I heard. I don't know. It just seems like there are questions about just the stability from that nature, too.
Ben:
I'm probably in a third place from you two and I probably care the least. I'm like, "Eh, it's a message board. They can make fun of my name." Okay. I had that happen when I was 10. People do that. It's like, "Oh, get on." I have a hard time getting up the energy to care, I guess.
Starr:
Don't mistake me. I'm not like up in arms about it. This is more like a passive viewing. It's like, "Oh, I got to go on Basecamp and check my things. Uh, I just feel kind of crummy about it." This is-
Ben:
It's one of those friction things in your life you just don't need. Yeah, absolutely.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Absolutely.
Starr:
I'm like, this is a message board. Like, should I be having to deal with this just to go check some messages? It's ridiculous.
Josh:
I think all of us are really just talking these are passing thoughts we have using the product in light of the drama of the past few weeks.
Starr:
If we end up staying on it, I'm not going to be super upset. I'll probably get over it. I don't know. It just seems like it might be nice to try something different especially if we can get that sweet Markdown.
Ben:
I've been surprised that there are so few products that are just about this one use case of the simple messages. I expected there to be tons of things to try and no.
Starr:
Of course, in our company Notion, there's now a design document-
Ben:
Of course.
Starr:
... for a simple-
Josh:
Because we're going to build our own.
Ben:
We're going to build our own, of course. What does any good tech team do when they're frustrated with the 20 solutions on the market? They build solution number 21.
Starr:
Of course.
Ben:
Maybe we'll build that. The code name for that project is Budgie. I named it Budgie because I went to do the Google search, I'm like, "What's a communicative type of animal? What's a social animal?" I can't remember the search I did, but the first thing that got turned up was like, the most social birds. I don't know. So there's this list of birds, and budgie was the number one bird. So I'm like, "Okay, cool." Then I was like, "Well, what kind of domains are available?" Because of course when you start a project, you have to buy the domain. Before you do anything else, you got to buy that domain. Surprisingly, and perhaps not surprisingly in retrospect, every variant of budgie is taken, of course, budgie.com but also budgie.app and budgieapp.com. I'm like, "Wow. How many...?" And they're all for sale. None of them are actual products. They're all parked, and they're for sale. I'm like, so a bunch of people have had this idea about what's a social animal. I guess budgies are really popular for pets, and so they're looking for the ad opportunities with people looking for, "How do I take care of my budgie?" Anyway, just kind of a diversion.
Starr:
That's interesting. The first thing that pops into mind when I heard that... I like the name. It's a cute name. There's this really good Australian kids' cartoon called Bluey, and there's an episode where they find a little budgie that's injured, and it dies. So the kids have to come to terms with that. I don't know. It's just like, "Little budgie died."
Josh:
Bluey is one of the best cartoons ever, by the way.
Starr:
Yeah, Bluey. Oh, I'm glad you like it, too.
Josh:
It's so good.
Starr:
It's super good. It's super good. Basically the whole cartoon is just these kids... They're dogs but they're kids. They're just making up games to play with each other. How it works is the kids watching the show see it and that makes them want to play that game, too. So it's just not dumb TV. It gets them doing stuff outside of the TV, which is kind of nice.
Josh:
That's a really good analysis of the show. I hadn't thought about that aspect of it, but come to think of it, my kids totally imitate them.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Climbing all over us.
Starr:
I now have to play every game in that show, and I've got to know them by name and what the rules are.
Josh:
One of the things we like about it is just they really got the sibling dynamic down. It is like our kids to a tee. It's pretty funny. Now that I think about it, maybe it's like our kids have now become the characters in the show.
Ben:
It's a good thing I watch the Simpsons.
Josh:
Oh, no. Actually we do watch the Simpsons.
Starr:
Is the Simpsons still on?
Josh:
It's on Disney+.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
Yeah, it is still a thing.
Josh:
They're still making it, too, right?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
Starr:
Wow. I don't know. I don't even know about that.
Josh:
We don't watch much of the Simpsons with them yet, a three and four-year-old.
Josh:
I don't know if I'm quite ready for a couple little Bart and Lisas.
Ben:
You put that off as long as you can. Well, I actually did a little bit of work this week. I was working on something, I don't know what. I noticed one of the tests was running kind of long like it was just stuck. I don't usually watch tests. I don't usually run the tests actually. I just let our CICB run the tests. I don't even worry about it. But this morning for some reason, I don't know, I was working on something, and I happened to be running the tests. I noticed one of the tests was just stuck. Like, that's weird. So I did a little investigation.
Ben:
It turns out that a number of our tests do some domain name server resolution because, for webhooks, when someone puts in their webhook, we want to verify that the destination is not like a private thing. They're not trying to fetch our EC2 credentials and stuff like that. So it does some checks like, is this is a private IP address? Does this domain name actually resolve, blah, blah, blah? Also for our uptime checks. Obviously, people are putting in domains for that, too. It turns out that, I don't know, maybe it was my machine, maybe it was the internet being dumb, whatever, but the domain name resolution was what was holding up the test. This happens, as you can imagine, in a variety of ways in our tests. This one test that I was running, which was only, I don't know, seven or eight tests, it was taking a minute or two minutes to run. Then I fixed this so that it stopped doing the domain name resolution, and it took two seconds.
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
So a slight improvement to our test suite there. A quality of life improvement.
Josh:
Did you benchmark overall? Because that's got to be a huge improvement if it's doing that everywhere.
Ben:
Well, it's not doing that everywhere. I did do a push, so I have to go and check and see what GitHub... see if it dropped that time.
Josh:
Well, it might have been whatever was wrong with your DNS resolution in the first place that was causing it to be extra slow. Would it be faster if DNS was fast?
Ben:
Yeah, it could have been. I actually did some tests on my laptop at the time. I'm like, "Is my DNS resolution slow?" No.
Josh:
So it's-
Ben:
The test... I don't know what the deal was.
Josh:
It was just resolving a bunch of actual URLs in the test.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah, that's bad. So nice work. You reminded me that I did some work this week, too.
Ben:
Oh
Josh:
Very important work, I must say. I added a yak to our Slack bot to where-
Josh:
... if you mention the word "yak" when you're interacting with the Slack bot now it will return... You should do it in Slack, just whatever Badger bot. Say Badger bot yak me, it-
Starr:
Okay, I'm doing it.
Josh:
Okay, do it.
Starr:
Oh, sorry. It was the wrong channel. Hold on.
Josh:
You got to do it in general, I think.
Starr:
Come on Badger bot. Oh my god. It's a little text space yak.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Awesome.
Josh:
This came about because earlier this week I was just passively mentioning in chat that I'm just yak shaving. My entire life is yak shaving. That just got us talking about, why don't we have some representation of that in our chat, in our Slack? Obviously, I had to stop everything I was doing and build that right away. Of course, there were some escaping issues that came up as a result of that, so obviously I had to deploy a few hot fixes.
Ben:
The whole episode amuses me. I love it. I would do exactly the same thing. But also what amuses me is that we already have, as part of Slack, GIPHY, and you could just dump a picture of a yak in there. But you're like, "No, that's good enough. I must have an ASCII yak.
Josh:
It's got to be an ASCII yak, yeah.
Ben:
This is great. I love technology.
Josh:
I kind of miss Hubot where it would just automatically... if you just mention it. Maybe I should change our Slack bot so that it does that. So if you say "yak," a wild yak appears. By the way, that's what the text at the bottom of the ASCII yak says, a wild yak appears. I just wish it would pop up if someone just mentions it in a chat, like if they're talking about it just because-
Josh:
It's listening to everything, right?
Starr:
That would be fine.
Ben:
We used to have Hubot, and every time you said "ship," it would show the ship-
Josh:
The ship, the squirrel. But I definitely would like... annoying at times, but overall I'd say it was worth it.
Ben:
Totally worth it.
Starr:
Yeah, definitely. I do remember sometimes where things were on fire, and it's just popping up funny GIFs, and it's like, "Not now. Not now Hubot, not now.
Ben:
Sit in the corner. Should have had that command. Like, "Go away for a while."
Josh:
Or just make it a separate... Maybe we should just make this a separate bot that you don't have to have any ops channel. Maybe this'll be our next product.
Starr:
Oh, there you go. It's like when you mention yak, it turns into an Oregon trail-type hunting scene, and you have to shoot the very slow pixel at it.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I do love this aspect of our business of being... I assume it's like a side effect of being small. I don't know. I'm sure large teams also do this, I didn't spend a day on this, but spend a day just doing something completely useless. I like that we can do that-
Ben:
Yes, it is.
Josh:
... and the total lack of responsibility, to be honest.
Starr:
Is there a total lack of responsibility? I don't know. I don't know.
Ben:
I think you could argue that there is a total lack of responsibility.
Josh:
Maybe relatively.
Starr:
Maybe.
Josh:
I think we're speaking relatively.
Starr:
Relatively? Well, there's responsibility to customers. I don't know. Do they count? Nah.
Ben:
Speaking of being a small company, just because of a recent acquisition of one of our competitors, I had gone to look at what some of our other competitors, what status they were, and I was just blown away with how many employees our competitors have. It's really amazing.
Starr:
What are they doing with all those people? Are they paying...? Do they have a professional volleyball team or something?
Josh:
Not in the past year.
Starr:
Well, they play over Zoom.
Josh:
It's a professional pong league now.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
We have five employees. The competitor that has the closest number of employees comes in at a hefty 71. Then the largest number that I found was 147 employees. That's impressive.
Josh:
With the competitor, the first one that you mentioned with the 70 something employees, and I assume over $100 million in funding, were they the ones that were recently bragging on Twitter about how much more usage they have than everyone else?
Ben:
I don't know because I don't remember seeing that bragging.
Josh:
They were. It was kind of funny. Yeah, you would probably be the major player.
Starr:
That's something I definitely learned throughout the course of running this business is that a company that has tens or, I don't know, hundreds of, did you say $100 million, that's a lot-
Josh:
It's a lot.
Starr:
... of funding can do more work than three people even if those three people are very, very good. It's-
Ben:
That's right.
Starr:
They can do more work, and that's all right. We're just going to have our little garden patch over here. It doesn't matter if ConAgra is a mile down the road. They can do their thing. We can do our thing.
Ben:
As long as they don't let their seeds blow into our farmland, right?
Starr:
Oh, yeah, definitely. Let me just ask you a question. When it comes to buying your strawberries for your traditional summer strawberry shortcake, are you going to go to that wonderfully, just delightful artisanal farm down the road, or are you just going to slide over to ConAgra and, I don't know, get some of their strawberry-shaped objects?
Ben:
I got to say, I love roadside fruit stands. Those are the best. When cherry season happens here in Washington, going and grabbing a whole mess of cherries from some random person that's propped on the side of a road, I mean it's awesome.
Starr:
My favorite ones are the ones have no... if you stop and think about it... I used to live in Arkansas. One time I was walking by and there was this roadside fruit stand just with oranges. It was like, "Hold up. Hold up. Oranges don't grow in Arkansas. What is this?" I don't know if he just went to Costco and just got a bunch of oranges or maybe he did the Cannonball Run from Florida straight up-
Josh:
Road trip.
Starr:
... and was selling oranges all the way up. There was some explaining to do.
Ben:
I didn't realize until I was saying it, but it really does sound ridiculous that you're going to go and get some fruit items from some random person on the side of the road. But I love roadside fruit stands. They're great.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
I don't know. In this day and age probably, yeah.
Josh:
Maybe things should be more like that. Maybe that would solve some problems.
Ben:
Well, coming back to the front porch thing, do you know that country song, If the World Had a Front Porch?"
Starr:
No, I don't.
Ben:
Definitely have to link it up in the show notes. It's all about if the world had a front porch like we did back then, then things would be different. People would be more friendly. We'd be chatting with our neighbors. Things would just be overall good.
Starr:
Yeah, totally.
Josh:
We'd all know each other.
Starr:
Is that true? Is that true?
Ben:
I got to say, I grew up in the Deep South. I did not have a front porch and none of my friends had a front porch because we all lived in the same neighborhood and all the houses were the same, but we were all still pretty friendly-
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Ben:
... even though we didn't have front porches.
Starr:
Well, I had a front porch and people were assholes, so I think the correlation between front porches and nice people is weak.
Ben:
The song If I had a front porch
Josh:
.Isn't it more like a metaphor? I don't know.
Starr:
You could say the internet's the world's front porch and look how great that's worked out.
Josh:
If you just build a front porch-
Starr:
I'm sure it's a nice song. I don't mean to make fun of the song. I'm sure it's a good song.
Josh:
You build a front porch that the entire population of the world could fit on, just see how that goes. That's what we-
Starr:
It's like, "Oh, shit. We deforested the Amazon to get the wood for this."
Ben:
We should name our little message board product Front Porch.
Starr:
Front porch, ah, that's nice. You could have add-ons to that. Like for upgrades, you could get the rocking chair or the whittling knife.
Ben:
Yeah, and the sweet tea-
Starr:
The sweet tea, yeah.
Ben:
... or the mint julep.
Starr:
Can I ask you a question? Was sweet tea a thing when you were a kid?
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
Do people refer to it as like, "Oo, sweet tea," as a saying?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
Okay, that-
Ben:
They'd just refer to is as tea.
Starr:
Okay, thank you.
Ben:
There was no other tea. It was just that.
Josh:
But it was sweet.
Ben:
Yeah, it was sweet, of course.
Starr:
Yeah, of course. It's-
Ben:
That's the only tea that existed. None of this Earl Grey hot business, no, no, no.
Starr:
I just noticed, I don't know, around 2007 everybody started talking about sweet tea. It's like, "What? What's this?"
Ben:
Yeah, totally. It's a Southern Thing, on YouTube, their channel, is pretty funny. They go into the sweet tea thing quite a bit. If you want some additional context, do some research on that whole aspect. You can go and watch that YouTube channel. I'll have to link it up in the show notes.
Starr:
Yeah, I'll check that out. Well, would you gentlemen like to wrap it up? I think I've got to start... I'm going to be Southern here. I'm fixing to get ready to think about going to my vaccine appointment.
Ben:
Jeet yet? You know that joke? Have you heard that?
Starr:
I haven't heard that joke. What?
Ben:
It's like, oh man, two southern guys, one's like, "Jeet yet?"
Starr:
Ah, did you eat yet? Okay, yeah.
Ben:
"No. Y'want to?"
Starr:
I haven't been back in a while.
Josh:
Did you eat yet?
Starr:
I haven't been back in a while.
Ben:
Oh, good times. Sometimes I miss the South but not during the summer.
Starr:
One of my favorite words, I think it might be a local Arkansas word, is tump. It's a verb, tump. It's the action of tipping something over and dumping out its contents. The perfect use case is a wheelbarrow. Like, you tump out the wheelbarrow. I'm sorry. Tump out the wheelbarrow.
Ben:
Totally.
Josh:
I am learning so much on this episode, by the way-
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
... about the South.
Josh:
It's great. I'm learning more about-
Josh:
This is your second vaccine appointment, right?
Starr:
Yeah, it's the second one.
Josh:
Second and final. Well, for now.
Starr:
So I'm ready for it to hit me. I'm like, "Bring the storm.
Josh:
Yes, it hit me.
Starr:
Bring it on."
Josh:
Mine was like a 48-hour ordeal, but back to normal now. I feel great.
Starr:
That's good. You got your super powers.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, good luck with that.
Starr:
Thank you. Maybe one day we'll be able to have a conclave in person again, although I might need the support of a therapist or something because just like... I mean I like y'all, but I don't know if I'm over the droplets yet.
Ben:
You can still wear masks.
Starr:
Okay, that's good. Thank God, okay. All right, I will talk to y'all later.
Show notes:
Links:Write for Honeybadger
Fluffy Arnold Schwarzenegger impression
Changes at Basecamp
Coinbase is a mission focused company
Faker
Full transcript:
I've been like texting with Zoomer person. And their emoji game is so deep and subtle that I just don't even know how to respond to these. I'm just like a thumbs up and they're just like emoji of falling leaves. How do I interpret that?
Josh:
Is that the difference between us and them? Is that they actually use all the emojis?
Starr:
I think so.
Josh:
We use six.
Starr:
I was just like, I can't just reply this with heart. So I just went and I was just like, emoji of panda bear. That seemed to be like an appropriate reaction to falling leaves. But I really don't know. I could have just completely been a jerk without realizing it.
Ben:
Yeah, I hadn't thought about it Josh but yeah, I think I can list the emojis that I actually use. There's thumbs up, there's troll face, there's pile of poop. Smiley face, heart. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Josh:
You should get them tattooed on your arm. I think our other defining characteristic is that we're the generation that still use this text emoji and thinks it's cool.
Starr:
I don't think it's cool anymore. But sometimes it's just like, this is just what I'm doing. This is who I am. I'm just going with it.
Josh:
Yeah, we've accepted it now.
Starr:
Because if we keep at it long enough, it'll come back around. I've seen some people use text emojis ... They're emoticons, right? They're not emoji. But it's like ... The Zoomers with the super nuanced emoticon game. They're not typing these out, that's for sure. They've got like a clip file of these somewhere.
Josh:
It's like an additional vector of communication.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true.
Josh:
We'll never be fluent.
Ben:
I think emoticons are vastly superior to emoji, especially for this mighty face case, because it's always going to be the same representation no matter what platform you're on. But the emoji, they change. An apple emoji's differ from a Google emoji, etc. So if you send an emoticon, you what you're going to get.
Starr:
What if the person's using Wingdings as or fonts, though?
Josh:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Ben:
I guess I hadn't thought about that one.
Starr:
Comic Sans.
Josh:
I guess they had similar problems back when emoticons were all the rage, when they were first discovered. What happens if they're like ...
Ben:
I think emoticons are just going to be a symbol of the crusty old man syndrome. I also prefer text based email.
Josh:
That's a get off my lawn.
Ben:
Definitely. Shaking my fist at clouds.
Josh:
I was just going to say on text based email that reminded me of one thing I like about Front, which we recently switched for our support to Front. And they have a markdown mode. I like my email in markdown.
Starr:
So what is Front? Could you describe it?
Josh:
It's like a shared team inbox. Like a support tool ... I mean, we're using it as a support tool but I think it's more than that. It has a deep integration with Gmail. And basically lets a whole team share the same Gmail inbox, basically. But they have their own app and everything. And then it adds collaboration features to your email. So you can assign email, you can even add your personal email to it. So you could assign a personal email to someone on your team, and it would move it to their inbox which is handy for delegation.
Starr:
Yeah, that's pretty cool. I just started messing around with it and I really do like it. I really like this email centric focus of it. Where I guess you can use this as support but that's not really the only thing it's for.
Josh:
Yeah, it has a bunch of add-ons which we still need to explore a little bit and I know it also supports ... You can add custom paints to it like how Help Scout could ... Which we need to add for ... So that when someone emails us to our support address, it'll pull up their customer information from our proprietary admin tool.
Ben:
Yeah, I haven't done that yet. Because the way that Front does it is, of course different than the way that Help Scout did it. But I much prefer the way that Help Scout did it. They hit an HTML endpoint that you define, and then render the HTML inside the Help Scout UI. And then of course it to be simple, an Li or P or whatever. You couldn't do all kinds of crazy stuff because the space in which you would render is very limited. But at least it was straightforward. All I had to do is dump out some HTML, but with the Front, it's like, well, you got to create this single phase JavaScript app and talk to our API. I was like never mind.
Josh:
That's what I heard about it. That you can do more with it but it lacks that simplicity. And I agree with you that I personally would prefer the Help Scout approach, which is ... It's almost dumb but it's good in a good way.
Ben:
The only thing we link out to our admin tool anyways and display some text. Not even emoji, just want to display some emoticons. But Front is nice. I'm glad we switched. The one thing I wish that it did as well as Help Scout is having a widget on the page that's not a chat widget. So I really liked having the Help Scout widget because it just dumped ... Someone could use our app, open up the widget to contact support and they would send us a message rather than starting a chat, which we prefer. And Front doesn't really have that, they have a chat thing. And they do have support for a form submission which you would think would work but it's limited, it's like one URL. You have to specify what URL it is at. It's like, well, I mean, that doesn't work inside of our app because our users are all different URLs every time they talk to us.
Ben:
So really that feature from Front is really meant for a contact page on a website that's static. And that's not a good fit for us. That's frustrating. Now we don't have a widget, and I don't like that as much. Basically every support link now in the app is, well just email us at support. Which is fine but it's just not as nice as having that widget.
Josh:
Yeah, Help Scout definitely seems like it's a little bit more tailored specifically for our SaaS use case was. But overall, the collaboration flow in Front, it seems to be better. But yeah, Help Scout gets a lot right. And Front also doesn't do ... If you have documentation that you're also hosting with your support, Help Scout has a docs feature. And the thing that's nice about their widget is that if you use the docs feature, it also integrates with that. So you can send them to the docs first before they create a ticket. But we never used that so it wasn't a deal breaker for us.
Starr:
Yeah I don't really like it when I go to support and it's like, what's your problem? And I start typing and it's like, here's some links.
Josh:
How often do you click on ...
Starr:
I do click on it sometimes. It's like, this is not what I'm looking for. Thank you. That's why I'm looking for support, not going to your help question.
Josh:
That's a good point.
Starr:
I am going your help desk, I'm not going to go into your docs.
Josh:
Yeah. It depends on how competent or savvy your users are too. Because if you're the type of person that goes and looks in the docs, assumes that you're going to find ... Search for the answer first, which I usually do. If it's something simple that I know is going to be in the docs, I'll assume that they've got it there and I go look for it, which is why it annoys me when I go to ... I have something super specific and it's trying to suggest the simplest possible guess. I'm sure there's a lot of people ... Companies that have a high volume of of support, that get a lot of the same questions and stuff, I could see it being useful there.
Ben:
Yeah. To your point there, I was wondering if perhaps those systems are better from our general use case apps, depending on ... An audience that's not technical, like QuickBooks. If you're in QuickBooks and you need some help about, I don't know, your payroll and you start typing W2, there's a good chance that they have a help desk knowledge base article about W2s that will answer your question. But if you're a software developer using a very technical tool, as a developer you've probably done everything you possibly can not to contact support because you don't want to talk to people. And you've done all the research and there's nothing that's going to help you. So by the time you get to the point of saying, okay, please help me with, you really don't need a suggestion.
Josh:
Yeah, that's true. It is a last resort for me.
Starr:
Exactly. By the time I'm like, please help me, I've been in the desert for seven days and dying of thirst. I'm sunburned, vultures are circling above me.
Josh:
I've read like your entire site on the Wayback Machine.
Ben:
I've read your blog. I've listened to all your podcast episodes. I know you better than yourself. I followed you on Twitter. I've visited your ancestral home.
Josh:
Even an app like ConvertKit comes to mind as the ... Because they have a much broader audience ... Bloggers. Did you I guess Arnold Schwarzenegger is using ConvertKit now? He was interviewed talking about his newsletter I think with Jimmy Kimmel. And it was fun to watch.
Starr:
Did he name drop ConvertKit on Jimmy Kimmel?
Josh:
No. They were talking about his actual newsletter.
Starr:
I just want to hear him say ConvertKit. What's that celebrity hiring platform where you can hire celebrities? I just want to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger say Honeybadger.
Starr:
That would be amazing.
Ben:
That's be amazing.
Starr:
In a terminator voice.
Josh:
You could always tweet at him every day for a month and see if you could get his attention because he seems like the kind of guy if you just happen to have a little extra time, he'd throw it out there for you.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Yeah, he seems like a nice guy.
Starr:
There you go. You got to link it to fitness. Like every day, I'm going to exercise more until you get back to me.
Josh:
You could just record a little video between reps.
Ben:
Speaking of Arnold, there's a funny bit by Fluffy, the comedian about meeting Arnold. So you should go check it out. I'll see if I can find a link and send it to you. It's funny. It's worth the five minutes or whatever to watch.
Josh:
Cool. Are we going to talk about Rails?
Ben:
Do we need to talk about Rails?
Josh:
Starr was just waiting for it.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
So this week, there's been some news in the Rails community thanks to Basecamp. One of the co-founders of Basecamp is DHH, David Heinemeier Hansson. And he's also the creator of Rails. And he created Rails for Basecamp and since Basecamp was in the news this week in such a spectacular way, it has now spilled over to the Rails community. And I suppose we should talk about the Basecamp stuff first, and then we can talk about the Rails stuff.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. I know about the Basecamp stuff. I haven't been paying attention to Rails land in the past couple days.
Josh:
We have drama to report, Starr.
Starr:
Really? Oh, my God, this is the best ... Yes. The FounderQuest gossip sesh. It's going to be great.
Ben:
So on the Basecamp thing, so Jason Fried came out with his posts talking about some changes they're making at Basecamp. And one of the changes is, we're not going to have these political conversations anymore.
Josh:
About level of information.
Ben:
About that level of information. And I'm sure people internally knew the background. Of course no one on Tuesday outside of Basecamp knew the background. Over the week, there is some reporting done that exposed some of that background and then DHH came out with some more. After that, reporting him [inaudible 00:19:36] and it's juts this snowball. On Tuesday, when that first hit, I was actually chatting with someone about this and my first thought was ... Well, I had many thoughts. The first two thoughts were, this really seems like ... Then again, having no inside knowledge, it seems like this could have been communicated better internally before it was communicated externally. It seems like the initial impact that I saw on Twitter was a lot of employees at Basecamp being blindsided by this.
Ben:
And I thought, it seems like that could have been handled better. It seems they were feeling like they weren't heard or they didn't have a chance to have input onto that thing before it went public. And the second thought I had was, that was one item out of a list of items of changes they're making at Basecamp. And some of the other items were definitely worth talking about but they all got lost in the noise about that one item. Things like we're not going to do 360 degree reviews anymore. Things like we're not going to be paternalistic in the benefits we offer. I think each of those things were interesting and deserve their own conversation. But having them all be right there paired with the whole we're not going to talk politics anymore thing was ... I think to me was disappointing, because I thought there was great stuff that could have been great conversations, but just got lost in the in the fear.
Josh:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting that Ben Thompson at Stratechery pulled out ... The thing that he focused in on was actually the benefits thing in terms of the broader Basecamp business analysis that he's done in the industry. But he made some interesting points just about how that actually does fit with ... That's very Basecamp thing to do is they're trying to ... They've always been the anti Silicon Valley company. And that's taking the opposite position of the Googles and Facebooks and Apples that have a campus where they expect you to live your life and everything's included, and they're giving you perks or rewards for exercising and staying healthy and things like that. But yeah, that didn't get really discussed a whole lot. I saw a few people talk about it. Maybe after all this blows over, we can circle back to the actual business discussions. But yeah, I have the same thought.
Josh:
It seems like we and them, them being the Basecamp employees were reading this at the same time, which doesn't seem ... That just didn't seem right. Which really surprised me, and I have the same thought. They must have been discussing this internally before this came out or something must have happened, but they didn't really go into it at all. And they left a lot of I think questions on the table which is what some journalists then picked up on it and started digging to figure out what that story was. What was the backstory? Which turned out to be dumb in my opinion. Did you read the Verge article Starr?
Starr:
No. I've been cut off from the news this week.
Josh:
Well, obviously this was only one part of it, but it sounded like the thing that was the last straw that led to Jason and David making this blanket decision was that there had been this internal ... I guess their customer support team, long way back has started this list of funny customer names. Customer names that make them laugh.
Starr:
Yeah, it's a little shitty.
Josh:
It is shitty. It just seems like a dumb ... especially being who they are but even for us ... For a company like us where we've talked about our customers so much and customer support is everything to us and all that. You're keeping a list where you mock and laugh at your customers, it's backwards.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true.
Josh:
I don't know, it just seems like the kind of thing that I would immediately ... I'm not necessarily surprised that in a company with tens of employees or more, you can't necessarily keep tabs on everything, but they were aware of it. And it just seems like the kind of thing that you would be ... You just acknowledge it like he did at first but then just ... I don't know why it had to turn into an argument. It's like, yeah, that was bad. We're not going to do that. I don't know.
Ben:
The conversation that I had earlier this week, I came to it saying, well, I can see both sides of this issue. From a business owners perspective, I can see where David and Jason might have been frustrated with, let's just get work done. Can we just settle this? Can we move past it? Can we move on? And again, Tuesday, I didn't know what the context was but now that I know, okay, this funny names list ... Yes, that was mistake. We shouldn't do it again, let's move forward. And then do we need to spend all of our cycles at work talking about these kinds of issues when that's not what we're here for? We're here to build a product to serve our customers. So I can totally see that side of the issue. And I'm just guessing that's where David and Jason were coming from. It's like, let's just get to work. But on the other hand, I think a lot of employees that I saw on Twitter were frustrated feeling like, well, we feel silenced. We feel like we don't have a place to express our views about these issues which are important to us.
Ben:
And I can totally get that too. You spend a lot of your life at work. And, for a lot of people, they're socializing too. Especially in COVID days, when you're locked into your house. If you're 100% remote company like Basecamp or like we are and Basecamp has a lot of remote, I can totally relate to, hey, my Slack is where my friends hang out. I'm hanging out with Starr, I'm hanging out with Josh, and I like chatting with them and talking about the things that matter to me. I get how you can feel shut down. I can see both sides and I think it comes back to ... A lot of companies will say, "We're family." And even some companies that I admire have that as one of their core principles. And I can respect that approach but I totally disagree with it. My company is not my family. My family is my family. My company, we might be friends, that would be a good thing. But we might not be, but at least we can be kind to each other. At the very minimum, we can be accepting of everyone. We can be kind and tolerant of everyone and respect when we have differences of opinion or differences of lifestyle, or differences of approach or whatever.
Ben:
We all are going to have a diversity of things. And I think we all should come to work in whatever situation we're in with an appreciation for differences and acceptance of differences. But at the same time, we don't have to focus on that all the time. That doesn't have to be our thing. Yes, we're different. We also have a common goal in this business to serve customers, make money, etc. And I think just getting wrapped around that axle of well, if I can't talk about all my things all the time ... Yeah, you're going to be frustrated.
Josh:
There are limits. It seems just like a very delicate thing. I think potentially one of the mistakes or at least one of the issues with what their response was that they made a blanket decision that banned an entire category or categories of opinion and feedback at the company. Versus ... I think it would have been different if they had said in that specific instance ... The first part of David's response was, yeah, this was a systemic failure of Jason's and mine that this list existed for so long. Yes, we were vaguely aware of it or whatever. We let it continue. We didn't really focus on it and it's wrong, and we're shutting it down now. And then say, okay, now we've discussed this and this is the decision on this issue and we're moving on, let's get back to work. Instead of going into the second half of his response which proceeds to argue specific points of the discussion with the employees, which seems to further ... It furthers the debate or argument on the issue.
Josh:
If it had just been like, okay, this has gone far enough, this is getting a little out of hand even in my opinion ... This is the decision, this was bad, we're not going to do it anymore. I'm closing the thread or whatever. I don't think they would have had the same response I assume compared to going public and saying, "Okay, we're never going to have a conversation like this ever again." Which by the way was not just somewhat random political ... They weren't arguing in favor of a politician or a social issue even, it was about the company itself. So when you say you've worked here for 15 years and you're not allowed to raise concerns that you have about the place where you work anymore, I could see where ... That's not cool.
Josh:
I probably broadly lean towards their point of view like David and Jason in terms of ... And yours Ben in terms of I think a business should exist to have a very more specific mission. And it shouldn't be your entire life. I think people are served better by having different facets of their life and business is one of them. And hopefully you work at a company where you both have the same mission.
Josh:
But yeah, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that you can just blanket say, we're not going to ever discuss political or social issues ever again. How do you do that? And especially considering David and Jason are two of the most political ... David is arguing political issues in front of Congress for crying out loud.
Starr:
I agree with you both a lot I think. One thing that is just true I think is that if you're in a group of people and you're trying to be good, and do whatever the right thing is ... Because in any group of people, people are going to sometimes mess up. And that will require a course correction, and everything and that's going to be uncomfortable. And it just seems like being able to exist in that discomfort is a really important skill to have when it comes to just getting along and leading a company. And the thing that struck me when I read this post at first is this has real big daddy's mad energy. It's like. "Daddy's mad. Oh, no!"
Josh:
And they mentioned the paternalistic benefits but I think the term paternalistic almost, fit the whole narrative better.
Starr:
IT does, yeah. Exactly.
Josh:
That was my thought too.
Starr:
It's like the kid's upset with something about their ice cream cone and so daddy just storms in and be like, "Nobody eats anything ever again." That's the energy it has to me. And the fact that it was not ... This was not discussed with people, this was just handed down in a dictatorial way furthers that. And it's also interesting because Basecamp has held itself up as this model of how to be a small business and stuff. And I feel like this letter is a very clear consolidation of power. Maybe power had gotten a little bit too dispersed among employees and stuff. So it's consolidation of power back into the ... I know that Jason and David are equals, I don't really understand how that relationship works. But whatever it is, I got that feel from it.
Josh:
Yeah, it sounded like they're just moving power back into the hands of upper management. Because it talked about the committees ... Because they disbanded a couple of few committees that had started and said that responsibility for those issues were moving back to the whatever head of whatever department that related to.
Starr:
I wonder if we're going to get a book from them about waterfall management now, like waterfall development. That's going to be the new hot take. If anybody could do it, DHH can.
Ben:
Starr, I think you made a great point there in that Jason and David as well put themselves forth as an example of this is how it should be done. They were very public about their very opinionated approach to business. And I think a number of people were just blindsided by seeing this thing coming from them. When they had bought into this idea that yes, Jason and David are into the progressive stuff. They're into the issues that I feel good about. And to have had this daddy's mad scenario ... I think you nailed it. I think really shocked and surprised them. I don't know if you noticed the Rework podcast for this week-
Josh:
That was brutal.
Ben:
That was brutal. The two hosts ... Okay, so they're employed by Basecamp. And the whole point of the podcast is talking about a better way to work. And they started their podcast episode, they're like, "No we just can't do this." So Basecamp is a way to work.
Josh:
And it's very like trouble in paradise type.
Ben:
The title of the podcast was going dark. I'm like, well, that's in more ways than one. They're basically saying, yeah, we're going off the air because we just can't do this with good conscience right now.
Starr:
I would have a very hard time doing that too.
Josh:
Yeah, how do you talk about anything? Ben and I were talking before this podcast. We were like, how do you not talk about this if you do a podcast? Now that it's an issue, you have to address it. So being a podcaster at the company, I can only imagine, there's no way you can continue.
Ben:
I've been thinking this week about what lessons to be learned from this, for Honeybadger or how do we change anything at Honeybadger if we do. We're not 55 employees, we're just five employees. And so that makes a difference. But as I was thinking about that, I was thinking back to when we hired Ben Findley, I remember Starr saying to the three of us privately, "Maybe we need to not be dropping our political views into our general channel in Slack." Because we always make jokes about political figures or things because the three of us have fairly similar political outlooks and belief systems and that sort of thing. And so we agree to most of the stuff that we share. And I think I had shared something and I was making fun of some politician, I don't know what it was. But Starr was like, "Maybe we shouldn't do that in general anymore. Because that might make our employees a little uncomfortable, feeling like they have to agree with us philosophically or politically." And I thought that was a great point.
Ben:
And so we moved that stuff out of our whole employee chat room into just the three co founder chat room, so we could still be amused of that stuff and not feel like we're imposing. But I think that a lot of people felt betrayed. We thought we were in this together with Jason, David, we thought they were on our side. And now they come and say this, which is totally different from what we had expected. And we feel like we're not aligned. I think a lot of was that.
Josh:
It seemed like a very illiberal decision.
Josh:
You're silencing dissent basically is out of character with a company that has advocated for such the opposite, or at least it feels like they have. When at the same time, there's a valid point that you cannot have your whole company absorbed in politics, either. But again, it's not something that you can just have a single ... There's not a single line you can draw. Even going back to with us, we try to keep things fairly apolitical. But we've definitely had some political discussions since then with our employees and even in some cases, they've been the ones to say something. Or when there's a big event happening ... We haven't had any major society affecting events in politics recently.
Starr:
Of course not.
Josh:
But it's like, how do you not say something about that? How do you not mention that a Viking is in the capital?
Ben:
Exactly. That was the first thing that came to mind when you said that is like January 6th. That was a bad day for us. And I remember we were just like, okay, I got to [crosstalk 00:39:41].
Starr:
I was like, I'm taking the day off. I need to figure out if I need to flee to Canada or something.
Ben:
And I totally think that kind of thing is fine. You got to have that space.
Josh:
We're all people.
Ben:
But at the same time, that conversation didn't go for weeks in our Slack. It wasn't like work stopped. We got back to it when we could. And I think there needs to be a balance there. I think people need to feel like they can express themselves about things that are they're concerned about. And to your point, I think this is probably a one on one conversation where the boss comes in says, "Okay, I appreciate you're having a hard time, maybe you need to take a vacation."
Starr:
Some management? Maybe this is the problem with non hierarchical type companies. There's no manager who can just take people aside and smooth out the tensions and all that.
Josh:
They have ahead of people ops, which is where some of the power got transferred in that post. And so does the CTO need to be the one that's stepping into squash ... They have managers that are supposedly their sole job is to deal with people too. The other thought I had about just political discussions arising at work is that if anything, I would say the leaders are the ones who should be not 24/7 just ranting about politics in their company chat. If anything, I think we made the right decision like, okay, let's not broadcast all of our political baggage and opinions in chat to make our employees feel like they have to agree with us or something. But we didn't say like, let's make sure they don't ever talk about politics. It's just like, let's not make them feel uncomfortable by broadcasting our politics.
Josh:
So I think you should almost give them more room to involve their opinions. And as far as the founders politics go, it's not that you shouldn't be political but I think that's where it comes down to where the company mission ... I think back during the whole Coinbase debacle, Ben Thompson had an interesting framework for dealing with political things in businesses. And I think part of it was the company can have a mission that has a society wide goal or whatever. And I think the founders moving ... If it's part of the company mission, that's where the founders ... That's where their politics should come through. You start a company like that is it to some extent, it's an extension of you. And I don't see a problem with wanting to change the world in the direction that you think it should go.
Josh:
But I think that's where founders should moderate themselves in at least in terms of the workplace to advocate for the mission of the company, and not be spewing all of their political red line bedrock issues as DHH called it.
Starr:
There's definitely this power dynamic and now it's something ... When we hired our first employee, I was super aware of that. That there was this power dynamic where I wielded really without wanting to, more power as a owner than an employee does. And so I just want to be very careful. That's why I suggested we move things to backroom because I just want to be very careful not to make people feel uncomfortable. And you talked about the mission of the company, there's different ways of looking at a company's mission. You can obviously look at a company and be like, the mission of this company is make as much money as possible. And yes, that's valid. But I mean that's just one side of things. Because the mission of somebody building a company with people in it is to create a system in which all of these people can work together to make money or do whatever in a way that is sustainable and scalable, and all of that.
Starr:
And part of those people is politics. For example, me personally, as a trans person, my existence is politicized in ways that I wish it weren't. But here we are. That's something that has to be taken into account. You can't just be like, okay, turn off all politics at work because that's basically asking somebody to deny some part of themselves. And I can't figure out how to make the system work with you in it. So I'm just going to ask you to pretend that you're somebody else to fit into this system that I made.
Ben:
Yeah. Some people tossed out the notion of they're canceling my existence. And I think that's a dangerous phrase on both sides, someone who does actually want to do that, and someone who's accusing another of doing that. Because we do bring a lot into the situations that we're in, we all have blind spots and it's easy to recognize someone else's blind spots without recognizing our own. It's much easier someone else's than our own. And no one should feel like they have to turn off a part of themselves or hide a part of themselves in order to be part of a community. I have strong feelings about this. We should be able to love each other enough to be able to accept whoever they are, wherever they are, whatever point they are. And be able to communicate that. And I keep coming back to this communication part. Because I think so much of this brouhaha is just communication. People being able to sit down and talk to each other and say, "This is how I feel. What you say and what you do makes me feel this way or that way." And responding to that rather than coming down with saying, "Well, this is how it's going to be."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I'm a pretty upfront in your face person with my communication style, and I'm sure I've offended more people than I could ever count. And I don't feel good about that. And I work on that or I try to be better about that. And I have my blind spots that are huge. And I'm sure I've rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and I still will. But not intentionally. I'm not out there to hurt people. And I think sometimes there are cases where people feel like, oh, he intentionally hurt me by doing X, Y, or Z. And it's like, well, no, they actually didn't. They didn't intentionally hurt you. Yeah, I can see where they did hurt you. The hurt is real. It happened. There's no question. But there's a difference between someone that hurt you inadvertently versus intentionally. And I think just offering some grace to people will help a lot in smoothing that out. I don't know, maybe that's idealistic.
Josh:
It seems like these issues Starr mentioned, these should not be politicized issues. And I think a lot of this is dealing with the fallout of the greater ... What's been done to society as a whole, making everything a political issue. And the polarization, it's bleeding into everything now.
Starr:
We're not allowed to talk about society in this podcast, Josh.
Ben:
Let's stay in our lane.
Starr:
It violates our policy.
Josh:
They shouldn't be political issues to begin with. People should be discussing things without assuming political positions, but it's almost impossible to do that anymore. And then I had mentioned I think before or maybe to you, Ben privately, we were talking before the podcast, just being professional ... Just treating people with respect. Obviously everyone is different and people have never agreed on everything. The tech industry especially is made a big point about being casual and dropping a lot of the trappings of business and empowering people, which is good. But then also, it just seems like there's a lack sometimes of just respect and professionalism between people. I can have my point of view, you can have your point of view but we can still work together because we agree on the bigger picture or whatever. I mean, I guess that's part of the point. There has to be some big picture that you agree on to. And I think that picture should be broad but it still has to have balance.
Ben:
Go ahead, Starr.
Starr:
Oh, sorry. I was just going to gently push back a little bit on the idea that things can be completely apolitical. And I'm not really talking about partisan politics. I'm just more talking in the more general sense. I think to some extent pretty much everything is political and wishing that things weren't political is ... That'd be great if there could be things that weren't political but I think just in reality, most things are. And I'm not saying that there's not a place for professionalism and all that. I think that's where the willingness to think that's ... The professionalism to me is where the willingness to endure some discomfort comes in. And that's I think what we're seeing in this statement by Jason is an unwillingness to endure discomfort. It's like, I'm uncomfortable, you guys have to be different so that I'm not uncomfortable anymore.
Josh:
I get what you're saying. I think I agree with you. In the grand scale, everything is political in the sense that if you're talking about power structures and things ... The people that have the power are the ones that are going to want to say that things aren't political, I think in most cases. And so if you are in a group that wants to see change, how can you not be political? So in that sense, everything. Is that what you're saying, Starr?
Starr:
Yeah, that's pretty much where I was going at. And But again, it's different from partisan politics. It's different from that kind of politics. It's a different thing.
Ben:
We all have our differences. We're all different people, everyone is unique. And I think we would be more accepting of differences and that makes the world better place. On that note, take on a weird segue, so we promised talking about the Rails effect.
Josh:
Yeah, let's talk about Rails.
Starr:
Yeah, we got to do that.
Ben:
Okay. So this is I feel, I guess, a little more emotion about this because it affects me a little more directly than the Basecamp thing does. Because as a company, we are invested very heavily in the Rails community. And as an individual having been involved in the Rails community since 2015 or so, it's a large part of my identity and my lived experience. So people are saying, "Well, we should fork Rails." Because-
Josh:
Well, first of all, let's talk about ... Some of the employees who are leaving Basecamp over this are Rails core contributors, they've contributed to a lot of the open source ecosystem of Rails, and some of them have actually said, "I'm not just leaving Basecamp but I'm no longer going to be involved in any of these open source projects." That's going to put a lot of pressure on the open source community when your core contributors are leaving because the control structure or whatever.
Ben:
And I got to say, it pains me. It pains me to see someone ... Because I can empathize with the weight of that decision. Some of these individuals, it's a lot of their life has been invested in these projects that they've put out there. And it's a generous gift that they've given to the world and they feel like they have to step away from that because of this situation, which I think is super painful. And I can totally appreciate why someone would make that decision. And on the other hand, having been an author of open source stuff myself in some things that have gained some popularity, there are times when it can get to a point where it grows beyond you. I'm thinking right now about Faker. I started the Ruby Faker as a copy of Perl Faker and it was a fun little thing for me to have something that I wanted to see in the world and it took a life of its own. It got to a point where I wasn't interested in carrying it any further.
Ben:
And other people were. And so now they are. I'm still around, occasionally might do a little bit of work here and there. But it definitely has a life of its own. And I don't want to make a false like equivalency here. I'm not saying that my stuff is anywhere near as interesting or valuable as some of the projects that you're referencing, Josh. But that's just a way to say I can understand this feeling of one, this emotional investment and two, sometimes things just grow beyond the individual.
Josh:
Yeah. And if anything, I'd almost say maybe it's time for DHH to think about that. As you mentioned, and I interrupted you ... So sorry about that. But you were getting to the point that there have been already people talking about forking Rails. What do you think about that? I'm going to put you on the spot.
Ben:
I got to say, it makes me frustrated to think about people saying, well, this is the reason why we need to fork Rails. It's obviously that DHH is bad and we want to be good. And we want Rails to be good and so we have to divest ourselves of DHH. A lot of thoughts there. One is, okay, it's really hard to have a really successful project and have a good fork. There are a lot of things there. The resources, the energy, just a whole lot goes into that. But one of my thoughts is-
Josh:
There's a split in the community.
Ben:
It's really painful. Why shoot yourself in the foot like that? And I know a lot of people think that that's a bad thought. But the DHH thing is what really I think gets me. If you want to fork Rails, okay, we can talk about that. But if you want to fork Rails because of DHH's behavior and that was the impression that I got from what I read about this one person who was talking about it ... DHH hasn't changed. This isn't new. DHH has been DHH for a long, long time.
Josh:
It's a running joke.
Ben:
I'm trying to avoid the false equivalency thing but in 2015, I wrote a blog post about Rails. I was at that time looking at Rails, but I was still doing a lot of PHP and Perl stuff. And I wrote a blog post and I compared where Rails was, it was still almost brand new. It was pre-version of 1.0. And I compared it to what I was familiar with in the PHP world, some frameworks that I had used, some approaches that I'd taken, and I basically came to the conclusion like, well, Rails looks interesting but it's immature. It's got these problems. And DHH gave me the full bore DHH effect. He just came after me, guns blazing. And he's all like, well, blah, blah, blah. You're dumb, basically. And that was his M.O at the time.
Josh:
Did he cyberbully you? Was that one of the first cyber bullyings? You're talking about 2005?
Ben:
Yeah, 2005.
Josh:
I thought you said 2015.
Starr:
Yeah, I was like, I had no idea you were doing PHP in 2015.
Ben:
Wow, time flies anyway. But this was what DHH did. Anytime anyone criticized anything about Rails, he just lit into them. Whether it was a Java person or a Perl ... It didn't matter. He didn't care. That's what he used for marketing. Intentionally or not, that's what he did. And it was effective, it worked, people gave him attention. And DHH has been basically the same. He has very strong opinions. He is not shy about expressing them. So by saying, well, this just shows that DHH is a butt head and we need to fork Rails because of it, why did you ever participate in Rails in the first place?
Josh:
I think part of it ... Go ahead, Starr.
Starr:
Oh, I was just going to say it's not really a rational choice like that. They're just pissed off and they're just saying shit like people do when they're pissed off.
Josh:
There's definitely some of that going on. My first reaction is just, whoa, cool down. Let's wait. Let's not fork Rails this week or even this month. But I think it's probably a little bit more than just we want to punish DHH for what he did or his opinion, although that might be part of it. But I think part of it is that DHH has so much control over Rails that there really is no participating in Rails without DHH being your open source boss, basically. And so the people that don't want to work for DHH to the extent that they're giving up their 15 year career at his company, I imagine are thinking, how can I still exist in this open source community where DHH owns the trademarks for Ruby and Rails and asserts them and basically has the final say on everything that happens, and is very vocal about it. He's not your boss anymore but he would be if there's someone who has a say over how your project gets incorporated into the larger ecosystem or whatever.
Starr:
I imagine DHH is not nice to people he's pissed off at.
Josh:
That could be part of it too.
Starr:
I think that just seems obvious to me is ... If there is a project like Rails, it's been around for so long and is so central to so many things. It needs to be owned by a independent Rails Foundation, that's a nonprofit or whatever. And yeah, sure DHH would play a role in that but it would be an independent organization ... That just seems to be like the way that these big software projects, open source ones get handled and it seems to work okay. Every place has drama, but why does Rails have to be so tied to Basecamp except that DHH wants it to be his personal project?
Josh:
Yeah. But it is unique in the sense that ... The roadmap for Rails basically has come out of Basecamp. Basecamp has been the roadmap for Rails essentially. So it is so tied to it ... Most of what gets into Rails or a lot of what gets into Rails is directly code from Basecamp. Which I guess does make it an interesting control structure currently. But that is the other alternative I have heard someone mention in all of this so far is, there should be some larger body overseeing the project now. It shouldn't just be one company. And if I had to pick between the two, I'd much rather have a Rails foundation than whatever the new Rails is going to be. I was telling Ben, I don't know if I have the energy for a Rails fork at this point in my life. The other interesting thing to think about is how this impacts our business just because we are very dependent on Rails in a lot of different ways. And it's our market, too. So in any case, I think we're going to be involved in this whether we like it or not.
Ben:
Yeah. It's funny because we're the live and let live kind of people. We roll with it kind of stuff. And this kind of thing is not what we signed up for. We don't revel in drama. But I was joking with Josh before we got on the podcast about I need to add this scenario to our risk register, with our Soc2 compliance, we have to list down various risks to the business and I'd never conceptualize that this could be a business risk where I have to worry about what some random person at some other company thinks about , Rails or whatever. It's like, oh, great.
Starr:
Well, maybe it's time to brush up on those PHP skills.
Josh:
Yeah, there's always Elixir. I said the risk should be DHH in his damn mouth. That's what we should put on our risk register.
Ben:
DHH blows up our business.
Josh:
I appreciate a lot of things about DHH in fairness too and he's been nice to me. But that does not come as a surprise that he has opinions and asserts them on people.
Ben:
Yeah. Reading some of the tweets that I read this week, sometimes I thought you did sign up to go work for DHH. You knew what you're getting into. He is a very opinionated person. And the way they run the business is very top down like most businesses are. And sometimes, you're in a situation you just have to leave and that sucks. I think that sucks for everybody. I think that sucks for the person that has to leave and a number of people are leaving Basecamp. I know it sucks for them and it sucks for DHH and Jason. They are losing the opportunity to interact with these fine people and to have their world broadened by the experiences that these people bring into their lives. So it's sad. I think it's sad all around.
Josh:
I think they're risking a lot. I don't know what they're thinking right now. And I guess you could make the argument that this is still just in that phase where the dust hasn't settled yet and people haven't accepted, but that's pretty optimistic. I guess if things settle down and there is no ... People don't fork Rails. But if a Rails fork happens, how can that benefit more than hurt your business in the long run when you basically depend on ... That's a big part of their appeal and their business. I just don't see how that's good for Basecamp just from a purely business perspective. I don't see how any of that's ... I guess time will tell, but they do tend to try to take the long view where they're like, this is for the good of the industry and the world. This decision is how business should be done and one day you'll all agree with us.
Starr:
Oh god. Someone told me this is publicity tour for their next book.
Josh:
Well, someone did make the point.
Starr:
It's going to come out within a week. We've been played, this whole time.
Josh:
There was a good tweet ... I don't remember it verbatim but it was about how Basecamp is basically trying to communicate trust in the trappings of marketing ... As marketing or something like that. Their post was very ... It was marketing, almost. It was in the voice of these are our big ... We're making these big changes at the company because this is how we believe the industry should move forward. I think that's the gist. And it's always in terms of telling you how it should be. And it just feels like in some way, they're telling you how you should be.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true.
Josh:
I guess don't give your touchy company announcements to the marketing department or something.
Starr:
I don't know. Like most Americans, I love a good fall from grace, a good reversal of fortune story. So I'm just going to get my popcorn. And hopefully it doesn't affect us too bad.
Ben:
This is just yet another example of a good reason why you do not want to be a thought leader.
Starr:
Yeah, good point. We really dodged a bullet there.
Ben:
We sure did. I'm just going to go back to running my business, keep my head down and trying to make people happy.
Josh:
So, speaking of, do we have any critical advice for the Rails community in this moment? That they will listen to you next week after they've made their rash decisions.
Starr:
Our weekly hot takes.
Josh:
Our advice is, take some deep breaths and think. Just spend some time to think for a week or so. And if you do that, if you listen to us right now, you'll save the community.
Starr:
Oh, Josh, you just don't want to have a bigger CI suite.
Josh:
Oh my god. I did not think about that, Starr.
Ben:
My advice, I would just steal directly from Bill and Ted. And it is to be excellent to one another.
Starr:
Oh, I thought I was going to need a party on. That's strange advice, Ben for the moment but it was actually good advice.
Josh:
That's party on Wayne.
Starr:
Oh, you're right.
Josh:
They both work in all situations.
Starr:
All right, well, I don't know. Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats you. I don't know what that means but it's from The Big Lebowski.
Josh:
It's from The Big Lebowski and it's truth.
Starr:
Yeah. Have we said our peace?
Josh:
I think so.
Starr:
All right.
Starr:
All right, this has been FounderQuest. If you would like to go to review Apple podcasts, that's great. Please go do that. If you want to write for us, we are usually looking for writers for our blog and stuff, go to our blog, Honeybadger.io/blog and look for the write for us page and get in touch. And I will see you all.
Ben:
And if you'd like to mimic Arnold Schwarzenegger saying Honeybadger, please do get in touch.
Starr:
Oh yeah, do that. Send us your WAV files.
Josh:
Please.
Starr:
All right. If you are Arnold Schwarzenegger listening to this, you know what to do.
Show notes:
Links:
Lego space shuttle
Challenger disaster
Challenger: The Final Flight
Roam
xkcd
Footage of Josh two weeks after final Pfizer shot
The Final Countdown
The Beach Boys
Full transcript:Starr:
All right. So now you're going to joke about how, since I've been vaccinated...
Josh:
Are you saying you are vacc'ed?
Starr:
In vacc'ed. I'm chipped. I like to say I'm chipped.
Josh:
Got your injection.
Starr:
People always act like being chipped is a bad thing, but now if I wander off, people will be able to return me to my family.
Josh:
Yeah. And I don't know what the big deal is, everyone loves new technology. I don't know anyone who's been bummed out that some new tech came out.
Starr:
That's true.
Josh:
I don't know what the... Yeah.
Starr:
I can't tell you the number of times I've been watching WWC and just being like, "why can't you just inject this into my vein?"
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
And now they are, and everybody's mad about it. Make up your minds, people.
Ben:
Let's see, so Starr you just got number one. Josh had two and I will have number two in a week and change.
Josh:
Yeah. I should have full immunity and well, I know on our next podcast in a week, it's been a week. Yeah.
Ben:
It feels good.
Josh:
So I'm not going to be here next week.
Starr:
Yeah. You get full immunity. Josh. You don't get diplomatic immunity, so
Josh:
Oh, okay. That's good to know.
Starr:
Cool it there, don't go off and rob any banks or anything.
Ben:
Did you see the new space shuttle, Lego kit?
Ben:
It's very cool.
Ben:
Yeah, it's the kit that is from the mission that launched the Hubble telescope. So it includes a little Hubble telescope as part of the kit. And you can mount it by itself, like display it on the stand itself or put it in the shuttle bay, the cargo bay of the shuttle.
Josh:
That's awesome.
Starr:
Oh, that's really cool.
Josh:
Yeah. My, my kids aren't quite Lego age yet. As we were saying the other day, they... what is the other, what's the bigger version?
Ben:
Duplo.
Josh:
Yeah. With their Duplo age, but actually, they're getting. We'll be getting Legos soon.
Ben:
Yeah. It's fun for the whole family.
Josh:
Yeah. It's going to be fun.
Starr:
Yeah. Mine's not really into Legos, but she loves... We just have like this big box full of random craft supplies, and she'll just go dig in through that and start building stuff.
Ben:
Pretty great.
Josh:
That's fun. My kids are both really into Pokemon right now. So that's actually pretty fun, because Pokemon's fun to watch.
Ben:
Have you done Pokemon Go with them?
Josh:
No, I haven't done that yet.
Ben:
I don't even know if the game is still around. Like..
Starr:
Oh, it's around. I know several people who are super into Pokemon Go and yeah, it's around trust me. Especially with the pandemic lots of people just wanted something to get them out of the house. They've been walking around with that.
Josh:
I could see that.
Ben:
We had this thing. So I haven't done Pokemon Go in quite a while, but when I was doing it, we had this Discord group here around town. They would use that to coordinate the battles. You know, they're like, "oh, there's a new ray, let's all go over." And like, oh, wow. I wasn't that into it, but all of a sudden I just hear through the same spot. And they're coordinating the text and the scores. It's kind of fun. So I went to a couple of raids, but I just kind of lost interest before I really got that deep into it. So.
Starr:
I just can't really get into a game where I have to socialize with people to win. Maybe I'm just showing my age. I'm from the generation where you play games, to like get away from people.
Josh:
Is it really socializing? Because you're all just standing around in a park, staring at your phones. Aren't you? I mean, for us, that is socializing.
Starr:
Yeah. That's pretty much socializing. That's what we do at my family some nights.
Josh:
Oh yeah. We all went to the park today.
Starr:
Yeah. So it's beautiful in the Pacific Northwest now. I assume it's beautiful where you are Josh? It's
Josh:
Oh yeah. It's going to be 80.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. It's the first real week of sun after just months and months and months of gray and we all at this point, know not to get our hopes up. It's going to go back to gray pretty soon, but you can enjoy it while you got it.
Josh:
Is this the false spring? Is that what we're in right now?
Ben:
Yep. I think today probably after we're done recording, I'm going to be wrapping up some things pretty quickly and then getting the old foldable kayak out of the trunk and hitting the water.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Oh, that's awesome.
Josh:
Yeah. I was thinking I might go sit in the sun or something.
Starr:
Yeah. So do you have any businessy type tech stuff to talk about today or we're all just have senior-itis?
Josh:
Well, we sort of unofficially launched a React Native support yesterday. So to our listeners, if you have any React Native projects that you want to monitor errors and you should hit us up, because we're looking for beta testers and things.
Starr:
That's awesome. And is that the one that Andre has been working on?
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
Yeah. Andre did a fantastic job in getting the native stuff going and, Josh wrapped it up on the server side and I was pleasantly surprised at just how little work we had to do to get that working on a server side.
Josh:
Yeah. Source maps... Because React Native is a... I'm not a React Native developer, so it's probably only half working, but from what I understand, it's a little bit tricky, because it's React on top of native code. And so I've heard that you can end up with stack traces that have JavaScript and native, like source locations in them and stuff. And it gets tricky. So what we have, you can generate source maps for your React code and upload that to Honeybadger. And it works just like a regular JavaScript application. So we have yet to implement support for translating the native lines in the stack traces. But that's that'll be up next, I think. At least when someone requests it, so go use it and request it and we'll build it.
Ben:
That's that just in time development, we're not going to build it. Someone asks for it.
Josh:
Yeah. And also we have to understand it before we build it.
Starr:
Yeah. That's a biggie. Like somebody needs to come out with a a paid service that just processes source maps and Java trigger phrases. I know we would be the only customer because nobody has to do this, but us, but it seems like way too much work for what it is. It seems like we should just be able to like buy something and fix it.
Josh:
Yeah. What we're talking about here, basically it would be another source maps, service because are other types of... What is it? Symbolicating?
Starr:
Symbolification? I don't know.
Josh:
I can't remember. I think it's symbolication. Yeah, they switch it up on, you know.
Starr:
That's not even a word.
Josh:
But that's how I remember it. I always remember, it's the one that's not the real word. So it's a different type of a...
Starr:
Wasn't that a Red Hot Chili Peppers song? Symbolification?
Josh:
Californication was.
Starr:
Ah okay. Sorry. I got that mixed up. I'm sorry, go on.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know where I was going with that. It's basically like another type of source map, but for native. And so you will have to build that into our infrastructure at some point
Ben:
There was a bit of conversation on Twitter this week about podcasts, and blog posts, and tweets, I guess too, about when people are sharing progress on their business and how there's all this positive stuff and hustle culture and like, "Hey, we were awesome. And we're doing all these great things and, look at our revenue, through the roof, it's to the moon." And some people were saying the reality is, there are ups and there are downs. We never hear about the downs so much in the tweets and in the podcasts and et cetera, et cetera. And so I was looking at that, I'm like, "yeah, that's true. And I think about our podcast and we don't very often share downs, but then we don't very often have a lot of downs.
Ben:
So that kind of works out I guess, but I thought about all this because we did have a down this week since, since recording our last episode. In the last episode I did say that we had a new feature coming out, where I talked about Slack and how we're going to have this threaded support in Slack and how it was going to be so awesome. And I said, it would be launched by the time that episode drops. Well, that episode dropped this morning and that feature did not launch on time.
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
It's kind of sad.
Josh:
It hasn't launched. I don't know what the story is. So...
Ben:
The story is, the features almost there, but there are enough corner cases that we just didn't feel comfortable launching it to our customers. Kevin and I had... So Kevin is working on this hardcore, for a long time and he really wants to get it launched, but we had a launch date that we picked and getting up to that date, there were still, these little bugs that are popping up and Kevin was getting pretty nervous. And so, Kevin and I chatted 6:00 AM, the morning that we were going to launch this thing, and he had just committed some code that would fix a couple more bugs. I could tell he was kind of anxious, but I could also tell that he also was really done with this, just so ready to get this out of the door.
Ben:
And so we talked to those last few issues and I said, "Look, I'll go with what you want to do here, but if it were me, I would not launch this. I would just set it aside, go do something else for a while, let my brain clear, and see if inspiration strikes about really making it feel like this was done." We're kind of nervous about launching this. And I really wouldn't want to deal with an increased support load by deploying a buggy thing, as opposed to just waiting a while and fixing it. We talked about, "what if we never get comfortable with this feature? What if this is just weeks and months worth of development that was thrown out the window?"
Starr:
What if nobody ever loves us again, and we die poor in a gutter.
Ben:
So there's definitely that sunk cost thing where it's like, "oh, we put so much work into this. Let's just push it out there. Let's get it done." Right? But ultimately we decided that we did not want to launch it and that we didn't feel comfortable enough putting it in front of our customers. That's a bit of sad news from Honeybadger. So for all those people out there, there you go. There's a little bit of balance to all that.
Josh:
Yeah. I definitely feel for Kevin because I've totally been there. And I think your advice was good though, because you don't want to deal with the fallout from support requests like that. If you're already in that place of frazzled and kind of done.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like being on tilt when you're playing poker or something. It's like, you don't want to deploy on tilt. I wonder if you could say that there's two types of deadlines and they often get mixed up and you don't really know which one you have. There's deadlines, which are real, like the space shuttle is launching on a certain day and you got to be there so you can get in on time. And then there's deadlines for motivation, which are not a big deal. It's not a big deal, we don't launch this feature. Maybe some people will be annoyed that they have to wait, but being a parent to a young child, I've really gotten over being bothered by people being annoyed.
Ben:
Yeah. We never set a deadline, like a date per se. It's just, we felt that it was ready. And so we said, "okay, we'll launch this on this day because it's ready." And then we got to that day. And I was like, ah, we don't think it's ready so I think artificial deadlines suck. But this was a slightly different thing where we thought it was ready, but it's not. And we're so emotionally spent on this thing that we don't want to play on tilt. I like that.
Starr:
Yeah. Is there something fundamentally difficult about it, or is it just a lot of weird little details have to be wrapped up?
Ben:
Yeah. More of the latter. And it was the thing of going into the final countdown basically and still having those issues. Right. Back to the space shuttle thing, it's like, it's really cold that morning, these o-rings man, I don't know, should we go ahead launch. No, let's not launch, let's double check those o-rings, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's funny. Non-sequitur the other day I was in this unrelated discord and somebody said something about the final countdown and I was really going to make it like that song. I wanted to find it and paste it in. And then I was like, "wait a second." I was like, wait a second. This person is like 20. They're not even going to understand what I'm doing. They're just going to be like, "oh, this is going to like my dad sending me a link to some Beach Boys song or something." It's just, Ugh.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. I guess we'll have to add a link to the space shuttle in the show notes so that the young ones can know what we're talking about.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
So we aren't going to be launching the Slack thing anytime soon. We may not launch that as envisioned, we may have to go back and rethink that. Some of the threading stuff is really cool, but I don't want to lose it. So Kevin and I are basically just kind of taking a break and we're going to get some head space around that.
Josh:
Maybe work on something else for a while?
Ben:
Yes. Kevin has already started working on something that customers have requested multiple times and I'm really excited about having, so that should be cool. And it's a much smaller project so we can get it out the door and it'll be nice.
Josh:
Yeah. Guess sometimes you just want to ship something and that's also a bad reason to ship something. Especially if it's something that's been bothering you or if it's been an involved project and you just want to get it out the door. That's not a good reason to ship it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
But sometimes you do.
Ben:
But sometimes you do, because you just got to.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
That was January 28th 1986, the space shuttle Challenger.
Starr:
Okay, challenger. Is this a model of Challenger itself? No, I don't think.
Ben:
No it's Discovery. Discovery is the one that launched the Hubble. That was for those of you here who remember of the space shuttle, Challenger disaster. I don't know.
Ben:
I remember exactly where I was when that happened. I wasn't watching it on TV. I was in elementary school and I was really into space. Everything space I ate up. So of course I was all over this shuttle and stuff, but it was the middle of the school day, and we didn't have the thing where, at least my class, we weren't watching it like a lot of classes did. And I remember very vividly sitting in the lunchroom and having lunch, and one of my friends came in. He was also really, into space, we were best friends, and he came in and he told me that the space shuttle had blown up.
Ben:
I just didn't believe him, because I thought that was impossible. I thought maybe a booster exploded or, there was some sort of failure and they had to... Whatever. But the whole thing? That just doesn't compute. And so I watched recently, in Netflix documentary, about the disaster and I was not the only person that felt that way. A lot of people that they were talking to were just like, it was inconceivable to them that something at that scale that magnitude could actually happen. That was a sad day.
Starr:
Yeah. That's rough. I wasn't paying that close of attention to it. This is a little bit of a different temperament. I'm surprised that all the space shuttles don't explode. It's just like strap some explosives to our butt and we're going to shoot ourselves into the sky. Like, how does that work at all?
Ben:
That is kind of U2 in a nutshell, Ben believes in all of them.
Ben:
That's pretty funny.
Josh:
Yeah. I was two in 1986, so I don't remember. But I do remember the space shuttle, just later. I had the models and was into it in the 90s.
Ben:
But we don't warrant Honeybadger for use in space shuttle programming.
Starr:
Oh God, no.
Ben:
Sorry. We don't have that kind of insurance.
Starr:
Yeah. I've had a pretty productive week. We're going on the Honeybadger intelligence projects, which I really like saying. At first, I was going to abbreviate at HBI, because that sounds kind of official, but I also like Josh's abbreviation of HBINT, because that sounds like it's some sort of intelligent service.
Josh:
HBINT.
Starr:
Yeah. Now I've got six authors working on different languages and everything. And I had a little bit of radio silence from some of them. So I was like, maybe they didn't quite understand what they're signing up for. And they got into it and it's like too much work. But no, it's just, if you give people a deadline, they're not just going to like keep talking to you. They'll just start working and then do it. So, that's good. They are actually working and that is excellent. And we got one report back. I don't know what you think about Josh, but I, was like, "okay, this is kind of what I imagined.
Josh:
I haven't looked at it yet, but it's up next actually. I've got it on my to do.
Starr:
Anyway, that's a fun thing. Just rolling along making progress.
Ben:
I have another update from last episode in which I said... I got almost no responses to my emails, to people who were,
Starr:
Oh yeah, you got that really good one.
Ben:
So I got off the podcast and I found in my inbox an email from someone responding to one of those emails. So that makes two, I've gotten two responses in total out of the ones that I've sent out. And yeah, that was a fantastic response telling us reasons why they think Sentry is a little better in this way or that way and things we can do to improve. That was awesome. I,
Starr:
They're wrong, but they're entitled to their opinion.
Ben:
Well. Turns out this individual is not in the U.S. And one of the things he called out was our date rendering, which we had actually put some effort into to, to make it localized and to make it really nice for people because, of course the U.S. is weird and how we display our dates and the rest of the world is not weird. And so, he was complaining about that when he logged in, he saw it in the U.S. format and I'm like, "oh, that's because you haven't configured it." And then I thought we're already detecting the time zone via JavaScript, we go and update timestamps and they're based on that. Why don't we use the person's locale to determine the format?
Ben:
So, that was like a two line code change. I deployed it out there within a few minutes and I just loved those kinds of little fixes. Right. That's that's great. Maybe nobody even noticed that thing, but it just feels good having that kind of polishing.
Josh:
I think the point is that they don't notice it in the future. I like those things like personalization.
Ben:
So now if you create an account, hopefully when you first sign in, if you're in the UK, you will see the day, month, year as it should be, as opposed to the U.S.s backwards way of month, day, year,
Starr:
The other lesson is that people aren't going to go hunting through configuration options.
Ben:
True. Very true.
Josh:
You should just like drop them into the settings page after they sign up.
Ben:
Wait, wait. Before you can use any Honeybadger. You have to have configured all the things.
Starr:
No, we'll have a file upload form and they can upload a yml file with all their configuration options.
Ben:
There you go. I like it.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
Yeah, but my week was more the same. Actually I think I'm about ready for vacation. Because I'm feel like,
Josh:
I'm thinking the same.
Ben:
Yeah, because I'm feeling a little tapped out. And so this week I've actually taken kind of quasi vacation, I guess. I took my foot off the gas pedal this week. I've been working every day, but not as much as I usually do. And that's been nice. I've been spending some time on the bike, and in the garden, and things like that. So
Josh:
Yeah. It's the three month mark. That's what it is for me because I started thinking about like the same thing last week or this week. I can't remember, I just started having those thoughts, like "oh yeah, vacation." I haven't taken time off in a while, so yeah.
Starr:
So you think it's three months? There's a sketch, I remember from Portlandia, where there's one patch of sunlight in the park and everybody, they move all the chairs to go sit in it and they're sprawling out and having a great time being all summery and then the sunlight moves to another part and then they have to run after it. I wonder if that's the thing, because it's like the sun comes out, it's like you've just to go outside for a little while.
Josh:
Yeah. That could be a part of it. I have noticed there's a cycle. Actually it's not three months, it's more like six weeks, is the sanity version where I should be taking a little bit of time at least. But three months is like, when I start to realize, I really need to take time off if I haven't already by then, that's when I start to notice that I'm starting to burn out a little bit. So that's usually like the critical point for me.
Ben:
I've wondered if we should have a mandatory vacation policy, where you have to take a week off every quarter.
Ben:
It seems like that would be hard to enforce. So that's why I haven't really like thought about it seriously, but as I speculated about other things, like vacation, because none of us take enough vacation time, in my opinion. I think at Honeybadger... We don't encourage people not to, I think we just like to work, and we like each other and we like what we're doing. And so we just ended up not taking a lot of vacation. And I was just trying to think of ways to fix that because vacation is good. It's useful. And so that was one idea. I was like, well, we could just say you have to take a week off. You're going to have to, but it's kind of hard to.
Starr:
...who's hoing keep up with that?
Ben:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
I'd like to bug people about it though. That's something we could do for each other.
Starr:
I don't really want people bugging me to take time off. That would kind of annoy me, but maybe we could have these periodic, like daily and weekly, reminders in base camp. I wonder if we could put a monthly one in there. There's like, "Hey, consider taking some time off," or something.
Ben:
Or we can build a SaaS that has a Slack bot that joins your Slack and nudges you. "Hey, have you taken a vacation yet?" And if you say no, then it goes away for a couple of weeks and then it comes back. And if you keep saying no, then it starts getting more frequent. Then it's every day it's like, "Hey vacation yet?"
Starr:
It'll overlay something on your screen where it just says vacation.
Josh:
I'm really beginning to dislike the automat, of the automated check-ins and things.
Starr:
They're not my favorite, to be honest. I do not process lots of like notifications coming at me very well. I have this time dedicated to figuring out what I've got to do today and I'll go to these places and I'll figure that out. And then yeah. If something comes at me in the middle of day, it was like, "Hey, you got to do this thing." I'm not like, "great, thanks for reminding me." I'm going to. Like shut up. I'll look at you tomorrow. I've already got my plan for today.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's a nice world to live in.
Josh:
My friend, Joel has an interesting approach to what we use the automated check-ins and base camp for, like keeping up with what everyone's working on and stuff. They use a shared Roam Research daily because Roam Research is note taking tool that's collaborative, so you can like invite a bunch of people to it. It's like a Wiki. So you're all editing the same Wiki, but it centers around like a day page. So it's basically like a journal, it's the default view of it. So they have their entire team in a database that's basically like a team journal. So it's completely asynchronous. You just go to it and you could put anything you want in there that you feel might be interesting to other people or it could be what you're working on. I'd like it because that just becomes part of your workflow.
Josh:
And it's not like something that's constantly nagging you. Like, "Hey, what are you doing? What are you doing?" And also it opens up some flexibility for the types of things that you can share and the frequency, because it's a page of bullet items basically that's nested. So you can organize thoughts or things, but also, you're not forcing anyone to go read it. People can go and just browse it at their leisure.
Starr:
That's true. Yeah. That's interesting. That's kind of like what I do anyway.
Josh:
Same here.
Starr:
I would feel hesitant to do that in a shared format though, because I just like put everything for the day in there. Even if it's not work-related and that stuff is not really something I want to publish for everybody to see. It just feels weird,
Josh:
This wouldn't take the place of a personal work journal or something like that. I think it would be in addition, probably you might have your team and your personal one or something like that. At least that's how I'd approach it because I do the same thing with Roam actually, but just detailing what I'm working on or personal thoughts or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. There is a personal note taking app for Mac and iOS that I saw recently that was built on markdown, but focused on a daily stuff. So kind of like the journal/notes app kind of hybrid. I thought that was neat. A good idea. And it sounds like the same kind of concept, every day, just dump your stuff in from the day and take notes that way.
Josh:
Hhhm-uuh (affirmative). I've been thinking maybe we'll try that at some point. I like to think about my experiments that disrupt people's existing workflows for a long time before I propose them, because we don't like to change things constantly. Maybe we'll try that at some point.
Starr:
Yeah. That makes sense. I think we're coming up on a conclave. I think it's about time.
Josh:
That's the reason I was really trying to get that React Native stuff shipped because that's been on every quarter for the last couple of quarters. This is not going to be on the next quarter.
Starr:
I should really go check my quarterly things. I think I've been doing them. I think I've been on track, but
Ben:
Yeah. I like to go back to that conclave to do list every once in a while to remind me would I agreed that I was going to do and then I just go, " oh yeah. That thing. Totally forgot about that."
Josh:
The real question is, is this conclave going to be virtual or in person?
Starr:
Oh, I don't know. If it's going to be in the next month it's going to be virtual. Because I'm not going to do my second vaccine yet.
Ben:
Yeah. You haven't scheduled that.
Josh:
Yeah. Maybe we'll go for virtual this time and then shoot for the first in-person one later this year.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
In Hawaii.
Josh:
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. I was, I went sort of attended a RailsConf. this week, which was online and it was great. It actually felt very RailsConf-y, even though it was different. I guess this is actually the second virtual RailsConf because the first one was canceled right at the start of the pandemic last year. But this one felt much more put together and definitely way more organized, obviously. They had a discord and a nice custom website with a hybrid prerecorded and live talks and things.
Josh:
They announced that RubyConf later this year is going to be in Denver. And so that was like the first event that I've heard recently, they're committing to some sort of in-person event. And that was kind of exciting because it's nice to look forward to traveling.
Starr:
Did they announce if next year's RailsConf is going to be, I assume it's going to be a person?
Josh:
Portland. It's back in Portland. So it's a do-over.
Starr:
They have unfinished business in Portland.
Josh:
Yes.
Ben:
That's awesome. I think the MicroConf Europe is scheduled to be in person.
Josh:
So, oh yeah. That was announced recently. Like last week or something.
Ben:
November or something. Yeah. So people being optimistic. It's good.
Josh:
Are we going to Europe?
Ben:
I'm not going to Europe but you're welcome to if you like. I have my passport,
Josh:
I don't know if I'm ready for that,
Ben:
But I'm not going to go to Europe. I'm not going to do non-essential travel for a while. Even vaccinated I'm just going to play it kind of close to home for a while and see how the summer goes.
Starr:
That's fair. And also I don't have a kid's vaccine yet. So I saw that maybe there's a chance it'll happen towards the end of the year. Who knows really?
Josh:
I might go to Hawaii or something.
Starr:
Yeah. It's just really weird because like I'm safe now, but now I've got this child who isn't. So how do I deal with that? We don't need to get into that. It's just the next level of this weird, crap parade that has been the past year and a half.
Josh:
Yeah. The risk to kids is not very high though. Right?
Starr:
They can still get it.
Josh:
I know they can get everything.
Starr:
There's a lot that's not known. Right. Kids have been largely sequestered. I think the risk of dying is low, but they can spread it to other people. Maybe, there's complications after they get it, but even though they are still alive, you know? So it's just...
Josh:
The long-term one is something that I'd like to know more about.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm kind of stressed out because our kid's scheduled to start school in the fall and it's just like, "ah! Like what?" Where's the information I need to make a sensible choice
Josh:
Well I'm done stressing. I'm so I'm so over like worrying about everything. I never want to worry again. Okay. I'm just done worrying just period. I'm going to go stand on the edge of the grand canyon and lean out.
Starr:
You're just a dude. It's okay, I'll get you one of those nice Pendleton sweater.
Josh:
Nice. Let me go skydiving.
Ben:
Yeah. We got to check on that key person insurance for Honeybadger.
Starr:
Well, should we wrap it up so we can all start our vacations?
Ben:
Sounds good.
Starr:
All right it was great talking with you all and that this has been... What was the name of our podcast? It's not Honeybadger. It's FounderQuest. That's the name of our podcast. You've been listening to FounderQuest. Go review us and yeah, we will talk to you next week. Bye.
Show notes:
Links:
Tailscale
Ubiquity hack
Front
Write for Honeybadger
Full transcript:
Ben:
The struggle is real when it comes to WiFi here. Because until two weeks ago you could've said, "Yeah, use Ubiquiti, it's all great." Now, there's this big disruption that they're having this attack that they didn't want to admit to.
Josh:
Yeah. I didn't hear about this.
Ben:
Yeah. So the thing that was terrible was that they said, "Oh, there was a leak at our third-party vendor." Well, the third party vendor is Amazon Web Services. If you're going to pin the blame on AWS for your lack in security, that's pretty ridiculous. So there was some whistleblower that came out and say, "No, they're really idiots. They're not logging access to the databases."
Ben:
Their press release was like, "Well, we don't have any evidence of access to your data." The whistleblower was like, "Well, they don't have any evidence of access to your data because they don't do any logging to their database." So they have no idea who's been querying what. It's like, oh, yeah, that's not great.
Josh:
That's cool. That's a good excuse.
Ben:
Sure, yeah. So the vagueness plus the misdirection stuff and it's just like, "Okay, my opinion of them just went through the floor."
Josh:
You never track it, you never know.
Ben:
That's right. Exactly.
Starr:
Yeah. It seems like the, I don't know, it seems like you just got to take the hit. Whenever something like that happens, you just got to suck it up and take the hit.
Ben:
Just like YOLO, "Yeah, well-"
Starr:
Yeah. YODO, you only die once.
Ben:
Well, you have to figure also my dad has probably been breached five or six different times from five or six different large companies. So it's like, who even cares anymore? I'll just spray my social security number and my birth date anywhere. I'll just put it on my billboard in my front yard. Yeah, have at it.
Josh:
Yeah. Publish it online.
Ben:
The dark web is like a light gray web now. There's just so much data out there. But it's Ubiquiti or do you buy, I have a really small house so I don't really need these mesh systems which promise this outrageous speed for outrageous amounts of money. So I don't need the great or whatever. And then if you don't go with those options, then all that's left really is TP-Link or NETGEAR. It's like, "Well, okay." But like, fine. It just doesn't seem like there's a really great quality product from a great quality company. I don't know. Maybe I'm just-
Starr:
Yeah. There was a couple of weeks ago.
Ben:
Yeah. They wisened up weeks ago.
Josh:
Yeah. I'd probably still just buy the Ubiquiti gear to be honest. Because they're all leaking your data.
Ben:
That's what I'm saying.
Josh:
Like, yeah, who's better?
Starr:
Yeah. That's why you use TLS.
Ben:
For real. Yeah, can you imagine we actually lived at a time when you would just not even use TLS to log into your websites or no WiFi?
Starr:
I know. I know.
Ben:
Can you remember those days?
Starr:
So unsafe.
Ben:
It's amazing. I had a friend who was all anti WiFi because, this is over 20 years ago, because he's like, "You just take all your secrets and throw them out the window so anybody can get at them." Yeah. It's remarkable to think that we lived that way. Speaking of security though, I was... I don't know why I was looking at this. But for some reason, this morning I looked at Tailscale again. I don't know if you're familiar with Tailscale.
Josh:
Yeah, what's that?
Ben:
It's a startup that they provide basically a smart VPN. It's like a vpn with some magic sprinkles on top. Basically they take a WireGuard which is a late generation VPN product. So you might be familiar with stuff like OpenVPN or even way back in the day Cisco stuff that was done on hardware. But WireGuard is the latest generation of VPN software which is actually not crazy to setup. It's actually reasonably easy to use.
Ben:
And then Tailscale took that to the next level with making it super easy to just connect to whatever. So basically you run their little agent and you can VPN into your network without even having to worry about the stuff. They do the authentication for example, through Google Login or through Octa or whatever. So you don't have to hop on a box and create keys and send out stuff to people one on one. It's basically all just magic.
Ben:
So I was playing with that this morning and it's really quite neat. I was like, "Okay." Well, I'm on my iPad reading about it and I'm like, "Well, just install this iOS." I'm like, "Great." So now I have a in thing. Then it gives you IP addresses for all your internal stuff. It's really cool. We already have VPN for our stuff but I thought that was, well, do a switch.
Josh:
Yeah. At this rate we wouldn't even need to pass our those OpenVPN files or whatever. That would be nice.
Ben:
Yeah. And they have ECLs and stuff. So you can say, "Oh well, the marketing person gets access to the internal dashboard but doesn't get access to SSH to these servers." And then of course there's audit trails and stuff.
Josh:
That's pretty cool.
Starr:
That's really cool.
Ben:
Yeah. It's pretty handy.
Starr:
Yeah. On their features it says magic DNS. I think we need a little more magic in our lives. So I'm going to... Yeah. But that would be useful even if you are... I don't know. I can imagine it being useful if you are traveling and you want to go on your home network even. That would be pretty nice.
Ben:
Yeah, I was thinking about replacing my laptop with a Mac Mini and just leaving it in my office and then using Tailscale to hop in if I ever needed it to do anything. Most of the stuff is getting whatever. It's like I just do it at home from a different machine. But I was just like, "Well, maybe there is that one thing that I'm going to have on my machine at work and I want to have at night." So I was like, "Oh, Tailscale." Put that on there and, yeah. Fun toys.
Starr:
Yeah. It's pretty neat.
Ben:
Not where they do security though. I have been spending all week on customer stuff like sales stuff, marketing stuff.
Starr:
How's that thing going?
Ben:
Well, I've been floundering a little bit. It's not my background and so everything is more difficult that it seems like it should be. There seems like there's a lot of friction there. Like for example, the early part of the week, we had some suggestions from Harris about some changes that we could make to the website. And-
Starr:
Yeah. Harris is a sales consultant guru guy. Okay.
Ben:
And then we had some other suggestions from another good friend of ours that we can make. So I was looking at the home page and it's like, "Man, copyrighting is hard." It's like getting into that mindset of, okay, what's your customer perspective? When they come to this page and you have a candidate here who's interested, what do they want to see? And then trying to get in that mindset and then come up with some copy that speaks to that mindset.
Ben:
I know that there's this notion of, you go get your customer's voice from reviews and things like that. But sometimes you just got to create stuff. I don't know. So I've been doing that and it's not a skill that I have worked on developing and so it feels very painful to try and come up with it. It's like, "Oh really, this stuff is taking a lot of energy and a lot of effort. I really don't want to do this. I'd rather go plug into some VPN or something."
Starr:
I remember, I think it may have been after a MicroConf or after... I don't think it was Bacon Biz but maybe even that first Bacon Biz we went to. We were having dinner with Reuben Gomez and talking about our homepage. He was like, "Well, what does your customer want when they come to this homepage? What are they looking for?" I was just like, "I don't know. I have no idea. This is so hard."
Ben:
Yeah. It's hard to ask too.
Starr:
Yeah. People don't even know. People can't tell you. People don't know what they want.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. That was the whole point of that switch workshop that I did way back, several years ago, talking about jobs to be done and getting in the mind of your customer. Why are they showing up today? Why are they checking it out? I've also been emailing people, like we talked about before, emailing people who are signing up and seeing how they're doing getting engaged with the product. And crickets. Zero responses. I think I've gotten one response. I sent dozens of emails, each one hand crafted but zero, maybe one response. That's tough. That's real tough. When you do the work and you don't see any results, that's a challenge.
Josh:
Those emails, we've tried it. We've made a few attempts at eliciting a response from people that are signing up like that. If you think about the number of products that you sign up for that you get emails from the founders and the number of them that you respond to, I think people are just overwhelmed with that particular channel or whatever. I think it's programmed into your head like, "Oh I'm going to sign up for this, I'm probably going to get a flood of emails and I'm just going to ignore most of them because they're run of the mill onboarding or looking for feedback."
Ben:
Yeah. We actually had one person cancel recently who was in the trial period. They said, "Yeah, you send me too many emails." That's not why they canceled but that was part of their message when they left. I was like-
Josh:
I listen to those people.
Ben:
Yeah. Maybe I should just turn off all of our automated emails and just send the one from me.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
Try that for a few weeks and-
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
Our emails, we put so much work into them. Those videos are awesome. I don't know.
Josh:
I think it's pretty well established that emails work pretty well for most people. I think you have a... There's always that vocal few that just hate emails. So you're going to hear from them much more than you're going to hear from people that actually read the emails I think.
Starr:
I wonder if it would be more successful to use something like a chat widget where it's like they're in the product, you're the only message happening there. They're not surrounded... Your message isn't buried in 50 other messages from 50 other companies.
Josh:
Yeah. But we get the responses from the... When you sign up the into introductions thing.
Ben:
Yeah, the onboarding.
Josh:
I was surprised with the number of people that actually filled that out. It's much higher than the response rate that we get on that kind of email that you send. Even if it's personal. I've never been able to see a difference between personally emailing someone versus having an auto respond. I think everyone just assumes they're automated. Personalization is so good these days that it's really, I think, it's really hard to tell from the user's perspective unless the entire email is literally about them.
Starr:
Yeah. I suspect a lot of people use email like they I do. Which is I just give it a quick scan and if it's not immediately applicable to me I just delete it. So, it could be a custom written email but I'm just like, "Oh, this is a company I didn't ask for. Okay, this is spam, just delete."
Josh:
Yeah, maybe just go get that Ubiquiti dump and put their social security number in the subject line or something.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Just to show them that you care.
Starr:
There you go. That'd be awesome.
Josh:
Let's really personalize it. Your date of birth is-
Ben:
Then even some, those emails that you get, like, "I saw you on your webcam. Send me bitcoin or else I'll send this video out to the world."
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Are you saying we should extort responses?
Ben:
Exactly.
Starr:
Yeah. That's one thing that we've dealt with for a long time which is just a lot of the things that people say to do, we do and then it's just you don't hear anything. It's like, "Okay. Is it me? Do you just not like me?"
Josh:
Have you tried bribery though?
Ben:
No, I haven't tried bribery.
Josh:
Bribery might work. Offer a 50 or $100 gift card or something to someone and-
Starr:
Yeah. Or even a free t-shirt.
Josh:
Well, the free t-shirts work for our credit card thing. My feeling is that you'd want to go a little bit... You could try the free t-shirt thing for the email you're talking about, the feedback thing. But if you really want to sit down with someone, if your goal is to get them on a Zoom call or something and just pick their brain, give them something of real value. Because that's valuable. Think about what their time is worth. It should be at least comparable to their time and probably a little bit more just for the contact switching cost. So I can see it happening. You were talking about developers here.
Ben:
That's good. Yeah. So, "If you respond to this email, I'll give you a free t-shirt. If you get on a call with me, I'll give you a $50 gift card."
Josh:
There you go. Have some tiers.
Ben:
Choose your reward level. Then when you do an onsite thing once COVID travel is not a problem anymore, and then we could do time share presentation thing where they come in for four hours at a resort or something. Have you ever done one of those?
Starr:
No. Of course not.
Josh:
I know that that's a thing. People totally-
Starr:
My in laws do.
Josh:
They like to game the system.
Starr:
Yeah. We went and stayed at their timeshare in Mexico one time which was nice and they had to go to some seminars or some, I don't know, sales presentation, something like that.
Ben:
It's just either you pay in money or you pay in time. They figure, "Huh, I could pay in time. That's fine."
Josh:
Well, a lot of the Timeshare places, you can just stay at them like a hotel. But if you do, they still give you that offer of you get whatever, a $200 gift card. It's usually a fairly decent offer. But then you got to go spend whatever, an entire morning or more at their sales thing. But I know people that don't own Timeshares but they stay at Timeshares. They will go to those things just to get the prize and then they have no intent... They know what they're doing and they still go to them.
Starr:
Yeah. That's so funny. There's so many different kinds of people in the world. Because I would rather stay home.
Josh:
Yeah, same here. There's no amount you could pay me, there's no amount you could pay me to, yeah, sit through one of those.
Starr:
Yeah. The more complicated some system is for me to pay for something, the more I think I'm just getting ripped off. It's like, "Okay, it's a hotel room, it costs $200." Verus, "Well, it costs this much, but if you have three friends stay with you, you can activate the 20% bonus round where you get to shoot three basketball hoops." It's like somebody has done the stats on this and I'm going to lose.
Ben:
The LTD must be just insane for their customers. To be able to have X amount of employees at the facility for Y amount of hours and then whatever else they do for you while you're there, that's a fair amount of money you're putting into that marketing engine.
Josh:
Timeshares are not cheap.
Starr:
No, they're not. Yeah, so this week I've been looking a little bit into conversion of free users which is pretty interesting. At least conversion of basic users I would say. We've had different free plans over the years. The most recent one is basic. So yeah, I still need to... I'm going to do a little video I think and go through everything. But the gist of it is I think we're looking at around... If you consider all... We have this question.
Starr:
We want to possible alter the free quota, the free error quota, to try and get more people to upgrade. Because right now, very few people who are on the basic plan, actually use the quota number of errors. So I was like, "Okay, well, how do you decide what the actual quota is that you want?" So, as part of this discussion, Josh was like, "Well, can we actually see what our existing conversion rate is among people who go over quota who are on the basic plan?"
Starr:
That conversion rate is around 30% at least in the sample of data I looked at. If you look at people in North America, it gets up to I think around 55%. It's pretty high.
Josh:
Not bad.
Starr:
So that's just one more factor to be at play by. Honestly, I was really gratified to see when people need to upgrade, a lot of them do. I think that's a pretty good number. I don't know. It's just fun getting to mess with that stuff. I got to use JupyterLab which is this, I've talked about it before, it's this data science thing. I don't know. It's just fun.
Ben:
Now, did you also look at the overall free to paid conversion ratio? I know I did a quick query or two about that. But I was wondering if you dug into that any more.
Starr:
Yeah. So just to be clear, I only looked at... I basically only looked at accounts created this year and that were created with the basic plan. So, there'll be some people who get left out of that if you start with a paid account and then you downgrade to basic but then you go over quota. You're not counted in this, because that's just getting too complicated.
Starr:
So with that caveat, the total... If you just divide total people who upgrade from basic divided by total number of basic accounts, that is around two percent, which I think is roughly in like with what we saw before or what you were seeing. If you look at North America, it's about double that. Well, then the obvious question is, okay, well why is it so low?
Starr:
It's like, well, one reason is probably that... If you look at that same group and say, okay, "How many of these people went over their quota at least once?" Well, that's five percent, I think, if I'm remembering correctly. So five percent of all basic users ever went over quota. So the rest of them were just never in a situation where they needed to upgrade.
Ben:
Yeah. They're not going to upgrade just out of the generosity of their hearts just so they can pay us.
Starr:
Oh no. Who would do that?
Ben:
But two to four percent is a pretty... That's in the range of typical freemium conversion ratios I think if I'm up on my current stats. That's what I've heard on the internet anyway.
Starr:
Yeah, I don't know. At some point you have to wonder what's worth it. It's a pretty low number of absolute conversions. Right?
Josh:
Yes. We never had the free plan before.
Starr:
Yeah. We have 10 times the number of free sign ups, then yeah, maybe it would be a higher absolute value of users. So it's like-
Ben:
Yeah. We've had that plan in place for about a year now. I was looking at these stats with Harris actually. He was walking me through some of that stuff. I happened to look back and... We launched them in March of last year. I think the key is with a two to four percent conversion ratio, depending on North America versus not, I think that's fine if you say, "Well, the costs aren't that high both in processing, data storage, et cetera, and also in customer service."
Ben:
For us, that's been the case. We don't have an overwhelming wave of basic customers who are soaking all of our customers for a time. And of course we have the quotas in place to keep them from soaking up all of our real, hard costs. So I'd say overall it's been good. I think it's successful.
Josh:
Yeah. I think as long as it's, yeah, as long as it's not costing us much, the way I look at it is it's a way to spread potentially more word of mouth. Increase word of mouth basically. Because the more fans of Honeybadger there are in the world, the better it is for us in the long run I assume. The more people that are potentially going to mention us to their friends and to their companies or potentially use us when they actually need something for a larger project or whatever. If they're already using Honeybadger, they've been using it for years as a free user, then we might see a return on that in the future.
Starr:
Yeah. That's a good point. Still, though, if you could double the amount of new customers we get from free plan users without causing a significant harm, why not? It's just, I don't know. So much of business just seems to be about making these minor, little improvements that just get you... What did the people at Turn/River call it that you like so much Ben like blocking and tackling? Just these little bitty wins.
Ben:
They're additive. You keep on stacking them and over time it makes a bigger difference. One of our-
Starr:
Yeah, exactly.
Ben:
One of our competitors, the way they try and keep a lid on their freemium support costs is they don't offer support to freemium customers. It's one of their features on their feature grid. Email support, crossed out if you're on their freemium. Yeah, that seems, I don't know, that... If you're going to have a customer, even if they're a free customer, I think you should probably acknowledge their presence by answering their support emails. That's all I'm saying.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. That seems reasonable to me. At the same time it's like, "Well, these people are signing up for this free service, we're giving to them something. The fact that we have given them something doesn't obligate us to give them the same thing for the rest of their life." It's this weird thing where you feel reluctant to change anything but at the same time it's like you're literally just giving somebody something with the hope that it will make you money in the end.
Starr:
I don't know. I totally get the hesitation to make changes that people might not think are cool and we want to be cool and everything. But in the end it's like, "Oh no, I signed up for this free service with the understanding that this company is going to try and make money off of me. Oh no, they're trying to make money off of me, I'm offended." I don't know, it just seems like part of the deal.
Starr:
It's like you got to... We have these plans and we just have to tweak them, adjust them, try and increase growth here or there. I don't know. I think it may be possible to make free plans a more significant driver of growth-
Ben:
Well, that'd be cool.
Starr:
... than it currently is.
Ben:
If we can double that conversion ratio, I'd be pretty excited about that.
Starr:
Yeah. Another thing I'm working on, I've got a table and a chart. So, if you're a visual learner you can use the chart. But if you prefer a table you got that too. Where it's just different error quotas and then projected increase in number of new paid accounts per month. I'm just giving you all a menu to choose from. I'm just your waitress. I'm just-
Josh:
Yeah, I liked Jupyter in that it inlines the equations. Does it build equations later on in the, whatever, in the document, build on previous ones or something? Is that how it works or?
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. So they're not really equations it's just Python code. Imagine you've got an IRB session and in between the little blocks of code that you have in IRB, you can just add markdown to explain what that is. That's all it is.
Josh:
Yeah, I like that. And then it shows the code inline. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. So if you do a-
Josh:
That's pretty cool.
Starr:
... calculation up at the top and you assign it to a variable, it's a global variable. It's still down at the bottom.
Josh:
Yeah. It reminds me of a super advanced way to do napkin math which I'm a big fan of always.
Starr:
Exactly, yeah.
Josh:
But you could then convert that data into charts and pretty things like you were saying.
Starr:
Yeah. I like Jupyter. It includes the code with the output not only because it makes it easier to play around with but also it's... I don't know. Whenever I do analyses like these, I always worry that I'm not... It's like I'm just using some secret process over here. It turns out that I had a big problem with it and nobody's looking through my source file. So they don't know this. They just see the output which looks fine. But at least this way it's like there's a little bit of a sanity check. People can say, "Oh, that's actually wrong."
Ben:
Yeah, I know that feeling. I had a random thought about the free.
Starr:
Yeah, what's that?
Ben:
This random thought was first prompted a few weeks ago as I was working on setting up Front. So we recently switched from Help Scout to Front for our customer support and other shared inboxes. As I was working on setting up Front, for some reason I was logged in to one browser and then logged in again from another browser, I don't remember what I was doing, but as I did so, Front booted me out of my other browser. So I signed into browser A and then I signed in on browser B.
Ben:
When I signed in on browser B, I got kicked out on browser A. I was like, "Oh, I guess they're probably..." It might be a security thing. Or what it's more likely, is since they bill on number of users, they're probably detecting if a user tries to share their credentials and using multiple browsers then they're going to prevent that, right?
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
So that was my thought. So, a random thought for free is I wonder if some people are using basic more than they should by sharing a login. Because we do have a limit on the number of users.
Starr:
Naughty, naughty. Some people are blushing right now Ben, yeah, some people know we're onto them.
Ben:
So I was like, "Maybe we should have some session fixation and enforcement happening there to check that. But I don't know if it'd be worth writing the code to do that.
Starr:
I think for free users we should popup the little live stream video window in the corner that's just scowling at them. Just looking at them really harshly.
Ben:
We love our free customers.
Starr:
I know. It sounds like we hate... We don't hate people. It's just, yeah-
Ben:
We're just capitalists.
Starr:
It's just a matter of, "Well, should maybe more than five percent of our free users face a choice to upgrade or not?" That seems pretty low to me. I don't know.
Ben:
They can just think of it as we're encouraging them to exercise their capacity as human agents. To exercise their free will.
Josh:
We already give people three users on our free plan. So, at this point, maybe they don't need to share logins. I could see back when it was the one user plan, I imagine people were doing that. If we move back to it, like I would say, yeah, maybe we should think about that.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. There was all sorts of fun things that we're not going to do because they're just mean. Like Josh had thought of doing a black and white color scheme. I think we talked about this last show. It's just-
Josh:
Make it ugly.
Starr:
It's just us making up fun ways to annoy free users.
Josh:
No, but I think finding ways to make the paid version cooler is definitely- there's nothing wrong with that.
Starr:
Get an animated mascot.
Ben:
Speaking of, although this is going to apply to free as well, talking about making the product cooler, by the time this episode drops, we'll have a big feature released courtesy of Kevin, who spent the last little while working on an upgrade to our Slack integration. So now, you have the opportunity to... If you're a lover of threads and Slack, then you'll love this change because we're now using threads quite a bit between Slack and Honeybadger.
Ben:
For example, we'll get an alert and that'll create a message in Slack. If you reply to that message, then that will be added as a comment to the error in Honeybadger and back and forth. If you comment in Honeybadger, it'll show up in the Slack thread.
Starr:
Pretty cool.
Ben:
... also some interaction there. So yeah, looking forward to that. Kevin's really looking forward to it because he's tired of working on it. It's been baking for a while.
Josh:
It's a big effort.
Ben:
Yeah. And we've been using it internally for quite a while and it's great. Even me, as a person who does not love threads in Slack, I still love this feature. I think it's going to be great.
Josh:
Well, he made it an option for you so that you can turn the threading off if you want to. So if you don't like threads, they're not forced upon you. But I have to admit, this is a really cool workflow idea use case for Slack that I haven't seen... I don't think I've seen this anywhere. People might be doing this but I haven't seen it.
Josh:
Also, it has all the embedded actions too that you would have in the Honeybadger UI for managing errors. I think the ideas that it gives you, it's just another UI alternative to our web app. So for people who don't want to use the web application, or don't want to spend as much time on their browser, or maybe they just like Slack centric workflows, this gets you closer to just being able to use Slack as your interface to Honeybadger basically.
Ben:
Yeah. It's pretty cool. We had considered making this a feature that was not available to the free users. Maybe this could encourage people to upgrade. But in the end we thought, "Well, this is just so cool, let's just go ahead and give it to everybody." So I don't know if that was the right decision but that's the way we're going so far. I think people like. I hope people like it.
Josh:
Limiting Slack on the free plan would be potentially... That would be interesting though because it's such... So many people use it. I'd be tempted to upgrade for something like Slack if I didn't have it. But we have always taken the approach of giving those... Whatever the ones that everyone use like Slack and GitHub, those are the ones that we make available and then-
Ben:
Hold back on Jira. Yeah.
Starr:
The understanding I'm coming to about free users is that they tend not to upgrade for nice to have things. Maybe this is just users in general. So I have a hard time really imagining that many free users upgrading for a really cool threaded Slack back and forth type thing. But if they needed to access GitHub in slack and they couldn't do that on a free plan, that seems pretty like a need to have verus a want to have.
Josh:
Yeah. That's what I was talking about by the way. No GitHub in Slack basically.
Starr:
So free plans only get, they only get to send messages, to send errors to Atlassian products. It's the reverse of a lot of enterprising. It's like free users can only send things to the enterprise products that nobody wants to use.
Ben:
I like that line. I think-
Josh:
That's extra evil. Because if the free plan also has the error limit that would drive you insane if you're someone who's already using Jira because you're some enterprise sign up, so there's no way that you can use the product without upgrading.
Ben:
Yeah. We could do logins where you can't login with an email address, you have to use Octa.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
You have to use an SSO provider to be able to login.
Starr:
Since we're thinking outside the box, I've got a good one. So, instead of having an error quota for free users, we can have a number of errors. So it doesn't matter if you send us 100 errors. If your quota is 10,000, you're getting 10,000 error messages.
Josh:
We'll fill in the gaps.
Starr:
Yeah. We'll make ones up. We'll make some up.
Ben:
That's pretty good. I like it.
Josh:
They all come in at the end of the month like we have a window. It's like-
Ben:
Gotta meet your quota. Here they are.
Starr:
Yeah. It's a weird back and forth because I love our customers, I have every intention of being cool to them. I want us to be cool and for people to like us. At the same time it's like, "Well, it's our job to try and optimize the business and make money." I don't know. So it's like you don't want to go full on Intercom with it and just steal money out of people's pants when they're in the shower. But at the same time it's like, maybe we can, I don't know, make people happy to let us rifle through their pants while in the shower. I don't know.
Ben:
At the same time, our kids still got to eat. Got to put shoes on the kids' feet.
Starr:
I know. I know. Shoeless and starving.
Starr:
So you've been listening to FounderQuest. Go give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever. If you want to write for us, then check out our write for us page. Just go to www.honeybadger.io, go to the blog, look at the write for us link, click on it, read through the whole thing and follow the instructions to a T. Yeah, when you do, a coded message will appear via carrier pigeon on your desk within two hours.
Ben:
That's service.
Starr:
It is. It is. We really believe in service with a smile.
Ben:
Will the pigeon be smiling?
Starr:
I think that's physically impossible. But I think they're always smiling inside.
Ben:
No doubt.
Show notes:
Links:
Exceptional Creatures
TradingView
Duke Cannon - Thick Beer
Ruben Gamez
MicroConf
AppSumo Community Marketplace
Full transcript:Ben:
You know, today is April second, as we record this. And I am so excited because I survived April Fools' Day without falling for anything online. All the dumb stuff that happens on April Fools' Day.
Josh:
I'm a little worried, because I didn't notice any April Fools' lies. Now, granted, I kind of checked out yesterday and I went for a super long walk in Portland, just because it was sunny and I wanted to get outside, so-
Starr:
That sounds really nice.
Josh:
It was awesome. So I'm hoping that that's the reason I don't... Because otherwise, I've been duped left and right, and my whole world is false at this point.
Starr:
I mean, last year there was that whole thing where people were just like, "April Fools' is canceled. No April Fools'." And so, maybe that just came up-
Josh:
We skipped a year.
Starr:
I don't know. Maybe people are still sort of hesitant to do that.
Josh:
Yeah, well it sounds like Ben avoided falling for some, so did you see any good ones, Ben?
Ben:
No, I never see any good ones because there are never any good ones. I dislike the whole notion of April Fools' Day, so I only saw three or four. And they were all pretty obvious. I started reading a press release or something, I'm like, oh, that's ridiculous. It's April Fools' Day. Moving on. So, yeah, nothing particularly clever or great, so-
Starr:
I kind of like the obvious ones. It's like, they're not actually trying to trick anybody, they're just being silly. You know?
Josh:
Right. Right.
Starr:
I really like it when companies do April Fools' product announcements, where it's like, they're announcing something that would be amazing, but also it's obviously impossible because it's just too amazing to exist in the world.
Ben:
Well, not quite April Fools', but Duke Cannon is a company that sells soaps and things like that, personal care items. And they typically do funny kinds of fake things, like... So they have this body wash that's really thick, the consistency is really thick because they think runny body washes are for wimps. And they're all about manly stuff, right?
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
The lumberjack in the woods with his soap, you know?
Starr:
That's real healthy.
Ben:
And so, they put out this set of posters, these fake posters of thick... And a video, actually, I should link to the show notes... For thick beer. And it's like these old-school 70s beer commercials, and these guys are drinking these beers that are just super, super thick. And it's just ridiculous.
Josh:
Oh, that sounds terrible.
Starr:
Like oatmeal.
Ben:
So you can go to Duke Cannon all year long to get that kind of funny stuff. But this year, they actualy did one of those joke things, but then they actually did it. And it was some sort of Irish... I think it was Irish body wash. Anyway, it was very green and minty, and they did it for St. Patrick's Day. But it was an actual, real product. And so, I'm like, "Yeah, they really did it this time." And we bought some, because hey, we thought, "Check that out." And it's great. So-
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
You can't get it now, because it was just a one-time kind of thing, but keep an eye on Duke Cannon throughout the year for fun, crazy stuff like that, and-
Starr:
Oh, that's funny. I like that it pokes fun at itself at least, because let's be honest, I don't think the effectiveness of soap has anything to do with its thickness. And also, I mean, I've had thick shampoo and stuff, and honest... You put it in your hand, and then it gets hit by a little water and it just slides right off of your hand, just like a solid object, and down the drain. So it's like, is that really better? I don't know. I'm not the target demographic.
Josh:
But have you had thick beer?
Starr:
No, no. But I always wanted to try Pulque, which is a traditional Mexican beverage that... I mean, it's made out of corn. But it sounds like it's in the spirit of thick beer.
Ben:
Well, if you want my personal recommendation for a Duke Cannon product to try, try the Smells Like Productivity soap.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
It is awesome.
Starr:
That's exactly the soap I would imagine you would have.
Josh:
It's just-
Starr:
That's your secret-
Josh:
It's marketed... Ben is their audience.
Starr:
Oh my God. Okay.
Josh:
Ben wakes up every morning. He wakes up every morning at 3:30, jumps in the shower with his Smells Like Productivity.
Starr:
Oh. That's so funny. Oh, I made a mistake. I said Pulque is made out of corn. It's not, I was thinking of a different thing. Pulque is made out of the fermented sap of the maguey plant. I don't know. Anyway. Oh, it's made out of the same stuff they make tequila out of, maybe? Anyway.
Josh:
I was totally going to call you on that.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, well I mean, somebody knows that in our audience, I'm sure.
Josh:
Yeah, I'm sure. I did want to mention, just in case you probably have been hearing it, if you hear pounding on walls in the background of this podcast, it's because I have people working on my house, directly behind my office, and there's no way around it. So rather than cancel the podcast, I figured we'd just deal with it.
Starr:
That makes a lot of sense. So this week is kind of exciting. After the podcast, I'm going to go and get the final instructions to the first of our authors to be doing our new experimental Honeybadger intelligence reports.
Ben:
Nice.
Josh:
HIBINT.
Starr:
HIBINT. Yeah, yeah. I really love the branding we've come up... For this. Just internally, it's fun. So yeah, if you missed our last mention of that, basically we have a hard time keeping up with all the different platforms that we support. I mean, not actually supporting them, but keeping up with the news and events, and what's the cultural zeitgeist of Python Land right now. That stuff changes enough when you only do one language, right? So, imagine having to keep up with... I don't know. How many libraries do we have? Like eight, or 10, or six? I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah, something-
Ben:
A lot. Yeah.
Starr:
A lot.
Josh:
Something like that.
Starr:
Yeah. There is more than I have fingers on one hand. Yeah, so we're actually going to be hiring authors who are experts in those fields, to make us little quarterly reports about what's going on. And we might share them with the public, depending on how it goes, but I'm excited. It makes me realize that with any new sort of endeavor like this, especially when you're trying to get other people to do stuff for you, working with other people, there's just... I don't know, it's just like it always takes more time than you think, right? Because last week, I was just like, "Okay, I'm just going to reach out to these people." And then I got a good number of replies, I was like, "I'll figure out what to do with them next week."
Starr:
So I replied to everybody being like, "I'll get back to you next week with details." Thinking I'd get back to them on Monday, and then Monday comes around, I've got all these meetings, so I didn't get to it. And I'm realizing slowly, it's like, I've got to figure out what to do with these people. What to tell them. So I was going to do it yesterday too, but then I started on it yesterday and I ended up actually writing stuff out, and I was like, okay. I've got to make changes to all these peoples' repositories, because I'm going to do this as issues on their... I've got to make sure that it has the right file structure. And so, just building these systems for people to work inside, it always takes more work than I expect it to.
Josh:
I'm sure this research engine that you're building will be very useful to us, though.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
I think, yeah. I could see it being handy for, I guess, the number of languages we support, or as many as we can handle. And right now, we're reaching a point where we're like, it's hard to juggle them and keep them all high quality. And so, I could see this going into new markets, or finding... There's something new we want to do, I could see pointing your researchers at it and tell us to come back with a bunch of intel about how to design it, what are best practices, where do they hang out, what are their conferences, what are their meetups. That sort of stuff.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, that seems pretty reasonable. And I'm also starting to realize that this would be really useful for our own blog, because if there's some... I don't know, if there's some topic blowing up in Laravel land, I'm not going to know about it, really. But if we get it mentioned in these reports, then maybe we can publish some content on it ourselves. And just, yeah, follow those trends.
Josh:
Yeah, we'll always just be one quarter late.
Starr:
I mean, we are named after a dead meme, so-
Josh:
It's our style.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean, it's... So there's always a first wave, right? There's a wave that crests. Everybody's talking about how microservices are great, and all that. And then that wave crests. And then you have a little trough, a little time. And then we'll be set to ride that second wave up, where it's like, are microservices great? So we'll just be-
Josh:
Man. Where are we with microservices now? Because you saying that just strikes me about how long ago that was, that microservices were great, and it's like, time really flies. Because now I'm thinking about the whole... What was the monolith? What was the thing that DHH, the-
Ben:
The Majestic Monolith?
Josh:
The Majestic Monolith, yeah. And even that feels like it was forever ago.
Ben:
Yeah, I think we've probably got to the point with the microservices one. Where the pendulum swung one way, then the pendulum swung back the other way, and everyone's like, "No microservices. They all suck." And no we're back at the point where it's like, well, it might work for you in this situation-
Josh:
We're back to whatever.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. It's like, despite all the vitriol spilled and everything, it always ends up just being like, "Just do what works for you. It's cool."
Josh:
Yeah. TDD is dead. No, TDD is the best thing in the world. Ten years later.
Ben:
Do it if you like it.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like, it's okay to write tests after you write the code or before. Whatever you want to do. The tests are still there at the end of the week. It doesn't matter.
Ben:
It is nice to have this pattern that we can at least count on in the tech industry, where things come into fashion, things go out of fashion. And then things come back to a point of stabilization, where it's like, just do what works for your team.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. So, I feel like we've got to start some of these though. If we're always just responding, we're never going to get that first mover advantage. So we got to start some religious wars, I think. That's a good idea.
Ben:
What could we use to start a religious war?
Starr:
Oh, I don't know. I don't know, it has to-
Josh:
It doesn't really matter.
Starr:
Yeah, it doesn't really matter. I think people do that over fonts, programming fonts, like Vim versus Emacs. Like, it's text editors.
Ben:
Yeah, there's editors. There's fonts.
Starr:
They're text editors, people.
Ben:
I mean, you can even argue about which terminal program is best on the Mac to use.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, like-
Ben:
Do we want type safety or not? I mean-
Josh:
If you really want to go all-in, we could go all-in on a text editor that is not VSCode or Vim. We could say both of those suck.
Starr:
Oh, like Emacs?
Josh:
Well, Emacs, or yeah, what-
Ben:
Yeah, you could say TextMate is the one, true editor, right? And then-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
There you go. Or just like, Notepad.
Josh:
There are still TextMate people out there, I think.
Ben:
I saw a funny tweet the other day, speaking of editors, that was someone talking about the editors they've used over the years, and they had this timeline. And so, it was like, 1995, VI. And then, whatever. And they switched to TextMate, and then they switched to Sublime. And then they switched to Atom, and then switched to... The current one was VSCode. And every two or three years or whatever, there was a different editor. And then someone replied to that tweet, and it was like, "BBEdit." The one line, like, "I used it for the past 25 years." I'm like, props to that dude.
Josh:
They're probably really productive with it. All that editor switching really... Yeah, I don't think it's the greatest idea, because you have to re-learn everything.
Starr:
I think people get restless, right? And so, you're always sort of searching for something that'll make a difference somewhere. But really, it's just... You don't really, maybe, care about the difference. You don't really care about being more efficient, just the process of learning about it makes you feel more efficient. Especially, maybe if the work you're doing isn't that much fun.
Josh:
Oh, man. I feel like I've lost the last 10 years.
Starr:
And then, also... I mean, not that I would ever do this, but if you're installing a new text editor, you can do that at work. And so, that's a little bit of self-
Josh:
It's like working on your car.
Starr:
It's a little self-care time at work that you get to do.
Ben:
I think if you want the full experience though, you have compile your own text editor. I mean, that's really where the craft is.
Starr:
Oh, I did that when I switched to Neovim, because-
Josh:
Yeah, I think I've done that too.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
You're preaching to the choir here, Ben.
Starr:
You've compiled your own text editor. I don't recommend it, no.
Josh:
Wait, you haven't?
Starr:
I don't recommend it. That's why I use VSCode now. I don't really do a lot of heavy programming, but the thing is, it's like... VIM, I am much more efficient at text editing with, but then once a quarter, I have to spend five hours just troubleshooting some random bullshit about it. Or if I want to have it do some small, new thing, I've got to... It's just such a research project to dive into and get it configured, and then it's always changing out from underneath you, and VSCode just kind of works. I don't really know how it does it. It's running node crap in the background. It's running different languages. I don't know how it does it, but it just works, and-
Josh:
I'm pretty sure it runs on money.
Starr:
It runs on money. Yeah, probably.
Josh:
Yeah. It's pretty impressive, I have to say. But I don't know, I've still struggled to go all-in on... I switched to VSCode, I still find myself in Vim a lot, just because it's so ingrained.
Ben:
Yeah, these days I'm mostly in VSCode for code-writing purposes, but I have a Vim extension in VSCode. So I still use all the Vim keybindings as I'm editing, so I saw that command mode stuff. But I spend a lot of my time editing in Vim, that's not code, because I hopping on the servers, or doing random little scripts here and there, and so... Yeah, never-
Josh:
Doing all that yaml.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So even though I've done the TextMate thing, and I've done other-
Josh:
BBEdit?
Ben:
I dabbled BBEdit, and it never really stuck in my brain, so I didn't really go there. But I'll always use Vim. Always loved Vim, since I first started hopping onto Unix computers back in the day. Vim is always there. Or, VI is always there. And so, once you know that, you always got an editor handy.
Starr:
Yeah, unless you have your own super tweaked-out config file. At which point, you get used to none of the defaults.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, I've managed to avoid that little trap.
Starr:
So, I've got a question. This is off-topic, but-
Ben:
Off-topic.
Josh:
This is all off-topic.
Starr:
Oh, I know. I know. Actually, this is a little bit more on-topic for the overall podcast, it's just not about editors. So you guys did the sort of virtual MicroConf thing last week, and after that I noticed that we're moving towards, I think, getting listed on AppSumo? Is that right?
Starr:
I was just curious, what happened at MicroConf that prompted that interest?
Ben:
Well, it actually first came up before MicroConf, when Ben Findley did some research into the AppSumo marketplace. So, this was back a month ago, or so. And so, he suggested that we do it, and it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time. But I didn't really move on it until I saw that presentation from Ruben Gamez at MicroConf, where he talked about his AppSumo experience with Docsketch. So when he did that, I went back to look at Ben's post on Basecamp about AppSumo, I'm like, "Yeah." And now that I'm more focused on the growth side of the business, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that could be a good opportunity for us to grab some customers." So, that was the impetus.
Starr:
Okay, awesome. And that would be maybe included in a bundle of discounted things that people get, or is it like, we do our promo, or-
Ben:
No. So, it used to be that AppSumo just had this daily deal, so-
Josh:
That's the AppSumo that I know, and I know they've changed a lot since then, but I've never really quite grokked what they do now.
Starr:
Yeah, me too, so I'm not quite sure how they do it now.
Ben:
Yeah, so they still have that. And you can still be on their daily deal thing. I think, as far as I know, they still have the same process they've always had, of... They reach out to people that they think would be good placements on their site, and they will work with you with copyediting, and blah-blah-blah-blah. But the newer thing that they have that goes along with that is what they call their Marketplace. And so, you can list your product on their Marketplace and still, there's a deal feeling to it. They still want you to have a big discount or something to make it interesting to the kinds of people who are already part of the AppSumo universe. But this is an ongoing thing. It's not like a one-time deal, it's not a bundle deal, it's not a time-limited deal. It's an ongoing... A promotion for AppSumo customers, basically, is what it is.
Josh:
Oh, interesting. Okay. So the plan, if you sign up through AppSumo for Honeybadger, you get the AppSumo deal plan for as long as you're a customer.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and so, as far as I understand, the way it works for SaaS is they... An AppSumo customer will buy the deal at the AppSumo site, and you provide AppSumo a promotion code. That customer can then come to your site, and sign up using your signup flow, but entering that promotion code, so that they get a free or discounted period of service as a result of using that code. Right, so they buy it at AppSumo. They don't buy at your site initially, but if they... Let's say you give away a 30% off for a year. So they would buy the discounted thing, that year's worth minus 30%, at AppSumo, get a promotion code, come to your site, enter the promotion code and get that year's worth of service for no charge. And then at the end of that year, should they decide to continue being a customer, then you would take their payment information, and blah-blah-blah. Like normal.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Okay, that sounds like it kind of works like... I think that's how they do the daily... Other services do that. Basically, when you sign up they just hand you a promo code that you use, or whatever. Yeah.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
So I assume we're getting a split from the money that AppSumo collects. Or is it just-
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
Okay. That's good. That seems a little bit more promising than-
Ben:
Yeah, so AppSumo has a payment term of net 60, because they allow for their customers to claim a refund up to 60 days after the purchase. So, a customer shows up at AppSumo, buys a thing for Honeybadger, and then could use that promotion code immediately, could maybe not use the promotion code right away. They don't necessarily have to sign up right away. And then 60 days later, AppSumo would then cut a check to Honeybadger for whatever that purchase price was, minus the percentage that AppSumo keeps.
Starr:
Okay. Yeah. That's reasonable.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
The 60-day refund thing in my mind is conceptually similar to a free trial, right? And so, I was just wondering, what if we... We've had a two-week trial for the longest time, but what if we had a 30-day trial or something longer? Because that might appeal to people. I don't know.
Ben:
Well, tell you a little secret. While we-
Starr:
What's the secret?
Ben:
While we advertise a two-week trial, we actually have a four-week trial.
Starr:
Oh, because of all the collection, all the-
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, because of the delays. And we re-try the billings so many times, so the actual invoice comes due, the first invoice comes due, two weeks after they sign up, that's the technical end of the trial. But we continue to re-try that invoice for however many days, and that gives them, effectively... And then we give them some grace period, even after the billing fails, we still give a grace period of a few days. So basically, it works out to... You can get about four weeks of free service if you really want to.
Starr:
That's still the... If they do sign up, it's all going to be back-dated, so that they're-
Ben:
True.
Starr:
They only got two weeks free.
Ben:
Right. Right.
Starr:
So we can't really advertise a four-week trial, because-
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
We wouldn't be giving that to people.
Ben:
And we still have people taking us up on our shirt offer, where if they enter their payment information before their trial ends, then they get an awesome T-shirt.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh. So I've been meaning to talk about this. I started using an app. So I've been trying to sort of learn about the stock market and everything, and I'm not really throwing gobs of money into it in any sort of way, but I've been trying to learn. And so, I signed up for a subscription for this app called TradingView, which is... It's a stock charts app, right? And it's very advanced and stuff. Anyways, so I'm a huge fan of this app. Having built apps, I know what a very good app looks like, a web app. And this is a extremely good web app. It takes so much... I had a dream the other night where I met the CEO of TradingView. And I cornered him, and I was like, "You need to pay your developers more, because you have no idea how good of a job they're doing for you." Yeah. It's like, occasionally you see a piece of work that is very, very good.
Starr:
So anyway, the reason I mention that is that I did sign up for a paid plan, and during the free trial though, they have... Up at the very top of the screen, and it's very well-designed, but also a very obvious spot, it's like, "You have so-many days left of your free trial. If you upgrade before your trial ends, you can get up to 60% off." And I've heard from some people, this didn't happen to me, but I've heard from some people that number would increase as your trial went along. And so, I don't know if that exact thing makes sense for us, but just... I think that we could definitely call out upgrade options, and benefits to upgrading and stuff like that for trial users, in a more obvious way.
Josh:
Do a little more, or even more frequently. Like-
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
They get the first shirt offer, and if it doesn't work we could just offer them two shirts, then three shirts, then a whole wardrobe.
Starr:
It'll just go up exponentially. If you wait out your whole trial, you'll get a kilobyte of shirts.
Ben:
Do you remember back in the shareware days, when you would try out... They had this one kind of shareware where it would delay in the application, before you have to do the thing. Like if it was a file directory listing thing, you would run the executable, and then there would be this modal. And it would be like, five seconds until you can actually use the thing.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Ben:
But if you purchase, obviously that delay would go away. So we should totally do that, on the free trial. Like, the longer you get into your trial, when you go to view an error, we show a full-page modal. Like, "Oh, we'll let you see your error in three seconds." And then count down, right? And then as they get closer to the end of the trial, the timer goes up and up. It's like, "Oh, after tomorrow you're not going to be able to see this at all. But now you have to wait for 15 seconds."
Josh:
Yeah. Or if you really want to be evil, just put a spinner on it and don't tell them how long it is, but make it a randomly determined-
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
That's evil.
Josh:
Just say, "You have to wait."
Ben:
And then, next level, you make a progress bar that actually goes the wrong way sometimes. It actually goes back, right?
Starr:
This is amazing. This is sounding like Undertale, this game that I love.
Josh:
Ideas like this remind me of the other day, my idea for our free plan was... Because we were talking about limits for free users that we could... If we were going to change it up to encourage more people to upgrade or whatever. And you always see things like features, but I was like, what if, if you're on the free plan, you just get a grayscale version of Honeybadger? It's just kind of bland. And then all of the upgrade messages, of course, would really pop. They'd be full-color. They'd have honey badgers on them, beautiful color-
Starr:
I might actually prefer grayscale, so you might need to make it a beige, kind of like pants were in the 90s. Just kind of khaki-
Josh:
Yeah. What's that 70s green that all the refrigerators were?
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know. You never know what's going to work.
Starr:
So, yeah. So I had the funniest realization yesterday, which was, you know how a long time ago, all the opensource people and all the... I don't know, all the small software people. Bill Gates was the enemy, they had Bill Gates photoshopped as the Borg, and Microsoft was the Devil and everything. And so, just for fun the other day, because I don't know, I just got it into my head, I was like, you know, I've got this old laptop. Maybe I'll install Windows on it. This old MacBook. And so, I went to do that. And so, now they let you download... You can just go to Microsoft and get an ISO of Windows, and you can just install it on the thing. And it'll just pop up a message. And I was just like, "Holy shit. Windows is shareware now." That's so wild. I mean-
Josh:
You didn't get it through Tucows?
Starr:
No, I didn't. I didn't. I got it straight from their site. But maybe, I guess, you're not supposed to share it. But it really felt like shareware. It's like, I'm just going to install this. I'm going to see if I like it for a while. Maybe if I actually use it, I'll pay for it eventually if I feel like it. But, yeah. I thought that was funny.
Ben:
I got to say, speaking of Windows, that's definitely one of the perks of living near Microsoft, is I have all these friends that work at Microsoft, and they have an annual allotment of money they can spend at the company store to buy things like Windows licenses. And they get, of course, employee discounts. And so, any time you want a new version of Windows, just go bug one of your Microsoft friends. They've probably got some extra budget in their account that they can use for you, and so you can get that employee discount, so that's nice.
Starr:
Oh, that's fun.
Josh:
That's funny. Yeah. That reminds me of... Around here, it's Nike. I have a friend whose dad works in the Nike accounting department. They have the same deal at the Nike store. They've taken us over there before and it's a annual thing.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
That's so funny. Yeah. And I learned about a... I forget the name of it, but there's a site where you can basically buy license keys. It's legit. Somebody had a license, they sell it to this third-party distributor, or this third-party website, and then that website will sell it to you. So you can actually get a Windows license, an OEM Windows license for $30. Significantly less. And they have it for lots of different apps. I thought it was a cool concept.
Ben:
Yeah. I still remember buying the boxed version of MS-DOS 6. That was awesome.
Josh:
You should make a Honeybadger box. I mean, while we're doing physical... We're doing the zine, or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah, right.
Josh:
Which I totally want to do.
Starr:
Oh, we're doing a zine?
Josh:
I've been meaning to think about it.
Ben:
Yeah, right. We've talked about it on the podcast-
Josh:
Yeah, we did.
Ben:
And we got some great responses on Twitter.
Starr:
You've been meaning to talk about it, that's like fixing to get ready to do it.
Josh:
I've been fixing to think about brainstorming ideas for it. But yeah. I could see that going out with a Honeybadger software box, with your coupon code or whatever, serial number, in it, and then you can use that to sign up on the website.
Starr:
Oh wait, I did see an April Fools' thing yesterday. I didn't fall for it, but it was... Somebody came up with a special, limited edition physical boxed version of Zoom. And it includes all these promos, like golden sweatpants, and just a bunch of silly stuff.
Ben:
It reminds me of the internet in a box days.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, actually Josh, you've made me think. Talking about promotion codes. Because with that AppSumo work that I did, we now have the ability to support promotion codes. So we could actually-
Josh:
Oh yeah, where you generate a bunch of them and then you can-
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). We could actually print up a bunch of mailers and send them out to people with a promotion code on it that says, "Hey, sign up for Honeybadger and get whatever discount."
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well, there you go.
Ben:
I'll think about doing that. I've long wanted to do a direct mail experiment with Honeybadger, and just buy a directory of every software agency in the U.S.. I don't know if that's even available. And then just send them a little postcard, like, "Hey, check out Honeybadger." So, now that we have promotion codes, that'd be even better.
Starr:
Oh, here's an idea for conference swag. Fortune cookies. And you open up the fortune cookies, and there's a little promotion code in there for you.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
Just a little sweet treat from your friends at Honeybadger.
Ben:
So Josh, I want to help you out here. I want to give you a warm fuzzy. I was looking through our signups, because I'm doing that now. Every day I'm checking out the signups, and I'm emailing people. Which has been good, it's been educational. But we do track where people come from when they hit the site, and we store that. And you'll be happy to know that we got a signup this week whose initial landing page was Exceptional Creatures.
Josh:
Really?
Starr:
Oh, yay.
Josh:
Awesome.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's great.
Josh:
That's really cool.
Starr:
Where are we storing that? What system is capturing that?
Ben:
So, we just have some JavaScript on the main sales site that just saves the refer to a cookie. And then, when they complete the sign-up process in the app, then that cookie value is saved to the database.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yes. I know that exists. I've actually looked at that recently. Well, you've been signing up for these sales-y things, I thought maybe you had some sales app or something that was giving you all sorts of information.
Ben:
No, actually... So I tried PostHog, the free version, the self-hosted version. And it's not good for what we want. It's fine for what it is, but it's just not going to be great for us, so I went back to, yeah, I'm just using things that we already have in place, and now there's no more PostHog.
Starr:
Oh, well. We'll have some Post bacon in a couple weeks.
Josh:
Oh, boy. This is exciting though, because this means that Exceptional Creatures finally paid for itself.
Ben:
Well, it's probably not the first. I mean-
Josh:
No, I think it's probably not the first. All of our listeners probably don't know what we're talking about, because Exceptional Creatures was years back, it's just been around now.
Starr:
Oh God, it feels like yesterday though.
Josh:
Yeah. Go to exceptionalcreatures.com, and you'll see what we're talking about. I don't know. We could explain what it is, or it could be a fun little surprise for you. If you're a Ruby-ist, you'll probably really dig it.
Starr:
Yeah. It's a little Easter egg.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, for-
Josh:
It's one of our Honeybadger passion projects.
Ben:
Yeah. And it's also one of those random marketing efforts, right? You put out a content site that's not directly about Honeybadger, but it's kind of funneling people to Honeybadger, so-
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I've thought about doing more creatures on it at some point. It would be kind of fun to keep it going.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
You totally should.
Starr:
Yeah, it would be. That's one of the hardest things about marketing, especially content marketing and things that aren't directly leading into a funnel. Hopefully, we'll have some high-powered sale process happening, so all we need to do is have people download some white papers and get them into a funnel, and then we'll have some... I would love nothing more than to have... I don't know. Have sort of a marketing approach, where we have these very concrete outcomes, and we can be like, "Okay, this worked. Let's do more of this." But yeah, with content marketing and stuff like that, it's like, you put something out there and you kind of get little hints over the years that it's working. And that's good, but it's not immediate feedback. I really would love some immediate feedback.
Josh:
I have a hunch that all of that plays a big part in our word-of-mouth, and the way that people... We always have people telling us, when we ask them why they signed up, that friends of theirs or people they worked with told them they loved Honeybadger, and they heard great things about it. But that could be that they were raving about the product, but it's also possible that they were also raving about just Honeybadger in general. It's not necessarily just the product, but maybe they love our blog posts, maybe they love our podcast, maybe they saw Exceptional Creatures and they love that we did that. I think it's the whole package that people love, so-
Starr:
So you're saying we're the total package.
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Exactly. We're the total package, SaaS.
Starr:
Yeah, that's why they should use us, because we're the total package.
Josh:
Yeah. And if you give us your mailing address, we'll mail you a collector edition box set.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Honeybadger.
Starr:
I don't know. What would be a good collector's edition for people who have to deal with errors a lot?
Ben:
And we can send them some care package kind of thing, with Tylenol, and some facial tissues for all the crying that they do, and maybe a little back massager for having been hunched over a laptop while they're fixing their errors. Or maybe some aromatherapy oils to help relax after they get past-
Josh:
That's what I was thinking, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, there you go. Yeah.
Josh:
Some peppermint or something like that. Yeah.
Starr:
Some herbal tea, some chamomile.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And then maybe a sleep mask, so they can get back to sleep after-
Starr:
That sounds nice.
Ben:
they get up at 4 AM.
Starr:
Yeah, we should do a giveaway amongst our users for an all-inclusive spa package. Get some cucumbers, get a pedicure, get some aromatherapy, some warm... I don't know. I don't know, a massage or something.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah.
Ben:
I like it.
Starr:
All right. So yeah, this is how the sausage is made. This is exactly what goes on in our meetings.
Josh:
This is where we get all our ideas, to be honest.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
All right. You've been listening to FounderQuest. If you want to go give us a review at Apple Podcasts, that'd be awesome. If you want to write for us, potentially maybe work on these intelligence reports for us, we look for authors and we pay well. Go to our blog at honeybadger.io. Find the blog. That's your first assignment. That's your first test. Find the link at the top that says, "Write For Us," and it'll have instructions, so that's all. I will see you guys later. I hope you have a great weekend, and I hope you all find a lot of Easter eggs. And I hope they're the kind with candy inside and not the kind with eggs inside.
Josh:
Sounds good. You too.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
Happy Easter.
Starr:
Bye.
Josh:
Bye.
Show Notes
Links:
Gather
Roblox Vs. Second Life
Docsketch
Ruben Gamez
AppSumo
Intro CRM
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Yeah, the party doesn't start until you show up, Josh.
Josh:
I'm a party animal.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. How's everybody doing?
Josh:
Good.
Ben:
I had a good last week. How are you, Starr?
Starr:
I'm doing pretty good. I got to dive a little bit into our sort of usage data for free users, and that's always fun when I get to do that. I got to use JupyterLab a little bit, brushing up on my Python skills, and yeah. So, I had been... whenever I do my sort of deep dives in the numbers and stuff, I would always just make a bunch of Ruby scripts, and use Ruby scripts to kind of process the data and make it understandable to me. But, it turns out there's a whole fricking ecosystem around this this and Python, and it's... yeah.
Starr:
There's a system called JupyterLabs. You can get it as part of this bigger distribution that's basically... it's called Conda, which is a Python distribution that just has all of the data science stuff built into it. And so, yeah. So, it's just this little web app you run, and then you can... it's really kind of awesome. It's like if you took an IRB shell or something and put it inside of a text editor and let you write markdown around it, and then also included a whole bunch of tools for doing really complicated stuff with tables of data, and doing that in one or two lines of code.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
That reminds me a little bit of what I've seen of org mode and Emacs. Isn't that the thing where you can embed code, and generate tables, and stuff like that, I think? It's super-
Starr:
I don't know, I've never used that.
Josh:
It's a pain in the ass.
Starr:
Well, this is surprisingly not a pain in the ass. It's actually pretty cool, so yeah. So, I've got some... I'm not done with it, but I'm going to have a little report to share at our marketing meeting, which I think is next week, and yeah, about how to squeeze more blood out of our free users. So, get ready, guys, because it's not going to be pretty. I'm just kidding.
Josh:
Well, we've been very generous to our free users, so there's a lot of potential there.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
I have a suggestion for helping our free users, add value to us.
Josh:
Is this just our monetization model now? We just rant at our free users in this new podcast? It's just like, if you want to hear us stop bitching then sign up for our paid plan.
Ben:
We'll annoy you until you pay us. So, we had a free user upgrade just a little while ago, just this morning, and I went and looked at their account, and they've been a free user for a few months, and the trigger... what I was interested in was, why did they upgrade? And I was actually going to email them because I've been spending all morning emailing new signups and reaching out to people who have signed up recently.
Ben:
Anyway, so I was going to contact this person and say, "Hey, why did you sign up?" But I went and checked their account and it turns out they sent a whole lot of errors, like today or yesterday. And so, they reached the quota limit and so they had to upgrade so they could actually get their errors. And so, my idea is we just send every new signup a bottle of whiskey and tell them that they can only drink it while they're coding, right? And so then can go like, "Oh, a bunch of errors."
Starr:
Oh, there you go. So we sabotage their... yeah.
Ben:
Exactly, exactly. Exactly.
Starr:
We sabotage their code. Our discussion along these lines is really reminding me in a weird way of The Godfather or something. It's like, "Okay, free users: we've been very generous to you over the years. Have you doubted our generosity? No. So, now it's time for us to ask a little favor."
Ben:
I like it.
Josh:
I don't know if it works that way on the internet.
Starr:
No, I don't think so.
Ben:
We need to get a new illustration of the honey badger as the Godfather.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Ben:
I can just see him sitting behind the oak panel desk, in the overstuffed chair, smoking a cigar.
Starr:
Yeah, that would be something. I'm not sure people would immediately... we'd have to caption it.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Starr:
Yeah, because otherwise he's just like an executive, right?
Ben:
Yeah.
Ben:
A fat-cat CEO boss, right?
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. We're not about that. We're the exception monitoring tool for the 99%.
Josh:
Is that why we're so cheap?
Ben:
Buy exceptions.
Starr:
Must be, must be.
Ben:
Yeah, I've been doing this outreach this week, getting started. We mentioned in the last episode that we're working with a sales team coach, concierge app combo, whatever you want to call it. I couldn't remember the name, unfortunately, last week, but this week I can remember the name because I've been doing it, working with them all week, and it's Harris from IntroCRM.com, and they are fantastic. We just started working with them on nurturing our inbound leads, because we do get people signing up all across the spectrum. We get a bunch of those free users, but we also get people signing up who are developers at very large organizations. And so, we're trying to develop a scheme where we optimize our time and reach out to people who... a little more personal approach to people who might be at those big orgs, who might end up being a bit bigger customer.
Ben:
So, this week I've basically just been reaching out to a whole bunch of people, regardless of their company size or whatever. I'm just trying to get into the groove of emailing people and saying, "Hey, what do you think about Honeybadger? Is there something I can do for you?" And then, over time, we'll refine that process and hopefully fill up the pipelines so I can even start doing demos or something crazy.
Starr:
Oh my god.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So, it's been great working with them.
Josh:
You have to get out the old clip-on tie.
Starr:
Yeah. We're going to have to get you some Oxford shirts and a clip-on tie.
Josh:
Do they make some that are just like they just need to cover your shoulders, basically, and just halfway down you torso, just like-
Starr:
I'm sure they have those.
Josh:
It's what we see on Zoom, so.
Starr:
It's like a bib.
Josh:
Yeah, right.
Starr:
A child's bib.
Josh:
It's a sales bib.
Starr:
Or like when you go to eat ribs.
Ben:
Actually, I'm still tying a tie once a week, every week. Yeah, even though I'm still doing church online-
Josh:
On Sundays?
Ben:
Yeah, on Sundays. I'm still putting on the white shirt, putting on the tie, and yeah.
Josh:
I mean, it's got to be kind of comforting to keep some sort of weekly tradition like that during the past crazy... yeah. Groundhog Day.
Ben:
Exactly. I have switched out the suit pants for sweatpants, but other than that I'm still-
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Haven't we all?
Josh:
Well, one of the interesting things, that I thought was interesting with that, because we have a Slack Connect channel, now, with the introtoCRM folks, and so they've been giving us some, I guess, sales tips, and they're helping us identify those leads. And, Harris mentioned that a lot of times users, like employees at large orgs, will sign up with their personal email addresses sometimes, and so you can't just identify people based on their company email or something, right? I think that was something he mentioned.
Ben:
Yeah, that's very interesting.
Josh:
So, those Gmail addresses might not be so-
Ben:
Yeah, I think that's-
Josh:
They might not be hackers.
Ben:
Right. Yeah, we do get a lot of signups from security researchers who use the Joe Blow and random six-digit address at Gmail.com, and in some cases we're like, "Well, we don't really count them because they're just kicking the tires and trying to see if they can find some vulnerabilities in the site," or whatever, which is fine, but they're not really a lead. So, yeah, it's good to have some external validation, I guess, around, "Let's really see who these people are and maybe that JobBob23@gmail.com is actually a CTO at-"
Josh:
Yeah. I'm trying to think why do you think that that would be... I don't know if it's a trend, like the thing you just mentioned. It can happen, but if it happens enough for a sales consultant to mention it, why is that a thing? Do you think they're trying to... Like, they don't want their bosses to know that they're trying tools outside the company?
Starr:
Maybe they don't want salespeople to contact them.
Ben:
Yeah. I could sort of see it.
Josh:
Is that it?
Ben:
They don't want the sales spam to their-
Josh:
Oh, the salespeople are onto them, though, because they're mentioning that as one of the first things to look for, so it's like.
Starr:
Yeah, it's-
Josh:
This is a rivalry, is what you're saying, right? A classic rivalry.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like War of the Roses. Since you're going through these by hand, I found that it was kind of obvious which free email addresses looked a little suspicious. Like, string of random characters at AOL.com, probably not a legit developer signup. The people with the free, who were probably pen testers probably not real leads who were using the free email accounts, they looked programmatically generated, or they looked like somebody's grandma's email account that somebody hacked in 1996 and hasn't been recovered yet.
Josh:
Yeah. They should have used Faker.
Ben:
Right?
Ben:
Yeah, we need to build an AI for this, to automatically give us a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on someone that looks like they're a real, actual customer.
Josh:
There's probably something like that out there.
Ben:
Probably is.
Josh:
But yeah.
Starr:
It would probably be terrible.
Josh:
Yeah, you have to join a sales call for it.
Starr:
Probably end up being super racist or something, like all AIs are these days.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
We don't have so many sign-ups that it's unworkable to actually manually go over them. We do have enough that I don't want to spend all day, every day doing deep dives into researching every person, but yeah. Scanning a list and seeing someone that looks like a Mailinator.com, it's like, "Okay, we'll just pass over that one and go on to the next one."
Josh:
Yeah. So, how's the response so far? Are you getting any people replying?
Ben:
So, per what you would expect from developers, not a whole lot of responses. But yeah, some, some. And, the people that do respond, it's been nice. Like, the responses have been good. Like, "Oh yeah, thanks for checking," or, "I'm doing this," or stuff. So, yeah. It's been good.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
And it's fun checking out their websites. Like, I've been checking out some things. One was a land... you can check out who a plot of land was owned by, and the classification, zoning, stuff like that. So, one of our customers who signed up recently is running one of those things, and I just love that stuff. I'm a location nerd. I love shopping for houses and stuff, so that was just fun to play on their website for a few minutes.
Josh:
That's cool. Do you mention that stuff, like when you do that research? Do you mention like, "Oh, I think your product is really cool"?
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Josh:
I did the same thing. Years back, I remember taking, just going through and emailing people, and I found that was helpful: mention something, show them that you actually did some research and you're not just like... So, I mean, a lot of people, they just assume that any email they get after they sign up for your product is an autoresponder.
Starr:
Yeah, that's a good tip. And also, if nothing else. It's going to be nice to have that kind of feedback about just our customers, and who they are, and what they're working on.
Ben:
Yeah, and I'm particularly focused in on... So, we have in our internal admin tools, we have a list of people who signed up recently, and on that list it shows ones that have not created a project, or not sent any error traffic. So, obviously they haven't really used the app, really, yet. And so, I'm really focused on those. If I see a zero in that column, then I try to make sure to reach out to them and say, "Hey, is there anything I can help you get your app going?" Get Honeybadger installed, because if they don't ever activate, then obviously they're not going to convert, and that's bad news for everybody, right?
Josh:
Yeah. I mean, it makes sense to have someone doing that on a regular basis, probably.
Starr:
That's true. I'm curious what you'll find, because I found that... I mean, obviously this was, when I looked at it, this was data from... It's historical data, right? But, I found that once you sort of filtered out people in free email addresses, once you limited it to the US, just to make things easier, we didn't have a ton of people who weren't onboarding themselves and sending errors to us.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, I think most people here are real people who are actually interested in a product actually do get through the whole process and do activate. So, yeah. But, anything. I'm trying everything to-
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
... to activate those people, so we'll see what is it.
Josh:
If you really want to go the extra mile, you could do one of those little personalized screen-casts, like Harris sent you for the sales proposal, but just do a quick one. Be like, "Hey, so-and-so. I saw you signed up. I just wanted to show you we're real people over here," and something really short that's easy to produce if you created a system for it. But, I wonder if that would change the response rate at all.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Because it's kind of hard to... I mean, at least if you see it and realize what it is, it's kind of hard to brush that off as, "Oh, this is just a low-effort."
Ben:
Sure, sure.
Starr:
Yeah. The trick will be getting people to click on it, because I'm not going to click on any video sent to me unexpectedly.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Maybe we should just send them a picture in front of their house.
Josh:
Upload it somewhere recognizable, like YouTube or Vimeo.
Starr:
Like, "I'm standing outside of your house right now, where you're probably working."
Josh:
It's like Street View of their office.
Ben:
Well, on the video note, actually one video that I'm thinking about, seriously thinking about making, is regarding our mission. I mean, I was talking to Harris. So, we had this intro, like this startup call. "Let's figure out what we're going to be doing for the first month," and things. And, it was just, I don't know, an hour or something on Zoom, and it was great because Harris is interviewing me, basically, to find out how they could best fit into our current situation and help us get to where we want to go.
Ben:
And, he asked about... I can't remember what the question was, but my answer was talking about why we do what we do, like why we built Honeybadger. And, as I was wrapping up talking about that I was like, "Man, I wish we had recorded this Zoom call, because if I took that snippet where I was talking about that and just published that, that would be a great video for our website." Basically, talking about how, one, we built Honeybadger because of our frustration with the tool that we had at the time, and how we felt like we deserve better and all developers deserve better.
Ben:
And so, we built something that we felt would be better and would help make the developers' lives better, at least when it comes with dealing with exceptions, right? And then, the next step, which I don't think we talk about enough, and I'm going back to the website copy to update this, and maybe this is why I'll make the video, too. So, we want to make developers' lives better, but also to make developers' customers' lives better.
Ben:
That's our goal, is to help developers know what's happening with their customers in their apps, and so they can fix those bugs quickly, they can respond to those customers quickly and let them know, "Hey, sorry you had a problem. Sorry about that, they fixed it." Just let people know that you care, that you're not just like, "Oh, whatever. We don't care about our customers because they can have all the problems and we're just going to on our merry way," right? So, yeah. So, I spent five or 10 minutes just delivering that spiel to Harris, and I was like, "Yeah, this would make a great video for our website." So, it's on my to-do list, if I can get up the nerve to actually see myself in a recorded video.
Josh:
Yeah. You can do it. Yeah, it might take a few takes. That was a lot harder than I realized, talking to a camera when you're not actually talking to anyone, when no one's there. You're just into the camera. It's weird. I think it gets a little bit more familiar the more you do it.
Starr:
You can just tape a picture of somebody you like below your webcam or something.
Ben:
Right? Maybe tape a picture of my ideal customer. Find that target customer, like MR. CTO, or Mrs. CIO, and be like, "Hi, Mrs. CIO. I'm Ben. I'm here to tell you why you've got Honeybadger."
Josh:
That would be a really funny product, like for AI and deepfakes and stuff. It could actually generate a person for you to talk to.
Ben:
Oh, there you go. I like that.
Josh:
For those types of things, that actually responds to what you're saying, so it's as if they're listening.
Ben:
Oh, I like that. That would be awesome.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I was going the other way. I was thinking you could just make paper cutouts and glue them to Popsicle sticks. You could have a little puppet show. That could be your video. People don't have to just watch you, you can do a little puppet show.
Josh:
You just do your two hands talking to each other.
Starr:
This is how serious we are. This is how businesslike we are.
Ben:
Sock puppets? Yeah. "I'm a developer."
Josh:
That would be unique. I have not seen that done recently.
Starr:
Yeah. I was just thinking of Sifl and Hoy the other day. I don't know if you'll remember that show, but it was pretty amazing. Nobody? Crickets. Okay. I guess that's why it got canceled. Anyway, funniest show. Funniest show from 1998, '99? I don't know.
Ben:
Speaking of funny shows of the 90s, so I got a trial of Paramount Plus because I wanted to watch a movie, and I was like, "Hey, they have it for free, so I can get a trial." And so, I watched the movie, and then I was cruising to see what else they had to watch. We don't watch a whole lot of TV in the Curtis household, so I was just scrolling through, and I saw Beavis and Butthead, and I'm like, my boys were in the room. They're 20 and 16. I'm like, "Hey." I mean, this is perfect, right? The three of us, Beavis and Butthead, what could get better? So I'm like, "Hey, you guys want to watch Beavis and Butthead?" And they're like, "No, not at all."
Josh:
Oh no.
Starr:
Oh no.
Josh:
It's not cool anymore.
Starr:
You should have said it was deep-fried.
Josh:
That's just got to suck.
Starr:
Call it a deep-fried meme or something, whatever they do.
Josh:
I know. It's all these things, all these shows and things that we love, that we grew up with, and there's so many more of them for us now, with all the media that's being produced, and it's just, the kids are just going to be like, "Yeah, I really want to watch I Love Lucy with my dad."
Starr:
Yeah, that's fine. So, my daughter, who's five, has this bit she does and I fall for it every time. She's like, "Hey, could you tell me about what things were like when you were a kid?" And I'm like, "Okay, yeah. This is something new, I like this," and so I start saying something. And then she lets me go for a second, and then she interrupts and then she says, "Were there dinosaurs?"
Josh:
That's awesome.
Starr:
"Did you have food back then?" And it's just like, every time I forget that I'm being set up. I fall for it every time. It's just, grr.
Ben:
That's great.
Josh:
Do you think she's trolling you intentionally?
Starr:
100%. She's 100% trolling me. Yeah, her whole job, it's her whole life now, is trolling me. Yeah, with her little shit-eating grin. It's like, I love her, but oh man she really trolls me.
Ben:
So, a number of us attended MicroConf Remote this week.
Starr:
Oh, how was that?
Ben:
It was good. What do you think about-
Starr:
Do you mean everybody but me?
Ben:
Yeah, basically.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
I liked Gather, the app. I attended a conference... it's Gather.Town, is the URL, and it's like a virtual event space that's eight-bit. It's like Zelda or something for conferences. I don't know. Or like Stardew Valley. It reminds me of kind of like that. But, you can basically... they had an event space where it was a virtual layout of whatever, a conference event, and they had breakout rooms and an auditorium, and I think I used this once before, like last year, right when everyone was scrambling to figure out virtual events, and it was a little like, I didn't really click as much then.
Josh:
I thought it was cool, but it didn't get utilized very much, but I think they recently added where they show the actual... Like, when you go to the auditorium is actually shows whoever's speaking at the time. It pops up their video and it's like, the event is actually happening inside of this little eight-bit world, which was kind of fun. So, we all... Ben, and Kevin, and I all sat together in the middle row, and Ben had an ops emergency, so we knew it was a real... It felt just like being at MicroConf.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Gather.Town was really good. I think that's the best virtual conference experience I've had so far. Business of Software was really good, and this was really good. I would make a couple changes, though. I know the eight-bit thing is all cool and stuff, but if you want to get really close to a real conference, it's better to have real faces. Part of the appeal for Gather.Town is you're wandering around in a physical space, and so you might come up to a group of people who are talking and then their audio fades in, and their video, if they have video on, you can see their faces, and so you can join a conversation like you would at a real conference: walk up and like, "Hey, I'm such-and-such," right?
Ben:
But, what you can't do with the way they had the eight-bit thing is... and you couldn't customize your avatar much... is you can't recognize somebody from far off. You can't say, "Oh, I know that person. I want to go and see what they're up to," or, "I remember seeing them last year," then we go. Because it's like, no one knew who Ben is. He's just an avatar. So, that was kind of frustrating, because there were people that I knew who were there, but I have none-
Josh:
You don't know who's, yeah. Unless they have a really unique name or something.
Ben:
Right? Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I have a similar thought. I think if you could customize, personalize your avatar to the point where people would recognize you, that would be cool. Or use a headshot. But, I don't know. The eight-bit is kind of fun, too. It's, I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah. And then the other thing that goes along with that is a badge. So, at conferences you wear this badge on your lanyard. It has your name and it has your company name, maybe your Twitter handle, maybe whatever. And, those are actually useful, surprise, surprise, because you can walk up to a group of people and you can quickly look at badges and see people's names, so if you don't know someone but you know their name, "Oh, you're whomever. Oh, I should talk to you because of whatever, we have a shared interest," right?
Ben:
But that information wasn't available on Gather.Town either. You couldn't really broadcast that "My name is Ben Curtis," or, "I'm a co-founder of Honeybadger," which, all the time at conferences people would see the name tag, and they see the name, and they're like, "Oh, I know Honeybadger," and then they strike up a conversation. So, I think if you really want to replicate that experience you got to show that, somehow, on the screen. But, otherwise, Gather.Town was great. I loved it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It seems like they need everybody's profile in there, and you can search and find where they are in the room or whatever they can.
Josh:
Yeah, they could definitely make some, like a roster.
Starr:
And as you get close to people it pops up dossiers on each of them.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Whatever happened to Second Life?
Starr:
I was just thinking this sounds very... it sounds like what people were doing in Second Life. It's still around.
Ben:
Yeah, 20 years ago.
Starr:
Yeah, it's still around. I saw a documentary.
Josh:
Yeah, it's still around and it hasn't changed. I mean, every time I've gone back and looked at it it's just the same. It's basically the same. But it just seems like... I'm surprised they just haven't exploded in the last year. This was their opportunity to... I mean, they're a virtual world that's got... They have all that stuff built in. You can play video in the world. It's one of the most virtual spaces, probably, that you could have. So, I'm surprised that they didn't pivot after however many years, and really-
Starr:
That would be pretty hard, though, to just... they would have to just be like, "Okay, drop everything. We're going to build a completely new platform that isn't old, that's going to entice people." By the time you get done with it, pandemic's over.
Ben:
So, I've never checked out Second Life, but one thing that was interesting about your idea about them pivoting, I think maybe it's just they support... it's too wide-open. Ben Thompson at Stratechery had a great bit about this recently, where he's comparing Second Life to Roblox, and talking about the success of Roblox, and he argues that one of the successful attributes of Roblox is the limited nature of the environment. It's very constrained. And so, that encourages creativity in other ways, that you don't get in a Second Life where "everything's possible". And so, it's a bit overwhelming, right?
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. I think, having watched the documentary and not ever used it, it seems like there's a lot of creativity there. It's just-
Josh:
Well, there is, yeah, but then it's also... I mean, I imagine it would be hard for them to pivot, also, just because of the way they've built a functioning economy into the system. I'm assuming they would have popular uprisings, and there would be revolts if they pivoted to sell out to some sort of corporate event overlords or something. The people would rise up, because, there's people that still, they make their living in that economy.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true.
Ben:
Yeah. I just think having a more constrained environment would be better for a conference, like the Gather.Town thing.
Starr:
Oh yeah, for a conference.
Ben:
Yeah. You're located in this conference center, and you have the expo hall, and you have the library and things like that. I did love the expo hall in Gather.Town. I really did. Being able to go up and check out a vendor sponsor without having to chat with someone was fantastic.
Starr:
Oh, that's nice.
Ben:
Yeah. You could go up, you'd walk up to a booth, and there might be a person there or there might not, and there would be a computer there on the desk, and you could, if you check that out, you would actually see their web page that was specifically for the conference. Or you could, of course, chat to the booth person who might be manning the booth. That's the best expo hall experience of a conference so far. That was cool.
Josh:
I didn't go in there. I should have.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I never really do anything, to be honest.
Ben:
Yeah, I didn't do a lot of hanging out, either.
Josh:
Besides sit in the auditorium. But, that was cool.
Ben:
That was cool. So, props to MicroConf for using Gather.Town. That was a good experience.
Josh:
One of the things I liked about the MicroConf, the way they did it, was that it wasn't all day, which, some of the past virtual events I've done, like they kept the schedule of a traditional event, which is sessions in the morning, break for lunch, sessions in the afternoon. By the end of it, you've been sitting in front of your computer in a virtual meeting, basically, for eight hours or something, and it's just exhausting, and MicroConf only had... they did two talks, I think, per day or something. And then there was opportunity to go do... If you wanted to go check out the sponsors or chat, find people to chat with, you could. But, it felt less overwhelming.
Starr:
I would like it if regular conferences were like that. I mean, they're not because everybody's away from work and doesn't want to be away from home for a week, but two talks a day is about, honestly, my ideal situation. Even at-
Josh:
That's basically what we do at normal MicroConf.
Starr:
Yeah. At normal conferences, I just can't watch them all. By the end of the day, sure I can sit there, but I am just not comprehending anything that's going on.
Josh:
Yeah. Should we complain? Should we voice our opinion about missing Las Vegas, Ben? Or is that too controversial?
Ben:
Oh.
Josh:
Because we were some of the ones that were like, "I'm sick of coming to Las Vegas," but now the thought of not going... I just don't want to go to Minneapolis. I'd rather... I miss Las Vegas for some reason, and we haven't come to that, yet.
Ben:
Yeah. Well, we got to the point where we weren't staying at the Tropicana anymore because we had enough of the Tropicana, right?
Josh:
Maybe that's it. We complained about Las Vegas for several years and then we were like, "Let's just stay somewhere else." And then we started doing that, and all of a sudden it switched and they-
Ben:
Got better.
Josh:
... listened to us.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. When you first said-
Josh:
We can afford to.
Ben:
When you posted that Street View of Coco's, that hit my right in the feels. I was like, "Oh, now I miss going to Vegas for MicroConf," because that was a great tradition that we had.
Josh:
Yeah. So, Ben and I, yeah. We always would go... and this was your tradition before, I think... I missed the first couple, at least, or... I don't know how many I missed, but Coco's is a diner right next to the Tropicana, or actually it's down the street, past the Hooters. And so, we would always walk down there in the mornings and get breakfast or whatever, just diner breakfast, and just because... I mean, Tropicana's probably not much better, and you get to go outside.
Ben:
Yeah, you get to walk.
Josh:
So, yeah. So, the first, or the second morning of virtual MicroConf. I got on Google Street View and I went to the Tropicana, and then I did the little, went, did our little street walk to Coco's and then sent Ben a screenshot.
Ben:
That was awesome, yeah.
Josh:
Trip down memory lane.
Ben:
Although, one point in favor of Minneapolis... and I agree with you. Given the choice between Las Vegas and Minneapolis, I would choose Las Vegas every time. But, one point in favor of Minneapolis is they have some fine eating establishments there around the convention center, so-
Josh:
That's true.
Ben:
When I travel, I love to kind of splurge on food, and I mean, obviously Vegas has some incredible food selections that you're just not going to beat. But, Minneapolis has some good eateries.
Josh:
It has some good stuff, yeah.
Ben:
So, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, and I liked the indoor skyway or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah, the sky bridge.
Josh:
That was Minneapolis. The sky bridge was, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, that was perfect.
Josh:
Yeah. But-
Ben:
Maybe we'll get to go to conference in person again, some time next year or something.
Josh:
Yeah. I mean, no matter where it is, it'll still be fun.
Ben:
Yeah. I actually realized that I do miss traveling a few times a year. I don't think I'd ever want to travel on a regular basis, but I think I had been averaging three or so times a year, prior to COVID.
Josh:
Makes a difference.
Ben:
Yeah, I miss it. I miss going to places.
Starr:
Yeah, it's nice.
Josh:
Actually, late last year I got the notification that my TSA pre-check is expiring in July or something this year, and when I first got the notification I was just like, it just bummed me out. I was like, "Man, do I even need this anymore? Will I ever travel again?" So, I'm starting to think that I will probably be renewing it pretty soon, here, because it'll expire right around the time I need it.
Ben:
They should totally give you a one-year extension on that.
Josh:
They should.
Ben:
I'm sure they're not equipped to do that.
Josh:
Yeah, they're not equipped for much.
Starr:
Yeah, it's really weird getting back into normal life, and travel, and stuff like that. We've been doing little road trips, and staying at Air BnBs and stuff, but that's not really the same.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
What a wonderful, somber note.
Josh:
So, where are you going to go first? Where are you going to go first, Starr?
Starr:
Oh, me? I don't know. I don't know the grocery store? Actually go inside. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe to see the grandparents in California.
Ben:
Yeah, that's where I'd be going. To see the grandparents. It's tough.
Josh:
I mean, screw the grandparents, I'm going to Hawaii.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Sorry, grandparents.
Ben:
Just tell the grandparents to go to Hawaii, meet them there.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, one other thing that happened this week that is kind of fun, I just deployed a few minutes ago, actually, is we're now supporting promotion codes. So-
Josh:
Oh.
Ben:
Another kind of growth hack that we're going to try is partnering with some different groups, and what really prompted this, actually, was MicroConf. So, a few months ago Ben Finley posted about going to the App Sumo marketplace, and I thought, "Yeah, that's a good idea." But, didn't really think a whole lot of it, didn't really plan on doing much about it. Just like, "Yeah, we should do that someday, " and kind of set it aside.
Ben:
And then, like at MicroConf remote, they talked about Ruben Gamez's DocSketch, and how he did an App Sumo thing. And then they had a person from App Sumo talking about the marketplace, talk about how it works and things like that, and I thought, "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea." And I remembered Ben's Basecamp post, and I went and looked at that and I'm like, "Yes, let's do it." And so, during that talk I started to write code.
Ben:
Like, "All right, I have an idea of how to do this." And so, I guess that was a Wednesday, Wednesday/Thursday I wrote the code and put it up there last night for PR, and Josh approved it this morning. So, now we actually support promotion codes, so we can do that App Sumo marketplace testing. And, I have some other ideas of people we can reach out to that I think would be interested in handing out promotion codes for Honeybadger.
Starr:
That's awesome.
Ben:
If you're listening and you happen to be interested in doing a promotion with Honeybadger, feel free to reach out.
Starr:
How can they reach you?
Ben:
Ben@Honeybadger.io would be the best way to go.
Starr:
All right. You mentioned DocSketch briefly. I feel like I should say, we use the hell out of DocSketch. So, DocSketch is a thing that, it's an e-signature platform. It's very much like, what is it, DocuSign?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
But, it is much, much, much more affordable, reasonably priced. It does everything we need and it's much more... I don't know. Also, it's just kind of friendlier, it's simpler.
Josh:
I like it, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. Like, I wouldn't be surprised-
Josh:
It really is the best one I've used, I think.
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
It is, it is. And we do at least one or two a week, because I use it for all my author agreements. So, we just-
Josh:
Yeah. I've been using it for the contractors, too. Yeah, for-
Starr:
Yeah, so I feel like we should plug that product, because, yeah, it's awesome, and Ruben's awesome, and yeah. So, everyone should go out and buy it,
Josh:
So, it really was like a classic MicroConf. You missed the first day due to Honeybadger, and then you spent the next couple days building out a feature based on your takeaways. We got a little trip to Coco's.
Ben:
Almost like the real thing.
Starr:
Wow, yeah.
Josh:
Couldn't have asked for more.
Starr:
You should have had me come over. I would spray you all with dirty water to simulate the time the fire extinguisher went off during the-
Josh:
Oh, that was fun. Yeah.
Starr:
During the talks.
Ben:
Yeah. No, I think we didn't get as like the sore feet from walking back and forth across half the Strip, yeah.
Starr:
Oh god, yeah. So much walking.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, you never know. Maybe there will be a return to Vegas one day, for old time's sake. Or we could just go to Vegas. If they keep doing the virtual MicroConfs, we could just go to Vegas and just stream it from the hotel.
Starr:
There you go. I mean, why are we even trying to pursue growth through customers? We can just put it all on red.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Just let it roll, let it ride. Whatever the people say.
Josh:
It's our annual growth trip. Yes.
Starr:
Okay. You have been listening to FounderQuest. If you want to review us on Apple Podcast, that's awesome. If you want to write for us, we're always looking for writers. Go to our blog at honeybadger.io/blog and see the Write For Us page. And, yeah. And, we're starting a new thing that I'm recruiting writers for, which is we're going to be doing some quarterly sort of reports showing all the sort of news and events and activity that's happened around various programming language communities, so if you're interested in that get in touch, too. All right, see you all later.
Show notes:
Links:Intro CRMAhoy
Andrew Kane
Full transcript:
Ben:
So I am feeling great this morning.
Starr:
Oh Good. Why are you feeling great?
Ben:
So over the past couple weeks, I've been working on cleaning up the low level noise, errors that are happening, that aren't really severe and that get corrected because of retries and things like that. So stuff, that's not broken, broken, it's just annoying. And so I just, yesterday I think, finished off the last of those things. So, we had a few big things over the past several months, we had the account billing migration. We've had the Elasticsearch migration. We've had the payload storage migration. And now as of yesterday, we have no lingering, low level errors happening. It's just clean. The logs are quiet, everything is happy.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
That's amazing. Good job.
Ben:
Thanks.
Starr:
Would you say it's like butter?
Josh:
Thought it was kind of quiet around here.
Ben:
It's like butter.
Starr:
It's like butter.
Ben:
Yeah, it feels really good.
Starr:
Oh, good.
Josh:
I got through my to-do list items that were kind of along those lines this week, actually. So that does feel good. I'm onto having time for real work again now until I come in on Monday and I have a bunch of busy work again.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well yesterday was my birthday, so I took it off so I'm a slacker this week.
Josh:
Happy birthday.
Starr:
Thank you.
Ben:
Happy birthday.
Starr:
Thank you. It's very nice, just like, I didn't actually really do anything special. I just went about sort of a normal day, but without any rush. I was just like, I'm going to kind of take my time and take as long as I want in whatever I'm doing. And it was very nice. It was very nice just having that off. And I mean, I didn't actually work, but I did just kind of read and stuff, so..
Josh:
Cool.
Starr:
So I was great and I-
Josh:
Sounds like the perfect birthday, to be honest.
Starr:
I know it was pretty great. Yeah. My kid was very enthusiastic until... She was super enthusiastic all week. She made all these decorations and everything and all these tiny little birthday present crafts that were just adorable. And then when my birthday dinner actually rolled around, they went to the restaurant to pick up the food and everything and they came back and she didn't like any of the food that we got. And so she just threw just a shit fit. And it's just like, ah, I was trying to have my nice dinner and you really pumped this up for me. And now you're just you're just like some sort of caveman or something.
Josh:
She definitely did it intentionally.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
This was her plan all along.
Starr:
Yeah. They build you up just to tear you down. That's children for you. But other than that, I got a lot of, I mean, a lot of progress on this interesting project that we're doing, where we're going to be using our sort of blog author set up to generate some reports, to make things easier for us sort of internally, right? Because it's kind of hard for Josh and everybody who's involved with the libraries, the client libraries to keep tabs on 500 different languages at once.
Starr:
It's just like keeping tabs on one programming language is kind of hard because everything changes every six weeks. And so, yeah. So we're going to try and get some authors to sort of go in, maybe start on a quarterly basis and come up with sort of reports about what's going on in a specific community. And yeah. And if it turns out-
Josh:
I'm so excited.
Starr:
Yeah, if it turns out they're useful, we'll probably start sharing them by our blog or email or something. Whatever allows us to extract the maximum value from you people.
Josh:
This came around or it came about, because I was like Starr, I'm tired of reading 15 newsletters every week. And I just want to read one thing, once a quarter or something like that and know what's going on. And so Starr like, I can do that and now we're going to have it. It's going to be awesome.
Ben:
So in a recent episode, when we talked about the vendor that you're not going to name on air Starr-
Starr:
I'll say it. It's okay. It's love sack. I was just feeling weird about it at that time. It's a terrible name. I realized later though, that it's based on love seats. Its like love seat bean bag type thing. At first, I thought it was a pun on love shack, which seemed like a really weird way to, I mean, I guess who am I to talk like my product's in Honeybadger, but yeah.
Josh:
True.
Starr:
I'm sorry. What were you going to say, Ben?
Ben:
So I brought that up to say that we had asked, in our podcast episode where we discussed that, we had asked people to respond to us on Twitter if they had any recommendations. And we actually got a recommendation, which was great. And the person who responded, suggested that perhaps we could engage people via Twitter, more from our podcasts. And so with this report thing that you're talking that made me think, hey, if someone out there would be interested in receiving a report, like we just described, you should let us know on Twitter.
Starr:
Oh yeah. That's a good idea.
Ben:
And-
Josh:
Honeybadger intelligence report?
Ben:
Exactly. Exactly.
Starr:
I'm abbreviating it HBI. Your HBI briefing. That sounds very official. Doesn't it?
Ben:
It does. Yeah. Expect that to come out on the first Thursday of the quarter right after the payroll report or something.
Starr:
Exactly. People are going to just be like, let me just tell you, the markets are going to move when that thing drops.
Josh:
I think that there are people out there that could get benefit from this sort of thing. It's not maybe not everyone, but anyone who has to keep up with multiple, like different tech language communities as a part of their job, which is like me, I maintain all of our integrations and stuff across the entire internet. And so... Or the entire industry. And so there's a lot of news and releases and what are the trends that people are talking about on Twitter? If I tried to stay on top of all that 24/7 I'd just never leave my desk.
Starr:
Yeah. It's so much work. I honestly, I'm kind of in the same boat, even though I don't work on the client libraries. I consider myself a developer. That's not really most of my job lately, but yeah. I'm a Ruby developer and I would like to keep up with the Ruby community and everything. And, but like when you're doing a job that isn't quite... Just day in, day out Ruby development, it's kind of hard to do that, right? So I would love to have like a thing to come to me every few months. Just like I just need to spend 30 minutes reading this once a quarter and I will have a good handle on things. So if I go to a conference, I just don't sound stupid. When people come up and talk to me.
Josh:
Yeah. You'll be in the know. Starr, can we send this out? Like snail mail to people do you think? Like an old school newsletter?
Starr:
An old school newsletter.
Josh:
Like before the internet. People, anyone who had an opinion... We could even have like a section where we like prognosticate and you tell what the future trends are going to be.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Do you ever see those newsletters where those guys would have like their stock tips or the economic trends that they foresee.
Starr:
And here's the thing with that though. We can't just print it out. We've got to type it on a typewriter and photocopy it.
Josh:
Photocopy it. Okay.
Ben:
And you have to put it in one of those clear covers that have the plastic binder thing going down the side. Like you did in school when you turn in your reports.
Josh:
Yeah. Ben has a photocopier right behind him in his office right now. Just saying.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
And it's a industrial one.
Starr:
Oh, this is just taking me back to my 90s roots.
Ben:
Speaking of 90s roots. So I saw a random tweet this morning. That was from, I guess, defense attorney. She said that her client was just released from prison after 30 years of being incarcerated. And as this individual was getting back to life, everyone kept saying, oh, well you can get that form at our website or we'll send you an email with that information whatever. And this person was like, what are they even talking about? 30 years, imagine 1991.
Josh:
No access?
Ben:
Yeah. Going away and coming back in 2021 and all that's changed. Can you imagine? That wow. That just made me think for a while. It's like, we've done a lot of stuff in the past 30 years.
Josh:
A lot of stuff.
Ben:
Yeah. It's crazy.
Josh:
I mean, I'm only 36, so that's like my entire life.
Ben:
Yeah. Guess that's a bit of a downer. Sorry. I just thought it was wild.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like the guy who woke up from the coma and he... I guess he went into a coma like right before coronavirus started and he woke up, he was just like-
Josh:
The entire world has changed.
Starr:
Yeah. But you know what, on a little bit of better news, I actually went and for my birthday treat, I went and drove to a coffee stand, which is something we have in Seattle, in the Pacific Northwest, which most places don't have, which are these little tiny shacks that you can just drive up to them and they give you coffee. And it's great. And I haven't done anything like that because of pandemic and it's... I just have been very tightly staying home. But I figured for my birthday, it's fine.
Starr:
So I just went through this little... This coffee shack and it was just like this little shining moment of almost normalcy. And I was just like, okay, I finally am feeling like this might come to an end one day and I can drive home. I can take my little coffee out of my cup holder in my car. I can walk back to my front door. I'm just not... I won't be like just in the house all day. Like I'll get to-
Josh:
It's definitely happening.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yes. It's going.
Ben:
I have to ask though. These coffee stands that you mentioned, did you go to a chain coffee stand or was an independent coffee stand?
Starr:
It was in independent. I don't even know if they have chain coffees stands. They do?
Ben:
Yeah. Mercurys Coffee is a chain of them.
Starr:
The only ones I know are they're always very weird idiosyncratic thing. Some of them have ladies in bikinis who make your coffee. That's gross. I'm not going to go to those. Yeah. It's just a normal little... It's sort of yellow. It's got a picture of a rooster on it and it's by the freeway entrance.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yeah, just around the corner from my office, they just recently built one of those. And it's Mercurys, which is why that's top of mind for me, because I pass by it. But they just built it as in they started that after the pandemic and I was like, wow, that's pretty optimistic. You're going to build one of these places when they're just no new cars coming through, but-
Josh:
Really? Are there no cars? Around here, they're pretty popular still. The drive-thru has been one of the things that people still do a lot. So I think if anything they've become more popular just because you can't get coffee any other way.
Ben:
Yeah. I guess so.
Starr:
So do you mind if I ask? You were talking to a sales consultant person and so what's going on with that? I'm just curious.
Ben:
So that's going to be starting next week actually.
Starr:
Oh, that's awesome. So this is a guy who has... What's the name of his company?
Ben:
I can't remember.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Okay.
Ben:
I'll have to link it in the show notes.
Starr:
Yeah. We'll link it to the show notes. Yeah. And his thing is he helps sort of software companies create sales systems and processes and everything. Kind of like what we needed. So we're all just like, yes. Go for it please.
Ben:
Exactly. Yeah. So he's really into sales. That's his background. And he's had a lot of experience in that realm and he's now started a productized service. So it's like, it's kind of like hybrid SaaS and professional services model where there is software involved. He has built some CRM software and also has a staff of people who help you use the software basically, and help you through the process of doing salesy stuff. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. Especially considering that just yesterday, I had a really bad experience with an outbound sales team from some company that we will not link in the show notes, but they email me like four times over the past three weeks. And of course all unsolicited. And I just ignore these things.
Ben:
Yeah. I just ignore these things. I just delete them. It's no big deal, but it became a big deal yesterday when we got a phone call to our main number and I typically-
Starr:
Oh, no, they didn't.
Ben:
Yes they did.
Starr:
They didn't call the 800 number, did they?
Ben:
They called the 800 number.
Starr:
We had to pay to get that call.
Ben:
I don't know what they were thinking, calling a number that's posted on our website, but they did. And they're all like, hey, this is what we do. And you should call us back and we'll talk to you. And the service that they sell is outbound sales.
Josh:
This is what we do. We hound you incessantly until you curse.
Ben:
So I just... as soon as I heard that message, I called them and I'm like, get me off your list. Do not call me, do not email me. And I don't know what they were thinking. Apparently they don't know how to market to developers because you don't spam email and call a developer and expect to have a good response and then-
Josh:
Well, they are trying to think.
Starr:
So I've got to say, we're just like, okay, we're going to get a sales consultant and do this stuff. And then we're just like, we hate sales people.
Josh:
Yeah, exactly.
Starr:
They are like what's going to break there. Yeah.
Ben:
Next week when we the record episode, I'll be like so calling people is awesome. Yeah. We're going to figure that out. I don't know how that's going to work out, how that's going to play out yet, but I'm hoping that our new consultant slash productized service person, is going to have the ability to help us thread that needle so that we can actually do some outreach without annoying them.
Josh:
He didn't seem the type of person that would annoy me like that in his video that I watched, for what it's worth,
Ben:
Yeah. He mentioned that. So he sent us a proposal with that nice little PDF, three to four pager thing talking about what he was going to do, but also sent a Loom video with the proposal and it kind of walked through it. And I was like, yeah, extra credit. Above and beyond.
Starr:
I like that.
Josh:
As a demonstration, an active demonstration of your sales techniques, I feel like that almost that already alleviates that concern for me a little bit. I mean, if he did that for our customers and in terms of this is what you get from Honeybadger, and by the way, I recorded this custom walkthrough for you of like how everything works, personalized. I mean, that kind of thing actually sells me versus like 15 phone calls and text messages.
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
Yeah. I agree. It was a very nice cozy feeling that you don't get from all of these sales emails.
Josh:
The video was also not too long either. That was the second impressive part that he recorded a video and then it was brief, concise and had basically the information that I was looking for.
Ben:
Yeah. It's like, he knows what he's doing.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll see about that.
Starr:
Yeah. Just hoping.
Ben:
And in similar news, I've been playing around with various metrics, gathering tools this past week or two to try and get a real good handle on what our rates are. Our conversion rates, from visitor to trial and from trial to paid. And it's been somewhat challenging because we have users and we have accounts and the billing stuff is associate with account and not a user. And a lot of these analytics tools are like, got to user. It's all user based. And it's like, well, we have to do this transition period where a user creates an account and that's where the payment thing happens, right?
Ben:
And of course, we also have the challenge of developers are our customers and they turn off all the, Mix Panel and all the other tracking stuff. And so we were doing something in house. We're using Ahoy, which is some Ruby code built by Andrew Kane. And that person is just a machine. Tell you what, go browse through the repositories and GitHub for him. It's amazing. Anyway Ahoy is great. It puts a couple of tables in your database and you track all these events like page views and whatever custom events you want from the backend, all in these tables. And so you can just query them like normal like a regular database table. And just this morning I was putting together some stats. And so now we have new percentages on our internal admin dashboard.
Josh:
Oh, is it up it's up?
Ben:
It's up. It may be slightly inaccurate. There were some problems, I think. I noticed right before we started recording. But yes, we actually have some big fat numbers with percent signs behind them. It's pretty cool.
Starr:
Oh, Cool. Yeah.
Josh:
Awesome. I've been wanting to set up Ahoy for a long time on our app, so I'm excited that we finally have it and-
Ben:
Yeah. Why did we wait so long.
Josh:
I don't know.
Starr:
That's kind of, one of the sort of curses of Honeybadger has always been we can get information on trial to paid conversion and stuff, because all that stuff it's in our own database. But like the tracking conversions from like a visitor to signing up is just... Has always eluded us. And maybe there's a way to do it that we just don't know. But I don't know if it's just because developers block ads or what, but based on all the tracking software, you would think that nobody ever looked at our website before signing up, which probably isn't the case. But yeah.
Ben:
Well, one of the things was self-inflicted wounds because we refused to send events to Google analytics. And so-
Starr:
I mean, we tried though for a while.
Ben:
Yeah, we did. Oh yeah, always felt kind of icky about it and so we never really nailed it.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, not recently, but when I set it up a long time ago, we tried and it's just, it was still-
Josh:
I think we did. Yeah. I remember we had Shane Rice configure the whole thing for us at one point. Like with all those events-
Starr:
Yeah. That was the second attempt.
Josh:
All the collection points. Yeah. And I mean and he did a good job. That guy knows Google Analytics, but I don't know. It seems like a tricky problem for a lot of SaaS companies too. Just getting that specific part the of the funnel. Visit to sign up. It's probably easier for info product type sales, because people are coming for a specific... It's like a specific conversion, like sales thing, but we've always had the problem of, if we're doing content marketing, like they're there for the content, not for a SaaS and they might come back at some point and because they were exposed to us through the content marketing, but how do you tie that event? It's just there's a bunch of interim steps that complicate things.
Ben:
Yeah. Speaking of that, I actually cheated a bit when I was putting the stats together because we have so much traffic to the blog that it kind of drowns out traffic of people who are actually intentionally coming to check out the product. So great job Starr. And so I thought, well, let me just ignore the blog traffic. So the query queries that I was working on, if I ignore views to blog pages and just track views to our main sales pages, then the, our conversion ratio is much better. So I decided to go with that approach. It's kind of funny how you can put your thumb on the scale on different places and make things look the way you want them to look.
Josh:
Exactly how you want them to.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm hoping that sort of a sales process might actually shed some light into that dark corner. Because if for example, we got people to sign up for, I don't know, say a intelligence report and give some information on that and we contacted them, we would be able to have stats about our ratios and everything from that, because there would be a physical person involved. It wouldn't just be trying to put a cookie on somebody's computer.
Josh:
Put a cookie on their desk and they're much more likely to buy Honeybadger.
Starr:
Oh, there you go. That's a good thing.
Ben:
Why did you put a honey badger on their desk and not so much?
Josh:
No.
Ben:
I have had my kids suggest that we do that.
Josh:
Send a honey badger?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Or a cookie? Because I mean, we've also talked about sending food. People do like food.
Ben:
Do you remember, this must have been six years ago or so, remember the time we actually did do cookies? For a conference?
Josh:
Yeah. That's right.
Starr:
Yeah. I remember that.
Ben:
Yeah. I think we actually borrowed that idea from Office Space. If I remember correctly. Because Suzie was really into doing the cookie thing. Well, that's when cookies were hot too. It's like the cupcake fad. Before the cupcake fad, there was a cookie fad.
Starr:
The great cupcake glut of 2011. Children were drowning in buttercream.
Ben:
Those were the good days. So yeah. It'll be interesting to see if we can make this tracking happen. And then my goal is to, once we have some good numbers actually find ways to make those numbers go up, right? But if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And so hopefully the measuring is going to be in place now. So I'm pretty excited about that.
Josh:
Yeah. It'll be nice to have that if it works to have it on the dashboard. Yes. We've always been... We've been able to go like Starr, you've done deep dives into the numbers and stuff and that's been awesome, but like you have to go and do that whenever we want it and if we had a way to just track that stuff, it would be useful. It seems.
Starr:
Yeah. Definitely. One thing to keep in mind also is, it might be useful to have a view that filters out some of the less, less converting sources of traffic like we've got certain geographic regions that just have way lower conversion rates than anywhere else and account for a lot of signups though. So it might be useful to have a view that kind of filters those out so you can get a more, I don't know, level, a less chaotic view of the stats.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. Yeah. I was thinking about that. I haven't done that yet. So I def want to do this, but I was thinking about that based on your analysis, you did. I am however, already excluding all the Horoku signups since they are, their customers are so much different than our on-site customers. And I'm also excluding the GitHub student pack people.
Starr:
Oh that's good.
Ben:
Because they come through, they get the free year. They don't convert anywhere near as well as, people who are actually like doing this for a job kind of thing. So yeah. That makes the numbers much more realistic, I think. To ignore those two sets of customers.
Starr:
Oh yeah, totally. And yeah, I'm curious to see how this sales consulting thing works. Like yeah. You should let us know how it goes. Because I mean, all this is sort of tied into marketing and the stuff we're doing at our monthly marketing meetings and everything. So it'll be good to work as a team on that.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Can't wait to see that hockey stick chart from the sales effort.
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
H E double hockey sticks?
Josh:
It's going to look like a Bitcoin market chart.
Ben:
We are going to work out what my compensation schedule is, right? What's my quota? Going to be driving that Lambo pretty soon. All those sales commissions.
Josh:
You're the only one in the company with the Lambo. It'll be worth it.
Starr:
Well, it seems like we are reaching a natural plateau. So should we call it? Let's call it. All right, well-
Josh:
Wait, the company's plateaued?
Ben:
No man, to the moon. Diamond hands.
Josh:
Joking.
Starr:
Oh, not you too Ben. I went on my morning walk and I saw that somebody had written in... A truck went by me on the road and somebody written on the dust on the background. They're like GME to the moon and then like pictures of diamonds. And it's awesome. It's like, oh my God, this is too wild.
Josh:
Wait, what was the car this was on?
Starr:
It was just like a delivery truck or something.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Somebody had written... had like walked by it or something. I don't think the truck's owner meant to do it. Because that's just, I don't know.
Josh:
Because if you're going to write that on your car, it better be a Lambo.
Starr:
Yeah. And it better not be written by somebody's finger in the dust on your car.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. Everything's just dust in the wind, I guess that's the message of that. All right. So you've been listening to FounderQuest. Please go review us on Apple podcasts or whatever. We're looking for authors. If you want to go to our blog, look at the write for us page. I'm going to be looking for people to help with these intelligence reports. So if you're interested in, I don't know, like doing deep dives into the current news of a specific programming language or platform, definitely get in touch. You can just go to that same write for us page. And I don't know, is there any final thoughts, any wisdom?
Ben:
So they got to tweet at us @founderquest.
Starr:
Oh yeah. FounderQuest. Tweet at us.
Josh:
Tell us your wisdom.
Starr:
Yes. That's a great way to engage.
Ben:
Tell us where you got coffee this morning.
Starr:
You can choose-
Josh:
I mean, we don't have any wisdom. That's obviously why we have a podcast.
Starr:
I just think all of our listeners should join the conversation. Engage the way you want to.
Josh:
We should do a call in show.
Ben:
On air?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Tweet at us if you'd be interested in having a live call-in show with FounderQuest.
Starr:
This is just getting super retro. We got a call-in show. We're going to have like a typewritten newsletter that goes out.
Josh:
I really kind of want to start a snail mail newsletter now. All the people with Twitter newsletters, none of them are doing actual newsletters. And I feel like you definitely get people putting in the info for that.
Starr:
You're right. Honestly-
Josh:
I like I really kind of want to do it.
Starr:
Yeah. Now that you say that, it kind of was like a joke, but now that I'm thinking about it-
Josh:
That would be amazing.
Starr:
If I could just get like two physical pages about what's going on in a programming community or whatever that I'm interested in, like that-
Josh:
Put it on my coffee table.
Starr:
I can just look at it. I don't have to remember to pull it up.
Josh:
You can throw it in the trash. After you're done with it Starr.
Starr:
You can just recycling Josh. We live in the Pacific Northwest. You don't want them coming for you.
Ben:
Love it.
Josh:
Oh no. This is like retro, remember? We don't recycle.
Starr:
Oh, I got it. Okay.
Ben:
We just throw out the car window as we driving down the road.
Starr:
All right. Well, this has been FounderQuest. We love the environment. We love our mother earth and we love most of all, you our listeners. Okay. Bye.
Show notes:
Links:
Sidekiq-cron
TextExpander
Alfred
Sondors Metacycle
Full transcript:
Ben:
So, you may not be surprised to hear this, but I've been doing a lot of shopping for electric vehicles this past week.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Josh:
Oh.
Ben:
And there are some new electric motorcycles and scooters coming out that are very, very tempting. There's one in particular, the Sondors model, which is going to be first released near the end of the year and it's only $5000 and it had a top of speed of 80 miles per hour. The battery is not really rated for doing 80 miles per hour very long. You're not going to commute for 20 miles at that speed, but it's nice to have that in case you just need to hop on the freeway to get someplace really quick.
Starr:
Wow. That's only like $60 per mile per hour.
Ben:
But I really got my eye on it. And my wife's not a big fan of the whole motorcycle idea, but it's been there in the back of my mind for years and this year might be the year that I actually get my two wheel endorsement and do the training course and all that.
Josh:
Yeah, that would be fun.
Ben:
I just didn't want another combustion powered vehicle and so I've been holding off on the whole motorcycle thing until they got electric motorcycles that were not crazy expensive but also not just useless because it only has a batter for five miles worth of range. And I think 2021 is the year that is actually-
Josh:
Is this going to be your big 2021 post-pandemic life change?
Ben:
Exactly, yeah.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Maybe this is my midlife crisis where I actually buy that motorcycle.
Josh:
You should get a hog, though. Be like a-
Ben:
The LiveWire is really nice. That's Harley Davidson's electric, but it's like $30,000 and I just, I have qualms about spending as much on a motorcycle as I would spend on a car.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Maybe that's not the right way to look at it, but it's just, I have problems with that.
Josh:
I'm seeing you with some of the... the trike handlebars or whatever.
Starr:
Oh, like a Chopper?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I'm wondering if the electrics have the same cache. Because I'm trying to figure out if all the Bruce Springsteen songs still apply to the electric motorcycles. Like would you call an electric motorcycle a Suicide Machine? It seems a little bit too environmentally friendly for that. I'm not really sure.
Josh:
Ben totally needs an electric Chopper. It'd be the first.
Starr:
I go on walks... I'm sorry. I go on walks in the morning and occasionally an electric car will pass by me because it's Seattle and there's a couple of them. And it always feels so sneaky. It feels like they're just sneaking up on me because I just hear this low whine and next thing I know it's right behind me. It just feels like they're sneaking up on me.
Ben:
Yeah, I think they are.
Starr:
I don't trust that Elon Musk fellow. I don't trust him.
Josh:
Eventually you'll be just hearing that whining throughout your entire walk, just constantly.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, like the state of Washington, I think they recently passed a law that prevents any new combustion based cars from being sold after 2035. I think that's what it is. So yeah, the clock is ticking man.
Josh:
Pretty wild.
Ben:
Yeah. But for-
Josh:
Are consumers going to go for it?
Ben:
I think so. I think so.
Josh:
I think they will.
Ben:
But for those who don't know, the reason why it's kind of an inside joke is I've been interested in electric powered vehicles for a very long time and Starr and Josh are well aware of having-
Starr:
As long as I've known you. As long as Honeybadger's been a company.
Josh:
Yeah. Honeybadger was actually going to be a electric vehicle company initially, then we pivoted.
Starr:
Yeah, we really chose wrong with that one. That was a really bad decision.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It might have required a little more capital than we put into our initial business, though.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. Well-
Ben:
So that's my week. I've been shopping for electric bikes all week.
Starr:
Well that's good.
Josh:
This has been another one of those weeks where I don't remember where it all went, what I did, but I know I did a lot.
Starr:
That's sort of the pandemic life, isn't it? I mean, you've been doing all the contracting stuff, right?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I've actually been-
Ben:
Yeah, you've been doing the PHP. The library's really had some improvement this week. That's been really cool to see.
Josh:
Yeah, we're almost to zero issues.
Ben:
Yeah, that's pretty awesome.
Josh:
Including enhancements and features. Although I've got a few that I'm going to be creating, so now we can get on to the fun stuff like adding new things.
Ben:
Oh, speaking of enhancements, we had a really awesome customer just last night, this morning, who sent us a request for new functionality in the Ruby gem to be able to notify the API of deployments. We didn't have that code in the gem for a Ruby app to use as a consumer. We had a command line task for that, but it wasn't exposed as code. So I wrote back to the customer, I'm like, "No, we don't have that but I'll create an issue in GitHub and if you want to open a PR, wink, wink, go right ahead." I woke up this morning and there's the PR. I'm like, "Wow, all right."
Josh:
Yeah, isn't that great?
Ben:
Yeah. And he tested it in his app. I'm like, well that's pretty awesome. We have the best customers. We really do.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's awesome. So why are we paying people again? Let's just make it all community maintained.
Ben:
This was a related thread and a couple of tweets going back and forth this week on Twitter and people talking about, "Well, you know, developers are a terrible market. They don't buy anything." And a number of entrepreneurs are like, "Oh, I beg to differ, they actually do buy things."
Starr:
Yeah. But they don't buy things, but their employers buy lots of things.
Ben:
Right. Right. And they definitely are interested in not spending their time on things if they can realize that there's a way to get something that's a quality product. And they are the best customers because when they file those bug reports, it's so easy to fix them. It's great.
Josh:
Yeah, I never get that argument. We buy a lot of things.
Ben:
We do buy a lot of things.
Josh:
We buy things all the time.
Starr:
Yeah, we do buy a lot. So I wonder if it has to do with the age of the developer. Like if you're around 20-something developers, early 20 developers who don't have jobs then, yeah, they're not going to buy much
Josh:
That's just age. 20-somethings don't buy anything.
Starr:
I know because you don't have money.
Josh:
Period. I mean, they buy Netflix and iPhones.
Starr:
Yeah, but as soon as they get one of those sweet startup gigs, they're buying fricking $200 fidget spinners.
Ben:
Don't they have company issued fidget spinners if they're working for that sweet startup?
Starr:
I mean, probably. Probably, yeah.
Josh:
Is that the new retirement gift? The gold fidget spinner? Like the gold watch.
Starr:
Yeah, they give it to you when you're 30.
Ben:
But one thing I actually did do... I guess I got a little bit of work done this week. I spent some time working on moving our stack so that we can more easily have Docker containers running it. So we currently use VMs for everything, but we really want to have an on-prem version. And we're most of the way there, but one of the things is we want to make it easy for people to deploy and so we think that doing so with Docker images is the way to go versus giving a customer, "Here's a bunch of Terraform that you can run and spin up a bunch of VMs. I think people will be happier with Docker images.
Ben:
So I've been moving a lot of our cron jobs from just cron on the box to Sidekiq cron, which an extension to Sidekiq that inserts another puller. So, Sidekiq has puller, it's running your background jobs and it's pulling, I don't know, every whatever seconds to see their new things to do and to spinoff and stuff like that. So Sidekiq cron is a gem that adds another puller that looks for cron jobs that you've defined in a particular configuration, then runs Sidekiq jobs for those things. So, I've been converting a bunch of rake tasks to Sidekiq jobs and it's pretty nice. I like it.
Ben:
It does avoid the problem of having multiple boxes running the same cron job at the same time. It does have that ability, which is the prime thing that we need since we have clusters of VMs running. We were using console to coordinate that before, but yeah, we needed a solution for inside of a Docker container and this seems to do the job.
Josh:
That's good, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Happy. Do recommend.
Josh:
I wonder what else Sidekiq can do for us.
Ben:
I know. Have to get it to wash the dishes. That'd be pretty cool.
Starr:
It already does a lot doesn't it? That's kind of the center of everything.
Ben:
Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah we use Sidekiq Batch for the export jobs because export jobs do a lot of work. So we split that into a bunch of little jobs and combine them all with Sidekiq Batch. That's been pretty cool.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
Yeah. Periodic jobs, exclusive jobs. Yeah, it's all good.
Starr:
Well, let's see, I guess this has been a pretty boring week. I've been working on just writing a bunch of article descriptions, which is very... it's not very fun to talk about. It's kind of boring work, which is why I put it off for so long for so many of these articles.
Josh:
For the rest of the podcast, why don't we just have you read them?
Starr:
We'll just read them. Oh, I'll share my one.
Josh:
You could just go down the list
Starr:
I'll share my one lyfe hack that I figured out. My lyfe hacks are spelled with a Y. The thing about publishing... So, we pay people to do these articles, they give them to me, they're done basically but they're not ready to go on our blog because our blog uses a static site generator and so I've got to add front matter to them, I've got to write descriptions, I've got to make sure they actually render okay in our particular version of Markdown that we accept and all that stuff. There's like a million steps to this. One of the things that made me procrastinate on this is because it would just stress me out that I would... I always felt like I was forgetting a step in this or even if I wasn't forgetting a step, I was worried that I was forgetting a step.
Starr:
So what I eventually did is I made a checklist of about 10 items or whatever and I put that checklist in TextExpander. So now when I want to publish an article, I just do my TextExpander snippet. With TextExpander, you type in a little keyword into whatever app you're using and it just pastes in a predefined snippet. So I can just do my little keyword and it pastes in this list of 10 things into my to do list and then I just check them off as I go through it. It's so much less stressful doing it.
Starr:
And also, the other thing that I found is really useful about this is that before I had this system in place, when I had to start working on one of these article descriptions, because... I don't know, it just seemed overwhelming because I would start and be like, "Okay, I've got to read this article. I've got to figure out what it's about." Because I have a lot of articles in progress, so I forget the details about individual ones until I'm looking at them. They just seemed overwhelming but now with this process in place it's like, okay, all I have to do now is run my image optimization script in that directory. So, I could do that. That's a mechanical thing, it's not big deal. And it's like, "Okay, all I need to do now is I need to go fix Markdownlint errors in VS code or whatever. It just makes it so much easier to get into it, and by the time I've done all these mechanical tasks it's like, "Oh, I remember what the article's about and now I can actually write the description." So it kind of is like boot strapping into this task, which I find kind of useful.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
That is cool. Have you considered using GitHub Actions for things like doing the image squishing and stuff like that?
Starr:
Yes. I would definitely like to set up Markdownlint to run as a GitHub action just because some of this stuff should really be caught at the time that the author pushes it, not by me. But for the image stuff, I don't know... Yes, but also, I'm just like, "Well, I don't know, do I..." I just don't know if I want that run every time. It just seems like there would be some sort of complication there, so it's just kind of scared me off from it. Maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But yeah, so the thing I'm getting at is like, okay, if I... Yeah, would I be interfering with the author if I just... If they committed an image and they were just working on it and suddenly it's like, "We compressed this for you and changed the dimensions of it." I don't know, it seemed like it might get in the way a little bit.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. You can do actions just on a pull request, though. So while the author is working, they're committing and nothing happens. And then when they open the PR, then that action does the squishing.
Starr:
Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point, I'll think about it. I mean, image squishing is relatively easy, but-
Ben:
Yeah, it's like five seconds of your job, yeah.
Josh:
Or you could just use some sort of image squishing CDN. Those exist out there.
Starr:
You know, I'd rather just run my little image squisher in the terminal because I know that shit works and I know that it's not just going to suddenly stop working randomly on a Wednesday.
Ben:
And then you have hand-crafted squished images. I mean, what's... premium, right?
Josh:
You know, Netlify actually has that built into it. I think you might need to use their file storage service. It's built on top of a... I think it's called... It's a Git feature. Git Large File Storage, I think. But basically it's a feature of Git that your platform, your Git provider, can support. And GitHub supports it. So it's like a way of basically pushing... Like managing large files inside of a Git repository. Because otherwise, I don't know if you've ever tried to commit super large files, say like videos or something, to just a regular Git repo, it becomes very hard to manage. And it turns out Git actually has a feature that's specifically for that. But Netlify supports that through... I think if you manage your media through that, then you can actually use their... they just have like an end point that you can use for your images that has parameters where it automatically does the resizing and cropping and compression and everything. Kind of like that thing you built at one point, Ben, upload... What was it called?
Ben:
Upload Juicer.
Josh:
Juicer. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Same idea.
Starr:
Yeah. That's really cool maybe for a more intensive use case, that would be good. I kind of like that I can just preview the post with the changed images and it's like I just don't have to worry about it working, it's just, it's very obvious if it worked, didn't work, or whatever.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I looked into it at one point and it was a little bit involved to set up, which is why we don't currently have it.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. If the rest of this whole process could be as easy as the image squishing, I would be in heaven. Netlify needs to have a service that reads the article and writes a marketing description.
Josh:
Yeah, you push your just general, your title, to it and it spits out the rest of the article.
Starr:
Yeah, they could just make it, make the whole article.
Josh:
The Markdown TextExpander process you mentioned, that would be a useful process in Notion. I've seen people do similar things with their Roam notes or personal knowledge system. But yeah, anything that supports Markdown that will automatically convert it into task lists or something.
Starr:
Yeah. You want to know something cool?
Josh:
What?
Starr:
This is actually very cool. I just recently discovered it. TextExpander can also paste in rich text. So if you want to... Like if you use Apple Notes or something and you wanted to do the same process and have it paste in things with actual check boxes and all that stuff, you can just copy that stuff out of Apple Notes and paste it into the TextExpander thing and then tell it to paste in rich text and it'll do it.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
So it doesn't just have to be Markdown. I happen to use Markdown for my daily to-do list, so that's what I use but it's actually pretty sweet.
Josh:
Yeah, Ben and I use Alfred. You use the snippet manager in Alfred don't you Ben?
Ben:
You know, these days more often than not I use the built in keyword expansion in Apple.
Josh:
Oh, do you?
Ben:
macOS, yeah.
Josh:
Oh, okay.
Ben:
Because my needs are pretty simple typically so, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. I prefer the one in Alfred because actually I really don't like the text expansion and Alfred actually has... You can do a keyword search. So you can search for just a quick fuzzy find on the snippet you're looking for. So you can have your snippet library in there. And it does support text expansion. Like you can give it a keyword and say, "Expand this," but it gives you the option not to. Yeah, I don't like when I'm typing and I accidentally type the wrong... Make a typo and all of a sudden my text expanded. Or sometimes I don't want to expand it.
Ben:
All my keyword triggers in macOS have a semicolon as the prefix
Josh:
Okay, yeah.
Ben:
So I can't have any accidental unless I'm typing a random semicolon for some reason, but yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. But at the same time then I'm like, well that's basically my Alfred workflow where I do whatever command space for the launcher and then I just find it. So, yeah it's just a couple extra keystrokes.
Starr:
I'm conservative, so I have two semicolons as my-
Josh:
It's like a path-
Starr:
I might be writing some JavaScript or something but I'm never going to have two of them right next to-
Josh:
It's two semicolons and a password that you change every couple months.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
You have to plug in your security key.
Starr:
Exactly. It's two semicolons followed by the ND5 and the current date.
Ben:
The thing that's really cool about TextExpander, I used to use it and I loved it-
Josh:
Yeah, me too.
Ben:
... was it's not just plain text. You can do fields and stuff. It's pretty advanced. So you can have it like you expand the text but it has placeholders for you to go in and fill in some stuff. So you can put in like a name or it can dynamically insert the date. It can do all kind of crazy cool stuff.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I used to use it but then I ditched it when they moved to their subscription model because it's just like, this is a utility, I don't want to have to pay yearly for this. Which I still think is kind of a valid thing, but I tried a couple of the alternatives and then I tried this and I was just like, "This is clearly better and it's really not that much per year," so it's like, "Eh, maybe, yeah, I'll give it a shot." I haven't actually upgraded yet, but I'm thinking I might.
Josh:
What, you might pay for something?
Starr:
I pay for lots of things.
Josh:
Completely out of character.
Starr:
I pay for lots of things.
Ben:
Developers don't buy anything, come on.
Josh:
I have a lot of paid software on my Mac, come to think of it. I almost prefer to pay for it these days.
Starr:
Oh, me too. I prefer to pay for it.
Josh:
Weird. It's like-
Starr:
I know how they're making money that way.
Josh:
Yeah. You know how they're making money. You feel like there might be some actual... like they actually care about proactive support and maintenance and stuff. Not that just regular open source software can't have good support, but financial incentive does help.
Ben:
Yeah, reminds me of that tweet from DHH when they were launching Hey and someone tweeted like, "Well how are they going to monetize it? His response was, "Money. We're going to charge money."
Josh:
What? Yeah. Love it. DHH is such a radical.
Starr:
You know, I do admit also one thing I kind of like about TextExpander is because it's such a hokey thing that they seem to have built into some weird enterprise business, I don't even understand it. But I kind of have a little fondness in my heart because it just seems like... I don't know, it seems like a chipmunk somehow entered the Wimbledon and is winning or something. It just makes no sense to me, but I kind of am glad that it's happening.
Josh:
The story with that was that after you downloaded it and they had your email, they sent you some enterprise sales like, "Let's hop on a call" type email, right? Is that what happened?
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, they were like, "Oh, I see somebody else in the Honeybadger domain also has an account with us, so let's see about how we can make this work better for y'all's teams so you're not just doing individual stuff." It wasn't sleazy or anything. It was a little bit weird and unexpected but I didn't feel dirty by it. I was just like, "I'm sorry, I'm just using this by myself so you're not going to sell this to my team." And they were like, "Okay, bye."
Josh:
It's interesting, though. Yeah.
Ben:
I added that email to my swipe file for when I start doing that for Honeybadger customers, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, it seems like something along the lines of what we could do. I think it's interesting that they're... I had forgot that they had pointed out that someone else at the team had it. So if you look for flags basically to figure out who you actually should reach out to and who you shouldn't.
Ben:
Yeah, that's much better than just scraping the email addresses out of our documentation site and spamming us.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
They're actually ethically emailing people for sales leads, I think.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Speaking of that though, I had a great conversation with a mentor this week talking about sales and growth and things to do. He gave me a bunch of great advice, but on the one hand, I was kind of embarrassed because he was sharing some things that are pretty basic. Kind of like table stakes for SaaS. I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, we could do better at that." Like, "Oh, we don't have all of our ducks in a row." But on the other hand, going over the numbers, the business is great as far as our revenues and our RPU and our LTV and all those things that you want to measure. All those numbers are good for us. So it's like, well, you've done really well so far. If you continue to do what you've been doing and you add these other things that can improve on, well then, great. It'll be even better.
Josh:
Yeah, that's what I've been thinking. Yeah.
Ben:
So I left that conversation much more hopeful and enthused and excited than going into it, so that was a good time. So I guess the moral of the story is find a mentor and talk to that person every now and then.
Josh:
Yeah, I was thinking earlier this week that if there is a risk in us... because we all tend to get impatient from time to time and be like... One of us will... It happens pretty... Seems like it's kind of predictable. Every so often one of us gets the bug. It's like, "Okay, I got to just go and just burn out on this." And I think that it's good to get inspired and want to go and try new things and try to move the needle, but if there is a risk to that besides the obvious just you don't want to burn out, is that if you get distracted form the things that are actually working and stop doing something just so you can go and try to do some big... Look for some big growth event or outcome, I think we want to make sure we don't stop doing what is working. We want to be consistent and systematic with that. And look for new things to try that we haven't done before.
Ben:
Yeah. Which is a great argument for building those systems like we've been doing. Because-
Josh:
Yeah. Things are running themselves.
Ben:
Yeah. Once you have that content system running like Starr has, then you don't have to put a lot of effort in that. Then you can go and look at those other things that you also want to do without dropping the ball-
Josh:
Yeah, without worrying. Yeah, that's it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
It's like, how do you juggle? How do you keep adding balls to juggle?
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah, that was the reason for doing the third party blog stuff in the first place is just because one of us would start blogging, or I would start blogging, and then it's like, "Oh, I have to go do something else. Okay, no new blog posts for a couple months."
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And then it's like, I feel all guilty about that. But you know, it's like, I think there's this temptation to be like, "Well, I can do everything myself as well as a team of full time people working somewhere else could do." I mean, I know I feel that temptation. So I have to remind myself that it's like, no, I actually do have limits to the amount of time and energy I have.
Ben:
Yeah. I think the other temptation is to just hire someone to do it. Like, "Oh, this thing needs to be done. I don't have time to do it, so I'm going to hire someone to do it." And then all of a sudden you turn around, you've got 100 people working for you.
Josh:
Well you can do everything that a team of 20 people in a normal company could do.
Starr:
Yeah. But you can't do it as fast.
Josh:
You can only do everything one at a time.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, you can do it like 20 times slower.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Probably not as well because your expertise is spread pretty thin at that point.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That's the slow growth approach to business. It's ecologically sound because it's maintainable.
Starr:
Oh my god. Talking about growth, this is-
Josh:
Because it's self defeating.
Starr:
I've got a funny story. So with regard to the stock market and all this, basically all my life I've been a perma-bear. I've just been like, "Things are too wild. Things are getting too crazy." And it just keeps rising. So recently in the past month or so, I was just like, "You know, I did not jump on the whole GameStop bandwagon. I'm not going to throw my money at that because that just seems like a disaster waiting to happen." But it did kind of pique my interest and be like, "I would like to actually understand how all this stuff works." So I've been just kind of reading books. Because up until now I've just been a very, "I'm just going to put all my money in an index fund, just forget about it."
Starr:
I read a thing about value investing a couple years ago and I tried to look at companies like K10s or 10Ks or whatever they're called, and eventually I was just like, "This is just an insane amount of work and also how am I going to get better at this because I don't know if I'm right," for like, five years. So I just kind of gave that up. Anyways, so I was like, "Okay." So the past month or so I've just been kind of keeping an eye on things daily and being like, "Oh, okay, as I learn stuff, maybe I'll start trying some individual stock investments." And then it's the moment I do that the market just crashes. So I am, I think, the most accurate contrarian indicator in existence. So I'll let y'all know-
Josh:
When Starr starts investing it's time to get out.
Starr:
I'll let y'all know when I lose interest and then you'll know things are about to just take off.
Josh:
Cool. Nice.
Ben:
You should keep us apprised on that.
Josh:
Yup.
Ben:
Yeah, well, you're reading books and not just asking your random Twitter followers, though, for investing advice? That sounds like a pretty dangerous strategy. I don't know.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean honestly, I've talked before about how I just love looking at charts and stuff and I don't know why I didn't figure this out before, but the stock market is just full of all the charts you could ever look at.
Josh:
You just get to look at charts. That's your job. That's literally the job.
Starr:
Yeah. It's just looking at charts and be like, "Oh, I wonder what's happening here?" And then just kind of... I don't even... I mean, yes, I would like to be able to retire one day, but that's... the motivating factor here is just, "Oh, this is kind of interesting."
Josh:
No. No, no. The best reason about retiring on stocks is that you get to retire to your charts just to look at them all day. That's what you do in retirement.
Starr:
Oh my God. That sounds like heaven, Josh.
Josh:
Yeah. And imagine, you could have the eight monitor array eventually at your desk for-
Starr:
Oh, like the Bloomberg terminal?
Josh:
... monitoring different exchanges. Yeah.
Starr:
No, I think I'd go the other way. I'm going to be one of those people with the graph paper who takes the price every day out of the newspaper and writes it into the cell of their graph paper.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
But it's been pretty interesting. I've been reading some books about... I've been reading one book by this really famous trader in the 20s, 30s and he's describing his system for identifying pivot points and stuff in the market. Nowadays most people just use a chart because it's the easiest way but this way is actually writing down numbers and keeping track of them and stuff. And I was like, oh my God, this is a state machine. This guy's describing a state machine in very... very clumsily and very... if we were writing this out as a program, it would be terrible code. But he's actually describing a state machine. So it's pretty neat. So it's like, yeah, if you have today's prize, you have yesterday's prize. If this condition is true, then the state changes from upturn to downturn. Or ordinary correction. I mean, he had this list of, I think, eight states or something.
Ben:
That's really cool.
Ben:
It'd be fun if you actually made that into a program and then wrote a blog post about it. That'd be pretty... I'd read that.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like there's much easier ways to go about things these days, but-
Ben:
Well sure, but it'd be fun.
Starr:
Yeah, it'd be fun. It's called, I think, The Livermore Market Key. I think people actually have written blog posts about it. But they did it overlaying it onto charts or something, so it's not quite the same.
Ben:
Yeah, I want to see it in Ruby.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
But first you have to make a DSL for doing stock market based state machines. Then you can write your-
Starr:
Oh, that's the Ruby way. That's the Ruby way. There you go. I mean, to be honest, I actually, I started to translate it into pseudo code Ruby and then I was just like, "This is just so spaghetti. It's really hard for me to follow." So I was like, "I'm not even sure I just want to go there." It's describing a pretty simple thing, but it's got so many... it describes it in, like, 28 steps and each of them has like five sub-steps and they're all spread out. So it's really hard to make sure that you've got all the different conditions in place.
Josh:
So did you try to use a state machine library? Because that sounds like the best-
Starr:
Oh, that was my problem. That was my problem, yeah.
Josh:
That's the use case.
Starr:
That was my problem.
Ben:
I forgot there's a gem for that. Or more than one, actually.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I was trying to roll my own.
Josh:
Doesn't the financial industry... Isn't Python or... Is that the more popular... What do they use for... What's the popular language in finance, like fintech?
Starr:
Probably Python for analysis.
Josh:
Or C-
Starr:
Probably like-
Josh:
Probably not C, but-
Starr:
C++ for-
Josh:
Maybe they're moving to Rust.
Starr:
All the weird-
Josh:
What do the high frequency traders use?
Starr:
... high frequency... Oh, they probably use C++.
Josh:
You think? Yeah.
Starr:
Or Rust or something. Yeah.
Josh:
Because you got to... yeah. Well, I think it would be a fun project to go back to the beginning of the stock market and take every single person's... person who wrote a book that had their own theory of investing and code a trading algorithm from it and then run them all in parallel and see which one wins.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. But the thing is they're not giving necessarily mechanical things. They're like, "Here's..." They're like, "This feature should alert you and then you should look at these other factors and make a decision." It's not just like-
Josh:
Okay, so yeah. So just get artificial intelligence machine learning thing and just have it read the books-
Starr:
Oh, I'll just do that. Yeah.
Josh:
... let' those do the trading-
Starr:
I'll use the AWS one.
Josh:
... and we'll see what happens. Because isn't that basically what high frequency trading is these days?
Josh:
I mean, I'm pretty sure high frequency trading is that, essentially. Do they know what's going on anymore?
Starr:
Yeah, I don't know. Well there is a... I forget what it's called, but there's... it's not trading view, that's just a... Anyway, there is an actual place where you can go and sign up and you can develop your own trading algorithms. And it's basically your code will be hosted on this company's servers and will be fed in the data as it comes in. And you can actually trade algorithmically. And then if your algorithm actually produces profits and can do that in a scalable way, then they will actually license it as a black box to hedge funds and people who have actual money. I don't know how much these people pay for these algorithms, but I don't know, it's pretty interesting. It's a little bit more intense than I am personally up for. I think I'm more like a daily or weekly chart type of person. I'm not really a give me second by second stuff to feed into my AI that I developed.
Josh:
They really love their black boxes in fintech it seems and dark exchanges.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
They just want it all to be completely opaque.
Starr:
Well no, I mean that's just because... Well that's for the author's Benefit. Because you don't want to actually tell the people your algorithm because then they'll just use it. They'll steal it from you.
Josh:
That's true.
Starr:
But, I don't know. It'd be an interesting hobby.
Josh:
This is why there's not open source trading algorithms.
Starr:
Anyway, it seems like we're about tapped out for topics. Maybe we should wrap it.
Ben:
Sounds good.
Starr:
All right, this has been FounderQuest. If you want, go and write us a review and we will talk to you next week.
Show notes:
Links:
Loom
Telestream
Recut
Lovesac
Comfy Sacks
Flipper
Full transcript:
Ben:
You know how we had that recent episode with John Nunemaker about Flipper and feature flags and that sort of thing.
Starr:
Oh, a podcast episode.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
I thought you meant a dramatic episode.
Josh:
It's just another episode with John.
Starr:
Oh my God. That guy.
Josh:
That was awesome. Yeah. That was a good conversation.
Ben:
We talked in that conversation about using Flipper at Honeybadger, because we've been using Rollout for our feature flags, which, if you didn't listen to that episode, you don't know what a feature flag is. It's a branch in your code that conditionally runs some feature. You can limit it when you deploy it to people and you don't have to deploy a new thing to all your customers at the same time. You can test it live.
Josh:
I'm not sure if we actually explained it in that episode.
Ben:
Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.
Josh:
This will be good background.
Starr:
I wasn't there. I'm usually the driving force behind backing up and explaining things.
Josh:
Yeah, Starr is good. Always, yeah, you've been pretty good about that. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I went ahead and did that. I put a Flipper in Honeybadger and tested a new feature. We are switching from Postgres to DynamoDB for our notice storage. That's every occurrence of every error. It's a lot of data and we cut over a few weeks ago to be reading from that data in Dynamo because now it's fully populated with the past month's of data and it's being updated. We're basically writing this to two places and now it's time to read from the new place.
Ben:
I tested that with Flipper and I'm so glad that I used Flipper for that feature because it saved my bacon this week. I deployed the reading from Dynamo. Oh, actually. We've been doing reading for a while and what I deployed this week was not writing to Postgres anymore, so stopping the dual rights. I put that behind a feature flag and I turned it on just for my projects. I'm so glad I did because I found a bug that really, really would have caused issues for all of our customers if I had deployed that just willy nilly. Yay for feature flags. Yay for Flipper. Go use it. It's a great thing.
Starr:
That's awesome.
Josh:
It's willy nilly. Is that a Ruby joke?
Starr:
How much money do you think that was worth avoiding that mistake? How much would you pay to do that? A thousand dollars? $10,000.
Ben:
Yeah, it's got to be a more than a thousand dollars, for sure.
Starr:
Okay. We're trying to help John with his pricing here.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Starr:
I'm sure that Flipper costs a lot less than a thousand dollars. It does.
Ben:
It's worth every penny.
Starr:
Oh, look at that. Real product placement. We're growing up. Look at this podcast we're doing. We just slid that right in.
Ben:
Yeah. In other infrastructure news, I got to say that having your primary search cluster die is not a fun experience, especially when it happens at 4:30 in the morning.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But I will say this. Amazon, props, Amazon, because we host our Elasticsearch cluster with Amazon. Yay for not having to figure out how to be an expert at running Elasticsearch myself and having to repair things when they went sideways. Also, the tech support was great. They zeroed in on what the issue was. It's our fault apparently, or kind of. What the real explanation is, everything was looking fine to me. All the stats were green. I had monitored six different things based on the documentation that Amazon provided. All those things were fine. There were no alarms. It just died. I'm like, "What the heck's going on?" That's why I opened a ticket.
Ben:
It took them a while to find out what was going on. It took them, oh, I don't know, two or three hours because they were a little perplexed because everything looked fine. Really what it came down to was the CPU spikes that we had. We had some CPU spikes that went over 90% and this was not in their documentation, but apparently that's a really bad thing. We had enough of those spikes that it just gave up the ghost finally. They encouraged us to upgrade the cluster, which I did. Once that was all done and deployed, then everything was fine. I made a suggestion that they might update their documentation for monitoring that particular metric. They appreciated that suggestion.
Ben:
After things were all good yesterday and I had gone and I was decompressing and things were back to normal. I had done the backfill. I was feeling pretty good about where we were. It wasn't a hair on fire situation, right? The app has been architected so that even if we lost our search cluster, it's okay. The whole app doesn't die, right? You can still use Honeybadger. We're still processing errors. We're still sending alerts. People are still using the UI. The way that we decided to ingest the data into the search cluster was delayed or put in a separate queue so that we could still be processing data and we could replay that data when the cluster came back when I was ready for indexing.
Ben:
I had just spent several hours on building some pretty awesome, in my opinion, backfill scripts using SQS and Lambda. All I had to do was queue up all those things that didn't get processed and they got processed. They got back-filled, so yesterday afternoon, I was looking out my kitchen window and I was feeling pretty happy. I was like, "That went really, really well for having such a really bad thing happen."
Josh:
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed yesterday, the outages we have been having lately seem to not usually even be our fault. It's when Amazon has an issue, which I guess, the way you look at it, on one hand, we're at Amazon's mercy now. I think that's the other side of the story, but it is nice that we're not dealing with the actual failures that you get if you're running your own box or something that you're responsible for every little, like network failures, for instance. When we used to have DNS go out or something, or those types of things, it's nice not having those types of issues. I'd much rather be at Amazon's mercy, I think, than be at the mercy of myself.
Ben:
Right. Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know, this has a little bit of a nostalgic flavor to it, right? Just a random, oh, if your CPU usage goes over X amount, your cluster just dies. That's the Elasticsearch I know and love from back in the day. It was nice. It's nice to stay in touch with our roots every now and again.
Josh:
It seems that would be the kind of thing that they could at least have a default notification for. If they know that that's a terrible situation, why don't they just have an email that automatically, it sends you and, "Oh, we noticed you're not monitoring those sorts of things." I could see why you wouldn't want to, but it just seems like it would be a nice touch.
Ben:
Yeah. That's not the way Amazon does things.
Josh:
That's not Amazon. I know.
Ben:
Yeah. They're really a sharp knives kind of company. It's like, "Here is all the tools and we'll give you some good guidance, but you have to go and look for that guidance." I mean, literally, we have eight alarms CloudWatch alarms set up for our Elasticsearch cluster. All of them came from the documentation where Amazon says, "Here, you should monitor this metric and it should not go over this threshold for this long." I'm like, "Okay," plug those numbers in and I've got my alarms but they're not going to force you to do it. Yeah, I guess a more curated experience would be, they would say, "Here. Here's all the pre-configured alarms based on our recommendations and then you can turn them off if you don't want them, but we really think you should have them."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Maybe it's a suggestion I should make to them.
Josh:
I'm pretty sure they'll just laugh at you.
Ben:
They assume you know what you're doing.
Starr:
They're like, "Sure, we'll just go tell Jeff that right away." I guess he's not even in charge anymore.
Josh:
Maybe he'll work on that now that he's not CEO.
Starr:
There you go. I've got to ask, circling back to the first thing about the Dynamo. Are we storing notices now in Dynamo or did we back off of that because of the bug?
Ben:
Yeah. We've been storing notices in Dynamo for a long time now, weeks or months.
Starr:
Did we turn off the Postgres?
Ben:
No. Postgres is still going.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
Yeah, that was the bug where, when I stopped it for a few projects, those projects started having some intermittent problems.
Josh:
You fixed that this morning.
Ben:
I fixed that this morning.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I bet Postgres is going to feel so good. Those database servers are going to feel so good when that gets turned off.
Josh:
Imagine.
Starr:
They're just going to be like, "Oh, finally. Finally I get to relax."
Ben:
Are they going to feel a little lonely and be, "Hey, what happened? Where did all the traffic go?"
Josh:
"Why aren't you talking to me anymore?"
Starr:
We're still sending them stuff. We're still sending all our users to them. They actually get to interact with all the people.
Ben:
"Don't you love me anymore? What did I do?"
Starr:
This is why I'm not running ops.
Josh:
We've been talking about this for a long time.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. We have been talking about it for a long time.
Josh:
We're getting there.
Ben:
It's just part of the trend of offloading more and more stuff to Amazon so that we can sip drinks on the beach in Hawaii.
Josh:
Yeah. Does this mean that we can move Postgres to RDS or something like it?
Ben:
That's the direction we're headed. Yeah.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Are we going to have anything? Are we just going to be running app servers eventually?
Ben:
It's just going to be a totally virtual company. We're just going to sit back, just cash the checks.
Josh:
It keeps getting better and better.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Speaking of loving this life, so I have a bit of an experience. I'm not going to name names because it's kind of negative experience, but I will say that for the past several years, we've run Honeybadger and from time to time, I have daydreamed. The grass is always greener, right? I have daydreamed "What would it be like to go back to a real job where I'm not in charge of everything and I'm just in charge of my little thing and I can turn off the pager and stuff," so I have that kind of wishful thinking.
Josh:
Where I could go on vacations.
Ben:
Right, right. That sort of thing. I think about that every now and then. Recently, I had an experience where I was interacting with some developers that were working on a project that didn't have a level of coordination that I'd been used to. I was not in control of the situation. I was not the boss. It was not my project. It was just chaotic, I think is the best way that I can describe this particular project. I was interested in participating, but I just, I couldn't. I was like, "No, I can't do that. My life is crazy enough. I don't need more crazy," but as I thought about it, I thought, "You know what? There are some organizations that are like that. There are some, probably many companies that are like that where the development team is just all over the place and maybe they don't have a great architecture or whatever."
Ben:
I had that experience and just made me renew my gratitude for the nice architecture that we have, for all the care that we've put into our systems so that it's, in my opinion, well designed and reliable and it's orderly and things make sense. I'm just loving Honeybadger this week.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah. Then things, yeah. Things are making more sense over time, it seems.
Ben:
Shout out to all those people who feel like they're overwhelmed by the chaos at their employer. I feel for you.
Josh:
A hair on fire company. Everyone's running around.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
You all were talking about being able to go on vacation. I don't know if you all have heard about jobs lately, but it seems like when I hear my friends talking about their childhoods, it doesn't really seem like they get much real vacation where they're not having to be glued to a computer anyway. They're not having to be on call.
Josh:
I wonder if since so many companies have been switching to remote the past year because of the pandemic, but they don't really, they haven't figured it out. I wonder if people are really especially struggling with being glued to Slack or being just stuck on the internet. That's easy to fall into, even if you know what you're doing. I could see that, where you can't go on vacation without having Slack on your phone and checking in or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. It's definitely a skill that you have to build up, both individually and as an organization, right? You have to set expectations. I saw this cool thing. I don't remember where I saw it, but I think it was a signature in an email or something. Basically, the idea was, this person said something along the lines of, "Your work hours may not be my work hours, so please do not feel obligated to respond to this during your non-work hours." Right? The idea being, I might be up at 4:00 AM and sending this email, but doesn't mean you have to be up at 4:00 AM to respond to this email. You can get to it whenever, right? I like the idea of just being upfront with people. It's okay to just be calm and not have to feel like everything's urgent, sort of thing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I'm loving the calm company lifestyle.
Josh:
Yeah. I was worried about that this week as I've been interacting with our awesome contracting team.
Starr:
How's that going?
Josh:
It's going really well. We've been getting a lot of work done and I've been using this, I've pretty much been centralizing everything around GitHub. I've spent the week pretty much living in the GitHub notifications tab. I did some work last week to tune my GitHub notifications so that they're not quite as overwhelming as they used to be, just unsubscribed from projects that I'm not directly responsible for or need to monitor. I can now basically keep, whatever, inbox zero in my notifications tab. I can be sure that anything that needs my attention is in there.
Josh:
I've been so excited about all the progress we've been making. I've been really on top of reviewing everything as immediately as possible. I was like, "Oh, no. What if people get used to this?" I just live here now. I now exist within the GitHub notifications tab. If I add 10 people to this process, that's going to be my full-time life. It made me just think, it is important to build the asynchronous expectation, manage that expectation, even if at the moment, you can be responding instantly.
Starr:
I've done that a bit with my blog contractors. Yeah, when I first set everything up, I was just like you are now. I was just constantly monitoring my project management and getting back to everybody super quickly and everything. Eventually, it's just like, I can't do anything else if I'm doing this. This has to be my full-time job forever if I just keep doing this. What I did is I essentially made Monday blog day and sometimes, I mean, it's still spilling over into other things, but eventually, I want most of the blog stuff to happen on Monday. What I mean by that is, so Ben Findley is going in and he's doing, if people open a ticket or they ask a question for us, and it's not something super easy to answer, it's something that requires a decision, he'll just be like, "Okay, we will get back to you after our meeting on Monday."
Starr:
Every Monday, we have a blog meeting where we just go over all the proposals, go over questions that people have, look at what drafts need to be reviewed, et cetera. We just knock them all out. Then, we get done with our meeting and I go off and do the stuff that it doesn't make sense to have Ben Findley do because it's of more of a technical nature and yeah, so basically, everything gets concentrated around Mondays. I find that this is much more sane, much more tolerable. I'm not quite at the point where the rest of my week is free for other things, but I can see it. I can see it on the horizon. I'm so close to it.
Starr:
One of the other main things that was holding me back from that was that I was scheduling, when authors get in touch with us and want to write for us, I usually talk to them, have a brief Zoom call. I was doing this throughout the day, I'm sorry, throughout the week. That was really messing with me. It was breaking up my day in a weird way. I was like, "Okay, all of those go on Monday too." Yeah. I'm really hoping that this, I don't know. In terms of setting expectations where you're definitely doing that in terms of just, I tell people, I'm like, "If you are working on an article for us and you're actively working on it, it will probably take a month from start to finish. You're not going to do four articles a month for us, because it just takes time, right? This isn't the only thing that we are doing."
Josh:
Yeah. What it sounds like is that we're finally, it only took us 10 years, but we're finally getting around to implementing that four hour work week book.
Ben:
Right. Right. Yeah. On that note, I decided, I made a, for me was a dramatic decision this week.
Josh:
What's this?
Ben:
I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday. I don't remember when, but I had this email from Postmark and they said, "We're getting rid of TLS version one." TLS is the SSL protocols that web servers use when you talk to them and version one is old and busted and we need to get rid of it. They said, "It looks your app is still talking to our API on that protocol. You need to upgrade that before we turn it off. That's going to happen in April," blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay.
Ben:
Normally I would put that off. I'd be like, "April, I'll get around to that. No problem," but for some reason, I don't know why, I was like, "You know what? I should just go ahead and take care of that." I knew exactly what I needed to do. I just needed to upgrade Ruby. I figured, "While I'm at it, I'll upgrade the Ubuntu version that we're using," because we're on an older, it's still LTS, so we're still covered, but there's a newer one since then. I'm like, "You know what? I'll just make some new images and we'll have a new Ruby. We'll have a new OS. Everything will be fresh and sparkly clean and it'll be great. It will last another couple of years and I won't have to think about it again."
Ben:
Here's where the decision came in. Normally in this situation, I would just go do the thing, right? I would make a new image, beat it up, blah, blah, blah. This time I said, "You know what? I am never going to do another thing like this again in Honeybadger without documenting it, step-by-step, every thing that has to be done, every command that gets typed in, every action that I take is going to be documented so that the next time this happens, someone else can do it without me." Yay. I know you've been wanting this for a very long time, Starr and Josh. I've made efforts to document along the way, but this is the first time that I'm like, "You know what? Everything I do is going to get documented so that I don't have to be anywhere near the thing the next time this process has to happen."
Ben:
It took me probably at least twice as long to get the task done because it was like, "Oh yeah. There's that thing. Oh, there's that thing." I had to type it in the document as I was going, but now, there's a document and now, anybody can do it and it's great. I'm loving it.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I read the document and the process makes sense to me now. It's very demystified. I'm not volunteering to do it, by the way, but it's definitely the sort of thing that you could just take that piece now and plug that into our system of work and have a contractor or an employee or whatever do it. Yeah. As long as they're familiar with Amazon, I mean, it's all very straightforward. It was more straightforward than I imagined. I think in a lot of cases, all you got to do is write it down and it starts to make sense.
Ben:
Yeah. I'm pulling back the curtain. You can see how the sausage is made now.
Josh:
Yeah. Now the key to the success with this strategy is, maintaining that document has to be part of, that should be a step in the document because then you have whoever does it next time needs to prepare the way for the person that does it after them. As long as everyone keeps that documentation up to date from that point on, then the torch gets passed, basically, because processes do evolve and I'm sure it won't be exactly the same next time potentially.
Ben:
Right. Right. Yeah. You can follow that principle of, leave it better than you found it, kind of thing.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. That's a good ...
Ben:
I'm going to go add a note to document right now, right at the end saying, "If you got this far and there are any changes, go back and document those changes."
Josh:
Nice. Yeah, that's good.
Ben:
Yeah, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. We'll see if I really stick to this resolution. It's going to be tough, but I'm feeling pretty committed because I do want to get to a point. I guess I'm getting jealous of Starr's infrastructure and Josh's budding new infrastructure. I want my own infrastructure like that where I can just have everything like that.
Josh:
Yeah. I see this as, this is an agency, this ability to outsource work within Honeybadger. I want to add more to it over time. We've got authors now, writing is outsourced and then we've got specific pieces of work, development work within the company currently, we're able to outsource and the more we can plug into that system, the less we have to be responsible for. I really like the idea of thinking of it like we're building our own little software agency inside of Honeybadger where Honeybadger is the sole client and we can basically can just funnel work to it.
Starr:
Yeah. I think of it, the stuff I've been doing, I've been thinking of it almost like an engineering project. I'm building a machine that creates blog posts, right, or creates some sort of content because you can point the machine and whatever, and yeah, the downside of that is it takes a lot longer than just making a blog post, right? It takes a lot of time to do that, but, eventually it gets going and it's nice. One thing I just wanted to throw out there with regards to documenting things, and I'm not sure if is the right choice for the stuff you're doing, Ben, or not. That's up to you to decide. One thing I found useful and I might actually do more is just a video for recording. How do you do a thing on a website and then what series of steps do you do, just taking a screen cast of yourself doing it. When I remember to do it, I'm like, "Oh yeah, this is way easier than if I was trying to explain it to somebody."
Ben:
Yeah. I love that idea. I hate the idea of recording myself, but I love the idea of having that recording. Yeah. I think that provides a lot of context and I think there's value. It reminds me of the DHH's video when he introduced Rails, his, build a blog in 15 minutes thing, and there are parts in there he's like, "Oops," where he made a mistake, right? I think even in the mistakes of those kinds of videos, there's a lot of valuable info. It's like, "Oh, I was going to do this.," or, "Oh, I forgot about that," and stuff that just doesn't really come up in a document like they do when you're watching someone do that thing.
Starr:
Yeah. Totally. If those really bug you, we can get an editor. We have got a podcast editor and they can just edit out all the oopsies. You're just in the matrix. You're Neo.
Josh:
We can have it transcribed too. We would get the actual guide from it as well.
Starr:
That's true.
Josh:
It could just be our internal. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Then you have to, and then you should record your Team X session or whatever so you can have all those commands recorded for you and you just copy and paste them in.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. It sounds great.
Josh:
We'll call it Ben Curtis University or Honeybadger university.
Ben:
Well, that's the other thing, I guess, aside from being recorded is, it feels like the most boring thing in the world to have someone watch this, right? Upgrading Ruby, compiling Ruby, and updating our Ansible scripts. All those things to me just seem exceedingly, so crushingly boring to watch. I'm like, "Why would I inflict this upon anyone?"
Starr:
Not if you're me who is trying to figure out how the hell to do it. That would be exactly the video I wanted to see most.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think there are some newer screen recording, screen casting software. I think there's some software out there, the newer things that people have been building that make it a lot easier too. I don't know. I forgot. I've seen a few. I don't remember their names, but it seems like if it was just easier to record and maybe do some quick editing along the way or pause it while the compile is happening and then resume. Okay, it's finished now and now we're back. Little things like that make it a lot easier to do that on a regular basis.
Ben:
I'm going to have to, I'll think about that. I think I've seen Loom referenced for that.
Josh:
Yeah, Loom, that was one. Yeah. Loom scared me because I tried it. Did I tell about this?
Starr:
No.
Josh:
Loom, I did a trial of Loom and I had left it installed on my computer and the app had had some glitchy behavior that happened a couple of times and I didn't think about it, but then one day, it was, I forget exactly what it was doing, but I noticed it. I was investigating basically, I think how to quit it or something. It opens up the Loom website and there an eight hour video of my screen because it streams to their service and that's not cool.
Ben:
That's not cool at all.
Josh:
No, it's not at all. It's not cool. I literally panicked and I mean, deleted that, deleted my account and I have never used Loom again. I'm a little bit skittish on Loom now. Yeah.
Starr:
There is also, you just quick time record and then Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah, but then, you lose a lot of the nice features I was talking about. I think Loom is one of the ones that does have, the ease of use of being able to just quickly do a screencast and it puts your little, your face down in the bottom and it has some of those, I don't know, editing or screen casting features.
Ben:
I have ScreenFlow, which is a Mac software that allows you to do recordings pretty easily.
Josh:
The classic one, huh?
Ben:
Yeah. It's awesome. It's great, and I got it specifically to do, back in their freelancing days, actually, when I was showing clients stuff, like, "Hey, here's how this works," and I would just walk them through something and, yeah, it's fantastic. I haven't used it in awhile. I can't remember if it has the watch your face and do the screen at the same time thing. It probably does by now.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I mean, really, we don't really need to see your face, Ben. You're upgrading Ubuntu. Your face is fine, nothing against it, but I mean ...
Ben:
You don't want to see the pensive, or the utterly bored stuff like that? I just saw, I have to look this up because I can't remember the name of it, but I just saw on Twitter, I think it was Alex Hillman. I think he was talking about this video editing thing that came out. Maybe he's on product hunt. I don't know. Basically, it takes out all of the pauses. It just automatically cuts out all the silence for you. Apparently, it does all that annoying stuff. I'll have to check that out. Maybe that would also be something that we can help make that a nicer experience rather than just sitting there and watching me blink.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. The one snag is I typically do this stuff, again at 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM and the rest of the family is not awake. Having me giving the monologue about what I'm doing.
Josh:
It's okay. You can whisper.
Ben:
I can whisper, yes.
Starr:
That would be amazing, actually. That would be be amazing.
Ben:
Don't forget to use Sudo. That's a whisper. That's so awesome. I'm going to have a YouTube channel.
Starr:
Well, the big thing in my life this week has been, there's a company whose name I'm really embarrassed to say, so I'm going to try to avoid it. It makes giant beanbags. As you'll know, I recently finished building a sort of backyard office and it's a little bit larger than just a desk. My desk and stuff takes up about, I don't know, a third of it. The rest of the space, I really wanted to be a nice reading nook type thing where I could, basically where anybody in the family could be like, "Okay, I want to be in a quiet place and not be surrounded by clutter," because we got a small kid, so of course, everything in the main house is just a disaster.
Starr:
I got this gigantic beanbag. It's six foot diameter and it's amazing. It's amazing. I love it. I also got a matching ottoman. I got a rug to put under it and it's covered in this white stuff that looks, if you've ever seen raw cotton or something, it's kind of furry, it's kind of swirly. It's really nice. That's my ...
Josh:
Cozy.
Starr:
That's my fun thing. Yeah. I can go, I can finish, I don't know, working on some Honeybadger stuff. I want to take a five minute break and I can just go plop down and this gigantic thing. It's glorious.
Josh:
Yeah. The way I'm picturing this is, your desk takes up a quarter of the office and then the other three quarters is the bean bag. Is that-
Starr:
Pretty much. I mean, the bean bag takes up about a quarter of it.
Josh:
Oh, okay.
Starr:
Yeah. I've got a room divider, so I can't actually see the beanbag from my desk. It's actually turning out very nice, the setup. I'm usually terrible at interior design or whatever, but this is actually turning out really, really great.
Ben:
Does, does it have a freshmen dorm room kind of vibe going?
Starr:
Oh no, no, no. We're much classier than that.
Ben:
Okay.
Starr:
No, no. It's kind of a, I don't know, a hippie lady vibe going.
Ben:
Okay. Yeah.
Starr:
I'll take a picture.
Ben:
Cool. I love interior design stuff, so I'm all about seeing pictures of people's places.
Starr:
Cool.
Josh:
I'm considering a giant bean bag now.
Ben:
Yeah. I've thought about doing that. Our couch needs to be replaced in our living room. We seriously thought about, get rid of the couch, just get one of the huge beanbags or maybe two, right? We haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
Starr:
Yeah. The thing about the thing about this is you wouldn't want to sit on it with somebody who you're not comfortable snuggling up to, because even if you're sitting separately, you're still very close. It pushes you together.
Josh:
I'm sure your kids will love it, Ben, having a single bean bag.
Ben:
Exactly. They're playing smash. I'm sure they're going to love that.
Josh:
Turn into literal smash.
Starr:
Oh my God. Yeah. That's been great. I'm really loving it.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
That's cool. Now, you can grab the book when you need a break and just relax.
Starr:
Totally. Oh, the other thing I've noticed, I hope none of my authors are listening to this right now because I realized I can be like, "Well, let's make this an audio call," on my author calls and I can just go sit in my giant beanbag during these calls.
Ben:
Real nice. Yeah. I've done a lot of calls this week, more than usual because I'm ramping up the whole sales thing and figuring that out. I'm getting a lot of advice and talking to people and one of the calls, I was arranging the meeting and I said, "Should we just leave it as a phone call? I don't know about you, but I've had enough Zoom," and the person's like, "Yes, totally. We should totally just make it a phone call." It was nice just to be able to stand by the window, look out the window and look at the trees while I was talking as opposed to having to stare at the screen. It was nice.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
Good change of pace.
Starr:
Yeah. That's very nice. That's very nice. Should we wrap it up or do you have anything else you want to talk about?
Ben:
Hey, let's get people to recommend their favorite beanbag chairs to us if they have them.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
I'm in the market.
Starr:
Okay. Yeah. Recommend your favorite beanbag chairs. I can also go offline and tell you which one I got.
Josh:
Can we put it in the show notes? Is it that embarrassing or can we put it in the show notes?
Starr:
Oh, it's fine. Yeah, we can put it in show notes.
Josh:
Awesome.
Starr:
All right. Well, you have been listening to Founder Quest. I got it right. I got it right this week. I didn't say Honeybadger. If you like us, go and leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you later.
Show notes:
Links:
Printfection
Swag.com
Full transcript:
Josh:
How's it going?
Ben:
I'm working on this Printfection migration and I've been thinking about what to do here. So we got this outreach from Printfection about our pricing going up, in our case, dramatically. We decided we just don't want to pay that much for what we're getting. So I'm going through all of our inventory looking at our Printfection items that we have, shirts and stickers and so on, and thinking, where... So I've got to send it somewhere. Well, I guess I have to send it to myself. I'm like, do I really want to get a box of 800 shirts? It's like, no, I really don't but I don't see there's much of a choice.
Josh:
Well, we could just pay Printfection.
Ben:
Well, I guess. Yeah, that is the other option.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, personally I'm on the fence about it because yes, it is a dramatic price increase but the value that they provide us is fairly dramatic from my perspective. So I'm not quite sure what price I attach to that, but I definitely attach more than $75 a month which is what we were paying them. Which just seems insane to me. I see why they would raise our prices, in their defense.
Starr:
How much is it raised by? I forget. I looked at it originally, but I forget.
Josh:
$500.
Ben:
I think it's in the narrative of $500 a month.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Now to be fair, we should explain they raised their prices I think a couple years ago, because I remember when they went up and I was like, "Man, I'm really glad that we got this sweetheart deal that they let all their past customers keep." But apparently they went through the same progression as everyone ever, same logic as us, over time... We're probably taking them for everything they're worth.
Starr:
I should probably back up and explain in case this makes it into the actual podcast. Printfection is a company that we have used to... They're an inventory company. They keep our shirts and all of our swag. When we want to mail it to people, we just give them the address, or they have forms that people can fill in themselves and magically shirts and stuff get mailed out to them.
Josh:
When we want to give someone a shirt, what we do is we mention our badger bot in Slack to a shirt meme and it gives us a shirt link that we then send to someone. It's like a magical shirt bog. Like a swag bot. Which is pretty cool.
Starr:
Yeah. I have a couple thoughts on this. The first one is, we were paying $75 a month plus shipping fees and handling and all that. We paid a certain amount to have things shipped out.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
The second is that, as the person who was previously kind of in charge of mailing out shirts, it is a huge, huge time suck and a giant pain in the ass.
Josh:
I've got a closet full of shirts still that is just warehoused at this point.
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
I don't want to go back to that.
Starr:
It is such a pain in the ass. So while it's like, yeah, $500 a month is a lot, it seems like a lot, if Ben Curtis ended up sending out the shirts, I am 100% sure that you would spend more than $500 a month in your time doing it.
Josh:
Yeah. We're going to pay someone like $300 an hour to ship shirts.
Starr:
Yeah. So let me-
Ben:
So what you're saying is, since I'm the only person that hasn't actually done the shirt shipping, that I'm not a good person to judge the value of this service.
Josh:
Oh, Ben, you don't know what you're getting into.
Starr:
Yeah, when I found Printfection, I was seriously... I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was just like, please take this off of my plate.
Ben:
So why are you even letting me have an opinion on this? You should be like, "Ben, shut up. We know what we're doing. We're paying the $500 a month, just deal with it."
Starr:
Well everybody gets to have an opinion. Yeah, so I guess there's a couple reasons why this is just hard. So first of all... Since most of our readers probably haven't dealt with swag much, I'll just go through and explain why it's such a pain in the neck and you don't actually want to do it yourself. So, essentially when you order t-shirts from the printer, usually they come in a big box that's just full of shirts. They're not nicely individually wrapped or anything like that. And maybe some printers offer that as a service, but when I got them they tended to be just giant boxes of shirts.
Starr:
So that means if you want to, say, go to a conference and put them on display, you have to fold them up or roll them up in some way. If you want to mail them out, you've got to fold them up into a dimension that will fit flat and be nice in the little mailer. You've got to make sure you've got the right size of mailers at all times. You've got to basically have a little postage setup where you're always going to Stamps.com or whatever and buying your stamps.
Starr:
Then here's a little something that I didn't really expect, but we often would have people want shirts who are not inside the United States, at which time you have to fill out customs forms. You have to drive to the Post Office and drop things off. It's just a huge, huge pain in the neck. It was... Yeah. It was-
Josh:
You're bringing back memories with the folding shirts before conferences. Because there were multiple and I just remember entire evenings the night before my flight, me and Kaylin just folding shirts for my suitcase.
Starr:
And not only that, but do you remember how we had to get the shirts to the conferences? They weren't just delivered nicely folded to the conference organizers. We checked them. We checked bags of shirts.
Josh:
Listen, one time I checked a bag of... Or, I checked a whole box. This 25 pound box of shirts. I think it was to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's, the airport there, is a 45 minute drive in rush hour traffic to the hotel. We were five minutes away from the hotel when I realized the box was still at checking. I hadn't picked it up at the baggage claim.
Starr:
No!
Josh:
So an hour and a half... yeah.
Starr:
Well, I had... So these boxes of shirts are big. They're like two and a half feet cubed and they weigh, it seemed like more than 20 or 30 pounds. It seemed like 40 or 50 pounds.
Josh:
Might have been 50. Let's go with 50.
Starr:
50, yeah. Shirts are heavy. So I was at a conference in Denver and I'd never been there before and the cab driver dropped me off in the wrong location. So I was humping a giant box of t-shirts around downtown Denver looking for the right place. It was-
Josh:
Sweat dripping down your face.
Starr:
Yeah, it was miserable. And when I got there, I just kind of... I found my table. The shirts weren't folded or anything because I had timelines, and I just sort of... I made a pile as best I could. The other thing is that if they're not individually wrapped and labeled and stuff, people have to dig through them to find their size because the size is written on the label inside the shirt. So if you don't have everything nicely, neatly organized beforehand, five minutes in you will just have-
Josh:
And they will.
Starr:
... a big pile of shirts. There will be no organization anymore, it'll just all be-
Josh:
Just, it's mayhem.
Starr:
Yeah, it is mayhem. It's Fight Club in there because developers love their shirts.
Ben:
This is awesome. I can see myself right now going back to Kyle at Printfection and saying, "You know what? We're happy to pay that $500, please. Please don't raise the price ever again."
Josh:
I hope they don't listen to this podcast or they're going to come back to you with a higher price.
Ben:
Like, "Well, our rates are now triple." Things that are cool about Printfection, as I was going through here... Because you can do the one off things. Like Josh described, we have that badger bot which can send a link to somebody and then they just go in fill in their info and they get their one shirt. But Printfection also does a drop ship option, so you can go in and you can do a bulk order. That's what I was arranging just now, a bulk order to myself.
Ben:
But one of the things that you can do that I think is pretty cool... All your stories of folding and rolling and labeling stuff. So Printfection has this option where if you do a drop ship to a conference, you can have them do the individual rolling and labeling of each individual shirt.
Josh:
Yeah, that's worth its weight in gold.
Ben:
I think it's 50 cents per item.
Josh:
50 pounds of gold. That's a lot of gold.you know, I will say that the amount of air time that we've given Printfection since the start of this podcast, they really should throw us a little bit of a discount.
Ben:
We have promoted them heavily. Maybe that's why we got the cheap rate for so long.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, maybe.
Josh:
It could be.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Although if we have listeners who have gone to sign up with Printfection because of our recommendations on the show, they should definitely email us so that we can forward those to Printfection and say, "Hey, look at all these customers we sent you."
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know, my own personal opinions, yeah it's a lot of money. I wouldn't recommend just not having any kind of service. If there's a different service that would work, cool, but if it's just-
Josh:
Yeah, we could replace it. It's just, I'm not sure what's going to be cheaper. I haven't researched the options, but I assume... This is a pretty involved business, so I assume it's going... Anyone who's doing that level of service is going to charge for it, something.
Ben:
It seems like the most direct competitor for our purposes would be Swag.com. I haven't reached out to them yet, so I don't know if they do the one off thing or if they're really focused around the bulk thing, but their pricing would be for us a little cheaper than Printfection because they charge you about... products that are like shirts, they'll charge you one cent per day per product. So per day of storage, per month. So it'd work out to a couple hundred bucks, I think, per month for us. And then of course there's shipping and picking and packing on top of that. So they'd be a little cheaper, maybe half the cost. But again, I don't know if they do the one off mailing like we can do with Printfection.
Ben:
Then the other complication is we've, for the longest time, wanted to do a store. We wanted to have a store where people can actually buy these shirts. So that's another wrinkle that I've been thinking about. It's like, okay, well go ahead and do that then. Let's get all this inventory, let's send it over to a fulfillment house. But again, I don't know what those prices are on those companies either.
Josh:
Well, and I know that there are ways to connect services like Printfection to Shopify stores and have them act as the fulfillment so that you can use it for both types of delivery, but I was looking at Printfection, that is one area where they seem to be lacking a little bit. Their documentation is linking to Zapier and stuff. So there may be an option. But I know people that have set up swag stores that have used a backend, I think, like Printfection. I forget what the services are, but I know there are alternatives that have been used, so we could always look into that.
Starr:
We should just put all of the swag on Amazon and just send it to Amazon fulfillment centers.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, so the problem with that plan... and I did think about that-
Josh:
Give us a $1 coupon or something.
Ben:
Yeah. The problem with that is Amazon is pretty picky about what they will put in their warehouses. They want stuff to move.
Starr:
Oh, that makes sense, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. We don't move inventory-
Starr:
I was really just joking. We couldn't tell Amazon to send 1,000 shirts to a gigantic conference. It doesn't exist.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well I mean, I actually thought about it, so. But yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, well if you go the full eCommerce setting up your own fulfillment and stuff, at some point you're... I mean, I don't know, that seems like you're still doing a lot of work that a service like Printfection should just be doing for you. They're consolidating all of the things that you have to manage still, right?
Ben:
You talking about the picking, packing and shipping?
Josh:
I guess, yeah. I mean, it would be more involved to just pick some sort of warehouse that... I don't know, it seems like it would be.
Ben:
I think-
Starr:
Yeah, and you also have to deal with the printer then too, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
It would be something to manage. Yeah. Logistics, I guess, is what I'm talking about.
Ben:
Yeah, you have to coordinate all those moving pieces.
Josh:
Yeah. Exactly.
Starr:
So here's my business idea for anybody with a warehouse and the ability to write a Rails app, is just yeah, put people's t-shirts in your warehouse and then we can Rails app and you just mail them out for people and you can charge several hundred dollars a month plus shipping, plus individual shipping fees.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Now one other option is Printful. That's what our friends over at Tuple use.
Josh:
I've heard of that one.
Ben:
Yeah. And I think if you were just starting out that would be a great option because it's print on demand versus Printfection where you have to have a certain amount of inventory. So I haven't looked closely at Printful. Maybe they would actually be a great fit for us. Maybe they can do the warehousing as well. I just, I don't know. I haven't looked yet. But I think if we were to do this over again, I could go down that path rather than printing up a couple hundred shirts at a time.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I remember-
Josh:
I know some of the print on demand services back in the day that we tried to use, we had some trouble with just because of the quality of our t-shirt designs and the fact that we're kind of perfectionists so we want really nice t-shirts. And not every printer is set up to do really nice graphic tees. I'm not a graphic designer, but there's a lot that goes into that process if you're doing detail in your designs and stuff.
Starr:
One wrinkle is that our t-shirts are very... the illustrator puts a lot of detail in them and screen printing processes are... The ones that most screen printers use are fine for blocky type things, but if you want a lot of detail, they've got to use special types of screens. You've got to essentially tell them to use that because they won't necessarily notice it and use them by default, and that costs a little extra and all that.
Josh:
Maybe that was more our problem is that we just didn't know what to ask for initially.
Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah. But anyway, I'm totally happy with the decision to make super detailed awesome t-shirt designs, because it really has set us apart over the years.
Ben:
Yeah, that's been a good thing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
A plus, would buy again.
Josh:
Well, we'll figure something out to mail out our-
Ben:
Speaking of t-shirt designs, it's been a long time since we commissioned one.
Josh:
Yeah, we should get back on the swag design. Yeah. Well maybe we should do the... We have a couple in the archives I think still. We could bust out some.
Ben:
True. True. Yeah. Maybe that would be a good trial of another fulfillment house. We could set up with Printful, maybe, and come up with a new design or use one of our designs in the vault and do a trial run.
Josh:
Well then you'd have somewhere to ship the shirts from the loser that's not your garage.
Ben:
Exactly. Yeah, I was actually thinking, okay, which address do I want to send them to, my home or the UPS store where we have our mailing address? I was like, well, I don't have room in my house for them so I guess I should send it to the UPS store because I could just take it straight to my office.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
All these complications.
Starr:
So I'm wondering... I'm looking at Printful right now and I'm just wondering... It looks like yes, per shirt, they are more expensive. It's saying $13 a shirt and I think we probably pay... I don't really know at this point, maybe $6, $7, $8, $9? I remember $6 from a long time ago, but that was when I was really trying to get the costs down, so I think they're probably more now. And I was like, well, how many shirts do we send out on a month? If we add up the total costs, I'm wondering if it's similar or less or more.
Josh:
Yeah. We don't send out a ton usually. Although I think Ben's thinking about sending more, like drop ship type things maybe.
Ben:
Yup. Yup. I'm looking at the Printful site and they do have warehousing, so apparently you can store a bunch of inventory with them. Their storage fees section is kind of weird though. I mean, for me because I'm not used to inventory. For them I'm sure it makes sense, but for me as a customer that has no experience, it's like, they do it by per cubic foot depending on how many units you have. So if you have... I think we'd fall in the 201-1000 units category. If you have that bucket then it's $1.30 per cubic foot. I'm like, how many cubic feet do our shirts take? I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. Shirts are like-
Ben:
I mean, I know how many shirts we have. Not that many.
Josh:
This is like how many errors is my app going to generate? Pricing is hard.
Starr:
I mean, a box of shirts like the boxes that we used to schlepp around the airports, I'm just imagining they were four or five cubic feet? Or wait, no, they're... Yeah, something like that.
Ben:
Yeah, it's totally like Honeybadger. Like you don't know how much you're going to pay until you get into it. I don't know how many errors my app throws. I guess I'll find out.
Josh:
Til you ship the boxes. Yeah.
Ben:
Well, I think what I'll do then is I'll hold off on this drop shipment to myself and maybe give Printful a shot and see if we can get that set up and we can do two at the same time and see which one we like better.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, I mean if we pay... I don't mind paying $500 a month for a while anyway. It's worth not shipping them to your house to... you know.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like, whatever we do is probably going to be more than $75 a month, so if it ends up... If Printful ends up being $1000-$2000 a year cheaper, I'm not even sure that it's worth the trouble.
Ben:
Yeah, true.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah see this is the thing, we're not as small as we used to be. We're constantly reaching a different level and it's weird doing things that before you would've just... It would have blown your mind that you're going to pay $500 a month for, just to store some t-shirts. But now it's worth it. Or whatever.
Ben:
Right. Yeah. Sometimes I'm still in the really scrappy mode.
Josh:
No, I mean it's not bad to keep that mindset and just adjust it proportionally, maybe. It's still good to be frugal or whatever.
Starr:
I mean, that's... using third party services is kind of how we're able to keep our headcount low, and headcount is the major expense of a business.
Josh:
Yeah that's the other thing. These are all expenses that allow us to run a virtual company. If you think about all the expenses that you have, if you were doing things like some other larger companies that are more traditional. I mean there's employees that we don't have. The alternative for a larger competitor might be to hire some lower level employees that don't mind huffing shirts to conferences in suitcases or whatever, showing up to move them around.
Ben:
If we end up doing whatever, changing with our fulfillment stuff and our swag, we definitely should get some more swag. Like we totally need some socks. Maybe a tie.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because shirts are cool, but we got to have some variety in there.
Josh:
Bolo tie?
Ben:
I'm not going to say we need to do things like, I don't know, USB charging battery things. I don't want to go down that path.
Josh:
Yeah. No, something unique.
Ben:
Yeah, something fun.
Josh:
People love socks. I got to say they do love socks, yeah.
Ben:
People do love socks.
Josh:
Yeah. I've also seen lounge... like pants and things. Stuff for work from home leisure wear, I guess is what you'd call it.
Ben:
COVID survival gear.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I was just sitting here thinking, I was like, if we did hire an admin, how rude would it be to be like, "Here's a box of shirts. Keep it in your garage. Mail them out."
Ben:
I don't know, they'll probably be like, "I'm getting paid to do this. Okay."
Starr:
Yeah, but-
Ben:
"I'll fold shirts for money."
Starr:
But also, all the labeling and all the rolling up, and... yeah.
Ben:
It's just work, right? It's like, it's just a job.
Starr:
That's true. But also, it's... I don't know, it's the sort of thing... It's like, it seems like when you have an employee, you need to be able to tell them what to do, you need to be able to show them and train them so that the next... If they want to go somewhere else, the next person you can do the same thing. And it's just like... I'm just imagining trying to remotely be like, "Okay, now show me how you rolled up the shirts, and how are you securing them so they don't unroll?" It just seems like such a pain in the ass.
Josh:
Yeah, and then if that person ever wants to leave or move on from the company, it's like, okay, now you have to put in your two weeks and you have to ship six boxes of shirts to someone.
Starr:
It's like, "Mail us all the shirts."
Josh:
And where do they send them? Yeah. They send them to Ben. That's the answer, Ben Curtis is where they send them.
Ben:
Yeah, be like no, you can't quit until you give away all the shirts, so you got to find a way to do a promotion or something. Next thing you know you go down to the high school and every kid there's got like three Honeybadger shirts because they just drove down there and dropped off a box.
Starr:
Oh my God, this reminds me... I don't know if I shared this online, but when we were first started doing the shirts and I was fulfilling them myself, we ran a ad in Ruby Weekly where we were like, "Hey, come get your free t-shirt." So okay, Ruby Weekly, they're all Rubyists. Sure, I'll send every Rubyist a t-shirt. That sounds like a great option.
Starr:
but then we got posted somehow on a message board of free stuff where you just fill out a form and people fill you with free stuff and I'm like, "Why am I sending all these... There's a lot of shirts that want to go to India right now. I didn't know Ruby Weekly's audience was so international." I mean, I know it's international but the overwhelming proportion of all the shirt requests we were getting were from places where we didn't have any customers. So yeah, so eventually I think I asked somebody or whatever and they're like, "Yeah, I found you on this thing." I was just like, "Oh, no." So I was kind of a jerk. I was just like, "I'm sorry, no more international orders until this is cleared out." Because it costs a lot of money to send things internationally.
Josh:
Yeah. Apparently there are boards where people share swag deals.
Starr:
Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that.
Ben:
The things you learn when you have no idea what you're doing in marketing.
Starr:
I know, right? That's great. It's like, these shirts aren't free. I'm not just giving them out to the world because I want to give shirts out to the world.
Ben:
Well, probably not the most important thing for us to think about as far as business goes but yeah, sometimes you got to just deal with the details.
Josh:
Yup.
Starr:
Yeah, this is truly what small business is about.
Josh:
Well, we got a lot done this week in open source land.
Ben:
Yeah, we should talk-
Starr:
Oh, that's right, y'all are rocking and rolling with the contractors.
Josh:
Onboarded a couple of contractors so far and they're already solving problems for us and it's great, yeah. We shipped a bunch of new releases already this... We did a couple PHP releases. I had a few of my own bug fix typical releases but yeah, making progress so that's exciting. And it's really nice actually just being able to... Because I'd gotten immersed back in the details for a while there over the last year or so, and it's really nice to step back again and just do some higher level management and spend time documenting issues and just have continual progress being made. I realized I'm a lot happier doing that, I think, than getting stuck in a project when I know there's 10 other things that also need to be happening. I need to be better at delegating. So yeah, it feels good.
Starr:
Good. I kind of feel the same way about the blog stuff. It's nice to have stuff happening when I'm not capable of doing it in the moment.
Ben:
Well it feels like, too, there are certain personality types that are more inclined towards delegating well than others. Some people have the control freak perfectionist kind of trait where they just want to make sure that everything is just so. And not necessarily "right," but they have a particular opinion about the way something should be and they want it done that way and they don't trust anybody else to do it that way. So they have a hard time delegating. I think I fall into that trap myself. But I think there are other people who are like, "Yeah, I totally see the benefit of having other people help me get my stuff done, so delegate away," and they have no qualms about that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So I think sometimes you have to check and see where you are on that personality spectrum and see, is this something that I really need to overcome or can I leverage my particular quirks for greater good, for much justice?
Starr:
Yeah, I definitely feel a pull of both. The light side and the dark side of the force.
Josh:
Y'all ever read E-Myth?
Starr:
Oh, a long time ago, yeah.
Josh:
Back in the day? Yeah. Yeah, same here, a long time ago. I reviewed it again recently because we've been working with a business consultant over at the consulting company, Hint, and it had been a long time since I read it so I just skimmed it again. But they've got the concept of a business owner has three roles that you are constantly having to manage, or maybe they're in conflict to some extent. But it's the manager, the entrepreneur, and the technician. I get stuck in the technician side of things when I'm just... I have the technical knowledge to do this and there's no one else capable of solving this problem except me. And so I'll just dive in and do it. And then I come up, like two weeks later I finally take another breath and realize I'm back in the technician mindset and I need to get out.
Ben:
I think the trap that I fall into on the technician mindset is not that no one else can do this, but that it's faster for me to do it.
Josh:
Yeah. Well that too, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, and I think parents have this struggle as well. It's like, well I could help my kid learn how to unload the dishwasher, or I could just do it and get it done.
Josh:
Yeah. They're like, am I going to manage my kid to clean up the living room for two hours, or am I going to just do it myself real quick in 10 or 15 minutes?
Ben:
Yup. And one approach leads to more growth than the other, so yeah, the struggle is real.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But I appreciate the delegation work that you've been doing lately because it's really motivated me to try and get over my own hesitation to delegate more.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Working on it.
Josh:
It's a continual... I don't know, it's something that you have to keep working at because it's definitely not a solved problem just because I found some people to do stuff right now. It's like, those people aren't going to be around forever. They might not be interested in this work forever. Also, trying to make sure I manage them effectively and keep the work interesting and not a drag on them. You don't want to burn people out or... You need to manage people still. So that's something I'm learning. Even with one off contractors, you still need to manage people and try to help them be successful. Otherwise they don't like what they're doing and they don't want to work for you anymore.
Starr:
I think the reason that in the past when I tried to delegate stuff it didn't quite work out like I expected is because I kind of... When I delegated something, I kind of expected the person to be another me. I kind of expected it to be like, "Okay, now clone, go off and just do this thing. And you can do it, right? You know how to do it? I would do it fine if it was me doing it, so you can do it." But that doesn't really work out because people don't really know every single thing that you know. They don't have the same aptitudes that you have or abilities or knowledge.
Starr:
I think the thing that I've had a little bit more success with is just, yeah, just not being so general in the things that I'm delegating. Just being very specific. Like with these blog posts it's like, I'm asking you to write a blog post about something you know about. So I can find people who can do that and that's very concrete. They know what they need to do, I know what I expect from them. Versus how I used to do things, which is just sort of like, "Okay, just start working. Just write some stuff." I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, that's good. Clear expectations and directions are certainly helpful.
Starr:
Yeah. And also kind of viewing it as a good delegation... Like you're not necessarily giving work to a person, you're setting up a system to which you can give work. Because if you just give work to a person, maybe you find a good person, but eventually that person quits and you have to find the other exactly right person. So it's just stressful because you're always sort of relying on this one person and your success depends on them willingly doing what you want them to do as opposed to, "Well, I can give this. I want to delegate this. I've got this system of several people and I can give this to one of them and if it doesn't work out, I can find somebody else who can do it."
Josh:
Yeah. I really like that flexible approach that you took. I think I've been trying, as a result of your suggestion, which is like, where you set the expectations is important and how... Yeah. The big thing I've been trying to get across to people is I don't mind... The pace of the work is really flexible. I'm trying to hire a lot of people so that if one person can't do something or doesn't have time or doesn't want to do something, that's totally fine. There'll always be something else in the future. I'm not mad at you if you can't get to something, but don't take something on that you're not going to deliver. So once you actually agree to deliver something, then that's the point where we want consistent communication and some kind of regular progress happening. And then have an off ramp. Because things come up. If you commit to something and then for some reason you can't deliver, then tell us and we'll have some sort of off ramp so that it doesn't burn the bridge there either.
Starr:
Yeah, I think that's a really important thing so people don't feel trapped. They don't feel like... Yeah, and you don't have these weird emotional things that just kind of creep up where people are worried you're mad at them because they didn't do something on a specific date.
Josh:
Yeah, and maybe you are a little bit... You get in these weird... Tension can creep into those relationships and there can be small passive aggressions and things and it's like, really it's just you need to be communicating and it needs to be like, okay, obviously you're having trouble with this. Why? The problem isn't that you're having trouble, it's just that I don't know what's happening so that we can figure out what would be a better thing for you to be doing or whatever.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned an off ramp. In the past it seems like I've gone into some situations where the only planned-for outcome was basically everything goes perfectly right. So then if I would... Like if I delegate something and somebody would not do it perfectly right, then there wouldn't be any plan for that. So I would get upset or I would be like, "Oh, this person doesn't know what they're doing," when in fact it's like, sometimes that's going to happen. So yes, it can be a little bit upsetting in the moment but also, I think it's important to be able to say, "Okay, I know how to handle this. It's in our playbook. So, okay, this is what I'm going to do. I don't have to make a decision right now when I'm annoyed." It's just not as personal.
Josh:
Right. Yeah, and especially if that playbook is shared between you then it's like, it isn't a surprise when whatever outcome... however that's handled because that's the expectation. It's like, you have planning for all the other potential outcomes, or whatever.
Starr:
You've been listening to Honeybadger.
Ben:
Yeah, you've been listening to Founder Quest, actually.
Starr:
Founder Quest? Oh my God. Oh my God. Okay. Okay.
Starr:
You've been listening to Founder Quest. Please review us on Apple Podcast and just... I just got to go because this is just too much for me.
Josh:
I think that that was great, Starr. I think that's a wrap.
Ben:
That's awesome. That's a wrap.
Show Notes:
Links:John Nunemaker Website
John Nunemaker Twitter
Flipper Cloud
Speaker Deck
Scientist
Full Transcript:
Ben:
So today we have a special episode of FounderQuest. We have John Nunemaker with us, instead of Starr. Starr was taking a break today. And Josh and I are going to be chatting with John, and talking about the fun things that John's doing. John, I got to start off by saying that I'm a huge fan. I've been following your work since the Harmony days, back at Ordered List, I guess that was ... I don't know when that was, 2000 and something.
John:
'07, 8, yep.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think I got introduced to you through the Rails community, being back in the early group. So I don't remember how exactly we bumped into each other back then. But I remember Harmony was pretty cool, and the other stuff you did with Ordered List.
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
I was newer to the Rails world back then. So both of you are Ruby celebrities to me. So yeah, it's cool. It's cool to have you here.
John:
Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. I feel the same way about you guys. Especially I remember I was at RailsKits.
Ben:
Yep.
John:
I remember ... Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
I remember that. I remember a bunch of the stuff back in the day. And is it Stympy, or something? Website?
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
Yep.
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, yeah. That stuff sticks out.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Nice. Nice, cool. Fanboys all around. It's awesome. And you're a prolific open-source author. We have in fact two of your gems in our app right now. We have nunes, and we have httparty running in our app. So thank you for those.
John:
That's awesome.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
That's really cool.
Ben:
Yeah. I love nunes. And I love the description of it. It's like, "This is the monitoring app I would add to your app if I was working with you."
John:
Yeah. I feel like stuff like that, I get lucky and it sticks. But it's just this moment where I'm like, "I got to come up with some kind of a description. I really don't want to do this. What should I put?" And then it's like, "This is what I would. I would do this if I were you." So I'm just going to put that as my description and peel out.
Ben:
It's cool. But I think the ... We're not going to talk about this much today. But I just wanted to toss this in here. And I think one of the projects that you've done that I'm most interested is probably one there is least information out there about. And that's Haystack at GitHub.
John:
Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I can answer any questions related to that too. On air, off air, whatever you want. Yeah.
Ben:
Awesome.
John:
Yeah. I worked on that for a little while. I didn't build it, but I tuned it a bunch.
Josh:
Remind me what Haystack does.
John:
It was the exception tracker-
Josh:
I remember now. Yeah. Cool.
John:
Yeah. Yep.
Josh:
I have built a few of those.
John:
Yeah, I don't know if you guys have heard of exceptions.
Ben:
Yeah, we did a little bit in that line. But yeah, I remember reading some of your blog posts about Haystack, and I was kind of jealous. I was like, "Oh, man. It'd be cool if we got GitHub as a customer." But yeah, I totally understand why you'd have something totally internal and custom to what you do there at GitHub.
John:
Yeah. I still always wonder if they still have ... I need to reach out to people who are still there and ask. I'm always curious what technology has lasted and what hasn't, and stuff like that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So how long have you been gone from GitHub?
John:
I would say ... Hard to remember. I would say 2018 I think is when I left. So it was right when after the Microsoft stuff went through. And it happened to coincide with paternity leave ending for me, and all the ... Just perfect timing. So all the stuff kind of came down at the same time. And so my last day of paternity leave was a Friday. And that Friday was the day they closed the deal. And then that Monday, I resigned and moved on to the next stuff. I love GitHub. You can see behind me.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
No one listening can, but I have an Octocat behind me in my room. It's completely office is stuffed with Octocats. I'm a huge fan still. I just am not a big company person really.
Ben:
Yeah. Totally can relate to that.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
I've never thrived in big companies. So yeah, getting acquired by Microsoft would make GitHub a pretty big company.
John:
Yeah. And it was ... I mean, we were 45 through 50, and then watched it grow over six, seven years to in the thousands.
Josh:
Wow.
John:
And it was just totally different than we had started. So it was-
Ben:
No doubt.
John:
Yeah. And that's kind of where Flipper and Flipper Cloud and stuff like that even came from was because I was working there. And not to jump ahead or anything like that, but that's ... I was like, "I know I'm not going to be a big company person. So I got to come up with some kind of a runway, because I'm the guy who runs off the clock in the fourth quarter." I'm very safe and conservative in my moves. So yeah.
Ben:
I love that. So let's talk about that. That's very interesting.
Josh:
So you're in good company. That sounds a lot like Ben.
Ben:
Yep.
John:
Yeah. So basically it was like ... I mean, Flipper itself, I started in 2013 just for fun on the weekend, which was a lot of ... Httparty, a lot of gems like that, that's where they came from, was just hacking around on the weekend or in the evenings. I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff. And I have always been interested in feature flags, because I worked on, a long time ago. I don't know if you guys know this or not. But I worked on Words With Friends, the Scrabble game on the backend. So I didn't work on any iOS stuff, but worked on the backend. And every time I tried to roll out, I always joked that that time period in my life, all I did was write caching for a year. Because it was just trying to ... We scaled from 50,000 requests a minute to over a million. It was insane.
John:
And so we were just trying to keep the service up. And that's where feature flags came in, and it kept going down every time I tried to roll out this new caching. And the new caching was really important, and I couldn't get it to roll out, because every time I added it, the whole site would just screech to a halt due to a cold cache. So that's when ... I was working with Jesse Newland I don't know if you guys remember him from Rails.
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Yeah. So we were working together on it. We were like, "We should do feature flags." He was like, "Check out this thing called Rollout." And so I set it up and got it working. And we slowly rolled it out. And then I was just like, "Wow. This is amazing." So yeah. So then a couple years later though, I didn't love the API. I'm real picky about APIs and the way the code looks, and the way it feels. And their examples used like, dollar rollout equals, or something. And dollar just made scrunch my shoulders and nose, and everything.
John:
So at that point I was like, "I think I can do it better." And that I feel like how I always end up in open-source is some kind of silly idea like that. It's usually like you change one thing, and then everyone's like, "Why did you make a new project? This is just one small change." But that's how it started. And it didn't get used by me for I don't know how many years. It didn't get used at GitHub even. So I was at GitHub at that time. And it was probably 2015 actually when my son was born, and I was on paternity leave with him. That's when it got added to GitHub. Two guys, Adam Roben and Rob Sanheim added it. And so they were kind of working with me a little bit. But I was obviously kind of off the grid at that point, struggling to find out how to be a parent.
John:
But yeah, that's kind of how it came about was then, I just kind of played on the weekend and thought it was fun. And a bunch of people started using it. I knew I just wanted to make it not tied to Redis. Because I've had interactions there that weren't fantastic. And I liked the idea in storing it everywhere. And so that's kind of ... I was like, "Let's just make something that can talk to anything." And that time, Rollout didn't. Now they have more of an adapter idea in theirs as well. But yeah, so that's kind of how it started. And then eventually those guys pulled it into GitHub, and I helped tune it a little bit, and help with that. And then from there, it just kept pulling my interest back. And so I just kept kind of playing with it.
Ben:
It's cool. Yeah, we've used Rollout a little bit in Honeybadger. We don't do feature flags very often. We typically deploy ... If there's something that we feel is kind of dangerous, we will deploy it to our internal instance of Honeybadger first. And so we'll inflict it upon ourselves, and make sure that it's stable and stuff before we unleash it. But every now and then we do have a feature flag. And yeah, Rollout's API, I think we're still using the old-fashioned, activate user, and stuff.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And yeah, it's-
John:
Yeah.
Josh:
Maybe that's why we haven't used it as much.
Ben:
Maybe.
Josh:
We're afraid to interact with a global variable.
Ben:
Exactly. Yeah, and now we have Standard running all the time on our ... To lint our code, right? And so now even in VSCode, you can it's like, "Oh, don't use that dollar sign."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
" ... man."
John:
Yeah, and every other instance of life, a dollar sign is good. It's just in Ruby where you're like, "Oh, this makes me feel bad."
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. But then again, I came to Ruby from Pearl. So sometimes it's like, "Ah, it's a kind of throwback." It makes you feel warm and fuzzy to have all those siggles.
John:
Yeah.
Josh:
So it's probably not great if your API is a linter error.
Ben:
Yeah. It's probably bad news.
John:
That's neat that you guys have an internal instance. So you use that for Honeybadger itself then?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John:
Oh, okay. Cool.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, it makes sense. I just hadn't really thought about it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
It's pretty handy. It's kind of like a production staging instance. It's live, taking a lot of traffic like live production traffic. But yeah, we can kind of play around with it.
John:
We did that at Words With Friends. We had, I think it was called a smoke instance. And it's the same idea as a canary or something. It was kind of pre feature flags. It was like we just had one thing that got 5% of the traffic. And so we could roll out to that first. And if it went well, then we would tag it and roll it out to product and stuff.
Josh:
Oh, yeah. That's a good idea.
John:
Which is not the same. But kind of the same idea.
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
That's cool.
Ben:
Yeah. One of the benefits has been, now we have ... So it's deployed in a separate region. So we're a 100% AWS. And so our internal instance is in a different region, so it's obviously a different VPC and everything. It's just completely separate from our production stuff. And we're big fans of Ansible and Terraform. And so the nice side effect has been, now we have this good set of scripts in Terraform and Ansible to spin up an entire stack pretty easily. So it's been a lot of fun to play with, kind of geek out on that sort of thing.
John:
Yeah, that's awesome.
Ben:
So you said Runway. That was a trigger word for me. Because yeah, it's like Josh said, I'm totally into having backup plans and that sort of thing. So at some point, Flipper went from this fun open-source project to, "Maybe I'm going to do something else with it." So tell us about that.
John:
Yeah. In 2017, I was ... I think it was 2017. But GitHub had just exploded growth wise, and stuff like that. And I was just kind of feeling the big company. At a big company, and there's nothing wrong with this. This is just kind of the way it is. But I feel like you spend a quarter of your time just telling everyone else what you're doing with the other portion of your time. And that was just starting to wear on me. I just like to get in and make an impact. And it's difficult to make an impact that you feel is substantial at a company that's thousands of people.
John:
And I think part of it's just a mental issue. Because I see other people who definitely make an impact. And I think they're just maybe well-suited to that. But yeah, for myself, I wasn't. So I was like, "I got to come up with something else." And I didn't really want to go back to consulting. So I was like, "Well, maybe I can come up with some kind of software as a service on the side." I was trying to think of what could possibly ... Because I always have ideas, I have tons of things that I want to build. My problem is not a lack of ideas, it was just which would make sense.
John:
And then randomly, I think I saw some flashy thing about Mike Perham, and hitting a million on Sidekiq, or something like that. And I was like, "Huh." And it just gave me a little bit of an idea. I was like, "Well, I wonder if I have an open-source project that could do that." Because I have several. They've been moderately successful. But I was like, "No one's going to pay for HTTP requests." That doesn't really make sense. And I couldn't think of anything else that I had that would really warrant that.
John:
And then I was like, "Oh, Flipper ... " One of the things that you do is, if you use Flipper, you set it up kind of on each project. And it would be really nice. We had a web UI and stuff like that. But that web UI is always per environment, and per project. So if you have eight projects, you got to have it mounted in eight places. And if you have development and then you have staging, and you have production, then the feature data's got to be synced between them. And all these kinds of tedious things. And so I was like, "I wonder if there's a way I could do that."
John:
And so I kind of started looking around, and I saw maybe within a day. I remember writing all the notes. But within a week for sure, I saw LaunchDarkly. And so they're probably I would assume the powerhouse or pretty close, in feature flags right now. And they got eight million in funding, or something like that. And I was like, "Okay, I don't ... " I mean, they've gotten way more since then. But I was like, "Eight million." I was like, "Wow, okay. That means people are actually interested in this as a hosted thing, not just like a ... "
John:
So I kind of looked at their model and how they do it. And they open connections. It's almost like long pulling, but it's not pulling. I think it does actually have push. And I was like, "Well, I don't know if I really want to build that. That sounds really complicated." And I don't think people are going to trust me with an HTTP request in their main request thread. That's not Ruby, for sure. I mean, you have a milliseconds just for being in Ruby and doing net HTTP. So I was like, "I don't know. That seems hard to believe." Obviously you guys have a lot of services like that. Because you have clients that are shipping all kinds of things to you, and you have to come up with ways to do it in the background.
John:
And I'm fairly certain that I've spent a decent amount of time in the Honeybadger gem in the last two years, looking at the thread and stuff. So yeah, I don't know. I was like, "Maybe this would work." And then right after that I saw Split.io came out. And they announced seven million in funding. And again, I didn't want to bootstrap ... Or I didn't want to fund, and I didn't want to go big and that kind of stuff. But I was like, "If other people are paying, or giving large sums of money to people doing this, that seems possible." So I kind of started hacking on some stuff. And at the same time, this guy, Alex Wheeler, he started contributing to Flipper and was like, "It'd be really cool if there was an HTTP API."
John:
And I was like, "That sounds interesting." This was a little bit before the cloud idea. And then he puts a pull request together. And I just was like, "If it was me, I would change these things. But this looks pretty cool." And we had a nice back and forth, and built out a bunch of stuff to just mount a Rack app in Rails or in Sinatra, or whatever. And you just have this HTTP API, and it could do its thing. And I was like, "I bet I could just mount that in a Rails app and then I would have a hosted service." And so it kind of started that way. So it was just for fun. And then one of the other guys that I used to work with at GitHub, John Hoyt. He's John Magic everywhere online. He was like, "I'll built it with you." He was looking just for some fun.
John:
So we started hacking on it. And then the Microsoft stuff went ... And we built it, and it was working. I started using it on Speaker Deck. In the meantime, I had reacquired Speaker Deck back from GitHub. And so I was like ... We were using it there, and we were just kind of pulling every, I don't know, 60 seconds and memoizing things in memory and stuff like that for performance. And it was like, "I think we could do this. There's more to this." And so we were like, "All right. Let's try and make it happen." And so we brought in a couple other people. And then eventually he and some of the other people around the time, and it ended up back as just myself and Steve Smith, who I was partners with at Ordered List, pre GitHub. So yeah, we were like, "All right. Let's try this."
John:
But then it just sat, because Microsoft happened. And that was kind of insane. And so I took a little bit of time off after that. And then rejoined Steve at Box Out. And he had started a new company. So I basically rejoined him at his new company. And then pushing that forward, we kind of just left Flipper in the background. And we started using it a bunch, but didn't do anything with it. And then it was like, "Okay, we have this whole thing, and it's working. We should really do something with it." But we actually launched Speaker Deck before that as a paid thing, in November I think it was when we did it.
John:
And people gave us some money to pay for that pro account. And we were like, "Whoa, this is really fun. We should do this on Flipper. We've had this software that we've been using for two years with no problems. Maybe we should actually slaps some billing on that." So Steve kind of did that over Christmas. And so then we just maybe a month ago released it, so that anybody can sign up-
Josh:
Nice.
John:
... and start using it now.
Josh:
I love that, "Slap some billing on it," by the way.
John:
So that totally comes-
Josh:
That's the way.
John:
Yeah. That comes from Gauges. We actually launched back in the day when we had Harmony, we had CMS. Well, if you have a CMS, you want stats, so we made Gauges.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
And so what was hilarious was we launched Gauges with a seven day free trial, and no billing. And so we were like, "We got seven days. We can slap a billing system in." So that's probably where ... It's not the first time I've said, "Slap a billing system in."
Josh:
Right on.
Ben:
Yeah, I love that. I've done that. It's like, "Yeah, I'll just push it out there. And if anybody wants to buy it, then I'll figure out how to get some for it." I mean, and if no one wants it, it saved a lot of time, right?
Josh:
Yeah. Who wants to build a billing system that no one's going to-
Ben:
Never gets-
Josh:
... put money into.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I remember back in the day using Spreedly, which was great. Because they was mostly just like what-
Josh:
Yeah, I remember Spreedly.
John:
Yeah. Webhooks and stuff like that. But then they kind of moved more to being an interface to multiple gateways, rather than the recurring billing stuff. And so I wasn't even sure. And then I went through a seven year entrepreneurial dark period where I worked at a huge company and was focused on that. I didn't pay attention to anything else. But Stripe Billing Portal was awesome. So that actually has covered for Speaker Deck and Flipper, it's made it ... I mean, it's 90% of what we would want. And the other 10% we can live without. So it would just be nice.
Ben:
Yeah. And eventually Stripe will build that 10%.
John:
They will. Yeah, they probably already did, and I just haven't seen it yet. Or it's in the works. It'll be out next month at their rate.
Ben:
Yeah. That's one thing. Over time, I've become much more comfortable with the idea of depending on services for things as opposed to building it myself. And with AWS, it's anything you want, just wait long enough. Eventually it's going to show up. We've been getting more into using DynamoDB, and other services that AWS has. And it's like, "Yeah, I wish had this thing." And then six months later it has that thing now. It's like, "Oh, great."
John:
And that ecosystem is so ... I mean, the only word is, "Rich." I mean, they just let you do everything, SQS, SNS. All those ... Yeah, they're really great.
Ben:
So you got this Flipper Cloud going. And you've got paying customers now because of your billing system, right?
John:
We do, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
So we have a few. We launched maybe a week ago ... No, a month in all, I think. Yeah, actually we just had our first person who paid us a second time.
Ben:
Nice.
Josh:
Nice.
John:
This morning. I got ... Thank you, thank you. It was very exciting. I got confused for a second, because I was like, "Oh, a new signup." And then I was like, "Oh, no. This is actually ... It's just the same person signing in again." So I think we have ... I was going to look before. I don't remember. It's probably maybe 300 bucks in seats right now. So I'm really okay with that. Speaker Deck we launched maybe end of November. So basically December, which is kind of Christmas time, and nobody's buying Speaker Deck accounts for Christmas for people, for stocking stuffers.
Ben:
What? Come on.
John:
Yeah, I wasn't sure how that would do. But it's so far maybe 7,000 in revenue that it's generated. And it's up to almost a 1,000 MRR. Which I was like, "If we can get to ... " The expenses on that are around a 1,000, like 1,200 bucks a month or something like that, for the AWS and Heroku, and all those kinds of things. And I was like, "If we can get to that by the end of the year, that would be amazing. Just by the end of the year, if we get to paying the bills on it." It's kind of just a passion project. I just love Speaker Deck, and I can't get rid of it.
John:
And so I'm like, "If it makes money, that's great. If it just breaks even, that'd be fine." And we almost break even three months in. So that was kind of I think what got us really excited about Flipper too. We were like, "Shoot, these things ... There are actually people out there that want to pay for software that solves their problems." It's funny that you can forget that. But Box Out Sports pays the bills and is doing really great. So it was kind of easy for us to kind of forget about that, and just kind of focus on that and not really diversify and try other stuff. So yeah, they're going pretty well. I don't have any complaints. So there's definitely, it's brand new. So people are like, "I don't know if I want to do this or not. It's brand new." Or like, "Tell me more about your pricing."
John:
Because I mean, pricing you guys know is really difficult. That's probably a lot of iterations, yeah, trying to get it right. And so that was a hard one. But I feel like you labor over it and labor over it. And eventually you're like, "The only thing that's going to make a difference is just putting something out there and getting feedback." So that's what we ended up doing. We were like, "You know what? We realize we're putting ourselves out there at half the price of LaunchDarkly and Split, and all these other companies." But we feel like we can make lots of money at this point. So we'll see. We'll just find out. And so far, the feedback has been good. Maybe it's a little bit high for some people. And a little bit, they didn't even notice the price for other people.
Ben:
That's a good place to be. I mean, if no one's complaining about the price, then you're priced too low, I think. Right?
John:
Yep. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
Definitely.
Ben:
And it's nice to be the no-brainer option, I think, for the other end of the spectrum too. So that's a pretty sweet spot to be in.
Josh:
We've found that the pricing project is one that has never ended for us. And I don't think it ever does. I think you always are adjusting your prices to what the current market is, and with competitors and stuff. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
How do you guys do that? Id' be super curious. Every time you roll out, do people kind of ... You roll it out for new people? The new pricing? And everybody else-
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
... just stays on the current plan? Do you have 800 different plans in Stripe, but you only show two of them on the website? I'm just curious.
Josh:
Yeah. That one.
Ben:
All of the above, yeah. Yeah, we try to do right by our customers, right? We don't want to push people into things that ... Like the Comcast thing. Like, "Oh, by the way. Your bill's going up." No one wants that. Right? So yeah, every time we do pricing, we just do it for new people. We typically don't announce it and make a big deal out of it, because we just want to see. Because don't do AB testing on our pricing. So basically, like Josh said, it's basically a full-time thing. Because for months leading up to a change, we're talking about it and thinking about it, and penciling it out. And then we make the change.
Ben:
And then for months after the change, we're like, "Okay, how'd it go? And how's the revenue curve looking?" And then we have had one round of price changes where we did go back to customers who are on our older plans, and asked them to upgrade. When we switched from basically unlimited to metered based on traffic, they were ... One of the reasons we switched to new pricing was because some customers were using a whole lot of traffic and not paying us very much. And so we did go back in some cases and say, "Look, we just can't continue to service your level of traffic. And here are some options. You can fix your bugs, or you could pay us more. Or you could just deal with some of the traffic going away. Well, cut you off at a certain point."
John:
Yeah.
Ben:
And those conversations were great. I think because one, we explained it clearly to people like, "Here's why things are changing." And we reached out, I reached out individually to people. It wasn't this mass thing. It was each account I emailed and said, "Hey, here's your traffic. Here's what we're talking about for new pricing. And here's some ways you can adjust it." And overall, the response was great.
Josh:
The ones that you actually contacted, especially the ones you contacted first, the way you lay it out, showing them their traffic and showing them how much we're making on them. By the end of it, they're apologizing to you.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
That's funny.
Josh:
That was a good email.
Ben:
And we've just started ... I think we made our last change around May of last year. And now we're thinking again about, "Is that working? Do we need to make some tweaks." On the receiving end, I don't know if you know about Penboard. It's a bookmarking service.
John:
Yeah, I use it.
Ben:
Yeah. I love Penboard. I signed up way, way back in the day when he was selling it the one-time fee. And I remember his price went up by a penny for every customer that signed up. And I got in, I think it was $2.36 or whatever. And did you get his ... I just got an email from him this past week. And he's-
John:
Oh, interesting.
Ben:
A big, long email. And I was like, "I know what this email is." And yeah, it was like, "Hey, you're a long time supporter. Thank you so much for signing up when I was just charging one-time. But I have ongoing fees, and I need to pay the bills." Et cetera, et cetera. It was a fantastic email. And the pricing, the new pricing is just ridiculously cheap, I'm like, "Sold. Take my money." Right?
John:
Yeah.
Ben:
And so I wrote back to him. I'm like, "Hey, great email. Thank you for explaining this. And happy to pay you more." Yeah, I think we kind of get twisted up in knots over those kinds of things. But if you have customers that love you, and you're treating them fairly, I think people get it. Like, "Oh, yeah. I can see that there's an imbalance here. And yeah, we can make a change."
Ben:
So on pricing, how'd you settle on pricing for Flipper Cloud. What did you consider? Or was it the first thing ... Was it the first thing you thought of we see today? Or did you go through some permutations on that?
John:
Yeah, we went through a lot of permutations. And Steve and I are the only two in the company. So he does most of the design and stuff like that. I do most of the backend, and we both cross over. We're real big on standards and stuff. So using the same things in all of our apps, so we can work and stuff like that. But business stuff we always do together. Which is good, because we have, like you guys obviously, probably find that you have different things that you bring to the table.
John:
So I think the goals is, we just want everybody who's using Flipper to use this. Mostly just because it will make your Flipper life better. If you're already using Flipper, it will make your life better. So we want people to use it. We don't want them to not want to use it just because it's paid versus open-source, or something like that. So that's one thing we've factored in.
John:
And so I think initially, we were like, "Well, what if we just came up with a small plan of some sort. Three plans," like everybody does. Like, whatever, nickel, bronze and gold. Or that kind of idea. On Box Out, we have Basic, Plus and Premium. So I mean again, it's just you make three plans, you bucket people in and move on with life. So we started with that. And the thing we were noticing was, LaunchDarkly, Split, Rollout.io which is not Rollout that we were talking about earlier. But there's several of these that exist and have pricing. And I went down through all of them. I'm sure you also do this. But did a little analysis. And I'm like, "These people charge a lot of money for feature flags." I was like, "It's crazy."
John:
I mean, it's not crazy. The people who are paying it is totally sane. But I was like ... It's just kind of mind blowing to me. I'm like, "Okay, I ... " I pay whatever, 10, 15 bucks a month, or maybe 25 bucks a month for some of the organizations that I have on GitHub. And I'm like, "If I charge $20 or $40, or $50 for one seat in a feature flag app, are they getting more value from that, or from GitHub?" It's difficult for me to say something that's been around for eight years, acquired by Microsoft and all this stuff that it's almost like how can I charge that? But then I try to remind myself like, "Well, yeah. But they have millions and millions of customers."
John:
So that was kind of a lot of the analysis was just like, "Well, what price point are people at?" Because you don't want to price super cheap, and then have people be like, "Well, they must be cheap." And you don't want to price super expensive if you don't feel you're delivering that kind of value to people. So I looked at what the market was at, which seems to be somewhere in the 40 to 50 a seat range, with different levels of freemium to get people in. And then after that, Steve and I talk and we were like, "We just want people to use this. So what if we just have a 25 bucks a month plan for some number of two people?"
John:
And then the value with cloud, I feel like is ... That's the hard thing is it's brand new. So how do you tell what the value is? But for you guys, you can have metered billing, which that makes sense. Because the more I use of your service, the more value I'm getting. And so the more money you should make. And obviously there's other things you probably differentiate on. But for us, we're ... Right now initially what we're offering is everything kind of in one place. And we help keep it all in sync. And some of that kind of stuff. And it really doesn't cost us a lot to do that. We have ideas down the road for analytics and other things that will cost a lot. So we can figure that out later.
John:
But we didn't really have a good value metric other than the number of developers. So the number of people that are using it, if you have two developers, it is less useful ... Or one developer, it's less useful to have it than if you have 10, 20, whatever. So we were like, "Well, if that's going to be the case, having a $25 plan, and then ... " I don't know, whatever. A $500 plan, or maybe a 250, $300 plan and a five or $600 plan, and then a, "Call us for more," kind of a thing. Where going from 25 to 300 or something just felt like a lot. And we didn't want to have eight different plans in between, and come up with Adamantium, and every other metal.
John:
So it was like, "Okay. Well, what are we going to do?" Realistically, we've always hated per seat pricing. Steve and I both have just kind of ... I remember when GitHub switched over to per seat pricing. And I was like, "I mean, whatever's in the interest of a shareholder. Cool." But I really hate per seat pricing. But I was like, "You know what? It just really actually makes the most sense." It is the thing that gives your organization more value. In this case, more developers using it means more things to keep in sync. And more things to keep track of changes, and stuff for, and more things where permissions matter.
John:
So I was like, "Okay, that actually makes the most sense. We need to do that. What do we charge?" And so we went back and forth on that for a while. Do we just make it 10 bucks a month? And hopefully everybody's just like, "Well, that's a no-brainer. I'll just do it." Or do we make it 50 bucks a month like everybody else? But we were like, "That just felt like too much." So we were like, "Okay, let's just pick kind of in the middle." So it was really scientific.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
A whole bunch of research. Yeah. See what other people are actually charging for it, what kind of value people you assume they're getting. And find the value metric that makes the most sense. Interestingly, a lot of people for feature flags charge based on a monthly active users in your app. Because they assume you're going to pass that user through every feature flag. And the reason they do that I think is just because of again, the analytics side. If you're actually sending each feature check, that's a lot of data. Because you can have ... I mean, GitHub would have hundreds of feature checks on any page rendering. And some of them were in a loop where you're checking it for every single listed org or issue, or things like that.
John:
So it's easy to generate a lot of data like maybe an exception app would get. And if that was the case, then yeah, you want to bill based on that. But we're like, "We're not doing anything with that right now. So we're just going to start with what makes sense." It's like, "Here's the cheapest we think it would make sense at. Here's where everybody else is at. And we're just going to kind of go in the middle. And we'll see how adoption goes." And then if it goes well, cool. If it's struggling, then ... We've got a few people who are like, "I don't know if I can quite pay that much." "Okay. Here's your discount." Like, "I just want you using this. Give me feedback. That's fine." And then we'll hammer out the pricing, because we basically just threw a dart after hours of discussion.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, we've been there. We've done that. And yeah, I too dislike the per seat pricing. But I agree, it makes a lot of sense in this case. And when you get to that point when you do the analytics stuff, you could ... So as an add-on. It's like, "Oh, you want the data pack too? There you go. All right?" When we started Honeybadger, we were really, I think, turned off by what Airbrake had done with their pricing, and being really limited based on traffic. And so that's why we decided like, "We don't want to do that." And we decided the key limiting factor that we could tier on was number of projects.
Ben:
We figured bigger teams would have more projects. And so they can pay more. And that worked out, except again, for those people that only had one project and they were sending us all this traffic. What really changed our minds even more than that, because we were just willing to bear that. But what really came down to it was microservices became a thing. And these small teams would all of a sudden have five and 10, and 20 little microservice apps they want to track independently. And our pricing just didn't work for them. Like, "I can't spend that much just for my little two person team," right? And so I was like, "Yeah, that does make sense." And so we flipped that around to that, "Okay. Well, if your overall traffic is low, then you don't have to pay us so much."
John:
What's funny is I looked at your website for a while last night, and I looked at everything but the pricing. And A, first off, I love it. There's so much good stuff on it. Super fantastic work. I just enjoyed reading it. I'm listening to some previous episodes and looking ... I felt like I completely immersed, I'm full on Honeybadger this morning.
Josh:
Awesome.
John:
But yeah. So you are meter based on basically what the traffic that people send to you. That's the ... Okay. I just wanted to confirm that. Cool.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, and it's tough. Because if you're a new Honeybadger customer and you're coming, you're like, "What pricing makes sense for me?" You don't know how much traffic you're sending. And it's hard. With cell phone management, you're like, "Oh, I know how much I talk per month," right? Or with user seat pricing you're like, "Well, I know how many people I have on my team." Right? It's easy.
John:
Yeah.
Ben:
But with the traffic it's like, "I don't know." And so that's another reason why we didn't launch with that.
Josh:
And this was back, whatever, nine years ago when very few people were doing metered billing too. So it was a new concept to everyone.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So yeah.
John:
I remember talking about that a lot with Gauges, metered billing. We ended up doing three plans and just saying, "Contact us for more." And then we had some hidden plans in Spreedly that didn't show up on our website, but for bigger customers and stuff like that.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
But yeah, metered I feel like works better with some kind of in that instance. Look, it's cool. If you just ... Somebody does this. They do a two month rolling average, or a three month rolling average, which I thought was cool too. Like, "If you use a little more one month, but less the next months, we don't really care." I feel like that's kind of been our approach to billing is like, "Look, we got to charge you something so that it's worth it for us to keep doing it. But we want this to make sense for both of us. We're not going to ... " Not to pun. But we're not going to badger you into higher prices, or whatever.
Josh:
Got to write that down.
John:
Exactly. So yeah, I feel like that's kind of how I always have approached it. And so metered pricing is interesting with some kind of forgiveness built into it. I feel I like that idea.
Josh:
That forgiveness was what was missing with Airbrake I think primarily. Because back then, it was ... If you did metered billing, it was like, "This is the number with whatever events that you get." And then it's like, "I just cut you off," basically. I just remember having those issues where if you hit the limit, then it was like, "You're on your own." And that feels terrible from a user, customer standpoint.
Ben:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah. You could hit that with a really bad exception in high traffic.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, I remember that with everything in Haystack, it was rolled up based on just a super simple algorithm. And if you don't have that, you can have one exception that just blows your entire limit. We had that happen at Box Out. I don't even remember what the exception was. But it literally just ate through our entire Century thing. And I was like, "Oh."
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
So then we upgraded the plan so we could get more. I think it was JavaScript tracking. We didn't even care about it. So we just-.
Josh:
It's always JavaScript.
Josh:
It's always JavaScript.
John:
Yeah. I mean-
Josh:
It's always JavaScript.
John:
Yes. yes.
Josh:
It was probably some old legacy version of IE that ... Yeah.
John:
Yep.
Ben:
Yeah. The forgiveness is key, I think, to having a great relationship with your customer. And the truth is, we're softies. We have people on a regular basis emailing us and saying, "Hey, I'm sorry I just sent you a million and a half errors yesterday. And my plan limit is a 150,000. But can I just get by for the rest of the month without paying you more?" And it's like, "All right. Fine." And so we flip a little switch that allows them to have the rest of the traffic for the month.
John:
What's that switch? Is it just you just wrote some code, and you cached the code? Or it's fast enough so it's fine?
Ben:
Yeah. So our internal admin tool just pushes a ... I guess it's a Redis key.
John:
Okay.
Ben:
So we have a daily check. So then we look back at the usage, and say, "Okay. Well, are you past your quota yet?" And if you're past your quota, then we'll add a limit. And so we just have a flag in Redis that says, "Oh, this customer's exempt until such and such time." And so that data check will be like, "Just ignore them."
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, it works.
Josh:
We abuse Redis a lot like that.
Ben:
We do. Quite a lot.
John:
I mean, everybody does. And pardon me, I feel like that's a huge ... That's where Redis gets a lot of its market share is that kind of easy quick stuff. So I've been thinking about that a lot. And we don't have to talk about it. But in Flipper, I think I've been calling it controls. So there are there's ... So we have it in Speaker Deck. In Speaker Deck we have Quality. And Quality defaults to 90. But some people are like, "These aren't clear enough." And so we're like, "Okay, 100." And before, we couldn't do that. And I was like, "Well, I need some way to just say this is the setting for this person. If it doesn't exist for that, then fall back to a default."
John:
And I was like, "That would actually fit ... " Flipper has, "Flipper.enabled?," Feature name. And then Actor. That's the same as a config. It's just instead of being a true/false response, you're returning some other typed piece of data. I feel like that would be ... Every app that I've worked on, I wanted that. And Flipper already has ... It's basically just like a key value thing with some Ruby logic on top of it. So now that we have syncing and other stuff, I'm like, "I totally just need to build that in, because I desperately want it."
John:
On Box Out, I want to say like, "What's your graphic limit? Or what kind of ... " It's not for secrets. It's for configuration. Things that you want to hot reload. You don't want to ... And then you just memoization and caching, and all those layers built in, just like they're built into Flipper or whatever you use. So yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
That was why I asked about the switch, because-
Josh:
That's cool.
John:
... I love that idea of controls, and I'm always curious how people do it. And I feel most people do it in Redis. And they do it because it's easy there. But not necessarily that they prefer to have that be the place. Because then you got to remember to clean it up if you ... Otherwise that will just keep growing. But yeah, sorry.
Ben:
No, that's cool. I love where you're going with that. Because in every billing system I've ever written, there's always this notion of limits per plan. A plan has certain project limit or a user limit, whatever. But you always want to be able to override that and comp something to a customer, right? "Oh, I just need another user." "Okay. Well, you can have another one."
John:
Yeah.
Ben:
And so there's always the user limit field on the plans table, let's say. But then there's also a user limit field on the accounts table, so that you can override. So if that's nil, it just falls back to the plan. But if they've got a value, then use that value instead. So you could totally do something like that with Flipper, kind of thing I think.
John:
Yeah. I definitely, I have it in my mind. I just have to sit down and do it. The only thing that's hard with that is, you have an explosion in your cardinality, because if you can have one setting for all one million users. All the Flipper data is designed to be able to be, basically you can read all your features and all their data in one request. And then the dynamic parts of it go in Ruby. Or the dynamic parts some day will go in whatever other language support we add.
John:
And so I try to control cardinality just because I've worked on GitHub, and Words With Friends before that. So you work on high traffic things, and you see how things fail. It's, "Well, you don't have a limit." And so you run into that with Amazon services, or anything where you'll have a limit. But you can email them, and then they'll up the limit. And so it's like they try to keep people from hurting themselves. But if they really know what they're doing, they'll know, "Yeah, they'll just turn it up."
John:
And so I just feel like it's a core part of every app, and there's no library or anything that kind of does it just from scratch in a way to make sure that you're not doing N+1 lookups all over the place for every configuration value, and stuff like that. So I desperately want it, so I feel like I'm going to build it in probably sooner rather than later. And it's a differentiator. There's only one or two other places that are doing that. I think ConfigCat is one that I saw that seems to do something kind of like that. But yeah, so that's why I was curious.
Ben:
Yeah, cardinality is a killer. Way back in the day when we first attempted to use Elasticsearch to index our customers' exception data, every exception is a unique snowflake, right? And so they all have just ... The union set is very small across all customers. And so Elasticsearch has of course limits on how many items it's going to track. And once you hit that limit, tough, sorry. Because they have to distribute that all around the cluster. So they have to limit that. And so we had to come up with some clever ways to normalize that data, and feed it into Elasticsearch in a way that won't blow up that cardinality.
John:
That's cool. It's tricky.
Ben:
Yeah. I should blog about that some day.
John:
You should. I would read it.
Ben:
So one more thing on price. So on the ... You got the Flipper open-source thing. And you've got the Flipper Cloud, and you've got the self-hosted option with the cloud on your pricing page. Did you think about other ways ... Could you talk about Mike? Mike was an inspiration. And Mike has a particular licensing scheme, right? There's open-source. And it's basically an open-core model, right? You want more features or you want a different license, then you pay for that, right? So did you think about those kind of alternatives for Flipper? And what made you decide on the hosted thing was right for you?
John:
Yeah. I definitely did. That's a really good question. I feel like ... I saw Mike's thing, so that was my first thought. And also, Robert, the GraphQL gem, he has the same kind of, I think as Mike. Where you can pay a little bit and get a different license or get more features, resolvers, cachers, all those things. I was trying to think through that with Flipper. And I'm like, "Well, I could definitely do that. But what a thing that's painful with open-source Flipper?" And that's the problem I would want to solve. And I mean, the number one things that people kind of brought up were audit logging, or some kind of audit history. They just want to know who did what, when.
John:
And then the other pain, a big one is everything is per project and per environment. And so everybody's got rake tasks, and sync scripts, and all these kind of stuff. So it's like ... I mean, especially when it gets like GitHub where you have hundreds of developers. And they're all creating features, and going to town. And you go on your local laptop to do something, and you're like, "I don't even know which feature I need to turn on to make this work, to see the feature." And so then you got to go through the code and figure out where it's hidden, and figure out what features get used, and how they need to be enabled, and all this kind of stuff.
John:
And I feel like those were the two things that we saw as the biggest pain points were moving feature data through your environments, and having a history of what's going on. Those were the two key things. And then the other thing that I feel like long term is huge, is the analytics on the information side that can be done. I've said it before, but I'm the kind of person that I played NBA Tecmo basketball, and Tecmo football on Nintendo growing up. And Tecmo football didn't track any stats, so I paused after every play and I kept track of passing attempts, rushing attempts, yards, tackles.
Ben:
It's hard work.
John:
NBA Basketball ... Yeah, it was better, because they kept track of everything. But they also kept track of rebounds, but they didn't do them correctly. I started noticing problem ... I'm like, "I know I had more than 10 rebounds in this game. This isn't right." And so I started keeping ... And I had my own rebound ledger. So I've always been into stats, I guess. And again-
Ben:
Apparently.
John:
Yeah. Thinking through what the problems were with open-source is, well A, you want to know, is a feature being checked or not? And if you set it to 25% of actors, kind of how many people does that mean? And is it actually returning that? And at GitHub, we used StatsD and stuff like that to kind of figure some of that out. And then we also eventually used other things, like Datadog and stuff like that. But I don't necessarily have that on every project that I set up, and stuff.
John:
But these are things that I want every time I use Flipper. And so if I'm going to want them every time. And probably other people are struggling with them every time, then those probably ... And those are the things that are the hardest to build, because they're unique to the setup. So if you want to have analytics tracking, you got to have some thread in the background that's keeping track of stats and shipping off events, and doing that kind of stuff to some kind of end point. And then that end point is going to have to do a lot of work to store the raw data, crunch up reports.
John:
Again, you guys, totally familiar with that. But that's not something you just want to solve in open-source. I was just that ... Or for each customer. I don't want to write an analytics roll up adapter to work with Redis and to work with Mongo, and to work with Postgress. There's some things that just make sense to centralize. And so I think that's why I went that route. And also, that was what I had done in the past with Harmony and Gauges was SaaS. I just understood that ... I've never licensed anything. I don't even look at licenses. I mean, other than legality just to make sure I'm not breaking laws. But yeah. I mean, I use MIT, because everybody uses MIT in Ruby. There's probably other licenses, I don't know what they are.
Josh:
Yeah.
John:
So I think that's kind of why I didn't go down that route.
Josh:
Have you thought about AB testing features?
John:
Yeah. That comes up. I feel like ... I mean, for me where I sit on that is, I don't AB test stuff. Like you guys said, you don't do it either. And I feel like I don't really have the desire. And I kind of alluded to this earlier, but just to sit there and micromanage the revenue or the color of a button, or all these kinds of ... I just don't care about that. So it doesn't interest me. I don't personally do it. I wouldn't know how to solve it right for people. There's other services out there, Optimizely, et cetera that are huge.
John:
But everybody that uses feature flags immediately is like, "Oh, this is the same thing as AB tests. Why doesn't this do AB tests?" Or I'm already doing AB tests, et cetera. So I've already ... I mean, there's been several people that have asked. And so probably some day. If your customers want something, you build it. I wouldn't know how to build it correctly for them right now. And that would detract from just trying to get people who are using Flipper currently onboard, which is goal number one is just if you're using Flipper, just make it a no-brainer that this is something you use.
John:
So that's the only reason why I haven't is I'm not sure how much I believe in it. And if people want to do it, that's totally fine. And I could see it being supported at some point. But it just feels, yeah, different. To me, they're different things. And maybe what you do is there's a better way with once you have those raw stats, you use some sort of export Zapier, or whatever it is. You have glue between two disparate systems that they use the data. But I don't know that I want to have an AB testing company. But I actually, a year after I left GitHub, the people who were working on maintaining Flipper internally were like, "Hey, we're looking at doing a lot of AB testing." And they had two different things, which-
Josh:
Didn't GitHub release a tool that did AB testing in Ruby or something? I feel like there was something back in the day?
John:
Scientist?
Ben:
Scientist.
Josh:
Yeah, Scientist. Yeah. I was going to say five years ago, or within the past five years I saw something.
John:
It's more for code changes to make sure that you can try-
Josh:
Okay. Yeah.
John:
... the old way and the new way, and test the performance-
Josh:
That's right. Yeah.
John:
... before they go out. Yep. But it's the same. That I love. And I feel like that's totally up Flipper's alley too is this idea-
Josh:
Okay. Yeah.
John:
... of server side tools to help you release software more safely. To me, I love that. I'm just less excited about the AB side.
Josh:
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, the Scientist thing was maybe a little bit closer to what I was thinking, versus product-
John:
Oh, gotcha.
Josh:
... feature maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I probably could phrased it a little better. It's just you said-
John:
I didn't know about that at all.
Josh:
... you love stats. And I thought, "How can I get this guy collecting more stats?"
John:
What crazy is I've never thought of the Scientist functionality in Flipper. But that makes total sense.
Josh:
It seems similar-
John:
Yeah.
Josh:
... to me.
John:
I think I owe you a percentage of the company now.
Josh:
Totally. The first one's free.
Ben:
Yeah. I got to put a plug in for Scientist. We recently used that, because we were upgrading our elastic search cluster from six to seven. And so we spun up a new cluster, filled it with data, and then we were like, "Okay, let's see. How does it work compared to our old cluster?"
Josh:
I didn't realize we used Scientist for that. That's cool.
Ben:
Yeah. It's great.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
So it really helped me realize, "Oh, okay. I won't blow up the world if I deploy this new thing."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's quite nice.
John:
Yeah. And the key thing with that is that I love having the AB execution, and deciding whether or not to run the B. And that was even ... I see that as it's more like A to B down, rather than A or B. We're always going to return A, but sometimes we'll do this other one. And I mean, I've been using that so much. I mean, it's really valuable. And the biggest thing I miss from GitHub honestly, was back when we still had StatsD and Graphite, and metrics whatever. Some magic that all the smarter people made internally just for us, or whatever.
John:
I miss that. I mean, you could just throw anything in StatsD that you wanted, and you never had to think about ... It was great. Now that I'm outside, I'm like, "I just want to click a button and just have that be on a thing." But not have to worry about, "Do I have a 100 metrics, or 200 metrics? Or 300?" I just want to ... If it fills up the disk, I'll just delete the disk and start over. It's fine. I just want to click a button and have it appear. And so I can just send Scientist stats and all that.
Ben:
We love that. So we use StatsD and send it out to Librato.
John:
Oh, nice.
Ben:
It's wonderful. I don't have to care. I just pay whatever per month, and they keep track of all of the stuff. And I can make nice little charts whenever I want on demand. And it's great.
John:
I need to check that out in more detail.
Ben:
I think they've rolled that out now. I don't think they actually sell Librato separately.
John:
Oh, okay.
Ben:
I don't know. Have to check that out. But yeah, it's cool stuff. Well, yeah. If Josh just gave you a huge business opportunity there, then yeah, we'll wait for that check in the mail.
John:
Yep. Just don't hold your breath.
Ben:
Well, John, thanks so much for joining us. This has been awesome. This has been a lot of fun.
Josh:
Yeah. A lot of fun.
John:
Yeah. This was great.
Ben:
So for everyone who wants to keep track of you, what's the best way? Twitter, your website? What do you like?
John:
Yeah, either one of those. I mean, anything I put on my website I'll eventually put on Twitter too. So either one of them is fine. And I'm now a proud Ghost user, paying Ghost user.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Cool.
Josh:
What's your Twitter handle, by the way?
John:
It's @jnunemaker. Which most likely you can't spell. But that's what the show notes are for.
Ben:
That's right.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll put it in the show notes.
Ben:
Well, thanks, John. And best of luck to you with Flipper Cloud. I'm going to go check it out again. And maybe we'll switch from Rollout today.
John:
Yeah. Hey, if you need somebody to pair with, you know where to go.
Ben:
All right. It sounds good.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Thanks. Well, this has been an episode of FounderQuest. If you want to write for the blog, I'll have to plug that for Star. You know where to go, because you've heard the podcast's outro so many times by now. If you want to check out John, we'll have some links in the show notes to his Twitter and his blog, and Flipper Cloud. And if you want to do some work for Honeybadger, Josh has been hiring like crazy.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And got a whole bunch-
Josh:
Still could use some more.
Ben:
... of contractors. Kevin said in Slack the other day, "Yeah, they're like Pokemon. Got to collect them all."
Josh:
Collect them all.
Ben:
But thanks so much for listening. And hope you all have a great day.
Show Notes:
Links:The Boys in The Boat
Founding Sales
All your base are belong to us
Write for us
Full Transcript:Starr:
I loved Beavis and Butthead so much in the 90s.
Ben:
Yeah, it was awesome.
Starr:
I was prepared not to like it because all I heard was everybody talking about how stupid it was. And then I watched it. I was like, this is amazing. This is just my brand. I was the target demographic. I was, I don't know, 16 17.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
Yep. That's a great show.
Starr:
Yeah, so.
Ben:
There was some picture. I don't remember who it was. It was Josh Hawley and I can't remember who the person was. But they had them as Beavis and Butthead. They did a montage, had them in a picture together and it was pretty funny.
Starr:
I feel like the children and their deep fried memes are the spiritual successor to the spiritual child of Beavis and Butthead.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Could be Yeah.
Ben:
No doubt.
Starr:
Because Beavis and Butthead were pretty deep fried. So, this podcast is just all about giving. We all live in the Pacific Northwest. And this podcast is going to be all about giving our readers, I know, what does it feel like a sense of what it feels like to live in the Pacific Northwest because I've got a guy chainsawing right outside my window. They've got a wood chipper going. And it's an extremely Pacific Northwest thing. I've lived all over the country. And I've never lived in place for about a third of the time, you can hear a wood chipper in the background in a residential neighborhood.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I think part of that is due to the trend here that I haven't seen anywhere else, of allowing 90 foot cedar trees to grow right next to the houses, right? And so at some point, someone's like, "You know what? We probably should take that down." And repeat that over and over again in every neighborhood around here.
Josh:
Speaking of, I have some chainsaw work to do right after this podcast. So we do live in a grove of cedar trees. And one of them fell in my backyard and took out my fence the other week so I've been working on that-
Starr:
Oh that's good.
Josh:
Slowly.
Starr:
So I learned, a what?
Ben:
You are going to be all set for firewood this winter then.
Josh:
Yeah, for sure. I've been all set for firewood since we moved in here, trees fall every year, it seems.
Starr:
One thing I learned when I started the permitting process for my backyard office is that Seattle has a concept of, I forget what exactly it's called, but it's like there is significant trees or important trees. There's an official designation for if a tree is worth living or if you can just kill it with impunity.
Ben:
Yeah. Kirkland is pretty uptight about that whole tree thing as well. In fact, apparently Kirkland is tree city USA, but there might be, I don't know, 5000 of those in the country. But anyway, for some reason, the people that owned my house before me or maybe the people that owned the house before them, decided to plant a nice Maple right close to the driveway. And that Maple over its lifetime, of course, grew and grew, and its roots grew and grew under the driveway and heading towards the foundation. And I'm like, I got to take this tree out. And the city of Kirkland was not terribly happy with the idea of me taking out this tree that had that designation. I don't know what they call it, substantial tree or something. But yeah, we actually, we have a policy in Kirkland. You can only remove two trees per year from your property. And you have to get special permission if the tree has a particular diameter of trunk. If it's been around long enough kind of thing. So-
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
That'd be the absolute unit designation.
Ben:
So I actually sent a Google Earth view of my house, my lot and I had to circle this tree and get permits to be able to remove it.
Starr:
And they're like, "Sorry sir that tree is a chonk, you can't remove that."
Josh:
What?
Starr:
That big boy's an absolute unit. You can't just cut him down.
Josh:
So Ben, what's it like living under tyranny?
Ben:
Well, and then tree removal service that, because I didn't want to do it myself. I'm not that manly. They came out and the contract was if you get sued by the city, then it's all you basically, they disclaim any liability of getting in trouble with the law.
Starr:
Oh, that's funny.
Josh:
Do they have tree lawyers or do they hire.
Ben:
They have the tree police that go out every year. And they look for the tress gone missing.
Starr:
Well, actually, I did, so when I was permitting my shed or my office, I call it the shed, but it's actually a pretty nice office at this point. I was originally going to have it on the other side of the lot, but that was too close to the roots of this special tree, which is good. I don't want to kill the tree. So I'm glad that they told me that. I don't care what side I build it on. But there are actually tree lawyers and tree laws. And it's a whole big deal with forestry. Let me tell you a little bit. This is just going to be the gossip episode where I just tell you all about all my family's dirty laundry. So my sister, my half sister, I've got several siblings and my half sister is 20 years older than me. And she got a little weird there and got a little hostile towards the rest of the family. And essentially, the family owns in common this little plot of land in Mountainburg Arkansas, it's just forest, it's pretty useless. It's not even really flat enough to build on.
Starr:
You'd really have to go in and clear it out and bulldozer it to make it a decent place for our house or anything. And so, she is not an owner due to some complications, she sold her part or something like that. But anyway, later on, several years ago, she went and hired a forestry company to cut down all the trees on the land and sell them to-
Josh:
Log it.
Starr:
Yeah, to log it and give her the money, the proceeds which is a pretty shitty thing to do, right?
Josh:
Industrious?
Starr:
Yeah. So anyway-
Josh:
Just take the initiative.
Starr:
So of course, we had to sue her. Just because I don't know it is just out of principle. Anyway, it was such a paltry sum of money, but it ended up being a principle of the thing. But yes, there's lots of laws about cutting down other people's trees. This is something people have really dealt with in the past.
Josh:
Well, if you're going to go into law, tree law seems like a pretty good way to go.
Starr:
Very stable.
Josh:
There will probably be trees in the future. Have you all, back to the Pacific Northwest, have you seen the pictures of the trees back before the whole, the Pacific Northwest was logged, back in the day?
Starr:
It was amazing.
Josh:
Pictures of entire logging crews sitting on the stumps of these trees. That was 20 people or something.
Ben:
Yeah, I was just reading actually, the book, The boys in the boat. It's the story of US Olympic team, rowing team in 1936. And they were from the Seattle area. They were the University of Washington crew. And so there's a lot of Seattle area history mixed in with this book. And they followed one of the members of the crew, his name is Joe and followed basically his life story. And he lived out in Sequim for a while. This is during the Depression era and so he had zero money. And he learned from a friend how to do various things that were handy enough to that someone would want to pay for. And one of the things that was interesting is they would go behind the logging crews who were chopping down these chute cedars and taking what to them was useful like cedar shingles was a thing.
Ben:
And so they would take the core, the straightest part of the tree and just leave the rest. And so Joe and his friend would go behind them, and get the rest of the tree that was left there on the ground. And then carve it up and sell their own shingles. That's pretty clever. It's a great book, though, check it out. It's so well written. It's so well written that, by the end when they're talking about the Olympics and talking about the race, there's so much drama. I was really engaged. How's this going to go? Even though I already knew the end, Right? But still it was really cool.
Josh:
Yeah. Well get your affiliate link.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Right.
Josh:
This is how we're monetizing the podcast.
Starr:
That's going to pay for the second. We're just going to second mortgage, second house, a second mortgage is not a second house, that's a very different thing.
Ben:
Well, I have anticipated further problems with my tree situation, because my lot has a few more old trees, legacy trees that are going to need to go at some point. And so what I've done to avoid any future problems is I've planted more trees on my lot so that by the time I'm ready to cut down the ones that go down, I have some replacement trees ready to go.
Josh:
Yeah. There you go.
Starr:
It's just all trees. There's no place to walk. Well, what happened this week? I didn't do anything this, I did stuff this week but I look back on it. It's like, I didn't get anything done this week. I realized yesterday, Thursday that I ended up with a schedule where I got zoom meetings every day. And I realized also because I've never had a schedule this. I've never done so many freaking calls in my life. In the morning, I get to choose what I do. I can be like, get on calls, social Starr or I can be don't talk to me, I'm looking at my computer Starr. And I can't choose one of those per day to be. And so if I take a call, I fall into the social thing. And then it's just really hard for me to do any work. I don't know why, it's just really hard for me to get in the mindset, the frame of mind.
Ben:
So it sounds like you did a lot of work this week. It was just all talking work.
Starr:
I did a lot of calls. That's for sure. But yeah, we're getting some PHP authors. So that's exciting.
Ben:
Awesome.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
And Josh, this week got some PHP developers.
Josh:
Yeah, I've been sending email this week. Not something I normally do. But yeah, we're building out our little contract developer team. And I think we got a few people interested and excited about that.
Ben:
So the Starr is making calls, Josh is sending emails, I was doing a lot of backfilling. I've had backfilling scripts running all week, and we're now ready to cut over for Dynamo. And by Monday we are ready to cut over for Elastic search.
Starr:
That's amazing.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
So I think I'm going to roll the dice. And I'm going to cut over both at the same time on Monday. I can see both of you cringing as I said that.
Starr:
Why not?
Ben:
This is funny.
Josh:
Did I tell you Ben, I'm going to be on vacation Monday.
Ben:
So we were having dinner last night and I was telling my family about the day and I was mentioning about this cut over thing. And I said, yeah, I've got the code ready. And I was ready to cut over Dynamo but there's a little bit of code that really depends on the new Elasticsearch and I was like, well, I could take that out and just deploy the Dynamo stuff now. But I think I'm just going to deploy it all at once and wait, and my son is like, "That sounds like a bad idea." And I'm like, "I have trained you well."
Josh:
Smart kid. I just had the picture of Ben's dinner table, by the way, with a white giant whiteboard next to it. So he can get up and diagram all his stuff out. That's it, that's a pretty technical dinner talk, Ben.
Ben:
I'm picturing myself as that conspiracy guy with the strings on the pictures and stuff-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Dad's getting the whiteboard again.
Starr:
You want to know the first thing that went through my mind when he said that and this requires a little bit of setup, so bear with me, but so last week, I was making jokes about buying call options on GameStop. And I didn't do that, because I learned that so little tip for the readers or the listeners, when they list the price of an option on the internet, that's per share. That's not for the whole contract of 100 shares. So yeah, I was like, this is going be 100 times more expensive than I thought it was. So no, forget that. But I was like okay, this is interesting. So I'll read a book about options and learn about them. And so the second you said that I was just like, got to buy a put option against us. It makes no sense.
Josh:
Everything.
Starr:
Yeah, it's just going to be like Wolf of Wall Street in here all day long.
Ben:
That makes me think we should launch a new product. It should be markets, that way you can bet on your your internal ops team's performance, right, if you know a big release is coming up.
Starr:
That would be great for morale. We would love that, yeah. We can incorporate it into Honeybadger. People could bet on who caused an error.
Josh:
There you go.
Ben:
Hey, I like that. Maybe you'd bet on your competitors.
Starr:
But backfilling wasn't the only thing I did this week, I also had some bad news. The bad news is that the approach that I took for the Heroku provisioning portion of Hook Relay is not what they would like to see they being Heroku. So I might have to redo that.
Starr:
That was a shame.
Ben:
There was some documentation that I missed, and they came back and they're like, "No, we really don't want to approve you, because you're not doing this this way." I'm like, "What are we talking about?" They're like, "See this documentation?" It's like, "Oh man, I did not see that documentation."
Josh:
And there was documentation?
Ben:
Well, it's very well hidden in my defense. Yeah, it's like, sub paragraph of a subsection, hidden under a filing cabinet with a lion in front of it saying. But and then also discovered that I thought we had had enough alpha testers test, but in fact, we have not had enough alpha testers test, because the requirement is you have to have 10 Alpha customers who have provisioned the add on. And we have not reached 10 yet, I've invited more than 10 but I guess I didn't keep close enough track as who's actually using the thing. And so yeah, we've got some work to do there so that's a bummer.
Ben:
Yeah, Heroku would know that that Yeah. But good on them that I asked them to double check, because I thought they were saying, well, you only have X number provisioned. And I'm like, "Well, maybe someone provisioned and then deprovisioned, right? So could you check your logs?" And they came back and they're like "Yeah, we checked the logs, we know what we're talking about." So yeah, I'm going to have to do some work there, I think or maybe hire a contractor to do that work for me.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
There you go. This all seems a little bit more rigid than when we started with Heroku. It feels like when we started with Heroku, they were like, sure, just slap the Heroku menu on your app, it's done.
Josh:
I'm positive that we did not know what we were doing as much as we know now. So we probably made many more mistakes.
Ben:
Yes. During this process, I thought, I sure hope they don't decide to go look at the Honeybadger add on. Because hopefully, we're grandfathered into the old ways of doing things there.
Josh:
Yeah, what happened? Why is it gotten harder to-
Ben:
Yeah, well, you know.
Josh:
To start a business? Start a SaaS?
Ben:
They have good reasons. They're a bigger company now, they got bought by Salesforce, what, 10 years ago now. And they have to, they've gone into, and I think since we've launched Honeybadger, they've gone more into supporting bigger enterprises and so they have a better story to tell, like around compliance and private spaces and things like that. So they're pretty touchy when it comes to security issues and making sure that you're all on the up and up.
Josh:
Makes sense.
Ben:
For a new add on, well, for coming like Honeybadger who is used to doing that kind of stuff now that we've gone through the compliance thing it's not so surprising, but if Hook Relay was our first go round and I've built this and I got that kind of feedback, I'd be like, "that's hardcore," right? So, yeah, it's getting harder, but I think that's just the nature of the beast. There's so many bad actors out there who want to take advantage of you that you got to be defensive.
Starr:
So you're saying that when we were initially approved, they didn't quite know what they were doing? And since then they've learned a lot more about what they were doing?
Josh:
Things change. It was just the Wild West back then.
Ben:
And it was a kinder, gentler internet.
Starr:
Yeah. I miss it, I miss the kinder, gentler internet before all the terribleness.
Josh:
Before the internet was ruined.
Ben:
But it was good week. I'm excited to have that backfilling stuff done and get the cutover done.
Josh:
Yeah, well I might still get to some React Native stuff this afternoon. That is my stretch goal. That was, this stuff just keeps getting pushed back and back by this, sometimes I forget how much work we actually have just sitting across all these different repositories and things that I maintain. And the effect that that has on me as just hanging over my head constantly. This week, I've been trying to go through everything and find someone to handle, someone to basically assign to cover all of that stuff. But then in the process, I'm getting distracted by it again. And then, of course, we have issues coming in, new things popping up constantly. So we had a few of those and then we've got the inevitable support requests that come in, we've got some source map, issues and debugging, so little debugging projects popping up here and there.
Josh:
By the end of the week, I realize, I've pretty much just spent the whole week doing support and pretty much writing and documentation is what I spent, I think, most of my time doing, but sometimes it just feels like you didn't get anything done. But I know I worked a lot. So hopefully all that documentation pays off.
Ben:
Laying that foundation.
Josh:
Yeah. But yeah, I'm excited to, I would really love to, because that was my goal, for this week was on Monday, I was going start on testing out this React Native integration that we're trying to roll out. It's Friday, and I haven't even looked at it yet.
Starr:
Yeah, sorry. My main goal this week was, I'm just going to lay, I've got about 20 blog posts, I need to write descriptions for and that's it. I'm just going to sit down and do it this week. And I haven't done a single one because I just so much stuff has come up in the meantime.
Josh:
Yeah, I will say that, I think I did really well this week resisting the urge to actually dive in on work that would distract me for, if I kept doing it, it would distract me for months, probably. So my goal is to really finally get serious about delegation. And so instead of actually, when something, when I see an issue that's nagging at me, and I'm like, oh, I could jump in and fix that and that's my instinct, this week, instead of actually just diving in and seeing if it was a quick fix or something, I'm just documenting the process of what I would do to address that issue. And then just putting in an issue for someone else, hopefully soon to take on. So basically spending that time just documenting the problem which will make it easier to pass off to someone.
Starr:
Yeah, you spent a lot of time writing a document about how this contracting system will work, how we're going to manage contractors going forward. And we had that call on Monday and that was really interesting. That was, I felt like you had a really solid, need to come up with a really solid foundation for building this contracting system on top of.
Josh:
It's funny, I forgot, as I've been fleshing that out, I forgot how much, I'd actually started on this, a couple years ago. And so, half of this was already completed somewhere or in process, so. I think that's helped. I had been building this out and just never brought it completely into reality. So I'm hoping that this time, it'll actually, we'll be able to make it work and it seems yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.
Starr:
You shouldn't have told me that because I was impressed. So I was just like it's been two weeks and your made the whole document.
Josh:
Well, it's still impressive Starr. It's pretty great.
Starr:
Yeah, it is pretty great. Time is an illusion. The past doesn't exist so you've brought forth this little thing, this document. I'm just going to start talking in hippie words from now on, that's going to be my thing.
Josh:
The document exists now, but honestly, I think that's probably still the easy part. The hard part is creating some cohesive community around the people that participate in this ultimately. And keeping people engaged, because our problem has always been, we don't always have, we have a lot of ongoing long term work that we'd like to engage people with. But for contractors, it's you get a big job, and you tend to move on, and it's hard to keep people around long enough to, a lot of times people will just get distracted or wander off. And we're trying to create some team. I want a team dynamic that we can rally around or something. So, I want an active Slack channel where we can hang out and -
Starr:
That'd be really cool.
Josh:
Actually work together.
Starr:
So one thing I am curious about, and I imagine that as you move forward in this, you're going to try lots of different things and we'll see what works. I'm curious about whether or not it'll be any easier or harder to get people to do jobs that are very, what's the word I'm looking for? Very finite and well defined and concrete, right? So, I'm curious, because one model of working with a contractor is to be like okay, so we're going to pay you, however many dollars an hour. And here's a list of things, go to town on them. Another way of doing it is be like, okay, you can do this one thing for us, and we'll pay you X dollars, or x hours at your hourly rate. And so, I'm curious, if those will get different responses in terms of interest. Yeah, because that's going to be, like if I was working a full time job, which I'm currently not.
Josh:
Same.
Starr:
But no, if I was looking for extra work on top of my normal job, I wouldn't want to do a hourly thing where I'm supposed to go in and pick up tickets, really, but I might be like, okay, I've got five hours, I can do this one project. So I don't know, it'd be interesting to see how that works.
Josh:
Yeah, like the open source metaphor. And I mean it works here, especially because these projects are open source for the most part. But I think eventually, if we have a group of contractors, we're going to be able to utilize them across the whole company. We could work on our Rails app and do other things eventually, but treating it like an open source project, with those well defined, finite issues and things like I don't know, it seems like people do, like you said people do, who are even employed full time, do still sometimes find time to contribute to an open source project, or knockout an issue that they ran into during their day job or something. So, it seems like, that could translate and I mean you get paid for it with us, which is always a nice plus. So the thing that I worked on this week that I think is important that I had not created before, is coming up with how we're going to actually handle the project management side of this whole thing, because we don't do project management really.
Josh:
And I want to keep it that way. I want to create an environment where everyone is individually responsible for the work that they sign up for. So, if you take on a job or take on an issue, for instance, if you're submitting a pull request or something to a open source project, you're going to be in charge of figuring it out and submitting it. And you don't have a manager who's trying to keep you on track for that necessarily. So I want it to be, I'm trying to figure out how to have it be up to, everyone feels responsible for the work they're taking on while at the same time creating an environment where it's all about helping each other move forward. So it's not necessarily that oh, well, it's just on your shoulders, and you just have to deliver. But it's like, you're responsible for the ultimate success of this thing happening. And that means that it's your responsibility to ask for help if you're stuck. And once you ask for help, you have more help than you could ever need, basically.
Starr:
Yeah, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about one aspect of the blog contracting, that I don't know, it might play a role in this whole building of a team and fostering that community. And it just might be something that needs to be accounted for but at least for me, I find that most of the people I talked to about doing blog posts, and who were like, yeah, I'll do a blog post, never write a blog post. And I'm not blaming them, right? Life happens. Maybe they got in touch thinking that we want some little 500 word BS, like search engine optimization piece. And we're like, no, you need to do a textbook chapter. And they're just like, okay, forget that. And they just ghost me but one thing I've tried to do is I've tried to foster this sense of, I don't care.
Starr:
I personally don't care, if you take a month to get back to me, or two months or whatever. People come, you can come you can go, I'm not going to get mad at you, if you take three months to write an article. And I may have to do certain things to keep my project going, right? I may have to flag your article as stale or something and put it in a different category so it's not clogging up the system. But that's not personal and just come back and you can finish the article if you want, sure.
Josh:
I like that a lot.
Starr:
So it's less of a dynamic, where it's less of a startup dynamic, where it's like, okay, there's five of us and we're all just living and breathing this stuff. And we're all up each other's butts all the time. And it's more of a, here's a nice little coffee shop, you can come and hang out for a little while, if you want. And then you can leave and we'll see you next month.
Josh:
Right. And then you're also get paid to be there.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. We could buy a literal coffee shop for people to work in, wouldn't it be great?
Ben:
Once you can actually sit in a coffee shop again. That'll be nice.
Starr:
Coffee shops are really cheap right now. It's a buyers market.
Ben:
I got to say that, having the opportunity to do a lot of I'll buy a coffee type meetings via zoom, rather than actually going somewhere to a coffee shop. Love it. And I really appreciate, thank you COVID, for that particular thing, I do appreciate that.
Josh:
Removing that constraint-
Ben:
Coffee shops are cool, I got nothing against them. But just to go and chat with someone for 15 minutes, you have drive across town and. I'm happy doing that via zoom.
Starr:
One thing that occurred to me is that, we've talked about, hiring a salesperson. And in my mind, these high powered enterprise software sales people are always on flights going out to people and stuff. And I wonder, since, pandemic happens, I'm sure that'll come back to some degree, but I also have a feeling people will be much more open to doing things via zoom. And so, it may be possible to have somebody who just stays in the office and does those things. And that's going to be much more acceptable.
Ben:
Yeah, I was actually reading this week, a book called Founding Sales. And it's about how to go from being a founder to being the salesperson. And so it's exactly for people like me, who need to figure out the sales stuff. And I'm early in the book, but so far it's good. But one of the, a throwaway comment in there was talking about getting outside of the building, going and visiting your customers and you hear about this advice, plenty of places, but just there's something about it struck me as funny as like, oh, yes this was written pre pandemic, because he's talking about, you going and visiting someone in their office, and you've got to have that Facetime. I'm like, yeah those are the days.
Josh:
That's that's how to save time.
Starr:
I've got FaceTime? We can do that.
Ben:
But yeah, I started on that this week. So I read that book. And I have an idea, actually. So I've also been chatting with a couple of mentors and just really smart folk about our current situation and wanting to get into the sales game and had some really good conversations about why do you want to do that? And what are you thinking and stuff? So it's been helpful. And one of the ideas that fell out of those conversations was, and I don't know if this is actually going to work or if I'm actually going to do this, but it's just a thought.
Ben:
What if I went through our existing customers, and looked at those customers that are parts of larger organizations, and I go to them and say, hey, you are using Honeybadger, you love using Honeybadger. You probably have some other teams at your company that aren't using honey badger. How about you introduce me to them. Or find some way to get more Honeybadger into your business so the land and expand? This is not a new strategy. But I'm just thinking maybe for us, that's a good entryway as opposed to just dialing for dollars, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Just going with relationships, we already have people like us, and finding ways to get them to help us expand in their works.
Starr:
That's really cool. I had assumed we would contact you some existing customers, but I assumed that would be like a trying to upsell them thing. But I forget that, big companies have lots of teams inside of them. So you could sell Honeybadger to like 50 teams inside of a company.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. So-
Josh:
Is that a situation where the other teams would like purchase a new account? Or would it be under the same account of the company, but then it would just result in more usage?
Ben:
I think both of those scenarios could happen easily. Yeah.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
So we're going to be doing some queries next week, and pulling out some of our good customers, we, this pro tip to people who are SaaS operators, what we do in our helpdesk system is when we have people give us kudos, we flag that particular response with a testimonial tag. And so we can easily go back to people who we know, love us and had great experiences with us. Because we can just filter on that tag. And so I think I'll be running some query this week and cross referencing our testimonial people, and finding out some good potentials to talk to sending out some emails. One of the things that so one of the early points in this book was this idea that you have to change your mindset, because again he's writing to people who are engineers, or product people or, maybe marketing people, but generally people who have not done sales before. And so the first part of the book is changing your mindset. Like, one of his points was, you're used to thinking things through, and planning things out and being very deliberate about the stuff and he's like, really sales is different, sales is, you just need to be talking to people, you just need to have activity, you just need to be making things happen, like
Starr:
Wheeling and dealing.
Ben:
Not exactly, well, yes. But also why don't we Yeah-
Starr:
Snapping your fingers a lot.
Ben:
Exactly. One of the specific points was instead of spending 10 minutes, reviewing the email to make sure that it sounds perfect, just send it right and move on to the next one email.
Starr:
That explains a lot of sales emails I've received.
Ben:
Yes it does.
Ben:
Yeah, very little proofreading going on.
Starr:
How I sit Yeah. I seriously sometimes I look up and it's like, I've spent an hour editing this like one paragraph email and sending to somebody I don't really care about.
Starr:
Why do I do that? I don't know.
Ben:
There's your sales tip for the day, maybe off the main theme, a regular feature of the FounderQuest podcast, come up with a sales Tip of the Week.
Josh:
A sales tip.
Starr:
That's cool. I love it when you often talk to people who know what they're doing, and then you come back and tell us what they say I'm pretty bad at that. So it's-
Ben:
We should do more of that.
Starr:
I always really enjoy hearing what comes comes out of it.
Ben:
So yeah, we'll see what happens.
Starr:
Oh, cool. I'm all up for becoming a hardcore hard driven sales or organization right? Coffee's for closers. Greed is good.
Ben:
Slap the top of that thing, "you fit so many errors in this."
Starr:
You can fit so many errors in there. You know how many errors you can fit into the trunk of a Mercedes? I don't know either but it's a lot more than a Honda.
Ben:
Buy now. Supplies are limited. We only have so many bits.
Starr:
You've been listening to FounderQuest. And go give us a review at Apple Podcasts or whatever they call it now and yeah if you want to write for us go our blog look for the write for us page and I'm drowning in new authors right now so it I may not be able to get to for a while but contact us and until next week we are the FounderQuest people. I guess.
Ben:
Beavis and Butthead shall return.
Starr:
Oh no.
Josh:
He did it.
Show Notes:
Links:
Heya
Ben Curtis’ Mad Money DreamHost Affiliate Link
Write for us
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Thanks to Starr, we are now linked on the Honeybadger site.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. It only took two years to do that.
Josh:
I saw that on the "about" page.
Ben:
What made me think about it, I'm just, I don't know, surfing the site for something. I'm like, "You know what? We should probably link to the podcast from our site."
Starr:
Yeah, thanks for opening that issue.
Josh:
I thought we had it in the footer or something. Was it not even in the footer?
Ben:
No.
Josh:
Oh, man. We're good at marketing.
Ben:
We are so good at marketing.
Starr:
Totally.
Ben:
That was a good thing, so thank you.
Starr:
No problem. It was good. It's nice to have a tiny, concrete task that I know I can do that doesn't fractally expand into just caverns of uncertainty.
Ben:
For reals.
Ben:
Well, speaking of caverns of uncertainty, I was helping a friend with their website, which is a very old, old website, and I can't even admit while recording what versions of various software it's using, because that's how old it is. But basically it needed to make a move, and I was like, "You know, the last time I touched this, which was two years ago or something, even then everything was crusty and old. There's no way we're going to find a new hosting provider that's supporting all this old stuff anymore." So, what to do? What to do? I was just like, "You know what? Let me just run Wget on the site and just mirror the whole site to static pages, and then dump it up somewhere behind Apache and just leave it at that."
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
So, I sent that over to her. I'm like, "Here, you should try this. How about this?" So, we'll see. The problem is there's no search now and the contact form and stuff like that won't work. I'm like, "You know what? Just let it go. Just embrace the simplicity."
Starr:
Oh my god, yeah.
Josh:
That's so weird. That is so weird, because yesterday I literally did that with the Heya sales site that was in Rails. I literally saved, I did the "save as webpage" thing, and then edited the CSS paths and just dumped into a GitHub pages branch on the public repository, because we decided not to sell Heya anymore and release it as open source, so we didn't need this fancy Rails app that we were paying to demo it. So, sometimes just "save as webpage" and deploy is the way to go.
Starr:
When you mentioned a search, that reminded me of this client I used to have. It was a freelancing client, it's a Rails app, it's a very, very old original Rails still. I guess technically they're still my client. I never actually dropped them, because they would get in contact with me once every two years and have me do two hours of work, so I was just like, "Okay, whatever." It's mostly because I like them and I know that they're not going to find somebody who's going to do this for them, so I didn't want to leave them high and dry. But I built an export as PDF feature a long time ago for them, and it used, what was that headless browser? Was it Phantom?
Josh:
Yeah, Phantom.
Starr:
I used the headless browser to save as a PDF, or print as a PDF or whatever, and it was all in Heroku. Last year they got in touch with me and was like, "Hey, this PDF thing stopped working," and I'm just like, "Oh my god. Oh my god." Because I haven't touched this in I think it's been almost 10 years, this part of the app. I was just like, "You know, all browsers support print to PDF now. All operating systems, you just press "print" and then you do the PDF. You select "PDF" and it works." I remember trying to get them just to do that-
Josh:
That's a good fix.
Starr:
... the first time I built it, but Windows didn't have that feature. You had to have-
Ben:
Had to get a driver for that.
Starr:
Yeah, you had to have a special software. But this time I guess Windows added print to PDF, so it was okay.
Ben:
Nice.
Josh:
That's amazing. Did it use WK HTML to PDF? Or was it something else? I think I used that graphic-
Starr:
No, it was a headless browser that would output-
Josh:
You were doing it, okay.
Starr:
... to PDF. It was running on Heroku somehow. I don't know how I got it to run on Heroku.
Josh:
Ben remembers what I'm talking about.
Ben:
Yeah. Oh, man, that was painful.
Josh:
On Heroku even, I think. I remember specifically an issue with that where I think we were deploying it to Heroku and it had some PDF function like this, but we weren't paying for multiple dynos or something. The app was having these random failures where it would just not respond to requests, and it turns out that the reason was that it was being blocked by this PDF process in the background, and then it would just block the threads for connections to Unicorn or whatever server it was using, probably WebKit or something, or WEBrick. The solution to that problem was just to pay for hosting.
Starr:
So, you're saying this wasn't a high-availability, high-scalability setup?
Josh:
No. But I think it was for our client. They were extremely cheap. I was like, "You just need to put some money into this."
Starr:
That's a catch-22 with freelancing, because you can be working on a thing and just be like, "This is terrible. I would be embarrassed to show anybody this." But nobody's going to pay you to make it any better, so you're just not, because you've got to make a living.
Josh:
That's the phase of freelancing where you just need to eat.
Ben:
Yeah, that's a terrible phase. Much better when you can get to the point where you can be selective in your clients and pick ones that'll actually both pay you and pay for the things that you recommend they do.
Josh:
One of my last old, old, old clients recently switched their website, like you were talking about, Ben, and I do remember the software versions they were running until within the last couple years I think, they were running a Joomla! 1.0 site, which I think the last release of that was 2008 or something.
Ben:
This was also a Joomla! site.
Josh:
Yeah, it's got to be a Joomla! site if it was from the late aughts or whatever.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Good times. I don't know. It must have been hacked 75 different ways. Or I don't know how it wasn't, to be honest. But I advised them to move to Squarespace, which I was looking at for a personal project recently, because I was looking like, "Do I want to build a custom little HTML site or whatever?" I realized for SquareSpace it's $140 a year for just to deploy a basic website. For most small business, like clients that I started out with in the early 2000s or whatever, that job just shouldn't exist anymore. It's just Squarespace or the services like them. You get a decent website that is maintained, and it's an hour of a modern developer's time per year. It just doesn't make sense to roll it myself.
Starr:
It's a little bit sad because one of my favorite aspects of web development was always just getting some mock-up from a designer or getting a screen from a designer, and then you have to make it somehow work using 2009-era CSS. It sounds very masochistic, but once you get into it, it's just a very Zen-type thing, because it just is what it is. You're just moving pixels from one picture to another, one window to another on the computer. It's just, I don't know.
Josh:
That was kind of fun, yeah.
Ben:
I never got into that. That was always for me very frustrating, so I just farmed that out to chop shops would would-
Josh:
I remember that. Yeah, you did.
Ben:
That was so awesome. I was so glad to find those services.
Josh:
Yeah, you give them whatever, a PSD, and they give you-
Ben:
Give them a PSD and they give you back the CSS and the HTML.
Starr:
Yeah, but they took no pride in their work Ben.
Josh:
That's the thing that always got me. I'd always get so mad, like, "This HTML is just garbage."
Ben:
I just held my nose and ran with it.
Starr:
I was thinking-
Josh:
It's all the same to the browser.
Starr:
I was thinking yesterday about doing just a website for personal stuff that's not related to work, and I was just like, "What would be the easiest for me to do but the least maintenance?" And I was just like, "Maybe I just do an AsciiDoc document, one AsciiDoc document, and publish it on Netlify." You'd have to set up the build to build the AsciiDoc, but that seems like it wouldn't require any maintenance.
Ben:
I would probably go with GitHub Pages for that instead of Netlify, actually because I'm a little peeved at Netlify today, because yesterday when I was working on this project for my friend, I was like, "Oh, I'll just do it on Netlify." No, no. Because for one, I've got buckets of HTML files that I'm just trying to send over to Netlify, so I just drag and drop like they say you can do. It's fine. Then it's deploying and deploying and deploying. 20 minutes later it's still deploying, and I'm like, "Are you kidding me? It's a few hundred HTML files. Give me a break." So I go into the deploy logs to see what it's doing. It's analyzing each HTML file and spitting out errors about all the references to non-secure assets. I'm like, "I don't care. It's a webpage. Just serve the webpage."
Ben:
Then I was like, "Well, let me put this on a separate team, because I don't want it on my stuff." Then Netlify is like, "Oh, no. You're already part of a pay team. You can't start a new free thing. Sorry, you're just out of luck." And I'm like, "Fine. I'll just go to DreamHost. I've been with DreamHost for 20 years, they know how to host websites." I just did it SFTP, I whipped out Transmit. I did a copy real quick, and boom, it just works. I'm like, "There you go. That's all I needed. I just needed you to render some stinking webpages." And DreamHost-
Josh:
It goes very well with Savefromweb
Ben:
Exactly. Exactly.
Josh:
Or whatever, "save as website."
Starr:
Could we name this, you've got the LAMP Stack, you've got... What are the other stacks?
Josh:
I don't know.
Ben:
Well, there's the JAM Stack.
Starr:
There's JAM Stack.
Ben:
There's MEAN Stack, if you're into Mongo, Express, Angular and... I can't remember what the N was now.
Starr:
So, it's going to be Savefromweb, it's going to be DreamHost, and, I don't know.
Ben:
We're going to have to put a referral link for DreamHost in the show notes so I can get some mad money credits on this.
Josh:
Yeah, include your referral code.
Starr:
It's going to be HTML... Wait, no. DreamHost is going to be running Apache probably, so it's going to be SDA Stack.
Josh:
SDA?
Starr:
SDA.
Ben:
SDA. You can run LAMP stuff on DreamHost. They do PHP, and they have a one-click Wordpress install, so it's so easy. It's four bucks a month.
Josh:
Can I just say one thing? Control panel.
Ben:
Control panel, there you go.
Josh:
Right? What else do you need?
Ben:
Here's the one problem with DreamHost though, the one thing that really just gets my goat. If they would do this one thing then I would be so happy with them, but because it's a shared hosting model and it's really cheap, of course they oversell it and stuff. Your IP address can change at any time because there are rotating Apache things and all that kind of stuff, so you have to have your DNS hosted with them because they're going to be changing your web server periodically. You can't have your DNS elsewhere. That's just a bummer. But as long as you're okay with having your DNS hosted by DreamHost, it's great. It's four bucks a month, you just throw some webpages up there and it works. I love it.
Josh:
What about dynamic DNS or something like that? Remember that from back in the day.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
All the wacky things? Do you think there are young people that listen to this podcast that have no idea what we've been talking about for the past 10 minutes, like control panel?
Ben:
Probably.
Starr:
I just think it's really funny that somebody is waxing poetic about cPanel. This is just such a weird cyclical moment. I feel like we've completed a circle. You start out 10 years ago or 15 years ago being like, "Oh, this sucks. I need terminal access," and you do everything with the terminal. Then you eventually move on and it's like, "Well, I guess I'm using Ansible now. Everything's shifted." Then finally it's just like, "You know what has scripting and things? cPanel. I'm just going to press that button and not worry about it."
Ben:
You know, "serverless" is just CGI-bin.
Starr:
Of course.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
Now to go back to that pearl, though. CGI-bin was horrible.
Starr:
You're making me reconsider Netlify, then. So, maybe we'll just go straight to S3. We'll just fill that locally, just I'll-
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
... put it into S3 and be done. I've been really surprised at a couple Netlify things. You would think there would be really just features that they would have, but they don't, I guess. One is you can't just tell it to rebuild my site every day.
Josh:
Oh, yeah?
Starr:
Yeah. First of all, maybe that seems like a very specific, weird request, but if you're using Netlify, chances are you're using a static site generator, and if you ever, ever want to schedule posts to be published in the future with a static site generator, you have to rebuild the site. So, rebuilding it once a day just makes sense. I had to do that in setting up a separate trigger for that, which just seemed weird. Then also I was looking into this because my little personal site I was thinking about, which don't worry, it's not a separate business project, I'm not trying to cut you guys out of the huge revenue streams.
Josh:
With an AsciiDoc?
Starr:
Yeah, with my AsciiDoc, my huge AsciiDoc revenue. It's just all about Honeybadger sucks. I hate working here. because I'm a whistleblower.
Ben:
I'm going to short that Honeybadger stock.
Josh:
Your diary, the Honeybadger diary. It's like you're just publishing the last 10 years of your innermost thoughts about how much you hate Honeybadger.
Starr:
No, it's not that-
Josh:
Starr comes clean.
Starr:
I'm sorry.
Ben:
That's all right.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. The other thing, I was like, "This would be an AsciiDoc, but maybe I could make it a little bit fancy by just adding some JavaScript to it and make it appear to be a website." You have a single AsciiDoc that has multiple sections, so maybe each section appears to be a webpage. Really you're just showing and hiding them when you click on links. So, I was like, you still want people to be able to link directly to the page they're on. I'm sure Netlify has some setting that lets it pass through... It basically lets it serve the same HTML page for a variety of paths, and let that page's JavaScript decide what to do based on that path. And it really doesn't. It lets you redirect everything to index, and, I don't know, maybe you could figure out from the refer what page they're on. But that seems pretty janky for something as fundamental as routing for that.
Josh:
I think what you need is AsciiDoc plus React.
Ben:
You want a rewrite rule.
Starr:
You want to rewrite... Do they have that?
Josh:
And a rewrite rule.
Ben:
They might. Apache does. DreamHost has got Apache, just DreamHost.
Josh:
I don't know if they have rewrites. I know they have their redirects file, and they might have-
Ben:
They do have rewrite.
Josh:
... some kind of rewrites. I don't know.
Starr:
The things I was seeing online were people saying, "Well, you should make a redirects file that includes every page on your site," and then somehow redirect... I don't know. It all seemed very just like it was made out of duct tape and twigs.
Ben:
Yeah, I was thinking about that yesterday when I was working on the site. I was thinking about your GitHub Actions thing that does the scheduled calls to Netlify to build our site so you can have those scheduled posts, and I was thinking, "If you're already going down that path of using GitHub Actions to automate something for your site, just build it there, and then SFTP it over to DreamHost, and you're done, and you can pay four bucks a month instead of 80 bucks a month to Netlify."
Starr:
Yeah, that's-
Ben:
We do the same thing for Hook Relay. The main site has documentation built on our OpenSwagger API annotation stuff that's in our app, so we have this YAML file that specifies all our API endpoints, and then we have some Java things that renders that YAML into actual HTML pages, the OpenSwagger renderer or something like that. Well, Netlify doesn't have Java installed, so Kevin found this GitHub Action that just does that. So, now instead of just having Netlify deploy our site like we used to, now we have GitHub Actions build the site and then sync it over to Netlify. It's like, "Well, now we're paying 80 bucks a month or whatever just for static HTML pages. That's kind of silly."
Josh:
Yeah, you can just deploy to S3.
Starr:
Yeah. I do like the fact that you can preview branches.
Ben:
That's nice. That is nice.
Starr:
And you can probably do that with GitHub too, right? But you'd have to figure it out, right?
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
You'd have to deploy it to different S3 buckets or whatever based on the branch name. Then you'd have to remember what that scheme was every time you wanted to build it.
Josh:
Yeah. If you do everything mostly Netlify's way, it all just works and it's pretty nice from my experience. But if you try to get too-
Ben:
Get too fancy?
Josh:
... but then... Yeah, get too fancy.
Ben:
Then there's friction.
Starr:
All right. So, you're all ready to launch "Badglify?"
Josh:
"Badgerfy."
Starr:
We'll just take-
Ben:
No.
Starr:
... them down.
Ben:
No, I'd rather not.
Starr:
What?
Ben:
Because I was working on Hook Relay this week, and I got it submitted to Heroku to be promoted to a beta add-on so that it would actually show up in their marketplace listings, because we've done the alpha thing, we've got our documentation in place, we've got our pricing done. We've got our paying customer that came on site, which, yay, thank you very much. Anyway, I was working on that this week to get it finished off with Heroku, and now I'm basically just waiting for Heroku to do whatever they do to approve the app to go out to be public. That's all great.
Ben:
But I was thinking, "This is a hassle." Just building the app is one thing, but then you've got to do all these just administrative stuff just to get it out there. Then of course you can't forget about the whole marketing side, and maybe you want to do some sales even. So I'm like, "Man, having another product, it's a lot of work." Josh, you can correct me on this, but I think that's why we just decided to give up on the idea of selling Heya, because it's just too much work to-
Josh:
It is a lot of work. The payoff has to be worth the effort, or the effort has to be worth the payoff. In the case of Heya, I don't know, I think we tried it. It was an experiment, and we tried it, and we realized that it's probably going to take too much work to actually market it and turn it into something that really makes a difference on the bottom line given our other business. I think it's still, a lot of people like it, they seem to like it, and I think it has a lot of potential to grow as an open source product, because obviously that opens up who can use it. There are definitely benefits of just releasing it for free. And it's a fairly simple, relatively simple project. So, I'm excited to... We haven't even announced that it's... This was yesterday. We changed the license and released it.
Starr:
Well, we're announcing it now. It's an exclusive.
Josh:
I guess, yeah, we're announcing that Heya is now free and open source.
Starr:
We'll link to it in the show notes. Everybody could use Heya. A $59.95 value.
Ben:
I'm looking forward to growing that. We talked recently about adding some more features for it for doing broadcast emails, and-
Josh:
I still really want to work on it.
Ben:
Me too. One of these Saturdays I'm definitely going to, when I'm bored I'm going to crank out the-
Josh:
Now that it's a true open source project, you're going to contribute some weekend time to it?
Ben:
Exactly, yeah. Now I'm not any more philosophically opposed to contributing to it.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
So, I can let my open source purity unleashed on Heya.
Josh:
Awesome. I think there's a potential there.
Ben:
I really just want to add a UI to doing the broadcast. We have it now where basically you can hop into the Rails console and you can send a broadcast email to customers, and I've done that, and that's fine. Dump some markdown in there, pick your recipients and you're off to the races. But it would be nice to have just a simple maybe... You know what I was thinking? Is have a web interface like Sidekiq does.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So it's just a Sinatra app embedded in the gem, and you can mount it. Then we could easily mount that on our admin app, and then just have basically a text box with some markdown and have some way to query which users you want it, and hit the "submit" button and off you go.
Josh:
That's what I want, so you should totally do that UI. This release actually also includes a major scheduler change to the way the scheduler decides what to send next to each user. But that change will actually enable us to I think do a simple stats dashboard on how many emails are being sent and who they're being sent to and some basic reporting; a basic reporting dashboard, basically.
Ben:
Cool.
Josh:
So, I'd like to... Eventually I envision having a little reporting dashboard, and then maybe a broadcast email section where we can schedule emails to go out.
Ben:
Maybe we should hire someone on Upwork to do this for us.
Josh:
We could, for sure.
Ben:
I had a really pleasant experience with Upwork this week in hiring some Python contractors, although-
Josh:
Yeah our first bug fix released.
Ben:
Already, yes. In one week. We posted the ad, got someone, got a thing published-
Josh:
Actually, it was within 24 hours I think maybe-
Ben:
Yeah, super-quick.
Josh:
... that he, yeah.
Starr:
What do you all do? Because every time I've hired people from... First of all, a little confession. When I just very first started freelancing, I was a contractor in Upwork for way too little money. But I didn't know what I was doing, so it balanced out. But every time I've tried to hire somebody on Upwork it's always been disappointing. It's always been just people didn't really produce good results. So, what did y'all do? What was I doing wrong?
Ben:
Well, I created the job ad, and there's this of course helpful little wizard that walks you through setting it up. Josh had written a great description about exactly what we needed, and I just took that markdown and I dumped it into their little text box there. But two of the things I think that were key were one, it asks you a variety of questions, but two of the questions in particular were, "What level experience do you want?" You get to choose between beginner, intermediate and expert, and I chose expert.
Ben:
It also asks you, "What pay range?" When it asks you what the pay range is, it gives you a suggestion based on other jobs happening on the site right now. For this particular job I had put in I wanted Python, that was the key word, and I wanted someone with back end development, that was another one of the tags, and I want to say it recommended a range of $30 to $50 an hour. I can't remember for sure. But it's like, "Here's what the typical job looks like," and you just choose that as a, "Yeah, just go ahead and do that." So, I chose that. I think those two things just made it, expert level and then choosing a range that's basically the same range as everybody else that's doing.
Starr:
I'm curious, when you choose an expert level, are people assigned a ranking, or is it self-identification, or self-selection into the rankings?
Ben:
I don't know.
Josh:
I'm not sure. We got a lot of responses, and I read through most of them. I will say they were definitely not all equal, so there were definitely some people in there that I wasn't going to hire. But the first couple people, because it recommends who the best match... It has some sort of algorithm that says this is the best match for you, or these people are. There was probably two or three ones at the very top who had already completed a lot of work through Upwork. It shows the dollar amount that they've earned through Upwork too, which helps you see what their success rate is with projects. I picked one that had I think $10,000 or $20,000 already through Upwork. I just picked one of the candidates that it recommended too, which, I don't know, maybe that makes a difference. They have some way of knowing.
Ben:
There was one little snag, and that was I did select... You can choose do you want to hire one person or multiple people, and if you choose multiple you can say how many you want to hire. I knew that Josh wanted to have some flexibility with picking people to work on a variety of tasks, since we have plenty of things to do, so I chose multiple and I chose two. I was like, "Well, we can't really manage more than two people right now, so let me just choose two."
Ben:
Josh went ahead and picked one. You mark them as hired in there, but we left the job open because we might need a second person, but we just haven't picked a second person yet. Well, they have this feature in Upwork where you can send out invitations to contractors. You post your ad and that's one thing, so somebody's going to find it and they might apply to it, but you can also proactively reach out to particular contractors who might not just see your ad. I think Upwork charges for this. You get so many invitations, and then you have to start paying. I don't know, I've never used it.
Starr:
It's just like a dating site.
Ben:
But they have what they call... Well, I don't know what they call it. It's some sort of assistant, or some sort of specialist or something that helps you with your job ad and helps you find the right candidates. It's like, "I'd never use that. I can pick people. It's not hard." But in our case, what this person did was started inviting candidates, and Josh had already hired a person. The job was still open, but we'd already picked the person and started working with that person, and then we started getting these messages from people like, "Thank you for inviting me to check out your job." I'm like, "I didn't do that," you know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But I realized that this assistant person was. So, that's not great, because we're not actively at the moment looking for another person. We've got it covered, thank you, so we're not going to be inviting people. So, I contacted the Upwork guy and I'm like, "Hey, look, could you stop doing that? Because we are set. And by the way, could you set a flag on our account that we don't want this automatic invitation thing ever again?"
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
I just guessed that they had that setting, and they do, actually. He wrote back and he's like, "So sorry. Yeah, I'll turn that off for you so you won't have that anymore."
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
That was a win.
Josh:
All right, cool. I'm excited about the potential for this type of work though, which is basically just open source work. We have all these open source projects to maintain, and we want to pay people to work on them. That might be another... This is just the first success and it's still ongoing, so this whole thing could fall through still, but if this works out, one reason could be that I think this is different from the typical project that I think of Upwork, is you have a self-contained project that you've specced out that you want to hand to someone and have them deliver, like an app or something, or some sort of complete deliverable.
Josh:
Our job ad is basically like, "You know what open source work looks like. You've probably already contributed to an open source project if you're going to be a good fit for this job, and here's our list of issues that you can go check out before you even apply to this job, and you can see what work is available. And when we hire you, we're just going to literally send you to this list of issues and say, 'Do that one.'" So, it feels a little bit different than like, "I need a web app from scratch," and we have to go through the whole planning process, and I probably have some sort of spec document, and it's all planned out. All the typical failures of software development apply to that scenario, versus this scenario it's like, "Well, if you don't work out we're going to know on the first issue probably, if you don't deliver." And it's no big deal if you don't, because neither of us have really invested much at that point, so we can try someone else, or if you don't like it we'll move on.
Starr:
I think that's very important that it's no big deal if it doesn't work out, because I feel like a lot of times with our contractors in the past we invest a lot of energy into them, and then eventually they're contractors, so they get a job or flake out or whatever. On our end we call it flaking out, but really they have no obligation to us to-
Josh:
Yeah, it makes sense.
Starr:
... do stuff for us. So, why would they just stay with us forever? And with a blog, I've benefited from a very similar attitude. I've got plenty of people writing blog posts, and if this particular one doesn't work out I don't really care. I don't want to spend a lot of time on something that doesn't work out, but if you contact me and you want to write a blog post and then I never hear from you again, that's fine. I wish you luck. It's whatever.
Ben:
It's like casual dating versus getting engaged.
Ben:
It's like, "Oh, if we don't like each other that's okay. We can go date somebody else."
Starr:
I don't know. It's a lot less pressure, and I like it. I really hope the Upwork thing works out, because we talked in our conclave about coming up with an in-house system for managing lots of contractors for jobs like this, and if Upwork can do it, that'll save us a lot of work.
Josh:
Well, I'm excited about figuring that out now. I think eventually this system, I think we can probably have a system that allows us to work with people through Upwork and allows us to work with people outside of Upwork. We already have a lot of the management pieces in place. We can send people contractor agreements in I think a few minutes at this point, and, you know-
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
... get that all signed.
Starr:
I've got a request for our listeners. If you know of a, it's like Upwork, but it's your own personal account and there's no army of freelancers bidding on your stuff, it's just like all the back-end stuff at Upwork that you can just use on your own and put all your contractors in there, and you have personal experience with this tool, could you tweet me at Starr, S-T-A-R-R H-O-R-N-E?
Josh:
That'd be cool.
Ben:
Because if you don't, we might have to build that product.
Josh:
Or I might just build-
Starr:
Maybe.
Josh:
... a notion page.
Starr:
I know that it exists. I know that one of these exists out there. I just don't know how expensive they are.
Ben:
You just need the universe to bring it to you.
Starr:
Exactly. This is the next evolution. It's not lazy webbing, it's lazy podcasting.
Josh:
There you go.
Starr:
It's just I say I want something.
Ben:
Well, while we're wishing, I want to hire an excellent VP of sales to come in and sell the heck out of Honeybadger for us. Totally flexible schedule, can spend maybe five hours, maybe 50 hours a week, I don't care, as long as they're selling, bringing in those hot leads. That's what I want. So, all of our audience out there, if you have a fantastic VP of sales that wants to work for us, then-
Starr:
Just one sitting around on the shelf.
Ben:
Yeah, just send them our way. And if you have two, even better. Send them both.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Keep the job open.
Starr:
You can put it on Upwork.
Ben:
Go on Upwork. I'm going to go right now, I'm going to see if Upwork has a sales category. Because I have no idea about how to do sales. I don't mind learning, but I think it'd probably be more effective if we probably had someone who actually knew what they were doing, doing that, and I definitely want to do some outbound sales for Honeybadger. I want us to be like Boiler Room calling everyone on the planet like, "You should buy Honeybadger because we're awesome.
Starr:
"Coffee is for closers!" I imagine we might also be interested in if there are people out there who just know about this and just want to talk to us, and possibly earn a consulting fee, we might be interested in that too.
Josh:
For sure. So you're saying this is the year that we figure out sales?
Ben:
This is the year we figure out sales, yes.
Josh:
We're ready. We're ready for it.
Ben:
We're ready.
Josh:
I'm ready for the next level. I know you are.
Ben:
I'm not going to say "or die trying," because we're not going to die.
Josh:
We're not going to die trying, yeah. We're going to do this very conservatively, and if it doesn't work out, that's okay.
Ben:
Because we still have plenty of revenue.
Starr:
I've got one idea for y'all for the next level. One word: options.
Josh:
Were you going to option our future? Is that what you're saying?
Starr:
No, I got-
Ben:
Did you see that GME went down to $50 yesterday?
Josh:
Ooh.
Starr:
It did, yeah. I have no desire to buy GME. I've been following it a little bit, and some people are predicting that there's going to be this lull, and then it's going to go back up. That's probably bullshit. That's probably completely wrong. But part of me is just like, "I wonder if I spent a hundred dollars on call options," you could probably buy call options for a thousand shares of GME for $100 for six months from now. Just to have a little money in the game.
Ben:
If you really want to get into gambling on the stock market, call options are the way to go, as opposed to just buying a stock and hoping it goes up, because you can get much more leverage from the call options than you can just from buying and holding.
Josh:
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal today that was like, "Teenagers are betting all of their savings on GME, and parents are worried."
Ben:
I like to look for the silver lining. In this case, I think perhaps just maybe a lot of teens and Millennials will get introduced to the stock market through this and maybe stick around and become savvy investors, and, you know?
Josh:
Yeah, you're actually right. Because I think to really experience the stock market, you have to lose money at some point. You're going to make some mistakes, and it's probably better to make some dumb mistakes in your teens versus when you're older and have more money saved, to lose and all that. I guess there are some investors who just, their entire investing career is just perfect, a perfect record. They've never, ever made a bad trade.
Starr:
You know what they say about monkeys and typewriters.
Ben:
Indeed.
Starr:
All of this has made me realize that I need to... I don't know. My whole approach to investing has always just been dump everything into a Vanguard index fund, and I think that's still correct for most my investing, whereas maybe I need to have a portfolio where 80% is in the mutual funds, 20% or 15% is medium-risk stocks, and then 5% is more high-risk type things. Because I realize that I have no desire to spend all my money on risky investments, but well, if I have almost no risky investments, maybe I'm losing out on upside. I don't know.
Ben:
My strategy has been somewhere in the high 90s percent of my investing is just index fund or 401(k), which is split with some bonds and things like that, just boring, just put the money in and forget about it kind of thing. But then I always like to keep aside a little bucket of basically I consider it play money, but it's to make those individual bets, like when I bought Apple stock in 2000, and that turned out to be a very good thing after 20 years. So, I like doing that. Well, the way I look at it is, this money, if it all goes to zero I won't miss it, but it could turn into something, and I'm going to make a bet on a particular stock. A while back I bought Shopify, and that worked out really well. I bought some Amazon, and that's worked out really well. So, things that I know and I'm like, "Yeah, I think that's a good company," then I will buy a little bit of it, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And then just sit on it for a while. And it's been fine. It's been fun, and then I can play like I know what I'm doing, but not risk all my savings.
Josh:
I've been watching a lot of people do the fractional trading thing on Twitter, and they're investing tiny amounts of money, but into a portfolio that would be... Basically it seems like practice. It's a way to practice making trades and investing without having to spend hundreds of dollars on a share or whatever.
Starr:
One thing all of this has taught me, this whole GME thing, and I'm not involved, but I just have been following along at home, is that pretty much everyone who talks about stocks on the internet just has no idea what they're talking about, and yet speaks with the most absolute certainty that they know everything about what they're talking about. So, I'm just left with a profound distrust of everyone.
Josh:
Well, welcome to the club. Welcome to the 21st century.
Ben:
Since we just happen to be three people on the internet that know nothing about stocks and we're talking about it.
Josh:
Yeah, with a podcast.
Starr:
But everything I say is riddled through with a profound uncertainty, so I don't know what I'm talking about.
Ben:
This is not financial advice. Please consult a lawyer.
Starr:
I thought the stock market was going to tank when-
Ben:
For real.
Starr:
... the economy collapsed. I thought that the economy collapsing would cause the stock market to go down, but it didn't.
Ben:
Shocker.
Starr:
It didn't. So I'm like, "Okay, Benjamin Graham. Okay, Mr. Value Investing. Where were you? Where were you in March, Benjamin Graham? This is not how it's supposed to work."
Josh:
Well, it's detached. It's detached from the economy.
Ben:
By the way, Upwork does have categories for sales. Don't know how well that work out, but there you go.
Starr:
Yeah, that could be truly horrifying.
Ben:
I think the one snag that we have, we couldn't just hire someone off the street because developers don't like to be marketed to in the typical ways. They do not want to answer their phones to people saying, "Hey, you should buy this thing." They don't want to get spam in their inbox and things like that. So, I think you'd have to find someone that's willing to put in a little extra beyond just the dialing for dollars.
Starr:
I wonder how much technical knowledge the person will need, because it's a pretty technical product.
Ben:
I would say probably not a lot, because for example, on any in-depth sales call I would be on the call as the technical salesperson, so I would be their support.
Josh:
And I imagine they're not initially... Are they reaching out to engineering lead, or are they reaching out to more the executive level or project management-type anyway?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
How technical is the lead, the first, until they bring in their technical people to evaluate via, "Hey, would this be useful to us?"
Ben:
Right. I'd imagine the first outreach is just like, "Hey, you should probably be monitoring your apps," you know, and-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
... "Let's talk about that."
Josh:
I have no experience with this, and this is what I want to learn more about. But you always want to leave open the possibility that you have no idea how this actually works, and this is why we need someone to come and tell us for money.
Starr:
But honor system. You can't just scam us.
Ben:
Because we have Honeybadgers.
Josh:
Just come and tell us what we want to hear. Cash is on the table.
Ben:
So, this is going to be a good year.
Starr:
Well, you have been listening to FounderQuest. Review us on Apple Podcasts. We're always looking for writers and for blog. Honeybadger.io/blog, go look for the Write for Us page. I actually have a little bit of a backlog right now, so it may take a little time before I can talk with you, but I won't forget you because I love each and every one of you. So, I will let you all go.
Ben:
Have a good one.
Josh:
Also, don't forget to buy GME so that Starr's options-
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Diamond hands.
Show Notes:
Links:
Amy Hoy - Wall Street Bets
Bloomberg - How Will the GameStop Game Stop
Clayton Christensen - Theory of Disruptive Innovation
Art of The Product Podcast - Does Tuple Ever Crash?
Jobs@honeybadger.io
Write for Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Did y'all buy any GameStop this week?
Josh:
I thought about it yesterday while Robinhood was not allowing buy orders or whatever, because my brokerage, I mean, doesn't shut you out. And I mean, it probably would have been a pretty safe bet given the stock today. But I don't do that kind of shit.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. I'm in the same boat. I want to, just for funsies, but at the same time, it's like, "Ah, that's really not a productive use of my time or money."
Josh:
Yeah. I deleted the Robinhood app after. Because I tried it out just because you got to see what the kids are up to these days. And the last straw with it was when they added this crypto trading interface that looked like a Tron ... Like some kind of arcade game. I was just like, "This is ... Yeah, I don't need a light cycle to buy cryptocurrency."
Starr:
Yeah, it's a little bit weird. My brother was like, "Hey, do you do stocks or crypto?" And I'm like, "Well, I've got mutual funds. But also, you don't have any money."
Josh:
This is how you know that the markets about to just evaporate, when your brother asks you if you trade stocks of crypto.
Starr:
For the past decade, I've just been like ... This is the last straw, global pandemic, 30% unemployment, last straw, market is going to tank. But I guess not.
Josh:
Yeah, this is new. Yeah, people won't let it fail, so let's just hold it or whatever the meme is. It's the new just thing to live by in general I think. Just hold, always just hold. Just never let go, never let go. Whatever it is, never let go.
Ben:
Diamond hands.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Explain the diamond hands thing to me, I don't understand that. I saw it, but ...
Ben:
You have to check out Amy Hoy's thread, Twitter thread, where she went and did a sale safari on Wall Street Bets. So sale safari is her and Alex Hillman's process where you go and discover ... You basically research a community, and you find out what the needs are, right. And so you can use that to help formulate some ideas for businesses or products that you might want to create. Instead of coming up with an idea and saying, "Hey, I wonder if someone will buy this?" You actually go and look for people who are looking for things, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I could satisfy that need, okay."
Starr:
That doesn't make any sense.
Ben:
So that's sale safari. And so she does this just for funsies, right. So she went on Wall Street Bets, and like, "I'm going to do a sale safari and find out what's this community all about." And so she just has this analysis on Twitter. It's a great thread, we'll put it in the show notes. But basically, she went and analyzed what their catchphrases are, and what they're doing in there basically. And diamond hands and paper hands are two of the phrases that show up in there repeatedly. And so if you're not familiar with the whole Reddit thing, which I mean, you must be by now if you're on the internet. But it's all about buying GameStop stock, and watching it go up, and up, and up, and putting the squeeze on short sellers who are just panicking because everyone is just buying this stock and making it go up, right.
Josh:
Which is hilarious.
Ben:
So they're all encouraging each other inside of Wall Street Bets, they're all like, "Hey, you got to hold on, you got to buy and hold, you can't sell." So diamond hands is someone who's holding on strong. And paper hands is someone who's chickening out and they're going to sell.
Starr:
Oh, okay, yeah.
Josh:
So I'm a paper hands?
Starr:
You know what this really resembles to me? It kind of resembles a Ponzi scheme in that-
Josh:
Well that's it, that's the thing, it just resembles a Ponzi scheme.
Starr:
For the stock price to keep going up more, more people have to keep coming in and buying at the higher price. And then eventually, there's not going to be anymore people, and then the price is going to collapse, and whoever came in last is going to be left holding a bunch of worthless stock.
Ben:
So Matt Levine had a great article this week. Actually, he's done multiple on this whole thing. Again, put in the show notes. So Matt Levine writes an economics column. But so he talked about the Wall Street Bets. And he was addressing your point exactly about, why would you buy now? Because you're just basically counting on someone who is dumb to come in and buy at some point later, right. Total Ponzi scheme.
Ben:
But he also provides some alternative exit strategies, as opposed to just depending on someone coming in whose dumber, buying the thing. So we'll post it. But it's a good read. I can't do it justice just to paraphrase it. So I'll link it, and you can read it.
Starr:
Yeah, I'll check that out. We'll put it in the show notes.
Ben:
That said, I wouldn't recommend actually buying GameStop right now.
Starr:
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Josh:
It does seem, just in general, that the world ... Society is rewarding true believers of all kinds right now. So it just seems to be a thing.
Starr:
Yeah, I don't know.
Ben:
It does feel eerily similar to conspiracy theorists and-
Josh:
Conspiracy theorists, populous politics, and just hold on no matter what. Doesn't matter what reality is, just hold on and we will win.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
Starr:
One thing that I do enjoy about this is that I've seen a number of people in my Twitter feed that are essentially like ... They're like, "I bought GameStop stock. I'm holding it. I know I'm going to lose this money. I'm doing it specifically to hurt rich people. I just really want to stick it to the hedge funds, so I'm going to put $1,000 into GameStop stock and just sit with it."
Josh:
Yeah, it seems to me like just another populous revolt.
Starr:
Yeah, it's like a Boston Tea Party type situation I think.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Only its weird, because it involves people staking their money. It's this really weird, abstract ... It's super cyberpunky. I could totally see all this happening in a William Gibson novel.
Ben:
Totally.
Josh:
Yeah. No, it strikes you as a Boston Tea Party, but a real one instead of the ones that people act out on the steps of capitals around the country.
Starr:
Oh, yeah, the Tea Party has connotations now, doesn't it?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Instead of a LARP, it's IRL.
Josh:
Yeah, it's IRL. The IRL Tea Party in the 21st century would happen on the internet I the world of finance.
Starr:
Oh, totally, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, my only concern is ... I get the whole ethos of, "Yeah, let's stick it to the man." And, "Those evil capitalists and hedge fund managers." Well, the problem is pensions, and retirement funds, and those kinds of things invest in those hedge funds.
Starr:
Hush now, don't think about that. We don't think about that, Ben.
Ben:
If you destroy them, that could affect me.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Josh:
No, anarchy works 100% of the time.
Starr:
That's why part of me loves to see the chaos unfold, but just at a small scale. Not at a large enough scale where it just jeopardizes my holdings, my Vanguard Total Index Fund holdings.
Josh:
Exactly.
Ben:
Yeah, Matt's article, he talked about the potential for GameStop to actually enter the SMP500 because it's market cap is now so large.
Starr:
That's amazing.
Ben:
And he's like, "Not really, because there's other things not just market cap." But it's funny to think, can you imagine index funds having to buy GameStop because it got put into the SMP, and they cover the SMP.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, this seems like the kind of thing that they've been doing with ... That crypto traders have been doing for a while now on telegram channels and stuff where they get a bunch of ... I forget, what do they call that? The operations that they run to the pump and and dump schemes. But yeah, it seems like that on a mass scale. And it's broken through into reality now, and I could see it continuing in the future, unless it's ... I guess that's why they're talking about regulation.
Ben:
I blame the pandemic, because people just got used to going to the store and buying out all the toilet paper to like, "Hey, let's just go buy all of GameStop."
Starr:
Yes. So a couple of things. First of all, yes, I think that we've seen a lot of things emerge that are just a result of people just being stuck at home with nothing to do. So this, you've got all the conspiracy theory stuff happening. And then the other thing I just wanted to say is just, I really hope that there are some people who really just work at GameStop, they love GameStop, so they've been like, "I'm just going to invest my meager savings into some GameStop stock, because I really believe in the mission of this company, and then just suddenly they're rich. I really hope that has happened to at least one person.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, many years ago, my wife worked for a company where they granted stock as part of their compensation. To every employee like, "Here's a little bit of stock, because yay, we're awesome." Right. And we sold that many, many, many years ago. But yeah, that could totally happen where you're that GameStop employee who just happened to get some stock because the company is generous like that, and now you're sitting on a ton of cash. I'd be like, "Sell, sell, sell."
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I'm being honest, I would definitely want to have a little brokerage account just so I can ... I mean, I know this is just completely irrational, this is totally a lottery thing. It's like when I heard of the Mega Millions was up to a billion dollars, I was like, "I should go buy a lottery ticket." Even though I've never in my life bought a lottery ticket. Yeah, it's that strange irrational thing. But I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, I just want to participate in the zeitgeist.
Starr:
Yeah, there we go.
Ben:
Be part of the thing, right. I was there, I bought GameStop.
Josh:
You experience. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Well, I did not pull the trigger. I don't think I will pull the trigger. I think I'm just going to sit back and watch from the comfort of my couch, and ...
Josh:
Yeah, I mean it just ... I don't know why you would at this point. It seems like it's at the point where all the suckers pull the trigger. But who knows? I mean-
Ben:
Who knows?
Josh:
Reality has been defied week after week for the last how many weeks?
Ben:
When we record next week, we might be kicking ourselves for not having bought GameStop at $300, right. Be like, "Oh, man, if we only knew."
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
The thing that, I don't know, one last thing that interested me about this is just, I didn't even realize this until a couple days into this whole saga, but these people ... This isn't an accident. These people basically, the Redditors and everything, they have developed a process now for going in and really messing with hedge funds who have big short positions in companies.
Starr:
So as far as I know, unless something changes about the environment, there's nothing to stop this from happening from other huge short positions, which seems like a pretty big oversight on the part of hedge funds, for one thing. It seems like you would be like ... I don't know, it seems like something that they should have thought of. People could literally just buy a bunch of stock and put us out of business just because they wanted to. Anyway, I don't know, it's weird. It's got a very ... The barbarians from England going in and taking Rome feel.
Josh:
Yeah, it seems like that's a common thing that the ruling class overlooks, is the people. The people rising up to overthrow them.
Ben:
And in a business perspective, Clayton Christianson's theory of disruption, right. Incumbents will be disrupted, and there's not anything they can do about it. Even if they can think, "Oh, yeah, we could be disrupted." But their business depends on what they're doing now. And if they were to really try to avoid being disrupted by disrupting themselves, then they would destroy their own business, right. And they can't win on that. And so I think that's what the hedge funds are like. They're pretty locked into their mode of business. And they just had the blinders on and like, "Oh, I don't know. I don't know what's going on with all these people out there who are actually buying stock but now they're getting disrupted."
Starr:
I just had a really scary idea. So our business, Honeybadger, is like a hedge fund in the tech industry, right. Most tech companies lose money when their error rates go up. But we make money when their error rates go up. So I just really hope they don't come after us.
Ben:
So we're actually a hedge then on the internet, right?
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
If you want to invest in the downside internet, you should buy Honeybadger.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
Yeah, that is if we had-
Josh:
Can that be our new tagline?
Ben:
We're the CDOs of web developers.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
Come and get your credit swaps right over here. Oh, yeah, it'll be a fun book anyway, it'll be a fun book next year or whatever when somebody writes the story of Wall Street Bets.
Josh:
Right, yeah, I'll read the book instead of all the blog posts probably.
Ben:
Well, we've been having our conclave this week, and it's been fantastic. And one of the things that we talked about is hiring. Well, I was listening to the Art of Product podcast yesterday, the episode that dropped yesterday. And Ben was on the ... Was on Adam Wethen's podcasts, which I can't remember the name of right now. Oh, I'm terrible. Anyway, they had a particular episode where the two of them recorded, about tips for people who are looking to get hired. And they recommended, Ben mentioned in the Art of Product podcast that one of the things they talked about was, you should reach out to owners of small businesses, and say, "Hey, this is what I can do for you, right." Instead of just like, "Hey, I want a job." Like, "Hey, here's a pitch, here's a proposal, here's ..."
Josh:
I like it when people do that.
Ben:
Yeah. Totally. So when I heard that yesterday, I thought, "I got to talk about that today?" Because I just wanted to echo that and boost that message, because when we've had people do that, that's been awesome. But when you just like, "Oh, give me something." It's like, "Well, no."
Starr:
Yeah, it's a little strange. And I would expand on that to say that even if you're applying for a position, tell the people who are hiring you what you're going to do for them, even if it's just repeating back what they told you in the job description. In all the candidates that we interviewed, there was really a big difference between the people who were just like, "Yeah, I am a technical expert. I have all these technical credentials, I know all this technical stuff."
Starr:
It's like, "Okay, that's great. You obviously know this." Versus the people who were like, "Okay, I understand the situation you're in, and the sort of things you need. And I've done that before. And here's how I can do it for you in the future." That's a very ... It's just much more appealing. Because otherwise, we have to do that work, and we have to be like, "Okay, well, this guy has some technical credentials, but how could that fit into what we're doing?" And stuff. Versus, "Ooh, somebody gift wrapped this nice little package. And look, there's a little thing of bon-bons attached to it." It's a complete different experience from this side of the table.
Ben:
For sure. Yeah, you don't want to make the hiring person do work, right. You want to do all the work for them.
Starr:
Yeah. I would go so far to say as, in any writing endeavor ... Because until you get to the interviews, hiring is a writing process. It's a communication via writing, and resumes, and cover letters. And any writing process, you don't want to have people do work, which is literally about ... A lot of my job editing the blog, what I end up doing is making the authors fill in the missing steps so that people don't have to come up with the links themselves in their own minds.
Ben:
Yeah, connecting the dots is useful. Whether you're writing or pitching something, yeah.
Starr:
So are we going to ... How many people are we going to hire? 10, 20?
Ben:
At least.
Ben:
Yeah. No, we do want to hire someone. And I think that someone is going to be a contractor that knows PHP. I think that's the next hire we want to do, because we need some help there. We've hit a couple of sharp corners when it comes to our PHP support, and it would just be nice to get them resolved. I think we could probably throw a pretty good sized project at someone who knows PHP well. So if you're listening right now, and you want to do some PHP work for Honeybadger, you're welcome to reach out to us and tell us just how awesome you are, and what you're going to do for us to make our PHP support better.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Just PHP in general? Or PHP Laravel?
Ben:
Laravel in particular, yeah. But PHP in general. Yeah.
Starr:
So yeah, that was one thing we talked about. We also talked about trying out a little bit of a different approach where we throw more small jobs to freelancers and contractors. And essentially have a pool of people. And it was interesting, because this idea came up on its own. And then we were like, "Wait a second, we're already doing that with the blog. We've already got this ... We got a pool of authors who just go in and do these little self contained jobs for us." And I mean, those authors are probably not going to be doing the code for us. But it's interesting to see how the processes for managing those contractors might apply to managing contractors who are doing little, small, self contained projects for us.
Ben:
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see if we can make that work out. I think one of the concerns is just the overhead of dealing with assigning work out to various people, and making sure that someone is available, and things like that. So I'm sure it's not going to be a cake walk, but it'll be interesting to see if we can make that work out.
Starr:
Yeah, it'll be interesting. It think there's going to be ... You have this maybe a little bit of a different approach with it, because it's more of a ... Yeah, it's almost like you're doing less vetting for individual contractors, because you can't do a huge interview process for somebody who's going to do a one day project for you, it just doesn't make sense.
Josh:
It's more like open source.
Starr:
Yeah. So I don't know. You almost have to be willing to assign the same things to multiple people, or maybe just maybe expect to assign it to two or three people before you finally get one that is decent. And then of course, you hone in on the people who are good. But I don't know, it's a different approach to putting work out to contractors. I think it might be interesting. I don't know.
Ben:
We could do something really crazy, and we could just shotgun it, right. We can be like, okay, we get five developers to come and do the same task for us, we pay each of them of course. And then we pick whichever solution we like the best, right.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean, that's crossed my mind to be honest. Yeah, I guess it just depends on how much money we have. And then the other thing we talked about is that there's actually ... We could actually be getting a little bit of extra value out of our blog authors, because what is a blog post, except for its information that somebody has researched, and is providing to readers on a silver platter. And it occurred to us that, well, we've got this system for creating that. Well, what if we just need to know something for our own business purposes, about certain technologies?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well, you could send that out to an author, and have them write it, do your research for you so then you don't have to do that leg work yourself. There's all sorts of interesting things that I hadn't even considered of when ... I hadn't even considered when I was building this, but it might ... I don't know, it might just be really useful. It'd be interesting to see what happens at least.
Ben:
Definitely.
Ben:
Yeah, I don't really want to get in the business of being an agency, and managing a bunch of contractors, and for clients. But I think it's really interesting, the idea of having a bunch of contractors that we have an ongoing relationship with that we can send work to, just for us. So we're the only client, so we don't have to worry about someone being on the bench, because that's not really costing us something, because they're contractors. But I just like the idea of having some more flexibility.
Ben:
Because we depend a lot on contractors so far to do our libraries in particular, areas that we are weak. And they've been great. And we love working with them. But sometimes, they're just not available, right. They have jobs, or they go on vacation for six months, or whatever. And so I think just increasing the number of people that we have relationships with, like we've done with the authors, I think will help us.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So what are we looking for in addition to PHP? PHP isn't all we do. I need JavaScript people. That's my biggest need right now to be honest.
Starr:
Front end or back end?
Josh:
Both. We've got our universal JavaScript client package now that supports both simultaneously.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
So all of this work we're talking about is basically open source, working on open source packages, like most of the repos are public for the most part. So it's essentially getting paid to do open source ... Working on open source projects. Most of the code is MIT license even. And so it's just we really want the work done. So we're going to pay people rather than wait for someone to show up and just do it. So yeah, we've got, yeah, PHP, JavaScript, Python is another one that comes up fairly frequently. And yeah, Java not so much. But whenever it does come up, it costs us the most.
Ben:
Yeah, so I guess, where should people send their info if they want to get in touch about working for us? Maybe it should be jobs@honeybadger.io. We'll set that up.
Starr:
That's a good idea.
Josh:
Sure. Jobs@honeybadger.io.
Ben:
Okay. We'll put it in the show notes. Well, other than thinking about all that conclave stuff this week, which has been fun, I've had a throwback week, because launching our new Elasticsearch cluster has been working out really well. But I decided that I wanted to change the layout of the nodes. I just went a different way than I originally had. And so I had to blow away all the data. And so that means back filling.
Ben:
And I was at first hesitant. I was like, "Oh, let me just leave it. So what if it's another month of two where we have to wait to cut over?" And then I was like, "No." But really, I really want a really good back fill script anyway, because sometimes we have to do back fills, just as part of our normal operations. The cluster just decides to go away for a little while, and we have to fill in some data that we missed.
Ben:
So I was like, "No, I should really just make this a function for me to really come up with a good back fill script that I like." And so I worked on that this week. And came up with a really fun, to me, a fun solution where basically we have all these documents that we need to index in our cluster. And we put them on S3 as a batch. So we maybe have a batch of 100, or 200, whatever, documents that need to be indexed.
Ben:
And we put them into Elasticsearch, via the bulk indexing API. And so we have, going back for months, we have many, many, many S3 payloads that each contain a couple hundred documents to be indexed. So for a back fill, all we got to do is iterate over all the objects in the bucket, and then push them into Elasticsearch. But of course, you don't want to just do that onesie twosie, right, you want to actually have some parallelism involved.
Ben:
And so I basically wrote some code that just iterates over all the keys, dumps all the key names into SQS, and then we have a lambda function that then works that SQSQ. So I mean, it's straightforward. It's not rocket science or anything. But it's the first time that I've done something where I'm throwing in a million SQS jobs all at once, right.
Ben:
And so it's been fun just to ... We use Redis we use Sidekiq as our normal batch. And so you have to worry about, "Well, does have enough RAM? And do we have a backlog that's too big?" And SQS, it's like, "Oh, who cares? Just throw it in there, it'll get done eventually."
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
So we now have a nice back fill script for doing our Elasticsearch cluster. And I've back filled all the data for several weeks back now, so it's been fun.
Starr:
That's really fun.
Josh:
So it really is infinite?
Ben:
As far as I could tell.
Starr:
It's just raw power at your fingertips.
Josh:
Okay. Because I think we're going to put Dynamo to the test next week.
Ben:
Well, yes. That's actually what I started working on this morning, was back fill script for Dynamo, yeah. Yeah, the main holdup there, aside from money that you have to pay for how may writes you want to do all at once, is getting millions, and millions, and millions of notices out of our Postgres cluster in a way that won't kill us.
Starr:
So this is a long term project of ours, to move some of the error data from Postgres into Dynamo DB.
Ben:
Right, right. Yeah, not that we don't love Postgres because we do love Postgres. But we took a look, and 75% of our Postgres data is just error occurrences. And it's like, "Well, maybe we could put that someplace else, and be a little kinder to our Postgres instance." So that's the motivation.
Josh:
It's basically just a list too. Because the actual data is not there, it's just-
Ben:
Right. Yeah, it's just pointers. So it's very simple. And it's a great use case for Dynamo, which is again, apparently infinitely scalable. And yeah, I think that'll help us avoid some of those backlogs where we're worried about how much RAM we have in our Redis instance.
Starr:
Yeah, once you do that, then the Postgres is just ... We've already got a Postgres that can handle ... I guess you'll be running 25% of the data that we used to have. So you could scale that up by four times, and you know that that would work, right.
Ben:
Exactly, yeah.
Starr:
Basically you've solved Postgres scaling for the foreseeable future.
Ben:
Right, right. So yeah, it's felt like old times, like the early years of Honeybadger, when I was having to back fill stuff on a regular basis, because of changing data stores, or whatever. So it's been kind of fun.
All right, you have been listening to Founder Quest. Go give us a review at Apple podcasts, or wherever. And if you want to write for us, go to honeybadger.io/blog, and there's a write for us link. If you would like to work on our open source projects for cold hard cash in your hands, just send an email to jobs@honeybadger.io, and let us know what's what. And until then, we will see you next week.
Show Notes:
Links:
Cobol On Cogs
Square Hole TikTok Video
Hook Relay
Universal Honeybadger.js
FounderQuest Accounts Episode
Write for Honeybadger's Blog
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Did you see that tweet I posted in the channel, the TikTok video about the shape sorter?
Josh:
It was so good.
Starr:
So good.
Josh:
Laughed really hard.
Ben:
So good. I just loved the voice of the person doing the shapes.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
"And where do you think this one goes?"
Starr:
So it's a shape sorting thing. And they've got all different color blocks, like a kid's toy and you're supposed to match the shape to the hole in the top of the bucket, but it turns out all of the shapes just fit inside the square hole. And so-
Josh:
That's why there's a hole in there.
Starr:
Yeah, so it's a reaction video. This woman's watching it and she's just getting more and more dismayed as he just puts everything. She's like, "No, put it in the triangle hole," and he's like, "No, this one goes in the square hole." So I think this is a metaphor for how users as well use Excel for every single task in their business.
Ben:
Yeah. So I'll have to put the tweet in the show notes, but that was funny that I found.
Starr:
Yeah, that's really good. I like-
Ben:
Well, I am... Go ahead.
Starr:
I was just going to say I like watching TikTok, but I'm like I'm too old to actually watch TikTok, so I just watch video compilations of TikTok that somebody shows me.
Josh:
Yeah, TikTok on YouTube.
Ben:
Saying, yeah, I watch TikTok on Twitter.
Josh:
Twitter. Yeah.
Ben:
So, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. That's an interesting thing about TikTok, because it's like half the people who enjoy the videos aren't even on the platform or whatsoever.
Starr:
And that's just the internet.
Josh:
But these are everywhere. They're all over Instagram. I guess, yeah, it is.
Starr:
I just want to know like how much of... So there's got to be a number out there, like the total traffic on the internet per day, like total bandwidth use. How much of that is just sending around videos and screenshots of other parts of the internet?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Well, I guess like the same thing happened with Vine.
Ben:
It's like marketing attribution. Right? You never know where your traffic is coming from. Like TikTok, they have no idea where the video is actually being seen.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Like, is it on TikTok? Is it on Twitter? Is it on Reddit? Who knows? It's got to be tough-
Josh:
They were pretty-
Ben:
... for their engagement numbers, you know?
Josh:
They were pretty smart to put their watermark on the videos.
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
So you were about to tell us how great you're feeling, I think, Ben?
Ben:
Yes. I'm so excited. Today has been a great day so far. I mean it's early. But-
Starr:
What happened?
Ben:
Well, I finally, after many, many weeks of having this on my to do this, I finally got it this week and this morning I finished off putting together everything required for the Heroku add-on for Hook Relay.
Starr:
Oh, awesome.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
So Hook Relay is a product you've been working on that adds sort of like push button reliability to people's implementations of webhooks. Am I right?
Ben:
That's correct.
Starr:
Did you pivot?
Ben:
I haven't pivoted yet. No.
Starr:
Okay, good.
Ben:
And as I was writing up that Heroku, for Heroku, of course you have to like put in a description of what your thing does and you have to upload some screenshots and you have to do pricing. And all that stuff was basically done. But the last thing to do, I think I kept on putting off because it's just not my strong suit. And so, you know how that goes, you just do the things you'd like to do over the things you don't like to do. But the last thing was putting together the Dev Center documentation page. So each Heroku add-on needs to have some documentation at Heroku, it tells you how to use the ad-on and how to provision it, things like that. And it's pretty straightforward and simple, but I'm just not a big fan of writing stuff like that.
Ben:
And so anyway, I kept putting it off. But bonus was Kevin had put a quick-start page together for Hook Relay, like months ago when we launched the product, which is basically like, "Here's how you use it," which is basically the same thing that Heroku wants for this page. So I copied and most of his stuff and just shifted a little bit. But the thing that kind of threw me this morning as I was finishing it off, there's a field on the Dev Center page. There's this big text blog where you put your documentation, and that's fine, but there's a field above it, and it says meta description. And I was like, what's supposed to go in there. I don't know. I mean, because there's a separate spot for doing it like you're marketing blurb. Like, "Hey, give us the one line description of your add-on that's someplace else." And so I'm like, so what is a meta description? I don't know.
Starr:
Is it like for SEO?
Josh:
Like a meta tag.
Ben:
Well, I'm not exactly sure still, but when I saved the content, like the big blurb of text that will make up the page, it took the first line of the content and put that in the meta description. I'm like, okay, so, I'm thinking maybe this is a TLDR. So I tweak that a little bit. And as I was tweaking that, I came up with a tagline for Hook Relay that, "Now, I'm no marketing specialist, I'm no guru. I'm no copywriter either. But-
Josh:
You're just the guy on podcast.
Starr:
... we're going to workshop this real time."
Ben:
But I'm pretty proud of what I came up with here.
Starr:
Ratings are going to go through the roof.
Ben:
And so here's the tagline. And Kevin helped me tweak it a little at the end. It is just, "Send a post request and let Hook Relay handle the rest."
Starr:
Nice.
Ben:
Yes. And Kevin's suggestion was that rest should be all caps because of course... Yes.
Josh:
Of course.
Ben:
Yeah. It's the rest, you know?
Josh:
There you go. I can see. Yeah.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah. The catch is that like post and delete requests cost extra, you got to pay more for those.
Ben:
Right. So there we go. So now I'm feeling pretty good. Like Hook Relay is signed, sealed and delivered. It should be on their Heroku marketplace next week. Somewhat by the time this drops, it should be there.
Starr:
Awesome. That's great.
Josh:
That's, yeah, really exciting. And don't we like have a customer or something?
Ben:
We do. We actually have a paying customer. That's pretty exciting.
Starr:
That's amazing.
Ben:
So, that's pretty impressive considering we haven't really done any real marketing or advertising for it. And I've talked about it on the podcast and I tweeted about it a few times, but it's been pretty quiet. We've done that on purpose. We're kind of laying low to do the gradual buildup, make sure things are working before they ship to the masses, but yeah-
Josh:
We did try to get a customer. That's the point.
Ben:
Yeah. We did. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. That's how I would've liked to get the first customer.
Starr:
Yeah. Can we get just trademark the term, like Ninja launch.
Ben:
Oh!
Starr:
I'm sure that people have done it. So it's the kind of launch where you just like sneak up on people and they don't see you coming, then you just suddenly jump out and you surprise them and convert them.
Ben:
I like it.
Josh:
Is it different? How is it different from the stealth launch? I'll have to figure that out.
Starr:
Well, it's about Ninjas-
Josh:
Is it like the bootstrapper version of the stealth launch? Because I feel like if you're a stealth launch, you have to have a bunch of VC funding and like be secretive for at least two years for a stealth launch.
Starr:
Yeah. I think the stealth launch is more VC.
Josh:
The Ninja launch is like you bootstrap it and like, yeah, you six months bootstrap it and then it's, or maybe a couple months even ship it.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. A stealth launch maybe is like you know that they're out there, but you don't know where they are or what they're doing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's like you just have no idea anything's going on.
Ben:
Yeah. I like the idea that bootstrapper versus a VC, because I think stealth launch, I think like stealth bomber, just coming in and bombing the crud out of something. But a Ninja, like it's much more personal. He'll come up and kill you one on one.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Right?
Starr:
Exactly. Exactly.
Josh:
So, it's more about hand-to-hand combat.
Ben:
Exactly. It's the personal touch.
Starr:
We don't really assault people.
Ben:
We're actually pacifists at Honeybadger.
Starr:
Yeah. That's true. I just feel like I have to... I don't know why. I just imagine there's somebody out there who's taking us literally for every single thing we say, so I just always want to add disclaimers.
Ben:
Then there's the cat launch. And that cat launch... The cat launch.
Starr:
That's where you build a trebuchet and the whole internet gets this off at you.
Ben:
I was thinking more of that's where you go out to your kitchen in the morning to get some coffee and you step on a hairball.
Starr:
Oh yeah. And that's for SaaS products.
Ben:
Yeah, it is. Right? It's like, "Oh wow, there's a thing."
Starr:
That's kind of how we did Honeybadger. Right? It's like, Airbrake was our hairball. We just stepped on when we were trying to do something else. Well, good, I'm glad you're having a good day in that, Hook Relay is doing well. What's the next step on that, do you think?
Ben:
That's an excellent question. So I was reviewing the competitive landscape again this week and realized that you know what? We should make some tweaks to our pricing. So now that we have our first paying customer, assignment change all the pricing. So that's probably going to be next week. I'm going to be taking a look at that.
Josh:
Naturally. Yeah.
Ben:
And then-
Starr:
I mean, it took us like a year to do that for Honeybadger. So I'm glad that we're just getting that over with quickly.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
I love it. Like this time though, it's like in reverse. It might be in reverse because like we're billing on more usage or like rate right now. And we're thinking maybe it would make more sense to bill on something, some other vertical or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. And then also figure out where, how we want to really launch. Like, how are we going to talk to people about Hook Relay? We've got to become the marketing experts.
Starr:
Yeah. It kind of makes sense maybe to not bill on rate, like because I imagine that a lot of the people who are probably going to be interested in Hook Relay or people who are building new things. I don't know. Maybe people are going to go and retrofit to existing things, but I can imagine it being really useful. It's like, okay, you're building a new product, you want all these features, you don't have time to implement it yourself because you have a million things to do. And so you're just going to bolt this on there and your traffic levels are... You're getting real value, so you should pay for it. But your traffic levels are going to be pretty low to begin with.
Ben:
Yeah. The contrary view to that is like Amazon, they have generous free tiers on most of their services, if not all. Right?
Josh:
Hmm.
Ben:
And so you can start out and get a lot of value for free. And then everything is like strictly usage base on even tiers for the most part. So, everything you do is a transactional fee. So you can go the other way and go from what we have now tiers of transaction levels to just straight old, like per transaction or per 1,000 or whatever. So yeah, a lot of things to think about.
Josh:
I feel like Amazon can get away with that free, like giving away the farm.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Like that's kind of part of their model.
Ben:
Right. Yeah. Well, when you have the biggest infrastructure on the planet, you can afford a little bit of it. Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So, speaking of Amazon, I'm wondering there's that ruckus lately about the Elasticsearch licensing. And I'm just wondering if that affects us at all? I think-
Josh:
Someone should explain that to me by the way, because I started talking about it in chat, but I didn't have time actually to really-
Starr:
Yeah. Could you explain it, Ben, because I assume you know more about it than I do? I could probably get 80% right.
Ben:
Well, I'll probably get some of it wrong, but a few years ago Amazon released their Amazon Elasticsearch Service. And it's important to note the name because Elastic, the company, that is the sponsor of Elasticsearch, the product, has a trademark on Elasticsearch. And so one of Elastic's complaints against Amazon and AWS is that they're using the trademark without permission. So, that's one thing. And that's kind of a big thing in my opinion. You're not supposed to be stomping on people's trademarks.
Ben:
But the thing about trademarks is there's timing involved. And so I don't know exactly the timing was, that they're getting to trademark or AWS is actually using that name, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm not going to get into that, but you also have to defend your trademark. And it's not exceptionally clear just how defending Elastic was back when Amazon launched this because the founder of Elastic, he's been talking about this on Twitter this week and he's like, "Well, we just want to keep our heads down and focus on the product."
Ben:
I'm like, "Okay, but there are certain legal requirements to defend trademarks," et cetera. Anyway. So, the thing that really triggered all this was that Elastic changed the license of Elasticsearch, the product, this week from the Apache license to a, what some people consider a non-open source license, which is the, is it called a server si- I can't remember what it's called. SSPL, I think. Basically, it's a license, same thing that MongoDB did, and Redis did, basically saying, "Anybody can use us except for companies who want to just resell our product, like by the way, Amazon." So, that just threw a match into the tinderbox of Hacker News. And people are like up in arms about Elasticsearch or Elastic doing this to Elasticsearch and how it's so terrible.
Ben:
And the internet is going to burn in flames because of this. And I mean, it's their product, they can choose to do whatever license they want. A lot of people are complaining about, "Well, the contributors contributed with a certain understanding and now you're yanking the rug out from under them." It's like, well, Elastic 7.10 is still a Apache licensed, it's still out there. And of course surprising no one, AWS announced yesterday that they are going to your fork Elasticsearch at Apache 7.10 that allows the Apache licensed version and they're going to have their own distribution.
Josh:
Predictable.
Starr:
I was wondering if they would do that because we are a customer of AWS Elasticsearch Service. And I just didn't want it to go away because it's been so hard to get a decent search thing that doesn't just like crash all the time. And this isn't I'm not blaming you, Ben, I'm just saying this is like a complicated thing. And it's like you finally found a system that doesn't take just a ton of work to keep alive. And I was just didn't want them to take it away from us.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And it's funny, because Elastic is really complaining about AWS because Elastic is making money on their cloud version. That's the whole point. And they don't not necessarily make money on their open source version. And the thing is like, we've tried, okay, I should put a disclaimer, this is just one person's experience. Please don't sue us. But we tried the Elastic cloud service, comparing it to the AWS Elasticsearch Service. And frankly the AWS service was better for us. Like it just worked better.
Ben:
Now, it's it's a little bit behind, like they don't, they don't always have the most recent version. They don't have all the coolest, latest features like Elastic cloud does because, well, I mean, Elastic is the company that runs that, but yeah, it's been rock solid and I haven't had to babysit it. Like we've had other solutions in the past, like you said, so, yeah. I'm certainly glad to have AWS handle that for us. And sorry, Elastic, I mean, you just got to compete, I guess.
Josh:
What was Elastic's actually, like actual end game with the license change, do you think? Were they trying to get the big customers who are reselling their service to pay them licensing fees or something to use it? Or were they just trying to like cut them off? Or, I mean, they must have seen this coming.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
You know?
Ben:
Yeah. I would guess they're angling for a partnership, some sort of revenue share because that's, I think that's what they're doing with Google Cloud and with Azure.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
That's what Reddis has done with Google Cloud and Azure. I mean, I don't know the details obviously, but they say the word partnership. And so I assume that means some sort of revenue share. But who knows what? I mean, maybe it's a licensing fee. I don't know. But I'm guessing that was their goal. Like, "Let's get some revenue from AWS using our product."
Josh:
Do you know if were they like targeting AWS specifically? Or was this just like more general? Like, "We really should get our people to pay when they're going to go ahead going to rebill," or whatever?
Ben:
Well, they have put in place recently partnerships with Google and Azure.
Josh:
Okay. So Amazon is like the biggest, I mean, like-
Ben:
So, it's basically talking about Elastic.
Josh:
There's no one else really.
Ben:
Exactly. Yeah.
Josh:
Like, who else are you going to care about?
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Do you think that this is a result of like talks breaking down with Amazon? It seems like if you wanted to have a partnership, you would approach them before you did anything directly.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That seems like a fair analysis. Yeah.
Josh:
That's interesting.
Ben:
Yeah. So I can, I can totally relate about the trademark issue. Like, back to that, as I said in our Slack, if Amazon tomorrow released an AWS Honeybadger service, I'd be a little cranky about that because we do have a trademark on Honeybadger. And so I would be pretty upset I guess, but again, I don't know, like when exactly they got that trademark and if they called up Amazon say, "Hey, by the way, this is bad," they're complaining about it now, but that was like six years ago. So, yeah.
Starr:
That's true. I may be willing personally to consider licensing the Honeybadger trademark to Amazon, depending upon the agreement we come to. I just want to put that out there, in case JB is listening.
Josh:
If it was just the trademark thing, they could have just... I mean, because they didn't... Like ElastiCache is Redis under the hood, isn't it?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's-
Josh:
So they don't call it AWS Redis.
Ben:
Right. And that's the thing. The AWS has been pretty good about that. Their document database is MongoDB-compatible, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And then they use Solar. They have, I can't remember it's called. It's called Cloud Search or something, but that was based on Solar. And then they had, like you mentioned their ElastiCache is based on Redis MemcacheD and now they have a Cassandra compatible thing. Can't remember what it's called, but it's not called Cassandra. It's called something else. Some key spaces or something. So yeah. I mean like product after-
Josh:
It's called something else.
Ben:
Yeah. So I don't know. So it seems like maybe there wasn't a trademark issue when Amazon actually initially launched this, because you'd think that they would have done the same thing with this one I did with all their other services that don't use that name. Right?
Starr:
Yeah. Maybe they figured that Elastic since it's just a word like Mongo isn't really that or like Redis is like this very specific thing.
Ben:
Yeah, true, yeah, that's a good point. Got to be careful when you trademark because yeah, generic stuff doesn't work.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. I read the legal briefings that Amazon did in the whole when Parler was trying to sue them-
Josh:
Yeah, it was Parler.
Starr:
... and I really haven't thought of responses and just like, Holy crap. I never want to be in a legal battle with Amazon because they were not joking around. Like they were not taking prisoners. They just like came and just use a nuclear bomb against this little guy with a slingshot.
Josh:
For real.
Starr:
I mean, yeah. Justifiably so, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have, but yeah.
Ben:
And maybe that's what Elastic figured. Like, there's no point in trying to go legal against AWS. And so we're just going to ignore it and try and build our business. And okay, that's a valid strategy, but then you can't undo that. You can't remake that decision six years later.
Josh:
Yeah. No, there's like a fork of your product in the world that's backed by the largest company in the market.
Ben:
So it's interesting times. I should disclose that I am a shareholder in Elastic and I am a shareholder in Amazon. So you know what? I hope they both win.
Josh:
I'm sure this conversation is definitely going to influence one of their stock prices. Ben Curtis makes disparaging comments about Elastic.
Ben:
I've been really interested though, as I've been reading on this past week, like thinking about, and we've talked about this before, open source businesses or businesses that try to have an open source component, how does it even going to work? Red Hat was a big success story. And it seems like since then, I mean, Mongo has been, I guess, somewhat successful, but the whole notion of open core, I think is in my humble opinion, it seems like it's not happening. Elastic tried it before they had their cloud, they tried adding additional, like amazingly enough. And I just so disagree with this approach, but they did it. The authentication piece was a sold add-on to Elastic. Like, "If you want to use your name and password, you got paid for that." It's like, what? But anyway I digress. It just seems like open core, not happening. And then suddenly-
Starr:
I've got to throw it out there, GitLab seems to be doing okay.
Ben:
Yes. Yes. And that's where I was going next. It seems like the real solution that all these open source companies have landed upon is hosted. Some sort of licensing, whether that's self-hosted licensing or it's a SaaS. And then that's why you see like Mongo and Redis and Elastic and having these licenses that say, "You can't host us because we're hosting us, that's our business," you know? And I don't know. If you're competing against the number one hosting provider in the world, and your only businesses that, and they have 50 other businesses because they have a huge product offering, well, who's going to win in the long-term? I don't know. Anyway, I don't have the answers. It's just interesting thoughts.
Starr:
Yeah. And just one thing that, correct me if I'm wrong, Ben, but one real advantage that AWS has is that if you use their Elasticsearch Service, it's like, you can put it in your virtual, private cloud, like you can use all these networking tools AWS provides, you can use all these extra services and it's going to be in the right data centers so that transfer between the two things it's fast. Because you don't want your fricking database in a different state than your main application. And it's just, I don't know, that piece is so easy for just stuff to stay inside the AWS ecosphere, and then it's just more work if you don't.
Ben:
Yeah. True. True.
Ben:
Yeah. Like the authentication stuff is handled. Most of this stuff has, IM permissions that are baked in. Now, most of the companies like Mongo and Elastic, they do have, you can deploy to whatever region you want. So the latency is typically not a problem. But yeah, the VPC thing is definitely an issue. Like, and for us, for me, in particular, like not having to get another vendor on the approved vendor lists for our GDPR stuff, oh, so nice.
Ben:
Like dealing with compliance every year, I have to review all of our vendors and make sure they're all doing the security thing. And like you know, AWS is fine. That's just a checkbox. But if you have some other vendor like Mongo, it's like, okay, well, I have to justify them and I have to put them on my approved list, et cetera, et cetera. So, if AWS has a service, I'm going to use it. So we're not going to be launching a database product anytime soon, I guess, is the moral of the story.
Josh:
No.
Ben:
No, there will not be a Honeybadger database.
Starr:
Which one of those... There's one of our competitors that pivoted into a database?
Josh:
That was Influx.
Ben:
Yeah, Influx. They made InfluxDB. Which I think that's worked out for them. They seem to be doing well.
Josh:
They seem to be. Yeah, they do.
Ben:
Despite my, on again, off again love, hate affair with Influx, as we've tried to use it a variety of times. But you know what I've learned over the years? We've worked together a long time and we worked together back when Mongo in particular was pre-1.0 And we tried using it. I think what I've learned is don't use pre-1.0 Software.
Starr:
Especially databases.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Especially databases.
Josh:
You want your database to be like 10 years old.
Ben:
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. So now it would be the right time to us to go all in on Influx.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Oh my God, has it been that long?
Ben:
Yeah, really?
Josh:
Not quite that long. It's getting close. Yeah. Because probably getting there.
Starr:
Honeybadger is going to be coming up on like 10 years old. That's wild.
Josh:
What is it like next year?
Ben:
Next year.
Josh:
Yeah. This will be nine.
Starr:
Now it's 2012.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Wow.
Ben:
It's been a long road.
Starr:
That's wild. Here's to another 20 years because I have no idea how I'm going to apply to jobs if I have to with... It's like, yeah, I was just my own boss for like 15 years. What kind of a reference is that? You can't give that to people. So, we just got to keep this train rolling.
Ben:
I don't know. Maybe we just go work for Stripe. That worked for Patrick McKinsey, you know?
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But yeah, it'd be-
Josh:
I don't know if I have that much ambition.
Ben:
He is a bit of an outlier. That's true.
Josh:
I don't know. Honeybadger's got me hooked pretty much at this point.
Starr:
I was literally-
Josh:
I'm just hooked on that recurring revenue.
Starr:
Hooked on that recurring revenue. Not that I have any plans to do this. And I was like, "If I had just had to get a developer job, it's just like, what if I just learned Java?" Just was like, "I'm just going to put my 40 hours in to Java and I'm just going to make a ton of money and just not care at all about the work." And I was like I don't think I would do it, but for a second it was like that seems viable.
Ben:
It's definitely a grass is greener kind of situation. I think if I were thinking the same thing instead of Java, because I cannot buy Java for whatever reason. I think it would .NET. And I think I would go find a job at a bank.
Starr:
Oh there you go. There you go. Yeah. I just know Java devs make like tons of money if they're in the right field, if they're in the right industry.
Ben:
Well, if you want to go old school, learn COBOL. Right?
Starr:
I totally would. I totally would. I would totally learn COBOL.
Ben:
Or become a mainframe programmer.
Starr:
Yeah. That actually sounds like a lot of fun.
Josh:
I can see that. I mean, I could see if you wanted to do that, I could see it working out because there's got to be plenty of people that are looking to retire and there's no one to take their place.
Ben:
Yup.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't want to have any deadlines because that would be incredibly stressful. Here's this 50-year-old legacy application written in COBOL and you've got to figure out how to make a major change to it by next week. It's like, that would be hell and just impossible. But-
Josh:
Do they really make major changes to them though? That's the question?
Starr:
I don't know. I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah. I guess like if tax laws change significantly, you might have to or something, but yeah, you think most of it would be like more maintenance work.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Why don't you guys shared this COBOL on cogs?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
I assume it's a web or it's a rails inspired. But it's a web framework and it is in COBOL and the site is run by it. So there you go.
Ben:
Wow. INDEX.HTM, all caps. Nice.
Starr:
I know.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
I know. They're not messing around.
Ben:
Oh, I'm loving it. Wow! Thank you for sharing that.
Starr:
You're welcome.
Ben:
I'm going to spend the rest of my day just looking at this website.
Starr:
You are more than welcome.
Ben:
So one of the things that's made this week just fantastic, and a call out to the idea of actually having goals, we have our weekly check-in that comes in from Basecamp every Monday morning. It's like, what are you going to do this week? And I try to be pretty vague in that because I'm like, I don't know. But recently I've been trying to be better about that, be more specific and to actually come up with like, okay, there are three things that if I accomplish this week, I will be happy. Even if like, they are small things, if I get them done, I'll be happy.
Ben:
And so this week I had two things with a third bonus that I didn't share and actually did all three. So I was pretty stinking excited. So one was the Hook Relay stuff which I did. Wrapped it this morning. Two was doing a test of our new Elasticsearch cluster using the scientist Gem from GitHub. So basically allows you to deploy your site with two different code branches. In our case, checking the performance of our existing Elasticsearch cluster versus the new Elasticsearch cluster. And so basically just runs through both branches of code and then tells you which one is faster. So I did that. And then, spoiler alert, the new cluster is faster.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
And also wanted to move our storage of notices from Postgres to DynamoDB. And I got that started last night. I mean, it's going to take a while to backfill.
Josh:
I was going to be like, "Ben, that's shipped?"
Starr:
I know. I was just, yeah, I was just like, you're just going to slide that one in there.
Josh:
And I finished up the branch and shipped it.
Starr:
Just migrated to a completely different database system for the most intense part of our application.
Ben:
Overnight just migrate this terabytes of data, and then we're good. Right?
Josh:
So you got to start on it at least.
Ben:
Yes. Yeah. So I felt so good. Because the things I set forth to do this week actually got done. So I'm just I'm pumped.
Starr:
Good. The tweet I was thinking about sending you last night, but I was too tired. So but so I'll just explain it to you.
Ben:
Okay.
Starr:
Anyway, it was the guy quote tweeting an old tweet from 2018 or something. And it was like, "Do yourself a favor if you're making a SaaS product, users and accounts should be separate from the very beginning." And it was a quote tweet yesterday where the guy was just like, "I just finished the refactoring that was a result of two years."
Josh:
That sounds just like us.
Ben:
I replied to that tweet. I'm like, "Yep. Amen. Here's our blog post about doing the exact same thing. Yeah. We took longer than two years though." I saw that tweet. So, that's pretty funny. Yeah. I don't even know how many years I had that as a goal, but yeah, that was one of the banner things at 2020 actually like, "Hey, got that done."
Josh:
Yeah. We forgot to mention that in the last, you don't remember. That was a big chunk of work.
Ben:
Yeah. So save yourself a lot of hassle, make users separate from accounts. Period. The end. No question about it.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll have to figure out what episode number that was that we... We did like an entire episode on that late last year, I think.
Ben:
Well, y'all done some fantastic work this week too. Right? I mean, Starr, you've been nailing the blog stuff. Josh, you got a bunch of JavaScript stuff done.
Josh:
That blog, we've got a nice blog. I was looking at that. I was showing Kaitlin actually my wife the blog, because she hadn't really looked at it. And she was looking at our author avatars and everything. And yeah, I was like thinking about how much we've actually put into that blog, like money and just all the great people that have written for us. And it's pretty cool.
Starr:
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. It's working out well. It's nice to kind of just have it humming along and sort of make it more, just kind of making it work better continuously. One thing I want to work on next week is to, and I got started on it this week, which is to actually have our posts that are... We have a huge backlog of posts that are written for us. And I would like to actually get those set up in a calendar where they're automatically published every week because-
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
... I currently just like prepare one every week and publish it. And so if like something comes up, people try and overthrow the government or anything like that, and I get distracted, then we don't have a blog post that week, which leaves people super bummed out, because now there's two things wrong. The government's being overthrown and they don't have a blog post.
Starr:
So yeah, this week I started making it so we can automatically publish blog posts and I crashed up against the rocky shore a little bit of trying to get scheduled actions running on GitHub. So I don't know, I need to check and see if it ran. Last time it was supposed to. And hopefully it did. And if not, I will just try random crap over and over again until it finally works.
Josh:
So wait, so how does the action actually work? Does it prepare the article somehow or does it auto merge the PR or something?
Starr:
Oh no. No, what it just does is, okay, I should back up and explain. So use a static site generator for a blog, which is great in a lot of ways, but also make certain things just like really bizarrely difficult. And one of these bizarrely difficult things is scheduled posts. So when we publish our blog to Netlify, our blog is built by Netlify and it's like, okay, which posts are published. And those will be the ones that it displays from then on, until we rebuild the blog. And there's no built-in way to periodically rebuild it or rebuild it based on when posts are supposed to go out.
Josh:
Got you. Okay.
Starr:
So essentially, how this is going to work is we've got a job that's going to run on GitHub just because that's convenient or was supposed to be convenient. It's going to run every day at midnight or 1:00 AM or whatever. And it's just going to hit a webhook on Netlify and trigger the site to rebuild. And when it rebuilds, well, middleman or static site generator, you can have posts scheduled in the future and it won't publish those. So if there is one that needs to be published, it'll just go ahead and build that one and not the other ones that are still in the future.
Josh:
Yeah. That's a cool way to do it. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah. That's nice.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's not nice. It's terrible. It's really crappy. Why am I writing config files for GitHub just to post this schedule posts on my fricking blog?
Josh:
In terms of if you're going to have to build that though, just a single job that just hits like a webhook to rebuild it once a day is probably about as simple as you could go.
Starr:
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. And it's nice that GitHub provides actions.
Josh:
You could just put it in the tab on your personal computer.
Starr:
Oh, I thought about it.
Josh:
On your iMac.
Starr:
I thought about it, but then I've got to make sure it's running. I got to make sure it's open, you know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know.
Josh:
You get like a little raspberry pie.
Starr:
That's my next stop. That's my next stop.
Josh:
You got to get a blog publishing.
Ben:
Buy a mainframe, learn COBOL.
Starr:
Oh, there we go. There we go.
Josh:
Yeah. So we're switching to WordPress then?
Starr:
No, no, WordPress is even worse.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
There's no blog platform that is perfect, I guess. I don't know. Although, I really don't know why Netlify just doesn't let you say rebuild this every day. It's kind of silly that they don't.
Josh:
Yeah. That would be cool.
Ben:
Yeah. There is a forum post where a bunch of people are asking for exactly that.
Starr:
Yeah. And there's just like use Zapier and it's like, "I'm not going to pay Zapier to hit a webhook once a day. That's ridiculous. You could also have GitHub to do that.
Ben:
Yeah. You could also use, if GitHub won't cooperate, you could also use the AWS, their events, the cloud events, because they have a scheduled event thing and they could just trigger a Lambda, which could call the event.
Starr:
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. That might actually probably be-
Ben:
They actually have a GitHub repo for a bunch of Cron jobs that run in Lambda.
Starr:
What?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
What?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Okay. You're just over here living in Jetsons land and I'm living in Flintstone land.
Josh:
But I used the Cron recently too. The Cron action on GitHub to automatically prepare a release for our JavaScript package once a week. So, if there's like merge dependency updates and stuff or if there are a change log additions, it calculates what the next version should be, and then submits a pull request that I just merge and then it all gets released to NPM and everything. So-
Starr:
Oh awesome.
Josh:
... fully automated, which is like that's been my dream for a few years now. So pretty stocked I finally got it working.
Starr:
Well, I'm glad to have reports that actually it's possible to get the Cron working because I got it working one time. I think the issue with it is I think when you make changes to the file, there's something weird about GitHub picking up those changes. It may not happen immediately or maybe it takes a little while for it to update itself. And so meanwhile, I'm like I told it to run this thing every 10 minutes so I could test it. I uploaded it 20 minutes ago and it hasn't run. So maybe GitHub has a longer term outlook on life than I do.
Ben:
It's really in Zen mode.
Starr:
Yeah. But it will work eventually.
Ben:
Cool.
Starr:
Yeah. And you Josh, you did a blog post about our new JavaScript library?
Josh:
Yep. Universal Honeybadger JS NPM packages out, and our documentation is updated. I think I got all the projects that we're depending on the old Honeybadger JS NPM packages are updated and also new releases for them. And I'm happy to have this project hopefully behind me. But I'm sure there will be some bug reports and stuff coming in as there always are. But so far it's been quiet.
Ben:
Wow, congrats.
Josh:
Yeah. Thanks.
Starr:
Congrats on that. It's been a big deal.
Josh:
Yeah, it was a large chunk of work. And I think it really it will set us up really nicely for the future, I think to have, I mean, we're from a maintenance standpoint, we're going from two packages down to one, but also there's a lot of overhead and having to duplicate code and now the code is all shared and only the environment specific parts are built in when you request it for no JS or for a browser. Which means you can now also use it for server side rendering environments where it's running on both the server and the client, which is still just kind of blows my mind a little bit that people do that, but there you go. It works. So it's a lot nicer now. And it's what you're expecting when you want to do that. So pretty excited.
Starr:
Yeah. That's amazing. Hopefully, it'd be appealing to people doing more sort of JavaScript as their main thing.
Josh:
It's just it's hard to stay excited about these projects when I've literally been building the same thing over and over and over again for eight years. These client libraries, it's either building new ones, in different languages, or rebuilding them when a language changes so much that you need to just completely start with something fresh. And after the 10th rewrite, basically, it's you're just on autopilot. So but there were some fun parts. I definitely learned a lot about JavaScript. I learned TypeScript. So I'm a TypeScript developer now.
Starr:
Oh, nice. I mean-
Ben:
So we should give you a raise?
Josh:
I know right?
Starr:
... lots of developers do cones and your cone is just writing exception notifiers.
Josh:
Exactly. Yeah.
Ben:
Next week, COBOL.
Josh:
I'll let Starr build the COBOL notifier.
Starr:
Sure. Yeah.
Ben:
I mean, if there's a web framework for COBOL and now there's got to be a Honeybadger client, right?
Starr:
Oh, of course.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Of course. I'll get right on that. We'll get right on that.
Josh:
Where we've react native is coming. We have our next focus and then I really do want to, I say this, and then I'm like, "Oh yeah, well, I'm like, now I want to go all into mobile, all the native platform." So, but I'm not going to build it myself. I'm going to hire some genius developer to just whip it up.
Ben:
Looking forward to that. And next week we have our conclave.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
Is that time of the quarter? We'll get to plan stuff.
Starr:
It is. I'm interested in seeing how it sort of pans out.
Ben:
Yeah. A lot of exciting planning to do. I think our quarterly action plan is going to be full to the gills this time.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Will we be coming up on a year since our last in-person conclave? When is that?
Starr:
I think so, yeah.
Josh:
It was this quarter? Because we skipped the one for Q2, right?
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
Yeah. It's been a while.
Starr:
Yeah. I miss going to the bunker with y'all.
Josh:
Smiling faces across the table, but there's-
Ben:
The bank vault yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll get back there eventually.
Starr:
Hopefully in six months we'll have vaccines and be able to have our in-person conclave or what? Q3? Q4?
Ben:
Yep. Yep. It's open.
Starr:
That would be awesome.
Starr:
Okay. You have been listening to FounderQuest. Give us a review on Apple podcasts or whatever. And we're always looking for authors. If you're interested in writing for us, we're especially looking for PHP authors and Ruby authors and occasionally JavaScript author, where I'm throwing JavaScript in there to see what happens. Go to our blog at honeybadger.io/blog and look for the write for us page link at the top. And it's pretty easy. Just get in touch.
Show Notes:
Links:Dithering
Stratechery
Promised Land
Shape Up
National Treasure
Full Transcript:
Ben:
I was looking through our accounts this morning and just doing some database checking and looking at some accounts that had been in our database for like seven years. Like, "Oh yeah. I remember them." And they're like old friends basically. It's like, "Oh, the memories."
Josh:
Memories.
Starr:
Yeah. That's funny. Last week I remember, it just hit me in the middle of the week, I was making jokes about our customers and like squeezing blood from turnips. And I just feel like I should point out that those were jokes, specifically because it's kind of absurd that we would do that because we treat our customers maybe too well, I don't know. But I realized not everybody might know me personally and realize I'm joking.
Josh:
There are those who will too, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. And they go on to run private equity firms.
Josh:
Right? My thoughts exactly.
Ben:
Oh dear.
Josh:
We won't say who.
Ben:
No names.
Starr:
Well, we'll name names for our Patreon supporters. They'll get the special feed where we just like dish on everybody.
Ben:
This is where we announce we're setting up our Patreon for a minimum contribution of $1000 a month.
Josh:
That's genius.
Starr:
Oh, my God. Can you imagine? That would be amazing, like all the secret insider backroom knowledge. We have enough to fill up about like 10 minutes of a show.
Ben:
Well, it could be the FounderQuest extended edition. Right? So in the normal edition we just cover the percentages, but in the extended edition you have real numbers, right?
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
That's amazing, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I like that.
Ben:
Yeah. So I don't know if you know of Ben Thompson, he writes Stratechery. It's fantastic.
Starr:
Wait, say that again?
Ben:
Stratechery by Ben Thompson.
Josh:
I was just listening to the daily update today. Catching up on daily updates.
Ben:
So he started a paid newsletter back before paid newsletters were cool, fantastic writer, good stuff. Talks about tech and legal and all kinds of fun things that we care about. And he and Gruber of Daring Fireball fame recently started a paid podcast. Recently, I mean, it's been a few months, several months now, but it's still kind of new to me. So I subscribed to that as well, and I love their format. It's 15 minutes, no more, no less, three times a week. And they just talk about the stuff that's currently going on, the same kinds of things that you would find at Gruber's site or at Thompson's site. So tech and legal and society and stuff.
Josh:
Current events.
Ben:
Yeah. Paid podcasts, man, that's where it's at.
Josh:
Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. They basically like just set a timer and then at the end of when it starts to run out, they play this little time running out stopwatch thing and then it just cuts it off. They have to wrap it up or I think it cuts them off mid sentence.
Ben:
Yeah. They have some tight editing going on.
Josh:
They're pretty good.
Ben:
It's fun.
Starr:
How much does it cost? I'm curious.
Josh:
$5 a month, I think.
Ben:
Yeah. I pay annually, so I don't even remember.
Starr:
Okay, so it's not like a luxury exclusive type product.
Josh:
No.
Ben:
It's not super premium like FounderQuest extended edition.
Starr:
Exactly.
Josh:
I imagine with their audience, $5 a month adds up.
Ben:
Yeah, I imagine it does.
Starr:
Yeah. But ours is SOC 2 compliant.
Ben:
Right, right. We've got compliance on our side.
Josh:
The other thing I found interesting about their format or about how they sell it is that they also bundle, like Ben for instance with Stratechery, you can buy Dithering with your Stratechery subscription. And I think it gives you maybe a bundle discount or something slight. And I don't know if Gruber does the same thing or what, but I think...
Starr:
Dithering? Is that the name of the...
Josh:
Yeah, Dithering is the name of the podcast.
Starr:
Oh, okay. I thought you meant like image dithering. I was really confused there for a second.
Josh:
Yeah. I guess it would help if we told people what the name is. But I thought that was interesting. So you can buy it through their, I don't know what their website is. Just search Dithering. But yeah, you can subscribe there or you can subscribe to both.
Ben:
Yeah. I have the bundle and it's so worth it. If you're into tech and you're into modern antitrust and things like that, it's totally worth it.
Josh:
Yeah. Tech and society.
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
We should get him on the pod.
Ben:
Yeah. That'd be cool. Actually, it was kind of...
Josh:
That's what the kids say these days.
Starr:
You know who we should get on this podcast? I've been saying we should get this person on forever. Barack Hussein Obama.
Ben:
Oh, speaking of, I've been reading his book, his latest book.
Starr:
Yeah?
Ben:
That is an excellent book. You should definitely check it out.
Starr:
What's it called again?
Ben:
I don't know. I just read it. I don't look at the cover. But it's great. The writing is just top-notch, the man is a genius. Not that I know him or he owes me any favors or anything, it's just, I mean obviously he's well-spoken, I mean he's got good evidence of that over his eight years of his presidency, but just the book is basically a reflection of his experiences leading up to becoming president and that's as far as I've gotten so far, I've gotten to election night, he just won. But the way that he writes, just the conversational style, and the context that he brings into his experiences running for president, it's just a great read.
Starr:
Well, cool, I'll have to check it out. We had the weirdest madness of crowds thing happen last night in our household. So I'm just going to tell this story, it's not related to FounderQuest. I mean, I guess you could make it a point...
Josh:
Everything is related.
Starr:
Yeah. Everything is related. I can tie it back to marketing, like look at this, look at me. So this friend group texted us last night and was like, "Hey, on the down low there's this clinic that has a bunch of COVID vaccine, it's about to expire and you can just go sign up for an appointment there, and because it's about to expire, they just want whoever." Right? And we heard stories about this happening at various places. And we're like, "Okay. I guess this is fine." So we go on and make an appointment and everything. And then about like an hour later, we're just sitting around being like, "This just seems a little weird, right? Like if it's about to expire, how can I make an appointment for next week? It just seems a little off."
Starr:
And so we started asking around and it turns out that like everybody, so many different people we knew had gotten a special on the lowdown tip from their friends that there was a batch of vaccine about to expire. And then in a parenting group, somebody in DC posted about like, "Hey, have you heard this thing that's going around? There's this batch of vaccine that's about to expire." And so we canceled our appointments and so did everybody else in that group. And so I was thinking about this and to me, this is just a case of just terrible technical communication. Because not only does each state have their own vaccine tiers and whatever, but Washington State's vaccines tiers are just incredibly complex. And they have a big page-long chart and I could barely follow it. And I'm used to looking at big charts. So no normal sane person's actually going to read this whole thing through.
Starr:
And so you end up with a situation where people just aren't really clear on the rules. It doesn't really seem like the authority in charge is trustworthy because there's apparently all this vaccine that's going to waste. I mean, I guess that's real, I've heard stories and read articles about it. And then the actual tiers are based on an honor system. So you get in this weird situation where you could, in acting in good faith, end up sort of skipping ahead in line and getting something that you really shouldn't be getting right then. And you haven't really necessarily done anything wrong except convince yourself to not really look too hard at the situation. So like I said, we canceled, so we're not line skippers. Although if I'm at Walgreens picking up my prescription one day and the nurse is just like, "Hey, you want to come back here..."
Josh:
And then some guy in a trench coat opens up his jacket and is like, "I've got vaccines. They're about to expire."
Starr:
Yeah, I'm just going to follow that man into his van and get my vaccine and then be safe.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
So for any of our listeners, if you're looking for vaccines, they're about to expire.
Starr:
But tying it back into marketing, I realized that this thing sort of combined a bunch of marketing type techniques, I guess. There's a time limit first, right? It's like, "Okay, this is expiring by Wednesday," or whenever. There's limited quantities, act now. There's like a big sort of discount situation, right? It's like, you don't have to wait, you don't have to go through all this hassle. You can instead just pay this one low, low price and get this delivered right to your door. And oh yeah, there's social stuff. Yeah, there's social stuff, because like, "Well, these people signed up for an appointment, I guess it's okay. Sure."
Josh:
Wait, so we're describing a scam, right?
Starr:
I don't know if it's a scam. I think it's just a chain letter situation.
Ben:
And there was a clear call to action, right?
Starr:
Yeah. There's a clear call to action.
Ben:
Like, "Go, sign up here."
Starr:
And this isn't really a marketing thing, unless you're... Maybe it's like a multi-level marketing thing. I don't know. Because it seems like you have this source of firsthand, or I guess second hand knowledge. It's like, "Okay, our friend who we trust has a good friend who works in a clinic and has this inside information," and that's not how it was, right? That was our sort of assumptions and perception of the situation based on the limited information we had from some text messages.
Starr:
I mean, that's kind of what it seemed like they were saying, but in fact, nobody really knows exactly where the original thing came from. And the friend who works in the clinic was actually just like; I don't know. It's possible, like they didn't really know. So yeah. It's just so weird. It's so weird to me how we're seeing, it's almost like a run on the bank situation or just this emergent behavior where a bunch of people acting in good faith reasonably create this the stampede, I guess. But fortunately it's easy to cancel, so I guess hopefully no harm done.
Ben:
Well, the good news is that that many people want the vaccine that that's effective. So that's a good sign.
Josh:
In Seattle, at least.
Starr:
Oh yeah. Totally, totally. Yeah. And I mean, the website was not really being super responsive. It was like it was under heavy load, which it took a minute for that to sink in and be like, "Wait a second, why are all these slots booking up so quickly if this is a special, one-time only situation."
Ben:
And then on the confirmation page, they ask you for your bank login and you're like, "Wait a minute, why do you need my bank login?"
Starr:
Oh, no. It was a legit, this was from Swedish. It's a legit clinic. Yeah, it's totally a legit clinic. I think it was just, I don't know. I don't know. Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I missed my only chance at survival. We'll never know.
Ben:
I don't know. I'm thinking there must've been something related to Bitcoin in this whole scenario. I had someone the other day like, "Have you seen the price of Bitcoin?" I'm like, "No." They're like, "It's like $30,000." I'm like, "Wow." They said, "You should totally buy some." I was like, "Why?" "Because it's going to go up." I'm like, "You realize you just described a Ponzi scheme." They're like, "But, but..." I'm like, "No, not going to happen."
Starr:
Yeah. Bitcoin's so shady. Not going to lie, I wish I had mined some Bitcoins back in the day.
Ben:
Seriously. Seriously. Yeah.
Starr:
But it's like, if I ever bought Bitcoin, it would be basically like buying a lottery ticket. It's just like, this is just gambling.
Ben:
Although I do really feel bad for those individuals that had that problem with the Bitcoin wallet where they have lost their password and now they can't get their million dollars.
Starr:
Oh my God. That would be so devastating.
Ben:
I know. That would kill me. So maybe it's good that I didn't do that mining, because I probably would've forgotten the password.
Josh:
You would've lost it.
Starr:
Totally, yeah. For me because I used same password for like decades until I realized that was incredibly stupid. Yeah. I mean, those people's grandchildren are going to be really sick of hearing about how their... This wallet's going to be passed down for generations, like some treasure chest in Granddad's attic.
Josh:
Yeah. Like I just imagine like the movies made about; have you ever seen National Treasure?
Ben:
I was thinking the same thing. National Treasure Three.
Josh:
It's like the search, digging through the family records to try to figure out what the password might've been.
Ben:
Totally. Yeah.
Ben:
It's like, "Oh, where was Grandpa living at this time?" And they go back and they reconstruct, "Oh, it was the barber shop across the street. And his name was such and such."
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So I've got a business idea for somebody, it might be a terrible idea. Okay. So we've got all these people with wallets who can't get into them because they don't know the password. I assume it's really expensive at the moment to crack those passwords, right? I imagine it's one of those situations where it would take a lot of computing power working for hundreds of years or whatever to crack it. Maybe in 50 years though, and we'll have quantum computers and it'll be easy. So you just buy people's locked wallets at a steep discount, like for a hundred bucks I'll buy your... Actually, I'll do this. Yeah. 10 bucks I'll buy your unused Bitcoin wallet. I have to figure out how to verify that it's actually a Bitcoin wallet.
Josh:
I'll sell you mine.
Starr:
And honor system that's got to have stuff in it, you can't give me an empty one. And then we'll just hold on to these for 50 years until the quantum computing happens and then we'll just open them and Bitcoin will be worth like a million dollars a coin by then because it's only going up.
Josh:
This is after you freeze your head, right?
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
Okay. I just want to be clear. It might be a while, but we'll get there.
Starr:
There you go. Totally. I'll memorize the data for all the wallets. Or I don't know, they can stick a zip disc in with my frozen head.
Ben:
Yeah. Speaking of obsolescence, that'd be my concern, like 50 years from now we've probably moved on to bytecoin.
Starr:
Oh. We're going to be at 16 coin.
Josh:
What a nerd.
Ben:
Coin 64.
Starr:
Coin 64.
Ben:
Well, I did something new this week, in my goal of doing new stuff and getting out of my comfort zone a bit to try and grow the business. I put together the beginnings of a roadmap. And it's kind of new for Honeybadger.
Josh:
Love it.
Starr:
I like that. This is intriguing.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We haven't done roadmaps before ever.
Josh:
Wait, you mean we're going to have a plan?
Ben:
We're going to have a plan. Well, maybe. So I sat down and put down some notes on things that I thought I'd like to deliver in 2021. And yeah, I think this is actually the farthest out I've ever in detail, thought about plans, and I'm liking this idea, coming up with things I want to get done and actually putting them on the calendar. That was the novel part for me, it's like, "Oh, and when will I schedule this chunk of work? Oh, I can put it there." So we'll see how that goes. It's early days, we're just getting started, but I'm going to give this a good college try this year.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I want to get back to setting deadlines better and meeting them.
Starr:
Y'all are on your own. I work like an artist. There's no rush.
Ben:
I'm going to do something doubly crazy. We never publicize future plans.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Ben:
I'm going to right now reveal one of the items from our roadmap.
Starr:
Okay, what's one of the items?
Ben:
We're going to be deploying support for React Native.
Starr:
What?
Ben:
In Q1. Yes.
Starr:
Awesome.
Ben:
I'm planting my flag in the sand.
Starr:
There we go.
Ben:
Yeah. So Kevin's working on something else right now. But scheduled for like February, I think is when I scheduled it, starting February, Josh and I in particular are going to be working on updates to our pipeline that will allow us to process React Native payloads so we can launch that sometime in March, hopefully, but maybe April.
Starr:
Well, that will be awesome. I look forward to learning more about that.
Ben:
Yeah. We're excited. Like this has been something that our customers have been asking for for years. So looking forward to having that.
Josh:
It's our first foray into anything native, I would say. Right?
Ben:
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So I wouldn't be too surprised if following on pretty soon after that there are things like native iOS, SDK support and things like that. So stay tuned, see how that goes.
Starr:
Oh, that sounds awesome. It's like, I think it was good of us to wait until we're sure that mobile is actually here to stay.
Josh:
For real. We played that one right.
Starr:
If we would have jumped on this bandwagon back in 2007, that would've just been too soon. Yes. I did something too that was a little bit outside my comfort area this week. So as I'm sure our listeners are tired of hearing, I've been working on blog stuff and having third-party authors do work for us and everything. And it's been about a year since we started this and when I first started out, I didn't know what I was doing, so we were just sort of building things as we went along, figuring out how this all worked. I wasn't really too concerned about what particular types of articles I wanted. I mean, I had an idea and everything, but if somebody proposed an article and it was a little bit different from what I thought, would be fine. I was like, "Okay, sure." Because I wanted to throw some spaghetti at the wall, see what stuck.
Starr:
And if I had been very particular about those things, it would have just been my guesses. Right? It would have just been my personal opinion. So I didn't really see why I should. I just wanted to keep things open and see what worked. Well, fast forward, record scratch, a year later we have an idea of sort of what has worked and what has worked less well and everything in terms of article topics and everything, but then also in terms of the back end, like what payment methods we can use for people conveniently, where are our real pain points on the administration side of things. And so I had to essentially write a big letter to our authors and be like, "Hey, here's some changes. We are no longer going to be able to pay by certain payment methods. We are limiting our topics to these languages, and stuff like this."
Starr:
And I was really worried that I was going to get a lot of angry replies, but I haven't gotten any. So I don't know, the thing that made me a little bit nervous about it was that all of our authors that they're still writing for us have done ranging from a good job to an excellent job. And so I don't know, it feels weird to be like, "Okay, we're doing things different through no fault of yours." I don't want to pull the rug out from anybody. I feel a lot of like compassion for people who are maybe, I don't know, expecting their writing for us to continue going in a certain direction, and then maybe it changes. So I don't know, that made me a little bit nervous, but it's worked out so far and I think going forward, I think it's going to be a lot better for the business. It's going to run a lot more smoothly. And hopefully everybody will just be happy and continue writing great content for us.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
Oh wait, I should mention, another uncomfortable thing that we're going to be doing is we're really hoping to publish some PHP content soon. So if you're a PHP developer and you want to write for us, go to our blog and look for the Write For Us page and get in touch. I'd love to talk to you. Thanks.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
Yet another bit of uncomfortableness, it's kind of funny. So I had my one-on-one with Kevin this past week and that's not uncomfortable. That's actually kind of fun. I like chatting with Kevin. But the uncomfortable bit is that this year for Kevin is going to be this first annual review, because we started doing annual reviews late last year with Ben, that was our first one ever for Honeybadger. And now our second one and our first one with Kevin.
Starr:
Oh, I did our first annual review? I didn't know that.
Ben:
You totally did. Yeah.
Starr:
I thought you had been doing them.
Ben:
No, I'm just a good actor.
Starr:
You just inherently look like you know what you're doing.
Ben:
I told Kevin, "So next month we're going to have an annual review, not just a normal one-on-one." And I was like, "But don't worry, it's not going to be all that different. We're not going to be doing like virtual trust falls or anything." So yeah, we're growing up as a company. Honeybadger is getting on up there in years.
Starr:
Annual reviews, roadmaps.
Ben:
What's next?
Josh:
I don't like where this is going.
Starr:
I know, right? Yeah. I got a little room divider from Ikea to put in front of my desk to just create less visual distraction behind me. And I realized it kind of looks like a cubicle. I mean, it's a very nice cubicle, but it's kind of a cube.
Ben:
Yeah. It's like you give the ferret its freedom and it comes running back to you because it wants the nice warm, cozy... Not that I've ever given a ferret its freedom before.
Starr:
Yeah, that's strangely specific.
Josh:
It's okay if you have, Ben.
Starr:
It's all right.
Ben:
I've actually never had ferrets, but I had a cousin that had ferrets and they were fun to play with.
Josh:
I had a roommate who had one once and yeah, they're pretty mischievous little critters.
Starr:
We're all about rodents. Are badgers rodents? I don't know.
Ben:
I don't know.
Josh:
We really should know that.
Starr:
We should know that. So what have you done that's uncomfortable, Josh?
Ben:
This podcast episode.
Starr:
Discomfort.
Josh:
I'm doing it now.
Starr:
Yeah. You're existing in this world today.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't really have an answer for that.
Starr:
That's fine. I don't want you to be uncomfortable.
Josh:
I worked on JavaScript this week.
Starr:
Oh, that counts.
Josh:
I guess that counts. But the good news actually is that I think I'm ready to ship that project finally and get it off my plate.
Starr:
Oh, awesome.
Josh:
Excited about that.
Starr:
So that's our unified front end and back end together node package.
Josh:
Yeah. Universal NPM package for browser and node server side JavaScript. So no more splitting the package like two packages, which is handy. I mean, it's also nice, in the process of combining these libraries, I was able to combine the documentation for them as well. Because JavaScript, before we had two sections, one for node and one for browser JavaScript and everything had its own, it was all split up. But since it's both JavaScript, it was really nice to be able to share a lot more. Basically the packages and the documentation, everything can now share a single core or single base.
Starr:
I'm curious. Could you tell me under the hood how much of the code is shared?
Josh:
Most of the code is shared actually. So it's like split up, it's a single package. Some people when they do this, they use a monorepo type design, which basically combines a lot of different packages into a single one. So you might have like a core package and then you have an NPM and a browser package that are all separate. But I opted to just build a single package. NPM actually has a feature where you can deliver different entry points based on the environment that is installing the package into your app. So it knows if you're a client side like a browser application, or if you're a server side application, and it gives you the right, basically entry point into the library.
Josh:
So basically I just have I guess three namespaces, there's core, server and browser. And most of the stuff is in core and then anything that is environment specific; so like in browsers, anything that depends on window, for instance, which will blow up in a node environment, that has to be in the browser package. So all of the window on error integration and other things we instrument, basically it just loads those and then installs them into the core client package and then the server does the same thing.
Starr:
Awesome. Yeah. I could see it going either way, but it's really interesting that you didn't really split it into multiple packages and then just combine them.
Ben:
Speaking of shipping stuff, I had this random thought as I was looking at the roadmap and scheduling things and thinking about time cycles and stuff like that. And the random thought I had was, maybe after every thing we ship, after every; I don't want to call it a sprint because we're not doing like capital A agile, but okay. Lowercase sprint. After every cycle that we do, maybe we should just take a vacation. Like three to five days off after every launch.
Josh:
Yeah. That's not a bad idea. That kind of lines up with the vacation cycle that I had come up with last year, which was basically based on observing my burnout cycle. So I mean it's good, because I usually have the tendency to put off. Like I always start saying, "Really it's about time to take some time off." And then three months later I'm taking time off out of necessity. So yeah, if we had some sort of cycle that actually prevented that and kept us fresh all the time, that would be great.
Starr:
Yeah. That's an interesting idea. How long are these cycles do you think?
Ben:
Well, I don't know yet, but I read the Shape Up book from Base Camp and they have six weeks cycles. They try to; well, maybe not, maybe try is the wrong word. I think they're pretty strict about setting their work so that they will not spend more than six weeks on a particular project. That's their appetite. And so I was thinking, "Well, we could shoot for six weeks and see how that goes." And so I've been thinking of these projects in terms of six week timeframes, but I don't know if I want to be particularly strict about that, but that's just kind of where I'm thinking right now.
Starr:
Yeah, that could be good. I like the idea of that sort of cadence.
Ben:
Yeah. If you haven't had a chance to read Shape Up, then you should definitely check it out. It's a quick read and it's good stuff in there. Even if you don't follow their; it might be a bit much to call it a methodology, but I think it's a good approach. I like what they've done. Now, we don't have the 50 or 70 people that they have where we split up multiple teams and doing all this kind of stuff. So it may not apply as well to our scenario, our situation, but I like the idea.
Josh:
We'd be more like a one or a two team company, right?
Ben:
Right, right.
Josh:
Yeah. And I guess what we do, we're all designers here. So they pair designers and developers together, right, on each team.
Ben:
Yeah. That would be pretty awesome to have a full-time designer dedicated person, that would rock.
Josh:
Our design would get a lot better.
Ben:
It definitely would.
Starr:
Yeah. When you say we're all designers, that means that nobody's really a designer.
Josh:
Yeah. That's what that means.
Ben:
So we'll see. If this first quarter goes well, then we'll keep doing it.
Starr:
Well, cool. We can circle back on the podcast and see how it worked out.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. But one of the things that's been rolling around in my brain is just what Josh said, it's been coming back to me a lot, is we did a lot of stuff in 2020, but not a lot of things we can really point to, to tell a customer, "Hey, look at this cool new thing." And so I'm now thinking, "Okay, what are some bigger projects that would have a little more visibility that we can get a little more excited about?" And so trying to reign myself in, but I got a bunch of ideas for things I think would be really cool to work on. And so if we can find a cadence that works, then I have I think at least four or five, maybe six projects that we could throw ourselves up.
Josh:
Nice. I will say, Kevin did some stuff in 2020.
Starr:
Yeah, he did.
Josh:
Did we do Actions? Was Actions 2020?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
So he did some cool stuff, he focused on some user facing stuff.
Starr:
Was dark mode 2020 too? Or was that...
Ben:
Oh, it might've been.
Starr:
Oh my God. I'm so old.
Ben:
We should really do a recap.
Starr:
I'm like, "Was that this year or was that five years ago? I don't know."
Josh:
Anyway, I know we did do some things, but yeah. Personally I felt like I was more just filling in everywhere else and that was all.
Starr:
Yeah, I think Kevin's been maybe working on the most front end feature, or the most customer visible features. Yeah. Personally, I find that with the work I'm doing lately, I feel like at the end of the day, I'll just be like, "Oh, I've got to finish this thing. I've got to stop slacking off and get some real work done." And then it's just like, "Wait a second. I have been working every minute of today." It's just been all like sending emails and doing stuff like that, which doesn't feel like real work somehow. I don't know. I just have to remind myself that like, "Okay, management stuff is actual work. It takes actual time and it's not me slacking off." Like why does my brain do the thing where it's like, "Okay, Starr, you have been being lazy and slacking off all day because you've only been writing emails to people about the work that they're doing." And yeah, it's just such a weird thing.
Ben:
I guess it's probably some of that developer background mindset. Like if I'm not seeing code getting ready, then work's not getting done.
Starr:
Yeah. I think so. And because you don't really see any of your... Like with development, you have a very quick feedback cycle. It's like you type some code, you run it, you see it at work. It's like, "Okay, that bit of code has been typed." But with this, it's just like, "Okay, I've just got to nudge this thing over here and we'll see if that works out in a month." And it's so much more vague.
Ben:
Yep. Well, I think it's going to be a good year.
Starr:
Yeah, I think so too.
Starr:
So this has been another wonderful episode of FounderQuest. Yay. If you want to review us, that's awesome. If you're interested in writing for us, especially if you're a PHP developer, just go to our blog at honeybadger.io/blog and look for the Write For Us link. And yeah, until then, stay alive, don't go near the Capitol and that's all I got to say.
Josh:
I'll try not to.
Starr:
Okay. Yeah, I'm talking to you Josh, especially.
Josh:
Yeah. I may have bought ballistic armor this week.
Starr:
Holy... I think we need to stop and clarify something. This is for your hobby of going and being a photo journalist at different protests. You're not actually the person, like...
Josh:
I'm not engaged in battle.
Starr:
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Josh:
Against the government.
Starr:
We can't just say that and then end the podcast. Because that is just...
Ben:
Mic drop.
Starr:
Yes. Yes. We are fans of living in the United States of America, this show. We don't want that to change. So all right. Well, see you guys later and see you next week.
Show Notes:
Links:How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?
Profitwell Retain
New Relic
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Okay, so you are listening to FounderQuest. We're a bunch of founders, we're on a quest. Thank you for listening, we are back after a rather long absence. Basically, people were gone different days during the holidays, and it was just a weird scheduling situation, so we just decided to take, I guess, two months off? A month and a half?
Ben:
Something like that.
Starr:
Something like that, yeah.
Josh:
A little more than we normally do at Christmas.
Starr:
Yeah, a little bit more, but I've got to say, I feel a little bit refreshed, I'm ready to talk into a microphone again, I missed talking to y'all.
Ben:
Likewise.
Josh:
Yeah, same. I also missed the routine of just having this call every week.
Ben:
Yeah, and our listeners missed us. I had people reaching out to me saying, "Hey, is the podcast coming back?"
Josh:
Nice, well that's a good sign.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I know, that's so sweet. You've got to get all your business tips in before it's just a bloodbath. You've got to prepare for the anarcho-capitalist future.
Josh:
Well there's some hope on the horizon, right?
Ben:
Of course. Well I've got to say, I'm having a great day so far. I was able to upgrade one of our repositories from Tailwind 1 to Tailwind 2 without any snags or hiccups whatsoever. I'm pretty excited.
Josh:
Wow.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
Nice Ben.
Ben:
It's not every day an upgrade goes off without a hitch.
Josh:
Yeah, for sure.
Ben:
It's kind of compensation, I think, from the universe, for how badly the upgrade that I'm trying to do with our Elasticsearch cluster is going. Because upgrading from Elasticsearch 6 to 7 apparently is not in the cards for me, so yin and yang.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well that's a shame. So what are we actually talking about today? It took everything we had just to make it here at 10 am on a Friday together. I don't know if anybody had the energy to think beyond that, so...
Josh:
Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption.
Ben:
Well actually I had a thought on something that we could talk about, something that's been kind of on my mind for the past few days, and that is perhaps a slight recap of 2020. Because as I took the break, I was thinking goals for 2021, and things I wanted to see, and looking back at 2020, and looking at some numbers. And to be honest, I'm kind of disappointed with how 2020 went from our business standpoint. The growth was not great. We had growth, but it was definitely off from previous years. And obviously coronavirus was a factor no doubt, we saw our revenue take a hit in March-April. So there's that, but still, it just feels kind of eh to have the worst growth year... I don't know if it's the worst, I don't know, I'll have to go back and check previous years I guess. But it was not a fantastic growth year, and I'm just like, eh, what can I do during 2021 to make that a different story? So that's been on my mind.
Josh:
Yeah, I think I was telling you the other day, I've had the feeling that it just felt like a stagnant year, just in general. And I know a lot of that is because just of the conditions, and things that were out of our control. But then also, you can only sit and stare at the news for so many years in a row before we get back to work. We did a lot of work last year. Thinking back we did do a lot of work, but I also feel like... I don't know, I'm just looking forward to doing some new stuff, and getting back to innovating.
Starr:
Yeah. Well first of all, I have to say that it's not nothing. I also looked at our growth numbers, and it's not nothing that we grew, we had growth. We are making more money now in the midst of a global pandemic than we were when it started, so that's definitely something. That's definitely a blessing. Maybe we wish it was more, but it's still there.
Ben:
Yeah, I agree. Having some growth is certainly a blessing. We had customers, and obviously in the news there are a bunch of businesses going out of business, and they have nothing now.
Josh:
We have nothing to complain about.
Ben:
Yeah, for sure. I guess I was thinking of it in terms of... As being three developers who started this business, three technical people, it's always been a weakness of ours on the growth side, the getting customers in the door kind of side. Yeah, we've done some things, and we've stumbled on the way, but we're not experts. We're not sales experts, we're not marketing experts, we're just doing the best we can. And that's been great for us, we've got a nice comfortable business, things are good, growth has been good every year. But as I was thinking of these things and I was thinking about, well, growth last year wasn't great. And yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but looking forward, what can I do that's different than I've done in the past, right?
Ben:
So one of the things that I've been thinking about... I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions, but I am a big fan of goals. Not that you need a new year to set goals, but... So I'm thinking, my goals for the year, my goals for the quarter, and so on. I'm like, eh, maybe I need to get better at this whole figuring out growth thing. Maybe I should really spend a fair amount of time just trying to get into what that means, and doing some... I don't know. That's the problem, I don't know exactly what that means for me, but the one thing I had thought so far is, maybe that means I spend a little less time on the detail, getting things done, upgrading Elasticsearch clusters, and that sort of stuff, and a little more time than I have in the past on, "Okay, how do we get growth in our business?"
Josh:
Yeah. It's easy to fall back into the comfortable routine. Believe it or not, upgrading Elasticsearch clusters is comfortable for you. It's not enjoyable, but it's... You know how to do it.
Ben:
It's the well worn rut in my experience.
Josh:
Exactly, and I have the same thing.
Starr:
The nice thing about technical tasks is that generally you know if you did it right, you know if you succeeded. And with marketing it's like, oh, I don't know. Or marketing, or sales, or whatever. I guess sales would be a little bit more direct feedback, but with marketing, it's like, "Okay, let's circle back in a year and see if we can notice any change." Yeah, well that sounds really good. I would love for everybody to be involved in chasing growth and all that. A couple interesting stats I just want to throw out there that I was looking at yesterday, and I'm not going to throw out absolute numbers, but we all agreed it was okay to discuss percentages, or percentage changes, and everything. So I think this interesting just to show how 2020 has been different than previous years.
Starr:
So what I did is, we use ProfitWell, and I went in and did their... They let you export a CSV of pretty much every page on their site. And so I got a CSV of customer numbers, right? Total customers, new customers added per month, customers who downgrade, who upgrade, et cetera. So the majority in the change in our growth... Our growth was lower this year, and the majority of that change came from having fewer upgrades, and... I forget the exact days, that kind of makes sense to me because we were doing this thing, I think in 2019, where we were asking people who were basically using too much of our service on an old plan, we were asking them to upgrade. We were asking them to either choose a higher plan, or we were going to choose a lower plan for them and they were going to lose some of their errors, because they were just not profitable for us to service them.
Starr:
And in 2020 we had done all that, and so we didn't really have that upgrade revenue stream, so that was maybe two thirds of the change. And the one third of the change, roughly, was due to increased downgrades, and this really surprised me. Essentially what I did is I just went into these spreadsheets, and I just added up the total customers who downgraded in 2020, total customers who downgraded in 2019, and just looked at the change. And over twice as many customers downgraded in 2020 as in 2019, and if you plot it on a chart by date, you see there's a definite uptick at March. So I think that is a legacy of coronavirus for us.
Ben:
Interesting.
Starr:
Yeah. And we also changed our plans around then, so I don't know, maybe it had something to do with that as well.
Ben:
Yeah, I was going to ask. I can't remember, when did we release the better basic plan, the new and improved free plan that we have? Because that, I think, would also encourage some downgrades, wouldn't it? If people are like, "Oh, I have a minimal usage on this plan, I can downgrade to the basic now that they're giving me more."
Josh:
I don't remember the date off the top of my head. I think it was like mid summer, mid year.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
So yeah, it kind of feels like coronavirus plus the basic could be a good explanation for seeing continual downgrades. And from the coronavirus perspective, I can totally get why people are like, "Oh, we've got to find ways to trim our costs, how can we do that? Oh, well let's cut the amount of traffic that we're sending in errors."
Josh:
Yeah, and back then our main focus was retention, and that's part of the reason that we really juiced the basic plan in the first place. I don't know, I still think that it's interesting, because we have a lot of... That plan has been very popular it seems, relatively.
Ben:
Yeah, very. In fact I was just starting, just this morning before we got on, doing some analysis of people who are on the basic plans. Maybe we're being a little to generous with that plan, so I'm going to run some numbers and see. Maybe we need to adjust that.
Josh:
We've had a few people on Twitter mention that we're the best value at the moment, which...
Ben:
Yeah. We've had people in the onboarding say, "Hey, your basic plan gives a lot away." So yeah.
Starr:
Oh, that's so good. So nobody sign up for a basic plan, none of our listeners. So, y'all want to hear some numbers? Because Josh mentioned that we changed our plans around to try and increase retention, and so we've actually got the year-over-year churn numbers. So year-over-year, our voluntary churn, which is people who hit the cancel button, went down 8%, so that's not bad. Our delinquent turn went down 20%.
Josh:
Wow.
Starr:
Yeah. I suspect that's due to maybe our using ProfitWell Retain, because I started that.
Ben:
Yeah, I would definitely say that's a factor, that's cool.
Starr:
Yeah, and this is total numbers of customers, it's not dollars. And let's see, and while I've got you here, I've got a spreadsheet open. Our new customers, we got more new customers than we did in 2019, it was up by 6%, which is not amazing, but it's not lower than it was.
Ben:
I'll take it yeah.
Josh:
And that's customers excluding free basic plan users?
Starr:
Yeah, that's paying customers.
Josh:
Okay, paying customers, cool.
Starr:
Yeah, and then upgrades were down 9%. And again, that is users, numbers of users. In dollars, upgrades were down 30%, and then downgrades were up 130% in terms of numbers of users. So yeah, I think that's the story of 2020, is lots of people just trying to trim costs, and downgrading and stuff, and not as many people actually leaving us, which is nice.
Ben:
Yeah, that's cool. It gives it a lot of good context, I appreciate that.
Josh:
So you're saying we need to put the squeeze on everyone in 2021?
Starr:
2021 is the year we get blood out of that turnip.
Ben:
What we need to do is send out holiday gifts to all of our customers that is just a case full of whiskey or something. Get them all smashed, and so they make really bad coding errors, and then they deploy that stuff and create a bunch more traffic, and so they have to upgrade, that's what we've got to do.
Josh:
Just do that all year.
Starr:
Yeah, it's a shame that Trump lost, because there might have been a place for you in his new administration.
Ben:
I just checked the Stripe Dashboard, and our basic plan was created on May 19th 2020.
Starr:
Okay good, my brain works. So here's an interesting little tidbit, even though our numbers of new customers were up by 6%, our growth in new customers was up by 6%. Our customers weren't up by 6%, but the growth was up 6%. The growth in revenue from new customers was down 26%, and yeah, so that might be due to us lowering our plans and our prices for our plans. That makes sense that that's how that would work, I guess.
Ben:
Yeah, we're going to have to knuckle down. Well, we did warn people when we launched the basic plan, and we announced it the podcast, you'd better get it while the getting's good, because it's not going to stick around, right?
Josh:
That still stands, go get it now.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. So we're now coming back, and we're doing the analysis, and low and behold, sure enough, having a very generous free plan does reduce the gross revenue's numbers.
Josh:
But in our defense, it also did what we set out to do, which was increase retention, hopefully. I guess we don't know because people stayed, but I have a feeling that it increased retention somewhat, some of the stuff. And lowering our prices in general.
Starr:
That's true, and one interesting thing about this is that the better free plan didn't cause an overall decrease in the number of paid signups that we got. Yeah, you could argue that we would have got more paid signups had we had a less generous free plan. But when I was looking earlier at the conversion rates of the different plans, the conversion rate didn't really change when we introduced the new free plan. That's good to know, and we're getting a lot more free signups than we used to with our old free plan.
Ben:
Yeah, and that was the other goal, right? To just get more acquisition, got more people using Honeybadger and trying it out with the hopes that they will eventually get really sloppy in their programming and have to upgrade.
Josh:
Or work with more people, or their business grows, and...
Ben:
So you know some companies, they build products or product families around the notion that they need to have... Like cyclical kind of companies. Like, if I'm a lawnmower manufacturer, obviously my sales are going to go down in the winter, right? So I should also build snowblowers to even out the thing. So I think what we need is some sort of product that rewards good developers who have code... That is not deploying much errors. I don't know what the product would be, but to kind of balance out, that we've got the ones that are doing a lot of errors, and we've got the apps are really pristine, so we need that product to balance out our product offering there.
Starr:
That's a super simple deal. So what we do is we just modify our existing Honeybadger client, and just have it count the error rate, and if the error rate is low, it just does a Webhook request, or it does an ARP request, or API, and we send people a cookie bouquet.
Ben:
Yeah, I like that. Or maybe it sends an email to their boss saying, "Look how awesome I am."
Josh:
From their own email account?
Ben:
Totally.
Josh:
It's just a time saver.
Ben:
Yeah. We totally should add that though, bragging rights. We could add that in our current app, right?
Josh:
That's a little bit like the gamification stuff we've been talking about.
Ben:
Yeah, but you can't reveal the secrets Josh, we've got to hold back.
Josh:
Yeah, we won't reveal the details, that's just a little tease.
Ben:
Little tease, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, I don't know if I should talk about... I don't even know what this is, and I don't know if I should keep going, because I don't want to give away secrets that I don't know. I was just going to say that would be fun to have an option for the Slack notifier, where if the error rate is really low, we can post a, "Good Job." "Good job everybody." To Slack.
Josh:
Oh yeah, I like that.
Josh:
Oh I like that, I really like that. We totally should do that.
Ben:
Yeah, we totally should do that.
Ben:
Add that to that. Yeah. We could have a new kind of event, instead of the, "You've exceeded the threshold." Event, we could have a, "Your threshold is zero." Or something like that, I don't know the name for it. But, "You're so awesome." And it triggers a Slack notification-
Josh:
Yeah, you don't want it to be semi random, and it's not going to happen on a regular basis, like, "Your errors were zero this week." But if it was just a nice little surprise that it happens one or twice in their life cycle, that would pretty cool.
Ben:
That would be cool.
Josh:
That's a nice touch. And also, adding little features like that that reach out between, if things are quiet, because it's easy to forget that you have Honeybadger if you're not receiving error notifications. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing to remind them that we're not delivering any value at the moment.
Ben:
Well there's also the wondering. There's forgetting, and then there's also the wonder, like, is it still working. It's gone kind of quiet, is that a good thing, or is that a bad thing, and you kind of get that anxiety. So maybe it could be, if there's a quiet period for a few days or whatever, it's like, "Oh, we're still here. Oh, your app is still up." No, it's just great.
Josh:
Well we do have the digest, which I think we don't send them, though, when there is no traffic, I'm pretty sure. Do we send one that just says, "There are no errors this week"? I can't remember now.
Ben:
I can't remember now either. I think I've gone a week with no errors.
Josh:
We'll have to look at that.
Ben:
Yeah. Love it Starr.
Starr:
Well, I just hope that Slack lets you post little animated gifs, like through their API.
Ben:
Yeah, the Giphy integration does that, so.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Okay, great.
Ben:
Speaking of, in our household, we have two teenagers, and they have opposite views on how you're supposed to pronounce gif, and it causes some heated arguments around the dinner table, let me tell you.
Josh:
In the same household, that's rough.
Ben:
Yeah, at least it's not Vim versus Emacs.
Starr:
Yeah, my take on it is that I just switch randomly. But whichever one I use, I just fight to the death that it is correct.
Ben:
That's what you're got to do, because there's opinions strongly held, right?
Josh:
You get to have an argument every day.
Ben:
So back to the growth things. So I was just thinking about this, and okay, what are ways you can get growth? Obviously you can do more advertising, get more people in the door. But you can also do, which we don't do, you can also do outbound, right? You could have a direct sales force, or salesperson, or some sort of thing that effectively is sales. And I was wondering, okay, yeah, that's cool, but I hate getting emails from people like, "You should buy my thing." And it's like, I don't care about your thing. And so my question is, how do you do outbound sales that's not really annoying, that's kind of where I'm stumped. So you guys have answers? You want to help me out here?
Josh:
Yeah, that's a good one.
Starr:
I don't know the answers.
Josh:
I think one thing just to always remember is that everyone is not you. So I think it's a pretty safe assumption that most people don't like cold sales emails, but they obviously work, or people wouldn't be doing them since the invention of email. So yeah, I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, I do have to admit, I do get the occasional email that's blind, and I'm like, "Oh, that might be something I should check out." But it's rare.
Josh:
Yeah, I think out of the few that have caught my attention, it's usually someone that's doing something different from the other sales people that are emailing me. And if it's whimsical, or they're actually giving me some sort of value immediately... I don't have any examples of that, but it's just a vague thought, that that maybe one way, is to try to be unique in the way that you're reaching out to people. Or maybe be self aware, even, about how this... I don't know how you do that, but...
Ben:
So you're recommending the purple cow approach, right?
Josh:
Yeah, basically.
Ben:
Yeah, that's good, I like it.
Starr:
I'm wondering-
Josh:
Sort of like a self deprecating comment.
Starr:
I'm wondering if our current pricing model would support outbound sales. Because it takes a certain amount of time and effort to do a sale, and I'm just wondering, what does our price need to be to have positive ROI?
Ben:
Yeah, well I read-
Starr:
This isn't an objection, I'm just wondering out loud.
Ben:
No. Yeah, totally. It just so happens I read a blog post the other day that answers that question. Jason Lemkin, SaaStr frame. He addressed this question this last week, I think it was, in a blog post, and we can link it up in the show notes. But basically, the TLDR is, you could get away with less, but $299 a month is really the floor for having an honest to goodness outbound sales organization that works.
Josh:
That's helpful.
Ben:
Yeah, and we totally have customers who are paying us than $299 a month, so if you find them via sales, then that could work, right? Of course the majority of our customers are spending, I would say... I think the majority of our customers are spending less than that, so we wouldn't want to find them. So we'd have to do some segmentation work, and find out how to really get to customers that we really want into that kind of pipeline. But it could work.
Josh:
Yeah, it seems like you'd still be going after the medium to enterprise people.
Ben:
And as I started to think about this, you start going that path, and it's like, well, at the same time, we don't really want to go exactly the same path that our big competitors are going. We don't want to try and do the same game plan that Sentry is doing, right? Because obviously they have more resources than we do, and so that's just not going to work. So yeah, you can't say, "Well I'm just going to do the enterprise call down playbook." Because that's presumably what Sentry is doing right now.
Josh:
I had a thought based on that recently. Just because Sentry is changing so much, and it seems like since they're the large player in the error tracking market, it seems like there are people out there that are the small to medium people that are being alienated a little bit by some of the changes that they're making. And also that they're departing from just straight error tracking and going into the APM performance monitoring space, and really obviously targeting more enterprise people. And I think we heard recently, even some people were complaining that they had made their free plan even less useful to them, and that's a reason some people were switching recently. So it makes we wonder, since that has always been our target audience anyway, maybe there's an opportunity there for us to double down on the smaller accounts, which is kind of what we're good at capturing in the first place. And both capturing the free users, but also figuring out how to convert them, and capture more of the mid paying customers as well who maybe just don't want another New Relic, or soon to be New Relic.
Ben:
Right, I think the good news is the blog has done a great job of getting those kind of customers in the door. I guess it was Ben Findley's idea, I can't remember who's idea it was to have the onboarding survey that we have as part of our onboarding process, where any new customer who signs up, they're asked, "Any thoughts for us, or anything you want to tell us as you get started?" That has been a goldmine of information. Hearing people say, "Oh, I saw this blog post that such-and-such wrote, and I decided to check you out." Or like that tidbit about Sentry changing their free plan. That came in, we got it though the onboarding.
Josh:
A lot of people fill that out.
Starr:
That reminds me, I was meaning to go and do a report of all those comments. Everybody who left a comment, and what action did they perform? Are they a paying customer now, what happened to them?
Ben:
Oh yeah, that would be cool.
Starr:
Yeah, so thank you for mentioning the blog. That was a big thing I did in 2020, and overall I think I'm pretty happy with how it's going. I'm sort of still in the middle of working up a sort of end of year analysis, like what do I want to change going forward, and stuff like that. But overall, we produced a bunch of blog posts, we got a bunch of authors working with us, we know that some of those are leading to conversions. I have a nice little chart of blog post traffic. Our blog post traffic correlates extremely well with our plans page traffic, and our plans page traffic correlates pretty well with our signups. And so you can overlay blog post traffic with our signups, and you can kind of see how the curves follow each other. And it's a little bit hard to see because there's a lot of noise and stuff, and it may just be completely in my imagination, hopefully not.
Starr:
I do have a vested interest. But yeah, I'll share those charts with you two later. And so what I am currently working on is figuring out what direction we want to go in the future with the blog. Because this year, basically I was just trying to get this system up and running. I wanted to have a post every week, I wanted to have people other than me writing them, and essentially have this process that is kind of mechanical, and spits out content for our blog. And so I think I've got that working pretty well. Overall it's caused our year-over-year traffic to increase by... I don't know, I think it was 40% to 60% depending on what month you look at it.
Starr:
Yeah, so going forward it's like, okay, now which topics performed really well for us, and how does that correspond with the people who are actually signing up? I don't know, I asked Ben Findley to run a report of how much traffic each blog post got, and it's a little bit... I don't know, I'm a little bit torn, because the most traffic that any of our blog posts got was an article about Go, and I shared this other report with y'all earlier, where basically Go users account for like no growth. We don't have a lot of Go users, and so I don't know if... Is this an opportunity for us to target Go users, or is this just a red herring? And is Go even amenable to the Honeybadger way of doing errors, or are people using Go more likely to want an APM type solution?
Ben:
It's a good thing we have you here to figure all that out for us, Starr. These are the hard problems to solve.
Starr:
The hard problems, yes.
Josh:
One thing to keep in mind is that some Go users do use Ruby. A lot of Go users are using multiple languages, I think, too. Or a lot of developers in other ecosystems will use Go as a utility, I think, in some cases. It may be like a gateway. It's not like they're going to sign up for Go necessarily, but maybe go brings them to the blog.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. I don't know, I think it's a matter of percentages, right? Because all users aren't Go users. Is it 5%? So then you multiply that traffic by 5%, and is that greater or less than just our straight Ruby articles where 100% of those readers are Ruby users. One thing that I'm intrigued by going forward is the second... If you ignore JavaScript, which I do if I can, our second biggest language is PHP, and we haven't published any PHP content on our blog. So I'm curious, if we're able to do more PHP, if that might be an easy source of people who could be customers who we are not targeting.
Josh:
Yeah, that would definitely be worth trying. Trying some experiments around...
Starr:
As we define-
Josh:
We've done some advertising in PHP land, which is probably some of the users that we have.
Starr:
Yeah, I'm sure it accounts for it, yeah. I'm pretty sure that PHP, the reason it's our second biggest language is simply because that's the other language that we've put a sustained marketing push behind. And even though that marking push isn't really there anymore, it was sort of a one time thing. It has continued to pay off.
Ben:
And we still are-
Josh:
We do a little.
Ben:
Yeah, we do a little. We still engage with it, like we did Laracon EU sponsorship for a week. So that's coming up I guess. So yeah, here and there, but definitely not the concerted effort that we did in that one quarter where we really pushed it.
Starr:
Yeah, so if your listening to this, if you're a PHP developer who wants to write a blog post and get paid a substantial amount of money for is, go to honeybadger.io/blog, and look for the, "Write for us," link, and it will have all the instructions. That page doesn't really mention PHP, but it will soon.
Ben:
So speaking of spending money on authors, which I think has been fantastic. But it made me think, have we looked at our cost to acquire a customer? Have we looked at all of our expenses for blog, and ads, and podcast, and et cetera, then divided that by the number of new customers that came in this year, and see what that number is? I haven't done it.
Starr:
I haven't done it either.
Ben:
We should do that.
Starr:
Okay, we'll do it live, we can-
Ben:
We'll do it right now.
Josh:
We'll do it right now.
Starr:
Our readers get to see the fascinating process of creating spreadsheets.
Ben:
But no, I don't know why I haven't thought of doing this before. But we should really do that, because we have a set budget, right? We've determined a blog budget, we determined an overall marketing budget, and we should say, "Hey, are we getting the ROI? Are we getting some benefit out of all this money we're spending?"
Starr:
Yeah. It's probably because I never got an MBA or something, but occasionally I will stumble across something, and I'll just be like, "Why have I not been doing this for the past 10 years?" For example, I did a deep dive while we were mostly gone on the podcast into our conversion rate, and our conversion rate has always been... If you just look at our global conversion rate, it's always been a little bit suspiciously low. If you believe it, it's like, okay, we've got just tons of people just signing up and then immediately really not doing anything. And so I was just like, "Okay, what happens if we do conversion rate by country?" And then suddenly the fog clears and everything makes sense.
Starr:
And it turns out that through this... And there's a lot more steps involved, but basically figuring out our conversion rate is significantly skewed by people who are pen testers, people who are probably hackers, people signing up for an account trying to enter in a quick SQL injection into some form, and then ditching. And so if you look at conversion... And most of those people are coming to us, not all, but most of them are coming to us from South East Asia. So we have wonderful customers in South East Asia, and I'm not meaning to denigrate anyone from there. I'm just saying that if we exclude those numbers from out conversion rate, it's like, okay, suddenly things make a little bit more sense in terms of our effort. And it turns out that we actually have a pretty good conversion rate, especially among Rubyists. Yeah, essentially, if you're a Rubyist, and you sign up for a Honeybadger trial, there's like a 50% chance that you're going to become a paid customer, which is pretty awesome, I think. So good work everyone.
Ben:
Totally. Yeah, that was an awesome analysis that you did.
Starr:
Thank you.
Ben:
And that makes me think that when we do that customer acquisition cost math, we should cut out the numbers of people that are showing up from just doing pen testing and going away after a day.
Starr:
Yeah, so it's always weird, I did this deep dive into the spreadsheets, and I'll sort of continue that a little bit in this blog end of the year review. But now it's sort of a matter of, okay, now what do I actually do based on this knowledge? It's always a little bit harder. There's some things that seem to be clear, but I don't know. I guess it's just a process of getting the train moving, right? It takes a little time to get up to speed.
Ben:
Yeah, so I think one of the questions that came out of that, what do we do with that information, is, okay, maybe we should double down on talking to Ruby folk. Every Ruby podcast should have a Honeybadger ad embedded in it, right? Because we know that they convert really well. Or, is the better answer to... Okay, well we need to juice the numbers on our other languages, so maybe we need to double down on everything PHP so we can get them to a higher number. So-
Josh:
Or both.
Ben:
Or both, yeah.
Josh:
Or all.
Ben:
Yeah, so even with good data, you still have to go with, okay, now figure that out. That's what I love about running a business, it's like, oh, who knows? No one can give you that answer until you try some stuff, and spend some money and time, and do some experiments.
Josh:
Well if we got that number of what is costs to acquire a customer, which yeah, we should do now, that makes it easy to spend money.
Ben:
So you just gave me a thought, if have to cost to acquire a Ruby customer, versus the cost to acquire a PHP customer, then we know how much money to spend on a Ruby ad versus a PHP ad.
Starr:
Yeah, totally.
Ben:
Segmenting for the win.
Josh:
That's always been the hard thing when you're talking about specific marketing efforts, that's been always the hard thing for us, is figuring what that number is. We've been chasing that number for our entire existence.
Starr:
Well here's a good goal for me, is to get... Let's grow Honeybadger big enough where I can just do spreadsheets and data analysis full time, because I just love it. I don't know why, it just makes me happy.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. I'm down with that. It's a good goal.
Starr:
Yeah, I'll just tell everybody else what to do. Or not even that, because I don't want the responsibility. I'll just be like, "If you do this, you have a 50% chance of success."
Josh:
So you're saying you want to start a lucrative live streaming career where you live stream yourself working on spreadsheets?
Starr:
No, I'm just saying I just want to be Honeybadger's in-house business consultant.
Ben:
I was about to say, it sounds like you want to become a McKinsey consultant. Like, "I've poured over all the data, and here's what you should do. Good luck with that." That is what they do, right?
Starr:
Yeah, when I do that for us I don't feel like a terrible person, I don't feel like I'm making the world a worse place.
Ben:
Well, I think overall 2020 was a good year. Obviously it was a really bad year, but it was also a good year. We had... Like Josh said, we got a lot of good things done, and we didn't die, we didn't go out of business.
Josh:
We learned a lot about ourselves, I would say.
Ben:
Did we?
Josh:
I think just as a company, I feel like I learned a lot about myself in 2020, and about the business. Before 2020 I didn't know how our business would respond to a crisis of that magnitude, and now I do. Every crisis is different, obviously the next one could wipe us out, but I don't know, I feel like we weathered a pretty big storm. I don't know, I feel fairly confident about the future still, so it's nice. There have been some lows, but I think it's important to come back to that optimistic stance on the future that's part of... As an entrepreneur that's kind of what keeps you going. So I'm always looking for that.
Ben:
That's awesome.
Starr:
Yeah, I think 2020 has definitely contained a lot of opportunity for personal growth. It's like-
Josh:
Understatement of the year.
Starr:
It's like another growth opportunity.
Josh:
Yay, we're going to grow some more.
Starr:
Yay.
Josh:
Do you think we'll grow some more in 2021?
Starr:
Yeah, probably, probably. Well, I think we did okay given that we were out of practice, and would you all like to wrap it up?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Okay, sure.
Starr:
All right, well thank you for listening to FounderQuest. Just so you know, when I draw a word out like that, it's not because I'm trying to sound like an announcer, it's because I'm literally trying to figure out what word comes next. That's probably what all radio personalities do it. Anyway, if you'd like to write for us, go to honeybadger.io/blog, we're looking for PHP people. We've got a link to a write for us page on there. And yeah, if you want to give us a review on iTunes, that's great. And if not, that's cool too, we love you anyway, and we hope that y'all are having an okay time as much as possible. Good luck.
Ben:
Happy New Year.
Starr:
Happy New Year.
Josh:
Happy New Year.
Starr:
May God have mercy on your souls. Okay, bye.
Show notes:
Links:
Rollerblade Chair Wheels
Kung Fu Panda
The Emperor’s New Groove
Justin Jackson
"The Fear" - Build Your SaaS podcast
Write For Honeybadger
FounderQuest Twitter
Full transcript:Ben:
So, I just moved back into my office after being away for six months, because COVID.
Starr:
I see that.
Ben:
And in the meantime, though, I had all my stuff at home. So I had my podcast setup, I had my monitor, my chair, everything. And while I was at home, I bought these new roller wheels for my chair, you know the ones that look like a roller blade wheels?
Starr:
The ball bearing ones.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at home I have a normal carpet. It's not shag, it's just standard carpet. But here I have those plastic things you put down so you can roll easier.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
And so at home I didn't really notice much difference on those wheels on my carpet, but here it's really slippery, so now I'm sliding back, and forth, and all around. It's kind of fun.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
So, if you want something to entertain yourself, get some of those roller blade wheels for your chair, and then make sure you're on a smooth surface. It's hilarious.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah that's still on my list. I totally want to do that. I mean, I have wheels on my chair now, but it would just be a smoother ride. I feel like I could do some... Have some fun with that.
Starr:
What are you doing? Are you riding in your chairs? What are you doing in your chairs?
Josh:
Oh yeah. You don't like-
Ben:
You got to do something while you're running all those tests.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Just you can do spins, and...
Starr:
Y'all must have much more space than I do.
Josh:
Bounce off the walls.
Ben:
Next month I'm going to install a half pipe.
Josh:
All right.
Starr:
Well, now I'm only moving my chair around and I'm wondering is it moving easy enough? Do I need a smoother action on that?
Josh:
You need a performance chair. That's right.
Starr:
All right, well before we get started I should make a little announcement. This will be our last episode for a little while. I know I just scared y'all.
Josh:
Yeah, are you trying to-
Ben:
That's scary.
Josh:
... put people on edge?
Starr:
Yeah, for a little while, because, yeah, a bunch of us have leave coming up, and it's just going to be impossible to make it all work. Yeah, and we don't record podcasts while we're on vacation, because that's just, that's bad.
Josh:
And breaks are nice.
Starr:
Breaks are important, yeah.
Josh:
It's good to take a break.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It'll let our listeners not be tired of us anymore. They'll forget all the things we repeat all the time.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, yeah, when we come back you'll have forgotten everything we say, and we'll just start from the beginning.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I think our plan is to come back with some fresh topics, and-
Starr:
Some fresh topics-
Josh:
... fresh attitudes.
Starr:
Oh, really? Okay, well.
Josh:
We'll see. We'll see how the election goes.
Ben:
That's one of the benefits of going on vacation, right? Is get that fresh attitude.
Josh:
Well, I think we'll see. This will be after November 4th, or whatever.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
It's 4th, right? Yeah so, we'll see how our attitudes are.
Starr:
That's not the reason for this little break.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
But it is a benefit that we just don't have to be on the record.
Josh:
Yeah, listening to own cynicism in 10 years.
Starr:
Yeah, live covering this terrible last month.
Ben:
So awful.
Ben:
Can I just chip in on that for a second.
Josh:
Get it in now.
Ben:
We've tried to avoid being overtly political and stuff, but that made me think again about the stay in your lane comment, that some people like to throw at other people. Like, "Oh, you're a tech guy you should stay in your lane." We talked about this before, but that's just hogwash. We're all people, right? And we all have opinions, and we should all be able to share them in ways that are helpful, and ways that are critical, but ways that are always kind. I don't know. I don't buy this whole stay in your lane, you should only talk about X thing. I think we all have opinions about stuff, and we should feel free to share them.
Starr:
For that to be true it's like the sum of your humanity would be tech guy, which would be pretty sad.
Ben:
It would be.
Starr:
Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's like all of us are more than tech person. Anyway...
Ben:
Agreed.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ben:
Agreed. Sorry, soapbox.
Josh:
Well, I think what we're saying is vote. Please vote.
Ben:
Please vote.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah.
Josh:
I mean, we got to get it in, get our-
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
We're all just terrified.
Josh:
We're just doing our part.
Starr:
We're literally spending the next, I don't know, six weeks just in our closets. Okay, well. So we just did our Q... What is this? Q4? Q4 Conclave?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Josh:
Yeah. Final of the year.
Starr:
Yeah, normally, in normal times, we get together in an undisclosed location in a meeting room called the bunker. I'm being serious. And we have a big long all day meeting, in which we hash out what's going to happen with Honeybadger for the next quarter, and so since pandemic started, we've been doing this on Zoom, and so it was spreading out over days, because an all day Zoom meeting would just be like hell on earth. And yeah, so here we are, and we are so... That one went pretty smooth. There are no big changes, we got it done pretty quickly, we got it done in two days under schedule, which made me really happy.
Ben:
Yeah. My wife asked about that. She was like, "So, you doing another day of conclave?" I'm like, "No, we're done." She's like, "What? You're already done?" I'm like, "Well, yeah. This was shorter than they had been in the past." And I was thinking, "Why is that?" And I was like, "Well, our Q4, our plan basically is to try and wrap up stuff, nail down some of the things we've been working on." And there wasn't really any big new initiative, or big decisions we had to make, it's like, "Oh, well just do that in Q1." Right? Right now, it like we're coasting through the end of the year, I think, is the plan.
Josh:
Well, let's be honest. October is basically over. It's basically already November, so we're already halfway through the quarter.
Ben:
Is that pandemic time?
Josh:
I think so, yeah, but I mean, honestly we are, a lot of us are taking time off in October, and we're also probably going to take a lot of time off in December, like we always do. So realistically, we're not making major plans, I don't think, for any huge initiatives.
Ben:
True. True.
Josh:
It was really nice to finish something for the year. Can I just say that? It was nice to say, "This is the last before the new year." I think that we're going to start to get more of those building up, and looking forward to.
Starr:
What do you mean exactly? You mean having this cycle where you start new things, then you work on it, then you wrap it up?
Josh:
No, I mean, it's nice to have something of 2020 wrapped up. It's nice that something in the year is finally over.
Starr:
Oh, I get it.
Josh:
Which is our conclaves, you know? We're starting to where we're heading towards the finish line.
Starr:
Yeah, and we brought a little bit of order in the chaos of the world.
Josh:
Yeah, I need to start on my New Year's resolutions.
Starr:
I really like the idea of a wrapping up loose ends quarter, because it always seems like there's some task on the action items, or thing that we make, where it's important, but it's not really crucial. Like it would be very good to do, but the world isn't going to explode if you don't do it. And so, for me, that's been, for the past year, that's been I want to go in and look at our numbers around our conversion rates, and see if I can find any patterns there. And just do some analysis. And that's sort of thing where nobody's on my case if I don't do that next week, but I've been saying I was going to do this literally all year. And so, it gets kind of embarrassing to just roll over the same action item every quarter.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So it's going to be nice to just have some time that's just set aside to work on that.
Josh:
That's a good fall task, you know?
Starr:
It is, yeah. It's cozy.
Josh:
Get some tea, and...
Starr:
Yeah, get some tea, get a nice fire going.
Josh:
Tea, and fire, spreadsheets.
Starr:
Crack open the spreadsheets. You're joking, but this is-
Josh:
I know. This is your dream.
Starr:
I love it. Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. That's cool.
Ben:
And my wrap up task, we talked about on our last episode about doing the accounts. Redoing how we have the billing relationship to our users, and all that. And that's been something... You talk about having yours on the list for quarters. Mine's been on the list for years.
Starr:
I know, and that's not cozy Ben. That's like Thunderdome.
Ben:
It's going to be a knockdown fight at the end to get that launched, but yeah, that will happen. It is going to happen in October, or else I will die trying.
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
Yeah. How long was that pull request you did? Like 10,000 lines or something?
Josh:
Oh, Ben's pull request was insane.
Ben:
About 6,000, I think.
Starr:
6,000. Yeah, it's-
Josh:
And it broke my browser. I had to switch to the native app to review it.
Starr:
Yeah, GitHub can display that much code in the browser.
Ben:
And Code Climate added comments. Like, "I gave up, and I can't even review this thing. It's too long."
Josh:
I almost did that but I was like, "I can't do that to Ben."
Ben:
I would have understood.
Josh:
I suffered through.
Starr:
Yeah. Like, "Start this over, do it in smaller chunks."
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
I think this was a third restart attempt, actually. I think I have two. One that just didn't get anywhere.
Josh:
We had a couple. Yeah. Well Kevin, we had Kevin-
Ben:
Kevin worked on it.
Josh:
... start on it, and then.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. And yeah, so it's going to happen. And I think once it does, I was talking to Starr right before we started recording. I think once it happens, that's when I'll take my vacation-
Josh:
Very good.
Ben:
As a reward for all that blood, sweat, and tears.
Starr:
Let's wait a couple weeks until after you deploy it, before you take your vacation.
Josh:
Yeah
Ben:
So Josh, what's your wrap up task for the year?
Josh:
Oh yeah, JavaScript, and I can't say that this is... The sad part for me is it's probably never going to be off my list.
Josh:
So I'm just wrapping up some things, though, that I've been working on this year, and, yeah, related to our packages and stuff, and I'm not going to go into it in depth, because I feel like I've already done that, and I would just end up ranting again so...
Ben:
Crying.
Josh:
Yeah. But, yeah, we'll, hopefully, make some progress on that. Actually I have made some, this stuff I've been working on this week with some, again, some improvements to our source map system. I think I've actually made some progress that should be a big breakthrough, actually, specifically for people who are using source maps with their JavaScript. I found some ways that we weren't doing. We weren't really fingerprinting in the optimal way, in some cases, so I'm pretty optimistic about that right now. At least for this Friday. Talk to me next week, I don't know what I'll discover. But, I'm feeling good.
Starr:
You know, Josh, yesterday's history, and tomorrow's a mystery. But today, this moment, is all you have. It's a gift. And that's why they call it the present.
Josh:
That's beautiful. I'm going to tattoo that on my forearm.
Starr:
That's a quote from Kung Fu Panda. It's a paraphrase from Kung Fu Panda.
Ben:
I love that movie.
Josh:
That would just be the greatest tattoo response, when someone in the store asks you, "Oh, what's your tattoo? What's the inspiration for your tattoo?" "It's something they said in Kung Fu Panda."
Starr:
Based on the tattoo artists I've known, that would not faze them.
Josh:
No. Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah in Portland, I'm sure it would be pretty tame.
Ben:
Well speaking of JavaScript stuff, we had a new message in Basecamp this morning, that just got me so excited for next year, because-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
... something's going to happen this quarter, but it's JavaScript related, loosely. And is going to be awesome. So stay tuned.
Starr:
What? I've got to look at Basecamp. Are you just teasing the audience now?
Ben:
Yes, yes I am.
Starr:
Okay, I'm going to go look at it now.
Josh:
Yeah, I need to respond to that Basecamp.
Ben:
It's going to be awesome. I can't wait. And I'm so excited about that message showing up right now, because the goal was to have something done by the end of this year.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And we just left it, just like, "Hey, hands off, we're going to delegate, and let's see how it goes," and sure enough, it's showing up before the year. So I'm just like, "Great."
Starr:
Oh, I know what you're talking about now.
Ben:
It's amazing.
Josh:
Is this is going to be our thing? This is the reason you come back, right? After our break? This is why you can't hit unsubscribe at the end of this?
Starr:
Yeah, that'll be our cliffhanger.
Ben:
So we have to come back for this.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So.
Starr:
Yeah, that's going to be game changing.
Ben:
Game changing.
Starr:
If you write games in a certain platform.
Ben:
It's going to be awesome.
Josh:
Yeah. The other big thing that, well, one of the things that, I guess, one of the other reasons, probably, that our conclave was not super long this year is, we also have our other major effort is launching Hook Relay. So that's going to happen, right? It's not going to be like Block Party launch, but I think it's going to be out there.
Ben:
Yeah, that's going to happen. Yeah.
Starr:
Are the rumors correct? Is it going to be ready in time for Christmas?
Ben:
It's going to be ready in time for Christmas.
Starr:
Yeah. All right.
Ben:
No, you know the real race though? The real way on is to see whether Hook Relay is going to launch, or my bathroom is going to be done remodeling before.
Starr:
Okay, I thought you're going to say we're going to have it ready by Black Friday, and I was just going to kiss you.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Black Friday. Oh well, you know? It's a good goal.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Although, we had a product update meeting this week, and I got that shot out one of my favorite lines, because we've had a few dates just like, "Hey, it'd be nice if we launched Hook Relay by this date." We've had a few those come and go. And so, I set another date, and I said, "Yeah I'm planting my flag in the quicksand."
Josh:
Again.
Ben:
Yeah again. Yeah, we don't believe in the strict hard deadlines here at Honeybadger. We just smile at them as they go by.
Starr:
Time is a construct.
Ben:
The present is a gift.
Starr:
Yes.
Ben:
You know what I also love from that Kung Fu Panda scene where he talks about that, where Oogway is giving him that enlightenment.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
I also love the bit about the peach. He's like, "The peach seed is going to become a peach tree. There's nothing you can do about that."
Starr:
Oh yeah, and then the other guy, Shifu, he's like, "Well I can choose where I plant the peach."
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
So are you saying that Hook Relay is our peach tree? Y'all know way too much about Kung Fu Panda, by the way.
Ben:
It is one of the top five movies ever.
Josh:
It is a great movie. I have to admit it's a really good movie so, I take it back.
Starr:
I don't know my kid went through a Hung Fu Panda phase, so I've seen it five times in the recent past.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I know how that goes.
Ben:
It's right up there with The Emperor's New Groove.
Starr:
I haven't watched that one yet.
Ben:
Oh, oh, you have to watch that one.
Starr:
Yeah?
Ben:
Oh, yes. You must.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
That is the most quoted movie and the Curtis household.
Starr:
Really?
Ben:
It is amazing. Yes.
Starr:
Groovy. So we had... What was our topic that we wanted to talk about?
Ben:
Permanence.
Starr:
Permanence. Oh, this is-
Josh:
This is a perfect time to talk about permanence.
Starr:
Permanence. Yes.
Josh:
And the future, the uncertainty of the future.
Starr:
Man, we are really just doing all the hits.
Starr:
We were talking at the conclave, though, about, I think a tweet that Justin Jackson wrote about how this idea of, well, if you can make a deal with the devil and maintain your same growth rate indefinitely over time, would you do it, giving up, obviously, the possibility of doing better? Yeah, and he was saying that, I think, he was saying he would make that deal. So we were talking about it, and we were talking about how this ultimately comes down to how stable do you feel in your business, I guess? How reasonably confident are you? Because that was something that we all felt very heavily earlier on. It's like, "We've got this thing, it's taking off, it's doing well, and that's great," but I remember a time, in the very recent past, when it wasn't doing that. And so, this is probably all just going to come crashing to the ground, and we'll be back to square one. I mean that's the anxiety. It's not based on any rational thing, necessarily.
Josh:
Yeah, and I don't think it really goes away completely. But I think we've gotten more used to it. That's a recurring feeling that I've had, but I think as the more times that I have that fear, and then months go by, and then things are still trending along, I think that mutes it a little bit.
Ben:
We've been fortunate, in that almost every month, we've had positive revenue growth. We've had a few negative months, and a couple of just flat months, but that, to me, is reassuring, right? Because I felt, for the longest time, I woke up every day like, "Oh, this could all end tomorrow," and I don't remember exactly when that went away. May have been some around 50,000 in MRR, I don't know. It took a while. It took a while. But now it's like, "Yeah, I think it's going to last." And the thing that surprises me was, with the COVID stuff, and we saw our own revenue take a hit at the beginning of the pandemic, and people were... Some of our customer's businesses just went away, right? And so like, "Well we're going to cancel." And so we saw a hit there. But even then, I wasn't all panicky like, "Oh, it's going to end tomorrow." Still like, "Well, we've made it this far, Probably going to keep on going." So, but I remember, the early days, that was really, really weighing on my mind, and I think that's the same thing that Justin was saying, in a recent podcast episode that he did, talking about topic, was that that fear was just ever present, and just gnawing, and I guess, maybe the good news is, if you give it a couple years, it'll go away.
Josh:
Yeah, if you want to go listen to that episode later, it's titled The Fear of the Build Your SaaS podcast.
Starr:
Yeah, I'm trying to think of an inflection point there, when that change... And I wonder if the switch to metered billing, and our going through that together, and almost killing each other over it. And I wonder if that cemented our, I don't know, security a little bit? Because it was a super scary thing we've got... Do you mind if I explain this a little bit?
Ben:
Feel free, yeah.
Starr:
Okay, so when we started on Honeybadger, we didn't have metered billing. We had all you can eat errors, which at the beginning, I was like, "Okay. Our people are freelancers, our customers are developers." And when you go to sign up for a plan, like Airbrake before us, they had these plans where it's like, "Well you sign up based on your error per minute rate." And I want 100 errors per minute, so I want the large plan, or whatever. And my thinking was that, "Who the hell knows how many errors per minute they're going to have, right?" Ideally, you're going to have none, but then you're going to have big spikes sometimes, and just yeah, that just seemed so unintuitive to me. So personally I was very in favor of the all you can eat plan. So we did that for many years. And, but eventually, eventually, people started eating too much. We found that-
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. We left the buffet unwatched, and people were just sneaking in and-
Ben:
The NFL football team walked in and started eating.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. We thought most of our customers were going to be little leaguers, but then we had some, yeah, we had some major league people show up, and suddenly we were losing money. We were losing money on the amount... On how much it cost us to send email to people. We were sending so much email to these people, that we were paying more than they were giving us every month. And so, Ben led the charge to move that, to move us to metered billing. And it was an uncertain time, and we'd been on a long plateau, in terms of growth. And so, we were like, "Okay, we'll try it. Who knows if it'll work? But yeah let's give it a shot." And then, so Ben flipped the switch, and then immediately our revenue just plunged down, because what happened is that we didn't force people onto new plans. And so the only people who moved onto the new meter plans were the people who are going to save money by doing that.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
It's like a big realignment.
Starr:
Yeah it was a big realignment. And I know I was just freaked the hell out about this, and Ben was a bit calmer, and we argued, but we hugged it out, and made friends.
Josh:
I think Ben was sweating over this too.
Ben:
I was totally sweating. Yeah.
Josh:
I think he was sweating.
Ben:
I was freaking out too, but in a different way, because I was so convinced that that was the right thing to do. But the problem was I had just finished this Herculean task of switching all that stuff. And I remember, Starr, you were like, "Uh-uh (negative). Uh-uh (negative). It's time to roll it back. Let's though stop this." And I'm like, "Oh no, no, no, no. We've too far. We can't turn around now."
Josh:
This is like accounts.
Starr:
Yeah, we'll see if accounts work out. We'll just roll this back.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So, yeah, that was intense time, for sure but-
Josh:
I forget, did we send an email that announced the new plans, or did people just find it on their own? Because, I mean, I feel like this would have been an even more drastic plunge if we had-
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
I remember talking about that. I think we were like, "Yeah let's not broadcast this one, initially to everyone we know, just because..." Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, and yeah, all the little guys were switching, downgrading like crazy, and all the people that were using it, that we were spending more than they were spending on us, they, of course, did not switch, and so we decided to go... So we realized that it couldn't persist forever. That would be bad. And so we came up with a plan to ask those customers, who were costing us too much, to upgrade to our new plans, and did that over a period of 18 months or so?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
We just did a few at a time, because we wanted to make sure that it was working for everyone, and it's a sensitive issue. If you're going to email a customer and say, "By the way, we've changed our pricing, and you know what? You need to switch, and this is why. And, oh, PS, it's going to be a heck of a lot more money because of our new pricing."
Josh:
A lot more in some cases.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Right?
Ben:
Yeah, a lot more in some cases.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And those conversations, they have to be handled very delicately, because you don't... I mean, just imagine how you feel on the receiving end of that, "Oh by the way."
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
I don't have to imagine. I've had Comcast.
Ben:
Exactly. Exactly. But the response was really good. People really understood. I wrote up this huge email, explaining how we'd gotten to where we were, and why we were making this change.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That was an awesome email.
Ben:
Thank you. Everyone was very nice. We had, I don't know, maybe one, maybe two people who were upset. But we just explained it, and like, "Well okay, they get it, right? They don't like it, but they get it."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But I was really happy with how that went after it was all resolved. Going through it was difficult, but-
Josh:
We had a good track record of, like you said, we've never forced anyone. This was the first time we've ever asked anyone to switch to a new plan for any reason. We always let people keep their current plan forever if we change pricing, and then it's just if you want to change, or it's just new people coming into the business are on the new plans. But, yeah, I think, like in this case, to go back to the Comcast comparison, if the CEO of Comcast personally emailed you, or called you, and explains all the reasons why they're losing money on your account or something, that's that's a lot different than getting some sort of generic broadcast email, or like, "Everyone has to... We're we're changing our pricing. What this means for you." Which is always that it means you're going to pay more money.
Ben:
A bit more.
Starr:
And to, yeah, just to take that a step further, this wasn't actually something we broadcasted. We basically, I went in, and pulled numbers down for all of our accounts, and found the ones that were consuming substantially more resources than they probably should have been on their existing accounts.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
And they were basically getting a ton of service for pennies. And those were the people that we asked to upgrade.
Josh:
That's the other thing I was going to say, because those people were also much more likely to see the inconsistency there, and appreciate it. Appreciate our position.
Starr:
Yeah, and they didn't actually, since it's metered billing, they didn't actually have to upgrade. They could have just sent us fewer errors too. Right?
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's the alternative. Some did a combination. They upgraded to a reasonable plan, but then they also cut back some of their unreasonable traffic that they were using.
Starr:
So you might say that, by forcing, or by politely asking them to upgrade, we actually made their apps more usable, and more sustainable.
Josh:
You could say that.
Starr:
We should force people to do stuff more often.
Ben:
I remember in the email, I gave four options for things that they could do. And the fourth option was fix your app, and I put a smiley face on there, right? Because yeah, all you got to do is not send us errors.
Starr:
Just a little wink.
Ben:
Exactly. And some people did that. We had actually a couple be like, "Oh, you know I had no idea," because they never paid attention. They were like, "It throws errors, but I don't care," and they're like, "Oh, I've been sending you millions of errors, and we don't really need to, so we'll just stop that." I'm like, "Oh cool. Perfect."
Josh:
Like those $10 a month Heroku accounts, that would send us... They would be on the top of our leaderboard for the month.
Starr:
Yeah, they're probably paying Heroku more than $10 in CPU costs to send themself errors.
Josh:
Seriously.
Ben:
But that did get us past that plateau, and that, yeah, to Starr's point, that did. After a lot of that transition happened, it did make me feel a lot better about the viability of the business, and seeing that continued revenue growth. I couldn't believe it.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean, it also helped that it actually worked, and revenue growth went up substantially.
Josh:
It worked really, really well. Yeah, I mean, actually, I don't think we can underestimate how much that actually... How big of a deal that was, because I think the more we move into the future now, the more we appreciate the revenue growth from the upgrade cycle. And we did not have that with the feature based plans, where, basically, the incentives were interesting prior to this, because one of the changes, I think we made, when we rolled out metered billing was, before we had one of the things we tiered on were number of projects, right? And I think, so you had a plan that limits you to 10 projects or something. So if you're an agency, you could have 10 clients essentially. So, that was one of the reasons a bunch of the people who were paying us, technically, paying us more on the old plans, switched to the new plans, just because they could remove that limit. But that upgrade cycle, people were not really hitting that limit as frequently as you hit if you actually grow to the point of having more, much more, significantly more traffic. It just seems that's a better cycle.
Starr:
Yeah, that was one lesson I, personally, really learned, is that, if you're trying to drive upgrades in your business, the thing that causes the people to want to upgrade has to happen to them, right? I mean-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's like before we were on this thing where we were like, "Okay we'll offer these different features, and people will see that they need this feature, and they'll upgrade." Or like, "They'll see that they want to do another project, and they'll buy a new plan." I'm not saying that didn't work at all, but that happens much less often than if, suddenly, they find themselves having used more resources than they intended to, and oh, they need to upgrade, or cut down on the resource usage.
Josh:
Yeah, that also works better-
Starr:
That puts it in front of them a lot quicker.
Josh:
It works better for everyone, I think too, because I guess the agency example is one example where you might, like the project thing, might actually work, because you get more clients, you need projects. But we have... An agency is one type of customer, then a lot of our customers are just startups, which are only going to have... They're not going to have, probably, the same explosion. I mean, I guess unless they're building with microservices or something. But, I mean, I think that the metered billing thing works, it covers everyone a lot better, because if you're a startup, and say you're just starting out, your traffic is going to be low naturally, but your traffic is going to increase over time as your business grows, basically. So, I think it's a little bit more equal across the different types of customers that we have.
Ben:
The other side effect that was nice was that we got to tie the revenue to our costs. We know that we can continue to scale out and pay for that, because the reason why we would scale out is having more traffic. And having more traffic means you get to have more revenue, right? So, in our situation, having that straight metered billing makes a whole lot of sense on all those levels, and to Starr's point, yeah, if you have this upgrade thing you have to really keep in mind how your customers are using your product, like Josh was saying with an agency, right? If your product is targeted at agencies, maybe it's number of clients, right? Or if, for some reason, you have a lot of customer support, well then maybe you really need to bill based on number of users, because your users are going to be... More users means more support, which means more money out the door on support people. So you have to find a way to recapture that cost.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, and you're going to hate me for saying this, but seats, right? It's like, "You hire somebody. Well, okay, we need to buy another seat."
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that can... I always wish we could make that work, but I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, I remember-
Josh:
I just don't think that's our style.
Ben:
Yeah, I remember when we had decided on the original pricing, one of the reasons was we just wanted to differentiate ourselves. Starr really hated the idea of the limiting people. And that was something I also felt like the worst thing you can do, when you're having a really bad day with a bunch of errors coming in, is to limit all that error traffic, because that's when you want it, right? But we also felt like it was a way to stand apart from our competitors. They're all doing this, but we're going to do that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And that didn't work out so well. We learned that it actually makes sense to do it like everybody else does it, in this case.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So getting back to the topic of permanence. So Starr, you're thinking that this whole episode was one of the things that taught us that the world doesn't end easily, maybe, or something like that?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
You can have a challenge that seems insurmountable, like for us it was our, I think, this was one of our first plateaus in our SaaS business. Which was a major deal, but even thinking back to that, we could not see over the top of that. I think this was almost, I want to say, this was almost like a last ditch effort. Like, "We got to change something major to break through this," which was why I'm assuming you just didn't sign up to volunteer just to change something this big, just for the hell of it. So there was this thing that drove you to do this, but at the time, I remember it being a major deal. Just like, "How are we going to break through this, and reach the level of growth that we wanted to, that we had envisioned for the business?" And I think that goes back to what I was saying earlier where, as your business grows, and you do it long enough, you have more of these points where you have a seemingly major challenge, and then you overcome it. Or you just keep going, and it's not the end of the world, basically. And I think over time, for me, that's helped reduce that fear of something ending tomorrow, basically. I mean, it's always there. There's always risk, but I feel it a lot less these days, I guess.
Ben:
Another way that I've felt this increased permanence feeling is actually related to competitors. Because I remember, for a long time, I had one of these fears in the back of my head was that some big, big money competitor would come into the space, and take all our customers away. And, and then Google released Stackdriver. I think they acquired this company, and then released Stackdriver.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And it had error tracking as part of it. This huge suite of stuff, like monitoring, and all this kind of things. And I was like-
Josh:
It was kind of an oh shit moment.
Ben:
Exactly. I was like, "Here it is."
Josh:
I remember.
Ben:
"Boom, there goes the business." And it had zero impact on the business. Zero.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
The other day we had someone sign up, and they filled out our survey form and they mentioned something about, I really don't want to use, I think it was Stackdriver, I think it was Google, like, "I really don't want to use Google cloud platforms, like off the shelf thing." It was either that or Amazon's, I can't remember. But I thought that was funny.
Ben:
Yeah. So...
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
When that happened, and then that fear did not materialize, I was like, "Phew, okay, well, all right. I guess..." And in thinking more about it, even if Amazon released an exact copy of our product tomorrow, we'd still have a ton of customers stick around, even if some of them thought it was interesting, because not everyone loves Amazon, right? And not everyone loves whatever Amazon does, and to be honest, a lot of people love the way that Honeybadger does things, right? That's why our churn is so low, because they just like the product, and they stick around.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And so, even if there was a big ecosphere change like that, still it wouldn't, at this point, sink the business, which makes me feel better.
Starr:
So do you think that we're like the little mammals, scurrying around, that survive when the asteroid hits?
Josh:
I hadn't thought of that, but that's pretty good.
Ben:
Like a honey badger?
Starr:
Yeah, like a little honey badger. A little proto badger. Because, yeah, because these big changes in the industry, and I'm not saying we're not affected by them, obviously, but I can see them being a lot more impactful if you are a startup, that has received a bunch of funding, and was directly trying to compete in the same market that Amazon, or Google, find significant enough to invest in. But in our little corner of it, it's a pretty small, little, cozy place. And it's not really big enough for Amazon to really worry about, I don't think. And I mean, there's a reason, I think, a lot of our competitors, who are VC funded, have pivoted away from a pure error monitoring model, and are going into application performance metrics, and okay, now they're going to take on New Relic, or now they're going to... I think there's probably a lot more money in those things, it's a lot more interesting to those business-y types.
Ben:
Yeah, it's one of the benefits of staying small, right? If there aren't a lot of mouths to feed, you don't have to have this unicorn success to come out winning, right?
Starr:
Oh, you know what?
Josh:
Yeah, what does the payout need to be, or the payoff need to be?
Starr:
And I just realized, we haven't even said it, but probably the biggest longevity booster is positive cash flow. We've had positive cash flow for pretty much our whole existence, so.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah. It'd be a lot... If you don't have a runway, you're never going to reach the end of it.
Ben:
True.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, I'm feeling pretty good. So I guess the message is, if you're in that boat that we were in, and that Justin also described, you got that gnawing fear that's making you crazy. Well, hey, if you make it through that, it gets better.
Starr:
Right.
Ben:
If you don't make it through it, your business goes up, goes away, and do something else, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I mean, worst case scenario, you find a new business to start, or you find a job.
Starr:
Yeah, you're not dead.
Ben:
Yeah, probably not dead.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Probably not. Well, should we wrap it up on that cheerful note?
Ben:
I like it.
Starr:
All right. Well, we here at FounderQuest are glad that you're not dead. Again, we will be taking a little break for the next, I don't know, six weeks, eight weeks. It just depends.
Josh:
Yeah. Who knows? We'll be back. Don't worry.
Starr:
We'll be back. Don't worry. Just-
Josh:
Harass us on Twitter. You can always harass us on Twitter.
Starr:
Yeah, I was going to say, just like King Arthur, we come back when England most needs us. And, yeah, if you like the show review us on Apple Podcasts. If you want to write for us on the blog, well actually, I'm going to be out, so you can go check out our Write For Us page at honeybadger.io/blog, but it's got a big notice on there saying, "Hey, I'm going to be gone for a while," so don't worry if I don't get back to you.
Ben:
And if you have any podcast episode ideas, topics you'd like to hear about, feel free to hit us up on Twitter. We'll be happy to answer your questions.
Starr:
Yeah, what are we? @founderquest?
Ben:
Maybe.
Starr:
I think we are, yeah.
Josh:
I think so.
Starr:
Yeah, that's one of the benefits of having a marketing person, is that you just don't have to keep all that in your head.
Josh:
Yeah, just search Founder Quest.
Starr:
Just look for us. Yeah.
Josh:
You'll find us.
Starr:
It's okay. It's pretty obvious. All right, we'll see you all later. Have a good one.
Show notes:
Links:CameoSarah Cooper
StiumulusReflex Video
Jumpstart
Whirly Board
Full Transcript:
Ben:
So we had a bit of an interesting COVID related thing in our household, so we have this grocery store that we love near us, it's called Haggen, it's a Northwest brand. So a lot of our listeners won't be familiar with it, but we love this place, it's a great little grocery store. My wife, who typically does the grocery shopping, hasn't been there in forever, because like, "I can just get stuff from Amazon Fresh." So we've been doing that, but finally, Amazon Fresh started running out of some of the things that we really want. So I think today was the first time in weeks, many, many weeks, that we've actually ventured out to the grocery store.
Josh:
Exciting.
Starr:
You went inside the grocery store?
Ben:
Inside the grocery store, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh.
Ben:
Just like the good old days.
Starr:
So you just love taking life in your own hands like that.
Josh:
I never took you for an adventurer.
Starr:
We're still doing the order online and then pick up outside the store thing.
Ben:
Yeah? I went and did a pick up for some teriyaki the other night, and there were actually people dining inside. It's like, "What? That's a thing?"
Starr:
I can't believe that. Florida just opened 100%, so I don't even know. I don't even know what's happening. So I did a little research over the weekend, like normally we record this podcast on Fridays, but we moved it to Monday, because I had a thing. So I had some time, I did a little research over the weekend, and I'm pretty sure that if we are willing to move the legal entity of Honeybadger Industries Incorporated, we can all move to Canada.
Ben:
Oh, yeah. I read something about that.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. Get in on some of that sanity.
Josh:
Does Stripe have, like Stripe Atlas for moving your business out of the country?
Ben:
Great idea.
Josh:
Because it's a freebie.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
We should relocate the headquarters to Vernon, BC, then we can hang out with Justin.
Starr:
Oh, of course.
Josh:
There you go.
Starr:
Another place I know that does this is Scotland. I'm pretty sure that actually if you move a whole company, you can go anywhere you want.
Josh:
We've just got to get everyone, everyone has to be on board.
Starr:
Yeah, just like, "Yes, bring all your ..." Hire local people.
Ben:
Scotland versus Canada, that's a tossup, that's a hard one.
Starr:
Canada's a lot closer, it would be significantly less disruptive. Just mosey on over to Victoria or Vancouver.
Ben:
It would be kind of hard to drive that U-Haul over to Scotland.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true. But you get to hang out with Nessie, and that's always a bonus.
Ben:
Yeah, my kids are like, "Yeah, so when are we moving?" I'm like, "Well, first they have to let us in, then we can talk about the practicality of moving to Canada."
Josh:
Is that the bigger hurdle here?
Starr:
There you go, yeah. You can be like, "I've got a business. I have skills." What are you doing? Why are they going to let you in? You've got to prove your own worth.
Ben:
I did mention that, I'm like, "By the way, I'm the only person in this family that has a passport, so I can go, but what are you going to do?" Speaking of traveling though, we talked last time about the conference that I was going to, the Business of Software Conference, and that happened last week. It was the one that originally going to be in Boston, because that's where they hold it every year. I've got to say, while I loved the conference, it was great, even online, I did miss going to Boston. I've realized that I actually enjoy putting myself on a plane for six hours and having that trip.
Josh:
Yeah, it's nice to get out.
Ben:
It is. I miss traveling, I miss leaving.
Josh:
Can you imagine what the next time that we do go to a conference, how great that's going to be? Hopefully, hopefully it's good. I think for us, we probably will wait until we're sure it's not going to be a train wreck.
Starr:
I'm just going to bring my moon suit with my ... It's just a completely contained bubble and I just walk around inside.
Ben:
Yeah, I'm surprised that industry hasn't taken off in the past few months. Personal suits.
Starr:
Are those big transparent plastic balls that you just inflate with air and then you roll around?
Josh:
That would just be fun too.
Starr:
I haven't seen any of those.
Josh:
That's not a hard sell.
Starr:
I did see a guy with a beekeeper's mask on, like a beekeeper's helmet on. Beekeeper's helmets look weird, they look fedora-y, like milady. They look kind of milady-ish. It's this weird milady hat and then screen stuff coming down. I don't think that works, I don't think that works like you think it does, guy. The coronavirus is much smaller than a bee.
Josh:
He was wearing the screen too?
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. No, it was clearly a PPE measure just walking down the street.
Ben:
Those bees that carry that virus, they can't get through.
Josh:
That's true.
Ben:
So the big bubble thing though, Josh, reminded me of your whirly board or whatever it's called. How is that treating you?
Josh:
I'm on it right now, I'm standing on it right now.
Starr:
You're so level, I wouldn't even imagine.
Josh:
I was debating actually taking a minute to lower my desk so I can get off, just because, I don't know, the gain on my microphone, I've noticed since I got this Cloudlifter thing, it's a little more touchy and I don't want to be slamming on my desk, or I think every little movement's going to show up. But I like it, yeah. It's nice to have something to stand on that keeps you off balance.
Starr:
That's so un-intuitive.
Ben:
You look like you've mastered it, that's for sure.
Josh:
I'm getting there, yeah. As long as you just stand right in the middle and don't move around a whole lot, you're good.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
So when are we ... We're getting pretty close to launching Hook Relay, right?
Ben:
Yeah. Some people have found it on their own and started using it.
Starr:
Wait, what? Really?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
Starr:
We've got organic traffic?
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Is it officially launched yet though?
Ben:
It is not officially launched yet.
Starr:
That makes those people hackers, those are called hackers. We need to sue them.
Ben:
Maybe we'll just ask them questions instead, that's almost as bad as a lawsuit.
Josh:
Then build what they ask for.
Ben:
Yeah, it's close. Kevin just opened a PR for one of the last features, we have to write some documentation, but beyond that, it's ready. It's good. I'm excited.
Josh:
We even have an amazing welcome video.
Ben:
Yes. Josh knocked it out of the park on that one.
Starr:
I haven't seen it yet, I need to watch it.
Ben:
You should go sign for Hook Relay and check it out.
Josh:
You just have to sign up for Hook Relay.
Starr:
I haven't signed up, that's my problem. I just assume I'll get ushered in with VIP treatment.
Ben:
You know what we should do though? Josh, your video is fantastic, but I think what would be even better maybe is if we have Sarah Cooper do the video. Could you imagine? That would be pretty awesome.
Starr:
Who is Sarah Cooper? Was she the lady in Terminator?
Ben:
She's the one that does the videos with Trump's voice.
Starr:
Oh, no. That's yucky, that's gross. What?
Ben:
She's hilarious.
Josh:
It doesn't have to be Trump.
Ben:
That's true, it doesn't have to be Trump.
Josh:
She isn't Trump, to be clear. Is she on that, what's the website where you can get ...
Ben:
On Cameo?
Josh:
On Cameo, is that where she's coming from?
Ben:
No, no.
Josh:
Can we get her to do something? Okay.
Ben:
I don't know.
Josh:
You might, because Cameo apparently, a lot of celebrities are on there right now, which was interesting.
Ben:
Yeah, that Stimulus Reflex video, that just blew me away when I saw that.
Josh:
Yeah. I can't remember that guy's name off the top of my head now, his character in Silicon Valley, the billionaire.
Ben:
I'll tell you a secret, I'm going to lose all my street cred right now, but I've never watched the show so I didn't actually recognize the guy in the video. Everyone's like, "So cool." I'm like, "Who is he?"
Starr:
So explain, so take two steps back and explain this to me, because I have a vague idea what you're talking about.
Ben:
Go for it, Josh.
Josh:
Well, okay. So again, I'm blanking on the actor's name, or the character's name in Silicon Valley, but he's like this, he plays an over-the-top Silicon Valley founder billionaire dude, and the people that do Stimulus Reflex, the Rails plugin, got him to record a video about how great Stimulus Reflex is and how much better it is than React, because they're a competitor to React. So his line was, "A reflex is faster than a reaction." You just have to go watch the video, because his character is just like ... I don't know what you thought, having not seen the show, Ben. You were probably like, "Oh, who is this completely plausible guy from Silicon Valley talking about Stimulus Reflex?"
Ben:
Yeah. Even without the context of knowing about the show or who this actor was, I thought it was still funny. It's great, great video.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
He's obviously a good actor to be able to pull off some ... I just think like, "What's that conversation like?" When you hire someone, like a voice actor that we hired for the podcast, and you give them lines like, "Here, do something with this." And they do. But not having actual experience with the field, I'm sure he's not a Rails, I'm guessing he's not a Rails' developer, so he probably isn't all that familiar with what Stimulus Reflex is. But still, to be able to take a script and to run with it and make it relevant, and then connect with the intended audience, that's an impressive talent right there.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It is, I guess acting is more than reading. Okay.
Josh:
Yeah, but apparently they got the video, he's on Cameo, so if you want him to record your video.
Starr:
Oh, he's on Cameo?
Josh:
Just go on Cameo.
Starr:
Is The Rock on Cameo? I want The Rock to do a Honeybadger video.
Josh:
I don't know.
Starr:
I saw The Rock was late for work, because his gate malfunctioned. He's got a gate in front of his massive house, I'm sure. So using his own hands, ripped it from the moorings, and got to work.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
So I want that kind of energy behind Honeybadger.
Josh:
That sounds like something I'd do, if I had a gate in front of my house. I don't, so that's why I've never done it, obviously.
Starr:
Josh, let's be frank, let's be frank, you work out, it's obvious, but you don't eat that much cod every day.
Josh:
I eat a lot of cod, but he's got me beat right now I think.
Starr:
The Rock is not on Cameo, I'm sorry.
Ben:
That's a real shame. But the video that Josh did is fantastic, so everyone should definitely sign up for Hook Relay and check it out.
Josh:
I actually might eat that much cod, just saying.
Starr:
You can get pets and stuff, they have little dogs.
Josh:
Really?
Starr:
I searched for Pee-wee Herman and there was a dog named Pee-wee Herman. Oh, my gosh. There's lots of wrestlers on here. There's Mick Foley, oh wow.
Josh:
Yeah, there's a lot of people on there.
Starr:
I'm sorry, I'm just going to ...
Josh:
Tommy Chong is on there, Tommy Chong would be a fun one.
Ben:
That would be. Sorry, I was going down the Cameo rabbit hole.
Starr:
Oh, my god. You can have Mick Foley do something for $75. This is wild. You can have the guy from Ghostbusters say something, you can have one of the Ghostbusters talk to you for like a couple-hundred dollars. Amazing. I just want to hire these people to just tell me positive things about life. It's like, "Go outside and look at ..."
Josh:
I bet that's a thing.
Starr:
They should, yeah. Like, "Go outside into the sunlight, look at a flower and describe it to me."
Ben:
But, Starr, how much should we pay you to make that kind of video for us?
Starr:
I'll do it for free, because that's just how I am. I just spread the joy. Oh, my god. Chumlee from Pawn Stars is on here.
Josh:
Yeah, not all of them, some of them are kind of pricey.
Starr:
Carole Baskin's on here? What? Carole Baskin, as featured on the Tiger King show, and she is at a higher price than Gilbert Gottfried or Mark McGrath. Okay, I'm going to stop looking at this, because this is really off topic. I'm sorry.
Josh:
It's a bookmark, for sure.
Starr:
I closed it, I closed the tab.
Josh:
But I know the question you really wanted to know is, is Randall on there? And unfortunately, not. Not yet, but maybe we'll get him anyway.
Ben:
It's a real shame.
Starr:
I don't recognize the existence of Randall. But now if we want some new podcast intros, we know that we can really ... If we want to splurge a little bit more, we can get some really top notch celebrities.
Josh:
The only thing is this is going to be the thing now, like everyone is going to have a celebrity introduction to everything.
Starr:
Yeah. These people's voices aren't that recognizable, so they'll just have to be like, "I'm so-and-so and you're listening to FounderQuest.
Ben:
But actually, I haven't been working on Hook Relay for the past few weeks, surprise, surprise.
Starr:
Yeah?
Ben:
I've been working almost entirely on accounts, yeah. So this long, long desired feature of being able to have a level above users that manage accounts is finally going to happen. It may not quite meet my self-imposed deadline of three days from now, but it is very close and I am pretty excited about it.
Starr:
That's amazing.
Ben:
Along the way, but now we do a lot of cleanup, and I think there will be some nice UI improvements. Nothing significant, but some little updates and a little bit of a polish and things that just work a little bit better than they do today. So I'm really excited to have this off my plate finally after wanting it for so long.
Josh:
I was thinking about this earlier today, when I was thinking about the podcast, and it might be good to explain how you should build your account system very briefly, in order to not end up in the position that we ended up, wanting to do this and it became a huge project, now that we have thousands of users.
Starr:
I was just thinking about that, yeah.
Josh:
You want to give that a go?
Starr:
We've got to make up for being so off topic, we've got to have a ...
Josh:
Yeah. This could be a really big tip, because if we had done things a little bit differently in the very beginning, it would have saved us all this work later on. The way we set up our app and account system, basically.
Ben:
Yeah. It's a perennial question that comes up in developer forums, like Stack Overflow and various other places where people hang out. Because developers, a lot of developers are building SaaS apps that have the concept of multi-tenant, and they have teams and they're trying to figure out, "Well, how does a user interact with a team and how do we do billing and how does all that set up?" There are tons of opinions about how to do that, and I'm not going to say that what we did before was most ideal, or that even what we're going to now is going to be the perfect solution.
Ben:
But I think what we're moving to is a lot better than what we did, so I guess I should describe what we did before and then what pain we felt and how we think it should be. So when we launched Honeybadger, we just had a user ... So everything's going to be in Rails' terms, since we're a Rails' shop, so I'm just going to put that apology out there right at the beginning. But we have a user model, so there's a user's table on our database, and that had a Stripe ID which is tied to a Stripe record, since we do all our billing with Stripe. When you created a user account, you created a subscription in Stripe to go along with that.
Ben:
We do offer a premium now, although we didn't when we launched, so we had this assumption that every user has a Stripe subscription. A lot of our users have free subscriptions, they're just collaborators with other users. But we created a user, we created a Stripe subscription for that user, and then everything associated with that user in our database. So we have a user owns, has many projects, has many teams, and that worked out really well at the beginning and was really good for getting people onboarded quickly, because we had a lot of freelancers who are our customers in the early days, and small agencies.
Ben:
But the problem comes when you start getting these bigger teams that have these billing responsibilities that are separate from the users who are actually using the application. Or as time goes by, you have a person who set up the account for a company and they move on to a new company, and then everyone else is like, "Okay, so now we need to take ownership of this billing relationship and it's tied to that user." That became painful over the years. We wrote some code to transfer all of the billing relationship from one user record to another user record, and fiddle with Stripe and do that, but it was kind of hokey.
Josh:
When we had so many things that were tied to the user based on the account owner role I think, that doing that meant assigning ... You had to change a bunch of different database IDs basically, like re-point them if you're going to reconstruct, like transfer ownership of everything to someone else.
Ben:
Right, right.
Starr:
So I think conceptually, I should point out that a lot of SaaS apps have a system where there is ... You go, you sign up for it, you, I don't know, maybe set up payment details or whatever, and then you start inviting people to collaborate. Those collaborators then belong to that account, so there's a clear delineation between the top level account, the owner, and these collaborators. Because the collaborators just belong to that account, and people can't collaborate for multiple account owners with the same login, and that's just not done by a lot of places.
Starr:
Whereas, a place like GitHub does a slightly different thing, you have essentially every user is a peer, every user is a peer, and users can collaborate on other users' projects. So I can invite Bob to collaborate on my project, and that doesn't mean that I own Bob's account or I have any control over it, but that's just it. So we went with the GitHub route, because we're like, "We want ..." I don't know if you guys were thinking about this, but I was like, "I want everybody to be a customer." You're going to log in to your Honeybadger account and you're going to see the arrows for all the different organizations you work with, because we all come from freelance backgrounds, so that seemed pretty natural. But we didn't start out with this accounts' idea that Ben was mentioning. To be fair, I'm not even sure GitHub started ... An account as you're talking about it is similar to GitHub org, and I'm not sure that you can GitHub launch with GitHub orgs.
Josh:
I don't think so. Actually, I don't even know if they have their full org system when we launched, because I think we copied a lot of what they were doing in the first place. So I think a lot of this has come out of us following what GitHub did.
Starr:
Yes, yes. I guess the lesson, and correct me or just let me know if you have any thoughts on this, but I think the lesson is like you either need to do a system where you have a single account owner and then user accounts belong to that owner, or if you go the GitHub route where people are peers, then in addition to those people, you need the concept of an organization or an account above them.
Josh:
It's detached, right?
Starr:
Yeah, that's detached, and that allows for the flexibility in setting up payment details and transferring projects and ownership that more things aren't just tied to individual people.
Ben:
Totally, yeah. We just launched with this notion that freelancers and small companies, they just have this person that pays for things and that's that. So you associate the billing with the person, and you're off to the races. But yeah, like the GitHub organizations, we realized that it is really handy to have this separate entity, separate from users, that has the billing responsibility, and then multiple people on the team can manage it and it can be moved from person to person, et cetera.
Josh:
Think of how often people switch companies, and a lot of people, like you work at a company and you sign up and you use your company credit card, but you're not thinking about, "What is this tied to?" But it's tied to your account, unless the service has some sort of abstraction that makes it easy to work in a team environment. So think about how often those people switch companies, that's how often we were having to deal with account transfers basically. It's pretty frequent, it turns out.
Ben:
There's the other issue that you just mentioned about having the person who is the primary responsibility for managing the account is not necessarily the same person that has the billing information available to them. But you might have an engineering team lead or an engineering manager or even a CTO that's responsible for managing Honeybadger, in this case, it's a developer tool, but someone in the billing department has the actual payment information. We ran into this problem fairly early on, we knew that developers by and large don't have the payment information on hand when they're signing up for their account, but they wanted to try it out. That's why we started out with no credit card trial up front, but we quickly ended up having to create a way for a user to share a link that they could send to someone that actually has the credit card. I think we, or at least I initially assumed that someone would get handed the credit card and they would key in information and et cetera. But having ...
Josh:
You would never give your employees a credit card back then, because as a freelancer, like ...
Ben:
Sure, sure. Although, everyone at Honeybadger does have a credit card, that's one of our policies.
Josh:
Yes, we do. We do give them now.
Ben:
So we did have that link where we say, "If someone else is paying for this account, just give them this link and they can enter in information." That worked out really well, but I think having a separate organization, in GitHub's terms, where you can actually invite someone to the organization whose only responsibility is billing, they don't need to access all the technical stuff, that's also really helpful and great for those businesses where you need some more partitioning among some different teams.
Starr:
I imagine this is going to useful going forward for things like SSO as well.
Ben:
So we do have to redo how we use some of our SSO, as a result of this. So right now, when like for example, Heroku, we're on the marketplace and people come in through SSO for that, after they've provisioned an account with us. So before, they signed in and we said, "Okay, you're a part of this Heroku app, so there you go." Every person that came in through SSO was actually tied to that one user. Now, they're going to have their own user records, because the Heroku provisioning is going to create an account, instead of provisioning a particular user. So it's going to be at a level removed. So yeah, it's going to impact that as well.
Josh:
That's interesting. That's potentially an improvement, like an improved user experience for Heroku users, because before, it's like no one had their individual settings, because everyone's on basically the same user in our app.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Which as I recall, was not unique to us. That's pretty much how everyone did it at the time when we originally designed our integration. I don't you could even have, they didn't have the concept of multiple users signing into an add-on at one point. Did they?
Starr:
No, they didn't when we launched. I'm pretty sure they didn't.
Josh:
So that's nice, people will get to use some of our user specific features like the local, like configuring your text editor for instance, with custom paths. You couldn't do that before if you were a team.
Ben:
So like I said, I've been wanting this for a long, long time. I remember talking about this many, many eons ago in Honeybadgers.
Starr:
This is an old dragon.
Josh:
Would you say it's canonical and accounts, the two dragons?
Ben:
I think I've started this work at least three times, and the prior two times were just like, it's such a big change, so much of the plumbing in our app that just gave up after a while and went back and did something easier. But I came back to it again, and this time though, having worked on Hook Relay, we used Jumpstart Rails for Hook Relay, and Jumpstart has an account, multi-tenant kind of thing built in.
Josh:
I was going to say, I really like the way they did it.
Ben:
Yeah. So I basically used that as the inspiration for how we're going to be doing it in Honeybadger.
Starr:
How awesome.
Ben:
That was really nice, so I really appreciate having purchased that and having seen their example. It kind of reminded me actually of people who bought RailsKits back in the day and they're like, "Yeah, I don't actually want to use the code, I just want to see how you did it so I can use that as inspiration for my own app." Which I thought, I never expected that, so that was kind of cool. So now I've done that on the other end.
Starr:
One thing that might be unexpected that also came about as a result of having our accounts we've had for so long, where every user has a Stripe ID, has been that one of the tools that go in and give you, crunch your Stripe statistics and then give you back information on trial users and everything, it really screws with them because they really ... If a user has a Stripe ID, they consider that user to be some sort of a trial or some sort of an actual potential paying user, which I guess that's fair.
Starr:
Whereas, in our system, it has this super long time. Everybody has a Stripe ID, even if they will never ever buy their own account, because they're only using someone else's account. So as a result of Ben's work here, I'm really excited that finally some of our metrics in third-party tools around trial conversion rates and stuff like that are finally going to make sense, because right now, our stats tools, they're like, "You have thousands of active trial users and you had a couple conversions today, therefore your conversion percent is nothing."
Ben:
Yeah, to be clear, we didn't have to do it that way. We didn't have to have a Stripe ID associated with people that we knew were just collaborators, but that was one of those technical shortcuts that you take to get the product launched faster.
Josh:
I don't remember, we might have built that before we even had collaborators. It might have just been literally everyone. I think we had collaborators.
Starr:
I think that was it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
But also, we had the idea of like, anybody can upgrade and then it's like, "I like this, I'm using it for my employer, I can just upgrade it and use it for my own other projects I'm working on."
Ben:
Yep, and that happened quite a bit. But now, we're going to have an account model and it's going to be created by a user, so a user has many accounts. So now you can have your private, your personal stuff, and you have your work stuff. You can manage those two accounts and build relationships separately. That account is going to have many users, and account will have many teams and many projects. So everything will be associated with the account now, and if we need to transfer ownership, now it's just a matter of changing the user ID for the account record, as opposed to changing a bunch of user IDs across a bunch of tables.
Josh:
Yeah. I think a lot of this just comes down to thinking about what the relationships are in your app when you're first designing it, and I think especially at the time for us, it was very much like the MVP, just do the simplest thing that you can think of or the quickest thing to ship. I think, I don't know about you, my thinking has come around on that a little bit recently, whereas like with Hook Relay, we obviously had Jumpstart, which did that thinking for us in a lot of ways, which that's like a huge pitch for Jumpstart. You can always just hire someone to design that up front.
Josh:
But if I were building an app from scratch, even if it's in MVP these days, I would spend more time thinking about the relationships, the model relationships within the code, but also the roles of what a user is in the system. Because a user, this isn't only useful in billing, I've run into similar issues in setting up marketing tools for instance. You want to communicate with different people, with people in your app differently, if they're a collaborator or if they signed up for a trial or if they own an account versus if they're just ... Maybe they're both, maybe they own a different account but they collaborate. There's a lot of different ways potentially that those relationships can coexist, and having some sort of abstraction for them in the actual app itself I think can solve a headache down the road. It's probably worth doing a little bit of that design up front for me these days, just because I felt the pain of trying to sort that all out once you have thousands of people in there and you're trying to figure out who is who.
Starr:
Yeah, it seems like it's a difference between breaking down all the different types of roles involved with your application. We've got a developer role, we've got a billing role, we've got a manager role. Versus just being like, "Oh, it's a user. We'll just make them ... Everything's a user, we'll figure it out later."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I'm with you, Josh. I think MVP was great when it came out and helped get people away from the idea that you had to do this waterfall, you had to do this huge production before you could even do anything. Agile of course, was the standard bear there, but these days, it's nice to have a little more polish, a little more thought going into that V1 that goes out the door. These days, I'm shying away from the MVP label and going more towards, "Well, this is the first cut. This is what we're going to show our customers, and we feel proud of it." It's not just, "Oh, here's the first thing that works."
Starr:
I really like that, the first cut. We should write a book about that.
Josh:
The first cut. Yeah.
Starr:
Can I tell you all a rambling grandma story?
Ben:
Please.
Starr:
It's going to relate. So I recently moved out to my new backyard office, and it basically took me about a year to build, I did most of the work myself. Early on when I was putting up the walls, I hadn't quite figured out how to reproduce, always cut off the ends of the boards in a completely right-angle way. So I had this one board and I didn't even notice at the time, but it was just at a little bit of an angle, so it stuck out maybe like a quarter of an inch more. One side of the cut was right at the right spot, and then it drifted a little bit, so it was maybe a quarter of an inch off the other way.
Starr:
I put it in the wall, I looked up, I was like, "That doesn't look quite straight, but it will be fine. It's a building, what's a quarter of an inch here and there? It's no big deal." So I built the wall, we put the trusses on, then like, "Oh, well the truss that sits on top of that piece of wood is now higher than the other side, noticeably so." So I added some shims under the truss on the other side to at least level it out, and so then we get that done and I'm doing drywall and I'm like, "Well, okay so this truss is actually uniformly higher than the rest of the trusses." So then I had to get these drywall shims and just stack those in. So now, finally, the drywall's done and the ceiling looks level, and you'd never know, but underneath is just 10 different types of shims, all just crammed in there. I feel like that's a metaphor for the user model.
Josh:
It sounds like Honeybadger.
Ben:
Yes, that sounds like a great metaphor for software development.
Josh:
It's great, yeah. Luckily, it's a little, I want to say it's a little easier to change the software than to change the building in most cases, at least that's ...
Starr:
That's true. Hopefully, I won't have to change it ever. We'll see.
Ben:
With the building, you don't have all your interfaces changing every time because an API went away.
Starr:
Oh, god. Yeah.
Josh:
You've got a new roof adapter that you have to support.
Starr:
Exactly. Like if you don't go in and change all the screws holding the drywall to the ceiling, they're just going to start failing in two months, because they're being deprecated.
Ben:
Like, "No, we don't have that paint color anymore, so you have to change it."
Josh:
That's a good one, Ben.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Back to the MVP thing though, these days, there are a lot more starters. Back then actually, there were a few starters, including the SaaS starter kit from RailsKits, which was your starter, Ben. You used some of that in our initial version. Ironically, I think you had it, at one point, you had an account model in there, and I think we opted to not go with it though or something. I don't want to out us, but we have to own, I guess we have to own it.
Ben:
I can admit my mistakes, it's fine.
Josh:
But yeah, these days, there are a lot of starter options, like Jumpstart or Bullet Train, there are others, there's free things. Then that's just Rails, so I think you can still, your MVP is going to usually, if you start with something else, it's going to include all, I don't know, the basic things that you need. You won't have to think about today hopefully, like you would back, if you're starting from scratch or back when these things weren't ... There weren't as many options basically.
Ben:
Yeah. I think these days, the stakes are higher, the table stakes. You have to come with some sort of team management if you're going to be doing a business app, because everyone expects to be able to invite people to join their team. I think maybe right now, we're going through a transition period where perhaps in a few months we'll see where ... Like two-factor authentication is table stakes, just because that's a thing. For example, Hey, they launched their email service recently and two-factor authentication is required, because we recognize that passwords are weak sauce. So this two-factor authentication is a way to make your app secure.
Ben:
So I think we definitely have seen over the past 10 years, and I think we'll continue to see these table stakes getting higher, and so it does really help to come in with one of these ready made things that has all this stuff done for you, so you don't have to think about it. It's just like Rails, when that launched, it did so much of the plumbing that you didn't have to think about, that before you had to do yourself. So I think going at those levels of extractions and having all that plumbing done is great.
Josh:
Again, these are the things that probably would have prevented us from launching anything at all, that's why we didn't do them in the first place I think, because we didn't want to have to do it ourselves and we could go scrappy. We had Rails, which was filling that, at the time, that was one of the ... It was like you said, the same deal. If we would have had to build our own web framework before we could launch our SaaS, we probably wouldn't have launched a SaaS. These days, you get to use Rails and you get to have billing solved and notifications and all the other things that have driven us crazy the past eight years.
Ben:
One thing I will say though, talking about tenant stuff, is I will come down strongly against the idea of using multiple schemas for doing multiple tenants. It's been a long practiced method of doing multi-tenant as having these multiple schemas in your database, how tenants are partitioned from each other. I've just seen so much pain come out of that.
Starr:
Like every separate account would have its own database or something.
Ben:
Basically, yep. In Postgres, they call them schemas, but in other systems, you can actually create separate databases to keep all the data partitions. Every database or every schema has the same structure, but it's just there's only one customer's data in that particular database or schema. But that's just so much pain, once you get to a point where you have hundreds of customers, because you're making all these changes anytime you want to change a structure.
Josh:
You have to migrate like 1000 different databases when you deploy.
Ben:
So totally just go with a tenant ID foreign key field in your database, people are like, "That's a security risk, because what if you forget to scope?" Modern framework will handle that for you, so just ignore the haters and go with a tenant ID, make your life so much easier by not doing multiple schemas, multiple databases.
Josh:
Yeah. You can make the same argument, what if you forget to have a database password or something? Yeah, you could definitely give everyone your data any way you look at it.
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
Yeah, security is so 2019. Well, we should probably wrap this up. Do you guys have any solemn parting words or anything?
Ben:
No.
Josh:
Jumpstart, strong recommend.
Starr:
Jumpstart, strong recommend.
Ben:
For sure.
Starr:
Okay, well if you have enjoyed this podcast, please give us a review on Apple podcasts or whatever. If you want to write for our blog, go to Honeybadger.io/Blog and look for the "Write for us" link. That is the first test to determine if you are capable of writing for our blog, is finding that link. Yeah, go with our blessing. I will see you all later.
Show notes:
Links:The B-52's - Roam
The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin GrahamRoam Research
TiddlyWiki
Art of The Product Podcast - Networking Thoughts
Scrivener
Josh's Blog
Write for Honeybadger
Full transcript:Ben:
So I had the first session of a conference that's happening online next week. It's the Business of Software conference.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And it's happening Monday through Wednesday. But on Wednesday this week, they had the replacement for the meet and greet, the night before kind of thing where you just go and socialize, and meet other people that are at the conference. And it was of course, it's all online this time, it's not in Boston where it has been in past years.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And so, the meet and greet was done on Zoom. And I was skeptical this was going to work out very well because big Zoom meetings, they're just not good. No one ever talks because everyone's afraid to talk over somebody else. But actually, it turned out really, really well. They did breakout rooms. So, they had at first everyone together, it was 50 people or whatever. And then, they did breakout rooms of five people, so you could actually just meet a couple of people at a time. And that was just great, and did a couple rounds of that. So, it really was the best ever type of meeting for conference like that. It's much better than yelling at people in a bar.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, you and I have always talked about the mixer events that they throw where the night progressively gets louder, and you eventually lose your voice.
Ben:
Right? Yep.
Josh:
Yeah. That's cool.
Starr:
And I mean, half the work for me in those events is creating my own breakout group anyway because the only way you actually get to talk to people is if you wrangle five or six people and get them away from the DJ, and just have a conversation with them.
Josh:
So, this does the work for you.
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, did you... How did they organize the breakout rooms? Was it in Slack or something, or did they have a list of them that you joined?
Ben:
No, Zoom apparently has this feature called Zoom Rooms.
Josh:
Oh.
Ben:
And you can just randomly assign segments of people into rooms.
Josh:
Oh, okay.
Ben:
And so, you just switch from main group-
Josh:
You hit a button?
Ben:
Yep. Yep.
Josh:
Huh.
Ben:
And in fact, you don't even... I didn't have to push a button. Whoever was running the show, pushed a button and all of a sudden, now I'm in a smaller room.
Josh:
Wow. That's cool.
Ben:
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Starr:
Did they have moderation inside the breakout rooms, or was it a free for all in that small group?
Ben:
So, Mark who was running the show, he gave us some instructions for splitting off into the rooms. So, he wanted each of us to introduce ourselves, and come up with a question. And then, basically, once we got into the rooms it was like, "Okay. Go. Figure it out." And the first round was... Didn't work all that smoothly because no one knows what's going on, right? But then, we came back from that, we chatted a little bit about how it went, and so we came up with some new parameters like, "Okay, you should probably take just two minutes." Rather than the whole time because it was only a five minute window. So, the second round went a little bit better, smoother. But yeah, so there wasn't moderation. There was just like, "Hey, here's what you should go do. Go do that." And then, they corrected a little bit after there was some confusion. But yeah, it worked out really well.
Josh:
Nice. Were you already planning to go Business of Software before the pandemic, and they switched it?
Ben:
Yes. Yep.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
Yeah. So, I haven't signed up for any online conferences since the pandemic started because I just thought that they wouldn't be all that great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But yeah, this one I had signed up for before. I even had the tickets purchased. And so, that's a thing where now I have a credit rather than a refund, and that kind of gets me.
Josh:
Right. They didn't refund any of the purchase price, I assume? They just switched it to online?
Ben:
Yep. Yep. That's right.
Josh:
Okay. Yeah, that's a pricey virtual event.
Ben:
It is a pricey event.
Josh:
Ben. Knowing... Yeah, if it's past rates.
Ben:
Yeah, it's the same as past rates. So, it is kind of a pricey conference. It's in the upper end of the ones we typically attend.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But it's a great conference to attend. If you're an entrepreneur, if you are involved with software in any shape or form, as a product manager, or as an engineering manager, it's a great conference to go to really take a break from your business, and hear from some great thought leaders, and get some good ideas. Each time, I've come... I've done this twice before I think, and each time I've come back with ideas for how to make Honeybadger better, and I think it's been really good. Really worth the investment.
Josh:
Yeah. The other attendees are like us I would assume too. Do most of them have established businesses, or are there a lot of people that are in the starting phase?
Ben:
No, I'd say the people there are more established.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
So, you're talking about businesses that are much larger than ours, and that have been around for 10s of years.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
So, it's not a lot of people who are in startups. But you know, the business software forums have been around forever, and these are that same kind of crowd. So, you get a lot of people who are working at fortune 500 companies and so on.
Josh:
Okay, nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I'll have to check that out one of these years.
Starr:
I've noticed it for virtual events. I do a weekly group on Zoom, and it usually draws a pretty good crowd. About 40 or 50 people. And comparing it to other less formal groups I've been a part of, it seems like structure is really the key to an enjoyable group experience in Zoom.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
And basically, letting people know what's expected of them. Like Ben mentioned, when they went into breakout rooms, the moderator was like, "Okay, here's what you're supposed to. Go figure it out." And so, it's like everybody has a task to work on, or everybody... Everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. The places where I struggle on Zoom meetings is when it's people that I'm not really super familiar with, and there's no structure, and you're just supposed to talk.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
That's just when I tend to go into crickets mode.
Josh:
Yeah. That's the kind of thing that makes it hard for me to even show up in the... My problem is I need to... The risk to me in a virtual event is that I just won't open the Zoom in the first place because there's not much resistance there, you could just not.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, I don't know. There's some commitment that has to happen if you actually go to a conference, and you're debating going to the networking event or whatever but then you force yourself, and once you're there, you can't leave. You're there, and you have to figure it out.
Ben:
So, one of the downsides to this conference though is that since it's normally held in Boston, and since the people who are running it are actually based in the UK, they're still keeping the Boston schedule. So, it's starting at 8:30 in the morning Eastern time. So, even though I get up early, and I'll already be awake for that, still, I'm not usually up for Zoom calls at that time in the morning. So, that's going to be a little rough.
Josh:
Yeah. That is early.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That is early for a Zoom call.
Ben:
But if you don't mind me derailing a bit from the conference thing, Starr, you said about having these loose conversations and that can be a problem on Zoom calls. I've had that same experience but it made me think of something that I saw twice this week from two different people regarding Zoom. Well, tangentially regarding Zoom. And that was, the idea that, if you were doing interviews for a job, which we've done via Zoom recently because that's what you do.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Actually, we've always done that because we're a remote company, right?
Starr:
If you're the interviewer.
Ben:
Right. But the two comments, both said, "You should interview people in the same context in which you'll be working with them." So, don't interview them on Zoom if you don't use Zoom on a regular basis in your business. If you're in Slack all the time, then interview them in Slack. And I thought-
Josh:
Oh, that's cool.
Ben:
"That's interesting." So, I wanted to see what you two thought about that.
Josh:
Hmm. Yeah, I don't know. I could see having them join some Slack channel for a period of time, and have some sort of format for interacting. Does it mean... Would you keep the same interview format but just have it over chat, or would you... Is that what they were saying?
Josh:
Or, would it be like... Would you invite them to your Slack for a week, and be like, "All right."?
Ben:
I think it was closer to the latter.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
As opposed to just doing the interview questions in a Slack channel.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
I think that the notion is, "Bring them into your workspace for a while, and work with them as a colleague, and then you get a really good feel for how they would be as an employee."
Josh:
Because what comes to mind for me is... Because we've had pretty good success with the take home projects, we've liked doing that with people. Which is great because that does imitate how we work, as individuals on projects. So, giving them a project, and they go away and work on it for a while, and if they have questions, they interact with us like we would with each other. But I could see that fitting pretty well. That could be the pretense for the Slack invite. So, forget the... Maybe do an initial saying hello, a short thing but we could focus on, "Okay. We're going to give you this project. Come hang out in our Slack for the week. We're going to interact... Try to hang out, and interact, and talk about the project, and share what you're working on and stuff." And that could be the foundation for the interview in air quotes.
Ben:
Yep. Yeah, and since we pay people for their time, and their working on that project, it's basically like you're paying to have that person show up as a contractor for a while with your business.
Josh:
Unless you're Basecamp, they don't pay.
Starr:
One thing that might be difficult for people regarding that is, if they have a job, it's going to be difficult to show up in another Slack during work hours doing work.
Josh:
Yeah. That does.
Ben:
But in our case, we're pretty asynchronous, right? So, just because we say, "Show up in Slack." Doesn't mean we expect them to be there during work hours. That's just what we use for interaction. So, oftentimes, we'll just drop something in Slack and just wait for someone. Whenever they show up, they show up.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). You could also do it over Basecamp.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Have some sort of Basecamp format for... Maybe have them write some longer form things on the project and about who they are. We could just send them the set of questions over Basecamp. At that point, you're basically back to interviewing people over email with a fancy UI.
Ben:
I just thought the concept was interesting, in not even having that in-person Zoom call if you're not really a Zoom company. Because we aren't really. I mean, we hang out every now and then but I just hadn't ever thought of the idea of not having a face to face chat with someone as part of the interview process.
Josh:
Yeah. I still think that I'd want the face to face in there somehow. Because I mean, for one, we do. We're on Zoom right now and we do weekly Zooms.
Starr:
Yeah, I've had Zoom calls every week, or every day this week.
Josh:
So, we're talking like we never use Zoom but we do. But then again, all the things that people talk about, like the benefit of... I mean, one of the reasons we've tried to do more face to face is just that it's nice. It is nice to be able to have visual queues, and even just for the social aspect of it. So, I mean, I'd want some form of probably face to face as a part of the interview process. But it doesn't have... We could... I think there's definitely room to not have it be a series of Zoom calls.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Thinking about this idea, there's been something that's... It's bothered me but I've been trying to figure out... I've been trying to put my finger on what it was exactly. And I think my problem with this idea is that it is going down that route of making an employee a cog in the machine, right? It's like, "Well, if you want to see how well the cog is going to work in the machine, just put it in the machine and see how it works." But the thing is, at least personally... While I understand that an employee, employer relationship is a financial relationship, and it's not your family, or your best friends or whatever necessarily. While that's true, I don't want to necessarily have employees be just defined entirely by their output. By their work output. I want to have at least some kind of a human connection with people.
Starr:
So, it would seem weird to me to skip the human part. Even if the human part is just not even necessarily used to make the hiring decision but just... I don't know, to connect with people. There's a similar... One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people who write for us in the blog have been like, "Oh, you want to do a Zoom call? That's weird." Because most people who do blogs, and hire external content, they don't actually get to know the authors really. It's all just very transactional. And that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it's just... I mean, I don't know. Maybe it produces the results that you want but it just seems sterile to me, and not really the place I want to work.
Josh:
Yeah. That's a good point.
Ben:
Starr, you are definitely the humanity side of our business.
Starr:
Oh yeah, I'm the humanitarian. It's okay.
Josh:
Well, maybe... It could be a generational thing here though because the younger generations, their communication is memes. So, bringing the chat into the picture could actually be a better way to express ourselves than face to face communication in the future.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Do I sound like a boomer? We have to do a phone call, let's just hope on a quick call.
Josh:
Okay, boomer.
Ben:
So, Josh, I thought you were about to say, "So, we should have our applicants in that their submissions as TikTok videos."
Josh:
Right. We only interview over TikTok. And we won't even see your video unless it's good enough and it shows up in our feed.
Starr:
We just look at the TikTok home page every day, and if there's a video there addressing us, we will respond to it. I mean, that would be a... That might be a good approach for a marketing person maybe, I don't know. A content creation person.
Josh:
Yeah, that would be a gauntlet for sure. Yeah, that's like making someone sell you for the sales interview or whatever.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Right. Well, not that we're hiring any time soon but I just thought that was interesting.
Josh:
Yeah. We could. We could be hiring sometime soon, I don't know. You never know.
Ben:
We could actually. I was looking at the budget this morning. I was like, "Oh, we actually do have budget for somebody."
Josh:
We've got a conclave coming up, our quarterly meeting. So, we could talk about that then.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm not entirely sure the sky's not going to start falling soon.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm not jumping to hire right now.
Starr:
Maybe let's wait a few months before we make any big decisions on that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, speaking of the sky falling, my stock portfolio is very heavily weighted on the tech side. So, I have been feeling the pain.
Starr:
Oh, has tech been going down lately? I forget.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I haven't checked.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Really got pummeled over the past week.
Starr:
Oh, true.
Josh:
Yeah. Oh, did you hear, Starr? What was propping the market up? Because that came out.
Starr:
Oh, no. I haven't heard. I haven't heard.
Josh:
It was SoftBank, right Ben?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
SoftBank was dumping... What? Was it risky trading? Basically, just dumping money into the market.
Ben:
Yeah, just buying like crazy.
Josh:
Yeah. Buying like crazy and no one knew. Well, I mean, no one knew it was them. People knew this was happening but it wasn't... Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Didn't that happen at BitCoin? Isn't that what happened at BitCoin?
Josh:
Probably.
Ben:
Yes, that's pretty much exactly what happened.
Starr:
Yeah, okay.
Josh:
Yeah. And I mean, I'm sure this is not the last time, or that it's even stopped.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
But it's... We've talked about this. I mean, this is kind of I think what we said was happening, it's just we didn't know who the culprit was this time.
Ben:
And we talked, I think, a couple of months ago about how we totally expected this to happen. So, corrections happen, you just have to ride the wave and keep on doing your dollar cost averaging, and trying not to refresh your portfolio page every five minutes.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know. I'm looking at the price of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, and it's still what it was in February.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
It hasn't tanked.
Ben:
But if you look at Nasdaq, which is very tech heavy.
Starr:
Oh, okay.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
You can see it's been not kind this week.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Oh, yeah. But still, I mean, it's the same as what it was. It's higher than it was in February.
Ben:
Well, yeah. But it was a dramatic reversal.
Starr:
Oh, okay.
Ben:
It was going up, and up, and up unexplainably until the SoftBank thing came out. And then, it's like, oh, pop.
Starr:
Yeah, it went slightly down.
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
Yeah, you should at least have corrections during a worldwide economic crisis.
Ben:
Yes. Exactly.
Josh:
I would imagine.
Ben:
Corrections are healthy.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. All this is really... It's really opened my eyes about the stock market in a lot of ways. So, I read a lot of books, like the... Oh, shoot. What's the name? The Intelligent Investor. The Benjamin Graham guy.
Josh:
Benjamin Graham. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. The Warren Buffet. It's like, okay, stocks are tied to economic value of a company. And so, the stocks of a country should be tied to the economic health overall of the country, and that's just not true. This is a lie, right? And thinking about it, it makes sense because all the people who... Not all the... But most of the people who are more or less in the same boat that we are, professionals who invest in stocks and do stuff like that. On the whole, that group isn't doing too bad. So, I guess, it's when that group starts doing bad, then people are going to start selling stocks whereas right now, it's mostly people in lower income brackets that are doing bad.
Josh:
Well, a lot of people like us apparently are speculating in stocks right now, that's part of the other... The reason for the volatility right now.
Starr:
That makes sense, yeah.
Josh:
A lot more people are doing risky trading.
Starr:
Because they're bored at home?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Basically, yep.
Josh:
Exactly. And then, at the same time, it's become so much easier to do. And then, fractional trading, it's becoming a thing now. So, people can get into with less dollar figures anyway.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
And also... Oh.
Ben:
As I will say, and you combine with that 0% interest rates. You can't make money any place else, right?
Starr:
Yeah. And also, I imagine there's lots of people who have been doing okay financially. If the market goes down, they're just going to buy. So, that's going to keep the market from going down.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Starr:
So, I don't know. Overall, I don't-
Josh:
Like me throughout the pandemic.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
I did, by the way, recently shift some of my money out of stocks. Actually, very recently. So, yeah, I'm not going to stop investing in stocks, or in the market but it's going to be volatile for a while.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
It doesn't hurt to boost other forms of savings.
Starr:
That's true.
Ben:
"Buy gold. Buy gold now."
Starr:
Buy gold? Oh, yeah. Sure. Don't buy gold. Yeah, when the pandemic started, I basically took out most of the money from the stock market that wasn't in a retirement account. So yeah, I'm still glad I did that. It's nice having a little bit of extra cash in the bank just for security and stuff like that.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
But yeah, definitely recommend the Total Market Index for your 401K, or your IRA for sure.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, see, I mean, we've talked about this but that's the only thing I'll invest in, period.
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
I don't buy individual stocks. But I've even shifted money out of that. Not totally though. Even if you're buying the entire market, still, that is a basket, if all your money is in the stock market, it's still all in the stock market.
Ben:
Right. Right. So, speaking of money. Josh, you're paying for a note taking app. And so, I want to know, why?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because there are a gazillion note taking apps and...
Josh:
Well, the simply answer is it's not a note taking app.
Starr:
Wait, what's a note taking app? Are you talking Roam?
Josh:
Yeah, Roam. Roam Research. So, roamresearch.com.
Starr:
Every time you bring this up, I hear that song, that Bangles' song, like, "Roam if you want to." You know that one?
Josh:
Well, they probably embrace that, yeah. There's all kinds of Rome puns. Most of them are R-O-M-E. It's R-O-A-M, is the spelling. But yeah, they use it as Ancient Rome, or all that stuff.
Ben:
So, yeah, I wanted to ask you about this because I just listened to the Art of Product podcast where Ben was talking about using Roam.
Josh:
Yeah, I saw that title. I haven't listened to it yet. Was it good?
Ben:
Yeah, it was good.
Josh:
You have to say it's good because they might be listening.
Ben:
They might be listening, so yeah, it was awesome. But no, it was good. But Ben was talking about using Roam, and why he finds it interesting. He kept coming back to this graph thing, and talked about this graph of nodes.
Josh:
The network thought type thing?
Ben:
Yeah. And as he was describing it, maybe I just wasn't getting it because I haven't used Roam, and I haven't really looked at it. But when he was describing it, I kept thinking, "Yeah, it sounds a lot like a Wiki."
Josh:
Yeah, it is.
Ben:
So, tell me why I should pay for Roam as opposed to just using a Wiki.
Josh:
Well, I've never... Okay, so I've never used a Wiki, or I've never made an attempt at using a Wiki for my notes. Some of the features of Roam... I mean, Roam, the basic features are very much like a Wiki. I would say the main difference, and I could be wrong on this, and the userbility of Wiki's is just amazing, and that you can just write fluidly in them with zero effort, which is basically what Roam is like. But my assumption is that Wiki software is a little bit jenky. Like, what do I do to set up a Wiki? What would you use if you were going to set up a Wiki?
Ben:
Back in the olden days, there was this app called TiddlyWiki.
Josh:
Yeah, and that's still around.
Ben:
Is it?
Josh:
Yeah. So, I mean, that's what I'm thinking of.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Okay. So, that's what I'm thinking of. So, I have to go... What am I going to go do? I have to go spin up TiddlyWiki and... I mean, that's self-posted isn't it?
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
So, I'm going to have to host my own Wiki, I'm going to have to manage the software. So, that alone, I mean, I'll pay someone to do that for me.
Ben:
Sure.
Josh:
But at the same time, I haven't used TiddlyWiki but from the screenshots, and what I've seen of it, a little bit like Wikipedia, or older software, right?
Ben:
Yeah, you get a text area, you enter some text, and that's basically it.
Josh:
Okay. So, Roam is so much more than that. It's like a modern... I would say it's... I didn't get it either before I was introduced to it. I was introduced to it by my friend Joel Hooks back in... He's been using it for... He was a very early adopter. I got into around the start of this year. And I didn't get it at first either, I was not sure exactly how to use it. But the more and more I got into it, and the more that it clicked, the more I realized... I'd say the closest thing I can compare it to, is probably the shift that happened with embracing Notion, which was a big shift for us because same thing with Notion, I was like, "Why would I pay..." And Notion is more expensive than Roam even. I'm like, "Why am I going to pay for this expensive app just to host my docs, or something that I have in a Git repo right now?"
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
But the same... Yeah, I don't know. It's a little bit of the same mental shift that happened with that, where in Notion you can create databases on the fly, and attributes, and all the things we love about it. In Roam, it's a little bit more focused. It is a little bit more focused on personal... Your personal thought process. But it is, it's like a Wiki but it's a very fluid way of building your own personal networked Wiki where you can write... You can just basically start typing in it, and write, and link up... The nodes in it... It used Wiki style syntax to link up nodes within your graph. It's a graph database basically. But you don't really think about it too much as you're doing it. So, it becomes a very fluid way to write, and actually, I found that it aids my thinking.
Josh:
As I'm taking notes in it, it helps me actually outline my thought process, and then connect ideas and that sort of thing. I mean, I don't know, I'm still... It's been a huge learning process of how to actually take advantage of everything that it does. And everything I've described is the very base feature set too. It has a lot of weird, interesting capabilities that I haven't even gotten into.
Ben:
Well, I guess I'll check it out. I've been reading your notes that you posted on your hosted site there.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And I've been seeing it popping up more and more. And I'm seeing these Wiki tag looking things, and I'm like, "So, why wouldn't I just use a Wiki?" So, okay.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you would be interested in using a Wiki, then I would highly recommend Roam because it's a very nice Wiki at the least. But if you want to do more of it, there's a lot more that you can do. For instance, they've got an entire community of people that are basically hacking... You can write JavaScript in it to change how it works for instance. That's one thing that's different from a Wiki. You can also theme it with CSS. It's got it's own query language built into it, so you can do a lot of interesting filtering because you can tag and reference things anywhere, you can do a lot of interesting queries on the data that you put into it after you've built up a large set of data. I mean, there's a lot more but they're not very good at... Well, this is intentional.
Josh:
They don't have a really good... You can't just go to their website, and you're not going to guide of how to do everything because they have this Roam cult marketing thing they do. This is the part that is... People will start to roll the eyes.
Starr:
I noticed one of their pricing plans is called believer and it's a five year subscription.
Josh:
It is believer.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I'm a believer, Starr.
Starr:
Oh, you are?
Josh:
I will say, I really do, I love it to the point where I actually was... I paid for the plan because I... Originally, I was on their free forever version before they actually started charging but I actually paid them for five years because I want them to be financially viable because I don't want them to go away, and take all my notes with them.
Starr:
So, I've got a question for you. So, I've been looking at the Roam website as we've been doing this. I've been looking at one of their sample... I don't know what you call it. Work books?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Whatever. And one thing that strikes me is that because it's a graph database situation because everything is so hierarchical, it seems like it would be really easy for me to lose track of what's actually in there. Because a lot of things are going to be hidden, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Because you write your document, then you link to 12 other smaller documents. And personally, for me, I know that after a month, I'm going to completely forget about those documents about the structure of this thing. And it just... I don't know. It seems like it would be hard for me personally to find things once I've made them. And this may just be personal preference but I just thought I'd ask you if there's something I'm missing.
Josh:
You might be missing the way that it does linked page references because... I've taken a fair amount of notes in the past using various things. Mostly, I've used mark down files. Before Roam, I was using Bear.app on the Mac, and IOS which was a note taking app. But I would say I would go back and find information that I'd taken in my notes or actually use it much less before I started learning to use Roam. And I would say that's mostly because of the way it does the nodes, and the inbound references. So, a while back, when I was... I had been working on HoneybadgerJS which is our JavaScript client library. I did a research project a while back on learning all about server side rendering, and what people are doing in React and Vue-land regarding server side rendering, and how to...
Josh:
Basically, what the applications are, and what the implications are for universal JavaScript packages because basically, if you want to build a JavaScript library for people that are doing this, it has to be able to run in both browser and server environments. So, I did a big research project on this. So, that's all in there somewhere. But if I happen to want to reference something, like in the future if I'm working on it now, whatever, four months later, and I remember there was some topic that was semi-related, I can go to that page and basically, it's going to link me back in a trail basically through my entire process of researching that topic.
Josh:
And it's because every... I don't... Well, I could just search for something and then go, and look through all my notes on it but I could also say, "Okay. Well, I'm going to go look at my page on server side rendering." And on that page, I'm going to see what I actually wrote about server side rendering itself. But then I'm going to see a list of linked references of all the courses I took on server side rendering, all the videos that I watched about various... How to do on various platforms for instance. And then, the notes that I took on those videos. So basically, you can follow the trail back just starting from any point in time... Or, I mean, at any point in the graph if that makes sense.
Starr:
Okay, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.
Josh:
So, I don't know. It's nice to be able to basically start anywhere. Wherever you are right now in thinking about what you're looking for, you can go to that, and then, start to trace back through whatever your other notes on the topic were. It's almost a way to research your own research, or something like that.
Starr:
That makes sense, yeah. I don't think I've ever... It makes sense because I'm not... I don't really use notes like that. I don't really use notes as a way to document what I'm working on at the moment, or learning at the moment.
Josh:
Yeah. I didn't either but this changed that.
Starr:
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. Okay. I'm curious, if you... I'm just going to ask a random question, and this is just my own curiosity but is it possible to... I don't know if you've ever used... I think it's Scrivener maybe, or Ulysses or somethere where you can essentially... If you're composing a story, what you can do is you can write these little snippets of story on these little "cards." And then, you essentially arrange them in whatever order you want. And then, the program will take the content of those cards and render it as one document, so you can look at it all in one piece.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Is that something that Roam can do, do you know?
Josh:
I believe so. I think Roam has a feature. I haven't used it but I think I saw it somewhere in passing. It either has it, or they're working on it where you can render cards on a board type thing but it's also displaying it as a... Everything is basically a list, that's the base format for the data. But yeah, it has a bunch of different ways to visualize the stuff that you put in. It can do tables, it can do different types of graphs and stuff. And yeah, it has features where you can split it out. I think it can split it out and show it on a board or something like that.
Starr:
Oh, okay. That's cool. Yeah, I just like the idea of... If you're working on a big article or something, being able to work on a little part in isolation, and keep it in isolation in your computer but then, essentially, have all your little isolated pieces concatenated to make the final document.
Josh:
Yeah, totally. And with the list... Because you write in a nested format usually, and you get used to writing like that to where you're basically outlining. And you don't have to do that, you could just write paragraphs and each paragraph is a list item that's just a flat list. But with nesting, you can jump down into a level and just focus on that block too which is nice. I use that a lot for... I've started... Because I actually used to... I made a few attempts at doing work journaling, where I'm keeping a running log of problems I'm working on, or things, thoughts that I have that I want to go back to. But with Roam, I've... So, one of the other unique things about Roam, is that it's centered all around a daily... It's called daily notes. So, daily notes is just a chronological, each day gets it's own document basically.
Starr:
Oh.
Josh:
So, it's like, the entire things... And you actually might like this, Starr. The entire thing centers around a daily journal basically. So, the daily notes is where you live during the day when you're using it. And so, everything usually stems from there. You start by writing... Taking notes during the day in this section but then, as you start to build references and things, and jump around, it starts to span out basically from there.
Starr:
Okay. That makes it a lot more interesting to me because yeah, I do... I've got my little bullet journal I use every day to keep track of what I'm working on, and make notes of things I need to do and all that.
Josh:
Yeah. So, my process has... Lately, I've been... I'll basically log a time stamp, and what I'm working on, and then I'll immediately just click into that bullet item, and it focuses just that item, and from there, I can basically outline as I work. I just keep it on the side of the screen, so it's really easy just... Tab over and I can write, tab back, and keep working. But it's all very... It removes all the other clutter of the entire graph of knowledge that you have basically. So yeah, it's nice, the different views that it has, that you can focus in on.
Starr:
Cool. Thanks for answering all my random questions.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I'm interested, if you try it out, let me know. I am curious to see what you think about it. But yeah, and you mentioned Ben, lately, my side project, personal project, is building a static site from a public Roam database, which I'm using for... I'm thinking it might eventually replace my blog, or it's definitely a supplement to my blog, it's where things will start. But it's been really... I've never blogged this much before to be honest. I never was good at... There was so many steps you have to do to do a finished blog post. For most of them, I would just never finish them, or never start them. Or, even just committing them to my static Git repo, so I can deploy them. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen. And this, basically, I just write in a Roam database, and then it's published. And there's no pressure of having to have a finished piece, or even...
Josh:
Because things can change in it. If you want to make a change, you just go edit the page, and it regenerates your site. So, I'm really finding this... I really like this idea so far, of publishing a public notes thing as a blog. And the daily pages are actually... It works really nice because that's my blog index basically. So, the index is just basically like a journal.
Ben:
Sounds cool.
Starr:
That's really cool. It's like a journal that's live or something.
Josh:
Yeah. I'll link to it.
Ben:
Starr has not let that one go.
Starr:
What?
Josh:
Live. It's like some sort of live journal.
Starr:
I'm sorry.
Josh:
It's almost like you're a blogger.
Starr:
So, I'm sorry Josh, I'm not making fun of you at all.
Josh:
No.
Ben:
Awesome.
Josh:
Yeah. No, there is a lot of hype around this, and it's about to get even worse. They just announced their funding, and it's starting to go mainstream, and we're talking about this now on the podcast.
Starr:
Okay. Well, I can't do it then. I can't get into it, sorry.
Josh:
A lot of podcasts are talking to. This is where the true believers go somewhere else, Starr.
Ben:
This is where Josh holds up his Roam shirt. He had it before it was cool.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
No, I'm just going to write an e-Book and how to most efficiently use NotePad.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
NotePad Hacks for the clever 2020 Dennison.
Josh:
So, there are a lot of alternatives to Roam now. People have been talking, within the cult, people have been talking about all the other things, like the other extensions, or alternatives to Roam that people are working on. And VS, there's a VS code extension that basically gives you... It turns code basically into a Roam database that just works off of markdown files, which is interesting. And there's other things like that. Or, if you like to use Emacs then you could learn Emacs and use whatever... I forget what they call the extension for that.
Ben:
I noticed that Notion just released Wiki links as well to their project.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's a total resonance for the Wiki man, it's coming back.
Josh:
It is. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I like it. I think that these are pretty powerful features, and I'd like to see them in more tools. And yeah, I don't think it's going to... It's definitely not a Notion replacement. I mean, you could if you really want to. I think people are doing company Roam databases because you can, it's collaborative. So, I haven't tried that yet but you can invite your whole team to it for instance, and all work on the same database.
Ben:
Hmm.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. If y'all want to try that, I could... I have the plans, so I could probably just invite you to one.
Ben:
I don't know. We might have to just stick with our old fashioned Emacs and text files.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I would try it out. I mean, I don't know if I have the bandwidth now to change my way of working.
Josh:
I don't think we need to do any kind of big experiment with it. I'd say check it out on your own. It does give me new... Well, it's a good way to... You can take ideas that you learn in other tools like this, and you can implement them in Notion as well. I still like Notion as our company knowledge database basically. Yeah, I'd say it's worth checking out. I mean, assuming you want to be cool.
Ben:
And I'm sure you have an affiliate link that we can use to sign up, so that you get a kick back.
Josh:
I don't think... Yeah, I don't... They're too cool for affiliate links. You have to be a... You really have to... You have to buy in. You have to buy into the cult. I'm not a huge fan of the whole cult thing.
Starr:
I don't know. We need to get some of this cult stuff for Honeybadger.
Josh:
Honeybadger cult?
Starr:
Yeah. We need to-
Josh:
The problem is that there's no leader. You don't have a three headed cult.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
So, one of us would really have to step up as the visionary.
Ben:
I nominate Starr to be our leader.
Starr:
You don't want to have the first oligarchical cult?
Josh:
How about this? We'll start a public room... Well, not a public.
Starr:
I mean, that's Tesla. I'm sorry.
Josh:
We'll start a collaborative Roam database, and we'll work on our charter, okay, Starr?
Starr:
Okay, got it.
Josh:
The first charter of the-
Starr:
And the handshake.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, that'll be in there.
Starr:
Yeah. All right. I think I sense us closing up and getting ready for our big finale. And by that, I mean, saying that this has been FounderQuest. If you want to review us, go to Apple Podcasts and do that. If you want to write for us, or for Honeybadger, go to honeybadger.io/blog, look for the write for us thing on the page. Get in touch with me. All right. Well, all right, see you guys later. Have a good weekend, and we'll see you next week.
Show notes:
Links:San Francisco Looking Like Blade Runner
The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States
Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
A People's History of the United States
Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris
The Dispossessed
I, Robot
The Murderbot Diaries
Foundation
The Unicorn Project
Open Yale Courses - The American Revolution
My Brilliant Friend
Bona Fide Masks
Full transcription:
Starr:
I got to tell you guys, this was just... I don't know. This makes up for the rest of 2020 for me personally but when I took all this equipment that I had bought for the fiber optic link between my house and the new office, and I hooked it up to the cable that had been buried by electricians who didn't really know what they were doing. Regarding fiber. And I hooked everything up. It just all worked the first time.
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
Wow.
Starr:
That was the most... This is the most amazing thing. I think that's what I need to get me through the rest of this year.
Josh:
For real.
Starr:
I'm just going to think back to that golden moment.
Josh:
Yeah. I still can't get anything but Comcast here and on top of that, we can barely breathe now because of the smoke outside.
Starr:
Oh yeah. I see the window behind you. It looks kind of apocalyptic.
Josh:
Can you see that?
Starr:
I can see it, yeah.
Josh:
It is daytime right now.
Starr:
I know. I know.
Josh:
It is so dark.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
I read that yesterday, it was so bad in San Francisco that the birds didn't even realize it was daytime.
Starr:
Really?
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Well, poor birds.
Josh:
Yeah, none of the roosters are crowing either.
Starr:
Yeah. I've just got to say though, Coit Tower in San Francisco was made for these apocalyptic red sky pictures. It's that really pointy tower.
Josh:
Yeah. Did you see the drone footage that someone did with the... Was it Blade Runner?
Ben:
Uh-huh.
Josh:
Yeah, the soundtrack.
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Oh, I need to find that.
Ben:
The air quality's been frustrating for me this week because I got my new kayak, and I was on vacation. I was like, "Yes, I'm going to paddle everyday all day long." And no. I did not paddle everyday all day long.
Starr:
Oh, that's frustrating.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I was thinking about you this week. How is it up there anyway? Because I was like, if you all are dealing with any of the stuff that we have done here, I wouldn't want to be out on a river right now.
Ben:
Yeah. Well, earlier in the week, we were getting Easterly winds. So, we were getting smoke from the fires in Eastern Washington. And so, our air quality index was hovering in the low 100s. So, 100 to 120-ish in my neck of the woods. And then, as of last night, now we're getting Southernly winds, so now we're getting the California, and Oregon smoke. So, now it's gone up... I think we're around the 200ish neighborhood. So, everyday I was hoping the next day would be a little bit better and everyday, it wasn't. So, finally on Thursday I'm like, "I'm just going." So, I just went and luckily, I didn't get overwhelmed by all the smoke. I was able to successfully complete the maiden voyage of the kayak.
Josh:
Did you enjoy it?
Ben:
Yeah. It was nice.
Josh:
Was it a good paddle?
Ben:
Yeah, it was great.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's good.
Starr:
Yeah. It's hazy here and unpleasant to breathe the air but it's not... It doesn't have the same world is ending vibes that are in Oregon, and San Francisco.
Josh:
Yeah. Apparently, you know Mike Perum, he was telling me that the air quality index inside his house is over 300.
Ben:
Oh, wow.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
How's he measuring that?
Josh:
Yeah. They are headed North. Yeah, he's got a little... I don't know. A little meter. Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, that's so cool.
Josh:
Yeah, I want one now.
Ben:
I found that you can buy them from Purple Air.
Josh:
Oh, really?
Ben:
Purpleair.com. Yes, they have both internal and external monitors. And they have a crowd sourced map of your local neighborhood air quality. Assuming, that someone in your neighborhood has one of their devices.
Josh:
Interesting. Okay. Oh, that's cool.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, cool.
Josh:
Yeah. I didn't really know anything about air quality... Like majoring air quality before. We've never really... Our air has always been pristine.
Ben:
Yeah. When you live in Washington state, it's like, "Yeah, the air's good."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Pretty much always.
Starr:
Yeah. It just comes in from the ocean, and it's always fresh. But apparently, if the air, or the ocean is full of smoke, then you're just... Yeah.
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
The worst part about this is it could not stop raining this Spring when we were all stuck quarantined inside. It just would not stop raining. And now, we're stuck inside due to the smoke and we just wish it could rain because it would dampen everything and it just won't rain. It's really doing the opposite.
Starr:
Yeah. Well, fortunately, I bought a bunch of... A resperator type mask, not the cloth masks, and they actually... If you wear one of those, you can't actually smell smoke in the air outside.
Josh:
Oh.
Starr:
Yeah. So, we just ordered 100 more of those just to have stockpiled. Yeah. So, we got those masks.
Josh:
And you look really cool when you go for your daily walks.
Starr:
Yes. So, I wear the... I use a respiratory type mask. They're not N95, they're KN95.
Josh:
Oh.
Starr:
By, I guess a reputable company that's been approved for use by the FDA for medical stuff or something. And so, they're legit good masks. And I tend to wear them whenever I go into enclosed spaces.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Or anywhere outside now. I guess everywhere. But I always wonder, do people think I'm too bougie because of my masks that I special order? Do they think I'm putting on airs?
Josh:
Well, I mean, maybe if you lived outside of Seattle. Yeah, I don't know. There's got to be other... You got to have some fellow mask wearers that you meet on the street and just quietly nod to.
Starr:
Oh, totally.
Ben:
All you got to do is get some big baggie pants, some big old boots, strap a keyboard across your back and then you can be all like, "Yeah. I'm Blade Runner cyberpunk."
Josh:
2020 nomad.
Starr:
Yeah. So, I've read a lot of cyberpunk literature and I don't really want to live in any of those worlds. So, no thank you.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
But one thing I do like about these masks, and I'm putting the link to put in the show notes in case anybody wants them because it's hard to find a decent place that's selling masks for not $1,000,000. It's not really on topic for the podcast but one thing I like about these, so, the American masks, the N95 ones tend to be shaped like a clamshell. They are this little round... It's like wearing a bowl on your face.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
But these KN95 masks are much more pointy in the front, and it almost gives off a plague doctor vibe.
Josh:
Hmm. Yeah. I like that.
Starr:
A miniature version of that.
Josh:
You see, my problem with the normal N95 masks is that my face is already shaped like a bowl.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
So yeah, they just don't really fit very well.
Starr:
I mean, bowls stack.
Josh:
Right? Yeah, they just need to be the proper relative size and it's all off. I got a big head.
Starr:
Well, so, what do you y'all want to talk about?
Josh:
I don't know. I was interested to see how Ben's vacation was going.
Ben:
Vacation's been awesome.
Josh:
Going good?
Ben:
Yeah. Aside from being locked indoors because of the smoke, it's been great. I think I need to take another week though. Do over thing, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh yeah. When the air gets better, you should definitely do that.
Josh:
I mean, seriously.
Ben:
I actually managed to not do any work aside from one hour thing where I was just doing some research on something.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Oh, really?
Ben:
Yeah. It's been amazing.
Starr:
Have we just not done tickets? Because I've been checking the diligently and there's really haven't been any when I've logged in. Or, maybe Josh has been taking care of them all? I don't know.
Josh:
I've been knocking them out in the mornings but it hasn't been too bad. The ones that have come in... Yeah, it seems like it's been a slow week. I mean, I've done a number of tickets but it hasn't been... I don't know. I think I've probably done six to 10, something like that.
Ben:
Oh, well, thank you for managing that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I've been doing a lot of reading, a lot of Sci-Fi. So, read I, Robot, and got started on Foundation.
Josh:
Awesome.
Starr:
Oh. How are you liking those?
Ben:
Yeah, I'm loving them. That's great stuff. I read the fourth book of the Murderbot series. Which is fantastic, you should definitely check that out. The first three are novellas, and the fourth is an actual novel.
Josh:
Hmm.
Ben:
So, they're quick reads, and they're fun. Basically, if you're not familiar with Murderbot, it's set in a future where this is sentient AI and Murder Bot is what's called a sec-unit, security unity. So, basically Murderbot is a hybrid robot human with some human organs and such. And basically, the job of the sec-unit is to guard colonists as they go and colonize planets. I don't want to give a lot of the story away but this sec-unit has adventures, and you get to follow along, and it's a lot of fun. So, you should definitely check it out.
Starr:
I was going to ask how they get past the first law of robotics?
Ben:
Ah, yes.
Starr:
Because bots aren't supposed to murder people but I guess by making a bot, human hybrid, it's the human parts that do the murder.
Ben:
Yeah. Well, their job is to defend other humans. So, if they have to kill a human to defend a human, well then it's okay, right?
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Starr:
That's a slippery slope, Ben.
Josh:
This is where the FX really come in.
Starr:
That's a really slippery slope. Yeah. Okay. So, you've got a trolley, and...
Ben:
And that's the I, Robot. If you haven't read that, that's...These first laws... These laws of robotics and stuff, and that's where they were created, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And the book does a great job of dealing with some of those interesting dilemmas that can come from these laws that they have to abide by, and interacting with them. And it's not a long read. So, if you haven't read it, it's a classic, and you should definitely check it out.
Josh:
iRobot, you mean?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. I haven't read that one. I'll have to do that. I finished the first book of The Expanse though, and that was fun.
Ben:
Yeah, those are fun.
Josh:
Yeah. I do wish I had read the book before watching the series. Even though the book was really... It had a lot more detail, so it was still a fun read but I hate having the picture... Picturing the characters in my head when you already know them. It's hard to get that image out.
Starr:
Oh yeah. That's why I still haven't watched the Magician series because I really like The Magicians book series and I saw the preview on Netflix and I'm just like, "No. That's not who those people are. I'm sorry."
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about... Even the Lord of the Rings, as much as I liked those... As much as they were really well done, I still wonder sometimes if I wish that they had never been made just because I loved the book so much as a kid. I love the movies, they're awesome but yeah. You feel like you lose a little bit of... You lose something when someone else interprets it for you.
Starr:
I've got to ask y'all, do y'all ever when you're reading a book, do you ever in your minds eye cast different people from different parts of your life as a character in a book?
Josh:
No.
Ben:
No.
Starr:
No?
Josh:
No. Do you do this? That's... I kind of want to now.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, it's unconscious but...
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I was just thinking about because of The Magician's, there's this one character, Alice, and I realized as I was reading The Magician's, it's like, "Oh, Alice is this person I knew in high school." And it's not the same person but in terms of what she looks like, what her mannerisms are, her general vibe and background.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know. I have trouble... I don't know, the way I visualize, it's like... It's not like... I have trouble visualizing things extremely clearly. So, I don't know if I'd relate it to someone specific like an image or something.
Starr:
I learned recently that some people do not have an internal monologue.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Which is kind of cool. I'm assuming y'all have internal monologues, but if you don't no judgment. I don't know, you just assume everybody works like you and then it doesn't happen that way.
Josh:
I'm glad you said that, Starr because before that my internal monologue was judging you but you're good now.
Starr:
Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I'm reading five history books right now for some reason. And it's getting...
Ben:
I believe that reason is because you're taking a history course.
Josh:
Well, that's a big part of it but I was also reading history books for fun before that, and those are still ongoing, so now I have... I don't know if you ever differentiate between week, and weekend reading. I'll have my... Not necessarily work books but books that are more for development of knowledge, or things that I want to have read that I'm making myself read, and then books that I'm really excited about. And sometimes I'll save those. So, I'll switch my books on the weekend and read whatever the fun books are. Well, they've converged. So, they're all the same at this point.
Ben:
It's good when you can enjoy your work.
Josh:
Yeah. But I am really enjoying the history class still and it's been a lot of fun. And it's also been nice being self-paced because... In a normal class, like college class, I don't know, I always... I was always intimidated by the pressure of having to get the work done by... You have to get it done by the deadline, and then move on, and there's no room... For instance, if you actually got interested in a topic, and wanted to go down a rabbit hole for a little while, you don't have the time but in a self-paced online course, if something really strikes you, you can pause for a week and go read some other book on it or something. So, I highly recommend it if you ever feel like taking a course but not actually taking a course.
Ben:
Yeah. I mean, that's how I could get my law degree. I'll do it all online.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
I don't know. For some reason, early this year I really started thinking about going back, or finishing my degree because I have a half-completed computer science degree. And I decided I wouldn't go back for computer science because for some reason, I'm just... I don't... I'm already doing well enough without a computer science degree, so there's other things I'm more interested in. And this would be purely for... I guess just for selfish fun reasons. But there's a lot of options online. Especially, this year things are shifting it seems to where... I think we're going to have a lot more options in the future. So, maybe you will get your law degree.
Josh:
Yeah. I did learn that history majors are common for pre-law though, Ben. So, if I did get a history degree, then we could both be lawyers some day. We could start a Honeybadger law practice.
Ben:
Well, when we start our Honeybadger commune, we're going to have to have politicians, right?
Starr:
Wait, what? Don't we just send all of them to the guillotine? What?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
We're getting away from them, that's why I did the commune.
Ben:
So, that actually reminds me of another book,the Dispossessed, is a novel about a group of people that... They're humans that are on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti and they basically... Historical to this character, 170 years back or something, a splinter group left the main population and moved to the moon basically, this planet's moon. And started this communal living experiment where basically they're all anarchists. And I really enjoyed the books description of their society. Ursula K. Le Guin, I'm not sure how you pronounce the name. But she goes to, I think, great lengths to describe... It's a utopia but it's not perfect. So, it's not really a utopia, right? But the idea is like, "Oh, this is a utopia novel but it shows some of the downsides you might find in any society."
Ben:
And so, I liked... Because I think some of the utopian novels get a little tired after a while. It's like, "Oh yeah, everything's wonderful and blah, blah, blah." But this one is trying to bring some realism to the idea of, "Well, okay. What if we had this ideal community? What would it look like? Okay. And then, now what might be some of the problems?" And in this case, some of the problems are... My comment about needing a politician for a commune comes from this because one of the problems that arises in this community, even though they're anarchists and they're basically all looking out for just the welfare of the community, still that generates over time, that generates some habits, some bureaucracies even.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And the main character is basically the story is rebelling against this what has come to be a Government, even though they don't believe in Government.
Josh:
Yeah. That sounds plausible.
Ben:
Yeah. It's a fun read.
Starr:
That makes sense. It's interesting to think about this stuff for when our grandchildren are running Honeybadger. And they look up at those bronze statues of the three of us and think, "God, what would they do? They were so wise."
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Or, maybe as they're rising up from the ashes of the society that fell apart in 2020 due to climate change, and COVID.
Starr:
No, that stuff's real. Well, see, I'll chip in with my books. I recently finished The Neapolitan Quartet Of Novels by Elena Ferrante. These are really... These came out five or six years ago and were super... Everybody gushed over them. Rightfully, because they're super good. But yeah, the novels basically trace this friendship of these two girls who grew up to be women, and they're in Italy. And it traces their friendship throughout their lives. And it's really interesting. And as a side thing... It's not really a main... It's not really something that gets really discussed in a lot of detail but one of the women is basically, an early programmer of IBM mainframes, and starts a start up. And I didn't even know this going into it but that was interesting to see.
Josh:
So, it's a start up book? Is that what you're saying?
Starr:
Yeah. Totally start up book.
Josh:
Okay.
Starr:
Yeah. The first one's called My Brilliant Friend. Yeah, the first two books in the series are great, the third book I was like, "I've got to read this but I really am hating everything the characters are doing." And then, the fourth book it was like, "Argh." So, I don't know. Maybe the first two books I would recommend and then just dip your toe in the third and see if you like it.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Speaking of start up books, so I also read recently The Unicorn Project.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's a good one.
Ben:
Which is the... Yeah, the sequel to The Phoenix Project.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I couldn't relate to it a whole lot because like The Phoenix Project, it's all about big business.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
And how IT and ops and stuff work inside very large organizations, which we are not. But it was a fun story anyway, just like The Phoenix Project was. It was... I really like how that particular author structures the lessons learned around a narrative.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And I don't typically want that in my business books. Usually, I want something that's a little drier and just to the point. Like The Tiny MBA that we talked about last week. But in this case, I think it works because the story is good enough.
Josh:
Yeah. And the story helps... I like how it helps put you... Because like you said, it's not relatable to us from experience. So, it gives you that experience of living through what it's like to work in a large enterprise like that. Because I don't ever... Well, I guess never say never but I don't expect to ever have that experience specifically. But it's important to understand, especially for our business obviously. You want to know... It puts us inside of our potential customers too. So, any kind of book that can put you in someone else's shoes in business or industry, I like those kind of books.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Maybe we should make that one is relatable to our size of business and we could call it The Jabberwocky Project.
Ben:
I like it. Or, The Lemur Project because everybody loves lemurs, right?
Josh:
You should totally write that book, Starr.
Starr:
I don't know lemurs were mythical.
Josh:
The Lemur Project.
Ben:
Oh, right. These are mythical creatures. I forgot about that. I kind of thought phoenix's and unicorns were real.
Starr:
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Ben:
My world view is crushed.
Starr:
Well, Phoenix, Arizona's real.
Josh:
True. I've been there. Yeah, I think the next business book I read will be... I haven't gone through Tiny MBA yet so I'll... Still got that on my desk. I'll be getting to that at some point. I think five to six books is definitely... I used to be one book, single threaded reader because I used to... Well, before that, I'd just have a bunch of books and read none of them. So, I decided, if I'm going to get through books, I have to just focus on one, get it done, and then not let myself start another one. And then, I got really good at that, so then, I went back to the older approach where I could have a couple different threads going. But I'm reaching the limit now. Yeah. Do you want to hear some history books that I'm reading?
Starr:
Of course, yeah.
Josh:
Because I don't think I've ever... I haven't actually named any of them. So, I've been reading The Federalist Papers for way too long. I've been trying to read that book my entire adult life, okay? And for a long time, I just wasn't... I don't know. I wasn't at the level of reader to have the patience to get through it, I think. But I'm on... This morning, I finished Federalist's 76 of 85. And so, I'm almost done. That one in particular, since it's a primary source... If you don't know what they are, they're papers written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in 1788. In favor of gratifying the constitution of the United States. There's 85 of them and each one is like a paper... It was like a newspaper article. But they were published at the time, as like a...
Josh:
And I didn't actually know this until recently but it was really a pitcher to advertisement. So, there's a little bit of... You can't necessarily read them completely at face value. There's a little bit of propaganda going on in there too.
Ben:
They were hyping it up.
Josh:
Yeah, they were hyping the constitution basically. But it's really interesting because it goes through point by point, arguing the specific details of every little decision that went into the document. But it's a really good slow... I wouldn't want to sit down and read this cover to cover in a few weeks. I don't know. You could but it's... I found reading one... I read one a day, and just spread it out. But yeah, I'm almost through that. And then, this class I'm taking, there's a few book but one is Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon Wood, which has been pretty interesting so far. I'm only five chapters in but the general idea is you think they're radicals but it's not necessarily for the same reasons that you thought. They were much more British than a lot of people think.
Josh:
So, the actual act of rebelling from Britain was almost a pretty English thing to do. So, that wasn't necessarily radical in itself but it was really like... You've heard the quote, "The Revolution happened in the minds of the people." It's kind of along those lines where it wasn't necessarily the actual act of the revolutionary war, it was the larger sea-change shift that happened in the people over the whatever years of... Interim years. So, that's interesting. And then, the textbook is actually really good that goes with this class which is called Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution and it has a lot of... It's a collection of primary sources. So, you get to read the perspective of all the different people at the time from the era. Even it might just be someone's diary, their day-to-day, like The Unicorn Project but for colonists. So, yeah.
Josh:
And I'm also reading a biography of Hitler because I mean, 2020, it just seems like a good... Demagoguery is a good thing to study right now. So, that's my weekend book. And I guess... Yeah. I'm surprised I'm not more depressed.
Josh:
If you haven't ever studied Hitler and the era, it is really interesting of how societies shift to embracing something that terrible and radical, and all the political and cultural trends that go along with it that aren't really specific to the era. There are definitely things that were specific to the era but then, there's also things that you can pull out and be like, "Oh. Okay, we have that going on today for sure." If you put it all together, you'd probably end up with some kind of similar result. Luckily, there are definitely things that are not happening... Other trends that are not happening currently which gives me some hope. But it gives you things to watch out for.
Ben:
That's cool.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
So, do you feel like this has been a good use of your time, taking this class?
Josh:
I mean, in times where you're not sure what the heck is going on, then nothing helps better than more perspective. It definitely beats reading the news.
Ben:
There's a quote, I don't know who said this but it's like... And I'm sure I'm butchering it because I don't remember it exactly but it's basically, "History doesn't necessarily repeat itself but it rhymes."
Josh:
Yeah. I love that quote.
Ben:
Yeah. So, I love studying these people, and their lives. I was reading the George Washington book by Ron Chernow recently.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And covering all that same time period, and seeing as it progresses, these photoless papers, they dripped out, and they were responses to criticisms about, "We don't want a strong federal Government. We're afraid of having a strong, centralized Government." We just got away from that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And then, even Madison turned away from his support of the strong federal Government over time and came more aligned with Jefferson's views.
Josh:
Right. And that was the falling out with Hamilton I think, right?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And as you read their experiences and their opinions as time went by, you get to see, "Oh yes, that does echo some of the things that we're seeing today in our environment." And you can definitely learn-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Get some perspective from them.
Josh:
Yeah. That's one of the major shifts that has stuck out to me, is the idealized view that you get if you got American history in college... I mean, in high school, or took a college class or something. You get this image that it was an ideal time or something and things today are just completely... Things have shifted to be terrible today in politics. They were dealing with just as major issues back then, if not worse. They had to deal with monarchy on top of it. Yeah, it's very similar dynamics. And like you said it's not... It doesn't repeat but it's definitely similar themes, and similar... Well, people, humans put in similar situations tend to behave in similar ways. You have similar outcomes in some cases. Politics has not changed all that much.
Starr:
You can see pretty clear consequences too from those arguments because I mean, there are a couple of issues in America right now where a strong federal response would be quite helpful.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
And we just haven't quite seen that. And we're suffering because of it. And that's not necessarily an argument one way or the other but it's definitely a consequence. A while ago, I read A History of Thinking, or finance or something like that for central banks and it was talking about how America around the turn of the century I think... I think that's the time we're talking about. The previous century, not the aughts, was just having... The economy was constantly in this boom bus cycle, it was very unstable.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
And European economies had, had this basically worked out. They didn't have these boom bust cycles. And the reason was is that they figured out, "Hey, we can make a central bank and set monetary policy and that will prevent these things." I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, I think... One of the things that spurred the creation of the fed, which isn't really a central bank in the way that other countries have, it's this weird...
Josh:
Sort of like a public private system?
Starr:
Yeah, it's a private sector made up of 20 different regional banks. That came about because essentially, there was a man-made famine in America and essentially, the reason for that was... Well, food production, it was all domestic back then pretty much. And when it was time to harvest the crops, what the farmers would do, was they would go to the bank, and they would take out a loan, and they would use the loan to pay their workers to pick the crops. And then, they would go and sell the crops, and then pay back the loan. But the thing is, they were on the gold standards, so the banks had to have gold in their vaults to equal the amounts of loans that were given or something like that. And they... Somebody... I don't know, something happened and they didn't distribute gold... The banks didn't have enough gold, so they couldn't give out the loans, so the crops rotted in the fields and people couldn't eat.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
And then, it took that sort of magnitude of events for American's to get over their reluctance to trust national systems. And even then, they were like, "Well, okay. But we've got to have... We can't just have a national bank. It's got to be this weird Rube Goldberg machine to convince ourselves it's not really a national bank."
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Yeah, the whole federal, non-federal debate has been happening since our founding, for sure. And maybe it will never end. I don't think it will ever end.
Ben:
Well, we have fresh water for that debate now. Like the whole managing elections. Like Starr said, a number of things recently could be better handled by having a more centralized, stronger federal Government even that we have today.
Josh:
Yeah. One of the things that does seem to be different today, and it might not be, it might just be that there's so much more noise and we literally have every piece of information that anyone... Anything anyone is saying at this moment is being dumped online, and shoveled into our brains or whatever. But I do appreciate some of the actual policy debates that you read from that era. And even, well, if you look... The early Presidents were the same people who wrote a lot of the constitution, they were lawyers a lot of them, and other similar professions. So, their ability to actually talk and work through issues logically, and speak about the actual policy instead of being politicians. There was definitely politicing but political campaigning was not really... It's not like it is today.
Josh:
I'd just be shocked today if for instance if we had a President of the United States who actually wrote a well-reasoned piece about constitutional law for example which did happen back then because they were capable of it, and it was... I guess it was a lot smaller society too so there were fewer people working on that stuff. But I do appreciate that from the time. And again, it might just be that those were the things that survived. And so, I'm assuming not everyone was reading these things necessarily. But it would be nice if people actually talked about the issues and kept the politics a little bit more to the side.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, I think people's... They still can. I think Barack Obama, and I think Bill Clinton talked about constitutional laws. So, I'm sure they could talk about it.
Josh:
Yeah. But they didn't.
Starr:
Well, yeah but they wouldn't have got elected then because that's not how the system works.
Josh:
Right. Exactly, yeah. And that's what I'm saying.
Starr:
We put the founding... We put the people who made the constitution up on this pedestal without necessarily realizing that it's like, okay, well, they kind of invented the system that we're living in now. So, not saying I would have done any better but they created circumstances in which this thing that we have now evolved. So, they're not completely... I don't know. They're not completely blameless for the current situation.
Josh:
Oh. Yeah, I'm absolutely not... I'm not trying to talk them up at all. I'm just saying if more people wrote even today about major issues... Fine. If you give your whatever, stump speech or something, and you don't have to go through the finer points of public policy or something, or even major... I would hope you would cover major issues but that doesn't seem to be the case. But maybe you could write a medium article or something.
Ben:
This is one of the things that really impressed about was with Warren.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
One of the things I really liked about her, is that she took the time-
Josh:
Same.
Ben:
And thought out those kinds of things. And not that every politician has to be like Elizabeth Warren, and has to have this great resource of thought but more of that would I think definitely be useful. Or, at least, more evaluating of that would definitely be useful. George Washington wasn't a lawyer, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Wasn't a great thinker necessarily as far as Hamilton was, or Madison was, or even Jefferson, right? But he appreciated all of those thoughts, all of those writings that came from those people. He had Hamilton, and Jefferson both in his cabinet, who went at each other's throats because they were ideologically on opposite sides of the issues, right? But he valued the exchange of ideas, and the effort, and the thought that went into those works that both Jefferson and Hamilton did. And I think if we had more people like that, that would definitely help us out.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's a good point. Like I said, they didn't have real political parties back then. I mean, they had the federalists, and republic, like the Jeffersonian Republicans. And it was started to evolve but it wasn't like the camps that we have today. And like you said, they both had to work together and argue it out in the President's office basically. I don't know. The other thing that is interesting about parties is they talked a lot about factions back then. If you read some of the writings, and what they say about factions, you're thinking, "Oh yeah, that's like political parties today. These different groups of people that grouped together and have a similar platform and stuff." But in a lot of cases, the faction that they were worried about was actually between the individual colonies themselves because the colonies all viewed themselves as individual... Almost like individual countries.
Josh:
And in some cases, like if you lived in one of the colonies, you would know more about England than you would know about some of your neighbors. And so, they're literally thinking, "Well, these foreigners down South... These are the factions that we have to worry about." So, that changed my thinking a little bit when you think about parties. It was such a different period. Everything almost meant something different than what we would take it to mean today. Like, party, liberty, all these words had completely different meanings to them than they do to us.
Starr:
Person.
Josh:
What? Yeah. Person. Right. And yeah, obviously. But I like... When you go deep studying it, it helps to understand how things evolved to where they are today and hopefully looking back helps to make things better in the future.
Starr:
One can hope.
Starr:
I guess that was our Summer reading episode.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
This is our common sense with Honeybadger episode. Next time, I'll have to get back to actual technology and business.
Starr:
All right. Well, this has been Founder Quest. And if you want to... I don't know. I don't know if I should ask people to rate us after this one because it's kind of off topic. So, if you don't like the off topic thing, don't rate us. But if you do, go ahead and rate us at Apple Podcast. If you want to write for us, we still hire people to do blog posts and stuff. Go to honeybadger.io/blog and look for the Write For Us link to read the whole thing and get in touch with me. And yeah, it was great talking with y'all and I hope that you have a good apocalypse this week.
Show Notes:
Links:
Horrorstör
Tiny MBA
Great Nuts
AntiRSI
MotivAider
Pomodoro Technique
Full Transcript:
Starr:
So, I've got to say, this is kind of a brag. It's completely off topic but I've got to tell somebody. I'm very proud of myself. You know how in any... I don't know. Whenever you watch movies or TV about prison, or weird situations, there's always somebody who's a genius at making booze, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, yeah. Like the trash bag or whatever?
Starr:
Yeah. You take whatever's in your environment and you somehow make booze out of it. Well, I think I'm kind of like that with ice cream. I think I'm the same with ice cream.
Josh:
Some garbage bag ice cream?
Starr:
No, not garbage bag ice cream. But I was just like... Yesterday, I was like-
Josh:
Some bathtub ice cream?
Starr:
Yesterday I was like, "I really want ice cream but I don't have any cream."
Josh:
Gotcha. Okay.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. So, I was like, "Okay. I need my fat source. I need my source of milk solids. I need a sugar source."
Josh:
Yeah, you're going all chemist on it.
Starr:
Oh yeah, yeah, totally. It does harken back into the chemistry stuff. But actually, it turns out, if you take a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a package of Philadelphia cream cheese, and you add a little bit of milk to dilute them, and then blend them in a blender, and then put them in an ice cream maker, it makes pretty serviceable ice cream. It's a little bit sweet for my taste but it worked out.
Josh:
It's good to know.
Josh:
Sounds like some sort of new form of gelatto or something.
Starr:
Yeah. Something like that.
Josh:
I don't know. You got to come up with a name for that.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Like your own name.
Starr:
I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. We don't have to do it on the air. I'm not... Not to put you on the spot.
Starr:
No. No. I'm not going to give that way to... I'm not going to give that away. You got to pay for that.
Starr:
Yeah. So, on Monday, we had our all hands meeting and... Except Ben wasn't here because he was taking some sort of time of which is just amazing. It's unprecedented.
Josh:
Yeah. Can we say why, Ben?
Ben:
I suppose.
Josh:
It's because Monday was Ben's birthday. Happy birthday, Ben.
Starr:
Oh, happy birthday.
Ben:
Thank you. Thank you.
Josh:
I'm pretty sure he hates this. So, I'm sorry, this is not your birthday present.
Starr:
I'm sorry. We won't sing. We won't sing.
Ben:
There was no ice cream involved but there was cream cheese. My birthday dessert was cream cheese sopapilla. So tasty.
Starr:
Oh.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yes. Yes.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
Sounds good.
Starr:
I'm really curious what that's like. But anyway, the thing that you missed, you missed our all hands meeting. It was lonely without you but we made do. And we had an interesting conversation I thought about the way that which we work, right? We're all working on computers all day. We all feel rushed. We're doing this stuff. It leads to surmounting pressure and tension. And I really enjoyed having a conversation with everybody about that. I learned that some people are into yoga in our office. I'm a little bit into yoga. I'm a baby yoga person. A baby yogee. We talked about balance boards, and how Josh is like... I don't know. It just seems like Back To The Future to me, you're on the hoverboard all day, just sitting there typing.
Josh:
It does kind of feel like a hoverboard, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah?
Josh:
I'm not on it right now.
Starr:
Well, unfortunately.
Josh:
Just because I... I don't know.
Starr:
You should do that more-
Josh:
I know If I always used it during the podcast, I know that at some point I'll probably wipe out.
Starr:
That's why I was saying you should do it. We should capture that.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. I discussed a little bit about how I found that just trying to do things quickly is kind of stressful. And so, things that are... Email checking that doesn't require a bunch of... It's not too thoughtful and I tend to just be like, "Delete. Delete. Delete." Just go through as quick as possible. I've been trying to purposely slow that down just a little bit. And we're talking about it adds an extra five minutes. So, not really that much longer, and that's helpful. I'm not saying I want to do the whole podcast about this, I just wanted to mention that because I just really enjoyed talking with everybody about that stuff. I think that's a good... It makes me happy that we're doing these bi-weekly check ins.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it was a good chat.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. That reminded me, I had to turn off my bell of mindfulness because I realized it was probably going to chime.
Starr:
Oh, you did? So, you go one?
Josh:
Well, I downloaded the app to check it out, and turn the thing on. So, every 15 minutes or whatever it dings.
Starr:
Oh yeah. I forgot I told y'all about that. So, that is-
Josh:
Yeah. I kind of like it actually. It's... Yeah, you have to say what it is but yeah, it's cool. It does bring you out of the moment and then lets you refocus.
Starr:
Yeah. So, it's just a really simple app. It's the plum village app which is... It's released by this monastery in France, it's a Buddhist monastery and as part of it... I mean, it's all free and stuff but as part of it, they have this basically that will... It's this meditation bell, this really long, and really... You have an option of a couple of them.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And it just rings every 15 minute so you just remember to be like, "Oh yeah, I exist in the world. I'm not just eyes looking and fingers typing."
Josh:
Yeah. It came about in this discussion on Monday I think because we got talking about when you're in deep focus at work, especially on a computer, I think Starr you mentioned you've experienced this and I have too to some extent, you can get really absorbed to the point where you're almost in some kind of... I don't know. It can be a little stressful after a while because... At least for me, I find myself, my breathing tends to get more shallow, and I stop blinking. So, having something to break you out of that and remind you, "Oh, you shouldn't work for... You shouldn't spend two hours in that state." And pomodoro technique for instance is something people created to create some sort of more focused schedule where you still remember to take breaks and let your mind wander and stuff.
Josh:
So, to me, this seems a little bit... It fulfills a little bit of that. It's not as structured but it's just a thing that reminds you, prompts you basically to stop and think for a minute before continuing in your work or whatever.
Starr:
Yeah. It's really cute because my little daughter is... She's obviously noticed there's a bell going off. And so, I told her what it was, "It's like, you take your breath." And so, she'll hear it, and she'll just be like, "Hmm-Ha." And then, just go back to whatever she was doing. But it's cute because it's so... It's kind of just like... I mean, it's "I'm just going to take this breath then I'm going to get back to what I'm doing." It's... I don't know. It's a little bit beside the point but she's learning, it's pretty cool.
Josh:
That's cool. It reminds me of... There's this thing called a MotivAider. It's M-O-T-I-V-A-I-D-E-R. And we can link it up. It's like a little timer device that's used by behavioral specialists, and psychologists and stuff I guess basically in helping to reinforce habits. But I think it could probably serve a similar purpose, where basically it's just a device to prompt you to remember to do something on a regular basis, or a semi-random basis. I think it has a couple of different settings. But it's the same idea. Basically, if it's something that your mind doesn't consciously remember to do on the cycle that you want it to happen, like a habit for instance, it helps to establish that and remind you.
Starr:
Can I just say that I just now looked up MotivAider, like MotivAider on Google and-
Josh:
Doesn't it look super old school? It goes really well with my pager.
Starr:
Well, yeah. But there's also apparently a quick charge automotive battery charger named the motivator and I thought that was it. And I was just like, "This is intense. It's got these giant wires coming out of it. This giant box."
Josh:
It just really helps you recharge, Starr.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
It zaps you. It zaps you out of the moment.
Starr:
I'm imagining a Clockwork Orange scene.
Josh:
Yeah. Your eyes wide open.
Starr:
It just shocks you violently every five minutes.
Josh:
Yep. Well, that would be the wrong way to practice something like the piano for instance. We were talking about... I know piano teachers back in the day, like my mom's piano teacher for instance, she would always tell me... Because when I was learning to play the piano, and you have to learn how to... Remember to keep your hands in the proper position. And the old school teachers would use a sharpened pencil tip under your palm to basically... So, it's like you have a real incentive to keep your-
Ben:
Oh, mine used an orange.
Josh:
Was it an orange? Well, you were lucky. I guess I was too. I didn't get the pencil either. Yeah.
Starr:
I'm wondering who ate those grubby oranges after kids have been putting their hands all over them.
Josh:
I don't know. But I guess the point is, is that something like the MotivAider, or something like it is the more humane way to remember to use proper posture at the piano.
Starr:
Yeah. Definitely. And also, naming your... Using a clever pun spelling for your product name makes it really un-Googleable.
Josh:
Or a meme.
Starr:
Yeah, or a meme. Or a meme. Yeah. Oh my gosh.
Josh:
We're one to talk.
Starr:
Yep, these are very unique product name.
Josh:
Hi, I'm Randall, and I'm the founder of Honeybadger.
Starr:
No, no, no, no. No, we never saw that. We saw that after we created the company. We only saw that after.
Ben:
So, along the lines of things helping you to remember to do things, I use an app on the Mac called Anti-RSI. And what it does, is it has a configurable timer that reminds you to take a work break. So, I think I have mine set at every hour or so. And then, you can configure how long a break is. So, I think mine is three minutes. And so, you can... It just pops up this overlay that says, "Hey, go take a break." And then, it does a countdown timer that you define.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
And so, I used that to remind myself to get up, walk around, get a glass of water, that sort of thing.
Josh:
So, that sounds a little bit like a Pomodoro timer but just with less... Yeah, fewer rules. It's just one work session, right? You work for a set amount of time, and then take a break, come back.
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
That's cool. It's funny, all these things we just mentioned basically do exactly the same thing which basically just prompts you to remember to do something.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
On a timer.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
There must be something there.
Ben:
One non-app, non-device that you can use for that though is just drink a lot of water and then periodically, you're going to have to get up to go the bathroom.
Josh:
Right. That does work. Yeah.
Starr:
I feel called out here. When we do conclave, I always have to go to the bathroom twice as much as everybody else.
Josh:
It's nature's motivator.
Starr:
It's nature's motivator. There you go. That's like the kids who drink a lot of water on Christmas Eve so they'll wake up extra early and bug their parents on Christmas Day.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what our... I mean, it seems like you could put any kind of... There's any number of applications for these type of devices. So, if yours Ben is Anti-RSI, which is completely... I'd buy that. I'd buy that along with my Pomodoro, and my MotivAider. Because they all do the same thing. I have RSI so obviously I don't want to make my RSI worse. So, I wonder, maybe that's an opportunity. You just find a problem that can be helped by regularly habitual activity, and then label it with the thing that it's fixing, like specific thing that it's fixing.
Josh:
And then just put an app in the app store.
Starr:
Today, on FounderQuest, timers.
Ben:
So, we can build an anti-hunger app that just reminds you to go eat?
Josh:
Yeah, exactly.
Starr:
There you go. There you go. Speaking of timers by the way, this is a complete tangent, I'm just going to gripe, I'm going to put this out into the universe, maybe somebody will inform me but I just want a microwave that just has a mechanical timer on it with minutes. That's all I want. Maybe another setting where it's a mechanical with power setting. That's all I want. I'm tired of digital... Of having to press a button.
Josh:
Like a mechanical dial. Like one of those old school kitchen timers would be cool.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Wouldn't it? Yeah.
Starr:
We used to have one a long time ago when microwaves were new and before everything was digital, and it was really awesome. Or, I mean, my parents had one. I'm not really old enough to have had that myself. Anyway, that's just my little gripe.
Josh:
Maybe you can find one and refurbish it, and bring it back to life.
Starr:
There we go. That's how I want to spend my time.
Josh:
"I'm Starr and I'm really into restoring old microwaves."
Starr:
Yeah, like Pimp My Microwave. This here is an 83 Victorilux.
Josh:
Look, I mean, you could have a thriving YouTube channel I'm sure. It's amazing the things that people will narrow... Get specific about, and it's just their thing now and the people they'll find to watch it. Yeah. It's pretty fascinating.
Starr:
Oh yeah, and especially since there's always a risk of death because it's really high voltage.
Ben:
But if you have a digital microwave, you don't need the mindfulness app because you can just set your timer on your microwave for 15 minutes.
Josh:
Oh, yeah, that's true.
Starr:
That's terrible for the planet. Terrible for the planet. We're supposed to hack the planet, not destroy it, Ben.
Ben:
And every developer can have a microwave on their desk for... Set it for an hour timer so they'll get up and go walk around.
Starr:
Oh, God. I worked at offices where that seems like that was actually the case.
Josh:
Yeah. I was going to say only if there's stale popcorn in it.
Starr:
Yeah. Actually, on one of our podcasts, we had this backlogger podcast topic, this is getting pretty small. This is one reason we just have these spur of the moment episodes.
Josh:
We don't really add to it.
Starr:
Nor do we really take away from it. Anyway, the reason that I was mentioning this is that one of the things on it was, "What do you miss about working for the man?" And I'm not quite sure this is... There's enough there to make an actual episode about but I guess if I miss anything, it would be endless free soda water. I've got to get my own soda water now, it's a pain in the ass.
Josh:
Wait, did someone bring you soda water?
Starr:
Well, no but there was a refrigerator, you go get it, it's fine.
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
But then, the microwave situation, people make popcorn in there, they heat up leftovers and I have a very... I have sensory things. I'm very sensitive to smells, and so it's just so, so annoying. I'm so glad I only have to deal with my own smells. That's the best thing about working from home, is I only have to smell myself.
Josh:
Yeah. And your loved ones.
Starr:
And my loved ones, yeah. My kids are pretty stinky.
Josh:
I never really worked for the man a whole lot. I've been self-employed for a really long time.
Ben:
Yeah. I think the biggest thing that I miss from the last office scenario I was in, was the unlimited snacks. I ate way too many cashews at the last office I was in because I love cashews.
Josh:
You all realize that all of these problems you're mentioning are easily solved. Like for instance, buying cashews or a soda maker, right? I'll go on Amazon and fix this for you right now if you want me to.
Ben:
Yeah, it's kind of silly. But it's different when you-
Starr:
But then you have to keep doing it.
Josh:
No, I know. It is. You have it all, and it was done for you. You didn't have to think about it. It's all stocked. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I remember my first job out of college was at a start up and this was back in the .com boom days. And there was a fridge in the office kitchen that was fully stocked. And it just blew my mind that I could just walk up to the kitchen, get a thing of ham, and some cheese, and some sandwich bread and make a sandwich, and take that back to... That was just really weird to me. Why are you feeding me whatever I want to eat? And then, I overtime realized, "Oh, it's because you don't want me to leave."
Josh:
"You mean, I have value? There's a reason you want me here?"
Ben:
Yeah, it was strange.
Starr:
Yeah, that's the secret. And I don't know, it's interesting being on the side of employing people. We don't really do any of this stuff because we're not evil. I mean, evil's a bit of a harsh phrase but we just don't really do it. But I don't know, it does make things occur to me a bit more. It's like, "Oh yeah, this is how you extract a little bit more value out of people."
Ben:
Yeah, it's... Well, I mean, one thing, we don't have an office, right? So, we can't provide snacks and meals and so on. But the whole thing about having that, those free snacks, to me it's not just that it's free but also that, I don't have to do anything a part from having to show up.
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
All I have to do, is walk over to the bin and fill up my handful of nuts and walk away.
Josh:
Yeah. I was going to say, I think there's probably something to be said for the decisions that are reduced that you don't have to make in order to have those benefits and stuff. I wonder if now that... Because I know there are entire positions, maybe even departments in... I don't know, whatever they call it, for corporate... For hospitality for employees or whatever. There's a position of whatever, managing entertainment, food, snacks, all the stuff that in a large modern office, if the switch to remote is... If large companies start doing that, do you think that there will be departments that are in charge of... Or maybe there are, in charge of employee happiness at home? Maybe you'll start getting boxes of stuff, like snack boxes delivered to your door or whatever so you can have that experience.
Starr:
Oh, I want that.
Josh:
Right?
Starr:
Can Honeybadger just provide me with a continuous stream of soda delivery?
Josh:
I think actually there... I've seen... There are some... I think there's some start up... Services that do that, like snack subscription. We've talked about that in the past I think a little bit but I wonder if companies buying those for their employees is a thing.
Starr:
Yeah, maybe. I know my partner at work said... She works at a really large company, and they are... They definitely are... They kicked up the working from home budget to spend on your workspace and everything. So, I know they're thinking about it.
Ben:
On this topic, if you want to provide some snacks to your employees remotely, of course you can just order some stuff and ship them. And you should definitely check out greatnuts.com. They were featured recently in a... Forbes or something? And they had this story about how they were the main supplier for American Airlines, and then American Airlines called them up one day and said, "You know what? We're not going to have anymore nuts. Thanks very much, have a great day."
Josh:
No more nuts.
Ben:
And this company's like, "Well, we're sitting on a year's worth of inventory. So, what are we going to do?" And so, they tried to ramp up their eCommerce arm pretty quickly and I decided to buy a couple bags of nuts to support them. And it's great stuff. If you put it in the microwave for a few seconds, it's like you're sitting in first class.
Josh:
But I can just like... He's got his little tray.
Josh:
He's going to his kids and like, "Hey, here, take this tray. And I'm going to go. Just bring this in, in a few minutes."
Ben:
And bring me a hot towel.
Starr:
The chair you're sitting in though looks too comfy for first class. You got to get a less comfy chair. Got to suck those legs in. I mean, do you think leg room's free?
Josh:
Just sitting by the window.
Ben:
So, maybe we should subscribe to... All Honeybadger employers to a delivery of great nuts on a regular basis maybe. Once a month drop off some.
Josh:
That'd be a cool... Yeah.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah, I'd take some nuts.
Josh:
I'd be down.
Starr:
You say they're really great. So, I know these people are honest.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
A+, would buy again.
Josh:
Will this put at odds with the airline industry because if they have success... If they start to come back after all of this, we'll be like, "What? The price of nuts is going up?"
Ben:
I don't know. You think the price of nuts is a determining factor in the price of airline fares like the price of gas is? Maybe they have nuts future's to help stabilize the prices.
Josh:
That's an economic question for sure.
Ben:
I'll have to research that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So, my theory of first class is that it's not the nuts that drive up the price. My theory of first class is that you're actually paying... I mean, the seats are nicer and everything but the few times that I've been in first class... Well, do you know, even nowadays, maybe if I were to travel... I've had the opportunity to go first class and I've not done it because people at the front of the plane tend to die more in plane crashes which is a little bit neurotic on my part, I know. So, I just get the rear most exit seat. I know that's optimizing for a problem that probably won't come up but I think the real thing that stood out to first class for me, is just the people, the stewardesses, stewards were very nice. And so, it's like, are you just paying to have people treat you kindly?
Josh:
Just not be mean to you.
Starr:
Yeah. You're paying to have people treat you like a decent human being.
Ben:
Basically, yes.
Josh:
Yeah. I think that's a good analysis.
Ben:
I mean, that's what you pay for when you go to stay at the Four Seasons. It's not like the bed is really going to be all that different from a bed at any other hotel but that service is really what you pay for.
Josh:
Yeah. They just hire people who care and train them properly. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
And I've been to a couple really nice restaurants in the Seattle area. And they both had really good service. And the thing that struck me at both of them is the waiters were just extremely kind and not rushed, and just like, "We're just here for you. We're going to take care of you, so don't worry about anything." In both instances, I remember just breathing this sigh of relief. It's like, "Okay, I can relax now because I don't have to handle anything. I don't have to worry about anything."
Ben:
And that's exactly what we've done with Honeybadger, right? We provide first class service at bottom rate prices.
Starr:
Under rock bottom prices. What is our ROI? We don't care. Because we're not MBAs.
Ben:
Speaking of MBAs, have you seen The Tiny MBA book?
Josh:
Yeah. By Alex?
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
No, I don't know about it. Tell me about it. Are you going to talk this one up too?
Josh:
Is this going to be my thing? I'm showing the book again.
Starr:
Okay. He's holding it up. It's yellow. It's got a '70s booker typeface on it.
Josh:
Yeah. It's got a very cool retro... I don't know, roller-derby type font or something.
Ben:
Yeah, it's very great. Very nice design.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, it's a great little book. The subtitle is, "100 Very Short Lessons About The Long Game Of Business" By Alex Hillman. And I had a chance to read through. It just took me... I don't know, a few minutes because it is pretty short. But I love business books in general but this one is great because it's not... It doesn't take forever to make the point. Some business books it's like oh, you read chapter after chapter and it's like, "Okay. I get it. Let's move onto the next thing."
Starr:
I know. And there's a parable about people in the middle ages thrown in there.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
How they're talking in yee-olden talk.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
That type of talking. Sorry.
Ben:
So, this is great because it's short. It's these great little tidbits, vignettes and so, you could read through it in a sitting but you can also take this one thought, one of the 100 thoughts and you can just chew on that for a day, or for a week, and just think about how it impacts your business, or your approach to businesses. It's really good stuff. So, if you haven't checked it out, do check it out.
Starr:
I will check it out. I'm the only one who hasn't checked it out in here, so I got to check it out now.
Josh:
You got the eBook copy, right Ben?
Ben:
I did. Yep.
Starr:
Is it available on Amazon? Or is it a you have to buy it through him thing?
Josh:
It is, yeah. It's available on both I think.
Ben:
So, there's a bit of a story behind the Amazon thing actually. I don't know if it is still available on Amazon. So, there's a whole... If you go and check out Alex's Twitter feed, you'll see this story and he actually wrote up a blog post about it too. So, what happened was, when he used their publishing tools, they neglected to call out and sufficient I guess red letters that if a you used the tool, the way they recommended, it wouldn't work for iPad... I'm sorry, for Kindle devices. So, the book runs... Works just fine with a Kindle app on the iPad, or on the iPhone, or presumably a Kindle Fire which I don't have. But if you want to read it on your Kindle Paperwhite, no go. Because the way they do their PDF layout stuff, he did fancy layout things that just aren't compatible.
Ben:
So, it might be available on Amazon. I got it from Amazon. I did the pre-order before everyone realized this was a problem. And I was cool with it because I just read it on my iPad, no big deal.
Josh:
Oh, okay.
Ben:
But if you want to read it on your Paperwhite, it may not be an option.
Josh:
That can be tricky. That's too bad.
Starr:
That's good to know.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
The Kindle device formatting, my experience with it has been... Basically, it's basic mark down, is what you need to use. That's the formatting you get to use, is just basic mark down.
Josh:
Yeah. I try to buy that stuff off of Amazon if I have the option anyway just because I think... They take a pretty decent cut, right?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I figure in any case, any cut is... Yeah.
Starr:
That makes sense.
Josh:
One bonus of the paperback, is that... Well, actually, there was an issue with the paperback too where there was an intro... There's an intro chapter to the book that I guess explains how... It's like a how to read this book type thing. Somehow, that got left out of the initial run of printing. So, the people who pre-ordered super early got a book that didn't have the first little intro, "How To Read This Book" Chapter. I think that's what it was. And Alex actually handled this very well because he pitched it as a limited first edition which is... That's just brilliant because that's what you do if you have a printing error in your first edition copy. I mean, it just makes it better. I'm stoked now. Now mine is even more unique now. It's not only a first edition, but it's a limited first edition.
Starr:
That's going to have real value in the after-market.
Josh:
It's like edition zero.
Starr:
Oh, I see that we have a... Ben pasted a link that we'll have in the show notes too. The actual to Alex's website where I think you can buy the book directly from him?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. If you can, go get the link in the show notes.
Starr:
Yeah. That's better than-
Josh:
It's stacking the bricks... What is it? Stackingthebricks.com/tinymba
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
There you go.
Ben:
Or, you can go to tiny.mba and that redirects to that.
Josh:
Oh, that's easy too. That's easier to say.
Starr:
Yeah. I used to be a big Amazon fan and order stuff from them every day but now I'm trying to order directly from smaller businesses too and just yeah. I don't know. It just seems a little bit yucky lately.
Josh:
I'm trying to but it's so hard. The number of times... It pops into your head, it's something you need around the house or whatever, you can just... Two taps and it's on it's way. I mean, the Amazon delivery people know us. They're here every... Multiple times... Probably, if not every day, it's close because it's just a steady stream of deliveries. And I mean, you think you can justify it like, "Well, they're driving by the house every day no matter what. Everyone is doing this." Which that's where the economy of scale comes from or whatever. So, it's not like you're necessarily saving a trip of a delivery truck to your house because they're just stopping. But still, it does feel... It feels a little... Yeah, not optimal I guess.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I don't know what the word is.
Ben:
If you're feeling guilty about the repeated Amazon deliveries, they do have that delivery day option now where you can-
Josh:
Oh, really?
Ben:
Yeah, you can group all of your orders into one delivery day.
Josh:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Ben:
Yeah. So, if you say Monday, and you order something on say, Wednesday, you're just like, "Oh, I can choose. I'll just wait until the next Monday." And then they'll just bring all that stuff at one time.
Josh:
And is that account wide option? If you set it, then everything will be delivered on that day, or you have to do it every time?
Ben:
If you set it, then it shows up as an option for your shipping when you check out. So, if don't do your buy it now, then you see the options like, "Next day." Or, "Save a buck." Kind of thing.
Josh:
Okay.
Starr:
Yeah. I saw that in my latest one. There's somethings that I just can't really find that places aren't Amazon, or Walmart. And it's like, "Well, you know, it's not like Walmart's really better people than Amazon." So, I'll just order from the easier one.
Josh:
If you do that, does it... Will they batch the stuff into boxes? Like, do you get a bigger box... Will they combine shipments if you do that? Or, is it 10 boxes showing up? Individual boxes? Because that would make me feel even worse. Seeing it all at once... I mean, at least with a slow drip of deliveries, you don't have to see all the cardboard you're wasting.
Ben:
I do believe they will try to package them together, yeah.
Josh:
Okay. Because honestly, that's a benefit. I think it's almost... It's like, the cardboard, all these boxes that you end up having to recycle, and knowing that recycling centers aren't even... They're overwhelmed and I don't think half the time they're not even able to recycle it properly. Yeah, it would be nice to use less shipping materials.
Starr:
Just burn it and use the fire to cook groul for orphans. Yeah, there's the environmental impact which I kind of am aware of but also, there's a couple things, like the counterfeit problem, and things that aren't necessarily counterfeits but... I've heard things about older models being passed off as newer models of electronics, or things that were recalled and there's a slight problem with it being passed off as the new version. When I was looking into Ubiquity stuff, people were getting... The people on the Ubiquity forum from Ubiquity were like, "Yeah, that's really... I don't know who's selling that but that's not... That's this old jenky thing."
Josh:
That's not cool.
Starr:
Yeah, so electronics I've been trying to order directly from either the supplier like Ubiquity, or Target because I know Target, at least it's going to get me the thing that they're promising me.
Josh:
Yeah. Or maybe even New Egg or something. New Egg has always been pretty good in the past for me.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Seems like they would care about that sort of thing with their customer base.
Ben:
And if you do want to avoid shipments, there's always Best Buy and Home Depot, they have great curbside service now. Which I hope continues after COVID because that is just super convenient.
Josh:
Yeah. I do. Yeah, I hope the curbside sticks around. Ikea has curbside.
Ben:
That's worth something right there.
Josh:
My hate for Ikea is legendary in my house. Yeah. So yeah, me and my wife, Kaylen had to go... Normally, I'm like, "Oh, we're going to Ikea." It's always a trip through a crowded maze. And I haven't been this year of course. But in the past, it's the last thing that I would want to do. So, Ikea having curbside pick up is... I'm a fan.
Starr:
There's a book... I'll see if I still have it to give it to you, Josh but it's called, "Horrorstor"
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
It's a horror story that takes place in a store very similar to Ikea but not named Ikea for legal reasons.
Josh:
Please do. I'm already sold.
Starr:
And the book is the format of an Ikea catalog, as much a text book can be in the format of an Ikea catalog.
Josh:
That sounds awesome.
Starr:
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
Josh:
Don't tell me how it ends. Does it end with having to put a bookshelf together for six days?
Starr:
I don't know. Honestly, I feel like the concept was the strongest thing about that book.
Ben:
Speaking of Ikea, I saw a joke about Ikea and TicToc.
Starr:
I'm linking to it in the show notes.
Josh:
So, tell me, what's the joke?
Ben:
So, Microsoft is bidding on TikTok and then it came out that Walmart wanted to be part of that where they're buying TikTok, and then someone tweeted a joke and said, "Well, Ikea wants to buy TikTok too but they're still assembling their bid."
Josh:
Hmm.
Starr:
Hmm.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's pretty funny. I don't know, I honestly... I kind of like Ikea. It's a pain in the ass going there, it takes all day. I like going in the morning, and having lunch there, and I don't know. They just won my heart because the first place we took Ida as a new born baby, was Ikea. And we didn't know what we were doing and we were just like, "Ah." And they have these family bathrooms which are these luxurious bathrooms bigger than our bathroom at home with all the stuff you need for a baby, and the rocking chair, and everything. And it was just like, "This is very nice." I will love Ikea always for providing this so I can not be super stressed out about dealing with this filthy little human.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm sorry, by the way Ben for... I ruined your joke I feel like because I got distracted in the middle of it. It's not that I didn't think it was funny, it's just that I wasn't listening to you. The horror story, the title of it caught my eye and I was looking-
Ben:
It's all good.
Josh:
My apologies. I love the cover of this, Starr. It's pretty good. It does fill me with some dread.
Starr:
Yeah. I'll see if I can describe. It looks like an Ikea catalog, it's got a bright couch with a palm tree looking plant and a bright rug, and a table, and then these little framed... These framed prints artfully arranged. And the prints, it looks like a zombie or something is trying to get out of them.
Josh:
Yeah, like through the glass.
Starr:
Yeah. It's pretty awesome. It's actually a great idea for somebody's home decoration.
Josh:
It is. Yeah. I kind of want to do that now. Yeah.
Starr:
All right. So, this has been FounderQuest. If you enjoyed the show... Wait. That's my mindfulness bell. So, let's all take a breath. Ready? If you enjoy the show, and the peace that it brings you in today's hectic world, please go to Apple Podcast, interview us. If you want to write for us, we still do that thing. So, go to honeybadger.io/blog Look for the link that says, "Write for us." Read the whole thing, and contact me. And yeah. So, until next week, see y'all later.
Show Notes:
Links:
Notion
Basecamp
Amanuensis
Neuralink
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Well, what's up in y'alls worlds?
Ben:
Went out kayaking yesterday, that was nice.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
Cool.
Starr:
Did you get that foldable one you were talking about?
Ben:
I did order, but it is back-ordered, so I have not yet received it.
Starr:
Damn.
Josh:
It's like this was a bad time for everyone to wait to purchase these things they were putting off for their recreation time.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Till they have forced time on their hands.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, totally. We went canoeing on our little vacation a couple of weeks ago, and it was really nice. It was one of those things where I was kind of dreading it because we had Ida with us. But it actually turned out being really calm and peaceful, and all that. It was just very nice.
Josh:
Where did you go, Ben?
Ben:
Out on the Sammamish River, which is right near me.
Ben:
Yeah. We went from Redmond towards Lake Sammamish but there's a little area with a bit of turbulence, and we were in an inflatable kayak, so we were not able to proceed. Some people might call them rapids, but I mean, it's-
Josh:
Did you do some sick rapids?
Ben:
No. We turned around. But it was a nice little cruise.
Josh:
You're going to wait for the paper kayak-
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
... for the rapids? Part origami.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Yeah. We ordered an inflatable one.
Ben:
Yeah, I think they're fun.
Starr:
Yeah. It's-
Josh:
I should do that. We've got some rivers around here.
Ben:
The only trick is, like where we go is rocky, so every time we're done I have to inspect the bottom for new holes.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
So ...
Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
As long as I remember to do that it's okay. Because otherwise-
Josh:
Does the water get low in places.
Ben:
Yeah, it gets pretty low.
Josh:
Okay.
Starr:
How does that work when you're out there? Do you just look for bubbles-
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
... coming out from under you? You just keep an eye out for bubbles?
Ben:
Or you start to feel lower in the water, and you're like, "Oh, I think I've lost some air."
Starr:
I guess that would make sense. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. Do carry the patch kit with us whenever we go out.
Ben:
Good news is, it's pretty easy to patch.
Starr:
People have been saying the '90s are coming back, so low riders are in, so low rider canoes I imagine are the next step for that.
Ben:
For sure.
Starr:
Definitely. We have some good news. I don't know if this ... I'm just going to say it and then you can tell me if it's public or not. But we got our SOC 2 report done, right?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
We got that in?
Ben:
Yeah. That's why I'm feeling a little tired today. I think it's like, finally got over the finish line and now I'm just collapsing. It's post-marathon, just dying.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I know.
Josh:
Time for a vacation.
Ben:
Yeah. Just scheduled it.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Good.
Ben:
Yeah. It's not public yet, because I haven't written the blog post yet. But, yeah, that's on my to-do list.
Starr:
But it's not a secret?
Ben:
It's not a secret. We did get-
Starr:
Just between us and our listeners, we can share.
Ben:
We did get our type 1 report for our SOC 2 audit, so I'm pretty excited.
Josh:
Yeah. Congratulations.
Ben:
Thanks. It was a team effort.
Starr:
No, not really. A team of one, yeah.
Josh:
I mean, I'll take credit for reading some policies, and-
Starr:
Yeah. I read some policies, and I was like, I guess this makes sense. I don't really understand it. Okay. Yeah. But-
Josh:
I did learn a lot throughout.
Ben:
We talked about this briefly a couple weeks ago. I saw this idea of building a site ... some sort of resource for startups like us, to get more familiar with what the compliance process is, and just demystifying that whole thing. I think I know a lot more now than I did when I started, and I think there's a lot that could be explained in layman's terms to help entrepreneurs understand what the whole thing is about, and why you might want to go through the whole process, and why you might not want to go through the whole process. I know we talked about this ... When we got started down this road, we're like, "Do we really want to do this?"
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
We didn't really know how to answer that question. Like, "Oh, I guess."
Josh:
It's not for everyone.
Ben:
Yeah. It really isn't. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. We should totally do that.
Starr:
Because one of the reasons we didn't know if we should go down that road was because nobody would tell us what that road actually was. It was all just a bunch of vague ... it was this very vague thing. It's a road you go down, but you can see about a foot in front of you. At least that's what it felt like to me.
Ben:
Yeah. And people who have been down that road are like, "Well, I'm not going to tell you anything about it. I'll let you find out on your own."
Starr:
It depends. You can pay me a retainer.
Ben:
Yeah. Part of the problem is, there aren't many small startups like us who have done it. Most of the people who do that are larger organizations, and for them, it's not even a question. It's like, well, they have to because of whatever.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
There really aren't people like us who can say, "Well, here's what I did and here's why you might want to do something like it."
Josh:
What are some reasons not to pursue that path?
Ben:
It's very expensive.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
You're guaranteed to be spending tens of thousands of dollars. There's no way around that. And it's very time consuming. It took a lot of time to put together everything, and then go through the audit itself is actually pretty time consuming as well, because you have to provide so many evidences of the things that are part of that process.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Those are some pretty good reasons why not to do it. It's experience, and time consuming.
Josh:
If no one's going to care anyway then the trade off doesn't work.
Ben:
Yeah. For sure.
Josh:
Just don't do it.
Ben:
I mean, we got started on the path because we got customers asking about it, and that is really it. If you have sales that are being held back-
Josh:
Someone actually cares.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That affects your bank account.
Ben:
And if you can't talk your way out of it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because there are things that you can do, and this is part of the resource site that I'm thinking about putting together. Because there are things that you can do that are short of full compliance audit, that will help alleviate concerns for people who are asking you for a SOC 2 report, who are asking you for your security posture. And no one who has any vested interest in this whole thing, like auditors, or consultants, no ones going to tell you that. Like, "Oh, by the way, there's this really cheap approach you can take, which should solve 80% of your problems."
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
This sounds like a course. This sounds like a ... "We need to get some long copy for a sales page. You need to record some bonus videos."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. To look good on a companion-
Starr:
Have a 30 page pdf.
Ben:
Right? Yeah.
Starr:
And we can just lay it out like, "In this book you'll learn the secret way to get around compliance stuff that none of the people will tell you, because it doesn't cost any money. It's just so obvious.
Ben:
"Buy it now for only, $4.99."
Starr:
Yeah. I'm not afraid of giving away this idea on the podcast because no one is going to do it.
Josh:
It's really hard.
Starr:
It takes so much work to learn this stuff.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Totally. Yeah, I have thought about doing that, I just don't know if I have the energy to do that. Maybe if I take a month long vacation first, then I'll have the energy to actually undertake that kind of project.
Josh:
I mean, we could get some help with it and probably, it would take a lot of organization and stuff. We could outline it, and see-
Ben:
Yeah, that's a good idea
Josh:
... it like a research project.
Ben:
We should talk about that on our next product meeting.
Josh:
We could mine Ben's brain as a research project, and then hire some designers and content people.
Starr:
Yeah. You could-
Ben:
I'm liking this blend.
Starr:
You could hire somebody to just interview you, and then write it down, and put it together. An amanuensis, if you will. I learned that word a while ago, I've been waiting for years to find a place to actually use it. Boom, there you go. Scrabble champion.
Josh:
Well, anyway, I'm down Ben if you want to ... we could treat that like another product in the company, or a-
Ben:
Sounds like fun.
Josh:
... project.
Ben:
I'm down.
Josh:
Yeah. We read the deep literature so you don't have to. That can be our tag line.
Starr:
Yeah. We were there when the deep magic was created.
Ben:
I love it.
Starr:
One thing that you said, has been really useful in this process ... has been our habit that we've fallen into of documenting everything. It's through documenting our meetings, documenting our processes, and stuff like that. I was thinking about that the other day because I was having a meeting with Ben Findley, our marketing guy, who ... We were talking about rearranging some of the processes around blog posts, the management of the content creation, and stuff like that. Because I'm spending a lot of time in that, and he would probably be better at it than me. In Notion, we've got this page that's just a list of meeting notes, so I created a new meeting note, and used our template, which is, "What's the agenda for this meeting? What did we actually talk about? What are the take away to-do items?"
Ben:
I love that format, by the way.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Thank you.
Josh:
It's great.
Starr:
Thank you. Every time I use this thing I'm just so happy because it's like, okay, this is very obvious what this structure is. I know we have to have a meeting, I know we need to discuss this stuff, but I'm kind of unclear about anything else. I know, first step, I create this document with the template, and then I just start filling it in. That just provides structure to the meeting, and then also I can just be like, "Here's the link to that meeting," and everybody else can see what went on at the meeting without having to go-
Josh:
I was going to say, we had our ... Me, Starr, and Ben Findley had our monthly marketing ... we all get together once a month for a strategy meeting, I guess. But that was what yesterday ... was it yesterday? It was this week.
Starr:
It was yesterday.
Josh:
But, yeah, I was able to read ... it's-
Starr:
I'm sorry, it wasn't yesterday at all, was it?
Josh:
It was some time this week.
Starr:
We're still in March, right?
Josh:
Yeah. Well, anyway, whenever that meeting was, the morning of ... because I missed the other meeting you were just talking about. But I was just able to go and read the meeting notes. Actually before that, you had posted some thoughts that you were going to cover in Basecamp. I just read those two things, and I thought, it was like I had been there. We were able to jump right into our big picture stuff.
Starr:
Yeah. I guess we should clarify, we use a couple of different tools. We use Notion, and sometimes we use Basecamp for other things. We tend to use Notion for documents that maybe have to be edited collaboratively, but that are mostly documents. They're not necessarily discussions, they're not necessarily things that you're ... I don't know. Works in progress where you're just like, "Hey, check this out. Here's what's on my mind."
Josh:
I can't stand discussions in Notion, with the conference feature. It's frustrating.
Starr:
I have personally had a lot of trouble just knowing that they are going on. In Notion you need to be like, "Okay, there's this document I want to edit. Okay, I'm going to that document." I find that the discussions aren't really surfaced very well. But Basecamp is more like where we do discussions. It's where we post spaghetti that we're throwing at walls, and stuff like that.
Josh:
It's where you throw spaghetti at each other?
Starr:
Throw spaghetti at each other.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Little known feature of Basecamp.
Ben:
Yeah. Notion is great for persisting those kind of meeting notes, and I like the collaborative editing in that context. Like when we're having our conclaves, and we're filling in those things that we actually talked about, or the to-do's that are coming out of that meeting. That's been really nice. But I agree that the notifications coming out of Notion, like, "Hey, you should pay attention to this thing I just changed," are terrible. And the discussions are terrible. Basecamp has got both of those things really nailed.
Josh:
I like collaborative editing in Notion when it works, especially too.
Starr:
Oh, that's a sick burn. That's a sick burn. Can I tell y'all a secret?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
For a while I was using Notion for my personal notes and I switched to the Apple Notes product, because it's good enough for my own personal notes. I don't need collaboration for them. It just always works perfectly. It's a native app, there's no weird dom glitches, or whatever. Not that Notion has a ton of them, but occasionally ....
Josh:
It's got a fair share, at least in my experience. We should probably look at alternatives one of these days.
Ben:
Yeah. We've never actually tried using Google Docs. We use G Suite for our email, but that's all with use it for. And a calendar. But we've never really tried using collaborative Google Doc editing for our meeting notes and things like that.
Josh:
Yeah. The collaborative features might ... it seems to be pretty well developed in Google Docs. But everything else about Google Docs I cannot stand. It's just like a document editor. The whole concept that Notion has of databases and how it's approached to data is completely different, so I don't know how ... I would hate to have a folder on Google Drive of our meeting notes. That you have to then search and come up with some sort of metadata system to classify them.
Starr:
Yeah. If you don't understand how Notion works, basically documents can also contain arbitrary data, and you can specify the format and they can be nested. We can have our document that's like the list of meeting notes, and then we can have, nested inside of that, individual documents that pop-up when you click on them, and stuff like that. It's really more flexible than Google Drive. Although, I'm not sure how different it is from a folder. Is it just like syntactic sugar?
Josh:
I don't think so.
Ben:
Well, the thing that's really nice, and I like about Notion, with those data elements is that you can look out of different views. You got that list, or you can do ... Like for our podcast episodes we have that kanban board view. You can say, "Is this an idea? Or is it something that we're recording? Is it now in production?" You can move it from stage to stage. Or you can look at that same set of data in a table view and say, "I like that part of Notion as well."
Josh:
I think if you're going to compare it to something, like sugar on top of something, I would almost say, it's more of a spreadsheet. It's almost like a spreadsheet with a document attached to each row, or something.
Starr:
With views?
Josh:
Yeah. Because then you've got different views on a spreadsheet basically.
Starr:
But it's a lot more text focused than a spreadsheet?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know. Well, I'm going the other way for blog stuff. I'm managing about ... I don't know how many active people I have. Maybe 10 active authors, and I've got maybe 30 or 40 nonactive authors, who may, or may not show up at different points in time. For managing all these articles and progress, and all the authors, I've been using a tool called ProofHub, which is a project management tool which I selected based solely and the fact that it was a set price per month for unlimited users. Because pretty much every project management tool I looked at, it was a $10 a month per user fee, which is just ... I mean, we could afford to pay that for 30 users, it's just really on principle.
Starr:
I just didn't want to pay $10 a month for an author who may never write a post for us. I just didn't want to do it. But since then, GitHub has actually changed their pricing model a bit. If you don't know about this dear listener, this is something that may be useful to you. It used to be that, the GitHub free plan, they would give you, I think, unlimited private repositories but you couldn't have a team. You couldn't really collaborate with people. Yeah, you couldn't have team features, which are something that we need because-
Josh:
Because we work with people.
Starr:
... well, we're a team. But recently they changed their pricing, where essentially pricing is based more and the number of CICD minutes that you use. Like minutes of compute time, storage, stuff like that. It's much more based on the resources that you use now, even the free plan has unlimited private repos, unlimited collaborators, teams, all that good stuff. I'm in the process of switching all the stuff ... the purpose built thing into GitHub because ... I don't know. I'm not a fan of Notion.
Josh:
Starting to find them more useful over time.
Ben:
That's fair.
Josh:
I use it for my primary to-do list, for personal ... like well, for work stuff. It's really nice because I spend a lot of my time in GitHub, so I can reference issues and do all the GitHub workflow stuff. If I have an issue that I need to remember later, basically, I add it to my project for our organization, and it's on my to-do list. It's nice to track things.
Ben:
I have a confession to make about to-do lists, I have never been able to get one to stick. I have tried so many different things for maintaining that to-do list, I've tried GitHub project, I've tried Notion, I've tried Basecamp they all have a to-do list of some form or another. I put stuff in there and it goes for a while and I'm checking stuff off, and then eventually it's abandoned. I have an abandoned to-do list that all have things and things on them. The only thing that works for me for actually keeping track of things I want to do is, using reminders on my phone. Like the Apple app.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. That's just for like ... I need to get an oil change, so I'll put that on there with a date. But that doesn't work so well for development tasks that spread across five, or 10 different projects that I'm working on. I have yet to find a to-do list that I can actually stick with to help me track my work. It's a bummer.
Josh:
I think one of the things that is important, is that you need to be able to clear your plate completely, and not be afraid to get rid of all your to-do's or something. Because that's where you end up with a huge backlog that you're afraid to do anything with, but you probably won't ever do it anyway. I use mine more as a short term ... like, what's going on during the week, and also what is happening that's still in progress. But it's like waiting on other people for issues, specifically. If someone creates an issue on one of our client libraries, for instance, it's not in my in my actively doing column, it's in the in progress ... I use the GitHub ... it's like their automation workflows. It's in the in progress ... I know it's still happening but I'm not really worried about that column.
Starr:
I'm in the same boat, in terms of, long term to-do lists. Especially for work stuff, I have a very hard time, because they get overwhelming. I find the through a big picture to-do list much more useful. In our quarterly conclaves, we all meet and set the direction for the quarter. We have action items, and those are really useful because it's like, maybe, one, two, three, things that I'm responsible for that quarter. So, I can look up and be like, "Okay, what do I need to do on this?" When it comes down to just sitting there and breaking those up into 100 small tasks, and then doing them one by one, I just can't do it.
Starr:
Like reality diverges from the task list and then I don't update the task list, and all that. When I talk about using GitHub issues and projects, and stuff for the blog ... I'm not even talking really about to-do them, more like talking about tracking the state of articles that are in progress, just so I can be like, "Okay, these ones all need editing. These ones, the author's working on them right now, stuff like that. I've also been using reminders a lot. That's just the way to capture things that occur to me during the day, so I don't have to worry about them. That's mostly because I can use Siri. I just use Siri to make a reminder to do things and then I didn't have to think about it.
Josh:
Which is awesome because-
Ben:
Yeah. I love that.
Josh:
... I just add things to the grocery list from the kitchen or wherever I am with Siri. And Siri understands, "Add this to my list." You don't have to say reminder. Basically I just say, "Add bread to my shopping list," and it does it. It's nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Nice. I didn't know that. I hadn't even considered about doing that.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
You attach a date, or whatever. It doesn't have to remind you, it could just be a place to store things.
Starr:
Isn't it interesting how all these products eventually get made into features of the operating system? I don't know. Pretty soon all new computers are just going to have Honeybadger-
Starr:
Every new AWS instance just spins up it own copy of Honeybadger.
Josh:
I'm constantly amazed at the things they add to the VS code. Like that AWS login integration you were showing us, Ben.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
What was that again? I didn't look too closely at it.
Ben:
AWS has a plugin VS code and this week they announced an update to that plugin that you can now cruise through your cloud watch logs groups. You can get access to your cloud watch logs directly from the VS code. I tried it out, it's pretty slick. You navigate and it gives you all your different groups, and then you drill down to each stream, and then you can basically say, "Okay, open the stream. Show me the logs that are in there." They're right there. It's pretty sweet.
Josh:
So then you could edit code, deploy your server less application or whatever, from within VS code and then watch the logs as it's happening.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's cool. Okay.
Ben:
I don't know that it has active tailing but-
Josh:
Are they going to put your charts with your metrics and stuff in there eventually? Yeah, you get your dashboard. Just flip to your dashboard. I mean, like that could be handy when you're coding you want to-
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I think that the plugin also has ... you can interact with your Lambda of functions. I think it also has S3 navigation. You can navigate through your buckets, so it's pretty slick.
Starr:
That's really cool. Like I see the Lambda function would be really useful too. Yeah. I've really been enjoying the ... It's a different thing. I've been enjoying the auto-complete for Tailwind. The Tailwind CSS for VS code plugin has awesome auto-complete because there's all these million classes that you need to know. I almost wonder like, if you really want your open source library to be successful you should release a VS code plugin with it.
Ben:
For real. I guess we need a VS code plugin for hook relay then. Maybe you can get your hook relay logs. Like the payloads that got sent, maybe we should have a log viewer in VS code. Could be kind of fun.
Josh:
Yeah, that could be cool.
Josh:
Yeah. Because then if you're working on the hook locally, or something, and your triggering it from your dev environment then you could watch the realtime stuff happening. Could be handy. Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Yeah. Or if you're receiving hooks from a third party that you're trying to build against, so if you want to see where the payloads are, yeah, bring them right to your editor. That would be cool.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Then it'd be pretty to generate a spec fixture if you want to test against. I'm thinking specifically about, if you want to write a test for your Stripe web book handler. You want to get a sample of that payload so that you can run that against your tests, that'd be pretty cool.
Josh:
A long time ago, I wrote a blog post on how to do that. I wrote this little rack app that took inbound, using ... I don't know, whatever the local tunnel or something at the time, and it was a huge pain in the ass. I haven't had to do that in a while, but it was a major pain.
Starr:
I'm wondering how auto-completion might figure into a hook relay plugin. I mean, you probably couldn't do anything if you didn't have a client library, if people are just sending direct post stuff to us. But if we didn't have a client library, you could have autocomplete for languages that don't have it built in.
Josh:
Most languages have some form of decent auto complete. Even Ruby with addition of the ... what is it? The Solargraph? Is that what it's called then? It's a gem that is a language server for Ruby that ... the language server is what provides some of that logic. But other languages which don't ... I don't know. Like static languages that have that stuff built in too. That's one of the benefits of type script in VS code, it's got really, really good completion.
Starr:
Okay. If you're not going to give me auto-completion, you can give me docs, right? Press F1 and you'd get your docs all about how to send this payload to hook relay.
Ben:
Yeah. Press F1. That takes me back, Starr. Back to Turbo Pascal, and WordPerfect.
Starr:
Yeah. That's where I'm always headed. I'm an arrow pointing backwards.
Ben:
On my little magic Mac wireless keyboard, I can't even press F1, unless I hold down the function key. Because it's brightness down if you push that key.
Josh:
I don't have a function key at all. I have to press a modifier key, and then my top row. It's the same idea, but it's on my ErgoDox docs. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't even have keys on the keyboard, I just scream at the transistors and they do what I say.
Ben:
You just modulate your voice to get the different modifiers?
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
That just reminded me of this really cool demo I saw in 2007, or something, of this guy who ... At that time the only real usable voice recognition software was called Drag, and they had a product, naturally speaking.
Josh:
I remember that.
Starr: Yeah. This guy programmed it to basically be able to program with it, because he had real bad wrist issues. He assigned different vocal sounds to special characters, like parens, and brackets and stuff like that. He did this demo he was just up there making these random sounding noises, and they were writing code on the projector.
Ben:
I think there was a PyCon talk several years ago that had someone who, she had done something like that, and was demonstrating her system for writing code using just voice. It was actually pretty damn amazing. I was impressed.
Josh:
Yeah. Massively impressive, the skill to learn a language of controlling a computer interface. Lucky for them, Elon Musk today is supposed to unveil the first brain computer interface that he's been working on. Whatever that company is called. I can't remember. Neuralink, I think that's the company. Yeah.
Ben:
Is it called Neuralink? Is that what that is?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Love Elon Musk so much. He's so wonderful.
Ben:
I got to say, for a company like, let's say Tesla, who hasn't yet figured out how to keep they're cars from driving into semi trucks because they think they're billboards, I'd be pretty hesitant to trust technology with my brain. You know what I'm saying?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
They're not even doing it on animals.
Ben:
I'm a little skeptical, let me let someone else try that first.
Josh:
It works great for them. Right?
Ben:
Yeah, what else do you need? I mean, hey.
Starr:
Yeah. Do these animals have Twitter accounts. Do they have a live journal?
Ben:
Live journal. You're all about it. Blast from the past-
Josh:
I guess the initial used case is for, I think, paralyzed people that can't interact with the world otherwise. Could be interesting technology in any case. But I'm not going to be the first to try it, I don't think. I'm not the first to try-
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I am not an early adopter.
Starr:
No.
Josh:
I'm sorry.
Starr:
I was-
Josh:
Yeah. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that.
Ben:
Same. Yeah.
Starr:
Can I tell y'all a story about electrodes.
Ben:
Oh, boy.
Starr:
A long time ago when I was in the sciences I watched a students give a paper the research they had done for ... I think it was an undergraduate thing, I don't think it was a grad student, but basically they were trying to do the same thing. They were trying to wire a mouses brain up to a wire, so that they could have it send a signal down the wire. The whole presentation was just like ... okay, we tried this way of attaching the wire to the mouses brain, and the mouse died. Then we tried this way and the mouse died. I mean, they didn't say died, but that's what was going on. And this whole day, it's like we tried this, and we tried this, and we tried this.
Josh:
Was the presentation tried on 11 dead mice?
Starr:
Those mice are just up in heaven smiling down at Elon Musk right now, I'm sure. They're like, "Finally, somebody's found a way to hook up a wire to my brain. If only I still had one."
Josh:
Well, I think like paralyzed, it's only the first step, because the ultimate goal is to connect humans to artificial intelligence in a symbiotic relationship. Apparently that's the stated-
Starr:
Yeah, so they can play chess against each other faster?
Josh:
The initial applications, they're obviously practical but-
Starr:
I thought ...
Josh:
I think he is-
Starr:
But I thought Elon was the one who is worried about AI robots taking over the world? Wasn't that true?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
He's only worried about them if he doesn't own them.
Ben:
Yeah. Totally.
Starr:
Yeah. I've got a preposition. How about we stop trying to make people smarter and start trying to teach people how to not be assholes?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's my plan for the improvement of humanity.
Ben:
I'm down with that.
Starr:
It's like, "Just learn to chill. You don't need a HAL brain, you just need to learn to chill."
Josh:
True.
Ben:
Those might be equal levels of complexity, or effort.
Josh:
Oh, man.
Starr:
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. What tasks are there that ... I know I'm just committing tech heresy here but ... What tasks are there in daily life where you're like, "If only I had a super computer attached to my brain. I could handle this if I was a 1,000 times more intelligent." I didn't understand it. Maybe that's a billionaire thing. Maybe Elon Musk wants that, so he can personally oversee all of his enterprises. So that Elon Musk will be everywhere at once. I guess I can see that desire, even though it's completely evil and terrible, but at least that makes sense.
Ben:
Well you'd be able to understand it if you had an AI enhanced brain. I mean, come on.
Starr:
Yeah. But it's like ...
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
I guess that's the thing. It's like, well ... When I find myself in a situation where it's like, "Damn, I bought this AI brain, and I'm just doing laundry. And I'm still doing laundry like there's ..." It takes a certain amount of time to do the laundry. I don't know.
Ben:
I think we have effectively proven that Elon has an AI enhanced brain, because he understands why he would want an AI enhanced brain.
Starr:
There you go. And because he chose that over learning to not be an asshole-
Josh:
Yes. Probably a deal with the devil.
Starr:
That's how we really know.
Ben:
That's a good one.
Starr:
Thank you. All right, we should maybe wrap things up before I have anymore fire takes.
Josh:
No. I'm just happy the RNC is over.
Starr:
Do you have anything you want to talk about before we go?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
I'm happy the compliance is over.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
Until next year.
Josh:
Same.
Starr:
I'm happy that March is almost over. Well, this has been FounderQuest. It's been a trip y'all. If you would like review us ... I feel like I have to say this at the end of every show. But, yeah, review us if you want to. Apple podcast, you know the deal. If you want to write for us at our blog, check out Honeybadger.io/blog, and then look for the link that says, "Write for us," and read the whole damn thing. Don't even email if you haven't read the thing. That's all. I'm actually very nice to work with, I don't yell at people, but I'm just trying to get a message across right now. All right, well, talk to y'all later.
Show Notes:
Links:
Snow Crash
Microsoft Flight Simulator glitch
Google deprecation article by Steve Yegge
Swiss Army
Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
Heroku
Full Transcript:
Josh:
This is just why I know. I know that whatever happens in November, it's just going to get... It's going to get crazier. No matter what.
Starr:
I do feel like... More and more I feel like I'm inside of a cyber punk novel. Not really a William Gibson, Chiba City, going to get your bioware implanted or whatever but more of a Neil Stevenson Snow Crash type of situation where you have to... Everybody lives in gated communities, and the gated communities are owned by the different franchises. So, you live in the KFC gated community, and you worship the Colonel and all that.
Josh:
Or you live in a super PAC community.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Where they have your videos playing on billboards for everyone who drives by.
Starr:
Exactly. And the hero of the story is just this girl trying to deliver some pizzas through this wasteland of a country.
Josh:
Okay, this really is just Snow Crash, isn't it?
Starr:
Yeah. Pretty much. The only difference is the way the internet's played out is that we have a lot less sword fights.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
I don't really just interact... I don't go online and just find myself in a seedy bar with my samurai sword.
Josh:
You got to give VR a chance to develop because you never... There might be more sword fights in the future.
Ben:
As long as you don't mind having a Facebook account since now, apparently that's a Facebook account for Oculus.
Josh:
Oh, Facebook sword?
Ben:
Well, you saw that news about Oculus. They're now-
Josh:
I did.
Ben:
Yeah. I had a friend of mine here in Seattle who said, "Okay. Well, I've got an Oculus for sale if anybody wants it."
Josh:
Really?
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
Yeah. I never... I would not have bought an Oculus after Facebook acquired them. Maybe for that... Not necessarily for that specific reason but that's as good a reason as any.
Josh:
Obviously, they're going to do something with it in their interest.
Ben:
Obviously.
Starr:
Yeah, my house is too small too. I just break everything. It seems like you need a fair amount of free space to have some sort of VR set up.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Or you can gesticulate and not destroy priceless family artifacts.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't even know. I tried one of the very early ones and it was like that but I'm not sure how far they've come since then.
Starr:
I know. Eventually, they'll refine it to the point where instead of having to jester around, you just have this little device that you hold in your hand and you can just move your fingers small distances.
Josh:
Oh. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I see where you're going with that.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, in non-VR gaming news, Microsoft Flight Simulator was released this week.
Josh:
Is that what I... I saw something that looked a lot like that and then the page refreshed and it went away. For a split second, I was like, "Holy crap. Is that Flight Simulator?"
Ben:
It is. Yeah.
Starr:
Did y'all hear about the OpenStreetMap thing with that? Okay, this is great. I actually didn't realize that it was just released but I read about this glitch. So, somebody... So, there's an open street map, right? That's... I'm getting the name right, right?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
OpenStreetMap is people's open source version of Google Maps. So, you can go and get these maps and do whatever you want with them. So, it's maintained like Wikipedia by an army of volunteers. And I guess somebody in I think Melbourne, made a typo, and instead of... I don't know. Instead of listing a building as three stories, they listed as something like 3,000 stories. And so, Microsoft when they were developing the flight simulator, they went and got the OpenStreetMap data and they didn't scrub it or anything. And so, if you're flying in Melbourne, it's Melbourne and then this one really narrow building that goes up just like a giant monolith in the sky.
Josh:
That's amazing.
Starr:
And there's all these pictures on Twitter of people flying around it, going like, "What is this?"
Ben:
That's great.
Josh:
It's just a glitch in the data.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Wow. This is because Microsoft... I mean, this would never happen to Google Flight Simulator, I feel like. They don't use OpenStreetMap, do they? They've got their own... They've got Google cars.
Ben:
Yeah. But the problem with Google Flight Simulator would be that in three years, they would trash it. They would end it.
Josh:
Right. Because no one would play it. Or, not enough people would play it. Like 500,000 people would play but they'd be like, "We need 500,000,000 to play this."
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
"If it's going to be..."
Ben:
Exactly. Yeah, that's been in the news recently too. Google Cloud, and Steve... I don't know how you pronounce his last name. Yegge, maybe? Had this blog post about how Google deprecates so much all the time that... Why would you even build on it? And it's notable because Steve is an ex-Googler. And not just a luminary in the field in general but having worked there, he was pretty annoyed that he'd have to rebuild all of his stuff every few years just because Google likes to turn things off.
Josh:
Yeah. It's not a great policy.
Ben:
That's definitely a consideration that we had when we were shopping around for hosting, comparing AWS versus Google. That wasn't the primary consideration but that was an issue. My primary consideration was it's really easy apparently, to get your Google Cloud account shut off, and hard to get it returned back on.
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
So, they made me pretty skittish.
Starr:
Based on complaints, or third parties, or what?
Ben:
No, based on automated algorithms at Google for detecting abuse.
Starr:
Oh.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Oh, wow.
Ben:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
So, that's a good selling point.
Starr:
Great. Yeah.
Josh:
"Our platform is so free of abuse that you can't even use it."
Ben:
So, yeah, there have been a variety of Hacker News posts about people-
Starr:
Or it's, "Amazon just bills you for the abuse."
Ben:
Exactly. Amazon's just, "Oh, just pay us. We'll be fine."
Josh:
I guess with that Bitcoin money that you're mining.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
Anyway, so yeah, so I think not a good idea to play Google Flight Simulator because halfway through your flight, they'll just turn it off.
Josh:
Just in the middle of the-
Starr:
Well, I don't know. They might keep it around because they got to train those self-flying planes.
Ben:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
That makes me think though, what would be really hard, so it'll be Google Airlines. Would you really want to fly in that airline? Because who knows.
Starr:
They might cancel it while you're up in the air.
Josh:
Do they have the courtesy of at least calling you from the Google control tower and telling you, "We're shutting down this product. Prepare for landing." Or, is it just like, "Lights out."?
Starr:
Well, the reason that we don't really have much... We're just rambling is because I was on a... I went on an impromptu vacation. My partner Evie was just... Quarantine and everything. We've been both working from... We've been trying to stretch a normal life into a more short amount of time. And because of childcare and all that and she was just like, "We need a vacation. I'm booking a place." Okay, I booked it. And so, it was like, "Ah. Okay." But she was totally right. It was a great thing.
Josh:
Yeah. How was it?
Starr:
It was wonderful. And we went to a little town called Shelton. We were actually outside of the town. It's... Let's see. I don't know. It's some direction in relation to Olympia. You get to Olympia and you turn right, whatever direction that is.
Josh:
Okay.
Starr:
So, I guess that would be West, West of Olympia. And it's on... There's a bunch of these little inlets from the sound, and so the tide comes in, and goes out, and it's called Shelton because lot's of shellfish grow there and so you can and dig them up and everything, which they did. And then we cooked them and then we're like, "Should we be eating these? Are these going to kill us and poison us?" And they didn't. They didn't. So, that was a good thing. But all in all, it was very nice. It was very nice.
Josh:
Cool. Do you feel refreshed?
Starr:
I do. I do feel refreshed. I'm wearing a colorful shirt.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Which you can tell. And while I was gone this Summer, I went away, when I left it was in the 90s or whatever. And I get back and it's 70 all day. So, I can live with that.
Josh:
So, the colorful shirt thing, I don't... For some reason, when I put on a... Because I always wear... My uniform is a black T-shirt but you might know this but when I go on vacation, I'll put on a colorful shirt just to signify that I am on vacation. And it makes me feel a lot better. It makes me feel more like I'm on vacation now.
Ben:
Well, just...
Josh:
I don't know if that... If you have the same experience.
Ben:
How colorful are we talking? Are we... Stripes like Rugby shirt, or Hawaiian shirt?
Josh:
Oh, full on Hawaiian.
Ben:
All right. All right.
Josh:
No, not Hawaiian. Just maybe like a blue T-shirt or something. No, you know, actually, like my ElixirConf T-shirt which was bright. It's not even red, it's... I don't know. It's very bright for a conference shirt, yeah. I have a very interesting wardrobe is what I'm trying to tell you. There's a lot of variety in it. It's basically black T-shirts... It's black T-shirts and conference T-shirts.
Starr:
You can't wear the Hawaiian shirts out because people will think you're a CIA agent.
Josh:
Yeah. I should definitely... I could definitely pull off the Hawaiian shirt I think.
Ben:
You actually could.
Starr:
Yeah, you could.
Josh:
I actually got a few of those.
Starr:
Get some aviators.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Nice... Turn your baseball cap around the other way for regulation.
Josh:
Right. Yeah.
Ben:
So, Hook Relay's coming along nicely.
Josh:
It is.
Starr:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Tell us about that.
Josh:
I'm excited.
Ben:
So, Josh has been digging in lately. And it was funny, we had a product meeting a couple weeks ago, and we're planning out what Josh, and Kevin, and I were all going to do, what our assignments were and I think Josh nervously asked something about tests because Josh loves tests. And Kevin and I are not quite as big fans of writing tests as Josh is. And so, Kevin and I both chuckled and we're like, "Oh yeah, Josh. That's your job." So, Josh started diving in and writing some tests, and it's been great. But it was really good because Josh was... Hasn't been working on Hook Relay until this past week or two. And so, he had to do all the typical developer start up things. Like, "Oh, how do I get set up with the database? And how do I connect to that?"
Ben:
And it made me realize in much shame, how little I had actually documented about getting set up, and getting everything going. And Kevin had learned along the way but Josh was like, "I don't know what's going on here." And I'm like, "Oh yeah. There's no documentation for that. Sorry."
Josh:
There is now though.
Ben:
Yes, thanks to Josh's-
Josh:
Because Josh also loves documentation.
Ben:
Yeah. So, thank you Josh for helping us out there.
Josh:
Hey, you're welcome. Yeah. Well, I think that's always a good... Actually, I mean, I always... You should probably write your documentation as you're building things but I think there is some benefit for having a new developer that's onboarding write the documentation because it's coming from their perspective. And you might get set up steps that are not something that you would think of that would save someone a lot of time that's not... Didn't start from scratch with the app or whatever.
Ben:
Right. Yeah. For sure. And when you do that, you just got to... Just how much context is in your head.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Even on new projects. Like, "Oh, there's this thing, and that thing, and this other thing." Yeah. I had forgotten all that stuff because I had been in it for so long.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Yeah, it's useful to have that fresh perspective come in. But Josh is tearing it up. He's added a bunch of onboarding stuff, which has been great. Kevin has been focused on the UI, I've been focused on the API, and Josh has been focused on, "Hey, can we actually make this usable for our customers?"
Josh:
Well, and yeah, and how do they learn how to use it when they first...
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Like they just sign up and land on the dashboard or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, yeah. We've been trying to come up with some ideas for things we could show... What's the first thing they see? What's the first thing you see when you sign up for something? Because there's a lot of options.
Ben:
I think having our years of experience learning with Honeybadger has really helped accelerate what we're doing here because it's like, "Oh, we should do this onboarding survey thing. And we should do this tour thing."
Josh:
Yeah. I had the same thought. I thought about that this week as I was... I was building this... I think we're going to with a... There's going to be... We don't want to put too much between the user between signing up and actually getting to work doing something in the app. But I think we are going to try showing a simple welcome screen, and maybe have a video or something. By the way, I need to get you to record a video, Ben. Because it's your app. So, I think it should be your face. But just saying hello, and then we are going to have a introduction... An optional introduction box where people can either say hello to us, or tell us where they... Why they're signing up which is something we did for Honeybadger after a long time and it's worked out really well I would say.
Josh:
We get a lot of interesting feedback from that little... Like, "Hey, where did you... Where are you coming from today?" People fill it out, and we get some interesting responses sometimes. For instance-
Starr:
And I can see that being even more useful for a new product when you're really steering direction based on user feedback.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it'll be interesting depending on where we get our initial... I don't know... We don't know yet how the launch... Where people will be coming from with the launch. I assume people will be coming from our Honeybadger channels, and founder quest and stuff. But I don't know. This is a totally different product for us, and it appeals to a totally different... A lot more people. So, I don't know, we could get featured on... We could be front page of Hacker News with our show HN Post. And then, get a bunch of Hacker News people commenting like, "I don't know if I want to see those introductions."
Starr:
Oh my God.
Josh:
But those will be a little different.
Starr:
I haven't been on Hacker News in so long.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't... I check it out occasionally. You read it, don't you Ben?
Ben:
Yeah. I have an RSS feed specifically for show Hacker News because I love seeing all the new stuff coming in.
Josh:
That's a good idea.
Ben:
Yeah. It's a lot of fun to see what's going on out there.
Josh:
Yeah. What my thought this week was like yours, it's just all of these things that I knew to do, I was thinking back, "What would I be doing if this was... If we were back whatever 10 years ago building... And this was my first app." And I'm like, "I would be doing none of this." We would have just launched it as... You built it, which is just... Which is fine. I mean, it's a good app and it works but there's no... There's none of the things we've learned over time of how to teach the user slowly how to use the app. Introduce them, and then shepherd them along. It would be just dump them into a dashboard. Yeah. So, I thought it was kind of cool.
Starr:
This is really interesting to me because it seems like it's an evolution of me thinking that was... When we first built Honeybadger, we did do that. You signed up, and you got dumped onto the empty project page, or maybe you got dumped into some set up instructions but it was very, very minimal. And that was in-line with the times, right? There's this whole MVP thing, you build the least amount of stuff you can possibly build and then ship it.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
A lot of people did that. And I guess... I don't know. It seems like a lot of those things were kind of bad. Or not necessarily bad but just... It seems like people expect a lot more out of an app these days. They expect it to be a lot more friendly. They don't really want to just immediately log on and see just nothing. Or, just have to figure it out themselves.
Josh:
Yeah. I'd say the bar has been raised. People are definitely expecting more.
Ben:
I kind of feel like it's a pendulum. Before the whole MVP thing, the idea was, "Well, it's got to be perfect." Well, because you're shipping oftentimes a golden master CD, right? So, it has to be perfect when it's going out the door but even web developers felt that way. It's like, "Oh, it's got to be pristine. It's got to be just exact." And then, the whole MVP thing came and developers like, "Oh. We can throw away all that idea and just throw out the basic minimum app that people can use." And I feel like, yeah, it's swinging back towards the, "Well, let's give our new users a little more of a polished experience. Let's not just give them the little scooter. Let's give a moped instead. Or, something a little more developed."
Starr:
You can see the difference in how long it took us to replace the font awesome icon as a logo with a real logo.
Josh:
Because we did start with a font awesome icon, staying true to ourselves but then...
Starr:
Yeah, with Honeybadger, we had that for at least a year.
Josh:
Got to start-
Starr:
Those were our very first shirts.
Ben:
Yeah. And this time we actually have a custom logo that we had designed.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Of course, this time we have a little more in the way of resources than we had when we launched Honeybadger.
Starr:
That's true. That's true.
Ben:
So, that doesn't make a difference. We can afford that logo design whereas last time, we really couldn't.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And that's... I'm excited to see how this develops.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Yeah. And I'm excited to get back to work on the static site. I keep being like, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to work on this." And then, it's like, "Okay. I'm going to be gone for a week." Okay, coming back, "I'm really going to do this, this time." Then it's like, "Okay. Surprise. No, you're not."
Josh:
I've been in the same boat though. So, it's okay. This year has been a bit of a struggle to meet deadlines.
Ben:
I've been following your work, Starr, on the static site, and it's looking great.
Starr:
Oh, thank you.
Ben:
The documentation stubs that you have look fantastic, yeah.
Starr:
Thank you. Thank you.
Ben:
So, it's going to look really good. Yeah, I think on launch day, it's going to be looking a lot nicer than the Honeybadger did on launch day. For sure.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Oh, definitely. Yeah.
Ben:
So, one of the things that I've been thinking about this week that's really got me excited is one of these little features that I want to have in Hook Relay which is to be able to send notifications about the success, and about the failure of deliveries to Slack. And we have a lot of integrations in Honeybadger, like sending notifications to Slack, or to Jira, or email, or you name it. We've got a ton of them. And I wanted to take a fresh approach to that in Hook Relay because we've had some pain points in Honeybadger with that sort of thing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And I realize, as I was thinking about this, I was like, "You know what? We could use Hook Relay for sending these notifications." The payload just needs a little bit of massaging from one JSON format to another JSON format.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, that it'll work well in Slack.
Josh:
If only there were a product who could do this.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That could do this.
Ben:
It's like, "Just so happens we've built this product that takes web hooks from one JSON format, to another format." And so, haven't written the code yet but I'm just excited about this idea that we can plug in a Slack notification, or any other kind of thing that takes a web hook, and we can easily support that in Hook Relay.
Starr:
Wait, so... I just wanted to ask, so you can actually... You can transform pay loads in Hook Relay?
Ben:
Yes. Yes, you can.
Josh:
Yeah. I was going to... Has this... Is this hinting at our secret evil genius plan to introduce serious transformations to pay loads?
Ben:
Yeah. So, JAMESpath, is what we're using today. It's a well known... It's like XSLT But for JSON.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
Incoming JSON pay load and you can spit out a different output JSON pay load based on this transformation language.
Starr:
I hope it's not too much like XSLT.
Ben:
So, it's pretty cool in that you can easily massage a pay load. And we use them at Honeybadger to send custom pay loads to pager duty for example because they don't want us as much data as maybe some of the other integrations that we support. But exposing this to Hook Relay customers is, I think, going to be pretty awesome because they can say, "Oh, well, take this... Maybe I have a web hook coming in from GitHub and I want to send it over to Slack, whatever, and I can select just the fields that I want, and put them in new fields, and it's going to be super awesome."
Josh:
Yeah. I'm excited about this... Back on the onboarding side of this, I was thinking about that this week because... There's certain aspects of Hook Relay which are just dead simple. You basically put it in between your web hook, and the user, and it gives you all this cool stuff for free basically. But then you have... So, in that regard, it's way simpler to get started with, I feel almost than Honeybadger. Even for example... Because you don't have to integrate into your application. You're sending the same... You'd be sending a post anyway, a request anyway somewhere. So, that's easy to explain. Fairly easy to explain. But then you get something like JMESPath which is... It's basically a custom programing language for transforming JSON data and that is the... That's a power tool or something.
Josh:
So, I'm looking forward to figuring out how to... Because you can't just drop that on someone. You can't just teach someone JMESPath and I'm getting that acronym, right?
Ben:
I think so, yeah.
Josh:
Okay. You can't just teach them that on that first screen when they sign up. "Here, learn this transformation language that you've never heard about before." And that's something with user onboarding and just even life cycle that you need to think about. How do gradually level someone up in the ability to use your product effectively? And there's opportunity there actually to teach people... Our customers who are developers, teach them skills that they didn't know before that will useful elsewhere. Because if you learn JMESPath with Hook Relay, I mean, you could use it... I mean, it's an open sourced tool, so you could use this in your own products or whatever. And it's something I had never heard of until we started using it in Honeybadger, and you introduced me to it Ben.
Josh:
So, I think that's cool to have things like that built in that are... It's super, super technical and powerful but you basically need to teach people how to use it effectively.
Starr:
I'm wondering what approach we need to take to support that? Right? Because I imagine that if people get really into the weeds on that, then they might email us and be like, "Hey, this isn't working." And in fact, their problem is that they've... They have syntax error and some...
Josh:
Oh, yeah. Oh, you mean from helpdesk support?
Starr:
Yeah, I mean helpdesk support.
Josh:
Yeah, you're right. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. So, it might be good from the outset to set a position on that and just be like, "You know, we can't-"
Josh:
This is something else we learned with Honeybadger.
Starr:
Yeah. People will... If you let them, people will have you... I don't know. SSH into their machine and do a day's worth of work for them. So, yeah, which you can't do if you're selling something for 30 bucks a month or whatever.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Or for free.
Josh:
That's a really good point, Starr.
Starr:
So, I don't know. Maybe we have a policy where we're just like, "Okay. You're using this thing. We know it works on our end. If we have any inclination... Or any idea that it's an actual problem on our end, we will fix it but if it's debugging your JMESPath code or whatever, that's on you. Here's some books."
Ben:
Yeah. That's a good point. So, what we've done so far, is we do some upfront validation on the syntax that they use, and we try it out right when they configure it, so that they know right away as opposed to having to wait and discover, "Oh, wait, why are my pay loads not shaping up the way that I thought they should?"
Starr:
Oh, that's smart.
Ben:
And then, also, linking to the documentation for the JMESPath website where they actually have an online evaluator. So, you can put in some pay load, and you can put in a query and it will try and evaluate that for you. So, we could pull that into Hook Relay's at UI right there, and that'd be kind of cool. We haven't done that yet.
Josh:
That would be cool. Yeah. Well, we can add those... Those are nice finishing touches we could add after we see how people respond to it, and use it, and everything. And I don't know, who knows, maybe we'll be adding a JavaScript transformation feature at some point.
Ben:
That would be super cool.
Josh:
Write your transformations in JavaScript.
Ben:
But the early responses from our alpha testers has been really good. They love it. One person said, "This is something that I've wished existed for a long time now." So, that was great to hear.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Awesome.
Josh:
That'll be on the home page, right?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
On the sales page.
Josh:
One thing that was interesting this week that Ben and I... The discussion we got into a little bit on Base Camp, and this might be a larger topic that we could talk about on a future episode or something. But just was like positioning with Hook Relay because we have all these really cool things that it could do, and ideas, things we want it to do, that we know there's reasons we want it do this because we could... It'll do this for us. Which is primarily why we're building it. But then, we keep thinking of these other use cases that it could handle basically. Whereas, I think when it first started, it was really just about improving the quality of web hook delivery. Am I getting that right, Ben?
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
I don't think we were thinking... I mean, in the back of our head, we had been talking about products that do some of these more advanced pipeline style transformations and things like that. But that's not really what we had in mind initially anyway. But those types of... These more advanced use cases fit nicely into what the product already does which is great but at the same time, it's... It doesn't necessarily fit in someone's mind in the same location that just web hooks do. If that makes sense.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Which comes down to... That comes back to positioning. So, even though the product can... Maybe it can do three really amazing, awesome things that different people want. You need to figure out, "Well, how are you going to actually tell people what it is?" Because you have to start somewhere. I mean, there's a competitive landscape for everything, so you have to look at what other people... What are other people... How are they representing themselves, and who are they selling to primarily? And where do we fit in that landscape? So, I think it's kind of fun too because it's exciting to have a product that isn't positioned yet. We don't really... I think at this point, we don't really know where this fits. And so, we really... We get to think about that.
Josh:
And this is something we really... We didn't really know... We didn't really think about this too much I think when we first launched Honeybadger. Again, it was just like... I mean, we obviously know what this is, we're basically copying something else that we can do better. And we already know that there's customers of that, that want... That would buy this basically. So, we didn't do any positioning exercise where we figure out, "Okay. Where are we going to fit in this market?" And do all the big product things that people do today. So, I'm looking forward to figuring that out. I guess that is part of the... How we... What will the copy be in and stuff. So, I don't know if you've thought about that at all, Starr.
Starr:
I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about it. The thing that... I want to compared Hook Relay's possible positioning to maybe... I'm interested in comparing it to Heroku because they do very different things obviously, right? It's not a competitor type thing. But Heroku came in and is like, "Okay. Well, you've got web hosting, you've got all this stuff exists already but we're going to take that and we're going to be like, okay, we're going to add easy deployment to web hosting, we're going to add scalability, we're going to..." It's basically, you have this thing, web hosting, that people already do, they already know how to do. And then, Heroku essentially came on and added these very simple... You press a button, and you add this to web hosting, and you get this to web hosting, and you add this to web hosting.
Starr:
So, my initial... Yeah, my initial thinking on this is that... Because Hook Relay's kind of like that with web hooks, right? You have your web hook, it exists, you know how to do it, it's fine. But then, you have this push button system where, "Okay, add reliability to your web hooks. Add..." I don't know, "Maintainability to your web hooks." Because you don't have to go into your app and edit code when Slack updates their pay load format, right? You could just change your JMESPath thing, you just change that. You just log in, you change that around and there you go. And so, it seems like each of these features that we've talked about is like this push button power up to web hooks as a concept.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Man, really liked that. I hadn't thought about it that way but that's pretty cool.
Josh:
Yeah, me either. Yeah, we'll have to expand on that. Or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. And then, another problem that we faced almost from the beginning when we had early alpha customers come in and say, "Oh, that's great. But can it do this?" Pushing the product in different directions. And we came to realize pretty quickly that while we had seen it primarily as an outbound use case, sending web hooks from Honeybadger to a variety of things, some other people saw it as primarily an inbound thing where they're handling a bunch of inbound web hooks and want to do stuff with that. And that was interesting. And as we worked through that, that changed the complexity of the home page. Just the sales high, okay, now you got to talk to two different use cases.
Ben:
And then in the past week, as Josh and I have been having a discussion on Base Camp, we've actually come up with a third area which is a higher level thing than just sending web hooks. It's connecting services both inbound and outbound. Being an actual relay like the name implies, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
So, it's going to be interesting to come up with... Not just with the positioning but also, okay, now these use cases and how that plays into positioning.
Josh:
Yeah. It's difficult to... It's hard to sell a Swiss army knife.
Ben:
Yeah. That's what I was thinking earlier, "It's like a Swiss army knife."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well, I mean, you get it for the knife part, right? And then you discover all the other tools and their carrying usefulness.
Ben:
It's like, "Oh but I got this knife but it also tweezers. Right on. I love tweezers."
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. We'll just hire that super shamming guy.
Josh:
I mean, I have to admit, a product that really embraced the Swiss army knife thing and sold itself, maybe it's even the metaphor is a Swiss army knife. On the home page, you've got a literal Swiss army knife.
Ben:
I had the same though, yeah.
Josh:
I mean, it's cute but at the same time, I don't think I would ever buy that product. So, it goes back to the thing, you really have to figure out... Yeah, some kind of concept to fit into the user's head that clicks. I don't know. I don't think I would buy a product that said, "I'm a literal..." I guess New Relic is like a Swiss army knife of monitoring and that's the very reason I don't like it in the past, so I guess that's a good example.
Starr:
But then again, think of Heroku because you have... They are kind of a Swiss army knife. I mean, some of their weird tools are provided by third parties in their Heroku marketplace.
Josh:
That's true, yeah.
Starr:
But it's just menus of things, and you just click, "Okay. I want this database. I want these add-ons to do Redis or whatever."
Josh:
Yeah. That's a good point.
Starr:
But it doesn't feel like it's diluted because they have their core product which is a hosting, and then the other stuff is sort of like... Yeah, it's add-ons to that.
Josh:
Yeah. It's like power-ups.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point because Heroku... You're totally right, Heroku is kind of like that but at the same time, Heroku has... When they first came around, they had some of their greatest positioning. I loved their positioning, and still do. It's like easy mode for app deployments. Hit push, and you've deployed your app. So, it's like the best of both worlds. It's dead simple, it's relatable but then when you get into it, it's like, "Wow. This is powerful. I can just click push a button... Hit push for my web app, I can't add whatever Redis or Postgress or whatever. Or monitoring. Honeybadger. Or Hook Relay."
Starr:
I'm wondering if the reason it doesn't feel like a Swiss army knife is that you have to pay for every button you press.
Ben:
Well, just out of curiosity's sake, I was thinking about the Swiss army knife thing. I'm like, "I wonder how their home page pitches the Swiss army knife." Because you've got all these use cases, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, I loaded it up just now, and I went to the website. And the funny thing is, the actual Swiss army knife is nowhere on the page. If you go to Swissarmy.com, you can't see a Swiss army knife. Right now, at least. The headline is something about barbecuing. And then they have a backpack, and they have their kitchen utensils. And then you get down, you keep scrolling down, then you finally actually see a Swiss army knife next to a watch.
Starr:
It's the Swiss army lifestyle.
Ben:
Totally.
Josh:
That's genius, Ben. We should definitely do some sort of... This would be a great positioning research exercise.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Josh:
Like, how do you sell a Swiss army knife?
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
And then apply that to SaaS or, software products.
Ben:
Yep. Yep.
Josh:
I would buy that eBook.
Ben:
You should write that eBook.
Josh:
That's a... Yeah, maybe I will.
Ben:
Yeah. So, it'll fun to see what the Hook Relay home page ends up looking like. Maybe we'll have backpacks, and kitchen utensils.
Starr:
There you go. People can add a photo, like them with Hook Relay, using it in their lifestyle.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. That makes me think of Kathy Sierra and her thing was, "It's not about a product, right? It's about your customer. It's about making your customer a badass, right?"
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
You just had the book. You just pulled that book right up. You just pulled that book right up, Josh.
Josh:
Yeah, no, I do have... I'm showing the book for it. People who are listening, I have the book sitting on my desk. It's Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra. And I highly recommend it. It's a badass book. It will make you more badass but it will also make your users more badass. But yeah, I'm going... I've been revisiting it through this week for our onboarding just to remind myself how to go through this.
Ben:
Yeah. But the... One of the things that made me key into that idea, and with Starr's comment, was also... And I'm still looking at the Swiss army home page, and that hero image is an individual who is slicing through barbecue. He's preparing it. I'm like... So, it's not even about the knife. It's about what he can do with the knife, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
He's using the knife to slice through some barbecue?
Ben:
He's making a really good looking barbecue. So, the knife-
Starr:
I found a Swiss army knife.
Josh:
Well, I think they sell... They sell cutlery as well.
Starr:
Oh.
Ben:
Yeah. It's Victorinox branded.
Starr:
Oh, that's right. I've got Victorinox knives in my kitchen. They're actually the best budget knife.
Ben:
Yeah, they're great.
Starr:
They're made out of stainless steel. So, if you're... Your family who never takes care of knives, kitchen things, once you use them, they can't destroy them accidentally.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
This is why... I may have backed off of buying $200 kitchen knives at one point because I just knew somebody was going to leave it in the sink, and it was going to rust, and I was just going to get upset.
Ben:
Right. Right. So, I think the challenge will be... If we... And we love that approach. We love Kathy Sierra, we love that whole idea. So, how do we communicate that on our home page? It's not about relaying web hooks perse, it's about what you can accomplish in your development workflow by having this service that's handling all that for you.
Josh:
Yep. It's all about what you can do.
Ben:
Or we can just throw up a picture of a guy cutting up barbecue and call it a day.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
How about this... How about this for positioning, it's a series of tubes. Hook Relay, a series of tubes.
Ben:
Love it. Can we get a picture of Al Gore with a testimonial?
Starr:
Yeah. I think... Yeah, I mean-
Ben:
These are the best tubes on the tubes.
Starr:
There you go. Wow, this guy has a really big beard on the Victorinox site. I guess they market to people with beards. You should check it out, Josh.
Ben:
Josh is like, "I have to buy that knife."
Josh:
This is obviously made for me.
Starr:
Oh, there's a recipe for barbecue sauce on here?
Ben:
What?
Starr:
I got to check this out. Yeah. There's butter, in their barbecue sauce.
Josh:
I think something for us-
Starr:
I'm sorry, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I have a Southerner's deep conviction about barbeque sauce.
Josh:
Starr loves barbecue. So, I knew we had lost her.
Starr:
I don't even eat barbecue that much. I just have very strong opinions about barbecue sauce. There's a great barbecue place down the street from me and they put cumin in there barbecue sauce. And I just... I lost it. I just don't understand that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
On FounderQuest. Next episode, we argue the merits of barbecue sauce ingredients.
Starr:
I will. I will talk about... If you want to get-
Josh:
We'll do the barbecue sauce episode, okay, Starr?
Starr:
Yeah. Okay. You can tell I'm hungry because everything comes back to food but I can talk for an hour about my strongly held food opinions if you want but nobody wants to hear it.
Ben:
Go ahead, Josh.
Josh:
Oh. Oh, I was just... I was going to say, I think for Hook Relay, thinking about what can people do? What does it give you as a user that makes you think... Makes it click and be like, "I'm awesome. This makes me feel really good with what I'm able to accomplish here." It goes back to the stripe user experience. I would love to be stripe. I would love people to see me as a super reliable, awesome service that it's a joy to use. And the praise that people give Stripe for their developer experience, I would love to have that praise for my own products. And that's kind of what we're selling... I think that's kind of what we're selling with Hook Relay, is the ability to be that good, basically.
Starr:
It's sort of like bottled excellence that you can buy and sprinkle on your apps, and your products.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Does it taste like barbecue sauce?
Starr:
It better not have cumin in it.
Ben:
When I think of bottled excellence, that's got to taste like barbecue sauce.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know. What would I... I'm thinking more of a beverage. More of something that tastes like honeysuckle for some reason.
Ben:
Hmm. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
I don't know.
Ben:
Maybe vanilla maple syrup?
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
Well, it must be time to eat.
Starr:
That's our positioning. It's, "Hook Relay, vanilla maple syrup for your technical team. Just slather it all over them."
Josh:
Well, we could always have some swag. We could have some barbecue sauce swag or something.
Ben:
There you go.
Starr:
That sounds great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Barbecue swag. Oh, man. That's a good business idea somebody should start up. Just to have some branded barbecue sauce that people can order.
Ben:
For sure.
Josh:
I'm sure... I don't know, I'd be surprised if one of the swag fulfillment companies out there isn't doing something like that.
Starr:
There's got to be.
Josh:
Maybe. I'm sure we could find it.
Starr:
It's probably crappy.
Josh:
It won't be good, yeah.
Starr:
It's probably not good. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
All right. Well, it seems like we're losing steam here. Should we wrap it up?
Ben:
Yeah, let's wrap it.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
All right. Well, this has been FounderQuest. Thank you for joining us for our rambling discussion with actually pretty... Some interesting points in there. It was not all fluff. There's some real good... Some nuggets in there. If you want to write for us, for Honeybadger, go to honeybadger.io/blog and check out the write for us page. Read the whole thing. And email me with... Following the incredibly detailed instructions, and you could write for us. And yeah, so... Oh, and yeah, give us some reviews. Apple Podcast FounderQuest, something like that. Just go ahead and-
Josh:
Yeah. Not enough people are reviewing us. So, give us reviews.
Starr:
I don't know. I haven't checked in a long time. Yeah, you should... What? Why am I even seeing this then? Maybe I should just cut it... I'm just annoying people. I used to feel like I can't end the podcast without begging for reviews. I feel like it's something that's expected.
Josh:
Well, no. We've got some. We've got... I mean, we have good reviews. I'm just saying, we could... We don't have as many reviews as we have listeners. I know that. So, step it up.
Starr:
That's true.
Josh:
Step it up, people.
Starr:
If I don't ask for reviews, then I'm going to have to feel like this is a real podcast some other way by shilling Casper Mattresses.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll have to get advertisers or something because that's no good.
Starr:
Or Audible. Let me tell you about a book I listened to on Audible the other day.
Josh:
It's Badass by Kathy Sierra.
Starr:
Badass by Kathy Sierra.
Josh:
All right.
Starr:
All right. See y'all later. Have a good one.
Show Notes
Links:_why
Ruby's Exceptional Creatures
Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method
Audience Ops
Peter Cooper
Docsketch
ProofHub
Scribendi
DeltaWalker
Notion
Honeybadger Developer Blog
Full Transcript:Starr:
I wonder if any of our listeners are too young to know what SOAP is, like SOAP?
Josh:
I'm guessing so.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
SOAP is what we have before REST APIs and JSON. It was interesting.
Ben:
It was hell.
Starr:
Yeah. I dipped my toes in that water a little bit and just gave up.
Ben:
Every time I hear SOAP I think of DHHs slide at that one RailsConf early on where he had the WS-Death Star. It was great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because all the... I guess I should explain that. It's all of the, I guess, it was schema domain or the name space, everything started with WS, and so they started referring to the different... Because there was, I don't know, 10 or 20 or whatever, there were a lot of them, and so they called them WS-Star, to represent all of his schemas that went into that whole SOAP definition. So DHH made fun of it by calling it the WS-Death Star.
Josh:
I see.
Starr:
Oh, I get it. I didn't get that joke to begin with. And the schemas are XML schemas.
Ben:
Right. Yeah, it's all... yes.
Josh:
It's all the good stuff.
Starr:
Yeah-
Ben:
All the fun java land things that you could ever want.
Josh:
I feel like I remember having at one point to take a SOAP endpoint and build a REST wrapper for it or something so that we could interface with... I don't know, I can't remember exactly, but I feel like that happened.
Ben:
That's a special level of pain.
Josh:
It was terrible.
Starr:
Did you use to do some freelance work for the mouse?
Josh:
Oh, yes. Mickey Mouse?
Starr:
Yeah, that mouse.
Josh:
Yeah, uh-huh (affirmative).
Starr:
That just sounds like something they would have had you do, I'm not sure though. I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. We're not saying their name just in case they decide to sue us, right?
Starr:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Ben:
At some point, we may want to monetize this podcast, and we can't have the copyright taking us down.
Josh:
We can't have the... Yeah.
Starr:
Well-
Josh:
That does sound like something that they would do.
Ben:
Yeah, it does, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well, today, I don't know if we've had unanimous consensus on this, but I think we're going to talk about blogging and content and I've done a bunch of paid content acquisition recently, and y'all want to talk about that stuff?
Ben:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Sure.
Starr:
All right, I don't know, there was a time back when blogs were the thing. You started a company, then you need a blog. I'm thinking 2005-ish, 2007, and I remember getting started blogging, I didn't know what I was doing then at all. I produced some terrible content with no real purpose, and since then I've learned a lot, like you do when you, I guess, do something off and on for a decade. Even if you don't really try, I guess you learn some stuff. Y'all had blogs too, right? Your personal tech blogs.
Ben:
Yeah. And it's sad, they're pretty lonely these days, somewhat abandoned.
Starr:
Oh, yeah, me too. Me too. I think starrhorne.com is still up, but I don't know. Don't go there, don't go there anybody. Anyway when we started Honeybadger, obviously, we had to have a blog and we just took the approach that I think a lot of people do, which is you write a blog post about what you're working on, you write a blog post and you do a new feature and you want to talk about it, or when... I don't know, just something occurs and... That did fine for a while, the main problem I found with that approach though is that everybody just gets too busy to write blog posts.
Starr:
Yeah, I feel like back in the day there was this real feeling like, oh, everybody's having blogs, it's this community thing, you'd link to your-
Josh:
You've got to have one.
Starr:
... blogs... Yeah, yeah. And you're having discussions by writing blog articles back and forth, and people don't really do that anymore. Since then, it's become a lot more, I don't know... When I look at a lot of company blogs these days, I just see, pardon me French, garbage.
Josh:
The earlier days of blogging actually were kind of cool, because everything was still... there was no standardization, everything was unique and... Actually, I didn't even have blog, initially, I had a weblog, I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure it was a weblog.
Starr:
Oh. Yeah, I don't know, it seemed much more of a discussion, because I guess there was... people weren't just uniformly on Twitter or I guess, Reddit or whatever people use these days. I don't know. I don't know what the children are using.
Josh:
The were on all those things that we talked about last episode.
Starr:
Exactly.
Josh:
Or whatever, BBS's
Starr:
Yeah, they fall in with just having everybody do a blog post when they feel like it, is that that nobody really feels like it kind of thing, because writing is hard and it's... I don't know. Plus when you're starting company, you have a billion things to do and a lot of them feel more important than writing some blog post, especially when you don't have a strategy or anything around it.
Starr:
Then, I don't know when this was, it was around the time when we started going to a bunch of conferences and stuff. I decided, okay, Starr, I'm going to write one blog post a day. And so I had a flurry of activity for about, I don't know, three, four, five months, where I just turned out tons and tons of blog content. And actually, I was really surprised, that started getting some results. In terms of people coming up to me at conferences... I'd never had that happen before where people come up to me and say, "Hey, you're Starr. You wrote this thing. That's cool." And it floored me the first couple times it happened, and then-
Josh:
That started happening to me too, by the way. Where people would come up to me at conferences and be like, "Hey, you know Starr?"
Starr:
Oh, really?
Josh:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Starr:
Oh, my gosh. I guess I'm famous.
Josh:
Yeah. People would always mention your blog posts, still do.
Starr:
Yeah, that's amazing. Some people still reference these blog posts I wrote years ago.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So I guess the one thing I learned there is that posting frequency is really important, probably, more than quality even. I'm not going to say that, but getting stuff out there frequently is important. And I actually did some stats analysis type stuff of our overall revenue. I did this about a year ago, and showed that growth in our revenue was correlated to growth in posting frequency during at least a time when I was doing a lot of posting, which was kind of strange to see. I don't know if it's causal. Since then, we've increased our posting frequency and I'm not sure there's been that direct of a relationship, but also, the economy's collapsed since then, so it's really had to say. It's apples and oranges.
Josh:
Yeah, and we're also a lot bigger now then we were then, so to see... We're growing more revenue than back then. Like to see a large increase, at least in the chart.
Starr:
Yeah, definitely. And since then, you, Josh, have done a lot of content stuff. You got on a real big content kick for a while, didn't you?
Josh:
Yeah. I do on and off. I feel like I go between getting a lot done and getting not much done at all. But I don't know, we have the email newsletter.
Starr:
You did the newsletter, you did Ruby the Exceptional Creatures.
Josh:
Yeah, Exceptional Creatures, which was a... I don't know what to call that, it's an index of Ruby exceptions, but it's themed with mystical or whatever, mythological creatures.
Ben:
I heard a lot of good comments on that from people. They really loved that.
Josh:
Yeah, people still like it, yeah. You can go... It's exceptionalcreatures.com, you can link it up, but... Yeah, it's still there and people like it. It has every single Ruby exception that there is in it and we were writing content about each one, but at some point it becomes a little bit ambitious to try to write an article on every single exception that there is, so we covered the top ones.
Ben:
Yeah, and it makes for good reading, so you should go check it out.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
One thing I really liked about that site is that it was along the lines of earlier Ruby stuff, in terms of flavor and content, and now that everybody's sold out, I feel like everybody really just yearn to authenticity-
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
... that we've all lost.
Ben:
If only we could bring-
Josh:
A few people compared it to _why
Ben:
Yeah, if only you could bring _why back and have him write for us.
Josh:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Yeah.
Ben:
Maybe do some Honeybadger sponsored content from _why that would be awesome.
Starr:
Oh, definitely.
Josh:
Writing is a super... The ability to write well is a super valuable skill for a programmer.
Starr:
Yeah, totally. You introduced me awhile back to what was it? The Fieldstone method? It was a book by-
Josh:
Yeah, the Fieldstone method.
Starr:
Who was the authors name?
Josh:
Gerry, is it Weinberg?
Starr:
Yes, that's right. Gerry... The Consultant Bible guy.
Josh:
Yeah, Weinberg on writing.
Starr:
Oh, look at, you got your-
Josh:
By Gerald M. Weinberg. I have a bookshelf here, so yeah, I pulled it off.
Starr:
You got your physical copy, look at you.
Josh:
I do. I often buy... I'll read on Kindle or pdf or whatever a lot, but I, also, often buy the physical copy for whatever reason, I just like them.
Starr:
You need to get a book shelf with all them behind you.
Josh:
Yeah. I should. I need more wall space in here for bookshelves.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
But, yeah, the Fieldstone Method is a way of, I guess, collecting topics, passively collecting topics to write about, or passively writing throughout whatever, as you have ideas and things, and then basically you can, over time, assemble ideas and little things that you've written into larger pieces of content. And it's worked out really well for us, I think. You've adopted a little bit of that technique too, haven't you Starr?
Starr:
A little bit, yeah. Not so much for technical writing, but I do... yeah, basically, the essence of the technique is that you have... if you want to build a fence out of stone, you could go out and take all the stones and bring them to the place where you need to build the fence at once, or just when you're out on walks, you could gather stones one by one and then bring them back, and then eventually you'll have enough to make a fence. Yeah, I've been doing little just bits of writing here or there. The idea is you just write these little things as they occur to you. Things that are interesting to you and you just store them away with no real intention, and then eventually, I don't know, maybe they'll coalesce into things. Maybe you have a couple running pieces that you just gradually write over the course of months.
Josh:
Part of it is just that you write more. I think my favorite thing that I took away from that book was the idea that you can pretty much always be writing. You don't have to... Writing isn't the act of sitting down with a blank page and having to write a whole article start to finish or something. When you feel like you have something to share on a particular topic, just write it down, it doesn't have to be polished. It's really just for yourself, but later you could take and it might become a paragraph in an article or something.
Starr:
Yeah, it's a really good point, because I feel like everybody, including myself, tends to think about writing as you just sit down with a blank page, but this way it's much more construction, engineering, getting all your pieces together and then you assemble them in a way that makes sense. And you use that a lot when you're starting the Leveling Up newsletter. We still have that, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
We're still publishing that.
Josh:
Yeah, we still have it. I haven't published it as frequently as I initially hoped to, but, yeah... and actually, I need to get... I kind of dropped off adding... I haven't been adding our... Normally, I take our blog posts that we have people write and reformat them for email content and I'll probably get back to that soon. I dropped off sending emails at all during the lockdown and the pandemic, because I don't know, I just didn't feel like emailing people. We'll probably pick that back up here.
Starr:
That makes sense.
Ben:
I can tell you Josh-
Josh:
but, yeah-
Ben:
... plenty of sales people think it's a great time to email people, because I've been getting a lot of them.
Josh:
I know. That's one reason I'm like, "People are already getting enough emails and-
Ben:
We've got to give them some balance though, we've got to give them some actual good stuff that they actually want to read-
Josh:
No, totally.
Ben:
... versus hey, can we schedule a call?
Starr:
What kind of capitalists are we?
Josh:
Yeah, I do want to get back on it.
Starr:
I don't think it's a good time to email people. What? We're ruthless-
Josh:
I have a really hard time-
Starr:
... robber barons.
Josh:
I have a really hard time with... I love to write and I love to research and I love everything about it, but I find that it's difficult... I only have so much mental capacity and energy for writing and the creative process, and there's overlap with programming as well, and if I'm really doing a lot of engineering work, I find it... I don't often have the leftover mental capacity to be creative and write. That's a constant struggle back and forth for me as an engineer.
Starr:
I would say I'm-
Ben:
I think on that point this would be a good place to plug one of our friends and Audience Ops, right? That's a service-
Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
... where they do the writing for you, and basically their argument is, you're busy, you got your mind full of other things, so let us handle the balance and content writing for you.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
One thing about our set up which is a bit, I don't know, I guess it's unique, but... Our audience is developers, so if we're going to publish content for developers, it needs to be about development. It needs to be about... It's got to be programming content and it's not... We've tried doing other types of content. Lord knows we've tried doing more small business content, more... just anything that we can have a non-developer write, we've tried, but then nobody looks at it, ever. Nobody wants to read it.
Starr:
Yeah, so I guess that's why-
Josh:
It has to provide a ton of value. That's the thing, and value costs money. Even if you have small business stuff that's popular, it's usually because the author has a lot of valuable experience to share, and... yeah. It's hard to find... Go just out and find someone random that's going to go write business... Even though it's easier to find people who can write business articles, it's more rare that you're going to find someone who actually has the experience that is going to be valuable enough for people to really connect with it, I think.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. For a long time we stuck with this just kind of doing it ourselves set up, when we could. Primarily, because of the technical angle. And then about, oh, it was, when was it? It was last year. It was as a direct result, I think, of the analysis I did that correlated blog frequency with revenue growth. I was like, "Okay, we've got... I can kind of estimate how much money each of these blog posts is making us, assuming it wasn't just correlations, assuming it was causation. So why don't we just give that to somebody and have them write a post," because it was a fair amount of money. It was thousands of dollars. Yeah, so I set out to try that, and that is how we arrived at our current set up for publishing stuff.
Starr:
If you listen to the show to the end, basically, every week I give a pitch for writing for us. If you go to our blog at honeybadger.io/blog and you look at the top, you'll see a link that says, "Write for us," and you click on it, and you'll get all sorts of information on how to write for us, and-
Josh:
For money, right?
Starr:
For money, yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Exactly.
Josh:
It's always good to mention.
Starr:
Yeah, after I looked at those ROI numbers, I looked at... I reached out to Peter Cooper, who runs Cooper Press, publishes Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly and a bunch of other newsletters, and he had mentioned paying some people to do content. So I reached out to him to ask, "Hey, I'm thinking about paying people roughly this figure, and does that make sense?" And he said, "Yes." And so, yeah, we arrived at this figure where we are currently paying about $500 for a blog post, and that is... There's some places out there that pay more. I think in terms of-
Josh:
Not many, I don't think.
Starr:
Not many.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I think that we are in the high range. If I was doing it over, maybe I'd do 400. I know some people are working for 300, but honestly, at this point, I'm not sure I want to go to back to my authors and be like, "Actually, we're going to pay you less. We're going-
Josh:
It doesn't usually go over well.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. "We're going to give you a hundred bucks less." Even though it doesn't really mean that much to us, because the principle of the thing. So we pay people 500 bucks, and I've actually been surprised. We've been able to get some really, really good content for that. We've been able to... Most of the people I'm working with, a lot of them are developers at tech companies you've heard of, and I guess, looking to make a little extra money on the side, looking to... A lot of people are publishing blog posts anyway, they want to write more, they want to do this and this gives them a way to do it in a way that...
Starr:
First of all, it gives them a little bit of money, which is nice. But then second of all, because we've been doing this for a little while, we know to promote blog posts a little bit better than most developers do, which is not at all, I guess. We do the bare minimum as opposed to nothing, so people get a bit more, I don't know, good traffic out of that, a bit more exposure. And so far, everybody's been pretty happy. I've been pretty happy with the quality of the content. We are publishing once a week, and we've got a pretty big backlog. I've got a two month or maybe even longer backlog, because I-
Josh:
Really?
Starr:
Yeah. I'm going to have to start probably, turning people down or being like, "Okay, sorry, we need to wait a little while before engaging.
Josh:
We're going to have to change the call to action at the end of this podcast to don't write for us.
Starr:
Don't write for us, no.
Josh:
I like that. All right, stop.
Starr:
Stop it, yeah. It's gone really well. I thought I would... I've been doing this over in a corner by myself and nobody really knows what I've been doing. Except maybe Ben Findley, so I thought I would just share a little bit of lessons learned in this own content, it's... I don't know, I've learned a few things setting this whole system up. Does that sound fascinating? Are y'all thrilled?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
All right, so when I started doing this, I had no idea what I was doing. I basically was very upfront with everybody about that. I wrote our writer guidelines, and just threw it out into the world, and I figured people would email me, I would talk to them, and we would figure something out together. And that's kind of, more or less, how it's worked.
Starr:
One thing that we try and do differently at Honeybadger is a lot of company tech blogs they're either focused on key words related to their industry and so you get all these incredibly boring, jargony articles that nobody wants to read. I don't know who reads these, not me. And other tech company blogs tend to be very, what I call, tactical. They show, okay, here's how to build a to do list in Angular and React version 2.X.X, and in a month it's going to be out of date.
Starr:
And just, I don't know, out of... I don't really know why, but we have always done things a little bit different, we've always covered more strategic topics. We've always covered things that I think are going to be beneficial to readers longer term.
Josh:
So more evergreen?
Starr:
Yeah, not only more evergreen, but just more, I don't know, more high level, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
We do our share of how to blog posts and everything, those are fine, but I think that's... I think overall, the things we've gotten a lot of praise for have been either deep dives into a very narrow facet of something, of Ruby or-
Josh:
Yeah, something foundational. Something that's not likely to change in the next Ruby version. It's... yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. And unlike a... You might think, "Well, I could just go to the docs for that. I can go to the docs and learn about Ruby, I don't know, Ruby string methods or something."
Josh:
Yeah, or open three.
Starr:
Yeah, yes, open three. You can go to the docs and learn about that stuff, but the docs will basically only tell you about that thing.
Josh:
So case in point, if you Google whatever, Ruby open3, all that stuff, we will come up. I know this because I routinely am programming and I need to Google something for Ruby and I go and do it, and it takes me a minute to realize, oh, I'm actually reading our blog now.
Starr:
Oh, me too.
Josh:
So it works.
Starr:
Yeah, so the deep dives that... They not only explain the one technical thing, like open3, but they give you a vertical slice through the whole stack, so here's open3, what is that actually doing, let's look up one level and down one level, and explain it. And so that's a sweet spot for us, and another sweet spot for us is to cover these big general topics. Recently, one article we did was an introduction to character encoding for Rubyist. A big general topic as applied to, historically, for us it's been, Rubyist, but we've also branched out a bit since we support a variety of languages in our product, so encoding for Rubyist.
Starr:
One of the things that I did early on that tipped me off to this approach was I did the Rubyist guide to security or something, and it basically just listed every possible security issue at that time that people were dealing with. And talked about how it applied to Ruby and Rails development, and I got a lot of positive feedback. Those are the types of things we look for, so I spent a lot of time really honing that and figuring it out, and honestly, I didn't even go into writing this guideline having a clear explanation of all this. I just had these vague, oh, well, we've published articles like this and that's done well, so what... And I really had to sit with it and think about, okay, what is it about this article that makes this us? What is it about that?
Josh:
How did you end up communicating this to the potential writers in a way that gets all that across? Because I assume our write for us page is not super long, I think it's pretty brief overview of all of this, but does that come across pretty well? Do people know what we're after? Or do you end up having to give them a lot of direction?
Starr:
I think some people get it from the write for us page. The way I communicate it there is I gave a bunch of examples and then I was like, "Here's a structure of the examples." I basically gave them Madlibs. Let me read off one, how does big concept apply to specific situation faced by readers? You know?
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
This specific detail of a certain programming language is weird, here's how fundamental properties of the system made it that way, stuff like that. That's-
Josh:
Does anyone ever write an article and it just leave fundamental properties of the system, they forget to fill it in?
Starr:
No, not really.
Josh:
Okay.
Starr:
I'm not sure how much of this people actually read, some people have clearly read it all, some people haven't. What happens when somebody contacts me? They'll email me, they say, "Hey, I want to write for you." In the write for us guidelines, I've said, "Email me two writing samples about programming, some other information." People put that in and essentially, that email I look at their writing samples, if they seem reasonably okay, then I ask them to book a call with me on Zoom. And I've been pretty open about who I accept. If you've emailed me and you have okay, decent writing samples, I've tended to be like, "Okay, let's schedule a call."
Starr:
I may have to become a little bit more selective as we get more and more people in, but, yeah, then we do a call and I've got my structure of the call that... Essentially, the call goes over all the stuff in the writer's guidelines, just to make sure they've actually heard it and not just skimmed over it, because some people may not quite understand everything. Then after the call, assuming they act like a reasonable human being on the call... The call's basically about getting to know them, understanding the things that interest them, because, honestly, I like my authors to bring me ideas for topics for blog posts, because frankly, my own experience is limited. And they come up with much cooler articles than I would be able to assign to them.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And you're going to write better about a topic that you care about versus something that somebody assigned to you. That call is basically just getting to know each, then I put them in the process, we send them our writer's agreement, we do that via Docsketch, via our free account that Reuben-
Josh:
Yeah, Docsketch is cool.
Starr:
... friend of the show gave us, so you all should go out and buy Docsketch. We should give them a little plug and pay them back for that.
Josh:
They're a unofficial sponsor of this episode?
Starr:
Exactly. We eSign the author agreement, which is just a standard contract, and the terms of the contract are basically what you'd use if you were hiring a programmer to do code. It's work for hire. We own the copyright of all the stuff that we buy, and I think that's fair because we pay a lot for it. But that said, we give people permission to post their own stuff on their own blog after a while and all that.
Josh:
Well, I like the aspect of it that we're trying to help promote the authors themselves, we're trying to help them get their content out there and I don't know-
Starr:
Yeah, definitely. We are... One thing I really try to do is be very author specific. Our authors aren't just... And I communicate to them, I hope, that we're not just some content mill, we are here to help them publish the things that they find interesting and useful and do that in a way that benefits Honeybadger. And we basically want to lift everybody up and be happy together. I don't know. I don't know, it's kind of crunchy, but that's okay.
Josh:
You put a lot of production stuff into that too. Everyone gets a custom illustrated headshot for example, right?
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Like an avatar for the blog.
Starr:
Yeah, everybody gets an avatar.
Josh:
Do we give that to them? They can use that if they wanted to use it other places even? Or-
Starr:
Yeah, I told them they could use it for their personal stuff.
Josh:
Twitter?
Starr:
I'm not sure anybody's actually done it.
Josh:
That's why everyone... There's 50 people on Twitter that have... they're all using this for their Twitter photo now, because it's so great.
Ben:
We're going to be like the Wall Street Journal, that style.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
There you go. We'll have to hire the gal from Fiverr to... Oh, no, I shouldn't say where i get it done.
Josh:
You just blew our source.
Starr:
I blew or cover, yeah. Now, everybody's going to get the same one done. So initially, I was using email to coordinate with everybody and just, I don't know, I figured they were writing stuff and I was trying not to plan too far ahead. And I quickly found that when you have five people working on articles, and they're all emailing you, it's really hard to keep straight, and it's real easy to forget people and forget what they're doing and all that. So that's when we moved over to a project management system called ProofHub, which I do not strongly recommend. We basically moved to them because pretty much every project management system that had the features that we needed was per seat, and I'm not going to pay $20 a month for a seat for an author who maybe is never going to write an article for us or maybe will write one a month or something, that's ridiculous. They had unlimited seats, basically.
Starr:
We've essentially just got a big kanban board that has all of our steps. We have a very set process. They do the first draft, they get it back to me, I give them high level comments, usually, that involves stuff that will make the article more approachable to people, because people tend to come to writing with their own knowledge, and they don't realize that they're assuming knowledge on the part of the reader. Once people get done with that, then they submit their second draft. This is all done by GitHub, we just markdown files in GitHub. And after their second draft, it goes into the editing process, which happens on our end, and I take a very programmery editing approach. I think most normal people who do editing tend to mark up things and send them back to the author and all that stuff. I change the files and submit a pull request, and I tell them this, it's like, "I want all of our authors to be happy with what goes out, so if they're not happy with any of the things in the pull request-
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
... sure we can change them, we can discuss them," but it just seem easier to do that than to try and figure out how to get them to do the exact thing that I want them to do. I'll just show them and then they can do it or not.
Josh:
So you submit a PR to their article and then have them review it?
Starr:
Yeah, and then I have them review it.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
And then when the PR is done and merged, they get paid pretty quickly. And for the editing process, that's changed a little bit. The editing process has been by far the most time consuming thing on my end. And initially, I edited every article to make it sound like I had written it, which just takes an enormous amount of time. A couple of the articles, I actually rewrote a lot of them, and since then, partially, owing to pandemic, because just having less time, since then I've stepped back from that and been like, "Okay." It's okay if people don't explain things in exactly the way I would or maybe the most simple possible way, that's okay. Let's just take their words, take their writing and make it the best version of itself that we can do. I'll still do a heavy hand edit occasionally, honestly, because several of our authors are overseas, so...
Starr:
Developers, in general, also, don't tend to be the best at writing introductions to things, so I rewrite some introductions, and then I send it off to this service called Scribendi, and Scribendi is essentially, it's a human editor and you send them a file and they send you back the edited version. It's a little bit hit or miss sometimes, at least in the beginning because you just send in your file and the assign and editor to it, and you hope that you get back something good. And sometimes it was good, sometimes it was just not good, sometimes people had rewritten things in ways that made no sense, technically, but I eventually found somebody on there who gave consistently good results, now I basically just pop it over them, and then when they're done, I look at the diff. I use a program which I really like called DeltaWalker. It's essentially a diffing tool that gives you really in-depth diffs where it can be like, this word was moved around inside this line as opposed to-
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
... to GitHub, where it's just this line changed somewhere.
Josh:
But there's no collaborative thing to it, right? It's just a tool.
Starr:
No, it's a desktop app.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I just have to go off about this tool. It can pdfs, it can do Word documents, it can do directories, you can diff whole directories of files, any way.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Yeah. Once that's done, then I do a PR, maybe I have to rewrite bits of it, if that requires it, then it's done. My overall impression of this, is this took a lot longer to get going and get rolling than I would have liked. It felt like in the beginning doing the paid content, I just kept thinking, "Man, I could write articles quicker than the stuff I'm doing to have somebody else write articles and pay them for it."
Josh:
Also, it sounds like a lot of process that you created over time.
Starr:
Yeah, there's a lot of process. But overall, now, it still requires work, but it's process work, it's mechanized work, so that, assuming I'm not in crazy limited quarantine hours, I can do it and then do some other stuff as well during the day. But you mentioned process, my favorite bit of process, which I almost forgot is that when it comes time to publish these articles, one thing that I always hated was actually publishing the article and taking the markdown file, bringing it into our static site generator and in that static site generator file adding a description to it and adding the title. Because, okay, I was always worried I was going misspell something or... And code editors don't have the best spellcheck, and it's just... I don't know, it always stressed me out.
Starr:
And then also, we had this issue where our marketing guy, who not technical, he would have to ask all these question about, "Okay, what is this article about? Who is this for? How do I promote this?" What I actually did is I came up with... it's a blog post marketing template, and I'm really, really happy with how this is turned out. Essentially, what it does is it steps you through a list of questions. Like, obviously, title, but then it asks you who is this for? Could you explain what this is about for a responsibly intelligent, non-technical person? That's our marketing guy Ben, so, hi, Ben.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So that's basically for him so he can understand what it's about, then it's like, "Okay, so what good does it do the readers? What are they going learn? When is it going to be useful?" These very simple marketing questions, and by the time I write those... Those are not supposed to be published. Those are just for internal use, so I don't have to worry about sounding cool in those. I get those written and then it's like, okay, so what's a short description for the post? And now I'm in place where, okay, it's super easy to write the description, because I've just done all my work. I've just figured out everything I'm going to say, I just have to write it into a clever description. Then since you were taking some of these blog posts for our Leveling Up newsletter.
Starr:
Yeah, you need some text to put in those emails. I started adding a long description, which essentially what it is is I take the... explain it like I'm five explanation of the article, I make it look a little nicer, and then I just append the short description to it, so it's like there's almost a formula for doing it, so it's super easy. And then also things like little quotes and stuff in the article for Twitter. All the stuff that, when I was doing it after the fact was super ad hoc and stressful, because it would be 10 things I have to remember at one time.
Josh:
Makes you want to procrastinate.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. This actually gets done before the blog is posted. It takes about 20 or 30 minutes to fill out and then I used to copy and paste everything over to create the file for a static site generator, but I since was like, "That was dumb." I started saving everything with a data sheet in YAML format, so I wrote a little build tool that takes the data sheet and then spits out the blog post with all the images in the directories and everything, so it's pretty sweet. It's pretty slick.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
That was my hour long excuse to brag about my little build tool I wrote.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
It sounds pretty awesome. It sounds like we could build a product that does all that.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh.
Josh:
Yeah, I was thinking like-
Starr:
Okay, everybody does exactly the same thing we do.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
The content... I really liked the editing process you talked about, especially with the idea of submitting pull requests back to the author for them to collaborate on your edits. I thought that was really cool. Maybe there should be a SaaS out there that's dedicated to editors for that kind of editing process. Maybe it could have that super high powered diffing that DeltaWalker has, but also do pull requests against it and stuff and reviews. Because it's funny, I was looking at ProofHub and it looks like it has a lot of features, but at face value it also looks a lot just like a Kanban board, so it always strikes me how much... How many tools can probably be replaced by Notion these days.”
Starr:
I'm using the tool in ways that I didn't necessarily think I was going to use it when I started out, so it's could be a different tool would be appropriate now, maybe, because of the way I'm actually using it now. I just haven't gone back to it, because that would be a lot of work to change everything over.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Cool.
Starr:
All right. Well, I've talked y'alls ear off, so if y'all have anything to say, let me know, otherwise, I'll let you all go.
Josh:
That was great. I think we're good. Yeah.
Starr:
Okay, awesome. This has been FounderQuest, so if you want to review up go to Apple podcast and do that. I think that's what it's called now. I always forget every week. If you want to write for us, if this has sparked a fire, we hire people to do programming tutorial type content with a lot of Ruby and a smattering of other stuff as well. So just got to Honeybadger.io/blog and look for the write for us page, read the whole thing and understand it before you contact me, and I will be seeing you.
Show Notes:
Links:Whirly Board
OWASP Top Ten
Detectify
Kolide
WWIV
Trade Wars
Security Researcher Hall of Fame
Full Transcript:
Josh:
Yeah. It's called a Whirly Board and it's a local... Well, not local. It's a US small business apparently that makes them. I forget where they're located. Not in Washington. It's like a skateboard. There's I've seen other balance boards that are made for standing desks, but none of them have the... This has also side... You can balance on the edges of it as well so you can rock back and forth between the outer edges and balance.
Starr:
Oh, that's really cool.
Josh:
Apparently you can do a tricks. You can 360.
Starr:
Of course you can.
Josh:
And... Yeah. You can ollie.
Starr:
So I was imagining literally a skateboard on top of an exercise ball where if you lost your balance it would just fly out from underneath you.
Josh:
Yeah. This is not... One of the big exercise balls?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. One of the big ones.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
You probably wouldn't have enough ceiling in your room to... The ceiling wouldn't be high enough to-
Josh:
Yeah. It would not be. Yeah.
Starr:
Well, that's cool. So that's supposed to work out your core or something or give you a better balance?
Josh:
Yeah, I think all of the above. I more just got it to give myself something to do while I'm standing. It's kind of fun. It's a sport you can do while working at your desk.
Starr:
Oh, that's cool. Sometimes at my standing desk I find that I'm fine. I find that I'm standing, but I'm standing in this very rigid way. And I have to remind myself to not do that. So maybe that would help.
Josh:
This definitely stops you from doing that. You have to... And I think this one is very... It's not stable at all so it's probably on the more unstable end of the options out there.
Starr:
I was trying to work that into a sick burn against, I don't know, Node or something, but-
Josh:
Put it in there somewhere.
Starr:
... couldn't do it in time. I'm a little bit tired. Feeling a little bit tired. So on Thursday... Wait. Yeah, Thursday I took the day off and drove down to San Francisco. It was a 13 hour drive. And then I had a-
Josh:
Pretty good time?
Starr:
Yeah. I had appointment, came back the next day and another 13 hour drive. I didn't really sleep very well. I mean, honestly, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was very long, but I've done that before. It's about the same distance from the bottom of Texas to Guadalajara, which I've driven several times.
Josh:
Yeah. It's not too bad.
Starr:
It's boring and you feel like mush. You feel like oatmeal after the end of it, but...
Josh:
Yeah. Get a good audio book or podcast or something.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I mean, our podcast doesn't work well for long road trips because our episodes are 30 minutes.
Starr:
I just binged our own podcast the whole way down there. I just binged it. It's so bingeable.
Josh:
So you binged on the way down, and then you binged it again on the way back?
Starr:
Yeah. So my biggest travel tip that I... Something I did different this time. It really probably only works. I mean, maybe you could swing this if you're flying. The reason I drove instead of just taking an easy one hour flight is that I don't want to die. And that seemed to be the less lethal option at this point. So I was able to take my yoga mat. I don't do really complex yoga, but just having this ability to stretch after I arrive at a place after driving many hours and, I feel much less pretzelified than I normally would after a trip like that.
Josh:
That's a good idea.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Did you go down by The Golden Gate Bridge and just out on the beach and stretch at dawn, do some yoga at dawn on the waterfront?
Starr:
I'll let you imagine that. Yeah. That's a great image. I'll let all of our listeners imagine that, that I have that kind of life.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That sounds wonderful.
Josh:
Yeah. I've done that drive more times than I probably should have.
Starr:
Do you all mind if I cross promote my Insta on here? I'm just kidding. I don't have an Insta.
Josh:
You're a lifestyle influencer?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So yeah. What are we talking about today?
Ben:
I was just thinking about security in the context of our compliance work, which thankfully is just about wrapped up. I checked on the auditor portal this morning and all of the evidences have been accepted.
Josh:
Yay.
Ben:
So now I think it's just getting the final report written is the only thing left for them to do. So I'm pretty excited about that.
Josh:
You knocked those out fast, Ben.
Ben:
Well, it only took, what, several months of preparation to get to that point.
Starr:
Fast.
Josh:
Yeah, the last couple of weeks it seems like you're like, yeah, they gave me another list of 40 things that we have to do. And I'll maybe get to them over the next couple of months. And then a whole week of doing things, and then it's ready.
Starr:
You posted a screenshot and it was all gameified. It looked like Xbox achievements or something.
Josh:
Oh, right. Are you going for HIPAA now?
Ben:
Oh man. I so want to. You have to envision this since you're listening to this podcast, but imagine a dashboard that shows you circle charts for completion. What we're working on, and what we've been working on, the compliance is SOC2. And on our dashboard for the auditor's tool, their web based tool they use to track all this stuff, there is a little circle chart that shows you what your completion is towards your goal of getting SOC2 compliance. Well, next to that chart are other charts that show you what your progression is towards other compliance games that you could use, like HIPAA or ISO 27001. And it's totally game mechanics, psychological kind of thing, where they're like, "Hey, look how close you are to this other thing that you could also do and spend a lot more money and time to get compliance certified for." And it just made me twitch because I'm totally a sucker for that sort of thing. I'm like, oh, I could get that, and I could get that. Yeah, it's been rough. I have to resist the urge to double down and do HIPAA and other things like that.
Josh:
Yeah. Does SOC affect... If a medical business needed to use us that needed something... I don't know. Does it help us at all in the medical field, or do we need to go for HIPAA if we're going to deal with that?
Ben:
HIPAA, like SOC, there's not a checklist of things. It's a bunch of guidelines, and-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
There's a bunch of guidelines, and you need to assure an auditor, and your customers, that you adhere to certain practices and procedures that make you a secure organization. So there is a lot of overlap. So, for example, that percentage goal thing that they showed in the dashboard. When it was showing SOC2 is 87% completed, it was showing HIPAA at 82% complete.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So there is a lot of overlap there.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
But the way that, typically, I think we will handle that, instead of just going for a full HIPAA certification for an auditor is we'll just sign the business associate agreements that HIPAA compliant customers want to use, in which we assure them that, yes, we're doing those things. But yeah. We can definitely point-
Josh:
Gotcha.
Ben:
... at the SOC2 report and say, "Yep. Our auditor says we're doing stuff that makes us secure so you can trust us." Yeah.
Josh:
Right. And having the SOC2 would probably add weight to our statements of-
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
... we're complying with other things.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. It's not just the pinky square kind of thing. It's, "This is legit. This is verified." Yeah.
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
It's kind of funny because a couple weeks ago, I was looking at using a new vendor. And as part of our compliance now, we have to go and make sure that our vendors are also following security best practices. And that means I have to get some sort of report or attestation from them. And so I sent an inquiry to a potential vendor, and said, "Hey, can you send me a SOC2 report? Or can you send me some sort of attestation?"
Ben:
And they're like, "Sure." And they sent me a bunch of their policies. I'm like, "Oh yeah. I recognize these policies. Because these are some that I wrote." And then my next thought was, "But how do I know that you're following these policies?" It's just kind of silly.
Josh:
Yeah. We're like on the other side of this now. Because now you've been going to try to make sure our vendors are complying with the things that we need to comply with, and they're giving you the run around. Right?
Ben:
Right. Yep. Yeah. It's been great.
Ben:
The shoe is on the other foot.
Starr:
The funny thing about all this, I feel, based on my limited understanding, is that like corporate regulation by the government, and the punishments that companies get, and people inside of companies get for white collar crime, malpractice malfeasant stuff is so just BS and just, yeah. Basically companies never get punished for doing anything wrong. We're creating these huge chains of liability. And then at the end of the day, not for us, we would probably get screwed if we got sued by somebody. We're not like Exxon, but yeah. If Exxon or Facebook or somebody gets sued by somebody, nothing really bad is going to happen to them as a result.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So I don't know.
Josh:
If you can tolerate the lawsuit, you probably don't care.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly.
Ben:
So one of the fun things that came out of the compliance work, though, was security testing. So one of the things that they asked for is, "Have you done a penetration test in the past year?" And prior to this, we had not done a penetration test primarily because they're darn expensive. Really, really expensive. But it turns out that it was a really interesting exercise. So we contacted a firm who has experience with testing Rails applications in particular. Again, this is the first time I had gone through it. So I was surprised, too. As we were onboarding with them, they gave us some options on what kind of testing we would like to have. And one of the options was just plain old they have no information. They're just going in blind, and try and mess up your system.
Ben:
But another option that I hadn't really considered before was they can get access to your code ahead of time. And they'll do a deep dive review of your code and look for vulnerabilities, and then use that information to inform their testing. So more of a targeted kind of thing, and allows them to optimize the time spent on engagement. And so we went with that option. And it was, it was really good. I was, well, pleasantly surprised that we did not have a significant list of issues to deal with. We did have some, and some that I was like, "Oh yeah. I could see that." And some I was like, "Wow! Where'd that come from? That's out of left field."
Ben:
So it was really useful for me to have that. And after having fixed a few of those things, now, I'm like, "Oh, I'm feeling pretty good."
Josh:
Feeling secure.
Ben:
Feeling secure. But it didn't... Go ahead.
Josh:
I was just going to say, we we've gotten some of the outside vulnerability testing and scanning for free a little bit. Or for the price of a bounty here and there.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I like the freelance people.
Josh:
We didn't ask for it. But yeah, I'm sure that helped a little bit. Because we've fixed a few things that people reported over the years. And...
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Maybe I should explain about this because this was all a surprise to me whenever this started happening. So I imagine it might be a surprise to listeners who don't know-
Josh:
You mean when you get big enough to attract the attention of security researchers?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I guess they have their lists or something. And you get put on a list of SaaS companies or whatever, and then-
Josh:
Someone gives out your phone number.
Starr:
... Yeah. Somebody gives out your phone number. Then suddenly, you have thousands of people from all over the world trying to break into your site, and usually they use these automated tools that spit out automated reports. And you can tell that nobody's really spent significant time in this. And you'll get these emails from their automated systems, which are like, "Oh, you need to do this. Or blah, blah, blah." And sometimes they're valid things. A lot of times they're like, "Oh, okay. I guess you're technically right. But that's not really-
Josh:
It's reaching.
Starr:
... "practically an issue." And they ask for money. Basically, they ask for tips. They're like buskers, aren't they? They're like security buskers.
Josh:
The buskers of the tech industry.
Ben:
Yeah. I totally remember the first few we got of those, and people were like, "So do you pay bounties for bug reports?" We're like, "No."
Ben:
Why would we do that?
Ben:
And I totally felt like, "Is that a threat?"
Starr:
Oh yeah!
Ben:
But it's really not. After having dealt with several of these, it's really not. There are plenty of bug bounty programs out there that do pay anywhere from tip money up to really big money.
Josh:
Yeah. Pretty well.
Ben:
And yeah. They're just looking for, in our case, because we always tell people, "No, we don't do bug bounties." But they still like to get the recognition. And so they'll ask for an acknowledgement on our website, which we do. And they also ask for a tee shirt, or some sort of swag, which we were happy to do.
Josh:
I think that's kind of cool. It's kind of like a frontier of the industry. You go into it. You're not necessarily going to get anything out of it. You have to be good enough. And if you discover the right bug, you might strike it rich.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
It does have very cyber punk feels to it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I think.
Josh:
You might die of dysentery along the way, but...
Starr:
Yeah. It makes sense to me that we all felt a little bit threatened by it because all the security stuff, like the bug bounty people, just came in one giant wave. And none of us expected it. And we're all just scrambling and being like, "What's happening? I don't know."
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I think we got listed on one of their sites or something. Because there're sites that list companies, like on bounty programs and things. I don't know how we would have made it on one of those. But I assume, since it all came at once, we must have gotten listed somewhere.
Starr:
Yeah. I may have mentioned this before on the podcast, but we are also now on a list of companies that buy content.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So we get spammed by every single person selling any kind of content online, whether or not it has anything to do with us or our business. And yeah.
Ben:
But thankfully, Help Scout has automated rules so that we can filter all those messages directly to Starr.
Starr:
Yeah. They just all come straight to me. It's wonderful. And I just send them straight to spam. I've considered just sending them straight to spam because you know what? In our write for us page, it doesn't say to contact Honeybadger support. It says to contact a different email address. And if you're contacting Honeybadger support, you clearly are using a scraped thing. Because you just scraped the support email address from somewhere else on the website.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's not in the right press page.
Ben:
Well, it's-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I don't know.
Ben:
It's even better when they use email addresses from our documentation that just happen to be the names from the Princess Bride characters. And it's like, "Oh, you emailed us at Inigo@Honeybadger. Yeah. I happen to know where you got that email address."
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's really clever. I didn't know that. I didn't know there was a schema there.
Ben:
Oh yeah. Totally.
Starr:
That's so fun.
Josh:
Ben's got a schema for everything.
Ben:
I love how the security researchers are doing it for street cred a lot of time. So what they'll do is-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
... they'll get your swag. And when they receive it in the mail, then they'll post a picture of it to Twitter and brag to all their friends like, "Hey, I got this thing from Honeybadger because I found this vulnerability." I just think that's awesome.
Josh:
It's a total glory for glory and honor thing.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm not going to pay you for a bug report, but I'll happily send you a shirt so you can brag about it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But-
Starr:
Should we pay people? I don't know.
Josh:
We do give them swag and stuff.
Ben:
Yeah. I think there's rationale for that. And I think it makes sense. So I'm not going to say it's something that you shouldn't do. But as a small business, it's kind of tough to justify what's the right price. And then you get into the incentive thing, and yeah. It's just-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
... kind of hairy question.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I think the recognition, at least, we have a security page where we list them. At least a nice thing to do if you're small.
Starr:
I wonder if we did start paying people, if we would start getting so many more people trying to find bugs, and submitting bugs and stuff, that we would just be overwhelmed by spam. I mean, not really spam, but by all these things that we don't really ... There aren't really that, I don't know, people just trying to make a buck.
Ben:
Yeah. I think that's one of the weak areas too, because like you mentioned, they don't report things. It's just like, "Ah, okay. I can see technically that's true, but we just don't care." It's not a big deal. And it would be nice if we had a won't-fix listing. Right? Like, "Okay, just don't even bother submitting a report, because we've gotten this report five times, and we just don't care about that particular thing." Right?
Josh:
We could put that on our security page.
Starr:
Yeah, because hashtag won't fix. Hashtag won't fix.security messaging?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I should make it clear-
Josh:
It's like guidelines.
Starr:
... we don't, if we didn't care about something, it's because it doesn't really have an effect on our user. It's not because we're just negligent.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, yeah. And back to the penetration test, there are different severities of issues, right? There are critical issues, there are high-priority, then medium, and low, and then just information. Right? And so, the things that we consider a won't-fix, are either informational or low. Some low things just don't matter.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But if anyone files a critical, of course we're going to hop on that right away and fix it.
Josh:
Yeah. For example, the one that I thought of when I mentioned that we had a bit of a head start, thanks to the security researchers, is I didn't ... One of the things I raised really early on was a brute-force issue on our login page.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Where if you don't throttle requests to your login page, people can just basically submit it over and over. And maybe your password-hashing algorithm, I think there's some cryptography stuff that can limit those attacks a little bit, but still, you want to throttle requests to that page. Right?
Ben:
For sure.
Josh:
I think I noticed that that was something that pen testers checked for, and we passed on. So we would have had to deal with that, if that were an issue.
Ben:
Yeah, another favorite one that we have changed over time as a result of a number of reports from security researchers are things around email addresses and confirmations. Like someone said, "Oh, if you change your email address in the app, then it should notify you at the old email address, and at the new email address to confirm that you actually want to make that change." And it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's a totally reasonable thing," and so we went ahead and did that.
Ben:
It's definitely useful to have these people out there doing that for basically the cost of a T-shirt, that's ... I mean, it's real nice.
Josh:
Yeah, especially at the price tag of a ... paying people to do it, apparently.
Ben:
Yeah, because a penetration test for the real deal is definitely much more expensive than a T-shirt.
Starr:
And what order of magnitude are we talking? What's a rough range? We don't say exactly how much, I don't even know if we can say how much we paid, but-
Josh:
Yeah. I mean, I don't care sharing-
Starr:
... tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? Do we pay millions of dollars?
Josh:
A revenue share? A revenue share deal?
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's less than $100,000, in our case.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Are my kids going to be able to go to college till then? Well, actually, maybe not, for other reasons, but ...
Ben:
Like I said, I am really glad that we had that done. I think there were three issues. One of them was just like, "Okay, you have to have the insider knowledge to exploit this." But if you had that insider knowledge, then you could be really nasty. It was high, but okay, it's mitigated. We fixed it anyway. But two of them were like, "Oh, wow, that's really a thing."
Ben:
And I'm actually surprised that no one in all their testing has found one of those. One of them was a cross-site scripting issue, which was embedded in our markdown parser. So thank you, Starr, for giving me the quick fix on that. But basically, we had neglected to use one option flag to the renderer that turned off basically cross-site scripting. It was like, "Oh, we should probably just make that the default, right?"
Josh:
It's not the default?
Ben:
It's not the default.
Starr:
No. And I didn't know this, but in markdown, if you use a redcarpet markdown rendering gem, you can put JavaScript links in there, instead of the URL, you can put, "JavaScript;" and then whatever your JavaScript is.
Josh:
Sounds like a-
Starr:
And it'll-
Josh:
... nice, great feature.
Starr:
I know, it's that's just ... You want your authors to be able to have that capability for markdown, that's what you want. So I don't know, I guess the lesson is for ... Yeah, for markdown, always use the most ... Always just turn on safe links, or whatever it's called, I don't know.
Josh:
Well, except in JavaScript plan where that is becoming the thing, is you can kind of mix the two. And if you're building a front-end site, you do maybe want to put a react component in your markdown for whatever reason, believe it or not.
Starr:
Those people are going straight to hell, Josh. There's no redemption for them.
Ben:
So when-
Starr:
No, you use Facebook's proprietary markdown in JavaScript to write your blog posts.
Ben:
You got to use the BB code, right? Remember those BB code tags?
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.
Starr:
I used to use straight ASCII codes, I just-
Ben:
Oh, so that reminds me, actually. Last week, we were talking about the old-school internet stuff, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Before the internet, and then forums on the internet.
Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
And no lie, I ended up on a phpBB forum over the weekend. Someone sent a link-
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
They were reading up on kayaks, and they linked to a kayak forum that was hosted, and I was like, "Wow, blast from the past!"
Josh:
I noticed the ones that are still around are those old-school, like non-tech-focused communities. There's one for Jeeps, too, because I have a Jeep Wrangler, and I've looked up stuff for Jeep parts and stuff, and there's all kinds of old-school forums about Jeeps out there. Yeah.
Ben:
So they still exist.
Josh:
They're still ...
Ben:
They're still cranking.
Josh:
They're serving their purpose, yeah.
Ben:
Still rendering those BB code tags.
Josh:
I want to start one.
Starr:
You should, you should. What would it be about?
Josh:
I mean, for us. Well, our Honeybadger or our FounderQuest community could be a phpBB. Why do we need a, whatever, Discourse or ... Why does it have to be fancy?
Starr:
I like it.
Josh:
It gets the job done.
Starr:
No, it needs to be a dial-up BBS, Josh. They have a house full of desktop computers.
Ben:
Yeah, we should do that. We don't even have to argue over which BBS software to run, because I'd be all for World War IV.
Starr:
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Josh:
I don't know if we can handle that, as a company.
Ben:
And then I wouldn't get any work done, because I'd be playing Trade Wars all day long.
Starr:
It sounds like an okay life, though.
Ben:
I guess.
Starr:
What was it? There was, I don't know if it was The WELL, or if it was some other big BBS ... You had your normal BBSs that were local, and then you had your BBSs that I think people had to pay it again too, and you attracted more of a international sort of following, I don't know, or maybe they were in big cities. And I saw a magazine interview with one of these people a long time ago, and they had a picture of their house, and it was just full of desktop computers, all running, instead of ...
Starr:
I don't know, maybe they didn't know about rackable servers, or maybe they just didn't have them or didn't ... I don't know, they couldn't afford them. Who knows? But the whole house full of desktop computers, and I remember thinking that was so cool, because I didn't know about rackable servers either, at the time.
Ben:
Well, one other thing that came out of the compliance work, that penetration test, was realizing that. And part of our pull request reviews, that we should be looking at the security checklist, as well. We check for code quality, naturally, and functionality, of course. But also, having a checklist of the top 10 vulnerabilities that you should keep in mind, in particular the OWASP Top 10, and Josh helped me out on that one. He created a little template for our pull requests in a repo. So now, right when you look at the pull requests, there's a list of all the top 10 things you should be looking for, like cross-site scripting or those other-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Ben:
... common issues, SQL injection.
Josh:
That's great. Every time you're opening a pull request now, it's just like you have a guy in a suit and tie bending over your shoulder and-
Ben:
It's like, "Tap, tap."
Josh:
"Don't forget the security." Yeah.
Starr:
Like, "Hello, Mr. Anderson." I guess with the issue with the markdown, we would've seen that checklist, been like, "Oh, maybe I should try inserting some malicious stuff." I'm not even sure that I would have caught that, though, even if I have been checking for it, because I wouldn't have ...
Starr:
Honestly, I never make JavaScript links, I wouldn't have even thought about making a JavaScript link. I might have tried inserting a JavaScript tag, and seen if it got stripped out, which it would have. But yeah, so I don't know, maybe we also need some ... Just like a test post, it has all the possible cross-site things, all the possible SQL injection things, and just ... You have to try posting this into any forum that you make.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Or, hire a dedicated security person. That's what they do all day long, is mess with your stuff.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, maybe this list in the pull request template will start to help us internalize some of these security things to look for, because I don't know about you all, but really the main one that I always ... that I might actually spot is usually the SQL injection stuff, because I've been ... I think my brain has been trained, so think about looking for places where input is coming in from the outside world.
Josh:
That must be a pattern that I'm already trained to look for. So maybe having the list of all the other things that you could potentially look for will, over time, help us to spot them more automatically.
Starr:
Yeah. That's a good thought. Well, on that note, we also started using Brakeman more regularly.
Josh:
Yes. Or you could hire a robot.
Ben:
Or hire a robot. And Brakeman's really good about finding SQL injections and things like that.
Josh:
Go figure, it does all the stuff that... Yeah. All the stuff that's easy for humans to do.
Starr:
It's an automated pen test tool.
Ben:
It's a static analysis tool. So it takes a look at your code, it reads the code and matches it to patterns that it knows could lead to vulnerabilities. And then flags code and says, hey, you should probably take a look at this and see. It would look for SQL injections. Like it would look for interpreted strings inside of the query, for example. Now that might not be an actual SQL injection because you might control that string, right? It may not be user input. So it's not necessarily 100% accurate, but it gives you a good check as to, hey, this is a concern you might want to take a look at that.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kind of make a list and then flag them. Flag them off-
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And, by the way, that's one of those things that's on the check boxes of all this compliance questionnaires, the security questionnaire that you get. Do you use static analysis on your code base? Now if you use Brakeman you can check that off.
Josh:
So right now we're trialing both, just a GitHub action that runs Brakeman, which is an open source tool. It's like a command line thing, but you can put it in your CI. And works like a Linter, so it'll fail if it finds an issue. So we're testing just a plain GitHub action. And then we're also testing Code Climate, which has an integration that basically runs Brakeman for you, and then gives you a little UI on top of it that gives you that false positive list. You can check it off as a false positive, or you could check it off as like, this was an issue that I fixed. And really, it's just a UI on top of Brakeman, I think. But-
Starr:
Is Brakeman only for Rails apps?
Josh:
I believe so. It's Ruby, yeah.
Starr:
It's Ruby. I asked about Rails just because it's like a brake as a part of a train and rail things tend to be sort of like locomotive theme.
Josh:
Yeah. I think you're onto something there.
Ben:
It's definitely focused on Rails, for sure.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And then to top off the security stack, we also, for a long time have been using a Detectify. Which is an automated web penetration tool. It's not as sophisticated as an actual human going in and doing penetration tests, but it does a lot of common things that tries to attack your web app with SQL injection and fuzzing, and all that fun stuff. And we run that every week, and it usually reports nothing. But every now and then it says, oh, you should fix this little thing, or you might want to add this header kind of stuff.
Josh:
What about Collide? That's that's not for websites, but it's a security thing we implemented, right?
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about that, Josh.
Josh:
Well, you know more about it than I do. But basically it's like a root kit I installed on my computer that tells me if I have misconfigured something security-wise. I think, from my perspective, I give it ultimate trust and then it helps protect me from myself.
Ben:
Yeah. The thing I like about Collide is that not only does it monitor those things, like, are you using full disk encryption? Do you have your firewall turned on?
Josh:
If you have an un-encrypted SSH key, was a cool one. So a lot of those things you don't think about all the time.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah. And then it reports that stuff to Slack. And so-
Josh:
And shames you.
Ben:
It shames you. It's like, hey, pay attention. My only beef with it is that it ends up making me update my Mac a little faster than I would otherwise. Because I don't like to reboot. But it's like, nope, you haven't applied the patches. You better do that. And it squawks at me.
Josh:
I know you can't handle it. You can't handle just letting it ride, so you have to do it immediately. I'll leave it until the end of the day or whatever. Just like, shut up.
Starr:
I've been impressed with Collide. I was a little bit nervous installing it. It feels weird. Just, I mean, I don't know the people at Collide. They could do whatever they want to my computer now. But yeah, it really is very thorough. You know how GitHub has ... like it lets you download a file with some recovery keys for your to two-factor authentication? I had forgotten to delete it after I printed it out, and it was basically two years old sitting in my downloads folder or something. And it found that. It felt a couple of them because I like, you know? Because when I transferred computers, I just took my whole desktop and put it in, I don't know, some shared thing. Copied it over. So I've got these things littered all over my disk, going several years back, and I didn't even know about it.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Yeah. I was impressed by that. And then it's like, oh, it's reading everything. It knows everything about me. It's like, what else does it know about me? Is it copying my journal entries?
Josh:
This is why you have a personal computer.
Ben:
It's cool stuff. Yeah.
Ben:
But the best part about the whole compliance process was all the things that I got to say do not apply to us. Like physical security and filing cabinets, and guests coming to your office. It's like, oh yeah, we are all work from home. It doesn't fly. Thanks very much. Skipped all that. So that was nice. I think that completes our security posture. We got the penetration test, we got the automated tests. We got checklists that we're going to use in our PRs. And got Collide watching our laptops.
Josh:
We've got firewalls. We've got-
Ben:
And of course, our production is just super locked down, right? Security groups and DPCs. And, it's fun. All the fun things you get to learn.
Josh:
Intrusion detection.
Ben:
Oh yeah. We got that now too.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Really?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. We have a tool now that's watching for file changes and intrusion detection. I don't know how it does it. It's like magic. I don't know. But it's fun stuff.
Josh:
So don't touch those files.
Starr:
I'm not going to touch those files. Honestly, I'm a little bit terrified of touching anything in production now. Because there was a day back when it was like, things run once and it had a command line and I could log in. But now it's like, everything is so... I don't know, it's so perfectly working and spread out and organized. And I just feel like if I do the wrong thing, it's just all going to fall apart.
Ben:
I feel that way sometimes too. Yeah.
Starr:
Well, yeah good work. We didn't really have, I mean, we had a couple, like... In the pen test we had a couple things, a couple little things, a couple bigger things. But it wasn't just 100 pages of disaster. It was actually, I was like, okay, this is not the end of the world. This is okay. So, good work, because I know that doesn't just happen. I'm sure those PHP BDD people would have had much worse pen tests.
Ben:
No doubt.
Starr:
Is there anything else you all want to talk about, or you want to wrap it up?
Josh:
I was just going to say, do you know what the best feature of the Whirly Board is though?
Starr:
Oh, what is it?
Josh:
It's that you can stand. You can stand with it.
Starr:
Oh, look at that. Yeah.
Josh:
When you're not on it, you can just nonchalantly hold it. Kind of stand on one foot, look really cool while you're podcasting.
Starr:
It's like you bought the gold package of your student photos in the 90's.
Ben:
We need to have custom screen printing done on those things.
Josh:
They do. They do. You can get your logo on them. So we should have a Honeybadger one. Although I don't think you can do the full graphic, but I should totally email the guy, and ask if there's anything we could do. Because that would be sweet.
Starr:
There's something delightfully metaphorical about advertising your error monitoring product on this board where you're precariously balancing. And if you lose focus for one second, you'll just fall down and break your ankle.
Josh:
We might need to include some kind of liability waiver with this swag. I imagine.
Starr:
Well, no, I mean, we are... I don't know, we are in the EU Josh, so we have to be able to say that if you fall off, you have the right to sue us, and obligation to sue us. And we basically have the obligation to give you what you want.
Josh:
Yeah. Well maybe we can put it in our privacy policies or something. Or, well, I don't know what it would be. Our terms of service. Terms of use.
Ben:
There yo go.
Josh:
If you get our swag, it's-
Ben:
It's on you. It's on you.
Starr:
Yeah. Literally in the case of a shirt. Okay. So we need to wrap this up because that was a terrible joke and they're just getting worse.
Starr:
All right, this has been FounderQuest. If you want to give us a review on Apple podcasts, go for it. We love those. And if you want to write for us, I am still talking to writers and doing that thing. Go to our blog at honeybadger.io/blog, and look for the Write For Us link at the top. And that's it. See you guys later.
Show notes:
Links:
Kathy Sierra
Seinfield – Vandalay Industries
Minnesota Fats
Lemonade Stand
Phrack
Honeybadger Developer Blog
Full Transcript:
Starr:
We are on uncharted ground. We usually record on Fridays, but I was out on Friday, so we're recording on a Monday now. We just had our all hands meeting. I had a meeting before that, which means this is my third Zoom call of the day. I've got another Zoom call after this one.
Josh:
Wow, that's a lot of meetings.
Ben:
That's impressive.
Starr:
I figure if I have enough meetings on Zoom, I'll become a Zoomer and I'll like have found the fountain of youth.
Josh:
Is that how that works?
Starr:
That's how it works.
Josh:
Cool, okay.
Starr:
That was a terrible joke I'm sorry.
Josh:
We're all Zoomers now.
Starr:
I apologize to our listeners.
Josh:
I think no, the joke proves that we're Zoomers, I think. They're funny, right?
Starr:
It's fine. I'm going to learn Snapchat this evening. I have an hour booked into my schedule.
Josh:
Very cool.
Ben:
Speaking of Snapchat, so I don't know if you heard the news over the weekend, by Microsoft is in acquisition talks for TikTok.
Josh:
Yeah, which is just like, I did not see that coming.
Ben:
No, no. Not at all. But someone made a funny joke on Twitter, and I just had to share it, and it was basically, "Now Microsoft is going to have a cradle to grave experience. Social networks from birth until death." And so they had TikTok, and then there's Xbox, and GitHub, and then LinkedIn. Right? So, it'd have you covered, right? From cradle to grave.
Josh:
See, I thought the cradle to grave experience with Microsoft was what happens to the social networks after they acquire them.
Ben:
Oh, oh.
Starr:
Oh.
Ben:
Sick burn.
Starr:
Sick burn, yeah.
Josh:
Thanks, thanks.
Starr:
Does anyone still used LinkedIn?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
It just seems like, I don't know, I had to go on or... I don't know. I was there for some reason, probably not a good one. And it was just like, "This just looks like..." All social networks end up looking like a... I don't know, like a strip mall eventually.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That definitely describes LinkedIn.
Ben:
Yeah, that's an apt description. Yeah.
Starr:
It's just like, what random crappy wares are you hawking? Is it shitty articles about synergy, or is it conspiracy theories about masks and mind control?
Josh:
Although, I don't know. We looked at people's LinkedIns when we were hiring, in past hiring sessions, so I guess HR departments obviously still use it.
Starr:
What if you had no LinkedIn? Would that be a detriment?
Josh:
I don't know.
Starr:
I can't imagine I would hold that against anyone.
Ben:
No, I wouldn't, but I would expect there to be something out there, right?
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
A personal website or a GitHub profile that has some stuff in it, or something. I would expect that if you were into tech, that you would be doing something online. Somewhere.
Josh:
Right, but as far as... I mean, LinkedIn, having an active LinkedIn or a Twitter account or something. I would understand why people would not have those for a variety of reasons. Yeah, I regret both regularly, so.
Starr:
I mean, because if you wanted to hire Kathy Sierra, she's not going to have a Twitter account. Right?
Josh:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that would not want to put themselves into the environment that is Twitter.
Starr:
No doubt.
Josh:
Very similar reasons.
Starr:
Definitely.
Ben:
Exactly.
Starr:
That's me lately.
Josh:
Yeah, which is unfortunate, yeah. Really? Is it, Starr?
Starr:
Oh, yeah. I was just like, "This is just making my unhappy every time I look at this. Why am I looking at this?"
Josh:
Yeah, I stopped reading the newsfeed because that's the thing. If I stop with Twitter, it sucks you in and then it just makes you sad or mad or another negative emotion.
Ben:
Doomscrolling.
Starr:
Doomscrolling. Yeah, it's like, I know the world's ending. I don't need to be reminded of it every two minutes. Give me a couple hours in between. So, what should we talk about today?
Ben:
So, one of the topics on our list is a question Ben put together for us a while back was, "What sparked each of the founder's interest in computers?"
Starr:
Oh, a nostalgia episode.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. And you talked about that person who was looking to get into tech, and I'm like, "Hey, we could do that. We could do some nostalgia.
Starr:
Yeah, cold, hard cash. In 25 years, I want to be making a typical engineer's salary.
Ben:
What I'm curious about though is what... Like Starr, you mentioned you had a non-traditional path, but I wanted to find out a little bit more about what y'all wanted to do when you were kids, before you ended up on the whole, "I'm going to be a developer/tech/person, whatever."
Starr:
Oh.
Ben:
Like for example, I wanted to be an architect. That's what I wanted to be.
Starr:
I can see that.
Ben:
At least one of the things when I was a kid. There were some other things in there, but one of the things I really wanted to do was to be an architect. I thought that was a super cool career.
Starr:
Wow.
Josh:
Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I know-
Josh:
journalist was always one for me.
Ben:
Well, that's cool. That's cool.
Starr:
You do value the truth.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Fake news.
Starr:
My dad was an architect, so I can actually see that, Ben. I think you would make a pretty good architect if you ever want to go back to school. But-
Starr:
Ben I think you would think a pretty good architect if you ever wanted to go back to school. But let me tell you, architects make shit money. Of all the professions that people know about, architect's the least paying.
Ben:
It's like a beige collar... it's not a white collar job, it's a beige collar because they get paid a little.
Starr:
Yeah. And I think it's just because it's, I don't know, game development or something, so many people are like, "Oh, well I like art and stuff. So I'm going to be an architect." So it's this prestige thing. But you don't actually need that many architects.
Josh:
There's only so many buildings and so many unique buildings.
Starr:
Yeah. For a while I worked doing drafting in an architect's office and that was one of my many careers and you just need one architect in the office to sign off on the plans. Everything else has become very specialized. So it's like you need your HVAC engineers and you need your plumbing people and all that stuff. So in terms of architects, they don't make that much. The engineers on the other hand, seemed from my limited experience, seemed to make a little bit of money. Can I tell you a story?
Josh:
Please.
Starr:
Okay. So there's this engineer who I guess had a firm, and this was in Arkansas. This was not in a big city. He always acted like he was this high roller when he came into the office to discuss... Like he wore suits, he had... you know those aluminum cases that have foam in them that people use to carry around weapons to assassinate people?
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah. It was one of those, but it was full of cigars. Yeah, it was that kind of guy. It was that kind of guy. Oh my gosh, so I don't know, I guess he was making some money, but I don't even know how much that was. You don't need much to be-
Josh:
He's making enough for a briefcase full of cigars, that's for sure.
Starr:
You don't need much to be a baller in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Starr:
So anyway, go into architecture for the love Ben, if you're going to do it.
Ben:
Yeah. I think that idea has pretty much floated by. The thing I thought of after I got past the architect phase was I wanted to be a writer. I really enjoyed writing. I enjoy English. I'm a kind of a grammar stickler. And so actually, when I went into college, I started as an English major.
Starr:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Until I realized just how little money you make as an English major. Because if you don't become a-
Josh:
There's no path.
Ben:
Yeah. If you don't become a famous writer, then there's really not a whole lot of great stuff, outcomes, from that.
Starr:
That makes sense.
Josh:
English teacher.
Starr:
How young are we talking about, by the way.
Ben:
Sorry?
Starr:
When you said younger, I just realized that this is a lot at this point in my life.
Ben:
Well, so younger for me, architect I think I was like, I don't know, 8, 10, somewhere when I decided that's what I wanted to do. That, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. By the way, before we get off the topic of architects, do you remember what was the name of the... You know on Seinfeld, George, that was his dream career. Have you watched Seinfeld? Oh you froze.
Starr:
What's up? What's up?
Josh:
I was like, wait, you haven't watched Seinfeld Ben?
Ben:
Oh plenty, plenty of times.
Josh:
Okay your video froze. Do you remember George's dream career was always architect and so he always wanted to be an architect and he had this character when he had to pretend to be someone else that was more successful, he was an architect. And I think his name was like Vandelay or something like that. I think it was Vandelay.
Starr:
Oh I remember that, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. And it would always be the thing he would go to if he had to make himself impressive.
Starr:
Like you do, you just make up a whole new life.
Josh:
When you have to... you know.
Starr:
Yeah. This is what your podcast is for, right? That's what most podcasts are about.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah. I got into computers when I was maybe 12 or 13, so before that, around when I was 10 years old, I really went through about a year of wanting to become a pool hustler or a professional pool player.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
That's cool.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I had a book by, I think it was my Minnesota Fats. I mean, you go into pool hustling just for the names, right?
Ben:
Sure.
Josh:
I could totally see it by the way, I could see you being a pool hustler.
Ben:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
Oh thank you.
Josh:
Yeah. The approach that you would take to becoming one would be very systematic, so I think you'd have a high chance of success.
Starr:
Oh, well thank you. Yeah to this day, I know exactly where to hit the pool ball to make it in. I just can't physically do it.
Josh:
Right. You've got all the math in your head.
Starr:
I know exactly what to do, though. Yeah. So that was pretty cool. I found or rented an old copy of The Hustler with Paul Newman and what was it, The Color of Money? Which was that remake with Tom Cruise. But the funny thing is pool hustlers as a career option didn't even exist anymore at that point. Nobody told me this. I feel like my career counselors let me down because nobody told me this. It was from like the '50s and '60s and stuff where there were pool halls and people would go into them. So I don't know, I don't know where I thought I would find my marks.
Josh:
Yeah. Like the smallest towns in the US, you could just tour them constantly and make like 5, 10 bucks here and there. Adds up after a while.
Starr:
I might as well be a musician.
Josh:
So card hustling on the other hand, some people make a living off of poker and stuff like that, I know still. And that's probably largely because there's still big casinos and things where you can go in to hustle people, I would imagine.
Starr:
Yeah, I guess. I don't know. It seems like in casinos there's not the level of trickiness though. Where you're just like, "Golly, what's this? It's like some sort of stick. What does that do?"
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That appealed to me. I always wanted to be a ninja too, as a child.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. So then getting into computers, my parents had an actual little computer store. It's called a store, I don't know what they were doing. It wasn't an actual store, it was run out of our living room.
Ben:
It was just a front. A money laundering operation.
Starr:
Yeah. I think they figured out basically somebody wanted to buy some computers and they had to become a wholesaler or something to do it, so it didn't last very long. But we always had these Apple II clones, we weren't even a nice enough computer store to have bonafide Apple IIs, they were Apple II clones. It was called the Franklin ACE 2000, they got sued and put out of business because they just copied Apple's firmware. They didn't make a compatible one, they just copied it.
Josh:
The physical act of copying it? They just...
Starr:
They just got, what is it an EEPROM reader and just dumped it.
Josh:
Just dumped it directly, nice.
Starr:
And just copy it. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And let's see. So yeah, I grew up playing these video games and stuff and then fiddling around with BASIC and stuff when I was maybe 12. And then my parents took pity on me and got me a 286 when I was 13 or so.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah that's around the same age that I really started to get into computers, I think. For me it was-
Starr:
That's a great age to exit society and move into some sort of realm of pure logic and predictability.
Josh:
Agreed.
Ben:
I think my first computer memory was a TRS-80.
Starr:
Yeah? Yeah? The old Trash-80?
Ben:
Yeah, loved it. My brother got one and we would spend hours and hours typing in programs from computer magazines. And that's where I learned the difference between an O and a zero. Because I would say, "O," and my brother would type that in and be like, "No, it didn't work. You told me the wrong thing." And get all mad at me and stuff. Yeah, that was pretty awesome. That was-
Starr:
That says something to y'alls strength as brothers to be able to get along while typing in program listings from the back of a... That's just maddening by yourself. I can't imagine having to be nice to somebody while doing that.
Ben:
Maybe it speaks to how little we had else to do. I don't know.
Starr:
There you go. Well, that's an item for your LinkedIn. You were an early proponent of pair programming.
Ben:
Oh, there you go. Yeah. Maybe that's why I hate pair programming today. I have to dive into that one with my counselor.
Starr:
We're going to have a... Yeah, that's going to be-
Josh:
We're getting pretty deep here-
Starr:
We're going to have a buyer ... Yeah, it's going to be ... Yeah, all the serious programmers are going to stop listening to us now. Yeah.
Ben:
But I love the Apple II, so we had that in my elementary school. We had a computer lab back in the day, when they were still computer labs because not everybody had a computer, not every classroom had one. And yeah, I remember going in there and we would play Lemonade Stand, and again type in computer programs from magazines, and that glorious BASIC. Oh that was fun times.
Ben:
What was your first computer-
Josh:
I don't remember what the first ... Like our family ... Like we had family computers. I remember like ... Because I was like ... My first computers would have been like mid '90s, I think. Like I got my first computer, I want to say ... Like I remember having the Pentiums, obviously. I want to say I remember 386 and something like that. But yeah, I don't recall.
Ben:
Yeah, my first family computer-
Josh:
I remember my Pentium II.
Ben:
Yeah, that was a cornerstone. My first family computer was an IBM ... Well no, it was a Hewlett-Packard 8086 processor with a 30 megabyte hard drive. It was wow, that was huge.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That was living.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh man, what a weird ... It's weird. It's like people used to be drawn to computers because they were like these little self-contained things that you could kind of understand, and play with. And now it's like you go into computers and it's the least self-contained thing that man has ever invented in the world. It's just such a-
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
I don't know. I think all the time about the contrast between how things were and how they are now, which I guess makes me old. I guess that's just like reminiscing about the sock hops or something. So-
Josh:
The thing that really got me into computers though was not ... I don't want to say it's like the computers themselves. I mean I remember I was pretty into playing MS-DOS games and stuff. I guess that was pre ... Like before the Internet really became a big part of my life, but the Internet was really what got me into ... Like what I really got interested in. Like I never wanted to do game development or any ... Like I didn't care about the hardware. Couldn't care less about computer hardware, to be honest. It was always the Internet and then I got into the software, like scripting side of it, but yeah-
Starr:
Well this was a little bit pre-Internet, but did you guys know that I ran my own BBS?
Josh:
That's awesome.
Starr:
Yeah, I ran my own BBS.
Ben:
Which software did you run?
Starr:
VVBS.
Ben:
Oh yeah that was good-
Starr:
Which was written in like Visual Basic, I think. And by a guy who seemed to be a wizard. And I bought a ... Like I saved up my 30 ... It seemed like a huge amount of money back then. I save up like 20 or 30 bucks to buy a license, and I sent it to him, and he emailed me back and it was like some celebrity was emailing me or something. It was like, "Oh this guy's like oh." Like I tried looking at the code, because it was like ... I don't think it was compiled, and I just couldn't understand it, and it just seemed very ... I realize now I think it wasn't the best code, but also I didn't really know Visual Basic that well. But it just seemed magical.
Starr:
And one funny thing about that, though, is I started my BBS ... Like my parents had a couple of houses and in one of the houses they rented out a room to this guy, who's a longtime friend of theirs, and he got into trucking as a profession and so he started being absent for like a month at a time. And in one of the other rooms of this house is where I had my computer. It's back when you had-
Josh:
I was going to say-
Starr:
... a room for the computer.
Josh:
Yeah, so this free phone line, right?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly, free phone line-
Josh:
I know this story.
Starr:
Exactly, yeah-
Josh:
I mean from my own life.
Starr:
And so I'm picturing it now. I haven't even pictured this for years, but I had ... It was an empty room and I had a desk in the middle of it with a computer on it. It was very much like ... I don't know. Sort of like hacker's aesthetic, where-
Ben:
Totally. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And I had my piles of cola ... Like they didn't sell Jolt in Arkansas, so I couldn't get it, but I had my Mountain Dew cans there. Yeah, and so I started BBS on this guy's phone line. And then he came back and his phone was just ringing constantly. It was-
Josh:
That's awesome.
Starr:
... modem sounds and nobody knew what that was back then. So I got in trouble and ... Yeah. But I got my own phone line out of it, so that was nice.
Josh:
There you go.
Ben:
So how long did you run your BBS?
Starr:
I don't know, like a year or so.
Ben:
That's cool.
Starr:
It was definitely shutdown by the time I went to college. And these two jerks like socially engineered me, and hacked it, and it just really ... Like that just ... Like I am still mad at them. I went to a computer store years later to buy a SATA cable and the guy there was like, "Oh yeah, have you heard from Ty," or whatever his name was, "He's doing this. Blah blah blah." And I'm just thinking, "I hate that guy. I will never talk to him."
Ben:
So BBSs are what really got me hooked into computers, so-
Josh:
Okay, so the social aspect was big for you all too-
Ben:
Yeah, the social aspect. Yeah.
Josh:
I think ... Yeah. Yeah that's ...
Ben:
Yeah. The first piece of software I bought, shareware, was the Blue Wave mail reader, right? FidoNet and-
Starr:
For FidoNet? Yeah.
Ben:
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah that really got me, the BBSs. And then, of course, later the Internet and ridiculous phone charges because I didn't have a local point of presence near me and ... Yeah. That got me into coding really hardcore too, because I wanted to write Unix programs, after I got into that scene, so that's what got me on the path.
Starr:
Well cool.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I was really big into Turbo Pascal.
Ben:
Love Turbo Pascal.
Starr:
Yeah. Like to this day I really wish I could put all my variable declarations at the top and just have like everything in this pre-defined order. That was part of the language, you couldn't do it any differently. But it doesn't really work that well-
Josh:
Well we could always ...
Starr:
... these days.
Josh:
We could make a RuboCop for that.
Starr:
Yeah. And to this day I've never used any sort of programming language that had as good of documentation as ... But, I mean, granted I don't use static type languages now. But yeah, you just like ... It was like you hover your mouse over it or ... Actually not even a mouse. This ran in DOS. You go over to it, and you press F1, and it pops up the exact documentation you need.
Ben:
Yeah. That ID man, that was the best.
Starr:
It was so good. It was so good. People actually still use Delphi, which is a variant of that. It's a descendant of that. Like at that first MicroConf we went to I met a guy who had just sold his business, like doing some sort of Delphi component-
Ben:
Oh yeah, I remember that guy. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know. So I don't know, maybe when I retire-
Josh:
It's niche.
Starr:
Let's go back and make Delphi components.
Ben:
Stellar plan, I like it.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Well I wasn't into the BBS scene really but I ran a number of my own Internet forums, so back when forums were the thing-
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
... like forums were my thing. I ran like phpVB, and ... Actually I mean I've written my own forum software, because haven't we all?
Starr:
Yeah. For our younger listeners forums are what we used to call Reddit.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. Forums, that's how we communicated between BBS and Reddit, I think.
Ben:
Well, and then Usenet was in between there, too.
Josh:
Still going.
Ben:
I ran Talkers. So those are Unix daemons that were just chat servers, basically. Like a MUD without the game. But MUDs were big when I was doing that sort of thing, and so I got into programming. That's what really got me hooked to C and Unix, and Linux, and all that.
Starr:
Oh, neat.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I wish I'd gotten into Linux or into Unix earlier.
Starr:
I really got into Assembly for a while because Turbo Pascal had Inline Assembly.
Ben:
Yeah, I forgot about that.
Starr:
Yeah. So I learned that. Then there was this little tiny codery of programmers who were hobbyist Assembly programmers in my town, and they seemed very old but I'm sure they were like 26, they took me under their wing because I was much younger. Yeah, so I actually wrote several programs in Assembler. I wrote a... So I read Phrack whenever it came out.
Ben:
Oh, love Phrack.
Starr:
Yeah. Phrack stands for phreaking and hacking magazine. I don't know what it stands for, but that's the gist. So one month they published, it was called a TSR program, it's called Terminate and Stay Resident, which means it can stay running while other programs on your computer were running, which is like magic.
Josh:
What?
Starr:
Yes. Yeah. This was before anything had multi-threading or multi-processing or anything like that. Like-
Josh:
Multi-user.
Starr:
Yeah. Like DOS was a single process-
Ben:
We had one core and we liked it.
Starr:
Exactly. Exactly. But TSRs, they were essentially little... They were bits of code that loaded the memory and they terminated, and they stayed resident like a, I don't know, some sort of zombie. It sounds a lot like a memory leak now that I think about. So you made this memory leak program and it had a little handler, a little call back, where you could register with an operating system and it would call back and let you know something happened.
Starr:
Anyway, so in Phrack there was a key logger that somebody had written and I was just like, "This is shit", like you do when you're learning to program. Kind of like, "This is the most disgusting garbage I've ever seen." So then I had to write my own key logger program in Assembler... It was much better.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Naturally.
Starr:
Naturally, and even would, before saving the file to disc with the keys in it, it would XOR it via constant. So they would be not quite as visible to anyone who was snooping around.
Ben:
That's advanced encryption, right there.
Starr:
I know.
Ben:
Ah, those were the days.
Ben:
So you have elite hacker credit there, Starr.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. Definitely. Definitely.
Josh:
That's, yeah.
Starr:
And now I make middle man sites.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It pays a lot better.
Ben:
That's funny. A while back you mentioned, when you were talking about the pool hustling, and you were like your counselors didn't teach you that that wasn't the career option. And I was thinking back to I really got started in my professional career as a web developer in the year 2000, and that career didn't exist, what, just a few years before that, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That's a pretty new thing. So no counselor when I was growing up would have said, "Yeah, you know what you can do this computer thing." Because it just didn't exist yet. I just think it's cool that the world has changed that much that that happened.
Starr:
Yeah. That's true. Oddly enough when I took my assessment test in Junior High it was computer programmer. But that was before there was web developer. It was just like, "Do you like people?" "No." "Do you like being alone?" "Yes." Okay, computer programmer.
Josh:
Little did they know that the profession would grow into the collaborative experience that it is today.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Where if you... Yeah, you don't succeed really if you can't communicate with others.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Not so much the-
Josh:
We got totally scammed. That's what I'm trying to say.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
What the hell?
Starr:
We still get our pizza and our Mountain Dew.
Josh:
Right. Yeah. But I guess we have hacked the system a little bit. Yeah.
Ben:
Well, that was a fun walk down memory lane.
Starr:
It was. It was.
Starr:
Well, if you guys don't have anymore BS to bring up. I'm sorry. I thought that would be witty but it just sounded mean. If you guys don't have stuff, any... Oh my God, what is wrong with me? I can tell that this is my-
Josh:
You're so mean, Starr. You're so mean.
Starr:
I can tell this is my third Zoom meeting today. I'm dragging. I'm dragging. I used up all my good material in the all-hands. So yeah, are y'all good?
Ben:
Good. But if we have listeners who have a favorite Usenet group that they remember, they have to Tweet at us and let us know that what that was so we can share the memories.
Starr:
That sounds great. I want to know what your favorite Interrupt was from Intlist.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
So just Tweet that at me. @Starrhorn. So yeah, if y'all like the show please go leave us a review on Apple Podcast. If you would like to write for us go to our blog at honeybadger.io/blog and look at the... There's a link that says "write for us", look at that. Read the whole thing because I will question you. I will test you. And yeah, until then, too-da-loo.
Show Notes:
Links:
TechCrunch Schrems II
Full Transcript:
Ben:
Speaking of town meetings though, we had a streamed event from our local school district last night in which they revealed that our school district will not be having school in person for the first semester of the year. They're going to do a wait and see approach and see if they can have school opening and the next semester, in I guess January, but for now, the kids are going to be at home.
Starr:
So how do you feel about that?
Ben:
I think that's the right decision and in the state of Washington and in King County, in which we live, the coronavirus cases are going higher than they were in the initial, back in March. So I don't see how it's a good idea to have a bunch of kids in an enclosed space for an extended period of time in those kind of conditions.
Starr:
The difference this time is that it's over.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
It's-
Starr:
The hurricane's past us.
Josh:
It's a good thing that it fizzled out. You know, the flame was extinguished.
Ben:
My son is not too excited about the idea because he actually likes to leave the house and see his friends and things that we would do in normal world where we had good leadership that helped us keep things under control. But no. So that part's unfortunate, but at least we won't die.
Josh:
Silver linings.
Starr:
Yeah. We try and keep the podcasts pretty nonpolitical, but it's hard to contain the simmering rage sometimes. My new greeting for people when I'm just checking on them. It's like, "How's the apocalypse going?"
Ben:
So I saw a tweet talking about the resurgence in cases. And she said, "well, how am I supposed to open my emails now? Because now it's precedented times."
Josh:
That's good. Yeah.
Starr:
I know. It's kind of weird how, yeah. How precedented this is feeling because it's like, okay. Yeah. I have all this list of things I can't do. That's normal now. I've got all these precautions I take when I leave the house. That's normal now it's just daily life.
Ben:
Yeah. It's like back in March when they were talking about what the new normal is going to be they weren't thinking just March, it's like, Oh.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Yeah, just March, but you're a little more comfortable with all the PPE and I don't know, I stopped spraying down, like all the, the bags of chips with bleach. I've stopped doing that. Because apparently that's not very important to do.
Ben:
I've installed that UVC conveyor belt device in my front room so I can just pass all the groceries through there instead.
Starr:
Oh, that's a great idea.
Josh:
Should we send a precedented times email? Like should we finally get around to sending that COVID email?
Ben:
Yeah. Hope this email finds you well in this precidented time.
Josh:
Yeah. I've completely been ignoring our email marketing lately.
Ben:
Yeah. We should do some of that someday.
Josh:
Probably. I've also been enjoying getting work done.
Star:
So today I think we're going to talk about, about Safe Harbor. 2020 just really sucks. Right? 2020 it's like the pillars that you've built your life on, just sort of crumble out from underneath you. And one of these sort of milder pillars I guess, is Safe Harbor. So what is Safe Harbor-
Ben:
It's funny actually, because it's not Safe Harbor-
Starr:
It's not Safe Harbor.
Ben:
But that goes along well with precedented times because Safe Harbor was the thing that happened five years ago. And now we're dealing with it again because of Privacy Shield.
Starr:
Oh, Privacy Shield! I'm sorry.
Josh:
Was Privacy Shield the thing that was in response to Safe Harbor? I'm trying to remember.
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
Yeah. Okay.
Ben:
Yeah. When Safe Harbor got torpedoed, then Privacy Shield came around. Yup.
Starr:
I can't keep my bullshit straight.
Ben:
So yes, precedented times, indeed.
Josh:
So yeah. So we're still shielding the Harbor though. Was that the idea? But I do know we no longer now, like the shield is, the shields are down. Is that? I'm losing track of this metaphor.
Ben:
Can't take much more of this captain.
Starr:
Well, they've sort of dropped it though, because it was... Well, which one came first? Safe Harbor?
Ben:
Yeah, Safe Harbor.
Starr:
And then Privacy Shield. And now it's standard contractual clauses or something like that?
Josh:
Right. Yeah.
Ben:
Right, today we're talking about data.
Starr:
Data, okay.
Ben:
And again, not Star Trek.
Josh:
And what to do with it.
Starr:
Ones and zeros.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So yeah. So a brief history is in order. So back in the olden days in pre 2015, so the whole thing is data transfer from the EU to the US that's what we're talking about. And that's why we care because we have customers in the EU and they want to send us data. In our case, in Honeybadger's case, we have customers who are sending potentially confidential data about their customers, right? Maybe an email address or an address or something that might show up at an exception report. And so they have to be concerned, our customers do, about what data they send us and how we protect that data because there are varying laws around the world about data protection.
Ben:
Like we've seen with GDPR the past few years. So I guess a brief history is back in the early 2000s, the EU started to get concerned about the US not having as good as protections on data as the EU and so they came up with this agreement with the US on how data would be treated. They got transferred to the US from the EU. And that ended up in the Safe Harbor agreement, which basically said that, "Oh, US companies, if you agree to this kind of thing, then you can accept data from the EU because you agree to do these kinds of protections. You're not just going to publish it on a billboard or, or whatever." Right. But then it got kind of blown up from a court case in the European union let's see, that's a Schrems, is that what it's called?
Josh:
Yeah, Schrems one and Schrems two then. Yeah.
Ben:
Well, Schrems one was a case that got decided by the court of justice of the European Union. And that was basically a privacy advocate who said, "Man, the Safe Harbor stuff, it's not really good enough." And so he sued and the court of justice agreed and invalidated Safe Harbor. And that sucked.
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
Safe Harbor it was kind of weak sauce. Right. It seemed to me more like the pledge of allegiance than a binding sort of contract.
Ben:
True. True. Yeah.
Starr:
It was just like, we hold these data to be protected. We really, really promise.
Ben:
Right, right. Cross my heart, hope to die, it will be protected. Yeah. So the court decided, "Nope, not good enough." And so everybody hustles and put in a valiant effort and came up with the Privacy Shield and that was fine. It still was like, okay, you're going to, as a US company, you're going to pledge to assure that you're going to do these kinds of things with data. But overall, my impression being on the implementation end was that it felt a little more, I don't know, real?
Ben:
I don't know, it was less of just saying you're going to do the system stuff and then more of a, yes, you're actually doing some stuff. I don't know. There really was no Privacy Shield police that came and knocked on your door, but it was more detailed. It felt a little more official, I guess. And I thought it was fine. My only real snag about Privacy Shield... We started it what? 2018 I think is the first time that we actually went through the Privacy Shield process, which is registering with the FTC and saying that you're going to do it basically and paying your fee. And you agree to have a representative that can adjudicate any kind of claims that an eight year resident might make against you for violating their data protection. So we did that and we set that up.
Ben:
So my only real beef was that it costs like 350 bucks a year. And I thought that's kind of ridiculous, but the FTC was saying, "well, we've got to have money to fund this program because we have to have people running it." I'm like, "Oh, okay. But 350 bucks a year, really?"
Starr:
The punchline is how much we're going to pay for our SOC 2 audits.
Josh:
Right? Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, that's a whole different story.
Josh:
350 bucks sounds pretty good.
Ben:
Yeah. So I don't know. Privacy Shield was fine, it made sense to me. You agree, you pledge it, you get listed in this whole database and you say, "yeah, we're going to do these things." And we did, we lived up to those things, but the return of Schrems. Schrems two. This person did not rest and said, "no, not good enough"
Josh:
I was going to say from your description of Privacy Shield and the Schrems one case, it sounds like one thing that they probably woud throw a wrench into the works would be, I don't know, national governments having policies of surveillance, where they create massive data centers that suck up all the information from basically any source they can find and store it for ever indefinitely. Is that pat of this, why you think there's a Schrems two?
Ben:
Yep. It definitely is.
Ben:
Yeah. I think this node thing is what blew up Safe Harbor because once that was revealed it looked like a paper tiger, I guess. It didn't look like it had enough teeth to really fight off the kinds of things that the US government was doing. So thus Privacy Shield, but I don't know enough about the decisions and the cases to say why Privacy Shield was a second victim. I don't-
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
All I know is we have customers knocking on our doors saying, "okay, now that Privacy Shield is dead. What are you going to do?" You know?
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I mean the short version is that there was a second Schrems case, right? And that case is the one that recently decided that Privacy Shield is no longer adequate and I think leaving in place some additional measures like the SCC, the standard, was it?
Ben:
The standard contractual clauses.
Josh:
The standard contractual clauses, which have been around. But those are still in effect and it seems like that's one of the things that have become maybe elevated? Am I understanding that correctly?
Ben:
Yeah. So the standard contractual clauses are what it says on the tin. They are standard in that it's basically boiler plate. They are contract. So they represent a contract between you, the... well, there's actually three different kinds, but in our case, a contract between the data importer, which would be Honeybadger and the data exporter, which would be one of our customers who is sending us some data. And then in clauses, there are this boiler plate has a set number of clauses that they don't change. And they just specify what what fulfills the contract, like what kind of provisions are you operating under that will assure that the data is being treated in a very kindly way. And for now the standard contractual clauses are still fine, but everyone who's talking about this Privacy Shield decision that came down just last week, July 16th, that's last week, right? Yep. There's they're saying, "well, yeah, you got your SCCs now, but I mean, that's next."
Josh:
Yeah right.
Ben:
That's going to be on chopping block next.
Josh:
So do you know what's going on with the US response to this? Because there was a great article, which I think we can link up in TechCrunch that went through the history that you shared with us, Ben, and from what I understood or took from it, it sounds like the US, like on our end, we had these obligations, like you said, to pay our fees and meet these obligations, they're kind of just surface, but you still have to do it. And it said the US is still, that is still active. Our obligations under the US side of this is, are still required. However, we still have to comply with whatever the EU says in order to actually fulfill those responsibilities now. And Privacy Shield is no longer adequate. So this is why we're talking about moving, like creating data centers in Europe, basically to satisfy those requirements. Is that a right way to explain it? Or-
Ben:
So I think there are two things to think about. There's the legal stuff, what you're committing to, and then there's the business to business stuff that you're committing to. So for Privacy Shield, we were pledging in that case to the US to the FTC, that we would take certain concerns and safeguards over data. Right. And then basically that relays to a company in the EU saying, to the FTC saying, "yep. You know, Honeybadger, they promised to do this and we will follow up. If you say they're not, then we will go and knock on their door and find out what's going on there." Right.
Ben:
And, but the invalidation of the Privacy Shield from the EU perspective is if you're an EU company that's not good enough anymore, that assurance isn't good enough to give to your customers saying that we're taking care of data well, with our sub processors, which Honeybadger in this case would be a sub processor. Right. And so, so now these EU companies who have been told through this decision that," Hey, that's not good enough." Now. They're like, "well, okay, well, we'll have to fall back to these standard contractual clauses for that." Basically it's an individual commitment between the subprocessor or Honeybadger and that business. Right.
Josh:
Okay. So we're being affected by our customers in the EU. Because they have to comply with this, which means they have to get us to comply with the EU side of this versus if we didn't have any EU customers and we've for whatever reason still wanted to have Privacy Shield in the US we could still do it. It wouldn't mean anything. But we could still have our, whatever, put it on our website or something like that.
Ben:
Yup, exactly.
Josh:
Okay, makes sense.
Ben:
And yeah, until the last week, if you had that Privacy Shield logo on your site, and that would say, Oh yeah, this company is agreeing to a certain standard of data protection.
Josh:
Yeah. Okay. So it's just the same old compliance spider web, where everyone is affecting everyone else and interconnected. Okay.
Ben:
Right. So to your point, yeah. Privacy Shield is still a thing, right. It's still valid. We're still a member, we've paid our dues for this year, you know?
Josh:
Yeah. We don't get our 350 back?
Ben:
We don't unfortunately. So we could still say, put that up on our website and say, yeah, we're Privacy Shield. You know, we're good. You're treating your data well, but no one cares anymore because of this ruling. Because no one in the US cares, right. We don't care about privacy at all, except for maybe the state of California. And that's a different kettle of fish, but-
Starr:
and this is just Privacy Shield, but our other badges are still, they're valid. They're unaffected. Like our McAfee, trusted site badge, like our Better Business Bureau badge.They're separate. So don't worry about that.
Josh:
I was worried.
Ben:
We're still working that Angie's list listing, but we'll get there.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So can I tell you all something about the... so I was reviewing the standard contractual clauses pull requests that Ben asked to see the other day.
Starr:
And I was just, I didn't understand that he was just asking, I think, for me to look at the end of it. So I was like, I was just going to read this whole thing. And so I read it all-
Josh:
I read the whole thing too.
Starr:
Yeah. And I was reading this. I didn't understand what these were about. I just thought these were things that our lawyer told us to put in our thing, and I'm just like, what, what is our lawyer? Like, what are we paying our lawyer for? They're just giving away the farm here. I expect this to be like, here are the conditions in which you can't sue us, which is all the conditions. Right? I mean, not that that's fair, but that's what a lawyer is supposed to do for you. And it's like we understand under these conditions, all these people can sue us.
Starr:
No, no, I don't agree to that. I mean, I do because it's fair and whatever, but it made me a little bit anxious. So yeah. It's really weird because I guess it's not weird, it just shows a difference in sort of perspective, because in the US, corporations, which we kind of are, are privileged in a lot of ways, like the US prefers corporations over people and that sucks. I wish it wasn't the case, but it sucks. Like there's as a corporation and as owner of a corporation, you get a lot of perks. And so it's kind of unusual to have-
Josh:
Yeah, having liability in writing is a little strange for us.
Starr:
It's weird. It's like, this is the US. If you get cancer from using Honeybadger, we're sorry. Like, no, I mean, again, I should say that this is not what I really think, but it's just, I've gotten so used to this mindset.
Josh:
Like the mentality.
Starr:
Yeah. And here's this document coming in saying like, if you get cancer, we will recognize that it's our fault. And yeah. So I don't know what's going to happen if we get sued in Brussels. Like, I guess we would hire a Belgian lawyer?
Josh:
I have the same thought, I mean, yeah, I haven't heard about those cases, definietly not on a small scale. You hear what happens when Facebook, and I think actually that's probably maybe a point to discuss is maybe a lot of theis is a result of large companies like Google and Facebook. But yeah. I don't know, what does happen if... Will small people get pulled into these sort of things? Because that doesn't sound like a great future for small tech businesses, to be honest, you know, even though it's solving an actual problem with the whole privacy issue.
Ben:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know .I don't think that's really something that's new here. Right. Because you always could have been sued by some person in Belguim, right?
Josh:
Well, yeah. And it's not very frequent.
Ben:
Yeah, so I don't know that it really makes that big of a difference. I could be wrong, but I mean, that's why you buy insurance. Right. You know, we have the general policy, we have the errors and omissions policy. We have the cyber policy. Right. Because of things like that, where if there's a breach or some other sort of thing, and we get sued, then that policy steps in and pays for those kind of costs.
Josh:
That's good. That's a really good point. Pro tip, buy insurance.
Ben:
Yeah. Buy insurance.
Josh:
Like in every situation buy insurance.
Ben:
Yeah. And in our case, we've had customers specifically require that we have the cyber, so we have some custom agreements in place. And part of those agreements is that we have the cyber insurance specifically to handle things like breaches and lawsuits and that sort of thing. So, yeah. It's a good idea. It's not terribly expensive and if you're dealing with a bunch of data, like we are, that would be painful if it got breached, like it would be for us then it's good to have that.
Josh:
Well Starr, sorry. I guess you'll have to cancel that Brussels attorney retainer.
Starr:
Well, I am wondering if our insurance will cover stuff in Europe.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good, I don't know. I have no idea.
Starr:
Because I'm pretty sure my car insurance won't work in Europe.
Josh:
Hopefully it does.
Ben:
So the thing though, that makes me a little nervous is what happens when Schrems three happens, right? And these standard contractual clauses are ruled invalid or unenforceable or whatever the legal term would be that basically makes it go away. And the only thing I can think of is like, well, I guess you got to have a data center in the EU so that the data stays there versus coming over to the US.
Starr:
So so it's all about the data. It's not about us as a company really. We can be a US company, but as long as we have our data centers in the EU and the data doesn't leave the EU, then we don't have to do all this stuff.
Ben:
I'm no legal expert. So I will give you an unqualified maybe to that.
Starr:
Okay. I mean, that sounds about like what most legal experts have always told me whenever I asked them a question. So-
Ben:
Maybe I am a legal expert.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
But he's not. Sub text.
Starr:
I mean, that's what I always told freelancing clients. Right?
Ben:
I think if you step back, the 40,000 foot view is that the EU wants to protect the privacy of its citizens, right. Including the data that they might leave across the internet. So their name, their birth date and stuff like that. And the concern with Safe Harbor and with Privacy Shield has been okay, well, what if some other entity like the US in this case, has a regime in place that doesn't care about hoovering up all the data about anybody on the planet? Well, then that's in direct conflict with the goal of the EU to protect the privacy of their residents. Right?
Ben:
So how can you protect that if none of these agreements really hold water because the sovereign authority of the United States says, "well, tough. I don't care what you agreed to. We're going to do whatever we want." Right? I think having data and a data center, that's not in the US is step one, helpful there. And then to your point Starr, is that enough? I mean, if you're even operating in the US is that going to be a problem?
Josh:
It might depend which direction you go in the future?
Ben:
Yeah. I don't know. I mean, is that data being transferred at all to the US in the form of somebody using their web browser, hitting our web app that happens to be running in Virginia, which is actually talking to the data that is living in Frankfurt? And I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Maybe it's just time to move the whole company to the EU.
Ben:
So that's one option.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, we could find a little chalet in some Alpine village.
Ben:
The other option is you say, EU residents don't, or companies, you can't do business with us. And that's not a fun idea. I don't like that idea very much.
Josh:
Or move to some kind of self hosted model where we just sell a license to the software. Does that work? Or do you still have a-
Ben:
Yeah. As long as it's not touching data anymore.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I wonder what are longterm future, I guess a different future look like for instance, if a wild idea, if the US decided to change its approach towards privacy, user privacy and data retention? What if Congress had an act that all of a sudden said there's no more Pfizer courts. There's no more NSA can't just like hoover up all the data, we're going to enact some regulation that is more in line with the EUs perspective of things.
Josh:
Which, I mean, to be honest I don't see any other way to protect, I mean, how do you protect user data on the internet or anywhere without regulating it in some way? You end up with what we have, which is the wild West kind of. So yeah. What if the US did create some sort of policy, which is in line with them, could that result in future, maybe Schrems three could be a good thing. Maybe it's like, okay, it's the return of a more cooperative... I'm trying to present an optimistic version of the future. Since we do a lot of doom and gloom, we never speculate on positive outcomes. So, you never know.
Starr:
I think that's true.
Josh:
I mean, maybe it'll be Schrem seven, the return of Safe Harbor.
Ben:
Revenge of the Schrems?
Starr:
I think that's got to be the episode title.
Ben:
Schrem Strikes Back.
Starr:
The great thing is very few people are going to understand it, but I still love it.
Ben:
I think that's totally possible. And there's even some question, like I mentioned California earlier as a wild card because they had the CCC PA-
Josh:
CCPA I think?
Ben:
Which is not a hundred percent like the GDPR, but it has similarities and the goal being to protect data. So yeah, there's actually some question like, Oh, well, I mean, California's policies are better than the USs at large. So maybe companies running in California won't have to deal as much with this kind of pain as companies in other parts of US because they have better protections. I think that's a pretty big open question, but yeah, I think it is possible that we could get to a point where the US has policies that are similar enough to the EUs policies, that it could be a moot point, which I think would be fantastic.
Starr:
Yeah. When you say policies like that, that makes me think of the current state of the federal government and the response to the COVID crisis, which has been essentially, every state is doing its own thing. And so it's like, I'm wondering if we may end up with, 30 different data protection systems and then 20 States without them. And we're trying to like lure companies, they're being like, see, we don't protect data. And yeah. So-
Josh:
Yeah, that definitely seems like a problem to solve on the federal level.
Ben:
It's, it's not like we would have done something like that with syntax.
Starr:
So many things seem like a problem to solve on the federal level Josh, so many things do. but, we don't believe in that in this country. it's morally wrong to solve problems on the federal level. Don't you understand?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. More people should go back and read the Federalist. They go through point by point a lot of the things that make sense to solve on the federal level.
Starr:
So here's an interesting twist. If the EU is more cohesive than the United States, what does that say? Because EU isn't even really a country.
Ben:
That is an interesting conversation to have, I think.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
We'll have to start our own politics podcast.
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
I'm down.
Starr:
Honeypundit. I don't know.
Ben:
So as you alluded to, we did have a change to our website this week where we pulled down the Privacy Shield text and put up the standard contractual clauses text. And now that's part of our data processing addendum, which we did awhile back for the GDPR. So all of our European customers who send us data are now covered under via our standard terms, both the data processing addendum and the standard contractual clauses, so that they can be assured that we are treating their data with the utmost respect and trying to be good netizens. And of course, we're also going through that SOC compliance process to prove it that way too. But, yes, we run a tight ship here at Honeybadger and hopefully we will be able to continue serving our EU customers for many years to come.
Starr:
Please, please don't sue us. Like, just talk to us. We're nice. We'll help you out, but just, yeah, just don't sue us in Belgium. Because I don't want to figure out if our insurance works over there.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Well, do we have anything more to say on this topic? Or should we ride into the sunset?
Ben:
I think we nailed it.
Starr:
Nailed it. All right.
Josh:
This is a good podcast. I think this is going to be a good one.
Starr:
It is, yeah.
Ben:
How long will it take for someone to write us and say you got it all wrong and here's how.
Starr:
I mean, this is the internet.
Josh:
It doesn't matter, because we just won't retweet them.
Starr:
I saw something on Twitter that somebody was like, "so in pandemic I've started making flower bouquets every day for my wife and it's pretty easy and here's how you can do it." And then somebody wrote underneath is like, "these are garbage. You don't know what you're doing."
Ben:
That's rough.
Starr:
But yeah, it was-
Josh:
I owned a flower shop before the pandemic.
Starr:
Yeah. So I mean, fortunately not too many people, like when we started Honeybadger, I expected way more of that and we haven't really gotten a lot of it yet. So-
Josh:
People seem nice to us.
Star:
Yeah. For a while we thought maybe all the people from Sweden were being like that to us, but really they're actually really nice people, but there's just a bluntness that sort of is lost in translation a little bit. And yeah. So, anyway, we have come to understand that and love all of our Swedish friends.
Josh:
Yeah. I actually think that I've come to appreciate bluntness a little bit more. Especially if both parties can drop the personal offense to the blunt comment, you can communicate a lot more effectively if you just get right to the point.
Starr:
Yeah. That's true. That's true. All right. So yeah. Well, okay. We're done. Get out of here. This has been FounderQuest so leave us a review if you want to. Be blunt if you want to. Yeah. Whatever. And if you want to write for a blog, come to our blog at Honeybadger.io and go click on blog. And there's a link at the top, it'll say write for us. So that's it. All right. Catch you all later.
Show Notes:
Links:Ghost
Octopress
Squarespace
Tailwind
Tyler Tringas
Full Transcript:Josh:
You're looking chipper, Ben.
Ben:
I'm feeling chipper, Josh.
Josh:
I'm glad.
Starr:
Yeah, there's kind of like ... you have kind of like a glow. Is this the new product glow?
Ben:
I think it is the new product glow, yes, yes.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
I pushed out a new feature this morning.
Josh:
Congratulations.
Ben:
Thank you, thank you. So, yeah, feeling pretty good. Had a good week, got some stuff built and deployed and things are working. I learned some things along the way, so yes, it's good.
Starr:
Awesome.
Josh:
You know, I had a pretty good week too, sleep aside. I even got enough sleep one day.
Starr:
Oh really? That's good.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah, that was a good day.
Starr:
Thank goodness, that's always terrible.
Josh:
I've been making progress on the JavaScript stuff so that's always good.
Starr:
On redoing our node client library?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, the universal rewrite. So it's combining the client side and the server side so that they can both function basically the same code running on the front-end and back-end with a few minor differences in how the platforms handle all the important things. So, it's a bit of a can of worms but it's what the kids demand these days, so got to give them what they want.
Starr:
Like your kids? Kids are pretty-
Josh:
Yes, all my kids are demanding universal NPM packages.
Starr:
My kid just demands pizza.
Josh:
Yeah. We've been making pizza lately and it's been pretty good.
Starr:
Oh, yeah, yeah. I've been doing it too. Have you been doing the dough where you let it rise for a day and all that?
Josh:
Yeah. Caitlyn does the dough and then I do the ... We got that ... Did I tell you? I told you all about the smoker with the ... It's a pellet smoker with the ... It has a pizza oven attachment that sits right directly in whatever the furnace part of the smoker, and so you get this ... It's like a wood fire pizza oven, and it can cook your pizza at 800 degrees or higher, so it's pretty intense.
Starr:
That would be really handy. We've scaled back our pizzas just because it's really hot and nobody has AC in Seattle and neither do we. We've got a unit that we can drag up from the basement and it's ridiculously obtrusive and everything, but yeah, we just try and avoid running the oven in this weather.
Josh:
That is one nice thing about this is that it's on the porch. I spend my time out there sweating on the porch baking pizzas, but everyone else doesn't have to be bothered by it.
Starr:
Yeah, we've been grilling a lot too and we've been trying to eat less meat, and so we've got this CSA farm box thing and they give us these weird ass vegetables, so I've just been grilling them all and it turns out pretty much every vegetable is good if you just put oil on it and you grill it.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Did you know there's such a thing called garlic scapes? I didn't know this. Do y'all know what garlic scapes are?
Ben:
Nope.
Starr:
If you've ever seen a garlic plant growing, there's a garlic part that's in ... it's under the ground, right? But then there's the stem part that sticks out and it's kind of round. It has a little onion bulb on top and that is called the garlic scape. I guess you can cut them and grill them, and they're delicious. They're delicious.
Josh:
Have people always been eating these? What have we done with these for the last however long that we've been eating garlic? Because I've never heard of this before.
Starr:
I imagine that people who grow garlic have always eaten these.
Josh:
They must eat them all? Like they save the good part ... That's the good stuff probably and then we just get the-
Starr:
Yeah, it must be.
Josh:
... Yeah.
Starr:
We get the dregs.
Starr:
Yeah. I had a pretty good week too. I worked a bit on the static site for ... or the sales site for Hook Relay which is the new sort of product that Ben has been working on with Kevin, and Josh, have you been working on it too? I don't want to leave you out.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
Okay, okay.
Josh:
I've been rooting for them though.
Starr:
Okay, that's good. Everybody needs a cheerleader.
Josh:
I'm cheering hard over here.
Starr:
So yeah. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about sort of sales sites, the static site that you sort of put out into the world so people can see your app, and that's not necessarily the actual sort of app itself. So I guess we currently for this, we have our sales site hosted on a separate domain, but it wasn't always this way. When we first launched Honey Badger we had our main Rails app and the sales site was just some pages served by that app. We eventually changed that. So why did we eventually change that and move it into its own domain?
Ben:
There were a few reasons there. One of them was we got kind of tired of having to deploy the app every time we wanted to make a constant change to the website.
Starr:
I forgot about that.
Ben:
You know, because it has to go through all the test suite and everything. It's like, oh, five minutes to deploy a one word change to the site.
Starr:
It's like it made a typo, it's going to take 10 minutes to deploy.
Ben:
Yep, yep. Another thing was, as I recall, we just had customers who were getting ... Some got confused about which ... I remember we had customers who were submitting traffic to www.HoneyBadger.io. Like, API traffic instead of ... I don't know how that happened, but instead of using our API domain, they use our dub-dub domain, and because the app also responded on dub-dub, then it just worked. They're like, "Okay, cool," and we didn't notice, and then, I don't know, three years later when we were moving stuff around and changing how the hosting was going, it's like all of a sudden we broke that client because they were still sending traffic to our main domain instead of the API.
Josh:
Yeah, probably an oversight on our part. To the allow the traffic to that domain if we were hosting different roles like that, but that's just kind of how we do it.
Ben:
Yeah, but when we first launched, the Rails app did everything, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It was the site, it was the app, it was the API.
Josh:
Which, to be fair, I like that a little bit. There's something about just having one thing that was nice and-
Ben:
Yeah, it's simple.
Josh:
... There's some other benefits, like you can do weird things with the sales site that integrates. Well, you can display a ... It's easy to show a logged in link or something because you have the cookies and everything right there, the session, because it's all just your app, but yeah, it presents other issues once you ... down the road.
Starr:
So Ben, were you telling me that somebody was discussing this? Was that in the discourse?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So a few weeks ago on Twitter ... I think Tyler Tringas brought this up. I think he was just throwing out some advice for people who are starting up, and he's like, "Here's a piece of advice that you'll like down the road. Separate your app from your sales site," and a lot of people were like, "Huh? Why?" And other people were like, "Yes, totally." And all the "yes, totally's" are people like us who had been there and done that, and like, "Yep, it's less painful that way if you just start that way."
Starr:
Yeah, also there's just a number of little things you don't think about when you're just a developer making your app by yourself and doing everything. It's like eventually you may want to have marketing own your sales site and not be able to deploy changes to your application. That may not be something you want them to be able to do, not because they have any malice in their hearts or anything, but just because you want to ... You don't want to have to train everybody on proper procedure for not destroying the profit making entity in your life.
Ben:
True, true.
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
Are we primarily talking about the sub-domain that you use, separating that? Or are we also talking about physically from the app? You could use an app and a WWW sub-domain still pointed at the same app. Maybe restrict certain things to each.
Starr:
That's a good point.
Josh:
That sounds complicated but that would put ... If we're talking about specifically sub-domain-related issues, because there are ... There's SEO and other concerns about having everything on the same domain, I think. Do you have any feel for that?
Starr:
Yeah. We've kind of been conflating those two, right? In this discussion so far?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Do you have separate WWW versus app sub-domains and do you have separate, I don't know, sites? Separate repos with separate things in them for your app and your site?
Josh:
There are benefits. When you're just starting out, it is nice just to be able to deploy one thing and just ship it, especially back then I guess. These days it seems to be easier to spin up a really quick static site or something and push it to Netlify single ... It's basically like the Heroku experience for static web hosting, whereas back then ... I mean, the alternative was, what, build an HTML page that you manage yourself for a static site or use something like WordPress. Who wants to also deploy a WordPress site in addition to their Rails app?
Starr:
Yeah, that's a really good.
Josh:
Or whatever, so ... I mean, that's why I always opted to start with the in-app sales site and then as the needs became apparent, then move it if it became an issue, but that's where I come back to the sub-domain thing because that's more difficult. To me, that's where the difficulty is. It's like you don't want to have to migrate either from ... Yeah, you don't want to have to migrate either way. In our case I think we had to migrate ... We started out everything on WWW or whatever and then had to migrate our app users to a different sub-domain which was kind of a weird process as I recall.
Starr:
It was a huge pain the ass.
Josh:
Yeah, it was a pain.
Ben:
I agree that the sub-domain part is more important than the actual infrastructure part, whether it's an app or a separate aside or whatever, especially if your app is going to have URLs that your users are going to share. Like for example in Honeybadger you can share a public URL for your error if you want to share it with the world and get some feedback or whatever, and you don't want to have to migrate those URLs at some point in the future. That's just painful, right?
Josh:
Right, because if you end up with hundreds or thousands of those all over Stack Overflow or something, or Reddit or wherever, those are sticky. Yeah, they'll have redirects apply to them but you still have to maintain those redirects forever and-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
This is why our Netlify site has a whole lot of redirects.
Josh:
We've got a lot of redirects in our ... yeah.
Starr:
Exactly. I think we still have some left over from our original ... like when we ported from WWW to app-
Josh:
We also have some left over from when we used WordPress because at one point we'd had ... I don't think for our sales site but for our blog, which is probably a related discussion, do you host your blog ... This is like an SEO argument usually, like hosting your blog on a sub-domain versus on your sales site. I think we started out, we made that mistake early on too and moved it to a sub-domain I think specifically so we could use WordPress for the blog or whatever, but then that came back to bite us a little bit.
Ben:
And then we moved it back.
Josh:
We ended up moving it back eventually.
Starr:
Oh, maybe I should step in and give everybody just a little bit of context around how we actually do things now.
Josh:
Do you to tell the story of our progression from start to finish?
Starr:
Gather 'round, children. Gather 'round the campfire.
Starr:
Our current setup, we've got a static site ... our sales site on WWW and that also hosts our blog, so if you want to go to our blog, it's www/blog, right? Our docs are currently on a separate domain. But if we had to do it again, maybe we would put them on the same domain with-
Josh:
I think I would.
Starr:
Yeah. With Hook Relay we're definitely putting the docs and the ... If we have a blog, we're putting the blog there and the main site all on the same domain, in the same repo, the same Middleman setup. In terms of the tech stack, we host all of our static sites on Netlify and we use Middleman to sort of generate them. If you're not familiar with that, Middleman is-
Ben:
And Jekyll.
Starr:
Oh, and Jekyll? We use that for the docs?
Josh:
We still use it for the docs, because we used to use Jekyll ... We used to use Jekyll for the blog as well at one point.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Josh:
We're standardizing on Middleman though, and I think if this work you're doing for Hook Relay goes well with the docs and everything, I might ... My goal is eventually to port our docs too, into our main repo, and then we'll just have one site again.
Starr:
Oh, that's good to know. I can keep that in mind when I sort of build that.
Josh:
Yeah, I'd love to do that.
Starr:
Yeah, so anyways, the new sort of approach that we want to take going forward with Hook Relay is we're using Middleman to do the static site generation. We're using it to do the static site, the docs and the blog, and that has a number of benefits as we've sort of, kind of discussed so far. But one other benefit that I want to mention is that by doing that, you can actually share CSS files, you can share your JavaScript and one thing that we discovered is that having ... If you have your blog and docs and static site hosted on different platforms and everything, it's a huge pain in the neck to make them all look similar and consistent. You end up having multiple versions of your style sheets you have to maintain. It's just a huge problem, and then you also have multiple ... It takes effort over time to maintain Middleman sites.
Starr:
It's not a huge amount, but maintaining three of them is more work than maintaining one of them.
Josh:
We had to upgrade Bootstrap because we use Bootstrap for a lot of things, so even though they're the same design, they're all separate ... I remember having to do multiple upgrades, or getting weird with sharing style sheets across domain. We definitely never did that, but if we did, it was a really bad idea.
Starr:
Yeah, so we're doing that. We've got Middleman set up with using Webpacker. About three or four times a year I remember how Webpack ... Not Webpacker, Webpack ... how Webpack works, so I recently got that all set up, and we're going to be using ... what is it? Tailwind CSS for this one. We kind of like that because it's this ... I don't know, it's a really nice sort of utility-based CSS framework that doesn't have a lot of built-in components but it's got a lot of utilities just to make writing CSS easy ... or writing code ... I don't know, do y'all want to describe why you like Tailwind?
Ben:
Well, I was playing around yesterday with the static site and I was trying to do some formatting stuff. What was really nice for me was I was in the HTML which was in this case pretty simple, because these are pretty boring pages. But I'm like, "I want this to have some more padding," so I just add a class, like PX2, and all of a sudden it has some padding and I don't have to go into the CSS file and say, "Oh, what's the class of this thing?" And, "Oh, do I have to worry about inheritance here because it's going to conflict with that or the other thing?" It's just like boom, that little change is done and I can move on.
Ben:
It's like, oh, well what if I want this section to have a different background color? Okay, well it's BG-gray-100. Okay, well that looks nice. I think I'll keep that. And then it's just ... move onto the next thing. To me it's very fast.
Josh:
You know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of ... I think it was Ryan Singer at Basecamp who ... Maybe a blog post or something or maybe it was a video I saw, but it was basically how he prototypes designs at Basecamp.
Josh:
Basically the thing was, basically you do your design in the HTML. Don't go to some wireframing tool or something. Do your wireframing in HTML, and the wild thing was he was just writing inline CSS using style attributes basically, just for speed. So, that reminds me of what you were saying. You can kind of do that but just do it all the time and it gives you the same benefit of basically designing in the same file as you go.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I just want to jump in and clarify, sort of the main philosophy of Tailwind in its approach is that instead of making some HTML and you say this div has a class of card and so then it ... you write some CSS somewhere else and it looks like a card. Instead of doing that, what you do is you don't have classes like card or whatever. Instead, you have classes like BG blue or P4 for padding four units, and you sort of use those in your HTML, and so basically by reading the HTML you know exactly sort of how it's being styled as opposed to having to go to a separate place and then look at the styles and then figure out if they inherit from anything or whatever. So, yeah. What were you going to say, Ben?
Ben:
Yeah, there's some other niceties in there, like you mentioned the P4, right? It's four units. I don't have to care whether it's four pixels or eight pixels or one rem or whatever. There's a set of predefined units that just ... they look nice, like they've been curated by someone who knows better than I do how things should look, and so then there's that. And then there's also the different colors. I mentioned the BG gray 100. Well the 100 is a lightness, right? It goes from 100 to 800 or maybe 900 but there's different levels of gray there that are coordinated. That's really nice too.
Josh:
Yeah, I like using 100, 200 versus for color variations than light, dark, lighter, lightest, because we have some of that going on for your utility classes.
Ben:
As I play with it, I've found, yes, there are some places where it gets repetitive, where you've got six or seven or eight different classes that are defining different aspects like the text color and the text size and et cetera, et cetera, and I do like how Tailwind also has this idea, I think they call it components, where you can pull out those classes and you use this keyword "apply" and basically you can say, "Replace all that with a custom class name like header or whatever," and then-
Josh:
Okay, so, yeah.
Ben:
And then in the CSS file you can say, "Okay, apply these seven or eight things and make that into header."
Josh:
Okay, because I was going to ask you, because Starr gave the example of the card component in Bootstrap and it's like, well yeah, it's nice when you're actually designing these things just to use the utility classes but it seems like if you're using cards all over the place ... We're back to just writing HTML across six different pages and when you want to change something, you have to go update every file, right?
Ben:
Yep, yep.
Josh:
That's what this solves basically?
Ben:
Yep, exactly. Yep.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
So that's really nice to work with.
Josh:
You can share it. Nice.
Starr:
It's kind of interesting to think that this approach has ... like Tailwind is a couple years old, right?
Josh:
Yeah, it's pretty new, yeah.
Starr:
I heard about it maybe a year or two ago and I think the reason that it's able to happen now is that we've got these more advanced build tool chain build systems like Webpack, because one thing that I learned sort of setting up Tailwind in this in our new sort of static site for Hook Relay is that if you just include all the Tailwind CSS, it's like two megabytes. Your CSS file is two megabytes, so then you have to have a tool that goes in and looks and sees which CSS classes are actually used by your HTML or your templates or whatever, and only include the CSS that is relevant to that and strip out everything else.
Josh:
That's PurgeCSS, right?
Starr:
It's PurgeCSS, yeah, and I originally ...
Starr:
I had set that up just as a separate tool or in the sort of Webpack sort of ... It's actually a post-CSS plugin which is like ... Anyway, it's in there, but then when I added Tailwind, it turns out Tailwind has its own ... It'll bring it to the party itself. You don't have to set it up yourself, so I removed the one where we manually added it and now it's like I'm using Tailwind's built in one. And the difference there is that Tailwind's will only ... It'll only strip out Tailwind stuff, because one thing I quickly found with sort of the general purpose PurgeCSS is that, okay, I added a bunch of ... I add a bunch of CSS for syntax highlighting and those syntax highlighting classes are never used in the HTML templates I write because that's all dynamically generated.
Starr:
And so then I have to go back and add sort of exceptions and rules and configuration to not strip those out, and so I was like, "Well, it's a decent compromise, is to just ... We'll just purge the Tailwind stuff," and then our own CSS that I manually import, I'm just going to assume that I actually want that imported and included.
Josh:
That makes sense.
Ben:
Yeah, sounds good.
Josh:
Yeah, I think you're right though. Tools like PurgeCSS are one reason you can do a lot more with CSS frameworks because you don't have to worry about the overhead of including it all because you know it's going to keep what your users use or whatever. So, I'm sure that Tailwind will eventually be 50 megabytes.
Starr:
I mean, probably.
Ben:
Josh, I wanted to get back to-
Josh:
I hope Adam listens to this by the way. He listens sometimes I think.
Ben:
I wanted to go back to a comment you made, Josh, and I have a question for you about it. So you were talking about how we split out the blog into a separate sub-domain because we wanted to use WordPress to host a blog and then we brought that back into our static site. So, there might be some people wondering, "Well, okay, how do you do this blog thing with a static site?" And, combining with Starr's comment, you might someday have a marketing person who wants to update the site and you don't want to be deploying it. So, how do we have our marketing person updating our static site so that he can post to the blog? You found the flaw. You found the critical flaw.
Josh:
We tried a few things first. First we tried just using GitHub because you can get pretty far with just using the GUI editor. You know, file editor and stuff on GitHub. You can teach most people how to create a file or et cetera. The thing that gets kind of tricky there is if you have a branching workflow or ... How are you actually submitting content? Because if you're auto-deploying your master branch, you don't want people just creating files at random. But that said, we've been using Netlify CMS which is a CMS on top of your static site that is deployed to Netlify and it's backed by your GitHub repository, so it doesn't have any kind of ... Basically it uses your Git repository as its database for your content.
Josh:
So, it's an editor, essentially, that gives you a little ... It gives you extra workflow so that you can create posts, you could submit ... There's a review process, so it has a branching workflow built in so that you ... Basically it opens up a pull request on GitHub when you create a blog post and then you can either approve it on Netlify in the CMS admin or you can just merge the PR on GitHub. I think it works both ways. So, it works okay. It seems like ... We've had a few ... We've struggled with it a little bit. I think it's still probably in development, is my guess, or hopefully anyway, because it needs some work.
Starr:
Okay, that's some shade there. "Still in development, or I hope it is."
Josh:
Well, I'm the one who has to drop everything and support this thing when it just stops working, which has happened a few times. I will say it hasn't happened lately, so I think ... Actually I don't know because I haven't ... Starr and Ben Findley are usually the ones that are using it these days, so you all maybe can fill me in on how it's working for you. I haven't heard anything, which I take to be good news, but I don't know.
Starr:
I don't know if Ben Findley uses it. I never use it.
Josh:
Is he using it?
Starr:
I never use it, and maybe it's changed but I'll tell you why. The reason why I haven't used it is because for images it just sort of adds this extra level of complexity. We have authors create articles for us and these articles are markdown files and whatever images they want to include in their article. So that's what I've got and then to get that into the Netlify CMS, at least last time I looked at it, which admittedly was maybe six months or a year ago, was really a pain in the neck. And not only ... It wasn't just a matter of, "Oh, I've got to pull this up and copy and paste it." It's like there was something about the images really wonky. I couldn't just give it my images. I had to go in and insert them in their WYSIWYG editor because it uploads them itself and then uses its own image paths.
Starr:
It was just such a pain, so for all the blog posts that we have commissioned and everything, I just manually do PRs for those or I manually just pull them in, and I've made my own tooling to make that a little bit easier.
Josh:
Yeah, to be honest I do the same thing and I'm guessing Ben does too, Ben Curtis, but I think that's also natural because we're the ones who decided to use a static site generator in the first place so that we could reap the benefits of doing stuff like that and writing scripts and using our own workflow or whatever.
Ben:
And not having to manage WordPress.
Josh:
Yeah, and not having to manage WordPress-
Starr:
Oh my God.
Josh:
... Which is basically like ... Netlify CMS seems to kind of give you ... I remember the media editor in WordPress still and always hating that thing. Why can't I just put a file on disk or something and then link to it? We prefer just to use the Git workflow that we're used to, but at the same time these tools like Netlify CMS are nice because you can have basically the best ... Well, you can have both worlds. I won't say the best of both worlds necessarily. I think there's a lot of promise in those kinds of tools. There are others out there. I don't know, off the top of my head I can't tell you which one is really nailing it.
Ben:
I think we should totally ask people to get back to us and let us know if there's something that we should use instead of Netlify CMS because I'm sure there's some other ones out there that are at least as good-
Josh:
Yeah, there are.
Ben:
... Maybe better, I would love to hear if there are better options out there.
Starr:
If we didn't have developers running the blog essentially, it would be not the best choice to have our blog ... It may have been worth going to an actual CMS as opposed to having everything Middleman, right?
Josh:
Yeah, no, I think if non-developers ... If you're non-technical and you want the benefits of a static site and a first-class CMS then probably you want to have a headless CMS static site developed, I hate to say. That's the more modern ... Like Gatsby JS for example is going ... That's an example of a headless CMS where basically it can generate a static site but it can generate it from any content source like WordPress, for example. So you could have everyone using WordPress still but you get the benefits of deploying a static site to wherever, S3 or Netlify or et cetera.
Starr:
That sounds like simultaneously both cool and hell.
Ben:
I think if I was-
Josh:
It doesn't have to be WordPress by the way. It could be Ghost or any number of things.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. I think if I was non-technical and I wanted to have my site and blog separate from my app, I would go with Ghost or Squarespace and I don't think I would mess with-
Josh:
Just use something hosted still.
Ben:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Old school. Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Ben:
And again, keep the app completely separate. Own the WWW and the blog and whatever else on that static CMS thingy, whatever you choose, and then have the app do its own thing on its own sub-domain.
Starr:
You know, I think we're discovering why so many commercial CMSs are consulting-ware.
Josh:
Yeah. Well yeah, and that is ... I was going to say, the whole headless CMS route, I think it really is the key is if you want the benefits of the static deployment, because, again, there are ... If you're anticipating being on the front page of Hacker News every day or something, or a few weeks out of the year, it would probably be better to host on a static site than hosting a WordPress installation or something. You still have to run PHP or whatever. I haven't hosted Ghost, but ...
Ben:
Yeah, just let somebody else host it.
Josh:
Let someone else host it.
Starr:
This is all really good points. Let's talk about hosting for a little while. One of the things in favor, I think, of not having all the stuff as a part of your main application is because the scaling stories for a static site are way different than for your application and, yeah, so having those two things coupled may not be the best solution and one thing you were saying, Josh, a little while ago was that ... You were talking about when we launched, and this is one thing that I always forget, right? I always forget things were different back then, and I've got a question for you all that will make you feel old but did S3 even let you have publicly accessible files when we launched like in ... What was it, was it 2011? 2012?
Josh:
I don't remember.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I mean, I remember the date. I don't remember if S3 ... your question, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I want to say no, it didn't exist at the time. I'm sure I'm going to be wrong when I say that, but I've got to look it up now that I'm curious, but yeah, I want to say that S3 static hosting was not a thing when we launched.
Starr:
I think for a while we would run a static site generator and then upload it to a publicly accessible ... We'd SFTP it to a public directory somewhere on a server that we owned. For sure we used S3 though for a while, and that worked. That was nice but also you had to sort of set it up yourself and it was kind of a pain in the neck. So now we are on Netlify which is sort of ... Netlify CMS is a little bit of a tangent from it. It's not really the main Netlify product. The main Netlify product, if you don't know about it, it essentially lets you ... It's like Heroku for static sites, right? You push your repo to GitHub and Netlify gets a web hook for it and builds you a static site and then publishes it for you.
Starr:
I kind of like Netlify. I think it's super convenient for standing up sites. It's super convenient ... I love the preview capabilities where you can set it up to build preview sites for all of your branches. That's just super handy, but I really haven't ... I know Josh, you've struggled with it a bit in certain aspects, so I may not have the most complete picture.
Josh:
No, I think overall it's still a positive. Yeah. Speaking of the whole preview thing, I remember back in the day working for a client that had this Rails app. It was basically a custom CMS. I forget the ... It was using one of the CMS gems that existed back then. You might remember some of them, Ben.
Ben:
I think I know the client you're talking about because I think I built that for them.
Josh:
Did you?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
It was basically ... It had a preview deploy process but it deployed to a whole different server and so when you updated the content ... So you would make all your changes. It was actually kind of cool because you could edit all the things and basically live preview it because it's just a Rails app updating your server and then it had a deploy button in the CMS UI and when you clicked it, it would basically spawn and deploy to production.
Ben:
Yeah, that was-
Josh:
But the content editors are doing this, so-
Ben:
Yeah, that was a pretty wild ... Yeah, I built that for them. That was ... Wow.
Josh:
Maybe it was ahead of its time or something.
Ben:
You know where that inspiration came from though is Moveable Type.
Josh:
Was it?
Ben:
One of the granddaddies of CMSs built in Pearl and totally awesome but basically what it would do is, yeah, you could write a bunch of content and it would store that in in the database and then you'd push a button and it would deploy all that. It would render it all out to static HTML and then put that where it needed to be served. Super awesome, I loved it.
Josh:
Yeah, I used to use Moveable Type. Back in the day that was-
Starr:
Didn't Fog Creek have a product that was something like that too?
Ben:
Yeah they did. Yeah, good memory. I can't remember what it was named, but yep. It was like something city? I don't know. I'll have to look it up.
Josh:
Do either of you remember the ... I want to say it's Justin Searles who has a project that I saw recently that lets you build a static site using a static site generator in a Rails app. Does that ring any bells? I was trying to find it on ...
Ben:
It sounds vaguely familiar.
Josh:
I was trying to search for it and I can't remember what it was called if it exists, but then there's also another static site gem for Rails called High Voltage that thoughtbot created but that's different. That lets you do static pages in Rails.
Starr:
So I've got a question for you. What if the static site you generate is just all the files you need to have another Rails project that generates static sites? You'd have static-ception.
Josh:
Like a static site factory or something.
Starr:
That's our new product for exceptions on static sites, is static-ception. Pricing is very generous.
Ben:
Low traffic. So, the takeaway for today's conversation is host your main site on a separate sub-domain from your app. The end. I think that works. I mean, yeah-
Josh:
And host everything else, all the other content related to that app on the static site? That's the other thing?
Ben:
On the static site, yep. You know, the one thing that I will say, you mentioned this before, Josh, about it's nice when it's rendered from your app that you can do things like add a "you're logged in" header thing to the top banner even on the public site, and one of the things that also makes it easy is if you have documentation or you have API keys that you're displaying in your documentation, you can just put it right in there. I'm pretty sure this site does this, where they show you an example and there's your API key that you can use right there, and that is so nice for copy-pasting work.
Josh:
I really like that too.
Ben:
Which all developers do, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I've always wondered that.
Ben:
Yeah, that's one thing I miss about our doc site is we never took the time to ... Because you can work around it, right? You can do a cookie or something.
Josh:
Yeah, there are some hosted documentation services that provide that as a feature that you can insert user data, so there's got to be a way. I'm sure Starr can ... Starr probably has that on their branch.
Starr:
Oh yeah, totally, totally, guys. I've got the whole damn site done on a branch. I'm just spoon feeding it out, though, so I can, I don't know, go to the horse races all day.
Josh:
Well if you want to just deploy that thing that lets us put random sensitive user data into the docs at will, that'd be good.
Starr:
Yeah, I'll do that. I'm sure that there's no GDPR problems with that. Yeah, so, I don't know. I think maybe the reason I've had a good week is that ... I mean, let's be honest. Setting up a new static site generator is one of the most sort of pure, innocent activities that a programmer can do. There's a reason that people ... The programmers who want to make blogs spend six months setting up their static site generator and then they write one post about how they did it and then they never write another post. That's because you have all these sort of naïve dreams about how easy everything's going to be and how automated and wonderful it's going to be.
Starr:
You haven't had to come up against the reality of that as you actually try and do stuff with the tools. You get to goof around with the tool.
Josh:
Yeah, when it comes to blogging, as everything, the real challenge is with the writing, not the-
Starr:
Not the tool.
Josh:
... Thing you're using to generate the blog, which I think is why there's a lot of blogs that end up with just how we built this blog. I've definitely been guilty of that in the past. What was the Jekyll-based blog template that everyone used six, seven years ago?
Ben:
Something on Octopus.
Josh:
Octopress? Was that ...
Starr:
Oh yeah, Octopress or Octokit. Octopress, yeah, that's right.
Ben:
It was Octopress?
Josh:
Remember? Because it had a default theme and literally every developer blog on the planet.
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
It was a little bit like dev two before dev came on the scene because everybody had their own blogs which were where they posted their learning experience and stuff, but no one changed the theme, so you could always tell who's writing a new developer blog because it was just an Octopress setup or whatever.
Starr:
Yeah, Octopress was very nice.
Josh:
And I used it. Yeah, it was. It was nice.
Starr:
I was impressed by it.
Ben:
It was great.
Starr:
I met the creator of that at a conference one time and he was super nice. He was a super nice guy.
Josh:
Yeah, it was cool. Now I just use Vanilla Jekyll migrated back.
Starr:
Well, this has been a great conversation. Do you guys have anything else to add on this topic?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
All right then, I guess we will sign off. Thank y'all for listening to us rant and rave about static sites and sales sites. It's so funny because we're FounderQuest and we're talking about business and all this stuff, and it's like we're going to talk about this business thing and we talk about that for five minutes and then we just sag into the technical aspects of it and talk about those for an hour, which is fun. It's good. So, yeah, this has been FounderQuest. Review us, please, and if you want to write for the Honey Badger blog, we still do that. We have people write tutorials in Ruby and Elixir and whatever, so just go to HoneyBadger.io/blog because it's on the same ... It's on our main domain, right? It's on www.HoneyBadger.io/blog.
Ben:
So easy.
Starr:
So easy, and yeah, look for the "write for us" link on the top header and that's it. So, I will talk to you guys next week I guess. Have a good one.
Show Notes:
Links:Mighty Cal
Hook Relay
Profitwell Retain
Floor Is Lava
Ben Curtis Twitter
Full Transcript:Starr:
So what were you all talking about before I jumped on the call?
Ben:
We were talking about Derrick's new startup Mighty Cal.
Starr:
Mighty Cal.
Ben:
Looking pretty nice. I was telling Josh how I like the virality of it. If you're using Mighty Cal and you share those links with someone, then they're going to be like, "Oh, that's cool. I should use that too." And it's just going to help the spread. I really like that kind of... I was reflecting on Honeybadger. It's like, well we just don't really have an opportunity to get the kind of-
Josh:
Wouldn't it be fun to have that aspect of it? They got that with Drip too. That was their big thing with the Drip widget, so I'm sure Derrick, he knows what he's doing.
Starr:
We tried to do that a bit when we did our... When there's an error on your website, Honeybadger can display a form for user feedback.
Josh:
The problem is... Yeah. And it's got to be a developer who is seeing it, and then... When developers try to do something, hits an error, and then is like, oh, I should add that to my app right now. Like I just got a fail whale or something.
Ben:
Yeah, I think the population of calendar users is probably a little bigger than the population of web developers.
Starr:
That's funny, because I thought that you were going to say that the thing you liked about the idea is... I'm assuming. I'm making assumptions here. But the relatively low ops burden.
Ben:
Well, yes. There's that too.
Ben:
The problem, Starr, with the whole ops burden thing is now we're good at the high ops burden thing, so now we're supposed to take on more apps like that, so that we can leverage those skills.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's kind of our thing. Which we are. Right?
Ben:
Exactly. Our next one, Hook Relay, is going to be a pretty big ops burden too.
Starr:
It's like, what does your company specialize in? It's like, well we have a variety of products, all of which process a ton of traffic. That's just what we do. It's just traffic processing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Our specialty is running services that you don't want to run yourself because it's a pain in the butt.
Starr:
That is pretty much every service. We should run a house cleaning service. I'm in dire need right now. So speaking of, I was late to the call, and I may actually... There's a chance I may have to run. There's a chance there may be a bunch of noise later on, because, well, a couple days ago my water heater just burst open. It was just like somebody blew the Hoover Dam in my little girl's room. Just been dealing with that, doing a lot of wet/dry vac-ing. Getting a lot of use out of that $30 investment.
Ben:
Have you been to the Hoover Dam?
Starr:
No, I haven't. I haven't
Ben:
You should totally go check it out. It is awesome.
Starr:
Well, now that I know what it would look like, what it's failure mode looks like, I'm not sure I want to go there. And yeah, so anyway I thought I vacuumed up everything, but it turns out there's... Your hot water pipes in your house have hot water in them. It's like when you have a straw in a drink and you hold one end of it, and then you pull it out and there's still drink in there. Well, I didn't think to go and open all the hot water faucets when I was draining the heater originally.
Starr:
And so as people were just sort of randomly accidentally turning them on, the water in the pipes would flush back into the hot water heater and then drain out again.
Josh:
Oh no.
Starr:
So I had to go take care of that. Oh, and I learned a few things I'll pass on to our listeners because I think one of the cool things about our podcast is the breadth. Some people may go deeper than we do, but we cover a pretty wide variety of topics.
Josh:
It really is the whole founder experience.
Starr:
Exactly. Exactly. Part of being a founder is dealing with your water heater bursting. And yeah, so I've got these friends. They're a couple. The husband is a maintenance man, and the wife is a forensic engineer. I was telling y'all about this yesterday, and that means that she goes in and whenever some building gets screwed and people get sued over it, she goes in and documents everything. It's like, who messed up here?
Starr:
And so I talked to them about it. Once water gets under laminate flooring, it's just a goner. You just have to pull it up. There's no way about it, because the water is never coming out. And so yesterday I pulled up half the laminate flooring, and then the guy I just mentioned, the maintenance guy helped me pull the rest of it up and did the baseboards and cut the drywall around the bottom where it soaked in there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Fun times. You said this happened in your daughter's room? In Ida's room?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Did she get a cool story out... like her bed is now a pirate ship or something, or an island.
Starr:
Well, she's really into the fact that she just has a concrete floor now that looks all gnarly. She's just going around being like, "I love it!"
Josh:
Maybe you should just leave it. I mean, she's happy with it.
Starr:
Yeah, I don't think that's going to work out. It might affect the resell value.
Ben:
The actual story is that she really wanted to play the floor is lava, and so she-
Josh:
My kids are obsessed with that. They love it. Yeah.
Ben:
I saw someone tweeted about that, talking about watching the show that's on Netflix.
Josh:
The Netflix show, yeah.
Ben:
I haven't seen it. But this person said, "Yeah, I watched it for about eight minutes, and then I got too bored. And I think I would've stuck around longer if the floor actually was lava."
Josh:
I mean, that's a pretty good commentary. My kids are two and four, and this is a show that is conceivably for adults, I think. But my kids just can't get enough of it, and it's one of the few things that we can actually watch as a family and they will sit through a whole episode with us. So it's more for their benefit. But yeah, I think if it's keeping the kids engaged that long, I don't know if it's the thing I would be watching after they go to bed.
Ben:
So really this is the way for Netflix to build brand identity with the young kids, so that they'll be hooked for life.
Josh:
Yeah. But it's not a kids show, as far as I can... I mean, it's like a family show, I guess. But I don't know.
Starr:
I do get really strong Double Dare vibes from it. I was a big Double Dare fan back in the day. So she doesn't get a cool story out of it, but I think I do because the way I found out about this leak was that I was downstairs taking a bath, and I just hear, "I need to pee." So I'm like, oh okay, whatever. So I get out of the bathtub, and I go out there, and I'm noticing there's water all over the floor.
Josh:
Oh, no.
Starr:
I'm just like, "Ida, what? This is too much." there's a big hissing sound coming from her room.
Josh:
It's like a parent's worse nightmare.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
But then the thing is she didn't even notice any of that. She just woke up and had to pee. But I think it was because there was this big giant hissing sound in her room.
Josh:
Yeah. That's hilarious.
Starr:
That might be TMI. We might lose our G rating for that.
Josh:
I think we'll be all right.
Starr:
Yeah. Well, yesterday, or I guess earlier this week we did our second all remote conclave, which is great. I like talking to you all. And for people who haven't listened to every single back episode, what's wrong with you? But our conclaves are sort of our quarterly meetings where we get together and set plans for the next quarter and do everything like that. And since we live in the apocalypse now we do this remotely. We sort of switched.
Starr:
Instead of doing one big day, we do a series of one to two hour meetings, which is actually pretty nice. It's a bit more relaxed. You guys still like that process?
Josh:
I didn't think about this until you said that, but I don't like that this was our second quarterly remote meeting post-coronavirus. Is it already... are we there? We're the second or third quarter now of dealing with this.
Ben:
Yeah, I hadn't thought of that either.
Starr:
I guess so.
Josh:
Oof.
Starr:
It does feel like we're still in March. Are we going to place bets on how many quarters we're going to be...
Josh:
How many quarters until we see each other in person again?
Starr:
How dark do we want to be on this show?
Josh:
Yeah. I'm going to take 2030.
Starr:
Okay, there you go. That is...
Josh:
Going for the long bet.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh. I hope not.
Josh:
You got to have an outlier just in case.
Starr:
I hope that isn't the case. I hope that isn't the case.
Josh:
Ten years from now, I'll be like, yeah, I nailed that one.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't even know at this point. But we discussed some pretty interesting stuff. It was kind of a light conclave. Last one, last quarter, it was pretty intense because we just had the pandemic starting, and we were like, "Okay, what are we going to do to address this? Do we need to change up anything?" So we decided to do a couple things to see what we could do to lower churn, because we figured churn might be an issue as companies are a little bit more strapped for cash perhaps.
Starr:
But then it turns out the stock market is just doing great. So I guess nobody is strapped for cash. Yeah.
Josh:
Everyone is obviously doing fine. The S&P is up.
Starr:
Gravity just doesn't exist in this world. In tech, gravity just doesn't exist I guess. I don't know. But then I hear about different tech people who've lost their jobs and stuff, so it's just... I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. I think it's driven by sectors. I don't know if we were talking about this on this podcast but the indexes are being driven by a few big winners, I think. At least that's what I heard, and there's a lot of companies still losing, going out of business, et cetera.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
This is now a financial podcast.
Ben:
Fortunately, like Starr you were mentioning our churn, we were pretty nervous a quarter ago, and in our conclave we looked back over the past quarter and some of the things that we did, and there hasn't been the flood to the exits that we were fearing. People hanging in there for the most part. We've had a few people take us up on our offer of we're offering a few months free service for people that are really impacted. And we have had some customers who their revenue went to zero, and so they asked us if they can take advantage of that. But overall the story has been pretty good.
Josh:
I'm happy with the measures that we took at the time. I don't know if given how things turned out, I don't know if I could've freaked out a little bit less or something for a few months. But I think we made some good decisions during that conclave. And we've implemented some good changes to... even thought it wasn't huge numbers, I'm sure we helped to prevent some churn, and maybe even... I think we're getting more customers than we were before with our new pricing. Yeah, I think that we made some good changes.
Ben:
Yeah. One thing I think was interesting is that we didn't make every change that we discussed. There were probably half the things that we thought about doing we actually did, and some of them are more dramatic than others. We kind of left the more dramatic ones off the table, and I'm glad that we did it that way, that we didn't totally freak out and try to do everything that we thought of, because it just wasn't really necessary. And it would've been I think a waste of time and probably somewhat anxiety inducing to bring all these changes in at one time. So I'm glad we held back a little bit on that.
Starr:
Let's talk about the-
Josh:
Yeah, we kind of did a lot of brainstorming and then chose the ones that seemed to make sense as we got into it.
Starr:
Yeah. So let's talk about the new pricing. I know we discussed it in more depth in another podcast, but we're talking about results and everything. What's the main difference between our current pricing and what we had a couple months ago?
Josh:
Well, we switched to... before we had a typical, whatever... I don't know. It's like four levels, or four tiers. Just across the board there's four plans you can choose from. We switched to a system that is a two tiered system where you can choose am I a team or am I business? And then within those two tiers you get things that appeal to that type of customer. And then we also tweaked, we switched the actual limits and actual numbers around as well. But it's kind of like a different UI applied to a similar pricing model.
Starr:
Yeah. It's a bit simpler, and also, at least at the lower levels, it's a bit cheaper. Right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. We re-introduced... We had removed our cheaper, our entry level plan. I don't know. Was it last year? Something like that. Which at the time I think it worked well. It turned out that we didn't lose a bunch of money from that. Our reasoning, I think, was now this is a different time. People are a little bit less... they're less eager to buy things right now. So we decided we wanted to try being a little bit more competitive again.
Starr:
Yeah. That makes sense. So the result of that is that our growth and MRR, our growth and monthly recurring revenue, it's about the same from new accounts as it has been. Might be a tiny bit lower, but the actual number of new accounts that we're getting is significantly higher. So I think that's a real big win. We're all just shocked a little bit, because we're not used to making a single change, and then just seeing a pretty obvious result from it.
Josh:
Yeah, not when it comes to customer acquisition.
Starr:
I know. I know.
Ben:
I suppose looking back you say, well, if you make your cheapest plan more than half of what the previous cheapest plan was then maybe you might get some more customers. Guess that makes sense.
Starr:
Yeah. Maybe. But also in other times when we changed pricing, it hasn't really made a huge, immediate, noticeable impact in finance.
Josh:
Yeah. And I don't know. I'd be surprised that people are really that price sensitive too.
Starr:
Yeah. I wonder-
Ben:
This is the first time we've really reduced prices. So in previous pricing changes, they've always gone up.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's true.
Starr:
It seems like you'd expect the reverse of that though.
Josh:
But even as we went through the process of raising prices progressively like we did, I don't ever remember having a huge drop off in signups either. It was always like, oh okay, we're going to raise this price. Maybe we're going to even double this price, or eliminate this bottom option and see what happens, and then nothing happens. People just continue to buy at the same level, which is I guess part of what probably reinforced my thinking that people aren't that price sensitive in this B2B, what we're selling.
Josh:
Is $20 a month going to... Does it make a big difference? I would've expected kind of the same result on the way back down, to be honest. If it really doesn't matter that much to people, the same number of people would probably keep buying. I don't know. It could be also... We're not talking about we did make other changes to the pricing page. We simplified the pricing. I think we made some good changes around the whole persona thing. Is my whole business going to use this? Or is my team... Am I a team within a larger business? Maybe even a business that uses other error tracking services across other teams and my team just wants to try a new thing. Those changes could also be affecting the increased conversion.
Ben:
For sure. Yeah.
Starr:
One thing I just want to throw out for... I know you guys realize this but I want to throw it out for the listeners because they might not realize it. The one big difference, we talked about getting rid of our old micro plan or whatever it was called. Now we have another low priced option. But now a big difference is that we base our billing on traffic volume, and so there's a real natural upgrade path as people see what volume of traffic their applications send us and all that sort of thing. Whereas previously we tended to tier more on number of projects and things like that that were not quite... I don't know. It was something that was people had more of a choice. I mean, it was more discretionary, as opposed to how many errors you have. That's a little bit less discretionary. So I think it's a sound decision. I think it's not just changing our mind and going back to what we had with the micro plan.
Josh:
Yeah. For sure. That was a big departure from the way we used to bill. I like the usage based model for us. I think it works better.
Ben:
Yeah. And our next product is going to be even closer to that too. In fact, we could go down to just straight metered billing. I've thought about that, but I also want to support Heroku, and of course Heroku doesn't do metered billing, so you have to have some sort of monthly thing or tiered thing anyway.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I've been interested in this idea of just going to plain metered. Okay, you want to pay us a penny per thousand. Great. We just charge you, I don't know, five pennies at the end of the month.
Josh:
Yeah. It works. That's kind of what Heroku does. Isn't it?
Ben:
Yeah, basically. Yeah.
Josh:
They have maybe some base limit or something.
Ben:
Yeah. But it really messes up your projections and planning and stuff.
Josh:
Yeah, that's true.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
You can't really say, "Well, who knows?"
Josh:
Your revenue is literally tied to traffic patterns, which... Yeah. I guess that would be interesting. I guess you wouldn't have to duplicate. You could just use your actual ops charts for financial forecasting. You wouldn't have to duplicate your... you don't even need to prepare metrics or any of that stuff.
Starr:
One thing that seemed to be the case for every place that does just pure metered billing, though, is if you want support you got to buy a support contract. I don't want us spending an hour replying to somebody's email who's paying us $1.50.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
At least not until we have a lot of people paying us millions of dollars on the new product. Right?
Starr:
Right.
Josh:
We haven't dropped the name of the new product on the podcast yet. Right? We're saving that till the... Did we? I can't remember.
Ben:
I slipped it in a few minutes ago.
Josh:
Okay. So are we going to just let people scrub back and get that if they want to, and then we'll pretend like it never happened or... Okay. We'll do that.
Ben:
Maybe it'll show up in the show notes.
Josh:
It might.
Starr:
I read something that Amy Hoy wrote years ago that was like, "Just have multiple launches." So I'm all behind that.
Ben:
We are totally doing that.
Starr:
We can re-announce the name next week. It'll be fine.
Josh:
Yeah. We're going to try the multi-launch thing. Always be launching.
Ben:
We currently have filled seven of the 10 alpha slots for Heroku. So the way that Heroku works-
Josh:
It's exciting.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. The way that Heroku works when you're building an add-on is you need to have 10 alpha testers using it before they will allow it to be lifted publicly in the marketplace as a beta. So a couple weeks ago we asked podcaster people to reach out, and they have. Thank you so much for all those who did. And we've had seven people. So we need three more to be able to finish that cohort. But the early testing that we're getting from these alpha testers has been useful and the feedback has been good, so things are looking up.
Starr:
Awesome. Should I do a little pitch? I don't think we've done a little description for anybody who might want to alpha test. Can I take a shot?
Josh:
Oh, for what it does?
Starr:
This will get me ready for working on the marketing site.
Josh:
Yeah, do it. We haven't talked about it. We talked about it last episode.
Ben:
When Starr wasn't here. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. So I want to hear Starr's take.
Ben:
Go for it.
Josh:
Go.
Starr:
Okay, so when you're building a web application oftentimes you have to use webhooks to interface with some sort of external service. And that's both inbound webhooks and outbound webhooks. And the thing is you want your webhooks to be super reliable for your users. If you send a webhook saying, "Hey, we processed this piece of information to your user's system," you want that to arrive on time and intact. Well, doing that is really, really, really hard, and a real pain in the neck. And there's lots of edge cases, and it sucks. I know, because I ran into all of them when I was building the first version of our uptime checker. It really sucks.
Starr:
That's why we built Hook Relay. Hook Relay is like just add reliability to your inbound and outbound webhooks. Hook Relay. Sign up now.
Josh:
That was awesome. Nice.
Starr:
Thank you. Thank you.
Josh:
We could clip that and transcribe it and just put it on our... That's the copy for the new website.
Ben:
For real.
Starr:
There you go. Yeah. What should people do if they want one of those slots in the alpha tester thing?
Josh:
There's three and only three. Right?
Starr:
There's only three.
Josh:
This is limited. There's only three, they're gone. When they're gone, they're gone.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Act now, supplies limited.
Starr:
Registration is ending at midnight tonight.
Ben:
You can email me, ben@Honeybadger.io. Or you can hit me up on Twitter. You can DM me. Stympy. But yeah, I'm happy to give you some info on how to get started once you email me.
Starr:
Okay. Awesome.
Ben:
For those who aren't Heroku users, because we've had a couple of our friends who are like, "Yeah, I'd help you test it but I don't do Heroku," I've been able to say, okay fine. We'll let you in anyway, but you have to have a GitHub account, because we're not doing authentication on our own. We're not doing email password authentication on this app. We're going to depend on third party's authentication. So if you really want to test Hook Relay and you don't do Heroku, you can still get in touch with me and I will let you in if you can log in with GitHub. And most people in our target audience are going to be able to log in with GitHub.
Josh:
Yeah. Are we going to support Apple's new...
Ben:
Sign in?
Josh:
Sign in.
Ben:
Probably not.
Josh:
I haven't used it for anything.
Ben:
I haven't used it.
Starr:
You can't say that, Ben. They're going to take us out of Apple Podcast now.
Josh:
Do we have to give Apple 30% of our revenue if we use their sign in?
Starr:
Yes, we mentioned our product on this podcast, so we've got to give them 30% of our revenue. One other thing that we discussed at the remote conclave was we've been trialing ProfitWell Retain for I guess two weeks now. Not too long. But this was another effort to reduce churn. And what ProfitWell Retain does, if you don't know, is it is essentially a dunning system. When you have lots of people who are on recurring payments, sometimes their credit cards stop working for whatever reason and you need to reach out to them and have them enter new credit card information.
Starr:
And if you don't do this, or if they don't act, they don't update their credit card information, well, then you lose them as a customer, and that kind of sucks. So yeah, ProfitWell Retain sends out emails to remind people. It has little in-app widgets that pop up and everything. And we had our own dunning emails in place, but we didn't have any sort of in-app stuff. So that's been really good so far. It's kind of too early to say exactly if it's something we want to keep. But so far, results are suspiciously good. I don't really believe in... I don't believe in miracles.
Starr:
No. I don't know. It just seems to have drastically reduced our churn due to failed payments. And I don't know. That might be a fluke, but hopefully it's not. And hopefully next month I'll be just singing the praises of Retain. In general, it seems to be a pretty good product. Integration was pretty easy. All the edge cases that... And of course because this is billing and we have a lot of customers already, and we had existing systems in place, I was worried about a lot of things. The rep answered all my questions about different edge cases. And they seemed to have thought about all of them before and implemented some simple behaviors.
Josh:
This is in addition to... Stripe automatically updates some cards. Right? So this is on top of that, like if that fails then this kicks in. Is that how that works?
Starr:
Yeah. It's pretty cool because in the user interface, it'll actually... it tells you how a individual customer was retained. And so it'll tell you if Stripe automatically... I think it's called smart retries or something. Wait. Is it called smart retries? I don't know.
Josh:
I'm not sure.
Starr:
Maybe I'm just making this up, but it will tell you how they're retained. Because Stripe offers that behavior where they will see a card is expiring and they will automatically update-
Josh:
Somehow they get the new expiration date and stuff. Is that what it does?
Starr:
Yeah. But that apparently doesn't work with everybody. And I guess sometimes cards aren't expiring, and sometimes the cards just change accounts. I mean, something happens and the card just becomes invalid.
Josh:
Yeah. Maybe they get canceled or corporate card, they switch to a different card or something.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm sick of cancel culture.
Josh:
Ooh. Spicy.
Ben:
On a related note-
Starr:
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Ben:
Since we're talking about payments and Stripe, can I rant a bit for something payments related?
Starr:
Yes. Go.
Ben:
It's not dunning. It's chargebacks. We don't have a lot of chargebacks here at Honeybadger, thankfully. It's rare that we do, but when we do it really gets my goat. It really, really does, because people, the ones that we've had anyway, are typically bogus. Someone says, "Oh, you didn't give me a refund when I asked you for it." Well, you never asked for a refund. Or, "It was a fraudulent charge." Oh, yeah? You've been paying us for four years. How is this fraudulent?
Ben:
We just had one recently where the company went out of business. So obviously they're not going to keep paying for services if they're out of business. But instead of canceling the service with us, we got a chargeback from their last month of service. And the reason was "refund requested, but you didn't issue the refund." I haven't even heard from you before. So I emailed the person, and their email is undeliverable, because the whole domain is gone. Okay, fine. Okay, well we won't be charging anymore obviously.
Ben:
But now are we not only out of the service fee for that month, but we're also out of the fee that Stripe charged, because they don't refund the processing fee. So whatever that was. And then there's also a $15 chargeback fee. So depending on how much that person is paying per month, that could go negative on that. It's just, ugh. It's very frustrating.
Josh:
And aren't chargebacks also... Are chargebacks bad for you processing capability too?
Ben:
Yeah. You get enough of them-
Josh:
It's like a spam report. Right? Almost.
Ben:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it's very rare that we have them, but man, if you're going to shut down your business, just cancel your cards. Don't ask for chargebacks. That's rough.
Josh:
I wonder who is the actual person who's initiating those chargebacks. Whose first thought is to call the bank and report? It makes me wonder if they outsource shutting down various systems to someone, like some accountant or something, or a lawyer whose policy is just to... This is a matter of policy. They make some sort of low effort to go and cancel things, and then they just chargebacks across the board or something. I don't know. I have no idea.
Ben:
Yeah. Hadn't thought of that. Yeah.
Starr:
I wonder if there's-
Josh:
I'm trying to see the good in people.
Starr:
I wonder if there's call centers in India where people just call around the clock to credit card companies on behalf of people demanding chargebacks for things.
Josh:
Yeah, maybe this is a startup that everyone is using. They write the letter for you, like it's been a journey, and then they take your statements, and they just go down the list and chargeback. Chargebacks for everyone.
Ben:
Starr, you said that the call center-
Josh:
They throw your data away.
Ben:
You said that call center thing, Starr. That reminded me of when I canceled the Wall Street Journal recently, and I had to go through one of those call centers just to cancel my account. They gave me the three different pitches while I'm on the phone. "Are you sure you don't want to save this much?" No, I just want to cancel. "You sure you don't want to save this much?"
Josh:
They're terrible.
Ben:
And it drives me crazy. Yeah. It's easy to sign up, but man, if you want to cancel, you got to turn over your birth certificate or whatever. And that's the thing that kills me when we get a chargeback. We try so hard to be so accommodating to people. We've had people contact us and say, "Hey, I've been paying you for a long time, but I haven't used your service for six months. Can I get a refund on all those transactions?" And we don't love to do that, but it's like, yeah okay. Sure.
Ben:
So that when we get one of those chargebacks, and it's like, "Oh, they were not responsive." You didn't even contact us. That's what gets my goat. It's like, oh man, at least give me a chance to help you out here.
Starr:
I wonder, you know how people contact us to handle refunds of Honeybadger energy drinks. I wonder if people are contacting Honeybadger energy drinks.
Josh:
That's a good question.
Ben:
Oh, you know? Yeah. Maybe.
Josh:
Yeah. Maybe they did contact someone and it was just the wrong company.
Ben:
Just the wrong someone. Okay, maybe I shouldn't have said-
Josh:
The wrong Honeybadger.
Ben:
I should peace out here. Okay.
Josh:
This just proves to me-
Starr:
Oh, no. No, I wasn't saying don't be angry.
Josh:
This just further confirms for me that we need alliances with the other honey badgers in the world, specifically for handling cross support requests like we've talked about in the past.
Starr:
What's the name of a group of honey badgers?
Josh:
You tell me.
Starr:
I don't know. A hurricane.
Josh:
Hurricane of honey badgers.
Starr:
I didn't have a funny answer. I thought that was y'all's job. I just ask the questions.
Josh:
It's definitely not flock, flock of honey badgers.
Ben:
If we can't arrange the cross company customer support, at least we should do a cross company affiliate thing, so we can get a cut of all that fine bitcoin action.
Starr:
That's a good idea. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. I have to order some of those energy drinks. Although, after that-
Starr:
Oh, wait. Is it an energy drink or a supplement?
Josh:
It's supplement like protein powder, actually. Yeah.
Starr:
So we could do an energy drink.
Josh:
Like a literal Honeybadger energy drink?
Starr:
We could sell it to all the old school Mountain Dew chugging programmers.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, the new ones, they do drink energy drinks. All the Rockstars. I don't know if it's Red Bull.
Starr:
And fruit ninjas. That's my favorite energy drink, is fruit ninja.
Ben:
You made me think of a completely different tangent. All right.
Josh:
All right.
Ben:
100% related. Trademarks. Okay, so five years ago we registered our trademark, and I'm learning that at the end of five years, you need to renew your trademark. The thing is your trademark and your contact information are in this public database. So when that five year mark comes up you get tons of spam from companies who want to help you with your registration, renew your registration.
Ben:
So I've been swimming... My email inbox is overflowing with all these trademark companies. "Hey, you need to renew it." And of course you also get those ones in the physical mail that look like invoices. It's like, "Oh, here's your bill." This is not a bill.
Josh:
Like refinancing your mortgage.
Ben:
Exactly. Exactly. Interesting little tid that I learned these past couple of weeks.
Josh:
Sounds like a job for a Fastmail filter, or rule or whatever.
Ben:
But the funny thing is though, just one last little tid on that, I started getting these emails probably about a month ago. And our registration first renewal, you don't have to do it until you get to that five year mark, like on the same date. And that date actually happened this week. So these companies way out ahead of the actual trademark office. Because the trademark office will also send you an email saying, "Oh, by the way, you really need to renew."
Josh:
But they know that they're timing it ahead so that they beat them to it.
Ben:
Yep. Yep. Clever stuff.
Josh:
Lot of trademarks in the world.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's wild. What if that was real life? What if that was what you spent all day thinking about? It seems like it would be kind of unfulfilling. I don't know. Some people find just money fulfilling, so maybe they would be okay.
Josh:
That's along the lines of people who just are outright scammers, and it's a little bit like you're hacking people. Maybe they get some fulfillment out of that-
Starr:
That's called murder, Josh. Hacking people is called murder-
Josh:
Not literal hacking.
Starr:
-and we don't condone it on Founder Quest.
Ben:
So if you're hacking people, then what is an exception in that context?
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know.
Ben:
Maybe the person having a heart attack. I don't know.
Josh:
They called the cops on you.
Ben:
Ooh. That would be exceptional.
Starr:
Well, it sounds like the plumbers are here to fix my water here, so I'd better go.
Josh:
Sounds good.
Ben:
Good luck with that.
Starr:
Yeah, thank you. It's good talking with y'all and to our beautiful listeners, just remember if you want to rate us, please do so at Apple Podcasts, whatever they're calling it these days. And if you want to write for us, we've got instruction on our blog at honegybadger.io. And yeah, if you want one of those three remaining alpha tester slots-
Josh:
I think it's two now. I think it's down to two.
Starr:
Oh, my God. We're down to two?
Josh:
Act quick.
Starr:
Oh, no. Oh, wait. It just put down to one. We've got one remaining alpha tester slot. Yeah, so get a hold of Ben at ben@Honeybadger.io. Yeah. Until next week, we will be your friends always.
Show Notes:
Links:Stripe
Hey
Bye
Full Transcript:
Josh:
I'm the co-pilot today, right?
Ben:
Co-pilot. Yeah, yeah. So today we're flying without Star. Star is not feeling well, so today is just the two of us.
Josh:
And I have been on vacation. Well, I am on vacation.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Sticking my head up.
Ben:
We are so into FounderQuest that we even come in on vacation to record an episode.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know. It's nice to keep the schedule. I don't know. I've been trying to take a lot of vacations, so if we didn't record every time one of us was on vacation, then I feel like we wouldn't have a very consistent schedule.
Ben:
That's true. Yeah. So how is your vacation treating you?
Josh:
Alright. It's really a staycation so far.
Ben:
Right. I think all vacations are staycations for a while.
Josh:
Yeah. I've looked at bookings, to go to places. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to deal with any of the stuff that's going on right now.
Ben:
Certainly.
Josh:
Or take the risk. Then if we did go somewhere, we still have two toddlers. We're better equipped here at least to manage two toddlers who are bored, and there's only so much hiking you can do with a two year old.
Ben:
Yeah. So no trip to Disneyland this summer?
Josh:
Not so far, unless my in-laws decide that they want to watch the kids for a few days or something then we can get away. But so far, that's not looking too likely at the moment.
Ben:
Well, I'll tell you what. All you got to do is wait 10 to 15 years, and it will be great.
Josh:
Only 10 to 15 years. Yeah, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, I don't know. I've been eyeing a bass guitar for a while, and I'm trying to talk myself into finally buying it right now. But I don't know, I'm still debating.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
There's a chance I'll pick one up.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. The pandemic is a great time to learn new things, right?
Josh:
Yeah. I think that a lot of people are thinking that way, and driving different parts of the economy.
Ben:
Now, you already played a keyboard, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I play piano and guitar, and I actually had a bass for a while. It was borrowed, but I liked it. I liked having it around just to funk around on it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. But now I want to get a big stack from a garage because I don't have enough cool stuff in there already.
Ben:
You need to take out some extra insurance on the stuff that's in your garage now.
Josh:
I know. If that garage burns down, I'm done for.
Ben:
Yeah. You got to declare that stuff, man. Those insurance companies, they don't mess around.
Josh:
Yeah. Speaking of that how's your bathroom situation?
Ben:
Yeah. My bathroom is still not great. So it's amazing how unresponsive contractors can be. I really don't get it. I sent out a bunch of requests to people like, "Hey, here's my situation, and I want to hire someone to help me fix it." And I would say 70% of the people just didn't even respond. I don't know what their sales process is like or if they're super busy right now or what the deal is, but how do you stay afloat in the business-
Josh:
Really?
Ben:
... when you're not responding to leads? I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. That's a good question.
Ben:
Yeah. So, I still haven't selected a contractor, so the chances of me of actually just doing it myself are increasing as the days go by. I've been watching the YouTube videos to learn how to-
Josh:
Really?
Ben:
... install a new tub, things like that. So my confidence is growing slowly, so I just might actually do it. We'll see.
Josh:
I've had the same thoughts a few times. I should really learn how to do stuff around my house if I'm going to be a homeowner, and then I've also had the thought that maybe I shouldn't own a house, and I should be renting in the first place. There's that whole camp that I don't think ... They're not wrong.
Ben:
So the whole economic theory of you should maximize your ... I don't know what the exact phrase is. I can't remember what the term is, but basically you should focus on what you're good it and pay people to focus on what they're good at, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
So the economist in me is arguing for me not to do my bathroom myself because that doesn't make any sense, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Pay someone to do it. They can do a better job than I can.
Josh:
It's like comparative advantage or it's the whole specialization thing, and yeah. Same.
Ben:
But on the flip side, there's the whole ... It would be kind of cool like, "Hey, I did that." Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I put that in there, and there may be a mistake here and there, but that's my sweat and tears, and probably blood.
Josh:
It's also knowing how to at least do some of the smaller things would be useful because at some point, finding good contractors, and then managing them, and getting the work actually done, that's a whole job in itself.
Ben:
Wait, are we talking about bathrooms or are we talking about software development?
Josh:
Yeah. That applies everywhere. Yeah. The whole management aspect of any kind of contractor project.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
At some point, it really does feel like it would be more efficient just for me to do it if I learned how or something.
Ben:
Yeah. Pro tip for all those freelancers out there is A) Be responsive to leads. B) Maintain good communication so that you don't have to put a lot of load on the person that's hiring you.
Josh:
Yeah. That whole management overhead thing is huge, and I run across it very infrequently in contractors I work with in both industries. But yeah. That's like a super power, having that skill of managing yourself, and actually driving the communication with the client, and making sure their needs are met, and all of that.
Ben:
Yeah. We've had projects from time to time, that I know that you've discussed that you think, "Well, it would be nice to do this, but I don't have a lot of time. I could hire it out, but then I have to have all the time to manage hiring it out." So it's a big deal for actually getting out that work to actually have someone that can actually just do it, and not to spend all your time managing them.
Josh:
It's also tough when you possess a lot of specialized knowledge that needs to be transferred to whoever does the work, at least if I have a specific way I want it to happen. Like I'm a perfectionist, and I want it to happen my way, but not do it. Personally, maybe that's a problem with me. Just like giving up and letting someone else solve the problem their own way. But there is knowledge transfer that you can take time depending on what the job actually is, which I think that's when argument for hiring someone who's going to stick around longer, and hopefully absorb, and be able to utilize that information for a longer period of time versus having to ... They have to learn all this special stuff about our business and problems, and then they move on in a couple of months, and you got to teach someone else how to do it.
Ben:
Yeah. I saw a Tweet this week that is related to that, and I thought it was interesting. I'll have to see if I can go and find it again for the show notes, but I'm going to roughly paraphrase it because I don't remember exactly what it said. But the thrust of the message was be satisfied with 80%, and the detail was, "So you get someone who can do the job 70% of the way, you teach them the knowledge that they need to get another 10%, to get them up to 80%, and then just accept that." You would do a 100% job, but someone else can do a 70% job. Then if you get them up to speed a bit, so that they can do some of what you do, then settle for that.
Josh:
Yeah. I like that. That's a good way to look at it. Yeah.
Ben:
So you can't always use that, but yeah. And I have the same issue. I'm a perfectionist, and delegation is an issue for me because if someone does something, I'm like, "Well, I would have done it this way." And I think one of the secrets is learning to have more acceptance of, "Okay, yeah." I think being married is helpful in that respect, especially having kids because you have to learn ... Well, hopefully, at some point you learn that there are different ways of doing things that doesn't have to be a right way. And just because I have a way I like to do it doesn't mean that's the only way to do it, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So, I guess it's kind of the same thing.
Josh:
I imagine that's going to come up a lot more frequently in the future as I start trying to get my kids. Right now, the level they're at is like they're starting to be able to pick up their toys if I stand over them and micro manage them for two hours. But yeah, that's-
Ben:
Yeah. Most recently, I thought about this for myself when I was loading up the dishwasher and getting it ready to run, and my sons, who are teenagers are ... They put dishes in the dishwasher in a way that I wouldn't, and sometimes I look at those things, I'm like, "How do you think this is going to get cleaned? It doesn't work this way."
Josh:
Good thing you brought a good dishwasher, I hope.
Ben:
So, I just have to relax a bit. It's like, "It's okay. It'll be fine."
Josh:
Yeah. The dishwasher has been built to handle all types of people or all types of person.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah. The one that jumped into my mind was picking up the dog turds in the yard.
Ben:
Oh. Is there a right or wrong way?
Josh:
You don't know about that one? No. On that one, I don't care. As long as they aren't in the yard anymore, my kids ... Yeah. I'm looking forward to the day that I can delegate that task. They can take however long they want.
Ben:
Nice. So, I haven't been on vacation this week. I've been actually doing some work. And surprise, surprise, I actually haven't been doing a lot of compliance work, which has been a nice change of pace.
Josh:
I bet.
Ben:
I've been working on the side project that we've talked about a couple of times, and it's coming along nicely. It's almost ready to show, but I thought we could talk about it a little bit today and maybe invite some people to come and check it out if they want.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm excited.
Ben:
So, I don't want to reveal the domain name just yet because I'm not ready to be able to just sign up and bang it. I want to have more of a white glove experience for the first few. But I will say it is related to Webhooks, and sending post requests. So it doesn't have to be just a Webhooks capitalized. It could be like, I don't know. If you're posting something to JIRA because just about every system has a REST API where you send a post request. But basically-
Josh:
The current integration or something?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So we have a lot of those at Honeybadger where things like JIRA, and GitHub, and Trello where we're posting stuff all the time. We have a bunch of outbound requests like that. And one of the inspirations for this project was Honeybadger, and just dealing with sending Webhooks. And I don't know if most of our listeners played with like Stripe. In Stripe, they have an option where you can receive Webhooks, like when people update their subscription or change their payment information or whatever, and Stripe has a fantastic setup for their Webhooks.
Josh:
Really kind of the gold standard of Webhooks-
Ben:
Yeah. I think so.
Josh:
... in my opinion. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. If your server doesn't happen to respond properly, like with a successful okay kind of thing, then it will retry, it will back off and retry over a period of days. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if we had that same kind of thing, but didn't have to build it?" If we built that for Honeybadger, but it's kind of a slog. It's not really fun work, and so I thought, "Man, developers need this, so that's why I built that as a side project." It started out a couple of months ago, I guess, and working on it here and there, and I love using it. It's to the point that I've been able to play with it, and we don't have it plugged into Honeybadger just yet. I think that's going to be next week.
Josh:
It's solving some of those pain points for you though?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So you don't have to worry about a queue because this isn't going to have a queue for you. It's going to do the retries for you, if that's necessary. Happy path is you send a request, and it just gets delivered, and no problems. But if it doesn't go that way, if there's a bad response, then it will retry, it will back off, it will retry for a period of days. But the one thing that I'm really looking forward to, to adding Honeybadger that we don't currently have that this does is it has every history of all the requests, and payloads that got sent, and the responses that came back. And that's just fantastic for debugging like if you're sending a Webhook.
Ben:
If you don't track what got sent, then you don't know. You can't report that back to your customer. And if you don't track the response, then you can't, "Well? Did it actually get there?" You're not really sure.
Josh:
Yeah. What about failures and retries? Is that in the history as well?
Ben:
It is, yeah.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
Basically, there's a list of responses. So if we got some 500 responses, we'll record the headers that came back and the response body that came back. So that all will be in history of each request.
Josh:
Yeah. I think I've ran into that issue before where it's frustrating, like if you're using a Webhook API or something, and if something doesn't happen or an event doesn't fire, and you're scratching your head, trying to figure out, "What went wrong? Was it on my end?" Maybe an exception occurred that I didn't track for some reason. Or maybe it was just a silent failure of some kind. Maybe I didn't check the right event name in the payload or something, and it fell through a case statement, being able to go, and I think Stripe and GitHub both have that feature, and I've used them on both. Like if they show the actual attempts, and retries, and failures, and stuff, then it's super useful.
Ben:
It is. Yeah. Really handy. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So that was a big thing that I wanted to have in this, and I think developers will love having that and not having to build it.
Josh:
Yeah. Because it's kind of specialized. The way we've currently solved the whole ... We rely on Sidekiq's exponential, back off and retry on an exception case, and I think we just raise an exception if it's not a successful post or whatever. But this is actually specialized responding to the actual HTTP response that it's working off of, I would imagine, which is tailor made for these case of delivering Webhooks and all that.
Ben:
Right. And one of the things that we do at Honeybadger is, for example, if we're sending a Webhook to someone's server and it doesn't respond with a success after, I think it's three or four tries, we just stop. We don't keep on hammering that thing. And we disable that particular integration in Honeybadger, and we flag it for the user saying, "Hey, this thing is not responding, so we're not going to send anymore stuff to it."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And this new service has a callback where it actually will send you a Webhook letting you know if something fails.
Josh:
Okay. So this has some Webhooks. Right.
Ben:
Yeah. It's like a Webhook inception I guess.
Josh:
So are we using this on itself? Do we have another service that we're using to send these Webhooks?
Ben:
Well, actually yeah.
Josh:
Kind of like we have Honeybadger?
Ben:
Yeah. It does use itself to send those reports back.
Josh:
Really?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Nice. That's sweet. I love it.
Ben:
So even the reports back have retries.
Josh:
So we've already got two use cases for this thing.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. And one of the things that I wanted to do, I wanted to build something that didn't require a whole lot of configuration up front. So what you can do is you can actually provision this like, I don't know, via Heroku maybe. You get back the API key, and you get the URL that you need to post your Webhooks to. Then you don't need to configure that. You can include in the headers the target URL. So basically this is like a proxy that records and retries for you, and you don't have to set it up ahead of time saying, "So you can use this for ..."
Josh:
Oh, that's cool.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
For one-offs.
Ben:
Right, right.
Josh:
Okay. Yeah. You don't want to have to go and set up what your event it's going to be beforehand. If you had to do that for every single thing that you re-layer, whatever. That would get a little tedious I imagine.
Ben:
Yeah. Exactly.
Josh:
I imagine we probably don't have a client library for this yet. I imagine it's probably in HTTP, API, but I could see a Ruby client library for instance, or Elixir, or PHP or whatever. There's a lot of opportunity in there. For example, because right now it's like sending an email. You're not going to want to do that in a process in most cases, like if someone signs up for your web app or something, you're not going to send that blocking the connection while it's sending an email or delivering a Webhook. But in the same way that we could potentially just use an in-process thread or something to perform some work, you could easily use that in this case to post the Webhook to this new third party service because the service has all of the retry logic.
Josh:
So as long as it actually gets the initial request, then it's going to take it from there. So you probably don't even need to have a true job system for sending the initial request event. I imagine that's probably something we can build into our future client library or SDK or whatever we're going to call it.
Ben:
Yeah. One of the goals for this was for it to be fast enough, so that you wouldn't have to queue on your end, right?
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
You can just go ahead and-
Josh:
Just send it.
Ben:
... just send it. So we're using Serverless, we're using AWS, Lambda, we're using DynamoDB. So you send the payload to us. It's, of course, infinitely scalable because of AWS, and then we persist that really quick. Just this morning I was thinking, "Okay. Now how do we deploy this for multi-regions, so that you can have-"
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
"... so you can have an endpoint that's close to you or close to your app?" And I've got a plan for that. So, I think we might even launch with multi-region support, so you can choose which one you want to deploy to.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Very cool.
Ben:
It's pretty close. It's cool. So just this-
Josh:
Can our tagline be send it by the way?
Ben:
Send it?
Josh:
Send it?
Ben:
Just like ship it? Now it's send it?
Josh:
Yeah. Like ship it, but send it. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Plus one. Yes, let's do that. So this week, I've been playing with the Heroku provisioning, and got that to work. So what I could really use, if any of our listeners are interested in checking it out, I could really use at least 10 people who would like to try out the service via Heroku because to get an add on listed with Heroku, you have to have 10 testers try it before they'll put it in beta stage, where it can show up in their marketplace. So if you want to try out our new hook sending service, please email me, Ben@Honeybadger.io, and I will get you squared away. It should be ready by the time this episode drops.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Yeah. We're already deployed, we have the production environment ready, it's just I want to, again, do that white glove service that I know things are working properly for the first few customers before I open the floodgates.
Josh:
Yeah. This has been all you, and I noticed Kevin has been jumping in a little bit for the past couple of weeks, which is awesome. But I wanted to make time to check it out and do some work on it. I have not even hardly. I looked at the read me or something. So, I am excited to hopefully be one of those testers.
Ben:
Nice.
Josh:
I have a couple of little Heroku apps that I might be able to play around with or something.
Ben:
Cool.
Josh:
So sign me up.
Ben:
All right. So you're tester number one.
Josh:
Yeah. When I get back though, I'm excited to work on the marketing, and start getting into this project a little bit. I really like the idea of basically if Stripe is the gold standard for Webhooks or even GitHub has pretty good Webhooks, this allows you to have ... You are now the gold standard as well.
Ben:
Right, right. Yeah.
Josh:
It allows you to give that Stripe because Stripe has been known for the developer experience. Everyone knows Stripe. They have an amazing developer experience. It's what their business is based on. So especially if you're a developer, if you have developers who are your customers or your users, that's one area that you can really ... You gain a lot with those little fine touches basically.
Ben:
Definitely. Yeah.
Josh:
Because we notice that, and we appreciate it, and it's not something you want to-
Ben:
Yeah. It's funny. I didn't really think about this until just now when you were saying that, but developers really, their job is to pay attention to details, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
They have to make things work exactly. So we really appreciate when we have a service that has paid attention to details and providing those little niceties. Yeah. Totally.
Josh:
Yeah. Documentation, that's the other thing that always comes to mind, even with Stripe. Their document has always been fantastic, and I assume we will have great documentation for this service once it launches, but that's another angle that's crossed my mind. Like when you were telling me about in the past also helping people provide that documentation on their Webhooks, not that this will cover that necessarily, but that's something we can definitely work into the whole onboarding process. You set up your Webhooks, now you should teach your users how to actually make the most of them and use them to build things, because that's really what it's all about. What are you going to do once you receive these Webhooks?
Josh:
It's the same idea as documenting your API. Your Webhooks are a part of your API. Yeah. And there's always-
Ben:
Yeah. I'm looking forward to have you jump in on that because you've done a lot of work on that with Honeybadger.
Josh:
Yeah. I still have a lot of work to do, but it's-
Ben:
Yeah. We still have those areas where it's like, "Oh, I really wish you really designed a payload this way instead of that way."
Josh:
Right. But again, maybe that's why we're building some of this stuff a little bit to create a better abstraction for what we currently have. Now, if you can solve versioning for me-
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Then yeah, take my monies.
Ben:
Yeah. I'll have to work on that.
Josh:
That's the biggest issue with our Webhooks currently. It's on a super old version of our API payload, and eventually we want to migrate to a newer event format.
Ben:
Yeah. It would pretty cool. I'm just going to spitball here, but it would be pretty cool. We're thinking about Stripe, we're thinking about Webhooks. Stripe's API versioning is the best. I haven't seen a better example of versioning for an API. So what if we could do something like that where you first receive a Webhook, you know what version you received, and if a new version comes along, then you get an option to upgrade at some point, just like with Stripe. You can choose-
Josh:
That would be awesome.
Ben:
... the same old version or not.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I have to think about that some.
Josh:
Yeah. Write that one down. That would be really cool because the way we would approach it in our current app, I think, is just build a new Webhook integration that new people can opt into, but we probably wouldn't ... It would be a larger project for us to actually go and implement some sort of opt-in for current users. I think what we would do is lead people on whatever they're currently using and support it forever, and then move new people who set up with Webhook integration are going to get the new version. But yeah, it would be awesome if we could actually encourage people to migrate ... To gain whatever benefits we've added.
Ben:
Right. Yeah. I'll think about that some.
Josh:
So maybe V2.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. I know that Stripe's Webhooks do change based on the version of the API that you're choosing because when we did our Stripe upgrade recently, those payloads changed a bit that were coming into us. So this product won't have a request API like that, like Stripe does, but we could still a version thing where you choose a new version, then you start getting new payloads.
Josh:
Well, my favorite Webhooks to use are always the ones that mirror whatever the REST API is. So in the documentation, if you have your API objects documented, so for say like a user, you're going to fetch your users from your web app, you hit the API V1 users endpoint or something, and you get back a list of users. If there's a user involved in a Webhook event and that user is going to be communicated through that Webhook, send the same documented payload of whatever that object is because really, you're just communicating in objects. Yeah. They should always match the version on either side. Hopefully, your API and your Webhook objects are the same or working from the same spec basically.
Ben:
Yeah. I totally agree. And this new product does that with one exception. So we do store all the responses that come back when that Webhook gets delivered, and those responses can be kind of large because you're talking about response headers and response bodies, which can be really big. So when I send the report of a Webhook delivery, I send the same object that you would get back from the API minus that responses array. So there's just no point in sending a huge ... It could be a huge chunk of data.
Josh:
Yeah. We've run into similar issues with our Honeybadger API in Webhook formats. You're right. I guess even in APIs themselves that's, I think, one of the use cases for GraphQL or one of the selling points is that you can actually ... The client can describe the form of the data that is needed, and then you only send that data specifically. It's not that you're sending a different type of object or format, it's just that the user can tell you what it needs out of that object, so that you're not sending data that's just going to get thrown away anyway or never read. So you're able to send a partial ... Basically a partial representation of that object.
Josh:
And as long as a user knows that those other keys aren't going to exist or they're not looking for them, then I guess it's okay. But yeah. Something along the lines of that, I think we've explored a little bit. What's the JSON query thing that we-
Ben:
JMESPath.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's some pretty cool stuff.
Ben:
That is some pretty cool stuff. Yeah. So we use that internally, like for our PagerDuty integration. They recently they changed their API, so that they don't want payloads that are very large, and our payloads can be very large. So what we did is we added JMESPath filtering to the payload that we send, so we just filter out stuff that you just don't care about for PagerDuty. And maybe we could use that and combine that with a versioning thing. So you could post whatever you want to the Webhook endpoint, but then it gets filtered for an older API version maybe.
Josh:
Yeah. It could be cool. It seems like the same. It's solving a similar problem though. You want the same object, but you don't want all of it necessarily.
Ben:
Yeah. And it can do more than that. It can transform. Basically it's a transformation language, so it's not just pulling the stuff out. But yeah, we can do that.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
Yeah. A lot of fun stuff.
Josh:
It's nice to already have a V2 list. When you can't stop thinking of new things to add to it, you're probably onto something.
Ben:
Yeah. Exactly. And it gives you, I guess, a little more interest in it rather than just like, "Okay, we're done." It's like, "Oh, we can do this, and then we can do that." Yeah. Totally.
Josh:
Cool. Well, I'm excited to try it out for the first time when I return. I'm trying to stay away from the computer. It took me a couple of days, as usual, to get into that vacation mindset, and pull myself off of Twitter. Gosh, I won't start. I won't go on a Twitter rant. But it's nice to be off the computer and have that head space back to think about other things.
Ben:
Totally. Well, speaking of Twitter though, I hate to draw you in, but can you just-
Josh:
What's the latest? Give me the dirt.
Ben:
Can we just revisit for a moment the Hey thing from our episode last week, where we were talking about-
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
And you've seen the-
Josh:
I saw our title today as we go out for our podcast. It's total click bait. I bet everyone will listen to it. It's great.
Ben:
So, I did not actually expect Basecamp turnaround that quickly. I didn't expect them to work over the weekend to do that.
Josh:
Yeah because you called it. You called that move, which was basically like, "Well, we're going to roll out the business version," which was part of it. That wasn't all of it.
Ben:
Right. But the other part was the free part, which I didn't ... It came out of left field for me and I thought, "That was really cool." So props to them for coming up with a clever way around that to come up with a-
Josh:
Yeah. It's a unique solution. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So for anybody who wasn't paying attention, it was if you get the app and you don't have an account, they'll create a throwaway email address for you that you can try for 14 days. So you can actually download the app, you can use it, so it solves the problem that Apple had about ... It's a non-functioning about basically if you don't have an account. So, I thought that was a really clever approach to the problem, and of course, they're also doing the corporate thing, which will also help. But yeah, I thought that was cool. So props to them.
Josh:
It was cool. Did you see, what was it? Bye?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I don't remember the domain. It was one of the-
Ben:
Yeah. I can't remember either. But yeah.
Josh:
... see all these.
Ben:
You don't want to talk to anybody.
Josh:
It's true.
Ben:
That's an email service for contractors.
Josh:
Right. Yeah.
Ben:
They don't really want to talk to anybody.
Josh:
Yeah. Totally. Yeah, they should rebrand themselves for the service industry instruction.
Ben:
Exactly. They could send out the service pro.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, they could integrate with Yelp.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
My favorite thing on that was the little squiggly design arrow things because Basecamp's are all handcrafted, just beautiful drawings, and then they took the arrow part of it, but then they just scribbled down the page.
Ben:
Yeah. That was beautiful.
Josh:
Obviously someone put a lot of work into that landing page, and then the sign up button was actually a donation to, I think, Black Girls Code-
Ben:
Oh, that's cool.
Josh:
... or one of those things, and I thought that was really cool. So if you've signed up for it, then yeah. The sign up is just to donate, which I think they're making a little bit of a statement there during the whole drama that was happening. There are larger issues to think about.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
I like that they capitalized oh and that a little bit, and helped to redirect the conversation a little bit.
Ben:
Yeah. That's really cool.
Josh:
Yeah. I got to get my Bye address.
Ben:
Well, any exciting plans for your next week of vacation or are you just going to do more bumming around?
Josh:
Yeah. I think more of the same probably. We might, I don't know, maybe we'll go for a hike or something, or try to get out and do a little bit around here at least. But I'm hoping that the sun stays out, and honestly it's nice. I like a two week vacation for that reason because the first week is usually trying to learn how to exist off of the internet, and then the second week is then actual vacation because by that point, you're used to just a slower pace, and not being constantly bombarded by information from all directions.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
And you start to be able to read a book again. Yeah.
Ben:
Well, cool. I guess we can wrap it.
Josh:
Are you going to wrap it this time since you did the intro or whatever? What are we-
Ben:
Well, if I do the intro, does that mean you have to wrap?
Josh:
I can wrap. So this has been FounderQuest, and you can rate us on ... What is it? Apple Podcast is what we call it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. We would much appreciate your five star reviews and/or ratings, and I don't know what else to say.
Ben:
And do get in touch if you want to try our new product.
Josh:
The most important thing is to email Ben@Honeybadger.io to try out ... Well, I guess to gain the gold standard of Webhooks-
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
... for your web apps.
Ben:
Be as cool as Stripe.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Cool.
Ben:
Awesome. Great job, Josh.
Josh:
That's a wrap.
Show Notes:
Links:
Hey
Worldwide Developers Conference
David Heinemeier Hansson
Jason Fried
Heroku
Andrey Butov
Configuring Fastmail to act like Hey
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Okay. Now we can talk about how terrible the world is. No.
Ben:
So speaking of Apple. Yeah, it's been interesting. So I've been watching all the hubbub over the past few days about Hey and Apple.
Starr:
So what is Hey?
Ben:
So Hey is this new email service from our friends at Basecamp.
Starr:
I still call them 37signals, because we go back.
Ben:
Way back.
Starr:
They let me do that.
Ben:
And also an app. So of course, their web application comes with an IOS application, which has caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Apple world over the past few days. Which is funny that the timing is such that it's right before their Worldwide Developers Conference. That's interesting. But I was thinking about it this morning-
Josh:
Yes, it's very interesting. Some would say it's a little more than a coincidence.
Ben:
I bet you that we will see Basecamp releasing the company version of Hey very, very soon. And when they do, I bet you that the IOS app will be cleared for takeoff. Because I-
Josh:
Ah, because then it will be a company app, right, in air quotes.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Y'all can't see my air quotes, listeners. But ...
Starr:
What is the kerfuffle, as you called it? What's going on?
Ben:
So Apple won't let Basecamp update their IOS app. And in fact, have somewhat threatened to removed the existing app from the store because-
Starr:
But the existing ... I'm sorry, the existing Basecamp app?
Ben:
No, the existing Hey app.
Starr:
Oh, the Hey app.
Josh:
Yeah, it's the new, their email client. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Because they do not support in app purchases for the Hey subscription, which costs $100 a year. And of course, David and Jason are not willing to give Apple any cut. And Apple is saying, "Well, our rules are you got to do IAP if you want to have an app that does something that's tied to a subscription."
Josh:
They want 30% or something.
Ben:
30%. So I bet you, again, that company thing will come out real soon now. And as soon as they do, Apple will be like, "Okay, well since it's not an individual thing, then of course we'll let that app in." Just like a bunch of other apps that are currently in the App Store, like for example, Fastmail, right.
Josh:
The argument is consumer versus business, right.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
The rules for consumer apps are different from the rules for business apps.
Ben:
And Basecamp, they're making quite a stink about this whole thing, saying it's highway robbery, and it's taxing the internet, and all this kind of stuff, right. But this is a thing of marketplaces, they charge you a fee for being on their storefront. That's just the way that these things work. It's not new, right. And we do the same thing with Heroku, right. We pay Heroku 30% of all the revenue that comes in through people using our service through Heroku. And that's just the cost of being on the platform.
Starr:
So let me ask you, I think I may have misunderstood this slightly. So in order to have any ... I guess, for new apps, Apple is saying that if you have any type of subscription service, it has to be purchasable through the app via Apple's payment purchasing thing that's equivalent to Apple's version of PayPal, or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. If that app is a personal app.
Starr:
If it's a personal app.
Ben:
And not a reader kind of app, like Netflix falls into the thing of readers I think. So that's-
Starr:
Wait, what?
Josh:
Oh, I didn't know the reader distinction.
Starr:
I was just going to ask about this, because Netflix, yeah you can't sign up through the App Store for Netflix. So what's the difference?
Josh:
Oh, because it's read only. It's just content you're viewing or something.
Ben:
Yes. Yeah.
Josh:
Oh. So if Netflix let you upload videos like Vimeo or something, then they'd have to ...
Ben:
Well, imagine if you download the Netflix app, and there was nothing you could do unless you had a paid subscription, right.
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
Then if there wasn't a special exclusion for Netflix, there obviously is, right, then Apple would say, "Well, the app doesn't do anything useful, we don't want that kind of app on our App Store." And that's the argument for Hey. It's an email app that can't load email from any other service except for Hey, and you can't use Hey unless you have a paid account, a paid personal account.
Josh:
Yeah, all you can do is log in.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Right. Yeah.
Ben:
Right. So I totally see Apple's stance on this. And a lot of people are thinking they're being jerks about it. But I mean, Apple is saying, "Hey, we have a big platform, and you are reaping the benefits of being on our big platform, so pay us."
Josh:
Yeah. Well, it seems like the bigger question is, is it a good idea to basically just build for one platform?
Ben:
That's definitely the question, yeah.
Josh:
If you're going to start a new company, is targeting solely ... Just building IOS apps for instance, is that a good idea?
Starr:
You want to target IOS and Blackberry.
Josh:
Right. Get that IOS Blackberry electron port or whatever.
Starr:
Yeah, you play them off one another.
Josh:
React Native. Does React Native target Blackberry?
Starr:
I don't know.
Ben:
Probably.
Starr:
My mind is just exploding right now.
Josh:
Yeah. I find it funny just the level of outrage on both sides. It seems like there's two very vocal camps on one saying, "Basecamp is just drumming up all this outrage as a marketing strategy, and it's just like billionaires squabbling over 30% of their empires or something." And then on the other side, obviously you have DHH and everyone else who's upset with Apple. But to me, it does seem like there are more pressing matters in the world right now than-
Starr:
Yeah, you think? You think? Just a couple things.
Josh:
I could think of a few things.
Starr:
Just a couple more important things.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
One thing about this, it's sort of ... Okay. First of all, I have to say, so I was reading Tweets from Andrey Butov a friend of the show, and ... I hope I can say that. I hope he doesn't get mad at me for saying that. And-
Josh:
Well, he built our IOS app, right.
Starr:
Yeah, he built our IOS app. So he's a friend of Honeybadger I think, and we're a friend of his. And he's like, "Why are people taking sides on this? This is two companies that both make a ton of money just arguing over a percentage. Why are people taking up arms about it?" And that made me think. Well, that was an interesting take, because I feel like Basecamp, 37signals, their shtick is, "We're bootstrappers." Jason Fried goes and speaks at bootstrap conferences and stuff.
Starr:
But really, Basecamp is in a league beyond pretty much any bootstrap company I know of that is in that world. So I don't know, it almost seems disingenuous to me of DHH to be like, "Well, I'm just a little guy, and y'all should feel sorry for me. I'm going to use my public platform to complain to Apple." And I mean, yeah, Basecamp is much, much smaller than Apple, but it's like, I don't really care.
Josh:
Yeah. I think they're still, they're a bootstrap company to me. I mean, technically they're bootstrap. They bootstrapped the company to start it. Yes, they took investment from Jeff Bezos. But the model for that was not the same as most companies that take investment to grow the business I think. I don't know. I could go either way on that. But how pure do you have to be to qualify as a bootstrap company?
Ben:
Are they a true Scotsman?
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Someone has got to do a Scottish accent.
Josh:
I mean, yes, they are the most successful. They're also one of the most ... They're one of the oldest. And to be fair, how many employees does Apple have versus Basecamp's? They're under 100 still, aren't they? Yeah. I don't know. Yes, they're raking in the profit. And I like to think, if we ever reached their level, we would be too. But yeah, I don't ...
Ben:
I just feel its kind of silly to complain about having to pay a platform's fee when you want to be on the platform so you can get the benefits of the platform. Hey, if you don't want to pay the 30%, okay, yank your app.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
To be honest ... Oh, sorry.
Ben:
And if you're not going to do that, why aren't you going to do that? What is the value that you're getting that you're insisting on having an app in the App Store? Okay, if you can say what that value is, now all you have to do is decide whether that value is worth 30% of your per user revenue. That's it. It's a simple math, right. I think it's whiny entitlement to say, "Oh, well, we're special. And we shouldn't have to pay because of X." Or, "Apple can't charge anybody this because it's just rent seeking." Well, they built the platform, they're bringing the customers to you, they're adding value.
Starr:
Yeah, they own the apartment building. They're seeking rent for their apartment building.
Ben:
Exactly. If you don't want a bed, then don't rent an apartment.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Yeah. I think what's kind of interest ... What bugs me about the DHH position is that it invites smaller bootstrap people to be like, "Yeah, this is something that's against us, and this is affecting us badly." But now that I'm thinking about it in more detail, the thing that strikes me is that this is a situation that is really only going to affect people who bring their own market.
Starr:
Basecamp and DHH have their own massive following, right. And they're bringing a ton of customers. And so they just want to have a place where people can download an app, and have their customers use it. But if you're just starting out ... I remember when we were just staring out, and we were getting our extension on Heroku, it was like, "Sure, great, we'll pay 30% because we don't have any customers. If you can get us some customers, we'll be happy to pay you 30% for them."
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Starr:
Yeah, it's just-
Josh:
And if that is your primary launch marketing channel, and you are good, your app is good, then you could get featured. There are avenues to advertise your service through the App Store as well, which I assume become more attractive to Apple if they are actually making money off of you. I mean, one would think.
Ben:
Yeah. I think the workaround is, you just make sure that it's not just an individual subscription. I'm really excited to see, if they launch the company thing, which it's already in beta. You can get an invite to it, right. So we know it's supported, and it's coming soon. I just can't wait to see, once it lands, is the whole IOS thing, does it go away? Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, yeah. And then they're better for it.
Starr:
Is that what we do? Do we have a company account, or are we just grandfathered in?
Ben:
Well, I did wonder how does this affect the Honeybadger IOS app? Because it really doesn't do anything if you don't have a paid account, right. But we don't do it just based on individuals, it's based on teams, right. Somebody can-
Josh:
Yeah, it's business.
Ben:
Somebody can be paying for multiple people to use the service, the app. So, whew, we're okay I think.
Josh:
Well, all I had to say on the whole thing is, if we're upset over billionaires ruining the world, and we've reached DHH as the one that we're ranting about, man, we're really screwed.
Starr:
Oh, I don't really care about DHH. I don't fundamentally care about any of this stuff. I'm just saying, DHH is not ... This isn't the everyman versus Goliath. This isn't like ... It's like, "Man, capitalism really sucks because they're sticking it to DHH." This company who makes how many hundreds of million dollars a year? It's like a cock fight between capitalists. Let them do it, fine. Bet on sides. Who cares? But fundamentally, it's meaningless to me.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That's fair.
Josh:
So you tried, Hey, Ben. As did I.
Ben:
I did, yes. Thanks to you.
Josh:
Starr, I tried to get you in with my invite. I thought that my invite had three, and I only gave it to three other people. But maybe it included me in that or something.
Starr:
Yeah, maybe. I'm left out in the cold. It said, "Sorry, invite code invalid."
Josh:
I was real excited to get you in there. Yeah, luckily-
Starr:
Now we really see why I am sticking it to DHH in this episode.
Josh:
Because yeah, it's interesting, Starr, that out of the three of us, you're the only one who hasn't been invited.
Starr:
I know, right. I'm standing out here in the cold. I'm just trying to sell my little matchsticks to make money.
Josh:
Well, luckily I think that you'll still have a good chance of getting Starr as a username out of the three of us I would say.
Ben:
Yeah, at least you won't have to pay $1,000 to get your first name as a username.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
I don't know. It costs 10 bucks a month though, right? Or 100 bucks a year.
Ben:
100 bucks a year. But if you want a three letter name like, I don't know, Ben, then you have to pay $1,000.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm not sure I want to pay another $10 a month for another email account. I've got too many email accounts.
Ben:
Well, I happily pay Fastmail for my email.
Josh:
Same.
Ben:
I have my own domain. So I get email at my first name, @bencurtis.com. And been doing that for years. And for the longest time, I had that hosted at Gmail, back when that was free. And I don't know, a year or two ago, I decided I want less Google in my life. And so I switched from Gmail to Fastmail. I don't know, I have five or six domains that I actually care about email for. And I love it. I love Fastmail for email, it's great.
Josh:
Yeah. I use Fastmail too. And actually, this whole Hey thing, because I went and tried, I've tried it out. And I think it's cool, and it has a lot of really good concepts. But I haven't come to the conclusion that it actually simplifies my email at all, just because I have different email accounts. And I have a fairly complex setup. And I've done a lot of optimization of my own email process. So I've got a lot of, I guess infrastructure set up to manage my email. And Hey just seems like a very ... You'd have to go all in on it. And it's not full featured enough to go all in with everything. So until it is, it ends up just being another email account or whatever.
Starr:
So what is the thing they're trying to do that fixes email? I don't even know what the point is.
Josh:
So basically, they're trying to ... When I first signed into it and started to use it, I think they're taking a lot of good patterns that people have used, kind of set up with automation rules, and more complicated setups in the past, and are trying to create basically just a template that does that for you.
Josh:
So it has a screening. It screens everyone by default for instance. So when someone first emails you, it doesn't show up in your inbox, it goes to, what I think they call the screener. And the screener basically gives you a thumbs up and thumbs down on whether you want to receive email at all from that person. And then also, if you do want to receive email, you can tell Hey what type of email that is. So it's either something like someone contacting you, so you want that to go to your inbox, or maybe it's a marketing email, or a receipt, or et cetera. So kind of like Gmail's, whatever they call the label system, updates and promotions.
Starr:
Oh, cool. That sounds useful.
Ben:
Yeah, I think if you are don't have a 15 year archive of email, and you can be fine with just one email address, and you don't really have a lot of filters and automation in place already, it'd be great for you. If you're not an email junkie expert, then do it, because it has, like Josh said, some great patterns. When you said it implements some well known patterns, or ways that we've been doing, it reminded me of Rails. That's what Rails brought to web development.
Josh:
Yeah, it's Rails for email. That's great. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. But yes, Basecamp likes to do this.
Ben:
Yeah, exactly. Before Rails, there were templating, there wasn't NBC, there were database extractions. But it wasn't all in one package nicely put together. And so that was one thing that was really beautiful about Rails. And I get the same feeling about Hey. They've taken a lot of experience ... For example, I have a newsletters filter in Fastmail. All the marketing stuff, all the newsletters I subscribe to all bypass my inbox and go there so I can check it when I want to. And so I think Hey is formalizing these patterns that people have gained over time.
Josh:
As I was using Hey, there were some concepts that I really liked, that I don't really have implemented in my email. So yesterday, I spent a little time actually implementing. So I implemented a screener folder in Fastmail, because Fastmail filters, they have an option to filter basically any email that is from someone who isn't in your contacts.
Josh:
So basically, I just created a to screen folder, and created a rule that said, "If this person isn't in the contacts, put it in that folder instead of the inbox." And that's essentially what Hey does. I think I'm actually going to do a little blog post on this, because I took screenshots as I set it up. So I'll share that maybe later this week, or next week, or something. But I really like it so far.
Josh:
And actually, I don't know how much further I'm going to go from that, because really all I want to do is, I want to receive ... Email from a few people should go to my inbox, but the rest of it, I just want to scan and archive. That's my process in Gmail and anywhere else that I use email. So basically, I could just have it all go to this folder. I could whitelist just a few people. And then basically the screening folder becomes just like scan and archive. I can do that every day, or every week. And just add whoever to the contacts if they're a new person that needs to make it through.
Josh:
And that actually is a lot simpler for me I think. Or will end up being a lot simpler for me than even Hey is in the end. So yeah, I think my ... I think I really don't need Hey personally.
Ben:
I might try that. I hadn't thought about setting up my own screen or anything like that. But I like that idea.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's interesting.
Josh:
I'll throw that blog post together. But it's easy.
Starr:
That sounds really great. I wonder if it would work for me personally. I tend to, if I have a cabinet with lots of drawers, I will forget that the drawers exist, and then never look in them. So my email workflow of just having a big inbox with 1,000 things in it, and I have to go through each one is almost best for me, because it's just one place I have to look, and I know that I'll remember to do that. So I don't know. I would try it though.
Josh:
Yeah, I put mine right under the inbox, or actually even above the inbox if you really want it to be front and center. And then in Fastmail, you can color code the folders.
Starr:
Yeah, cool. I need to get on Fastmail. I'm still rocking Gmail.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Like it's 2007 over here.
Josh:
The other big discovery I made this week was how Fastmail handles forwarding. So I now have both ... Because I have to other, I have Honeybadger, and then I have Hint, the consulting company that I'm a part of. And both have an email account. And so before, my workflow was basically, I had the same workflow duplicated across three different email accounts. But now I have my two other Gmail accounts forwarding into Fastmail. And then Fastmail has an identities feature that actually integrates with Gmail. So you can send, you can reply. So basically, it's three email accounts in one. And so I basically have just one process now where I can manage all of my email accounts. And it's really fast.
Starr:
Oh, awesome.
Josh:
Fast. I guess that's why they call it Fastmail.
Ben:
Here's another cool thing about Fastmail. So like I said, I have five or six email domains all pointed at Fastmail. And I have each domain set up so that you can send email to any address, at any of those domains, and it will come to my one inbox, right. So I can use that for spam tracking, or if I sign up for a newsletter, I can sign up with some random email address @bencurtis.com. Right. So the thing that's cool ... A bunch of email providers do that. But the thing that's cool about Fastmail is, if you have that set up, and an email comes into one of those throwaway email addresses, and you reply to that, then the reply will come from that same email address that it came to.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
That's like the same identities feature. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So that's pretty handy. So you can still keep up the charade of having this other user specific email address.
Josh:
I do the same thing. I never thought about the catch all thing, because I always worried that I'm going to get a bunch of ... Do you ever get random people emailing random spam? Spam.
Ben:
Of course, yes.
Josh:
So I normally, I do the same thing you do, but I just use the plus syntax with my name, so Josh plus whatever tag I want for the service I'm signing up for. But Fastmail also has, they have an aliases feature that not only can you create aliases on your own domain, but they give you a list of 30 plus different email domains that they just give you for ... Well, it's not for free, because you pay for the service, but it's included. And you can create basically an unlimited number of email addresses that work the same way. They come in, and then you can reply to them. So I've used that before for specific ... If I'm signing up for something that's potentially really spammy, I'll create a special ... There's no way of knowing that it's ... It's not even at my email domain.
Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it's for you black hat SEO forums.
Josh:
Yeah, right. Yeah, so we'll put in our Fastmail referral code right here, and ...
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
Just go to fastmail.com/honeybadger. Don't do that.
Josh:
If you do, you'll be extremely disappointed.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, it's cool.
Starr:
Ben Findley is setting up some podcast advertisements, right. And we were talking about doing that sort of vanity domain thing. But in the end, it just seemed simpler to have people mention us in our little sign up, "Why did you sign up?" comments section.
Josh:
Oh, yeah. You mean doing a Honeybadger IO slash the name of the podcast, or something?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, and we're looking into conferences and we don't have conferences. Conferences are just gone.
Ben:
Yeah, so Ben wanted to do a coupon that allowed people to get a credit. You sign up and you get X dollar credit. But Stripe doesn't support that. So we've done coupons before for these podcast sponsorships, and conference sponsorships, and the coupons have always been either for a dollar amount off, or a percent off.
Starr:
Okay. Let me stop you there. So what's the difference between $10 off coupon, and a $10 credit?
Ben:
So credit, you'll consume over time, right.
Starr:
Okay. So the $10 off coupon only works on the one months billing cycle.
Ben:
Or three months, or six months, or whatever you specify.
Starr:
Yeah, but one payment.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
It doesn't get depleted across multiple payments.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Oh, okay. That makes sense. Yeah.
Ben:
So I love the idea of having sign up credits, that's cool, because then you can, for example, play with a more advanced plan, right, try out some of those features, whereas, a dollar off credit, or coupon, wouldn't give you that same ability to test it out for free, right. So I wish that Stripe supported that. But in leu of that, like you said, we're just going to do the manual thing.
Starr:
Ah, that makes sense.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But speaking of coupons and pricing, the new pricing that we launched a few weeks ago seems to be working okay.
Starr:
Oh, tell me about that. I don't know anything about that.
Ben:
Yeah, well, I'm not-
Starr:
I don't like this tone in your voice. It just doesn't sound good.
Ben:
Well, I do watch the revenue closely. And the revenue does not indicate that this is a super win for us. So I think more time is required. You can't judge new pricing with just a couple weeks worth of data. But early indications are that it's either neutral or somewhat negative. So we'll see.
Starr:
But also, the economy is on fire.
Ben:
Yeah, that makes it tough.
Starr:
It's really hard to know what's caused by what these days.
Josh:
The economy is bad. I mean, we introduced a much lower price point. So people are going to be defaulting to that initially. I mean, it's obviously not going to make as much unless we get a exponential amount more people signing up or something.
Ben:
Yeah, I think the intent of the lower pricing was to be more attractive to people signing up. And that, I think has born out. We've seen an increase in the numbers of people signing up for paid accounts.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So that's worked. I just, yeah ...
Josh:
Yeah, it's-
Ben:
So hopefully, over months, we'll see-
Josh:
It's going to take a while.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I mean, if it works out, it'll have to work out in the lifetime value or something, right. And yeah, I don't know either.
Ben:
We'll make it up in volume.
Starr:
I'd rather have more ... I don't know. I'd rather have more people paying us than necessarily have the total amount of money they pay us be a little bit higher.
Ben:
Distributes that risk.
Starr:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah, same here. And yeah, I don't know. It's always been amazing to me how few signups we've actually had over the lifetime. We don't have hundreds of people signing up every day, right. And it's really, I mean, it's a slow drip of customers coming in over time. And it's always been amazing to me how big of a business you can build with just that slow drip of customers. So I mean, the fact that we haven't ... Yeah, I don't know.
Josh:
It's also made it a little bit difficult for me when we're making pricing changes, because we're not like Zoom or something where we can get statistical benefits of an analyzing the rate of signups, and figure out how our pricing is affecting it. So for me, anything that moves the needle on more people signing up, and assuming they stick around, and maybe even pay us more in the long run, if they ... You can't get introduced to Honeybadger and like it enough to bring it with you to your next company unless you have the opportunity to use it now. So anything that adds customers, I'm usually pretty positive on that.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, one time a couple years ago, or several years ago, I was ... Remember when everybody was like, "A/B testing. You got to do AB testing." There were all these presentations like, "Yeah, I did some A/B testing, and I found that if I changed the color of my signup button from blue to green, we made 50% more money that year." And that was all ... I mean, okay, yeah it was all lies.
Josh:
That was Google.
Starr:
It was all lies. But also, it's impossible to do any kind of A/B testing unless you have a ton of ... Unless your sample size is large enough, right.
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
If you've got a really small sample size, then ... And these A/B testing tools will actually calculate it for you, it was like, "How long do you need to wait to get some meaningful data on this?" And it was like, "Two years." Just like, "No. No, thank you. I'm just going to go back to guessing."
Ben:
Well, we have had a few more customers sign up since the last time I tried A/B testing. So maybe the time frame would be a little shorter than two years now.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, but it's been more than two years. Maybe we should have just left it running.
Ben:
How's that test going, Starr?
Starr:
Yeah, it's like, "Well ..." I don't know. I don't know. We've changed the website a little bit since then.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
I like our approach of longitudinal testing versus parallel A/B testing.
Starr:
I like the way you say that. Longitudinal.
Ben:
It makes me feel more sciencey.
Starr:
That's true.
Ben:
It's a longitudinal study.
Josh:
Sciencey. Sciencey should be the word of the year, or the decade. Yeah, I'm glad you're keeping track of that though. And it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. The flip side of the whole pricing thing is, if it's not working, or we realize we're not making enough off of people initially signing up, we can always raise the lower end of the pricing a little bit. And then if that doesn't reduce the rate of signups, then that's a good sign. That's a good signal for us. I think it's always been a pretty good signal.
Josh:
Because we did that in the past where, when we were charging too little, we just started bumping the price a little bit. And then you can watch that. And usually, it doesn't matter how many signups you get. Usually, if it's going to impact you, if it's going to have a big impact, you'll see a little bit of a dip or something. At some point, people will stop paying. Versus, there's usually never a point, there's rarely a point where, when you drop the price, people ... You're always going to get more people or whatever.
Ben:
Yeah. But I really love the plans. I love the, having the change up we made where we have the team versus business, and then the different traffic tiers. That, I think makes a lot more sense than the small, medium, large stuff that we had before.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It does.
Josh:
Yeah, I think it's a good framework. It's a better framework moving forward even if the numbers change a little bit over time.
Ben:
Yup.
Starr:
Yeah. And regardless of the numbers, it's nice to have made the world make a little bit more sense. Because so much of the world makes no sense whatsoever. So it's nice, in our little corner, we've got our little Japanese garden.
Ben:
Doing our part to bring peace to the world.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, I think next week, maybe next week, maybe two weeks from now, we'll need to talk about a new product release.
Starr:
Oh. You're going to be ready.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Going to drop a few hints here?
Ben:
Yeah, well if you're a web developer, you'll be interested. How's that for a hint?
Starr:
Don't give away the farm.
Ben:
Yeah, we can't stray too far from our current customers. We love web developers, so we have to build more products for them. But I will say that one person with whom I have shared more detail about this side project, this person said, because it could be infrastructure heavy, and we know a thing or two about infrastructure here at Honeybadger.
Starr:
You do. I don't.
Ben:
This person said, "I would trust you with this type of service, because I know how good you are at this sort of thing."
Starr:
Yeah, that's a great compliment.
Ben:
We're going to have to put that on the testimonials page when we do our launch page.
Starr:
Yeah. I have to say, so I was in Basecamp, and I was reading your spec that you wrote. And I was like, "Wow, this is actually really ..." I read it one time because I was in a rush and I read it, I was like, "Okay, that looks good, whatever." And then I came back to it later, and I was like, "This is really a good idea."
Josh:
I'm excited.
Starr:
So, go, Ben.
Josh:
I'm really excited.
Ben:
Yeah, so hopefully this week. Today, I created the official Amazon account for it.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Ben:
Yeah. I was just doing it on the personal account before. But I do love ... So one of the things that I'm doing is segregating this from the rest of Honeybadger.
Starr:
Yes.
Ben:
Just in case-
Starr:
That's a pro tip. That's a pro tip.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Just in case something bad happens, or ... What were you going to say, Starr?
Starr:
I always just use separate AWS accounts for separate products.
Josh:
Things.
Ben:
Yeah. Because who knows, someone might come along and say, "Hey, I want to buy that thing." And it'll be much easier to turn over that Amazon account, versus trying to pull stuff out from a co-mingled account.
Starr:
I think I still may be hosting some files on S3 for old clients. I don't know. And it doesn't cost hardly anything. But I think I may still. Some of their files may be on my personal AWS account.
Josh:
Nice. Those were the days.
Starr:
Those were the days. Yeah.
Josh:
Well, I'm really excited about the launch. I just realized that I'm going to be off for two weeks starting Monday. So if this launch is happening in the next two weeks, then you might see me pop back in, because I don't know if I can keep myself away, at least from doing some signal boosting or something.
Starr:
Oh, that's good.
Josh:
And also, I'm really excited about the marketing side of it too, because there's a lot of good marketing opportunity I think, for this.
Starr:
Yeah, definitely. And I feel like we got to keep up this tradition of Ben launching gigantic things while you're on vacation, Josh.
Josh:
Yeah. I just realized, that really does fit that narrative. So maybe I should just go away. Maybe that'll actually help the success. Because it's worked well in the past.
Ben:
So if you go on vacation, and we deploy big new things, then I propose that, when I go on vacation, that you get a bunch of new customers.
Josh:
That works for me. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I'm excited to see what people think about this. And yeah, see what we can do to push it going forward. I think that'll be great.
Ben:
Hope so. Is that a wrap?
Starr:
All right. If you've enjoyed the show, go to Apple Podcasts, and give us a review I guess. And yeah. And if you want to write for us, I'm still doing that. So publishing the old blog. Go to honeybadger.io. Go to the blog, and there's a write for us thing in the header. And until next week, this has been FounderQuest.
Show Notes:
Links:Justin Jackson Twitter
12 Monkeys
Kingkiller Chronicles
Full Transcript:
Ben:
As I was getting this morning and reading Twitter and just... Twitter. Something that's come up lately, and Justin Jackson has talked about this, and there's a couple other people who have talked about this. On Twitter this morning, it was being talked about. But that's the idea of staying in your lane.
Ben:
If you're a technologist, and typically your podcast is all about business or whatever. I'm just talking about us, right? Then you should stay in your lane and not talk about current events, whatever. People said that to Justin Jackson as he's been talking about equity and the environment. Some of the things that are concerns to him, and things that he likes to think about and talk about.
Ben:
I was thinking about that this morning, and I was like, "Well, we could talk about current events on our podcast. There's no reason why we couldn't." Then I thought, "Well, except that, you know what? Maybe this is just a nice break for people that just have too much news in their lives. They can turn to FounderQuest, reassured that they won't have to deal with all the garbage that's going on." We just talk about happy things here.
Josh:
This is the escape.
Starr:
I think we're probably not taking an official stance on the staying in your lane thing.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
Honestly, this is kind of my break, and I don't want to have arguments during it. I don't really want to debate serious topics right now, because everything is just on fire. I guess that's our way of saying that even though this seems to be the worst possible timeline. I read this morning that the monkeys stole the coronavirus samples from the lab and are running wild with them.
Josh:
Sounds legit.
Starr:
Which is the plot of a Terry Gillian movie. Yeah, yeah. If you haven't seen, what is it, 12 Monkeys, there you go-
Ben:
Oh, that's a good movie.
Starr:
Yeah, it is. I don't know. I guess this is to say, we're all affected by it, but we're not... I don't know.
Josh:
As much as we want to be.
Starr:
I see some people, and people are just plowing ahead with React is... Here's my hot take on React right now. It's like, nobody really wants to hear that right now. Maybe they do, I don't know. It's just hard.
Josh:
I've been blowing up our Twitter channel with hot takes lately.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah, Josh is all about the anti-React this week.
Josh:
Not really hot takes, but.
Starr:
Is that the anti-poke?
Josh:
Oh, yeah, you mean my blog? The blog thing?
Ben:
Yeah, the blog thing. That was pretty cool.
Josh:
Yeah, it's been... I don't know if you caught it, Starr, but I've been kind of just working on my blog a little bit. Playing around with things lately. I use Jekyll, but I hadn't updated it in a long time, so I migrated my assets and stuff to webpack and did some stuff to kind of modernize a little bit. I decided I didn't want to go too far with the modernization, and kind of see how far I could get.
Josh:
A lot of people are using their blogs, rebuilding their blogs in JAMstack to kind of play with Gatsby or some of these newer front-end frameworks. I thought it would be fun to do kind of the opposite. See how close I could get to the performance that you see with one of these more modern frameworks, with just old school technology. I'm using just Jekyll and Turbolinks, and I got this cool prefetch script that will do prefetching of links if you hover over them with your mouse for 400 milliseconds or whatever, which kind of speeds up.
Starr:
Oh, cool.
Josh:
Really, it kind of turns it into a... It feels like a single page app, but it's just a webpage.
Starr:
That's really cool. I actually, fun fact, we had that at Honeybadger before we moved to Jekyll, we had a little prefetch thing.
Josh:
Yeah, I'm actually, I've been planning on-
Starr:
Not Jekyll, I meant Turbolinks.
Josh:
Turbolinks.
Starr:
Before we went to Turbolinks
Josh:
We have the pjax setup. I remember that, it was a jQuery prefetch plugin or something.
Starr:
Yeah, no, I wrote it.
Josh:
Did you write it? Okay.
Starr:
It was Starr's prefetch blue plate special.
Josh:
Yeah, that was cool.
Starr:
I eventually disabled it because it was hard to get right. I really got tricky after a while and I don't know. I was being too tricky, and it turns out, the world doesn't really appreciate that.
Josh:
I think that's why it hasn't been officially added to Turbolinks. When I was digging through, trying to figure out how to do it, which is what led my to this gist that someone made. There's a bunch of issues on the Turbolink's GitHub repo, talking about it. It's not that it will never get added, but I'm assuming it's a difficult thing to implement or something like that, for everyone. I don't know.
Starr:
I forget what the issues were. For blog, it seems like it would be pretty straightforward though, because it's just webpages.
Josh:
Yeah, it's working pretty well on mine. It's fun. I've been meaning to move that stack-
Starr:
I saw that you-
Josh:
... over to our blog, too. Eventually I'll apply the same optimizations to the Honeybadger website.
Starr:
Cool. We don't currently use Jekyll, are you talking about moving it to Jekyll as well?
Josh:
No, just the front end. It's simple to install Turbolinks and maybe some prefetching on things. And do some optimizations. Have you looked at PurgeCSS at all?
Starr:
No, I haven't, but I really like the name, so tell me what that is.
Josh:
It does what it says. Basically, it removes... So, it analyzes, once you build, if you have your HTML built already, or in the case of Jekyll if you're generating it. You build your HTML and your assets, like your CSS and stuff, then it analyzes all of your CSS usage. Then it purges the CSS that you're not using.
Josh:
Imagine if you're using Tailwind or Bootstrap or something, and you're importing the entire framework, right? Well, you're not necessarily using a lot of that framework, so you're having to download, everyone's downloading a bunch of useless CSS, basically. This removes the unwanted stuff.
Starr:
Is this something that is in webpack? How does it do that?
Josh:
It's a third party project, but they have a webpack plug-in. It just plugs in.
Starr:
Okay. So it's back-end code, though?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I thought for a second, because it has CSS in the name and a lot of times that means it's a CSS package, or whatever.
Josh:
Oh, yeah, no.
Starr:
Like Bootstrap, so I was like, "How is this doing?"
Josh:
This is a build tool.
Starr:
"What have they added to CSS since I last boned up on it?" I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah, it's a build. It's a build tool. Disclaimer, I'm new. I'm just starting to play with this, so if I butchered the description or something, I'm sorry. But as far as I know, that's what it does. It's pretty cool. It reduced... I forget, my CSS, the bundle wasn't huge to begin with, but I think it reduced it from six or 7k three to four. If you are importing something like a large CSS framework, I imagine that's a big savings.
Starr:
I have to ask, how does it know which CSS tags are being used and which ones aren't? Does it have to be used with a static site generator and it goes through all the generated pages, or how does it do it?
Josh:
I don't know for sure how it works on the backend or how it's implemented. From what I can tell, it actually... I think it actually needs to have your HTML wherever it is. I think it could technically analyze your views, or if you have a source, your source HTML or templates or something. I think it can work off of that? What I'm doing, because Jekyll, it's generating all of the HTML for markdown, I just pointed it at the site generate directory, the destination directory. Then it just analyzes the entire build after the webpack and Jekyll do their thing.
Starr:
That makes sense.
Josh:
It just works from the production build. I don't know, it seems to work. Everything looks like it did before adding it, and the bundle is a lot smaller, so.
Ben:
I got introduced to that this week, as well. I started playing with Tailwind for the first time, in depth.
Josh:
Yeah, they use Purge.
Ben:
Yep, as part of the default.
Starr:
Would you mind giving a little overview of Tailwind?
Ben:
Tailwind is a pretty neat CSS framework. It takes a different approach to say something like Bootstrap. Where Bootstrap would, say, give you different classes like card, or table, or things that apply a bunch of styles to give you a certain look, Tailwind is, I guess, one way you could say it is a bit lower level? In that you define those kinds of looks that you want on the actual elements themselves. Instead of a card class, you can say, "Oh, I want this to be rounded," so there's a rounded kind of class.
Ben:
There's a whole bunch of selectors, as you might imagine, because of all the thing that you can look. Tech center, things like that. It's really neat. You know, I've been using Bootstrap forever, and it's nice to... Tailwind is kind of a breath of fresh air, because as a developer, I'm not hip to all of the design stuff all the time. I was always just digging into the Bootstrap reference. Like, oh, what was that card thing again? Do I have to have a card title and a card body? I just never memorized all those special class names I was supposed to use.
Ben:
Tailwind, I don't have to remember stuff. It's like, oh, do I want margin? Okay, it's MY-2, and now I get two elements of spacing in the Y direction. That's just easier for me to remember, so I can do automx and things like that, and it's great.
Starr:
Oh, that's great.
Starr:
There's two ways of viewing a CSS framework, which one is to do components and stuff. It's kind of what bootstrap does, and the other is to do a utility type framework, which is what Tailwind does. I personally haven't used Tailwind, but I've used the utility approach just with my own sort of cobbled together utility stuff, and I actually kind of really like that. That's how the last time I rebuilt our sales site, that's how I did it, and I really enjoyed doing it that way just because you can read the HTML and tell what it does as opposed to... It's like, okay, I know this has a class of new hero five, and it's like, "What the hell does that mean?" Okay, now I've got to go search all the CSS files for that.
Starr:
It's impossible. The only way to tell what style is actually going to be applied to that thing, at least as far as I'm concerned, is to go in and inspect it in the browser and see all the inheritance because it's just the way there's no structure to CSS inheritance, who really knows? Who really knows?
Ben:
That's been fun. Been a nice change of pace.
Josh:
Yeah, that's cool.
Starr:
Didn't you use Tailwind for some side project recently?
Ben:
Yep, that's what I've been doing in my spare time this week. When I'm not trying to bail myself out from the water leakage.
Josh:
Or the compliance.
Ben:
Or the compliance stuff, yeah.
Starr:
Or the compliance.
Josh:
It's like you're dealing with insurance claims and compliance process simultaneously.
Ben:
I might as well just go to law school at night and do the trifecta, right?
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. Maybe someone can sue you.
Ben:
The good news on the compliance is, I had a meeting yesterday with a auditor, the first of the meetings where they reviewed our evidence of all the things that we say we're doing. The meeting went super well. Most of the things that we covered, like we had just done, and basically just checking off boxes. There are a few things they got back to me about, like, "You should look at this, and we need more evidence here." Overall, I was just ecstatic yesterday after getting off that call. All the work that I had been doing over the past several months actually seems to be close to paying off, so I'm pretty excited.
Josh:
We really do need to throw a party when all this is wrapped up. This is a major, major effort that we've been talking about for pretty much the life of the company, I think.
Starr:
I know. We just need to throw Ben a party.
Josh:
It went from we could never do that to, "Well, maybe we'll do that," and then Ben's just working on it. Yeah.
Ben:
You know, all throughout this process, as I've talked to people who actually know what they're doing, much more than I do, I would ask, "Well, do you see companies our size doing this? Do you have experience with that?" They're like, "Yeah, that's not too common, but sure, you know." I always just came away from those conversations like, "Well, I guess we could do it." Sitting down with this auditor person yesterday, he said, "Well, you are the smallest company I've ever worked with. Yeah, we're going to have to change some things about how we usually do this," because we don't have a board of directors, and things like that.
Ben:
So, pro tip for all those small companies like us out there. You do have to find an auditor who's able to be a little flexible in their work, because you might be the first time they encounter something. Like for example, CI/CD. Person I was working with, he's like, "Yeah, I know what that is, but a lot of my peers don't." One of the requirements is that you have a separate development versus production environment, and that you have a log and a control over what goes into production.
Ben:
So when you say, "Oh, well, we have CI/CD. We have continuous integration, continuous deployment, and it runs the tests and it push the code to production for us automatically," they scratch their heads a little bit and they're like, "Oh. So you don't have a process or a person that's the gatekeeper for production?" It's like, "Nope." So they're like, "Well, then, hmm. We're going to have to come up with something."
Josh:
We had a person write the rules for that.
Starr:
I mean it's a process, it's just not a person doing it, right?
Josh:
Right, right.
Ben:
So there's things like that that's like, "Oh, okay, it's a learning experience for everyone."
Josh:
Hmm, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I think I need to write some sort of mega blog post or maybe miniature ebook about if you're a tiny tech company, here's what you can expect when you're about to walk into the compliance world.
Josh:
Seriously, you should.
Starr:
Oh, you should.
Josh:
Okay, we should-
Starr:
You could sell that, even.
Josh:
We should do a pay, like an ebook. That would be totally... Just put it on Gumroad as a downloadable. Seriously, you could even just do a screen cast with a brain dump for an hour and a half or something.
Ben:
That would be more than an hour and a half. But, yeah, that would be cool, maybe, I should do that.
Josh:
A seven part, seven session.
Ben:
A mini-series on Lifetime TV.
Starr:
I had fun the other day, though, when you were like, could y'all help me think of threats to the business and things. You're asking me to think of things that could go wrong? I was born for this. This is my jam. I'm great at thinking about things that could go wrong.
Josh:
I still need to do that. Spend a little time thinking about worst case scenarios.
Starr:
Yeah, that's all right. Come on over to the dark side.
Ben:
That was one of three things that I didn't have ready in time for the call yesterday. That's the last of the work I need to do next week to be able to get this hurdle and get our type one report in process.
Josh:
Yay.
Starr:
What's the upshot of all of this? What comes out of it? What will we be able to offer customers once we get this?
Ben:
Especially for publicly traded companies who might want to use us as a processor, they have to attest that they are managing all of the their data in a secure fashion. They have to go through the same process. Part of that process is you have to say, "Okay, for all of our key vendors that handle sensitive data, they also need to assert that they abide by these kinds of policies."
Ben:
If you're in that situation where you need to attest that, yes, your data is being treated securely by your vendors, then there's two ways that you can get that done. You can ask the vendor for their SOC 2 report; an auditor has given an opinion that, yes, they are following good policies.
Ben:
Or, you can ask that vendor to fill out a security questionnaire. Or I guess you could visit their office and make sure you could do a personal inspection. Typically, it's either going to be, you're going to ask that vendor for a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report. Or you're going to ask that vendor to fill out the security questionnaire.
Ben:
When you receive one of those, and we've received a few of those from our customers. It's painful, it's super painful, because they ask you, basically, all the same things that you would go through in a compliance thing. Your security posture, your privacy stuff. Just going through the process once and having an auditor give you their opinion that, yes, this company is being run well. Then you can just turn that over to customers who need that as part of their process to become compliant. Then it just saves everyone a whole bunch of time.
Starr:
I've got a question for you. It sounds like this whole... It sounds like compliance is GPL that went viral. If you want to be compliant, all your vendors that you use have to be compliant. But for them to be compliant, all their vendors need to be compliant. Would it be fair to say that by providing this to our customers, we're allowing our customers to service bigger customers that may require compliance reports?
Ben:
Yes, yep.
Starr:
All right. Yeah, we are opening entire new markets for our customers. It's time to raise prices.
Ben:
I will give you a for instance. As I was talking to the auditor yesterday, we were talking about our vendors, the vendors that Honeybadger uses. We use Amazon web services, so obviously they have a whole bunch of compliance stuff done, right? You can go and download their SOC 2 reports and that kind of stuff.
Ben:
You use other providers like Twilio for sending SMS. One of the vendors that we use that we do rely on for delivering our services to our customers, we don't have a report from them, yet. I do need to go to them and say, "Hey, I know you don't have a SOC 2 report because I've asked you for that in the past and you didn't have it, so please answer my security questionnaire." Now I'm on the other end.
Josh:
Now you're the one with the questionnaire, oh no.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
That must make you feel so powerful.
Ben:
No, it just makes me feel kind of frustrated. I don't want to spend my time doing this, but we do depend on them.
Josh:
Do you feel like a stooge?
Ben:
Yeah, exactly. I feel pretty bad about it, actually. Got to do it, you know? My auditor's going to be talking to me, be like, "How do you know that they're being secure with your stuff?" There you go.
Starr:
One thing to come out of this I'm really liking is whenever we have to do something that people don't like, and they're like, "Why are you doing this?" We're like, "Got to do it, the auditor says. Auditor says we got to do it, sorry."
Ben:
It's always helpful to have that third party somewhere nebulous behind the scenes that, "Oh, sorry, I can't help you, my hands are tied."
Starr:
Yeah. I wonder how far you could take that. I'm sorry, we can't rename errors to notifications in our tabs. The auditor won't let us.
Ben:
Parents do this all the time, right? The kid comes to Dad and says, "Hey, Dad, I want to blah." And Dad's like, "I'm not sure I want to say yes to this, but I kind of need some backup." So he says, "Go ask your mother." As the kid is heading towards mom, there's this kinetic or telekinetic communication happening, right? This dad is winking at the mom or whatever, or shrugging, or giving that... You know what I'm talking about. Giving that signal to say no. Then the parents talk about it later, right? And they decide what they're going to do and how they're going to handle the situation. But yeah, it's nice to have someone to blame it on.
Josh:
It's like an auto dealership trick.
Ben:
Yeah, totally. I've got to go back to my manager.
Josh:
I have to go check. I'll have to check with my manager.
Ben:
Right?
Josh:
Oh, sorry.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah. You could just give them, if they ask for something, just give them a compliance questionnaire. Say, "Fill this out."
Ben:
I can do that for you, but first you have to fill out this 60 question form.
Starr:
Before I can read your support ticket, I'm sorry, you're required to fill this out.
Ben:
Speaking of support tickets. We got a support request that came in this week, asking for a feature. The person was very nice about it, and said, "You know, this is a problem that I'm having. I can't find a place in your application where I can change this, did I miss it?" I really appreciated that approach, it was very non confrontational. There are nice ways to say things, and not so nice ways to say things. Unfortunately, we don't have the feature that this person wanted. Of course, they already knew that because they couldn't find it in the UI, and that's why they're asking.
Ben:
So I said, "Yeah, sorry, we don't have that." So they came back and said, "Could you add that? Even though I'm not a paying customer, I do send paying customers your way," smiley face. I grinned at that, and I thought, you know, we actually don't discriminate against our nonpaying customers when they send in support requests like that. We consider every feature request equally. We are very magnanimous about that sort of thing here at Honeybadger. But I thought it was very kind, very polite way to ask nicely for something. I think we'll have to turn around and build that just because he was so nice.
Starr:
Aw, I love it. That's heart warming. One thing that Josh and Ben Finley and I talked about on our marketing call yesterday was that a lot of times the nonpaying customers and the paying customers are the same people. I don't really have any evidence for this, but I've done it before. I've had free accounts in a service, then I'm like, "Hey, we should use this in our business," and then we have a paid account for it, too.
Starr:
We were talking about that in the context of how it might be useful to, instead of tailoring all of our messaging to free trials and student accounts, instead of tailoring that messaging to getting them to upgrade to a paid account, perhaps we should try tailoring that messaging to sell them on how they should bring Honeybadger into their other projects, you know? Why you should bring Honeybadger to your day job, if you're working on a side project, or whatever.
Josh:
Especially in the context of... We've been having a significant number of GitHub student sign up still, because we're part of the GitHub student pack. Those people, they might not have jobs yet, but they're learning, and we know they're going to have jobs soon. It's a perfect opportunity to make a good impression and hopefully suggest that they can bring Honeybadger with them as they embark on their new careers.
Starr:
Even if they do start some hot new startup or whatever, they're not going to use their GitHub student account for it, probably.
Josh:
Yeah, probably wouldn't happen.
Josh:
Do you want to switch gears a little bit and talk about work/life balance? There was this discussion recently, yesterday, that I was discussing with Justin Jackson and a few others on Twitter.
Starr:
I don't mind switching gears, I learned to drive on a manual.
Josh:
I spoke a little bit for the three of us, so I thought it might be good to get your takes on our early starting years. The discussion was about how much time it requires to start a new company or a new business. I think we were kind of talking more about software as a service business, in particular. But there's this tweet that went around that was talking about basically you can start a small, medium, or large. You can start an Uber-sized business, and each of those businesses are going to take all of your time. The point was, so start the big one.
Josh:
The example was you're all going to have to work 100 hours a week on all of these to start them. Justin was like, "Hell no, you don't need to work 100 hours a week on anything."
Starr:
Oh, no, that's what we did wrong. Okay.
Josh:
So yeah, he started this discussion about there's a lot of small businesses out there that are starting on much less time than 100 or even 50 hours a week, say. I was thinking back, and what I recall, I recall working... Because I was working a full time 9:00 to 5:00, eight hours a day on my freelance business. So I'd work usually a few hours in the morning, and maybe a few hours in the evening or over the weekend or something on Honeybadger. I think it totaled an extra 10 to 20 hours initially, I would guess.
Josh:
I guess we might even have time sheets somewhere, because I think we were logging our time, eventually. Does that sound about right? So what I said was total, including a 40 hour week day job, I was working probably 50 to 60 hour weeks just for the initial period while we built up our revenue to the point where we could start shifting from our jobs in freelance income, to Honeybadger, at which point we didn't continue that extra work. We basically worked less over time as we replaced our income.
Ben:
I think that's true in the large... I think since I was responsible for the ops stuff, I think my time commitment was a little higher in those early days. Even after we transitioned to full-time, I think I was spending probably more than 40 hours a week on stuff.
Josh:
Combined, or on?
Ben:
Early on, I agree, 10-ish hours a week, when we still had full-time jobs. Then we transitioned to... Starr and I transitioned to doing freelancing for a while, between the full-time job and being full-time on Honeybadger. That was a ramp, I guess. Over time, i just built up my Honeybadger time and decreased my freelancing time as the revenue allowed it. But then once Honeybadger was full-time, I think even still then, for quite a while, I was, I would say, 50 to 60 hour weeks, because I was dealing with stuff after hours that I didn't choose to deal with, I had to deal with.
Josh:
I wasn't really thinking about the point of after the transition was over. But I still get the feeling I, in general... I don't know. I also made the point that it's a little bit hard to separate between these things, because I often code for fun, and back then, and even still, Honeybadger, it was a side project then, it's not a side project now, but there's lots of projects that I enjoy working on. A lot of times I'll find myself hacking, but it's hard to say, is this work, or is this just my hobby?
Ben:
I think Ian Landsman made that point in one of his speech. He was like, "Yeah, but you're forgetting about if you're reading about the thing, and you're studying about how to do whatever, that's work." To your point, for me-
Josh:
Talking about it on Twitter for hours into the evening.
Ben:
For me, that stuff is fun. It's not just work, it's also a hobby. So yeah, I can easily spend a lot of time doing what someone would call work because I think it's fun.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. Also, I think it was good that we were able to use the product. I said we were the first customers of Honeybadger, and we built it for ourselves. We were using it during our day jobs because that's where we needed it. Even as we were working, we were using it as a tool for our clients or employers or whatever. That helped us iterate faster. I'm sure there were times when we were able to go and improve a little thing, or fix a little bug or something in the process of doing our normal work, which helped.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. I think when I had my day job and actually even I guess when freelancing afterwards, I would work evenings a lot more. I probably didn't really go over 60 hours too often. I think I was actually... We didn't really discuss this, but it just kind of worked out this way, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong. I think I may have been the first person to actually go full-time because I moved to Mexico. I didn't need a ton of money to live, and all that. And I didn't have kids at the time, and I wasn't married. I don't know. But it was only by a couple months. It wasn't a huge thing.
Josh:
Yeah, I think it depends on the sit... The discussion of whether you can you start a business on less than 100 hours a week, obviously.
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
Can you start it on less than 40? Yes, totally.
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
It all depends on the situation. You can't start every business, probably, with just one person working under 40, say 30 hours a week. You're not going to start Uber single-handedly working 30 hours a week.
Starr:
Or 100 hours a week.
Josh:
Or 100 hours a week, yeah, probably, to be honest. But there's a lot of businesses you could.
Starr:
Can I-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Can I just say that this whole premise, the whole tweet about, "You're going to be working 100 hours a week and you can do a small, medium, or large business, so you might as well do the large business," I'm sorry, that's just dumb.
Josh:
It's a pretty BS take. Yeah.
Starr:
That's just idiotic. First of all, there's so many differences. The lifestyle of have a small or medium sized business is quite different from the lifestyle of having an Uber sized business. There's a difference between are you trying to start a business to support yourself, your family, and your employees, versus are you trying to start a public company?
Josh:
Is your goal to ship yourself to the moon, eventually, or something like that? We all have different...
Starr:
I think the source of this, I think where this stupidity is coming from, is the source of a lot of stupidity, especially online, which is everybody assumes everybody else has the same values and experiences and goals as they do. That, if they are not achieving those, it must be some sort of failure, or it must be just dumb. It seems like half the internet now is people taking things out of context. I don't know, maybe I'm taking this tweet out of context because I haven't even seen it. .
Ben:
One thing I'll add here, it was not a tweet, it was actually someone talking to me back in the olden days when we talked face-to-face with people.
Josh:
What?
Ben:
Yeah. He made an interesting point that stuck with me since then, he said, "You really only have so many years." Right? You only get so many businesses you get to build. You should thinking about that when you're thinking about what kind of business you want to build next. We were talking about big versus small. Of course it's down to personal preference, and that's exactly the point. You only get so many times to go out there and try this, right? You might build three, or four, or five businesses in your lifetime. Choose what's going to make you happy. Not just the final destination that you think will make you happy, but also the process, the journey, right? That old phrase about it's the journey, not the destination. You only get a few decisions like this in your lifetime, might as well make the most out of each one of them, regardless of whatever your personal goals are. Just decide and be deliberate about that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I think that's a good way of looking at it. The whole journey before destination thing. Yes, I'm referencing the Kingkiller Chronicles, which I know you love that.
Ben:
I do, I do.
Starr:
That makes sense for another reason, too. You might not get to your destination. If your destination is a billion dollar startup, chances are good you're not going to get there. If you're miserable the whole time and then you get there, that just sucks, right?
Josh:
Totally.
Starr:
Why would you want to do that?
Josh:
Yeah. Going back to how everything depends on the situation, thinking back. If you're in your 20s, no kids. When we started Honeybadger, I was just recently married. I think I had been married for a couple years. It was just us, had a house and stuff. But we renting at that point. Even working 50 hour weeks, just think of all the free time. Just think of all the free time we had working 50 hour weeks. It's very relative. Now it's barely work a 30 hour week and still... Yeah.
Starr:
That's a good point.
Josh:
I don't have a problem with you have the time, you're young, and if you like to do the work, I'm not going to rain on anyone's parade of wanting to work a little over 40 hours. There's no set in stone, you have to work over 40 hours or you're a terrible person or something.
Starr:
Oh, that's true, it depends on the person.
Josh:
What are you doing with the rest of your time? Does anyone ever talk about that?
Starr:
I'm building out my Animal Crossing island.
Starr:
Yeah, it's funny, it's in pandemic, and being home so much and everything, it's getting less done, being able to work less hours. Although the amount of work I do in a day, not work work, but the amount of labor I do in a day has probably doubled. Everybody has their own situation. The thing is, everybody can... I'm not going to say it's possible in every situation, because some people definitely are in really rough situations. But it's possible to start a business in a variety of situations in terms of work, in terms of the amount of time that you can put in. And it really depends on a lot of factors other than that I think.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Agreed.
Starr:
Well we're at time. I feel like this is a pretty positive message to leave people with especially since we live in the worst possible timeline. I'm feeling good about this are you all feeling good about this?
Ben:
FounderQuest is all about bringing you the calm, peaceful, reassuring thoughts that you need in times of crisis, pandemic, and world turmoil.
Starr:
That's true and aren't we so privileged to be able to have those thoughts and not be thrown in the middle of the fire ourselves right now. I think about that everyday.
Josh:
For real.
Starr:
Alright so if you have enjoyed this show dear listener please go to Apple Podcasts and review us and if you do want to write for us we do hire people to do blog posts about Ruby, Elixir, you know, cool stuff, go to our blog at www.honeybadger.io/blog and there's a link right that that says "write for us" so go check that out.
Starr:
One side benefit, I haven't said this before, but if you do want to write for us you get to have a one-on-one call with me cause I gotta check you out, I gotta make sure you're for real
Ben:
What more could you ask for?
Josh:
We should be charging them.
Starr:
I know why are we even paying people?
Show notes:
Links:
Build Your SaaS by Justin Jackson
Basecamp Hill Charts
Scrooge McDuck
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Darkpatterns.org
Honeybadger.io
Full Transcription:
Starr:
So, how have you all been doing this week? I've been on vacation.
Ben:
This week has been an interesting week in the Curtis household, we discovered a water leak in our house, in the bathroom.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh. So when you say interesting, you're using it in the sort of like British way?
Ben:
Exactly.
Starr:
You mean like terrible.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Because, yeah, when you're in the middle of a pandemic-induced lockdown, the thing you really want is a water leak.
Ben:
Exactly. Yes. So, that has turned into quite the adventure, again in the British way. Yeah, plumber came, found the leak. It was a pipe in the wall. So, pro-tip, don't put pipes in your walls. So, yeah. Then, the mitigation crew came and demolished a good chunk of the bathrooms because actually this wall is the separation between two bathrooms in my house. So, two bathrooms were affected, not just one. So, it's...
Josh:
Ouch.
Ben:
It's been a week that's for sure, and it's not over yet.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry. You have any bathrooms left?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
Oh no. I was thinking all I have is two bathrooms too, so...
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. It's been... We got four people, two bathrooms... Well, kind of two bathrooms now. It's been interesting.
Josh:
And yeah. You said it's not going to be repaired until what June?
Ben:
Well, yeah. So, the mitigation guy was telling us that, "Yeah, we can do the demolition, and we can get you basically to a point where everything is safe. We'll put some sheeting on the walls where the holes are and things like that. But, we can't actually restore your bathrooms because we're under the lockdown right now with COVID." So...
Josh:
They can only do the essential part.
Ben:
Exactly, only the essential parts, not the cosmetic parts, which would be having an attached wall, right?
Ben:
So maybe I'll send a letter to the governor. I'll make a petition. Please, can I have a contractor come to my house and you know. If worse comes to worse.
Josh:
Are you going to be out with the demonstrators?
Ben:
I can just do it myself.
Josh:
Out with the demonstrators in Olympia? You got a big toilet-shaped picket sign or whatever?
Ben:
A plunger, yeah.
Starr:
I need my vanity!
Ben:
But, I'm happy to say that everyone that has come to my house has worn protective clothing, has had a mask on, and of course, we have masks on too because we don't want them to think that we're trying to get them sick, so. But, yeah, that's been nice calling them and saying, "Will you please be wearing a mask?" And "Oh, of course that's what we're doing these days." So, that's nice.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah, it's still kind of hit and miss on the masks around here. A lot of people are on it, and then there's a good number of people who aren't.
Ben:
Yeah, it just makes sense to me. I don't know, in a common sense kind of way. If you have something in front of your face that will trap droplets, that will help other people from getting sick in case you're sick. So, yeah, that's just a good idea. Let's do that.
Starr:
It's just what the deep state wants you to think then? You all are just sheep. You're sheep. I bet you even going for that 5G service on your phones... Okay, I'm not going to...
Ben:
Speaking of that, did you read the news about AT&T and the 5G this week?
Starr:
No, I didn't. I didn't. So, just skipping it and going straight to 6G?
Ben:
Well, the FCC, I think it was the FCC. I guess it might've been the FTC. But, anyway, one of the great federal organizations that we have came down on AT&T for advertising the 5G thing because it's not actually 5G. So, you can't actually tell people that it's 5G, slap on the wrist kind of stuff.
Josh:
I feel like they've gotten in trouble for that before with LTE and 4G.
Ben:
The funny part is AT&T is like okay, we'll take down the advertisements that say 5G. But, we're going to still show it on the phone. So, it's like okay, thanks AT&T. That's great, so... We won't lie to you on the billboard. We'll just lie to you on your phone.
Josh:
Yeah, but you've already bought the phone by that point. So, it's not false advertising.
Ben:
That's right, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, that's some universe-level thinking there, Josh.
Starr:
Well, so today I think we're going to talk about... Speaking about AT&T... Because when I was on AT&T, they always just raised prices on me. And so, we're talking about pricing. But, we're not raising prices on people. So, maybe I shouldn't have drawn that comparison. We're actually nothing like AT&T or-
Josh:
I thought you were going to talk about unlimited plans.
Starr:
Unlimited, yeah.
Ben:
Oh, yeah. Unlimited with an asterix.
Starr:
But, I'm out of the loop. I've been on vacation this week, which means that a time of COVID, when I am locked down with my family and I'm watching the kid half the time, that means I get to take an extra-long walk in the morning. That's my vacation. So, yeah, so I really don't know what's going on with pricing. Have we launched it yet? What's the deal? What're we doing?
Josh:
It's live.
Starr:
It's live? Oh my gosh.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I got to go look at it.
Ben:
Launched it this week.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, go check it out.
Starr:
Okay, oh this is going to be... It's like an unboxing video.
Josh:
It's the reveal.
Ben:
It's the reveal.
Starr:
Look at that. It's amazing. Oh my gosh. Oh look at that. You click on things and it updates the price live. That's some real nice JavaScript there doing that, or it could be CSS. I don't know because I've been on vacation.
Josh:
It's mostly CSS.
Josh:
It's a smattering of both.
Ben:
So, this is really Josh's initiative.
Josh:
We talked about it. This came out of our quarterly, our first remote quarterly conclave that we talked about a while back. And I think the reason that we initially... that we started talking about this was because of COVID and talking about steps we could take to help our customers out, help potentially stem the tide of either people not signing up or increased churn and that sort of thing. As it turns out, I think we're doing a lot better than we thought. We were kind of worried there for a little bit for that first month or so. I think everyone was, but for us anyway, it seems like things have kind of evened out and not a whole lot has changed in the revenue conversion department.
Ben:
I got to say I'm still worried because that's what I do.
Josh:
Yeah, right because we're not resting easily, but...
Ben:
But yes. We're definitely feeling better than we were a couple of months ago when things were just heading in a downward direction, right?
Starr:
Yeah, I'm feeling better, but I'm actually also kind of feeling worse because I don't know what's going on. Everything's terrible. The stock market's doing great though. And yeah, and our metrics are doing fine in our business. And I just don't understand how that's possible. And so part of me is just like there's another shoe that's going to drop. The other shoe is going to drop.
Josh:
Well, I don't know. For me, there's an element of that all the time. You don't ever know exactly why things are happening, especially with economics and stuff. It's pretty wild. Who knows what's causing what.
Starr:
We're getting into bit coin levels of not understanding that... Usually, I'm kind of like well, okay so the stock market... My company's doing pretty good. The stock market's up. Maybe the valuations are ahead of... They're a little bit high because people are being really... betting the future's going to be great. But, then we've gotten to the future. The future has happened, and it wasn't great. And so, things are still the same, so...
Josh:
It's great for some sectors though. It's still not great for others. The entire market is not up.
Ben:
On that note though, going from a macro-level there down to the micro-level, I have a question for you two because I was listening to Justin Jackson's podcast, I guess it was last week I want to say. He was talking about how he still some days, he thinks oh, this could all go to zero. I could wake up tomorrow, and Transistor.fm could be no more, right. The revenue could be zero, and I'm looking for a job. And I was thinking about that. I remember having that thought quite a lot. But, then I thought I haven't had that thought lately. And I think I've moved past that point where I actually am afraid that HoneyBadger would go to zero. So, I wanted to ask the two of you, have you thought about that recently? When's the last time you thought... you were really worried. You wake up in the morning and you're like oh, this could all end tomorrow.
Josh:
Yeah, I haven't worried about that in a while. I'm fairly certain that if things did go to zero, it would take us 10 years or more. So, it would be a very... I don't know. I think that would give us plenty of time to prepare for zero. I'm not worried about a sudden, Oh, no everyone's gone.
Ben:
Right,
Starr:
The rapture happened.
Josh:
The customer.
Starr:
I guess we'll get to see if our customers were good or bad.
Josh:
I mean that's part of it. And that's the thing, we do lose customers through churn and we replace customers. And the fact that we still replace customers mean that there's still people out there who like us enough to buy Honeybadger and that means we have a brand and something that people know. And that just doesn't go away overnight. You don't lose your brand, I mean unless... You could destroy your reputation. I don't think any of us are planning on doing anything to destroy our reputations overnight though. If that happens, we have other problems, so.
Starr:
I'll let you know when I get back from my big game hunting trip.
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
To Africa.
Josh:
Yeah, you go... So, yeah, outside of some major reputation incident, I think that we have something that people... that just doesn't disappear.
Starr:
I don't worry about it just dropping to zero. I think Josh, you're right in that if there is a decline, it's going to be sort of a slow steady decline. The thing that I'm worried about now isn't... It's not the sort of thing where it's a business-ending event. I see the congressional budget office or whatever was predicting the gross domestic product was going to be down something like 30% or 40% this year. And I was just like, "That's got to come back and affect us at some point." That's got to affect our customers and that's got to put some people... I don't want to jinx our customers. So, I'm not going to go there. But, it just seems improbable that we're going to get away scot-free in this scenario.
Ben:
I'm knocking on wood over here. So far, so good.
Starr:
Yeah, so I mean if that happens, I wouldn't expect it to go to zero because there's still going to be companies out there. But, the the thing I am more concerned about is just kind of a... I don't know, an environment which makes it... I don't know, that sort of puts us into that gradual decline. But, I don't think we're there yet.
Ben:
But, I remember... I guess back to the topic, I remember back in the early days... I guess it was within the first year or so that we launched, we decided you know what, we need to change the pricing. And we did. But, I think at that time, we were still like "Oh, this could all go to zero tomorrow." And we didn't have nearly as many customers and not nearly as much revenue, right. So, that was still a valid concern, I think. But, I think these days, we're a little more apt to do tests like that, to test pricing or do bigger experiments because I would feel a little more confident that whatever we do, it's probably not going to destroy an entire business within a month.
Josh:
Right, yeah and that was part of this change that I think allowed us to move a lot faster on it than like you said in the past because we did lower... We lowered and raised prices a little bit at the same time, added to the low end and increased prices on the high end, by just a little bit I think. But, my thought was we can always do... We can always change prices again. We could raise the prices next month, and every month after that, if we wanted to figure out where the point is where people will stop paying even then we could that. We kind of did that with our pricing before over time. We started out charging way too little, and then we progressively... I don't remember.
Starr:
How much did we charge?
Josh:
I don't remember what...
Starr:
I think our lowest plan was $9.00.
Ben:
Yep, $9.00 a month.
Josh:
Was it $9.00 a month?
Starr:
Yeah, $9.00. For people who care so much about their web applications are will to pay $9.00 a month to monitor them.
Josh:
Nine bucks. Yeah, and we had no idea what we were doing, which is why it was $9.00, I think. And over the next couple of years, we had several iterations of pricing where we probably didn't go high enough the first iteration. So, I'm all for gradual experimenting and gradually increasing the prices to see if we feel it's not quite right. In this case, we wanted to take the prices... We wanted to offer a lower priced plan again, specifically for businesses who might for whatever reason be struggling, or new businesses that are starting up that have more limited resources than before, we just wanted to make it more attractive and useful to those businesses. So, I think we've done that and yeah, in the future, we could raise them again. But, I think the thing that really helps with that for us is that we never change prices on our customers, our current customers. Current customers are always grand-fathered into old pricing or whatever the new term for that is that we're using for now. And so when you have that, we can change prices as much as we want. And it doesn't affect anyone, except new people signing up.
Josh:
So, that makes it a lot easier because if we were asking our current customers to upgrade to new pricing, we would never change pricing. I don't think we would ever do it.
Ben:
Yeah, I mean no one loves getting that flyer in the mail from Comcast that says, "Oh by the way, you're now charged $10.00 more per month. Have a nice day."
Starr:
So, we're talking about raising and lowering prices and stuff. But, the change that you guys just rolled out, it's a little bit different than that. Yeah, the price has actually varied a little bit. But, it's actually kind of an organizational change, right, because previously we had a list of four plans maybe. What was it, micro-small, medium, large or something?
Josh:
Small through extra large, yeah.
Starr:
Or small through extra large. We ditched micro at some point.
Josh:
Yeah, we ditched micro.
Starr:
Yeah, so and now we have essentially two main plans, team and business. And then each of those two plans has different traffic levels. So, different numbers of errors that they can send us per month. So, what was the impetus for going that route?
Josh:
I'm not going to take any kind of credit for this structural change because basically I just ripped off all our competitors because everyone else is doing this now too. And I can see why because it makes a lot of sense to me. It had been a while since I went and reviewed what the rest of the market was doing for pricing for tools like this. And like you said before, it was usually either some kind of mix of just a flat list of plans that you could choose or maybe just a straight-metered pricing, choose how much traffic you want to send, and there's just one plan. But with this, it's basically, there's two levels of pricing. And it's usually some combination for teams and for businesses. And so, I think it makes sense for us because we have two types of customers. One type of customer is a team within a business, a single team within a larger business. Or maybe it's a small... a team, an agency or something that just... 10 people or something. And they want to have error tracking just for their employees or whatever. That's a team, and I think that's one type of customer.
Josh:
And then the other type of customer is an entire company or business, a large business that uses HoneyBadger, in which case, they're going to want more of the user-management features. They want to have multiple teams, be able to control access for different groups of people and get more of the enterprise type features, SSO and all that other stuff that we offer. And so, this kind of splits those features on those two plans. And then people can choose how much traffic they want to send on either one. I don't know if that's... I rambled a little bit there, but do you get the gist of it?
Ben:
Yeah, that was great. I remember you saying that one of the things that made you want to change it this way after looking at our competitors was we know that people are shopping around when they're looking at services. And it makes sense for us to be directly comparable to our competitors.
Josh:
Well yeah, people are comparing... They're comparing us, and yeah it really helps if you can compare us to some... compare apples to apples, basically.
Starr:
So, you actually come out ahead in a lot of those comparisons, but we're making that harder by having plans that were hard to compare.
Josh:
Right, yeah. Yeah, for instance, a lot of people haven't even realized that we... A while back, we started offering a free plan again. And that's because we had added it, but it was kind of down on the page a little bit and you had to find it to know it existed. But, it's actually the best free plan. I think I'm safe to say it's the best free plan for an error tracker on the market. I don't know of anything that is more generous than our free plan, which yeah, so...
Ben:
Yeah, I think... This also reminds me of another bit that Justin mentioned in his podcast recently, talking about choosing a market and choosing your pricing and things like that. And the reality is that you're probably going to have competitors for your business. So, people are going to compare you. And you really can't go way too far outside the range of your competitor's pricing, right. You can't come in and say, "Oh, my competitors are priced around $20.00 a month. So, I'm going to bill mine at $200.00 because I'm awesome." Right. Unless you're super, super awesome and you're in a really different kind of category, it's really not going to work. People are going to be like, "No. I'm just going to go with the $20.00 option." So, I think it is if you're just starting something new and you're thinking well, I want to be making X per month and what does that look like and the number of customers I have to support, etc., etc., well you got to look at pricing there because people are going to compare your pricing to everybody that's already out there.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I liked about this change is how much we simplified our pricing tiers. Before we had... Like I said, whatever five plans or something, and each plan had a bunch of different features. Each plan kind of built on the plan before it. But, each of them also had a matrix of different things between them. So, each one had a different error rate that you could send. Each one had a different number of check-ins that you could create, and as well as uptime checks that you could create. So, it created this really complex matrix of things to think about when you're trying to choose which plan you wanted. And with this change, it's really just about the errors per month is what we are tiering on now, as well as the two, are you a team or are you a business? But, those two, team and business plans, for all the other things like check-ins and uptime, those are fixed numbers. Now everyone gets the same thing, basically, which I think makes a lot of sense for us because our primary... The thing people are really comparing us on still, I think is error tracking.
Josh:
I think you probably agree. So, the other stuff is really just... I don't know, it's all gravy.
Ben:
I know, as far as advertising goes, you just made a great point, how awesome we are compared to our competitors in pricing because not only is our pricing good just for the error monitoring, but you also get a time-monitoring, and check-in monitoring for free.
Josh:
Exactly, it's free.
Ben:
You should do this deal all day long, right?
Josh:
Yeah, it's free at least until we split them out into separate products or whatever.
Starr:
Can we make the new tagline for Honeybadger be Honeybadger, It's All Gravy.
Ben:
It's all gravy, yeah.
Ben:
I wonder if... Do honey badgers taste good with gravy?
Starr:
What? What?
Josh:
Didn't we... We could probably find out... I don't know. We'd be doing the world a favor it turns out
Starr:
That's cannibalism.
Josh:
... because honey badgers are destructive.
Ben:
That might be our business ending event if we go try and find out if honey badgers taste good with gravy.
Josh:
They're killing the bees.
Josh:
Didn't we talk about some sort of the extra... the special sauce, add the special sauce or something?
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
I just wanted to have that.
Ben:
Right. I really wanted that where instead of the team and business, we just had one thing, and then we had a button you could push, put on the extra badger sauce, and that would give you basically the business kind of stuff as well.
Josh:
Well, and I mean that's really... That would be kind of, basically a UI change. And the reason that I didn't do that... Because I mean I'm all... That's totally our style. The reason I didn't do that is because I wanted to actually get pricing launched this month. And I didn't want to go try to become a designer.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
To be honest, that would kind of hide the business plans behind, you'd have to click the thing to see them.
Ben:
Yeah, I like it the way it is.
Starr:
Yeah, I petition to rename team and business to mild and spicy.
Josh:
Mild and spicy, I like that, yeah. Are you mild or are you spicy? Yeah.
Ben:
Well, it's a good thing you made that call too because I delayed the price of launching for so long by working on so many yak-shaving things that it's good that we went with the plain language.
Starr:
I'm not sure that was you. I think that was just pricing delayed the launch, the pricing.
Ben:
Just blame Stripe. Stripe delayed the pricing.
Josh:
So, I was a little strategic in this project because this was... I don't remember if it was assigned to anyone on our quarterly action plan or whatever. But, I was like all right, I'm going to do this. We'll get this done first. We'll just do it quick, and then it'll be done, and we can have that checked off the list. And so I went and I actually did the UI work on our sales site and kind of figured out what the plan, the new tier should be and got it already basically to go live for people to purchase it. However, there's a second part to the project which is doing all the back end stuff to prepare the plans for people to actually get assigned to them in our Rails application. And so, for that, I went over to Ben, and I was like, "Hey Ben, do you mind handling the back end side of this while I'm working on the front end?" And lucky for me, it turned out that the back end... It was the tip of the iceberg type thing. I was like, "Hey Ben, can you break up this little tiny iceberg?" And then he got in there, and it turned out to be this massive... I think a month later, we upgraded Stripe. And we have a new versioning system for our plans and all kinds of things you did.
Ben:
Yeah, a lot of refactoring went into that. That was one of those total developer, "Yeah, sure, that'll take two days." And it takes two months.
Josh:
In my defense, I had no idea that that was all under there. So, I wasn't literally trying to get you on the hook for all of this, but I do really appreciate you doing that because I think it would've taken me a lot longer than it took you, to be honest.
Ben:
Well, it turned out really well, and I'm really happy that I had the chance to go in there and do some of that stuff. We didn't really have to do that. We could've worked around it. We could've launched the pricing faster. But, the engineer in me... it's like oh, we can make this nicer. We can make this better for future generations and so..
Josh:
We fixed a lot of things that were bugging us.
Ben:
Yeah, I know.
Starr:
Yeah, thinking of children, thinking of children,
Ben:
Paying that debt now.
Starr:
You mentioned that programmer thing where you're like, oh, this will take two days and it ends up taking a month. And that happens so much to me that I sort of got scared straight about that. Now, it's my tendency to say things will take a month, and then it takes me two days. And I'm really embarrassed because I was like, oh, okay, this wasn't as bad as I thought.
Josh:
Way overestimated.
Ben:
Yeah, well I love the... Totally unrelated, but I love the concept that Basecamp has with the hill charts, where there's this ramp up of uncertainty, where you have a decreasing uncertainty about what the project or the task involves. And then you get to the top of the hill, and you're like, yes, now I fully understand what needs to happen. And now it's just a matter of getting it done. I know the concepts, and I have a plan, and now I just need to execute a plan. And then you go down the other side of the hill as the task becomes towards completion, and so you can-
Starr:
A downward slope of merriment.
Ben:
Exactly. And I just like that idea because in every software project, you do have so many unknowns. And even if you think you know going into it, you get surprised along the way, and you're like oh, what about this? And I didn't think about that. And the uncertainty definitely is growing initially until it starts to contract and you finally figure out, oh yes now I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and it's already two weeks past the deadline.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that kind of keeps from starting a lot of projects these days, come to think of it. I'm just like, I know I'm not going to dive into this right now. I need to plan this out.
Ben:
My favorite contribution... I guess a very minor contribution to the pricing, what you can see on the home page is the subtitle under the enterprise plan because this is great. So, Josh put it together, and he showed it to us and he's like, "What do you think?" And it was just slightly unbalanced because the basic plan had this little free subtext, and the team and the business had their own little bits. But, the enterprise had their little bit underneath it. And so I'm like, you just got to put not free under there. And it's totally a joke, but you did it. And I think it's awesome.
Josh:
Yeah, I love that. It's a little... And it's great because it's enterprise, so that's where you're not supposed to be making jokes, right. You're supposed to be like, it's serious business, but not at Honeybadger. So, yeah, there's a price attached to enterprise, I assume then. Honestly, that's more your department anyway, but I don't think you're... Yeah, I didn't think you were giving it away for free.
Ben:
Yeah, I just didn't want to put call us on the page because everyone says, "Call us." Right. It's so boring. But, really it is call us.
Josh:
It's contact us.
Josh:
We should've just used the money bag emoji.
Starr:
Oh, there you go, just have a picture of Scrooge Mcduck on there.
Josh:
It's just like... yeah.
Starr:
Maybe just have an animated background of Scrooge Mcduck diving into his money bag.
Josh:
Yeah, so one thing I want to be sure to rant about on this podcast about pricing is the practice of displaying annual... defaulting annual pricing on your pricing page, but display in monthly units. So, as I was doing my research, it seems like most of our competitors do this. And then I went and looked. If you look around... Especially a lot of the... I don't know. It's kind of trendy, it seems right now, to use this practice where you basically... You go to a pricing page and it's like, oh cool that's $26.00 a month. That's reasonable. But, then you find out, oh well, that's if I pay a year's worth up front, and I don't even know what that is. So, I have to multiply 26 by 12 to figure out what I'm actually going to have to pay. Or I'm going to have to go find some toggle that says, show me the monthly prices, in which case, the price goes up. And I don't know about you all, but that's just shady to me. And yeah...
Ben:
I think it's officially called a dark pattern.
Josh:
It's a dark pattern, right, yeah.
Starr:
I find it mildly annoying. I never really thought it was shady, but...
Josh:
Yeah, I go back and forth on the dark pattern because that's I don't know. I agree. It's kind of... It's in between somewhere but it's definitely... It's shady to me.
Ben:
So, you think it's not necessarily 100% evil.
Josh:
I don't think it's 100% evil, but I think at the very least it's hostile to your user because you're forcing more work on your user. And it's a little bit of a trick, to be honest. I mean when you go to a website and it says $26.00 a month, and then you have to realize through searching on the page, that it's actually not $26.00 a month. How is that not tricking them?
Ben:
That reminds me when you see the price at the gas station, and it's $2.65 per gallon, and then in small letters, it's cash. But, the credit...
Josh:
It's the same, yeah, the same idea.
Ben:
The credit is $2.75. It's two cents more per gallon.
Josh:
Right. And it's not, yeah, like you said, it's not a total... I don't know if I'd call it a dark pattern, but it's a little sleazy-
Starr:
A dark pattern would be...
Josh:
And do we want to be a gas station. Is that what we're attaining to?
Starr:
It seems like a dark pattern... That seems a little more dramatic like when you delegate out a murder or something.
Josh:
Well, I think a dark pattern is...
Ben:
Dark.
Josh:
Yeah it's usually like an intentional trick. There's a web site. You can go look at the web site.
Starr:
I'm just being facetious now. I'm imagining... Was it the gang of four who did the patterns book, the original patterns book? You have the Gang of Four book, but it's all dark versions of all the dark design patterns.
Ben:
That'd be awesome.
Starr:
You have the hit man patterns, I don't know. Okay, I'm about to say stuff that I don't want to be on here saying, so I'm just going to... I mean there's...
Josh:
If you go to darkpatterns.org, and there's a-
Starr:
I'm not going there, Josh.
Josh:
It's a list of dark patterns that have been used.
Starr:
Do you know what happens when you look at that web site? It steals your soul.
Ben:
Or it steals your credit card number.
Josh:
Yeah, but to... Yeah, seriously though. It's a list of dark patterns, if you want to know what they are.
Starr:
I trust you. I trust you.
Josh:
I know this because I'd actually thought about this a little bit, and I came to the same conclusion. I don't really think it's a dark pattern, but I think it's just tricky... It's just tricking people. And it's not... If we're really all about our customers, we're not tricking them, and we're trying to make things easier for them. And for me, if I'm going to buy something, showing me the correct price so I don't have to do math in my head, that's a no-brainer. That makes my life easier. So, I think there's maybe one of our competitors that do it the same way that don't do this. But, I'm pretty happy that we are one of the ones that don't try to trick our users into annual pricing.
Starr:
Yeah, me too. I'm glad we're not growth hackers.
Josh:
Well, and so the other great thing about this is that... And that's, yeah, I'm a growth hacker.
Starr:
We're not the bad growth hacker. We're the white hat growth hackers.
Josh:
We're white hat growth hackers. So, back to the comparison thing, if you're comparing two pricing pages, I wanted our pricing to be comparable to our competitors', just general tiers. So,, people could look at the numbers and get a sense of what they should be comparing to. But, I also didn't want to... Because our competitors are displaying the annual pricing, the low plan is $26.00 but it's actually $29.00 or something when you switch to the actual monthly pricing. I was like, screw it. I'm just going to show... Our plan is just going to be $26.00 a month, but it's actually going to be $26.00 a month. So, we actually are cheaper. We're beating them. I don't know if people are actually going to notice this because, again it's hard to tell until you find that annual pricing button, or monthly pricing button. But, we actually are cheaper on an additional level now, so...
Starr:
We're not cheaper, Josh. We're a greater value.
Josh:
Yes, yes.
Starr:
Yeah, I'm glad that you went with this transparent approach. I feel good about it as much as I'm throwing bombs into your little explantation of it.
Josh:
Yeah, well. I'll die on that hill. It's sleazy.
Starr:
So, how is this working? How is it going? It's too early to know, right?
Ben:
It's hard to tell.
Starr:
Have you had any sign-ups yet with it?
Ben:
Yeah, we have.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Awesome.
Ben:
Yeah, the way that we test pricing is we put it out there, and if the revenue keeps going up, then we're happy.
Josh:
Yeah, we're not really...
Ben:
We're not supersophisticated about these kind of things. We don't do A/B testing on our pricing. And if goes out, if it goes out there for a while, and the revenue doesn't go up, well then, we just pull the plug on it, right. And we just go back to our previous generation.
Josh:
Or go to a new one, yeah.
Ben:
It's a little bit difficult with all the stuff going on in the economy. There's going to be some extraneous things affecting pricing, I imagine. But, the good news is we're patient. We don't insist on having the results within a month. We can wait a while, and we can see how it goes and... Yeah, there's nothing scarier than a patient honey badger.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That's a deadly combo right there, patience and a honey badger.
Josh:
The one thing we didn't mention is the new free plan. The other big change to the free plan, which I think was Ben's idea was that it went from user to three users, which I think that's the big COVID response thing we did, if anything, I think is like... Some other companies have created... I've seen people create a $1.00 plan or something, or done interesting pricing things to cut people a break or whatever. And we kind of just decided, let's just make our free plan good enough for... to get by if you need to. Or if you're small, and if you're a small team of three people or less, you can now use Honeybadger with the collaboration features. And I think it's 12,000 errors per month, which is enough for a lot of people. So, I'm pretty excited about that, and I think it's a really good value. I don't know how long it'll stick around so...
Starr:
Act now.
Josh:
If any of our listeners have been on the fence, yeah at least go grab your three-user...
Ben:
Basic plan.
Josh:
Basic plan because like I said, we really don't move people if we change it in the future, so it's a yours for life type deal.
Ben:
And we have yanked plans in the past. One of our tests was yanking micro back a few years ago, so...
Josh:
Are we calling it the free for life plan?
Starr:
So, yeah when we yank this bad boy, these things are going to be valuable in the secondary market.
Ben:
For real.
Josh:
They'll be on eBay. Yeah, you might... Yeah, go get two or three of them. Don't, but it's one per customer.
Starr:
Yeah, it's not toilet paper.
Ben:
Supplies are not currently limited, but you should still act now.
Josh:
People are now stockpiling the free plan, free SasS plans. That's good.
Starr:
Well, I think we're coming to the end of our time. Have we talked about pricing as much as we wanted to. Is there anything else you wanted to add?
Josh:
I just wanted to get that rant in. I'm good now.
Starr:
That's good. I'm glad you did, work out the stress.
Starr:
You have been listening to FounderQuest, and yeah, if you want to review us, please go do that on wherever. And if you want to write for us, go to our blog. There's a link at the top of the page. You go to Honeybadger.io, click on the links to our blog. Click on the link to write for us. And I'd love to hear from you. All right. So, yeah stay safe guys, and see you all next week.
Show Notes:
Links:Mike Perham
Full United Flight
Sidekiq
Faktory
Heya
Patrick McKenzie
Techstars
TinySeed
Roy/SAC
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Starr:
What's on your wall behind you? You've got like a autographed jersey like a hockey jersey.
Mike:
Yeah, I'm I'm a soccer fan.
Starr:
Oh, a soccer jersey. I'm sorry.
Mike:
It's the Portland Timbers. Yes.
Josh:
The timbers, yeah.
Mike:
And it's not looking good for us playing in 2020.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's looking good for anybody?
Mike:
Some people more than others. Yeah.
Josh:
I never... I thought it'd be cool to make it to one of those games I've never been. I've never been to any sporting event in Portland, even though like...
Mike:
Well, I'm a season ticket holder. So Josh, if you ever want to come on down and we can go to a game together, I'm in.
Josh:
That would be awesome.
Starr:
Oh my gosh, this is great. I'm glad we're recording this. This is like networking. This is like stuff happening. This is like deals happening.
Josh:
This is actually like, when people are like seeing each other going to events.
Mike:
When you invite guests onto your show magic happens.
Starr:
I know, right?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, Ben and I have been talking about snowboarding too someday. And Mike and I have been talking about snowboarding as well. So that's another networking opportunity. Maybe for next winter.
Mike:
Yeah, in fact, I had a pass to meadows and they said that they're closed down so you can't use the pass and so people were freaking out.
Josh:
Yeah, they didn't refund any anything, did they?
Mike:
They say that you can use your punches in the first three weeks of next season.
Josh:
First three weeks.
Mike:
Yeah.
Ben:
Sounds kind of bogus. I mean, that's like the-
Mike:
So if it doesn't snow, well, your out of luck.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It sounds a lot like the airlines policy to get a credit rather than a refund.
Josh:
By the way the season is starting three weeks early.
Ben:
Starting the season in July.
Mike:
It starts in August.
Ben:
That reminds me of a tweet that I saw this week. I think it was and someone was they tweeted picture of themselves on an airplane and the airplane was full.
Josh:
Oh, I saw that one.
Ben:
Three by three.
Josh:
Where they're in the middle seat or something or?
Ben:
I don't remember but. But they were on a United flight. And I'm thinking what do you expect? Like it's United of course you're going to have every seat full on a United flight. They're not going to care about Coronavirus.
Starr:
Okay, so I feel like I should do like a record scratch now. And we should stop and actually say to our loyal listeners, I'm sure you're thinking, well, what's going on? There seems to be like one more person. And that's because there is. We have a special guest today, Mike Perham. And if you don't know Mike, he is very well known in the open source community for such projects as Sidekiq and Faktory. Are there any other projects?
Mike:
That's about it.
Starr:
That's about it?
Mike:
I've only got so many hours in the day Starr.
Starr:
What's the matter? I thought you hustled, I thought you knew how to hustle.
Josh:
That you're a hustler.
Mike:
I'm getting old. In my old age. I'm getting old so I'm slowing down.
Starr:
I mean, that's fair.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
What is Sidekiq anyway, Mike?
Mike:
Sidekiq is the number one universal way of doing background jobs on Ruby. Except no competition.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
Nice.
Mike:
And Faktory is taking my background job knowledge and patterns and bringing it to every programming language. So you can use Faktory with JavaScript, with Python, PHP, Elixir, those sorts of languages.
Ben:
Yeah, naturally, we're big fans of Sidekiq here at Honeybadger, we use it quite a lot.
Josh:
Yes, Sidekiq since the beginning.
Mike:
Y'all were, yeah, one of my first pro customers along with TravisCI was also a very early pro customer. So thank you very much.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, so Mike is a... Mike knows a lot about making a living from open source. And so we're having him on to talk about that about little bootstrap life because he's a fellow bootstrapper. And, I don't know, we have palled around with Mike throughout the history of our company. And yes, we're just going to have an open discussion but vaguely generally centered around open source, bootstrappy stuff.
Josh:
And we're also just all losing our minds being stuck at home and it's nice to see another human face or three of them.
Mike:
Yeah, the listeners probably don't know, but I generally go up to Honeybadger HQ, well, in Vancouver, like once a quarter or so, I'll go out there and have lunch with you guys. So since we're about 20 miles apart, I'll generally go up there and say hi and hang out with the gang and have lunch together. But we had to cancel our last meeting because it happened right as the virus was picking up.
Josh:
Yeah, this was pre virus life.
Mike:
Right. So it's good to catch up remotely now.
Starr:
Mike I'm sure the question that all of our listeners are wanting to have answered is how do you manage to create an open source project that basically is a required piece of infrastructure for every Rails project, and then monetize that.
Mike:
Well, you start off by scratching your own itch, so to speak. And then it turns out, everybody in the Ruby world has that exact same itch.
Starr:
Okay. That's sounds easy I should do that.
Mike:
Well, I'm a big believer in eating your own dog food is the common expression. But you solve your own problem first. And if that problem and your solution deliver a lot of value, and you can productize it, then boom, all of a sudden, you've got something which could potentially have some income around it. And of course Heya is your guys's latest thing. But the opportunities there for people to solve their own problem, and if they think outside the box and want to make it more of a sustainable long term thing, they can build a business around it, and that's exactly what I did with Sidekiq when I started it.
Mike:
I said to myself, this is going to be popular if I do it well. And it's going to require a lot of my time to support people. And so I almost immediately started doing financial experiments around how can I make money off of this thing so that I can, money, I still believe money is the best way to incentivize people to do something. So if this is my full time job, then I'm going to do it and I'm going to support people.
Ben:
Can we just rewind just a little bit? Because I want to talk about that scratching your itch thing. I want you to talk about like because yours wasn't the first background job system that came out for the Ruby world, right? There was at the time there was Delayed Job and there was Resque, those I think were the popular ones at a time.
Ben:
So can you tell us about what prompted you to say, "You know what, I gotta build Sidekiq."
Mike:
Yeah. So I think the major thing that Sidekiq brought to bear in the Ruby world was multi threading. There was no piece of Ruby infrastructure before Sidekiq that was multi threaded. If you think back, you had Mongrel, you had Unicorn, you had Delay Job, you had Resque. All these things are single threaded processes. And so when I started Sidekiq, I wanted to get the memory benefits of running multi threaded.
Mike:
So instead of running 10 gigabyte processes, you could just run one, two gigabyte process and save all that RAM. And so the caveat here is, of course, your code needs to be thread safe. And when Sidekiq started, there were a fair number of gems and application code that was not thread safe. And so Sidekiq started from a place of, if you have a greenfield app, and you're just starting out, you can make your code thread safe, you can use Sidekiq, and it'll work a lot faster than the existing solutions.
Mike:
And so for the first six months to a year of Sidekiqs history, the Ruby community had to step up and fix those thread safety bugs in gems that were very popular, there was a number of thread safety bugs that I recall.
Josh:
I think like Rails Gem even, right?
Mike:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
I remember going through that even when we first started using Sidekiq, and some of the other like multi threaded Ruby servers and stuff, yeah.
Mike:
Yeah, I remember very well, a thread safety issue in Rails 3.2 which caused us to have to upgrade the point release from 3.2.2 to 3.2.5 or something like that, because Active Record had a thread safety issue.
Mike:
But yeah, since Rails 4 the thread safety of the entire ecosystem has been really good. And it's because of Sidekiq and Passenger and Puma bringing threads to everywhere. Almost every Gem these days is safe to use.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding like the real benefit that people got from switching to Sidekiq was that like in the old way of doing things like you mentioned, everything was single threaded, and that meant that you ended up, you would use up the RAM and your server a lot quicker than you would use up the CPU. So the RAM became this limiting factor. And so what you let people do is actually use the CPUs that they're already paying for.
Starr:
More and basically use a whole computer more efficiently and get more work done with your computers. Is that right?
Mike:
Yeah, I mean, it's a little more complex than that. But if you remember, a Ruby process can only use one core. So what it turns out is if you're single threaded, you may only be using 10% of that core. And so if you fire up four Ruby processes, you may be using all four cores, but you're only using 10% of each core. So by using threads, and multiple processes, you can both use all of one core, and then use all four, use 100% of all four of those cores.
Starr:
Okay.
Mike:
So you need to mix and match threads and processes too. Yeah.
Starr:
That makes sense. So, yeah, so the threads are useful for things where it's like, you might do a call to the database that has to wait or something. So then your other threads can be doing work while that one's waiting.
Mike:
Exactly. Yep, IO concurrency.
Ben:
The thing I like about how you got started is sometimes people say, they'll poopoo on the idea that you should rebuild something like, "Oh, you know, you don't have to reinvent that wheel, it's already been done. Just use what's out there."
Ben:
And I think that the thing that I like about what you've done is you saw a problem, and you could have said, "Well, it's fine. Like, I'll just deal." But instead, you're like, "No this is something that should be fixed. No, this is something that's wrong in the world, and I'm the one that can fix it." So I just like the taking the initiative and striking out and doing it.
Mike:
Yeah, I saw a dramatic inefficiency. And wherever you see dramatic inefficiency, there is possibility for you to charge money. Because if I can sell someone on $1,000 piece of software that will save them $10,000 a year, that's a no brainer. I mean, that thing sells itself. And that's exactly what Sidekiq brought to the table. Is by moving from Delay Job, or Resque to Sidekiq you could cut your cost by 10x.
Ben:
That's a compelling argument.
Josh:
Here's a question. In the beginning how much work did you put into Sidekiq before you realized this is financially viable, this is something that is going to be big, like widespread?
Mike:
I mean, almost immediately when I started Sidekiq, I had three dreams or goals for the project that I never articulated publicly. But my first goal was to make a million dollars off of the life of the project. My second goal was to get one of the big three Ruby companies as a customer. So you had GitHub, you had Basecamp and who was the third one? Maybe Shopify or New Relic? One of those two. But I think I have three of those four now as customers.
Josh:
I think it was, I think the third was Honeybadger if I recall.
Mike:
Let's put you in the Big Five. You're the fifth.
Josh:
All right, I'll take that. So you have three, you have two, you said two of those three as customers or?
Mike:
Three of those four.
Josh:
Three of those, nice, yeah.
Starr:
That makes me wonder does Sidekiq predate Honeybadger. I seem to remember like, didn't we use it from the beginning or did we use something else?
Mike:
I started Sidekiq in February 12.
Ben:
Ours started May of 12. So yeah, we started with Sidekiq.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Wasn't there some cue system that store the jobs in Postgres or something?
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
There's a number of job systems that use sorts of backing stores, but there's cue and cue classic.
Starr:
Yeah, like, didn't we use that in Honeybadger at some point?
Ben:
We did, yeah. At the very beginning, we used the I can't remember if it's cue, but yeah, it was definitely one of the Postgres based ones until we got to the point that couldn't keep up with our traffic.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
Yeah, I had done enough work with Delayed Job and Resque before that point that I knew I didn't want to deal with any one of those. So it was an easy choice.
Mike:
Yeah, and it took me about, I'd say 10 months, nine months before I launched the pro version.
Josh:
Okay.
Mike:
But I knew almost within a month or two of starting the project that I wanted to have some sort of commercial variance. That was my second financial experiment was I was selling licenses. Those weren't selling very well. So I said I'm going to maybe the open core model will do the trick.
Josh:
Sure, okay. Oh, that's interesting. So you did try selling licenses in the beginning before open sourcing? Is that correct?
Mike:
Yeah, I decided to... Because Sidekiq is LGPL, and I thought, "Oh, maybe there's some companies that want to avoid the new licenses. And so I sold a commercial license. But that kind of legalese doesn't sell very well. A developer doesn't care, and the developer is the one who's actually making the choice to upgrade because Sidekiq ultimately is developer tool.
Josh:
Yeah, and you want like a feature or something.
Mike:
Bingo.
Ben:
So the pro version is that the same license then? Or is that a custom commercial license?
Mike:
It comes with a commercial license as one of its features that it offers.
Ben:
Yeah. As you had bigger and bigger companies, as you've been doing this for a number of years now. Have you seen a difference in the licensing concern, like you said that developers don't care, they just want the features. But have you seen, as you've had bigger buyers come in, are they more interested in that aspect as well?
Mike:
Not per se. They never necessarily articulate that they're specifically buying due to the commercial license. But I do get a small subset of my customers that have a whole legal team that go over the commercial license with a fine tooth comb. And they usually highlight the same one or two issues every time.
Ben:
Yeah.
Mike:
And so yeah my mantra is, I'm willing to give you custom terms if you're willing to pay for them. And so like any feature, I just make the customer pay.
Ben:
Yeah, that's one of my favorite things that Patrick McKenzie goes on about is if someone wants something that you don't offer, and you're willing to offer it at some price point, well, then you say, "Okay, yeah, I can do that for you, and here's the price point in which I'm willing to do that." And it really works.
Mike:
Yeah, I mean custom license terms probably makes me five figures a year, which certainly keeps my lawyer fed and adds a little bit of lift to me. I mean, it's not a huge source of income, but it's nice.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I'm curious have we ever done that? I know we've offered it several times, but have we ever actually done it?
Ben:
Yes. Yep. We've had customers who have come to us and want a custom agreement. And that's when I take the conversation. And I'm like, "Sure, we can do a custom agreement, send it over, and then I'll let you know what the price will be." And yeah, we've had a few take us up on that.
Starr:
Oh, cool.
Mike:
Great minds think alike.
Ben:
Yeah, I remember, you know, back when I launched RailsKits back in the day, because that was what 2008, 2009 time period. A lot of people thought, "Well, you can't make money selling code because like developers don't buy things." And all you have to do is actually try to sell something and you'll find that quickly false, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It doesn't take much time to sell a developer something if you can show them that it does save them time, saves them effort, saves them resources, like you said.
Josh:
That's still something people say, like I've been hearing people say that there's been arguments on Twitter about that over the last couple years too. Like that's not going away.
Mike:
Oh, really.
Josh:
Like people don't think developers won't buy things. And it's like, we buy everything, we just don't buy dumb things.
Ben:
Maybe professional developers buy things.
Mike:
How much did that laptop cost them?
Josh:
Right.
Mike:
You know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
And there's that there's a certain set of people that are only developers or only engineers, and those are the people who say, "Yeah, I don't buy anything." Well, because they have the skills to build it. But there's also a huge set of entrepreneurs, who are also a little technical. And you'd be surprised at the number of these people that run their own small business and they write the code, and they're not great at it. Like they're not rock star developers, but they cobble it together and they have specific niche or vertical information or connections to where they make a living off of this business.
Mike:
I'm thinking specifically of one of my customers who has a business selling car fit information to people that sell parts on eBay. So like if you have an air hose, you use his service to determine which cars this air hose will fit on, so that you can put it in your eBay description.
Josh:
Well, that's wild.
Mike:
This may only cost a penny, but he scales it to millions of parts on eBay. And so he can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by selling a penny per posting or whatever and it'll give you car fit specs.
Mike:
It's one of these things where he just scrapes all this data. And I don't know that his business is more than him and maybe one or two other people. But he's been using Sidekiq Enterprise for years and he just emails me once or twice a year with a particular problem he may be having.
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
But the world is full of these entrepreneurs who could use professional tools which help them and provide additional features which then they don't have to cobble together and that's valuable to them.
Josh:
When you say Sidekiq and web scraping, I can just picture his error dashboard.
Mike:
He may be a Honeybadger customer, man.
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
I mean, anytime someone says, "What kind of error service should I be using?" I say, "Well, something like Honeybadger right?"
Ben:
Yeah, maybe we're getting one tenth of every one of those pennies that he's making.
Mike:
I really wish I had some referral code I could give people.
Ben:
We actually do have-
Josh:
We might have to get you one.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's like that scene in The Matrix where the guy's looking at all these green numbers scrolling on the screen, he's like, you just see some numbers I see like, brunette blonde. So it's like normal people might just see a bunch of errors, but Josh is like, "This guy's selling part fit information."
Josh:
Obviously. No, it doesn't go that direction. It's only like, you can tell me about the business, and then I can picture the errors that it's generating. I can't infer the business from the errors, it's just the errors from the business.
Mike:
Now, let me toss a question back to y'all. What were the discussions like when you were first starting Honeybadger around funding and which direction you wanted to go in terms of the business? With regards like bootstrapping versus VC versus taking investors, that sort of thing. Tell me, give me some insight into me some insight into those conversations.
Josh:
I was not there at the very beginning, but in the first couple of months, I think it was just the two of you talking about that stuff. But I don't recall us ever talking about going out and securing major funding. Did that discussion happen?
Ben:
That discussion did happen.
Josh:
Yeah?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Didn't we like think about applying to TechStars or something like that?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Oh, wait. I kind of vaguely remember that.
Ben:
Yeah. Starr and I definitely had some discussions around that at the beginning.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
And we were firmly, I think, part of our eventual decision, which spoiler alert was to not take any money and not do the incubator thing. But a big part of that came from being freelancers before we started Honeybadger. We were used to being in control, and doing our own thing, and not having a boss per se. And, frankly, when we thought about it, it's like, "Well, if you take someone's money, now they're calling the shots." They'll say that they're not but really I mean and maybe you have some, of course you have some opening to do what you want but within bounds that your investor sets. Because there's an expectation.
Ben:
Once they give you money now you have an obligation to try to return that money and then some, right? And so you basically have to do things that they think will help bring that money back. And so we just decided that that's not the business we want to be in. We want to do our own thing.
Josh:
I totally forgot about the TechStars thing but I remember that now and I remember like not being super stoked about it either because I think I was going to have to move to Seattle or something. Because it was in Seattle, right?
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Oh, that's right, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, I was in the Portland area and I was like, I don't want to like go to Seattle.
Ben:
Yeah, well that-
Josh:
I just want to start something from here.
Ben:
I had totally forgotten about the TechStar thing but that was actually a separate conversation from the do take money. Because the do take money thing came up first. And then the incubation thing came up later and within a few months, but I remember now, now that Starr has reminded me that we thought about it, because we could use the mentoring and we could use the resources. And we didn't really need the money per se. But sure, we'll take some money.
Ben:
But the thing that really convinced us not to do it, as I recall, was that we came to the conclusion that if you sign up for an incubator, what you're signing up for is the rest of the VC track, like the incubator will fund you and expect you to take on additional rounds of funding. And then you're basically on this path and you can't get off that path without the business going to zero, or hitting the home run or going home basically.
Ben:
So, and we thought you know what, that's not the path that we want to be on. So there's no point in even starting down that path.
Starr:
Yeah, like with that path there's really no option of just like making some money and like, having a business that grows and is nice. Yeah, and also just like, I don't know, Honeybadgers are just too... like you can't housebreak a Honeybadger right? Like they're feral. You can't do any of that.
Mike:
Staying on brand star, I love it.
Josh:
You probably would have been the odd ducks on the pitch. What do they call the pitch week or whatever?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I think it's interesting though, today, the calculus has changed a little bit. There's still that option, you can still do the incubation VC route, you can still do the bootstrap option where you do it all yourself, but now there's also a middle ground that didn't exist when we started. So now there's places like TinySeed, or Earnest Capital. I think there are a couple others that are more geared towards helping a boot strapper kind of founder or founders get started with a little bit of capital without the expectation that you're going to reach for the stars and that you have to have this 10x return. I think the more sustainable options.
Ben:
So if we had, would have had that option back then I think we would have seriously considered that because I think that's pretty attractive.
Mike:
Yeah, it almost makes you wonder why small business loans from banks aren't as big as they were in the past. I mean, why do investors and funds need to step up to do this kind of stuff? Why aren't banks just giving small loans for businesses to start in their area?
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
Maybe it's the rise of the nationwide bank everywhere, where small banks just aren't around as much anymore, and so they don't have as much skin in the local game, so to speak.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. And I think also because it's hard, at least 10 years ago was hard for an individual at a bank to wrap their brain around the idea of you build this online business, you have no assets, you have really no expectation of, there's no proforma that you can do that says, "Oh, yes, by year three, we'll be making this kind of money based on the comparables of like a hotdog stands," right?
Mike:
Good point. Yeah, there was kind of this shift and around the turn of the century, where businesses are starting to get more and more online. It's a whole wild west out here, I guess.
Ben:
Right.
Mike:
Which I mean, speaks to our businesses, right? I mean, our businesses are not anything like what my grandfather knew. So yeah, that's a good point, Ben.
Josh:
Yeah, I wonder like the bank loan or more traditional capital thing could come back around as that becomes more normalized, it becomes easier to prove like a market online versus... Because back then, you can't go walk around the neighborhood and get the demographics and stuff and give that to the bank. But these days, it's techniques are being developed for that sort of thing to prove markets.
Mike:
Yeah, I mean, the problem with an online business is by virtue of it being online, there is no locality to it, right?
Josh:
Right.
Mike:
You're not selling, you're not opening up a small dry goods store to sell to the 5000 people around you.
Josh:
There is no street traffic.
Mike:
Right, exactly.
Josh:
Or foot traffic or whatever.
Starr:
Yeah, and it's different because I imagine like in the '50s, which is when I imagine all this stuff happening, like a bank could be like, "Okay, you're gonna open a laundry mat. Okay, there's no laundry mats in this area. Okay, we're gonna open our book to the page for L. We're going to look up laundry mats and see all the facts and figures for how much they make. Here you go, here's some money." But now it's like winner take all. So it's like-
Mike:
Yeah, a little bit.
Starr:
"Oh, you're gonna start like your neighborhood Twitter. That's cool."
Mike:
Exactly.
Starr:
Like how do you...? I don't know, they're not replicable. Like every success is a success in its own weird way.
Ben:
Yeah. Well, speaking of uniqueness, so I have a question for you, Mike. That is you're a solo business, you're a solo owner, founder.
Mike:
Yes.
Josh:
Single threaded, if you will.
Ben:
You're single threaded. And I'm sure-
Starr:
That's a deep irony, that cuts deep.
Josh:
Not to cut Ben off too much, but the flip side of that is that you're also multi threaded and distributed in your open source model. So you have many hands helping you.
Ben:
That's true.
Mike:
That is true.
Josh:
Sorry, Ben, go ahead.
Ben:
Yeah, no worries. So-
Starr:
Is Mike the hypervisor then, like how does that work?
Mike:
I've lost the analogy.
Ben:
So my question, I'm sure you've had the conversation with some of your customers where they come to you and say, "Okay, but what happens if Mike gets hit by a bus?" Like, you're just one person what's our insurance policy?" So how do you have, what conversations do you have around that? Because I'm thinking in terms of like, if I'm thinking about starting something today, I might have to think about, "Okay, well then how do I answer that question to someone who comes to me and says, 'What are you going to do? You're the only person in the business?'"
Mike:
Yeah. So I've talked to my wife about this. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of what happens if a meteorite hits my house and destroys the entire family. But let's not get too bleak, all right. But yeah, I mean, continuity and sustainability long term is something that I've been thinking about more and more.
Mike:
I've told my wife to contact Evan Phoenix and some other luminaries in the Ruby community that would probably be well positioned to take over support and long term maintenance. So there's that. We've also discussed briefly, setting up maybe a Foundation, a nonprofit to run Sidekiq, if necessary like Ruby Together. In fact, that was another thing I suggested is she could possibly talk with the Ruby Together, folks about bringing Sidekiq under their umbrella also.
Mike:
So yeah, there's a couple options. Money makes everything more complex and a little more difficult. But yeah, I want to do the right thing for the community. And I certainly don't want to leave the community in lurch if I disappear. So that is something I'm thinking about and something I do need to work out.
Josh:
Yeah. It's interesting, it's a little different, like when you have an open source project versus like a software as a service or closed source business. Because like there is a community around it and a lot of the source code is already out there. The people are working on and maintaining. So it seems in that sense, like it's a little bit better of a model for like a solo person to be pursuing. At least-
Mike:
And I try to keep my business as open as possible. I try to do as much support through GitHub issues so that there is a search history and people can go through and look for solutions for issues that they may also be having. I hate private email support, just because it locks away information into my inbox and another person's inbox.
Josh:
One you probably get more emails then too because people can't just go search for the answer.
Mike:
Yeah, and if I disappear for a day, I'm on vacation and away from my phone or computer, if someone opens an issue, then another community member could possibly answer the question or give them advice. So yeah, I try to direct people to Github so that if they want to guarantee a response as fast as possible, that's still the best option.
Josh:
Do you put the link to your GitHub wiki and your autoresponder, your vacation autoresponder?
Mike:
You'd be surprised at the number of responses that I give that are just links to wiki, areas of the wiki. "Have you read this paragraph?" Because it answers your question precisely.
Josh:
Yeah, us too. We've talked about that, it's like just, yeah.
Mike:
I try to be kind about it, but yeah,
Starr:
I'm never sure like am I being rude, how much fluff do I need to put around this to make it polite?
Mike:
Yeah. And that's a common sentiment for myself, too, is I don't want to be too... I mean, what glib? Is that the right word?
Ben:
Yeah.
Mike:
I don't want to be too offhand and hint that maybe RTFM is the correct response here.
Mike:
Yeah, I mean, I've had customers that just emailed me over and over and over questions that are literally answered in the wiki, and I keep sending them wiki links hoping that they will get the hint, "Hey, take 20 minutes to read through the wiki. And it'll solve you two hours of writing emails back and forth."
Josh:
Yeah, that's something I'm constantly thinking about and working on at Honeybadger is like how you make that information more discoverable to people or because no one, like all best intentions, very few people are going to sit down and actually just read through your documentation. They hit it in different ways. And it's like figuring out where those entry points are, and the best presentation for it because no one wants to read like a wall of text or something.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, I do admit that I'm a fan of the wall of text, but I'm also a fan of examples. So like, too many people try to explain how something works rather than actually giving you examples of sample code, and that sort of thing, and there's always places where Sidekiq's documentation can be improved. But I also take pride in the fact that the wiki is pretty good. And there are examples everywhere so people understand the types of things you can do with the various API's.
Josh:
Yeah, I like providing a lot of deep information too. Lately, I've been trying to figure out how do you like... because I think you can, there's a way to start with the simple information that most people want.
Josh:
And also if you're new to something you don't want to deep dive into the internal threading, how threading works in Sidekiq or something. But I think for the people like us, for instance, who have been using Sidekiq for eight years and also like, maintain integrations with it, that's super useful if the creator has written a document specifically for an integrator, for instance, that goes through all of those deep internals and explains them.
Mike:
Yeah.
Josh:
So I think progressively getting more advanced as people get into the product or whatever?
Mike:
I mean, at some point, it's a losing proposition, and you're just better off diving into the code, frankly.
Josh:
Sure.
Mike:
If you really want to know what this API can do, and how it works, oftentimes diving into the code is faster and more reliable. Because Wiki pages and documentation can get out of date.
Josh:
They're out of date, yeah. Totally.
Mike:
Yeah, and people give me a... have said pretty nice things about the Sidekiq code base since I've been able to maintain it as a full time job I've been able to keep it clean and refactor where necessary. So I try to...
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
And then I try to, and then there's four Easter eggs peppered through the-
Josh:
I was going to say my favorite thing about the Sidekiq code bases is that you have... Don't you have a flip the tables one in there or something? That's my favorite.
Mike:
That's one of them, yeah. There's a couple more.
Starr:
No spoiling, Josh.
Josh:
I won't mention the other ones. You can go experience them for yourself.
Mike:
But yeah, I've had people just literally spelunk through the code for half an hour, an hour just looking for the Easter eggs which is nice.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I have to say even just randomly on the internet, like I think probably I've been exposed to the Sidekiq codebase more than a few times just with people sharing those Easter eggs. Because they'll drop them on Twitter or make an issue or something.
Mike:
Yeah, exactly.
Starr:
That's hilariously clever from a marketing standpoint, I think, especially around developers. Developers can't stand a mystery, right? So just give them a little bit of a mystery and you'll have them hooked forever.
Mike:
I mean, it's about bringing joy in a product, right? I mean, people, all too often entrepreneurs talk about building little bits of joy to make someone smile, because it makes them feel good that they're using your product, right? And that's worth its weight in gold. It gives you goodwill from your users, keeps them happy and presumably keeps them paying for it.
Mike:
So I'm doing things like the splash screen which shows the Sidekiq Pro and the old school BBS ANSI.
Starr:
Oh, I love that.
Josh:
Yeah, love it.
Mike:
That's another thing that I added, and people love it. But I found a guy on DeviantArt to do that, and he had a bunch of ANSI art in his portfolio and I said, "Hey, would you... can I pay you like $100, $200 to do me a splash screen that just says Sidekiq Pro." And he's like, "Well, I don't charge money for my art. But here I did it for you." And so he just gave it to me. And it turns out this guy is like, he's like the Picasso of ANSI art. Like he's well known around the world before this. I had no idea who he was, but he just did it for me for free. So it was great.
Starr:
That's amazing.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
The Picasso.
Mike:
Shout out to Roy Sack.
Starr:
All right.
Josh:
I thought it would be cool to do a ANSI Honeybadger. Yeah, it's on my bucket list.
Mike:
Put it in your Gem install, man.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.
Josh:
Yeah, it's tough. Did you all see, was it Twitter that announced that were going to allow employees to work from home indefinitely now? Like they're just switching to the remote first model.
Ben:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
That's cool.
Mike:
It should have been done years ago.
Josh:
You're right. Yeah, totally.
Mike:
Why are you buying a million square foot of downtown San Francisco office space? I mean, what a waste of money. When everybody can do their job in front of a computer screen anywhere. It makes no sense.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I wonder if other companies will follow them.
Mike:
I just signed a contract in March for a desk at a co-working facility.
Ben:
Good timing.
Mike:
That's probably not happening anytime soon.
Josh:
Yeah.
Mike:
They haven't even opened yet, because they keep delaying their opening.
Josh:
Was it a WeWork?
Mike:
It was a Central Office, which is a local Portland co-working facility.
Mike:
So bringing that back to the topic at hand. Have you all enumerated any policy around COVID in pricing? If a customer says, "Hey, we're struggling to make ends meet," do you have a policy around what kind of pricing you... what kind of deals you're willing to work, that sort of thing?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). We've got deals.
Ben:
We decided to give six months of service free to anyone that has impact due to COVID. So we've had a few customers reach out to us and say, all my revenue just has disappeared. And so yeah, we're happy to help accommodate that. We've had, I would say, less than 10 people take us up on that.
Starr:
So do we have one implemented in our app to...?
Ben:
Yeah, we actually added a thing to our app that if you went to cancel, you would see this message saying hey, if you need some relief from COVID, just pop us an email, we'll take care of that for you.
Mike:
Nice.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah, we also added a parking account parking feature, right? So that if people need to pause their billing or whatever, they can do that.
Mike:
Yeah, I don't have anything that mechanical yet, but I've definitely had some customers contact me and ask if they can delay, or pause, or get a couple of months relief. And I've certainly accommodated those requests. But usually on an ad hoc basis, right? I don't necessarily have a pure policy. Someone who contacts me about Sidekiq Pro, for instance, is very different from a customer that's paying me tens of thousands of dollars a year for instance. All that's based on my own feeling as to what is this customers, the details of the customers plate, and that sort of thing. But yeah, I'm right there with you.
Josh:
Yeah. It's also, I think, we always jump to automate that stuff. But I think in that case, it's a little bit of a premature optimization too, because you've got to think like, if 10 people have taken us up on it, yeah, we might have saved, it might have broken even or something, but then there's the cost of maintaining those little bits of code that do things like that into the future, which I often forget about and that always adds up. So like, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, and like knock on wood, like we had a little blip. But churn isn't really different from what it usually is for the passing month or so. So I don't really know what's up with that, we're just sailing along, it's weird, but I'm grateful for it. And hopefully it'll continue.
Ben:
It was really interesting, Mike ProfitWell put out a chart and they showed because they do a lot of... they have a lot of data on SaaS billing because they provide bare metrics. They provide analytics for Stripe, people who are using Stripe to do the recurring billing. So they have a lot of data and they had showed a chart that is up and to the right, for all our customers.
Ben:
And then COVID happens and there's this dip. And then if you keep going the chart it starts to come back up again. And that's exactly what our chart look like. So we're like we're pretty much-
Josh:
Like the stock market.
Ben:
Yeah, it looks a lot like the stock market actually.
Starr:
Oh, my gosh now I want to overlay a chart of a growth to the stock market.
Ben:
That's interesting.
Josh:
It's all connected Starr.
Starr:
The VTSAX index or something.
Josh:
I'm going to write a book.
Starr:
Yeah, and get some of those flag pins and pieces of thread and stuff and connect them.
Josh:
I'm forecasting the stock market based on our revenue numbers.
Starr:
I was thinking the other way around, but I guess you could do that.
Mike:
When you lose money, you really lose money.
Starr:
There you go. It's like that, what was it that the octopus that people say could like predict the World Cup or something?
Mike:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that was a thing.
Josh:
That one.
Starr:
Yeah, we have a SaaS business that predicts the stock market.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That would be a really good...
Mike:
It seems like there's been a lot of businesses that are starting to come online. And due to them having to shut down a physical presence. And it seems like y'all could get some piece of that, but we'll see. I'm glad to hear that you're mostly weathering the storm though.
Starr:
Yeah, me too. Well, we are getting up there on time. We're having a lot of fun talking.
Starr:
Should we put this one in the books?
Ben:
Wrapity wrap.
Starr:
Okay, so, this has been a special episode of FounderQuest with Mike Perham. Thank you Mike for joining us.
Mike:
Thank you for having me, Starr.
Starr:
Yes. And yeah, the other guys had you too, it's okay.
Josh:
Do we want to mention where to find Mike online.
Starr:
That's a great idea.
Josh:
Friendster friends with him or something, Mike's best friends.
Starr:
What's your Friendster ID?
Josh:
What's your ICQ number?
Mike:
So my Twitter handle is @getajobmike. It's a funny joke trust me. It's a funny joke more than anything. But yeah, @getajobmike and sidekiq.org is my website.
Starr:
Well, awesome. Yeah, and we are Founder Quest. If you want to review us on Apple podcast, go for it and we'd appreciate that. If you are interested in writing for our blog, Honeybadger, go to the honeybadger.io website and click on blog and then there's a link to write for us. So just check that out. And are you going there, Mike? You're pointing, you're doing something. Oh, you're petting your cat. I thought you were going to check out our write for us page. I was getting excited.
Starr:
Okay, well see y'all later and have a great Friday.
Show Notes:
Links:
Amethyst
PopClip
Alfred shortcuts
Hacker New Ubuntu 20.04 Thread
Ansible
Josh's dotfiles
Mathias Shell Scripts
UltraFine
Bartender
Transcript:
Starr:
I'm the type of tiling Window manager user that never changes any of their layout, basically. I'm the type of tiling Window manager that like has all applications open full screen except for like my terminals, which I have a vertical split. And so, I've got two of those open on a single screen. I actually don't know any shortcuts to any of the Window managers I've ever used. I have to look them up every single time.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, that's the great thing about Amethyst, it is the one that's based on ... It's has nothing to do with Haskell, but it's based on xmonad. But the key bindings are all like ... There's not really much way to change them, it's all pretty simple. It's a lot simpler to use the key bindings than it is to use the Haskell.
Starr:
I use Magnet for my Windows manager.
Josh:
Yeah, that's what I've been using too.
Starr:
Yeah, I really like that. The key combos are easy to remember to put stuff in the various places. I'm always like corner or half or top or bottom, it's super easy.
Josh:
Yeah, that's what I've been doing. It's a different approach. Amethyst, I've used it before and it is really nice because it automatically tiles, it's not like ... Magnet is kind of you just set up, basically, your halves or whatever.
Starr:
That's been around for a while, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Okay. Yeah, I just used to use that, I think.
Josh:
There's a bunch of them like that.
Ben:
We're talking about Mac tools today because-
Josh:
I guess we are. I could go forever on that.
Starr:
I've got a feature request for the makers of Amethyst who I know are dedicated listeners to FounderQuest. For the love of all things good in the world, can we please have a dropdown menu that lets you select different Window actions? Why do I have to use hotkeys, because maybe I want to do something that I do once every six months and I don't want to have to look up the hotkey for it and then try and make my fingers go into that weird chord position.
Josh:
Because it wouldn't be a pure tiling Window manager.
Starr:
I know, it's like come on, just give me a dropdown. It's not pure anyway, let's be honest. There's little bars at the top of the Windows, I can minimize things, I can drag things around, it's not pure anyway. It's already debased-
Josh:
It's not written in Haskell but you got to draw the line somewhere, and the line is dropdown menus.
Starr:
It's like a menu. It's like a GUI, okay. Okay, fine-
Josh:
You're totally making want ... I'm going to have to go try Amethyst again, you're making me want to go check it out. You might look ... There was like a configuration, I think it has a JSON configuration file or something that you can edit.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Which is exactly what you were looking for if you were looking for a dropdown menu.
Ben:
Do either of you use PopClip?
Starr:
No, what's that?
Josh:
No.
Ben:
PopClip is a little extension thing ... I don't know how you describe it, what do they call it? I don't even know what they call it. I'm looking at their website and they don't really say. But basically, any time you select text, then this little popup pops up right above your cursor. And it's extendable, you can choose what kind of things appear in the little menu that pops up, but by default it does things like copy and paste, but also there's a little search icon. If there's a text you want to search on instead of having to right click, that's much too much work to do, so you can just hit that little search icon. Or there's a dictionary one so you can define something.
Ben:
But I use it a lot because it has an Alfred connection as well, so I will ... I have a bunch of Alfred shortcuts for things like jumping to one of our user records in our admin tool, and so, if I highlight let's say a user ID, then I can ... It'll give the popup, I can then choose Alfred and then I can type in my shortcut and boom, because it puts whatever's highlighted into that little Alfred box for you.
Starr:
Oh, that's really cool.
Ben:
It's super handy.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
You know what's really amusing to me is that ... Because I've been working with you all for so long it's like we sort of like swap ... Okay, we kind of like swap places in weird ways. I remember a long time ago I'd be like, "Okay, I'm using Alfred, what you using, Ben?" And it's like, "Oh, I'm just using Spotlight." And now it's like reversed, it's like, "I just used Spotlight," and it's like, "Oh, Ben's using Alfred now."
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, I love Alfred.
Ben:
I actually also use Spotlight. The reason why is Alfred I've never really gotten it to work the way I want it to work for looking up files and folders. If there's a file or a folder that I want, I use Spotlight. But anything else, basically, I use Alfred.
Josh:
Yeah, file search in Spotlight seems pretty advanced. It's got all the indexing and stuff built into it.
Starr:
Yeah. It seems like it'd be really hard to get right.
Ben:
But one thing I love about Alfred is the Safari shortcut support and one password support. If there's a site I know I want to go to, boom, Alfred, it's three characters away.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And if I have a login I want, if it's a log in thing I can just type in my one password name for it and, boom, it goes there and fills it in for me. It's brilliant.
Josh:
I haven't decided if I want to enable that or not yet because you have to go enable third party access or whatever to your one password database.
Ben:
That's true.
Josh:
I don't know. I've gotten kind of in the habit of using whatever they call one password mini or whatever in the toolbar.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Because they have a system wide hotkey for it, it's like shift command/ or something.
Ben:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Josh:
That'll pop it up. I do that instead.
Ben:
I should do that.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. Just something about enabling third party application access to my passwords. Even though I think it's ... It's not the passwords themselves, it's just the index.
Josh:
The metadata.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
But, yeah. One of my favorite tips, I forgot ... Someone posted this on Twitter a long time ago and I don't remember who it was, but ... Maybe it was one of you. If you option click the notification center icon in the toolbar, it will toggle do not disturb.
Ben:
Yes, I love that.
Josh:
That is a great one.
Starr:
Oh, wait. Really? Okay, I'm going to try it now.
Josh:
Yeah. I use it all the time.
Starr:
It's option, and that's alt, right?
Josh:
That's alt.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Option click.
Starr:
Oh, wow. That's nice.
Josh:
Isn't that cool?
Starr:
I'm doing it right now.
Josh:
There's another one ... Especially on my ... I have an ultra-wide monitor which I realized I'm not sure ... I might be going back towards the regular size monitor side of the argument because half the time I just want to center the window on a screen anyway. I can center that with Magnet, but if I want to resize the window then from there and do it equally, like expand it out equally, equal sides, and, of course, I'm not using a fancy tiling window manager that does it for me at the moment, hold down option and then drag a corner of the window and it will resize the entire window from the center of the window.
Josh:
That reminded me, last week when I was dealing with ... In the middle of my computer troubleshooting woes, that morning when I was like ... The morning of the second day, which I was already like frazzled and upset and stuff, and I get to my desk and I bumped ... I don't know how I did it, but I bumped my ... I have that ... You know the large trackpad, is it the Pro ... I forget what they call them, it's like the Pro Apple Trackpad or whatever.
Ben:
The Magic Trackpad?
Josh:
The Magic Trackpad that I keep in front of my Ergodox keyboard, bumped it and it fell facedown on my tile floor and shattered.
Starr:
Oh, my God, they can shatter?
Josh:
That was just the icing on the cake. I don't want to have another entire episode of bitching about my Mac problems, but that just ... It sucked.
Starr:
What part of it shattered? I'm curious.
Josh:
The top of it is kind of ... I don't know what it's made out of, it's almost like a glass type material. And it's happened with an Apple watch before in the past too, if you drop something, usually, it does pretty well if you drop it on a corner or something, but if you drop it face down on a tile floor, it's curtains.
Starr:
It's a goner.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
You know you have to replace all your tile floors. That's the real solution.
Josh:
I'm now carpeting my office.
Starr:
It is a suggested solution by Apple.
Josh:
Yeah, right.
Starr:
Because hard flooring is for Microsoft users.
Josh:
Apple shag carpet.
Ben:
I have been spending more time at home, thanks to COVID, and ...
Josh:
I was going to say, "Why?"
Ben:
Yeah. And as a result, I've actually started using a keyboard shortcut that I've never really used much in the past. Don't do it now, you don't want to do this now, but if you hold down option command and hit the eject key, that will sleep your computer.
Starr:
Oh, really?
Ben:
And when I'm at my office, I don't have any reason to sleep my computer, but when I'm at home I do. Yeah, I've been using that a lot.
Josh:
Nice. I will try that when I get my eject key back.
Starr:
Can I tell you all something ridiculous? It seems ridiculous to me and this may be the best solution available to me, but it seems really silly. Yeah, as you all know, I got an iMac six months ago or something and it comes with a keyboard and trackpad and everything, and I really like my Kinesis Advantage that I use so I didn't want to switch to the just terrible tiny little keyboard that they ship with it. Yeah, so I used my Advantage, but the problem with that is that I don't have any of the little sort of function keys. I've got the F1, F2, F3, but they don't have the little icons as to what they do, like make the screen brighter, make the volume louder or whatever. And I've got it set up so that they're actually like F1, F2 keys because I do real stuff with my computer, and I don't have that function key anymore. And so, how do I make my screen brighter or turn it up and down? The answer is you keep the original keyboard as a second keyboard underneath the monitor and you just kind of whip it out whenever you use an of those function keys.
Josh:
That's a life hack right there.
Starr:
It is. It feels so silly that I have to do this.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And yeah, I literally ... I assume there's some way to adjust my screen brightness without using the OEM keyboard, but ...
Josh:
That's a good point. I never adjust my screen brightness like that because I use an external monitor. Is that a thing with externals? I know that iMac has it.
Ben:
Yeah, you can do that. I have that, I have the LG, the UltraFine, and yeah, you can use the Apple keyboard to change the brightness on that.
Starr:
Oh, nice.
Josh:
I should have set up some ... I should configure my keyboard to have shortcuts for that. I have the Ergodox which is a split one, a little bit like Kinesis but they're detached, but I have some custom key bindings for volume and stuff that are handy.
Ben:
You reminded me, speaking of keybindings for volume, and remembering the UltraFine. There's one snag to the UltraFine and that is its audio. It had audio and it has speakers and they're great, but the problem is that basically normal volume that you would enjoy typically as your computer making sounds is the first notch on the volume scale.
Starr:
Oh, wow.
Ben:
First notch. And there's like, I don't know what, 10 notches or whatever? There's 1, 2, 3, 4 ... I don't know, 15. I don't know. Okay. If you hit the volume up key once, you get notch number two, and it freaking blows you away.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
And you might think, "Oh, but there's nothing between one and two so I'm just hosed now." That's actually not correct. Another key combo you can use, it is shift option volume up, which increases the volume by a quarter.
Starr:
What? Wait, there's like a fine volume adjustment on Mac's?
Ben:
Yes. Yep.
Starr:
Wow.
Ben:
Shift option up and down changes it by a quarter rather than a full step, which is absolutely critical if you have an UltraFine display because you cannot go to two without killing yourself, you have to go to one and a quarter if you want the volume to go up.
Josh:
That's the most Linux issue like old school Unix or Linux style issue on a Mac that I've heard recently.
Starr:
Yeah. But unless you know ... The UltraFine is the monitor to get if you want to have some house parties, if you want to be jamming with your tunes.
Josh:
Yeah, you got your ... Or if you want to plug your guitar into it and rock the neighborhood. You've got like a Marshall stack built into it.
Ben:
Disclaimer, I have never taken the volume on the UltraFine beyond three, because I've been too afraid to do so. I don't know if actually does actually keep going up to-
Josh:
I have one question. Does it go to 11?
Starr:
Apparently, it doesn't need to. Or does it destroy itself before it gets to 10?
Ben:
Do either of you use Bartender?
Josh:
Yes. Bartender's cool.
Starr:
I used to, but I haven't recently. About six months ago, whenever I got the iMac is when I switched back to using Mac. I lost a lot of my institutional memory of Mac apps.
Ben:
Plus, your Mac screen's probably big enough you don't care about all the stuff in the-
Starr:
It is really big, yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. You got plenty of room. But when I switched to a 13 inch back in the day, I realized just how much room all those icons can take up. And so, Bartender is fantastic. If anyone doesn't know what that is, it hides menubar icons, and you can define which ones get hidden and how you can toggle between the ones that are hidden and shown. And it's pretty handy if you find your menu bar filling with icons, you can use Bartender to help manage that chaos. And I hide Docker, I hide Dropbox, and I hide Alfred.
Josh:
Yeah. You can also configure it to ... If it's like an icon that changes, if it updates its status occasionally you can have it appear when its changed, and then it will disappear.
Ben:
Hide again, yeah.
Starr:
Nice. This is reminding me of when I was on Linux and I had a sort of ultra high definition monitor hooked up to it. And it for the most part worked okay at sort of scaled resolution, but one of the little icons in my top sort of toolbar at the top of my screen, it didn't scale, and so, I had normal icons and this one half size icon, and then the rest of the box where it should have scaled up to fill the box was just white as opposed to the black of the toolbar. That's why I quit using the Linux on the desktop.
Ben:
That is the reason why you quit using-
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, it's one of them but look at like ... If you want to drive somebody slowly crazy, just have them look at that every single day for years on end. It'll drive them mad.
Ben:
Okay. Well, you just brought back memories of when I used Linux on a desktop, which was a long time ago. But when I first started using Linux on a desktop, I-
Josh:
You're going to get me going.
Ben:
I was blown away ... Well, this is kind of a double sided coin. I was blown away by X Windows, right, the whole idea that you could run something on a server somewhere and you're getting the UI on your machine, you know? I thought that was just amazing. The double sided coin is it was horrendously hard to set up, to actually get my monitor to work and get X server to work properly.
Starr:
Do you still remember your Vsync?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Your Vsync numbers?
Ben:
For real.
Josh:
It was probably easier to hack than it was to set up, I would imagine.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Ben:
But the thing that really brought this back to my memory when you said that was this week GitHub announced their Codespaces.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's like their cloud nine thing where you can have your visual studio code running on someone else's server, and it just displays the UI on your machine. I'm like, "We've come full circle. Now we're back to X Windows."
Josh:
Well, and they have a lot of remote tooling built into VS code as well, which I suspect ... And I haven't read all of the things that they released, but I suspect that eventually you'll be able to also like connect that locally, which is kind of similar. You'll be happy to know that remote X is disabled or deprecated by default in modern X now.
Ben:
What? That's so sad.
Josh:
But I think that you can ... There's still an arch Linux guy that you can use to enable it or something if you really want to. But, yeah, X it's still the primary display thing on Linux at the moment. It's going to be replaced by Wayland in the future, which is a much more secure server.
Ben:
Get off my lawn.
Josh:
But, yes, X is still for now ... And it's one reason that Linux desktops are still inherently insecure from a screen recording standpoint.
Ben:
You can take your Wayland and you can take your system D and you can go just take a hike.
Josh:
Right?
Ben:
I need my X and leave me alone.
Josh:
And your Gen 2.
Ben:
Slackware.
Starr:
The reason I'm not saying anything is because I'm over here having flashbacks. They're not good. Because if you didn't have a brand name monitor, they didn't actually tell you your Hsync and Vsync and all those numbers, so you just had to like try them, you had to try all of them.
Ben:
And hope they didn't fry your monitor in the process.
Starr:
And hope thy didn't fry your monitor.
Josh:
See, I remember you all talking about that. That was definitely before my ... Because my Linux experience is more recent, I was on it for four years or something. I don't know if it was that long.
Josh:
Just like frying the monitor is like ... That's crazy.
Starr:
And it was because it like ... If your screen goes away, there's really no way to just recover from that, at least not that I knew at the time. You have to essentially reboot every time, so it takes you five minutes to try a new config value, and then it just blanks your mind really quick. And it makes a really scary noise when it does it, kind of like a ... Almost like something breaking, something really expensive breaking.
Ben:
Now, this is a key combo I do not remember actually accurately, but it might have been alt F6 or alt 6, I don't know, but that was the key combo that I discovered while working on X that actually got you to a text console. So Slack had like five or six virtual consoles, and that was like the one console-
Josh:
Oh, no, no ... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I use that. I still use that when I'm troubleshooting X. It's not as common on like ... If you use a Ubuntu or something you don't have to do that anymore, but if you use one of the more DIY Linux distributions, which are fine, you learn a lot and it's probably a lot more like OG Linux used to be.
Ben:
Right, totally.
Josh:
But, yeah, that's all just basic TTY stuff, right, so you're switching the terminal.
Starr:
I even got ... I was using Ubuntu and I went to turn on my computer one day because I had some work to do, like you do, and no graphic, no GUI.
Josh:
Sounds like my Monday.
Starr:
And like a 4K monitor, and so, that means no scaling. All the texts, like two millimeters high, and it's just gobs and gobs of just error texts that I have no idea what it means. And I'll give you a guess, Josh, as to what caused it.
Josh:
Did you accidentally replace your X resources file or common out the DPI setting?
Starr:
No.
Josh:
Because that's what it was for me.
Starr:
No, I'll give you one more guess, because I hadn't made any changes to any configuration.
Josh:
Okay, no changes.
Starr:
Well, maybe I ... Okay, I hadn't intentionally made any changes to anything.
Josh:
I don't know, there's probably a ton of potential reasons, but yeah, tell me.
Starr:
NVIDIA drivers.
Josh:
Ah, yes.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. The computer did some automatic update or something which meant that my NVIDIA drivers no longer worked at all, which meant that no GUI. And it wouldn't just be like, "Hey, your NVIDIA drivers need updating," because that would be like for news, that would let the riffraff in. Instead, you got to spend all morning trying to figure out how to upgrade your NVIDIA drivers.
Ben:
Funny you should mention that, because there was a Hacker News thread this week about Ubuntu until 2004, which is their latest long term release, just came out.
Josh:
Yeah, I have that on my desktop right now in the meantime while my Mac's out.
Ben:
And the people are pissed off because of Snap and auto updates and things like that.
Josh:
Yeah, I noticed that.
Ben:
We do the security auto updates on our Ubuntu servers, so I didn't think much about it, but now that you're talking about drivers getting updated overnight and now you can't even see your UI, I'm like, "Oh, I can see why people get upset about that."
Josh:
That could be tricky. I'm generally in favor of auto updating just for security reasons, but yeah, it can be kind of tricky. And especially with that, specifically, you have to enable third party repositories or something on Ubuntu to enable those drivers. Yeah, if you're not using the stock drivers then you're probably going to want to turn off that auto updating setting based on what Starr's saying. It probably works okay with like all the true ... If you're a true opensource person that won't use any proprietary drivers, then I bet it all works pretty well.
Starr:
Oh, that's right. That's right, it was a moral problem. I wasn't sure-
Josh:
It's a moral failing, Starr, yes.
Ben:
I think if you're a true opensource person-
Ben:
You're compiling all your things from scratch, you're not packaging something, come on, people.
Josh:
If you were just a good person-
Starr:
I just want to mention, who gave me this NVIDIA card that I'm holding up right now? Who gave me this, Josh?
Josh:
I gave you that. I did give that to you, Starr.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry for bestowing that plague upon you for free.
Starr:
It was a really nice graphics card, thank you.
Josh:
I'm glad you got some use out of it.
Ben:
The memories, they're flooding back now. The other awesome thing about Linux circa 1995 was having to know what network chip manufacturer of your network card, right, so you could load the right driver so you could actually use your ethernet.
Starr:
Oh, no.
Josh:
Ethernet, yeah.
Ben:
The ethernet, heck yeah. Wi-Fi wasn't a thing.
Josh:
Yeah, there was no Wi-Fi.
Starr:
That's terrible.
Ben:
You had to know ... Oh, I have a Realtek card and my no name knockoff brand happens to use a Realtek chip. Or it's a-
Josh:
It's still a little bit like that on DYI Linux for Wi-Fi cards. If you have a certain proprietary one you have to install the specific ... It's like the whatever driver slash or dash your card, dash-
Starr:
Or maybe you have a cheap one but then you have to know which chips it's compatible with, which chips that it's ripping off, right?
Ben:
Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Compatible means stealing in tech.
Josh:
I will say, Fedora and Ubuntu and the other pre-packed ... They're relatively much better these days. And I have actually been pretty impressed with this little desktop I've set up, it gets the job done at least. To take it back to Mac though, so do either of you configure your Macs with Ansible?
Ben:
No, I configure my server with Ansible, but yeah, that's hardcore.
Starr:
No.
Josh:
I configure my Mac with Ansible.
Ben:
Did you?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah? That's impressive.
Josh:
I also ... Do either of you store all your system configuration in an executable shell script that basically has like every Mac OS default in it that's changeable so you can commit to your-
Josh:
Wait, you didn't even make that one, right?
Josh:
I didn't make that. I forked it from a guy, his name is Mathias. But it's amazing, it's a community maintained shell script set up for your Mac. But when I go and set up a new Mac, before I would go and I'd have all these ... I like things a lot different from the defaults and you'd have to go in and have a list of things to hit and system preferences to go and configure it the way you like. With this, you keep it in Git so it's got history and everything, and it just changes the option in the file and then you run the shell script and it sets all of the defaults for you.
Ben:
You got to link me up with that.
Josh:
Yeah, I got it right here.
Ben:
Sounds cool.
Starr:
Yeah, it's used for a lot of stuff. I use it on my laptop and I didn't use it on my desktop this time because I don't like some of the settings it has and I just was not really feeling-
Josh:
Yeah. Well, you kind of need to maintain your own ... I forked it.
Ben:
Yeah, so I've got a new technique, it's for getting set up on computers super fast, which is just to be like the most basic computer user ever.
Josh:
Yeah, just use the defaults.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Also, a very valid approach.
Starr:
Also, store all your photos, if you are a Mac user, on Apple photos and use Apple notes and Apple reminders, and Apple cloud storage for everything. And it's kind of amazing how little maintenance that requires.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And once you fully buy into the ecosystem thing, then your life is so much better. It's like sunshine and lollipops-
Josh:
Drink the Kool-Aid is what you're saying?
Ben:
Yeah, pretty much.
Starr:
Yeah, except the Kool-Aid doesn't kill you, it actually-
Ben:
It tastes good.
Starr:
It tastes good, yeah. It kind of has the cherry thing, it tastes like childhood in summer.
Josh:
I thought it was apple flavored.
Ben:
Well, what's your favorite Kool-Aid flavor?
Starr:
My Kool-Aid flavor? Well, I've got peaches on my island, so I'm going to have to go with peach.
Ben:
Really?
Starr:
No, I'm joking. That's an Animal Crossing references for anybody who isn't playing Animal Crossing. We bought some Kool-Aid for my kid a couple months ago and I hadn't had it in so long. I guess just red, I'm a red person.
Ben:
Tropical punch?
Josh:
I was going to say red. I don't remember the flavors.
Starr:
I don't know. Just red.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Whatever.
Ben:
Yeah, it's probably a tropical punch. That's I think the most common choice for people with Kool-Aid. Because cherry's different, and black cherry, even more different. I'm a Kool-Aid connoisseur, sorry.
Josh:
Yeah, you're a connoisseur.
Starr:
Yeah, don't get him started, he'll go on and on about the tarrior.
Josh:
What is the ... Yeah.
Ben:
Like grape is pretty good, but it's not a grape soda kind of grape.
Josh:
What is the nuance between cherry and black cherry though?
Ben:
Yeah, so black cherry definitely a bit on the bitter side, like it has-
Starr:
Oh.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
A slightly bitter finish.
Starr:
Before we bought this I tried to make Ida some drink out of ... We got these rally concentrated flavorings for like cooking and candy making and stuff, so I tried to make her some strawberry soda out of that, and she was not impressed. I think I didn't put any sort of acidic element into it. I think it really needs some sort of like sour ...
Ben:
I would think that these days kids taste buds are a little more refined than ours were at a comparable age, right? If we got cherry we were like, "Woo hoo, it's not water," right? And they're all like, "Oh, no, that's got to have this particular-"
Starr:
Oh, no, she loves Kool-Aid, she just didn't like my DIY life hack, not "Kool-Aid" Kool-Aid.
Ben:
Got it. You got to get the real stuff.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, she sure as hell like eats a lot less sugar than I did.
Ben:
Okay. Speaking of ... I'm on a random kick today. Speaking of sugar ...
Josh:
This is the random episode.
Ben:
Okay. One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was I would ride my bike with my friends down to the convenience store. It was like, I don't know, maybe half a mile, a mile away from my house. And they had like a couple of arcade games and candy and candy and candy, right? Every kind of candy you could possibly want was in this convenience store. I guess they knew their clientele pretty well. We would go down there, we would play a video game, grab some candy and it was the thing we did like every day. But the thing that I never understood were people who chose Lick 'em sticks or Dip 'em sticks.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Those are pretty good, occasionally.
Ben:
It's a sugar stick and you're dipping it in sugar.
Starr:
Yeah, what else would you dip it in?
Josh:
Yeah, that's what that is.
Ben:
I don't get it. It's like no.
Starr:
But it's kind of like a powdery sugarless flavorless sugar stick and you're dipping it in flavor.
Josh:
Like Pixie stick kind of thing, right, only you dip it.The sugar is like pixie-
Ben:
Right, you're dipping it in stuff like pixie sticks innards, yeah, yeah.
Josh:
No, let's just dump it straight into my mouth, please.
Ben:
Exactly. That's what I'm talking about.
Josh:
The large ... Do you remember the huge one? They have a large size of pixie stick, I think.
Ben:
My favorite was Now and Laters. Those were the best.
Starr:
Now and Laters?
Josh:
I was more of like an ice cream sandwich kind of kid.
Ben:
Yeah, Now and Laters.
Starr:
Oh, wow. I was ... I got my Sugar Daddy's, which is like ...
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Why did they name it that? It's just a giant caramel.
Josh:
Because we're talking about it now.
Starr:
It's like a giant stick of caramel. Yeah, so I get my Sugar Daddy, I go watch Scrooge McDuck on DuckTales, which I guess there's a pattern happening here.
Josh:
We've been doing-
Starr:
Recently, I got Disney+, and so, I was like, "Hey, it's got DuckTales, I'm going to watch DuckTales."
Josh:
Watching some DuckTales.
Starr:
And oh, man, DuckTales, it's kind of disappointing me in terms-
Josh:
Really?
Starr:
It's still entertaining and stuff, but there's some kind of gross stuff on ... They put in like a fat kid character who eats everything and they're like just making fun of him, and his name is Duffus. Like, come on DuckTales, that's just ... Like come on. And I was like a little chunky kid watching DuckTales so it's like I'm like-
Josh:
What was that telling you?
Starr:
What was this telling me about myself? Yeah. And there's some episodes that are like ... A lot of the episodes are super really kind of ... I don't know if it counts as racism, but very like 1980s stereotypes of like various not white cultures that you would not be able to put on TV today. I don't know.
Josh:
It ain't the 90s anymore.
Starr:
No, no. That was the 80s even, I think it was like '89.
Josh:
DuckTales was ... Yeah, okay, like late 80.
Starr:
Yeah. And also, Scrooge McDuck, a little bit of an asshole. I thought it was like, okay, it's fiction, like, "Okay, he got his money through ... He just happened to do some really clever things and gets some money." Then there was an episode where somebody defaulted on a debt so he took ownership of a TV production studio, and then he went in and immediately went into his nephew's favorite show and was like, "I'm shutting this down because the ratings are crap."
Josh:
I hope Scrooge doesn't listen to this podcast.
Starr:
I know, right? I know. And then the show is actually kind of like making fun of all the employees who were kind of sucking up to him because they don't want to lose their jobs, right? This guy comes in, he's their new boss, they're trying not to lose their jobs, it's like, "Oh, look at them, they're so ridiculous and gross because they're trying to suck up to him." It's just like, "What?" Did Elon Musk pay for this show to be made for like propaganda purposes? I don't know.
Josh:
He really looked up to those characters and he watched DuckTales.
Starr:
Yeah, my timelines are a bit mixed. It requires Elon Musk to invent a time machine and go back and-
Josh:
That would be amazing, modern DuckTales.
Starr:
They have it. Yeah, they have it. They remade it a couple years ago. I haven't watched a ton of it.
Josh:
But it would be awesome if they made it just like vintage DuckTales but then they worked in, like you said, characters from now show up in time machines and stuff like that.
Starr:
Oh, yeah? That would be funny.
Josh:
I will say, for Darkwing Duck there's one thing I can still say, he is still the terror that flaps in the night. So some things never change.
Starr:
Thank goodness. It's good to know there's constants in the world.
Ben:
We totally need to make that our wrap. You saying that needs to be the end of this episode.
Starr:
Oh, I thought you meant like a music rap.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't put that past us either.
Starr:
I'd put that past myself. I'd put that past myself, yeah. That can be a Josh and Ben duet. All right.
Josh:
It's got to be Fresh Prince style.
Starr:
Well, since we've obviously reached the climax of our genius ...
Josh:
We've recorded like an hour of this.
Starr:
I know.
Ben:
There's ample stuff to cut in this episode.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. This is all gold to me.
Starr:
Ship it. We'll ship it and if anything breaks we can edit it back out.
Josh:
Yep.
Ben:
In production.
Starr:
All right. Well, it's been great talking with y'all. If our loyal listeners would like to review us on Apple podcast, go for it. If you want to write for us, check out our blog, we have a "Write for us" thing in the top part of it if you want to do tutorial type stuff. Yeah, until then, catch you next week, and this has been Founder Quest.
Show Notes:
Links:Stripe
Spam Nation by Brian Krebs
Bad To The Bone by George Thorogood
Grammarly
Egghead.io
Udemy
Chris Oliver
Jumpstart
Heya
Lamby
StimulusReflex
Andrew Mason
Remote Ruby podcast
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Josh:
So I'm sitting in my chair with this laptop and the thing literally crashes in my lap. And when I turn it back on, it gives me that blinking folder. The blinking folder. I don't know if you've ever seen the blinking folder, Ben says he hasn't.
Starr:
I've never seen it.
Josh:
The blinking folder is what you get when there is no hard drive attached to the system.
Starr:
Oh, no. What's there? Is there a hard drive in it?
Josh:
There was. It's not finding it anymore.
Starr:
I mean, is there one physically in there?
Josh:
There is a physical hard drive in the system. Yes.
Starr:
Okay, that's good. That's good.
Josh:
However, the hard drive I suspect has finally croaked. So now I've had to... I've literally had like two laptops die on me in one week. I don't know if I'm cursed or something.
Starr:
Well that's what you get for using that cheap aftermarket hardware.
Josh:
Right, yes probably. Just, I probably should never have upgraded the hardware, the hard drive. Anyway fingers crossed because if this Mac mini kicks the bucket then it really is back to Linux.
Ben:
It's just the universe's way of telling you it's time to take a vacation.
Josh:
I think you're right Ben. I've been saying that I could use a vacation.
Starr:
You two were talking about taking vacations and then like the world ends, so-
Josh:
Well, yeah that's like, the world ends and then it seems like... I don't know I've just been feeling pressure to get stuff done. I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah getting stuff done is a good thing.
Josh:
Yeah, it... Actually making progress on something is one way to kind of combat anxiety too.
Ben:
Well, speaking of getting stuff done. So while you've been trying to actually get anything done this week, I've been working on the... I was going to go on vacation, I was thinking about taking time off but then you said, "Well, I could use your help on this task." And so I'm like, okay, I'll help you with that. And that was two weeks ago and I thought it was going to take two days but it didn't end up taking two days. So what I've been working on-
Josh:
Sorry.
Ben:
That's totally fine. You know like sometimes the thing that's great about being one of the few people at Honeybadger is that we get to decide what we do, right? We don't have deadlines that we have to meet, We don't have like deliverables that we promised. And so when you have a case like this, where I felt like, there's something I want to get done here, we can just do it. So the task you gave me was to get some new pricing support ready. So we have some new pricing that we want to deploy. It's going to require some changes in our app too, because we're changing how we're structuring the pricing.
Ben:
And I'm like, yeah, I can bust it out real quick. And so then I looked at doing that and the way that... So Stripe has changed how they arrange the products and the plans and how you do pricing, since we launched with Stripe, seven or eight years ago. And I decided I wanted to use this new approach that Stripe has but the trick there is that you have to use the new API version or a recent API version. And we were not using a recent API version. We were using an API version that we started using back eight years ago. Which happened to be an API version of Stripe's from like, 2011. So-
Josh:
2011.
Ben:
Yeah. So I decided, you know what-
Starr:
It was year, you know?
Ben:
Yeah, it was a good year.
Josh:
It's a good vintage of API, like-
Starr:
Yeah. Exactly.
Josh:
Got to hand it to it.
Starr:
Like some people call that legacy, I call it vintage.
Ben:
Well, either way, props to Stripe for how they do their API versioning. It is freaking awesome. Like, you can stay on that old version as long as you want, basically, they will support it until the end of the internet, looks like.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And they have a really awesome way to manage the upgrade process, when you decide you do an upgrade and their documentation is very clear about changes that have happened between the different API versions.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't want to like jump ahead of you too far. But I was going to say, I noticed when I was reviewing the pull request that you sent, it looks like we're supporting both versions of the API for now or something like that. Is that true or did I misread that?
Ben:
That is true. So yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So I just decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and do the upgrade of the API. Because I'm like, you know what, this is an area of technical debt that we should probably just pay down on some. And so as I was looking at the different payload formats, they're not dramatically different. Which is nice but there are some key differences. And there're two aspects, right? There's the outbound API request that you make, like when we want to update a card. We have to make a request to update the customer record.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
But then there's also the handling of webhooks, right? And those webhook payloads also changed a little bit. And I knew that we could deploy the new version of our app with using the new API version but the webhooks would still be coming in as the old version. Until I went into the Stripe dashboard and changed that. Again, they're very good about, you can manage which API version you want. So I decided that we'll support both versions so that I could deploy the app, not have to worry about the timing of changing that setting in Stripe. Then go to stripe and change that setting and not have the app have to have an immediate deployment. So, kind of a straddling the river kind of thing.
Josh:
Basically, we've shaved all the yaks and we're ready to-
Ben:
I made a major payment on that technical debt.
Starr:
Yeah, we've completely like swapped out our old like Vim plugins for like new Vim plugins?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And it's, I think one of the reasons why it took so long is I did spend extra time on those tests because you don't want the billing system to break, right? You don't want to not be able to take people's credit cards.
Josh:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
And to fail on those webhooks. So we have a lot of logic that happens when people's payments... You know things change and we don't want any of that to break.
Josh:
Yeah and I'm glad that you did.
Ben:
So one benefit of doing this work, aside from having that technical debt paid down and feeling all nice and shiny on the new API version, is that we also upgraded two major versions of the Stripe JS. So you know, we use their JavaScript on the client side to actually collect the payment information so that we don't ever touch it. Like it goes... You know, the credit card data goes straight to the Stripes servers and-
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
We just get a token. So we use their JavaScript for that. Well, we were using version one of their JavaScript and the current version is version three. So I completely skipped version two, like who needs that, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
But the benefit is that now we can support the 3-D Secure thing for credit cards. So I don't know if you've ever seen this but when you go and you try to do a check out, like I don't know Newegg or something and your visa provider is like, you need to do this extra step of actually verifying that you want to use your credit card. Have you seen that kind of pop up thing?
Josh:
Right. Yeah, it's like an internment like-
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
In between the request. Like it go... Does it actually go to one of the other network, like websites or something or is it?-
Ben:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well, in this case, Stripe handled that in their new version of JavaScript.
Josh:
They do okay.
Ben:
So just by upgrading that-
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
We're able to support that now. So someone who's using a card like that can now use Honeybadger more easily. And there was this whole thing in Europe about the secure card authorization, I think what's called. That happened late last year I think. They have a similar kind of thing except it's more prevalent. Like in the US we don't see that very often but it's more prevalent in EU. And now we support that better. So that's good.
Josh:
Yeah. Cool.
Ben:
Yeah I mean-
Josh:
So we're stronger, better.
Ben:
Exactly.
Ben:
Speaking of security, I don't know if either of you follow Brian Krebs. He's a security specialist.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
He writes about security stuff and-
Josh:
I follow him a little bit.
Ben:
He wrote this post recently that talked about this new twist on bank scams. So you know you have someone calls you and they're spoofing your bank's phone number and they're like oh, there's some fraud on your account and then they end up convincing you to give up your password or your pin or whatever. Well, there's a new twist on that scam and that is the scammers, while they're calling you acting like your bank, they're also calling your bank spoofing your phone number. So that the bank thinks you are calling them and so they might, get your recent three transactions, for example, using the automated system because the automated system is like, it's the right phone number. I'll just let him get that info, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
No big deal but then the scammer is like telling you, so the last three transactions on your card were bla bla, bla, bla, bla. And you're like, it's actually right. I guess this is legit, right? And then that-
Starr:
It's like an actual literal man in the middle attack.
Ben:
Exactly. A literal man in the middle attack. So then you give them your pin and then they're like, okay, please hold and they are on the other line with the bank. They're like, okay, here's the pin. And then they get access to your account and then of course, they can just do whatever right?
Josh:
Wow.
Ben:
Amazing.
Josh:
Yeah, see they always think of like something new. That's the thing. Brian Krebs, did you ever read, I think it was Spam Nation? Was that the name of his book?
Starr:
I did read that, yeah.
Josh:
That was a good book about the, like the dark world of spam email and like all the things that people go to, to like own their little spam kingdom.
Starr:
Yeah, that one was about, like it followed this, I think it was in Russia like an internet pharmacy person who did like Viagra spam.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know if people still do Viagra spam. I haven't seen that in a long time.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. There was like... I think like Spam has come in waves. Like it's... As I recall, like they'll kind of figure out a new method and it'll ramp up and then you know, the people that are fighting it will come up with new defenses. And then they'll have to go back to the drawing board and figure it out again and then you'll get another wave of, them deploying their botnets and all that. Because that's the other thing, you have to like build up your spam army. Like you got to have your botnets. So that's why they're actually like hacking all these, PCs and stuff, just so they can send emails.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean-
Josh:
It's a good book though.
Starr:
Just use Amazon. Why not move that to the cloud?
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Oh my God, it seems like a lot of work to like rip people off. I'm sure there's money in it but I mean, then you're like, a bad guy.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
And that... I mean, I would just... That just seems like it'll drain you, at the end of the day. I don't know.
Josh:
Yes. There's got to be some people who really are fulfilled by it.
Starr:
They're like, I was born to be bad, like that George Thorogood song The Boomers love. Or is that... No, it's Bad To The Bone, I'm sorry.
Josh:
Bad To The Bone.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. Man so this week I guess... Or past few weeks. What have I been up to? So yeah, I have this like grand scheme to have an editor, a freelance editor. Who had actually written for us in the past, on blog post. Do some editing to kind of lighten my load because I'm trying to, juggle, you know childcare and work and all that.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
And that kind of just fell on its face. So I've been doing a lot of editing this week. And I was like, well, if I'm going to do this, I might as well invest a little bit of time and some tooling. So I actually have... I spent some time on setting up VS Code to be a sort of Markdown editor. I mean, it works with Markdown out of the box but you can sort of make it pretty, super nice for Markdown. And there's actually unofficial sort of Grammarly plugin. Grammarly is this web service that will... I mean, it's got spell check, it's got grammar check but also let's you know about like, hey you're using this word that people use too much and it sounds stupid. So maybe use this other word instead. Suggestions like that and so I can get like Grammarly suggestions in VS Code itself and it uses-
Josh:
That's really cool.
Starr:
It is. Yeah. And it uses the same sort of UI system that like, syntax checkers use.
Josh:
Yeah. You posted a screenshot, it looked like almost like it was a linter or something. So like, shows problems in VS Code or whatever and then, or like hints or whatever they call it.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
It's really cool.
Starr:
Yeah, underlines the problem word or phrase or whatever and then you can mouse over it for more information. It's also got a... I don't know like, I forget what this is called. Like there's a pane down to the bottom where you usually get like a list of all your compile errors or whatever and the... It puts all the errors in there. So you're going to sort of go through them and it's pretty nice. I mean it's kind of an unofficial plugin and everything. So it's got like a few little hiccups here and there but overall I'm actually a lot more happy using VS Code for this sort of work than I was with them just because... What?
Josh:
Do you like it better than the Grammarly app too, for that sort of thing? Because they have like the Mac app or whatever but it's like more... You copy your text into it and then it makes the suggestions or whatever.
Starr:
Yes, so-
Josh:
Do you use that?
Starr:
I've tried it, yeah. So here's the thing that I would really appreciate Grammarly actually doing is supporting Markdown files because-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, you can't really open a Markdown file, like something with an extension MD in it. And then once you get in there, it doesn't really know what to do with the Markdown.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So, it's kind of just a huge pain in the neck because like okay, so I copy and paste the Markdown text into Grammarly and then well, once I've checked it now it's time to get it back, like it's screwed up all my Markdown.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
And now I have to like reformat it. And it's just... So this... Yeah, that's why I was really excited to see this, this plugin for VS Code and-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I even got like a special like, you know writing font that had like... There's some like very good rationale for like the specific font. I completely went over my head because I don't understand typography. But anyway, it's pretty.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
So yeah, in addition to that just been, working on... I think we talked about this in a previous show how we're sort of like juggling responsibilities a little bit. And so I'm sort of more in charge of managing day to day marketing stuff. And so we'll be working on that. And we have instituted a monthly marketing check in meeting with like our marketing person, Ben Findley and Josh and myself. And so we did one of those. And one things I really liked about that is that, we did that thing where we open like a document in Notion and then collaboratively edit it.
Starr:
And I'm finding that super useful because normally at this point, I would be struggling to remember like, what did we talk about in this meeting? Like what am I supposed to ask Ben Findley about? What am I supposed to follow up on? And, you know hopefully I remember to write that down to my own to do list but since we've got this document here, I can just go check and be like, oh yeah, like we're supposed to be doing this stuff. So let's actually do that instead of forgetting about it.
Josh:
Yeah, note taking in templates are good. We could make, even like a template for each of those meetings so that we have like a starting point every week, which... Or every month or whatever. So we can just kind of fill it in and...
Starr:
Yeah, definitely. And, another way this is useful, it's like one of my tasks was to like, prepare some notes for Ben Findley because he's going to contact a vendor about a potential piece of software for us to use. And so I was able to just sort of put those notes straight in that document. So now it's like, you know I don't have to like, keep track of a separate file, you know before I put that thing like where is it saved? It's just-
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
It's just all right in there.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
So, I don't know, that's basically what I've been doing and you know, lots more childcare than usual. Which is both exhausting and wonderful and exhausting.
Josh:
Yeah, I concur. Well, I have been... Aside from like the tech support for my computers, I've managed to get a little bit done this week. And also, what I was planning on doing. And I'm just getting around to it like yesterday. And today is starting to dig into some more of like, third party library. Like open source stuff that I want to learn. And the reason for that is because since I'm shifting I've been... I was doing a little bit more of the marketing side before all this but now that we're not bringing on another hire at the moment to take over some of the like the client library development and maintenance and also some of the work that I was planning to actually like move those, those packages and libraries forward. I'm shifting back to focus on that a little bit.
Josh:
And that's actually been kind of fun because I'm trying to like, dig into some of the things that I was kind of like, holding off on. So like I took... We recently got a team membership for Egghead.io, which is like a screencast or education thing. And I took a Python course the other day to kind of brush up on my Python knowledge because we've been doing a lot of work on our Python package for our Django integration and that sort of stuff. So that was fun and like, right now I'm, like diving into some, isomorphic JavaScript and server side rendering and all that fun stuff, Vue and React. So that's where I anticipate spending some time over the next couple of weeks, try to get a better handle on that world. And my end goal is to better support those platforms with our JavaScript packages. So it's been kind of fun and I'm looking forward to it.
Ben:
So, you've done some Udemy courses I remember like we did a hackathon for Elixir. We picked up some Elixir and Phoenix ones. And now you've done some Egghead ones. So I'm interested to know what you think about the differences of those two? Like, how's that been? Are they both great or you like one over the other?
Josh:
So I really like Egghead now. And I've been meaning to like try Egghead for a long time. I'm actually friends with one of the founders. And they have been longtime Honeybadger customers as well. So like we love Egghead. And so, they have like a really strong focus on like the front end like JavaScript side of things. So this was like the perfect opportunity, I think, for me to dive in and do that. The thing that I really like about Egghead over, like my experience with Udemy, and I guess they both have kind of their strengths, but Egghead is much more tailored towards like small bits of learning. So the courses are typically... They seem to be much shorter. The lessons themselves, like the courses are like broken down into really concise little chunks. So like, they could be like three to 10 minutes or something or two to 10 minutes or something like that.
Josh:
And you have like a... I think the Python course I took had like 28 lessons that were within that time range. So it was like an hour, a couple hours I think, the total course was. But some of the courses are, you know under an hour even. So they really focus on like, optimizing your time. Like not taking too much of your time whereas with Udemy, I forget how long that course took but that was like that was like a month long. It was a long course.
Ben:
Yeah it was long. Was like eight hours or something.
Josh:
It was like a huge investment.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Like, I had to plan like days of my time for that month to actually get through that course. And that's a reason like I've... That was the first course like that, that I've actually ever gotten, like actually gotten to the end of I think. That was an Elixir, an Elixir Phoenix like Masterclass type thing.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, like I enjoyed the deep dive into Elixir but I think it was more because I really enjoyed Elixir and less because I enjoyed like a, whatever, 40 hour course that I had to like, you know hit milestones on and everything. So, I'm liking the Egghead format and I think they're onto something.
Ben:
They just need some more server side stuff.
Josh:
Yeah, some of that. Well, you know I don't know we could always like, start making our own courses-
Ben:
We should make some.
Josh:
That's our jam.
Starr:
Badgerhead?
Ben:
Badgerhead.
Josh:
Badgerhead. The other thing I've been doing is I've been trying to, like play with things more. Like random, if I see a new project come up like actually take it and like try it out. So I recently took Heya, which is my email campaign gem for Ruby and went through the process of installing into a fresh Jumpstart app. Which is Chris Oliver's Rails template, you know like starter kit. And so that was fun. I got to like check out Jumpstart and at the same time like, I took down some notes for like how to install Heya into a new app. And also that was a really good opportunity to experience like the first run process of installing my thing into a new project because I don't get that opportunity very much. So I was able to make a lot of some nice improvements to that. Make it smoother and reduce friction. So that was fun.
Josh:
I recently tried Lamby. Which is... The Lamby gem, it's a gem that lets you deploy a Rails app to AWS Lambda. Which is kind of wild. I'm not sure like how I feel about that approach yet. But actually I ended up getting to talk to the creator of the gem and he made a lot of good points. Like they're... It's Custom Ink, I think, is the... They built this Custom Ink tech. And they've been using it, they're in production and it seems to work well for them. So it's interesting, like some of the things you can do if you really try make it work. But, I just like deployed. I went through their getting started guide and deployed a little "Hello World!" Rails app to Lambda. And that was a fun experience. That took a little bit longer than the Jumpstart thing.
Starr:
How long does the cold start on that take? Like, how long does it take to start up on the first-
Josh:
It's a while. Like, I mean, it's about as long as it takes a Rails app to boot. So it's not great but that that said once it's hot like it seems it's responsive and snappy and everything. I haven't... It might be an interesting test to do like some load testing on it. I should run A/B on it or something. But yeah, I mean like, once it started, it seems to be pretty good. And the other... I had that same question. The other question I had was about the... Well actually, my brother asked this, Ben would... Apparently Lambda has a max payload size of, like the unzipped package is 250 megabytes. And so my other question was like, well, Rails apps could be fairly large, like is that going to be a problem? But apparently the answer to that is like Rails apps are actually not quite as big like Node. Node apps can actually get up there, from what I've heard but for a lot of Rails apps they can fit under that limit, is what I gather.
Ben:
So recently, Amazon, they added a feature for Lambda, where you can actually keep a Lambda function hot.
Starr:
Oh nice.
Ben:
Yeah. I mean, obviously, it costs money-
Josh:
Yeah, I saw that.
Ben:
Because, you know you're running something pretty much full time instead of just on demand. But yeah, if load time, if cold start time is really a problem you can just run one concurrency all the time and always have something ready to respond.
Josh:
Yeah. It's interesting. And actually, like the design of this gem is really cool because it'll actually work with any Rack app. Because really all it does is, it creates a Ruby Lambda handler function that takes the input from wherever. So like API gateway, it's takes the function input and then basically creates a Rack request object from that. And then it passes that into the Rack endpoint for your Rails app. And then from there, it's just Rails. You know the Rack pipeline all the way down, it does its thing, responds. It's just a response and so that hands it back to the Lambda function, which hands it back to whatever, the gateway.
Starr:
You know what's funny? Is that, they say the technology goes in cycles. And I've heard Lambda compared to like, CGI-bin, right? And so this project is kind of like the old, I forget what it's called, like CGI gateway or something or Ruby CGI. Whatever you have to use to get Rails working under CGI.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
To get rails working on the CGI and everybody knows that was a disaster, right? And so next, there's going to be Mongrel. Like next up is Mongrel. So that's going to... It's going to happen in the cloud somehow.
Josh:
Yeah but it's at scale. That's the difference-
Starr:
But it's at scale, yeah.
Josh:
Web scale.
Starr:
I have no idea what that looks like, I'm just...
Ben:
From a compliance standpoint, I love the idea of not having any servers. Like that just-
Josh:
Yeah,
Ben:
Knocks out so many problems. If you say, "Oh, it's just a Lambda thing. And my whole Rails app is there. I don't have to worry about any servers running. There's no patching. There's no network intrusion. There's no..."
Josh:
Yeah. It is. It's really interesting.
Ben:
It's a big selling point.
Josh:
Yes. Yeah so my next step on that, before I move on, I think is going... Of course, I'm going... I got to install the Honeybadger gem and create a failing error endpoint. So I can see how that works in Lambda, in a Rails app. Which will be a first I think, probably so that'll be fun. I might do that later, some point.
Ben:
You know, we can move our Heya sales site over there? Get it off Heroku.
Josh:
I thought of that. Yeah, that was my... I was... I thought about using that as my... Instead of just doing like the Hello World thing I thought, well, that's a small Rails app, I could do that. But I wasn't that committed to the project. I was like, that's going to be... Like, then I have to learn how to like run a Rake task and like, all this other stuff. I'm like, no, I'm just going to, like do the quick start guide like what they recommend. And even that ended up being a little bit of a can of worms because it wasn't quite up to date. So I got to figure out some things for myself.
Starr:
Once you get an error reporting from Rails app in running a Lambda, like you should do a little screen cap of that. And share it with the world.
Josh:
Yeah, I guess I could do that. I did. The thing I've been doing with these little projects is I've been writing. Like keeping notes of like everything I did to get to whatever the end result is and then just sharing the notes out there, which is kind of cool. It's actually been one... Like that's how I was introduced to some of the people that actually work on these projects and can ask them questions and stuff. So you can post like... I just like created Gist and then post that on Twitter or Reddit or whatever, Dev. So it's a good way to like get some extra mileage out of playing with new things.
Starr:
Totally. That makes sense.
Josh:
I think the next, one of the next things I'm excited about playing with is StimulusReflex. Did you guys see that video yet?
Ben:
Yeah, that was awesome.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Could you describe it?
Josh:
So it's... If you... Are you familiar with Phoenix LiveView? It's the thing, it's basically like a way to build reactive web applications but just with like a Rails Web stack instead of like all the JavaScript stuff. Like basically you can build applications without JavaScript.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Yeah, so like, the way it works and I don't want to butcher this because I am not an expert at it but it uses WebSockets basically to pass information back and forth. So it allows you to basically respond to client side events. Say like, the app that he built was a Twitter clone. It was Twitter clone in 10 minutes in Rails. So say like clicking a Like button in... Normally, you'd have like some JavaScript that handles that and maybe like increments the likes counter and then forwards that to the back end or something. Well with this, it basically like literally lets you click the Like button on the front end and respond to it on the back end.
Josh:
So you have something called, I think they call it a Reflex. And the Reflex is basically like the controller that handles that client side event. So the Reflex does whatever the back end handles, the increments and stuff like increments in the database and then responds and it broadcasts the response back over the WebSocket. And then the client side has like automatic handler code that picks that up and does whatever, the action is, like incrementing it on the client side.
Starr:
Cool. So one of the things that I think, obviously I may get this totally wrong but I think that Phoenix LiveView did that was interesting. Like it used like a virtual DOM to like find the difference in the HTML that was sent down the wire versus the, you know whatever was being displayed in the DOM so that it only updated that I think. Does that sound right?
Ben:
Yes. Yeah, the LiveView has a very small data comes back out just a-
Starr:
Does this do like a similar thing? Do you know?
Josh:
I'm not sure. Do you know Ben?
Ben:
Yeah, I think it does. I don't think it's quite as little bit of data as Phoenix LiveView. I think there's more but yeah, it does do a certain kind of DOM to thing. It uses I believe DOM morph or... Morphdom, that's what it is.
Josh:
Yeah, morphdom.
Ben:
And changes... So you're definitely not sending back a whole page. You're sending back some HTML and so not as little bit as LiveView. Which is still a very small JSON payload.
Josh:
Sorry, I forgot, I had the same question. And actually, I forgot to give a shout out to Andrew Mason who's also on the Remote Ruby podcast now. But after the show yesterday, we were talking about... Because he works... I can't remember the author's name of StimulusReflex but he works with him at CodeFund. And yeah, so we were talking about it and he said, like... What I kind of got from him is that it should be possible to get it down to like the small amount of data over the wire as like... I think it's the same idea in theory. So I don't know if it's quite there yet but it sounds like it might get there eventually. Like, I think it's the same concept. But you're right, it does the... It uses morphdom or whatever, which is a no JavaScript library to... Or JavaScript library to do the diffing and then basically just replace just what has changed in your elements.
Starr:
I mean of course the big question is, does it work on Lambda? Because like we are using Lambda for everything.
Josh:
That's the biggest... That's the big thing-
Ben:
Stay tuned.
Starr:
Stay tuned.
Josh:
Yeah. I think part of the part of the answer to the question of like sending data over the wire is also like how you can choose how much you want to send. So you don't have to replace an entire element if you're just updating like a counter or something. Like you can actually... There's an option to like send just a counter. Like you can just send the data and then the data gets handled on the front end.
Starr:
Oh, cool.
Ben:
Well you've learned a lot from not having a computer.
Josh:
I know right? But the iPad has come in handy so that's the other pitch, other part of the story.
Ben:
So the moral story is have at least five computing devices in your home that you can use. In case two of them fail.
Josh:
Exactly. Yeah, like I never thought, that all this redundancy would come in so handy but it really has. And, we'll see fingers crossed, that I don't lose more devices over the next few days because if I go at this rate, I'm going to be...
Ben:
You'll be beating rocks together-
Josh:
Going to be like... Yeah, exactly.
Starr:
Well, should we wrap it up?
Ben:
We should.
Starr:
All right, well this has been FounderQuest. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcasts and review us. If you would like to write for the Honeybadger blog and we hire people to write, you know Rails and Elixir and you know maybe other languages tutorials, so just go to the blog honeybadger.io. Wait, that's the old way of doing... That's our old way of getting to the blog but it still works just don't link directly to that, please. Go there and there'll be a link in the top nav saying how to write for us. So I will talk to you all later. Have a great week.
Show Notes:
Links:
Voltron
Transformers
Gobots
Thundercats
Animal Crossing
Stardw Valley
Factorio
Dependabot
Gumroad
Shopify
Stripe
Pinky and the Brain
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Did you prefer Voltron over Transformers? Which team were you on?
Ben:
I guess I did, because I don't remember watching much in the way of Transformers, but I did watch a lot of Voltron, so.
Starr:
Oh really? That's a shame. Transformers were great.
Ben:
I'll take your word for...
Josh:
I like the name Voltron better. Voltron's a pretty good name.
Starr:
Well, can we all just agree the Gobots just suck? Let's just all agree to hate the Gobots.
Ben:
But I think perhaps Thundercats were better than both Voltron and...
Starr:
Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. Thundercats for life.
Josh:
Are we the Thundercats of air trackers?
Ben:
Honey badgers go.
Starr:
I don't think a honey badger is technically a cat.
Ben:
I decided to try out Animal Crossing this morning.
Josh:
Oh really?
Starr:
Oh good. How do you like it? I've been playing in too.
Ben:
Well, it's not very exciting. It's a very slow pace kind of thing.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Ben:
That's the goal. That's the point, right? And I was like, "Yah, I'll check this out. Maybe it'll help me relax." And I'm like, "Now what do I do? Now what do I do? Now what do I do?" This is not helping me relax.
Starr:
Oh yeah. It is kind of a bunch of tasks.
Josh:
That's maybe not for everyone.
Starr:
But you do get to a point where you can kind of just goof around. I got it and then I played 20 minutes every three days or something for a couple of weeks just because I was like, "I don't know if I want to go gather this wood right now." But then you get over a hump and then it's more of an open world and you can kind of just sort of make it your own.
Ben:
I think part of my problem was my son's been playing it for a while now and he's got this nice house with all this cool stuff in it and I show up and I got a tent. I'm like, "Oh. I want a nice house."
Josh:
You've got to put the work in. Got to put the time in. He plays Minecraft too, doesn't he? Or did?
Ben:
He used to. Yeah.
Josh:
Okay. Do you ever play that with him?
Ben:
Yep. Yep. Yeah. And they totally eclipsed me. It was no contest. I had, "Hey, I got two blocks together", and they've got the Taj Mahal. I'm like, "Oh, all right."
Starr:
Yeah. Everybody's gives Tom Nook such a hard time for being such a capitalist, but you know, I'm just saying, I want, I want a house loan with no interest and no payback schedule and I can pay it off reasonably with, with a couple hours work gathering nuts and berries.
Ben:
So I started playing this morning because I read an article in the Atlantic about the game and I really enjoyed one of the angles. The article was like, "Maybe this is an indication of where we can take our society, where people are doing things they want to do but not under the pressure of having to pay back a serious mortgage", and all this kind of stuff.
Ben:
And I was like, "Hmm."
Josh:
Everyone has their own island where they live with a bunch of artificially intelligent NPCs and we can occasionally visit but it's rare.
Starr:
There you go. And if you save up your Nook Miles, you can buy a ticket to an island that's covered in spiders.
Ben:
Ooh.
Ben:
Well yeah I read that those spiders are actually, that's the way you make the real bucks. You collect those tarantulas, right?
Starr:
Well I mean there's the real spider island. So I looked into this. There's the real spider island, which is just a thing in the game and then for a while there was a bug in the game. Where you could force tarantulas to spawn infinitely. But they kind of did a patch that didn't get rid of it entirely, but it kind of made it less game-breaking.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
Fun.
Josh:
So.
Ben:
So maybe I'll report back in a week or so and be like, "I love this game", and I won't be able to work for a month cause I'll be playing Animal Crossing. We'll see.
Starr:
Well I hope you. We all need some relaxation these days.
Josh:
Maybe Animal Crossing is really a metaphor for reality.
Ben:
It's the world they wish we lived in.
Starr:
Yeah, definitely.
Josh:
I wish I could spawn tarantulas at will. That would be a pretty cool defense mechanism.
Ben:
That would be pretty cool.
Starr:
Yeah. If that one doesn't work for you, I'm telling you Stardew Valley might be more your jam too.
Josh:
I've heard that one's really good. Yeah,
Ben:
I heard that I'm supposed to avoid Factorio at all costs.
Starr:
I don't even know what that is.
Ben:
Apparently it's a really addictive game. I don't know much about it because I've avoided it.
Josh:
My problem with these games is just...
Starr:
It's the one where you take one number and you multiply it by itself minus one and then you just keep doing that?
Ben:
The game goes really quickly.
Josh:
It's a pen and paper. Yeah. I don't have the attention span for, for these games anymore. That's why I just play first person shooters, just mayhem for 30 minutes to an hour and then I'm done.
Ben:
You want to get your Twitch on and then get back to real life?
Josh:
Yeah. It's rare that I get immersed in, in a game like that. Occasionally I guess one will come along, but it hasn't happened for awhile. Except for Ruby programming. I think that's really what ruined. Developing kind of ruined everything for me because that's...
Starr:
You know what? When you said that, I just realized Ruby is the Animal Crossing of the programming world.
Josh:
Is it?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. If Ruby was a game it would be Animal Crossing, which is kind of nice. So what are we talking about today?
Ben:
Talking about Animal Crossing.
Ben:
You know, since you talked about Heya in our last episode, but we didn't get around and talking about the backend of how we're actually doing Heya, I thought that'd be kind of fun to talk about because it's kind of fun to build.
Starr:
Wait, what do you mean how we're doing the back end? I thought it was an open source project that you installed in your own app and everything. So what sort of back end would that be?
Ben:
Well, we have to have a website to tell people about it and then we have to have a way to take people's money because we're actually selling licenses.
Starr:
I mean, technically they give us their money. We don't take it. They give it to us.
Ben:
You know it's kind of like Tom Nook. Yeah.
Starr:
We make them an offer they can't refuse.
Ben:
We're not going to force you to pay us, but...
Josh:
Full transparency, we haven't taken anyone's money yet.
Ben:
That's true.
Josh:
We're hoping to. This is all very much an experiment but I think we have some cool infrastructure.
Ben:
But there is the final part after the money part, which sometimes the money is zero. Then we generate a license because we want to try out this prosperity license approach where we send out this open source into the world, but we also want to see if it's sustainable by selling licenses to it. For people who are just starting out, we do that zero dollar price where they can enter a coupon code and get a license for free. There's the website, there's the selling the thing, and then there's the delivering the thing, the license.
Josh:
We have had a few people request the small business license, which is what has so far been exercising the system.
Josh:
We're using kind of a newer, it's a commercial open-source license called the prosperity public license. And what it is, is it's free license for open-source or for nonprofit use, non-commercial use with a 30-day trial for all other commercial use. So the source is completely open, which is where the open-source comes from. But if you want to use it commercially, you can use it for 30 days after which you need to buy a license for it, a commercial license.
Ben:
So optimistically speaking, we are still in the 30 day license trial period, since we only launched a week ago.
Josh:
Yes.
Ben:
Right, so who knows, three weeks from now we could have a bunch of people throwing a bunch of money at us because they love it so much.
Josh:
I you might be a little bit more optimistic than I am on that one. But that said, we have had some pretty good interest. We've had some pretty good interest and feedback in it and people seem to like it. This is our first time ever doing an open source commercial thing and it's very much like we're throwing it out there, see what happens and see what we can learn.
Starr:
Have we learned anything from the feedback that was interesting or surprising or anything like that?
Josh:
Not so far. The feedback so far is kind of like, "That's really cool. I'm going to try it out." It's been out a week or so.
Starr:
Oh okay, that's a first step.
Josh:
Yeah. But anyone who wants to can go and try it. There's no limits or anything in it without a license. It's basically just it'll put out a warning that says it's not licensed.
Ben:
I've had a few people on Twitter say, "Oh, this is the same thing I was going to do, or the same thing I did", so they're pretty excited about not having to do that work. I'm saving measure for sure.
Josh:
Yeah. You mean the actual, the sending email sequence in Rails thing?
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yep.
Josh:
Yep. I think it'll definitely get some users. I don't know how many. Of course for an open-source library like this to actually make any money, it has to have a large enough base of people trying it out and then a certain percentage of those people are going to actually pay for it. The other model we were considering was the open core Sidekiq type model, which is where are you would have a true free open-source core version of it that anyone can use (commercial or non) and then have a pro or an advanced version that you sell a license for that you have to buy.
Josh:
And the benefit of that is just that you get a much larger user base, in the beginning because a lot more people are probably willing to deploy it to their apps or production or whatever if there's no commitment or if it's true open-source in the beginning. You have to actually sell this because you only have 30 days to use it if you're a company or whatever.
Starr:
Was that intentional? I imagine that if you did an open core there might be a burst of work in the beginning because all these people who are free open-source users were like, "Hey, you should do this, you should do that whenever." Was it intentional to not do it open core so you could sort of rate limit the amount of work you have to do?
Josh:
That wasn't the primary thing but that plays into it a little bit. Ben and I definitely had conversations about even doing this at all because I didn't want to create a bunch of work for myself right now. So this very much is a side project. I've been doing this in my spare time.
Josh:
We talked about both models. I'm really interested in this model because I like the idea of not having to put a bunch of work into the open core version. If I could focus all my work on stuff that is actually paying, I like the idea of that. We talked about how we could easily go from this model to an open core model in the future, but it would have been much harder to go from an open core or even just an open-source model and go back to a paid model. Basically if we'd released this code under a more permissive open-source license, people probably would complain a lot more about it if we then walked it back to some sort of more restrictive license.
Josh:
So we figured there's not much harm in trying out this new license and just see how it works. But that said, this license, there's not that many people using this approach. For instance, Dependabot, which was recently acquired by GitHub, uses this license. But there's not a lot of data out there on how this works, how this business model with this license works. I think there's a lot to learn and I suspect that this might be more of a longer play. This might be the kind of thing that we need to keep building on it over time and give it a chance for people to see it mature a little bit before it might have any kind of major adoption.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. Can I ask you a technical question?
Josh:
Sure.
Starr:
Which is, I've always wondered about this. When people do libraries that are this sort of open-source, you have to have a license key, how does that work? How does the license key thing work?
Josh:
We a sub-licensed some code that we got from a GitLab, which is an open core model, but they use this licensing code that they wrote. They use it, I believe, to handle the license for their...What do they call it, Ben? It's the paid version.
Ben:
Yeah. Their self-hosted version has four different levels I think. You unlock different features based on which level you get. They delivered you a license file that once you add it to the GitLab installation then unlocks those features based on whatever the license gives you permission to use.
Josh:
Right. Yeah. This license is based on a public key generation. We generate a private, a private key and we sign this license file and give it to the person. Then the public key is basically embedded in the gem itself, which is how the gem knows that a license is valid.
Starr:
Okay. That makes sense. So to some degree though, it's sort of based on the honor system though, because since it's open-source you can go in and remove the license check or whatever.
Josh:
Open-source and Ruby. Yeah. It's very much the honor system. Pretty much one monkey patch would turn the entire thing off at this point. So yeah, it's, yep.
Starr:
It would be a funny smart ass thing to do. It's probably not a good business decision, but I'd be very tempted to ship it where your license key is a YAML file or something that just has one field that's like, "Has a license? True."
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's not far from the truth of what it actually is. The license file has your company name and it has the limit of users you can have since we decided to tier on that. It's a very simple YAML file that's just signed with the private key.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. Probably down the line though there'd be a little bit more sophistication. It doesn't make sense to be super protective of this new thing. We don't really even know if people want to steal it yet.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I'm a big fan of the honor system. It worked well when I did the Rails kits because people would buy a license and they would get all the code and there was nothing really stopping them from reusing it as much as they wanted or even distributing it.
Starr:
Yeah. What did you have? I know you had a help desk because I helped work on that a long time ago and other, an eCommerce storefront written in rails and stuff like that and people just modified them.
Ben:
Yeah. That worked out and people would come back and buy additional licenses when they wanted to deploy it on additional sites. I'm sure there was some cheating. I mean I'm not that naive but it worked out.
Josh:
It seems like you're always going to have cheaters. Unless you're distributing some sort of binary or something that people can't crack, which there's always going to be someone who can figure out a crack it no matter what it is it seems, but Sidekick or GitLab or anything else that is closed source but you still have to pay for it to get the pro version, you're still getting that code, aren't you? I mean, that's how that works. There's no way to hide what Ruby is once you have it.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. The whole idea that we had while working on this project was to do the minimal amount of effort to get something out the door where we could test the market and see if it would be successful at all. The license generation was one of those things. It was like, "Oh yeah, we know that GitLab does something like that, let see what they do. Oh, okay. They had this little gem", and then, "Let's use that."
Josh:
Yeah. It's just what's a little roadblock we can put in to prompt people to respect the license. Really the license itself is the thing. We could say, "You don't need a license. It's just completely honor system. If you use this for longer than 30 days, we won't know, but you will and you'll feel really bad about it."
Josh:
We're not quite that optimistic. I don't think we believe in humanity quite that much. But you know, there's a lot of people who probably would still pay under that model, but there's a good chance that they would just forget if you drop it into your app and figure I'll try this for 30 days. If it's working, hopefully you're not going to have to think about it as much.
Josh:
I probably would forget in a lot of cases to go back and be like, "Oh I need to get a license and then I need to remember to renew that license in some way."
Starr:
Yeah. I guess the renewal is probably a big reason to have an actual sort of licensing system because you need to spit out those warnings.
Josh:
Yeah. So these warnings, it prints them out and then when the license expires it prompts you, it reminds you and gives you the link again. It's very simple.
Starr:
So when this thing takes off and we really need to lock it down because we're losing tons of money through piracy, I've got this really good idea for how we could do that, which is instead of distributing this code, we could have a computer and we can run the code on our computer and then people could access it through the internet.
Josh:
I see where you're going with this.
Ben:
Yeah, that's a pretty good idea.
Starr:
That was a terrible joke. I'm sorry.
Ben:
I'll look into that. See how that works. So part of what we decided to do to get this out the door as quickly as possible was we decided that as much as we like building things, we just didn't want to build a storefront. Josh decided to go with Gumroad to actually sell this. What do you think? You'd recommend that?
Josh:
It's awesome. I set it up in three minutes or something and very simple and they actually have software licensing built into Gumroad now, which is kind of cool. I didn't know about that. You were sending me some documentation and stuff. We ultimately decided to use our approach because their approach is you have to reuse their API to verify the license remotely and we didn't really want to be pinging Gumroad every time you boot your app or something. First time cases, it seems like you get pretty far with Gumroad, which gives someone a link to buy and then it handles the checkout process and everything.
Ben:
One thing we didn't do initially, since we're not using Gumroad's licensing stuff, we were using our own, we do have to generate a license when a purchase comes through. At first we just got Gumroad's email and then we went to our console and generated it. We got tired of that. After the first person we were like, "Oh, you know, we should probably do something about this." So I threw together a quick little Lambda function.
Starr:
I love it. I'm sorry, this is the most programmery thing ever, "I got tired of it after the first one. I made a Lambda function." That's great.
Ben:
Yeah. So a Gumroad thankfully has what they call pings their web hooks that sends you a payload when a sale happens. It was pretty easy to throw together a quick little Lambda function that has a web endpoint that uses our licensing code, generates a license and sends an email to the persons with the license file.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. I think the key thing there though is that we didn't build the Lambda function first because that would've been insane. We're not getting many sales now, but I think this is something we talked about. It's a little bit of code and it was fine, I assume, for you to build it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
But yeah, we started out we use a Help Scout for our support at Honeybadger, so we created a separate, just another mailbox called Heya and had the Gumroad emails go there basically so that we could just generate one if there was a sale. So we did that and then we automated it. I think we're probably going to be releasing this Lambda and licensing code in some fashion open-source as well because it's really cool. I don't know how many lines of code between the Ruby licensing code and the Lambda code, but put Gumroad in the middle of that and anyone could recreate this with their library, which is pretty cool I think.
Ben:
Yeah. We've had a few people mentioned that they were interested in trying out a similar kind of thing where they want to sell their gem or sell their code. I think it would be fun to put out this thing that people could use and maybe if there's enough interest we can have other entryways into it. We could have a Shopify hook or maybe a Stripe hook as well.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
I guess people should ping us on Twitter if you're interested in having some sort of thing that can do licensing generation for you.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm thinking whenever I get around to it. It's been on, my long term to-do list to extract the licensing code to some gem or something that other people could use basically. We should probably do the same thing, throw that Lambda code on a repo at the very least.
Starr:
Is that the real product here, are we going to end up launching a licensing service?
Josh:
You know it could be. It could be. It seems like that's how this kind of thing could work because these are much smaller plays. We're not building a SaaS for six months and just have to make that go. I kind of like this model of we can build basically just open sourcing the tools that you regularly use that you've built, even the small ones, and then just see what sticks basically. That's kind of the way I'm looking at it.
Ben:
So I was impressed, Josh, when you set up the sales site, instead of just doing a plain old webpage, you actually put it up on a Heroku dyno so that you could actually demo Heya with people coming in. People can literally subscribe to your thing.
Josh:
Yeah, that's the other insanity of this project. It was probably a little overkill. Instead of doing a static site or something, the sales site is a fairly boilerplate just Rails app that I generated that has Heya built into it.
Starr:
Where can people find that?
Josh:
You can find on our GitHub repo. Actually if you go to Heya.email, that is the sales site. There's a link to it and you can sign up for a real time demo of Heya, because the site is running, Heya to basically send a drip email campaign that you can sign up for. It's a little meta.
Starr:
Wait, is it a drip email campaign for Heya, why people should buy it?
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
Ah, that's genius.
Josh:
Yeah. I think if you go there, there's a link to the repo that generates the campaign. So you can go and look at the Ruby code that basically sends the campaign that you're getting. Yeah.
Ben:
Shout out to MVP.css.
Starr:
Yeah, what's going on with that? Y'all have been talking about how you really have been enjoying that. What's with that?
Josh:
Initially the site, I basically generated this Rails app, generated this little campaign. It's this a very simple app. It's got one controller scaffold or something basically. The homepage is actually just the new action of a user so when you sign up, you're basically creating a user in a Rails app.
Josh:
But I wrote some content for the site, one weekend or something and just threw it in there. Basically just raw HTML, no styling. And actually my plan was basically just to leave it like that. I was just going to launch it just basically completely unstyled. You can go check, go read it. It's different. It's got some gifs and stuff. Yeah. I was going to be super web 1.0 hipster and just not style it at all, but Ben found this new CSS framework called MVP CSS, which basically it runs completely off of HTML elements. Basically you just write HTML in a certain way and it styles your page to look like a landing page basically. Is that the gist of it?
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Oh, okay. It's not necessarily even a general purpose CSS reset. It's specifically for making things that look like product pages.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Oh cool.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. It's so that if you're like us, you're trying out this little thing and you don't want to put a lot of work into it, you can have something that doesn't look like just a plain old webpage in 1994.
Josh:
There'll be two people that actually get it.
Ben:
Right, right.
Josh:
They're like, "This is awesome." Everyone's else like, "Where the hell is the...Is the style sheet not loading?"
Starr:
So I've got a question for y'all. So MVP, does that stand for minimum viable product or most valuable player?
Ben:
We know the NFL draft was yesterday, so I guess it could be either today.
Starr:
There you go. I just think MVP should steal that for their tagline.
Ben:
Meaning that the CSS is the most valuable player on your team.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah.
Ben:
Totally. Yeah. I agree. So it's been a fun project.
Starr:
So where do we go from here?
Ben:
Wow. Immediately I thought of Pinky and The Brain, "What are we doing tonight, Brain", when you said that. I don't know why I thought that when you said that.
Josh:
I think we're always doing...
Ben:
"Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world." I guess that's the next thing we're doing. Try to take over the world.
Starr:
Do we have to leave our houses for that, because that's a big no-no right now.
Ben:
I suppose not. We can do it from the comfort of our couch.
Starr:
Okay. We can hack the planet.
Josh:
Ben's talking about taking over the world of an Animal Crossing. I'm pretty sure. Right? He's going to, he's going to unseat Tom Nook.
Ben:
I think the next thing for us for Heya is see if there's actual interest. See if people want to use it and come up with any feature requests and also see if we have any things that we want to do to it.
Josh:
Yeah. That's my plan. There's a number of things, ideas I have for it. It's still a hobby project for me so I have some things that I'll get to eventually. Even if no one uses it, we're, we're still using it. I think it's gotten a pretty good response and longterm, the plan for Heya always was to pretty much replace Intercom for us that's still my plan. I think there's a lot more Intercom things that we could, that I could add to it for it to do more. There's things that we are still working on.
Starr:
Well, awesome. I'm sure as this progresses and we learn more we'll sort of keep people up to date as people follow along at home. All right. Is there anything else that we'd like to mention about Heya?
Josh:
No.
Starr:
No? Yeah, I'm sick of talking about that.
Josh:
No. It's back to error tracking.
Starr:
Back to the old diamond mine.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
All right. Well, I guess we'll wrap it up then. This has been FounderQuest. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate us on Apple podcasts. If you want to write for us. We're hiring people to write blog posts for Ruby and Elixir and stuff like that. Just take a look at our blog at honeybadger.io and look for the link, write for us, in the header and do that. See y'all later.
This week Ben, Starr, and Josh break down Heya, their freshly shipped open source email campaign mailer for Rails developers. Learn how Heya works, how it can help with GDPR and Soc 2 compliance, and how it saves Honeybadger $$$ in Intercom and Segment costs. Plus, don't miss the hot thermometer takes!
Show Notes:
Links:
Heya
Ruby Weekly
Action Mailer
Intercom
Customer.io
Segment
GDPR
Mixpanel
Soc 2
Prosperity Public License
MailCatcher
Ginsu
Flex Tape
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:Starr:
I saw some article about how some grocery stores like taking people's temperatures before they let them in.
Ben:
Yeah?
Starr:
And the one they showed actually projected, using a laser, the temperature reading on the person's forehead.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
And I thought that was so cool. And I was like, "I want one of those." And so I actually started searching for it. And I was like, "What if you want to take your own temperature?" Then you have to go to a mirror and-
Ben:
Shoot yourself in the head.
Starr:
Shoot yourself in the head. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that imagery. That's kind of gross. Oh, Lord. There are all sorts of problems with that, now that I think about it. So, yeah. We just got an old fashioned digital thermometer.
Josh:
Every other morning. You just wake up and go into the mirror and you're just like.
Starr:
I don't know if you guys have this, but I realized that I have this thing sort of hung over from childhood, which was back when I was a kid, it was pretty common still for people to have mercury thermometers.
Ben:
I still have it.
Starr:
You still have one? Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Mercury thermometers are a... I mean, it might break. But-
Ben:
It's the gold standard, man.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's the gold standard, yeah. That's what they use in chemistry labs, still use a mercury thermometer. But the one thing that I was always scared to do. They tell you when you're a kid, "Well if you bite down on it, and it breaks, then you're going to have mercury in your mouth." And that basically just means you're going to die immediately. I mean, not really. But that's the impression I got. And so even though our thermometer now is digital, I still have this anxiety. It's like, don't bite down on it. You know?
Ben:
Yeah. Honestly, I'd be more concerned about the broken glass in my mouth than I would about the mercury.
Josh:
The glass could be a problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I guess so.
Josh:
Yeah we have one of the forehead contact ones, and it works pretty good. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, the reason why we have four thermometers is we had the original, the glass one. That was our first one. And then we upgraded and got the digital one when the first kid was born. And then at some point later, we got one of those forehead ones. And that was great. And then when the older one went off to college, one of the recommendations from... They had the orientation for parents as well as orientation for the kids.
Ben:
And the orientation for parents, they said, the medical person got up and said, "If you don't send anything else with your student, send a thermometer." Because they get so many reports of kids not feeling well. They could have called the clinic and say, "Hey, I'm not feeling well." And I'm like, "Well do you have a fever?" And the kid's like, "I don't know." And they're like, "Well do you have a thermometer?" And the answer's always, "No." So they said, "So please send them with a thermometer." And so we got one. We got a thermometer and set him up. Now he's back at home, so now we have four. So that's how we have four thermometers in our household.
Josh:
Smart. Yeah, I can imagine not many college kids have a thermometer.
Starr:
All right. So today I think we're going to take a mild break from simply talking about the fact that everything outside of our little bubbles is on fire, and we're going to talk about some cool news that Josh actually shipped something, and we're going to talk about it. And that thing-
Josh:
Josh and Ben.
Starr:
Josh and Ben. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Ben.
Ben:
But mostly Josh.
Josh:
Ben did all the cool stuff.
Starr:
Yeah, I'm just saying I didn't do anything. That's all. That's why I'm announcing it. Yeah. So this week we released Heya, which is Josh's sort of email marketing gem Rails engine thing. So what does it mean to say that we released it? What's the state of it?
Josh:
Well it's been on our GitHub, if you went and looked for it, for a few months at least now. It's open source. It's just a GitHub repo. But this week we announced it and started talking a little bit about it. I posted on Reddit. And then it got picked up by Ruby Weekly this week too. So that kind of got it some attention, and more people know what it is now. Which is, it's basically a campaign mailer, like a sequenced mailer, for Rails. So it works kind of like, I don't know if you're familiar with Action Mailer? Sending you just vanilla emails in Rails. This basically feels just like Action Mailer, but it lets you send sequences of emails. And the emails within sequences can be segmented. So you can send different emails to different people who enter a campaign. So it's very similar to Intercom or Customer.io. But it's a direct plugin self-hosted in your Rails app with direct access to your user database, which is my favorite part.
Starr:
Yeah. And it's a little bit timely, just sort of accidentally, because the main reason that Josh sort of really wanted to do this, let me just talk for you, Josh. Let me speak for you.
Josh:
Yeah, please do.
Starr:
Or that we wanted to do this is because we were paying a really large amount of money to Intercom for essentially this one feature. Are we allowed to say how much money we spent? Does anybody remember?
Josh:
Yeah. Well we were paying... It was around a thousand a month, I think, at one point. And then that's also not including Segment, for instance. We were using Segment to send our data to Intercom and a few other places, and that was another $400 a month. So we were probably all in for $1500, $1400/1500 a month I would guess.
Starr:
Okay. So it's a pretty big chunk of change.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That was even with trimming the user database from time to time, to keep the cost down.
Josh:
Yeah we were doing all the stuff. We were doing all the things that people do with Intercom.
Starr:
Because they go by the user, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So you can't actually store all your users in there. You've got to-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
And when we say user, we mean user in your database, not users that can use Intercom. It's how many users of your app you are wanting to message. So we were storing just our active users, and still it was astronomical.
Ben:
Yeah. Which in fact kind of makes the product worse, because you end up... Like the users that aren't active might have sent you a request a few months ago, and if you decide to be aggressive at purging, then now you don't have that context for that user. So it's frustrating as well as expensive.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And maybe you want to send some reactivation campaigns to old users, or something like that.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Or maybe you want to get in touch with people. Having the old users in there isn't as valuable obviously as having your current users, but it's still useful, and it's kind of crappy that having all your users in there is prohibitively expensive.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
I hadn't thought about that part. If you can't send re-engage, reactivation campaigns to old users, maybe Intercom is even more expensive than we thought.
Ben:
Yeah. And also speaking for Josh, another problem that we had was just syncing the data over, because you want to define segments for people, to send them different kinds of emails depending on what they've done in the app. And always keeping that data in sync is problematic, and thus Segment.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. If you haven't ever set up Intercom before, basically you have to send all your sort of user data that you want to be able to use inside of Intercom, you have to send it to Intercom. So anytime it changes in your app, you've got to update it in Intercom. It's one of those things that's just a real pain in the neck to consistently do right, or just to maintain.
Josh:
Typically it's your user data, which consists of a collection of properties per user, so attributes. And then events. So what they're doing. The activity that is happening in your application and elsewhere in your system. And the use case for Segment is that there's all these kinds of different marketing platforms like Intercom, or for instance Mixpanel or something, that do different things with the same data, basically. And so you have to send it everywhere. So you might be sending it to six different sources, or destinations I mean. And Segment comes in and basically you can send it to them, and then they act as the central repository that sends it out to everything else. And that solves a problem, I guess, if you're using six different things, and constantly changing things, but we weren't. And I came to the conclusion that that's just crazy overkill for us. We didn't need that. And we struggled with that whole setup for years before we finally got around to replacing it. So what we have is just a little gem for Rails now, and I like it a lot.
Ben:
I had some of my own frustrations with the setup. One was if you want to create a segment, a new segment, in Intercom for a new attribute. Let's say a person has this feature. You wouldn't have that data in Intercom, because you didn't put it in there before. Maybe it's a new thing. And you have to go back and do a backfill for users that had that thing happen at some point in the past, but you weren't tracking it. You weren't sending it to Intercom yet. So that got us. It's just annoying how you have to go, "Oh, okay. I want to email these people. Oh, but the data's not up there. I have to go send it over there."
Ben:
And then from a privacy standpoint too, me being the compliance person, I get kind of twitchy when we have to send data out to third parties. And of course being GDPR compliant, we have to tell our customers where we're sending the data that we process. And giving this to Segment, giving this to Intercom, and whoever else that we're sending data to. And it's just more kind of a hassle.
Josh:
The GDPR made that a lot more... because the user case... When we signed up for Segment, it was because we didn't really know what we needed, I think. Like what tools were going to stick. We were trying a bunch of things, as I recall. And I think we were trying Mixpanel, we were trying Intercom, we were trying different things. We hooked it up to our Google Analytics. And the real nice thing back then was that you could basically just turn it on with the click of a button in Segment, and your data starts showing up. So you can try any service basically without any integration, once you do the first integration to Segment.
Josh:
But after GDPR, it's like sure, you can click all those buttons, but then you got to add like six different new things to your DPA, and go through and notify all of your customers that you did that. And that alone, it kind of like talks us out of trying new things, to be honest.
Ben:
That's true.
Starr:
Yeah. I feel like I should mention that GDPR is a privacy sort of regime that was instituted by the European Union a while back, I think. So basically if you send data to third parties, you've got to notify your users if you send that user's data to a third party. Basically you have to get consent for everything.
Ben:
If they are just doing your stuff, then it's fine. But then even that though is for GDPR, it's protective. But there's SOC 2. There's the other kind of compliance that they've been working on. And that is different, because that, every vendor that you use that you send any kind of data to, you do have to keep track of. You do have to make sure that they are also doing the same kind of principles that you are committing to doing with SOC 2.
Starr:
It's a lot more strict.
Ben:
Yeah, it is. So you have to keep track of all that, and that's a hassle too. So any third party that you can remove from receiving your data is a good thing.
Josh:
Yeah, and this is making it, especially for small businesses that don't have people to sit around and just deal with this stuff all day, as Ben has found out. Yeah.
Starr:
So how far in the SOC 2 process are we, Ben? If you're comfortable sharing that.
Ben:
Yeah. We are getting close. And by close, we're probably within months.
Starr:
Oh, really?
Josh:
I was going to be like, is that a few years out?
Starr:
Because you've been working on this for a year already, right?
Ben:
I don't know if it's been a year. But it has definitely been at least six months. But, yeah. We did this past week sign an agreement with an auditing firm. So we are on track to actually get that done. The one thing that's really cool that I didn't know about, until I talked to this auditing firm, is we've had customers asking us for our SOC 2 report, which we don't have, because we haven't gone through an audit. And so what I've been telling customers is, "Sorry. We don't have that. Here are the things that we're doing. But we're working towards that."
Ben:
But the thing I learned this week from that auditing firm was, they're actually happy to give you basically an engagement letter saying that, "Honeybadger has engaged with such and such firm to do this compliance audit." And that's a way for you to actually somewhat prove to people who are asking for this report that it's not here yet, but it's on the way.
Josh:
That's cool.
Starr:
Oh, nice. That's great. That's great.
Ben:
It's pretty cool.
Starr:
Yeah, and when that happens, we will be one of very few companies in the space that actually offer this, I think. Offer SOC 2 compliance. Which is going to be important, because if you want to offer SOC 2 compliance, then you got to have your error report handling service that's also SOC 2 compliant.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Another cool thing that I didn't really think about is this helps us with even future things that we might do, because I assume now that our company is SOC 2 compliant, as long as we follow these guidelines for anything new we build, that is also compliant, right? So this kind of goes a long way it seems into the future for helping us out.
Ben:
Yes. Yeah. That's true. It definitely gives a good selling point. Part of the compliance audit is you do give them a system description.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
Basically you describe what you do, how you do it, where does data go, so that they can get an idea of kind of what the risks might be. So if we create a new line of business, let's say. We would have to amend that description and say, "Okay, now we're also doing this." And then have the next audit include that. But, yeah. You would be definitely starting from a much more advanced point than starting from scratch. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. That's pretty cool.
Starr:
But you know what? It doesn't even matter for Heya, because it's self hosted.
Ben:
True that.
Josh:
Exactly.
Starr:
Anything that a business self hosts, you don't have to get a third party compliance report from them, or anything like that, because it's on your own hardware.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Indeed.
Josh:
Yeah, that's one of the big selling points, I think. Yeah.
Ben:
Speaking of selling, it's not just an open source gem. Right, Josh?
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Yes. It does have a price attached to it. So we're using this new... It's a new open source license called the Prosperity Public License. And what this is, is it's kind of like a hybrid. So it's free for nonprofit or noncommercial companies. It has a 30 day trial for anyone else. And then after that, if you're a commercial business, then you're required to pay. We actually are also extending that, the free version, to any small businesses, like bootstrappers and stuff. So if you have less than 1000 users in your application, then you can use it for free, just like as if you were a nonprofit, basically.
Starr:
Because let's be honest, you probably are nonprofit.
Josh:
Pre-profit, Starr.
Starr:
Pre-profit. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I didn't mean to be too negative there.
Josh:
Yeah. So, yeah. The price tag right now is $99 per year, which is pretty low. We weren't really sure what to charge for it, and it's a new gem, so that is likely to change in the future as more people use it, and I have a lot of ideas to add to it. So if we actually get there, I think it'll be going up a little bit. But, yeah. That's kind of the introductory price.
Starr:
Yeah. We discussed this I think in the last conclave, which was that yeah, we're going to price it, give it sort of introductory pricing just to test the waters and see how people respond, see how people use it in the real world and everything.
Josh:
Yeah. This whole model, we've explored the open core model a little bit. That's kind of what Sidkiq, for instance, the Ruby background processing gem. It has a free, completely open source, true open source version. And then it has a pro that's closed source. A pro version. And you can buy that and it comes attached with a separate license, I think. But this is different from that in that everything actually is open source. You can go read all of the code on GitHub right now. So there's much more of an element of the honor system in this approach. It's kind of untested. Uncharted territory, at least for us, especially. So we're kind of going to see how it works. But, yeah.
Josh:
Actually we came up with some pretty cool licensing key scheme, which basically we can generate license keys for people when they purchase. Right now, the only thing it is does is it basically removes a warning that says, "This is the free version." I don't know if we we'd actually ever gate features or anything like that within the gem. But that would all totally be doable.
Starr:
So we mentioned earlier that it's kind of a replacement at least for our use case of Intercom where we were having these email campaigns that can be triggered by things, by users' actions within the application. They are sequences, meaning you get sort of emails dripped out across time. And in Intercom, I know how you do things like that, how you set this up, where you go into this user interface and you say, "Okay, I'm going to define this segment of my users, which is users meet criteria x, y, and z. And then for each of these users in this segment, do this series of emails." And Heya is a completely different approach. And I was just wondering if maybe we could talk a little bit about what setting up one of these campaigns actually involves. Maybe like an actual example of some way that we're using it in our app. Just to give people a little taste.
Josh:
So currently there is no UI, no graphical UI for Heya. It's all command line and Ruby files, which we like, because we're Ruby developers, and we're mostly just managing the content ourselves. So we don't mind digging into the Ruby to add new emails, or create new campaigns and stuff. So I really like that approach. I kind of look at this like... So basically with Heya, every campaign has its own file. It's one Ruby file where you would define the steps of the campaign. So each step has a name. And each step has basically an email that is sent. So you can have options for each step, like how long it should wait between them. You could segment who's the step actually going to send to. Or people that don't match, you're going to skip to the next one.
Josh:
Like I said, it's similar to Action Mailer. With Action Mailer in Rails, Rails stores those mailers in app/mailers, the directory. Campaigns with Heya are stored in app/campaigns. So it's very similar mapping there. So each campaign maps to a file. And then the templates and stuff are all basically just Action Mailer to the hood. So if you know how to build in Action Mailer a Rails email, you know how to build a Heya email, basically.
Starr:
Yeah, and there's a couple things that may not be completely obvious I just want to call out that are actually huge benefits of doing it this way. It's not just about we want to be programmers and do things in this programming way. So a couple things. First of all, when you define your email sequences in code, these get checked into your version control system, right?
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
So if you screw it up, you can go back and revert to a previous version. You can do all this stuff. Which if you've ever edited campaigns in a tool like Intercom, it's just this visual thing.
Josh:
Yeah. It's terrible.
Starr:
Yeah. Who knows. Who knows. You have no way of tracking anything about how that's changed over time, or who originally set it up, or anything like that. So that's one big benefit. And the other big benefit is that you can actually test these things. You can write unit tests to make sure that your email sequence is executing in the way that you expect it to, given certain conditions. Like users with certain attributes and stuff like that.
Josh:
There's also segmenting, which is tying into the testability benefit. To me it's huge, because most of the email automation tools are fine if you're just doing the bare minimum, like if you're just sending a drip email sequence, basically. But if you start to get into complicated workflows, or you have a lot of complicated segmenting logic, like different groups of users who are getting different emails at different times, and all that sort of stuff. You're basically programming within those interfaces, because you're creating all this logic that is going to dictate what the system does. However, testing does not exist in that universe. So aside from just your standard QA. Using it, trying to make sure it works.
Starr:
Is this why every month I get some apology email from some random companies?
Josh:
Yeah. "Oh, we didn't mean to send that."
Starr:
"Oh, sorry. We didn't mean to tell you that your account was expiring," or "you needed to change your password," or whatever.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And to be honest, it's surprising to me that that doesn't happen more often. I suspect it actually probably does, but it's email, so you can't necessarily always see what's happening either, or notice it. But, yeah. It's very easy for your workflow logic to misfire or not work like you thought you set it up to work. With Heya, the segments are basically, well not basically, they are just Ruby code that's basically on your user model. So a segment is literally just a proc that a user has passed into, and then you can return true or false, and that user is in that segment. So you can test that.
Josh:
You probably already have most of your segmenting logic built into your user model already. At least we did. And that's another problem we had with using the third party, using a bunch of services. They all have their own versions of segmenting. And if you're doing it at the edge, if you're building your segments into Intercom, then basically if you want to use those segments anywhere else, you also have to build them into those other tools. So then you're managing custom logic in a bunch of different places with duplication, which is just, yeah. It's terrible.
Ben:
Yeah, I think it's so cool that you can have your logic right there in the app for which emails get sent when. You can check and is this user paying? Or does this user have this feature? Or when was the last time this user logged in? All that kind of stuff is right there, because you are dealing with the user model that's in your app.
Josh:
I've learned over time that's a best practice in general. I like to keep my segmenting logic as close to my application and my single copy of user data as possible. And that's one reason you probably don't want to just send all of your properties to services like Intercom, because then you end up basically... If all you have are your properties, you're having to recreate those segments based on the property values on changes and stuff. Whereas if you actually computed your segments in your application and then sent them out, you have that, the result of that to Intercom. Or all of your other tools. Then they're all getting the same thing and you're not duplicating the logic, basically.
Starr:
So let me throw out an example and see if this is what you're actually talking about. So you're talking about instead of just saying... Imagine your user table in your database has a field that's like projects count that has the number of projects this user has created. Instead of sending that directly to Intercom, and then Intercom being like, "Well we want to have low usage people." So we're going to create a new segment in Intercom that says if projects count is less than five, or whatever, do this thing. So you're suggesting the way you would prefer to do that is to do that in the code itself and send maybe an attribute for that user that says low usage user directly to Intercom.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And then just check that sort of Boolean inside of Intercom?
Josh:
Exactly. Yeah, because you're adding a conditional, so that's logic. Basically you have the if statement in Intercom if you're saying project count is less, or whatever, than five.
Starr:
You know what? That just sounds like a whole lot of work anyway. It would be so much easier if you just did this all in your code and yeah, that way you could just have a single copy of your data. You could have a single copy of your logic. You wouldn't have to be sending stuff all over the place.
Josh:
Exactly. With Heya you don't have to worry about-
Starr:
I mean, who are we? FedEx?
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. Well I think Segment is, or something. I don't know. It's interesting though. The martec industry, which is marketing technology, that's the cool word for all of this stuff.
Starr:
It sounds really cool.
Josh:
Companies that are dealing with this problem on a mass scale are the reason for Segment's existence. Segment is solving that problem for companies that can't just build everything into their app, for whatever reason. So it's interesting. One of the features that Segment came out with, within the last couple years anyway, I feel like it was within the last year, is the ability to basically you can do that. They now have segments where you can define your segmenting logic in Segment. And it basically stores it in your data warehouse. And then they forward those values on. So basically they're computing your segments in one location. They're kind of acting as that intermediary. And then they send the values out. So it's the same thing.
Josh:
But that led me to think, why do we need Segment in there if at this point we're only using a couple things in the first place? So I kept just walking it back and realized we really just need to send some emails with some logic, and Ruby's great for that. We love Ruby. So let us use Ruby.
Starr:
Yeah. The only downside really here is that a person who's not a developer realistically can't add a new email, can't do any of that. But honestly, with all the stuff we've been talking about, about all the work it takes to send this data to Intercom and stuff, it seems like half the time a pure marketing person wouldn't be able to do that anyway, because they'd be relying on some data that wasn't present, or something like that.
Josh:
It's a lot to manage. I think, again, companies that have big marketing departments with a bunch of people that can dedicate their entire workdays to managing that stuff, sure. But it's been a lot for me to manage as a developer doing marketing. So it's got to be a lot for a non-developer doing marketing to do the same thing, or more.
Starr:
Definitely.
Josh:
Heya also supports Markdown, actually via a different gem which is really cool called Maildown. So it's very easy. You could have your marketing people, non-technical people, most people are learning to write Markdown these days. So you can still have non-technical people actually producing content, for instance, write in Markdown. Basically, you just copy it in, and that's it.
Starr:
Oh, that's awesome.
Josh:
So it's really not that hard to set these things up.
Starr:
Can I just also mention one other cool thing about the testing? It may not actually have much to do with Heya, but the fact that Heya is built into Rails and it uses... Does it use Rails Action Mailer stuff under the hood?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
Yeah, you can use basically all of that stuff to your benefit.
Starr:
Yeah. So what that means is that you can actually test the content of your emails.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know if our beautiful listeners have ever been setting up a campaign in a tool like Mailchimp, or whatever, and you find that when you send it, the mail merge tags didn't work right, or whatever. And yeah, you can send test emails, and you can do all this stuff. But it's so awkward, and it's so easy to miss things. So just making sure that the email is rendered correctly with all the mail merge tags in there. With maybe different types of data, different links of strings and stuff, and being able to sort of look at that. And in addition to the unit test, Rails also has a... I forget if they built this in is at this point. Do they have the... Is it built in where?
Josh:
The previews?
Starr:
What?
Josh:
The previews.
Starr:
The previews. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. It is.
Starr:
It's got a built in preview thing now where you can, by now I mean like within the past decade, where it runs a little server and you can basically see any emails that it sends out, like the actual HTML of it in a browser, like a mail client. And it's so cool. All that infrastructure is amazingly useful.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. So you really don't have to send test emails at all when you're building a campaign with this approach, because you're doing a test driven approach, so you're doing the testing with whatever, RSpec MiniTest, or whatever. And then if you do, of course you probably do want to see what the emails look like. There's a lot of different tools in Rails that basically can act as a... There's MailCatcher, for instance, that will act like an email server and let you see what it's sending out. So it's a very nice integrated environment to build out your marketing campaigns, basically.
Ben:
And then there's also localization, right?
Josh:
Yes.
Ben:
You can use those localization strings.
Starr:
Oh, shut up, Ben. We're including localization too?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
We can't afford this. We can't afford to do it. Stop the recording. We can't afford this.
Ben:
We're giving the whole store away.
Starr:
Yeah. You're giving away too much, Ben.
Josh:
You know what the best part of all of this is, is basically we're just selling you Rails. Pretty much what Heya does is it's the scheduling which is the magic, the scheduling and the segmenting. But even that, all of that stuff under the hood is taking advantage of all the awesome stuff that you get in Rails for free as well. So it's an extremely good deal.
Starr:
I feel like if this Honeybadger thing doesn't work out, we can always just sort of go on the roadshow and do some sort of super shammy roadshow at fairs and carnivals and stuff.
Josh:
Just be like Rails advocates, or something.
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
Or is this non-tech? Like we're going to go just to the roadshows?
Starr:
No. Like super shammies.
Josh:
Okay. Yeah. That's nice.
Starr:
Yeah. Or whatever. Like Ginsu knives or-
Ben:
For a limited time, every purchase of Heya comes with a free roll of Flex Tape.
Starr:
Oh, there you go. Flex Tape. Yeah.
Josh:
Flex Tape. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. We talked about how much you love that stuff.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
I feel like we need the technical version of Flex Tape. You could make a lot of money if you have the technical version of Flex Tape.
Ben:
It's called Perl.
Starr:
Yeah. It's called Perl? Oh. It's like your queue's dropping jobs. Your web servers are falling down. Just put some Flex Tape on it.
Josh:
Slap some Perl on it.
Ben:
Totally.
Josh:
So in the future, right now Heya is basically what we just described. It's a campaign mailer. It's all in. It's a developer tool in Ruby. There's a lot of interesting things that we can do with it in the future though that I think could be interesting. So for instance, I think I just said interesting like five times. So for instance, the way I designed the campaign scheduler and basically the DSL that you use to build these campaigns in Ruby, it's designed so that it could potentially also work with a UI. So we could actually build a graphical user interface for this that would mount it to your Rails app, and then you could have your marketing people add campaigns and manage the content in them, and all that normal stuff. So I haven't decided if that's actually something that I would want to add, because personally, I prefer the way we just described, for all the reasons we just said. But it's got some interesting technical possibilities.
Ben:
That'll be the Heya platinum edition.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Could be. Yeah.
Starr:
I've been feeling-
Josh:
I guess we'll see if enough people use it. Hopefully I'll get some feedback and see what they want, and then I'll probably just build that.
Starr:
Yeah, I have a feeling a lot of this is just going to depend on the feedback we get from people who use it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So if you're a Rails developer, you should go and check it out and use it, and ask us to do some stuff with it. And we will.
Josh:
Yeah. And you can find it at Heya.email. That's the domain name. Heya.email.
Starr:
Heya.email?
Josh:
H-E-Y-A.
Starr:
And can I just make a suggestion? So in these uncertain times, we're all going to be tasked with cutting expenses and doing all this stuff. And some of us may face a choice of okay, do we need to cut out the expense of our error monitoring system? Which is a hard choice. But I'm just saying, Intercom is in general much more expensive to use than Honeybadger is. And so we are graciously offering you this chance to cut Intercom instead of Honeybadger.
Josh:
We're offering them in our place?
Starr:
Yeah. We're offering them in our place, because that's just how we like to do business.
Ben:
A+, would offer again.
Starr:
Would offer again.
Josh:
Got it.
Starr:
And honestly, we got to claw back some of that money that we gave them.
Josh:
We gave them a lot of money.
Starr:
Yeah. We can get some of that back now.
Ben:
Yeah, that makes me think, we did have a process for migrating off of Intercom and onto Heya, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So we probably document that for people who are also interested in moving off of Intercom.
Josh:
I've got a bunch of things I should write. I've got a list of documentation stuff. But yeah, I think it would be cool to kind of go through the process that we came up with for migrating, because there's a number of different steps, different points. We haven't even talked... I think we talked about maybe in a previous episode, but our move to HelpScout from Intercom was the first step in all of this too, because initially we used more of Intercom. So we were using it for support as well as for onboarding emails. So the first step was to get our support out of there. Which we're much happier with, I think, in general as well. And then yeah, basically for us, it just left the emails we were sending. So that's where Heya came in. And once we moved to that, we were able to ditch Intercom entirely.
Starr:
So you're saying the next step for Heya is to build a support system tool called HeYelp?
Josh:
If I do, that will be the name, for sure.
Starr:
Okay. Thank you.
Ben:
I love that. I love that name.
Josh:
Yeah. I got to go. I should go snag that gem name, just in case.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So it sounds like we're wrapping up. Anybody have anything else they'd like to add?
Ben:
Nope.
Starr:
This has been FounderQuest. If you enjoyed listening to us, go give us a review on Apple Podcasts, whatever it's called. And if you want to write for us, we are hiring people to write in the vein of Ruby tutorials, Elixir tutorials. We talked about maybe getting Node. Maybe trying something in Node. I don't know. But, yeah. It would have to be good one. So go to our blog. Look at the top navigation bar area. There's a "write for us" link. And read that page and contact me in the manner specified. I do accept bribes. Just FYI. So this has been FounderQuest. And we'll see you guys later.
Show Notes:
Links:
Tuple
Google Hangouts
Jitsi
WebRTC
Notion
Epictetus
Sphere
Andromeda Strain
Stillness is the Key
Chopin
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Josh:
I see we've got doom and gloom on the agenda today.
Starr:
Oh yeah. I put doom and gloom on the agenda.
Ben:
It's a good thing you had that reminder that there is doom and gloom, because otherwise we'd forget.
Starr:
I mean, we do tend to be a little bit flip. Or, by we, I mean me. So, you know-
Josh:
It's just my way, the jokes are my way of coping with the world.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. It's ... We're joking through the tears now. So in the past couple of episodes of FounderQuest, trademark, we kind of just were dealing with the fallout of having to be home, in quarantine, and all of that. Just sort of talking about how it's affected our work lives and stuff. We really hadn't, at that point, stopped to figure out exactly, okay, what does this mean in terms of our business? Because there is obviously an economic downturn in progress, and we don't really know how that's going to pan out. So yeah, that's what this podcast is going to be about. Since then, we sort of went into this seclusion, we had our first ever remote conclave. We'll talk a little bit about that, and the process we used for that, which actually turned out to be kind of awesome. Yeah. So we're still here, though, right? We're still shipping errors to people.
Josh:
We are.
Ben:
Yeah, we're still ...
Josh:
Yeah, well-
Ben:
Still catching errors.
Josh:
We missed a podcast last week for the first time in a while, I think.
Ben:
Yeah, I think the doom and gloom were hitting us, it was getting real.
Josh:
Yeah, it was hitting us last week. I don't know about you, you all, but I was just kind of too bummed out to really record.
Ben:
Yeah, I was kind of in the same boat. Since we had been talking about Covid the past couple of weeks, I was like, "You know what? I just don't want to record another podcast about Covid."
Josh:
Can we record another ... Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I think everybody is kind of sick of it at this point. I know I am. I was ... Last night, I was sitting on the couch with my partner, and we were chatting. I was just like, I've got to think about something to talk about other than the state of the world, other than ... Like our kid, who we're with constantly now, because she's home from daycare. It was ... Food, like cooking was, I think, our savior then. We both like to cook, we've been actually eating very well, because who knows how long that's going to last, right? So you might as well enjoy life while you've got it.
Josh:
When you got all of this time on your hands.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. It's ...
Josh:
That's all you have to do.
Starr:
Yeah. It's weird. It's like there is certain tasks you can do with a kid. You can cook dinner with a kid, you know, underfoot. But you can't really record a podcast with a kid underfoot. You can't really write with a kid underfoot. I don't know. By underfoot, I mean climbing on top, and hitting you with the broom, and doing all that fun stuff that kids do.
Josh:
Yeah. You did, you recorded a ... Well, not recorded, but you all did a ... DIdn't you do a Zoom session with your daycare a few weeks back, or something like that?
Starr:
Oh my gosh, yes. We did.
Josh:
All the kids.
Starr:
It was cute. But let me tell you, I had a flipping panic attack doing IT support for that call. Because I had it all set up, the computer was hooked up to the TV, so that all the little kids would be big, so that it would be ... I don't know, I just though it would be nicer. I was like, "Okay, well, I'm just going to move this laptop up here," and in doing so, I jostled the HDMI cable, which caused the connection to the TV to go down. Then that, for some reason, that caused my computer to completely freeze up for like five minutes.
Josh:
Naturally.
Starr:
Yeah. Until it just magically popped back up like nothing had happened.
Josh:
Oh, did it come back, was everyone still there?
Starr:
No, they were gone.
Josh:
Oh, okay.
Starr:
Like, I don't know if it rebooted, I don't know if it just-
Josh:
Yeah, it dropped, and then, yeah, it just came back.
Starr:
I don't know if the screen just shut off. But I was trying to force power it down and everything. But it's just like, "Nope, sorry. We're on break."
Ben:
Speaking of Zoom, I guess we could mention that we've been playing with alternatives this week, right? We use Zoom with our podcast, but we decided this week, with all of the security craziness around Zoom, we decided, "Let's try some other stuff that's out there." We tried Hangouts, and we tried Jitsi, and they're just not as good as Zoom, unfortunately.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, I mean, Zoom got one thing, at least, right, which might be the cause of their security concerns. But it's very easy to use. It works well. So there is very low friction. But apparently, there is also very low friction for randos to join your call, and yell at you.
Starr:
Well, the video conferencing just works better. I'm sorry, but it's like, that's ... It seems like all the web based ones all have a similar ... I don't know, they all have a bit more glitchy-ness in terms of video and it's just kind of annoying.
Ben:
Yeah, that to me is it. Zoom is just, the video is better, period.
Starr:
And I wonder if that's because they're all... The web ones, I assume all use web RTC and that's probably just running Chrome's web RTC, I don't know, stuff under the hood. I can't believe even-
Josh:
Well, Ben set up a self hosted one that used web RTC.
Ben:
Yeah, I did see.
Josh:
And had pretty similar results.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, I found this awesome Terraform recipe for deploying a Jitsi instance, and it was great.
Josh:
That's cool.
Ben:
It was pretty awesome. But yeah, just the video quality just wasn't there. But hey, if we ever decide to do huge meet the Honey Badgers kind of thing with our customers, then that would be a good way to go, right?
Josh:
Yeah, that would.
Starr:
Oh totally. That'd be a great way to go.
Starr:
Okay. So yeah, taking us back to last... I wish I had one of those harp sound effects for flashbacks.
Josh:
Yeah, we could throw that in.
Starr:
Yeah. So taking us back to last Friday, we did have a call that was... Normally we would be recording the podcast at 10:00 but instead we did a call because I had been looking at some numbers in preparation for our conclave and given the economic situation, I was feeling nervous about those numbers. And I think Ben had also been looking at numbers around that. And so we decided to have a serious business meeting instead of doing the podcast.
Starr:
And as a result of that, that was one of the shittiest days of my business career, guys, because we had to decide to postpone our new hire who we'd actually already made an offer to, had accepted, it was a done deal. And we had to walk back on that and postpone in as nice of a way possible, in a way that doesn't... We try not to leave them out to dry or anything, but we just couldn't go through with a hire. And so yeah, that really sucked.
Josh:
She was going to be starting, what, the end of this month?
Starr:
Yeah, I think so.
Josh:
It was going to be a little later, but we moved it up. We had moved it up due to the whole situation. Yeah, it sucked.
Ben:
Yeah. That was absolutely brutal. Brutal. Top negative thing I think that has happened since starting Honeybadger. Yeah, that was rough.
Josh:
Yeah. Ben had to be the one to break the news. Ben, you've pretty much driven the process, the hiring process. So yeah, Ben had to pull in on that one.
Ben:
Starr was gracious enough to offer to do that and take that one for me. But yeah, I had been the one that had done most interaction with all the candidates, so it seemed like it was more reasonable for me to do that. But like Star, you mentioned, we were looking at finances, we were getting ready to start our conclave on the following Monday and so we were getting ready for that. And so we decided to have that emergency meeting on Friday instead of doing our podcast. And talking through that, walking through that was just brutal as we looked at our finances.
Ben:
We're at this point, back to where we were in January. We've had enough cancellations or churn or whatever, what have you, people not signing up, all of the above, that now our revenue numbers are back where they were at January. And we do play the numbers pretty conservatively when it comes to money. We don't try to spend ahead of revenue and we had the budget for that hire, and now we don't, and that's just heartbreaking.
Starr:
Yeah, the budget can just go away like that, I guess. Sometimes things don't continue on like you expect them to. So we had to make that decision. Ultimately it was the right call because we had to protect our current employees and everything and I don't know, had we gone through with the hire, we would have been in a situation where down the road, even though we had savings and everything, we would have put ourselves in a situation where we would have probably not been able to keep her on after a while, and that seemed like even worse than just... It seemed like the kindest thing in the circumstances was just to take the hit now and just try and deal with it now.
Josh:
Yeah. I mean, I think we're very conservative when it comes to this stuff, so yeah, I think we also want to make sure that we are taking care of our other employees too. We want to make sure that the people that we can employ, that we can employ them well and that they don't have to worry. Everyone's got a worry, but we'd like to reduce that worry or minimize that worry as much as we can.
Ben:
Yeah, I totally feel a responsibility. We have five employees and their families. It's not just us. There's a crowd of us now that we have to take care of.
Josh:
Yeah. So it was a real bummer. I had gotten into my head. I'd already made the, her coming on and being a part of the team, part of the way I was looking at the company. So it was already like losing one of our team members a little bit.
Starr:
Yeah, and she was so awesome too. That's a extra shitty thing. It wasn't just like we had found somebody who was adequate. I was really excited about working with her but...
Josh:
Yep. Well, I don't know, I think, like I was telling Ben, I think I'd been in a little bit of denial that this whole situation was going to affect us, at least affect us strongly. And it feels like over the last week or so, I've been kind of, you know the five stages of grief or whatever? I feel like I'm in the denial. I was in the denial phase and I don't know if I'm moving to anger or what. I guess we'll see. But yeah, it's a lot to happen in such a short period of time. Well, like 30 days or a little over 30 days that we've been dealing with this and we go from moving into an outlook of hiring a new person, we had some pretty cool events lined up and things for this year, and then to go to like conferences basically don't exist anymore and everyone's going out of business, yeah, it's a pretty...
Starr:
I feel like we should clarify that we're very much not going out of business.
Josh:
No.
Starr:
When we're talking about-
Josh:
Yeah, so...
Starr:
When we're talking about things affecting us, at this point we're talking about a decrease in new signups. Like they're still happening, they're just happening at a decreased rate, and also we don't have a ton of data. We don't know. This has been going on for a couple weeks, so we don't really know how it's going to pan out in terms of that.
Josh:
It's like, all things considered, I think we're doing pretty well. I know people who are taking much harder of a hit than we are and it really sucks, and I hope we don't continue to see decline in growth like we are, but I think everyone's experiencing this to some extent by now. Like I can't image, unless you're maybe Zoom or Slack or Tuple, shout out, but unless you're just really lucky to be in one of those industries that are seeing a boom just from people from working from home, I cannot imagine you're not seeing a hit to your numbers at this point.
Josh:
I think we're probably in the same boat as everyone and all things considered, we're in a pretty good business. Our actual business is a pretty good business to be in right now, I think, because we're kind of one of the last things that people would cut. Like you don't cut your error tracking unless it's pretty dire.
Starr:
Yeah, we were talking about all the different ways we could capitalize on this grand human tragedy, right? Because right now, you really don't want churn. And what causes churn? Errors. There you go. So, I think we're just-
Josh:
Being the cutthroat capitalists that we are.
Starr:
I just think we should set email to blast and just go balls to the walls with it, right?
Ben:
Sadly, as we've learned, the other thing that causes churn is the whole cratering of the economy, so...
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
But mostly errors.
Ben:
Mostly errors.
Starr:
Mostly errors.
Ben:
If you had a lot of errors then the economy could crater even worse, so you don't want to have errors.
Starr:
That's true.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Right. But we have been affected by COVID in other ways, not just our revenue and not just the state of our minds, but also in how we do conclaves, so we talked about that before and how we get together, we meet at our secret vault, literally a bank vault in Olympia, Washington, and we chat.
Josh:
Not a good idea under the current circumstances.
Starr:
No, we don't.
Josh:
A vault is the last place that we all want to be together.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah, we are already worried about the limited air supply, now that's just too much of a risk, right?
Josh:
Yeah. Unless we have like some heavy duty filters in there.
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. So in order to be wise and take heed our fine governor's admonition to stay home, we have decided to not do our conclave in person this quarter and instead try an online version, and we did that this past week, so every day, Monday through Thursday, we spent an hour and a half talking about a different aspect of the business, talked about finances and product and marketing and then did our typical quarterly plan, and I think the whole process went really well. I really enjoyed. I mean, it was a bummer not to be able to be in person and hang out with my fine co-founders, but it was quite nice, actually. I liked it.
Josh:
Yeah, I did too.
Starr:
And there's a couple things I liked about it specifically, which are, first of all, an hour and a half a day for four days, like you're approaching each topic sort of with a fresh mind and you've had a chance to sleep on the previous day's discussion, whereas in a normal conclave, we only talk about all this stuff basically towards the end of it. We're all really kind of tired and itching to get out of there, and so it's hard to give the things that you talk about later in the day the same level of attention.
Starr:
And then also just from sort of a, I don't know, logistical point of view, I liked what we did in terms of the way we have Zoom going in one window and in another window we had our sort of conclave document open in Notion, which allows collaborative editing, and I imagine you can do the same thing in Google Docs or whatever, but it essentially allowed us to... It's just kind of like a skeleton of a document. It just has the headings, and then as the meeting progressed, we just kind of filled it in. And it was really nice because as one person was talking, the other person, if they had something they wanted to add to that, you could add it as a little item in the list so then you didn't forget to say it.
Josh:
It felt more efficient.
Starr:
It did, and it's like we kind of have done that in our in-person meetings too, like I have had that document open, but it's just not as... Yeah, like when you're in a conference room talking, it's like you're not really in a good position to, I don't know, it discourages you from sort of looking at your screen and typing when somebody else is talking because you're ignoring them, but with this setup you're actually paying attention to them because they're right there.
Ben:
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. We have better note-taking and a better, I think, capturing of the things we've talked about because we were right there in Notion writing things down as we're talking about them, versus, like you said, it's uncomfortable and kind of awkward to be chatting with someone face-to-face and then look down at your keyboard and start typing whatever you were just talking about. The way that I set up my screen is I had the Zoom window right under my webcam, so I'm kind of looking at you and the camera at the same time, and then I had Notion right under that, so it was all in my same vertical line of view and so it was really easy for me to just look up and down quickly and I don't have to feel like I'm ignoring you when I'm typing something.
Starr:
That's a good idea. So once this crisis ends and we can go back to meeting in-person, I just want to suggest one way we could maybe keep some of that is that, so, we get a really big mirror, and we put it on the wall, and then we all sit on the same side of the conference table facing the mirror, and then that way yeah, that way we can look at each other and be typing at the same time.
Ben:
Or we could just not get together and just keep doing it on Zoom.
Josh:
We could do it, yeah.
Starr:
That's music to my introvert heart there.
Josh:
That's the real plan.
Starr:
To my introvert ears.
Ben:
We may like each other, but we don't really have to-
Starr:
We don't really like each other. I mean, not in-person like.
Josh:
In-person like, is that a new-
Ben:
It's a new level of relationship, right?
Josh:
It's the new like-like-
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
... it's in-person. I don't in-person like you, I just remote like you.
Ben:
I Zoom like you, but I don't really in-person like you, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, are you willing to be exposed to somebody's droplets? No.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Nobody.
Ben:
I saw a tweet the other day, it was some woman, she said, "You know guys, now you have to learn how to court again because you can't just come up to me and say whatever, right? Now you have to actually come up with something to write to me. In fact, I think you need to start getting on that poetry right now."
Josh:
There some story I saw, I don't know, clickbait story I saw in passing recently, where a guy asked a girl out with his drone on the other building. It was a high rise or something, high rise apartments. That's getting pretty... yeah, clever.
Ben:
Pretty clever, yeah.
Starr:
Maybe it's just me, but I think both of those are terrible ideas. They're both of the sort of thing... I don't know, I just feel like you need to wear a fedora hat when you do either of those.
Josh:
No, I mean you could wear the fedora, but she'd never know, or they'd never know. I think what you would probably want to do is put the fedora on your drone.
Starr:
Can I tell you all a funny story? It's kind of related to this.
Josh:
Sure.
Starr:
First of all, I'm sorry, it took a second for that to sink in because there was so much awesomeness it took a while to sink in. But yes, a fedora on a drone-
Josh:
A fedora on a drone, yeah.
Starr:
... that's the best thing. That's the best thing. As long as it's also vaping.
Josh:
Maybe that's our next product.
Starr:
There you go. So when I was in college I did an internship at Los Alamos, and they had all the people in dorm settings, in a dorm setup, right? And this one guy was really interested in this one girl, except the guy was a pretty typical nerdy, I don't know, 19 year old guy, didn't really have the best ideas around getting to know this girl. And so what he did is he bribed her roommate to let her into his room and then he stole her dresser, and then left a trail of clues about how she could find the dresser.
Josh:
This does not sound like it ends well.
Starr:
When she followed the trail of clues and found the dresser and he was waiting there with roses, and she was just livid because it was her dresser. Somebody's stolen her dresser with her clothes in it. So that's about the level of-
Josh:
It's not creepy if you take the entire dresser.
Starr:
There you go. So that's what I'm thinking of when I think of poetry, in terms of...
Josh:
Yeah, that's the next level.
Starr:
He would have written some poetry for her, I think.
Starr:
Yeah, so the conclave went great and, I don't know, I feel like we did a great job of planning, and I guess we should maybe talk about our general approach that we took for dealing with this economic situation; we've got this two stage situation, right? We've got this immediate pandemic, everybody's quarantined scenario, and then after that we've got this longer term economic downturn that's going to be prompted by the fact that as of this recording, 16 million people have filed for unemployment, and by the time you get this it's probably going to be 100 million or something, I don't know.
Starr:
And so we decided basically right now, for the duration of this crisis, one thing that we really need to keep an eye on is churn, right? Because if churn stays the same, we're good. Growth can go down, growth could even go to half of what it is, or quarter of what we've been dealing with, or growth could even go to zero and we'd be fine for a long, long time. Assuming churn stays about what it has been, assuming we don't have huge upticks in cancellations or downgrades, or stuff like that.
Starr:
So that's what we're focusing on, so we're going to be doing a couple of immediate measures, just little things to try and get that down in terms of like, "Okay, we're going to look at our credit card decline, churn, see if we can get that down any way." We're talking about options we can offer people who might have just straight up canceled their account to let them pause their account, or maybe do other things, stuff like that.
Josh:
Yeah. I think the overarching, the thing that we really ... I mean, if you just simplify it all, it just comes back to focus on your customer. So pretty much everything we talked about is just basically, how do we focus on helping our customers? Part of that is, that helps retention because the more we help our customers, hopefully the more that they can like Honeybadger and stick around. One of the other things we talked about was even, for the people that are really struggling, just cutting them a break. It's better for us and them. For us all to take a little hit and keep the customer, versus losing the customer entirely, and then they don't have error tracking and we don't have a customer.
Starr:
Honestly, it just seems like the decent thing to do too. If it's not costing us a ton of money to service those accounts, and companies are legitimately going through a really tough time, but they might emerge at the end of six months, why wouldn't we want to help people out in those circumstances? It's like, it's good business too because hopefully they'll still be a customer and they like us. I don't know, it just seems decent.
Ben:
It's just being a good human. That's how I've always run the business, is trying to be kind to our customers. And we've had customers come to us and say, "My revenue just went to zero. Can you cut me a break?" It's like, oh, yeah, you can totally use a service for free for six months. So that's I think just part of how we operate, like you said.
Starr:
Yeah. One of the more interesting things we talked about had to do with ... in addition to the churn avoidance stuff, we also talked about ways that we can grow revenue in this time. One interesting thing we've talked about was our pricing page and maybe our approach to pricing, and making our free plan more prominent. Because right now we have a free plan, it's just stuck down at the bottom. And it's funny because one of our competitors ... I think maybe Josh or somebody posted in Slack today, oh, yeah, they're offering this special discounted plan-
Starr:
... yeah, for companies impacted by this thing. Ben was like, "Yeah, that's not as nice as our normal free plan."
Josh:
Yeah. That's the real thing, our free plan is better than a lot of the starting in paid tiers of our competitors. So we probably should do a little bit of a better job at promoting that.
Starr:
Yeah. So we'll just put that first and we'll call it the stimulus plan.
Ben:
And then with an asterisk, by the way, this is our normal free plan.
Starr:
It's just a little showbiz. A little showbiz never hurt anybody. That's what marketing's about, right? You got to call out your strengths.
Josh:
Yeah. It is nice to be in a position to help people out first, even if it's like ... We've helped out a few projects that are dealing with Covid response. We've also helped out a few customers who are inundated right now with extra traffic because they happen to be in one of those segments that is just overwhelmed, like a food delivery, for example. So we've been able to work with people to cut them breaks on data rates and stuff. That feels good.
Ben:
And in general, just being kind during this time. We had one customer this week who accidentally sent us eight million error notifications and they're on one of our smaller plans. They're like, holy cow, it's going to cost us thousands of dollars. It's like, no, don't worry about it. It's no big deal. If you found the problem, you fixed it, it's okay. They don't need that stress in their lives right now.
Josh:
Please don't do it.
Ben:
Yeah. Please don't do that.
Josh:
Please don't do it again.
Ben:
It's not an invitation. That's just how we roll at Honeybadger. But one thing I thought of last night, speaking of sleeping on things between conclave days, we talked about our plans yesterday in our final day of the conclave and I was thinking about it last night. And this morning it's like, talking about ... because we were talking about, what can we do to try to increase revenue and come out stronger at the end of this time? Maybe six months from now, four months from now, how are we going to be better positioned? And yesterday was kind of a down day for me. I was just concerned about our revenues and concerned about the economy, concerned about what's going to happen in the next six months.
Josh:
Same here.
Ben:
And the thing that occurred to me was like, you know what? I should just relax a bit because there's really nothing dramatic that we can do. We can't control the situation in any way, right? We can't stop the pain that the greater economy is feeling. We can't prevent a lot of our customers from having that same pain, right? So there's nothing we can ... oh, we're going to have this new marketing initiative that's going to get X new customers or increase revenue by X percent. This is our plan and that's our goal. It's like, yeah, well, that's just not going to work right now. So just relax, take it easy. Don't put such pressure on yourself to come up with solutions for all the world's problems, or even just our problem. Sorry.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
That's sounding like acceptance, Ben.
Ben:
Oh, maybe. Maybe I am coming to a... There's this fear-
Josh:
I'm jumping between acceptance and screaming terror. But-
Ben:
There's this sort of-
Josh:
... it's spiking like the market right now,
Starr:
There's a kind of mindset that I know that I've had in the past and I think it's a very American sort of Hollywood mindset. It's like that movie with the Rock and the earthquakes. What was that?
Josh:
I think I've seen one of those.
Starr:
Do you know what that movie's called? Aftershock? I don't know, it's about an earthquake and its aftershocks.
Josh:
One of those end of the world movies though, right?
Starr:
Yeah. It's one of the ones where San Francisco is just calved off of the United States and falls into the ocean and everything and as the earth is shattering apart, the Rock is jumping onto helicopters and stuff. And it's like, that's not real. When that happens, you're not going to be an action hero. If California goes in the ocean, and you're in California, you're going in the ocean unless you just get really lucky.
Starr:
And so I feel like there's this tendency, it's like, okay there's this recession, there's all this stuff happening. I've got to figure out my escape from it where I'm going to be super clever. And it's like, maybe you will. Maybe you'll escape from it. If you do, I would almost venture to say it's probably more due to luck than anything else because there's a hundred other people as clever as you are trying to do the same thing that came up with just as good of plans who aren't going to get lucky. So I don't know. I think acceptance is an okay thing to have.
Ben:
It's a noble goal.
Starr:
It is. Everybody should be reading Epictetus. I'm just saying all my listeners should. My listeners, because, you know: my podcast.
Ben:
Well, speaking of reading: a couple of episodes ago I mentioned that I had just finished reading Sphere by Michael Crichton. And I was like, maybe that wasn't the best book to read being quarantined and locked into a house kind of thing. I was like, ha ha.
Josh:
Yeah. So what are you reading now?
Ben:
I just finished Andromeda Strain.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
Yeah, also not recommended to read during a quarantine big virus infection.
Starr:
What is going on with you guys?
Josh:
Why are you doing this to yourself, Ben?
Ben:
I had this queue in my library, because they do eBook checkouts and so you just got to read them when they come up. You can't determine when the book arrives and it just so happened those two came up at this time. I was like, "Ugh."
Starr:
It's cause nobody else wanted them. Everyone else was returning them.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know. I read there's a trend of people reading those right now.
Ben:
Oh yeah?
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know if we talked about that on the podcast or if it was in person somehow or other but, yeah. I don't know. It's a good opportunity to really experience the visceral... It's much more visceral.
Ben:
That's true. On the flip side, I recently read Stillness is the Key. I recommended that to my wife and she started reading it after coronavirus really started getting bad and she said that was a fantastic book to read during the quarantine or isolation time.
Starr:
Oh good.
Ben:
I can recommend that one. I started rereading that. What do you recommend?
Starr:
Maybe we can link to that in the show notes. We can also maybe link to the Epictetus, Discourses and Fragments, which is like, it's got its problems, but it was written 2000 years ago. If you can overlook those, it's a pretty good book about this stuff. So in addition to books I've really been enjoying listening to Chopin. I'm not usually a super classical musicy person, but Chopin is a Polish, I think, pianist who did all these piano pieces that sound like basically they're in the score of every World War II movie. Here's the scene: you're in Paris, the bombs are falling, these historical, beautiful churches are getting blown apart, in slow motion with no sound. And it's just a piano song in the background. That sort of summarizes it.
Starr:
So that's Chopin, that song. And so I've been listening to this, walking around my neighborhood in Seattle as everybody's got their face masks on and it's like nothing's open. The sun's coming down beautifully. Just thinking about the... I don't know, it captures this moment of how sort of beautiful and at the same time completely screwed up everything is. It's really good. I've enjoyed that.
Josh:
I'm totally going to listen to Chopin on my next trip to the grocery store.
Starr:
You should.
Josh:
Although I heard you're not supposed to have your headphones in just in case you bump into someone or something like that. So maybe I'll leave the noise cancellation off and put a little sound in.
Starr:
Well, if you don't have the noise cancellation, how are you going to filter out the germs that get into your ears?
Josh:
Are we to the doom and gloom yet?
Starr:
Oh, I thought that was the whole thing.
Josh:
Or is that what we've been doing?
Starr:
I don't know. We could...
Ben:
Oh, I thought we'd done the whole arc. We started the doom and gloom we went down into the trough of misery and now we're up at the final resolution where everyone is happy. It's Act Three, everything is wrapped up and it's a happily ever after.
Josh:
Are you happy, Ben?
Ben:
I'm so happy.
Josh:
As a single little tear...
Starr:
A single tear rolls down.
Ben:
As the film goes to black and white and I look out the window.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, you know, we'll all make it through this. We're all in it together and I think, all things considered, we've still got it pretty good, I think.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
Heck yeah.
Starr:
And I'll totally share my 25 pound bag of lentils with you guys, because I don't really like lentils anyway, but I bought it for some reason.
Ben:
Yeah, things hurt. If you think about it, things are fantastic. Out of all the employees and family at Honeybadger, none of us are sick or have gotten sick. We did have one trip to the ER recently, but that was resolved and everyone's healthy and well there. We have plenty of food and water and our houses are nice and comfy. The sun shining outside. The weather's beautiful here in the Northwest.
Starr:
And to be honest, Pacific Northwest, not a bad place to ride this out, because from what I understand, the hospitals in Seattle at least never got to capacity, unlike say, New York or wherever. People, despite some issues, I think people for the most part have been taking it seriously, and I'm really proud of Seattleites and everything for doing it. And people are trying to... yeah, I think...
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, so I think overall, yes, I am actually very happy. Counting your blessings is amazing. Last night I read something, it's like, just list the 10 things you're thankful for. And so I started listing that, and of course I got past 10 pretty quickly, right? And I just kept going. It's like, yeah, that feels pretty good. So yeah, life is good.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think that longterm, if we make it through this with the business, even with the businesses intact, I don't want to say it doesn't get worse than this, but this is pretty heavy to make it through this and come out the other side. Like, this is experience that we're getting right now.
Starr:
It might be a little too early to start talking that way, Josh. I just don't want to-
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I've got a real...
Josh:
I'm not saying... yeah.
Starr:
You know about those old stories about the gods punishing Hubris?
Josh:
Listen, we were born in the great recession, Dar.
Starr:
Okay, then.
Josh:
You made a joke of being forged in the darkness. We were made for this.
Starr:
That's funny. You and I have made the same joke like five times.
Josh:
I know.
Starr:
This week at each other... We're both going insane.
Ben:
So while, I agree. It is a bit premature to say there's a happy ending because yeah, we're still in the thick of it, right? And we will be-
Josh:
I wasn't saying there's a happy ending. I'm just... yeah.
Starr:
But I'm ever the optimist. I'm optimistic there will be a happy ending, and I think that's what you were saying, is like, yes, we will survive. We will get through it, and one of the things I think is-
Josh:
We will hopefully be stronger.
Starr:
Yeah. And I just love frankly, having co-founders. I'm glad I'm not alone. I'm glad I have the two of you to go through this process, to be supportive.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So thanks. I'm glad.
Josh:
Likewise.
Starr:
I feel the same way. Yeah. I'm optimistic too. I kind of have this... my optimism is often misunderstood, I feel. My optimism doesn't always take the form of like, this is going to be... like everything's going to be okay and work out in the end. My optimism takes the form of like, it may or may not work out. We'll do our best. Even if it doesn't work out, we'll be fine. Sometimes things don't work out. So, I really hope the Honeybadger is going to work out. I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it does. Ultimately, you know, once we've done everything we can, everything that's in our power, that's all we can do, and you know, we'll be good.
Josh:
I'm pretty sure there's been social studies done that you have to be irrationally optimistic in order to even start a business. So yeah, we're there.
Ben:
We're there. Yeah.
Starr:
All right. Yeah. Let's... forced optimism. Let's have institutionalized optimism with Honeybadger.
Ben:
Just put that in a bottle and sell it.
Starr:
Yeah, let's write that in our policy. Can we put that in our policies?
Ben:
Just like, we value optimism.
Starr:
Notify our employees that they are required to be optimistic.
Ben:
You must be optimistic.
Starr:
For eight hours, or however many hours, 30 hours a week they're on the clock.
Ben:
Instead of having a performance improvement plan as part of HR policies, we will have an optimism improvement plan.
Starr:
Ah, well maybe we should sign off. I feel like we're getting to time. We've kind of rambled a bit, and...
Josh:
Yeah, I think this was in the bag.
Starr:
All right. Well, it was great talking with you all, and please go and give us a review if you're bored, because you have nothing to do all day in your apartment. If you want to write for us, you know, for similar reasons, we're still accepting... we're still working with authors, great, great content, Ruby and Elixir, and maybe we might branch out and do some react tutorials, like not as the main, just like as a little test. So if you're like-
Josh:
Maybe some node?
Starr:
Maybe some no, like if you're really top notch at those and you want to write for us, check out our Write For Us page. You can go to our blog and in the top nav, there's a little link that says Write For Us, and that will tell you how to get in touch with me, and what you need to provide. And yeah, so that's it. Everybody stay safe, and talk to you next week.
Show Notes:
This week on FounderQuest, it's a cutting room floor clips episode. Hear vintage, unreleased clips of episodes that you weren't supposed to hear. Discussions include: 90's software stores, Alan Turing, water heaters, buying top quality spyware dongles from China and even FounderQuest itself!
Links:Wish
Apple Arcade
Bear
Day One
Babbage’s
Usenet
Spencer’s Gifts
Charles Babbage
Alan Turing
Naive Bayes
What The Golf
Nintendo Switch
Full Transcript:
Ben Findley:
Hello there. This is Ben Findley, the other Ben at Honeybadger. Don't worry, you don't have to hear my voice for very long. Before we begin, this is just a heads up that this episode will be a bit different. Josh, Ben and Starr were hunkered down this week and weren't able to record an episode.
Ben Findley:
We didn't want anyone to go through withdrawals, so I scoured the cutting room floor for old bits of Maxell UR90 and spliced them together to present you with this, FrankenQuest. As a warning, there are no tips on bootstrapping assess business. If you tuned in for that, you may want to see yourself out. However, if you can hear some random discussions held together with jarring transitions, then you've come to the right place. And now, back to the episode.
Announcer:
Three developers, one mission. Build a business to nurture personal fulfillment. It's not stupid. It's FounderQuest.
Ben:
Yeah, I was talking to someone just yesterday and he mentioned the podcast and enjoyed listening to it and he said, I really enjoy how short the episodes are and that you really get in there and dig into things. So maybe we have to cut all that so that they keep all that.
Starr:
Oh no, okay.
Josh:
But on to play devil's advocate, you know that the other, December was it? That we didn't really have an agenda and the podcasts just totally devolved into awkward pauses and jokes about holidays. Well, I mean that turned out great. I think it was fine.
Ben:
I haven't listened to it, so okay.
Josh:
No, you should, I mean, yeah, it wasn't bad at all. So it was, it was pretty funny and like a few people told me they thought it was hilarious, so.
Starr:
That's great.
Ben:
So let's dive in.
Starr:
You know how Amazon is mostly like Chinese knockoffs and junk now? It's all, it's all grossly overpriced. Like I've bought stuff from Amazon. It's like, this is kind of what I need it's okay, but I know this costs somebody like 30 cents to buy and I bought it for $10. Well, Wish is an app for your phone that cuts out the middleman and lets you buy cheap Chinese crap. Just sort of like directly. So, basically like it's, it's just like a bunch of super cheap stuff. A lot of which looks suspiciously like you can get some things that look suspiciously like.
Josh:
iPhones.
Starr:
Air Pods and iPhones for like $3.50. They're not really, they're not Air Pods but you know, if you want to maybe fool somebody.
Josh:
They're not even Bluetooth.
Starr:
Maybe. Maybe, maybe not.
Josh:
You have to wire them.
Ben:
They're just little pieces of plastic.
Starr:
Yeah. But for things like hats and little pieces of clothing and stuff and jewelry and all that, it's super, super cheap. And I haven't actually gotten anything from them yet. I ordered a bunch of stuff about a week ago and I've got another week to go before it gets here. And so I'll have to let you guys know how it is.
Ben:
Yeah. The only problem with ordering like clothes is that you can't really easily return them right?
Starr:
When they get shipped from China. But if it costs you like $3 for a jacket, who cares? Just give it to Goodwill.
Ben:
I suppose.
Josh:
That's a very Seattle way of.
Starr:
I guess, I guess. I mean, I guess I could go to like the boutique, some boutique store and try stuff on and then buy stuff for $100 and it fits. Sure. But it's like, why don't I just order every size it'll cost me like $12 in total.
Josh:
Yeah, just ship it on an oil tanker from China.
Starr:
You know those, I find those like I've had an oil fumes lend kind of a certain authenticity though.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. you can skip the cologne. I see where you're going.
Starr:
So anyway, yeah, I mean everything, everything you could imagine on there. And it's just like, I'm sure it's all flea market quality at, I mean, sometimes that's all you need. Right?
Josh:
So why one thing, why is it called Wish?
Starr:
I Wish? I wish that it would get here sooner.
Josh:
Nice. That's, I'm sure that's why that's, that's their tagline, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
No, honestly like compared with a lot, with some stuff that like even Amazon you buy it and it ships from China and compare with that. Like it's, I mean it's just, it's like a couple of weeks. It's no big deal. You can also have it shipped like to a store near you. And so I was like this is weird. They don't have stores near me. And so I looked it up, the nearest store near me and it's like some shady like iPhone, right, repair business.
Josh:
Really?
Starr:
Yeah. I was like I got to go to my device repair business and like pick up my headbands or whatever.
Josh:
Like one of those, one of those like PC specialist shops?
Starr:
Yeah. That just seems like a front for something else. Like, you know, shady imports of costume jewelry.
Josh:
Do people get like still get like a whatever shareware infect, or not shareware, spyware infected PCs and have to take them into like some specialist guy at, at one of the strip mall stores? Is that still how, that works. Do you like that's what those places do, right?
Starr:
Do you even have parents, Josh?
Josh:
Yeah, I bet. I mean like they have, they have me, right?
Starr:
What are they doing if they're not infecting their PCs with spyware and making you fix it?
Josh:
I got them all using Apple.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
I mean, come on Starr. We're like upper middle class.
Starr:
Oh, there you go. Yeah. My mom's pretty much on an iPad. Like my dad before he passed away, had this PC and oh my goodness. He was just like, he was. So, this was in the time when they had all those things where it's like, fill out this and get a as stereo or whatever. And what it is it's an affiliate thing and basically it's not a quiz, it's like a form. And what it does is it just like sends you to affiliate offer after affiliate offer in this endless cycle, claiming that you'll get an iPad at the end and eventually you just give up.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
And then you've signed up for like, you've downloaded like 20 spyware programs and anyway he's like, if I keep going like if I keep going, they'll have to give me the iPad.
Josh:
It makes sense.
Starr:
No dad, no. They don't. It's a scam. It's just a scam. That's all.
Josh:
Yeah, it's amazing how many are out there and how many people fall for them.
Starr:
Yeah. Oh well. Speaking of which, you can also get sort of shady networking devices from this Chinese app.
Josh:
As we like we installed like the wifi module from from Wish.
Starr:
I know you can get, yes, you can get stuff that claims to be like ubiquity gear. Just like, I'm not plugging that in. No.
Josh:
Like I come to think of it, I literally just ordered like a $12 Bluetooth like USB thing from Amazon last night because I realized like my PC, my gaming PC, somehow I like didn't put Bluetooth in it since 2015. But there's a good chance that that is probably going to infect me with spyware. So I guess maybe I'm the person who still goes to the PC shop.
Starr:
Well if you don't have anything to hide Josh, why are you afraid of spyware?
Josh:
That's a good question. And I don't, so I'll just plug in all the dongles.
Starr:
So our topic today is, can you hear that? It's a drum roll. Okay. Somebody say the topic.
Josh:
We should get you to an actual drum. Like a snare. Like a little snare. Some sticks. Drumsticks. Yeah.
Starr:
Can you get one of those on Wish?
Starr:
I'm going to look it up on Wish and see how much it costs.
Starr:
I spent hours looking at stuff on here.
Josh:
This episode is going great so far.
Starr:
Snare drum.
Ben:
This is a shopping tips episode.
Starr:
Shopping tips. $20. $20 For a snare drum. That seems reasonable.
Josh:
Yeah, it actually does. I mean snare drums are not cheap.
Ben:
My shopping tip is to drop cable.
Starr:
You dropped cable?
Ben:
Yeah. I got rid of cable.
Ben:
You don't need it.
Starr:
Who has cable?
Josh:
Well Ben did not anymore.
Josh:
When did you drop it?
Ben:
It's been a long time. Like I haven't had cable for 18 years. Yeah. Wow.
Josh:
You were a cord cutter ahead of your time.
Starr:
I know that's like five snare drums a month.
Josh:
Ben cut the cords before there were any alternatives.
Ben:
It helped. It's easy when you stop watching TV.
Josh:
He just, he just sits in a dark room at night staring at the wall.
Ben:
My, that grass is really growing today.
Ben:
That reminds me of a tweet that I saw this morning from Marco Arment. He was responding to someone who is complaining about app developers switching to subscription models for their apps, particularly mobile apps. Right. And he said, well, you know, if you want your app to keep working, it requires continued work. And continued work matches well with continued revenue it's a mismatch if you expect the developer to pay just once and then they maintain it for the rest of their lives. You know, because OS versions change and data sources change and he mentioned specifically like weather apps, right. They have to pay per use. Right. They don't pay per customer. And so you can't expect them to take a one time payment and then they then go and pay their providers for your usage for the rest of eternity.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So things changing kind of kind of bugs me.
Josh:
I used to be a little hostile to that idea that I've been warming to it a little bit more for those reasons. I think. The few apps that I pay for, I pay for Bear and a few other ones. I think I pay for Day One, which is like a journaling app. But yeah.
Ben:
Speaking of subscriptions, have either of you tried Apple arcade?
Josh:
Not yet, but now on the fence. I've been looking at the games multiple times.
Ben:
Yeah, you got to you guys make it at least do the free trial. I did that cause my wife's like, I really want to, because my wife is really into the casual games. I'm not so much, I just, I don't like those but.
Josh:
Yeah, same here.
Starr:
You know, the filthy casual.
Ben:
You know, I play my Switch but I did yesterday again on Twitter. Somebody mentioned What the Golf and they said, yeah, it was really good. And so I checked it out and it is really good. It's a great fun game. You should definitely check it out.
Starr:
I remember when I was a kid going into like the video store to rent like my NES games and I was just always amazed how many fricking golf games are where I was like who wants to play a golf game. This is just so, so weird. But you know, I guess, yeah, I guess now I know, huh?
Ben:
I mean I remember going down to Babbage's to buy my computer software.
Josh:
I always would have no idea what you're talking about.
Starr:
I just went straight to the Software Farm. They had a little stand set up.
Josh:
It's just like the farm on Usenet or something. To download your, download your apps from the farm.
Ben:
So Josh, you don't know about Babbage's?
Josh:
Uh-uh (negative).
Ben:
Oh my. How about you Starr? Come on help me out here.
Starr:
Oh yeah, I know about Babbage's.
Ben:
Okay. All right, so Josh?
Ben:
Yeah. Back in the olden days when you wanted to buy a software, you'd go to the mall. There was a store, you know next to Spencer's that is called Babbage's. Yeah. It had all your things that you could buy on the wall. Like in actual boxes. There's like Word 1.0. There was Microsoft Windows Version 3.
Josh:
Yeah. Now that you say it, it's sounding vaguely familiar, but I was like, I was still, I don't, I wasn't buying my own software at that point. I don't think so.
Starr:
You know, you don't hear too much about Babbage these days. Like I remember a while ago, a couple of decades ago, people were all about Babbage, but now it's just, it's Turing, like everything's about Turing and it's like, you don't, you don't really hear about Babbage. I wonder what happened.
Ben:
You know, here, here I hear more about Bays and I hear about Turing.
Starr:
Oh really?
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
I mean they made a movie about him. I haven't seen any movies about Bayes. That's true.
Ben:
Well, actually Turing is going to be on the 50 pound note, right?
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
Is he?
Ben:
He's official. He's legit. That's like Jefferson and Washington.
Josh:
Well they're waiting for one of these artificial intelligences to write the script for the Bayes movie. I'm pretty sure.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
I think that's what's happening. Yeah, they'll kind of like.
Starr:
They won't be able to write it though. It'll just be able to detect scripts that have been written by other artificial intelligence.
Josh:
I mean, they'll read it will read the Turing, you know the Turing script.
Ben:
How's your heater doing?
Starr:
Oh, the heater's good. It turned out it just needed a, like the, the thermocouple needs like cleaning or something like that. And then he was like, Oh yeah, this is like a 80 year old heater, so you might want to get a new one. And we're like, yeah, I know.
New Speaker:
That's impressive.
Starr:
It's not really 80 years old. It's just, it's more like 30 or something, something like that.
Josh:
That's old houses.
Starr:
Yeah. On the one hand I'm like, yeah, it's old. We should probably replace it. But then on the other hand it's like, what heater am I going to buy now that's going to last 30 years?
Josh:
You just buy an entirely new house.
Starr:
Oh there you go.
Josh:
Brand new. Just go all new.
Starr:
Maybe I'll just buy a new heater and then like go to the architect and be like, build my house around this heater.
Josh:
There you go. I've always thought it would be kind of cool to start, start completely fresh, you know, start with fresh everything and then you get to be the one to enjoy the new thing until it gets old and someone else has to move into it.
Starr:
Yeah. But the thing is, is like I think like houses and stuff just like any other like product that you build. It's like there's always bugs and crap that you've got to work out.
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
So you spend the first 30 years troubleshooting?
Starr:
Basically. Yeah.
Josh:
And then someone else gets to move it and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Starr:
Yeah. So basically when you buy a house, you're like sort of buying a stable productive legacy app.
Josh:
Right. Yeah. Just needs a little maintenance here and there.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like, and does it really matter? If your house is like built in COBOL?
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
Yeah my iCloud key chain is awesome. The only thing it lacks is the one-time codes, right?
Starr:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Ben:
I still got to use the one password for that. Plus it's nice to have a backup. You know, I'm a belt and suspenders kind of guy. Right. So it's nice to have the iCloud key chain and the one password, even though I'm wholly wedded to the Apple ecosystem.
Starr:
Yeah. The problem with belts and suspenders does that makes it really hard to use a bathroom.
Starr:
I don't know where that, I don't know like what that maps to in that metaphor, but just going completely literal.
Ben:
Just saying, it makes me think of data leakage.
Announcer:
Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. Founder Quest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
Show Notes:
The world is burning, yet we find ourselves settling into our weird new daily routines. This week Josh, Starr, and Ben discuss the importance of company transparency during a crisis, Tiger King, and, political trigger warning, separating health coverage from employment. Bring your marshmallows, chocolate and crackers!
Links:
The Witcher 3
Scribendi
The Office - Micheal's casual jeans
Tiger King
Disney+
Animal Crossing – Tom Nook
Justin Jackson – Good Businesses Have Margin
Obamacare
Full Transcript:
Starr:
I was thinking this show we could talk about... I don't know just kind of getting settled into this sort of weird, new normal. Even though it's hopefully temporary. The last few shows I feel were-
Josh:
Wait, you're saying we actually have a topic this show? Because that actually, in itself, means that we must really be settling in if we actually have a topic this week.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean the last few weeks, it's like personally, I felt like I had no idea what was going on in the world, or my life, or anything. It was just everything got blown up. I'm starting to figure out how the pieces are going to fit together. So this week I feel personally like I kind of am getting a little bit of an idea of like how it's going to be. It's just a matter of keeping on doing it for two months? I don't know... how long? However long?
Josh:
Y'all getting a little bit of a routine dialed in now?
Starr:
Yeah. Exactly. The situation in my house is that my wife is also working from home. She also works in tech as a writer. So basically we switch off during the work day. I work mornings, she works the afternoons. And then we take turns watching the kid. And then we both try and steal scraps of time during naps, and in the evening, or whatever, to do things that we couldn't do during our lifetime. I feel like I'm at the point where I'm kind of able to sort of scrape by the stuff I need to do. It might be a little bit hard to do extra stuff, to start getting ahead, but as far as just making sure that the wheels stay on the car, and stuff like that? On the work I'm doing, at least, it's possible. What about you guys? I think y'all's work situations have changed less than mine.
Josh:
Yeah, mine hasn't changed a whole lot, to be honest. Because I was commuting to an office for a little while early last year, and over the course of... like late last year, I'd moved everything back home, including... I've got my home gym now. So pretty much my day was already spent at home. And we have young kids, but I was already home with them. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and takes care of them and stuff. She's kind of going crazy right now because we had to tell our babysitter that she can't come because... but that's the thing, lock down. So yeah, we have a lot less help right now. I guess that's the big difference. I've been taking a little bit more time, in my work day, to stop and help with the kids and stuff. Like put them down for naps, or that sort of thing.
Starr:
My question for you is, what did you know that the rest of us didn't? You've obviously been prepping for this, Josh. You've got your home gym. You've been going on this for at least six months.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm just a hermit. I don't know. Usually my work week is pretty much the same as it's has been for the last six months. I usually will get up and do some reading. I ride my stationary bike that's in my office. I do some work. I work out. Do a little bit more work, and then it's family time. Before all of this happened, during the week, my major outings usually revolved around food, so just like getting lunch or something. I'm not doing that, but we replaced that with getting out. We still try to get out for walks and things. I even still have the occasional outing here and there as well. I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, my schedule hasn't changed a whole lot either. I'm still getting that six hours or five hours of sleep every night. Waking up at 5:00 or whatever in the morning. Working. See, everyone else is asleep. My kids are older. They're teenagers, so they're sleeping till noon anyway, right? So I'm working from like 6:00 to noon-ish. Grab some lunch-
Josh:
Yeah, and then the play the Witcher for the other eight hours a day, before they go back to sleep.
Starr:
Wait, does the Witcher even work if you try and play it at like 4:00 AM? Isn't it down for maintenance every night?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Every night from like 4:00 to 6:00 AM?
Ben:
I don't know. Wouldn't know. Never tried. Yeah, and then like lunch. And then I'll do a little bit of work, maybe, in the afternoon sometimes, if I feel like it. I'll go for a walk, go for a run. I do miss going to the gym regularly, because I was still doing that. So that's kind of a bummer but, I've got the weights in my garage, and doing that.
Josh:
Got some stuff, yeah.
Ben:
It's not really that much of a difference, except that I don't go to my office every day now, even though, I'm really usually the only one here. Still, I felt like, "It's probably a good idea not to go into the germ environment." Just shelter in place. And just bring my stuff home. Yeah, not much changed for me.
Starr:
That makes sense. I don't know, it's pretty different working in this new environment. Normally my days... We work 30-hour weeks at Honeybadger, and I though I have like a 40-hour week to fit that into? Now I'm trying to fit that into like a 20-hour week. So things are a bit more hectic. There's a bit less of a leisurely pace to things. And then also, there's no downtime. There's like 30 minutes of downtime. Or maybe that downtime is when Ida gets her iPad or something. And she refuses to nap.
Josh:
Routines really help us kind of get through this sort of thing. I've been trying to keep changes to the routine minimal. Or take steps to maintain routines that we did before. Or replace things.
Starr:
Yeah, that makes sense. The sort of systems that we've put in place... and I'm thinking about the stuff I put in place around the blog, in terms of project management, honestly is just saving me right now, because I have zero extra capacity to remember things. So like the other day I forgot to mark an article that was in fact done, as done. And it was still in the needed to be edited category. And so I sent it to this person who is doing some editing for us, and she's like, "You sent me this last week." It's because I forgot to mark it done.
Starr:
Let's talk about some more, maybe productivity or business-why things. Personally, one thing I'm trying to do to get through and sort of supplement the fact that I'm so stretched now is to get in a little bit of help on the editing side of all these blog posts I'm doing. What I had been doing previously is I had been essentially doing all of the big editing stuff and then outsourcing a kind of proofreading to a service called Scribendi. They're actually pretty good, so I would recommend them if you need that sort of thing. But I'm experimenting with having an actual, in-person relationship with an editor who's Melissa, who's a previous sort of author of ours. We published a article that she wrote about Pry recently. That's actually been really good for us.
Josh:
Yeah, it did.
Starr:
She has editing experience, so I don't know. I'm experimenting with that. So far it's pretty low scale. It's going to be maybe a couple of hours a week. Just freelance and see how that goes. So far, she's doing a great job. So my hope is that she can sort of in addition to eliminating that proofreading service... which we're already paying for. In addition to that, she can maybe take on some of the more higher level changes that need to be done that I would normally, personally do. So that would sort of free me up to then go on and do improvements, instead of just making sure that the system is just running.
Josh:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Starr:
In terms of the business? We briefly talked about this, but we're going to... We normally do like a once a month chat with all of our employees and everything. Like an all-hands, just to hang out. I brought up maybe making that more frequently. And Ben suggested weekly. So we were kind of hovering in like on maybe Mondays doing that. As sort of a non-required thing. Just for fun.
Josh:
Yeah, I like that idea. I think that one thing this is forcing is... even it's forcing remote teams to become even more remote, because now that... I think the reason we're thinking about changing it up is that we don't have the social outlets that we normally do, that helps us get through the remote lifestyle that can be isolating. So it's forcing us to think about that a little bit more. And build more of that into our company DNA.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. I see a lot of people on Twitter, and they're like, "Is this what remote working's like?" It's like, "No. It's usually much nicer than this." It's not like a case of the world ending.
Josh:
Yeah, although if you're new to remote, or if you're doing it wrong? It can get pretty bad if you don't establish good habits, even in normal times too, I would say.
Ben:
Yeah, I think a lot of people when they start working from their home, they're excited about it. They're excited about the idea of being able to not have to commute and things like that. One of the side effects that I've seen many times, is people will just work more. Right? They start to lose the boundaries between work and home. And then end up working 10-hour days, and they don't really notice, because it just blends together. I'm like, "Oh, the computer's there. Let me check my email." And then half an hour later, "Oh, I'm working." Right?
Ben:
I think a lot of people who have made that transition have gone through that phase and realized they needed to set up some things around their life to make sure that doesn't happen. Maybe my commute is taking off the pj's and putting on some sweatpants, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But anyway, some way to delineate what's work time and what's home time. And sometimes that can take a while. I hope that people get enough time during this phase where they can actually learn that, and work through those things, so they can understand, "Oh, this is really what working from home is like." Once you actually get into the groove.
Josh:
Yeah, I've heard people say that it really helps to have even specific rituals for starting and stopping work, when you're working from home. I've even heard... I forget who it was. I read a book semi-recently where they were like saying they have rituals where they actually have a saying that they utter, when work is over. Just to get it into their head-
Starr:
I really like that.
Josh:
... "I'm done."
Starr:
I really like that.
Josh:
Yeah, so you could have your little work rituals at home. It could be small things, it doesn't have to be like-
Starr:
Come to think of it, I think... having worked from home the majority of my career, I kind of do that stuff too, without really thinking too much about it. Yeah, to start work basically, I get out my little notebook. I make a little list of things to try and not forget today. Things that I maybe need to do. Drink some tea. Yeah, that's kind of the start of the day. I tend to do that even if I don't have a full day. Even if I know exactly what I need to do, I just write it down.
Starr:
I think what y'all are talking about is structure. Like overarching... this is kind of what we're moving towards a little bit more with the weekly, hang-out meetings. It's kind of just injecting a little bit more structure into the company remote culture. To maybe compensate a bit for the structure that's lost from being able to go to the outside world. Because just taking my kid to daycare, and picking them up, and stuff like that's a structure. I've got to leave by 5:00 because I've got to go get my daughter. Everybody has little things like that, and suddenly all those are gone, and it's just this Wild West situation.
Starr:
And I just want to show my age for a second. I think it's so funny that people are like, "What are you doing wearing jeans? You should be wearing sweats." It was like sweatpants are like a category now in casualness, like below jeans, but separate from pajama pants.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
In my olden days, my antiquated way of thinking, pajama pants are basically the same as sweatpants.
Josh:
Yeah. And jeans are things you wear to like casual day or something?
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. But jeans are like the new formal. I don't know, I never got into athleisure, so...
Josh:
I like Michael's jeans on The Office were always funny. He had these... his casual day jeans, and whenever he got into his casual day jeans, the real shenanigans would happen-
Starr:
Oh, my God.
Josh:
... because they would just make him extra crazy.
Starr:
Yeah, but I mean, there used to only be also light jeans. But now you've got light jeans and dark jeans. So it's like you're wearing your-
Josh:
Acid-
Starr:
... dark jeans.
Josh:
... wash?
Starr:
Acid wash? Those are just on another level, Josh.
Josh:
I mean, that would be a way to really know you're working, though.
Starr:
Yeah, speaking of acid washed jeans, we started watching Tiger King last night, which is this new show on Netflix everybody's talking about. Have y'all seen it?
Josh:
Mm-mm (negative).
Ben:
Nope.
Starr:
I recommend it. It's one of their limited series, documentary, true crime shows. But I don't think anybody actually gets hurt in this one, so it's good. We're not quite profiting off of... making light off of somebody getting hurt. Yeah, it's about this private zoo owner in Oklahoma named... I think his name was Joe Exotic.
Ben:
Is that the guy that ran for president?
Starr:
Probably. He ran for governor of Oklahoma. Anyway, and it's super interesting to me because he's got a mullet, I'm sure he had lots of acid washed jeans. Super redneck guy, kind of like a stock character. It's really weird for me to watch this because I'm from the Arkansas/Oklahoma region. Everybody in there is just... everyone who is in this documentary... it just seems bizarrely familiar to me. I don't know any of them, but I know people like them. Including people like Joe Exotic. It's just bizarre.
Starr:
So anyway, moral of the story? Watch that show, it's really good. And don't ever pay to pose with tiger cubs, because it is bad news. It's bad for the tiger cubs.
Josh:
We finally bit the bullet and subscribed to Disney+. Like I made it this far, but yeah, this was the last straw. So, we are now Disney+ subscribers. Katelyn said something the other day about "the kids have so few pleasures left." And I'm like, "What are you talking about? They have unlimited high-definition Disney-
Starr:
What else do you want?
Josh:
We were lucky if we got the VHS tape to rewind properly.
Starr:
Trying to not like eat itself?
Josh:
Yeah. Like we had to blow on the cassette tapes.
Starr:
Yeah, that's so funny. Yeah, we might have to do that too. Ida's iPad actually broke... or the screen got messed up. So we got her a replacement, but it's not an iPad, because the iPads are really expensive to give to a little kid. So we got her an Amazon Fire tablet. They have a kid one that's like indestructible. It's sort of the same deal, it's Disney+. It comes with a year of their subscription service, and the subscription service is basically like the Apple app store, just loaded with kids' stuff. And it's unlimited. So she's like downloading all these games, and she's just like...
Starr:
Yeah, she briefly turned into like a guy in his early 20s. Sort of shut in to his dorm room, just playing games. Didn't want to eat or talk to anybody, or sleep.
Josh:
Yeah, it's like training for college. It's preparation for things to come.
Starr:
Yeah, there you go. The upside of that is that she at least not watching YouTube as much, so...
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Starr:
We were talking about... we should probably get back in the...
Josh:
The other thing we've been talking about is, because this is about time for our quarterly team, all-hands meeting, which we affectionately refer to as our conclave... That's not going to happen in person, but we've been talking about ways to move that to a remote structure. I don't think we have that fully figured out yet, because I don't think any of us want to sit on Zoom for like eight hours straight, which is what we would usually do in person. Break for lunch, of course, but yeah... I think we're talking about ways we can tackle that remotely?
Starr:
That makes sense. We need to work that out. Maybe split it over several days, or maybe like... I don't know have just the three of us meet for longer than everybody else? Because everybody probably doesn't want to be involved in every single conversation about things that don't really have directly to do with them.
Josh:
Yeah, I feel like there's much more opportunity to take advantage of the asynchronous communication style this way. There might be some benefit there to us, I think, because it would give us a little more time. As long as we have some structured planning around guiding the discussions and things? It might give us more time to put deeper thought into things, and explain ourselves more clearly than if it's all just off the cuff.
Starr:
Totally. That makes sense.
Ben:
We also talked about... you had the idea of sharing more financial information, just to give... overcommunicate, give some reassurance that, "Yes, we're okay."
Starr:
Oh, yeah. That's right.
Ben:
So I had my one on one with Ben, and we talked about the financials, like how much money is in the bank, and talked about... we have seen a slight decline in the revenue. It's not crazy, yet, and it feels like a typical kind of up and down, like a normal course of business thing. But we're obviously keeping our eyes on that. So I talked through that with Ben. Talked about how we're thinking about... We're cautious. We're cautiously optimistic. We don't feel like there's going to be a huge impact to our business because a lot of our customers are not going to be dramatically impacted by having to stay home and that sort of thing.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
But obviously, it's a concern that we have, and especially as projections for how long this goes on continue... there could be some impacts to our revenue. But talking about where we are with our current balance, and how we're cash-flow positive, we've always been pretty conservative on our money so we don't spend ahead of revenue or anything like that. We've communicated that stuff in the past, but I think, Starr, you had a great idea of reiterating our operating principles, and our beliefs, and giving a snapshot of what we're doing today.
Starr:
Awesome. I don't know, when you're an employee, you don't really have that intimate knowledge about the business' financials, so I don't know. Everything seems a little bit more off in the fog, and you have to trust that it's just kind of working, and it's going to maintain itself.
Ben:
That reminds me, I was totally nodding when you were saying that, but I did tell Ben, because as an employee, you're kind of nervous, right? Like, "Oh, I could get laid off if things get bad." Or "I could just get laid off anytime, really." There's no stopping a business owner from just terminating you any time they want, really. In the US, anyway. And so I said to him, "Look, we're good financially. We have money in the bank. We're cash-flow positive, et cetera. We're not anticipating any layoffs. We're not planning on doing any kind of reduction like that. And we definitely won't say one day to you, 'Oh, by the way, Ben, you don't have a job anymore tomorrow. Good luck.' If we see that sort of thing coming, we'll obviously give you plenty of notice, so you don't have to panic."
Starr:
That's a really good idea. That's a really good idea.
Ben:
But I also told him... I committed us, the three of us, I said, "If things get bad, like the three of us? We will take a salary cut before we start cutting employees. We feel that's the right thing to do-
Starr:
I don't know if I'd go that far.
Starr:
Stop recording. Stop recording. I've got payments to make on my Switch.
Josh:
Right?
Ben:
I've got that $10 a month-
Josh:
On the Switch-
Ben:
... premium coming out of my-
Josh:
... games-
Ben:
Yeah, you've got to pay it back to that guy in Animal Crossing, right? Yeah, I've got to work off my indentured servitude to Tom Nook. Great game, by the way. I started playing it. Great game.
Josh:
Yeah? Katelyn's been playing that, because she got a Switch, and yeah, she's really liking it.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
I was thinking about this because there's been a lot of memeing going on about how... people are learning, who don't really pay much attention to business normally, that most businesses don't have a ton of cash where they can keep on operating for more than like a month. Most businesses operate on a pretty hand-to-mouth system, even if they are relatively big. We have a little bit more buffering than that, and I was just thinking about that because there's all these memes going around where people are being like, "Oh, you expect normal people to have six months of savings, but your business doesn't have six months of savings."
Starr:
It occurred to me that both of those things are actually probably caused by the same structural force, which is, in both cases you have the owners of the business trying to... the one thing they're trying to do above all else is to maximize investor returns. And so any sort of surplus that you have laying around goes to investor returns. It doesn't go into a rainy day fund, and it doesn't go into paying your employees more than you absolutely have to, so they can do their own rainy day funds. I don't know. I was just thinking about that because that's thankfully one force that we don't really have operating on us directly, although, I'm sure all of our customers do.
Ben:
Yeah, though I did hear that, I think it's Apple, has enough cash on hand to run their business for a year, without any revenues.
Josh:
If all the revenue stopped tomorrow-
Ben:
That's Apple. That's darn impressive.
Josh:
Isn't that because it's all stuck outside of the country, and they haven't been able to bring it in or something? Or did they figure out a way around the taxes?
Ben:
Yeah, I don't know.
Josh:
I've heard they have massive cash reserves or whatever.
Starr:
I'm sure they do.
Josh:
It would be nice if businesses all operated like that, because if that's the case, basically businesses just could kind of finance their own shutdown, basically. It would just affect longterm profits for the overall economy. But it wouldn't... the businesses would bear the cost of that, versus the taxpayers.
Starr:
I was just going to say that maybe it also... even when one step farther, and then it goes back to the whole... everything's based on price, right? I don't know. Like the reason that Apple can probably have that much cash in the bank is because they can charge a premium. They're not a low-price leader or anything. It's maybe
Josh:
Yeah, it really depends on the type of business. And that's one of the reason why that'll probably never happen.
Ben:
I think if you read Justin Jackson's thing about margin, right? That's the argument he's making, right? If you run a business that has that kind of margin, that gives you that luxury? Then things are much easier. And I think that applies on a personal level as well. Basically, just living below your means. It's simply just spending less than you make. Then, over time, you can accumulate that buffer, that rainy day fund, so you can weather a storm that comes, when it comes. Because storms will come. I just feel like-
Josh:
Yeah. And it's so much to live on half your income, because then you don't have to worry.
Starr:
And honestly, even without the savings component? It's good knowing that you just have to... like if you need to find a job? You only need to find a job making half as much as you're making now, which is always easier.
Josh:
Yeah, totally. You could take a 50% pay cut and still-
Starr:
I mean, it's not-
Josh:
... like nothing will change.
Starr:
Yeah, we're talking about sort of survival situations. Were not talking about ideal situations. I don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, it's an interesting time for the world.
Starr:
It is.
Ben:
We're having conversations that most people haven't had. Our grandparents experienced the great depression, and left some of that legacy with their children, and how they lived their lives. We're a bit removed from that. We don't have as much of that in our psyche as our parents did, because of that event. Well, now we're experiencing an event that could be very similar to that experience that they had, and I think we will definitely have a community psyche adjustment. At least I hope so.
Josh:
Yeah, for sure. I don't know about you all, but I'll be washing my hands for 20 seconds for the rest of my life.
Ben:
For real!
Starr:
Oh, definitely. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Definitely. Every day it just gets drived home and more, just how insanely lucky we all are. And not to say that we haven't worked hard and all that stuff? Yeah, we've worked hard and everything. But it's like lots of people have worked hard in industries that are just shut down right now. And they just don't have any... There's people who have worked way harder than I have, who are just out of work. Through no fault of their own.
Ben:
We're very fortunate to be in the business that we're in. Because we could have put this much work into... and even twice as much work into our own restaurant chain. Right? And right now, that would be just washed away.
Josh:
Yeah, it would be tough. Going back to the whole living on less than you make thing or whatever, having a good buffer... I was looking at the income requirements... it's the CARE Act, right? That's cutting checks to everyone in America. But there are income thresholds where you won't get a check. And it's at some point. But I was thinking about that because I know that there's a lot of people out there that made more than the income thresholds, but they are so over extended... as far as like their mortgages, car payments, if they're doing the typical McMansion lifestyle or whatever... they would probably really appreciate that little check right now. And I bet some of them will be complaining about it.
Ben:
I'm going to get a little political on you here, so fair warning. I was reading this week about this act coming through, and people making various arguments about what we should do to help people. One thing that came out is it's kind of a big deal that we have this huge jump in unemployment... that was just reported yesterday... and yet, all of our health insurance is tied to our employment. Like that's probably a bad thing to have in this situation.
Starr:
I know.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
This has been one of my things, my soapboxes for years. I was like let's just divorce employment from your health insurance, please. So I'm just-
Josh:
Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
Ben:
... I'm hoping beyond hope that this event will push that over the edge, and we'll actually make that happen. I care less about whether it's private insurance, versus multi-payer, versus single. That's great, we can talk about that-
Josh:
Right, just make it not-
Ben:
But just make it not tied to your employer, for Pete's sake.
Starr:
I have a feeling a lot of people's opinions are going to get changed about a lot of things in the coming year.
Josh:
Yeah. It seems like that whole thing is like a holdover from a very, very different time. Like that was back in the early days of when health insurance because a thing.
Ben:
Well, it was all about-
Josh:
Back when it was created, right? Like it was the companies that were pushing it initially.
Ben:
Yeah, well it's all about post-WWII, you could not-
Josh:
They were competing-
Ben:
... yeah, you could not raise salaries past a certain point. There was price control on that.
Josh:
Yeah, so they started to compete-
Ben:
So offering that-
Josh:
... on benefits. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. So let's just unwind that.
Josh:
Right.
Ben:
For me, when I look at... of course, I have no idea what I'm doing here, I'm just a web developer, right? But I would say-
Josh:
Just.
Starr:
I'm just a simple, country web developer. I don't cotton to these big city ways.
Ben:
Let's just transition from employer-based private insurance to 100% private market, private insurance. Everyone goes to the marketplace and buys the insurance that they need. That's a step we can take. And let's talk about other steps we might want to take at some point. Fine. Great. But I think if we could just do that one thing, get everyone out there buying health insurance for themselves, rather than through their employer-
Josh:
Big step in the right direction.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I think that would be helpful.
Josh:
As a freelancer-
Starr:
It gets so complicated though, because it's easy to think about the main sort of happy path in terms of that, but there's so many sort of sad paths, and people's lives are so complicated that it's-
Josh:
Yeah, you'd obviously still need to cover the people that obviously can't do that.
Ben:
Sure.
Josh:
That don't have any chance of doing that.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
But even just as a freelancer, in my early 20s learning how the world works, I didn't go through the career path, so I didn't go work for a company. I pretty much just went straight into freelancing. So I learned the value of buying my own health insurance. And it wasn't fun, because it wasn't cheap, as a young person. But yeah, a lot of people don't learn that... I just don't think that you should... insurance is something that you should buy for yourself. A lot of people just kind of assume that it's something that comes along with all the other benefits that you get from employment, or citizenship.
Ben:
Yep. I will say that when I was doing freelancing first, when I first transitioned from an employee to being a freelancer, that really opened my eyes to the whole insurance thing. Because yeah, like you said, you have to buy your own-
Josh:
Because then you have to buy it yourself.
Ben:
... insurance on the private market. And that was before Obamacare, so it was kind of a different world.
Ben:
If we could just agree to get it away from employers, that would be so much better.
Starr:
A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Josh:
Get it away from employers, and maybe like standardize the rules of the coverage a little bit, so that everyone's not like bartering over the different provisions and stuff. A lot gets wasted in just trying to figure out how each plan should work.
Starr:
I don't know. It's all very complicated, and ideologically, I really like the idea of single payer. Personally? Like right now? I wouldn't really enjoy transferring all of my health stuff over to some different system. But I don't know. I recognize that any change is going to really... it's going to be change, and it's going to involve a lot of pain in the neck stuff for a lot of people.
Ben:
Yeah, I think there's a lot to like about the single payer thing, and I think one thing that we're seeing with this pandemic is that healthcare is a national interest issue, right? We should care about everyone receiving adequate healthcare, because that only helps everyone.
Josh:
It affects our health, like-
Starr:
Oh, yeah, totally. Totally. And if that is the actual goal of any sort of private insurance whatever, and they make it so that that's possible? Then, yeah. Sign me up for that. Right? It's just the whole idea of I've got to choose between rent or not dying? I just think at this point, the fact that we require this as a country is a moral failure. I think morally, we need to do better for people.
Ben:
And hopefully we'll have more of these conversations nationally, as a result of this. You know I'm always the optimist.
Josh:
Maybe we'll actually be able to talk about it.
Ben:
Hopefully.
Josh:
This time.
Ben:
Yeah. Hopefully we'll be able to have some good conversations around how we want to take care of ourselves.
Starr:
Yeah, and they're all going to happen over Zooms, so.
Josh:
Right?
Starr:
Your Zoom stock is going to go way up.
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
Yeah, we've got-
Josh:
Is it Slack?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Your Slack and your Zoom.
Starr:
There you go. We've got a play date with all of my daughter's daycare kids-
Josh:
Nice. You can deal with that.
Starr:
... lined up in a couple of hours. So just FYI, I'm using the company Zoom account for a lot of this stuff. So we can get more than 20 minutes-
Josh:
That's awesome.
Starr:
... in calls.
Ben:
It's all good.
Josh:
That'll be something to grow up with, if this is like a thing. Yeah, doing your daycare meetups remotely... that'll be something that'll stick, right? I imagine.
Starr:
Well, hopefully not, because they'll all be going to daycare.
Josh:
Yeah, well.
Starr:
We've got to get back in that...
Ben:
I don't know, you might find a lot of people decide they like this new lifestyle right? You and Evie might decide, "You know what? We actually like this. We're going to keep Ida at home. Starr's going to work in the morning, and Evie's going to work in the afternoon, and we're going to just do this as a family."
Josh:
Yeah, I don't know. We've talked about homeschooling, to be honest. If anything, this drives me more in that direction than less, because I see what people are dealing with, with like the school systems in a crisis like this. And I'm like, "I'm glad my kids aren't in school yet."
Starr:
Yeah. We were supposed to start Pre-K... when is it? June? And I read this article this morning that was like, "The social distancing in Washington's working, but they need to keep it up through like early June, for it to actually make a difference in the longterm." So, it's like, well, we'll see what happens there.
Josh:
You know something interesting, going back to Ben, you said, "We've never really dealt with anything like this before. Our grandparents could talk about the depression and stuff..." We had 2008... that was a big event on the grand scale of things. But one thing that is different between then and now among a lot of things is podcasting. But podcasting has grown a lot since then. I think that'll be interesting, because there's a lot of smaller businesses like ours, that are now, I assume, documenting this whole period, that maybe happened a little bit less in 2008. There were some, but there's certainly a lot more happening right now.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Starr:
You know it's definitely the first one of these to happen when everybody's writing about it, and talking and posting about it, and all that stuff.
Josh:
Of course, will anyone ever come back and listen to them all?
Starr:
I don't know, maybe some doctoral student-
Josh:
Maybe.
Starr:
... will do their thesis on Honeybadger's podcasting. Honestly? That would be great because that will mean that society's been prosperous enough that somebody can waste their time doing that. All right, so do we have any messages for future generations? Anything you want to put in the old time capsule?
Josh:
Future generations of 'Badgers? When every citizen in the world refers to themselves as 'Badgers?
Ben:
The message is stay home, stay healthy.
Starr:
Yes, yes.
Josh:
Hopefully you don't have to deal with this like we are. Hopefully we have it figured out by then.
Starr:
I don't know, if there's one good thing that's coming out of this, I think it's that at least in my household, we're actually sort of reaching out to people more that we know. Just to make sure everybody's doing okay. See if we can help people, stuff like that. So you know, if anything? We're being driven maybe physically apart from the people, but I don't know, I feel like in other ways, we're being pushed closer. So, that's kind of nice.
Josh:
I heard everyone's back on Facebook.
Starr:
Oh, my God, no. I'm not-
Ben:
Not me.
Josh:
Apparently they've had a huge uptake in people rejoining, that had left during the whole Facebook whatever it was called.
Starr:
Yeah, I totally want to see what my racist uncle has to say about COVID-19.
Josh:
Reconnect.
Starr:
Yeah, that's great. All right. Oh, my God, you had to bring up Facebook. Now it's going to leave on a sour note.
Josh:
Always.
Starr:
I'm a never Facebooker. Well, I was once a Facebooker before-
Josh:
I like that never Face...
Starr:
Yeah. It's like I threw a party celebrating leaving Facebook, so-
Josh:
What about never Zucker?
Starr:
I never Zucker, yeah. What about that guy? He was like, "I want to run for president. Everybody loves me." And he got hit in the face by reality.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
All right, well it's great talking with y'all, and I'll catch you next week. Have a safe and prosperous week.
Josh:
Yeah, you too.
Starr:
Oh, wait, I've got to say the stuff. If you like this show and you're stuck at home, go to Apple podcast and review us. If you want to write for us... if you write about Ruby, or Elixir, or whatever... We've actually had kind of an uptick in people wanting to write for us, including some people who you might even recognize, who are fairly well known in the little community we live in. If you want to do that? Go to our blog, look at the top navigation, and see the Write for Us link. Our blog's at honeybadger.io.
Starr:
All right. I think that's it. So, have a good one guys, and catch you later.
This week on PandemicQuest Josh, Starr and Ben share insider trading tips via the dark web, explain why aliens haven't attacked yet, and their thoughts around starting a SaaS company for hand sanitizer. The truth isn't out there, it's in here! Can you handle it?
Links:
Kodak Calendar
Josh's Investing Blog Post
Daddy Daycare
Kindergarten Cop
Animal Crossing
Doom
Jack Bogle
Full Transcript:
Starr:
What's today, March 20th?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It stays March 20th for the next two months.
Josh:
So the freeze as a solution to the economic crisis. Just pause everything until it blows over. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, and the thing where that falls down is at that... it's like, well that would also... You wouldn't have to be your mortgage and all that. It's like they wouldn't be able to evict people. But then also you wouldn't get paid, and you still have to eat, so... I don't know. If you have to have a-
Josh:
Well, but maybe that's where the tax stimulus comes in. We just... Future tax payers can... can pay for that.
Starr:
Oh, I guess so. I was thinking an amazing potluck. It's just what you want in a pandemic.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know about that.
Ben:
I like the idea of changing our whole calendar system for the pandemic. You know? Let's-
Josh:
Yeah, that wouldn't cause any trouble.
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. Let's forget Gregorian, forget Julian. Let's just build a new one. I like it.
Starr:
The COVID?
Ben:
The Covian?
Josh:
The COVID.
Ben:
I think it was Kodak... Kodak built their own calendar and for the greater part of 20th century actually ran by it. It's pretty sweet actually.
Josh:
Are you serious?
Ben:
Yeah, yeah. We should switch to that.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. You know, that's so... I mean, I don't really think I'm ever going to be like founder of Kodak rich. I don't honestly want to be, but if I was, that's the kind of shit to pull. It's like, okay guys, I invented a new calendar. You all have to do it just because money. You know? Because I've got it, so here's my calendar, chip chop. You know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I should probably clue in our listeners. Given the current, crazy state of the world with everything literally being on fire and... I'm expecting aliens to come next week and blow up the White House or something. We're sort of just going to be winging it for the next few weeks until things stabilize a little bit, because it feels kind of weird to go on and in the midst of all this stuff be like, all right, so we're going to do... we're going to talk about VC versus Bootstrap. Go. And it's like, who even knows if VCs will exist in two months. They might just... right? They might all be wiped out by the virus. You don't know.
Josh:
It's possible. I was going to say, I don't know about the aliens though, because I think the aliens are probably also self-isolating right now. I don't know if they'd want to actually come here.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Yes. I mean, it's kind of like a spaceship. It's like, I wish I had a spaceship for my self-isolation.
Josh:
Maybe that's why the aliens haven't actually arrived, because they've been just self-isolating this entire time. The entire history of earth. You know? This is hitting us late, so...
Ben:
Yeah. They're all like, humanity is a virus.
Starr:
So the one thing I was thinking about in the past couple podcasts we've done is we go... We come on and we do a podcast and we're like, oh yeah, this is the state of the world. And then we come in a week later and everything's completely changed.
Josh:
We're lagging. Yeah, we're lagging by a week. So just keep that in mind.
Starr:
Yeah, we're lagging by a week. So it's just... it's just interesting to me to think about because last week I was... I was saying, well you know, maybe we might be... Like my daughter's daycare might be shutting down, something, whatever. Then by Sunday my wife and I were both like... we're like, we're pulling that girl out. She's not staying there anymore. And then an hour after we emailed them, they're like, we're closing anyway. Sorry. And now, basically, we're in our tiny little Seattle, city house. We've got two people working from home, or trying to. We've got... My four year old daughter's at home. And I've been working on this backyard shed for a long time, or it's an office. It's intended to be a backyard office.
Josh:
Well, it's a daycare now.
Starr:
Yeah, I spent most of yesterday picking up the razorblades off the floor, literally. Use a lot of razor blades in construction. Who knew? And vacuuming up all the carcinogenic dust and everything, and to make it into a big playroom because it's like our living room is getting a little tight.
Josh:
Starr, even if you did none of those things, it sounds like it was still a safer environment than the daycare.
Ben:
Josh, that reminds me of the movie Daddy Daycare.
Josh:
You know, I haven't seen... I don't think I've seen that one.
Ben:
You still haven't seen it?
Josh:
I still haven't seen it.
Ben:
I know we've talked about it before. You have to see it.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
It's hilarious.
Josh:
All right, well-
Starr:
That's not the "It's not a tumor" one, is it?
Ben:
No. No, that's Kindergarten Cop.
Starr:
Okay. Okay. Similar premise?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It sounds like a similar premise. It sounds like a direct rip off actually. You know?
Ben:
Daddy Daycare basic plot line is two executives get laid off and they can't deal with their kids. And they start a daddy daycare and hilariousness ensues... hilarity ensues.
Josh:
Classic. Classic thing to do.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. We got to corporatize this... this stay home thing.
Ben:
Can you imagine what Honeybadger Daycare would look like? I think that would be awesome.
Josh:
Absolute chaos.
Ben:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I think you just put in some padding on the walls and the kids go crazy.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
But back to the VCs. I read... I was reading the other day just because I've been doing a little trying to keep up on the state of... the state of that world where people's minds are at. And there are at least a few people talking about VCs investing in some sectors still. Especially sectors that are... the few that are still potentially seeing an increase as a result of this health, obviously, and in remote... remote work and stuff.
Starr:
I'm just trying to figure out how we can make a SaaS that like a hand sanitizer. It's like you pay a monthly fee and then you go on the website and then your hands are sanitized.
Ben:
That'd be cool.
Josh:
That would be... that would be an invention. Yeah. I do... We are going to be making some hand sanitizer here pretty soon. I've got... I've got a surplus of supplies, let's just say. So, I think-
Starr:
Oh, wow.
Josh:
I think we're going to be-
Starr:
Are you sure you want to be announcing that on the... to the public, Josh? Are you sure you want to be letting that-
Josh:
Well, I'm pretty sure that I have... I have enough to... I would share with everyone in the neighborhood so I might... we might have to go door to door. And I thought it's... Not only is it a nice thing to do but it also might actually help improve the neighborhood's odds of like staying healthy. So it's a little bit of a... it's also a bit of a selfish gift.
Starr:
That's funny. It's like, in 50 years it's going to be some grad student who's... who's pouring over all the data to try and come to some... trying to figure out some thesis for their post-doctoral degree or something, and they're going to be like, huh, this one little cluster of houses survived. I wonder what's the story there? And the story is a hero with some rubbing alcohol.
Josh:
Exactly. 99.8% alcohol.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
So speaking of things dying and surviving, I'm wondering what's going to happen with colleges. Because my older son's in college and they've... their next quarter is going to be online. They announced that this past week. So he's not going back to campus for the next quarter. But longer term, this goes on for several months into next year, let's say, like some people are theorizing that it will, does the perception of the value of a college education finally change, right? I mean, people have been talking about this for a long time. Have we reached the point where it's just not worth it to spend ridiculous amounts of money to send a kid off to college, right? And now that colleges in the U S are like, well let's just do it all online, people are like, okay, why am I even paying you? You know? I was like, um? The colleges are like, well, we're still provide a quality education. It's like, it's a Zoom Meeting. Really? You know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I don't know. I'm interested to see how that plays out.
Josh:
There seems to be like there would be more competition for online education if the colleges are forced to compete.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Purely... purely with the online model. Although of course they still have the upside of actually an accredited degree.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
But, I don't know. Yeah, I mean the other thing is it could, it could just... it could encourage more of the online. Maybe they... the online thing will stick in some places more than it is now. And yeah, I don't know. I think... Personally I think it would be... It's cool the more asynchronous it can be in my opinion, the easier it becomes for people who aren't full time students to... If they, say you want to get a degree or maybe you want to get a second degree or whatever, it makes it a lot easier if you can basically do it whenever. Work it into your schedule.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
So, yeah it's pretty cool.
Starr:
I wonder if... I'm going to guess that if anything, pandemic world is going to make the value of a college degree be perceived as higher. Because I bet you most of the people who are working from home are college educated, or have some college and most of the people who are having to go out into the world and who are really stressed out about that probably aren't. So, I don't know, it's like-
Josh:
That's interesting.
Starr:
It's like people are going to be like they kind of fight each other for those shitty office jobs that you can do remotely at least.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
And then on the flip side... So my younger son's in high school and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do for the rest of the school year basically. But at this point the teachers are saying, well, here's some stuff that you could do, but it's really just enrichment because, for the sake of equality, they can't be handing out assignments and grading them because not every student in the school or in the district has access to good internet or has the computing resources at home that they would need to be able to actually attend lectures or even complete assignments. And so basically the school is done for the year. I mean, really it's not coming back before the summer. So at that point it's like, okay, so what do we do for public schooling? Right? Because if you want to be equitable and make sure everyone has access, well then maybe you... we finally have to treat internet access as a public utility because, frankly, everybody needs it to get an education.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
So yeah, it could be a lot of interesting results that come out of this particular event.
Josh:
Now that everyone is on the internet at the same time I could see... I'm already starting to see the effects. I think we all are... of things getting overloaded. The three of us on video right now are kind of jumping around the screen erratically.
Ben:
You mean we're going to spend it on a podcast episode complaining about Comcast?
Josh:
Right. I mean, our internet's... Yeah I mean the Internet's fine. It's, we're just jumping around erratically. Like we-
Starr:
Remember to tell your children about the times before so that the memory of them will last... will linger on. You know? Beyond us.
Josh:
So my internet, it has been... It has been disconnecting a little here and there and I've been using my LTE tethering as a backup. But yesterday my LTE was kind of getting spotty and then my... We have an alarm system in our house that has a cellular transmitter to notify our, the alarm company and that thing started like going off because it has an alarm when it disconnects. The transmitter on that was having LTE issues, so I called the company and they said that they blamed it on the 5G rollout. So apparently my... Apparently the tower is experiencing 5G growing pains because they're diverting 3G resources to 5G apparently.
Ben:
That poor tower.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Thoughts and prayers for that tower.
Josh:
Right. So I don't know what it is, but that's another data point that... Yeah, either 5G or everyone tethering on their phones is causing some issues. Although it did seem to be signal related. It wasn't like a bandwidth issue. I think the signal was actually like getting weaker.
Ben:
That's because Joe was standing in front of the dish while he's putting a 5G in. I mean there's really... I just... Okay. So I don't know anything about cellular networks, right, but I find it, as a technical person, a little difficult to believe that doing... adding a new service through a tower should degrade the old service. You'd think they have protocols for making sure they don't degrade their existing servers when they're trying new stuff? You know?
Josh:
I think... I mean yeah, I would assume they would. Yeah, I don't know either, but I've never heard... I've read a little bit about cellular, how cellular networks work, and I have not read that they take the... I've heard they add. It's usually like they're adding equipment to the tower versus re-purposing old equipment. That's why these towers start out with one little antenna on them, or whatever, and end up looking like... You know? I don't know. Like... yeah.
Ben:
Like something from Star Wars.
Josh:
Like a pin cushion or, yeah. Yeah, like a Star Wars. And then they have to make them look like trees so that we don't all realize the society that we're living in. If you just took Star Wars and just made everything look like a tree, or like something natural... Just put... Just disguise it all. Maybe that's what we have now. We don't know.
Ben:
Yeah, I could just imagine Han Solo flying around in a ship looks like a pancake.
Josh:
Yeah, just drinking some Kombucha.
Starr:
I don't know. The emperor just think all that stuff looks tacky. The emperor likes his vistas. He likes his nature.
Josh:
Yeah. I don't know what the modern equivalent of the Death Star would be.
Ben:
I don't know about you two, but I have definitely noticed my performance this week has taken a hit. I'm just... Even I've seen a lot of people on Twitter saying... people who have been working from home for a long time, like we have, telling people who are new to working from home this is not normal. If you don't like this, don't freak out because this is crazy for all of us. And that is totally true. You would think, I'm kind of used to the idea of checking the news on a regular basis and still getting work done, but this is just taking it past any kind of normal.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, who would have thought society collapsing could distract you a little bit.
Josh:
I know, right.
Starr:
The complete dissolution of the world in which we live in. Who would've thought, who would have thought that would have any effect?
Josh:
See, I've been... I normally try not to check the news. I read the news on the weekends. I try to stick to more of a slower news cycle. But lately... I mean, I've been checking it way too much.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Josh:
But I've been... I'm going a little easier on myself because... I mean, this is a historical time. This is not normal times and it's all so interesting. Everything that is happening is interesting, as well as terrifying. But it seems like... I mean it's not... I'll give myself a little leeway right now to kind of experience-
Ben:
Well that's a good point.
Josh:
I'll look back on it and I don't want to have... I don't want to look back on it and realize that I just went through it not paying attention.
Ben:
Yeah, I like that. I have a friend of mine from church, she's a teacher. She teaches second grade, and one of the enrichment assignments that she sent out to her class, to her students, was for them to journal about their experiences during this time. She said, because, talking to her students she said, you are going to be a primary source for a historian 50 or 100 years from now, or even your own grandkids are going to be looking back at this time saying, what was it like for grandma. You know? What was it like for grandpa to live through this? And I thought that was an excellent suggestion, to... I like to journal, but I hadn't thought of documenting the kinds of firsthand experiences that we're going through right now so that my grandkids could be like, Whoa, that was crazy. You know?
Josh:
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I was thinking about that too this morning, actually. I might do a little writing and... Actually, I started a physical journal around the first of the year in addition to my yeah Notes app and stuff. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I can imagine, in 50 years or whatever, these kids sitting around the fire with these old journals being like... being like, oh, grandma keeps talking about... She's really into the craft of mining or something. Or it's like, did they still use that word fortnight back then to mean two weeks. That's weird. I thought that was... that was something from a hundred years ago. But they spelled it funny. Huh? Just...
Josh:
How can you have fortnight all weekend?
Starr:
I know. It doesn't make sense.
Ben:
We totally need to release a game called Furlong.
Josh:
Yeah, what would that one be about?
Ben:
I don't know, but you know... You know that-
Starr:
A really long piece of fur.
Ben:
Yeah, the furlong's for Fortnite, right? So we definitely need a furlong to go with our Fortnite.
Starr:
Oh, I don't know. I don't... I've never played Fortnite. I don't... I just know that the kids were obsessed with the last year and I'm kind of assuming that they're not obsessed with it anymore. I don't know.
Josh:
It's still pretty big.
Ben:
Speaking of obsessive games, you know what today is, aside from being March 20th?
Starr:
What?
Josh:
DOOM?
Ben:
Not DOOM.
Starr:
Are they really an Animal Crossing?
Ben:
Animal crossing.
Starr:
Animal Crossing, yeah.
Ben:
Today's Animal Crossing day.
Starr:
Awesome.
Josh:
Hey, you're pretty stoked about that I see, Ben.
Ben:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
I got my switch? I got... It was my birthday a few days ago. I asked everybody... Everyone is like, what do you want for your birthday? And I was like Nintendo gift cards because I don't want any of that. I don't want things from the outside world entering my house right now. So yeah, I'm going to set that up, maybe tonight, and play some Animal Crossing.
Ben:
Sweet.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah, I might play some DOOM.
Starr:
It's like, what a perfect game to released at this time.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. Well I was saying the same thing about DOOM. I've been on the fence of picking that up but that's always a good time.
Starr:
Is there a new DOOM coming out?
Josh:
Yeah, there is. It already is. It already is out, yeah.
Starr:
Oh, I haven't... I'm sorry I haven't been paying attention.
Ben:
That's a nice contrast in options there. You can go with DOOM or you can go with Animal Crossing.
Josh:
What type of person are you?
Starr:
There you go. So I actually don't mind these... these Zoom lag... the lagging in the Zoom calls, because my reflexes are already kind of on a one second lag. So things like DOOM just don't really... I'm just not very... very competitive at them. You know? And I thought I was when I was in college because I was on a good college internet connection that was back when everybody had 28.8 dial-up modems and I was like, man, I'm really good at this. But I just had a really fast connection compared with everybody. And yeah, I learned my mistake.
Josh:
You were like those stock traders that are on the New York stock exchange fiber.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. I should have... Why wasn't I doing that instead?
Ben:
Made a lot more money.
Josh:
Gosh, I'm so much better than everyone. Look at all this cash that is reigning upon me. Validation.
Ben:
Speaking of stocks, my stock pick from last week is up by $1.
Starr:
Oh boy.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
Raking in the big bucks now.
Josh:
$1.
Ben:
$1.
Josh:
I hope you bought a million shares.
Ben:
Well, maybe a little less than a million.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah. Yeah, I did not buy any stocks. I decided that stock picking is just not my cup of tea. So I'm going to stick with my boring, long-term... Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah. I think that's the way to go.
Josh:
Jack Bogle investment plan.
Ben:
I think-
Starr:
Now what was it you were saying, Josh? About the risk minimization or regret minimization, that you laid out this argument for why you weren't going to pick stocks.
Josh:
So the argument was... Actually, I wrote a blog post about this on my blog too, but the argument was that I'm so risk averse that I'm never going to dump... I'm never going to spend a substantial amount of money doing that. And so Ben and I were talking and we were like, well, you know you can do it. It's kind of just... It's a hobby. It's for fun. It's almost like fantasy football or fantasy sports or something. You pick the companies that you think are going to do well and then it's just kind of fun to watch it go up and down, or whatever.
Josh:
But I realize... I mean, if I do that and the stock does really well, I'm going to regret not dumping, not putting more money into it because I'll be like, well, what could have been if I would've just taken a risk, or whatever, but that is not... That's not me. So I was like, I'm actually going to regret rash... Acting rationally for me is like, just not to don't do that in the first place. So I decided that I would have less regret if I just didn't do it.
Starr:
Yeah. And I don't know, like I remember... I remember the moment where I actually realized how the math worked on sort of individual stock trades and sort of how... Suppose that you had some sort of magical knowledge that was totally legal to use and not insider information at all, but you had figured out the code and you knew that the stock market, or one particular stock was going to jump by 25% tomorrow. Right? That would be a incredible piece of knowledge. Right? So it's like, okay, I'm going to invest all of my available money in this. I want to invest $100 grand in it. And so then the next morning you get a profit of $25 grand. So it's this... You've had this great once in a lifetime piece of knowledge and it got you $25 grand. Which, it's nice to have $25 grand, but-
Josh:
But it's also a felony.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean it's a felony. It's a-
Josh:
And it's... Yeah, because there's no compounding, right? Like there's no... There's the longterm part is what makes you the money. So, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And also you might be wrong, so I don't know.
Josh:
Right. And then, yeah... you know there's the risk. Yeah. It's still a gamble, yeah. We were... I read a article today about our... Not today, but this week, about apparently there's on the dark net, which I think is-
Starr:
That's my favorite net.
Josh:
I think it's just Tor. There are stock tips trading sites, so where people in the financial industry can go and share their insider trading tips.
Starr:
Oh.
Josh:
Or sell them, basically sell them. But yeah, so they are-
Starr:
And there's some sort of peer to peer cryptographic thing that makes them tell the truth, right?
Josh:
Well it's... I mean it's all... It's a house of whatever. Like a house of mirrors or whatever type thing where everyone... No one knows who anyone is and everyone's a cop. But yeah, apparently the price of entry into one of them is one Bitcoin, which at the time was about $5,500 for an annual membership. And you have to trade... You have to share, I think it was a couple, up to two decent sources of information every year to maintain your membership. So just... Yeah, I don't know. If you want to be a criminal, it's a... You know, it might be a better subscription than the Wall Street Journal. I'm just saying.
Ben:
You know, it's just... There's proof that there's nothing new under the sun because that totally reminds me of the Warez-BBSs back in the day where you had to... you had to upload, download credit. You had to upload some Warez before you had enough credits to download other stuff. So you had to prove your cred first. Yep.
Josh:
Nice. Oh, you know what it was called? What this one was called? If I recall, it was called StockNet, which is... I mean, I love the names that they come up on these things. It's always the most... It just sounds like that's... It sounds like something out of Tron or something. Right? I don't know.
Ben:
You know what their tagline could be? StockNet, only slightly less evil than Skynet.
Josh:
Nice, yeah. Yeah, let's go tell a Skynet thing.
Starr:
And the irony is that it was a Dragnet all along.
Josh:
Right?
Starr:
So I've got a hot tip for you guys.
Josh:
Let's hear it.
Starr:
This is my stock investment tip, which yeah, I've definitely researched this, but I'm just saying Eucerin Lotion, right? Because when you've been washing your hands as much as I have, my hands get dry and I didn't think to hoard that. You know? Everybody's hoarding this hand sanitizer. Well what happens if you use hand sanitizer 20 times a day is you need some lotion. So yeah. So we went out and bought that. We... My poor little daughter has... The back of her hands were all red and she doesn't like putting on lotion. So we got her some magic socks that you put them on your hands while you sleep and they do a magic spell which is called lotion inside the socks. And that will... that'll fix them right up. But oh gosh, it's just a dry chapped wasteland out here.
Josh:
See, I thought this would be good for you to Starr. Because when you're finishing your office, you don't need sandpaper, you can just use the back of your knuckles.
Starr:
Oh there you go. That's a great idea. I should, do that.
Josh:
In these trying times, you have to get... You have to be resourceful.
Starr:
You have to make due. You have to make due. Well you know I... This is all very unfortunate circumstances and very, it's difficult for everyone, but... And also I am more busy than I have ever been in my life because we've got two people working from home and we've got my daughter here. But one silver lining is that I've really actually gotten to spend some great time with my daughter in a way that I don't usually get to.
Starr:
Usually if we see her, we're both together with her and that's cool, but I haven't gotten to spend just four hours a day one-on-one with her before and it's really neat. I'm sort of seeing a new side of her that I didn't really know was there. She is really into this idea now that we're this family who's all working together to keep everybody happy... to keep each other happy and try and be kind to one another. And, I don't know, it's just really great. She's really stepping up and we're getting to have more fun with her. So I'm maybe... Once this is all over, maybe we can, or maybe I can figure out a way to sort of keep that a little bit somehow.
Josh:
Yeah. That's a good... It's a good opportunity for bonding.
Starr:
And it's of course, as soon as I say that she's screaming no. I don't know if y'all heard that one.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
We should probably leave that one in. And that's comedical.
Josh:
I mean, kids stay in on request. Yeah.
Starr:
Well, I should probably better go pretty soon because we've got the... the office needs to be used by another video conferencer.
Josh:
Yeah, you're rotating. Got to rotate out.
Starr:
All right, well this has been a FounderQuest. This has been a pandemic quest.
Josh:
Pandemic quest.
Starr:
Yeah. If you enjoyed the show, please give us a review on Apple podcast. If you are a Ruby or elixir developer interested in writing for us, we're still doing that. Just shoot me an email. All the information about that is on our blog. Go to our blog. There'll be a link in the top navs. Shoot me an email. And yeah, we'll catch you next week maybe. Hopefully. I think we're planning to, but I think we shouldn't make promises at this stage.
Josh:
Yeah, internet... If the internet allows, we'll be here.
Starr:
Yeah. If the internet exists, if the economy's still here.
Ben:
We need some dramatic out music for our pandemic coverage.
Starr:
Oh, we should get some, yeah.
Josh:
That would be good.
Starr:
And if it doesn't... if everything's gone next week, I'll just sit around a fire Friday morning and just pretend I'm talking with y'all.
Josh:
Burning your furniture.
Starr:
Yeah.
Ben:
Playing Animal Crossing.
Josh:
With your Switch.
Starr:
Like on my... I've got one hour left on my UPS, I'm going to play Animal Crossing. All right, well we'll see y'all later. Have a good one and yeah, stay alive.
Glove up, mask on, and tune in to this week’s FounderQuest! Starr, Ben and Josh talk hot investing tips now that our 401(k)s are gone, plans for the “Honey Bunker,” pivoting away from remote and back to co-located working, Animal Crossing, hoarding Mucinex, and the Corona vs. Pacifico beer debate is finally settled. Show Notes:
Links:Daniel Kahneman
Mucinex
Animal Crossing
Nintendo Switch
Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework
Basecamp
Splatoon Squad
Ground Kontrol
RailsConf
Nero
Jim Kramer
Honeybadger Developer Blog
Full transcript:
Starr:
All right. So let's get back on topic. You all were talking about profiteering off of this terrible crisis by investing in the stock market. Honeybadger Blog
Josh:
That's a wonderful way to describe it.
Ben:
Seriously, I'm all about profiteering.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. So I've kind of, I don't know. I've been telling myself I've been waiting for this, so I'll really kick myself if I don't profiteer a little bit or at least try, I feel like, I don't know. There was an article, I forget, I'm trying... Who said this? Basically, Oh, I think it was Daniel Kahneman said one of the keys to investing at least to maintaining peace of mind is like knowing what your future regret will be. And then basically like taking like modifying your behavior to optimize for that versus like adapting to whatever your current fears or whatever is driving the market is driving you or whatever. So I decided that if I don't put a little bit of money into these bargains that I'll kick myself, I'll regret it more if it goes up and I didn't participate versus if I lose a little money.
Starr:
You know I haven't read that book, but I was using a similar strategy today. I was at target and I was like, well, should I get two boxes of Mucinex or three boxes of Mucinex.
Josh:
You would really regret.
Starr:
So I was imagining myself like in the future really needing some Mucinex. So I bought three, I thought four would be too much. I thought four would be like be tipping into... it's like nobody ever buys four boxes of Mucinex.
Josh:
And then-
Starr:
I could see somebody buying three just if they are a big fan.
Ben:
I think you get put on a list if you buy four at the same time.
Starr:
Oh yeah?
Josh:
Because this is like how, this is how like only a few people end up with all the Mucinex.
Starr:
Well you know what, it was the last thing available on the shelf, which was lucky because I actually went there for it. And it's like all the... what does it DayQuil NyQuil tabs all cleared out although there's still some bargains available on that. The liquid form, because nobody likes the liquid form of DayQuil or NyQuil because it tastes gross. Right. And so even in the apocalypse, I don't want to be drinking that stuff.
Ben:
So Josh what you talked about sounded to me like the regret minimization framework that Jeff Bezos-
Josh:
Yeah, that's right. That was, that was another one that kind of was a similar. Yeah, I really liked that. I think it makes sense.
Ben:
So Starrr is loading up on the Mucinex, you know my prepper thing?
Starr:
What's your prepper thing?
Ben:
I'm going to get a haircut
Starr:
Yeah. If you're going down, you want to look good doing it.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Why not?
Ben:
I'm thinking, if you see that chart, US vs. Italy and it shows that the US following the same exact pattern that Italy did but just a little different timeline so if you see that and go "Ok myabe everything will be shut down in a week right? and I won't be able to go get a haircut in a week so I'd better get a haircut today so that I can look good for the apolcolypse."
Josh:
And, yeah, and I mean like, you won't look handsome. Yeah. I mean, you, you won't look handsome on the on zoom calls and we can have that. We can have a shaggy Ben on zoom calls. Now I don't know if our listeners have ever seen me in person, but I don't have this problem. I never cut my hair. So like, well, I cut it a little bit more often than I used to a few years ago.
Ben:
You're like the Sampson of Honeybadger
Starr:
That's all right. You know your Honeybadger's is nature boy.
Josh:
So Ben, did you go stock some stock shop shopping this morning you said?
Ben:
No we always have a backup supply, like we always have months of toilet paper and food and stuff in our garage. That's what we do, but, just this morning I thought "You know what? Maybe it's time to buy that freezer for my garage."
Josh:
Yeah. Nice. I have the freezer and I stocked it yesterday with a lot of chicken breasts from Costco. Not the organic chicken breasts because the organic was gone like long gone. So, apparently-
Starr:
Well, let's be honest. You want those preservatives, you want those preservatives now. You don't want that stuff to last as long as possible.
Josh:
Yeah. It's probably a, it's a net win for me probably to get the non-organic.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm just, I'm just saying Josh though, like when that electricity goes off because the zombies have like broken into the power plants and gnawed the wires like that, like all your chickens going to be rotting, but I'm going to be sitting pretty on my 50 pounds of brown rice.
Josh:
Nice. Yeah. Well I might just eat all the chicken and just absorb all those gains, all those protein gains at once, like just to inject it straight into your veins.
Starr:
You're the hero we've been waiting for Josh. You can like go out and battle the Coronavirus.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
You know, like a boss fight.
Josh:
Yeah. What's better than steroids? Eating 50 pounds of chicken in a single sitting.
Starr:
So since we did our show last week, essentially like the news moves super fast like pretty much everything we talked about was completely out of date. And which is funny because that show was going to be released today, like the day of the... we're actually recording this and then this one will be released in a week.
Josh:
Yeah. So hopefully by the time people get this, the world will have returned to normal and it'll be like, this all never happened.
Starr:
I'll be like, dammit, why did I pay 20 pounds of red lentils? I don't even like lentils.
Starr:
So yeah, so it's a little bit hard to focus on all the stuff going on. It's like yeah, I'm like popping out here and there to buy my rice. I spent like $700 at target this morning, but like I also bought an Nintendo Switch and accessories. So that kind of bumped it up quite a bit.
Josh:
We were talking like about the electronics department because we have a friend at Costco, we have a friend who like manages the electronics department. We were like, I wonder how he's doing. And I'm like crap, I should have like bought a big screen TV while I was there, because there was like no one in the electronics department and we could ride it out and in style.
Starr:
Yeah, it was a bit of a ghost town there. But so I guess this morning like they released a special branded Animal Crossing Switch. And so I guess people were like in line at like 2:00 AM last night outside the Target. Even though the Target opens at six or something. I know like I wouldn't have thought-
Josh:
People were lining up to buy a Switch?
Starr:
And the Animal Crossing branded Switch. Like I got a normal Switch and I haven't checked. I'm pretty sure I can just go download Animal Crossing whenever I set it up. But it has special colors on the little control pads or whatever they're called toy pads.
Josh:
It's all that... It's that, What is the Jeff Bezos framework like you got to ask yourself, will I regret? Like, am I gonna regret not getting that switch? The minute that it's released versus getting the Corona virus?
Starr:
Well, I mean, they'll at least I'll have something to do. Right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I must be honest, the animal crossing-
Josh:
The wrist band, There's, it might... you might make that calculus work.
Starr:
Animal crossing is a very relaxing game, it's exactly the type of game I would want to play if I had the Coronavirus.
Josh:
Which, yeah.
Starr:
I was listening to the radio this morning in the car and the like, DJ said something about telecommuting and I was just like, hello, 1990s?
Josh:
Yeah, we should put that on our website that we're telecommuting 100% telecom media company.
Starr:
That would be amazing.
Josh:
That would be great.
Starr:
I love that... you did get a pager. You got a pager?
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
This is perfect.
Josh:
I got the pager just in time too, because if the cellular networks go down in the middle of all this, I will still make a call.
Starr:
Yeah. Then that's great because the rest of us are just screwed. Oh man. So yeah, it's a little bit hard to focus when all this stuff is going on. I think that coring to-
Josh:
We did do a little work this week.
Starr:
Oh yeah, we've done, I've done work. It's just hard to feel like it... The most pressing thing that I should be doing? You know, it's like should I be writing up these new marketing documents that we talked about or should I be like getting some sort of survival rations for my family? Like it's just a very bizarre, it's this very bizarre calculus to be weighing these things against one another. Because it's like probability of something bad happening times the magnitude of it happening versus whatever gain I'm going to get for this from this marketing stuff.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm trying to kind of just take like the panic Twitter version of the story and the like calm official whatever versions of the story and like go down the middle and plan for whatever plan to be it just home for a bit.
Starr:
Okay. So it's you like average the amount?
Josh:
Yeah. I'm kind of averaging the stories because no one knows exactly what's going to happen. So rather than like going full on bunker, digging a bunker under my house or something. I stocked my freezer and we're self-sufficient here for probably two weeks to a month. I would imagine.
Starr:
I've been doing something similar to a sort of averaging them out where I sort of like oscillate wildly between them and over a span of time. It's basically the same as an average.
Josh:
Like 10 times a day?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. I know the feeling. It is hard, like when you have like such extreme, you have different people saying different things and yeah. I don't know. The way I look at it, no matter what, we still have to deal with the economic fallout of all these people panicking. So I don't want to be going to Costco again for another month, having been there yesterday, on a weekday during the slow period. Like I just don't want to go back. So I'm happy to be somewhat stocked now, so I just don't have to do that.
Starr:
Yeah. That's fair. So it's just like in terms of our business, like things are like, we're obviously keeping on running the business and stuff. It's just like things are kind of up in the air in terms of like, okay, do we need to like, am I going to have childcare next week?
Josh:
Right. The childcare thing kind of throws a wrench into getting work done at home.
Starr:
Oh totally.
Ben:
With the upside that like we don't have to worry about actually leaving the office to go do all that shopping, because we just go like Basecamp, they put out this thing, they close down their office today and next Monday they're doing a four day weekend to give all their employees a chance to go out and do whatever they want to do. Just to like take some of that pressure off.
Josh:
Ben and Kevin yesterday, kind of the same thing. Like basically just go like, we're not expecting you to be here, so yeah, just go take care of any stuff you need to.
Ben:
Yeah, it's kind of surreal though, sitting here in Kirkland and watching like with president Trump's address the other night. And then the response to that that happened over the next day or so, like sitting here and watching the rest of the country kind of wake up to what's going on. It's kind of interesting. I've been talking to my parents who live in Alabama, my in laws who live in Las Vegas and they have a very different experience and their social circles than I do in mine. Just because like, we have all the deaths happening here and all that stuff. So I guess that's kind of like what they feel like in Italy versus the USA. It's like, Hey, US people, you should really pay attention because this sucks. So it's been kind of wild being on the leading edge I guess of that experience.
Josh:
Yeah, for sure.
Starr:
Yeah. It is bizarre. Like it almost doesn't seem real to me because I'm like reading all these headlines and it just seems like the sort of headlines that you'd see in a movie, they sort of like the newspaper like flashes by or something or it's like some characters watching CNN and it's like stocks plunge 10% as blah blah blah. And it's like, Oh man, it just doesn't like it. I know it's real, just doesn't seem real because it's all just, I don't know, it's just, it's too big to wrap my head around. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. And meanwhile, like I mean around here, I'm not like in the middle of, I'm in Vancouver, Washington, which is like two and a half hours South. But I mean it's been sunny. Nice, nice outside. I mean, for the most part people have been going about their business, because we have one confirmed case and, well that's another story because like we have like 10 people under tests, but it's been 10 people under test for like 10 days. So basically there is no information. But anyway, if anything, you go out like to a restaurant or something, it's like there's not as much of a rush. So, it seems pretty normal. So it's like hard to square that with like, you read the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day, which I've been like taking screenshots of, to remind myself later what the next time it happens.
Starr:
So optimistic to think we're going to have computers in 10 years.
Josh:
Well, I mean, it'll be antiquated, but I can still bust out the old photo viewer or whatever.
Starr:
It's like child of mine, get on that bicycle generator and pedal. I want to look at my photos of the Wall Street Journal.
Ben:
It's been, it's been nice though being able to in some ways just proceed like business as usual. I get up, I'd do some code in the morning, right. And I go into my office, my little sub leased space and I just shut the door and I can write some code and yeah. I was never a big restaurant goer or anything and I'm not the person that goes to concerts and things. So like for me, I don't, okay. I already don't have a social life. So shutting everything down doesn't make a whole lot of difference.
Josh:
Yeah. I'm highly regimented. Like, we've joked like the being like quarantine isn't really a big change for our family, because like I just went through... It was good timing actually, like going through moving my like daily routine back, completely centered around my house. Like, I've got the gym here, I'm not going to the office at all anymore. So, some weeks I... if I don't actually try to leave my house, I don't leave my house anyway, but I've noticed that like, keeping to that routine and not letting myself like pay too much attention to what's going on and like stop doing what I normally do. Like keeping that routine is a big, big help. Like it makes you feel a lot better for sure.
Starr:
Yeah. I can see that. It's always been nice to be able to kind of lose yourself in work.
Josh:
Yeah. Plus I had a thought like, if the stock market is tanking, the economy's tanking. People say there could be a recession, there could be a recession, we don't know. But you can't control any of that. Right. So what we can control, like maybe there's no value being created in the market right now. We can still create value in our company. So that's kind of my plan is like, it's kind of an opportunity that we're not going to be spending all this time going to events, flying in, having social time and wasting all that time away that we could be working on product. So that's my plan is to just like reinvest that time back into like heads down, do as much as I can to make what I can, improve what I can in that time. And things will return to normal at some point. I would be shocked if they don't.
Ben:
Or you could just sit on our couches and play Switch all day long.
Josh:
Or we could do that together. I mean like, yeah, we could, will you send me a friend request or whatever they call it?
Starr:
Oh my gosh, we can do that. We can only play Pokemon together or something.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
We can do that instead of a company retreat or company Xbox.
Josh:
Everyone gets an Xbox live account.
Ben:
We can Start a Splatoon Squad.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
You know, I'll learn what that means momentarily.
Josh:
So, RailsConf is not happening, so we won't be doing that sponsorship, unfortunately. We are still trying to decide what to do with the Ground Kontrol. And I know I'm not supposed to say this because this would disclose the location of our secret. Our secret, like hide out if shit really hits the fan.
Starr:
Wait, Josh, are you talking about the Honey Bunker?
Josh:
I'm talking about the Honey Bunker.
Starr:
Trademarks.
Josh:
So yeah, that's one idea we have is, instead of just canceling the reservation, we could keep it and just instead of like, everyone's going remote right now. Like all the companies are going remote, let's just bring all of our people together. We're a small company so like we can pool our resources locally for survival and defense.
Starr:
And annex this arcade bar.
Josh:
In the middle of Portland.
Starr:
That sounds like a great idea.
Ben:
Everyone else is going from co located to remote. So obviously we should go from remote to co located. Yeah, I like it. I like that logic.
Josh:
I mean it makes sense, because we pretty much do the opposite of everyone as it is. So it sounds to me like-
Ben:
The future of work is butts in chairs or-
Josh:
The future of work is like-
Ben:
Or fingers on games. Right.
Ben:
I don't know about, because I can be standing at that arcade game, right. That pinball machine. You're not sitting there butt in the chair.
Josh:
It's maybe like the race car one or something. Right.
Starr:
I'm sorry guys. But if I am like in a bunker, I rarely really sit down.
Josh:
Recline, I think we talked about that.
Starr:
No, this is not a laziness issue. This is just like, I can't stand... like I'm not a horse. I'm a human being. We like to lounge occasionally. There's nothing, it's not a morality issue.
Ben:
Yeah. So we've internally discussed the idea of just keeping that Ground Kontrol reservation and having like a company game night or we just, we have the whole place to ourselves, but yeah, I don't know. It seems a little reckless at this point.
Starr:
It's a little bit Nero. I'm getting Nero vibes.
Josh:
Yeah. It'll definitely depend on the situation with the health crisis.
Starr:
Maybe everything will magically clears up, by May.
Josh:
If it clears up, that's what I'm saying. Like, we could keep it for a little while and just to see.
Ben:
So I think if we did keep it, we would still need to invite a hundred of our closest friends in the Portland area to come and join us at Ground Kontrol.
Josh:
Like a Coronavirus, Like a party that it's over.
Starr:
Yeah. I'm concerned the Corona.
Josh:
The apocalypse party.
Ben:
Yeah, a survivalist party. Right. We made it.
Josh:
Got it. Yeah. Everyone has to dress like a prepper.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean that is ironically the way to like ensure social distances and like cure Corona virus is just like, make all the parties serve Corona beer and it's so bad. Nobody's going to want to come to your party. And maybe it's good, like fresh, but like those clear bottles, like it just gets so skunky it's so gross.
Josh:
I don't know. They serve a lot of PBR at Ground Kontrol as it is. And I would rather have Corona with a lime than PBR.
Starr:
Oh really? Oh no, no, I'm a Pacifico girl.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, Oh yeah. Pacifico. Whoa, wait.
Starr:
I don't know. I lived in Mexico, so I've got strong feelings about the quality of Mexican beers.
Josh:
I'm just talking about comparing which I like to PBR.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
Pacifico 100% is better than Corona. We agree.
Starr:
Yeah. So, I don't know, I suppose it's, I mean, we don't have any plans to change the podcast, eventually we'll probably get back to talking about actual like business stuff instead of just sort of just vomiting our fears onto the public.
Ben:
But for now you get group therapy.
Starr:
But for now, I'm sorry, I'm sorry people.
Josh:
Are you afraid?
Starr:
I'm not afraid. You're afraid. Yeah. Sometimes the bravest thing is to admit you're afraid guys. Anyway, so, yeah, I mean, I imagine it's possible though. Like if my kid is home, I might not be able to record the podcast if like, I decided to make a run for it to Montana or some remote location. This can be difficult. So I don't know, we just have to see how it goes, I guess.
Ben:
We hope for the best.
Starr:
Yeah. Honestly, I'm kind of tempted just to like be like, okay, company vacation.
Ben:
Yeah, I was thinking the same along the same lines. Like, you know what, maybe this is a good time to take that vacation I have been meaning to take for a few months now.
Starr:
More of a staycation really, but yeah. What month is it? March?
Josh:
Still March.
Starr:
Christmas in March.
Ben:
A lots happened in March.
Starr:
That's how we're going to get our economy back.
Josh:
It was a lot different, a lot different times.
Ben:
And we haven't even reached the Ides of March yet.
Josh:
I know.
Starr:
Really. Oh my God. And remember how everybody was like, Oh my God, 2019. Can't wait for that to be over. Well, thanks guys. Thanks. Like look what you did to us.
Ben:
That was just a warmup act.
Josh:
Hey, at least 2020 is interesting. It's keeping things interesting.
Starr:
You know, I just have to, I just have to say like, 2020 is interesting. I'm grateful that all my family is safe and everything for the moment. And I'm just trying not to attempt 2021 like I just want to keep 2021 very calm and not rile it up.
Josh:
Slowly.
Starr:
Exactly. Oh wow. Is there anything else you guys would like to mention?
Josh:
Nope.
Starr:
It's just, okay. You all are so still and silent. I thought that maybe my connection dropped. We're just like, that would be a good... Everybody's working at home and it's hard to have that sort of camaraderie when you're just on Zoom all day. But I just want to give everybody a little freebie. So here's a prank you can play on somebody that you don't like in your office is you get everybody else on the group call to, on cue, just suddenly freeze and stop saying anything. And maybe you can have one person put a fan on. The background is kind of like blow a plant sleeves just slightly, That would be a really great prank to play on somebody.
Ben:
I think it would be awesome.
Josh:
Please do that and tell us about it. Like organize it.
Starr:
There we go. So this is really the... this is our new business model I think is like consulting. We're like working at home consultants.
Josh:
Yeah. We're a way now telecommuting, consultants?
Starr:
We're telecom. Oh my gosh. Yes, we are telecommuting, like visioneers.
Ben:
Wait, before we go, like we were talking about profiteering at the open.
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Starr:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
So Josh, what stock do you recommend our listeners buy?
Josh:
I was going to say I was going through and looking at all the... like a lot of transportation stocks are just completely tanked and obviously because no one's going anywhere. And there's some other sectors too, but I've never been one for really buying individual stocks. And doing that still makes me like nervous just because there's like, there's no spreading the risk around. That's all your eggs in one basket. So I was thinking about like trying to pick my own handful of bargain stocks to buy. But I think what I'm probably going to do is go research some like transportation funds that cover the whole industry or sector potentially. I don't know what they're, I haven't looked at the charts yet, so I don't know if those are a good bargain or not, but I would prefer to have something that is more automated and spreads the risk across the whole sector versus just going all in on a couple. So I don't know. I might do a little bit of both, just for fun, just for funsies.
Ben:
So I go in the opposite direction. So like my 401k is where all the safe money is. My brokerage account is while I'll play money is, and so I pick individual stocks in my brokerage account. Right. So, my pick, and of course this is going to be published a week after I say this, so-
Starr:
Some people will want to check you.
Ben:
Yeah, exactly. Everything will be different.
Josh:
And did you just choose one?
Ben:
Yeah, I pick one. One stock I bought this morning.
Josh:
But should you just buy one if you're going to buy or should you buy like-
Ben:
Heck no, no, that's stupid.
Josh:
That's what I thought.
Ben:
Like don't do what I do now. This is my play money account. This is not investment advice. If I lose all this, I'm still okay. Right. This is not my kids' college fund.
Josh:
Yeah, of course. All of this we're talking about is pretty much play money I think.
Starr:
Yeah. I mean, that's the kids' college fund is gone at this point. It's like, Oh, you're on your own kid. Yeah, they're going to, they're going to go to the school of hard knocks.
Ben:
But it's going to be an online school because all the schools shut down.
Josh:
I'm just glad my kids are still young.
Ben:
So my pick, the one that I bought this morning, Slack.
Josh:
Slack, good call. Awesome. Yeah, that's a good call. You're anticipating the growth.
Ben:
Yes. Well, and they had earnings yesterday and their stock just tanked because they missed, they had like a big mess and so they just got pummeled and there's absolutely no reason. There's no fundamentals that changed. And with Coronavirus everyone's getting on Slack and Zoom. So I'm like, well I've already have Zoom so I bought some Slack.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Well nice.
Josh:
That was a really good "pummeled" by the way, the inflection that you use for that. Like I could just see you on your own financial advisement advising show, like cable, like Ben's hot stock tips. Yeah, whatever.
Starr:
Yeah, you could have it on a button. You can be like "pummel pummel!"
Ben:
I'm going to take on Kramer. It's my new career.
Josh:
And I'll keep you updated. I'll let you know what I go with.
Ben:
Me too.
Starr:
Thanks. Yeah. So Josh, just keep one thing in mind. This is a thought and maybe that's going to be a nice closing thought, but okay. Tired profiteering, wired privateering hoist up that jolly Roger-
Josh:
I love it.
Ben:
like do something with the main sil, like bring her around with and load the cannons or whatever.
Josh:
Yup.
Ben:
All right.
Josh:
Love it.
Starr:
It's a very Honey badger move.
Starr:
Well, if you've enjoyed this show and you're not cowering under your desk at this point. Please go and review us on Apple podcasts if you are interested in writing articles for us, like we're still publishing articles about Ruby, about Elixir and stuff like that. So check out our blog and look on our header. You'll see a link there for information on how to get in touch with us. And yeah, if it takes me a while to get back to you, it's because I might I mean, might be fixing some brown rice that stuff takes a long time to cook.
Josh:
You know, if people are cowering under their desks, they're, they're also simultaneously looking at Twitter so they can definitely go give us a good rating and It'll also give them some peace of mind, relieve some of that anxiety that comes with Twitter addiction during a pandemic.
Ben:
Oh, it's scientifically proven that if you give us a five Starr rating, I'll give you an endorphin hit.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
We're not legally allowed to say that.
Josh:
It might not give you a bigger endorphin hit than Twitter though, so.
Starr:
Wow. All right. Well, it's been great talking with you guys and I will catch you on the flip side.
Ben, Josh and Starr are transmitting...err...broadcasting from deep within the COVID-19 epicenter on this week's FounderQuest. They talk about life in our brave new COVID-19 World, Tailwind CSS, and reminisce about the old freelancing days in the time of Big Mouth Billy Bass!
Show Notes
Links:The Social Network
Tailwind CSS
Themeforest
Morpheus
Covid 19
Basecamp
Ruby Central
Comic-Con
Tornado Alley
Second Life
Team Fortress 2
Tobi at Shopify
Stardew Valley
Bill Lumbergh
Big Mouth Billy Bass
Jeff Foxworthy
Full Transcript:
Starr:
What you were saying, Ben, about source maps reminds me of a long, long time ago, when I had this one freelancing client who ... so there was like ... right after that movie, The Social Network came out, which was about Mark Zuckerberg making Facebook, everybody who had $20-30000 laying around was like, I'm going to hire some cheap developer and have them make me some weird niche social network and I worked on several of these because I was freelancing at the time and one of them was for ...
Josh:
Those were the days.
Starr:
Yeah those were the days where you could get paid to write something that you knew in your heart nobody was ever going to use. So it was this one for nurses and so the guy was like very unresponsive to questions and so I eventually put something up. I was like, hey let's ... can you please start looking at this and tell me if you see anything wrong. Like you do in software and he was just like, it's broken, just make it work. It's like, give me the working site. And it's like, that's not how this whole process works sir. It's not like a car. You don't just go to the lot and you buy it, you've got to work the kinks out.
Josh:
Yeah, we all worked on ... well Ben and I worked on one of those too. Did Starr work on ...
Ben:
I don't remember if Starr was on that one ...
Starr:
I worked on one with y'all.
Josh:
It was fun.
Starr:
I think we're all taking pains not to name names because we don't want to shame anybody.
Josh:
We don't want to bash our past clients or anything.
Starr:
Yeah they were generally pretty typical.
Josh:
It was fun though, back when people thought that it was really just about the tech. You could just build the ... if you just built an activity feed there would be activity in it.
Ben:
And to be fair I think that was before Facebook groups so that basically killed any other type of social network that you wanted to build because everyone was like, oh we'll just make a group.
Starr:
Yeah that makes ... I never actually put that together but that totally makes sense.
Ben:
I sometimes miss those freelance days. I think though today if you're a freelancer there's so much cool stuff like the Tailwind UI was just released recently and that is just super awesome.
Starr:
What is that again?
Ben:
It gives you a bunch of components built on top of Tailwind CSS, which is a CSS framework that makes it really easy to build out designs. Anyway so Tailwind UI is built on top of that and gives you some premade components like, here's a list of users, or here's a marketing page with a pricing grid kind of stuff. So there's been templates around since forever like on Themeforest or whatever but this is the latest built on, reusable component framework idea and I love it. So I think as a freelancer today, if I was doing that today, I'd be all about that. I'd be like, oh let me just whip something up for you real quick from my UI since I'm a developer and I suck at UI.
Starr:
That's really cool. It's weird because I feel like there's been ... I don't really know what the historical progression has been because on the one hand it seems like we've gone from this world in around 2005 or whatever where one web developer with rails was basically for getting out a minimum bio of product that was pretty close to as good as you were going to get, and so you could just whip out these things, but now it seems like apps have to be so much full featured from the get-go, there's also so many more tools to do it. I don't know. I'm really ... I guess maybe it ... I'm just confused by it. I don't know what the lesson is here because on the one hand there's all these tools, but then on the other hand there's so many tools and people expect so much from new apps that it's like is it even possible for one person to do it?
Ben:
I think the moral of the story is the only constant in life is change.
Starr:
Oh that's good. You're like the Morpheus of Honeybadger. We need to get you one of those trench coats.
Ben:
Does that come with extra pay?
Starr:
Sure, yeah.
Ben:
Awesome.
Starr:
All the red and blue pills you want.
Ben:
Sweet.
Josh:
I wonder, do we even really need all these apps though? So many apps. Everyone wants a certain ... I think so many apps can exist together because there's so many people that want them. You can make an app and there's ... you have 100 users or something. You can probably find 100 people that want to use your whatever, your mobile ... your take on fitness tracking or something on iOS. But are we going to get to a point where we have as many apps as we have people in the world? Everyone has their own app.
Starr:
If the economy's growing at a certain percentage and that means the internet economy's growing at a certain percentage then you either need that ... you need the number of apps to grow at a certain percentage don't you. Either that or everything gets consolidated which it kind of has been doing.
Starr:
So I don't know, you're arguing for centralization.
Josh:
I guess I am, yeah.
Starr:
So you would rather have Reddit rather than 1000 VBBS installations.
Josh:
I haven't really thought this through Starr so don't hold me to this. I'm all for decentralization in general.
Starr:
It's all right. Welcome to Founder Quest Debate Club Edition.
Josh:
You really ... yeah. You're making me question all my beliefs now.
Starr:
There we go.
Ben:
So debate club ... I'm sorry, go ahead Starr.
Starr:
No, go ahead.
Ben:
I was thinking a debate club, if we want to have a debate we can talk about Covid 19 and should we shut down schools or not? Go.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
It's huge.
Starr:
It is huge. And we're at the epicenter of it. You and me Ben and Ben Finley, our marketing person, our marketing guru.
Ben:
So just for some context, I live in Kirkland, Washington, which is the ground zero basically for Coronavirus infections in the United States. As of yesterday I believe we had 10 or 11 deaths in my community due to that. Primarily focused around one ... what is it called?
Starr:
Like a senior living-
Josh:
Was it like a senior care thing?
Ben:
Yeah like a senior center, life care center.
Josh:
It's like the worst place that it could possibly break out, right?
Ben:
Right. So that's right around the corner from my house.
Starr:
Oh my gosh, really?
Ben:
Yep. It's interesting, we have a technical college nearby that shut down for a few days because they took a class field trip to this particular care center. So the faculty member got sick and I think 40 or 50 students were involved in that trip. So they shut down that campus for a few days to do cleaning it up. And then the, not our school district but the one just north of us, the North Shore school district, closed their system down because one teacher, or faculty, tested positive and so they closed the school system down for seven days. I'm not sure if they're even open yet again.
Ben:
So our school system is currently open and people are like, close it. And other people are like, please don't.
Starr:
Yeah the University of Washington also suspended all in-person classes.
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
Which is like ... the University of Washington's a big university. I don't know ... school's in session too right? It's a ... it's not ...
Ben:
It is. Yep. My son's attending there and yeah we got the email this morning saying that they're going to close it down for the rest of the ... well the campuses are still open but classes are not going to be meeting together in person throughout the end of the quarter which ends this month.
Starr:
Yeah, my wife's company is ... everybody was told to work from home until at least the end of the month, which is like three weeks away. I don't know. And yeah, pretty much all the big tech companies are work from home.
Josh:
Yeah. Same with Amazon. I'm sorry, my buddy Richard, last night he was saying Amazon HQ is all working remotely and he said it's kind of like the good old days.
Ben:
The good old days?
Josh:
Everybody gets to work from home again. Well he used to be remote so.
Ben:
When everybody's quarantined and ...
Josh:
It's not the good old days of pandemics. Back when everyone got the measles or whatever.
Ben:
Back in 18 with Spanish flu. Boy those were the days.
Josh:
I think he was talking more about the novelty of being able to work from home when you're used to having to go in and ... yeah.
Ben:
Yeah really appreciate having the remote company that we have. We've always been 100% remote so it's not adjustment. It's just like, oh yeah, same old, same old. Still working.
Josh:
I have the ... like a dystopian image of the future where the world is ravaged by global pandemics every week and everyone ... but we've automated to the point where we can just all work remotely. So everyone is basically on full-time quarantine.
Josh:
This might be too close.
Ben:
Too soon.
Starr:
We did a recent episode about the future of work but I didn't expect the future would arrive so soon. Literally everybody is working from home. The other day ... so today is, what? March 6th and so maybe a week ago I was ... which is sort of before all the shit hit the fan, pardon my french, and I was at the grocery store and I've had a cold, just a normal cold, for the past month and a half, and I have a kid in daycare. This is normal. I know what colds are like. And it's a cold. But I was at the grocery store just picking up some normal stuff and I was like, oh well I'm here, I might as well get some Clorox wipes or something. And so I'm walking down the Clorox wipes isle and then for some reason my cold kicks in and my nose just starts running, just running and I don't have any tissues or anything so it's just kind of dripping and I'm just like, oh my god, this is just a scene out of Andromeda.
Starr:
This is a scene out of a movie. I'm just going to get some Clorox wipes, my nose starts running and then it's just ... that's the beginning of the montage, at the end of which everything's terrible.
Josh:
Be careful you don't start a stampede too of people trying to get away from you.
Starr:
Oh I know, I know. And as of now the store is completely out of cleaning products and Clorox wipes. You cannot buy hand sanitizer in Seattle. You cannot buy hand sanitizer on ... Amazon have it shipped in Seattle. I ordered a gallon of hand sanitizer from a natural products company that sells bulk ingredients for things because that's the only one I could find.
Josh:
Right so you probably wouldn't have bought a gallon if you could have just bought a regular supply at the store, I would assume?
Starr:
Well no but ...
Josh:
I have to wonder how much ...
Starr:
Now I've got a gallon, that is like liquid gold. That's liquid gold in this economy Josh.
Josh:
Yeah you could literally divvy that up and sell little containers of it.
Ben:
Setup a stand out front of your house.
Josh:
How much hand sanitizer are you people using? I have a little thing of it and I'm a germaphobe so I use it all the time but it lasts me forever.
Starr:
Well we're starting a thing ... I'm trying to start a thing where whenever I put my kid in her carseat she has to put on hand sanitizer because I'm like, that's an easy rule to remember and she's sort of captive. She's tied down. And that happens in between transitions between locations.
Josh:
That's the real benefit of carseats by the way is that ... it's the physical restraint aspect versus ...
Ben:
So my sister who lives in Louisiana, she saw on Twitter about all the toilet paper being purchased. You can't get toilet paper in Seattle right because everyone's bought it all.
Starr:
Yeah people bought up all the toilet paper in Costco.
Josh:
Toilet paper and hand sanitizer. For it to all ... people have to be buying massive quantities of hand sanitizer and toilet paper for this to happen. This is one of those classic economic situations where people cause the ...
Starr:
If everybody buys one roll of toilet paper on the same day that would probably disrupt the supply chain.
Josh:
Yeah I guess you're right.
Starr:
It helps to spread out toilet paper purchases, amortized if you will.
Ben:
My sister texted me and she was like, so do you need me to ship you some toilet paper? I replied, no we're good. We have plenty of leaves.
Josh:
All I'm saying is ...
Starr:
Oh taking it back to nature.
Josh:
Everyone uses toilet paper and we never run out in normal times. As far as I know. So people must be stockpiling thinking that the supply chain is going to be disrupted by Coronavirus. I get the feeling.
Starr:
Or thinking they don't want to ...
Josh:
They're just afraid. Or they don't want to go out.
Starr:
Yeah they don't want to go out.
Ben:
Time to buy stock in those companies that make bidets.
Josh:
Yeah, seriously.
Starr:
That was the start of the great bidet rush of 2020.
Ben:
You heard it here first.
Starr:
The real money's not in the bidets, the real money's in the bidet making tools.
Josh:
Yeah, we're joking but you're not wrong, probably. Could of made your fortune Ben in toilet paper futures and bidets.
Ben:
Giving away those hot tips for free.
Starr:
Toilet paper futures. That sounds like it's involved in the plot of some '80s movie.
Starr:
So anyway, this actually has a little bit to do with our business because, well first of all we all need to kind of be alive to prosper in our businesses, but also RailsConf is coming up in two months in Portland, and Portland is really close to Seattle so ...
Josh:
It's very close.
Starr:
Yeah so ... it's like right now things are proceeding as usual but I started a thread in Basecamp where, which we used to handle all of our long-formed discussions online, Basecamp Trademark. Get yours now. And ... yeah it's just kind of a weird situation to be in. It's just kind of trying to keep your eye on current events to be like, okay are we going to have to cancel last minute or ... I don't know. It's just a bizarre situation to be in.
Josh:
Yeah. I remember when ... it was like two, three, four years ago when Zika was a big deal and we had to cancel a vacation because of that. We were going down to Mexico and that just ... that was no fun. It's not fun to have to disrupt your plans but it is kind of crazy when that happens.
Josh:
So are we at this point canceling RailsConf? Are we not going?
Ben:
I think we're still planning on going.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
If it's still going to be on.
Josh:
Yeah. I think Ruby Central released a statement about Covid on March 2nd and said that they're tentatively still planning. They're still ... it's still on basically. And that was based on the advice of the ... I think whatever the convention center or the expo center down here and everything. So right now they're saying that they're not canceling events.
Ben:
Yeah. Here's something interesting that came out of this past week, I've been reading probably should about all these current events and Google IO was canceled, or moved to online only. Microsoft canceled an event that they were going to have here in Seattle. Comicon, surprisingly, is actually going on here in Seattle. It's going to be huge and it's going to bring a bunch of people here.
Starr:
Those comic book nerds, they're hardcore.
Ben:
But someone made the point, when you have ... and Facebook, they canceled their F8 developer conference. And someone made the point, because a lot of people are on Twitter talking about how ... calling out smaller conferences who haven't canceled yet saying, you got to, you can't be risking people's lives and stuff like that, which I can sympathize with being in Kirkland, where all this is happening. But someone made the point that for a company like Facebook or Google or Microsoft or Apple, if they happen to make their change to WWDC in the summer, for them that's not their primary business. Yes it's an impact but it's not going to ruin the whole business for the year. They sell other things. But if you're a tiny conference, that's what you do, or ... even a bigger conference, if that's your thing, that's your business, then canceling ...
Josh:
Yeah, that's a huge hit.
Ben:
Is a huge deal. So for Ruby Central, if Railscon is canceled, that's a much bigger impact to them than it is for Google shutting down Google IO.
Josh:
Or Apple. Apple could probably come up with something creative and announce online and still ... whatever.
Ben:
And they're going to make everyone think that it's better.
Josh:
They're still going to make some money.
Ben:
Right.
Starr:
Only losers like to do in-person conferences. We're all doing holograms now.
Josh:
It'll be incredibly brave of them to cancel the conference.
Starr:
It would be. I hear what you're saying. It would be really rough for a lot of small conferences to cancel. In the end, it comes down to a big question about morality. Do outcomes matter in terms of making the correct moral decision. I personally don't really think they do but I'm not everybody.
Ben:
Well there are a lot of impacts too, and this goes back to the school closure question.
Starr:
Yeah I was going to ask, we kind of weaseled away from that. We're going to have debate club now.
Ben:
Yeah so you have some parents are like, shut it down. I don't want my kids being in an environment where there might be a lot of transmission going on. But there are a number of parents who can't afford to be home with their kids for weeks or whatever. They have to go to work. They can't make alternate arrangements when everything is shut down. And the same is true with these conferences. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money from a lot of services around conferences. Not just directly with ... like a vendor who's setting up your booth, there's people who are actually moving in tables and things like that, but all the business around the conference, conference center, the hotels, and that's quite an impact that you have to consider when you think about shutting down a large event like RailsConf or South by South West.
Starr:
That's true. I'm not sure that ... on the school closure thing I think ... it's kind of a unique thing because so far, knock on wood, the whole ... the illness doesn't ... it hasn't really hit children especially hard, which I've been paying attention to because I have a small child, so having a bunch of kids together in school, you're having a bunch of people who are sort of in a not a super vulnerable group together, versus you let schools out and suddenly grandma's going to take care of the kids and grandma is in a high-risk group, or you send the kids off to hang out at the mall or something. I don't know. Whatever people do.
Starr:
If it was a ... if it primarily targeted children it seemed like it would be ... it's like, yeah then you have to shut down schools regardless of economic impact because that's the most highly risked people and they're all together.
Josh:
That's a good point because you're saying there is ... if you send the kids home there is an incentive for the parents if they have an option to, for instance grandma, or whatever grandparents, to allow them to still go to work or whatever they're going to take that and then that's going to spread that around.
Starr:
Yeah because a lot of people they don't go to work they get fired and they lose their houses. It's not really much of a choice.
Josh:
So people are going to work around it any way they can.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly.
Ben:
Yeah but there's also the question of, okay but how much of a carrier can someone be without getting very sick? So is that kid coming home from school with those germs and then sharing them with grandma who happens, because they have a multiple generational household? It's a complicated question.
Starr:
Yeah, it is.
Josh:
Like all questions, right?
Ben:
Yeah but then you have companies like Microsoft I think which did a solid. Yesterday they announced, or this morning they announced, that contractors who work at Microsoft who are impacted by this stay home thing, that they are still going to be paid. So even though Microsoft is shutting down, telling people to work from home, that impacts people like in the cafeteria. And so Microsoft is saying, no, we'll still pay you. So that's pretty cool. So yay Microsoft.
Josh:
Yeah that is cool.
Starr:
Yeah that's good. And they're doing that not just with developers?
Ben:
Right, it's everybody, yeah. Everybody.
Starr:
Oh good because so many times you hear people being like, oh people just work from home, it's no big deal but not everybody can work from home. Jobs don't all work like that.
Ben:
Yeah somebody floated on Twitter an interesting idea talking about trying to do containment, which at this point it's arguable whether that's even possible or not, but this person was saying in the vein of trying to improve containment, what if we say Seattle, for example, you're ground zero. You're potentially infecting a lot of people if you have people traveling in and out of Seattle, so how about we just quarantine Seattle. What does that mean? Obviously that would be a huge impact to the economy and this person was saying, well maybe our federal government needs to step in and say, we will give you a subsidy. We'll give you some sort of economic compensation for just shutting everything down. Tell everyone to go home and stay home. That's interesting idea.
Starr:
So it's exactly like ...
Josh:
Better than breaking out the national guard.
Starr:
It's going to be exactly like Escape from LA. They just ... the movie got it right. They were just a little too far south.
Starr:
So who was in that? Was that Kurt Russel?
Ben:
Yep.
Starr:
So which one are y'all going to be Kurt Russel? That's what I want to know.
Ben:
Oh I think that's Josh for sure.
Starr:
Oh wait Josh isn't even in Seattle so he can't escape ...
Josh:
I'll have to come up ...
Ben:
He's already escaped.
Starr:
Yeah he's already escaped.
Ben:
Movie's over.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I'll have to ... you know what? I can be the heroic figure who hauls a truckload of TP up to you all.
Ben:
Mad Max style.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
There you go.
Josh:
Mad Max style, yeah. Of course I'm going to have to charge you for it but it's still brave.
Starr:
Okay fellas, so we always talk about how we're always looking for new ways to add profit centers to the business and I'm just saying, Josh, if you got a U-Haul and filled that thing full of hand sanitizer and drove it up here. We could just park downtown and I'm sure ... we'd sell it out by lunch.
Josh:
We got people on the outside. This is a serious competitive advantage here.
Ben:
So glad to know that our team is distributed so that if Kirkland has to be nuked from orbit Honeybadger will survive.
Starr:
Yeah if I get nuked from orbit I don't care honestly. You all are on your own.
Josh:
We buy all our stuff at Costco so if Kirkland TP is out or whatever.
Ben:
You're in trouble. The whole world's in trouble.
Josh:
Yeah. Do they have Kirkland TP? I don't even know.
Ben:
Yeah I think they do.
Josh:
I assume they do.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh my goodness. So it's just kind of this very weird thing because everybody's kind of a little bit ... you know what it kind of feels like? It feels sort of like ... I used to live in Tornado Alley, as they called it, and it feels a little bit like when there is ... they come on the news ... all the TV stations in Tornado Alley have these crack news teams. Basically they have war rooms setup for the weather and the weathermen just live for this shit. You can tell. They are on. It is like you know when ... y'all remember when they invaded Iraq the fourth time, how ... CNN and stuff they had all these 3D graphics of bombs going in and blowing up hospitals and stuff but it was all animated and slick looking? So yeah but it's like that only for these relatively small town TV channels weather stations.
Josh:
Tornado Alley is in the south I assume, right?
Starr:
Mid-west, yeah. Kind of. So yeah it feels like that. It feels like when the people come on in their war rooms and they're like, a tornado's about to happen. And so nothing's actually happening at the moment, it's just like, oh there's kind of some clouds. I don't know, but I guess we better just all pay close attention. It feels like that. It's kind of this weird anticipation and it's like you're probably going to be fine but who really knows? So I don't know. It's time to just throw caution to the wind I guess. It's time to do the things we always wish we could do.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Time to get that kayak and paddle on the river.
Starr:
Yeah get your kayak and paddle on the river.
Josh:
Yeah when are you going to do that Ben?
Starr:
Tell your children you love them.
Ben:
Probably this summer, yeah. I've got my eye on one.
Ben:
Yeah I was watching ... so I don't watch the local news on TV, that's my parent's generation kind of thing to do, right? I get my news online. But I saw ... somehow I came across this video clip of the local news broadcaster covering this news about the Kirkland care facility. And, like they like to do, they sent someone to the location to stand in front of the ... to have the interview. And I'm thinking, is that a really good idea? Do you really want to send a newscaster on location to a place where there is an active infection going on? That just seems like a bad idea to me. Yeah over there ...
Josh:
Especially if it's just to get the shot. If there's actually news to do there maybe it's worth the risk. If they have to get the story from someone at the facility.
Ben:
Yeah it's just ... seems a little ... I don't know, not so safe.
Starr:
Yeah that's so crazy that it's happening just down the road. It's so weird. Honestly I didn't even know it was happening till a couple days after because I wasn't super ... I wasn't paying attention to things super closely but then ... so I go to this group every Wednesday and it was like they met every week for 30 years in person and they sent out their notices like, we're doing a Xoom meeting this week. And it's just like, whoa, stuff is happening. This is no joke.
Ben:
End of world stuff here we're talking about.
Starr:
Yeah, I know.
Josh:
I can't go to my bowling club.
Ben:
It's like my D&D group's online now, what is this?
Starr:
I know just like, watch out for horsemen people. Watch out for strange men on horses.
Ben:
So I've been thinking though, and this is not a well formed thought, but I've been thinking like, okay so there's got to be plenty of opportunities here for start-ups like us and founders like up, entrepreneurs or like ... there's got to be an angle we can take to build some fantastic software, offer some great service, to really take advantage of this changing dynamic in the workforce. Like if we shut down all these companies and everyone's working from home, that has impact today and next week, but is it going to have an impact months from now and years from now? Are we going to see this, like you were saying earlier Starr, are we going to see an acceleration of the future of work where more and more people are working from home? And if that's the case, are there some things that we can do now as a company that can take advantage of that?
Ben:
Like if there's a development team, because we target developers, that's who we sell to right? So this is what I'm thinking, again back to the not well formed thought, so if there's software teams who are out there who are used to working together, rubbing shoulders everyday, hanging out, sharing doughnuts and all those germs and stuff. And now they're all working from home. How does that change their day-to-day work? And how can we take advantage of that? What kind of tools can we build to help people make that transition better or take advantage of this new scenario, or help people feel comfortable working at home?
Josh:
Are you saying we need to make a 3D doughnut printer?
Ben:
That would be totally awesome.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
I see where you're going here.
Ben:
Obviously already software teams can use Honeybadger remotely to help coordinate over keeping track of their errors and making sure their app's healthy and stuff but I just think we need to get to that next level and maybe we come out with this Honeybadger vinyl figurine that has a little voicebox in it and it gives you stuff that your project manager would say to you if they were going to tap you on the shoulder and interrupt you while you're working. Like, hey is that Jira ticket done yet? Things like that. Just at random intervals it just says something to you.
Josh:
How about a life-sized honey badger that can just stand over your shoulder and make those comments?
Ben:
Even better.
Josh:
Like a ... what is it, Bill Lumberg style?
Starr:
I like the way you're thinking Ben and this just occurred to me, the answer to this has been staring us in the face the whole time, the whole time, and I've got two words for y'all, you ready?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Second Life. Second Life people.
Josh:
We're going to have our own ... we can have our own island Ben. Haven't you always ... we've always wanted an island.
Ben:
Okay, now you got me. I'm interested.
Starr:
I saw ... I was at Borders a decade ago and I saw a magazine there that was Second Life is the future and it's been like a decade so it's got to be the future now, right? It literally is the future.
Josh:
It's in the future now.
Starr:
I was like ... perpetually in the future?
Josh:
It's still around. I mean it looks exactly like it did back in whatever the mid 2000s but it's now in the future. It's kind of like having a VHS tape or something. It hasn't changed.
Starr:
Actually I saw a documentary about this and Second Life actually still has a very ... well I don't know if it's vibrant but a very active user community.
Josh:
Yeah it's got the in-game economy. People make their livings off of it, which is crazy and hilarious.
Ben:
Wow, who knew?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh yeah I remember the documentary is about that. There was a woman who sort of made these ... you can craft items and sell them and stuff, but then there was a bug in the game that let you glitch spawn, or duplicate items, and it caused the whole economy to collapse.
Ben:
Okay so this is random, but are you familiar with Team Fortress Two?
Starr:
I'm familiar with those words.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah so it's an old, old shooter.
Josh:
A very, very good one.
Ben:
Yeah, it's a classic. But the thing about Team Fortress Two is that they spawned this whole hat culture, collectables, things that you can trade and sell. There was this whole Team Fortress Two economy.
Starr:
Are these real hats or virtual hats?
Ben:
Virtual hats.
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
Well there was a vibrant Team Fortress Two hat economy up until about a year or so ago, maybe a little less, where they had a bug where some of these rare items could be easily duplicated.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Josh:
I didn't hear about this. That's crazy.
Ben:
Totally crashed the market. Just ruined it.
Josh:
People must have been pissed.
Ben:
Oh yeah.
Josh:
Oh man I can't imagine the gamer retribution for losing your diamond level hat.
Ben:
Totally. Stuff that was worth hundreds is now worth pennies.
Josh:
Oh yeah so ...
Ben:
In a day.
Josh:
The things that kids come up with when you put them in an economy that can be rigged like that and they're clever and they grew up on a computer, I've heard some really, really hilarious stories about people making tons of money with various schemes just involving rare loot items. Selling them on eBay. People have built entire businesses on that in their teens or whatever.
Starr:
That's so funny. At least though it's only in games and no real industry can ever be decimated by things becoming easily copyable.
Ben:
Like Bitcoin?
Josh:
Yeah this is never going to be a problem in the future.
Starr:
Oh my goodness, wow.
Josh:
Life is a game Starr.
Starr:
That is a ... that is way too nihilistic for me Josh. That's ... I can't get on bored with this Nietzsche train of yours.
Starr:
Okay. Next week we do the podcast in Second Life.
Josh:
We totally should.
Ben:
Yeah Toby at Shopify already beat us to that. That was on Twitter this week.
Starr:
Oh they did?
Ben:
Yeah they totally did a ... it wasn't Second Life but it was totally VR thing. That's kind of funny.
Starr:
Wait so they did a podcast in ... was it like there were no video, they were just like, whoa we're in VR? Because we could do that right now.
Ben:
Well I mean there is a video clip of it.
Starr:
Those cubes.
Josh:
Are you saying we're all going to get ... are we all going to get VR rigs now?
Ben:
VR rigs? Totally.
Josh:
Is that what we do? Is that what we do to stop the spread of the virus.
Starr:
We can totally expense them if we use them for the podcast.
Ben:
And then we could use them to do ...
Josh:
I am on board with this.
Ben:
We could do motion capture of ourselves for that PM over your shoulder idea, right?
Starr:
Yes.
Josh:
Oh now you're ... yeah. Now you're talking. Augmented reality is where it's at.
Ben:
Yeah you could just setup a second screen at your workstation at home, right, and be like, hi. We're standing there waving at you.
Starr:
I remember ... this is a little bit off-topic but I remember how heartbroken I was when I realized that you couldn't just directly deduct ... like if you buy a computer or a VR rig you can't just deduct that from your taxes, you can only deduct the amount that it depreciates over time from your taxes, which isn't the same. It's like 10% of it. I don't know. I just don't buy enough crap to make it really that much money.
Josh:
Yeah I haven't taken the leap into VR yet. It just seems a little novel, or it has in the past anyway. I hear people tell me it's getting good but.
Starr:
There's too much junk on the floor or else I would injure myself. I've got a small child. I would trip. I would probably trip over my child.
Ben:
But it would make for a funny video to put on Reddit.
Starr:
Yeah. That's ... oh my god Reddit. I'm so sick of ... yeah I deleted the Reddit client off of my phone and I'm much happier. Now, instead of looking at Reddit I got Stardew Valley and so I've just been playing Stardew Valley. I'm not meaning to brag here but I'm a pretty good fisher person on Stardew Valley. I catch some ... just with a little bamboo pole I've caught like 60 inch tunas. You wouldn't believe it's physically possible but it is.
Josh:
You've got to ... can you screenshot and blow up the picture and print it out like hanging on your wall to commemorate your catch.
Starr:
Like a trophy?
Josh:
Like a trophy.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah and then I can make it sing annoying songs somehow.
Josh:
All your Stardew Valley trophies.
Ben:
You can hang it on your wall in Second Life.
Josh:
Oh I forgot about the singing bass.
Starr:
Yeah Big Mouth Billy Bass.
Josh:
Yeah. They probably have a lot of those in the Mid-West, right?
Starr:
Oh my god, so much.
Josh:
I can so guess.
Ben:
Back in Tornado Alley.
Starr:
So much you can't ... I don't even ... I know this is wrong, this probably isn't correct, but in my mind it has ... it's singing voice is basically like Jeff Foxworthy's voice. The guys like, you might be redneck if ... you know? So I don't know.
Josh:
It's totally unrealistic. A bass would never sound like that in real life if it could talk. That would not be the voice I would imagine.
Starr:
They're so small relative to a human. Their voice box would be tiny so they'd be really squeaky sounding.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
You're saying that a bass would not have a bass voice, is that what you're saying?
Starr:
Oh that's a good place to ... that ... that is a good dad joke.
Ben:
If I'm going to have a singing bass I want like Barry White.
Starr:
Yep.
Josh:
Yeah, this is true. I'm trying to figure out how we got from Coronavirus ground zero to Billy White Bass in the Mid-West.
Starr:
Well that's the mystery of FounderQuest Josh.
Josh:
I love it.
Starr:
Yeah. I guess we don't have anything more to say, that's probably a good note to end it on.
Josh:
I think so.
Ben:
I agree.
Starr:
Well this is ...
Josh:
Your silence says it all.
Starr:
Your silence says it all people. Yeah, I've got a. I'm sorry I'm going to sort of emotionally distance myself from y'all in case you're not around next week.
Josh:
Ouch.
Starr:
All right everybody, this has been FounderQuest. If you would like to review us, maybe it'll matter, maybe we'll be around to see it. Just go on over to Apple, whatever, it doesn't even really matter. If you want to write for our blog, if you do like Ruby or Elixir blog posts and you want to write for us, I'll definitely ... I'll have somebody answer your emails to us, even if I'm not here, so just go to our blog and look on our header and there's a link about how to write for us. Until then, yeah. Vaya Con Dios everyone.
Join Ben, Starr, and Josh on this week's FounderQuest for a look at our dystopian future. Ben shares the most interesting questions he received while interviewing and the discussion results in the creation of an onboarding manual for time traveling job candidates. Also, Discover which host, like, bought a totally rad pager, like, this month. Beep Beep!
Show Notes
Links:
Pagersdirect.net
Pagerduty
O’Reilly Safari
Full Transcription:
Josh:
So I think I mentioned a little while ago that I've been kind of experimenting with ways to disconnect from the internet and from my digital life. And being able to turn my phone off is a big part of that. But with the business and, especially if I'm on call or even when I'm not on call, I'm still a little, I want to be available for alerts, or major things that if you all need to get a hold of me for an emergency. So my thought was, if I want to just be able to shut my phone off and not ever worry about it, just know that there's always a way to get through to me, I could have a landline at home.
Josh:
But then I had a different idea and I want to see if I can show it to you. We have to, this is going to be very dramatic because we have to wait for it.
Starr:
I'm waiting.
(pager beeping)
Starr:
Did you get a pager?
Josh:
Maybe.
Ben:
A raspberry pie with a breadboard. Just a little light that flashes.
Starr:
So awesome. Oh my gosh. You really got a pager.
Josh:
That's a pager.
Starr:
They still sell those?
Josh:
They still sell them.
Starr:
Where did you get that?
Josh:
I got this at pagersdirect.net.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Okay. We're not even advertising pagersdirect.net. Your source for all paging supplies!
Josh:
Well I'm pretty sure I remember no, I'm serious. I'm pretty sure I remembered the brand name from radio commercials, in the early 2000s. Their website looks like it hasn't been updated since the 90s so I'm almost positive that I remember their commercials. But yeah, they're one of the options where you can still buy a pager. The networks are still all active and as far as I could tell, because I did, I went down a rabbit hole on pagers over the weekend and apparently doctors still use them, some other on-call people still use them, emergency on-call people use them, because the networks are still, they penetrate better than cellular networks apparently in some cases. So yeah, apparently it's still a thing.
Starr:
So that's a new pager. Does it have 5G?
Josh:
No, it's not a 5G pager. It is... They still run their own, the old school networks. I don't know what it is. I think it's like a much lower frequency though.
Starr:
Oh yeah? That's interesting. I actually, I think I remember a long time ago being like, I should get a pager, but then I just, I couldn't figure it out in 10 minutes and so I just forgot about it I guess.
Josh:
Yeah. So it's just, it's an experiment I'm messing with and I don't know if it's going to work forever, but I thought if it does, if it works, it's reliable and I mean it's at worst it's a backup, you know? It's just a backup alert and at best it's like, I can just leave it around the house and not worry about my phone or my computer or whatever. So.
Ben:
That's cool. I still have my pager from the 90s.
Starr:
Does it work?
Ben:
I don't know. I haven't used it in forever.
Josh:
You could reconnect it, Ben. If you have your own pager, they have it on the form, you can just put whatever the ID number is in.
Ben:
I should totally do that.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. You should.
Ben:
That's fun. That's great. Having a real pager for PagerDuty.
Josh:
By the way, PagerDuty supports pagers.
Starr:
Of course it does.
Josh:
It has an option for pagers.
Starr:
Yeah. Embarrassing if they didn't really.
Ben:
Because I can never turn off my phone. Right. Because I'm always the last line of defense for ops.
Josh:
Actually, they actually make modern, they make newer pagers. I actually went with this one, this is a refurb from 2003 but I went with this one because the modern one requires a USB charger, this requires a AA battery that you only have to change once a month. And I was like, this is actually selling me more on the old version than the new version.
Ben:
Yeah. Totally.
Starr:
2003. I'm trying to think what computer I ran in 2003. I think I may have actually had a pager in 2003 so that might've actually been my pager.
Josh:
That might've been your pager. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll let you know how it goes.
Ben:
Okay. Good. Because I'm unreasonably jealous about this now.
Josh:
Well we could all get one.
Ben:
Yeah, that's got to be standard issue now for Honeybadger. Anybody on ops gets a pager, right?
Josh:
I did have that thought. It's pretty cool.
Starr:
I mean that would be pretty cool. We could put that in our job listing. That'd probably get a couple sort of people who wanted to apply just to see what that was all about.
Josh:
It's also, I mean, this is an alphanumeric pager, I should also clarify, so it can send the actual alerts from PagerDuty, like what the issue is, and I can also hook it up. It has an email address, like the pager's number at whatever USA mobility, which is the network. And so I can hook that up to whatever Honeybadger alerts or anything I want to.
Starr:
Oh, neat. Neat. Does it have a mobile web browser so you can browse the web one line at a time?
Josh:
No. No browser. That's one of the features I would say.
Ben:
We're going to have to set up nag iOS so you can actually get alerts from monitoring straight to the pager.
Josh:
Yeah. We'll just, yeah. I don't think we want to take our monitoring into the 2000s, just our alerting.
Starr:
So speaking of employee perks like pagers, which I think are now going to be standard issue, this week, we are going to be talking about, we've been interviewing for this, our open role, our open developer role, and Josh and I have been interviewing fairly often in the past week, but Ben has been interviewing just a crazy amount. He's waking up from, from bed, from sleep for 10 minutes at a time to screen some guy in different time zone. He's just going right back to sleep. Every time I talk to Ben, he's just like, "Oh yeah, I just screened two more people." So...
Josh:
He's like, "I'm screening one right now." He's been quiet. That's where he was.
Starr:
Yeah. If Ben doesn't talk for five minutes at a time, he's probably screening somebody right now.
Starr:
And so anyway, out of these interviews have come some, it's really been interesting talking to people because you see a wide variety of personalities and you have a wide variety of questions that people ask you, things they want to know about the company and things they're interested in as an employee. And so we thought, it wasn't my idea. I think it was Josh's idea, that it would be interesting to talk about some of the questions that people asked us. And honestly just because we're a tiny company, we haven't had to deal with a lot of these questions before. We're kind of making up some things as we go along because let's be honest, it doesn't make sense to figure out everything ahead when you are a five person company. But yeah. So I think we're going to talk about some of those because they're interesting and might bring up some interesting discussions. What is an interesting question that we should start with? What's on your mind?
Josh:
What do you think, Ben, was the most, what was the top one? I think the 30 hour work week was probably one of the top. Because people, I think we got from more than one person, we got the phrase, so what's up with that?
Starr:
Nobody believes us.
Ben:
Yeah. I think there was some of that. Is that legit? I think that was the main thrust of the question.
Josh:
Yeah. Is that real?
Ben:
And yeah. I think people, maybe it's PTSD from their existing jobs of just having too much pressure and being expected to work all the time. But yes, the 30 hour work week is legit. But the first, I think my first response to that question was always, it's really an arbitrary number. We don't really care about the amount of time that your butt is in the seat, right. Whether it's 30 hours or 40 hours or whatever. The point is, we don't believe in sitting in a chair for eight hours a day, five days a week, and that's a definition of being at work. That doesn't work.
Josh:
It's really, the 30 hours thing is kind of just a target.
Starr:
Yeah. And I think we get asked this so much because so often, this is weird kind of doublespeak that happens in tech, where unlimited vacation means no vacation. So I mean it makes sense that people will be like, "Oh, 30 hours a week. That means 80 hours a week." It's like, we don't care about the exact number of hours. That means you have to be here for 60 hours a week because you shouldn't care that you're having to work 60 hours a week. We're going to get results.
Josh:
We could advertise unlimited hours.
Starr:
We could have our own cell phone company.
Josh:
Yeah. Everyone gets a pager and works unlimited hours.
Ben:
Sounds like a winning recipe right there.
Starr:
Wait a second, Josh. If you work unlimited hours, why do you need a pager? You should be at your computer.
Josh:
Well, you might pass out from exhaustion. And this pager, I got to tell you, the alert on it, it's not your nice phone ringtone or whatever. It's loud. So it'll cut through. It'll cut through the fog.
Starr:
I don't know. I think falling asleep on the job is grounds for immediate termination.
Josh:
Yeah. That's very true.
Ben:
So I think one of the things we also talked about was people were like, "Well, what does that look like in reality?" I think that was part of the motivation behind the question. Because they're like, "Okay, 30 hours. That sounds good, but what does that really mean? How do you get to 30 hours?" And I think over time, after answering that question a few times that we came up with, it's like, "Well, it looks different for different people." Right? So for Kevin, it's he takes Friday off every week, he works four day weeks. For Ben that's taking a big chunk of time off, but not necessarily every Friday. I think for the three of us it looks like, "Well, we don't stick around past one o'clock or two o'clock", whatever it is. It's not really set in stone, but we just work five days a week. But it's not necessarily eight hours a day. Right? So I think the flexibility is the key there.
Starr:
And lately you're talking about flexibility. I've enjoyed flip-flopping that a little bit. Where I might work until five but start at, I don't know, 10 or 11 or something.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
Yeah, it's cool.
Josh:
Yeah, it's nice to be able to adapt that to your schedule.
Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And talking to people from different time zones. We opened up the application process this time more than we did last time and so we were willing to go up to UTC plus one, which is about nine hours from our current time zone. And because since all of us right now just happen to be on the West Coast and in talking with people in various European countries, that was something that came up too. It's like, "Well, when do I need to be working?" It's like, "Well, we don't care so much about overlap because we're so async." Right? So if you like mornings, if you like evenings, if you like splitting it up, taking a break in the middle of day, it's like whatever. Do whatever works for you.
Josh:
I think in some cases like we as the founders do need to... I think if it's the way it's worked out I think is if someone is going to overwork, it's probably one of us. To not only on a regular basis, but also if there was something, if it's an emergency or if there's something that just really is pressing, time pressing or we just want it to happen faster, it's likely it's going to be one of us to pick up that slack versus pushing it onto our employees because I think we're very concerned with keeping that way of working for employees. And as the business owners, we obviously have more invested in this and it's really, ultimately the ultimate responsibility does fall on us. So if for some reason we do need a week that has more than someone working 30 hours, it's probably going to be one of us like picking up that slack, so that we can keep everyone else on an even keel.
Ben:
One thing that I thought of while we were having this conversation with some of the candidates was, I was remembering back to the time when I was a manager at a company where we were all there. It was not a remote company and we were building stuff and we had client demands. We were client of services kind of company, a lot of consulting. And so we had a lot of time pressure and there was always this pressure to work longer than they really should, to work more than 40 hours a week. And then it was easy to me as a boss to go... I could see that someone had been sitting there for too long. They were staying too late and I would say, "Hey, go home. You've worked enough today or you worked enough this week, just leave."
Ben:
Right? And some people need that permission, right? They feel like they don't want to let the team down. They want to be there for everybody. And so they sometimes push themselves too hard. And so having someone, having their boss come to them and say, "Hey, just go home. It's fine", gave them that relief, you know? And the one downside to being remote is that I won't be able to see that. Right? So we haven't had that problem yet or someone just working too much. Like you said it's probably going to be one of us.
Josh:
If it does happen, it's usually among us I think. And we have, at various times, been to each other like, "Hey, you should take some time off because you've been working a lot." Yeah.
Starr:
You know what this reminds me of when you're talking about making sure that that people are taking enough time for themselves? Is this reminds me of... I was actually thinking about this earlier. I don't know about y'all, but when I was in high school and I was in I don't know, AP history or something like that, some nerd class, and the teacher was fond of saying stuff like... When somebody would be like, "Oh this person was bullying me or whatever." And they were like, "Don't worry about that. When y'all are grown up, they'll be working for you." And first of all, I've been thinking about this because it's one of those things that when you're in high school, that sounds I guess good. It's like, "Okay cool." Yeah. But it's like as an adult it's kind of messed up on so many different levels. Right?
Josh:
Yeah. You're going to get payback but then...
Starr:
Yeah, I mean because it assumes being an honor's class and being an honor's student makes you higher up in the hierarchy of whatever corporation and any... Yeah. And that assumes...
Josh:
And they don't even have to explain why life would automatically be worse for the underling in the first place with you as the boss.
Starr:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You'll get to poke them with your tines? Your pitchfork.
Josh:
Right. By the way, I mean is your definition or vision of success having to work with the people who bullied you? Having to manage the people that bullied you in high school? I don't know.
Starr:
I know, I know. But the main reason I was thinking about this, that your conversation brought this up was that more than anything, I feel an obligation to take care of the people that we hire. You know?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
It's kind of like they need to work for us and try and do a good job and to the best of their ability and all that stuff. But other than that, I feel this real kind of obligation to try and provide them with a nice work environment and not exploit them and stuff like that. So it's just, I don't know, it's sort of the complete opposite. So I was thinking about that and it's like, "Oh, so I'd end up taking care of these people who bullied me." And that I mean, I didn't really get bullied at a ton, but I think if...
Josh:
I've got to say Starr, Starr if we find out that you went to high school with any of our employees, it's going to raise serious questions.
Starr:
I know, I might have to recuse myself.
Ben:
I've got to say, that really disrupts our plans to pivot to a diamond mining company where we can send our employees down into the mines.
Josh:
Oh yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, if we have to take care of them, I guess we can't do that.
Josh:
Yeah, yeah that's probably not...
Starr:
Oh, sorry. I didn't know we were in an episode of Despicable Me or something. A sequel to Despicable Me.
Ben:
Yeah, I know what you mean so I feel the same way. I think that any good employer should be looking out for the best interest of their employees. I don't know, maybe that's a crazy thought, but I definitely feel that responsibility. And this question came up too a few times about, "Well, how's your financial status?" Right? Because from a candidates point of view, "I don't have any idea. You're a tiny company, you're privately held. It's obvious you don't have any investment. So do you actually have money to pay me?" And...
Josh:
And yeah. And you already seem like a little... I mean, you're very not in the mainstream, so are you for real or are you just out of your minds? I think...
Ben:
So I feel that as a responsibility.
Josh:
Are you hiring ahead of revenue?
Ben:
Right, exactly. Yeah. I feel like you got to have money in the bank to be able to hire someone and assure them, "Yes, you actually will have a payment and it shows up on a regular basis. You don't have to worry that we won't make payroll because we actually have money", you know?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean we do that a lot different than a lot of tech people. Yeah, like you said Josh, we don't hire ahead of revenue. We kind of do the opposite. We tend to have something like a year of salary in the bank before we hire somebody, which is pretty conservative. But that's cool. I like that. Yeah.
Josh:
I think I like our business in general because it's employees aren't tied to revenue really. And that's kind of our goal. We've mentioned that before. We try to maximize profit per employee, which means actually keeping the company smaller. So in some businesses it's like if you don't hire, your revenue stops growing. And so there's this chicken and the egg problem where sometimes you have to hire to be able to support more revenue.
Starr:
Oh, I see. Like a sales organization? You have to have more sales people to sell more stuff.
Josh:
And, yeah like a sales, an agency that... Anything that's billing time. And we don't have that. And I really like that about the stats business, even though the downside is that it takes forever to get it off the ground and to be making money. So yeah. But once it's going, it's a really nice business I think.
Starr:
Yeah. One question I thought was really interesting was about, I don't know if the question was about this but I kind of read into it this a bit. And it was about sort of career advancement and it's kind of an interesting topic I think because there's really... I don't know, people think maybe, "Okay, a job, it's a job. I'm a developer, I'm going to be developing the same sort of code regardless of where I work." But it really is different working for a small company versus a big company and it may not always be in sort of the ways people think about. Right?
Starr:
Because one thing about working at a small company is that there's not this sort of set path for career advancement, right? Maybe somebody could work with us and eventually we need to hire more people and they'll be managing them or something if they want to. And that might happen, but it also might not. There's not this... It's not like you go to work for, I don't know, Microsoft or something. And it's like you can look at the org chart and be like, "Okay, this is the way I'm going to climb up this org chart."
Josh:
You don't get hired at Honeybadger and kind of start at... You start at Honeybadger one and then work your way up to Honeybadger five or six, right?
Starr:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Josh:
Five or six, right?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we might need to, if we hire more junior people, we might need to actually change that and have different levels of developer.
Josh:
Have some sort of progressions?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah. If we do that, can we call the roles Honeybadger, so all Honeybadger, Honeybadger one through six?
Starr:
Sure, yeah.
Josh:
You know, how they do like developer one, developer two? Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. I agree. I'm down with that. It is so decided. Yeah. And it's just a very different way of working in a small versus a large company, right? In a large company you have, I don't know, there's structure. You can go to ... I don't know. You've got your HR department, you've got, you know, if there's, I don't know, a problem between like you and somebody on your team, you can sort of transfer to another team maybe. But like with us, it's just us. Like as long as you're here, you're going to be working with us, you're going to be ... Maybe your role will evolve over time, but it's not like you're on some management track or whatever. So I don't know.
Starr:
I think it's just something that we try to communicate or I try to communicate in that instance pretty clearly because it's something that people might not think about. I don't know. But that said like the other side of it is that you kind of get to like mold your own career path a little bit. You can ... like if you're interested in learning certain things, like we can hopefully support you in doing that. And you know, so it's just a bit more free form. It's a bit more ad hoc and less structured.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, that brings up another question that came up several times that was around learning. Since we are learning focused organization, the question came up like, well how does that work in practice? How do you encourage learning or support learning? And one of the things is, well, I mean we have to figure out how to do our tasks, right? Like we have to learn PHP today because I need to support someone using the PHP library and I don't know PHP that well.
Ben:
So part of the expectations of the job is to spend time learning things you don't know yet just to get the job done. We don't expect people to be experts at everything on day one. And we don't give you demerits for not being able to turn around something and immediately because you're not an expert yet. And we believe in developing that expertise over time.
Ben:
And then of course we also have things like, "Well we'll pay for a Safari subscription, O'Reilly's subscription as a service. They're ... What are they? I don't even know what they call it. But it's basically you get access to all their books and all their conference videos and basically everything that O'Reilly puts out on a yearly fee.
Starr:
I think that's Safari.
Ben:
Yeah. O'Reilly Safari.
Starr:
Yeah. Because all their books have animals on it. So it's like you're on a little safari looking at all the different animals on the covers of the books.
Ben:
Oh yeah. And so we do that. We send people to conferences if they want to go to conferences. Although we haven't done a lot of conferences for learning things lately. So I guess that's something we could do better at, but happy to do that. And I think just in general, like if there's something you want to learn while you're working at Honeybadger, go for it.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, we talked about like learning is expected to be part of your day job. Like it's not something that you do on the side. Like if you take off and read a book for a day or something, if it's needed for your job and, or it's developing you personally, like no one's going to give you grief about that, I think. Unless of course you're not ... other things that are falling down. Like we all have to manage.
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
Manage our own jobs. That's the other part that goes with it.
Ben:
Oh yes.
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I think one of the big things about like working in a company like ours is just that it's, I don't know, it's a much more sort of choose your own adventure story than I think a lot of people are used to, and so it might take some time to sort of get used to that and find a plot or find a path that works for you.
Ben:
You know, it just occurred to me that it is absolutely genius that we are talking about all these things in this episode because the next time we do a round of hiring, we can just send this podcast episode to people and be like, "Here are some answers to questions that you probably will have about this process."
Ben:
That's a good idea. Yeah, I like that. So hello future employees.
Ben:
Future candidates.
Starr:
Hello bullies.
Josh:
Should we run through what your first day at Honeybadger will be like?
Ben:
Logging into a bunch of different things.
Josh:
Now that you've landed your job at Honeybadger, let me tell you a little bit about what working at Honeybadger's like.
Ben:
That's our next episode, the onboarding sequence, yes.
Starr:
I'm imagining like this sort of 1950s like announcer voice sort of like taking you through the land of tomorrow, only it's Honeybadger.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Totally.
Starr:
It's like very sort of fallout sort of aesthetic.
Ben:
All right. Well I can't think of any other questions that came up regularly. Those were the top ones that we had.
Starr:
I just have to say that like I'm really impressed by the sort of, I don't know, by the not only quality of candidates but also the sort of breadth of sort of people that are out there and I don't know, it's just really cool.
Starr:
Like I do have this habit, which I recognize in myself is like, so we interview these people and then we go and sort of write down our thoughts in Basecamp and everything. And it's like, I tend like after every interview I tend to be wanting to write, "This is my favorite candidate so far." It's like the last one I talked to is always my favorite because like everybody's so great.
Starr:
So I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah, same.
Starr:
I don't know, I'm just sad we can't save the world.
Ben:
So I guess pro tip there is be the last person to apply, so you're the last great candidate, right?
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean it probably doesn't work that way everywhere, but just for me, that's how I'm rolling today.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Well thinking back, by the time ... Go ahead.
Josh:
We can always ... Oh, I was going to say we could always go down to the Bay area, meet some of our VC friends, raise a little or a lot of money, then we can hire everyone.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Everyone will be happy.
Starr:
Is that one of those things where you destroy something to save it?
Josh:
I think so. But yeah.
Starr:
I was thinking, you said that and I was like, okay, yeah so step two is question mark and then step three is profit.
Josh:
There you go. I mean profit Starr ... I mean it's not destroying anything. There's profit somewhere. I mean it's in the future.
Starr:
Okay.
Josh:
The profit is in the future though. It's-
Starr:
I think the thing we need to take away from this is that the profit is really an opening of the questioning store. Because like the question mark is the valuable thing, you know?
Josh:
Question marks are money.
Starr:
It's like selling shovels to miners. It's like selling question marks.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
There's so many of them. All right, well that's all we've got to say about the interview questions. I think we should wrap it up. Is that okay?
Ben:
That's great.
Josh:
Good with me.
Starr:
All right. So thank you all for listening. We will catch you next week. Same bat time. Same bat channel. If you liked the show, please review us on Apple Podcasts. I said it right, I didn't call iTunes that time. And yeah, if you want to write Ruby or Elixir tutorials for us, check us out at, well, honeybadger.io, go to our blog and there's a link there for write for us. Do we have anything else that we need to announce?
Ben:
Yeah, if you want to get in touch with Josh, you can page him.
Starr:
Oh yeah, just page Josh.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Just page Josh. Anybody selling girl scout cookies?
Ben:
Not this year.
Starr:
No, not this year?
Josh:
Buying this year is another story.
Starr:
Buying? Well, aren't we all. Until next week, it has been Founderquest.
This week on FounderQuest, Josh, Starr, and Ben hypothesize how long Honeybadger could keep going if they went off the grid given the current pace of tech churn. They also discuss going all-in on COBOL and whether framework trends are actually any different than fashion trends. Get lost in this week's FounderQuest!
Show Notes
Links:
How to Build a Blog in 15 Minutes with Rails
Lindy Effect
Programming is a Pop Culture
Laugh Factory
Star Trek Next Generation
Bigelow Tea
Wallace and Gromit & Wensleydale Cheese
COBOL
Angular 1 vs. Angular 2
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar
Full Transcript:
Starr:
All right. I guess we're going to be talking about tech churn today, and by that, I guess we mean the sort of turnover, right? Like you have an app, you build an app, and it's not just done. I remember when I was freelance or like people ... I know these clients who weren't in technology and they would just expect that you build this app and you hand it to them and it works. Sort of like a house or something. It's like you built the house and you expect the house to sort of stay standing up.
Starr:
But with software, it seems like you build the house and then you have to sort of keep a crew of carpenters on hand to make sure it doesn't just fall down in a couple of weeks. Because dependencies are always changing. And I don't know. Standards are always changing, there's security issues, and stuff like that.
Starr:
So I guess this week we're going to be talking about that sort of stuff because at this point, it takes a fair amount of work keep Honeybadger ... I'm not talking about running, right. We can go away for a week and it's going to stay up. But if we went away for a year, we would come back and things ... I don't know. I feel like we couldn't just do that. Does that feel like a fair assessment?
Josh:
I think it's partially fair. There's some parts of our system that operate ... I mean that haven't changed for a long time. And there's some that are constantly changing or trends we have to keep up with.
Ben:
I think we couldn't go away for a year on the client libraries. Because every different language has its own schedule for releases. GO just had a release recently that changed error handling. And then on top of the languages, you have frameworks. React had some changes to their error handling recently. So that in particular I think we're affected by.
Ben:
But the core of Honeybadger, I think we could probably go away for ... I don't know. Two or three years before we had really have to change things. Because we picked a lot of boring technologies when we started. And those ... Like for example Postgres doesn't change a whole lot from year to year. I mean, yeah, it's good to upgrade to get new features that come down pipe, can you get better performance and bug fixes and things like that. But generally speaking, Postgres doesn't change a whole lot. And so you can stick with that for a few years.
Josh:
We host this meetup in town here in Vancouver, Washington called Vancouver Full Stack. And this last one, my brother, who's also named Ben, gave a talk on ... It was titled, I think, Building a Rails Blog 15 Years Later. And so it was kind doing the same thing that DHH did in the famous blog in 15 minutes video that got us all into Rails.
Starr:
Oh, yeah. That was like a huge deal back then because it was ... Nowadays, it's super common. It's like you done with some of your framework, you run some generator, and bam, you have some sort of working, basic web application like a blog. But back then, that was unheard of.
Josh:
Yeah, you basically either strung it together yourself out of a bunch of PHP or Perl or whatever files. Or you used WordPress or Typekit, maybe, as I recall. Was that the pro version?
Ben:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
So yeah, that was huge. Like being able to bootstrap your own relatively custom application.
Ben:
It was a movable type. That's what you're thinking about.
Josh:
Movable type, that's what it is.
Josh:
It was interesting, though, going through his talk, not a whole lot has changed in Rails as far as building a block in 15 minutes. I think the generators generate a little bit more code for you now. Actually, they're a little bit more explicit about ... So they put the code in your controller instead of just hiding it in the framework. But other than that, there was not a whole lot that has changed with Rails as far as the basics. Which I found really interesting because it's like how it's been 15 years. Because I think it was 2005 that that video came out, if I recall correctly.
Josh:
And of course, I mean, Rails has gotten a lot better since then. But also it has kind of just quietly done it's work for a lot of people, I think during that time. And they just had to upgrade it and ... You have to keep up on it. But compared to some of the other tech stacks that you could choose that aren't around anymore-
Ben:
The funny thing is that Rails itself, it's been around for long enough. But it's funny that you should say not much has changed. Because if you were around back for Rails 2 and upgraded to Rails 3, that was huge. And the upgrade from Rails 3 to Rails 4 was also nontrivial. And it hasn't been as bad like 5 to 6.
Ben:
But there some pretty big adjustments that happened in Rails. But yet, even still, the philosophy has changed not so much. The approach of building apps has barely changed. Like you said, it's a very similar of how it was back in the beginning. So I think that says a lot about the vision and the foresight that they had with baking in the original stuff in the framework.
Starr:
It's an interesting-
Josh:
Right, and I mean like-
Starr:
It's an interesting case. I just wanted to say it's an interesting case because with Rails, I have a feeling that ... How long ago was it? 15 years ago, you said?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Starr:
Between 15 years ago and now, I imagine there's no code in the framework that is still there that was there 15 years ago. Or if it is, it's like a line containing a closing bracket or something. And yeah, from the standpoint of your brother trying to make the blog app, it seems very similar. And so I wonder ... It's almost as if you could say that Rails, the framework, the actually code of Rails, has had a huge amount of tech churn. But its certain aspects of like user interface have been made a bit more sort of stable.
Starr:
So in terms of a basic blog, and sort of functionality you need for that, the user interface that Rails presents in order to create this blog is pretty similar to what it was 15 years ago.
Josh:
Yeah, the user interface is pretty much the same. And a blog is the simplest Rails application you can build. That's why you chose that, I'm sure. As a straight example-
Starr:
Yeah, and I just want to be clear. By user interface, I'm stretching that a little bit. I'm meaning like all of the sort of public ... The things that a programmer would use in Rails to make the blog. So all-
Starr:
the methods that you call and the generators and ...
Josh:
Yeah, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And the fact that it's like they're still called controllers 15 years later.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, of course, I mean, Rails has obviously changed a lot over 15 years. And it does a lot more now than make a blog. Back then it was mainly like ... The feature set was a lot slimmer. It was building REST applications. It does a whole host of other things now with action cable and some of the real time stuff. And a lot of stuff has been added to it.
Josh:
But I think there's different kinds of churn in there, too. Because from a tech churn standpoint. Because yeah, obviously, you're going to have to upgrade ... There's going to be churn, the software that you use as it matures and as it goes through upgrade cycles and stuff, you're going to actually have to migrate things.
Josh:
But 15, 20 years, that's a long time. If you chose something that was not quite as stable even from like a foundational standpoint, you might be moving between different frameworks within that time to stay relevant or to keep up with the pace of change. So I think from that standpoint, Rails still holds up as far as being potentially a little bit lower maintenance.
Ben:
So did your brother get his blog made in 15 minutes?
Josh:
It wasn't 15 minutes. It was a little bit longer than 15 minutes but he got it made. Also he got to-
Starr:
He didn't make the framework, so he's not going to be as fast at it as a DHH would be.
Josh:
Well, and there was a live audience so we had some banter. I made up a lot of snarky jokes about Rails and JavaScript. So I introduced the talk as Ben Builds a Blog and React on Rails.
Starr:
That's a weird open mic night at the Laugh Factory, I've got to say. That's a weird standup routine.
Josh:
Because that's what ROR stands for, you know, these days.
Ben:
React on Rails.
Josh:
Yeah.
Josh:
But yeah, but we did ... I don't think the original talk had ... I don't know if it was TDD, but it got around to actually running some tests for it, too. Which was cool so ... There were some new people there. I think they got a lot out of it.
Ben:
Okay, but did he use TextMate?
Josh:
No. He used VS Code.
Ben:
Because that's-
Josh:
He used VS Code on Linux.
Ben:
That was an interesting-
Josh:
While giving a live coding presentation.
Ben:
Well, that's brave, right there.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That was an interesting side effect from that DHH video. Like TextMate and the Mac, actually exploded, in terms of web developers using them. It was kind of surprising. Interesting experience.
Starr:
Yeah. Similarly like I was ... I have here ... Audio listeners cannot see this but I have my mug of Earl Gray tea. And I remember that I started drinking early gray tea when I was in high school because I really liked the Next Generation, like Star Trek, the Next Generation. And so I was like, I wonder how much value ... Or how much, I don't know, Bigelow, the tea company's stock went up when Next Generation came out. And suddenly all these nerds are ordering Earl Gray tea everywhere.
Ben:
Well, I heard that Wallace and Gromit say it's Wensleydale cheese.
Josh:
Really?
Ben:
Yeah. The story that I heard was like they were basically going to shut down, but all of a sudden Wallace and Gromit came along and everyone wanted Wensleydale cheese.
Starr:
Wait, did they eat that or something or ...
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
I've never seen it. Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? I don't know.
Josh:
They're like a Claymation show. Yeah. It's a guy and his dog and they love their ... What? Their tea and cheese-
Ben:
Cheese and crackers, yeah.
Josh:
-and crackers, yeah.
Ben:
You got to check it out. It's great.
Starr:
Oh, maybe I should get some cheese and crackers for my tea.
Josh:
I'm surprised you haven't seen it Starr. I think you'd really like it.
Starr:
Yeah?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I'm just thinking of all the fun our listeners could have listening to me each crackers.
Ben:
And I had to recommend Wensleydale cheese. It's delicious.
Starr:
Oh wow. You just bumped their stock by another 10 points. Time for me to go-
Josh:
I think-
Starr:
-time to run this little pump and dump scheme.
Josh:
I think ... I have an alternate theory that Ben is the one who saved the cheese. Sounds like you're a pretty big fan.
Ben:
I am a big fan.
Starr:
One thing that you mentioned early on, Ben, is that the aspect of Honeybadger that experiences the most tech churn in terms of us having to update things, is the client libraries. Like the bits of the libraries. I was going to say the bits of code, the people inserting their apps, but they're a lot more than bits of code. They're actually libraries.
Starr:
And these things have to hook into go, and react and view, and all these stuff. All these frameworks to sort of seamlessly pull out error information. And these frameworks are changing all the time. And so we're constantly having to update them.
Starr:
So it's like do you guys think that it would be a bad business decision for us to just become a COBOL focused company? Like we throw in-
Josh:
Just embrace it.
Starr:
Yeah, we just put everything on COBOL.
Josh:
Embrace the stability.
Starr:
Embrace the stability, that's right.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, I mean Rails is kind of the newest. The webs COBOL is becoming itself ... I just give us another like 10 to 20 years and ... I mean, we're not going to change, right. We're going to be using the new Rails in 20 years, right?
Starr:
Oh, totally. I hope so. I mean, that'd be great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
I mean, we like to joke about COBOL, but there are still plenty of apps out there running in COBOL. And I think-
Starr:
That's what I'm saying. I'm not joking. This is a business opportunity, Ben.
Ben:
I'm just saying. Bit pick some, if you're a developer and you're looking at what am I going to build on? One of the things you should consider is what does my stack look like longterm? Am I going to be able to be around 15 years from now and still doing this thing. If you chose Rails, that was a risk in 2005. Not so much a risk today since it's been around 15 years.
Ben:
But if you chose Angular One, well, that didn't work out totally well.
Josh:
You've been through a few.
Ben:
Part of the real bugaboo about tech churn is that when you have to pick a technology to build on, you have to try and predict the future. And no one's very good at that, right. So I don't think there's a solution out there except for trying to in with eyes wide open. Or just pick something that's been around forever. So yeah, let's just switch everything COBOL. I'm down with Starr.
Starr:
All right, thank you. Thank you. I've got one other person on the COBOL train, leaving the station. Yeah, I think-
Ben:
The Fortran.
Starr:
Fortran, okay. Going way back.
Josh:
Leaving Fortran for COBOL. I mean from a ... Like it might actually work for us so-
Starr:
Fortran is dead. Fortran's dead. I'm doing everything in COBOL now.
Josh:
Fortran ... Nothing ever dies, Starr. There's someone still doing Fortran.
Ben:
Lots of someones.
Josh:
Yeah, you're right. It might work for us because I think one of the reasons companies tend to not stay on ... because there's not as many developers that are learning, training for that, right. So if we had to hire like 100 developers, COBOL will probably not be a good choice for us in a competitive developer market, I would imagine.
Starr:
That's true.
Josh:
Now being a small company that hires like once a year seems ... At kind of our current pace ... It's a little faster than that. A couple times. Maybe that works for us. Maybe we can stay on the old crusty stuff. And we can just find everyone who's interested in working on that.
Ben:
What I think is how you can choose what kind business you want to have based on what kind of choices you make.
Ben:
Like, for example, O'Reilly. They thrive on churn, right? The more new technology-
Starr:
Yeah, the book publisher.
Ben:
Exactly. They publish books about technology so-
Ben:
-new frameworks, new languages. Yeah, exactly. But yeah. Lets have that, right?
Ben:
But someone like I don't know, a hospital. They're like, no, lets just stick with the old stuff for a long, long, long time. And we'll just train people if we can't find them to hire them.
Starr:
I mean, lets be honest, churn has a whole different connotation when it comes to a hospital. You want very low churn at your hospital.
Josh:
Full disclosure, when we first started this conversation, I completely thought we were talking about business churns, so ... yeah.
Starr:
I like to keep you on your toes, Josh.
Josh:
To clarify my statement about how ... I think choosing technology like potentially things like Rails, could potentially lead to lower tech churn. We're not talking about technical debt, to be clear. That's a slightly different topic, I feel like.
Josh:
So churn is not necessarily the same thing as debt. Because you filled out that tech and different systems definitely have different properties as far as how that debt is managed over time.
Ben:
Both do have that issue with dependencies, right? The dependencies you choose and especially if you have more dependencies, you're going to have more churn to deal with. Because they're all on their own schedules on how they release stuff. Back to what I was saying, pick your dependencies carefully, right.
Josh:
Here's a random thought. Maybe this has something ... It has a lot to do ... Like technology and the amount of churn that it experiences could have a lot to do with the platforms that it's built on.
Josh:
So for instance, like server-side technologies. We've had TCP/IP and HTTP and all the base technologies. They change but they've been around a really long time. And server frameworks, in my experience, they don't change quite as rapidly as, for instance, like a client site applications because browsers have gone through a lot of upheaval. System IDs and continue to today. Browsers are constantly changing little things that affect the developers that build on those platforms everyday.
Josh:
I feel like it's a little bit more on the browser side but not the server side.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Do you think that's a fair statement?
Starr:
That is an interesting aspect to this. Because I almost wonder, like in Rails and stuff, there was a ton of churn, you did have to ... There were tons of things changing around 2006, 2007, and onward. But early ... It's like there's this flurry of everybody rushing to try and figure out how to do things and to build a system that will sort of catch on. And then eventually there are parts that gets to be accepted and then things slow down.
Starr:
And it's not to say there's never churn. It's like yeah, sure, you've got to upgrade your gems and stuff like that for security patches and whatnot. But the amount of turnover in code and stuff that happens in Rails land nowadays is much, much, much less than happens in like JavaScript land.
Starr:
I'm not sure that that's anything innate having to do with Rails versus JavaScript except that there's just a lot more people building single-page, front-end heavy web applications these days.
Starr:
And so we're sort of in this process of that sort of getting thrashed out. Because right now, it's a lot better than it used to be, right? Because five years ago, everybody was using ... there were 20 different package managers for JavaScript and nobody knew who was going to reign supreme. But now, it's like, well, there's still a lot of them, but ... Webpack seems to be kind of the big kid on the block now. And I don't know.
Starr:
So yeah. So maybe we're just seeing this weird sort of feeding frenzy. And so the trick to minimizing tech churn is to avoid the feeding frenzy. Like hang out in the sort of shallow type pools.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, ThoughtWorks is the consulting ... Is that Martin Fowler's consulting company? I want to say.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
They have this thing called the technology radar. It's a report that they publish, I think it's twice a year. But I was looking at it recently, it's kind of interesting because what it is is they get all of their senior technologists at the company together in a room with a whiteboard for I don't know, a day or two or something. And they all hash out all the technologies that they've been using, they're excited about, they've seen recently.
Josh:
And then they put together this ... Basically it's like a radar map of all these technologies with different quadrants in terms of whether they would like one to ... Like they think they're ready to adopt, whether they're just kind of observing them, whether they think that they're not a good idea and they would actively avoid them.
Josh:
The interesting part about it, in terms of this discussion, is like seems they have a process where like actually figuring out when it's actually time to start embracing something. And I feel that probably has ... Like that plays into it. Is this thing ... Is it widely adopted enough to be here for the longterm? Versus is it one of these technologies that is kind of just still ... It's one of the predecessors to the ultimate one. Or it's a flop.
Ben:
Yeah, one of the concepts that I like that's related to this is called the Lindy effect. And that's the idea that something that has been around for a long time will likely be around for a long time. So the longer something sticks around, the longer it will be around, right. So ...
Josh:
Hey, good news for the Badger.
Ben:
Exactly, like yes, we are much more likely to be around a couple years from now than someone who starts the same service a month ago, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ben:
By the order of this effect.
Ben:
So I think one strategy that you could take is just like, okay, I'm not going to look at anything until it's been around for a year. I am not even going to touch something that's brand new. But you lose that first mover advantage that can come with picking the technology that does stick around early in the life cycle.
Ben:
But if you're a risk averse, there's nothing wrong with hanging back and using the tried and true until someone else stubs their toe on it.
Josh:
You could still go play with it and stuff and learn about it. Just you don't need to go all in in production with it.
Ben:
Right. Okay, good thing about tech churn is that it keeps us all employed as software developers.
Starr:
That's true.
Ben:
Like Starr was saying, you can't just build the house and it stays standing, right? You got to have those carpenters on hand to always be wielding those hammers. So as a carpenter myself, I really appreciate that aspect of tech churn. Are we-
Starr:
So one thing that sort of is coming to mind continually as we're having this conversation is there was this great essay written a while ago by ... I may mess up his name, Reginald Braithwaite?
Starr:
Anyway, it's called Programming is a Pop Culture. And the reason I was thinking about this essay is because I was wondering, as we're discussing this stuff, could we just be discussing shoulder pads? Or skirt length? It's like okay, we could be ... If you want to be safe and sure that nobody's going to give you weird looks or anything, it's like yeah, you can wear the sort of fashion that's been around for a while. But if you want to be cool and have everybody want to be on board with what you're doing and stuff well you got to pick these hot, new things.
Starr:
So basically, in this essay, he's talking about how so much of the stuff that we, as developers, argue about is essentially sort of trends, in another word, fashion. But at the same time, there's this weird thing where developers being in general sort of factually oriented and used to dealing with mechanisms of things and stuff. It's like we like to argue as if we're talking about things being objectively better. But-
Josh:
We like to turn things into science.
Starr:
Yeah. It's like oh, everything is ... It's obviously, objectively better that you build a React app than you build a Rails app. Like those two things are ... Like it's the next step in evolution. But in fact, we're just talking about sort of trends.
Josh:
Makes sense.
Josh:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting at that talk about the Rails blog 15 years later. I mean, there seemed to be people there that had obviously not ever seen that talk much less kept up with Rails over the years. And they were interested in, really? Doing all of this and you get a blog? They were impressed by it. I'm like, this has been around for a long time.
Ben:
Are you saying they were impressed by how little work they had to do?
Josh:
Yes. Because I mean, if you went through some of the more modern curriculum ... I mean, a lot of code schools, they do teach Rails or another backend framework or whatever. A lot of them do focus on the front end or on the newer technologies. And a lot these technologies, they weren't built for the solo developer with the idea that you're going to be able to do an entire application yourself.
Josh:
And so a lot of these technologies like React, for instance, built by Facebook for massive software teams. And the idea is that it's one part of the system. And it's up to you to go and pick all the other components that you're going to use to piece together the ultimate thing, which is probably going to be amazing if you know what you're doing.
Josh:
But if you're a newcomer, I can see how challenging that would seem to think, I'm going to start from scratch and build a complete application. Say, I wanted to start my own software as a service as a new developer. And I just learned all the latest things. I could see that being kind of daunting.
Starr:
Do you think that, in some ways, the situation we're in now sort of mirrors the situation we were in sort of around 2002-ish. Back then, it's like you went to whatever the equivalent of a code school was. I guess university or whatever. And you got out and you're basically going to be going into whatever the equivalent of Facebook back then was. I don't know like IBM and you're going to be programming Java. And you're going to be part of a big team and you're going to work on some little aspect of this Java code base and you're not going to be building things just completely by yourself.
Starr:
But then Rails comes along and everybody's like, "Oh my God, I can build a blog by myself in 15 minutes. I don't have to have a team of 20 people." And so now people get out of code school, they go to Facebook, they work with a team of 20 people on some tiny little feature.
Starr:
And so this message of being able to build stuff just by yourself is actually cool. Although I guess it's not as bad as it was in Java times.
Josh:
Yeah. Well, it seems like this is not something new. Like you said, the whole Java, people aren't typically going out and building their own companies off of Java single-handedly, probably.
Starr:
Yeah. Let's be clear, I have no illusions that we're not still in Java times. There's still a lot of Java-
Josh:
Yeah, that's where we're saying that too. You're like, yeah. A lot of this hasn't really changed, it's just Rails has come along and other technologies like it have come along, I think maybe in a response to that. These technologies are geared towards slightly different audiences. They're geared towards smaller, potentially audiences that have more limited resources or they want to build something themselves or be able to do it start to finish.
Josh:
One of the reason a lot of people will still ... Even today, people will say like, "Well, Rails is good. It's really good for prototyping." Or for doing the rapid prototyping thing because you can accomplish so much with it in such little time.
Josh:
And then they'll say, "Where it falls down is as you grow and you have more people working on it and you have more of this churn happening on your application, that's where really it tends to shine less." I think the benefits of starting with something that's like Rails is that you can accomplish more with your resources.
Starr:
You know what this reminds me of? People want to build applications as if they're going to be scaling to millions of users simultaneous. I've also fallen into that trap.
Starr:
This reminds of that Mark Twain quote. It's like ... I forget exactly what it is. But it's about, it's like, "There's no poor people in America. We're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Yeah, so it's like, don't worry, I'm going to have a lot of money. So I need to plan for a life as if I was going to have a lot of money.
Josh:
Right.
Josh:
And I guess make life a lot harder on yourself now so that you can make sure you're set up for that billionaire life?
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Starr:
And there's one lesson I've learned I guess fairly recently. Which is that immediate gratification is kind of under-rated.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Because like-
Josh:
There's no billionaires that didn't make their first dollar.
Starr:
Oh, there you go.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
There you go.
Josh:
So if you're hung up on what technology to choose and you're not considering something like Rails or Laravel or whatever it is that won't scale ... That's not embraced by Silicon Valley or whatever, how many people have those aspirations but never get to the first line of code or the first customer or whatever.
Starr:
You got to tell me, honestly, did you make that up?
Josh:
Yeah. Well, as far as I know. I might have heard it somewhere.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. You're just like ... You got that. You got F That Money. Like you're just a machine! You're coming up with all these amazing phrases.
Josh:
What can I say. I don't know. I do hear things and then ... You never know. You can never be sure where you incorporate things from. But that's my knowledge. I'm not quoting stuff.
Starr:
Well, you know what? We're publishing this podcast and that counts. So anything you say here automatically-
Josh:
You heard it here.
Starr:
-copy-written so nobody else can use that. That's Josh's for his series of motivational books.
Josh:
I was pretty stoked about F That Money because I Googled it and I couldn't find it used in that context anywhere. So as far as I know, that was one of my original thoughts. Which are few and far between. So ... Maybe it wasn't the only one.
Starr:
Wow. It looks like we're coming up on time. Is there anything else you'd like to add to the conversation, anybody?
Ben:
Nope.
Josh:
No, I'm good.
Starr:
All right. Well, I guess that's all we have to say about tech churn. So, yeah. I guess we solved that one. You're welcome, everybody.
Starr:
So this has been Founder Quest. You've been listening to Founder Quest. If you would like to, I don't know, write for us on our blog, not Founder Quest blog, HoneyBadger blog, we herd people to do Ruby tutorials and stuff like that so check that out at ... Go to HoneyBadger.io and click on our blog and then there'll be a link right for us in the top nav. And you'll learn all about that. If you'd like to give us a review on iTunes or whatever. I always say iTunes. It's like Apple Podcast now. They rebranded it.
Josh:
Yeah, I did that, too.
Starr:
It's ridiculous.
Starr:
Just go and do that, please. Please don't feel like I have to ask you to do that. You are a free agent. You have autonomy and I want you to trust in yourself to make those decisions.
Starr:
And in the meantime, that has been Founder Quest.
This week Josh, Ben, and Starr talk vintage console games and announce details about Honeybadger's upcoming RailsConf blow out. The episode then pinballs over to dismissing FU money, insights on hiring and more. Hold on to your headphones!
Show Notes
Links:
RailsConf
Waza
Remus & Romulus
SAML
DHH
Tableau
Calendly
M Night Syamalan
Full Transcription:
Josh:
It all started with Remus and Romulus, am I right, Ben?
Ben:
Oh, yes.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Oh my gosh, Remus and Romulus, those were the names of our first two servers.
Ben:
Our first database servers
Starr:
Our first database servers, I'm sorry.
Josh:
Was it Snickers was the ...
Ben:
Yes, Snickers was the first.
Josh:
Yeah, Snickers was the first.
Ben:
Yeah, so back in the day when we actually named our servers we named them after candy bars, so we had-
Josh:
First came Snickers, then came Remus and Romulus, and would you say that today Honeybadger is kind of in the late ... Like the decline of the empire stage?
Ben:
I hope not, no. We're still-
Josh:
I hope we didn't predestine ourselves ...
Ben:
Right.
Josh:
... with our server naming.
Ben:
We're still in the vigorous days of the republic.
Starr:
Yeah, I mean, we're referencing the Roman Empire, right? Remus and Romulus, they were ... You just said that they were like the, sort of like second servers that we set up, and before that was Snickers. I just wanted to say that you're implying that in the foundation of the Roman Republic before there was Remus and Romulus, like the official story, there was somebody named Snickers who really kicked it off?
Josh:
There was a Snickers, yeah.
Starr:
Little Snickers ...
Josh:
Snickers was the god that no one talks about.
Starr:
Yeah ... Maybe Snickers was the name of the wolf that raised Remus and Romulus, right?
Ben:
There you go.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Okay, that's a good name for a pet.
Ben:
I like it.
Josh:
Snickers the wolf.
Starr:
I love that so much! I love that so much, oh my gosh.
Ben:
Now we need some-
Josh:
I am totally going to name my next dog Snickers, by the way.
Ben:
That's awesome.
Starr:
That's a great name.
Ben:
I miss that server.
Josh:
Yeah, that was a good server.
Ben:
The good old days.
Starr:
Welcome to a special Valentine's Day episode of FounderQuest. We're talking about love. We take reader questions on romance, and how to ... I'm just kidding. We're going to be talking about ... Last episode we talked about, briefly towards the end we talked about how we were going to be doing the Honeybadger ... What's the official branding? What are we officially calling it? The Indie ...
Josh:
I think we're calling it the Honeybadger Indie Lounge.
Starr:
I like that. You know what would be even better than that?
Josh:
Tell me.
Starr:
The Honeybadger Indie Ultra Lounge.
Ben:
With sprinkles.
Josh:
Yeah, with sprinkles.
Starr:
Overstuffed furniture in there ... I don't know. I've never been to an ultra lounge-
Josh:
We should give out Snickers bars.
Ben:
I was thinking the same thing.
Starr:
Yeah, you should.
Ben:
You can have that party pack of Snickers in a bowl. Yep.
Josh:
In honor of our first server, yeah.
Starr:
That's a great idea. Actually, I've been legit hungry at conferences, so I feel like we'd get a lot of traction if we just had like a fruit bowl, just like bananas, just like free bananas.
Ben:
That's a good idea.
Josh:
We're going to have something really good there.
Ben:
We're working on getting a popcorn cart, actually.
Starr:
Oh, really?
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
That's so cool.
Ben:
Yeah. Because who doesn't love popcorn?
Josh:
It's good to snack on, yeah.
Starr:
Maybe we should explain a little bit about what the heck we're talking about. We're talking about ... First of all we're talking about RailsConf. RailsConf is going to be when, like in May?
Josh:
Yeah, I think it's in early-
Starr:
It's in May, it's in Portland ...
Josh:
The first week.
Starr:
Portland is the Pacific Northwest, we're in the Pacific Northwest, so we're like, "Okay, we've got to really represent." If it was across the country, I mean, let's be honest, we just couldn't be bothered, but ...
Josh:
Also we have ... This is part of our origin story. We kind of launched at RailsConf, Pdx ...
Starr:
That's right!
Josh:
Was it RubyConf or was it RailsConf?
Starr:
It was RailsConf, yeah.
Josh:
It was RailsConf. Yeah, last time RailsConf was here ... I forget what year that was, it was ... I know it wasn't like 2012, but it was like a couple years after that, within that time span I think. Yeah, we went to RailsConf and we couldn't afford to sponsor, because RailsConf is a pretty hefty sponsorship price-
Starr:
Josh, we couldn't afford tickets.
Josh:
Yeah, you're right, we couldn't afford tickets, right?
Starr:
We didn't even get to go inside, we just sort of hung out in the hallway.
Josh:
We did the hallway, yeah, the hallway track. We basically bombed the hallway track, and put stickers on tables and things.
Starr:
Yeah, that was a lot of fun. That was one of the first times I've actually spent much time in Portland, so ...
Josh:
I totally forgot that we actually couldn't even afford tickets.
Starr:
Yeah, I remember sitting outside in the hallway ...
Josh:
Good times.
Starr:
... doing some client work for somebody, because I was still freelancing part-time, and just sort of doing that, and felt like such a rebel.
Josh:
I'm trying to remember that ... I don't think ... Was that before Waza?
Starr:
I don't know.
Josh:
If so, that was like my ... I had never been to a conference before.
Starr:
No, Waza was first because we met at Waza, right?
Josh:
That was first ... Oh, that's right, I guess you're right, okay. Okay, so I've been to one conference before.
Starr:
Cool.
Josh:
RailsConf is back in Portland and-
Starr:
RailsConf is back ... You know another cool little-
Josh:
This time we can afford tickets.
Starr:
You know another cool little sort of like circling of the circle? I don't know, looping back of the snake that eats his own tail?
Starr:
Yeah, so Portland has this awesome video game and pinball bar space called ... What is it called?
Josh:
Ground Control.
Starr:
Ground Control, it's amazing. That's where I first learned to enjoy pinball. That was actually on the night that I'm talking about. GitHub basically rented out Ground Control and opened it up to RailsConf people, and I looked enough like a RailsConf person that I sort of snuck in and played a bunch of pinball for free on GitHub's tab. This time, though, this time we're going to be actually renting out Ground Control ourselves, right?
Josh:
For a ... Yeah, for a little party on, I think it's on the first night-
Starr:
Yeah, a little shindig.
Josh:
The first night of RailsConf ... Yeah. We're also doing that. We're doing two things, we're doing the Indie Lounge and we're doing a party. That's going to be really fun, because the party is going to be free to play, like all the retro arcade games will be free to play, and we're-
Ben:
Except for Galaga, Galaga will not be available because I'll be playing it all night long.
Josh:
Ben has Galaga reserved.
Ben:
I've got dibs.
Starr:
VIP Galaga.
Josh:
I guess I better get on that, I better go stakeout my machines early.
Ben:
We're going to do a signup for this, we're going to send out invites and allow people to register, because we don't have capacity for the entire RailsConf population to go to the event, so we're going to have to limit it, but we should put that on the registration form, like your name, your favorite video game, so that we can warn people, "Oh, there's a lot of demand for Pole Position ..." I don't know.
Josh:
Oh, yeah that would be ... You got to get there early.
Starr:
I don't want to get between the nerds and their games. That just seems like a bad place to be if we're trying to engender goodwill. I just say let them fight it out, I mean it's Lord of the Flies out there, we all know that.
Josh:
Yeah, that's true.
Ben:
You have to play Mortal Kombat to find out who gets to play the game they want to play.
Starr:
Yeah ... What was the thinking behind doing the ... The lounge bit, the Indie Lounge, or Ultra Lounge as I'm calling it, is-
Ben:
With sprinkles.
Starr:
That's a little bit of a different deal than you usually see at conferences. Most of the time you go to a conference and it's just kind of like the company, they've got reps there, they've got maybe demos, maybe they're giving out little koozies or something with their logos on it, or maybe little flashlights or some other stuff that will get lost in your backpack and you'll never see again. What are we trying to do? How are we trying to change that up?
Josh:
There's always been a problem ... We've always had a problem at RailsConf ... Like I said, back when RailsConf was in Portland and we couldn't even afford tickets much less sponsorship, even then in the years after that, as a small bootstrap company, even though we started attending and stuff, we still couldn't afford some of the sponsorship tiers at the larger conferences that a lot of the larger companies are doing, so we'd have to kind of improvise or come up with our own things.
Josh:
I always thought it would be cool if there were a way to involve some of the smaller businesses, and even maybe solo or individual developers, so that they can come and have a semiofficial place to hang out, and talk to people, and that sort of thing. That's where this lounge idea kind of came in, the idea is basically ... We're kind of like the headlining sponsor, but we're going to be involving some of the other small businesses in the Rails community, and then hopefully there's going to be ... It'll kind of be like a meeting place for all of the, I guess, indie creators in the community, or whatever you want to call them, like the MicroConf crowd, even.
Starr:
Yeah, and just to warn you, this isn't like an ambush ... We're not trying to just get these people in a corral so we can just like have our salespeople swarm on them? We don't really have salespeople. We're just legit trying to-
Josh:
Yeah, we don't have salespeople.
Starr:
We're just legitimately trying to sort of foster community amongst people like us, who are sort of building things, and sort of out there trying to do stuff at a scale that's not sort of this big corporation thing-
Josh:
Yeah, well that's the other thing, we don't ... It's not really our style to go set up a demo booth and have salespeople try to sell developers walking by on Honeybadger, right there in your face. We kind of just like to chill, so this is a place to chill, and it lets us put our name on it and gives somewhere, the people can come talk to us or whatever. We can do other cool things around this lounge. This lounge idea is, it's like a meeting ... We can build things around it that I think are pretty interesting as opposed to the, like Ben was talking about, like handing out keychains or something
Starr:
What do you mean ... What sort of things could we build around it? I mean we're not going to hold you to this because it's all ... We have the lounge booked but we don't have every single detail worked out. Anything that we say is sort of tentative, I think, beyond this point.
Josh:
Yeah, I don't have ... I mean, I don't have any super crazy ideas, really. The party, for instance, we're doing this also, we're doing this party that we're hopefully going to ... We might involve that in this a little bit, I think some of ... We might offer some of our ... We don't have official co-sponsors yet, we'll be announcing that at some point, but the idea is that we're going to make ... I think we're going to have some sort of mini, kind of like a prospectus where different people can participate at different levels, if that makes sense. I'm not quite sure what all those levels will be yet, but it'll be like you can get your logo on the banner for the lounge, for instance, and we'll promote you as a part of our promotion to our customers as we kind of get this thing out there to people.
Starr:
I've got to ask you a tough question, Josh.
Josh:
Uh-oh.
Starr:
Does this count as multilevel marketing?
Josh:
I think we could go there. If you recruit ... We recruit you, and then you recruit several of your friends to join you at the lounge, and then they can recruit their friends.
Starr:
Yeah, but do you ... If you buy a spot in the lounge do you get to put up your own little tiny banner with tiny little logos on it?
Josh:
A tiny banner ... Okay, yeah, I see where you're going. We could have sub-prospectus, and then a sub-sub-prospectus that we ... Prospectuses, everyone gets their own prospectus that they can then sell to their people basically.
Starr:
Yeah. Unlike a multilevel marketing thing it's not actually a scam and everybody gets to have a good time, so ...
Josh:
Yeah, I like it.
Starr:
Well, I really like this whole direction because ... I don't know, with marketing stuff like this it's really hard to tell ... Okay, it's really hard to draw a straight line between some effort like this and a signup. Occasionally some people will come by and be like, "Oh, I signed up because I saw you at this place," but for the most part you don't really know. One thing I really like about our marketing efforts lately is that ... They're all things that I just think are good, they're just good to do in the world, and I'm just happy that we're doing them. Obviously I hope that we get good ROI on it, and if we somehow magically learn that we didn't we'd probably have to stop it, but in the meantime I'm just sort of glad we're doing it. It makes me happy to sort of be in this community like this.
Josh:
I don't know, Starr. You can just buy things, you can buy things for yourself, and not everything has to have an ROI. We could just buy ourselves a RailsConf lounge if we just wanted one for us.
Starr:
Like just for us?
Josh:
Just for us, like this could ... We could just ... We don't even have to let anyone in. This could just be ... This could be a place for Honeybadger people to hang out. It doesn't have to have a return on investment necessarily.
Starr:
Can we get a scary bouncer and put them outside the door with a little velvet rope.
Josh:
Honey badgers only.
Starr:
Yeah, and we'll leave the door open so people can look in.
Josh:
Right. I don't know if this is ... We're not hiring tons of people ... We actually are hiring one person right now, but a lot of companies that go and sponsor conferences, they're doing it because they're hiring. We do happen to be a developer tool, so any kind of goodwill that we can build with other developers obviously is good for us long-term, and I think that's been our approach to conference sponsorships, is that we're kind of just out there building goodwill with developers and ... We've never really had a good way to tie this sort of thing to the bottom line. I think that's fine, I think it's cool to do stuff just because you want to do it, or it's fun.
Starr:
Yeah, and also we're kind of like, sort of writing a perceived sort of injustice in the world a little bit, because ... I mean I remember when, back in, when was it? Like 2015 or something, 2014, where there were just Ruby Conferences every ... Every two weeks there was a Ruby Conference somewhere in the country. We sponsored pretty much all of them except for RailsConf, because RailsConf basically ... It would have been like, our budget could have gone to all of the Ruby Conferences in the country or RailsConf.
Josh:
Yeah, it's like all of them combined.
Starr:
It would have cost the same. Yeah, all of them combined or RailsConf. Which, I understand why they do that, it's a big conference like the biggest one, but it's just like ... It's just ...
Josh:
Supply and demand.
Starr:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben:
I remember back in those days, when we were talking about that sort of thing, and I remember saying, "Oh, wouldn't it be awesome if someday we could have that booth, that we actually had the money to be able to do that?" And here we are, we do. Isn't that awesome?
Starr:
It is awesome.
Ben:
Dreams come true.
Starr:
Dreams come true, it happened to you.
Ben:
That's why I like to say that we're living the bootstrapper's dream, because at first it was, "Let's get enough money so that we can actually stop doing freelancing." We got there, then it was, "Oh, let's get to a point where we can do this kind of fun stuff," and we got there ... It's great, I love it, I love this life.
Starr:
Can anybody tell me who came up with this idea of the lounge?
Ben:
It's got to be Josh's idea, it sounds like a Josh idea to me.
Josh:
It was a Josh idea.
Starr:
You are a genius, Josh. You are a fricken genius. I'm so glad you did this, because honestly ... Let's be honest, if we would have gotten a normal booth and done the normal booth thing, I would have shown up, I would have done my part manning it and smiled at people, but honestly I would have been just terrible at that. That just does not play to my skills.
Josh:
Yeah, that's the other part of this lounge, is that none of us wanted to actually have to stand at a booth. No one in the company wanted to man a booth, so we were like, what can we do that doesn't involve tying us to a place for the entire conference? We like to move around and talk to people, and also go to the talks and things, so ... Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, so we should think of the things that always, that we find annoying about conferences, or that we would really appreciate when we go to a big conference like RailsConf, and then try and provide those in the booth to some degree, right?
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr:
Wouldn't that be nice? Like the bananas, free toothbrushes ... I don't know.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, we're going to ... I think we're going to do-
Starr:
Lots of places to sit quietly.
Josh:
I don't know, I haven't confirmed the details on this yet, but the idea is that we're going to have a place for people to bring some of their swag and stuff, if you've got your own product or business or something. We're hoping to have a place to at least hand out some stickers or small items. We're not going to have a bunch of different t-shirt tables or something. There's this ... Actually they did this at RubyConf and they've done it some of the past years, but the rule is kind of that if you're an unofficial ... If you're not a sponsor but if you are a small company or something, or a developer and have your own thing, you can put your stickers on the tables that aren't being used around the venue, for instance, and everyone does that. My thought was this kind of gives a way to legitimize that a little bit more too. We're going to be hopefully encouraging people to bring their stickers, and small items like that to hand out.
Ben:
Who knows? We might even do a podcast interview on the show floor. We might talk to some of our indie developer small biz friends ...
Starr:
That's right, yeah, we talked about maybe doing that. That would be fun. Yeah, so-
Josh:
Meet the listeners.
Ben:
Yeah, that'd be cool.
Starr:
I should say at this point if anybody is interested in co-sponsoring or, I don't know, being interviewed or whatever ... All of this is kind of up in the air, but you're always welcome to contact us, slide in our DMS at Twitter, @FounderQuest, or email us at wherever.
Josh:
... like ideas for things you'd like to see at the lounge, we're always open.
Starr:
Yeah ideas of things you'd like to see at the lounge at Honeybadger.io.
Ben:
Any particular snacks you'd like to have.
Starr:
Snacks
Josh:
Popcorn toppings.
Ben:
We have confirmed, though, that there will be power.
Josh:
Power is a big one.
Ben:
Yes, we are going to have places to plug various kinds of things in, so if you want to rest your feet a while and rest your battery a while, you can come and hang out with the Honeybadgers and charge up.
Starr:
Oh, that's good.
Ben:
Here's some stories of the good old days.
Josh:
There will not be Tesla parking.
Starr:
No Tesla parking?
Josh:
Leave your Model 3s at home, we're only charging laptops and phones.
Starr:
How indie is this going to be? Should I bring my NES or something and CRT?
Josh:
I think that ... Yeah, that would be cool.
Ben:
You might run into some problems with the venue. They get pretty strict about what kind of equipment you can have there.
Starr:
Oh, they don't like it if you bring your own equipment?
Ben:
Not at all. Like, "Oh, you want a power cord with that power? Oh, that's going to be an extra charge."
Starr:
Wow ...
Josh:
Right, okay ... Can we rent an NES from the venue, do you think?
Ben:
That's an interesting idea.
Josh:
I mean it is Portland, Portland's pretty hip that way.
Ben:
True. Oh, I know, I know, we need to rent a Galaga upright video game. That would be awesome.
Josh:
We could, yes, have that, an arcade cabinet ...
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
... at the booth ...
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
... to promote our ...
Ben:
We have to get Ben on that right away.
Josh:
... off the books party.
Starr:
The thing I don't like about arcade cabinets is you've got to stand up.
Ben:
Well, yeah.
Starr:
I do most of my gaming reclined.
Josh:
We could make some kind of ... I don't know.
Starr:
That's why I never get into PC gaming. Let's be honest, I don't want to sit at my desk and play a game ... If I'm playing a game I'm laying down on my living room floor.
Ben:
Okay, so here's something completely random, speaking of reclining ...
Starr:
Okay.
Ben:
I walked into my office this morning, and as you know my office is upstairs from a wine tasting room, a retail little place, establishment. Of course they're not here at the time of the morning that I get here. I'm walking in, unlock the door, disarm the alarm, and I'm looking around, and they had this little display of little wine paraphernalia things you can buy, like, I don't know, whistling wine stoppers or whatever. They had these socks, a pair of socks, and the socks ... One sock says, "If you can read this," and the other sock says, "Bring me some wine." If you're reclining and you've got your socks on, and your feet are out, and you're like, "Hey, if you can read this, bring me some wine."
Josh:
Oh, I see, okay, they're like reclining socks.
Ben:
Exactly.
Josh:
Nice.
Ben:
There you go. While you're playing your video game, Starr, you can recline, and you can be like, "Hey, hook me up here."
Starr:
There we go. The main thing I'm getting from all this is wine ain't as fancy as it used to be.
Josh:
Right, it's not.
Starr:
That's the impression I get.
Josh:
When you have special socks ...
Ben:
We will not be serving wine at the lounge, sorry.
Starr:
It's like, "Janet, get me my wine socks! I'm going to drink some wine!"
Josh:
If we do it'll be out of a plastic bag.
Starr:
There you go.
Starr:
Maybe I'll just bring my ... I'll get my big 20 inch professional, sort of CRT video monitor, and my NES, and I'll put them in a big, black plastic trash bag, and I'll just wheel them in, just like, "Oh, just taking out the trash." Then I'll just open up the front and there it'll be.
Josh:
You just have to be a rebel, don't you, Starr?
Starr:
I do, yeah.
Ben:
Maybe we should do special giveaways at the lounge. Maybe, like, if you bring us a box of Voodoo Doughnuts then we'll give you a month free of Honeybadger.
Josh:
We're just going to do promotions to get stuff. No one's invited, you can bring us donuts and leave them at the door, and we'll hook you up with a free account.
Starr:
I like this, I like this whole corruption vibe. I like this, yeah. I could get on this gravy train. I think we've been sort of like upright citizens for too long. It's time to cash in, boys. I'm sorry.
Josh:
Honeybadger is going criminal.
Starr:
We're pivoting, Josh, that's what that's called. When you do that that's called pivoting, when you go criminal.
Josh:
Right, okay, yeah.
Ben:
Fortunately we have a business model already that works, so we don't have to.
Starr:
Yeah, we're not really criminals, we're not really ... Okay. Okay, I know ... I know you see all the work you've been doing in the PCI compliance, whatever compliance, just like crashing down around you, like Godzilla or Rampage, my favorite video game from the '80s.
Ben:
That's an awesome game. Josh, what is the game you're going to be playing all night at Ground Control?
Josh:
I don't know. Maybe pinball. Pinball was pretty fun.guess it was last year, we went to the Pinball Hall of Fame and got to play some super, super cool ... It's like a pinball museum. Yeah, I'm a big fan of pinball now.
Starr:
My big insight, my big pinball pro tip is that you don't press both flippers at the same time. That was a habit left over from childhood.
Starr:
It's both of them, you're guaranteed to have one of them hit it, but actually it's a trap, it's guaranteed to not work as well.
Josh:
Yeah, it doesn't work.
Starr:
All right, so ... Do we have anymore stuff we should say on topic?
Josh:
Come check out the lounge ... Ben, I probably will be playing, now that I've had a little chance to think about it, I'll probably be playing Street Fighter or a Street Fighter-like game, the fighters.
Ben:
You do seem like a Street Fighter kind of person to me.
Josh:
Actually I like Mortal Kombat better, but ...
Ben:
Yeah, no doubt.
Starr:
I challenge you to a Street Fighter duel, Josh.
Josh:
I like that ... You got to have the mortality.
Ben:
It'll be fun, it'll be a blast if you want to come hang out, sit on the couch with us for a while ... It's going to be great.
Josh:
Yeah, details forthcoming on bringing swag and whatnot.
Starr:
So the other things been going on is that we've been interviewing and hiring, or not hiring, we've been interviewing and working on the hiring sort of process for this new position of ours ... Ben has done a ton of interviews and Josh and I have talked to two people who have, I guess, made it past Ben's rigorous dragnet of competency.
Josh:
Ben kind of like ... Ben's Honeybadger HR and I'm kind of ... Well, I guess we've ... We've joked that Starr is like hype, like the hype man or whatever.
Ben:
The hype man, yeah.
Josh:
I feel like in this instance I've been the hype man to your HR, because I've been basically just trying to dump job candidates on you. We're up to how many, like 43?
Ben:
50.
Josh:
50?
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
It was 43 yesterday, so we got like ...
Starr:
50? Oh my gosh.
Josh:
50 people have applied to our job so far.
Ben:
Yeah, not bad.
Josh:
Not bad, yeah.
Starr:
That's crazy. It started out slow, I thought it was going to be a little bit sparse, but no.
Ben:
Yeah, it did start off kind of slow. Josh's hype man abilities, when he sent out that newsletter it got a lot of people-
Josh:
Sending out emails ... The podcast also helped, we've had a number of people come through the podcast, so if you're listening think you for applying.
Starr:
Is this the email you wrote as part of the Leveling Up mailing list?
Josh:
Yeah
Starr:
What's Leveling Up and what is the email?
Josh:
Leveling Up is our weekly newsletter, or I guess it's every other weekly, but it's articles for how to level up your career as a web developer. The email, I mean we don't really do expletives on FounderQuest, do we? It's titled F That Money, and there's a lot of cursing in it, and it's basically about how Silicon Valley culture sucks. We don't like ... We're not in this to make a shit ton of money, basically, we would rather have a shit ton of freedom than a shit ton of money.
Starr:
I just want to point this out because it may not come through over the audio as well as it does when you're reading it, but the F That Money is a corruption of F You Money, right?
Ben:
F You Money, yes.
Starr:
VCs and stuff are always going on about like, "You want to get F you money where you can just like ..." I don't know, if your neighbor is bothering you you just buy their house from the property management company and kick them out on the street ... That's like F you money.
Josh:
Raise the rent on them until they have to break their lease.
Starr:
Yeah, which I know is the American dream for a lot of people, I'm not denigrating that at all whatsoever. We all got to have our own goals in life. Josh is talking about F That Money-
Josh:
That is not ours.
Starr:
F That Money ...
Josh:
It's kind of a contrast, where you're not trying to screw over other people, but you basically don't have to do ... I think that the real idea behind it was that a lot of people that have that mentality of, "I want to make that kind of money someday and have that kind of power," they spend their whole careers working crazy hours, and trying to get ahead, and doing the whole whatever it is ...
Ben:
Hustle culture.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
In the end, let's just say it, most of them don't, most of them-
Josh:
Do you get it? No, you probably don't get it anyway.
Starr:
You probably don't get it.
Josh:
You don't have to make ... You can make good money, money that lets you live the life that you want to live, you don't have to overwork yourself, you can spend a lot of time with your family, and you still make a lot of money, let's be honest.
Starr:
You can be like, "Oh, my rich neighbor doesn't like my band practices and I guess is trying to buy my house ... F that, I own my house."
Josh:
Exactly. Yes, that is F that, that is the F that money. Thank you, Starr.
Starr:
You're welcome. I'm all about the metaphors.
Ben:
Yeah, Josh, that email did drive a lot of our applicant traffic, and the blog post was good ... Yeah, the FounderQuest podcast ... What's been great about the podcast, and basically being who we are just recorded in sessions once a week, is a lot of people have had a chance to learn about how we operate at Honeybadger, and who we are, and that resonates with a certain set of people, and those are the people that we want to attract to our job posting, and so they apply ... It skips a lot of stuff. They're like, "Oh yeah, I already know about how you do things, and I'm down with that, so let's talk about the job." That's been helpful.
Starr:
Yeah, I never thought that would be a benefit of the podcast. I think it really has been, I think we're pretty ... We're not really putting on much pretense here.
Josh:
Yeah, I got called unprofessional by a few people and ...
Starr:
What?
Josh:
Ben had the insight that if you're like ... If you don't know at this point that Honeybadger isn't exactly professional ... I mean, it's Honeybadger.
Ben:
It's got to be us.
Starr:
We need a flag where it's like if somebody uses SAML login, or somebody ... If we have a compliance agreement with some company they don't get the F That Money type emails?
Ben:
They don't get the cool stuff.
Josh:
I thought about putting some ... We could put, yeah, like a whatever, a rating level on the newsletter and then have options where people can choose the content they want. Then I could just go wild.
Ben:
PG versus mature audience kind of thing.
Josh:
Yeah, exactly.
Starr:
One thing, can I just-
Josh:
Can I just, before we move on from this, can I just thank the person that said that that newsletter was the, and I quote, the "greatest marketing email they have ever received" ...
Starr:
Oh my gosh, really?
Josh:
Yes, at least one person said this.
Josh:
That made me feel good.
Starr:
Aw, that's so great, Josh. You deserve that. You deserve that, you do really good work, and I'm not being facetious at all.
Josh:
Thanks.
Ben:
So true.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah, I'm pretty great.
Starr:
Aw, what a great thing ... Oh my gosh. Okay, okay ... Yeah, so I guess more of that ... You just need to ... We should just unchain Josh, we've been holding him back for too long.
Josh:
Yeah, just going to go full on DHH
Starr:
Just full Badger, give them the full Badger.
Josh:
I think DHH was the original Honeybadger.
Ben:
As I was going through the candidates this week and feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the screenings that I've bee doing, I did have the thought, maybe we didn't time this correctly. Maybe we should have waited until RailsConf, and we're having our lounge, and we could have a little sign saying, "Oh, and we're hiring," and then ... That's what everyone does, right? You advertise that you're hiring when you're at a conference. Then 30 seconds after I had that thought I had the thought, if we had more responses that probably wouldn't be great for me.
Starr:
Yeah, that's true, and it would probably make it a little bit less fun just having to deal with all that.
Josh:
This is why companies have HR departments.
Ben:
That's true.
Josh:
We've discovered it. Otherwise the founders sit around on phone calls, 10 phone calls a day.
Starr:
I love how we just rediscover all these sort of principles, it's like ... We started out, we're like, "Oh, these stupid companies, they don't know what they're doing ..."
Josh:
We don't need that.
Starr:
Over the years it's just like, "Oh, okay ..."
Josh:
I get that.
Starr:
We're going back to the first principles of running a business here, we're building really from ground zero.
Josh:
Yes, we're discovering ... Yeah.
Starr:
I feel like we're in sort of our mid-20s, where we're learning that maybe our parents weren't entirely just stupid ...
Ben:
Right, right.
Starr:
I don't know. Still, we still have that rebel attitude, because we haven't been crushed by our 30s yet.
Ben:
Right. That's totally right. Even though we haven't had the, I don't know, the 2,000 people or so that applied to Basecamp's job recently, I'm quite happy with the number of people that we've got, because yes, I am talking to most of them, and that would be one heck of a lot of people to talk to.
Starr:
It's really been interesting for me because ... I'm finding myself sort of on this other side of the sort of interview chair, table ... It's virtual because it's all online, but ... More and more, and it's kind of interesting how ... I don't know, I guess whenever I interviewed for positions before I always kind of just had this vague idea, like I didn't really know what I was supposed to emphasize about myself, I just kind of created, "Oh, in general I am a good programmer, I'll try and demonstrate that to you ..." Sort of being on this side, it's really interesting how ... It's like, no, I've got a pretty good idea the sort of things that I want to see, and there's a very big difference between sort of the people who sort of deliver those in their applications and stuff, and the people who don't. This is just like a personal thing, too, this isn't ...
Starr:
I'm not even saying that you guys have the same experience, but it's like, it's very obvious to me when a candidate is just very impressive. A lot of times that impressiveness doesn't have anything to do with resume or sort of past coding skill or whatever, it's just sort of the level of attention that they bring to the actual sort of job application, and the, sort of like take home ... We're paying people to do a take home assignment, like the level of attention that they bring to the take home assignment is like ... Are they carefully thinking things out? Are they putting themselves in our shoes and trying to be like, "Oh, well what would they want? How can I fit into that role?" Versus, "Here's all about me ... Here's all about me and you can decide whether or not I fit this role." It's not like that latter approach is terrible or anything, but it's just there's a huge difference between them. One is just like, "Oh, okay, yes, this is exactly what we need."
Josh:
I think the same thing works here as works in sales and marketing. In marketing you don't want to make it about you, you want to make it about them, so I mean you're really selling yourself and ... Yeah, no one wants to hear all about you, they want to hear about themselves and how much better their lives will be if they, whatever, have the product, or have you working for them, et cetera.
Starr:
Yeah. Personally, again, this is just personal, but I feel like in interviews there's a tendency for people to ... It's like you ask them a question and they're like, "Okay, what's my experience that I have with regard to that ... If I don't have experience I'll think of something adjacent to it, and then I'll just kind of talk about that to sort of prove that I know what I'm talking about," and that is okay, but the thing that really ... A different approach that really works well on me is to ... If this person just really sort of dug in with sort of questions, and be like, "Well, that's ..."
Starr:
Maybe they don't actually have experience in a specific technology, but maybe they're asking me some really good questions, trying to understand the context around the problem, and maybe parts of that are similar to things that they've done before and they bring that in, so it's not just completely ... There's something to back it up but it's more ... I don't know, it's like ... It's more demonstrating sort of a command of the sort of like understanding a problem, and being able to work on solutions to it, as opposed to sort of command of a specific technology.
Josh:
Yeah, it seems like asking good questions has been one thing that has set some people apart so far.
Starr:
I'm just saying this because personally I never ... It came as a surprise to me to notice these things.
Ben:
Yeah, and it's interesting to see the level of effort that people put into the initial application, so ... Back in the olden days before email you had a cover letter, that was all nicely formatted and printed out on heavyweight paper, and then you had your resume, also nicely formatted, printed on heavyweight paper, and you put that in the mail ... These days we still use those terms, cover letter and resume, but I think the point of the cover letter is to get me to read the resume. You want, as a candidate you want to convince that hiring person this resume is worth a look, because if you're Basecamp and you've got 2,000 candidates it takes a long time to through every resume.
Ben:
We need a little bit of incentive, why am I even spending more than 30 seconds looking at what you sent me? If your cover letter or your, what's now basically the email that you send, if that is like, "Here's my resume," okay, well ... That's like zero effort, thanks a lot for playing. If you write something like, "I found this job because I always listen to your podcast, and it's awesome because X, Y, and Z, I relate to it in these ways ..." Blah blah blah blah blah, at least give me a paragraph or two of some context about why you even care and why I should care.
Josh:
Or a haiku.
Ben:
Or a haiku, yeah. This time in the job post ... I always like to put something kind of weird in a job post, this time I put, "Send us maybe some poetry." It was an optional thing, it wasn't required.
Josh:
Honeybadger themed.
Ben:
Yeah, Honeybadger themed poetry, and we got two, two individuals sent us some poetry so far out of the 50, and one was a haiku, and to top it off the haiku included memes. Of course, of course I'm going to talk to that person, no question we're going to have a chat, even if it's just for me to say, "Thanks for doing that," versus the person like, "Here's my resume, let me know."
Starr:
That's so funny. That's not just in tech too, people don't really ... For some reason a lot of people don't know about the cover letter thing. My wife likes to help people with their resumes, and my wife is a huge ... It's kind of a hobby of hers and she's a huge proponent of cover letters. She got this job at Tableau, and a ton of people applied for it, it's a very good company to work for, and she didn't have a ton of experience ... Her experience was not super exactly the right experience you would want for that position, but they told her later that she just nailed the cover letter so well that they had to talk to her. Yeah, cover letters, super big. Then if you really want to really sort of impress, tailor your resume to every job application. If certain stuff in your resume isn't applicable to a particular position just don't include it, or maybe stick it down at the bottom or something.
Ben:
Yeah, that's huge. That happens even more rarely than a good cover letter. I understand, I've done the job application process before, it's tough if you're shotgunning your resume, but at the same time we have had some people say, "You know what? I'm not shotgunning my resume, this is the only job that I'm actually applying to right now, I'm happy where I am, but this job posting sounded so cool I just had to apply." That makes a definite difference. Of course that resume is just for us, and that makes a difference.
Starr:
That's amazing. I feel like we're doing good work.
Ben:
Well, we'll see ... I mean, we've stayed around this long. I've been taking all those in, using our applicant tracking system, my side project SaaS that's been running for, what? 13 years now.
Starr:
38 years.
Josh:
Which is awesome, by the way, it's been nice.
Ben:
It does what it says, so I'm happy.
Josh:
It works, yeah.
Ben:
All these resumes are coming into there, filtering through them, contacting a good ... Well, I contacted everyone, at this point we're not so overwhelmed with people that I can't personally email every one of them, so I do that. I don't see a reason why you wouldn't unless you do get to the volume that you just ... I don't know, we're not a super big corp so it's not a problem. I think that's just being polite.
Ben:
If someone takes the time to email you and say, "I would like a job," I think it's reasonable to respond to them and say thank you, "We're going to pass, but thank you." Yeah, so I'm contacting everybody. A good chunk of them, I'm doing an initial phone screen, a Zoom screen with, and basically Calendly is awesome, I basically just send them, "Hey, I'd like to have a chat. Thanks for applying, I'd like to have a chat with you. Please hit my Calendly link and schedule a time with me. If there's a time that doesn't work for you please let me know," because we do have people from all over the world. Sometimes their awake time is not the same as my awake time, so I give them some flexibility.
Ben:
Calendly has been awesome for scheduling. Then we'll have like a 30 minute chat, and talk about their questions about the job, about Honeybadger, and we talk about what they're up to. I love these chats, actually, I love meeting new people ... I don't love big parties, I'm not like a ... Well, I don't drink, so that makes a lot of parties un-fun, but I'm also, I'm not-
Josh:
Makes all parties boring.
Ben:
I'm also not really into the whole cocktail, lounge, let's all get 100 people in a room and everyone's chatting, and you can't hear the person that's two feet in front of you ... I'm not a big fan. That doesn't mean I don't like talking to people, I love talking to people, I love one on one conversations. This is a good chance for me just to meet a bunch of cool people who happen to be interested in Honeybadger, which is ... I mean that's a point in their favor, right? I'm having a lot of fun ... We did about, I want to say I've done 10 to 15, somewhere in there so far, of these screens, I have five more scheduled for next week.
Starr:
Oh my gosh.
Ben:
Yeah, I've been busy, that's what I've been doing all week long, because it takes some prep time. Each one I've got to review the stuff, and think about the questions I want to ask, and things like that, take some of those afterward ... They've been great. The next step, it kind of varies, after we do the screening either we will have all three of us chat with them, like a one hour scheduled meeting where we can dive into more detail about their experience and Honeybadger, or we have them take a take home assignment. This has worked out really well. Last year when we hired Kevin we had an assignment, and the thing that's been awesome about that is just having ... Being able to see how people work. We don't give a whole lot of direction. We do pay for it because we don't believe in asking people to do unpaid work-
Josh:
Yeah, we always pay people.
Ben:
It's been really cool to see the differing interpretations of what we ask for come back, and even the questions that come back, like, "I'm not sure what you meant by this ..." And that gives us some definite insight as to how it will be working with that person. We don't do pairing, so we're not sitting there looking over their shoulder, so they do have to figure some stuff out, even in a regular work day. This gives us a good chance to see how that's going to be.
Josh:
Yeah. Especially in the remote environment, one of the big things for me has been how they communicate, especially through documenting what they did, or their work. That's a huge one.
Ben:
Yeah. It was interesting, last round when we did that some people, again, like the cover letter thing, some people just phone it in, they're like, "Oh, here's the bare minimum that's going to get the requirements done," and then other people were like, "Oh, I've really thought this out, and I put some work into this," and I mean, that shows obviously.
Starr:
I like that we're saying this honestly, because I feel like it's legitimately something that a lot of people just don't know, they haven't been taught it, they haven't had parents or whatever, and their first jobs were like, "You've got to write a cover letter ..." How would you know that if you hadn't been exposed to it? Yeah, it's good to sort of say that. I really like ... I think we've been fairly sort of transparent and explicit, so I like that.
Josh:
Yeah, I have not personally taken ... I didn't take the traditional career software developer path. I freelanced for 10 years basically, I haven't even really had a real software development job, and I was always nervous about the idea of interviewing because I didn't have any experience with it. Now, being on the other side of those interviews, and also just knowing some very experienced career developers and listening to them talk, it sounds like the difference between kind of a mediocre career and a really great career could be just learning how to interview, and knowing how this process works. I'm starting to feel better now if I actually did have to go out in an interview, especially now that I've got all this business and marketing experience and I can apply that to myself as someone going and trying to land a job. I feel like I would do a lot better than I would have given myself credit for in the past.
Starr:
Yeah, I think that ... Like the M. Night Shyamalan twist to this story is that being that person who's really good at interviewing isn't really about being perfect, or perfectly knowing all the stuff ... I mean, okay, we're kind of a different company, we don't put people on the spot and be like, "Solve this equation-"
Josh:
Yeah, we don't do whiteboard ... The whiteboard is still my ... That's like my worst nightmare, and where I would probably totally choke.
Starr:
For us, at least, it's much more about just sort of being able to engage as a peer with somebody, and just having a normal conversation with them, and not feeling like I'm some ... Giving them a test or anything.
Josh:
That's how interviewing should be.
Ben:
Yeah, totally.
Starr:
I think we're about ... We're at a pretty good length now. Should we wrap it up?
Ben:
Sure.
Starr:
All right, we're wrapping it up. This has been FounderQuest. If you're interested in any of the things about the Indie Lounge or anything that we talked about just let us know. If you are interested in applying to this job, who knows, it might still be around by the time you hear this ... Probably not, but it might be, I don't know. Check out our careers page, you can go to our website at Honeybadger.io, scroll all the way down to the bottom, and there's a link to that. Yeah, if you're interested in writing like Ruby or Elixir blog posts for us you check that out at our blog, and there's a link in the header. Then finally, go give us a review if you want to ... I think we said last time that we don't really care, so ... I feel like it's a podcast, I have to say that.
Josh:
We care.
Starr:
I have to say-
Josh:
Honeybadger cares.
Starr:
Okay. I mean, Honeybadger is immortal at this point, so I'm not sure ... It may be past caring or uncaring, Honeybadger just exists.
Josh:
Well, FounderQuest has not reached immortal state yet, so ...
Starr:
Okay, there you go.
Josh:
FounderQuest could use your love.
Starr:
There you go. Okay, well I'll talk to you all later.
The honeybadgers have been busy this week! Ben, Josh and Starr each have work that shipped this week that they want to brag on. This episode strides over vast expanses, covering issues like compliance, open-source marketing and content marketing. It all builds up to a big reveal at the end, where we finally announce a new Honeybadger effort: the RailsConf Indie Lounge.
Full Transcript:
Starr:
Can I tell you the nerdiest thing that has ever happened to me, that I've ever done? The nerdiest, most embarrassing thing that I've ever done?
Josh:
Sure, as long as this isn't reciprocal.
Starr:
No, it's not reciprocal. It just reminded me of that. When I was in junior high, I was a super big computer nerd. It was the 90s, the mid 90s, so that wasn't cool back then. It wasn't seen as some sort of path to fame, riches, or anything. There was a song, it was really popular, I think it was by INXS and it was called More Than Words. It's this really sweet love song, something about my love can't be expressed by words and I was like "this is how I feel about my computer."
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
See, I'm editing the show this week so I feel safe. I feel safe disclosing that because I can just edit it out if I want to.
Josh:
And you were listening to this on, what would it have been, CD probably?
Starr:
The radio.
Josh:
The radio? Wow.
Starr:
No, the radio. Yeah.
Josh:
When did we switch from cassette tapes to CDs? I don't remember.
Starr:
It was around that time. There were definitely still cassettes around. People still had cassette players.
Josh:
Yeah, but definitely wouldn't have been MP3 downloaded from anonymous FTP server or something. That feels like five years later.
Starr:
Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. Are you from the future, Josh? Are you some spaceman from the future?
Josh:
I am, actually.
Starr:
Okay. So, we didn't fully discuss it but we discussed it in chat a little bit, talking about sort of what's been going on. It's been a pretty eventful week, we've shipped a lot of stuff, we've had some stuff happening on the job search front. Is that what you guys would like to do?
Josh:
Works for me, if that works for Ben.
Ben:
Sure.
Starr:
Okay. What should we start with?
Ben:
Let's start with the most boring part of the week.
Starr:
Oh, really?
Ben:
Yes. That was the most of my week, which was writing policies.
Starr:
Yeah?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I'm sorry. You seemed a little bit low energy too. That makes sense now.
Josh:
It's funny because the most boring part of my week was reading Ben's policies.
Starr:
Oh. Sick burn.
Josh:
Ouch. Sorry.
Starr:
So, what are these policies and why are you losing so much of your life force working on them?
Ben:
We are working on Site2 compliance. We have customers who would like to get our Site2 report and we don't currently have one. We'd like to have one because all the cool kids have one. The idea being that a Site2 audit gives you the stamp of approval that you're running your business in a way that's secure and does things that big boy businesses do, I guess. A lot of part of the compliance is, you have to define how you run your business through policies and then the auditor comes and checks that you're actually running your business like you say you are. We have a lot of things that we do at Honeybadger just because that's the way we've always done them, that's our MO, but this is actually documenting those processes like, how do we select a vendor? We actually do care that our vendors have security policies and we follow up on that. All these policies that I'm writing and getting done, basically just put into words exactly how we run our business.
Josh:
Yeah and we're mostly doing this so we can work with customers that require this, right? I think we've been finding that it has been a helpful process to actually go through and document these things just for the sake of having it. It makes us think about how we do things.
Ben:
It's a good feeling. It's a good corporate hygiene and it's nice to be able to say, yes this is what we believe at Honeybadger and we're putting our signature on the line saying this is actually what we're doing.
Starr:
I feel like in early years it would've been a much more simple policy document. It just would've been like, I do what I want.
Josh:
Just shrug.
Starr:
Yeah. Whatever.
Josh:
The shrug emoji didn't exist back then but it would've been the ascii version, or whatever.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
The text one.
Starr:
Oh, that's too complicated. You have to use lots of characters to make that one.
Josh:
You can figure it out.
Starr:
No, I can't.
Ben:
Just use /shrug in Slack.
Josh:
Yeah, well. This is probably before Slack though. Campfire, maybe.
Starr:
Yeah, so...
Josh:
Sorry, Ben, I didn't mean to say that I was bored out of my mind with your documents.
Ben:
That's totally fine.
Josh:
To be honest, it's not your first choice in reading, I would imagine, for anyone but I think it has been enlightening in any case to learn some of these large business practices and terms that we're not typically exposed to. And if all the cool kids do this and all the cool kids are rich, then we definitely want to be like the cool kids.
Ben:
Definitely. The thing that's been interesting, though, as I've sat back and looked at some of these things and in light of the hiring that we're doing right now, it is useful to have all these things on hand for the new person that shows up. For example, one of the policies this week is the Change Management policy, which defines how we do software development at Honeybadger. We've always said it's a pretty loose process. We're pretty independent and that sort of thing but we actually do have some controls in place to make sure that we don't put bad code in production.
Ben:
We do pool requests and we do require someone else to review big changes and we do have automated CI/CD. We do have a way to revert changes, right? So, all of these little bits of how we do business are now documented and when a new hire shows up, it'll be easy to point that person at a document and say here's your 30 second introduction to how we do things at Honeybadger.
Josh:
Nice. We could probably also summarize or copy some of this stuff into our handbook then smooth over some of the legalese areas. We probably don't want to just send them to all of our compliance documents. It would be like, okay your first week is also reading our compliance documents from start to finish.
Starr:
Yeah, and you know we'd have to quiz them on it to make sure they actually read them. Otherwise, nobody would really read them.
Josh:
We could have an 80 question, multiple choice quiz on each document.
Starr:
There you go.
Ben:
Well, I mean, there is a policy that says that everyone has to receive these policies and sign off on the handbook and things like that.
Josh:
Yeah. Nice.
Starr:
You know how people are with stuff like that. It's like the terms of service on every software application, that I'm sure we've all read in detail.
Josh:
Yeah. Well we could probably summarize it for the handbook and then link to the long version or something like that too. Just so they receive them.
Starr:
By the way, I'm officially stating that I'm not undermining our policy that all employees have to read the appropriate documents. I'm just being a smart-ass.
Josh:
We'll speed that part up, like they do the small print on radio commercials.
Ben:
Exactly.
Starr:
I thought that guy did that by himself. I thought that was just a guy who talked really fast.
Ben:
Do you remember that Micro Machines guy?
Starr:
Oh my god. The Micro Machines guy! Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
I forgot about those.
Josh:
I don't remember the Micro...
Ben:
It's before Josh's time, I think, but back in the olden days when they had toy commercials on TV...
Josh:
Which was like six years before your days...
Ben:
There was this toy called Micro Machines, a set of toys. They were these itty bitty cars and planes and stuff.
Josh:
Yeah, I kind of remember those.
Ben:
They had this one particular actor who would read the copy for these ads in a very rapid fire fashion. He also did FedEx ads.
Josh:
Okay.
Starr:
Oh, yeah.
Josh:
I, kind of, vaguely remember those.
Starr:
I've got a fun fact for y'all. Actually there was a time before toy ads were allowed on TV. Yeah, basically it was considered exploitative for a long time, so the FCC disallowed advertising to children, I think, of any kind.
Josh:
So, this would've been before we advertised to children but back then most of them were cigarette commercials.
Ben:
Right?
Starr:
Yeah, basically. Essentially what happened was that Reagan came in and deregulated everything and as part of that, okay we can now advertise stuff to children. That's when all the toy commercials came onboard. This I'm really ambivalent about. This fact I don't really know how to feel about it but cartoons then were developed as elaborate plots to sell toys to children. So, many of my favorite childhood cartoon memories like He-Man and G.I. Joe and all that were, ThunderCats, hello... No, ThunderCats, Ho! That's right. They weren't like ThunderCats, Hello! Anybody there?
Ben:
Voltron?
Starr:
Yeah, were an offshoot of companies trying to sell stuff to kids.
Josh:
It's still like that today.
Starr:
Oh, it totally is. [crosstalk] It's a hell scape out there, Josh.
Josh:
Yeah but I still can't get over the fact that they stopped selling kids cigarettes and alcohol and started selling them toys because that just seems messed up.
Starr:
Oh, totally. Wow. Is there anything more about compliance? I'm trying to figure out... So, out of all this compliance stuff, does that mean that we will be creating new childhood memories for some future generation...of children? Is that the moral of the story?
Ben:
Yes. Yes, it is.
Josh:
That Honeybadger's here for the long term.
Starr:
We're here for the long term.
Josh:
And...if you want to order our Honeybadger action figure, call this number. It's on our website.
Starr:
Yes, we should do that.
Josh:
1-800...I forget our phone number because we never use it. I've answered it like twice...
Starr:
I want an action figure now.
Josh:
In seven years.
Ben:
Speaking of our 800-number, I use it periodically. Just this week I used it when I was signing up for a service. I won't name names, but I was signing up for this B to B service and they asked what's your company name, what's your phone number.
Josh:
I do use it for that.
Ben:
So, I use it. Exactly.
Josh:
I use it as a spam trap.
Ben:
Exactly. Well they got me because after I clicked the sign up button and they took all this info, the next page was we sent you a text message to verify your phone number. Please enter the verification code to complete your sign up process.
Starr:
Not all phone numbers can receive text messages.
Josh:
I was like, well, my entered number can't receive an SMS, so now what do I do?
Starr:
That's just dumb. Business phone systems can't receive text messages.
Josh:
We use Grasshopper, don't we? Grasshopper does. I think they do support SMS on their mobile app but I don't know if they support it for 800-numbers. They do for some though.
Ben:
Well, not ours.
Josh:
Okay.
Ben:
Because I...[crosstalk 00:15:33]
Starr:
People still have landlines. Those exist still. [crosstalk] I don't know why this upsets me so much.
Ben:
Well, it wouldn't have been so bad if on the front page where they took your phone number, they said, oh by the way we're going to text you so that you can complete the sign up process but they didn't. They just said, give me a number and I'm like okay, here's my number.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. Lame. That's my rant for you.
Josh:
On the topic of landlines, I am actually in the process of setting up a landline in my house as an experiment. I've been trying to find ways to disconnect from my phone when I want to be away, I want to not be online. That's what I do on vacation and it's great, so why not do that more of the time when I can. But I cannot disconnect because I have this online business that demands if there's an emergency or something, I don't want to be gone all the time. So I'm going to put a landline in my house, connected to pager duty, because they can call you and then I can turn my phone off whenever I want.
Starr:
Whoa.
Josh:
Although, now, the hitch might be that I also get woken up in the middle of the night by spam, by telemarketers, so I'll get back to you both on this. If it works, I'll let you know.
Starr:
Yes, so I'm wondering Josh, how does that work with maps? Do you just get a really long cord and spool it out the back of your car or what?
Josh:
You mean if I need to go somewhere? To navigate somewhere?
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I call the direction service. I forget what three number code that is but you just tell them the address then they give you sight based directions like, turn left at the red building.
Starr:
You're going to have to remember them though.
Josh:
Yeah, I'll just call you.
Starr:
Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know how to get anywhere. What are you talking about?
Josh:
I'd be like, Starr, how do I get...?
Starr:
What are you talking about? I don't know how to do anything. Okay, so we should get back on topic. What else have we done this week that we want to talk about?
Josh:
This isn't a topic but Basecamp released their new email. The service to solve email that they're kind of been hinting at.
Starr:
Oh, that's right and you're really upset. You're really mad.
Josh:
I'm not mad.
Starr:
You're furious.
Josh:
I know what you're trying to do, Starr. You're trying to raise the heat levels on Founder Quest for the ratings.
Starr:
You know, we've had too much freaking Richard Banner here, I hope I got that name right. We need some more Hulk. Less Banner, more Hulk.
Josh:
They named their product for email. They named it Hey. Meanwhile, I've been working on a product for email named Heya. Oh, and both have a logo that is a waving hand although to be fair, mine is just an emoji. They actually had one of their designers go and trace it.
Starr:
That's not agile. We've got a venerable history of this. Our logo for the first several years of our company was on some lightning bolt icon.
Josh:
We're extremely lazy at Honeybadger.
Starr:
When it comes to logos at least. I don't know.
Josh:
I don't know. I'm pretty [crosstalk]
Starr:
I'm sorry, Josh. I'm sorry if that takes the wind out of your sails a little bit.
Josh:
No. It's fine. I don't know yet if it's actually going to cause any confusion as far as two email things being so similar in name but I did email them because they said email them with a story about email or whatever to get an invite to Hey. I did email them and I promised not to enforce my trademark, if they would give me a Hey account. Fingers crossed but I'm looking forward to joining because it sounds pretty cool. We'll see what they did.
Ben:
I saw on Twitter this morning, they have 12,000 people contact them about getting access.
Josh:
I had the thought that, that might not actually get read.
Ben:
They only have one Joshua Wood.
Josh:
I know that they were just sitting on the edge of their seats just to see if I would notice the similarity in branding. It actually is flattering, to be honest, because we both independently, at the same time in history, came up with the same branding for email.
Ben:
It's got to make you feel good.
Josh:
It feels good. Mine is not quite as large in scope, I have a feeling. I'm sending email sequences, they are solving the email problem on the internet. I've got a [crosstalk] little bit of work to do.
Ben:
Maybe they are avid listeners of Founder Quest and they heard our broadcast about Heya and they're like, you know what that's a great idea.
Starr:
Son of a bitch. You're right.
Josh:
The timing coincides.
Starr:
Okay, we are pulling the cloak down on this, guys. We're putting the velvet curtain back up.
Josh:
I do have to wonder how much they shelled out for Hey.com because that is a freaking bad-ass name and I'm jealous.
Ben:
Yeah, that is totally awesome. It's definitely a far cry from their early days of their company when it was like BasecampHQ.com, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
How are people going to know if they're talking about... People might think they're purveyors of hay. You know like to feed cows.
Josh:
Like h-a-y?
Starr:
Yeah. How do you know? It's really dumb business sense. I don't know what Jason Fried was thinking.
Josh:
Hay bales. All those farmers are going to be so confused.
Starr:
They are. Those poor little fellows.
Josh:
All the Google conflicts.
Starr:
All the Google conflicts. I was going to make a joke about rural people, which is okay because I'm kind of from a rural place, but I'm not going to do that because I don't want to be a jerk. I'll do it in private.
Ben:
We did launch, I think, this week. We launched our public dashboard.
Starr:
Yeah, tell us about the public dashboard.
Josh:
We launched our public dashboard, privately.
Starr:
This should've been the first thing we opened with. We just have a pyramid. We need an inverted pyramid, right?
Josh:
We launched a bunch of things this week, it feels like. But public dashboard, I think, is my favorite.
Ben:
Really, you think that's more a favorite then Breadcrumbs? Because that was pretty cool.
Josh:
Breadcrumbs...it is. It's great. Breadcrumbs was a lot of work and I'm happy it's over. I'm happy that it's out there and people can start using it.
Ben:
We need to back up and be like, what are we talking about.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So...what are public dashboards? Can somebody explain that?
Josh:
I'm just getting there.
Starr:
Get there.
Josh:
Ben built public dashboards so, I want Ben to introduce us.
Ben:
I thought you were going to do it because it was all you. We had our friends over at DEV, they got in touch with Josh and they said, hey-
Josh:
This is DEV. DEV.to.
Ben:
Said we love to be able to... We love Honeybadger. Thanks guys we love you too.
Starr:
Are these customers?
Ben:
Yes.
Josh:
They are.
Starr:
Wait, you mean the leading developer? Like developer blog platform is a Honeybadger customer?
Josh:
The platform that might replace Twitter for developers, which is a sorely needed thing to happen.
Starr:
Huh. Well that's a cool little fact. I didn't know that.
Ben:
Yes, they are super awesome and only partly because they use Honeybadger.
Josh:
Yes.
Ben:
But they love the public sharing ability that we have where you can publish a public view of an error that you get, which is stripped of personally identifiable information so you don't have to reveal all your secrets to the entire world. You can share an error if you want to get some public feedback on, maybe, can someone tell me what this is or whatever? What they asked for was an ability to list all of the public errors that they share with people. Previous to this, you just had to pass around a link but now we have a dashboard where you can go and see all of the errors that DEV has shared with the world. They can have the opensource contributors helping them resolve their errors and I think it's a pretty cool thing.
Starr:
That is so cool.
Josh:
They also have a Honeybadger label on their GitHub project and every error, they also cross post to their GitHub issues and give it a Honeybadger label. Which, I think, is just awesome because you can go and see all the errors and see how they link to us.
Starr:
That's so awesome. I love the idea that there's this whole, sort of, community out there working on this project, this platform, and we are providing, sort of, a very useful service to them. Bringing people together because I always hoped that, that's what we would do as a company is bring people together.
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
That's why, with you guys, I started an error monitoring service.
Josh:
This was the long term plan.
Starr:
This is the long game.
Josh:
Yeah. So, DEV published a blog post about this and how they're using it and we'll link that up in the show notes. We have not actually publicly released this feature yet. We will be soon, as soon as we have a setting to turn it on and off but the hope is that other open source communities... So, Honeybadger is free for nonprofit, not for profit open source. Obviously any other open source projects, that are for profit, can use it as well but a lot of these projects don't actually host their applications, they're just open source software code that maybe someone else hosts but some do.
Josh:
DEV is an example of one that does. RubyGems.org is another that uses us and also runs the RubyGems.org servers, which is why they use us. I'm hoping that there are some more of these types of projects, that are open source out there, that does host things can get some use out of this where they can share the dashboard with their community and it'll give them another place to involve people and they can fix errors together.
Josh:
Can I tell you a cool story about Ben though?
Starr:
You should ask Ben that, I guess?
Ben:
No. Just kidding. Yes, of course.
Josh:
Molly over at DEV, she emailed me about wanting something... She came up with the idea, basically, for the dashboard. Thanks Molly.
Starr:
Thank you Molly.
Ben:
Thanks Molly.
Josh:
She emailed me, I think it was in January or something because it was before we had our all-hands meeting with everyone. I was like, I love that idea, we're going to talk about that so we talked about it at the all-hands meeting and agreed that it's a cool idea we should do it to support her. That's, kind of, how we do our quarterly planning. And so, after the meeting, the week or something after, I was looking at all my projects that I had to do for the quarter. I'm like, these are all really awesome projects and I want to do all of them but I don't think I'm going to be able to personally do them all.
Josh:
So I put up a few of them, I was like. Hey, does anyone want to help out with some of these so that we can get them all done together? Ben volunteered to do the public dashboard project, which I was like. Great because that was one of my favorite ones. I wanted to get it done. The next day he deployed it. It turns out that that one was actually like, I was thinking, this is going to take me at least a week. I'm going to have to think about this and get it all planned out and stuff and Ben just busted out and throws it on a branch and then it's deployed. I sent it to the DEV crew like a couple of days later. So, thanks Ben.
Ben:
Fun times at Honeybadger. I always love it when I can do that.
Starr:
I feel like that's an archetypal Ben story.
Ben:
It's great.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So... Breadcrumbs.
Josh:
Breadcrumbs. Did we talk about Breadcrumbs before?
Starr:
We did.
Josh:
I thought we did.
Starr:
We talked about them.
Josh:
When we [crosstalk] launched it for Ruby.
Starr:
When we shipped them as part of the main product.
Josh:
Yeah. We can, kind of, just describe what they are. What we launched this week was Breadcrumbs for JavaScript. Clients at JavaScript. So we're bringing Breadcrumbs, which we had launched. We had added to the product and we launched them for Ruby last year, and then we added them to Elixir, and now we're finally getting around to adding them to JavaScript. I feel like, this is their sweet spot actually. Most people actually want them or use them for JavaScript. They're extremely useful. What they are, are like basically an event log that is recorded all the time as your users interact with your application. So it might be your actual application logs, like in a Rails app, events that happen like active support events and stuff we can instrument in the browser for the client side. Think of things like consul logs, clicks, ajax requests and all of that sort of stuff that happens as your user's interacting with your application.
Josh:
Breadcrumbs basically log those events and then when an error happens it sends all those events, that event log or a chunk of it, with the exception report so you can see what the user was doing and what happened before the error occurred. Which is extremely useful on JavaScript because JavaScript is a little flaky on providing context around errors. Especially in asynchronous callbacks or things where it's outside of the users direct involvement, it can be really difficult to trace it back to a user action and say this is what caused this error. This should really help people reproduce exceptions or errors that happen in there and react and review applications and that sort of stuff.
Starr:
And, also, it's going to be super useful because a lot of JavaScript errors are just completely bad. They don't give you enough information to figure out what exactly happened. It's just like, something went wrong. Okay great, thank you JavaScript.
Josh:
Starr, it's a script error happened.
Starr:
Oh, it's the script error. Oh, it's a script error. Sorry.
Josh:
Come on, Starr.
Starr:
Sorry, I didn't mean to be such a prima donna.
Josh:
Starr, there was an error in your script. Obviously, there's an error in your script. Just go fix it.
Starr:
Oh, my script. Oh, sure. It's only, what...
Josh:
It was on line one. It was line [crosstalk]
Starr:
3,000 lines of code?
Josh:
Column like 500,012.
Starr:
Oh my gosh. Why do they even have errors in JavaScripts? Why do they even bother?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I don't know. Anyways but the thing is Breadcrumbs is now useful.
Josh:
Yes. It's true. JavaScript errors are terrible, for a lot of reasons, but the biggest ones are this issue we're talking about. Not being able to trace them across...connect them to user actions and then also the minification that happens when you build your code and compile it to reduce file sizes and make it optimized for the web. It cuts a lot of your source code out. You don't actually know where the error is in your source code and you fix that with source maps. Source maps are the answer to that but, again, it's an extra complicating step that just makes it all really difficult.
Starr:
Even with source maps it doesn't always...it doesn't give...it's not 100% solution. And with the Breadcrumbs... I'm thinking of some errors I have troubleshot in the past where there was just no information given to fix it. Breadcrumbs wouldn't have told me exactly what was happening, necessarily, right away but it would've told me what I need to do to reproduce it in a browser so then can go and do it myself and see what was happening.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
That's huge.
Josh:
Yep, I'm excited. I was actually looking at one of our own front-end errors because we use Honeybadger to monitor Honeybadger. We had an error in our front-end UI on our main Honeybadger app, which is a Rails app that uses Webpacker and that whole Stack, but yeah I was looking at this error report, I'm like. That is a really good looking JavaScript error report. It tells me what the problem is. It tells me exactly where the code is. It linked to the source code on GitHub so I click through like it's the-
Starr:
That's a good feeling.
Josh:
It's the Honeybadger workflow that we're familiar with for Ruby, for JavaScript, which kind of blew my mind, to be honest, because this has been such a disparity in the past. I think we're starting to get good.
Ben:
You reminded me of that Saturday Night Live skit from several years ago, the Handsome Man skit series? You are a handsome man into you are a handsome error.
Josh:
Nice.
Starr:
Sometimes it's the best feeling because usually when I come across work I did in the past, sometimes, you're like "oh, okay what was I thinking" but then sometimes I come across something that I was responsible for and I was just like, "This is really good! Whoa, that's impressive! I didn't know I could do that." It seems like maybe you had a little bit of a moment like that.
Josh:
I did. It felt great because this has been a lot of freaking work. I've been working on this for like three years or more.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
Probably longer. JavaScript has been a relatively large amount of time to get it to this point then one of the backend languages for all those reasons. It takes a lot of work to build these tools that are so necessary to actually get some value out of it so I'm really happy that we are finally starting to see some of that value.
Starr:
We are about to plow into the JavaScript market like a ravenous honey badger.
Josh:
Maybe. In any case, for modern Rails development it's really nice too because if you do Rails new today, you get a Webpack pipeline. You can basically just plug in our Honeybadger Webpack, NPM package and whatever, they use yarn, right? Yarn install.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
That gives you automatic source maps. Now, if you ever try to get source maps in the old asset pipeline, like with sprockets, you'd probably pull all your hair out. I know I did. So, this is a big deal. Being able to just Rails new and get source maps for your JavaScript, I think you can even test your JavaScript in Rails now. I'll stop now. I don't want to Rail too hard.
Starr:
You don't want to Rail too hard again sprockets? Oh, man. Yeah, sprockets has never got the love that it needed.
Josh:
I liked parts of it but...yeah. There's just...
Starr:
I remember hating it when it came out and then I eventually came to an easy peace with it until modern JavaScript happened. Suddenly we needed source maps and everything and it was like oh, okay this is...
Josh:
Sprockets just wasn't built for the modern, it wasn't built for the NPM ecosystem. It was its main problem I think. It was built for the ecosystem where you download a jQuery plug in off the internet and put it in a folder, basically.
Starr:
That'll come back. It all comes back. I miss those days.
Josh:
Right? I mean, it was simpler in some regards.
Ben:
Global objects.[crosstalk 00:38:20]
Josh:
Right?
Starr:
I'm not sure. Oh, god. Oh, no. Okay. I'm going to need some space to process these emotions I'm having. I'm remembering all that. Can I brag about something?
Ben:
Please.
Josh:
Yes.
Starr:
I just want to brag about my writers or my authors. If you've listened to the podcast for any amount of time you'd known that, a while ago, we started soliciting third party authors to do stuff for our blog. That's simply because we really like to put out a certain type of content on our blog, a certain type of content that sort of goes into depth around the issues in, sort of, I don't know, environment surrounding code, not just like how to build a to do app, how to...whatever.
Starr:
Our ability to do that has, sort of, always been limited by just, us, not having time. Even when I've done it myself, I just run out of stuff that I know about, that I can write about convincingly, and so then I have to start learning stuff to write about it. It just becomes very shallow, very quickly. And so, we started bringing on these third party authors and I just have to say I am just so freaking proud of the work they're doing. They're doing such a great job.
Starr:
We recently started publishing all these articles that have been, sort of... I've been hoarding them like some sort of dragon because I just hadn't really figured out what to do with them. I don't know. Maybe I was a little bit scared to start publishing them because I didn't want to waste them because they were so good. I didn't want to just throw them out there and have them fail. But, we've released two of them so far. The first one by Jose, and the second one recently by Julie. They've done so well. They both were placed really highly in Ruby weekly. They both are getting shared a lot.
Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). They did well on Reddit.
Starr:
Yeah, they did well on Reddit. People are giving them lots of love and it just makes me so happy to see them so well received because I really think they're doing a great job. We've got more in the works and more authors even who I'm not naming now because it would just take too long but we have so many people doing such great work for us.
Josh:
I'm really excited about all this. I think it's really cool and also it seems to be more fun to promote other people versus always just promoting yourself. I really like the aspect of, we can give other people an opportunity to write and have a voice and we can, kind of, just be in the background and try to get people to read it. Get it out to our members.
Starr:
I know, personally, this may just be a mental thing of mine but it is really hard for me to be a hype person for my own content because I just feel like a jerk saying how great I am and stuff. Which, I mean, is true but I don't have to say it but you know other people, it's weird-
Josh:
That's why I deleted my Twitter account.
Starr:
Yeah. It just feels really nice to help promote people who I really believe are doing good work and, honestly, who are in a lot of cases developers and they may have the similar feelings about self promotion that I do. So maybe I'm helping them get a bigger audience than they would have otherwise. It just feels really nice.
Josh:
We should also mention that you're paying them.
Starr:
Oh yeah. We're paying them.
Josh:
You're paying them well which is...that's the best part because like, who does that?
Starr:
Apparently people don't pay blog authors?
Josh:
Right.
Starr:
Somebody posted a tweet, they were like, well if you're wondering how much technical authors make, this is how much. I guess a book they wrote recently came out from a major publisher, a major technical publisher, and it was about a very mainstream topic. I think, React or something and like the royalty check from one quarter was like $800 dollars. We have been paying...
Josh:
Isn't that our minimum...?
Starr:
No, we've been paying around $500 dollars, but for an article. Not a full technical book.
Josh:
Right and isn't that the minimum, we don't pay someone less than $500.
Starr:
Yes, that's the minimum. So far we haven't gone above it but if somebody wants to really tackle a super complex thing and they're just like it's going to take me too much time, I would totally talk to them about that.
Josh:
Yeah. I just think that's great.
Starr:
Yeah, I don't know. It feels like I'm going some good in the world. Finally, we wanted to talk about... Do we want to talk about hiring and how that's going?
Ben:
Yeah, when Josh was talking about Breadcrumbs and how much time it took to get there, I was thinking, with the hire we're working on now, that would be very helpful in getting that kind of stuff done a little faster because the goal is to have someone that can really own those libraries and bring them to where we want them to be because they're just not. I mean, they're great, but they're not where we want them to be yet. Having someone on board to help with that. As I've been talking, I've been doing that this week along with writing compliance, so the more interesting part of the stuff I've been doing is talking to job candidates which has been fantastic. I always love doing that, it's energizing because there are so many awesome people out there who are doing so many awesome things.
Ben:
Talking with them about taking on this responsibility of, not only JavaScript but also writing some Elixir code and some Go code and whatever else we're supporting, but also owning parts of the Rails app. It's been fun talking to developers who are in a variety of situations and talking to them about our process because so many developers are in the conveyor belt software development world. I call it the conveyor belt, you have some sort of project manager who's writing specs and the specs show up on your desk and then you write some code to meet the spec. You ship that code and you turn around and there's another set of specs on your desk, right? So it's just this like conveyor belt of things you're taking off the conveyor belt, you're writing code to put back on the conveyor belt, and it sucks.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Can we call that like jera driven development?
Ben:
Yeah, I like jera driven development...
Josh:
JDD. You're probably not even integrating that code, right, like in a lot of cases?
Ben:
Yeah, depending on the size of your company.
Josh:
Someone else could be. If it's really large, someone else could be stitching it together.
Ben:
Right. So it's been fun talking to people and helping them understand we don't work that way at Honeybadger. We own our projects. We pick something we want to work on because it's always a question. Whenever I ask the candidate what questions do you have for me, a question that always comes up is, how do you schedule work? How do you pick projects? What's your roadmap and stuff like that. I always explain it's really about whatever interests you. We have a list of things we want to do.
Josh:
What roadmap?
Ben:
Exactly. I always say that. Well we don't do a roadmap. We do have goals but out of those goals we have project, tasks, and wishlist items and all that kind of stuff. Basically you sit down and when you have some time you say, what do you want to do? And you pick something and you go and do it and you own that and you build it from start to finish. It's fun talking to developers and just see that gleam in their eyes like oh, that sounds like heaven. Like yes, it is.
Starr:
I can see certain ways that sort of having everything specked out and just focusing on this narrow aspect of things might be good. If you have a certain type of outlook or whatever and yeah, we're not saying that's necessarily bad or anything, it's just we have a different way of working because we just don't have people that can write specs all day.
Josh:
You know what we do? We kind of treat every project like a side project almost. You're going to go start this thing, you're going to figure out how to even do it first because it's you. It's all you. And then you're going to build it and what you build might be the first version and if it really becomes a central piece of Honeybadger, we might rebuild it in the future or enhance it but we don't architect for some massive scale initially. We kind of build everything like we initially built Honeybadger, which was, let's just build this Rails app and throw it on a dinky server and see what happens.
Starr:
Except we don't have dinky servers anymore.
Josh:
They're not anymore but we certainly did.
Starr:
So, all this seems to relate back to the fact that we all started out in life as freelancers so we're all very comfortable with that model where it's like, okay. I'm just assigned this big objective and I'm just going to go away for a while and work on it. I think maybe people don't fully understand that about us sometimes because when we are talking about being polyglot or knowing these different languages and stuff, we're not really talking about now you're going to be specked out to build this little feature in Go. Now you're got to switch to Ruby. Now you're got to do this other thing over here in JavaScript. It's more like, here's this objective, it involves some stuff involving JavaScript or whatever. So yeah, you're going to be working in JavaScript for a while. When that's done maybe it'll be some other objective and maybe that involves Ruby so you get to sort of immerse for a while in that. So it's not like you're constantly switching back and forth like every hour. It's just like a project mentality.
Josh:
I think we're figuring out a lot of this out. Not only process but hiring and all of this stuff but I have a feeling that we tend to gravitate towards what we like. People kind of choose what they like to work on for the most part, right? If you're owning part of the app and you really like that part, which is how you ended up there, we're not going to say, oh now you have to learn a different language and do that now because this fun part is over. I think people gravitate towards areas of the company where they're going to make the biggest difference. I don't know. This is just kind of a thought that just came to me but, I don't know, maybe our job positions morph over time too. Does that make sense?
Ben:
Yeah, definitely.
Starr:
Makes sense to me. We're the Mighty Morphin' Honeybadgers.
Josh:
We're like a transformer.
Starr:
Like Voltron.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Back to the cartoons. It's always back to the cartoons. Actually speaking of cartoons, as you were talking about how we do things in our process, I was thinking about Dilbert cartoon. I can't remember when it aired but it was very short run. There was actually an animated cartoon series for Dilbert.
Starr:
Oh yeah. I remember seeing that when I worked in DC.
Ben:
There was this episode, at least one maybe more than one, about Nirvana Co. Thing was, Dilbert's office is terrible, everything bad that could happen to you as an engineer happens at Dilbert's office, right? But Nirvana Co was the very opposite. All the engineers wanted to work there because they had these beautiful projects and this awesome process and everyone is just happy. Then it becomes destroyed as they try to bring in some process that Dilbert's like, you mean you don't do x, y, or z? They're like, we've never heard of that let's try that and he's like no, no, no. The episode ends with Nirvana Co is completely destroyed.
Josh:
It's like the ideas coming in wreak havoc.
Ben:
So yeah, we're trying to copy Nirvana Co.
Josh:
We're trying to keep bad ideas out.
Ben:
Right. Make it an engineer's paradise.
Josh:
One of the things Ben and I worked on, mostly Ben, the past week or so was rewriting the job post because our initial one, we had some feedback from people and we realized that it was very fact based, factually oriented like here's what we're looking for, here is what you do. It talked a little bit about us and our process but from a standpoint of selling this position, I think it came across as this is a lot of different responsibilities. There's a lot of different things in here, I think the polyglot stuff in there might have been part of that, but we ended up rewriting it to focus a little bit more on the whole position at Honeybadger. Which kind of fits into our culture and how we work too. Because like you were saying, a lot of people don't get that part of it unless we explain it. So we realized we need to always be explaining that part of us because it's so different from what people are used to.
Ben:
Yeah, I don't think there was anything wrong with the original post but I think if you were coming to that job posting in the same mindset that you would come to a job posting at Amazon or something, you'd be like oh crap this is a lot. If you understand that we don't really work like that and you understand the whole context then it makes a lot more sense and it's a lot more reasonable.
Josh:
Yeah. It's really just a matter of framing. We made a few other tweaks, I think, to it. We had a salary number posted in that one too.
Ben:
And the updated listing I also put in a bit about how they're be also working on our main app. That was completely left out of our original. Some people thought, oh I'm just going to be working on the client libraries, that seems kind of boring, right? But no, that's not what we're going to be doing 100% with this job, it's going to be working on other projects and the new products that are coming out this year.
Starr:
Well, in interviews, well I mean, Ben's already started the interviews but the rest of us are going to get in on the action next week. So, I'm super excited about that and talking with people.
Josh:
That'll be fun.
Starr:
And seeing what they have to bring to the table for the Badger.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
I'm not going to talk to them like that don't worry.
Josh:
See if they're willing to put on a badger suit.
Ben:
Right, still have to get someone to put on the badger suit.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
I think Ben Findley is still hot on that. I think the only thing that's stopping him is us.
Starr:
Let me ask you guys. Is the RailsConf thing a sure deal at this point?
Ben:
Yes. It is a sure deal.
Starr:
Okay well, we will be having a...what is it, a lounge?
Ben:
Yes.
Starr:
We'll be having our own lounge at RailsConf and probably with some other great companies that we are going to be working with. Some Indie companies and so maybe there'll be a badger suit there.
Ben:
Well, I would say that if you are an Indie company like us and you want to hang out in the Honeybadger lounge with us, please get in touch. We're doing co-sponsoring, we're allowing the opportunity for other people like us to join with us in having this space at RailsConf. If you're part of the Rails community, if you're a small Indie start up, come talk to us.
Starr:
We should do another episode where we talk about this a lot more.
Josh:
We should.
Starr:
That would be so interesting.
Josh:
We should do it next week. I think the actual title is, I think we're calling this the Honeybadger Indie Lounge.
Starr:
Yeah.
Josh:
So this is the purpose of it and we should really talk about it.
Ben:
Okay, let me just say this. First of all, we've made it in life. We're rolling with the big dogs and whatnot but for a long time we were not quite there yet and we always felt excluded from places like RailsConf, just because they're so expensive to get any sort of sponsorship deal there. Now that we're sort of able to do that, we are trying to bring in a community of Indie creators and help open up that space to people who might not otherwise be able to access it.
Josh:
That's a perfect description of it.
Starr:
You're freaking amazing.
Josh:
Good job Ben.
Starr:
All right. Next week. We'll leave on a cliffhanger.
Ben:
To be continued.
Josh:
If it's not next week, it will probably be one of these weeks.
Starr:
Yeah. Should we wrap it up, you have anything else you'd like to add?
Ben:
Let's wrap.
Josh:
That's a wrap.
Starr:
Okay. That sounds great. I talked a little bit about hiring writers and so if you would like to write for us about, preferably Ruby, it'd be cool to get some Elixir authors. I would like to see some Elixir content. Yeah, stuff like that. Just go to our website. Go to our blog and you'll see a 'write for us' link in the top nav and if you're interested in a career with us, interested in applying for this job, it might be filled by the time this goes out but who knows. There's a link in the footer of our website called Jobs or something.
Starr:
Yeah, other than that. I'm just going to beg for you to go give us positive reviews places because this is what we do. I don't know. Do we really need positive reviews?
Josh:
Honeybadger doesn't care so...
Starr:
Yeah. I think my own validation comes from inside of myself. I don't think I really personally need them but if people want to give them that's cool
Ben:
Or you know, if you want to come write compliance policies for me, feel free to.
Josh:
Is that our next hire?
Starr:
If you want to write compliance policies, if you want some fascinating reading material...
Josh:
You can handle our year-end taxes.
Starr:
Yeah. I need someone to tidy up my office.
Ben:
All kinds of opportunity here at Honeybadger.
Starr:
Yeah, we're just saving the world, one error at a time. All right. See you guys later.
Josh:
Bye.
In this episode the Badgers talk about their predictions for the future of work. They also discuss some of the pros and cons to working remotely and how to prevent loneliness. Conveniently enough, Honeybadger is also hiring a JS developer. Learn the secrets of becoming a Honeybadger!
Show Links:
Job Listing
Code[ish] Podcast
Buddhism - No Mind
Justserve.org
Full Transcription:
Josh : Speaking of remote controls, I told you about the ridiculous garage door I put on my home gym.
Ben: I am jealous of your garage door.
Starr: Wait, You did? I never knew this.
Josh : I did. Yeah.
Starr: When was this?
Josh : Let's see. Well, the whole thing took a while to install, but yeah, I finally gave, it was finally completed this week. But it's been in for a while.
Starr: Okay.
Josh : So it's this like, it's like one of those full, they call it a full view, but it's like, it's all glass for the most part. Like it's framed like glass panels with a metal frame.
Starr: Oh nice. So you can look outside.
Josh : Well, it's the glass, it's like opaque, like it's fogged or whatever. So you can't actually see through it. But it lets a lot of light in. So the light is awesome. It's the brightest room in my house now, I think, from the natural light. So, I might actually just move my office in there and then I just, never have to leave. But, so I got the garage door opener that goes with this system. It's like one of the top of the line. Residential ones, anyway. It's a LiftMaster and it has wifi built into it.
Ben: Oh yeah. I have one of those too. So awesome.
Josh : So do you have the... What did they call it?
Ben: MyQ?
Josh : Like the garage hub,though?
Ben: Yes.
Josh : It goes with?
Ben: Yes.
Josh : Okay, so you can open your garage door with Siri.
Ben: Yeah. So awesome.
Starr: So you all know garage doors opener, garage door openers don't have a stellar record of security?
Josh : Security. Yeah, I do.
Starr: At least the old style garage door openers, basically, it was like a four digit code. Like they transmitted like a four digit code so somebody built a device that just transmitted all the four digit codes and so you could just walk down the street and open everybody's garage doors.
Josh : Yeah. And I've known people who've done, I never, I never did that, but I always wanted to. I never got my hands on one.
Starr: I'm sure that since it's got wifi you can SSH in and use a private key on there.
Josh : Right.
Starr: Use a key pair for authentication.
Josh : Just transmits a public key for authentication.
Starr: Yeah, no, I mean, your little remote would transmit the public key and then the hub would like check it against the private key.
Josh : Yeah. Well I'm sure Apple does something like that.
Starr: Oh, probably. Yeah.
Starr: I mean, it's Apple though. Nobody tries to break into Apple products cause they're just too cool.
Josh : Yeah. Yeah. I mean if windows had a garage hub, I'd be extremely worried. Microsoft, Microsoft garage. But yeah, it's cool. And then, whenever it opens, I also get note of it. Cause through HomeKit, I guess. This is my first HomeKit device. So, I am officially a connected house, which I swore I would never do. But, I'm probably going to do more now.
Ben: Of course, you are.
Josh : Cause now I want to control my front lights. So that they're, put them on a timer or something.
Ben: Oh yeah.
Starr: Is HomeKit like the Apple home automation thing?
Ben: Yep.
Josh : It is. Yeah. So it's all integrated in a MacOS and iOS. And so, when my door, when the garage, if anyone opens the garage door at any time, I'll get a notification. The garage door just opened like on my computer.
Starr: And then you'll see the garage door open.
Josh : Or I'll be in there. But like if the kids open it. Yeah. But if my office is in there, I'll just see it.
Starr: So, what are we talking about today? We were talking about maybe doing a sort of future of work thing where we're talking about remote working and all that. But then, also, Josh suggested that we, since we have a new job opening and we're a remote company, you could say that Honeybadger is the future of work. Do you think that's too bold?
Ben: No, that's right on.
Starr: That's just bold enough. Okay, we are the future of work and we have a new job position. So I think we're going to use that as like a lens to discuss the future of work. Is that correct?
Starr: Yeah, that sounds good. And I don't even know. Yeah, I really don't think it's that bold, because we're one of the companies that are, I think, pushing the boundaries here.
Starr: Okay. That's good. That's good. Listeners can't see this, but everyone's looking at me like I'm so full of crap. Right now.
Ben: Maybe we need to ditch the whole remote thing though. We should all work from Josh's garage.
Starr: That's a good idea.
Josh : We're going to going to do the central office again. Yeah.
Ben: In your garage?
Starr: No, but it's in a garage. Like garages are where things happen. Garage is where innovation happens.
Josh : The future of work is my garage, that's what we're saying, right?
Ben: Yeah, exactly.
Starr: Exactly.
Starr: I mean think of all the great companies that were started out of garages. Amazon, Tesla, Hewlett Packard, Apple.
Ben: HP.
Starr: HP?
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Like those are companies that are actually started out of garages though. I was trying to think of the most ridiculous one.
Josh : We didn't start in the garage, but I'm obviously moving that direction so it might, it might not be the future, but it's my future.
Ben: Nice.
Starr: Yes. The thing I don't like about garages is like the sloped floors. This is, we just covered the real, the hot issues at FounderQuest.
Ben: But that is one of the issues of remote work, right? Is finding a nice place to work. Right? We talked about this before, like how we each have different situations. Starr's backyard office because his house is a little cramped. I totally fled my house and I'm subleasing an office and Josh is now going to make an office out of his gym.
Josh : And also, apparently I'm like putting desks in every room. I'm basically putting them everywhere. I can't just, cause I like to move around. So-
Ben: And that's one thing that we've offered with our new jobs. When we've published jobs in the past and this was, as well, as we've always offered to new employees that we will pay for a coworking space if they don't have a suitable place to work.
Starr: Wait, we do that?
Ben: We do that. Yeah.
Starr: Has anybody taken us up on that?
Ben: Actually, Kevin did for a little while.
Starr: Okay.
Ben: Because he was getting a little stir crazy at his house. Because he, previous to working for us, was not working from home. He was working in a traditional employer office kind of situation. And he discovered, after a while, that he was feeling lonely and stuff, just being there. And so, he decided to try out his nearest co-located, coworking space. And it was working fine until some sales guy moved in to the desk next to him. And was like, on the phone 24/7.
Starr: Oh, is that what happened?
Ben: Yeah, that's what happened.
Starr: We said that's the future of work? That doesn't sound very nice.
Ben: So, Kevin made some adjustments and found ways to get that stimulation that he needed. And then now he's back at his house and he's happy.
Starr: So should we talk a little bit about what the job opening is? Like, what are some of the reason that we have a job opening and what we're kind of looking for? Maybe some of the history around it.
Josh : Yeah. So the job opening. The last developer we hired was Kevin. And he was kind of like, that job was a little bit more, I think, general. Just kind of, basically, add extra development to the capabilities to the team. Lots of backend, like Ruby and full stack stuff because we have a Rails app and most of our stuff is built in Ruby.
Starr: I just wanted to say that Kevin's done an amazing job at that, by the way. In case, you're listening, Kevin, you've done an amazing job.
Josh : We are extremely happy with Kevin.
Starr: Like dark mode. Oh my gosh. I never knew I wanted it until I had it.
Josh : If we could get another Kevin here, that would be great. So yeah, the only shift with this position is that there is, we are looking for someone who likes JavaScript a lot. Which is, JavaScript, not everyone loves JavaScript, but some people really love it. Some people dislike it extremely. Extremely dislike it. But we have a lot of open source JavaScript projects that we manage. And currently, I am pretty much the sole maintainer of these projects. In addition to a lot of other open source projects in different languages. So, there's, kind of like, a polyglot aspect to this job. So basically, we're looking for someone to come on and help me reduce some of my workload and take on some of these open source maintainer type positions and push forward our open source libraries to make improvements and fix bugs and interact with the community and all that sort of stuff that comes along with that.
Ben: Yeah. Right now our Ruby library is the best of our client libraries. And then, from there, we have a variety of levels of support and features in the various libraries. I think, bringing them all up to par is one of the early tasks for this job. And then, of course there's going to be plenty of development work to go forward, right? So, even if all of those things were done, which never will be, we still have plenty of backend stuff to do. So, we're still looking for people that enjoy being in a variety of languages and especially doing Ruby as well.
Josh : Yeah. And I think, that's the thing, I think we've talked about that. We want everyone, I'm pretty sure we want everyone to have, somewhat of a full stack background still. Just because, a small team, this will be what? Number six, in total, including us founders. So obviously, we don't have enough people for each of us to completely specialize in one very narrow thing. But we try to have a couple core areas where that's like our strongest route. Say, Ruby and JavaScript. And then we can, as time permits, be able to have a broader knowledge of other things that we have in our toolkit.
Ben: I think that the polyglot thing is really important to bring out. Because we do have, as you said, libraries and a variety of languages. Like, this person should be expecting to say, "Oh, can you take a look at this Elixir stuff?" And we don't expect an Elixir pro, necessarily. But someone whose like, "Oh yeah, I'd be happy to take a look at that and figure that out."
Starr: So, here's the question for you. Is there anybody out there who can meet all these requirements?
Ben: No.
Josh : Yeah. No.
Starr: It sounds like a lot.
Josh : Yeah, it is a lot. And I was going to say, one of the cool things, like I'm not getting rid of this job or you know, I'm not trying to look, I'm not looking for someone just to take. So I can get rid of my job. I have five jobs I'm doing. And I can't go on like this. But, one of the really cool things, when I was first starting this, getting into managing all of this stuff. Because I didn't know any of this stuff. I was pretty much, JavaScript and Ruby I had done. Before Honeybadge, I was mostly PHP freelancing and couple of years, like, two or three years of Ruby and Rails, I think.
Josh : So when I got into, I didn't know like anything about Elixir, Python, Node, Go, Java, the list goes on. But I got to learn that stuff. And I think, what we're saying is we're, I think, one of the, if nothing else, this person needs to be interested in learning new things and not necessarily becoming an expert in all of them. But learning and exploring the landscape and being able to think and understand those things properly in their proper context. So yeah, I don't know. One of my fondest memories of, Honeybadger open source, when I got to, we wanted to support Go and Go was kind of a new thing. It was kind of hot. Everyone is talking about it. I didn't know any anything about it, but just because we wanted to support it, it fell on me to go learn the language and then build the integration library to report errors to Honeybadger. But that's what I did and it was a lot of fun.
Starr: Yeah. So, it sounds like, coming in, this person would be primarily, sort of taking on JavaScript. And start taking the JavaScript, like client library stuff off of your plate, Josh. And maybe, some backend stuff that goes with that. And then, sort of as time goes on, as it makes sense and stuff, they might branch out into other things. Just sort of depending on the circumstances. Does that sound about right?
Josh : Yeah, it's funny. Out of all the, because a lot of these, we've got, I don't know, like 10 or so major open source client packages for reporting areas of Honeybadger in different various languages. And out of all of them, they have, aside from Ruby, they have pretty much, feature parity and they're relatively stable. But it seems like JavaScript, it's one of those languages. But it seems to be the majority of the work is maintaining it. And also, there's a lot more we want to do with JavaScript just because it's such a large ecosystem. It's so popular. And there's just a lot more we could do and I really want to do a lot more with it and I just don't have the time.
Josh : So that's part of the reason, I think, that this is going to have like a heavier JavaScript focus. Especially, in the beginning. And specifically, I think, our Honeybadger JS is our client side JavaScript integration for error reporting. And we have plugins that you can plug it into your React app or a view or whatever. But there's a lot more work we can do on that to bring all of that up to speed and keep pace with the JavaScript community. Which is constantly changing, so we want to stay on the edge.
Starr: Maybe that's a good point. It's like, we kind of need a ringer because keeping up with the JavaScript is kind of exhausting. There's always new frameworks coming out. There's always new ways of doing things and you know that the language itself is not a normal fricking language where you have a single version of it running and you can trust that that version will behave in the same way across multiple computers. There's 20 different implementations of it running in people's cars and crap. It's insane.
Josh : Yeah. I don't think I have cars in the CI built yet for cross browser testing. But maybe, I should get, if you all want, I will buy a Model 3 just so I can build Honeybadger in it. Just to make sure.
Ben: I have to interject at this point for legal and compliance reasons that Honeybadger is not warranted for use in vehicles or aircraft or marine vehicles. So, yes please.
Starr: Is that in our insurance? That's on our liability insurance.
Josh : I think it's also, it's probably like a compliance, a requirement too, right? Yeah.
Ben: Yes. Our software is not to be used in life threatening situations.
Josh : Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. Please don't, we don't want that money.
Ben: I mean we write good stuff but come on, give us a break. But yeah, I think back to the point of no person is going to know everything that we would like that person to know. Of course, when you write a job description, you write the wishlist. Right? But I think, that one of the key attributes that we look for in any person who's interested in HoneyBadger would be someone who's excited to learn. Right? So, it doesn't matter as much what you know as it does, what's you're willing to learn. And how much energy you're willing to put into that.
Josh : Yeah, totally.
Starr: With the caveat of, you have to know something already.
Ben: Yes. That's helpful.
Josh : Yeah. We're looking for your senior level in something. I was going to give the example of, we are a Rails shop, we're Rails developers and that's what our stuff is built at, built in. But if a senior level Laravel developer was really interested in this position for instance, and they, with the caveat that they were also interested in learning Rails. Laravel to Rails is, I mean that's a no brainer transition. They're very similar systems. You can totally learn Rails if you're expert in Laravel.
Starr: But they are also very good at JavaScript.
Josh : But they're also very good at JavaScript.
Starr: And Cobol.
Ben: But hey, we don't need to be an expert in Linux administration.
Starr: No, just 8086.
Josh : Right? Yeah. So?
Starr: So, I think now that we've scared everybody off. So, there's some good things about working for us, right?
Ben: Well, there are some good things.
Starr: These are all good things. I mean learning is great.
Ben: But there is something that we should mention. Another, maybe, potentially scary thing, but potentially good thing, I guess it depends on your personality. One thing that Kevin brought out, as we talked to him, as we started the process of this new hire. We asked Kevin, some thoughts that he has since he was the last person to be hired at Honeybadger. And one of the points that he made was that he was surprised just how independent we are in our work habits here at Honeybadger. He, like a lot of developers, were used to working on a team, that you go into the office and you talk to your coworkers about whatever, right? And as you have issues with your projects you might lean over and ask somebody a question and we don't do that at Honeybadger. For the most part, like we are very independent in our work. We just pick a task and we go and do that task until it's done, basically. And that can be disturbing to someone who's used to a more collaborative kind of environment.
Starr: I mean, we can still ask questions out, right?
Ben: Oh yeah.
Josh : We do. I mean, we communicate, obviously. But yeah, what Ben is saying is, and we talked about this, I think, in the past and I've talked to about it at various places, I think on The Indie Hackers interview I did, we've discussed a lot of our freelancing background and I think we tend to operate a lot like freelancers still. We are working from home on, kind of, individual projects and we're not doing a lot of pair programming or constant. We're not usually working together on the same projects within the company at the same time, constantly.
Starr: Can I tell you guys a story?
Josh : Yeah.
Starr: One time there was a one person who contacted me, maybe a couple of years ago, who was writing some sort of book or something about remote work. And I guess, since we had a blog post about that, they contacted me and were like, "Hey, do you want to be interviewed for this book?" And I'm like, "Sure." And then, we get on this call and he's really nice. He's, all these questions and he's asking about our process and how we like coordinate things and all this stuff. And I'm just like, we just work on independent things and we don't really talk about it except like, you know, when they're done.
Starr: Honestly I felt like I felt like I was doing such a bad job as an interviewer or interviewee. I was just like, we just kind of like don't really collaborate. That's our collaboration strategy. I mean we do collaborate but in a much more high level way, right? We'll collaborate and be like, okay, you do component A, I'll do component B and somebody else will do component C and then in six months they'll all come together and it'll be beautiful.
Ben: That brings up a good point too. The, the six months things like, typically our projects are pretty short actually like six months that that would be an incredibly long project for Honeybadger. We have very few projects that actually go that long. Right?
Josh : So like Ben just took on a project that I didn't have time for apparently and like shipped it in a day. So it's like, it's like dark launched right now as we're speaking.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh : So that this was, this was yesterday by the way.
Ben: Yeah, that felt so good. Like in the morning I'm like, I'm going to do this thing and then by, by afternoon it was like, it's done. It's launched. Enjoy.
Starr: Yeah. I'm always impressed by how fast Ben is.
Josh : Yeah. I'm really, I'm really glad. I like I finally threw up my hands and asked for help on something cause I had like, you know, a bunch of, I had multiple projects that I wanted to do and I could, I hadn't, I knew I would kill myself if I tried to multitask. So I was like, Hey, does anyone want to like, you know, take one of these? Like does this sound interesting and Ben's like, "I'll do it".
Ben: So that's, I guess that that describes the collaborative environment that we have. Right? We're all willing to help out and pitch in and do a variety of things, but just let us go work in peace. Right?
Josh : Right. Yeah. And I mean we come together like when, when we, like if we have problems, I think that's like, and we're trying to get better at that too. Like when, when we're actually struggling with something, that's when you ask for help. You know, and, and then we're all happy to like pitch in and that's when we would jump in. You know, we jump on a, on a zoom call or or whatever or, or chat in Slack or something. Yeah. But otherwise we like to be heads down.
Starr: So I'm getting, I'm getting some ideas in my mind about a book we can write about the future of work and you know like, Hey, have you guys ever heard like in like in Buddhism, I'm going to botch this. So I'm, I apologize to any Buddhist who is listening. But you know how like in Buddhism or maybes in Zen Buddhism there is like, there's this concept of like no mind, right? It's like you're there and you're, you're, you obviously have a mind but then it's like, like the, I don't know, like the key to the, the stuff that they're doing is to embrace this idea that there's no mind, right? So I'm imagining this very kind of like new agey future of work book that we do and it's like the process is like no process, like collaboration process, right?
Josh : Yeah, I like it.
Starr: I mean, I think some people would buy that and like fall for it.
Josh : You don't like all the pages it could like use a negative space like to the maximum. So like, like each page just has like, like one sentence on it about, about work.
Ben: Maybe. Maybe the title of the book, is this page intentionally left blank.
Josh : Yeah.
Starr: Oh, there you go.
Josh : And it's a one page book.
Ben: It could sell for like $1,000 on the Amazon marketplace.
Starr: I like it.
Ben: So the future of work, I do think that we're going to see more remote work happening. I mean, fortune tellers and prognosticators have been saying this for quite a while now that we may having more remote work in the future. I think it's not a new trend, but I think it will continue because we have great technology to help it. Like right now, right. We're chatting via Zoom, which is a fantastic technology, which makes it really easy to collaborate when you need to. But also I think that the nature of the work at least in and the work that we do in software development and, and I think in a work that requires you to do a lot of thinking and a-
Josh : Which is more like a lot more work, is that type of work, these days.
Ben: A lot more thought work these days. And I, I just don't see that a lot of need for people to be co-located all the time. And I think as we as more companies realize that they can leverage technology and allow people to have more flexibility to be where they want to be, I think that's just going to become more and more prevalent.
Josh : Yeah. Well we should talk about the work hours that we do because not only are we remote, we have all this flexibility but we work 30 hour weeks.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh : Sometimes last for that matter, like 30 hours is the maximum for Honeybadger.
Starr: I'm convinced Ben works like 80 hour weeks and he's just like,
Josh : Well Ben might work, some of us might work more than 30 hours, if we want to. And I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but that 30 hours is, especially for employed, our job positions like 30 hours is what you're committing to.
Ben: And there was, there was some conversation about this on Twitter recently about, the hustle people celebrating that culture of like, , Silicon Valley and 80 hour, 100 hour work weeks and it's so horrible and that's ridiculous. And I agree, but at the same time, one person made the point that I agree with strongly is, sometimes people work those 60, 80 hour weeks because they enjoy it, right? That's what they want to do. And I'm more on that end of the spectrum where I enjoy working so that it wouldn't be such a chore for me to do that. Now I don't actually regularly work 60 hour plus weeks, but I can see people who would enjoy that. And because I enjoy the work that I do. And so I think, give some, give some leeway to people who actually do want to do that and you know, let them go wild.
Ben: But yeah, we don't, certainly at Honeybadger, and I think more generally speaking, I think as we a move more into this information economy and the way you thought work, I think we should get to the use the idea that it's the 40 hour week is, is outdated. Like I was talking about this actually on an upcoming podcast episode for Heroku, the Code[ish] podcast, I was talking with Mike about this and I think that expecting someone to, to sit their butt in a chair for 40 hours a week and be productive is ridiculous. I mean, they're not, they're not tying pieces of thread together. They're not screwing parts of the car together. They're actually doing a lot of work in their brains and to, to expect someone to do that, all day, every day for eight hours a day. It just doesn't happen.
Josh : Well that's that. And that's the part. The other thing is like I probably do 20 hours or you know, probably less than 20 hours of like actual, like solid focused, like real work, like programming or something. But it's not that I don't work the rest of the week, it's just that I'm, I'm investing in other areas. And even if those areas you know, because we work, we have 30 hour weeks. That doesn't mean I'm taking 30 hour weeks and going and like sitting on a lawn chair in my yard or something. You know, the other 10 weeks I probably still work like quote unquote work a 40 hour week. But those, those other hours are spent in personal improvement learning. I've been learning, like I'm learning marketing, I've been learning marketing for the last like whatever, two or three years as a like, concerted effort.
Josh : So I'm reading, I have a gym, I built a gym in my garage so I didn't have to commute to the gym and save myself an hour every weekday. Working remotely saves a ton of time and then you can divert that time back into like personal development that is still, it's still building something but it's not necessarily all about the company. You don't always have to be slaving away for the company.
Starr: Can I mention something that I find a little bit disturbing about the sort of remote work trend and kind of the vision for the future?
Josh : Sure.
Starr: So first of all, just to say, I like working from home. Like I probably like it more than most people do and I really dislike working in offices. But one thing that I'm just thinking about all this and I'm just imagining this world where everybody just kind of wakes up and brushes her teeth or whatever and goes into their living room or their dining room table and fires up the laptop and goes to work and then gets home and then goes to the kitchen and gets dinner and then watches TV and then goes to bed. And it's like, at what point? Do you just never leave your house? At what point does this become jail?
Josh : Yeah, that's, that's a good, that is a good question. I do, I do find some weeks that I, I don't leave my house and, and I think I'm the same as you. I have to make a concerted effort not to be a hermit. So, I like the isolation, but after a while I do realize, Hey, I should probably have somewhat of a, some kind of social life or it's going to get bad.
Starr: Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like in the moment, it's fine. It's like, okay, I had a good day today, but then, a year or two later you wake up and you're like, I don't really have any friends or I do have friends, people, this is, this is hypothetical. I just want to say, I have friends.
Josh : This is something you have to deal with to avoid ending up in that position. And I think, I think you're right. You have to think about those things more when you're working remotely because it's not just handed to you. The water cooler at work is not just handed to you. It's not, just happens to be there on the way to the bathroom or something. So you have to actually, we have to build that into our company culture to provide more opportunity for social interaction but also just on a personal level. You have to think about getting out and it's not that you just stay at home.
Starr: Yeah. I did the digital nomad thing for a while and right now I have a house and a family and so I've got lots of, sort of, outlets for interacting with people. But back when I was doing the digital nomad thing, sometimes you just kind of in a room by yourself typing on a computer and it can be a little bit bleak at times.
Josh : Yeah. I've noticed, one thing I've noticed about, I guess this might be going back more towards the discussion about, when Kevin had tried switching to the coworking space or sometimes people, for whatever reasons, home life is not conducive to a work from home kind of situation. And then that's when you get the office or find a coworking space that works or whatever, go to the coffee shop even. But I think, those situations tend to change. I mean, they definitely changed throughout times of your life. Back when my kids when they're super young and actually they're super young now, they're just getting out of the phase where it's constant, constant crying and screaming, which try to do some programming...
Starr: You're going to look back on that fondly.
Josh : With a kid screaming in either ear.
Starr: It's scary how people pay for that.
Josh : Right? You've got stereo children. But yeah, during that time, I was trying to work from home and I was like, I just can't get anything done here. This is just not working. And so, I started going to the office and I went to the office for like whatever, four or five months or something. Until, I was realizing, it's been getting better at home. My wife's like, things had been a lot more stable here, and she's like, it would be really cool if you came back and gave it another try. And so I did. And now, I've been home and I'm loving it again. So I think, you shouldn't be in the mindset like you have to pick one and just stick with it forever. I think you should adapt the workplace to whatever is best for you at the time, if that makes sense.
Starr: Oh, totally.
Ben: Yeah. And I think being intentional about socializing is, is important. As we, as we talked about, if you're in that situation where you're not going to coworking space on a regular basis if you are, if you don't have a family. Cause like for me going home, hanging out with my family, my kids are older, they're great conversationalists. I get a lot of my socializing right there, right around, we have dinner conversations every night that are fantastic.
Ben: I go to the gym and see some people there. I go to church every week and I hang out with people there. Right. So I have ways that I get my socializing but, but if you don't have that built in, then you have to make some plans around that. If you're going to be switching from an environment, especially if you're switching from an employment environment where you were in an office and now you're contemplating remote work, you have to make some plans. Maybe I need to go find a local group that plays basketball every week and I just go play basketball. Right. I make that part of my plan so that I don't go crazy with lack of human contact.
Josh : I really, at the risk of starting to get into like the thought leader-y side of this future of remote work discussion.
Starr: I mean we're already there, Josh.
Josh : Are we just there? I can just run with it. But I really liked it. You know like for a long time there seemed to be a trend. I don't know if as a result of industrialization and stuff, but the trend was people moved from having more local community to moving to a work community where things revolve much more around the workplace. And a lot of people these days, they don't have any kind of local community, church or, or whatever. Other civic groups or anything that people used to do.
Josh : But now, I think that, that is becoming a lot more important if you are working remotely, like in your home, like location, physical location. You're not moving around a lot. I think it's a lot more important to start to go back out and like find start finding, like rediscovering that stuff again to maybe fill some of that void of like not having the like the community.
Starr: Yeah. Cause those people are going to need the ones who like have your back when stuff hits the fan, right?
Ben: So can I make a plug, then? I totally agree with you Josh.
Josh : Sure, sure.
Ben: So, I've got to make a plug for a website called justserve.org. It's a website where you can go and you can find local groups that need volunteer help. Right? So if you, if you want to get connected with your community, with their local people around you in a way that's helpful to others, go to JustServe, they have projects from a variety of nonprofits who are just looking for people to help. And I think, if you have no other way, and even if you do have other ways, but if you're looking for a way to add more interaction, that's a great way to do it.
Ben: Get to be hanging out with people who are also interested in giving back to the community. It's a fantastic, you don't have to use JustServe but rendering service in general. Like when I was a kid, I was part of the Rotary. I hung out with them and did some service projects with my local rotary and that was great, right? I got to meet people I wouldn't meet otherwise and it was a lot of fun to you feel like you're really contributing to people who could really use it.
Starr: And you know what? You can do that with your 40-30 hour week. You can't do that with those like 60-hour week jobs. Right?
Ben: Well totally. And being remote and with us like with the flexible schedule, like you know, if someone wanted to go and hang out at a soup kitchen for two hours in the middle of the afternoon. Cool.
Starr: So I feel like we did. We started out kind of rough, selling this job, but I think we're coming around in the end. I feel like in the beginning or a little bit maybe scaring people away, but now I feel like if they made it this far, like maybe people are a little bit more on board with us.
Josh : And that was part of the test all along.
Starr: It is, I mean like a life of community and love and support and just being in fellowship with humanity. Like that sounds pretty great. And that's the spirit-
Josh : I'm not saying I'm going to do any of that stuff. I live on the internet, so just to, just to be clear.
Starr: Yeah?
Ben: Honeybadger does care.
Starr: Josh is trolling people on Reddit right now as we speak.
Josh : Yeah, yeah. But no, I mean, I have been thinking about that lately because it's like, you get in this bubble of just people. I know pretty much like most of the people I know now or like, or like software developers and technologists, it's like what. I remember having, relationships with other types of people, normal, non non-technical. There are complete, all other kinds of people out there. And it offers a nice perspective when your circle is not just the people that are exactly like you.
Ben: So I think we'd say like for the work of the future, I think we could argue the point that in a very thought leader-y style, that remote work will bring us back to the people. It will help build our communities, strengthen families and improve self confidence and self esteem.
Starr: I love where this is going. Okay.
Josh : It was beautiful, Ben.
Starr: So go to honeybadger.io and sign up for our seminars. We're coming to a town near you. We'll help you build self confidence, will help you improve your social life.
Josh : We'll send Ben to your garage.
Starr: I'm sorry I started making jokes that I really, really actually liked that Ben. So I'm sorry, I just can't not make jokes. It's just my way. Well should we end it on that? Y'all have any anymore like prognostications?
Josh : No. Well, for our listeners to learn more about that job, hopefully there's, hopefully there's some people out there who have made it this far. What is it? honeybadger.io/careers?
Starr: Yeah. So, if you just go to our site honeybadger.io and scroll all the way down to the bottom. There's a link that says Careers, I think.
Starr: Okay, well it was great talking with you guys and if anybody wants to go give us a review at, Apple podcast or whatever, that'd be great. And if you are interested in writing for us, if you do software blog posts or something, we, we actually might be interested in talking to you about that and we actually pay people. So yeah, you can learn more about that. If you go to our blog and I'm looking at the top nav and that's honeymeta.io. Yeah. So you'll find it, you'll find that's the first test. So I'm sure you all pass. All right. So I will talk to you guys later. And yeah. Future of work, like we are the future of work.
Ben: It's bright.
Starr: It's bright. It's so bright. We got to wear shades. Future so bright, you got to wear shades. You got to be a certain age to remember that song.
Ben and Starr have an informal fireside chat about recent tax changes and how to navigate them when running a SaaS company with nationwide sales. Learn about some of the surprising rules some states have around business classifications and why you might have to pay sales tax in one state but not another. Uncle Sam is crashing the internet party, listen and make sure you're prepared!
Links:
Justin Jackson
South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc
Avalara
Stripe
Ian Landsman
Write for Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Starr: Josh is not with us this week and I'm, I'm not actually sure, do we know what Josh is doing or is he just out?
Ben: He's just out gallivanting, I suppose.
Starr: That's all right. We, we respect people's privacy here at Honeybadger Industries LLC and yeah. So Ben and I are just going to do a little fireside chat episode. That's when there's only two of us around. We're only... we just sort of chat about whatever is going on and on our mind. And this week that is sales tax.
Ben: Super fun topic.
Starr: Yes. So is it okay if I set the stage a little bit?
Ben: Please.
Starr: Okay. So being an internet company and specifically being a software as a service company, Honeybadger Industries doesn't usually have to worry that much about sales tax. We are located in Washington state, which is actually one of the only places that sort of historically has had a sales tax on software as a service or services in general, I guess. And so it's really not been that big of a deal, but some things have changed, sort of... it, I don't know, I just feel like the party is, is coming to an end on the internet. We had all these great times and then now the government's coming in, the party's over and everything's owned by Google and now we're just having to sort of keep up a little bit. So. So what's been going on with the sales tax, Ben?
Ben: So you mentioned that we're in Washington and that they do charge sales tax. So we do pay a sales tax and our accountant handles that for us, figuring out what that number is. We don't actually charge sales tax to our customers though. We just decided early on that we would just eat that cost. And so we, we charge the same amount to all our customers everywhere.
Ben: But recently, the changes you've alluded to include a Supreme Court decision. So this is in 2018. Wayfair and South Dakota, and the state of South Dakota sued Wayfair because Wayfair wasn't paying sales taxes in South Dakota. And the Supreme Court overturned previous rulings, which said that basically if you were, if you didn't have nexus in a state, you didn't have to pay a sales tax in that state. So nexus being some sort of location, like a headquarters or an employee in that state. So, Wayfair is arguing, "Well, we don't have nexus in South Dakota, we don't have our offices there so we don't have to pay sales tax there." But, the Supreme Court decided that South Dakota had a point and that Wayfair should actually pay sales tax in South Dakota. And so that kind of changed everything for everyone who sells across state lines in the United States. That was kind of a big deal.
Starr: Yeah, I felt, I remember feeling sort of, it kind of felt like a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt some, some tingles happening. Yeah. Just because it's just so... You know, we're a tiny company, we're five people and we... possibly soon to be six. But you didn't hear that here... possibly. And yeah, and we're developers and we don't really have people on staff whose job it is to worry about sales tax and stuff like that. So, so yeah. So for me, hearing that, okay, suddenly internet people are going to have to pay sales tax sort of injected this bit of uncertainty into my life where it's like, "I don't really know what we're supposed to do." And so I actually... I emailed our accountant, which is what you do when you get anxious about sales stuff or tech stuff.
Starr: I do this all the time, mostly with my personal accountant, but sometimes with the Honeybadger accountant and... so I was like, "Okay. What, what this? Please? I'm anxious. Please soothe me." This is the new law, right? Everyone's got pay sales tax, so it's law. So it has to be really... there's just an obvious way to do it. And she was like, "Oh... actually right now nobody really knows how to do that. All the regulations are kind of up in the air. Every state is doing it differently..." And all that. And this was a year, maybe ago, I don't know... six months to a year ago. And so I was just wondering, do you know if that's still the case?
Ben: Yeah. So yeah, like I said, this happened in the summer of 2018 and we basically ignored it for a while, like most small companies did, I'm sure.
Ben: And yeah, we started looking into it and there is some, some vagaries, some, some confusion. And when the new year rolled around... 2020 started, we started look at this again because our accountants like, "Oh, you should probably pay attention to this."
Ben: And so I did a little bit of digging. And to answer your question... yeah, there's still a lot of ambiguity about going... what's going on. But it has settled down a little bit and there are some, there's some rough guidelines you can use now to know whether you should really worry about this and have to give props to Avalara. They are a company that sells a software that helps to manage sales tax reporting and remittance. And they, I chatted with them to find out, "Hey, what do we need to do and do we need to be concerned about this?" And their people were very helpful in getting started. You know, they have all those software as a service companies out there that don't have pricing on their site and you're like, "Oh, that's so terrible." Right? You know, because it just... "Give me the price, man." And Avalara is one of those where they don't have pricing on those sites. Like, "Contact us." It's like, Ugh. All right, fine. You know?
Starr: Oh yeah, of course. Because what's your other option? Like, hire your own staff of lawyers or-
Ben: I don't know, yeah.
Starr: I didn't actually know it was a product. I assumed it was just a consulting company since you sort of got this information from them. So I assumed that they were consulting for it.
Ben: Well, I don't know. Maybe they do some consulting as well, but they definitely have some software in the mix. So maybe it's a hybrid. But, they were helpful. They were actually helpful and talking to them even though they don't have pricing on their side. So it was great to do that. And we walked through our numbers. So what I did was... what we do every year is we put together a report for our accountant on the sales that we've done through Stripe. And so we find out which states we've actually sold things in and we'd done this every year because, well Washington, as you said, charges sales tax. And so we had to figure out every sale that we make in the state of Washington and we then determine what zip codes those sales were in. And we can report that to our state authority to get their taxes paid.
Ben: So I just increased the scope of that a little bit. I took our same Stripe export for the entire year and I did a pivot table based on the transactions and I grouped it by state and I summed up the amounts and I summed up the number of transactions just to see how much we do per state. And I walked through that list with the Avalara guy on the phone and basically found out that we're doing okay. We do have some significant states, like New York and California. We have a lot of transactions in those states. But, we're not at a point where we are, we have reached the threshold for any of those States where we actually have to pay sales taxes based on the current laws. So, the way that it works is each state has their own rules and typically, there's some sort of threshold, the minimum threshold that you have to meet in order to have an obligation to pay sales tax in that state.
Ben: So, let's say the state of Alabama. It might have a threshold of $100,000. If you've done $100,000 of sales in their state for the year, then you're on the hook. Or it might be a number of transactions. Let's say state of Alabama, maybe it's 200 transactions. If you sold 200 items in their state for the year, then you're on the hook. Got to pay them some sales tax. So fortunately, running the numbers for us, I determined that we don't meet any of those thresholds for any of those states. So, that was really nice.
Starr: Yay. Oh wait... Oh...
Starr: I saw that. I saw that horn around.
Starr: I mean, I think the real lesson here is that pivot tables have come to the rescue again.
Ben: Amen. I love pivot tables.
Starr: I know. Pivot tables are amazing.
Ben: That was a total level up of my life when I learned how to do pivot tables.
Starr: Yeah, I mean I... okay, so I know you really like pivot tables, so I just wanted to give you a chance to talk about it.
Ben: Thanks, man.
Starr: How much you liked them.
Ben: Got my back.
Starr: Yeah, I got your back. So yeah, so we don't meet any of these thresholds. How... I, I see that there's this, that we have a link to a blog posting our notes for the show. Should we?
Ben: Yeah, we're definitely going to put that in the show notes. So that's, that's a link to Avalara and they actually have a page that kind of gives you the brief rundown on what this is all about and they show you what those thresholds are per state. So, both the dollar amounts and the transactions. And one thing that the guy I was chatting with on the phone pointed out, he was like, "In the case of SaaS, there are two things you really need to be interested in. One is it's not just customers, it's actually number of transactions, right? So if you're billing monthly, like most of us are, then you have 12 transactions per customer per year." Right?
Starr: Okay.
Ben: So that can, that can get, you can get up to that 200 transactions number pretty easily that way.
Starr: I just want to say that doesn't seem very fair.
Ben: Well, we get that. I guess the other side of that is a number of States don't charge sales tax for software delivered as a service. So.
Starr: Oh, okay.
Ben: Even though they might have dollar minimums and transaction minimums, we still get off the hook we're a SaaS, so that's nice-
Starr: Oh, that's good. Yeah.
Ben: Not every state, but in many states they will not charge. They will not require you to pay sales tax on SaaS. Yeah.
Starr: Can I just say that I'm still a little bit miffed that in the new tax laws that they passed, the new federal tax laws that they passed a couple of years ago, that they got rid of all these, all of these exemptions or loop, not loopholes, but sort of... I don't know, what's it called when the government's like, "We like farmers"? So you're a farmer, so you get this tax, I don't know.
Ben: Exemptions?
Starr: Deduction, exemption, whatever.
Ben: Yeah, deductions.
Starr: So, yeah. So we technically classified as a... we're technically classified as a manufacturer. And I learned about this from Ian Landsman on his podcast because he mentioned it. And so I send that to our accountant and I was like, "Are we a manufacturer?" And she's like, "Yes." So, for many years we were classified as a manufacturer and we got a tax break for it and we lost that. And I don't really care about the money. I just wished that we were technically still a manufacturer. But then we might get charged sales tax.
Ben: That's true. Or, if we were a services firm, if we had any services on top of our SaaS, some states split that out. And so they will charge you sales tax or require you to charge sales tax for services rendered but not SaaS. So yeah, there's-
Starr: Oh, really?
Ben: There's some out there that are kind of a hybrid, but we're not like that. We don't, we don't do services here at Honeybadger.
Starr: Okay. We shouldn't tell them what the last word in the acronym SaaS means. Because that would be bad.
Ben: So, it was an interesting little discovery. It's been a fun kind of... it's again, it was one of those things where we just ignored and hoped it would go away and it's not going away. But, for many of us that don't have obscene levels of transactions... I mean, Honeybadger is a pretty good business. We're making good money and even still we're below thresholds in many cases because, well, we don't have a lot of customers in any given state, right? They're spread out all over the place.
Starr: Yeah, we've kind of work the spread.
Starr: Well, I'm glad to hear that we're not a... yeah, that we don't have to hire a new developer just to figure out all the ramifications for sales tax and we can keep passing along the savings are beautiful customers.
Ben: Indeed.
Starr: Well, should we wrap this up? Is there anything else we want to cover?
Ben: No, I think that's it.
Starr: All right. Well, it's been great talking with you about sales tax. I have been so excited about this all week. To get talk about sales tax. One of my favorite topics and... yeah. You know, actually that's... oh wait, no. I was going to make a joke about how Josh lives in Portland and they don't have sales tax there, so that's why he's not here. But then I realized he doesn't actually live in Portland, so-
Ben: He just does all the shopping in Portland because he lives in Vancouver.
Starr: Yeah, he lives in the Washington side of the border. So, I don't know.
Ben: Funny story, though. That reminds me... as I was reading up on some of this stuff, the state of New Hampshire does not charge sales tax.
Starr: Live free or die, that's them, right?
Ben: Right.
Starr: Okay.
Ben: And yeah, so they get very agitated when the states nearby them get all upset when their residents... like the state of Massachusetts for example... it gets kind of upset and cranky with New Hampshire because all their residents cross over the border and go buy stuff in New Hampshire and avoid the whole sales tax thing. And at one point New Hampshire even detained some sales tax collectors from Massachusetts who were in New Hampshire trying to scope out Massachusetts residents who were avoiding buying stuff at the store, right?
Starr: That's so funny. That's so funny. So in this scenario, the internet is sort of the 51st state.
Ben: Yeah, I guess so.
Starr: It's like all the other states are getting upset that the internet's getting all this money and not paying their taxes to those states. And so I think it's safe to say it's safe to say that the state of the internet is, it's just all on fire.
Ben: Yeah. Well, you know what they say... this is fine.
Starr: If everything's fine... that's a great note to end the show on, then.
Starr: If you would like to write for us at Honeybadger, we hire writers for our blog. If you're interested in writing about Ruby and Elixir stuff, we have lots of writers for all the other topics. So, we're looking for specifically Ruby and Elixir right now. And if you want to give us a good review on any of your fine podcasts. Whatever you get a podcast from. I don't know, I'm 80 years old. Just please do that, because we would love to see it. And until then, I'll see you later, Ben. And this has been FounderQuest.
History is made this week as FounderQuest welcomes its first ever guest, Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm! A debate ensues around whether it's better to build a product for a niche market or target the larger market as a whole. Also, the next time Jeff Bezos corners you with unsolicited advice for your bootstrapped startup, just ignore him. Listen to find out why.
Show Notes:
Justin Jackson
Transistor.fm
Mitch Hedberg
RightMessage
Product Journey podcast
Kevin Kelly - 1,000 True Fans
John Gruber and Merlin Mann talk at SXSW
Jawa
Adam Wathan
Peldi Guilizzoni
Tyler Tringas
Superhuman
MicroConf
Jason Fried
Full Transcript:
Justin: You just wait for someone to say something funny?
Josh: Yep. We just got to wait. We don't start until someone says something funny.
Justin: That's so much pressure. That reminds me of the old Mitch Hedberg bit. Do you remember that bit?
Josh: No, I don't.
Justin: He's like, "My job is to sit around and wait and think up things that are funny, but sometimes I'm too far away from a pen. So then I just convince myself that what I thought up wasn't funny."
Justin: Mitch Hedberg's my spirit animal. If you haven't... I think he's better on audio, but yeah, just look up some of his old stuff. It's just some comedians are... they'll get into a bit and the bit has stages, and they'll sometimes hit the same thing over and over again, and it'll be 30 minutes. Like Chris Rock, "Barack Obama." He'll just keep saying the same thing over and over again. But Mitch Hedberg is like fastball after fastball. It's just all one-liners. Yeah, he's so funny.
Josh: Nice. We'll have to find some links for the show notes.
Justin: Yeah. Definitely worth checking out.
Josh: And speaking of, for our listeners, I was going to say if you think that Starr sounds a lot like Justin Jackson today, it's because Starr, unfortunately, couldn't make it. Her daughter's sick, and so she's home playing caretaker. But luckily Justin was available, and so we're going to... I guess this is the first guest episode of-
Justin: Is this the first time ever?
Ben: You're our first guest host.
Josh: You're the first ever guest.
Justin: I should've worn my Honeybadgers shirt today.
Ben: Totally.
Josh: Yeah.
Justin: I love that shirt. I don't even know what I was thinking.
Josh: To be fair, you should always wear your Honeybadgers shirt. But especially on FounderQuest.
Ben: We should send you six more so you can wear them every day.
Justin: Yeah, just so I wear them every single day. I've got the Godzilla one. It's so good. Is there multiple shirts, or is that the only one you guys have right now?
Josh: There's two. Godzilla's the latest, and then the other one was like a badger ripping out of the chest of the shirt. We actually have a couple other designs that we should probably get going, get to the printers.
Justin: I think folks could learn a lot from you just in terms of swag. You definitely have the best swag. I think you set the high bar, and everyone else is just trying to catch up to you.
Josh: Well, thanks. We love our swag.
Ben: It's been a lot of fun.
Josh: It's fun. Yeah. And we like to have fun.
Justin: My least favorite thing about going to conferences... I'm going to get into trouble for this. My least favorite thing about going to conferences is somebody comes up to me with a shirt that they made for their startup, and they're like, "Hey, take a shirt. What size are you?" I'm looking at the shirt, I'm going, "I'm never going to wear that." I'm not going to wear your shirt that's for... See, I can't even talk about it because some people will know.
Josh: Hypothetical company incorporated.
Ben: They make the great painting shirts.
Justin: It's almost like people forget. They do all of this, well hopefully, they do all of this thinking about building something people want with their software product, and then they make a shirt that just like, their dumb logo or something with the .com in it or the .biz. And then-
Josh: It's an afterthought.
Justin: Although, actually, I will wear a .biz shirt. If you have a .biz domain, I will wear that shirt.
Ben: How about a .ca shirt? Would you wear a .ca shirt?
Josh: A .ca?
Justin: I will definitely wear a .ca shirt. That's fair.
Josh: You got to rep the CA.
Justin: I've had a few Americans go, "What the hell is this .ca?" I'm like, "It's Canadian. It's .ca."
Josh: .ca. That's good.
Justin: Because the C in French is ca-
Josh: Yeah. Yes. I caught that.
Josh: We're a little bit cultured here.
Ben: We are in the Pacific Northwest. We're close enough, right?
Josh: Totally. Yeah. Well, if you... I know you're a Laravel guy for the most part, but if you ever want to explore the Rails world, RailsConf will be here in Portland this year.
Justin: Oh, sweet.
Josh: So you could always come hang with some Rails people.
Justin: Well, our Transistor's built in Rails, so when I-
Josh: Yeah, well there you go.
Justin: -when I do hop in, much to John's chagrin, it's always in Rails.
Josh: Nice.
Justin: But the nice thing for someone like me is that once you understand... because almost always all I'm doing is editing views. So as long as you know where to find the views, you're fine. Whether it's Laravel or Rails or anything that uses that MVC way of organizing things.
Josh: Yeah. They all have similar architectures.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, I dig it. Yeah, we should totally go to Portland. That's actually John and I kind of... that's our meeting point. So we've seen each other in Portland, I think, almost every year since 2014.
Josh: Nice. Where's John located again? You might've said-
Justin: He's in Chicago.
Josh: He's in Chicago. Oh, that's right. I think I knew that. Cool.
Justin: Which does work a little bit... I'm still trying to figure out, because I live in a really small city, how big of a city do you need to live in? For us it almost feels like we needed at least one founder to be in a big center, and I don't know exactly why I feel that way. There's just some serendipity of being in a big city. People are always flying in. No one ever flies into Vernon, British Columbia, unless they're going skiing.
Josh: But yeah, you had been in Seattle the longest, and you kind of had all the startup connections, I recall.
Ben: Yeah, that definitely helps.
Josh: You were the city guy.
Ben: Yeah, even though I live on the east side of the area. For Seattle people, I'm considered to be out in the boonies. I'm a grand total of 13 miles away from downtown.
Josh: Kirkland.
Ben: It's kind of funny how regional it gets. Yeah, I think it does help to have someone in one of those bigger centers, because yeah, you're at the networking stuff, if that's your bag, and you're meeting those entrepreneurs. You're having, let's go to coffee and talk about X, Y, or Z. I think it's much easier when you're in a place like Seattle or Chicago.
Justin: Yeah. I might move someday. But today is not the day.
Ben: If you move south, you come down here, you can still get the all dressed chips in the grocery store.
Justin: Oh, see. See. Okay. This is the sales process you need to...
Josh: You've got Transistor, sounds like, going pretty well now though, so maybe you won't have to move for a while, because you know...
Justin: Yeah, I mean-
Josh: You're doing the sustainable long-term growth thing.
Justin: That's right. And I think if-
Josh: Kind of pro.
Justin: -if anything, I think John would move to Canada.
Josh: Yeah. Right.
Justin: So we'd have to figure that out.
Josh: I mean, you don't need Chicago anymore now that you've got it going.
Justin: Everything's going now. Yeah, we got to go somewhere else.
Josh: Yeah. Well, I'm super stoked that you're like the first guest on FounderQuest, considering that we're big fans of Transistor, and of course we use Transistor.fm to host FounderQuest and have since the beginning.
Ben: It's been fantastic.
Justin: Yeah, you guys do it right. Everything about your show, like that voiceover guy that you got and the music and the artwork. It's actually interesting that's in your culture. I almost have a tendency sometimes to be like, okay, well, let's just get this going and do bare minimum. And it seems you folks have the opposite inclination, which is, no, let's get some really nice artwork made. Because it's all custom drawn, right?
Josh: Yeah. We use the artist that does our shirts, we used for the FounderQuest art.
Justin: Yeah, and you did a bunch of customizations on your podcast website, and you got that voiceover guy. It really does make a difference for a first impression. And people always wonder how can they make their... Well, they're always wondering how they can stand out with their podcast, or their product, or their blog or whatever, and some of it is just like the noise is always kind of just thrown together. So there's a blog post that's just kind of thrown together, or a podcast that's just kind of thrown together. But very few people just do the extra steps of we're going to make the artwork look really great, and we're going to have this funny voiceover guy do our intros and outros. It really does help.
Josh: Yeah. A good friend of ours, Alan Branch, back in the day gave us, I think it was actually Ben and I, some advice on marketing, specifically for us, because I was asking him... I wanted to learn marketing, but we're really small and we're trying to stay small. I was like, "How should we do this?" And he's like, "Really, the only thing you have going for you is who you are, your personality and your brand." Basically, that's your competitive advantage for the most part. That's how you can really stand out is to be a unique individual company. That's why we've tried to double down on that, the whole badger thing. We put that badger illustration everywhere. We try to do interesting artwork, interesting swag.
Josh: And we didn't always do that. To be fair, our first shirt was just a logo shirt on a Gildan. It's like the shittiest shirt. It's like belly shirt on me, because my shoulders are big, and it doesn't fit at all.
Ben: But it was orange. It was orange. It had at least that.
Josh: Yes. It was bright orange and it worked in the beginning, because even that stood out. No one is walking around in a bright orange like construction shirt.
Ben: Exactly.
Justin: That's the kind of risk taking I want to see is somebody handing me a midriff shirt.
Josh: Oh, yeah. It stood out because of that too.
Justin: Just say, "Yeah, you got to wear this." I'd be like, okay. I like it.
Ben: Yeah, it's definitely been intentional. We've definitely tried to really enjoy... If you pick a name like Honeybadger, you just got to run with it. That was the point that Alan made, and he helped us really liberate that in ourselves. And the thing that's been really cool that's been our experience is that it really resonates with the customers that we have, and the customers that we want to have. If someone doesn't really latch on to the whole Honeybadger idea, if they're repulsed by that or they find it unprofessional or whatever, it's like, okay, well you're probably not the best customer for us.
Justin: Yeah. But wait a second. How many customer service messages are you getting that say, "I'm repulsed by this"?
Ben: Last count I think it was zero.
Josh: We should have a survey or something in app, like "Are you repulsed by this?" We got the Right Message thing on the website. We could make that a question.
Justin: I think most people would say that's the wrong customer.
Ben: But we do have a lot of people saying, "It really resonated with me. I really like what you guys are doing. I want to support you." That's been a lot of fun.
Justin: Especially for, I'm imagining that a lot of folks are... the purchase cycle starts with the developer who's saying I want to use this. They're advocating for you. So I think having some fun in your messaging makes sense, because that's what's going to stand out for a developer who's working on stuff. There's a lot of boring companies out there, so if you're interesting at all, maybe they advocate for you.
Josh: Exactly. Yeah.
Ben: Right.
Josh: Yeah, we've specifically chosen to... That really is... A developer is our, is the person we're always talking to versus... And that's something that does set us apart from our competitors, because they're very into the enterprise, they have a lot of VC funding, and they've got enterprise salespeople. That's where all their money is. That's what they're going after, so they don't have the ability to speak to developers quite like we do.
Justin: Yeah, I've got questions about that. Do you have specifically things you want to talk about?
Josh: Well, yeah. So, no, this is great. This is really great, because I think this actually ties into why I actually asked you to come talk to us today, because I caught... I forget... I think the name of the episode on Build Your SaaS was "should you build an audience first", but it was like you had an interview with... What was the other name of the podcast that you were interviewed on? I'm blanking out right now.
Justin: Can you build an audience first? Oh, this was... Oh, yeah, it was on the Product Journey podcast.
Josh: Product Journey. Yeah. So I caught that episode. It was really interesting to me. I know you've talked a lot about the whole the myth of the niche market a lot. I think I missed some of that conversation, so forgive me if we're rehashing old Twitter debates or something. But I thought that was really interesting, especially considering with Honeybadger we kind of chose a niche early on, which was obviously within web developers. We launched only for Rails. I think that there's some nuance there. I know that your position is kind of like you think it could be bad advice potentially to choose a niche when you're just starting out. I think there's probably some nuance in there, but I just thought we could maybe get into that a little bit, and kind of hash it out.
Justin: Yeah. My favorite topic. People getting sick of it. I think, first of all, the challenge in saying anything in public, or even just trying to figure things out in public is that people might take my line of thinking from three months ago, and then hold onto that forever. And I've tried to say this over and over again, on Twitter especially. I treat Twitter like a comedian treats testing out material at a local club. I'm just going there and I'm testing things out, and definitely some of what I want is people to respond back with challenges to those thoughts. And it's like now there's almost this expectation that every thought you ever express publicly has to be fully formed and rock solid. You have to be willing to defend it till the day you die, and it's maddening to me.
Justin: So the flip side is something that annoys me even more, which is I'll have thought about this and hashed it out in public forever, and then I'll do this well researched article that took me weeks to think about and years to process, and I'll finally put it all down on paper and it's sourced. And then somebody will just say, "Well, that's dumb." Or, "That's wrong." Okay, well. At least give me something. Write a fully formed piece in rebuttal instead of just saying, "Well, that's dumb, or you're just after attention." Or something like... It's silly.
Josh: Yeah, that's super frustrating.
Justin: I think there is nuance to this. Part of it is semantics. What do you consider to be a niche? I'll tell you what I've seen happen that I think people should be wary of, which is, for them a niche means a small, tiny, little group of people where there isn't a lot of other competitors. So they'll say, "Well, no one is competing in this little market here, so that must mean it's a good thing to go after, because I have no competition." Or even Kevin Kelly's idea of 1000 true fans. To me, when you really think about it, because his line of reasoning in that blog post... If you haven't read it, it's a famous internet essay... is that there are billions of people on the planet and therefore any kind of category or interest group you can think of, you can find 1000 true fans, which he defines as 1000 people who can support the work you do financially.
Josh: Right.
Justin: To me, that's just a silly line of thinking. One, because what kind of math are we using here? Are we using every man, woman, and child on the planet? Because that cuts down your billions. Are these interest groups irrespective of country and culture and economic situation? There's all sorts of ways you can slice this. In practice, and sorry I'll just go to the side here. There's also a famous John Gruber and Merlin Mann talk at South by Southwest where they say, "Don't create a site about Star Wars. Create a site about that one Jawa in that one scene." To which, I've always gone like, "Are you crazy?" Nobody cares about that one Jawa. Sure, create a site about that, but it's not like there's all this pent up demand for that one scene with that one Jawa. That's just ridiculous.
Josh: A few people care about it maybe, and you might have a lot in common with them, but are they going to keep you afloat for-
Justin: That's right. Are they going to support a business? And this is the challenge, is that obviously there's multiple vectors to this, and this is just kind of ground zero, which is are you focused on a group of people where there's enough of them, enough purchase frequency, enough purchase price, and enough actual activity going on in this market that you think you could have a business? One realization I've had lately that kind of messes up this conversation about niche is people will say, "Well we focused on Ruby on Rails developers and that's a niche, so therefore..." One thing I've realized as I've thought about this a lot is that web developers or even just programmers in general is the most uncharacteristic market there is in the world. There's no other market like developers, and I mean this in a good way, in that... The joke used to be that programmers don't pay for things. That is such bullshit. Programmers are some of the most highly-
Josh: They pay for everything.
Justin: Highly paid people on the planet. They are always buying new tools. They are always paying for their education. They are highly incentivized to be better at what they do. All of their political capital in an organization is about what they suggest. Programmers as an example of how niche markets can work, I think, is uncharacteristic. You're not going to get that same benefit with shepherds. There's no market like programmers. It's just very uncharacteristic right now, and by the way, if artificial intelligence really does take over, let's say in 25 years, takes over most programming, that will become a bad market, because there'll be way less people who...
Justin: It's just like we've seen these waves before. Anyway, I'll stop talking.
Josh: I think programmers, they won't pay for dumb things usually. But when it comes to something, at least me personally, if it comes to something that will demonstrably increase my productivity or my ability to do what I do better, I will buy it in a heartbeat. It's a no-brainer to me. I don't know. Maybe that's part of developers are always optimizing, looking for opportunities to optimize in the first place, but I don't know.
Justin: Yeah, and there's some things that programmers, like any group, won't pay for. Certainly, you could do far worse than choosing a technical audience for your product or service or educational product or whatever. It's a good market. So I think some of the challenge is, especially for new entrepreneurs, is we set up these examples of, well, Adam Wathan released this course and did amazing with it, and so you can take this to any group in the world and have similar results, because Adam chose a niche of Laravel developers that care about test driven development. You have to take every characteristic of that market. You can't just say, well, it's the fact that it is somewhat... That you're positioning it for this... Like the contours-
Josh: To be fair, most Laravel developers care about test driven development to some extent. There's not ever... I assume there's not a huge group of Laravel developers that just despise test driven development and would never buy a course about test driven development.
Justin: Yes, but I think the counterpoint is that in other adjacent groups there may be something similar where people care about it but don't have the same incentives to pay for it. Going back to my shepherd example, this is going to get bad, but maybe there's a proper way to shear your sheep or I don't know, but they might not have the same incentives or the same ability to pay or the same economics that rule their lives. So there's tons of nuance to this. In the original post that I posted, it was kind of attacking this idea that because the internet is huge and there are billions of people, any niche will do. That's not good advice, and just saying... And even there's these truisms that get thrown around that I just do not find helpful at all, like the riches is in the niches.
Josh: I hadn't heard that one, but that's amazing.
Ben: I think some of the nuance there is maybe some confusion about making your product versus marketing your product. If you make your product that only shepherds can use it, let's just roll with those shepherds, obviously that's a very limited market. But if you made a product, let's say like scissors or shears, and oh, by the way, shepherds could use these shears. Maybe camel herders as well. Maybe your initial marketing is just the shepherds with the idea that I'm going to make some noise in this smaller group, like Seth will tell us. Market to people like us who do things like this. You get that small audience where you can actually make some noise, and then you can take it to the next adjacent audience and the next one. Even though our marketing for Honeybadger started out with the Rails people and we tailor the product very much for Rails people in the early days, it wasn't like it was only applicable to Rails developers.
Ben: Any web developer, any software developer, which is a very big market, could use it. So there's a difference between building your product for a very small group of people, and depending on 1000 life fans versus just marketing to that group initially.
Justin: Yeah.
Josh: So this is kind of, this is like my secret agenda all along. Part of the nuance I think in this discussion might be positioning versus actual market. I don't know. I feel like that can get kind of confusing a little bit, because if we're talking about... Like Ben said, shepherds is a defined... there's only X numbers of shepherds. But there's tons of people who use scissors.
Justin: Yes. Again, I could be wrong. I'm just some idiot on the internet. What do I know? But in my experience so much of a business's success actually gets decided in the first 1% of the company, which is when you decide who is this for and what is this for? So in my early 20s, I started a skateboard and snowboard shop, and immediately I am now in the skateboard and snowboard market. And there are characteristics about that market that define and cap how well you're going to do. It defines your margins, it defines your customers, it defines who your competitors are. It defines everything. It defines how you're going to ride the waves of the economy, and I think... And I got my degree in business. These are things that never got taught to me, and I still think these are things that people just brush over, which is, "I'm going to choose this group because I like them, or I'm going to choose this group because of whatever metric we use."
Justin: To me, I say you should choose that group because there's evidence that there's a lot of economic activity going on in there, and you feel reasonably confident that you could capture some of that economic activity. That's the process that you have to think about. That 1% or 10% is going to define everything else that comes after that. It's kind of like, you mentioned positioning. I think it's kind of like skiing. So if you are on a flat slope, you can position your skis however you want. You can point them right, you can point them left, you can do a pizza. You can do whatever you want. You can go backwards. You're not going to move, because you're flat. If you have a steep slope, you're going to move a lot faster, and then positioning matters quite a bit, because that's how you're attacking the slope.
Justin: I think business is like that. Now I'm kind of glad that I don't have a slope as steep as Peldi did when he started Balsamiq. That sounded crazy. Too much slope, too steep, going too fast. But I can say Transistor's slope is a lot better than things I've tried in the past, and wow, do things get easier when you're... If you've ever taught somebody how to ski, if they're going too slow, it's actually harder. You need some sort of slope there to even be like, "Well, okay, now you're going to lean this way."
Josh: So you can gradually get into it as you learn. Yeah.
Justin: I just feel like not enough people are talking about that. What slope are you choosing? Is there any evidence that there is a slope there that you could actually ride? Because all of the stuff we add later, which is positioning, which is like tools, that's like your ski gear and all that stuff, all of that matters, but it only matters once you're moving. In the beginning, it seems like the most important decision you make is what market am I going to target?
Ben: I think that's excellent. I 100% agree. I have a friend of mine who, as an entrepreneur, whenever he's looking for ideas, he's always looking for is there a marketplace where people are spending money on this thing already? If there isn't then I'm not interested, because I don't have the resources to make a market.
Justin: Yes.
Ben: But I do have the resources to carve out a segment of an existing market.
Justin: Yeah. Exactly. I'm just digging into this. There's probably smarter people than me that know about this, but I'm really interested in how markets get created, because so far I've just focused on is the slope there or is it not? But then there's this also interesting thing of what creates those slopes in the first place? I've used the surfing analogy as well. We can't just be winter specific here. What creates those waves that you can then paddle out to and then try to ride? I think, from what I can tell, as I investigate the big waves like the internet, automobiles, kind of things people often bring up to me when they're like, "Yeah, but what about the light bulb?" A lot of those things are actually the result of government and academic investment.
Justin: So the internet is nothing without the U.S. military and is nothing without millions and maybe billions of dollars in research grants. The internet is a huge wave, but it wasn't an entrepreneur that created that wave. Henry Ford did not create the automobile wave. What created the automobile wave is a bunch of things, but maybe the U.S. Interstate Highway Act where the government funded 90% of the cost of construction had something to do with Henry Ford having this big wave to ride. I think there's this capitalist idea that it's like, "No, it's us entrepreneurs that are creating all.." I don't think entrepreneurs in most case create the demand. I think we find demand.
Josh: You're saying we're kind of riding larger economic trends, basically.
Justin: That's right. I think the waves get created by things bigger than us, and maybe once you get to scale, maybe at Apple scale or Amazon scale, but that's my other point. We're not even close to that.
Josh: Yeah, it's pretty crazy how different things are for small business. We're small businesses, basically.
Justin: And the difference between a business at our size... So Amazon's revenue was $70 billion in 2019. So I'm just going to put... I think Transistor's annual revenue right now is around $500,000. What's 500,000 divided by a billion?
Ben: It's like our annual revenue is Amazon's toilet paper budget for the year.
Justin: Yes. I had that thought. I visited the Spotify headquarters in New York, and I was like waiting... First of all, that's crazy, like they have a security desk downstairs. I'm just this Canadian from the sticks, and I'm like, "What the hell?" Go up this elevator, and then there's another waiting room where you sign in and wait for the people you're going to talk to. It has a coffee bar and it overlooks the New York harbor. My eyes are just like, "What the heck?" And then I went to the bathroom, and it's like they have all these bathrooms. And they have all of these startup amenities like mouthwash and everything. And I was looking around and thinking, "How much does it cost to stock these bathrooms every month? It's probably just as much as Transistor was making."
Josh: Yeah.
Justin: I think that's... It's interesting to think about. Yeah, so the point being... Oh, my God. I just did 500,000... Oh, wait, I did 70 billion divided by 500,000, right? Is that what, yeah.
Josh: Yeah, I think so.
Justin: Divided by 500,000. Amazon's annual revenue is 140,000 times our annual revenue. The scale of these companies is crazy, and so the idea that us little bootstrappers would take any advice from Jeff Bezos, is like why are you even... Don't read his book. Don't ever quote him. Why are we quoting... I quote Steve Jobs all the time, but Steve Jobs, he's in a different universe. He's not even on the same planet.
Josh: Yeah, and there are people who start businesses that aspire to that, that are trying to build the next Amazon, but then there's people... I don't think that's... We are not trying to build the next Amazon, and a lot of us in the bootstrapping world are not.
Justin: And again, I'm still not convinced, as far as I can tell, those companies are still riding waves at their scale as well.
Josh: Right.
Justin: Maybe they can create some demand, but even the iPhone, which people always hold up as this super, this big innovation, I mean, there was lots of things in the long line leading up to the iPhone. There are many things. And there's also this idea that we're always building on top of something else that you can't just build demand off of nothing.
Josh: Right. Well, a lot of the demand for the problems that the iPhone eventually solved weren't possible until the iPhone existed too. It ended up doing a lot of things that they didn't even foresee when they created it.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Some of that just happens as things get into motion. But I mean, I had apps on my PalmPilot. I had a word processor that I could download off a app store on my PalmPilot when I was going to college in the early 2000s. So these ideas were already in motion. They build on that momentum and it just keeps going. I think for folks that are building... And I guess now the challenge for Honeybadger and for Transistor is... I also have this theory that there are natural limits to every market, meaning there are walls or contours. So you kind of grow to whatever the limits of the market are, and then you stop and then you grow slowly. Have you guys experienced that as well?
Ben: Yep.
Josh: We have, yeah. I was going to ask, and this probably is a lead into that, like when you talk about the slope and you might be going in a direction skiing down this slope, but you have the ability to change directions. For us, we started out, we only supported Rails and Rails developers were our market, but we eventually did reach limits to that where we weren't growing as fast as we wanted to grow. We had to go and look for how do we broaden the market that we can serve basically. And because our broader market was still web developers and we do something that is still general to all of them, of course we could go add support for Laravel, or go into numerous markets that existed within this large market that were all open to us.
Josh: I think where I still... I want to say I still... Like the niche advise holds up is that early on, I think it was a good idea for us to launch for Rails developers. It was who we are. We know them intrinsically. There's nuance in every development community, so you can't sell the same thing in the same way to everyone. And like you said, we probably didn't even have the ability to launch something that was going to appeal to every single type of developer out there, and I don't even know if that's even possible. Even now, there's always going to be... there's going to be a development group that just doesn't get it.
Justin: Yes, and I mean, this is another... So I agree with you, by the way. I like Tyler Tringas's definition of niche after we've argued about this a lot, he says when he uses the word niche, he uses it in the ecological sense, meaning roughly sufficiently specialized to the point of acquiring a comparative advantage, rather than simply meaning small.
Josh: Nice. Okay. Yeah.
Justin: I think there's something about that that can be helpful. Again, we got to be careful, because it really depends on what you're trying to do, in that in some cases maybe you do get started better if you focus on this specialized group and it gives you comparative advantage. For Transistor, the opposite happened, is we started saying, "Okay, we got to specialize. We got to say this is who this is for." And I was getting tons of DMs from paying customers that say, "By the way, that messaging on your home page where you say you're just for businesses kind of threw me off. I almost didn't sign up." Now that we have about 2000 customers, I can see, okay, wow. We were really off.
Justin: Yes, we have businesses, but really, Transistor is much more aligned around the job to be done, which is, I just want somewhere to host my podcast. Podcast hosting, that's what I'm searching. I'm not searching podcast hosting for... And this is another, I think, nuance about the software development market, is that, yeah, often you are looking for error monitoring for Rails apps. But there are some markets where you're just looking for engagement rings. That's all I care about. I don't want engagement rings for Canadians. I don't want engagement rings for people who are 5'8. I'm just looking for engagement rings. I'm sure there's exceptions to that, but I'm just saying in the mass... if you really want to target the market, sometimes adding on this qualifier can be a disadvantage.
Justin: But I do think that for some products, or maybe even all products, I don't know, this is where you have to know the group targeting. Sometimes there's an advantage to really narrowing your focus and saying this is the specialized group of people like us that we're going to focus on. There are other advantages too. It's not like that's the only one that exists. Again, there's so many different vectors to business, and-
Josh: That's the thing. We only did this one way, so we only have experience of how it worked out for us. I'm not married to this idea at all. I don't know what it would've been like if we had targeted the entire market and still been appealing to Rails developers, but just because I don't have that experience.
Ben: I think, too, you have to consider the maturity of the market, right? Because if you launched a HR tool today, a tool for recruiters, there are gazillions of recruiting tools out there right now. It's going to be hard to grab a significant portion of that market without doing something pretty remarkable. But if you're launching a podcast hosting platform in 2019 when podcasting is on the rise in a big way, and the market is relatively new, it's easier to capture a broader segment of that market with a broad message. You don't have to say it's just for shepherds. You can say it's for everyone podcasting, because it's growing so quickly. I think that's definitely a consideration as well.
Justin: Yeah, and also, remember, some of those big mature markets, all markets go in cycles. So some of those big, mature, competitive markets, all of the players are super old and crusty, and all it takes is a newcomer to come in. I mean, look at Superhuman. To me, that is ridiculous that someone comes in with a new email client in 2018 or whenever they came out. You can stand out in some of those markets. The common advice is like, "Oh, no. Don't go into those markets. Microsoft's got it all wrapped up." Maybe you shouldn't, like for example, I think project management, that market is very difficult right now. Lots of big players who are quite entrenched. The market itself is difficult you have to convince a whole team to buy, as opposed to just one person.
Josh: And literally everyone's building one, too. I've built a project management system. Most of my friends have.
Justin: Yeah. They're very opinionated, people-
Josh: They're all different.
Justin: Yeah. So you've got to do some research. I've had some podcasts where people are like, "Well, give me an example of another good market you should pursue." It's not that easy. If it was easy, I would just be betting on the stock market all the time. It's difficult, and so much of it has to do with your entire journey, what brought you here today, and what position you are, and what you can see from your vantage point. I've been podcasting since 2012, and I could see a lot of things that a lot of other people maybe couldn't see, and that helped. There's other things that happened there too. I built up a bunch of connections. There's a bunch of people who knew me. There's a bunch of people who I knew. There's all of these kind of characteristics that you bring to the slope, and maybe I was geared up better than some other folks.
Justin: Because that's the other kind of pushback I get is, well, it can't just be the market. Obviously, something else, there's other things that matter. I'm like, of course. Let's build a foundation here. Okay, first you choose a slope. Okay, and then you show up in jeans and T-shirt. Okay, that's not going to work here. You're going to need a ski outfit. Okay, go back and get a ski outfit, and then you come back and you've got little snow blades. I'm like, no. That's not going to work either. We're skiing powder today. Go back again. And if you've been skiing since you were three and you show up that day, and it's a super steep slope, and someone else shows up and they've only been skiing for two days, yeah, you're going to kick their ass. That is how it works, right? And that's how business works.
Justin: So yes, the slope matters, but after that... There's also this... We're not all going to make it.
Josh: Yeah, I was going to say I've always had this sneaking suspicion that we were just super lucky with Honeybadger. Like maybe that's the reason that we're here, is that we just happened to do this at the right time, and there's demand.
Ben: There's definitely a right place, right time aspect. There's no question that that plays a part, but I think the preparation's also there. We had been Rails developers for nearly 10 years at that point. We saw a lot of the things like Justin's talking about. I think that's definitely a factor that should go into your selection for what you want to work on. What am I prepared to do? And oh, by the way, I'm not going to hobble myself by picking a market that's too small to actually make an impact in my life as I'm trying to make a business that supports me.
Justin: Yeah, actually, and what am I prepared to do, and what have I been preparing for, I think are the two things you want to think about.
Josh: Yeah, well, and the other thing like... When we started Honeybadger, everyone was mad at Airbrake for not working right and stuff. Most of our customers were developers who were frustrated with Airbrake, which is what we were. But they didn't go out and start an error tracking service, even though a lot of them were in the same position as we were, had all the same foundation, maybe even had better network. I'm sure we had an initial customer that had a better network and Twitter following and everything than we did at the time. But we were the ones who went out and did it, so now we're the ones who have a business today-
Justin: Exactly.
Josh: -because the demand existed.
Justin: Well, just picture in your mind all those surfers out there in the ocean just waiting for waves, and it's a big group. There's hundreds of them, and every once in a while, a wave will come along and the surfer has to make a decision. Am I going to go after that wave? And sometimes you choose the right wave, and sometimes you choose the wrong wave. Sometimes you choose the right wave, but there's so many other people going for that wave it doesn't work out. They kick you off your board or whatever. Or sometimes you just do everything right and you still just slip. There's all sorts of potential there. I mean, even sometimes you can ride... See, it's hard to ride a bad wave. That's the thing.
Justin: But yeah, you could have a bunch of people sitting around looking for waves to ride and they miss a good one. That happens all the time.
Ben: If you pick too small of a wave then you're not going to have much fun.
Justin: That's right. That's right. That's where the metaphor works.
Josh: Nice. Well, I don't know if we're... have we run this metaphor into the ground yet, or I guess into the shore?
Ben: We got to get some shepherds on their boards.
Josh: Get some shepherds on the boards. Maybe we could talk about a swimming pool next time.
Justin: I'm glad you brought it up though, because every time I have this discussion, my thinking gets moved forward a bit, and I get nudged forward. The whole reason I talk about it is because if we're going to even have podcasts like FounderQuest or Build Your SaaS, or we're going to have conferences like MicroConf, if we're going to be discussing this, the whole idea is we're trying to help people not make mistakes. That's Rob and Mike's intro, "So you don't make the same mistakes we did." This advice is mostly for folks who are starting something new, but still applies to us.
Justin: Again, if we go back to the skiing metaphor, there's this run at our mountain here where you're going down this slope, and then it splits. You can either go down this black diamond or double black diamond, and depending on the conditions that day, you have a choice. Am I going to go that way or that way? You can also... I've gotten myself into places where it's super flat and I have to dig myself out and it takes forever. So even once you're going, there's these decisions, and I feel like that's where I need help these days is figuring out, okay, things are starting to slow down. What do we do now? Yeah, there's still things that can happen while you're in motion that are market related, that are just like...
Justin: I mean, that's what I think about all the time. Maybe podcasting is just here for a couple years, and then it's going to be gone and what do we do then?
Josh: Yeah, we think about that too.
Justin: That's the part... Well, that's good to know.
Josh: Not podcasting, not podcasting. But we have the fear. Is it just a passing thing or... We're still kind of pinching ourselves a little bit. I think you've maybe used that...
Ben: We share your feeling. We still wake up like, "Is it all going to be gone tomorrow?"
Josh: It's been eight years.
Justin: Eight years of that anxiety. That's the other thing is like-
Josh: It gets a little better. I mean, to be fair.
Ben: It gets a little better.
Josh: It gets a little better, to give you some hope.
Justin: Yeah, I guess once you have... That's the other challenge-
Josh: You get used to it.
Justin: -is that once you have more years of data, then you can at least... Most things don't drop off suddenly. Most things have a gradual slope up, or a gradual slope down, or an up or down or whatever. And yeah, we just don't have enough data right now to know. We've got two years of data, and I think I'll feel better when I get to year three or four or five, or whatever. But I can see that the, what do you call that? Temptation to sell, because we actually had an offer just a couple weeks ago. We're still, like I said, we're over 500K in ARR, but if you think of the multiples of that, they're not great.
Josh: But that's in two years, right?
Justin: Yeah. But if you get a three times multiple, you can do the math, and that would be split between two people. So 1.5 million split between two people is not a great payout, but you can see why people sell, because there's always this nagging thought of... It's very much like poker.
Ben: Exactly.
Justin: Do I-
Ben: Do I let it ride?
Justin: Do I let it ride? And when do I cash out my chips? We've all been in those games where you cashed out too late. I mean, I think we're still too early to sell, but I can understand. I used to kind of judge people that sold with a 37signals piousness. Like, "Oh. Way to go." But I totally get it.
Ben: We've had the conversation a few times. The first time, the first opportunity, we felt the same way. It was just too early. We felt like we haven't shown yet whether or not we can actually do this, and we want to find out if we can do this. So, later opportunities came along and it was like, okay, the payout isn't exactly what we would like, the revenue, doesn't give us a multiple that we can just sail off into the sunset forever, but the same time, this could all disappear tomorrow.
Justin: Yeah.
Josh: And by now, we have a pretty good idea of what it will take to get it to the next level too, whereas before we didn't know half as much as we know now.
Justin: I mean, from my perspective, from an outside perspective, podcasting definitely feels like a more fragile market, because the medium is always changing. A lot of our customers are aspirational, like they aspirationally want to have a podcast, and as you folks know, it's hard recording something that's good every week. Error tracking and error monitoring, to me, that just seems like that's only got to increase.
Josh: As the number of programs in the world.
Justin: Yes, and actually this is the way I like to think about it is how many people are going to be lined up tomorrow waiting for the Honeybadger store to open up so that they can buy error tracking? And in my mind, I'm like, of course, tomorrow there's going to be some boss that says, "Hey, we got to get some error tracking, and we want something that works with Slack." So they just like da-da-da-da, and they're lined up at your door waiting for you to open up for the day, so that they can get error tracking. I like that image as well, because it gives me this picture of, we've all been in a coffee shop line up, and you're like, "Man, this line up happened today, and happened yesterday, and the day before, and the day before." Every single day there's people that wake up all over the world and go order a cup of coffee. That's probably not going to change.
Justin: I think you folks are in a good place. Maybe I should invest.
Josh: Speaking of, ever since Jason Fried at last MicroConf was talking about, we've been dropping subtle hints to Jeff Bezos, or other Jeffs out there. Maybe you're our Jeff. If anyone wants to take some money off the table for us with no strings attached, we can kind of just pad our bank accounts so we eliminate some of that risk, we're all ears.
Ben: Yeah. We're open.
Justin: That doesn't seem to happen very often, does it?
Josh: No.
Ben: Well, Justin, it's been a lot of fun.
Justin: Yeah, sorry. I hope we didn't go too long.
Ben: No, it's good.
Josh: No, I think it's good.
Justin: We're at one hour and two minutes, 23 seconds. Yeah, no, this is-
Josh: No, it's lots of good stuff.
Justin: -this is great. Thanks for being here. I mean, I'm glad to be here.
Ben: Thanks to-
Josh: We're glad you're here too. Cool. So I think we need to ask our FounderQuest listeners to, if you like this episode or you like FounderQuest, or if you like Justin, then go and rate. If you like Justin, go on iTunes or wherever your podcasting, wherever you listen and rate us nicely, or leave a nice review.
Ben: And of course check out Transistor.fm where we host FounderQuest, because it is awesome just like Justin is awesome.
Josh: Please start your own podcast if you're starting a bootstrap company. Start your own podcast and use Transistor to do it.
Justin: Yeah, there's so many other founder things you could add, like founder adventure, founder journey, founder...
Ben: Just take that and run with it.
Josh: If you want to just do a generator in the app, you can just generate your name and founder whatever.
Ben: Shepherd founder.
Josh: Roll the dice.
Justin: Lots of options.
Josh: Founder surfer. Cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Justin, and we'll link you up and everything else in the show notes. Yeah, it's been great chatting.
Ben: Thanks.
Josh: Cool.
Ben: Catch you later.
Justin: All right.
This week Josh reveals his super secret project that he's been working on and it will...BLOW...YOU...AWAY!!! Just kidding, you and your surroundings are most likely safe but it's pretty darn cool! Want more? The Founders get contrarian and talk about why they sometimes go to the trouble of building tools instead of buying ones that are readily available. They also make a case for using separate apps rather than an all-in-one solution. Ancient viral video fans rejoice and get ready for some reminiscing about The Hamster Dance and The Badger Song.
Show Notes
Links:
Badger Badger Badger
Hamster Dance
Intercom
Help Scout
Zoho
Unix
Segment
Josh Pigford
Baremetrics
Haskell
Kramer Sounds
SQL
PostgresSQL
Hey Ya (song)
Write For Us
Full Transcription:
Josh: Should we have to all say 'Badgers when we clap instead of just you, like we all say it?
Ben: Yes, but in different languages.
Starr: Yeah, and it's all going to come back in slightly different line times. So it's just going to be like 'Badgers, 'Badgers, 'Badgers.
Ben: Mushroom, mushroom, mushroom.
Josh: Mushroom, mushroom. Nice.
Starr: That was... What was that from? That was from an ancient meme, wasn't it?
Ben: Yeah, it was a video.
Josh: Badger, badger, badger-
Ben: Badger, badger, badger, mushroom, mushroom.
Starr: Oh! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. I was totally referencing that. I was totally referencing that, guys. So have you guys heard the song Raining Tacos?
Ben: Nope.
Josh: Mm-mm (negative).
Starr: Because my little girl is super into it, and it's a song about it raining tacos. I think it's new, but it's a very old school internet type song.
Josh: I haven't heard that one.
Ben: Have you shown Ida hamster dance?
Starr: No, I don't know what you're talking about. What's that?
Ben: You've got to check it out. You've got to check it out.
Starr: Hamster dance?
Ben: I don't even want to spoil the surprise.
Starr: Okay. I'll write it down.
Josh: Everyone should check it out.
Ben: It is like the original internet video meme song catchy thing.
Josh: Viral video. Viral song.
Starr: Okay, I probably seen it, but... Yeah, I probably seen it, but all the new viral content has pushed out the old viral content. It's like a stack that just overflows. It's like a stack overflow.
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: They should name a website that.
Ben: So deep.
Josh: My question is do we actually want to check out any of these videos, because it'll be stuck in our head and our kids won't shut up about them?
Starr: No, probably not.
Ben: Come on, Josh.
Josh: Is this like the ultimate troll, Ben?
Ben: You're spoiling the surprise.
Josh: Is it like Baby Shark or whatever?
Starr: Yeah, this is funny. So it was Ida's birthday the other day and-
Josh: Nice. Happy Birthday, Ida.
Starr: Yeah. So we did her birthday party, and we gave her her CD player, and I got her a couple CDs. She's got like four favorite songs, and they're all wildly eclectic. So we got her a Jewel CD, because she likes Jewel's rendition of Twinkle Twinkle. And we got her a Bob Marley CD, because she really likes a Bob Marley song, and some weird country western CD because it's got a Rudolph Red Nose Reindeer on it that she really liked. And what was the last one? Oh, yeah. The Wiggles, just for fun. Yeah, so yesterday... So I was very strategic about this, because kids birthday parties are chaos. So I was like, "Let's open the CD player first. You get one CD, the Jewel CD, which is super mellow." So I was like, "Why don't we just play this while we open the rest of your presents." So we had this super mellow acoustic music playing, and it made it a little bit more chill. I don't know.
Josh: Did you have a lot of kids there or was it manageable number?
Starr: There were no kids.
Josh: Oh, okay. I was going to say.
Starr: She had her party at daycare-
Josh: Okay.
Starr: -and then at home we just did it with... because all of her friends were at daycare, so at home we just did-
Josh: That's genius, actually.
Starr: -an adult thing. By adult, I mean her parents and her aunt, and that's it. And then 1000 phones on FaceTime. A complete camera crew.
Josh: Well, good for you. I've never been... I don't know. The whole invite 50 parents to your house from school or whatever thing terrifies me.
Starr: Yeah, that's why we were like no we're not going to...
Josh: Yeah, I don't think I'll ever do that.
Starr: So what are we actually going to talk about, guys?
Josh: Yeah. I mean, I don't really care what we talk about. I don't mind if we talk about Heya, really. Yeah. I don't know.
Starr: So is Heya public at this point?
Josh: No, it's not. It's still private. We haven't actually talked about it.
Starr: So are we editing all this out?
Josh: I don't know.
Ben: I guess one question is are we ready to talk about Heya publicly yet?
Josh: Yeah, I mean, I don't care. I don't think like... I don't really... I wasn't going to make a big announcement of it anyway. I don't know. I've just been working on it.
Starr: Personally, I'm fine with just letting things drop. It's not like we're a public company and our stock price depends on things being released in a certain way. I don't think if... I think if we decide to just drop the project and not do anything all of a sudden again, I don't think anybody is going to really care or fault us or anything.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: Okay. Let's talk about it.
Josh: I was going to say I haven't decided the license yet. So-
Ben: Let's talk about that.
Josh: -that's the main reason why it's not public.
Starr: Yeah. We could give a disclaimer and be like everything is tentative and nothing's real.
Ben: These are forward looking statements. Please do not make your investments based on the things we discuss in our podcast.
Josh: Yeah, don't by Honeybadger stock based on anything we're saying here.
Ben: Right.
Starr: So-
Ben: Yeah, let's talk about that.
Starr: This is like one of those... So this could be like one of those movies where half of it takes place in a alternate universe.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: So this could be the alternate universe Founder Quest where we talk about this thing that Josh has been working on, or it could be your just mundane universe Founder Quest, in which just nothing's going on. We're just petting puppies, and drinking lattes over here.
Josh: You never know which is which.
Ben: Let's just go for radical transparency. Let's talk about it, and-
Starr: I'm into it. Honestly, I can't keep track of things that I'm not supposed to talk about, like I'll forget. All right, so I guess all that stays in, right?
Ben: Maybe.
Starr: Mostly?
Josh: If it does, this is the longest build up to I don't know.
Starr: Okay, that's fine.
Starr: Let's do a clean break just in case. I have no idea how they're going to edit this, since I'm not editing it anymore, but let's give them a clean break. So what are we going to be talking about today, guys?
Ben: I think we're going to be talking about Heya.
Starr: What's Heya? I don't know what you're talking about.
Josh: Heya's my super secret December... Well, it's longer than December, but I worked on it in December as my side project. Yeah, I don't know. It's a thing that we've thought about a lot over the last year or so, and it's something that we've wanted to play around with and try. So I've been working on it. I don't know if it's going to fly yet or not. We haven't actually started using it. But it's a little software project, and we can discuss what it does.
Starr: I know we've had some pain points around our communication tools that we use to communicate with our customers.
Josh: Yeah. I think we've talked about our frustration with Intercom a little bit on this podcast, as I recall.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: I know... I'm trying to remember when this story would begin, because I know, Ben, you've got a lot of opinions about this too. And it's something that, I guess all three of us, but Ben and I especially have been ranting about for some time now.
Starr: Yeah. It was the Winter of 1997.
Ben: A very cold year, and I do have opinions. That's for sure. Yeah, I think we've talked about it, but it doesn't hurt to talk about some more, like how we hate the world. Specifically, spending money that we feel is not being well spent, and that's where we are with Intercom. So we've used Intercom for quite a while. We moved to Intercom from Help Scout when we wanted to have some chat functionality as part of our customer support.
Starr: So just in case people don't know, what exactly do Intercom and Help Scout do?
Ben: They help you have relationships with your customers by receiving inbound requests. In the case of Help Scout, that's primarily what it does. But also sending out communication to your customers, and Intercom has been very strong about that and Help Scout has actually picked up some of that lately.
Starr: Okay. So when somebody goes to a specific page where they sign up for a upgrade or something, you can trigger a message that gets sent out to people. That sort of thing.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah, and they all do different things. They handle different aspects of the customer communication life cycle, except for Intercom, which kind of tries to do it all. That's one reason that it's probably so expensive, but it's also another reason why I think that... It does a lot of things, and I think any product that tries to do everything isn't going to make everyone happy. So I think we fall into the camp of it does what we need but for too much money, and it doesn't make us very happy to use it.
Starr: I don't know about you, Josh, but I'm a happy Zoho CRM user.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: I also use Zoho writer, and Zoho babysitter.
Josh: Zoho desktop.
Starr: Zoho, they come twice a week and clean out my house.
Josh: Yard service.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: I heart Zoho. So we did move to Help Scout, back to Help Scout from Intercom several months ago. Josh did that for us, because we were not too happy with how Intercom was handling our inbound requests from customers, like support requests. That's been great. But we still have been hanging on to Intercom for outbound messaging. So particularly for life cycle messaging, like Josh mentioned. So when someone signs up, we send them an email. When someone maybe takes too long to install our client, we send them an email giving them a little nudge saying, "Hey, we see you haven't done X. Please go do X." And other automated sequence emails like that. So we're still using Intercom for that, and we're kind of to the point where we're frustrated and ready to stop spending as much money on Intercom just for that one feature.
Josh: Well, and the other thing... There's two things. So that's one of them. The other thing we use them for still is our broadcasts to customers. That's where you might think that, well, if you moved your support out of Intercom, and now if you're just using it for onboarding emails, you don't need to have tens of thousands of users in there necessarily. But for broadcast you do, because you need to be able to email everyone when you want to, or segments of people. And of course, Intercom, the pricing is based on how many users you have, so we're still... We're basically still spending the same amount of money on Intercom and paying for Help Scout now. And we're just trying to figure out how to untangle this whole mess so that we can have a single tool for each purpose basically.
Starr: Yeah, so broadcasts are like, it's like a mailing list, right? It's like the sort of thing that-
Josh: Just a mass email.
Ben: Like Mailchimp.
Starr: Yeah, like Mailchimp. But we used Mailchimp at one point for this.
Ben: Yeah, we did.
Josh: Well, we did and we used... We currently use ConvertKit for our marketing email. About a year ago, we had been talking about building some sort of Intercom replacement or killer or something like that that's going to solve the Intercom and the email marketing problem for us, and do everything in one tool and basically combine email marketing and customer lists somehow. And I think over the course of those discussions, I learned how bad of an idea that really is and went the opposite direction of where I'd really like to separate more features, even in Intercom, and have more single purpose type things.
Starr: A Unix philosophy for customer messaging.
Josh: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. One of the problems with that, though, is especially if you're going to build a SaaS, like some sort of centralized tool that is going to do this, is the user database, because all of these things need to have access to your users and access to the information you use to create segments of people for various purposes, whether it's for emailing them directly through a broadcast, or if it's sending automated sequences to certain groups of people. So I think that's one of the reasons why Intercom has been so successful is because it's really difficult to do that and to duplicate your data and send it somewhere else in the first place.
Josh: So if you only have to do it once, and that one thing does everything else-
Starr: Yeah, so like-
Josh: -then it's good.
Starr: So right now... Yeah, right now basically we've got two copies of our user data. We've got one copy that is the real copy in our database, and then we've got this sort of second ancillary copy in Intercom. So every time a user updates themselves or we have a new user sign up, we have to send that information to Intercom as well. And we have to keep those in sync, which is just a fun thing to do.
Josh: Yeah, there's whole industries that are building up just to solve that problem.
Starr: Oh, really? I didn't know that.
Josh: Which we can talk about. Well, I mean it's part of the-
Starr: I'd love to talk about that.
Josh: It's part of the overall, I guess, what do they call it? Is it martech industry?
Ben: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh: So that stand for marketing tech. But I think the biggest player in that is probably Segment, which is a data warehouse tool, which you send your data to it, and then it's the central location where it basically broadcasts it to all your other tools, marketing, customer communication tools that need it. And that solves that problem of using a bunch of things but only wanting to send your data, handle sending it to one service versus 10 or something.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: So it's just the more tools people add to their stack, the more complicated it's becoming. It seems kind of crazy.
Ben: And the more expensive it gets, because Segment itself is not cheap. So we're in the position where we're paying Segment to send our data to Intercom, and we're paying them to send emails to our customers, and we already have all that data in our own database. So we thought, man, we got to do something about this.
Josh: And meanwhile, we're not that big. We have one person who does marketing full time, and then four other people in the company that do everything else. And it seems like we've got this enterprise level marketing stack that we're basically using just to email a handful of people.
Starr: Yeah, I feel like in a larger company they would probably have somebody who just did the Intercom integration, and just made sure that was perfect.
Josh: Well, yeah, I think... Yeah, in the larger companies they've got both, multiple developers, I imagine, dedicated to managing the integration side, or maybe maintaining that Segment integration, and then they've got marketing teams that are also working on from the Segment onwards side. That's the benefit of Segment. One of the benefits is that a relatively non-technical user can go into Segment and add a new tool and copy paste some API keys or something, and it's basically added to your marketing stack automatically. So it allows non-technical teams to add tools to your website without going to the developers.
Starr: What you just said, Josh, is literally giving me hives right now, and I'm thinking about GDPR and compliance things.
Josh: Right?
Ben: I was thinking the same thing. It's like, yeah, and then all this data is flowing everywhere, and we're tired of that.
Starr: Even the lowliest marketing intern can make your company violate GDPR now.
Josh: Okay. So we're going to do a jump cut, and it's like meanwhile in Sacramento.
Ben: CCPA.
Josh: Right. So meanwhile, you've got all these... privacy and regulation is the thing of the day. It just seems like these two trends are... I can't decide if they're actually complimentary to each other or if they're going in opposite directions. I think that it's a little bit of both sometimes. But yeah.
Ben: I mean, the good news is companies like Segment and Intercom, they have good compliance policies in place. So they're good stewards of your data. I don't distrust them, but at the same time it's just yet another thing you have to answer, another thing you have to put a control in for, another thing you have to worry about. It would be good to have all our data in one place.
Josh: I mean, we're not going to get into a political discussion here, but the answer to regulation and centralization in this case, if you have one data warehouse and they are compliant, and then they implement integrations that are compliant to the next party, which is like Intercom or whatever, then that solves a huge problem for you, if you're a large company that wants to use a bunch of tools without having to have your own compliance team that's managing your DPAs or whatever and having to update everything every time you use something.
Starr: I mean, you still need to get, in the case of GDPR, don't you still need to get the user approval though? Like if you're sending your data to Intercom, and then you suddenly start sending it to Help Scout as well.
Josh: Yeah, I think you do, and I don't have... I'm not an expert on any of this, but my feeling is these tools are also going to, like they're going to help with that too. Centralizing all this stuff, if you're going to go the route of using a bunch of, using everyone basically... This centralized architecture probably will help with that, but someone will make a tool for it that will help get that consent. But it's also a lot more complicated and potentially not actually protecting user privacy either.
Starr: Point of order, Josh. Point of order. I just want to say you say you're not an expert, but the very fact that we have a podcast makes us experts at whatever we talk about.
Josh: Oh. Yeah. You're right. Yeah.
Starr: That's how it works.
Josh: I've got this... There's this book on... it's like a book on law, like a law course on my Audible account that I've got on my to read list. So after I read that, maybe we can come back and revisit some of this stuff, because I'll basically have a legal opinion.
Starr: That's awesome. Then we can stop paying so much money for that attorney.
Josh: You don't have to congratulate me yet.
Starr: Congratulations, Josh.
Josh: But give me a month or maybe two weeks or so.
Starr: What is that? (singing)
Josh: Got my graduate cap on.
Starr: Yeah, we'll get you a graduate cap for next time. Oh, my goodness. So you know what would be very convenient for GDPR and all sorts of regulations? What would be very convenient is if you didn't have to send your data anyplace but your own, well-secured, encrypted at rest, data store. If only there were a solution-
Josh: Which we already have, right?
Starr: If only there were a solution that allowed you to message your users using your own data store that you have locked down and you control, I mean, that'd be incredibly convenient, because then you wouldn't have to duplicate your data everywhere. You wouldn't have to worry about as much compliance stuff. I don't know.
Josh: But wait, wouldn't it be...
Starr: Should really think about that.
Josh: I mean, where would we find such a data store, though, because it's going to add a lot of overhead to manage our own data store, I would imagine. I don't have any idea where we're going to find such a thing.
Starr: We'll get Ben to do it.
Josh: It's not like we already have a database where we store our users or anything.
Ben: We actually might have one of those.
Starr: Wait, we have one? I think we're at different points of the sketch.
Josh: Oh, okay. Yes, we have... there's such a thing as a database, and most people have one, which is the conclusion that I've come to.
Starr: We're advanced because we've actually got a couple of them, I think.
Josh: Right. In a lot of cases, that's the issue. The more times you duplicate your customer data and have to sync it different places, the more complexity it adds to your system and to your data. Not to mention the more, like with anything else, it locks you into things, because if you ever want to change that data format, you've got to figure out how to update or migrate it in a bunch of different places instead of one and re-sync it or however you're going to handle that. Yeah, so the approach that, the idea that I've got or that we've had and the direction we're trying to explore is basically can we build tools that basically just use our existing user database? To where we don't have to sync that data to other parties.
Josh: Ideally, this is going to be something that is self-hosted, so we don't have to deal with the privacy and regulation constraints and problems that arise when you have to add a new third party to your stack. So that's kind of the direction that we've gone with this set of problems that we've been describing. That's kind of what Heya... Heya is a project that addresses some of this stuff, specifically the sequence emailing.
Ben: Yeah, not to mention we'll save ourselves some coin.
Josh: Yes. It's cheaper just to send emails versus use an entire marketing stack.
Ben: Now Josh at Baremetrics he says, his opinion is you should never build something internally that you can just buy from someone, right? He's all about use the vendors that are out there, like it doesn't make sense to pay a developer to build something for you.
Starr: Where's the fun in that?
Ben: Totally. But I get where he's coming from. It's like, you know, if that's not your business then it doesn't make sense. But I think in our case, A, we're developers and we love building stuff, so we're just not going to stop, so hey might as well, and B, I think the end goal here is to not only to build something for ourselves that we feel like we love, but also that other people like us will also love. And then we just make bank selling that to people.
Josh: Yeah. I think it all depends on what it is that you're building. I mean, I think as a rule it's probably good to say...
Starr: Oh, the bomb's going off.
Josh: Sorry, my phone. I think generally as a rule it's probably good to say we're not going to just build everything that we use. But I think there are cases where, I mean, it could make sense.
Starr: I feel like we just-
Josh: It all depends on what the use case is, what the benefits are, the trade offs.
Ben: And hopefully this is one of those cases where it makes sense, because we're definitely doing it.
Starr: Yeah, so this is... I feel like we kind of slid into this, talking about this, so let me just catch people up.
Josh: We haven't really said what it is.
Starr: Yeah, so if it is okay if just go ahead and do that?
Ben: Go ahead.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: For the past couple months Josh has been working on a little side project, a little but not uncomplicated, as he's learned, I guess. And the goal of that is to provide some of these marketing messaging features that we currently use Intercom for, but to do that in a way that pulls the data directly from our own databases and runs on our own server, and that we have more control over. Did I do that justice?
Josh: Yeah. I think so.
Starr: Okay. Cool.
Josh: Yeah. And what it is, is... So we're building as... it's a Rails engine. Our platform is Ruby on Rails. So it basically just plugs into our system, like you said. And currently we have a bunch of things that it possibly could do, or different things that we could solve. But right now we're focusing on the sequence. Basically, we're trying to replace what we're left with at Intercom, because that's obviously the goal that started all of this was to solve the email sequences and potentially we need to have a way to broadcast, like send a mass email to our users. So that's kind of the MVP for us. When we can leave Intercom is when we have those two things. Currently we have the sequencing completed.
Starr: So what does the sequencing entail?
Josh: The email sequences are, I call them campaigns. But they're basically just drip email campaigns, like similar things that you'd see in a lot of other customer communication products, or like user onboarding basically. So what they allow you to do is run user onboarding email campaigns. So when someone signs up for Honeybadger, they get a welcome email. They get instructions on how to install our code. They get a bunch of other things maybe based on... like throughout their two week trial that they go through, they might get emails prompting them to set up features that they have not actually looked at or set up yet. So it's got some rules built into it where it can say if someone hasn't used this feature, send them an email. If they have already used it, then don't send them an email, because they've already seen it.
Starr: How cool. So it's sequences, but it's not just time based sequences. It's got some logic built into it.
Josh: Yeah. So it's based on time and logic to determine. So really it's still like a time based sequence at its core, but basically where the logic comes in is it allows you basically to skip emails, or if you look at it the other way, you can send emails if they match conditions. But really it's still based on it's going to send a sequence of emails, but if they happen to not match the conditions for one, it'll just skip it basically.
Starr: Okay. That's really cool. I don't know. Should we talk about sort of some of the things that you've learned from doing this? I haven't done any of it.
Josh: Well, we can talk about... I think one of the cool things about this is that because we happen to be developers who like marketing to varying degrees, we are able to build this in a way that appeals to us as developers, and not necessarily to marketers, or at least a segment of people that have an interest in both. So one of the things that I've done with it is so far it doesn't have any kind of graphical user interface. The user interface that it does have is basically Ruby code. So to actually set up these campaigns, the way that you do it is very similar to generating a user model or something, or mailer in your Rails app. So you can generate a campaign. It basically creates a file on disk in your project. It's a Ruby file with some boilerplate, and it lets you define what your sequence is or what your campaign is.
Josh: And from there basically you just... a lot of the hosted tools have automation features so that you can set up rules of when people should join a campaign, or when they should leave, and handle a lot of the other life cycle things that happen around these email sequences. But in our case already have an awesome tool, which is called Ruby on Rails, that has all kinds of callbacks and event subscriptions, and all kinds of things that we can hook into basically to just add people to campaigns. So at its core it's a lot simpler, because really you're just adding people to these campaigns, removing them from the campaigns, or if they complete one it automatically does that for you. So in a lot of ways it's actually simplified a lot of things for us.
Starr: Oh, cool. So you don't have to have a lot of that functionality duplicated in a external service.
Josh: Right. Yeah. That's kind of the idea. The way I look at it is, I mean, Rails has a lot of automation stuff built into it. It does a lot of similar things that marketing automation tools do. But it's for developers, and it's a lot more flexible. So we can take advantage of some of those things. Of course with the caveat that it's a much more technical tool. We're not going to have a completely non-technical user, at least not yet, step into this and manage it.
Starr: So if we really want to target technical users, shouldn't we have the configuration be done in Haskell? Then people could just get their Heya set up.
Josh: Right yeah. I did evaluate Haskell versus Ruby and spent a lot of time debating if I wanted this to be functionally pure or not, but I decided that in the end that Ruby is actually pretty flexible. It's already kind of a automation scripting language-
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: -for a lot of things. So yeah, I went with Ruby.
Starr: That's cool. That's a really... I think a lot of people don't know this that it's actually kind of neat, is that Ruby is, in Japan at least, it's used for a lot of automation things, a lot of... they actually use it for some embedded stuff, like I forget what car maker, but some car maker a while back used it in the embedded systems in their car. So Ruby actually isn't terribly suited for stuff like this, and it has a bonus feature that, unlike Haskell, we can actually use it.
Josh: So yeah, Heya though, the status of it is that I have a limited, like a feature set that I thought I needed basically in order to completely replace the email sequencing that we do in Intercom, and that is currently feature complete to the best of my knowledge.
Starr: Oh, yay!
Josh: It's going to require a little more testing. We haven't actually used this in production yet or anything.
Starr: Awesome. Hey, wait a second. Wait a sec. Wait one second. They can edit out this pause. Don't say anything interesting. I'll be right back. Hold on. Okay.
Josh: Okay.
Starr: Take off my headphones. This is very exciting.
Josh: He's got like a noisemaker or something.
Ben: That's what I was thinking. Yeah, he's going to get the party favors.
Josh: Nice. Hooray.
Ben: Hooray.
Starr: We have those left over from the birthday party.
Josh: Love it. Yeah. That's like a party noisemaker.
Starr: It didn't sound like a strangled duck to you?
Ben: We had to put that in there for the hearing impaired folks. We got to put that in the transcript.
Josh: No, it's not like a dying elephant.
Starr: Yeah, that's the problem with these. They're a little bit cheap. So we're just, at the party, we all just sounded like a herd of dying geese or something.
Josh: Can you do me a favor though? You need to keep that by your podcast station for future episodes.
Starr: Is this going to be like my Kramer sound effect?
Josh: Yes.
Starr: It's going to be like bye, bye, bye. I'll just have my... Okay. I'm going to get a collection of these things. I'm going to be so obnoxious.
Starr: Okay. We'll see.
Josh: So we're kind of at the place where I think we can try some of this code out. I actually have a branch that I was showing Ben of our main Rails app that adds our onboarding emails using a... to our Rails app. Aside from doing some testing and maybe some additional set up work for actually sending the emails and that sort of thing, I think it's close to being ready to go.
Starr: That's awesome.
Josh: Now if I sound hesitant it's because every time I think it's ready to go, I find some sort of edge case that invalidates all the work I've done to date-
Starr: Oh no.
Josh: -and I have to figure everything out from scratch, but I'm pretty sure at this point I've spent enough time on the actually scheduling logic, where I think that it's ready to go.
Starr: Yeah, you've had to do some intense SQL querying and stuff, right?
Josh: Yeah. It's because I'm basically using... The little project, like the software itself, it's a relatively small project. I don't know how many lines of codes it is, but it's not a ton, and most of the complexity, though, is in SQL. So it's mainly a SQL program is kind of the way I look at it. It's like a SQL program with a little code UI built on top of it, or some framework built on top of it. But yeah, it took me a while to get the SQL and basically the test suite that proves that the SQL does what I think it does. To get all that to work was kind of the meat of the project.
Starr: Well, there you go. So you're not actually building this in house. We're using SQL.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: So we meet Josh Pigford's rules then, I guess, because we're not wasting resources by building something in house we could buy.
Josh: Yeah, that's true.
Starr: And it's even free, right? We're using Postgres. It's free.
Josh: Or if you want to look at it the other way, it's going to save us at least 12K a year in Intercom bills.
Starr: That's a lot.
Josh: I think I've probably already blown that budget, if I'm being honest, but that helps lighten the load a little bit.
Ben: Yeah, I think maybe the beginning, the initial desire for this was to save the money on Intercom, but I think in reality the other reason, we're developers and we like building stuff. I think that's really what has been the driving force behind this.
Josh: It's not the money. Yeah. I don't mind spending that 12K on Intercom, especially if I was happy with it and it didn't give me any grief. I'd be fine with it. Like, was it Josh that says just buy tools that are already on the market. But I think I was bored. This is something that I thought a lot about. I just wanted to see if it could be done.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: It's like a really nice suit. There's nothing wrong with buying a suit off the rack, if it works. It'll get you to the wedding. It's all good. But when you want to feel really good, you go and you get that custom made suit, and then you're on top of the world.
Josh: Right. Yeah.
Starr: Do you have a custom made suit, Ben?
Ben: No, not yet, sadly.
Starr: Oh. Oh, man. Well, if you ever want one, I know a guy. So what you're saying is you're doing it for the love, Josh.
Josh: Yeah, the love and the adventure, I guess. I think the whole project has actually helped me work through some thoughts and opinions or ideas I have about marketing automation and developers doing marketing automation. So it's also been kind of like an intellectual exploration to some extent, trying to figure out if there's other ways to do things. I don't know if anything will actually come out of that, but it's been an interesting project in and of itself. So if it came to nothing, I'd still be happy that I did it, I think, is what I'm saying. And also this is one of our side projects. Last year, we've tried to do more things where if there's just something that we wanted to build, we've tried to give ourselves time to actually just go do and explore that thing. That's one of the things we did in this last December was part of our winter break was go and work on your side project.
Josh: So I know we've got, what, like three or four other side projects that have been happening in the company that I don't know anything about, because we haven't actually.... this is the first time we're actually reviewing what we did. So I'm excited to see what everyone else has been working on. But this is mine.
Ben: Yeah, we're getting together next week, all of us, and I'm definitely going to be talking about the side project I worked on, and we'll get some reports from Ben and Kevin. But I'm looking forward to having more Heya around.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah, me too.
Starr: Have we made any decisions about... I'm sure people are just chomping at the bit. What should they do? Should they tweet at us? Should they... This isn't released.
Josh: Yeah, it's not released. I don't know when it will be released. I guess the biggest factor is we haven't decided what our license is going to be yet. So we'll be talking about that. Obviously, we can't really release it without a license. But the other thing is that it's so early it just became kind of even... the MVP or whatever just became feature complete, and we haven't run it in production. I'd like some confirmation that it actually is going to work for people before they trust all of their emails to it, or their customer database to it. So I'm a little paranoid in that regard. But yeah, I think we should probably get it released pretty soon, and I'd like to just to get it out there.
Josh: In the meantime, I'm interested in hearing if any of this actually appeals to the developer/marketer or marketer/developer out there. So you could always tweet or email us or whatever.
Starr: Yeah, you can tweet at us @FounderQuest.
Ben: And I think, get in touch too, if there's something that you've always wanted in an email tool, a customer messaging tool that just doesn't exist out there, or it exists but it's not quite right, something that you would like a little different. I think this is a great time for us to find out other use cases besides just our own.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah, tell us your heart's desires.
Josh: Right. I mean, that could relate... I mean, obviously Heya's going to be something, for now at least, specifically for Rail users. This is a broader problem space that the three of us have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about. We're interested in it. We're not diving into a new market head first, but yeah, it's a hobby of ours for sure.
Ben: More to come.
Starr: More to come. Well, awesome. And I'm looking forward to seeing the Haskell version, because I won't understand-
Josh: Because you really like parentheses?
Starr: I like looking at Haskell knowing that somewhere there's somebody that understands it.
Josh: Yeah. You're just like, "I need more nesting in my code."
Starr: Yeah, I want to live in a world where somebody understands Haskell. All right. Well, do we have anything else we'd like to mention about Heya?
Josh: I don't think so.
Starr: Oh, wait. Wait, wait. Yeah so, you always do such a great job at naming things, Josh, so is this... It's obviously like, hey, we're emailing you communications that you've definitely opted in for and are looking forward to receiving. But it also a reference to that song?
Josh: It's not but it can be. We've talked about that after the fact. So I think that it's both at this point.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: I love... Yeah, that's a great song. You're talking about Hey Ya, right?
Ben: We'll have to get some info from them about licensing it for our theme song.
Josh: Yeah. That's the only problem. We don't have the licensing yet.
Starr: I mean, fair use, I think you can use a couple seconds.
Josh: Really?
Starr: Yeah, I think you can use a couple seconds.
Josh: All right. So we can splice that in, right?
Starr: Maybe. We'll see. We can splice in my acoustic version. I'll send it to the editors.
Josh: Nice. On the party...
Starr: On the xylophone. My acoustic xylophone version.
Josh: You got to play it on the sound maker from Ida's party.
Starr: Oh! Of course, yeah. It's a little monotone.
Josh: Basically just use it like a kazoo.
Starr: Yeah, maybe. We'll see. We'll see. Anyway. All right, so if we're done, if we said everything we're going to say, then I would say I'm going to give our spiel. So if you are interested in writing for our blog, we're interested in maybe talking to you. If you write about technical stuff and you want to check it out, we have a write for us link in our blog header. Please... Oh, my goodness. Somehow we got added to some list of people who just, I guess, buy content, and so we get all this spammy terrible people contacting us. Somebody wanted to have guest posts on our blog about growing cannabis and stuff. It's like, what? You obviously did not read the write for us page that is accessible from the top nav in our blog. So yeah, anyway, if you are a decent human being and you want to talk to us about writing for us, go check that out. And if you want to give us a review, we'd love that on iTunes or Apple Podcasts or whatever they call it.
Starr: So that's all. All right. I'll play us out. This is my rendition of Hey Ya. All right.
Josh: Nice.
Ben: That's awesome.
Starr: Thank you. See y'all later.
Josh: See you guys.
In this episode Josh, Starr, and Ben talk about each of their results from taking the CliftonStrengths assessment and debate the validity of the results. They also discuss if having differing strengths and weaknesses has helped or hindered them working as a team.
Show Notes:
Links:
Macklemore
5 Minute Dungeon
Common Sense With Dan Carlin
StrengthsFinder
StrenghtsFinder 2.0 (book)
Cliff Clavin
Comparative Advantage
Mike Perham
Fieldstone Method
Myers Briggs
What Color is Your Parachute
Harry Potter
Woo Strength
Full Transcript:
Ben: So, how's the vacation been everybody?
Josh: Good. For the most part.
Starr: Yeah. What have ya'll been doing?
Josh: Well, so I've been a little cynical today maybe because my family has been sick for the past few ...
Starr: Oh no.
Josh: My wife specifically. She's not feeling well and I've been on kid duty and kids are cooped up and tired of dad.
Starr: I'm so sorry, Josh. That sounds so rough.
Josh: But we'll get through that. Well, it is what it is.
Starr: Well, if you need to take a little break and go away, wrangle some kids.
Josh: Oh. I am ready to get back to work.
Ben: Just remember what Macklemore said, right? "These are the good ol' days."
Josh: Yeah. It is true. I have been enjoying the time with the kids for sure, especially after they go to sleep and I have time to reflect on the day.
Starr: Yeah. So, was Christmas great? Did your little ones just love it?
Josh: They did.
Starr: Did your little ones love it, Ben? Your slightly bigger ones.
Ben: Well, if they both hadn't had the stomach flu, they would have loved it.
Starr: Oh my God, everybody is sick this Christmas.
Josh: Everyone is sick, yeah.
Starr: Even when one of my friends back in Arkansas. I was like, "How was Christmas?" And she's like, "Oh, I got the flu." So, I don't know what's going on.
Josh: Yeah, my brother's daughter got the flu over Christmas too. So, it seems to be going around.
Ben: But we did get a new board game as a family thing?
Starr: Which one?
Ben: Five minute dungeon. If you haven't heard of that-
Josh: I have it.
Ben: ... it's a co-op card-based game. It's got a five minute time limit thing. So, you're rushing, you're playing cards to try and beat the monsters and obstacles to get through the dungeon. And it's pretty frantic and it's a lot of fun, so yeah check it out. It's three to five players. It's eight years old and above, I think. It's a lot of fun.
Josh: Pretty cool. Can we link that up in the show notes?
Ben: You betcha.
Josh: With an Amazon affiliate link.
Starr: It's so cool that you can just say that and somehow it'll happen. I'm not sure anymore how it happens. It just does.
Josh: It doesn't have to be an affiliate link for the record, Ben. But if it is, you're totally covered because I've just disclosed ...
Ben: Well, Ben will just slide his own affiliate link in there.
Josh: Right.
Starr: Yeah. So, I know for a long time, Josh, you listened to Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast, which is now I think pretty much defunct. I listened to that too. He always talked to his producer ... I think his name is Ben, right?
Josh: Yeah. His name is Ben yeah.
Starr: And the joke is like you don't know if Ben is real, but he's just talking to Ben throughout the show. And so, I think maybe we should start doing that with our own Ben Findlay.
Josh: He really is our ... he's our producer, so yeah. I love him.
Starr: Yeah. Got our marketing expert, Ben Findlay, who is involved in the production of this podcast, so we should just start doing that and that would be really weird.
Josh: The dynamic on Common Sense was great though because he's always making fun jabs at him. And then, like any intro's like the announcer voice is taking jabs at Dan because I'm assuming Ben is writing the scripts for those.
Starr: Oh yeah. Fun fact. Our cheesy announcer voice was a direct ripoff of that show.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Cheesy announcer voice.
Josh: We're fans.
Starr: I don't have any original ideas, so what are we talking about today? We're talking about StrengthsFinder, right?
Josh: StrengthsFinder, yeah.
Starr: Should I set the scene?
Ben: I'm looking at it right now and, Starr, your number one strength. I'm just looking at it right now. Is ideation.
Starr: It is. I've got all the ideas. So, maybe we should back up and be like, what StrengthsFinder? Why are we ... Okay. So, a couple of months ago, we all took these StrengthsFinder assessment, right? StrengthsFinder is a test you take online. There's a book that goes with it. I think it's called StrengthsFinder 2.0. link that up in the show notes.
Josh: This assessment's run by Gallup, right?
Starr: Yeah.
Starr: They're good at asking people questions.
Josh: yeah.
Ben: They have some experience there.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: They changed the name to Clifton Strengths, by the way. You can still find it under StrengthsFinder, but they call it Clifton Strengths now. I'm just going to call it StrengthsFinder for consistency.
Starr: Okay. After beloved Cheers character, Cliff Clavin.
Josh: Yeah. I think you're right there.
Starr: So, can somebody tell me what's the purpose of StrengthsFinder?
Ben: Find out where your strengths are, so you can be better.
Josh: Yeah. I think one of the big things is it's a ... A lot of businesses use this as an assessment tool or as an alternative assessment tool. And I think the idea is that like a lot of traditional assessments would focus on the areas that you're weak, your performance is weak in.
Starr: Yeah. We're talking about personal assessments, right?
Josh: Yeah, personal assessments. Yeah. So you go in for your whatever annual assessment with your boss or whatever, or performance review I should say. A lot of those have tended to focus on areas that you're weak in or that you're working on improving and kind of like where you are with your weaknesses. But the StrengthsFinder assessment is basically focused ... the idea of focusing on your strengths, you get a lot more ... I guess a lot more bang for your buck if you focus on your strengths versus on your weakness. So, if you can focus on improving what you're already good at, versus trying to get better at something you might be weak in, you might find a lot more success.
Starr: So, the idea is you log into this thing and you take this test. How long did it take? Half an hour or something like that?
Ben: Yeah, something like that.
Josh: Something around there. It was less than an hour, I think.
Starr: Yeah. And then, it spits out a report and tells you a list of your strengths. And it's got a lot of them. The book goes through each of them. I don't know how many there are. Like, 50 or something. And you sort of get ranked in them.
Josh: Yeah, there's a lot.
Starr: Yeah. So, you can see your top five and it goes through and gives you sort of a list of action items. It gives you this whole report, it's all suggestions, how to take advantage of this strength, things to watch out for, and all this stuff.
Starr: So, I got a question for you guys. We're the scrappy little bootstrapped tell it like it is company. So, is StrengthsFinder late stage capitalist corporatist bullshit?
Josh: I don't know. I don't think so.
Ben: I got introduced to StrengthsFinder through a friend who worked at Microsoft. He said that their whole team took this assessment and shared the results with each other. And he said the benefit that he saw from doing that was being able to interact with his teammates better, to understand what their motivations were, and to understand what they would be good at, what he would be good at, so they could as a team be stronger. If late stage capitalism is all about working better, sure, yes. It's all about.
Starr: I'm trying to throw some spice in there. Ever since like Mike Perham said, we weren't spicy enough, I've been trying to court controversy.
Josh: I love that question though. I think the idea behind the StrengthsFinder thing, not only in improving or making yourself better, more efficient or whatever. It's really about working together. I know the corporation, the whole enterprise synergy thing, people love this idea of like if you put different types of people together and all of their skills blend and they synergize. That's the bullshit lingo of what we're talking about a little bit.
Josh: But I think this whole idea of a bunch of different people with different skill sets or different things they are good at coming together and then working together, originally came out of an economic idea, which was called comparative advantage. And that was the idea of actual countries or nations or economies. And the idea of specialization. So, back in the day when they were studying is it better for a single economy or a country to be completely self-sufficient and produce everything themselves so that they can basically be an island and be completely self-sufficient? Or is it better for countries to basically specialize in certain areas, and then, trade with other countries who specialize in other areas? And they found that it turns out most countries have things they are good at and other countries have other things they're good at, and it's better to trade and share either ideas or what they're producing.
Starr: And that's comparative advantage, right? I initially read that as competitive advantage and I was more confused.
Josh: Yeah, no, competitive doesn't enter into it, I don't think.
Starr: Yeah. Sometimes I feel like this is my role in the podcast. Is I just go into the minefield and blindly walk through it. And whatever explodes on me, I'm like, "Hey, there is a mine here." And then, I just point that out.
Josh: You just like to blow things up.
Starr: Yeah, yeah. So, personally, it's a little bit corporate, but I think it's useful. I found the results useful. I wouldn't necessarily use this as a way to like it's the only way to assess somebody or get to know them or assign them tasks or whatever. I wouldn't be like, "Okay, take this StrengthsFinder test. I don't know you. And then, based on this I'm going to give you a job or give you a particular responsibility." I wouldn't do that, but it's sort of interesting as a prompt. Sort of like, "Oh, think about these things. Maybe think in this direction. Maybe focus a little bit of your introspection in this area. And here's some interesting prompts."
Josh: Yeah. I think I found it really useful. I was in a burned out state. This is back in August or whatever. I wanted to reevaluate what I was doing at the time, in the business and just in my professional life, and see if I was doing the right things. And this was one tool that helped me figure out ... think about where I should be putting my effort basically.
Starr: Yeah. Totally. I think it's also useful ... and one reason we brought it up in conclaves in the past, I think Ben brought it up because his friend had mentioned it to him. Like Ben said, to essentially help us understand each other and work with each other in a way that plays to each other's strengths. So, I think it's been pretty useful.
Josh: You mentioned not using it as a hiring tool, which is I think one thing that a lot of people do use it for. It might not be the first round of an interview, but if you pass a couple initial rounds of an interview, they'll ask you to take it as one I guess facet of the process.
Starr: Oh really?
Josh: Yeah. I'm not totally against that idea. I think the biggest advantage of using it is a potential hiring tool or as a way of really just evaluating people on your team it's not that you're looking for people that are going to fit well in terms of having similar strengths, but you're really looking for people that have opposite strengths from you. Like, that's the whole idea. It's kind of like a tool to increase the diversity of strengths on your team. So, the idea is you want to find people that don't necessarily have all the same core strengths as everyone else.
Josh: And I think it's funny being three, now four developers who are pretty much the same type of person. We found that we all actually do have a lot of similar strengths. And at least for me, that was one thing that came out of it. For me was like, in the future I think we could do well to hire more people who have different skill sets.
Ben: Yeah. Though we are pretty similar, we do have some pretty distinct differences in the top five. So, the CliftonStrengths, the StrengthsFinder 2.0, it focuses on the top five things as areas that you really want to be spending time to develop your strengths. Of those top five, the three of us we have a pretty good spread there. There's not a whole lot of overlap. So, even though we are very similar and have very similar business backgrounds, we do have some diversity when it comes to what our top five strengths are.
Josh: Do we want to share what our top five ... because I don't have yours up here, so I'm speaking from memory. My memory might be fuzzy.
Starr: Does everybody have their own up?
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: I do have my own here. I actually have mine printed out because I've kept them on my desk to review.
Starr: Wow.
Josh: Old school, right?
Starr: You have a physical desk, Josh.
Josh: Right. I know.
Starr: That's so 1996 of you.
Josh: And there's paper on it.
Starr: Oh my God. I just-
Josh: Not a lot of paper.
Starr: ... fell off my gravity well. Nothing is real.
Starr: Oh my God. I've got a funny story. Can I go off on a tangent before we ...
Josh: Yes.
Starr: So, partially I'm going off on a tangent because it's a funny story, but partially also I really want to tease these results because I feel like people are just sitting on the edge of their seats waiting to see what our strengths are.
Starr: So, my daughter's birthday is coming up. Yeah, it's coming up soon. We're like, okay what should we get her? She already has Christmas presents. And we're like, okay, we should get her something where she can play music that is not a iPad or any sort of tablet or anything like that where she's going to want to watch stupid YouTube videos all day. And so, we're looking at all this stuff. We're like, okay, here's this ... There's a couple different devices. It's like, okay, kids' mp3 player, that's cool. It's like, I don't have a ton of ripped CDs, especially not children's CDs. Well, there's one that looks like Spotify and it's got these little statues and things, and you can move the statue in a certain slot, and then it plays ... sounds like some video game or something.
Starr: But then eventually, Abby and I were just sitting back and we're like, "Wait a second, wait a second. We just want a CD player" for the price of one of these fancy things that hooks up to Spotify, which is $200. We can get her a CD player and a lot of CDs.
Josh: Yeah. Put those CDs to use.
Starr: Yeah. So, we just got her five CDs and a CD player.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: Anyway, so that's the whole thing. For me to think about that it's like the physical desk versus everything virtual.
Josh: Did you ... sorry go ahead.
Starr: Oh, I was just going to say this. My first instinct is to be like, "Oh, it's got to be hooked up to Spotify and do all this stuff."
Josh: Yeah, it has to be.
Starr: No. It's just physical thing is fine sometimes.
Josh: Did you introduce it to her as a compact disc player?
Starr: We should. It's not her birthday yet.
Josh: Yeah. Oh right. Okay. Yeah. So, you got some to think about how you explain-
Starr: A compact disc player.
Josh: How you explain what this thing is that you put a physical media into.
Starr: I don't know. I think she's going to love it. She really wants to put the DVDs into ... When we occasionally rent DVDs because we have the only surviving movie rental store near our house. So, we rent those and she loves putting them in. But anyway, so StrengthsFinder. Do we all want to read our own strengths?
Josh: Sure.
Starr: Or is that TMI?
Josh: I mean, I'm cool with it. I'm not going to encourage you guys to if you don't want to.
Ben: I was reading through my strengths getting ready for this podcast and they were, like a lot of personality tests, when you look at it, it's like, "Oh yeah. That makes sense" because it means you, right? You know you. But my number three strength actually taught me something, as I was reading through the notes, the extra material they give you to understand what your strengths are.
Ben: So, my number three strength is achiever. And the way that they describe this is basically you're a person always needs to be accomplishing in something. What they said is that every day, because of this achiever strength, every day you need to have some sort of accomplishment or else you feel like the day was wasted. And not just every work day, but literally every day. Work days, weekends, vacations, you have to be doing something, you have to accomplish something. And I was like, "Wow. That really is me. I'm so frustrated if I'm not doing something."
Josh: This is coming from the guy who upgrades a database for fun on New Year's. On New Year's Eve.
Starr: What are we paying money for this for? You could've asked me Ben.
Ben: But as I thought about it some more I thought, that's also though to me a warning. It's like some video games could be dangerous to me because they have these game mechanics that are based on achievements. You unlock this goal or you get this level or whatever. Those kinds of games can be addictive to me because I'm like, "Yeah. I want to get that next thing. I want to accomplish that thing." So, it's both a strength and a potential weakness I have to watch out for.
Josh: Yeah. I like that about how ... because you get a page basically on each of your strengths that describes what the upsides and the downsides are. I really like the downside. That they include the downside, things you need to look out for, or the pitfalls or whatever.
Josh: So, my number one was intellection, which is I guess I appreciate intellectual discussions and I guess going deep on topics. Two is input. Three was learner, which is I guess I like to learn things. Four is context, which I thought was interesting because context, as I recall, really like historical context and the past. I had noticed I've been gotten a little bit into history and history reading. I've always appreciated going back to the past and looking for lessons or trends and that sort of thing to see how things work. And so, context, that kind of fit with that. It's distilling lessons from the past or whatever.
Starr: That one's interesting because that one is also online and you and I have had lots of historical discussions.
Josh: So, that explains probably why we love to talk history and all that other stuff. Yeah. And then, five was strategic. And I'll just go through ... Those are the top five. They put those in bold. Those are the ones that you really focus on. And then, the next five. So, there's ten total that they'll tell you are your strengths. So, six through ten are basically additional things that you can focus on after the first five. So, those are focus, relater, futuristic, discipline and responsibility. The last two are fun because those were learned over time. Over lots of mistakes and lots of slacking off.
Starr: What were the last two again?
Josh: Discipline and responsibility.
Starr: Oh okay.
Josh: Probably if you would have known me in my early 20s, those would not have been in my top ten. But ten years of freelancing will definitely instill some discipline and responsibility if you're good at it.
Starr: Well, cool. So, you mentioned ... I'm looking at this report right now. And you mentioned already that they give you ten fields to strengthen. These were listed under a heading called "Strengthen". So then that leaves fields like 11 through 34 ... I guess, category or strength ... like, what are they? If they're not your strengths, what are they, attributes?
Josh: What are they called? Yeah, something like that.
Starr: Anyway. Themes.
Josh: They don't call them weaknesses.
Starr: No, they don't call them weaknesses. They put them under a heading called "navigate" which I thought was the most mealy mouth, neutral.
Josh: You just have to deal with it.
Starr: Yeah. You just have to navigate it.
Josh: Yeah. So, the idea is it's not like you get ten things you're good at, and then, all of the other skills, you just completely ignore. You're not supposed to completely drop off. So, empathy is not even in my top 20, I don't think. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't try to have empathy, right?
Starr: Yeah. All right. Well, I'll go. My first one is ideation. That's basically coming up with ideas and tweaking things. It was interesting because it gives you these action items you can do to take advantage of this. One of them I found interesting was this: "Make small changes in your work or home routines, experiment, play mental games with yourself because you will get bored quickly. So, these adjustments can help keep you engaged." I thought that was really interesting because I have never explicitly sort of figured that out, but that's something I do just intuitively.
Starr: And then, also it's like "Your limitless thoughts and ideas" which limitless is a bit much. "Your thoughts and ideas can sometimes overwhelm and confuse people." Yes, yes. I often I'm like, I've come up with the best thing ever, and no one has any idea what the hell I'm talking about. So, yeah that was number one.
Starr: Number two is strategic, which is coming up with strategies and thinking about all the different ways, scenarios can play out, and picking the best one.
Starr: Number three is context, which is historical stuff like Josh already talked about.
Starr: Four is developer because I'm a web developer. That's not what that means. It actually means that you like to develop people's skills. Like a teacher almost. You help people get better.
Starr: Five is empathy. I'm pretty empathetic person. Then the next five, which is sort of like your not-so-great strengths, I guess, are intellection, being intellectual input. I don't even know what that is. What does that mean? What's input, Josh? You got that too.
Josh: Yeah, I do. I have it here.
Ben: It's all about ... that's my number two. It's all about when you're gathering information from all over.
Josh: Gathering yeah. It's like gathering and collecting and storing it, right?
Starr: So, like the Fieldstone method.
Josh: Yeah. So, like Fieldstone. Yeah. So, that was having, like we talked about, a place to store your research and that sort of thing. Yeah.
Starr: Okay. So, there's that. Number eight is maximizer, which is sort of like min-maxing and trying to find optimal paths for that. That's definitely something I've done. That's something that ... I don't even know if this is in the negatives to this, but I'm just going to say it's a negative. It's like I'm a sucker for premature optimization info. It's like I will spend like ... If you're like, "Okay, Starr. Give me a dollar." I'll be like, "Okay, here's a dollar." But if you're like, "Well, there's two products and one's a dollar cheaper." I could spend an hour trying to figure out which one I should buy.
Starr: The other day I ordered something on Amazon and it seemed to be the same product. One was $3 more expensive than the other one. It seemed to be exactly the same. It drove me insane. I couldn't figure out what it was. I eventually ordered the more expensive one because it had the most reviews, so I was like, "Well, maybe it's not a fake one."
Starr: Number nine. Positivity. I'm a pretty positive person even though I think I haven't necessarily displayed that a lot.
Starr: And number ten is learner. It's like learning things. I would also like to share my worst one. They say these aren't your worst ones, but I'm going to say they are your worst ones because it's more fun that way. So, my number 34 strength, the thing I'm least good at, is significance. I don't know what that is. Let me scroll down. Hold on, significance. Oh, "People exceptionally talented in the significance theme want to make a big impact. They're independent and prioritize projects based on how much influence they will have on the organization or the people around them." I don't give a shit about that. So, that's about right.
Josh: Yeah. You mentioned one of the ... what was your number one by the way?
Starr: My number one is not remembering things. Ideation.
Josh: Ideation. So, you were talking about how you need to be careful of overloading people with information. Was that what it was?
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. I forget which one of mine was that, but that was one of the potential whatever they call them. Things to watch out for. That totally made sense. I tend to give people too much information when I'm trying to ... especially people that aren't interested in business theory and stuff like that.
Starr: Yeah. I can think of several examples where I've gone away and worked on something for a month and then just made some sort of summary and given it to you all and just been like, "Here. You've got five minutes to fully understand all the nuance in this." It's like, okay, maybe that's not the most fair approach.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah.
Starr: So, what do we take away from this? Do you think this is a useful exercise?
Ben: Totally. Yeah. I think you can learn some things about yourself. I mean, you can do it other ways too. You can take the Myers Briggs and you can take "what color is your parachute" that's a good personality test. I like that one. But I like the way the StrengthsFinder list out the things that you'd be good at and based on your input into the questionnaire obviously. And what things you can focus on too. And how you can present yourself to your team on things you can take up.
Ben: Like, my strength on achiever, for example, I talked about a while ago. I know that I'm going to every day be wanting to accomplish something. So, if something needs to be done, I can say to my team, "Hey, I can take that because that's my thing. I want to mark things off a to-do list." Someone doesn't have that strength, they're like, "Okay, Ben. You can take that. The thing that has to get done that I don't want to do."
Josh: Yeah. I have noticed that I have ... I mean, I think we all have that to some extent where even just as people, people like to accomplish things. One of the things that makes us happy is actually making progress in our worlds. But I found for me it doesn't have to necessarily be something checking something off a list because I have the learner, whatever intellection thing high on my list. I'm okay if I learn something that I feel like has really moved me forward or something like that. I'm okay ... I can consider that making progress on a task or something like that, which isn't something I probably would have thought of before I took this thing. So, I've tried to double down on that. If I find myself spending a day just reading a book or something, I'm not feeling like a total slacker. As long as it's not like Harry Potter or something.
Starr: Yeah. We don't support JK Rowling in this family. So, I just want to expand on your point a little bit, Josh. I think it was a really good one. It's very interesting because one thing that I really like about the test and the results is that each of these different ... I'm going to call them strengths even though not everybody has them as strengths, but I'm just going to call them that because I don't know what to call them. Each one of these is weighted the same. None of them is given any sort of priority over other ones.
Starr: I think that's really cool because some of these things in society I feel like are kind of weighted. I feel like ... or at least in my mind, I will feel guilty if I'm not checking tasks off a list, but to be honest, lists can be very overwhelming to me. I really don't enjoy working off of list and that's why achiever is number 29 out of 34 for me. But it's really interesting because it's like, okay, well, maybe I'm not so great on working on my tasks on lists, but I've got all this stuff up here. I've got empathy. That's something that's not super explicitly valued a lot because it's kind of a soft skill. It's hard to see. Same thing with the developer and context. In a weird way the whole assessment made me realize maybe I'm not the best at checking tasks off a list, but there are all of these other things I'm really good at. So, that was kind of cool and that was eye opening.
Josh: Yeah. And the idea of giving those skills, those strengths the time to develop or improve, you can get the most gain out of that. And you don't know what will come out of that in the future. Maybe focusing on empathy will be the most productive thing you can do right now.
Starr: Yeah. You get the most gain. Also just kind of be happiest, I think, because it really sucks trying to do stuff every day that you're terrible at.
Josh: Well, I mean, a lot of times you're happy if you're successful or something. It's easier to be successful at something that you're really good at versus something that you just aren't built for, doesn't come naturally to you.
Starr: Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.
Ben: I think when it comes time to sell yourself, whether it's as a freelancer trying to get a client, or it's if you're trying to get a job in that interview, I think having a good awareness of what your strengths are and being able to market yourself to create the packaging around yourself that will sell yourself the best. If Starr goes into an interview and says, "Oh, I love working from lists" right? And they hire him. Like, "Uh, no. This guy sucks."
Starr: Hello! They're not called "sucks" they're called "navigate" Ben. I navigate lists.
Ben: But as Starr goes into that same interview, saying, "I can really connect because I have strength in empathy" or "I can really bring good ideas to the table because I have a strength in ideation," if he focuses on those, then that's going to make all the difference in finding the right fit for yourself, whether be a job or a client or whatever.
Starr: That's a really good idea. That sounds like the Woo strength, Ben. Do you mind telling me what number you are for Woo?
Ben: Let me get that.
Josh: Mine is 33 out of 34.
Ben: 32.
Starr: Wait what? I've got the highest Woo? Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm sorry. I assumed your Woo would be much higher because that was a great point and a great argument.
Josh: He totally Wooed you.
Starr: He did. I'm Wooed. Okay. Wait a second.
Starr: No, that's not actually ... okay. I looked it up. That's not anything about convincing people. It's like when you're out in a museum, you go "Whoo!" That's what that is.
Josh: Okay. So, yeah, he's just a party animal. Yeah. Number 32 for me is developer, which is in your top ten, Starr, right?
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, I'm glad that we have some things that are completely flipped or inverse. Maybe that's one of the reasons for our success.
Starr: Yeah. And honestly, this is kind of ... I wouldn't say this has led me to consider this, but I've been thinking going forward, things involving training, things involving ... I wouldn't say HR, but things involving a bit more of the management, sort of mentorship type role seem pretty appealing to me as opposed to more individual contributor stuff. So, I don't know. It's an interesting mirror to look through.
Josh: Cool.
Ben: A plus. Would buy again.
Starr: All right. So, this concludes our infomercial for Clifton StrengthsFinder.
Josh: I don't think they have an affiliate program unfortunately.
Starr: No, they should, they should. They can buy us something off our Amazon wishlist if they wanted.
Josh: There you go.
Starr: All right. Do you have anything else to say? Are we done here?
Ben: Happy new year.
Starr: Happy new year.
Josh: Happy new year.
Starr: I just want to say I appreciate y'all's diversity in spirit or whatever we're calling this stuff.
Josh: Likewise.
Ben: Agreed.
Starr: All right. Well, signing out. And wait. Oh wait, wait, wait. I've got to do the-
Josh: You got to do the spiel.
Starr: I got to do to the spiel. Okay. If you want to write for us, we hire writers. You can do technical blog posts and stuff for our blog. Go to our blog at honeybadger.io and look for the "Write for us" thing in header, at the top nav. If you would like to go and review us on a podcast service of your choice, that would be awesome. Does anybody else have any reviews or announcements or anything?
Josh: Nope.
Starr: All right. Well, we all survived the holidays and so I think we're going to get back to our regular schedule and not having breaks until the early spring vacation, month off that we all take. And after that comes the May vacation.
Josh: I still got to take the Santa hat off the honeybadger.
Ben: Oh I did that yesterday.
Josh: Oh did you?
Ben: Yup.
Josh: Okay. See, he's got it on his list.
Ben: That's right.
Josh: He probably went on the list, submitted and put it.
Starr: I didn't even know we had a santa hat on the honeybadger.
Josh: Um. Well, I'll post the graphic anyway.
Starr: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So, I was just joking about all those vacations, but we'll be back to our normal schedules. So, look forward to having lots of chats with you all.
Josh: Yeah, for sure.
Starr: All right. So, see you later. Bye.
Ben: Bye.
Josh: Bye.
The trio is morphing into a duo on this week's episode of FounderQuest, Fireside Chat edition. Ben and Josh talk about their 2020 resolutions, upping their serverless usage, side projects, and holiday plans. Ben also drops a major update from a previous episode.
Links:
Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Continuous Integration (CI)
Unicorn Project
Phoenix Project
Dependabot
Jenkins
GitHub Actions
Buildkite
Full transcript:
00:15 This is our first fireside chat with the two of us, right?
00:18 So you're ready for Christmas?
01:28 I think so.
01:31 How about the kids, are they ready for Christmas?
01:34 They're ready for Christmas. Everyone's been a little bit cooped up because of the winter weather, but I don't think we're going to get any relief there.
01:47 No, I saw that they had this like, what is it called? The pineapple express. This weather pattern that we have where this big stream of moisture comes from Hawaii into the Pacific Northwest and that's what we're doing right now. We've got this big rain storm coming in and I was looking at the visuals from Cliff Mass blog and there was just like the moisture was indicated with colors, right? Like you usually see on a forecast, and it was deeply red. Like all the way from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest and the end of it, as it passes the U.S. Coast, the kind of like a fist and so people were calling it the Hawaiian punch.
02:36 Hawaiian punch. That's awesome.
02:39 Yeah, we had a road shut down near us because all the rain caused the soil to get unstable and so there's a little bit of a mini land slide, I guess what happened, and some trees fell down and... yeah.
02:56 Ouch and Hawaiian punch, that's like a weather reporter's dream, isn't it like?
03:01 Yeah, basically.
03:01 Getting a name like that you can say.
03:04 I'm pretty excited for Christmas. There's not going to be any snow, but that's okay. It'll still be fun. Oh, it's follow up though, for like a couple weeks ago, I think it was just Starr and I who were having the chat. I don't think you were there for this one, we were talking about the Christmas lights and-
03:26 No, I was there.
03:27 Oh, you were there?
03:28 Yeah.
03:28 Okay. All right. I bought some Christmas lights for the outside of the house.
03:32 Did you? Nice.
03:33 So, now I have one string of lights draped over my garage door and it's-
03:40 That's what I usually have, except I didn't put them out this year yet because I was waiting for my garage door to go in and so now Caitlin and the kids are kind of bummed that they're not up, so I might put them up this weekend just because it doesn't look like it's going to be here.
03:55 Totally.
03:57 Throw them up for a little while anyway.
03:58 It's kind of fun and it is fun, like Starr said, to see them when you're coming home, get that holiday cheer.
04:07 It does, it kind of changes the atmosphere, for sure. So I thought we could talk for a second about a work related thing. Just because I think people are going to be getting this. I mean, this episode's going to go out next week, which is a couple of days before New Year's and so I thought we could, or at least I could share a New Year's resolution, which I normally don't do because usually if you share your resolutions, they don't happen. But I'm just going to throw caution to the wind here, but anyway, I think I posted this in chat before, but one of my resolutions is not to wait on a CI unnecessarily.
04:52 Oh, we got to do the Starr thing though. What is CI Josh?
04:58 So, CI is Continuous Integration, but there's a bunch of services that do this for you. It's like an automation feature that runs build steps on your software basically every time you push into your code repository, like github.com or whatever.
05:13 So we have a bunch of tests, test code for our application and the CI service runs all those tests for you and lets you know if they passed or failed, right?
05:24 Exactly. Yes. Being around for a while, the badgers getting up there in age, we have a lot of code repositories laying around now that we have to maintain and a lot of those happen to belong to me and they all have CI, and so they all have test suites that are running on every code push and that's fine. We've used a bunch of different services in the past but I think we've been using like Travis and Circle for the most part.
06:04 Normally it's fine, like, if I push code and I'm not doing like a ton of changes or I'm not working on a ton of repositories at once, but lately we've been using Dependabot, which is kind of a newer automation tool which automatically submits a dependency updates to your repositories. So it's a good way to keep like your dependencies up to date so you're not like having to go and do like this massive upgrade of all your things at once. What it does is it submits a more granular like, it submits one pull request for each dependency that has a new version that's come out. So on a lot of these repositories, a bunch of them anyway are NPM packages and as you know, NPM is a super low number of dependencies in an NPM project.
07:07 Like usually an average project, like a hello world might have a couple of hundred, more like an actual project might have a couple thousand. I forget how many it is, but it's a lot.
07:23 It's a lot.
07:26 Every time an NPM package that we're using gets updated, Dependabot on what submits a PR, when you want to go and merge all those things together especially, say like the other day I was doing this for six repositories at once that each had a bunch of a Dependabot PRs open. So it's like every time you merge it's generating a new test run, every time Dependabot opens a new PR, it's generating a new test run, every time you merge one PR and then it makes Dependabot need to rebase all the other open PRs, because it changed a package lock file or something and it needs to regenerate that for all the other open upgrades that are in process. Like 50 CIs runs need to happen. Basically I was stuck in this hell of like waiting for CI to run just so I could merge these tiny little PRs.
08:30 So finally I was not too happy. I wasn't a happy camper and the reason it was taking so long. Is that we didn't have very good concurrency for running all those builds basically.
08:48 So your resolution is to not wait on CI. What's the solution going to be?
08:54 My resolution is not to wait. First of all, the projects that we're using Travis, it's not Travis's fault that it was taking so long, we were using their open source plan. So I can't complain about Travis. Thank you Travis for giving us open source whatever, build time for so long, that's awesome, but if you're maintaining a lot of projects, it's not great because it has limits on how much you can run at a time. So one, I'm moving to some somewhere where we actually are paying like we can pay for more concurrency basically and we can basically pay for as much as we need because we can afford it. I think at this point my time is probably more valuable than waiting on CI runs.
09:52 So I'm moving most things to GitHub actions, that's kind of my answer because as I understand, the GitHub actions, you get a certain number of free minutes or something and I'm pretty sure then you just pay for extra, whatever you need. So that's great and we also use Circle for some things and for a long time they had some kind of, it was like a strange way they did concurrency. I don't think our plan had a super, like it wasn't unlimited like pay for as much as you need, but I'm pretty sure they just switched that model. So, if we want to we can also pay them more money to us to save us time.
10:38 So, the plan is we're going to trade some money for time?
10:41 Exactly.
10:42 Yeah I like that plan.
10:43 So that's my plan. My plan in 2020 is to spend more money.
10:47 Talking about CI, I have long wanted to just take some time and work with Buildkite, that's a CI service where you run the runners yourself and your own infrastructure and they run the coordinators and then you run the actual boxes that run all the tests. I've wanted that because like you can decide how much do you want to scale up and you can just run the instances and we already have a pretty awesome set up with Amazon for all of our hosting needs. So we could just use Buildkite. They have a cloud formation stack. You can just throw in there and that was it all, but-
11:31 That's cool.
11:32 ... I just didn't know that that was a good use of my time. That's one of those, it'd be fun to do but it's really not worth it, you could just pay GitHub or pay Circle to do that for you.
11:41 Right. I remember back in the day like trying to run my own Jenkins server and-
11:48 That's no good.
11:48 ... I don't recall that being like a valuable trade off or a worthwhile trade off, at least not in my size.
11:58 Yeah. I ran Jenkins back in the day and that's not something I would choose to do again, that's like choosing to run your own email server. It's just a world of pain, you don't need that.
12:09 It is interesting like all this stuff it's getting progressively easier to run your own. I think there's definitely a trend that's still moving in that direction for certain use cases. Whereas, doing email things it's easier than it used to be. At least using other services or Amazon's got what's their email service?
12:39 SES.
12:39 SES.
12:40 Yeah, I definitely see that being a trend over the next couple of years with the compliance stuff that's been happening with GPR and CCPA. It's having control over where that data goes, I mean CI isn't as important in our case because that's just code. That's not any of our customer's data involved in that, but things like email and search, all those places where that customer data ends up or has to go through, all of a sudden it's much more important now. Like who is touching that data and can you verify that those companies are actually operating in a secure way, because if someone wants to audit you, they're going to ask you who your vendors are. In that case it makes sense not to use some fly by night service to do your CI. You want to use someone that's got a good SOC 2 story, or whatever and being able to have or for the more paranoid among us to run all those services yourself. So like Buildkite, that's probably a good thing for them to sell. You can have all this stuff on your own services.
13:45 For those services that allow you to do that, the easier they get, the more attractive it is to be able to do that, because at least from my perspective, if I know that at some point I'm going to be dealing with privacy regulation things, if I can build it with something that doesn't require me to think about that at all in the future, why wouldn't I. If it's relatively the same cost.
14:16 That's always the trade off, right? If you want to run it yourself, then you have to administer yourself, that's one thing I think is nice about the rise of serverless. Is that you can just outsource all that, you can quote self host it, but let Amazon actually handled for you and its in your Amazon account.
14:33 You're like offloading all of that risk and all of this stuff, the headache to the platform, which is designed basically just to give you a compliant way to run your own email server or whatever kind of.
14:46 I think software developers, entrepreneurs in 2020 might want to look at some of those popular SaaS services that are out there that are hosting a bunch of data and maybe make a self host adoption.
15:01 Yeah, but for CIs at least we won't have to think about that because we're not like running our tests against like live cast, like a database clone of a production, I assume.
15:14 No, we're not.
15:16 I'm reading the Unicorn Project right now, which is the followup to the Phoenix Project and really it's about super archaic enterprise company, it has to switch to all cloud services and modern tech stack and everything, with hundreds of people into different teams of things, but reading that makes me recall all the weird things people do out there.
15:50 You know, just that brief intro that you gave just now makes me so glad that we're in a cloud native company, that we don't have any of that baggage to deal with.
16:01 Have you started that book yet, by the way?
16:04 I haven't yet, no. The Phoenix Project was great, I loved it and so Unicorn Project it's definitely on my list, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
16:10 So one thing I thought the book was like kind of like a sequel or actually what I thought the book was when I first saw it come out was I assumed it was like the Phoenix Project, which kind of focuses more heavily on the operations. It's about DevOps, the Phoenix project is basically about how to implement DevOps in a large old-school organization, but it focuses a little bit more on the Ops side of things. So I assumed that the Unicorn Project would do the same thing, but for the Dev side of the picture, but what it actually is, the Unicorn Project is written more for developers.
16:54 So it's written for like the developer in the large enterprise organization and it's specifically like how can those people move their companies in the right direction, into the direction basically of the Phoenix Project. Whereas the Phoenix Project was like, how do you implement DevOps in the enterprise? Or why should the enterprise even care basically?
17:23 That's cool.
17:24 I thought that was an interesting dichotomy I guess. So anyway, recommend it.
17:33 Definitely on the list. I think I might spend some time caught up on some reading over our Christmas vacation.
17:41 Yeah, same. I've been having fun on my side projects this month so far. I got pulled into a few Honeybadger actual work things, but I've gotten a lot done, but I'm also feeling the need to also rest a little bit this month. I think I'm going to force myself to set everything aside for probably for the rest of the month coming up pretty soon here, maybe starting next week, give myself a weekend.
18:14 I've been liking our side project month. It's been going really well. I've spent more time on non side projects than I had planned, so I haven't had a lot of side project time, but at the same time I've taken a look at like some of the systems that we have and I guess lubing up some of those squeaky wheels and that's been fun because I've been playing a serverless. So that's always a fun thing, but I think that's a valid use of side project time, is to take a look at stuff that is working fine, but I would like it to work a little differently, just polish that a little bit.
18:53 I liked the idea of just taking time off to work on what you would work on if you didn't have any kind of responsibility or pressure to do anything, like what would you do. I wish that we could just do that all the time and maybe take time off occasionally to do actually do stuff that we're forced to do.
19:16 I think maybe in the new year we can talk about how it could make this little more regular kind of thing. Instead of just one month of the year, maybe we can do one week, a quarter or something on. I'd love the story of Basecamp and how it was built on Fridays. Basically they spent a few hours every week and just built that up and I like having the distraction. Side projects in general are fun, whether they're work or not and I think if we could kind of schedule that into our system a bit and that would help keep things fresh. So chat about that.
19:53 That'd be cool. Nice. So any other 2020 plans yet or do you have any resolutions?
20:04 No, I don't typically make resolutions. I try to build good habits and then stick to those habits. Like exercising, like a few years ago I decided like I'm going to start doing it and so just doing that three times a week as a minimum. That's the habit that I've now been doing for several years.
20:26 I agree, it's all about habits.
20:28 I mean resolutions, I don't know, they kind of get talked up a lot and then kind of get forgotten.
20:35 That's why I said resolutions, I'm a fan of them, but I keep them private. Like I don't usually share them just because it's a personal motivating thing and I weigh it's fine if you actually do accomplish something that you had set out to do, then you can like brag about it later or something like say, "Look, I actually did it," but you can. Normally it's setting yourself up for failure.
21:07 One thing I found that works for me aside from habits is I journal. So I try to keep a journal on a regular basis, maybe once a week and just write down things that are going on basically. What I've done is I put a sticky note and the front of that journal that has like five or six things that I just want to work on, like self-improvement kind of stuff. Every two weeks I'm seeing these little sticky note of things, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I want to work on that," and so it's a good reminder to do those things. So that's worked out pretty well because I can kind of reflect on that and say how am I doing on those things and it's been good. Like you said, I don't share those publicly because I don't need to admit all my failures to people. It's been really weird like this past few weeks, maybe it's because we've been working on non-critical things but I felt like really motivated to work, exceedingly motivated to work for the past two weeks and-
22:13 I felt the same thing.
22:15 It's kind of weird. So now I'm going into this Christmas vacation that we planed and I'm like, "I don't really want to take a vacation right now because I'm really motivated to work."
22:23 This may be a problem with starting the side project work before the vacation, before you're going to take the time off, because then you're like you really want to work on this stuff because you've been having fun. We had it late last year where we did the work after the vacation.
22:40 Exactly. Well, we could always make up our minds to just go ahead and do some more side work after our vacation.
22:47 Or we could just decide to take January off, just to take the vacation.
22:54 There you go.
22:56 We'll just work through Christmas.
23:00 Well, one thing I think I've decided not to do over the break is I'm pretty sure I'm not going to upgrade the database this time. I was really planning on it and part of the side project work, I did find a little snag. We have a test instance of PostgreSQL 11 running and as I was working with some data there, I found a minor snag that could impact our production system if we went ahead and did that upgrade. So I probably will not pull the trigger on upgrading to PostgreSQL 12 over Christmas.
23:31 That's a good call. I don't think anyone wants to get like Honeybadger notifications or not get Honeybadger. I don't know what's worse like, not getting the ones that you should be getting, or getting the ones that you shouldn't be getting. Reminds me that we had a PagerDuty customer support request come in the other day about our PagerDuty integration. That was like, "Hey, like we're having this," it's like an edge case like use case kind of issue, but it's something that we might change in the future or we might tweak it to make it work a little bit better for that person. But it's like, do we want to make drastic changes to the data that we send a PagerDuty like on the week of Christmas?
24:24 Survey says no. No, we don't.
24:27 So don't worry everyone. I think Honeybadger, it's a feature freeze time.
24:33 Exactly. It's like those e-commerce shops that don't do any deployments, the week before Thanksgiving, right?
24:40 Like holiday time is our...
24:43 We try to keep things pretty static.
24:45 Static and stable and running smoothly.
24:50 So 2020 resolution though, I think one thing I'll definitely do is more serverless for sure. I'm really enjoying it. Like having the discreet bits of functionality that are independent of anything else. It's like, "Oh, you want to do some other transformation to that data that you already have? Okay, fine." Just throw it on the Kinesis Stream and set up another consumer and have a Lambda running that. That's awesome.
25:11 That's some really cool stuff. I think there's lots of opportunity to like pull out stuff, parts of the pipeline like we've been talking about and I want to learn more about that too.
25:28 Maybe we'll do that big rewrite, like one step at a time, right?
25:32 Yeah. At least the processing rewrite or whatever the pipeline rewrite.
25:36 Exactly.
25:37 I'm pretty sure, yeah.
25:39 12 months from now we'll be looking back and be like, "Oh, over the year we changed our whole pipeline," now we have V2.
25:45 No, I don't think we need to rewrite anything like in our actual rails app. It's just the parts of the rails app that maybe shouldn't be in there anymore. So yeah, we'll see, but I'd like to learn more about serverless in 2020.
26:01 So as part of my side project mostly, I've been playing with Vue, learning Vue. Maybe I'm late to the party, I'm not a big fan of front end frameworks and stuff. But-
26:13 This is the V-U-E, for client side framework.
26:21 As I've been doing more serverless, it seems like all the cool kids like to have their single page app in front of their serverless back end and so I've been playing with that and it's been fun. I like how easy it is to get into Vue. Like you can get started pretty easily with an existing page and existing app. It just feels lighter than react maybe that's just some personal prejudice or something, but it seems fun so far.
26:47 I've heard that too I think. It's cool. I haven't really compared them personally, but from what I've heard.
26:59 So what I did though is I bought a Udemy course on Vue. Remember last year when we did the hackathon, we bought that Udemy course about Elixir. I thought, well, we just go buy a course on Vue and so I got one and it's pretty good, but now I'm thinking like maybe every year we ought to have just like a Christmas giveaway at Honeybadger where it's just Udemy credit, so all the employees can just spend the Christmas break learning new stuff-
27:24 I like that.
27:26 Or maybe that's just me who like to learn new stuff. I don't know.
27:29 Yeah, no, I've got a couple of Udemy courses since last December and I'm currently going through a one on photography just to kind of brush up on my photography skills. That's been cool and it's nice. It's also fun having something that you're learning that's not tech it's a different type of learning.
27:57 Back to the resolutions, last January-ish, I bought a Udemy course on drawing, so I can improve my drawing skill. I haven't watched it yet.
28:07 Haven't? Well, you still have it though, so you can.
28:10 Yeah, I do still have it. So maybe over the Christmas break I'll learn how to draw.
28:14 Well, I bought the AWS developer certification course on Udemy, but I don't know if it's current. It's was for 2019, like November 2019 so now I might have to get the updated version if I'm going to actually do it next year, but we'll see. That's something I might still try to do.
28:40 I did one of those. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun.
28:41 You and Starr both did.
28:42 Yeah. I think we're supposed to renew those once a year. So I think it's actually a time for us to renew to if we're going to do that.
28:50 Do you have to do the test when you renew or is it just like?
28:53 I think so.
28:54 Really? Wow. A yearly Amazon AWS exam.
29:00 I'll do a double check on that, but it was fun. It's kind of like feel like you're back in school, studying and cramming and testing.
29:09 It'd be like the first test I've had in a long time.
29:16 So we talked about our Thanksgiving dinners last time, now it's time to talk about a Christmas dinner.
29:21 Like what we had for Christmas dinner, right?
29:24 Right, because this is watching after Christmas. So the Curtis family, we do the same thing for Christmas that we do for Thanksgiving, so just do the turkey and sides.
29:34 Yeah, we've done that before and I'm a fan of that as you know. I like Turkey dinner.
29:42 Do have that turkey that you had?
29:44 No, I still got the two extras in the freezer, so we'll probably. I think we're going to do one sometime in like January or February or something. Who knows where when the other bird will. I think this Christmas we're going to do a ham go like traditional ham dinner.
30:05 So I do like the ham. That's what we do for Easter. That's our Easter one.
30:14 Easter ham. Nice, cool.
30:20 So is there anything that you really want Santa to have under the tree for you on Christmas morning?
30:26 I don't think so. Like I'm really bad, I just buy things that I want usually and if it's something that I decided that I'm going to buy, I'm not like usually quick to buy things, but once I decide I'm going to do it, I don't see the point in waiting. It's a little different here, when you're married and it's all the same bank account. We don't do like huge presents usually, but we do stockings and small things and occasionally like a surprise larger item or something that you didn't really think of. What about you?
31:18 I'm hoping for a Raspberry Pie under the tree.
31:21 Raspberry pie.
31:22 The latest generation. I wanted to build a little box to have pie hole on it.
31:28 Okay. That's cool.
31:31 Strip all those Ads from that nasty internet.
31:35 I've heard about that too.
31:36 Just have a fun little box my way.
31:37 You'll have to let me know how that works for if you get it installed and everything. I've heard they're pretty cool. It's like the Ad blocker that you install on your entire network, right?
31:50 Yeah, basically you just changed the DNS to point to it and so it just routes all Ad requests, so dev null.
32:00 That's really cool.
32:02 So we'll see. We'll see if I've been nice this year.
32:05 Yeah. Okay. So I think we're wrapping up here. I had a thought though that, if our wonderful listeners wanted to get us a belated Christmas present or holiday present, I think the best thing that they could do for us is to go to iTunes or I don't know what other platforms have like have reviews or ratings. I don't know if Overcast does, but at least if you're on iTunes, go to the FounderQuest podcast and give us a nice review and or rating and or review. I think that would be... What do you think?
32:42 Yeah. I think so.
32:44 That'd be a good one.
32:45 If you want a little Christmas cheer in addition to the gift to us, you can also tweet about the podcast, tell your friends.
32:54 Yeah, that would be great. That reminds me, on Honeybadger io, we've got the Honeybadger is looking pretty festive right now too. I don't know if you went and checked it out and I think we'll probably leave his Santa hat on until... I'll leave it up through the new year, just so people have a chance to check it out. Then if you're listening to this, like 10 years from now, unless it's in December, it'll probably be a regular old Honeybadger.
33:32 Sounds good.
33:33 Cool. All right.
33:34 Merry Christmas Josh.
33:35 Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Cool. Cheers to 2020.
This week Josh, Ben, and Starr look back at all of the things that Honeybadger shipped in the last 12 months. They also give Apple some free management advice and provide their thoughts on MicroConf's latest announcement. Lastly, will Honeybadger move away from error monitoring and bet its future on textbox applications? Tune in and find out!
Links:
Exponent Podcast
Johny Ive
MicroConf
Hiring Process FounderQuest episode
Fireside Chat FounderQuest episode
Dundie Awards
Full Transcript:
Ben: I was just thinking. Hey, Tim. Let's give you tips on how to organize Apple.
Starr: That should be a show that we do. Yeah, we should do a special show where we just do something extremely full of hubris.
Ben: Every week we could pick a large multinational enterprise and give them tips on how to improve their business.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: How to Honeybadger-ize it.
Josh: I think that's what the Exponent podcast does, which is-
Ben: Beat us to the punch.
Josh: Yeah. Is it Ben Thompson?
Ben: Uh-huh (affirmative).
Josh: Yeah. But I mean, he sounds like he's qualified to talk about that stuff.
Ben: He actually knows what he's talking about.
Josh: Yeah, but I have heard buzz just following... Because I've been having issues with some Apple services, and it seems like they are having some, like they have some growing issues, or they have had growing issues. There has been buzz about they might need to create some sort of clearer division or something. Because it's totally different, running services. Totally different from having a hardware, software company.
Starr: Well, if they're having problems scaling maybe they should move to AWS.
Josh: That is... yeah.
Ben: Pretty sure they have quite a big AWS spend as it is.
Starr: The whole Apple photos thing, I hear it's just run off a couple of Mac Minis in some guy's closet.
Josh: It's just running on a disc. It's running in Tim's closet.
Ben: Although, they have created Mac Pros now. They just released that. They don't have a rack mount yet for them.
Josh: Oh, yeah. And you can get eight terabytes in the MacBook Pros now, so they could finally extend their iCloud storage.
Starr: Yeah, do y'all think they actually run their services on Macs as servers?
Ben: No. I don't think so. I mean, maybe some old, old services are still running on some of those Xserves, but no. I think-
Josh: I'd be surprised.
Starr: Yeah, that would take some dedication.
Ben: I'm sure they're well invested in the public cloud.
Starr: If Steve Jobs was still around, they would be, I think.
Josh: Wait, you don't think-
Starr: That just seems like the kind of line he'd draw in the sand.
Josh: Did Jony Ive not design all their rack mounts?
Starr: See, the problem with Apple computers, with Apple servers in the data center, is it just is insane to manage all the dongles.
Josh: Just dongles between it.
Starr: Yeah, they don't have ethernet jacks. You got to have a dongle that goes into your USB 3.
Josh: Have you seen the fiber dongle, to connect the fiver to the Thunderbolt?
Starr: I know. It's crazy. It's crazy. What are we talking about today? We're talking about lessons learned in 2019. It's 2019, isn't it, guys?
Ben: Still, yes it is.
Starr: Okay. That's great. Yeah, so lessons learned in 2019 at Honeybadger. It might be applicable to your huge multinational corporation that manufactures software and hardware. It's been a pretty big year today... Today. It's been a pretty big year. I've had days that feel like that. It's been a pretty big year this year. We have grown the team to five people, and we've just gotten a whole bunch done. I guess maybe we should start by... What do you think we should do? Should with start at the beginning or should we start by talking about big 10000 foot view of lessons and then sort of get into the details? How do y'all want to do it?
Ben: I was thinking of this episode as the things we did this year episode, the recap, as opposed to things we learned.
Starr: Oh, I'm sorry.
Ben: I don't know.
Josh: Well, there might be things we learned that we'll share along the way.
Ben: Will come out of the things that we did. Hopefully, we learned some things along the way.
Starr: Okay, that's cool. Things we did. That's a little bit more cut and dry too.
Josh: I forgot we did a lot of this stuff, so I kind of learned what we did this year, today.
Ben: Yeah, it's good to reflect and celebrate your successes, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: So what we did this morning, or what, I guess, Josh did is asked Ben Findley to compile a list of all the things that we did. So we didn't have to... We're getting the hang of this enforcing thing, I think.
Josh: I was like, "Hey, Ben Findley. What did we do this year, again?" And then he created a nice list in Notion, and here we are.
Ben: I jumped in there too, because he was looking at all the... He does all of our product announcements and stuff, so he was looking at it from things that we announced. What I did is I went back to our GitHub repo and I looked at all of our pull requests that we closed through the year.
Starr: Oh, nice.
Ben: And found a few things that we did that we didn't necessarily advertise or talk about very much. Some things that he might not have been aware of.
Josh: These aren't on our list right here? Are you saying you're going to surprise me with some extra stuff that we did?
Ben: No, no. I already added them to the list.
Josh: Oh, you put it... Oh, okay.
Ben: Yeah, he and I were like in there together.
Josh: I thought there was even more that I... I thought there was more. I got excited for a minute.
Starr: These are pretty unannounced features. To the public, this is all going to be news.
Ben: I don't know. A lot of these things have been announced.
Starr: Okay, to the public, a couple of things are going to be new.
Ben: Oh. Oh, yes. Yes. A couple of things will be somewhat new, unless you're thinking-
Starr: That are going to be amazingly new and-
Ben: Shockingly new.
Starr: They're going to blow people's minds.
Josh: This is kind of a premiere.
Ben: Knock your socks off.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: In continuing the premieres of the morning, having just watched the MicroConf premiere.
Ben: Oh, yes. Yes. Did you see that, Starr? There's new news from the MicroConf community.
Starr: I saw you all talking about it, so could somebody tell me what's going on?
Ben: Josh can fill you in, I'm sure.
Josh: Well, Rob had nine new things to announce in a video. They had it go out at 9 AM this morning or something. They did a little video launch thing. I'm not going to go through all nine of them, because I don't remember them all. But you can go to microconf.com and see what they are. But a few of them are, I think, MicroConf 2021 is going to be in Denver, and they're not going to be doing Starter anymore. So it's going to be just... I assume that they're just going to combine the... whoever wants to go to MicroConf, it'll just be MicroConf again.
Starr: Because they had changed it a couple years ago where there was a MicroConf for beginning business people, and then a MicroConf for more experienced business people.
Josh: Yeah. I think the reasoning was MicroConf was fairly... it's a fairly pricey conference to go to, and all the travel and stuff, and they can get more... For the people who are just starting out, they can get more mileage out of some other things that they're planning. So they're going to release all of their video library for free online. They're going to start doing more local, regional style events, it sounded. So there will be more opportunity, basically, for people who can't get to the big MicroConf. They can go to one of these other smaller things, or participate in the community online.
Starr: Oh, that's great. That'll be good. Hopefully, that'll bring in some new blood. MicroConf's good but it seems like there's... Every year it's sort of like the same people, so it's nice to see those people but at the same time, maybe it might do more good in the world if you get some new people in there every now and again.
Josh: Yeah. New faces are always good. Yeah, I don't know.
Ben: Yeah. I think it'll be fine. Plus, there's going to be the Slack community that's going to be ongoing all the time.
Josh: Yeah, there's a new Slack. Oh, yeah. I thought that was kind of... I mean, the last thing I need is another Slack.
Ben: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Oh, boy. One more Slack to be part of.
Josh: That said, I don't join most of the Slack's I am a part of. But I have been thinking lately, since I left. I haven't been on Twitter. I deleted my Twitter account a while back. So I have been missing a connection to some of those people that I've been trying to think about how do I reestablish that without re-joining social media, because I'd like to have the best of both worlds. So maybe that's... The Slack might be a little bit better alternative.
Starr: Yeah. At least it's not a Discord server.
Josh: No?
Starr: I don't really care. It seems like Discord is exactly like Slack. Just gamier.
Josh: It's similar, yeah. It is gamey. I don't know. It's kind of cool.
Ben: That's actually one of the things we did this year. We added a Discord integration.
Starr: Really?
Josh: Yeah, we did that recently.
Starr: Okay. Well, let's not give it away. We don't want spoilers. So are we going to just go down this list? Or what are we doing?
Ben: Yeah, just down the list. Chronologically. I started the list in December of last year. It's not really a this year recap, but I figured we're in December now, so if we go back 12 months... That gave me some wiggle room to include the CircleCI orb that we launched back in December of last year. What that does is that's a little bit of code that plugs into the CircleCI environment, and you can use our orb to send deployment notifications and to upload your source maps. So a lot of times it's part of your CI/CD pipeline you might be doing compiling assets and you can now use in that CircleCI. Or you can just easily plug in and send those assets to us as part of your source map, and then let us know. We do some deployment with CircleCI. When something passes on master on our main repo, CircleCI, once it's test run, it actually does the deployment for us. And in that kind of environment, you can use our orb to then notify Honeybadger about the deployment.
Josh: It's cool.
Ben: Yeah, it was kind of cool.
Josh: Remind me... I know I'm probably getting ahead of things here, but do we have that for GitHub Actions too?
Ben: We just launched that in November, this November. Yes, for GitHub.
Josh: I thought so.
Ben: GitHub Actions was in beta for quite a while, so we kind of held off on that until it was publicly available, and that happened in November, October. Somewhere in there. So now I have that in both places.
Josh: I just set up my first testing thing on GitHub Actions. It's really cool. I like it.
Starr: So looks like January is mostly my stuff, so I'll go. We revamped our onboarding system, so when you sign up now, instead of just being taken into our configuration page with some instructions, you're given a nice little step by step installation guide that sort of tells you when you've completed the steps to interact with our server. It's very cool and interactive, and that was actually a outgrowth of hiring Ben Findley, our marketing person who is basically... I think we're trying to increase the number of people who converted. Do you guys remember? Do we have any results on that?
Ben: Do we have results on that? That's an excellent question. I know we've gotten great feedback about that. We've had people say that the onboarding is fantastic. I don't remember looking at stats.
Josh: I haven't looked at the numbers. We have them. I know that we have them.
Starr: I think I remember they got a little bit muddied, because we launched our free plan, and then we also launched PHP support, and both of those had different... Both of those are going to mess with your conversion rate, right?
Josh: Yeah, well, at the time we were having... we were coming off of a big marketing campaign for PHP that had like... we were getting a lot of signups, but since it was a relatively new thing, fewer of those signups were converting. So that was skewing our stats. I think the biggest change that came out of the revamping the onboarding process, I think, was that we wanted to lock the process of... we wanted to require you, basically, to install our code before continuing into the rest of the app and stuff. Because that's our biggest factor of where someone falls off. I think we had some good results with that, where we have fewer people.
Ben: I think we had more people.
Josh: It's also easier to identify those accounts, the ones that are progressing versus the ones that are just stalled on that one step.
Starr: Right. That's true.
Josh: So that's been great.
Starr: And I think maybe some people weren't entirely sure what they were supposed to do. Maybe more beginner people who weren't... I think in our old system they didn't quite know what they were supposed to do next, even though we gave them instructions and stuff. But it wasn't quite as obvious.
Starr: In January, we also launched search autocomplete, which was my baby, which was a huge, huge effort. Basically, we always had this really sweet, cool advanced search syntax that lets you search errors by all sorts of different parameters and stuff. But you had to sort of type it in manually and nobody really knew how to use it. So what we did is if you go on our site now you'll see that we have... When you click on search, you'll get a menu of options, and when you say search by assignee, it actually edits a little text field and inserts the right syntax for you. And then if you go and type into that text field it basically, it does autocomplete. It autocompletes to give you the right syntax so that you don't really have... You can do searches without having to type so much, which was nice.
Starr: Yeah, so then moving on. February, we had our first engineering hire, full time engineering hire, right?
Ben: Yeah, brought Kevin on in February. We talked about that in a previous episode, so I guess we should link that episode, because we spent some time talking about that process.
Josh: The hiring process.
Ben: Yeah. But that was great. It's been wonderful. Kevin's still with us, thankfully. March was his month, really, looking at the list of things.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Bunch of things.
Starr: He got off to a running start.
Ben: He's really been doing a good job.
Josh: I was going to say after February, which is like the only thing that we did in February, apparently, is hired Kevin. We have 50 things to go through for the rest of the year, so we either need to pick up the pace or combine some of these things, because we're going to be here a while.
Starr: Yeah, we're going to take forever. This'll be a double header.
Ben: We can stretch this out. Oh, my God. We're only through a couple of months. So in March, Kevin added two-factor authentication. Also, the Have I Been Pwned database that tells you if your password has been compromised in some sort of data breach somewhere is actually a gem that we can use to check is the password you're using one of those compromised passwords and warn people. So, little security improvements there. Did some integration improvements. We made it so you could customize the way that our notices show up in Jira or GitHub.
Starr: You know what else we did in March, Ben?
Ben: What did we do?
Starr: Well, as fans of the show will undoubtedly know, March is the month in which we launched this podcast, FounderQuest. So that means our birthday's coming up soon. Only three months.
Josh: We're going to have to do something. What are we going to do for FounderQuest's birthday?
Starr: I don't know. I'll send you all a piece of cake and we can eat it on air.
Josh: Okay.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: Yeah, I like it.
Ben: Sounds good.
Josh: We had been talking about starting a podcast for a long time-
Ben: Long time.
Josh: -and procrastinating. That month... When we started FounderQuest it was like that was a ship it moment for us. We just got to do this and try it.
Ben: I think that's why our February was kind of slim, because we were doing a lot of recording in February.
Starr: Oh, yeah. Sure.
Josh: We were.
Starr: Sure, yeah. All that recording you guys did.
Ben: And Starr was doing a lot of work in February for getting the site right, did the illustrations-
Josh: Site, editing. Yeah. We had recorded a bunch of episodes up front, because we're conservative.
Starr: It's so funny because seeing this I see patterns now that make total sense, but it's hard to see unless you have a list of everything that we've done. My pattern is just like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, huge thing, nothing, nothing, nothing, huge thing. It's kind of funny.
Ben: Let's see. In April, we added deployment tracking for Laravel Forge. That was a customer request that came in, and Josh did some JavaScript work, which is always his favorite.
Josh: Sorry. You're being facetious there?
Ben: Yeah, just a little bit.
Josh: I love JavaScript.
Ben: And then we had our first conclave, our regular scheduled meeting where we all get together, our first conclave that had more than just the three of us. So we had a company wide meeting, all five people.
Starr: That's a bit of a milestone. How do you think that went? I thought it was great seeing everybody. I wondered if we were boring them with some of the business stuff.
Ben: No, I don't think so. I think they were fascinated, like-
Starr: They're fascinated? Okay.
Ben: -this how these guys actually work.
Josh: I think everyone had a good time.
Starr: Okay. That's cool. And I guess a day long meeting, not everybody's going to be having rapt attention at every moment.
Ben: Right.
Josh: Yeah. We're having our next one in January, right? With everyone?
Ben: Yeah, but it's not going to be on the slopes. That's still something that we want to do but haven't done yet.
Josh: It's on my to do list to look into that.
Starr: I guess you probably can't book a magical ski chalet weekend with three weeks' notice in the Seattle area, or in the northwest.
Ben: So moving right along. May. Coming up on summer. We did content security policy support, so now you can send in the CSP reports. We talked about that on an episode too, a while back.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: We updated our PagerDuty integration, supported their V2, and then added Jira Cloud, because just having two Jiras wasn't enough. Now you had to have a third Jira.
Starr: We got all the Jiras here at Honeybadger.
Ben: So we added that, and Josh did some source map stuff, which is always fun.
Josh: More JavaScript.
Starr: I added Turbolinks.
Ben: Yeah, that was your big thing for that.
Starr: It was my big thing. Yeah, 2019, the year of Turbolinks. That's what I'm saying. Everybody should install Turbolinks. We previously had... we were using this pjax library, which was originally made by GitHub, but it turns out that that was not being supported anymore. So it was preventing us from upgrading jQuery, which we love. We're just all about jQuery at Honeybadger.
Josh: We're 10X jQuery developers.
Starr: Yeah, to upgrade the big JQ we had to switch to Turbolinks, and let me y'all, it's just turbo. I'm joking, but I honestly like Turbolinks.
Josh: Turbolinks is awesome.
Starr: It's pretty cool.
Ben: Didn't you also switch us from Sprockets to Webpack during that time?
Starr: Oh, I did. You're right.
Josh: We went full modern at Honeybadger.
Starr: We did. We're using Webpack to pack our jQuery code.
Ben: So hot.
Starr: We are. People say I'm too old to be a hipster or to be cool, but I disagree.
Ben: Speaking of hot and on the cusp, we added IPv6 support in that month as well. We had a customer request that from us. I was like, "What? There's someone out there actually using IPv6?"
Starr: There's one person.
Ben: So that one person now is supported.
Starr: You're welcome.
Ben: That was kind of fun. July got some Ben Findley action in July. He launched our affiliate program, and that's been going well. I think we should probably open that up to everybody. Right now it's just invite only. It's this exclusive club. But I think-
Starr: Is this an announcement? Is this announcement?
Ben: Yes. I'm announcing it.
Starr: Right here on the FounderQuest podcast, you're seeing history in the making everybody.
Josh: If you want to be an affiliate, hit us up.
Starr: Hit us up.
Ben: And we'll hit you up with some cash.
Josh: What is the deal?
Starr: Can I be an affiliate?
Ben: You bring customers in, and right now the deal is we do 20%. So whatever ongoing revenue that we get from that customer that you bring to us, you get 20% forever. They pay us, we pay you.
Starr: Cool. Yeah. I'll think about embezzlement opportunities with that.
Josh: We got to update the handbook again, Ben.
Starr: The handbook doesn't say no embezzlement.
Josh: We just keep...
Ben: In July, we also had Breadcrumbs. So that was a lot of Kevin's work and Josh did some work on that as well. That was cool, allowing people to track some more data around their errors. And then my project for that time was Highcharts. I was getting frustrated with our perfectly adequate but sometimes not so great charting that we had, and I wanted to do some more fun things with charts. So I replaced our charting library with Highcharts, which is fantastic. That was a great choice, highly recommend it.
Starr: I was really happy because that got rid of another old jQuery plugin. Slowly getting rid of them jQuery plugins.
Ben: We are web-scale.
Starr: We are.
Ben: Speaking of web-scale, the next month we had a change of our plans. We're like, "You know what? Let's just throw caution to the wind, and let's just 10X our limits." So we gave people more uptime, more check ins, but not more error traffic.
Starr: So what are we saying? We're saying that-
Ben: We had some customers say that we were kind of stingy when it came to how many uptime checks we have on our plans.
Josh: Compared to-
Ben: Like Pingdom.
Josh: Yeah, competitors that do just uptime checks. We were pretty low.
Ben: Yeah, we were. So we said, "You know what? We do not want people to have that excuse as a reason why they should use any other uptime service." So we brought ourselves to parity with other vendors out there who were offering more uptime checks. So now you get your uptime checks and you get your exception monitoring and your cron monitoring all at one place, and all the checks you could possibly want. And that was great.
Josh: Yeah, and I think that was win-win for everyone, because that doesn't really cost us a whole lot either. It's just a huge value add to Honeybadger that no one else... none of our competitors have that. It's like why not just give people a bunch?
Starr: Yeah, because that's what we do here at Honeybadger.
Ben: That did lead to some unintended consequences. We had a few scaling issues we had to iron out as a result of that decision. But it was good overall. We are stronger, faster, better now than we were. So that's good.
Starr: Awesome. So in August... I don't know if this was August or July. I was too lazy to actually look it up, because literally nobody cares. I locked myself in a room with a bunch of data and tried to figure out what it meant. We've always had this sort of hard time linking our marketing efforts to direct results, because we do a blog post, it's really hard to say, okay, somebody came and read this blog post, and then ten days later they signed up for Honeybadger. I don't know. The customer life cycle doesn't work like that, because you don't always have a need for a new error tracking system. It's when you set up a new project, and that might happen in six months. And also developers really like to use those ad blocking, tracking blocking, things. So we're kind of at a disadvantage there.
Starr: So what I did is I was like, okay, I'm going to take all of our revenue data and signups data, and then I'm going to go back and find everything we've ever done, with respect to marketing actions, stuff like that. Basically, I just made probably 100 different charts where it's like I looked at one chart on the same plot as the chart of new customers, or the chart of revenue, and tried to see if any of them lined up, which is my very advanced mathematical approach to things. I think we came up with some pretty interesting results from that, and as a result I've been working on getting more content to the blog, and getting us set up with a system that can produce a lot of blog content on a more sustainable basis than just me writing it.
Josh: Yeah, which was one of the successful things we did.
Starr: Yeah, that was one of the successful things.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: [crosstalk] I'm sorry, what? I was just going to segue into the integrations.
Ben: Yeah. I had kind of forgotten about this, but we redid the GitHub integration. We ditched the old OAuth way and did the new GitHub app way. We also replaced the old Slack. We were one of the original Slack integrations, way, way back in the day. They, since then, had come out with a new way to build apps. So we built our new Slack app and got customers starting to switch over, which turned out to be a really good thing to do. So that was August. I think it was October Slack sent out this email to all their customers who were still using the older integrations saying they're going away. So all of a sudden we got a bunch of people saying, "Oh, my goodness. Our Slack integration's going to die. What are you going to do?" I was like, "Oh, just go ahead and click the button over here, because we already upgraded it." That would've affected not just us, of course, but everyone that had an old integration on Slack like-
Starr: It's a little bit of a jerk move on Slack's part.
Ben: It was abrupt.
Starr: It would've been nice for them to say, okay, instead of just your service is going away, they could say, "Your service is migrating to this new thing over here."
Ben: There were a lot of people affected by that, other companies that provide integrations. So there were a lot of hustling going on that month to get new integrations built. But it was nice to be able to sit back and say, "Oh, yeah. We got this covered." We also added deployment tracking for Netlify. That was a weird one. I was like, "Static sites getting deployed, I guess we could track that too."
Starr: Wait, I didn't even... Do we do that?
Ben: We do that.
Starr: I didn't know that. Today, I learned something.
Ben: Yeah, so if you're a JAMstack fan. You can-
Starr: Jam it. I love jam it.
Ben: -deploy yourself to Netlify and you can still use Honeybadger to track that.
Starr: Do y'all like that Bob Marley song, Jammin, because I just love it. I like to listen to it while I'm programming my JAMstack application.
Ben: Can you hum a few bars?
Starr: While making some homemade jam. No, you're not going to get me to sing on here. I'm sorry. No. That's not happening. So, vacations-
Josh: Yeah, speaking of patterns, I'm noticing a pattern. I go away and it's JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript, and then I can't take it anymore and I got to just take a month off.
Starr: That's fair. We're getting some real good insights from this.
Josh: So yeah, in August we took some time off.
Ben: Let's see. In September, Kevin built this awesome feature that we've had requested a number of times over the years, and that is to be able to link to existing tickets in GitHub or Trello or wherever. So forever we've had the ability to create tickets or issues in GitHub and the other integrations, but people wanted to be able to link to an existing one. So Kevin added that. That was cool. Let's see. Josh, I'm sure you have some comments about the next item, replacing-
Josh: Oh, yeah. We replaced Intercom with Help Scout, partially, because we're still using Intercom for a few things, onboarding emails, which I'm in the process of replacing. That was something else.
Starr: Can I ask you a question, Josh?
Josh: Sure.
Starr: I remember that the main impetus behind this was to make customer service, or to make the volume of our customer service requests a little bit more manageable.
Josh: Yes.
Starr: Because people can't just write us a one line chat, like, "Hey, what's up? This is broken." They have to write an email, which makes them think a little bit more. How do you think that's worked out?
Josh: I think it's worked out great. I've felt a lot of reduced pressure, I don't know about you guys, from that flow versus the old chat based Intercom flow. We basically, we don't have any... well, we have... There's a little widget that lets you submit a support... basically send an email from our app. But it's not like the Intercom widget that everyone seems to have where you can just click it and chat with someone right away. I think that was a huge success. I feel a lot better with support lately. I know Ben still does a lot of tickets before we can ever get to them, so we should ask him how he feels about it.
Starr: Yeah, we should.
Josh: I have other ideas that I was planning to further optimize support. They're still kind of on the back burner right now, because, honestly, I haven't felt the need to spend time on that. If we start struggling again with support, I'll probably go back and implement some of those things or try them out. What do you think, Ben?
Ben: I think it's been really good. I've backed off a little bit. I don't know if you've noticed I'm not taking all the tickets-
Josh: Yeah, that was one of the things I was trying to fix too, was trying to figure out how we can have a more even distribution.
Ben: It's been good.
Josh: I'm hoping that... From my perception, support hasn't been as much of a strain, and I'm hoping that I haven't just dumped all the strain on you. I don't think that's the case. So, reduced all around.
Ben: I got to play with some serverless stuff with the GitHub Student Developer Pack promotion that we launched, because all of the provisioning... not all of the, some of the provisioning steps happened in a serverless app outside of our main app. So that was kind of fun.
Starr: Yeah, and you and I talked about that in a special episode of FounderQuest fireside chat. So it's just you and me.
Ben: So that's been good. We had quite the influx of new signups during that promotion, as you might expect. That was a big bump, and that has continued. We have a continued-
Starr: Oh, awesome.
Ben: -continued drip of students coming in and trying out Honeybadger.
Starr: Good for them. I believe the children are the future.
Ben: And one reason we know they're still coming aside from watching our stats every day, which we don't actually do, is we had that onboarding survey that we launched. It was Ben's idea, I think. Ben Findley. That's turned out really well.
Josh: I would nominate that, potentially, for the best thing we've done this year.
Starr: Oh, really? We should describe what it is then for people.
Josh: Basically, it's just a little... it's a text box that we pop... It's the first thing you see when you sign up for a new Honeybadger trial or account, and it just asks you why you're here, and who you are. You can introduce yourself. It's easy to skip, but a lot of people have been filling it out. And Starr, you mentioned how it's difficult based on our sign up flow or pipeline or whatever, that it's difficult to track people via more traditional methods from a blog post to trial to paid. That's difficult based on how our customers behave. This is one thing where I think we've been getting very useful feedback of where people are coming from, because they can just tell us. I've noticed a lot of things like, "Oh, I didn't realize we were getting sign ups from that effort over there." And it turns out people are actually coming from a lot of different places where we've put in effort and tried to...
Starr: That's so great.
Ben: Yeah, it's been really cool to see. We ask, "Why did you sign up for Honeybadger?" And it's been a great source of marketing copy as well, because we have people coming saying, "Oh, well, my hobby is not to watch server logs all day." So they're telling us the benefit they see-
Josh: Copy paste.
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: So you're telling me... So we got five people, four of whom are sensibly developers, and the best thing we did this year is a text box?
Josh: I would stand by that. Yes.
Starr: All right. Okay.
Josh: I mean, we've done some great things, but yes. We've wanted to know where people are coming from for a long time and know who they are, and we have a steady stream of that coming into our Slack channel now.
Starr: Well, let's just get this going at scale. 2020, all text boxes.
Josh: We're just a text box company now.
Starr: The whole app is text boxes.
Josh: That's our next product. It's a text box.
Starr: It's amazing.
Josh: [crosstalk] You just install in your app. It's a one liner code-
Starr: Josh, Josh, people are going to steal this idea. You need to be quieter. Don't give away all our ideas. This is money.
Josh: One of the sources where we've found that we're having some signups come from is this podcast, which is-
Starr: Wow.
Josh: -surprising to me. We didn't start it to get new customers, but some of them have been coming from listening to us.
Starr: That's great. That's great.
Josh: So thank you, everyone.
Starr: Yeah, thank you, and you stragglers just get your butts in gear.
Ben: So moving into the fall we added breadcrumbs for our Elixir customers. That's exciting. And we did some updates on the Ruby side for Lambda. We had a customer write a blog post and say, "Oh, watch out for this gotcha when you're using Honeybadger and Lambda, because the function ends and Honeybadger doesn't have a chance to send the error report, unless you use this one flag which says send it synchronously rather than asynchronous." I saw that blog post and I'm like, "No! No, I cannot have this. We cannot have gotchas and caveats, and things like that." So I insisted that we immediately rectify the situation and within a few weeks we had an update to our code that now detects when it's running in a Lambda environment and does the sensible thing, so that you don't have to know the special incantation to get the error to show up.
Josh: That's awesome, by the way.
Starr: It is awesome.
Josh: It's great.
Starr: I love this attitude too. Such a proper, just like a gentleman standing up for our customers.
Ben: Exactly. Cannot have this badness-
Josh: Shall not stand.
Starr: It shall not stand.
Ben: Starr, you launched a new blog design.
Starr: I launched a new blog, yeah. That's one of those things where it took a while, because whenever I have to make websites and make... Well, I should back up and say the reason I launched a new blog design is because we decided we wanted to have third-party authors join us. And our existing blog design was just really kind of a basic Bootstrap, Bootstrappy CSS framework, look. I, personally, found it kind of hard to read, just with the typography. Also, it just kind of looked like an afterthought, and I really wanted to make our blog sort of a first class citizen, sort of its own destination. So I spent some time doing that. It took a little while, because my approach to design is basically just to try things over and over again until something looks kind of okay to me. I don't really have much design skill, per se. I just have-
Josh: That's my software design process.
Starr: Yeah. I have design persistence, so it's not always the fastest process, but it usually gets something. So yeah, go to the blog, check it out, and just see how beautiful it is. And once we get these new blog posts going, which I've got a bunch of new content ready for the new year that we're going to publish. It's just going to be beautiful, because all the new content's going to use the new style guides. It's just going to be amazing.
Josh: It is beautiful, by the way, the blog design.
Starr: Thank you. Thank you.
Josh: I loved it.
Ben: If the onboarding survey text box was our number one feature for the year, then I nominate this next item as our number two feature.
Starr: I thought you were going to nominate the blog, Ben.
Ben: Sorry. Sorry, it was awesome. But dark mode is more awesome.
Josh: Are we going to have an award show, by the way? Or ceremony or something.
Ben: Don't we just give each other awards?
Josh: The Honeybadger version of the Dundies.
Starr: There we go. Can I be like Chris Rock hosting it or something?
Josh: Absolutely. So dark mode.
Ben: So dark mode. That's something I wanted very badly for a long time, and we had an active issue in GitHub for at least a year. And Kevin knocked that one out of the park, I think. And timely enough, we had launched it in October, which is the best time, with Halloween, to launch a dark mode. I tell you what. I have, since upgrading to Catalina, I have the auto-switching from dark mode to light mode in my UI, and in the mornings when I'm doing work at 4 AM and I open up the Honeybadger and it's dark, I'm like, "Yes. This works." Love it.
Starr: I feel like we should really lean into this, and instead of just having things that are visually dark, we should change all the micro texts to be like, "This is your error. You'll probably never fix it."
Ben: "This is your death."
Starr: Yeah. "This has happened 1000 times, and it will happened 1000 more."
Ben: An interesting tidbit, though, that came out of that work. One thing that I did not anticipate but came up immediately after we launched dark mode was people who were in dark mode in their OS but did not want dark mode on the web page. So they asked us to be able to customize that and turn off the dark mode and have light mode. So we added that.
Starr: Did they ask nicely?
Ben: Very nicely.
Starr: Okay. Well, that's good.
Ben: All of our customers are very polite. At least 99% of our customers.
Starr: Sometimes when you make design changes that people don't opt into, they can be like... not quite so nice. I'm glad they were nice to Kevin, because he deserves it.
Josh: Well, in this case it was only people that already had dark mode enabled that opted into automatically. In their OS.
Ben: Yeah. Exactly. There are a few that actually opt for dark mode, even when their OS is in light mode, so that's interesting.
Josh: Right. So they can use the option-
Starr: Is there a switcher button? I haven't seen it.
Ben: Yes. Yes. It's in the user preferences.
Starr: Okay. Oh, you have to go to user preferences. Okay.
Ben: The default is it matches your OS settings, but you can override that either light or dark.
Starr: Okay. I think we should have a... We should lean into this too and have a cute badger theme, just have lots of themes like a pink, cute badger.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Starr: I'm saying cute badger because I know Josh doesn't like the idea. So I'm trying to zing him a little bit.
Josh: I mean, if you want to do a cute badger, Starr, knock yourself out.
Starr: Okay, thanks.
Josh: I'm not going to hold you back.
Starr: Okay, so as we mentioned, we added Discord integration, and then moving on to November, we're getting really close to now. We're getting down to the wire.
Ben: Yeah, more JavaScript for Josh.
Starr: JavaScript Breadcrumbs.
Ben: Yeah, Josh worked on that.
Josh: Yeah. That's currently in beta on... well, it's on a branch on our... No, actually it's merged on the master now on our JavaScript Honeybadger JS repo. But it is not out of beta yet, and that is because I do not want to support that in December. If you want to use that, though, you can use the latest beta of our honeybadger-js package, which includes Breadcrumbs, which will probably not have any problems. If it does you can report them on GitHub, and I will get to them in January.
Starr: So the breadcrumbs in JavaScript are going to track things like the AJAX requests that were made prior to an error and stuff like that.
Josh: UI clicks, page navigation changes.
Starr: Yeah, that's huge. That's going to be huge for JavaScripters.
Josh: Lots of state things. It's especially useful. Breadcrumbs, we launched it for backend initially, because we're kind of backend first. We focus on Ruby, usually exclusively. But Breadcrumbs is really a front end feature and it, I think, at first was basically created for JavaScript, just because it's so difficult to know what is actually causing an error in JavaScript. Most people, I think, would probably build it first for JavaScript, but we always focus on our favorite customers first, which is Ruby.
Starr: You're able to-
Josh: Sorry JavaScript. Am I really just like...
Starr: JavaScript has eaten the world.
Josh: Feel like I'm digging a hole here.
Starr: You're digging a hole. It's all right.
Josh: I mean, we just basically said jQuery is our favorite front end framework.
Starr: You know, you got to believe in something.
Ben: It'll come back in style.
Starr: It will.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: And the Breadcrumbs are actually replacing my own janky half implemented version of Breadcrumbs that I just had running on our web app, like JavaScript, right? We had this really weird error where jQuery was taking the results of some AJAX requests and executing it as JavaScript, which most of the time it should not do that. But that error in JavaScript gives you no visibility. So I implemented my own hacky, bad version of breadcrumbs to log every AJAX request and the results of it, so I could see what "code" was being executed, and it turned out that jQuery for some reason thought that the NGINX error pages, like the ones that we serve when somebody gets throttled, it thought those were JavaScript and that it needed to execute.
Starr: So that's the sort of things you'll be able to fix, or you'll be able to debug in... like with legit Breadcrumbs. You'll be able to do it ten times faster than me, because it'll just be there.
Josh: It might just be apparent that that was the issue.
Starr: Yeah, it'll just be obvious and you won't have to think about it-
Josh: Right. It's like versus-
Ben: Just right there on your error page at Honeybadger. Boom. This is what caused your problem.
Starr: Yes. Exactly. I literally had to patch jQuery, I think, to make this work, and you all won't have to do that. You can use your virgin, pristine versions of jQuery.
Josh: Why are we going to all this effort? Not because we love JavaScript, but we love our customers.
Starr: We love all of you.
Josh: We will put ourselves through this hell for you.
Ben: And to give those JavaScript customers additional help, as we mentioned before, we do have the source map upload as part of GitHub Actions now. So if you're using GitHub Actions, you can compile your assets. You can pack everything using your packer of choice, because there's only like 20 of them now, and send them to us so you can get that juicy and full flavored source map in your Honeybadger display, so that you don't have to worry about minify JavaScript when you're trying to figure out where the heck that error came from.
Josh: I should also mention... I don't know if this was on the list, but in addition to jQuery, we also support React and Vue now. If you're not a 10X jQuery developer, we do support React.
Starr: I feel like this show has veered from what lessons did we learn, from what patterns we're noticing from all the stuff we've done. Now we're just on QVC selling knives or something. It's like, "This knife will chop all of your parsley into little bitty bits. Hey, Susan, have you ever seen a knife slice a tomato without putting any pressure on it? Let's show the audience."
Ben: To cap it all off we had one of our two hires over the past year actually make it to a full year of working at Honeybadger. So we celebrated Ben Findley's one year anniversary in November, and he is delighted to be with us still, so we're doing something right. And we're delighted that he is with us. He's been great.
Josh: Congrats, Ben.
Starr: I'm a big Findley fan. Yeah, I have to say. Okay. So we made it. We're not going to do December, I guess, because it's not on our list.
Ben: We're taking vacations in December. We're not doing anything.
Starr: Oh, yeah.
Ben: We're doing our side projects in December. We're planning stuff. Although, we've done some things, minor things here and there. The ship is still running. We're still steering.
Josh: I've continued to work on source maps in December.
Ben: Oh, you say that with that 10000 foot stare.
Josh: I think I'm done for the year, though. Fingers crossed.
Starr: I'm sorry. Here's my suggestion. Whatever next technical hire we do, they just do source maps. They don't do anything else.
Josh: Oh, my gosh.
Starr: Merry Christmas, Josh.
Ben: So we'll get together in January, then we'll be talking about what we're going to be talking about in next year's recap episode, right? Because we're going to be planning out our year.
Josh: Well, yeah. At this rate, if we keep... I don't know if we're going to hire any other developers next year, but if we do I don't know that we're going to be able to do a full recap.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. So question for y'all. It is in real time, like calendar time, not show release time, we're about two weeks out from Christmas. Are we going to record a show next week? What do y'all want to do?
Ben: Sure. Let's record a show next week.
Starr: I'm fine with that. Are you going to be around, Josh?
Josh: Yeah, I will be here.
Starr: Okay. That sounds great, and then... I don't know when that would be released, if that would be released after the new year or what?
Ben: That would be right after Christmas if we decide to have a Christmas release.
Josh: Yeah, I think it would.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Okay. That sounds good.
Josh: The 27th?
Ben: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: Maybe we can do a favorite things show or something. I've been wanting to do that for a while. We can just talk about what we got for Christmas.
Josh: Yeah, there you go.
Ben: It wouldn't have been Christmas yet.
Josh: Oh, it'll be like the... Yeah, it'll be-
Starr: Oh. Oh, my God. Yes. I'm sorry.
Josh: We could talk about what we want for Christmas.
Starr: Time is so confusing. We can just pretend that we got what we wanted to get.
Josh: Well, like you said... Yeah, if we're going to continue that, yeah we can...
Ben: We'll figure it out.
Josh: To be fair, no one will actually know the truth.
Starr: That's true. That's very true. Well, here's to that. Here's to nobody knowing the truth ever. And this has been FounderQuest. This has been FounderQuest. If you want to write for our blog, we talked a little bit about that, go to our blog and there's a little link in the top nav right next to the RSS link. And if you want to give us a nice review, please go ahead and do that. We love those. Yeah, I think that's it. So I will see you guys later, unless you have something else. Anybody have any final last words?
Josh: I love JavaScript.
Starr: There you go. That's a good one. Sure.
Ben: That's beautiful. Brought a tear to my eye.
This week on FounderQuest Josh, Starr, and Ben talk about the quandary of not knowing how to build something until after you’ve already built it. Therefore, once it's built it can be hard to fight the urge to tear it down and build it again taking into account all of lessons that were learned along the way.
The Badgers also imagine a rewrite of Honeybadger using the latest in 90s technology. Trigger warning for Perl developers!
Links:
Peanuts Christmas special
Garfield Christmas special
KonMari
Living Computer Museum
Rewrite! by David Heinemeier Hanson (DHH)
Jeff Foxworthy
Xennials
Generation Jones
ELIZA
Animated Star Trek
Full Transcript:
Ben: Oh wow. That's so amazing. Cause I love like the Christmas specials from like Garfield and Peanuts, you know? And so I'm just thinking of a Honeybadger animated Christmas special. That would be so awesome.
Starr: Oh, that'd be fun, wouldn't it?
Josh: That would be the best Christmas special.
Ben: I don't know. The FounderQuest Christmas special might end up like the animated Star Trek series. Right? It might be a total bomb.
Josh: We're all in character, but it's like bad cosplay. What were the moral of the Honeybadger Christmas specialty? Would it be that it's not about the errors you fix, it's about the friends you make along the way?
Josh: Could be.
Ben: I like that. Yeah.
Starr: Okay. Well that's good. Speaking of cosplay, so I got a random package delivered to me to my name from Amazon and I order a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I assumed I just forgotten that I ordered something, so I checked and that's not it. And I opened it up and it's like, the name on the bag inside is like such and such cosplay and so, like, this is going in a very bad direction. I'm not sure I want to open this, but I think somebody had, like, one of, I don't know, one of our relatives or some family member had maybe sent a costume for my daughter or something and just, it's a time of year. The packages just randomly show up. And you're like, "Oh, I don't know who this is from, but it's got some kids' stuff in it."
Ben: We had that same package problem, that Amazon thing because we do a lot of Amazon ordering and so you know, packages around this time of year starts showing up and you're like, "Oh well I guess that was the present I shouldn't have opened. Sorry."
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: You opened the Amazon presents that aren't addressed to you, Ben?
Ben: No, not all the time, just every now and then.
Josh: Just on Christmas, true. One year?
Ben: Just on Christmas time.
Josh: Just on Christmas.
Starr: One year, we did Christmas in my in-laws and so we shipped everybody's packages there and we put their name on it cause it's where they live and everything. But I guess there was some miscommunication because my father-in-law was just starting to start opening everything and he assumed that it was all presents for him. He was, like, thanking us and it's like, "No, actually that's for my brother, that's not for you."
Josh: I could totally see that happening.
Ben: One of the benefits though of being in charge of the Honeybadger official post office box is that I get to also use that for my Christmas deliveries , so all my Amazon shopping shows up there. Yeah.
Josh: That's sneaky.
Ben: Yes.
Starr: Oh my goodness. So what are we talking about today?
Ben: Talking about a big rewrite.
Starr: The big rewrite. I guess we should explain what a big rewrite is, unless, like, programmers know this, right? There's this idea that you build something. You build a product, an application and like you don't really know how to build it until you've already built it. Right? Until then you're just kind of learning along the way, like, what the best approach is to take on things and so then, once you get it done, you actually know how to build it. There's always this really big temptation. It's like, "Oh, I just want to like build it for real now. I'm learning all the lessons," you know, taking into account all the lessons I already learned. And so, yeah, I mean that's my take on the big rig. Right. What does a big rewrite mean to you all?
Ben: Well, you know, that actually made me think of, you know, there's actually a development approach called, you know, you build one to throw it away where people, you know, in the early stages we'll build just a prototype, right? And we are with the intent that we're going to throw it away. But that's not the same as a big rewrite. I think the big rewrite happens when you know you've built this thing over time and it works and it's been working and it's making money but now you look back you're like, ah, I really wish we could redo that whole thing.
Josh: Yeah. You start noticing all the things that you could have done better or you could go back, you make decisions throughout the process of writing it that lock you into certain things or past decisions lock you into things now and pretty soon you find yourself basically architecting for this legacy system where, like, that happened to me this week when I was working on this feature. And I probably would have built it a different way if I could, if I was starting from scratch, but I had to basically bolt it on to what we already had, so the past decisions were influencing how I have to build stuff now, which makes you want to go and throw it all out.
Starr: That's an interesting take on it too, because yeah, you're right. Like, when you find yourself building something and sort of having to do it in a less than optimal manner because he has to sort of, you have to shoehorn it into an existing product. That can be be super frustrating.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. That's better than I think this sometimes is the cause of the big rewrite desire and that's, I just wanted to write it in a new programming language, right? I don't like that old English.
Josh: I'm just bored.
Ben: Yeah, I want to do something new. Yeah.
Starr: We are redoing everything in react though.
Josh: Even the back end?
Starr: Even the back end.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: I don't know how we do that but even like Mozilla foundation is working on it right now.
Starr: Well yeah, and they just replaced all of the components, so actually kind of just to do that.
Starr: This was kind of a spur of the moment topic. I remember I logged on to chat and usually the way this works is that the morning we record the podcast, I go into chat and I'm like, "Hey everybody, let's think of what we want to do. Here's some ideas," and like, what topic we want to record about? But you know, I came in to chat today and it's like, it was already, there is this discussion going on, so that saved me some work. I'm really happy about that. But I assumed there was something that triggered this for you all like, so what's going on?
Josh: This is, this is something that Ben and I have been chatting about this week on and off as we've been trying to like solve this bug that came up as a result of some performance improvements we made a few months back to a system. It's to the our source maps processing system or we call it the source map service, which is basically it translates a minified, you bundle your JavaScript and stuff for production source maps. Translate that back into the original source information so that you know where the error happened in your stack trace, in your actual code, your original source code.
Starr: Yeah because otherwise otherwise the Honeybadger error would be like error in line one of your one-line file.
Josh: Yeah, line one column, like 100,000 or something. Yeah, so basically like we've made, so we had to make some performance improvements to the service to fix a performance issue and that introduced a new problem that we had to fix then, which we realized this week. And in the process of fixing it, it was a very simple thing, like, it should have been a very simple change. But just the complexity of the whole processing pipeline and everything and some of the legacy, you know, like I was talking about the legacy decisions we've made. That was definitely in play, like influencing how that was implemented and like it took a lot longer than it should have, basically ate my week.
Starr: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Josh: Yeah, it's okay.
Ben: This was coincidentally, you know, at the same time that the Amazon web services Reinvent Conference was going on. And I always pay attention to that because there are typically new things that come out that we could use or that are just, you know, interesting, because I geek out on that sort of thing. And there were some new announcements that like, "Oh, we could, you know, do what we do this new way instead of that old way . We're using this new thing that just came out." Right? And so, and then, yeah, Josh and I are talking about-
Josh: I was like.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Josh: It was the perfect storm because we're already frustrated with our past, develop ourselves, like shooting ourselves in the foot and stuff and then Amazon announces all this cool new stuff that we could use to put the world right again.
Ben: Yep.
Starr: I don't know. I don't know, I've got this little theory developing and you guys can tell me if it makes sense to you. When you first start developing a product, you go in with necessarily a very simplified idea of what it's going to work like, right? Because you don't really know, you don't really have a ton of experience in that domain and so you go in and you start with a very simple version and then over time, you learn all these little sort of edge cases and nuances and then you have to refine your application to, I take care of those. And I don't know about you all, but for me like over time I tend to like if I, if I'm not continually just focusing just on a single system, I forget about all those little edge cases and nuances and stuff.
Starr: My understanding of the system or my feeling about how it should work goes back to the original way, which is just like simple, it's got to be this simple thing. I have a feeling that if anybody is to go back and reopen that and be like, okay, well you know, I'm going to make it the simple thing. It's like you're just going to run and smack dab into all the complexity that you forgot about it.
Josh: Yeah. I've done this with things. Yeah, where I have to rebuild it for whatever reason even smaller components and then yeah, I find myself going through all the same things. It's like deja vu.
Starr: Yeah. It's like, "Oh, I should be able to, this is like, what is a hundred lines of code? I should really get this down to 10 easy." Then you go through and it's like, "Oh, I can't take that out. No. That actually does something. Oh huh."
Josh: Yeah. When I rebuilt the gem, I think that's what I'm recalling is like when I rebuilt the gem, I kind of started from the ground up thinking like, you know, it would be worthwhile to start from scratch and rethink things and I mean it was a, I think it had benefits too, but it definitely, like, you find yourself through the same, going through the motions, like running into the same common issues, then finding the less common ones later on as they come out.
Ben: It's kind of like when you have your second child. Yes. After having.
Josh: It's like, "Oh my gosh, I'm a pro at this now, I can just knock it out."
Ben: But you've forgotten all those things that happened with that first.
Josh: Oh my gosh. I've got a second child and I still have the first one.
Starr: Yeah. That's why I don't have a second child. That scares me. It scares me too much.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Also, yeah. My child is a freaking like hurricane as it is. I don't know if I could handle another hurricane.
Josh: Yeah, yeah. She does seem opinionated.
Starr: Oh my goodness, yes.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. When you do that big rewrite, you definitely run the risk of missing those corner cases and those little gotchas, you know, that were in the original system that were, have been covered and, and working well, right? I like that phrase. Someone said that legacy code just means code that actually makes you money right? It's out there. It's working. It's good. You know, and then when you build out this new code, now, you're introducing bugs that your forebears solved eons ago.
Josh: Yeah, well that's the, yeah, well that's like the thing with the pipeline specifically too in our system. That's the thing that like it doesn't change very often because it's, you know, we've built it, it's stable and it's, yeah. I mean, error tracking doesn't change a whole lot, like you're processing the data, so we might add features around what you can do with the data in the UI or something but yeah, the pipeline is pretty, it's like, we never have an issue with it really at this point, and so why would we risk setting ourselves back like six years back to when it was like, you know, we were constantly finding things and you know, patching it?
Starr: The thing you were saying, Ben, seems really interesting to me because legacy code is this pejorative term, right? It's like, Oh, I hate dealing with this stupid legacy code, but if it wasn't actually valuable and doing useful stuff, you could just throw it away and nobody would care, right? The fact that it exists and you have to like work around, it means it's actually useful.
Ben: Right. You have to honor that legacy code. You have to appreciate the joy that it has brought to the world, into life.
Josh: Right. And respect the lessons that it embodies.
Starr: I like this. We could get a whole, like a KonMari tidying up thing going on. It's like before you refactor a line of code, before you delete it, you have to thank it for the service it's given you.
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: I like this. I like where we're going with this.
Ben: Totally.
Ben: You know, but at some point you do realize, you know what, there is enough pain in my life with this legacy code that it's worth the pain of doing the rewrite. And that's a really tough call to make and a fraught with peril, but yeah, at some point, you might make it.
Josh: There's trade offs and or you know it might, it might also just not be the pain but is there a financial insight? Could rewriting it actually make, could it change things for your business or would it make it easier for us to go out and you know, scale to the next whatever, 10X size that we could or something like that? Like, that would be huge. I'm not saying that's the case, but you know, you never know.
Starr: You know since you mentioned the big rewrite is analogous to having a second child, like, I'm wondering if all this other stuff you're saying also applies to your children.
Ben: Oh dear.
Starr: It's like you're not doing it. You've got to help us scale, son.
Josh: We're going to go, yeah, we're going to go through this, this episode like minute by minute and pull out all the lessons that we can apply this to child rearing.
Starr: There you go. You're going to help us penetrate the enterprise market, little Timmy.
Ben: Yeah. I think in our case, the big rewrite that we've always envisioned is, you know, changing the policy lifeline, like, how it works and the idea being we want something that can scale bigger than we've ever scaled before and that can be more reliable than they've ever been before. And our current systems scales and been very reliable, you know, so we have these daydreams of, "Oh, it'd be nice if it could do X, Y and Z or it could scale this and that or intervention at all, you know? But the fact of the matter is that it does work really well, so it makes it really hard to justify doing a rewrite.
Josh: Yeah. I think for us for, I mean I don't know if we'd rewrite everything, at least initially anyway, but in the case of like the pipeline, the big reason that I would see that we might consider it would be if we're finding ourselves making more changes to it more frequently, like, say we want to support some kind of new processing feature, like, what was the Android thing you were talking about with some ...?
Ben: Yeah, the symbolication. Yeah.
Josh: Symbolication, yeah, which is like source maps.
Ben: Exactly. Yeah. So that could be, it could be a good, maybe that doesn't require a big rewrite. Maybe it does because it is kind of central to how we fingerprint things and group things or maybe that's something we could split out.
Josh: Yeah. It's just like if we ... Because there's different ways to build a system and like we've definitely tended towards like the monolithic approach and it's we're very small, we've always been very small and we've like really embraced that and done things. It's, you know, the rails way for the most part, but there's more, there's a stage we could build a more like step pipeline, you know, basically that allows you to bolt in new pieces into the middle easier. And that's what's really difficult in the current system.
Ben: Right.
Josh: If we had specific plans where we knew we were going to be doing a lot of development, like, investing a lot of new work in features that are going to be affecting that part of the system and that system is really resistant to change, we could justify it's going to save us a lot of development time in the long run to basically refactored in something that is more modular or something like that. Basically, it's just a refactor.
Starr: Yeah, doing that. It's always like there's always a specter of risk, right, because the dark cloud looming over the big rewrite. I just finished, I just finished the Lord of the rings trilogy reading it for the first time ever except for all that weird encyclopedia stuff at the back, I'm skipping that. But yeah, so I'm like imagining like Mount Doom and all this stuff. And so to me like the big rewrite, it looks a lot like Mount Doom and you're like trying to climb up at or whatever and I don't know. My metaphor really breaks down pretty quickly. Yeah.
Josh: Orcs are like rising out of the ground.
Starr: Yeah. Yeah. And what would the orcs be? Technical debt? I don't know.
Josh: Yeah, something like that. Errors, errors on it.
Starr: So, yeah. I mean, the bigger rewrite's scary because it can go terribly wrong, right?
Ben: Yeah. I had a big rewrite scenario several years ago where we were, it came down to, actually, this is a language thing. The system that we were replacing, that we wanted to replace was built with Perl back when CGIPM was still a valuable way to build web apps and PHP was on the rise.
Starr: So Perl is a programming. I'm sorry. That's me being catty. Probably most people know what Perl is. It's a programming language that people used to use a lot more than, yeah.
Ben: And it, you know, PHP started to eclipse Perl back in the early 2000s.
Josh: And Perl was my first programming language.
Ben: Yeah, me too.
Starr: Oh, really?
Ben: Wait, wait, wait. That was your first programming language?
Josh: Have I betrayed myself?
Starr: Poor thing.
Ben: I was thinking Perl's my first web language, but, wow, first programming language.
Josh: Well, I think, yeah, I did some, OS type stuff, I guess like Visual Basic or something like that.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. I don't really count those though, like, I don't know. I guess it was, yeah, I guess there were a few.
Starr: All right. The Honeybadger health plan does include therapy, Josh. You know, in case like, trauma lasts a long time, is all I'm saying.
Josh: Yeah. Well we can't all have started on COBOL.
Starr: Oh, Oh burn. Oh, who started on COBOL? Is that Ben?
Ben: No, I started on basic, but yeah, I'm pretty sure that that was a dig at me.
Starr: Yeah, I started at basic too.
Ben: Right. I can take it.
Josh: I'm just calling you guys old because you're like five years older than me.
Starr: Yeah. It's all right, millennial.
Starr: Totally cool. No, it's okay.
Josh: No, a Xennial, right?
Starr: Xennial, yeah. Oh, you're still Xennial?
Josh: A Xennial, like that ... I learned recently that there's a micro generation or something like that between gen X and millennial. And that is actually what I think we fall into, because you know how you always said like, you don't really feel quite gen X and I'm like barely millennial. Well it turns out there actually are people, I guess, felt that like more than us just felt that way and they came up with am actual generation for us.
Starr: I think I've heard about that. It's like something about like you basically, you grew up with the internet but you didn't have it your entire life.
Josh: You know what the it, it's called the, the Oregon trail generation is what Wikipedia said it.
Starr: Yes. I like that way better than Xennial.
Josh: That resonates. Yeah, so I definitely-
Starr: I'm an Oregon trail.
Josh: I definitely played at Oregon trail.
Starr: And you ended up in Oregon, so you won. You literally won Josh.
Josh: I really followed ...
Starr: Yeah, I ended up in Seattle, so somehow like I just veered off course a little bit.
Josh: Yeah. But none of us died of dysentery along the way, so that's winning.
Starr: I know because we're so good at hunting for food with those little pixels, the little pixel rifles that take about 10 seconds across the screens so you have to, like ,aim in front of the deer so that it, you know, runs into your ...
Josh: Right.
Starr: Your little pixel bullet.
Josh: I wish I could remember there's a, you'll have to go look this up later because I can't remember the name of it. There's a generation between the baby boomers and gen X and it's got a really funny name but I can't remember what it is but it's like the same thing. It's like ,the people in between people, so it's a lot of generations out there.
Starr: Completely off topic.
Josh: Totally tangent.
Starr: No, I mean I'm going to go even farther off topic but I'm just saying that you know, if you ever get a chance to go to the living computer museum in Seattle, they have all the old systems both from like throughout the entire history of computing. They have a huge room full of systems from the 80s and so you can go play Oregon trail on an Apple II. Yeah. You know, if you bring a juice box, I bet you can sort of surreptitiously sip it while you're doing that.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: What are we even talking about? Oh, a Perl, rewrites, scary stuff.
Ben: Anyway, yeah, where I was going with that.
Starr: Oh, you're telling a story about a terrible rewrite. Sorry.
Ben: I was telling a rocking chair story.
Josh: I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Ben. This all started with Perl.
Ben: I'm just rocking in my chair over here. It's all good. Yeah.
Starr: Wait for us kids to simmer down.
Ben: By the way, I totally identify with gen X. I did play a lot of Oregon trail, but I'm not going to claim the Oregon trail generation because I identify as gen X.
Starr: Yeah, I identify millennial. Ben, I'm sorry.
Ben: Yeah, it's okay., it's all right. It takes all kinds.
Josh: Okay. It's the generation or the social cohort of the latter half of the baby boomers and the first years of the gen X of generation X where it was called generation Jones.
Starr: Generation Jones.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Why? Jones Town?
Josh: You'll have to go read the Wikipedia page because I don't have, I don't remember enough to tell you off the top of my head.
Starr: Oh, it's too saucy to say on air?
Josh: Well, no, it's just, I don't remember things very well.
Ben: That'll be in the show notes so we can go there.
Announcer: Okay. Generation Jones.
Josh: Show notes.
Ben: So yeah, the story, I'll just skip the story and get to the punchline, which was like the one of the big risks of the big rewrite is that it just takes forever because you don't remember all those corner cases or all those bugs or you know, someone wants the new feature that you promised them while you're doing the big rewrite, so you have to fact that in. And so this one project that I had, which was just a mess, I just, I kept and like, the project manager kept coming to me and be like, "So you promise me this on this date and we're past that day." So now what? And so I give another date, right? And so we'd slip past that date too and finally I just said, "Look, I'm planting my flag in the quicksand here." And because really like every time I planted my flag, it just disappeared behind, you know, another deadline.
Josh: Yeah, there's a visual there. I just picture that.
Starr: Yeah, but it totally wasn't your fault that you were missing the deadlines because people, like, it was, you're dealing with the quicksand situations, like the situation was changing so much and you had.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: I don't know cause I was the one giving the estimates, so ...
Starr: I'm trying to give you an out, Ben.
Ben: Well, thanks. But I'll take it. I'll own it. That's my role.
Starr: Okay. Going down with the ship.
Ben: I apologize to my coworkers that I did that too.
Starr: There we go.
Josh: Yeah, you got to be careful with wanting it so bad that you think you could you trick yourself into thinking that it's going to be, you know, easier than it really is. And there's definitely like some denial you can get into there where ...
Ben: Totally.
Starr: There we go.
Starr: I'll take the sting out by saying something dumb I did one time, which was one time at the height of Facebook games popularity, I took down a popular Facebook game for like two hours because they were like-
Josh: Was it Farmville?
Starr: No, it wasn't really that famous, but still, it had a lot of users.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: Yeah. What it was, if they had a really a really stupid, Oh God, maybe they're listening. They had a really, they were really stretching the limits of Postgres and how they had their database set up and they were like, "Oh Starr, go make this changes to the database." And I was like, okay, I'll write a little script to migrate it. And I wrote it and then it's like it takes time to update a big, big database, people, like, it's not instantaneous. And I was a little baby programmer. I hadn't really learned that lesson yet. And also the way they were doing it, made it so they took like about a thousand times longer than it should have. Like the way the database was set up, so yeah.
Starr: Anyway, that's the most hate I ever gotten from any sort of user base is because I took away their stupid little, like, magic game where they like, you know, cast spells on beans or something. Those people are vicious.
Josh: It's rough.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: They were casting spells on you by the end of that outage.
Starr: Oh, no. That explains a lot. Yeah.
Ben: This is why I stay away from consumer apps. Fair. Business apps, when they're paying you, at least they have a reason they can be yelling at you, right? It's like, "Oh, that's fair. You can yell at me because you pay me.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: And I never ran a database query again, so I learned my lesson.
Ben: To this day, never touched SQL ever again.
Starr: I have never run it. No, no. Not even for other people's apps, I don't use their databases.
Josh: But if, I mean, in that situation, again, if you're stretching the limits of what your technology can do to the point where you can't deploy a change without risking taking the system down.
Starr: Yeah. It might be time for a big rewrite.
Josh: Right.
Starr: We're going to, let's have a Jeff Foxworthy bit.
Ben: It might be time for rewrite if ...
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: Well, one thing I thought was really interesting, a few years ago, DHH from Basecamp, he had a presentation at Business and Software Conference where he talked about the big rewrite and talked about why they would do a big rewrite. And he gave his justification for Basecamp 2 and Basecamp 3, which is now the current version of Basecamp and basically said, I'm paraphrasing, that what they had wasn't what they wanted to present to the world as their best work. Like, they felt they could do better. Basecamp was out there and it was great, but then they kept having ideas on how it could be better and his ideas didn't fit well into the existing Basecamp and so Basecamp 2 was born.
Ben: And then same thing happened again with Basecamp 3. And they aren't exactly the same approach to the same problem, but they are the approach that they felt was the best at that time for the team they had and the lessons they had learned. And I liked that idea. That really resonated with me, like, you know, if the work that's out there right now isn't what you would consider your best work and you have ideas for what would be better then, that could be a good reason for a big rewrite. Now, in Basecamp's case, what they did instead of what a lot of people do, they throw away the old thing and replace it with a new thing. They didn't do that. They kept the old thing running with a commitment that, you know, we will "run it until the end of the internet", which I think is pretty cool.
Josh: Yeah. I really like that approach. That's really, really good. Yeah.
Starr: It seems pretty stand up. Yeah. Also, man, they would've gotten so much hate mail.
Josh: Seriously.
Starr: They just changed Basecamp, like, you don't have any option to keep it. They would have gotten so much hate from people.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Ben: But you know, the downside, the trade off there is they're now running three production systems, right? They have to maintain those things. Obviously, they're not adding new features to the old ones. They're doing that in the new one, but still they have to keep those servers going and keep the customer support people trained on, you know, this is version one way to do that versus, this is version two way to do that.
Josh: The customer support, yeah, being, but then again, like, I think some of the benefits of the legacy system being harder to change in the first place, but the change is where usually the problems are introduced. Also if you're, you know, if you don't have new people coming into the software, the support load is reduced. If you're not signing up new customers or your support comes from new people. There's not going to be as much support. It's going to be like the people that stay on that system longterm are going to be like the diehards that love Basecamp one or the people that just don't care enough to switch off. You know, it's good enough.
Josh: And in that case, they're probably not going to be the people that are bugging support a lot anyway. And then the system itself is if it's been around for 10 years or something, it's going to be stable and if you're not changing it, you're not rocking the boat at all, so maybe it's not as hard to run at that point. I could see the argument there. I can see, you know, if that was in our case like Honeybadger, if we did that with Honeybadger, like I could see it, it would, it's really stable now. Imagine if we never changed it.
Ben: Right. Yeah.
Josh: We could run that for a long time.
Ben: That's a good point.
Starr: I don't know. They could have big sort of retention, like employee retention for programmers sort of effects and I can imagine, it's like nothing makes developers happier than to be like, "Hey, let's do this like Greenfield project."
Josh: Yep. Totally.
Josh: Nothing makes me happier than that.
Ben: For real. Let's do it.
Starr: All right, so we're going to rewrite everything?
Ben: Yes.
Josh: We'll see.
Ben: V2 coming January, 2020.
Josh: It's back to our roots.
Starr: Yeah. They say the 90s are coming back, so yeah.
Ben: We can all moved to Portland.
Josh: Maybe Ben can write a couple of components in basic.
Starr: Only if I get to use some Turbo Pascal, that's my condition.
Josh: Yeah. You can use whatever you want, Starr.
Ben: Then they can have an interface that you'd Telnet into like an old BBS and you have to use, like your arrow keys to go through things, yeah, like an old ASCII or ANSI we have some, like, total art, you know, some ANSI art right in there.
Starr: My God, it's such a beautiful idea, Ben. I'm sad it's not going to happen now, but oh, that's such a beautiful idea.
Josh: We should definitely just open up a Telnet port and do something.
Ben: Totally.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Like an Easter egg.
Starr: Exactly.
Starr: We can have sort of like a FidoNet sort of implementation of Honeybadger where you have to, like, you get your errors like a week later because people have been forwarding them.
Ben: Oh yeah. You have to download them all into your offline reader and do it there.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Oh, that's a good idea.
Josh: Or you could just log in and you can talk to Honeybadger kind of like, what was the, it was like the one of the first AI bots that was the psychologist?
Starr: Eliza?
Josh: Eliza, yeah. You come and talk to Honeybadger if you're having a bad day.
Starr: That's a good idea. I mean, we could just have a support person on a phone and you could call in once a day and be like, "Hey, did I get any errors today?" And I'll be like, "No, honey, you're good." And go like, "All right, thanks. I can go skiing now."
Ben: That would be awesome.
Ben: I'm just thinking of like all these great landing pages we could do for April fools, right?
Josh: Yeah. We'll have to write these down.
Starr: Yep. Are we, have you said everything we're going to say about rewrites? It sounds like we're reaching a natural conclusion.
Ben: Yeah. I think you should totally do your big rewrite. Do it now.
Starr: Yes. Might I suggest that you're going to do a big rewrite, like, you've got to start it out with some sort of dramatic gesture, right? Maybe fire a gun, maybe look somebody dead in the eye and say like, "Let's do this." Maybe ...
Josh: Press release.
Ben: Yes. Make sure you set a firm deadline.
Josh: Make a dramatic statement of, yeah, what you intend to do and when it's going to be.
Starr: That's a great idea. Yeah. How about pay? No, here's a good idea. This is free consulting for you all. Pay a designer to come up with a video mock up of exactly what it's going to look like and then you know, prerelease that.
Josh: I love it.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Okay. Okay. Guys, I think what we're saying here is that you got to plant your flag in the quicksand.
Starr: Yeah. I think there's some Yolo in there too.
Ben: That's right. For sure.
Starr: All right. Well, it's been great talking with you all.
Ben: Likewise.
Starr: Oh, I've got to say, hey, if you're interested in writing technical articles for us about programming, check out our blog, there's a link in the top nav that tells you how to do that. Also, if you like this show, go to your podcast place and you know, give it a bunch of stars and that's it for FounderQuest, so see you guys later and talk to you soon.
The guys throw the show notes out the window and kick it freestyle on this special Thanksgiving episode. All of today’s hard-hitting questions are answered: Dark meat or light meat? Turkey or duck? The warm glow of a fireplace or the warm glow of a database upgrade progress bar? Plus, the guys talk about when to start holiday feature freezes and what Honeybadger is working on/not working on this December.
Links:
Build Your SaaS podcast capitalism episode
Transcript:
Ben: For some reason that reminded me of the presence method that I use from time to time with our Ruby and Rails work.
Josh: Ruby? Yeah.
Ben: I didn't really actually know about that until like, I don't know a year ago. I never paid attention because I always use the present a and then do something or something else.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: But that presence method, that is pretty dang slick. I love that. That's one of the reasons I always love Ruby, do stuff like that.
Josh: It's a very nice ... yeah, I like how it works.
Starr: I don't think I've used that one. So what does that do again?
Ben: So if you have a string that might be nil-
Starr: Okay.
Ben: So you have a variable that contains a string, it could be nil and you want to display something other than blank if it happens to be nil. So like username, right? You want to, you want to spit that out into a template. What you can say "username.presence" or whatever text you want as a fallback.
Ben: Then what it'll do is if the string is present, if it's not nil, not blank, it will display the user name. But if it is now, then it'll display the alternative. Whatever your fallback is. So you don't have to use a ternary operator to like say, "Oh, if it's new, then do this or that," you know?
Starr: Oh, that's nice.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: That's pretty handy.
Ben: Yeah, it's fun. One of those little things that make Ruby such a delight to use.
Starr: Yeah. I think this week's podcast is going to be freestyle. Okay. No, it's going to be a little bit looser because we're coming up on the holidays. So this is our special holiday episode, I guess where we talk about like what are we doing in December? Last year we did a hackathon. Are we going to do a hackathon this year? What are we doing about time off?
Starr: I would just like to know about some of this stuff because ...
Ben: I think, I think the first we have to talk about what are we having for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.
Starr: Oh that's right. Okay, so this is going to come out like a week after Thanksgiving there, right?
Ben: Oh right.
Josh: Yeah.
Josh: Well that's okay.
Starr: What good did we have for Thanksgiving? Looking back on that, I just have fond memories of it.
Josh: We're getting on a dangerous it's a slippery slope here because then the next week we're going to have to pretend like it's the week after the week after Thanksgiving-
Starr: We have to keep up for the rest of our lives.
Josh: We're going to keep up this charade for the entirety of this podcast.
Starr: I don't know Josh, I just got such a great deal on a flat screen TV on Black Friday that I just can't not talk about it.
Josh: This is going to be like podcast inception.
Ben: Well the the Curtis household always has traditional Thanksgiving dinner. We have turkey, we have a green bean casserole, we have some mashed potatoes and of course the sweet potato casserole. You cannot have Thanksgiving without the sweet potato casserole.
Josh: Oh yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Do you guys do like the marshmallows on top?
Ben: No. Man, that's evil.
Starr: That's the best part.
Josh: Strong opinions on Founder Quest.
Ben: Cannot abide the marshmallows, no.
Starr: that's all right. What's a food that you have a strong opinion about Josh?
Josh: Turkey, I like my turkey.
Starr: Oh really?
Josh: Well, I'm very adamant that you have to ... turkey has to be included. There are elements within our family that believe otherwise. So that's one of our disputes. Yeah.
Starr: Well I'm having duck this year. I hate to break it to you so don't come to my house because there's not going to be that many of us, so why? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know why I should make a turkey for that. That many people.
Josh: Well, ducks ... at least it's not like a fish or something like that.
Starr: Oh my God. Who would do that?
Josh: Some people. I won't name names. I want to, I want to enjoy my Thanksgiving this year.
Starr: Oh, I love Thanksgiving because it's all about cooking and large, extravagant cooking projects. Which is like my favorite thing to do. I posted the picture in Slack. I made some cultured butter, which started by you buy some cream and you mix it with some bacteria and you let it sit out for a couple of days. Then-
Ben: I thought you just took it to an art gallery. Now you're cultured butter.
Starr: Oh yeah. That would probably be quicker.
Starr: Let's see, we got the duck in the fridge. It's sort of air drying because you have to wait until the skin is like parchment, which is what they say. Then what else? I made a panna cotta with the leftover buttermilk for tonight and ... Oh yeah. For the sauce I'm making duck l'orange, which I'd never or duck Allah, Laura, I don't know French. I've never made this before. What I had to do is I had to buy five pounds of chicken wings because I can't afford five pounds of duck wings. Five pounds of chicken wings. You make stock out of them. You make about two quarts of stock or two liters of stock. Then you boil it down until it's like a cup of liquid and then that's the base for your sauce.
Ben: Wow.
Starr: Yeah, so we're not messing around.
Ben: That's hardcore.
Josh: Seriously.
Ben: Nice. Now I'm hungry.
Starr: Well, too late. Because you got to you got to finish this podcast.
Starr: Got to.
Starr: Too bad.
Ben: Let's get on it. I'm going to come crash your Thanksgiving Starr. That sounds pretty good actually.
Starr: Yeah, you should. You should. I mean there's like food for four people.
Josh: We have like, we've got a 25 pound turkey in the fridge. That's what we're doing. We've got like our big family get together at my brother's house that we're going to.
Ben: Nice.
Josh: We're doing the turkey. We usually do that every year. Well, if Katelyn has a really good turkey recipe that she does. It's like an orange citrus brine that we do.
Starr: It's like a turkey l'orange.
Josh: Yeah, kind of. I'm not as a learned as you are Starr in the cooking department. I'll leave that to you.
Starr: I just, I looked up the recipe.
Josh: You have the internet. I guess I also have the internet I'm just too lazy to use it.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: But we also have two 15 pound turkeys in the freezer for later. That's how much I like turkey.
Starr: Those are backup turkeys?
Josh: Yeah. Yep.
Ben: Wow.
Starr: Oh, I didn't know anybody actually like turkey to be honest. I thought it was just this thing that we all had to pretend to like for one day a year.
Josh: I like turkey.
Starr: Oh.
Ben: Yeah, me too.
Josh: I mean, I like the full dinner.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: I mean, I'll get tired of it but I also eat a lot of lean meat for the protein factor so that's good for that.
Ben: So when it comes to Turkey, I have to know what is your preference? Light meat or dark meat?
Josh: Probably, I mean like, dark. Everyone likes dark meat, right?
Ben: No, I'm a light meat person myself.
Josh: Really?
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: I like the light meat, but it can't be super dry.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: Starr? Light, dark?
Starr: I guess dark. I mean ... yeah, usually. Usually like turkey breasts are really dry. Man, we're really getting the hard hitting questions this week. It's getting too real. I think people might be having a hard time listening to this because it's so intense.
Ben: You're like Justin Jackson. Is anybody still listening? He had this podcast episode. Yeah, he had his podcast episode a while back where he's talking about capitalism and he was having like this existential crisis about, you know, being a business owner and et cetera, et cetera. It was a fantastic, listen, I loved it, but I like repeatedly throughout the episode, he's like, "Is anybody still listening?" Because he just is going on and on and on about business. It was fantastic. So, so Justin, yes. I was still listening. It was great.
Josh: I kind of want to go ... I have to go listen to that now. I'm intrigued.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Oh, we should have a show about capitalism.
Ben: Totally. I'm sure we have opinions.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. About the, about the, what is it? Oh, it's okay. I'm not going to go there. So holidays. It's important not to talk about politics during the holidays.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: But we can talk about it at work, right? Because friends here. Yeah. So what are we actually talking about? Like what does this have to do with us? We're doing some sort of, so last year we did ... let's talk about last year. We took some time off. We came back, we did a hackathon. Like we took a fair amount of time off, didn't we?
Ben: Yeah, we did. I think we took like two weeks off or three weeks off. Last year, last December.
Josh: I'd say it was at least three ... I think it was like three weeks in December. Then we took the week for the hackathon right after. I think it was like a month.
Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we know Thanksgiving is the beginning of the holiday season at Honeybadger, right? So after Thanksgiving it's like "Hmm ..." we kind of slow down. Like we don't have a whole lot happening. We don't have a whole lot of customers asking for stuff. We don't, you know. Things just kinda chill.
Starr: That's a good point. That's a good point. We should mention that we are kind of like a seasonal business. Yeah. People sort of, I don't know why but like I have my guesses but our business comes in waves, right? I guess as people sort of get ready for holiday season and they're putting up these websites and stuff, we get more people signing up and then after Christmas people are not doing anything or whatever. We get less people signing up and so yeah. So it's kind of a natural downtime for us.
Ben: Yeah.
Ben: So this month we decided, you know what, we should actually get around to doing that second product that we've been talking about for like a year now. One of the things on the table for this December is to spend some time researching that. Doing some prototyping or doing some market research or something. Instead of just sticking around we will also be doing a little bit of work by looking at some of the future kind of stuff we want to build.
Josh: Yeah. Kind of similar, similar to hack week.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: It's like no very low pressure. Work on anything you want or not. I think it's very loose.
Ben: It's pretty loose. Yeah.
Starr: Are we ready to announce by the second product is?
Ben: No.
Starr: Are we ready to ...
Ben: We have like a list of I think four or five things that we have in mind, like ideas that we've had over the past year or even that we've worked on. I know Josh has worked on one of these ideas some and he's thinking about picking that back up and doing it. I have a couple of things that I think are interesting. Ben has a great idea that he wants to do that's actually would be quite a change of pace for us. So keep you posted on that if that happens because that's really kind of fun. But I think it's too early to say exactly what they are yet. We don't want to spoil the surprise.
Starr: Okay. It's not like, "All right we have to ship this in December."
Ben: No, not at all. This definitely like research, experimenting, playing, having a diversion kind of stuff.
Starr: That's cool.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah.
Starr: That's cool. Yeah. I'm going to be trying to like ship the fricking blog. This has taken so much longer than I expected. I know I could have just buckled down and like written a bunch of blog posts myself and had been sort of published right now. But then we run into the problem that I've run into before where I just run out of stuff to say and then what are you going to do?
Starr: So I've been working with these authors and we've got some articles done now and everything but, I'm like, do I want to get them illustrated? I want to do stuff like that and sort of like how do you ... it turns out when you have dozens of people working for you doing independent projects, maybe just having them all in your email isn't the best way to manage them and not drop the ball.
Starr: So setting up the project management system, like this is a whole ... like this whole management thing could be somebody's entire job.
Josh: Yeah, for sure.
Starr: Like it could be a career. Somebody should write a book about how to do it.
Ben: A book about management. I don't think that it is.
Josh: This hasn't been covered at all. I don't know. I'm really thankful for you Starr that you're handling all that because I don't know, I get mad when I have a single meeting. It's bad enough just showing up every week for this podcast. I don't schedule calls. This is my only scheduled call during the week on a fairly regular basis. I like that we have the flexibility to do that. But I guess sometimes you need to coordinate with other people.
Starr: Yeah, yeah. It's kind of, I'm kind of enjoying it. It's a big change of pace from the past 40 years of my life and having all these meetings and stuff and working with people. But it's actually a lot of fun because these are smart people and a lot of them are actually kind of better writers than me. I'm actually discovering that my talent, I think, isn't actually ... I'm a much better editor than I am a writer. If you give me something and are like, "How do you rearrange this so it makes more sense?" Like I can do that pretty easily. But it's like starting from a blank page takes me a lot more time. So I don't know. We'll see. That's fun.
Ben: That'll be a nice Christmas present to yourself to get some other blog posts up that aren't written by you. Right?
Starr: Yeah, totally. I'm thinking about waiting until like January to publish them because it seems readership always kind of goes down and people are ... I mean, maybe some people are reading stuff slacking off at work, but I don't really know. I don't know if that's ...
Josh: Plus there will be like no one around to promote them.
Starr: Oh that's a good point.
Josh: Because we're-
Ben: We're taking off and doing other things.
Josh: I actually, I have a few projects that I've worked on but I basically already put the feature freeze on the year. I don't think I'm going to actually ship anything from here on out and I keep moving it up every year. So I think it's like ... first it was like, you know, in December you're putting out the Christmas decorations and then it's the day after Thanksgiving and then they're coming out like the day after Halloween. I think that's what I'm doing with my Christmas vacation. I'm basically done, I think.
Ben: Yeah. I actually, you may not know this, but I actually use the time around the Christmas holiday to do a lot of ops work that's disruptive or that could be disruptive. Things like upgrading our lastic search cluster or upgrading our post-grads to a new version. I like to do that around Christmas time because nobody cares, right? Because they're all taking a break. Everyone's gone away. If I happen to have the database down for 10 minutes instead of two minutes, well, I mean no body cares that much.
Starr: Everybody's just schlossed on eggnog. They don't care.
Josh: On Christmas Eve.
Ben: Well actually not Christmas Eve, but New Year's Eve actually is my favorite time to roll out stuff like that.
Josh: Really?
Ben: Yep. Yeah. I'm an early riser so I go to bed early, right, typically. On New Year's, family is all like, "You got to stay up with us and party." Right? I'm like, I don't care. It's just another day. But you know, for them it's fun. I'm like, "Okay, what am I going to do between the hours of 9:00 to 12:00 when I'd rather be in bed?" You know, so I'm going to do some work. They're playing card games or whatever. Now, of course I'll play with them and stuff, but also I'll have in the background, a database upgrade happening.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: So festive. I love this time of year.
Ben: Yeah, it's great.
Starr: You mentioned Christmas decorations. Josh, can I just say I've had my Christmas lights up like for the past four years?
Josh: Nice.
Starr: It's like a little tradition now is like you plug them in and see if they still work.
Josh: Yeah, I could get on board with a year round Christmas lights thing.
Ben: Yeah. I don't do Christmas lights outside of my house. I do Christmas lights inside because why do I care what my neighbors see?
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: If I want to see pretty light, they're going to be inside where I see them.
Starr: But I don't know if it's super ...
Starr: Yeah.
Starr: It's really nice to like, you know, you're coming home and it's dark because you're in Seattle, like it's dark out at about 1:00 PM this time of year and you see these little festive Christmas lights welcoming you home as opposed to a dark lawn that could be full of killers and alligators and snakes.
Ben: I could see that.
Josh: Yeah.
Josh: Is that what it's like in the South?
Starr: I mean, pretty much. We didn't have alligators where I'm from, but lots of snakes. Yeah.
Ben: So, yeah. You know, December is a happy time at Honeybadger, right? We get to relax, work on fun projects, maybe take a few weeks off, maybe upgrade a database. You know, whatever we enjoy doing.
Starr: Can we get some like special music I wonder? I wonder if we could find some special jingle all the way type music for the show?
Josh: For like the background?
Starr: Yeah, yeah,
Josh: Yeah. Some sleigh bells.
Starr: So do you have anything else to say about the holidays or is that, should we ... how long have we been talking? 20 minutes. That should cut down to about like 10 minutes once you cut out the "ahs" and "ums."
Ben: This is going to be the, we're leaving early for Thanksgiving episode, so we're not going to talk very long.
Starr: Okay. I mean we could live cast our Thanksgiving dinners. I can go stand in line at the mall. Oh, they tore the mall down. Nevermind. Sorry. I could go stand in line at Target.
Ben: Like Northgate's gone now?
Starr: Yeah. Yeah. I mean they're in the process of tearing it down. I live by a mall and they're tearing it down because we're building a light rail. For all the non Seattle people like Josh.
Ben: I have good memories of Northgate.
Starr: Yeah, it's a nice little mall.
Josh: Mall's used to be a big deal.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Not so much anymore.
Starr: I know. It's like everything in life. It's so temporary and impermanent.
Starr: Alright so ...
Ben: Yeah, we're pretty much done here.
Starr: I think we're done. I think we're all short timers or something.
Ben: For real. Like, oh ....
Starr: Oh my God, is it five o'clock yet? Can we go?
Ben: It's like totally noon. It's time to cut off.
Starr: All right. It's time for lunch. All right, gents is great talking with you about the holidays. I hope our editor was able to cut down-
Ben: Get something out of this.
Starr: Cut down on the silences and condense this into like a two minute interesting podcast-
Ben: That's worth listening to.
Starr: Okay. This has been Honeybadger phoning it in. I was going to say, if you liked this, please don't please let go review us. But actually for this episode, just don't review us because I don't even know. I don't think I'll like the results of that.
Ben: Just drink some eggnog instead.
Starr: Yeah. If you want to write for us, go check out our blog in the top nav. We've got a little link and don't expect me to reply to you this week. Anyway, so this has been Honeybadger keeping it festive.
Ben: Happy holidays.
Starr: Happy holidays. Okay, good bye everybody.
This week on FounderQuest, the guys talk about their decision to offer a free plan alongside the paid plans for Honeybadger and how it impacted the overall business. Josh is also back shares the hottest of takes from his recent trip to Nashville to attend RubyConf.
As usual, the show goes off the rails and talks about flying, Ben’s Eye of Sauron approach to fiscal management and an acquisition strategy based around companies named after honey badgers.
Full Transcript:
Josh: Oh yeah, I got first-class back from RubyConf. I forget what it cost, but it was like too cheap to pass up, so I splurged a little bit.
Ben: Yeah, I love me first-class, especially on the way back.
Josh: It was nice. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. You're wiped out. You're tired. You just need to crash.
Josh: Yeah. I was hungry and they had food. It wasn't a lot of food granted, but it was better than no food.
Ben: So I've read on travel blogs that the guideline is, if it's less than a dollar per minute of flight time, then it's worth it to spend the extra. So you get a deal like that.
Starr: That's interesting.
Ben: Go for it.
Josh: Yeah. I need to start making that calculation more and make sure I'm getting the most out of my Honeybadger expense card for real.
Starr: Whoa.
Josh: That the handbook-
Ben: Yes.
Josh: ...grants me.
Starr: Wait, what's this? I must have glossed over that part of our new company handbook that Ben wrote?
Ben: Yeah, our handbook says that every employee in the US gets a company issued credit card and you can use it at your discretion.
Starr: Oh my goodness. Cha ching.
Ben: Yeah, totally.
Starr: That's what that is. I wondered what that thing in my wallet was.
Ben: Of course-
Josh: Well, it doesn't have to be burning a hole anymore.
Ben: Of course, you also have to deal with the part of our code of conduct policy that talks about how we do financial reviews of all of our credit card statements, or in other words, Ben, looks at every line item of every credit card statement like, "Hey, did you really need to spend it?"
Josh: I already know that Ben is like, I already assumed that Ben is watching, like, actively watching the credit card statement in real time. Don't you get notifications or something Ben?
Ben: I have, yes, I have Amex configured to alert me whenever a purchase happens that's over $500.
Starr: Oh my goodness. You know who you are, Ben?
Ben: What?
Starr: You're probably not going to like this. I've been reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, finally. It's like the Eye of Sauron, right. But for credit card, for financial-
Josh: The eye of Amex.
Ben: Do you think Sauron was a micro manager or did he delegate?
Starr: He was definitely a micro manager. He was directly controlling everybody in the army.
Josh: Right, yeah.
Starr: As soon as he died or whatever, like his armies just dissipated.
Ben: Right.
Starr: So yeah, I also have got the first-class upgrades a couple of times. I'm sorry Ben. I hope I didn't hurt your feelings. I don't really think you're like Sauron. I just thought it was too funny to not say.
Ben: I don't know. Being compared to Sauron, that's actually kind of cool.
Josh: Bad ass.
Starr: I mean he's very, very capable manager that person.
Ben: That's true. He didn't do a lot of management.
Josh: Yeah, very successful right up until the end.
Ben: Up until the end yeah.
Starr: Yeah. He just took on too much VC cash.
Starr: So how was the actual conference, Josh? You went to RubyConf. You decided to go old school and you took a bunch of tee shirts with you, I think, right?
Josh: Yeah, it was good. I took a duffle bag of tee shirts this time. Not something I had to check. It was carry on. It was kind of fun. We'd moved to just like taking virtual, you know, we take our business cards that have little links to get tee shirts on them most of the time, but it's fun to have the actual swag at the conference and hand them out and stuff. Yeah, it felt like old times.
Starr: How'd you feel like the conference was in terms of attendance and the talks and all that?
Josh: It was great. It was, obviously it was sold out. Lots of people there. The talks that I saw were good. Honestly, I did mostly the hallway track while I was there. I think I probably only attended six talks or so, maybe five or six, but I got to catch up-
Ben: How was the game night?
Josh: Game night was great. I forget how many people actually showed up, but it was a full room. I think they had like eight to 10 tables or something and they were all filled at one point. So yeah, full house. We had a little swag table, so I got to put my shirts out with the other sponsors. Ruby Together and BackerKit were both sponsors.
Starr: Oh, so we sponsored the game night?
Josh: And Sidekiq yeah, we did.
Starr: Was that an official conference thing or is that a side thing?
Josh: It was official this time. Normally it's, I think we did it at RailsConf I think earlier this year.
Ben: Yup.
Josh: But it was unofficial. It's usually been unofficial, but this year Mike, with Contributed Systems who does Sidekiq, put together a official game night package and we got a couple of other sponsors to co-sponsor. I think that it made a big difference having it be an official event because the attendance seemed to really tick up with it being on the official docket.
Ben: Yeah. That's cool. And Nashville had some good food, right?
Josh: Oh yeah. Yeah. My favorite was the hot chicken and it was very hot. I'm glad I didn't get the a, they had one that was like a ghost pepper sauce, which we got a side of, and I'm glad I didn't get that on my chicken because it turned out to not just be ghost pepper sauce, it was ghost pepper oil basically.
Starr: Oh no.
Josh: The oil changes things. I was like, "I eat ghost pepper. It can't be that bad. You only get so hot, right?" No. I discounted the fact that oil exists.
Ben: Yeah. That changes things.
Josh: Yeah. Oil changes everything. So I'm glad I didn't dive into that.
Ben: Glad you had a good time.
Starr: All right, so I think the actual topic for today is going to be our free plan. Yeah. So I was talking with Jonathan from New Zealand, who is actually going to be writing an article for us pretty soon, and he is a listener and was like, "Hey, you should talk about your free plan because I noticed you have a free plan. But I've heard everywhere that when you have a free plan it contributes the most to support. You end up doing way more support for free users than for anybody else, and also just ends up draining a lot of resources and costing a lot of money."
Starr: So he wanted to know, first of all, what was the process by which we came up with the free plan, why did we decide to do it? And then he also wanted to know how has it affected our support costs and everything like that. And little did Jonathan know that this is a issue that has been, this is like a long standing, not really an argument or anything, there's no sides, but it's something that's come up and then been dropped a lot over the entire life of the company.
Starr: So maybe we should start a little bit by talking about our current free plan and what it's like and what we offer and whether or not it's working for us in support and all that. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that Ben?
Ben: Yeah, so our current plan.
Ben: Yeah, so our current plan, you started talking about support and I was thinking, how has that been? I'm thinking back over the past few months that we've had the free plan in place, and really as far as I can remember, it hasn't been much of an impact on support actually. I can't think of particular support requests, or volume of support requests, that have come in that have made me think, oh this is terrible. So I guess a win in that column, right?
Ben: So that's been nice. That's been a pleasant surprise. I don't think I was really expecting support volumes to change all that much, but it is nice to have that bear out that it hasn't killed us. But our current plan we decided to offer, because we saw that there was a certain group of people that would like to use us, specifically solo developers, but who just felt that our small plan was just too much. At $60 a month, they couldn't swing that.
Ben: And so they would go to our competitors who would offer a free plan. And so we thought, why are we turning away people? Why don't we build a free plan that allowed those kind of individuals. And, it is individuals. I was about to say, and small teams, but really it's not small teams because we decided that our free plan be limited to one user. And we decided that because we didn't want to run the risk of cannibalizing our existing business with having teams of 10 or 20 or more people and say, hey, we can get away with the free plan.
Ben: So yes, we decided that, for individual developers who just couldn't swing the 60 bucks a month, that we should offer them something because we didn't want to push them away to somebody else. We wanted them to be able to grow into a paid Honeybadger account. And if that ever happens for them, maybe they will bring us to their workplace. Maybe right now they're between jobs, and they'll get a job, and introduce us to their new coworkers. Hopefully, these free users will end up leading to paid users at some point through some life circumstance change.
Josh: Or maybe their side project will take off. And that would be the best.
Ben: Even better, yeah!
Josh: For us and them.
Ben: That'd be awesome for everybody.
Josh: That's always awesome to see.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: I wonder if the fact that we have it limited to single user has resulted in us not having a huge support volume. Because if you're a single developer working on a project, you're not going to spend all of your time doing super detailed error instrumentation, you're not going to be spending all your time doing these really sort of weird edge cases, like you're not going to have firewalls that need to be configured, probably. And so, yeah. So maybe they just use the simplest case scenario. They plop in our gem, or our library, and they just let it do its thing.
Ben: Yeah, that's a good point.
Ben: Yeah, and to go along with that idea, we don't have, like it's a developer who presumably knows what they're doing, right? We don't typically have an unsophisticated user base. We have pretty advanced people using our system. And so the, the one place where that sometimes isn't the case, where there's a big team where they've got people who are not developers who are collaborating on a particular project. So that could introduce those more support problems that might bury someone who's offering a free plan for their service, that has users that can't help themselves basically.
Starr: Yeah, actually, I don't even know if this is the result of the free plan, but one thing that occasionally happens that is always a little bit amusing, not that I would make fun of people but sometimes we get people who sign up for our app, who contact support and it's pretty clear they really don't have any idea like what our app is for. They really have no idea what it is so it's like, why did you sign up for this? But you know, we try and sort of gently show them the exit and maybe point them to whatever.
Josh: Point them to the Honeybadger Bitcoin, or the hoodie? I forgot what the other one is that we get sometimes.
Ben: The nutritional supplements.
Josh: Or the nutritional stuff, yeah. It's either Bitcoin or nutritional supplements, so you've got to pick one or the other.
Starr: Out of all the companies online with some name having to do with honey badgers, we provide the most open and best support. And so we get support requests for all companies named Honeybadger.
Josh: Right, yeah.
Ben: So what we should do is we should totally acquire those companies, and then when those people contact us we'd be like, oh yes, we can help you with that. Here, check out our line of health-enhancing products.
Josh: That's an interesting acquisition strategy. You know, namesake.
Starr: It would be truly selfless because it's like we acquired this company because we want to be able to provide support for the people who are contacting us about these nutritional supplements.
Ben: And of course we want to make mad money by being a Bitcoin exchange. I mean, who doesn't?
Josh: Oh yeah. I've always wanted a Honeybadger coin that was our own.
Starr: If you really want to be abused though, go read patio11's tweets about Bitcoin. It's always amusing.
Ben: He is. Yeah. He's amazing. So yeah, no, we're never going to touch Bitcoin. That's never going to happen at Honeybadger.
Josh: Yeah. Patrick's got just a little bit of financial knowledge I gather. Right?
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: But on support, that wasn't our primary concern. Would it overwhelm us with support? Actually, our primary concern, and the reason why we didn't do free for a long time, was we were concerned about the costs of supporting those users. Like, if we got a free user who signed up and then sent us like a gazillion error reports, well that would swamp us, right? And we'd be doing all that for free. We were pretty allergic to that idea, and for many years when people would ask us if we had a free pen, our stock response was, nope, we can't afford to get the level of service that we provide to someone that's not paying us. Sorry, it just doesn't make sense, economically.
Starr: Oh, I was just going to say that unlike a lot of SaaS companies out there, it's possible actually for a customer to cost us more money to service than they pay us. If they have a high error volume, and they result in a lot of emails being sent or a lot of, I don't know, SMS messages being sent or whatever, we pay for each one of those. So, yeah.
Josh: I'd say, one of the big reasons that the free plan was tough in the past was when we [inaudible] having actually any kind of limiting of anything on our service, which we talked about before. But if you're allowing people to send basically unlimited traffic through your system, then the free plan could get pretty expensive in that regard I would imagine.
Ben: Definitely.
Starr: Yeah. So the current free plan is sort of a direct outgrowth of us implementing rate-based pricing, right?
Ben: Yeah, once we had the ability to limit, then we can say, okay, yeah, we can give you a plan that has a pretty low limit. And that was pretty straightforward.
Starr: Yeah. And it's a nice upgrade path too because if somebody sends us over their amount of errors, they get this automatic prompt to upgrade to get a higher limit. And if you are a free plan user and you start using more than is on your plan, then that's a nice upgrade path.
Ben: Yeah, I don't think we've seen that much. I think so far, again, we haven't had this live for a long time. It's just been a few months, if I remember correctly. We haven't really seen people doing that, starting out free and then upgrading. What we actually have seen more of is people who were on our small plan downgrading to our free plan because they had signed up before we had the free and then they realized, oh, my traffic is so low and I'm just me, I can use Honeybadger for free and stay within limits. And that's totally fine. We have no problems with that.
Ben: But yeah, the idea being that, you know, the person who's at work and using Honeybadger, he wants to have a side project and also use Honeybadger. We get that a lot. And to me, that's gratifying. I love being able to actually support someone who's doing that. I like side projects, and I like being able to have someone be able to use our tool who is really, there's no justification for actually paying monthly for it.
Starr: Yeah. So one side effect of having a free plan that I noticed when we did our stats, or when I did my deep dive into stats a couple months ago, is that if you implement a free plan, make note of the date that you launch it because you're going to see a super large drop in your conversion ratio. If you're not like, oh yeah, the free plan, then that might give you a little heart attack and I wouldn't want that to happen.
Ben: Yeah, it's good to mark turning points when you do those pricing experiments. Every pricing experiment that we have done has been over time. We don't AB test pricing, but we put new pricing out there and we see what happens after a few months. So yeah, you've got to be able to track like, oh, why did this chart all of a sudden change? Oh yeah, we launched new pricing that month.
Josh: Yeah. It's interesting. There's a little bit of a complexity overhead. It seems like when we introduce new concepts of a paid versus a free user into the system, or something. I've been working on redoing our onboarding emails and it seems the more different types of users we have, the more complicated that setup is too. And I have to have these conditionals. I don't want to send an email asking someone to pay us if they're on a free plan. But how do you know they're on the free plan versus a paid one. So it just adds a little bit of extra complexity.
Ben: Yes. It's totally bogus when there's a site that offers you a free trial, or a free plan, and they ask you for a credit card. It's like, but you're not going to charge me, right? So sending them an email like, hey, you've been using for two weeks, time to pay us. It's like, oh, but wait, I'm not paying you.
Josh: Wasn't there some discussion about that today. I think the rework podcast talked about that or something.
Ben: Yeah, that's today's episode of the rework podcast is all about how they decided to do your free plan again. They had one back in the day, and then recently decided to launch it again and yeah, Aaron responded to DHH complaining about the people that ask for a credit card for a free plan just doesn't make sense.
Josh: Yeah. Aaron Patterson, right?
Ben: Yep.
Josh: Yeah. So I think I totally agree on if you're signing up for an actual free, like the free version of something, it doesn't make sense at all to ask for a credit card because it's never going to get charged. It shouldn't ever get charged. There is debate between asking for payment upfront on a trial, which I think is probably more valid because if you're signing up for a trial, that's one of the steps. It's really important to continue if you decide to keep the trial or not.
Ben: Yeah, we've always decided to do it not through that, not have the credit card up front. Because a developer on a team often doesn't have the company card handy, right?
Josh: Right.
Starr: Not always. We started with a credit card up front, but then we quickly sort of-
Josh: Well, I think that's why too. Or it was part of the reason was that it wasn't working as well for us. And I think Ben's right though, it does have a lot to do with the customer that is signing up. For instance, the company or the thing we're switching to for our onboarding emails is user list. And I was a little bit surprised when they asked me for a credit card up front because it hasn't been as common. Like I don't see that.
Josh: Maybe it's because I'm a developer and other companies have come to the same conclusion we have, but I think it works in their case. Their customer is, like, they currently serve SaaS operators. And a lot of them are founders or someone relatively high up the chain. So they know they have a credit card, and the ability to pay. So I have personally, I had no problem putting my credit card in there. I was already pretty sold on it when I signed up.
Starr: So this isn't our first attempt at a free plan. How many other ones have we had?
Ben: I'm thinking one other attempt if I remember correctly.
Starr: Oh really?
Starr: I thought we did two. I thought we did one brief one a long time ago.
Ben: Oh, maybe. I have a bad memory. I can't remember stuff more than six months ago, right?
Starr: That's my shtick. And the last one, Josh was the person who was sort of the lead in developing that. Is that right?
Josh: On the free plan?
Starr: Yeah. I just remember that you were just pulling out of your hair over all the code that had to be written to handle the case where somebody was over the resource limits for the free plan, but then got automatically assigned to the free plan, and you don't want to just delete their resources.
Josh: That's starting to vaguely come back to me now, and I'm having bad feelings, Starr, so.
Starr: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Josh: Yeah, I think you're triggering me a little bit right now. No. Yeah, I remember that I took a fairly convoluted approach to that I think, which turned out to be maybe a bad idea. But yeah, we basically had a downgrade mechanism where you could sign up for the trial, but if you didn't pay at the end you got converted, and you weren't using any paid features, you automatically got a free plan.
Josh: So basically I think the idea was good. Let people sign up and see what Honeybadger could do in all of its power, and then at the end of the trial, so everyone goes through a trial, and then if you still just aren't, you know.
Josh: And then if you still just aren't using that stuff, then it would automatically convert you and you get your free plan. But it turns out that's a lot of extra logic and there's a lot that can go wrong there and it was a nightmare.
Ben: Yeah, and part of it, as I recall, there was some confusion because of the way that we do accounts and how we do collaborators. If you signed up because someone invited you to collaborate on their account, if you were then on a free plan, you could create your own project and we're like, well, is this my collaborative's project? Is it my project? And doing the checks on that. Yeah. That got kind of hairy.
Josh: Our whole account system, I think that's part of the problem is our user account system was not designed for that level of ... I don't know. It's not a good abstraction for those types of things. And I mean, that's been a problem elsewhere as well, and that's one reason I think you're working on that right now, aren't you, Ben, to get some sort of new account abstraction, which will be a better model.
Ben: Yep. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: So, I'm thinking about the question, what is it about our plan system that makes it hard to sort of switch between, to downgrade somebody from a paid plan to a free plan? And it seems like it's the fact that when you have the paid plan or the higher plan, you can create more of these resources, projects or whatever, and then I guess you could in the past. It's not how it works now, but in the past you could.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: And those stick around and we actually perform work for those projects. We take inbound errors, we do processing on things, and that work goes on whether or not you're logged in or whatever. And so then, it's like this question. It's like, well, what do we do with those resources? Which ones do we shut down? We have to pause it and we can't just delete them entirely. So, it seems like if you're going to develop a plan system that was the most optimized for being able to switch somebody between a free plan and a paid plan. It would all be like ... The resources and stuff, there's no difference between free and paid. It's just the sort of features that the user themselves can use against the resources, and it's like everything else would need to stay the same.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: I think having all those different, that whole ... We've had a fairly complex feature matrix for our plans in the past where it's like ... Especially when we weren't doing resource-based billing or usage-based, I mean. So, before we were doing usage, charging for the number of errors you can send or whatever. We tiered on a lot more granular things within the app itself. And if you're in a trial and you can just use anything, it's easy to get yourself into a paid state and then it's like, how do you get them back into a free state if they want to do that? I don't know.
Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And this one's more clear up front, what you're getting into. If you sign up for a solo plan, which is our free plan, you know what you're getting into, you know that there's some limits. There's no surprises 15 days down the road.
Josh: Yeah. I think that's the key for me, is just have different signup, just different paths for each type of user. If you've got a free plan, you sign up for the free plan from the beginning. If you've got an open source plan and having a specific page for it that lets people go through a different process to get into that. And that's something we're learning I think.
Starr: Why don't we to take that one step farther and we'll just have different apps for each plan. Completely separate applications on different servers and everything.
Josh: Yeah, that would really reduce the conditional logic in our app.
Starr: Yeah, it'd be great.
Josh: That'd be great. We just set just a handful of environment variables for each app and we're done.
Starr: Yeah. And you know what, the best thing of all is that it's Webscale.
Josh: It is. Yeah, I like that idea.
Ben: Like so many things in that we've experienced in running Honeybadger, the time, where you are as a business makes a difference. When we started out, we didn't have a free plan. We knew that we couldn't afford it in terms of support and in terms of operating the servers and handling the traffic and that sort of thing. And we gave up that opportunity for the growth that can come because people are being exposed to your service without having to pay for it. It's a marketing cost, but over time we dumped the system. We added the metering, we got to a scaling point where we could handle that kind of cost and offer that.
Ben: And so, if you're just starting out, like when we were just starting out, it's definitely a struggle. You're thinking, can I afford that? Can I run a business that way? And maybe you can. Maybe you can get lucky and structure it in such a way that the cost won't kill you. Or you're VC backed and you don't have to care. You can just give it all away free. That's not the situation that we found ourselves in, but if you have that, go for it.
Josh: Yeah. Early on, I think that not having the free free plan was a really good form of validation for us that we were actually onto something with the product because people who signed up we knew were signing up because they valued the product because you had to pay for it. And it's easy. I've seen people that have launched new things with basically a very strong freemium model, and they might end up with 10,000 users or something, but then no one is paying them. And so yeah.
Starr: And the feedback you get from paying users is also going to be way more useful than the feedback you get from free users, because a lot of free users are going to be like, well if you add this one thing then I'll pay for it or whatever. But that's usually bullshit, but the paid users, they're already paying, so you kind of know that they're already contributing something, so maybe it's worth optimizing the app for them and not the people who are not paying.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Totally.
Josh: That's true. Yeah. I've been really surprised though. It's been really great since we launched the current solo plan, which is what we call our free plan, that I've been loving seeing the signup. We do that onboarding introduction where they can introduce themselves. It's a freeform text field where we just say, hey, why are you signing up for Honeybadger? And we've had a ton of the GitHub student pack people signing up because we're-
Starr: Oh nice.
Josh: Yeah and it's been really cool though. It's like all these student bootcamp developers that are signing up for Honeybadger, and it's cool to read some of the things they say about why they want to ... They've never been exposed to monitoring before, a lot of them, so it's cool to see the next wave of developers being exposed to Honeybadger and to just monitoring in general.
Starr: Yeah, it's kind of neat with doing my interviews with the writers who are going to be working with us. We've got a lot of people who came through boot camps a couple of years ago and have been developing professionally and I don't know, this is kind of neat to see the next ... I mean, it's not really a generation because anybody can go to a boot camp, but a lot of these are sort of younger people. And so, it's kind of neat to see the next generation sort of coming through and how sort of different they are from my generation. I think that's kind of awesome.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: One thing we haven't talked about yet is, we've always had a free plan for open source projects.
Starr: Oh yeah.
Ben: Yeah. We don't advertise that much. It's on our site somewhere, but whenever anybody asks, we're happy to give them a free account so that they can monitor their open source projects, and we have several people using us for that, and I love being able to give back in that way. I mean, we've benefited of course so much from open source in our business. Everything that we run on is an open source stack and it's nice to be able to support people who are contributing in that way to the community.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: One of the things that's on my to do list is to make an official ... I'd like to get an official Honeybadger for open source page up and advertise it a little bit more.
Starr: One wrinkle with that that I run into with replying to support tickets and stuff, and this isn't really a big deal, but it's just something to be aware of that the listeners might want to be aware of too, is that people have a wide variety of definitions of open source, and so the open source plan isn't for necessarily anybody for any web app who's source code is open source. Because we got somebody whose like, yeah, I'm going to make this ... It was some sort of Twitch clone or something, and it's like, yeah, it's open source, but we're going to run it and it's going to be a business. It's like, no, we're not going to pay for your thousands of users business who releases an open source projects monitoring. That doesn't do us any good. Open source is about sort of giving back to the community that creates the type of open source projects that we all use and benefit from.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. And there's probably a few, well admittedly fewer of those for a monitoring service because to use our open source plan it implies that you have a production service that you're monitoring, and there's fewer open source projects or organizations that run some kind of production service. RubyGems.org is one. So, that's an example. They use Honeybadger, and they're on our open source plan, and they are literally an open source foundation. It's being run by a foundation to benefit the Ruby community and they run RubyGems.org, which serves all the gems to everyone. So, that's an example of someone who would use our open source service as opposed to if we were a CI platform or something like that, then everyone would use us for their project because basically every open source project on GitHub needs CI. So, there's more of a market for open source people there.
Starr: So, could you say Josh, that every time somebody types in bundle install, that Honeybadger plays a tiny part in delivering those libraries and those gems to their computer?
Josh: That's true. Yeah.
Starr: That's amazing. We do amazing work, gentlemen.
Josh: Yeah, we were talking about Ruby Together a lot at RubyConf, and we support Ruby Together, and I think some of the work they do is really, really cool too because that's kind of their purpose is to build the tools that we as Rubyists use to build our businesses and projects and things. So, I definitely, on a serious note, it's great to support the Ruby community.
Starr: Do you have anything else to say about free plans?
Ben: Everybody loves free.
Josh: Yeah, give me more of that.
Starr: That's true.
Starr: Yeah. So, I guess we're going to wrap things up. Thank you dear listeners for listening to another episode of FounderQuest, all about free stuff. Everybody loves free stuff. If you like the show, please review us on your podcast app of choice. If you want to write for us and our blog, we're always sort of accepting applications and looking for people. So check us out. In the past, I've advertised this and said to go look at the blog top nav and you'll find a link, right for us, and it wasn't there because I forgot to merge that branch. So, I've since merged the branch. It's up there. Go look for it. Any other announcements? No, they're shaking their heads silently.
Josh: We're good. Yeah.
Ben: Founder Quest, always free.
Starr: Oh, that's a good one.
Josh: This is our gift to you.
Starr: Yeah. Stay tuned for our Patreon.
This week Ben and Starr talk about Honeybadger's efforts using marketplaces to get new business and whether it's worth the development time needed to set them up. They also discuss Honeybadger's participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, creating a code of conduct that still allows for free swag, and tease out a special announcement for RailsConf 2020!
Links:
GitHub Student Developer Pack
Seth Goden
AWS Marketplace
Heroku Marketplace
GitHub Marketplace
Microconf
RailsConf
Honeybadger Blog
Full Transcription:
Ben: Speaking of Macs and stuff, software kind of being weird, my son, my younger son over this week has been playing with Raspberry Pi again.
Starr: Oh, that's cool.
Ben: Yeah, he wanted to do some funky USB stuff, and he's like, "I think I'll try it with the Pi." And so he's getting all into that, and then he's coming to me with questions like, "okay, how do I start up something on system boot?" And I'm like, "Oh, well let me introduce you to System D."
Starr: Oh my goodness, Ben. You've been waiting for this day, haven't you?
Ben: Yes, it's pretty awesome.
Starr: Oh, that's so great. That's so great. I'm so glad.
Starr: Did you buy your kayak yet? You said you were buying a kayak.
Ben: No, I didn't buy the kayak yet. I almost bought the kayak, but I decided against it because we had the expenses for working on the house and sending Addison off to college and so on. So yeah, hesitated. I'm going to wait. Maybe this summer. Maybe in the summer I'll get that kayak finally.
Starr: Yeah, that's the reason I was thinking about it. I was thinking about... I was like, "Oh, has Ben got his kayak yet?" And then I was like, "It's really cold to be kayaking." Do people kayak in this weather? I mean, probably, because it's Seattle and people are crazy, but-
Ben: Yeah. Well, just this week some dude crashed his plane in a lake nearby and a kayaker rescued him. So yes, kayakers apparently do paddle out this time of year.
Starr: Oh, well thank goodness for these kayakers who want to be freezing, I guess.
Ben: I know.
Starr: They saved that guy's bacon. All right. Today I think... Well, our astute listeners will know that Josh is not with us. He's had a bad cold and yeah, we just haven't been able to... He hasn't gotten well in time to make this happen. So we're having another one of our Honeybadger fireside chats, which is our branded marketing effort for when one of us is gone. And so it's just two of us kind of chatting, and-
Ben: It's like everything is better when it's a branded marketing effort. You know?
Starr: Exactly. Exactly. That little trademark, like that little TM sign. That's like the salt. The salt in your cooking, you know?
Ben: That's when you know you're getting a high-quality podcast.
Starr: Exactly. We looked up the Unicode character for that and everything.
Ben: Nice.
Starr: Today we're going to be talking about a number of things. They're all sort of loosely related. First we're going to be talking about GitHub Student Developer Pack, which is this sort of marketing effort that I don't really know about, and so I'm going to use this as a chance to sort of ask Ben lots of probing questions and figure out what's going on. And since that's kind of like a referral marketing-type effort, I don't really know what the official type name is for it. We're maybe going to talk about other things that we've done in the past. What is the GitHub Student Developer Pack, and why have we done that?
Ben: Yeah. So GitHub started this a while back where they offer a variety of products and services to students as part of a outreach thing. And we just recently started being involved in that, because I think it's a good idea to get students familiar with our product. It's the Microsoft strategy that they did way, way back in the day. Well, even Apple before them, right?
Starr: Oh yeah.
Ben: You get students using your product, and then as they grow up, they eventually buy your products. Right? I think Apple has been very successful in that in the education market. And then Microsoft came and did the same thing, and then Google did that too with Chromebooks now. Anywho, yeah, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is all about helping students get access to a variety of services and products to help them in their development. So GitHub's like, "You know what? We should make students better at developing stuff and give them tools to help them do so." And so you can go to their website and get all kinds of goodies if you happen to be a student.
Starr: I study the Blade. Does that count?
Ben: Hmm. Well, maybe, but only if you happen to have an email that will certify you as an actual student.
Starr: Okay. An email. Really?
Ben: Yeah, yeah. If you have a .edu.
Starr: Oh, an email address. Okay.
Ben: Yes, yes.
Starr: I'm sorry. I was like, so they think... Anybody who can use GitHub can forge an email. Like, come on.
Ben: No, they actually do some verification to make sure you're a legit student, but once you can verify that you are... And if you don't have the .edu kind of email address, if your school isn't cool enough for that, then you can upload your student ID, and presumably some human somewhere will look at that and say, "Oh, yep, this is an actual student," and then flip the bit on your account that says this person is a student.
Starr: Awesome. We've done various things like this in the past, and I think our thinking about these have changed a little bit. And this was maybe prompted by that Seth Goden course that you and Josh did. In the beginning, we were really looking for... I don't know. We were just kind of tracking these efforts very seriously and being like, "Oh, okay. How many people are signing up as a direct result of this versus like..." But then, yeah, at some point we were like, "Oh, this is just kind of like... These are students. These are seeds we're planting for years to come, and there's literally no way we can tell." There's no real direct way to track that, right? Is there? I mean-
Ben: Well, yeah. Like you said, we in the early days were really interested in being able to track all the conversions and having measurable results of all the efforts. And over time, we've gotten more comfortable with the idea of brand and marketing, and doing things that will pay off in the future. In this case, I think it's a bit of both, because we do want our brand out there. We do want developers to be exposed to us early in their careers, but also we can track it pretty well, because we are of course signing them up with identifiers saying, "Oh, this person came from GitHub Student." We know of the however many signups we have in a given week, how many of those are coming in through that offer. And over time, we'll be able to find out just how well that converts. Now of course in this case, the time horizon is a bit longer than our usual, because our particular offer for that pack is one year of free service. We'll have to wait a little bit to find out if they convert at all, but we'll see.
Starr: We'll see. Siri, remind me to check back on this in a year. So you mentioned tracking. I assume that there's some sort of development effort involved in setting this all up, because it seems like this wasn't just like going into Stripe and creating a coupon code, was it? Or was it more complex than that?
Ben: Yeah, it was a bit more complex than that. I mean, it did involve creating a coupon code in Stripe, so that was a good start. But we did have to build a custom little app that the student can come through to get access to the offer. What GitHub asks you to do as a partner in this scenario is to allow a user to come in. The developer comes to your site. They click a button that says, "I want to get this offer." And you ask them to log in via GitHub so you can find out who they are, and then you check with a GitHub private API whether this person is actually a student. And then the API tells you yes, no. If yes, then you allow them to come through and claim that offer. And if not, you say, "Yeah, I'm sorry. You can't have this offer," or whatever.
Ben: We had to build that little app. And when I say little app, I guess I should say micro app. In our case, it's just a couple of serverless functions that run on AWS Lambda.
Starr: Oh, nice.
Ben: Really, all it does is do a redirect to GitHub's 0Auth. It's very, very minimal, but it was a little bit of code.
Starr: Yeah, and that's great. I feel like if we're going to be attracting students, we really need to be using the trendy stuff like Lambda. I think that's a good call on that.
Ben: Totally. Yeah.
Starr: They would see us using just Rails for that and they'd be like, "Come on, man. What's that all about?"
Ben: Okay boomer. Yeah.
Starr: Yeah, yeah. I'm not a boomer though. I get to say that.
Ben: That's true. Neither am I. Generation X is totally the best generation ever, if we actually cared.
Starr: I don't even really think I'm Generation X. I'm that sort of in-between generation where I get to pick, so I picked millennial.
Ben: Cool, cool.
Starr: Because that means I'm younger, and I will die less soon.
Ben: We do have a coupon, and one thing that I'm still not sure I did the right way or... Right way. I mean, I'm not sure I did it the way that in the long-term I'll be happy with, because the offer that we give is students can have a free year of our small plan. We have a coupon that they can claim that puts them on our small plan, and it's free. But the thing that I'm not sure about whether I actually did it in a way that I'll be happy with in the long-term is they're on our normal small plan, and once that year is expired, then it'll act like they just had gone a year without paying us. The normal trial stuff isn't really in place, so I'm going to have to build something, I think in about, I don't know, 10 months or so when these guys come to you that does some smartness, like checking on their coupon or checking on their referral source, and then sends them a special onboarding kind of campaign.
Ben: Like, "Hey, we noticed you've been enjoying Honeybadger as a student for a year now. It's time to buy up. I hope you want to do that," or something. I don't know. It may have been better to put them on a different plan in Stripe, and then we could have had a different trial kind of thing. Because in Stripe, you can configure the trial period, and so our default trial period is like 15 days. We actually had to work around that if they had this particular coupon to not give them the trial expiring message that we usually give people. Maybe it would have been better if I actually would have created a different plan in Stripe, and it could have had a year-long trial, and then we could have had our normal kind of trial onboarding sequence happen. I don't know, but I have time to figure it out.
Starr: You know, that reminds me, is it okay if I go off on a little tangent?
Ben: Please.
Starr: You're talking about creating new plans. This is one thing that always struck me. I don't know if there's a better way to do it, but we have so many plans in our database. And dear listeners, I'll tell you about this, because if you go to our website and you look at our pricing page, you will see a nice ordered set of a couple plans you can choose from. But on the back end, this is what, our fourth or fifth revision of those plans? And we don't-
Ben: At least.
Starr: Yeah. And we tend to grandfather people in, so we've actually got several versions of each plan, and then we've got special one-off versions of each plan. If a customer comes to us and they're going to pay us a lot of money and they want a special deal, we're not going to say no, so Ben will go in and create another plan. And I'm not saying this is the wrong way to do things, but when it comes time to change a plan, it's kind of difficult. And I mean, if you're going to grandfather everybody in, I don't know any other way to do it other than to keep the old plan stuff around. But I don't know.
Ben: Yeah, it's become a bit of a operational burden, but it's not something I'm crying over in my milk. But yeah, because we do pricing experiments from time to time, and that's how we got those five or six or whatever versions. It's like, "Oh, let's create a new set of plans." The Stripe ID is kind of like small V2 unlimited tests.
Starr: Yeah, yeah. I remember a long time ago I had to go in, and we originally were looking up the plan by the plan name which wouldn't work, because we wanted to keep the same plan names but just change the options of the plan, like the different parameters.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah, I had to go in and make real a plan name. This is the plan name, but this is the real name that really defines the plan.
Ben: Right. Yeah. And that's actually why I hesitated to create a new plan for this offer instead of go with the coupon route. That was the main consideration, I think. But on the other side, I'm kind of concerned what is the return going to look like in 10 months when these students stop using Honeybadger. Right? Because they're effectively falling out of their trial, but it's not a trial because they've been out of the trial for a year now, because that trial was only 15 days. You see what I'm saying?
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: It could really mess with our numbers, so I'm trying to think through that and say, "Well, do I need to change something between now and then?"
Starr: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, ideally we wouldn't really count them in turn, because they're on a completely separate track, maybe.
Ben: Right, right. Yeah. Something to figure out. But we believe in just-in-time development here at Honeybadger, so I don't have to figure it out for quite a while yet.
Starr: Well, here's an option. Instead of writing that code that you were talking about that goes in and doesn't bill them for the past year, maybe we just do build them for the past year, and we threaten to send them to collections. I know that when I was a student in college, I didn't really understand how any of that worked, so we might actually get some of them to be able to pay up. Yeah, I mean, this is capitalism. I think we're way too honest about things.
Ben: Well, they're used to being in debt, right? I mean, they are students after all, so it wouldn't be a surprise to get another collections call.
Starr: That's true. That's true. I don't know. Let's see. We've got a couple other sort of efforts maybe in the works, maybe not. I've heard them talked about, but I don't think we've actually done them yet. And that is GitHub has a marketplace too, which is different from the student pack.
Ben: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: And also AWS Marketplace.
Ben: They do. Yeah. And we've been on the Heroku Marketplace forever, almost since day one.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: And that's been a good source of customers for us. And so we've looked at doing the AWS Marketplace and the GitHub Marketplace to add on, basically having our brand, our product be in front of people when they go shopping for stuff at these good places, right? And that's the idea. And the thing is, the reason we haven't done it yet is because every one of these marketplaces has a different way of interacting with your system and telling, "Here's a new user that wants to sign up, and here's how you build that user." Right? Each one has their own way of doing it and it's like, "Oh, I got to write yet another provisioning thing." Right?
Starr: Yeah. And they don't want to standardize, because they all want to own the space. They want everybody to use their standard, probably. Or actually, they don't want other people to exist.
Ben: Yeah. And they have their own opinions about how things should be. I mean, every developer does, right? They say, "Well, we'll do it this way, and you should follow that way." And that's great, except now we have to have three or four different ways to provision an account in our system.
Starr: Yeah, that's true. And that's true for a lot of sort of affiliate or partnership-type plays where... We've had talks with other companies and stuff. It's, "Oh, we should integrate our products. We can send customers to you, and it'll make it more useful for our customers if they can link their error data or whatever." And it's like, "Okay, that's great. We'll put a developer on that for the next three months," and we don't really have that developer. And also, a lot of times the deals aren't really that sweet. They're not really enticing enough for us to put a developer on it for months. Yeah. It's like, "Okay, so we're just going to be a name amongst all of our competitors in your list, and we're probably not going to get any real sign-ups." I don't know. I can be too pessimistic about things like that, and I own that.
Ben: I think it's situational in that for us, early on, we supported Heroku. GitHub Marketplace didn't exist yet. AWS Marketplace, I don't think it existed or if it did, it wasn't really relevant to our audience. Heroku really was the only option when we launched.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: And so we did launch early in our lifecycle with Heroku Marketplace, and that was a great way for us to get our early customers, because we were unknown and that's how we got some discovery. But as time has gone on, we've been at this for more than seven years now. The number of people coming to us through Heroku has just decreased over time. I mean, we still have plenty of customers that have our service as a Heroku add-on, but it's definitely been on the decline for years now. And I think part of that is we have enough brand out there aside from Heroku that people just come to us through word of mouth or through advertising or whatever. They're not discovering us so much through Heroku. If we were brand new, I think it would be more of a priority for us to get on every marketplace under the sun to get our name out there some more.
Starr: Heroku seems to me like it was sort of a special case though, because everybody was getting on Heroku at the time and everybody was using Heroku extensions. You know what this reminds me of?
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Remember how years ago, everybody was using Facebook apps? And I know you developed a few Facebook apps for your clients when you were a contractor.
Ben: I did.
Starr: Yeah, but everything was going to be Facebook apps.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: The Horoku add-ons kind of remind me of that. I mean, they're actually a bit more useful than Facebook's apps, I feel. It's actually kind of a good user experience for some things. But yeah, it just seemed like everybody sort of wanted to have this sort of thing where it's like you'd go to one place and you'd get your hosting, and then you just press some buttons in that control panel and everything is set up for you already.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: And that's kind of gone by the wayside a little bit, or maybe it's been replaced by... I don't know. I don't know. It seems like people are more into full-on dev ops these days, and if they're going to go to one place, it's going to be AWS and whatever.
Ben: Yep. Yeah. I don't think there's any right answer. For several months now, I talked about adding AWS Marketplace and GitHub Marketplace. And like you said, it's like, "Okay, that sounds interesting and could be useful to us, but we got to put a developer on that, and we just had other things to do." I guess if someone is desperate for us to be on the GitHub Marketplace so they can have their consolidated billing and they want to use Honeybadger there, yeah, reach out to us and let us know. But alternatively, we will be getting around to that eventually someday, because yeah, it's good to be out in various places. Why not?
Starr: Let me just pitch an idea to you, Ben.
Ben: Okay.
Starr: Okay. Honeybadger Marketplace.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Right? You come to us. You can purchase your AWS services through us. We'll get a very reasonable cut, and it will be great. We'll make lots of money.
Ben: Totally. Yeah, yeah. Have a friends at the Honeybadger program. And then we'll sell credit card processing, because that's where the real money is.
Starr: Oh, is it?
Ben: Oh yeah. You get that 2 percent of that 1 percent of that transaction, and man, you can just make bank. Yeah. Ask me how I know. I have a friend that's in that business. It's pretty awesome, actually.
Starr: Really? How do you get in the credit card processing business?
Ben: It's actually really easy, because the credit card-
Starr: That's kind of scary the way you said that. "Oh, it's easy."
Ben: Yeah, yeah. In fact, actually, I still get checks from when I was reselling credit card processing. I'm not getting big checks anymore, but
yeah.
Starr: Oh, okay. Okay. So you're talking about reselling, you're not talking about setting up a credit card processing company.
Ben: Right, right. Yeah, right, right. Being a reseller. Yeah.
Starr: Oh, that's great. Your friend does well for himself?
Ben: Oh, yeah. He's done very well for himself. He was in it in the early days. Back when the iPhone launched, basically, he built an app that you could use to run credit card transactions, and this is before Square.
Starr: Okay.
Ben: And he found quite a successful business by selling that app to people who are selling stuff at flea markets who needed a way to handle transactions on their mobile device. And he also set himself up as an affiliate for the credit card processing, so he got a cut of their cut of each transaction. Right. Yeah. Pretty sweet business. So yeah, we should totally do that.
Starr: All right. Yeah. Let's workshop that a bit. We'll do some improv sketches around it and see what happens.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're not going to do that. But we did recently start kind of an affiliate kind of thing, where we started having resellers. I guess reseller might be a bit more glamorous than this program actually is, but we do have a very down-low kind of referral system that we've been... I don't know. It's been, I don't know, four or five people, I think right now. It's early days, but it's been interesting to see people who get to make money off of us. Right? That's kind of cool.
Starr: It is. I think I remember at lunch at MicroConf last year, you were talking with some people from some company which I don't remember about that. Is this sort of like an outgrowth of that?
Ben: Yeah. Yeah, that was a interesting chat where they were talking about affiliate programs. We didn't actually end up going with a ready-made affiliate program, because I mean, we're developers. We get to build stuff, right? So we built our own. But also, we didn't want it to be something, at least at the outset, something that was really big and that could overwhelm us. So we started off really small and built our own little thing. Basically used sign-up links. We have some affiliate tracking code that lets us know when someone has come through one of our affiliates, and then we just remit a percentage of their monthly or annual billings back to that affiliate. It's pretty simple. It didn't take us too long to build that.
Ben: And so far, we've had one who's done well with it, who's really worked at promoting those links and figuring out what works. We've had a couple of others who have showed lukewarm interest, and then one who's like, "Yeah, I'll do that," and then it's been radio silence since then. It's an interesting experiment. It's still early, but we've had new customers coming in because of at least one affiliate, so it's been interesting.
Starr: Well, that's exciting. It's early days. I guess if you really want to get on the ground level of this, I don't know. Send Ben flowers or something.
Ben: Yeah, hit us up.
Starr: Do you prefer flowers, or cakes or cookies or-
Ben: I'm more of a chocolates kind of person.
Starr: You are?
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Wait a second. But our new code of conduct says no bribery, doesn't it?
Ben: That is true, but we can still accept gifts. We carved that out.
Starr: Oh, we can accept gifts? Okay. We're like senators. As long as there's no quid pro quo, it's okay.
Ben: Yeah. I wrote our code of conduct this week, and as I was writing it, I was using some examples from other people and their code of conduct. Because I mean, who wants to write something from scratch, right? And what I found out there, they touch on bribes, accepting and giving bribes, and how you shouldn't accept gifts from people that would influence your business decisions, like partnerships or vendors and that sort of thing, right? But as I was looking at this, ironically enough, considering our topic for today, I thought about the GitHub Marketplace work that I just did a few months ago, because as a thank you, GitHub sent us t-shirts. Right?
Starr: Oh yeah?
Ben: Yeah. So in the code of conduct, I made sure I did not say that you could not accept gifts, because I mean, it's a t-shirt, right?
Starr: It's a t-shirt. It's not-
Ben: You got to be able to accept a t-shirt, you know?
Starr: Yeah. I don't think you're going to sell us out for a t-shirt.
Ben: No. No. So yes, we can still accept those gifts.
Ben: If you ever think about doing that, then you just come to me, because I've got some t-shirts that will just blow away anything GitHub could give you. I promise.
Starr: Right.
Starr: I'll double their t-shirts. I'll double the amount of t-shirts you get. You wear a medium now? You're going to get an extra large.
Ben: Nice. I'll remember that.
Starr: Let's see. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about, about the marketing stuff before we sort of tease our RailsConf 2020 event?
Ben: Ooh. No, I think that pretty much covers it. I mean, we've done other random things in the past. We've tried all kinds of stuff, but the things that we're trying now, we'll see how they turn out.
Starr: Yeah. We'll keep everybody up to date. Yeah, we've got an exciting RailsConf 2020 event. It's going to be in Portland, right?
Ben: It is going to be in Portland.
Starr: And we're not going to mention what it is, because we're going to be those people.
Ben: It's going to be a surprise.
Starr: It's going to be a surprise. It's not going to be announced until it's announced.
Ben: But it's going to be awesome.
Starr: It's going to be announced. It's going to be a very Portland thing. If you live in Portland or have spent time in Portland, you'll hear it and you'll be like, "Yeah, that's a pretty Portland thing."
Ben: Right. Yeah. I mean, we had to do something special, because Portland is one of our hometowns. Being a hundred percent remote company, we don't have just one hometown. We have multiple ones. And yeah, we thought like, "Hey. Portland, RailsConf. Yeah, we got to do something awesome." If you are on the fence about whether you want to go to RailsConf, you should totally come because we're going to have something awesome.
Starr: Yeah. And I feel like this is kind of coming full circle too in this nice way, because the first RailsConf I went to with you all was in Portland, and we didn't have the money to buy tickets, so we just hung out in the hallway. And so it's nice to go and throw a little event for people.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. It'll be great.
Starr: That's going to be nice. It's like, "See how far we've come?"
Ben: Honeybadger is growing up.
Starr: Yeah. Let's see. Other announcements. We are always looking for developers who are interested in writing for us. And for more information on that, check out our blog. In the sort of header, there should be a link. I said there was a link last week, and I really thought I put a link there, but I guess I didn't deploy it or something, because the link isn't there. Maybe somebody took it away to gaslight me. But yeah, it'll be there. And yeah, if you like this show, please go onto your favorite podcast place and review it. And if you want to say who your favorite Honeybadger person is, that's all right. We're not going to stop you. Nobody's going to be mad at you if we lose the office pool. All right. I guess that's it. Anything you want to add, Ben?
Ben: Always a pleasure, Starr.
On this week's episode of FounderQuest Josh, Ben, and Starr talk about their Soc 2 and GDPR compliance efforts. They go over the different strategies to handle compliance, the potential costs involved, and discuss if it's worth the time and money.
When embarking on their compliance research, the guys also stumbled across some surprising claims companies are using to stretch the truth on actually being compliant. Learn a few of the 50 shades of compliance* that they found.
Links:
Kolide
Soc 2
GDPR
Elasticsearch
Redis
Slack
BitDefender
Saul Goodman
Arthur Andersen
Honeybadger - Write For Us
Full Transcript:
Starr: Did y'all go trick or treating?
Josh: Yeah, we did. We went to a neighborhood with some friends of ours and it was a good suburban trick or treating neighborhood. Most of the houses were all participating. The kids had a blast.
Starr: Oh, great.
Josh: We were a family of bats.
Starr: Oh, cool.
Josh: Yeah, I wasn't the Batman. I was just ...
Starr: You were just a bat.
Josh: Just a bat.
Starr: That's okay. There's nothing wrong with just a bat.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah, we did the neighborhood thing too. This was Ida's first year of really understanding what was going on and not being just terrified of strangers. So she was just all over this. She was like, "We're going to go get more candy. Mom and dad, you stay right here. You leave me alone and let me do this myself. I'm going to go knock on their door and say trick or treat. She's not even four yet, so it was super cute.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: Yeah. I can't even imagine when she gets to be like 13, she's just going to be like, "You stand over here dad, you park a mile away from school and I'll walk."
Josh: Yeah, she's going to be choosing colleges across the country or something or ...
Starr: Yeah, she likes us nearby, but she just wanted to do it herself. She's very big on that.
Josh: It makes sense. Yeah, Tatum was doing ... she was going up to doors by herself too. I'm pretty sure I saw her hit houses multiple times. Like I should go up, come back to the street and then I think I saw her go back up at the same house.
Starr: That's so funny.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. I ate so much candy last night that this morning I literally feel like hung over or something. My brain isn't working, I'm just exhausted. That's how you know you're getting old, I guess.
Josh: Yeah, we did the same thing.
Starr: Yeah. Today, we're going to be discussing ... what are we going to be discussing? We're going to be compliance GDPR, SOC 2, all those big things.
Ben: Yeah. All that fun stuff.
Starr: Where should we get started on? Is anybody want to give us sort of an intro? This isn't really my forte.
Ben: In talking about compliance, we're a small company, and I think a lot of times people in our position, entrepreneurs in our position ignore the whole compliance issue because they're just too small to handle that, and like, "Oh, I don't have a compliance department because it's just me." I think we spent most of our existence in the same boat, like, we'll just ignore that and we'll just whistle and move along our way, but really came to a head with GDPR because we had customers who are international and who themselves had to deal with it. So, we had to deal with it because they had to deal with it. So I think that's the reason why we really felt like we had to get up to speed on what all this compliance stuff means and couldn't just ignore it, put our head in the sand.
Starr: What do we mean when we say compliance? What are we talking about?
Ben: Yeah, really, all the compliance regimes are about, generally speaking, like security. A good security practice is making sure that you are operating your business in a way that protects the data, which you're entrusted. GDPR was very much about personal data and making sure that companies treat that responsibly, that is not going out to everybody and their brother, that you're not doing things with it, that your customers wouldn't agree with you doing. For them, it was about, you want to be sure that you're not sharing this information willingly and unwillingly. Either through marketing partnerships or through breaches, that would be basically a breach of trust with your customer, or your employee, like they have a special case for HR data.
Ben: If you're employed by a company, they have your social security number and they might have other information about you and your address, your, maybe some health insurance information, whatever. You don't necessarily want that information going out to everybody and their brother. Basically, GDPR came about, and compliance, more generally, is all about doing what you're supposed to do, being ethical with the data that you have in your possession.
Starr: A lot of the companies are sort of ... If you're a company in the European Union or you're selling to people in the EU, you are sort of legally required to follow a GDPR, this sort of list of rules. Right?
Ben: Right. If you're a company in the EU and you have to comply with this regulation, you also need to make sure that your suppliers comply with this regulation. That's where it involves us because we're not in the EU, but we have customers there.
Starr: Yeah. The other sort of compliance regimes, what is it? SOC 2. I don't know, there's, I think HIPAA is sort of in that same boat. All these are, either there's a law somewhere that says that certain people have to follow these or big companies have in their policy that they only do business with people who follow these. They're like viral, right? A lot of these, because if a big company only does business with a company that follows, say SOC 2, that means like they have to get certifications from all the vendors they use. Then, those vendors have to get certifications for all the vendors they use, saying that they are compliant to some degree or whatever. Is that right?
Ben: Yeah. This avoids the scenario where you can be ignorant of what's happening with the data once it leaves your control. If I'm processing data for my customers and I hand that data off to an email vendor or whatever, I can't just say, "Oh well, I don't know what they're doing with it, but I'm fine." You have to be able to say, "Oh no, my email vendor is also behaving responsibly with this data that I'm giving them." Yeah.
Josh: Nice.
Ben: Yeah, so that's how we got introduced to it.
Josh: You're saying as a developer then, I can't use a public S3 bucket as my database? Would that be a bad idea?
Ben: I'd recommend against doing that.
Josh: Okay.
Starr: Well, you can, but you have to disclose it.
Josh: Oh, all right. Okay. That's where the compliance comes in.
Ben: Yeah, and more recently, I think they've done a pretty good job of locking down the S3 thing. AWS has added more controls around making it harder to actually accidentally expose your S3 Bucket, but lately in the past few months, the new thing has been open Elasticsearch instances where they're just hanging out on the internet, no restrictions, no password required. Just hop on in there and query all the data you want.
Starr: It's interesting.
Ben: There've been some relatively big breaches on that.
Starr: Oh really?
Josh: Is that from an older version or is it newer versions? Really?
Ben: Yeah. It's just because people stand up in such instances and ...
Josh: You'd think they would have learned and learned something from Redis. Way back when Redis had the same problem, basically just like unprotected Redis instances.
Ben: Yup. Yeah. That's why I love how Amazon does the VPC thing. And they have this option for Elasticsearch, specifically their service that allows you to restrict access to it, to your VPC. It's a private network. No one's getting into there. There is no public IP address that is listening to you. That makes it a lot easier to handle these kinds of security issues. After GDPR, we dealt with that and it wasn't too painful, actually. I think for a long time. We were like, "Oh, it's going to be so horrible."
Starr: That was mostly me saying that I think.
Ben: Well, it really helped to get some good third party help. We had some consultants help us. We had a good legal team help us. There's a company here in Seattle that specializes in compliance issues and they gave us some great advice and walked us through the process. Basically, what it came down to is like, we were already doing good practices for security, but we had to formalize it a bit. We had to make sure that our terms of service had the right verbiage in there and that we were disclosing who our vendors were. Of course, we had to go through that whole chain of trust thing too, where you had to go to our vendors and get their GDPR attestations. We had to come up with an information security policy, which that legal team helped us write, which gives us basically a framework for how we run things.
Ben: Things like, well, we have our hard drives encrypted or we have SSH access to our servers rather than ... it's wide open, things like that. But that information security policy like documents, then it says, yes, these are the things that we do and we certify that basically.
Starr: It sounds like there's sort of two aspects to this, right? There was the technical requirements and then there are these sort of a documentation and paperwork requirements. Is that fair?
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: I know we're already doing a lot of those sort of technical stuff, but if you were doing a new app, what would be the main technical requirements that you be worried about or not worried about? You would be sort of paying attention to when it comes to making sure that your app is GDPR compliant?
Ben: Yeah. There's the basic security stuff like not having that public S3 Bucket or not having that public Elasticsearch server. Making sure your data is under control and making sure there's access controls around that, like SSH keys and things like that. Not everyone's using the same root login, for example. In the, in the specific case of GDPR, there's also data retention rules that you want to pay attention to. You need to specify like how long we hang onto data and what data we hang onto. If you're building an app and you know you're going to be tracking social security numbers for example, well, you know there's going to be some extra scrutiny around that, like I need to encrypt that data somehow as opposed to just storing it plain text.
Ben: Whereas, I could just order name, maybe plain text. And then also like deleted data. How long do we hang onto that? And then, in the case of GDPR, we can have request for data, right? Someone can say, give me all the data that you have on me. So you have to be able to track that data that you have. Basically, when you're building your app, you need to say, well, what data am I taking in? What types of data is it? And then how do I know what I have and for how long I have it?
Starr: One interesting thing about GDPR, it also has this sort of aspect of consent to it where you have to get people's consent in order to track certain data about them. That poses front end challenges too because you have to figure out a way to get people to opt in. How do we go about doing that? I think I remember you doing a lot of stuff on that, Josh.
Josh: Yeah. Do Not Track was something, I guess, I don't know if it plays into the like GDPR specifically, but it's a internet standard that basically it's a browser feature that sets a header if you enable this, like it says. It's basically like if you go on your browser settings and say, "I don't want people to track me," what that does is it sends a header to each website that you visit. If that website happens to comply with Do Not Track, then they will disable any Google analytics or tracking code that they use. At least they're supposed to.
Starr: Okay. But with the GDPR, how do we inform people of this? Did we just like change our terms of service or?
Ben: We did change our terms of service to include information about more details about what we collected. Fortunately, we're not like a marketing company. We don't track a bunch of personal info and then send it out to a bunch of people, but we basically had to write in a text that we, "Yes, we do not do that sort of thing." Then, we're not collecting, at least as a first party, we're not collecting from our customers very sensitive data, like HR data or social security numbers and stuff like that. So we made that clear. We didn't really have a lot to do in that regard because we're not redistributing data for marketing purposes or really much at all, besides our limited list of vendors that handle things like email and data storage, things like that.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, and I think we've been trying to go the other direction of intentionally not using services that would require us to get extra permission or extra do extra disclosure. Even if you have the option when you're building an app in the first place, I think it's better to opt for using more ... I guess in the way that you store, if you're handling user data, just like if you can build your app to just handle as little user data as possible, opt for the minimum amount that you need, that seems to be like a good way to set yourself up for being more compliant, maybe.
Starr: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It seems like this really kind of encourages vendor lock in a bit because once you get permission to send data to one vendor, it's like, Oh, I would change, but now we've got to get everybody to opt in to this other vendor.
Ben: Yeah. There are two ways that I've seen people handling that because you do, as part of the GDPR, you can provide this data processing addendum to your terms of service, a DPA, that specifies exactly what kind of data you handle and what do you do with it and who do you send it to. In there, we list out people that we sent it to like Intercom, AWS, for example, Google analytics. Every time you add a vendor, you've got to go and update that agreement, right? And you have people, this is a signed agreement and so you've got, however many customers who have signed it. Now you have to go back to those customers and say, "Oh, here's a new vendor that we've added, so we're sending data to.
Ben: I've seen two ways that people have handled that. Our vendors have handled that sort of thing for us. They either will send an updated list like, "Oh, we are amending the addendum and here's our new list of vendors to whom we're sending data." Or, I think MailChimp does it this way. They send out an email saying, "We've updated our list, please come back to our website to check out the new list." Like we used to do in the olden days with our terms of service have been updated, and a lot of companies still do that, and you never click on the link. But yeah, you do have to have some way of tracking who has signed the agreement so that you can then send them the updates when the list of vendors changes. Yeah, it's kind of annoying, but ...
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Weren't the terms of service, emails a compliant, due to some regulation to ... I just remember I didn't used to get any of them, and then all of a sudden, I started getting everyone I ever used in the world started sending me, like "we updated our terms of service." I assumed it must have been some legislation that was passed.
Ben: Yeah, I vaguely remember that, but I can't remember details, but I had that same experience.
Josh: I want to say it was part of GDPR, but it might have been further back.
Ben: Yeah. That's been put to bed pretty much. We're just doing the usual stuff that we have to do. We expire data as we agreed to, and we keep that vendor list updated and stuff like that. But what's come up a little more recently for us is SOC 2. We've had more and more customers contacting us asking for our SOC 2 report and I really didn't know what that was about, so I had to do a lot of research into what that means. It's been an interesting experience. I think we're about to embark on an endeavor to come into compliance with that as well.
Starr: What does it mean? What is a SOC 2 report?
Ben: A SOC 2 report is basically an attestation that you follow certain best practices in handling ... there's five different areas that you can cover. There's security, availability, privacy, confidentiality and processing integrity. Each of these five areas have criteria that say, are you following best practices in this area? For example, like in a security, there might be a requirement for you need to know when there are attacks on your servers, you need intrusion detection. You need to know if any files have been changed, or you might require your employees to use two factor authentication whenever handling customer data. Is like a laundry list of things that you need to be pay attention to you in each of these areas.
Ben: A SOC 2 report is a report that says, "Yep, we're doing X, Y, and Z to cover these particular concerns." And then, an external auditor comes in and looks at the systems that you've implemented to counteract these risks and says, "Yep this company is doing those things." That's what that report is. There's actually two types. There's a type one report and a type two report. A type one is just like the initial. The accountant comes in or the auditing firm comes in and says, "Yeah, these are the things that they say they're doing and I can see they're doing them and we feel that these things that they're doing are sufficient to control the risks." Then, a type two report is actually over time.
Ben: They'll come back in a year or six months or whatever and say, "Having evaluated this company and these controls, these controls are in place and they've been monitoring them for this amount of time and we feel that this monitoring assures that they are following what they said they were going to follow." It's like, there's your attestation. It's an involved process, not just because of the things you have to have in place, but also because then you have to monitor and show that you're monitoring, and then have this audit where you have these third parties coming in and checking your work basically.
Josh: Right. If I just run my app in, say a data center that is SOC 2 compliant ... They have a certification, I can basically just ... that means I'm SOC two compliant. Right? I can just ...
Ben: Maybe, partially. Yeah, I think some people might say, "Oh look, I'm SOC 2 compliant. because I use Google Cloud. And they are so I am."
Josh: I can just put that on my security page.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: It sounds like y'all are bitter about something.
Ben: Yeah. Let's put that on our security page. Let's say that we're compliant because AWS is compliant. Yes. You can say we do use AWS and yes, they are obviously SOC 2 compliant. Our data center is covered. That part of the compliance, boom, you're done. Right? You could use AWS in a very insecure way, right? You could have that Elasticsearch instance running in AWS that's wide open to the public. And so, that's obviously insecure. Yeah, it's not just add water kind of thing.
Josh: Well, I know, but we can say we are compliant asterisk right there. That'll solve the problem, right?
Ben: Boom, problem solved. Yeah, you saved me months of work. Thanks. I'll go add that to our website right now. We are compliant, asterisk.
Josh: Nice. It's what I do.
Josh: Yeah. We've learned in researching this that some people do ... that is like their version of compliance. It's interesting because the whole compliance thing seems to be very hand-wavy to like no one really knows exactly what it is, especially at the smaller level. Maybe the large companies who have to be like ... they have government oversight ensuring that they are compliant and they have lots and lots of money to pay compliance departments and outside auditors to come in and make sure that they're checking all these boxes for everyone else. You might check some of the boxes and then just hope for the best.
Starr: Wait, so are we doing things in the hand-wavy way or are we doing things in the correct ethical way?
Josh: I think we're trying to do things in the ethical way, but we're realizing why everyone else seems to not.
Ben: Yeah. What we've done so far, we have had requests for a SOC 2 report, and we don't have one because we haven't gone through that full process yet. But the way that I've responded to that kind of request has been to say, we're following the principles, security best practices and these are the things that we do and here's our information security policy and here's the things that we've implemented. I think that's the most upfront and straightforward way that we can be, to say, "No, we don't have that report, but these are the things that we're doing that goes along with the desire that you would have to have someone had this report."
Ben: I think that's fair. I think it's fair to say, yeah, we follow the principles outlined in such and such security framework, but we don't have an auditor to check that off yet.
Starr: That's reasonable.
Ben: That's the approach that we take so far.
Starr: That's not like thing, we're SOC 2 compliant asterisk though.
Josh: Yeah, right. Yeah. The difference is that you're not advertising it as a core part of your benefits, yeah, your platform.
Starr: Yeah. A lot of the marketers in startup land, feel like they can say anything and it doesn't matter.
Ben: Yeah. I think you got to be careful when it comes to this kind of stuff because that can get you in some pretty hot water. There's also like there's third path, which we haven't talked about yet, which is, and we've had this happen to us at Honeybadger, where one of our customers comes to us, and instead of asking for a SOC 2 report or instead of just like, "Oh, tell us what you do," they come at us with a third party vendor and they have this like security questionnaire. You might think, oh, a questionnaire, no big deal. But it's like 40 pages of questions, and each of those pages has like 40 questions on them. So, you're talking about like days worth of work to fill this out. But basically, it's ...
Starr: For like a $40 a month account.
Ben: Exactly. Basically, these questionnaires are like, they have all of these same security and privacy criteria as these compliance frameworks have, and then they just ask you specifically, yes, no, are you doing this? And if not, why not? Right? There's like a gazillion questions to go through. That's one option. You could also say, "Well, we're not compliant, but we'll fill out this survey for you or this questionnaire." That's one of the benefits I think from going through the whole compliance work is that you can say, oh, here's our report. Yeah, and you just save yourself three days of work of filling out this questionnaire, right? It's this commonly agreed to like, oh, if you have a support then I know you're doing all these things that I care about from a security perspective.
Josh: Makes sense.
Starr: I really wonder what would happen if you took that questionnaire and just filled it out in the most negative way possible. It's like, no, we don't do that security thing. Yes, we give your data to everybody. We don't have passwords, and then just see what happens. Do they just want to report somewhere?
Ben: That is the interesting part about the whole compliance ...
Josh: Does anyone read it is what you're asking?
Ben: Yeah. It really is about, here are these risks that we care about like data loss or data breach or whatever. And then what are the controls that you have in place to handle those things. You can say, "We don't do anything. We have all of our stuff out there, it's wide open, blah, blah, blah." As long as you sign your name to what you actually do, you're done. Right now, a customer might say, well that's not good enough for me. I'm going to go someplace else. But yeah, you can totally answer those questionnaires with like all "No" if that's the case for you.
Starr: Well, it might be worth a shot. I'm just saying if you're going to fill it out anyway.
Josh: Yeah, it's cheaper because you can easily outsource answering those questions because ...
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: We did have one example of a customer who came to us and wanted a custom agreement, and they're paying us enough money to make us consider that. They came to us with this list of requirements and basically, it was the SOC 2 kind of stuff. And I said, "Okay, well, so we don't do all the things yet that you might ask for in these five different areas of SOC 2, and what we're working on that." So, I couldn't agree to all the things they had listed. They had this appendix to the agreement, is multiple pages long, and here's all the things that you need to do. And I couldn't say yes to some of those things right off the bat.
Ben: Some things take some time to actually implement. So I said, well, we don't have those things in place. This is what we do have in place. I said, so we can't agree to all these things in this appendix. So they came back and said, "Oh, all right, well, strike that and we'll come up with other ways to control for those risks." On their end, they had to make some control statements on their own saying, "Well, we have this vendor who doesn't certify that they do X, Y, and Z, but we have these other controls in place to handle that, to mitigate that risk.
Starr: That's really interesting because a lot of times I always assumed that things are non-negotiable, and it's just like, well, that's it. Sorry, see you later. The world usually isn't like that, especially if you're to the level where people are emailing you forms to fill out personally, and they're going to have lawyers look over them like. There's often room for a little back and forth.
Ben: Sure.
Josh: Yeah, I didn't think of that either. It sounds like this is a lot of this is really just about shifting risk around.
Ben: It really is. Yeah.
Josh: By default, you want to give as much risk as you can to your vendors. If maybe some of them push back, they catch the risk and toss it back over the wall in some cases if they're smart.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: But it's been good. It's been a good experience for us to start to go through this process. I've been researching this for a while now and I've started doing some things. For example, and part of the compliance stuff is that you have to monitor. It's fine for you to say, "Yes, we're secure," but okay, how can you assure that you're secure? One of the ways that is baked into these frameworks is monitoring. They might say, "Okay, you need to encrypt your data." Okay, so that's a requirement. Now, you say that you're encrypting your data. How do we know you're encrypting your data? What are the monitoring tools that you have in place that say you're encrypting your data? I started looking at those monitoring tools and we started using them some in the past few months.
Ben: One for example that I really think is really cool is Kolide. K-O-L-I-D-E.
Starr: I like it too.
Ben: Yeah, it's really slick because it's built into Slack. What you do is you sign up with Kolide and you install this agent on your Mac or on the Linux box, your Windows box, and it reports back to them a variety of security checks. One of them being, is your hard drive encrypted? Because they can look at the OS level settings and they can see where that's the case. So, it sends that back to Kolide, and if not, if that's a problem in your particular environment with one of your machines, it then sends a message to Slack saying, "Oh, Ben's computer doesn't have this hard drive encryption turned on. You need to fix that." That's one of the tools that we're using to help with this monitoring aspect.
Ben: The thing I love about that is it's actually useful. Sometimes you can say, "Oh, this compliance stuff is just a bunch of lawyers and account and stuff. But that's actually helpful, to say, "Oh, I didn't know I had one of my teammates using an unencrypted hard drive. We should fix that." I think that's a good thing.
Josh: A lot of the checks that it does are pretty granular. The hard drive is obviously like a big one. But there's a lot of smaller OS settings and best practices related to your specific operating system that you might not know all of them and they will tell you.
Ben: Yeah. Another thing that we started using recently, it was a BitDefender, it's antivirus. I've always been of the opinion, like I run a Mac. Give me a break. I don't run into viruses on my Mac, but it's one of these things like you have to have if you want to check that box on the compliance things. So, we started using that. That's really cool because again, it has the same ... it's monitoring a whole team's worth of stuff, and it's like, "Oh, Josh's virus definitions are out of date." It's like, oh, Josh, can you go update that? It's just a confidence builder.
Josh: Yeah, and before you had to email me to remind me to update my virus definitions.
Ben: Well, more likely, like I didn't even think about it and so nothing happened.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, so having those tools in place, that makes it a lot easier. I appreciate that.
Josh: Pretty soon we'll be having weekly meetings with printouts of our a BitDefender and Kolide results for the week. We can get together and share results.
Starr: Can we have some TPS reports?
Josh: Ooh, yeah. To cut down on the meetings, we can probably like create some forms to fill out just so we can fill out the forms and pass them into to Ben, central management.
Starr: There we go. We'll get Ben one of those like giant rubber stamps that says like "denied" on it, so send it back.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Well, that was a whirlwind tour. Is there anything else you'd like to add about compliance before we head out into the sunset?
Ben: Well, one thing we haven't talked about yet is cost and I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in hearing about that.
Starr: Yeah, let's do that.
Ben: It can be costly. Like our GDPR compliance cost us a couple thousand dollars. Legal was most of that cost. SOC 2 is going to be at least as much, probably not as much in legal but in time, because there are a lot of systems you have to put in place. All that monitoring, it takes time to set that up and to keep on top of it, like you have to ... For a SOC 2 type two report, you have to be able to show evidence that hey, yes, we've been monitoring and these are the systems we have in place to show that we're monitoring.
Josh: Yeah. Even with GDPR too, like time was a big factor. I remember you spent a lot of time on GDPR. So, if we factored that in, it was probably a lot more than that even.
Ben: Yeah. Now, the good news for small startups like us is that SOC 2 is only will only take you a few months versus a year or more with a larger organization. But it's still like a couple of months really. Then there's the whole question of the actual audit. Because SOC 2 is, is done ... it's a financial based compliance regime so it's done by CPA firms, accounting firms. The audits can actually only be performed by licensed CPAs. You're paying these accounting firms to do that audit for you. Tens of thousands of dollars is not an unreasonable amount based on my research to expect to pay for one of these audits.
Starr: Yeah. Every year.
Ben: Yeah. That's kind of hard to swallow for a small startup.
Josh: Every year is a big one.
Ben: Yeah. I'm still researching that and hoping maybe I'll find the fly by night and bargain basement CPA that will do it for cheaper. But yeah, I'll keep you posted on that.
Josh: Do we want a bargain basement CPA though? I don't know. It's like we need the Saul Goodman of CPAs.
Starr: I hear a lot of people from Arthur Andersen are still looking for work.
Ben: Finally, I think one thing to mention is that there are a lot of consultants out there who are happy to help you for really obscene amounts of money. I've talked with a number of them and I've found a local person actually here in Seattle who is not going to charge us an obscene amount of money, but will help us get started and do a gap analysis to find out, what are we doing today versus what we need to get to before we could do an audit. You had to, maybe look under some rocks to find those people that can help you for reasonable amounts of money, but they're out there.
Josh: Ben, you just missed the golden our opportunity to bootstrap your SOC 2 consulting business.
Ben: Yeah. Ask me again in a year, maybe-
Josh: There are consultants who will charge obscene amounts of money. By the way, I'm one of them.
Starr: Ben's consultants only charge a slightly obscene amount of money.
Josh: Right.
Ben: It's risqué.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: That's it. Well, you have to check back with me in a few months to see how we're doing, but ...
Starr: We can do a followup episode, that'll be great. All your hair will be gray. You'll just have a 10,000 foot stare in your eyes.
Ben: My pockets will be empty.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: All right. Well, before we get going, I wanted to mention that we are still looking for writers for Honeybadger blog. We've had a good response to our initial call, but we're like continually bringing in writers. So, go check out our posting on that at honeybadger.io/blog. I don't remember the URL. Just go to the blog and there's a link in the header. Yeah, I don't know why I was tell you the URL.
Ben: That's the first test. Can you actually find our post?
Starr: Yeah, that's a good first test. There's instruction there for how to email me, and I'm super nice. Yeah, and if you liked this podcast, go to wherever you review things and review it please. And thanks. Oh man, I'm only like 10 credit hours away from my certificate and professional broadcasting.
Ben: Another hour down, boom.
Starr: All right. There we go. Well, I'll see you all next week, guys.
This week on FounderQuest the guys weigh in on a recent debate sparked by Jason Fried at Basecamp around the value of backlogs. In short, Fried proports that backlogs cause unnecessary stress and that if an idea will be forgotten about if it isn’t written down, then it probably isn’t important in the first place.
Honeybadger does have a pretty significant backlog and some on the team find it more useful than others. Each of the guys discusses how they deal with the backlog, whether they ignore it, stress out about it, embrace it as a useful part of the business, or actively plot to burn it down and rebuild Honeybadger V2 from the ashes.
Links:
Justin Jackson
Intercom
Help Scout
Trello
Clubhouse
Jira
GitHub
Jason Fried
Local Editor
VS Code
Sublime
Full Transcript:
Starr: So how was your trip, Ben?
Ben: My trip was good. Yeah. I went down to Mobile, visited my parents for a few days, and I actually went over to Louisiana as well and saw my brother and sister. So, good time. Got a lot of reading in. It's a kind of a long trip and so I got some books done. You know Kindle, makes everything wonderful.
Ben: So yeah. Had a good relaxing few days. Nice little vacation.
Starr: Good. Did you eat some crawfish?
Ben: No, but I did have some fried catfish.
Starr: Okay. That counts.
Ben: Yeah, that counts.
Josh: I love fried catfish.
Starr: Yeah. It's the only way to eat catfish.
Ben: It's been a long time since I had some.
Josh: That is true.
Josh: Do people eat catfish any other way?
Ben: Oh, of course.
Starr: Really?
Ben: It's kind of like Forrest Gump. Boiled shrimp, fried shrimp.
Josh: Oh, yeah, yeah. Boiled catfish, though. I don't know. I think I'll stick with fried.
Ben: Yeah. It's the best way. For sure.
Starr: Yeah. So today we're going to be talking about backlogs. We're kind of late to the party. This was on Twitter a long time ago, and then we all went on vacation.
Josh: A long time ago.
Starr: And then I think we're trying to hit the sort of rebound cycle where everything old becomes new again, and people are sort of into vintage tweets. So yeah. So we're going to talk about this. So could somebody explain to me this whole thing about backlogs and why everybody was talking about it?
Ben: Yeah, I think there was... Well the issue of backlogs is when you have a whole bunch of stuff that you've thought about doing at some point. And so you kind of log it, right? We use get GitHub for that. But you can use whatever like Trello or Clubhouse or something. Basically, any idea that you have, people like to throw those in a big bucket and say, yeah, we'll get to that someday. Right? And so you create this big backlog of work that you want to do, or that you think at some point was worth doing. And the conversation on Twitter was, there was some anxiety about this issue, oh I've got this big backlog and I feel like, oh, I've got all this work to do and I'll never get it all done. And woe is me kind of thing.
Ben: And then someone said, "Oh I'll start a service, I will charge you $10,000 and I'll come in and just delete your backlog, and you'll feel so much better." So we've got a request from Justin. He said, "Yeah, the FounderQuest guys should definitely talk about this." Because opinions, and of course we have opinion. So here we are.
Josh: So remind me, did we hire that guy to come in?
Ben: No. And because my opinion is I like backlogs. We can talk about that.
Starr: Well, can I read the quote? There's a quote and it's sweet, and it's from Jason Fried, who seems like a decent guy. I don't know, I'm not going to go into a big tangent about hero worship and the sort of small bootstrap, whatever. But yeah. So he says, "We don't believe in backlogs. Backlogs and make you feel guilty." So I don't like feeling guilty.
Ben: I would say backlogs give you the opportunity to choose to feel guilty. They don't make you feel guilty. Right? But maybe that's splitting semantic care.
Starr: I like it, it's a very stoic quote from you.
Josh: That's what I was going to say. Yeah. It's like I'm-
Josh: Everything is in your perception, right Ben?
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: Well, I mean, yeah, a backlog can't make me feel a certain way. I'm the owner of my emotions.
Ben: Exactly.
Starr: Right? I say that so much. That's my little mantra throughout the day. It's like I'm the owner of my emotions.
Josh: Yeah, say it through my tears.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: I could see how you might want to say that pretty frequently when you have a three year old in the house.
Starr: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well she is... Ah, I don't know. Maybe I'm the owner of my emotions, but I feel like she's definitely subletting them, to a certain degree. So.
Ben: We could start a new acronym. OME. Owner of My Emotions.
Starr: Oh yeah. And have little yellow wristbands that we sew on.
Ben: There you go.
Starr: Yeah.
Starr: Great idea.
Starr: So how big is our backlog? We've got...
Ben: We've got a couple hundred things in there.
Starr: A couple hundred things? And where does this come from?
Ben: Oh, a lot of them are feature requests. So we'll get someone say, "Oh, it'd be nice if..." Fill in the blank. And so we'll say, "Oh, that's a good idea. We'll think about that." And so we toss it into GitHub, and basically go on our way. We don't really jump on most feature requests. We just kind of file them away and keep them and let them percolate. And if it bubbles up, if a lot of people start wanting that or some day we feel like, hey that's interesting, let's think about that some more, then we'll come back to that. So, that's a good chunk of our backlog. But also we have things like internal, I guess, feature requests, like, oh, it'd be great if, from our point of view, if we did X, Y, or Z. So one that's that we've had for about a year now is dark mode. Right? When iOS 13 was first announced and they talked about dark mode, I was like, "Oh, it'd be really cool if we had dark mode." And Safari was going to support it and it showed up in a technology preview. And so I filed an issue in GitHub saying, Hey, let's look at implementing dark mode. And then we did basically nothing on it for 10 months, but that's-
Starr: Are we going to do that now? I thought I saw Kevin looking at that or something.
Josh: He's working on it right now.
Starr: Oh cool.
Ben: So, but over those 10 months, people would post blog posts about, "Here's how I did dark mode support, and detected Safari in dark mode" and blah blah blah. And so I would add those as comments to the issue. Right? And so kind of paving the way for it to get done, should we ever decide to get around and doing it. And then, Kevin's one day like, "Oh, it'd be kind of nice if we had dark mode." And I'm like "Well, here's the issue. Take it." And that's the idea.
Starr: Yeah. That's kind of handy. It's like, what's the difference between a backlog and then sort of a crude customer research?
Josh: I would say that our approach to backlogs is not... I don't know if we take the standard approach either because the other place you see a backlog is in the agile tracker, Kanban style thing where you have your backlog doing and done type set up, and you basically pull stuff off the backlog when you're done working on what you're... When you finished something, you pull something off the backlog, basically, and it's like a stack. But we don't do that. We don't actually look at our backlog very often which might be why we can tolerate it like we can.
Ben: Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of people might look at that, a strict definition of the backlog is something that is going to be done next, after you're done doing whatever you're doing now. And yeah, like you said, we don't do that. We just... I like it because we keep it around as if you're kind of bored one day and you're looking for something to do, you can try troll through the backlog and find something interesting.
Josh: It's like an idea list or something.
Ben: Well I think one thing that's been really helpful about it is, like I said, we file stuff. If someone requests something and we file it away, and then someone else does and then someone else does, well we track that, right? We go back to that same issue and we link to that new person that's asking for it. And then when you see something come up four or five times, hey, there's something here. Right? And then the other thing that's nice about that is actually if you do that, then you know exactly who to go back to you and say, "Hey, we've done it." We've had one time, I think, where we went back, someone had requested something three years before and we finally got around to doing that thing, and so we contacted him. He's like, "Hey, great, thanks for letting me know".
Starr: Oh yeah, I've done that before. And it always feels really good. It's like, "Hey, I noticed that you suggested this thing 18 months ago. Well here you go." They're always like, "What? Huh?"
Josh: They don't even remember."
Josh: Yeah. We try to link up our tickets to any issues that result from them. So we cross post with Intercom, we used to... They had a feature that was pretty handy that kind of took care of that for you. But Help Scout needs to get on that.
Ben: I guess we could make some sort of, I don't know, client-side widget that could do that. But-
Josh: Yeah, yeah, I've seen services as well that are made for that purpose but we just use... GitHub issues has been pretty good for our purposes, since it's really just a bucket we dump stuff in and then just never revisit.
Starr: So do you fellas ever go through the bucket and go throw stuff away? I've never really gone through and just deleted stuff because I don't know what y'all are planning on using. But I have... If I've been working on a feature and then I see an old ticket in the backlog relating to something that maybe is no longer necessary because of the work I did, I'll delete that. But do we ever sort of go through the whole thing and clean it up?
Ben: I think I've done that once or twice. I'll go through maybe and say, "Oh, I've done that." For sure. So I'll talk about, oh that's not necessary anymore. Or that technology doesn't exist anymore. We've had integration requests for third parties. We have integrations for Clubhouse or for a JIRA or whatever. And we've had integration requests for things you have may not have heard of. And so we just file those away. And in some cases, those SaaS providers went away. So it's like, oh, well we don't need to worry about that issue anymore, and close that. But yeah, I've gone through a few times and it's like, oh, we're never going to do this, so we're just going to delete that. Or we've gone in the direction that this doesn't make sense anymore. So just delete that.
Josh: Yeah. Personally I tend to... I think I lean towards Jason's opinion on this more than Ben does. I'm not a huge fan of backlogs. They do stress me out if I think about them too much which is why I kind of try to just basically dump stuff in there but ignore it most of the time. And I like the idea of when you're looking for something new to do, don't just go look at what's on the list and just pick something. But the idea of focusing on what's the most relevant, and what makes sense for the moment, for your users, for your customers, in the moment. If you just go and pick the next thing off the backlog, I don't like that approach. I like the idea of working for whatever's happening right now. So I think I'm more of a blend.
Josh: I don't see a problem in just having somewhere to store ideas longterm, it makes sense. Assuming it's not controlling what you do 100%, it's useful to know what people have asked for in the past. But yeah, at the same time, if, if it's okay to just go and delete your whole backlog, then it's okay to just have the backlog but assume if it went away someday, it wouldn't be the end of the world for us. It wouldn't stop, it wouldn't change anything in what we do today or next week or even this year, probably. So it's really not that consequential for us.
Starr: Yeah. So what if we just rename the backlog, and we just renamed it to Ideas? Or maybe every year we take it and we take all... It's like people who put a bunch of junk on their desktop, on their computer, and then every year you create a new folder, like 2019, and then you to just throw all the junk in there and at the end of the year-
Starr: Yeah, I do that with my files.
Starr: Yeah. So what was it? Somebody posted a tweet or something. It was every year they create a directory called Files, and they put all their desktop stuff up in that. And then the next year they create another one called files and they put everything in that. So it ends up just being this sort of recursive, Files, Files, Files.
Josh: Oh, that's the recursive. That sounds good. Man, my file storage strategy doesn't have recursion.
Starr: I know. I know. We really need to get with the times, Josh. We started this company what, seven years ago? Things were just different back then.
Ben: You should add that to your backlog, Josh.
Josh: That's a good idea.
Ben: So, but one thing that's also been nice about having that backlog is when we have requests that come in that aren't the same but are similar, one thing that's on my mind here is people who have asked for customizations to JIRA or GitHub, and the message that we send, the thing that we post to their GitHub issue, or the title that we use, and we had, I don't know, five or six different requests over time around these same kinds of things, but they were all slightly different. It's like one person wanted, "Oh I want my title to be customized." Or I want X, Y or Z.
Ben: And over time, being able to track these, it's like, oh, this person wanted that and this person wanted that. And if we actually took some time and built something that addressed all those things, that would be useful. Right? So I think that was really helpful. And now we have this nicer system than those minor things. If we just did a Wednesday, Tuesday kind of thing as they came in. So that helps.
Josh: That's a good example.
Starr: Yeah. And I think this points to a way that our use of GitHub issues and our backlog is kind of different than a lot of companies in that when we create something, when we create an issue because the customer requested a feature or whatever, that doesn't mean that we expect it to get done. That just means that we're logging that somebody wanted this. And maybe we'll decide to do it in the future. Maybe we won't. So it's not really a backlog of work that has to get done. Because I mean, we do have some, we do put our bugs in there and we do have more urgent stuff in there, too. But-
Josh: Yeah. And for that reason, I've thought about actually splitting them up because that might help us kind of differentiate between those. But that's another topic, maybe.
Ben: Yeah. Well, I mean, so far we've used labels in GitHub for that, right?
Josh: Yeah, we use labels.
Ben: So we have a feature request label, right? And we have a bug label and a security label. And so the bug and security things get addressed pretty quickly. But those feature requests ones hang out forever. But yeah, maybe it makes sense to separate them.
Josh: Yeah. Just have a separate repo or something.
Ben: But I like what you were saying, Josh, about how, even with all those issues in there, it doesn't really affect our choices day to day, and what am I going to work on this morning. Because we have a more proactive approach to our work, right? We think, what would be most beneficial for us right now as a company and for our customers right now? As opposed to, what's all the things that we've ever thought about doing?
Josh: Right.
Ben: Yeah. I think the way that we've structured the... How we build Honeybadger, we just... Whatever you feel like doing, and with the intent that we want to grow the business, we want to make our customers happy. So whatever features or changes we think that will increase customer happiness, increase retention or increase acquisition, those are always our focus areas. And so we always had that goal in mind.
Ben: I think that's one of the things I've been great about hiring Ben and hiring Keven, is that they were people who we could say, here's the longterm goal. Here's where we're trying to get. Here's our main focus, our emphasis is retention and acquisition. So whatever you do, whatever you decide to do on a daily basis should forward those goals, further those goals. And they've been great in being able to latch onto that. Not everyone has that drive or that initiative. So it's been great that we've been able to have a couple of people join us who are similar to us in that way, that can work that way.
Starr: So I don't want to delete our backlog, but I've got to tell you, there's something about the idea of just going in and deleting all of the GitHub issues that just appeals to me on a deep, cellular level. Just clean slate, just wipe out all the issues, wipe out all of our logs, all of our... I don't know, financial performance data. Just start fresh day one.
Ben: Oh yeah, totally. I know how you feel. There are days I'd like to delete all of our infrastructure and start over.
Starr: Yeah. I mean, well, I mean that's.
Josh: Delete the company.
Starr: Yeah, that's-
Ben: Can we just shut down all the servers and we'll start again tomorrow?
Josh: Build from scratch
Ben: Build from scratch.
Josh: We could always do V2.
Ben: Yes. The V2 that we've always wanted to do.
Starr: The V2.
Starr: Yeah, that's... Oh boy. You want to give me nightmares, don't you?
Josh: One of my favorite things about our backlog from our customer support or customer feature requests is it's kind of a last straw effect where if we have a couple customers request something and we punt on it a few times, and then finally one person will request it and, and it's like, that's it. Okay, we're doing it. And then we'll just build it and ship it, maybe even that day. But yeah, that's kind of how it works. If we get enough requests and we actually happen to feel like doing it, maybe at that given moment, then we'll just do it. Otherwise it'll sit for however long until someone feels like doing it.
Ben: Yeah. So we have three responses, basically, when a request comes in from a customer. So the first response is the first time we hear of a feature request and we our response typically is, "Oh that's a good idea. We'll think about that." And so that means what we do in the back end is we go create a GitHub issue, and we might talk about it amongst ourselves for a bit, and then we just kind of let it sit there and rest and see what happens. The request type number two is, "Oh yeah, thanks for suggesting that, we've had other people request that. We'll consider this a plus one for that." And so we'll go to our GitHub issue and we'll link to that support conversation and say "Hey, such and such also wants this thing" right? So there's the plus one. And then Josh, you described the third response. "Yes, we should totally do this." And it's shipped. We finally built it.
Starr: Yeah, you're forgetting response type zero, though. Which is some of them it's just like, "Thank you so much for giving us your feedback. But honestly, I just can't see us doing this anytime soon."
Ben: Oh, that's true. We do have that. That's more rare, but yeah.
Starr: I mean, my favorite... Sometimes people write in and it's just like, Oh geez, do you... They're like, "okay, so I think this... It makes more sense to call, I don't know, makes more sense to call errors, faults and to have this group under this, so just move this page, make it a sub tab of this other page." And it's just, well, maybe if we were starting from scratch, that would be a good idea. But you want me to make all of our users mad and angry by arbitrarily moving around things in the user interface just because you want it? So I'm sorry.
Josh: Most people don't like change unless they were the ones that asked for it.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: Unfortunately we don't have-
Ben: Sometimes-
Starr: I mean occasionally, occasionally, not too often.
Ben: Not too often. Yeah. But then there are those things that never even show up in the backlog because it's just some random idea that one of us has and we just do it, right? And then all of a sudden you wake up and oh, there's a new thing there. I mean, we did that, I think more in the past and we do now, but still it happens from time to time.
Josh: I think local editor was that, I think.
Starr: What's local editor?
Josh: Local editor is where you can configure in Honeybadger for each project, you can configure the path of the project on your local file system. So you got your user directory slash code or something where you keep your GitHub projects to work on. If you configure that in Honeybadger then we can show them links. We can basically give you links in your back trace to open the code on your local editor in your computer. Either use GVim or whatever, VS Code, Sublime. We can open it directly from the web app into your local editor to fix the bug, edit the file and fix the bug.
Starr: Well that sounds incredibly convenient.
Josh: Right?
Starr: Yeah. I should check out that Honeybadger product.
Ben: So I guess the moral of the story is if you want to try DDoS Honeybadger, you can send in your feature requests and we will add them to our GitHub issues thing. And that some point, Starr will declare backlog bankruptcy and we'll start over.
Starr: Yeah, I'm not going to do that.
Ben: Oh, all right.
Starr: I don't know. I don't have the courage to live my convictions, I guess.
Ben: It would be a fun experiment, though. I think you're right, Josh. I think that there wouldn't be anything of huge loss if we wiped it clean. And I guess that gives me the, I don't choose to be made anxious by our backlog because that is true. We'd just go on doing what we're doing if we didn't have-
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. So maybe one of these days it'll just mysteriously disappear and you guys won't ask too many questions.
Ben: Okay, got to admit, that does make me a little bit anxious.
Josh: It would be.
Starr: You'll never know when the moment will strike.
Starr: So Ben, that's a nice backlog you've got there. It'd be shame if something happened to it, you know?
Starr: All right. I think maybe we've beaten this horse as much as she will take. What do y'all think? Do you have anything more to add about backlogs or should we call it wrapped?
Josh: I think that's a wrap.
Ben: Yeah, I think we're good.
Starr: All right, everybody, thank you for listening to FounderQuest. If you liked this show, please review us on Apple podcast, or whatever they're calling it this year, and Google Play store or whatever that is. Whatever the podcast thing you use, just review us, please.
Starr: And yeah, we'll catch you next week. Bye.
The guys talk about creating content for Honeybadger and the difficulties switching back and forth from writing prose to writing code. Starr channels his inner Anna Wintour and describes his latest initiative recruiting developers to write guest posts on the blog. Josh talks about his process for writing evergreen content for the newsletter.
Links:
Leveling Up
The Devil Wears Prada
Seth Godin
Indie Hackers
Mastering Ruby Exceptions eBook
Full Transcript:
Announcer: Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole a nerdier. You're tuned in to FounderQuest.
Starr: I'm blaming a lot on the internet these days, Josh. So one more thing, we'll just throw it on that pile and we'll get a volume discount on that.
Josh: I love it. Yeah.
Starr: Take that to town.
Josh: Internet's pretty much responsible for all the ills in the world. I think.
Starr: Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's a few goods. A few goods. It allows me to ride out the ills in relative comfort, but ...
Josh: Right. You never have to leave your house.
Starr: No, I never have to leave my house. Yeah. So I guess we should explain. So if the astute listeners haven't noticed, Ben is not with us today. And the reason for this is very convoluted. We had originally planned to record this episode on a Friday and we had been ... We had Josh and everybody ready to go and then this truck pulls up outside my house and starts sawing down this gigantic tree, chipping it. And there was just no way that was going to happen. So we canceled. But then Ben has all sorts of travel plans because he's an international Ben of mystery. And so yeah, so it's me and Josh this week.
Starr: So we're going to be talking about something that Ben usually doesn't get involved too much in, which is content creation, like blog posts and email newsletters and all that stuff and ...
Josh: Something that you happen to be actually working on lately.
Starr: I am working on it. Yeah. Right now. I don't know if our readers remember or listeners remember, but a couple of weeks ago I put out a call for writers for people to contribute to our blog. And we actually had a lot of people respond to that. It was very successful. The only issue is now I have to go through all of them and kind of manage that process and chat with them about what they want to write.
Starr: And I think it's all going to turn out really well. But this whole having coordinating things with 15 different people over email and having all of them at a different stage in the process, that's the type of thing that is designed to make my brain just fall apart. It's just something I'm apparently not good at.
Josh: It sounds like you're a kind of like a magazine producer or something now or editor.
Starr: It is, yeah. I'm kind of like an editor in chief. It's pretty cool.
Josh: We could give you a title of editor if you want, business cards or something. Or desk, one of those little desk nameplates.
Starr: That would be nice. I'll take it. I'll take whatever form of recognition I can get.
Starr: So Evie and I watched The Devil Wears Prada a couple of days ago. So I'm all ready, I'm ready for my role as a big time magazine editor. If you haven't seen that ... Have you seen it, Josh?
Josh: I have. Yeah. It's been awhile, but I think, yeah, I saw it a while back.
Starr: Yeah, so it was all about, what is it? A thinly disguise fixing fictionalization of like Anna Wintour's Vogue or something. Anyway, this lady who ran Vogue and was very mean to her subordinates or something and imperious. That's what I'm working towards.
Josh: And then in the end though, doesn't she have a change of heart in the end or something? I don't want to .... Spoiler alert.
Starr: No, there's no change. It was very confusing.
Josh: Oh, okay. I thought there was. That's too bad.
Starr: Yeah. So at the end, it's like the movie simultaneously celebrated this woman, this young woman who sort of rejected it all and went off to do her own thing, while at the same time sort of glorifying the sort of people who stayed in the magazine and devoted their lives to it even though their lives were falling apart.
Starr: It's like, I have no idea what the moral of this is. Pick one.
Josh: I have faith in you in as the editor of the Honeybadger blog that you will see the light in the end.
Starr: I'm not sure how many divorces I'm willing to have to make the Honeybadger blog a success though.
Josh: Right.
Starr: So, yeah, I was honestly super pleased with the quality of people who applied. Just like some really good writing going on out there. I consider myself a pretty good writer. I'm like, "Oh man, these people might be better than me so I've got to get them on my team."
Josh: Yeah, they must be pretty good. That's cool. I can't wait to read what they come up with. Are you kind of directing the topics or what's your process for kind of figuring out what each person is going to work on?
Starr: Well, like most things I do in life, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. Basically my plan was to sort of see what people wanted to write about and see if I could make that sort of fit with the theme of our blog. And at least the initial contracts you do with people are probably just going to be stuff that they want to write about, which I think is great because they probably already know about it and are excited. As time goes on, maybe I will jump in there and suggest things. I'm really, really hoping to have a sort of collaborative relationship with these folks. Not just assign them something and then they produce a deliverable and then I sign off on it and then they get a check at the end. I'm kind of hoping it'll be this personal little, I just get to be the den mother of the writer's room and just make everybody cookies and just as long as they keep producing that content.
Josh: We talked about I think doing a series of posts kind of around a central theme or central topic or something. And I imagine you could have some opportunity to kind of take the initial topics and develop them, suggest areas that you could go deeper on for future or subsequent posts and that sort of thing.
Starr: Series are sort of my attempt to sort of do double duty because we found that we have good success with this ebook that I wrote a long time ago based on sort of blog articles. It's about Ruby errors and stuff. And we have a lot of people download that. And so I was like, "Well, if we have more eBooks that would be nice." But the thing is, it's like if you just kind of assemble eBooks from haphazard blog articles, it's really difficult. I basically had to rewrite everything in that book. I couldn't just compile articles and have it be read as a book because they were all, there was no planning behind that.
Starr: So my thought with series is that each blog post can be maybe like a chapter in an ebook or something. And so then we can sort of publish this in lots of different ways and hopefully that will provide value for people. For my own writing, I find it hard to context switch. So if I can spend two months writing many articles about the same topic, more or less, that's going to be way more efficient than switching around all the time for me.
Josh: I was going to ask about that. Actually, I made a note before this call because that's one of the things that I have too. Right now, because as you know, my contribution to the whole content thing over the past year or so has mainly been in the form of getting our email newsletter and our email content going.
Starr: What's that called? It's Leveling Up, right?
Josh: So yeah, we have an email ... Our newsletter series is called Leveling Up. It's basically a newsletter you subscribe to and we send out. I think it's a couple emails a month right now goes out. I think it's every ... Pretty sure it's every Tuesday. Just covers topics of more general interest. Some of them are technical development things and other things are kind of just of general interest, to like web developers and with a specific idea of advancing your career, leveling up as a developer.
Starr: Level up your career as a web developer. Subscribe now.
Josh: That's it. Actually, if you do want to subscribe, it's a honeybadger.io/leveling-up, I believe.
Starr: If it's not that write a script on fuzzy URL.
Josh: Or just go to our blog and there's a signup form.
Starr: That's probably easier.
Josh: Yeah. That's probably what I should have said.
Starr: I remember when you came out with the sort of idea behind this newsletter. There was some sort of high level business-y ideas happening around ... What were you trying to accomplish? Was this an outgrowth of you attending that Seth Godin seminar, maybe?
Josh: Yeah, maybe a little bit. I think it was just more a way to come up with content that developers would care about and that would actually be a valuable source of education or learning. I wanted to cover maybe a little bit of the overlap between the business end of things and maybe the marketing end of things and development. So it's got a little bit of a flavor of FounderQuest, indie hacker type stuff that we talk about on here. It's probably a little bit more on the technical end.
Starr: Yeah. But you managed to do it in a way that doesn't really require a ton of updating. Right? It's kind of ... It's more evergreen than a normal tutorial blog post.
Josh: The name that the marketing people these days use for the type of newsletter, the way it's set up, it's called an evergreen newsletter. So the idea is that instead of a traditional newsletter where you're like, you have come up with content every week or however often you're sending and you're basically on a constant schedule to send the next newsletter. With an evergreen newsletter, people subscribe to it at as they over time, but they're basically subscribing to, it's more of a sequence. So everyone starts at the beginning, gets all of the past emails that have been sent, and then when they reach the end, they start to get any new content that you're adding to the list.
Josh: So it kind of gives you a way to get off of that hamster wheel of content production and kind of produce really good content.
Starr: We should have figured out a way to do that with this podcast.
Josh: That's kind of built in. Maybe we could just tell people to start at the beginning instead of ...
Starr: Oh yeah, there you go.
Josh: If you just subscribed, just go all the way back in time and start at the very first one and that's basically an evergreen podcast.
Starr: And if you get to the last one, just start over. These episodes have depth.
Josh: I'll do that. With a really good podcast, I'll listen to some past episodes that go back and refresh myself.
Starr: When I get into a podcast I love though I listen to the whole catalog. There's no stopping me.
Josh: We're selling this pretty hard.
Starr: Yes.
Josh: But you have to when you're hustling.
Starr: Hustling?
Josh: I don't know. I wanted to talk about the whole ... I think you mentioned the mental context switching thing. It's easier for you to sit down and write for a month versus trying to write a bunch of stuff in between other things that you're doing.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: I get that too. Right now, I was working on newsletter content pretty much exclusively when I was doing more marketing things. Now I've been like, I've taken a detour back into development stuff and it's like the content and writing side has dropped off a little bit just because it's so ... It takes a lot of brain power and focus to actually do good writing, write a good article that people are going to care about. It's almost like it's a full time job.
Starr: Yeah, pretty much. And I don't know. I find that it's a different kind of brain power than programming. And also you have a lot fewer kind of incremental deliverables. Right? Because you may write something but then the next day you may just delete it. It's not like you're just sort of incrementally pushing these little units of work. So at first that really bothered me at first because, I don't know, it's just I felt like I wasn't getting anything done, even though I was obviously sort of getting stuff done.
Josh: It seems it's definitely more of a creative process where you're kind of formulating, even if you write the first draft and delete the whole thing because it's just not where you were going, it probably helped you figure out what you actually need to write.
Starr: Oh, totally. Can I share with you my writing process, Josh?
Josh: I would love to hear your writing process.
Starr: Okay. So it centers around the fact that I find it difficult to read things unless they're really simply written. And so basically I write something and then I come back the next day. I'm like, "I can't understand that. What am I trying to say?" So I rewrite it and then I just do that for about a week. And then eventually it's about as simple and compact as it will be.
Josh: Yeah. You end up with a couple paragraphs and ...
Starr: Yeah. So the take away is that it's hard to be able to write dense texts very easily.
Josh: Well, you've edited my writing before so you know I tend to ramble along and then come back in and pare it down and ...
Starr: Yeah. Always a rambler. Yeah. You're a rambling man.
Josh: I know. But yeah, that's something I've had to learn too is to come back and condense and try to say things as briefly as possible. It's definitely helped my writing.
Starr: I'm going to be writing more for the blog after I get all this stuff set up with the other writers. I'm going to contribute myself, but also I kind of want to make it so that I'm not sort of the main person driving the content of the blog. I would like my efforts to be kind of supplemental to it so that if something happens to me or whatever, all you have to do is keep having the same people write good content. I don't know. That's the dream at least.
Josh: Well, not the something happening to you, but making the blog sustainable.
Starr: Yeah. I'm-
Josh: I hope nothing happens to you.
Starr: There's totally not in my Google search history searches about having yourself disappeared mysteriously.
Josh: Yeah. Mysteriously. Yeah. Well if you ever, yeah, just vanish, I won't ask questions.
Starr: That'd be a good marketing stunt for us. You could run ads and be like, "Where's Starr?" Who's that?
Josh: Ben and I will just do the podcast. We'll turn it into a true crime podcast where we're investigating your disappearance.
Starr: Oh my goodness. And it's going to turn out that you were the murders after all and you did it so that you can make a true crime podcasts out of it.
Josh: You just gave away the ending though.
Starr: Oh damn. Sorry.
Josh: We'll cut that out.
Starr: Yeah, we'll cut that.
Josh: One thing I'm looking forward to with having more a variety of content on the blog, at least from an email standpoint is that it makes my job as just writing emails a lot easier because I can just write emails about the content and kind of just promote the content that other people are writing versus having to produce it all myself.
Starr: Yeah, that makes this much easier.
Josh: That'll be nice.
Starr: Honestly the main thing about hiring people, about having other people create content is that one of the hardest things for me isn't necessarily the writing. Writing isn't that difficult for me, but what's hard is after I exhaust my well of topics that I know about right away and trying to come up with new topics ... A long time ago, a couple of years ago, my goal was write a new technical blog post every day. I didn't quite meet it but I came close. And we saw a lot of good results from that. But I eventually sort of quit because it was just impossible to keep up because I felt like I had written about everything I could possibly write about without setting out and exploring new frontiers of knowledge that ...
Josh: Yeah. You covered a lot.
Starr: Yeah. And once I started doing that, once I started trying to cover things I didn't know, then it became super hard because now, well, I think this is going to be an interesting topic. And so I spend a day or two researching it and doing little blurbs about it. And then I realize, oh shit, this is actually not the way people do things anymore because I didn't understand that because I didn't really understand the topic. So that time is wasted. And then I don't know, I felt like that was ... That's really what kind of made it impossible is just having to have this breadth of topics.
Josh: I think that ... So that comes down to somewhat of a contextual problem I think because a lot of times when I'm trying to ... When I actually write something that I really end up liking that is actually really relevant and adds something to the conversation, it's come as a result of maybe I've been reading a bunch of different books kind of around that same idea for a couple of months or something versus going and trying to understand a topic in a short period of time and then come up with something to say. A lot of times I need to be ... Honestly, when I'm actually writing a lot, I'm doing a lot of reading and research and just general exploration behind the scenes. For me, that's where the writing pretty much comes from.
Starr: Oh totally. You need time for that stuff to percolate and you get ...
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. Also I noticed that when I would try and cover topics I didn't really know that much about, it's like, really all I'm doing is paraphrasing other tutorials at this point. Because I don't really have enough knowledge about this to contribute much to it except in maybe sort of the way I organize the writing or the knowledge or whatever. But really it's like, I've read three or four tutorials or articles about this and now I'm just kind of condensing it into this new article. Which just kind of didn't really seem the most useful thing for the world to have.
Josh: When we were learning Elixir earlier, I guess earlier this year still, you did a blog post or two about some just beginner Elixir topics that just came out of your, as a beginner, learning the language and learning how it does things differently and that sort of thing.
Josh: I thought those turned out really well. But I think the difference there is that you are actually diving into a topic. You had been working with it for a couple of months and you were actually, you were just in the process of learning it and happened to have, happened to see things that you didn't understand as a beginner. But I think in that case, there's a good chance that a lot of other people that are just beginning would benefit from that. If it's actually trying to understand how a concept works or something versus a tutorial.
Starr: Yeah I could see you being able to put out a bunch of content if the sort of premise was that, "Okay, I don't know Elixir. I'm going to learn Elixir and just write about everything." Which is how a lot of developer blogs work.
Josh: I think that works really well if you happen to be learning a new language or something new for a long period of time. I don't know if it's sustainable as an approach to just go and produce content, just go learn an entirely new career as a developer and then use that as your jumping off point to write about. But...
Starr: Well, I mean if we wanted a ton of content about Elixir then it might be a good idea. Frankly, a lot of our stuff is ... We still write a lot of stuff about Ruby people and that's still primarily our main audience. Even if our blog posts cover things other than Ruby, I don't know, at this point there's not much in Ruby that is super surprising and new to me. Although there's still a couple things. Ruby, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
Josh: As they continue to develop it there'll be hopefully some big new things to talk about.
Starr: Oh yeah. But then everybody's going to be talking about that.
Josh: Yeah, that's true.
Starr: So you're going to be writing more emails soon, you said?
Josh: I would like to. Yeah. So I've been trying to figure that out. How do I pace that writing, assuming that I'm going to be jumping between different things that I do? Because I still do development. I still do. I still want to write. I want to do a little marketing, that sort of thing. And all of those things are, they are very mentally exhausting for me. So I have a certain amount of mental resources that I have each day to invest in something. And if I'm investing at all in developing or development or whatever, it's probably going to be at least a couple, a week or two of unwinding from that before I can get into a mode of actually thinking and writing. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I might do similar to what you're doing where I just kind of take weeks or months where I focus on a specific area so that I can actually go deep on those things and get fully into that frame of mind.
Starr: Yeah. This is one of the less fun aspects of having a really small company because you end up wearing so many hats that it's sort of a game of whack-a-mole. You can focus on your code, but then while you're not doing the blog, it's going to take you awhile to get used to doing the blog again. But no more. No more. We are professionals now. We're a professional business organization that hires people to do business activities.
Starr: Well, do you have anything more to say or should we wrap this one up? It can be a little short episode since it's just us.
Josh: Oh yeah. I think we can keep it short. Short chat.
Josh: And then Ben will be back next week and ...
Starr: That sounds good. Maybe we can have special branding for this and be FounderQuest Fireside Chats.
Josh: I like that. Next time we'll have to have our apple cider ready and we'll do that.
Starr: All right. Well, I will go start mulling that, I guess. I guess I better go plant an apple tree now.
Josh: You have a lot of things to mull over.
Starr: I do.
The guys talk about how they are scaling up their awesome customer service without adding headcount and their journey from email customer support, to chat support, and back to email support. They also discuss how to deal with informational silos and if they should transition Honeybadger to an invite-only luxury brand.
Links:
Intercom
Help Scout
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Announcer:
Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your own terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest.
Josh:
So our topic is customer support.
Starr:
And how how it was maybe murdering us-
Josh:
Eating us alive.
Starr:
Eating us alive, devouring our souls. Maybe we might be doing to fix that. Our old system, the system we've had for years and years. We've been using Intercom. And Intercom put this little widget on your website. It looks a lot like a live chat widget, and just encourages people to enter in whatever problems they have and then you reply to them and they can see it right in the website, or they can get an email or whatever. And we really liked this when we set it up. Years ago, we thought it was really cool because we got a ton more interaction with our customers and were really enjoying that and everything. So why are we looking to change this? What was going on?
Josh:
The way Intercom works in the in-app widget is it really is a chat system. So it's basically live chat, right? From a user's perspective, you assume that someone's going to reply immediately if they're there. And I think it'll say when people are offline or something then it'll let you email. But really for in our day to day it was kind of like whenever a support request comes in, we're thinking, okay, there's someone sitting there waiting for a response so we need to drop everything and answer it right now.
Starr:
Yeah. We would get people just saying, "Hey, what's up?"
Josh:
Yeah, "Hi."
Starr:
And it's six hours later, "Hello. Hello, customer."
Josh:
Yeah, actually, the one offs were kind of ... I might actually miss those a little bit just because someone just says, "Hey." And then I'd often just reply with some emoji waving symbol or, "Yo." In the beginning, like you said, that was really good because it put us ... When we were first figuring out a lot of things, we were first figuring out who our customers are. I think one of the reasons we really liked it was that it put us in much closer contact with people on a real time basis so we could chat back and forth and just be ...
Josh:
It was a little bit more informal and we could just talk to people. And I think we talked about that in the past on this show. How that was good for getting customer feedback and getting to know people. But what we found lately as we've grown and scaled is that it's begun to cause a lot of interruptions, and I guess I would say anxiety in our day to day support process. The way our support process works alongside all the other things we do. And that's probably, we're going to go into that. But basically we didn't have a support process really, which doesn't help.
Starr:
Yeah, because when you know that somebody thinks your support system just being this live chat thing. Then there's a lot of pressure for you to respond to things super quickly. And that can be good sometimes. Sometimes you get some really awesome wins because you're able to fix somebody's problem right away and all that. But sometimes you get bogged down in these super intense support questions, and it's really distracting to, at any moment you could be pulled into one of these lengthy discussions of a thing. And it may or may not actually be honestly. Our system works pretty well. Right? So it's honestly, a lot of times it's just some mis-configuration or something, but there's something weird going on that's preventing people from just seeing that there's some obvious mis-configuration problem. And so, yeah, so you just ended up going down this rabbit hole for half a day.
Josh:
Yeah. And those more of your typical customer support things. That's kind of what customer support is for. Right? But the way we handle support at Honeybadger is again, we're small, small team. We're a technical product, so we like to give high quality support and that usually involves supporting developers. So we are developers on support. We don't have any dedicated support operator or anything like that at Honeybadger, which would normally be able to buffer between some of the more technical questions and the less technical questions. What happens is if you're a developer and you're trying to actually get development done, you're in the middle of whatever your project is, some deep thought or something. And then a support requests comes in, and if everyone's on call for that, you're basically constantly just expecting to be interrupted throughout your day.
Starr:
Yeah, it's like one of those psychology experiments where they watch you as you go about your day and then somebody administers random shots to you.
Josh:
They zap you, yeah.
Starr:
Yeah. And you never know when it's coming. So you just live in this state of expectation.
Josh:
Yeah. The customers who are listening, I don't think you guys are like electric shocks. I mean some of you are, but-
Starr:
I kind of feel sometimes that when I'm doing support, it's almost like I'm doing some whiteboard interview or something where somebody's like, "Okay, here's the problem. And fix it, go." And you're doing this blindfolded. It's like you're a veterinarian and you're trying to fix some problem with an elephant but you can only see two inches of it at a time. Right? It's like you can look at the elephant through a rubber hose from 10 feet away. And you have to ask the elephant, "Well, move the rubber hose over this way for a little bit, so I can maybe see through here."
Josh:
Yeah. You go, "Move it over to Active Record."
Starr:
Yeah, yeah. It's can you squeeze your Gemfile file through the rubber hose?
Josh:
Check the Postgres adapter. Yeah, obviously we don't have access to our customer's code or applications. We have a history of maybe even over supporting our customers, and that's kind of like, we like to do that. We like to actually sit down and really understand what their problem is and help them come up with a solution, even if it's not necessarily problem with Honeybadger. A lot of times it'll end up being, Honeybadger was kind of the ... It's the reason they thought there was a problem, but something's actually mis-configured in their application and we come across a lot of these issues that some of these, they seem to be similar across a lot of different applications when you're installing error tracking code. And we like to help people with that stuff. But at the same time it can be a lot of overhead and it's a lot of work too.
Starr:
Because our library is, it integrates in people's application. And the way Ruby works is that some completely separate third party library can come in and clobber something and then the Honeybadger library will stop working. And so the problem may be the problem isn't in our system, the problem is in this third party thing. But it appears that the problem is on our system.
Josh:
That's one side of the support problem we have. Those kinds of deep technical tickets can come in and just eat half a day, basically. The other problem is the smaller requests, the ones that you mentioned, where even sometimes it's really cool when you can ... Someone chats in and within five minutes you're able to say, "Oh hey, yeah I fixed that," or, someone wanted to ...maybe it's like an administrative task and they chatted and you can fix it real quick, and they're super happy.
Josh:
Every request like that that comes in though is a context switch for whoever is responding, right? So if we're in the middle of trying to get long term work done and if you keep having those little micro interruptions, as you know, it's creating a lot of time out basically because it takes time to get back into the flow and back to what you were previously working on.
Starr:
Yeah. Context switches are super difficult for me, especially because yeah, even for simple tickets sometimes it'll take me 20 or 30 minutes just to remember how everything works and sort of get ... I'm sort of like a train. It takes a lot to get me going. But then once I'm going, I'm good for a while but to always be changing direction. Trains don't change directions very easily. Anyway, so it makes sense that I spent most of my career working with Rails, because I'm a train, choo choo.
Josh:
Nice. I love that we're talking about all these support problems and Ben hasn't really said much so far, but Ben basically does most of our support if we really are honest, I think. Ben, well I guess one of the other things we've been trying to work out or come up with a solution to is the information siloing that happens based on how we've organized our roles at the company. At this point we have four developers. But even with three to four developers, we've each built specific parts of the application and we kind of own, we tend to kind of have ownership of those areas. And so when support requests come up that involve those parts of the application, it's typically our process is just to route those tickets to whoever created the code. But that creates dependencies basically between who can answer customer support requests. Because if it's not documented somewhere and it's the information is in someone's head, basically our only option is to send it to that person or have them wait so they can reply.
Starr:
So what are your thoughts on that, Josh? Because that is a serious problem and I've struggled with that as well because it's like, "Well if I'm spending most of my time either doing front end stuff or working on blog posts and things, I'm not say that familiar with how we process source maps." Source maps is this big system that we deal with that source maps are just inherently complex and messy. And so we get support questions about them. And a lot of times I just really ... I either have no idea of what to do or maybe it'll take me ... I'll work sometimes for an hour or two when you're gone, Josh, and I'll maybe have some very superficial understanding of maybe what's happening, but it's still not really good enough. And it's rough because how do we handle ... How do you deal with that? Because it's the solution isn't for me to learn about source maps because that means everybody at the company has to know in detail everything that's happening at the company, which is just unrealistic.
Josh:
Yeah, I think it's in those cases, it's really about writing good documentation and building good support tools, and then basically relying on those things to have the answers, if that makes sense. Because one trap we've fallen into is related to not trusting ourselves as far as how we built the system or how the system works. So when even I have fallen to this, when someone comes in and says they're having this issue and you know with source maps, JavaScript source maps. They're probably one of the most complicated things to support that we have. But I kind of got into this habit of assuming that there was something wrong, that we did something wrong if someone's having an issue with it. And that's not usually the case from actual experience.
Josh:
A lot of times I'll go in and I'll have to ... Even I have to go in and dive into the code and and dive into documentation on how the source map spec works and try to remember how all this stuff should work together. A lot of times usually it comes back to they didn't have one thing configured right and so it wasn't working, or they didn't follow something in our documentation. What I should've done is just trusted that the documentation was correct. I mean, if we wrote good documentation, does that make sense?
Starr:
Yeah. So what do you do when somebody comes to you and says, "Okay this is broken." Then you just give them a link to the docs?
Josh:
What do you do, Ben?
Ben:
Yeah, the source maps is a good one. Because that one does cause a lot of issues, and it's one that I was weak in. Because, Josh, you built that and so I was like, "Oh that's Josh's thing." But Josh goes on vacation from time to time. And so when that happens you have to pick up that ball. And the documentation that you've written, over those experiences that you've had those repeated times, we have a troubleshooting guide now that is a great starting point for someone who writes in about a problem. So to answer Starr's question, yeah, I actually do. The first thing I do is I point someone to that doc and say, "Hey, did you go through all the things here?" Thank you, Josh, for actually writing that because that saves a lot of time.
Ben:
And sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes there is additional followup. And the person's like, "Yeah, I did read through that and I'm still having this problem." And so at that point I do have to find out what's going on. And I like what Josh was saying about we always assume that we're wrong. It's like, I guess it's our version of the imposter syndrome, right? It's not that we don't know what we're doing, but that, "Oh, I guess we didn't do something quite right. And so yeah, got to go fix it." But usually that's not the case like you said. And just over time, I've had to get more familiar with it. Just a couple weeks ago when you were on vacation, we had a request come in for source maps. I'm like, "Well, I can't really ask the person to wait a week when Josh gets home. I guess I better find out what's going on here."
Ben:
And that was really useful, even though it did take me a day or or two, whatever to find out to dig into that code and find out what was going on. It was useful, and I found a place to do a performance improvement. It's like, "Oh, this maybe could work better, right?" on our end. And so wrote some code there. So for us having such a small company, but the problem with information silos is addressable. It just takes some time, right? Maybe you do have to drop what you're doing and work on something else for awhile that you weren't really planning on. Overall, I think that's a good thing. Right? That helps with the bus number. Right? And allows us to go on vacations.
Josh:
I think we're going to talk about some of the improvements we've been making to address some of these issues, but one of those is around setting clear expectations. And I mean, we want to set clear expectations for what our customers are expecting out of support. But we need expectations too. As a developer, we want to know ... Because obviously we don't want to have to drop. If you're in the middle of a complicated project or something, you don't want to be diving into another complicated project for the rest of the day and then have to try to go back and pick up the pieces. That happening on a regular basis just isn't tenable. We need clear expectations of what's expected of us in order to fulfill our customer's expectations of support.
Josh:
So one of the things we can do is we don't have to respond immediately to answer the most complicated questions of our product. It's okay to say like, "I'm in the middle of something right now. I got your request. I take it seriously. I'm going to respond in two hours," or, "I'm going to respond first thing tomorrow morning," or something like that. It's okay to defer. Really, I mean, you're just emailing with people so you don't have to drop everything necessarily and address it right now.
Ben:
I think that's one of the benefits of having moved away from Intercom's chat setup, right? There's expectation there that if you see a chat window, you're going to get a response. And now that we don't have a chat window, now that it's a leave us a message window, then that expectation's already like, "Oh, okay, I will get a response." And we tell them no, it's going to be in a few hours. And yeah, I'm totally cool with that. And I think that really helps people feel like, "Oh, they're not ignoring me." Even if it's going to take maybe a day. Right? To get that problem actually fixed.
Starr:
I was just going to say, here's a thing that I think about occasionally, which is that we pay ... How much do we pay? We pay AWS at least six figures a year. Right? And for awhile we were paying for additional support. And even when we're doing that, people wouldn't get back to us with developers ready to dive into super detailed problems within an hour. And we're providing this for people who are paying us what, 30, 40 bucks a month? And I think the expectation that Amazon has is that if their systems are working, then it's on the customer to make it work. Right? And they'll provide documentation and stuff like that, but we have kind of defaulted to a different thing where it's like it's always on us to make it work. Even if we end up spending ... If you spend eight hours, 10 hours a problem, 10 hours a problem, $200 an hour. We just spent $2,000 to solve your problem and you're paying us $500 a year.
Josh:
And we do that a lot.
Starr:
So I wonder about that. We do that a lot. And it's like, it feels good to do that sometimes. But then also, it's since we're such a small team, it's like, "Ah, is this really ..." It's like how tenable is this really?
Josh:
Well and there's more efficient ways to address the problem too. If we're actually getting that many requests, requests that are, if we actually support each of them fully is eating that much time, there's a larger problem I would say. And two ways that we're trying to work to eliminate those problems is through creating automated self service tools or improving the documentation and making it more discoverable. Surfacing answers in our support and documentation systems more efficiently or effectively. And I think there's a lot we can do there still.
Starr:
So you guys kind of alluded to the fact that we've recently switched help systems. We're trying out another one. I'm not sure we're 100% sticking with it forever, but we're giving it a shot. So, yeah. So we switched to Help Scout. And could you describe a little bit of the reasoning behind that? Why you wanted to do that and what we've seen happen as a result?
Josh:
The actual reason we switched to Help Scout was that I wanted to try and experiment. When I was trying to address this, the constant sense of urgency and support anxiety issue that I thought that chat was causing. At this point, I'm pretty sure that I was right. I wanted to try and experiment of just turning off chat and moving to email only. The problem I think as I recall with Intercom is that Intercom does not do email only very well. It's kind of built for realtime chat first it seems. Anyway that's what I remember. So basically it was easier to set up, just set up Help Scout for this experiment to try moving to a more email oriented system.
Starr:
Yeah, so Help Scout is a more traditional help desk system where people can email us, or maybe fill out a form online. And then it goes into our backend ticketing system, then we respond to it.
Josh:
Yeah. It has an in-app widget, kind of like Intercom, called a beacon. They actually do chat now so they're moving into some of those features. But I think the fact that Help Scout has always, from the beginning it's been like it started out as like a very email centric tool. That still shines through basically. So I kind of like the way that they've addressed the email versus chat problem a little bit better so far.
Ben:
Yeah. We really like having the UI in our application for someone to be able to submit a support request without having to depend on just opening up their email client. Right? We like that. But we just don't like having chats. So I think that's why you picked Help Scout because we had the best of both worlds in that case. Right?
Starr:
Is the widget pretty lightweight? Do you have a sense of that? I'm just curious.
Josh:
I don't know if I'd call it lightweight. I don't know what they use to build it, but it's pretty much ... It seems like most other JavaScript widgets.
Starr:
One thing that always bugged me about Intercom is it loads basically a React app into your application. I'm just too old fashioned for that.
Josh:
I will venture a guess and say that the Help Scout Beacon is more, it's lighter weight than Intercom's. Because everything Intercom does is heavyweight, it seems. That's just-
Ben:
Yeah. I think none of us are crying over the loss of having to use the Intercom UI for our help supports.
Starr:
Yeah, oh my gosh.
Josh:
Yeah. So I was going to say the second reason that we just decided to try Help Scout was that Ben and I, and Starr too, we've been dying to not use Intercom anymore for other reasons.
Starr:
So Ben, we saving money?
Ben:
We are saving buckets of money. Are you kidding?
Starr:
How much were we paying Intercom?
Ben:
Too much.
Starr:
Like it was thousands a month?
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Something like that? Yeah.
Ben:
It's ridiculous.
Starr:
An insane amount of money. I've never seen another SaaS company that just squeezes blood from radishes the way that Intercom does.
Ben:
But I was going to say, but Help Scout is a nicer user experience in our opinion anyway. We're not huge fans of the single page application model, and Intercom went 100% that way. And it's just nicer to use Help Scout, for me anyway.
Starr:
That's true. And I wonder if having the default be email, or a form submission might actually encourage people to write better tickets? Because a chat window, it's like you're going to be like, "Hey, what's up? Something's broken. I can't get it to work. Peace." But with an email you have to maybe compose something. And you might actually include some details about something.
Josh:
Or all the details, assuming that you want an answer to come back in completion, yeah. I think, Ben, you've experienced that so far a little bit, haven't you?
Ben:
Yeah, definitely. We see better response. We see better requests come in because people do take a little more time to write out the full description of what's going on rather than expecting this is going to be an exchange of a chat, right? So we do get a bunch more information that allows us to actually see, "Oh, this could be the problem." And that helps our customers as well. Because again, with that expectation that they have to deliver us a full message rather than it's going to be a chat. We've seen times where people were like, "Hi." And we respond and we're like, "Hey, do you have a problem?"
Starr:
Six hours later.
Ben:
Six hours hours later, right? And then they're like, "Oh yeah, so here's my problem." Right? Whereas they could have given us the full thing right up front, and we'd be like, "Oh, here's the solution."
Starr:
It's a little more formal.
Ben:
Yeah. Yeah, so that helps.
Josh:
The worst tickets, and this happens on email sometimes, is it's not just a chat thing. But the tickets where it's not a very well formed request. It's just like I'm having a problem. And then you start to get into a debugging, troubleshooting conversation. But the information just slowly drips out in the conversation and a lot of times it's just off the top of the head. So it's not necessarily ... It's like, "Oh, well this is happening so this must be the cause." And so you go deep into that, but then it turns out that, "Oh well that was just ... It's not actually happening," or you just didn't see it correctly.
Starr:
Here's a question. For things like that, for situations like that, maybe we should have a template like open source projects have for submitting an issue where it's like, what did you see? What did you expect to see? What code did you write that did this thing? And then you're just like, "Hey, I'm having a problem." Great, fill this in and give it to us and we'll solve your problem.
Ben:
I'm not convinced. Yeah.
Josh:
You're not convinced?
Ben:
No.
Starr:
I mean, not for everybody, but for some people.
Ben:
I've seen so many open source projects use those templates on GitHub, and, "Here's your issue template." And so many people not following the template, and it was just like, "Delete all that junk, and I'm going to put it in whatever I can put in." So I was like, "No."
Starr:
I guess it requires a good faith effort on the part of ... so 2019, if it's taught me anything, it's taught me to not assume good faith.
Josh:
In anything?
Starr:
On the part of anyone in the world, ever.
Josh:
Moving forward, new policy.
Starr:
Default assuming bad faith. Unless I know that you're a nice person.
Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, Starr went on GitHub and replaced all of our GitHub issue templates with middle finger emojis.
Starr:
Yeah. The world is a terrible place.
Josh:
Oh, I don't know. I'm kind of in between both of you though. I think that even if it helps 50% of people create better, form better requests, or better support responses, I mean, it's probably helping more than it's hurting.
Starr:
It's not all or nothing. There may be some people who just don't know what you want them to give you. Maybe they just honestly don't know, so they're looking to be guided.
Josh:
Right. But also I think from our support process standpoint, one of the things that I am really trying to do is try to identify those kinds of tickets earlier and handle them better, or guide the user better to the solution versus letting them lead the conversation wherever it may be going. Because again, you get into those slow drip conversations that aren't necessarily ... You're not even communicating as efficiently as you could be. So that's part of some of the process that we're trying to implement or work through is analyzing more of our support tickets and actually trying to make improvements to the process.
Josh:
Trying to come up with ideas, like your idea with the template, maybe that's something we could try. But basically coming up with ideas, I'm calling them experiments, where we just try something out for a little while. If it helps then we keep it. If it doesn't then we try the next thing. The moving to email only and then setting more definite expectations of what people should expect from support was one experiment that I think at this point we could call that a success. And I would say that we're-
Starr:
It's a winner.
Josh:
Yeah, I think it's a winner. Announcing it on the air.
Starr:
Yay, we'll have to get some sound effects for that.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
Yay, so-
Josh:
Yes, I think we're going to stick. I think we'll stick with Help Scout. I think, Ben, I don't think I can drag Ben back to Intercom even kicking and screaming. And I don't want to try. So yeah, Ben's the reason really that we can't go back to Intercom.
Ben:
Well the funny thing is, do you remember when we switched to Intercom and what we switched away from?
Josh:
Yeah, we switched from Help Scout. We're complete full circle.
Starr:
We're back.
Josh:
It does feel like coming home in a sense. It's familiar.
Ben:
So I guess the lesson there is if you're running a SaaS and you have a customer churn, they might come back someday. Right? Just keep doing what you're doing and building an awesome product, right?
Starr:
Yeah, I mean I see, because Help Scout didn't really change, but we changed. We decided that we liked that better and we went back.
Josh:
I thought it was interesting that our needs actually did change because when we switched, we had a legitimate reason to switch. We were trying to combine email and chat because we really wanted chat support so that we could have better visibility and more informal conversations with our users. And Help Scout didn't do chat at the time and we were tired of trying to combine two things into one. And Intercom solved that for us. And I remember we were really happy about that switch. Worked really well, we were happy for years. But then our needs changed back. Now we can't handle the strain of at our current level of customers, all of them chatting to us when we haven't scaled our team. It hasn't been linear with the number of people we have on our team versus the number of customers we have. So it makes sense that we've gone back.
Starr:
I feel like we're kind of like a ... When we switched away we were maybe an 18 year old. We're like, "Whatever, old man. I don't need you and your email. That's for old people. I got my new chats systems. What cool people are doing." And then we go, we live some life and we get beaten down and we see some reality. And then we come back and we just quietly start using email again. And then the old man is just ... He looks and he knows, he notices, but he doesn't say anything because he doesn't have to.
Ben:
So you're saying that we're now they ultra mature 24 year old?
Starr:
Yeah. Yeah, so we're ready to maybe start looking for a life partner, maybe start looking for some houses, some stable careers, I don't know.
Ben:
In our next episode-
Starr:
Wait, what am I talking about? 24's still adolescence.
Josh:
I was like, "It's probably six years out for the 401k," but-
Starr:
I didn't have a 401k until I was a ... When did we start our 401k? 35? I don't know, I felt super guilty talking to my accountant about it when she asked. I really liked what you said, Josh, about adding some formality back to the process. Formality means that, I don't know. Formality I feel like is all about expectations. It's like I'm going to treat you in this way that you expected to be treated. And then you know how. You know what's coming so you can prepare for it, and it's just going to be more efficient. Right? It's like a protocol in computers. Our help support protocol has been, just send us some data and we'll figure out what the protocol is on the fly every time.
Josh:
Our old protocol was like UDP. Oh I know Ben will appreciate that one.
Starr:
Except you are always guaranteed to get a response back.
Josh:
Oh that's right. That's a good-
Starr:
Don't go saying that, Josh. That's my best networking joke I've ever made.
Josh:
That was really good.
Ben:
That reminds me of my favorite joke. I would tell you an UDP joke but you might not get it.
Starr:
Oh, boom.
Ben:
Love it.
Starr:
Boom. So what's next? What's the next experiments? What's on deck?
Josh:
We've got the clear expectations. We have office hours now, which we kind of had before, but I think it's a lot more agreed upon and clear. And I think 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Pacific is our defined support window where we're here active on it. If you sent an email after that, we actually have a response that goes out that says, "We might reply." We still try to offer the same high level of support that we always have. It's just we try to do it in a way that isn't killing us. So yeah, so we might say, "We'll get back to you in the morning or the next business day or whatever."
Josh:
But when we do, it's going to be the most kick ass customer support that you've ever had by a real developer who understands you. We can get the best of both worlds there. As for what's next, is just continuing to iterate on this experimental approach to automation and documentation for support. So I want to figure out how to make our support even better and make it even less dependent on the silo, the information silos that we were talking about earlier. So that involves actually looking at the customer support that we're doing on a regular basis and then actually making improvements gradually to issues as they come up, or coming up with, like we said, self-service type solutions, making our documentation more clear.
Josh:
I might like to try Help Scout's support beacon actually has an answers feature where it lets you put documentation into the widget and it'll surface that information before someone would actually contact you. So we might be able to actually surface some of the most common answers or troubleshooting guides even, up front. Things like that. Basically like trying to figure out how to make support something that anyone in the company can come into for a day or a week or something and do as a job versus having to route everything to the right person basically.
Starr:
That sounds really useful. So before we go, can I just throw out one out of the box lateral thinking idea at you? I think this could revolutionize our support. So you know how most of our support comes from people just getting set up in the products, for people who aren't sort of long time customers? So we make Honeybadger a invitation only product. We make it exclusive. It's like a country club. So we only invite people we know are super competent and won't throw us any support tickets.
Josh:
That sounds like a home run. We'll make it an experiment though, so in case it doesn't work out, we can always just revert it.
Starr:
I don't know. I think that you just can't put a value on exclusivity and on luxury Josh. The feeling that you get from knowing that just not anybody can sign up for the error tracker that you use.
Josh:
So we're not selling an error tracker anymore, we're selling a feeling of exclusivity.
Starr:
Yeah, maybe we could get PDiddy or something to become a limited partner in the business.
Ben:
See, I don't know that that's really on brand for the Honeybadger. Maybe if our mascot was a giraffe, that would be more exclusive feeling. I don't know. Honeybadgers, exclusivity, it just doesn't feel-
Josh:
Honeybadgers are breaking out.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
You know, right?
Ben:
They're more democracy, and like, yeah. Everyone gets a piece of this pie, right?
Josh:
Everyone gets a piece of the honeycomb. Except no, just-
Starr:
The honey badger came from a rough neighborhood, and you're going to hold that over him his whole life. He has worked and clawed his way out of that situation, Josh.
Josh:
And you know he's not sharing that honeycomb either.
Starr:
All right. I think this one is going off the rails. So now we need to ... I think we better wrap it up. Yeah, if you enjoyed this episode of Founder Quest, go on your podcast thing and vote it up. Give us a positive review and everything. And we will check y'all next week. Bye.
Announcer:
FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
Season Two of FounderQuest is upon you! The guys discuss what they did while on summer break, releasing breadcrumbs on Honeybadger and why they help when debugging, launching the new blog, Amazon RDS, and Airwolf!
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Full Transcription:
Josh: We can't all be book-learned like you star.
Starr: Yeah, I'm book smart.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: You guys are just the street smart ones.
Josh: We just read what's ever on the front page of Amazon.
Starr: No, y'all know how the streets work, you know how to get stuff done, you know, outside of formal channels if you know what I mean?
Announcer: Never forget that you have the tools to build a life on your terms. Forget the haters. This is Founder Quest.
Starr: We were going to talk about I mean we've been gone for a couple of weeks, several weeks, and I think we're just going to talk about what we're going to do. I've decided, we shouldn't say that we had a vacation because that's not the appropriate...
Josh: How I had multiple vacations and I did some work.
Starr: No, hush, hush, hush.
Josh: Okay.
Starr: I think we shouldn't call it a vacation. I think we should say that this is season two of Founder Quest.
Josh: Oh, I see where you're going. Okay, so season two go.
Starr: Yeah, nobody says like serial had a vacation.
Josh: Right.
Starr: There just on, you know, they had a new season.
Josh: So are we going to be a serial podcast now?
Starr: Well, we come serially so yeah sure.
Josh: Okay, cool.
Starr: Yeah, sure, it's just whenever we want to go on vacation we'll just say there's a new season.
Josh: Nice.
Starr: so people have to say tuned.
Ben: I can't wait for season three.
Starr: I hope we don't get canceled. That would suck.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: So how were your vacations, Josh?
Starr: Yeah. How many vacations did you take?
Josh: I think I took two. The first one was a kind of a, I mean I was planning to take some time off, but it was not as planned as this last one. Yeah, in August I took a couple of weeks off just to kind of recuperate and just connect and stuff. This last week, I just got back from visiting my kids grandparents, my parents in Arizona. That was a fine. It wasn't, I don't know, it was still a lot of work because the kids. Taking two little toddlers on an airplane that was the first time we'd done that. Yeah, it was fine. Got some sun, they have a pool. We spent a lot of time by the pool.
Ben: Nice.
Starr: I see a little bit of a thousand-yardstare in your eyes.
Josh: Yeah, I think.
Starr: The children on the airplane thing.
Ben: Oh, Starr you did that too, right? You just got back?
Starr: Yeah, I got back from also a grandparent vacation, but this time the grandparents, my partner's parents were like, Hey, we've got this timeshare in Mexico in Puerto Vallarta and so you should come down and I've got to tell you, boys. I was skeptical because it seemed like we were doing all the work right because normally like paying for accommodations is not the most daunting part of an international vacation with a three-year-old. I was skeptical, but it turned out to be super nice and relaxing because they have the timeshare they have, it was very nice. It was a sort of like an all-inclusive resort. They had this giant like a four-bedroom suite with balconies and a hot tub on a balcony and like I got to sit during the day for several hours for multiple days in a row and just like read by myself. I haven't gotten to do this unless I just like skip work and do it or something.
Josh: That's what I did by the way.
Starr: It's not the same. Right, because you feel like you need to get back. Yeah, it was just great. I mean it wasn't a cultural trip. I lived in Mexico for a year. I feel like I have a good appreciation of the Mexican people, country and culture already. A little bit of a resort vacation. It was kind of welcome I think.
Josh: I also got to spend some time reading by the pool while the kids were napping and that was very nice. What about you Ben?
Ben: I did not take any vacations with toddlers, but I did drop off my older son at college. He just started college this fall. That was a pretty wild experience. Let me tell ya. And I got some house work done, like had contractors doing work on my house, so I'm flat broke now because between college and, Oh and then my car broke down. I had to replace a bunch of stuff on it.
Josh: Oh man.
Ben: One here actually another, it's been, it's been crazy, but you know, it was a good Summer I got to relax a bit and yeah, I didn't go anywhere. I didn't do anything but read some books and you know, I hit the trail with my bike several times, which is nice. We had a good summer here in Kirkland. So yeah, checking out of work at, at lunch time and going riding is a good thing.
Josh: You're going to take some time off later this year?
Ben: Yeah. And go weeks. I'll be heading to visit. My parents haven't seen him at their house in quite a while, so that'll be fun.
Starr: Yeah, that's great. That's like a big life milestone when you think about it. It's a little bit of a permanent vacation.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: You know, it's like they're out for good, you know, I mean, until they, you know, decided to become an artist and then come back because you know art, the only pay much. You got a couple of years.
Ben: It's interesting, the house is definitely quieter, that's for sure.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: You know, kids these days. He texts his mom regularly and you know, when I went off to college it was, I never talked to my parents because I couldn't afford to call them cause all long-distance phone calls and there are no emails.
Josh: That's right, yeah.
Ben: It was like to write them a letter.
Josh: Go down to the telegraph, go down to the telegraph station.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: So it's a, it's a little different these days than there was back in my day. But it's, it's still fun and you know, he's still in the dorm and doing all the college stuff, so that's cool.
Starr: That's good, I've got a plan for IDA too, to pay for college and that's just like have her, you know, join the circus instead I've got a friend, Bernie. I think he might be able to get her an in, a little foot in the door.
Josh: Yeah. Well I think, I think connections are really important in getting your kids into college these days. I hear. So it's good to have those.
Starr: It's not meritocracy people. I'm sorry to break this to you. The world is not a meritocracy.
Ben: Yeah. Only chumps like me actually pay for college.
Josh: Well you know what I did, I, I've been saving for my kid's college since before both of them was born. That's just what I do. I figure I'll just, I'll save a certain amount and if it goes to college, great. If it goes to some other kind of education, you know it doesn't have to be college and hopefully, it's not, to be honest. We'll see.
Ben: Worst case scenario you get a pool.
Starr: We're going to be one of those micro people who to be like micro and feeling like you don't need to go to college.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Or Pre-school it's okay. So Josh like you came back and like immediately were interviewed like by some pretty like serious famous podcasters, right?
Josh: I know, Yeah, I'm a minor celebrity now. I'm pretty sure, cause I was on indie hackers. I interviewed with indie hackers a couple of weeks ago. I think he came out last week, last Monday and it was a lot of fun. Me and Courtland, Courtland Allen is the host there and he's a great interviewer. We had a lot of fun just kind of going through the Honeybadger story,
Starr: Refresh my memory. I think they're the people who always sort of get, they're always sort of back when I read hacker news. Before I realized it was a trash fire. They're always getting sort of featured on hacker news and stuff because it's like, you know, learn about someone's a small product team and they may make this much money now and blah blah blah. So that like that's the sort of thing it is, right?
Josh: Yeah. It's like a podcast for honestly, it's a, you know, a lot of pretty, pretty similar to our audience with basically like Bootstrappers, I think they lean heavily towards them because of the hacker part, you know, it developed Bootstrap developers that are trying to do their own thing. Yeah, that's right where we fall in a lot of their other interview, like all the other people on the podcast or fall into similar space like us, I think.
Ben: Yeah, listen to that. It was good. You did a good job on that.
Josh: Thanks, yeah, I don't know. I'm always, you're always like, you don't know how it's how it goes. Like right after you, I always think the worst and I'm like, you know, review every thing I said in my head. Yeah, I think it turned out turned out pretty good.
Starr: Oh yeah, when we started this one. This is like I said, I remember Josh that you were always like, Oh I was so dumb sounding and you know I was editing them and I was like, no, you didn't sound dumb. You sounded pretty smart. It's the same thing. I had the same thoughts and I would go into the editing process and see how I sound, I was so off the rails scattered. Then I listened to it and it's like, no. I say I'm pretty sure I knew what I was doing.
Josh: The process of recording this podcast has helped a lot just to make me a little more comfortable sitting down and talking. I actually enjoy it now.
Starr: You guys haven't necessarily had this experience sitting down and like listening to your own voice every week for like an hour or so. It's really sort of enlightening in a strange way. I can't really put words to it. It's just like, Oh.
Josh: Mmhmm.
Starr: it's like, it's like you learned kind of what you really sound like as opposed to what you always sort of imagined. You sound like in your head, it gives you a little bit of perspective.
Josh: I know a number of people who podcast and just won't listen to their episodes. They just, you know, record and ship it in and it's gone.
Starr: They're missing out on a wonderful growth opportunity.
Josh: I was not sure if I was going to do that or if I should listen and I ended up listening to them. Now I think yeah, like you said, listening does help you kind of a perfect your cadence and you know, the um's and AH'S and stuff. I like to think I'm getting a little bit better at dropping those. As I say like five of them.
Starr: It's all right. I mean you're better now. Not perfect, right?
Josh: Yeah, every little bit is an improvement.
Starr: Yeah, when we first started, I had a real problem because I was so used to like having a complete thought-form before I started talking. It turns out like on radio or podcasts, you kind of just have to start talking and trust in the universe to give you something to say, because otherwise it's just going to, yeah, it's just going to be so stilted and, and slow and it takes forever to edit together.
Josh: I think that in The Office, Michael Scott's, that was Michael Scott's formula for telling jokes, I think it is just like start a train of thought.
Starr: Just start talking.
Josh: Then hope it turns out, yeah.
Starr: Wait, I haven't seen the American office. Which one is Michael Scott?
Josh: He's Steve Carell's character the main one. Yeah, the main one. The boss.
Starr: You're comparing me to a satirical character Josh. Yeah, okay sure.
Josh: Yeah. I mean you're a total Michael Scott. Just a shoo-in.
Starr: It's okay. I love you too. So let's see, what have we been up to like with the product and stuff? I mean, we haven't been all just completely on vacation. We've been like, we shipped a major feature like breadcrumbs. Did we talk about this in an earlier podcast?
Starr: I don't think so. We talked about CSPs. I think breadcrumbs was still in stealth mode, so we hadn't discussed it.
Starr: Oh god.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Every time people say self mode know it. I just think of like Knight Rider and it just sounds so cool. I want everything to be on self mode. So what are breadcrumbs? Can somebody explain breadcrumbs to me?
Ben: Oh, sorry. I got kind of distracted by the whole Kight Rider thing. I was thinking about Airwolf and how cool that show was.
Starr: It's okay. We're all distracted by night rider. I mean it had the Hoff, right? I've never rider but no.
Ben: It's like Knight rider but a helicopter instead of a car?
Starr: Oh, okay.
Josh: It was called Air Wolf?
Ben: yeah.
Josh: Wow.
Ben: It's sweet. Check it out.
Starr: Oh man. The eighties, the eighties were very Weird.
Ben: All right so breadcrumbs.
Josh: where they weirder than now?
Starr: The breadcrumbs, yeah.
Ben: Yeah, so breadcrumbs the feature allows you to track the things that happened and your application right before an error happened. Maybe a user clicked on a certain thing or certain queries got to run or whatever. So it allows you to some additional context. We already had the notion of contexts. When you're reporting an error you can report things like the user ID or maybe an order ID or whatever was like in flight at the time that error happened. Breadcrumbs extends that a bit and say, okay you can stuff a bunch of activities that happen that were leading up to the event and to this basis basically in a ray they get sent to us. You can say, Oh well they encounter this page or they ran this query or whatever. And that helps set the scene for how that air could have happened. It's pretty handy information.
Starr: Can I tell you of a place where I could have used breadcrumbs like sort of recently, but they were just not quite, you know, shipped and, and ready. We use Honeybadger internally. You know, as you guys know to keep track of our internal errors, cause we do have a couple. I was going and one of my morning routine things is I go and check the errors specifically for like the front end Java script stuff because that's the stuff I am most likely to break. And I noticed there was this weird specific class of error where our front end code, we full confession, we use jQuery still because it's just awesome when we built the app. Yeah, you're right. You know what? I should own this. We love it. We're never getting rid of it. No, we're using jQuery and for some reason jQuery was interpreting Ajax requests response as Javascript.
Starr: Then there was, it was saying there was a syntax error in the Javascript and in case you'd never had this happen to you before. This is one of those JavaScript errors that give you no information other than like something bad happened and it's just like syntax errors like crate what, where, what's the syntax error, please tell me. So I had to go and sort of do a little custom instrumentation to log every data request that happened in the application and still get to figure out which one was returning. I could figure out which one happens just before the error to figure out to see like why it was returning.
Ben: Mmhhmm.
Starr: To be honest, we don't really have a lot of like Ajax responses. It should be returned in JavaScript. We have a couple, which is another great technique and yeah, breadcrumbs would've been really nice because then it would've let us, it would have, let me just see sort of maybe automatically that, well, you know, here's all the responses we got and I wouldn't have had to look at that manually.
Starr: It turns out, you only know the punchline. It turns out that jQuery, because it's so awesome and so user friendly, unless you tell it exactly what type of response to expect from an Ajax call, it will do its best to figure it out for you. For some reason our engine X error pages that you get when you know you're throttled or whatever. For some reason it was interpreting those as Java script that it needed to execute even though there's not. I checked the headers, I checked the content, there was nothing in it that looks like Java script. I have no idea why.
Josh: I like a dollar sign in the, in the body.
Starr: Oh there may be cause I'm all about the Benjamins.
New Speaker: If there's a dollar sign. It's jQuery.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Damn, Hmmm. Anyway, that would've been useful.
Josh: That's exactly the use case for breadcrumbs. Yeah and we launched them so far we've launched them up for Ruby and Elixir. I'm currently working on the JavaScript limitation. Pretty soon you won't have to hack all of that networking code together to see what's happening.
Starr: Well, you know, what am I going to do when like Honeybadger just does everything for me? This is a problem they're going to have.
Josh: Yeah, just a vacation and well yeah, record seasons-
Starr: More vacations?
Josh: of Founder Quests.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: One other thing that we've been doing is or I've been doing mostly is revamping the blog. If you dear listeners, go and look our blog Honeybagder.io/blog. You'll see a brand new spiffy design.
Josh: Looks amazing.
Starr: It looks amazing. Yeah, no lie, it does. That's one of the things I've been working on because we're going to have a big new effort, a big new push around blogging. It's interesting because the genesis of this is actually kind of interesting because one of the things I really like to do is occasionally download a whole just ton of .csvs full of data around all aspects of our business and then just sort of like disappear for a couple of weeks and crunch it and, and try and figure out what it means.
Starr: I noticed that in sort of the times when we happen to be the most active sort of blogging, we saw some results from that in terms of revenue and all that. They are the type of results though that are really kind of hard to see like in the moment. I remember checking stuff and checking stats like in the moment when we are blogging after six months or a year. It was pretty obvious. So yeah, so my big new push is blogging and we got so new blog design is sort of the first step because we want the single look great and we want it to look attractive to people. You know, the second step, which I'm working on now is finding authors because I like to write and you know, I plan on writing, but keeping up the level and the pace of blog posts that we really need.
Starr: I did it once and it wasn't sustainable.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: It was just stressful and I ran out of things I knew about to write.
Josh: you blogged a lot Star.
Starr: Yeah I was like doing, you were like a blogging machine. I was doing like a technical blog post every day. It was your full time job. So now I'm trying to maybe recreate sort of the success that we had in that by in a way where that is sort of more like a system, more like a business should be right. Where we sort of hire people to do some work and we do some of it in house. And so it's kind of this big new thing. I'm excited about it and we'll see how it goes.
Josh: Tell me about like the quality of the blog posts and the authors that you're looking for. Cause I don't know, maybe we have some listeners who would be interested in writing us?
Starr: That's a great idea!
Josh: I mean we are on this podcast here where developers listen.
Starr: Ya so, I've been working on a sort of author recruitment document, which I shared with you guys yesterday and it includes a lot of this. I guess I'll publish that and we'll probably link it in the show notes and everything. Basically what we're looking for, the type of content we're looking for and that we've had success with in the past sort of has to do with teaching people sort of fundamentals and teaching people how things work on a level deeper than a lot of tutorials usually go because there's so much content on the web. It's just about how like how do I build a form? How do I make a to do app in Angular? Does Angular still exist? I don't know.
Josh: I'm pretty sure it does.
Starr: There's this, a lot of this very sort of tactical content, this like how to do a specific thing that's useful and everything. But well I found personally, and I think how this relates to the mission of Honeybadger as a company is we help people deal with errors and in their systems and fix their errors. One of the things I found to be really useful is to have a sort of very broad knowledge of things and to try and sort of understand how systems work. A lot of times the thing that's causing your error is a misunderstanding of something sort of fundamental to the system. It's a leaky abstraction where like the operating system and the way it works is somehow influencing the way your code needs to work and your code didn't take that into account.
Starr: I think the blog is all about just sort of providing people that context and providing this sort of rich learning experience that teaches people things that they're going to stick with them like for a year or two. It's not just something that's going to they're going to sort of forget in or it's going to expire because like a new version of node came out in three weeks. That's the sort of thing we're looking for and we're looking to find people who we can work with on a sort of a longterm basis to do lots of articles. We're going to pay very well compared to most places that pay for blog posts. We're going to start at, you know.
Josh: The price is free right? Like, we're, we're just-
Starr: Oh yeah, you're doing it for free.
Josh: I mean you get the privilege of guest posting on the Honeybadger blog. That's, I mean that's, that's exposure right there.
Starr: Exposure is the ultimate currency. That's right. So no, we're going to pay him money. I talked with Peter Cooper about this, he said this is a very sort of generous or of starting rate. We're going to start at $500 for sort of average article, whatever that means. We're still kind of working it out, you know, more complex stuff we'll pay more for or we're not interested in nickel and dimeing people and we're interested in having sort of excellent content that really helps people. I don't know if you're interested in working with us on that, working with me specifically, then yeah, get in touch. We will link to that on the show notes in Twitter and whatever.
Josh: Yeah, I can't wait.
Starr: What else is going on, like?
Ben: So a lot of what I do is not visible to our customers. A lot of the work that I do is in the background. It's, you know, as long as you don't notice any problems that I'm doing my job, right? I like what star was saying about how we're looking for people to write content that's not about the tactical, here's how you do with thing, but more about here's how you understand stuff. In contrast, like when I write for our blog, I typically write about and here's how to do the thing because I'm doing this kind of thing in the background. Oh, this is kind of cool to share, right? I love writing about that kind of stuff.
Josh: Mmhmm
Ben: I think I'll continue doing that.
Josh: Yeah, which is totally useful as well.
Ben: It's fun I like learning stuff. Then, you know, one of the, to me, I think one of the things is whenever you learn something, it's a good time to write about it because as you teach other people, you learn it better and you start to poke holes in your and your own experience and you see where you may have messed something up.
Ben: Recently, I've spent the past a week or two redoing our internal Honeybadger instance. So sorry I mentioned that you know we had used honey Badger to track honey Badger. Our instance was a little out of date because we've been making some significant changes over the past year. We switched from Solar to Elastic Search. We started using Lambda a lot more. There are a bunch of like moving parts to our production Honeybadger instance that hadn't quite made it to our internal Honeybadger instance. In the past week or two, I've replaced our internal Honeybadger instance with a brand new stack. While I was in there I thought, Hey, why don't I automate all this so you know, while I'm doing some work, let me do some extra work that no one's going to notice. I built an entire like Terraform infrastructure that boots up a new region for us. It creates the VPC.
Josh: Mmhmm
Ben: It creates all the security groups, the elastic search cluster, the RDS instance, the EC2 instance. Gosh, you just run, apply and all of a sudden we have buckets and Lambdas and everything. It's pretty cool.
Josh: I don't know Ben, that sounds like a huge waste of time. Like, I don't see how that could ever be useful to be honest. I mean, yeah, that's awesome.
Starr: Can I ask you a question that may betray my ignorance or maybe just my memory? Are we using RDS for like our main Postgres?
Ben: For our production, since we are not, we are a self-hosting Postgres. We use Petroni name to have automated fail-over and that's been working like a champ.
Starr: Okay. So the way that you work so often Ben is you sort of slide things in and so I know we talked about using RDS for our main Postgres and so I was just like did this just to use like do this just nonchalantly?
Ben: I placed everything in Cassandra.
Josh: That's my favorite like yeah, just I come back and there's Casandra like everything is running, out of cassandra, I'm like-
Josh: Well, it sounds like this RDS chain, like maybe this is this kind of like a good test environment for trying out these ideas and then potentially we could implement those changes like go the other direction and roll that out in production?
Starr: I feel like I should explain that RDS is Amazons managed database hosting options that you would use instead of like running your server and running your own Postgres on top of it.
Ben: What I did is I created this in a separate AWS account. I created a new account so that it would be just, you know, from scratch and there won't be any conflicts with our production environment or our testing environment and yeah, the goal was to be able to just run Terraform and you could get a full-stack and you could do all kinds of experiments with it, right? We can, and you name it, you can try it out or even just the like one of us wants to have that full environment. That's not our laptop, right? You could have that too, they could do things, you know, test a new version of Postgres. For example, like it's running this internal instance is running Postgres 11 and we're still on 9.6 In our production environment. Yeah, I get to test that.
Ben: I'm glad you mentioned that because I tested the new partitioning scheme and Postgres has I think Postgres 10 introduced this and post wrestle that and made it even better. 9.6 That we're using in production. We use the PC department, it manages our petitions for us.
Ben: Basically, what a partition is Starr, I know you'll want like to explain this, a partition splits up your big database table into smaller tables so you can more effectively manage the data that's in there. You can have queries against smaller tables because it's partitioned say by day or by month.
Ben: In older versions of Postgres that was good as it didn't have native partitioning, you had to use triggers. An insert would happen to a parent table and the trigger would say, Oh Nope, don't put it in the parent table. Put it in one of the child tables. The new partitioning that was introduced in version 10 and made better in version 11 now has that built into post-grads so you don't have to use triggers that understands how you can split a table and send multiple child tables. And so just the past couple of days, it did that in our, in our new internal environment. Now it's using the native Postgres partitioning rather than part man. Stuff like that will eventually roll back into our production environment after being tested in this stand a lone environment. Yeah, that was fun!
Starr: Nice! Good work! Yeah, I think Founder Quest we are sort of on track for, you know, being back. I think we're back. Are we back?
Josh: We're back.
Starr: Okay, Well now when you go to MicroComf next here, everybody can come up to you and say, I know what you did last summer. I've been saving that one out this whole time.
Josh: Well done.
Starr: I've just been dying, I've been waiting for my spot. All right, well should we, should we wrap this one up or what?
Ben: You know it's not happening in Vegas next year?
Josh: That's right.
Starr: Oh, I know. Yeah. What's up with that? It's like I didn't want it to in Vegas, but I didn't want it to be like a layover plane ride away. I'm just going to bitch about whatever happens,
Ben: You know, we went to Minneapolis for Rails Conf. It was really nice. Yes, you can get a direct flight there.
Ben: So yeah.
Starr: Oh, you can? Okay. I didn't know that. I think I may have missed a direct flight last time I went there, but Oh wait I went to Madison not Minneapolis. Oh my God. The Midwesterners are just going to be throwing cheese at me.
Starr: All right, well it was great talking with you guys and yeah, if you're ready to wrap it up, I think we can do that.
Josh: Yeah,
Starr: Alright thanks bye.
Josh: Bye
Announcer: FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it available at Honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? You can go do Founderquestpodcast.com that's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week!
The guys are taking a few weeks off from podcasting to enjoy the fleeting Pacific northwest summer. They'll be back in late August or early September, fully rested and ready with hot takes to warm you as summer turns to fall.
The guys talk about their experiences with offers to acquire Honeybadger and go over some common structures of acquisition deals (hint - most don’t involve walking a wheelbarrow of money out of your office and never returning). They also chat about things that you should think about if you are presented with an offer to sell your company.
Links:
GitHub
Dependabot
Pull Panda
Gemnasium
Tableau
SalesForce
Tropical MBA, Before the Exit
MicroConf
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Starr: 00:01 It's happening in me. I'm going to remember you silver lady, so don't you worry.
Josh: 00:08 You'll find her some day.
Announcer: 00:10 Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned in to FounderQuest.
Starr: 00:21 Somebody tweeted a while back and somebody referenced us and said that we should talk about this. You know, you should run your company like you're going to sell it. So then I thought, "Well maybe we could talk about sort of acquisitions in general, maybe weave it back and forth."
Starr: 00:33 So Honeybadger has had a couple of fairly serious acquisition talks, none ongoing right now, none that panned out obviously. We're not going to name names because I think it might be illegal for us to because we signed stuff. The first one was with a private equity firm that specialized in sort of smaller companies and taking these companies built by developers and then bringing in business people and figure out how to grow them. And then we had another acquisition talk with a pretty well known company in the developer space, and that would have been kind of a strategic thing because they were kind of trying to bring something to the market that was very similar to what we did. And sort of both of those eventually fell through because we just couldn't really come to terms.
Starr: 01:15 But I think we learned a lot while we were pursuing these because starting out I knew about acquisitions, like what pretty much I imagine anybody knows about acquisitions. It's like, "Okay, you sell a company, you make a ton of money, and that's like your happy ending." But it's really a lot more complex than that. Unless you happen to win the lottery, it's not necessarily like this huge, "You're going to be rich and set for the rest of your life event."
Starr: 01:40 Yeah, so I don't know. What do you guys think?
Ben: 01:44 I think that last statement is key. Our business has grown steadily, but not exponentially right? So, if you're sitting on a rocket ship you could probably have one of those acquisition events where you're set for the rest of your life because they're buying based on the future value of the company. They are not just based on what you've done so far, they are based on what they think you could do with them, combined with you. If you have had this exponential growth event, or if you can show that happening with their added resources to yours, then you could probably pull that off. But in our case, that wasn't really the scenario, right? We were growing steadily, the acquirers were interested in us because they knew that it was a reasonable business that could continue to grow, but not that it was expecting like this phenomenal growth. Yeah, so in our case those numbers weren't going to be crazy high numbers, but they were still nice numbers.
Starr: 02:47 I feel like this is kind of a theme in our podcast, in that the way that most people probably think about acquisitions is focused on the VC model of startups and fundings and acquisitions. In a lot of our episodes we're like, "Okay, this is the VC way of doing things," but that's not like the way for everybody. The sort of VC acquisition model that everybody has in their head is, "Okay, you start this company. Your company has a ton of growth and it targets some market that is adjacent to a big, big company. And that big, big company doesn't have their eye on this sort of little market. Maybe they don't realize how much opportunity is there, but then this little plucky startup comes and exploits that, gets crazy growth, and now you have this little company who is kind of edging in on the territory of a bigger company. And so the big company buys the little company in order to get access to that market." I think that's the most common approach. I mean sometimes the bigger company buys you because you've developed some crazy new technology that they couldn't develop on their own.
Starr: 04:04 I think those are the two situations in which you have this really big possible monetary outcome. I mean just listening to stories like that, you kind of see that while in order to that you have to have this crazy amount of growth, to the point where a big, big company worth a billion dollars or more... Actually when I was sort of getting to know about investing, I learned that a company worth a billion dollars is a relatively small company for a public company. So you have to get the attention of one of these sort of bigger companies. And you're not really going to do that unless you have a lot of growth or you have a whole bunch of customers that they really want access to. You've got to have something that they want. And you know we're just not really on that train, right?
Ben: 04:56 Not at that scale. I think one thing to keep in mind is the motivation for the acquirer is to, like you said bring in some new technology, or bring in this innovative team, or have access to a market that you have found a way to have access to. And backing up from that, why do they care about these things? Because they want to increase their own revenue. They want to move the needle on their own business. So if you're talking to a hundred billion dollar company and your revenues are in the ten million dollar range, right well okay, that's interesting, but that's not really going to move the needle for that hundred billion dollar company. They are looking for much bigger things.
Starr: 05:37 Unless they can leverage something that you have to make a lot more money than you are currently making. Right, because I don't think Microsoft really cares about how much money Github was bringing in. I mean I'm sure they do to some degree. Microsoft bought Github because they want to own open source.
Ben: 05:58 They want access to that market. Those developers who have a goodwill feeling towards Github. So in our case, we don't have this huge market that we've tapped into. We have a respectably sized market and we don't have this rocket ship growth. So, we're not going to be having necessarily Microsoft come knocking on the door saying, "Hey we want to throw hundreds of millions of dollars in your lap."
Josh: 06:24 Speaking of Github, Github has made a number of acquisitions recently. All seeming to relate to Github related tools that people have built to do specific things that Github didn't do.
Starr: 06:37 I've noticed that, who have they bought?
Josh: 06:39 They bought Dependabot, which is a automated dependency service. So like if you've got outdated NPM, if your Node packages are outdated or something in your project, it will monitor that and then it will actually send pull requests to update your dependencies. We use it at Honeybadger and it's pretty cool.
Josh: 07:00 So they pulled that in and they are actually rolled into Github, so Github is now doing that as a feature of the core platform. And then the other one was Pool Reminders.
Ben: 07:15 It started just as Pool Reminders, but they've actually added a few more things so now I think it's called Pool Panda.
Josh: 07:21 Yeah, and so they did the same thing recently. They just announced that they were being acquired by Github. But it seems like Github is a round of consolidation for some of those features and instead of building they are just bringing those apps in.
Starr: 07:36 How much money do you think they would pay for something like that?
Ben: 07:39 Whatever it took the founders the join the company. Because in that case for Pool Panda, that was a very small team. They are probably a similar size to us. So probably the two factors that happen a lot in these smaller acquisitions, I guess is sometimes called an acquihire. Where if their pre revenue, or the revenue is very small they say, "Okay, well there's no real evaluation based on how much money you're bringing in because that's not going to make a difference to the acquiring company but we want your team badly enough that we're willing to pay a premium over market rates for hiring you." So basically it's a super big hiring bonus, an acquihire.
Ben: 08:18 And as you add more revenue though, and I have no idea where Pool Panda is on revenue, but as you get into the millions of revenue or maybe even hundreds of thousands, that's worth something to a certain size of acquirer. And so then the money is probably based on the multiple of the revenue, more than getting a team, maybe it's a combination of the two.
Starr: 08:41 Because if Github really wanted to add dependence checking, they could just build that themselves and release it for free and that would make Dependabot just completely go out of business.
Ben: 08:54 Which they did Gymnasium, right? So Github built the security thing a couple of years and basically took the rug out from under Gymnasium.
Starr: 09:04 Yeah, so they must have done some sort of calculation where it's just like, "You know, hiring these people is worth something to us, and sort of bringing in this existing code base is just worth it."
Starr: 09:15 To have it.
Starr: 09:15 It's sort of almost like a convenience thing where they-
Josh: 09:18 You've gotta build up like an internal team if you're going to build that feature, you know you're going to like create an internal team and have them go and they are going to explore that domain and build it. And if you can just hire someone that's already done that and pull it in and they basically become that team moving forward.
Ben: 09:34 It saves time.
Josh: 09:37 It's not that they couldn't do it the other way, but it's just like you said convenient.
Starr: 09:41 It sort of illustrates the two different scales of acquisitions. You have the scale of acquisition where it's like, Microsoft buys Github for what, like a billion dollars or something? And then all of these smaller players are getting bought out for, I would surprised if it's over ten million dollars? Probably a couple million. Most acquihires are-
Ben: 10:03 Like a million dollar per head or something [crosstalk 00:10:05]-
Josh: 10:05 The multiples are lower on acquihires, right?
Starr: 10:07 I mean with acquihires, it doesn't even necessarily have to be a multiple I don't think. So when we talk about multiples, let's explain this. We are talking about multiples of revenue, right? So that seems to be a pretty normal way of thinking about value for tech companies that are being sold and it's little different than if you were buying a dry cleaner's. If you were buying a dry cleaner's or some very stodgy business, probably what you would do is you would go through the books very carefully, you'd figure out how much profit they are making, and then you would buy it based on some sort of multiple on profit. But with tech companies, it's also often pretty normal to buy based off of a multiple of revenue. The multiple that you're going to get paid is gonna depend on why they are buying you, right? So if they are buying for the cash flow that your company generates, then they are going to pay a certain amount. If they are buying you based on the fact that they think take your business and make it like a hundred times bigger, then you are get a much higher multiple.
Starr: 11:11 So what's like on the low end of-
Ben: 11:15 So a starting point that often comes up in our world is 36 times that monthly revenue. Or the free cash flow I guess, take out whatever the founder is being paid. Because presumably, assuming someone takes over the whole business, that founder goes away happily into the sunset with their cash. So you can back that money out. But basically the starting point to talks it typically around 36 times that monthly number.
Starr: 11:46 Okay, so three times yearly revenue. And that's low end right?
Ben: 11:52 Yeah, there are a bunch of factors, again the growth and so on.
Starr: 11:55 Github was probably paid much more than that.
Ben: 11:59 Like you said there are other factors like growth and market size and so on.
Josh: 12:03 I feel like lately I've heard people say that's pretty low low. Like for if you're going to go sell your company, don't sell it for 3x. I mean do the-
Starr: 12:14 That's just if you really want to sell it.
Starr: 12:16 If you want out to sell it for 3x, but like yeah.
Ben: 12:20 Yeah, I've heard some people recently talking about 5x is a more reasonable starting point. But I think even before you get to the point of, "Well, how much am I willing to take," and you think about, "Am I willing to sell at all?" You know mentioned, Star, that we had a couple of opportunities and I remember the first one we talked about quite a bit. And when we had that first offer, because that was new to us. Like, "Oh, that's really interesting, let's spend some time really thinking about his," and we-
Starr: 12:49 Yeah, it's kind of flattering.
Ben: 12:50 Yeah, it is. It definitely feels like-
Starr: 12:51 It's like, "Oh they like, they really like us wow. Wow, we're real. We're doing it."
Ben: 12:56 I remember we spent a lot of time talking about it amongst the three of us. Like, "Oh, is this something that we really want to pursue and we met with them and it was great." But what it really came down to was, as I recall anyway, you can correct me if I'm remembering this incorrectly, but we just hadn't been at it long enough and we felt like we wanted to see if we could do it. Like if we could see if we could make this successful business and that we weren't quite willing to exit that way yet.
Josh: 13:28 And the terms, like it was kind of between an acquihire and hiring for the business. But it wouldn't have been like a walk away acquisition.
Starr: 13:42 Yeah, let's talk about this. Because this is another sort of thing people think about is you sell the company and you just kind of leave, right?
Josh: 13:51 Yeah, that doesn't happen usually.
Starr: 13:53 I think it's pretty rare to sell a company and they just hand you a pile of cash and you turn over the keys and you leave. Instead there's usually terms because they want to make sure that they are getting something that's actually valuable. They want to make sure that the business doesn't fail when you leave immediately. And so, like what are some normal terms for acquisitions for tech companies like ours?
Ben: 14:16 It's pretty standard to have the founder or founders be around for two years after an acquisition, and so a lot of the compensation that comes is tied to that two year threshold. So yes, once you've invested all of your time, two years, then you get whatever. So you get some percentage up front and then some percentage later, when you complete that term. I've seen that as short as three months, six months. But typically it's two years.
Starr: 14:48 I don't know, I've always been anxious about the thought of working somewhere for two years after selling the company because you really have to trust that everybody is working in good faith, everybody is really sort of above board. Because I'm just thinking of all of the things people could try and do in two years to try and get you to quit. It's like, "Okay, I've got to be more trusting." But that's where my mind goes, because I'm the engineer, I've got to think of the case where everything breaks.
Ben: 15:20 Yeah, totally. And that's why you know we say the 5x, the 3x, that's the starting point. Because there are all these factors like, "Okay, so what is the vesting schedule for this? If you want me to be around for two years, or four years, well then you've got to pay me more. You've got to promise more than if I just had all this cash in hand, 100 percent up front, today, and I could walk away tomorrow."
Ben: 15:45 And so those are terms that affect what that price looks like.
Starr: 15:51 And for a business like ours, I feel like if we ever do sell, we have to price in just the annoyance to go back to work for somebody else?
Ben: 16:03 Totally.
Starr: 16:04 Because if you sell your business to somebody and then you stay for two years, like you're an employee. My life is a lot more nice as a business owner than as an employee. Like just the little things, right? And I'm not saying it would be terrible to be an employee, but it would be pretty jarring I feel. It would be one thing if okay, this Honeybadger thing isn't working out, I've got to go back and get a job. Okay, that's fine, but to be in your own company and be an employee and sort of have to be like, "Yes sir, right away sir." That just feels weird to me.
Ben: 16:39 Yeah, I've talked to people who have gone through this process and who have stayed through their entire vesting schedule. And by and large, the advice that I got back was get the right acquirer. If you get the right person who is going to buy your business, then you'll be happy to work with them for that time. And you may not want to stick around one day past that cliff, that vesting schedule, but if you find the right acquirer who has the right vision that lines up with what you've been doing, then it will be an enjoyable time. Even if you aren't the boss anymore.
Starr: 17:16 Yeah, that's fair. And that's a strike against a lot of cash flow buyers maybe, because if you get acquired by a big company and they really want you to sort of do some exciting work for them and I don't know, do this big strategic thing, that's one thing. But if you acquired by somebody and they are like, "All right, we've got to cut costs now and raise prices and increase efficiency of everybody across that board," then that's going a whole different experience.
Ben: 17:48 Yeah, totally. And so you'd want to have more cash up front in that case. You'd probably want to negotiate a departure time of like one month. Like, "Okay, you want to cut costs, then you don't have to pay my salary any more. I'll just take my money and run."
Starr: 18:03 I don't know, my wife's company just got acquired. She works for Tableau. They just got acquired by Salesforce for like 15 billion dollars.
Ben: 18:10 Not too shabby.
Starr: 18:12 Yeah, it is.
Josh: 18:13 I'd take that deal for Honeybadger.
Ben: 18:15 Josh, would you sell for 15 billion dollars?
Josh: 18:18 Yeah. I'd sell for three billion even. A billion each is pretty good still.
Ben: 18:26 Yeah, that's a pretty good split. I like that.
Starr: 18:27 You know, even there Tableau is not a distress asset. Tableau was growing like crazy, they were bought by Salesforce for explicitly strategic reasons because Salesforce is trying to compete with Github in the analytics sort of business analytics market. So I mean Tableau is going to be fine, but even just seeing the amount of uncertainty and stress that sort of brings onto the employees, it's a lot. There is a lot of attention given to the monetary aspects of an acquisition, but the sort of human aspects are something that people don't really think about that much. Like didn't you say Josh one time that there was, actually I read this too, there was a book by one of the Tropical MBA guys called-
Josh: 19:15 Before the Exit? Yeah, Before the Exit.
Starr: 19:18 Is that what it's called?
Josh: 19:19 Yeah.
Starr: 19:19 Yeah. And it's a really interesting book because it's like, "Okay, you know, everybody thinks that you should be leading up to an exit. And an exit can be fine. Selling your company can be fine, but it's not 100 percent beautiful fun times all the way. So here's reasons maybe you should reconsider selling your company." And it goes through a lot of the things we've sort of talked about here, plus you know a bunch more because it's an actual book. Yeah and I think it focuses a lot on this transition, so we're seeing this thing you've built become, sort of like your baby become somebody else's baby.
Josh: 19:54 There's kind of like a grieving process that they said that most founders will go through if they sell the thing that they've built and loved and all that. And you're not guaranteed to be happy after the sale either, so it depends on a lot of factors. So even if you get that high number that you're looking for, you're not necessarily going to be happy, because then you just have a bunch of cash, but cash is a lot different than having an actual cash generating business. You still have to find something-
Starr: 20:28 A lot of people looked at their businesses for purpose and for connection to people and I can imagine having that kind of just kind of taken away from you would be difficult.
Ben: 20:37 Yeah, we were at MicroConf, and there was a presentation about how entrepreneurs look at their businesses, how they feel about their businesses. And there was like this study, they sat down these entrepreneurs and they gave them pictures of things, like a car, or a boat, or whatever, to measure their emotional response. And when they showed them a picture of their company's logo, it had the same kind of response in their brain as when they looked at pictures of their own children.
Starr: 21:09 Really?
Ben: 21:10 Yeah, because they had these probes on their brain and stuff so they measured the brain activity. And the car would be like whatever, and the plane whatever, but when they saw a picture of their baby or saw a picture of their business, it was basically the same as their baby.
Starr: 21:23 I mean it fits. Like, my daughter is basically a little Honeybadger. She's just like jumps off of everything, and climbs on everything, and oh my God, yesterday she literally punched out a window pane. I brought her in and she really wanted to be outside, playing on the construction equipment, which I let her do for a little while and then I brought her in. And she was so mad, she was like like "Ahh." And she hit the door, and it's one of those doors that's just sort of like an old fashioned door. It's all sort of single pane glass panels and she just put her fist straight through it. So She's kind of like a little Honeybadger.
Ben: 22:04 I had a friend do that in high school except instead of punching it, he kicked it. And instead of it being an old fashioned glass pane, it was a security reinforced door. So it had all that wire going through the glass and so he ended up in the hospital.
Starr: 22:19 Well she's like only three, so she's got a lot of time to train.
Josh: 22:23 To bulk up.
Starr: 22:23 And prepare before high school. I think we can get her there though.
Ben: 22:26 So maybe, one of the things you can do to prepare for that acquisition, knowing that you might be looking at your business like it's your baby, is develop a healthy sense of detachment. All parents have to go through this transition period like I'm going through right now, where their children are going to leave the nest, they are going to go, do their own thing, live their own lives. So maybe part of being an astute business founder, who is looking forward to, "Somebody I might want to sell this business," is "Okay, I have to have a healthy sense of separation between me and this business."
Josh: 23:05 Or maybe, you just have a ton of businesses and then you spread your emotional whatever across them.
Ben: 23:15 So you're saying that people have like eight kids don't mind as much when one of them leaves?
Josh: 23:21 Exactly. You just have a ton of businesses-
Starr: 23:25 I can't get behind this. I don't want to become a cold, emotionless capitalist like you guys.
Josh: 23:31 You want to have Honeybadger be like our only child. I mean don't you guys think that Honeybadger needs a friend.
Ben: 23:40 I think Honeybadger needs a little sister. We need bring a new bundle of joy into the world.
Josh: 23:47 One thing I've been thinking about is just the distressed asset thing and also we talked about how say like Github acquiring a small, bootstrap like our size, or somewhere around our size, say like Dependabot or something, do they actually care about revenue? Because with one of our talks, we ran into a weird situation where it was like we're a profitable company. We're small but profitable and we have revenue, we have customers, they didn't seem interested in that aspect of the business. So I just wonder how much do they actually care, like a company that size, how much does it actually care about the revenue versus like we said the convenience factor? Like you have something that would make our lives easier, we have a ton of money, we don't care about your relatively small annual revenues.
Starr: 24:50 I would guess they probably don't care that much. Probably a lot of these companies that get acquihired don't have much revenue to begin with.
Starr: 24:57 It seems to be just like anything else. It's like companies are bought for a reason, just like anything else you buy, you buy it to do something. You buy it for a reason and maybe that reason involves adding a cash flow asset to your portfolio, maybe it reason involves hiring some cool people and it's a reasonable price you're willing to pay. I don't know, I can't imagine Github really cared much about Dependabot's revenue. They probably cared more about its user base, maybe they had a product already working.
Ben: 25:29 Yeah, I agree. I think it's interesting in the Github case, if you compare the Dependabot and the Pool Pandas' acquisitions especially considering the rapidity in succession to Gymnasium and what happened there. Because you know, I remember sitting, I think it was Github Universe where they announced their feature that basically tanked Gymnasium's business. There was some ill will there, for sure. I don't know if Github suffered much as a result, but there were people who were like, "That's kind of stinky." I mean Apple does this all the time right, there's a phrase for it, it's called being Sherlocked because Apple built Spotlight into the operating system and then completely eliminated the need for Sherlock, which was a for sale addon that did basically the same thing. So in the Apple world, they're used to this. Apple does this periodically, where release features that then kill one of the providers in the market place. In the open source world and developer world, this hadn't happened a whole a lot. And so when basically Github Sherlocked Gymnasium, there was a little bit of like, "Oh, that's not so nice." And so I wonder if some of the motivation behind the acquisition for Dependabot and Pool Panda was good will.
Ben: 26:55 I think Microsoft is going above and beyond trying to make sure that people don't feel like Microsoft is coming in here and ruining the party. That Microsoft is playing nice. I wonder if acquisition is also like, "We want this feature." Github is like we want to build that, we want to have that Dependabot feature, we want to have that Pool Reminder feature, but let's be nice and let's acquire those teams that are building that and integrate it rather than just doing it ourselves.
Josh: 27:25 That's interesting. And also they just happen to have a ton more money to do it now. So it's like why not.
Ben: 27:33 Totally.
Josh: 27:33 If you can get the good will and it's really not that much-
Starr: 27:40 If you have company and you're thinking about getting acquired, or somebody is interested in acquiring you, the key thing you have to figure out is why. It could be several reasons, it could be they want your IT, they want to have good will with the developer community, whatever. It seems like you really have to figure that out so you can figure what they're willing to pay so you can negotiate with them because yeah, if you think that they are looking for some sort of strategic thing and really they just want an acquihire. Well you're just going to waste everybody's time because you're going to be thinking about two different prices.
Josh: 28:13 And I've had the feeling from our experiences and also just hearing some experiences from other people. I feel like some of these companies that do a lot of this acquihiring or buying distressed assets or that sort of thing, they kind of look at it like the teams really want to sell. Like they're looking for an out or something. At least I've had that feeling before. It's like they are not expecting you to be in this for the long haul or to have a profitable business that you're happy with, does that make sense?
Ben: 28:54 Well yeah, that brings up the concept of a BATNA. What's your best alternative negotiation agreement? If you have a successful business that's making a bunch of revenue and you're happy running it, well then your best alternative is keep running the business, make you happy. But if your best alternative is, "Well I've got to go file for unemployment because I'm about to go under," well then you're in kind of a weaker position.
Josh: 29:18 In which case getting a job at Microsoft, or wherever. Usually these acquiring companies, getting a job there that's a good job too. But at least for me personally, I wouldn't be looking for a job there in the first place, so that's not a pro to me.
Starr: 29:42 Honeybadger is kind of a weird spot. Companies in our spot, we're not trying to get acquired, but I feel like companies have a harder time getting acquired or it just doesn't happen as much because our revenue is too high for some sort of individual investor to just be like, "Hey," unless they are rich, to just buy us and run us. Some people, they start a web application, it makes 30,000 dollars a year, so you can sell that for 50,000 bucks or whatever to somebody and they'll run it for themselves. Our revenue is too high for that, but our revenue isn't really high enough and we're not on this rocket ship trajectory where some bigger company is going to buy us at a larger multiple, just because it doesn't really move their bottom line that much.
Starr: 30:46 That's not to say that nobody is interested in companies like this, but it's kind of like this whole topic is a little bit more complex than you might think just going into it.
Ben: 31:01 It's pretty squishy.
Josh: 31:02 We're making it kind of difficult for them by being so awesome and content.
Starr: 31:05 That's true.
Ben: 31:09 If we were desperate it would be easier.
Starr: 31:11 Yeah, they could play on our insecurities more.
Josh: 31:17 But in any case, I think that going through these talks with people has resulted in us thinking about how, back to running the business like you're going to sell it someday, it has made us think more about that. And it has resulted in some positive changes just for us. It's nice to own a business that is more automated and runs itself better because it's just healthier. You're the owner, so it's healthier for you. That's why someone wants it to be that way when they buy it, because they don't want something that they are stuck to. Why would we want that?
Starr: 31:58 It's kind of both really annoying and also somewhat useful in that, like when you're in acquisition talks, everything stops. Like you're not doing any work because you're just thinking about this stuff.
Josh: 32:12 That's the worst part.
Starr: 32:13 You're trying to figure it out. And so for a week or two or whatever, you're just kind of like in this weird limbo which really sucks. Also, it's like everybody is kind of thinking about the big picture things and everybody is thinking about what they want. You do kind of come out of it with a little bit more clarity in terms of what are things worth to you. What is the company worth to you, what is your time worth to you? If I had to go and work for somebody, how much is it going to take me to do that? Is there any amount?
Josh: 32:48 Or what happens after you go and work for someone and you're not going to stay there forever, are you starting from ground zero after that? Like sure you have some cash in your pocket and you can still start, but starting is still hard and if it's not enough so that you don't have to get a job or start something else, that's one thing. But if it's not quite enough and you still have to fill in some income in the future, then I think it's something to really think about. Like do I really want to start from zero? I don't know about you guys, I forget how hard it was to get this thing to where it is now and yeah that's a good another five, five plus years at least of pretty hard work. And that's if it actually goes.
Ben: 33:43 Yeah, that's the back to how your business is like a baby thing. You forget the early days, how hard it is in the early days. Even if you do have enough money to ride off into the sunset, even if you don't have to worry income, if you don't have any purpose, if the business is your purpose in life and you sell it, and you end up walking away from it, then what? You've got to think about that. That could be pretty disruptive to your life.
Starr: 34:10 All right, so what we're trying to say is, we've sold the business.
Josh: 34:14 Announcing.
Starr: 34:16 We're shutting down tomorrow, we're joining Microsoft.
Starr: 34:19 Peace.
Starr: 34:20 It's been a great journey.
Starr: 34:23 I will say, if have a business and you are in that position of someone is interested, go read that book Before the Exit. Because we did that last time and it really got me thinking about a lot of things that I think you want to think about before you actually decide if it's for you or if it's not.
Ben: 34:47 Yeah that was a good book.
Starr: 34:48 And selling your company doesn't mean you've won. Just like selling your car doesn't mean you've won. You can get a really bad deal if your company without really considering it. Things can work out badly. Or things can work out goodly, it just depends on doing it right. It's totally natural to have those giddy feelings like, "Oh my God, this finally happening. The world is going to see what a genius I actually am. They are going to love me for my true self."
Josh: 35:20 There's the ego side to that for sure.
Starr: 35:24 I think you just kind of have to wait that out, just give it a little time to tamp down a little bit because anybody who's feeding that, anybody who Is trying to get you to feel that is trying to do that so that they will the upper hand over you in a negotiation. Any sort of congratulatory rhetoric, that's all bullshit to get you to sell for less money.
Ben: 35:50 Just buttering you up.
Starr: 35:51 Just step back, be a hard ass-
Josh: 35:55 Or sometimes the boring path is the better path.
Starr: 35:59 That's true.
Ben: 36:00 But if you do sell your company, please don't write the blog post about how it was a wonderful journey. Just say, "Hey, we're taking the money and we're running."
Josh: 36:09 "TLDR; peace."
Starr: 36:12 "Peace out, screw you guys. There is no data export. You can't export your data, sorry."
Announcer: 36:26 FunderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io.
Announcer: 36:41 Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com, that's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors or fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
This week the guys talk about their office equipment and remote workspaces which range from working in a winery to building a standalone office in a backyard. They also go full old cranky developer mode on the new office paradigms and warn the youths of back issues stemming from working on couches and bean bags. Don't get them started on open floor plans or unassigned desks! Learn what has, and hasn't, worked for each of the guys on their quest for the perfect coding space.
Links:
FogBugz
Joel Spolsky
Joel Spolsky's Blog - Bionic Office
Hint
ErgoDox
Regus
International Residential Code
Full Transcript:
Starr: 00:00 So you just got out there and you reached a moment, you reached a point of decision, and you decided I'm just going to keep going.
Ben: 00:07 That's right, yep.
Starr: 00:08 Yeah, all of us I think dream of that.
Announcer: 00:10 You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Time to start a fire, crack open a can of Tab, and settle in for FounderQuest.
Starr: 00:22 And sometimes it's like you go out to buy some milk for your child, or whatever, it's like I'm just going to keep driving. Just keep going. Really. No, I love my child.
Josh: 00:33 Before I became a father, you always hear those stories like, dad went out for a pack of smokes, never came back, and I'm like, "How could people do that?" But now that I'm a dad, like I totally get it.
Starr: 00:43 Yes, it's not ...
Josh: 00:46 I mean it's still wrong.
Starr: 00:47 It's very wrong, but it's like I understand the sentiment a little bit better.
Ben: 00:53 Of course, my keep going moment just happened to be when I was doing a loop, so I don't know what that really says about me, but ...
Starr: 00:59 Oh, that's deep. We're getting really into the weeds now.
Ben: 01:03 So how's your shake coming, Starr?
Starr: 01:06 It's coming pretty well. Maybe we should ... Should we talk about offices work environments and then we can save it for the podcast? Save it for the-
Ben: 01:14 Oh, yeah. That's a good plan.
Josh: 01:15 This is the podcast.
Starr: 01:18 Holy shit, Josh.
Josh: 01:19 Did I just blow your mind?
Starr: 01:21 You blew my mind.
Ben: 01:22 Because we just fix it all in post around here.
Starr: 01:28 We do. Yeah, actually since we're restful, wouldn't we fix it all in put?
Ben: 01:36 That's deep, man.
Starr: 01:37 Yeah, that's a bad ... That's like a combo, like a dad joke or something. All right. So today I think we're going to talk about offices and work environments, which is, I mean we don't really have offices here at Honeybadger headquarters. Honeybadger headquarters is more of an idea than a place, I think.
Starr: 01:57 Each of us has our own customized work unit in the place of our choice. We all set it up to achieve maximum efficiency. And so I thought it might be fun to talk a little bit about that. It's like what do we like in an office? What don't we like in an office? Do you think we'll ever have a big Honeybadger open floor plan office?
Ben: 02:21 No.
Starr: 02:22 No?
Ben: 02:23 Never, no.
Josh: 02:24 If we had an office it definitely wouldn't be open floor plan.
Ben: 02:27 Do you remember the business and software forums back in the day with Joel, and he had this ... When he wrote his blog, he had some awesome stuff about making an awesome development environment, and he had this one about his office space. So they had office space, I think it was in Manhattan, and he went into great detail about how they made it perfect for developers and he just-
Starr: 02:52 I realize that. I remember that.
Ben: 02:54 Do you remember that blog post?
Josh: 02:55 Yeah.
Ben: 02:55 And he talked about how each developer had their own office, with a door, and I believe all of them had exterior light, like they all had an exterior window. And I remember him describing it. They had to angle the walls in a certain wall so they could all get a little sliver of window. Anyway, reading that-
Starr: 03:13 This was at FogBugz, so Joel Spolsky, FogBugz.
Ben: 03:13 Yeah, that was FogBugz, yeah. Yeah. So after I read that I was convinced, yep, that's the way to go, that was the gold standard right there. So I determined that I would never be happy in an open space ever again.
Josh: 03:27 Well, I currently am in an open space because my other company, Hint, which is a software, Ruby consulting shop. I'm the only one who likes closed offices, I think. So yeah, I'm currently in an open office but I don't like it.
Starr: 03:47 So you're telling me there's developers that like an open floor plan office?
Josh: 03:51 I think they're starting to come around. I think that if we ... We did this office back when it was the hip thing to have the open office space, and I think people are starting to come around a little bit.
Starr: 04:03 So what if we did, instead of your regular open floor plan office, what if we did one of those where you don't actually have an assigned desk? Where you just float? My sister-in-law works for a tech company here in Seattle, and they don't have fixed desks. It's like a co-working space, basically. You go in, you pick whatever desk is available, you plug in your laptop, you go to town. You don't get your special ergonomic keyboard. You don't get your special standing desk, or whatever, or your ... It's just that. What if we did that?
Ben: 04:38 I would quit. I think that's ridiculous. No, I think that's absolutely asinine. The ideal, everyone has their own office. If you can't have that for some reason, because your company is too cheap, then everyone has an open plan. But if you can't have that for some reason and your company is maniacally insane, and you have this rotating desk thing, quit. Because that's just ridiculous. Who puts up with that? I'm sorry. I'm very opinionated on this particular topic.
Starr: 05:07 Man. Okay, we're getting into like talk radio level of passion here, I like it.
Josh: 05:11 That's basically like a co-working space where you're not even paying the permanent desk option.
Ben: 05:17 Yeah. Now, co-working space I can totally understand. That's what you're paying for, right? You're paying for a hot desk, that's the cheapest option, I get it, right? But when your office, your company, decides that everyone's going to have a hot desk, that's utterly ridiculous. Why ... Oh, man.
Josh: 05:34 Better yet, don't have an office at all.
Ben: 05:38 Yeah, don't have an office at all.
Josh: 05:38 And let people work from home and pay that money to set them up however they want in whatever location they want.
Ben: 05:46 For real. For real.
Starr: 05:47 Well, I don't know, like she doesn't seem to mind. My sister-in-law doesn't really, like she doesn't really love it, but it's not a deal breaker for her. She's not going to quit the company over it or anything like that. But she's also not a cranky, like old developer.
Ben: 06:07 Are you saying I'm an old cranky developer, is that what you're saying?
Josh: 06:09 I think that makes a difference.
Ben: 06:11 I'll own that.
Starr: 06:12 Yeah, you're a bit of a crusty crab, Ben-
Ben: 06:14 Yeah, I know.
Starr: 06:14 ... but we all got a little crust under our elbows here, here and there.
Ben: 06:18 The number one worst part of an office is the commute. That's the biggest problem that I have with offices, is you're shuffling everyone into one location, which is hard to get to because no one wants to live there, at the same time every day, typically. And then everyone tries to get out of there at the same time everyday, typically. And you have to again, do this in reverse, right? So if I have to deal with that ridiculous commute like on the bus, or driving in my car, or whatever, and I'm dealing with that ridiculousness every day, and then I show up and I don't even have my own place to go to? No, mm-mm, uh-uh. Nope, not doing it.
Ben: 06:52 Because I'm going to adjust my chair to the way that feels good, right? And like you just mentioned, keyboard, right? I'm going to have a keyboard that feels good for me, and not some generic keyboard. And if I want to work on my lapboard all the time, why don't I just do that from my couch, right? The point of going into a place to work is to have it set up to be nice to work, according to what you need, not whatever Joe needed yesterday because he happened to be sitting in that spot that you're sitting in today.
Josh: 07:21 Yeah. But for the record, the reason you shouldn't work on your laptop on your couch is because of your back.
Starr: 07:29 Oh, yes.
Josh: 07:31 At least in my experience. I did that for two long and that's how I got back issues.
Starr: 07:38 Yeah, I see pictures of the kids in these hip start-ups, or maybe these bigger tech companies where they have these nests full of bean bags and people are just laying around with their laptops open, they're coding away. This is like oh, my God, honey, you're going to pay for that in 10 years.
Josh: 07:56 Right. Yeah, cut to 10 years later.
Starr: 07:59 Yeah, you're going to wish you had sat upright with both feet on the floor in your Steelcase leap chair, and with the optional head rest.
Ben: 08:11 I write a lot of code in my La-Z-Boy, though, on my laptop.
Starr: 08:15 Oh, you do?
Ben: 08:15 I do. I spend several hours on a regular basis, yeah, per day I would say, in my La-Z-Boy writing code. When I get up early, when I get up at 4:00 or 5:00 or whatever, then I go hop in my La-Z-Boy and I'm there for two or three hours doing stuff. And yeah, I don't have any back problems. It's great.
Starr: 08:32 Well, maybe you don't have the genes. Maybe you have the strong ... like you're the strong-backed Honeybadger.
Josh: 08:39 That could be.
Starr: 08:46 Sometimes it feels like I've got a thin, glass rod running through the very bottom of my spine, and sometimes it breaks. I don't know, not recently, though because I've actually ... We can talk about this later, but I've actually got all the ergonomic style down, like I figured it all out and this is part of growing up, I think, for me at least. Part of growing up is recognizing all the things you're doing that are destroying your body slowly, over time.
Starr: 09:21 When you're young, you're like, when you're 20, you're like oh, my God I just feel like crap. Why do I feel like such crap? And then you turn 30 and you're like well, no shit, I just ate a whole box of Oreos last night. Now I feel like crap. And then you're 40 and then you're like okay, well, also I just have to get up at 7:00 a.m. or I can't sleep in until 10:00 a.m., And I feel like crap. So, I don't know. Do offices. I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic.
Josh: 09:50 Did I mention the reason that I have been working out of this office as opposed to my beloved home office, which is where I would prefer to spend my time?
Starr: 10:01 You got a sweet home office, why aren't you there?
Josh: 10:03 I do. I'm not there because I have an almost three year old and a one, actually yeah, 18 month year old, or 18 month old and yeah, that's a little tough working from home with two little kids under three running around.
Ben: 10:23 Yeah, it's like when Daddy's home it's time to play, right? They don't understand this concept of Daddy's home but he's working.
Josh: 10:31 My office is downstairs and they spend most of their time upstairs, like the playroom and kitchen and everything is upstairs so I've got it pretty dialed in, in that sense, but it's just, it's tough like our walls are not completely sound proof, though. There's a lot of noise. If I ever leave my office, that's when the fun starts usually. That's an excursion. It's usually, you get the feeling that you're trapped in a box that you can't leave if you want to be productive.
Starr: 11:05 Why don't you describe your home office a little bit, Josh? You can't really go there now, but eventually the infestation will diminish I imagine, and you'll be able to go there again.
Josh: 11:17 Yeah, the kids will be in school one day.
Starr: 11:18 You've got it sweet, so why don't you tell us about it?
Josh: 11:20 I don't know, I've got a standing desk, it's a sit-stand desk so it's got a motor so I can, got a motor and pre-sets. Basically I just use two pre-sets, really. But I don't know, I think I usually prefer to sit. I'll stand occasionally if I'm feeling like it. I have a split ergonomic keyboard, though I recently got an ErgoDox and I've been really happy with that. I've gradually moved through different types of mechanical keyboards, mostly because I get wrist, hand and wrist pain from typing a lot, and this is the only keyboard that has actually completely eliminated that pain, which is cool. That's basically it. I've got an ultra-wide monitor.
Starr: 12:18 Which one is that? You recently got one and then you returned it and stuff. Which one did you end up with?
Josh: 12:23 I ended up with the LG 5K-2K ultra-wide. It's 5K across and 2K up. It's flat, it's not curved, it's not one of the curved ones. It's a 34 inch ultra-wide monitor. It gives you basically the resolution of 4K, but it's ultra-wide.
Starr: 12:52 Okay. How much extra screen real estate do you get on that? Like 33% or something like that?
Josh: 12:58 Yeah, it's about a third extra. I found it's pretty good for splitting your screen into thirds, you can do pretty comfortably. You can have three windows side by side that aren't too scrunched.
Starr: 13:17 That's interesting. I thought about getting one of those, but then I'm just like, oh, I just keep putting it off because I just want to see how they work out.
Josh: 13:24 I still have that one at home. I've moved a lot of the rest of my setup down here to the office in downtown Vancouver. But down here I already had two 4k displays that are just like 27 inch 4Ks. But recently I tried ... I have one in regular orientation and then on the left I put the second one in portrait, and I've been trying that out. Usually if I'm coding I have Vim, or whatever, my code running on the main monitor and then I'll put my browser or whatever documentation that I need on the portrait mode monitor, and that's been a really nice thing lately.
Starr: 14:14 Oh, cool. I tried that briefly. It didn't really stick for me, but-
Josh: 14:18 Really?
Starr: 14:19 Yeah.
Josh: 14:20 I've been liking it. I'm not sure which I like better, the ultra-wide or the two 27s. I have to admit, I really am liking the portrait thing.
Starr: 14:34 Oh, cool.
Josh: 14:36 I don't think I would do a second monitor with the 34 inch ultra-wide, because it's just excessive.
Starr: 14:42 That's too much.
Josh: 14:43 Except maybe another 34 inch ultra-wide. Stacked on top.
Starr: 14:50 Oh, yeah. You need one of those stacked displays where you've got one in the front, two on the sides, and then one above the one in the front that are angled down at you.
Josh: 15:02 Those stacking ones?
Starr: 15:03 Yeah.
Josh: 15:03 Yeah. We'll see if I end up with one of those, whatever the Apple, the 6K. It's a 6K monitor, but it costs $6,000 dollars. Either the resolution or the price, I think.
Starr: 15:18 Can I just tell you guys something? This is disturbing for me, because I'm a historically very cheap person, but the fact that we run this company and we hire people and we pay an ungodly amount of money to AWS, and I see something that's like a $6,000 dollar monitor, and I'm like oh, okay. I'm not going to buy it myself, I don't really need that personally, but meh, okay. Whatever. And then I'm like wait, Starr, that's a lot of money for a monitor. You can get a monitor for a couple hundred bucks these days. But it's just this ... I've gotten anchored at these high price points by reviewing our budgets. I don't know, it's just weird. I got to get out of that habit. I got to un-anchor myself.
Josh: 16:08 I'm not going to go buy a Mac Pro with that monitor because I don't need that. That is excessive, but I'm fine with spending a lot of money on computers. It's the only equipment that I use for my career, so I figure buy a nice computer at least, or whatever you like working on.
Starr: 16:29 Yeah. But don't make it cost as much as a factory certified refurbished car.
Josh: 16:38 I don't know. I know contractors who have to have a truck.
Ben: 16:43 Yeah. Make a lot more money with our laptops than we do with our cars, so they're probably worth the money spent on them.
Starr: 16:49 So, Ben. You are like a notoriously minimalist office person.
Ben: 16:54 Ah yes, yes I am.
Starr: 16:56 You can't see this in the audio, but basically Ben's background is a white wall. There's a copier behind him. Ben's just like ... You just like a blank room and a desk, right?
Ben: 17:07 Yep. Basically, which is funny considering how much I hate the idea of hot desks because I'm really the kind of person that doesn't have much on my desk anyway. So I could actually conceivably swing the hot desk thing because I just show up with my laptop and then I leave and ... it's like Shadow, right?
Starr: 17:24 That's what I think every time you leave. Was he even here?
Ben: 17:31 Exactly.
Starr: 17:32 That's why I started this podcast, just to have documentary evidence that you exist.
Ben: 17:36 Right, okay. Yeah, my office, I like to keep it minimal, but I do like to have a nice monitor so I do have the LG ultra-fine 5K, which is a fantastic monitor. It does Retina, and that's all I care about. The resolution is what I need, I don't care about the size so much, but I need sharp resolution for my aging eyes. And it's beautiful, it pairs nicely with my MacBook Pro, which is why I bought it.
Ben: 18:04 And I love, back to the minimalist thing, I love the one cable and I'm done thing, right? I plug in the Thunderbolt cable and then I've got power, I've got video, I've got audio. Everything I need is right there. One day we will have wireless video. That's not cost prohibitive, and I will have that and I will be happy because then I don't have to plug in anything when I have the wireless power and the wireless video. It'll be great.
Starr: 18:32 You'll be able to play some nice pranks on people then, hopefully. Hopefully, they don't secure it very well so you can just take over people's screens. That would be nice.
Ben: 18:41 I've never had the home office, though. When I started doing freelancing, like when I left the work-a-day world, I tried to work from home and that just didn't work. I too had kids at home, and they're great and they know how to leave me alone when I want to be left alone, but still there's ... Like you said, going out of your office and going to get a snack or whatever, and it's just an interruption, and it breaks the flow. There are noises around because your walls aren't soundproofed, and things like that. So it lasted oh, probably two days when I was working at home and before I decided I've got to have some office space. So what I've done, because office space is ridiculously expensive to acquire, because you have to get this minimum size of typically 1,000 square feet or something, and you have to commit to this one year or three year or six year lease, or whatever.
Starr: 19:32 Yeah, as a solo person a normal office space lease is just ... It's not impossible, but it's insanely expensive and kind of dumb.
Ben: 19:41 Yeah, it's mostly out of reach, yeah. So your options are well, you could buy an office condo but that's pretty limited.
Starr: 19:49 Wait, what's an office condo?
Ben: 19:51 An office condo is ... You know what a condo is, like a residential condo. You buy this unit inside of a big building, right, typically. Well, an office condo is the same thing. You buy a unit inside of a big office building. So instead of renting or leasing your office on an extended basis, you buy the thing, right? Obviously, they're not cheap because you're buying this office space, and since I have an office building that gets leased at crazy rates, but you basically own it. You don't have to rent it.
Starr: 20:20 That's pretty cool.
Starr: 20:20 I had no idea that existed, but it makes sense.
Ben: 20:23 Yeah, yeah. There's not a lot of them out there, and I don't think there are any on the east side of Seattle where I am, which is one problem with the office condo approach. So what I typically do, is what I've done over the past, I don't know, 15 years or whatever, is sub-lease. So there's always office space out there that someone has that they're not using, and the circumstances vary widely but you can typically find something that's good for development work that's not a budget-buster and that's pretty close to home.
Ben: 21:00 So what I did is, I live in again, the east side of Seattle, so the Kirkland area, and near me, I live right by Woodenville, which is a winery district and it's transitioning into the rural area of the King County in Washington. And there just so happens to be a number of wineries here, some that are, to have a little bit of vineyard here, but some that are just like a retail shop, like a tasting room. So there's an individual here who owns a building that used to be like a Jiffy Lube kind of building, and they converted the garage spaces to these retail wine shops, tasting rooms, and the upstairs is like normal Class A office space.
Ben: 21:48 So he has an office, my landlord does, and then he had two offices that he's not using upstairs next to his, and so I met him through a friend and found that he had this space, and so I subleased that on a month to month basis. That's worked out pretty well for me. It's quiet, except for on Thursday and Friday afternoons when the tasting room is in full swing, and they've got the music going and they've got people downstairs having a good time. Then I might have to check out and go to the library or something for a couple hours, but in the mornings it's very quiet. I'm the only one here, and it's nice. It's close to home so I don't have to deal with that ridiculous commute. And I have my own space, i don't have to share it with anybody. It's great.
Josh: 22:32 Yeah. Except a copier.
Ben: 22:34 Except a copier. Well, that's my landlord's copier. He's like, "Oh, can I just leave that in the room?" And I'm like, "Yeah, sure." It's a really big copier, so ... Yeah, so I have my Aeron chair set up just so, and I have my ... I used to do the ergonomic keyboard thing, I used to just swear by the Microsoft , I can't remember what it's called, but the old one, the beige looking one that's really, really big, the battle tank of-
Josh: 23:02 Yeah, I do. Forget the name.
Ben: 23:04 ... battleship of keyboards, yeah. I think it's before the curve, but anyway, it doesn't matter. I used to have, I still have it, it's in my garage, but what I found was when I moved to doing freelancing I had my laptop, I would be transitioning between my office and then at home, like I said, I worked for a couple hours in the La-Z-Boy, and my hands would just get confused, right? During the day I'd be on this really big honking keyboard that was ergonomic and split, but in the mornings I would be on my laptop and be cramped up on that small keyboard. So I gave up that keyboard, the ergonomic keyboard, and I just got an Apple wireless keyboard, which basically matches the layout of the laptop, so now I don't have to transition between the two sizes, and fortunately I don't have RSI problems, so I can just get away with being on the cramped keyboard, so that's fine.
Josh: 23:56 Yeah. Yeah, I think if not for the RSI problems that makes sense, because it's the least confusing for your hands.
Ben: 24:07 Yeah, yeah. It's nice to have the same function keys in the same places, and that sort of thing. Of course, the MacBook Pro with the touch bar threw that off because now there's eight keys not where it is on my keyboard, so I do have a preference of actually using the keyboard separate. It's like I have my escape key, but-
Starr: 24:25 The thing about that, Ben, is it's your fault. It's your fault for expecting that.
Ben: 24:31 That's true.
Josh: 24:31 Yeah, you just need to be more adventurous.
Starr: 24:37 I'm getting ready for a job at Apple, like customer service.
Ben: 24:44 So another option, oh, I guess I should mention that. For a while I was doing an executive suite. That's where you can, it's like Regus has these, where you can go and you can lease a single office, a single person office or usually it's up to three or four people is the biggest office they would offer. That's expensive, it's not as expensive as having a full office on a long term lease, but it's still pretty pricey, like basically double what I pay for a sub-lease. But you get like a full service office. You have a mailing address, you have a coffee service, and all those things that you don't ever use.
Josh: 25:21 They even give you a reception service, so you can have someone answer your calls and forward your voice ... Take messages for you.
Starr: 25:30 A lot of people don't know about this, but a Regus is, are, a company that's ... They have offices in pretty much every city of any size in the country, and you can go rent an office from them. What we do all the time is we rent conference rooms from them to have our meetings and stuff, just because it's nice to have an actual conference room to have a meeting and not have to try and do it at a coffee shop or whatever. At first, I thought that sounds like basic and boring, and whatever, but now I'm a real big Regus fan, like it's just super convenient and nice.
Ben: 26:07 And pricey.
Starr: 26:08 And pricey, yeah. I think when I looked into that it was $600 to $1,000 dollars a month for a dedicated office.
Ben: 26:17 Yeah, and they're smart about charging more for the exterior offices. The cheapest ones don't have windows.
Starr: 26:25 Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Josh: 26:27 When I started, like starting out my freelance career, one of my first offices was an executive office in the middle of the building, like basically a closet and I had a desk, it was one of those narrow desks. It was basically like a side table and it was ... It's giving me post traumatic stress right now.
Ben: 26:56 I'm a big believer in natural light. You got to have a window. You can't be shut up in a closet.
Starr: 27:01 So, okay. Can I go?
Ben: 27:03 Go.
Starr: 27:05 All right. I'm currently talking to you guys from my beautiful home office. My house is incredibly small. You people who live in these 2.000 square foot houses, et cetera, I think my house is 1,100 square feet. It's tiny, and basically I'm in one of the four bedrooms and that means we don't have any guest room or anything like that. So one of my big projects over the past year has been to construct a office in my back yard. So it's like a legit 350 square foot structure, it's the whole deal. It's a real building. I had to go down to the city, I had to get permits, pay somebody to do the foundation.
Starr: 28:00 Then after the foundation I basically have been doing it all myself, with a little bit of help from people when I just can't carry something by myself. But yeah, for the most part it's by myself, and we're getting really close. The walls are up, the windows are in, the doors are in, I started putting siding on yesterday. And I'll probably have it completely sided in a couple more days. And after that, it's just electricity and insulation and drywall, and then it's done. So I hope to move in there in the next couple months.
Josh: 28:33 That's super exciting.
Starr: 28:35 It is, yeah. A couple tips on that. If you ever want to build an office in your back yard, first of all, really consider not doing it. Or not doing it yourself, unless you just really like construction. I enjoy going out there and doing something physical, but it has taken an insane amount of time and thought and work and all that stuff, because if you come to it from a developer perspective, like I have very minimal background in construction. I worked construction briefly.
Starr: 29:11 I had an idea of roughly how things fit together, but there's actually a lot of detail that you have to get right when you're building any sort of structure, and you have to deal with getting inspections, and you have to deal with, I don't know, it's just a lot. Even for something as basic as ... This is basically like a rectangular building with a closet. It's the simplest possible building you could get. Even with that, there's just so many details that you have to figure out so that it will be waterproof, so that it will meet code.
Starr: 29:56 For example, did you know that walls in a seismically active place, like Seattle, walls have to have a certain amount of bracing on them. There's a lot of calculations that you have to do, not to necessarily do the engineering for it but the code lists all these things you have to do. You've got to have so many inches of bracing per inch of wall, openings can't be any bigger than xyz. But the one thing that's interesting that I'll share, that is a little bit surprising, is that the code was the National Residential ... I'm sorry, the International Residential Code. It's pretty standard, it's accepted by a lot of different cities.
Starr: 30:44 If you actually read the code, it will basically tell you how to do everything you need to do. I mean not everything, but the important stuff, like the structural stuff. It'll be like, okay, you need to have so much bracing on this wall, or you have to call an engineer and have them do it. And you don't want to do that because that's expensive and this is like a little 300 square foot rectangle, so they don't want to deal with that. It's not worth their time. So you're just like, do everything like the code tells you to do it, which is just a lot of research and a lot of work. So, I don't know. Yeah, unless you just want it to be your hobby for a year, don't do it.
Josh: 31:27 Plus, you even bought a tool belt, like that's how serious you were on this, right?
Starr: 31:36 No, I didn't buy a tool belt, Josh.
Josh: 31:38 You didn't buy a tool belt?
Starr: 31:39 I didn't buy a tool belt, no. I don't like having all that stuff hanging off of me. I don't like it.
Josh: 31:47 This whole time I was imagining you with a tool belt.
Starr: 31:50 Well, I'm sorry I couldn't match your expectations, Josh. I did have to buy lots of different types of nail guns.
Starr: 31:57 Yeah, pro tip?
Josh: 31:58 Those are fun.
Starr: 31:59 When you're building a building you use a lot of nails. And if you use a lot of different types of nails, each one of those needs it's own gun. Because you don't want to be hammering those.
Ben: 32:09 So how many nail guns did you end up buying?
Starr: 32:11 I have three right now. And I'm really making some them do double duty. I really probably should have four.
Ben: 32:21 I never would have thought that you'd have to have more than one nail gun.
Josh: 32:27 You mentioned that if Ida's home, that you just take off because it's easier to just hang than try to work with the distractions. I think that's a really good thing. It's okay to throw in the towel and just admit that you can't work today, if there's too many distractions. I think that's better than trying to stick it out and work under miserable conditions.
Starr: 32:52 I agree. It's one of my favorite things about having my own thing, is that I don't have to pretend to work when it's impossible for me to work. I can just be like, okay, this isn't working out. We're going to reschedule this.
Josh: 33:16 So, conclave at Starr's next time. Let's move it out of the vault.
Starr: 33:21 Oh, yeah. We totally could do that. We totally could do that. I could get a ping pong table and put in there if you guys want. And we could have a Honeybadger ping pong table. Totally.
Ben: 33:33 Got to get the hot tub in there.
Josh: 33:39 Yeah. Foosball, hot tub, ping pong.
Starr: 33:42 Yeah. That'd be pretty sad. I'd just be in the hot tub all day by myself, in my little room.
Announcer: 33:54 Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The guys answer a listener question about how to ensure customers are happy with your product and how to be proactive in finding out if they aren't. This can be especially difficult if your customers tend to be a little bit introverted...cough developers cough. Plus Ben reveals the number one reason customers leave Honeybadger!
Full Transcript:
Starr: 00:00 Yeah. I totally have been playing dumb this whole time as a strategy, 100%. It's not like I don't actually know anything, or I'm just making it up. It's 100% a strategy.
Announcer: 00:11 They're just three amigos making their way in the crazy old world of software as a service. Welcome to FounderQuest.
Ben: 00:22 In other news, I deployed the Logplex to Lambda, and it worked like a champ. Unfortunately the economics just don't work.
Josh: 00:31 Again, bit by the economics again.
Ben: 00:34 Yeah. I penciled out the math and it worked. You know you can allocate the amount of ram to the function, right?
Josh: 00:42 Yeah.
Ben: 00:42 I did the math based on 128 megs of ram, which is the lowest option, because it doesn't use that much. It uses about, I don't know, 30. The problem is, the performance and the concurrency was such that we were running, like, hundreds of concurrent Lambda functions in order to service the level of traffic, well, one-third of our production traffic. AWS has a soft limit of 1,000 concurrent Lambda invocations. You can of course get those soft limits raised if you can justify it, but of course, that comes with money, right? More invocations means more money.
Ben: 01:19 I was like, "Okay, 600, 700 concurrent indications, that's really not great. Let's see if we can get that down a bit by increasing the ram," which increases the CPU allocation as well. That works, but at that point, the economics didn't work. Yeah, it was just the combination of concurrency and the amount of time taken to actually process each request.
Josh: 01:46 I've taken a shot at this, and now, Ben's taken a shot at this. You guys are Seinfeld fans?
Ben: 01:51 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 01:52 Sure.
Josh: 01:52 Katelyn and I have been watching Seinfeld, re-watching it because she's never seen it. Last night, we were on the episode where Newman learns about Kramer's failed Michigan recycling scheme, where they basically like take the bottles in New York, which are worth 5 cents, and they have to figure out how to work the economics out to truck them to Michigan to get 10 cents. I feel like Ben and I are kind of like Kramer and Newman. Yeah, Logplex on Lambda is kind of like our Michigan recycling scheme.
Josh: 02:31 Well, in the Seinfeld episode, the way they solved the recycling problem was that, Newman works for the U.S. Postal Service, as you know, and on one day of the year, on Mother's Day, the U.S. Postal Service has overflow, they had a fifth overflow mail truck that goes to Michigan. On one day of the year, they could co-op that mail truck and fill it with recycling, and get a free truck which changed the math in their favor.
Ben: 03:05 We need Amazon to provide us a mail truck.
Starr: 03:08 The solution to our economic problems is fraud. That's what you're saying, Josh, isn't that?
Josh: 03:14 Yeah. Amazon does have a truck. What is that truck that you can like move your data center with?
Ben: 03:24 Snowball.
Josh: 03:24 Yeah, Snowball.
Ben: 03:25 Snowball, yeah.
Josh: 03:26 It's like the world's biggest USB drive, right? It's like this semi truck, and it's got a little bit of USB jack on the back of it, and you stick it in your computer.
Ben: 03:34 Yeah. I think our customers and might have some issue with the amount of latency that would introduce.
Josh: 03:38 Yeah.
Ben: 03:39 Oh well.
Josh: 03:40 We just need to find a Newman at Amazon that has access to a Snowball truck, and there you go.
Ben: 03:47 Yeah. You know those Snowballs actually have like an EC2 environment on them? It's pretty wild.
Josh: 03:52 Could take this show on the road.
Starr: 03:56 Oh, man. Today, we have another listener question, and it's from, let's see, I can't find this name on here. Tony. It's from our old friend Tony. Tony asked us another question back a couple of episodes ago, and we answered it, and so we're back for round two. The previous question was all about marketing to developers and stuff like that, and now we're on to customer success around developers. I'll just read it. How about that, instead of me just making stuff up?
Josh: 04:34 Sounds good.
Starr: 04:36 It says, "For an early stage startup in the developer tool space, it's important to talk to customers, get product feedback, build social proof with testimonials and stuff, provide top notch support and love." I like the love part, you know? I like where Tony's coming from. "However, engineers are busy people and do not want to talk to someone," I totally understand that sentiment, "Unless something is broken or if they want to cancel." Yeah. Personally I still don't really want to talk to people.
Josh: 05:06 Yeah.
Ben: 05:06 I was thinking the same thing. I still don't want to talk to someone.
Josh: 05:09 I don't want to talk to someone if I have to cancel.
Starr: 05:11 It says, "I find it especially difficult with new signups that come through Cloud Forecast to get them to engage with us early on, even with qualified leads. What are some approaches that Honeybadger's taken to ensure that potential customers and existing customers are engaging with us, that we know that we have a good feel on the heartbeat of our customers?" How do we do that? How do we do that guys?
Josh: 05:35 I don't know.
Ben: 05:37 I think the story is different where you are in the stage of your business. When you are prelaunch or you just launched, I think it's relatively easy at that point to have good interactions with customers, because typically your customers are people you already know. We've talked about this before, like your first 10 customers. They want to see you succeed. They're participating in what is probably a Beta. They are enduring a buggy product, because they like you and they want you to succeed. They're happy to tell you where things are broken, or things could be better, that sort of thing. If you're that early stage, just reaching out is easy, no matter who your customer segment is, whether it be developers or not. That's probably not what he's talking about here. I think he's probably already got that covered.
Ben: 06:26 It's those customers that come in that you don't know, people show up on your doorstep who don't have any relationship with you. I think that's a tougher nut to crack. I totally agree with you, Starr. Like, I just don't want to talk to people. If I'm trying out your product and it doesn't work for me, I'll probably just go away, rather than talk to you about it. It's an interesting problem to solve, when you have developers as your customers.
Starr: 06:53 Yeah. I just want to say like, we also have had issues with this, right? Yeah. We've got a ton of great loyal customers who we can call up on the phone and they'll talk to us for hours, but you know, when we are trying to engage with people who maybe have just signed up, and they're not maybe making it through our funnel and we're trying to figure out, okay, what's happening to these people, and we try to reach out to them. A lot of times, we also have trouble with that, right?
Josh: 07:24 Yeah, that's tough.
Starr: 07:25 Didn't Ben Findley do something?
Ben: 07:28 Yeah. I think we've tried a number of times to reach out to people, especially who are trialing or who just had their trial expired. The response rate on reaching out to those people is almost zero. They just don't want to engage. I don't know that we have a solution for that, because we still have an almost zero response rate. Then there've been times that we just gave up. Like, "Okay, they're not going to talk to us. We're not even going to try." Yeah, that's a tough one.
Josh: 07:57 Yeah.
Starr: 07:59 Those are the people who haven't reached out to us, because when somebody signs up and they're trying to get our product to work for them, maybe they run into some problem and they contact us. Then, we have a chance to talk to them and figure out what's going on. The people we're specifically talking about are people who just show up, sign up for a thing, and then immediately disappear and never ...
Ben: 08:24 Yeah. I think, Josh, you had something to say on that.
Josh: 08:26 I was just going to say it's hard. Like I think we've talked about trying to bribe them, or at least more seriously try to bribe them, like a $50 gift card or something, or more. That might get some people to reply, but yeah. We haven't gone to those lengths yet.
Ben: 08:46 Well, we do bribe them. We do have the T-shirt offer that you started.
Josh: 08:50 Yeah. I bribe people with swag, but that's like a $10 bribe, versus like, if it's actual cash money, that's a little different.
Ben: 08:59 It works.
Josh: 08:59 It does, it works.
Starr: 09:00 Tell us about the T-shirt swag thing.
Josh: 09:03 Well, the T-shirt offer is something we send to trial users during onboarding, so people who have signed up who are currently using Honeybadger or trialing Honeybadger, because we don't want to offer it to just every single person who comes and creates an account. Because like Ben said, I think some people are just kicking the tires or checking. They create an account and go away immediately. We send this email after they have created a project in Honeybadger and actually reported an error to us, which means that we know that they've actually installed and they're engaged in the trial. We know they've gone through the hardest part, which is installing our code, which actually means they have to go and physically make some changes in their application and deploy it.
Josh: 09:56 After we know that they're at least committed to that level, we send them an email and it offers them a free T-shirt if they go and add their payment information early in the trial, versus waiting until the end. We've had a pretty good response rate on that. I think it's been around, maybe, 30, 40% of people have actually converted. Well, actually, I think that might be the response rate, and it might be slightly lower for the conversion rate, but it's pretty good.
Ben: 10:27 Yeah, it's worked out pretty well. We didn't start off with that, right? We came to that over time. That was an experiment at first, where we just did a certain segment of the trialers. Then, you kind of rolled that out as we saw that. Yeah, that was really successful.
Josh: 10:41 Yeah. Well, it started out as an experiment, and it started out just for Ruby trials, because our T-shirts actually said Ruby on the back of them still. It kind of limited us. Like, we didn't want to send Ruby T-shirts to non-Ruby developers. We were like, "Okay, we'll try this on Rubists," which we know is our best segment in general. Yeah. It was an experiment to the point where I literally said, "Hey, I'm trying this weird thing," like in the email, "I'm trying this thing where I send a T-shirt to new trials, if they will add their payment information early." Then I explained, there's no risk, they can still cancel their trial and it's not going to charge them or anything. Yeah, and actually, I haven't changed that copy since. It's still kind of, it's pitched as an experiment, but yeah. It's an experiment that we just left running, and now it's making us money.
Starr: 11:42 Would you call that a weird trick?
Josh: 11:45 I don't know.
Starr: 11:45 Can we say that this show has one weird trick?
Josh: 11:48 One weird trick, that's just to send ...
Ben: 11:52 It's funny that you say that, because I didn't have that thought at all, but at the same time that Josh was talking, he was talking about how this is a trial, and he put that in the message, like, "This is something we're trying out." I think that's part of our approach to not just marketing but also customer success, is being upfront and real with our customers. Like, "Hey, this is what we're doing. Let's see if this works. This is not like a weird trick that we've masterminded, and we're like all these evil genius hackers that are come up with all these awesome things to try and manipulate people."
Ben: 12:27 It's like, "Hey, our email that bills people, that gives them a receipt for their charge, it says at the bottom, "Thanks for supporting us. We're three bootstrap guys, thanks for supporting our business." That's part of our whole messaging, part of who we are. It's not like some charade or something that we've made up. We're being real here.
Josh: 12:50 Yeah. It also gives that message, a similar thank you message, when you install the Gem and your Ruby project too. It outputs it in your console. Like, "Hey, this is who we are."
Starr: 13:03 You know what's funny is that, when I first started doing business-y type things, even when I was in high school on to, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, before Honeybadger, I was always concerned with looking like a professional, big thing. I didn't want to just use my name. It's like, I had to have a business card printed up with some company name on it, and all that. Now that I have an actual business with you guys, it's just like, "Hey, we're just three fellows. Please be nice to us."
Ben: 13:40 Like, "Yeah, we're just chilling over here, running our business. Hope you like it."
Starr: 13:45 Yeah. The thing is, that sort of honesty and candor is going to meet with people being a little bit nicer to you, I think, unless they are at another big company or whatever. If it's pretty obvious that you're a human being, and you're sending them like real stuff, like you're not just spamming them and whatever, yeah, people are going to be a little bit nice to you. I don't know. I hope this doesn't stop working, because a lot more people are getting into this semi-personalized email marketing B.S., where it's like, everybody's suddenly now like, "Hey, Starr, we're best friends. I've never met you. Now, why don't we have a call about your deepest, darkest thoughts and desires?"
Josh: 14:37 People do seem to know us a lot better than they used to.
Ben: 14:40 Yeah. Well, I think as long as we're not sending out emails saying, "Oh, you must be trapped under a bus because you didn't respond to my email," as long as we don't do that kind of-
Starr: 14:47 Yeah. Oh, you're still pissed about that.
Ben: 14:49 Oh, man, I hate those emails.
Starr: 14:51 This was a cold email that somebody kept escalating.
Ben: 14:53 Yeah.
Starr: 14:54 After you didn't reply, they kept escalating even more dramatic, or something?
Ben: 14:57 Right.
Josh: 14:57 I've heard people advocate this in conference talks. Like, "You can use these tricks to close more sales," and it's bullshit.
Ben: 15:06 I think developers have highly refined B.S. detectors. That works for sales emails, like those that we just talked about, but also for the customer success stuff that we're talking about in this episode. If you're a founder and you are trying to find out, "Why aren't people responding to my emails about their trials," are you being sincere and personal in your outreach, or is it just an automated thing that you just set it and forget it? There's that whole struggle versus, "Well, it doesn't scale," versus, "Do things that don't scale." I think in the early days, and I think where Tony's coming from here is, "I am reaching out individually to these people, and yet they're still not responding. How can I get more responses out of them?"
Ben: 15:52 Assuming that we're at that base level of, yes, you're being genuine and you're being personal and you're being real, I guess from that point then, how do I get more success when I'm not trying to be a sleazebag or as scammer?
Starr: 16:05 When you're trying to convince somebody to do something, it's important to show them how that will benefit them. It may be impossible to do if somebody is a new trial signup, they're not invested in you, they don't really care about you, but if somebody's been using your service for a little while and you want to get a feel on what they're thinking about maybe some new feature, or maybe pain points in your service for them, you can just be like, "I'm writing you because I want to fix things." Like, "I want to make your experience better. You can tell me what you don't like or what you do like, and we'll try and do less or more of that."
Ben: 16:40 Yeah. You reminded me of Kathy Sierra. She said it's about making your customers awesome. It's not about making you awesome as the provider. It's about making your customers awesome.
Starr: 16:50 We're already awesome.
Josh: 16:51 Yeah, we don't need any help.
Ben: 16:56 Your customer is using your product for some end goal, right? There's something they want to accomplish in their lives. They want to be better or do something better. They don't care about your product, they care about them. I think if you focus on them, like you said, Starr, your email is, "Hey, I want to make this better, not because I just want to be better, but because I want to make your life better. Help me help you," kind of thing. I think that that definitely helps grease the skids there.
Josh: 17:22 I usually have Starr edit my copy when I write articles or website copy and stuff. Half the time, his main feedback is just, "Stop talking about us, and rewrite this in terms of you." I try to do that. I try to remember that every time.
Starr: 17:39 That's just my auto-responder. I've got a rule set up in Gmail.
Josh: 17:44 Yeah. No, it's helpful. It's like, you default to talking about yourself, versus talking in terms of the user or the person you're talking to. Yeah, I like to think that I'm starting to default to the other way, a little more often anyway.
Starr: 17:59 One other technique that you can do here is to try and collect user feedback and interact with the users in a way that's maybe not just an email. Maybe you can move that interaction to someplace that's closer to something that your users are actually trying to do. For example, we have a little text box right next to our cancel button. If somebody cancels ... I don't know if they still have to, we had it so that they had to enter in a comment, but it may be optional now. I don't know. Yeah, we get comments, and a lot of the comments are crappy, but some of the comments are actually useful. It helps to keep an eye on, like, why are people canceling?
Josh: 18:38 I want to say it's required because some of the comments are just, like, dot.
Ben: 18:43 Yeah, I think it's still required.
Josh: 18:44 Or, like, "Bye," but some of them have been very good.
Ben: 18:49 Yeah, and we struggle with that, actually. I remember when we first put the cancellation little text box out there, it wasn't required because we hate that as developers. We hate when someone makes us do something, but we got, like, zero responses. People just canceled and nothing. Fine, then we're like, "Okay, well, let's just make it required so we can get something." I think that was a good decision because occasionally we get the useful info about things that could have been better.
Josh: 19:16 I'd say it's more than occasionally. A lot of times, people will at least be willing to tell us that they're switching to a competitor, or if there's a reason. We get competitors' names a fair amount of the time, which is really useful to know. If people are switching to someone else, it's nice to know who. I think the reason that we actually made that compromise, even though we don't like having to fill out those boxes ourselves, is that, it's so important, and that is one of the few places where you can actually make contact with those users before they leave forever. I think we decided, we'd kind of set aside our disgust for that one thing, just because it's so valuable.
Ben: 20:00 Can I reveal the big secret, our number one cancellation reason?
Josh: 20:04 Please.
Starr: 20:04 Sure.
Ben: 20:05 It is, "Business ended."
Josh: 20:07 Yeah.
Starr: 20:09 Oh, damn. You're saying that using Honeybadger makes people go out of business?
Josh: 20:12 Oh, gosh.
Starr: 20:13 We shouldn't put this on the air. One thing I was thinking about, I've been thinking about this for a while, is that, it might actually be good to have a similar form right after somebody signs up, just to try it, just to test it. Like, "What are you trying to do?" It would need to be a little bit more well thought out than that, because we'd get a bunch of smart asses being like, "I want to track errors."
Ben: 20:34 Yeah.
Josh: 20:35 Yeah.
Starr: 20:35 I think we could possibly collect some information there that might be useful, and that might be a decent strategy for Tony or whatever. Just put a form in the signup or onboarding flow.
Josh: 20:48 That would be a good experiment.
Ben: 20:48 Yeah, I think that'd be good. One thing we did try, it wasn't during the onboarding flow, but it was during the normal day-to-day usage of the application. We did try putting up an NPS survey, a net promoter score survey.
Starr: 20:58 What's that?
Ben: 20:59 The NPS is basically a measurement of how much people are satisfied with your product. You've probably seen this out there. It gives you a little pop-up and says, "Would you recommend us to a friend?" There's a scale from, like, one to 10, one being, "No, I hate you," and 10 being, "Yes, I would tell everyone about you." Then, if you answer that, then it asks, "Okay, is there anything we can do better," or whatever. There's a followup question. Some people swear by this, like the NPS is their metric upon which they are paid. Like, marketing people had this as part of their customer sat score or whatever. Anyway, it was kind of a real big rage a couple of years ago, and it's still around.
Ben: 21:43 We had this time where we were like, "Oh, NPS, that's a cool idea. Let's see what our rating is, and let's see how people like us." We put that pop-up on there, and it was useful. People would actually respond. They would interact with it and they would give us a rating. Oftentimes the rating was great, and they would even put in additional comments, and we still have those. Some of them great, you know, like feature requests or whatever, but some people got pretty annoyed by that. They were like, "You know what, you're popping this up in your UI, and I'm just trying to get my job done. Get rid of this thing." I guess there's a balance there you have to strike.
Josh: 22:17 I think that's why we haven't done a ton of Intercom pop-ups either. We have I think one or two, but we don't have some sort of in-app.
Ben: 22:30 Maybe we should do the NPS thing again some time, but not as a pop-up, maybe as an email.
Josh: 22:34 Yeah.
Ben: 22:35 I don't know. It was useful information, but it just got in people's way when it was in the app.
Josh: 22:38 One of the areas that I think that we have talked the most to our customers out of anything, probably by a lot, is support. Our approach to support is, I think, a little bit more hands on than a lot of people do, in that, we are the founders of that company and we are still handling a majority of our support tickets in the business. We have since day one.
Josh: 23:10 I think that's really put us close to a lot of our customers who have contacted us for support issues, because we're also looking towards customer development or product development, so we know the questions to ask, or we know if there's an opportunity to learn something that we're curious about from a customer. It's like, they're right there. We're already talking to them, we're helping them with some maybe small issue, but we can put in, "By the way, what do you think about this?" More often than not, we're already helping them, so they're more likely to respond.
Starr: 23:47 One thing that's interesting is, I noticed that when we switched away from a traditional email ticketing support system and moved over to Intercom, I noticed that the sort of tenor of the conversations with users changed, because Intercom has much more of a chat feel to it. It's not really chat, people don't expect an answer immediately, but I don't know. I felt like we had a lot more discussions as soon as we moved over. I mean, we paid dearly for it. I, for example, have given my firstborn child to Intercom. They're named Intercom now.
Josh: 24:28 Yeah, mine is too.
Starr: 24:30 But you know, well, it might be worth it.
Ben: 24:33 Yeah, definitely, I agree. It did help improve the conversation that we had with the customers, as opposed to just getting a random request or a complaint or something. Like Josh was saying, when someone's on there saying, "Hey, I'm trying you out, I'm a Sentry customer," we'd be like, "Oh, that's interesting. Why try us? What's different enough to make you want to come and try it?" We get that information that we wouldn't get any other way.
Starr: 25:01 I think because the support widget is kind of built into the app itself, like you can just click a link and it pops open a widget, and you type in your requests, I think we get more casual support tickets than we would if it was email.
Josh: 25:19 Sometimes they'll just say, like, "Hi."
Starr: 25:22 Oh, yeah.
Josh: 25:22 Those are my favorite, because I'll reply with, like, a bunch of Emojis or something.
Ben: 25:26 Well, and it's really cool for me, being as agile as we are, being able to turn on a dime, do whatever we want, is when we have a customer who's on chat and they're like, "Oh, I wish you would do this," and be like, "Okay," and an hour later, come back and be like, "Okay, it's done. It's deployed." They're just blown away that we got this feature.
Starr: 25:48 Yeah, you're the master of that, Ben.
Josh: 25:50 Yeah.
Ben: 25:50 I love doing that. It makes me smile.
Starr: 25:52 That's because you've got everything on a branch. We have a little private joke here at Honeybadger that Ben has every possible feature on a branch, and so, all he has to do is merge it and deploy. Because half the time, he does. I don't know how.
Ben: 26:06 It's magic. The thing that I think is really neat, aside from that endorphin rush that you get when you make someone happy like that and they're all excited, that turns into a testimonial. The person is so excited at that point, you've given them such a good experience, that they're keyed, they're primed. They are just super ready to be able to give you a glowing testimonial, and so you ask them. As soon as you're done helping them like that, you say, "Hey, glad you're happy. Could we use that as a testimonial?" Of course they say, "Sure."
Ben: 26:39 Then, it gives you a chance later, you might come back to them later and say, "Oh, we would like to talk to you more about how you use Honeybadger. Could we do a case study, or talk to you more about what you like, what you don't like?" That deposit that you put into their emotional bank account, that happiness that you gave them, it translates into them being more willing to give you some of their time.
Josh: 27:02 Yeah. I think that ties into why I'm thinking, like, customer support is such a good place to get customer feedback or testimonials, or any of that sort of stuff, just because if you are doing it right, you are providing them with a great amount of value. If you can go above and beyond in your support and give them a good feeling and a good response, then like you said, they are primed for helping you in return. People want to reciprocate. I think it's a good place to do that, and I think it's probably overlooked, because a lot of people, support is the first thing they want to automate away so they don't have to do it, but if you just put a support operator on support that is just trained in triage and solving the immediate issue, they're not going to be looking for those opportunities unless you've specifically trained them for that, which I guess you could do, but it'd have to be intentional.
Starr: 28:02 Yeah. I think people can tell when they get a response that is completely tailored to the question they ask, and it's not like a canned response. Recently, I say recently, this is six months, a year ago, I don't know, we did a bunch of interviews. We hired somebody, Shane, to do some interviews. How did we get people to sign up for those? Were those mostly people that we knew through support, or did we send out just a mass email, or what do we do?
Josh: 28:32 I did a customer research project to figure out who we should send those surveys and ask to interview. Actually, the whole idea was kind of a system that Clair from Userist.io had put together and presented at MicroConf. It was basically, she had templates and even like interview questions, and how to conduct the whole survey thing. Basically, what I did in the beginning was, I went through and I did a spreadsheet on some of our top customers based on things like what plans they were on, how much they were paying us per year, what their engagement with various features was, so like, are they using specific features of our app that we consider high-engagement type features. Then, I think I just ranked. Once I got it down to around 200 or so, I just ranked it a little arbitrarily, probably like on top annual spend or something.
Starr: 29:36 Since you did a study to figure out who to contact, what was your goal? Like, who were you trying to select?
Josh: 29:43 I was trying to select, probably like, people that are using Honeybadger the most, so like, the most engaged users. Because I figured, the people that are going to care the most about what we're doing at Honeybadger and maybe helping us out, are the people that are getting the most value out of our product. I just figured I'd find the people that are engaged as much as possible with the features that I'm curious about, and go from there.
Starr: 30:10 Then we had Shane follow up with them, like he did Skype interviews with them?
Josh: 30:18 It was a two-part thing. We did a survey first, and that was to a majority of the users. I took the top 40 users and set them aside for later, and I took the bottom 160, and we sent the survey to them, and so we got some survey responses. Honestly, that was a little tougher, to get people to answer the survey. We got some good responses but it wasn't like 80% of them responding. We did that, and then after the survey, we took the remaining 40 people and we sent a separate email to them, which was like asking them to do an interview with Shane. I think in the email copy, we mentioned that, like, we noticed they're power users and would like to pick their brain about how they use Honeybadger and what they'd like to see us do with it in the future.
Ben: 31:12 When you sent that, did you say, "Hey, we're going to incorporate your feedback into the product," or was there some sort of incentive that you gave for talking to Shane, or just like, "Hey, please talk to Shane?"
Josh: 31:23 I didn't do an incentive. I think we did give T-shirts or some swag to those people, like as a thank you, but I'm pretty sure, I don't think we offered that in the actual email that we sent them. I think it was just, like, "Hey, thanks for doing the interview." I don't know, we might've mentioned it, but yeah. I think it was really just kind of like, it explained who we are and what we're doing and kind of humanized us again, like, "We're a small team, we really could use your input on the product. It's going to make a really big, observable impact. It's not like we're just something big customer success team or something that's just doing a random survey."
Ben: 32:08 We talked a few minutes ago about how these automated emails that are really scammy feeling and stuff, and you can see right through that. I just remembered, there was this one service I signed up for, I don't remember what service it was, but I remember getting the welcome email. It was obviously automated, it was from their system, but it was from the founder, and it said, "Hey. Yes, this is an automated email, but I am excited to hear about whatever your thoughts are about the product. Please, reply to this, and I read all the replies that come to this," or something along those lines. "I read every response."
Ben: 32:46 That, for some reason, connected with me. I was like, "Oh, someone who is telling me he will read my reply." He just gave that. I don't want to say, quote, "That's a great line to use in your emails," close quote, but it worked really well for me that at that time.
Josh: 33:05 It's a great thing to be. If that's who you are, it's a good ...
Starr: 33:08 That also takes the whole interaction away from this idea of, "Wow, I'm doing a big mass emailing, and then I expect you to respond to me," or it's a big campaign. It basically makes opportunities for interaction all over the place. Whenever you send transactional email to somebody, they have the opportunity to reply to that and let you know what they're thinking. It's kind of unusual. Not many places do this. Most places have, like, noreply@whatever.com. I know people reply to our automated emails and we listen to them.
Ben: 33:44 Yeah.
Starr: 33:47 We read them.
Ben: 33:47 We read every one, yes.
Josh: 33:49 Yeah. Well, we get replies to emails that are, like, for our newsletter that we've been sending. I've gotten some pretty good replies every time I send a new article to our newsletter. That's been cool.
Ben: 34:00 Yeah. I wanted to mention one thing on Tony's question. He mentioned building social proof testimonials and case studies. I think the thing that we did early on that I think everyone has to do, I think it's table stakes, is, those first 10 customers, they have to give you testimonials. You have to work with them enough so that they're happy enough that they're happy to give you some sort of endorsement, and then you can just use those forever. We used Mike's testimonial since day one, and we're still using Mike testimonial.
Josh: 34:27 Yeah. Mike's not even a customer anymore, but he's still our top testimonial.
Starr: 34:32 Well, that's because he doesn't really have a big Rails app anymore.
Josh: 34:36 Yeah. I wanted to ask Ben just one thing, going back to, we were talking about maybe testimonials and case studies, but you mentioned the emotional bank account thing.
Ben: 34:51 Yeah, yeah.
Josh: 34:51 Remind me, I know that I read that book. What book was that again?
Ben: 34:55 Man, I don't remember.
Josh: 34:56 You don't remember? Okay.
Ben: 34:56 It could have been John Gottman, the marriage professor from University of Washington.
Josh: 35:01 Okay.
Ben: 35:02 I'm not sure that it was original to him, but yeah. The idea being that every interaction you have with people either causes a credit or a debit to their emotional bank account with you. Yeah.
Josh: 35:11 Yeah, or maybe it was a blog post. Yeah. I remember reading, yeah, whoever originally came up with that. It was really a good way of thinking about it. Because you can make withdrawals, in addition to making deposits.
Ben: 35:26 Right.
Josh: 35:28 Over time, I think that's one thing we've done really well, is, through our customer support and through our customer-driven approach, I feel like we have a pretty good selection of users now, who are even friends, who we have a very high balance with. Maybe that's why now it's a little bit easier to solicit customer feedback or ask for things, because we've created such a good track record of treating our customers well.
Ben: 35:59 I think one thing you can do before the interactions happen, even before someone contacts customer support, is provide a lot of value to them. I know I was shopping for a service recently, and I just started on Google, or DuckDuckGo as we discussed last time. I just searched for the thing that I'm interested in. People showed up in the list, and I started clicking, and one of the providers just had a ton of useful information out there. I grabbed their .pdf, which did not require me to give them an email address to download. When I go to buy that service, they're going to be number one on my list of potential providers.
Ben: 36:36 I think if you're struggling with the idea of, "Yeah, I want to have this awesome relationship with my customers, but they haven't been around long enough to talk to support, or they haven't signed up at all yet," I think leading out with the value, give them something. Whatever your expertise is, share it. That will cause that first credit in their emotional account.
Josh: 37:03 Totally.
Starr: 37:04 Well, I'll tell you what, boys, every time I talk to you guys, my emotional bank account is totally full.
Ben: 37:10 Aww.
Starr: 37:10 Overflowing. Yeah.
Ben: 37:12 That's so nice.
Starr: 37:16 Should we wrap things up?
Ben: 37:17 Sure.
Starr: 37:18 All right. Well, I'll talk to you guys next week then. All right.
Announcer: 37:24 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger, zero-instrumentation, 360-degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io.
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Do you know what the 3rd-party scripts on your website are up to? In this week’s episode of FounderQuest, the guys talk about CSP (Content Security Policy) and how it can enhance security in the browser. They also weigh adding it as a feature of Honeybadger vs. a standalone product. CSP - learn it, live it, love it, on this week's FounderQuest.
Full transcript:
Josh: 00:00 A middle of the night disruption for Ben, what is that? Like 8:30?
Starr: 00:05 Oh, somebody called the burn unit! Oh!
Announcer: 00:08 You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Time to start a fire! Crack open a can of Tab, and settle in for Founder Quest.
Starr: 00:21 It is telling that the only way we can have sick burns on Ben is to accuse him of being too productive.
Josh: 00:27 Yeah.
Ben: 00:28 It's all good.
Starr: 00:29 So you know how turkey makes you sleepy?
Ben: 00:31 Tryptophan.
Starr: 00:32 You can buy pills full of that stuff.
Josh: 00:35 I forgot about Tryptophan supplements.
Ben: 00:38 Wait, do they have pills that have both Tryptophan and Melatonin?
Starr: 00:41 No, but...
Josh: 00:43 Oh that's, that's like a cocktail.
Starr: 00:44 I don't know if I want to do that. I want to wake up in the morning eventually.
Ben: 00:49 You got to have the Tryptophan, plus the Melatonin, plus the NyQuil chaser.
Josh: 00:54 Yeah.
Starr: 00:54 And you just empty all those pill... empty all those capsules into a shot of whiskey. And then you just pound that bad boy.
Josh: 01:01 Yeah!
Ben: 01:03 Throw some Benadryl in there if you haven't... If you're still awake.
Josh: 01:06 So today, I thought it would be fun to talk about like an actual sort of feature, like I don't think we've actually shipped this feature yet. Have we?
Ben: 01:15 We kind of shipped the feature.
Josh: 01:17 We've shipped it a few times in various forms, not-
Ben: 01:22 It is not GA yet, as the big boys say.
Josh: 01:25 Oh, so if you're a VIP, you get the feature flag. Like the "you can totally use this feature".
Ben: 01:30 Exactly. If you're on the list then you get to use this feature.
Starr: 01:32 Oh, yeah.
Josh: 01:32 You did deploy... yeah, you deployed some of it, right? Or is it all of it?
Ben: 01:35 Yes, it's deployed. It's out there.
Josh: 01:35 Oh, okay.
Ben: 01:36 We could launch it today if we really felt like it. But...
Starr: 01:40 Anyway, I thought it would be fun to talk about this feature because it's something we've been discussing for literally years.
Ben: 01:47 Literally.
Starr: 01:48 I think...
Josh: 01:49 Yeah, I think about-
Starr: 01:50 I think Ben has taken a couple shots at it.
Josh: 01:52 I've taken a couple of shots at it, too.
Starr: 01:54 Damn, I feel like I should've taken some shots at it. And this feature is CSP reporting. So could somebody please tell me what the heck that is? Like what, what is CSP reporting?
Josh: 02:06 Well, CSP is content security policy reporting. Content security policy is a feature of modern browsers that allows you to alert, basically send alerts to a URL of your choice when content that you don't, that you didn't authorize is loaded on the page.
Ben: 02:30 So yeah, in addition to reporting, it also blocks that content, right? I mean, that's the primary use case, is to prevent your side from serving something that you didn't intend it to serve. Right? And so the reporting is kind of an extra benefit that you can, you can track-
Josh: 02:44 Yeah.
Ben: 02:44 ... but, you can see this in your browser. You know when you open up the console and those console errors, right? You can see if anything violates a content security policy. You can see that the browser is like, "Nope, didn't load that."
Starr: 02:56 So what, what might be... What is an example of some bad behavior that this is trying to prevent?
Ben: 03:02 So cross-site scripting is huge. So you know, you can inject some JavaScript into a vulnerable page. Let's say you have a content management system that allows you to put some user input in and then it displays it to some other user. And if it-
Starr: 03:16 Or you have user comments or something.
Ben: 03:18 ... yeah, yeah. And so, if you don't escape that stuff properly, you can have... you can inject some scripts into the page that some other user sees, right? And so you could steal their cookies or do all kinds of things, right? And so-
Josh: 03:31 Yeah.
Ben: 03:31 ... content security policy says, "well, I don't actually want to allow in-line scripts to be executed on my pages because I don't do that sort of thing." Right? And so if there is some sort of weakness in your system that allows in-line scripting to be put in there that you didn't put in there, then that policy would say, "Nope, not going to run it."
Starr: 03:49 Oh, wow. That's... I had no idea that it could do things like block in-line scripting. I assumed it was just solely a sort of URL based thing, where it's like any JavaScript that doesn't come from these specific domains, block that and report it but you can do in-line stuff too.
Josh: 04:07 Yeah. So, it can do both on the page and remote, and yeah, I guess like if... an example of something it would block is if a remote script like Google Analytics got hijacked or something, and someone tried to load another remote script, you know? By dropping it into the DOM or something that loaded a JavaScript file from a bad domain, then it would not have that domain white-listed and it would block it.
Ben: 04:39 Yeah. It can also block like you were thinking, Starr, it can block connections to remote JavaScript and remote style sheets and remote forms. So yeah, there are a lot of things that it can do.
Josh: 04:51 Yeah.
Ben: 04:52 And one... another-
Josh: 04:54 It's like any XH... like any cross domain request, right? It'll block anything, I think, or...
Ben: 05:01 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I know it has script source-
Josh: 05:03 Yeah. Like XHR.
Ben: 05:03 ... and style source directives. So, I don't know if it does anything, but...
Starr: 05:07 So how do you actually add... so this is... so the CSP policy tells the browser to block certain things and possibly report them. So how do you... what actually does that look like? How do you add a CSP to your page? Is it like a meta tag in the document head or what?
Ben: 05:27 Typically, it's going to be a header that your web server would return, right? So Apache or NGINX would be configured to return this header.
Josh: 05:36 You send it with the request. Actually, I believe in the latest version of Rails, it actually has some pre-configured CSP headers that it sends. And I think it probably does that, like I haven't checked, but like in a rack middleware or something, I'm guessing. Where it would just add the headers to the request as it's making it. And I think that you can like configure what you're going to allow.
Ben: 06:00 Yeah. So the... in the new versions of Rails, I think it started in 5.2 actually.
Josh: 06:04 Was it 5.2?
Ben: 06:04 Yeah.
Josh: 06:04 Okay.
Ben: 06:06 You can... there's this new initializer called content security policy, which allows you to configure that header being sent or not. And one of the things that's cool about the way that Rails did it is that one of the things that content security policy allows, specifically for in-line scripts and styles, is this concept of a nonce. So, if you actually do want to have in-line script run, because for some reason you like to work that way, I don't know, you can actually say, "This particular in-line script is safe to run, so run this, but not anything that I don't declare as safe." Right?
Josh: 06:42 Mmhmm. (affirmative)
Ben: 06:43 And so you could use nonces for that and basically it's just like this random string that you generate that says, "Yeah, this particular JavaScript section is safe to run." And what Rails does is it generates that nonce for you, and then there's actually a helper. A view helper you can use to wrap your JavaScript that says, "Yes, wrap this JavaScript inside this nonce and declare it safe." Basically.
Starr: 07:02 Oh, nice. Cause otherwise, that would be a huge pain in the neck, because you'd have to somehow coordinate your headers with sort of the content of your... I guess HTML, if you've got in-line JavaScript in that HTML file.
Ben: 07:16 Yep.
Josh: 07:17 Yeah.
Starr: 07:17 That'd be a huge pain in the neck. And the fact that-
Josh: 07:19 I love that about Rails.
Starr: 07:20 ... the fact that Rails is doing this now, that's... this is all kind of... it's not super new, but it's kind of new-ish. Like people were just now...
Josh: 07:29 Yeah.
Ben: 07:29 It's still pretty new.
Starr: 07:30 ... getting used to this idea.
Josh: 07:31 That's why I think that's the big... that's the reason we never fully... Ben and I have been tracking this for a long time, and we've been tracking it since the early... since you know it first came out, and I think we kind of saw that this is going to catch on at some point, but we don't know when it's going to reach the mainstream, basically. And I think that Rails... Rails adopting it is a pretty good sign that this is, you know, pretty much everyone's gonna know about this at some point now.
Ben: 08:00 Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think especially with Rails 6.0, people are going to be upgrading to it and seeing this new initializer showing up in their... when they do the upgrade.
Josh: 08:08 Yeah.
Ben: 08:08 I think it'll definitely become more widespread.
Josh: 08:11 A few of our earlier attempts when we were first learning about CSP and so... there's some other browser... similar browser features that go with it. But we were initially thinking that, you know, this would be a cool standalone, kind of, new thing to build... like a product around it or something like that. Or a tool, even. And we kind of jumped back and forth between, "should we put this on honeybadger?" or "should this be like, should we make something specifically for this?"
Starr: 08:40 So what exactly is this? So we've described CSPs a little bit.
Josh: 08:45 Yeah.
Starr: 08:45 But what... where do we come in? What part are we playing?
Josh: 08:48 Yeah. So the report, the reporting feature I mentioned is where we come in. So CSP headers have a feature called report URI, which... it's that URL that I mentioned that you can give it that it will post the reports to when there is a violation.
Josh: 09:07 And so there's two ways that people use that, there's when they're blocking... when they're entirely blocking any requests that are not allowed, they can still report the violations. And they might want to know that just, you know, for security reasons, like to know that these requests are being made, even though they're blocked.
Josh: 09:26 And the other reason... the other way is that there's also a report-only mode, which will basically still allow the request to happen, but it will send the report as if there was a violation. And that can be handy if you're rolling out CSP, but you don't want to like risk breaking your entire site if you like forgot to white-list your assets, for example.
Ben: 09:48 Yeah. When I was doing some testing for this, I had a site that I used as a Guinea pig, and that was exactly my scenario. Like if there's a bunch of JavaScript already and styles being loaded on the site, I didn't want to break it, but I did want to find out what things would trigger a CSP violation.
Josh: 10:06 Yeah.
Ben: 10:06 So I deployed the app with the report-only header, and started tracking the violations, and I was able to go back and update the policy based on the things that I saw, like "Oh yes, yes, I'm going to load Google Analytics, so that's fine, I'll put that in my white list."
Starr: 10:22 So the idea is that people will set their report URI to point at our servers, and then we'll take those reports and do something intelligent with them, right? Because we already have all this infrastructure for reporting application errors, for integrating with people's chat systems, ticketing systems, stuff like that were already in people's lives. So it kind of makes sense for us to sort of handle that for people as well. Especially since it's going to be in Rails, and so this is just something that... we really support Rails very thoroughly, out of the box.
Ben: 10:59 Yeah.
Josh: 11:00 Yeah. I'm really excited about that aspect of it. Cause I assume... I don't think we've looked into it yet to build it, but I'm hoping that we can actually automatically... will automatically be able to, you know, send the CSP reports from Rails to Honeybadger without any, you know, any kind of additional configuration. At least that's how I hope that we can make it work. And then maybe even on the Honeybadger side we could like, you know, tell people what headers they need to send, if there's a violation that they're not catching, you know? And they want to white-list something, we could help them like just give them like a drop-in, you know, tell them how to basically configure it.
Starr: 11:36 So, the idea is that our gem- our Ruby gem currently goes in and attaches itself to Rails and picks up all this error data automatically. So, you know, hopefully it'll be able to pick up the CSP data automatically too.
Josh: 11:51 Yeah, I think right now we're just... We're just building the infrastructure to report... to monitor and report this data, is as where Ben's at, I think. But yeah, I think that...
Ben: 12:00 Yeah, at the moment, since we're still in Beta, what I've asked- what I've told the people who are testing it, they can do is just, "here's the report URI setting that you can use to report your violations to our stack."
Josh: 12:14 Yeah.
Ben: 12:14 Yeah. But I think adding that to the gem, like we could detect if it's enabled and then we say, "okay, just slide in this report that you run for them automatically." That'd be pretty cool.
Josh: 12:22 Here it is. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the reasons- I think one of the reasons we didn't go down the let's create a new like CSP product route is that the data volume can be fairly large for these types of monitoring services, because if you imagine potentially every- every user who visits your website could be sending multiple requests per page visit. If there's a lot of violations to whatever your reporting services, is that right, Ben?
Josh: 12:57 Yeah, so just imagine the volume of reports that you could potentially be like hammering your API with if you're doing this with thousands or tens of thousands of customers to a single service. So we thought like, you know, do we- we already have one ops-heavy startup, do we really want like to have an entirely separate one? And the answer was no, let's just roll it into our existing one and handle the traffic anyway.
Ben: 13:23 Yeah. Another consideration was that the use case for this is a lot of people want to know that this violation happened, right? Once you have the enforcement happening, it's actually an error, right? It could be someone trying to hack into your site when you see a violation pop up after you've done all the white-listing work. Right? So the idea there is we already have all this infrastructure for people to be alerted for errors, so why would we ask our customers to set that up again? Right? You know, you wanted to get- check this other kind of thing that looks like an error and feels like an error separately from your errors. Well...
Josh: 13:57 Mmhmm. (affirmative)
Ben: 13:58 Yeah. But the one- the reason why it wasn't a slam dunk and we thought about a long time whether to keep it separate, was the other issue- the other side of it is these payloads are very small. They don't have back traces. They don't really have any, you know, actionable information that we're used to having with a typical error. Like, you know, there's not context, there's not, you know, a lot of that kind of stuff. So we're like, "well, it doesn't necessarily fit like a glove into our current thing."
Ben: 14:25 So we had to basically create a shim where we take the information that we do get from the browser, which is pretty minimal, and kind of shape that into what we're expecting for notification. So we can't just make up a back-trace, right? But we can put in things like, "oh well the user agent header can turn into the the user agent environment variable that we usually get from a server psych" and things like that.
Josh: 14:49 I really like how you're reusing our fingerprinting system too. So that- because our fingerprinting system is how we actually de-duplicate or de-dupe errors- error reports. So if- if you have like a bunch of errors that are reported from your application that are like the same- from the same location in your app, you don't want to get 50,000 error reports, you want to get one error report.
Josh: 15:12 And so we use fingerprinting to kind of analyze the error data that's coming in and determine if it's the same error or if it's different. And we're kind of doing the same thing, basically reuse- repurposing that system to de-dupe the CSP reports, right?
Ben: 15:24 Yeah. Yeah, and it's, it's still not perfect. Like they're still- looking into my sample project and I can see that there are a bunch of violations that look very similar, but they're somewhat different, right? So, I don't know that I've totally nailed that yet and that's one reason why I haven't released it for GA, but, but yeah, there's definitely a lot of volume like you mentioned and if he didn't de-dupe that, it would just be noise.
Josh: 15:48 Yeah. Well, I'm sure as we get more data to work with, those fingerprints will evolve just like they did for errors too, because-
Ben: 15:54 Yeah.
Josh: 15:55 ... as I recall, we had this same situation where as you get more data, you see more edge cases and you can build that into the algorithm, basically.
Ben: 16:02 Yeah.
Starr: 16:03 So question. How are we dealing with the fact that the service is going to have so much traffic? Like it's conceivably gonna have a lot more traffic than our error reporting or inbound error reporting system. What- like how are we managing that?
Ben: 16:23 Well, I mean it might have significantly more traffic. It's hard to say yet, because I mean, if you look at our JavaScript client traffic, we get a lot of traffic from JavaScript, right?
Starr: 16:33 Oh, yeah, that's true.
Josh: 16:34 Yeah. Which, by the way, is a significantly small portion of our actual installs. Like most- a lot of people- we have a lot of server side customers and relatively fewer buy inside. But the client side is like a large portion of our...
Ben: 16:49 Right. Yeah.
Josh: 16:51 Everyone, don't go out and install the client side reporting at once, please.
Ben: 16:55 Yeah.
Starr: 16:56 So you're saying we should ditch JavaScript and just go back to straight Rails.
Josh: 17:00 Oh, can we please?
Ben: 17:02 Let's start a no JS movement, right?
Josh: 17:04 Yeah.
Ben: 17:05 So yeah, we might- we might be buried in traffic because of- yeah, like Josh was saying that-
Josh: 17:11 It depends who uses it, right? Like, or how fast it gets adopted.
Ben: 17:14 So you know, we have our- our normal auto scaling stuff in place and so we can handle, you know, increases in traffic pretty gracefully. But I'm also looking at maybe using lambda for this. So, back in November of 2018, AWS announced that you could, in fact, connect an application load balancer and route that traffic directly to a lambda, rather than having to use API Gateway, which saves you buckets and buckets of money.
Josh: 17:43 Oh, that's cool.
Ben: 17:44 Right. If you are using a lot of API requests. And so we might be able to do that. I know we- like Josh, way, way, way long time ago looked at using a lambda for some other high volume stuff and like the API Gateway costs were just ridiculous.
Josh: 18:00 Well, that service is a lot like this service, actually. That was our log plex service, which takes basically like a Heroku log drain and scans the logs for error-like events, like on Heroku's side, and then it's the same situation where it's not- it's not an application exception, but we kind of massage it a little bit and convert it into one if it's- if it meets our criteria and then forwards it onto our API. But yeah, the like API Gateway was going to be crazy expensive based on the amount of traffic that we would receive.
Starr: 18:30 So, the Heroku logs' basically like we get people- we send people error alerts if like Heroku times out.
Josh: 18:36 Yeah, time's out. There's, there's a whole class, like a class of errors. There's like, I don't know, 20 or so, I think, different error codes that you can get with Heroku, that's like before it reaches your application, like your applications execution.
Ben: 18:50 Like a memory- memory use, like if you run out of memory.
Josh: 18:53 Yeah. Memory, yeah.
Ben: 18:55 Yeah, so that was a nonstarter. We tried that back- back a few years ago, but now that you can use an application load balancer instead and just send that traffic directly to a lambda function that that might be viable. And the, the benefit there is that, you know, Lambda could scale to infinity, right? At least that's what the marketing materials say. So, we don't have to worry about spinning up instances in an auto-scaling group like we do today. So that's one less concern. So, that could be interesting. So I'm playing around with that.
Josh: 19:26 If that is a successful experiment, I could see us moving a lot of stuff into there actually. Like, I mean we can move log plex into there, back in, you know, back into Lambda, we could potentially move our entire collector someday.
Ben: 19:38 Yeah, we could.
Josh: 19:40 You know, that's pretty exciting.
Ben: 19:42 Yeah. It gets us to the goal- closer to the goal that Starr has of no infrastructure, right? Just put it all on Amazon's plate and let them do it all. Yeah?
Starr: 19:50 Yeah, I should probably explain that Lambda is Amazon's serverless play where instead of administering a server, you just give them some code and they run it whenever a certain event happens that you define. So you know, whenever somebody goes to our URL with some payload data, the load balancer would then run, you know, tell Lambda to run this bit of code, send the data to it. And you know, bada bing bada boom.
Josh: 20:15 Yeah, yeah. It's- some people refer to that as functions as a service. F-A-A-S.
Ben: 20:21 Yeah. So we'll see. I mean, so right now we're just, it's deployed on our current infrastructure since we're, you know, not expecting a whole lot of volume from our test users. And we might stick with that because it's been working well for all these years and we just keep on working at. But you know, Lambda is interesting. So I'm playing with it.
Starr: 20:39 Even though Lambda sort of bills by invocation, it's still possibly doable in terms of price?
Ben: 20:46 Yeah. So, there was a great presentation at ServerlessConf San Francisco about your utilization of your, let's say- let's say you're comparing costs for, like in our scenario, running EC2 instances all the time versus doing that same kind of workload in Lambda. And, so the concern is if I have a per-invocation cost, then that's going to be way more expensive. But in reality, like usually many loads in EC2 are, like, 20 to 30% CPU utilization, right? So you're paying for a lot of idleness, in that case. And so the theory is that if you're not paying for that idle, if you're paying, you know, per invocation, then it can actually work out. So we're just gonna test it and see what it looks like and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't.
Josh: 21:33 Yeah, that'll be, that'll be good to know though. Cause this is probably like one of the- of all the things I can think of, like BIS, like CSP and log plex are the two things that I could see like, I mean, that's going to be the highest number of invocations that we would ever, ever use.
Ben: 21:48 Right.
Josh: 21:48 I, well, I guess I may have just screwed us.
Ben: 21:52 Until the next thing, that's the highest.
Josh: 21:55 Yeah. Well, we're gonna put our- like we're going to bring back metrics and put metrics into Lambda or something.
Starr: 22:02 I guess one thing that would be neat is if there were way to- in a nice serverless automated way to just kind of like batch the requests. Cause I don't- like for CSP, it doesn't really matter if it's a second layer. It would be nice if they could sort of batch requests into groups of a hundred and then you only have...
Josh: 22:21 This is why we pay Starr the big bucks, because he's- he's saving- this is how he saves us money. He's like- he's like, "what big bucks?"
Starr: 22:30 Stay tuned at the end of this episode for my phone number.
Starr: 22:35 No, no.
Ben: 22:37 Yeah. So, I mean, we've been working on this, like we- like I mentioned for years, literally. It was funny because I didn't really realize that until I went back to our customer support and you know, we keep track of all those things, and everyone who requested CSP along the years, I went back and told them, "hey, now you can come and test it."
Ben: 22:54 And I just happened to notice that the oldest request was three years ago. So I was like, "yeah!"
Starr: 22:58 Oh my goodness.
Ben: 22:59 Three years in the making. This was a well- a well- a good vintage feature.
Starr: 23:04 Where are we on this? Like is there a- do you have sort of plans to release this general availability anytime soon or is it we're just gonna wait for a while and play it by ear?
Ben: 23:14 Yeah, I mean I don't, I don't think I'll take us long time to figure out whether it's working for these- for these tests, the assessors, so you know, a week or two.
Starr: 23:22 Unless it's not working.
Josh: 23:23 I thought you were going to say we're going to do it live today.
Ben: 23:25 Oh, like do it right now, like while we're recording the podcast.
Starr: 23:26 On the podcast.
Josh: 23:27 Oh, we should do that. You know? We should ship it on a podcast though, on a Friday.
Ben: 23:32 On a Friday. Well, I mean, that's kind of cheating, cause it's already shipped.
Josh: 23:36 Right, I know. Well, I-
Josh: 23:39 We'll cut that out, Ben. Shut up.
Starr: 23:41 We could- we could just tell people that we're shipping it.
Ben: 23:46 Speaking of, though-
Starr: 23:47 Yeah, exactly.
Ben: 23:48 ... that is a strategy that we've used time and time again, just launching darkly? And I love that strategy. You know? Putting it out there in production, seeing how it works before you tell the masses about it and it works out great for us. Like if we can find out any edge cases like what you were talking about earlier and maybe some bad mistakes that we could avoid.
Ben: 24:08 There've been times where we've put something out there and get some real data in there, and it was like, "Oh! That was a bad idea." You know? Launching darkly really helps with that.
Josh: 24:16 Yeah. If only we could do that with changes to the notice pipeline or the fingerprinting thing I mentioned, like deploying anything that touches that, like the finger- you know, the fingerprinting or anything that could instantly change how many notifications people get on any given second-to-second basis is terrifying.
Ben: 24:37 Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: 24:38 But I don't really see a way around that, you know? I mean, I guess maybe there's something, but... yeah. We- we got to live with a little bit of uncertainty.
Ben: 24:48 Yeah.
Starr: 24:49 Well, this is cool. This is, you know, I've learned some stuff about CSP that I didn't know before and yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing this feature in production and everything.
Josh: 24:59 Yeah, me too.
Ben: 25:00 Yeah, that's pretty cool. Like the test site that I was using it on. It's actually pretty neat to see the violations come in and be like, "Oh yeah, I do want to have that particular JavaScript loaded" or "let me take a closer look at that and see what it's doing" because it's- yeah, like Josh mentioned the- the eval thing. A third party script can inject some- some script into your page and maybe you don't want that.
Josh: 25:24 Mmhmm. (affirmative)
Ben: 25:24 So yeah, it's pretty- it's pretty cool to see it in action and to say, "yeah, I feel better now that that site has that in place."
Starr: 25:30 Yeah. And even though like this stuff seems like kind of big company security audit type thing, this is just a reality that we're living in now that the web is becoming more and more sort of regulated. There's more and more issues of compliance that people have to deal with, and you know, part of that is security best practices. And so, you know, here comes along CSP, so as much as it sounds not very- very fun to just set that up and like look at all these alerts and stuff, that's just- that's just the way things are going I think.
Ben: 26:06 Yup.
Josh: 26:07 Yeah. Well, that's why it's nice. Frameworks like Rails that are kind of making it turnkey and services like Honeybadger that can plug into that also as a turnkey monitoring solution.
Starr: 26:19 Yeah.
Ben: 26:19 Yeah.
Josh: 26:19 It makes it a lot easier.
Ben: 26:22 We love our customers and so we made their lives easier, by providing them with these awesome tools.
Starr: 26:30 It's a shame we don't have video cause we could flash a 1-800 number.
Josh: 26:32 Yeah. Except who would answer it?
Starr: 26:36 Ben.
Josh: 26:37 But the answer is Ben.
Ben: 26:38 I wasn't going to say anything, but yes. I think we all know the answer to that question.
Josh: 26:43 Yeah.
Starr: 26:45 All right. Well, are we... are we good to go on this one? Do you think we should put in-
Josh: 26:49 I think so.
Ben: 26:50 That's a wrap.
Josh: 26:51 Ship it.
Ben: 26:52 Ship it.
Starr: 26:52 Okay. See you later, guys. Have a good one.
Starr: 26:58 Well, that wraps up our show for this week. Those boys really sound like they know what they're talking about, huh? Want to help us out? Head on over to your podcast service and give us a review. Any questions or comments? We're on Twitter @FounderQuest. Thanks!
Announcer: 27:12 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation. 360 degree coverage of errors. Outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io.
Announcer: 27:26 Want more from the Founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive, VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
Running a lifestyle business is awesome, contrary to what the VC's say. Figure out your life goals and fit your business to achieve them rather than worrying about 10x-ing. The guys also talk about why developers seem to experience higher rates of burnout than other professions and share their own prevention and coping solutions. Let's FounderQuest!
Links:
The 'Badger Life Blog Post: https://joshuawood.net/badger-life
Full Transcript:
Starr: 00:01 I had the voiceover guy, the voice of Barney who does our voiceovers. I had him do an intro that involves three guys trying to find personal happiness, and I may have used it once. I don't know, I just feel kind of lame putting it on there because I'm like this is too earnest. My 90s teenager self just won't let me be that earnest.
Ben: 00:22 We're pretty earnest, when you think about it.
Announcer: 00:25 Three developers, one mission. Build a business to nurture personal fulfillment. It's not stupid, it's FounderQuest.
Josh: 00:36 The Badger Life was the title of the blog post I did too that was kind of on this topic.
Starr: 00:42 Oh, that's right.
Ben: 00:43 Josh is the expert on that-
Josh: 00:45 I was just looking at it.
Ben: 00:45 We'll just have you talk the whole episode.
Josh: 00:47 No.
Ben: 00:48 Monologue.
Josh: 00:48 I mean, you want to have an episode, right? My talent is like just breaking the tension with the dumb jokes.
Starr: 00:57 Oh, I thought that was my talent.
Josh: 00:59 Well, clearly we're in trouble because Ben is the only one who can actually like talk cohesively.
Ben: 01:06 So Josh, what was your motivation for writing that blog post?
Josh: 01:11 I think just kind of sharing our view of the world. And I think we found a certain level of success with this now, and it's been something that we've been ... It's a kick that we've been on for a while, and I think it's one of the reasons we started the business was we were early starting the business to have, I think, like as a carryover from the last episode.
Josh: 01:38 We never really start the business to be some sort of like, to get us a bunch of fame and power, anything like that.
Starr: 01:44 Wait, what?
Josh: 01:48 Maybe Starr did, but yeah. I don't know, like we always ... I think the book that I had read and it's probably corny because this is .... I don't know if cliché at this point but I remember like I had just read The 4-Hour Workweek, and I was like, I want to start something that doesn't kill me and still makes a good living and all that sort of thing. That was for me to achieve my financial goals and stuff.
Josh: 02:19 I wrote this blog post, I think it was the last year. I think it's been a little while since I wrote it but-
Starr: 02:27 It's only been a year?
Josh: 02:27 Yeah, I just kind of talked about how we do things.
Starr: 02:30 Wow.
Josh: 02:30 I think it was already a year ago since I wrote that.
Starr: 02:33 I was going to say it seems like a decade ago, but ...
Ben: 02:36 Yeah, I would guess two years ago.
Josh: 02:38 Two years ago?
Starr: 02:39 That's because I have a small child so.
Josh: 02:44 Again, same here. So I don't have much of a concept of time at this point. But I have a feeling it wasn't as long as we're thinking, long ago as we're thinking.
Starr: 02:56 Yeah. So the post was called Badger Life and it sort of describes how we work, the things we value as company. And, man, the response to this was amazing like people were getting in touch with me. They're like, "How do I do this, Starr?" And I was like, "I don't know, man. Get lucky."
Starr: 03:13 Oh, no. I just ruined the podcast. No, everybody is going to unsubscribe now.
Josh: 03:19 Gosh, Starr.
Starr: 03:19 I know. I know.
Josh: 03:21 Well, I know like ...
Starr: 03:22 Ben is the one who knows everything. I'm just along for the ride.
Josh: 03:27 We had a few people mention when we were hiring, as we've hired a few people recently after being a company of three for a long time, and we've had people tell us that through that hiring process that they had read this blog post and it was one of the things that made them want to work with us.
Starr: 03:48 A question for you, Josh. Are we a lifestyle business? Are we a lifestyle business?
Josh: 03:54 I freaking hate the term but let's say, we probably are.
Starr: 03:59 Wait, what?
Ben: 04:00 I love the term. I will come out-
Josh: 04:02 You do?
Ben: 04:02 ... fully in favor of the term lifestyle business and I will tell you why. Because for me, this business is about maximizing the lifestyle that I want to have. And I totally embrace the idea of creating a business or creating an environment, I guess even in a more general sense, creating the environment in which you want to live.
Ben: 04:23 I'm a big believer in the whole sphere of concerns, sphere of influence thing, and if I can grow my sphere of influence to encompass the things that I'm really concerned about, if I can make my environment, my world and universe exactly how I want it to be, boom! I'm all about that.
Josh: 04:40 I'm totally on board with you there, Ben. I just don't like the term and how ... It gets thrown around in a lot of different ways online. I don't know, it's kind of like the term growth hacker to me. It's just one of those terms that people kind of throw at anything. And it's used flippantly sometimes. "So you guys kind of more of a lifestyle business," implying that you're not a real business and it's kind of like, is this a full-time thing for you?
Starr: 05:11 Yeah, we're really like doing multilevel marketing.
Josh: 05:14 It's kind of like a passive-aggressive jab.
Starr: 05:16 Stay tuned everybody for a lovely segment about our essential oils that we're selling.
Josh: 05:24 And if you like those, I've got some candles for you.
Ben: 05:28 I'm a big believer in embracing those terms like I agree that that term has been used in-
Starr: 05:33 Wait, are we taking it back?
Ben: 05:35 What?
Starr: 05:35 Are we taking it back? Are we taking back the word lifestyle business?
Ben: 05:38 Yes, exactly. We're going to own it.
Josh: 05:40 You guys can't see this but the look on Starr's face is just pure joy right now.
Ben: 05:46 No, I agree. It's been used in a lot of negative connotation. And I hear you. I understand where you're coming from, but I am a believer in like you grab that by the horns, you just wrest control of that whole phrase. You'd be like, "I'm going to own this. I'm going to take it. It's mine. And I'm going to make it what I want it to be. So that's-"
Josh: 06:04 I'm on board with that. I'll take it back with you.
Starr: 06:06 I'm on this train, Ben.
Ben: 06:07 All right, excellent.
Starr: 06:08 I'm 100% on board.
Ben: 06:10 Some people may accurately say that I'm very opinionated, and I have very strong opinions. And some people might even say that I might be a know-it-all but I don't think I'm a know-it-all. But-
Starr: 06:22 I would never say that.
Ben: 06:23 But I do have very strong opinions about my work and the way my life should be. And if I can have things my way, why not? Now, that has caused me some problems. Interpersonal relationships have suffered as a result of my head strong nature, I can totally own that. At the same time, when I try to get things my way, and it actually works out my way, that makes me happy.
Josh: 06:49 Who would have thought?
Starr: 06:51 So, if we're taking it back, if we're redefining the phrase lifestyle business around us, what does that mean to us? What is our brand of a lifestyle business?
Ben: 07:03 To me, that's getting paid well to work on things that I enjoy doing and providing service to a great group of people. I really honestly believe in the whole service mentality that we're here to serve our customers. And I care very deeply about developers are chosen customer group, developers like us having a great daily experience with the tools that they have.
Ben: 07:29 And to me, like the ideal is I get to do interesting things, interesting work serving that community and I get paid well doing it. What more could I ask for?
Starr: 07:41 A private airplane?
Ben: 07:43 Oh, yeah, the private jet.
Starr: 07:44 Yeah, was that from last episode?
Ben: 07:47 If anybody wants to give me a private jet, I'll be happy to try that out and let you know how that lifestyle just goes up. Where would that put me on the treadmill? If I got the private jet, what would I want next?
Starr: 07:58 Spaceship. Obviously, I mean look at all billionaires now. They all got spaceships.
Ben: 08:04 That's true. I'll think about that. But really like, owning that lifestyle business to me is about, "Okay, what to you makes ..." I don't know. I mean it just simple. It really comes down to me being happy. We talked about in the last episode about that sandwich shop and how they'll be happy not having 30% growth. As long as they're having people coming in the door everyday getting their sandwiches and that they're on that business for years, they're happy.
Ben: 08:32 That's cool. That wouldn't make me happy because that's not what I'm interested in doing. But if I can make my business configured to my happiness, like I was the kind of person when I worked for other people before I was unemployable as a founder, I would always have opinions about how things should be. I would see how my boss is doing or what my boss was doing this or that, the other thing. And now, I think I could do that better, or I have a different idea. And no one was asking me, probably wisely. But I always had my ideas about how things could be better in my opinion, anyway.
Ben: 09:08 And so when I founded my own company, then I got to do that. I could say, "Hey, I think this should be done this way," and then I did it that way and I got to find out if it actually was better. I think, to me, a lifestyle business for someone who is a person that has strong opinions about how things should be, a lifestyle business is a business where I get to choose everything about how I work. I get to choose who I work with. I have awesome co-founders.
Ben: 09:36 I get to choose the technologies to work with. I love Ruby and I love Linux and I have built our stack around those things. And I love just working with developers and so I chose in this ... I don't know. I guess I'm all about optimizing my happiness.
Josh: 09:55 Yeah, is there a little bit of like a richer king in there too? Is that what it is, where you want to be king?
Ben: 10:04 Definitely.
Josh: 10:05 Yeah.
Starr: 10:06 Like when you talked about this before, somebody was like, "Do you want to be rich or do you want to be the king?"
Josh: 10:12 I think, yeah. It was Jason. It was Jason Cohen that wrote about that originally, yeah. We want to be rich and king ... Rich is kind of relative. So ...
Starr: 10:28 So, how does this work? Do we each have like our own kingdom? Am I like king of the North?
Ben: 10:33 Oh, I like that.
Josh: 10:35 We talked about this since we kind of like, we're little different and that we don't like collaboration at Honeybadger. We like our silos. We talked about that before. And I think we just need to take this one step further and each have our own factions-
Starr: 10:55 Tell me more.
Josh: 10:55 Ben has his hoard, or whatever. Or I have my hoard. I typically work with a lot of contractors and stuff, or our open source libraries and things. That can those can be ... That's like my hoard of open source developers and Ben can have some ... He got Ben Findley and Kevin kind of his like ...
Josh: 11:16 So we need to get Starr a-
Ben: 11:18 I think Starr gets a dragon-
Josh: 11:20 The dragons?
Starr: 11:21 Oh, that's nice.
Josh: 11:22 Nice.
Starr: 11:24 I might go with puppies instead. They're cuter. I don't really want a-
Josh: 11:28 Starr just has the puppies.
Starr: 11:30 I hear bad things happened to that woman with the dragons, so I don't really want to go that route.
Ben: 11:36 I have an admission to make. I haven't watched any of those. I have not-
Starr: 11:40 I haven't watched them since like three seasons ago.
Ben: 11:42 I don't know even know what it's about-
Josh: 11:44 Are we talking about Game of Thrones?
Starr: 11:46 Breaking Bad or something.
Josh: 11:50 I have watched Breaking Bad. I'll tell you one thing though, the Badger Life for me is not so that I can binge watch Game of Thrones in my free time.
Ben: 11:59 Yeah. Well one of the things that I felt strongly about like my entire career was not overworking, like not work ... I was never into overtime. I would go into a job interview and after I was reasonably sure that they were interested in hiring me, like I wouldn't lead with this, but later on in the conversation, I would say, "There's something you need to know about me, I'm not going to work more than 40 hours in a week."
Ben: 12:27 For some people, that's a turn off. They're like, "Well, we expect you to work 60 hours a week, so goodbye."
Starr: 12:31 Where's your passion? Where's your passion, Ben?
Ben: 12:34 Well, I don't know. My passion is not for working overtime, I guess.
Starr: 12:37 Don't you want to change the world?
Ben: 12:39 Yes. My world in my way.
Starr: 12:42 Oh, nice comeback.
Ben: 12:44 Yeah, thanks. So that was a big deal to me like that we create an environment where that's not an expectation. And honestly, I think the whole 40-hour work week is outdated. The idea that-
Josh: 13:00 Amen.
Ben: 13:00 ... you're in a factory and that's the maximum you can work, great. The idea that you are a thought worker or a developer or some sort of person that uses their brain all day long and you have to work at least 40 hours a week, I think that's old news. I just don't think that works. There are days when I can work 8 hours, 10 hours, boom and I have a lot of productivity. But those are rare.
Ben: 13:26 I'd say much more often, I have a good solid four hours of intense, deep, productive thinking time, maybe six hours and then I'm done. My brains is like, "Okay, you're done. You're going to go to think about something random or you can do some random tasks. Maybe some things that are useful and necessary but you're not doing that hard work of writing some awesome code or whatever, solving those deep problems. Not eight hours a day every day, no sir."
Starr: 13:54 For our recent job posting and hiring thing, what did we list? Like a 30-hour work week?
Ben: 14:05 Yeah. And that's an approximation because there are some weeks when you're really into it and you can do those 8, 10-hour burst and you're like, "Yeah, this is awesome." But that's not sustainable long term and so I think overall, it's more reasonable to expect a 30-ish hour work week.
Starr: 14:24 Question, actual business question. I don't think we put that in our job posting for the marketing position. Do we ever tell Ben Findley? I hope he doesn't expect that he has to work more than Kevin.
Josh: 14:39 Than the rest of us?
Starr: 14:41 Yeah.
Josh: 14:42 Maybe someone should mention that to him.
Ben: 14:44 Well, we didn't actually have a job posting for the marketing thing. That just happened.
Starr: 14:49 Oh, that's right. That's right.
Ben: 14:51 I know he's taking advantage of that non-40-hour work week for sure.
Josh: 14:56 Good.
Ben: 14:57 Or at least if he wasn't before hearing this episode, he's doing it now.
Josh: 15:02 Yeah, I think, for me like I want to be able to work when I want and when I'm productive so kind of like you were saying, it's just dumb to work when you're spent. And a lot of times, if I go and do something else or switch, do something else I like to do that maybe I'm fresh for. I'll come back and something will hit me during that or later in the day.
Josh: 15:33 And then maybe I'll have energy to go and work a little bit more or something but I don't have to. And then on the other hand, if I just don't feel like working, if it's not in me today for some reason, then again it's dumb to sit there and try to struggle through it when you're not going to produce your best work anyway. And you could use that time to enjoy something else.
Ben: 16:01 Totally.
Starr: 16:02 There are few things I hate more in life than being at a point where I can't do anymore decent work but having to sit in a chair and pretend like I'm working for another two hours or whatever until it's five o'clock and time to go home. God, I hate that. That's just, ugh!
Josh: 16:19 If I do that over an extended period, I think that's like what tends to lead to burnout for me where I just can't do it anymore.
Starr: 16:31 So talking about burnout. This is like I'm doing a very clever, smooth segue into burnout.
Josh: 16:40 And I was setting you up for that because I knew you wanted to there, Starr. So-
Starr: 16:43 Thank you. I don't know if I'll leave this in-
Josh: 16:45 We're both real smooth right now.
Starr: 16:47 Yeah, since you got a new microphone. I can't wait to hear what it sounds like under high quality.
Josh: 16:53 I can't too. Yeah, I want to see if it's-
Starr: 16:54 You're going to be getting all the fan mail, Josh. It's like, "Who's that smooth voice man?"
Josh: 17:00 Oh.
Starr: 17:05 Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about burnout recently. There's a big sort of discussion on Twitter. Lots of people sharing their stories about burnout, and developers ... It seems like developers tend to experience burnout more frequently than other. I hear about burnout a lot more when talking to developers and when talking to people who have sort of normal jobs. Is that just because developers are expected to have this sort of like all-in passion for the project, or is that just ... I don't know.
Josh: 17:39 That's a good question. I wonder if it's like, I think the whole thought worker thing might come into this because I think like there are some jobs that you can just do repetitively like, I don't know, I could go dig ditches for eight hours a day, like physical activity and just like routines and stuff and do that for a long time and I'm not expecting to move the needle on how good of a ditch digger I am or something.
Josh: 18:11 And that would be fine, I like routine, so I could get into a routine. It's not the ideal thing and that's obviously why I'm not doing that. But if I'm doing more of like a creative or, I don't know, like a problem-solving type thing, I feel like I start to get really mentally worn out after a while. Yeah, it's hard to describe but over time, that can kind of buildup and lead to a lot of self-doubt and just tiredness and-
Starr: 18:47 And one interesting thing I noticed from our own discussion sort of in the company is that it seems like when we ... I think this is common amongst developers. But it seems like when we are personally feeling burned out, one of the most clear options on the table, one of the things that we gravitate towards is doing more work, like doing more projects and taking on more. What's up with that?
Ben: 19:13 I think part of that is ... And maybe part of why you feel you see burnout as an issue more with software developers than perhaps other groups of people is there is this infinite backlog of work. Every software organization I've been in including Honeybadger has a backlog of work that could really just take a really long time to get through. And you know that-
Josh: 19:36 Interesting.
Ben: 19:36 ... that even if you cleared through that backlog, while you're doing that, more backlog is going to show up. More feature requests are going to come in or things will change that you have to update whatever. There's always going to be more work and so I know for me, I'm feeling like I've got to get this thing done. And sometimes, not in our case, we don't have external deadlines. We don't have project managers telling us that we have a launch on a certain date, but I know in a lot of software companies, that is a thing where we have this deadline and we have to meet this deadline and we have to do the death march.
Josh: 20:11 We've got ourselves.
Ben: 20:12 Yeah, we push ourselves quite a bit and I think part of the problem is like versus the ditch digger. When you're digging that ditch, you know once it-
Josh: 20:21 Just there's a ditch right in front of you, it just goes forever. That's the nice thing about digging ditches. I was going to say that like-
Ben: 20:27 I think that's part of the problem. We feel like if I can just get ahead and I could just get this crunch done or whatever, but in reality, the backlog is infinite. And at some point, you feel like you just-
Josh: 20:39 It becomes overwhelming.
Starr: 20:41 So maybe that's why people want to move to like new projects because in a new project, there's no backlog. There may be deadlines but there's not an overwhelming amount of stuff like pressing at you from all sides.
Ben: 20:54 Yeah, right.
Starr: 20:55 It's like freedom and I guess it's even there and the words we use to describe it because we call new projects like greenfield projects.
Josh: 21:02 What about like ... I haven't spent a whole lot of time as a career software ... I'm actually employed moving from company to company but I hear that software developers change jobs a lot. And I imagined to some extent, it's not greenfield but going into a new company you're not familiar with their backlog yet and you haven't personally taken personal responsibility for any of it. So I could see how that's ... There's probably a little bit of that greenfield feeling going to a new job as well as like what you were just talking about, Starr, with like a greenfield project.
Starr: 21:39 That's a good point. Yeah, I was thinking about this other day and I think like among all my developer friends, I may have been at my job the longest, like by far.
Ben: 21:49 Yeah. It's rare for people in our segment of the industry startups, small businesses and so on to be in that one position for several years. And I think these issues are definitely at play there. It's taken me a while to really convince myself like telling myself, "Look, you know what? There's always going to be more work to do. As soon as you finish this thing, there's going to be another thing. And it will still be there tomorrow. You can go ahead. You can shut down the laptop and you can go do something else. And you can come back to work tomorrow and keep working on it."
Josh: 22:27 I think my career skill could be just to create backlogs. And so if I could just like start it ... I work at Honeybadger. I just make this awesome backlog and then just move to a new job that doesn't have a backlog yet. I could do the same thing for them.
Starr: 22:46 I mean, isn't that kind of more like a PM does?
Ben: 22:47 That's exactly what I was going to say. That's exactly the job description of a Project Manager.
Josh: 22:50 Are you saying I'm a PM? I'm not actually a developer, I'm a PM.
Starr: 22:55 I know I've to confess something too to you guys. This is a little bit disturbing for me to realize but we had had recently some talks about maybe doing a new product and stuff like that. And honest to God, the thing that was making me the most excited about it was writing the spec for it. I was just like, "Oh, no. Oh, no."
Josh: 23:19 It's happening, Starr.
Starr: 23:20 "What if I'm turning into a manager?" Oh, no, But I'm not managing anybody, but it's still happening.
Ben: 23:31 It's okay, Starr. I've been there. I've done that. It's totally fine. There's a lot-
Josh: 23:36 I mean, this is part … This is probably why we've built this freedom into the business so that we can all go work on specs for products that may or may not happen. And that can be fulfilling itself.
Starr: 23:47 Yeah. Maybe it seems nice because it's like the only time where I would actually fully understand the thing because once it's built, it's like too big and you can only really understand the part of it at once.
Ben: 23:59 Writing a spec is a very creative process. You have an infinite number of possibilities in front of you and you're formulating something out of nothing. It's pretty cool.
Josh: 24:11 Yeah, I like writing specs too. Well, I don't know, the past couple of weeks, I've been working through my backlog of GitHub issues that have been assigned to me for way too long. And some of the way I got through that was just unassigning them and some of the way was actually doing some work. But I can say that after having gotten through a lot of them, like not having those nagging in my subconscious is a little bit freeing.
Josh: 24:48 But I think a key for me is to kind of limit my exposure to the backlog. Anyone or any given moment and try to have like a more focused ... Yeah, try to focus my efforts in like on a small number of things I'm trying to accomplish and just let the backlog like exist down there, wherever it lives.
Starr: 25:14 Yeah, I agree. I have a very hard time personally dealing with lots of things happening at once. And so my experience of our backlog of issues is kind of like that. There's like a thousand things all yelling at me like, "Starr, fix me." And it's hard for me to deal with, and so I tend to, almost to excess sometimes, trying to push away extraneous things and just work on a single thing, hopefully for a week or two.
Starr: 25:50 Do you guys have any techniques? How do you deal with burnout? How do you prevent burnout in yourself? Have you noticed anything interesting in your own work lives?
Josh: 26:01 I've definitely had some burnout over the last couple of years and at least been trying ... Maybe it's more like seeing that I could go there and trying to not go there. Usually when I start feeling like overwhelmed or if I'm getting to that place, I just have to stop working for a while. Maybe it's a couple of days, maybe it's just going on vacation. I'm probably getting pretty close to that point right now to be honest, it's about time for a vacation. But I think actually taking time off and not having to ... If you don't feel like you're stuck and that you got to keep trying and you can't just reset or whatever, that makes a lot worse for me.
Josh: 26:57 Yeah, I don't know. We've been pretty good lately about taking time off. We took almost the entire month of December off last year, and I took off a month. I think I actually took off ... I was out two months last year because of December and then, we had our second kid. Yeah, I did pretty good last year. But still I'm finding I need to take that time in order to maintain sanity.
Ben: 27:27 Yeah, it's similar. I've had times of burnout during the past few years. And those times looking back tend to come when I'm feeling very stressed about getting something done soon, something is broken or something is kind of broken. And I know what the solution is and it takes a lot of work to get that solution and I just got to power through it.
Ben: 27:54 The times where I let myself just get buried in that kind of work tends to contribute to your feelings of burnout. And then as far as solving it, I found that ... I know my body is telling me or my mind is telling me when it's time to take a break. It's like I start thinking about, "Maybe it's time for a vacation." And when I start having those thoughts, it's time to get a vacation. And if I don't, then I'm going to get increasingly more burned out. If I just try to push through it, it just doesn't work. It just makes it worse.
Ben: 28:25 And vacation for me doesn't have to be to two weeks in Hawaii. I know a lot of people often think about. That's really not a great vacation for me. I don't like being idle. I don't like doing nothing. So for me, a vacation is I maybe take a Thursday and a Friday off in addition to the normal weekend. And in that Thursday and Friday, I go work on my yard or I go for a long bike ride or you see stuff around the house. Maybe I go for a long drive and go see something different. It's not going to Iceland, for example.
Ben: 28:57 So, just taking a time and really being conscientious about not thinking about work, because work comes back in. It happens to me like I think about it all the time. And so I have to actually actively ... I guess it's the behavioral therapy, the cognitive behavioral therapy where actively it's like, "Okay, you're thinking about work. Stop thinking about work. Put that aside. Put it in the box and you'll be able to come back to that on Monday."
Josh: 29:24 Yeah. I actually do like Hawaii. But I like it because, one, I like the weather and the tropics and all that. But I like to go ... If I go on vacation, I'd like to go somewhere where I'm not attached to work, where there's not an agenda or a structure to it. I don't like going on vacations where you feel forced, you have to be making the best of it or something or making the most of sightseeing or something like that. I don't do tourism, so really not well anyway.
Josh: 30:01 When I go on a vacation though, I don't like being idle either, so I totally make ... I have personal goals and things I want to do and all that sort of thing but it's just not work-related. I spend most of it ... I love to read on vacation. I just go and just churn through books basically. That plus active things. You like bike riding. You can just give yourself a schedule of reading books and bike riding and that would be ... That's my vacation right there.
Ben: 30:36 Yeah, that's awesome.
Josh: 30:39 Yeah, and then the other role is just like to get away from ... If you are sitting on a couch or something, you're going to want to pick up the laptop and look at Slack or whatever. I just don't bring the laptop or just bring it but leave it under the bed or something. I try not to even turn it on unless obviously, if we're on call or something, you might want to bring it for that reason. But that's what your SMS is for. SMS works most places in the world, and you can just leave the laptop under the bed.
Josh: 31:15 I've gone on vacations where I literally just never even turned it on, powered it on. It's been there as kind of a safety net. But, yeah, it doesn't have to consume you.
Starr: 31:27 Those are all good points. And I just wanted to add that I think it's really important that I think in general, developers are probably terrible at this. You have to ... Vacations are great and stuff. But that's a way to respond to something once it's happened. It's a way to put out the fire and maybe you can keep the fire from starting or longer or something. And so I think it's really important to take time in your day for self-care because maybe vacations aren't possible. If you don't have your own business and you can't be like, "I'm heading out next week. See you." Maybe get fired if you did that. But it's possible to sort of check in on yourself on a daily basis to do self-care, to take some time for yourself to work through whatever feelings you're having and stuff like that. Yeah, I think that's very important too.
Josh: 32:28 Yeah. Well, I think one of the reasons back to the Badger Life thing, one of the reasons that we've designed things like they are and over time we've been trying to automate more systems and make it easier for us to take vacations and be outside of the business is so that we do have the opportunity to use that sort of time, use vacations as more preventative versus ... I forget how you put it, but as a response to a crisis that you're already having.
Josh: 33:03 Ben was saying ... You said you take the vacation when you see the symptoms of the end result, which would be burnout. If you're starting to feel like, "Man, I need ... I really wish I could take a break," go take one because we set the company that way. We set up the company that way.
Starr: 33:27 That's great. I would say not everybody loves the Badger Life.
Josh: 33:30 Yeah. But I mean, we're kind of like saying this is the new way, like this is the way people should live. That's kind of what we're saying.
Starr: 33:42 Yeah. But some people can't, they'll get fired.
Josh: 33:43 No, I know. I totally agree with you, Starr, like yeah, it's nice to get practical advice for people who don't have the ...
Ben: 33:51 Yeah, so here's a suggestion if you're in a situation where you don't have that flexibility. At a company that I worked for several years ago, it was a consulting company. We did software development and our primary client was Microsoft. And at the time, Microsoft had a reputation for being very hard driving with their contractors, and so were under a lot of time pressure all the time.
Ben: 34:17 And one thing that I learned from that situation, the owner of our company actually had a policy in place. It is called mental health days, and the idea ... A lot of people are familiar with this. This is not like new stuff, but it's a small thing that you can add to your organization if you don't have it or something you can advocate for. And that is you don't have to take a sick day. You don't have to take a vacation. You can just take a mental health day. We had the ability, the flexibility to say to our boss, "Look, you know what? I got to take a break. Tomorrow, I need to take a day." And that was always okay.
Ben: 34:57 And obviously people didn't abuse it or else it wouldn't have been okay for long, but it was really helpful to have that release valve and to say, "I just need a small break today and I'm going to take it." And that was great and that really helped alleviate a lot of pressure that we had in that environment.
Josh: 35:15 Yeah, I like that. That can also be kind of a way to ... Because I think for a lot of more typical employee situations, it's harder to signal. If you're having a hard time, it's hard to signal to people that you are, because it's a little bit stigmatized. And if there's no system for dealing with it in place, you feel like, what do I do? There's not really anything you can do where you don't feel like you're putting the rest of your co-workers out or whatever. At least that's how I assume they would feel.
Josh: 35:55 Starr, what kinds of things ... Do you have any specific things that you think are good to do on a daily basis versus taking large chunks of time away? What's the more routine maintenance daily stuff that people can do or that works for you?
Starr: 36:15 I guess it just depends on your individual situation. But I think taking some time, trying to practice some mindfulness, maybe trying to take some time to think through your day and to do whatever makes ... Burnout to me is like exposure to stress for too long. You don't necessarily have to be working 80 hours a week to get burned out. You could work 20 hours a week and get burned out if those 20 hours are extremely stressful. And so pretty much anything that will reduce to your perception of that stress, I think, is very useful. And it's just going to vary depending on your circumstances and all that.
Josh: 36:58 DHH [David Heinemeier Hansson] said an interesting thing in his RailsConf talk when he was talking about how he got burned out working on Basecamp at one point. I think, as I recall, it's before they had decided to build version three. And he said that in 37 Signals, they're at the time ... Well, really all along, it's always been like this sustainable ... They started this sustainable work movement, so it's weird for a CTO to be having burnout and if he's living this dream life in this low pressure organization.
Josh: 37:37 But I think his point was it wasn't because he was working too hard, it was because he was not working on the right things and he wasn't feeling fulfilled in what he was doing. I assumed he was just looking at this backlog like we've been talking about. Just nothing is really doing it for you. So, it's not necessarily about overworking. It could also just be about not being creatively engaged or just not being fulfilled in the work that you are doing.
Starr: 38:11 That makes a lot of sense, like feeling that the work that you are doing doesn't make any difference.
Josh: 38:17 Or doesn't matter, yeah.
Starr: 38:18 Yeah. And I mean, it's similar thing to a whole infinite backlog. Why does it matter if I fix this bug because there's just a thousand more bugs to fix?
Ben: 38:28 Yeah, I think the phrase that I remember from that keynote was it was not he was overworked, is that he was under-purposed. He didn't feel he had that purpose.
Josh: 38:38 Yeah, that's good, under-purposed.
Ben: 38:41 Josh, you reminded me when you asked Starr about those daily maintenance things. One thing I learned from Starr a few years ago was go take a walk. I remember seeing it on our Slack, Starr would be like, "I'm going for a walk." And I'm looking at the clock and it was, I don't know, 12:30 or whatever, just some random time. It doesn't matter when it was but I was, "Oh, that's a good idea."
Ben: 39:00 And he comes back and he's ready to do some more work. And I'm like, "I'm going to try that." And so I started doing more walks and that's good stuff.
Josh: 39:09 My problem is that I go for the walk and then I just don't want to come back. I just want to keep walking.
Ben: 39:17 Then keep walking.
Starr: 39:18 Well, it helps to have like a set walk, like you're walking along a path and then you get back to your car or whatever.
Josh: 39:24 I have a couple of good loops from my house that I like to take which end up bringing me back eventually.
Starr: 39:32 Yeah. Well, I think we will be coming up on time. Okay with you guys if we wrap up?
Ben: 39:41 Sure.
Josh: 39:42 Yeah.
Ben: 39:42 We don't want to burn ourselves out. No? Okay.
Josh: 39:46 On podcasting?
Starr: 39:47 God, I'm so sick of podcasting, guys.
Josh: 39:49 We want to be doing this for a while, right?
Starr: 39:51 Yeah, we're going to ... I don't know, man. You got to feed the beast. It's one a week, the people demand their FounderQuest. If they don't get it, I don't even want to know what's going to happen, pitchforks, torches, probably.
Josh: 40:04 Probably. I mean we've been doing pretty well so far. And actually we're recording another doubleheader or whatever today.
Starr: 40:16 As always, it's been great talking to you, guys. And, well, we'll see you later.
Ben: 40:21 All right.
Starr: 40:26 What's something I can say? I'm running out of-
Ben: 40:30 Tune in again next week. Save bat time. Save bat channel.
Josh: 40:35 In the spirit of Badger Life, I could repeat some of the core values that we had outlined in the article that we mentioned earlier, which I think for me kind of summarizes how we do things, and that is that these are kind of in order of significance. Family is more important than work. Health is more important than success. And financial independence is more important than being rich.
Ben: 41:02 I love it.
Starr: 41:05 What a great sentiment to end on. And I've got to ask, are we too legit to quit? I don't think so. I think that was pretty good, wasn't it?
Josh: 41:16 That was good. I'll start dropping this too legit thing so we can finally get that shirt done.
Ben: 41:23 Right. Yeah.
Starr: 41:24 Oh, yeah. We have too legit to ship.
Josh: 41:26 Yeah.
Ben: 41:27 Yeah.
Starr: 41:27 Okay. Well, it's great talking to you, guys. And I'll catch you next time.
Ben: 41:33 All right.
Josh: 41:34 That was good. See you, guys.
Ben: 41:35 Okay, bye.
Announcer: 41:39 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360-degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at www.honeybadger.io.
Announcer: 41:54 Want more from the founders? Go to www.founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The guys talk dissect the "If you're not growing you're dying" aphorism and debate if it has merits or if it should be discarded into the dustbin of history. Do entrepreneurs need to have a winner take all mindset or is it acceptable to be a minor player in a large market? Let's get philosophical on this episode of FounderQuest!
Full transcript:
Josh: 00:00 I just... I think that Ben could really pull off like a massive... Like if you had a gigantic, like foot long beard or something. I think you could pull it off.
Ben: 00:11 I could pull off the following.
Starr: 00:12 Like one of those people who moved to California for the gold rush.
Josh: 00:15 Wouldn't he look amazing?
Announcer: 00:17 It's like Steve Jobs and the dude had triplets and they built an app. This is FounderQuest.
Starr: 00:26 If you have one of those cabins and tell people to get away from it.
Josh: 00:29 Like the Unabomber. So I enabled... What is it called? Tweet Delete or something like that? I think you did this too Starr but it deletes all your tweets like beyond a certain timeframe or date.
Starr: 00:48 Yeah.
Josh: 00:49 So now I only have the last year of tweets on my Twitter account.
Starr: 00:55 That's good. So people can't like blackmail you with your own words.
Josh: 00:59 Yeah. They can't like go back to like 2008 and dig up you know, whatever I was saying back then.
Ben: 01:06 I have kind of mixed feelings about that. I mean I like the idea of preserving that history even if it's stupid. I don't know. I guess maybe you could have this goal of tweeting such that your family at your funeral service they just get up and read your tweets your entire life.
Josh: 01:26 I don't know about that. I'm not sure that has... I'm not sure that's how it works.
Ben: 01:32 I mean, they can read the date stamp like March 4th, 2004. Pooping.
Starr: 01:41 My thought on the whole thing is that like what good is it doing anybody to have like my ancient tweets out there? Like the only good is doing anybody is people who are like harvesting that data. And I know people have already harvested it but why leave it out there? Like nobody's going back and reading an old tweet of mine and being like, "Oh, that was insightful."
Josh: 02:01 You mean you... But you don't want to quote tweet yourself from like 10 years ago just to show everyone how right you still are or you were back then or whatever?
Starr: 02:10 Yeah, I don't know. I'm not I don't think that's myself.
Josh: 02:16 Sorry, I totally like blew up your train of thought.
Starr: 02:20 It's okay. There wasn't much of train of thought. It's more like one of those, you know the things like, "Oh brother Where Art Thou?" where they sort of like pump up and down? That's like well platform. They always have them in cartoons?
Josh: 02:32 Yeah.
Starr: 02:33 Yeah. It's like that. That was like the train. That's my train.
Josh: 02:37 Just like the maintenance crew.
Starr: 02:40 Yeah. Oh, so today I think we're going to talk about something that was on Twitter. Justin Jackson, who is at Transistor FM, was in a conversation on Twitter with somebody about this topic of if you're not growing, you're dying. And I think somebody else brought this sort of quote out. Like we all heard this. This is sort of a little aphorism that makes its way around.
Starr: 03:03 And people say... Its one of the things that people say without thinking about too much. And Justin, I think disagreed a little bit with us and was like, "Well, at Transistor, maybe that's not the case." So I think we're going to talk a little bit about that today. And just see where the conversation goes.
Ben: 03:20 I think the danger when it comes to the growth mindset of like, "I have to grow for growth's sake." I think that's where it gets dangerous. And I think that's where a lot of people who reject the whole VC funded path. Because they don't want to have that scenario where they have to grow, like at an extreme rate, or else they just go bust. Like the go big or go home thing. I think-
Starr: 03:44 So you're saying that like there's different pathways, right? There's like this VC funded pathway. And so you're saying like if... The VC funded pathway if you're not like having major growth and you are effectively sort of dying? Is that what you're saying?
Ben: 03:59 Yeah, I think they want you to die if you're not having that spectacular growth so they can focus on something that is having that spectacular growth.
Starr: 04:04 Whereas like a little company like ours like, what does that even mean?
Josh: 04:09 In a regular business?
Ben: 04:10 Yeah. I mean, you may not even be able to handle that spectacular growth. You just are... I don't know if you've read that book Company of One? Fantastic read, if you haven't had a chance to read it.
Starr: 04:20 No. I haven't.
Josh: 04:21 I haven't either.
Ben: 04:22 Yeah. He talks about the same concept. Like he's not interested in running this mega corporation. He wants to run a business that he can just run himself and maybe that involves some contractors from time to time. Maybe that involves a partner here and there. But overall, he wants to run a business that he can just manage himself. And the idea being that like that, to me, in his words, is a comfortable business to run.
Ben: 04:46 I think that's one of the things that we decided early on in the Honeybadger early years when we had investors calling us and asking us about investing, is that we decided we didn't want to have that kind of major growth company. Like we didn't know how to run that kind of company. And we didn't want to learn that with Honeybadger. We knew how to run a small shop and that's what we felt comfortable doing.
Josh: 05:05 But let's talk about you know... So what about like bootstrapper levels of growth? You know, like regular business growth levels. Let's say like not 10-X'ing but whatever. Say 30% year over year.
Josh: 05:21 I don't know about you guys, but like, whenever things are completely flat and stagnant or stagnating, then I do feel... or stagnating, whenever things are totally stagnating, I tend to feel kind of like I'm wanting to kind of pour some more gas on the fire or whatever.
Ben: 05:41 Yeah, I agree. I definitely lose motivation to work on a product when I don't see any increased benefits from what I'm working on. Right. If you don't see the results, why keep putting effort into it. And so if your growth is completely flat, I think you will probably eventually die just because you lack interest in keeping it alive.
Starr: 06:00 I don't know. Is that true? So take like a corner store, like a laundromat. They're not growing 30% year over year. For any business that's not a software business, growing 30% year over year is insanely good. So I guess they don't even have laundromats even more. I'm showing my age. Like that's not... they're not growing 30% year over year, but it's a good steady business.
Starr: 06:22 So I mean is that... So this... Let me just take a step back. So I really freaking hate sort of sayings like this. You're not growing, you're dying. It's one of the things that it sort of has this pleasing symmetry to it, like it sounds cool and good to say and so it shuts your brain off. And you don't understand just how freaking stupid it really is. Maybe for like a very specific type of company. Maybe for like a VC-backed company. Maybe that's true. If you're not growing eventually you're going to... you're not making enough money, you're going to run out of runway, you're going to have to fire everybody and your business is going to be dead because you're spending more money that you're making.
Starr: 07:01 But for a normal business that is not VC funded, like what does that mean? So the sort of mom and pop sandwich shop on the corner who's not growing, like are they dying? Well, they've been there 20 years.
Josh: 07:13 So maybe it maybe it should be more like, if you're not growing you, you might be bored, but you might also be fine.
Ben: 07:20 Yeah. Well, that's what I wanted to say. Is I think that it's definitely aligns with a certain personality. Like we build software because we're interested in solving problems. Like, I would be bored out of my gourd if I was running a sandwich shop for 20 years. Like making the same sandwiches every day for 20 years that would drive me absolutely crazy. But I'm not-
Josh: 07:39 I'd like to see the sandwiches that you would come up with as a result of that. Thanks though, Ben.
Ben: 07:45 But that's not to say that that's not a perfectly reasonable business for someone to have. If that's what they enjoy, great. And I agree with you Starr that they're not going to have a goal of growing that business 30% year over year, they're going to have a goal of maintaining that business and having a good lifestyle to go along with that business. But like, I would be bored to tears if I was doing that. And I think in the software world and the software companies like growing is a sign that you're solving people's problems in a way that's interesting. And you're working on interesting things. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.
Starr: 08:14 Okay, so what do you mean by growing? There's lots of different types of growing, right? We can grow profit, we can grow revenue, we can grow customer base, and they're not necessarily related.
Josh: 08:24 We can grow vacation time.
Starr: 08:26 We can grow vacation.
Ben: 08:27 Well, and personal development too. I mean, you can grow your experiences and the knowledge you have of whatever technologies you find interesting, that sort of stuff.
Starr: 08:35 Yeah. So I guess I'll come around. I'll say that, well, maybe this makes sense. Maybe this aphorism makes sense. If you can define growing and dying in whatever ways you want. If you can make those mean anything, then yeah, sure.
Josh: 08:51 Like I get all my gains at the gym. So I don't... the business can just kind of stay flat and it's good.
Starr: 08:57 There you go. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to bump up the controversy for the follows and the listens and the subscribes, right?
Josh: 09:02 I think you're... I honestly think you're onto something there though. Like it's those like drastic statements that kind of like just are designed to get people's blood pumping versus actually like say something or get to the bottom of an issue because, like things are rarely black and white. There's a lot of different ways to look at it.
Josh: 09:22 So one of the other points made in that thread was Jordan was talking about goalposts which kind of resonated with me. He was saying that basically like, with best intentions, you can say like, "This is going to be enough if I get to X dollars and MRR." And then you get there and I think this has happened to us, at least it's happened to me where you get there and then it's like this is awesome. Like, we hit this goal. It's been what we've been like working for the last few years or whatever. And then it's like, "So now what?" And then my brain comes up with a new arbitrary number. Basically, that's how it works. And that's the new goalpost. And then that becomes enough.
Starr: 10:08 You know what that's called Josh? There's a name for this in psychology. It's called the hedonic treadmill.
Josh: 10:13 Nice. Okay. Today I learned.
Starr: 10:15 Yeah. So it's the whole thing. It's like, yeah you're making 20 grand now and you're happy. It's like, "Well, now I need to make 30 grand," because you get used to... you get used to whatever you have, no matter how good it is. Always want more. So basically, this insight is a bit at the basis of a lot of sort of stoic thinking, which is the hot philosophy right now among startup influencers, which I consider myself to be.
Starr: 10:46 Yeah. So the idea is that while you just have to... You can note like, the problem with the hedonic treadmill is you're never happy, right? So they would say that our problem is that well, we're saying that to be happy we have to grow. But that is just shooting ourselves in the foot. Because we can't control whether or not we grow necessarily. We can only control our perceptions of things, we can only control our reactions to things.
Ben: 11:15 Yeah, I definitely believe in that the whole treadmill concept. You get that new shiny car and then six months later, it's not a new shiny car anymore. It's like it's just a car. But at the same time, like I'm very goal oriented, and if I'm not striving towards a goal, then I feel like I'm wasting my time, like I'm not making myself better in whatever dimension you want to measure that. It's not necessarily strictly tied to money coming in the door necessarily, but could be interpersonal relationships, it could be physical health or whatever. Like I have plenty of goals that I want to accomplish.
Starr: 11:49 Oh yeah, I was just going to say that, you can set like... It is possible like you mentioned to set very personal goals that are not based on sort of external factors.
Josh: 12:01 Yeah, for me, like I think I like to see revenue growing and profit growing obviously. But it doesn't all have to come from that to have like personal fulfillment. Like I like to have everything like in my life growing on some level. So like Ben mentioned fitness, you know that's like I like to go to the gym, like I like to be seeing progress there. Like I can see progress in a lot of different places that kind of give me that... that satisfy that like bored factor that kicks in, like if one thing isn't growing like hopefully you have some other things that are... you're making progress on.
Josh: 12:37 And for me, I think that kind of back kind of satisfies a little bit of that, what you said the treadmill basically where if one thing is never enough, then you're just going to constantly be chasing that one thing. But yeah. But you can have like multiple things that you know if one thing's not growing as fast as you like you can go and work on something else. Well, you know, in the meantime.
Ben: 13:01 But I've had that same experience that you had Josh. You talked about, you reach that dollar goal, whatever that is, and then you're like, "Okay, now I have a new goal." And I think that can be healthy. Because you're pushing yourself to a new level, to a new challenge. And as long as you don't tie your self-worth in how much money I'm making, I think that's fine.
Josh: 13:23 And what are you prepared to do to get there? Anything? And how soon do you want to get there? Like, are you just like stab people in the back and just work 16-hour days.
Starr: 13:37 Those are definitely equivalent.
Ben: 13:39 Yeah. And we've had we've had those kind of conversations when we've talked about like, what do we want our revenue goals to be? But we've always couched them in the terms of, but we're not willing to sacrifice our day to day happiness or the time that we get to spend with our family or the other things in our lives that make us happy.
Starr: 13:56 You know, I think one aspect of this whole idea that, if you're not growing, you're dying. That would be interesting to talk about. And I know this may go wildly off track. So we're doing this-
Josh: 14:09 This is FounderQuest so-
Ben: 14:10 Yeah.
Josh: 14:12 It's kind of our MO.
Starr: 14:13 I think this whole, you're not growing you're dying thing. I think a lot of it is tied up with dominance. And I think this ties into a lot of the reason why people... People say Ruby's dying all the time, even though it's still there. But what people mean, I think what people are really saying is that if you're not growing, you're not keeping with everybody... up with everything else may be growing. And so you're not going to be dominant. It's this whole idea of a winner take all sort of ecosystem which may be in some aspects like search, Google has won the search war for now, pretty much. Although I use DuckDuckGo because I am a decent human being.
Josh: 14:52 Same.
Ben: 14:53 Same.
Josh: 14:53 There you go. High-five.
Starr: 14:55 So people say, well Ruby's dying because well, that's not really true. Like lots of people are still using Ruby but it's no longer maybe keeping pace with like Python. So it's no longer this dominant thing. Because I remember when like Ruby was hot, everybody's like Ruby has taken over the world. Like, everybody's got to learn Ruby. And that's just sort of gone away. But it's still, like the language itself is still here. Maybe the key to the sort of happiness, and everything is to sort of give up this idea that you have to win, you have to be number one, you have to dominate.
Josh: 15:29 DuckDuckGo might actually be a pretty good example of this. Because even like, in the basically monopoly market of search, there's still room for this little like at the time scrappy search engine to come in and get a number of people enough people to make a business out of it. And grow in that environment. There's like two search... three search engines that people use. And DuckDuckGo was able to get into the market and actually like become one of them.
Starr: 15:58 You know what's sad, I was like, what's the third one. It's like... It's Bing, right?
Josh: 16:01 I'm pretty sure it's Bing. Maybe we should Google it. Sorry, Microsoft. Actually not sorry Microsoft. They're getting ready to eat the world again.
Starr: 16:17 You know, you make an interesting point about DuckDuckGo because, I think there's always room for sort of small niche players in a gigantic market like you can always find people who don't want to go with the giant.
Ben: 16:29 Well, I was just thinking about the second half of the tweet. We focused very much on that that you're not growing you're dying part. But there was more to squeeze. He also said-
Starr: 16:40 Oh, there was? I didn't actually read the whole thing.
Ben: 16:43 He also said adding more people and maintaining the same net through growth, not at all attractive.
Starr: 16:49 Can we take a second and maybe explain what he means by that because I feel like may be a little bit obscure.
Josh: 16:54 I kind of stumbled over the wording of that myself and I was trying to read it and failed. Maybe we can dissect it a little bit.
Ben: 17:02 If you're adding the headcount, and you're not really moving the needle on the top line, what's the point?
Starr: 17:09 So if I hire somebody, and they cost me $100000, and as a result of their work, I make an extra $100000, I'm still making the same amount of profit. I just got an extra employee.
Ben: 17:19 And that goes back to the company of one thing.
Josh: 17:23 I mean, it's nice to have friends.
Josh: 17:25 But not if you have to pay for them.
Josh: 17:30 Well, I mean, if they're if they pay for themselves, then the more the merrier.
Ben: 17:36 No, I was just thinking of this. What you were saying about the winner take all mentality and that's definitely a software thing. I think that's we face that when take the question of do we take investment money because our competitors have and are they going to take the whole market, if we don't do the same thing they're doing? And your point about people choosing different providers for whatever reason. Like all three of us have chosen DuckDuckGo probably because of the privacy implications of always using Google for everything. And that's one way that DuckDuckGo has carved out a segment of the market for themselves.
Ben: 18:15 In Honeybadger's case we've carved out a segment of the market or for ourselves, based on features, brand, whatever. Whatever reason people have to go with Honeybadger over one of our competitors. And we're still around and they're still around. It hasn't been a winner take all. It may be a winner take most. We don't even... We don't know because we don't know our competitor's revenues. But there's definitely room for multiple people in the space.
Ben: 18:45 And I think that over the past few years, that's become more of an acceptable idea in the software world where it may have been previously like, "Well, you've got to be the number one or else you don't matter at all." And I think we've seen a slight change in that attitude over time.
Josh: 19:05 Do you think there's a risk of like... So there's always going to be like some room for the smaller players. Because there's always going to be enough of the fringe of people usually that they like things that in such a certain way that they'll go and look for alternatives. But that said, there's also a lot of spaces have the one or two big players that do tend to dominate most of the market. And then the smaller players tend to live on the edges or have a smaller, a relatively small percentage of that market.
Josh: 19:42 Do you think that that's a risk to the smaller players as over time as those markets get more consumed, or as the larger players tend to consolidate and centralize things generally tend to centralize? Do you think that's a problem?
Ben: 20:00 I don't think so. If you have a reason to exist, if you have something that's interesting enough for you to have customers, I don't see a big fear. I mean, I don't expect our customers to like one day decide, "Oh, you know what? I'm just going to switch." No. I mean, we're providing great service and they like that service. You know, look at how many car companies there are. Yes, there's been a lot of consolidation over the past say hundred years. But there's still a lot of car brands and there is still demand for that Aston Martin. There's still demand for that Bentley. You know, all these different brands have their unique reasons to exist and people still buy them even if maybe Bentley doesn't sell as many cars as Ford. I don't see them crying in their milk.
Josh: 20:52 The takeaway here is that Honeybadger is the Bentley of error tracking services.
Ben: 20:59 Of course.
Starr: 20:59 No. I think we're the Aston Martin because if James Bond needed to track some errors, he would definitely use Honeybadger.
Josh: 21:02 Oh, yeah. For sure.
Ben: 21:03 Of course I had to go and look it up. And I had to find out who Bentley is actually owned by because obviously, they're not a standalone company anymore. They're owned by Volkswagen.
Starr: 21:13 So I think like when people say, if you're not growing, you're dying, like part of that is... maybe that's part of just sort of like a personal statement of where they want to be in life. They're saying, like, "Well, I want to be at the head of a company that is dominating the market that has won the winner take all race. And if I can't do that, then I don't want to play. I'm going to take my cards home and go."
Starr: 21:37 I think this maybe segues a little bit into the second part of the tweet that we talked about earlier, because the whole idea of well, if you hire people, and it doesn't increase your profit, necessarily, then that's not desirable. But I think that that could be desirable in the case of where you want to kind of step away from the business and provide a little bit more space for yourself. Because there's a difference between owning a company and running a company. You could very easily...
Starr: 22:10 Like if you say start a company, and it becomes Google, and you want to be at the head of it, well that's part of its own sort of power trip. But if you start a smaller company, and it's going steady, and you're getting a little bit bored with it, well you have the option to replace yourself. And by replacing yourself maybe your profit stays the same, maybe it goes down a little bit because you're just replacing somebody who's doing the same thing. I don't know where I'm going with this.
Josh: 22:40 You mean like replacing yourself basically just turning the business into like an asset that you that you just have someone run?
Starr: 22:48 Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know you can bring a business up to the point where it's stable, and it can maintain itself for a while and then you can just step away from that.
Josh: 22:59 I've told you guys before the way I kind of look at Honeybadger and my other business or I guess businesses is kind of like as an investor I try to look at it like an investor like these are investments. And you know I've put most of what I've invested in these businesses over the last whatever 10-plus years is time. And so we're building these things up but basically like this could have just been just as easily been like money in a mutual fund or something that grows over time and that would be like more of a passive investment.
Josh: 23:38 But there's no... I don't really see a difference with a business. Like a business is still a way to grow your money, basically, over the span of your lifetime. And so like, I totally think that it's fine if you want to do like if you can get the business to a point where it's generating a predictable amount of profit and you can hire people and just have it just run by itself then that's just basically an investment asset that you have there that's generating a return on a regular basis. Just like anything else.
Ben: 24:11 Yeah, one thought I have about the growing on that note of treating it like an investment and being satisfied with where you are. If you're satisfied with, what are my living expenses today? Great. But what are you going to do for 10 years from now or 15 years from now? If you are satisfied with something that gives you a savings rate of let's say, 75%, well then you know, "In a few years, I can retire and I'm done." So I think... I guess what I'm trying to say is you have to be careful about being short-sighted about what is enough, right? There's the treadmill of nothing is ever enough. And then there is the, "Well, I'm fine where I am today, but I'm not really thinking about the future," which is probably not enough. So I guess the line you need a walk is, "I'm going to make sure that I have enough and not be so concerned that my enough always changes and I never have," and I'm not saying that too well.
Josh: 25:11 Well, I try to look at things with like I'm a big like long term financial planner and you know all that stuff and I know you guys are too. So like that's how I try to look at everything. And I'm trying to look at it like I've got this vision of like where I'd like to be in the future and it's not on a yacht. I wouldn't mind living on or having a yacht or something that I vacation on or something but I'm going to be totally fine if I don't.
Josh: 25:41 But I have this future that I see for myself and my family. And so I look at what I'm doing now and my businesses and our growth and all that stuff in terms of is this getting me there? Not, "Is this like getting me to Zuckerberg or something?" And so that kind of helps temper the desire to go and start some sort of like 10X company and be a rock star or something like. How many people like do that and actually succeed anyway, versus how many people actually just slowly work over the course of their lives to achieve like their, whatever retirement dreams and actually achieve that. Like, that seems like a much more achievable goal versus like, constantly trying to create some sort of like unicorn.
Ben: 26:36 Yeah. I'm totally on board with that. I don't want the yacht but I do want the private jet.
Josh: 26:41 Yeah. I'll take a private jet. I mean, I'll take the mansion. It's just like... I don't know. It's like-
Starr: 26:45 Yeah, no mansion for me. You know, I'd be happy if I could just get to finish the shed I'm building on my backyard. That's all I want. You know, I think the important thing though is you know, these are all very personal things. These are all very personal decisions and goals and all that. And one thing that really irks me about that phrase and I wish we could all sort of get beyond, that the sort of VC mentality of winner takes all you have to be playing your A game all the time, you got you're growing you're dying, et cetera. These are like, moral statements. I'm saying like, "Well, this is true for everybody when I say stuff like that." And I wish we could all just be like, well for me, I want to be the head of a really big company doing awesome things. You know, we don't have to couch that in terms of this universal like, this is the right thing for people to do as human beings.
Josh: 27:38 Everyone has different goals. Yeah. I think for me, if put it in financial terms, like, I don't want to be rich, but I want to be wealthy. And like, the way that was explained to me, I think a book or something back in the day was like, rich is like you have a lot of money or cash or something. But wealthy is like, you have the ability to sustain yourself and it's like it's financial... more financial independence or you know being independent.
Josh: 28:07 And so I don't care... Like I said, I don't care. I don't need the yacht or the mansion or something but I do want the independence and the freedom that comes with having enough to basically sustain a certain lifestyle that is the level that I'm happy at. And if I can do that and I have to work or not have to worry about my family and our future, then that's kind of my personal goal.
Starr: 28:31 Well, Amen. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Was great talking you guys and we'll look at you on the flip side.
Starr: 28:42 Sounds good baby.
Starr: 28:45 I've decided that that really awkward end things are like my stick now.
Josh: 28:50 No. Awkward is good. I think it works for us.
Starr: 28:57 It's my natural talent.
Announcer: 29:00 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger, zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The guys chat about the early days of Ruby and Rails and discuss how the developer community has changed from a more individual hacking pursuit to more of a team sport. Ben also talks about his experiences at the very first RailsConf and teaches young whippersnappers about Why The Lucky Stiff, Shoes, Caboose, and Chunky Bacon. Lastly, is BadgerConf morphing from running joke to a reality? Tune in and find out!
Full Transcript:
Ben: 00:00 All right.
Starr: 00:01 All right, are we good?
Ben: 00:02 Yep.
Josh: 00:03 Yeah, I'm already up to one megabyte.
Ben: 00:05 We are so good.
Starr: 00:06 Dang. Okay maybe we might have to back up for maximum quality, I don't know.
Ben: 00:10 We'll see how it goes.
Announcer: 00:11 They've been in business for seven years, and they still don't know what they're doing. I guess a podcast seemed natural. Here's FounderQuest.
Josh: 00:23 It should be. I've got terabyte in here, so hopefully we'll...
Ben: 00:26 Yeah. Now you're glad you bought the big disk.
Josh: 00:30 Yeah so I can podcast for an hour without crashing my computer.
Starr: 00:34 Oh that's awesome. So I have been up since four o'clock. Ida woke up at four and decided she wasn't sleeping anymore...
Ben: 00:42 Ouch.
Starr: 00:42 ...so I may lean a bit on your guys for things like making sense.
Ben: 00:46 I've been up since 1:30 because...
Josh: 00:48 No, Come on Ben.
Josh: 00:48 Oh damn, Ben, you always have to one up me.
Starr: 00:54 Alright, so, you guys recently went to RailsConf. You came back, thankfully. You weren't lured away by all those, I don't know...
Starr: 01:07 This is what I mean when I say I'm tired.
Starr: 01:10 Yeah, so you guys went to RailsConf and...
Josh: 01:13 We did get distracted by elixir along the way and...
Ben: 01:16 Today's gonna be the punch drunk podcast.
Starr: 01:19 Yes, yes it is, oh man. You guys recently came back from RailsConf, I was here in my little home office, not at RailsConf, editing the show all on my lonesome. I'm feeling pretty lonely and wistful, and now you guys are back and I'm so happy.
Ben: 01:36 You know what the best thing about RailsConf was? You didn't have to step outside to go to it. Because of all the sky bridges there, we stayed in the conference hotel, which was three blocks away from the conference center. But yet we walked through a sky bridge all the way there. So handy.
Josh: 01:53 This was in Minneapolis right?
Starr: 01:56 You know, I think that's a theme, I don't think I've been outside at any of the RailsConfs I've gone to.
Ben: 02:01 Really?
Starr: 02:03 No, even Atlanta, didn't go outside, tried to walk someplace for lunch, let me tell you, you don't walk places for lunch in Atlanta. You get in your Escalade.
Ben: 02:16 I did a lot of walking around outside in Kansas City.
Starr: 02:17 So how many RailsConfs have you guys been to?
Ben: 02:21 Oh wow.
Starr: 02:22 I've been to, I think, three or four.
Josh: 02:25 I think I've been to, two.
Starr: 02:26 I've spoken at two.
Josh: 02:27 Because I didn't go to RailsConf for a really long time because I went to RubyConf every year.
Starr: 02:33 Yeah.
Josh: 02:33 And I just never got to RailsConf until, I think Phoenix was my first year at RailsConf.
Starr: 02:40 Was it because you were trying to be one of those hipsters that who's like "I don't do Rails, I'm a Rubyist."
Josh: 02:44 Yeah, I don't do Rails, just tell me about garbage collection, okay.
Ben: 02:49 I think I've been to about eight of them.
Starr: 02:50 You went to the first one right?
Ben: 02:52 Yeah, well there's actually two first ones.
Starr: 02:55 Well that's confusing.
Ben: 02:56 Yeah, funny story. So the first official RailsConf was Chicago, but the first international RailsConf happened before the first official RailsConf. And the first international RailsConf happened in Vancouver, Canada.
Josh: 03:09 So, funny, story, I was on twitter recently, and I was looking at the hashtag RubyFriends, and someone had posted the schedule from the very first RailsConf and I'm looking at all the names because it's kind of nostalgic, people that are extremely well known now, all these different people. And whose name do I come across as one of the speakers at the very first RailsConf, but Ben Curtis. And yeah that pretty cool.
Ben: 03:36 That was fun, so the first RailsConf, the official one in Chicago was the second technical conference I had attended, and the first one was that first international RailsConf which happened a few months earlier, and what happened was, I went to that one in Vancouver and I was sitting there listening to the presentation and they were great presentations, DHH has his famous picture from that one. David A. Black spoke, talking about how Ruby was this calm peaceful language, and it was awesome.
Ben: 04:08 And I thought "You know what, I could do that. I could get up there and talk about stuff. Just like they get up there and talk about stuff." So I submitted my proposal for the first RailsConf and actually got in. I was shocked. It was pretty cool.
Starr: 04:22 So one of the things I'd like to talk about today is, the technical community around Ruby and just tech in general has changed a lot, what year was the first one? Was that 2000 and -
Ben: 04:34 2006
Starr: 04:37 Yeah, that's about the time I started, sort of, getting into web development and into Rails, and things have changed a lot, not even in just the technologies but in the ethos. What I mean by that is back then, in 2006 we still had a lot of this, hacker in the basement ethos, I think Why The Lucky Stiff who is this sort of absurdist character, nobody actually knew his name. I mean some people knew it, but it was supposed to be a mystery. He was this merry prankster who made Ruby tutorials that were cartoons.
Starr: 05:15 It really captured the vibe of this chaotic anarchistic tech scene, that existed back around the early auchts. And now I feel like in general, tech has moved onto a more corporatist mode. Open source projects, like React is run by Facebook, we've got, the big languages are all sponsored by Google and stuff like that.
Starr: 05:50 How has RailsConf changed, do you guys think? Do you think it's mirrored this change in technology in general, or is it still plotting its own crazy weird course?
Josh: 05:59 I was going to ask, do you think that quirky fun side of tech that we had back then, and to some extent I think in Ruby probably still do today, do you think that was specific to tech in general? Or was that specific to Ruby? Was that more of a Ruby thing?
Starr: 06:14 I think it existed a lot more in tech in general. You had the character in society and culture of, this unwashed... okay where am I going... this rogue, this person who doesn't respect authority, and he goes off and does these weird, genius off beat things, and brings them back to society. We had Wired, the original Wired, before it got bought out and cannibalized, the original Wired had that same feel to it.
Josh: 06:52 Yeah, okay, so I get what you're saying, you're saying that now that what's his face is running for president, the guy that used to be cult of the dead cow.
Starr: 07:01 Oh Beto.
Josh: 07:02 Yeah, so you're saying Beto, he is kind of like that guy back then and now that guy is running for president and it's mainstream.
Starr: 07:10 Yeah, you can say that, that's a great analogy.
Ben: 07:14 The generation that was fighting the man has now become the man. I think there are definite arguments for both that tech in general, like Starr was talking about and also the Ruby community in particular, because, in 2005, 2006, the Ruby community, even though it had been around for a while, especially in Japan, it was still very small, and especially not well known in the U.S. right?
Ben: 07:37 And so, the RubyConf occasions that had happened before RailsConf had started, those were typically small affairs and there were a bunch of people who knew each other well because it was a pretty tight knit community. And there was space in the room for people like Why, and that kind of fun. Even though at the same time, in the tech industry at large you had things like the Java community. Which was completely different, because it was very corporate, and Sun, the no fluff just stuff conferences, and all those big corporate things were happening at the same time.
Starr: 08:11 I guess you're right. Those weren't ever even on my radar, so probably discount them a little too much.
Josh: 08:18 I guess two sides to the picture.
Ben: 08:18 But I think you're right Starr, in general, over the past 15 years, there has been a lot of co-opting of the space that we grew up in by the bigger corporations. I mean, you mentioned Facebook with React and things like that, Facebook is a great example because it didn't exist, at the beginning of the time period we are talking about, and has grown up to be this huge influence on society as a whole.
Josh: 08:43 Well, now you see even, Microsoft now, is increasingly into open source and web tech, so I think even they've been getting into React a lot and that sort of thing. So, that's kind of an interesting shift. You have the behemoth of whatever the past is now coming into.
Starr: 09:01 Isn't Microsoft making a big bet on React native for Windows? Didn't I see a big announcement for that recently?
Josh: 09:08 I believe so. Yeah, I think all of their office suite is built on React already.
Starr: 09:14 Oh, I didn't know that.
Josh: 09:15 Yeah, the web version at least. I think the native version runs the same thing. I think that I have heard they are interested in doing more native things with web stack.
Starr: 09:30 Can I just have a non sequitur, a sort of web versus native non sequitur?
Josh: 09:35 Sure.
Starr: 09:36 Because this is an interesting point. We talked in a past show how we all love Notion, for taking notes and collaborating and stuff. I was using that for my personal writing notes which I don't share with you guys, because, secrets, then Josh, you mentioned you're using an app called Bear, which is a native note taking app, for the Mac ecosystem and iPhone and all that. So I started using that and I use them both now and I'm just like "Oh my god, the native experience for note taking is so much better."
Josh: 10:13 Yeah, I would tend to agree.
Starr: 10:14 Maybe the collaboration aspects are better on Notion, I haven't tried those out in Bear, but even with a very highly polished web application like Notion, you run into glitches. You run into weird UI glitches, and maybe it's just because I'm on Linux half the time or whatever. It's just the native app has such a feeling of solidity to it. I was like "this really exists."
Josh: 10:37 Yeah, well I mean if you're writing in a notion, you're still just writing into some hidden text input with a ton of Java script running behind it to pull out, and do app mentions and all the other features they have in there. And I think that still adds some hidden overhead that, you can't see it all the time but I think you can perceive it subtly, basically.
Starr: 11:06 So, tangent tended, I just wanted to take that little side note to plug Bear, because it's really a nice app for writing.
Josh: 11:14 Yeah I like it too. I don't think it does collaboration stuff, it's kind of single purpose.
Starr: 11:20 Oh I don't know, I haven't tried it, I haven't looked.
Josh: 11:23 Okay, yeah.
Starr: 11:25 So, yeah, it's been really interesting to see this change in tech and development, and I'm a little bit torn, because, first of all, I kind of love the whole DIY, scrappy, you know, Why, way of doing things.
Starr: 11:41 It broke my heart when he quit the web, and killed his alternate persona. But at the same time it seems like, the nature of programming is changing. It's no longer so much an individual sport played by people by themselves, it's more of a team thing. It's much more social. The people getting into development now, which I think is great, a lot more different type of people are getting into development than just nerdy white boys who needed some way to escape reality in their teenager years, so they learned to program computers. There are a lot more normal people coming in, and I don't know, I think it's kind of cool. It's just interesting how it's changing things. I don't think it's necessarily bad, I mourn a little bit for the way things used to be, but I think that's just an aspect of being human.
Josh: 12:40 Yeah, it's just that it's going main stream, so everyone's interested in it, including the large corporations and the entire world and it's not like the small close knit interest community of people that it used to be, where you could find your people and you're all super excited about web development. I don't even know if you can be excited about the entirety of web development anymore with all the different ways to do it and different technologies and stuff. It seems like everyone is in their part of their industry even.
Ben: 13:18 It seems like it's a side effect of software eating the world. But yeah, I have a hard time believing that anybody starting out these days could have a complete grasp of everything involved in web development. That's a pretty tall order.
Ben: 13:32 But you know, Justin Searls, he gave a great talk on this topic at RailsConf. His talk was entitled the selfish programmer. You should definitely check it out.
Starr: 13:41 What's it about? I wasn't going to watch it because I'm not selfish.
Ben: 13:43 But, he's advocating about how you should be.
Ben: 13:47 So this presentation, you can find it on the interwebs. It's definitely worth a watch. But the whole point was, yes we do spend a lot of time building software in teams these days, the selfish programmer just does things for fun. Just does things for himself or herself. When you think about that, you can have a little more liberty, you can have a little more fun with what you're doing.
Josh: 14:10 Yeah, we kind of talked about that a little bit I think after the talk. I think both of us have kind of felt a little bit like we used to just program for fun and get an idea and get all excited about it and just hack on it all weekend. Just because we could. These days it's much more, what's the ROI on this and what's my business plan for this thing before I even start, create my gem file or something.
Josh: 14:42 And that's great, starting a business, that has its place but also, it's a lot of fun to just start hacking on something because you love it, or because you're super excited about it and you want the thing that you're going to build
Starr: 15:00 Yeah, just because you have a business doesn't mean you can't do personal development and personal growth and explore that stuff. Not every single thing you do has to be a part of the business, even if you're doing it during work hours. Because you know, learning counts.
Josh: 15:15 I think for me a big factor in that is that I have much less time non-work hours anymore to do that stuff. Having children is pretty much the source of that problem, but I realize it would be a lot easier to just hack on something for a weekend if I didn't have to worry about the two little kids that I have to entertain.
Starr: 15:42 Yeah, if I had a time machine, I would go back and I would just shake myself and say "You are wasting so much time, you have no idea how good you have it. In the future you're going to have about six hours a day to do everything that doesn't involve appeasing a three year old."
Josh: 16:01 Yeah, so I've had to get much more serious about optimizing my time and being productive and unfortunately a lot of the fun hack projects get cut out and go by the wayside. But I think I'm going to try to work a little more time, probably during my work days now, to be honest, is the only time that, that's going to happen, but I think you could still do that.
Starr: 16:22 Yeah you should.
Ben: 16:23 When you own the company, you definitely can do that. Maybe that's a call for, it's time to have another hack week.
Josh: 16:31 Yeah, the hack week was so much fun that we did earlier. We talked about that on the first episode of the podcast but we basically took a long vacation over Christmas and then we came back and we didn't go back to work we took another week off and worked on an Elixir project, that we just wanted to build. So that was so much fun and I hadn't done that in a really long time.
Starr: 16:53 Yeah, I'm game, I don't know, we can talk about that.
Ben: 16:59 Or we can just, on a Friday declare, next week is hack week!
Starr: 17:04 This is crazy Ben. This is not on our quarterly plan. [crosstalk 00:17:08] Go back and listen to our systems episode.
Starr: 17:12 I think we're diverging a little bit.
Josh: 17:13 You know what, we can just bust out Vim and start right now.
Starr: 17:17 Yeah, you guys are freaking me out. But Justin's talk was super inspiring.
Ben: 17:24 I think if you're a developer who is experiencing some burnout or the slog is really getting on you, it's not quite as fun as it used to be, go check out his talk and think about whether a little break from the norm might be helpful. Give you some variety in your life.
Starr: 17:43 If that doesn't work, just quit your jobs. Just leave, just set it on fire, burn some bridges. You only live once, YOLO.
Josh: 17:53 Just take that stapler.
Starr: 17:55 Yeah, I mean, I don't know for certain, but I imagine that throwing a Molotov cocktail would be extremely satisfying. Just chuck it at the mainframe, you get to hear it break, I imagine it has a whooshing sound.
Josh: 18:13 Then there's the smell of the melting plastic.
Starr: 18:14 Exactly.
Ben: 18:15 As long as you disable the fire suppression system before you do that, I think you're fine., because otherwise you're dead.
Josh: 18:23 Do we need to have our attorney listen to this before we ship it, is there some sort of liability issue here?
Ben: 18:29 This is not legal advice. We are not your lawyers.
Josh: 18:29 Do we need disclaimers? Maybe we should have Barney read a disclaimer at the end of the podcast.
Starr: 18:35 Like do not do this at home?
Ben: 18:38 Use at your own risk.
Starr: 18:39 Man, I'm fed up with the capitalist, imperialist system, so I'm doubling down here.
Josh: 18:47 That's revolutionary Starr.
Starr: 18:51 I'll be sitting here in my nice residential neighborhood in Seattle, and I'll just bring you my hot revolutionary takes.
Josh: 19:03 So to be honest, when I first got into Ruby, I got into Ruby around, late 2009 I think. I was interested in it before then, but I didn't get into it professionally until I had the opportunity to take on a client that was using Ruby, and it was a perfect opportunity to learn. Then I started working with you guys and I honestly did not know who Why was at that point. I think it was right around the time that he actually left the community. Remind me what some of his projects, from back before then, what were the projects that made him -
Ben: 19:41 For my, Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. It was eye opening. I had to reread it a few times to really understand it, because, wow, it was pretty mind blowing. But it was fantastic. And really, for me, it was a great introduction to Ruby and to why I would care about Ruby. And he had several projects that he did.
Josh: 20:03 And these are still online, by the way, I think, so some of these you can go check them out still.
Ben: 20:06 Yeah, when he burned his account to the ground other people cloned the stuff really quickly before it all evaporated. So the Poignant Guide, I'd totally recommend it, anybody wants to read, chunky bacon is awesome.
Ben: 20:18 He also did Camping, which was a mini framework in one Ruby file, so it was kind of like a Sinatra kind of thing. But one file, and it had all this crazy, crazy code in it. And then there was Shoes which was a UI thing. A lot of fun wacky experiments.
Starr: 20:36 Yeah, his software and projects, to me, they're almost more like art projects, they're meant to make you be like "Oh my god, what is happening right now even."
Josh: 20:47 An extreme creative element to them.
Starr: 20:49 Yeah, and I know he got a lot of crap for writing bad code by Aaron Patterson, and people came in later, but you know, Aaron Patterson hasn't made me as happy as Why made me, so, who's the winner there?
Josh: 21:05 Well I think everyone's still a winner with Why and Aaron Patterson in the same community.
Starr: 21:12 In my head, I really hope Aaron doesn't listen to this Podcast, but in my head Aaron developed this really kooky internet persona with all the jokes and stuff, as sort of atonement for having badmouthed Why.
Josh: 21:28 I think we should get Aaron on the Podcast. I want to work this out between you guys.
Starr: 21:35 I'm going to psychoanalyze this person who I have exchanged two words with in my life, who doesn't know me from Adam.
Josh: 21:44 Well I will say that, that's one of the things that I really love about the Ruby community, are the personalities that you get. And like Ben said, kind of just, not goofy, but just quirky. Doing things just because it's creative and fun.
Starr: 22:02 Totally. One thing that surprised me that you guys came beck with from RubyConf is that they ask people to raise their hands who it was their first RubyConf. And there was a lot of people.
Ben: 22:12 There was at least half the people that was new, or there for the first time. I was-
Starr: 22:17 I said RubyConf I meant RailsConf.
Ben: 22:19 I was surprised. I was not expecting that many people. It could have even been two thirds, I didn't get a good look, but it was a lot.
Josh: 22:28 It was a lot.
Starr: 22:28 We had these narrative that Rails is dying and going away and stuff and that seems to belie that, doesn't it?
Josh: 22:36 I think that a lot of older people from Ruby have gone away, but as we've seen there's definitely new interest in it. It's not like interest is dying if half of RailsConf are new to the community and RailsConf sold out.
Starr: 22:55 Yeah, they sell out every year I think.
Ben: 22:56 You know, the other day, on Twitter, Tim Brey posted this tweet where he asked, "If I wanted to start a new web project today, what should I use? I think it's probably Rails, but it's been so long I should just ask."
Ben: 23:13 The responses that he got were "Yeah, it's Rails." Some people were like "Oh I love React, and this and that but really if you want the fastest way to get your project done, just use Rails, because it works."
Ben: 23:24 And I think that's where we are, it's obviously not the new sexy anymore, but it's definitely matured to the point where it's a no brainer choice for people who want to build apps on the web. And I think that continues to attract new people into the community even as, I think Josh is right, even as the older people in some cases go off to greener pastures and go play with Elixir or something like that.
Josh: 23:47 Yeah and I think like we said, there's a lot of different kinds of developers out there, and we've touched on this a little bit in past episodes where, not every popular open source project or popular even methodology or way of building web applications is built for everyone. So, JavaScript is huge but everyone uses JavaScript and from Facebook down to a solo Rails developer or something.
Josh: 24:16 Maybe all the employees at Facebook and Microsoft probably aren't going to RailsConf and getting excited about building a full stack web application. But there's still a lot of people out there that don't have the resources of the large companies and would like to just ship their own project quickly and efficiently and not have to learn all the crazy thing you have to learn basically to be part of a huge team building rich web applications, or something like that.
Starr: 24:41 Here's a question for you, when I started doing Rails, for a long time I was a freelancer as we all were, it seemed like there was this huge ecosystem of freelancers doing Rails and small agencies because Rails is perfect for a team of one to three people to put out sites very quickly. I'm wondering, are there as many freelancers now as there used to be? As things get more complicated, are there as many people out there, sort of, doing the full stack web freelancing?
Ben: 25:09 Yeah, I think so. If you cruise Upwork-
Josh: 25:16 I would tend to agree.
Ben: 25:16 You'll find tons of people.
Josh: 25:18 I don't know how much all of them are doing full stack, when Ben was freelancing 10 years ago, he was building Rails applications for a lot of solo people, or solo founders and that sort of thing that had an idea and wanted to build a start up or something. And you were doing, basically, the entire stack from start to finish. I honestly don't know how common that is any more, as far as solo freelancers, I think a lot more people are leaning to specialize, just because things are so much wider. But I don't know, I assume there's still a good number of people out there doing the full stack thing too.
Ben: 25:56 It definitely seems though that there are fewer of those small to midsize agencies that we knew back in the day. Yeah, it's just my feeling-
Josh: 26:05 You think there's fewer of them?
Ben: 26:05 Maybe I'm just not as connected with them because I'm not doing freelancing as much anymore, but.
Starr: 26:09 Sorry, you cut out there for a second, were you asking a question or anything?
Ben: 26:11 No, you cut out. No, I wasn't asking a question.
Starr: 26:14 Oh, well, no you cut out.
Josh: 26:17 Well you guys cut out for me, so both of you cut out.
Starr: 26:22 Screw you, I quit the company.
Josh: 26:26 I knew this podcast wasn't going to work.
Ben: 26:28 So, I love the lunch sessions at the conferences. I love chatting, and we sat down with a couple of the guys from Weedmaps.
Starr: 26:40 They're our customers right?
Ben: 26:42 They are our customer, yes. And we sat down with a couple of guys from Weedmaps and then some of their coworkers came and sat down with them, and low and behold, there was Brian. Brian and I have known each other, because of the Rails community, its gotta be 13, 14 years now, and we haven't seen each other for 10 years, just because we haven't been same place same time. We had that connection because "Hey, you're still here, and I'm still here." And that was fun. So meeting new people is great and seeing all the new people come into the community is great, but there's still some of us old timers hanging around still gotta represent for Caboose. It's all good.
Starr: 27:24 Wait, what's Caboose again?
Ben: 27:26 So, Caboose was this little, I guess a little crowd of people who were involved in Ruby and Rails back around the-
Starr: 27:34 Okay, because it's a railway thing.
Ben: 27:38 Exactly, the tail end of the train.
Starr: 27:40 I get it. It only takes me about five minutes.
Ben: 27:42 So we had a little RSS feed channel where we'd help out people who were new to Rails, which was everybody at the time, because Rails was new, right. So a lot of that crowd has moved on, to other adventures, but some of us are still kicking around.
Josh: 27:54 It's rare, being, kind of a third party observer to that exchange was fun because it was like watching Ben and Brian, who did Rubinius, was that his project? Yeah, it was like watching two Jedi's, passing in the night.
Ben: 28:12 He is definitely the master in this situation. He is way, way beyond me, as far as skill.
Josh: 28:19 Well, it's not often that you get two people, in general, that have been around since the very beginning, kind of reminiscing about the very, very first good old days.
Starr: 28:30 Yeah they're going to have to start providing rocking chairs and peanuts, I think, at RailsConf. Just so you can have the rocking chair track, you can do some whittling.
Josh: 28:38 That would be a funny thing. We could just get a booth and put a rocking chair in it, and put Ben in there. Actually we were kind of talking about this, and not in a strange way, but basically telling the new people about the good old days. Sharing stories and that sort of thing, I don't know if we'll actually have the rocking chair, but this is something that I'm kind of.
Starr: 29:03 This is what this Podcast is turning into.
Ben: 29:06 Well I've toyed with the idea of actually making that a talk proposal of a RailsConf or RubyConf, the history of, the good old days, and let me tell you about Mongrel.
Starr: 29:16 Oh, I saw a tweet about this from somebody, who was like, I want to do a conference call, where it's like let me tell you about BBS Door Games.
Josh: 29:24 Yeah, Justin Searls did a talk kind of like that, with a lot of throwbacks and history in it, I think, a few years back. I think it was at a RubyConf, but it was really good as usual.
Starr: 29:36 Yeah, we're just the boomers talking about going to the sock hop, and getting the malts, things were simpler back then. There weren't all these, young people, with their hair and their pierced faces.
Ben: 29:56 One of the takeaways from this conversation, I think should be, if you haven't gone to a technical conference, especially a Ruby or Rails conference, you should definitely consider it, it's a fantastic place to go and meet great people. Maybe develop some friendships that will last for many years to come. And learn some technical stuff as well.
Ben: 30:16 One of the things that Josh and I were reflecting on while we were there, was, well you know some of the sessions we're just not that in because either we've heard it before or it's not really something that we're into. And that's fine. You don't have to feel like you have to be in school and sitting down for every seminar, but the people that we got to hang out with, and the conversations that we had were fantastic, so I think it's a great use of your time.
Starr: 30:41 You in particular came back and you were all fired up about conferences so now we are going to sponsor some conferences again aren't we?
Ben: 30:46 Well the thing that got to me about having so many new people there at that conference was, oh, they may not know who Honeybadger is.
Starr: 30:55 Yeah, so what, we are doing Southeast Ruby? You bought tickets for that one.
Ben: 31:01 Yeah, I got the plane tickets.
Starr: 31:02 When is that happening?
Ben: 31:03 It's going to be in August, it's in Nashville. And then later in November, it could be in Nashville again, it's going to be RubyConf.
Starr: 31:09 Yeah, we're double Nashing.
Starr: 31:12 Yeah it's really cool to see a new Ruby conference happening. We're a Ruby conference, we're not trying to be hip, we're not, I don't know, polyglot programmer conference.
Ben: 31:26 Well speaking of conferences, you know Josh, we haven't told Starr about our plan. He may or may-
Starr: 31:34 Oh we're going to get a real time reaction.
Ben: 31:37 Here's the reveal. So Josh and I want to do a conference. We want to have a Honeybadger conference that's-
Starr: 31:50 BadgerConf.
Ben: 31:50 That's technical and business, so kind of like MicroConf but an UnConf. You don't come for the presentations.
Josh: 31:56 Kind of like FounderQuest.
Ben: 31:57 You don't come for the presentations, you just come to hang out with awesome people and have good conversations about your business and about technology and stuff.
Josh: 32:05 Yeah, more of a hangout active type thing.
Starr: 32:07 Well we've talked about this in the past.
Josh: 32:09 Versus a... yeah we did talk about this a bit.
Starr: 32:13 Where's this Unconference going to happen?
Ben: 32:14 You gotta do it in Seattle of course.
Josh: 32:16 Yeah? Because I was going to say we should do it in Bend.
Ben: 32:19 Oh, Bend would be nice.
Josh: 32:21 What I want to do, I want to charter a bus in Portland and we could have the meetup, people can fly into PDX, and get on our bus and then we'll all take a nice, it's like a two and a half hour bus ride. We could watch a movie or something, and go out to Bend, which is like high desert, country, really pretty and kind of smallish town feel. But I think it would be an interesting place. That's where they used to do Ruby on Ales, and it was one of my favorite conferences of all time. So maybe I just want to get back to that.
Ben: 32:58 So would we do this in the winter so we could have an extra day of-
Josh: 33:02 That's a good question, I don't know, because summers are up there, but the snowboarding is, I heard is good too.
Ben: 33:08 I guess let's have our listeners tweet at us, and let us know if they'd attend such a conference, if we were to put it on.
Starr: 33:14 Where would they tweet?
Ben: 33:15 Tweet at FounderQuest right?
Starr: 33:16 @FounderQuest, that's right. We do have a twitter account, we don't hype it nearly enough.
Starr: 33:22 So I like this idea.
Ben: 33:25 Wow.
Starr: 33:26 A couple of points, just for people like me, I could only do so much togetherness before I need to retreat and recharge. If this is like a Boy Scout camping trip, where you're together with the same people for five days, that's going to be very difficult for me. You're going to find me, I'm just going to end up painting myself with mud and running through the wilderness, throwing sticks at people, it's not going to be a good scene.
Ben: 34:02 How about two days?
Josh: 34:09 With private cabins.
Starr: 34:12 Oh well if I've got my own cabin to retreat to, that's cool. I can do that. So to go along with your snowboarding activities, might I recommend, an I'm quiet, fireside reading group.
Ben: 34:26 Yeah, totally. I think you have to have the reading room, right, the library with the pillows and stuff so you could just have some quiet time.
Starr: 34:34 Just a little nod to the people that aren't really extreme.
Josh: 34:40 I would tend to, I think the way I'd do it is just make everything completely optional. "Hey these guys are going to snowboard, do you want to come?" Or you can hang out by the fire. I envision it being extremely loose.
Starr: 34:55 Yeah, I'm liking this idea, come, you can do the snowboard Josh, I'll have a little hot chocolate station, I'll make people hot chocolate, they can sit around the fire and you know, have readings of poetry or whatever. I don't know. I'm not really that into poetry, I feel like I should be.
Josh: 35:14 You'll recite poetry.
Starr: 35:15 I'll recite my own poetry, about my feelings.
Ben: 35:18 You know what's great for hot chocolate? An electric kettle.
Starr: 35:24 Cognac. You weren't going to say that, I know.
Ben: 35:26 Electric kettle. Electric kettle is awesome for hot chocolate. Just put the mix in the cup, you pour your water in your kettle. Boom! Hot chocolate.
Josh: 35:34 Oh yeah that's true.
Starr: 35:35 Have I told you guys about my kettle?
Ben: 35:36 No.
Starr: 35:38 We've gone one step beyond that. We've had an electric kettle for coffee and stuff forever. A couple years ago I discovered that there's this company Zojirushi, I think, which is Japanese.
Ben: 35:51 Yup, great rice cookers.
Starr: 35:51 I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. Yeah, they make rice cookers but they also do these electric kettles, where, it holds a gallon of water and it's essentially a gigantic thermos with a heating element inside. And so for about five watts, which is much, much less than any light bulb or whatever, it's maybe a low energy LED light bulb, you get always, on, hot water to whatever temperature you need it. So it's amazing, it's one of those things where, at first you're like this is ridiculous but then you just keep using it more and more and more, and I wish I would have had it when we had Ida, because making formula and stuff, you have to microwave, it's just meh.
Josh: 36:40 Can you drop a link to that in our Slack channel?
Starr: 36:43 Of course, I can, and maybe we could put it in the show notes too.
Ben: 36:46 Yeah they make great bread machines, if you are in the market for one of those.
Starr: 36:52 They are pretty good all around. So I've been curious, about their rice cookers, do you have one Ben?
Ben: 37:01 No, we have a different brand, but yeah, I've seen them.
Starr: 37:06 Well they always advertise that they have neural networks in them.
Ben: 37:12 Do I need a neural network to make my rice?
Starr: 37:15 Why does a rice cooker need a neural network? What kind of crazy...
Josh: 37:22 That's hardcore.
Starr: 37:24 What's it doing in there? And also, they're not fooling me because they've been selling these things since the 90s I think, so this can't be that... Technology has advanced a little bit, so you're selling me your 90s era neural network rice cooker. But apparently they cook really good rice, so who am I. I'm not Japanese.
Ben: 37:47 Maybe it's their marketing term for a state machine.
Starr: 37:50 Yeah, maybe.
Josh: 37:56 It's either warm, cook or off. I mean.
Starr: 38:07 We're getting enough listeners and this is a nerdy enough thing, maybe somebody actually knows the deal behind the neural network in this rice cooker. And so if you do, let us know and we'll give you credit, we'll give you store credit.
Starr: 38:20 Towards future podcast episodes.
Starr: 38:24 Well, what a wild ride it's been. So, if you liked this episode and you want to help us out, if you want to keep us reminiscing about the good old days in our rocking chairs and stuff, head on over to iTunes and give us a five star review. We only accept five star reviews, and if you want to talk to us about why we only accept five star reviews or if you have any questions or whatever, @FounderQuest, is where we are on Twitter, and yeah, thank you guys, and we'll check you later. God, I gotta work out this, see you next time, I got to work on this tag line business.
Announcer: 39:03 FounderQuest is a weekly Podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io.
Announcer: 39:19 Want more from the founders? Go to Founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word, you can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine Podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The guys talk about strategies for creating systems, documentation, and automation to separate yourself from your business so you can hire employees, get it ready for sale, or even take some time off. Balancing good customer service while being efficient with your time is also discussed along with reasons Honeybadger doesn't use automation for customer service.
Full Transcript:
Starr: 00:01 I probably should have muted that, so you couldn't hear the toilet flushing.
Josh: 00:05 I don't know whose it was, so... You just needed... There, there you...
Josh: 00:11 Okay, so, Starr. There is, there's your intro.
Announcer: 00:16 They're just three amigos making their way in the crazy old world of software as a service.
Announcer: 00:22 Welcome to Founder Quest!
Josh: 00:26 Oh, that reminds me, I was going to... during that decision-making thing, I was going to say we'd be a lot cooler, though, if we used a blockchain, like to decentralize, since, you know, we're totally like a, you know, a remote, very decentralized company, like we should have a blockchain for a decision-making process.
Ben: 00:42 For real, scan that audio trail.
Starr: 00:43 Yeah.
Ben: 00:44 To make sure that-
Starr: 00:44 The future. The future's now.
Ben: 00:46 ... make sure that Starr doesn't go back and change the decision that we made?
Starr: 00:52 What?!
Josh: 00:52 Uh-huh (affirmative).
Starr: 00:52 Why am I getting this flack?
Ben: 00:53 Well, you know, because you know that I would be the one that would actually be doing that sort of thing, so that's why I'm the...
Josh: 00:58 Well, it's more to protect against Ben, yeah, so it's like a digital gavel.
Ben: 01:01 I'm the totally random element in this outfit, that's for sure.
Josh: 01:05 Yeah. The wild card.
Ben: 01:07 Yes!
Josh: 01:08 The joker.
Ben: 01:08 The joker!
Josh: 01:10 And plus I could buy more video cards, so that I have more weight, my decisions have more weight.
Ben: 01:14 There you go.
Starr: 01:16 All right, so let's catch people up. So last week, we talked about some issues involving systems, like what are our systems for decision-making? And we talked about our quarterly conclaves, our process for doing that, and so this week we're going to be talking about systems and continuing the conversation, this is one long conversation that's just been split up into two.
Starr: 01:36 And we're going to be talking about managing employees, we're going to be talking about daily operations, about ops and all that stuff.
Starr: 01:45 Yeah, let's get going! So like what... we started with nothing, we started with no systems, errors would come in, and Ben would see them and he would manually write out an alert email, and send those out on Gmail. And since then, we've like, we have systems out the, uh... I can't say it on iTunes, I'm sorry, but we've got lots of systems!
Starr: 02:07 So how do we coordinate a bunch of, like three of us are independent workers, we've hired a bunch of independent workers, like how do we coordinate between those?
Ben: 02:15 I think that the technical term you were looking for there was "wazzoo."
Josh: 02:17 Wazzoo?
Starr: 02:18 Oh, okay, most definitely was it.
Ben: 02:20 You know, one of the things that was really crazy early on was, it accelerated so rapidly. Like, I remember, in the early-early days, when we first started this out, and most of the day I was thinking, you know, because we had jobs, so Starr and I were working for a start-up, and I was thinking, "Ah, this should be great! I have two incomes streams, right? Like I have my day job, and then Honeybadger just will be doing its thing on the side, it'd be a cash machine, it'd be awesome!" And then, it didn't go that way. Like-
Josh: 02:51 Then reality struck.
Ben: 02:52 Yeah, the reality struck, where, like, Starr and I are sitting there, at our day jobs, and all of the sudden Honeybadger's on fire, and it was like, "Oh, we got to go take a lunch break right now!", you know?
Starr: 03:00 Yeah.
Ben: 03:01 And so, like eventually, that just... its like the pressure was too much, right? We couldn't do both, and so we had to dive in on Honeybadger. But a lot of that was because things were just growing so rapidly, and traffic was coming in, and things were falling apart, and like in that one server that we bought initially, right, had to become two, and so on. But-
Starr: 03:21 Yeah.
Starr: 03:21 And we did not build this thing for a scale, people. We did not prematurely optimize.
Ben: 03:25 We did not, no. We definitely did not.
Ben: 03:28 And, so, you know, a lot of the, you know, that people joke about, the bailing wire and duct tape, and the changing the engine wire going down the road kind of thing, and that's definitely what we were doing, and that was high-stress. And over time, it became just too much. Like I was totally getting burned out.
Ben: 03:45 And so I was talking to a friend of mine, who also has a start-up, not exactly the same kind of operational burden that we have, but he had a lot of customers who were smaller, and so he's also dealing with some of his own constraints and his own pressures for scaling his business, and one of the tips that he gave me was, when you do something, document it. Like, don't just fix something, like if you fix something, document what happened, why there is a problem, and what you did to solve it. And then if you find yourself like having to deal with that again, automate that. Like, so, step one, do it. Step two, document it. Step three, automate it.
Ben: 04:23 And when I really got in the groove with that idea, that just changed my world. I got into the point where I was actually like documenting things that I was doing, so that if I was away for a day or whatever, you two could like read my documentation, and find out where things were. And then, as time went on, automated so that you didn't have to care, because it was just taken care of. And that was just... that changed my life, so I just had to throw that out there.
Josh: 04:48 Yeah, and we've brought that to basically every other part of the business as much as possible. Like we're all about documenting everything and automating anything that can be automated, so, yeah, it's not just operations at this point, like we're trying to do that for whatever's possible to that with.
Ben: 05:06 One of the side effects was, and aside from me being able to like, go away for a vacation-
Josh: 05:12 Yeah.
Ben: 05:12 ... which was really nice. But the other side of it was, just feeling more comfortable with where the business was as an entity separate from ourselves. Like we mentioned briefly in the last episode about how we wanted the business to be able to operate independently from us, so that we could go away, and that can be a short-term thing, like a vacation, or could be a long-term thing, like when you want to sell the business, right?
Josh: 05:32 Uh-huh (affirmative).
Ben: 05:32 Or when you want to replace yourself with employees. Like, in the early days, we couldn't hand anything off and not think about it, because none of us had documented, it was all in our heads, we were doing our own things that we knew how to do but nobody else knew how to do them, and over time, as we did document that, and automate that, it was much more conceivable for us to actually bring on an employee to do X, Y and Z, because now we had it pretty well planned out, it wouldn't be just like a discovery process, like "Oh, good luck, figure how to do it!", you know?
Josh: 06:01 It's kind of interesting to me, hearing like the documentation automation story from the operations side.
Josh: 06:07 We talked about, in the last podcast, we talked about, you know, like the books about scaling and creating business systems and business systems are basically the same deal. Like most of those books talk about, you know, like you document, and then you build the systems, which you're kind of like usually like checklist or something, and then the automation comes through having, you know, getting other people to do that, do those things.
Josh: 06:29 And I think, you know, we have tried to do that to some extent, but as developers we kind of, we try to prefer like, you know, getting computers to do those things, or outsource services whenever possible, because we can just, you know, if we can program something to do that, it kind of just fits our, you know, our small lean style better.
Starr: 06:48 Totally! So what are some of examples of, like we're talking kind of generally.
Starr: 06:52 So what are some specific examples of things we did that we no longer have to do because they were documented and subsequently automated?
Josh: 07:24 One of our classic examples, and this might be on the tip of Ben's tongue too, but is a, and I know we've talked about it before, is Printfection and how we've automated, you know, our swag to fulfillment. Because, I don't know about you guys, I was getting really tired of like going out and buying envelopes and folding shirts and putting shirts in envelopes, and then, you know, taking the envelopes to the post office to mail to people.
Josh: 07:25 And now, you know, we basically like, we have documented how we were doing that, and then we found a service that actually like can let us do that through an API, which is kind of like the best thing in the world to me.
Starr: 07:37 Can we get like a sponsorship from them? I feel like we really should. I feel like we're repping them more than we're repping our own company.
Ben: 07:45 Here you go! A specific example from our pipeline, over the last little while.
Ben: 07:51 So we used Elasticsearch for indexing the notice payloads that come into the system, so that-
Starr: 07:58 Yeah, the notice payloads are like the main sort of data in the error that happened, right?
Ben: 08:03 Right, right.
Ben: 08:04 And so we index, like where the error happened, and who it happened to, and all that stuff is in like a really big Elasticsearch cluster and it works great, like 99% of the time, but there are cases where we might try to submit a batch of payloads to be indexed by Elasticsearch, and it returns an error, and the whole batch just fails.
Ben: 08:28 And our batch is typically like a 100 payloads at a time, and there might be a case where, you know, Elasticsearch is taking a little siesta, and a few hundred payloads just don't get indexed right away. And so we have a system that kicks information about that particular error into Slack. It's like, "Oh, okay, Elasticsearch had an issue, and these payloads did not get indexed!"
Ben: 08:51 And when I first implemented that system, like that was it, like it would notify the Slack channel, and I'd have to go in there manually and find those IDs of those payloads that did not get indexed, and go back and manually tell Elasticsearch, "Yeah, go index those payloads!" And that worked fine, initially.
Ben: 09:08 And then, over time though, you're don't want to be doing that all the time, so the next step was, "Okay, we know which batches did not get processed, so let's record those batches in a database," in our case we're using DynamoDB for this, and then whenever we detect that some batches fail, like when records show up in that DynamoDB table, we know there is a failure. We can just use that table to drive Elasticsearch and remind it, "Hey please, hey, go re-index those payloads," right?
Ben: 09:37 So, that's where we are today. So now we don't have to use a Slack channel, like we can say, "Okay," and we can pull those records on the DynamoDB table. And then the next step in the automation, which I haven't done yet, is "Okay, well, we know that these things can be re-indexed, maybe a few minutes later, so let's just have an automated process, that once it sees the record show up in DynamoDB, like it waits five minutes, and then tries the reindexing, keeps on trying that until it's done, right?"
Ben: 10:02 So that's one example of something that we've done to like, something that I did manually, and then I did document "How do you actually do this restoration process?" And then, we're working on the automation part.
Starr: 10:13 You know what this really reminds me of? This really reminds me of the whole like, lean start-up approach to building products for other people, where you start with a minimum viable product, or maybe that minimum viable whole product is like, you responding to e-mails in a way that looks like a computer, and then, based on what you learn from that, then you, you know, slowly automate it and build it into a real product. Only, you know, you're the customer and the programmer.
Josh: 10:55 Back on the business end, what about customer service stuff? Because I know that we have a lot of customers, who, you know, got customer-service requests, they got pretty repetitive up about it over the years, and a lot of them might we've been able to completely eliminate by creating like self-serve tools, and, you know, things that allow customers to help themselves, and sometimes that is like an actual tool that we build, sometimes it's actually just putting, you know, writing some extra documentation that answers that question preemptively, and you can kind of look at documentation as, you know, as far as, customer-facing documentation as a kind of as a system in itself.
Starr: 11:14 That's a good point! Because when you mentioned customer service, I got this little lump in my stomach, because I was like, "Well, he's going to talk about how we don't really have canned replies or anything," we've talked for a long time about having canned replies that we can sort of just send off to people, but it hasn't really worked for us very well, because we get a lot of questions along the same lines but they're, you know, they're all very specific, you know?
Josh: 11:42 Well, yeah, and we don't want... a lot of them are specific, but some of them you could, you know, you could answer them with a click or-
Josh: 11:50 canned reply, but we really want to help people. I think that helping people is really important in our support, and we don't want, you know, if we can give people a more specific answer, just something more, like, a creative solution, I think that we're not really happy with just a canned reply that we would have for everyone.
Starr: 12:12 What I was saying is that that's not the only way you can automate this customer support. You can actually kind of do it around the back way, by eliminating the reasons why people are contacting you for customer support. And if you can do that by, say, putting a link to the appropriate documentation right next to the thing in your user interface that causes people problems, do it that way, or maybe you can make a tool that automates something they're asking you to do manually.
Josh: 12:37 Just to be clear, I wasn't saying like, "We don't want to be personable," I was saying, like, as a developer, I can spot canned replies from a mile away, personally, and they piss me the hell off. So-
Starr: 12:49 Well, I mean-
Josh: 12:50 as a customer, since we have developers that are our customers, you know, I want to be able to help them and give them a good, you know, an actual solution versus an "Oh, yeah, here's the, you know,"
Ben: 13:01 You know, that kind of mentality, like we are who we serve, right?
Ben: 13:07 That actually guides a lot of the decisions that we make. Like, the help desk system that we use. I remember when we first started and I was looking at the options for what kind of support system we were going to use. There were ones that had this autoreply feature, which is, you know "Hey, we've received your request, your request is number blah blah blah, we'll get back to you, you know, shortly," and that drives me crazy. I hate that! Like, I hate this automated thing that says, "We got your request,"
Josh: 13:36 Yeah.
Ben: 13:37 And I understand why some people like that, you know? It's like "They didn't get lost in the ether, blah blah blah," but I'd rather just like respond to people, like me, you know?
Josh: 13:46 Yeah.
Ben: 13:47 So we ended up not choosing one that had that feature because I didn't want that kind of experience for the customers.
Josh: 13:52 Yeah, I mean, we, to be fair, we do have a couple canned replies, and a couple of them are very, extremely useful because we have a few like highly technical edge-cases that, if you're going to help someone with this issue, you know, you're going going to go spend an hour digging on it. You know, JavaScript source maps is a pretty hairy one that comes to mind.
Josh: 14:13 And I have a canned reply for, specifically, for those types of issues, which like, you know, is very, it lays out all the different things that they could do to potentially troubleshoot their issue, just because the issues are so, there's such a variety of potential solutions to it. And I think that's pretty helpful for the rest of you guys, who don't really want to have, you know, the experts in the Source Map V3 spec that is currently published in a Google doc, by the way.
Ben: 14:41 And the other thing that we've done, you know, regarding the customer service stuff, is there are some things that we just have to do on our end to fix things, you know, right? Because sometimes data gets out of whack and there's nothing that the customer can do, it's on us, right? So we've documented-
Josh: 14:55 Yeah.
Ben: 14:55 ... "Here are all the steps that you need to follow when someone asks about this particular problem," right? And that's been very helpful-
Josh: 15:01 Yeah.
Ben: 15:01 ... I think, and sharing our load and making that more efficient.
Josh: 15:05 Yeah, so we've use documentation in our support process to help us provide better support, but we do it with standards, I think is.
Starr: 15:12 Yeah. I mean, life would be a little bit easier if our customers didn't have such like, sensitive bullshit meters. Right?
Josh: 15:21 Yeah.
Starr: 15:21 Let me find a target market that's a little bit more gullible next time, maybe?
Josh: 15:27 Yeah, but like... be a little more hand-wavy. Yeah.
Josh: 15:32 But yeah, I can think of, I think a number of cases where I think Ben has done a lot of this, but yeah, automated a solution, or built something into the app that lets people do a process that they were asking us to do before.
Ben: 15:45 Yeah.
Josh: 15:46 Like transferring projects, for instance.
Starr: 15:48 Yeah. Because a lot of customer support is, at least for us, is really just sort of like a band-aid over something that the app itself is missing, or like the user interface is confusing in some way, and so the real solution, you know, is to fix the user interface.
Josh: 16:03 Yeah, yeah. I'll say that really we have like two, there's two types of typical support requests, and that's it's like, "Something's missing," they just want to do but they can't, in the interface, and then there's super technical like, "Let me help you debug your app" type of thing. And we've tried to get a little better at like, saying "no" in certain cases, because in the past we've been tempted to like...
Starr: 16:28 Yeah, "Let's talk about this!" Let's go into this. This is interesting!
Josh: 16:31 You know, like, jump on a screen-share or something, and you know, pair a program with them to... I'm exaggerating, we haven't done that.
Starr: 16:38 But I mean, we-
Josh: 16:39 Ben might have!
Starr: 16:41 We've figured out some intense issues for people, right?
Starr: 16:44 Like, what are some of the issues that we've like helped people debug?
Ben: 16:46 Well, there was that one with Rational in the Ruby World, right?
Josh: 16:49 Well, yeah, that's the... that was the math, the math-
Ben: 16:53 The math engine, right. Or-
Josh: 16:55 It was a standard lab.
Josh: 16:56 Well, the math, I'm trying to remember, so the math and gem, or not gem, that was a standard library thing in Ruby. It's not required, it's an optional thing though, and if you require this math, if you require math and, and this isn't in Ruby anymore, thank God, because they took it out I think in like Ruby 2... I forgot what it was, like...
Ben: 17:15 2.5 or something.
Josh: 17:17 Yeah. Recently! Because I saw it, and I was like, jumping for joy.
Josh: 17:23 If you require this thing, it changes all decimal numbers to rational numbers or something, or...
Ben: 17:29 It changes division.
Josh: 17:30 Division, that's-
Ben: 17:31 It gets you returns as a rational number instead of-
Josh: 17:35 Yeah, instead of like floating point.
Starr: 17:37 So normally when you divide, you get a number that's like, 1.125 blah blah blah, repeated. But then, like a rational number's is like a fraction, right?
Ben: 17:46 They're like, 22 over 7.
Josh: 17:47 Yeah.
Josh: 17:48 And in Ruby is like an entirely different object, it has totally different, you know properties on, you know, how it interacts and like what it converts to, and-
Ben: 17:55 And it blew up our gem.
Josh: 17:57 It just... yeah. But it blew it up in such an obscure like, just like very subtle way. And this was back when we were doing metrics collection, by the way, I think it was in the metrics service when we were doing some like statistical calculations, and it was like, it wasn't in a way where it was like an error, it was like one of those errors where it's like, it's not an exception, it's not blowing anything up, but it's giving you the wrong value, and you just cannot figure out, like why you would be getting this value back, because it's like... there's no rational explanation, pun intended.
Starr: 18:36 Yeah, and I remember we've had some other cases where people include gems that redefine certain library standard methods.
Josh: 18:42 Yeah. And then, yeah monkey patching, because that's basically what math-end was doing, monkey patching in Ruby, is when they're basically rewriting, you know, rewriting things dynamically at runtime, and it's incredibly difficult to find where those things are unless you're familiar with the application. And in a lot of cases, like we've actually, like, you know, like stepped through that thing and, you know, that process in people's apps, which I think is well beyond what most companies are willing to do.
Starr: 19:09 So these people are paying us like maybe as low as 50 dollars a month.
Josh: 19:14 Yeah, I was going to say, like I've never had such a low hourly rate.
Starr: 19:18 So 50 dollars a month, and we're like, you know, sometimes spending hours on customer service. So that's something we're trying to get a little bit better at.
Josh: 19:25 And we have!
Josh: 19:27 Yeah, we've gotten better at that. And like I said, as we've... I think it's helped us to some extent, though, that we got in deep into those issues for a time, because it's helped us build much more comprehensive and deep documentation about the types of issues that people can run into. It's not, you know, it's not really our fault, it's just programming. Like, you're going to run into issues with things.
Josh: 19:52 So yeah, we kind of know what to expect and then we can build that into our documentation now instead of like sitting down and spending a bunch of time on it, hopefully.
Starr: 20:00 Totally, because like the number of issues that can come up, especially in Ruby, where someone can redefine the language out from underneath you.
Josh: 20:07 Yeah.
Starr: 20:08 Like, you can't depend on anything in Ruby, and that's cool in some cases, but also, if you're trying to provide a library for somebody to use that always works, it's going to be a little bit frustrating.
Ben: 20:20 One of the things, in talking about things, blowing up underneath you, that we've done more recently, is our continuous deployment set-up.
Ben: 20:29 Like, you know, for a long time we've done continuous integration, right? Where we have a big set of tests that we run for our code, and Josh is really good about keeping on me, in particular, about making sure that I'm writing new tests when I'm writing new code, and so we have this big test suite that gets run, you know, whenever you want on your machine, but also gets run automatically for every check-in, every push.
Starr: 20:53 Yeah, so every time you add new code and you share that code, it gets tested.
Ben: 20:56 So we find out in Slack, you know, if I wrote the build or whatever, but for the longest time we just manually deployed using Capistrano. It worked just fine.
Starr: 21:06 And note even just Capistrano, this is Capistrano-
Ben: 21:09 Oh, yeah.
Starr: 21:09 ... like, 2., like a version of Capistrano that stopped being developed four years ago?
Ben: 21:15 It works, it's like they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, you know?
Starr: 21:17 Yeah.
Ben: 21:17 But we recently decided we brought on, you know, a new developer hire and we thought, "You know, maybe it's time to make this process a little more automated so that's little bit more hands-off," and so now we have CircleCI, we're using the continuous deployment feature function, where we can actually have it trigger jobs that actually do the deployment for us. And that's been really nice to see that code shows up when it's supposed to, we're not like wondering, "Oh, did it get there?" You know, "Can I deploy this stuff, is it safe?" if like sometimes, as we are siloed in how we do our development, sometimes like, "Oh, did you really want that to go to production yet, or you know, that's still waiting.?"
Starr: 21:55 Now, we have like some sort of issue too, where like something was...
Ben: 21:59 It was the asset compilation in Rails. It would like-
Josh: 22:02 Yeah.
Ben: 22:03 ... compile on like one of our web servers, but not on the other, and so then there'd be some inconsistent results, you know, when you were browsing the site, the CSS would be missing, or the JavaScript would be missing, so...
Starr: 22:12 Yeah.
Ben: 22:12 You know, just having... so, as part of that continuous distribution, we have the assets pushed out, you know, automatically by Circle and that really smoothed that over.
Starr: 22:22 Yeah, so it turns out deploying like applications for multiple servers, and having them all be like in sync all the time, isn't always super trivial.
Ben: 22:30 This is actually a... You're talking about having things change out from under you, this is actually exactly that. Like you upgraded Webpacker, right? Because we're trying to keep up current with our dependencies, and the behavior changed from the version that we were using to the version that we upgraded to. And the behavior change was that those asset file names, when it compiles the assets, they changed based on the path. And when you deploy into two different servers, and we use time-stamped deployment directories, like Capistrano does, well, one server may have been one second ahead of the other server, and so now they have different path names, and now those assets when they got compiled had different names in their file names.
Starr: 23:12 Oh, interesting!
Josh: 23:13 Hm.
Ben: 23:14 Doing the continuous deployment thing made that more consistent, and I went and found that little behavior change in Webpacker after like hours of pulling my hair out, trying to figure out what was going on, and, yeah, probably made that consistent again and that solved that problem. But having that continuous deployment helped pave over that weirdness.
Starr: 23:34 Well, I didn't know that, Ben. Thank you!
Ben: 23:35 Thank you.
Starr: 23:36 Thank you for your service!
Josh: 23:37 I've been loving the continuous deployment, by the way, that I-
Starr: 23:40 Oh, me too!
Josh: 23:41 ... I mean, it seems like it's a small thing, like you can just run cap-deploy or whatever, but it's... it really... those little automations seem to add up over time.
Ben: 23:49 Yeah.
Josh: 23:50 Yeah, seems to add up to a lot of time saved.
Starr: 23:52 I don't know about you guys, but when I deploy manually I can't help but just like stare at the output as it deploys, and I don't know what I'm expecting to find, I'm not going to like jump in and fix something that goes wrong if I just can't just like not just like sit there.
Josh: 24:07 ... the environments like having it always in the same environment, deployed from the same environment helps, because it's more like, you're not thinking like, you know, "This is running in my laptop, there's a number, like a bunch of things that could cause this to fail and I literally need to sit here and watch this to make sure it doesn't blow up."
Ben: 24:24 Right.
Josh: 24:25 At least that's like, for me, I find myself doing the same thing as Starr, and I think usually I'm sitting there, I'm not quite convinced that it's actually going to work.
Ben: 24:35 And it's helped scale the business, right?
Ben: 24:36 Because the precipitating event for this was hiring Kevin, and like, "Oh, Kevin has to be able to deploy now!" Well, do we tell Kevin to cap-deploy whenever we want, or do we just say-
Starr: 24:47 VPN's, and all that stuff?
Ben: 24:49 Yeah, exactly. Why don't we just say, "Push it to Master and Circle will take care of it for you." I mean, that's much easier-
Josh: 24:54 Yeah.
Ben: 24:54 ... much more scalable on the people sense.
Josh: 24:57 Yeah. And it helps us enforce our rules around master. So-
Ben: 25:01 Right.
Josh: 25:01 ... it's, if you commit directly to master, it's definitely going out.
Ben: 25:05 It's going to production!
Starr: 25:07 Oh, wait, what?
Josh: 25:10 So have you been force-pushing to master Starr?
Starr: 25:13 That's, I just made a batch that just force-pushes everything, like I just-
Josh: 25:17 Right!
Starr: 25:18 I just type in, "git push", and it just automatically force-pushes to master.
Josh: 25:21 Okay, okay, cool.
Ben: 25:22 You know what, confession time though: my favorite commit message-
Josh: 25:25 Yeah?
Ben: 25:25 ... my favorite commit message that I make is, "Oops."
Josh: 25:29 What?
Ben: 25:29 When I commit that thing to master, and like things break, and like, "Oops!" So I commit the fix, there it is. "Oops."
Josh: 25:36 Yeah.
Starr: 25:37 Yeah, we can do this because we're the bosses, so... all you dev-ops, all of you ops people out there, who were like pulling your hair out, well, hmm, yeah, too bad.
Ben: 25:45 So, you know, one thing that's changed recently, and this came up during the interview process when I was talking to developers, it was, you know, we talked in our previous episode about how we work pretty independently. Like the three of us, we pick things that we want to work on, and then we go and work on that thing until it's done, and then we go do the next thing right? And so the question I got a lot of times was, "Well, how was that going to work when you have a developer who's not one of you three right? He doesn't share your brain space."
Ben: 26:11 And so that's been a bit of a change in the business. So I guess we could talk a little bit about how we've, you know, transitioned into that new reality.
Starr: 26:20 Yeah, how does that work?
Ben: 26:22 Well, I think having the conclaves on a quarterly basis definitely helps, you know? Setting the vision for what we want to have happen over the next few months definitely gives us, or gives me, anyway, some talking points and some context that I can share with like Kevin, and I can say "Here are the things that we want to accomplish, like here are the goals that we have for the next, you know, year, or the next half-year," and, compare that to the list of issues that we have and get GitHub you know, enhancement requests and, you know, bugs and things like that. So, you know, go wild, go in there, figure out like what makes sense, what you feel has impact to get us to where we want to go to get us to, you know, make some progress on the goals that we set out in the conclave.
Ben: 27:08 And that's been really helpful, you know, because I find I don't want to be in a situation where there's micro-managing happening, like I don't want to tell someone what to do every day and that person I'm sure doesn't want to be told what to do every day?
Starr: 27:20 Yeah, we kind of hire for this too, we hire for somebody who could work fairly independently.
Ben: 27:26 Right.
Ben: 27:26 And to be able to do that, though, that person has to have some context, right? Some framework from which they can make decisions about "What am I going to work on today?" So I think that having the Conclaves has been really helpful for that.
Josh: 27:39 Yeah.
Starr: 27:40 Oh, totally.
Starr: 27:41 Yeah, and we, ah... I think actually maybe doing the podcast has also been a little bit helpful too, because I know some of the... I know Kevin and Ben F. have mentioned that they listened to some episodes, so...
Josh: 27:54 Yeah, they can kind of get the inside scoop before it's in our heads.
Starr: 27:58 Yeah. So how do we...
Starr: 28:01 So now that we are like bosses, like what...
Starr: 28:05 I'm not really involved in the bossing, I don't do much bossing myself, I think Ben is like the big boss here. Well, most of the time. So, how do you do this? How do you... like how do you manage these good folks and make sure that, you know, everybody's happy and doing what they should be doing and stuff?
Ben: 28:25 What we do is we have... we do have a monthly one-on-one, so I meet with Ben F. and with Kevin monthly via Zoom, we chat about what happened the previous month, the things that they were able to accomplish, we chat about the the things we want to accomplish in the next month.
Ben: 28:42 It's really driven by them, I try not to set the agenda, except for they know that I'm going to ask about things that happened before and I'm going to ask about what they want to do next. But after that, it's really up to them to discuss like, how are they feeling, how they like, you know, being a Honeybadger, and what kind of things they want to work on, and what longer term goals they have, things they want to learn, maybe skills they want to develop.
Ben: 29:05 And, yeah, for us, I think we've built a business around having fun, learning stuff and, you know, building cool things and serving our customers well. And we want to have that same culture with all of our employees; we want them to have fun, we want them to learn new things, we want them to join us in serving our customers well, and hopefully that will be, you know, engaging for everybody and so far its worked out really well.
Starr: 29:30 We don't have sort of the separate track for employees, like we want to be one company that acts in one way.
Josh: 29:37 Yeah, we talked about kind of all wanting to be peers.
Starr: 29:39 Would you say we're a flat organization?
Josh: 29:41 Yeah, I would say, yeah. Exactly.
Starr: 29:43 All right.
Starr: 29:44 I'm going to read a book about this now.
Ben: 29:47 You know, I've always avoided the corporate work environment where there's a lot of just crud you have to deal with, you know? I've avoided working for big companies, I've avoided working for cruddy bosses, and so obviously I don't want to make my own business into that kind of cruddy environment.
Josh: 30:04 It'd be fine if we did, though, where... if everyone has a direct report and we are, you know... Ben's like... Ben, you can be the big boss, and then, yeah.
Starr: 30:14 No I think it needs to be circular where Ben then reports to the lowest person on the totem pole?
Josh: 30:18 Oh, okay!
Josh: 30:19 Oh, that would be interesting, to see where the business goes, and with that sort of management structure.
Starr: 30:24 Yeah, I mean, it's a wheel, so I'm guessing it's going places!
Ben: 30:27 But it has its benefits, for sure, but it has its own challenges as well.
Ben: 30:33 And, you know, we're still learning, we're trying to figure this out, and, you know, both Ben F. and Kevin have to flexible, right? And they have to be willing to, I guess, step a little bit into the dark because, you know, they are basically trodding the path for the first time, and hopefully, and they have been very patient with us, and in the mistakes that we make, and dealing with them, and they've been very good about like taking the initiative and not having to be directed in everything they do, and realizing that hey, yeah, we're just three guys who are trying to figure this out.
Starr: 31:04 Yeah... I've really enjoyed working with them, I'm glad we brought them on board.
Josh: 31:07 Yeah.
Starr: 31:08 So what's up next, like what do we want to do in terms of systems, and automation, like what's going to take our business to the stratosphere?
Josh: 31:16 Yeah, what's... you're asking us like what's your next thing to hype, right? Because you want to be the hype man?
Starr: 31:22 Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm going to be the worst hype man.
Josh: 31:27 Yeah... I don't know, um...
Ben: 31:29 Yeah, nevermind.
Ben: 31:29 You know, we're not at the four-hour workweek yet.
Josh: 31:32 Yeah, I know.
Ben: 31:33 So, I guess we have some more automation to do, or maybe some more people to hire or something to get to that point?
Josh: 31:40 Yeah.
Ben: 31:40 But yeah, I think definitely, continue to automate stuff is a good way to go.
Josh: 31:43 We've talked about, we've been... we've talked about recently like, ways that we could more like, streamline our content production process-
Starr: 31:51 Uh-huh (affirmative).
Josh: 31:51 ... and I think there's something there, you know? That, um...
Josh: 31:54 Just right now, we've all been a lot better at producing content, and I think that's really awesome, and now that we actually... you know, we're actually doing stuff now, that's always a good opportunity to start documenting and then automating and streamlining it, so.
Starr: 32:09 Also, for example, like outsourcing is good, you know? We can do more-
Josh: 32:14 Yeah...
Starr: 32:14 ... more on that end, and sort of moving things into managed services, like for example, we used to host all of our own blog content and stuff like that, using Jekyl, or whatever, static site generator, and now we started using Netlify for all that, and we have four or five websites on Netlify, and we just don't have to do any of the stuff around managing, you know, the hosting for them anymore, and that's great.
Starr: 32:39 Like, I'm very excited about, you know, whatever we can put on our managed services, even if the cost is twice as much, like, I'm all for.
Josh: 32:47 Yeah. Totally.
Starr: 32:49 You know, occasionally teases me, when it's like we're going to put our Postgres into a managed Postgres service.
Josh: 32:58 That would be the day.
Starr: 32:59 My heart just starts beating.
Starr: 33:00 There's always good reasons why we don't quite do it yet, but, you know, one day maybe we'll get there.
Ben: 33:05 Yeah. I've definitely had to learn how to give up that control, that sense of control over the things that were running, because I'm the Ops person, I like to make sure that things are my way, and...
Josh: 33:16 Yeah.
Ben: 33:16 But yeah, we're making progress, like Starr, you've convinced me that there are many things that I don't have to control, I don't have to run myself, like that Elasticsearch cluster that I was talking about, and like, we don't run that, like that's a hosted by Amazon kind of thing.
Starr: 33:29 Yes. Yeah, now we use that.
Ben: 33:32 It's beautiful! Makes me weep. Like, I can upgrade versions, all I do is click a button! And I'm like, "Thank you, Starr," as I click the button.
Starr: 33:39 Really? You are?
Ben: 33:40 Yes.
Starr: 33:41 I don't think... I don't know, I don't think I was like that instrumental, but you know, if you want to give me credit, I'll take it.
Starr: 33:46 Um, it's going on my resume!
Ben: 33:49 There you go.
Josh: 33:50 Well, you know, like we could circle this all back around to, you know, to like the business advice.
Josh: 33:58 But giving up control is an essential theme in all of these like, systems, you know, business systems, stuff to, like that's the classic small business owners' problem, like... You have to give up control, you have to be willing to like let yourself, take yourself out of the picture, and let someone else run the show, if you're going to be able to like take yourself out of the picture, or like go on vacation, or, you know, sell your business someday. Like chances are, you're not going to be too happy if the only way you can sell your business is if you go with it and work for it for the rest of your life. So you have to have step back, yeah.
Starr: 34:35 The whole point of systems is that they allow people who aren't you to do things, right?
Josh: 34:40 Right, yeah, exactly.
Ben: 34:42 Yep.
Starr: 34:43 And yeah, speaking of, so also one other thing, one other system I'm thinking about, maybe invoking, is getting somebody to edit this damn podcast, because that takes me a long time.
Josh: 34:53 Yeah, totally.
Starr: 34:54 I'm a little worried they won't be able to, like, bring the sass, and they'd-
Josh: 34:57 Well, that's the thing, you like, you're doing such a great job, you know, with it, and you have such specialized knowledge about it that, you know-
Ben: 35:04 That's... that's-
Josh: 35:04 ... you'll probably never find someone to take over for you, Starr.
Ben: 35:07 That's the eternal struggle!
Starr: 35:09 I know!
Ben: 35:09 I can do it better myself!
Josh: 35:10 Yeah, exactly, I'm being kind of facetious there, but...
Starr: 35:13 I think I may... there may be like, there may be, a... there may be a middle ground for us. Like I can go in and do a couple of like, big edits.
Josh: 35:22 Yeah.
Starr: 35:22 Things I want there, and then just be like, "Okay, you go take out the "ohs" and "ahs", and make us sound beautiful.
Josh: 35:28 Sure. Yeah. Well, I think like, having, like... you're building up a pretty good library of examples of like what we want the show to sound like, right? Like, that's part of what you're doing by doing it yourself right now, so, when you find the right person to be the editor, we can say, you know "Go listen to our," you know, "our huge back catalog, and see what it should sound like, and then make it sound like that."
Starr: 35:51 You know, this is a topic that I see coming up again and again when it comes to like outsourcing things, and doing systems, is that, you know, when it comes to having some sort of creative element in the process, is like you really have to give people the autonomy to, for example, like I do sometimes, I just delete whole chunks of things that we say, because I... they run on, or whatever, they're not... they don't really make the podcast sort of flow as well as I'd like it, and it's like you got to give people control over that stuff, and really find people who will take advantage of that control, and actually do it.
Josh: 36:29 Yeah. You do make me sound really, really smart, Starr, and I appreciate that, and I do, I worry that if we have someone else come in that doesn't know what to cut, they'll want to leave in that, you know, everyone's going to find out what we really know, what we really think.
Starr: 36:46 Here's the thing, Josh. Here's the thing. I don't make you sound smart. Because that's just how you sound.
Josh: 36:51 Aww!
Starr: 36:52 I'm just going to be, yeah, you're wearing your ruby slippers this whole time, Josh.
Josh: 36:58 Well, thanks. Thank you, Starr.
Starr: 37:02 I love that we can end the show on such a nice, positive note!
Starr: 37:05 This wraps up our special two-part episode on Systems. Next week Ben and Josh will be back from RailsConf, so we'll be doing our normal thing, and until then, why not head over to iTunes, give us one of those five-star reviews; we'll take it. Head over to Twitter, join the conversation. We're @FounderQuest, we'd love to hear your questions, comments, you know, whatever, just, you know, be nice, be supportive, be loving and we'll catch you the next time. Thanks!
Announcer: 37:29 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io.
Announcer: 37:44 Want more from the founders? Go to FounderQuestpodcast.com! That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week!
Two part special! In part one, the guys chat about decision making in a siloed company structure and the challenges of making sure everyone is on the same page. That's not all! More details about the secret Honeybadger conclaves are leaked, dirty laundry is aired about the logo scandal that shook the company to its core, and America's favorite Honeybadger is revealed!
Full Transcript:
Ben: 00:00 Yeah, maybe you want to omit that from the whole thing because we probably don't want the FBI come and knock on the door and ask us, "Hey, what other customers that we have here might be...
Josh: 00:08 I like that it's a good story and...
Announcer: 00:10 So did those guys really name their app after a meme? Huh? Buckle up, fellow kids. It's time for Founder Quest.
Josh: 00:20 I mean, okay. Once you get that Trump tweet out there it brings down the hammer on you.
Ben: 00:26 No collusion.
Josh: 00:28 I like the Ben Findley's suggestion that we kind of just put out a no collusion preemptively. Like, you know a disclaimer tweet.
Ben: 00:34 Right, right.
Starr: 00:36 That works. That's law.
Josh: 00:38 Right? Yeah. I think it is.
Starr: 00:40 It's like calling shotgun.
Josh: 00:40 Right? Yeah. Just call no collusion ahead of time.
Starr: 00:46 I just wrote a message to my friend, the orthodontist to ask her about how people sell stuff to orthodontists.
Ben: 00:51 Direct mail, direct mail.
Ben: 00:54 I've always wanted to do direct mail, like designing postcards and putting them in the mail.
Starr: 01:01 You know, I'll give it to you. Like direct mail does have this sort of appeal to it, but also it's like I've never actually bought anything from direct mail. I don't think.
Josh: 01:07 You know what's big business in direct mail, is political mailers.
Starr: 01:13 Oh yeah. So let's get into those. So my friend... I'm just going to describe this in case we decided to put it in the podcast. My friend, the orthodontist, was described a marketing issue that they have. They have to do this process manually, and it's real pain in the ass. It doesn't really map well to any generic marketing solutions because they have to coordinate between a prospect who's also a patient.
Starr: 01:36 So it was medical stuff involved. They have to get in touch with their dentist, and so there's like a two party thing happening. And she's like, "Yeah, you should build me this software."
Starr: 01:45 So I just messaged her and was like, "Okay, so how do people actually buy software in orthodontist land? Do people come and like demo it for them? When they buy do they come back, and then train the staff?" Because all that stuff just sounds like a lot of work, boys. Like I don't know how to do that.
Ben: 02:06 Well. That's pretty easy to do, but yeah, that's a lot of work.
Starr: 02:08 No, I mean I would know how to do it, but I don't know how to like manage people to do it. You know what I mean?
Ben: 02:14 Wouldn't it be wild to have like a fleet of reps out across the country, out showing software and like a real enterprise-y business. On that note, an area of software sales that I've always found interesting and intriguing is school systems. Like they had the most horrendous software ,and I'm pretty sure it's only because they have to deal with companies that have to deal with their purchasing process.
Ben: 02:39 And so these companies are like, "You know what, because of your messed up purchasing process, I'm going to force you to use this craptacular software. Ha! Take that."
Starr: 02:48 Oh totally, totally. So my partner Evie was a... she used to do web stuff at this well-respected local university that I will not name. And it was just amazing hearing about the amount of money they were paying for a new CRM. Like a CRM in 2019, the University of Washington... Which is not the school that she worked at. It's much bigger than the school she worked at. Their CRM is WordPress, but no. This little private school has to have this weird enterprise-y CRM because it does all this things, meets all this requirements.
Starr: 03:28 It's like they're paying something like twenty thousand a month for it. Like, it's insane. It's insane.
Josh: 03:33 CRM or CMS?
Starr: 03:35 Oh shit. A CMS. I always get those confused. No wonder nobody calls me. No wonder I suck at sales, guys.
Ben: 03:42 You are not going to be a sales rep, Starr.
Starr: 03:44 No, I'm just publishing my sales leads for the world to see. I don't even realize it.
Ben: 03:52 We talked about Josh's food truck dream, and like one of my dreams once there's sunset money involved, and I don't really have to work anymore, what kind of things would I like to do? I think like volunteering to replace the craptacular software at schools is something that I would like to do.
Ben: 04:12 I'm just going to show up. I'm going to be the White Knight, I'm going to just replace all your bad software.
Josh: 04:18 Just set up shop in their basement.
Ben: 04:19 Exactly, and I'll ride off into the sunset, and everyone will be happy. Right?
Starr: 04:22 Oh, you poor boy. Like you're not going to be the White Knight. You're going to be Don Quixote.
Josh: 04:26 That sounds like a slow, terrible death to me.
Starr: 04:30 It does. You're going to be tilting at those windmills.
Ben: 04:35 But you know part of the motivation is listening to my sons deal with the software they have to deal with because all their teachers use this online software for managing the assignments. And you turn assignments in, and half the time they're like, "I can't turn in my homework because the site's down." Like, "Wow, gosh," you know, as a person building software for businesses to help them keep their sites up, that just makes my skin crawl. You know, my son can't turn in his homework because their site's down.
Josh: 05:04 It's crazy how many industries are left. Some of the more traditional industries are left in that situation though. It's not just education, I don't think. You hear that sort of story from a lot of different places like healthcare, and service, contractor type industries, and those sorts of things.
Josh: 05:22 We've talked about how it would be fun to do a company that serves an entirely different out of our wheelhouse type of industry. I mean it's kind of like totally the opposite of what we've been talking about over the last couple of months. But yeah, I think it would still be fun. If we wanted to throw everything out the window and just start over. Try to go after something new.
Starr: 05:48 The way to do it though, you have to bring somebody on board who knows that industry, right? You've got to have an insider, right?
Ben: 05:54 Yeah. I think we just put in the disclaimer right now. This is not official business advice, right? Don't throw away everything you all have experience you have and all the advantage you have and just...
Starr: 06:05 I don't think it's throwing away, Ben. I don't think it's throwing away because look, I think I said in one of the previous marketing shows, it's like, yeah, if I started a custom cabinet shop, I can out market the hell online out of all the custom cabinet shops. Because software as a service companies ,and just sort of online sales in general, is just a couple of decades ahead of just normal sort of mom and pop businesses, in terms of marketing.
Starr: 06:31 Like the product my friend was describing they were needing for their orthodontist practice. It sounds like something that's very... it's like something we would just sort of take for granted and just have Intercom do for us or whatever. But because there's some special requirements, you know, those things don't quite work.
Starr: 06:49 So I think it's not throwing away. I think it's like moving to a sort of smaller pond where you can be a bigger fish, and use your expertise as a fish to catch more things that fish catch.
Josh: 07:04 But you know-
Josh: 07:05 Worms, catching worms.
Josh: 07:06 I think the point that we're trying to make is that there that there's a lot of weird fish out there, and if you haven't spent a lot of time in the pond, you might not know what fish you're dealing with.
Starr: 07:18 Alright. So today we're going to talk about systems, right? We're programmers, we build systems for a living. We think in systems. We eat, breathe, and sleep systems. But you know, there's like a lot of systems that aren't really, they're not programs. They're just kind of these manual systems, or these sorts of systems of thinking about things, that we've put in place.
Starr: 07:40 So first of all, one thing that I've actually heard from people. People want to know because we're a company, we have three guys who have equal ownership. I don't think we're legally allowed to fire each other. So how do we... Oh, I saw you make that face, Ben. I saw you make that face.
Ben: 07:56 I was pondering, like how-
Josh: 07:57 He's like, "Well, I could find a way."
Starr: 07:59 This is going to turn into Game of Thrones, before you know it.
Starr: 08:04 So how do we make decisions?
Ben: 08:06 I think you know, to start off, one of the things to remember is that even though that we have different opinions about how to accomplish some things, and so we had to come up with a framework for dealing with that. I think if you back up a bit and say, but we all have the same long term goal, right? We have the same mentality when it comes to the kind of business we want to run, the kind of customers you want to serve. Basically, how we want things to look in general. Like we were on the same page from the beginning on that. So that helps resolve a lot of differences right there. Right?
Starr: 08:39 We all want to be the person who's sitting on the iron throne when the final credits run.
Ben: 08:43 So that helps. But you know, I think we kind of fell into it by accident from the start. Three developers, we had things we wanted to build, and Starr you fell into just doing the finance stuff because that was interesting to you. And Josh you were doing the client stuff because that's what we needed to have done. And I did the backend stuff because that was fun for me. Right?
Ben: 09:03 And so we got started, I think, accidentally, but it worked out really well. Just focusing on a particular area, I think that helped avoid a lot of stepping on each other's toes from the outset.
Starr: 09:13 Sometimes when people have asked how do you work together and what's your process, I was like at least earlier on, our process was kind of to not work together.
Josh: 09:24 It's just that we don't. You avoid all sorts of conflict if you just don't, if you don't work together ever.
Starr: 09:31 And it sounds bad, but I mean, you're building this business and there's so much work to do. There's so many different pieces of it where three guys can easily each have their own silo. And people say silos are bad and they do have their own problems. Yeah, you want to make it so that people can dip their toes into each other's silos. Initially, that worked pretty well, didn't it?
Josh: 09:56 Yeah. And I don't know, as someone who freelanced for pretty much their entire career, and I've always had a home office. I'm comfortable in my silo. So, yeah. It's nice in here guys.
Starr: 10:08 That's exactly how we approached it, essentially. We approached it like three freelancers who were just working on the same project.
Josh: 10:16 We didn't really want to change a whole lot, I don't think.
Ben: 10:18 But over time, you know, of course we have come to have disagreements about certain things. Have we talked about the logo experience before on the podcast?
Josh: 10:27 I don't know. I don't think we did.
Starr: 10:29 I don't know if it's the people are ready to hear.
Ben: 10:30 Yeah, I think that was the first major one where we all had some opinions. Right? And they weren't the same opinion. I think... We didn't let it formulate this plan, but I think what came out of that experience was like one of us has the ultimate responsibility for a decision, and whoever that person is, that person gets the final say like I guess they get the-
Starr: 10:54 Wait, who had the ultimate responsibility for that decision?
Ben: 10:56 That was you Starr, because you're all... Oh yeah. That was totally-
Starr: 11:00 I think we have very different memories of this. I don't really feel like I hold-
Josh: 11:05 I think the point was... I think the point that Ben is making is that you were supposed to, and we like, we like ripped that responsibility out of your hand, and tried to tell you what was up, and that's when we decided, okay, we need to have a process for who who's driving this ship or whatever.
Starr: 11:25 So a little backstory and a confession. Nobody really called us out on this. I really expected somebody to call us out on this, but for what, two or three years, our logo was a fun awesome icon. Like you know that that font that has a bunch of icons that just people use with bootstrap and stuff, it's free.
Starr: 11:47 It was just that, and it was a lightning bolt because I thought that'd be kind of cool. It doesn't have anything to do with honey badgers, but you know what? They didn't have a honey badger icon or I would have chosen that. It was just a fun, awesome icon.
Starr: 11:58 So, eventually, we were like making some money. I mean we should buy a real sort of logo. And what were some of the... I think I went to 99 Designs first, and everybody hated everything because there was all... weren't there some cartoon honey badgers involved at some point?
Josh: 12:16 Yeah. Yeah, it was a little. Like there were a lot of-
Ben: 12:18 Got into the weeds pretty quickly.
Josh: 12:20 A lot of duds in there. Yeah.
Starr: 12:21 Yeah. It's like stylize honey badger logos, and eventually we decided to go with somebody from... This freelancer we got off of Odesk. What's it called now? What's Odesk called now?
Ben: 12:35 Upwork.
Starr: 12:37 Upwork. Back then it was still Odesk. I think they're from Argentina, and they helped us out. Like they knocked out this logo, and I think we all liked that one.
Josh: 12:46 Yeah.
Ben: 12:47 Yeah.
Starr: 12:47 It's our current logo. It's a riff off the lightning bolt because we were just like, okay, nobody can agree on like these badger concepts. Let's just go back and make a fancier lightening bolt.
Josh: 12:58 Yeah, it's great because like there's absolutely no other company, that either then or now, that has a lightning bolt for a logo. It's really worked in our favor.
Starr: 13:10 Yeah, especially not a yellow or orange lightning bolts. And definitely none of our direct competitors have a logo in a very similar shade of orange.
Josh: 13:21 Yeah, either the border... where we really stand out is the border, I think. You know, around the lightning bolt? Because ours is a diamond, and everyone else is like a square or a circle or something.
Starr: 13:36 Yeah, I think we've got a couple of... Maybe there was a hexagon involved.
Ben: 13:38 Diamonds are forever.
Starr: 13:39 So, yeah. That's one example of a sort of dispute that we had. And frankly there was no system involved in resolving that. It was just, we just all thought about it until we were just exhausted of fighting about it.
Ben: 13:55 Yeah, basically.
Starr: 13:55 And then we basically resolved never to change the logo again. Like that's something I'm never going to do. I'm sorry, I don't care if it starts to look dated in another 10 years. I'm not going to do it. Like I'm going to sell the company before I change the logo.
Josh: 14:10 That's like classic brand advice too though. Like you never want to change the logo no matter how bad it is because people just know it. People wouldn't know Honeybadger if they didn't see our wonderful logo.
Ben: 14:22 I was just thinking about the Slack logo. It's like I definitely don't want the Internet to bring out their pitchforks when we change our logo.
Starr: 14:29 Oh, yeah. They do, man. They do.
Josh: 14:32 They do. And I guess like if you're going to do it, there's been a few that have done it, but most of them are like Slack sizer or larger, it seems.
Starr: 14:41 Well I guess. Let me step back. The logo thing was an example of just a dispute about a specific thing. But we also, I think, found ourselves kind of drifting towards pulling the company in different directions almost, right? Because we're all kind of working on things that we personally wanted to work on, and we all had our own sort of ideas of where the company was going and that's understandable. But we didn't really have much coordination like between us, or making sure we're all on the same page or whatever. Eventually that was kind of difficult because we're all sort of on different pages. And I think that's when we instituted the system of the quarterly conclave.
Ben: 15:20 Yeah, I think our silos got a little too far apart there. So we decided we had to coordinate with better-
Josh: 15:26 Yeah, well, and we realized that while the silos work pretty well for actually getting a lot of work done, they don't work well for coordinating, moving in the same direction. I think we found that we needed to have somewhere where we actually decided on larger big picture things that we wanted to happen in the company. Otherwise, it was just going to keep drifting in whatever direction the three of us each would pull it. That's when we started the conclave, and meeting up on a regular basis.
Starr: 15:55 Yeah, so first we just did the meetups. We call them conclaves as a joke because we sort of go into seclusion for a day, have a day long meeting at an undisclosed location. It's varied right now. We meet at an undisclosed location that is a converted bank fault. I've posted about that on Twitter.
Starr: 16:12 Yeah, we have a day long meeting, and at first it was just us in a room talking in each other, but eventually we kind of... I think based on some books we came up with a system for like what we do. Should we go through like what a typical conclave involves?
Josh: 16:32 We first got the idea from... We all read a book called Scale. I had it here. Which one was it? It was a Scale: Seven Proven Principles To Grow Your Business And Get Your Life Back by Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel.
Starr: 16:46 I think I may have gotten that from the Tropical MBA podcast.
Josh: 16:50 I believe... I think at least one of those guys, is he Tropical MBA? I don't know.
Starr: 16:57 I don't think he wrote the book, but they recommended a lot of books. It's about these guys, they built a business manufacturing fancy cat furniture, you know, like stuff for cats. So they moved to Asia so they could oversee the manufacturing of it, and live this baller lifestyle. Then they moved on and started making portable bars for events, I guess, whatever. Then they sold those companies. Anyway, lots of good advice.
Josh: 17:27 Well, I remember reading... I've read some books by them, and one of the ones we read recently was After The Exit, I think. That was pretty interesting. It was kind of like a devil's advocate view of selling their business. That was kind of interesting for me. And if you're in a bootstrap company, it's interesting to think about what happens if you did sell. Are you happy with just money versus having a business that you love?
Starr: 17:57 Yeah. Like the point of that book was like everybody focuses on selling your business. But a lot of times when you sell your business, you wish you hadn't.
Josh: 18:05 Yeah, and there's like a period of grief that you have to go through, that a lot of founders go through. It was interesting.
Starr: 18:12 So anyway, what does this book Scale, what did we get from that?
Josh: 18:15 I mean, it was a fairly practical book. They have an actual process, planning processes and things, and basically a system for building a company that runs itself without being reliant on the founders. And I think that's what we've kind of always wanted. You know, to some extent we would like to have a machine that works when we go on vacation or whatever. We don't want to be stuck doing things. We don't want the business to fall apart if we go away for a while, or forever. It doesn't really matter, it's kind of the point. Scale was a system for that.
Josh: 18:52 There's a lot of other books out there that kind of have similar things. Like it seems like there's a lot of people who have written this book based on their own particular experiences. There's other ones I've seen. I know there's also one called Scaling Up, which is pretty similar.
Ben: 19:06 Yeah, I just remember initially we didn't have any of that in mind. Right? We were just building something we wanted, and wanted to make some money, and that was good enough. But at some point it was like... And Josh was really, as I recall, really pushing this. Like, "I want a system for the business so that we're not always working in the business." Right? To make it extend past us.
Starr: 19:27 You know, I had actually forgotten that the book Scale had a bunch of that stuff because what we took from it was mostly the quarterly planning system, but it has a bunch of other stuff too. So what does a quarterly planning, like how does that work, and how have we changed that sort of over... Have we modified it at all?
Josh: 19:46 Ours has become a lot looser than is in the book. I've read through a number of these types of books now, and like I said, there's a lot of them that kind of echo each other in different ways. And I think every business needs to figure out what system actually works for it specifically. And I think everyone will take... you can take things from different places and kind of build your own way of doing things. But we're still pretty, we're loosely based on the system in that book.
Josh: 20:17 But I think most of what we do is, basically, it's called a quarterly action plan. It's basically just a template document that we use to kind of help us go through what our goals are for the business at this moment in time, and then translate that into some like actionable things that we can do throughout a single quarter. So we do this like four times a year, and that's a really good pace for planning strategic goals, I think. It's kind of like you've got the annual and then the quarterly planning cycle. It helps keep us on track, in the bigger picture sense.
Starr: 20:52 The first step in our sort of modified version of it... Because, I mean, books like Scale and I don't know books about scaling up, a lot of times they're talking about much larger companies than we have. You're talking about setting goals for divisions, and departments, and things. It's like we don't really have those. We've got, at the time, we had three people and now we have five people. There's really no divisions. We had to modify it, and make it a little bit more flexible.
Starr: 21:18 The first step in our quarterly planning process is we decide focus areas that we're going to focus on for the quarter. Right? How many of those would you usually do? Like three?
Josh: 21:30 Try to keep it to three. It's three focus areas, and each focus area has up to five individual items within it that we want to tackle.
Starr: 21:40 What's a focus area? What's a couple of examples?
Josh: 21:42 So a focus area could be, say, acquisition.
Starr: 21:46 Like customer acquisition?
Josh: 21:48 Yeah, like customer acquisition. I think like lately ours, they haven't changed very much typically. We have customer acquisition, and we have product usually because there's, at least lately, we've been wanting to do things in those two areas.
Ben: 22:04 Few years ago we had problems around ops, right, when we were feeling the pain of our hosting company, and we wanted to move to Amazon, and that was like a multi-quarter project. But that was one of the things that we set as an action plan for a couple of conclaves. Right? Here are the steps because it was a bit of a process. So here are the steps we want to accomplish this quarter so that we can be set up to do X, Y, and Z next quarter. It's been really helpful to have those action plans in place for the things that take longer than a month or week, or that we know it's going to take awhile.
Josh: 22:37 Yeah, that kind of proves that it actually works too. Because I remember back then for even a year or more, operations was one of our focus areas. That was like the top one. It didn't go away, and now today I don't remember the last meeting that we had that was operations that was on the sheet.
Starr: 22:58 That's true. So we've defined our focus areas. They could be marketing, it could be retention, it could be operations, it could be, I don't know, hiring. There's lots of different things, sort of these big broad categories. And then we set up to, I don't know, three to five items per section. These are, these are not like little to do items. These are things that it would take a quarter of somebody working part time on them. What are some examples of those?
Starr: 23:27 So, like my last quarter, one of my things was set up this podcast and get it going. And believe you me, there's a lot of work involved in setting up a podcast. So that was a pretty good thing to have a quarter to do.
Josh: 23:41 And that was like one item. These are very broad things. It's not like... It's not small. It's not like a to do list.
Starr: 23:48 And then most importantly, like each of those items is assigned to a person who is the person responsible for it. There's no confusion about who's going to do what. I mean, we don't always get them done. We don't always finish what we started or what we set out to do because sometimes things pop up and prevent us from doing that.
Starr: 24:05 But man, I gotta tell you I love this system because before that, I was so stressed out because I didn't really know what you guys expected me to be doing on, working on versus what I just happened to be working on. I didn't really know like how what I was doing sort of maps to the overall strategy of the company. It was just very vague and stress inducing, but now it's like I'm not sure what I should be doing. Okay. Let me look at my list of three quarterly goals. Okay. I'm just going to work on one of those.
Josh: 24:31 One of the other things I liked from the Scale book that kind of helps us come up with those sub items within the action plan is the sweet spot analysis.
Starr: 24:41 Oh, what's that? I forgot all about that.
Josh: 24:43 We don't always do it exactly like they have in the book because they actually have printout templates and stuff that you can use. I think this is more just like a way of thinking now that we use versus like an actual system. But the sweet spot analysis, it had to do with low hanging fruit, and the... Basically, finding things to do in the business that are both low hanging so that it's not like a ton of work to accomplish them.
Josh: 25:13 You might be able to knock them out in a quarter or less, or even maybe a week or a day. So the combination of that, it's easy to get done but it also will have a high impact on the business or on whatever your immediate goal is. So you can kind of like make a big list of all these ideas of things you could do in a quarter, and then basically score it against... Is it low hanging fruit, and what is the impact on the business or on what we're trying to accomplish? It gives you a weighted list of things to do, and you kind of just start with the top.
Starr: 25:47 So the sweet spot analysis is a way to populate your list of tasks to do.
Starr: 25:53 Yeah. Per action items. So you find like... You make a big list of everything you could do. Then you figure out, okay, which is going to give you the most impact for the least amount of effort, and then you do those things first.
Ben: 26:03 Yeah, there are other ways that this represented... Some people use a quadrant kind of chart where it's four quadrants where they map effort versus impact, right? Basically, like you said Starr, that's the idea. What are the low effort things that get the most high impact. And you definitely don't want to spend time on the high effort things that have low impact. Right?
Starr: 26:22 I don't know. We've done a couple of those.
Ben: 26:23 We have.
Starr: 26:24 That could be a separate show. It could be our anti-planning show.
Josh: 26:30 A lot of those were probably before we started doing this, and maybe are the reason we started doing this.
Starr: 26:35 Oh, that's a good point.
Josh: 26:36 Yeah.
Ben: 26:40 I think one of the other benefits of the plan that we do is, you know, being customer driven sometimes means we are reactionary. Like a customer comes up with something, or something just happens, and we have to deal with that. And I know for me, it's easy to get distracted with the day to day things. You just need to be done. Sometimes I forget, I lose sight of the larger picture of the things I'm trying to accomplish. Right? Like Starr saying, going back to that quarterly plan, looking, "Oh, what are my goals for this quarter?," helps get me recentered, refocused back on the things I want to be doing rather than just the things that pop up in my face.
Starr: 27:10 So we did this, we implemented the system based on primarily the Scale book. Our quarterly meetings, or quarterly conclaves, we set out these plans. And that's all great, but I started to notice there was this one sort of problem and that we discuss a lot of things at these meetings that weren't necessarily part of the quarterly action plans. Right? You've got to make a lot of decisions in business, and some of those they involve a lot of money. They involve directions for the business to go in, and I started to notice it was very difficult for me to personally tell when something was, "Are we just brainstorming?" versus "Are we making a decision here?"
Starr: 27:52 So are we just talking about potential budgets for hiring somebody, for buying something, whatever, or are we actually making a decision to budget certain money?
Josh: 28:03 Yeah, because Ben and I love to brainstorm.
Starr: 28:05 Yeah, you guys do. You guys do. And my general mode of working typically has been if I say I think this might be an okay course of action, I've probably spent two weeks thinking about it and I've decided, yes, this is 100% the best course of action. There's a little bit of mismatch there and the impedance. I came up with this voting system.
Starr: 28:29 It's really simple. I mean, it's just like what'd you would imagine, right? Essentially, for big decisions, like budgets and things like that, we have-
Josh: 28:38 First, you put on your powdered wigs.
Starr: 28:43 Yes. We have to put on powdered wigs. First things first. We're not like barristers, we're not. Do you put on a powdered wig when you go to vote for president, Josh? I hope so.
Josh: 28:54 Yeah, every four years. Yeah.
Starr: 28:56 So if we want to change the budget, if we want to do anything sort of big, involves a lot of money, involves a change in business, involves hiring people, etc., we write up a proposal for it. And we have a place in Basecamp where we have all these. You post it in Basecamp, then there's some comments because usually even when everybody knows we're making a decision, people remember that decisions slightly differently. People sort of just completely honestly emphasize different parts of it. So a lot of times you end up thinking you're in agreement, but you're actually kind of have different ideas about what that means.
Starr: 29:33 Then later on, when somebody does something different, you're like, "Well, I thought we agreed on this and we're doing something different now." When in fact there was never really an agreement. So you write up a proposal, and then you hash it out in the comments, make sure everybody really understands what that all means. Then there's just a straight vote on it, right? Either it's unanimous or it's not. So that, as simple as it is, it's really made my life less stressful because now I know if there's a big decision being made, it's going to be in the voting booth. So I can just brainstorm with these guys or whatever, and I don't have to worry about am I committing myself to something.
Josh: 30:12 The thing that I've really appreciated about that particular system is the documentation aspect of it. You kind of talked about that a little bit just now, but it really helps to get things documented and down on paper because like you said, they do tend to... How we see them tends to drift over time. If we have something that we can go back to and refresh ourselves on, that's really helpful.
Starr: 30:34 That's true. It's very nice to be able to say, "Okay, what was our marketing budget again?" And you go and you can just look it up. It's right there.
Josh: 30:42 I still want to get you a gavel, Starr.
Starr: 30:44 Oh yeah. I mean I have a gavel emoji. Isn't that good enough?
Josh: 30:48 Well, you've got the emoji. I just want to get you like a physical gavel.
Ben: 30:53 Alright. Just one of the things I think is interesting about the voting booth is that it didn't feel natural to me, right? Like we've always kind of run the business pretty loosely. And I guess this comes down to the difference, like you're talking about, and how we think about things. Like Josh and I were pretty much off the cuff. I'm like, "Hey, let's go do that thing," and then we'd go off and we do that, right? And Starr you'd like to think about things a bit more, I guess, than we do.
Ben: 31:15 So the voting booth really felt to me like a whole lot of friction was added to the process. And so initially I was like, I just don't even want to deal with it. I mean, come on, we can just agree. Right? But the points that you made I think have proven out over time. Like I've seen the value there. So I think it's okay to introduce some things into the business that you might not love. Right? If it really does make it better for everyone that's involved.
Josh: 31:40 Yeah.
Starr: 31:40 I'm so glad. I'm so glad it seemed... it sort of proven itself to be useful to you. And I mean, we're talking about like four or five votes a year. We haven't done one in a while. The last one we did was to set a budget for hiring.
Ben: 31:56 And that was good because we had some, as you said, we had some differences of recollection of what we agreed to do. Like when we had our conclave, right? So documenting that, said no, this is exactly what we mean, and what we plan to do.
Josh: 32:09 We've talked for like half an hour about this. Did you guys want to go ahead and keep talking? We can maybe split it into a to be continued second episode?
Ben: 32:19 Yeah, I think we could split it into a second episode because the documentation thing, documenting the business, that's a pretty good segue into not just documenting stuff for day to day use, but also in light of what you might be thinking for selling your business. right, and getting plans down. And then also we could talk about documenting how you do your business everyday, like ops stuff, and the customer support stuff, and things like that.
Starr: 32:43 Yeah, totally.
Ben: 32:44 We could talk for quite a while on that stuff I think?
Starr: 32:46 Are you guys down to do that for another half an hour?
Josh: 32:48 Yeah.
Ben: 32:49 Yeah. Whatever.
Starr: 32:50 Okay, cool. Can I take a bathroom break?
Josh: 32:56 Yeah.
Josh: 32:57 No, Starr, you cannot. We have to keep going.
Ben: 33:02 Find a bottle.
Starr: 33:04 That's a hell of a cliff hanger. Hey, everybody, this is Starr, America's favorite Honeybadger. I can say that because Ben and Josh are off at RailsConf doing their conference marketing thing, and I'm stuck here at Honeybadger headquarters editing this show for you guys.
Starr: 33:17 Stay tuned next week for part two of this episode, and in the meantime, why don't y'all just head over to iTunes and give us one of those little five star reviews that everybody's been talking about. Just go over, you know, hit number five for us, and you know what? If you start a podcast, just email me and I'll do the same thing for you. So no collusion. Peace.
Announcer: 33:37 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation. 360 degree coverage of errors. Outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have web app, you need it. Available at https://www.honeybadger.io/. Want more from the founders? Go to https://www.founderquestpodcast.com/. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive, VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
Hey guys ladle out some secret sauce for successfully marketing and selling to software developers. Also discussed is their Facebook ad boycott, why you should never call a developer, Coke vs. Pepsi, and leveraging Princess Bride to weed out sales emails.
Links:
Art of Product Podcast website
Ben Orenstein on Twitter
CloudForcast website
Nathan Barry on Twitter
Brennan Dunn on Twitter
Railskits website
Ruby Weekly website
Peter Cooper on Twitter
Rob Walling on Twitter
Traction website (not an affiliate)
Transistor.FM website
Full Transcript:
Starr: 00:00 That was really good. I didn't know you could recite poetry.
Ben: 00:02 And having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear. Though as for that, the passing there had warned them really about the same.
Josh: 00:10 Yeah, I honestly, I read that poem right before each Crossfit session to kind of pump myself up.
Announcer: 00:18 You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Time to start a fire, crack open a can of Tab, and settle in for FounderQuest.
Ben: 00:31 So the Office Max near my house is closing, and so they had to have this closing sale, like everything's 90% off and stuff.
Starr: 00:40 Yeah?
Ben: 00:41 And we needed some printer paper so I'm like, there's probably nothing left there, but I'll go and just, you know ... So there's gotta be paper. I mean, who buys all the paper, right? There was no paper.
Starr: 00:50 Yeah?
Ben: 00:51 There were some pastels. Like if I wanted pink paper, then I would have been fine. There was plenty of that, but it was bare. Pickings were slim. It was amazing. And it's like post-apocalyptic zombie attack kind of scenario where you're like, "Wow. This place just looks-"
Starr: 01:07 And the zombies eat paper, in this scenario.
Ben: 01:10 Apparently.
Josh: 01:11 Yeah.
Starr: 01:11 Can I show you guys something? Talking about big box stores.
Ben: 01:14 Yes, please.
Starr: 01:14 So I ordered some socks on Amazon. Let me show you, they're very nice socks. They're stripey socks-
Josh: 01:22 Fancy.
Starr: 01:23 I had one pair and I liked them so much, I ordered a variety pack of stripey socks. I'm pretty happy with how they look and everything, but then I looked at the actual box they came in, and look what it has written on it.
Josh: 01:40 What?
Starr: 01:42 It says designed by PetSmart.
Ben: 01:44 Nice.
Starr: 01:45 And I don't know what to think now. Because-
Starr: 01:47 Really? Were they really designed by the PetSmart?
Josh: 01:49 Maybe PetSmart is just like the moniker of the designer.
Starr: 01:53 Maybe. Maybe this is someone in another country who doesn't realize that-
Josh: 01:58 No.
Starr: 01:58 PetSmart's already taken-
Josh: 01:58 It might be like an internet handle or something, @PetSmart. He's PetSmart on IRC, like on Freenode or something.
Ben: 02:07 Now, Starr, aren't you concerned that the horizontal stripes will make your ankles look fat?
Starr: 02:13 Well, you know, Ben, I have very skinny ankles, so, actually, it's the opposite.
Starr: 02:19 Oh, man. So how do you guys want to do this thing? Is this an actual reader question, or listener question?
Ben: 02:25 It is an actual-
Starr: 02:26 Wow.
Ben: 02:26 listener question.
Josh: 02:27 And I think we've got a couple of these lined up, too, so ...
Ben: 02:30 Well, you know, I should qualify that. I don't know that he was an actual listener, listener, because he just sent me an email. He was a listener to The Art of Product podcast-
Starr: 02:38 Oh, okay.
Josh: 02:39 Oh, that you were on a while-
Ben: 02:40 Yeah.
Josh: 02:40 Like two weeks ago. Yeah.
Ben: 02:41 Right, right, and so in my interview with Ben, he asked some questions, and so this individual emailed me, and said, "I hope you don't mind me contacting, but I have some questions about your startup."
Starr: 02:53 Yeah. It's some great questions.
Ben: 02:56 They are great questions.
Starr: 02:56 Yeah, so ... how do you want to handle these? Should we just like ... It's sort of a multi-part question, should we just read it part by part, and then we can jump in and give our thoughts or ...
Ben: 03:06 Oh, why don't you be the narrator.
Starr: 03:08 Okay.
Starr: 03:10 This question comes from Tony Chan, @cloudforecast.io. "From my point of view, of an early stage startup in the DevTool space, and the Bootstraps, there isn't much good in valuable information on customer acquisition. You know how difficult it is with limited runway when you first start. And that, on with marketing to developers, it makes it a little bit harder."
Starr: 03:32 What do you guys think about ... I mean, this is kind of like how we started out, right?
Josh: 03:35 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 03:35 We marketed to developers, we had very limited runway. I remember like ... I said this before, I totally thought Ben was a baller for paying like 70 dollars a month for our first server.
Ben: 03:45 Well, the thing I like about how Tony starts off his email to us, is that he's talking about marketing to developers specifically, right? So there's a lot of content out there about, you need to do this, you need to do that, when you're building your status as you're marketing, and so on. But, marketing to developers, that's a pretty specific group of people you're trying to target, and there are definitely things that you can do with developers that you can't do with other groups, and vice versa. Like, for example, developers do not like to have their phone ring with sales calls, right? They hate that, so that would not be something you would want to do.
Ben: 04:17 But, one thing that we found was really helpful in the early, early days when we were just starting, was already being a part of the community. We specifically targeted Ruby developers, Ruby on Rails developers, because we are Ruby developers, and so we knew that group of people, we'd been in that group of people for a while. We started Honeybadger in 2012, and I'd been Rails since 2005. So, we already knew the community, we were already a part of it, so people knew who we were and trusted us, and we already had reputation. That was very helpful.
Josh: 04:47 Yeah, as a developer, I know how to ... I know a little bit more about customer acquisition for developers, maybe. But honestly, I've never sold a product to a non-developers, or into a totally different market that I have no idea, you know, like I don't know anything about. So, yeah, I don't know. I think if I was going to start ... you know, if I was going to pick a brand new market that I didn't really know, I would kind of try to just go into that market and try to become as much of one of them as I could. And kind of just spend a lot of time doing research, and reading the books they're reading, maybe going to the conferences that they go to, and just kind of try to see what they're about first, before deciding which direction I'm going to go.
Starr: 05:28 You guys mentioned that a lot of techniques don't work for developers, and I sort of get this impression that a lot of the marketing techniques that people talk about and stuff, are meant for people other than developers. Like, man, I was going to start a custom cabinetry shop, I could out-market the hell out of all the other cabinetry shops in Seattle. I'm positive about that.
Josh: 05:51 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 05:51 But yeah, with developers, it's a little bit tricky isn't it?
Ben: 05:54 Yeah, like one tactic that's popular these days is this whole email sequence where, "Hey, I just want to get on your radar." And then you get like five more emails from the person, and they're like, "You know, you must be trapped under bus because you haven't responded to me."
Starr: 06:07 I know.
Josh: 06:08 Do people actually respond to those?
Ben: 06:10 They must, because they keep on doing it. But like, developers don't-
Josh: 06:13 Yeah.
Ben: 06:13 Respond to that, unless ... not in a positive way.
Josh: 06:15 I don't even answer my phone for most people.
Starr: 06:17 Yeah, I hate those, because it's this cold email sequence. People pull your name off of some sort of domain registry ... Pro tip, don't put your real name and phone number and whatever on your domain. I don't know if it's illegal to do that anymore, but you shouldn't do it, because you'll get all sorts of spam calls.
Josh: 06:35 Yeah, well, I think the-
Starr: 06:36 Yeah.
Josh: 06:36 Whois registries aren't allowed to show that anymore, anyway, like it's a big ... yeah, it's a big thing. Yeah, I'm pretty sure-
Ben: 06:43 Oh, yeah?
Josh: 06:43 There was like a law ... like a privacy regulation or something that passed, at least.
Starr: 06:47 Yeah.
Starr: 06:48 So ... Oh, here's a couple other things you shouldn't do. Register a podcast with your actual email address, because, man, you get some podcast spam. People really want to get into that podcast of yours and sell you stuff for it.
Ben: 07:02 Here's another thing not to do. Don't be scraping websites for email addresses and then email them-
Josh: 07:06 Yeah.
Ben: 07:06 Your cold emails. That happens all the time, still, and so on Honeybadger and our documentation, I always use character names from The Princess Bride. So it's really clear when we get an email to Inigo at Honeybadger.io, how someone acquired that email address.
Josh: 07:22 Yeah. We've had a few of those.
Starr: 07:22 You do that?
Ben: 07:22 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Starr: 07:24 Oh my god, so we get emails to Inigo Montoya.
Ben: 07:28 Yes. Yes, we do.
Starr: 07:29 That's amazing.
Josh: 07:30 I saw ... I haven't like ... The other day, I saw the first really brilliant email scraping kind of, I guess, scheme, you'd call it. So you guys remember RequestBin, that it was, you know-
Ben: 07:44 Yeah.
Josh: 07:45 It was a service that let you record inbound requests, and it would record them and then show them to you.
Starr: 07:50 Yeah, like API requests.
Josh: 07:51 Yeah, exactly, yeah. So you could use it for testing ... yeah, testing webhooks or any kind of HTTP request. Well, the company that had originally had that website, had discontinued it because I think of stealing ... like, it was getting too much traffic and it was becoming too much overhead for them to manage. But the software's opensource, and there are links to RequestBin all over the web that are now dead. So, I got an email from a guy who had set up his own RequestBin, and he was scraping websites for dead links to the old RequestBin, and asking the owners to change the links to his new RequestBin, basically.
Starr: 08:34 Oh, and another thing, I'm sure you can't do this anymore. I haven't checked, I'm sure you can't do it, though, because it's too big of a hole. But, you used to be able to get pretty much anybody's email address from GitHub-
Josh: 08:44 Yeah.
Starr: 08:44 From their commits. Like you could go in and do some API thing and it would just pop you up their email address. I think people were using that for ... like recruiters were using that.
Josh: 08:54 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Josh: 08:55 I think mine's public on Github-
Josh: 08:57 Like, I occasionally get recruiter emails, but it's not like a flood.
Starr: 09:00 So I'm noticing something where like ... so people are like, "How do you approach marketing for developers?" And we're like, we just immediately hone in on these growth hacking, like scraping ... We don't really do that.
Josh: 09:12 We haven't done any of that, for the record.
Ben: 09:14 Yeah.
Starr: 09:15 No.
Josh: 09:15 Yeah.
Ben: 09:16 Yeah, I think the key is ... And we were just talking about all the stuff not to do, but I think the key is, if you're a developer and you want to know how to market developers, just look at yourself. Look at the things that you like and things you don't like, and behave accordingly. Developers like to have quality stuff out there, right? So, if I'm producing opensource software, then that builds up some sort of reputation, right? If I'm out there participating in Reddit, or whatever, and I'm commenting and helping people out, that builds up reputation. And then, when I have something that I want to offer to developers, now I'm a known quantity in the community, and people are more willing to listen to what I have to say.
Josh: 09:54 Yeah.
Starr: 09:55 Yeah, I think that ... The main thing about developers is that we are all very suspicious, un-trusting people.
Ben: 10:05 No.
Josh: 10:06 Well, I am.
Starr: 10:07 Well, I guess ... It's-
Ben: 10:07 Yeah, I can get you. That's fair.
Starr: 10:07 Kind of true, right?
Josh: 10:07 Yeah.
Starr: 10:08 It's kind of true.
Ben: 10:09 We're skeptical, yeah.
Starr: 10:11 Yeah, people are skeptical.
Josh: 10:13 Earlier, when I said I don't even answer my phone, I meant, to qualify, I meant for family members.
Ben: 10:18 Oh.
Starr: 10:19 So personally, I think that ... like, the thing I've seen work best for developers, for marketing, has been to just like ... you focus on creating value for people, not worrying about getting paid for it right away. You see this in these products that are say, OpenCore, or like, GitLab. You can go and install GitLab, you get a lot of value from it. And then, eventually, they can capture some of that value monetarily when people need to upgrade, or maybe they want a hosted version of the same thing. It's similar thing with blog posts, tutorials, stuff like that, which is one of the things we've done a lot.
Josh: 10:54 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 10:55 Which is you basically create this value upfront, you give it out, and that's kind of the-
Josh: 10:59 Yeah.
Starr: 10:59 Ethos of opensource and the community we have ... the developers-
Josh: 11:03 I'm not so sure that this is limited just to developers, though, even, and I think like ... I don't know. I feel like more people in the non-developer world are also coming around to this like ... Marketing has gotten a lot shadier over the years, and it feels to me a little bit like if you're not providing some sort of real, good, upfront value to people ... Marketing, to me, like modern marketing, is all about providing that value, basically, for free. And actually giving your audience something, so ... I don't know. I know it works-
Starr: 11:35 Yeah.
Josh: 11:35 It works, but I wonder how long it's going to work.
Starr: 11:38 What, giving people value?
Josh: 11:39 No, no, doing it the other way. Using the shady marketing tactics that people ...
Starr: 11:44 So what's an example of a non-developer-y, giving value upfront thing? Are we talking about whitepapers? Are we talking about ...
Ben: 11:51 I think if you look at people who are doing e-books, there's a lot of value ... If you look at what like Nathan Barry does with ConvertKit, like he teaches about what he's learning, and he offers a lot of value to people who aren't customers. I think Brennan Dunn, done the same thing around his info products.
Josh: 12:09 It doesn't necessarily have to be a physical thing, either. It could be like membership ... from a branding perspective even, it could be like membership in a community or a member ... you know, like, a feeling that people get when they interact with your brand or something. It doesn't have to be like a book that you spent months writing or something that you just have to give away for free, I feel like.
Starr: 12:29 Yeah, so the ... It's like those Coca-Cola ads they play before the movies, you know, because they get a bunch of people, they're all happy looking, they're together singing, and it just makes you happy-
Josh: 12:42 Yeah.
Starr: 12:42 You know? And that's the value they're providing-
Josh: 12:45 Except it's Coke, but, yeah. I mean, Pepsi is better.
Starr: 12:47 Oh, dang, boy. We're going to have to fight about this.
Ben: 12:53 So, amusing aside, so of course my kids grew up in the northwest, right? Because that's where we've lived for the past 20 years. But I grew up in the south, the deep south. And, you know, so it's something-
Josh: 13:02 That's Coke territory.
Ben: 13:04 Exactly. I mean-
Josh: 13:05 Yeah.
Ben: 13:06 You don't ask for a soda, in the south. You ask for a Coke. And, so my kids are like-
Starr: 13:10 What kind of Coke do you want, Ben?
Ben: 13:11 Exactly. I'm going to ask you what kind of Coke do you want-
Starr: 13:14 Yeah.
Ben: 13:14 Or you have to specify, like, "I want a Coke, and give me a Sprite," right? And so my son's asking me, we're talking about this, the other night, at dinner, and my son asked, "Well, what if you want a Pepsi?" And I'm like, "No, you don't want a Pepsi."
Josh: 13:28 You're raising him up right.
Ben: 13:31 But, I'm like, "Do you know where Coke is headquartered? Like in the south, you don't get Pepsi."
Starr: 13:37 Can I have a Pepsi, pa?
Josh: 13:38 What's the matter with you, boy? Like, an example I ... Here's an example of like ... I guess of providing value ... because like in both cases, you're going to be giving something away for free. So like, we talked about this last week in the marketing episode, where we talked about like, sponsoring conferences. And there's the traditional way you can do it, which is like, you can get a booth, and you could give away pens or something, or whatever ... shirts or ... mugs, and talk to people. That's nice, traditional marketing. People are coming up and talking to you, and they're probably having a good interaction. But, you could also do what we do, which is like, go get a bus and take everyone somewhere cool, and just hang out with them. And there's no real like-
Starr: 14:26 Yeah.
Josh: 14:27 There's no real hard agenda to it, but it's giving them an experience where they're hanging out with their friends, they're making new friends, and they associate that all back with Honeybadger. And it kind of helps build our community, so, that's kind of how I look at it.
Starr: 14:41 I mean, you don't even have to have a bus-
Josh: 14:43 Yeah, it could be anything.
Starr: 14:43 You could just make reservations. People could pay for their own dinner.
Ben: 14:46 The value that you provide people doesn't have to be costly-
Josh: 14:49 Right.
Ben: 14:49 Right, and it definitely doesn't have to be about you-
Josh: 14:51 No.
Ben: 14:51 Right?
Josh: 14:52 Yeah.
Ben: 14:52 So, the value you provide can be just a space where people get together and meet each other, and have a good time-
Josh: 14:56 You could just take them on a scavenger hunt throughout the city, or something, where you're like-
Starr: 15:00 This is sounding shady, Josh.
Ben: 15:02 Or, you know, if you're a developer and you're building a developer-focused tool, then obviously, you are learning things as you build your tool, right? So, share those things that you you learn, and that's great value that you're providing for basically free, right? You've already got the experience, might as well just write about it.
Starr: 15:18 Should we move on to our next segment of the question?
Ben: 15:21 Yes.
Starr: 15:22 All right. I'm still going to be the narrator.
Ben: 15:25 Okay.
Starr: 15:26 "It will be super helpful to break it down with how you guys acquired your first 10 customers, first 50 customers, first 100 customers, et cetera, and this makes it more tangible and practical." This is-
Starr: 15:39 We're getting serious, now.
Ben: 15:41 Yeah, this is the real deal.
Starr: 15:42 Yeah.
Ben: 15:43 Well, customer zero is us, right? So, I think that's important to remember. It's a lot easier to get customers one through 10 if you can satisfy a need for yourself. If you happen to be part of a group that's interesting, as marketing purposes go. But I think our first 10 customers were all friends. People that we knew. People that we'd met at Microsoft, or people that we had met through our freelancing work, people who were in the community. And we didn't just give it away, though. We asked them to pay us a dollar a month so that we could test out our billing system, right? And so they had some skin in the game. But the first 10 customers, even though they're paying us very, very little, still gave us great feedback and helped us at a time when, frankly, there wasn't much product there, right? They were giving us the benefit of the doubt.
Starr: 16:30 Okay, so that's the first 10. Then what about the first 50? I'm not sure we're going to be able to give super accurate descriptions, because it all kind of blurs together, right?
Josh: 16:40 Yeah.
Starr: 16:41 I would say like, the first 10 are one thing, and then sort of the first 50 and 100 are sort of the same group of people, right? So didn't you ... After we did the friends and family sort of group of people, didn't you do a mailing or something? Like, didn't you have a list? Like you were doing RailsKits, at the time-
Ben: 17:00 Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, I was doing a RailsKits, and, so I had an audience of people that I was talking to on a somewhat regular basis, and so I emailed them, and I said, "Hey, you've liked my RailsKits thing. Check out this other thing that I'm doing, and you might like it." And it helped that it was an overlapping audience.
Starr: 17:18 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 17:18 And that it was relevant to those same customers.
Starr: 17:21 Yeah, RailsKits was a ... You don't do it anymore, right?
Ben: 17:25 Right, I sold that business a few years ago.
Starr: 17:27 Okay, so it was a, correct me if I'm wrong, it was a ... basically, you sold these sort of pre-made Rails apps for like Help Desk ... what were some of the other ones? Like a payment processor-
Ben: 17:39 Yeah.
Josh: 17:39 Software as a service kit.
Ben: 17:41 Yep. A SaaS kit.
Starr: 17:43 Yeah, so, people had something to start with when they built their own application. And that was, you know, we obviously targeted Rails people when we started out, and so did RailsKits. So how many people were on that list? Do you remember? Like ...
Ben: 17:56 It's a couple hundred, I think.
Starr: 17:57 Okay.
Ben: 17:57 It wasn't huge. Yeah. I think another thing that we did early on, like those first 10 customers, those friends and family customers, they also told their friends-
Josh: 18:07 Yeah.
Ben: 18:07 Right? When they saw that this was actually a good thing. And, of course, they were rooting for us, because they're our friends, they went and tweeted to their people, and that helped spread it-
Starr: 18:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 18:17 Right?
Starr: 18:17 Basically, as far as I remember, our first 50, our first 100 customers, just came from word of mouth. It seemed like we kind of launched this thing, right? We got the friends and families in, we got our initial sort of customers from your mailing, maybe ... it wasn't that many. But then, after that, it kind of just sort of fanned out and grew on its own. We weren't doing any sort of paid acquisition. We weren't doing any sort of direct sales. It just kind of started.
Josh: 18:46 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 18:47 Yeah, we spent zero dollars on marketing for a very long time. Yeah.
Josh: 18:50 When did we-
Ben: 18:50 And we also-
Josh: 18:51 When did we do Ruby Weekly?
Ben: 18:52 It might've been in the first year-
Josh: 18:54 Uh-huh (affirmative)?
Ben: 18:54 Or two. Yeah. But it wasn't-
Josh: 18:56 Yeah.
Ben: 18:56 That's not the first six months, that's for sure.
Starr: 18:58 Yeah, so Ruby Weekly is a ... it's one of Peter Cooper's weekly sort of newsletters. He does a lot of them for a lot of different languages, but Ruby Weekly was a first one, and it just is a list of links, things that are going on this week in the Ruby community. At least back then, it was like the central place to figure out what was going on in Ruby and Rails, and it still plays a very central role, I think. Right?
Ben: 19:25 Yeah, I still read it every week. Another thing that we did, is we designed the app, the user system in a way that it was easy to spread via word of mouth, right? I wouldn't say it was necessarily designed with the viral loop, because that's not accurate. But, we recognized, early on, that a big segment of our customers would be freelancers who are moving a lot of from client to client, right? And, also, small agencies where it's a small group of developers, and we found that a developer, once he falls in love with a tool, he wants to bring it to his next shop, right?
Josh: 20:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 20:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 20:01 Or the client that developer had, when that client gets another developer, then that developer gets introduced to the product that the first developer had already set up, right? So it spread a lot that way, as well.
Starr: 20:12 Yeah, that's a really good point. Like, we don't have a viral product, but it's definitely something that people take with them, they learn about it when they come to a new job-
Josh: 20:21 Yeah.
Starr: 20:21 And stuff like that.
Josh: 20:21 A collaborative product can kind of be viral in and of itself, right?
Ben: 20:26 Yeah.
Starr: 20:26 Exactly.
Josh: 20:26 Yeah.
Starr: 20:27 Exactly.
Josh: 20:28 I was looking at our emails, our old emails, by the way, and I've got emails from Starr about Ruby Weekly as early as mid-2013, so, there you go. Yeah.
Ben: 20:39 That sounds about right.
Josh: 20:39 Yeah.
Ben: 20:40 Yeah. So about a year in, right?
Starr: 20:41 Aw, man, you've got all my old emails?
Josh: 20:44 I know, I haven't gone-
Josh: 20:45 Through the old-
Starr: 20:46 This is-
Josh: 20:46 Emails yet from the early days, and I was just thinking about that, the other day, like, that'll be a blast from the past.
Starr: 20:51 Dang. I'm ... I always feel like I can never run for political office, now.
Josh: 20:56 I know. You've said some pretty inflammatory things over the years, Starr. To me via email, especially.
Josh: 21:07 He hasn't. I'm joking.
Starr: 21:10 I've got a little bit of a different take on this question, and my take is that, we've been discussing what happened for us, and this may or may not be useful for you starting your small business. I think the most important thing, when you're starting a small business or launching a product, et cetera, is that, from the very beginning, you need to know who your market is, you need to know how you can approach that market and how to talk to them. So, basically, if you don't know how to get in touch with 10 or 20 potential customers, starting out, you need to like just, you know, record scratch, stop the presses, stop building, and figure that out.
Starr: 21:46 Because that's a problem that you're going to have to deal with ... the minute you have your product done, you have to deal with this problem. And it would really suck to build a product, I know a lot of people do this, build a product and find out that, hey, there's really no way for me to get in touch with my target market, because either it doesn't exist, or the normal channels involve these lengthy enterprise sales processes that we can't afford-
Josh: 22:12 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 22:12 So, yeah. So I think like, as a business founder and as a person on an early product team, yeah, that's your job. You've got to figure out a product that you can give to a market. Like, the market is the thing that you have to figure out first.
Ben: 22:30 Yeah, and I've seen people who, like on Reddit, and they're like, "How do you find out what your customers want?" It's like, talk to them. Right? And they're like, "Well, how do I find 10 people to talk to?" And it's like, whoa, whoa, right? If you don't have 10 people you can talk to, then you need to fix that problem first.
Starr: 22:45 Yeah, because if you are that out of touch with your target market, then chances are, you're going to build something that isn't quite aligned with what they want, and ... What was this book that talked all about this? Like the whole, you've got to have your first customers, and you should have them write you checks and stuff. Is that Lean Startup?
Josh: 23:03 Might've been. I think it's been in a lot of books. And I know like, Rob Walling has talked a lot about that sort of thing, like validating your market and stuff upfront.
Starr: 23:13 I'm not sure like, any of those books is entirely right, but this idea that, yeah, you've got to know your freaking market ahead of time. And you've got to know how you can talk to them-
Josh: 23:21 Yeah.
Starr: 23:21 That's a very important-
Josh: 23:22 I don't think any business or marketing book is entirely right because it's different for everyone, and so I think everyone is like ... it's just like, what worked for them, and it all is just a way to gain experience and kind of figuring out what's going to work for you.
Ben: 23:36 I think if you're in a boat where you have this idea, and you have a market in mind, and you have people that you have an idea you could talk to, but you don't know them yet, I think it's fine to reach out to people via email and say, "Hey. I appreciate your work in X, Y, or Z." You should know something about them, right? And say, "I'm thinking about doing this thing. Would that be something that you would find interesting?" Right? And, people respond well to that. I mean, if you sent me that email, I would give you a couple minutes to think about it, and I would respond to that email. Start building those relationships, I guess, is the point that I'm trying to make.
Josh: 24:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 24:17 It's okay to reach out and say, "I'm just thinking about this thing," or "I'd like some ... your suggestion on this thing." Make it a low effort kind of response, but find those five or 10 people who will respond, and then, work from there.
Starr: 24:31 Yeah, that's a good point. Like, what else can people do to really get in touch with their markets? We kind of just fell into it, right?
Josh: 24:37 yeah.
Starr: 24:37 Because we were building something for ourselves, and there was already lots of conferences we can go to, and stuff like that. But how else can people really get in touch with those people?
Josh: 24:46 You can ... I mean, if they have events, you can go to the events, like you just said. But, if it's a specific ... if it's a niche that people are kind of like, either writing about, or talking about a lot, go to the places or read the things where they're actually, you know, where they're developing whatever the industry or, you know, whatever it is that you're going into. I find like, if I don't know anything about a certain topic or a certain market, I like to figure out how to get into their head space. Like, learn to think like they think. What are they thinking about? What are they talking about? I mean, usually, you can find at least a few places where that's happening.
Ben: 25:37 I think that's right. I mean, as we went into other languages and frameworks. Like, when you wanted to get into Laravel.
Josh: 25:46 Yeah, I did that for Laravel, yeah.
Ben: 25:49 Yeah, exactly. And you went to the conferences. You read up on the community. Find out-
Josh: 25:54 Yeah.
Ben: 25:55 What they need, and try to serve that need, verses like, "Hey, I know everything-"
Josh: 25:58 Yeah.
Ben: 25:58 "I'm just going to come in and do the same thing I did before."
Josh: 26:00 I mean, I made friends in the Laravel community, now, that I talk to even just ... yeah. We're Twitter friends and stuff, now. And it's not just about Laravel, it's become about everything, you know, Honeybadger business, and just knowing them, so ... Yeah, I understand how they think better, now that I know who they are and I've been in their world.
Ben: 26:22 Yeah, it really bugs me when people have this notion that business is not an interaction between people. Like it's just some, I don't know, anonymous interaction of money and goods and stuff like that. It's really about the people.
Josh: 26:32 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 26:33 Right? You make good connections with people, and they respond to that. Like you make a friend in the Laravel community, and you're not being deceitful and like, "Oh, I'm just doing some market research." Like, you're actually interested in these people-
Josh: 26:44 Yeah.
Ben: 26:45 You're interested in learning about their scene, right? And getting to know them, and that's how you build those connections, and that's how you find customers.
Josh: 26:53 Well, and like ... Yeah, it's a lot of them are there for the same reason, too, so it's, yeah, you're meeting other people who are-
Ben: 26:59 Yeah.
Josh: 27:00 You know, potentially, even interested in where you're coming from, just as much as you're interested in where they're coming from. And so ...
Starr: 27:08 I can see how this might seem a little bit overwhelming to a lot of people, you know, especially if you're a typical engineer, you focus on building things. You're not really focused that much on networking-
Josh: 27:19 Yeah.
Starr: 27:19 And sales, and all that stuff. It's not even really my cup of tea, personally. But, frankly, if you can't go and make friends with somebody at a conference before you have a product that you're trying to sell them, it's going to be even harder later when you're trying to sell them something, because then like ... In the first case, you're just interested in them. You're just trying to make a connection. In the second case, you're trying to get them to do something, which is always harder.
Ben: 27:44 Yeah, I think if you have no interest in developing those kind of skills or talents, or no interest in people, then, starting a business is not for you-
Josh: 27:53 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 27:53 Right? Go work at the bank. Go work, you know, some big company. It doesn't matter. Because there are a lot of places you could work where it doesn't matter, right? You just-
Josh: 28:00 Yeah.
Ben: 28:01 Do your work. You type in the keyboard all day long. But yeah, if you're going to be going out there and trying to hustle, yeah, you have to be able to talk to people and be interested in people and be interesting-
Josh: 28:13 Yeah.
Ben: 28:13 As well.
Josh: 28:14 I mean, yeah, those kind of skills are probably going to help you anywhere you go. I mean, there are the basement jobs, but ...
Starr: 28:22 Well, there are ... I mean, there's some places where you can make money, like online and stuff, without having a huge like-
Josh: 28:29 Oh, yeah.
Starr: 28:29 High-touch type thing.
Ben: 28:31 Like drop shipping.
Starr: 28:33 Yeah, drop shipping. I don't know, man. Maybe you can make WordPress plug-ins or something, and sell them on a WordPress plug-in site. Or maybe you make apps and sell them on some sort of app store. There's lots of things that aren't really high-touch job ... Or, actually, we're not even talking about high-touch. We're talking about just, that don't involve networking and stuff like that. But, I think, if you want to sort of like, reach the next level, then you're going to have to ... you've got to sort of step out of the office and sort of go and meet people and understand their needs and stuff like that.
Josh: 29:03 Yeah, for me, it still just, it all comes back to understanding the audience, and I just personally don't know how you really do that without going and meeting them or ... yeah, spending a large amount of time, at least, in their world, wherever that is.
Ben: 29:19 Yeah. Well, and if you're doing a startup, if you're doing a small, self-funded, or, you know, very small funding kind of startup, that's your advantage, right? Being able to get out there and connect with people. And that was a lot of what brought us the success at conferences in the early days, like we talked about in our previous episode. Just spending time connecting with people and letting them know that Honeybadger wasn't some amorphous blob of a company, it was three guys who were building a thing, right? And that resonated with people. They were interested in that. And they rooted for our success, because they connected with it.
Josh: 29:53 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 29:53 And that's the advantage you have when you are the bootstrapped, scrappy startup that ... like, IBM doesn't have.
Starr: 30:00 Okay, so we've got one more part to this question. This one's a doozy. "Are there any channels that you felt reson-" I had to start reading this because I felt you going in that direction, Ben, so I felt like I just really needed to-
Ben: 30:12 Oh.
Starr: 30:12 Read this.
Ben: 30:12 All right.
Starr: 30:13 So we didn't answer the question, and then just be like, "And, there was another part." So, "Are there any channels that you felt resonated well with the engineering audience? Maybe channels that did not work so well. Channels that are worth trying, what are your customers coming from now? What channels would you spend the majority of time on with each growth phase?" So, yeah, just keep on saying what you were saying, Ben. Conferences and ... Just, start right up. Press play.
Josh: 30:38 Well, we didn't start with conferences. I don't think, because we couldn't-
Ben: 30:44 No.
Josh: 30:44 Afford them, really. No.
Ben: 30:46 So yeah, we started word of mouth, exclusively-
Josh: 30:49 Yeah.
Ben: 30:50 Right, friends and family. Twitter, we did promoted tweets, right? That worked out pretty well.
Josh: 30:53 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 30:54 Lot's of blog posts.
Ben: 30:55 Lots of blog posts. Starr was cranking them out all the time. And I guess, after we got to the point where we were making enough money to travel to conferences on Honeybadger's dime, then we started going to conferences.
Josh: 31:06 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 31:07 Right. But, I think, over ... like, so the last ... I'm looking at that question, and like growth phase is really sticking out to me. What channels should we spend the majority of our time with each growth phase? And-
Starr: 31:19 I know, and that's the part that just makes this question a thousand times more complicated, right?
Ben: 31:22 Yeah.
Josh: 31:23 Yeah.
Ben: 31:23 Because word of mouth always works, right? Or at least it has for us, the whole time. People telling people about us, has always been a great growth ... So I don't think we've ever outgrown that growth phase.
Josh: 31:35 This-
Starr: 31:35 But you know, maybe that ... maybe the thing is we haven't accessed the growth phase beyond that, right?
Josh: 31:38 Well, this reminds me of the book ... you guys remember the book, Traction, that we read a while back?
Starr: 31:44 Yeah.
Ben: 31:45 Yeah.
Josh: 31:45 I can't remember the author, but it's a popular marketing book. I think the idea in that book was that there's these channels that work ... they work for a certain period of time, and then they might not work. Some might not work. Some might work longterm. But the advice of the book was to pick one of ... you know, find the channel that's working now, and then work that channel until it stops working. So, it didn't really put them into specific phases of growth, necessarily. It's like, the channels kind of drive the phases of growth, and if you outgrow one, it might not be the same time for everyone. So ... you kind of just use ... If it stops working, it's maybe time to move on and start trying all the other channels until you find one that is actually getting you growth again. And it's kind of just this never ending process of trying something until it works, and then working that until it doesn't, and then, doing it over again.
Ben: 32:44 I may not be remembering this correctly, but I thought that in that Traction book, which is fantastic, it talked about also the notion of trying channels that you enjoy. If you don't like the idea of billboard advertising, don't try that channel, right? It's okay to not try all the channels-
Josh: 33:03 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 33:03 That you have available to you. I would totally recommend, someone who is just starting out, and has no idea, grab that Traction book, because it breaks it down, the things, like nineteen categories-
Josh: 33:13 Yeah, it was a lot.
Ben: 33:14 And, yeah, you can definitely pick and choose from the list, and just say, "Hey, I think I would like-"
Josh: 33:17 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 33:17 "To try that," or, "I think I can do that." And at first it's, "I can't do this other thing because it takes a lot of money." And then go from-
Josh: 33:23 Yeah, I think for us, it really has been content marketing, longterm, and obviously word of mouth. But content marketing is something I think that we're still growing and that we ... I don't see the end in sight for that, so ... Yeah, I guess that's good news for us. We've got room to grow there.
Starr: 33:42 Yeah, so I'm going to say for that other part of the question, what hasn't worked, I'm going to say that, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'm going to say like, except for Ruby Weekly, I'm going to say advertising hasn't really done a ton for us. Do you think that's true?
Ben: 33:58 Yeah, we've tried some direct advertising-
Josh: 34:00 Yeah.
Ben: 34:01 And that just hasn't really shown much in the way of results.
Josh: 34:03 I'm not sure we're very good at it, just to clarify.
Starr: 34:09 Yeah.
Josh: 34:09 It's definitely not-
Starr: 34:10 That's a good point.
Josh: 34:10 Our ... I think we might ... I see us trying a little bit more, now that we have Ben Findley on our side, who, you know, our marketing director, who is more ... that's more his, I think, skill set, so, we might circle back on that and see if we can make it work again, but, yeah. I never ... I don't think we actually tried it to the extent where we could say that it really didn't work.
Starr: 34:34 But even though it may be difficult to ever know if it would work, just because exception monitoring isn't something that people impulse buy-
Josh: 34:43 Yeah.
Starr: 34:43 When they're browsing Facebook, right? They see it, then maybe six months later, when they need it, they think of the people that they've seen before and maybe you're in that list, now. But that was pretty much-
Josh: 34:55 Yeah.
Starr: 34:55 Impossible to track, so, I don't know.
Ben: 34:59 You brought up an interesting point, in like we have avoided Facebook ads-
Josh: 35:03 Yeah.
Ben: 35:03 Right? Because people just, like you say, they're not looking to impulse buy an exception tracking system when they're browsing their Facebook feed, right? It's not a good fit for what we're doing-
Josh: 35:15 Yeah, but, I mean, like that doesn't work for anyone, really. Well, I guess it does work for some direct, maybe products, or you know, impulse buy type things. But, a lot of the people that I've heard talk about those types of ads, like social ads, basically, is that you need to have more complex funnels, where you're advertising some sort of content, or like I said, like info product or some sort of content thing, even just a free blog post. But then, you click through the blog post, and then, there's some sort of additional call to action or something that moves them along in the direction that you want them to go. Just because like, people reading Facebook just aren't interest ... they're not looking to buy something right now. They're looking to consume content. So, give them what they want, and then ...
Josh: 36:00 Yeah, but I think we've just been too lazy to set up those kind of complex funnels and ... It feels to me that our content, most of our efforts have, I guess in advertising and the things that we've done have also been still centered around word of mouth, because it's not necessarily like we have this grand flowchart of things people have to do to buy ... We haven't been very scientific with it. But it's been very much about showing up and trying to interact with people and get some sort of reaction or make some sort of impression, and get them to like us. And then, hopefully, I think we just hope that they like us enough to try us, or to tell someone else about us, and-
Starr: 36:48 So, I have to take issue with this idea that people don't buy anything from social media-
Josh: 36:53 Yeah, well, I-
Josh: 36:54 Didn't say they don't.
Starr: 36:55 They have it-
Josh: 36:56 To clarify. I said they don't buy SaaS. I said they don't buy developer ... software as a service developer tools-
Starr: 37:04 Oh, okay.
Josh: 37:04 They ... yeah.
Ben: 37:04 What did you buy from Facebook, Starr?
Josh: 37:06 There it is.
Starr: 37:10 I didn't buy anything from Facebook, but, at a conference, maybe four years ago, five years ago, I talked to a guy who worked for Teespring. I think it's Teespring. They do ... They have like an API where you can design T-shirts, one off, have them mailed out. And this guy was telling me how people were making millions of dollars by doing Facebook ads where they're advertising a custom T-shirt, with, I'm sure you've seen these ads, where it's like, "Nobody loves wine like ..."
Josh: 37:45 Yeah.
Starr: 37:46 "Joanna." Because it matches their name.
Josh: 37:48 So it's like long tail ... highly targeted long tail type stuff. Yeah.
Starr: 37:53 Exactly. So like, "Nobody is as beautiful as-"
Josh: 38:00 Yeah.
Starr: 38:00 "thirty-seven year olds." That sort of thing.
Josh: 38:02 Right. Yeah, or like their college or something ... You could target campuses or something, people, alumni of colleges and stuff. Yeah.
Josh: 38:10 So, but yeah.
Starr: 38:11 I'm sure that's not working.
Josh: 38:13 Those are like ... I mean, that's like impulse buy ... I think that stuff, yeah. That stuff is probably the better ... that's the sweet spot for social advertising. Yeah.
Ben: 38:22 Yeah. Like, about 15-
Josh: 38:23 Like yeah, 15-
Ben: 38:24 Dollar one time purchase-
Josh: 38:25 Yeah. It's like-
Ben: 38:26 Different story than an ongoing, recurring revenue kind of-
Starr: 38:28 See, now I think that is a sort of thing that people imagine is this ultimate sort of, you never have to talk to a person, type of online business. And I have to say that, that's always ... that sort of thing has always kind of fascinated me and appealed to me, but then also, at the same time, I'm like, "Oh, this is really yucky. I don't really want to do this."
Josh: 38:48 Yeah.
Starr: 38:50 It's like, this is my mark I want to make on the world?
Josh: 38:51 Well, we hate Facebook. Just to throw that out there. I don't have a Facebook account, and I haven't since 2014.
Starr: 38:59 I don't think any of us have Facebook accounts-
Josh: 39:01 Yeah.
Ben: 39:01 No. Anymore.
Josh: 39:02 And we're ... yeah. I think we're semi ethically opposed to using Facebook for advertising, so, at least I am, so ... Yeah, that's another reason we haven't done Facebook.
Ben: 39:14 I'm just going to double down on my belief about you do the marketing channel that you like-
Josh: 39:19 Yeah.
Ben: 39:19 Right? Just do the things that you enjoy. If you don't like talking to people, find another way, and maybe hire someone to talk to them, I don't know. But ... like, we don't like Facebook so we're not going to advertise there, period-
Josh: 39:30 Yeah.
Ben: 39:30 The end.
Starr: 39:33 That was very definite.
Ben: 39:35 Yes. Putting the lawn down.
Starr: 39:38 Never say never, Ben.
Josh: 39:39 But I think you have bought or sold something to Facebook, Starr. You've sold your attention and your data. There's always an exchange with using Facebook.
Starr: 39:50 Oh, man. What a mercenary world you view, Josh. How do you sleep at night?
Starr: 39:56 Well, I think we've put this question in the ground. I think we've done a great job, so-
Ben: 39:59 We nailed it. Thank you, Tony. Thank you for-
Josh: 40:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: 40:01 Asking-
Starr: 40:01 Hey, you know what, Tony? You're welcome.
Ben: 40:04 We should send him a shirt. I will email him and tell him that we're going to do this episode and he gets a free shirt from Honeybadger-
Starr: 40:11 That is awesome. You know what that shirt is? You know what that shirt is, Ben?
Starr: 40:14 That shirt is value. It's value.
Starr: 40:17 Just giving it away.
Josh: 40:18 I thought the shirt was going-
Ben: 40:19 You're going to-
Josh: 40:19 To say something like, "You rock, Tony." Like the shirts on Facebook that you were talking about.
Starr: 40:25 Oh, we could do that-
Josh: 40:25 It's like-
Ben: 40:26 It says, "Honeybadger," because it's also word of mouth.
Josh: 40:29 Oh. Yeah.
Starr: 40:29 Yeah, "Nobody asks great questions like ..."
Josh: 40:31 Right.
Ben: 40:35 Yeah. I guess we have to get Kyle to make us a FounderQuest shirt.
Josh: 40:37 Yeah, that would be cool.
Starr: 40:38 Yeah, I bet people would actually be ... I was going to say people would actually wear those, but that's pretty shady. Like, people wear all of our shirts.
Josh: 40:46 Oh, people love our shirts. Yeah.
Starr: 40:48 Yeah.
Ben: 40:50 This is the part where we invite people, please send in your questions to FounderQuest.
Starr: 40:52 Please send them in, questions, to FounderQuest.
Josh: 40:56 We should work in asking people to rate us at some point.
Starr: 40:58 Oh, yeah.
Josh: 40:58 Because I did that on Twitter, and it got us another five ratings.
Starr: 41:02 Yeah, and I should give our Twitter login information for the FounderQuest Twitter account to Ben Findley-
Josh: 41:08 Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: 41:08 Because right now it's just getting automated for updates. And I'm sure there's no subscribers, because we haven't even promoted it.
Josh: 41:16 There's a ... Transistor.fm estimates there's 150 ... Oh, you mean of the Twitter account?
Starr: 41:22 Yeah, there's no subscribers-
Josh: 41:23 Yeah, there's like 13 subscribers or something.
Starr: 41:25 Oh, there are? Wow.
Josh: 41:26 There are, yeah.
Josh: 41:27 There's a few. ... Yeah.
Starr: 41:29 Okay.
Josh: 41:29 No, we've got a couple fans out there-
Starr: 41:31 Or some trolls.
Josh: 41:32 And Transistor says there's like a hundred ... estimates 150 subscribers to the podcast.
Starr: 41:36 That's pretty good.
Josh: 41:37 So-
Starr: 41:38 Well, thank all of y'all.
Josh: 41:38 Yeah.
Starr: 41:39 Thank y'all.
Josh: 41:40 Yeah. Thanks, guys.
Starr: 41:42 You're awesome. Yeah, so please rate us, and tell your friends about us, so ... I guess we've answered this question, so should we head out? Should we sign out?
Ben: 41:49 We should.
Starr: 41:50 Okay. Let's see. What's a good tagline?
Ben: 41:57 Something like Rick Steves-
Josh: 41:58 Like a sign off, you mean?
Ben: 41:59 Like Rick Steves, like, "Keep on marketing." You know.
Josh: 42:03 Keep on ... Keep ... Yeah, I don't know. Keep on 'badgering.
Starr: 42:05 Yeah, this has been the 'Badger Guys, and just remember, keep on trucking.
Starr: 42:13 I think that's good. I think that's a wrap.
Josh: 42:14 Is that it? That's ... yeah, nailed it.
Starr: 42:16 Right, we'll talk to y'all later, boys.
Ben: 42:18 All right.
Announcer: 42:19 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation. 360 degree coverage of errors. Outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have web app, you need it. Available at https://www.honeybadger.io/. Want more from the founders? Go to https://www.founderquestpodcast.com/. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive, VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The guys discuss gorilla conference marketing and how they promoted Honeybadger back when they could barely afford to attend the conference, let alone a sponsorship. Also discussed is turning Honeybadger's unprofessionalism into a marketing strength, dealing with swag logistics, and why you should never wear a blazer to a dev conference.
Full transcription:
Josh: 00:01 Tatum's favorite programming language right now is Haskell, but I suspect it's because there's a big blue elephant on the cover of the book and elephant is her favorite animal. Yeah. I'm guessing it's not the functional purity that she loves it for.
Announcer: 00:23 Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned into FounderQuest.
Starr: 00:31 Yeah. Ida's just been getting really into scientific visualization type stuff. She's doing R a lot lately. I don't really think it's a very good programming language just for general purpose stuff, but she does seem to like it.
Josh: 00:44 Nice.
Ben: 00:44 When the Honeybadger founders compete on their kid's language learning. My kid's just doing basic. They suck.
Josh: 00:52 Yeah.
Ben: 00:53 You should get Tatum a PHP book. She would love that.
Josh: 00:55 Or Postgres.
Ben: 00:56 That's true.
Josh: 00:58 Any elephant ... Why are there so many elephants in programming by the way?
Ben: 01:02 That's a good question.
Starr: 01:03 I don't know.
Starr: 01:05 Programming books-
Josh: 01:06 Is it because of the memory?
Ben: 01:08 For Postgres I think that's the case, yeah.
Josh: 01:10 They either have a long-
Starr: 01:11 Yeah. Like they're supposed to be smart or something.
Josh: 01:14 Yeah.
Starr: 01:15 I don't know I've never met an elephant that struck me as that smart.
Josh: 01:19 Like an elephant never forgets, right?
Starr: 01:21 Right.
Josh: 01:22 Maybe that means, I don't know.
Starr: 01:24 That doesn't mean they remember.
Ben: 01:25 As opposed to Mongo I guess their logo should be what?
Josh: 01:27 That's true.
Ben: 01:27 A fruit fly.
Starr: 01:28 Oh burn.
Ben: 01:29 Oh burn. Sick burn.
Starr: 01:30 Ouch. Yeah, because it dies after 12 hours.
Ben: 01:36 Exactly and forgets everything.
Josh: 01:39 Ben's on fire today.
Starr: 01:40 Oh man. Poor Mongo.
Ben: 01:41 I know.
Starr: 01:44 They've been around, it's been like a decade since-
Ben: 01:46 Wow.
Starr: 01:47 ... we've had bad experiences with Mongo.
Ben: 01:48 That's true.
Starr: 01:49 We still have to say bad things about them.
Josh: 01:54 Yeah.
Starr: 01:55 Okay. We should probably talk about marketing gentlemen.
Ben: 02:00 Sure.
Josh: 02:01 Yeah. That sounds good.
Ben: 02:02 Yeah. Love marketing.
Starr: 02:03 You love marketing?
Ben: 02:04 I do love marketing. How else-
Josh: 02:05 I do too.
Ben: 02:06 How else are you going to get people to know about who you are and give you money, right?
Josh: 02:11 I also hate marketing, but that's another podcast.
Starr: 02:14 You could commit a crime.
Ben: 02:17 Okay, but will that convince people to give you money?
Starr: 02:20 They give you money in the end.
Josh: 02:21 Yeah.
Ben: 02:22 Unless the crime is like a Ponzi scheme.
Starr: 02:23 You end up with money. Is it really that different?
Josh: 02:30 Yeah. You can convince people through crime. What do you think robbery is?
Starr: 02:38 It's an advance tactic of persuasion.
Starr: 02:41 We've had a lot of different marketing strategies. I don't even know strategies, approaches. We have lots of different marketing approaches over the years. Josh, you're the marketing guru now, you're the person who's been most into marketing lately.
Josh: 02:59 Oh gosh.
Starr: 03:00 What's our general approach?
Josh: 03:02 I think our approach has always been really centered around content. Content marketing has always been our big thing. Well, I guess content and word of mouth.
Starr: 03:11 I mean philosophically. Where do we stand on-
Josh: 03:15 Oh.
Starr: 03:15 What are the big picture things? What do we believe about marketing?
Josh: 03:20 We believe that our marketing should have as much personality as possible and we should try to be ourselves in our marketing as much as possible. Yeah. I don't know, that's the big thing for me. We do different tactics. We're Honeybadger, we can't be all like business professional.
Starr: 03:40 We're taking our weakness, which is our unprofessionalism and we're turning that into a feature.
Josh: 03:47 Exactly. I look at it like almost a competitive advantage. We've got these larger competitors with marketing teams and bosses and things and they can't get away with the things that we can just as scrappy little Honeybadger or whatever. I totally think we can use that to our advantage.
Starr: 04:07 Yeah. We could be the punk rock error attacker.
Josh: 04:10 Fighting the man.
Starr: 04:11 I know. I hate the man. We do content, we've always done content and stuff, but we've also done a lot of other things, right? We do the conferences, we've done a lot of cool giveaways and shirts and stuff, we do a lot of stuff on ... We do social media stuff. Let's talk about conferences. What was the first conference we went to? Was it that RailsConf?
Josh: 04:31 Ben and I, I forget when, but we were just talking about when I actually met you Starr.
Starr: 04:39 What? Oh.
Josh: 04:41 If you recall, we started a company together before we had actually met in person.
Starr: 04:45 That's right.
Josh: 04:45 We were legally contractually in business together and we had never met each other. I think I remembered though, that's why I'm bringing this up, is I think it was ... What was the Heroku conference in San Francisco Ben?
Ben: 04:59 Waza.
Josh: 04:59 Ben?
Starr: 04:59 Waza.
Josh: 05:03 Waza. Waza, I think that was when I first met both of you guys together.
Ben: 05:06 Yeah. I think that's right.
Josh: 05:07 Pretty sure.
Ben: 05:07 Yeah. Oh. I totally forgot about that one too.
Starr: 05:10 I had totally forgotten about that too.
Josh: 05:10 I did too. Yeah.
Ben: 05:13 That was the first, I remember now, that was the first meal that Honeybadger paid for.
Josh: 05:16 Yeah. It was surreal. I'd met Ben before in person once when he came down to Portland, but I just remember flying into San Francisco and we're going to this ... It was actually I hadn't been to that many conferences at that point, to be honest either.
Starr: 05:32 Me neither.
Josh: 05:33 It was one of my first, probably first, big conferences I went to and I'm meeting my business partners for the first time, yeah, that I'd met on the internet. We have our company credit cards finally.
Starr: 05:45 Oh yeah. It was so exciting.
Josh: 05:46 We can buy ourselves meals.
Ben: 05:47 Yep. That was awesome.
Starr: 05:49 Did we all stay in that weird anime Japanese-
Josh: 05:53 Uh huh.
Starr: 05:53 ... hotel?
Ben: 05:54 Yep. Yep. Right there in Japantown. It was awesome.
Josh: 05:57 That's a long way to answer your question is I think that was the first conference that we all went to.
Starr: 06:00 You know what, man? That conference still sticks out in my mind as the most fun conference I've ever been to.
Josh: 06:09 From this, what we're talking about right now, from the whole personality in marketing thing, Waza was like ... I feel like Heroku always did a great job with that aspect of marketing. That conference, we remember that conference because it was so unique, I think-
Starr: 06:24 Yeah. That's true.
Josh: 06:25 ... and because it was so different. To bring it back around, that's kind of what I'm talking about is, like yeah, whatever, six, seven, years later, we're still talking about it.
Starr: 06:34 Yeah. Heroku is an application hosting company, right? Now they're owned by Salesforce, but they used to be a start up and everything. They're called Heroku, they have this sort of Japanese ... I guess Heroku is a Japanese word?
Josh: 06:46 I think so, I don't know Japanese.
Starr: 06:47 It means something.
Josh: 06:47 I don't know what it means.
Starr: 06:48 It means something in Japanese maybe. Maybe it just sounds Japanese.
Josh: 06:52 Matts probably knows.
Starr: 06:54 Yeah. All their marketing was very different, right? It was very sort of like Zen, Japanese garden type, beautiful, minimalist feel to it. This conference also had a very unique feel to it. It felt like almost an art event as much-
Josh: 07:11 Yeah. It was all about crafting things if I remember correctly.
Starr: 07:17 Yeah. They had these people come out and do this weird ... It was some sort of dance where they were ceremonially sweeping the floor of the stage where the presenters were going to be. It wasn't like a normal conference venue where you're just in ... there's a hallway, there's a bunch of rooms, it's kind of like a hotel or whatever. It was this beautiful open space. The whole conference was in this giant open room and there were these little stations where you could go and you can make robots and things. Yeah. It was just super unique and I was sad that they stopped doing that because I really wanted to go back the following year, but it was over.
Josh: 07:53 Yeah.
Ben: 07:53 Yeah. It was just two years. We went that 2013. I think our earliest marketing efforts, like going to that conference, was having Honeybadger logo on our shirts, right, and just walking around and people be like, "Oh what's Honeybadger?" I picked that trick up from my RailsKits days when I would wear the RailsKits shirt to RailsConf and people like, "Oh yeah RailsKits."
Starr: 08:18 I didn't know that.
Ben: 08:18 Oh yeah.
Starr: 08:19 Nice.
Ben: 08:20 Works.
Starr: 08:20 Yeah. And we also-
Josh: 08:21 Actually I remember you telling us that story when we actually wore the shirts.
Ben: 08:25 Oh yeah?
Starr: 08:26 I wasn't listening.
Starr: 08:28 The other thing that we did ... Shortly after Waza we went to, I think we went to RailsConf and it was in Portland, only as a company we didn't have enough money to buy tickets to RailsConf-
Josh: 08:42 Yeah.
Starr: 08:42 ... because we weren't making any money whatsoever. Just getting us to Portland was a big enough expense for us. We basically just went to RailsConf and just sort of hung out in the hallway.
Josh: 08:53 Yeah we just crashed the lobby.
Starr: 08:55 Yeah. Did we have stickers printed up and stuff?
Josh: 08:57 Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ben: 08:58 Yeah.
Starr: 08:58 We had stickers printed up, we were scattering them around like you do, leaving them in restrooms.
Josh: 09:04 Uh huh. It was very Portland of us in hindsight.
Starr: 09:08 GitHub did this after party. This was back when GitHub was actually doing sponsoring big things at conferences involving Ruby. They don't really do that anymore as far as I know. GitHub had this after party thing where they bought out Ground Kontrol. Ground Kontrol is this famous arcade with tons of pinball, tons of retro games and stuff in Portland. They're just like okay nerds, free play. I'm like, I don't have a conference badge or anything, but I want to get in on that. I just went in and slipped through.
Starr: 09:42 Did you guys go with me or did I go by myself?
Josh: 09:46 I don't think I went that time.
Starr: 09:47 Okay.
Josh: 09:48 Yeah. We've been to Ground Kontrol, but yeah, I don't think that I went to that one.
Starr: 09:52 Yeah. This was my own stealth mission. I snuck in amongst a pack of nerds and that's when I learned that I really like pinball. Previously whenever I'd try and play pinball, you put in a quarter and if you don't know how to play you just immediately lose. That's frustrating.
Josh: 10:10 Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Starr: 10:11 With free play you can play as much as you want, so I just played pinball for awhile. I actually got us a customer then too because there was a company called Sorcery. A whole pack of developers came in and I was like, "Hey what's up? What's Sorcery?" They told me it was sort of logistics thing. I told them about my deal and told them about Honeybadger. That was back when everybody was super excited to find any sort of error tracker that was an alternative to Airbrake.
Josh: 10:42 Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Starr: 10:43 Yeah. Later on they signed up.
Josh: 10:47 Nice. I don't think I knew this story.
Starr: 10:49 You didn't?
Ben: 10:50 Yeah.
Josh: 10:51 That's awesome.
Ben: 10:51 It's new to me.
Starr: 10:52 I think that maybe, that's definitely my first direct at getting people to sign up event.
Josh: 10:58 Yeah. This reminds me, we internally, kind of jokingly, but it's an actual term, is we refer to our marketing as guerrilla marketing. That is the pinnacle of guerrilla marketing to me is sneaking into a conference event that you didn't even pay for and then selling someone your product.
Starr: 11:20 Yeah. I guess you're right, I guess that is pretty bad ass, isn't it?
Josh: 11:23 Yeah. That's pretty bad ass.
Starr: 11:23 Or annoying, depending upon how you do it.
Josh: 11:31 We can talk about guerrilla marketing, but it should be done with tact, obviously.
Ben: 11:34 2014 we picked it up a notch, right? We went and spoke at like 5,000 different conferences. I remember Starr you put together like 20 proposals and you shot gunned every conference.
Starr: 11:48 I did. I submitted like, yeah-
Ben: 11:50 Yeah.
Starr: 11:50 ... like 10 or 15 proposals to every single Ruby conference and at the time there were like 15 Ruby conferences.
Ben: 11:56 Yeah.
Josh: 11:56 Yeah.
Ben: 11:57 We were all over the place that year.
Josh: 11:58 Remember you guys spent ... Yeah, that was all you were doing for a while it seemed.
Starr: 12:04 At the time, people just wanted to hear that there was an alternative to Airbrake. Going out and being amongst the people was totally a good thing.
Josh: 12:14 I'm trying to remember how many I actually attended that year. It was at least one a month probably. I know there were a few months were there were multiple conferences.
Starr: 12:24 Yeah.
Josh: 12:24 ... per month. Yeah. I would say like 10, 12 conferences probably.
Starr: 12:30 Oh man. If nothing else, I made a ton of people who actually turned out to be good friends now. A lot of my friend group in Seattle comes directly from just going to conferences, and not even conferences in Seattle. A lot of Seattle folks go to other towns and do conferences, especially when the whole Ruby conference circuit was on fire.
Josh: 12:53 You know Richard Bishop who lives in Seattle now and works for Amazon, I met him at, I think it was Ancient City Ruby in Florida. I want to say that was 2014, 2015. That was around our big conference travel time. Yeah. He didn't live in Seattle at the time.
Starr: 13:12 Yeah. I met my good friend Carrie who, I think I met her at maybe Philadelphia, or maybe Pittsburgh.
Josh: 13:20 Yeah.
Starr: 13:21 I don't know. I met my good friend Jeremy at Pittsburgh. He had just moved to Seattle and I ended up in a D&D game with both of them so I got to know them really well. This was all after the conference, a couple years. Man, it takes a toll on you, doesn't it?
Josh: 13:38 Oh gosh yeah. That was a rough year, yeah.
Starr: 13:41 Yeah.
Ben: 13:42 It built a lot of awareness right? A lot of people learned about who we were and that we existed, just because there was someone up on stage that had our logo in the slide deck, right? Also, made a lot of great connections with people, the friends like you're talking about, but also people who found out, hey this Honeybadger thing, there are actual people behind it, right? It's not some nameless company that just is off doing its thing. It's like these are real people who are kind of cool and I like them. I think that really helped make a connection with people and helped make a connection with people and helped build the brand individually.
Starr: 14:13 Oh totally. Just like you said Josh, our big thing is we're devs like you are.
Josh: 14:19 Yeah.
Starr: 14:19 We're building a product for you because we want to make your lives easier.
Ben: 14:23 That's something that if you're in a, like we were, if you're in a position where you're competing with someone who's already in the space or maybe has more backing than you do, that's something that they're not necessarily going to do, right? The IBMs of the world are not going to be sitting out there hanging out with people around the table at lunch at the developer conference. When you're a start up, you can do stuff like that.
Starr: 14:40 One thing I did that I probably should've done a little bit differently, but my whole outlook on how I should present myself when we first started going to conferences, I was like, well, I'm going to this professional thing, I need to look at least somewhat professional. I got to tell you guys, I've always had a love of blazers and I never get to wear them because I work at home. I'm not going to put on a nice shirt and a blazer to work at home.
Starr: 15:09 I was like, okay, conferences, this is going to be my time where I get to let my blazer game shine. You know, I'm not really sure it worked very well because I would go and sit down at the conference lunch and start talking to people. Everyone kept asking me, "So are you a recruiter?"
Josh: 15:25 Yeah.
Starr: 15:25 "What's going on with you?"
Josh: 15:27 Yeah. They probably thought you were sales or something.
Starr: 15:29 I know. I know. I'm like, dude come on. It's a blazer. You can put one on too.
Josh: 15:36 Your problem is you should've had some sort of pin or patch or something on the blazer to distinguish yourself as a developer, like a logo of a programming language or something.
Starr: 15:47 Maybe like a Haskell or something so then people will think I'm really smart.
Josh: 15:50 Yeah, or maybe just like the Lambda character.
Starr: 15:53 Oh that's a good one.
Ben: 15:55 We didn't maintain that forever right? After 2014 we did a few more, but we decided we weren't going to be out there hitting the road every year?
Josh: 16:03 Yeah.
Ben: 16:04 Also, the Ruby conferences diminished, a number of them diminished.
Starr: 16:10 Let's talk about that. There's still way more Ruby conferences than I think any other language that I've heard of, but the total number has gone down quite a bit. Also I noticed a lot of companies have stopped sponsoring conferences as much.
Starr: 16:27 GitHub used to do these crazy after parties. They used to do parties, they used to buy out Ground Kontrol, stopped doing that.
Josh: 16:32 I think, GitHub in particular has grown so ... They're a household ... They were a kind of household name back then, but now they were acquired by Microsoft, they're GitHub.
Starr: 16:44 Well, yeah, but-
Josh: 16:44 I feel like a lot of those companies, at least my impression has been that they're there really to get their name out and hire versus getting customers. At least that's kind of what I thought. There were some companies that were there as a product, but I think there's also a lot of companies there that are looking to hire.
Starr: 17:09 Okay. Think of our direct competitors.
Josh: 17:12 Yeah.
Starr: 17:13 Our direct competitors used to sponsor a lot of conferences and that's definitely cut back.
Josh: 17:19 Yeah.
Starr: 17:19 There used to be all of them almost at RailsConf and now ...
Josh: 17:22 Yeah. There were-
Starr: 17:22 I don't think I saw any at the last RailsConf I went.
Ben: 17:25 Yeah. Sentry does.
Josh: 17:27 Yeah.
Starr: 17:27 I didn't see any booths or anything.
Ben: 17:29 Oh.
Starr: 17:29 I didn't see a Sentry booth.
Josh: 17:30 Yeah. You're right.
Starr: 17:33 Maybe I missed it.
Josh: 17:34 Our competitors, I happen to know there was specific decisions made to cut back on the conference sponsorships just because I don't think that they were as effective as before. I don't know why. That's specifically to error trackers too, at least that's what I know, that's what my experience is in. Maybe it's because as the industry has matured, people already have their error tracker now. That's just a speculation.
Josh: 18:03 Yeah. I wonder maybe before when we were moving off of ... error tracking had been there was Airbrake and maybe a few others, but it was still kind of a newish thing and now it's so saturated that I don't know if it's as effective to go and get new customers.
Ben: 18:19 I think we experienced that ourselves and then we decided to trim back the number of sponsorships that we did because of that. Once you get enough awareness going, once that flywheel is spinning fast enough, you don't need to keep investing in that particular method anymore I think. I don't know.
Josh: 18:34 It was, I think for us, the real value to us was brand awareness. We go to conferences today and most people know who Honeybadger is.
Starr: 18:45 Yeah.
Josh: 18:46 ... at a Ruby conference.
Starr: 18:47 It makes conferences more fun.
Josh: 18:49 Yeah.
Starr: 18:49 Because you know people.
Josh: 18:50 It does.
Josh: 18:52 Yeah. If no one knows who you are, going to conferences is like, even today if I was building something new, I would hit the conference circuit again to get that brand out there and get in front of people. Once they already know who you are, then conferences might not be as effective.
Starr: 19:08 I imagine the people who are listening to this are trying to maybe apply this to their own situation. I wonder, I kind of think that maybe we got lucky just because we happen to be in a field, or we have a product for people who just fricking love to conference. I've never seen a group of people that gets together and does events like Ruby people do.
Josh: 19:31 Yeah. The Ruby circuit, it is interesting. When we spent a year basically going to all of them, you get to know all the circuit people too.
Starr: 19:41 Yeah.
Josh: 19:42 It's like this weird traveling tribe that you're-
Ben: 19:45 It's like carnies.
Josh: 19:46 ... a part of. Yeah. It's like carnies.
Starr: 19:51 That year when we were going to so many conferences, I would basically just stop going to the talks because I had literally heard the same talk several times at several-
Josh: 19:59 Yeah.
Starr: 20:00 ... conferences.
Ben: 20:01 We gave the same talk at several different conferences.
Starr: 20:04 Yeah, but ... I'm not blaming them. It takes a lot of time to make a talk. Here's a pro tip for future conference speakers. If you're trying to raise your profile, speak at more conferences, don't do what I did and make 15 different proposals. Let me tell you, when you make 15 different proposals, that means that if you get accepted by five conferences, great, you've got five speaking engagements, whatever, but you've got to make five completely separate slide decks. That takes a ton of time.
Josh: 20:35 Yeah. That sounds like so much work.
Starr: 20:37 It would take me a couple of weeks of more or less full time work to put together a presentation for some place like RailsConf. That's not even a perfect presentation, that's just what I had thought was an acceptable presentation.
Ben: 20:50 It worked.
Starr: 20:51 Yeah. That's true. That's also me, I tend to over-prepare for things.
Josh: 20:56 It seems like a good strategy though would be, since you put so much work into a talk, if you're going to put together five talks, why not just spend that time or even half that time putting together one really, really good talk and then giving it at a bunch of places around the country. It's not the same people going to those conferences, except for the circuit people.
Starr: 21:21 Totally.
Josh: 21:22 Everyone can benefit by it.
Starr: 21:24 The only gotcha is that it's really hard to tell which talks are going to take off. A lot of times the proposals that got accepted of mine were not the ones that I expected to get accepted. Sometimes they were just ones I was just like, well, I'm just going to throw this out here because I kind of know about it.
Josh: 21:40 Yeah.
Ben: 21:40 I think it's really a numbers game. I think the reason why you had so many opportunities to speak was because you did 10 or 15, right?
Starr: 21:46 Yeah.
Ben: 21:47 There was plenty of selection. Yeah, just the law of numbers worked in your favor.
Starr: 21:51 I guess there's no perfect approach.
Ben: 21:53 No. It's all an experiment.
Josh: 21:55 Our conference strategy now, we do some conferences, but it's changed a little bit. I thought maybe we could talk about that. We're not really going to conferences for the same reason these days. It's a chance to go and talk to new people and meet new people for sure, but it's also a chance to reconnect with the people that we've met and reconnect especially with our customers. It's really cool. I love going to conferences and meeting our customers, some of them who've been customers for years.
Starr: 22:22 Totally. Are we going to talk about food?
Josh: 22:24 I think we should talk about food.
Starr: 22:25 This is our main marketing secret. I'm going to just out us right now. Food.
Josh: 22:31 For me it's not necessarily food, it's more of experiences, but food is my favorite experience so it usually is a food event that we'll plan. I know Ben did one of these, the first of these, which is really creating a unique event for people at the conference to go to. A lot of people are looking for something to do and they might not know people. It's nice to have something interesting and unique to go to that doesn't feel like it's going to be some sort of cocktail hour or something where you're just standing around and not really knowing who to talk to and that sort of thing.
Josh: 23:11 What we've done is, I think Ben, was it in Kansas City that we did ... It was a barbecue tour?
Ben: 23:20 Yeah. That was fun.
Starr: 23:20 How did that work?
Ben: 23:21 When we were going to Kansas City there was a number of activities happening and we signed up to sponsor one of them basically. The one that we sponsored was the barbecue tour bus, which was just awesome. I had no idea, but people living in Kansas City know that barbecue's a thing there. We signed up to sponsor this tour bus, which loads up, I don't remember how many people it was, 30 or 40 people, load them up onto a bus and take them on a tour of Kansas City, some of the historical districts, and stop at a couple different barbecue places to have a couple of light meals.
Ben: 23:55 It was just a ton of fun. I just put out a thing ahead of time saying, hey the first 30 people who sign up get to come and hang out on the bus and have some barbecue with us. We got there, I think it was the first night before the conference actually started. Everyone who showed up and was on the list piled into the bus. We drove around and had some food and chatted. Josh, like you said, I had a couple people there who were like, "Yeah we've been customers for a long time."
Josh: 24:22 Yeah.
Ben: 24:22 It was pretty fun to meet them. Of course there were some people who didn't know who we were and they're just like, "Free food, I'm down for that."
Josh: 24:28 Yeah.
Ben: 24:28 It was great. Getting to meet a lot of people and not, like you said, not having this cocktail hour thing where you're having to yell at people to hear them, but you're just sitting down and talking with two or three people on the bus and across from someone at dinner, it was a lot of fun.
Josh: 24:42 Yeah, I think the key for me I think is that you're sharing an experience too. Everyone goes to, whatever, the conference after party, but not everyone can get on the bus and not everyone can go on this tour that is a shared experience of you're going somewhere.
Josh: 24:59 There's been other instances where conferences ... It's rare that they're this good. I think it was, again, Ancient City Ruby, their events were all like ... They didn't do so many parties, they had a number of tours and things that people could get together, sign up for basically, and then go do them. We did the Ripley's Believe It or Not, there's a ghost tour in Ancient City because it's the oldest city in America. Yeah. That was the one I went to. Creating a shared experience with other conference goers where it's not just all about networking, even though networking happens, but it's about doing something else. I think that takes a lot of the social pressure off of the situation.
Josh: 25:42 Since then, since the barbecue bus, I think we've kind of doubled down on that idea. If a conference is not offering that kind of event, that doesn't mean you can't just go and do it yourself, which is what we did in Phoenix. I did another bus and we took a group to In-N-Out Burger because In-N-Out Burger happens to have a location in Phoenix and it's not within walking distance of the conference.
Starr: 26:08 This was for RailsConf, right?
Josh: 26:09 Yeah. That was RailsConf I think in Phoenix.
Starr: 26:12 We were not sponsors of RailsConf.
Josh: 26:14 We were not sponsors of RailsConf, no, because RailsConf is crazy expensive.
Starr: 26:20 Yeah. It's like 15 to 30 grand or something.
Josh: 26:22 Yeah.
Starr: 26:23 Even though you don't sponsor conference, there's nothing saying that you can't, say, charter a bus and park it outside the convention center and say to people "hey if you want some-
Josh: 26:32 Exactly.
Starr: 26:32 ... if you want to go to In-N-Out, yeah, just get on board that little bus there. Don't worry about who's taking you."
Josh: 26:40 This is guerrilla marketing. Yeah. You can do whatever you want. Like I said, you have to have tact. I'm not parking the bus outside of the main event.
Ben: 26:51 You're not rushing the stage during the keynote and be like, hey.
Josh: 26:53 Yeah. You're taking a group of 50 friends out for dinner. What's wrong with that, right?
Starr: 27:00 Yeah. It sounds like you're a little bit defensive about it almost, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. If I was a conference organizer, I would love it if people were just creating these more rich experiences happening after the conference.
Josh: 27:14 Yeah.
Starr: 27:14 That would be awesome. Conference organizers can't ensure that everybody has a great time all the time after the conference.
Josh: 27:23 Yeah. It makes the conference better, it totally does. This was a couple years ago at this point. People I meet or people that I catch up with that were on the bus, they still bring it up when I meet them at conferences now. It's something people are still talking about. Mike Perham has for years done a game night at every Ruby and RailsConf. That's another great example. It's marketing for his project Sidekiq.
Starr: 27:50 I'm sorry I just had a genius idea. If we ever do a bus again-
Josh: 27:54 Uh huh, which we are, so I need your ideas.
Starr: 27:57 Okay. You have some t-shirts printed up that say Were you on the bus? 2019.
Josh: 28:04 I love it. Yeah.
Josh: 28:05 That'd be great.
Starr: 28:06 Yeah.
Josh: 28:06 I don't know if I ever told you guys, on the actual bus that I chartered, I actually paid for everyone's dinner, which by the way is like $7.50 a person, so we spent like two or three hundred bucks on dinner for a bus of people, which is just, it doesn't get cheaper than that for a conference sponsorship.
Starr: 28:24 How much did the bus cost too? What was the total?
Josh: 28:26 The bus was like two or three hundred bucks I think, maybe it was four, but we were well under like probably $700 for the whole thing.
Starr: 28:34 Oh my goodness.
Josh: 28:37 It makes a lot of sense in a lot of different ways. Yeah. I had brought shirts. I put a nicely folded shirt on each sheet, I had a little envelope. In-N-Out is just walk up to the line and order, so I didn't know how to pay for everyone, so I just went to a bank and got a bunch of $10 bills, took out a bunch of $10 bills. I bought some envelopes at like a CVS or something.
Starr: 29:06 That's genius.
Josh: 29:08 I put a sticker and a $10 in each envelope, put it on top of the shirt. You walk onto the bus, you find a seat, your seat has your stuff on it. Yeah, then it was just drive to In-N-Out and had a good time.
Ben: 29:21 Those kind of events are fantastic. I enjoy them. Your comment about putting things on the seat reminded me of the untactful things that you can do for sponsoring conferences when you're not really sponsoring. I've seen people try to sneak in the main hall and put their stickers on chairs right before the keynote.
Josh: 29:39 Yeah. That's not cool.
Ben: 29:40 That's not cool, right?
Josh: 29:41 Don't do that.
Ben: 29:42 The sponsors, the real sponsors, are actually paying for that privilege, right?
Josh: 29:46 Yeah.
Ben: 29:46 They do pay quite a bit of money to have the right to put something in those drop bags or on those chairs. Most conferences, that we go to anyway, have a sticker sharing station where you're expected to just dump off a load of stickers if you want to share them and people come by and pick them up. That's totally cool.
Josh: 30:03 Yeah.
Ben: 30:04 Do respect that the conference organizers have bills to pay and the sponsorships pay those bills and those sponsorships come with those privileges.
Josh: 30:14 For me, I think the line is if people are obligated to be there as a result of attending the conference, then if you're not a sponsor then don't interfere with them. You have to go to the conference hall in order to go and see the talk, so don't go put stuff on their seats because the sponsors are there for that. If you invite them to something off, whatever, off duty and they respond and they just want to be there, then it's totally fine.
Starr: 30:41 For every conference there's this group of people that they're together at the conference, but they're also together on Twitter, they're also together in whatever conference communication system there is, like MicroConf had a conference Slack. We did something similar just by launching this podcast during MicroConf. We didn't go to MicroConf and sponsor it, we didn't set up a booth in the hallway of MicroConf, but we were like, "Hey MicroConf people, we're here at MicroConf and we're launching our podcast, please check it out."
Josh: 31:13 Yeah.
Starr: 31:13 Which I think that's a respectful way to do things.
Ben: 31:16 Sure.
Josh: 31:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Ben: 31:17 Especially when the conference is a bunch of entrepreneurs here.
Starr: 31:19 Oh yeah.
Ben: 31:22 Yeah.
Starr: 31:22 People would be way more pushy than we are. That's the problem with being a developer is that your conscience prevents you from doing the really aggressive marketing stuff.
Josh: 31:31 We've talked about the Honeybadger suit. We have our marketing director, Ben Findley has graciously volunteered to wear a honey badger suit.
Starr: 31:41 Is there a honey badger suit? Do we have one?
Josh: 31:43 It doesn't exist yet.
Starr: 31:44 Okay.
Josh: 31:45 I doubt it actually exists in the world because honey badgers are really ugly so I don't know who would want to wear one besides us. Yeah. Ben has volunteered to wear one if we make one.
Starr: 31:58 Talking about honey badgers, one thing that I think has been really cool for us has been our amazing swag. I feel like we do swag marketing way better than any of our competitors, better than most companies. That's just because our namesake honey badger, we don't give a F. Can I say F? I think this is a family podcast.
Josh: 32:16 You can say-
Ben: 32:17 You can say whatever you want.
Starr: 32:17 I don't want to get the explicit label on iTunes.
Josh: 32:21 Okay.
Ben: 32:21 That's true.
Josh: 32:23 That's a good reason. You say whatever you want, but yeah-
Ben: 32:27 Honey badger don't care.
Starr: 32:30 When did we start doing this, like four or five years ago? We got a great-
Josh: 32:33 The shirts? Yeah.
Starr: 32:34 Yeah.
Josh: 32:34 We got Kyle Shold, my friend Kyle Shold, who's a local artist here in the Pacific Northwest who's great, he designed our shirts. Yeah, they're kind of like comic book, graphic novel style, bad ass honey badgers-
Starr: 32:50 Yeah he's the same guy who did the podcast artwork.
Josh: 32:53 ... destroying things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He did our podcast artwork. It's kind of nice, yeah.
Starr: 32:58 I like how every couple of years we get a new set done and it's always a new little story. For a while we had these shirts where the honey badger was fighting a giant bug, had one a bug was destroying a train or something because it's Rails.
Josh: 33:15 Yeah it was like a Ruby train on rails. It had a whole thing, it probably went a little too deep for a 3X3 sticker. I learned a lesson there.
Starr: 33:27 The most recent one, which I art directed, had the honey badger on top of a building like King Kong.
Josh: 33:35 Yeah. That's our current shirt.
Starr: 33:37 Yeah. That's the current one.
Josh: 33:38 Yeah.
Starr: 33:38 We could probably go back and reprint some of those though because people's old ones are probably wearing out by now.
Josh: 33:43 Totally, yeah.
Ben: 33:44 The limited edition, though, it's a thing. People love to collect them all, right?
Josh: 33:49 What I'd like to do is eventually I'd like to try doing it like a swag store where we could put some of our older shirts up for sale or put all of our shirts up for sale. They're good shirts, yeah. We give them out right now as ... since we're not taking boxes of them to conferences anymore, we have people who ask us for them. I don't know.
Starr: 34:07 We use a company called Printfection to do this.
Josh: 34:11 Yeah.
Starr: 34:15 We're not sponsored by Printfection, I'm just going to say their name a lot. Before we had that, we would basically go to a local screen printer, have a giant box of shirts made up, go to a sticker maker have a giant box of stickers made up. Josh and I at various points had these in our closets or garages or whatever and whenever we needed a shirt we would pack it up and mail it out.
Josh: 34:35 Or if we're sponsoring a conference, I don't know about you, but I remember lugging boxes of like 75 shirts across the country.
Starr: 34:45 I know. Yeah and check them.
Josh: 34:46 One time in Pittsburgh I actually forgot the box at check ... I don't check a bag normally. The Pittsburgh, where the conference was is like 30 minutes from the airport-
Starr: 34:58 Oh my goodness.
Josh: 34:59 ... with traffic. I got to the hotel and realized I hadn't remembered my box.
Starr: 35:04 Oh my goodness, I had no idea.
Josh: 35:07 Yeah.
Starr: 35:07 No idea about that.
Josh: 35:08 I'm a big fan of Printfection.
Starr: 35:10 Yeah. What Printfection does is they print up your shirts and they keep them in their warehouse and when somebody wants a shirt, you give them a link to a form and they fill out the form with their size info and with their address and it gets mailed to them. You as the business owner don't have to do any of that BS.
Starr: 35:29 Let me tell you, most screen printing companies don't even fold the shirts for you. How do you create a nicely folded t-shirt presentation that's your swag, I don't know. At times we sponsor a conference and I've had just a pile of unfolded t-shirts out because what else can I do in the moment?
Josh: 35:49 Yeah. Actually my wife Kaylin graciously helped me fold the shirts on a number of occasions before going to a conference because I would've had a pile of shirts on a table.
Starr: 36:00 I know.
Josh: 36:00 I don't know how to fold.
Starr: 36:03 I folded a lot of them, I actually bought a shirt folder-
Josh: 36:05 Yeah. I
Starr: 36:06 ... to do it.
Josh: 36:08 I should've been that smart. Yeah. I can fold shirts, but you should see what they look like.
Starr: 36:13 Yeah. They don't look nice. To fold a shirt in a presentable, professional way is really more difficult than you might think.
Josh: 36:21 Yeah. Kaylin, she had some retail jobs in her earlier days so she knows how to fold a shirt properly. I was thankful.
Starr: 36:32 Yeah. We've outsourced a fair amount, a lot of labor to them, and it's worth whatever we pay for them. It's a bit spendy, but worth it I think.
Ben: 36:41 Yeah. They also do a great thing where if you are sponsoring a conference and you do want a box of shirts, you can just have them do all the folding, box it up, and send it to the hotel where you're going to be staying so you don't have to lug it to the airport and then you just bring it to the conference. It's awesome.
Starr: 36:56 Yeah. Even that though is difficult sometimes. Let me tell you, a box is 70 shirts is heavier than you might think and is also big. It's not the sort of thing that's easy for one man to carry around.
Josh: 37:10 If you don't give them all away, you have to do something with them too, which is one of the problems I ran into. Yeah. Actually a couple times at, I think it was a RubyConfs ... Mike Perham, who I mentioned before that does the game night for Sidekiq, was in the same boat. He's lugging shirts to conferences too and we would sometimes both have shirts left over at the conference. We started actually at the very end when people would be leaving or when sponsors would be packing up early and stuff, we had a thing where we would hijack a table, an empty table and then just put out a tweet, like a whatever, a Tweetstorm or something. Come to this table at this location at this time and take a shirt because they all have to go.
Starr: 38:05 That's amazing.
Ben: 38:06 Maybe conference organizers should partner with local charities like Goodwill and tell them, hey our conference is going to end at this place at this time and there will be shirts that you can just come and take.
Starr: 38:17 Marketing, I'm glad we were able to cover the entirety of the subject.
Josh: 38:22 Yeah, I think we did. We could maybe break this up into two podcasts.
Ben: 38:29 Yeah maybe. Maybe next time we can talk about specific acquisition activities that we did in the early, early days. Even before the conferences, what did we do to get those first customers?
Starr: 38:39 Oh yeah.
Josh: 38:41 There's so much.
Ben: 38:42 There's a lot.
Josh: 38:43 We could go deep on some of these marketing issues because there's so much to cover. Personally, we code a lot, but I think marketing is our number one activity that we all do on an ongoing basis and spend a lot of time on it.
Ben: 38:58 Oh totally.
Josh: 39:00 Yeah. It's not "marketing" at least for me, it's really just about connecting with people and showing our personality to the world and all of that. That's the part I like about it anyway.
Ben: 39:18 Of course it does help to have a really killer product.
Josh: 39:20 It does, yeah. You kind of have to write a little code for that.
Starr: 39:23 All right. Yeah. We can definitely do some more podcasts on this big topic of marketing. It was great talking to you guys.
Ben: 39:30 Likewise.
Josh: 39:31 Yeah, you too.
Starr: 39:32 Always.
Starr: 39:33 Catch you on the flip side.
Ben: 39:35 Bye.
Josh: 39:36 Later.
Starr: 39:36 I'm working on a phrase.
Josh: 39:38 Catch you on the flip side.
Ben: 39:40 Got to nail your catchphrase there.
Starr: 39:42 Yeah.
Josh: 39:43 Yeah. Cool.
Starr: 39:44 Okay bye.
Josh: 39:45 Later.
Announcer: 39:47 FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradation for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at www.honeybadger.io.
Announcer: 40:02 Want more from the founders? Go to www.founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The gents look back with some hindsight on the debates around private equity, VC vs. bootstrapping Honeybadger, and how funding decisions may have affected recent layoffs at NPM and Travis CI. Our recent Twitter ad performance for FounderQuest is also discussed as well as Nintendo graphics and food trucks. Join us!
Full Transcript:
Josh: We did it. We forgot to send him headphones, Starr.
Starr: He said he had headphones. I asked him, Josh. I asked him.
Josh: We're trying to get Ben to part with his AirPods, and it's like pulling teeth, man.
Announcer: It's like Steve Jobs and The Dude had triplets and they built an app. This is FounderQuest.
Starr: Can you hear us?
Ben: Kinda.
Starr: Yeah? Well, the AirPods might give you a little bit of a delay. I could imagine that would be ... this KVM, the video part worked even though the keyboard and mouse didn't work, but I totally forgot that this monitor can't do 60 hertz over HDMI. Does that makes sense?
Josh: What was the refresh rate on the original, the NES games and stuff?
Starr: Oh, it's super good.
Josh: Right?
Starr: Because it's a CRT.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: It's just whatever the refresh rate is for your TV. Right? That's baked into the NSTC. It's for standard, which by the way, is frickin' complicated. Video output onto old school NTSC ... for CRT stuff is incredibly complicated, and I tried to understand it, and I pretty much just failed.
Ben: Is his PAL any simpler?
Starr: I mean, I don't think so because you're, because it's all analog, right? You're controlling the signal that goes, this analog signal that goes out and directs this electron beam and ...
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: It's just not this world of pixels. So TV's don't, they have phosphors but they don't really have pixels. Like computers have. There's no pixel at 1010 so, but fortunately some, some people who are smarter than I have when I was doing my emulator, they all basically they had mapped out the different cycles of the PPU, which is the NES' GPU, basically. The different clock cycles of the GPU each correlate to a specific pixel on your screen. So I didn't have to actually, you know what? To do an emulator, you don't actually need to know the details of how TVs work and stuff and refresh rate and all that.
Josh: So the results for the my Twitter experiment yesterday got a little better over time. So it seems that Twitter's ad algorithm is a self, it's a self learning algorithm. So it starts out, you tell it kinda who the type of people you want it to target are, but then it optimizes itself over time as it actually starts to get clicks.
Starr: Really?
Josh: If someone clicks then it, I assume, it picks people that are more similar to them or that it thinks are more similar to them and yeah, so it started out when I had first run it for a few hours, I had a, it was, it spent 10 bucks and got 13 clicks and but that's really bad. It was 86 cents a click by the end ...
Starr: What's a click though? What's a click?
Josh: No. It was a link.
Starr: Okay, yeah.
Josh: Whatever they call it. a link promotion campaign.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: There was one link in the tweet and the call to action was, or the result was to click that link.
Starr: I thought you were talking about your pun.
Josh: Oh, no. No, that did terribly. That was a follower campaign. I think I learned a lot about follower campaigns too. I just was using the wrong campaign too.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: Also, people don't really probably care about puns in their advertised Twitter feed, but it was a fun afternoon and I stand by it. But yeah, by the end of this fall, by the end of the second experiment, which was more of a real experiment, I had brought the click down or the cost per click down to 46 cents. So we got about 113 click throughs to FounderQuest.
Starr: Oh, nice. Nice.
Josh: To the episode and yeah.
Starr: Very cool.
Josh: At least now we know and I don't know, I think I got the targeting pretty good, but I, it was my first try, so I'm sure we could optimize that a little bit. Maybe the content too. So if we want to buy clicks, we now know that they probably cost somewhere between 25 and 50 cents.
Starr: Awesome. I wonder how many of those people subscribed or downloaded something.
Josh: I don't know. I think that's one reason I wasn't quite convinced that it was the best idea to link to the, I linked to an actual episode page 'cause I wanted to talk about the episode is like the reason you want, you get interested.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: But I think if I did this again, I want to try a dedicated landing page that's made for the campaign that has an actual, a real call to action like subscribe.
Ben: Yeah. Like an intro or something.
Josh: Right. Yeah. Not just the transcript, which is basically what we have.
Ben: Right.
Josh: Yeah, yeah.
Starr: You know what would be awesome is if we could somehow get people, if we could send Apple users to just subscribe in Apple Podcasts.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Or I guess people use different, Podcatcher, so it may not work.
Josh: Yeah, that's the problem.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. I did target only people on mobile though. I was smart enough to do that. 'Cause I think people, for a podcast people are going to subscribe on mobile pretty much exclusively. So it's ...
Starr: Oh totally.
Josh: You don't want to target desktop users.
Starr: You know what would be pretty easy to do is to send them to a landing page and on the landing page it detects if they're in Apple or whatever and then just displays the correct ...
Josh: Yeah that could be cool. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe pre-selects the link or something.
Starr: Yeah. Yeah.
Josh: I like that. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Or you could just hide the ones that aren't, right?
Starr: I wonder if on, 'cause I use Overcast on for my podcast.
Josh: Okay.
Starr: And I wonder if Overcast has some code that you could have a button to be like, "Load it in Overcast."
Josh: Yeah. I was looking at the analytics and Transistor.fm and it said 25, I think 25% of our downloads are through the web.
Starr: Really?
Josh: Which surprise me but not too much because because we've done a lot of promoting like my email and the ads and stuff like those. A lot of people might be just hitting the play button because they make it so easy to play the podcast. But I was surprised that the next 25% of users were Overcast. That was the next large chunk of plays. So apparently everyone is using Overcast and I'd never heard about it.
Starr: I'm like one the only subscribers.
Josh: Yes. Or Starrs is just listening on repeat.
Starr: It is, yeah. They have their own directory and everything.
Josh: Wow. Okay. Yeah, I guess I just, yeah, I dunno. I just like always use the podcast app just because it's default, I guess.
Starr: Yeah, I guess if you're fine with a default experience, Josh.
Josh: A default podcast listening experience.
Starr: Some of us demand a more premium experience though.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Something that occurred to me with all this Twitter promotion and this work that you were doing or the past couple of days is that we now have our second product. I didn't realize this until this morning and maybe I'm late to the game here, but FounderQuest is.
Starr: Oh my God, you're right. Only we don't make any money from it. It just costs us money.
Ben: Well you know, hopefully it's helpful for lead gen in the general. Right?
Josh: No, I had the same idea. Content is infinitely easier to promote online than a SAAS. So that's the thing I love about FounderQuest and I love about if we do any other kind of content related things is that especially if they're standalone, we can take those and treat them as products with the Honeybadger and have a marketing playbook for them basically. 'Cause I'm pretty convinced I can generate traffic to the podcast now, I think. It seems like people like it enough and it's easy to promote via ads and stuff. So, yeah, it's really just depends on how much we actually want to throw into it.
Starr: That's really cool. Personally, I think, I'm a little bit more comfortable promoting the podcast from my personal like Twitter account and stuff.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: I can promote blog posts and stuff about Honeybadger, but, but I'm not gonna just day after day just be like, "Hey everybody sign up for Honeybadger." Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Well, it's 'cause we're actually talking about stuff.
Starr: I know, I know.
Josh: There's actual new things to talk about that relate to the actual thing that you're promoting. So it makes it a little easier versus just being a broken record.
Starr: So have you guys heard about the recent NPM layoffs and all that? You've been following the gossip?
Josh: Not a ton. I've been exposed to it mostly through your tweets to be honest.
Ben: Yeah, same here.
Josh: Yeah. I've read a little bit about it and it seems pretty shitty to be honest, but I don't know all the details.
Starr: Yeah. So let me tell you. Basically, so NPM, unlike most package managers, NPM has the package manager for Node, right? Just like Ruby Gems, the package manager for Ruby. Hex is the package manager for Elixir. But unlike these other entities, NPM is a for profit start up or its, not NPM, but I don't know.
Starr: There's some entity, the entity that runs the main packager repo thing where everybody goes and grabs their packages from is a for profit start up. So recently, I guess what happened is they had new management come in, a new management, the new focus on making more money. They're gonna turn things around. I don't know. And so as part of this, they decided that they needed to shake up the team and so they did a bunch of layoffs. I don't think the number of layoffs they did was super high, but the way they went about them was super, super shitty. Right? They laid off their, I think they laid off their CTO via a text message.
Josh: Wow.
Starr: Yeah.
Josh: At least it wasn't a tweet from the company account.
Ben: I was going to say, that's totally Trump's playbook right there.
Starr: Yeah, they laid off this one developer I was following. They laid him off after two days after he had been hired. They laid off one person days before their options were about to vest.
Josh: I saw that one. That one was, yeah, that's, that sucks.
Starr: And so it's just this whole sort of sleazy stew of grossness and NPM isn't the only people that have had some issues lately. A couple of months ago, Travis CI was acquired by a private equity firm, right? And private equity firms, what they do is they go in, they see a company that is, they've raised money, but they're not making quite enough money to sustain themselves at the levels they've been spending money at. And so they buy the company, they do a bunch of quote unquote renovations. They quote unquote make it better, which basically means firing people.
Starr: Yeah. Then everybody from Travis got fired pretty much, I guess some people are still there and yeah. And then there was a recent outage of it and nobody was able to respond to it because they had fired everybody who knew how to raise respond to outages. So it's just this whole shit show. I think is obvious to me. The main culprit here is this VC model of funding that we have as an industry. I thought it'd be fun to talk a little bit about sort of VC funding versus bootstrap funding.
Josh: I like it. That was a really good intro by the way, Starr.
Starr: Thank you. Thank you. I just got more animated as I got more and more pissed off.
Josh: Yeah, no, I like that Starr. Yeah.
Ben: Preach it, brother. Take it to the bridge. Hallelujah.
Josh: I think the other, one or the other, what did you call them? Renovations or improvements that the private equity firms like to do? At least my favorite is just, and it seems the most natural, is just raise pricing. That makes everything better too if you've got some problems. Right?
Ben: It's not just limited to the technology wall, of course, right? Private equity firms operate in all kinds of industries. And I think one of the big one, headlines from recent history was Toys 'R' Us, right? The firm came in, rolled up the assets, got a bunch of debt to fund that purchase and then Toys 'R' Us went under when they couldn't service the debt. That can be a pretty, pretty bad end to a business.
Starr: We're talking now about sort of the end game. What happens to these companies when everything goes wrong? But maybe we should talk a little bit about the lead up. What leads these companies? What is the path on which these companies are that that leads them off of this cliff? Like so many lemmings. Lemmings don't really do that by the way though. It's a myth.
Josh: Ever seen a bunch of lemmings.
Starr: No, it was a big scandal. Disney made a documentary in, I think, the '50s and to make it more interest, because there's about lemmings and I guess the business people were like, "Lemmings are boring." And so they made up this thing where they used movie magic to make it look like they were all jumping off a cliff. And that's where the thing that lemmings jump off cliffs do. But anyway, yeah. So these companies are like lemmings. They're being sort of driven off the cliff.
Ben: Wait, do you remember that lemmings video game?
Starr: I do. I do. I never played it. I remember the box art though. When it came out I was still rocking a Apple II. I didn't have the hardware to run that. That beast.
Josh: You could only handle, your Apple II could only handle one lemming.
Starr: Yeah. So let's think back, boys, back to 2011, 2012. We're just a bunch of baby badgers. We're thinking how nice it would be to start this little company of ours. And so we had this choice and I remember we talked about it and discussed it and thought about it a lot. So the choice is do you go the VC route, do you raise funding or do you keep it kind of all in the family? Sort of bootstrap it. And what are the tradeoffs involved in that? And I think, obviously, these companies that like NPM and Travis and stuff, they went the funding route as do sort of all of the big successful companies. Whereas we chose the sort of keep it in the family bootstraps route. What are the main sort of features that you might keep in mind when you're making that, if we have to make this decision again, what sort of things would be you'd be thinking about?
Ben: I think one of the key things is how big is your market and how much money do you need to address that market adequately? In our case, we looked at, yeah, this is an opportunity to take some funding for this kind of start up because we felt like the market was big enough to support that. But I think one of the factors to consider is you're going to be getting a big chunk of money and what are you going to do with that money? You're going to go and do some sales or some marketing with it and you need to have a market to address to actually use that money for that marketing or that sales effort. Right? I think that's question number one is what kind of marketer are we going after? And does it respond well to having a boatload of cash to go after it?
Starr: I think that was something that we were seriously doubting too. We were seriously doubting whether or not our market was big enough to support this model. Right? And many of our competitors went ahead and raised funding and they have done very well. Many of them are bigger than us and that's fine. More power to them. But I think this interesting thing is happening where a lot of our competitors now are kind of being forced, I assume, to almost pivot away from error monitoring, error tracking, which is our bread and butter into this whole application performance metrics space. Because that's where New Relic is. That's where the companies that make real money are, whereas sort of individual error tracking like we do is, I'm wondering if maybe it was just a little bit too small of a market for the people. What did you think?
Ben: Yeah, I wonder if at that might be the case. Sentry is definitely going to the APN thing. I haven't seen any word from Rollbar if they're making any changes, but you could say that error tracking is more of a feature than a product. Right? If you look at it that way and you can say, "Oh, I need a bigger product then to sell into the larger organizations to make those revenues that I need to get to help make the VCs happy with it." Revenue people.
Josh: Yeah. Well you also think about, we talked about the size of the market and markets are not usually unlimited in size. We've all been at this for a while, 10 years now. I think we've been in it for for seven but error tracking is kind of a thing has been around for 10, 15 years. I think there's a good chance that if you're VC funded and you've got these investors that are expecting constant returns, you're going to hit the top of that market eventually and then they're gonna want you to go somewhere. They want you to keep growing. You still have to keep growing if you've hit the, you've completely consumed your market. Right?
Starr: Yeah, exactly. 'Cause these people demand just constantly rocket ship growth. And some companies can do that. Google did that. Yeah. The total number of applications out there that need error monitoring is finite. And if that market is saturated, if you, even if you like dominate that market, eventually it's, that's not going to be good enough because you're going to plateau and you've got to keep growing to keep those investors happy.
Ben: Yeah. I think the end point, the end game in that scenario when you do get addressed as much as the market as you possibly can and that growth stops is acquisition, right? The return comes from selling that company to a larger company. So maybe they company gets sold to IBM or some deep pocketed technology company that could roll that feature or that product up into their offerings that they can then take to the rest of their customers.
Starr: Yeah, that's true. So what do you actually give up? What type of control do you give up when you take funding? Because just because somebody gives you some money, it doesn't mean they necessarily have control over your company. It seems like maybe over time investors can gain more, if a company isn't just amazingly going gangbusters, where it immediately generates all the capital it needs to expand, it seems like investors kind of over time get more and more control over what's going on. Right?
Ben: Well, it's like the variation on the golden rule, right? He who has the gold makes the rules. If you have to keep going back to the well as a company, if you've taken money and you can get to profitability and you can't get the growth that you need and you have to go back to investors and say, "Hey, I need some more money." Well, additional conditions may come into play and that's really what it's all about. What terms? Right. Because someone will give you 1 million bucks with no strings attached. Hey, take it.
Starr: I know, right? Can you believe the Jason Fried thing from MicroConf? How Jeff Bezos is a minority and Jeff Bezos is a minority investor in Basecamp and he has no control. He has no power. He just gave him some money and they didn't even use it to expand the company. They just took it for themselves.
Josh: Taking money off the table was, I think, was the term he used, which ...
Starr: I know.
Josh: Which I love. Yeah.
Starr: 'Cause there are so many people just wanting to do that with everybody's business. They just want to give you money to ...
Josh: Well, I think the reason that ... he said that they took that money is one reason that I think is probably a good reason for, in some cases, take money off the table, which means that they were, they had this risk that they were putting all this time and effort into this company and they weren't quite sure, they didn't know for sure if it was going to be a huge success or if it was going to eventually go away. And since they weren't taking funding and looking for a big exit, taking this money and kind of just putting it into their savings account meant they were kind of getting some of the benefit upfront of having that success in case that you know something, it, did it work out in the future.
Starr: Oh yeah. It sounds great.
Josh: Yeah. So if you're listening, Jeff ...
Starr: I know. I'm just wondering what's the pay off for Jeff? Why do you do this? Did he just want to be one of the cool kids because Rails was taking off at the time? Where's his pay off?
Josh: I don't know. I don't think Jason got that far.
Starr: He gets his distributions of the profit of course.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: I can't imagine he cares about that.
Josh: I don't know. He's an investor. I guess every little bit counts.
Starr: Yeah. But I guess what we're getting at is that most investors want a little bit more control. They don't just want to give you a pile of money and have you use it to buy yourself a sports car. So imagine you're a little start up and you raise an angel round. Right? Well those angel investors aren't going to take 75% of your company, hopefully. They'll, I don't know, take 10%, 15% and then okay, that's fine, so then you need to grow so you need some more money and you issue some more stock and you keep going back for more and more rounds and over time basically you sell off the company bit by bit to fund it, but that leaves the people who founded it with less and eventually you can get less, have less control and maybe even lose control of the company if you don't have a majority of the stock.
Ben: I think that's the key. And one of the talks we had at MicroConf talked about that. Chris at Wistia talked about how they went to, they got the debt so they could buy out their investors. They can have that 100% control. Again, I think the moral of the story is if you own the company and you're profitable and you can do whatever you want for as long as you want, right? You've got an infinite runway. The only problem is when those things aren't true, right? We have to start giving up control to get the money 'cause you're not profitable. And I think we decided from day one that we wanted to optimize for profitability so that we could be in control. That was our whole goal.
Josh: You said that sales and marketing were big...are big factors when you are considering taking money in the beginning. You can do a lot more of them with a lot more money. Hiring's also a big deal. Right? Or, too, right? Usually, what I see companies starting out and they take a, they get a VC round or something. Then they just start hiring like crazy. Even ahead of the actual, they might not actually need all these people, but they're assuming that they will if they're successful, which is they have to be successful. And for us that was, I don't, I think we were all three developers and we were comfortable building, we didn't think we were going to need 50 people right off the bat to build an error tracker and not to mention our whole model of product development is kind of the opposite of that. We're lean and agile, so you can't really, it's harder to be agile when you have 15 people sitting around on their hands looking for something to do.
Starr: We obviously chose to go the the bootstrap route. Three of us own the company completely. As a result of that. What have we gotten from that? What have we lost from that? Lets be negative first. So first of all, we have given up some growth. We're a smaller company.
Josh: Yeah. Potentially a lot of growth. I think too, if we're being honest. We've seen the market is big, so if we had had a ton of money in the beginning to to go after it, we'd probably be a lot bigger than we are now.
Starr: We've had to keep things small intentionally, right? We can't really do a ton of big new projects and stuff, but what have been the, the positive outcomes of this?
Ben: Well, we get to determine what our workday is gonna look like, right? We get to determine what our roadmap is gonna look like. We get to make all the choices because we're in 100% control. We've chosen the king option over the be rich option.
Starr: Just to round out the picture of funding. One other thing that we briefly touched on but we haven't really talked about is this idea of debt. And I know that we all started out very sort of anti debt because you get this idea of, well, I think all of us had been very scared of taking on too much consumer debt in our lives. Personally, I've come around to the idea, even though we haven't taken on any corporate debt, I'm much more sort of friendly to the idea then than I used to be. If we knew that if we ran say a certain Google ad campaign, like an AdWords ad campaign and we were getting 200% ROI on it and we knew that we could scale it, we just needed $50,000, yeah, I'd be all about that. Let's go borrow $50,000 from the bank.
Josh: Yeah. I think I'd agree with that. Especially in that case, the results are kind of measurable and you can see the money come back progressively over time. I think that makes total sense. It's a lot different from just taking debt because you want something.
Starr: I feel like this is a big step for us. I feel like we're really becoming more sophisticated on air.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know.
Starr: While people are listening.
Josh: Yeah. I've been very anti, I am very anti consumer debt.
Ben: Regarding the debt question, when we started out we didn't want to do that. We didn't fund the start up with credit cards. Right? We funded it with our own sweat equity and going to a bank really would not have been an option because the business had not existed. There were no revenues, there's no history. Now we're in a different place. A bank, I think, would be happy to give us some cash because yeah, we do have revenues and unless an act of God happens, the business isn't going going away tomorrow. Right? There'll be revenues tomorrow just like there were yesterday. Right? Yeah, we're definitely in a stronger position on that front. So yeah, I think taking on debt at this point is not that much of a risk.
Starr: No, but we have a business. We could totally do a bait and switch on them.
Josh: I have always kind of wanted to start a food truck. So maybe we'll ...
Starr: There you go.
Josh: Honeybadger food truck.
Starr: Well, what would we have?
Josh: I want to start an oatmeal, because I really like oatmeal but it's usually boring. Art as an oatmeal truck.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: Hear me out. Hear me out.
Starr: Sell me on this.
Josh: We've got a name. It's called Rollin' Oats.
Starr: Okay.
Josh: And you'd have all kinds of special, you'd get to pick all your own toppings. Yeah. It wouldn't be your regular, your normal morning oatmeal, Starr.
Ben: One of the things I thought was interesting, and this wasn't on our agenda, but just an aside, I can't not say it, was, we had calls from investors in the early days of Honeybadger. For some reason when we started Honeybadger and Sentry was starting out and Rollbar was starting out about the same time, there was this just this food, I don't know what you call it, but the sector was hot.
Starr: Feeding frenzy.
Ben: Yeah! A feeding frenzy. That's good. That's what I was thinking. The investors were just pouring money into this space of development tools. For some reason it just was really hot at that time. Right? And so just by being virtue, by the virtue of being in the space with a product at the time we were interesting to investors. We never sought any, they sought out us.
Ben: I fielded these calls on a regular basis and we always said, "Well, tell me what you're gonna offer. It doesn't sound that interesting. We want to do it our own. Thanks very much and we'll circle back in a year." Because they always want to circle back in a year. So we got, I don't know, four years into it, I guess, and still getting the occasional call. But I had told people no enough times that they eventually just stopped calling. But I remember this one call in particular ... they did the same into. Like "This is what we're about. We'd like to talk to you about Honeybadger and blah, blah blah." And they said, "Well, how are you doing?" Like, "Well, there's still three co-founders. We're profitable. We've been around for five years now." And I remember this one guy just, when he heard that and he's like, "Oh, well then you don't need us." Right? And it just felt like it really, at that point, is when the first time I felt like they're just praying on the weak, right?
Starr: Oh yeah.
Ben: They're looking for people who are in distress or have run out of money or are really up against the wall. And when they realize, you know what? You've been in business for five years and you're profitable, there's really nothing that we have to offer you. You figured it out. Right? Basically.
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: To me, that was an eye opening, once you get to the point where you're making money on a consistent basis and basically you figured it out, although you'd never really do completely figure it out. But once you get to that point, you don't need that anymore, you're good to go. And if you can get to that point on your own, boom, you're golden.
Starr: Oh, totally. And there's so many, man, there's so many sharks out there in the water, looking for these distressed companies. I'm not going to say their name because I'm not sure if I would get sued because we have an NDA and stuff, but we were pursued for acquisition by a fairly well known company and the developer tools sector and it eventually turned out they were pursuing us as if we were this distressed company as opposed to a frickin' wonderful growing fierce, beautiful ...
Josh: Kick ass.
Starr: Kick ass, bootstrap company and yeah, and so it was this weird disconnect because they were just like, "Yeah, we're just going to cut all your users loose. We just want your code base." And we're like, "But we have all this profit. What are you even talking about?"
Josh: Yeah, that should have been a flag to us.
Starr: I know.
Josh: Yeah, how could this be true? It sounds too good to be true. I guess it was too good to be true, but it's like they didn't have a playbook for companies that actually had profit and customers. Yeah. They just didn't know what to do with it. So that was kind of a funny, it was weird because they were having, they got, we had these discussions at one point, where like, "Okay, so what do we actually do with all of our actual revenue?" 'Cause it's not like it was not necessarily big enough to be super interesting to them, but it's, who throws revenue away? I mean that's crazy.
Starr: I know. Our revenue was maybe a tenth, 10% of their revenue the previous year or something. It's not crazy bad.
Josh: Right.
Ben: It might've been closer to a 1%.
Starr: 1% well, I said the previous year because they were on a growth trajectory, Ben. But still.
Josh: They're 10 X-ing, Ben. Come on.
Ben: Every day.
Starr: Yeah, so it's just such a weird environment and also at MicroConf, there were all these investors just kind of circling, mingling. You could kind of spot them because they were dressed a little bit better than everybody else. They looked a little bit more expensive. They're a little bit more smooth talking and just kind of mingling. Just like you do 'cause they're just interested in the space. They're just really fascinated by people who make these small companies and how they do it. It's just so amazing to them.
Ben: Funny you should say that there are some people who are just interested in the space. There are actually some investors who are private equity investors, I guess I should be clear, who actually do run companies pretty well after they acquire them. There are those that acquire, roll up a number of SaaS or small e-commerce companies and purchase them from the creator or from the operator, whoever has started the business because, typically, the answer, the reason is I just got kind of bored of the business or I got tired of running it or it's just not what I want to do now. And so they'll buy the business from the owner, the owner has cash in hand and goes away happy and the acquirer just keeps running the business and that, there are a few of those at MicroConf as well and I've seen that work out fine. That's an option too. If you're running at a revenue generating business and you're kind of just done, then you can sell it to one of these guys and they'll run it for you.
Josh: Yeah, I think it kind of, for me, it would depend on how much revenue we're talking about. I'm not going to throw away Honeybadger's revenue just because I'm bored. I'll just find someone else to do my job and go on vacation or something. But yeah, I could see if I had a side SaaS or something, like a lot of people do and it's not my main thing or maybe it is, but I'm just tired of it and it's really, it's a grind to get the growth to get it to where I want to go. That seems like it would be an attractive offer that could work out well.
Starr: None of this stuff is absolute and I mean honestly I don't even know what I'm talking about about a lot of this stuff. We've been bootstrapped for so long that we've seen a lot of action around funding and around how this stuff plays out. But we don't really have the inside perspective of a lot of it.
Ben: Yeah. I think that's, that's a good point to make. 'Cause we made our decision based on our personal preferences. We didn't want to have a boss, we wanted to be in control. And so that's what we know. None of us have run VC backed companies, right? We don't really know how the other half lives. We just know that this worked for us for this time, for this product.
Starr: Yeah. We're simple men really.
Ben: We really are.
Starr: Okay. Is there anything else you guys would like to talk about? Alright, well, I'll talk to you guys later and I'll see you in Slack and have a good one.
Announcer: FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at www.Honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to www.FounderQuestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
The guys dish about their experiences at MicroConf. Ben talks about entrepreneurial ADD, Josh explains why the "good old days" at Honeybadger are now, and Starr challenges younger developers to a coding battle royale. There is also a preview of Badgercon (pending wildlife insurance procurement).
Full Transcription:
Ben: ... and now Ikea, they're coming out with a blind that's going to be home kit enabled, so we can be like, Hey, Siri, open the blinds.
Josh: So you can have the Vegas experience at home.
Ben: That's right.
Starr: Oh my god guys, I can't believe you've been holding back on me. Maybe I would have gone to more MicroConfs if I would have known there would have been some James Bond automatic blind situation happening.
Announcer: They've been in business for seven years, and they still don't know what they're doing. I guess a podcast seemed natural. Here's FounderQuest.
Starr: I really enjoyed going the MicroConfs with you guys. It was a lot of fun getting to see everybody, getting to be there with Ben Findley and stuff. It was pretty intense in terms of conferences. I feel like everybody there is way more extroverted than I am, but I got my little connections and networking in.
Ben: I guess it's probably overall more extroverted than your typical developer conference because a lot of people there are interested in running their own business, and they're already down with the idea of doing marketing and sales. They are more out there than your typical developer might be.
Starr: Yeah. So, there's two additions right? The starter edition, and the growth edition. The growth edition happens first, which is where you mostly have people like us who already have small businesses, and are reasonably successful. The starter edition comes after that, that's people who are looking to start something up from scratch, and maybe haven't done it before. I wonder if the starter edition captures most of the introverts.
Ben: That could be.
Starr: Okay. Let's talk a little about the conference itself. MicroConf is a business conference that focuses on term, micro-size businesses. That means anything from zero employees, you're just starting out as a one person developer. It is a very developer heavy conference. Lots of people there are devs. It could be from zero employees, up to, the large people there maybe have 50 to 100 employees, but that's getting up there. Us, as a five person company, I would say we are pretty normal there. Right?
Ben: Yeah, I think we fall on the bigger size.
Starr: Oh really?
Ben: Yeah, I think most people there are probably a company of one or two.
Starr: Wow. I'm not used to being the big dog.
Ben: Yeah it's kind of crazy.
Starr: How long have you guys been doing this? Ben you've been doing this for decades at this point?
Josh: He's going to be there soon.
Ben: Yeah, I think I started in 2011. I was there at the first one. Its been a lot of fun. The first one was kind of neat because you know the lean methodology right? Where you go out and you find the customers first, and then you build whatever they want. Rather than making the product first. The lean methodology was really hot in 2011. So, when they first started MicroConf they were like, do you know what, we don't even know if anybody is going to want to do this, and we don't know if anybody is going to show up. They totally advertised the conference before it even existed, just to see if there was interest. When people we signing up, it was like oh, we should probably put on this conference. So, Rob and Mike gathered everything together and it was a lot of fun. It was at the Rio, or the Hot Rock I can't remember which one.
Starr: Yeah. This one was in Vegas.
Ben: Yeah, it was in Vegas. It's been going on since 2011. They actually added European ones as well. I haven't been to any of those. Every six months there is a MicroConf, either in Europe or in Vegas.
Starr: When it started out it was this kind of revelation. It was this scrappy little thing. People were figuring out, okay well we have this new world we are living in, where you have Ruby, you have Rails, you have Heroku. All these things that allow people to make a software business with very few people, as long as you know how to make software. People were sort of figuring this out and it felt very exciting. Well I didn't go to the first one, but I was sort of in the scene, I was around. And this one was good, but you could tell it's been around for a while. It is a little bit more stable. Most of the people who we met there, and who we hung out with, we've met there and hung out with at other MicroConfs. It's not bad, but how do you guys think it has changed over the years? You've been to more than I have.
Josh: I was going to mention that, as Ben said, it started out kind of small and grew. Up until recently it was just a single track. I guess it's always been a single track conference, and it still it, but we mentioned they recently split it into two separate events. There's the growth and the starter. We are in the growth now. I have a suspicion that the starter would feel more familiar to us because that's where we spent more of our time in the beginning of MicroConf.
Starr: Okay, that's a good point. Maybe the people in the starter are getting that new conference experience, like this is all new and exciting for them
Josh: I would assume that a lot of the people at growth have been there for a while if they have a successful business. Or at least in our case, that's the case.
Starr: I can see why they split the conference into two because after you've been going to the equivalent of the starter edition for a while, it's all similar stuff. You're like, okay that's great you're telling me how to validate market, but I've already validated my market, I've got customers, I just need to figure out how to get more of them. That's good.
Starr: Let's not just spend all of our time playing the grumpy old man talking about how things were better when you're younger. Before we were so jaded by reality but hard business, facts, and life. What did you guys really like about MicroConf this year?
Ben: I think the best part of MicroConf is the people that are there. Hanging out with my tribe, really.
Starr: Yeah?
Ben: Meeting other entrepreneurs, other people who are really into both technology and business. You don't find that crowd around very much. You go to a developer conference, you are meeting a lot of developers, obviously. That intersection of developers that care about business at a technical conference can be very small, but at MicroConf it is huge. Almost everyone there is into both. It's a lot of fun hanging out with people who are doing the same thing you're doing. To me that's the best part, meeting up with people that I've been keeping track of for the past 10 years and seeing how their businesses are progressing, and learning from what they've learned, commiserating about mistakes made. That's to me, the really awesome part about MicroConf.
Starr: I agree, it's really fun to be able to talk to people who are doing the similar stuff that you are. Let me tell you boys, I've never felt so completely enclosed in a demographic before. I was sitting there watching the speaker, looking around the room, and I'm like, everyone here looks exactly like me, exactly the same age as me. I never seen so many balding, shaved head men in a room trying to rock the Jason Statham look, and not really succeeding. That's sort of how I view myself.
Josh: I think you're succeeding Starr.
Starr: Well thank you, I've got this beautiful shirt so that's helping.
Starr: It's just so strange being around because you go to tech conference, and tech conferences are very monotone. There's lots of white guys and everything. I'm usually the old guy in the room. I'm usually not quite fitting in, even though nobody questions my right to be there. But this time it was just really bizarre how median I felt.
Josh: So you're saying if you're a aging software developer, that MicroConf could be a good career path for you.
Starr: I'm not sure I would say I'm an aging software developer, I would say I have an excellent vintage.
Josh: That sounds better.
Starr: We're maturing.
Ben: That's interesting. When I was getting started in my career, I would look forward and see there's definite ageism in tech. Right? The older you get, the more skeptical the looks are when people are trying to evaluate whether or not you're really skilled. I thought about that, like when I was in my 20s I was like, okay what am I going to be doing in my 40s? Then I started making some plans, like if I have to age out of tech then I think I want to go get a law degree. Ill go to law school, and I'll become lawyer and go into intellectual property law or something like that. I ended up not doing that plan at all. Instead I ended up founding my own business. Maybe there's something there, some connection, like the reason why you're seeing a bunch of people about your age, or about your style, is that they're all like, I'm doing my own thing so I'm not subject to the whims of ageism that might be out there.
Josh: Yeah. I always thought that building your own business is like, you get to solve similar challenges to software development in a lot of ways. It scratches that itch a little bit for me too. Maybe there is something there.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: That's interesting. I've also spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I've just decided, you know screw it. I'm going to be loud and proud. I'm an old man, great you can come look at my wrinkles, I'll still code circles around you. I don't care. Come on, let's do this.
Josh: Just get a gold plated walking stick, you know?
Starr: Yeah, come on children. Let's rumble, let's see who comes out on top.
Josh: That story Ben tells about how he had a back up plan of becoming an attorney when he was 40, in his 20s. That is why Ben is in charge of our infrastructure. He always has a back up plan. Back up plans are good when you're running a traffic heavy application.
Starr: That's true. Did I ever tell you guys I took the LSAT? I sat for the LSAT?
Josh: I think so. That was really cool. That surprised me.
Starr: I haven't told the listeners.
Josh: I mean, no! Tell us, Starr!
Starr: You guys didn't get the memo about presentation. So, after i got my chemistry degree, my bachelors. I was casting around, didn't know what to do. Was looking into law school because at that time lawyers made a lot of money, but I guess a lot of people had that same thought. Economics and the invisible hand had something to say about that. I studied, I took the LSAT and everything, and it was the weirdest thing. I didn't really feel particularly good at it. I didn't feel like I did particularly good, but I ended up getting a 99 percentile. At the time I took the test I had decided I was not going to law school, but you know I paid 100 bucks for the test, and at that time 100 bucks was a lot of money. It was a serious investment, so I was like, well I'm just going to take this and, whatever, come what may, let's see what happens.
Starr: I think that is the power of not being nervous in a room where everyone around you is sweating bullets. It was the strangest experience of my life because I was just sitting there completely relaxed and happy, and everyone around me was so intensely terrified. They could see their future hanging in the balance. That doesn't have anything to do with tech, but it is an interesting story. Plus I get to humble brag that I got 99 percentile, and I didn't even want to do it.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: If I put my mind to something, think of what I could do.
Josh: You ended up making more money than a lawyer in the Midwest anyways. It's all good.
Starr: I think I might make similar money to a lawyer in the Midwest. We'll see.
Ben: On that note, I think one of the things that is interesting about MicroConfs in particular, it wasn't so much much this time as it has been in years past, but the focus of MicroConf, the micropreneur, the solo entrepreneur community that's been built up around MicroConf is too be able to support your life, and your family, and the things that are important to you. As opposed to maximizing for revenue. Right? The message has consistently been, we're in this to be able to do the things that are important to us, like spending time with our family, or travel the world. As oppose to, I want that billion dollar exit. Right?
Ben: We've definitely taken that approach in our business. We have a similar kind of mindset, like we are in this to support our lives. We are not here to slave away, it's not like we can have a lottery ticket that makes us multimillionaires so we can have that private jet to the private island. Right? I mean, we wouldn't turn those things down but that hasn't been our goal. That's one of the things that is really interesting about the MicroConf crowd. Is that pretty much everyone there is on board with that idea.
Ben: In previous years, every speaker would have a slide that had a picture of their family. They're like, yeah this is why we are doing this. That wasn't as much there this year, maybe it fell out of trendiness, but still I think that thought is there. That we do this not necessarily for maximizing our income, but for maximizing the joy that we have in our life.
Josh: I liked Jason Fried, who did a Q&A at MicroConf this year. I really liked what he had to say about how they optimize for profit at Basecamp versus optimizing for revenue. Which kind of helps them run a stable business and give everyone a really good salary, and plan for a sustainable long term, versus always chasing the next way to make a dollar. When I was thinking about how that applies to us because we've always talked about optimizing for profit, I don't know I think we have put it different. I think of us as optimizing for freedom or independence, over profit. You can still work 60 hour weeks in search of profits, and I don't think we are about that. We are not about that at all, we're more about, do we have to work at all? Or if we don't feel like it, maybe we want to go out for a bike ride or do something else, hang out with our families.
Starr: Yeah, it took me forever to realize that I am not morally obligated to make as much money as humanly possible. Which you wouldn't think that you have to realize that because it's obvious, but for some reason, I don't know. One thing Jason Fried also said, that really bumped him up a couple notches in my estimation, is when he was asked something like,
Starr: "How would you do it again? How would you do a start up if you wanted the same level of success that you currently have?" he basically said, "I don't know." He said, "The reason that we got so successful was mostly luck, and timing." He said the reason why he is so intent on pushing base camp as a single product entity is because he doesn't really have much faith that he could equal that success with something else. I thought that was really honest, and it seems very real to me because having been involved in a small business myself, Honeybadger. I think a lot of our success if due to luck, and timing. We can try, and find another way wave, and be lucky and have good timing again, but it's not really something you can decide to do.
Josh: Yeah. One of the things he said, I think it was in relation to selling. Someone asked him, "Would you ever sell Basecamp?" Because it's kind of the template to, you sell, you have a big exit, and then you go and grind, and build the next thing and try to sell that too. The thing he said was, "I don't want to lose the good old days." You know, you don't know if you sell your company, and you have a good thing going now, you don't know that you're going to get that back. If you do, it will be with a ton of hard work, and sweat, and toil. So, I kind of like that, and I feel like we're still in the good old days with Honeybadger.
Starr: We're definitely in the good old days.
Josh: Yeah totally.
Starr: That Happy Days. Who's the Fonz?
Josh: I think you're the Fonz Starr.
Starr: Aaaayyyy! Yeah. I'm not cool enough to be the Fonz though.
Josh: Well I think you could be though, I think you're getting there.
Starr: One thing that I noticed was kind of this trend, and it crossed several MicroConf talks. Was this, okay we built this company, here's some thing that haven't gone right, maybe we expected to built a billion dollar company, and we didn't. This is really interesting to me because a lot of the time when you start out, well I don't know about you guys, but when we started out I was like, yeah lifestyle business, optimize for happiness and all this stuff. But secretly there's a little voice inside my head that was like, you know what you're still going to be freakin' rich. You're still going to get the yacht, and the iron man suit. I mean, let me tell you. At least with this business, that's not going to happen. We make a nice living, we have a great lifestyle, and everything. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but we aren't making Jeff Bezos. Our lifestyles are a rounding error. Jeff Bezos pays more in tips in a year than we make, probably.
Josh: I don't know Starr. There are some pretty cheap yachts out there. They don't all have to be shiny. You could get a budget yacht.
Starr: Do they have inflatable yachts?
Josh: I'm sure they have something, yeah.
Starr: Like a Zodiac or something? Oh yeah, okay.
Josh: Yeah we could totally have zodiacs.
Starr: How about one of those big swamp things? You know how they have those swamps, big fans in the back.
Josh: Yeah I'm trying to remember the name of those. Yeah. I've ridden in one before.
Starr: What?
Josh: Yeah, I kinda grew up in a swamp, but yeah.
Starr: What? You grew up in a swamp?
Josh: My family grew up in Sacramento Valley, wetlands area in California and they would ride those boats around sometimes.
Starr: Were there gators?
Josh: No, we don't have gators out there.
Starr: There's no gators. It's not a swamp josh, I'm sorry. Stop trying to appropriate swamps.
Josh: It's mostly muskrats to be honest.
Starr: I don't know, business is a brutal reality, and it will crush you on the shore. The waves of business will crush you on the shore, and then you have to figure out what you're going to do with your crushed, little shattered, broken dreams. That's when some real growth maybe happens with you as a person, and you realize that maybe you're dreams weren't actually you're dreams, they were just some bulls*** that you somebody told you, you should believe. I think business is very interesting because it really forces you to confront your desires in your life, and how your desires match up with your willingness to do work. Right? Because we all want to be rich, but I'm not going to put in 80 hour weeks to become rich. I don't care. I'm not going to do that. I want to see my daughter. So yeah, there was that sort of feel, which I thought was really cool, and interesting, and honest.
Josh: One of the highlight for me from MicroConf was the mixer at the end. Since they switched to the growth/starter kind of two track thing, and people don't often get to see each other because before it was all one thing, but now some people might go to growth, and some might go to starter, but they don't go to both. They do a mixer on the last night of growth, which is technically the night before starter. They do a networking events where both conferences can get together and mingle, and network. That's kind of been one of my favorite things over the last couple years. Since I haven't been able to go to starter because I can't handle Vegas for that long, it's nice to see some of those people and also to meet some of the new people that are just getting started. They are, where we were five, six years ago. It's nice to be able to talk to them. I feel like I can be a lot more helpful, than I can to someone who has got a 50 person company.
Starr: What were some hot tips that you gave the aspiring young business people?
Josh: Oh I don't know. I don't really give out hot tips. I kind of just listen.
Ben: I was asked by one of those attendees, "What kind of lessons learned would you share?" It just so happened that I had been thinking the last couple days that topic. One thing that stuck with me was that doing something that you really enjoy is very helpful because you've been at this for seven years, and we've had ups and down, and they've been some pretty exciting times, and some long slogs. Having a mission, like where we care about what we're doing, like we really care about making developer's lives better, and building a tool that developers love. That really helps. The day to day, the ups and downs, ad getting through the slogs.
Ben: He was asking, I could do this or I could do that because a lot of entrepreneurs I think you'll find have this entrepreneurial ADD. You have five days, you have five different businesses you could work on, and he we was telling me about the ideas he had, and they all sounded good. I said, "The one thing I would tell you is that find the one that you really think you'll enjoy working on." Not that you have to have a passion per se, because some people say you have to do your passion, but I don't necessarily believe that.
Ben: If you have two options, and one of them is something that you enjoy and one of them is like, meh it could make money... I would go with the option one. That's going to help keep you going much better than the money at end of the rainbow.
Starr: I would even add to that and say that even if you think the option that you don't enjoy is going to make money, maybe still go with the option you'll enjoy because frankly none of us are very good at predicting what is going to make money. Let's be real. If you're going to succeed, succeed in something you enjoy. If you're going to fail, you might as well have a good time while the ships going down.
Josh: I think even just being able to focus on something for a sustained period of time is kind of a success factor too. A lot of the time if you're not interested in what you're working on, you're not going to want to keep working on it. Being interested in what you're working on helps you keep the focus over the long term.
Starr: How long did you guys stay at that mixer? I cut out early because I was exhausted.
Ben: We stayed until nine-ish, I think.
Josh: Yeah that's our usual. The audio levels tend to raise progressively as the night goes on, and I think 9:30, 10 is usually when Ben and I hit our limit.
Starr: Okay, you stayed like an hour, hour and a half after I left.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: That's not too bad.
Ben: Usually my limiting factor is my voice. Because of the volume always going up you have to speak louder, and louder, and basically I'm yelling at people for an hour straight. Right? So I'm just done after a while.
Starr: Oh totally. You guys liked the closing mixer, but I like the opening mixer because my problem at conferences is I'm an extreme introvert. I can be friendly with people, but I only have an hour of friendliness in me per day. Something like a conference where you're just constantly interacting with people all the time, by the end of the conference that gets down to maybe 10 minutes a day. So, I just need to crawl back into my cave and be in the dark, and fondle my precious ring or whatever. I really enjoyed the opening mixer, I feel like I met a lot of cool people. I met the guy who does the art of product, podcast-
Josh: Yeah, Ben.
Starr: Yeah, Ben. He was really cool. I met Eric from LessFilms.
Josh: Yes, LessFilms.
Starr: Eric is from Florida, and he will talk your ear off about Florida, and by the end of the night you'll want to go to Florida. He is literally the nicest, friendliest man I think I have ever met.
Josh: Yeah, I like Eric.
Ben: We should totally relocate to Panama City.
Starr: Oh, my mortgage would be a lot less.
Ben: That's for sure.
Josh: Yeah, so speaking about Eric. One of the coolest things that I have done at any MicroConf, or at least in Vegas is the pinball hall of fame. I had no idea that this place existed, but it was a mile or two up I think Tropicana Boulevard. But yeah, it's a couple miles up the street from the Tropicana, where the MicroConf is hosted, and it looks like it's in an abandoned shopping center. There are no signs or anything, there is an open sign above the door, but that's pretty much it. But you walk in, and it is wall to wall vintage pinball machines. Some dating back to the 50s, and a lot of them are in great working condition so you can go and play a lot of them. That was a lot of fun.
Starr: Yeah, I'm so jealous that I missed that. I love pinball.
Josh: Yeah, I know you do. We will definitely have to go. Maybe all three of us will go back next year if we happen to be there. Definitely will be going back to that.
Starr: The main thing we did at MicroConf is we launched this heckin' podcast guys!
Josh: Yeah!
Starr: Good job.
Josh: Go us! You can put in some clapping, or some crowd audio effects there.
Starr: Yeah, totally I just have those on a button.
Josh: Yeah, a Kramer. From Kramer. We could get you a little keyboard or something with some sounds effects, if you want.
Ben: Yeah, we can get you a sound board.
Josh: For sure.
Starr: Really? Really? You will come to regret that decision sir.
Josh: This is why we do what we do, because we are the boss. We can get you a sound board with fart noises if we want to.
Starr: We'd be doing a podcast in six months where we talk about our biggest mistakes, and that would be one of them.
Josh: Yeah, but you know anything is worth trying, right? Because you just never know how it's going to turn out. So, it's all about experimenting.
Starr: Ideation. So, okay.
Josh: Exactly.
Starr: Well it sounds like we all had a pretty good time, like I know I did. Did you guys have a good time?
Ben: Yeah, it was great.
Josh: Definitely.
Starr: Are you going to do it again?
Josh: Yeah, I think so. Ben and I talked about that. I think, like he said, you really go for someone that talks, but for what you really go for is the people and the relationships that you make while you're there, and over the years. I think it would be pretty hard not to go, and see all of the friends we've made, and make some new ones.
Starr: Yeah, if I go again next year I think I want to focus a lot more on this luxury, VIP, Spa experience.
Ben: Yeah, you can go for the penthouse suite next year.
Starr: Oh totally. So one thing I'm kind of tempted to do is maybe rent one of those places out for the night, and just have our own event there.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Maybe have a DJ, or something. I don't know. Can you have a DJ in your penthouse in Las Vegas.
Josh: I think you can do whatever you want.
Starr: It seems like we should be able to.
Ben: Can we have real, live Honeybadgers?
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Maybe we'll save that for later in the night.
Josh: You might need some special insurance, but I'm sure Honeybadger insurance exists in Vegas.
Ben: Well you know, we haven't made plans that extravagant before, so that would be new, but what we have done is set up a dinner before. This is my favorite MicroConf hack.
Starr: Any conference really.
Ben: Yeah, I guess you could go to any conference. You know what happens is, you get out of the conference at 5:30, and everyone is like, okay I'm hungry, I want to go eat. I go, and what's the nearest restaurant, and of course you're trying to do that with 200 of your closest friends trying to get into the closest restaurant. Right? I've found one thing that make a great experience for me is making a reservation at a restaurant. I know this is simple, but it's a mind blowing experience when you're hungry and you don't know where to go, like oh we already have a reservation for table of eight, let's just go over there. You sit down, you eat, it's amazing. So, I hardily recommend that to anybody, anytime.
Josh: Yeah, it makes it easier to get people to eat dinner with you too.
Starr: Yeah, it's pretty cool to be like, "Hey we're having this nice conversation, why don't you come to our table at dinner? Why don't we continue this over tapas?"
Starr: So I think yeah, we talked about this. I think the ultimate MicroConf experience for us would be to get rid of the talks, get rid of the trappings of the conference stuff, we just go play paintball with people, or go camping.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Starr: That would be so much fun because the funnest thing about this whole experience is hanging out with other people. If you could have a place where you had more opportunity to hang out with the interesting people, then that would be great.
Josh: I think you're talking about Badgercon.
Starr: Badgercon, yeah!
Josh: That's what I thought. Is that what we are talking about?
Starr: Badgercon 2020.
Josh: No I would totally be into a conference with some of the same type of people, like Ben said, like our tribe. That's just all about hanging out, and doing whatever we want.
Starr: Well this was fun, I enjoyed this. I think this will make a good episode because it was very conversational.
Announcer: FounderQuest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation. 360 degree coverage of errors. Outages in service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalogue, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. FounderQuest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week!
We originally sat down to discuss distractions and Yak Shaving. What emerged was more like group therapy for a team struggling to cope with a spate of JS dependency upgrades. We also discuss purchasing an ice cream truck. Buckle up!
Full Transcription:
Starr: So, I learned something amazing. Just before coming on here I learned something amazing. Okay, Beto O'Rourke, the presidential candidate, used to be a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, hacking group. In, yeah the 90's.
Josh: Wow.
Ben: Awesome.
Starr: I know!
Josh: Sold.
Announcer: Three developers. One mission. Build a business to nurture personal fulfillment. It's not stupid, it's Founder Quest.
Ben: It might have to go look for his byline, what the frack?
Starr: I know, I know, right? I used to read their reports from Def Con and all the conferences and stuff. I used to be like, man these guys are so cool, they're so much more mature than I am. I don't know how they got all the money and go to Las Vegas and do things when I'm 17 and have no job.
Josh: That's kinda how you feel about the guy who's running for president now probably.
Starr: Yeah, probably.
Josh: So, I guess not much has changed.
Starr: Oh, speaking of Yaks and blockers and all this stuff, we finally have our pod cast artwork as you saw.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: So we can now actually... This is episode number 6 of Founder Quest.
Josh: Is it? Wow.
Starr: And, yeah nobody's heard it, but me. Really.
Josh: I kinda like it like this, there's no pressure.
Starr: Yeah. Should we just keep saving them to drop box.
Josh: Yeah.
Josh: And that's it? I mean like... yeah that's cool with me.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: That's fine they can release them after we're like dead and famous.
Josh: Right, yeah.
Starr: It's like I didn't want to set up the web site because I don't know what colors the art work has in it and you have to have ... you know, you want to have them matched colors and stuff so.
Josh: Yeah, but know we can get the first one out?
Starr: Yeah, now we can start rolling em out. See what people think of em. In slack we've been talking all morning yesterday about all these blockers we have right, because when you're doing development on any sort of bigger project, you have this idea of the real work you want get to, like the feature work, and then you have the things that are preventing you from doing the real work. Sometimes you call that yak shaving because in order to, you want a sweater, but you know you need yarn to make the sweater, then you need wool to make the yarn and you eventually end up shaving a yak. I think that's what I
Starr: Yeah that sounds about right. Is this a false distinction you guys, you think there is a such thing as the real work?
Josh: You mean like does the real work exist, or is it all just yak shaving.
Starr: Yeah, does the real work exist?
Josh: I think you could make a case that it is yak shaving to an extent like anything you would do, would be blocking something else at least.
Starr: The reason I ask is I had this bit of an epiphany when I was struggling through some random webpacked stuff where I was like man what if this is all there really is, like what if this is it guys?
Josh: Kind of like an existential crisis.
Starr: Yeah, kind of, kind of. And it was fine like I was having a good time you know, just doing my webpack updates and everything, but this idea that we have some sort of mythical real work to do.
Josh: Well web development has become, feels like to me its become a lot more complex over the years, like I don't know, that could be an illusion too you know, computers have always been hard. But it feels like the amount of things that you have to do just to do web development in the first place, has increased. I don't know, what you, how you guys feel but that's how it feels to me.
Ben: Yeah, I can definitely agree with that, I mean it's not as simple as just drawing some HTML up on the webs you now, and having people see it, right?
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: So, yeah I think when you're building on anything, right, you have to deal with all the things you're building on top of.
Josh: Kind of like when we used to write HTML and then we had to write some PHP in our HTML.
Starr: So the three of us kind of, I don't know, came of age but we really enjoyed the rise of rails, and I wonder if that was maybe some sort of golden moment in which things became simple enough you could build an entire website, state-of-the-art website, with the skills of sort of one person, right? I remember working on rails projects and feeling like, man I've got this rail stuff down, it's like I can go over here write my ruby I just gotta make a few little views in HTML got some CSS, done, like I am a ninja at this stuff. But now it feels, you know, different. It's like okay, I can work on a feature in ruby for a while, and then I'm going to have to go and redo my JavaScript tooling to make JavaScript compile, because you know something happened and there's all this context switching that maybe there didn't used to be.
Josh: Yeah, and the pace of change again, especially I think with JavaScript tooling is sped up so much and everything's changing so rapidly that I think we have to go back and re-evaluate our tooling and that stuff more often.
Starr: Yeah you're working on something right now aren't you Josh, you're re-doing some of our code on our point library for JavaScript?
Josh: Yeah, I'm working on our Honeybadger.js or our Honeybadgerjs library for a big 1.0 release finally we've been pre 1.0 all this time, but-
Starr: Oh we're still not up to 1.0 yet.
Josh: No, I'm a big fan of semantic versioning and you don't really have to do it if you're not to 1.0 yet, so, you know that's a good way around it.
Ben: Yeah I think the JavaScript world has definitely made us deal with acceleration and the dependency management world I guess, like with rails, what I would appreciate is that they've taken kind of a measured approach, it has definitely changed over they years, but the change comes pretty slow. Like rails basically you know, every couple of years there's a major version, and you have to deal with that, right? But it seems like JavaScript libraries every couple months there's a major version, or one of the five things that you're working with has a major version, so there's always a major version change happening and you gotta rebuild it.
Josh: Yeah, the thing I'm working on now is, I've been trying to, I've done a bunch of features, like a feature work on the library, but it always seems to come back to when I have to work on our build tooling, or our CI continuous integration, is where I seem to spend the majority of my time especially since I don't develop this package all the time so I'll let it sit for a while then come back to it and do a bunch of work on it so usually by the time I get back to it, things have kind of moved on in a lot of ways and there tends to be things that I need to kind of troubleshoot to bring up to modem standards again.
Starr: Yeah I'm feeling the same, the same thing. Maybe a year ago I converted all of our Coffeescript to ES6, and I'm really glad I did it and as part of that we have webpack now in our sort of build system. And in addition to webpack, we have a lot of webpack, we have a lot of dependencies, so recently we use this thing called Dependabot to see any if any of our dependencies are out of date, they have security problems with them, stuff like that. It opens a PR in GitHub and, I guess it was Ben, turned this on for JavaScript and so suddenly we have a ton of dependencies that are out of date, and I've been sort of working through those.
Starr: It's a little but rough, one thing I find that is really different between the sort of JavaScript dependencies and ruby dependencies, is that with the ruby dependencies it seems like, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't really done a ton of them but it seems like okay, it's a new version of the gem, you update maybe you have to change your code a little bit but that's it, but one thing I'm finding with these JavaScript dependencies is that the Dependabot way of upgrading each one individually and then opening a new PR for each upgrade, is kind of difficult because you have to upgrade all these things at once for them to work together or else you're just screwed because they're all so tightly interconnected.
Ben: I haven't dealt much with the JavaScript dependencies so I can't say the differences between them and the ruby side, but yeah, definitely I agree that the ruby dependencies are usually pretty independent of each other, right? You can upgrade this gem and not that gem.
Josh: Yeah, and there's a lot fewer of them typically.
Starr: I wonder how big our node module directory is?
Ben: I have back in the dark days where rails three, when you would have to update gems, I remember a number of times where I was like, okay just bundle update, and update everything at once and it was a mess.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: So maybe that's the same point we're at with JavaScript right now, where really to get a good update you have to update everything at the same time-
Josh: Yeah
Ben: And that's just a mess.
Josh: Yeah, and I think it also has a lot to do with how you lock your dependencies, and, I don't know what we're doing on that, and as well for JavaScript too, but that's also a ruby thing.
Starr: And one thing I'm finding with JavaScript dependency upgrades is that, well we sort of straddle two worlds, right? With Honeybadger with our front end, because we have on one hand all this modern tooling, we have a lot of JavaScript, but when we started building this, this was before react, this was before pretty much all the more modern ways of doing things with JavaScript, and so most of our code uses a sort of older paradigm using jQuery, updating the DOM and stuff, and it works fine, we've got it organized in a way that I'm very happy with.
Starr: One thing I'm finding is that because, we use, dependencies, that are from this sort of older time we're actually having some of them becoming sort of, abandon wear, and this is a bigger problem for us right now because I recently needed to upgrade jQuery to the latest major version, but we use jQuery Pjax which is a plug in, to give us this single page like, Turbolinks style behavior on our front end, and it just doesn't work with the new jQuery because it's abandoned, pretty much. So now, in order to update jQuery we have to migrate to turbo links, or some other more modern way of doing things, so it's just a backasswards way of working that's just incredibly frustrating at times because you just want to freakin build features-
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: And ship them, but yeah.
Josh: Well I remember back when Pjax was the hotness, that was well before turbo links, and I think it was, was it, it was GitHub that initially...
Starr: It was GitHub, yeah.
Josh: And initially, kind of started that whole way of doing, making kind of normal traditional web apps faster, with the Pjax and that's basically what got picked up and rolled into turbolinks.
Starr: Yeah maybe we should explain what this is, with Pjax and turbolinks, instead of having a single page application where you have a bunch of JavaScript that creates an application in the browser, what you do is, everything is still rendered server side, just like a traditional web application, but there's a little bit of JavaScript that goes in and when you click on a link, instead of fetching a whole new page, it intercepts that, and sends and an Ajax request to your backend, and the back end renders the new page, sends it to the front end and JavaScript is used to update and refresh the page. And that may sound like, not much of a change, but it actually results in significantly improved performance times, because you don't have to reparse all the JavaScript, you don't have to reparse all the CSS you're using. So its actually a really great compromise.
Josh: Yeah, I recently threw turbolinks onto my blog. You know it was already fast because it was basically just like HTML pages, but it created a noticeable improvement in the page load times, and all that, so, that was kind of a cool little thing. It's like three lines of code you just throw it in the page and its done. So, my blog is now a singe page app.
Starr: That's.... awesome?
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Well I mean it seems to be kind of the thing to do these days.
Starr: It is.
Josh: I know a lot of people who are converting their blogs to react and that sort of stuff, so I figured I'd have to you know, give it a try.
Starr: I published my personal blog on a xerox machine, so...
Josh: Oh, cool. You were saying kind of, how, dependencies, some dependencies tend to become abandoned ware or become outdated, and that's something that I've also been running into with this, Honeybadgerjs, the build system work because we use a build system called Grunt which is, it's a build system, it basically lets you create tasks that automate, things that you're doing when you're building the production JavaScript package.
Josh: It's kind of similar to Rake and Ruby, or Make even, but it has a bunch of packages, or plugins that have been developed for it, and I've been running into the same thing, where because Grunt is not the new hot build system anymore, there's a bunch of other ones like Gulp, and I'm sure like five others that are even more popular than that now, I keep running into packages that I want to use, but the last commit on them was like 2016, or I'm running across GitHub issues when I'm trying to figure out how, why somethings not working, and I check the date and its like 2013.
Starr: Ohhh.
Josh: So...
Starr: Those are the worst.
Josh: Yeah, so it's like do I use this stuff, because some of it actually works but its, unsupported obviously, but the only other alternative is set up a new build system, and re-do everything, and that in itself is a massive yak to shave, so I'm making yak trade offs. Like which yak do I want to shave, which one is bigger.
Starr: So they would say open source isn't free, and I guess this is one of the costs of open source.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah I guess the alternative would being that you're stuck with whatever your vendor tries to put on you right? And you know if things are dead they're like, you know tough, buy the new version.
Josh: Yeah, that's true.
Ben: But, I guess, a lot of web developers, don't remember the bad old days of building for a platform like windows, right? Where you only have one choice and that's whatever the vendor decides to give you.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: To give you. Like now, we have all this choice, and all these ways to be able to implement whatever we want, and so, I guess that's the cost, like Starr was saying, that's the cost of open source.
Starr: These problems we have are problems that more established products have, like we didn't have these problems when we were starting out because we didn't have this much code, we didn't have as much infrastructure, anything like that because we just built it all it was all relatively new, so I don't know I think we should maybe just ditch this one, start something new.
Josh: That sounds like a good solution.
Ben: Well you know one thing that's nice about dependabot, the thing I really enjoyed about that, is that it keeps you aware of the dependency changes, so you don't get so behind.
Ben: I think the real pain of abandonware is when you rely on something that hasn't been updated in three years, but you know if you notice, things are moving on, and you're only behind like three months, well that's not as quite as a painful update.
Starr: That's true.
Ben: And yeah, that's what I really like about dependabot, its like you should, I guess, you have to combine that with the discipline to actually take some time to go and manage those updates, like even if it's a simple ruby gem update, right, you have to take a look at the commits and maybe the maybe the change log and see what's changed, and will this break my app if I add this dependency, and that takes time.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Right, so I guess you just have to be disciplined about it to really save yourself the pain down the road.
Starr: The thing at this point, it might be a little bit of a stretch, but I think we could probably come close to keeping a junior hire busy simply upgrading dependencies, and doing tests to make sure that everything worked, and all that.
Josh: Yeah cross like all our repos, and everything.
Starr: Yeah, cross all the repos, I bet we could keep somebody busy.
Josh: I really like, what you said Ben, a lot of this what we're calling yak shaving here, is really managing, its managing technical debt, and not upgrading our, like pushing things off like upgrading, creates more debt down the road and so when we go and we actually need to get some work done on something and we realized oh, we haven't touched this place, or these dependencies in like a year or two we have to pay some interest before we can actually get to work, and so, I think yak shaving is kind of, you create more yaks with the more technical debt that you have, or you can also call it interest on your debt.
Starr: I'm not saying we shouldn't do all this stuff, but it's kind of like, you're on a treadmill almost, you're running just to stand still.
Josh: Yeah, well, some of these automated tools like dependabot are, I think are really going to help, and they already are helping us with that but as we integrate them more into our development flow, I think that I would expect them to help this problem a little bit because we're not going to get this far behind hopefully, and as long as we're a little bit more disciplined and these tools kind of help us, I think it'll hopefully create less work in the future and less technical debt to deal with.
Ben: On your note of "let's just build something new," I think that is part of the argument behind microservices, right? So if you have a new feature you wanna build, like that blog post you just wrote about the autocomplete.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: And you implemented that completely outside of our main app so you could call that a microservice, if you want, but the dependencies there are much smaller, like the scope of the work is much smaller you're just focused on that one feature, and so, you don't have to worry about this dependency conflicting that dependency, and blah-da blah-da blah, and so yeah I think one of the arguments people have for going now the microservice route is we have all these small services that are all very self contained, and upgrading the dependencies on them is much easier piece by piece, but then of course you have to do that on 20 different apps rather than just one.
Starr: Yeah, that's interesting, its like there's, you're right though because you'd be doing more dependency upgrades, but there might be fewer dependencies per upgrade, so there's less chance of them clashing. Yeah, so, we talked briefly about turbolinks, and stuff, and one thing, this isn't really related to the subject, but it kind of is because I'm hoping that this new thing, this new technology will completely eliminate the need for me to ever have to set up webpacker again, or webpack again, and that is, I'm talking about phoenix live view, in case people don't know, phoenix live view is essentially going to be, turbolinks on steroids.
Starr: The thing with turbolinks is that when you request a new page, what happens is that it goes and it fetches the entire new page and then it puts it in the DOM and everything, what phoenix live view does, is because phoenix is based on elixir and elixir is very, very good at doing high concurrency things. What happens with phoenix live view, I think, is that you can actually go and fetch a little component, a part of the page, you can have the server render that and then return it, and you can have several of these requests going at the same time, so essentially you have a highly interactive front end type app, but its being entirely rendered server side, so there's no need for real any sort of custom JavaScript. I don't know if I got that right.
Josh: Yeah its kind of I think, the way it struck me when I first saw it, was as a rails developer its kinda how you can do JavaScript partials in rails, you know where you'd make a partial, like an Ajax request the server and then you can render out some sort of JavaScript code that then gets passed back to the server, and then executed on the client side, but with phoenix it's so fast that you can actually do that almost in real time basically so, you can build applications that you couldn't with the, even though rails can kinda do that you can't build a real time application, just because its not fast enough, and with phoenix live view at least the claim is, that it's actually because of the way phoenix and elixir and Erlang work with their process model, it is fast enough basically to serve a bunch of different clients like that in real time, to the point almost where you could actually, have a chat client, or even do real time animation that's server rendering your HTML which is kind of, that was an example that was crazy to me.
Starr: Yeah because phoenix has excellent support for websockets, and all that.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: But I think it's, it's a little bit different from JavaScript partials.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Because, well I really hope it's different because JavaScript partials kind of suck, uh, I think with live view you're not sending back JavaScript that manipulates DOM and stuff like that. I think what happening is you're rendering a template, you return some HTML, and then the live view JavaScript library goes in and does something very similar to React, and that it, does this sort of shadow DOM thing, where it looks at the snippet of code, trying to be inserted into the DOM and then it only changes the elements, sort of as necessary in place. So you don't get that, sort of, full refresh sort of penalty.
Josh: I think that's right, and the thing that really makes it possible is the websocket, support because it does everything over websocket, which is why you can, well it's one reason why you can take advantage of more like real time capabilities, because it's not making as many round trips to the server.
Starr: I mean it's not gonna work for things like necessarily mobile, it's not gonna work for things where you have to have offline access, but you know, I'm willing to never write a mobile app if it means that I can write things in pure elixir and have these beautiful interactive, fast applications.
Josh: Yeah, I don't know, it's the most rails-y thing I've seen, that is purely phoenix and elixir, personally, it's really cool. I could see rails doing this if ruby could support, if ruby was capable of it, but because elixir has those capabilities it's one of the few things that I look at and it's like, ruby really can't handle, it couldn't. I don't see it ever being able to handle that sort of thing, and it's totally unique way to build a web application.
Starr: And I have to say, even if this thing doesn't pan out, it still gives me hope, because without hope all I see is endless JavaScript dependencies, endless node module directories, just stretching out before me and It's bleak guys, it's bleak.
Starr: I don't like it.
Starr: I don't want this future.
Josh: Yeah, it is kind of heartening, that people are still trying to build frameworks that simplify things, in that regard, and I think you talked about how rails, back in 2010 or something, was like the golden age of web development because it was basically just like simple, and you could kind of understand the full stack. For me like, what I loved about rails, was that it basically took all the stuff that I was already doing, and it organized it. Like it wasn't really doing anything new, but it was still my server side code, and my HTML, and CSS, and JavaScript, but it was organized in a way that made me a lot more efficient, so I'm hoping that people still kind of build in that way in the future, I guess like with a lot of this frontend stuff it can kind of get pretty complicated pretty quickly.
Starr: Yeah, as somebody who likes to, work in small teams, work by myself, and build products I really love solutions like that where if not just, so much of the process, and sort of technology that we have now is about sort, of being able to manage complexity and that's fine but you still have to manage it, I rather it just not be there.
Josh: A lot of these technologies really are build for, their build for much larger teams, and larger problems, than.. or you know, larger things basically than what we're even doing. Some of these, the scale of some of these applications that people are using, some of them more complex, like JavaScript frameworks for, I don't see us ever really attempting to tackle as a three person team, so.
Starr: No I don't think we could, like we couldn't build Facebook, like that's ridiculous.
Josh: So I'm wondering are we getting to the point where the tooling is like diverged, where some of the tooling is built for, managing us a massive level of complexity with a massive number of people, working on it at the same time, does a team like ours, really need to use the same tools that, Facebook needs to use for instance.
Starr: That's an excellent question. So, talking about blockers and yak shaving, I think guys, I think I'm about ready to give the mac dust off another shot.
Josh: Throwing in the towel, huh?
Starr: I don't know if I'm throwing in the towel, I love my Linux box for running docker, for doing development on, but pretty much everything that's not vim and a terminal, it's really starting to get on my nerves, and its not that you can't set it up to be nice, but it's like we talked about with all these dependencies, and managing that, you set it up to be nice, once and then over time it just slowly devolves and becomes less, and less, and things just gradually stop working, then you have to go in and figure out, well okay what changed about some new version of the thing to make this not work, and that's fine if that's my job, but I don't wanna have to do that with like, Spotify. I don't wanna do that to be able to put emojis in my tweets.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: You know, that's just, ahh, I don't know.
Ben: Yeah that's where I was when I was using Linux on desktop after several years I was like you know what, when OS10 came out, and I saw the beauty that was the Mac UI on top of the Unix shell, I thought that was just awesome, I knew that was what I wanted to be and I decided, I had [inaudible] after that point, and had the same experiences, you know you always gotta worry about thins that are breaking, and at some point I decided, I wanna do work with my computer, rather than working on my computer.
Starr: Yeah, so I've got a suggestion just for all of us, lets just destroy our computers, and we'll buy an ice cream truck, and we'll go and sell ice cream to the little children, and we'll get to see the smiles on their beautiful faces as they, you know, eat their treats. So much nicer.
Josh: The way you described that, is, is beautiful.
Starr: I know.
Josh: I'm in, yeah, I'm in.
Starr: Alright, I think we have enough content so, should we, should we say goodbye?
Announcer: Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverages of errors, outages, and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to Founderquestpodcast.com that's one word, you can access our huge back catalog, or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content Founder Quest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see ya next week.
Faced with a punishing week of distractions, the crew discusses their own techniques for remaining personally productive.
Full Transcript:
Starr: I'm sick of being discriminated against because of my name. It's like they have a better for a name but-
Josh: At least I have to pay 60 bucks for just a domain.
Ben: Change your name.
Announcer: So do those guys really named their App after a meme, huh? Buckle up fellow kids, it's time for founder quest.
Josh: I think mine was like ... for what it's worth star, my name was like $180.
Starr: Do y'all think that Dev domains are going to be like pogs?
Josh: Maybe.
Starr: Like beanie babies?
Josh: Like garbage pail kids.
Starr: Oh No. Garbage pail kids or a classic.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: I just mean like when we started Honeybadger we did an io domain and back then those were pretty hip and so in 10 years our dev domain, it's going to be kind of ... right now people are like, oh an io domain, wow. Our dev domain is going to be like that in 10 years? I don't know.
Ben: Maybe the app domains, you know the.app.
Starr: That app, I kind of think dev is ... well, I mean it's going to be used for a lot of things, but I think one thing that it'll be popular for us, like get hub projects and that sort of thing. Like I said, like faker.dev would be cool to like forward to you're a faker project.
Ben: Would be cool. I'm just not going to pay 115 bucks for it.
Starr: Right? Yeah. Who bought honeybadger.dev? I'm like dying to know this cause I thought it was one of you guys because I was going to do it and I forgot. I think someone's messing with us.
Ben: We'll find out some day.
Starr: So I thought like this week we could talk about just productivity. Some people are really surprised when they hear that we're ... because I was going to say we're a three person company. We just hired another developer and we hired a marketing person a few months back. But we're still a very small company, so people are interested sort of like how do we do it? I mean, we must be super productive. We must all be super productive, including me despite the evidence, despite the soul crushing evidence. So what's our secret?
Ben: I think the secret to our success is that I wake up naturally at 4:00 AM every morning.
Josh: That's it. Yeah.
Starr: I do too. But I fight it. I fight it. Ben so much.
Ben: I don't think we have a secret of success. We're just standing up just regular folk doing some regular stuff.
Josh: I do have to say like I've been a lot less productive I felt since having kids, especially the second kid.
Starr: Yeah, well my secret, a reason for choosing this topic actually was at this week and the previous week I've been incredibly unproductive and so I'm really just trying to get my groove back on.
Ben: Just looking for tips.
Starr: I'm looking for tips guys.
Josh: Yeah. I had the same thought actually when you suggested and I was thinking about it last night and I was like, I'm actually looking forward to like talking about this because maybe I'll refresh. Get a refresher on it.
Ben: Yeah. So the past couple weeks have been rough for me too but the snow, really threw me off. School was shut down for like two weeks or whatever it was. I couldn't get to my office because driveway was buried in snow and that's on a hill. And so I was at home. At home, which is not usual for me and with kids at home, which is not usual for me. And so I ended up playing a lot of sports here and stuff. So I had to get back on the focus train and actually work on it. And so one thing that I did was the tomato technique, you know the 25 minute thing.
Starr: Pomodoro.
Ben: Yeah, Pomodoro. So I'm like, yeah because I always sit down and I would pick but get some work done and I would open up the laptop and be like, ha, I don't feel like doing anything. There's like 5,000 things I could do and I don't feel like doing any of them. And so when it came down to you, I was like, all right, you know what? I can't wait to feel like it. I just got to do it. And so I said, boom, set the timer for 25 minutes, I'm going to work on something and then I can be done and give myself a break, you know? And then of course, the 25 minutes ago that I'm heads down, I'm focused and so there's no way of taking a break right now. It's like keep working on for a couple hours. Right. So that helped me like get over the hurdle of I really don't like doing a thing.
Josh: I tried doing the Pomodoro technique for awhile, like long time ago and I liked it. Yeah. Maybe I'll give it a try again sometime here.
Starr: I like it too. It only works from you for certain things. Like, Pomodoro is really nice for me for things where I've got like a list of things and I'm going to sort of cycle through really quickly and sort of churn through. Is not so great for things that are more sort of loosey Goosey, kind of like writing and stuff. I don't really like having a timer going when I'm writing because I just feel so sort of constrained by it and like I've got this deadline looming over me and that's like-
Josh: "Be creative come up with something interesting in 10 Minutes.
Starr: And under the gun.
Josh: How do you guys typically start your days? How do you think about like what you're going to going to do first or what you're going to do during the day?
Starr: I've recently, after we came back from Christmas break, I changed up my routine and I've really liked it. So let me tell you a little bit about that. Previously, I just kind of started the day without like a plan or anything, like coming to work, check my mail, check Slack, figure out what my main task was, just start going heads down on it and not really think about it much. And that's fine when it works. But a lot of the times it left me feeling like I was ... while I was making progress on my main task, I was kind of losing sight of the big picture or maybe other tasks that are important but aren't really as major.
Starr: What I started doing, when we came back from break is that I started, saying, well, I've got a three hour window of intense work time. I've got three hours and I'm going to book in that with an hour on each end of sort of less intense, more open ended work time. And so what I've ended up doing is in the morning I come in, I get my coffee, I open up Slack and everything. I say hi to everybody. And I have a a journal now.
Josh: Oh, fancy.
Starr: It's a very nice-
Josh: It's not leather.
Starr: So yeah. So I've started a work journaling. I actually read about work journaling on a Hacker News, some articles, somebody had mentioned the comments that they find it really useful and I kind of like journaling anyway. I like getting my fountain pen and writing in cursive. It's just something very relaxing and fancy about it. It makes me happy. And usually every day I follow more or less the same format. It's really simple. I just kind of think, okay, well what's important to me today? What's on my mind, what's coming up in the next couple of days? Write a small paragraph about it.
Starr: Just to kind of clear away the cobwebs, get mentally unstuck. And then then from that I'll generally make a to do list and that will be my plan for the day. After that I sort of slide into my three hours intense work and then have an hour for email and random stuff like that. So I really liked the system lately I've been a little bit lax about it just because things have gotten thrown for a loop with our snow days, with some very personal stuff that's come up that you can read all about it on Twitter. But I really liked the system. I want to get back to doing it more consistently.
Ben: I don't have a daily plan per se. I have a daily schedule, like I said, I get up at 4:00, I do some meditation for a little bit, I read like maybe some RSS feeds or a book just to warm up the brain and then I just dive into whatever I had going on the day before. I believe in this concept of starting on a downhill slope. I try to leave my previous day's work at a finish point, but also a point where it's easy to pick up again. Like, Oh yeah, just keep going on that task. Right?
Starr: Yeah. I like that. That's a really cool concept.
Ben: I don't also plan day by day. It's just kind of rolling from one day to the next with that, starting on the slope. But what I do to set that up, it's on Sunday nights, I actually spend time thinking about my week coming up. And so I make a plan, I think about like what are my areas of responsibility. So I have family things I need to get done, have personal things I want to get done, like maybe clean up the yard or something, church things I want to get done and then work things I want to get done. I look at those areas and I think about the upcoming week, like what are some tasks that need get done and made some overall goals that I want to move forward on during that week? I make that list and then out of that falls and things I do every day, like, oh, today I feel like clean the yards, I'm going to go do that. And mark it off my list.
Josh: That came from a book of the like areas of responsibility in your life, like work, church, family ... I forget. Do you recall anything about that? It might've been Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Ben: Yeah, I love that book so probably.
Josh: Yeah, I think it might've been a Covey. But yeah, I liked too, I forgot about that, you reminded me of it. I do something kind of similar to the pre thinking about, I like to think about stuff than I before especially because a lot of times if I've got like work running through my head and I don't get it out, I can't sleep and it's causes extra stress. So I actually like to just ... I keep like a stack of index cards by my bed and if I can't stop thinking about work or something, I'll just usually like make a little like a shoe, very short to do list like three to five items usually for like the big things I want to do the next day. And then that's usually enough to get it moved to tomorrow and I can relax again.
Ben: That happens to me too. So that's a good ... I like that idea.
Josh: Yeah. I need to remember to .... I should start doing the Sunday night planning though again, I used to do that kind of a little bit like you were describing and I really liked it.
Starr: So my wife calls that the vague sense of anxiety before a Monday that you get on Sunday night. She calls out the Sunday scaries. I don't know if she made that up or if?
Ben: The Sunday scaries is nice.
Starr: Yeah. Which is funny because like I still get those even though I literally ... I don't think I can legally be fired guys. I still get the Sunday scaries and I don't know, maybe writing stuff down would sort of help with that.
Josh: Yeah. Do you guys ever feel like, like guilty if you feel like you're not being productive enough or you're not getting enough done or you just don't feel like working. I know Ben is like always working, so he probably isn't affected or afflicted by this, but I don't know sometimes.
Ben: Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah.
Starr: Oh yeah. That's like half of my life. You guys have no idea how much you have no idea how much a mental anguish I've like put myself through being like, am I doing enough? Am I ... we've engineered this life of luxury and leisure that so supposedly, but you can't really take the workaholic out of-
Josh: Yeah, exactly.
Starr: You can't take the work out of the workaholic.
Ben: Yeah. It helps that I liked to work. Right. But still there are times where my daily schedule and typically in the office from 9:00 to 2:00, I like to take off early and go do other stuff. But even then, it's taken me years of Honeybadger to get to a point where I'm comfortable just being done for the day.
Josh: Yeah. It's nice though. I like the direction we're going. Being able ... yeah, not feeling bad about like not killing yourself.
Starr: It's silly to say this, but it came to me a couple of years ago as kind of an epiphany that I am not morally obligated to make the absolute most money possible in my lifetime. That's not a moral requirement.
Josh: You're not?
Starr: No. I have to support my family. I've got to try and be a good member, the community and everything but if I don't want to like kill myself to make millions and millions of dollars, like that's fine. But who cares?
Josh: I don't know man. If I'm not as Zuckerberg, I'm not happy first of all.
Starr: You got to answer this question, if you were Zuckerberg, would you be happy? because that's-
Josh: Oh, that's existential, that's sick burns coming from me. I wasn't going to tell you about one other cool, morning routine type thing that I picked up. Somewhere I think it was like last year sometime and actually I think this was like a thing that Ben Orange Dean who's currently building two bull, I think he like blogged about it and it was like a while back and then posted about on Twitter and that's where I saw it. But he basically like keeps a bash. I think it's like a bash at alias called, start on his work laptop. What it does is you like just type start into your console or whatever and it brings up a new vim window that has like basically a little agenda, checklists for the day that helps you do the routine things that help you get started.
Starr: Every morning it's kind of a pain in the neck to have to bring up all my programs, put them in the right windows, I use a Tiling window managers or everything's got to be in the right spot or else I won't ever be able to find it.
Josh: You just have to commit your layouts to source control.
Starr: Oh God. See, I really enjoy a lot of the tools that people have for interacting with their computers is like power users and stuff. Right. I've got the Tiling window manager, I use Linux and all that stuff, but really I get it to the point where it's good enough and I never quite am able to make myself spend the time to get it to the point where it's just truly amazing and excellent.
Josh: You're on Awesome. Right? So I switched. As you know, I was on the hardest of the hard mode window manager's XMONAD for a long time. But recently I've, I've started walking myself back from the edge of that and I switched to I3 recently.
Ben: How do you like that?
Josh: I really like it. It's the exact opposite as far as like configuration management of the window manager. It's basically just a flat single file that's kind of declarative. So it's a little bit like Yam or something. So it's just like options versus like with XMONAD you're building, you're actually kind of like building your desktop with Haskell, which is a ... yeah.
Starr: The thing about XMONAD I found is that you're building in Haskell and all of the snippets that you find are all in like 20 different styles of Haskell, and if you don't know Haskell, who knows which one of those is right?
Josh: I'm not convinced anyone knows Haskell.
Starr: So Josh, a few months ago you mentioned to me there's a book it's called, Weinberg on Writing. And in this book he describes his method of writing and it's called The Fieldstone Method. And if the listeners don't know Weinberg, I forget his first name.
Josh: I think it's Gerald Weinberg.
Starr: He's as sort of legendary computer, author, consultant guy back from a long time ago, from the 80s, I think, were his heyday, so he was flying all over the country doing really expensive consulting gigs for all these big companies on their mainframes. And he wrote a lot of different books and he also wrote this book called, Weinberg on Writing where he describes how he writes. And how did you learn about that Josh?
Josh: I think it had been on my list for a while. I had heard a bunch ... I've heard various people talk about it over the years and just never really got into it. But I think most recently and my friend Joel had mentioned it to me because I've been trying to do more writing for Honeybadger marketing material. Specifically I've been doing it writing an email newsletter for developers. And so I've been kind of trying to come up with ways to write for that, come up with topics and organize my thinking.
Starr: So have you been doing it? Have you been using that particular method?
Josh: I have. I don't know if I've been doing it as efficiently or effectively as he would. But yeah, I've been kind of like .... I've been trying anyway. It's really helped me write the last couple articles I think because with the method, The Fieldstone Method is basically the ... it uses the metaphor of a field stone wall. So if you're building a field stone wall, it's made up of all these individual, like very unique stones that people typically collect from fields. And so you can't build a field stonewall by like just stacking bricks one on top of the other. The idea is that over time you want to collect these things and eventually you'll have a wall. But until then you're kind of like in collection mode.
Starr: So you're always keeping an eye out for interesting things in the world. You're always writing little paragraphs about things in this kind of stuffing them away in some sort of system.
Josh: Yeah. I've been doing a lot of reading over the last couple of years. I've always loved reading, but I've been trying to read a lot more than I even used to. It's worked out really well if I'm reading, especially like a technical book or a book on programming or something. Or even recently read a couple books on Dev ops that were really good. You can kind of like extract ideas as you're reading and just throw them into wherever you keep your notes or whatever and then you can come back to that stuff later. And oftentimes you'll have a good writing prompt for maybe something related to a topic that you're writing about.
Starr: Well, I've been doing it too, right? I've got a ... So Honeybadger, we use Notion for a internal documents and wikis and I set up my own personal Notion account that's just all about these field stones, right? These different little snippets that you collect here and there and I made it my own personal account because some of it doesn't really have much to do with the business. I don't want you guys to be able to steal that for me. And like I'll be reading a technical book.
Starr: Recently I've been reading, Building Data Intensive Applications and it's pretty cool because you see something that's like, oh, that would be a great blog post. So you just pop open the app and take a picture of the page or whatever. And there you go. Now you've got something to write it or something to talk about in a blog post or maybe it's an idea for a blog post.
Starr: Personally, I've found that collecting these little notes and snippets of writing, it's useful for constructing the actual blog posts, but it's even more useful for coming up with ideas because my main problem in writing has always been, not necessarily doing the writing, but coming up with ideas for things to write about that I can do without having to spend five days researching it.
Josh: Because if you're writing a full blog post or article or something or even a book like you need, it's made up of a bunch of different concepts that kind of come together to illustrate whatever point you're trying to make. At least that's how what I found and so like coming up with those individual, what are the best tools that you're using basically to get the idea across. It helps if you have ... if you can quote something interesting from a book or something versus just like coming up with something on the flies.
Starr: One thing that I struggled with for a long time was that I kept thinking, well, I just don't have ideas. Right. It turns out that's false. I have plenty of ideas. I'm constantly doing stuff. I'm just constantly doing work for Honeybadger and thinking, oh, this is interesting. This new thing I learned is interesting. Or Oh, I learned some lesson from this mistake I made or whatever. And that stuff is constantly happening to all of us.
Starr: The only thing is that, well normally that might happen to you and you might think, well, I need to write a blog post about it, but that's a big thing. I'll deal with that later. And then you just forget it because you're constantly being bombarded with all these little interesting things that are happening.
Starr: But if you say, well, I'll just write two sentences about it or a paragraph and throw that into my Notion setup and not worry about it. And then so later on I can go back and access that and be like, oh yeah, that was really good idea for a blog post or whatever.
Josh: Yeah. I think my favorite takeaway from that book ... the method is great. But the way it changed my thinking about writing is that it kind of demystified the idea of like writing as like you have to write this finalize like piece. Like you're an artist creating some work that has to be ... it's like a super creative process that inspiration has to strike basically and then you write. A lot of times that's where like writer's block will set in and then people think like, well, I've got writer's block, I just can't write.
Josh: With The Fieldstone Method, it's much more about doing the work. And even like just making, writing something where you don't necessarily have to write like a complete ... you don't have to write a novel in order to write. You could just write a little, a couple of paragraphs like you said on something like a little interesting idea that you got from a book you were reading. And even that in itself might just be a fun exercise or maybe that'll go into one of an article or something that you're writing that will actually get published somewhere.
Starr: Yeah. And I think the key takeaway is that while yes, writing is a creative activity, it's very difficult to sit down and be creative on demand. But if you are just living your life doing interesting things, you have these little moments of creativity and if you can capture those when they happen, well then you're ahead of the game.
Josh: Yeah, totally.
Starr: So how did you find out about Notion Josh? I remember like a while ago you were, you came to us and you said, "I want to use this new note taking app and I ... I'm a grumpy old man." I don't think I really said this out loud, but in my head I'm like, "Oh Jeez, another note taking app kids. Why are you getting in my face about this?" Like haven't we figured out in note taking by now, but it's actually really nice. I'm now a complete convert. I've got the APP on my phone, I use it all the time.
Josh: Well, I think I would normally call myself a grumpy old man too. I might just be a little bit behind behind where you are, but it did take me a little while get used to ... kind of like see the value in it. But once I did it's a really, really cool tool. And I forget where I saw it. It had launched semi recently and I think a lot of people were talking about it, a lot of people have been switching to it. And even, I think there's a few competitors out now, but basically like ... I don't know how to describe it. It's kind of like a new note take on like collaborative note taking slash like company Wiki.
Josh: It's a bunch of different things rolled into one and it lets you create like databases. But essentially it's all built out of basically like built out of like just pages of content. The thing I like about it is that it makes it really easy just to like anywhere you are in it, you can just start writing. It's kind of like captured this. It doesn't make writing feel like this daunting task where you have to get all set up and whatever, get your word at your word processor out and do writing. If you have an idea you can just like throw it in to Notion and then organize it either then or later.
Starr: Yeah. And one cool thing about everything being a document is that, for example, we have our editorial calendar in Notion, which is, it's an actual calendar with things on it, but it's also, there's a view of it where you can do it as a combined board. And so what you can do is you've got these items, which is sort of like things to write or things that are written and you can just pop open the item. And because everything is a document, everything is equally editable and all this stuff, you can just write the actual article in the to do item so that there's no, "Oh, I wrote the article, it's over here now I've got to go update my to do lists. I've got to update that editorial calendar." It's just all there. And that just kind of blew my mind when I first saw it. That was when I was originally like, well, there's something pretty cool going on here.
Josh: Yeah, the editorial calendar was the thing that converted me too because I've been trying to set up a good process for that for a while now and I've tried a bunch of different tools and nothing actually allowed me to actually produce the content in the same tool that I was managing the schedule in. And when that's all in one place, it seems to be a very, it's a very streamlined process and it actually helps, I don't know about you, but it's actually helped me, get more writing, more actual content done because I don't know, for some reason it just makes it really easy to sit down and work on something.
Starr: Yeah, totally. It's just ... I don't really know how to describe it because we're saying like, well, it's a Wiki, it's a document editing and all that sounds kind of weak source. But then when you see it all put together, just the way they've done it is so nice. It makes things feel way easier to do than say, back when I used to use Evernote, it was just kind of of a struggle. You felt like you were fighting against things, but I don't know, I guess maybe that's why people hire good user interface designers.
Josh: Yeah, something like that. I'm curious, Ben, how would you describe Notion?
Ben: Yeah. To me, it's a collaborative content editing solution. That's pretty vague and general, I guess that's where I found them, It'd be useful for us. I think it's like this morning, it was really neat. I was chatting with Ben Lane, we were talking about some marketing related stuff that we wanted to do and he gave me a couple of things he wanted me to do. So I just opened up Notion. I went to my to do Kanban board, I create a new item and that was writings and content. And then in that item I just created it to do this. Like, here are the things that I need to do to be able to finish off this item.
Ben: And then like one of those to do items with something I needed from them. And so I said, I signed that, I an add to that, I'm like, here, I need this surgery. And so we were able to collaborate on that. And so now I can .... it's on my to do this. I'm not going to forget about it. I had a list of things in that item to track. And then as I'm filling in those items, I'll just write it right there on the page. So to me it's like a very collaborative environment focused on generating content, and getting things done. I like it.
Josh: Cool.
Starr: Yeah, we've run into a couple of problems still with that around ... not really problems but just I think we were using it for things it wasn't designed to do really.
Josh: Oh, like team communication.
Starr: Yeah. It's not really built for ... it's built for editing documents and editing content. And also sort of keep taking track of things like to do lists and stuff, but it's not really built for ... it's not like a message board. Right?
Ben: One of the things that we use Basecamp for a long time too and one what things that we really liked about Basecamp being a remote team is that, we have an idea for something and want to build or if we have something we want to change, like write a proposal basically. Like, here's something, an idea that I had or I think that I want to do and let me describe it in a couple paragraphs and then notify everybody so that everyone can come back and comment on it and give me their feedback and then I can decide how I want to proceed on this thing.
Ben: We use that ... I think that was our primary use case for Basecamp and helps us keep track of decisions that we make and make an informed decision with all the teams input and have a good place to keep it all rather than Slack where stuff just gets lost. Right. And I think we wanted to use Notion and that kind of way too, but it didn't work out so well. One of the things being that it's hard to follow up conversation and two, notification is just much weaker than in Basecamp was in that regard.
Starr: Yeah. Like the cool thing about Notion is that you have these documents, you have to do items and all these things and you can actually sort of put them wherever you want. You can make ... like Ben was talking about, you can make a document that contains to do items assigned to somebody else, but it's not like there's a place called to do's and so it's this very moldable thing. But as a result of that, it's kind of difficult to ... It makes it a little bit harder to discover new content because it could be kind of anywhere in there.
Josh: Right.
Ben: Yep. I like to keep a track of what's going on across the team by seeing what everyone is doing. Like where is the blog post that started just right origin and what does the marketing experiment that Josh just did, right. And like when we are using Basecamp, you could log those things and you can write those things and everyone gets notified. And so as every day I can check my email and say, oh, here's the things that people are working and they knocked off and Notion doesn't have that. And so I felt kind of lost because it's like, oh, what are people doing? So I think, we're trying Geekbot right now and Slack.
Starr: Yeah. I love Geekbot so far.
Ben: Yeah. Pretty cool. Have a daily check in and that's ... I feel better, I guess maybe it's-
Starr: What does Geekbot do?
Ben: Just asks us every day, It's like a daily standup. Right. And now since we're a remote team, we don't actually have daily stand ups because we're not in the same office, but Geekbot will ask you a questions but you can configure. So we have our set up every day to ask us, what did you do since yesterday? What are you planning on doing today and is there anything blocking your progress? And then all those answers show up in our channel and Slack so that we can see, oh, Josh migrated the blog yesterday. That was cool.
Starr: I did discover one critical flaw and Geekbot the other day though, is that when you when you answer a question with memes, it doesn't actually display those. And the slack channel, it just shows you a link.
Josh: Yeah. That's messed up.
Starr: That's disappointing. I want to be able to answer, are you blocked by anything with a funny meme, right? Because this is who I am people.
Josh: We'll get that fixed. We'll get that worked out Starr at some point. I'm sure that's good because I know there's other people that you cannot be the only one that is very upset about that issue.
Ben: It's like an in modern day collaboration apps. You have to support a few new key features and one of them is Emoji. That's like [inaudible 00:31:18]. Number two is probably like APP mentions. And then a close three. I think we'd be meme support for sure.
Starr: Yeah, definitely man, they should even ... I think I would pay extra for that if there is a little Giftly search bar like there is in Twitter.
Josh: Yeah. Well actually you can, there is, we can add the Jiffy. There's a jiffy slash command that you can add.
Starr: Well, I feel like I'm going to be much more productive next week, now that I've gotten this awesome tips from you guys.
Josh: Yeah, same here.
Ben: Me not so much. I'm just going to slide off.
Starr: That's fine. You've built up enough credit, Ben, you've built up some stuff, but I think we've done a pretty good amount of work just right now. We can take a break now, right? That's Friday. Yeah. What time is it? Take the day off? It's almost noon time.
Ben: At lunch time?
Starr: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, that's great.
Josh: All right. Peace.
Starr: Well, bye guys.
Josh: Later.
Announcer: Founder quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger, zero instrumentation 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it available at www.honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders, go to www.founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. Founder quest is available on iTunes, Spotify, another purveyors of fine podcast. We'll see you next week.
This week Josh, Ben and Starr talk technical debt and how to cope with it. They also discuss "suits" vs "hackers" is a trope as old as tech itself. Suits want to make money and cut costs. Hackers want to build cool things the right way.
Full Transcript:
Ben: If I start selling my kidneys, I'll let you know.
Starr: Okay, that's cool. Do I get a friends and family discount?
Announcer: You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Time to start a fire. Crack open a can of Tab, and settle in for Founder Quest.
Starr: I thought originally that this podcast would be called something like Hard Technical Decisions, which sounds pretty hitting to me. Like, I like that, cause I think of myself as a dyed in the wool realist.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Starr: Who's unafraid to face hard facts, you know? But, then we were talking about it in Slack and it turns out that some of the things I was originally going to highlight, as tough Hard Technical Decisions, were mistakes. Rather, were actually forms of technical debt that we kind of took on on purpose, that we knew what we were getting into. Maybe not exactly to what depth we were getting into them,. But, we knew that something was happening.
Starr: And, so, this week's topic has kind of blossomed into something a little bit more interesting I think. So, yeah, personally, running a business and being an engineer means there's this sort of constant struggle between the engineer in me and the business man in me. But, what I mean by that is that there's this constant desire to want to do things right, the engineering way. But, then, you always have to trade that off between, what is the return on investment?
Starr: Like, what are my business outcomes that I'm trying to achieve by doing this engineering.
Josh: The engineering in you wants to achieve technical perfection but the business person in you wants to make money.
Starr: Yeah. Exactly. So, I guess maybe we should go into like, what is technical debt. Let's talk a little bit about technical debt and stuff like this in general and then maybe we can go onto some specifics about our
Ben: When I think of technical debt, the first phrase that comes to my mind is: "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
Ben: Right? I think it's those things that you do with good intentions that just over time, didn't continue to scale, which is just a normal outgrowth of scaling. Or, over time became an obviously bad decision based on new information. So, you just have to change your mind and go back and fix it.
Josh: Yeah. I tend to also throw maintenance costs in there. There's extra things that you have to do that come with the technical decisions that you have to make. And so, like, things like putting off, deferring some things like maintenance costs. For instance, like on Rails, like a Rails upgrade for instance.
Josh: I know you can kind of get behind on those, or like push them down the road, and those can build up like a large overhead that you have to think about all at once, which to me is technical debt. And, there's all kinds of maintenance costs, I think, associated with software or infrastructure.
Starr: That's interesting because my take on technical debt is maybe a little more specific? I've always considered technical debt as a way to bide time with shitty code. Right?
Starr: When we first launched Honeybadger, I felt that the market was super rife for a competitor in the space. So, I felt like we really needed to ship something out very fast. And, as a result we made some decisions that made us able to get to market much more quickly than we would have otherwise. But then maybe, a year or two later, we came to regret those decisions. Maybe we didn't really regret them. Maybe we just had to come back and clean them up a little bit.
Starr: So, one thing that we did, that I think falls definitely into the category of technical debt is that when we started ... Well, our service for people who don't know, is an exception monitoring service, right? We have a little snippet ... well, it's not a snippet, it's a library, that goes into your application. And, it sends us information whenever errors happen.
Starr: And, what we did when we first started out, is that we actually kind of you know used the library of the main competitor, which was totally legal. Because, it was MIT licensed. And, we always knew we were going to replace this with our own library. And, we got a little bit of flack for it.
Starr: But, in the end, I think it was sort of the right decision. What do you guys think about that decision?
Josh: I think it definitely bought us some time of not having to like figure out or reinvent that wheel, basically, because it was a pretty well-established pattern. And, if you look at those same libraries, today, of everyone who does this, basically, they're pretty much all doing ... they're all basically copies of each other. They're all basically doing the exact same thing. It's a pretty well-established pattern of code.
Josh: So, it definitely helped us get to market quicker. And, as you said, it's MIT licensed. SO, we included attribution and all that stuff.
Starr: I suppose we should say it was MIT licensed before we did that.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: And, then they changed the license. Which I don't really blame them for. But, it took a while. Josh, you were the one who was in charge of version 2 of the [gem] that was 100% developed by you. How long did that take? That took a while, didn't it?
Josh: It took a number of months. It was a not a small project. I know by the time we got to that point obviously there were a number of reasons we wanted to re-write that code, or re-implement it. We wanted to kind of custom-tailor some things to our particular service. By that time, we had made enough decisions with the service, where we knew where we wanted to go and we could bring that to the client side and it made sense to re-do it. And, it also gave us the opportunity to re-think some of the decisions that we didn't get to make as a result of using that code from someone else up front.
Josh: So, that probably added a little time to the project. But, I think, overall, it was useful to us.
Starr: Yeah. So, it saved us several months maybe coming out of the gate.
Josh: I think it would have been ... I mean we, obviously, wouldn't have started with probably all the features that came with it initially, either. So, I think that a lot of the time it probably saved us ... it would have been incrementally over the first year or two of building the product that we didn't have to think about building in or coming up with how this thing should work. It just kind of worked out of the box initially anyway.
Starr: We no longer support the original notifier. But, how long did we keep support of that in our application? Do we still have that?
Josh: Probably too long. I think we still have some code for it. I don't know that anyone's actually using it.
Starr: Like, if I sent an error payload from like 2012, would it work?
Josh: That's a ... I don't know. What do you think, Ben?
Ben: There's a good chance it would actually work, yeah.
Starr: That's crazy.
Ben: Yeah, I think we do have the ... the way we supported it was we basically implemented the same API server-side and then the [GEM] just change the host name that it connects to and it works.
Starr: Yeah, and I think you became really well acquainted with some of the problems with this original library, which started out, I guess, as a much simpler thing. All legacy software grows and becomes more complicated. And, it's always kind of nice, and it's a ...
Starr: I guess engineers always want to re-write their big thing. And, you kind of got a chance to do that. Because, we started with something that we knew we were going to have to re-write in the beginning.
Ben: I like what you said there about technical debt, from the perspective that it's a shortcut that we choose to make that saves us some time. You know? But, one of those examples, I think, that from our experience of, that [I] was talking about, like, it's a good idea at the time, was when we started off with Backbone and we had ...
Starr: Oh, you're not going to remind me of this, Ben. This is ... I've blocked this out.
Ben: But, those were fun times. Like, everyone at the time, [inaudible 00:07:44], of course it was like the new hotness to build a single-page app. Like, React wasn't a thing yet, as far as I know. It was a brave new world. Like, let's try this new thing. And, so, we ... you, Starr, actually, because you did all the JavaScript.
Starr: I'll own it. I'll own it. Sure.
Starr: I make mistakes, Ben. I'm not perfect. Yeah.
Josh: Well, and as developers, we don't want to fall behind the times. We want to be able to learn and grow. And, stay current and all that. So ... I'm sure it was a fun frontier for you to explore.
Ben: Yeah. Well, that' the point I was trying to make. It wasn't a mistake. Right? It was a good idea at the time. Like, it sounded like a good idea because it was fun to build, and it was what other people we were doing and it was a good experiment. And, it worked. It's just, over time, we decided, "it's not working so well for us." And, we had to go back and replace that.
Starr: Oh, see. I'm much more harsher in my ... I'm much harsher in my evaluation of my decision there.
Starr: I think it did sound like a good idea at the time. But, it was the wrong decision.
Josh: I tend to agree. I think that for us it was the wrong decision. Just because what we know now of the extra overhead that it takes to maintain. Especially, at the time, like, Backbone was not ... it had a lot to workout that today's frameworks have solved, I think. So, there was a lot to struggle with, in addition. But, you know, that, compared to if we had just gone with basically vanilla JavaScript in the Rails way, which isn't flashy, but works year after year. I think that's what would have made it a better decision for us to, kind of, go the more standard approach just because we're a small team and everyone knows.
Starr: I mean, maybe, I should backup a little and give a little perspective for people who are listening. So, when we first started out, we wanted a really awesome application and so we chose to build it as a single-page application using this library, Backbone.js. This was before React. This was before, you know, Angular view. Any of the modern front-end libraries.
Starr: So, the problem with building our application as a single-page application, using Backbone, wasn't necessarily that it was hard to build, using Backbone. The problem was that we had built this system which only one person, me, knew how to, sort of, use and work with.
Starr: And, so as time went on, I had to move onto other things. Because we're three developers, we're all doing a lot of different things. We all have to be able to interact with all parts of the system. And, it became just more and more obvious that it was very hard for everybody to be able to work with this front-end application code that I had built. Because, it was so complex.
Starr: It was like its own separate application. Having a separate, single-page application was incredibly difficult to maintain for three Full Stack developers and no independent, full-time front-end guys. So, that was our main mistake. So, I guess, maybe, this one canceled out whatever time we gained from using the Airbrake [Gem 00:10:41].
Josh: It probably did. Could I just make one point? And, I might, probably get on a soapbox here, so I'll try not to.
Starr: That's fine. Do it. Do it.
Josh: So, if we went Backbone ... if you look today, at the number of people that are building Backbone applications how many would you say are doing that?
Starr: New Backbone applications?
Josh: Exactly.
Starr: Nobody. Nobody.
Josh: They're like ... I mean, it seems to me that anybody who's building a Backbone application back then is probably ported to a different framework entirely, I would guess. Like, React or something like that.
Josh: You know, if you're going to use the latest, hot, front end thing, there's a good chance that you're going to want to use the next hot thing that comes along to replace it.
Starr: Okay. Josh, now, now, now. We've got to fight about this, right?
Starr: Backbone was the way, right? Backbone was the way. It was the way to write front-end apps. And, it turned out we were just wrong, you know? And, then, it turned out that Angular was the way, right?
Josh: Right.
Starr: [crosstalk] So, nobody's perfect. Nobody's perfect. So, still wrong.
Starr: Now, React. But,
Josh: I'm pretty sure that React is definitely the way, though. I mean, we can all agree on that.
Starr: It's yeah, 100%.
Josh: Meanwhile, JavaScript and Rails still works. You know, it's not super fancy.
Starr: Maybe if you're an old man, Josh.
Josh: Maybe I am an old man, Starr.
Starr: I'm older than you, so.
Josh: Well, maybe we're both old men, then. In any case, Rails and JavaScript has treated us pretty well. You know? I think we could all agree that it's treated us pretty well over the years, in that, we all know it. It's all basic ... it's built on basic web technologies that don't really have a whole lot of overhead. There's a little bit. But, comparatively, it's done pretty well for us, I think.
Starr: And, so, the punchline for this, the end result, is that I went back. I ported the whole single-page application into sort of a vanilla Rails application with ... it's got a pretty extensive JavaScript layout on top of it. But, for the most part, it works without JavaScript. I think that's the perfect thing for us because it's easy for us to maintain. It's easy for us to understand and onboard people who need to work on it.
Starr: And, frankly, I don't think our application is a very good fit for a single-page application. Why? Because, well, a single-page in our application has a huge amount of data that we have to go in and sort of extract and format and everything. And, just sending that over the wire and having that happen front-end is just kind of weird to me. You know?
Josh: Yeah, and the other thing that I've told people in the past is that the usage pattern of how people like to interact with Honeybadger is ... our strategy is to keep people out of Honeybadger for the most part. In that, it's issue-based. So, if they get a notification that an error has happened, then they want to come in and look at Honeybadger to see what the error is and debug it.
Josh: Ideally, they're not going to have to be, like, in there all the time. Hopefully, they're going to be able to be working on code and deploying features and that sort of thing. So, it's not the sort of app that people have open in a tab, 24/7, or whatever.
Josh: So, what they're doing is usually clicking on a link from a notification and landing on Honeybadger and if you're putting all of your ... if all of your performance benefits are being loaded up front ... So, with a single-page app, a lot of the time, you'll load a lot of the application logic up front. And, if you're in the app for a long time, it seems faster.
Ben: Yeah, people get in and get out. Instead of leading up all this data and this supporting structure that a single-page app requires. We just load the page they want to view, the data they want to see, and then they move on with their life.
Ben: And, on that note, on the data thing, I think. Maybe a better example to make my point: that would be like Postgres, right? We decided, early on, to go with Postgres as our data store. It's been a great decision. We're still using Postgres. But, we've changed how we use it over time, right?
Ben: Because, initially, we stored everything in Postgres.
Starr: Yeah. We just had a basic Rails [CRUD] app, right? Our highly data-intensive application where we handle thousand of inbound errors and everything. Originally, our first version of that was a Rails CRUD app with everything ... all the default Postgres settings, pretty much everything vanilla, right?
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: Yeah, we didn't even have a queue in the beginning. We took a request from a payload. We put it right in the database.
Josh: Straight to the database.
Ben: But, you know, over time that didn't scale. And, so we had to make changes. We had to add a queue. And, then overtime we decided, you know what, maybe putting these 10 megabytes payloads inside a database isn't a good idea anymore. And, so we split that out to S3, right?
Ben: Again, we just stored our reference to that, in Postgres. [crosstalk]
Starr: How big was our database? I remember it got pretty big.
Ben: It was about 2 terabytes.
Starr: Yeah, that was right after I did a Rails comp talk about scaling up your database.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Like, "Everybody talks about, you know, scaling out your database and moving things onto different servers. But, you know. Just buy a bigger database. It's cool."
Ben: Which we did, a few times.
Starr: Yeah, we did that a couple times.
Ben: And, then, I think the real breaking point for me was when I realized it would take a full 24 hours to re-store a database to production if we had to do a whole restore. I'm like, "You know what? We need to do something about that."
Josh: You know, doing that, splitting out those larger payloads has allowed us to maintain that scaling strategy for Postgres for the most part. We're still ... we're not sharding or anything like that. We basically are just buying a bigger database. It's just that our database happens to be smaller.
Starr: Yeah, and one other thing that ... I think I pushed for this, too, in the beginning I didn't really want to be on AWS. Because at the time, we launched Honeybadger there were all these really public AWS outages and it seemed kind of sketchy to me. They hadn't launched this entire ecosystem of cloud services. It was pretty much just EC2. So, we decided to go with a dedicated server, or several dedicated servers, at a host that ...
Starr: I don't know, can we legally name them?
Ben: No, let's not. Because, it wouldn't be nice.
Starr: Okay, if we legally name them, we're going to get sued. Because, they were so incredibly terrible.
Ben: You know, I think that was a great decision early on. Because, A: it was cheap. B: it was easy to get started and they did support our needs for quite a while. It was really only once we scaled a bit that we discovered the limits of their service, right.
Ben: They were great for a while. Until, they weren't. So. I mean, it [crosstalk]
Josh: They were pretty bad.
Ben: Yeah. At the end, there, it was like "Ugh!", pulling teeth and stuff. But, it wasn't a universally bad experience.
Starr: No, but it took us forever to get off of them. We eventually moved everything over to EC2. We use a lot of AWS services, along with it.
Starr: And, how long did it take you, Ben? Like, that took a really long time.
Ben: Yeah. I mean, I think several months. I think the thing about AWS is everything has to be automated. When you're using EC2, those instances can disappear at any time. And, the one good thing about that hosting company is that those servers just did disappear. Right? They were rock solid. They lasted forever. So, like, automation isn't so important if you know your server's going to be there. But,
Starr: They disappeared occasionally for a few seconds at a time.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: They were still there. But, we just couldn't see them.
Ben: So, I mean, it took definitely a bit of work to move to AWS. So, if we were to do it again, yeah, the math might be a little different. Like, knowing how long, knowing how much work it took to actually make that change. Having done that up front, it would have been nice. But, then, how long would that have delayed our launch? That's the question.
Starr: Do you think it would have delayed our launch to launch on like EC2 or AWS[crosstalk 00:18:37]
Ben: No, because we probably would have done it naively. Like, "Let's just throw some instances. It's fine." And, then like one day, they would have disappeared and we'd be like, "Oh, crud. It's not fine anymore."
Starr: Yeah. I think that's exactly what we would have done. That does sound like us.
Starr: Did I mention that we've learned a few things?
Starr: So, one of the benefits of AWS for us now is that we have this super awesome scaling set up so that if we have more notices come in then we can handle. We just spin out more servers. And, it all just kind of happens automatically.
Starr: Yeah. One of the most intense evenings of my life was where we're in the middle of all these ... it was some sort of scaling problem with our old servers, our old dedicated servers. And, I was at some conference that night. I couldn't sleep. I eventually finally got to sleep. I was woken up by an alarm call from my home alarm company, saying somebody was trying to break into my house.
Starr: So, then, I call my wife, who's at the house. And, we're freaking out and she's trying to figure out what's going on. And, then, okay. So, that's done and I go back to sleep. And, then I get a page. Because, I was on call. I get paged by our pager duty set up because the database is acting weird or something. And, then, okay. We have to get that done. And, then, an hour later, I go back to sleep for an hour. I get up and I have to give a presentation.
Starr: I'm like the first person in the morning. And, on my personal timezone, it's like 4:00 a.m.
Josh: So, that's my absolute nightmare.
Starr: And, it turned out okay. The presentation went okay I think. But, man, that was pretty stressful.
Ben: One of the lessons learned from that is that now we don't assign on call when you're traveling for a conference. Right?
Josh: Right. I don't know if I've heard that ... knew it was that bad. But, sorry, Starr.
Starr: It's okay. It wasn't like that all the time. It just was this perfect storm of ...
Ben: We've definitely had the benefits from the automation that we had to do for Amazon. So, now we don't get pages in the middle of the night when we're traveling on a conference, right. It just handles itself.
Starr: We don't hardly get any pages. At all. It just works.
Ben: A+. Would do again.
Josh: In order to get to this point, though, obviously we didn't have ... we weren't to this point back then or we would have built it like this in the first place. And, so, what we have today has come out of a lot of the mistakes and the experience that we've gained from doing things the wrong way. And so, I assume that we would have probably made our share of mistakes on any platform that we would have started on and we'd still be here talking about what we did wrong and what we wished we would have done in the beginning.
Ben: Yeah. Well, you know, I think part of it comes down to, what is the pragmatic thing that gets the job done today versus what is the ideal solution that I would love to have for the next ten years.
Ben: I mean, when we started, it was really one server. It cost us $75/month. Boom. We launched.
Ben: Because, we had ...
Josh: Yeah. And that was our entire infrastructure cost.
Ben: Yeah. Totally.
Josh: We had no idea, right?
Starr: Now, we spend, what, like six figures on servers.
Ben: Yeah. But, you know at the time when we launched, we had no idea if people would actually pay us for this server. We were just like, "We don't know. Will this work? Let's do the cheapest thing that could possibly work, right?"
Ben: And, as soon as we started making $100/month we started talking about, "Okay, now, do we buy another server?"
Josh: I remember thinking you were such a baller for dropping like $75/month on that server, Ben.
Ben: Good times. Good memories.
Josh: I'm a big fan of the idea of building to solve your problem today not building to solve your problem of, like, five or ten years from now or something. I think that goes into what you were saying abut taking the pragmatic approach. And, that's part of pragmatism, like you're not solving for needs you don't have yet, basically.
Ben: I was thinking about that approach when it comes to software development. Less from the outside and more from the software side. The concept of you aren't going to need it, right?
Ben: It took me a while in my career to accept that particular mentality that you don't need to build in on all the extensibility from Day 1. You can just build the thing that works today. And, then rebuild it when you need to, if you need to, as opposed to spending a whole bunch of time up front trying to anticipate every potential variation that you have to deal with.
Josh: That also has helped us focus on our customers because we didn't build a bunch of stuff that we thought they wanted. We waited and built things they specifically told us they wanted. So, if it doesn't do exactly what they want from Day 1, at least they can tell you what they want it to do, versus you kind of to making those decisions for them.
Starr: So, yeah. In the end, y'all guys are saying that ... like how do you think we did? [crosstalk] Did we do okay?
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Hey, we're still here right? We're still making ... we're still in business. So, yeah, I think did alright.
Josh: Yeah. We're still learning. But, that's like we were saying that kind of goes with the territory.
Starr: For the past several years, we've sort of kicked around the idea of doing another product. I think this is going to be maybe something that we have to watch ourselves on, if we ever do develop another product. That we want to do everything right. We want to apply all the lessons that we learned while building Honeybadger. But, we also maybe need to realize that we're not going to be able to get everything right from the beginning and that it's okay to do things with ... to take on a little bit of technical debt at the beginning.
Starr: Alright, well. It was really talking with you guys about the whole technical debt thing. And, I'll catch you next week and we can talk about something else that sounds [crosstalk] cool and fun.
Announcer: Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation. 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web-apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at Honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to Founderquestpodcast.com. That's one word. You can access our huge back-catalog or sign-up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. Founder Quest is available on iTunes, Spotify and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
Looking at the major events in our lives, we can often trace them back to turning points -- decisions big and small that had outsized effects. In this episode the dudes reflect on some of their major decisions, good and bad.
Full Transcript:
Starr: So I was like, "Okay, we've got no heat now. We're just going to have to slaughter the horses and crawl inside of them or-
Josh: You guys have horses in Seattle?
Starr: Slaughter the neighbor's horses.
Josh: I thought all the horses were in Kirkland.
Announcer: It's like Steve Jobs and the dude had triplets and they built an app. This is Founder Quest.
Starr: I got back the work from the Barney guy. The Barney guy is going to do our intros and it's all pretty great.
Ben: Cool.
Starr: It is excruciatingly difficult for me to listen to it though. I don't know why but.
Josh: Let's just clarify. He doesn't actually sound like Barney. I assume like he is [crosstalk] voices right?
Starr: No, he like sounds like announcer dude. Yeah. He sounds like sort of cheesy announcer dude but it's excruciating. I was listening to these introductions that this guy recorded for us and I'm like, "I have to listen to this so I can spot errors and stuff" but I'm just clenching my fists. I'm kind of in a fetal position because it's so painful to listen to this professional man who has been the voice of Barney amongst many other roles, reading out the really stupid shit I ask him to read. So anyway, I'm sure I'm making you guys feel great about the future direction of this podcast.
Josh: I'm sure it's going to be awesome and I mean by the time people are actually hearing this, they're going to have already heard the announcer. So I guess they'll know whether it's shit or not.
Starr: Oh yeah, that's right. Maybe.
Josh: I mean they can tell us. I guess.
Starr: One thing that I get asked a lot and I'm sure you guys get asked a lot too is how do we do it right? The three of us have this pretty cool little software company. We build things we like. We do it on our own terms. How did we do it? Because a lot of people are interested in doing similar things. So I thought it would be fun to have a show where we talk a little bit about that. So what would you guys think about that?
Josh: Yeah. Sounds good. I mean I think it's just pure blind luck obviously. I don't know about you but.
Starr: Oh 100%.
Josh: I don't know how I the hell I do it.
Starr: Show is over.
Josh: Show is over.
Ben: There may have been a little bit of work involved.
Starr: I guess I should start out and explain a little bit about what we have right? So the three of us started Honeybadger about like, how long ago was it?
Ben: Yeah, we started in 2012.
Josh: 2012.
Ben: Yeah. So it would be seven years old in the summer.
Starr: Oh Man. What grade is that like second grade?
Ben: Yep.
Josh: I just don't. I don't want to see Honeybadger when it's a teenager. I don't know. I thought that's going to be pretty scary.
Starr: Yeah. So seven years ago we set out to build this app to monitor our web apps for errors. We were using an old service that does a similar thing called Hoptoad. Eventually turned into a thing called Airbrake and it just wasn't doing it for us. It had a lot of problems. It had a lot of service degradations and we eventually just kind of got fed up and decided to build our own thing and fortunately for us, a lot of other people were thinking the same thing. So we had a lot of early customers out the gate who were Airbrake customers originally and looking around for a more stable replacement that was being actively developed instead of just kind of milked like a cash cow.
Josh: I think one of the things that we did, I mean that kind of just came naturally is that we were solving our own problem or I guess they say scratching your own itch, but it was something that we really wanted ourselves and that was a big in doing it in the first place. I mean we did want to build a product and sell it but we also really had this need that we wanted to solve for ourselves and we kind of did that. That was the initial motivation, how we chose what to actually build in the first place was we used ourselves kind of as guinea pigs.
Starr: Yeah, because we were like freelancers for a long time and we weren't really in the same company, but we worked on similar projects and we all used Airbrake. Actually at the time that we started on Honeybadger Ben and I were working at another company as employees and we used Airbrake then too and it was just not doing it for us.
Ben: Yeah. I think the thing about scratching or itch is you can have a lot of itches, right? And there are some that are more interesting than others and some that are more painful than others. And you've heard that phrase like, "Is your product a vitamin or is it an aspirin?" Right? Is it solving a real pain or is it something that it's kind of nice to have and I think one of the things that made a difference was we felt that Airbrake was a painful experience. We were really pissed off about how the service had degraded and we decided that we had to fix that. So we felt the pain keenly. It wasn't just, "Oh, it'd be nice to have this thing". It was like, "We gotta have this thing".
Starr: Oh yeah, totally. I remember this and this, you might say that one of the things that set me off being interested in Honeybadger was a mistake on my part. I was having trouble with Airbrake. I was having an issue and so I posted a question on their customer service forum which was literally the only way to get customer service. And maybe a day later somebody responded and it was kind of a flip, non-response answer. And that just made me so angry that these people who I'm paying or my boss is paying I guess are writing me off like this and not even giving me a decent customer support answer and it was only a couple of months later when I went back and realized, "Oh man, that was just another customer". They were in the same boat as I was. That wasn't even Airbrake support but I guess if they would've really had support in the first place, that wouldn't have happened. So it's still their fault. Screw those guys.
Josh: Yeah and I mean it's too bad because I mean I think part of the reason why we were passionate about this thing in particular too was because we were such big fans, at least I don't know about you guys, but I was. I was a big fan of Airbrake for a long time since Thoughtbot had originally started them and stuff and they were acquired after that, which I think was the turning point but I was a huge fan of their and it was incredibly useful to me which made it really hurt when it started to stop working and there were ... you'd have errors coming in but you're not getting notified or you're not getting the details that you need and at the time I was still freelancing, so I was having my clients pissed at me and stuff when their apps would stop working. So yeah. I felt pretty strongly about the fact that it wasn't working like it used to.
Starr: So yeah. We had a bunch of people in the same boat as us and I just remember having this moment where I thought, "Okay, we have to build a competitor to this because it sucks. There's so many people who want it. We have to build it right now". So from then on, I think it was kind of like a mad dash. It was me and Ben at first who were going to do it because we were talking all the time. We were taking lunch breaks together and working together at this other company and so we started working on it and then Josh was in the Campfire chat room that we used and I think-
Josh: Because we just never left.
Starr: Yeah. We never stopped hanging out in the same Campfire chat room. Yeah. It was such a small start up that Ben and I were at that there were no other developers to talk to. So we had to talk to somebody right?
Josh: So you had to talk to Josh.
Starr: Yeah, we had to talk to Josh. Why else would we want to? No.
Josh: Yeah. I think your biggest mistake was actually talking about Honeybadger in the campfire chat room because if you hadn't then I would've never forced you to let me build it with you.
Starr: I don't know. I think it's been a net positive.
Josh: Yeah. I think so.
Starr: I think you've pulled your own weight.
Ben: Yeah. I'm just basking in the memories. You've gotta pour one out for Campfire. I mean, but I remember when we got started and we just had too much to do right? And so we said, "Oh, let's hire Josh to do some stuff. He's still freelancing. We'll pay him" and Josh declined and we were like, "What? What's the deal?". And so-
Josh: Yeah. I was like, "Oh, no".
Ben: And so I turned to Starr and I'm like, "You know what Starr? If he doesn't want to get paid and he wants to be a founder, he wants to join us. So let's cut him in on it" and so I mean that's an easy decision. So that was awesome. I think that has been great. Having the three of us has definitely made it possible to do it. I realized that there are certain levels of problems that you just can't take on. To take on certain kinds of businesses you have to have a certain number of people, right? You have to have a person who can do x, y and z and there are plenty of businesses that you can do by yourself and there are other [inaudible] of business that you can't and I think had Starr and I just done it by ourselves, I think we wouldn't have had the success because I think we needed those three opinions, those three voices, those three contributors to the project.
Starr: And plus man in addition to what you're saying Ben. I love you dude but you and I would have just murdered each other at this point.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: I think Josh has been a good influence.
Ben: Totally. Yeah, I think that's something we've talked about before and definitely having the three people and the different personalities that we have definitely helped smooth over differences that we've had as we built product.
Starr: Yeah. It's nice having a tiebreaker.
Ben: Yeah and it's nice having someone as easy going as Josh.
Josh: Yup and sometimes like ... well, I was gonna say I feel like I do end up kind of being a tiebreaker a lot but sometimes it changes too. It's nice to always have a person that is kind of, if the two people have a disagreement, the third person can jump in and try to understand where both sides are coming from and try to smooth that over or whatever. At least that's how I've tried to look at it over the years and yeah, I think it's worked out pretty well.
Ben: Yeah, I think so. Yeah I've always been, I guess amazed that we have an ownership structure of the company that's a third even right? All of us have a third of the company. It's 33.33% and you always hear stories of someone has to be in control. There has to be like a 51/49 kind of thing so someone can make the decision and we made it work with that even Steven probably mostly because of Josh helping us get along.
Josh: Yeah. I think that us all being equals has been a really big, a really important factor in that and I'm personally a strong believer in equal equity splits. At least in serious partners for that reason. I just think it helps avoid a lot of jealousies and it helps you, at least even in your own minds, be on equal footing as peers.
Ben: Yeah. A question I've gotten several times is with three founders who are all developers, how does that work? How can you have a business? And I think that one of the key advantages that we've had is that we can all contribute equally because we all are three developers. No one feels like, "Oh he's not doing anything" or feels like, "I can't contribute right now in a way that's useful". Plus we're all business-minded and I think that's what saved us. If we were just three developers who are just writing code all day long and that's all we like doing, then we would have flopped because we would've never done the required marketing and stuff that you gotta to do to make a business work. Being freelancers beforehand, we knew you have to do some sales in order to get business and we weren't allergic to that.
Starr: I'm still struggling with that one.
Josh: Yeah, well it's a learning process but yeah, I agree Ben. I mean I don't know about you guys. The reason I was freelancing in the first place and I freelanced pretty much my entire career. I was freelancing over 10 years by the time we started Honeybadger was the fact that I was interested in creating a business and it took me a while to figure out how to actually do that but that's all part of the process too. So yeah. If I was just looking to just be a developer or just do development, I probably would have had more jobs but I think that kept me ... I always wanted to start a business and solving business problems has always been really interesting to me.
Ben: I was just going to say, the short version is if you just want to be a heads down developer, don't start a business.
Josh: Yeah because I mean yeah, best intentions. You just can't. There's so many things that you have to do and it really helps if you like to do that stuff.
Starr: So here is a fun idea guys. If Honeybadger is a home run, how many non home runs have we had between the three of us? Personal, together, it doesn't matter.
Josh: That's a good question.
Starr: Personally I can think of three, maybe one of which was shared with Ben.
Josh: Yeah. I probably got a couple under my belt at least.
Ben: I guess my number would be like four or five, maybe six, depending on how you count.
Josh: Yeah, Ben has been doing this a while.
Starr: So between us we've got at least 10 projects that were not as successful as Honeybadger before Honeybadger.
Ben: Right.
Starr: That's something. That's something to think about huh?
Ben: That's a [inaudible] right there.
Josh: Yeah, that's experience. Yeah. I think in some cases you have to have that experience before you can really find the one that works.
Starr: So we made a good decision we already talked about by deciding to enter the market when we did. We focused on Rails. We focused on a group of people who were very unhappy with their current situation and were actively looking for something new. So what other turning points do you think there were?
Ben: One of the things I think you mentioned briefly, but I just want to dive in a little bit on was you mentioned paying customers. There was a product already in the market that people are paying for right? So you weren't just building something out of thin air and just hoping people would come to it right? We already knew there was a demonstrated market for that particular product and so we just took something that was existing and we improved upon it. We added better customer service and we added better functionality. So I think that's a key.
Josh: Yeah and Starr kind of alluded to it but we did highly focus on a niche market at the time. I think that was the first big thing we did and I don't know if we did that, I don't know if that was our genius that led us to that or just the fact that we didn't have the resources to pursue the entire market but I think focusing on Rails and Rails developers, which we are, we know very well and I think it allowed us to, even from a marketing perspective, speak to that group of people a lot better than we could have if we were trying to just be an error tracker for web applications or something.
Ben: Yeah. I remember that helped Starr keep the product really focused right? Because I remember he could make decisions that were just perfect for a Rails developer that may not have worked as well if we tried to sell to every developer on the planet but focusing on that small market, that small group of people was one of the lessons that I learned from one of those five or six not so successful side projects that I'd done before. Catch the Best I built starting in 2007 and it's still running but it's not making a whole lot of money. It's just a little cash machine but one of the mistakes there was trying to go after a really big market. Like small to midsize businesses you are hiring right? So I learned from that. Focus. Focus on a very small market and you can make a lot more noise in that small market.
Starr: Yeah. I think the best decision that we made was choosing a market that one, existed and two, we could talk to in a way that was a cost effective for us and was welcomed and appreciated by the market. Like with your Catch the Best example, the market is really big and so it's really difficult for you as a solo developer to go and talk to that market as a whole. How do you even start to do that? That's the sort of thing that people have enterprise sales teams to do but as Ruby developers, we knew how to talk to Ruby developers and we ... man, at the time there were like 50 Ruby conferences in the United States. So we just went to all of them and at the time it was like you would talk to people and you would say, "Oh, we're making an Airbrake replacement" and people, their faces lit up like you were their savior. They were so happy to talk to you about this.
Josh: Yeah. If we had say pulled a product out of thin air for just a large market that we didn't know as well, we probably wouldn't have even known that they had that problem in the first place. So understanding them that well gave us the specific knowledge of what they actually wanted and needed at the time which helped that it was also what we wanted and needed. So.
Ben: Yeah, that helped I think too with my deciding what was going to be in and what was going to be out of the product. Being able to scratch your own itch, being the developers that we wanted to serve, we could say, "Oh, this feels good. This feels like it should fit in the product. I think other developers will like this" and then we added later on a bigger expansions like uptime monitoring and check ins. It all came back to like, as a developer, what do I care about? I care not just about my errors happening, but I also carry that my site is up right? And I care that my [inaudible] are running. So being customer driven is easier when you're your own customer.
Starr: Yeah but that also led us to one of our big canards I think. You might call it a mistake. I have the privilege of being the person who I think was most in favor of doing this and then the person who suggested getting rid of it.
Josh: I don't know but I was like, I may have been the most excited about actually ditching it.
Starr: I just realized I haven't said what we're talking about. We're talking about-
Josh: Metrics.
Starr: ... metrics.
Ben: Sad, sad metrics.
Josh: APM. Rest in peace metrics.
Starr: So a little bit of a background information on this. So we started out with our product doing, well, only exception monitoring right? Your application throws an exception. We catch it, we let you know about it and that works great. That's still the majority of our business and then later on we started adding other features and the first, I think this was the first extra big part of the app that we added was metrics, sort of a New Relic thing. There's lots of apps that do this now and it's huge business but we ran into some problems because, well, there are whole companies to put into this, right? And we're just three guys. We were like the dog who chased the car and we finally caught the car. It's like, "What do we do with it?".
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah I think it was one of those classic, it was a good idea at the time. We thought there were so many people who were buried in the complexity of New Relic for example, and they just wanted few things. They just want to know what the performance, how many requests are you getting? And so we thought, "Well, if we could just build that 10% or that 20% solution, wouldn't that be cool?". And it was until it wasn't.
Josh: Well, it was just too much for us to handle at the time I think and I think we've joked about even bringing it back someday and I'm never saying never on that. If we have the people to do it, that's fine but I think to do it even up to our standards, even to address that 10% that you talked about well, we just didn't have the time to be able to do it right and I think that because we're kind of perfectionists in our own way, it drove us crazy that this thing wasn't really fully up to our standards and that's kind of what led me, that was the big thing for me when I was thinking about just pulling the plug on it.
Starr: Yeah. So we ended up with a metrics feature that works but not a ton of people used it. I think we did some analysis on that and we found that maybe fewer than 10 people actually use it, but it ended up contributing, what was it? It was more than half of our server usage was just handling metrics.
Josh: And just development time too because, I mean to collect that data you have to be able to collect it on every single platform we support, which means modifying every client package that we have to be able to do like application performance metrics, which is like diving deep into framework code and stuff and pulling out numbers which is a lot of work. So New Relic, for instance, has a multi-person team to do that just for Ruby. So us doing it with one of us dedicated to that task was kind of, yeah, it was starting to become a problem I think.
Starr: Yeah, so eventually what happened was we decided to look into dropping it. Then we did some research. Found out that only a handful of people were using it. We emailed them. They weren't too sad to have it go away. So we dropped it because it was ridiculous the amount of effort and money we were spending on this thing.
Ben: Yeah. I think in the end there were a grand total of two people who were sad that that feature went away.
Starr: I know all that work. All that work for two people. What could we have done different? With our main product, the exception tracking, we built that based on a need that we knew existed but with the performance monitoring, we just built it right? We didn't really get a ton of feedback from users. We didn't have people calling us saying, "Why don't you add this to your product?" Or, "I just can't wait to get rid of New Relic". We just assumed that people would be interested in it.
Josh: I was thinking earlier as we were getting into this, one of the big decisions that I think we made early on was to focus on our customers and I think that's something ... a lot of the features that we added to Honeybadger shortly after we launched with an MVP, a lot of them were customer feature requests and a lot of the things we've continued to add to the product have been pretty much entirely customer driven and so I don't know. Maybe this is one area where we dropped the ball on that and maybe that's why we were seeing, it didn't quite take off like we hoped it would.
Ben: Yeah, I agree with what Josh is saying that I think this is one area that we weren't as customer driven as we had been with all the features. Like, "This is something that I thought would be cool and so let's build it" and our customers just weren't that interested in it. So, yeah.
Starr: Yeah. I mean to be fair, we all thought it was cool.
Josh: Right. I was into it. I mean for the record. Yeah, it is cool. It's just, yeah, there's a lot of things that are cool though.
Ben: That's true. Well, my philosophy about business is it's just one big experiment. Nobody has it all figured out, right? And every business is different and you just learn as you go. That's part of what you do as a business.
Starr: So you're talking about experiments. Another experiment that we did recently, maybe a year ago was that we switched to meter billing and that worked out in a big way for us. Let's talk about that for a minute.
Ben: Yeah. Well that's almost two years because it was summer. Yeah summer of 17.
Starr: Two years ago?
Josh: Is it?
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Wow.
Ben: Yeah, that was a great call. We started initially with unlimited traffic. That was a big thing that Starr wanted because one of the things that really irked him about Airbrake was how they limit you on number of errors per minute. From a developer standpoint, you're thinking, "I'm having the worst day of the year when my app is falling over because all the errors that it's getting. The last thing I want to worry about is I'm going to go over quota on my error tracker. So now I can't even see what's going on in my app?". And so we resisted that and that was a great decision I think for the initial part of the business but then over time it just got too much for us to take on. I think we saw too many customers who were making hardly use of that unlimited allotment. And the-
Starr: It's like economics. It's when you make something free, people who need that thing gravitate towards it, right? So we ended up with a lot of customers who were really sending us tons of errors because we were the only company that wouldn't bill them thousands of dollars for receiving those errors. We ended up with a lot of really big customers sending us a ton of errors and paying us what? 20 bucks a month?
Josh: We're such nice guys.
Starr: I know we're such nice guys.
Ben: We're softies.
Starr: And oh my God, we rang our hands over this, didn't we?
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Ben: That was one of those rare disagreement things, right? Because we just did not, could not really agree on how to proceed and finally we just said, "Well, let's just try it". That was the point I think in the business where we decided, "You know what? Let's just stop talking about stuff and let's just try something and if it doesn't work out, we can just roll it back". And I think that definitely involved some nail biting but in the end it's been awesome for the business and I think it has-
Starr: If you recall, it almost didn't, it's not that it almost didn't work out but there was definitely a roller coaster ride there because the first thing that happened after we implemented metered billing, because we didn't make everybody upgrade to it, only the people who would be paying less money under metered billing upgraded to it. Only the people who were on our larger plans that let you set up lots of projects, moved over to the meter billing because you had unlimited projects. Whereas the people who were paying 10 bucks a month and sending us millions and millions of errors, they're not going to move over to metered billing so fast. So revenue started dropping and it really freaked me out personally. It really freaked me out.
Josh: No, it was scary. Yeah, that was one of the scary times in the business, I would say.
Starr: Yeah but then we had a meeting. I think the thing that turned it from a scary downhill ride to an exciting uphill ride is that we decided that, "Hey, we just really need to ... if we're billing people based on their usage, we really need to enforce that" because again, we were being nice. We were saying to people, "Okay, you went over your errors but we're still going to let you send us as many errors as you want but we're all adults here. Please pay us the amount of money that's appropriate to the amount of errors that you're sending us" and people just didn't do it. I mean I'm not saying they're dishonest. They're probably just busy and didn't have the time to think about it. But yeah, nobody was doing that. So eventually we just had to say, "Okay, you're sending us too much errors. We're going to give you lots of warnings. We're going to give you lots of information about it so you can plan better but eventually we're going to have to cut you off guys".
Josh: I think the way we've solved it and the way Ben has solved it really is still a lot nicer than a lot of the other options that are out there on the market too. We're pretty generous, I feel like in how we do it, but it's enough so that it's equitable. We're not getting the short end.
Starr: Yeah and we managed to develop a system that lets people send us sort of spikes of errors and stuff like that, that is fair to people in cases where they're just having a bad day but that charges more to people who legitimately send us consistently more traffic. So I think we ended up with the best of both worlds.
Ben: You know talking about experiments, one of the other experiments that was interesting and I guess one of the nature of our business is sometimes one of us gets very interested in something and the other two just don't care that much about and so that one person just goes off and does it right? And the other two people are like, "Yeah, we'll support you but good luck with that" right? And I think one of those things was GDPR. I remember being very interested in GDPR when I started learning about it. I'm like, "Oh, we gotta do this" and I remember Starr was like, "You know what? I just don't care" right? "You want to do that? Go right ahead". Now I may be remembering that incorrectly. You can correct me if I need to Starr bur-
Starr: In the beginning at least I sort of lumped GDPR into the whole corporate certified compliance. There was tons of these certifications have long acronyms that basically you have to jump through all these hoops to prove that you're trustworthy to be used by some sort of enterprise company and they just seemed all so much BS to me. I guess we should say what GDPR is in case people don't know. GDPR is a, I don't know if it's the name of the law or whatever, but essentially the European Union is saying that companies have to provide certain guarantees to their users, to their customers about the data they collect, about their online usage and stuff.
Starr: People can ask the companies to provide a log of whatever information they keep and to delete that log. There was a whole right to be forgotten and stuff in it and we as a service that captures errors for people sort of end up right in the middle of that, right? Because we're actually logging information about people's users and those users might live in the European Union and so they might be able to contact our customers and say, "Hey, I need to know all my information". And then those customers have to be able to get that from us if we have it. Also we need to make sure that we're not doing things that are just kind of verboten which is just things like logging people's IP addresses and keeping them around forever for no real reason and stuff like that.
Ben: So it was a good chunk of work and it was definitely a headache dealing with the legal side of it but being able to choose what we want to work on, even if that thing isn't so much fun that day, I think it's a great way that we've enjoyed running our business.
Starr: There's new regulations coming down the pipe from California, right? I forget the name of that. Do you guys remember?
Josh: The CC something. Yeah. Ben probably knows.
Ben: Yeah. It's got a bunch of C's in it. That's [inaudible] remember.
Starr: But it's going to be essentially like the GDPR but for California residents.
Ben: Yeah and like with car emissions, probably what California does is what other states are going to end up doing. Right?
Starr: Exactly. So privacy is a huge deal and it's going to become even more of a huge deal. In these frameworks, in these privacy frameworks you really need to have complete control over the data that you're collecting for people and you have to get people permission to opt in if you're sending their data to a third party service like Honeybadger. So this kind of leads us, we've been talking a lot about open-core. We've been talking a lot about self hosted apps because we're wondering if maybe self hosted apps are going to make a little bit of a comeback, right? Everything's been moving to the cloud to software as a service type models but if you have to be super strict about where you send your users' data, that's really something in favor of running your own infrastructure, isn't it?
Ben: Yeah. It's simplifies things quite a bit. I think one of the things that we discovered in that GDPR process was that you have to have that chain of responsibility all the way down to all the other providers that you're using. So like in our case, we use Google Analytics, right? So we need to have that agreement in place with Google which of course is just a very simple form that you fill in because they deal with so many, but you have to have that with every provider that's touching that data that you're handing down. Whether it's your user data or your customers' use your data. So being able to say, "Okay, this set of data we know is under our control. It's not going anywhere". It's definitely helpful for complying with those privacy regulations.
Starr: Exactly and it's my understanding that say, if you have a user who opts in to tracking with Google Analytics or whatever and then you want to switch to a different analytics provider that's run by some other company, you've got to get that user to re opt in essentially whereas if you switch to an analytics platform that you're running on your own hardware, that you're running yourself, you don't have to have the user do anything because that's just considered your company still. Yeah. So that's really interesting. I think we've been interested in open-core stuff recently. It's really fascinating to me to see how a certain companies have been able to leverage this idea that the core of your software is open source so people can install it, they can distribute it freely, they can do whatever they want with it and for a small team like us that seems like a really attractive model if you can build something that people legitimately want because yeah, because we just don't have the resources to go in and do marketing enough to own a market.
Josh: It allows a lot more community involvement I think because the core, a large part of it is open source and people can take it in and use it and then contribute to it as well. So I think like there are a lot more opportunities for things like community building or the entire construction of it becomes a little bit like a marketing type of thing too. Like where you can engage with the audience too as you build it.
Starr: Yeah. It kind of takes on a life of its own almost. Yeah. If you're building a product out in the open, you can talk to people about it the whole time. You can get people's feedback, you can get them to contribute. Whereas if you build something behind closed walls and then you get it done and you release it into the world and nobody has heard about it, that's a real uphill battle that a lot of, I mean, most companies face and it's really hard to get over that.
Josh: So what are we talking about here? I think what we're saying, we're interested in these directions. I think we're kind of interested in building additional products within our company I think is what we're getting at and these are kind of models for thinking about what that might be. Is that kind of what we're saying here? I was just going to say kind of like to tie it all together with kind of the open-core model of distributing an application, we think that kind of ties in back into some of the privacy regulation things that are coming down the pipeline where in the future it may make a lot more sense that it has in the past even to run certain types of applications on your own infrastructure. Open-core is a good potential way to do that and so we're kind of exploring technologies that can like be distributed along those lines.
Starr: Yeah. That's why Erlang is so interesting to me personally. If you're going to distribute a Rails app for people to host on their own hardware, not only do they need to be able to run the Rails app, they have to run a database. They've got to probably run Sidekick. They've got to run Redis. Maybe they've got to run Memcached. If they want WebSocket, they've got to run a WebSocket server.
Josh: Right? Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. So in Elixir you get all that stuff kind of baked into your application. So if you want to distribute a single executable that has all this functionality baked into it, then that just seems pretty awesome to me. Yeah, also with the way that Elixir does packaging or I guess the way the Erlang does packaging, you can distribute your app as a single self contained package. You don't have to do what you do with like Ruby, which is you download Bundler. Then you have Bundler install a bunch of things and hopefully they don't collide with any of the other things that you've had installed by other Bundlers on your system.
Josh: And all that ties in, like you get a lot of this from just features of the language, but all of this revolves around the fact that it's in a virtual machine. You've described it like you're basically, you have an entire ecosystem that you don't have to call out to other services.
Starr: Yeah. A lot of languages have their own VMs but beam is a lot different because it's set up to run different bits of code as sort of standalone processes and they can interact in ways that is very similar to servers interacting on network. Yeah, so I've said before, it almost feels like you're programming and almost as like a serverless environment. Like programming on AWS where you just reach out and throw something in cache or throw something in database. You can kind of do that just inside Elixir or Erlang itself. Anybody else want to add anything, any final thoughts?
Josh: I don't think so.
Starr: All right. I'll talk to you guys next week I guess then.
Josh: Sounds good.
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How we attracted top quality software developer candidates without offering Facebook, Amazon, or Google salary levels. We talk about how to write the job description and reveal the feedback we received from candidates.
Full Transcript:
Starr: I was in my car. So there was no-
Josh: There was no, it like it wasn't that creepy.
Announcer: Hands off that dial. Business is about to get a whole lot nerdier. You're tuned in to Founder Quest.
Starr: Yeah I mean ... but also like this is Seattle, so literally everyone here is a quasi-tech celebrity.
Josh: That's true.
Starr: Yeah, it's dime a dozen.
Starr: So this week, we have been not getting much real work done. We've all been super distracted because we've been really focusing on hiring.
Josh: When you say, "we've been working on hiring," I think what you mean is "Ben's been working on hiring."
Starr: What's the point of being in management if you can't take credit for other people's work, right?
Josh: Exactly.
Ben: Exactly. That, and you got the whole royal "we" going for us, so gotta ... Yeah, it's been a bit of a slog, so. But it's been kind of fun too. Like, you know, we decided a few months ago, I guess, that we were about ready to hire and, you know, we've been thinking about this for a while. We've had contractors helping us from time to time. And we just decided it was time to have someone who could be around to the long haul. And so, we started the process of just thinking about who we wanted and what we wanted. And I had just ... it was pretty good timing ... I had just seen this blog post about hiring, and about what job posts should look like versus what they usually look like. You may have seen this on Twitter, but like there was an image where it was like colored red and green, and the red was ... it was mostly red ... and the red were parts about the business, and the green were parts about the candidate.
Starr: No, I didn't see that.
Ben: Oh yeah, yeah, it was really cool. So, like if you're a candidate, like, what do you care about when you look at a job post? What kind of technology are you playing with? Things like that. What kind of benefits are you going to get? And so this person was talking about how most job posts are all about the company and nothing at all about the candidate, right? And so, I had just read that and I thought, oh, that's, that's good to think about. And so, I wrote our job post in a way that was more approachable for a candidate, like, what would a candidate really wanna see? I guess it's like Marketing 101, right? Speak to your audience.
Starr: Exactly.
Ben: I think that was, that was really helpful in getting some great candidates coming in the door.
Starr: I sent the job posting to Evie, my wife, and she was bowled over. She's like, nobody writes job applications like that ... er, I keep calling it an application ... she said, nobody writes job descriptions like this. Some of the responses we got from people were amazing, some people said things like, I can't believe a job like this exists in such an imperfect world.
Josh: Yeah, it seems like we struck a nerve.
Ben: Yeah, yeah. It was fun to write and it was fun to see those kind of responses come back from people. And I think that was critical because our budget was kind of low, and in fact, we even included the budget on the job posting. The trade off there was that even though the budget was kind of low, the benefits were pretty high. Specifically, people were very interested in having a 30 hour work week. That was-
Starr: Oh, yeah. Maybe we should, maybe we should, go through some of the, the things we put in the job posting. Some of the benefits, some of the interesting things about the job that maybe drew people, because I know a lot of people are always wanting to know how you can more easily hire developers.
Ben: That's true, yeah, you hear that a lot. And I think, one thing that makes it easy is you give developers what they want.
Starr: That's ... no, that's too easy. That's too simple.
Ben: We found that there are definitely a group of developers who have experience, because we said, we needed deep Ruby experience, and who are interested in playing with new technologies, because we said, yeah, we're looking at Elixir and playing with that, and who sometimes value their time over money because we basically said, we'll be happy to pay you a little less but we'll give you a lot more time, like you can have a day a week off, or you can work five hour days, or however you want to work that.
Starr: Mm-hmm.
Ben: And I think a lot of people underestimated just how much a developer values that flexibility and having some more time versus just always maximizing the dollar sign.
Starr: It seems like a lot of the developers that we got who applied were a little bit more experience. I know, I know that we were really interested in experience in general, but we got a really good crop of candidates coming in with some real deep experience in Ops, in Ruby development, so forth. And it just surprised me. So it seems like maybe once you've ridden the startup rollercoaster a few times, once you've put in your 80 hour workweeks, you realize that maybe that's not the best way to live your life and start looking for something else. And surprisingly not many other companies are offering that sort of package.
Josh: Yeah, one of the, one thing someone said during this whole process was um, the salary we were offering was actually a small pay cut for them. But based on like, the benefits and the actual, like money for time argument, they're actually getting a raise if they take this job offer. Because rather than like working 60 hour weeks for what they're making now they can work 30 hour weeks for a little less, but it's still a net win.
Starr: And I guess a lot of the times people don't consider that when somebody is working for Facebook making 200 grand total comp that they're not necessarily working a 40 hour week for that. Maybe some of them can pull it off, but I think the whole focus on hours is kind of disingenuous because really when you work an 80 hour a week, you're not at your best for those 80 hours. Like personally, I find that I can get maybe two or three hours of really hard work done, uh, before I'm, I'm just kind of dead and have to move on to easier things.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, yeah. If we're talking programming especially, it's just, yeah, I don't, I don't believe you can even get 40 hours of, of solid productive programming in a week. There's always extra time you need to get into that space.
Starr: That's why you need bureaucracy, so you can fill in the spaces. We had a couple of meetings in there.
Ben: I think that was another big sell for the job. You know, we were three developers. We've really, and I told this to people a lot and are in the phone screen I did, like we really maximize the lifestyle portion of this lifestyle business. Like we've tried to make this company a place where we love to work, right? Why not? Uh, if you can have your dream job, why not make it? And so we have, you know, we get to work on what we want to work on, when we want to work on it. And that resonated a lot with developers being able to work with other cool developers, being able to have the flexible schedule, being able to work on cool technology, being able to work on a product that's being sold to developers. Like, all of those things were, were great points that our candidates talked about. When they talked to me.
Starr: One thing that came up a lot was that people had really read Josh's the 'Badger Life blog post, which is a blog posts he put on his, his own personal blog a while back that just laid out our philosophy of, of business and life, and showed people sort of how we spend our time during a day and all that. Was that included in the job description?
Ben: No, that wasn't, but I think a lot of people got that because Josh included that in his tweet when he tweeted about the job.
Josh: Oh yeah, that's right. I did.
Starr: That makes sense.
Ben: But, uh, next time I think we'll definitely have to include that or maybe even throw that into a page on our site where people can understand what our philosophy is.
Josh: I have been thinking about, uh, bringing that in, in bits and pieces and in our various things we're doing. Even in some of the emails I've been sending to our, our newsletter list. There's a lot of like topics. I think we can break in, break out of there, That kind of covers some of that in more detail too.
Ben: Yeah, I think it's, it's definitely a mindful philosophy that's opposed to the standard VC backed startup rocket ship culture. Alright, we've, we've chosen not to take that road. We don't have the super fast growth. At the same time, we don't have the super high stress job. And I think that's worked out well and I think a lot of people are finding that's an attractive place to work.
Starr: And this is partially why we've waited this long to hire our first real full time developer.
Ben: True.
Starr: Um, I think we could talk a little bit about what were we looking for in like a peer, to bring into the company and work with us as a, as a developer.
Josh: That was one of the things that I brought up in the interview. I wrote a document that described all of the things that we were, kind of looking for in a person. And at the very top of the list, the uh, the TLDR was we're looking for a peer. That's kind of different from a lot of other tech jobs. When I say a peer, I don't necessarily mean an engineering peer, although that's part of it. I mean somebody who can look at our entire business, our entire product and work on whole features, from the point where they contact the user, all the way down to the database level and the backend stuff. I guess there's not a lot of jobs out there that, that involve that. One thing that surprised me that some of our candidates mentioned in their interviews, was that this type of full stack generalist position is very hard to find. Like, people who are hiring tend to want specialists, I guess.
Ben: Yeah, it's definitely a, a function of the company size, right? I mean we're, we're tiny. There are only three founders, plus we have Ben Findley who does our marketing stuff for us. And so anybody who comes on has to be able to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things, because there are a lot of things to be done and very few people do them. And then I guess, as companies get bigger and bigger, they just have to specialize to be able to most effectively use those people.
Starr: This kind of slides into lessons that we learned from interviewing people. Like I learned a lot from talking to the different candidates who passed Ben's screening and just getting a feel for them. Also from there, uh, the, the code samples that we asked them to submit. Personally, I learned that it's almost as stressful interviewing somebody as being interviewed by somebody. Because when you're interviewing somebody you kind of have to be in control of the, the, the flow of the conversation. You have to direct things where you want to go, but when you're being interviewed all you have to do is sort of answer questions and respond in a good way. You don't have to control the situation as much necessarily.
Ben: Yeah. Some of the candidates that we, that I talked to in the initial phone screens, like I would schedule a call for about 30 minutes and just get a feel for the person and find out like what kind of background they had, what their interests were, why they are interested in the job. And I found that of those, the ones that I really liked and the ones that I recommended to move on to the next stage, where those who asked good questions as well. I didn't realize at the beginning of the process that I, that would be something I'd be looking for. But I found that those who did that, who were really thinking about the position and how they would fit in and asking questions around those topics, those are the ones I think showed a, an initiative and an interest that helped them, you know proceed onto the next stage. So TLDR, ask questions when you're being interviewed.
Starr: Yeah, I found that the people who really stood out for me were the people who obviously put in an effort to understand both the position and our company and our, our somewhat unique needs as a smaller company. And then to really tailor their applications and their interviews to those needs. We had a fair number of applicants who were very competent seeming developers, but it was pretty obvious that they just submitted the application on a lark. They did a drive by application. We didn't get any resume from them. Uh, most of their interviews centered around just sort of generic developer topics. They didn't really seem to latch onto the idea that what we needed was this type of generalist who could work on all levels of our product, uh, who could interface with the users and interface with the database.
Josh: So I think what we're saying here is that it's marketing on all sides.
Starr: What a terrible realization for a developer.
Ben: Yeah, you'd have to learn how to sell yourself. Obviously when you're, when you're the product that an employer is buying, right? You've got to sell that product the best way you can.
Starr: I don't think that people who-
Josh: Right.
Starr: Didn't really stand out to me didn't sell themselves. I just think they were selling themselves for a different type of position than what we needed.
Ben: I think a lot of the way we, we approached the process was laid back and kind of vague, kind of like the day to day business that we have. You know, we are three developers who work pretty independently and we take vague notions of what we want to do, or the place we want to get, and then we just make it happen, right? We don't have detailed specifications as part of our normal work day lives. And we took the hiring process in the same kind of approach, where like we, we gave a coding assignment, right? We asked people to do a simple task that didn't take very long. Um, but we didn't give them a lot of direction and that was on purpose, right? Because we don't have a lot of direction in the things that we do, and that person that we hire is not going to be getting a lot of direction from us because that's not how we operate. And so we tried to use that as part of the filtering process as well. It's like, well, let's see if our candidates are going to respond well to the notion of having very limited direction. And we definitely got a spectrum of experiences back from those code samples. It was really interesting to see that. And it was also fun to learn from the code samples that we got.
Starr: Yeah. I think we all learned a new variation of the regular expression, was it the match syntax?
Josh: It was like a hash.
Ben: Yeah. We had one candidate use a gsub, but the block that had a hash for replacements, and that was kind of fun.
Starr: Yeah, we all, we all went scurrying for the documentation and then were like, oh yeah, this is actually a real, a real live thing that we don't know. That's a, that's a frustrating thing about Ruby but it's also kind of cool, is that you can work in it for 10 years and there is still surprising things about the language that you find. You know, surprising and hopefully useful things.
Josh: There's a different way to do everything.
Starr: It's either good or bad depending upon your outlook.
Starr: The code challenge was pretty interesting to me. Did you have any real inkling going into this code challenge that we would get such a wide variety of responses?
Ben: No. You see I've done hiring in the past, many times, but this is the first time that I did like the same code challenge for every candidate how got passed the phone screen. And, uh, again, I got this idea for a blog post. I really didn't know what to expect, but the thing that was critical about the blog post and the thing that I learned was that it has to be the same. Basically the idea is you want to have the same baseline comparison. It's like when you interview people, you're having a conversation. You're asking questions, and of course there are like some questions that you want to make sure you ask everybody, but obviously the conversations are gonna to vary from person to person. And so you may, you may cover one topic with one person and not cover that with another. And, and so you don't always get a great, even comparison of each candidate.
Ben: But the code sample like being like, here's the thing we want you to do, here's how I want you to do it, gave everyone the same instruction. Everyone had the same opportunity to report back and that to me was really awesome and that we were able to see variation from person to person and compare them as equally as possible. Like I said, I gave pretty vague directions of what we wanted and I was surprised to see people go off in one direction and see other people go off in a different direction. Uh, you know, and, and all of them accomplishing a task. And eventually the pers, the one that we liked the most, happened to line up with the kind of needs that we have. Like, we're very customer focused as a, as a business. And so that particular candidate had the most customer focus kind of code.
Starr: Yeah. I think in his interview he mentioned that he didn't view it as a code challenge. He viewed it as a product design challenge, which I thought was a pretty useful way of looking at it. It's not like we intended it to be some trick question or anything. It's just some people chose to the answer the question in a way where it was obvious that they were just assuming that we wanted to see if they could do an http post, if they could code. While other people saw it as sort of a, a chance to show off their, their product design chops. And so went a little bit more in depth with it and when a little deeper. We gave them all a rough time limit of which to do it. With all of their responses, it seem pretty reasonable that they could have produced them in the, what was it, two hours that we set the limit for.
Ben: Yeah, and I think some of the key factors in that code challenge were that, one, the task was simple. We asked them to post a payload to Slack. Two, it was relevant to the kind of work that we do because we do a lot of integrations with Honey Badger and involve sending post requests to things like Slack. Uh, and three, it was there was timebox, right? Like you said, we set a time limit for two hours. And so, set that expectation, right? It's not gonna take you a week, it's not gonna take you a day. It's just gonna take you a little bit of time. And then finally we said up front, we'll pay you for your time. Like we just-
Starr: Yeah, that's-
Ben: We don't think it's fair, you know, to make people do work for free.
Starr: That's important, because we've all been freelancers and we've all had people try and screw us out of our time. And we don't, we don't want to be that type of person.
Josh: Um-hmm.
Ben: Overall I was happy with how the code challenge went and it gave us, the three of us, something to talk about with each, as we reviewed all of them together. What was interesting to me though, what I was kind of surprised about was, you know after we, so we did the phone screens, we had four or five candidates out of that who we sent the code challenge to, and of each of the, and we also had a second interview with each of those. The thing that I was surprised about was that in our second interview, where all of us were together and talking with the candidate, like we didn't really discuss the code challenge much. It didn't really come up like, you know, we were more interested in the fit for the job, answering their questions, getting to know them better, but we didn't really like dive into a code review, you know, of the code sample itself. I guess I was expecting, I would talk about that more. So that was kind of surprising to me, but I think worked out really well.
Starr: Do you think it would have been more useful? Like, it was pretty obvious to me with the responses. Okay, this person is writing good code here obviously. So I don't think we're the type of organization where we are going to go in and, and nitpick and reject somebody because they chose a style that we didn't like for, for their code, or if they, they just did something slightly in a different way that, that we would do it.
Josh: One of the things I liked from the code challenge was uh, the documentation that people generated as a result of their, their projects. And there were, there were a few people that went really heavy on the documentation and outlining what their actual thought process and design process was to solve the problem. And I think that helped us with two things. It helped us, understand what kind of a communicator they were. Because communication is really important. That's, I think, something that's really key to what we're trying to match on. And then of course, the actual like what their, uh, like how they solve problems. And so we got to see that from the challenge. And I really liked not focusing on such the technical topics in the team interview that we did and kind of focusing more on a, like a team, cultural fit sort of thing. Just seeing how we blend basically, uh, cracking jokes and, and uh, answering questions and, and that sort of thing.
Starr: Yeah, the documentation was kind of surprising to me. I didn't expect to get such good documentation from some people.
Josh: Yeah.
Starr: Some people wrote up the, the problem as if it were a, as if they were giving it to somebody else to solve. Um, if they were ... which I really appreciated.
Starr: So what else did we do right? Did we do anything else right? That we want to brag about?
Ben: I can't think of anything else.
Starr: Crickets.
Ben: One of the things that was really handy to me and the phone screen, and this is like Hiring 101, I guess, is just having a template of questions, right? I talked about the inconsistency that you have amongst the interviews, there are of course certain questions you want to ask every time. And so just having 'em, I had a bullet list of five questions that I wanted to talk about in that first 30 minutes with every candidate, and that was, I mean, super helpful. Because you know, conversations can run away from you and you can just get chatting about whatever. Right? But there are certain things you want to know and having all of that in one place, was really handy to go back and review. And then of course, you know, taking notes during and after the call helped quite a bit in making sure that all the, all the bases get covered.
Starr: Awesome. Let's see. What, I'm trying to think of anything that, oh yeah. Like, I really enjoyed using Calendly to automatically set up zoom calls with people. I found myself wanting to have events where peo, I needed to talk to people and do a video chat with people, just so I could use Calendly to set up a zoom call with them. Because it was so cool to me that I could just, I could do that. Like they could pick a time, you know, you send them a link, they go on, they pick a time that's already in your schedule and then they get a zoom link back. I don't know why that's so cool to me, but it just seemed like magic.
Ben: Well, I'll tell you, that's one thing that we did poorly and we being the royal "we", uh, in this case, uh, because this was the first time I had been doing a lot of scheduling of Calendly and we used, um, Google for our domains that we have in a Google calendar and we use Gmail. And what I did not realize when I was first setting up appointments was that, um, Google, in it's wisdom, helpfully adds Hangout meeting details to every meeting request that you send.
Starr: Oh, that's right.
Ben: So I would set some, you know, I'd set up the Calendly, I send out links to people so they can schedule a call. But I wanted to do a phone call. And so I ask them for their phone number. But then when Calendly connected to Google calendar and made the appointment, they would get an invitation that had the Hangouts link. And I didn't realize this until like the third or fourth person said, oh I thought this was going to be a Hangouts call. And I went and looked, oh sure enough there are all the Hangouts links in there. And so I had to go into the G Suite Admin and turn that off so that um, events wouldn't greeted with that link. So I had to apologize to those people that I confused 'cause I was calling them on the phone, they're like, oh I was in Hangouts. Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. We could have had her process nailed down a little, a little better. The way we typically work on development problems, on business problems, is that we all work sort of on our own, sort of asynchronously, and we meet up and coordinate. This doesn't necessarily work when you're hiring people because you know, those, those people want a sort of unified experience. I don't want random founders contacting them and making appointments on their own that they don't really understand how, like, how does this fit into the whole hiring process. So for the most part, we uh, had Ben do all of the point work with the people, but at some point we had some confusion over should we, should Josh and I call these people individually now or should we do a group interview and we eventually got it sorted out, but it would have been nicer to have it planned, you know, from the beginning.
Ben: I think next time, definitely, I can put a document together like here's my plan and then we can talk about that before we actually execute the plan.
Josh: Nah, I like, um, we have some, our friends at Wildbit just posted their job interview for a, uh, engineering [crosstalk] I think it was.
Starr: A job posting
Ben: A job posting.
Josh: Yeah, a job posting. Did I say-
Ben: Interview. Application. I
Starr: I'm calling them job applications. Josh is calling them job interviews.
Josh: They posted a job posting. One thing I liked about it was that they had like bullet points right in the, in the posting, how, how the interview will typically go. And uh, it just kinda goes through like you'll have these two, three interviews, uh, and then you'll talk to our CEO and founders and then we'll get back to you. It kind of sets the expectations of the whole process up front and I think that's something that we would benefit from in the future.
Starr: Oh, definitely.
Ben: I think in the hiring process you really cannot over communicate. I think a lot of people really appreciate like, what is the process gonna to look like, how am I gonna know when you're going to get back to me, you know, what are the next steps? And I would always include that at the end of our, my phone screens. Like I would tell people, okay, and I'm halfway through my phone screenings or I'm almost done with my phone, the screens. And so you'll hear from me no later than x day. Right? And if you don't hear from me, please, you know, call, hit me up and make sure that I don't forget about you. But it's a process that, where there's a lot of nervousness, right? And you're, you're working with new people that you haven't worked with before and so. I love that idea that, that Wildbit post has of here's what the process is going to look like. So you can kind of have some familiarity with this, so you feel comfortable with it, take some of that stress out of the equation.
Starr: It's kind of a personal goal and also a professional goal to be maybe a little bit more transparent about things because it just helps everybody understand where you're coming from. It helps diffuse some of those nerves and yeah, in this case it would have been nice to be able to give people an idea of the interview process before they went through it. Uh, it also would have helped Josh and I to, you know, not a trip over our feet. Yeah. Just in general I think, I think transparency is kind of something we should all strive towards a little bit more.
Josh: Totally.
Starr: Although it is kind of telling that our quarterly meetings happen in a converted bank that's now an office space rental place.
Josh: The bank vault, in the vault.
Starr: Yeah. Our meetings happen in a conference room called "the vault" and it has an actual vault door that you can, you can, I guess hypothetically close, like we haven't tried to close it yet. There's a little device on the wall in the vault that I was always curious about and so I investigated it, I investigated it and it's air holes in case somebody accidentally locks you in the vault so you can breathe.
Josh: Well, that's comforting at least. At least there are air holes.
Starr: Oh Man.
Ben: [inaudible] You can't fit much food through those air holes, so.
Starr: No, no. Just lots of Spaghetti.
Ben: I think for our, for our first time in a full on hiring process, I think we did okay. We had a few missteps and a few stumbles there, but you know, no one went away crying and that's good.
Starr: I give us an A++.
Ben: Is that like C++?
Starr: No, it's, it's just an extra plus.
Josh: It's just an extra plus, Ben, you don't have to-
Starr: It's like when you do really good, you get an extra plus and then maybe a smiley face and a gold star or something.
Josh: Well, hopefully this is not the last time we hire, so.
Starr: Yeah, I mentioned this on Twitter that literally I wanted to hire everyone I talked to. Like I thought everybody was great.
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: I thought they were, I didn't think everybody was a perfect fit for this role, but um, for some sort of developer role that I could possibly see in our company, I thought everybody was great. I wanted to hire them all, but we don't have millions of dollars to spend on, on developers. So unfortunately that can't happen.
Ben: Yeah, it is, it is sad to be able to only I choose one because everyone was fantastic.
Starr: All right. And it's, it's really kind of cool to see that we have something that so many people are interested in joining. That's very gratifying.
Speaker 3: Founder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of Honeybadger. Zero instrumentation, 360 degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradations for your web apps. If you have a web app, you need it. Available at honeybadger.io. Want more from the founders? Go to founderquestpodcast.com, that's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. Founder Quest is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.
In their first episode, Starr, Josh and Ben talk about the company hack-week where they built a small proof-of-concept product with Elixir and Phoenix.
Full Transcript:
Josh: Okay so you guys tell me if this too stupid but
Starr: Well if you have to ask
Ben: I like how this is starting.
Starr: Sold.
Announcer: They're just three amigos making their way in the crazy old world of software as service. Welcome to Founder Quest.
Starr: Yeah so ah lets talk about the hackathon guys.
Josh: Cool.
Ben: Okay.
Starr: So last week we had our first ever honey badger hackathon and the idea was that we would take a break from working on our from our mundane lives you know working on air tracking, up time tracking stuff like that and work on something completely different to kind of clear out the cobwebs and have a little fun. Yeah we chose to build a product in Elixir and Phoenix because we don't really um use those two often so it's a nice chance to do something different.
Starr: So what do we hope to achieve by doing this? Like what was the goals?
Josh: So I think like just I mean mainly have fun um one of the things I really liked about the hackathon was we also this was the first thing we did coming back from a three week vacation for Christmas over which I think we all worked on an Elixir Udemy course, so it was a chance to practice some of the stuff we learned in the course and get back into the swing of things.
Starr: Yeah that was nice. Are we gonna do that vacation all the time? Is that going to be a regular thing?
Josh: Yeah I think so. Will break it up by hackathons but otherwise I'm good with just being on vacation.
Starr: Okay can we have a hackathon driven company? Is that a thing?
Josh: Yeah I think so.
Josh: Would we be like hip then, would we be popular?
Starr: Probably. What do you think Ben?
Ben: Can we be more popular? I mean you know. There are limits right?
Josh: Yeah Ben always brings humbleness.
Starr: Don't want to fly too close to the sun.
Starr: Let's think back to so we first were talking about the hackathon at one of our conclaves. If you don't know us we work remotely, we do everything in Slack and stuff. We meet up once a quarter for what we call conclaves at an undisclosed location in western Washington.
Starr: So we went through lots of different ideas for the hackathon.
Josh: Who was it that came up with the idea we went with?
Starr: I think it might have been Ben. We're talking about like the model of deploying the applications that we're interested in building and I think we were talking about things that are easy to do onsite or on a single server, they're like a self hosted type thing and that's what kind of led us to talking about Elixir and stuff, but I think it was Ben that came up with the
Ben: I think you know we do a lot in our day jobs with high traffic sites. We do a lot of processing and one thing that was really interesting was as far as Elixir is concerned is that the high concurrency that it can support so we're like “oh what can we build that would be interesting that would be in our wheelhouse but still kind of fun” and we did that. Like you said we did Elixir over the Christmas break but we also did the advent of code and
Starr: Oh yeah the, I didn't finish that.
Josh: Yeah.
Ben: I didn't finish it either .
Josh: I did like one tenth of what I expected.
Starr: I did like two.
Ben: But we don't have to talk about that. But we started with the right intentions. I know that for me, I was like doing them first in Ruby and then I would do an Elixir and see how different it was. Having the idea to play with that was a lot of the fun motivation behind the hackathon.
Josh: Yeah so eventually I think Ben was like “lets build a segment replacement”, because we use segment to send various,
Starr: Well Segment is sort of works like a repeater, you send events that happen to your users, you send your user data to Segment and then it sends out to your vast array of third party services that consume that data like Intercom, like I think we use Mix Panel, we use Drip. Maybe Google analytics, I don't know.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah. Like it costs a lot of money, right?
Starr: Yeah it costs a lot of money well, a fair amount of money. It depends
Josh: Yeah right.
Starr: We basically only use it to broadcast, request to other services.
Josh: Right.
Starr: So it seems like it should be pretty cheap but its not pretty cheap.
Starr: Yeah and we've had some trouble. We've been, we've talked about building some sort of internal thing to do this for us, just because we're not fully utilizing its full capability yet either. I think the core of what it is like a centralized customer information database and warehouse really. And then it handles, like you said sending all those events to all the different places like third party software and service tools, even to the point where it can even replay events which I think is a cool feature that we're not using at all.
Josh: So is it actually a database though? Can you go in and query your users straight into Segment?
Ben: Well one of the destinations that you can configure is like a [inaudible] database, which we do, we dump [inaudible] so you can go and query the events. I think one of things that was interesting about using that at the hackathon project was that its very similar to what we do, we take in a bunch of events, and we spit them out to different places like Slack or Github issues, or whatever so we thought "hey we kind of know what this is like we can build something that will take in events and spit out things".
Josh: Yeah so we didn't end up replacing Segment. Note for future hackathon planners.
Starr: Yeah you probably can't duplicate a complex product built by a whole team of people with a couple guys working a week.
Ben: And I guess we should qualify what our hackathon was because I think some people might think when you say hackathon and think “oh like you start on a Friday, and its red bull craziness until Monday morning”, but ours is nothing like that. We just did it during the week.
Josh: Yeah it was just a normal work week.
Ben: During normal working hours.
Josh: I don't know, you guys did, I was chugging the red bull. I was like "where is everybody?"
Starr: That explains a lot.
Starr: So we kind of divided up the responsibility. I ended up doing sort of the back end routing of the requests as they come in, sort of fanning them out to different notifiers that would send the requests then on to Intercom, to Drip, to stuff like that. Ben worked on deployment and Josh worked on the API or intake side of things. And also I worked on the notifiers as well but I feel like Josh did the most research and had the best graphs out of all of us into the problem domain.
Josh: Yeah what I started with was working out the data model which kind of helped with that. Segment is really awesome in their documentation in that they share a lot about how they do things on the back end anyway. They have a really amazing API spec which kind of outlines how their data model works and I borrowed mostly from that but did a few interesting things to kind of make it faster for us just so we could get more decoding and not trying to figure out the whole domain and architecture and everything.
Ben: I think one of the things that you did that was really cool talking about the API and stuff was that you built those Jason schema documents.
Starr: Oh that was really nice.
Ben: Yeah that really helped, I think make it really smooth to build out the code once you had that in place.
Josh: Yeah the Jason schema, they weren't
Starr: Should we explain a little bit? What we actually did?
Josh: Sure, I can. Basically like I mentioned there's a nice API spec that segment has on their website. Its got like example payloads of like the kind of things that you can send to Segment, which is basically what models your customer data.
Starr: So do you think like I'm a person that's coming to your website or your app, I've signed up and I'm using your app and you want to tell all the tools you use that I've just showed up and logged in. You can send an event to Segment called identify which basically includes a bunch of information that you have about me, like my email address and that sort of stuff. That creates the customer record and then from there Segment would forward it on to Drip or Intercom or any of the other tools we're using.
Josh: And so these events are the core of the data model. They basically describe everything that could happen with a customer in your product. And Jason schemas are handy for describing the model of what that data is. So the data is modeled in Jason so its key values and objects and stuff and Jason schema is a standard that you can use to describe Jason data. Its like a structured format so you basically define what each property in your Jason object is, and from there you can actually run it through a validator that would check your actual data object against the schema and if it doesn't match up it will throw an error.
Starr: Yeah so the idea is that if you submit a bad API request, it will just reject it outright instead of sending it on to the model layer or further code within errors because it was wrong. You basally validate it when it comes in.
Josh: Yeah and so that's, once I had the schemas which kind of helped to make sure we understand what the data model is then the next step was to, I added a little, actually I found this little Elixir package called X Jason schema and luckily it pretty much did all the work for me to actually take an object and verify it against a schema. I plugged, I put that into a little, in Phoenix, I put into a plug which is kind of like a middleware that when a request comes in I can actually just run that payload through the schema validator and if it was wrong then it would return an error to the user basically.
Starr: I went into this not really knowing much about Elixir, not much about OPT which is sort of the foundations that Elixir and [inaudible] are built on. And I found it really fascinating to learn about all this. It was a bit hectic at first. At first, I felt like I'm not making any progress at all, this is incredibly slow, why am I doing this? But it actually helps to know the language and the platform that you're using before trying to build things in it. Eventually by the end of the week I was actually surprised at how quickly we were able to stand up, I wouldn't call it a product, but a robust system. By the end of it, we had a system that would take in events, process them, where for any given user you always use the same queue and events always went in the same order so that you didn't have the problem where the same user sends events in and they get assigned to two different queues and one queue is running faster than the other, so then they get processed out of order.
Starr: I was super impressed by Erlang and Elixir by the end of the week.
Josh: Yeah I really liked the code that you came back with, the repeater code which is what we ended up calling it. It didn't seem like a whole lot of actual code that was written but what it actually did was kind of crazy to me. The way it basically had like a routing system that would control the flow basically of data through the repeater system.
Starr: Yeah it used a built, well I guess its not built in, it's a package but its called Jenstage which lets you process streams of data in a way that takes into consideration the fact that processing doesn't happen immediately.
Josh: It was all pretty cool.
Starr: What were you going to say Ben?
Ben: One of the things that I thought was neat, one of things that we had thought was interesting going with Elixir for this was, you know we're used to the idea and the [inaudible] band, you take in some work, you shove it into a sidekick queue and then you have a job somewhere that's processing it. The only problem is that you have to now worry about Redis, and keep that up and deploy it and so on but the thing I think was really cool about how Starr did this is that its all self contained. You're running the application and its handling that queuing, that processing just in one place so you can reason about what's going on more easily and you can handle the back pressure that happens when you're trying to deliver to a target that can handle the work that's coming in. I thought that was pretty neat.
Starr: Like for our main product, honey badger, we do stuff mostly in Ruby. We work in AWS, in any given system that we push up, we may have several separate services that support it, like we may have a data store, may have caching, and its just kind of crazy to me that in Elixir and Erlang you can put all of that, or a lot of it, into the application itself. That's just really cool to me.
Josh: By the end of the week we had like what two actual destinations done, Drip and Intercom?
Starr: Yeah that was it, we had two destinations up, we could handle.
Ben: Well started [inaudible] too.
Starr: Did I? Oh my god, I forgot about that.
Josh: That's true.
Ben: Yeah on Friday you busted out the
Josh: I was, it was all the red bull, it just
Starr: That's right.
Josh: I was in a red bull fueled haze of productivity.
Starr: Yeah so by the end of the week I think we had two types of events done, which are the main two, we had the identify event that I mentioned, which is like basically telling the system that a user exists and that their here and then a track event, which is telling the system when a user performs an action. And that's where it gets really interesting is sending the data to other systems like Drip or Intercom because those systems will use these events to do things like, in Intercom for instance, when someone signs up, we start triggering various onboarding actions like emails and stuff that go out to them and that's all handled through events. That's like the end result of this data coming through our system and going out to these sources. On the actual destination side, we had Drip, Intercom, Poststress, we had a, I forgot to mention the debugger that we that I built.
Josh: Oh yeah that was really nice.
Starr: Yeah so we could see the events actually coming in like when you would post an event to the API it would put it out to the actual web browser using a Phoenix channel over a web socket, so it would actually show the formatted Jason data, and the browser basically in real time, which was
Josh: Yeah that was amazing.
Starr: And that was all
Josh: Like two lines of code, right? It was nothing.
Starr: Yeah just a couple lines, mostly boiler plate. It was more than a couple lines but it was mostly boiler plate Phoenix code so that was pretty cool.
Starr: Can I tell you guys a secret?
Josh: Of course.
Starr: The whole event routing thing I did that was boiler plate too. I copied most of it straight from the Elixir docs. And most of the time I spent on it was just trying to understand how it all worked.
Josh: Oh my gosh, Starr.
Starr: Am I fired?
Ben: Well while we're talking about copying and pasting, so
Starr: Yeah what did you copy and paste Ben?
Ben: Yeah so what I copied
Starr: We are experienced senior engineers here.
Ben: So my job was the upside so I had to figure out “how we gonna get this into production” and I'm somewhat colored by having to keep honey badger up and running at all times so sometimes I over engineer but I held back and I just copied and pasted a bunch of docker stuff from the distillery documentation which is fantastic. They have great examples on how to deploy a various providers and so I decided to run with the docker version because you can run a docker container anywhere, right?
Ben: SO the docker that I got from Distillery was pretty cool, they talked about how you can build, and this was kind of new to me, I haven't spent a lot of time with Docker, so I got to learn about this, which was fun. You can build your one image like a build image and then you can use that build image in another image so that you don't have to have all of those build artifacts along with the final image that you send out. So you know with Elixir you got to do a lot of compiling, got to have Erlang and all that stuff installed and you might not need all those things in your final production image right? You can, step one is you compile the app using Mix and get everything into a release a [inaudible] and then the second step, the second image that you make grabs that tarball puts it in the right place and then packages it up. Instead of having a few hundred megabytes worth of image you can have like forty or fifty, thought that was pretty cool.
Ben: So yeah there's documentation on the Distillery side about how to do that and it works out pretty well. The one trick being that you do you really want to configure your configuration of like for example, Intercom and Drip have API keys that you have to use right to be able to talk to their services so the only bit of snag is that you want to have the Elixir application configured by a little code that actually hangs outside of the compilation step because those API keys aren't necessarily available when you're compiling. But they will be available when you run it in production. Toss a little code to the side that loads those things from the environment at run time rather than compile time so that you can configure on the fly with those API keys.
Starr: So on the whole, what do you guys think of hackathon? Would you do it again?
Josh: Totally.
Starr: Awesome. It was great being able to work on something that didn't have to do serious stuff in production or we could fail and it didn't matter. It's kind of nice.
Josh: Yeah. I had a lot of fun.
Starr: Alright well I guess that wraps up our podcast. I think Ben has somewhere he needs to be so
speaker 4: Thunder Quest is a weekly podcast by the founders of honey badger. Zero instrumentation, three hundred and sixty degree coverage of errors, outages and service degradation for your web apps. If you have a web app you need it. Available at www.honeybadger.io.
speaker 4: Want more from the founders? Go to founder quest podcast dot com. That's one word. You can access our huge back catalog or sign up for our newsletter to get exclusive VIP content. Founder Quest is available on iTunes, Spotify and other purveyors of fine podcasts. We'll see you next week.